Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called on the Department of Justice to investigate the third-party funding behind the antisemitic protests that have taken college campuses by storm in recent weeks. The Missouri Republican sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, demanding he open a probe into the funding. Alleging the demonstrations are “not just spontaneous student unrest,” Hawley reminded Garland that he sent a similar letter seeking information on “how many pro-terrorist student organizations … received significant funding from third-party groups” in October.
“Now, we have answers — just not from your Department,” Hawley wrote. “Earlier this week, Politico detailed the vast amounts of dark money subsidizingthis mayhem. Their report found that key groups backing the campus protests — like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — received financial support from George Soros’ Tides Foundation, David Rockefeller’s Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Democrat megadonors Susan and Nick Pritzker were also cited in the report.”
Hawley said the “pattern is disturbing” and “almost certainly illegal,” given that IRS Revenue Ruling 75-384 established that “no organization may retain its tax exemption if it backs protests at which members are urged to commit acts of civil disobedience.”
He said the IRS “explained at length that illegal acts are ‘inconsistent with charitable ends'” and “stressed that ‘illegal activities … are contrary to the common good and the general welfare’ and are therefore not approved methods of ‘promoting the social welfare.'”
“In short, by supporting illegal acts while enjoying tax-exempt status, dark-money groups and foundations are defrauding the American people and putting Jewish students and faculty at risk,” Hawley said.
In the letter, the GOP senator told the attorney general he must “immediately provide answers” as to how many anti-Israel protests are currently receiving funds from third-party groups and which groups are providing such support.
Hawley also wanted to know what steps the Justice Department will take to “immediately enforce” IRS Revenue Ruling 75-384 against the groups that are sponsoring or funding the ongoing violent protests at universities nationwide.
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
Woody Allen once said that “80 percent of success is showing up.” Yesterday, Columbia University established its academic corollary: 80 percent of defeat is not showing up. In a disgraceful decision that deprived students of one of the most memorable moments of their lives, the university yielded to protesters who have occupied parts of the campus and buildings. Instead, graduates will be allowed to go to small-scale graduations. It is a profile of cowardice that will stain the record of Columbia for years to come.
Notably, the graduation is ordinarily held on the space where students set up an encampment, but that space was finally cleared by police last week. It did not matter. Columbia stated that “holding a large commencement ceremony on our campus presented security concerns that unfortunately proved insurmountable…Like our students, we are deeply disappointed with this outcome.”
“Insurmountable?” It is your campus. These are your students. Hold the damn commencement.
Columbia said the security advisers identified “too many variables” for holding the commencement and that adding security would only trigger the protesters. So, the solution, once again, is to do precisely what the protesters wanted.
Schools like University of Southern California said late last month that it was canceling its main commencement ceremony, citing similar security concerns. Protesters disrupted the commencement at University of Michigan this weekend. However, Michigan did not yield. They handled the disruption and held their ground. They held their commencement.
The decision by Columbia is consistent with how administrators have approached disruptive protests for years. While some of us have called upon schools to suspend or to expel students preventing others from speaking on campus, universities have yielded over and over again. Indeed, citing security concerns became an easy way for schools to cancel conservative speakers while professing neutrality on the content of their views. Faculty have not only encouraged but participated in such cancel campaigns.
Even classes have been stopped by protesters at places like Northwestern without any repercussions for the students. Northwestern (my alma mater) is the ultimate example of administrators picking the path of least resistance in the face of radicalized students. Recently, seven out of 11 members of the “President’s Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate” resigned in protest.
Under the controversial agreement, the school will admit five Palestinian students each year, support two Palestinian faculty members annually, create special housing for Muslim students, and add students to Committees to review purchases from Israeli businesses.
Columbia has been consistently ranked at the very bottom of schools for free speech due to its intolerance for opposing viewpoints and failure to protect a diversity of opinions on campus. Even the dean of its leading journalism school has warned against the “weaponization of free speech.” One of Columbia’s centers publicly complained when Justice Brett Kavanaugh was allowed to speak on campus.
When Columbia finally drew the line at protesters damaging and taking over buildings, the response from many students and faculty was outrage.
After Hamilton Hall was cleared by police, the editors of Columbia Law Review asked for the cancelation of exams because they were emotionally compromised. The editors wrote that the clearing of the unauthorized encampment constituted traumatic “violence” that left them “irrevocably shaken” and “unable to focus.” They were joined by editors of five other law journals, including the Columbia Human Rights Law Review & A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual.
They portrayed the trauma as the appearance of counter protesters and police on campus, accusing a “white supremacist, neo-fascist hate group” of “storming” campus. The Columbia students told the university that “many are unwell at this time and cannot study or concentrate while their peers are being hauled to jail.”
Columbia then faced threats of protests at the commencement, so it solved the problem by doing what the protesters were demanding. Of course, it did not solve the problem. Columbia is the problem. It is an example of how administrators have yielded control over their campuses to the loudest and most aggressive elements in their community.
Higher education is not supposed to be an academic version of the Hunger Games where the last person standing wins in a contest of attrition.
It is perhaps only appropriate that Columbia’s final lesson for graduates should be a continuation of years of yielding to the demands of those who dictate what can be said or done on campus.
Many of these students were denied commencement ceremonies four years ago. They worked to get into Columbia and many of their families had to make huge sacrifices to allow them to study at the university. As protests ramped up, they found themselves barred from campus and told again to take remote classes. A Jewish professor’s access card was deactivated because his presence on campus was viewed as too inflammatory for the protesters.
When they are finally ready to celebrate that moment, they have been told, again, that commencement is cancelled. However, this is not due to a pandemic but protesters. They will have to go to smaller graduations that are less objectionable to the radical elements of the student body.
Henry David Thoreau once said, “The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.” It has the same effect on higher education. There was a clear path open to Columbia. Hold the commencement and hold any disrupters accountable. In choosing to yield, President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik has abandoned not just these graduates but the integrity of Columbia.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – It’s beginning to look a lot like Kristallnaught from the 1930s Germany with the protest and violence erupting in and around our universities across the nation.
“Let 10 Million Cop Cars Burn!” – Radical Pro-Hamas Terror Group ‘Rachel Corrie’s Ghost Brigade’ Admits to Torching 15 Portland Police Cars in ‘Preemptive Attack’
By Jim Hoft – May 6th, 2024
Fifteen police vehicles were torched at the Police training facility near the Portland Airport last week.
The case was being investigated as arson. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
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Joe Biden is becoming universally hated. And you can bet that Democrats are scared to death at what happened recently at a protest.
Two opposing groups managed to find common ground in their disdain for Joe Biden. Watch here, as University of Alabama protesters who differ dramatically on issues managed to chant the same thing:
University of Alabama earlier today.
Oppsoing groups spent the entire day with dueling chants.
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 2, 2024
Perhaps Joe Biden is the uniter he’s always claimed to be? Because he managed to get pro-Trump and LGBTQ+ groups to agree to one common theme: “F Joe Biden!”
No wonder Biden desperately woos young students by (unconstitutionally) erasing their tuition debt.
The game with this move is to have Trump rescind the free money, thus transferring blame to Republicans for undoing an illegal act. Clever when you think about it. Except, people aren’t falling for it anymore, as most people resent paying for other people’s debt. Particularly indoctrination debt.
Obviously, the Biden ploy isn’t gaining him any sway with the youth vote, as protests all over America continue against Biden’s policies. Polls with youth continue to provide bad news for Biden. So his policies are seen as a pander, more than real initiatives to help students and ultimately the country.
Whether the students are right or wrong in their protest is immaterial to me in the discussion. The fact that they see Biden as wrong benefits America.
Trump supports Israel.
Why haven’t Democrats even attempted to play this card? Trump has been vocal in his support of Israel. And let’s face it, he kept terrorism at bay for the most part during his tenure.
Biden’s problem? It’s difficult on the Biden administration who purports to support Israel while funding terrorists. And oh, the irony that Biden can’t take credit for his support of Hamas and Iran, less he admits to suborning the enemy.
Biden funded Iran who funds Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Iran is the George Soros of funding terror; except they have a deep pockets partner in Joe Biden.
As for the college students, admittedly they are morons. But they represent the enemy of my enemy as it relates to Biden. So, I’m actually happy they targeted him, regardless of their warped reasons.
The by-product of the student (terrorist) protests is the attack on academia, as well.
Colleges and universities birthed these idiot ingrates and raised them to be void of critical-thinking skills. I enjoy seeing Leftists feed off each other, as academia as we know it today begins its death spiral.
I’m tired of funding ignorance and indoctrination. We pay a fortune to train students on how to give up on real dreams and instead get indoctrinated.
Perhaps we finally are getting our money’s worth? Because it appears that Leftist chickens have come home to roost. And they are serving up crow.
Special Counsel Jack Smith admitted federal prosecutors tampered with evidence in his criminal case alleging former President Donald Trump mishandled classified documents.
According to a Friday court filing, prosecutors said documents the FBI seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence are no longer in the same order in which they found them, and some are mislabeled and may even be misplaced. A government “filter team” that dealt with the boxes once the FBI took them “was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box,” the special counsel’s office wrote in the filing.
Later the filing says, of early inventories and scanned records of the seized document boxes, “Because these inventories and scans were created close in time to the seizure of the documents, they are the best evidence available of the order the documents were in when seized. That said, there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” A footnote on this last sentence says: “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.”
The filing also suggests the Department of Justice and FBI may have lost and mislabeled some of the documents. When the agencies first took the documents at Mar-a-Lago, government employees used many blank sheets of paper as substitutes and cover papers for what they decided might be classified documents.
After the FBI brought the document boxes to Washington DC, federal employees and contractors began replacing these “handwritten sheets” with proper classified document covers. At that point, the filing says, “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.” This indicates the special counsel’s office disclosed it isn’t sure whether some it lost or mislabeled some of the allegedly classified documents it seized in the Trump raid.
In response, Trump’s defense team filed a motion to dismiss the case over prosecutorial misconduct.
Setting aside the FBI high-tailed it out of southern FLA to conduct the investigation within the confines of the corrupt Washington FBI field office, Smith admits DOJ cannot be sure every place holder corresponds with the correct document. pic.twitter.com/Fxy8MZp2qs
Smith charged Trump last June with 37 criminal counts related to the former president’s handling of classified documents. In July, Smith added three more counts against Trump as Democrats strategize to retain the presidency by imprisoning their chief political opponent in an unprecedented lawfare campaign. New evidence shows the Democrat White House worked closely with the DOJ and National Archives and Records Administration in crafting the documents case against Trump.
The classified documents case is Trump’s largest election-year court battle, as nearly half of the 88 total charges against him currently are related to the records. Federal prosecutors confiscated 33 boxes of documents from the hostile raid on Trump’s home in August 2022, according to Fox News. The Department of Justice has spent more than $23 million in taxpayer dollars for Smith to investigate Trump.
In April, Federalist Elections Correspondent Brianna Lyman outlined three major revelations to emerge from the classified documents case to date, including deep state pressure to move forward with Trump’s prosecution and White House involvement.
“President Biden also retained classified documents after leaving the vice presidency,” Lyman reported. “Yet he was not charged because prosecutors say they believed he would ‘present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’”
The Department of Energy allegedly revoked the former president’s security clearance retroactively once Trump was indicted.
In February, journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported the FBI raid may have been orchestrated to cover up the intelligence state’s role in the Russia hoax. The article posted on Shellenberger’s news website, Public, outlined how intelligence officials fretted over the presence of a classified “binder” in Trump’s possession that former CIA Director Gina Haspel was careful to protect for years.
“Transgressions [the feds might have wanted to cover up] range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian ‘influence activities,’” Public reported.
The binder was “Trump’s insurance policy,” according to an unnamed source cited as “knowledgeable about the case.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last week warned that “threats to democracy” will imperil U.S. economic growth. Yellen’s admonishment is a less-than-veiled finger wag at former President Donald Trump and anyone who would dare question the official lie that the 2020 election was “one of the most secure elections in history.”
The real threat to the economy is Joe Biden, his buffoonish treasury secretary, and the rest of the capitalism-crushing useful idiots in this dangerous administration.
As Democrat Party public-relations firm the Associated Press reported, Yellen used “economic data” in her address Friday in Arizona to “paint a picture of how disregard for America’s democratic processes and institutions can cause economic stagnation for decades.”
“Yellen, taking a rare step toward to [sic] the political arena, never mentioned Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, by name in her speech for the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum, but she hinted at the former president’s potential impact if he regains the White House,” the AP’s Fatima Hussein and Josh Boak propagandized in a shared byline.
The former Federal Reserve chairwoman, who has routinely injected herself into the “political arena,” used the speech to “serve as a sort of warning for business leaders who may overlook Trump’s disregard for modern democratic norms because they prefer the former president’s vision of achieving growth by slashing taxes and stripping away regulations.”
Yellen’s comments, and the AP article marketing them, are as nakedly political as they are hilariously absurd. Trump’s assertions that the 2020 election was rigged — by shattered election laws in swing states, unprecedented infusions of leftist third-party cash in election administration and election interference by the same rotten-to-the-core corporate media peddling Yellen’s assault on democracy diatribe — are more dangerous than Bidenomics? Americans and economic data disagree.
‘Transitory’ Regret
Yellen’s comments preceded Gallup’s latest Economy and Personal Finance poll showing Americans’ trust in Biden’s leadership at an all-time low. The poll, conducted April 1-22, finds just 38 percent of respondents say they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of confidence that Biden would do or recommend the right course for the economy. Former President Donald Trump, the Republican opponent Democrats and their pals in the Deep State are trying to throw in jail, is polling at 46 percent on the economic question.
Understandably, Americans are downright cranky about the shaky state of their personal economy, compliments of the Biden administration’s prosperity-crippling policies.
“With Americans less optimistic about the state of the U.S. economy than they have been in recent months and concern about inflation persisting, their confidence in President Joe Biden to recommend or do the right thing for the economy is among the lowest Gallup has measured for any president since 2001,” Gallup reported Monday.
Over the past three years, Americans learned to be confident that Biden would do the wrong thing. And his bungling treasury secretary has provided plenty of political cover. What is stunning is that a majority of Americans (57 percent) until 2022 had confidence in the Dementarian’s management of the economy. Only President George W. Bush had a lower rating, with a meager 34 percent confidence number at the end of his second term amid the real estate bubble-burst recession.
As inflation began to climb in 2021, economics genius Yellen described the soaring cost of things as a “transitory” problem. She doubled and tripled down as inflation ballooned to levels not seen since the real Great Recession of the 1980s, caused in large part by the policies of a lousy president Biden is often compared to: Jimmy Carter.
“I regret saying it was transitory. It has come down. But I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people,” Yellen said during an interview with Fox Business in March.
No Sale
Inflation has come up since Yellen expressed her regret. Soaring mortgage rates have priced Americans, particularly young families, out of home ownership. The housing crisis could be the “death knell for America’s middle class,” Newsweek warned in December.
American workers have seen any income growth devoured by rising costs for everything from gas to Happy Meals. Yes, Democrats’ massive expansion of government regulations on business — especially small business, climate change cultism, foreign policy debacles, and unsustainable spending — has everything to do with why middle-income earners are feeling the pain and increasingly frustrated.
Just as frustrating, you have the accomplice media covering for the bungler-in-chief, telling Americans what they’re experiencing is simply not real. The New York Times’ gag-worthy piece last month claiming Biden has a positive story to tell on the economy is political propaganda of the most ludicrous order. No one should be surprised about such absurd water-carrying by a Biden-backing corporate media that has pushed Democrats’ perfect election narrative despite Democrats’ many, many imperfections.
Now the tone-deaf treasury secretary wants to tell American businesses that tax-cutting, “election denier” Trump is more of a threat to the U.S. economy than the economic menace that is Joe Biden. America isn’t buying what Yellen is selling. They can’t afford to.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Israeli Defvense Forces reported on Monday that they’ve begun attacks against Hamas targets in Rafah, Gaza Strip, after the latest round of talks on a proposed cease-fire took a turn unsatisfactory to Israeli leadership. The news came after Hamas announced it had accepted an Egyptian-Qatari proposal for a cease-fire to halt the seven-month-long war with Israel in Gaza, hours after Israel ordered about 100,000 Palestinians to begin evacuating from the southern city of Rafah, signaling that a long-promised ground invasion there could be imminent.
Israel’s military spokesperson said Monday that all proposals regarding negotiations to free hostages in Gaza are examined seriously, and that in parallel it continues to operate in the Hamas-ruled territory.
“We examine every answer and response in the most seriously manner and are exhausting every possibility regarding negotiations and returning the hostages,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said when asked during a media briefing whether Hamas saying it accepted a cease-fire proposal would impact a planned offensive in the Gaza city of Rafah.
“In parallel, we are still operating in the Gaza Strip and will continue to do so.”
An Israeli official says Hamas approved a “softened” Egyptian proposal that was not acceptable and not approved by Israel, which apparently keeping up airstrikes on the Rafah hideouts of Hamas terrorists, as covered live by Newsmax.
Newsmax’s John Huddy is on the ground in Israel as the sound of strikes rang in the air, reportedly from nearby Rafah.
“This would appear to be a ruse intended to make Israel look like the side refusing a deal,” said the Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Israel’s Channel 12 quotes Israeli officials saying Israel’s negotiating team has just received Hamas’ response from the mediators. The report says Israel is now carefully evaluating the Hamas response and will issue orderly comments later this evening.
It says the Israeli officials are already saying “this is not the same proposal” for a deal that Israel and Egypt agreed upon 10 days ago, and that served as the basis for the indirect negotiations since then.
“All kinds of clauses” have been inserted, according to the TV report.
These new clauses, among other issues, relate to the cardinal questions of if, how and when the war would end, and what kind of guarantees are being offered to that effect.
Hamas, the report noted, had been toughening its demands in recent days, and demanding the war end during the first, 40-day phase of the deal, rather than in the second or third phases.
Israel, for its part, has repeatedly rejected ending the war as part of a hostage deal at all, instead insisting it will resume fighting once the deal is implemented, in accordance with its twin war goals: returning the hostages and destroying Hamas’s military and governance capacities.
Earlier, Hamas said in a brief statement that its chief, Ismail Haniyeh, had informed Qatari and Egyptian mediators that the group accepted their cease-fire proposal. The statement gave no details of the accord.
There has been no successful agreement on a cease-fire in Gaza since a week-long pause in the fighting in November. The Hamas announcement of an agreement came hours after Israel ordered the evacuation of parts of Rafah, the city on Gaza’s southern edge that has served as the last sanctuary for around half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.
In recent days, Egyptian and Hamas officials have said the cease-fire would take place in a series of stages during which Hamas would release hostages it is holding in exchange for Israeli troop pullbacks from Gaza.
It is not clear whether the deal will meet Hamas’ key demand of bringing about an end to the war and complete Israeli withdrawal.
Hamas said in a statement Haniyeh had delivered the news in a phone call with Qatar’s prime minister and Egypt’s intelligence minister. After the release of the statement, Palestinians erupted in cheers in the sprawling tent camps around Rafah, hoping the deal meant an Israeli attack had been averted.
Israel’s closest allies, including the United States, have repeatedly said Israel should not attack Rafah. The looming operation has raised global alarm over the fate of around 1.4 million Palestinians sheltering there.
Aid agencies have warned that an offensive will worsen Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe and bring a surge of more civilian deaths in an Israeli campaign that in nearly seven months has killed 34,000 people and devastated the territory.
President Joe Biden spoke Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reiterated U.S. concerns about an invasion of Rafah. Biden said that a cease-fire with Hamas is the best way to protect the lives of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, a National Security Council spokesperson said on condition of anonymity to discuss the call before an official White House statement was released.
Hamas and key mediator Qatar said that invading Rafah will derail efforts by international mediators to broker a cease-fire. Days earlier, Hamas had been discussing a U.S.-backed proposal that reportedly raised the possibility of an end to the war and a pullout of Israeli troops in return for the release of all hostages held by the group. Israeli officials have rejected that trade-off, vowing to continue their campaign until Hamas is destroyed.
Netanyahu said Monday that seizing Rafah, which Israel says is the last significant Hamas stronghold in Gaza, was vital to ensuring the terrorists can’t rebuild their military capabilities and repeat the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war.
Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an army spokesman, said about 100,000 people were being ordered to move from parts of Rafah to a nearby Israel-declared humanitarian zone called Muwasi, a makeshift camp on the coast. He said that Israel has expanded the size of the zone and that it included tents, food, water and field hospitals.
It wasn’t immediately clear, however, if that material was already in place to accommodate the new arrivals.
Around 450,000 displaced Palestinians already are sheltering in Muwasi. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said it has been providing them with aid. But conditions are squalid, with few bathrooms or sanitation facilities in the largely rural area, forcing families to dig private latrines.
After the evacuation order announcement Monday, Palestinians in Rafah wrestled with having to uproot their extended families once again for an unknown fate, exhausted after months living in sprawling tent camps or crammed into schools or other shelters in and around the city. Few who spoke to The Associated Press wanted to risk staying.
Mohammed Jindiyah said that at the beginning of the war, he had tried to hold out in his home in northern Gaza after Israel ordered an evacuation there in October. He ended up suffering through heavy bombardment before fleeing to Rafah. He is complying with the order this time but was unsure now whether to move to Muwasi or another town in central Gaza.
“We are 12 families, and we don’t know where to go. There is no safe area in Gaza,” he said.
Sahar Abu Nahel, who fled to Rafah with 20 family members including her children and grandchildren, wiped tears from her cheeks, despairing at a new move.
“I have no money or anything. I am seriously tired, as are the children,” she said. “Maybe it’s more honorable for us to die. We are being humiliated.”
Israeli military leaflets were dropped with maps detailing a number of eastern neighborhoods of Rafah to evacuate, warning that an attack was imminent and anyone who stays “puts themselves and their family members in danger.” Text messages and radio broadcasts repeated the message.
UNRWA won’t evacuate from Rafah so it can continue to provide aid to those who stay behind, said Scott Anderson, the agency’s director in Gaza.
“We will provide aid to people wherever they choose to be,” he told the AP.
The U.N. says an attack on Rafah could disrupt the distribution of aid keeping Palestinians alive across Gaza. The Rafah crossing into Egypt, a main entry point for aid to Gaza, lies in the evacuation zone. The crossing remained open Monday after the Israeli order.
Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, condemned the “forced, unlawful” evacuation order and the idea that people should go to Muwasi.
“The area is already overstretched and devoid of vital services,” Egeland said. He said that an Israeli assault could lead to “the deadliest phase of this war.”
Israel’s bombardment and ground offensives in Gaza have killed more than 34,700 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them children and women, according to pro-Hamas Gaza health officials. The tally doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. More than 80% of the population of 2.3 million have been driven from their homes, and hundreds of thousands in the north are on the brink of famine, according to the U.N.
Tensions escalated Sunday when Hamas fired rockets at Israeli troops positioned on the border with Gaza near Israel’s main crossing for delivering humanitarian aid, killing four soldiers. Israel shuttered the crossing — but Shoshani said it wouldn’t affect how much aid enters Gaza as others are working.
Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes on Rafah killed 22 people, including children and two infants, according to a hospital.
The war was sparked by the unprecedented Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which Hamas and other terrorists killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. After exchanges during a November cease-fire, Hamas is believed to still hold about 100 Israelis captive as well the bodies of around 30 others.
The mediators over the cease-fire — the United States, Egypt and Qatar — had appeared to scramble to salvage a cease-fire deal they had been trying to push through the past week. Egypt said it was in touch with all sides Monday to “prevent the situation from … getting out of control.”
CIA Director William Burns, who had been in Cairo for talks on the deal, headed to meet the prime minister of Qatar, an official familiar with the matter said. It wasn’t clear whether a subsequent trip to Israel that had been planned would happen. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door negotiations.
In a fiery speech Sunday evening marking Israel’s Holocaust memorial day, Netanyahu rejected international pressure to halt the war, saying that “if Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone.”
On Monday, Netanyahu accused Hamas of “torpedoing” a deal by not budging from its demand for an end to the war and a complete Israeli troop withdrawal in return for the hostages’ release, which he called “extreme.”
Information from The Associated Press, Reuters, and Newsmax’s Eric Mack contributed to this report.
In 2023, 138 Dutch people chose to end their lives because of psychiatric suffering. (Photo: ArtistGNDphotography/Getty Images)
Once, we told stories of rescuing women in distress. Now, we hand them a prescription for assisted suicide.
Two young women in the Netherlands, Jolanda Fun and Zoraya ter Beek, have recently done media interviews explaining their respective decisions to pursue euthanasia, despite being physically healthy.
Fun, who planned to end her life on her 34th birthday late last month, has struggled with depression for years. “Most of the time I just feel really sh—-,” she told The Times, a British newspaper, in an interview published April 14. “Sad, down, gloomy. People don’t see it, because that’s the mask I put on, and that’s what you learn to do in life.”
In the Netherlands, euthanasia has been legal since 2002. (The legislation passed in 2001, and went into effect the next year.) Fun started exploring the possibility two years ago, when a counselor mentioned it. For Fun, who has parents and a brother and a boyfriend, death still seemed like a better reality than staying alive.
“My father is sick, my mother is sick, my parents are fighting to stay alive, and I want to step out of life,” she told The Times. “That’s a bit strange. But even when I was seven, I asked my mother whether, if I jumped from a viaduct, I would be dead. I’ve been struggling with this my whole life.”
Meanwhile, ter Beek, 28,told The Free Press she plans to die by assisted suicide this month. Ter Beek, who is autistic and suffers from depression, has a boyfriend she loves and with whom she shares a home and cats. Her psychiatrist told her, “There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never [going to] get any better,” ter Beek told The Free Press, saying those words triggered her decision to end her life.
Zoraya ter Beek is one of a growing number of people across the West choosing to end their lives rather than live in pain. Pain that in many cases can be treated.
Ter Beek and Fun are not alone in their decisions. (So far, no media outlets have confirmed that either one has died.) In 2023, 138 Dutch people chose to end their lives because of psychiatric suffering, according to Spanish newspaper El Pais, which reported that represented a 20% increase from 2022. The trend is undeniably upward: The Netherlands had a mere two assisted suicide deaths for mental health reasons in 2010 and 68 in 2019, according to the Times.
In general, euthanasia has grown in popularity in the Netherlands over the past two decades. More than 9,000 Dutch people chose euthanasia in 2023, reports El Pais, noting that euthanasia deaths made up more than 5% of all deaths in the Netherlands last year.
Canada—which initially legalized assisted suicide in 2016 for those with terminal illnesses and later for those with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition”—is similarly experiencing an upward trend. Over 13,000 Canadians died by assisted suicide in 2022, a 31% jump from the 2021 numbers. In 2017, the first full year assisted suicide was legal in Canada, 2,838 people chose to die that way.
Canada was slated to further follow in the Netherlands’ path and allow assisted suicide for mental health reasons this year, but due to concerns over straining the medical system, it has postponed that to March 17, 2027.
If you value life, you should be worried.
Already in the United States, 10 states and the District of Columbia allow assisted suicide under certain circumstances. If mental health continues to deteriorate in the U.S., as unfortunately seems likely, we could well face advocacy for allowing suicide for the mentally ill.
Of course, mental illness is a “real” illness, and its suffering can be acute.
But there is a reason we fight so hard against suicide, try to help and encourage and to provide medical assistance to Americans who struggle with depression and anxiety and other mental illnesses.
Not only do we love them, and want them to remain in our lives, but we also know that as long as someone is alive, there is hope—hope that he or she might heal, fully or partially, from mental illness and be able to live life more joyfully, less burdened by rapacious negative emotions. That belief is hard to hold when you are struggling with depression, making it all the more critical that the non-depressed in society vociferously advocate for the value of life.
⭕️ Jolanda Fun, qui est en bonne santé physique aux Pays-Bas mais qui veut mettre fin à ses jours par l'euthanasie parce que sa psychologie n'est pas bonne, mettra fin à ses jours en appelant ses amis le jour de son anniversaire.
Furthermore, plenty of those who have suffered from depression or other mental illnesses have, as their health has improved, become grateful they did not die by suicide. “I am extremely thankful that I did not take my life,” Olympian medalist Michael Phelps said in 2018 when discussing his history of depression.
In a 2023 Washington Post essay, Billy Lezra described a planned suicide attempt.
“I’d been drinking whiskey mixed with flat Coke all afternoon to work up the nerve to jump in front of the train, and I was drunk enough that my plan felt within reach. I was 23,” Lezra wrote.
“Two months earlier, my mother had tried to take her life, and I had interrupted her attempt. This experience, compounded by years of depression and addiction, made me long to stop feeling. It’s not that I wanted to die, exactly, it’s that I didn’t want to live.”
But then “a wiry woman with pink hair and a titanium lip ring” asked Lezra to take a photo. By the time the photo was taken, the train was gone—and now, seven years later, Lezra remains alive.
Lezra cannot recall the face of the pink-haired woman, but “what has stayed with me is a feeling of sharp, profound gratitude.”
Statistics back up Lezra’s experience. About 90% of suicide survivors will not ultimately die by suicide, according to the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. That suggests that many depressed people do, in fact, get better, at least to some extent.
And what does it say about us as a culture that we allow people to end their lives, that we publicly support it?
As Western civilization further becomes divorced from its Christian roots, it’s perhaps not surprising that there is renewed interest in suicide. The belief that God gives life and that it is not ours to take is less widely held. In modern thinking, where the individual becomes a free agent encouraged to pursue his own truth and happiness, obedience to the timing of a Creator is about as unfashionable a virtue as it gets, especially when such obedience includes chronic suffering.
“In the absence of Christianity, suicide and euthanasia become, perhaps, the ultimate and extreme (if mistaken) vindication of human choice and human dignity: My life is mine, and I can end it when I want to. In this way, individual liberty is reduced to a kind of death cult,” wrote John Daniel Davidson in “Pagan America.”
How bleak.
In addition to embracing individualism in our time, we constantly talk of kindness—but it is often a limp kindness, never deployed in tough times. Sometimes, the truest kindness is to fight for someone when she can no longer fight for herself.
Laws often more shape, than reflect, cultures. If the Netherlands had not legalized assisted suicide, perhaps both Fun and ter Beek would be trying new doctors, new treatments, and other ways to ease their very real suffering.
Instead, their government’s laws are telling them their lives may well not be worth living.
For years, I have written about the analogy of what is happening on our campuses to the French Revolution, including faculty enablers becoming the targets of radical groups. Many faculty were silent as conservatives and libertarians were purged from faculties. Some even supported cancel campaigns against professors and speakers with opposing views. Now the analogy has become even more poignant on my campus of George Washington University after protesters held mock tribunals and called for the heads of the President, Provost, and Board of Trustees to be cut off by guillotine. A video has emerged over the weekend from the enactment outside of my office with students gleefully cheering for the beheading of faculty, administrators, and board members. They specifically “convicted” President Ellen Granberg, Provost Christopher Bracey, the Board of Trustees, @GWPolice, and others according to the poster of the video.
Shocked to see this blatant act of culturally appropriating the Robespierrian traditions of the indigenous peoples of France. https://t.co/BJQZ0RPigz
— Francis Joseph Beckwith (@FrancisBeckwith) May 6, 2024
I discussed earlier how the D.C. police refused to clear the street outside of the law school and next to the quad. In D.C., it often matters what you are protesting in determining whether action will be taken.
As for the guillotine video, the Post Millennial reported on the scene:
In the mock tribunal, the woman asks, “How do the people find you?”
The crowd shouts, “Guilty!” then “Guillotine! Guillotine! Guillotine!”
“Bracey, Bracey, we see you! You assault students too. Off to the motherf*cking gallows with you,” the woman chants, along with the gleeful activists.
Moving on to the Board of Trustees, she states “On the charges of having a vested interest in the genocide of Palestinian people as they profit off Zionist weapons and purchases that you refuse to divest the apartheid as they line their pockets. The people find you.”
“Guilty!” The crowd screams with a mix of mob rage and joy.
“To the Guillotine!” the girl yells. “Board of Trustees, we charge you with genocide. I hope all that money is gonna save you when you’re rotting in jail.”
The crowd calls out President Grandberg, as well. “On the charges of using our tuition dollars to fund genocide, and selling out students to Zionist interest, the people find you?”
“Guilty!” The crowd yells.
“As you already know where I am sending her,” she adds, referring to the guillotine. “Her and her f*ck *ss bob.”
Fortunately, we got rid of shop in many schools years ago so the actual construction of a gallows may prove challenging. Amazon can deliver a guillotine but it is only five inches tall so it might be a bit of a Spinal Tap moment for the new Jacobins.
Few of us expect tumbrils to roll in Foggy Bottom. These students clearly thought that this was funny and no one believes that they are turning into little Robespierres. However, the rhetoric of these protests have displayed violent and unhinged elements – fueled by radical activists from Antifa and other organizations.
The protesters have already succeeded in forcing concessions from universities like Brown, Northwestern, and Rutgers. The growing protests have also clearly spooked the White House, particularly with the chant “Genocide Joe” catching on across the country. At GW, that image was projected over the large flag hung by the school.
The protesters are likely to take solace in the fact that the Biden Administration just reportedly put a hold on an ammunition transfer to Israel. It is not clear if this will be a mere symbolic hold that will be lifted or something more significant. Israel is preparing the long-announced offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza where the remaining Hamas fighters are located.
Below is my column in The Hill on the expected appearance of Michael Cohen in the Manhattan trial of former president Donald Trump. It will be a scene that is both mesmerizing and repellent for many, particularly in the bar.
Here is the column:
A disbarred, serial perjurer walks into a courtroom and asks to take an oath . . . No, seriously, this is not a joke. Michael Cohen will soon appear in a Manhattan courtroom in what is sure to be one of the most bizarre moments in legal history.
Cohen nearly comprises the prosecution’s entire case against former President Donald Trump under a criminal theory that still has many of us baffled. It is not clear what crime Trump was supposedly trying to conceal by making “hush-money” payments to former porn actress Stormy Daniels. What is clear is that none of the witnesses called in recent weeks has had any direct involvement with Trump on the payments. The witnesses had a lot to say about Cohen, and most of it was not good. They described an unprofessional, self-proclaimed “fix-it man” who created a shell corporation to buy out Daniels with his own money. The money was later paid back by Trump after the election, with other legal expenses.
So, Cohen will now make the pitch to the jury that they should put his former client in jail for following his own legal advice. This would be difficult even for a competent and ethical lawyer. For Cohen, it is utter insanity. But Bragg is betting on a New York jury looking no further than the identity of the defendant to convict.
Cohen has an impressive history of lies and exaggerations that may be unparalleled. Just weeks ago, another judge denounced him as a serial perjurer who was still gaming the system. This is not the defendant, mind you, but Alvin Bragg’s star witness.
When a journalist pursued a story Cohen did not like, he told the reporter that he should “tread very f—ing lightly because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting. Do you understand me?”
It is not hard to “understand” Cohen. He has long marketed his curious skill of voluntarily saying whatever the highest bidder wants him to say. He is a convicted perjurer who seems to lie even when the truth would do. Each time he is caught lying, he claims to be the sinner who has finally seen the light, seeking redemption.
When he was called before the House to testify against Trump soon after his plea agreement with the Justice Department (for lying), Cohen was again accused of perjury. House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), warned Cohen repeatedly that he had better tell the truth this time. Cohen then testified that Trump wanted him to work in his administration and offered him multiple jobs, which he turned down. He also claimed, “I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump.” Multiple sources have said that Cohen’s lawyer pressed the White House for a pardon, and that Cohen unsuccessfully sought a presidential pardon after FBI raids on his office and residences last year.
Even after being stripped of his law license and sentenced to three years in prison, Cohen continued the pattern. In 2019, Cohen failed to appear to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing an inability to travel due to surgery. He was then seen partying before the hearing date with five friends.
Even while in jail, Cohen was accused of lying to a court, in violation of an order for early release due to medical problems. He was ordered back into custody after being spotted at a high-end restaurant.
But the most impressive moment came when Cohen was put back on the stand under oath and matter-of-factly claimed that he had lied in his prior hearing, when he pleaded guilty to lying.
In his 2018 guilty plea before U.S. District Judge William Henry Pauley III, Cohen admitted to this conduct under oath.
Then, when Cohen was asked by Trump’s counsel, “Did you lie to Judge Pauley when you said that you were guilty of the counts that you said under oath that you were guilty of? Did you lie to Judge Pauley?”
Cohen responded, “Yes.” He was then again asked “So you lied when you said that you evaded taxes to a judge under oath; is that correct?” He again responded, “Yes.”
Most of us expected the Justice Department to bring new perjury charges at that point. It is rare that a defendant will actually take the stand and confess to perjury. However, Cohen was now useful again. This time, he was willing to deliver Trump. The Justice Department and Manhattan prosecutors were clearly willing to tolerate a little perjury for that prize.
Cohen’s conduct has already loomed large in the Manhattan proceedings. When Keith Davidson took the stand — the attorney who represented both Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal — he recounted how Cohen was furious about not being offered a job in the White House. That directly contradicts Cohen’s congressional testimony. Davidson said that Cohen believed he might be named attorney general.
The account, if true, shows that Cohen is not only unethical, but also delusional. Cohen was found incapable of being an attorney, let alone an attorney general.
As prosecutors set the table for the grand arrival of their star witness, the testimony only got worse. David Pecker, the former owner of the National Enquirer, said charitably that Cohen was “prone to exaggeration.”
Davidson described Cohen’s profane and unprofessional conduct, stating that “the moral of the story is nobody wanted to talk to Cohen.” That may be the first time the word “moral” was used in the same line with Cohen.
Former Trump associate Hope Hicks mocked Cohen on the stand. She said that he constantly tried to insinuate himself into the campaign, without success, and that he “used to like to call himself Mister Fix It, but it was only because he first broke it.” Mind you, these were his fellow prosecution witnesses, not the defense.
These witnesses also contradicted the basis for the prosecution. Pecker said that he killed stories for various celebrities for years, and that he did so for Trump for over a decade before he ran for office. Davidson testified that he did not consider the deal to be “hush money” but simply “consideration” to kill bad press.
Hicks testified that she believed Trump wanted to kill the stories in significant part to protect his family from embarrassment.
Cohen could not even maintain a consistent position during the trial. Many of us have denounced the gag order on Trump that prevents him from responding to Cohen’s unrelenting attacks in the media. Cohen then promised to stop any further comments. That promise may have set a record for Cohen. He kept it for roughly three days before being accused of trolling for dollars on social media by attacking Trump.
District Attorney Bragg will now call this disbarred, serial perjurer to make the case against a former president. Under New York law, the oath administered by the court is supposed “to awaken the conscience and impress the mind of the witness in accordance with that witness’s religious or ethical beliefs.”
Before the bailiff administers the oath to Cohen, Judge Juan Merchan may have to warn spectators in the courtroom not to laugh. For anyone familiar with Cohen, it will sound like the ultimate punchline to a bad joke.
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Hennepin County Board candidate and current Minnesota Rep. Heather Edelson is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban the sale of gas-powered lawn and gardening tools in Minnesota.
Hennepin County candidate is co-author of bill banning sale of gas-powered lawn mowers
By Luke Sprinkel
Hennepin County Board candidate and current Minnesota Rep. Heather Edelson is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban the sale of gas-powered lawn and gardening tools in Minnesota.
Currently running in a special election for the District 6 seat on the Hennepin County Board, Edelson faces conservative newcomer Marisa Simonetti. Serving in her third-term as a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Edelson signed on as a co-author of HF 1715 in the early days of Minnesota’s 93rd Legislative Session. Under that proposed law, the sale of new gas-powered lawn mowers, leaf blowers, hedge clippers, chainsaws, and other “law and garden equipment” would be banned in Minnesota on and after Jan. 1, 2025. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Universities across the nation are facing a meltdown due to the Marxist rot they are injecting into young students’ minds to the point kids are now advocating for Hamas’ terrorism against Jews in the form of violent protests and occupation of campuses. This seems to be having a negative effect on the democrat party and Biden’s poll numbers.
Watch: Dr. Phil Rips ‘Liberal Woke’ Universities for Fostering Anti-Semitism, ‘Intellectual Rot’
By Ken Kew – The Western Journal
Dr. Phil has launched a full frontal attack on America’s “liberal woke” universities.
