President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, is relying on Second Amendment arguments that his father once slammed as “deeply” troubling to escape conviction on gun crimes.
On Monday, attorneys for the president’s son filed a series of motions to dismiss federal charges handed down by Special Counsel David Weiss. Among the charges Biden’s attorneys want thrown out are firearm charges that were filed on the basis of Hunter Biden purchasing a gun as a drug addict. Hunter Biden’s initial sweetheart plea agreement — which was derailed this summer after it fell apart in court — would have forgiven the felony firearm conviction if Hunter maintained 24 months of sobriety.
“Hunter Biden asserts that the gun charges fail as a matter of constitutional law because Congress could not criminalize the possession of a gun by an addict,” explained Federalist Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland. “And since Congress could not criminalize possession by an addict, it also could not make lying about being an addict a crime. Therefore, Hunter Biden argues the three gun charges fail.”
Hunter Biden’s attorneys cited United States v. Daniels, a 5th Circuit decision in August that reversed the firearm conviction of a non-violent drug user.
“In short, our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage,” the court ruled. “Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users.”
“The prosecution charges that Mr. Biden violated a rarely used statute that it claims prevented him from owning a firearm as an unlawful user of a controlled substance,” Hunter Biden’s lawyers wrote in their Monday motion. “But that statute’s status-based prohibition on gun ownership recently was struck down as unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.”
The Daniels decision followed the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, a landmark ruling in 2022 that broadly upheld the right to carry a handgun in public.
In another gun rights case that followed Bruen, attorneys for an Oklahoma man who was pulled over with a gun and marijuana in his car “argued the portion of federal firearms law focused on drug users or addicts was not consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, echoing what the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled last year” in Bruen.
Attorneys for Hunter Biden cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen 19 times in their motion filed on Monday. And yet, when the court handed down the landmark case in June 2022, President Biden said the “ruling contradicts both common sense and the Constitution and should deeply trouble us all.”
Now, Hunter’s case may further strengthen the Second Amendment protections his father disparaged.
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.
Christmas is supposed to be a season for love, comfort, and joy, but the arrival of the holidays means the grinches, scrooges, and corrupt politicians of the world are lurking. This year, unfortunately, yielded an abundance of bureaucrats, brands, and buffoons who blew their shot to make the nice list when they sacrificed common sense and dignity for partisanship and radicalism.
Merry Christmas to everyone except these naughty no-gooders!
1. Jack Smith
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s association with the corrupt Department of Justice alone was enough to land him in Santa’s bad graces. Smith further solidified his place on the naughty list when he brought two “legally flawed and politically shady” cases against former President Donald Trump over classified documents and the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Smith also demanded the court gag Trump from criticizing him, President Joe Biden, and other deep-state bureaucrats for their hyperpartisan prosecution of his First Amendment right to claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, which D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan eagerly agreed to do.
2. Letitia James
James is on the naughty list for following through on her campaign promise to sue Trump, his children, and the Trump Organization for allegedly “grossly” inflating their assets in financial statements by billions of dollars.
Despite bringing a case with “no merit” and “no evidence,” James continues to work with Arthur Engoron, a judge of the Supreme Court 1st Judicial District in New York, to silence Trump and keep him from conducting business in the state of New York.
3. David Weiss
Every time a bell rings, a corrupt Department of Justice official like Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss gets named special counsel.
Weiss and the DOJ deliberately choked the IRS’s tax crime investigation and charging recommendations for Hunter Biden because they didn’t want to damage the elder Biden’s presidential chances.
After a federal judge denied Hunter’s initial sweetheart plea deal, the Biden son was eventually charged with several tax-related felonies and misdemeanors, but Weiss failed to indict him for any foreign influence-peddling or registered foreign agent violations.
House investigators warned the tax charges would never have happened without the testimonies of IRS whistleblowers the DOJ tried to silence.
4. Joe Biden
Biden may not technically have a stocking since his family was publicly shamed into ditching the tradition after leaving their seventh grandchild out of last year’s display, but he’s for sure getting coal for Christmas (for the second year in a row!) for repeatedly denying his role in the Biden family influence-peddling scheme.
Senate Republicans certainly don’t deserve presents this year. They may not even deserve your votes.
Their gravest 2023 mistake by far was working to take down one of their own, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, for daring to hold the Department of Defense accountable for its embrace of Biden’s radical abortion agenda. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer later thanked the GOP senators forcurbing Tuberville’s protest of the Pentagon’s baby-killing activism.
The upper chamber GOP didn’t stop there. They were also indefensibly silent on Biden family corruption and impeachment, ignored their constituents’ feelings about taxpayer-funded abortion, and spent a majority of the year simping for Ukraine. It was only when it was no longer politically beneficial to put a foreign country over their own — a move many Americans have long opposed — that they started to pivot.
6. Elite Universities
Presidents from three of the nation’s top universities refused to admit that student calls for Jewish genocide following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel violate their schools’ codes of conduct. Backlash ensued, prompting both University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill, who faces a forced resignation, and Harvard President Claudine Gay to issue apologies days after the hearing.
In an interview with the student newspaper The Crimson, Gay blamed her delayed condemnation of antisemitism on a failure to “return to my guiding truth.” As one clever X user noted, Harvard’s slogan is “veritas,” not “veritas mae.”
7. Los Angeles Dodgers
Who doesn’t love a good baseball game? There are rowdy fans, Cracker Jacks, and — drag queens? Well, at least at Los Angeles Dodgers’ games there are.
Instead of focusing solely on the sport — which is what any real fan cares about — the Dodgers decided to honor an anti-Christian drag group during this year’s “pride night” game. Known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, this group’s members mock Christians by dressing up as so-called “queer and trans nuns” and performing highly offensive acts on biblical symbols, including the cross.
While initially disinviting the group after public backlash, the Dodgers caved to the leftist mob by apologizing to the Sisters and begging them to attend the “pride” event.
If that’s not worthy of coal this Christmas, I don’t know what is.
8. Bud Light
What better way to make the Yuletide gay than by chugging down a cold can of Bud Light?
After partnering with woman-pretender and TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney this year, the Anheuser-Busch brand’s sales tanked, with drinkers abandoning the beer quicker than Hunter Biden left town when he found out the stripper he had sex with was pregnant.
Sales got so bad that retailers could hardly even give Bud Light away for free. But that didn’t stop the beer giant from doubling down on its LGBT obsession by sponsoring various “pride” events throughout the country.
9. Target
Target and the naughty list go way back, but the company’s partnership with a Satan supporter who called for the eradication of critics of transgenderism, and its “pride month” displays featuring “light binding effect” tops and “tuck-friendly” bottoms, angered millions of Americans.
Miss Americana Taylor Swift may have won Time’s Person of the Year, but that doesn’t mean she won over everyone’s hearts. The pop star’s presence at boyfriend Mr. Pfizer’s — er, Travis Kelce’s — NFL games stole the TV cameras, sports announcers, and fantasy football apps away from America’s favorite Sunday evening pastime.
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. 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
Constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Thursday that the Jan. 6 case the Supreme Court has agreed to take up “probably” applies to former President Donald Trump, in addition to a number of other Jan. 6 defendants, including his client.
“Look, these were not obstructions of justice,” Dershowitz said during an appearance on “National Report.” “These were attempts to exercise First Amendment rights to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Some of the people went too far and destroyed property, but those people who just tried to influence the congressional hearings were exercising their constitutional right.
“They’re entitled to do it, and I think the court will render a ruling in which it says that the indictments of many of the people went too far by charging obstruction of justice.”
“It doesn’t apply to everybody, but I think it probably does apply to President Trump,” he continued. “He, too, as a citizen, had the right to petition his government for what he believed was a redress of grievances.
“He was wrong, in my view, but that doesn’t affect his legal claim of acting under the First Amendment. So, I think the Supreme Court may very well render a ruling that helps former President Trump, helps my client and helps many others who were swept up in this.
“It’s very important that everybody be treated as individuals. If you did something, if you went in there and you destroyed property deliberately, that’s one thing. But if you simply objected to the way in which the votes were counted, even if you were wrong, that’s a complete defense under the Constitution.”
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court agreed to decide if a man involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol Building can be charged with obstructing an official proceeding. Defendant Joseph Fischer, who was indicted on seven charges following the Jan. 6 protest, is 1 of at least 325 people facing that charge for their alleged roles in the incident. The charge has also been brought against Trump in the federal case charging him with trying to overturn the 2020 election results.
In agreeing to take up the case, the justices made no mention of the Trump prosecution, but legal experts say Trump’s lawyers could argue that the court’s move should delay the start of the trial, slated to begin in March.
Dershowitz said everything, for both Trump and the Department of Justice, comes down to “timing,” given next year’s November presidential election.
“The prosecutors want a down and dirty conviction to affect the election, before the election, knowing that they very well may be reversed on appeal, but that will be too late to affect the election,” he said. “And so both sides are playing the timing game and timing is always up to the judges themselves — how quickly they put the case on, how quickly they decide the case. There’s very little anybody can do to affect the timing of judges.”
“But it really affects all of us because there are many Americans who won’t vote for somebody who has been convicted of a serious felony, whether it be on the Democratic side or the Republican side,” he continued. “So, the criminal justice system has been weaponized by both sides to try to influence the election and the losers are the American public.
“We’re not getting fair justice on either side. We’re getting politicized, weaponized, partisan justice.”
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
The U.S. Senate is expected to delay the start of its holiday break as bipartisan talks on border security and providing more aid to Ukraine and Israel continue, multiple senators said on Thursday.
“We’re making progress and the White House is engaged, which is good. Everything’s encouraging,” Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, told reporters, cautioning that “right now, they’re still talking concepts.”
Lawmakers said the Senate would return on Monday, delaying the start of its holiday break.
President Joe Biden has been urging lawmakers to pass a supplemental aid package to provide $50 billion in new security to Ukraine as it fights off Russian invasion, as well as $14 billion for Israel as it wages war against Hamas in Gaza.
Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as Republicans in the Democrat-majority Senate, have repeatedly said they will only vote for that aid if it is paired with new controls for the U.S.-Mexico border.
Any deal reached in the Senate, which Democrats control by a 51-49 majority, would also need to win the approval of the House, which Republicans control 221-213, before passing into law.
House lawmakers left Washington as scheduled on Thursday to begin their holiday recess.
“There is too much on the line for Ukraine, for America, for Western democracy to throw in the towel right now. We must keep talking, we must keep working,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said in a floor speech on Thursday morning.
What if some of the antagonism around labor unions in the United States could be reduced by eliminating laws that force workers and unions alike to do things against their will? A new bill in Congress would do that. Pictured: Employees of The Washington Post walk a picket line as they stage a 24-hour strike outside The Washington Post building Dec. 7. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
What if some of the antagonism around labor unions in the United States could be reduced by eliminating laws that force workers and unions alike to do things against their will?
That’s what the Worker’s Choice Act, introduced Wednesday by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), would do.
Current law forces workers in unionized workplaces to be represented by a union even if they do not join the union and it forces unions to represent workers who do not pay union fees. The Worker’s Choice Act would allow workers who do not pay union fees to choose their own representation, and it would free unions from having to represent so-called free riders who do not pay union fees.
Under the Worker’s Choice Act, employees who live in the 26 “right to work” states that do not require workers to pay union fees as a condition of employment would no longer be forced to accept union representation that they do not want. Instead, they could negotiate directly with their employer, or choose their own outside representation. This change would apply to the 4.2 million workers in right-to-work states who are currently represented by unions. Among them, nearly 800,000 currently nonpaying workers would no longer be represented by unions unless they chose to begin paying for representation.
The proposed law would not change anything for the 11.8 million workers in unionized workplaces in forced unionism states where the law requires workers to pay for union representation even if they do not join the union.
This freedom from union representation would be particularly helpful to workers who do not believe the union represents their interests. They may think this for any number of reasons. A worker may want to be compensated and promoted based on her performance instead of the union’s rigid seniority-based system; a worker may feel ignored and ostracized by the union that is supposed to represent him; a worker may have caregiving duties that could be alleviated through a different schedule than the union dictates; and a young worker struggling to start a family and buy a home might be better served by bigger paychecks rather than the union’s Cadillac benefits plan.
Yet the bill does not only help workers. It would also free unions of their “free rider” problem. No longer would unions have to represent workers who don’t pay for representation. This would enable unions to focus their efforts on the interests of their paying members. Without the costs of representing nonpaying members, unions could lower their fees for those who want union representation. Moreover, some unions’ membership may even increase as non-members may choose to become dues-paying members to maintain their representation. Workers’ voices cannot truly be heard if workers are prevented from speaking for themselves and prevented from choosing who gets to speak for them. A 2016 Heritage Foundation analysis found that 94% of workers represented by unions did not vote for their representation.
Ending forced representation would benefit workers and unions alike by freeing workers to choose their representation and freeing unions to focus their time and resources only on workers who want and are willing to pay for their representation. An upshot of this shift could be growth in alternative types of labor organizations that allow more workers to band together and benefit from their shared interests and pursuits.
For example, as more workers are pursuing independent work that allows them to be their own bosses, professional organizations like the Association of Independent Doctors and the Freelancers Union can provide a collective voice and pooled resources to offer lower-cost products and services such as insurance, education, and advocacy.
Labor unions could also offer more targeted representation services that allow individuals to represent themselves, in order to appeal to more workers. For example, the Major League Baseball Players Association sets minimum salary requirements and provides individual representation services but also allows individuals to negotiate their compensation directly with their employer.
Exclusive representation muffles the voices and denies the rights of at least a minority of workers, and imposes undue burdens on unions. Prioritizing workers’ choices and reducing government barriers to work pursuits are crucial to elevating workers’ voices, improving their well-being, and expanding their opportunities.
Police tape surrounds a crime scene where a suspect rammed into the San Francisco Chinese Consulate on Oct. 9, 2023. (Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party.
If the Left wished radically to alter the demography of the U.S., it could have expanded legal immigration through legislation or the courts. Instead, it simply erased the border and dynamited federal immigration law.
By fiat, nihilists ended the wall, and stopped detaining and deporting illegal aliens altogether. Or was it worse than that when candidate Joe Biden in September 2019 urged would-be illegal aliens to “surge” the border?
As a result, through laxity and entitlement incentives, 8 million illegal entrants have swarmed the southern border under the Biden administration. They are swamping border towns, bankrupting big-city budgets, and infuriating even Democratic constituencies. The same nihilism applies to crime.
In the old days liberals gave light sentences to criminals or reduced bail. But today leftist prosecutors do not even seek bail. They hardly prosecute theft or random assaults. Criminals are arrested and released the same day. Is the nihilist plan to destroy the entire body of American jurisprudence, and to ensure “equity” in being victimized?
Is the woke idea that all Americans—inclusive of diverse Beverly Hills elites, Hollywood celebrities, or members of Congress alike—must share victim equity, and thus experience firsthand street robbery, car-jacking, smash-and-grab, and home invasion?
The United States can produce annually more natural gas and oil than any nation on earth. It once pioneered nuclear power. It has vast coal reserves and sophisticated hydroelectric plants. The old idea was to use these unmatched resources to transition gradually to other cleaner fuels such as hydrogen, fusion power, solar, and wind. That way consumers would still enjoy affordable energy. And the United States could remain independent of coercion by the oil-producing Middle East.
But that was not the nihilist way. Instead, the Left deliberately cut back on pipelines, new energy leases, and fracking. It bragged of an upcoming ban on fossil fuels. In drought-stricken, energy-short California, the state is blowing up, not building new dams.
Is the nihilist agenda to punish with bankruptcy the energy-using middle class? Is the hope that Americans will have to beg the Saudis, Iranians, Venezuelans, and Russians to pump more of the hated goo for our benefit so we would not have to dirty ourselves helping ourselves?
When Biden entered office in January 2021 the U.S. was naturally rebounding from more than a year of COVID-19-enforced lockdowns. Overtaxed supply chains were still fragile. Pent-up demand was soaring. Consumers were flush with government cash. Trillions of dollars had been printed and infused into the economy to ward off a feared recession. All economists advised not to increase the deficit, spike further consumer demand, and expand entitlements. Instead, the Left did just the opposite.
