These days, you’re not allowed to criticize George Soros for any of his evil anti-humanitarian deeds, or you’re automatically labeled as anti-semitic because he is supposably of Jewish descent. Many of my good Jewish friends say he’s done more harm to the Jewish community than anyone in America. He’s donated millions of dollars that have funneled their way into anti-semitic leftist groups such as BLM, Defund Police, and prosecutors that ignore actual crime while targeting political adversaries (conservatives), Making all communities less safe. He’s also supported left-wing groups and politicians that push for open borders, allowing Fentanyl, murder, child labor, and human trafficking.
Maybe Elon Musk was right. He “hates humanity,” and that has nothing to do with his Jewish heritage.
Eight teens have been arrested in connection with the beating death of 17-year-old Jonathan Lewis near his Las Vegas high school on Nov. 1. Undersheriff Andrew Walsh of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department revealed in a press conference Tuesday that the suspects will be charged with murder. Walsh further indicated that the investigation into Lewis’ slaying is far from over, calling on parents and students who may have seen the video to help identify others in the mob who mercilessly kicked, stomped, and punched Lewis as he tried to get away.
Lt. Jason Johansson of the LVMPD’s homicide section indicated that the fatal beating took place in an alley one block east of Rancho High School after classes let out. All involved in the incident were reportedly students from the school.
“As you know, the video that has been shared widely on social media … is very graphic and in my opinion is very void of humanity,” said Johansson. “What you see in the video though is approximately 10 subjects kicking, stomping, and punching our victim Jonathan as he’s on the ground, not defending himself, until the point at where he becomes unconscious.”
KVVU-TV previously reported that police found a student who was “battered and bleeding from the head.”
According to police, the fight was initially over a pair of stolen wireless headphones and possibly also over a stolen vape pen, apparently taken earlier in the week from the victim’s friend.
“After school let out, all parties then walked to that back alley where — as you see in the video — our victim removes his clothing, engages in a fight initially with one subject, and the minute the punch is thrown with that person, 10 subjects immediately swarm him,” said Johansson.
After the mob overtook Lewis and left him with “non-survivable head trauma,” Johansson said a concerned citizen found the victim’s crumpled and unresponsive body lying in the alley, began attending to him, then carried him back to the school. He was subsequently taken to University Medical Center, where days later he perished.
JUST IN: 8 teens have been arrested for the murder of Las Vegas teen Jonathan Lewis who was jumped & beaten to death.
The teens range in age from 13 years old to 17.
According to investigators, the fight broke out over headphones which were reportedly stolen from one of Lewis’… pic.twitter.com/g8dZRezdCe
Lewis’ cause of death was ruled a homicide. Police suggested there is presently no evidence to suggest that it was a hate crime.
The Clark County School District and the high school reportedly helped identify the eight suspects, who were taken into custody by law enforcement officials Tuesday morning. LVMPD also executed nine search warrants at various residences, obtaining clothing allegedly worn by the suspects during the attack.
The suspects range in age from 13 to 17. All were booked into Clark County Juvenile Hall on charges of murder.
“The case will now be turned over to the Clark County District Attorney’s Office, who we’ve been in close coordination with,” continued Johansson. “We’ll go through the normal steps … for them to be certified as an adult.”
Las Vegas has seen other teens charged as adults in recent weeks for ghastly murders.
Jzamir Keys, 16, and Jesus Ayala, 18, were both charged as adults in connection to the fatal rundown of 64-year-old retired police chief Andreas Probst. Ayala and Keys appear to have filmed parts of their rampage, including when they allegedly drove a white sedan off the road, then targeted Probst, the former police chief of Bell, California, for slaughter, giggling while doing so.
“I want to say just as a parent and as a member of this community, the video that’s out there and the videos that we have mentioned throughout this investigation and that you’ve seen reported in the media, they’re extremely disturbing,” said Undersheriff Walsh. “And this should be a reminder to all of us to have those difficult conversations with our children and remind them that their actions have consequences, their actions have lasting consequences, their actions have life-altering consequences.”
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These days, when she gets ready for school, the hair will be done. Perhaps it will be a braid of some sort, perhaps it will be curled. Earrings will be selected. A light and subtle application of age-appropriate makeup usually follows. The only constant is that she will always put on a skirt.
It didn’t used to be this way. When younger, she was quite the tomboy. There were the fights over getting her hair cut short, fights she lost not because we’re that controlling, but because short hair has to be cut more frequently and we didn’t want to add monthly visits to the stylist to the calendar. The uniform was shorts or pants and a polo for school, nicer pants and tops for dressier occasions, and athletic gear for casual moments. Jewelry was a no-go, even the pearls and things that grandmothers like to give to be worn at church.
She never suffered from dysphoria. She always knew she was a girl. It bothered her how often she was mistaken for a boy, not connecting the dots between her preferred functional form of attire and how it was virtually indistinguishable from the clothing sported by little boys. She was horrified when a classmate exhorted her to “just get the surgery.” That was reading too much into the truth, which was that she just wanted to play, to roughhouse, and to get outside. Dresses and skirts didn’t lend themselves to such things.
Once puberty arrived, the interests largely remained, but the video tutorials on how to do different braids and requests for new earrings joined them. It’s also when she looked at me earnestly in the car one evening and said, “I’m glad you and Mom aren’t liberals. You would’ve tried to turn me into a boy.”
While there are people across the political spectrum who recognize the realities of biology, statistically speaking, she wasn’t necessarily wrong in her proclamation. If she’d been born to this mom, this mom, or this mom, things could have turned out much differently. Thankfully, she was born to us, and we don’t hold retrograde opinions about the imaginary relationship between preferred clothing, toys, activities, and sex.
Not everyone is so enlightened, though, instead preferring to categorize children based on rigid stereotypes about how superficial things define us as boys and girls, men and women. Countless stories, like those linked above, of parents realizing their daughter was “transgender,” start with “I knew my son [sic] was trans when…” and revolve around such stereotypical markers. She didn’t like the color pink (once hated in our house, now one of her favorites), dresses, or games associated with little girls. Ergo, she must be a boy!
All one has to do to make such a logical leap is ignore the fact that prepubescent kids are, by definition, not sexual creatures and, as such, not much thinking in terms of true masculinity and femininity. They are just thinking about what interests them, not how those interests align with or diverge from their sex. It’s misguided parents who swoop in and make those assumptions.
This viewpoint is especially incomprehensible when one realizes that tomboys have long been with us. They were once staples of literature and other entertainment, from Laura Ingalls to Jo in Little Women to Pippi Longstocking. That they enjoyed clothing or activities more typical of boys wasn’t reason to attempt to muck around with their biology, and it still isn’t reason now.
If you have a daughter, you have a daughter. Her preferred clothing and activities do not define her, particularly when she’s young. Maybe she just finds pants more comfortable or likes playing in the dirt more than playing with a Barbie. If you let her grow up as a girl, those preferences may stick or they may, as in our case, shift in more traditionally feminine ways. In either case, it is not our job as parents to guide them toward self-destruction, but toward self-fulfillment and flourishing.
Let your tomboy be a tomboy. As a father, enjoy that you can get out and do more rough-and-tumble things with her. As a mother, enjoy that she isn’t raiding your closet or makeup tray. To do otherwise, to make the destructive assumption that because she doesn’t fit a stereotype she must have been “born in the wrong body,” is to abdicate your responsibility as a parent, to punish her with pseudoscience, and to saddle her with a lifetime of legitimate suffering, not the imaginary kind that arises from preferring blue to pink.
This author is a regular Federalist contributor.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
President Joe Biden met Chinese dictator Xi Jinping for high-level talks in California on Wednesday, marking the first time the two leaders have spoken face-to-face in a year. While specific details of the conversation will assuredly remain under wraps, a White House readout of the discussion indicates that Biden and Xi covered a variety of hot-button issues, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s defense against Hamas terrorists in the Middle East, and Taiwan. The two leaders also agreed to revive communications between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.
Given Biden and his administration’s history of getting humiliated in talks with their Chinese counterparts, it wasn’t surprising that Wednesday’s meeting didn’t produce any headway on holding China accountable for its human rights violations, military aggression, or cover-up of Covid-19’s origins. But aside from Biden’s incompetence at juggling U.S. foreign policy, Wednesday’s U.S.-China talks raised a far more concerning question. How can Biden be trusted to manage U.S. relations with China when he and his family have received millions of dollars from Chinese entities connected to the Chinese Communist Party?
The Paper Trail
Despite Joe Biden claiming on national television that his son, Hunter, “has not made money” from Chinese entities, the New York Post published a bombshell story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, sourced to Hunter’s laptop, which called Biden’s assurances into question. Emails from the laptop showed Hunter had “pursued lucrative deals” with CEFC China Energy Co., a Chinese energy giant that operates as “an arm of the Chinese Government.”
As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported, one email obtained by the Post showed Hunter describing a business transaction as “interesting for me and my family.” Another listed the younger Biden as “‘Chair / Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC’ with pay at ‘850’ and could offer monetary compensation for six people.”
“Those involved in the email from James Gilliar of the international consulting firm J2cR, including Hunter, were allegedly part of the four people who created a ‘provisional agreement’ to split 80 percent of the ‘equity’ of the company equally with ’10 for Jim’ and ’10 held by H for the big guy,’” Boyd wrote. While “Jim” is in reference to Joe’s older brother James Biden, a highly credible confidential human source has since corroborated that “big guy” was a moniker used to refer to Joe Biden.
Hunter’s dealings with CEFC often involved Ye Jianming, the since-arrestedhead of CEFC who has ties to China’s military. In early 2017, Hunter worked for Ye “as a counselor and adviser” and was later hired by CEFC in September 2017 to serve as defense counsel for Chinese businessman Patrick Ho, “despite his little experience in criminal defense.” Ho — who served as Ye’s “top lieutenant” and whom Hunter referred to as “the f-cking spy chief of China” — was arrested and later convicted by the Justice Department for bribing the presidents of several African countries.
Bank records obtained by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office indicate that Hunter was paid $1 million for representing Ho. According to Yahoo News, however, “it is not clear what work, if any, [Hunter] did for Ho,” with court records of Ho’s case “show[ing] no indication that Biden or his law firm at the time … participated in Ho’s legal defense.”
A bevy of communication records released by the House Ways and Means Committee in September included a December 2018 WhatsApp text exchange between Hunter and Hallie Biden — who was the widow of Joe’s other son, Beau, and dated Hunter after Beau’s passing — lamenting Ho’s arrest and Ye’s disappearance. The records also showed how Hunter sold the Biden “brand” to overseas business associates to increase the family’s fortunes.
But as additional evidence released by House Republicans has shown, the Bidens’ financial connections with CEFC and its associates run deeper than previously known, and in several cases, further implicate Joe Biden. Despite the elder Biden repeatedly denying involvement in his family’s foreign business ventures, Hunter’s communication records indicate that Joe was keenly aware of his son’s overseas financial interests and served as a primary force behind the operation.
A series of July 2017 WhatsApp messages sent by Hunter to Chinese businessman Raymond Zhao show the younger Biden leveraging “his father’s name and threaten[ing] CEFC executives unless a lucrative deal was worked out with Ye.” In his messages, Hunter explicitly stated, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” He further threatened to leverage “the man sitting next to me and every person he knows” to punish Zhao should he fail to follow through on the arrangement.
Within 10 days of that conversation, a CEFC subsidiary poured roughly $5 million into a Biden-linked bank account. Bank records recently obtained by House Republicans show that on the same day, Hunter “transferred $400,000 out of [that account] and into his corporation, Owasco P.C.,” before wiring $150,000 of these CEFC-tied funds to a company owned by James and his wife, Sara, who withdrew $50,000 from said company and deposited the money into their personal checking account. Less than a month later, on Sept. 3, 2017, Sara signed a $40,000 check to Joe, claiming it represented a “loan repayment.”
As noted by The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland, “the $40,000 Joe ‘the Big Guy’ Biden received was exactly 10 percent of the $400,000 Hunter Biden received from CEFC.”
At a time when China is becoming increasingly aggressive towards the U.S. and its allies, Americans need leaders doing everything in their power to stand up for U.S. interests and limit threats to their security. But with Biden at the helm, that’s no longer a guarantee.
Lunch Bucket Joe and his family’s financial ties to individuals and entities connected to Beijing’s communist government make him a liability for the United States. Americans can’t — and shouldn’t — trust that Biden’s judgment over anything having to do with U.S.-China relations is fully within their best interests.
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
Democrats have one huge, unavoidable problem. And his name is Joe Biden.
According to recent polls, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump would beat Biden if the 2024 election were held today. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday shows Biden with 46 percent and Trump with 48 percent among registered voters, still within the margin of error and too close to call. However, a new Fox News poll, also out Wednesday, shows that in a head-to-head, the former president would prevail with 50 percent to Biden’s 46 — a number Trump has never garnered in a Fox poll going back to October 2015.
Do these numbers and thin margins mean anything? Maybe not. We are still a year from the election. And if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that polls are traditionally garbage and are used far more often as tools to shape public opinion than to reflect it. But there are deeper and far more meaningful insights to mine from the survey, and they don’t spell good things for the Democrat Party.
For instance, it’s worth noting that not only does Biden appear to be losing generally to Trump, but the incumbent is losing his own dependable voters to his rival. Polls show Biden is hemorrhaging black, Hispanic, suburban, and young voters — all demographics that reliably vote Democrat. It could have something to do with how Biden has handled major crises he’s either caused or exacerbated. According to Quinnipiac, voters disapprove of his response to the Hamas attack and subsequent fallout (54 percent disapproval to 37 percent approval), his economy (59 to 37 percent), his foreign policy (61 to 34 percent), his border crisis (65 to 26 percent), and his response to the Russia-Ukraine war (49 to 47 percent).
The implications are simple. Voters are confronting a rare moment in U.S. history in which they can actually compare what it’s like to live under the leadership, or lack thereof, of the two major presidential candidates. Do they want Bidenomics or the affordable grocery and gas prices of the Trump era? Do they want war in the Middle East — or Eastern Europe or the South China Sea — or peace? Do they want an open border or national security? The Trump-Biden decision is an increasingly easy calculation for voters to make.
So, Democrats are stuck. And they did this to themselves, largely by closing off the possibility of a primary and instead committing to dragging Joe’s corpse across the finish line.
And yes, that really is the strategy. It’s not that Biden is a strong candidate by any measure, save for maybe his incumbency, but again, even that’s in doubt after his disastrous first term. He’s a demonstrably weak candidate, especially compared to Trump — another reality easily extrapolated from the polls.
On the Republican side — which, in contrast to Democrats, is still choosing to slog through primary election theatrics — the second-tier candidates are a notable governor and former governor, both beloved by their states and beyond. And Trump is still leading them by some 50 points. He’s got 48 points on Ron DeSantis and 51 on Nikki Haley. If prominent leftist governors such as Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer were to challenge Biden for the Democrat nomination, there’s no way he’d have that kind of lead.
This week there have been murmurs of a potential challenger — just maybe not who you would have expected. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on Capitol Hill hobnobbing with Sen. Chuck Schumer on Wednesday and refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he’ll run for president. This after he divulged last week that the parties did approach him last year. And you can see the twinkle in Democrats’ eyes at the thought of dumping weak, old Biden for his antithesis. Here’s Schumer flirting with The Rock on X after their meeting, posting cutesy little lyrics from one of the actor’s Disney roles.
But while Democrats might view The Rock as an exit strategy, they still have a monumental problem to overcome: Voters aren’t just fed up with Biden, they’re fed up with Democrat policies both foreign and domestic.
There’s no denying Democrats have become the party of mass illegal immigration. Every town is a border town, and even urbanites are done with the Democrat policies overrunning their cities with aliens who suck resources dry. Speaking of cities, left-wing policies have destroyed them, from Portland and Seattle to Washington, D.C. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies have caused violence in these places to skyrocket, with carjackings up more than 100 percent since last year and violent crime up 40 percent in our nation’s capitol. In fact, just this week D.C.’s disaster of a mayor declared a state of emergency because youth violent crime has gotten so bad. Meanwhile, Democrats have also become the party of inflation, war, no-limits abortion, transing kids, weaponizing the federal government, terrorist sympathizing, and every other anti-America policy position you can imagine.
That takes a strong leader to overcome. Sure, The Rock does a magnificent job at the role he plays in every movie, but he’s not that leader. And besides, would today’s Democrat Party really vote for a candidate who’s a Joe Rogan bro and friends with Trump supporters?
So, Democrats are left to lie with sleepy Joe in the bed they made for themselves. It’s hard to feel sorry for them.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley weighs in on President Biden’s upcoming visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., not running for re-election.
A new national poll released Wednesday showed President Biden trailing all three lead GOP presidential candidates: former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
According to the survey, conducted this month by Marquette Law School, Trump has an advantage of 52% to 48% over Biden among registered voters, while DeSantis holds a 51% to 49% advantage in a head-to-head matchup with the president. And Haley, who also previously served as governor of South Carolina, holds a 55% to 45% edge over Biden, the largest lead among Republican candidates.
The survey showed that Trump’s edge over Biden has grown considerably since July, when Marquette’s poll showed the pair tied at 50%. It further showed DeSantis’ lead over Biden has remained consistent in that same time span.
And while all three of the top Republican candidates lead Biden, Trump is the only one who leads among Independent voters. Haley, meanwhile, has the largest support among Democrat voters compared to Trump and DeSantis.
At the same time, Haley draws the support of 15% of Democrat voters, while Trump gets 11% and DeSantis gets 8%.
In addition, the Marquette poll showed Trump, for the first time this year, has taken a lead among registered voters who report being reluctant to choose either him or Biden. Trump leads Biden in that category by a margin of 53% to 47%, a big shift from Biden’s 55% to 42% lead as recently as September.
Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley holds a 10-point lead over President Biden, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a two-point lead over the president, the Marquette poll showed. (Getty Images)
The most recent poll comes as the White House continues to claim it is not concerned about polling, which continues to show Biden’s approval rating falling and his 2024 prospects waning.
“I mean, look, I spoke to this yesterday,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters earlier this month. “And what I said is you have to take these polls… with a grain of salt, right? And I talked about 2020… and what we saw in 2020 and what was being reported then. And what we saw is a president that was… able to bring an incredibly strong, diverse coalition to win in 2020. We saw the same thing in 2022.”
“So, look, we don’t put much stock in… polls,” she continued. “The president is going to focus on delivering for the American people. He has an agenda that is incredibly popular, and that matters. And that’s going to be what the president is going to focus on: How do we continue to deliver for the American people? And that’s the focus.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier this month that the White House doesn’t “put much stock” in polls. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
“I want [Biden] to consider what is best in terms of the goal that I know he is committed to, which is defeating Donald Trump,” David Axelrod, a former senior Obama campaign adviser, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Nov. 6.
“And if he believes, based on not just what [is] in his heart but what’s in the data and what he’s being told, that he has the best chance to do it, then he should run. But you know, the thing that irritates me a little bit, Wolf, is this notion that people who are concerned are ‘bedwetters.'”
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
The United Nations Security Council called for a days-long pause in fighting in Gaza on Thursday as Israeli forces continued to strike against Hamas leaders in Gaza City. Israeli forces took control of the Al-Shifa Hospital and are working to “destroy” Hamas in the region.
The Israeli military continues to target Hamas leadership in northern Gaza and has captured several the terrorist groups’ key bases in the region
There remain up to 238 Hamas hostages in Gaza, and 10 of them are believed to be Americans. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 11,200 Gazans have been killed in the fighting, though they do not distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas terrorists.
After weeks of gridlock, the United Nations Security Council voted to call for a days-long humanitarian pause in fighting
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IDF soldiers recover body of Hamas hostage found near Al-Shifa Hospital
IDF soldiers recover body of Hamas hostage found near Al-Shifa Hospital
Israeli Defense Forces say they found the body of a hostage taken in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Thursday.
Israeli forces say they found Yehudit Weiss’ body in a building adjacent to the Al-Shifa Hospital, which Israel says Hamas had been using as a headquarters until early this week. The IDF did not offer any details about Weiss beyond her name, but noted that her family has been contacted.
Soldiers searching the building say they also found military equipment including Kalashnikov rifles and RPG’s inside.
Weiss was one of roughly 240 people taken hostage by Hamas duirng its Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. She is now among a small number of hostages confirmed to have been killed since Israel’s war on Hamas began.
Israeli troops discovered a hidden booby-trapped vehicle inside the complex of a Hamas-run hospital in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces said Thursday.
In a video posted to X, the IDF said the vehicle contained AK-47 rifles, grenades, RPGs, sniper rifles and other explosives.
“This is what Hamas is trying to hide from you,” an IDF spokesperson said in the footage.
Near the vehicle were weapons, ammunition and other items, including handcuffs and knives displayed on the ground, the IDF said.
“And where they’re hiding all this equipment is in the hospital,” the spokesperson said. “A place that’s supposed to be for humanitarian aid. They have all this evil hidden here.”
“This is where they choose to hide everything because they know the IDF won’t attack, the air force won’t attack here,” he added. “They use the hospital as human shields.”
Israel has long claimed tat Hamas has used hospitals and other sensitive locations as cover to conceal its military operations.
On Tuesday, John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, said that intelligence supports Israel’s claims about Hamas activities in hospitals.
“I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” Kirby told reporters on Air Force One.
IDF chief of staff says Israel close to ‘destroying’ Hamas’ military system in Gaza’s north
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi talks with troops Thursday in the Gaza Strip. (Israel Defense Forces)
The chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces on Thursday credited his troops with moving closer to destroying Hamas’ “military system” amid its weeks-long campaign against the terror group.
Herzi Halevi visited soldiers on the ground inside the Gaza Strip, where he spoke of Israel’s response to Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israeli border communities.
“As the campaign move forwards, with what you have done here with these battalions, Division 36 and 252, we are quite close to destroying the (Hamas) military system that existed in the north of the Gaza Strip,” he said, according to a press release. “We will complete it, we still have some things to do, but we are getting closer.”
He said the IDF will continue its military operations and that “as much as it depends on us, area after area, we’re going to kill the commanders and kill the operatives and destroy the infrastructure.”
“You have done it excellently so far, take what you’ve learned so far – for almost three weeks, and do it even better,” Halevi added.
Israel has battered Gaza with continuous airstrikes in the weeks since the attack, resulting in thousands dead and an escalating humanitarian crisis.
It’s highly unlikely that Israeli military operations will eliminate the ideology of Hamas, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby suggested Thursday.
Israel has pummeled the Gaza Strip for six weeks with airstrikes as Israeli leaders have vowed to eliminate the terror group.
“What we have learned through our own experiences … through military and other means, you can absolutely have a significant impact on [a] terrorist group’s ability to resource itself, to train fighters, to recruit fighters, to plan and to execute attacks,” Kirby said Thursday during a briefing.
He noted that Hamas leaders have repeatedly said they plan to attack Israel for the foreseeable future.
Military operations against a particular group, no matter how precise and targeted, cannot eliminate an idea, he said, citing the defeat of other terror groups in recent years.
“I mean, look at the shadow of itself that ISIS is right now, look at the shadow of itself that al Qaeda is right now. That doesn’t mean that the ideology also withers away and dies,” he said. “But you can absolutely have a practical, meaningful effect on a terrorist organization’s ability to conduct and execute its attacks.”
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this report.
Israel released video footage that purportedly shows part of a tunnel on the grounds of a hospital complex in Gaza.
The tunnel was near the Al-Shifa hospital, which Israel has said is used by Hamas to plan attacks and military operations.
On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces released footage showing weapons and military equipment inside the hospital, which has shelter thousands of civilians amid Israeli shelling.