The popular television host, whose full name is Phil McGraw, said in a video message this week that he was appalled by the “sickening smugness” displayed by leaders of elite universities they were testifying on Capitol Hill about the issue of campus anti-Semitism. McGraw declared that these prestigious institutions have become “liberal woke hotbeds fostering intellectual rot rather than critical thinking.” 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 • Joe Biden is the Most Radical Pro-Abortion President Ever, We Must Defeat Him • Trump: Vote for Me to Stop Biden From Pushing Abortions Up to Birth • Ben Carson Condemns Abortion: “We Must Guarantee the Right to Life For Those in the Womb” • Maternal Deaths Fall From Pre-Dobbs High as Almost 20 States Ban Abortions
More Pro-Life News • They Don’t Just Want Roe v. Wade, They Want Abortions Up to Birth Nationwide • Pro-Life Doctor Shares How He Saved Babies From Death in the Middle of the Abortion • Planned Parenthood is Using Your Tax Dollars to Push Its Abortion Agenda Worldwide • Florida’s Heartbeat Law Now Protects Babies, But We Must Stop Amendment 4 and Abortions Up to Birth • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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There is almost no subject the left won’t lie about. Whether it’s denying basic biology or fabricating “bloodbath” hoaxes about their top Republican rival, no topic is off limits for the Democrat “disinformation” police — and that includes elections.
Since the 2020 election, Democrats and their media allies have worked overtime to smear Americans concerned about the integrity of U.S. elections. No matter how legitimate these concerns may be, the left slanders anyone who challenges controversial elections won by Democrats as so-called “election deniers.”
Putting aside the fact that Democrats have questioned elections they don’t win (see the Trump-Russia collusion hoax), it’s important to highlight that the left regularly lies about America’s elections to further their party’s goal of acquiring and maintaining government power. In service of this goal, no falsehood is too great.
Here are the 10 biggest lies Democrats tell about U.S. elections so you can identify and combat these mistruths.
1. Election Integrity Laws ‘Suppress’ Voters
Under the guise of Covid, many states expanded the use of unsupervised mail-in voting, permanently changing the electoral landscape and how modern elections are conducted. With Covid-era lockdowns now in the rearview mirror, many Republican-controlled states have spent the past several years returning their election systems to pre-Covid practices and moving away from unsupervised methods.
With their election machine that thrives off the insecure mail-in system threatened, Democrats have taken to dishonestly attacking GOP-backed election integrity laws. The most common of these smears is the debunked claim that voter ID laws suppress voters, especially those who aren’t white. Of course, there’s no evidence to support such assertions, as multiplecourt rulings have found.
One of the more egregious examples of these attacks came from President Joe Biden, who grossly labeled a benign 2021 Georgia election law as “Jim Crow on steroids.” Contrary to Democrats’ smears, Georgia experienced record early voter turnout during the state’s 2022 midterms. A poll conducted after the election also revealed that zero percent of black Georgia voters said they had a “poor” experience voting.
2. The 2020 Election Was the ‘Most Secure in American History’
This claim from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — the “nerve center” of the federal government’s censorship operations — is just as inaccurate today as the day it was issued nearly four years ago.
From illegal election rule changes in Michigan and Pennsylvania to the unauthorized use of ballot drop boxes in Wisconsin, the 2020 election was fraught with mischief and irregularities. In unprecedented fashion, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, which funneled most of these “Zuckbucks” into election offices in Democrat-majority localities to push Democrat-backed voting policies and get-out-the-vote efforts.
There was also heavy involvement from U.S. intel agencies and officials to help Joe Biden leading up to the election.
Weeks ahead of the 2020 contest, the New York Post dropped a bombshell story documenting the Biden family’s foreign business dealings. Despite having authenticated the laptop as early as November 2019, the FBI spent months leading up to the election pressuring Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter (now X) to be on the lookout for so-called “Russian propaganda” and “hack and leak operations.” Zuckerberg all but admitted during a 2022 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan that the company’s decision to suppress the Post story was based on the FBI’s warning.
The CIA — while allegedly coordinating with the Biden campaign — purportedly solicited signatures for a letter issued by 51 former intel officials claiming Hunter’s laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Meanwhile, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss reportedly delayed his investigation into Hunter’s alleged tax law violations to avoid negatively affecting Joe’s electoral prospects.
When it comes to defending the chaotic and irregular 2020 election, legacy media have adopted the strategy of pretending that voter fraud never happens. But recent cases of such illegalities show that isn’t true.
In December, the Louisiana Supreme Court let stand a lower court decision that the existence of voter fraud in a local sheriff’s race warranted a new election. While initial results in Caddo Parish’s November sheriff’s race indicated that Democrat Henry Whitehorn defeated Republican John Nickelson by one vote, a lawsuit filed by Nickelson and subsequent legal proceedings revealed there were enough illegal votes to call into question the election outcome.
The judge overseeing the case ultimately determined there were 11 unlawful votes cast in the race, and as such, ordered that a new election be held.
Another recent incident of voter fraud occurred in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Democrat mayoral primary. Surveillance footage released after the September election showed what appeared to be a city employee affiliated with the incumbent mayor’s campaign “stuffing ballot boxes.” The matter prompted a superior court judge to order a new election.
4. Election Workers Are Under Siege
As America edges closer to the 2024 election, Democrats are ramping up their attacks on election oversight. On an almost weekly basis, regime-approved media outlets run article after article lamenting an alleged wave of “threats” against election workers that they blame on Trump’s 2020 election criticisms.
Of course, these same doomsday predictions didn’t materialize during the 2022 midterms. But that hasn’t stopped the press from continuing to repeat the narrative they have little evidence to support.
As I previously wrote in these pages, Democrat claims that election workers have experienced a spike in threats since the 2020 election are primarily based on “surveys” issued by leftist organizations and unsubstantiated statements from Democrat election officials. Moreover, data produced by the Biden Department of Justice indicates the issue is minimal.
5. Ranked-Choice Voting Is ‘Fair’
Often referred to as “rigged-choice voting” by its critics, ranked-choice voting (RCV) is a system whereby voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.
RCV’s (mostly Democrat) proponents have deceptively attempted to garner support for the system by claiming it brings “fairness” to the voting process. But a quick look into RCV’s history reveals anything but a fair system.
RCV has produced election results that contradict the desires of voters, especially Republican ones. Since adopting the system, Alaska and Maine have produced elections in which the Democrat candidate was the declared winner despite the Republican candidate winning more votes in the first round of voting.
Jurisdictions employing RCV have also experienced inaccurate election results and high rates of discarded ballots.
6. Contingent Electors Are ‘Fake’ and Unlawful
After Arizona Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes released an indictment alleging 18 Republicans illegally participated in a so-called “fake elector scheme,” media hacks are once again using this dishonest terminology to characterize Trump’s challenging of the 2020 election results as unlawful and unprecedented.
But there’s no such thing as a “fake elector,” and the naming of contingent Republican electors during the 2020 election was neither unprecedented nor unlawful. The process undertaken in states such as Georgia closely mirrored efforts taken during the 1960 presidential contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Had courts ruled in Trump’s favor in lawsuits disputing the election results in battleground states, the alternate electors would have been in place to ensure the will of the people was exercised.
Deceptively marketed to states as a means to keep their voter rolls updated, ERIC is a widely used voter-roll “management” system founded by far-left activist David Becker that places a higher priority on registering new voters than on cleaning up existing voter rolls. The program inflates voter rolls by requiring member states to contact “eligible but unregistered” residents and encourage them to register to vote.
Concerns about ERIC’s ties to Becker and its refusal to change its bylaws prompted numerous GOP-led states to depart the organization. To salvage ERIC’s reputation, the media launched a seemingly coordinated campaign to position the group as “nonpartisan” and cast its opponents as “conspiracy theorists.” Of course, this coverage fails to disclose ERIC’s relationship with the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), another Becker-founded nonprofit most notable for its “Zuckbucks” interference in the 2020 election to help Biden and other Democrats.
As The Federalist previously reported, ERIC sends the voter-roll data it receives from states to CEIR. Upon receiving the data, CEIR “then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach.” In other words, CEIR — a highly partisan nonprofit with a history of left-wing activism — is creating lists of potential (and likely Democrat) voters for states to register in the lead-up to major elections.
8. Mail-In Voting Is Secure and Reliable
Much like the issue of voter fraud, Democrats have gone to great lengths to convince the American public that mail-in voting has zero problems and is 100 percent secure. But according to left-wing media’s own reporting, that narrative isn’t true.
In recent months, outlets such as NBC News and CBS News have published stories highlighting insecurities within the U.S. postal system. While NBC addressed the effect postal delivery delays could have on mail-in voting during the 2024 election, CBS explored the increasing problem of mail theft.
NBC even cited remarks from Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, who expressed concern that mail delivery delays could present “difficulties” and “barriers” to voters during the November election.
9. Democrats Are the Party of ‘Democracy’
Biden and Democrats love to contend that “democracy is on the ballot” this November. The insinuation, of course, is that the republic as we know it will collapse if Trump and Republicans emerge victorious at the ballot box. Yet, for all their professed concerns about “democracy,” Democrats are doing everything in their power to destroy it.
In unprecedented fashion, the left is abusing the legal system in an attempt to imprison and bankrupt their chief political rival ahead of a major election. Spanning dozens of counts, a roughly half-a-billion-dollar fine, and five judicial venues, the Biden Department of Justice and leftist prosecutors are waging lawfare against Donald Trump to hinder his reelection prospects.
10. Biden’s Federal Election Takeover Is Just a ‘Nonpartisan’ Outreach Effort
The seriousness of Executive Order 14019 cannot be overstated. Signed by Biden in March 2021, the directive ordered hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration by using taxpayer dollars to engage in voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities — a policy Congress never authorized.
Under the edict, each department was instructed to draft “a strategic plan” explaining how it intended to fulfill Biden’s order, and to collaborate with so-called “nonpartisan third-party organizations” that have been “approved” by the administration to supply “voter registration services on agency premises.” While Biden and his lackies claim these outside groups are “nonpartisan,” the facts tell a different story.
Good government groups and conservative media have discovered that many of the organizations collaborating with the administration are extremely left-wing, indicating an effort to identify and register likely-Democrat voters. Among those identified are the ACLU and Demos, both of which contributed to a “progress report” tracking agencies’ compliance with the “Bidenbucks” order.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Five West Virginia middle school girls banned from participating in track and field meets after they protested against a trans athlete last week are allowed to compete again, a judge ruled Thursday night. Judge Thomas A. Bedell issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the Harrison Board of Education and its schools from penalizing student-athletes for their speech. (https://wordpress.com/post/whatdidyousay.org/90958)
The school board denied allegations of retaliation against the students, and instead asserted the students were allowed to protest without hindrance and with full awareness and permission from coaches and the principal.
Liars don’t win trials. The truth does. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.
Fulfilling that maxim is the challenge for the defense in the Manhattan trial of Donald Trump. Lawyers for the former President are tasked with exposing the legal deceit of District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the chronic dishonesty of his star witness, Michael Cohen. Compounding the challenge is a presiding judge, Juan Merchan, whose anti-Trump bias is conspicuous and disgraceful.
Back on the stand Thursday was the Beverly Hills attorney who negotiated payments for two women who demanded exorbitant cash from Trump in exchange for their silence about purported affairs. But the witness, Keith Davidson, admitted he had no contact whatsoever with the defendant and never met him. He dealt exclusively with Trump’s ex-lawyer, Cohen, who appeared to be acting entirely on his own. Nothing in his testimony involved crimes allegedly committed by Trump.
Davidson’s description of Cohen was both accurate and scathing —profane, offensive, unceasingly angry, and often threatening. Importantly, he depicted Cohen as a liar who turned bitter toward Trump when the newly elected president refused to take him to Washington, D.C. Jurors learned that Cohen had delusions of grandeur, envisioning himself as White House chief of staff or even attorney general of the United States.
When his bubble burst, Cohen detonated like a nuclear device with seething hatred for his former boss that became a maniacal obsession. He raged to Davidson, “Jesus Christ, can you f***ing believe I’m not going to Washington after everything I’ve done for that guy?” Cohen seemed suicidal. This helps shape the defense theory that Cohen’s real objective in testifying against Trump is vengeance, not truth.
It’s hard to imagine that any sentient or ethical prosecutor would ever rest his case on the slumped shoulders of an unhinged and inveterate liar like Cohen. After confessing in 2018 to a string of shameful fabrications under oath, he was dispatched to prison for perjury and fraud. He is exactly what a federal judge called him recently, “a serial perjurer.” He’s the Talented Mr. Ripley…without the talent.
After appearing incessantly on television shows trashing Trump and calling him a criminal, Cohen has taken to TikTok during the trial to comment on the testimony and escalate his Trump tirades. His social media rants reap financial profits, which means that now, more than ever, he has an economic motive to lie. Indeed, his livelihood depends on it. Prosecutors’ heads must have exploded when they discovered what he was doing. What little credibility Cohen might have brought to the courtroom has vanished.
FILE – Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump is seen outside federal court in New York City on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The mere mention of Cohen’s name in a court of law should equal “reasonable doubt.” He’s the definition of untrustworthy. Without him there is no legitimate case to be prosecuted. But instead of throwing in the towel by admitting that their central witness has gone rogue and self-destructed, Bragg persists in his contemptible pursuit of Trump. The D.A. is like an attack dog who won’t let go.
If there is a sleaze factor to the trial, it has rubbed off on Bragg’s witnesses more than Trump. Increasingly, the defendant resembles a victim of blackmail, which the law defines as a demand for money under threat.
If Bragg thought that Davidson would be a stellar witness for the prosecution, it may have backfired. He refused to call the Stormy Daniels payment “hush money or a payoff” while insisting that its proper definition is “consideration.” That is a fancy legal term in contract law that simply means an exchange of benefits. Here, it was compensation in return for a non-disclosure agreement. Booking it as a legal expense would, therefore, be manifestly proper.
This key testimony blows a gaping hole in all of Bragg’s 34 charges against Trump that he falsified private business records. What was false? The Daniels deal was a legal settlement negotiated by two lawyers that culminated in the execution of a legal document. Of course, it was a legal expense. What else would it be?
On cross-examination, Davidson melted like a Joe Biden ice cream cone when confronted with evidence that he was once investigated by law enforcement for criminal extortion, although never charged. He admitted that much of his practice involved “extracting” money (he preferred to label them “settlements”) from celebrities. He also “brokered sex tapes.” For the defense, it fits a pattern of squeezing prominent people for cash during times of vulnerability. People such as Donald Trump.
If there is a sleaze factor to the trial, it has rubbed off on Bragg’s witnesses more than Trump. Increasingly, the defendant resembles a victim of blackmail, which the law defines as a demand for money under threat. In 2016, as the presidential election neared, the cash ultimatums intensified and, in the case of Daniels, Trump reluctantly capitulated.
However, that does not mean that Trump himself committed any crimes. His personal reimbursements to Cohen did not constitute a violation of election laws, as Bragg contends. The two government departments that have exclusive authority over such matters —the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department— correctly concluded that the payments to Daniels did not constitute an unlawful contribution.
In other words, there’s no there there. But Alvin Bragg could care less. He deliberately commandeered a state statute that has no application to a federal election and twisted it into a pretzel to bring a preposterous charge against Trump that is utterly unsupported by the facts and the law.
The consternation for the defense is the jurors who may be predisposed to convict in a politically charged case involving a presidential candidate they might dislike. Are they capable of setting aside their personal beliefs to see through the prosecution’s charade? Or will they be snookered into believing that there is an election crime here, even though there is none?
When an unscrupulous prosecutor contorts statutes and deploys nefarious or lying witnesses to fool a jury into convicting an innocent defendant, it is an assault on the rule of law and an abuse of our justice system. In Manhattan, the crooked cards are stacked against Trump.
Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. His recent book, “The Trial of the Century,” about the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” is available in bookstores nationwide or can be ordered online at the Simon & Schuster website. Jarrett’s latest book, “The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents,” was published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins on November 14, 2023. Gregg is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His follow-up book was also a New York Times bestseller, “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History.”
In recent years, there has been much discussion of the claims of “trauma” by students caused by court rulings and other events. These developments are often cited as a basis for the cancellation of exam or classes. Conservative speakers, case decisions, and protests have all been cited in the past for such demands as well as the creation of therapy tents and trauma counseling. Now, editors of the Columbia Law Review (and editors of other journals) have called for the outright cancellation of exams due to the trauma of watching recent protests on campus. This is indeed a learning moment. Law students need to be able to face such moments without shutting down due to the stress. Our profession is filled with stress and trauma. It is the environment in which we operate. In those moments, we do not have the option of being a no-show. We make our appearance and speak for others.
Such claims have been commonplace. Black Harvard and Georgetown law students demanded exam cancellation after the death of Michael Brown in 2014. Administrators and faculty foster these claims by calling free speech “harmful” and “triggering” for students.
Students have also complained of the trauma of taking classes by faculty who do not recognize “white privilege” or classes that touch on certain crimes. After Trump was elected in 2016, universities set up “safe areas” and trauma tents for students.
The editors of the Columbia Law Review are virtually guaranteed their picks of top jobs after graduation. Yet, they told the law school that the clearing of the unauthorized encampment constituted traumatic “violence” that left them “irrevocably shaken” and “unable to focus.” They were joined by editors of five other law journals, including the Columbia Human Rights Law Review & A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual.
They portrayed the trauma as the appearance of counter protesters and police on campus, accusing a “white supremacist, neo-fascist hate group” of “storming” campus.
The Columbia students told the university that “many are unwell at this time and cannot study or concentrate while their peers are being hauled to jail.”
The law school has postponed exams due to the protests but has not cancelled the exams.
The students offered an alternative but not preferred option of allowing them to take exams pass/fail. However, they emphasized that “instituting an optional Pass/Fail policy is not really optional when employers will see that some students have grades and others do not… [T]his leaves room for the introduction of extreme bias into the hiring process.”
It is true that law firms are likely to look for students who can handle high-stress situations. This letter suggests the opposite of students at the very top of the Columbia law class.
More importantly, the question is how such law students are emotionally prepared for the pressures of practice when such protests shut them down and leave them “unable to focus.” However, they have been educated in systems that have fostered the sense of victimization or trauma from opposing views.
While often called the “trophy generation,” it sometimes seems like this is becoming the trauma generation. I do not blame these students. Teachers and administrators have reinforced this view. That was evident in the controversial cancelling of a federal judge at Stanford Law School last year.
The Stanford Federalist Society invited Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to speak on campus. It is a great opportunity to hear the views of one of the highest ranked judicial officers in the country. However, liberal students decided that allowing a conservative judge to speak on campus is intolerable and set about to “deplatform” him by shouting him down. It was reminiscent of an equally disgraceful event at Yale Law School when another conservative speaker was similarly canceled — the law students then objected to the fact that campus police were present.
In this event, Duncan was planning to speak on the topic: “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” A video shows that the students prevented Duncan from speaking and the judge asked for an administrator to be called in to allow the event to proceed.
Dean Tirien Steinback then took the stage and, instead of simply demanding that the students allow for the event to proceed, Steinback launched into a babbling attack on the judge for seeking to be heard despite such objections.
Steinbach explained “I had to write something down because I am so uncomfortable up here. And I don’t say that for sympathy, I just say that I am deeply, deeply uncomfortable.”
Steinbach declared “It’s uncomfortable to say that for many people here, you’re work has caused harm.” After a perfunctory nod to free speech, Steinbach proceeded to eviscerate it to the delight of the law students. She continued “again I still ask, is the juice worth the squeeze?” “Is it worth the pain that this causes, the division that this causes? Do you have something so incredibly important to say about Twitter and guns and Covid that that is worth this impact on the division of these people.”
These students have spent years with such faculty telling them that they are fragile, vulnerable victims. However, our clients are often victims with traumatic injuries that must be addressed. Securing an equally vulnerable and triggered lawyer is not going to help them much.
Outside of the Columbia Law Review offices is a thing called life. It is neither predictable nor comfortable. We enter the lives of our clients when they are often failing apart. We have to bring our skills and support at those moments without the assistance of a trauma tent or emotional coach. We also cannot ask judges for postponements to allow us to process the stress of the moment.