Four-trillion dollars were printed and distributed. In no time, Americans, recovering from COVID-19, next experienced the worst, but entirely preventable, inflation in 40 years. Three years later prices on staples remain 30%-40% higher than when Biden took office. Mortgage rates tripled.
Abroad the nihilism is even more inexplicable and terrifying. All nations suffer military setbacks. But none in memory have shamefully hightailed out of a theater as we did from Afghanistan. Few countries could even imagine discarding billions of dollars of weapons and hardware into the hands of the terrorist Taliban, or abandoning a $1 billion new embassy, and a huge, remodeled air base.
Why did the administration simply allow a huge Chinese spy balloon to float and photograph leisurely over the continental U.S.? Naive countries might endure two or three attacks on their overseas bases without serious retaliation. But how could the U.S. military permit 135 rocket barrages by Iranian-supplied terrorists on American soldiers without a major and sustained response?
Is the point to humiliate our own troops? To destroy what is left of U.S. deterrence?
Popular culture is especially captive to leftist nihilism. It is not enough to object to a statue or artwork. Instead, without deliberation or public input, they must be defaced or destroyed, all the better stealthily and by night.
After the massacres of Oct. 7—but well before Israel had even responded to the barbaric invasion—thousands of students swarmed their elite universities cheering on the violence. And what so exhilarated them? The nihilist, ghoulish beheading, torture, mutilation, mass rape, dismemberment, and necrophilia of unarmed, civilian Israeli elderly, women, children, and infants.
In sum, we are witnessing an epidemic of leftist nihilism similar to the 16th-century European mad wave of iconoclastic destruction of religious art.
Or is the better parallel the suicidal insanity that Mao Zedong unleashed during his cultural revolution of the 1960s?
The old politics of Right versus Left, and Republican opposed to Democrat have now given way to a new existential struggle: Americans must choose between civilization—or its destroyers.
The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote a book to argue that Trump-supporting Christians are apostates and enemies of democracy, Tim Graham says. (Photo: Jose A. Bernat Bacete/Getty Images)
In a previous epoch, Tim Alberta was a reporter for National Review, one of too many NR cubs who later joined the liberal-media zoo. Alberta is now at The Atlantic, one of America’s most intense producers of frothing leftist drivel.
It seems like every leftist network has welcomed Alberta to trash conservative Christians through his latest book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” It’s touted as Alberta’s “deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement. Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood— people living in America today.”
Wait. No one in these interviews asks about the polarizing cultural extreme on the libertine Left. That extreme is the leftist media’s address, at the corner of GLAAD Street and Planned Parenthood Avenue.
Interviewers loved Alberta’s funeral story. On the “PBS NewsHour,” anchor Geoff Bennett began: “I asked Tim about a searing moment he describes, when, at his own father’s funeral, a church elder admonished him for not fully embracing Donald Trump as God’s chosen leader.”
Is this an exact quote? Alberta answered: “Once I was able to process it, because it was a surreal moment, having just buried my father—you’re in this state of mourning and of shock, and not sure, is this even real? … If I could be treated this way, if I could be regarded as a member of the deep state, as an enemy of the church, as an apostate—if I could be treated that way, then how are we treating those outside the church?”
On NPR’s “Fresh Air,” host Terry Gross also loved the funeral tale: “Let me back up and say that Rush Limbaugh started quoting you and assailing you on his radio show. What was he saying about you?”
Alberta said, “Rush Limbaugh was on his show describing some of my unflattering characterizations of Donald Trump and of the evangelical movement. Trump himself was tweeting about my book. I was getting a lot of threats, a lot of nasty email, a lot of criticism from right-wing media.” So “people were asking me if I was really still a Christian, if I was on the right side of good versus evil … and all the while, of course, my dad is in a box 100 feet away.”
Gross then asked, “If they saw that in you, the son of their pastor, you, who many of them had known your entire life, that—what about people who they don’t know? How easy is it to dehumanize them and just make them into the enemy?”
Funerals shouldn’t be a setting for political combat, which is why they love this funhouse portrait of conservative Christians. But Alberta wrote this book to argue that Trump-supporting Christians are apostates and enemies of democracy. PBS and NPR and the rest “dehumanize” conservatives routinely.
Alberta was bitterly angry at his pastor father for voting for Trump in 2016. So, what kind of Christian is a Hillary Clinton backer? Why is his pro-abortion “division” of evangelicalism not “threatening to destroy” it?
Alberta and his media helpers can’t seem to find the cultural context of our times. The arrival of “same-sex marriage,” naturally followed by twerking drag queen performances for children, and graphically sexual books in school libraries, and “gender-affirming care” for minors aren’t reasons for Christians to feel something is slipping away?
Is nothing “extremist” about that? Do Alberta’s model Christians offer any remedy or resistance to these trends? No one asked.
Obama, Biden, and the Democrats could write the book on being a Fascist/Communist style dictator in America yet they, along with the corporate media, are trying to label Trump as a dictator?
Delusional Cheney Claims Trump Will Be A Dictator, Warns Trump’s Comments Must Be Taken ‘Literally And Seriously’
By Alicia Powe
As former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. promotes her soon-to-be-flopped new book, she continues to wail over former President Donald Trump’s lingering control over the Republican Party.
In an interview slated to air Sunday on ABC News‘ “This Week,” Cheney echoed the Deep State’s attempt to silence Trump and institute speech crimes, warning Americans cannot brush off Trump’s comments, but must take his words “literally and seriously.
“I think we have to take everything that Donald Trump says literally and seriously,” the former lawmaker said. “And I think that we saw, frankly, what he was willing to do already after the 2020 election in the lead up to Jan. 6, after Jan 6,” she continued. “People need to remember that when Donald Trump woke up on the morning of Jan. 6, he thought he was going to – 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 • Supreme Court Will Hear Case to Ban Mail-Order Abortions, Save Babies From Dangerous Abortion Pills • OBGYN Says Abortion Pill Injures 20% of Women Who Take it, Some Women Have Died • Texas Supreme Court Rebukes Judge Who Authorized Abortion in Violation of State Law • Pro-Abortion Groups Exploit Kate Cox to Push Abortions Up to Birth
More Pro-Life News • Mom Fights in Court After State Denies Adoption Due To Her Christian Beliefs • Marco Rubio Introduces Bill Requiring Biological Fathers to Pay Pregnancy Expenses • Society Needs to Stop Victimizing and Killing Disabled People • Supreme Court Review of Abortion Pill Could Save Babies From Abortion, Protect Women • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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The board of Harvard unanimously voted to retain the university’s president Claudine Gay despite her public refusal to say that calls for genocide of Jewish students would contradict Harvard’s code of conduct — and subsequent allegations of past plagiarism.
“Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the Harvard Corporation announced in a statement on Tuesday.
Gay kept her position despite both credible allegations of plagiarism and an abysmal performance alongside other university presidents before the House Education and the Workforce Committee. On Capitol Hill last week, Gay along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania refused to testify that calls for Jewish genocide violate student codes of conduct — despite their schools’ histories of punishing students for conservative speech.
“We embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful,” Gay said. “It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment, intimidation.”
Gay’s peers offered lawmakers similar answers when it came to confronting students who called for the genocide of Jews at their respective schools. University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned from her role on Saturday after donors responded to her disastrous testimony by pulling contributions. Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, threatened to withdraw a $100 million donation from his alma mater — and he was only one donor to threaten to pull funding.
Investor and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman claimed that Gay’s poor performance had cost Harvard more than a billion dollars. But somehow Gay survived both poor reactions from donors and allegations of plagiarism, a chief sin in academia — and it was likely not a coincidence.
Gay is the first black woman to run the university that is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious institutions in higher education.
“She assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal,” Chris Rufo reported Monday in City Journal. “As dean and then as president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, following the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, failing to stand up to rampant anti-Semitism on campus.” She landed the top job at Harvard despite having only authored 11 peer-reviewed articles, four of which have now come under allegations of plagiarism.
Gay, however, is among one of the most protected classes according to the left’s hierarchy of victimhood. Firing not just a woman but a black woman would be blasphemous against the religion of identity politics.
“A white male would probably already be gone,” observed Carol Swain, a retired professor from Vanderbilt and Princeton whose work was apparently plagiarized by Gay.
Swain, who is black, told Fox News that “obviously” Harvard “did not have the courage to fire its first black president.”
The New York Post reported Monday night that Harvard University even threatened the paper months ago over the Post’s own probe into Gay’s allegations of plagiarism. Yet, as dean, Gay reportedly forced “dozens” of students to leave campus over violations of academic integrity codes.
So-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives such as the programs endorsed by Gay, however, have begun to replace merit-based standards in academia, government, and business, with physical characteristics becoming a factor in employment eligibility. The vice president and a Supreme Court justice were both explicitly chosen based on their sex and skin color.
In the Soviet Union, residents needed a party card to guarantee their employment and other benefits unavailable to the rest of the country. In America today, special perks are now afforded to those who meet the criteria of preferred classes, from race to sexual orientation.
DEI is welfare for idiots who are unemployable in the absence of identity politics. In the Soviet Union, the party card was a guarantee of employment and perks unavailable to the unwashed masses. In America in 2023, identity politics serves the same purpose. With the right skin…
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.
Should universities punish students who chant genocidal slogans aimed at Jews or sign petitions blaming women and children for their own murders? It’s a worthwhile debate about open discourse. But don’t let it obscure a more relevant fact: There is no free speech on campus. Not really. Not in any way that matters. And certainly not for those who would dissent against the quackery of identitarianism, intersectionality, and “anti-colonialism” — and a host of other pseudointellectual “-isms” that currently infect education.
If American campuses actually housed robust, open discourse, these “elite” schools wouldn’t be churning out so many moral imbeciles and credentialed ignoramuses who detest the country and civilization that makes “protest” possible. The near uniformity in outlook speaks to the fact that dumb ideas go unchallenged in these hermetically sealed institutions.
It also goes without saying that if Harvard students were signing statements blaming black Americans for the existence of white supremacy or calling for an international Intifada against gay populations, we would already be awash in an overwrought national conversation about the limits of free expression.
Everyone knows, of course, that no such thing would ever happen in the first place. Defending free expression when one side can monopolize debate is worse than an empty gesture.
But even nominally controversial right-of-center ideas barely have a place in these schools. Academic freedom is a myth. Elite schools don’t explicitly prohibit dissenting views. They have merely expelled, neutralized, grandfathered out, and replaced those ideas. Outside of STEM programs and perhaps a few other fields, academia is now dominated by extremists and quacks.
Years ago, I can recall Colorado University making a big show of searching for a professor of “conservative thought” — or some such thing — by which it meant they were looking for a person to teach a set of ideas that would, in any healthy university setting, already be embedded in an array of disciplines. Even when schools ostensibly try to do the right thing, conservatism is treated as a set of exotic notions — something akin to Zoroastrianism.
And it is quite humorous watching donors act like this all somehow snuck up on society. God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” the bestselling book that made William Buckley famous, was published in 1951. The opening line of the 1987 bestselling Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, by Harold Bloom, reads, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”
Malleable truths lead academics to believe in malleable morals, science, and history, which then compels them to contextualize things like genocide. That’s where we’re at.
Now, we can’t bore into the souls of those suddenly and passionately interested in defending the values of free expression. But we do know most of them are nowhere to be found when the state is setting up Ministries of Truth or conservative speakers are being chased from campuses — or, rather, never invited to speak, much less teach.
Indeed, free speech is treated very much like plagiarism at places like Harvard. There are different sets of rules for different people. When a Cornell professor tells a crowd that the wanton murder of Jewish babies is an “exhilarating and energizing” event, he has an incontrovertible right to free speech without consequence. When the conservative Parkland survivor’s invitation to attend Harvard gets rescinded over slurs sent in private texts written when he was 16, not so much. This is a microcosm of the modern-day college experience.
Now, none of this would matter very much if credentialed extremists — armed with an impenetrable emotional certitude about the world but little else — weren’t populating our institutions of journalism, government, and academia. The biggest problem with our rotting universities is that they still matter.
It is debatable whether the hipster-Yasser Arafat cosplayers who bully and harass Jewish kids until they lock themselves in a library are engaging in any legitimate form of expression. Fortunately, no one in the real world has any responsibility to hire them. Freedom of association also matters.
Still, the answer to this kind of bigotry isn’t to give Jewish students special DEI coverage to protect them from ugly speech. Rather, and there is no panacea, universities should be ridding themselves of all DEI protections so everyone has the same opportunities to speak. Not only Jewish students but students who hold other heterodox views — say, a belief in God or a belief that skin color doesn’t define a person or a belief that the American founding was a windfall for humankind. They just need the same freedoms the pro-terrorist crowd already enjoys.
Or, to put in language a Harvard president might understand, let them all speak their “truth.”
A recently released Hamas hostage’s revelation of sexual violence against her fellow captives appears to refute anti-Israel progressives who tend to downplay or dismiss terrorists’ atrocities. Chen Goldstein-Almog, 48, was held hostage by Hamas with three of her children for 51 days following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israelis. Her husband and eldest daughter were murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the attack.
Chen Goldstein-Almog, 48, was held hostage with three of her children by Hamas for 51 days following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on innocent Israelis. (Israel Defense Forces via AP)
Goldstein-Almog and her children were released by the terror group, and the wife and mother gave an interview with the Israeli press on Dec. 11 about her time as a hostage. During her interview, Goldstein-Almog revealed she heard firsthand accounts of sexual violence from other female hostages by their Hamas captors.
“I heard the testimony directly from girls and heard things second hand,” Goldstein-Almog said. “Some of the sexual violence happened well into our time in Gaza, not in the first week.”
“But the way their bodies were desecrated, they don’t know how they will deal with that. It happened weeks into their time in Gaza,” she said.
“If they were released earlier, they would’ve been saved from experiencing sexual violence,” Goldstein-Almog added.
Goldstein-Almog said they “heard three stories firsthand of women saying they were sexually abused and we heard an additional story.” She added that “presumably, there are more instances” of sexual violence by Hamas.
Briahna Joy Gray, a former spokesperson for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, tweeted, “‘Believe all women’ was always an absurd overreach: woman should be heard, claims should be investigated, but evidence is required.” (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
The former hostage also said she “was threatened once when they thought I was wandering around and looking free” in the first apartment they were taken to and that “there was a threat that” she would “be handcuffed, but it didn’t happen.”
“I said I have kids and nothing happened to me,” Goldstein-Almog said. “It was the only time I felt under threat [of sexual violence].”
A spokesperson for the Biden administration State Department noted earlier this month that one of the reasons Hamas does not want to release women hostages is because “they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them.”
Many American progressives have been largely silent on Hamas’ sexual violence against Israelis, while some have downplayed or dismissed the reports of sexual assault.
Briahna Joy Gray, a former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, tweeted earlier this month, “‘Believe all women’ was always an absurd overreach: woman should be heard, claims should be investigated, but evidence is required.”
“The same is true of the allegations out of Israel,” Gray wrote in a Dec. 4 tweet. “But also, this isn’t a ‘believe women’ scenario bc no female victims have offered testimony.”
“Believe all women” was always an absurd overreach: woman should be heard, claims should be investigated, but evidence is required. The same is true of the allegations out of Israel.
But also, this isn’t a “believe women” scenario bc no female victims have offered testimony. https://t.co/a3Ku6gzY8L
“Zionists are asking that we believe the uncorroborated eyewitness account of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms,” Gray continued in a subsequent tweet.
“Shame on Israel for not seriously investigating claims of rape and collecting rape kits,” she added.
Zionists are asking that we believe the uncorroborated eyewitness account of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms.
Shame on Israel for not seriously investigating claims of rape and collecting rape kits. pic.twitter.com/zbHfduQnev
Progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., was torched after she clashed with CNN’s Dana Bash over the lack of widespread condemnation of Hamas’ use of sexual violence against Israeli women during the Oct. 7 attacks. The Washington state Democrat suggested that wasn’t true and claimed she had already condemned Hamas’ treatment of women, before quickly turning the conversation back to Israel.
