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.
Ex-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund is determined to set the record straight on what happened at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot more than two years ago.
After writing a book that challenged the groupthink of corporate media and the partisan Jan. 6 Committee, Sund sat down for an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. According to Carlson, the interview with Sund was scheduled to air on the network April 24, the same day Fox News announced the anchor’s termination. (Another already-taped interview, with a Federalist senior contributor, was also stifled). Fox News refused to release the footage of Sund’s conversation with Carlson, so the pair recorded another sit-down published on Twitter Thursday.
“[Sund] knew more about what happened than virtually anyone else in the United States,” Carlson said. “Yet congressional investigators weren’t interested in talking to him. The media, not interested in talking to him. But we were.”
Ep. 15 Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund reveals what really happened on January 6th. Our Fox News interview with him never aired, so we invited him back. pic.twitter.com/opDlu4QGlp
Sund went on to make explosive allegations of federal misconduct related to the Capitol chaos that raised more questions than answers about how and why the complex was left vulnerable. The Capitol Police, Sund said, were left in the dark about a cascade of intelligence gathered by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security that warned about the rally turning violent.
The intelligence that Capitol Police gathered, Sund said, indicated a level of political activity similar to previous rallies that featured “limited skirmishes” with counter-protesters.
“Coming into it,” Sund said, Capitol Police received “absolutely zero” of the “intelligence that we know now existed talking about attacking the Capitol, killing my police officers, attacking members of Congress, and killing members of Congress.”
“None of that was included in the intelligence coming up,” Sund said. “We now know FBI, DHS was swimming in that intelligence. We also know now that the military seemed to have some very concerning intelligence as well. “
“None of the intelligence,” Sund said, was shared with the Capitol Police chief.
“I’ve done many national security events and this was handled differently,” Sund added. “No intelligence, no [Joint Intelligence Bulletin], no coordination, no discussion in advance.”
2. Milley Wanted to Shut Down D.C. Ahead Of Jan. 6
Military officials were so concerned about the intelligence that warned of an explosive riot that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, considered preemptively shutting down the city.
“Acting Secretary of Defense [Christopher] Miller and General Milley had both discussed locking down the city of Washington D.C. because they were so worried about violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” Sund said.
According to Sund, the two Pentagon leaders discussed even revoking permits on Capitol Hill out of concern for violence.
“You know who issues the permits on Capitol Hill for demonstrations?” Sund said. “I do. You know who wasn’t told? Me.”
On Jan. 4, however, Miller signed a memo “restricting the National Guard from carrying the various weapons, any weapons, any civil disobedience equipment that would be utilized for the very demonstrations or violence he sees coming.”
3. Congressional Leadership Denied National Guard Requests Before and During Riot
Despite federal intelligence warning of mass upheaval amid the joint session of Congress, Sund explained how he was denied preemptive deployment of the National Guard twice in the days leading up to the riot. On Jan. 3, 2021, Sund sought approval from congressional leadership for guard deployment as was still required by law.
“I was denied twice because of optics and because the intelligence didn’t support us,” Sund said. “I was denied by Paul Irving, House sergeant-at-arms, and also Mike Stenger, Senate sergeant-at-arms.”
Irving served under the direction of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Stenger reported to GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The former Capitol Police chief said he was forced to beg for National Guard assistance as the turmoil escalated. While the riot grew, Sund said he called House Sergeant-at-Arms Irving to demand reinforcements from the nearby Guard troops.
“I’m told by Paul Irving, ‘I’m gonna run it up the chain, I’ll get back to you,’” Sund said. “His chain would be up to Nancy Pelosi. He didn’t have to do that but he wouldn’t give me authorization.”
Irving was allowed to authorize the deployment without Pelosi’s approval in the event of an emergency, Sund said. The former speaker’s office confirmed to The New York Times that Pelosi herself was asked to dispatch the National Guard.
Sund said Stenger was called next, who in turn said, “Let’s wait to hear what we hear from Paul [Irving].”
“For the next 71 minutes I make 32 calls,” Sund said, with no help from congressional leadership.
4. Secret Service Turned Over One Text to J6 Committee
While Sund made dozens of calls from the Capitol command center, the first agency to come to the police chief’s assistance was the Secret Service.
“One of the first people to offer assistance was United States Secret Service,” Sund said. “By law, I shouldn’t have requested their assistance … until I had approval. But I’m looking at my men and women having their asses handed to them and my first thought was ‘f-ck it, I will take whatever discipline there is. Send me whatever you got.’”
“That was the one text Secret Service turned over,” Sund added.
The agency had apparently deleted text messages from Jan. 5-6, 2021, that were subpoenaed by the House select committee probing the riot last summer. The only message turned over was Sund’s out-of-order request for support.
5. New Jersey State Police Arrived to Help Before National Guard
While Sund was begging congressional leaders to greenlight assistance from the National Guard, New Jersey State Police were on their way to reinforce Capitol Police.
The 150 to 180 National Guard troops who were “within eyesight” of the Capitol, Sund told Carlson, were put in vehicles and driven around the complex back to the D.C. Armory. Instead, Sund received the evening troops, who didn’t arrive on the scene until 6 p.m. By that point, according to Sund, the Capitol was under control.
“While I’m begging for assistance,” Sund said, “the Pentagon sent in resources to generals’ houses to protect their homes but not me.”
By the time the National Guard finally showed up, Sund noted, “New Jersey State Police [had] beat them to the Capitol.”
National Guardsmen were then positioned in front of the Capitol to take “pictures for military magazines” as “heroes” of Jan. 6.
6. Sund Wasn’t Told About Federal Informants Present at the Capitol
In the fall of 2021, The New York Times confirmed the presence of at least one federal informant at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot after the paper dismissed such claims as a conspiracy theory. The former Capitol police chief, however, was kept in the dark on undercover operations with “no idea” how many were in the crowd. The Justice Department had even deployed special commandos with “shoot to kill authority” at the Capitol, according to Newsweek.
“Not to share that in the intelligence,” Sund said, “that’s concerning.”
7. Lawmakers Didn’t Want Sund to Testify
In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, lawmakers began to schedule hearings on the security failures while the fever grew to launch a snap impeachment of the outgoing president.
“I fought to testify,” Sund said, but “they didn’t want me to testify in the Senate hearing.”
The hearing in the upper chamber was initially limited to current Capitol employees. Sund was excluded from the lineup because he was immediately dismissed from his job as chief of police after the riot. Irving and Stenger would have also initially been excluded. The trio of security officers eventually testified in the upper chamber after Trump’s acquittal in February 2021, with Sund the only one to appear in person.
Meanwhile Pelosi, who was in charge of the Capitol as speaker of the House, was “off limits” to investigation — leaving open questions such as whether the speaker was briefed on the potential for violence from other agencies. The House speaker even blocked Republican access to relevant documents ignored by the Democrats’ Jan. 6 Committee.
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.
In 2019, Päivi Räsänen did what any one of us might do — she tweeted at her church. Her tweet was simple and peaceful. She questioned the choice to sponsor a local pride parade. She questioned, was this befitting of their Christian faith? And she attached a scripture passage to the tweet.
Räsänen will be headed to court for the second time on criminal charges of “hate speech.” This longstanding member of the Finnish Parliament, medical doctor, and grandmother has faced onerous prosecution for four years at the hands of Finland’s government for a tweet.
Subjected to 13 hours of police interrogation, authorities dug into her past, charging her with three counts of “agitation against a minority group” for the tweet, in addition to a 2004 church pamphlet and 2019 radio appearance. Bishop Juhana Pohjola of Finland’s Evangelical Lutheran Church also was criminally charged for publishing the pamphlet, which discusses a Biblical-based understanding of marriage and human sexuality. Their charges carried with them tens of thousands of euros in fines and even the possibility of a two-year prison sentence.
In March of last year, the Helsinki District Court delivered a unanimous acquittal, stating clearly that, “it is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts.” However, the law in Finland allows for legal double jeopardy — prosecutors can appeal all the way to the Supreme Court on the mere basis of dissatisfaction with the verdict. On Aug. 31, Räsänen and the bishop will be back in court once again. Their legal defense is supported by ADF International.