This is not meant to be another “buck up buttercup” dismissal. I understand that the campus faced disruption and that many feel deeply about the underlying issues. That passion is needed. Young lawyers should be motivated to right wrongs in this world. I also understand that many of these law students likely had friends who were arrested or involved in the protests. However, our clients look to us for strength not fragility in such moments.
The response from Columbia Law School should be simple: see you at the exams.
The Trump short list for vice presidential candidates is reportedly down to Ohio Senator, J.D. Vance, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. Rubio is a favorite for many due to his record in the Senate and his appeal to hispanic voters (where the GOP is hoping to make gains in the coming election). The problem is not Rubio or his record, but his residence.
TheTwelfth Amendment contains a habitation or “favorite sons” provision: “The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.”
The risk is that Florida’s electoral votes could be challenged in any election since both Trump and Rubio reside in the state. That is a chunk of 30 votes in a close election. In addition other states which sought to block Trump from the ballot like Colorado could try this new tack to derail his campaign.
The most obvious option is for either Trump or Rubio to move. The easiest would be for Trump to move since Rubio represents Florida. That could include either New York or New Jersey (where his Bedminster property is located).
That option would be costly for Trump in terms of taxes. Moreover, Trump is desperately trying to get out of New York where he is effectively shackled to the defense table as his opponent, President Joe Biden, campaigns around the country.
The funny thing is that Trump has been campaigning in New York and drawing some large crowds. It would be the height of irony if Trump ends up making New York competitive with a mix of the time forced to be in the state and a change of residency.
Alternatively, Rubio could resign from the Senate and focus on running with a residence in a different state. He could also attempt a more creative approach and just change residency for the election.
Under Article I, Section 3, Clause 3:
No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.
Rubio can argue that he was “an Inhabitant” of Florida “when elected.” Given the recent controversy over the appointment of Democratic Senator Laphonza Butler, it could be hard for some Democrats to object.
Yet, there will be some who will no doubt try. In 2000, Dick Cheney was challenged by three Texas residents when he moved back to Wyoming. They failed.
Ultimately, it could also be challenged in Congress under the Electoral Count Reform Act.
Despite declaring the challenge to the Biden election was an attack on democracy, Democratic members previously challenged Republican presidents in Congress, including Jan. 6th committee head Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)
In other words, it could be done but it would likely draw challenges. Then again, why should this part of the election be any different from every other part?
Police officers involved in clearing out protesters at a New York City college campus are sharing signs recovered from the scene bearing terrorist slogans.
New York Police Department officers broke up an “illegal encampment” at New York University on Friday, with cleaning crews called in to remove tents and sweep away the belongings of the protesters. NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry shared various photos of “inflammatory literature and signage” found at the protest.
A piece of protest literature recovered from the anti-Israel encampment at New York University. (New York Police Department)
“The NYPD proudly protects everyone’s right to free speech and peaceful protest,” Daughtry said in the post, before sharing the signage.
One piece of literature found on the site explicitly calls for “Death to America” and “Death to Israeli real-estate.”
NYPD Chief John Chell spoke to reporters on Friday and confirmed the NYPD had two operations “at the request of school presidents,” including at New York University and The New School in New York.
Hundreds of students rally in Washington Square Park along with faculty in response to the mass arrests at NYU. (Fox News)
He confirmed that officers arrested 56 people, with no incidents. The police chief noted that “99%” of those arrested were students.
“You will not find a truce from us,” one sign recovered from the protest area said.
“Enough with De-Escalation Trainings: Where are the Escalation Trainings!” added another.
A photo shows a poster put up on the New York University campus during anti-Israel protests. (New York Police Department)
On April 22, police went to NYU and arrested more than 100 students who held a demonstration in solidarity with the students at Columbia University and to oppose Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
On Wednesday, Fox News correspondent Alexis McAdams reported from the campus that the anti-Israel agitators had re-established the encampment.
Editor’s note: This headline has been updated for accuracy.
Fox News Digital’s Lawrence Richard contributed to this report.
Timothy Nerozzi is a writer for Fox News Digital. You can follow him on Twitter @timothynerozzi and can email him at timothy.nerozzi@fox.com
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Steve Bannon is continuously under attack by the Fake News legacy media CNN, MSNBC, etc. accusing him of being racist and a Nazi when in reality, he is exposing them, Biden, and his deep-state apparatus for their corruption.
It’s Obama… The New York Times Admits Obama is Running the Deal — Steve Bannon Weighs In on What We Already Knew (VIDEO)
The fake news New York Times said the quiet part out loud today.
Steve Bannon has made bold claims regarding Barack Obama’s involvement in efforts to undermine former President Donald Trump.
According to Bannon, a recent New York Times article by Katie Rogers provides groundbreaking insight into Obama’s behind-the-scenes activities, suggesting a direct link between Biden and current actions against Trump. 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 • Katie Hobbs Signs Bill to Repeal Arizona Abortion Ban, Celebrates Killing Babies • Joe Biden Slams Donald Trump for Letting Florida Protect Babies From Abortions • Kamala Harris Celebrates Abortion: Killing Babies is “Freedom” for Women • Pro-Life Advocate Suffers Stroke After She’s Placed in Solitary Confinement for 22 Days
More Pro-Life News • Joe Biden is Pressuring Pro-Life Guatemala to Stop Protecting Babies From Abortions • America is 1 of Just 8 Countries Worldwide That Allows Abortions Up to Birth • Florida Health Department Confirms Pregnant Women Still Receive Health Care Under New Heartbeat Law • Joe Biden’s Polling Numbers Sink to Lowest Ever, Americans Want Him Gone • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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A witness in the NY v. Trump case in Manhattan testified that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen wanted a job in the 45th president’s administration, despite previously denying wanting a White House role during congressional testimony.
Keith Davidson, an attorney who represented former pornographic actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, continued his testimony before the court Thursday, when he said that Cohen had been hopeful that he would land a position as White House chief of staff or attorney general in the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration.
Davidson also recounted that Cohen had been upset he was “not going to Washington” following Trump’s win in 2016.
“Can you f—ing believe I’m not going to Washington after everything I’ve done for that guy? I can’t believe I’m not going to Washington… I’ve saved his a–…,” Davidson recounted of a conversation he had had with a “despondent and saddened Michael Cohen” in December following the 2016 election.
Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to President Donald Trump, appears outside federal court in New York on Dec. 14, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Davidson testified that Cohen had called him while shopping in a California store memorably decorated with an “Alice in Wonderland”-type theme.
The NY v. Trump case focuses on Cohen paying Daniels $130,000 to allegedly quiet her claims of an alleged extramarital affair she had with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels.
Cohen lamented to Davidson in the December call that he had not yet been reimbursed for the sum he had paid Daniels, according to Davidson’s testimony.
Former President Donald Trump awaits the start of proceedings at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on April 22. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, Pool)
Prosecutors allege that the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen and fraudulently logged the payments as legal expenses. Prosecutors are working to prove that Trump falsified records with the intent to commit or conceal a second crime, which is a felony, in violation of a New York law called “conspiracy to promote or prevent election.”
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Davidson’s testimony that Cohen sought a White House job stands in stark contrast to what the former Trump attorney told Congress back in 2019.
“Sir, I was extremely proud to be personal attorney to the President of the United States of America. I did not want to go to the White House. I was offered jobs,” Cohen told Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, in 2019 during a House Oversight Committee hearing.
Michael Cohen, who is supposed to be a star witness in NY v. Trump, might have “torpedoed” the case before taking the stand by ranting about it on TikTok, according to legal observers. (Getty Images)
“I can tell you a story of Mr. Trump reaming out Reince Priebus because I had not taken a job where Mr. Trump wanted me to, which is working with Don McGahn at the White House general counsel’s office,“ he continued. “What I said at the time — and I brought a lawyer in who produced a memo as to why I should not go in, because there would be no attorney/client privilege. And in order to handle some of the matters that I talked about in my opening, that it would be best suited for me not to go in and that every president had a personal attorney.”
“I did not want to go to the White House,” Cohen added later in his testimony to Congress. “I retained, I brought an attorney in, and I sat with Mr. Trump, with him for well over an hour, explaining the importance of having a personal attorney, that every president has had one in order to handle matters like the matters I was dealing with.”
Cohen’s comments came after he pleaded guilty to five counts of willful tax evasion, one count of making false statements to a bank, one count of causing an unlawful campaign contribution and one count of making an excessive campaign contribution in 2018. He again pleaded guilty in November of that same year to lying to Congress about testimony regarding the work he had done on a project to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
A court sketch depicts former President Donald Trump’s appearance in Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on April 19. (Christine Cornell)
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison and has since been released.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., are currently demanding the Justice Department investigate Cohen. They allege that he committed perjury and “knowingly” made false statements while testifying before Congress in 2019.
Turner and Stefanik argue that Cohen is being used as the prosecution’s “star witness” in the NY v. Trump case, despite his previous conviction.
Trump, meanwhile, has slammed the trial as a “scam” and “hoax” promoted by the Biden administration and led by a “conflicted judge.”
Former President Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower to attend his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to extramarital affairs in New York on April 22. (Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)
“This is a hoax. This is a judge who is conflicted — badly, badly, badly conflicted. I’ve never seen a judge so conflicted and giving us virtually no rulings,” Trump said outside the courtroom on Tuesday morning.
“I’m going to sit in the freezing cold icebox for eight hours, nine hours or so. They took me off the campaign trail. But the good news is my poll numbers are the highest it’s ever been. So, at least we’re getting the word out. And everybody knows this trial is a scam. It’s a scam. The judge should be recused; that he should recuse himself today, he should recuse himself today. And maybe he will,” Trump said.
Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
A trove of unsealed documents connected with the investigation into allegations that former President Donald Trump mishandled classified materials has revealed that several top Biden administration officials were working with the National Archives to help bring Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against him.
Lawyers representing Trump in the Florida case compiled court exhibits consisting of more than 300 pages of unredacted items, including emails and other correspondence showing that Deputy White House Counsel Jonathan Su had been regularly communicating with National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) National Archive officials, as had the Department of Justice, reports Real Clear Investigations’ Julie Kelly. The correspondence also indicates that the Department of Justice had been communicating with NARA throughout most of 2021, even though it had claimed it became involved only after the Archives had sent in a criminal referral on Feb. 9, 2022. The referral was based on the Archives reporting that records with “classified markings” were included among the 15 boxes of materials Trump had turned in.
President Joe Biden, who denied involvement in the investigation, was not specifically named in the exhibits, which Trump’s attorneys filed in January.
The items were at first heavily redacted, but the team asked U.S. District Court judge Aileen Cannon, the judge presiding over the case to remove many of the redactions.
Meanwhile, Smith claimed that releasing the materials would jeopardize his investigation, reveal potential witnesses, and potentially subject them to risks of harassment and intimidation.
Cannon, however, posted the mostly unredacted archives on April 22, and a comparison of the redacted and the unredacted materials showed the coordination between NARA and the DOJ, the White House, and the intelligence community.
The documents revealed that shortly after Trump left office in 2021, Biden’s Office of Records Management and the National Archives started making demands to the former president’s transition team and Mark Meadows, his chief of staff. Archives general counsel Gary Stern emailed Trump’s team in May 2021, the unredacted documents show, and asked the attorneys to account for almost 2 dozen original presidential records that were not transferred.
He did not specify any particular records except for “original correspondence between President Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jung-un” and “the letter that President Obama left for President Trump on his first day in office.”
One of the unsealed FBI reports indicated the Archives also wanted to get hold of a map that Trump had drawn on with a Sharpie during a 2018 briefing on the track of Hurricane Dorian.
David Ferriero, a national archivist appointed by Barack Obama in 2009, warned the Trump transition team in June 2021 that he was “running out of patience, and on Aug. 30 told Trump’s team that he assumed the boxes were destroyed and he would have to report the loss to lawmakers, the DOJ, and the White House.
Other documents showed evidence that White House lawyers were advising the archives, including a draft letter accompanying a Sept. 1, 2021 email where Stern said he had advised White House counsel about the documents.
The letter, from Ferriero to Attorney General Merrick Garland, said that presidential records “may have been unlawfully removed from U.S. government custody or possibly destroyed.”
Completed FAFSA applications were down nearly 30% as of April 19. (Photo Illustration: Richard Stephen/Getty Images)
In a normal year, May 1 is known as National College Decision Day, the deadline for students to commit to enrolling at a college, guided in part by their financial aid awards. But the Biden administration’s disastrous rollout of a new financial aid application has left tens of thousands of families in the dark about their students’ future and prompted several universities to push back their enrollment deadlines.
As of April 19, completed FAFSA applications were down nearly 30%. At best, it means many students and parents don’t know how much it will cost to attend college in the fall. Even worse, it may lead frustrated young people to skip college altogether.
Ironically, because of the Biden administration’s incompetence, the simplification has led to massive complications and confusion for families this year as they apply for college. Focused on other priorities, the Biden administration failed to update the FAFSA website before October, when most students start applying.
In fact, the “improved” FAFSA website didn’t go live until the end of December, and even then, only in 30-minute increments. This was presumably so that the department could meet the statutory deadline for release, as Inside Higher Ed reported. When the website finally became available in a more final form in January, the Department of Education still wasn’t processing applications or relaying students’ financial information to colleges. It said it’d be able to do that by mid-March.
President Biden’s FAFSA Chief Steps Down
With the May 1 deadline now here, the Biden administration is still running behind, prompting the bureaucrat in charge of the new form to resign last week. But it’s students and their families who are paying the real price of this debacle.
Couple that reality with what families are now seeing at America’s universities—protests featuring ugly displays of antisemitism—and it appears that higher education is experiencing the same “Zoom moment” that K-12 schools experienced during COVID-19. Parents now see up close what schools are teaching and the values they relay. All of this is the perfect recipe for a significant decline in college enrollment this year.
That might not be such a bad thing. Far too many students feel that pursuing higher education is their only option for success, and if this FAFSA debacle ushers in a much-needed course correction, that would be a welcome silver lining.
But for those students still pursuing traditional higher education, this academic limbo is maddening.
Colleges Push Back Enrollment Deadlines
Colleges are trying to adjust, and many have extended their decision deadlines, some as far out as July. Department of Education officials had to explain the disastrous rollout in congressional hearings, more of which should come soon.
All of this is yet another reminder of the pitfalls of the federal government’s involvement in higher education. Today, the federal government originates and services most student loans. But the Department of Education wasn’t designed as a bank, nor Uncle Sam as a lender. And it’s clear the agency isn’t up to the task.
As dual trainwrecks of the FAFSA rollout and antisemitic university protests play out simultaneously, there’s no better time for Congress to cut off the open spigot of federal funds to universities and protect future American students.
A poll from the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center has found that a majority of Americans are extremely worried or very concerned about bias in the media and the reporting of false or misleading information. Only 48% of Republicans and 34% of independents still receive their news from national news outlets and expressed the greatest trust of the media.
The poll shows that 47% of Americans have serious concern that news outlets would report information that has not been confirmed or verified, and 44% worry that accurate information will be presented in a way that favors one side or another.
For years, the journalists have sawed on the branch upon which they are sitting. Even National Public Radio, which receives federal funding, is unrepentant in the face of criticism over its overt political bias.
Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones declared recently that “all journalism is activism.” Advocacy journalism is all the rage in journalism schools and on major media platforms. A recent series of interviews with over 75 media leaders by Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this shift. As Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, stated: “Objectivity has got to go.” But that objective seems to depend heavily upon what ideology you are advocating.
The result is that the mainstream media is increasingly speaking to itself and a dwindling number of viewers and readers. NPR is again a good example. NPR’s audience has been declining. Indeed, that trend has been most pronounced since 2017. The company has also reported falling advertising revenue and, like many outlets, has made deep staff cuts to deal with budget shortfalls.
Yet, while tacking aggressively to the left and openly supporting narratives (including some false stories) from Democratic sources, NPR and its allies still expect citizens to subsidize its work. That includes roughly half of the country with viewpoints now effectively banished from its airwaves.
The result is that about half of Americans rely on social media for their primary source of news. That is why it is not surprising that the censorship of social media has been a priority among many liberal groups. The effort is to eliminate sources of information and regulate what citizens see and read.
Despite this effort, the trend is likely to continue. Recently at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the host Colin Jost remarked how he could not believe the race was tied despite all of the bad coverage of Trump. At events like the dinner, there is disbelief that citizens are not just following their narrative and shaping of the news. The fact is that many are no longer listening or watching. The MSM is “playing to the house,” not to the public at large.
So, we are left with the variation of a common Zen-like question: if the media reports and no one is listening, does it still make a noise?
Now this could truly be educational. Students protesting on our campuses have been offered free scholarships at Shiraz University in Fars. So, while Northwestern has reached a settlement with protesters to give scholarships to Palestinian students and positions to Palestinian faculty, U.S. protesters can now go to Iran for their education.
Mohammad Moazzeni, head of Shiraz University told media that “students and even professors who have been expelled or threatened with expulsion can continue their studies at Shiraz University and I think that other universities in Shiraz as well as Fars Province are also prepared [to provide the conditions].”
Warning: vegan meals are not available at Iranian protests. Instead, it has ordered the arrest and killing of writers and artists while holding such fun events as a cartoon competition on the Holocaust.
While expungements are not a common feature of the criminal justice system, it does have unique elements like judicially ordered blindings. Likewise, where else can you go where a criminal defendant was ordered to be executed by being tied into a burlap bag and thrown down a cliff with sharp rocks?
Some universities clearly have space after students were arrested for protesting the death sentence given a rapper. That includes Shiraz University where the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) arrested students for protests.
The good thing is that U.S. students are already covering up their faces. Iranian women have faced arrest for being photographed without hijabs.
Students like Khymani James, the Columbia organizer declaring that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” have the right viewpoint but may find that the Iranian officials are less supportive in other respects.
Just a year studying abroad in Iran is worth a lifetime of education.
So Iranian universities are making the ultimate pitch to come for the free education and stay for the free amputations.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – The Democrats and the legacy media flipped out over Gov. Kristi Noem putting down her puppy 20 years ago, but they have no problem with putting down millions of babies every year by way of abortion.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem Stirs Controversy With Tale of Killing Her ‘Untrainable’, ‘Dangerous’ 14-Month-Old Hunting Dog and a Goat
By Kristinn Taylor – April 27, 2024
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R), who has been mentioned as a possible Trump vice presidential pick, wrote in her new book that she shot and killed her “untrainable” and “dangerous” 14-month-old wirehair pointer hunting dog named Cricket after it killed a neighbor’s chickens and attacked Noem, as well as a killing a goat the same afternoon.
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 • Florida Heartbeat Law Now in Effect, Will Save Thousands of Babies From Abortion • Arizona Senate Votes to Repeal Abortion Ban, Two Republicans Join Democrats to Allow Killing Babies • Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders Signs Pro-Life Bill to Support Pregnant Women • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Defends Abortions Up to Birth: Killing an 8 Month Old Baby is Morally “Nuanced and Complex”
More Pro-Life News • Florida Law Could Save 50,000 Babies From Abortions Every Year • OBGYN Professor: Abortion “Harms Women,” It’s Not Necessary for Their Health • Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers Sue New York Attorney General Letitia James for Trying to Stop Their Work • Doctor Confirms Florida’s New Heartbeat Law Will Save Babies, Help Women • 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.
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.
A West Virginia school board “punished” a group of middle school girls who protested a biological male competing against them at a track meet earlier this month, according to a legal complaint.
Cellphone video showed girls from Lincoln Middle School staging a protest in the shot-put ring at the Harrison County Middle School Championships on April 18; one by one, they stepped into the ring and then quickly stepped out without making attempts.
🚨🚨FIVE middle school female athletes in West Virginia refuse to throw shot put against male, Becky Pepper-Jackson.
This comes just 2 days after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the WV law that says you must compete in the category that matches your sex.
While the video in the post from female athlete advocate Riley Gaines appears to show six separate protests by Lincoln girls in the shot put ring, AthleticNet indicated that five Lincoln girls posted “ND” (no distance) in the finals. Gaines also wrote that five girls refused to participate.
Blaze News reported that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals just days prior to the meet ruled in a 2-1 decision that a West Virginia law requiring every student athlete to participate in accordance with their biological sex violates the Title IX rights of Becky Pepper-Jackson — the student against whom the girls protested.