“But I think we have to remember Israel is a democracy. That is why they’re a strong ally of ours. And if they do not comply with international humanitarian law, they are bringing themselves to a place that makes it much more difficult strategically for them to be able to build allies, to keep public opinion with them, and frankly, morally, we cannot say that one war crime deserves another. That is not what international humanitarian law says,” Jayapal said.
“With respect, I was just asking about the women, and you turned it back to Israel. I’m asking you about Hamas,” Bash said.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal was torched after she clashed with CNN’s Dana Bash over the lack of widespread condemnation of Hamas’ use of sexual violence against Israeli women during the Oct. 7 attacks. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The lawmaker said she had already answered the question and added, “We have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians. Fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, three-quarters of whom are women and children.”
“And it’s horrible,” Bash said. “But you don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.”
“I don’t want this to be the hierarchies of oppressions,” Jayapal said.
Jayapal has since issued a statement“unequivocally” condemning “Hamas’ use of rape and sexual violence as an act of war.”
“This is horrific and across the world, we must stand with our sisters, families, and survivors of rape and sexual assault everywhere to condemn this violence and hold perpetrators accountable,” Jayapal said.
Neither Jayapal nor Gray immediately responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Fox News Digital’s Hanna Panreck contributed reporting.
Houston Keene is a politics writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Houston.Keene@Fox.com and on Twitter: @HoustonKeene
Hunter Biden is facing intense backlash after holding a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday in which he refused to sit for a deposition before Congress, and declared his father, President Biden, was never “financially involved” in his business dealings. Calls to hold Hunter in contempt of Congress began almost immediately following the end of the press conference, while other critics pointed to the claims concerning his father’s relationship to his business dealings as “goalpost shifting.”
“They belittled my recovery, and they have tried to dehumanize me, all to embarrass my father, who has devoted his entire life to public service,” Hunter said. “For six years I have been a target of the unrelenting Trump attack team. ‘Where’s Hunter?’ Well, here’s my answer. I am here.”
He added that “my father was not financially involved in my business,” saying the elder Biden was not involved in his dealings with Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, or his Chinese investments and others in the United States.
A recent column from New York Times columnist Frank Bruni claimed that the media and Biden allies ignoring the Hunter Biden scandal and other Biden administration corruption are being “dishonest” and “dangerous.” (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
“We have moved from Joe Biden saying he never discussed business with Hunter to a new argument of Joe Biden wasn’t financially involved at all with Hunter’s business & most media haven’t covered the changing stories. Hold Hunter in contempt & impeach Joe,” OutKick founder and Fox News contributor Clay Travis wrote on X.
We have moved from Joe Biden saying he never discussed business with Hunter to a new argument of Joe Biden wasn’t financially involved at all with Hunter’s business & most media haven’t covered the changing stories. Hold Hunter in contempt & impeach Joe: pic.twitter.com/Mpnmohweld
Hunter Biden refuses to comply with @JamesComer's subpoena to be deposed behind closed doors and demands a public hearing so he can tell sob stories on TV.
Reminder that Don Jr. testified behind closed doors for over 40 hours about the Russia hoax.
“Hunter Biden refuses to comply with [Rep. James Comer’s, R-Ky.] subpoena to be deposed behind closed doors and demands a public hearing so he can tell sob stories on TV. Reminder that Don Jr. testified behind closed doors for over 40 hours about the Russia hoax. Hold him in contempt!” conservative commentator Greg Price wrote.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee quickly reacted on social media, pushing back against Hunter’s “stunt.” Reps. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., both echoed those calls to hold Hunter in contempt, accusing him of mocking Congress with a “stunt” and calling his refusal an “obstruction of justice.”
“Hunter Biden, this ain’t Burger King. You can’t Have It Your Way when it comes to congressional subpoenas. Quit the stunts, make your way to the deposition room, and let’s talk,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., wrote.
Donalds also responded to Hunter’s claim he was being targeted by “MAGA Republicans,” declaring, “‘MAGA Republicans’ did not impugn Hunter Biden’s character. Hunter Biden did that to himself.”
“What’s Hunter Biden so afraid of?” wrote Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C.
“This is one HELL of a new qualifier from Hunter Biden. Hunter now says, “My father was not financially involved in my business” FLASHBACK: Joe Biden used to say he has never talked about business with his family. This is a major shift from the Bidens,” GOP communications strategist Steve Guest wrote.
So we've gone from Joe Biden claiming he never even discussed business with Hunter to Hunter claiming Joe was never *financially* involved in his business.
Big goalpost shifting and lots of lies from the Bidens.
Abigail Jackson, the communications director for Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., echoed Guest, noting that “we’ve gone from Joe Biden claiming he never even discussed business with Hunter to Hunter claiming Joe was never *financially* involved in his business. Big goalpost shifting and lots of lies from the Bidens.”
Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden, is seen after making a statement during a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol about testifying publicly to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Wednesday. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“First, Joe Biden had no knowledge, then he had no involvement, and now he has no ‘financial’ involvement. Time to explain ‘10 held by H for the big guy,’ the reported bank records showing a money trail to Joe Biden, and Hunter’s messages saying Joe Biden financially benefited,” Republican National Committee strategic communications director Tommy Pigott wrote.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
Brandon Gillespie is an associate editor at Fox News. Follow him on X at @BGillespieAL
The Law of Unintended Consequences is a public policy constant. Few lawmakers, politicians or academics are wise enough to look beyond their own biases or the next election to grasp the potential follow-on effects of their actions. But in President Biden’s complete surrender of control on our southern border to Mexican drug and human trafficking cartels, we can see political consequences unfolding in real time.
On Dec. 7, Fox News’s Bill Melugin reported that the day before saw a record 12,000 migrant encounters on the southern border with more than 10,200 Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal immigrants.
The recent trends observed in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, historically a Democratic stronghold, indicate a significant shift toward the Republican Party.
Fox’s Griff Jenkins added that Customs and Border Patrol reported that they had more than 535,000 since Oct. 1 with “more than 65,000 Known Gotaways – that’s nearly 1000/day – no idea who they are, where they’re from or why they’re here.”
Separately, John Rogers, a pollster with Cygnal, authored an opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News on Dec. 7 that contained findings from a poll of Hispanic voters. The key takeaway from the poll was a continued shift Hispanic voters to the Republican Party in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
What caused that shift? According to Rogers, it was “…the Democratic Party’s embrace of progressive stances on immigration, the economy, crime and foreign policy.”
The implications for Texas are striking. The Rio Grande Valley contributes a bit more than 3% of the vote in Texas, with about 90% of region’s 1.4 million people being Hispanic – specifically, Tejanos.
Contrary to Democrats’ desire to see Hispanics as a monolithic voting bloc, Tejanos have their own priorities, with 67% holding a favorable view of the U.S. Border Patrol and 61% wanting an “enforcement-based approach” to immigration laws – compared to only 28% who prefer an “amnesty-centered approach.”
But immigration takes second place to the economy, and views on Biden’s economy fare better, with 43% trusting the Democratic Party’s policy prescriptions over 40% for the Republican Party. So, if Bidenflation doesn’t rear its ugly head in the form of higher gas and food prices over the next 11 months, Biden may have a chance with this contingent.
As Rogers notes, “The Democratic Party is increasingly urban and progressive, with an activist base focused on electorally niche issues like gender identity and an economic message that income inequality has killed the American dream.”
But, Rogers concludes, “69% of Hispanic voters in the Valley believe the American dream remains achievable,” leaving South Texas Hispanics “…open to the GOP.”
The shifting political landscape in the Rio Grande Valley, particularly among Hispanic voters, presents a complex picture that reflects broader national trends in immigration policy and political affiliation.
The recent trends observed in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, historically a Democratic stronghold, indicate a significant shift toward the Republican Party, particularly in the context of the 2024 presidential election.
The larger political question is what might happen in other Hispanic communities across America as the Democrats’ White and woke intellectual elite continues its long march to the left.
Chuck DeVore is a vice president with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, was elected to the California legislature, is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, and the author of the new book, “Crisis of the House Never United.”
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to decide whether a man involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol assault can be charged with obstructing an official proceeding, a case with potential implications for the prosecution of Donald Trump.
The man is one of at least 325 people facing that charge for their alleged roles in the attack, which has also been brought against the Republican former president in the federal case charging him with trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat by Democrat President Joe Biden.
The justices said nothing about the Trump prosecution in agreeing to take up the case, but legal experts said Trump’s lawyers could argue that the court’s move should delay the start of his Washington trial on election subversion charges, currently due to begin in March.
Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination to challenge Biden, is facing four concurrent criminal prosecutions. But the Washington case brought by U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith is scheduled to begin first and is seen as the likeliest to be resolved before the Nov. 5 election.
The case taken up Wednesday by the justices involves defendant Joseph Fischer, who was indicted on seven charges following the Jan. 6 riot. Among his charges is one count under a provision of federal criminal law for anyone who “corruptly … obstructs, influences and impedes any official proceeding.”
The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in the case in the coming months and issue a ruling by the end of June.
It was not immediately clear how the Supreme Court’s action on Wednesday might affect Trump’s case. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Typically, the Supreme Court agreeing to review an issue in one case would not be a basis for pausing a separate case that raises the same issue, said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former top federal prosecutor appointed by then-President Barack Obama. Still, McQuade said she expects Trump’s legal team to make the argument because delay “has been his strategy throughout all of these cases.”
LIMITED FOCUS FOR CHARGE?
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, granted Fischer’s pretrial motion to dismiss his obstruction charges, ruling that the statute applied only in cases in which a defendant had taken “some action with respect to a document, record or other object.”
Federal prosecutors appealed that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A divided three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit in April reversed Nichols’ ruling, saying the statute was not limited to documents and records, but instead “applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding.”
The charge carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison with a conviction.
Fischer is awaiting trial on his other criminal charges, including one count of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers and one count of civil disorder, among other charges.
After the election, Trump and his allies made claims that it had been stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. On Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to certify Biden’s victory, protesters stormed the Capitol, broke through barricades, attacked police officers, and vandalized the building, prompting lawmakers and others to flee for safety.
In federal charges brought by Special Counsel Smith, Trump faces four counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results: conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the United States; and conspiracy to deprive citizens of their voting rights.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to his election-related charges, as well as charges stemming from three other ongoing state or federal criminal prosecutions.
Conservative women pushed back vehemently on Wednesday against the idea that Republicans must embrace pro-contraception messaging to win back the White House in 2024. Pictured: Kellyanne Conway, then-senior advisor to President Donald Trump, addresses the media in the press briefing room at the White House on Jan. 10, 2020. (Photo: Jahi Chikwendiu, The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Conservative women are pushing back vehemently against the idea that Republicans must embrace pro-contraception messaging to win back the White House in 2024.
POLITICO reported Wednesday morning that “Kellyanne Conway is going to Capitol Hill on Wednesday with a message for Republicans: Promote contraception or risk defeat in 2024.” Conway reportedly believes the Republican Party can persuade voters that they are not anti-woman by pushing pro-contraceptive messaging.
“This is a mistaken strategy,” warned Alexandra DeSanctis Marr, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Statistics actually suggest that increased access to birth control increases the abortion rate because it leads to more unplanned pregnancies.”
“[Kowtowing] to the Left by promoting abortifacients isn’t a winning GOP strategy,” tweeted Lauren Baldwin, government relations coordinator at the Conservative Policy Institute. “American women deserve better than this.”
This is a mistaken strategy. Statistics actually suggest that increased access to birth control *increases* the abortion rate because it leads to more unplanned pregnancies. See the excellent work of @Michael_J_New for more on this. https://t.co/A0VPNYWXzN
Pro-life groups have previously argued that to counteract the Left’s messaging on abortion—namely, that Republicans are extremist and are pushing pro-life policy because they want to control women—the GOP should focus on the joy of adoption, the lifesaving work of pro-life pregnancy centers, and the unique strengths of women and mothers.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, for example, pushes Republicans not to “ostrich” it by ducking their heads into the sand when they are asked about abortion but instead to highlight their Democratic opponent’s extremism (given that Democrat politicians will often not name a single restriction on abortion that they will support).
Some, like “EWTN Pro-Life Weekly” host Prudence Robertson, fear that Conway’s strategy will only cause more harm to women and further embattle the GOP. Robertson called the idea a “damaging strategy” in a Wednesday tweet.
“Women will be caught in the crossfire for the sake of political wins,” she predicted. “Studies show skyrocketing rates of depression for women on birth control (73%). Not to mention this flies in the face of her [Conway’s] Catholic faith.”
Emma Waters, a research associate in The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, pointed to Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark Supreme Court case that struck down state laws outlawing birth control, even for married couples, pointing out that this case was decided only eight years before Roe v. Wade “wrongly allowed abortion.”
“Casual sex = unplanned pregnancies = more abortion,” she said, above a screenshot of the POLITICO story. “This is NOT the pro-life answer.”
It's funny that the same Republicans who support more contraception as a winning issue, also support more access to IVF, a treatment that routinely tests, freezes, and destroys unwanted embryos. @KellyannePolls Does life begin at conception, or not?
National Review writer Madeleine Kearns warned that “a culture that treats unborn children as disposable begins by treating sexual partners as disposable.”
“You can’t curb the former by encouraging the latter,” she added.
EWTN News contributor Catherine Hadro slammed the strategy in a tweet citing the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute’s numbers on contraception.
“You want to focus in on it?” she asked. “OK. Here’s @Guttmacher’s own numbers, which reveal half of U.S. abortion patients used contraception the month they became pregnant. This is not a pro-life strategy.”
You want to focus in on it? Okay.
Here’s @Guttmacher’s own numbers which reveal half of U.S. abortion patients used contraception the month they became pregnant.
Multiple female conservative professionals also pointed out that public sentiment on birth control is rapidly evolving given the high number of side effects that the drugs have on women’s bodies.
“This makes the GOP look even more out of touch,” tweeted National Review’s Caroline Downey, highlight that there is “a growing Gen-Z [Generation Z] movement” to get off the pill.
“The list of potential risks for the pill is longer than a CVS receipt,” Downey added. “Blood clots, stroke, depression, low libido & more. And, birth control is big business, like abortion.”
NCAA athlete Macy Petty, who advocates for fairness in women’s sports, argued that women deserve better than birth control, saying: “Girls are told the answer to acne, painful periods, unplanned pregnancy is attacking our bodies with birth control chemicals that lead to infertility, mental illness, and more. I could list horror stories, including my own.”
Patricia Patnode, research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tweeted a clip of a comedian joking with women about how drastically their lives changed after they got off birth control, building off viral accounts of women breaking up with their boyfriends once they got off the pill.
“Conservatives should feel safe to attack the health impacts & coercive nature of birth control & the emergency contraceptive market like we do with abortion,” she said. “It’s bad. The culture is broadly on the side of science here.”
Conservatives should feel safe to attack the health impacts & coercive nature of birth control & the emergency contraceptive market like we do with abortion. It’s bad.
The culture is broadly on the side of science here. This clip is a good example⤵️ pic.twitter.com/GfHEXm40bA
Carmel Richardson, an editor at The American Conservative, remarked that she finds it “wild” to see “older ‘conservative’ women still pushing birth control.”
“So many young women of my generation, regardless of their politics, have rejected the pill in favor of holistic health and natural cycles,” she said. “Hormonal drugs are not the way.”
And Sarah Wilder, a reporter for The Daily Caller, accused Conway of ignoring the dangers of birth control for political gain.
“Ironic that Republicans seeking to appear more pro-woman would do so by pushing a synthetic hormone that causes gut issues, heart attacks, depression, infertility, and a myriad of other side effects,” Wilder said. “Stop lying to women for political gain, Kellyanne.”
Ironic that Republicans seeking to appear more pro-woman would do so by pushing a synthetic hormone that causes gut issues, heart attacks, depression, infertility, and a myriad of other side-effects.
Vivek Ramaswamy was on fire Trump style, at the last debate, eviscerating Nikki Haley on corruption and ties to the Military-industrial complex.
