That’s the asinine campaign message Democrats are using heading into the 2024 election to convince voters that Donald Trump and his “MAGA Republican” supporters are an existential threat to the republic. Because as everyone knows, the political party that attempts to throw its primary political opponent off the ballot and into prison; prosecutes praying pro-lifers; targets practicing Catholics; interferes in elections to its candidates’ benefit; and coordinates with Big Tech to silence dissent online is the standard-bearer of “democracy.”
For all their disingenuous rhetoric about upholding the will of the people, Democrats are actively fighting against Americans’ wishes — especially when it comes to the integrity of U.S. elections.
Last week, the Honest Elections Project (HEP) released a report recommending 14 policies for states to implement to ensure an electoral process that’s fair and accountable to the people. Democrats are actively fighting against many of the commonsense practices outlined in the analysis despite their popularity amongst the American electorate.
Take, for instance, voter ID requirements. In July, the HEP released survey data showing that a whopping 88 percent of U.S. voters back laws requiring eligible citizens to show a form of identification in order to cast their ballot. Polling by Gallup in 2022 produced similar results, with 79 percent of respondents in favor of a photo ID requirement. But that doesn’t seem to matter to Democrats, whose acolytes have spent years ignoring voters’ wishes and engaging in dishonest lawfare to dismantle states’ existing voter ID requirements.
From Ohio to New Hampshire, leftist lawyers and groups have filed frivolous lawsuits aimed at gutting voter ID statutes. Many of these suits are based on unsubstantiated claims that such laws “disenfranchise” nonwhite voters.
While courtsacrossthecountry have repeatedly determined their “voter suppression” arguments to be bogus, Democrats’ continuous use of nonwhite voters as a crutch to smear popular voter ID laws shows how little respect they have for “democracy.” The aforementioned HEP poll also showed the vast majority of black (82 percent) and Hispanic (83 percent) voters support such requirements in order to vote. Gallup found that 77 percent of nonwhite respondents supported photo ID laws. If Democrats truly respected the will of the American voter, as they regularly claim to do, why are they trying to undercut a policy most of them support?
But it’s not just voter ID requirements. Democrats are actively waging a nationwide campaign to demolish numerous policies recommended by the HEP that ensure secure elections and are supported by the majority of U.S. voters.
While most of the electorate (89 percent) believes “American elections should only be for American citizens,” that hasn’t stopped Democrats from attempting to authorize noncitizen voting throughout the country. Last year, for example, Rhode Island Democrats introduced legislation to authorize localities to allow illegal aliens to vote in their municipal elections. Some cities, such San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C, have already passed measures permitting certain noncitizen voting.
In response to left-wing nonprofits dumping hundreds of millions of “Zuckbucks” into local election offices during the 2020 election to benefit Joe Biden, elected officials and voters in 27 states enacted measures restricting election offices’ ability to accept and use private monies to administer elections. In response, several of those same Democrat-aligned groups formalized the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence as a way of circumventing these “Zuckbucks” bans and therefore violating the will of the people in the aforementioned states.
The same dynamic can also be seen regarding mail-in voting. Most voters (66 percent) support terminating no-excuse mail voting “as long as states offer two weeks of early in-person voting, including weekends.” Meanwhile, Democrats — who used the Covid lockdowns as a pretext for expanding the use of vote-by-mail and other insecure election practices — have continued to push unsupervised mail balloting across the country. Some states, such as Nevada, automatically mail individuals listed on the state’s voter rolls a ballot ahead of elections.
Whether it’s banning foreign money in elections, ensuring transparency in the elections process, or backing election audits, the story remains the same: Democrats actively oppose policies supported by voters that bring accountability and security to the U.S. elections system. Their screeds about being the party of “democracy” are a dishonest talking point designed to obfuscate their contradictory actions and smear their political opponents as extremists.
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
Yesterday, a reporter standing outside the Senate chamber told me that after four months of secrecy, The Firm™️ plans to release the text of the $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package — possibly as soon as today. Wasting no time, she then asked, “If you get the bill by tomorrow, will you be ready to vote on it by Tuesday?”
The words “hell no” escaped my mouth before I could stop them. Those are strong words where I come from. (Sorry, Mom.)
The reporter immediately understood that my frustration was not directed at her. Rather, it was directed at the Law Firm of Schumer & McConnell (The Firm™️), which is perpetually trying to normalize a corrupt approach to legislating, in which The Firm™️:
Spends months drafting legislation in complete secrecy
Aggressively markets that legislation based not on its details and practical implications (good and bad), but only on its broadest, least-controversial objectives
Lets members see bill text for the first time only a few days (sometimes a few hours) before an arbitrary deadline imposed by The Firm™️ itself, always with a contrived sense of urgency
Forces a vote on the legislation on or before that deadline, denying senators any real opportunity to read, digest, and debate the measure on its merits, much less introduce, consider, and vote on amendments to fix any perceived problems with the bill or otherwise improve it.
Whenever The Firm™️ engages in this practice, it largely excludes nearly every senator from the constitutionally prescribed process in which all senators are supposed to participate. By so doing, The Firm™️ effectively disenfranchises hundreds of millions of Americans — at least for purposes relevant to the legislation at hand — and that’s tragic. It’s also un-American, uncivil, uncollegial, and really uncool.
So why does The Firm™️ do it?
Every time The Firm™️ utilizes this approach and the bill passes — and it nearly always does — The Firm™️ becomes more powerful.
The high success rate is largely attributable to the fact that The Firm™️ has become very adept at (a) enlisting the help of the (freakishly cooperative) corporate media, (b) exerting peer pressure in a way that makes what you experienced in middle school look mild by comparison, and (c) rewarding those who consistently vote with The Firm™️ with various privileges that The Firm™️ is uniquely capable of offering, such as committee assignments, help with campaign fundraising, and a whole host of other widely coveted things that The Firm™️ is free to distribute in any manner it pleases.
It’s through this process that The Firm™️ passes most major spending legislation. And it’s through this process that The Firm™️ likely intends to pass the still-secret, $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package, which The Firm™️ has spent four months negotiating with the luxury of obsessing over every sentence, word, period, and comma.
I still don’t know exactly what’s in this bill, although I have serious concerns with it based on the few details The Firm™️ has been willing to share. But under no circumstances should this bill — which would fund military operations in three distant parts of the world and make massive, permanent changes to immigration law — be passed next week.
Nor should it be passed until we have had adequate time to read the bill, discuss it with constituents, debate it, offer amendments, and vote on those amendments.
There’s no universe in which those things will happen by next week.
Depending on how long it is and the complexity of its provisions, the minimum period of time we should devote to this bill after it’s released should be measured in weeks or months, not days or hours.
The U.S. military has begun striking targets linked to Iranian proxy groups after a drone attack killed three American soldiers in Jordan this past weekend, Newsmax and other outlets are reporting. The strike reports were confirmed to Newsmax by a U.S. official at the Pentagon, who said airstrikes were ongoing against Iran proxy groups in both Iraq and Syria.
The attacks began a little more than an hour after the conclusion of a dignified transfer ceremony honoring the three soldiers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware Friday afternoon. That was attended by President Joe Biden. The U.S. has blamed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq umbrella group for the weekend attack that killed Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, and wounded roughly 40 other American service members. With nearly a week passing between the attack and the U.S. response, critics of the Biden administration have warned that the delay has given Iranian military officials and members of Tehran-backed militia groups ample time to go into hiding.
Other actions
The reported military actions came as the United States announced terrorism and sanctions-evasion charges and seizures linked to a billion-dollar oil trafficking network that it says finances Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other militant groups.
The cases are in response to the drone strike and other aggressive actions by Iran over several years, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said. In August of 2022, for example, the U.S. charged an IRGC member with plotting to murder John Bolton, who served as U.S. national security adviser under former President Donald Trump.
Actions by Iran-backed militants, including the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas and the attack over the weekend in Jordan, have increased the focus on Iran’s oil trade, the DOJ said.
“The Justice Department will continue to use every authority we have to cut off the illegal financing and enabling of Iran’s malicious activities, which have become even more evident in recent months,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
The DOJ seized more than $108 million that it said China Oil & Petroleum Company Limited attempted to launder through accounts at U.S. financial institutions. The DOJ said China Oil & Petroleum is an IRGC front company.
The DOJ said it also seized more than 520,000 barrels of Iran’s oil aboard the crude tanker Abyss that were covered by U.S. sanctions.
Seven defendants, including Sitki Ayan, who is a Turkish national and chairman of the ASB Group, Morteza Rostam Ghasemi, who is the son of a former IRGC commander and Iranian petroleum minister, and Behnam Shahriyari, who is an IRGC Quds Force official, were charged in the Southern District of New York federal court in connection with the seizure of the money.
The DOJ also charged a Chinese woman, Shaoyun Wang, and an Omani man Mahmood Rashid Amur Al Habsi, with Iran sanctions evasion and money laundering in connection with the trafficking and selling of Iranian oil to Chinese government-owned refineries in a case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Iran’s crude exports and oil output hit new highs in 2023 despite U.S. sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear program. Tehran says the program is for peaceful purposes. In January, China’s oil trade with Iran stalled as Tehran withheld shipments and demanded higher prices from its top client, tightening cheap supply for the world’s biggest crude importer. Iranian oil makes up some 10% of China’s crude imports.
Open Doors International logs an increase in persecution against Christians globally, notably North Korea, China, India, Somalia, and Nigeria. Pictured: Attendees depart a Catholic church in China after attending Sunday Mass on Jan. 15, 2023, in Dali, northwest of Yunnan province. (Photo: Noel Celis/ AFP/Getty Images)
Open Doors International, a nonprofit organization that supports persecuted Christians in over 70 countries, has released its annual 2024 World Watch List, which highlights and ranks countries in which Christians face the most severe persecution and discrimination.
Each year, the report brings vital attention to brave Christians around the world who suffer because of their faith.
Tragically, the 2024 report reveals that persecution against Christians is worsening.
The previous year’s World Watch List found that more than 360 million Christians faced severe persecution and discrimination for their faith. Today, this figure has increased to more than 365 million people, with “dangerously violent” instances of persecution taking place in listed countries.
Further, the 2024 report records a significant increase in the number of attacks on churches and Christian properties last year. According to Open Doors: “More than 14,700 churches or Christian properties such as schools and hospitals were targeted in 2023. It marked a sevenfold increase compared with attacks recorded the previous year.”
Additionally, in 2023 the total number of Christians who were forced to leave their homes for various reasons—including political instability, war, and extremism—more than doubled from the previous year. Nearly 300,000 Christians had to flee their homes and approximately 3% of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa’s most dangerous countries were displaced.
According to the report, North Korea is “the most dangerous place in the world for Christians.” If a person’s Christian faith is discovered, he or she is killed on the spot or shipped to a labor camp where the chances of survival are slim. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sees Christianity as a threat to the dictatorship and carries out an effective death sentence on believers.
In China, General Secretary Xi Jinping similarly sees Christianity as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s power. Last year, at least 10,000 churches (mostly underground house churches) were closed in China; other, state-sanctioned churches were required to display signs that read “Love the Communist Party; Love the country; Love the religion.”
In Asia as a whole, 2 in 5 Christians are persecuted for their faith. Christians in India face violent attacks from Hindu extremists and are punished for violating anti-conversion laws in some states.
Rishi, a church leader in India, told Open Doors: “Though I was attacked twice, still I can feel God’s protection in my life. I was attacked, yet was not crushed. I will continue to trust my God.”
In Africa, 1 in 5 Christians are persecuted. Somalia was ranked No. 2 for countries in which Christians face the most extreme persecution. In Somalia, most Christians are Muslim converts and are consequently targeted by Islamist extremists, namely the terrorist group al-Shabaab, which has expressed its objective to eliminate Christians from the country.
Nigeria, according to Open Doors, “remains the deadliest place to follow Jesus.”
In 2023, nearly 5,000 Christians were killed for their faith, with 82% of the slayings occurring in Nigeria. Ranked No. 6 on the 2024 World Watch List, according to Open Doors: “More Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than in all the other countries of the world combined.”
For millions of Christians around the world, the cost of worshipping freely is high. Some even pay the price with their lives.
Open Doors’ 2024 World Watch List brings crucial attention to Christian persecution and discrimination— and is a vital tool for those who wish to help Christians around the world.
Judge Florence Pan of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will be hearing Trump cases despite her husband making clear his current opposition to another Trump presidency. Pictured: the District of Columbia Court of Appeals building in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Rex Wholster/Getty Images)
Washington glitterati assembled at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in October to celebrate federal employees making a difference in government. Hosted by CNN anchor Kate Bolduan, the black-tie affair featured in-person appearances by top Biden White House officials, including Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack.
Midway through the evening’s festivities, Max Stier, president of the group sponsoring the event—the Partnership for Public Service, a $24 million nonprofit based in Washington that recruits individuals to work in the civil service—took the stage to thank his high-profile guests.
“Great leaders are the heart and soul of effective organizations,” Stier said, “which is why I am so thankful to see so many of our government’s amazing leaders here tonight.”
Stier also acknowledged one federal employee, his wife, Judge Florence Y. Pan, who sits on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Pan would soon need no introduction. Earlier this month she made headlines by asking former President Donald Trump’s lawyers whether the presidential immunity he sought in connection with alleged Jan. 6 crimes was absolute.
“Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival?” Pan asked Trump lawyer John Sauer. “That’s an official act—an order to SEAL Team Six?” she clarified.
Although the back and forth between Pan and Sauer was inconclusive as to the question about a president’s criminal liability, many mainstream outlets misconstrued the exchange while lionizing Pan for posing a question that they then used to advance their description of Trump as a lawless menace.
The exchange, which Pan prompted when she posed the pre-arranged hypothetical at beginning of the hearing, has raised new questions about the impartiality of judges hearing politically charged cases.
For months progressives have been insisting that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from any case that involves Trump because of his wife Ginni Thomas’ political involvement and participation in the events of Jan. 6. Those same interests have yet to express similar worries about Pan’s objectivity, despite her husband’s longtime political activism and current opposition to another Trump presidency.
Power couples are the lifeblood of Washington so it’s not unusual for political activists, judges, and White House bigwigs to rub elbows at fancy soirees like the October gala at the Kennedy Center. But Stier’s longtime ties to the Democratic Party, his access to key Biden administration officials, and his suggestion that Trump represents a threat to democracy at the same time his wife is handling sensitive matters related to the Department of Justice’s prosecution of the former president should raise questions about her impartiality.
A member of former President Bill Clinton’s legal team during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Stier, 57, has been a Democratic Party fixture for nearly three decades. Since 2001, he has run the Partnership for Public Service, which is funded by some of the most generous benefactors of progressive causes, including the Gates Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Ford Foundation.
In 2020, the Partnership launched an effort tied to the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement, pledging to demand what it considers greater diversity in government agencies and institutions.
In a letter to mark the group’s 20-year anniversary, Stier lamented the country’s democratic “crisis” caused by “a violent insurrection against Congress and growing suspicions about the results of a legitimate election.”
Recently, Stier has joined the growing chorus of Beltway voices warning that a second Trump presidency would pose a unique “threat” to the country’s future. Stier and others are particularly concerned with Trump’s promise to convert tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats into political appointees, meaning they could be fired without cause by the president. Such a plan, according to Stier, undermines the Constitution and the law.
“You wind up with a workforce that is not only going to deliver poor service, but also that is going to be a tool for retribution and actions that are contrary to our democratic system,” Stier said in a December 2023 Politico interview. “If you are selecting people on the basis of their political persuasion or their loyalty as opposed to their expertise and their commitment to the public good, you’re going to wind up with less good service and more risk for the American people.”
“I don’t think we have a deep state today,” he said. But “the proposals that are on the table would create a deep state, rather than the effective state that we all should be pursuing.”
Stier is doing more than just discussing the issue in media interviews; he is working directly with Biden officials to prevent Trump from following through on his pledge if he wins in November. Stier has called Trump’s plans to reform so-called Schedule F employees “an assault on our civil service, the core to our system of government and democratic institutions.”
When Republicans threatened to shut down the government last year over disagreements with Democrats on federal spending levels, Stier warned it would sideline what unions estimate as 4 million government employees. “[It] is the equivalent of burning down your own house,” he said of a potential shutdown.
But Stier is perhaps best known for his involvement in attempting to thwart Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Stier and Kavanaugh attended Yale University together in the mid-1980s. In September 2019, while reporting on a sexual abuse accusation made by another Yale student, Deborah Ramirez, The New York Times disclosed Stier’s account of an incident he allegedly witnessed during their freshman year.
Two Times reporters, in their first-person-plural “analysis” favoring Kavanaugh’s accusers, wrote:
A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier; the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not recall the episode.
Stier’s still unproven allegations are included in a new documentary, “Justice,” about the Kavanaugh scandal. The film, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, centers on Ramirez and features a recording of Stier’s never-before-heard 2018 call to the FBI tip line detailing what he claimed to have seen and heard.
Washington Post entertainment reporter Jada Yuan wrote in January 2023:
In the previously unheard recording, Stier says classmates told him not just that Kavanaugh stuck his penis in Ramirez’s face, but that afterward, Kavanaugh went to the bathroom to make himself erect before allegedly returning to assault her again, hoping to amuse an audience of mutual friends, In the film, Ramirez says she’d suppressed the memory so deeply she couldn’t recall this second incident. … Stier’s message to the FBI also cites another incident involving a different woman, which he says he witnessed “firsthand”: A severely inebriated Kavanaugh, his dorm mate, pulling his pants down at a different party while a group of soccer players forced a drunk female freshman to hold his penis.
Stier did not appear as an interview subject in the film. Some speculated that Stier’s involvement in the Kavanaugh matter was retaliation against former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for allowing his wife’s earlier nomination as district judge to expire with the end of the Obama administration.