Without free speech, there can be no freedom, and the enormous implications of this case for fundamental freedoms have triggered international outrage. Finland, regularly ranked as the “happiest” country on Earth, is known as a stable bastion of European democracy. If this can happen there, then we must all beware.
On Aug. 8, 16 U.S. members of Congress, sent a letter to Rashad Hussain, U.S. ambassador–at–large for international religious freedom, and Douglas Hickey, U.S. ambassador to Finland, in response to Räsänen’s “egregious and harassing” prosecution. The letter highlights the severity of what’s at stake: “This prosecutor is dead set on weaponizing the power of Finland’s legal system to silence not just a member of parliament and Lutheran bishop but millions of Finnish Christians who dare to exercise their natural rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion in the public square.”
Free speech is a preeminent American value, but also one well-protected in international law. The U.S. should always stand against the criminalization of peaceful expression and especially should raise concerns when violations of free speech occur in countries we view as allies, especially on human rights. As the legislators’ letter states, “No American, no Fin, and no human should face legal harassment for simply living out their religious beliefs.”
Now is the time for the Biden administration to speak out loud and clear. While the administration has acknowledged that it has privately raised concerns over Räsänen’s case with the Finnish government, it is vitally important that the U.S. government take a public stance in defense of free speech so under threat in this case.
With regard to Räsänen’s case, the legislators’ letter makes clear, “The selective targeting of these high-profile individuals is designed to systematically chill others’ speech under the threat of legal harassment and social astigmatism.” Historically, the U.S. has been the strongest bulwark against international violations of freedom of speech. In standing up for Räsänen, the U.S. government would in turn send a signal that it is standing up for the right of every person who feels the rapidly encroaching winds of censorship.
Elyssa Koren is director of legal communications for ADF International. ADF UK is supporting the legal defense of Isabel, Adam, and Father Sean. Follow her on Twitter: @Elyssa_Koren
Children, whose schools, parks and recreation areas are being used to house migrants, are blameless and powerless in this crisis but are being hit the hardest
As New York City’s migrant crisis grows increasingly out of control, it is children who are paying the highest price and facing the most potential harm from the incompetence of federal and city leadership. Some 56,000 migrants have flooded Gotham in recent months, and floundering officials are running out of places to house them.
Mayor Eric Adams has now set up a hundred cots at McCarren Park in Brooklyn, mainly for adult males, who have given great reviews to the set up including use of the pool, which kids flock to in the summer.
All programming in the South Wing of the Recreation center at the park, including a media center used by the city’s youth, has been canceled until further notice, owing to the influx of migrants. Meanwhile, across the East River on Randall’s Island, playing fields, mainly meant for kids, are being repurposed as makeshift Bidenvilles for the waves of humanity bursting the seams of the city. This all follows on the heels of the mayor using public school gyms to house asylum seekers while students are in attendance, which has led to major protests from parents.
As if lack of recreation facilities were not enough, as of May, some 14,000 children of migrants had signed up for the New York City public schools, with that number only growing, and threatening to overwhelm the institutions with kids, who through no fault of their own, are unlikely to be able to keep up with their native counterparts.
All the while precious resources are being diverted from programs to protect the homeless youth in New York who have been here and been suffering since long before the crisis. Between President Joe Biden’s border bungling that has let loose the floodgates and Mayor Adams’ shambolic sanctuary city shenanigans it is the kids who suffer the most even though they are not only blameless but powerless.
Sorry kid, you can’t use the media center to explore college scholarships; bad news, Bucko, no basketball in the gym this year, just run around your desk a few times; oh, and the pool might be a bit overcrowded.
What honestly makes this so horrible is that as our nation and its cities delay truly tackling this crisis, time is ticking on childhoods.
It doesn’t do a 12-year-old much good to get it figured out in 5 or 6 years, because they aren’t getting that time back, and will be thrust into adulthood with a lack of needed preparation owing to adults’ sordid choices. Also, let us not fail to mention that since March 2020 and the disastrous COVID lockdowns, these kids have been getting the short end of the social and educational stick for 3 years already, this just furthers the punishment.
What a woeful precedent we put in place shuttering the schools, closing the playgrounds, removing the rims from basketball courts, and now, almost in slow motion we see it again, not for fear of a virus, but for unwillingness to protect our southern border and implement reasonable policies in our cities.
It is difficult to discern a more vital purpose of local government than to protect children who are helpless to protect themselves, and yet this sacred duty is being thrown to the wayside by the unsustainable failures of Democrats at every level of government. Mayor Adams continues to howl into the leftist wind, begging Biden to come to his aid, but the scandal-plagued president has more or less told Hizzoner to drop dead.
New York Mayor Eric Adams, left, and city officials listen to a reporter’s question during a City Hall press conference, Wednesday Aug. 9, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
The children of New York and America deserve better than the short shrift their plight has been given by liberals supposedly acting out of kindness to migrants. Where is the kindness to our kids?
The playing fields and parks of this city where generations of New Yorkers made childhood memories now sit in the shadows of Bidenvilles, that is the memory we offer today’s youth. And make no mistake, our children aren’t making sacrifices, that would suggest they have some say in all this, no, they are being sacrificed to progressive policies so blatantly failing that Democrats are now even squabbling with each other.
It is time for President Biden to secure the border, it is time for Mayor Adams to stop taking resources from our kids, it is time for order to be restored before an entire generation is lost. The time to act is now, because faster than we might think, it will be far too late.
A potential plea deal between Hunter Biden and the Justice Department collapsed Friday after attorneys for both sides failed to finalize an agreement.
“Hunter Biden’s plea deal has collapsed. Talks with gov’t at an impasse,” Vox.com’s Andrew Prokop tweeted Friday with a screen grab of a court filing.
“DOJ filing: ‘Following additional negotiations after the hearing held on July 26, 2023, the parties are at an impasse and are not in agreement on either a plea agreement or a diversion agreement.'”
The court document adds: “Therefore, the Government believes the Court’s briefing order should be vacated.”
Prokop later tweeted: “DOJ says they are moving to dismiss the Delaware case against Hunter so they can file tax charges against him in CA or DC.”
Delaware U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika rejected a proposed plea deal on July 26 when she questioned aspects of the agreement for Biden to plead guilty to tax charges and avoid a gun charge. The judge told Hunter Biden’s lawyers and prosecutors that they could persuade her to approve the deal as it was previously negotiated, or to alter it to a form she can accept. She said she did not want to “rubber stamp” a plea deal.
President Joe Biden’s son then pleaded not guilty to charges of failing to pay taxes on more than $1.5 million in income in 2017 and 2018 despite owing more than $100,000, prosecutors allege.
The document shared by Prokop said DOJ officials requested Biden’s plea position on Wednesday and Friday. After his attorneys requested more time, until Monday, prosecutors declined.
Noreika released the proposed plea deal last week to satisfy a request from an NBC News reporter. Large portions of the plea deal were read in court on July 26.
On July 28, Noreika ordered attorneys Friday to raise issues with her chambers, not the court clerk. The order came two days after an employee at a law firm representing Biden allegedly misrepresented her identity to the clerk’s office during a phone call.
Attorney General Merrick Garland conducts a news conference at the Department of Justice announcing that U.S. Attorney David Weiss will be appointed special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, on Aug. 11. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc /Getty Images)
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday named David Weiss — the same prosecutor who made a court-rejected plea agreement with first son Hunter Biden — as the special counsel in the tax probe.
Garland said on Tuesday that Weiss, the U.S. attorney for the district of Delaware, asked him to be special counsel in the case.
“Upon considering his request, as well as the extraordinary circumstances relating to this matter, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint him as special counsel,” Garland told reporters on Friday. “This appointment confirms my commitment to provide Mr. Weiss all the resources he requests. It also reaffirms Mr. Weiss has the authority he needs to conduct a thorough investigation and to continue to take the steps he deems appropriate independently.”
The appointment comes the same week that the House Oversight and Accountability Committee released bank records showing family members of President Joe Biden have raked in at least $20 million from foreign individuals and entities.