“The Only Person More Fascist than the Biden Regime Now, Is Nikki Haley” – Vivek Levels Nikki Haley in Frothy GOP Debate (VIDEO)
By Jim Hoft
The third or fourth GOP presidential primary debate for second place was held Wednesday night on News Nation. The Republican leader Donald Trump is now leading by 48 points – 7 points higher than when the debates started. Donald Trump has wisely passed on the Republican sideshow. 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 • Radical Pro-Abortion Groups Got $2 Billion of Our Tax Dollars, Getting More Under Biden • Kate Cox Should Give Her Disabled Baby a Chance at Life Instead of Having Abortion • Texas Supreme Court Explains Why It Protected a Disabled Baby From an Abortion • Doctor Who Specializes in Treating Children With Trisomy 18 Says 90% of His Patients Survive
More Pro-Life News • Big Abortion Gets $592 Million in Taxpayer Funding Every Year, It’s Time to Defund Planned Parenthood • Pro-Life Advocate Will Run Ads on NBC Exposing Horror of How Abortions Kill Babies • Children Have Worth Even if They are Disabled • Congress Should Vote Against Defense Bill That Makes Americans Fund Abortion Travel • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Several elite American universities have recently been involved in increasingly dramatic debates over the meaning and value of free speech and intellectual diversity. Two weeks ago, the University of Virginia, my current home institution, was the site of an event sponsored by the state’s Department of Education called the “Higher Education Summit on Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity.” The summit generated pledges by the presidents of every state university in Virginia (and some private universities) to create “action plans” to advance the goals of free speech and intellectual diversity.
Last week, the presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT provided plenty of evidence on how they view these goals. They explained to Congress how their understanding of free speech and intellectual diversity did not allow them to protect their Jewish students from a range of actions taken in recent days by students and faculty on their campuses. The university presidents repeatedly hid behind the right to free speech, saying that the Constitution would not allow them to do more to suppress antisemitic advocacy on campus. Outraged by Penn President Liz Magill’s failure to more clearly and forcefully condemn antisemitism on its campus, several mega-donors to Penn announced they would not be giving any more money unless Magill was fired, and after one such donor effectively withdrew $100 million that had already been donated, Magill resigned this past weekend.
At the congressional hearing, Republican members of Congress such as Harvard alumna Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York asked the university administrators why it was unconstitutional for them to protect threatened Jewish students against antisemitic actions — including not just advocacy of intifada and Jewish genocide but targeted threats of violence, and in many cases the crimes of menacing and assault — but perfectly legal for them to have suppressed university professors’ views critical of affirmative action or transgenderism.
This question has an answer, but it is one that the testifying university presidents did not and perhaps could not provide. The answer is this: Free speech and intellectual diversity are inconsistent with the dominant ideology within the vast majority of contemporary American universities. This dominant ideology consists of a set of paired beliefs about the world and what should be done to change it. These beliefs, which I will call the progressive university party line, entail the even more significant and overarching belief that any disagreement with and dissent from core beliefs is a form of violence that must be suppressed.
Core Beliefs of Leftist Universities
The core beliefs of the progressive university party line include at least the following:
1. A system of oppression called systemic racism still permeates the United States. To redress such oppression, some number of people should be hired as faculty and staff and admitted as students because they belong to what are considered oppressed groups. And some such people should be given their positions even if they would be unqualified were they not members of the oppressed group.
2. Beyond its borders, the United States — like other developed countries, such as Israel — has waged a war of imperialist, colonial oppression against so-called people of color, a war in which a primary weapon has been the intellectual framework of the enlightenment, a framework whose purported objective search for truth is simply a façade used to devalue the alternative intellectual perspectives of oppressed people.
3. Without immediate and massive government intervention to stop fossil fuel producers from continuing their carbon emissions and to subsidize the development of wind and solar power, the Earth will suffer catastrophically harmful climate change.
4. The violent crime problem in America is due mostly to widespread legal gun ownership, so violent crime can be at least substantially reduced by severely restricting Americans from possessing firearms.
5. Any government restriction prohibiting a woman from aborting her child at any point after conception is an immoral, patriarchal infringement of her individual rights and liberty. Similarly, an individual’s freedom to use recreational drugs should not be restricted by the government.
6. The prevention of disease and illness justifies virtually any infringement of individual liberty ordered by the state or university.
It would be hard to argue that any of the beliefs listed are not part of the contemporary radical leftist university ideology. Huge and growing university bureaucracies — such as offices of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and sustainability — exist to pursue these policy goals and to ensure that only those people who support these beliefs are hired as faculty and staff.
Danger of Dissent
Paramount among the core beliefs is one that follows directly from those listed: that dissent from any of the core beliefs represents a form of violent oppression that cannot be tolerated within the university.
This danger of dissent is a logical and ineluctable consequence of the listed core beliefs. The danger of dissent holds that to critique any of the core beliefs and espouse a contrary, dissenting view is to inflict harm upon members of the university community. This cannot be overemphasized: Dissent from any of the core beliefs is violence.
To see why this is true, consider just two of the core beliefs. If one opposes government regulations and orders restricting individual liberty to prevent the spread of illness or disease, then obviously one supports the spread of illness and disease. If one opposes gun control measures, then since guns cause violent crime, opposition to gun control causes harm. And so on with all of the core beliefs.
If one holds to the danger of dissent, one cannot justify steps to allow true intellectual diversity and freedom of expression. To hire faculty or admit students who challenge any of the core beliefs is to include in the community people who are prepared to cause harm. And to let them express their dissenting views is to let them harm the community.
This explains why universities are so intolerant of dissent. From their point of view, Ohio Northern University law professor and legal historian Scott Gerber had to be physically removed by police from his classroom because he had publicly questioned that university’s DEI mandate. And Penn Law professor Amy Wax, who has for years publicly and repeatedly questioned whether affirmative action in law school admissions has actually helped the students it is supposed to be helping, must be banned from teaching first years and charged with “major infractions” of university standards — charges which if confirmed by a faculty senate hearing board would trigger “major sanctions” and may include Wax’s termination as a tenured professor of law.
Stopping Oppressors
However, removing dissenting voices from universities does not explain why voices of antisemitic hate, intolerance, and even imminently threatened violence must be tolerated and encouraged. To understand this, we need only to reflect on the core beliefs. Each of these posits that an oppressor group — white males, fossil fuel companies, religious opponents of abortion, gun manufacturers, colonial states such as Israel — is at this moment actively harming people in the oppressed group.
The oppressors are causing harm, and they must be stopped. There is no need to be worried about identifying precisely which oppressors are causing harm, for in the leftist view, responsibility and guilt are collective, not individual. There is also no halfway between opposing and supporting group oppression — one is either all in, working to expel and punish oppressors, or all out, effectively supporting oppression.
Given that it has defined itself around a set of core beliefs positing oppressor and oppressed classes, the contemporary leftist American university defines itself as a leader in a political and cultural war to stop ongoing harm and avenge wrongs suffered by oppressed groups. These universities are commanders in wars against racism, climate change, colonial oppression, and patriarchy. With this understanding, antisemitism is an attack on oppressors, and that is what the progressive university is all about.
Encouraging Analysis and Skepticism
These universities are not wrong in their belief that there is much that is evil and unjust in the world. But the goal of the university should not be to support highly politicized notions of precisely which problems are the most pressing and which policies should be adopted to address them. Instead, the university’s role is to guide students in acquiring the knowledge and analytical tools necessary to form their own beliefs about the world’s problems and potential solutions. Students should be encouraged to be skeptical of all accepted wisdom and to have the confidence and skills to independently advance the frontiers of knowledge.
The American university system is still the best in the world, and across our country, there remain many faculty and staff committed to the goals of guiding students in their acquisition of skills and knowledge. By jettisoning their political agenda, American universities will not only be able to see and respond to the present resurgence of antisemitism on campus, but they will also be able to realize their enormous potential for actually educating students for the future.
Jason Scott Johnston is a law professor at the University of Virginia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington this week, once again pressuring U.S. lawmakers to dole out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars for his war effort. At issue is a $110 billion national security supplemental the Biden administration has requested that includes about $61 billion for Ukraine, as well as more funding for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and money to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.
Senate Republicans last week sensibly blocked a vote to advance the bill because it doesn’t include changes to border policy, which is the only thing that would actually secure the border. But the border isn’t the only good reason to block the funding package. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the war in Ukraine is an unwinnable quagmire, and that for all the calls we hear for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, what’s really needed is a ceasefire in Ukraine, where the solution today is more or less what it was before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022: a negotiated settlement.
Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio hinted at this in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper over the weekend, saying there’s no reason to think $61 billion will accomplish what $100 billion hasn’t. “The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous. Nobody actually believed it. So, what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is.”
So far, neither the Biden White House nor any neocon Ukraine hawk in Washington has been able to articulate what the endgame strategy in Ukraine should be. Instead, we get platitudes about the need to shovel more money into a bloody war of attrition from the likes of Mike Pompeo, who of course doesn’t bother to elaborate on what he means by “end the war.”
If Ukraine loses, the cost to America will be far greater than the aid we have given Ukraine.
The least costly way to move forward is to provide Ukraine with the weapons needed to win and end the war.
At this point, nearly two years into the war, no one really believes what Pompeo and Biden administration officials have been peddling since the conflict began, that somehow Western aid to Ukraine would enable a Russian “defeat” that would send Putin running back to Moscow, where perhaps he would even be deposed. That was always a neocon fantasy.
What was obvious from the beginning, as Mario Loyola pointed out in these pages just three weeks before the Russian invasion, is that Ukraine could have territorial integrity or political independence, but not both. Because of the unique historical circumstances of Ukraine’s borders, together with what Moscow has long viewed as its core strategic interests, Ukraine should have been prepared to trade land for independence. Indeed, U.S. leaders should have insisted on it.
Instead, President Biden embarked on a desultory policy of half-measures, giving Ukraine just enough aid to keep Russia from overrunning the country but not enough to expel Russian forces and risk a potentially catastrophic escalation with a nuclear power. Biden did this, moreover, without ever even attempting to explain to the American people why funding a proxy war against Russia constituted a core national interest. Then and now, anyone who questioned our involvement was labeled a Putin apologist. Insults were traded for arguments, and this is more or less where we are today.
That’s too bad because what the goal should be now is fairly obvious: an immediate ceasefire in which Ukraine de facto accepts Russian control over some of its territory without formally ceding it to Moscow. In exchange for this, Ukraine could fairly ask for and receive the kind of formal Western support that would ensure the territory it does have, which is most of the country, would be secure.
The lazy counterargument that such an arrangement would invite Putin to invade all of Eastern Europe is, as Vance argued, preposterous. Moscow is weaker than anyone thought, and if its military could not overrun Kiev, there’s no reason to think it could so much as set a track on any NATO member territory. Any suggestion to the contrary is fearmongering designed to shut down legitimate debate about what U.S. policy should be in this conflict.
Contrast all this with the war in Israel, which vast swaths of the American left seem to think needs to end immediately even as they support endless support for the Ukraine conflict. It’s a perfect illustration of how Americans tend to view foreign policy as a proxy for domestic politics. For the left, supporting Israel is to side with the oppressor. Never mind that Israel was viciously attacked by Hamas terrorists who control the territory from which they launched the Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli civilians. Hamas has vowed it will launch more such attacks as soon as it can. Under these circumstances, a ceasefire makes zero sense.
But for Ukraine, a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement is probably as good as it was ever going to get. The Minsk ceasefire agreements of 2014 and 2015, laid out in U.N. Security Council Res. 2202, provided that the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk would be allowed to conduct local elections with guarantees of local autonomy and a general amnesty. In exchange, the separatists would disband their “people’s republics,” disarm, and the Ukrainian military would reassert control of all Ukrainian territory to the Russian border.
That agreement was designed to avoid war, but it was never implemented. At this point, Ukraine will almost certainly never officially cede territory to Russia, but something like the Minsk agreement could work to bring an end to the fighting. The United States isn’t going to risk World War III to guarantee Ukraine’s 1991 borders, and the sooner Senate Republicans and the Biden administration make that clear to Zelensky, the sooner we can start working out what a post-war settlement could look like for Ukraine and Russia.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, told Newsmax on Tuesday that the automatic granting of American citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. is based on a “misinterpretation” of the Constitution, and that he would correct it.
Babin, appearing on “National Report,” claimed that birthright citizenship “came out of a misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment,” which, he said, “had led to the implementation of this birthright citizenship by which children born to foreign nationals from illegal migrants, to tourists, to refugees, are automatically granted United States citizenship.”
Babin acknowledged that his bill to end birthright citizenship for the children of those who illegally entered the country is likely to stall.
“If it passes the House, will probably have a real hard time coming through the Senate, and then an enormously hard time to be signed into law by President Joe Biden,” Babin said.
Babin added that “this is something that we have to do. We’ve got to stand up and have courage to fight against the open border and all the policies that have … developed around it.”
Babin on Tuesday also denounced attempts to send more aid to Ukraine as it attempts to fight off the ongoing invasion by Russia, saying that the U.S. should prioritize its own border before sending money elsewhere.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The Palestinians are expecting a high vote Tuesday for a U.N. General Assembly resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza to demonstrate widespread global support for ending the Israel-Hamas war, now in its third month. After the United States vetoed a resolution in the Security Council on Friday demanding a humanitarian cease-fire, Arab and Islamic nations called for an emergency session of the 193-member General Assembly to vote on a resolution making the same demand.
Unlike Security Council resolutions, General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding. But the assembly’s messages “are also very important” and reflect world opinion, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Monday.
The General Assembly vote is expected to reflect the growing isolation of the United States as it refuses to join demands for a cease-fire. More than the United Nations or any other international organization, the United States is seen as the only entity capable of persuading Israel to accept a cease-fire as its closest ally and biggest supplier of weaponry.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, told U.N. reporters Tuesday that Arab and Islamic ambassadors have been mobilizing support for the resolution and expect it will get a significantly higher number of votes than their Oct. 27 resolution, which called for a “humanitarian truce” leading to a cessation of hostilities. That resolution was the first U.N. reaction to the Gaza war, and the vote was 120-14 with 45 abstentions.
“I think it will send a message to Washington and to others,” Mansour said, adding that a demand from the United Nations, whether it’s the Security Council or the General Assembly, should be looked at as binding. “And Israel has to abide by it, and those who are shielding and protecting Israel until now should also look at it this way, and therefore act accordingly,” he said. The resolution to be voted on expresses “grave concern over the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population,” and it says Palestinians and Israelis must be protected in accordance with international humanitarian law.
It also demands that all parties comply with international humanitarian law, “notably with regard to the protection of civilians,” and calls for “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, as well as ensuring humanitarian access.”
Mansour said the 22-member Arab Group and 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation will oppose any amendments to the resolution. The resolution makes no mention of Hamas, whose militants killed about 1,200 people and abducted about 240 in the surprise attack inside Israel on Oct. 7 that set off the war.
One amendment proposed by the United States would add a paragraph stating that the assembly “unequivocally rejects and condemns the heinous terrorist attacks by Hamas.”
A second amendment proposed by Austria would add that the hostages are “held by Hamas and other groups” and should be released “immediately.”
The war has brought unprecedented death and destruction, with much of northern Gaza obliterated, more than 18,000 Palestinians killed according to the Hamas-run health ministry, 70% of them reportedly children and women, and over 80% of the population of 2.3 million pushed from their homes.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Former President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday that he “wanted to testify” in his civil fraud trial in New York on Monday, but said he couldn’t because of the limited gag order from Judge Arthur Engoron.
“I wanted to testify on Monday, despite the fact that I already testified successfully, answering all questions having to do with the Fake, No Victims, No Jury lawsuit, thrown at me by the Corrupt Racist A.G., Letitia James, and presided over by a Trump hating judge who suffers from a massive case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and is a puppet for the CROOKED A.G.,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social page.
Trump added that Engoron “put a GAG ORDER on me, even when I testify, totally taking away my constitutional right to defend myself,” and said his side is appealing. “How would you like to be a witness and not be allowed free and honest speech. THE TRIAL IS RIGGED. I DID NOTHING WRONG!!!”
Trump on Sunday said he wouldn’t testify, saying that the evidence in his case is strong.
In a statement to ABC News on Monday, Trump attorney Chris Kise said he also partially blamed the limited gag order for Trump’s decision against taking the stand.