Pan, 57, a Taiwanese American, has longstanding ties to the Democratic Party. A graduate of Stanford Law School, Pan worked for Clinton’s departments of Justice and Treasury before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in 1999.
After Trump left office in 2021, Pan became one of President Joe Biden’s first judicial nominees, tapped again to serve as a U.S. district judge in Washington. Less than a year later, Biden promoted her to the D.C. appellate court; in both instances, Pan replaced Ketanji Brown Jackson as she made her way to the Supreme Court. She is the first Asian American to serve on both benches.
“This is a perfect example of how the deep state defends its interest,” Russell Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America, one of the organizations pushing for the Schedule F reforms, told RealClearInvestigations. “In and out of government, multiple branches of government, relying on personal networks, even marriages, to defeat President Trump and thereby protect a permanent, unaccountable bureaucracy.”
During her brief tenure on the appellate court, Pan has found herself on an unusually high number of politically charged cases.
A panel of three judges initially hears appeals before the full court selected out of 11 sitting judges. Pan has been seated on two such panels regarding cases involving Jan. 6 and Trump. In both cases she provided the key vote in a split 2-1 decision that sided with the government.
In Fischer v. USA, Pan acknowledged that the government was making a “novel” use of a post-Enron statute that addressed tampering with documents to increase the legal jeopardy of individuals who disrupted the Electoral College count on Jan. 6.
“To be sure, outside of the January 6 cases brought in this jurisdiction, there is no precedent for using 1512(c)(2) to prosecute the type of conduct at issue in this case.” Nonetheless, Pan applied a “broad reading of the statute” to allow application of the law.
Pan reached the same conclusion in Robertson v. USA on the same matter in another 2-1 decision.
Her opinion in the Fischer case is now before the Supreme Court; legal observers predict the court might reverse her opinion, essentially overturning how the Justice Department has interpreted the statute’s language to charge more than 300 Jan. 6 protesters with the felony count. (This would put Kavanaugh in the unique position of voting against a decision written by the spouse of one of his accusers.)
Unusual GOP Dissent on Court
Pan also upheld another controversial lower court ruling that favored the DOJ and worked against Trump, one that recently resulted in a harsh rebuke from some of her colleagues on the circuit court.
U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, another Obama appointee, in 2023 authorized an application from special counsel Jack Smith to obtain a search warrant for Trump’s Twitter data in his Jan. 6 case against the former president. Not only did Howell force the company to produce the records, which included direct messages and draft posts, she signed a nondisclosure order to prevent Twitter—now X and owned by liberal bête noire Elon Musk—from notifying its customer, Trump, about the warrant for 180 days.
X appealed Howell’s nondisclosure order; Pan backed Howell’s decision and ruled against the company’s appeal, citing the need to “safeguard the security and integrity of the investigation” and “avoid tipping off the former President about the warrant’s existence.”
But Pan’s conclusions were wrong, four Republican-appointed judges on the D.C. Circuit Court wrote last month in what legal observers described as an unusual 12-page statement related to the appeal.
“The Special Counsel’s approach obscured and bypassed any assertion of executive privilege and dodged the careful balance Congress struck in the Presidential Records Act,” Judges Neomi Rao, Justin Walker, Gregory Katsas, and Karen Henderson wrote in an order filed Jan. 16.
“The district court and this court permitted this arrangement without any consideration of the consequential executive privilege issues raised by this unprecedented search. We should not have endorsed this gambit. Rather than follow established precedent, for the first time in American history, a court allowed access to presidential communications before any scrutiny of executive privilege.”
But it was Pan’s exchange with Trump’s defense attorney during oral arguments related to Trump’s claims of presidential immunity against criminal prosecution that caught the media’s attention. Trump is seeking to dismiss Smith’s Jan. 6 indictment on immunity grounds; Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued a landmark ruling in December denying Trump’s motion and concluded that presidents are subject to criminal prosecution.
Roughly one minute into the Jan. 9 discussion, Pan interrupted Trump lawyer Sauer with her hypothetical question. The exchange went as follows:
Pan:Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival? That’s an official act, an order to SEAL Team Six?
John Sauer: He would have to be and would speedily be impeached and convicted before the criminal prosecution.
Pan: But if he weren’t … there would be no criminal prosecution, no criminal liability for that?
Sauer: Chief Justice’s opinion in Marbury against Madison … and the impeachment judgment clause all clearly presuppose what the Founders were concerned about …
Pan: I asked you a yes or no question. Could a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?
Sauer: If he were impeached and convicted first.
Pan:So your answer is … no.
Sauer: It is a qualified yes.
Despite Sauer’s answer, figures in major media nonetheless reported that Sauer claimed a president could not be prosecuted for ordering the assassination of a political rival. (It was unclear whether Pan suggested the order or the act itself was illegal.) Legal analysts, cable news hosts, and columnists praised Pan regardless of the plausibility of such a scenario.
Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman told MSNBC host Chris Hayes that “after Judge Pan asked that hypo about SEAL Team Six, Sauer … was a dead man walking. He will lose. He should lose.”
Writing for The Atlantic, former federal prosecutor and Trump antagonist George Conway described Pan’s hypothetical as a way of setting a “trap” for Team Trump. He further suggested Pan could host “Meet the Press” if she decided to pursue a different career outside the judiciary.
Conway continued to praise Pan in a CNN interview, calling her SEAL Team Six line of inquiry an “intellectual tour de force.”
Democrats also seized on Sauer’s response. Rep. Adam Schiff, currently running for the U.S. Senate in California, denounced Trump and his legal team, insisting “there is no immunity for murder.”
A reporter asked Trump about the exchange during an appearance on Jan. 11. “Do you agree with your lawyers, what they said on Tuesday, that you should not be prosecuted if you ordered SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent?” Trump replied that presidents “have to have immunity,” otherwise every president would be prosecuted by that leader’s successor of the opposite political party.
Some pundits took Pan’s hypothetical a step further. MSNBC contributor Elie Mystal misrepresented Sauer’s answer, then proposed that Biden could “launch a preemptive strike on a rebel stronghold at Mar-a-Lago” under Trump’s way of thinking.
Paul Rosenzweig of the anti-Trump conservative site The Bulwark wrote that Trump’s reasoning meant Biden could assassinate Trump without any consequences.
The controversy presumably will continue to swirl until Pan’s panel issues its ruling. It could be weeks until the opinion is filed. Until then, Trump’s March 4 trial date is on hold and looks less likely by the day, which is why Smith asked the court to fast-track the announcement to expedite the process as it inevitably heads toward the Supreme Court.
Considering the political composition of the three-judge panel—two judges appointed by Democratic presidents—most observers expect the appellate court to uphold Chutkan’s ruling.
Meanwhile, Pan’s hypothetical scenario of a presidentially ordered hit likely will figure prominently in any opinion.
Rumor has it that Taylor Swift is going to team up with Biden to keep him in office despite how disastrous his administration has been for America. With her billions can’t feel the effects of Bidenomics.
Media Hypes Taylor Swift’s Potential Influence on 2024 Election Outcome, Despite Polls Showing Just 18% More Likely to Support Her Endorsed Candidate
A new poll suggests that pop icon Taylor Swift could hold sway over the 2024 presidential election. Despite this, the numbers reveal a more nuanced reality, with only a modest 18% of voters indicating they would be swayed by her endorsement. The survey, conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek, highlighted that while a segment of the electorate might lean towards a Swift-endorsed candidate, there’s another 17% that would be less likely to give their vote under the same circumstances.
However, the majority of voters, 55%, reported their voting decision would remain unaffected by Swift’s political preferences. The poll suggests Swift’s endorsement could particularly resonate with the younger demographic. Approximately 30% of Americans under 35 said they’d be influenced by Swift’s political opinion, while only 4% of those 65 and older felt the same. 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 Spending Billions of Your Tax Dollars on Abortion and Population Control • There’s a Massive Difference Between Pro-Life Donald Trump and Pro-Abortion Joe Biden • After Hundreds of Acts of Pro-Abortion Violence, Joe Biden Has Only Prosecuted 4 People • Donald Trump Lines Up With Americans Who Reject Biden’s View of Abortions Up to Birth
More Pro-Life News • House Passes Bill for Expanded Child Tax Credit, a Pro-Life Victory • Senator John Kennedy Introduces Bill to Stop Government From Using Aborted Babies for Research • Court Rules Oregon Legislators Who Walked Out to Stop Radical Pro-Abortion Bills Can’t Run for Re-Election • Dr. Mildred Jefferson, First Black Woman to Graduate From Harvard Medical School, Was a Pro-Life Leader
• Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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On Thursday, the Oregon Supreme Court upheld a decision by the state’s chief election official to ban 10 Republican state senators from the ballot this fall for walking out of the legislature to protest bills on abortion, guns, and transgenderism.
“Last year’s boycott lasted six weeks — the longest in state history — and paralyzed the legislative session, stalling hundreds of bills,” the Associated Press reported. If enough lawmakers walk out, they can deny the quorum required to legally pass legislation. Through their walkout, Oregon Republicans extracted concessions from Democrats on bills related to firearm transfers and medical procedures for abortion and transgender-identified people.
Voters approved ballot Measure 113 in 2022, which amended the state constitution to boot lawmakers from the ballot for more than 10 unexcused floor absences. Oregon voters passed Ballot Measure 113 after Republican walkouts in 2019, 2020, and 2021.
“We obviously disagree with the Supreme Court’s ruling,” said GOP Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, according to the AP. “But more importantly, we are deeply disturbed by the chilling impact this decision will have to crush dissent.”
Democrat lawmakers have also deployed walkouts to block legislation in Texas, Wisconsin, and Indiana. In 2021, Texas House Democrats staged a weeks-long walkout to prevent the passage of a Republican-sponsored election bill. Lawmakers made national headlines for launching the walkout by fleeing the state to Washington D.C., where they met with Vice President Kamala Harris. Democrats in Wisconsin and Indiana also staged legislative walkouts to delay progress on union-busting right-to-work bills.
In the last few months, Democrat U.S. House Rep. Jamal Bowman also received a slap on the wrist for pulling a fire alarm amid Democrats’ attempts to delay a vote on unfunded federal spending.
Stripping Oregon Republicans from ballot access marks the latest episode in a decades-long saga to eradicate the state’s political minority. Conservatives in Oregon have become so disillusioned by the leftist state government that activists are petitioning to redraw the state’s rural eastern counties into Idaho.
Just last year, Oregon Democrats rubber-stamped aggressive laws restricting guns and water use while expanding abortion and transgender interventions. Last year, lawmakers in the Idaho House of Representatives formally approved talks to annex disenchanted neighboring counties from Oregon.
Ballot bans have quickly become Democrats’ central campaign strategy, with former President Donald Trump disqualified as a candidate in Colorado and Maine. Challenges to Trump appearing on ballots have been filed in at least 35 states and remain unresolved in 16. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in an appeal of Colorado’s court-ordered Trump removal next week.
Democrats are also working to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr. off primary and state ballots, fearing his effect on Joe Biden’s re-election chances.
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.
Iran has crossed the rubicon, when its proxies launched a drone attack that killed three of our soldiers in Jordan on Sunday. The strike marks a clear escalation in the de facto war launched by Iran on the United States, in response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Tehran-backed Hamas on Israel.
Iran will almost certainly ratchet up hostilities in the coming days, weeks and probably months. The window of opportunity for President Biden to tame Iran with decisive action is closing rapidly. Here’s why.
First, Tehran highly likely views the Biden administration as extremely risk-averse and unlikely to engage with it in a direct large-scale kinetic confrontation. Despite the steady escalation of the scope and scale of Tehran-backed attacks on U.S. forces and bases in the Middle East in the past 100 days, Washington’s response has been focused on proportionality and escalation control. Rather than establishing escalation dominance by bringing war home to Iran, the White House authorized only periodic individual strikes on proxy targets.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reviews a group of armed forces cadets during their graduation ceremony, in Tehran on Oct. 10. (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP)
The number of attacks by Iranian militias targeting U.S. military personnel from Oct. 17 to Jan. 29 has reached 165 and the number of injured Americans has climbed to 34, most involving traumatic brain damage. And yet, the key message coming out of the administration has been “We do not seek war with Iran.”
Everyone, from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, to the National Security Council’s John Kirby, to the commander in chief himself has rushed to telegraph to Tehran that the president’s primary goal is to avoid escalation and a wider conflict, rather than to protect U.S. troops and end hostilities. A key tenet of the Western conception of warfare, proportionality, is culturally alien to Iranians. Consequently, they interpret Biden’s measured response as a sign of weakness and acquiescence to aggression.
Second, Iran’s aggression is almost certainly underpinned by its increasing confidence in the imminent viability of its nuclear deterrent. In early January, nuclear expert David Albright, who served as a weapons inspector for the United Nations in Iraq, issued a shocking new report, assessing that Iran needs as little as one week to construct its first nuclear weapon, once the leadership issues the order to do so. According to Albright, Iran has sufficient weapons-grade uranium to build six weapons in one month, and 12 weapons in five months.
The Iranian regime, therefore, probably calculates that its new status of a de facto nuclear power is a sufficient deterrent that will prevent Washington from launching a mass devastating retaliatory strike on Iran proper.
President Biden speaks at the University of Tampa on Feb. 9, 2023. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Tehran likely watched closely the Biden administration’s reluctance to fully back Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. It is because of the threat – likely real, in my assessment – of Putin’s launching a tactical nuclear strike on the battlefield in Ukraine that President Biden ruled out the deployment of forces into the theater soon after Russia attacked Ukraine. The ayatollahs probably believe that Biden’s fear of nuclear Armageddon and of Iran’s strategic partnership with Russia will further influence the White House’s decision calculus regarding the kind of retaliatory measures it is willing to take against Iran.
Third, Iran probably believes it has a sufficient missile and drone arsenal to keep U.S. forces in the region at risk. Iran’s target list includes some 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq, 900 in Syria and an embassy in Baghdad.
Iran has the largest and most diverse missile force in the Middle East, according to the 2019 assessment by Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) titled “Iran Military Power: Ensuring Regime Survival and Securing Regional Dominance.” Designed to “overwhelm U.S. forces and our partners in the region,” Tehran’s “substantial” arsenal includes close-range, short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles that can strike targets throughout the region as far as 2,000 kilometers from Iran’s borders, as far as Israel and southeastern Europe.
Missiles and an Iran flag are displayed at Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) National Aerospace Park in western Tehran, Oct. 11, 2023. (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Moreover, the Iranian state has prioritized its missile modernization, focusing on improvements in range, accuracy, mobility, warhead design and survivability. The employment of improved guidance technology and maneuverability has resulted in increased lethality and precision of Iranian missiles, almost certainly emboldening the regime to act more provocatively.
In its most recent effort to further augment its ballistic missile arsenal, on Jan. 20, Iran launched an advanced satellite, named Soraya, into the highest orbit yet. Carrying a 110-pound payload, Soraya was placed in orbit 460 miles above the Earth’s surface, using a three-stage Qaem 100 rocket. The launch, which was condemned by the U.K., France and Germany in a joint statement, very likely allowed Iran to test an increased lift capacity of its space launch vehicle (SLV) technology – needed to place an object in a higher orbit in space – that is essential for the development of an indigenous long-range strike capability.
Progress in its space program could shorten Iran’s pathway to an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) because SLVs use very similar technologies. If Iran develops a booster capable of ICBM ranges, it can reach the continental United States, if configured for that purpose, warned the DIA. The fact that Iran is deepening ties, including in “the field of military-technical cooperation,” with Russia, which is the world’s leader in space launch and nuclear know-how, makes Tehran’s progress in ICBM development even more alarming.
The flag of Iran in front of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters in Vienna, Austria. (Michael Gruber/Getty Images)
On Monday, Austin vowed that the U.S. will respond to Iran-backed lethal attack “at a time and place of our choosing.” But the president doesn’t have much time to deliberate. Iran clearly doesn’t feel threatened by Biden’s “Don’t. Don’t” counter-strategy and is postured to climb the escalation ladder.
Once Iran achieves an operational capability to deliver a nuclear strike on Israel and Europe – and then, eventually, on the U.S. homeland – it will be nearly impossible to re-establish deterrence without accepting the risk of a broader war. The time to act is now.
Rebekah Koffler is a strategic military intelligence analyst and the author of Putin’s Playbook. She is Managing Editor of an e-mail newsletter for independent thinkers, CutToTheNews.com. Follow her on Twitter @Rebekah0132
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday that he will send members of the Florida National Guard and the Florida State Guard to assist Texas in its efforts at the southern border. Florida will offer a battalion of National Guard members to be deployed based on the needs in Texas, said DeSantis, who last month dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
The deployments join the more than 90 officers from Florida’s Highway Patrol, Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the Department of Law Enforcement who have already been deployed, and DeSantis noted in a statement that more law enforcement resources are coming.
“States have every right to defend their sovereignty and we are pleased to increase our support to Texas as the Lone Star State works to stop the invasion across the border,” he said. “Our reinforcements will help Texas to add additional barriers, including razor wire along the border. We don’t have a country if we don’t have a border.”
Maj. Gen. John Haas, the adjutant general of Florida, said the deployments are not a new mission, as Florida has supported border security missions in Texas, including federal and state deployments.
“Last spring the Florida National Guard was one of the first in the nation to deploy rotations of soldiers to support Operation Lone Star in Texas,” Haas said. “We have proudly and readily supported our own state’s efforts in similar roles here in Florida.”
“Florida State Guard Director Mark Thieme said his branch is prepared to stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” with its state agency partners in Texas who are “grappling with an unprecedented surge of illegal immigration along their border. The Florida State Guard is postured to deliver rapid emergency response, public safety operations, and humanitarian assistance — wherever the need arises.”