Israeli officials claim that the facility is being used as cover by Hamas terrorists and that the group has set up its main command center underneath the building.
“A few of the most interesting things that we found totally confirms, without any doubt, that Hamas systematically uses hospitals in their military operations, in violation of international law,” IDF Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said as he walked through an MRI building at the hospital.
Shelling ramps up at Israel-Lebanon border with Hezbollah, IDF trading missile strikes: report
Smoke rises from an Israeli airstrike, left, and artillery shelling, right, on the outskirts of Aita al-Shaab, a Lebanese border village with Israel in south Lebanon on Monday. Israeli troops and Hezbollah militants and their allies have been clashing along the border since the Israel-Hamas war started five weeks ago with a bloody incursion into southern Israel by Hezbollah ally Hamas. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
The Israel Defense Forces and Lebanon-based Hezbollah have ramped up shelling against each other as both sides continue to trade airstrikes.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, said it has struck eight targets so far in Israel on Thursday, including Israeli soldiers and a military barracks, “in support of our steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip,” according to Reuters.
In response, the IDF said it hit a site in Lebanon that has tried launching anti-tank missiles toward its territory and that artillery strikes have been directed at other locations, the news agency adds.
Israel’s counterattack has impacted several villages along Lebanon’s southern border, a source told Reuters. There were no reported injuries. Both sides have repeatedly traded airstrikes since Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israeli border communities.
Since Hamas launched its war on Israel, more than 70 Hezbollah fighters and 10 civilians have been killed in shelling in Lebanon, Reuters reports.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this report.
Pro-Palestinian protesters block bridges in Boston, San Francisco during rush hour
Pro-Palestinian protesters block bridges in Boston, San Francisco during rush hour
Pro-Palestinian protesters blocked traffic on bridges in Boston and San Francisco during rush hour Thursday morning to call for a cease-fire in Gaza as Israel continues to target Hamas leadership more than a month after the militant group’s deadly incursion into Israel.
On the Boston University bridge, the group IfNotNow, which says it represents members of Boston’s Jewish community, chanted “Cease-fire now!” and demanded that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., support an immediate cease-fire and use her influence to stop the Israeli government’s military action in Gaza.
The protest slowed traffic to a trickle on the bridge, which connects Boston and Cambridge, as the group held signs that said, “Let Gaza Live,” and unfurled a banner across the roadway that read, “Jews say: Ceasefire now.”
“We care about Palestinian lives, we only want to hurt Hamas,” one protester on the bridge told NBC Boston, while another said, “There can’t be peace for Jews unless there is peace for Palestinians.”
Meanwhile, Pro-Palestinian protesters also shut down the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, where President Biden was courting world leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
Fox News’ Stephen Sorace contributed to this report
Republicans blast pro-Palestinian protests at DNC: ‘Nation’s capital is under siege’
I am on Capitol Hill right now and it’s on lockdown. No getting in or out of our offices. We have officers that were pepper sprayed by pro-Hamas protestors with a lot of people attempting to break into the Democratic HQ. Anyone else notice how violent the so-called “ceasefire”… pic.twitter.com/UbtMmLe7Ei
The Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., saw fireworks on Wednesday night when pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with police in front of the DNC.
Republicans weighed in on the protests online, with Florida Rep. Kat Cammack posting a video of the protest while she was on Capitol Hill.
“I am on Capitol Hill right now and it’s on lockdown,” Cammack wrote. “No getting in or out of our offices.”
“We have officers that were pepper sprayed by pro-Hamas protestors with a lot of people attempting to break into the Democratic HQ,” she continued. “Anyone else notice how violent the so-called ‘ceasefire’ crowd is?”
Fox News’ Houston Keene contributed to this report
The Guardian removes Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ after TikTok unearths pro-terror screed
The Guardian removes Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ after TikTok unearths pro-terror screed
The Guardian removed Osama bin Laden’s infamous “Letter to America” this week as the words of the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, went viral after being unearthed by social media users.
The left-wing outlet had the anti-American and antisemitic letter published on its website since 2002 and was the first Google search result when searching for the document. But the publication deleted bin Laden’s letter amid a sudden spike in traffic.
A spokesperson for The Guardian told Fox News Digital, “The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead.”
The Guardian declined additional comment.
The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, with many thousands more injured and suffering from long-term illnesses, after Islamic terrorists crashed four hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania; the latter was forced down by heroic passengers. In the letter to the American people translated in English, bin Laden justified al-Qaeda’s attacks against the U.S. because “you attacked us” and “you attacked us in Palestine.”
“Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation,” bin Laden alleged.
Suspect arrested in death of pro-Israel demonstrator Paul Kessler
Suspect arrested in death of pro-Israel demonstrator Paul Kessler
California police have arrested Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji, 50, in relation to the death of Jewish man Paul Kessler at an Israel protest last week.
Alnaji has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and has a bail set at $1,000,000. The arrest comes roughly a week after Kessler, 69, died in the hospital after striking his head on the concrete during an altercation with Alnaji.
Footage showed Kessler bleeding on the ground following the incident. Alnaji, a pro-Palestinian protester had allegedly manhandled Kessler and caused him to fall.
The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department stated last week that they had identified a 50-year-old suspect in the case, but they had not yet identified him nor made an arrest.
AOC leads two dozen Democrats calling for Israel cease-fire over ‘violations against children’
AOC leads two dozen Democrats calling for Israel cease-fire over ‘violations against children’
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is leading renewed calls for President Biden to support a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas over the “grave violations” being committed against children in the war.
“We write to you to express deep concern about the intensifying war in Gaza, particularly grave violations against children, and our fear that without an immediate cessation of hostilities and the establishment of a robust bilateral ceasefire, this war will lead to a further loss of civilian life and risk dragging the United States into dangerous and unwise conflict with armed groups across the Middle East,” the progressive lawmaker wrote.
She and 23 other progressives wrote to Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday, asking for details on the U.S. plan to de-escalate tension in the region.
They cited figures from both Israel and the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza about how many children have been killed or abducted since Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing hundreds of civilians.
Israel has responded by bombarding Gaza with rocket fire and a ground invasion.
“We reaffirm our unequivocal condemnation of the Hamas attacks on Israel that took place on October 7th, in which Hamas killed over 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, and captured over 200 hostages, who were subsequently taken to Gaza,” the Democrats wrote.
Massachusetts town flying Palestinian flag sparks backlash from residents, Jewish congregation
Massachusetts town flying Palestinian flag sparks backlash from residents, Jewish congregation
A local Jewish leader spoke out on “FOX & Friends” Thursday after his Massachusetts town approved a permit to allow a Palestinian flag to fly in town.
Marc Freedman, president of Congregation Ahavat Olam in North Andover, said the flag was now a “symbol of antisemitism” following the Oct. 7 attacks.
“It is a symbol to just eliminate the entire Jewish population,” he said.
Town officials approved a permit Monday allowing the Palestinian flag to be flown on the North Andover Town Common.
“I think they’re just a bunch of cowards. They took a legal initiative, a legal statement from council that said you need to follow specific guidelines and must raise this flag, when in their hearts, in their hearts, I know every single one of them did not want to raise their flag,” he said.
He said the council put personal concerns ahead of the town and added, “that’s not what leadership does.”
Fox News’ Hanna Panreck contributed to this report
IDF footage shows Hamas rockets stashed under child’s bed inside Gaza terrorist’s home
IDF footage shows Hamas rockets stashed under child’s bed inside Gaza terrorist’s home
Israeli Defense Forces released footage of troops searching the home of a Hamas terrorist in Gaza and uncovering a stash of rockets hidden under a young child’s bed on Thursday.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari says the rockets and other weapons found inside the home were destroyed soon afterward. Footage shows an Israeli soldier walking past a pink “baby girl” sign before revealing several rockets inside a compartment in the bed.
“Rockets were found inside a bed in the children’s bedroom inside the house of a Hamas terrorist during operational activity carried out by the troops of the 551st Brigade. The terrorist was a part of a Hamas terrorist cell in Beit Hanoun,” Hagari said in a statement.
“During the operational activity, the troops uncovered a significant amount of weapons including rockets, explosive devices, and dozens of kilos of explosives. The weapons were subsequently destroyed by the forces,” he added.
Rockets were found inside a bed in the children's bedroom inside the house of a Hamas terrorist during operational activity carried out by the troops of the 551st Brigade. The terrorist was a part of a Hamas terrorist cell in Beit Hanoun >> pic.twitter.com/25SneQfOkF
— דובר צה״ל דניאל הגרי – Daniel Hagari (@IDFSpokesperson) November 16, 2023
Information, photos about Hamas hostages found on laptop inside hospital: IDF
Information, photos about Hamas hostages found on laptop inside hospital: IDF
Israeli Defense Forces uncovered information about hostages taken by Hamas on a laptop found inside the Al-Shifa Hospital on Thursday.
Israel says the laptop had photos and videos taken of hostages after the Oct. 7th massacre in Israel. Israeli forces say evidence indicates Hamas was using Al-Shifa Hospital as a base of operations “within the last few days.”
“At the end of the day, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus told the BBC. “Hamas aren’t here because they saw we were coming. This is probably what they were forced to leave behind. Our assessment is that there’s much more.”
Fox News’ foreign correspondent Trey Yings and cameraman Yaniv Turgeman visited the hospital with Israeli special forces early Thursday.
Israel says Hamas took some 239 hostages on Oct. 7, though the U.S. has said there is no way to know how many of those are still alive.
Online personality and pro-Palestinian activist Lynette Adkins urged her over 175,000 TikTok followers on Tuesday to read the words of the terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.
“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read- It’s literally two pages. Go read ‘A Letter to America,” Adkins said the video. “And please come back here and just let me know what you think because I feel like I’m going through, like, an existential crisis right now and a lot of people are, so I just need someone else to be feeling this.”
Her video received roughly 800,000 views and over 80,000 likes on TikTok.
Fox News Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst and cameraman Yaniv Turgeman went inside the Al-Shifa hospital with Israeli special forces on Thursday, sharing images of weapons found inside the complex.
Israeli forces say the weapons are evidence that Hamas had used the facility–and tunnel systems under it–as a base of operations.
Footage from Yingst and Turgeman’s visit showed rifles stashed behind an MRI machine as well as other supplies.
President Biden says he thinks Israel’s military operation in Gaza will stop when Hamas “no longer maintains the capacity to murder, abuse, and do horrific things to the Israelis.”
Speaking at a press conference after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden called on the Israeli military to exercise caution as they pursue Hamas military targets near civilian infrastructure. He said the Israel Defense Forces has “an obligation to use as much caution as they can in going after their targets.”
However, he added, “Hamas said they plan to attack Israelis again and this is terrible dilemma.”
Biden and his administration have remained steadfast in support for Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas. U.S. officials have strongly condemned the Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel, in which Hamas terrorists infiltrated the Jewish state and massacred as many as 1,200 people, taking some 240 back to Gaza as hostages. Other world leaders have condemned Israel’s military actions in Gaza, specifically attacks on hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, pointing to the staggering death toll figures released by the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry. Israel has said, and the White House confirmed, that Hamas uses Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza City, as a military base to store weapons and plan terrorist attacks.
The U.S. government has rejected calls for a cease-fire in the conflict, insisting that Israel has a right to defend itself. At the same time, the Biden administration has pressured Israel to allow short-term pauses in the fighting so humanitarian aid, including food and medical supplies, can be delivered to the Palestinians living in Gaza.
Fox News’ Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report
Israeli military gains ‘operational control’ over Gaza harbor used by Hamas
Israeli Defense Forces have gained “operational control” over the Harbor in Gaza city, previously a Hamas stronghold.
Israeli Defense Forces have gained “operational control” over the Harbor in Gaza city, previously a Hamas stronghold.
The IDF announced its successful oepration in the harbor on Thursday, saying Hamas had used the area to train maritime forces.
“The IDF has gained operational control over the Hamas-operated Gaza Harbor,” The IF wrote in a statement. “Disguised as a civilian area, the harbor was used by Hamas as a training facility for their naval commando forces to plan and execute terrorist attacks.”
“During the operation, conducted by soldiers of the 188th Armored Corps’ Brigade and Flotilla 13, numerous terrorist tunnel entrances and terrorist infrastructures were destroyed,” the statement continued.
Israel has conducted a relentless campaign against Hamas terrorists cells in Gaza City. The terrorist group has maintained a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the population center.
The IDF has gained operational control over the Hamas-operated Gaza Harbor.
Disguised as a civilian area, the harbor was used by Hamas as a training facility for their naval commando forces to plan and execute terrorist attacks.
Hamas has agreed to release dozens of hostages from Gaza under terms of a tentative deal that the Israeli government is now considering, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
While the exact terms of the deal remain unclear, it is believed to involve the release of some Palestinian prisoners held in Israel in addition to a multi-day pause in fighting in Gaza. The deal may already have been rejected, however.
Hamas terrorists took up to 240 hostages during their Oct. 7 massacre inside Israel. That number includes 10 Americans and many other foreign nationals who were in Israel.
UN rights chief calls for international investigation into alleged Israel-Hamas war crimes
UN rights chief calls for international investigation into alleged Israel-Hamas war crimes
UN human rights chief Volker Turk appeared to call for an international investigation into alleged war crimes commited by Israel in its war against Hamas on Thursday.
Turk made the comments after returning from a visit to the Middle East, though he was not allowed to access Israel or Gaza. The official condemned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and argued that some in Israel have no qualms about killing civilians.
“Extremely serious allegations of multiple and profound breaches of international humanitarian law, whoever commits them, demand rigorous investigation and full accountability,” he said during a U.N. briefing in Geneva, going on to decry the “intensification of violence and severe discrimination agaisnt Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”
“It is apparent that on both sides, some view the killing of civilians as either acceptable or collateral, or a deliberate and useful weapon of war,” he continued.
Driver rams barrier at Israeli embassy in Tokyo, injures police officer
Driver rams barrier at Israeli embassy in Tokyo, injures police officer
Police in Tokyo arrested a lone driver who rammed his vehicle into a barrier outside the Israeli embassy on Thursday.
Israeli ambassador to Japan Gilad Cohen confirmed the incident in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Japanese police say they arrested the suspect, a 53-year-old man who was suspected to be a member of a “right-wing organization.”
A police officer outside the embassy received minor injuries in the incident.
“Shocked by the suspected vehicular ramming attack on a police officer on guard near the Israeli embassy in Tokyo. This matter is under investigation by the local police. I would like to express gratitude to the Japanese government and Tokyo Police for their commitment to ensuring our security. Wishing a speedy recovery to the injured police officer,” Cohen wrote on social media.
Top media outlet marred by string of retractions and apologies related to Israel-Hamas war
Top media outlet marred by recent string of retractions and apologies related to Israel-Hamas wa
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been blemished with a string of apologies and retractions related to stories detailing developments in the Israel-Hamas war.
England’s premiere outlet, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, is the oldest and largest local and global broadcaster and has been heralded as an integral source of worldwide news.
But the broadcaster’s reputation has been questioned in recent weeks after a series of inaccurate news reports led critics and social media users to wonder why the BBC’s mistakes erred on behalf of Hamas and Palestinians.
On Tuesday, BBC News Channel aired a report that claimed Israeli forces had descended on Al Shifa hospital in Gaza and targeted “medical teams and Arab speakers” inside.
While reports did indicate the IDF had entered the hospital, no reports corroborated the claim that soldiers had targeted those inside.
The error led the BBC to issue an on-air apology, retraction and a written statement.
“As BBC News covered initial reports that Israeli forces had entered Gaza’s main hospital, we said that ‘medical teams and Arab speakers’ were being targeted. This was incorrect and misquoted a Reuters report,” the BBC said. “We should have said IDF forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers for this operation. We apologize for this error, which fell below our usual editorial standards.”
Fox News’ Nicholas Lanum contributed to this report
Chicago college professor justifies Hamas attack ‘after 75 years of Israeli white supremacy’
Chicago college professor justifies Hamas attack ‘after 75 years of Israeli white supremacy’
A Chicagoland sociology professor sent a mass email to her students and department colleagues attempting to rally support for Palestinians who she claims have faced “75 years of Israeli White supremacy.”
Brooke Johnson, an associate professor and sociology department coordinator at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), argued “As critical sociologists we are trained to analyze power and inequality in society” and that “this importantly comes with the responsibility to speak up when we witness harm, injustice, and violence,” stressing “What is currently happening in Palestine is one of those moments.”
“After 75 years of Israeli White supremacy, including displacement, human rights violations, and systemic violence, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th which resulted in 1400 deaths and 240 hostages,” Johnson wrote in a Nov. 8 email obtained by Fox News Digital. “Israel is now collectively punishing Palestinians. The Palestinian death toll from Israeli airstrikes exceeds 10,000, and almost half of these are children. This number increases daily as airstrikes continue; water, food and medical aid are cut off; and demands for a humanitarian cease-fire increase.”
One student who received the email was left “really upset” by what Johnson wrote, calling the accusations she made against Israel including being guilty of “White supremacy” as “just not true.”
“I called my mom and I started crying,” the student, who did not wish to be identified, told Fox News Digital.
The student accused Johnson of “justifying” the Oct. 7 attack.
Fox News Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report
Police in the nation’s capital responded to the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters Wednesday evening as pro-Palestinian demonstrators grew violent while calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
About 150 people were “illegally and violently protesting” near the DNC headquarters building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., according to U.S. Capitol Police.
Six Capitol police officers were injured during the clash on Wednesday evening, according to the agency. Their injuries stemmed from minor cuts, pepper spray burns and punches thrown by protesters who turned violent alongside peaceful protesters.
Videos on social media showed protesters shoving police officers and trying to hold on to metal barricades at the DNC headquarters while officers attempted to remove them.
Capitol police and the Metropolitan Police Department, who also responded to the protest, did not immediately confirm to Fox News Digital how many arrests were made at the event.
Protesters included members of “If Not Now” and “Jewish Voice for Peace.” Both organizations have organized other demonstrations in Washington D.C. since Hamas’ unprecedented Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Fox News Digital’s Sarah Rumpf-Whitten, Adam Sabes, Kelley Kramer and Michael Ruiz contributed to this report.
Israeli Air Force strikes home of Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ Political Bureau: IDF
The Israel Defense Forces said Thursday its air force conducted a strike on the home of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Haniyeh, who is the head of Hamas’ Political Bureau, is accused of using his residence in Gaza as terrorist infrastructure and a meeting point for Hamas’ senior leaders to direct attacks on Israel.
It’s not clear if anyone was killed in the strike as Haniyeh lives in Qatar, according to the Times of Israel.
Overnight, IDF fighter jets struck the residence of Ismail Haniyeh, the Head of Hamas’ Political Bureau.
The residence was used as terrorist infrastructure and a meeting point for Hamas’ senior leaders to direct terrorist attacks against Israel. pic.twitter.com/kljYYN6O0U
Pro-Palestinian protesters are acting more violently than Israel’s supporters due to “cultural Marxism,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Newsmax Thursday.
Cruz appeared on “Newsline” while pro-Palestinian protesters blocked the Bay Bridge leading into San Francisco during the APEC summit, calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war. That followed U.S. Capitol Police officers in riot gear clashing with roughly 200 demonstrators who gathered outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night to demand a cease-fire.
“This week we had a peaceful protest on the mall, 300,000 people came out to stand for Israel,” Cruz told host Bianca de la Garza. “I took part in the March for Israel, and it was peaceful and calm and united.
“You contrast that to these violent protests and it is … these are dangerous, and we’re seeing them. We’ve seen violent attacks on the White House. We’ve seen violent protests at universities, and these are viciously antisemitic protests. We’re seeing Jewish students at universities across the country harassed and all of this is a manifestation of the cultural Marxism that has infused the institutions of our country.”
Supporters of Israel rallied by the tens of thousands on the National Mall under heavy security Tuesday, voicing bipartisan solidarity in the fight against Hamas and crying “never again.”
Cruz, while promoting his new book, “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America,” was also asked about a standalone Israeli aid bill that passed in the House but failed to pass in the Senate.
“Unfortunately, today’s Democrat Party has been radicalized,” Cruz told de la Garza. “And so what happened this week in the Senate is, I and several other Republican senators forced a vote on Israel military aid on the Senate.
“We used a procedural tool called a rogue closure petition, where basically we took control of the floor from the Senate majority leader and forced that vote. And Democrats were furious. But then, sadly, they … every single Democrat … all of them voted against providing emergency military aid to Israel.
“Israel is at war right now. They’re in a war for their very existence. They are fighting to eliminate Hamas. It is a battle between civilization and terror, and the Democrats, their view, they put partisan politics above everything. And so all of them voted no. I thought it was disgraceful.”
Cruz said Democrats can do what they want because the mainstream media provides them cover.
“Our corporate media has abandoned the role of actually reporting on news, and it is now simply a propagandist,” Cruz said. “And so the Democrats can all vote against military aid to Israel. Why? Because they all know it will not end up on the six o’clock news. They know that CNN will not report on it. They know The New York Times will not report on it, so their voters will never hear about it.
“And it’s why instead they’re more afraid of the radical antisemites on the left. They’re more afraid of the ‘Squad,’ and they also want to use Israel aid to leverage their other partisan objectives. And so it was a really sad moment to see every single Senate Democrat vote against Israel military aid.”
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The parental rights group Moms for Liberty reported more than 500% revenue growth in 2022, according to its form 990. Pictured: Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, speaks at the Florida Freedom Summit at the Gaylord Palms Resort on Nov. 4, in Kissimmee, Florida. (Photo: Paul Hennessy, Anadolu/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The parental rights group Moms for Liberty’s revenue has grown by more than 500% in its second year, according to the Form 990 it filed with the IRS.
According to the Form 990, exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal, Moms for Liberty brought in $2.14 million in total revenue in 2022, while it brought in $370,029 in total revenue the year before. A significant majority of that money (92.3%) came from donations—contributions and grants. Expenses for 2021 totaled a mere $163,647, while in 2022 they rose to $1.7 million.
This represents a 579% growth in revenue and a 1,040% growth in expenses, a massive expansion.
🚨🚨🚨BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: @Moms4Liberty revenue skyrocketed📈 by more than 500% between 2021 and 2022 according to the IRS 990. Moms for Liberty exposed woke in schools & helped 365 parents and advocates take seats on school boards. Its leaders only take $50K and $44K salaries. pic.twitter.com/hzxl5dyzPn
The parental rights group held its first Joyful Warrior Summit in Tampa in 2022. It also formally adopted governance and financial policies, conducting its first audit. The group began a coordinated fundraising campaign, increasing its charitable solicitation filings to more than 30 states.
Moms for Liberty lists three officers on payroll: Tina Descovich, the executive director and co-founder, who made $50,140; Marie Rogerson, executive director of program development, who made $50,251; and Tiffany Justice, the director and co-founder, who made $44,250.
According to the form, Moms for Liberty’s mission is “to empower members through education, support, outreach, and advocacy to defend parental and constitutionally protected rights within their communities and throughout all levels of government.”
The mission statement continues, saying Moms for Liberty aims to “raise awareness of parental rights in the community and provide its members with the data and tools to protect their rights as parents to make important decisions and take actions on behalf of their children.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as schools started teaching kids remotely, parents could watch over the shoulders of their children, seeing what they were learning in school. This access, along with disagreements over COVID-19 restrictions such as the use of face masks, spurred parents to engage with local school boards, demanding answers about COVID-19 restrictions, critical race theory, and lessons with sexual or gender themes.
When parents raised their voices, teachers unions and school boards dismissed them, even occasionally demonizing them as equivalent to domestic terrorists.
Descovich and Justice founded Moms for Liberty to advocate for parents who felt disenfranchised in this way and to empower them to effect change.