“There is really nothing more to say to a Judge who has imposed an unconstitutional gag order and thus far appears to have ignored President Trump’s testimony and that of everyone else involved in the complex financial transactions at issue in the case,” Kise said.
Meanwhile, Engoron said Tuesday that he will allow James to call two witnesses during the state’s rebuttal after the Trump team rests its case, and Kise argued that the “government has held these witnesses back. “
State Attorney Kevin Wallace said the rebuttal witnesses — former Trump Organization executive Kevin Sneddon and Cornell professor Eric Lewis — will only discuss arguments made in court, but Kise said they’ll be “filling a hole” left by the defense team’s lack of evidence.
Engoron, though, said he saw “no reason not to allow these two purported experts to testify.” Trump attorneys said they may present an additional witness after the state’s rebuttal.
The ACLU and First Liberty Institute are challenging the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s restrictions on advertising. Pictured: A train pulls into Metro Center in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2016. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)
The American Civil Liberties Union joined with the conservative legal group First Liberty Institute on Monday to challenge the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s restrictions on advertising as First Amendment violations. The two groups filed a lawsuit on behalf of WallBuilder Presentations, an organization that raises awareness about the “moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built,” after WMATA said the ads it wanted to display on buses violated its advertising guidelines.
WMATA restricts ads “intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying public opinions,” along with those that “promote or oppose any religion, religious practice or belief.”
“Though WMATA never identified the specific issue of public controversy that it believed the proposed advertisements addressed, it is apparent that WallBuilders was prohibited from advertising because its proposed ads sought to address issues of public importance from a religious viewpoint,” the complaint alleges.
The ads display depictions of Founding Fathers overlayed with the word “Christian?” and invite viewers to learn about the “faith of our founders” on the Wallbuilders website, according to the lawsuit.
“The case against WMATA is a critical reminder of what’s at stake when government entities exercise selective censorship,” Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel at ACLU-D.C., said in a statement. “The First Amendment doesn’t play favorites; it ensures that all voices, regardless of their message, have the right to be heard.”
The lawsuit includes multiple photos of ads WMATA did find permissible, though they appear to violate its guidelines. These include ads for “The Book of Mormon” musical, which “sharply lampoons” the religious practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, along with an ad by the Brennan Center for Justice demanding term limits for Supreme Court justices, a “source of substantial public debate,” according to the lawsuit.
Breaking: We're suing @wmata for unlawfully rejecting political ads in the D.C. Metro. The First Amendment bars the government from silencing speech based on specific viewpoints. This case seeks to expand free speech opportunities in the D.C. metro and beyond.
“ACLU defends these suits, regardless of whether it agrees with the underlying message because it believes in the speaker’s right to express it,” Spitzer continued. “The government cannot arbitrarily decide which voices to silence in public forums.”
Jeremy Dys, senior counsel for First Liberty, said in a statement that the First Amendment “grants all Americans the right to express their point of view, religious or secular.”
“Rejecting a faith-based advertising banner by labeling it an ‘issue ad,’ while accepting other ads such as those promoting a ‘Social Justice School,’ ‘Earth Day,’ and the highly controversial idea of terms limits for Supreme Court Justices, is clearly hypocritical, discriminatory, and illegal,” Dys said.
WMATA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Klaus Schwab, head of the world economic forum, aka New World order, bringing in the Great Reset. What does that mean for Christmas?
Klaus Schwab’s WEF Sets Authoritarian Goal: Limit 76% of Private Cars by 2050
By Jim Hoft – June 10, 2023
In a push to counter the so-called ‘climate change,’ the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF), under the leadership of its founder and Executive Chairman, Klaus Schwab, has proposed a comprehensive plan aiming to limit 76% of private cars by the year 2050.
The authoritarian objective is a part of WEF’s broader vision for a ‘sustainable and low-carbon future,’ as outlined in its Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility in collaboration with Visa in May 2023.
According to WEF’s recently published white paper, by 2050, people are likely to travel twice as much within cities as they do now. If people don’t change anything, this would mean that there would be 2.1 billion cars, buses, and other vehicles on the road, emitting 4.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide. 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 • Woman Who Wants to Have Her Disabled Baby Aborted Leaves State After Texas Protects the Baby • Texas Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Lower Court, Protects Disabled Baby From Abortion • Poll Shows Abortion Support Has Dropped Since Dobbs Decision • 65 Abortion Businesses Have Closed Since Roe Overturned, Protecting More Babies From Abortions
More Pro-Life News • Attacker Kills Catholic Priest as Violence Against Pro-Life Christians Continues After Dobbs • Abortion Activist Pleads Guilty to Attacking Pro-Life Pregnancy Center, Faces Prison Time • Texas is Right to Protect Disabled Babies From Being Killed in Abortions • Doctors Defend Wyoming Abortion Ban in Court, Confirm Abortion is Not Healthcare • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Minneapolis Police department is hiring because it is way understaffed but would want a job with low pay and low rewards and at the risk of going to jail or prison for just doing your job.
Attorneys threaten more legal action against Minneapolis for failing to hire police
The UMLC demanded that Minneapolis take “concrete measures” to meet the minimum staffing requirement of 731 police officers.
The Upper Midwest Law Center (UMLC) sent a letter Monday to the City of Minneapolis demanding that the city fulfill its obligation to fund, employ, and retain a minimum of 731 police officers.
In its letter, the UMLC, a public interest law firm that specializes in constitutional violations, called out Minneapolis for failing to abide by Minnesota Supreme Court case Spann v. Minneapolis CityCouncil…. READ MORE
Cartoon – The Authoritarian left trying to silence and jail their political opponents are accusing Trump of being an Authoritarian Dictator.
It is becoming evident that the accusations against Trump stem from political motivations rather than a genuine concern for democratic values. The Corporate Media, Soros Prosecutors, and the Democrats, in collaboration with elements within the DOJ and FBI, seek to undermine Trump’s campaign by painting him as an authoritarian figure. This strategy was employed to delegitimize his administration(Russia Hoax), hinder his policy agenda, and now destroy his 2024 campaign.
The allegation that Trump is an authoritarian dictator, as espoused by the Left, DOJ, FBI, and the Democratic Party, is viewed skeptically by many because their accusations are politically motivated and reflect a paradox wherein those making the claims are themselves exhibiting authoritarian tendencies. This underscores the importance of maintaining a robust and unbiased justice system to ensure the protection of our judicial, constitutional, and American values, regardless of political affiliations.
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 • Texas AG Ken Paxton Fights Judge’s Ruling Allowing Disabled Baby to be Killed in Abortion • Chip Roy: Republicans Should Vote NO on NDAA That Allows Joe Biden’s Illegal Abortion Travel Funding • Doctor Confirms: “An Unborn Baby’s Heart Begins to Beat Approximately 22-23 Days” After Conception • She Worked for Planned Parenthood But Quit, Begged God to Forgive Her, and Became Pro-Life
More Pro-Life News • Donald Trump is Right, Democrats are Extremists Because They Support Abortions Up to Birth • Mom Who Rejected Abortion and Saved Her Daughter Says “Adoption’s Always a Better Alternative” • Congressman Blasts Google for Censoring Pro-Life Groups • Here’s How Pro-Life Americans Can Fight Back Against Pro-Abortion Ballot Measures • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
A badly burglarized Los Angeles businessman is fed up with crime in the area — and with Democrats he supported at the polls, KTTV-TV reported.
“I voted for [Mayor] Karen Bass. I voted for [President Joe] Biden. I voted for [Gov.] Gavin Newsom,” Ryan Baggaley of the Delta Construction & Electric Co. on North San Fernando Road told the station. “I’m sick of it. It’s like, at some point, you have to give me a reason to vote for you again.”
Video shows a group of at least 10 thieves using a car to smash through a gate and then proceeding to steal from the business in the Glassell Park neighborhood early Wednesday morning, KTTV said.
Image source: YouTube screenshot
“This whole strip has been broken into,” Baggaley explained to the station while pointing out various victims nearby. “Our neighbors have been broken into four times. These guys got broken into two months ago. What are we supposed to do? We’re a small construction company.”
Image source: YouTube screenshot
Baggaley told the station the thieves stole construction tools from his business — along with musical equipment and instruments stored on site, as he and his brother had played in a band together.
Now gone are six of his family’s guitars, KTTV said.
Image source: YouTube screenshot
Image source: YouTube screenshot
Baggaley added to the station that the getaway car, a blue Kia Soul, was stolen from an impound yard owned by the Los Angeles Police Department. He noted to KTTV that police knew it was from the yard because of chalk marks on the window. The station said the business is now boarded up, and Baggaley is frustrated. Beside the stolen items, there are demolished gates and doors — all adding up to thousands of dollars in losses, KTTV noted.
He also told the station that he and other business owners just want to “do our jobs, make a living, help our employees make a good living, and move on. But it’s really freaking difficult to survive.”
KTTV added that police are investigating, but as of Wednesday night, there have been no arrests.
Three GOP lawmakers are pushing legislation that would have the U.S. completely withdraw from the United Nations and cut off all funding to the globalist organization. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, and Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama are pushing the proposal, which would put the kibosh on U.S. ties to the U.N. and affiliated entities, including the World Health Organization.
“The UN doesn’t deserve one single dime of American taxpayer money or one bit of our support; we should defund it and leave immediately. I am proud to lead this critical effort alongside Mike Lee and Mike Rogers,” Roy said, according to a press release.
“No more blank checks for the United Nations. Americans’ hard-earned dollars have been funneled into initiatives that fly in the face of our values –enabling tyrants, betraying allies, and spreading bigotry,” Lee said, according to the press release. “With the DEFUND Act, we’re stepping away from this debacle. If we engage with the UN in the future, it will be on our terms, with the full backing of the Senate and an iron-clad escape clause.”
While conservatives would hail the prospect of the U.S. completely ditching the U.N., the legislation likely has no chance of advancing through Congress, as many lawmakers would probably oppose the idea of U.S. withdrawal.
“The President shall terminate all membership by the United States in the United Nations, and in any organ, specialized agency, commission, or other formally affiliated body of the United Nations,” the text of the measure reads in part.
Two biologically male athletes who identify as females took the top spots in an Illinois cycling competition last weekend after taking the top two places in an October race. Results from the Montrose Beach Cyclocross event in Montrose Beach, Chicago, Sunday show that Tessa Johnson and Evelyn Williamson won first and second place, respectively, in the Cyclocross Women Single Speed race.
Johnson finished the race in 33 minutes and 33 seconds, while Williamson completed it in 35 minutes and 28 seconds. The third-place finisher, Kristen Chalmers, finished the race in 36 minutes and 48 seconds.
In a social media post Sunday, Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer who has emerged as one of the most forceful critics of policies allowing trans-identified athletes to compete on sports teams that align with their stated gender identity, said that “two men take 1st & 2nd at the Illinois State Cyclocross Championships yesterday.” She lamented, “@usacycling has 2 categories for men and none for women.”
An X account with the handle @i_heart_bikes provided a picture of the top three finishers, asserting that “men took the top two podium spots in the women’s singlespeed category at the Illinois State Cyclocross Championships.” The post noted that “Tessa (Michael) Johnson took [first place] and ‘Evelyn’ Williamson took [second place].”
“Thanks to @usacycling, men are racing in women’s categories all over the US,” the post added.
Today male racers Tessa (Michael) Johnson and Evelyn Williamson once again proved they are GREAT at women's cyclocross at Jackson Park in Chicago.
Johnson took 🥇in both the women's 1/2 AND the singlespeed.
A spreadsheet documenting the results of the 2023 Chicago CycloCross Cup, of which the Montrose Beach race was the eighth and final event, shows that Johnson won first place overall in both the Women Single Speed category and the Women’s Category 1/2. This makes Johnson a 2023 Illinois State Cyclocross champion in two separate categories.
Johnson and Williamson took the top two spots at the Chicago CycloCross Cup in October, and Johnson previously competed in men’s categories at Clemson University, OutKick reports.
The participation of trans-identified males in women’s sports has become a hot-button issue in American politics. Arguments against allowing trans-identified athletes to compete on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity as opposed to their biological sex focus on the concerns that the physical differences between men and women give male athletes, on average, an unfair advantage over their female counterparts.
USA Powerlifting, a national sporting organization that enacted bans on biological men competing in women’s sports, identifies the differences between men and women as “increased body and muscle mass, bone density, bone structure, and connective tissue.” A 2020 study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that trans-identified male athletes maintain an advantage over biologically female athletes even after two years of taking feminizing hormones.
Two dozen states have banned trans-identified males from competing in women’s sports at the K-12 level and/or the collegiate level: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
A poll of 1,011 United States adults conducted by Gallup in May found that 69% of respondents believed that trans-identified athletes “should only be allowed to play on teams that match their birth gender,” while 26% thought that “transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity.”
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is investigating whether the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter were paid by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
After Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop surfaced during the 2020 election, more than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter in Politico saying the computer “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” In a letter to CIA Director William Burns on Monday, Jordan, who leads the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, demanded the CIA chief come clean about the agency’s alleged involvement in branding the laptop as Russian disinformation, which plainly amounted to election interference.
“We understand that former intelligence officials often return to the intelligence community under private contract for their previous agencies,” Jordan wrote. “It is vital to the Committees’ oversight to understand whether any of the signatories of the public statement were actively employed by CIA as contractors or consultants at the time they signed the public statement.”
“If so,” Jordan added, “this information would raise fundamental concerns about the role of the CIA as it pertains to the October 19, 2020, ‘Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails’ signed and published by 51 former intelligence community officials in the weeks preceding the 2020 presidential election.”
A report from the Weaponization Committee in May revealed the CIA’s covert involvement in orchestrating the letter. Evidence that surfaced from Hunter Biden’s laptop unveiled blockbuster details about the Biden family’s influence-peddling operations now at the center of a Republican impeachment inquiry.
In his Monday letter to the CIA chief, Jordan demanded a list of all signatories to the letter “who were on active contract or consulting for the CIA at any time from January 1, 2020, to the present,” as well as whether any of those potential contracts “pertained to Hunter Biden’s business dealings, Biden family influence-peddling, Ukraine, or the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.”
Several of the intelligence letters’ signatories have since doubled down on the debunked claims of Russian interference despite the laptop having been verified even by news outlets that first dismissed the computer’s legitimacy. Charges that the laptop stemmed from a Kremlin campaign were even debunked by rare on-the-record statements from the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of National Intelligence, and the State Department before Election Day. However, the laptop was suppressed by major online platforms, at least in part over the allegations that it was Russian propaganda.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper defended signing the letter in an interview with New York Magazine last fall, with the magazine noting that “Clapper was not pleased to be asked about the letter two years after its release.”
“What are you trying to get me to say, that I screwed up and I shouldn’t have signed the letter? I’m not going to say that,” Clapper told the paper. “As far as I was concerned, we were waving the yellow flag. At the time, it was fishy to me. It had the characteristics of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who led the agency under President Barack Obama, likewise told Fox News in October, “No, I don’t have any regrets” about signing the letter.
Last week, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., became the latest to peddle the fake Russia narrative at a hearing on censorship with the House Weaponization Committee.
“The problem,” Goldman said about the laptop, “is that hard drives can be manipulated by Rudy Giuliani or Russia.”
In April, House Republicans expanded oversight inquiries surrounding the Politico letter to include Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In a letter to Blinken, lawmakers wrote, “[W]e have learned that you played a role in the inception of this statement while serving as a Biden campaign advisor, and we therefore request your assistance with our oversight.”
Jordan gave CIA Director Burns until Dec. 15 to comply with the congressional request for records.
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.
A federal appeals court in Washington on Friday upheld a gag order on former President Donald Trump in his 2020 election interference case but narrowed the restrictions on his speech. The three-judge panel’s ruling modifies the gag order to allow the Republican 2024 presidential front-runner to make disparaging comments about special counsel Jack Smith. But the court upheld the ban on public statements about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses concerning their potential participation in the case.
“Mr. Trump is a former President and current candidate for the presidency, and there is a strong public interest in what he has to say,” read the decision, which was posted by Politico’s Kyle Cheney on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“But Mr. Trump is also an indicted criminal defendant, and he must stand trial in a courtroom under the same procedures that govern all other criminal defendants. That is what the rule of law means.”