DeSantis’ office noted that since 2021, when President Joe Biden took office, the state has been providing direct law enforcement and military assistance to Texas, including with the Florida National Guard in support of the Texas Military Department in several missions, including with roving patrols, engineer assistance, and observation points.
Further, the Florida Highway Patrol has made contact with nearly 150,000 illegal aliens while conducting over 27,000 traffic stops, resulting in 2,102 human smuggling or human trafficking charges with 2,278 overall arrests, the governor’s office said.
It was also noted that the federal Customs and Border Patrol recorded 2.5 million encounters at the border in fiscal year 2023, including 169 people on the terrorism watchlist trying to come into the U.S. across the southern border.
“More than 10 million illegal immigrants have crossed the border, including more than 1.7 million known got-aways,” the statement said, adding that in December alone, “roughly 260 million lethal doses of fentanyl were seized at the border.”
Michael Humphries, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s port director of the Port of Nogales, Arizona, presents photographs of seized fentanyl and other illicit drugs at the Nogales-Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales on Feb. 28. (Photo: Kitra Cahana/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Editor’s note: Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and other Oregon leaders declared a state of emergency for downtown Portland on Tuesday owing to an explosion of fentanyl use in the city. The state of emergency will last at least 90 days.
According to The Associated Press, city, county and state authorities will coordinate to address drug addiction and to crack down on drug sales in Portland.
This comes following Oregon’s decriminalization of fentanyl and other hard drugs in 2020. Daily Signal Signal columnist Jarrett Stepman wrote about the chaos caused by Oregon’s drug criminaliztion in a Nov. 21 article, republished here.
There’s a price to be paid for bad policies divorced from human nature.
The Associated Press reported Sunday that Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law to decriminalize hard drugs is finally facing serious backlash. This may come as a surprise, but according to the AP, the state has seen an “explosion of public drug use fueled by the proliferation of fentanyl and a surge in deaths from opioids, including those of children.”
Who could have seen that coming?
Measure 110, passed by the Oregon legislature in 2020, decriminalized several hard drugs. It also set up a fund with taxes from cannabis sales, to invest in “recovery.”
What Oregon residents got was a whole lot of drugs with no recovery in sight. The penalties for hard-drug use are now so light as to be nearly worthless. For instance, residents caught with under a gram of heroin are subject to a ticket and a maximum fine of $100. That’s barely more than the cost of a parking ticket these days.
It gets even better.
“Those caught with small amounts of drugs can have the citation dismissed by calling a 24-hour hotline to complete an addiction screening within 45 days, but those who don’t do a screening are not penalized for failing to pay the fine,” the AP reported.
In 2021, according to the AP, “only 1% of people who received citations for possession sought help via the hotline.”
I’m shocked—shocked!—to learn that people caught using heroin aren’t following through.
What’s really taken off is fentanyl use, which has become a national epidemic. It’s made worse, of course, by Oregon’s permissive environment. So, now the state, which already had an issue with drug abuse and homelessness, is in a full-blown crisis. The situation is so bad that some Democratic state lawmakers are considering rolling back the drug-decriminalization law.
“Everything’s on the table,” said state Sen. Kate Lieber, a Democrat who co-chairs a new joint legislative committee created to tackle addiction, according to the AP. “We have got to do something to make sure that we have safer streets and that we’re saving lives.”
The fentanyl scourge hit Oregon hard, but nowhere is the problem more acute than in the state’s most notable progressive paradise, Portland. Portlandia has really been hit with a perfect storm of bad policies.
In June 2020, the city defunded the police following the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police. It was then rocked with nearly 200 days of protests, many of them violent. Portland was in anarchy. Violent crime exploded to an almost unprecedented extent.
Of course, Portland now struggles to staff its beleaguered police department, despite pivoting and re-funding the police. “With just 1.26 officers per every 1,000 residents, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) ranks 48th among the nation’s 50 largest cities for its staffing-to-population ratio,” the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman wrote in September. “As a result, PPB struggles to provide even basic service, taking up to half an hour to respond to high-priority calls.”
Qualified applicants don’t want to be police officers in Portland? Incredible, I know.
But violent crime and lack of police is only part of the equation. Oregon’s drug decriminalization and Portland’s toxic drug culture are clearly making things much worse.
“All roads in downtown lead to fentanyl,” said David Baer, a member of the Portland Police Bureau’s bike squad,in an interview with Fox News. “Whether that’s stolen cars, whether that’s burglaries or thefts or organized retail theft, there’s almost always a fentanyl nexus. So, we spend a lot of our time currently policing fentanyl and trying to stop that flow.”
Portland city leaders tried to ban public drug use, but a state law prohibits local governments from passing laws to criminalize the public use of controlled substances.
Now, city leaders have poor health and a whole lot of crime.
Portland has become the poster-child model city for open-air drug markets on the West Coast.
It’s maybe even worse than the situation in San Francisco, where a visit last week by a communist dictator prompted the city to clean up a bit and roll out the red carpet.
This is only a temporary fix, though. In the end, the problem for San Francisco and Portland isn’t drugs. Not really. The problem is ideology.
Obama and Biden (Obiden) have been very weak in dealing with the number one sponsor of terrorism, Iran. This has emboldened Iran and its proxies to wreak havoc and bloodshed in the Middle East.
President Trump Slams Biden in Statement on US Troops Killed in Drone Attack by Iran Proxy in Jordan
President Trump released a statement Sunday afternoon regarding the drone attack by an Iranian proxy group on U.S. troops in Jordan that killed three soldiers and wounded several dozen more.
Trump expressed his “profound sympathies” to the families of the fallen and prayers for the wounded. Trump went on to slam Joe Biden for reversing his policies on Iran, actions that have provided the state sponsor of terror with billions of dollars used to fund terror proxies in the Middle East, putting the U.S. “on the brink of World War 3.” Trump closed by saying, “Our Country cannot survive with Joe Biden as Commander in Chief.” 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 • Pro-Life Americans Appeal Bogus Conviction Putting Them in Prison for a Decade for Protesting Abortion • Six Pro-Life Advocates Face 11 Years in Prison for Protesting Abortion After Joe Biden Targets Them • Joe Biden Claims Everyone Has a God-Given Right to Life, Then Says It’s Okay to Kill Babies in Abortions • Kamala Harris Falsely Claims Killing Babies in Late-Term Abortions is “Not an Issue”
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The United Parcel Service announced Tuesday that it would be laying off 12,000 workers only five months after it was celebrated for agreeing to a massive pay raise for drivers negotiated by a union.
“We are going to fit our organization to our strategy and align our resources against what’s wildly important,” said CEO Carol Tome on a conference call.
He went on to call 2023 a “difficult and disappointing year” for the company.
The company reported that revenue plummeted by 7.8% in the fourth quarter to $24.92 billion, just below Wall Street projections of $25.31 billion according to NPR.
UPS stock plummeted by nearly 9% on Tuesday.
Tome said the layoffs would save the company about $1 billion, and he added that employees would be ordered to work back at the office five days a week.
Many on social media blamed the company’s problems on the union agreement it signed that would raise pay for drivers to an astounding $170,000. When the deal was announced in August, social media went wild with memes portraying UPS drivers as suddenly wealthy.
The Teamsters’ Union touted the deal in August as “single largest private-sector collective bargaining agreement in North America.” The union represented about 70% of the company’s employers.
The company had agreed to increase part-time workers’ salaries to $25.75 per hour and also ended mandatory overtime as part of the union deal.
Tome also blamed the broader economy for the disappointing outlook after citing the threat of a strike by Teamsters and the union deal.
Other companies have announced layoffs in recent months, which some economists see as a sign that the economy is weakening. Polls show that Americans blame President Joe Biden for the high inflation that has significantly impacted household budgets in a negative way.
Here’s more about the announcement:
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Republican Sen. Josh Hawley forced Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to publicly apologize to the families of children victimized by his company’s addictive algorithms and practices.
During opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Zuckerberg, who is on the record as encouraging his kids to play outside instead of use screens, falsely claimed social media doesn’t damage many kids’ happiness and health.
“Mental health is a complex issue, and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having more mental health outcomes,” Zuckerberg said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that there is no “causal link” between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes: pic.twitter.com/QZCE3UWr7G
When Hawley pressed Zuckerberg about the statement later in the hearing, Zuckerberg doubled down.
“What I said is I think it’s important to look at the science. I know it’s — people widely talk about this as if that is something that’s already been proven and I think that the bulk of the scientific evidence does not support that,” Zuckerberg replied.
Hawley spent the next five minutes citing Meta-funded studies that find the opposite. One internal research project conducted by Meta in 2021 determined one in three teenage girls struggling with body image “reported that using Instagram made them feel worse.”
“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups,” a slide summarizing the study noted.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of the study warned that Meta researchers “repeatedly” found that Instagram “is harmful for a sizable percentage of [young users], most notably teenage girls” but did nothing about it.
Zuckerberg tried to dispute his own company’s findings, but Hawley did not let his excuses slide.
“You’re here testifying to us in public that there’s no link. You’ve been doing this for years. For years, you’ve been coming in public and testifying under oath that there’s absolutely no link, your product is wonderful, the science is nascent, full speed ahead. While internally, you know full well your product is a disaster for teenagers,” Hawley countered, which elicited a round of applause from viewers.
“That’s not true,” Zuckerberg replied.
Must Watch! @HawleyMO eviscerates Mark Zuckerberg for claiming "there’s no link between young people using social media and negative mental health problems."
Senator Hawley then forces Zuckerberg to apologize in person to the parents of children exploited on his platform. pic.twitter.com/36ni1eAKP4
“That’s not a question. Those are facts, Mr. Zuckerberg,” Hawley said, before continuing to list evidence that Meta knows its products endanger their users.
He listed several statistics uncovered by former Facebook executive Arturo Béjar. Béjar testified to a Senate subcommittee last year that high percentages of teen girls were exposed to nudity, unwanted sexual advances, and self-harm content within the last seven days on Meta social media platforms.
“I know you’re familiar with these stats because he sent you an email where he lined it all out. I mean, we’ve got a copy of it right here. My question is, who did you fire for this and who got fired because of that?” Hawley asked.
Zuckerberg danced around the question several times before Hawley answered it for him.
“You didn’t fire anybody, right? You didn’t take any significant actions,” Hawley said.
When Zuckerberg tried to deflect because he didn’t think it was “appropriate” to talk about his hiring and firing decisions, Hawley did not hold back.
“You know who’s sitting behind you? You’ve got families from across the nation whose children are either severely harmed or gone. And you don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about steps that you took? The fact that you didn’t fire somebody?” Hawley asked. “Let me ask you this. Have you compensated any of the victims?”
Zuckerberg confirmed he has not.
“Don’t you think they deserve some compensation for what your platform has done? Help with counseling services help with dealing with the issues that your service has caused?” Hawley pressed, noting that profit drove Meta’s decisions.
As Zuckerberg fumbled for a response, Hawley demanded he turn towards the gallery of onlookers and apologize to the families of children Big Tech has helped harm.
“There’s families of victims here today. Have you apologized to the victims? Would you like to do so now? Well, they’re here. You’re on national television,” Hawley said. “Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed, but you’re not showing the pictures? Would you like to apologize for what you’ve done to these good people?”
Zuckerberg stood, turned away from his mic, and told the parents holding pictures of their children’s faces that he understood “your families have suffered.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is coming out in support of a bipartisan tax deal scheduled for a vote later on Wednesday.
“The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act is important bipartisan legislation to revive conservative pro-growth tax reform,” Johnson said in a statement. “Crucially, the bill also ends a wasteful COVID-era program, saving taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.”
“Chairman Smith deserves great credit for bringing this bipartisan bill through committee with a strong vote of confidence, and for marking up related bills under regular order earlier in this Congress. This bottom-up process is a good example of how Congress is supposed to make law.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The bill is a result of negotiations between House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore. It is aimed at temporarily expanding the child tax credit while also reviving key tax deductions for small businesses, including for research and development conducted inside the U.S.
However, it has faced pushback from an unusual coalition of conservative and moderate Republicans, albeit for different reasons. GOP hardliners have claimed the bill’s child tax credit would be available to illegal immigrants, something Smith had vehemently denied.
The bill was negotiated by House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, left. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, moderates, specifically from the suburbs outside of major cities like New York City and Los Angeles, were frustrated the bill does not touch state and local tax (SALT) deduction caps. They have argued it is a critical issue for their swing district constituents and could make or break House Republicans’ chances of holding onto their razor-thin majority in November.
Both groups were also angry at House GOP leaders’ decision to put the tax bill up for a vote under suspension of the rules, a maneuver that allows legislation to bypass a committee vote and a procedural “rule” vote in exchange for lifting the threshold needed for passage from a simple majority to two-thirds.
That decision came after Freedom Caucus members weaponized rule votes several times during this Congress to shoot down GOP priorities in protest of Republican leadership’s decisions.
Long Island Republican Congressmen Nick LaLota, left, and Anthony D’Esposito protested over the bill on Tuesday. (Getty Images)
The tax bill is expected to pass along comfortable bipartisan lines. In addition to GOP criticism, it’s also faced some scrutiny from progressives who say the child tax credit provisions don’t go far enough.
A group of four New York Republicans threatened to tank a procedural vote for an unrelated GOP-led measure over the SALT exclusion, but two sources told Fox News Digital that they later secured a commitment from Johnson to bring a separate, targeted SALT bill to the floor at some point soon.
Elizabeth Elkind is a reporter for Fox News Digital focused on Congress as well as the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and politics. Previous digital bylines seen at Daily Mail and CBS News.
Follow on Twitter at @liz_elkind and send tips to elizabeth.elkind@fox.com
Trucks like these are headed to the southern border by the thousands to take part in Take Back Our Border rallies this weekend in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. (Photo: Dominika Zarzycka/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Trucker convoys that could total as many as 700,000 vehicles are headed south to demand a secure border this weekend.
“We have a trucker convoy coming down to the border,” Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, said in an interview with Fox Business Network, adding: “The American people have had enough. We’re demanding that the Biden administration do its job, enforce the laws on the books and secure our border.”
We the People will not be silent! We the People will not be intimidated!
When describing the crisis at the border, Self estimated that illegal immigration had surpassed “8 million people during the Biden administration … . This is the time for us to rise up as the American people and demand that our president do his job.”
Self shared information about the trucker convoys on X, formerly Twitter, in which he urged followers to “join us,” adding: “The time is now for we the people to peacefully assemble in honor of our constitutional rights to call on our government to take action and secure our borders.”
Once again, the truckers are standing for We the People! 🚛🇺🇸
There is a Take Back Our Border trucker convoy that will begin Jan 29th, ending with 3 rallies on Feb. 3rd in Eagle Pass TX, Yuma AZ, and San Ysidro CA. 🇺🇸
The trucker convoy event—dubbed “Take Our Border Back”—kicked off on Monday, with the departure of Convoy 1 from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Three trucker convoys are participating, all leaving from different locations. Convoy 1 is headed for Eagle Pass, Texas. It will then drive through Dripping Springs and on to Quemado, Texas.
Convoy 2 departs from Dripping Springs, Texas, for Yuma, Arizona, on Thursday.
Convoy 3 leaves from San Ysidro, California, and will head toward Yuma on Saturday.
On Saturday, rallies are planned for Texas, California, New Mexico and Arizona by participants in the trucker convoys with the goal of shedding light on what they are calling “the obvious dangers posed by wide-open southern borders.”
In its news release, the “Take Our Border Back” trucker convoy coalition described itself as a “peaceful, lawful and clear message to all city, state and federal politicians and immigration officials.”
The goals of the trucker convoys are to “request all laws of our U.S. Constitution be immediately upheld, to slow and ultimately stop drug trafficking and human trafficking associated with open borders, and to call for immediate action to secure our borders before irreversible, serious consequences befall our nation.”
If only Biden was as ferocious with Iran as he seems to be fighting against Texas’ border policy.
GOVERNOR GREG ABBOTT TO TUCKER: WE ARE ‘PREPARED’ FOR CONFLICT WITH BIDEN REGIME OVER BORDER – 10 STATES HAVE SENT THEIR NATIONAL GUARDS TO DEFEND TEXAS AGAINST INVASION (VIDEO)
Texas Governor Greg Abbott told Tucker Carlson Friday afternoon that he is fully prepared for conflict with federal authorities and that states have already sent their National Guards and other law enforcement to defend the border.
Tucker started the interview by asking Abbott what he would do if the Regime federalized the Texas National Guard. He responded they would attempt to defy the Regime and continue building barriers, including razor wire, and expand the denial of illegal entry into the state of Texas.
He went on to tell Tucker that 10 of the 25 GOP-led states pledging to defend Texas have sent their national guards to the Texas border, and more will follow soon. He did not specify which states had deployed forces. See and 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 • Six Pro-Life Advocates Face 11 Years in Prison for Protesting Abortion After Joe Biden Targets Them • National Pro-Life Group Endorses Donald Trump: “He Delivered Historic Results” for Unborn Children • Senator Slams Biden for Making Military Leaders Approve Abortion Travel to Kill Babies • Germany Announces Proposed Law to Ban Praying Outside Abortion Centers
More Pro-Life News • Pro-Life Group Endorses Donald Trump: He Was the Most Pro-Life President • Abortion Drugs Kill Babies and Hurt Women, But They Can be Reversed and Save a Child’s Life • Leaked Messages Reveal Jean Carroll Supported Christine Ford to Protect Abortion • Abortion Pill Reversal Has Saved 4,500 Babies From Abortions, Like This One • 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.