Moms for Liberty trains parents to run for school board, and in the 2022 and 2023 elections, 365 of the candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed won their races.
“Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago,” Justice told The Daily Signal last week. “For us to have now been able to elect in 2022 and 2023 365 school board members who are liberty-minded individuals standing up for parental rights, putting the focus back on the basics in American public education, stopping this woke indoctrination that we’ve been seeing—it’s very exciting.”
Want an example of the teachers some of our children find in their classrooms? Check out an example below.
LGBTQ education organization encourages teachers to be trans activists in their classrooms by using pronouns and removing gendered language pic.twitter.com/s7RcH54ul1
Critics have accused Moms for Liberty of aiming to ban books, when the group only opposes sexually explicit materials in school libraries. Similarly, some critics have accused Moms for Liberty leaders of harassment, though a Daily Signal analysis found the claims it reviewed were baseless.
In June, the Southern Poverty Law Center put Moms for Liberty, along with other parental rights groups such as Parents Defending Education, on its “hate map,” placing them alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC claims that Moms for Liberty is part of an “anti-student inclusion” movement, which it compares to “uptown Klans” of white southerners who supported segregation after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education said that racial segregation of schools was unconstitutional.
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it has used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare its donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents.
In 2019, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward to call the organization’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
Seven years earlier, in 2012, a terrorist with a gun used the “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept the organization targeted by the gunman on its map.
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More Pro-Life News • Joe Biden is So Bad Some Democrats Think it Would be Better to Replace Him • 12,000 Babies are Killed in Late-Term Abortions Every Year, More Than All People Killed by Guns • Mother, Son Take Teen Girl Out of State for Secret Abortion After He Rapes Her • Pro-Life Attorneys Ask Iowa Supreme Court to Let Heartbeat Law Save Babies From Abortions • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Hillary and the left are calling Trump Hitler, saying that he is going to arrest his opponents if elected President again like the dictator, (although he could have done this while he was president but didn’t). You know, just exactly what they are doing to him right now, using law-fare to try and keep him off the 2024 ballot. The left are being anti-democratic while claiming to save democracy. This is a prime example of the left accusing their opposition of exactly what they are doing, right out of the Saul Alinsky/Stalin/Mao handbook.
Trump is the one who has been working within and abiding by the legal system under the Constitution while they weaponize the legal system and disregard all reasonable legal protocols to destroy him.
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.
Around 150 lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle attended a screening on Tuesday of footage from the heinous Hamas terror attacks perpetrated in Israel last month, according to the Washington Post.
Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland said in a statement that the footage “will forever haunt” him. “Every Member present was either in tears or sat stunned,” he noted. “The sheer carnage of the scenes I saw called to mind the darkest moments of the Holocaust, the pogroms, and thousands of years of antisemitic violence.”
“In one clip, two little boys watch a Hamas fighter kill their father right before their eyes. In another, a terrorist stands over the bodies of dead Jews as he brags to his parents over the phone about how he killed ten Jews with his bare hands. We saw images of mutilated infants, defiled corpses, and families burned alive in their homes,” Hoyer recalled.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland described it as “utterly chilling,” according to the Post. “Hamas is a terrorist death cult, and it would clearly kill every person in Israel if it could. Nor does it show any interest in the rights of the Palestinian people.”
“It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-Tx.) said in a tweet.
This morning I viewed footage of Hamas’ brutal October 7th attack against innocent Israelis. It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen.
Israel went to war in the wake of the horrific Hamas attacks last month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that the Jewish state is attempting to allow civilians to escape danger but that Hamas is blocking people from fleeing to safety.
“While Israel is doing everything to keep civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing everything to keep them in harm’s way. Israel provides civilians in Gaza humanitarian corridors and safe zones, Hamas prevents them from leaving at gunpoint,” Netanyahu asserted.
It is not Israel that is deliberately targeting civilians but Hamas that beheaded, burned and massacred civilians in the worst horrors perpetrated on Jews since the Holocaust.
While Israel is doing everything to keep civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing…
When regimes capture power, it’s often not in the dramatic fashion of the storming of the Bastille. Instead, it’s a bureaucratic takeover, hidden in jargon and filled with clichés, for the greater good. The Federal Communications Commission is poised to vote today on a sweeping set of new rules called the “Preventing Digital Discrimination Order.”
The 200-page report recommends implementing an exhaustive array of new restrictions that will alter the internet forever. It springs from section 60506 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act 2021. This legislation was meant to infuse some federal dollars into America’s sagging internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, this vote will grant the FCC the power to control nearly every aspect of internet infrastructure in the name of our secular gods of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The TL;DR of the obtuse rules is the ability to censor, control, and regulate internet service providers based on vague laws around equity. Most disturbing is that it doesn’t have to be “discrimination” as it’s generally understood but rather “disparate outcomes,” meaning all internet infrastructure must produce perfect equity or face the wrath of the United States government.
The agency’s unelected officials will convene to deliberate on regulations to integrate the latest progressive ideals regarding race and identity into the internet landscape. It’s expected to pass 3-2. It will stifle innovation and impede internet access opportunities, all in pursuit of achieving equity.
If approved, this would mark the first time the FCC would gain the authority to oversee various aspects of every ISP’s service termination policies, including customer credit usage, account history, credit checks, and account termination, among other related matters.
Experts have been sounding the alarm about what this could mean for internet freedom.
The @FCC is claiming the power to control every aspect of broadband infrastructure and the industry itself.
To call it "extreme" or "radical" doesn't do this proposal justice.
It includes price controls, forced buildout of broadband regardless of ROI, and more. https://t.co/b7HMYW1sDD
Even FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has blasted the power-grab, calling it a free pass giving the “administrative state effective control of all internet services and infrastructure.”
“President Biden has called on the FCC to adopt new rules of breathtaking scope,” Carr noted on X, formerly Twitter. “Those rules would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions — from how ISPs allocate capital and where they build, to the services that consumers can purchase; from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive.”
“The FCC reserves the right under this plan to regulate both ‘actions and omissions, whether recurring or a single instance.’ In other words, if you take any action, you may be liable, and if you do nothing, you may be liable. There is no path to complying with this standardless regime. It reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university’s Soviet Studies Department.”
Next week, the FCC will vote on President Biden’s plan to give the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure.
These regulators have established a framework that could penalize any organization seeking to enhance internet accessibility or provide internet services if the agency determines that it did so in a manner that facilitates discrimination. Whatever the regulators decide that means.
Congressional pushback
Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, along with 27 fellow senators, is urging the Federal Communications Commission to withdraw its preliminary proposal regarding “Digital Discrimination.” This proposal would grant the federal government significant influence over virtually every facet of the internet, potentially subjecting broadband providers to extensive, vague, and detrimental liability under a “disparate impact” standard.
In a letter to FCC Chairwoman Rosenworcel, the senators wrote:
“Your Draft Order, which largely follows a Biden administration diktat, will create crippling uncertainty for the U.S. broadband industry, chill broadband investment, and undermine Congress’s objective of promoting broadband access for all Americans. We urge you to adhere to the will of Congress and conform to the plain meaning of [the bipartisan infrastructure bill] to avoid causing serious damage to the competitive and innovative U.S. broadband industry.”
Net neutrality back door
This power-grab is also a de facto attempt to bring back net neutrality. Net neutrality, with its burdensome and intrusive regulations, hinders the internet’s natural evolution. The internet has thrived remarkably well without the heavy hand of net neutrality oversight. Moreover, these regulations prevent internet service providers from rightfully charging substantial fees to content giants like video streaming platforms, which are voraciously consuming bandwidth. By prohibiting these fees, net neutrality shifts the responsibility of expanding network capacity entirely onto individuals and away from giant tech platforms.
This, in turn, is expected to result in higher costs for consumers, as they will be forced to bear the burden of more expensive internet packages, even if they don’t use these data-intensive streaming services. As it stands, net neutrality stifles innovation, undermines market forces, and ultimately harms consumers and the internet ecosystem. The idea that they would resurrect these onerous rules through the back door is no less worrying just because it isn’t surprising.
The one silver lining to this is that the disparate impact rules they cite to justify the power-grab have been struck down by the Supreme Court. There will no doubt be immediate lawsuits to try to fight these rules. Across varying industries and government entities, a concerted effort exists to curtail your freedom. From COVID lockdowns to tech censorship, expansive regulations, gun laws, and the jailing of political dissidents, the underlying result is curtailing your freedoms. The regime knows a free internet is one of the last tools the American people have left, which is why it tries to control it at every turn.
In the United States, global financial speculator George Soros has been the single-biggest financier of overtly political causes for decades. In 2022, he poured $178.8 million into federal campaigns, making him by far the biggest campaign contributor in that cycle. Then there are his hidden and comingled political contributions — a vast web of dark money — that are intentionally designed to influence elections and avoid public scrutiny.
According to OpenSecrets.org, a research organization that tracks money in politics (coincidentally funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations), Soros Fund Management was by far the largest single political contributor going into the 2022 midterm elections. The fund ranked first out of 31,955 contributor organizations with a known war chest of approximately $180 million. Not a single dollar went to a Republican candidate.
The political research group noted that organizations like Soros Fund Management cannot legally contribute directly to candidates or party committees. Instead, the fund funneled cash to political affiliates, the largest being an entity innocuously titled Democracy PAC II. The super PAC’s Federal Election Commission filing lists Michael Vachon as its treasurer. Vachon has served on boards of left-wing organizations tied to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, such as NYC Partners, Democracy Alliance, and Catalist. George Soros’ son, Alexander, runs the super PAC.
Notably, the first iteration of Democracy PAC funneled more than $80 million to Democratic groups and candidates in the 2020 election cycle. In a statement to Politico, Soros said the massive spend was necessary for “strengthening the infrastructure of American democracy: voting rights and civic participation, civil rights and liberties, and the rule of law.” Incidentally, the Soros-linked America Coming Together political action committee was slapped with what was, at the time, the third-largest fine in the Federal Election Commission’s history following the unsuccessful bid to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004 and install Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in the White House.
The group’s $137 million election effort spanned 90 offices in 17 states and employed more than 25,000 neighborhood canvassers and election staff. The FEC unanimously approved a $775,000 fine for using unregulated “soft money” to elect Democrats. The penalty was a pittance of accountability compared to the amount spent, though America Coming Together shuttered operations in 2005.
Soros had also given millions to the leftist MoveOn.org Voter Fund, which the FEC fined $150,000, to run television ads attacking President Bush. The progressive megadonor was an early supporter of Barack Obama. In 2004, he held a fundraiser in New York City for the community organizer from Chicago and his successful U.S. Senate bid in Illinois. Soros — the so-called “smart money” in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary — would go on to back Obama over Hillary Clinton.
Ironically, Soros would later say that Obama (whose 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, suggested was the most anti-American president in the nation’s history) was his “greatest disappointment.” Not because Obama’s leftward lurch didn’t go far enough, but because Obama, in Soros’ view, stabbed him in the back, politically, and left him to operate outside the inner White House circle.
In 2016, Soros threw his full weight behind Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump by pouring millions into her presidential election run. FEC filings in the summer of 2016 showed Soros had committed or personally donated more than $25 million — mostly for her benefit.
Upon Trump’s election, the Soros mission turned to getting rid of the 45th duly elected president of the United States. How that jibed with any honest notion of democracy is anyone’s guess.
Framing President Trump as a Russian agent guilty of colluding with Vladimir Putin to cheat Hillary Clinton out of the White House was always a Clinton campaign smear. The associated Steele dossier, named for the former British intelligence officer and Fusion GPS opposition research operative Christopher Steele, was laundered through the law firm Perkins Coie.
According to The Washington Post, Perkins Coie represented “the national Democratic Party, its governors, almost all of its members of Congress, and its campaign and fundraising apparatus.” The firm’s “Democratic superlawyer,” Marc Elias, was the Clinton campaign’s general counsel. Elias was not only involved in the Steele dossier fiasco, which the FBI used to obtain a surveillance warrant to spy on the Trump campaign — and led to subsequent FISA warrant renewals to spy on the Trump presidency — but Elias was simultaneously paid by George Soros to knock down election integrity laws in swing states.
Flash-forward to the 2019 impeachment of President Trump, and Soros surfaced again through his Open Society Foundations’ ties to Ukraine and the so-called whistleblower at the center of the controversy, identified by independent media reports as Eric Ciaramella. Breitbart journalist Aaron Klein found that Ciaramella was reportedly receiving email communications from a top director at Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Klein also noted that the Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity was fueling the impeachment narrative that President Trump acted improperly with respect to the purported temporary withholding of military aid to Ukraine in exchange for evidence of former Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged corruption.
Corporate media outlets with a collective loathing for President Trump used the Soros-backed group’s assertions to substantiate Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment effort. Trump was indeed impeached and acquitted by the Senate. Just as in previous elections, Soros reportedly told a group at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the 2020 election would determine the “fate of the world.” He said Trump was “a con man and a narcissist, who wants the world to revolve around him.” Previously at the World Economic Forum, Soros claimed Trump was “doing the work of ISIS.”
Soros spent $52 million in the 2020 presidential election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings. But there is no way to know how much money and influence originated from the billionaire activist, whether directly or indirectly via his Open Society Foundations.
One thing is certain: The 2020 presidential election, amid unprecedented Covid-era election changes and summer riots destabilizing dozens of American cities and the nation’s capital, was unlike any in American history. Soros-backed prosecutors are already swaying the 2024 presidential election via lawfare. Soros grant recipients are attempting to remove the leading opposition candidate from the ballot.
And George and Alex Soros are only just getting started.
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as Covid-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the “Twitter Files” revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations — such as the Stanford Internet Observatory — to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings — which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in — use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective — The New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100 percent rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80 percent rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5 percent rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5 percent rating.
As it stakes a claim to being the internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95 percent of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and The New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process to libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem,” Crovitz told reporters.
How NewsGuard Starves Disfavored Sites Of Ad Clients
NewsGuard’s BrandGuard tool provides an “exclusion list” that deters advertisers from buying space on sites NewsGuard deems problematic. But that warning service creates inherent conflicts of interest with NewsGuard’s financial model: The buyers of the service can be problematic entities too, with an interest in protecting and buffing their image.
A case in point: Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard’s largest investor and the biggest conglomerate of marketing agencies in the world, which has integrated NewsGuard’s technology into its fleet of subsidiaries that place online advertising. The question of conflicts arises because Publicis represents a range of corporate and government clients, including Pfizer — whose Covid vaccine has been questioned by some news outlets that have received low scores. Other investors include Bruce Mehlman, a D.C. lobbyist with a lengthy list of clients, including United Airlines and ByteDance, the parent company of much-criticized Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
NewsGuard has faced mounting criticism that rather than serving as a neutral public service against online propaganda, it instead acts as an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests. The criticism finds support in internal documents, such as the NewsGuard proposal to Twitter, which this reporter obtained during “Twitter Files” reporting last year, as well as in government records and discussions with independent media sites targeted by the startup.
Beginning last year, users scanning the headlines on certain browsers that include NewsGuard were warned against visiting Consortium News. A scarlet-red NewsGuard warning pop-up said, “Proceed With Caution” and claimed that the investigative news site “has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war.” The warning also notifies a network of advertisers, news aggregation portals, and social media platforms that Consortium News cannot be trusted.
But Consortium News, founded by late Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Robert Parry and known for its strident criticism of U.S. foreign policy, is far from a fake news publisher. And NewsGuard, the entity attempting to suppress it, Consortium claims, is hardly a disinterested fact-checker because of federal influence over it. NewsGuard attached the label after pressing Consortium for retractions or corrections to six articles published on the site. Those news articles dealt with widely reported claims about neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and U.S. influence over the country — issues substantiated by other credible media outlets. After Consortium editors refused to remove the reporting and offered a detailed rebuttal, the entire site received a misinformation label, encompassing over 20,000 articles and videos published by the outlet since it was founded in 1995.
The left-wing news site believes the label was part of a pay-for-censorship scheme. It notes that Consortium News was targeted after NewsGuard received a $749,387 Defense Department contract in 2021 to identify “false narratives” relating to the war between Ukraine and Russia, as well as other forms of foreign influence.
Bruce Afran, an attorney for Consortium News, disagrees. “What’s really happening here is that NewsGuard is trying to target those who take a different view from the government line,” said Afran. He filed an amended complaint last month claiming that NewsGuard not only defamed his client, but also acts as a front for the military to suppress critical reporting.
“There’s a great danger in being maligned this way,” Afran continued. “The government cannot evade the Constitution by hiring a private party.”
Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, observed that in previous years, anonymous social media accounts had also targeted his site, falsely claiming a connection to the Russian government in a bid to discredit his outlet.
“NewsGuard has got to be the worst,” said Lauria. “They’re labeling us in a way that stays with us. Every news article we publish is defamed with that label of misinformation.”
Both Lauria and Afran said that they worry that NewsGuard is continuing to collaborate with the government or with intelligence services. In previous years, NewsGuard had worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. It’s not clear to what extent NewsGuard is still working with the Pentagon. But earlier this year, Crovitz wrote an email to journalist Matt Taibbi, defending its work with the government, describing it in the present tense, suggesting that it is ongoing:
For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.
The company has not yet responded to the Consortium News lawsuit, filed in the New York federal court. In May of this year, the Air Force Research Lab responded to a records request from journalist Erin Marie Miller about the NewsGuard contract. The contents of the work proposal were entirely redacted.
Asked about the company’s continued work with the intelligence sector, Skibinski replied, “We license our data about false claims made by state media sources and state-sponsored disinformation efforts from China, Russia and Iran to the defense and intelligence sector, as we describe on our website.”
Punishing An Outlet That Criticized A NewsGuard Backer’s Pharma Clients
Other websites that have sought to challenge their NewsGuard rating say it has shown little interest in a back-and-forth exchange regarding unsettled matters. Take the case of The Daily Sceptic, a small publication founded and edited by conservative English commentator Toby Young. As a forum for journalists and academics to challenge a variety of strongly held public-policy orthodoxies, even those on Covid-19 vaccines and climate change, The Daily Sceptic is a genuine dissenter. Last year, Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve his site’s 74.5 rating.
In a series of emails from 2022 and 2023 that were later forwarded to RealClearInvestigations, NewsGuard responded to Young by listing articles that it claimed represent forms of misinformation, such as reports that Pfizer’s vaccine carried potential side effects. The site, notably, has been a strident critic of Covid-19 policies, such as coercive mandates. Anicka Slachta, an analyst with NewsGuard, highlighted articles that questioned the efficacy of the vaccines and lockdowns. The Daily Sceptic, for example, reported a piece casting Covid-19 lockdowns as “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful,” citing academic literature from Johns Hopkins University.
Rather than refute this claim, Slachta simply offered an opposing view from another academic, who criticized the arguments put forth by lockdown critics. And the Hopkins study, Slachta noted, was not peer-reviewed. The topic is still, of course, under serious debate. Sweden rejected the draconian lockdowns on schools and businesses implemented by most countries in North American and Europe, yet had one of the lowest “all-cause excess mortality” rates in either region.
Young and others said that the issue highlighted by NewsGuard is not an instance of misinformation, but rather an ongoing debate, with scientists and public health experts continuing to explore the moral, economic, and health-related questions raised by such policies. In its response to NewsGuard’s questions about the lockdown piece, Young further added that his site made no claim that the Hopkins paper was peer-reviewed and added that its findings had been backed up by a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Yet to NewsGuard, Young’s site evidently posed a misinformation danger by simply reporting on the subject and refusing to back down. Emails between NewsGuard and the Daily Sceptic show Young patiently responding to the company’s questions; he also added postscripts to the articles flagged by NewsGuard with a link to the fact checks of them and rebuttals of those fact checks. Young also took the extra step of adding updates to other articles challenged by fact-checking non-governmental organizations. “I have also added postscripts to other articles not flagged by you but which have been fact checked by other organisations, such as Full Fact and Reuters,” Young wrote to Slachta.
That wasn’t enough. After a series of back-and-forth emails, NewsGuard said it would be satisfied only with a retraction of the articles, many of which, like the lockdown piece, contained no falsehoods. After the interaction, NewsGuard lowered The Daily Sceptic’s rating to 37.5/100.
“I’m afraid you left me no choice but to conclude that NewsGuard is a partisan site that is trying to demonetise news publishing sites whose politics it disapproves of under the guise of supposedly protecting potential advertisers from being associated with ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation,’” wrote Young in response. “Why bother to keep up the pretence of fair-mindedness John? Just half my rating again, which you’re going to do whatever I say.”
NewsGuard’s Skibinski, in a response to a query about The Daily Sceptic’s downgrade, denied that his company makes any “demands” of publishers. “We simply call them for comment and ask questions about their editorial practices,” he wrote. “This is known as journalism.”
The experience mirrored that of Consortium. Afran, the attorney for the site, noted that NewsGuard uses an arbitrary process to punish opponents, citing the recent study from the company on misinformation on the Israel-Hamas war. “They cherry-picked 250 posts among tweets they knew were incorrect, and they attempt to create the impression that all of X is unreliable,” the lawyer noted. “And so, what they’re doing, and this is picked up by mainstream media, that’s actually causing X, formerly Twitter, to now lose ad revenue, based literally on 250 posts out of the billions of posts on Twitter.”
The push to demonize and delist The Daily Sceptic, a journalist critic of pharmaceutical products and policies, reflects an inherent conflict with the biggest backer of NewsGuard: Publicis Groupe.
Publicis client Pfizer awarded Publicis a major deal to help manage its global media and advertising operations, a small reflection of which is the $2.3 billion the pharmaceutical giant spent on advertising last year.
The NewsGuard-Publicis relationship extends to the Paris-based marketing conglomerate’s full client list, including LVHM, PepsiCo, Glaxo Smith Kline, Burger King, ConAgra, Kellogg Company, General Mills, and McDonalds. “NewsGuard will be able to publish and license ‘white lists’ of news sites our clients can use to support legitimate publishers while still protecting their brand reputations,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman of the Publicis Groupe, upon its launch of NewsGuard.
Put another way, when corporate watchdogs like The Daily Sceptic or Consortium News are penalized by NewsGuard, the ranking system amounts to a blacklist to guide advertisers where not to spend their money.
“NewsGuard is clearly in the business of censoring the truth,” noted Dr. Joseph Mercola, a gadfly voice whose website was ranked as misinformation by NewsGuard after it published reports about Covid-19’s potential origin from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“Seeing how Publicis represents most of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world and funded the creation of NewsGuard, it’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors,” Mercola added, in a statement online.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
Lee Fang is an investigative reporter. Find his Substack here.
Israeli soldiers and tanks rolled into al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip and location of a major Hamas terrorist compound, according to Israel. The military is conducting a “precise and targeted operation” inside the hospitals, where hundreds of medical patients and personnel remain. Hamas has denied Israeli accusations it uses the hospital as a shield.
The Israeli military captured Hamas government buildings in Gaza and has fought its way to the gates of the region’s largest medical facility, Al-Shifa Hospital.
The Israel Defense Forces said troops killed Hamas terrorists and encountered explosive devices and terror cells during its “precise and targeted operation” at the al-Shifa Hospital.
There remain up to 238 Hamas hostages in Gaza, and 10 of them are believed to be Americans. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 11,200 Gazans have been killed in the fighting, though they do not distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas terrorists.
Israel-Hamas war: IDF finds weapons inside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released video early Wednesday showing weapons found inside the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
“IDF troops are continuing the precise and targeted operation against Hamas in the Shifa Hospital complex, in which the troops are conducting searches for Hamas terrorist infrastructure and assets,” the IDF said in a statement.