Pepper-Jackson — a biological male — has been living as a female and taking puberty blockers for years. AthleticNet said Pepper-Jackson of Bridgeport won the shot put final at the meet with a toss of 32 feet, 9 inches, easily besting the second-place finisher by more than three feet.
What happened next?
Parents of four of the five protesting girls filed the legal complaint against the Harrison County Board of Education. The complaint states the girls attended an April 24 press conference addressing their protest. Attendees included Gaines and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and Auditor J.B. McCuskey, along with several Republicans from the state Senate and House of Delegates, the complaint states.
The complaint also states that the next day — Thursday — the father of one of the girls “spoke with Lincoln Middle School principal Lori Scott,” who told him that the girls who protested “would not be permitted to compete in a scheduled track and field meet on April 27, 2024.”
The complaint also states that a father of another girl spoke with coach Dawn Riestenberg, who “informed him that his daughter would not be allowed to participate in the scheduled track and field meet on April 27.” The complaint adds that Riestenberg told the dad that the girls were barred from the meet because it was her job “to score points for the track team,” which the complaint says correlates to “the minor student athletes’ protest and subsequent appearance at a press conference to the decision to ban them from competition.”
The complaint states that the protesting girls “are being punished” by the school board “for exercising their rights to freedom of speech and expression under the Constitution of West Virginia.”
The complaint was filed Friday — the day before the April 27 meet from which the girls allegedly were barred — and seeks no monetary damages, only “injunctive relief.” State Attorney General Morrisey filed an amicus brief Friday in support of the parents’ complaint.
“The only thing this decision does is teach these children to keep their mouths shut and not disagree with what they saw as unfairness,” Morrisey said in a news release, according to WBOY-TV. “That is outrageous and it tramples these students’ rights to freedom of speech and expression.”
Apparently, the complaint and even support from the state attorney general were not enough.
AthleticNet records show that none of the Lincoln Middle School girls listed in the complaint took part in the shot put competition at the Mid Mountain 10 Championships on April 27.
In addition, while it’s been reported that the protesting girls were barred from competition for a longer period of time, all the girls in the complaint are listed on the shot put stat sheet from a Monday invitational meet.
The school board on Tuesday didn’t immediately reply to Blaze News’ request for comment on the complaint.
Left-wing dark money networks are funding the outbreak of anti-Israel protests spreading at college campuses across the country.
Last week, Fox News reported the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), “a national organization affiliated with around 200 independent chapters” including Columbia University, raked in “a six-figure donation from a nonprofit bankrolled by the George Soros network.”
According to Influence Watch, the group orchestrates student activism on university campuses, accuses Israel of committing genocide, and compares Palestinians to black Americans under the Jim Crow era.
“In addition to Columbia, NSJP has been protesting and setting up encampments at other universities across the country, including UCLA and USC in California and at the University of Texas in Austin, where over 50 people were arrested this week,” Fox News reported.
The University of Texas said in a statement Tuesday that 45 of the 79 people arrested on the school’s Austin campus Monday “had no affiliation with UT Austin.”
“These numbers validate our concern that much of the disruption on campus over the past week has been orchestrated by people from outside the University, including groups with ties to escalating protests at other universities around the country,” the university said.
The New York Post reported Tuesday that police have arrested more than 1,000 demonstrators across more than 25 U.S. campuses. At Columbia University in Manhattan, which became the epicenter of anti-Israeli encampments when school leadership testified about antisemitism to Congress, police arrested nearly 300 protestors Tuesday night.
According to Fox News, “Another group active at Columbia, Jewish Voice for Peace, has brought in at least $650,000 from Soros-linked groups since 2016. JVP has also taken in hundreds of thousands from the billionaire-fueled Rockefeller Fund, which is boosted by millions of dollars from a dark money funding network.”
“Another Soros-backed group, U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, has paid what it calls ‘fellows’ to organize and attend anti-Israel protests across the country,” Fox also said, citing New York Post reporting.
On Wednesday, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the People’s Forum, another non-profit in New York that “received more than $12 million from Goldman Sachs’ charitable arm[,] encouraged anti-Israel activists to re-create the violent protests of ‘the summer of 2020.’”
The sustained demonstrations breaking out across American campuses have led some schools to cancel in-person classes and have jeopardized graduation ceremonies. Columbia University has shifted to a hybrid model for the remainder of the semester and announced final exams will be held remotely.
At the University of Southern California (USC), officials announced the school’s primary graduation ceremony will be canceled. The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) also canceled classes Wednesday after fighting erupted on campus.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Democrat election officials in Arizona and Nevada are using taxpayer resources to register and turn out Democrat-favorable young voters ahead of the 2024 election.
On Monday, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, announced that his office is partnering with the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge to launch the “Arizona Campus Voting Challenge.” According to an office press release, this allegedly “nonpartisan initiative” is designed to increase voter engagement among students attending accredited universities throughout the state.
Young voters (18-29) broke for Democrat House candidates over Republican ones by a nearly 2-to-1 margin during the 2022 midterms, according to estimates by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
Participation in the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge is free and allows participating colleges to become “eligible for awards based on voter turnout and registration rates on their campuses for the November 5, 2024 election.” Federal law makes it illegal to “make[] or offer[] to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote.”
Students who join will also be “provided guidance and tools to create an action plan for increasing student engagement on their campus,” according to Fontes’ office.
“By signing up for the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge, all accredited, degree-granting higher education institutions across the state can improve, measure, and celebrate efforts to institutionalize nonpartisan civic learning, political engagement and informed voter participation,” the presser reads. “Institutions that sign up for the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge will also be automatic participants in the nationwide ALL IN where awards are issued for highest voter turnout, most improved voter turnout, and highest rate of voter registration. As well as state-specific awards for meeting objectives mapped out in an institution’s nonpartisan democratic engagement action plan.”
Despite being marketed as “nonpartisan,” the initiative appears to be anything but. As I previously wrote in these pages, ALL IN is an enterprise of Civic Nation, a left-wing nonprofit headed by Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. The initiative has previously produced Democrat talking points, such as the baseless claim that “strict voter ID requirements” are “barriers” to voting.
ALL IN’s leadership team is also comprised of Democrats. Founding advisory board member Alicia Kolar Prevost, for example, previously served in the Clinton administration and worked at the Democratic National Committee.
Not Democrats’ First Rodeo
Fontes is hardly the only left-wing election official using his office to turn out a demographic favorable to Democrats.
Earlier this year, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, also a Democrat, announced his office would be accepting applications to join his “Youth Advisory Task Force” to engage young voters ahead of the 2024 election. According to an office press release, the task force’s priorities include “identifying and proposing programs that support participatory democracy and solutions to any problem concerning the level of participatory democracy of young voters,” and “supporting projects … that encourage and advance participatory democracy of young voters.”
Task force members were appointed by Aguilar earlier this month and include “high school and college students, as well as non-students, between the ages of 17 and 24.” There are roughly 118,000 students enrolled in Nevada colleges, according to Univstats.
Michigan Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson launched a similar task force in October.
Democrats Use Taxpayer Dollars to Target Young Voters
At the same time Democrat officials like Fontes and Aguilar target young voters with taxpayer dollars in their respective states, President Joe Biden is weaponizing the federal government to take these efforts nationwide.
Signed in March 2021, Executive Order 14019 directed hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration by using taxpayer funds to boost voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities. Agencies were instructed to collaborate with so-called “nonpartisan third-party organizations” that have been “approved” by the White House to provide “voter registration services on agency premises.” Of course, many of these “nonpartisan” groups have been identified as extremely left-wing, such as the ACLU and Demos.
As part of its compliance with the “Bidenbucks” order, the Department of Education issued a memo in February announcing that Federal Work-Study funds — which are used to provide part-time campus jobs to help students with tuition costs — may be used to employ students by government agencies for work such as “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration, providing voter assistance at a polling place or through a voter hotline, or serving as a poll worker.” The agency also released a “toolkit” that included guidelines for universities on how to increase voter registration and turnout on their campuses.
A Nationwide Strategy
Through the use of these taxpayer-funded GOTV operations and voter registration drives conducted by left-wing nonprofits such as the Voter Participation Center, Democrats are hoping young voters can make the difference for Biden in the battleground states needed to win the presidency this November.
In the 2020 election, for example, Biden won Arizona by less than 11,000 votes, or 0.4 percent. The Grand Canyon State also experienced close elections in the 2022 midterms, in which Democrat Kris Mayes defeated Republican Abe Hamadeh in the attorney general’s race by just 280 votes.
Given these slim margins and college students’ history of (mostly) backing Democrats, it’s no surprise Biden and Co. have made them a major focus of 2024 GOTV operations. With many students living near or on university grounds, campuses make for the perfect Democrat Party registration hubs and offer the party an opportunity to expand their chances of electoral success.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
When Robert Mueller appointed Andrew Weissmann as one of his top advisers, many of us warned that it was a poor choice. Weissmann seemed intent to prove those objections correct in increasingly unhinged and partisan statements. This week, he ratcheted up the rhetoric even further in claiming that the nation is “one vote away” from the end of democracy if the Supreme Court does not embrace the sweeping claims of Special Counsel Jack Smith.
At the time of his appointment, many Republicans objected to Weissmann’s status as a democratic donor, including his reported attendance of the election night party for Hillary Clinton in 2016. My objection was not to his political affiliations but to his professional history, which included extreme interpretations that were ultimately rejected by courts. Weissmann was responsible for the overextension of an obstruction provision in a jury instruction that led the Supreme Court to reverse the conviction in the Arthur Andersen case in 2005.
Now he is predicting the end of democracy if the Court remand the immunity case for further proceedings. Weissmann told MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki on Sunday:
I think that it’s important to remember that at the outset, the court had already given Donald Trump the win that he was seeking, which is the delay of the DC trial.
So going into this, this was all upside for him. I mean, I think he had to be thinking, I’m making this really outlandish argument, with ramifications that couldn’t possibly be squared with the text and history. The text of the Constitution or the history of the presidency? So, it’s all upside if the court would actually bite on this. And so, what was surprising is that there were justices who actually were taking this seriously. And it just was, frankly, shocking.
Remember, going into this, the given was that private conduct was certainly not, immunized from criminal liability. What everyone’s talking about now is, hey, maybe they think that some of this is private and they can go forward, but that was what was given going into this. And the reason people are thinking that is because there seem to be four justices who were really taking Donald Trump’s claim of criminal immunity seriously. And we are.
I mean, I know it sounds like hyperbole, but I think your opening is so correct that we are essentially, as Neil put it, one vote away from sort of the end of democracy as we know it with checks and balances. And to say it’s an imperial presidency that would be created is, it’s frankly saying it would be a king, he would be criminally immune. And that that is what is so shocking is how close we are.
And we are really on the razor’s edge of that kind of result. But for the chief justice.
Just for the record, it sounds less “like hyperbole” than hysteria. The justices were exploring the implications of the sweeping arguments on both sides of the immunity question. What they were not willing to do (as does Weissmann) is simply dismiss any arguments of official status on the part of the accused. That would establish a dangerous ambiguity for the future as prosecutors claim that political statements are private matters for the purpose of prosecution.
Ironically, Weissmann’s lack of concern for the implications of such an interpretation is reminiscent of his prior sweeping arguments as a prosecutor that led to the stinging defeat in the Anderson case.
Of course, there is another possibility is that the justices were not seeking the end of democracy. The Court was honestly trying to get this standard correct not just for this case but future cases. To do so, it will require a record on the underlying actions rather than the categorical threshold judgment made by the district court. The argument showed justices exploring how to avoid a parade of horribles on either extreme with a more moderate approach.
As I previously noted, it has been almost 50 years since the high court ruled presidents have absolute immunity from civil lawsuits in Nixon v. Fitzgerald. That protection applied to acts taken “within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”
Apparently, that immunity did not endanger democracy.
In United States v. Nixon, the court also ruled a president is not immune from a criminal subpoena. Nixon was forced to comply with a subpoena for his White House tapes in the Watergate scandal from special counsel Leon Jaworski. Since then, the court has avoided any significant ruling on the extension of immunity to a criminal case — until now.
There are cliffs on both sides of this case. If the court were to embrace special counsel Jack Smith’s arguments, a president would have no immunity from criminal charges, even for official acts taken in his presidency. It would leave a president without protection from endless charges from politically motivated prosecutors.
If the court were to embrace Trump counsel’s arguments, a president would have complete immunity. It would leave a president largely unaccountable under the criminal code for any criminal acts.
The first cliff is made obvious by the lower-court opinion. While the media have largely focused on extreme examples of president-ordered assassinations and coups, the justices are clearly as concerned with the sweeping implications of the DC Circuit opinion.
Chief Justice John Roberts noted the DC Circuit failed to make any “focused” analysis of the underlying acts, instead offering little more than a judicial shrug. Roberts read its statement that “a former president can be prosecuted for his official acts because the fact of the prosecution means that the former president has acted in defiance of the laws” and noted it sounds like “a former president can be prosecuted because he is being prosecuted.”
Weissmann is not concerned with the clear politicization of the criminal justice system by Bragg just before one of the most consequential elections in our history.
No, the threat is that justices may want to balance the interests over immunity by rejecting the extreme arguments on both sides. They may try to pursue a course that allows for immunity for official acts or functions while rejecting immunity for non-official acts. Some or all of Trump’s actions or statements could well fall into the unprotected category.
The sense of alarm expressed by legal experts is that the Court would not simply sign off on the absolutist arguments of Smith and, most importantly, allow for a trial before the election.
So how will democracy end if the Court adopts a middle road on immunity? It appears to come down to the loss of a possible conviction to influence the outcome of the election.
At the same time, MSNBC guests are also calling, again, for the packing of the Supreme Court. While conservative justices have repeatedly voted with the Biden Administration, it does not matter. They want the Court packed to guarantee outcomes with the appointment of reliable liberal justices. All of this is being defended in the name of democracy, as was ballot cleansing.
The problem with the escalating rhetoric is that there is not much room for further hysterics. Where does Weissmann and others go from here after predicting the imminent death of democracy?
Pundits have now predicted the creation of camps for democrats, killing journalists and homosexuals, the death of the free press, and tyranny. That leaves only systemic mutilations and Roman decimation. For lawyers to fuel this hysteria is a sad commentary on the state of our country. Whether a true crisis of faith or simple opportunism, it disregards centuries of constitutional history in overcoming every threat and obstacle. We have the oldest and most stable constitutional system in the world. To suddenly embrace tyranny would require all three branches, and the citizens as a whole, to shred an elaborate system of checks and balances.
We are better than that . . . and these inflammatory predictions.
Northwestern University has agreed to a controversial settlement with pro-Palestinian protesters encamped on its campus this week, including
a commitment for scholarships for Palestinians,
Palestinian faculty appointments,
and special housing for Muslim students.
The protesters will also be allowed to continue their protests while agreeing to stay in a particular area of campus.
It will also put the students and supporting faculty on bodies to review any university investments and purchases, a major demand from supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Previously, protesters had reportedly prevented some students and faculty from entering buildings and engaged in property damage.
The Daily Northwesternreported the details of the deal and noted
“The University has committed to provide a conduit for students to engage with the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees. It will also re-establish an Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility this fall, which will include students, faculty and staff.
…
In addition, the University committed to some support for Palestinian students and faculty in the agreement. NU will ‘support visiting Palestinian faculty and students at risk,’ and will provide the cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduates to attend Northwestern.
…
The University also committed to providing an ‘immediate temporary space for MENA/Muslim students’ — a longtime demand from students on campus — and will provide and renovate a house for MENA/Muslims students as soon as possible. The final house is expected to come in 2026.”
It also includes a commitment of the university to intervene with employers to guarantee that students suffer no consequences for participating in protests in their jobs and internships.
Northwestern (my alma mater) has always chosen the path of least resistance when it comes to protesters, including at times surrendering core academic functions. I have been particularly critical of the loss of freedom of speech and academic integrity on campus.
Students previously succeeded in cancelling a speech by former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Student Zachery Novicoff embodied the rising intolerance to free speech on campus. He is quoted as saying “There’s a limitation to free speech. That ends at overtly racist old white dudes.”
During his tenure, the university often seemed a mere pedestrian to mob action taken against dissenting voices. For example, we previously discussed a Sociology 201 class by Professor Beth Redbird that examined “inequality in American society with an emphasis on race, class and gender.” To that end, Redbird invited both an undocumented person and a spokesperson for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is the type of balance that is now considered verboten on campuses.
Members of MEChA de Northwestern, Black Lives Matter NU, the Immigrant Justice Project, the Asian Pacific American Coalition, NU Queer Trans Intersex People of Color and Rainbow Alliance organized to stop other students from hearing from the ICE representative. However, they could not have succeeded without the help of Northwestern administrators (including Dean of Students Todd Adams). The protesters were screaming “F**k ICE” outside of the hall. Adams and the other administrators then said that the protesters screaming profanities would be allowed into the class if they promised not to disrupt the class. Really? They were screaming profanities and seeking to stop the class but would just sit nicely as the speaker answered questions?
Of course, that did not happen. As soon as the protesters were allowed into the classroom, they prevented the ICE representative from speaking. The ICE official eventually left, and Redbird canceled the class to discuss the issue with the protesters that just prevented her students from hearing an opposing view.
The comments of the Northwestern students were predictable after being told by people like Schapiro that some offensive speech should be treated as a form of assault. SESP sophomore April Navarro rejected that faculty should be allowed to invite such speakers to their classrooms for a “good, nice conversation with ICE.” She insisted such speakers needed to be silenced because they “terrorize communities” and profit from detainee labor. Here is the face of the new generation of censors being shaped by speech-intolerant academics like Schapiro:
“We’re not interested in having those types of conversations that would be like, ‘Oh, let’s listen to their side of it’ because that’s making them passive rule-followers rather than active proponents of violence. We’re not engaging in those kinds of things; it legitimizes ICE’s violence, it makes Northwestern complicit in this. There’s an unequal power balance that happens when you deal with state apparatuses.”
Last year, the Northwestern student body banned press from meetings to protect students from the harm of media coverage. The students also have previously frozen funds of conservative groups.
The Northwestern journalism faculty is little better. Steven Thrasher, the Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern, who trashed a reporter who waited for the facts before reporting on a police shooting.
Of course, it is not just conservative speakers that the students want to ban. In 2021, they called for the removal of the President of the Board of Trustees. Despite being a major donor and supporter of the school, J. Landis Martin was denounced as a Republican who donated money to former President Donald Trump.
The university issued a statement that “This path forward requires the immediate removal of tents on Deering Meadow, cessation of non-approved use of amplified sound and a commitment that all conduct on Deering and across campus will comply with all University rules and policies. Compliant demonstration can continue at Deering Meadow through June 1.”
The university has long lacked the fortitude to stand up to students engaging in disruptive protests. The danger of such passivity is evident on our campuses. As Henry David Thoreau warned, “all rivers and most corrupt men follow the path of least resistance.”
A.F. Branco Cartoon – The “Death to America” crowd will most likely vote for Biden since they have similar anti-American views, and he’s willing to forgive their student loans.
BREAKING: Biden Regime is Considering Flooding US with ‘Refugees’ From Gaza
By Cristina Laila – April 30, 2024
Here we go…. The Biden Regime is considering ‘welcoming’ so-called ‘refugees’ from Gaza into the United States. According to internal federal documents obtained by CBS News, the Biden Regime is considering resettling Palestinians who have family members in the US. Egypt doesn’t even want to take in refugees from Gaza!
The US will work with Egypt to resettle Palestinian refugees who have escaped there. 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 • Nancy Pelosi: If Democrats Win, We Will Kill the Filibuster and Legalize Abortions Up to Birth Nationwide • Trump Says He Won’t Intervene When States Protect Babies From Abortions • 17 States Fight Joe Biden’s Plan to Force Employers to Fund Abortions • Pro-Life Group Heads to Supreme Court to Defend Right to Pray Outside Abortion Centers
More Pro-Life News • Florida Heartbeat Law Starts Tomorrow, Saving Babies From Abortion and Helping Pregnant Women • 10,372,100 Babies Killed in Abortions Since UK Legalized Abortion 56 Years Ago • Planned Parenthood Doesn’t Just Kill Babies in America, It’s Overturning Pro-Life Laws Worldwide • Joe Biden is So Radically Pro-Abortion He Wants to Turn a Pro-Life Law Into an Abortion Mandate • 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.