FIRST ON FOX: House Republicans are introducing a joint resolution disapproving of the Biden administration’s new “digital discrimination” rules package, which they describe as a power grab by the federal government over the internet.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution of disapproval, which is led by Republican Reps. Andrew Clyde and Buddy Carter of Georgia and co-sponsored by 65 House Republicans, aims to nullify the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) new digital equity rules package that went into effect this month as part of President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
“Under the guise of ‘equity,’ the Biden Administration is attempting to radically expand the federal government’s control of all internet services and infrastructure,” Clyde said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “The FCC’s so-called ‘digital discrimination’ rule hands bureaucrats unmitigated regulatory authority that will undoubtedly impede innovation, burden consumers, and generate censorship concerns. Given the Biden Administration’s long history of weaponizing agencies against the American people, Congress should not let this unconstitutional power grab go unchecked.”
Rep. Andrew Clyde, left, President Biden and Rep. Buddy Carter (Getty Images)
A resolution of disapproval under the CRA allows lawmakers to object to rules being put forward by the administration. The FCC rules package the Republicans are targeting, which was ratified by the commission on Nov. 15 and went into effect Jan. 15, implements a section of Biden’s 2021 infrastructure bill that aims to prevent digital discrimination of access to broadband services based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion or national origin.
“These rules will protect civil rights, lower costs, and increase Internet access for Americans across the country,” Vice President Harris said in a Nov. 15 statement.
According to the FCC, the new rules allow it to “protect consumers by directly addressing companies’ policies and practices if they differentially impact consumers’ access to broadband internet access service or are intended to do so” and to apply those protections “to ensure communities see equitable broadband deployment, network upgrades, and maintenance.”
The Federal Communications Commission seal (Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
However, critics of the package argue it could have the opposite effect by widening the so-called “digital divide,” which refers to unequal access to digital technology.
“Yet again, the Biden administration is attempting to push its ideology through heavy-handed government controls,” Carter, who is co-leading the resolution, told Fox News Digital in a statement. “This time, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to enact widespread regulations on every aspect of our internet’s functionality. This FCC ‘Digital Discrimination’ rule will undoubtedly widen the digital divide by stifling future investment in broadband deployments. Not only is it unconstitutional, but it goes against the very core of free market capitalism. Congress must block the FCC’s totalitarian overreach.”
FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel (Kevin Dietsch)
Multiple outside groups have also endorsed the GOP resolution, including Heritage Action for America, Americans for Tax Reform, Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) and Americans for Prosperity, among others.
“TPA is happy to support Rep. Carter’s CRA of the FCC’s order on digital discrimination. The order represents a massive extension of government power into broadband networks and is a solution in search of a problem,” TPA President David Williams said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. “Notably, embracing a disparate impact standard, which ignores a vast number of economic factors that shape market decisions, will inevitably result in regulators telling companies to alter their policies based on the race of their customers. We encourage all members to support Rep. Carter’s CRA and hold the FCC accountable for this unnecessary proposal.”
Carr said in November, prior to their ratification, that the rules give the “Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure.”
“President Biden has called on the FCC to adopt new rules of breathtaking scope,” Carr said. “Those rules would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions — from how ISPs allocate capital and where they build, to the services that consumers can purchase; from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services, to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive.”
“Talk about central planning,” he added. “I oppose President Biden’s plan.”
White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson previously defended the president’s plan in a statement to Fox News Digital when asked about Carr’s comments in November.
“President Biden believes no parent should have to drive to a McDonald’s parking lot so their kid can do their homework online,” Patterson wrote. “That’s why he worked with Democrats and Republicans alike to pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to ensure every American has access to affordable, reliable high-speed internet.”
The House Republicans’ CRA resolution, which is expected to be filed Tuesday, would have to pass the House and Democrat-controlled Senate before making it to Biden’s desk.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment.
The FCC declined to comment on the resolution but pointed Fox News Digital to a Nov. 15 statement by FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, who said, “The language is broad. But Congress was explicit —these rules have to ‘facilitate equal access to broadband.’ As part of this goal, Congress also told us we need to prevent and eliminate digital discrimination of access. That means our rules would miss the mark if they cover just discriminatory intent because we would fall short of meeting our statutory obligation to ‘facilitate equal access’ to broadband. As a result, we define digital discrimination to include disparate treatment and disparate impact. I believe this approach puts us both on the right side of history and the right side of the law.”
Jessica Chasmar is an editor on the politics team for Fox News and Fox Business. Story tips can be sent to Jessica.Chasmar@fox.com.
If you’re rushing to the airport and forget your photo ID, good luck being allowed on the plane. But many migrants without “an acceptable form of identification,” according to airport signs, don’t need a photo. They get special treatment.
Migrants who have entered the country using President Joe Biden’s new CBP (Customs and Border Protection) One app — about 422,000 of them — can fly domestically without photo ID.
A sign posted at the Miami International Airport tells migrants: “1. Notify the TSA officer that you are a migrant. 2. The TSA officer will take a photo (optional). 3. If requested, provide your alien identification number or biographic information.”
Taking a photo would allow the TSA officer to confirm that the person boarding matches the person pictured in the CBP One app. But the airport sign repeats, “Photo capture is voluntary.” The migrant trying to board could be anybody.
An American without photo ID will likely be grilled for more than an hour and patted down, and their luggage will be gone over inch by inch while their plane takes off without them.
Allowing migrants — or anyone — to board airplanes without photo ID, and promoting ID cards that blur that lines between legal and illegal, sabotage us.
Businessman Connor Esraelian, who was flying from San Francisco to his home in Chicago, forgot his wallet with his photo ID. He filmed the 75-minute ordeal to get on the plane, posting it on TikTok. He called it “a nightmare.” He didn’t get an E-Z Pass, but migrants do.
This is our government kowtowing to the immigration lobby and putting Americans second, safety be damned.
Even worse is the 16-year delay in implementing the Real ID Act, passed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks to prevent people from using lax forms of ID to illegally get on planes.
Most of the hijackers used state driver licenses issued by states with lax requirements to get on the planes. They weren’t in the country illegally.
Following the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation, Congress enacted Real ID, barring TSA from accepting state driver licenses or other IDs that don’t require proof of being in the U.S. legally. Real ID was supposed to go into effect in 2008, but it’s been repeatedly delayed. Now the official start date is May 2025. Don’t hold your breath.
All 50 states now provide Real ID licenses to legal residents who request them. But blue states such as New York and Illinois are normalizing being illegal.
Illinois used to issue a license for illegals with a purple stripe across the top and the words “Not Valid for Identification.” But last June, Illinois discontinued it, in Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s words, “decreasing stigma and creating more equitable systems for all.”
Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias said the purple stripe had become “the ‘Scarlet Letter’ of someone’s immigration status.” Now legal and illegal residents of Illinois will qualify for the same “standard license” that says “Federal Limits Apply,” a fuzzy reference to the May 2025 deadline. In the meantime, illegals are boarding planes.
The same is true in New York state, which issues a “standard” license available to everyone, including illegals. It carries a vague notation, “Not for Federal Purposes,” which applies only after May 2025. The state Department of Motor Vehicles is barred from even asking a customer about their citizenship status.
New York City’s ID program also blurs the distinction between legals and illegals. It’s advertised as one ID for all New Yorkers regardless of immigration status. The card looks like a state driver license, and nothing — not one word — alerts the viewer otherwise. It’s unlikely to work on a plane, but likely to allow anybody to get past security and into the elevator in an office tower.
An open southern border flooded with millions of migrants from over 100 countries, some hostile to America, puts our nation at risk. Most migrants are just desperately seeking economic opportunity. But it only took a handful of sinister actors with misleading ID to bring down the World Trade Center and cost nearly 3,000 Americans their lives.
FILE – Smoke rises from the burning twin towers of the World Trade Center after hijacked planes crashed into the towers on September 11, 2001 in New York City. Associated Press photographer Richard Drew talks about AP’s coverage of 9/11 and the events that followed. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Allowing migrants — or anyone — to board airplanes without photo ID, and promoting ID cards that blur that lines between legal and illegal, sabotage us. Don’t let Biden and the hard left play Russian roulette with our lives. Remember 9/11.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.
The U.S. needs to reverse the policies of the Obama and Biden administrations and treat Iran as “an evil enemy that cannot be placated,” said Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. Two days after three American troops were killed, and dozens more injured in an overnight drone strike in northeast Jordan, Cotton said Iran and its terrorist proxies are exploiting a “weak” and “cowardly” president.
“[President] Joe Biden is weak and pathetic and cowardly,” Cotton said on Hugh Hewitt’s podcast. “You don’t deter people like the ayatollahs who govern Iran by going on TV and saying, Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t. You do it by holding at risk and ultimately destroying or killing the things and the people they hold most dear, like the Revolutionary Guard shock troops.
“Iran is laughing at us and high-fiving because they’ve had a decadelong strategy of using proxies throughout the Middle East to attack us so they can deny that it was them. And what do we do when we only attack Iranian proxies? We validate their proxy strategy.”
Cotton cited the America-First leadership of former President Donald Trump, under whom Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani was killed, and former President Ronald Reagan, under whom half of Iran’s navy was sunk or severely damaged.
“Unfortunately, this is the result of eight years of failed policy of Barack Obama and his understudy, Joe Biden. Or, I’m sorry, 11 years,” Cotton told Hewitt. “Eight years under Barack Obama, and three years under Joe Biden.
“They have viewed Iran as a normal nation that has legitimate grievances against America, and if we would simply conciliate with them and appease them and grant them one-sided concessions, Iran would pull in its horns and begin behaving like a normal nation, and everything would be wonderful again in the Middle East.
“It’s not the case. Iran has been an unappeasable enemy of the United States for 45 years.”
Cotton said the only way to respond to Sunday’s attack is with “massive and devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces throughout the region and in Iran itself. Only then will Iran realize that killing an American is an absolute red line that they can never cross again.
“We have to totally reverse the failed Obama-Biden policy of 11 years and view Iran for what it is, an evil enemy that cannot be placated, that can only, in the long run, be defeated. That should be the policy of the United States.”
Cotton, an Army veteran, said there was “no shortage of targets that we could take out that would send a message to the Ayatollah.”
“We certainly should target all IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] camps and boats or ships and bases,” he said. “But there’s also other targets that would put immense pressure on Iran.
“For instance, their refineries, because that is a massive bottleneck in the Iranian economy, one also that is controlled in so small part by the people that run the IRGC, who are also getting rich off the killing of Americans.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told Newsmax on Tuesday that the Border Patrol agents in Texas who are taking down the razor wire that the state put up to keep out illegal migrants “do not like” what the Biden administration is ordering them to do.
“I don’t think there’s tension between the actual people on the ground,” Paxton said on Newsmax’s “National Report.” “The Border Patrol do not like what they’re being forced to do. They do it because they’re forced by [President] Joe Biden and his administration. On day one of his administration, he said that he was not going to deport people anymore and ever since then, we’ve been in litigation with them over immigration, and he’s continued to let people in. But that’s not what law enforcement wants. I can tell you nobody wants what he wants.‘
“Basically, he’s decided, to the detriment of the American public, that he’s going to bring these people in, work with the cartels every day, because the cartels make money off every person coming through and he’s making it easier for them because they don’t have to hide anymore. They just turn themselves in. It also allows the cartels to import more drugs, so it’s been very profitable and good for the cartels. It has not been good for Americans because of the increased crime, the risk of terrorism and the cost that every state is going to bear as a result of this.”
Texas has continued to install razor wire at the U.S.-Mexico border, even as federal agents were given the go-ahead by the Supreme Court last week to cut it down. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called the razor wire an “effective deterrent against the illegal border crossings” and vowed to “continue to deploy this razor wire to repel illegal immigration.”
Paxton on Tuesday also commented on the state’s fight with the federal government over Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, which the Biden administration has sought unsuccessfully to enter since Texas cordoned it off.
“This is property owned by the government in Texas,” Paxton said. “The federal government has no right to come and take over that property — which is used for recreational purposes, that’s being funded by tax dollars in Texas — and use it as a way to increase the number of people crossing the border and potentially, as we know, increasing crime in the area, and so, absolutely we’re going to keep them out. They have no right to take it over.
“It’s only a 2.5-mile area. It’s interesting to me that there’s 1,260 something miles of border and they’re mad about 2.5 miles when they’re letting people in all over the place. So, it’s an interesting fight that doesn’t seem, in my opinion, to have a lot of purpose for them. It has a lot of purpose for us because this is a park that residents use for recreational purposes.”
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
I’m confident about the future of democracy after speaking at the World Economic Forum because these global elites are profoundly unimpressive. Pictured: Participants wait for a session to begin Jan. 16 at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. (Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
I recently attended the World Economic Forum’s 54th annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The theme was “rebuilding trust,” and today, I can truly say that I’ve never been more hopeful about the future of democracy.
That’s not because I was impressed by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ shock at “the systemic undermining of principles and standards” or convinced by Chinese Communist Party Premier Li Qiang’s case for “all sides” to “treat each other with sincerity and work in the same direction.”
Nor was I particularly persuaded by Professor Klaus Schwab’s call for more “open, transparent conversations” as I watched World Economic Forum’s founder and his friends set the agenda for the Great Reset while hobnobbing in a remote town in the Swiss Alps.
The reason I am confident about the future of democracy is because these elites are profoundly unimpressive. For 72 hours, I watched speakers who supposed themselves to be the most powerful people in the world fret about a “trust” they knew they’d lost and wouldn’t get back.
They represented multinational companies and nongovernmental organizations—and had nice titles like “Undersecretary,” “Co-chairman,” and “Chief Sustainability Officer.” But few had started a successful company, taken a real risk, or even won an election. These were the managerial elite—the mediocre technocrats who held the real power in communist and leftist regimes alike.
And I am not the only one to realize the emperor has no clothes. Around the world, and in America in particular, more and more people are seeing through the façade. We know the Davoisie don’t want to “rebuild trust”—they want to control our lives. And more importantly, we know they only have as much power as we give them.
They’re old. They’re tired. They’re scared. And they should be. Their time is up. That’s what I told them, right to their faces. But they won’t relinquish their weak grip on power voluntarily. So how can we depose them from their lavish throne in the Alps? The answer is a simple, timeless motto: “Live not by lies.”
That was the title of an essay the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn released on the day of his arrest 50 years ago this February, and it is as true today as when it was first written.
The heart of Solzhenitsyn’s essay is his insistence that it is not the corrupt elites “who are guilty, but we ourselves.” Because the people “wait inertly” for the regime to collapse while accepting and repeating the lies that give it power.
Of course, Solzhenitsyn was writing about the Soviet Union, but the time he predicted would come—“when our thoughts can be read, and our genes altered”—has arrived.
Just look at our country. Are we not constantly commanded to comply and affirm lies dished out by the ruling elite—be they in government, academia, or corporate America?
Consider how often people accept the delusion that a man can become a woman. Think about how many “gender affirming” procedures are conducted every day, how every new building features an “all gender” bathroom, or how many folks include their preferred pronouns on their resumes or in their social media profiles. The same people who affirm this farce then have the nerve to turn around and say, “Follow the science.”
Finally, to take on the favorite subject of the Davoisie, mull over how much time and money we spend trying to stop “climate change”—a meaningless term itself. Year after year, government bureaucrats, ESG fund managers, and college professors lecture us to stop innovating, stop building things, and stop having children because sea levels are going to rise dramatically, and the world is going to end in a flood.
It isn’t true. The Good Book says as much. And our leaders must stop going along like it is.
In 2024, our world will not end, but the decadent world of Davos will collapse. The global elites maintain power as long as their lies are affirmed and their surrogates elected. If “We the People” wake up and simply change course, the game is up.
This is the year we’re going to take our power back and restore self-governance once again. We’re going to reject the lie that the border is secure and that states can’t resist illegal immigration. We’re going to stop obeying the so-called “experts” for their opinions on public health, public safety, the environment, sexual ethics, and the rest. We’re going to oust bureaucrats from our government.
And we’re certainly not going to ask anyone from Davos, the European Union, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, or the World Health Organization for their permission or advice.
Together, the American people possess more talent, drive, courage, and honesty than the managerial elite represented at Davos and in Washington, D.C. All we need to do is refuse to “rebuild trust” with those who don’t deserve it and choose to “live not by lies.”
To quote Solzhenitsyn: “We will be amazed at how swiftly and helplessly the lies fall away.”
Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley will likely be hard-pressed to continue her doomed presidential campaign as large-money donors have begun to abandon ship. CNBC reported Wednesday that notorious Billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman decided that he had wasted enough money on the Haley campaign and is closing his wallet. As TGP readers know, Hoffman has cut big checks to Joe Biden’s reelection effort and also donated $250,000 to a super PAC backing Haley.
The Daily Mail notes Hoffman previously wrote on his Linkedin page that donating to Haley was worth it to stop Trump because America would “survive’” her presidency even if she was not “as good” a president as Biden. 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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Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board — the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”
In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”
The legal problems and public backlash to the Disinformation Governance Board also demonstrated to him that “the government has a major role to play, but they cannot be out in front.”
Murphy, who made headlines late in the Trump administration for improperly building dossiers on journalists, has spent the last few years trying to help the government find ways to suppress and censor speech it doesn’t like without being so “out in front” that it runs afoul of the Constitution. He has proposed that law enforcement and intelligence agencies formalize the process of sharing tips with private sector actors — a “hybrid constellation” including the press, academia, researchers, nonpartisan organizations, and social media companies — to dismantle “misinformation” campaigns before they take hold.
More recently, Murphy has worked to make his vision of countering misinformation a reality by joining a United Kingdom-based tech firm, Logically.AI, whose eponymous product identifies and removes content from social media. Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.
Logically says it uses artificial intelligence to keep tabs on over 1 million conversations. It also maintains a public-facing editorial team that produces viral content and liaisons with the traditional news media. It differs from other players in this industry by actively deploying what they call “countermeasures” to dispute or remove problematic content from social media platforms.