“This move by Attorney General Garland is part of the Justice Department’s efforts to attempt a Biden family cover-up in light of the House Oversight Committee’s mounting evidence of President Joe Biden’s role in his family’s schemes selling ‘the brand’ for millions of dollars to foreign nationals,” House Oversight and Accountability Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said in a statement.
Comer has previously said he opposed the appointment of any special counsel or special prosecutor, fearing it would slow down the investigation.
“The Justice Department’s misconduct and politicization in the Biden criminal investigation already allowed the statute of limitations to run with respect to egregious felonies committed by Hunter Biden,” Comer continued. “Justice Department officials refused to follow evidence that could have led to Joe Biden, tipped off the Biden transition team and Hunter Biden’s lawyers about planned interviews and searches, and attempted to sneakily place Hunter Biden on the path to a sweetheart plea deal.”
IRS whistleblowers previously testified to the oversight panel, as well as to the House Ways and Means Committee, that Weiss sought special counsel status to investigate Hunter Biden in other jurisdictions, including Washington, D.C., and California. The same IRS whistleblowers also alleged the Weiss team tipped off Hunter Biden to search warrants, allowed statutes of limitations to run out, and negotiated felonies down to misdemeanors.
“If they wanted somebody to look into, the Justice Department should have looked to someone not tainted by whistleblower allegations,” John Malcolm, director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “This appointment is not going to address any allegations of political interference from Main Justice [the leadership of the Department of Justice], and it is not going to take care of the allegations of a shoddy investigation.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Democrats have been quick to note that then-President Donald Trump nominated Weiss as U.S. attorney, but Delaware’s two Democratic senators also supported him at the time.
According to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Weiss was aware of an FBI form that alleged then-Vice President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden each took a $5 million bribe from an executive with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that employed the the younger Biden as a board member.
This is the second special counsel named to investigate a matter related to Joe Biden. In January, Garland named former U.S. Attorney for Maryland Robert Hur to investigate the president’s possession of classified documents during the time he was out of office.
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
In November, the leader of the incoming House Republican majority, Kevin McCarthy, sent a letter to the Select Committee on Jan. 6 reminding lawmakers they were required to “preserve all records” related to the panel’s work. Nine months later, however, Republicans in charge of investigating the committee’s work say the probe failed to comply with House rules.
GOP Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk, who became the target of the since-disbanded committee’s salacious attacks last summer, is leading the Republican probe into the Jan. 6 Committee as chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration. Loudermilk told Fox News on Tuesday his team has struggled to locate the leftover material required to review the Select Committee’s work under Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. The partisan probe spent 18 months prosecuting political opponents and was complete with Soviet-style show trials presented with fabricated evidence while lawmakers sought to portray the Capitol riot as a “deadly insurrection.”
“Nothing was indexed. There was no table of contents index. Usually when you conduct this level of investigation, you use a database system and everything is digitized, indexed. We got nothing like that,” Loudermilk said. “So it took us a long time going through it and one thing I started realizing is we don’t have anything much at all from the Blue Team.”
The “Blue Team” refers to the investigative staff on the committee in charge of probing the Capitol security failures, all of which point to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. After then-Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson aired footage undermining central narratives of the Jan. 6 Committee in March, Chairman Thompson admitted the Select Committee didn’t actually review Capitol surveillance video.
“We’ve got lots of depositions, we’ve got lots of subpoenas, we’ve got video and other documents provided through subpoenas by individuals,” Loudermilk told Fox. “But we’re not seeing anything from the Blue Team as far as reports on the investigation they did looking into the actual breach itself.”
“What we also realized we didn’t have was the videos of all the depositions,” said the congressman.
Fox News reported on a series of exchanges between Thompson and Loudermilk, the latter of whom was defamed by the committee as giving “reconnaissance” tours of the Capitol on the eve of the riot. The Jan. 6 tapes aired by Carlson, however, show the Georgia Republican was giving a routine tour of the complex to constituents.
Loudermilk told Fox News his committee was only given 2.5 terabytes of data, contrary to Thompson’s initial claim the Select Committee handed over 4. A letter from the former chairman of the Democrats’ probe this summer conceded the Select Committee failed to maintain records that the probe was required to preserve.
“Consistent with guidance from the Office of the Clerk and other authorities, the Select Committee did not archive temporary committee records that were not elevated by the Committee’s actions, such as use in hearings or official publications, or those that did not further its investigative activities,” Thompson wrote.
“He’s saying they decided they didn’t have to,” Loudermilk told Fox News. “The more we go in the more we’re realizing that there’s things that we don’t have. We don’t have anything about security failures at the Capitol, we don’t have the videos of the depositions.”
McCarthy sent the letter demanding records preservation after reporting from The Washington Post raised concerns that the Select Committee was prepared to omit key details of the investigation.
“It is imperative that all information collected be preserved not just for institutional prerogatives but for transparency to the American people,” McCarthy wrote last fall. “The American people have a right to know that the allegations you have made are supported by the facts and to be able to view the transcripts with an eye towards encouraged enforcement of 18 USC 1001.”
California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa threatened members who served on the Jan. 6 Committee with censure over the destruction of records.
“The ones that are still in Congress might very well face a censure for what they participated in,” Issa said.
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.
Corporate media are returning to their favorite question to ask of any and all Republicans who care about the integrity of elections: Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election? A New York Times employee asked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis the question in Iowa last week. NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns asked a variant of the question, to which DeSantis gave an extended reply about the proper and improper way to run elections. Completely uninterested in his substantive reply, she followed it up with: “Yes or no, did Trump lose the 2020 election?”
The question is never asked in good faith, and you can know that with certainty because none of these reporters even came close to asking it from 2016-2020 when the entirety of the Democrat Party refused to accept the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s election. In fact, they eagerly and actively participated in the Russia-collusion information operation designed to overturn the results of that election. Hillary Clinton was claiming the 2016 election was stolen throughout 2019, and the media generally cheered her on.
But if you need help understanding why the question is never asked in good faith, let’s step out of the realm of politics for a minute and consider the men’s gold medal basketball game of the 1972 Olympics.
The game is one of the most controversial events in Olympic history, with the American men’s team refusing to concede they lost to the Soviet Union. In fact, it’s been more than 50 years and the men on that team have never accepted their silver medals because they still do not believe the game was conducted in a fair fashion. Just last year, the men wanted to have the silver medals donated to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, but the International Olympic Committee demanded the men officially accept them first before they could be donated. On principle, the men will not take the medals or recognize the legitimacy of the outcome, so the medals remain in limbo.
The team, which is the only team in Olympic history to contest an outcome, has an excellent case that the game was rigged. The Americans had dominated the Olympic sport since it first appeared in the 1936 Olympics. They had won seven gold medals and were the presumptive favorites in 1972. Their record before the final game was an astounding 63-0.
However, the Soviets were very good that year and their older and experienced team was winning the game until the final seconds, when the U.S. player Doug Collins was fouled and sank two free throws, putting the team ahead by one point with one second left on the clock.
An official demanded that an additional two seconds be put back on the clock. When that time expired, the U.S. team began to celebrate and their fans swarmed onto the court. But officials said the clock reset had not been done properly so they put three seconds back on the clock and gave the Soviets another chance. The Soviet team also managed to make an illegal substitution of a player who, with the help of a Soviet Bloc referee interfering in the play, passed to another player who scored the winning point.
The Americans were outraged at how the game was conducted and appealed to a basketball court made up of five judges. However, they lost that appeal 3-2. It is perhaps worth noting that all three judges who voted against the Americans happened to be from communist countries.
The Soviet Union men, for their part, are absolutely defiant that they won a free and fair game. Just a few years ago, Russians put out a very popular movie called “Going Vertical” — also known as “Three Seconds” — about their surprise victory over the Americans. It became “the most-successful Russian film of all time,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Can you imagine if reporters cornered the players or their fans and said, “Yes or no, did you lose the 1972 game?” Can you imagine if they badgered each player to utter an affirmation that the Soviets won fair and square or be called “basketball deniers”? Can you imagine how juvenile and idiotic that would sound? Real journalists wouldn’t do any of these things, particularly if they genuinely wanted to understand or accurately convey why the game was so controversial.