“As the soldiers entered the hospital complex, they engaged with a number of terrorists and killed them,” the statement added. “Following this, during searches in one of the departments of the hospital, the troops located a room with technological assets, along with military and combat equipment used by the Hamas terrorist organization.”
The footage shows Israeli officers sorting through the firearms, ammunition and weapons reportedly left by Hamas fighters.
The IDF says that “technological assets and extensive intelligence information” found in the hospital are being reviewed by authorities.
Biden allies condemn far-left calls for cease-fire in Israel-Hamas war
U.S. President Joe Biden departs the White House November 14, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
President Biden’s strong backing of Israel and his response to its war with terrorist organization Hamas speaks to the mainstream of the Democratic Party and the majority of Americans, according to supporters of the president, despite progressive Democrats publicly opposing the administration’s rejection of a cease-fire.
Multiple Biden allies told Fox News Digital that the administration’s stance against a cease-fire protects Americans and national security interests at home and abroad.
Nearly a dozen Biden allies defended the president’s policies in interviews with Fox News Digital after more than 400 government officials within the administration signed onto a letter opposing the president’s handling of the war, and demanding a cease-fire.
NYC Columbia University faculty and students protest suspension of 2 far-left groups
A protester holds a sign at a “All out for Gaza” protest at Columbia University in New York on November 15, 2023. (Photo by BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images)
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters stood outside of Columbia University in New York City on Wednesday, holding signs while chanting and demanding the removal of Jewish people from Gaza, while others boycotted the suspension of two far-left student-led groups by the school’s administration.
The “emergency protest” was shared on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, by groups such as WOLPalestine (Within Our Lifetime) and CUNYPalestine, noting the event was scheduled for Nov. 15 at 2 p.m.
“All Out for Gaza at Columbia University,” the post read. “In solidarity with Columbia SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) and JVP (Jewish Voices for Peace) who were recently unjustly suspended by the university administration.
NYU hit with lawsuit for fueling ‘virus of antisemitism,’ ‘abusing Jewish students with impunity’
A New York University (NYU) flag flies outside of the NYU business school on August 25, 2020. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
New York University was hit with a groundbreaking lawsuit, the first of what is expected to be a series against elite universities, for allegedly allowing antisemitism to fester on its campus and also “deliberately” seeking to “make the campus environment even more… frightening for Jewish students,” according to court documents.
“NYU is among the worst campuses for Jewish students, and NYU has long been aware of the festering Jewish hatred permeating the school,” the suit filed by Kasowitz Benson Torres, an influential firm based in New York City, said.
It alleged that NYU was aware of “ongoing and disgraceful acts of anti-Jewish bigotry,” and refused to act in violation of Jewish students’ Title VI civil rights and sought remedial measures and financial penalties. The suit made startling allegations, including that NYU’s administration’s actions, or lack thereof throughout the years, added fuel to antisemitism on campus.
The “Outnumbered” co-hosts reacted to the rise of antisemitism and Tuesday’s March for Israel rally, as the war between Hamas and Israel continues.
Fox News contributor Morgan Ortagus, who is Jewish, thanked the show for lending her support amid rampant antisemitism.
“I’m so grateful to this show, to all of you, to the producers. I’ve never cried on air,” Ortagus explained. “And a couple of weeks ago, just seeing the images and the rampant anti-Semitism, having a daughter, it has been so hard to talk about it. But I’m so appreciative of you guys for for giving us the voice, giving us the opportunity.”
“I never have felt unsafe in this country for my daughter the way I do now,” she continued, adding that she was appreciated for the 300,000 people who showed up to the March for Israel rally.
“Between October 7th and November 7th, there have been 832 anti-Semitic attacks,” co-host Kayleigh McEnany said. “Do the math, that means 28 per day. That means more than one every hour.”
Comedian Jon Lovitz blasts HBO’s John Oliver for shaming U.S. over alliance with Israel
Jon Lovitz arrives at the Mike Tyson Cares and We2Matter’s 100 Women Matter Celebrity Fundraiser Gala on August 17, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Legendary comedian and actor Jon Lovitz blasted HBO host Jon Oliver this week after the British talk show host reprimanded the United States for supporting Israel and the “suffering” it has caused in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
Lovitz replied to a social media post from Oliver’s talk show with an X post noting how the U.S. would obviously support its “democratic ally” Israel over the radical terror group that killed 1400+ people in the country last month.
Pushing back against the British HBO host’s skepticism of America’s alliance with Israel, Lovitz declared, “God bless America. #IstandwithIsrael.”
Netanyahu’s wife writes Jill Biden a letter urging her to save ‘suffering’ Hamas child hostages
Former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara Netanyahu at an election-night event on November 1, 2022 in Jerusalem, Israel.
The wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has written a letter Wednesday to first lady Jill Biden, urging her to call for the “immediate release” of child hostages who are “suffering” in the captivity of Hamas terrorists.
Sara Netanyahu opened her plea by saying that “I’m writing to you not only as Bibi’s wife but first and foremost as a mother.”
“For over a month now, 32 children have been held kidnapped in Gaza, brutally torn from their parents and their homes,” Netanyahu said. “These children are surely suffering from untold trauma, not only by being kidnapped, but having witnessed the brutal murder of their parents and siblings on that horrific October 7th.”
Biden’s favorite columnist urges him to use Trump’s peace proposal for two-state solution
Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas L. Friedman on February 26, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman, one of President Biden’s favorite writers, is urging him to follow in part former President Trump’s plan for a two-state solution in the Middle East.
After visiting Israel and the West Bank, Friedman came to the conclusion that America needed an active “vision for how the Gaza war must end” in a column published Tuesday.
“The Biden plan — are you sitting down? — could actually use as one of its starting points President Donald Trump’s proposal for a two-state solution,” Friedman wrote, “because [Benjamin] Netanyahu embraced that in 2020, when he had a different coalition. (Netanyahu and his ambassador in Washington practically wrote the Trump plan.)”
‘Will & Grace’ star Debra Messing blasted for speech at pro-Israel rally in DC
Debra Messing speaks during ‘March For Israel’ at the National Mall on November 14, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)
Social media users criticized “Will & Grace” star Debra Messing after she gave a speech in defense of Israel during a pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C., this week.
Users on both sides of the political spectrum slammed Messing for her impassioned speech condemning the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, with pro-Israel conservatives hitting her for voting for Biden, who has given aid to Israel’s enemies, as well as pro-Palestinian leftists accusing her of defending “genocide” in Gaza.
Messing, a Jewish person and Hollywood liberal, gave the speech in front of thousands at the “March for Israel” in D.C. on Tuesday. The Jewish Federations of North America organized the event to support Israel amid its war with Hamas and to call out terror and hatred being shown towards the Jewish community.
Bipartisan lawmakers push Biden to investigate Hamas’ cryptocurrency financing
From left: House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, President Biden and Rep. Ritchie Torres (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll, Ting Shen/Bloomberg, Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call)
Top House lawmakers are investigating the breadth and depth of the digital wealth owned by terror groups like Hamas just over a month after the Gaza-based organization’s surprise attack on Israel.
“Reports indicate that Hamas-linked digital wallets received about $41 million and Palestinian Islamic Jihad-linked digital wallets received about $93 million between August 2021 and June 2023. Yet, it remains unclear how much, if any, of the publicly identified digital assets are accessible to or remains in the possession of Hamas,” the lawmakers wrote to President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
“According to reports, Hamas shut down its digital asset fundraising campaign in April 2023 citing the ability of government officials to identify and prosecute donors.”
The bipartisan letter is led by House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., Digital Asset subcommittee Chairman French Hill, R-Ark., and Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y.
“We request the White House and the Treasury to utilize the open blockchain ledger to assess the footprint of Hamas’ digital asset fundraising campaign. In doing this, Congress can better understand the United States’ available tools and capabilities to target bad actors on blockchain and support legitimate digital asset use and innovation,” Emmer told Fox News Digital.
A top United Nations humanitarian aid official is being ripped Wednesday by an Israeli ambassador after sharing an image on X showing him shaking hands with Iran’s foreign minister, who reportedly helped Hamas plan its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths posted that he held a meeting in Geneva with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian about the “devastating” situation unfolding in the Gaza Strip and the “critical” need to deliver aid to the area.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Amirabdollahian had taken part in at least two planning meetings in Lebanon with the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad ahead of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which launched the Middle East war.
“Tell me @UNReliefChief, what role do you see Iran playing in such regard?” Israeli Ambassador to Geneva Elion Shahar wrote in response to Griffiths’ post. “What role do you see for the prime sponsors of a terrorist organization who murdered, raped, and tortured over 1,200 Israelis?”
“Did you ask him about the weapons Iran has transferred to Hamas through aid shipments, which were used to kill Israelis on October 7th?” she continued. “Did you ask him about the money Iran has transferred to Hamas, which pays for its leaders’ 5-star hotels in Qatar where they cheered when young Israelis were murdered on TV?”
“Iran is part of the problem, not the solution,” she concluded. “It is about time the U.N. starts to understand this simple truth.”
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this update.
Destroyer USS Thomas Hudner shot down a drone from Yemen in the Red Sea
BOSTON, MA – NOVEMBER 26: The USS Thomas Hudner, named after Concord’s Medal of Honor recipient Thomas Hudner, arrives in Boston for its commissioning ceremony later in the week on Nov. 26, 2018. (Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The USS Thomas Hudner, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, shot down a drone from Yemen in the Red Sea, two U.S. defense officials confirm to Fox News.
A defense official said the drone was shot down in self-defense. “The drone was heading towards the Hudner,” the official said.
On Tuesday, during the Pentagon news briefing, Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin asked Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh about the lack of U.S. military response to the Houthis in Yemen who downed the $32 million MQ-9 drone over the Red Sea last week.
“Isn’t the lack of response by the US military inviting more actions, aggressive actions by the Houthis?” Griffin asked.
“I wouldn’t say that it’s inviting more aggressive or further response from the Houthis,” Singh replied. “We’ve seen the Houthis do this before.”
“I’m not saying that we’re not going to respond. We always reserve the right to respond at a time and place of our choosing. But I just don’t have anything to forecast for you right now,” she added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited troops at the Zikim military base near north Gaza and said, “There is no place in Gaza that Israel will not reach.”
Netanyahu was briefed on the fighting that occurred on Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and attacked residences and military posts in southern Israel. Hamas killed more than 1,200 people in the assault, mostly civilians, and took some 240 people hostage back to Gaza.
Standing next to soldiers at the base, Netanyahu said: “Do you remember when we were told that we would not break into Gaza? We broke through. We were told that we would not reach the outskirts of Gaza City – we arrived. We were told that we won’t enter Shifa – we entered.
“There is no hiding, no shelter, no refuge for the murderers of Hamas,” Netanyahu said. “We will arrive and eliminate Hamas and return our abductees – these are two sacred missions.”
Hundreds gathered Sunday at a Ventura County, California, intersection where a week earlier, a 69-year-old Jewish man struck his head on concrete and later died after a confrontation with an unnamed pro-Palestinian protester.
Flowers, wreaths, candles and letters surrounded the spot in front of the gas station at Westlake and Thousand Oaks Boulevards, where Paul Kessler sustained his fatal injuries.
One man held a sign that read, “We want justice for Paul,” per footage shared with Fox News Digital. Others bandied Israeli flags and sang “Oseh Shalom” — a Hebrew song praying for peace for the country, its people and the world.
Blood still marked the ground where Kessler’s head struck the sidewalk in widely-shared footage from around 3:30 p.m. on Nov. 5 showing medics attending to a bleeding but alert Kessler at the scene as police questioned onlookers.
Kessler was pronounced dead at nearby Los Robles Hospital about 10 hours after the incident. Per the Ventura County Medical Examiner during a press conference Tuesday, Kessler’s non-lethal injuries were noted on the left side of his face, while internal injuries included skull fractures, swelling and bruising to the brain.
Kessler’s manner of death was determined to be homicide, Medical Examiner Christopher Young said.
Fox News Digital’s Christina Coulter contributed to this update.
BBC News Channel has apologized for an inaccurate report that claimed Israeli forces were targeting “medical teams and Arab speakers” inside of Gaza’s main hospital.
On Tuesday, a BBC News program reported that Israeli forces were carrying out an operation against Hamas forces inside Al Shifa hospital.
The news anchor then claimed that the soldiers were targeting individuals, including hospital workers and Arab speakers, inside the hospital, which would constitute a war crime. The BBC News anchor cited Reuters as the source of their information. However, reporting from Reuters on Israeli troops entering the hospital contradicted the BBC.
“Israel said its troops uncovered unspecified weapons and “terror infrastructure” inside the hospital compound after killing fighters in a clash outside. Once inside, they said there had been no fighting and no friction with civilians, patients or staff,” an article from Reuters noted.
“Witnesses who spoke to Reuters from inside the compound on Wednesday described a situation that appeared calm, if tense, as the Israeli troops moved between buildings carrying out searches,” the outlet added.
One of the most influential news organizations in the world, BBC issued an on-air apology for its claims about the Al Shifa hospital the following morning.
“BBC News, as it covered initial reports that Israeli forces had entered Gaza’s main hospital, we said that medical teams and Arab speakers were being targeted,” the anchor said. “This is incorrect and misquoted a Reuters report which said IDF forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers for this operation. We apologize for this error, which fell below our usual editorial standards.”
The anchor also noted that the correct version of events was broadcast “minutes later.”
Fox News Digital’s Nikolas Lanum contributed to this update.
Pro-Palestinian protesters marched in Staten Island on Tuesday, chanting anti-Israel slogans and burning the Israeli flag.
“From the river, to the sea,” hundreds of people shouted, a phrase that appears in the founding charter of the terrorist group in Hamas and calls for the destruction of Israel.
Protesters were also filmed burning an Israeli flag.
Police arrested six people, including at least one minor, in connection to the pro-Palestinian rally in St. George, SILive.com reported.
The rally was organized by the pro-Palestinian group WIthin Our Lifetime and held outside of Borough Hall. NYPD officers forced the demonstration to relocate onto Richmond Terrace, disrupting traffic, the report said.
Protesters also criticized President Bident and the U.S. government’s support for Israel in th ewar against Hamas. People chanted, “Israel bombs, USA pays. How many kids have you killed today?”
“What other words can be used for this besides ethnic cleansing? Besides genocide? Words that these mainstream media outlets still refuse to use,” Nerdeen Kiswani, founder and chair of Within Our Lifetime, told SILive.com.
“There are Palestinian men, women and children, every day, on our screens begging people to look at the world and tell the world to stop this genocide. But they are not stopping it. In fact, countries like the one we live in, like the United States, are funding it,” she said.
Israeli forces continue operations inside al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas official says
Israeli soldier stands near boxes labelled “Medical Supplies” at the Al Shifa hospital complex, amid their ground operation against Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, during what they say is a delivery of humanitarian aid to the facility in Gaza City, November 15, 2023 in this handout image. Israeli Defence Forces/Handout via REUTERS
A senior official with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry told the Associated Press that Israeli forces are still operating inside al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in the territory.
Speaking by phone from the hospital, Munir al-Boursh said Israeli soldiers ransacked the basement and other buildings, including those housing the emergency and surgery departments.
“They are still here … patients, women and children are terrified,” he said. He said doctors vowed to stay with their patients “till the end.”
The White House confirmed Tuesday that Hamas terrorists are using al-Shifa Hospital and the tunnels beneath it as a base for military operations and to hold hostages. The Israel Defense Forces said earlier Wednesday it is carrying out a “precise and targeted operation against Hamas” in a specific part of the hospital away from patients and medical staff. The IDF also said it delivered medical supplies.
Al-Boursh told the AP he spoke with an Israeli official by phone on Wednesday and asked him to join the forces searching the facility, but he refused.
The IDF says it recovered weapons from the basement of the hospital.
The mood in the nation’s capital ranged from somber to jubilant Tuesday, as tens of thousands of people rallied in support of Israel and the Jewish community.
“I feel like it’s my duty right now to be here, to be advocating for my people,” Tal told Fox News.
Demonstrators draped themselves in American and Israeli flags as they congregated at the National Mall for the “March for Israel.”
“We love America, and we’re so happy that America is standing behind Israel,” Elliot from New Jersey said. “It’s really great to all be here together, show support to each other and say thank you to the country.”
A coalition of Jewish organizations planned the march to show support for Israel in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks in which Hamas killed around 1,200 people, primarily Israeli civilians. More than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its counterattack, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
“I came to stand with Israel during this really crazy time … and stand up for the hostages to come home, and for peace, once and for all,” Cillia from Michigan said.
Fox News Digital’s Hannah Ray Lambert and Jon Michael Raasch contributed to this update.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib is part of a secret social media group in which its members have glamorized Hamas in its war battle with Israel after the terror group attacked and killed hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians last month, Fox News Digital has found.
The Michigan Democrat is a member of the Palestinian American Congress group on Facebook. The group is hidden from non-members and does not appear on the platform’s search engine, though Fox News Digital was able to gain access to it.
The group’s founder, Maher Abdel-qader, who has extensive ties to Tlaib and has also been linked to other liberal politicians, has come under fire in the past for his antisemitic social media posts, including questioning if the Holocaust ever occurred.
The Palestinian American Congress group, of which Tlaib is a member, has featured pro-Hamas posts in the wake of the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
On Oct. 12, one group member posted: “We don’t want to throw you in the sea…we want you to ride it back from where you came.” The message was accompanied by a picture of an elderly Israeli woman and a Hamas fighter holding her captive.
Fox News Digital’s Joe Schoffstall and Peter Hasson contributed to this update.
UN official condemns Israeli raid on Gaza hospital, insists Hamas not use it as a ‘shield’
UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Martin Griffiths speaks during an international humanitary conference for civilians in Gaza, at the Elysee Presidential Palace, in Paris, on November 9, 2023. (Photo by LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The United Nations’ top emergency relief official on Wednesday condemned the Israeli military operation in Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital and said Hamas must not use it as a ‘shield’ for their activities.
“Look, Hamas must not, should not, use a place like a hospital as a shield for their presence,” said Martin Griffiths in a video statement, adding that “hospitals should not become a place of – a war zone – of danger.”
Earlier on X, Griffiths said he was “appalled” by overnight reports of Israeli military operations inside the hospital.
The U.N. World Health Organization says Shifa patients have needs that are “well beyond basic care.” Images reportedly from the facility showed medics trying to keep newborns warm in blankets because power for incubators had failed.
“The babies have no incubators,” Griffiths said. “Some are dead already. We can’t move them out. It’s too dangerous.”
“I understand the Israelis’ concern for trying to find the leadership of Hamas, that’s not our problem,” he added. “Our problem is protecting the people of Gaza from what’s being visited upon them.”
Maryland middle school DEI teacher under investigation for Israel-Hamas comments
A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion teacher at a Maryland middle school is being investigated over social media posts suggesting Hamas terrorists’ attack on Israel was a hoax. (Google Maps)
A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion teacher at a Maryland middle school is being investigated over a social media posts suggesting the Hamas terrorists’ attack on Israel was a hoax and other posts about the war in the Middle East.
Sabrina Khan-Williams, a World Studies teacher and a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team leader at Tilden Middle School, made a series of posts doubting reports about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel, according to Facebook screenshots obtained by The Daily Wire.
“Debunked!! No music festival attack. Babies were not burned. Women were not violated,” she wrote in one post.
More than 11,000 people have been killed in Gaza and Israel since Hamas launched its largest attack against Israel in decades on Oct. 7, prompting a military response from Israeli forces. Thousands more have been wounded, and many others have been taken hostage by Hamas and raped, tortured and murdered.
Kahn-Williams suggested in another post that Hamas did not start the war against Israel.
“Hamas did not start this. They were just the perfect vehicle for Zionists to continue its apartheid,” she wrote.
Fox News Digital’s Landon Mion contributed to this update.
Turkish President Erdogan labels Israel ‘terrorist state’
ANKARA, TURKIYE – NOVEMBER 15: Turkish President and the Leader of the Justice and Development (AK) Party Recep Tayyip Erdogan makes statements as he attends his party’s group meeting at the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara, Turkiye on November 15, 2023. (Photo by Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made incendiary anti-Israel comments on Wednesday, calling Israel a “terrorist state” intent on destroying Gaza and its residents.
In a speech to members of his own political party, Erdogan also vowed to bring Israeli political and military leaders before an international tribunal to be tried for war crimes.
“Israel is implementing a strategy of total destruction of a city and its people,” Erdogan said. “I say openly that Israel is a terrorist state.”
In the same speech, Erdogan referred to Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” trying to protect their land and people.
Turkey recently normalized relations with Israel but its war with Hamas in Gaza has again strained their ties. Israel recalled its diplomats from Turkey last month after Erdogan accused Israel of committing war crimes. Turkey later also recalled its ambassador from Israel.
Turkey has found itself at odds with its NATO allies, most of whom have backed Israel’s right to defend itself following the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, while Turkey has echoed the stances of other Middle Eastern nations in questioning Israel and defending the Palestinians.
Fox News Digital’s Peter Aitken and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
Reports of a potential hostage deal between Israel and Hamas is evidence that the terror group is reeling from the IDF’s barrage of Gaza, a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told FOX News Tuesday.
Hamas and Israel are reportedly close to to a deal that would exchange as many as 70 women and children held hostage by Hamas in return for the release of female Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
Mark Regev, who recently served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and is now a senior adviser to Netanyahu, said one aspect of the deal should underline how evil Hamas truly is.
He cited a figure of 240 people estimated to be held by Hamas, including 32 children and infants.
“I always ask us to remember what sort of people kidnap babies and infants, what sort of people can kidnap a 9-month-old baby. They really are sick. They really are depraved. What more could one say about Hamas?” Regev said.
“But if they are moving towards releasing hostages, it’s not because they have suddenly become humanitarians. It’s because they’ve been on the receiving end of the IDF’s (Israeli Defense Force) military might. And they are feeling the pain, feeling the pressure.”
Regev said he is hopeful for a deal soon, while reiterating the IDF’s pressure campaign must continue in order to expedite the possibility of future prisoner releases by a potentially teetering Hamas.
Fox News Digital’s Charles Creitz contributed to this update.
IDF emphasizes hospital operation targets Hamas, not civilians
An aerial view shows the compound of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on November 7, 2023, amid the ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas. (BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The Israel Defense Forces emphasized Wednesday that its forces conducting a “precise and targeted operation” at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza are targeting Hamas.
The White House confirmed Tuesday that Hamas terrorists are using Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, and the tunnels beneath it as a base for military operations and to hold hostages. Both Hamas and hospital officials have denied the allegation.
“Israel is at war with Hamas, not with the civilians in Gaza,” said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces. “The IDF has publicly warned time and again that Hamas’s continued military use of Shifa Hospital jeopardizes its protected status under international law.”
Hagari said Israeli forces in Gaza included medics and Arabic speakers to try and provide assistance in the “complex and sensitive environment.”
Israel continues to attack Hamas military targets in Gaza with a relentless campaign of airstrikes. Thousands of Palestinians have moved southward toward the Rafah border crossing into Egypt as the Israeli military has urged civilians to evacuate the warzone in the north.
Fox News Digital’s Brandon Gillespie and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
An Israeli practises using a newly acquired gun, at a weapons distribution point for people allowed to carry arms, at the Ayyelet HaShahar Kibbutz, in northern Israel, near the Lebanese border on October 12, 2023. (Photo by JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images)
Israeli citizens are rushing to arm themselves in the wake of the deadly Oct. 7 terror attacks.
A news release from the Ministry of National Security said more than 236,000 new requests for gun permits have been filed since the attack – a figure equal to the number filed over 20 years, the ministry said.
Israelis feel uneased after Hamas terrorists caught the country off-guard, infiltrating through the south and slaughtering more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, at a music festival and in their homes.