The business is even experimenting with natural language models, according to one corporate disclosure, “to generate effective counter speech outputs that can be leveraged to deliver novel solutions for content moderation and fact-checking.” In other words, artificial intelligence-powered bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments to dispute content labeled as misinformation.
In many respects, Logically is fulfilling the role Murphy has articulated for a vast public-private partnership to shape social media content decisions. Its technology has already become a key player in a much larger movement that seeks to clamp down on what the government and others deem misinformation or disinformation. A raft of developing evidence — including the “Twitter Files,” the Moderna Reports, the proposed Government Disinformation Panel, and other reports — has shown how governments and industry are determined to monitor, delegitimize, and sometimes censor protected speech. The story of Logically.AI illustrates how sophisticated this effort has become and its global reach. The use of its technology in Britain and Canada raises red flags as it seeks a stronger foothold in the United States.
Logically was founded in 2017 by a then-22-year-old British entrepreneur named Lyric Jain, who was inspired to form the company to combat what he believed were the lies that pushed the U.K. into voting in favor of Brexit, or leaving the European Union. The once-minor startup now has broad contracts across Europe and India, and has worked closely with Microsoft, Google, PwC, TikTok, and other major firms. Meta contracts with Logically to help the company fact-check content on all of its platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
The close ties to Silicon Valley provide unusual reach. “When Logically rates a piece of content as false, Facebook will significantly reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it, apply a warning label to let people know that the content has been rated false, and notify people who try to share it,” Meta and Logically announced in a 2021 press release on the partnership.
Meta and Logically did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
During the 2021 local elections in the U.K., Logically monitored up to “one million pieces of harmful content,” some of which they relayed to government officials, according to a document reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. The firm claimed to spot coordinated activity to manipulate narratives around the election, information they reported to tech giants for takedowns.
The following year, the state of Oregon negotiated with Logically for a wide-ranging effort to monitor campaign-related content during the 2022 midterm elections. In a redacted proposal for the project, Logically noted that it would check claims against its “single source of truth database,” which relied on government data, and would also crack down on “malinformation” — a term of art that refers to accurate information that fuels dangerous narratives. The firm similarly sold Oregon on its ability to pressure social media platforms for content removal.
Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl has a led push against the state from renewing its work with Logically for the election this year. The company, he said in an interview, violates “our constitutional rights to free speech and privacy” by “flagging true information as false, claiming legitimate dissent is a threat, and then promoting “counter-narratives” against valid forms of public debate.
In response, the Oregon secretary of state’s office, which initiated the contract with Logically, claimed “no authority, ability, or desire to censor speech.” Diehl disputes this. He pointed out that the original proposal with Logically clearly states that its service “enables the opportunity for unlimited takedown attempts” of alleged misinformation content and the ability for the Oregon secretary of state’s office to “flag for removal” any “problematic narratives and content.” The contract document touts Logically as a “trusted entity within the social media community” that gives it “preferred status that enables us to support our client’s needs at a moment’s notice.”
Diehl, who shared a copy of the Logically contract with RCI, called the issue a vital “civil rights” fight, and noted that in an ironic twist, the state’s anti-misinformation speech suppression work further inflames distrust in “election systems and government institutions in general.”
Logically’s reach into the U.S. market is quickly growing. The company has piloted programs for the Chicago Police Department to use artificial intelligence to analyze local rap music and deploy predictions on violence in the community, according to a confidential proposal obtained by RCI. Pentagon records show that the firm is a subcontractor to a program run by the U.S. Army’s elite Special Operations Command for work conducted in 2022 and 2023. Via funding from DHS, Logically also conducts research on gamer culture and radicalization.
The company has claimed in its ethics statements that it will not employ any person who holds “a salaried or prominent position” in government. But records show closely entrenched state influence. For instance, Kevin Gross, a director of the U.S. Navy NAVAIR division, was previously embedded within Logically’s team during a 2022 fellowship program. The exchange program supported Logically’s efforts to assist NATO on the analysis of Russian social media.
Other contracts in the U.S. may be shrouded in secrecy. Logically partners with ThunderCat Technologies, a contracting firm that assists tech companies when competing for government work. Such arrangements have helped tech giants conceal secretive work in the past. Google previously attempted to hide its artificial intelligence drone-targeting contracts with the Defense Department through a similar third-party contracting vendor.
But questions swirl over the methods and reach of the firm as it entrenches itself into American life, especially as Logically angles to play a prominent role in the 2024 presidential election.
Pandemic Policing
In March 2020, as Britain confronted the spread of Covid-19, the government convened a new task force, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU). The secretive task force was created with little fanfare but was advertised as a public health measure to protect against dangerous misinformation. Caroline Dinenage, the member of Parliament overseeing media issues, later explained that the unit’s purpose was to provide authoritative sources of information and to “take action to remove misinformation” relating to “misleading narratives related to COVID-19.”
The CDU, it later emerged, had largely outsourced its work to private contractors such as Logically. In January 2021, the company received its first contract from the agency overseeing the CDU, for £400,000, to monitor “potentially harmful disinformation online.” The contracts later swelled, with the U.K. agency that pertains to media issues eventually providing contracts with a combined value of £1.2 million and the Department of Health providing another £1.3 million, for a total of roughly $3.2 million.
That money went into far-reaching surveillance that monitored journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticized pandemic policies. Logically, according to an investigation last year in the Telegraph, recorded comments from activist Silkie Carlo criticizing vaccine passports in its “Mis/Disinformation” reports.
Logically’s reports similarly collected information on Dr. Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Figueiredo had published reports on the negative ways in which vaccine passports could undermine vaccine confidence and had publicly criticized policies aimed at the mass vaccination of children. Despite his expertise, Logically filed his tweet in a disinformation report to the government. While some of the reports were categorized as evidence of terms of service violations, many were, in fact, routine forms of dissent aired by prominent voices in the U.K. on policies hotly contested by expert opinion.
The documents showing Logically’s role were later uncovered by Carlo’s watchdog group, Big Brother Watch, which produced a detailed report on the surveillance effort. The CDU reports targeted a former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies.
Carlo was surprised to even find her name on posts closely monitored and flagged by Logically. “We found that the company exploits millions of online posts to monitor, record and flag online political dissent to the central government under the banner of countering ‘disinformation,’” she noted in a statement to RCI.
Marketing materials published by Logically suggest its view of Covid-19 went well beyond fact-checking and veered into suppressing dissenting opinions. A case study published by the firm claimed that the #KBF hashtag, referring to Keep Britain Free, an activist group against school and business shutdowns, was a dangerous “anti-vax” narrative. The case study also claimed the suggestion that “the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory” was one of the “conspiracy theories’’ that “have received government support” in the U.S. — despite the fact that a preponderance of evidence now points to a likely lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the pandemic.
Logically was also involved in pandemic work that blurred the line with traditional fact-checking operations. In India, the firm helped actively persuade patients to take the vaccine. In 2021, Jain, the founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview with an Indian news outlet that his company worked “closely with communities that are today vaccine hesitant.” The company, he said, recruited “advocates and evangelists” to shape local opinion.
Questionable Fact-Checking
In 2022, Logically used its technology on behalf of Canadian law enforcement to target the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” against Covid-19 mandates, according to government records. Logically’s team floated theories that the truckers were “likely influenced by foreign adversaries,” a widely repeated claim used to denigrate the protests as inauthentic.
The push to discredit the Canadian protests showed the overlapping power of Logically’s multiple arms. While its social media surveillance wing fed reports to the Canadian government, its editorial team worked to influence opinion through the news media. When the Financial Times reported on the protest phenomenon, the outlet quoted Murphy, the former FBI man who now works for Logically, who asserted that the truckers were influenced by coordinated “conspiracy theorist groups” in the U.S. and Canada. Vicesimilarly quoted Joe Ondrak, Logically’s head of investigations, to report that the “Freedom Convoy” had generated excitement among global conspiracy theorists. Neither outlet disclosed Logically’s work for Canadian law enforcement at the time.
Other targets of Logically are quick to point out that the firm has taken liberties with what it classifies as misinformation.
Will Jones, the editor of the Daily Sceptic, a British news outlet with a libertarian bent, has detailed an unusual fact-check from Logically Facts, the company’s editorial site. Jones said the site targeted him for pointing out that data in 2022 showed 71 percent of patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were vaccinated. Logically’s fact-check acknowledged Jones had accurately used statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency, but tried to undermine him by asserting that he was still misleading by suggesting that “vaccines are ineffective.”
But Jones, in a reply, noted that he never made that argument and that Logically was batting away at a straw man. In fact, his original piece plainly took issue with a Guardian article that incorrectly claimed that “COVID-19 has largely become a disease of the unvaccinated.”
Other Logically fact-checks have bizarrely targeted the Daily Sceptic for reporting on news in January 2022 that vaccine mandates might soon be lifted. The site dinged the Daily Sceptic for challenging the evidence behind the vaccine policy and declared, “COVID-19 vaccines have been proven effective in fighting the pandemic.” And yet, at the end of that month, the mandate was lifted for health care workers, and the following month, all other pandemic restrictions were revoked, just as the Daily Sceptic had reported.
“As far as I can work out, it’s a grift,” said Daily Sceptic founder Toby Young, of Logically. “A group of shysters offer to help the government censor any criticism of its policies under the pretense that they’re not silencing dissent — God forbid! — but merely ‘cleansing’ social media of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”
Jones was similarly dismissive of the company, which he said disputes anything that runs contrary to popular consensus. “The consensus of course is that set by the people who pay Logically for their services,” Jones added. “The company claims to protect democratic debate by providing access to ‘reliable information,’ but in reality, it is paid to bark and savage on command whenever genuine free speech makes an inconvenient appearance.”
In some cases, Logically has piled on to news stories to help discredit voices of dissent. Last September, the anti-misinformation site leaped into action after British news outlets published reports about sexual misconduct allegations surrounding comedian and online broadcaster Russell Brand — one of the outspoken critics of government policy in Britain, who has been compared to Joe Rogan for his heterodox views and large audience.
Brand, a vocal opponent of pandemic policies, had been targeted by Logically in the past for airing opinions critical of the U.S. and U.K. response to the virus outbreak, and in other moments for criticizing new laws in the European Union that compel social media platforms to take down content.
But the site took dramatic action when the sexual allegations, none of which have been proved in court, were published in the media. Ondrak, Logically’s investigations head, provided different quotes to nearly half a dozen news outlets — including Vice, Wired, the BBC, and two separate articles in The Times — that depicted Brand as a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who had finally been held to account.
“He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures, who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end,” Ondrak told Wired. In one of the articles published by The Times, Ondrak aired frustration on the obstacles of demonetizing Brand from the Rumble streaming network. In an interview with the BBC, Ondrak gave a curious condemnation, noting Brand stops short of airing any actual conspiracy theories or falsehoods but is guilty of giving audiences “the ingredients to make the disinformation themselves.”
Dinenage, the member of Parliament who spearheaded the CDU anti-misinformation push with Logically during the pandemic, also leapt into action. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, she sent nearly identical letters to Rumble, TikTok, and Meta to demand that the platforms follow YouTube’s lead in demonetizing Brand. Dinenage couched her official request to censor Brand as a part of a public interest inquiry, to protect the “welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.”
Logically’s editorial team went a step further. In its report on the Brand allegations published on Logically Facts, it claimed that social media accounts “trotting out the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ refrain” for the comedian were among those perpetuating “common myths about sexual assault.” The site published a follow-up video reiterating the claim that those seeking the presumption of innocence for Brand, a principle dating back to the Magna Carta, were spreading a dangerous “myth.”
The unusual advocacy campaign against Brand represented a typical approach for a company that has long touted itself as a hammer against spreaders of misinformation. The opportunity to remove Brand from the media ecosystem meant throwing as much at him as possible, despite any clear misinformation or disinformation angle in the sexual assault allegations. Rather, he was a leading critic of government censorship and pandemic policy, so the scandal represented a weakness to be exploited.
Such heavy-handed tactics may be on the horizon for American voters. The firm is now a member of the U.S. Election Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, the group managed by the Center for Internet Security that helps facilitate misinformation reports on behalf of election officials across the country. Logically has been in talks with Oregon and other states, as well as DHS, to expand its social media surveillance role for the presidential election later this year.
Previous targets of the company, though, are issuing a warning.
“It appears that Logically’s lucrative and frankly sinister business effectively produced multi-million pound misinformation for the government that may have played a role in the censorship of citizens’ lawful speech,” said Carlo of Big Brother Watch.
“Politicians and senior officials happily pay these grifters millions of pounds to wield the red pen, telling themselves that they’re ‘protecting’ democracy rather than undermining it,” said Young of the Daily Sceptic. “It’s a boondoggle and it should be against the law.”
House Republicans will proceed with impeachment charges against President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary this week. On Sunday, Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee unveiled two articles of impeachment against Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the administration’s efforts to actively undermine border security.
“These articles lay out a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment,” Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green of Tennessee said in a statement to The Federalist. “He has willfully and systemically refused to comply with immigration laws enacted by Congress. He has breached the public trust by knowingly making false statements to Congress and the American people, and obstructing congressional oversight of his department. These facts are beyond dispute, and the results of his lawless behavior have been disastrous for our country.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., introduced a resolution to impeach Mayorkas last year, but it was referred to the House Homeland Security Committee in November. Since then, House Republicans have held two hearings on the secretary’s impeachment in January. The embattled DHS chief was absent for each. In a statement, Green called Mayorkas’ refusal to testify “deeply troubling.”
“We have given him every opportunity to explain his handling of the crisis,” Green said in a statement earlier this month. “Unfortunately, this pattern of defying Congress has continued with his refusal to testify before this Committee specifically about his handling of this crisis and his failure to enforce America’s immigration laws. Apparently, accountability and transparency are not high on his priority list. The American people deserve better than this.”
On Sunday, Green proposed an amendment in the nature of a substitute, or new bill language, as the base text for the articles being formally introduced this week. Charges will include “Willful and Systemic Refusal to Comply With the Law” and “Breach of the Public Trust” stemming from the secretary’s failure to secure the border.
Republicans say Mayorkas has acted contrary to his obligation to provide border security with programs facilitating open migration such as the expansion of the CBP One App, which allows migrants to enter the country after scheduling an appointment with officials. According to the Washington Examiner, the app has also been abused by Central American cartels with virtual private networks (VPN) to smuggle people across the border.
Green said Mayorkas has “empowered and enriched cartels, mass fentanyl poisonings, surges of terror watchlist suspects, more criminal illegal aliens causing harm in our communities, and traumatized and exploited migrants.”
December set a new single-month record for border arrests, with more than 300,000 illegal aliens encountered by U.S. border officials. According to an October report from the House Judiciary Committee, an estimated 1.7 million more known “gotaways” have come in undetected since Biden took office, bringing the estimated number of illegal entries under this Democrat administration to roughly 10 million or more.
At the House Homeland Security Committee’s second and final impeachment hearing for Mayorkas last week, Republicans featured victims of the fentanyl crisis. Fentanyl seizures by federal border enforcement are up 860 percent since 2019, according to ABC News.
“In my humble opinion, Mr. Mayorkas’ border policy is partially responsible for my daughter’s death,” said Josephine Dunn, whose daughter died from fentanyl poisoning.
If Republicans are successful, Mayorkas would become the second presidential cabinet member to be impeached. William Belknap, who served as war secretary under President Ulysses S. Grant, was impeached in 1876 shortly after resigning over allegations of corruption. Belknap was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.
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.
More than two dozen Republican attorneys general sent a stern message to President Joe Biden and his border czar, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, on Monday: If you’re not going to enforce the law at the southern border, then “get out of the way so Texas can.”
The letter, spearheaded by Iowa AG Brenna Bird and signed by 25 other AGs and the GOP leaders of the Arizona legislature, followed a similar letter from Republican governors last week showing solidarity for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s waging a two-front battle: against Biden in the courtroom and what Abbott calls an “invasion” of illegals pouring through the border.
Monday’s six-page letter also comes after the Biden administration’s release Friday that December set a record with more than 302,000 migrant encounters at the southern border, part of a “staggering” and record-setting 371,036 overall encounters nationwide. It also comes as myriad Democrat lawmakers and leaders call on Biden to federalize the Texas National Guard, a move Abbott said Friday would be “boneheaded.”
“What you should do is simple: enforce the law and protect the border,” the letter stated. “And despite some recent suggestions that you should nationalize control of the Texas National Guard as a ruse, we would like to remind you that you cannot do so without legal authority that you currently lack. If you cannot bring yourselves to enforce the law, get out of the way so Texas can.”
Further, the letter says Border Patrol “used a forklift to lift the wire to let more than 300 people crossing the Rio Grande into Texas.”
The letter also addresses the Supreme Court’s ruling last week that allowed the Biden administration to remove razor wire deployed at the orders of Abbott, but it did not issue a cease-and-desist to Texas.
“As lawyers yourselves, you must know that reports that Texas is ignoring or ‘defying’ the Supreme Court are wrong, either misunderstanding or deliberately misstating the law,” the AGs wrote. “The Supreme Court’s order did not tell Texas that it could or could not do anything. Texas should be applauded for continuing to try to protect the border despite the federal government now, again, being able to try to destroy the barriers Texas builds.”
The letter goes on to assert that Texas and other states “must be able to defend themselves from invasion.”
At least one Biden administration official agrees. A Customs and Border Patrol senior official told Fox News that the relationship between Border Patrol and Texas law enforcement “remains strong.”
“Bottom line: Border Patrol has no plans to remove infrastructure (c-wire) placed by Texas along the border,” the official said. “Our posture remains the same. If we need to access an area for emergency response, we will do so. When that happens, we will coordinate with Texas (Department of Public Safety) and (Texas Military Dept.).”