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.
Dozens marched at the fourth annual March for Martyrs in Washington, D.C. on April 27, 2024. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
WASHINGTON — Pouring rain didn’t stop demonstrators from marching in the nation’s capital on Saturday to stand in solidarity with persecuted Christians globally, with some asking why the American Church isn’t doing more to spread awareness. Dozens gathered for the fourth annual March for the Martyrs on the National Mall, with many carrying flags representing the countries they are supporting in the mission to overcome global brutality against believers.
After worship and speeches encouraging Christians from all denominations to advocate for their persecuted brothers and sisters, the crowd marched from 17th Street and Constitution Avenue to the Museum of the Bible.
“I think that with all that’s going on in the world and with Christianity, I just had to be here to hear the speakers,” D.C. resident Carrol Monaco told The Christian Post, adding this was her first time at the March for Martyrs.
“I was expecting more people to be here. Maybe it’s because of the weather. I just think it’s very important that we bring awareness to this. Christians are being persecuted, even today.”
“It’s just something that we need to be more aware of and more sensitive to,” she added. “I think events like this are vital because it raises sensitivity. I think it’s possible that people just don’t realize what’s going on.”
According to the global persecution watchdog organization Open Doors, which monitors persecution in over 60 countries, over 360 million Christians live in areas of the world where they face high levels of persecution or discrimination for their faith in Christ. In some countries, owning a Bible or converting to Christianity can send someone to prison or put them on death row.
March for Martyrs founder Gia Chacón told CP she was inspired by the March for Life, the annual pro-life rally in Washington, D.C., launched after the Supreme Court’s 1972 Roe v. Wade ruling to call for an end to abortion. Today, the March for Life is attended by tens of thousands each year. March for Martyrs started in 2020 in Long Beach, California, during the height of COVID-19 pandemic.
“I thought we should be doing the same thing for our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world and show them our solidarity and advocate on their behalf,” she said. “We need to pray for persecuted Christians and ask God for their protection and for their comfort.”
As a devout Catholic, Monaco said events like March for Martyrs help make people more aware of persecution impacting Christians globally and helps spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
“We have to try to counter the persecutions that are occurring. My faith is a journey, and I’m still on this journey. It really is about living the way, the truth, and the life of Jesus Christ each and every day. I know it’s a struggle for a lot of people,” Monaco said.
“I struggle with it sometimes. I ask the question: ‘Why? Why is this happening?’ I don’t understand it. But you have to have faith. The Christian faith is about helping each other along on that journey.”
Monaco believes one way that Christians can begin to alleviate persecution is to help spread the Word of God as love.
“That’s what He is. God is love. And it’s about spreading the love of God each and every day. And I think that is a message that gets missed a lot, and I think that needs to be emphasized everywhere, Church outside of church. God is love, and He gives us His love. It’s up to us to spread His love in any way we can,” she said.
‘Opened my eyes’
Another D.C. resident, Patrick Jordan, attended the event to support persecuted Christians in Lebanon. He told CP that no weather — rain or shine — would have stopped him from attending.
“I saw this as a very important event and it called to me, and here I am. When I sailed back from Europe to America, my dad’s friend was Lebanese, and he actually opened my eyes to what happened to that corner of the world during the civil war, and how just beng Christian you’d get rounded up and killed,” Jordan said.
Jordan said his father’s friend told him about one occasion when a group of Lebanese Christian friends organized a garbage cleanup as a way to maintain God’s green earth, and many were murdered due to their faith.
“It was pretty shocking as a 12-year-old to hear that. This was a very nice guy, and I couldn’t imagine anyone doing that just for your faith. This guy had no ill will towards others,” he said. “That just opened my eyes to certain dark areas. It’s great to see that people at this event want to shine a light on that.”
Jordan said that events like the March for Martyrs are crucial to raise awareness.
“I was very fortunate to have met my dad’s Lebanese friend. How many people are going to have that opportunity to have their eyes opened wide to the atrocities taking place across the globe when it comes to persecuted Christians?” Jordan said.
“These events are so important to let other people know that there are people hurting out there, and they need your help to survive. That’s why everyone is here today. I would love to keep being a part of this every year.”
Jordan said he allows his faith to inform how he treats others. He cited Matthew 5:44, where Jesus advises followers to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
“It’s a pretty confusing world. I like to reflect on what God wants me to do, and that helps me temper whatever part of my humanity that may not be good to others. But, once I give myself over to the Lord, it brings more light to the world,” Jordan said.
Although he hasn’t been severely harmed for his faith in Christ like some people have faced overseas, he said societal opposition to the Christian faith made him think twice about becoming a teacher.
“I was training to become a high school teacher in public schools. The persecution I faced made me feel guilty about being a Christian as someone training to be a teaching professional. We were advised not to bring our faith into the classroom,” Jordan said.
“This dissuaded me from becoming a teacher at all. I knew that I couldn’t really represent that part of me. It felt like I couldn’t really be myself, and it dissuaded me from my whole career. I would have loved to be a teacher.”
Jordan now works as a nurse, where he is better able to express his faith when helping treat his patients back to good health.
“I think the persecution against Christians can be alleviated by just sort of notifying someone that there’s a bear outside your cave. The correct thing to do is to say: ‘Hey, this exists.’ And should you be afraid of the bear? Yeah, maybe. But how do you prepare for that?” Jordan said.
“I hope that these organizations can tell these people. ‘Hey, there are hostile militants that are against you due to your faith.’ How do you overcome this issue?”
Christians are not doing nearly enough as they should be doing to combat anti-Christian hate crimes nationally, Jordan contends.
“I mean, if you look at every church, [this issue] is not on their site. They have the rainbow flag. They don’t have Christ on the front. Churches are totally gone now. I think churches need to start to realize we are Christians,” Jordan said.
“They keep focusing on these little political issues. You have to be above that and say: ‘No, we’re trying to build something that’s for a church for eternity,’ not something to get us through the next election year.”
‘Why is the Church not paying more attention?’
Chacón hopes the march brings “attention to the global crisis of Christian persecution.”
“During that [first year in 2020], we saw an increase in Christian persecution. And after my extensive travels overseas working with the persecuted, I just couldn’t help but wonder why is the Church in the United States not paying more attention to what’s happening to our brothers and sisters? Why is the world turning a blind eye to the human rights abuses against Christians because of their faith.”
March for Martyrs founder Gia Chacón speaks at the fourth annual March for Martyrs in Washington, D.C., on April 27, 2024. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
As a Christian, Chacón said her faith inspires her to stand with those suffering globally for following Christ.
“My faith is everything to me. And I really have the persecuted to thank for their inspiration and their boldness and their willingness to lay down their lives for Christ inspired my own faith so deeply. Through my personal relationship with Jesus and the witness of the persecuted, nothing is more important to me than my faith,” Chacón said.
“I have never faced persecution myself. I pray that the Church in the United States of America never faces persecution. Although we do face intimidation. I have sat with people who have firsthand suffered persecution and to hear their stories and what they have suffered for their faith in Christ, and they remain faithful and hopeful in such a huge way, can motivate us in the United States to stand strong no matter the costs.”
Nicole VanDyke is a reporter for The Christian Post.
However, a poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports — a survey I wrote with a team of experts at the Heartland Institute and discussed last week on Tucker Carlson’s show — not only calls into question that often-repeated claim, it shows the opposite could have been true. According to its findings, voter fraud, especially fraud related to mail-in ballots, may have been common in the 2020 election. This conclusion isn’t based on questionable allegations but on voters’ own responses to the poll questions.
The Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey, which was conducted from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6, asked likely voters who cast ballots in 2020 questions about fraudulent activities, without telling them such actions were a form of voter fraud. The results were stunning. One in five people who voted by mail admitted to engaging in at least one kind of potential voter fraud, seriously calling into question the security of widespread mail-in balloting.
For example, one question asked, “During the 2020 election, did you cast a mail-in ballot in a state where you were no longer a permanent resident?” Such an action nearly always constitutes fraud. Incredibly, 17 percent of voters said “yes.”
Another question asked if “a friend or family member” filled out a respondent’s ballot, “in part or in full,” on behalf of the respondent, which is illegal in some states. Nineteen percent of mail-in voters who responded to the survey answered “yes.”
Even more remarkably, 21 percent of respondents admitted to filling out a ballot for someone they know, such as a spouse or child, and 17 percent confessed to signing a ballot or ballot envelope “on behalf of a friend or family member, with or without his or her permission” — both potential forms of illegal voting.
Taken together, these results strongly indicate fraud and illegal voting heavily affected mail-in balloting in the 2020 election. Even if a fraction of the people admitting wrongdoing here are actually guilty, that would still equal the electoral margin for 2020.
It’s an incredibly important finding since that contest involved more mail-in ballots than any other election in U.S. history. Election officials report that of 159 million ballots cast in 2020, more than 68 million were submitted by mail, about 43 percent of the total. In addition, as the MIT Election Data and Science Lab noted, “the dramatic increase in the raw number of absentee ballots cast was accompanied by a significant decrease in the overall absentee rejection rate for the country: from 0.96 percent in 2016 to 0.79 percent in 2020.”
If the recent Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey is accurate and one in five ballots were, in fact, fraudulent, that would suggest greater than 13 million ballots should not have been counted nationwide in 2020. That’s far more than the margin of victory for President Biden in the popular vote, about 7 million.
As troubling as these findings are, however, additional questions in the Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey suggest voter fraud and illegal voting may have been even worse than the one-in-five figure suggests. For instance, 8 percent of all respondents — not just those who voted by mail — said they were offered “pay” or “reward” in return for voting.
Equally disturbing, 10 percent of voters said, “a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance” admitted to them that he or she “cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 in a state other than his or her state of permanent residence.” Eleven percent said that “a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance” admitted to filling out someone else’s ballot.
These questions could indicate far more fraud occurred than anyone previously thought.
It’s also worth remembering that presidents are not elected by a national popular vote but through the Electoral College. The three states in which Trump and Biden were closest — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — were all decided by fewer than 21,000 votes.
Biden narrowly won each of those contests, but if he had lost those three states, he wouldn’t have reached the 270 electoral vote thresholds needed to win the presidency. Instead, the Electoral College vote would have been a tie, pushing the decision to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. With such razor-thin margins and the results of the recent Heartland/Rasmussen voter fraud survey in mind, it’s hard not to wonder how big of an effect fraud truly had on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
But regardless of how much fraud occurred, one thing is absolutely certain: States must take appropriate legislative action to protect the integrity of the next presidential election so that all Americans can be confident that the winner of the 2024 campaign will capture the White House fair and square.
There is already substantial evidence that voter fraud could play a significant role in 2024. Another survey conducted in March and April by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen shows that 28 percent of likely voters now say they would commit at least one form of illegal voting during the 2024 election, “if given the opportunity.” Interestingly, respondents’ willingness to commit fraud was similar among Republicans, Democrats, and independents.
There is some good news, however. The threat of voter fraud can be limited dramatically by changing mail-in ballot rules. Voters who are physically able to cast their ballots in person should be required to do so, or they should be mandated to have their ballot signature notarized, significantly reducing opportunities for fraud. Lawmakers could fund public programs to increase access to free notaries for those who need them.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, just three states require notaries for mail-in ballots — Mississippi, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Only nine additional states mandate that a voter obtain one or more non-notary witness signatures when casting a ballot by mail. Most states require neither a witness nor a notary to verify signatures.
Lawmakers must ensure widespread voter fraud does not happen in future elections. That can only occur if mail-in voting systems are radically improved. Time is running out for legislators to fix these major threats to American self-government.
Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org) is the director of the Socialism Research Center at The Heartland Institute and a New York Times bestselling author.
It’s not just atrocious polls that suggest President Joe Biden will lose in November; it’s also the behavior of the White House. In just the past few weeks, the Biden administration has rolled out over a dozen new initiatives and rules, many of them – like banning development of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve – likely to impact our country far into the future. It’s a startling avalanche of executive activity.
Call me crazy, but that looks like a White House panicked that its days are numbered.
Who can blame them? A new national CNN poll shows Trump leading the president by six points, one of the biggest gaps yet; more important, Fox News surveys have Trump inching ahead in several critical swing states.
Bad polls, an unpopular president, disruptive protests at home and rising threats around the world, sinking consumer confidence and resurgent inflation; all signs point to defeat in November. Hence, the whirlwind of regulations, which includes the following:
3. EEOC charges of racism against a company because they avoided hiring criminals;
4. More federal help on student loans;
5. FTC preventing the merger of two luxury goods makers;
6. New overtime rules;
7. New regulations detailing airline refunds;
8. New decision restricting drilling in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve;
9. FTC blocking hospital group mergers;
10. New power plant emissions rules;
11. Putting on hold a ban on menthol cigarettes;
12. A revamp of school lunch mandates, reducing sugar and salt.
The Biden administration appears to be preparing for the worst, pushing through policies that could be overturned if passed later in the year. Congress has 60 days to nix rules promulgated by federal agencies with a simple majority; if there’s a red wave, Biden diktats adopted in the traditional “lame duck” session would likely disappear. The Trump administration employed that tool successfully, ditching several policies rolled out late in President Obama’s second term; Biden returned the favor when he came to office.
Some decisions, like forgiving student loans or not banning menthol cigarettes which are favored by Blacks, are obviously meant to attract targeted voters. Others seem to scratch a progressive itch, like the upending of long-standing employment laws.
Voters should wonder: Is all of this activism well-thought-out? The answer is almost surely no. After all, these are the folks that forced Detroit automakers to go all-in on EVs, sure that Americans were ready to abandon their gas-guzzling SUVs.
Consider the FTC, led by the reckless ideologue Lina Khan. Under Khan’s guidance, the FTC has clamped down on corporate merger activity. Most recently, the agency sued to block luxury fashion firm Tapestry’s acquisition of Capri. Tapestry owns Coach, Stuart Weitzman and Kate Spade, while Capri owns the Versace, Jimmy Choo and Michael Kors labels.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill on July 13, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Henry Liu, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition claims, “This deal threatens to deprive consumers of the competition for affordable handbags…” Forgive me, but only a man could utter such nonsense. Any woman will tell you that there are a gazillion handbag makers, and that they compete mainly on style and image, not price. And, frankly, that few of them are “affordable.”
This is one of many examples of the FTC interfering with the normal pursuit of business. Fashion is fickle; companies continually add names and brands to survive. Liu has no idea what he is talking about.
But we cannot dismiss this FTC intervention as insignificant. The Biden White House, just like that of President Obama, is tragically lacking in business leaders, and in common sense.
Lina Khan is a typical progressive Biden appointee, who is now compiling an impressive record of overreach and defeat. She failed to prevent Meta from acquiring the virtual reality company Within, failed to keep Microsoft from buying Activision and will probably fail in her effort to keep grocers Albertson and Kroger from combining. She denies that mergers can create efficiencies and lower costs for consumers. As an undergraduate, she wrote a paper criticizing Amazon for being big; if Khan had been in charge, Americans would not be enjoying the obvious convenience of the world’s largest online retailer.
It isn’t just the FTC which, by the way, is also behind the outrageous and sure to be overturned ban on non-compete agreements. Consider the new Department of Transportation demands that airlines must “immediately” refund money for delayed or canceled flights and reimburse passengers for equipment issues like non-working TVs. Talks about adding headaches to an industry constantly toggling between profits and losses! What the government should be doing is investing in critical air traffic control equipment and infrastructure; let consumers punish airlines that don’t treat them fairly.
Some of the White House’s most enduring and damaging new rules have to do with energy. Biden is desperate to shore up his bona fides with the environmental lobby, and so has added new restrictions on domestic oil and gas development. Consequently, he just banned exploration of a vast swath of Alaska’s huge National Petroleum Reserve, even though the region contains some of our country’s most promising prospects and despite support for drilling from the state’s native population.
In addition, the president’s EPA has recently issued new power plant emissions rules that could force the closure of many coal-fired power plants, even as demand for electricity expands. It also requires by 2032 wide-spread use of carbon-capture technology that does not yet exist on a large scale. Similar rules adopted by the Obama administration were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2016; critics claimed executive overreach. The Biden team’s approach, which could undermine the nation’s energy security, is likely to meet the same fate.
These are not sensible policies; they are the wish-list and fantasies of a progressive White House not likely to pay the price for their damaging meddling. Here’s hoping.
Liz Peek is a Fox News contributor and former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company. A former columnist for the Fiscal Times, she writes for The Hill and contributes frequently to Fox News, the New York Sun and other publications. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter @LizPeek.
The U.S. under a second Trump administration would “be there” to help Israel defend itself against Iran, former President Donald Trump told Time magazine in an exclusive interview.
Despite promoting what Time termed an overall foreign policy based on “transactional isolationism,” Trump made it clear he would back Israel against Iran.
“If they attack Israel, yes, we would be there,” Trump told Time.
The former president added he now believes a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state neighboring Israel in peace, is increasingly unlikely after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and massacre and Israel’s retaliatory war.
“There was a time when I thought two-state could work,” he said. “Now I think two-state is going to be very, very tough.”
Trump, running to unseat President Joe Biden in November’s general election, criticized Israel’s handling of its war against the Hamas terrorists, who also took nearly 250 hostages Oct. 7.
He called for Israel to “get it over with.”
The former president appeared to levy criticism on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to prevent Hamas’ attack.
“It happened on his watch,” Trump said.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, once a close ally with Netanyahu, also told Time that he “had a bad experience with Bibi.”
According to Trump, a January 2020 U.S. operation to kill a top Iranian general was supposed to be a joint attack until Netanyahu backed out at the last minute.
“That was something I never forgot,” Trump told the magazine.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas—seen here at a news conference outside the Capitol in September—took issue Tuesday with some fellow Republican lawmakers on their unwillingness to fight to control federal spending. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
For Rep. Chip Roy, it’s a frustrating conversation that happens all too often with fellow lawmakers on his side of the aisle.
“‘Chip, we have a razor-thin majority. We just have to win the White House; we just have to win the Senate,’” the Texas Republican recalled in a speech Tuesday.
When he hears colleagues concerned about the narrow 217-212 House Republican majority, he notes the Democrats’ narrow Senate majority—51 senators in the Democratic caucus compared with 49 Republicans.
“Well, when do they ever look across there and say Chuck Schumer has a razor-thin majority?” Roy said of the Senate Democratic leader from New York. “When do they ever look and say, ‘You’re actually in charge of the House of Representatives, which James Madison told you in [Federalist Paper 58] actually has the power of the purse. Do something with it. Stop making excuses.”
That prompted applause from the audience at The Heritage Foundation at an event, “Defunding the Left.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Roy had earlier quoted Madison—father of the Constitution and later the fourth president of the United States—who wrote in Federalist 58:
The House of Representatives can not only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government. … This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.
Though the GOP mostly prevented nondefense spending hikes, and kept the political focus on border security, he said irresponsible spending is a bipartisan problem that “infests the entire swamp” in both parties.
“The fundamental problem is not just the weakening of the dollar and the strength of our financial system. It’s actually the radical Left funding the tyranny, funding the government that’s at war with your way of life.”
He noted the Republican-controlled House approved $62 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security amid rising crime and fentanyl deaths in the U.S. resulting from the border crisis.
The House majority also went along with $200 million to fund a new FBI headquarters and overall about $40 billion for the Justice Department, despite concerns about politicized lawfare. He noted $824 billion went to the Defense Department with no demands to scrap its focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that are hurting armed forces recruitment.
The House majority allowed $80 billion for the Department of Education; $9 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency; and $117 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services, while requiring no accountability for mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic by departmental subordinate agencies, such as National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While his GOP colleagues often talk about the need to win the next election, Roy said, conservative control of both houses of Congress and the White House are not guaranteed to reverse the trend.
“Literally, on Day One, they are going to say, ‘Chip, we can’t do all you want to do because we don’t have 60 in the Senate. You’ve got to be reasonable.’” Roy predicted. “I promise you that’s coming. So, we have to win majorities. But we have to plan now for driving a steamroller over the weak-kneed individuals in Congress that will use 60 [as a premise] not to fight for you.”