Armed civilian security squads entered the breach in the army’s absence to fight off some of the attackers. Shortly after, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir said he would expand and arm such squads with 10,000 assault rifles that would be distributed particularly in border towns, mixed Jewish-Arab cities and West Bank settlements.
Some 1,700 permits are being issued daily after the Ministry of National Security eased restrictions, the report said. By comparison, an average of 94 were issued daily in November 2022, and an average of 42 a year earlier.
Israeli soldiers killed in war against Hamas rises to 49: IDF
Israel Defense Forces said captains Omri Yosef David(left) and Yedidya Asher Lev(right) were killed in Gaza on Tuesday. (Israel Defense Forces)
The Israel Defense Forces announced two more soldiers were killed on Tuesday as Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists continues.
The fallen have been identified as Omri Yosef David, 27, and Yedidya Asher Lev, 26, and their families have been notified. Both David and Lev were captains, according to the IDF’s memorial page.
As of Wednesday morning, there here have been 49 IDF soldiers killed since ground operations began in Gaza.
On Wednesday, the IDF said its forces have entered Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital after surrounding the facility earlier.
The army said its forces were carrying out “a precise and targeted operation against Hamas in a specified area” at al-Shifa Hospital. It gave no further details but said it was taking steps to avoid harm to civilians.
In a statement, the Israeli military said it had warned “the relevant authorities in Gaza once again that all military activities within the hospital must cease within 12 hours. Unfortunately, it did not.”
Fox News’ Yonat Friling and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Israel ‘will not stop’ operations in Gaza until Hamas destroyed, hostages released: defense minister
ISRAEL – NOVEMBER 11: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visits the 91st Division’s base in northern Israel, November 11, 2023. (Photo by Israeli Defense Minister/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant said the Jewish state “will not stop its operations in Gaza” until Hamas is obliterated and hostages are back home with their families during a Wednesday meeting with U.S. Special Coordinator Brett McGurk.
The meeting between Gallant and McGurk, U.S. Special Coordinator for the Middle East, took place at the Ministry of Defense’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. The two discussed operational developments in Israel’s war against Hamas and the complexity of fighting the terrorist group given that it operates in civilian buildings.
Intelligence and additional details related to the hostages being held by Hamas and efforts to bring them home were also discussed.
The two leaders spoke on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and how to overcome the challenges in facilitating aid to the civilian population, as well as the international community’s role in getting more urgent supplies delivered to the area.
Gallant also expressed his appreciation for America’s ongoing support and deep partnership, and the two agreed to remain in close contact.
Medical supplies provided by Israeli forces arrive at Gaza hospital
Israel Defense Forces said medical supplies provided by the force have arrived at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. (Israel Defense Forces/X)
The Israel Defense Forces said medical supplies, including baby food and incubators, have arrived at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza amid the targeted attack on Hamas terrorists inside the building.
“We can now confirm that incubators, baby food and medical supplies, provided by the IDF, have successfully reached the hospital,” the IDF wrote on X.
The supplies arrived Wednesday morning after Israeli soldiers began a “precise and targeted operation” against Hamas, which operates out of the hospital. The operation remains active, according to the IDF.
Arabic-speaking soldiers and the IDF’s medical team are reportedly at the hospital to ensure the supplies make it to those in need.
The Israeli army alleges the main command center for Hamas is hidden inside the hospital, in underground tunnels beneath the structures that house hundreds of patients and medical staff. Both Hamas and al-Shifa Hospital staff deny the allegations.
More than 11,200 Palestinians — two-thirds of them women and minors — have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths. About 2,700 people have been reported missing.
Israel Defense Forces said troops killed Hamas terrorists and encountered explosive devices and terror cells during its “precise and targeted operation” at the al-Shifa Hospital.
The area of the hospital where the operation is taking place was decided upon by intelligence indicating Hamas activity was coming from the area, the IDF said.
Before entering, troops discovered explosive devices and terrorist cells, which prompted an “engagement” that left Hamas terrorists dead, according to the IDF.
A Hamas training camp containing terror tunnel shafts, classrooms, intelligence material and dozens of weapons, including rockets and loaded RPGs, was located in the area on Tuesday by Israeli forces.
In addition, the IDF said it struck two terrorists with a UAV after it identified a terrorist cell exiting a building with an anti-tank missile launching post in the northern Gaza Strip. The terrorists were carrying suspected IEDs, which were planted in the area.
Consider this – over the past year, the national debt increased by $2.5 trillion, which amounts to an eye-popping $78,401 every second. U.S. federal borrowing for Fiscal Year 2023 neared 9% of the entire economy. These numbers should terrify every American.
As vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, I feel compelled to address the alarming growth of our national debt. If we fail to confront this issue head-on, future generations will face the crushing prospect of a combined top marginal tax rate of 100% just to pay for existing government services.
We have an opportunity to come together to save our Republic by forming a bipartisan debt commission focused on finding innovative solutions to address this perilous threat and ensure our children and grandchildren have the same opportunities that we had. I commend Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., for pledging to establish a debt commission in one of his first acts since his election.
Our primary fiscal challenges stem from demographics. The number of workers-to-retirees ratio has fallen from over 5-to-1 to under 3-to-1. At the same time, 1-in-9 prime age men are not showing up in the workforce. These trends put an immense strain on Social Security and Medicare, programs that American retirees rightfully rely upon. Simply put, we must fulfill our promises to them. At the same time, it is morally indefensible to ask Americans to incur a massive tax increase to keep these programs afloat.
So instead of focusing on the question of who should pay, I believe we should focus on why health care costs have grown so rapidly. Consider obesity, a key driver of health care spending that fuels a multitude of conditions from diabetes to heart disease. The 2023 Joint Economic Report put a price tag of $4.1 trillion on the cost of untreated obesity to taxpayers over the next decade.
There is hope in the emerging role of medications targeting severe obesity and its complications. By ensuring access to effective treatments, we can tackle the underlying causes of these health issues, easing the financial pressures on federal health care spending.
Investing in research and development is vital for continued medical breakthroughs that enhance quality of life, reduce costs and improve outcomes. Yet, even with a forward-looking approach to health care, we cannot disregard the imminent fiscal challenges facing Social Security and Medicare. Without legislative intervention, these programs face automatic, draconian cuts that no American wants.
In just a decade, the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money. When that happens, federal law mandates an automatic 25% cut in Social Security benefits along with a reduction in Medicare spending.
It is incumbent upon us, as a nation, to find a bipartisan solution that solidifies their financial stability. Another pressing concern is the historically low liquidity in the U.S. Treasury market. As the country prepares to issue $1.8 trillion in new debt in Fiscal Year 2024, we must recognize the risks posed by this illiquidity.
A slight drop in demand for U.S. debt can cause a significant increase in interest rates, as evidenced by the yield on the 10-year Treasury currently standing at 4.6%—nearly a full percentage point higher than the Congressional Budget Office’s projection at the year’s outset. Escalating interest rates have the potential to set off a perilous cycle of slower economic growth and higher federal budget deficits, which, taken together will exacerbate our debt crisis.
We must consider innovative approaches to financing our debt while addressing liquidity. One approach is for Treasury to issue perpetuities, as suggested by Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane. These instruments would be both highly liquid and lock in the government’s long-term financing costs, providing stability and predictability to the market.
The Federal Reserve could also improve Treasury market liquidity by adopting a rules-based monetary policy, thereby reducing interest rate volatility.
The dramatic rise in America’s national debt is a crisis that can no longer be ignored. It is a challenge that threatens our future prosperity, and one that Congress must rise to before it’s too late. By forming a bipartisan debt commission, we have a unique opportunity to come together and tackle this issue directly. It doesn’t matter what party one belongs to, we should all want a healthier population, strong and secure social safety net programs, and a strong and flourishing economy.
Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., was shut down Wednesday on pressing FBI Director Christopher Wray on purported evidence of “ghost buses” filled with alleged federal operatives before the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.
“These buses are nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters and deployed onto our Capitol on Jan. 6,” Higgins said in closing of his five-minute questioning. “Your day is coming, Mr. Wray.”
Democrats sought to shut down Higgins’ line of questioning that had turned a bit contentious as Higgins asked Wray if the FBI had operatives “embedded” in the crowd on Jan. 6.
“Can you confirm that the FBI had that sort of engagement with your own agents embedded within to the crowd on Jan. 6,” Higgins asked.
Instead of a direct answer to that question, Wray deflected to suggest the Republican was asking whether the FBI was stoking violence, something Higgins did not ask, nor allude to.
“If you are asking whether the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and or agents, the answer is emphatically not,” Wray shot back.
“You’re saying no?” Higgins asked again.
“No!” Wray said.
“Do you know what a ghost vehicle is, director?” Higgins continued. “You’re the director of the FBI, you certainly should. Do you know what a ghost bus is?”
“A ghost bus?” Wray replied. “I’m not sure I’ve used that term before.”
Higgins, a former Military Police Corps staff sergeant in the Louisiana National Guard said ghost buses are “common in law enforcement.”
“It’s a vehicle that’s used for secret purposes,” Higgins said. “It’s painted over.
“These two buses in the middle here, they were the first to arrive at Union Station on Jan. 6,” Higgins said, pointing to a photo. “I have all this evidence. I’m showing you a tip of this iceberg.”
That is when a Democrat in the hearing sought to stop Higgins’ questioning and the chairman forced him to yield. The chair did permit Higgins to briefly close with the “nefarious in nature” and “your day is coming, Mr. Wray” remarks.
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
Israeli forces seized the Hamas terror organization’s military headquarters in Gaza this week. On Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces revealed new details about Hamas’ subterranean “pit” command center. Israeli soldiers were reportedly surprised by the level of sophistication of Hamas’ underground high command quarters, drawing comparisons to the IDF’s own “pit” beneath its Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
The Hamas subterranean headquarters includes a special shaft with an elevator that can reportedly reach a depth of 30 meters (nearly 100 ft.) and fit seven people inside. The elevator descends to a specially- designed tunnel that is air conditioned and outfitted with oxygen. In addition, the tunnel includes advanced communication equipment, suggesting that top Hamas officials hide in there, including Gaza’s Hamas chief Yahiya Sinwar and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif.
The Israeli military doctrine has traditionally focused on deterrence rather than dismantling the Hamas terror organizations. However, following the unprecedented Hamas massacre on Oct. 7 that claimed the lives of 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, mostly civilians, Israel has vowed to dismantle Hamas from the Gaza Strip.
IDF Division 162 Commander Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen stressed that the Israeli military is currently implementing the goal of eliminating Hamas’ military and governing capabilities in Gaza City.
“We created conditions which could lead to taking apart the military and governance capabilities of Hamas in Gaza City,” Cohen explained.
“Since the start of the invasion, the IDF and Division 162 have been taking apart the centers of gravity of Hamas and the capabilities that it spent years building. Since the start of the invasion, divisional forces have killed over 1,000 Hamas terrorists and reduced rocket fire from northern Gaza at Israel by around 80%,” the IDF general added.
Earlier this week, Israeli forces from the Golani Brigade seized Hamas’ parliament building in Gaza City, an important symbol of the Iranian-backed terror organization’s political power in the coastal enclave.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a retired IDF general and former commando from the Shayetet 13 naval elite unit, recently said Hamas is unable to stop the Israeli advances throughout the Gaza Strip.
“Hamas isn’t capable of stopping the IDF. The IDF is advancing to every (necessary) location,” Gallant stated.
“The Hamas terrorist organization has lost control of Gaza, terrorists are fleeing south, civilians are looting Hamas bases, and they have no confidence in their government,” he assessed.
The Israeli army announced on Wednesday morning that it had launched “a precise and targeted operation against Hamas” in one part of the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The medical center has emerged as a hub for Hamas activities, including its command centers below the hospital.
“The IDF is conducting a ground operation in Gaza to defeat Hamas and rescue our hostages. Israel is at war with Hamas, not with the civilians in Gaza,” the Israeli military confirmed in an official statement.
Hamas has systematically used hospitals, mosques, kindergartens, schools and private homes for storing weapons and hiding terrorist operatives. The IDF recently revealed that the Rantisi Children’s Hospital, named after Hamas founder Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was being used for weapons storage and has likely been the location where Hamas has been hiding hostages for more than five weeks.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been working to destroy the United States from within for DECADES, this is their secret written plan exposed. pic.twitter.com/2bodbC4vcg
An American mom whose child is being held hostage in Gaza by Palestinian terrorists delivered the most caustic speech. It hurts but you need to put yourself through it.pic.twitter.com/NqWWSiHKAB
I’ve never in my life been in such a huge crowd. The #MarchForIsrael rally today was incredible. Singing. Dancing. Prayers. Inspiration. There was no violence. No vandalism. No destruction. Just a real, raw, peaceful, gathering. #BringThemHome ❤️🙏🏻 pic.twitter.com/CiL36UDpZ2
🔥🚨HIDDEN HISTORY: On December 1, 1963 Malcolm X gave a speech called “God’s Judgement of White America.” where he identified the ‘White Liberal’ as the most ‘dangerous’ and ‘deceitful’ thing in the Western Hemisphere.
Top Stories • Court Dismisses Bogus “Hate Speech” Charges Against Pro-Life MP for Quoting Bible • 19 AGs Tell Supreme Court: Ban Mail-Order Abortions, Protect Women From Dangerous Abortion Pills • Republicans Stand Up for Tommy Tuberville, Slam Democrats’ Obsession With Abortion • Indi Gregory’s Death is a Reminder That We Must Restore Parental Rights
More Pro-Life News • March for Life Unveils 2024 Theme: “Pro-Life: With Every Woman, For Every Child” • Senate Republicans Demand Biden Rescind Policy Forcing Americans to Fund Military Abortions • Peru Congress Passes Law Affirming Unborn Babies Have a Right to Life • Doctors Asked Mom to Abort Baby with 7% Chance of Survival, Now Her Daughter is 2 Years Old • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Just more of the same upon Capitol Hill, a Continuing Resolution (CR) passes the House and on to the Senate, leaving many to ask the question, when are Republicans going to stand up and be the opposition party to the Marxist Democrats party hell-bent on destroying America?
It may be too early to tell if Speaker Johnson is going to be the Conservative savior, we were hoping for but so far, it’s not looking real good. We still remain hopeful.
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.
Over the weekend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali revealed in an essay at Unherd that she has become a Christian. For Christians, this is welcome and joyous news. But it’s also instructive. A former Muslim who very publicly rejected Islam and became an avowed atheist in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Ali has been speaking and writing in defense of Western civilization and liberal values for decades.
Now she has come to the conclusion that there is no way to maintain Western civilization and no way to preserve its liberal values apart from Christianity. Just as she came to discover the fundamentalist Islam of her youth was a dead end, she has also discovered the atheism she adopted in response to it is also a dead end.
Ali is right, of course, although the reasons she gives for her conversion might raise some eyebrows. “Part of the answer is global,” she writes. Ali says the West is under threat from three different but related forces: “the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”
She’s also right about that but wrong to think Christianity is primarily about countering those forces or preserving a particular civilizational or political project. As great as Western civilization is, it arose as a byproduct of the Christian faith, the sole object of which is communion with Almighty God by means of salvation through Jesus Christ. Things like freedom of speech, rule of law, and human rights are fruits of the Christian faith, but they are not what Christianity is about.
Still, Ali’s conversion is instructive in an important way. As Hussein Aboubakr Mansour noted on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, Ali was “the poster child of what the New Atheists promised Islam.” There was a lot of discussion after 9/11 about how Islam needed its own Reformation to tame and secularize it, as Christianity had supposedly been tamed and pacified by the Protestant Reformation (never mind the century of continental war that it triggered). What the atheists promised Ali and other disillusioned Muslims was rationalism, freedom of inquiry and expression, and scientific objectivity — all of which would flourish in Muslim societies just as it had in the West, if only Muslims would set aside their backward religion and embrace the secular humanism of Western elites.
According to this theory, Christianity itself had served its purpose in the West, bestowed all its gifts, and could safely be discarded. We could live forever, drawing on its capital, which we assumed would never run out. The Islamic world needed to do likewise, and all would be well.
But something very different happened instead. It turns out, the capital was gradually spent and never replenished. Liberalism always depended for its vitality on something it cannot itself supply: the Christian faith, active and alive among the people. As the French philosopher Rémi Brague wrote back in the 1990s, “Faith produces its effects only so long as it remains faith and not calculation. We owe European civilization to people who believed in Christ, not to people who believed in Christianity.”
Ali’s conversion, which is laudable on its own (even if she doesn’t quite yet grasp the true object of her new faith), is a stark reminder that the liberal, secular West cannot survive without the Christian faith from which it emerged. Indeed, the secular elites who once promised apostate Muslims like Ali that they could have all the benefits of Christianity without Christianity itself are now abandoning the principles they once espoused.
In recent weeks, we have seen this abandonment most potently in the Red-Green alliance between the global left and the pro-Hamas crowd, who have been marching through the streets of Western cities in a show of force reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The naked antisemitism of the Hamas people, together with the deafening silence of the elites of the global left, tells you everything you need to know about the durability of secular humanism.
There is no room anymore for freedom of speech, open inquiry, or rational debate among the people and institutions that once espoused these ideals. There is only the brute force of the mob. It’s easy to see this at work throughout Western society, not just on the Israel-Hamas issue. What commitment do our elites really have to liberal totems like science and rationality, after all, when they insist that a man can become a woman, or that children can consent to castration and sterilization? When a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court insists she cannot define what a woman is because she is not a biologist, we’ve stepped firmly into what C.S. Lewis called the void, where nothing is objectively true and all that matters is will and power.
“Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue,” writes Ali. “And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.”
Indeed it does, and it has given us all that is good in our civilization. Having first rejected the Christian faith, however, our secular elites are now rejecting all those other good things that sprang from it, and positing a very different sort of society. Instead of a society that embraces rationality and freedom and human rights, they offer something from the pagan past: a society that embraces power and violence and domination. If we’re honest with ourselves, we can already see, on the streets of London and New York and Paris, what that society will look like.
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.
Today a Helsinki appeals court acquitted two Christians of “hate crimes” charges with potential prison sentences for tweeting Bible verses and publishing a Christian booklet about sexual ethics. This unprecedented application of Finnish law has kept Member of Parliament Paivi Rasanen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola in court for nearly five years.
Despite today’s unanimous ruling affirming a unanimous lower-court acquittal, those five years are likely to increase. The state prosecutor told media she will appeal to Finland’s Supreme Court, and the court is likely to take the case, said Rasanen and Pohjola’s lawyer, Matti Sankamo, in a press conference from Finland this morning. An adverse ruling could effectively outlaw Christianity in Finland and damage the fundamental human rights to free speech and religious exercise across the world.
“This is a significant win … for everyone concerned with the protection of fundamental freedoms,” Rasanen said in the press conference. “While I celebrate this victory wholeheartedly, I am also saddened at the thought of the enormous state resources expended over the last four years to prosecute us for nothing more than the peaceful expression of our Christian faith. The basic human right to free speech remains under serious threat in Finland and around the world.”
Rasenen and Pohjola said they immediately texted friends and family the news of the court decision this morning, with Pohjola reading Psalm 103’s words of praise to his family, he said. He also immediately shared the news with fellow pastors, and “I got an immediate reaction that ‘We are so happy our bishop is not labeled as a criminal,’” he said.
“This is not only a cultural or legal battle but also a spiritual battle,” Pohjola said, noting their prosecution raises the “question of [whether] pastor and church can teach publicly what we understand to be the word of God and the created order and the natural law. There have been difficult moments, but I understand this is my calling as a Christian and a pastor to guard the faith and teach it publicly and carry the cross.”
That cross, he said, is not a physical cross like the one he wears around his neck, “It’s to pay the price in this age to be a witness for Christ.”
The case began in 2019, when Rasanen argued on X (then Twitter) that Finland’s state church, in which her husband is a pastor, should not sponsor an LGBT parade. She tweeted a picture of Bible verses that say non-heterosexual acts are unnatural.
Finland’s top prosecutor investigated complaints filed over Rasanen’s tweet. This led to three days of police interrogating Rasanen and an investigation into Rasanen’s 25 years as a member of Parliament and former interior minister for the nation recently admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
That investigation unearthed a 2004 booklet Rasanen, a medical doctor, wrote and Pohjola published as part of a church catechism series. The booklet, titled “Male and Female He Created Them,” explains basic Christian doctrines about God’s design for marriage to comprise one man and one woman for life.
Helsinki prosecutor Anu Mantila argued Finnish courts should ban from the internet the booklet, Rasanen’s tweet, and an audio recording of Rasanen defending Christian views. Mantila also seeks punitive fines. “Male and Female He Created Them” was published in 2004, several years before Finland adopted the antiterrorism laws now being used to prosecute the two Christians for “hate speech.”
“With the right police and prosecutor, we could expect to see similar cases crop up across Europe and in fact around the world,” noted Alliance Defending Freedom International lawyer Paul Coleman, who is assisting the Christians’ legal defense. Hate crimes laws like Finland’s are on the books in many European nations and American states and cities.
Rasanen said the most difficult part of her prosecution has been the prosecutor’s false accusations against her, including that Rasanen considers homosexuals inferior. She said that is “against my conviction” as a Christian. Christianity teaches that every human is made in God’s image and so beloved by God that He sacrificed His own Son to wash away every sin ever committed.
“We represent the common traditional classical understanding of family and sexual ethics, and now this has been labeled widely in our society and also in the established Lutheran church as something which is … not only offending and extremist but it’s also criminal,” Pohjola said.
Pohjola is the bishop of a small non-state church body that adheres to the Bible’s teachings, which Finland’s state church has in large part abandoned. The Federalist interviewed Pohjola in person in 2021, and Rasanen in person in 2022.
In the press conference, Pohjola and Rasanen expressed gratitude for all the prayers and messages of support they’ve received from around the world, as well as their own families’ steadfast support during their trials. They both called it a “privilege” to defend Christianity and the basic human rights of free speech and freedom of religion in court and in numerous media appearances since their prosection began.
Rasanen, whose 11 grandchildren include a newborn, highlighted a message she’d received from a 16-year-old Finnish girl who said the prosecution has encouraged her to be more public about her faith at school.
“In a free society, faith is not meant to be hidden behind closed doors,” Rasanen said today. “This is what happens in dictatorships, not democracies.”
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.
Secret Service reportedly opened fire Sunday night on three suspects attempting to break into an unmarked government vehicle parked in front of the Georgetown home of Naomi Biden, President Joe Biden’s granddaughter. Reports allege that the three offenders fled the scene after the gunfire started.
These types of scenarios are exactly why Americans advocate for the Second Amendment, but unfortunately, not all citizens have the same protection the Biden family is afforded.
The average DC resident does not have protection from the Secret Service, as Naomi Biden does:
– 760 carjackings occurred in 2023
– 65% of those arrested for carjacking are juveniles
Residents of Washington, D.C., are forced to navigate an onslaught of regulation and red tape before they can use firearms for self-preservation. According to D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, residents have the “authority to carry firearm[s]” only in “certain places and for certain purposes.” Concealed carry requires a variety of applications and training, while “open carry is prohibited.”
Meanwhile, crime in the District of Columbia is out of control. So far, violent crime is up almost 40 percent in 2023 over 2022, according to D.C.’s preliminary reports. Homicide and robbery are up 32 and 68 percent, respectively, while motor vehicle theft is up nearly 100 percent over last year. On Monday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a state of emergency over the juvenile crime crisis.
Yet stringent gun laws are especially common in high-crime areas, making it even more difficult for citizens to protect themselves. And in the face of rampant crime, many law-abiding citizens are left defenseless at the direction of lawmakers and an executive branch that enjoys the protection of armed security details. The Council on Criminal Justice reports that across 37 U.S. cities, violent crime is up since 2019, with “24% more homicides during the first half of 2023” compared to the first half of 2019, and “motor vehicle thefts more than doubled (+104%).”