Similarly, there is something downright pathological in the media and other Democrat activists’ attempts to silence any and all genuine discussion about the weirdest election of our lifetimes. I researched and reported a full-length book about all of the verifiable problems with the election. These problems include the effort by the same top Democrat lawyer who ran the Russia-collusion hoax to push for the coordinated change of hundreds of election laws and processes, supposedly due to Covid. The vast majority of the significant changes were done in violation of the Constitution’s requirement that state legislatures handle such rules. The changes led to tens of millions of unsupervised ballots flooding into the system at the same time that scrutiny of said ballots was diminished. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent more than $400 million to orchestrate the takeover of government election offices by left-wing activists. This get-out-the-vote effort was overwhelmingly focused on the Democrat areas of swing states.
There is also the issue that corporate media moved from pervasive bias into overt propaganda on behalf of Democrats and against Republicans. They invented fake news that was inserted into national debates, such as the false Aisne-Marne story claiming Trump secretly didn’t like American soldiers and the false claim that Russia was paying bounties for dead American soldiers and that Trump didn’t care. They also suppressed completely true stories about the Biden family business of paying for access to Joe Biden. In fact, a cabal of powerful figures conspired to falsely blame as Russian disinformation a laptop belonging to a key member of the Biden family pay-for-play business.
And that doesn’t even mention the fact that the U.S. government conspired with Big Tech companies to run a massive censorship-industrial complex to suppress news and information advantageous to conservative politicians and issues. This censorship-industrial complex also worked and continues to work to elevate left-wing media with a track record of running false information operations, such as the debunked Russia-collusion hoax and the Kavanaugh rape smear.
But let’s get back to the basketball game.
Did the men’s basketball team of the Soviet Union score more points than the United States in 1972? They did. Did they receive the gold medal? They did. Did Joe Biden receive more Electoral College votes than Donald Trump? He did. Was he inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States? He was.
All of those things are true. It is also true that reasonable people on the losing side of both contests believe — for very good reasons — they were not fair. It is sheer gaslighting to use the immense power of the Democrat media and corrupted Department of Justice to say that people are not allowed to oppose the way election contests were conducted or discuss how the manner in which the contests have been conducted affected the outcome.
Fans of the 1972 Soviet men’s basketball team and the 2020 Joe Biden campaign have every right to say they won a free and fair contest. They should not be jailed or persecuted for that view. Some fans and operatives of the current regime want to make it illegal or unacceptable to question or oppose the censorship-industrial complex, the plot to radically change election laws in an unconstitutional fashion, the private takeover of government election laws by left-wing billionaires, or our propaganda press. It’s something one might have expected to find in 1972 Soviet Russia more than in 2023 United States.
Sen. Joe Manchin D-W.Va., said Thursday that he is “seriously” considering becoming an independent and lamented that Washington Democrats’ brand had become “so bad.”
“I have to have peace of mind, basically. The brand has become so bad, the ‘D’ brand and ‘R’ brand,” Manchin told West Virginia Metro News’ “Talkline” host Hoppy Kercheval.
“In West Virginia, the ‘D’ brand because it’s [the] national brand. It’s not the Democrats in West Virginia, it’s the Democrats in Washington.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said Thursday that he is seriously considering switching party affiliations. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Manchin has been asked several times in the past about a possible party switch, particularly after helping kill off key pieces of President Biden’s progressive agenda like Build Back Better. He never ruled it out. On Thursday morning, however, he said: “I would very seriously think about” becoming independent.
Long a fixture of the West Virginia Democratic Party in a heavily GOP-leaning state, Manchin faces a fierce GOP Senate challenge from West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice should he decide to run for reelection. And while he has been a thorn in Biden’s side, Manchin was widely panned by Republicans for ultimately supporting the Inflation Reduction Act, which included many provisions supported by progressives to address climate change.
“I’ve been thinking about that for quite some time,” Manchin said. “I haven’t made any decisions whatsoever on any of my political direction, I want to make sure that my voice is truly an independent voice.”
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice switched parties from Democrat to Republican in 2017. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, File)
But he vowed to continue calling out “extremes” on both sides of the aisle.
“When I do speak, I want to be able to speak honestly about basically the extremes of the Democrat and Republican Party that’s harming our nation,” he said.
Manchin’s latest comments come after he fueled speculation of a potential third-party presidential bid when he refused to rule the idea out during a No Labels event in New Hampshire.
In his Thursday radio interview, Manchin denied that such a campaign would hurt President Biden — something the Democrat commander-in-chief’s allies have warned about.
If Manchin becomes an independent, he would be the second Senate Democrat to do so in the last 10 months after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz. (Getty Images)
“I don’t see that favoring either side because you just can’t tell how this is going to break,” Manchin said.
If he switches from Democrat to independent, Manchin would be the second Senate Democrat to do so within the last 10 months after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., did so late last year.
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
FIRST ON FOX: House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., is blasting a “damning photo” showing then-Vice President Joe Biden with his Hunter Biden-linked current adviser aboard an Air Force Two flight during his infamous 2015 trip to Ukraine.
Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s current special presidential coordinator, was apparently in communication with Hunter and Hunter’s associates at Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings when the first son was serving on the firm’s board, according to emails previously reported by Fox News Digital.
A photo taken by White House photographer David Lienemann shows Biden being briefed by Hochstein aboard Air Force Two on his way to meet Ukrainian leaders in Kiev on Dec. 6, 2015, when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid if they did not fire their top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.
“This damning picture of then Vice President Joe Biden on Air Force Two en route to Ukraine talking with Amos Hochstein is just further evidence that Biden and senior officials in the Biden Administration not only knew of Hunter Biden’s corrupt foreign business dealings, but also that Joe Biden was intimately involved while Vice President,” Stefanik told Fox News Digital in a statement.
This photo taken by White House photographer David Lienemann shows Vice President Joe Biden being briefed by Amos Hochstein, right, aboard Air Force Two on his way to Ukraine on Dec. 6, 2015. (White House photographer David Lienemann)
“At the time of this photo, Hochstein was in communication with Hunter Biden and Burisma where Hunter served on the board,” she continued. “We also know that this photo was taken on Air Force Two ahead of Joe Biden’s now infamous meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, where Biden threatened to have aid withheld if a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma was not fired.”
“All evidence points directly to Joe Biden being deeply compromised. House Republicans will leave no stone unturned in our investigations into Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling scheme,” Stefanik added.
President Biden, Amos Hochstein and Hunter Biden (Getty Images)
Hochstein, who served as special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs under the Obama-Biden administration, was tapped as Biden’s special coordinator for global infrastructure and energy security in August 2021, and he was made special presidential coordinator to Biden in February 2022.
Fox News Digital reported in June that in the summer of 2014, shortly after joining the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, Hunter and his associates at Burisma and his now-defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners discussed speaking with Hochstein for contacts who could help navigate a new tax in Ukraine on private energy companies.
On July 31, 2014, top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi expressed frustration in an email to the group that the Ukrainian parliament had “voted in favor of the package of laws, among which is a draft law on raising the tax for private gas producers.”
Amos Hochstein, senior energy security adviser for the U.S. Department of State, listens as President Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Oct. 19, 2022. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Minutes later, Heather King, who did crisis communications for Burisma at the time and was in frequent communication with Hunter, said she was concerned by the news.
“This news is very concerning,” she wrote. “I assume you will be sending an email to the State Dept today about this? We will also get you connected with the US Embassy contact so you can hopefully meet with the guy Hochstein recommended as soon as possible.”
Nearly two months later, on Sept. 24, 2014, Pozharskyi emailed another communications consultant, Georgette Spanjich, and copied King, Burisma lobbyist David Leiter and Burisma board member Devon Archer, writing that “Ukrainian authorities are still pushing for further legislative initiatives which are going to cause even more damage to the gas industry.”
Amos Hochstein, special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, is interviewed in Houston on Aug. 15, 2016. (James Nielsen/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
“I am genuinely looking forward to your ideas on how we could influence this process,” Pozharskyi wrote. “Please, note that I am going to share this information with the US embassy here in Kyiv, as well as the office of Mr Amos Hochstein in the States.”