The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database now contains over 1,500 proven cases of election fraud that show the vulnerabilities in our election system. (Photo illustration: BackyardProduction, iStock/Getty Images)
The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, the only such database in existence, now contains over 1,500 proven cases of election fraud. The sampling of cases vary from lone wolves stealing one vote to conspiracies that stole many votes, defrauding citizens and candidates of honest elections and sometimes changing the outcome of an election. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
As the website states:
The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database presents a sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country. Each and every one of the cases in this database represents an instance in which a public official, usually a prosecutor, thought it serious enough to act upon it. And each and every one ended in a finding that the individual had engaged in wrongdoing in connection with an election hoping to affect its outcome—or that the results of an election were sufficiently in question and had to be overturned. This database is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list. This database is intended to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed.
We launched the database in 2017 with 1,071 entries. We added 98 cases to the database in 2023 alone and are following several hundred other cases that are being investigated by local authorities. No case is added until and unless there is a conviction or a judicial or official finding that an individual or group of individuals engaged in wrongdoing in connection with an election.
Here are some of the most recent cases that pushed the database above the 1,500 mark:
Let’s start with a local Democratic primary election in Bridgeport, Connecticut, between Joseph Ganim (the incumbent mayor and the party-endorsed candidate) and John Gomes (the challenger), which was decided by 251 votes. Following the September 2023 election, videos surfaced showing Ganim supporters Wanda Geter-Pataky (a Democratic town committee member and the leader of Voting District 136) and Eneida Martinez (a candidate for City Council) illegally dropping off stacks of votes into various drop boxes.
In overturning the election and ordering a new one, Superior Court Judge William Clark concluded that “the number of ballots at issue, brings the reliability of the primary into serious doubt.” He added, “The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all the parties. To disregard the significant mishandling of ballots by partisans that were caught on video flouting the provisions of Connecticut law … endorse(s) this blatant practice of ballot harvesting.”
A new primary election was held on Jan. 23, which Ganim won, and a new general election will be held Feb. 27.
This is not the only example of ballot trafficking that was recently added to the database.
In Arizona, Gloria Lopez Torres (a San Luis city councilwoman) and Nadia Lizarraga-Mayorquin were charged with illegally trafficking absentee ballots during the August 2020 primary election. Arizona law only permits family members and close relatives to return ballots. They both pleaded guilty to one count of ballot abuse, were sentenced to 24 months of probation, and fined $2,500 each. The violation of the law was so serious that Torres was barred from running for or being appointed to public office again.
Torres is also, unfortunately, not the only public official engaging in election fraud in our latest batch of cases.
David Cole, a Republican member of the Alabama House of Representatives, was charged with falsely claiming he resided in Alabama’s 10th state house district during the 2022 primary and general elections despite living in District 4. To disguise his ineligibility, Cole entered into a $5-per-month lease at a home in District 10, which he never occupied, although he registered it as his voting address and had mail sent there. He also falsely claimed he had sold his District 4 house.
While Cole’s crime came to light during his campaign, he was not charged until after the election, which he won by 973 votes. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 60 days in jail and three years of probation; agreed to resign from his legislative seat; and was ordered to pay $52,885.79 in restitution, the salary he was paid as a state legislator. A judge ordered a new election to fill his seat.
Christopher Coyle, the former Democratic candidate for Clark County, Indiana, clerk, and a former chairman of the Clark County Democratic Party, was charged with falsely claiming his residency in Clark County and voting there during the 2022 election.
He filed a false report with the Clark County Clerk’s Office claiming he lived in Memphis, Indiana, despite having sold his home and having not updated his driver’s license or voter registration to reflect the fact that he was living in Louisville, Kentucky. He then voted in person in Sellersburg, Indiana, on Election Day. He admitted the conduct and entered into a pretrial diversion agreement. The charges were dropped once he successfully completed the program.
We also added our first cases from the District of Columbia, which has not shown much interest in investigating allegations of election fraud. Five individuals—Renee Diggs, Jessica Miser, Eddie Bishop, Margaretta Sibert-Dean, and D.C. Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Vanessa Rubio—were all fined by the D.C. Board of Elections for voting twice in the 2020 general election.
Diggs, Miser, Sibert-Dean, and Rubio all voted in person both in Washington and Maryland, while Bishop voted in person in Washington and by absentee ballot in Maryland. Laughably, Rubio, an elected public official, claimed she thought her duplicate voting wouldn’t count because the district is not a state.
We also added 16 cases from North Carolina of aliens charged with falsely claiming to be citizens when registering to vote.
George Ian Richardson, Soraya Paktiawal, Lurbyn Chirinos-Castro, Miriam Perez Robledo, Faustin Ngaruyinka, Jeffrey Hamilton, Miguel Angel Dominguez Martinez, Gessyca Eyene Jeaspautine Misse, Gloria Lopez, Odalinda Mondragon-Arroyo, Byron Benavides-Campos, Ikechukwu Augustine Okeke, Denis Javier Miranda, Fathy Ahmed Nasser, Jose Abraham Navarro, and Gabriela Guzman-Miguel all made false claims of citizenship.
Despite the fact that such a violation of the law is a federal felony and grounds for an alien to be denied citizenship, each was given the opportunity to enter a pretrial diversion program for 12 months after admitting their conduct, and the charges were dropped upon successful completion of their respective programs.
As the 2024 election draws near, let’s hope states prioritize implementing election reforms—like requiring an ID to vote and effectively maintaining accurate voter registration rolls—that are needed to ensure fair and honest elections, and then vigorously enforcing them, so Americans can feel confident casting their votes in the polls.
The Black National Anthem is a song to purposely divide the country which is exactly what the Democrats want to gain power in perpetuity, the same reason why they want millions of illegal immigrants pouring across our open borders.
WATCH: Kansas City Chiefs Fans Rain Down Boos After the NFL Plays the “Black National Anthem” BEFORE the Real National Anthem
The Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl title defense got off to an inauspicious start Thursday night after falling to the Detroit Lions 21-20. But an arguably bigger story before the contest has Americans across the country up in arms.
The National Football League (NFL) made the decision to play “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is considered the “Black National Anthem.” To add insult to injury, they decided to do so before the “Star Spangled Banner” as Fox News reported.READ MORE
Minnesota state legislators gathered at the State Capitol Thursday to hold a hearing on assisted suicide. The hearing centered on House File 1930, legislation which would legalize assisted suicide throughout Minnesota.
Democratic Rep. Mike Freiberg, the chief author of the bill, spoke at a press conference on the subject Thursday morning. With terminally-ill patients standing behind him, Rep. Freiberg referred to the practice as “medical aid in dying.”
If passed into law, Rep. Freiberg’s legislation would allow anyone over the age of 18 who is diagnosed with a terminal illness prognosis of six months or less to end their life with physician-assisted suicide. The bill requires those seeking assisted suicide to be “mentally capable.” READ MORE…
A.F. Branco Cartoon – When the left is screaming for women’s abortion rights but can’t tell you what a woman is and feels it’s okay to kill babies up to 9 months in the womb and beyond, shows the insanity of their thinking.
Abortion Was Leading Cause of Death Worldwide for Fifth Consecutive Year in 2023
The abortion statistics for 2023 are in, and they make for grim reading. The Christian Post reported that abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide in 2023, topping infectious diseases and cancer. Approximately 44.6 million babies were murdered in the womb over the course of 2023, marking the fifth consecutive year in which abortion was the world’s leading cause of death.
Other significant causes of death included infectious diseases (12.9 million), cancer (8.2 million), smoking (4.9 million), alcohol abuse (2.4 million), HIV and AIDS (1.6 million), traffic accidents (1.3 million) and suicide (over 1 million). 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 • Pro-Abortion Study Claiming Pro-Life Laws Cause Thousands of Pregnancies From Rape is Totally False • Jill Biden Invites Woman Who Had Her Disabled Baby Aborted to be Her State of the Union Guest • Christian Nurse Files Lawsuit Against CVS After it Fired Her For Being Pro-Life • Planned Parenthood Director Admits: We Take Teens to Other States for Secret Abortions “Every Day”
More Pro-Life News • Mom’s Unborn Baby Saves Her Life When Doctors Find a Tear in Her Aorta • Joe Biden Wants to Force Christian Doctors to Participate in Abortions • Kamala Harris Was Supposed to be the Border Czar, Instead She’s the Abortion Cheerleader • Studies Confirm One-Third of Women Suffer Depression After Abortion • 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.
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On June 17, 1953, more than a million East Germans walked off the job and launched a massive strike in protest of unfair production demands imposed by the communist government. The playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was living in East Berlin, responded by composing a poem about the Soviet-installed government’s approach to the problem, “Die Lösung” (which translates into “The Solution”):
After the uprising of the 17th June The Secretary of the Writers Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?
Anyway, you know things are bad in America when East Germany seems like a relevant historical analog, but here we are. Perusing the press these days, you’d think Brecht’s satirical joke about the government voting out the people was a real possibility. In fact, I’d dare say attempts to impose our rulers’ wishes on the electorate are now a prominent feature of American discourse.
The morning of the Iowa caucuses, The New York Times published a typically oblivious op-ed headlined “The Responsibility of Republican Voters,” essentially commanding them not to vote for Donald Trump. In reality, such a sentiment coming from the Times is tantamount to encouraging Republicans to support Trump, both as a result of its own sins and as a synecdoche for America’s utterly reviled journalistic establishment. Naturally, a guy the Times insists is “distinguished from the rest of the Republican candidates primarily by his contempt for the rule of law” went on to romp to victory later that day.
Anyway, speaking of contempt for the rule of law, just over a week after the Iowa caucuses, we launched headlong into what could be the biggest legitimacy crisis the federal government has faced since — well, perhaps comparing it to the Civil War overstates things. But to quote Biden, Texas’ standoff with the federal government over illegal immigration is “a big f-cking deal.” There’s a very solid argument that Texas is well within its rights to seize control of its border and enforce the laws Biden won’t, but please tell us more about which candidate is distinguished “primarily by his contempt for the rule of law.”
At a minimum, Biden’s complete disregard for border enforcement is a far bigger threat to America’s security and constitutional order than anything that happened on Trump’s watch, Jan. 6 included, an event the media and Democrats have been bleating about for three years. Yet how much discussion have you seen in The New York Times lately about Biden’s corrupt responsibility for America’s immigration disaster?
New York made kids go to class remotely so it could use their school as an immigrant shelter. (Though if you try to point out how outrageous this is, fact-checkers will tell you that any discussion of kicking taxpayers’ kids out of school for illegal immigrants “needs context,” and by “context,” they mean selective framing to mitigate the issue for the Democrats enabling this.) You have to provide ID, take off your belt and shoes, have your bags examined, and submit to a body scan to fly, but the government is flying planeloads of immigrants all over the country without any identification or due diligence to determine whether they are terrorists. Oh, and Boston is also literally housing illegal immigrants in Logan Airport, so no security threat there, I’m sure.
Even if arguments about maintaining the most basic level of national security and sovereignty don’t move Democrats, you’d think that the feds losing track of tens of thousands of kids and handing them over to sex traffickers would mean that the news wouldn’t be largely confined to the ghetto of local news affiliates and GOP press releases.
Aside from the lack of accountability for violating reams of immigration laws and imposing an avoidable economic and humanitarian crisis on entire states and communities, you’re definitely not allowed to talk about why Biden has allowed, by some estimates, 10 million people to cross the border illegally.
If you suggest that Democrats are counting on the fact that at some point in the future there will be some kind of amnesty or other mechanism to offer these illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship and voting, thereby achieving the literal fulfillment of Brecht’s joke about the government creating a new electorate, well, there’s an entire ideological infrastructure, one that the media are happy to parrot, dedicated to telling Americans that this common-sense concern is part of an elaborate neo-Nazi conspiracy theory.
The only way you’re allowed to be concerned that a sudden and dramatic influx of immigrants will dramatically alter the political or cultural character of your community is if you’re the kind of disgustingly wealthy liberal who lives in Martha’s Vineyard. Then your concern suddenly merits days of news coverage. Fifty new migrants in Barack Obama’s backyard is a humanitarian crisis; 10,000 Haitians living under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, is a statistic.
Of course, polls now show immigration is the top concern for American voters, ahead of inflation and the broader economy. And near as I can tell, the White House and media strategy (but I repeat myself) seems to be ignoring the voting public’s grave concern and making the next 10 months about whether half the country should even be allowed to vote for Donald Trump.
This is not an exaggeration. On Thursday Politico ran a piece from a “professor of law and political science at Yale University,” arguing, “Trump’s Supreme Court Must Kick Him Off The Ballot.” This op-ed contains such modest proposals as saying the high court “should issue an injunction postponing Super Tuesday to early May” because nothing quite instills faith in American democracy like unelected jurists telling states where and how to hold their elections, never mind the author’s endorsement of a ridiculous interpretation of the 14th Amendment that says state officials can unilaterally kick someone off the ballot and disenfranchise millions of voters who support him.
Now, I do agree with the author’s sentiment that “a democracy can’t possibly function if presidents use force to remain in power after they have lost elections.” I just missed the part where there was any compelling evidence Trump organized or instigated the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, the riot itself was a serious attempt to keep Trump in power, and Trump was convicted in a court of law on any of these things. And this is emblematic of years of concocting fantasies about how the will of the voters can be overturned — recall this started before Trump was even president, with an organized attempt by Hillary Clinton and her allies to convince the Electoral College not to validate Trump’s victory at the ballot box — which strikes me as a far bigger threat to democracy than Trump has ever been.
It is truly amazing the lengths that America’s establishmentarians will go to avoid actually meeting voters where they are and entertaining persuasion and compromise. Along those lines, we can debate whether this was a planned strategy to ensure Trump got the GOP nomination, but it ought to be a far bigger concern that Trump got even more popular with the electorate after they brought a bunch of (admittedly dubious) criminal charges against him. Isn’t anyone concerned that tens of millions of Americans now think the Democrat Party isn’t above orchestrating the political prosecution of those that threaten to defeat them in elections? Or that once firmly established, this perception could have very harmful effects on “our democracy” long after Trump is gone?
The lack of concern here only seems to make sense if you fully expect that you can repress the opposition and/or remake the electorate so much that you eventually achieve uniparty control of the country. By then, elections, to the extent they are permitted and the problematic will of the people is not simply overruled by unelected bureaucrats and activist judges, are little more than a rubber stamp.
It’s not a crazy thought. It’s already happened in blue states such as California, where supermajorities mean that none of the elected leaders are particularly worried about voters holding them accountable for their obvious and many failures. The only problem for the rest of us is that once uniparty control of the entire country is achieved, the result won’t ultimately look like California and its present dysfunctions. Given enough time, they’ll turn America into something a lot more like East Germany.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Some confused climate activists are asking President Biden to hurt the climate. Protesters are planning a sit-in at the Department of Energy next month, calling for the White House to not permit any new liquefied natural gas (L.N.G.) export terminals. But examining the facts shows that surrendering to this pressure would actually raise global greenhouse gas emissions — as well as hinder our allies’ energy security and our economy.
Those on the left who oppose L.N.G. exports cite concerns about emissions. They also argue that natural gas exports are sabotaging the deployment of renewable energy. These objections are off the mark for two main reasons. First, American L.N.G. exports have a carbon advantage over more carbon-intensive sources of power generation overseas that they displace. Focusing on natural gas, Russian exports to Europe produce over 40 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than U.S. exports to Europe.
Second, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that global demand for natural gas will increase by 2050. Advanced energy technologies that affordably harness solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal power are promising and the United States should lead the world in building them. But even with rapidly improving economics from innovation, and even if permitting reform slashes red tape and facilitates accelerated deployment, it still takes a long time to replace natural gas.
‘Fossil Future’ author Alex Epstein reacts to green economic ‘revolution’ push in the latest climate crusade on ‘The Bottom Line.’
Natural gas will be needed for the foreseeable future, since there’s no such thing as an overnight transition to all renewables. Denying this reality will not decrease emissions. It will just allow higher-polluting exports from other countries, like Russia, to fill the void and raise global emissions.
The energy transition will take time — but less time if the government chooses innovation, competition, and regulatory reform over bans, mandates, and subsidies. Because of Texas’ competitive electricity market, for example, the Lone Star State is easily the country’s biggest wind energy producer. And Texas recently eclipsed California (with its command-and-control policies) for the lead in grid-scale solar deployment.
Natural gas will be needed for the foreseeable future, since there’s no such thing as an overnight transition to all renewables. Denying this reality will not decrease emissions. It will just allow higher-polluting exports from other countries, like Russia, to fill the void and raise global emissions.
Natural gas can be the backbone that allows renewables to flourish. Gas provides firm power, complementing the variable nature of solar and wind as new battery storage technology scales.
Diversified Energy Company co-founder and CEO Rusty Hutson Jr. breaks down the impact of methane emission rules on ‘The Claman Countdown.’
The U.S. has already significantly lowered emissions in the power sector without compromising reliability and affordability. That happened because of innovative natural gas extraction, relicensing nuclear power plants, and increasingly cheap renewables.
The future is even brighter: U.S. trailblazers developing and deploying inexpensive energy technologies — everything from solar-plus-storage and carbon capture for natural gas to nuclear fusion — and exporting them.
In the meantime, American L.N.G. exports have a crucial role in not just reducing global emissions, but also in strengthening our allies’ energy security and our economy.
In early 2019, during my time as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), I visited Poland and witnessed the importance of American gas exports to our friends’ energy security. My Polish counterparts were deeply concerned about regional dependence on Russian gas. Even then, long before the war in Ukraine, they were asking the U.S. to undercut Russia’s weaponization of energy.
‘Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street’ catches up with Newt Gingrich and Kellyanne Conway, who discuss the 2024 presidential race
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 turned those fears into reality. Russia’s economic power comes from oil exports, but its political power over Europe at that time came from natural gas exports. And Russia bet that starving European countries of natural gas would weaken their support for Ukraine.