Naomi Biden isn’t the only one getting special treatment when it comes to firearms, however. Her dad, Hunter Biden allegedly lied about his drug use on a federal form to purchase a revolver in 2018 — a bombshell the public didn’t learn about until a few months after his father was safely installed in the White House in 2021. Later, Joe Biden’s DOJ struck a sweetheart plea deal with Hunter, which posited that if the Biden son pled guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges, he would get broad immunity for other crimes, including no prosecution for his illegal possession of a firearm. Luckily, that deal fell apart thanks to an astute federal judge.
Then last month, Hunter Biden pled not guilty to three federal firearms charges. And while his lawyers claim the underlying law is unconstitutional, even Politico recognizes that argument “stands in stark contrast to President Joe Biden’s advocacy for stricter gun laws.”
The double standard is clear: gun rights for the Biden family and their elite friends, not for everyone else. As Biden said of the Second Amendment last year, it’s “not absolute” — for you, at least.
Jesse Watters EXPOSES how Deep State is really PROTECTING Biden by charging Hunter with gun crime… pic.twitter.com/oQo3pECqG9
The firearm hierarchy is not unique to the Bidens. Political and cultural elites alike have benefitted from guns while simultaneously pushing anti-gun legislation. Along with the Bidens, other Democrat politicians are some of the worst offenders. For instance, the notoriously anti-gun former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had her own armed security detail to protect her home and office. Former New York City Mayor and Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg also demanded gun control while being protected by armed guards. Both lived comfortably under the protection of firearms while the citizens of their crime-ridden cities were left facing unmanageable gun regulations — and these politicos are just the tip of the iceberg.
This blatant hierarchy reveals the truth that Biden and other Democrats refuse to acknowledge: Guns can preserve life. And though Biden claims gun control is “about protecting children. It’s about protecting families. It’s about protecting whole communities,” his family’s own security details are proof that guns are actually the best way to protect yourself and your loved ones.
“Piers Morgan Uncensored” host Piers Morgan repeatedly pressed UK member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn to label Hamas a terrorist organization during a heated exchange on Monday.
“Are Hamas a terror group? Yes or no?” Morgan asked Corbyn in a verbal battle that has since gone viral online. “I’ve asked you two questions: should Hamas stay in power and are they a terror group. You’re refusing to answer either of them. That is very telling. And you wonder why people believe you had a problem with Jewish people.”
“That is not very telling at all!” Corbyn yelled back. “What is very telling is your inability to keep quiet for 30 seconds to allow anyone to answer a question.”
“Piers Morgan Uncensored” host Piers Morgan repeatedly asked UK member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn if Hamas was a terror group in a heated exchange on his show Monday. (Getty Images)
“On my show, I ask people questions,” Morgan responded. “Normally they answer them.”
“No, you don’t, you shout at people,” Corbyn said back.
“Only when they don’t answer the question,” Morgan said.
At one point, Corbyn repeatedly asked Morgan “are you done?”
Commentators online weighed in on the verbal battle between Morgan and Corbyn.
Journalist Yashar Ali wrote that the exchange was “extraordinary.”
“A reminder that Corbyn took payments from Press TV in the past. Press TV is funded and controlled by the Islamic Republic,” Ali told followers.
Author Hen Mazzig took Morgan’s side in the verbal battle. “I totally understand why Piers is aggravated, imagine speaking to a politician who cannot condemn a group which beheaded and burned babies alive, and violated little girls. For shame.”
Piers Morgan asks Jeremy Corbyn 15 times whether the former Labour leader thinks Hamas is a terror group.
Morgan referenced previous accusations of antisemitism against Corbyn, which have plagued him and his Labour Party for years. A 2019 poll showed that a whopping 87 percent of Jewish people in Great Britain believed Corbyn was antisemitic, pointing to many incidents and remarks, many of them involving his staunch support for Palestinians and a perceived hostility toward Israel. Recent reports also showed Jewish members of the Labour Party repeatedly expressing concerns of what they saw as growing anti-Semitism within the party.
Corbyn was eventually suspended from the Labour Party from the party over charges of antisemitism. He also once referred to “friends” from Hamas coming to address Parliament.
Corbyn did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion, and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media.
Jeffrey Clark is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. He has previously served as a speechwriter for a cabinet secretary and as a Fulbright teacher in South Korea. Jeffrey graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a degree in English and History.
Since before its founding, our country has been blessed with extraordinary leaders who steeled our resolve for independence. They invented a new form of government by the people and for the people. Each brought different skills and talents to the cause of freedom. Those who followed guided us ably through more than two centuries of often treacherous challenges and grave threats. It is a story best told through the lens of historic documents that have been honored and preserved for our national heritage.
In this unique collector’s edition, the writings, speeches, and letters of our founders and their successors are carefully selected and explained. The important promises and navigating principles that shaped our great nation can be read in full. Over time, others helped transform public sentiment to advance equality and opportunity, empowering generations that followed. Their eloquent beliefs and convictions are also included.
The American experiment had its genesis in the power of words and ideas. We owe our unparalleled success to the exemplary statesmen – and women – who expressed them. Bold and transcendent figures defined what it is to be an American and to control our own destinies. Their dynamic opinions, steadfast faith, and inspiring arguments are revisited in this volume as a salute to our nation’s enduring triumph.
The durability of our constitutional republic and the rights we enjoy today also serve as a shining testimonial to the moral courage and intellectual brilliance of our forebearers. We are their grateful beneficiaries. Absorbing their wisdom enriches our appreciation for the lives we enjoy and our love of country.
Among the essential patriotic documents contained in the book, we revisit seminal moments in the American journey. For example…
*As Patrick Henry stirred the nation with his passionate vow, “Give me liberty or give me death,” it was the inexorable logic and “common sense” of Thomas Paine that galvanized Americans to declare their independence when he wrote, “Resolution is our inherent character, and courage hath never forsaken us.”
*John Adams cautioned that only the ballot box in a representative democracy would prevent men in power from becoming “ravenous beasts of prey.” He argued that “The happiness of society is the end (goal) of government.”
*While Ben Franklin expressed sober misgivings about the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison penned a brilliant set of essays known as The Federalist Papers that led to its adoption. Madison acknowledged the flaws of our system when he wrote, “That which is the least imperfect is therefore the best government.”
A statue of Benjamin Franklin, founder of the University of Pennsylvania, on the school’s campus in Philadelphia, March 15, 2007. (Mike Mergen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
*As he left office, a prescient George Washingtonwarned that divisive political parties would become “potent engines of unprincipled men” who would “undermine freedom and enfeeble good governance.” He vigorously counseled against them, to no avail.
*Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, abolitionist icon, and confidant of Lincoln delivered a powerful lament on the hypocrisy of American slavery by arguing that “We, the people” does not mean “We, the white people.” In plain language he deplored the cruelty and depravation that rendered “four million of our fellow countrymen in chains…and sold on the auction-block with horses, sheep, and swine.”
*In one of the greatest acts of moral courage Abraham Lincoln proclaimed “that all persons held as slaves shall be forever free.” At Gettysburg, he reminded Americans that “all men are created equal.” In his Second Inaugural he sought to salve the wounds of war by uttering the words, “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Abraham Lincoln (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs)
*As the suffrage movement gained momentum, Elizabeth Cady Stanton condemned the tyranny of sexism, leaving “women to feel aggrieved, oppressed, and deprived of their most sacred rights.” Victoria C. Woodhull correctly argued that “the Constitution makes no distinction of sex” and “women are the equals of men.” In a much acclaimed speech, Susan B. Anthony, who was indicted for casting a ballot, posed the vexing question, “Is it a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote?”
*At the dawn of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt shattered the Gilded Age of ruthless monopolists and robber barons with his promise of a “square deal for every man, big or small, rich or poor.” Drawing from the principles of Lincoln, Roosevelt moved aggressively and successfully against corporate corruption and what he called “the sinister influence or control of special interests” in government.
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States (The Associated Press)
*His relative, Franklin Roosevelt, saw the nation through immense suffering in the Great Depression by reassuring Americans, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” His innovative fireside chats buoyed the spirits of a nation in despair. When the U.S. was attacked by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, Roosevelt delivered his famous “a date which will live in infamy” address before Congress. He vowed that “The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”
*As Germany initiated World War II in Europe, the renowned theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, sent a secret letter to Roosevelt warning him that the Nazis were attempting to develop a new and frighteningly powerful weapon —an atomic bomb. Einstein’s alarming missive triggered the covert operation by the U.S. to build its own weapon in the highly classified Manhattan Project.
Albert Einstein takes his oath of allegiance upon becoming a U.S. citizen in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1940, alongside his daughter Margot, right, and his secretary, Helene Dukas. (Getty Images)
*When Harry S. Truman ordered two atomic bombs dropped on Japan he revealed to the nation that “The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”
*In the face of Soviet aggression, Dwight D. Eisenhower sought peace through strength by urging a halt to nuclear proliferation as he warned, “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
*Ronald Reagan became the unabashed voice of conservatism and opened his presidency with a masterful address declaring, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He precipitated the end of the Cold War when he challenged the Soviets to remove the physical barrier in Berlin. “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall,” Reagan demanded. Two years later, the wall came tumbling down. And so did the communist empire.
Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States (1981-1989) and 33rd governor of California (1967-1975). (Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The common denominator among all these exceptional men and women was their abiding faith in our country’s greatness fortified by a devotion to patriotism. In their memorable words, Americans found both solace and inspiration. We still can.
The virtues, aspirations, and ideals they so elegantly expressed are rediscovered in my new book, “The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents.” It is a living testimonial for American patriots who are immensely proud of our foundational desire for a unified nation dedicated to freedom, prosperity, and justice for all. We continue to seek ways to improve the human experience and strive for “a more perfect union.”
In an era when too many have forgotten our country’s remarkable past, the noble ideas and uplifting words of these exceptional leaders are needed now more than ever to rekindle the indomitable American spirit.
Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. His recent book, “The Trial of the Century,” about the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” is available in bookstores nationwide or can be ordered online at the Simon & Schuster website. Jarrett’s latest book, “The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents,” was published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins on November 14, 2023. Gregg is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His follow-up book was also a New York Times bestseller, “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History.”
Evidence showing how Hamas terrorists used Gaza’s Rantisi Hospital for Children as a terror base was revealed by the Israeli army on Monday.
“Hamas hides in hospitals. Today, we will expose this to the world,” IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Daniel Hagari said as he presented the evidence at a press conference.
Atypically, Hagari, himself was featured in the video footage, as he accompanied the Israeli Navy commando Shayetet 13, the unit he once commanded, on a raid deep inside the Gaza Strip, Hagari, at first, showed evidence of a weapons depot under the Rantisi Hospital that included suicide bombs, AK-47 rifles, grenades, RPGs and more.
BREAKING:
The Israeli Army took control of the Rantisi children’s hospital in Gaza & found a secret tunnel leading 20 m below ground to a Hamas command & control center.
Weapons, baby bottles & motorcycles in the tunnel indicate hostages were held there pic.twitter.com/ArFWOqfkgl
On Sunday, the IDF presented footage showing terrorists firing RPGs from the entrance of al-Quds Hospital.
“Hamas uses hospitals as an instrument of war,” Hagari confirmed while standing in front of the displayed weapons. He was standing in a room painted with trees and other children’s drawings above the weapons displayed on the floor.
Hagari then went to another room, showing motorcycles that were used by terrorists during the Oct. 7 massacre of Israel’s Gaza border communities, suggesting that the terrorists likely brought some of the Israeli hostages to Rantisi Hospital.
More evidence of this was found in the room next door, where a woman’s clothing lay on a chair with pieces of rope attached to it. Above the chair, a baby’s bottle was found and diapers lay on the floor nearby.
The IDF suspects that Israeli hostages, including small children and their mothers, were held in the complex and is analyzing the evidence to gain more clues as to the identity and the whereabouts of the hostages, Hagari said.
Army Radio later reported that a bloody knife found in the basement was also being analyzed.
This area of the hospital basement was closed off from the rest of the hospital and contained improvised sanitary installations, including toilets, showers and a kitchen, and had its own ventilation system.
Hagari also showed a list of guard shifts hanging on the wall of a room decorated like a living room, with the title “Al-Aqsa flood” (the Hamas name for the war) and began with Oct. 7.
“Our war is against Hamas, not against the people in Gaza. Especially not the sick, the women, or the children,” Hagari reiterated at the press conference. “Our war is against Hamas who uses them as human shields.”
Rantisi Hospital as well as other hospitals in northern Gaza were evacuated with the help of Israeli forces, Hagari added.
Two Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee issued a criminal referral letter to the Justice Department recommending charges against Michael Cohen for his contradictory testimony in court last month. Cohen, former attorney to former President Donald Trump, testified under cross-examination last month that he lied under oath before the House Intelligence Committee in 2019 when asked in a deposition about Trump’s personal financial statements.
House Intelligence Chair Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and committee member Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who chairs the House Republican Caucus, sent the letter accusing Cohen of committing perjury and of having” knowingly made false statements” before Congress four years ago.
“That Mr. Cohen was willing to openly and brazenly state at trial that he lied to Congress on this specific issue is startling,” the letter reads, according to The Hill. “His willingness to make such a statement alone should necessitate an investigation.”
In 2019, Cohen told a House panel that Trump did not direct him to inflate financial statements for Trump Organization assets. He testified in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial last month that he lied under oath in 2019, claiming that Trump “speaks like a mob boss” and gives directions “without specifically telling you” what to do.
Migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. from Mexico are detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the border on Nov. 12, 2023, in Jacumba, California. (Photo: Nick Ut/Getty Images)
Federal authorities recorded 240,988 migrant encounters at the southern border in October, sustaining record highs seen under the Biden administration, according to Customs and Border Protection data released Tuesday. The number of encounters along the southern border in September totaled 269,735, marking the highest month on record. CBP recorded 232,963 and 183,479 encounters in August and July, respectively, according to agency data.
“In conjunction with our resumption of removal flights to Venezuela consistent with delivering consequences for those who cross the border unlawfully, CBP saw a 65 percent decrease in southwest border encounters of Venezuelans in the second half of October, compared to the second half of September,” Troy A. Miller, senior official performing the duties of the commissioner, said in a statement regarding the new data.
“In October, CBP also saw an overall decrease of 14 percent between ports of entry, as well as an overall decrease of family units. We continue to enhance our border security posture and remain vigilant,” Miller added.
The number of encounters of illegal migrants exceeded 188,000 at the southern border in October, while the number of migrants encountered at ports of entry surpassed 52,000, according to CBP data. Of those processed at ports of entry, 44,000 used CBP One, a phone application the Biden administration allows migrants to use to book appointments to enter the U.S.
“CBP’s narcotics seizures in October highlight our work on the frontline in the fight against fentanyl and other dangerous substances entering the United States—but we need more resources to sustain and increase these efforts. The President’s supplemental budget request is critical to funding the frontline, and would provide much-needed personnel, resources, and technology to go after transnational criminal organizations, enhance border security—including the enforcement of consequences for those who break the law—and support state and local partners, all to keep Americans safe,” Miller added.
Top Stories • Indi Gregory Dies After Hospital Yanks Life Support Over Parents’ Objections • Catholic Bishop: Pope Francis Ousted Me Because I Spoke Truth to Power • Pro-Life Republican Tim Scott Ends His Presidential Campaign • American Medical Association Rejects Proposal to Support Assisted Suicide
More Pro-Life News • Bishop Strickland Calls for Prayers for Pope Francis, Warns of Forces Corrupting Catholic Church • Teen Girl Charged With Murder After Stabbing Her Newborn Baby to Death • Baby Indi Gregory Couldn’t Even Die at Home Because Her Life Support Was Forcibly Removed • Catholic Bishops Mourn Indi Gregory’s Death, Call for Greater Parental Rights • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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After years of California taxpayers begging, Gavin Newsom has finally put his foot down and decided to clean up San Francisco of the Human Facies, needles, and the homeless, but not for the local communities’ benefit. He’s doing this to appease the communist dictator Xi of China.
It seems like it was only a few days ago Newsom was in China licking that genocidal regime’s boots. Oh wait, it was only a few days ago. They must have a lot in common in how to move forward in how to lead their countries.
As a Transplant from California, it breaks my heart to see what Governor Newsom and the Democrats have done to that beautiful state.
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.
Britain’s High Court effectively executed a sick 8-month-old girl early Monday morning.
Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth of Derbyshire fought desperately in recent weeks to see that their daughter, Indi Gregory, would continue receiving treatment for her mitochondrial disorder or potentially undergo experimental treatment abroad so that they could spend more time with her.
Hope came in the form of support from Italy, not just from the Vatican but from the government, which gave Gregory citizenship and paved the way for her to be treated at the Vatican’s Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital in Rome.
Despite international pressure, a fully comped alternative, and the parents’ desperate pleas, England’s High Court determined that Gregory would be better off dead sooner rather than later.
In a statement released by #IndiGregory 's father, Dean Gregory, during the night, he said:
"Indi's life ended at 01.45am. Claire and I are angry heartbroken and ashamed. The NHS and the Courts not only took away her chance to live a longer life, but they also took away Indi's… pic.twitter.com/IdbJRuzI2k
Indi Gregory was born on February 24 with a rare degenerative mitochondrial disease that saps energy.
The staff at Queen’s Medical Center in Nottingham recently decided to give up on helping the girl and sought to take her off life support, noting that death was in the girl’s best interests, reported the BBC.
High Court Justice Robert Peel granted the medical center’s application to stop life support in October, suggesting that despite the parents’ moving “belief in Indi’s resilience, courage, and fortitude,” the medical evidence justifying termination was “unanimous and clear.”
Peel’s ruling cleared the way for the physicians’ plan to wean the girl off of intubation and let her die, “at home or at a hospice.”
Gregory’s parents were evidently unwilling to let a London judge and some masked strangers determine the fate of their daughter.
“The doctors painted a terribly bleak and negative picture of Indi’s condition during court proceedings,” said the girl’s father. “Indi can definitely experience happiness. She cries like a normal baby. … We know she is disabled, but you don’t just let disabled people die. We just want to give her a chance.”
With the backing of the British advocacy group Christian Concern, Gregory and Staniforth made repeated attempts to have their little girl moved to a hospital that might actually try to keep her alive. The parents attempted to persuade Court of Appeal judges in London as well as judges at the European Court of Human Rights in France to overturn the fatal decision, reported the Telegraph.
Italy ultimately intervened, granting Gregory citizenship on Nov. 6 and agreeing to cover the cost of Indi’s medical treatment at the Vatican’s pediatric hospital. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni pledged to do what she could to “defend her life” and pressured Britain’s lord chancellor to help facilitate the girl’s transfer to Rome.
Simone Pillon, a lawyer and former senator who helped secure a spot for Indi Gregory at the Vatican hospital, said in a statement, “A place is ready and waiting for Indi at a leading paediatric hospital, which will be funded by the Italian government. I hope there will be no further delay in the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust cooperating with the specialist Air Ambulance Service and to work with the family rather than cruelly denying them this chance.”
On Thursday, the girl’s Italian guardian, the consul in Manchester, Matteo Corradini, reportedly made a plea to the U.K. High Court, calling on Justice Robert Peel to cede the case to him under Article Article 9§2 of the 1996 Hague Convention.
The next day, the High Court ruled that the Italian efforts to save the child from the British health care system were “wholly misconceived” and that the baby’s life support had to be removed “immediately,” reported the Catholic News Agency.
Dean Gregory responded to the ruling, saying, “Claire and I are again disgusted by another one-sided decision from the judges and the Trust. The whole world is watching and is shocked at how we have been treated.”
“This feels like the latest kick in the teeth, and we will not give up fighting for our daughter’s chance to live until the end,” added Gregory.
Justices Peter Jackson, Eleanor King, and Andrew Moylan all denied the distraught parents the ability to appeal the ruling, thereby sealing Indi Gregory’s fate.
On Sunday, Christian Concern indicated that the baby had been transferred from Queen’s Medical Care Center to a hospice, apparently with a security escort and police presence.
Indi had been moved to a hospice as opposed to home because Justice Peel reneged on his earlier order last Wednesday.
“Indi’s life ended at 01:45. Claire and I are angry, heartbroken and ashamed,” said Dean Gregory. “The NHS and the courts not only took away her chance to live a longer life, but they also took away Indi’s dignity to pass away in the family home where she belonged.”
“They did succeed in taking Indi’s body and dignity, but they can never take her soul. They tried to get rid of Indi without anybody knowing, but we made sure she would be remembered forever. I knew she was special from the day she was born,” added Gregory.
The grieving father indicated that Indi ultimately passed in her mother’s arms.
While not religious, Dean Gregory had Indi baptized in September, telling an Italian newspaper, “When I was in court, I felt as if hell pulled at me.”
“I thought that if hell exists, then heaven must exist too,” said the father, noting he wanted his daughter to go to heaven.
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For the last seven months, many wondered why the Covenant School shooter’s manifesto remained hidden. On March 27, a trans shooter massacred six people at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, including three 9-year-old children.
After several pages from the manifesto were leaked on Monday, those who suggested that politics were at play are feeling vindicated. The shooter ranted and raved about the “white privilege” of the students and referred to them as “crackers,” a racist term used to describe whites. It would be a miraculous coincidence if these details were unrelated to the Herculean effort to hide the manifesto from the public.
Although we only have a few pages, it doesn’t really matter what else the shooter wrote. Even if the shooter went on a racist rant against another demographic, she ultimately targeted white children for execution and did so based on their skin color.
War on ‘Whiteness’
This is yet another example of violence originating from the demonization of what the left calls “whiteness.” The Democratic Party suffers from a case of tunnel vision that causes them to deduce all the world’s problems from a single premise: “Whiteness” is evil. What was once an obscure social theory has proliferated into a belief system that has consumed all positions of authority on the left, including in politics, media, corporate America, and the academy. Everyone who voted for President Joe Biden doesn’t hate white people, obviously, but attacks on so-called “whiteness” are working well with a growing percentage of the left’s voters.
Hatred of “whiteness” has helped Democrats form unlikely alliances among their constituents. Consider the recent anti-Israel protests that were well attended by trans and abortion activists. By supporting abortion, transgenderism, and Palestine, they are embracing diametrically opposed worldviews. The left’s cultural agenda is deeply unpopular in the Muslim world.
Trans activists aren’t going to cozy up with militant Muslims because of shared views on the capital gains tax rate, and the left knows this. Uniting what should be warring political sects requires a powerful narrative. The left found the common enemy it needed in “whiteness.” Israel is considered whiter than Palestine, and Israelis are “colonizers.” Therefore, Israel is bad, and Palestine is good. It’s that simple for these people.
Some will suggest that anti-capitalist attitudes, radical gender ideology, abortion, or perhaps climate change are the issues that unite the left today. But that’s true only on the surface. Those issues are now inextricably linked to the supposed oppression of nonwhites at the behest of whites. To illustrate, let’s consider a handful of issues that galvanize the left.
Abortion and White Supremacy
According to the ACLU, pro-life attitudes are “rooted in white supremacy.” Media outlets allege that pro-life policies are racist because of the high rate of abortion among black women. They claim, therefore, that white men wish to exert control over black women through abortion restrictions. It never occurred to the legacy press that perhaps actual racists might instead prefer to limit the size of the black population through abortion.
Climate Racism
This issue is now discussed almost exclusively in terms of “climate justice,” “climate reparations” and “climate racism.” Not much else needs to be said here other than giving due consideration to the breakneck speed with which the left racialized this issue.