On Nov. 13, 2014, seven weeks after Pozharskyi said he would forward Burisma’s response to the Ukrainian tax hike to Hochstein’s office, Hochstein attended a meeting at Biden’s Naval Observatory residence, according to White House visitor logs. The next day, Eric Schwerin, the then-president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, sent Hunter a link, without comment, to Hochstein’s biography on the State Department’s website.
Eric Schwerin sent Hunter Biden a link to Amos Hochstein’s biography on the State Department’s website. (Fox News)
Three days later, on Nov. 17, 2014, Hochstein met with Kathy Chung, according to the White House visitor logs. Chung was Biden’s executive assistant at the time and now serves as the Pentagon’s deputy director of protocol. A few days later, Hunter asked Schwerin to send Hochstein’s contact information to Archer, Hunter’s fellow Burisma board member and a co-founder of Rosemont Seneca Partners.
A couple of weeks later, on Dec. 11, 2014, Hochstein met with Biden and Chung in two separate meetings and later attended a holiday party at Biden’s residence that same day. Four days later, Hochstein attended a “meeting” at the vice president’s residence, according to White House visitor logs.
Four months later, on April 16, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing of the White House, the visitor logs show. That meeting took place the same day that Hunter introduced his father to Burisma executive Pozharskyi and other business associates from Kazakhstan and Russia during a dinner at Café Milano in Washington, D.C., Fox News Digital previously reported. It is unclear whether Burisma or Pozharskyi’s visit to Washington, D.C., was mentioned during that meeting.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden and Amos J. Hochstein, special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, talk during the Caribbean Energy Security Summit at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 26, 2015. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
The day after the dinner, Hunter received an email from Pozharskyi that read, “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”
Two months later, on June 17, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden twice, according to the visitor logs. He met with Biden again the next month in the West Wing on July 13, 2015, and with Chung again months later on Nov. 2, 2015.
According to a Senate Republican report on Hunter’s business dealings released in December 2020, testimony and public records show that Hochstein in October 2015 raised concerns with both Biden and Hunter that Hunter’s position on Burisma’s board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine.
Senior adviser for energy security Amos Hochstein and Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman al-Saud speak after signing bilateral agreements during an investment agreement signing ceremony in the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah on July 15, 2022. (Amer Hilabi/AFP via Getty Images)
Victoria Nuland, who was serving as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs in 2015, testified to Congress in 2020 that Hochstein had another conversation about Hunter’s position on Burisma’s board with Biden on the way to Ukraine in 2015, according to the Senate report, during the same plane ride shown in the photograph criticized by Stefanik.
During Hochstein’s testimony in the 2020 report, he recounted that he spoke with Biden about Burisma in the West Wing of the White House in October 2015. According to visitor logs, he visited the White House three times in October 2015, with two of the visits occurring in the West Wing and the other on the second floor of the West Wing.
“We were starting to think about a trip to Ukraine, and I wanted to make sure that he [Vice President Biden] was aware that there was an increase in chatter on media outlets close to Russians and corrupt oligarchs-owned media outlets about undermining his message — to try to undermine his [Vice President Biden’s] message and including Hunter Biden being part of the board of Burisma,” Hochstein told Congress, according to the report.
According to Hochstein, Biden told Hunter about the meeting, prompting Hunter to request a meeting with Hochstein, according to the 2020 Senate Republican report.
“You are all set to meet with Amos on Friday at 4pm for coffee,” Joan Mayer emailed Hunter on Nov. 3, 2015, referring to their Nov. 6 meeting. She later emailed Hunter to let him know the Nov. 6 meeting with Hochstein at a Starbucks in Georgetown had been moved to 3 p.m. Hochstein met with Biden in the White House Situation Room the day before on Nov. 5, 2015, the visitor logs say.
Joan Mayer emailed Hunter Biden to let him know the Nov. 6 meeting with Amos Hochstein at a Starbucks in Georgetown had been moved to 3 p.m. (Fox News)
“Well, he [Hunter] asked me for a meeting,” Hochstein said in his testimony. “I think he wanted to know my views on Burisma and [Mykola] Zlochevsky. And so I shared with him that the Russians were using his name in order to sow disinformation — attempt to sow disinformation among Ukrainians.”
The report said Hochstein “did not go so far as to recommend that Hunter leave the board,” citing an earlier article by the New Yorker.
About a week later, on Nov. 12, 2016, Mayer let Hunter know that he missed a call from Hochstein, adding, “Please call back today if possible.” Hochstein met with Vice President Biden again in the White House Situation Room less than two weeks later, on Nov. 23, 2015.
On Nov. 12, 2016, Joan Mayer let Hunter Biden know that he missed a call from Amos Hochstein, adding, “Please call back today if possible.” (Fox News)
On Dec. 11, 2015, two days after they returned from Ukraine, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing.
Biden visited Ukraine from Dec. 7-9, 2015. Three months after the visit, Shokin was fired, and Biden would later use it to boast about his foreign policy skills.
Shokin was investigating Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder and then-president of Burisma Holdings, where Hunter served as a board member from April 2014 to April 2019. Biden’s defenders have said that Shokin was fired not because he was pursuing corruption too aggressively, but rather because he was too lax.
On Dec. 17, 2015, less than a week after his meeting with Biden, Hochstein attended a holiday party at the vice president’s Naval Observatory residence, where Hunter was also in attendance.
Hochstein visited Biden at least another six times in 2016, including the day after Shokin was fired on March 29, 2016.
The Obama administration had pushed for Shokin’s firing, and Biden boasted on camera in 2018 that when he was vice president, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.
“I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden said in 2018, according to a transcript of his remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a b—-. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
The White House and the State Department did not respond to Fox News Digital requests for comment.
Jessica Chasmar is a digital writer on the politics team for Fox News and Fox Business. Story tips can be sent to Jessica.Chasmar@fox.com.
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee plans to subpoena President Joe Biden and first son Hunter over allegations they peddled influence during foreign business dealings to secure millions of dollars in payoffs. Panel Chair James Comer, R-Ky., on Wednesday delivered a third round of bank records, bringing the official paper trail of payments to more than $20 million from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan during Joe Biden’s vice presidency in the Obama administration.
“It’s clear Joe Biden knew about his son’s business dealings, lied to the American people, & allowed himself to be ‘the brand’ sold to enrich the Bidens while he was VP of the United States,” Comer tweeted Thursday morning.
“This is public corruption at the highest levels of our federal government.”
Comer on Thursday told Fox Business, “This is always going to end with the Bidens coming in front of the committee. We are going to subpoena the family.”
The chair added that with all the opposition and obstruction from the Bidens’ attorneys, “we know this is going to end up in court when we subpoena the Bidens.”
The president’s legal counsel claims the latest allegations do not tie Joe Biden to Hunter Biden’s foreign influence peddling.
Appearing Wednesday on Newsmax, Comer said the president’s team should be more transparent with requests for information.
“If the president has done nothing wrong, then they should allow us to see their personal bank records,” Comer told “Rob Schmitt Tonight.” “If there’s nothing to hide, then they should be transparent with us, with their financial records, and stop obstructing and intimidating our witnesses and blocking us from more bank records.”
Joe Biden snapped at a reporter Wednesday after being asked about congressional testimony by Devon Archer, a former business associate of Hunter Biden.
“I never talked business with anybody, and I knew you’d have a lousy question,” Biden told the reporter, who then asked why it was a lousy question.
“Because it’s not true,” the president said before walking away.
Archer last week told congressional investigators that then-Vice President Joe Biden joined Hunter Biden’s calls during business meetings and dinners, where foreign businessmen were present and heard his voice, which was the “prize” in luring foreign businesses to pay to send “signals” to the highest levels of the Obama White House.
Critics warn of an attempt to “chill parents from speaking out” as the California State Assembly considers a bill that would criminalize causing a “substantial disruption” at a school board meeting. Pictured: A man hoists his message at a July 20 meeting of the Chino Valley school board in Chino, California. (Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)
California already has undermined the rights of parents from out of state when it comes to experimental transgender “health care,” but the Legislature also is considering a bill that would criminalize causing “substantial disorder” at school board meetings—an attempt to “chill parents from speaking out,” critics warn.