Trump, who has described the gag order as unconstitutional muzzling of his political speech, could appeal the ruling to the full court or to the Supreme Court.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed the gag order in October, barring Trump from making public statements targeting Smith and other prosecutors, court staff and potential witnesses. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had lifted the gag order while it considered Trump’s challenge. Prosecutors have argued the restrictions are necessary to protect the integrity of the case and shield potential witnesses and others involved in the case from harassment and threats inspired by Trump’s incendiary social media posts.
The order has had a whirlwind trajectory through the courts since prosecutors proposed it, citing Trump’s repeated disparagement of the special counsel, the judge overseeing the case and likely witnesses.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The Left has created a hostile environment on college campuses for those of any color, race, or creed who dissent from its Orwellian groupthink. Pictured: A Jewish student watches a protest in support of Palestine and for free speech at Columbia University campus on Nov. 14. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Sara Garstka, a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation in 2023, received a bachelor’s degree in English in 2022 from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
During a hearing this week on the rise in antisemitism on college campuses, Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., said a lack of ideological diversity contributed to the hateful educational environment endured by Jewish students since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel by Hamas.
He’s right.
A recent poll found that 73% of Jewish college students and about 44% of non-Jewish students have experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the beginning of the 2023-24 school year.
“Since Oct. 7, students who have felt comfortable with others knowing they’re Jewish decreased significantly,” according to the poll results released jointly by the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish outreach organization Hillel International.
The poll found that, before Oct. 7, 63.7% of Jewish students surveyed said they “felt ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ comfortable, but now only 38.6% feel the same.”
Among those testifying Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee was University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who finds herself under increasing fire from critics. Penn is one of the Ivy League schools at the center of controversy over free speech on college campuses amid the troubling increase in antisemitism, especially since Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel.
Previously, the existence of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives at Penn and on other college campuses made it look like universities actively promote safe environments for minority groups such as Jews.
Magill’s DEI statement on the University of Pennsylvania’s website, for example, reads: “Penn is a place with deep-seated values that reflect respect for all and a sincere commitment to service, to diversity in all its forms, and to creating conditions where all can thrive so we can as a Penn community have our greatest impact on the world.”
‘Context-Dependent’
But antisemitic speech isn’t respectful of “diversity in all its forms,” nor does speech advocating genocide promote a safe environment for Jewish students.
Rep. Elise M. Stefanik, R-N.Y., pressed Magill at the hearing on whether “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Penn’s code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment.”
“If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill said, adding later: “It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.”
Stefanik told Magill that it was the easiest yes-or-no question to answer. But Magill didn’t say “yes.”
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill listens during her testimony Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Following backlash for her testimony, on Thursday morning Magill posted a video statement on X stating her intention to clarify and evaluate campus policies on free speech. She didn’t apologize.
Penn donor Ross Stevens, founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, later withdrew a $100 million donation to protest the university’s stance on antisemitism on campus and Magill’s congressional testimony, Fox Business reported.
“In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., asked Harvard President Claudine Gay during the hearing.
At Penn, a clear double standard exists for protecting free speech, alumnus Arjunan Gnanendran told The Daily Signal. Gnanendran said he spoke on behalf of a law professor, Amy Wax, during her examination by Penn’s Faculty Senate for allegedly creating a hostile classroom environment by the way she talked about affirmative action in her course, “Conservative Political & Legal Thought.”
“They’re defending the right of the pro-Palestine students to say things like ‘From the river to the sea’ and call for the genocide of Israelis,” Gnanendran said of university administrators.
“That’s free speech, [but] it’s not, you know, creating a hostile environment for Jewish students?” he argued.
“But then at the same time, they’re saying when Professor Wax talks about racial preferences in affirmative action, that creates a hostile environment for students of color and she should be stripped of tenure,” Gnanendran said. “So, there’s no free speech for Professor Wax, but there’s free speech for the pro-Palestine people who are harassing Jewish students.”
Like others interviewed for this article, Gnanendran is a fellow member of The Heritage Foundation’s internship program, called the Young Leaders Program. Their stories illustrate the existence of the ideological echo chambers at today’s colleges and universities. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Antisemitism on campus is another form of cancel culture from the ideological echo chambers entrenched at today’s colleges and universities, something Grothman alluded to during the House hearing.
For many young conservatives on-campus intimidation for their beliefs can come from all angles: peers, professors, and administrators. It’s no wonder that a new unifying issue for the Left, the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists, could result in hateful speech and behavior toward Jewish students. It already was happening to conservatives.
When some speech is protected and other speech is not, colleges become echo chambers for left-leaning ideology, where “there are things that you are prohibited from speaking about,” Austin Gae said in an interview about the culture on his campus.
Cancel culture “is anything that represses free speech and open debate” and often is characterized by disrespect, said Gae, a senior at The George Washington University in the nation’s capital.
Indeed, cyberbullying, classroom censure, false narratives, administrative neglect, and social blacklists are all methods used on campus to discourage ideological diversity.
Peer-Pressured Into Silence
Gae said he became the target of cyberbullying in a class group chat after saying that then-President Donald Trump didn’t incite an “insurrection” by asking supporters at a rally near the White House to “peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
People who had never met him labeled him a racist homophobe during his freshman year at GWU for something that had nothing to do with race or sexuality, Gae said. The experience prompted him to go silent on his political beliefs for the remainder of his education.
“After that, I decided to not really talk to anyone on campus,” Gae said.
Unless a person can first get to know someone else, and share that he is “a kind, real person with manners and stuff like that,” he said, it’s hard to feel comfortable talking about politics on any level.
For Erin Leone, a junior at GWU, not even a history course on President Ronald Reagan was a safe space for conservative thought. Reagan’s famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” was the subject of study for one lecture in which the professor filtered his analysis through a lens that saw the future president’s speech was “divisive and racist,” Leone told me in an interview for The Daily Signal. When she asked the professor for specific examples of racially divisive language in the speech, instead of answering the question, the professor called on three outspoken, left-leaning classmates to explain how Reagan’s words made others “afraid of black people,” Leone said.
“Does that answer your question?” the professor asked Leone after her three peers finished yelling at her, she recalled.
False Narratives
In another one of Leone’s history classes, she said, a professor claimed that Catholic missionaries in Mexico “made up the Our Lady of Guadalupe apparitions to trick the Mexicans into converting to Catholicism.”
Afterward, Leone approached the professor with concerns that the remarks were racist toward Mexican culture and openly anti-Catholic. The professor, she said, later denied making the remarks.
“If a professor said that about Islam or Judaism, they should be fired,” Leone contended.
In another situation at Penn, the student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian neglected to follow journalism ethics and reported allegations as fact to push a narrative that fraternities are places that harbor racism and should be removed from campus. The student newspaper claimed that a person of color was assaulted by a Penn student, Nicholas Hamilton, at a fraternity party. Hamilton had to go to court over the allegations and was found not guilty of assault in Philadelphia Municipal Court, the newspaper reported.
Administrative Neglect
At Nicholls State University in Louisiana, the Student Organizations and Activities Office neglected to process paperwork establishing a College Republicans chapter, former student Cooper Moore told The Daily Signal. This occurred despite the university’s having a chapter of College Democrats as well as a Democratic Socialist Club, Moore said. Moore served as vice president of College Republicans for the brief period the club was permitted to host activities on campus at Nicholls State. That ended, he said, when College Republicans’ “chalking campaign” during the 2020 presidential campaign resulted in a riot in which leftists called for his death and the banning of the club from campus.
On the campus quad, College Republicans chalked slogans such as “MAGA,” “Vote Trump,” and “Vote #1,” this last a reference to a pro-life amendment on the state ballot at that time, Moore said.
“None of it was bigoted,” he said. “None of it was derogatory toward the Democrats or Joe Biden or to liberal students.”
Yet the College Republicans’ chalk was washed away with mops and buckets by some of his peers, and the university hosted a town hall to discuss free speech on campus. In that forum, Nicholls State President Jay Clune neglected to take a clear stance on free speech, Moore said. Nicholls State implemented a policy prohibiting “political chalk” on campus, he said, although Democrat-affiliated clubs had been doing so with no push-back from administrators. The next day, Moore said, he had to be escorted from class by campus security because participants in a Black Lives Matter rally were yelling his name.
The university didn’t follow up to ask about his safety or mental health, Moore said. The only thing the school reached out about, he said, was to say that the College Republicans club was barred from campus because the necessary paperwork hadn’t been filed. But the club did file the paperwork and the school’s Activities Office was at fault for it not being processed, Moore said.
Free Speech at Stake
While she was at GWU, Leone said, two members of a Greek organization were shunned by their sorority sisters after someone found Instagram photos of them taken at a College Republicans event. “Nobody would be friends with them anymore,” Leone said of the two students, as if they were socially blacklisted for being conservative. It’s the same in other student organizations, she said.
“The rhetoric in the groups is that, if someone were to not agree with [liberal ideas], they’d be a horrible person,” Leone said.
The Left has created a hostile environment on campus for those of any color, race, or creed who dissent from its Orwellian groupthink. Since college and university administrators continue to discourage ideological diversity on campus, speech encouraging acts of genocide should come as no surprise. Unless free speech, including dissent from the Left’s doctrines, is encouraged on campuses, our educational institutions will continue to embolden hostility that endangers those with a different view who speak out.
He did this from Antarctica, a place we’re sure he traveled to by sailboat.
Meanwhile, in Munich, a bunch of jets (won’t someone think of the fossil fuels?!) won’t be flying to Dubai for a climate conference because, despite ‘record warming’, they’re buried in a blizzard. REED MORE…REED 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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Policymakers at the international climate conference COP28 need to get out of the way of those harnessing energy responsibly. In energy lies not just the power to create but also the power to conserve and protect all that has been created. Pictured: John Kerry, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, speaks during a press conference at the UN’s COP28 Climate Conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Dec. 6. (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Miles Pollard is an economic policy analyst with the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation.
As the international climate conference known as the Conference of Parties, Or COP28, starts the first Global Stocktake—a methodology for countries to measure their compliance with the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate—the participating governments would do well to remember that energy is more than a mere commodity; it’s the backbone of human progress. Energy’s ubiquitous role in our daily lives masks its positive and profound effect on economic growth, medicine, longevity, and wealth creation, empowering people around the world to rise above mere subsistence.
A forthcoming Heritage Foundation special report, “Powering Human Advancement: Why the World Needs Affordable and Reliable Energy,” shows that energy is the thread that weaves the fabric of civilizations together and the universal currency to transact business.
The report shows that countries that harness more than 1,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy per capita begin to lower poverty substantially. Countries that harness more than 10,000 kWh per capita see the virtual elimination of widespread poverty. The conclusion is clear: encouraging energy use reduces global poverty and generates economic growth to overcome environmental concerns. (The Daily Signal is the news and commentary outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
For instance, the health care revolution of the 21st century owes much to the relentless march of energy. Energy has allowed medical discoveries to leap beyond geographical barriers, bringing advanced medical care to far-flung corners of the world. From the hum of MRI machines to the quiet reliability of vaccine refrigerators in clinics, energy is a silent guardian of health. Neonatal incubators use energy to keep millions of premature babies’ little hearts pounding and lungs breathing. The result of abundant energy has been a century of dramatic reduction in child and disease mortality and a leap in global health standards.
The story of this increased longevity in the past century is, at its core, a tale of energy. Access to clean water, efficient food production, and sanitary facilities—all energy-intensive—have drastically reduced mortality rates. This longevity boom is intertwined with wealth generation. As people live longer, healthier lives, they contribute significantly more to economic prosperity, creating virtuous cycles of wealth and well-being.
In combination with the rule of law, wealth can be generated by affordable and reliable energy sources, and it is this wealth that will, in turn, afford a society to buy pollution scrubbers for their hydrocarbon power plants. Wealth, thus accrued through energy use, not only creates a buffer against long-term environmental degradation, but actively fuels the fight against it. High- income countries with high energy use can afford to remove the worst criteria pollutants from the atmosphere.
Many pundits at COP28 will ignore these realities and blame the harnessing of hydrocarbons as an environmental disaster that has befallen the world, despite hydrocarbons’ many benefits. COP28 officials should be careful about advocating for solar and wind power without acknowledging their respective drawbacks in terms of cost, their lack of reliability as energy sources, pollution from the manufacture and disposal of solar panels, and the harm to wildlife that wind turbines pose.
COP28 attendees should also recognize how dependent the world, and especially America, are on the Chinese Communist Party for critical minerals that are used in the manufacture of renewables and battery technology. In fact, China already produces 80% of solar components and 65% of lithium-ion batteries that the world uses. Furthermore, attendees should be cautious about advocating for zero-carbon emissions mandates paid for by raising energy rates on consumers (a form of regressive taxation that hurts the poorest the hardest) or letting supranational bureaucrats intervene in contracts because their preferred energy company did not win.
While some policymakers advocate “allowing” poor people to have air conditioning, some COP28 attendees were against plug-in air conditioners for the poor. We should be wary of such officials using “climate change” as a mechanism to hold back low-income individuals and those in developing nations. Those attending COP28 should not distribute untransparent powers to governments and bureaucrats while also signing expensive deals with dictators like the president of China.
Policymakers at COP28 need to get out of the way of companies that are harnessing energy responsibly and innovatively and recognize the need to pave the way for a legacy of human advancement worldwide. In energy lies not just the power to create but also the power to conserve and protect all that has been created.
Argentina’s President-elect, Javier Milei, gestures during a Nov. 29 session at the Argentine Congress in Buenos Aires, at which he was officially declared the winner of the runoff election. He is set to take office on Sunday. (Photo: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images)
Milei’s ideas are neither radical nor novel. They represent a move toward returning to normal and a repudiation of the economic sins Argentina has repeatedly committed.
The nation is in the throes of its fifth hyperinflation in less than five decades, with prices now rising 143% per year. It was enough to convince the Argentine electorate that it was time for a 180-degree change in economic policy. The people want to make Argentina great again, as former President Donald Trump said in congratulating Milei, 53, who takes office on Sunday.
A century ago, Argentina was the crown jewel of South America. It was one of the richest countries in the world, with a gold-backed currency and a higher per-capita gross domestic product than Austria, Italy or Spain, its former master.
But Argentina got caught up in the progressive era of the early 20th century and elected socialists around World War I. Government meddling in the economy took root with new laws controlling factory production and working hours. Major industries such as energy and transportation were nationalized. Government schools became ubiquitous.
Economic efficiency declined and output fell as the bureaucracy became bloated.
With the onset of the Great Depression, socialists in both the U.S. and Argentina found a new excuse to implement the agenda they had been advocating for decades. Argentina‘s government exploded its budget and launched an economywide industrial policy, which backfired spectacularly, just as the New Deal drove U.S. economic output lower.
To finance an expanded government, Argentina chose to print money and abandoned the gold standard, then devalued the peso by half. Agricultural output plunged, including beef, and Argentina lost its place as one of the world’s biggest beef exporters.
The political unrest that followed led to a military coup and takeover by fascist-sympathizing national socialists who doubled down on their predecessors’ failed policies. The next four decades saw more inflation and the nationalization and unionization of more industries and workers amid constant pushes for social justice.
The middle class all but disappeared, replaced by an overregulated, overtaxed underclass.
In the first of a series of hyperinflations, the peso’s value went from 42 cents American to less than three one-thousands of a cent in 1969. Argentina abandoned its throne among the pantheon of the richest nations in the world, descending to perennial economic basket cases.
Although the peso was restored in 1970, it quickly lost 99.9% of its value. It was reset again in 1981, only to lose 95% of its value thereafter. Each time government spending expanded beyond its means, Argentina printed the money to pay for it, robbing the people of their wealth.
After resetting the peso in 1983, hyperinflation was repeated yet again with a 98% devaluation. A further reset of the peso in 1985 was preceded by a collapse of the currency, losing 99.9% of its value once more.
By 1992, then-President Carlos Menem was able to restore the Argentine peso to parity with the U.S. dollar, but the feat lasted only a decade before the nation returned to its socialist credo. Government spending grew, financed by printed money, and the currency predictably lost more than 90% of its value.