Capitalism and White Oppressors
Overthrowing meritocratic systems of “whiteness,” especially capitalism, is the linchpin of critical race theory and other offshoots of Marxism. Having failed to topple capitalism through class warfare, the left has intertwined its anti-capitalist attitude with its hatred of whites. Racial groups are innately more tribal than income brackets. Socioeconomic status is often transient, but skin color is not. The temptation to engage in race-based resentment is more alluring than class-based resentment. By combining the two, the left stands to gain at the expense of our social fabric as race relations rapidly deteriorate.
In discussing the state of black Americans under capitalism, Vox expresses a widely held belief on the left. It claims that “no amount of money can insulate them from marginalization or the everyday exhaustion of navigating America as a Black person.” This claim amounts to an unfalsifiable theory more absurd than any conspiracy ever embraced by anyone on the right.
Even black billionaires are “victims” who are “marginalized” through the vast conspiracy perpetrated by their “white oppressors.” The left ultimately uses these arguments as justification for ditching merit-based market economies in exchange for race-based transfers of wealth and other centrally planned economic hierarchies. In the new economic system, fashionable in-groups are rewarded through punitive taxes levied on unfashionable out-groups.
Replacing Whites Through Immigration
The intent behind the left’s policies on illegal and legal immigration is to dilute the power of undesirable voters who are most likely to elect Republicans, especially white men and married white women. This is so obvious it’s stunning that anyone could question it. For decades, the left has openly bragged about using demographic change as an electoral strategy. For some strange reason, however, the Southern Poverty Law Center thinks you’re racist if you’ve noticed their explicitly stated goal.
White Racism in Health Care
Virtually all differences in health outcomes are now blamed on white racism. The CDC echoes this sentiment on its website with long-winded and incoherent diatribes about “racism and health.” Cringeworthy banalities such as “health equity” represent the left’s latest rehashing of tired buzz phrases as they blame everyone’s health issues on white Americans and “structural racism.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is on board with this initiative, as you might imagine.
Gender Ideology and Oppressive Whites
Do a search for any variation of “transphobia and white supremacy.” You’ll lose a few IQ points by reading the articles, but the results speak for themselves. The male-female binary is being attributed not to one of the most basic facts of human biology but to “oppressive structures created by whites.”
Transwomen become angry and wish D_eath on Transphobic people. They need to up the dose of hormones on this one. 😱 🔉 pic.twitter.com/Uos14nLgHc
These sophomoric theories masquerading as insights might be amusing if only the attitudes weren’t incredibly dangerous. The left now uses “white supremacy,” a term once used to describe the ideology of small neo-Nazi groups, to describe what it sees as a vast network of oppressive systems in which all white people are complicit.
Laying the world’s problems at the feet of one group of people is how genocidal urges originate. For anyone suggesting that this is hyperbole, consider that climate change is described as an existential threat to the very existence of human beings. We are told that our physical and mental health are subject to the racist structures built by whites. In other words, according to the left, your survival, and the very survival of humanity itself, is largely dependent on “correcting whiteness.” There could be no characterization of a race more damning than this.
Historically Unparalleled Racism
The scope of this anti-white sentiment surpasses that of previous theories that gave rise to wholesale discrimination and violence throughout history. After all, has any race of people ever been blamed for making Earth uninhabitable? Has any race of people ever been blamed for everything from heat waves to heart attacks?
There’s another strange characteristic that sets this movement apart. Whites are participating in their own indictment in proportions previously unseen. In fact, whites themselves are largely responsible for creating these attitudes — both because self-loathing personalities are prevalent on the left and because white Democrats believe this strategy will secure the nonwhite vote in perpetuity. Suffice it to say that they haven’t given much thought to the long-term consequences.
Escalating Toward Violence
The left claims all of this is a “racist conspiracy theory.” They’ll continue to blame white Americans for every problem under the sun, then cry foul when you notice. If this environment is not a catalyst for future violence, then please tell me what is. There are no problems left to blame on whites — the left cannot escalate the accusations. Future escalations can come only by way of penalties for these imaginary misdeeds, and we know how that story goes.
Rank-and-file voters of the Democratic Party will determine whether this anti-white sentiment continues to thrive. If they continue to reward politicians for this repulsive and incendiary behavior, widespread violence is inevitable. It’s just a matter of time.
B.L Hahn is a freelance writer covering topics including culture, politics and economics.
The National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) is helping tech developers build artificial intelligence programs that suppress digital speech by starving online companies of ad revenue and isolating them from the financial system.
As part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program’s second phase, the Massachusetts-based Automated Controversy Detection, Inc. (AuCoDe) received just over $940,000 for a project titled “A Controversy Detection Signal for Finance.” The company received $225,000 during the first phase of the program for the same project, for a total just under $1.2 million. AuCoDe received this money over a span of four years, from 2018 to 2022.
According to LinkedIn, AuCoDe is an “NSF backed company that aims to make online communication more productive and less dangerous.” Its now-defunct website states that AuCoDe “use[d] state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to stop the spread of misinformation online.”
Let’s all say it together. “Who is responsible to determining what is, and is not, misinformation, or disinformation?” The wrong answer is Socialism.
The company developed artificial intelligence programs to identify “opposing sentiment,” “misinformation and disinformation,” “fairness and bias issues,” and “bot activity and its correlation with disinformation campaigns.” It used similar methods to “gain insight into sentiment and beliefs.”
Along these lines, the NSF-funded project’s goal was to develop technology that can “automatically detect controversy and disinformation, providing a means for financial institutions to reduce risk exposure” amid the increase of “public attention and political concern” being paid to disinformation.
Second phase SBIR grant money funded the “development of novel algorithms that automatically detect controversy in social media, news, and other outlets.” AuCoDe’s used this money to attempt the creation of “artificial intelligence and machine learning” programs that combat “the growing noise of controversy, mis- and dis-information, and toxic speech.”
According to the grant’s project outcomes report, AuCoDe developed several such “technologies.” The company created the “Squint,” controversy detection dashboard, and “Squabble, a proprietary controversy detection model.”
Squint and Squabble, “enable users to learn the controversy and toxicity levels of social media content, together with the stance score of an individual or company.” AuCoDe also created a free Chrome extension called “DETOXIFY” that enables users to blacklist and blur topics from their social media feeds.
Squint and Squabble are unavailable for public use.
AuCoDe also used this grant money to launch a YouTube channel where company members discuss “current controversies.” The channel boasts three total subscribers, and the most recent of its nine videos was uploaded eight months ago.
A paper, co-authored by AuCoDe staff members Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Keen Sung, Jengyu Chou, and Julian Lustig-Gonzalez, produced as a result of this grant detailed how “detecting information disorders and deploying novel, real-world content moderation tools is crucial in promoting empathy in social networks” like Parler and Reddit.
A supplemental video provided by the authors discussed the “cost of disinformation” both before and after Covid — partially AI-generated results “conservatively” estimated to be upward of $230 billion — and relied upon a report from the Global Disinformation Index to substantiate that brands like Amazon, Petco, and UPS “inadvertently funded disinformation stories leading up to the 2020 election.”
Below is a teacher (yes, a schoolteacher, teaching children as we speak). It is safe to assume that a person this him would be used to determine what is, and is not, misinformation, disinformation, et., al.
Ontario parents, this man says you’re a snowflake if you don’t want him teaching Marxism, queer theory, intersectionality, anti-racism, etc.
He says it’s all curriculum-related and he can teach whatever he wants.
The Global Disinformation Index, of course, is a formerly State Department-backed British organization that provided advertising companies with blacklists to starve companies accused that were accused spreading disinformation of revenue. AuCoDe’s research was aimed at helping the federal government further this goal through the algorithmic curation of digital speech.
In January 2021, using research gathered from these grants, the company published a piece titled “Misinformation drives calls for action on Parler: preliminary insights into 672k comments from 291k Parler users.” The company said it was “investigating the nature of accounts on alt-tech networks, with an eye toward who is spreading misinformation” and suggested that the platform’s very nature enabled users to circulate and engage with “mis- and dis-information.”
“In conclusion, our first look at our collection of Parler data finds a plethora of misinformation driving a desire for action,” the company wrote. “We also discovered that in addition to highly permissive content moderation, there is a lack of moderation around bots, leaving enormous potential for disinformation campaigns to be carried out on these networks — something we will be keenly exploring in the coming weeks.”
The reality is that AuCoDe interfered with Americans’ right to free speech because it didn’t align with the left-wing consensus and used federal tax dollars to run cover for Big Tech oligarchs. If the company was actually dogmatically concerned with “misinformation,” it would have gone after Facebook, which played a much larger role in hosting Jan. 6 discourse.
A source close to the company told The Federalist that AuCoDe closed in May 2023. More than $1 million in taxpayer money went to a government-backed start-up specifically focused on attacking the First Amendment rights of Americans and sabotaging businesses that deviate from left-wing orthodoxy.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.
Politics absolutely, positively had no bearing on the Hunter Biden investigation, Delaware U.S. Attorney-turned-Special Counsel David Weiss assured the House Judiciary Committee last week. Yet Weiss also acknowledged it would be a “problem” if someone had warned Joe Biden’s transition team of FBI agents’ impending plan to interview the president-elect’s son, as whistleblowers say occurred. Weiss just didn’t bother to ask anyone about the leak or any other concerns of political favoritism, showing the federal prosecutor has opted for willful blindness over oversight of the Hunter Biden criminal probe — even after his appointment as special counsel.
On Tuesday, Weiss sat for an interview before the House Judiciary Committee. A transcript of Weiss’s testimony, which The Federalist has reviewed, shows the special counsel faced several questions about claims that political favoritism infected the Hunter Biden investigation.
But even before the questioning began, in a brief opening statement, Weiss declared that “political considerations played no part in our decision making.” Rather, the Delaware U.S. attorney, doing double duty as special counsel, assured the committee that “throughout this investigation, career prosecutors on my team and I have made decisions based on the facts and the law.”
Weiss repeated that mantra several times during questioning about specific steps his team took — or didn’t take — in the Hunter Biden investigation. “Again, I’m not going to comment on any aspect of the investigation or a prosecution, and from my perspective, the prosecutors who participated in this case followed the law and the facts. That was the motivation.”
Of course, that was Weiss’s “perspective” because, even after the IRS whistleblowers provided concrete examples of the politicization of the Hunter Biden investigation, the U.S. attorney buried his head in the sand rather than inquire about the veracity of the claims. The totality of Weiss’s testimony confirms this reality, but it is best exemplified in an exchange about the warning given to President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team that agents intended to interview Hunter Biden.
IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley had previously testified that the day before their Dec. 8, 2020 “day of action,” when agents planned to interview a host of relevant witnesses, he learned someone had tipped off Joe Biden’s transition team of the plans to interview Hunter Biden and another 10-plus witnesses. “This essentially tipped off a group of people very close to President Biden and Hunter Biden and gave this group an opportunity to obstruct the approach on the witnesses,” Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee.
The House Judiciary Committee asked Weiss if he knew “who made the decision to tip off the presidential transition team about the day of action, and that the investigators wanted to try to speak with Hunter Biden.” Weiss initially responded that it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to comment on the matter but that he would address the question in his special counsel report.
A Concerning Connection
However, additional questioning soon reviewed a concerning connection between the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office and the Biden transition team, in the person of Alexander Mackler, whom Weiss acknowledged had been one of his assistant U.S. attorneys from 2016 through about mid-2019. According to the committee’s questioning, Mackler had at one point served as Joe Biden’s press secretary, had been Beau Biden’s campaign manager during his reelection campaign, and from 2014-2016 served as deputy counsel to then-Vice President Biden. While Weiss testified, he knew Mackler had worked for Biden, he said he didn’t know many of those specifics. However, Weiss acknowledged learning that Mackler had been named to Biden’s transition team, although he said he couldn’t remember when or how he had learned of that fact.
The House Judiciary Committee then pushed Weiss on whether he or anyone else from his office had any communications with Mackler while he was working with the transition team. While Weiss stated he was “very confident” he “had no conversations” with Mackler about the latter’s work on the transition team or about the Hunter Biden case, Weiss said he had “no idea whether anyone else has spoken to Alex Mackler period or about the case.”
Weiss further testified that he was actually unaware of whether the transition team had been tipped off, as IRS whistleblowers claimed. But if so, Weiss confirmed it would be “a concern” and “a problem” and that “it shouldn’t happen.” Yet when pushed on what he would do to address the problem if he “found out that something like that did occur,” Weiss refused to answer the question, saying it was “a hypothetical” that he would not “speculate on” other than saying that “as a general matter, it’s problematic.”
Willful Blindness
On first blush, Weiss’s non-answers about the tip-off to the transition team seem like inconsequential, unhelpful responses that merely lead to a dead end. But Weiss’s acknowledged ignorance is explosive news: The man that Attorney General Merrick Garland named as special counsel to supposedly ensure independence in the investigation and prosecution of the president’s son failed to inquire of his team about whether someone had leaked to the transition team details about the impending questioning of Hunter Biden. In fact, according to Weiss, he didn’t even bother to confirm the tip-off had occurred — much less seek to determine who bore responsibility for the leak — even though he knew that a former Delaware assistant U.S. attorney served on the Biden transition team.
Weiss’s failure in this regard was not an aberration. Rather, throughout his House Judiciary Committee testimony last week, Weiss confirmed he has ignored the whistleblowers’ claims of politicization. For instance, when asked whether “any of the attorneys on your team, whether it’s a Special Counsel team or before the Special Counsel team was stood up, have any ties which you would consider close to the Biden family,” Weiss said he doesn’t “delve into those kinds of things,” but that he is “unaware of any such thing.”
Weiss’s failure to inquire about his staff’s relationship with the Biden family may have made sense initially but given the two whistleblowers’ detailed allegations of political favoritism, not asking some basic questions to ensure an unbiased staff is inexcusable.
Weiss’s failures extend much further, however, with his Tuesday testimony confirming he has not reviewed his staff’s handling of the investigation in light of the whistleblowers’ testimony that there were “politically-motivated decisions made in the Hunter Biden case.” Specifically, while Weiss acknowledged the whistleblowers’ claims, his responses to questions show he disregarded the claims without any inquiry. For instance, when asked, “If an investigator or prosecutor makes what is believed to be a politically-motivated statement or decision, how is that reviewed in your office?” Weiss responded that he was “not aware of such a situation.”
The House committee pushed the special counsel more on this point, asking: “For example, on the Hunter Biden case, if one of your assistant United States attorneys was exhibiting favoritism towards the Biden family or towards Hunter Biden, and that was brought to your attention, what would be the process to sort that out?”
“My office has no process or protocol for dealing with something like that. It’s not something we have engaged in, participated in, or that I have experienced,” Weiss countered. Weiss held firm under additional questioning, stating he was “not aware of any such reviews.”
“I’ve told you. I have no such process. We haven’t experienced it in our office,” Weiss insisted.
Head in the Sand
This testimony establishes that Weiss has done nothing to review his team’s handling of the Hunter Biden investigation for possible political bias, notwithstanding the whistleblowers’ detailed claims of such favoritism. No wonder then that Weiss can say he has confidence in his prosecutors and believes they acted “in a professional and unbiased manner without partisan or political considerations.”
Ironically, if this were a criminal case in which federal prosecutors needed to establish the defendant’s knowledge of some sort of “shady dealings,” the U.S. attorney’s office would seek what is collegially called the “ostrich instruction.” The “ostrich instruction” informs the jury that a deliberate effort “to avoid guilty knowledge is all the guilty knowledge the law requires,” and that a defendant who knows or strongly suspects “he is involved in shady dealings” cannot avoid criminal liability by making sure “he does not acquire full or exact knowledge of the nature and extent of those dealings.”
While there is no suggestion that Weiss is a co-conspirator in some criminal enterprise, he is similarly burying his head in the sand when it comes to the politicization of the Biden investigation exposed by the IRS whistleblowers and congressional oversight committees. Thus, his assurances that “political considerations played no part in our decision making” are meaningless.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
California Democrats hastily cleaned up San Francisco last week ahead of the upcoming state visit between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. On Friday, The New York Times described the scene in the city as one of “teenagers frantically cleaning up after a house party with their parents on the way home.”
“On Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, maintenance workers resurfaced uneven sidewalks and installed plywood over empty tree wells,” the Times reported. “Nearby, a crew gave a long-derelict plaza a makeover by turning it into a skateboard park and outdoor cafe with pingpong tables, chess boards and scores of potted plants. Elsewhere, workers painted decorative crosswalks and new murals, wiped away graffiti, picked up piles of trash and removed scaffolding to show off a refurbished clock tower at the Ferry Building.”
Why the sudden clean up after years of decay? Xi will be arriving Wednesday. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, which began Saturday, will draw 21 world leaders from Pacific nations along with 30,000 people to the Golden City. Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted last week the quick cleanup effort was provoked by “fancy leaders” who are “coming to town.”
“That’s true,” Newsom said.
Gavin Newsom just admitted that they only cleaned up the streets of San Fran because "fancy leaders" were coming to town.
The reality: They were always capable of this but they don’t care about your safety. They care about the safety of the elite. You’re expendable to them. pic.twitter.com/BPedyEjn3q
As government officials work to power wash transit stations and clear homeless encampments in major areas, residents openly wondered what took leaders so long to clean up one of California’s largest cities.
“What about the people who are here year-round?” Marc Savino asked a local Fox affiliate.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed pledged cleanup efforts will continue even after the conference closes.
“We will continue to do everything we can to maintain cleanliness in our streets,” Breed said at a press conference.
There is not enough discussion about this.
They managed to clean up San Francisco using existing budgets in just a matter of days to prepare for Xi’s visit. No one can explain why they couldn’t have done this a long time ago.
For years, deteriorating health and safety conditions in California’s fourth-largest city have made San Francisco an emblem of American decline. Rampant crime and homelessness have left residents exposed to safety hazards while the jewel city of the West Coast remains prohibitively expensive to live in. Instead of implementing aggressive efforts to clean up, as residents saw last week ahead of visits from foreign leaders, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors prioritized leftist activism. In March, San Francisco leadership moved forward with a plan to hand out slavery reparations for $5 million per person to people who never were slaves, paid for by residents who never owned slaves.
In August, The Wall Street Journal published a feature on San Francisco’s downward spiral, openly wondering in the headline, “Can San Francisco Save Itself From the Doom Loop?”
“Downtown San Francisco now trails nearly every other major urban center in economic health,” the paper reported. “Retailers like Nordstrom and Banana Republic have announced in the past few months that they are closing their downtown San Francisco stores. The owner of the city’s biggest mall, located downtown, is handing it back to the lender rather than continue to make debt payments.”
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.
The Supreme Court on Monday issued a new “Code of Conduct” following months of heightened scrutiny from Senate Judiciary Democrats pushing for new ethics laws for the high court.
“The undersigned Justices are promulgating this Code of Conduct to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court,” the announcement Monday read.
“For the most part these rules and principles are not new: The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules, that is, a body of rules derived from a variety of sources, including statutory provisions, the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary, ethics advisory opinions issued by the Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct, and historic practice,” the statement reads.
“The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules. To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct,” it says.
The Supreme Court on Monday issued a new “Code of Conduct” following months of heightened scrutiny from Senate Judiciary Democrats. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images)
The Code is a set of five “canons,” including two new canons that appear to be in response to reports over travel arrangements for private trips taken by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas paid by others, and use of Court staff for book promotion — referring to a recent report on that staff of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff urged colleges and libraries to buy her latest book.
“A Justice should not to any substantial degree use judicial chambers, resources, or staff to engage in activities that do not materially support official functions or other activities permitted under these Canons,” the code states.
The Surpeme Court on Monday adopted a new Code of Ethics amid pressure from Senate Democrats (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
“A Justice may accept reasonable compensation and reimbursement of expenses for permitted activities if the source of the payments does not give the appearance of influencing the Justice’s official duties or otherwise appear improper,” the rules say.
To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct,” the statement from the justices’ said. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“Expense reimbursement should be limited to the actual or reasonably estimated costs of travel, food, and lodging reasonably incurred by the Justice and, where appropriate to the occasion, by the Justice’s spouse or relative,” the new code says.
The Code also states that, “For some time, all Justices have agreed to comply with the statute governing financial disclosure, and the undersigned Members of the Court each individually reaffirm that commitment.”
Fox News has learned that the Court has been meeting privately for months on how to structure a new ethics code, one that would address public concerns over ethics without abdicating what the Chief Justice in particular had said was the court’s independence on such matters from congressional oversight.
Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in recent weeks had all publicly voiced support for a new ethics code. Chief Justice Roberts in May issued a statement signed by all nine members of the court saying there was more work for the court to do to “adhere to the highest ethical standards.”
Members of the Supreme Court sit for a group photo following the recent addition of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, at the Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill on Friday, Oct 07, 2022 in Washington, DC. Bottom row, from left, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, and Associate Justice Samuel Alito. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had mounted relentless pressure on the high court after reports that Justices Thomas and Alito went on luxury vacations paid for by friends. Ranking Member Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. accused his Democratic counterparts of launching “a concentrated effort” to delegitimize the conservative majority Supreme Court.
“This is not about trying to update the ability of the court to be more transparent, it’s about an effort to destroy the legitimacy of this conservative court,” Graham said in May.
Republican Senator John Kennedy, R-La., called the Democrat-sponsored legislation – the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act – a “court-killing machine” that was both “dangerous” and “unserious.”
It’s unclear whether Committee Democrats will continue to push for their reforms in light of the Supreme Court’s announcement Monday.
Brianna Herlihy is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
The attempts to blame former President Donald Trump for the Jan. 6 protest is a function of “corrupt DOJ talking points” and “neuro linguistic programming” for “critical factor bypass” by anti-Trump “mockingbird media,” the infamous Jan. 6 “Shaman” Jacob Chansley told Newsmax in an exclusive interview Monday.
“No, I do not” blame Trump, Chansley told “National Report.” “And I think that any attempt to try to paint anything that happened on that day onto the president or try to paint him with that broad brush is just mockingbird media and corrupt DOJ talking points, because the fact of the matter is the man said peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Chansley was giving his first national TV interview since his imprisonment for having taken part in the Capitol protest that had him convicted for the obstruction of an official congressional proceeding. He spent the time researching, studying, and even teaching inmates as he prepares for a 2024 libertarian campaign in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District.
“What we’re talking about here is optics, and based on the mockingbird media and neuro linguistic programming, based on critical factor bypass, and all that kind of psychological warfare, basically, you can paint anybody to be anything,” Chansley said.
“So you could choose to look at me as a felon. I’ve heard people call me a traitor that’s a threat to democracy. Or you could choose to look at me as I am a person that was maligned and skewered by a corrupt system — as so many hundreds of thousands of people have been in the United States, as so many Jan. 6ers have been in the United States, and as Donald Trump has been in the United States of America.”
Chansley turned his attention back to the question on Trump, convinced Trump bears no responsibility for the Jan. 6 protest.
“I don’t see the former president as responsible at all,” Chansley said. “Nobody can make me do anything, and that’s why I should go to D.C., because I’m not going to be beholden to the NGOs [non-governmental organizations]. I’m not going to be beholden to lobbyists. I’m not going to be beholden to the deep-state puppet strings.
“I will represent the American people the way they deserve to be represented.”
Chansley says he won’t accept campaign donations, because it would be hypocritical to be against the establishment in politics and then participate in it.
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Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Monday that the recently opened investigation into alleged terrorist group contributions by American Muslims for Palestine, while also donating to Democrats, including members of the “Squad,” show just how “embedded” the left is with antisemitic organizations.