SB 596, which the California State Senate passed in May, 30-8, would expand state law that bars adults from subjecting “a school employee to harassment.”
The bill, now making its way to the floor of the lower chamber, the California State Assembly, would expand the definition of “school employee” to cover any employee or official of a school district, charter school, and county or state education board or office.
The bill also would outlaw, as a misdemeanor, actions that cause “substantial disorder” at a school board meeting.
The law proposed in the Golden State doesn’t define “substantial disorder,” and its definition of “harassment” leaves broad room for interpretation. Under the proposal, Californians who violate the provision face a fine of $500 to $1,000, a year in county jail, or both. A second offense would mean mandatory jail time and could involve another fine; a third offense would mean more jail time and perhaps a third fine.
“It’s clear they’re trying to chill parents from speaking out,” Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
“I find it curious that there’s no definition of ‘substantial’ or ‘disruption’ within the proposed text,” Perry said. “Considering that these are essential terms for the bill, it’s likely that if passed, the law would fall under a vagueness challenge.”
Parents “have a right to express themselves under the protections of the First Amendment,” she noted. “Ordinary limitations on certain speech—making a true threat of violence, for example—already apply within the context of the First Amendment, making the criminal penalty here unnecessary, legally suspect, and ideologically driven.”
“California Democrats want to increase the presence of minors’ activism while working to chill the free speech of rightfully concerned parents and taxpayers,” Kelly Schenkoske, a California mother who homeschools her two children in conjunction with a public charter school program, told The Daily Signal.
“Instead of focusing on solutions for a state riddled with low academic achievement, a drug crisis, homelessness, rising taxes, human trafficking, water storage issues, and fire prevention, this Democrat-controlled Legislature continues to propose their aggressive, anti-family, legislative pet projects,” Schenkoske added. “Their work over the years to erode parental involvement and rights has been noticed by parents who will stand courageously to speak for the protection of their children and for a better education.”
Jim Manley, state legal policy deputy director at the Pacific Legal Institute, told The Daily Signal that the state government has the prerogative to make laws regarding school board meetings, but the vagueness of the text might encourage school employees and prosecutors to chill parents’ rights to speak freely.
“The idea that the government is trying to regulate conduct at school board meetings is pretty normal,” Manley said. “What sends up potential red flags is some of the language in this bill.”
SB 596defines “harassment” as “a knowing and willful course of conduct directed at a specific person that seriously alarms, torments, or terrorizes the person, and that serves no legitimate person.” The bill defines “course of conduct” as “a pattern of conduct composed of two or more acts occurring over a period of time, however short, evidencing a continuity of purpose.”
A parent or other critic “saying two things that the school official finds harassing could be enough to qualify there,” Manley said. “An email that simply torments would count as harassment under this standard.”
The lawyer noted that “to torment” merely means “to cause mental suffering.”
“If you send two emails that cause a school board official to mentally suffer, technically you fall under this definition,” Manley said.
The bill “could be interpreted in a way that chills people’s ability to communicate with elected officials,” he said.
Manley also noted that the bill includes an exemption for “any otherwise lawful employee concerted activity, including, but not limited to, picketing and the distribution of handbills.”
“Parents showing up to hand out literature would not be exempt” under the proposed law, the lawyer said. “Given how broadly this expands the coverage of the crime, I’d like to see the exemption be similarly broad. As written now, it only applies to employees who are picketing.”
Matt McReynolds, deputy chief counsel at the Pacific Justice Institute, echoed these concerns.
“I would certainly agreethat SB 596 targets conservative parents who have been energized and re-engaging at the school board level,” McReynolds told The Daily Signal.
“It’s not just speaking at school board meetings; this would criminalize sending emails that seriously annoy or alarm school employees,” he said. “Note, too, the double standards, beginning with the exception in the legislation for labor union activity such as picketing.”
McReynolds also said the “larger context” of the bill is “revealing.”
“In nearly all other areas, our state leaders are stressing decriminalization and have released thousands of dangerous offenders back into our communities,” he said. “The rhetoric about mass incarceration and overcriminalization goes out the window when they’re going after their political enemies. And in the school setting itself, our legislators are moving to reduce the ability of teachers and administrators to punish kids for defiance, disruption, and disorder. The hypocrisy is unmistakable.”
McReynolds also mentioned AB 1078, which passed the California State Assembly in May. That bill, which aims to boost instructional materials regarding diversity by circumventing parents, threatens “to reduce parents’ influence at the school board level,” McReynolds argued,
State Sen. Anthony J. Portantino, the Democrat who sponsored SB 596, didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the bill.
The bill comes amid new California laws prioritizing children’s stated gender identity over parental rights. Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law SB 107, a bill to turn California into a “sanctuary state” for “gender-affirming care.” The measure, which took effect in January, gives California courts the ability to award custody of a child if someone removes that child from his or her parents in another state to obtain such “care” over the parents’ disagreement.
In June, a California state senator told parents to flee the state as the Senate debated a bill that would subject parents who refuse to “affirm” their children’s “gender transitions” to child abuse charges.
“In the past when we’ve had these discussions and I’ve seen parental rights atrophied, I’ve encouraged people to keep fighting,” state Sen. Scott Wilk, a Republican, said. “I’ve changed my mind on that.”
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.
Barack Obama is often hailed as one of the greatest orators in modern politics. While he had undeniable gifts in that department, as someone who attended a number of his speeches in person, I never quite understood all the praise. Setting aside his career-making “red states, blue states” speech at the 2004 Democratic convention — a plea for political moderation he spent his time in office repudiating — the only memorable things Obama said were either campaign pablum such as “hope and change,” or remarks that were unintentionally revealing.
In the latter category, my personal favorite remark was this comment about congressional Republicans from 2013: “We’re going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what’s going to be best for the country,” he said.
“Permission structure” is a phrase that’s been used by marketing executives for many years, and was apparently in common usage at the Obama White House. The idea is“based on an understanding that radically changing a deeply held belief and/or entrenched behavior will often challenge a person’s self-identity and perhaps even leave them feeling humiliated about being wrong. … Permission Structures serve as scaffolding for someone to embrace change that they might otherwise reject.”
While there’s more overlap between politics and marketing than anyone would like to admit, the naked use of jargon that comes from the world of consumer manipulation betrays a remarkably egotistical approach to politics. There was no need to address honorable disagreement to Obama’s policies, which were politically extreme and consistently opposed by voters. The White House just needed to create, with the help of a slavish media, narratives that could help people admit they were wrong and come around to his way of thinking.
Ironically enough, I thought of the “Permission structure” remark reading David Samuels’ interview in Tablet with Obama biographer David Garrow, which is shaping up to be perhaps the most discussed piece of journalism of the year. That’s because the entire article is a really effective “Permission structure” for a lot of Obama voters and moderates to finally admit he’s an entirely overrated, largely failed president who was far more radical than he ever let on. He’s also obsessed with celebrity and not very loyal to the people who helped him along the way.
In other words, he’s pretty much the guy his critics on the right said he was all along.
MLK vs. Obama
To be clear, that’s my gloss on it, and while I don’t think it’s an unfair summation, I wouldn’t want to claim to speak on behalf of Samuels or Garrow. But I think it’s undeniable the article does real damage to Obama’s reputation because the many criticisms in the piece are rooted in factual revelations about Obama’s past and the considered opinion of Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr. (In addition to decades of work as a civil rights historian, Garrow is a major historian of abortion.) Garrow was considered an important enough scholar that Obama sat for eight hours of interviews with him while he was still president. And it’s clear his opinion of Obama is somewhere between dismissive and contemptuous.
Worse, Garrow’s opinion is all the more devastating to Obama because, throughout the sprawling 16,000-word interview, Garrow keeps reverting back to his extensive knowledge of MLK and making explicit comparisons between the two men to reinforce his unflattering judgments about Obama. At first blush, being compared to MLK would be an impossible standard for almost anyone to be held up to. However, as a historian Garrow is notable for deftly exposing MLK’s considerable character flaws — the degree of MLK’s womanizing and alcoholism are decidedly worse than the public wants to know — while still burnishing his historic accomplishments. It’s clear throughout the interview that Garrow is not so reverential toward MLK he can’t think objectively about him, yet he still considers him a great man.