In the Senate, 60 votes are required to end filibusters.
Roy noted there were some positive accomplishments, however. Since winning the majority, House Republicans have for the most part “kept the ball on our side of the field,” he said.
Nondefense spending was largely held flat, while increased defense spending in 2023 was initially paid for by taking money out of the Internal Revenue Service and unspent COVID-19 funding.
That occurred after then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., put caps in place, even though the caps were discarded in January. Further, Roy noted that House Republicans didn’t let Democrats redirect the border debate to one of amnesty for illegal immigrants.
“Amnesty was off the table. All we talked about this last year was border security. We didn’t achieve it, but we didn’t allow the Democrats to start moving the ball down the field and have a debate about amnesty,” Roy said. “It matters where you set the goal post and how you set your mission.”
The Texas lawmaker criticized the recent $95 billion foreign aid package that passed without the support of most Republicans. He said that too often, members of Congress “default to fear” on defense spending.
“I want the strongest military that we can possibly produce. I want it to be sparingly used,” Roy said, adding:
I don’t want to use it often, but if we do, I want it to destroy everything in its path. But we just default to fear, and we use the national security-defense complex to run over everything else.
“People literally come into [House Republicans’] meetings and say, ‘We just can’t risk defense.’ Well, if that’s what you do, you’re never going to change the town,” he continued, “because they are always going to use defense as the leverage to say, ‘We’re not going to cut [the Justice Department]; we’re not going to cut education; we’re not going to make reforms.”
There has been a notable shift toward more and more extreme rhetoric in the media from predicting that democracy will end with this election to “disappearing” journalists and gays to ending all rights for everyone. On Monday, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace added to this litany with a claim that “as with racists, all of the conspiracy theorists are Republicans.”
After discussing how GOP candidates have stated that they believe that the last election was “stolen,” Wallace added “It is not accurate to say everyone in the Republican Party is a conspiracy theorist but as with racists, all of the conspiracy theorists are Republicans.”
It was a crushingly ironic moment. Wallace has been repeatedly criticized for spreading false news. For example, the “Deadline: White House” host told viewers that they should not take the Hunter Biden laptop seriously: “We shouldn’t look at it as anything other than a Russian disinformation operation.”
Wallace heralded the Mueller investigation while pushing the now debunked Russian collusion claims. However, on the Durham investigation, she told viewers that they could ignore it despite the fact that the report stands uncontradicted:
“Durham’s whole thing is predicated on it’s like a rabbit hole conspiracy that suggests that the Trump-Barr paranoia infected his ability to stand back and evaluate whether the probe yielded guilty convictions of people who would have had nothing to do with any of these questions he looked at.”
Wallace and MSNBC also pushed false claims about Bill Barr clearing Lafayette Park for a Trump “photo op.”
On August 5th, 2019, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace falsely claimed that Trump had talked about “exterminating Latinos.”
Wallace claimed that the lab theory of the Covid 19 was a “conspiracy theory.” It has been embraced by various federal agencies despite being called racist by many experts.
Many on the left now routinely call opposing views as spreaders of disinformation or conspiracy theories. The Biden Administration has funded various groups to blacklist or bar those with opposing views as disinformation, malinformation, or misinformation. Indeed, new groups are being formed before the election to echo these claims, including one headed by the former “Disinformation Czar.”
Bidenomics, with its high inflation and high cost of living, is wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy. Though the left continues to gaslight and cook the books in their favor, Americans can feel this economic disaster.
POLL: Biden Trails Trump in Six Swing States – 70% Say Economy is on the “Wrong Track”
BY JORDAN CONRADSON – APRIL 26, 2024
According to a recent poll, President Trump currently holds a lead in six of the seven key swing states that are expected to determine the 2024 Presidential Election.
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 • Pro-Life Advocate Placed in Solitary Confinement for 22 Days for Sharing Food • Florida Heartbeat Law Takes Effect Wednesday, Will Save Thousands of Babies From Abortion • 17 States Challenge Biden Rule Forcing Employers to Facilitate Abortions • Birth Rates Plummet to Historic Lows, Lowest in Blue States With Abortions Up to Birth
More Pro-Life News • Mother Confirms Abortion Ban Saved Her Baby’s Life • Planned Parenthood Made $178 Million in Profits From Killing Almost 400,000 Babies in Abortions • Kansas House Overrides Gov Laura Kelly’s Vetoes of Two Pro-Life Bills • Radical Abortion Activist Won’t Go to Prison for Attacking Pregnancy Center • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Forty years ago, a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, revealed the systematic plan Soviet communists used to take down countries and establish a communist-type society and regime. More recently, a Chinese defector immigrant, Xi Van Fleet, has been on a crusade to warn Americans about the parallels between what is happening in America today and what Mao did in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The systematic plan Bezmenov revealed involves four fluid stages of communist subversion: 1) demoralization, 2) disorientation, 3) crisis, and 4) normalization. In Mao’s America, Xi Van Fleet explains how Mao’s destruction of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) is being replicated by today’s leftist cancel culture, which will end what is left of freedom in America if not stopped.
Demoralization
The first stage in the Bezmenov analysis, demoralization, lasts a generation or more. One of its main thrusts is to undermine the Judeo-Christian beliefs, customs, habits, and traditions that have been foundational to America — these parallel the Four Olds that Mao destroyed in China.
Another target for demoralization is the family, which communists want to replace with the state. Xi Van Fleet points out that just as the Chinese Cultural Revolution turned children against their parents, American families are under increasing attack. Government schools, the medical establishment, and popular culture — which now support the transgender movement — are increasingly turning children against their parents.
A third demoralization strategy is breaking the people’s loyalty and love for their country by rewriting history, denigrating the founders and national heroes, and destroying historic monuments — again, the Four Olds. In summary, the goal of demoralization is to disconnect people from the virtue of the past and render them unable to assess what is true.
Disorientation
The second stage of the communist strategy, according to Bezmenov, builds on demoralization to advance society’s disorientation, a condition wherein the masses feel bewildered and helpless. While it’s impossible to prove intentionality at this time, the China-originated Covid-19 pandemic caused massive disorientation in the U.S. when the government mandated masks, social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, and the abandonment of tried-and-true medical practices of preventive and therapeutic treatments.
Another important part of disorientation happened early in the Covid crisis after the death of George Floyd. Assertions of systemic racism in law enforcement triggered rioting, looting, and the destruction of several billion dollars’ worth of property, along with the tearing down of historic statues and memorials in many cities across the United States.
Americans became further disoriented when they realized government authorities were unable or unwilling to do anything about the destruction in big cities across America. There were few arrests while more than 2,000 police officers were injured. Disorientation may have reached its peak when cities with the most lawlessness, such as Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, initiated efforts to defund local law enforcement.
Crisis
Following disorientation is the crisis stage. An unprecedented crisis stage for America came in November 2020 with election rigging. Democrat operatives exploited the fear factor of Covid-19 in the summer months of 2020. They visited almost every swing state to change voting rules to accommodate expanded mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and extended vote-tally deadlines — all of which facilitate vote fraud.
The crisis that ensued from election irregularity was deepened by the massive media and social media censorship and cancellation campaigns that began well before the Nov. 3, 2020, election. The Department of Homeland Security division called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, better known as CISA, collaborated with the Stanford University-based NGO Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to suppress information that would help Trump.
EIP launched a campaign to prevent the public from challenging the anticipated voting irregularities by getting agreements from all the social media companies — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest — to modify their customer terms-of-service policies to incorporate language about “delegitimization.” Once that was accomplished, according to Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department communications policymaker and an expert on propaganda, the door was opened to algorithmic mass censorship and cancellation.
EIP exerted pressure on all the social media companies to adhere to their customer service policies and censor, cancel, or deplatform any content that contained “delegitimized” narratives about new election protocols and “processes,” election “issues and outcomes,” “mail-in ballots,” “early voting,” “drop boxes,” “Dominion Voting Systems,” and “Antifa.”
The media treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke in mid-October 2020 in the New York Post illustrates just how quickly the channels of propaganda and media manipulation fall into place. The laptop story (which contained massive incriminating evidence revealing a compromised Joe Biden family), was immediately delegitimized and taken down from every social media site. At the same time, 51 former top intelligence officials signed a letter, published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, stating that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
After the 2020 election, social media effectively thwarted discussion about election fraud. Again EIP insisted that social media companies uphold the terms-of-service contracts that required censoring social media content containing newly delegitimized terms, such as “Stop the Steal,” “dead voter rolls,” “Sharpiegate,” “stolen election,” “ballot harvesting,” and “Postal Service,” to name a few. Additionally, people questioning the integrity of the 2020 election were marginalized by the media and discredited as “election deniers.”
Bemenov’s four stages are fluid, so demoralization and disorientation continue in the crisis stage. We see this with lawfare against Donald Trump, his aides, and some 1,200 Jan. 6 participants arrested by the FBI.
The target is not just Trump and his supporters, but the American people, who are now seeing that large parts of the justice system in America resemble that of a banana republic. With equal justice under the law and respect for the Constitution being mocked, the subliminal message is, “This is not the America you know; it’s a new world that you have entered, so get used to it.”
Normalization
While America is still in the crisis stage, some subversion experts argue that the lawfare, censorship, and cancellation regimes that now exist are really part of the last stage of communist takeover known as normalization — Bezmenov’s fourth and final stage. If America’s borders remain open and the American people are denied access to information, become accustomed to rigged elections, accept limitations on free speech, and acquiesce to the rewriting of history, the constitutional republic that was the United States will be gone, and the new world of communist global elite control will be normalized.
John Adams, the second president, unequivocally warned, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.” It is no longer enough just to man the ramparts. It’s time for the people to turn the tables on the elite destroyers of our constitutional republic.
Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His recent book, “Rediscovering America,” was the No. 1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org.
Parents across the United States are being restricted from accessing their adolescent children’s online electronic health records. Not only are military parents barred from accessing all but basic information on their 13- to 17-year-olds in the military’s online health care portal, but the adolescent minor also is not allowed to have a user logon until 18. Though elected officials are tackling this issue on the state level, military parents will need to be their own advocates as they appeal to Congress to restore their parental rights.
Military insurance provider Tricare finally issued a press release in March explaining Department of Defense (DOD) policies that restrict parents from adolescent records in the portal, Military Health System (MHS) Genesis, as well as from “sensitive” physical records.
Last year, I wrote about my experience of spending months trying to obtain the official policy that barred parents from these records. Now that the policy is out in the open, it must not be allowed to stand, as it is ultimately harmful to children.
Many military parents object to providers’ having a confidential relationship with their children because they do not trust activist MHS doctors who believe a child can be born in the wrong body to counsel their children on anything in secret — as some are doing.
One sobering example of what can happen when parents are excluded occurred in Louisiana, where two civilian parents were treated as the enemy. After less than an hour behind closed doors with their 13-year-old, the provider tried to manipulate them into affirming their daughter’s new identity as a boy by asking them if they would “rather have a dead daughter or a live son.” One of the doctors involved, Dr. Ryan Pasternak, is a leader in adolescent medicine and has co-written recommendations for the Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM) on the management of electronic health records. SAHM’s ideal method includes permitting full access only to the adolescent, while actively blocking parents so they receive only nonconfidential information.
Even as state legislatures are moving to restore parental access to unemancipated minor medical records, the MHS seems to be plowing ahead with its efforts to keep parents in the dark. With all I’ve uncovered about adolescent confidentiality and gender activists within the MHS, parents are right to be concerned.
Congress Fails to Act
In 2017, the Defense Health Board, a federal committee that advises the secretary of defense, acknowledged in a report that the emerging field of adolescent medicine had “recently made a profound shift from its traditional role. Instead of providing preemptive guidance to parents, providers now work to reduce risk-taking behaviors with their focus aimed directly at the adolescent.” The board also recommended expanding the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to address gender dysphoria and suggested possibly including surgeries for gender-confused children in the future. The board pointed out that the Tricare Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Treatment final rule on Sept. 2, 2016, “permits ‘coverage of all non-surgical medically necessary and appropriate care in the treatment of gender dysphoria.’” This was a final rule that came from unelected bureaucrats — not Congress.
Nevertheless, recent efforts in Congress to prohibit coverage for transgender procedures for minor military children were removed by the Senate from the House-passed fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. Language to prevent the Exceptional Family Member Program from being used to facilitate child transgender transitions was also removed.
Bases, Schools Push Transgenderism
Today, adolescents can receive confidential care on military bases and in school-based clinics. For example, Joint Base Lewis-McChord’s Madigan Army Medical Center’s adolescent clinic offers subspecialty care for transgender confusion, sexuality issues, and substance use, among other services. Madigan also runs a system of school-based health clinics in 10 area schools; dependents on Tricare Prime insurance can visit the clinic once each week.
If military parents aren’t “affirming” of a transgender identity, activist group PFLAG recommends that children talk with “a school counselor, the on-base youth Military Family Life Counselor (MFLC), a chaplain (if from an affirming denomination), or an online friend or peer.” PFLAG also reveals that MHS Genesis “now allows patients to mark their gender identity in addition to their sex assigned at birth.” This will “allow transgender youth to receive appropriate care without as many obstacles.” And “military LGBTQ+ organizations are currently working with DoDEA [schools for children of military families] to incorporate the same procedures in school documents.”
In the school-to-scalpel age, confidential care being provided to adolescents should cause alarm bells to go off. Ian Prior, founder of Fight for Schools, in his article, “Queer Whistleblower Exposes Evils of the School to Scalpel Pipeline,” shows how indoctrination into transgenderism can begin at school as young as kindergarten. In many cases, children are encouraged to socially transition at school. By the time parents find out, children can be convinced they were born in the wrong body, and doctors who favor the “gender affirmation” approach steer parents and their dysphoric children down that path of care.
Thanks to an official Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA) teacher training in May 2021, we know that secret transgender transitions are happening in overseas schools for military children. Former Rep. Vicky Hartzler wrote a letter to DOD in 2021 asking why teachers were being trained at a DODEA teachers summit to transition children at school without parents’ knowledge. She never received a response — and DODEA has avoided accountability even to this day.
I spoke with a military mom whose daughter, Cami (not her real name), was enrolled in a public school in Fairfax County, Virginia, that concealed from her parents that she had transitioned to a boy at school. Though the mother only wanted Cami to see a therapist to address her depression, military medicine additionally referred her to a so-called gender clinic in the Washington, D.C., area. When the mother didn’t take her daughter to the clinic, she received a call from a military doctor who suggested Cami might need puberty blockers to give her time to decide about her sex. At the time of our conversation, the family was still reeling from the harm that “trusted” adults at school had caused.
MHS Treats Thousands of Confused Dependents
Armed with this information about a gender clinic on base, I found research conducted by active-duty medical doctors and a medical school professor that mentioned a regional referral-based adolescent medicine clinic that opened in 2014 and serves dependents between the ages of 9 and 24. It provides “services including diagnosis, puberty suppression, affirming-hormone treatment, reproductive health services … and affirming counseling, and refers for surgical, ancillary (e.g., voice therapy) and complex mental health services.”
Ft. Belvoir in Virginia fit the clinic’s description, and transgender-confused children do, indeed, seek care there. Dr. David Klein was chief of adolescent medicine at Ft. Belvoir in 2016. He and his associates have diligently documented their research on transgender-identifying military dependents. They reveal that from 2009 until 2017, more than 2,500 military dependents, ages 4 to 25, sought treatment for gender confusion from the MHS. When Tricare began to pay for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for dependents in 2016, they observed a marked increase in the number of patients seeking such care. One can only imagine how high the figures are today when taking into account estimates that the number of transgender-identifying youth in the United States nearly doubled between 2016 and 2022.
Another Klein study looked at 53 gender-confused adolescents and measured parental support for their care. Researchers looked at MHS data from 2014 to 2017 and rated strong support of parents for initiation or continuation of “gender transition” at 55.8 percent, non to moderately supportive at 25 percent, and conflicted support at 19.2 percent.
Though numerous studies show that military kids suffer from a higher rate of anxiety and depression than their civilian peers, key recommendations from Klein and his co-authors provide advice to doctors as if wrongly named “gender affirmation” is the only approach for treating gender dysphoria. They claim a transgender diagnosis is not necessarily related to other mental health concerns and that attempts “to convert a person’s gender identity to align with their sex assigned at birth are unethical and incompatible with current guidelines and evidence.”
Klein and colleagues made the news last year and caught congressional attention when they stated in their latest research, in a discussion about understanding the risks and benefits of “gender-affirming” care, that 7-year-olds can begin participating in medical decision-making. Fortunately, as former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard pointed out to Tucker Carlson, 53 percent of MHS physicians in that study said they would refuse to prescribe hormones even if trained to do so. Sadly, others would be willing to, and Klein is now the Family Adolescent Medicine Program director at Travis Air Force Base in California — training the next generation of military physicians.
Falling out of Favor Around the World
Even as MHS leaders continue to promote this harmful medicating of children, it is rapidly falling out of favor among doctors around the world, who are opting for psychotherapy as a first line treatment for gender dysphoria, after studies have shown “no demonstrable, long-term benefit” on “psychosocial well-being of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”
Additionally, the leading organization for transgender care, WPATH, was recently exposed for its lack of evidence and safeguards that led to members performing pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on minors. And, similarly, the Cass Review, released this month, detailed how England’s leading specialist youth transgender “clinic,” now permanently closed, was untethered from evidence-based medicine.
As the rationale for transgender drugs and surgeries unravels, a legal reckoning is being led in the United States by detransitioners such as Chloe Cole, who began transitioning at 12 and had a double mastectomy by 15. DOD and affirming doctors in the MHS must be included in this reckoning and held accountable for any harm suffered by military dependents under their care.
Laws and policies that allow medical records and medical treatment of adolescents to be hidden from parents are potentially harmful to children and destructive to families, and this is why military parents must urge Congress to strike DOD’s policies that drive a wedge between them and their children and to pass legislation that clarifies their right to guide the medical care of their children.
Amy Haywood is a former senior legislative assistant for a U.S. House representative. She writes The Primary Educator newsletter, which can be found at theprimaryeducator.com.
President Joe Biden has a message for the 133 hostages held by the monsters of Hamas: He will not rest until they are “back in the arms of their loved ones.”
“They have my word. Their families have my word,” Biden pledged Saturday on the POTUS X account before heading to a posh, black-tie White House Correspondents’ Dinner to rub elbows with the corporate media sycophants who have been carrying water for him.
I will not rest until every hostage, like Abigail, ripped from their families and held by Hamas is back in the arms of their loved ones.
Such a vow from the vaguely alert octogenarian known for being full of crap must have been comforting to the families of the people who have spent the better part of the past seven months in an unimaginable hell while the Biden administration has been sweet-talking the same people who want to wipe out Israel and annihilate Jews.
Biden tirelessly avoided any talk of the political headaches of hostages and Israel’s right to exist during the annual fete of self-important politicians, journalists, and celebrities at the Washington Hilton. Reportedly on the menu, Terrine of Jumbo Lump Crabmeat as an appetizer, an entree of Smoked Paprika Rubbed Filet with Foraged Wild Mushroom Ragout and Pancetta & Gala Apple Demi, washed down with some very fine Chateau Ste. Michelle, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Sauvignon. Safe to say the menu for Hamas’ captives was not nearly as epicurean.
But pretending to think about hostages works up a man-sized, elitist appetite.
“And let there be laughter. I hope for lots of side-splitting, light the internet on fire laughter,” Kelly O’Donnell, NBC senior White House correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, insipidly said in her opening remarks.
But not a word about the goings on in Gaza and Israel from Biden or the assemblage of narcissists, to the chagrin of the hundreds of Hamas sympathizers protesting outside the high-priced Hilton.
“Shame on you!” shouted the protesters adorned in the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh, the Associated Press reported. Their renunciations, like those of the professional protesters at Columbia and other college campuses, were reserved for Israel, the United States, and anybody who dares do business with them.
It was tough all over. Some of the correspondents’ dinner guests had to “hurry through hundreds of protesters outraged over the mounting humanitarian disaster for Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” in the AP’s telling. The self-loathing reporters forced to cover the glitzy affair couldn’t help but make the story about the protesters and the poor Palestinians, most of whom have been cheerleaders for the genocidal “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” campaign.