But American L.N.G. helped our allies wean off of Russian gas. Stopping or limiting the supply of this crucial resource to the global market would be as disruptive as economic sanctions. Our friends and allies, in Asia as well as Europe, are relying on us to continue exporting this fuel.
L.N.G. exports also benefit our economy. These exports have the capacity to create tens of thousands of jobs along the entire economic supply chain — including jobs in Wisconsin and Ohio, not just in Texas or Louisiana.
As FERC chairman, I pushed for bipartisan action to streamline L.N.G. export terminal approvals without sacrificing safety or environmental quality. It’s now time for President Biden to do likewise. He should ignore the activists staging a sit-in. They’re wrong on the facts and should sit this one out.
Neil Chatterjee served as chairman and a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He has decades of experience working on the most important energy policy initiatives for Republican leadership in Congress.
The World Court ordered Israel on Friday to prevent acts of genocide against the Palestinians and do more to help civilians, although it stopped short of ordering a ceasefire as requested by South Africa. South Africa brought the case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) earlier this month, asking it to grant emergency measures to halt the fighting, which has killed more than 26,000 Palestinians. It accused Israel of state-led genocide in its offensive, begun after Hamas militants stormed into Israel killing 1,200 and kidnapping more than 240. Israel sought to have the case thrown out.
In Friday’s ruling, the judges said Israel must take all measures within its power to prevent its troops from committing genocide, punish and must take steps to improve the humanitarian situation.
While the ICJ did not order a ceasefire, it said it would not throw out the genocide case, ruling that the Palestinians appeared to be a protected group under the 1948 Genocide Convention. It did not decide the merits of the genocide allegations. Israel has called South Africa’s allegations false and “grossly distorted,” and said it makes the utmost efforts to avoid civilian casualties.
Donald Trump took to Truth Social to excoriate the $88.3 million verdict against him in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case on Friday and vowed an appeal, calling it a “Biden directed witch hunt.” A federal jury ordered Trump to pay damages to Carroll for allegedly destroying her reputation as a trustworthy journalist after she accused him in 2019 of raping her nearly three decades ago. Another jury last May ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million over a similar October 2022 denial, finding that he had defamed and sexually abused Carroll. Trump is appealing that decision.
“Absolutely ridiculous! I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party. Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon. They have taken away all First Amendment Rights. THIS IS NOT AMERICA!” Trump posted very shortly after the verdict came down.
Carroll was seeking at least $10 million more in this trial and awarded more than eight times that. This trial was solely to determine how much more Trump should pay to Carroll. Carroll, 80, sued Trump in November 2019 over his denials five months earlier that he had raped her in the mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
Trump, 77, claimed that he had never heard of Carroll, and that she made up her story to boost sales of her memoir. His lawyers said Carroll was hungry for fame and enjoyed the attention from supporters for speaking out against her nemesis.
Another jury last May ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million over a similar October 2022 denial, finding that he had defamed and sexually abused Carroll. Trump is appealing that decision. In the current trial, Carroll had sought at least $10 million more, saying Trump had “shattered” her reputation as a respected journalist who told the truth. She also sought punitive damages, in part to keep Trump from repeating his denials.
TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw both trials, said the earlier verdict was binding for the second trial, meaning the only issue for jurors was how much Trump should pay.
Trump, a Republican, has tapped into outrage over Carroll’s case and his other legal travails to bolster his campaign to retake the White House in the November election in a likely showdown against Democrat Joe Biden, who beat him in 2020.
Trump faces 91 felony counts in four criminal indictments, including two cases accusing him of trying to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss. He has pleaded not guilty in all of the cases, and has portrayed himself as the victim of politically motivated lies and an out-of-control judicial system.
During the Carroll trial, Trump was heard saying in court that the case was a “con job” and “witch hunt” and that he still did not know who Carroll was, prompting the judge to twice admonish him to keep quiet.
Trump stormed out of the courtroom during the closing argument on Friday by Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, but returned for his own lawyer’s argument.
Kaplan, who is not related to the judge, had argued that Trump acted as though he wasn’t bound by the law.
“This trial is about getting him to stop, once and for all,” she added. “Now is the time to make him pay for it dearly.”
‘COCOON OF LOVE’
Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba countered that it was the publication of excerpts from Carroll’s memoir in New York magazine that triggered the attacks, not Trump’s denials that began five hours later. She also argued that Carroll enjoyed her newfound fame and was “happier than ever,” citing her testimony that she had entered a “cocoon of love” from her supporters.
A Northwestern University damages expert who testified on Carroll’s behalf estimated the reputational harm from Trump’s statements was $7.3 million to $12.1 million.
On Thursday, Trump spent only four minutes defending himself on the witness stand after Judge Kaplan forbade him and his lawyers from revisiting issues that the first trial had settled. Trump was allowed to confirm his October 2022 deposition testimony, which jurors had been shown, in which he called Carroll’s claims a “hoax” and said she was “mentally sick.”
Carroll wrote the “Ask E. Jean” column for Elle from 1993 to 2019, and often appeared on such programs as NBC’s “Today” and ABC’s “Good Morning America.” She said those appearances dried up because of Trump.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project uncovers documents showing how President Joe Biden is implementing and enforcing transgender policies across government agencies, despite what individual employees believe. Pictured: Biden greets the crowd at a Jan. 5 campaign event at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Woodrow Wilson, the father of the American administrative state, once wrote: “Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.”
Well, the times now “demand” the construction of a massive transgender architecture across the labyrinth of the federal government.
Perhaps if Wilson were able to gaze a century into the future and see the absurd result, the 28th American president would have hesitated before unleashing this unconstitutional form of government. We weren’t so lucky, and now here we are.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has been busy investigating the federal government’s sophisticated bureaucratization of transgender policy. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
The Oversight Project’s investigation has obtained and publicized several explosive documents over the past year that expose this fundamental shift. It’s time to identify the trend line.
Each government document, standing alone, is an experience in the absurd. Each reads as the Frankensteinian combination of a mechanical bureaucrat and a Drag Queen Story Hour.
We live in a time when a Supreme Court nominee can’t define the difference between a man and a woman, and yet an army of government human resource officers (whose names history will not remember) can fill reams of paper with exactly how workplace policies should govern, celebrate, and enforce every last detail of how to approach the matter of gender identity.
These policies stem from action from the very top.
Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes.
Biden’s executive order directed government agencies to review all policies, conform to the newly established principles of the Biden administration, take necessary actions, and produce plans demonstrating such.
With the stroke of a pen, and without any vote on the issue, the entire federal government workforce was forced to take the deeply unpopular side of a contentious social issue.
Biden’s order has been followed by a series of related orders, pronouncements, and initiatives.
Office of Personnel Management
In its “Guidance Regarding Gender Identity and Inclusion in the Federal Workplace,” dated March 2023, the Office of Personnel Management states that any federal employees who don’t comply with the use of fake pronouns may be disciplined for contributing to “an unlawful hostile work environment.”
OPM directs agencies to support “transitioning” employees by instating transgender points of contact and offering support for “workplace transitions” such as name and pronoun changes in employee profiles. The agency goes so far as to say that men should be allowed in ladies’ rooms and vice versa.
“Agencies should not restrict any employee to a single user facility instead of common facilities,” OPM directs.
🚽 Potty Politics from Biden Admin – Men in the Ladies Room 🧵
We unearthed the radical @USOPM policies that control all federal agencies.
Here, OPM mandates that men are allowed in the ladies room, even absent any indication they are actually "transgender" pic.twitter.com/OngVzQXf95
In the Biden administration, the Department of Agriculture is guided by a memo from its Sub-Working Group for the Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.
We uncovered the infamous document showing that Biden administration officials directed Border Patrol agents to use the “preferred pronouns” of illegal aliens who are invading the United States.
The document from U.S. Customs and Border Protection [KM3] decrees: “DO NOT use ‘he, him, she, her’ pronouns until you have more information about, or provided by, the individual.”
🚨Biden Directs Border Patrol to use Illegal Aliens' Preferred Pronouns
We just obtained @CBP documents directing personnel to only use woke language when encountering individuals invading the United States pic.twitter.com/HwhiYJmqmm
A clinical guidance document obtained from the Federal Bureau of Prisons shows that the Biden administration is providing taxpayer-funded transgender operations for inmates. These surgeries include various procedures to remove, create, enlarge, and reshape sex organs request. Federal prisoners also may request feminizing or masculinizing hormone therapy from a prison warden.
The process is reviewed by a Transgender Utilization Review Advisory Group, which assesses whether a requested procedure is “medically needed” and makes recommendations to a medical director for final approval.
🚨 Biden is Transgendering Prisoners!
We obtained internal @OfficialFBOP guidance on exactly how. Doc at bottom of 🧵
Biden’s Treasury Department created an internal policy mandating use of the letter “X” as a gender marker, instead of the traditional “M” and “F.”
Treasury’s gender policy is overseen by a special “bureau designee” whose job is “to ensure adherence to this policy in all official communications and written materials.”
The Interior Department’s lengthy personnel bulletin on the matter attempts a definition of “gender identity” that hinges on “an individual’s internal sense of being male, female, another gender, no gender, of multiple genders, or fluid in gender.”
Even with this “fluid” definition, department employees who use the wrong name or pronoun are considered to be practicing unlawful discrimination.
🚨 Franky the Park Ranger is now Franny
We obtained the new Department of the @Interior bulletin on "Supporting Gender Transition in the Federal Workplace"
According to a “Manager’s Diversity Tip Sheet” for the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, managers should play an active role in mandating “gender identity inclusion.”
Managers should screen interviewers’ reports for new hires and crack down on noncompliance with gender policies.
Managers are encouraged to “carefully probe remarks suggesting the interviewee was uncomfortable” and “consider whether unconscious bias may have played a role.”
Managers also should proactively correct employees of the Antitrust Division who “misgender” coworkers and facilitate introductions by sharing their own preferred pronouns.
According to its Strategies for Gender Identity Inclusion in the Workplace, the division has plans in the works to further increase such diversity and inclusion.
🚨 We obtained Merrick Garland's @TheJusticeDept@JusticeATR woke managers guide to "Supporting Diversity in the Antitrust Division"
We highlight some of more outrageous policies, intended to screen out traditional Americans, that the weaponized DOJ is using in this 🧵 pic.twitter.com/HhRzLgOU6X
These and other documents reveal a massive muscle movement by the federal government under the Biden administration, in which minute details are given intricate thought and put into enforceable rules governing employee behavior. This movement includes creation of a class of transgender commissars throughout the alphabet soup of government agencies, complete with boards and multilayered organizational charts. The end result of these efforts, and what I expect to be the actual sinister motive, is an act of ideological segregation by the federal government. The end is not to protect other people’s feelings, but to strictly enforce ideological compliance and ensure a bureaucratic workforce aligned with radical political aims.
Incidentally, the same theory holds for the federal government’s vaccine mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had the net effect of purging ideological dissenters.
Leftists are acutely aware of the federal government’s power to set standards. Workplace rules and dictates are likely to bleed down to state and local governments and corporations, as well as the wide community of federal contractors. This isn’t about just remaking the administrative state, it is about transgendering America. But at least we now know exactly what we need to rip out when sanity is returned to the White House.
Border Patron has become nothing more than processing agents for the radial left’s voter enhancement program. Biden and the Democrats continue trying to impede Texas’ ability to enforce immigration law.
It’s Official: 50 Texas Counties Declare Border ‘Invasion’ Due to Biden’s Policies
The Constitution is clear on what the role of the federal government is when it comes to illegal immigration.
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence,” Article IV, Section 4 declares.
As we’ve seen, President Joe Biden’s administration and his Democratic enablers in Congress don’t want to meaningfully protect U.S. citizens from the invasion of illegal immigrants and criminal cartels at our southern border. They don’t want to protect voters in border states against the flood of fentanyl and lawlessness with anything except words. 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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A talking point cropping up on social media and press contends that Texas Governor Greg Abbott is “ignoring” or “defying” the Supreme Court by continuing to erect fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border. This is wrong.
Abbott can’t ignore the Supreme Court because Texas wasn’t ordered to do anything. SCOTUS vacated an order against the Department of Homeland Security [sic] that stopped the Feds from cutting down razor fencing along the border. Nothing says that Texas can’t erect the fencing.
Though, you must marvel at the breathtaking audacity of Democrats suddenly treating the court’s (non-existent) words as if they were sacred text. This very week, President Joe Biden again ignored the court, rolling out yet another iteration of his unconstitutional student “loan forgiveness” program. Biden habitually circumvents, ignores, defies, attacks, and demeans SCOTUS — and Democrats cheer him on along the way. Senate leaders and “dark money” fake media organizations like ProPublica have poured millions into delegitimizing and smearing the court to undermine its authority.
Now, it is true that Biden has the power to ratchet up the fight, take federal control of the border, and implement any policy he desires — or, more specifically, any non-policy he desires. The Biden administration is standing in the way of Texas’ efforts to enforce state and federal law. Once that happens, we can have our constitutional crisis.
As a political matter, the case tells us that the border mayhem is not only a matter of historic incompetence but is also driven by ideology. Many Democrats believe limiting illegal immigration is immoral. They believe anyone who wants to walk over the border should be able to do so without any incumbrances.
This week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that razorwire at the southern border is ineffective and gets “in the way” of law enforcement. I’m no expert on border control, admittedly, but I am relatively certain that any fence is better than what is happening now.
A few years back, Nancy Pelosi distilled the left’s view on physical barriers when she called them an “immorality,” the “least effective way to protect the border,” and too expensive. “I can’t think of any reason why anyone would think it’s a good idea — unless this has something to do with something else,” the then House Speaker said. None of that is true, either. The idea that real fences and walls can’t mitigate the movement of people is undermined by looking at the entirety of history. The least effective way is probably what we’re doing now.
The “something else,” of course, is meant to call you a racist. The reality is that Mexico is the top origin country for legal immigrants. Most Americans still see immigration as a net positive. The lawlessness at the border, and now in major cities, is helping undermine that sentiment.
One of the vital jobs of the federal government is to protect the sovereignty, borders, and citizens of the nation — even more important than creating “book ban” czars or banning Zyn packets. But not only has Biden abdicated his responsibility on that front, he wants to stop others from doing their duty, as well. But sometimes, it seems like the lawlessness is the point.
When it’s seeding time on our farm, we seed. When it’s haying time, we put up the hay. And when it’s harvest time, we bring in the crop. We don’t sit around and hope that somebody else will do the job for us. We handle it the Montana way: rolling up our sleeves and getting to work.
That’s the kind of mentality that small business owners, farmers, ranchers and hardworking Montanans all across our state bring to their jobs every single day. And it’s the type of mentality that my colleagues in Congress and President Biden urgently need to bring to the table to secure our border.
Montanans know that what’s happening at our southern border right now is a serious problem, plain and simple. No matter your political beliefs, allowing anyone to enter the country without being properly vetted or going through a legal process undermines our national security.
Thousands of immigrants, most wearing thermal blankets, await processing at a U.S. Border Patrol transit center on Dec. 19, 2023, in Eagle Pass, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)
We know that drug cartels are taking advantage of these gaps in our border security to traffic drugs and people across the border. That needs to stop.
For too long, Congress has kicked the can down the road on securing our southern border and some have even refused to fund it. It’s time to stop kicking and get the job done.
When I talk to Montana sheriffs and mayors in communities big and small, they all tell me that the situation at our southern border and the deadly fentanyl crisis are having disastrous impacts on the folks they’re sworn to protect. We can save lives by taking action now.
The stories of those impacted Montana families, local governments’ budgets that are stretched thin, and our national security are front of mind for me when I’ve told President Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that what’s happening on our southern border is unacceptable.
That is why I urged Senate leaders from both parties to prioritize a solution to the border crisis, one that I believe we should have stayed in Washington and worked over the holidays to solve.
The lack of urgency from my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to address this crisis is frankly disturbing.
When I visited our southern border, I stood at a section of the wall near McAllen, Texas, and spoke directly with Border Patrol agents who told me they need additional manpower and resources to get the job done. That’s why I’ve worked with Republicans and Democrats to introduce bipartisan legislation like my FEND Off Fentanyl Act and my ANTI Drugs Act.
These bills would give law enforcement the tools and funds they need to tackle this crisis head on. But politicians who would rather score cheap political points and play politics with our border blocked our bipartisan efforts.
It’s time for Congress to quit the political gamesmanship, put our shoulder to the wheel, and use commonsense proposals like the ones I’ve put forward, and others, to finally get a border deal done that protects our state and country.
Simply put, protecting our country by securing our southern border shouldn’t be a partisan issue – it’s an American issue. Montanans from all political stripes understand that the current systems in place are broken. They want to know why their elected leaders are so dysfunctional that they can’t seem to fix it.
My message to the president and my colleagues in Congress is simple: It’s time to stop pointing fingers, quit using the border as a political talking point, and roll up our sleeves. I’m committed to working with anyone, Republican or Democrat, to get a deal done that secures our borders and protects our state and our country.
Homeless people in California were found living in caves along the Tuolumne River before they were cleared out by the Modesto Police Department and volunteers over the weekend.nVolunteers with Operation 9-2-99 and the Tuolumne River Trust worked with police to clear them out, removing some 7,600 pounds of garbage from the area, authorities said.
“This particular area has been plagued by vagrancy and illegal camps, which have raised concerns due to the fact that these camps were actually caves dug into the riverbanks,” the Modesto Police Department said in a statement.
The cleared debris filled two truckloads and a trailer, police added.