And in fairness, Obama invited this comparison upon himself. He rode into the White House encouraging supporters to frame his election as the fulfillment of MLK’s legacy, and further invited comparisons by appropriating MLK’s rhetoric.
Speaking of memorable Obama rhetoric, I’d be willing to bet that millions of Americans are under the impression “the arc of history is long and bends toward justice” is an Obama quote rather than an MLK quote (and it appears MLK borrowed it from a 19th-century Unitarian minister). Nonetheless, Obama has used the phrase “arc of history” more than a dozen times since his first presidential campaign.
The “arc of history” soon transmogrified into another oft-used Obama phrase, which was invoked by Obama and his staff many times throughout their triumphal bullying of political opponents for being on “the wrong side of history.” Obama’s abuse of the “right” and “wrong” side of history was so absurd that even The Atlantic took a break from acting as a court stenographer to run an article fretting this language “suggest[s] a tortured, idealistic, and ultimately untenable vision of what history is and how it works.”
It’s just as well people attribute that quote to Obama, because while this progressive and Hegelian understanding of history is perfectly in sync with American liberalism, it’s not exactly compatible with common sense — history is full of injustice that comes out of nowhere and sets righteous causes back quite a ways. King himself eventually recognized this and rejected the sentiment in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
“Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills,” King wrote. “Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.”
At the same time Obama expressed arrogant certitude about his own role in history, he rejected the aspects of King’s idealism that were actually productive. In 2020, Obama gave an interview to Atlantic editor and Obama superfan Jeffrey Goldberg where he said, “America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold.”
So, America is the most powerful nation because of accidents of history — not because of our historically unprecedented founding commitment to human rights and limited government. It’s telling how the arguments about being on the right side of history are casually discarded here, even though they might make sense to use retroactively. As Garrow observes, “What I could never understand was Obama’s contempt for the idea of American exceptionalism. … Why would the president of the United States feel the need to disabuse his countrymen of the idea that they are special?”
Regardless, that’s hardly the most revealing part of that quote. MLK offered Americans “a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Well, I don’t exactly know what Obama’s offering in response to King’s vision of the future is, but it sounds pretty pessimistic to say you’re not sure America can survive as a “multicultural democracy” — especially coming from a guy so famous for having his likeness emblazoned next to the word “HOPE” that the poster has its own Wikipedia entry.
Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect America ever to stamp out racism (or any other sin for that matter), but King’s call to a virtue-based vision of equality was nonetheless deeply taken to heart by most Americans. Otherwise, the fact it took just 40 years for America to go from assassinating civil rights leaders and turning firehoses on peaceful black protesters to electing a black president is just another “historical accident.”
Maybe we still have a long way to go, but the progress made on civil rights in this country is still worth celebrating — and there’s no good evidence we should abandon the belief that progress was made because, in King’s words, “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” That it’s hard to tell whether America’s first black president believes that racial progress in America is because of, not in spite of, American ideals, well, that isn’t exactly reassuring for ordinary Americans looking to validate the trust they placed in him.
Of course, lots of other black leaders harbored doubts about King’s hopes for the future. Which brings us to the other startling aspect of the interview between Samuels and Garrow, where we move from the abstract realm of character judgments to disturbing historical facts. In Obama’s ballyhooed first memoir, Dreams of My Father, Samuels summarizes his description of the breakup between Obama and Sheila Miyoshi Jager, one of his serious girlfriends before he married Michelle Obama: “In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism.”
But Garrow, who started writing his Obama biography well into Obama’s second term as president, tracked down Jager — now a professor at Oberlin with a formidable academic reputation — and asked her about her relationship with Obama. (That the credulous journalistic establishment was totally incurious about digging into Obama’s inconsistent and self-serving life story is a thread running throughout the interview.) According to her, what really happened was this:
In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
While it’s hard to land firmly on one side of a he said/she said account of a romantic break-up, Jager has an outstanding reputation; she’s a professor at Oberlin college. She hasn’t been outspoken about Obama on much of anything, much less publicly critical of him. She doesn’t seem bitter about a relationship that ended decades ago, where Obama asked her to marry him twice and she rejected him.
If Jager is to be believed — and I think she is, as the rest of the Samuels-Garrow interview is full of criticism of episodes where Obama has obviously fictionalized aspects of his memoirs and life story — then this just really puts an exclamation point on the narrative established by this landmark interview. Americans thought they were electing a guy who had tacitly, if not explicitly, said he would fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, a man who, in Garrow’s considered words, “did not buy into identity politics.” Instead, they got a guy invested in defending Louis Farrakhan’s vision of race in America.
Being a president in the mold of King would entail evaluating leadership failures as a matter of the content of your character and judgment. Following Farrakhan would entail blaming… well, it seems hard to believe Obama would embrace antisemitic conspiracies, but certainly there’s ample evidence that Obama and his defenders do dodge accountability by blaming a more socially acceptable villain of shadowy cabals of racists and Republicans. (On the other hand, if Obama is hoping for favorable assessments of his famously antagonistic relationship with Israel, he’s not helped by Jager’s anecdote or the fact that he had his kids baptized at a church run by a guy who even Ta-Nehisi Coates admits spews “crude conspiratorial antisemitism.”)
‘He Loses Interest’
For those of you who may think this is a little too harsh and/or a Manichean take on Obama’s nuanced worldview, I have good news. The interview is also a springboard to debate Obama’s sexuality. And large portions of the interview are also consumed with discussions of whether Obama is a “celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or … a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society.”
Garrow and Samuels’ conclusion on that last dilemma seems to be that the shallow narcissism of the former neuters a lot of the impulses related to the latter. Garrow concedes Obama, who frequently touted his credentials as a law professor, would be a terrible Supreme Court justice because Obama himself admits he’s “fundamentally lazy.” Elsewhere Garrow sums up much of his political career by saying, “Some things are meaningful to him, but then he loses interest.”
Samuels, however, doesn’t have Garrow’s scholarly restraint in describing Obama’s post-presidency. “I remember thinking, imagine telling Harry Truman, ‘Hey, why don’t you sell that old house and buy three or four huge mansions in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii and Washington, D.C., and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in sweetheart deals with big corporations while you’re vacationing on rich people’s yachts?’” Samuels tells Garrow. “He’d probably sock you in the jaw.” (For what it’s worth, the yacht vacations with Bruce Springsteen, Oprah, and Tom Hanks appear pretty nauseating.)
In order to keep the Secret Service at bay, let me say for the record that neither the ghost of Harry Truman nor anyone else should sock Obama in the jaw. But it’s been seven years since the guy was in the White House, and the judgment of history is starting to come in. I think we at least have permission to say he was a bad president.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
An Army installation in Texas has been struggling to put food on the table for its soldiers for months as the base faces a shortage of cooks to staff its dining facilities.
Fort Cavazos, previously known as Fort Hood, has struggled to provide its junior enlisted troops with meals for months, with the base only opening two of its 10 major dining facilities for much of the summer and with limited times, according to a report Tuesday from Military.com.
According to the report, the base has faced a shortage of cooks to man the dining facilities around base, with many Army cooks either on deployment or away on field training. Soldiers who depend on the dining facilities to eat have also faced confusing and conflicting opening schedules for the facilities as base officials attempt to move personnel around to staff the food service buildings.
Bernie Beck Gate at Fort Hood, Texas, now known as Fort Cavazos. (Drew Anthony Smith/Getty Images)
Some of the dining facilities have only been opened during limited times, forcing some soldiers to drive a long distance across one of the military’s largest installations in attempts to get food.
“For months, one [dining facility] was open and was a more than 30-minute drive for my soldiers,” a noncommissioned officer who anonymously spoke to Military.com said. “All the soldiers were going to that one. It’s unmanageable during the workday.”
Many Army cooks have been pulled off the base for a rotation at the National Training Center and for support of a cadet exercise at Fort Knox, Kentucky, further straining the Fort Cavazos facilities, according to the report.