Argentina returned to being persona non grata in the world of investment-grade bonds, and Argentines were once again laboring away under the yoke of hyperinflation.
This is the context that elected Milei. At long last, Argentines have had enough socialism and want their country back. Sadly, it took Argentina almost a century of chaos to learn that lesson.
The United States is following in Argentina’s footsteps, but it is running instead of walking. Relative to the size of the economy, Washington is racking up deficits twice as large as those of Buenos Aires. More than 40% of U.S. personal income taxes in America are consumed just in interest on the federal debt. If the spending is not cut soon, Argentina-style hyperinflation will follow as the only way to pay for excessive government spending.
America should skip to the end of the story of Argentina instead of reliving the whole tragedy page by page. That seems unlikely since, as our South American cousin has shown, even repeated bouts of hyperinflation aren’t always enough to wake people up to the disastrous reality of socialism.
With his virtual revolving door of a southern border, Joe Biden is allowing untold numbers of illegal aliens who’ve already committed crimes in their home countries to enter the United States to commit more here. Pictured: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents apprehend an illegal immigrant with a criminal record in an early morning raid on Sep. 8, 2022, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo: Irfan Khan, Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)
Simon Hankinson, a former foreign service officer with the State Department, is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
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Thanks to President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, every American is forced to play a game of “recidivist roulette” with criminal aliens. In addition to installing a virtual revolving door at the border, the Biden administration has spiked immigration law enforcement in the interior of the country, putting the lie to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas’ oft-repeated whopper that “our border is not open, that crossing irregularly is against the law, and that those who are not eligible for relief will be quickly returned [to their home countries].”
More than two years ago—before the Biden administration started mass releases and parole of illegal aliens caught at the southern border—there were already over 400,000 convicted criminal foreigners walking free throughout the United States. That’s 400,000 convicted criminals out of around 5 million illegal aliens on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket,” meaning all the aliens involved in deportation proceedings who, under U.S. law, should be detained while awaiting their hearings but are not.
With today’s social media, facial recognition, and amazing data tools, a lot of the 400,000 could be found, but ICE officers are so constrained by their political bosses that they are barely able to arrest anyone. The Biden administration has given ICE the paltry target of deporting just under 30,000 criminal aliens this fiscal year and the same for next year.
Roughly 4 million illegal aliens have been allowed into the U.S. since Biden took office, at least an estimated 1.8 million of whom were “gotaways”—those thought to have entered the U.S. but not identified or arrested. Given the number, age, and origin of all the illegal aliens entering the country, it’s certain that a percentage of them have criminal records and that Biden is thus adding more convicts per year to our population than ICE is subtracting.
Over 70% of U.S. state prisoners (both citizens and foreigners) are re-arrested within five years of release. It’s a fair bet that released or paroled aliens with foreign criminal records (that are undiscoverable or unknown to the Department of Homeland Security), re-offend at similar rates. And logically, it would be even higher for the gotaways who deliberately avoid detection.
The costs of recidivism, or re-offending, by criminal aliens are borne by Americans, including physical and financial harm to victims, diverted law enforcement resources, and burdens on the entire criminal justice system.
Just a few of the many examples of preventable crimes resulting from Biden’s border policies will illustrate the risk we all put up with.
In August 2018, Jose Gonzalez-Flores, an illegal alien from Guatemala, rear-ended a family van near Chesterfield, Virginia, killing 4-year-old Elias Camacho. He was drunk—at 5 in the afternoon—and fled the scene of the accident. For that “involuntary manslaughter,” Gonzalez-Flores served 3 1/2 years in prison, after which ICE deported him back to Guatemala. A year later, he was back in the U.S. as a gotaway.
The Biden administration’s deliberate decision to divert all possible staff and money to processing illegal aliens at the border (to let them into the U.S. rather than turning them away) has allowed gotaway numbers to rise from the decade-long average of about 125,000 a year to at least 600,000 now.
Recidivist criminals like Gonzalez-Flores, and the cartels that smuggle them in, know that. So that their U.S. criminal records are not discovered, they avoid ports of entry and easily evade a Border Patrol thinned out by re-assignments off the border. ICE eventually found Gonzalez-Flores and re-arrested him in Virginia. He was charged with unlawful re-entry after deportation. After serving his latest 4-year sentence, he should be deported again.
On Nov. 24 of this year, ICE deported Cesar Antiono Rafael Lopez, an illegal alien wanted in Guatemala for rape. Border Patrol encountered him in Arizona in 2019 and was able to deport him a few days later under an expedited removal process created in 1996.
That process was intended to limit the release of illegal aliens into the U.S. at the border and to allow them to be more quickly deported. However, illegal aliens claiming that they have a “credible fear” of returning to their home countries for fear that they would face violence or government persecution can avoid removal and apply for asylum in the U.S. There is a very low bar for aliens to claim credible fear and avoid this quick process, and around 75% pass the test to enter the U.S. and the years-long asylum process.
Lopez illegally came back three more times, on June 3, June 8, and June 12, 2021. He was removed each time—most likely to only over the border to Mexico, given the speed of his re-entries. On his fourth try, he made it back as a gotaway. There had been no consequences for his earlier fails, although the government should have prosecuted him for the crime of illegal reentry.
Lopez remained in the U.S. for two years until this September, when he was arrested in Michigan on unspecified “local charges.” As often happens, local jail officials didn’t honor the detainer ICE had lodged with them. Detainers are a law enforcement courtesy where ICE asks state authorities to let it take custody of prisoners before they are released, so that the government can enforce federal immigration law. Probably due to local “sanctuary city” policies, the jail failed to inform ICE before it released Lopez, but ICE found and arrested him in October. A month later, Lopez was deported to Guatemala.
In September, Honduran illegal alien Kevin Castro-Garcia was charged with two murders in Nashville. Authorities found the burned body of victim Brandon Rivas-Noriega inside a torched car and the decomposing body of a second victim, Elmer Nahum Miranda-Martinez, in the trunk of a different car. Castro-Garcia is a member of Sur 13, a transnational criminal organization. He had already been deported from the U.S. twice before, in 2010 and again in 2018, but for him and other dangerous aliens, re-entering the U.S. illegally as a gotaway has never been easier.
In July, a 25-year old Haitian gotaway was released with a Notice to Appear before an immigration judge in Boston to explain why he should not be deported. But there are 55,000 asylum cases pending in Boston. The average wait there from court filing (assuming he bothered to file for asylum) to asylum hearing is about four years and growing. He didn’t make it that far, as on Oct. 3, police in Massachusetts arrested him for assaulting someone in his own household.
DHS knows it is releasing potential human time bombs into American communities every day. U.S. citizens only learn the risk when it’s too late. Unless we get control of our border by ending the flow of migrants making fraudulent asylum claims, enforcing immigration law in the interior, and getting Border Patrol back on the border, thousands of high-risk illegal aliens like those mentioned above will keep coming. Under Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security is failing at its “one job”—securing the American people from preventable threats.
Evangelical Christians of multiple races mixed their faith in God with their faith that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump can heal the nation at a Christian gathering in Cleveland on Wednesday.
Trump appeared at the Midwest Vision and Values Pastors Leadership Conference where he said, “I want to thank the African-American community because, I don’t know if you’ve been watching, but the poll numbers are going like a rocket ship. I fully understand the African-American community has suffered from discrimination.”
Trump also said that America’s cities must be rebuilt- “It breaks my heart to see any American left behind or to see a city like Cleveland that has had so many struggles, and that there are many wrongs that still must be made right.”
Journalist Tom Boggioni at Raw Story reports that after Trump addressed a few African-American pastors and a whole lot of white people at the Midwest Vision and Values Pastors Leadership Conference, pro-Trump pastor and co-host of the event, Darrell Scott, took the mic.
Speaking to the attendees, Scott claimed that a “nationally known” — but unidentified — preacher had forewarned Trump “that if you choose to run for president, there’s going to be a concentrated Satanic attack against you.”
In video captured by Right Wing Watch, Scott can be seen announcing, “He said there’s going to be a demon, principalities and powers, that are going to war against you on a level that you’ve never seen before and I’m watching it every day.”
Taking the microphone, Scott’s wife, Belinda, led the plea to the almighty by praying: “Now God I ask that you would touch this man, Donald J. Trump. Give him the anointing to lead this nation.”
Jack Davis at Western Journalism reports that the meeting was open to clergy or all faiths and political ideologies.
“I think it’s good he’s open to hearing from clergy,” said Pastor Mike Wingerd of Emmanuel Assembly of God. “I’m very glad he’s concerned about religious freedom.”
Scott, who led the session, had spoken for Trump at the Republican National Convention.
“America is a melting pot, a country of diversity. We stand poised to make history, by standing together as Americans, as one. We are here as Americans regardless of race, creed or color. We are here as those who hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he said.
“The truth is the Democratic Party has failed us,” Scott said. “At home, our debt has grown, we are spiritually empty and we are more divided now than we have ever been before. Abroad, we are neither respected, we’re not feared by our adversaries, and our friends cannot count on us either. This is their legacy, and we need to make a sharp turn. We need to put into practice the great ideas and principles that our country was founded on, and which, after God, are the source of strength that has made this nation great.”
The demands by Democrats in Congress for absolutely censorship of those with viewpoints contrary to the political party’s ideology have become “insatiable,” as evidenced by the actions of a party member from Pennsylvania, according to recognized constitutional expert Jonathan Turley.
Turley, a professor at George Washington University, often has testified before Congress on constitutional issues, and even has represented members in court.
His conclusion is that, “Democrats have embraced an anti-free speech agenda to silence opposing viewpoints” that has become “insatiable,” after Rep. Summer Lee, that Pennsylvania Democrat, lost her cool during a hearing.
She demanded that a witness statement, because it referenced her personally, be censored, even though Lee had barely finished attacking that witness.
It happened like this: Lee insulted witnesses scheduled to make statements as transphobic and hateful, with, “Madam Chair, I ask that while we sit through this hearing and the hateful misinformation I’m sure is coming our way, let us not forget the children at the core of this issue.”
Waiting to testify on the issue of Joe Biden’s agenda to promote transgenderism, no matter the injury to other innocent people, was Riley Gaines, famed as a college athlete after racing against Lia Thomas, a man portraying himself as a woman in college swim competitions.
Thomas responded to Lee’s attack with: “Of course, there is a place for everyone, regardless of gender identity, regardless of sexual orientation, regardless of race or what sports you play. There’s a place for everyone to play sports in this country. But unsafe, unfair and discriminatory practices towards women must stop. Inclusion cannot be prioritized over safety and fairness, and ranking member Lee, if my testimony makes me transphobic then I believe your opening monologue makes you a misogynist.”
Turley reported, “Lee than pounced and demanded that Gaines remarks be struck for ‘engaging in personalities.’”
He reported, “What followed was hurried consultation and presumable a few explanations for Lee on why witnesses are allowed to respond to such attacks by a member. Lee then withdrew her demand.”
He noted Congress has a rule that bans members from engaging in “personalities,” apparently to prevent personal attacks.
“However, Lee was attempting to use this against a witness who was defending herself against her own personal attack. It is a dangerous extension,” he warned.
He explained, “The fact that Lee’s immediate response was to censor a person who she had just attacked is telling. After labeling Gaines a hateful bigot, Lee did not believe that she should be allowed to denounce Lee’s own comments as an attack on women. It shows the slippery slope of censorship. Democrats have embraced an anti-free speech agenda to silence opposing viewpoints. That desire becomes insatiable even as citizens seek to rebut personal attacks from members in a congressional hearing.”
“That would create a nightmarish combination if members are protected from actions in defaming witnesses but then can censor them when they defend themselves.”
The commentary pointed out, “Democrats and their bureaucratic allies already believe they have the right to shut down speech they don’t like. It’s just a matter of whether the courts allow them to get away with it or not.”
The commentary’s conclusion? “The Democratic Party is made up of entitled wannabe tyrants who believe they should be immune from the very things they do. They don’t want to live by their own standards, and that’s not a tenable position for a functioning society. The problem is especially acute among younger Democrats like Lee. She does her ‘yas queen’ rantings for the camera, accusing others of bigotry but can’t take the slightest bit of pushback. Meanwhile, she wouldn’t dare say that stuff outside the halls of Congress because she knows she’d be legally liable. It’s cowardly and pathetic.”
Top Stories • 100 Pro-Life Groups and 218 Churches Have Been Attacked. Biden Has Prosecuted Only Four People • Elon Musk Condemns Population Control, Complains How Unborn Children “Have No Voice” • The FBI Still Thinks Pro-Life Catholics are Domestic Terrorists • Pro-Life Members of Congress Bash Joe Biden for Trying to De-Fund Pregnancy Centers
More Pro-Life News • 42% of Babies Killed in Abortions are Black, If Black Lives Matter They Would End Abortion • Woman Sues Texas to Have Abortion Just Because the Baby Might be Disabled • Congresswoman Introduces Three Bills to Help Women, Save Babies From Abortion • Canadian Cancer Patient Euthanized Because He Couldn’t Get Chemo • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Sometimes, former President Donald Trump’s political opponents tell you what they want to hear rather than what is actually said, all the while embracing the vice they seek to level upon him.
Speaking to supporters at Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Dec. 2, Trump accused his opponents of waging a war on democracy, stating, “From that day on our opponents, and we had a lot of opponents, but we’ve been waging an all-out war in American democracy. You look at what they’ve been doing, and becoming more and more extreme and repressive. They have just waged an all-out war with each passing day.”
Taking that rather clear statement about his opponents’ campaign to see him jailed, Salon.com’s Kelly McClure misquoted him in a Dec. 3 piece “Trump’s ‘war on democracy’ fumble sparks backlash” claiming he “said the quiet part out loud…” 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.
The U.S. State Department is violating the U.S. Constitution by funding technology to silence Americans who question government claims, says a lawsuit filed Tuesday by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas.
The three are suing to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” says the lawsuit. It exposes federal censorship activities even beyond the dramatic discoveries in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).
This lawsuit alleges the State Department is illegally using a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” instead to stop American citizens from speaking and listening to information government officials dislike. Other recent investigations have also found government counterterrorism resources and tactics being used to shape American public opinion and policy.
Through grants and product development assistance to private entities including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, the lawsuit alleges, the State Department “is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”
This is just the latest in a series of major investigations and court cases in the last year to uncover multiple federal censorship efforts laundered through private cutouts. The “Twitter Files,” a series of investigative journalist reports, uncovered that dozens of federal agencies pressured virtually all social media monopolies to hide and punish tens of millions of posts and users.
Missouri v. Bidenfound this federal censorship complex has included government officials changing the content moderation and user policies of social media monopolies through threats to destroy their business models. House of Representatives investigations have uncovered U.S. national security and spy agencies creating “private” organizations to circumvent the Constitution’s prohibition on federal officials abridging Americans’ speech. These false-front organizations deliberately avoid creating records subject to transparency laws and congressional oversight, public records show.
Congressional investigations in November revealed that federal officials have specifically targeted The Federalist’s reporting for internet censorship.
In which Sean Davis was censored for saying the best evidence against the integrity of the election was the fact that Democrats/media/Big Tech were censoring anyone who observed their censorship efforts related to the election. pic.twitter.com/r6NdbnSx1f
‘Coordinating the Government’s Efforts to Silence Speech’
The Fifth Circuit refrained from stopping the State Department’s participation in the “vast censorship enterprise” that Murthy v. Missouri uncovered because, the court said, it hadn’t seen enough evidence of that agency’s involvement. This new lawsuit from Texas, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire provides such evidence.
Even though Congress and the Constitution have banned the federal government from silencing Americans, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has morphed into “the lead in coordinating the government’s efforts to silence speech,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit names as defendants the U.S. State Department, GEC, and multiple department officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. GEC originated as a counterterrorism agency created by an executive order from President Obama.
Through GEC, the State Department evaluated more than 365 different tools for scrubbing the internet of disfavored information, the lawsuit says. The department also pays millions to develop multiple internet disinformation “tools.” It also runs tests on censorship technologies and awards government prize money to those most effective at controlling what Americans say and hear online, the lawsuit says.