“I think what it really shows is how embedded on the left anti-Israel and antisemitic organizations have become,” Steil said on “Newsline.” “I’m incredibly concerned about the funding structure that Hamas has. This administration has not done enough to limit the funds that are going, in particular, from Iran into Hamas.
“We have legislation that we’re going to be working on to move forward this week, in particular, as it relates to that, but broadly speaking, I think it really shows how the radicalized left his really driven forward an agenda that’s anti-Israel. It’s not surprising to me that those individuals are funding Democratic members of Congress.”
Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares’ office announced Oct. 31 that it was investigating the AJP Educational Foundation, Inc., which is also known as American Muslims for Palestine, for possibly violating Virginia’s charitable solicitation laws by asking for contributions without being registered with the state and using those contributions “for impermissible purpose” like funding terrorists.
The organization put out a statement denying the allegations and accused Miyares of “smearing” them and inciting hate.
“Instead of working to protect the people of Virginia from the wave of Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian hate sweeping across our nation, Jason Miyares is contributing to the hate with tired Islamophobic tropes and promises of a witch hunt straight from the McCarthy-era,” the organization’s statement read. “American Muslims for Palestine is a duly registered non-profit organization that has stood up for justice here and abroad for over a decade in compliance with the law.”
Newsmax reported that the organization donated money to all four Democratic Squad members: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., but Steil said he is more concerned about President Joe Biden’s administration not clamping down on overall terrorist funding.
“This administration needs to do far more than they currently are to limit the access to funds to Hamas and other terrorist organizations across the globe,” Steil said. “The fact that this administration allowed millions and billions of dollars to be transferred from South Korea to a bank account in Qatar shows you the lack of concern this administration has as it relates to funding for terrorists.”
Three would-be thieves attempted to break into a “parked and unoccupied government vehicle” in Georgetown late Sunday night, and at least one Secret Service agent assigned to protect a presidential grandaughter fired at them. (Photo: Getty Images)
A Secret Service agent protecting one of President Joe Biden’s five granddaughters shot at three unidentified individuals who were trying to break into a government-owned car in Washington, D.C., just before midnight.
The Secret Service agent was part of a detail assigned to Naomi Biden Neal, 29, who is presidential son Hunter Biden’s oldest daughter and was married at the White House in November.
The three would-be thieves attempted to break into a “parked and unoccupied government vehicle” in the Georgetown neighborhood of Northwest Washington late Sunday night, the Secret Service said in a written statement on the incident. The government vehicle is one used by the Secret Service detail assigned to Naomi Biden Neal. At least one Secret Service agent reported firing at the offenders, although he said he believes “no one was struck.” All three offenders bolted from the scene in a red vehicle, and agents began coordinating a “regional lookout” for them.
The attempted car theft is part of a pandemic of carjackings and car break-ins in the nation’s capital. The Washington Examiner reported that carjackings and other car-related crime increased nearly 250% in the past five years. Such criminal incidents are up 102% since October last year, according to statistics from the Metropolitan Police Department.
The incident involving the Secret Service wasn’t the only such vehicle-related D.C. crime in the past few days. A white Ford F-250 pickup truck with government tags was carjacked at 6 a.m. Monday, less than two miles from the U.S. Capitol building.
Alan Henney, who tweets about D.C. crime, reported that guns were stolen from two different vehicles in Penn Quarter and Chinatown, near Ford’s Theatre and the National Portrait Gallery. He also reported that four people were shot Sunday, one during a carjacking, in Northwest Washington.
Police officers are taking numerous reports of THEFTS FROM AUTOS in #DowntownDC in the past few hours.
This includes: 900 blk H St NW, 800 I St NW, 600 F St NW, 600 E St NW, 600 Mass Ave NW, 600 H St NW.
The drivers of two different Uber vehicles, a Toyota Corolla and a BMW, were carjacked over the weekend. In early October, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, was carjacked near his home in DC by three men brandishing guns.
The D.C. Council has promoted “soft-on-crime” policies over the past few years, critics argue. In January, the 13-member council passed legislation called the Revised Criminal Code Act to reduce maximum sentences, eliminate most mandatory minimum sentences, and expand “rights to jury trials” for those accused of misdemeanors.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, vetoed the bill. But the council, made up of Democrats except for two independents, overrode it within a week. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, a Democrat, said the bill would “improve public safety and provide long overdue clarity and fairness in our justice system.”
In early March, the U.S. Senate voted to overturn the changes to the D.C. criminal code, with all Republicans and 33 Democrats supporting that. Biden then signed that override into law. Since then, the mayor’s office has begun providing Apple Air Tags, a remote tracking device, to D.C. residents so they could track their car in the event of a carjacking. One victim later told The Washington Post that police officers refused to do anything with the tracking data as her car was being stolen; officers told her, “We can’t pursue.”
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson told Congress in March that, despite the public’s “perception” that the city is unsafe, “there is not a crime crisis” in the nation’s capital.
After Cuellar was attacked, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted that it was “Time to invoke Article I, Section 8, Clause 17” of the U.S. Constitution. The clause gives Congress unilateral authority over the District of Columbia. Lee elaborated, writing: “D.C. is dangerous. Something’s gone terribly wrong here—for far too long. Congress has the sole power to make D.C.’s laws, and must intervene.”
A Heritage Foundation report by legal fellows Zack Smith and Cully Stimson found that the District of Columbia’s effort to rewrite its criminal code benefited criminals at the expense of victims and public safety. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
Heritage’s July 12 report called on Congress to “enact commonsense solutions” such as those that helped “drive down crime rates in the 1990s.”
Minnesota Teachers Alliance candidates are getting big wins over Teachers Union candidates because MTA is focused on children’s education over teachers’ benefits. Minnesota Parents Alliance touts wins in key school board races.
Despite going up against one of the most powerful political organizations in the state, Minnesota Parents Alliance-backed school board candidates still claimed key victories in Tuesday night’s elections.
Minnesota Parents Alliance (MPA) caught Education Minnesota off guard last election cycle, according to Cristine Trooien, executive director of MPA. MPA-backed candidates won 49 school board seats statewide in 2022.
“They were ready for us this time, and we still won seats in key districts,” she said.
Systemic Racism is something you hear thrown around a lot lately, used mainly to bully society into subverting the Constitution and attacking meritocracy without little evidence that it actually exists.
A Black president elected twice, countless Black police officers and state and local Black officials hired across America beg to differ with that hypothesis.
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.
REPORT: The San Francisco homeless population has "miraculously" gone missing as President Biden & Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to meet in the liberal city.
Remarkable!
The typical drug addicts & homeless who wander the city like zombies have disappeared as 20,000… pic.twitter.com/2iDpl4FHCG
In memoriam: On November 10 Amanda Blackburn, who was 3 mths pregnant, was at home w/ her sleeping son when a group of 3 men who were burglarizing houses arrived at Amanda's home. Larry Taylor shot Amanda twice in the upper body & then in the head. She was found by her husband. pic.twitter.com/SHrPSUjYhx
SEE IT: Just last July, @SpeakerJohnson said, "The evidence now shows that the first family is hopelessly corrupt. The facts are truly ALARMING." Now, he's singing a different song. WATCH pic.twitter.com/t4gkVEvrQF
Every Person In America Needs To Watch This Video ‼️ On The Record Testimonies That Our Elections Are Being Stolen. Two Affidavits Provided To Congress “Work to change the results of the United States election” Audio Evidence Acquired From Inside The CIA & State Department
Palestinian grandmother on Hamas TV says Jihad against Jews is the top priority of the Palestinian people. She is ready to sacrifice all her 17 children and 65 grandchildren as martyrs for the cause of killing Jews and taking over Jewish land. pic.twitter.com/JgoITt3Hl8
Insurrection: Hamas supporters occupied Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s Capitol office longer than the J6 protesters – are any of them in jail? pic.twitter.com/AtEW3LToJa
I've deployed 3 times to the war zones in the Middle East/Africa. I know how serious the threat from Islamist jihadists is. The Dem elite not only don’t care, they’ve become apologists for Islamist jihadists. They leave our borders open which we know are being exploited by these… pic.twitter.com/86hlE6cHFv
Must see: This is how Hamas places its ammunition and rockets inside schools 👇
It's not that they don't care about their children; they intentionally do want those children to get killed, to blame Israel 🤯 pic.twitter.com/BYWPyZvkPL
VICE just ran this piece celebrating a 6-year-old drag queen. His parents claim he knew since he was 4 that he wanted to do this adult themed entertainment.
He was taught as a toddler to dress up as a girl and perform provocatively for adults as they hand him cash tips. pic.twitter.com/bDhKZGeQID
BREAKING: Arrests have been made in a high-profile s*x ring that involved government contractors, professors, military officers, executives at pharmaceutical companies and more.
Will they be protected like Jeffrey Epstein's clients?
🔥🚨EXCLUSIVE: On June 6, 2023, Diana Álvarez Ramíre uploaded this video of this secret tunnel under her hotel room through her closet. Many viewers claim that it could have been used for spying or human trafficking.
🔥🚨EXCLUSIVE: On June 11, 2022, this man uploaded this video of a secret underground tunnel inside his Miami Days Inn hotel room to TikTok.
On July 12, 2023 it was announced that several hotels were being sued for their connections to human trafficking. Days inn was one of… pic.twitter.com/nHuBoIKl5v
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) November 5, 2023
Important video on the history of the people you know as “Palestinians” being kicked out of Arabic nations.
Democrats have slowly changed what we consider normal in America. They have allowed for those that would need mental help to roam free under the disguise of being ‘bold’ and ‘different’ Democrats created the ideology that being different is independence. There is power in having… pic.twitter.com/Gok6Hk35qK
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) October 26, 2023
An unsettling video shows the moment that a Florida man mowed down two deputies in an alleged “ambush” attack, according to police. The cops were critically injured, and one officer may need to have his leg amputated.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office stated that officers responded to a 911 call from a mother who said she was in fear of her son being violent. The mother allegedly told police that her son, Ralph Bouzy, was suffering from a mental health crisis.
Shortly before 8 a.m. on Thursday, officers arrived at the residence in Brandon, Florida. Deputies encountered Bouzy in the driver’s seat of a car in the driveway of his home, according to a news release from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. Officers reportedly assured the 28-year-old Florida man that they were there to help. However, Bouzy refused to speak to the police and quickly drove away.
Bouzy drove back to the scene just minutes later in a Nissan Altima. Two deputies were standing beside a police SUV, and video shows Bouzy barrel into the deputies – pinning them to the patrol vehicle.
As the deputies were strewn on the pavement after suffering excruciating injuries, Bouzy calmly got out of his vehicle and walked toward another officer who was not hit by the vehicle. Police bodycam video shows Bouzy refusing to adhere to commands from the officers.
Police bodycam footage shows a deputy deploy a Taser on Bouzy, which causes him to fall to the pavement. Another officer apprehended the suspect while he was on the ground.
Bouzy was arrested and charged with three counts of attempted murder on a law enforcement officer.
Law enforcement noted that Bouzy has an extensive criminal history, with three felonies and 14 misdemeanors. In 2017, Bouzy was involved in a hit-and-run in which he punched a deputy in the face, according to WFLA.
“There is no other way to describe this other than an ambush,” said Sheriff Chad Chronister. “Our deputies put their lives on the line every day to protect this community and what happened today makes me absolutely sick.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that he and his wife, Casey, are “praying for the deputies who were seriously injured during this ambush in Brandon.”
“We don’t tolerate attacks on our law enforcement officers in Florida,” DeSantis declared. “The coward who brutally attacked these deputies will be punished.”
Corporal Carlos Brito, 39, and Deputy Manuel Santos, 31, suffered critical injuries and are receiving medical treatment at Tampa General Hospital. Santos has a bilateral break in his leg with extensive ligament damage that will require surgery.
Brito’s injuries are so severe that his leg might have to be amputated. Brito’s leg was crushed in between the two vehicles to the point that a piece of his femur bone was stuck in the car. A surgeon requested that the bone be dislodged from the vehicle and brought to the hospital to help save his leg.
Chronister said, “Deputy Brito is awake and surrounded by his family. The surgeons are monitoring his progress and continue to do everything possible to save his leg.”
“Corporal Brito and Deputy Santos came to work today committed to making a difference in their community,” Chronister added. “Because of this man’s deliberate and intentional actions, their lives, and their family’s lives are changed forever.”
(WARNING: Graphic video)
𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆: 𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐏𝐇𝐈𝐂 𝐕𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐎#teamHCSO is releasing surveillance and body camera footage from today's ambush of two deputies in Brandon. Both deputies are currently at Tampa General Hospital undergoing surgery for critical injuries.
Top Stories • Appeals Court Rules Hospital Can Yank Baby Girl’s Life Support Without Parents’ Consent • Joe Biden Confronted With Pictures of Babies Killed in Abortions • Donald Trump Slams Democrats on Abortion: “They Support Killing Babies in the Ninth Month” • Abortion Activists Spent $67 Million Buying Ohio Vote, Had 3-1 Advantage on TV Ads
More Pro-Life News • Ohio Senator J.D. Vance: Keep Fighting Abortion, “Giving Up on the Unborn is Not an Option” • Speaker Mike Johnson Celebrates His Christian Faith, Helps Him Lead Congress • Veterans Support Tommy Tuberville’s Battle to Stop Joe Biden’s Military Abortion Funding • She Was in the Middle of the Abortion But Changed Her Mind and Save Her Baby’s Life • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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Last week in Denver, several hundred people gathered in person for the Genspect conference, “The Bigger Picture,” while many more from all over the world joined online. Genspect’s founder, Stella O’Malley, has the intentional strategy of hosting their annual conference at the same time and in the same location as the annual World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) meeting.
Last year they gathered in Killarney, Ireland, when WPATH met there, and next year they will host their gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, piggybacking off of the WPATH dates and location. It’s an interesting strategy offering WPATH attendees to come to Genspect’s sessions for free whereby they can engage with a different perspective, as well as putting WPATH on notice that there is a growing movement of those who want to offer a “healthy approach to sex and gender.”
I was unable to attend their gathering last year in Ireland, but when O’Malley invited me to speak at the Denver conference, I was happy to accept. The speaker’s list was a who’s who of those fighting gender ideology, some for many years.
On the Front Lines of the Gender Wars
Michael Shellenberger opened the conference with a bold claim that time is up for WPATH and that soon he would release his “WPATH files” on his Substack, where he will show the receipts he has on the pseudoscientific standards of care and practices of WPATH. Amid robust applauses, attendees were encouraged to post on X using #TimesUpWPATH. A lifelong member of the Democrat Party, he lamented how far the left has fallen from the principles that drew him to that party.
Highlights for me were hearing from the brilliant Leor Sapir on “Institutional Capture (How gender ideology has been embedded within America).” Sapir chronicled Obama’s 2010 anti-bullying initiative, which was at first sex-based directed, and then expanded in 2011 to include gender language in the antibullying initiative.
Following this was the 2015 letter from James Ferg Cadima in the Office of Civil Rights, stating, “The Department’s Title IX regulations permit schools to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes under certain circumstances. When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex in those situations, a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”
Wonder how America got to this place? Perhaps a well-intentioned initiative to combat bullying quickly led us down the path where boys can have access to spaces that were once protected for girls.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright and scientist Heather Heying did an excellent job, patiently and thoroughly stating the obvious, that there remain only two sexes no matter what others assert. They marveled at the fact that even once-trusted scientific journals are now claiming that “The idea of two sexes is overly simplistic.”
Two mothers, January Littlejohn and Erin Friday, gave impassioned speeches about their daughters who believed the lie that they were born in the wrong body. Littlejohn spoke about her daughter’s middle school working behind their back to encourage this idea and talked about her decision to bring forth a lawsuit, restoring rights and protections to parents over their own children.
Friday, an attorney by training who works with Our Duty, had many in tears using Hans Christian Anderson’s story of “The Snow Queen” to parallel her own efforts to save her daughter from the evils of gender ideology. She is a force in the state of California, fighting laws passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom while trying to raise funds to get initiatives on the ballot to put before voters which will protect children and parental rights. She appealed to the audience that if the transing of children can be stopped in California this will have an enormous positive effect across the whole country.
Stories of Destransitioning and Whistleblowers
Any conference like the one hosted by Genspect naturally needs to include the voices of those most harmed by “gender affirmation therapy,” those who transitioned and have now detransitioned once they realized their decision to transition didn’t fix any of their mental health issues, and as is often the case, made things worse. Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley both spoke about their deeply personal experiences. Many other detransitioners attended the conference as well. It was wonderful to see how their tragic stories have brought them together in the spirit of camaraderie.
And who doesn’t love a good whistleblower story like Jamie Reed? Reed blew up the internet back in February with her expose, “I thought I was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.”
Since 2018, Reed served as a case manager at Washington University, in their Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, until she came to the realization that she could no longer condone the treatment children were receiving. Her remarks at Genspect were a rallying cry for the political left to wake up and stop harming children. As a lifelong leftist, she implored the audience not to give up on the left, but to help them return to principles.
The title of my own talk — “Transgender Assisted Reproduction: where is this going?” — was a convergence on my years of work in assisted reproductive technology and how this technology will most likely be needed by trans-identifying people, especially children who are fast-tracked to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
When I first found out that children were being offered fertility preservation procedures, knowing
that “gender affirmation care” harms natural and normal fertility, I began speaking up and producing documentary films about the lack of medical ethics and evidence-based medicine supporting these practices. Pre-puberty, children are offered to cryopreserve their ovarian or testicular tissue because their gametes, (ova and sperm) are not yet mature. Post-puberty, the child will have mature ova and sperm, so they are offered to freeze and bank their gametes.
The data is clear. Most assisted reproductive technology cycles fail. Data is coming out about the harms and risks to children being created by these technologies. The maxim, “First, Do No Harm” is being ignored in offering hope of future children, when in fact this is considered an experimental procedure with no data on this population. From the audience’s reactions and comments, it was clear that this is a whole new level of doubling down on harming children to advance an ideology that ignores biological reality, evidence-based medicine, and medical ethics.
Times up, WPATH.
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is a filmmaker and founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. She is on X @JenniferLahl
Harvard Law professor emeritus and author Alan Dershowitz harshly criticizes former President Barack Obama and college students for their anti-Israel comments and sentiments. Expressing outrage over former President Barack Obama’s call for an end to Israeli “occupation,” Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz expanded on why he’s never talking to the Democratic president again.
“I think he always had a deep hatred of Israel in his heart. He hid it very well. He called me to the Oval Office and he said to me, ‘Alan, you’ve known me for a long time. You know I have Israel’s back.’ I didn’t realize he meant to paint a target on it,” Dershowitz said Friday on “Mornings with Maria.”
“He’s never been supportive of Israel. And finally, his true feelings have come out now that he’s no longer president and doesn’t have to be elected,” the professor continued. “He has contributed enormously to the problem because he is respected among young people. And if he says the occupation is unbearable and that anything can be done to stop it, he is encouraging people to engage in their antisemitic, anti-Israel and anti-American attitudes. He should be ashamed of himself. He should apologize, but he won’t.”
Dershowitz’s commentary comes after he claimed Thursday that any relationship with Obama is “over” following the 44th president’s onstage statements about the Israel-Hamas war.
Obama spoke at the Obama Foundation’s Democracy Forum last Thursday, where he called for a two-state solution and an end to the “occupation,” while not clarifying what occupation he meant.
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, left, called for former President Barack Obama to apologize for his Israeli occupation comments on “Mornings with Maria.” (Fox News)
“All of this is taking place against the backdrop of decades of failure to achieve a durable peace for both Israelis and Palestinians,” the former president told the forum audience.
He continued: “One that is based on genuine security for Israel, a recognition of its right to exist, and a peace that is based on an end of the occupation and the creation of a viable state and self-determination for the Palestinian people.”
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz and political activist Cornel West join ‘Hannity’ to sound off on major disagreements.
The Harvard professor on Friday accused Obama of lying “through his teeth” about what the former president called an “unbearable” occupation of Gaza.
“To compare those disputed claims with the rapes, beheadings, burnings, kidnappings, it’s just obscene and despicable,” Dershowitz said. “And what it does is it lends support to those students basically, who are saying, ‘Well, what Hamas really did was not so bad… It was in response to the occupation.’”
“Although he said that the attacks by Hamas are not justifiable,” Dershowitz added, “he made them justifiable because if life really is unbearable, as it’s not, then you can do anything you want.”
Harvard University graduate student Shabbos Kestenbaum calls for a ‘moral reckoning’ across college campuses and the U.S.
Obama is further “pouring gas on the fire” of a serious matter, the Harvard professor argued, which could fuel more antisemitic sentiment nationwide.
“What he did was contribute to the risks to not only Israelis, but Americans, because it’s coming to a theater near you,” Dershowitz told host Maria Bartiromo. “If Hamas is not stopped in its tracks from doing the terrorist acts, they will bring them to the United States.”
The Obama Foundation did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
The No. 3 House Republican leader is wading into the dramatic New York civil trial of former President Donald Trump, accusing the judge involved of exhibiting “bias” and “bizarre behavior” in the courtroom. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., filed an ethics complaint against Judge Arthur Engoron on Friday morning in a letter to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct.
“I write today to express my serious concerns about the inappropriate bias and judicial intemperance shown by Judge Arthur F. Engoron in New York’s lawsuit against President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Organization,” Stefanik said in her letter.
“This judge’s bizarre behavior has no place in our judicial system, where Judge Engoron is not honoring the defendant’s rights to due process and a fair trial,” the letter continued.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., is going after New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron via an ethics complaint.
“These serious concerns are exacerbated by the fact that the defendant is the leading candidate for President of the United States, and it appears the judicial system is being politicized to affect the outcome of the campaign,” Stefanik wrote.
This historic trial over whether the Trump Organization and its top officials knowingly misrepresented the value of multiple real estate holdings over the years has seen Trump and his three adult children all testify in a downtown New York City courtroom this month.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James brought the civil case, which is now in non-jury trial in Engoron’s court. Trump allies have accused Engoron of acting with bias from the beginning of the trial, when cameras caught him smiling when they were allowed into the courtroom in those initial moments.
New York Attorney General Letitia James brought a civil case against the Trump Organization. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Stefanik cited that and other reported incidents in her Friday letter, as well as a limited gag order Engoron imposed on Trump and his lawyers, citing a deluge of threats to himself and his staff since the trial started.
“Judge Engoron has gone on to gag and fine President Trump for merely criticizing Judge Engoron’s law clerk, which is core political speech protected by the First Amendment,” Stefanik said. “If anyone in America must have the constitutional right to speak out against the judge, his staff, the witnesses, or the process, it’s a defendant going through a process he believes is politicized and weaponized against him.”
She also lashed out at him for valuing Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida “between $18 and 27.6 million,” a number Stefanik and the ex-president’s allies have called implausibly low.
Former President Donald Trump was in court in downtown Manhattan earlier this month.
“This is yet another example why Judge Engoron demonstrated bad judgment by keeping this case, instead of sending it to the expert judges in the Commercial Division where it belongs,” she said. “Judge Engoron’s bizarre and biased behavior is making New York’s judicial system a laughingstock.”
Trump himself has attacked Engoron on his social media app Truth Social, most recently accusing him of colluding with James against him.
When asked for comment on Stefanik’s letter, Commission Administrator Robert H. Tembeckjian said: “All matters before the Commission on Judicial Conduct are confidential according to law, unless and until a judge is found to have committed ethical misconduct, and a decision to that effect is issued.”
Fox News Digital also reached out to the New York State Unified Court System for comment but did not immediately hear back.
Elizabeth Elkind is a reporter for Fox News Digital focused on Congress as well as the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and politics. Previous digital bylines seen at Daily Mail and CBS News.
Follow on Twitter at @liz_elkind and send tips to elizabeth.elkind@fox.com
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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 (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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