Volunteers with Operation 2-9-99 and the Modesto Police Department participated in a joint clean-up operation along the Tuolumne River in Modesto, California, on Jan. 23, 2024. (Modesto Police Department)
Ahead of the cleanup, individuals residing in the caves and nearby homeless camps were told about the operation and informed of services to assist them, the department said. The caves were about 20 feet below street level, and some were fully furnished, indicating that vagrants had been living there for some time. Items found inside included bedding, belongings, food, items on a makeshift mantel, drugs and weapons, local news station KOVR reported.
“We had a hard time figuring out how they got so much stuff down in there, considering how hard it was to get it up the hill and out,” Operation 2-9-99 coordinator Chris Guptill told KOVR.
Guptill was one of many volunteers who participated in the cleanup. He said his group found eight caves in total, and this was not the first time they were occupied.
Homeless people were found living in caves like this one pictured along the Tuolumne River in Modesto, California, on Jan. 23, 2024. (Modesto Police Department)
“We really don’t have a known solution on how to deal with it,” Guptill told KOVR.
Tracy Rojas, a Modesto resident who lives near the caves, said it is dangerous for people to take up residence underground.
“If one of these were to collapse, it would be devastating,” she told KOVR. “This whole thing would come down and go into the water.”
A tarp and trash belonging to homeless people encamped by the Tuolumne River in Modesto, California, on Jan. 23, 2024. (Modesto Police Department)
The city of Los Angeles, about 300 miles south of Modesto, recently began recruiting up to 6,000 volunteers to count homeless people.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority-led street tally helps the county government’s efforts to tackle a homeless crisis, which has crippled the city with tens of thousands of people living on the streets, living in cars, tents and makeshift street shelters. These temporary homes have proliferated on sidewalks, in parks and other community areas.
The so-called “point-in-time” count aims to estimate how many people are homeless and what financial or medical services they may require for potential mental health conditions or from drug addiction.
This count comes as California residents have grown increasingly frustrated over lawmakers’ failure to deter the surging homeless population. Since 2015, homelessness has increased by 70% in Los Angeles County and 80% in the city. In 2023, officials reported more than 75,500 people were homeless on any given night in LA County, a 9% rise from a year earlier, and about 46,200 within the city of Los Angeles.
“Homelessness is an emergency, and it will take all of us working together to confront this emergency,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement, calling the count “an important tool to confront the homelessness crisis.”
Fox News Digital’s Lawrence Richard contributed to this report.
Chris Pandolfo is a writer for Fox News Digital. Send tips to chris.pandolfo@fox.com and follow him on Twitter @ChrisCPandolfo.
Democratic strategist James Carville advised the media not to treat former President Trump like a regular candidate as campaigning for the presidential election heats up ahead of November.
“This is not a typical election,” Carville said Wednesday on MSNBC.
Carville complained that there is a “massive effort” to normalize Trump’s candidacy for president and then compared the Republican front-runner to Nazi military leader Hermann Goering, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest lieutenants.
Democratic strategist James Carville advised the media not to treat former President Trump like a regular candidate as campaigning for the presidential election heats up ahead of November. (MSNBC screenshot)
“Nothing is normal about this at all,” Carville said of Trump’s treatment by the press. “And if you watch his speech last night, it was completely unhinged.”
“What I am obsessed with is, stop treating him like he is a normal candidate,” Carville said, emphasizing that Trump is not like other Republican politicians or past GOP nominees Bob Dole or Mitt Romney.
“But if you look at this, there is a chance that Trump could win this election,” he continued. “And the way that he wins is he is treated as a normal candidate.”
Multiple polls have found that Trump is leading Biden in multiple key demographics and battleground states, including among young voters by a 13-point margin, per a Fox News poll.
Forty-one percent of respondents under 30 said they’d vote for Trump in the 2024 general election, while 28% said they’d vote for Biden, 14% said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 7% for Jill Stein, and 5% for Cornel West. In that scenario, those under 45 years old also favored Trump, with 41% saying they’d vote for Trump, versus 31% who’d cast their vote for Biden.
Carville has made numerous attacks against Republican leaders in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election. (Screenshot/HBO)
Carville suggested that The New York Times and other major outlets should give context to Trump by writing that he has been “found to be a rapist by a jury.”
“We’re ill-informing the public of just what a wretched human being this man is,” Carville said. “And there is a giant effort to try to normalize this.”
A federal jury in New York City found last year that Trump was not liable for rape but was liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The former president has been ordered to pay advice columnist E. Jean Carroll $5 million.
Carville, who once served as an adviser to former President Clinton, has made numerous attacks against Republican leaders in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
In December, Carville said that House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and other “Christian nationalists” like him are a bigger threat to the country than al-Qaeda.
Carville has repeatedly argued in recent months that Democrats should be concerned about President Biden’s waning popularity with voters and especially with his age. (Getty Images)
But the political strategist has also called attention to vulnerabilities within his own party, notably warning that Biden’s age and unpopularity may cost him the election. Carville has repeatedly argued in recent months that Democrats should be concerned about Biden’s waning popularity with voters and especially with his age. At 81 years old, Biden is the oldest serving president in American history.
“The idea that this should not be aired out and should be discussed in hushed tones is ludicrous,” Carville has said of Biden’s poll numbers. “This needs to be discussed.”
Fox News’ Jamie Joseph and Hanna Panreck contributed to this report.
Jeffrey Clark is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. He has previously served as a speechwriter for a cabinet secretary and as a Fulbright teacher in South Korea. Jeffrey graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a degree in English and History.
A draft resolution was presented to the Republican National Committee to make former President Donald Trump the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, even though Nikki Haley, his lone remaining opponent, has not dropped out of the race.
David Bossie, an RNC committee member from Maryland and Trump ally, proposed the draft resolution, The Dispatch reported Thursday. Bossie’s effort follows RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel saying after Trump defeated Haley in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday that it was time for Republicans to unite behind Trump and focus on defeating President Joe Biden.
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the race, endorsed Trump and called on Haley to drop out.
Under RNC rules, Trump must win 1,215 delegates at the national convention July 15-18 in Milwaukee to secure the party’s nomination for the general election. After Trump won the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, he has 32 delegates and Haley has 17.
“RESOLVED that the Republican National Committee expresses heartfelt gratitude to all candidates who offered themselves in this long and arduous process,” the resolution reads. “RESOLVED, that the Republican National Committee acknowledges and respects the commitment and contributions of all persons who worked tirelessly to support this nomination process, particularly the grassroots supporters of all candidates involved.
“RESOLVED that the Republican National Committee hereby declares President Trump as our presumptive 2024 nominee for the office of President of the United States and from this moment forward moves into full general election mode welcoming supporters of all candidates as valued members of Team Trump 2024.”
Haley said she is determined to keep running even through Super Tuesday, although there doesn’t appear a path to victory for the former South Carolina governor. She won’t gain any delegates at the Nevada caucuses on Feb. 8 since she is not on the ballot, and is trailing in polls by a wide margin in her home state’s primary, South Carolina, on Feb. 24.
The resolution might be considered at the RNC winter meeting Jan. 30 to Feb. 3 in Las Vegas, The Dispatch reported. If passed, it could begin a process of the national party working with Trump as if he had secured the nomination, and under RNC rules, that is permissible.
Newsmax reached out to the RNC and the Trump and Haley campaigns for comment.
A House tax bill is under scrutiny for disguising welfare expansion, corporate windfalls, and inflationary deficits, all at the expense of the middle class. It includes weak work requirements, improper payments, and benefits for illegal aliens. Pictured: The Capitol building on Capitol Hill on May 3, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post/Getty Images)
If you think congressional deadlocks are concerning, just wait until you see what Congress does when it’s in a blinding rush. The House Ways and Means Committee is ready to go from introducing its latest tax bill to House passage in under a week and a half.
Though branded as full of middle-class tax cuts and pro-growth reforms, checking inside this Trojan horse known as The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act instead reveals a mixed bag that includes welfare expansions, corporate windfalls, and inflationary deficits.
The only individual tax cut in the bill is a slight cost-of-living adjustment to the child tax credit—likely from $2,000 to $2,100—that would apply to taxpayers’ 2025 and 2026 tax filings before expiring.
The bulk—91.5% to be exact—of what is being described as “middle-class tax relief” is, in fact, an expansion of welfare benefits. The legislation does not fix existing work requirements for individuals to receive the “additional child tax credit,” which, unlike the ordinary child tax credit, exclusively goes to individuals and couples who pay no income tax. Sadly, this feature was begun in the Tax Cut and Jobs Act in 2017.
This provision would amount to a whopping 32% expansion of this welfare credit by 2026—at which point, in typical Washington fashion, these handouts would expire and create a political crisis where tens of millions of people would lose their brand-new welfare benefits—creating a perfect storm for yet more expansion and permanence.
Currently, households with more than $2,500 of annual earned income can qualify for the additional child tax credit. The credit phases in at a rate of $15 for every $100 of earned income after $2,500.
The new tax and welfare bill would accelerate the phase-in so that, for example, a taxpayer with $10,000 of annual income claiming three children could receive a $3,375 benefit instead of $1,125, despite paying $0 in income tax. This additional benefit would be on top of $4,500 in earned income tax credit benefits and any otherwelfarebenefits he mayreceive.
This would also likely exacerbate existing fraud issues with both programs. The improper payment rate for the earned income tax credit was at 31.6% for fiscal year 2022 while the improper payment rate stood at 15.8% for the additional child tax credit.
To make matters worse, a tax filer would be able to claim this new enlarged additional child tax credit with an individual taxpayer identification number instead of a Social Security number, meaning that many of these new payments would go to illegal immigrants. This was another shortcoming of the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act that is not fixed in this bill.
The bill would also add a lookback provision for the work requirement, so that if a household doesn’t work enough in 2024 to qualify for the credit, but they did in 2023, they would be allowed to receive the benefits based on the prior year of work. In other words, to qualify for the benefits, it would be enough to work part-time, part of the year, even if you only work every other year.
Conservatives have long fought for stronger work requirements for welfare recipients. This legislation fails to enact any and actually takes a step backward in that respect.
The business tax provisions in the bill are better than the welfare provisions, but they’re also deeply flawed.
For example, the bill would temporarily extend for 2024 and 2025 some expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that allow companies to deduct research and development expenses and short-lived capital investments in the same year that they bear those costs instead of having to depreciate or amortize those costs over multiple years. That’s good tax policy and also leads to more growth by encouraging investment.
However, the pro-growth benefits of those changes are done alongside retroactive relief for the 2022 and 2023 tax years. Such a windfall does nothing to improve companies’ incentives to invest, since they can’t go back in time to change past investment decisions.
The bill does include a modest win by slightly increasing the expenditure threshold where small businesses may qualify for full expensing, and this change is permanent.
The combination of these handouts and the temporary nature of most of the expensing provisions culminates in a staggering long-run growth estimate of precisely zero new jobs created. Yes, you read that right: A Tax Foundation modeling analysis showed that the contrived and odd construction of these provisions would have no impact on long-run economic growth. Maybe it creates momentum for pro-growth policy in 2025, but the bill itself doesn’t move the dial much.
The Joint Committee on Taxation—the official congressional scorekeepers—agree that the business provisions would have no significant impact on economic growth. Tens of billions of dollars of corporate windfall handouts buy a grand total of no long-run economic growth.
To compound these issues, even ignoring the gimmicky way the bill intends to “pay for” these handouts, the formal cost estimate shows $155 billion in new deficits through this year and next from this bill. This would only add to inflationary pressures and spike interest rates—including on mortgages and on loans to small businesses looking to expand.
As with much “bipartisan” legislation, this one falls short on conservative principles. The bill has some small wins but unfortunately will redistribute wealth from hardworking middle-class families to large established corporations and to individuals who are barely engaged in work at all.
The left is trying to convince voters that the disaster they have created via Obama and Biden is great compared to the devastation that will happen if Trump is elected, although most people know their lives were substantially better under Trump’s policies. Secure borders, foreign policy, energy independence, and the economy, just to name a few.
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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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement on Wednesday asserting that the Lone Star State has a constitutional right to defend its sovereignty in the wake of an invasion facilitated by President Biden’s open border policies.
“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now,” Abbott wrote. “President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them. The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration.”
According to the Washington Examiner, more than 10 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended by U.S. border officials since Biden assumed the presidency in January 2021. Those figures don’t even include the estimated 1.7 million “gotaways” who evaded capture upon illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
In his statement, Abbott slammed Biden for facilitating the ongoing invasion and noted how the president’s “refusal to protect the States” has resulted in “more than 6 million illegal immigrants” traversing Texas’ border alone. That figure is greater than the population of more than 30 states.
The Texas governor further underscored the federal government’s obligation to defend states from invasion and the states’ right to defend their sovereignty from outside forces, citing Article IV, § 4, and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution. While the former stipulates that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” the latter recognizes “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”
“James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border,” Abbott wrote. “The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense.”
“For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” he continued. “That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”
Abbott’s remarks appear to come in response to a Monday decision by the U.S. Supreme Court allowing the Biden administration to authorize Customs and Border Protection officials to cut razor wire installed along the border by Texas to stymie illegal immigration. Five of the court’s nine justices sided with the administration, including Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
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
If you pick me, that’ll be the end of politics, and you won’t have to deal with politics anymore. You won’t have to deal with contested elections, you won’t have to deal with contests or divisions when it comes to power, you’ll have a strongman leader and I’ll just do what I want. And won’t that be a lot simpler? That’s what he’s offering. That strongman model is what the Republican base is enthused about.
Funny, because this also happens to be what Maddow is enthused about. It’s what the officials taking leading presidential candidates off ballots are enthused about. So is Joe Biden, who gives angry speeches demonizing opposition voters and demanding one-party rule. Everyone wants his own dictator. Every president wants to be one. Politics can turn normally rational people into raging authoritarians.
The thing about wanna-be dictators, though, is that they have no real way of pulling it off. Don’t get me wrong: the consequences of an imperial presidency are bad enough. But there will be no military coups in America. There will be no Hitler. No political riot is going to overthrow “democracy.” That’s all paranoia. The reality is much more mundane. It’s what we have now — a slow-motion, tedious corrosion of basic standards.
And both sides aren’t equally at fault. The things progressives detest most about our system—a deliberative Senate, federalism, counter-majoritarian institutions, various inconvenient liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, for starters—compel Trump to deal with “politics.”
Here, for instance, is something I think most Democrats probably know but would never say: If a President Trump blatantly exceeded his constitutional authority, it is highly likely that “conservative” justices would stop him. Yet every time the court renders a decision undercutting the political agenda of the GOP, which is often, the media acts like it’s some big surprise. It’s not. And Trump, for all his bluster last term, didn’t ignore the courts.
Now, if Biden blatantly exceeded his executive authority, as he already often does, what are the chances that a “liberal” majority court would bless his actions? When you have no limiting principles, it all comes down to justifying the morality of the underlying issue. Considering the modern left’s collective superiority complex, that is never a difficult task.
We don’t really need to theorize about how this works, either. Many left-wing politicians and intellectuals — self-styled defenders of “democracy” — not only implore Biden to ignore courts, they press him to declare national emergencies empowering the president to run virtually the entire economy through a massive administrative state. If Trump threatened to take similar power, the media would be convulsing with horror.
Indeed, the contemporary left isn’t working to delegitimize the court because it harbors ethical concerns (the people leading the charge are corrupt), it’s because they want to circumvent a court that still occasionally limits state power and preserves American “democracy.”
Won’t that be a lot simpler? Maybe if Trump wins in 2024, he’ll figure out that the Federalist Society’s principled jurists make no political sense for him and nominate lightweight partisans like Sonia Sotomayor to uphold whatever crackpot theory he wants. Why not?
When the Supreme Court upheld the Civil Rights Act, eliminating racist preferences in schools, Biden said, “We cannot let this decision be the last word. I want to emphasize: We cannot let this decision be the last word.” That is something of a mantra for him.
A few years ago, Biden admitted he didn’t have the constitutional authority to extend (Trump’s) eviction moratorium. An extension would not “pass constitutional muster,” he said. The president, the administration noted, had “not only kicked the tires, he has double, triple, quadruple checked.”
It was illegal, and Biden did it anyway. Congressional Democrats, tasked to protect the interests of their institution, cheered him on. The same goes for the obviously unconstitutional student loan bailout Biden keeps proposing. High-ranking Democrats, in fact, demand that Biden ignores the Constitution and separation of powers.
If Biden feels like he can dismiss SCOTUS on student loans, or anything else, why shouldn’t Texas ignore SCOTUS on protecting its borders? Maybe Texas should think about taking up the Biden method, which would entail erecting a new, slightly different fence every time the court shoots down the idea.
All of it is reminiscent of Barack Obama telling Americans he couldn’t pass the DREAM Act because he was not a “king” or an “emperor,” and then doing it anyway. Indeed, the premise of the Obama presidency was the circumvention of “politics,” summed up neatly in the illiberal notion of political “unity.”
Once Obama lost control of Congress in 2010, he not only acted like a person who didn’t “have to deal with politics anymore,” he became the first president in memory to openly champion working around the law-making branch of government. “If Congress won’t act, I will,” he liked to say. People cheered.
Since then, every time Democrats can’t get their way, we are inundated with stories about how the system isn’t working correctly, rather than stories about how the contemporary left is destroying the system to fix the problem.
Now, I’m not naïve. Most voters couldn’t care less about these idealistic arguments. I don’t know “what time it is,” apparently. That said, protecting the system is not only a high-minded pursuit, but also the most practical way to preserve your own policy achievements and freedoms.
But you can’t expect the opposition to play by rules when you refuse to honor them. You can’t lecture everyone about accepting elections when you won’t. And you can’t keep acting like you’re saving “democracy” when you’re murdering it.
I mean, you can. It seems like the more norm-busting degradation of the system you promise, the more popular you become these days. But that does not bode well for our future.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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