State then shares these censorship technologies with companies, favored media outlets, academics, and government agencies. It markets these government-funded censorship technologies to Silicon Valley companies including Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. The tools included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says.
At least two of the censorship tools the State Department has funded, developed, and awarded have targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, the lawsuit says. NewsGuard and GDI wield these tools developed with government assistance to deprive government-criticizing news outlets, including The Federalist and The Daily Wire, of operating funds.
They do this by rating conservative outlets poorly, falsely claiming these outlets purvey “disinformation” and are “unreliable.” That deprives leftists’ media competitors of high-value ad dollars from the big companies that use these rating systems. Such companies include YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil, Kellogg, MasterCard, and Verizon.
“Advertising companies that subscribe to GDI’s blacklist refuse to place ads with disfavored news sources, cutting off revenue streams and leaving the blacklisted outlets unable to compete with the approved ‘low risk’ media outlets — often legacy news,” the lawsuit says.
Boosting Disinformation While Claiming the Opposite
Ratings companies like NewsGuard and GDI base their low ratings of outlets like The Federalist at least in part on politically charged “fact checks” of a tiny percentage of the outlets’ articles. While these companies’ full ratings criteria are secret, in December 2022 GDI published a top 10 list of its most favored and most disfavored news outlets. The Federalist and Daily Wire appear on GDI’s 10 “riskiest” list.
All of the outlets on GDI’s “least risky” list have helped spread some of the government’s biggest disinformation operations in the last decade. Those include the Russia-collusion hoax and Hunter Biden laptop stories, which influenced national elections in favor of Democrats. The 10 “least risky” outlets have also widely published notable misinformation such as claims that Covid vaccines prevent disease transmission, the Covington student insult hoax, and evidence-free claims that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist.
This federal censorship-industrial complex’s numerous disinformation operations include the Hamilton 68 effort. In contrast, The Federalist not only reported all these stories accurately from the beginning but for most led the reporting pack that proved it. GDI rated The Daily Wire’s “risk level” as “high” and The Federalist’s “risk level” as “maximum.”
While technologies and enterprises the State Department promotes push corporate media’s biggest purveyors of propaganda, they also “blacklist” The Federalist and Daily Wire, the lawsuit says, “negatively impacting Media Plaintiffs’ ability to circulate and distribute their publications to both current and potential audiences, and intentionally destroying the Media Plaintiffs’ ability to obtain advertisers.” Microsoft, for example, uses NewsGuard technology “to train Bing Chat.”
The lawsuit is filed in the U.S. federal court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks a court declaration that the State Department’s funding, testing, pressuring, and promoting of internet censorship tools is unconstitutional and an order that it end.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” “The Advent Prepbook,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Wednesday threatened Hunter Biden with contempt of Congress charges if he fails to appear for a Dec. 13 deposition before the oversight panel. Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, earlier in the day sent Comer a letter to reiterate that Hunter Biden is willing to testify before the House panel in a public hearing, but not for a deposition.
Lowell said Hunter Biden was “making the choice [to appear publicly] because the Committee has demonstrated time and again it uses closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort, the facts and misinform the American public — a hearing would ensure transparency and truth in these proceedings.”
“Contrary to the assertions in your letter, there is no ‘choice’ for Mr. Biden to make; the subpoenas compel him to appear for a deposition on December 13,” Comer wrote to Lowell.
“If Mr. Biden does not appear for his deposition on December 13, 2023, the Committee will initiate contempt of Congress proceedings.”
Last week, Hunter Biden offered to testify publicly as Republicans investigate his foreign business dealings as they pursue an impeachment inquiry into his father, President Joe Biden. Comer, on X, then accusedHunter Biden of “trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else.”
House Republicans have not initiated contempt proceedings against anyone this year. They threatened both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and FBI Director Christopher Wray with charges after unsuccessful attempts to obtain certain documents from them, the Washington Examiner reported. Blinken and Wray averted contempt votes by reaching 11th-hour agreements with Republicans.
If the full House votes to hold someone in contempt, it is referred to the Department of Justice, which then has discretion over whether it wants to begin criminal proceedings against the person. There have been contempt votes since 2008, with the DOJ pursuing indictments against Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, both aides to then-President Donald Trump.
A man hiding in a pit during the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on an outdoor music festival in Israel said he heard someone nearby screaming she was being raped. Elsewhere in the area, a combat paramedic saw the body of a young woman with her legs open, her pants pulled down, and what looked like semen on her lower back. An army reservist who was tasked with identifying those killed by the militants said some of the women were found wearing only bloodied underwear.
Such accounts given to The Associated Press, along with first assessments by an Israeli rights group, show that sexual assault was part of an atrocities-filled rampage by Hamas and other Gaza militants who killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took more than 240 hostages that day.
While investigators are still trying to determine the scope of the sexual assaults, Israel’s government is accusing the international community, particularly the United Nations, of ignoring the pain of Israeli victims.
“I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation — where the hell are you?” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a news conference Tuesday, switching to English to emphasize the point.
President Joe Biden called the reports of sexual violence “appalling” and urged the world to condemn “horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty.”
Two months after the Hamas attacks on the music festival, farming communities and army posts in southern Israel, police are still struggling to put together the pieces.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, priority was given to identifying bodies, not to preserving evidence. Police say they’re combing through 60,000 videos seized from the body cameras of Hamas attackers, from social media and from security cameras as well as 1,000 testimonies to bring the perpetrators to justice. It has been difficult finding rape survivors, with many victims killed by their attackers.
The group Physicians for Human Rights Israel, which has a record of advocating for Palestinian civilians in Gaza suffering under Israel’s longtime blockade of the territory, published an initial assessment in November.
“What we know for sure is that it was more than just one case and it was widespread, in that this happened in more than one location and more than a handful of times,” Hadas Ziv, policy and ethics director for the organization, said Tuesday. “What we don’t know and what the police are investigating is whether it was ordered to be done and whether it was systematic.”
Hamas has rejected allegations that its gunmen committed sexual assault.
Ron Freger fled the music festival when Hamas attacked and said he heard a woman screaming for help. “I was lying in a pit (and) I heard (a girl) yelling: ‘They’re raping me, they’re raping me!'” he told the AP.
Several minutes later, he heard gunshots close by and she fell silent, he said. “The feeling in that moment is one of complete powerlessness. I’m lying in this hole and I have no ability to do anything. I have no weapon, I have nothing, I’m surrounded by other people who are hiding with me and we’re completely powerless,” said the 23-year-old from the northern Israeli town of Netanya.
Last month, Israel’s police chief presented to the international news media videotaped testimony of a rape witness at the music festival. Her face blurred, she said she watched militants gang-rape a woman as she lay on the ground. The men then stood her up as blood trickled from her back, yanked her hair and sliced her breast, playing with it as they assaulted her. The last man shot her in the head while he was still inside her. The woman in the video described watching the militants as she pretended to be dead.
“I couldn’t understand what I saw,” she said.
A combat medic told the AP that he came across half a dozen bodies of women and men with possible signs of sexual assault when he reached one of the attacked communities.
One girl had been shot in the head and was lying on the floor, her legs open and pants pulled down, with what looked like semen on her lower back, said the medic who spoke on condition of anonymity because his unit was classified. Other bodies had mass bleeding around the groin with limbs at distorted angles, he said.
At the Shura military base where victims are being identified, Shari Mendes, a member of the army reserve unit that deals with the identification and religious burial preparation of female soldiers, said some of the women’s bodies came in with little clothing, such as parts of their pajamas. Some only had bloodied underwear.
Based on open-source information and interviews, the Physicians for Human Rights Israel report documents incidents at the music festival, homes around the Gaza Strip and an Israeli military base, all attacked by Hamas.
“It is becoming more apparent that the violence perpetrated against women, men and children also included widespread sexual and gender-based crimes,” it says.
Before this war, Hamas, an Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, wasn’t known to use rape as a weapon, said Colin P. Clarke, director of research at The Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consulting firm. Its tactics included suicide bombings and shooting attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.
A country like Israel should have the means to do rigorous testing to confirm if people were sexually assaulted in a more systematic way, said Nidhi Kapur, a specialist on sexual abuse in situations of armed conflict.
“Forensic testing should have been a priority to build a full picture of the attack,” said Kapur, who has worked in the region. “In a conflict you first take care of the survivors, you don’t count bodies.”
Netanyahu and members of his war cabinet held a tense and emotional meeting Tuesday with recently released hostages and family members of hostages still held in Gaza. Some of the recently released hostages shared testimonies of sexual abuse during their time in Gaza, participants said.
Separately, a doctor who treated some of the 110 released hostages told the AP that at least 10 men and women among those freed were sexually assaulted or abused, but did not provide further details. He spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the hostages’ identities.
According to the Israeli military, 138 hostages, including 15 women, are still held by Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza. Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, a military spokesman, said the army is “absolutely” concerned about sexual violence against female hostages.
On Monday, Israel hosted a special event at the United Nations, where former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, I-Ariz., and top technology executive Sheryl Sandberg were among those who criticized what they called a global failure to support women who were sexually assaulted and in some cases killed.
But some groups say Israel isn’t making it easy to investigate.
The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said it requested access to Israel and the Palestinian territories to allow it to collect information from the events that took place on Oct. 7 and 8, and since then, but Israel has not responded to its requests, said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Office.
Israel says the office has preexisting biases against Israel and it will not cooperate with the body. Israeli officials said they would consider all options for independent international mechanisms to investigate.
Rights experts say the United Nations is best placed to conduct a fair, credible and impartial investigation.
“These accounts are horrifying and deserve an urgent, thorough, and credible investigation,” said Heather Barr, associate director for the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The harms social media poses to children are well documented. People agree that kids shouldn’t be exposed to certain content. Here’s an age verification system that wouldn’t infringe on the First Amendment. (Photo: Flashpop/Getty Images)
A bipartisan group of senators is about to take Big Tech CEOs to task on Jan. 31, 2024, by having them publicly address their failures to protect kids online. And the CEOs need to! The harms social media poses to children are well documented and, at this point, indisputable—even by the companies themselves.
In it, he writes that YouTube “can’t do it alone … [and] support[s] policymakers, families, researchers, companies, and experts coming together to define a set of consistent standards for companies serving young people online.” He then advocates for policies that provide more parental rights, age-appropriate content for minors, and “appropriate safeguards.”
Even with this call for legislation, policymakers are finding it hard to impose basic measures, such as age restriction requirements to protect kids using these services.
Age restrictions on a deliberately addictive product that targets children should be a no-brainer. Various levels of government impose age restrictions on these types of offerings all the time. For example, kids can’t get tattoos or piercings without parental consent. Or attend movies that are rated R or PG-13. Or purchase video games rated “M.” But somehow, social media services are distinct, even though they trigger a similar addictive response as nicotine withdrawaland gambling.
So, why haven’t we done it?
State legislatures are making unforced errors by not considering the full internet stack—e.g., the operating system, the app store, or the app—when imposing such measures. Arkansas’ social media law is a prime example of an unforced error. Its law would have required some, but not all, social media companies to verify the age of their users. The law didn’t apply to YouTube, for example.
Failing to take a holistic approach when crafting legislation for the social media market unnecessarily opened the state up to a First Amendment challenge. This is because for the state to require such a measure, it would have to show that the requirement is both “narrowly tailored” to not impact adult users’ speech and also necessary to address the harms alleged.
According to federal District Court Judge Timothy Brooks, the state failed because excluding some social media companies made little sense if the law’s stated goal is to protect kids from the harms social media imparts. Brooks pointed out that even though “YouTube is not regulated by [Arkansas social media law],” the state oddly cited YouTube as being particularly harmful to children and “[a]mong all types of online platforms, YouTube was the most widely used by children.”
So, if Arkansas’ law doesn’t apply to YouTube, how can the state justify an imposition on adult speech on services that aren’t even favored by most children?
But it’s not all bad news. Brooks may have provided legislatures a path forward to get age verification without implicating the First Amendment—by going through the app stores.
Brooks seemed to be more upset that Arkansas’ law imposed duties on social media companies rather than on Google and Apple, the companies that run two of the biggest app stores on the internet. Throughout his opinion, he noted that Apple and Google provide parents several tools to shield kids from certain apps and wondered why the state needed to go through social media platforms to do what the app stores ought to.
He’s got a point. Social media apps rely on users to self-certify their age when they create an account, but they can’t fully confirm that the user is being truthful—whereas Apple and Google know the precise age of the owner of the device. How? Well, their software is integrated at every level of the mobile device. They own the two dominant mobile operating systems (i.e., iOS and Android, respectively), app stores (i.e., the App Store and Play Store), and browsers (i.e., Safari and Chrome).
Candidly, not including Apple and Google in age verification legislation makes little sense, because doing so would almost certainly resolve the First Amendment concern.
Why? Because all the law would have to require is for Apple and Google to give the app a thumbs up or thumbs down when a social media app asks to verify the device is owned by an adult or a child. The social media company would no longer have to guess how old the user is, which limits, or even eliminates, the risk of denying an adult the ability to engage on American social media platforms.
What’s more, going through the app stores makes parental consent more doable, because, as the court noted, parents have more control over the device than the apps themselves and the app stores are already required to obtain express parental consent for in-app purchases to comply with consent decrees from the Federal Trade Commission.
If the child’s device’s app store prohibits the child from downloading apps without a parent’s credentials (e.g., entering a password, providing a fingerprint, or using facial recognition), then parents immediately get more agency over the apps their children can access.
Better yet, it wouldn’t require the consumer to provide more information about the user to social media companies. If social media companies could simply send a request to the device (leveraging the data already available from the device’s operating system) to confirm (almost instantaneously) that a person is above the age of 18, then two things occur: 1) The user doesn’t provide more data other than what he has already provided to Apple or Google; and 2) the social media company only gets a thumbs up or a thumbs down in response to its inquiry, which limits the amount of new information the company receives.
State legislators should learn from these mistakes in order to effectively protect kids online. The biggest lesson so far is to look to both the apps and the app stores when it comes to age restrictions.
We as a society need to assert that healthy families build human flourishing in every nation and culture, and we are not being honest with people when we don’t, said the CEO of what has been called the most influential free-market think tank in Britain.
“There are some logical steps to what leads to human flourishing, and we need to be open about these things,” Legatum Institute CEO and member of the British House of Lords Baroness Philippa Stroud told Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast. She said that people should get a job, get married, and then have a child, in that order, to promote success for themselves and their families.
Good social policy (that which promotes healthy families) makes for good economic policy, she said.
“If we don’t have good social policy, we end up spending a huge amount of money on picking up the pieces of a breakdown. Whereas, actually, if we could get ahead of it [the breakdown of individuals and families] in our community to support people properly, then actually it wouldn’t—it doesn’t cost so much money later on,” Stroud asserted.
For the younger generation, there must be an effort to make it possible for them to have “hopes of owning a property” and “ensuring dignified work for all,” according to Stroud.
Success for Stroud would be about changing the narrative to one that is “filling our children’s minds with the facts that they can—they do—have a future.” She said she believes in the importance of young people knowing that their efforts and agency can build and support a future for their families.
“We might have limited resources, but when you take those resources and you match them with human ingenuity, then actually, the potential is unlimited,” Stroud said.
To inspire the next generation, there should be a pathway for good leaders to be embedded in a community, working alongside others to inspire them, she said.
However, sometimes leaders may be reluctant to step forward. “One of the things we’ve seen is great leaders who say what everybody is thinking and then get mobbed on Twitter, and it damages people,” Stroud said.
“The isolated leader standing on a hilltop on their own I don’t think in today’s world will make it. But communities of leaders building this vision, they will make it,” she said.
She said that leaders need to be clear about the problems we have and a vision for addressing them. The challenge with politics is creating clarity about the issues, according to Stroud: “If you don’t create the clarity about the nature of a problem, why would people accept a solution?”
Politicians oftentimes don’t “cast a vision of the possibilities and the future that we can build together. Or if they do, they don’t then actually implement the journey towards that solution. So, people are just left with the nature of a problem,” said Stroud.
“The only way to progress forward in my understanding … is [the] founding principle on the dignity of the human being … and that is a founding principle of this nation [the U.S.]” She said that gives her hope for the future.
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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
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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