‘Take This Serious’
Biden could muster all of 10 minutes in his stand-up routine, and much of that was to knock the political opponent he’s trying to imprison. The dinner is designed to be a good-natured roast, but Biden’s speech took a grim turn as he warned of the kind of horror only Democrats and the reporters assembled at the Washington Hilton could invent: a J6 apocalyptic future under another Donald Trump presidency. The room of accomplice media members surely shuddered thinking about the hellscape that life under Trump would unleash — like a booming economy, low inflation, a safer world, and a closed U.S. border.
“We have to take this serious — eight years ago we could have written it off as ‘Trump talk’ but not after Jan. 6,” Biden told the attendees with a straight face. Know this, White House correspondents and esteemed corporate media reporters: Biden will never rest until every one of those Jan. 6 grandmother rebels, Capitol sightseers, and the Republican presidential candidate leading the current White House occupant rot in prison.
Colin Jost, after comparing his late grandfather to Biden, closes by saying his grandfather voted for Joe in 2020 "because you're a decent man" and "my grandpa voted for decency and decency is why we're all here tonight."
Trump did not attend the dinner. That might have something to do with the fact that he’s been forced to defend himself in a Democrat-led banana republic while trying to find time to campaign for president. But as AP pointed out, Trump never attended the smorgasbord of smugness during his presidency.
“In 2011, he sat in the audience, and glowered through a roasting by then-President Barack Obama of Trump’s reality-television celebrity status. Obama’s sarcasm then was so scalding that many political watchers linked it to Trump’s subsequent decision to run for president in 2016,” the story asserts as if communicating facts. We all know the No. 1 reason presidential campaigns launch is out of spite. Franklin Pierce jumped in the 1852 race after Whig Millard Fillmore dogged the Democrat about his raging alcoholism. Hell hath no fury like a Jacksonian Democrat scorned by “scalding sarcasm.”
Biden did spend time on Sunday telling Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu how to run Israel’s war on terror. You’ll recall how much the United States appreciated similar meddling by other nations after 9/11. According to The Times of Israel, Biden spoke to Netanyahu about his joint statement with the leaders of 17 other nations calling on Hamas to immediately release the remaining hostages it is holding in Gaza amid the human shield Palestinians. Israel would grant a ceasefire if the hostages are released. And that’s what an unpopular American president drowning in bad polls really wants: a ceasefire. The release of the hostages is a means to his political ends, which is to get two critical contingencies — Muslims and Jews — off his back.
And the hostages and their families can rest assured, tough-talking Joe Biden won’t rest until he secures freedom for his political aims. *Not including his daily rests and swanky dinners.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Colleges around the U.S. implored pro-Palestinian student protesters to clear out tent encampments with rising levels of urgency Monday, including an ultimatum from Columbia University for students to sign a form and leave the encampment by the afternoon or face suspension.
Columbia activists defied the 2 p.m. deadline with chants, clapping and drumming from the encampment of more than 300 people. No officials appeared to enter the encampment, with at least 120 tents staying up as the deadline passed.
The notice sent Monday by the Ivy League university in Manhattan to protesters in the encampment said that if they left by the deadline and signed a form committing to abide by university policies through June 2025 or an earlier graduation, they could finish the semester in good standing. If not, the letter said, they will be suspended, pending further investigation.
Early protests at Columbia, where demonstrators set up tents in the center of the campus, sparked pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the country. Students and others have been sparring over the Israel-Hamas war and its mounting death toll. Many students are demanding their universities cut financial ties with Israel. The number of arrests at campuses nationwide is approaching 1,000.
College classes are wrapping up for the semester, and campuses are preparing for graduation ceremonies, giving schools an extra incentive to clear encampments. The University of Southern California canceled its main graduation ceremony this spring. Others are asking the protests to resolve peacefully so they can hold their ceremonies.
Fewer new tent encampments have sprouted around the country as the school year winds down. But students have dug in their heels at tent encampments at some high-profile universities, with standoffs continuing between protesters and administrators at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale and others.
Protesters at Yale set up a new camp with dozens of tents Sunday afternoon, nearly a week after police arrested nearly 50 and cleared a similar one nearby. Later Sunday, they were notified by a Yale official that they could face discipline, including suspension, and possible arrest if they continued the encampment on a grassy area known as Cross Campus, protesters and school officials said. No deadline to leave was set.
Yale said in a statement Monday that while it supports peaceful protests and freedom of speech, it does not tolerate policy violations such as the encampment. School officials said that the protest is near residential colleges where many students are studying for final exams, and that permission must be granted for groups to hold events and put-up structures on campus.
Protests were also still active at a number of other campuses. Near George Washington University, protesters at an encampment breached and dismantled the barriers Monday morning used to secure University Yard, the university said in a statement. The yard had been closed since last week.
About 275 people were arrested Saturday at various campuses including Indiana University at Bloomington, Arizona State University and Washington University in St. Louis.
In its letter to student protesters, Columbia officials noted that exams are beginning, and graduation is upcoming.
“We urge you to remove the encampment so that we do not deprive your fellow students, their families and friends of this momentous occasion,” the letter said.
Mahmoud Khalil, the lead negotiator on behalf of protesters, said university representatives began passing out the notices at the encampment shortly after 10 a.m. Monday. A spokesperson for Columbia confirmed the letter had gone out to students but declined to comment further.
Under the terms spelled out in the letter, students who leave the encampment would be put on disciplinary probation through June 2025. Students who are already receiving discipline, or who face harassment or discrimination charges for actions in the encampment, are not eligible for the offer.
Red and orange tents stayed up on the lawn as protesters considered the latest amnesty offer from the administration. A hundred feet away, a student cafe was open, and people enjoyed coffee in the warm spring sun.
On one side of the shuttered campus, students and staff lined up for security checks across the street from a cluster of TV trucks. At the other side, a police officer stood next to an unmarked black sedan with blue and red lights quietly flashing.
The demonstrations have led Columbia to hold remote classes and set a series of deadlines for protesters to leave the encampment, which they have missed. The school said in an email to students that bringing back police “at this time” would be counterproductive.
The students and administrators have negotiated to end the disruptions, but the sides have not come to an agreement, university President Minouche Shafik said in a statement Monday. The university said it will offer an alternative venue for the protests after exams and graduation.
Columbia’s handling of the protests has prompted federal complaints.
A class-action lawsuit on behalf of Jewish students alleges a breach of contract by Columbia, claiming the university failed to maintain a safe learning environment, despite policies and promises. It also challenges the move away from in-person classes and seeks quick court action requiring Columbia to provide security for the students.
Meanwhile, a legal group representing pro-Palestinian students is urging the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office to investigate Columbia’s compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for how they have been treated.
The plight of students who have been arrested has become a central part of protests, with the students and a growing number of faculty demanding amnesty for protesters. At issue is whether the suspensions and legal records will follow students through their adult lives.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
An illegal alien from China arrives Oct. 10 at a San Diego train station with a group of other illegal immigrants. (Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
Chinese nationals are crossing America’s southern border at a rapid rate. On Wednesday alone, the U.S. Border Patrol encountered 206 Chinese nationals crossing into the San Diego sector, Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin reported. But the illegal entry of Chinese nationals into America through the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector isn’t new. Chinese individuals long have worked with criminal cartels to get into the U.S., former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott says, but the numbers have shot up.
In January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported over 3,700 encounters with Chinese nationals on the southern border, nearly all in the San Diego sector. But back up to January 2021, when Joe Biden became president, and CBP encountered only 17 Chinese nationals at the southern border. So what changed?
To find out why so many Chinese nationals are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the San Diego sector, The Daily Signal spoke to Scott as well as to Derek Maltz, a 28-year veteran of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and to Michael Cunningham, a research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
They point to six main reasons.
1. San Diego Infrastructure
“It’s easy,” Scott said of why San Diego is a favorite crossing point for illegal immigrants from China.
Before serving as the 24th chief of the Border Patrol from January 2020 to August 2021, Scott was chief patrol agent for the San Diego sector from 2017 to 2019. San Diego, population 1.4 million, long has been a popular illegal crossing point for illegal aliens because it’s easy to disappear on busy city streets, Scott explains.
“If you’re coming across [the border] in between the ports of entry through traditional smuggling, we used to talk about a vanishing point,” Scott said. “How fast can you get across the border and then blend into society? That’s one of the reasons you look for [urban] infrastructure.”
San Diego is even more popular now for illegal aliens, given the situation at the border, because “it’s a lower risk,” he said.
To cross into Texas from Mexico, “you’ve got to come across the river,” the former Border Patrol chief explained, adding that globally, smugglers and others seeking to enter the U.S. illegally have seen Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s response to illegal immigration. In an initiative called Operation Lone Star, the Republican governor placed Texas National Guard troops along sections of the border with Mexico and installed concertina and razor wire, creating a greater challenge for migrants seeking to cross the border illegally.
And in Arizona, the harsh realities of the desert are a turnoff for illegal aliens trying to cross into the U.S., Scott said. Although such conditions don’t prevent illegal crossings, he said, Arizona is “hot” and “desolate.”
Mexico’s border with California in the San Diego sector offers a safer, more comfortable crossing option, he said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s nine southern border sectors. (Graphic: CBP/Border Report)
A migrant can go to Tijuana, Mexico, “be in a hotel drinking coffee, watching TV, get the ‘go,’ and in 15 minutes [he] can be in the United States,” Scott said. In 20 more minutes, he said, that same migrant can be getting processed inside a Border Patrol station with “air conditioning, food, and water.”
When illegal aliens are released in San Diego, the city offers “this massive nongovernmental organizational network system that’s going to provide free bus tickets [and] shelter,” he said. California also is a sanctuary state, meaning it doesn’t cooperate with federal authorities to enforce immigration law.
“From a marketing standpoint, it’s the easiest place to convince people to cross illegally,” Scott said of San Diego. “And then from a cartel perspective … that smuggling infrastructure has been well-established for years.”
2. Money Motivates Cartels
Chinese migrants are “lucrative” to the drug and smuggling cartels in Mexico, Scott told The Daily Signal.
“It’s pretty hard to get out of China,” the former Border Patrol chief said. “Nobody just goes to an airport and flies to the United States without specific permission from the government, so you have to be smuggled out of China and then into the United States.”
Chinese nationals buy “travel packages” from the cartels that are similar to commercial vacation travel packages, Scott said, and they pay based on what is included. For example, he said, one package for Chinese nationals requires them to travel to Ecuador and then on to Mexico.
“And when they came into Mexico, they got legit legal travel documents so that they could fly on domestic airlines in Mexico. But for a lower fee, you didn’t get that.”
3. Because They Can
Established smuggling routes, urban or suburban infrastructure, and the cartels’ financial motivation long have driven illegal Chinese migration to the U.S. So again, why the spike now?
“The difference now,” Scott said, “is there’s no real response from the federal government of the United States to slow it down. There hasn’t been since 2021.”
Biden, a Democrat, was inaugurated Jan. 20, 2021, and quickly dismantled the border security policies of his defeated Republican predecessor, Donald Trump.
Now, with a Biden-Trump rematch looming in November, Scott speculated, migrants and smugglers are concerned that U.S. border security will return if Trump or another Republican wins. That may help explain the rapid rise in crossings in recent months.
Illegal crossings in the San Diego sector by Chinese nationals were relatively few at the beginning of the Biden administration. CBP records only 75 encounters with Chinese migrants in the San Diego sector during fiscal year 2021, which ended that Sept. 30. The number climbed to 942 in fiscal 2022, then exploded to 10,520 in fiscal 2023.
So far in fiscal 2024, which ends in five months, CBP has encountered 23,890 Chinese nationals in the San Diego sector.
Cunningham, the research fellow in Heritage’s Asian Studies Center, told The Daily Signal that Chinese nationals “see all over the news that the border is wide open, that Biden is not protecting the border.”
So the question, he says, is “why wouldn’t they” attempt to cross into the U.S.?
4. ‘A Better Life’
“A lot of people are desperate to get out of China now,” Cunningham said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese citizens endured about three years of lockdowns and restrictions that dwarfed those in the U.S. These “draconian lockdowns” led many Chinese to lose faith in their communist government, he said.
China’s older population lived through the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, if not previous repressive political campaigns, Cunningham said, before the regime implemented a strict “zero-COVID” policy.
“They saw zero-COVID as what it was—a political campaign. And they’re worried about China’s future,” he said of ordinary Chinese citizens.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping gained an opportunity to rule the nation indefinitely when the communist regime ended formal presidential terms in 2018.
China’s economy is struggling as young people try to find jobs, the nation’s real estate market is in trouble after the failure of two major property development companies this year, and its stock market saw a $7 trillion decline in just a few years.
“People for years have wanted to get their money out of China, and it’s very difficult because of capital controls,” Cunningham said. “Now more of them are just wanting to get out of China altogether for a better life.”
5. Chinese Influence on America
Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China plans to develop trade routes with other nations, expand infrastructure, and invest in foreign economic development initiatives.
With Chinese leaders’ end goal of expanding “their power and control dramatically,” Scott said, it is “not a hidden secret that they have long allowed and or even facilitated and helped getting people out of China into the U.S. through whatever means possible.” The former Border Patrol chief pointed to reports that Chinese nationals are “systematically coming into the United States and buying property, buying foreign property, buying property near military bases,” as evidence that they are crossing the border intentionally.
China owns 384,000 acres in the U.S., about 1% of foreign-held acres, according to a Department of Agriculture report in 2021, the latest data available.
Although illegal immigrants could achieve some cultural and economic influence on America, Cunningham said, it’s unlikely that significant numbers of Chinese nationals cross the southern border with the intent of spying on the U.S.
Legal ways to enter the U.S., he said, provide greater opportunity for Chinese spies to access sensitive U.S. data than an illegal alien could get at.
“The idea that China is desperate to get their spies in the U.S. and so they’re sending them across the border illegally where they’re going to have no identity, they’re not going to be capable of getting the high-access jobs that they want their spies to get—it’s just not reasonable,” Cunningham said.
But, he added, it’s reasonable to believe that Chinese spies are infiltrated within criminal cartels and are “keeping tabs on some of the Chinese who are coming to America.”
6. Marijuana Farms
The Chinese are heavily involved in the domestic growth of marijuana in America, both legal and illegal, federal officials say. In February, 50 members of the House and Senate sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland expressing concern about and asking for answers to “reports from across the country regarding Chinese nationals and organized crime cultivating marijuana on United States farmland.”
“There’s a new term that’s been used a lot lately in local law enforcement—especially [in] Northern California [and] the inland parts of California—called narco slavery,” Scott told The Daily Signal. “And they’re seeing more and more Chinese that are being brought across and they’re being forced to work these domestic marijuana operations; they’re being forced to shovel money around the United States to pay back the smuggling fee that they couldn’t afford up front.”
Chinese-run marijuana grow operations “are all over the country,” Maltz, the former DEA official, told The Daily Signal. This isn’t a coincidence, he said.
“The marijuana today has high content of THC, much higher than we’ve ever seen,” Maltz said. THC, formally known as tetrahydrocannabinol, is a psychoactive compound found in cannabinoids. Large amounts increase the effects of marijuana on the user.
“Marijuana use directly affects brain function—specifically the parts of the brain responsible for memory, learning, attention, decision-making, coordination, emotions, and reaction time,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Cannabis products have been legalized for medical use in 38 states and legalized for nonmedical use in 24 states. The increased levels of THC in marijuana are “causing issues with the brain more than we’ve ever seen,” said Maltz, who also was in charge of the Justice Department’s Special Operations Division for nearly 10 years.
“Very smart Chinese Communist Party leaders understand this is another way we could take advantage of America’s addiction to marijuana, and dumb Americans will never figure it out,” he said.
Last night, I had the pleasure of attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton. This dinner was memorable from past years in the huge number of anti-Israeli protesters around the hotel. I was dropped off a couple blocks from the hotel and immediately confronted with protesters with cameras demanding that I denounce Israel. Once guests made it to the security line, they walked next to protesters shouting insults and some tossing fake blood. In other words, it was not that different from my campus so there was a sense of familiarity.
I have attended the dinner in prior years, including when I worked for CBS, NBC, and BBC. I was attending this year with my colleagues at Fox News.
The President did a very good job and delivered some very funny lines: “The New York Times issued a statement blasting me for ‘actively and effectively avoiding independent journalists. Hey, if that’s what it takes to get The New York Times to say I’m active and effective, I’m for it.”
He primarily attacked his opponent, which is not surprising. (“Age is the only thing we have in common. My vice president actually endorses me.”). Some lines surprisingly received applause despite their implied slap at the treatment of the WHC by his administration: “In a lot of ways, this dinner sums up my first two years in office: I’ll talk for 10 minutes, take zero questions and cheerfully walk away.”
He spoke to “all my friends in the press . . . and Fox News.” It was a funny but poignant line for a press corps repeatedly criticized for being in the bag for the Bidens.
I must confess a certain dismay at having President Joe Biden speaking under a huge banner reading “Celebrating the First Amendment.” As I have written in columns and my forthcoming book, President Biden has proven arguably the most anti-free speech president in our history after John Adams. While that record primarily reflects his support for censorship rather than curtailing the free press, the banner held a degree of bitter irony for some of us in the free speech community.
This year’s host was Colin Jost who also had some very funny moments. I have been to some WHC dinners where the hosts were distinctly unfunny and even painful. Jost had some very good jokes, even as he was poked fun at Fox, New York Post, and conservatives. My favorite WHC dinner remains when Ray Charles appeared. He proceeded to sing a couple of his signature songs. His voice had become even more gravelly with age and it only made the songs more powerful. The whole room was rocking as was then President Barack Obama.
Yet, Jost brought some good material:
“My Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che was going to join me here tonight, but in solidarity with President Biden, I decided to lose all my Black support. Che told me to say that, and I’m just realizing I was set up.”
“Doug [Emhoff], as you can tell from all the comments about my wife, I’m also used to being the second gentleman.”
“The Washington Post is here. … They were the ones taking your coats at the door. Please be sure to tip.
He also ended with a moving tribute to his grandfather, a firefighter in Staten Island, New York, who passed away in the last year. It was genuine and moving.
Throughout the remarks, Jost remarked how he could not believe the race was tied despite all of the bad coverage of Trump. However, the open support shown for the President last night is why the one-sided coverage is not having much penetration with many Americans. Many in the public now simply tune out the mainstream media after seeing the bias and reframing of the news, including the continued protection of the President by the media. Indeed, Peter Doocy is viewed by many as one of the few members of the White House Press Corp willing to consistently push the President in damaging stories.
I joined figures like Shannon Breem (who I will see this morning as her guest on Fox Sunday), Jennifer Griffin, Trey Yingst, and others at our table. It was great to see Trey out of his usual flak jacket in a war zone, though the Beltway can be an equally lethal environment. The evening would not be complete without my own embarrassing moments. When Trey and I decided to do a selfie, I showed my usual complete inability to handle the basic functions of life. Here is my selfie that I took of the two of us:
Having spent time under fire and recognizing incompetence under pressure, Trey delicately noted that I did not have a clue how to take a selfie, grabbed my phone, and took this picture:
This is why the closest place that Fox allows me to real combat is the United States Supreme Court.
To make matters even worse, my friend Steve Doocy was there (with, of course, that “other Doocy,”Peter). Steve also had to grab my phone to perform this simplest of tasks:
The fact is that, like Blanche DuBois, I have always depended on the kindness of others to get me through the basic requirements of life. As my children can attest, the idea of my work with modern technology as simple as a cellphone is fraught with danger. This is why I try to stay in the 18th Century for much of my academic work.
It was a fun night, though the walk out of the hotel was another running of the gauntlet with protesters throwing the fake blood and screaming profanities at the journalists and others leaving the event. It was around midnight, but many protesters remained (though the numbers were much smaller than the crowd at 6pm).
I happily skipped the after-dinner parties since this was long past when all good law professors should be in bed. Nevertheless, it was a fun evening and I have the non-selfies to prove it.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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Perhaps Joe Biden is the uniter he’s always claimed to be? Because he managed to get pro-Trump and LGBTQ+ groups to agree to one common theme: “F Joe Biden!”
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