Soldiers eat at the Patriot Inn Dining Facility at Fort Hood, Texas, on Jan. 9. 2015. (U.S. Army)
Making matters more difficult, many junior enlisted soldiers do not have vehicles, and there has been limited shuttle service options available to get those members to the facilities. Two of the installation’s dining facilities have been reopened in the past week, according to the report, potentially providing some relief to soldiers facing packed facilities and logistical hurdles.
The report comes as the military has continued to battle its worst recruiting crisis in over 50 years, with the Army being the branch hardest hit by the shortfall, falling 15,000 recruits short of hitting its goal in fiscal year 2022. While Army leaders, including Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, have expressed optimism that the branch has turned the tide this fiscal year, it is still expected to come well short of meeting its goals again ahead of Sept. 30, the last day of fiscal year 2023.
While it is unclear if the cook shortage at Fort Cavazos is related to recruiting issues, Army leaders have made improving dining facilities a key focus raising the quality of life for troops, an issue that could help to alleviate some of the recruiting shortfall.
Staff Sgt. Sean Prater, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 115th Brigade Support Battalion, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, works on creating a stuffed beef loin on Nov. 18, 2015, for the Thanksgiving Day celebration. (U.S. Army)
For the time being, Army officials are considering a plan to allow soldiers to use meal cards typically used at official dining facilities at on-post military restaurants such as Panera and Qdoba. That idea is currently being piloted at Fort Drum, New York, according to the report.
Reached for comment by Fox News Digital, an Army spokesperson said the issues experienced at Fort Cavazos stemmed from “Combat Training Center rotations, operational deployments around the world, facility renovations, and support to Cadet Summer Training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, Fort Cavazos was limited to running two Warrior Restaurants during the month of July.”
However, the spokesperson stressed that “dining facilities available through July did not reach capacity and were well stocked throughout the month. Since August 1st Fort Cavazos has reopened multiple Warrior Restaurants on base. There are currently five opened facilities.”
“We take the health and welfare of our Soldiers seriously and making sure our Soldiers have the sustenance necessary to them is a top priority,” the spokesperson said. “Flyers and posters were placed throughout unit areas, barracks, and at all dining facilities to inform Soldiers of the changes for the summer.
“As our operational demands shift, the availability of dining facilities will also be adjusted to meet the needs of our Soldiers. Earlier this summer, the Commanding General established an Installation-level food service board to ensure the best use of food service resources in support of our Soldiers. As of 1 August, two of the largest dining facilities have re-opened.”
Michael Lee is a writer at Fox News. Follow him on Twitter @UAMichaelLee
Amid allegations President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has spied on former President Donald Trump‘s Twitter account, constitutional legal expert Alan Dershowitz chimed in on Newsmax.
“I can’t imagine there’d be anything in his Twitter account which isn’t public, but if there is something, they should have to justify that: Government can’t just go rummaging through people’s First Amendment statements,” Dershowitz told Wednesday’s “John Bachman Now.”
“But this is a First Amendment case,” he continued, rejecting former Attorney General Bill Barr’s claim to the contrary.
“This is a case all about what Donald Trump said, what he believed. Even the things he did, he did, according to him, because he honestly believed, and still believes, the election was stolen.
“He was wrong, in my view, but my view doesn’t matter under the First Amendment.”
Trump’s election challenge speech, and subsequent seeking of legal remedies, is protected, according to Dershowitz.
“Under the First Amendment, there’s no such thing as a false idea or a false opinion,” Dershowitz told co-hosts Bianca de la Garza and John Huddy.
“The remedy for false ideas and false opinions is to respond to them and write better ideas and better opinions, not to criminalize what somebody said or did consistent with his belief that the election was stolen.”
Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan cannot be trusted to give Trump his right to a fair trial, Dershowitz continued.
“I am a liberal Democrat who has voted for Democrats all my life. I do not trust her; I do not trust her to do justice,” he said. “The test is not only must justice be done, must it seem to be done. I don’t see it being done.”
Chutkan has concerning ties to a law firm “that has had the most conflicts of interest, in my opinion, of any major firm in the United States,” in addition to ties to Hunter Biden and clients and cases tied to Burisma Holdings, according to Dershowitz.
“This is exactly the wrong person to preside over this case,” he warned. “This case is going to be decided largely by the judge, by what instructions the judge gives.
“So, this case should be taken away from her. She should be recused, and she should not be deciding issues that divide the American people. Because they’re not going to trust her judgment.”
The case should be moved out of Washington, D.C., to grant Trump a fair trial, Dershowitz added.
“The case should be taken out of the District of Columbia, to which is 95% anti-Trump, and put in West Virginia or Virginia or some purple area, where at least there’s a shot at getting a fair trial, like there is in Florida, in the county where the trial is going to be taking place in Florida.
“But you know Manhattan and the District of Columbia, I can’t imagine two districts more anti-Trump and more unfair to Trump. The American public is not going to trust them.”
Even though the decision to recuse is in the hand of Chutkan, Dershowitz said keeping it under her hand will leave it open to preemptive appeal all the way up the U.S. judicial system.
“It’s her decision, but it can be appealable,” he said. “If she doesn’t recuse herself and if there’s a conviction, there could be an appeal.
“There’s also some argument that can be made — of course, today, lawyers trying to make creative arguments, they get indicted,” he added, noting the basis of special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment listing Trump’s lawyers as alleged co-conspirators, “but there’s some argument that could be made that if there’s a motion to recuse her and she refuses it, that is appealable or subject to a writ of mandamus right away.
“There are cases all ways on that, and so that’s one other possibility that could be explored.”
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Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday lashed out at “crooked Joe Biden’s” Department of Justice for secretly attacking his Twitter account and “making it a point not to let me know about this major ‘hit’ on my civil rights.”
“My Political Opponent is going CRAZY trying to infringe on my Campaign for President,” Trump said in a Truth Social post hours after court documents revealed that special counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed and obtained a search warrant related to Trump’s account on Twitter, which is now known as X.
A federal judge ordered Twitter to turn over the documents and also fined the company, owned by Elon Musk, $350,000 for a three-day delay in complying with a court order regarding the records.
“The district court found that there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that disclosing the warrant to former President Trump ‘would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation’ by giving him ‘an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates,'” the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. noted in its ruling.
Trump bashed the move.
“Nothing like this has ever happened before. Does the First Amendment still exist? Did Deranged Jack Smith tell the Unselects to DESTROY & DELETE all evidence? These are DARK DAYS IN AMERICA!”
President Joe Biden—seen here Tuesday discussing conservation near the Grand Canyon, south of Tusayan, Arizona—is the climate change alarmist-in-chief. (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”
“It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”
She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change. The media loved her when she published a study that seemed to show a dramatic increase in hurricane intensity.
“We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled,” says Curry. “This was picked up by the media,” and then climate alarmists realized, “Oh, here is the way to do it. Tie extreme weather events to global warming!”
“So, this hysteria is your fault!” I tell her.
“Not really,” she smiles. “They would have picked up on it anyways.”
But Curry’s “more intense” hurricanes gave them fuel.
“I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists, and I was treated like a rock star,” Curry recounts. “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”
But then some researchers pointed out gaps in her research—years with low levels of hurricanes.
“Like a good scientist, I investigated,” says Curry. She realized that the critics were right. “Part of it was bad data. Part of it is natural climate variability.“
Curry was the unusual researcher who looked at criticism of her work and actually concluded: “They had a point.”
Then the Climategate scandal taught her that other climate researchers weren’t so open-minded. Alarmist scientists’ aggressive attempts to hide data suggesting climate change is not a crisis were revealed in leaked emails.
“Ugly things,” says Curry. “Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Trying to get journal editors fired.”
It made Curry realize that there is a “climate change industry” set up to reward alarmism.
“The origins go back to the … U.N. environmental program,” says Curry, adding:
Some U.N. officials were motivated by anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.
The United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Says Curry:
The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change.
Then, the national funding agencies directed all the funding … assuming there are dangerous impacts.
The researchers quickly figured out that the way to get funded was to make alarmist claims about man-made climate change.
This is how “manufactured consensus” happens. Even if a skeptic did get funding, it’s harder to publish because journal editors are alarmists.
“The editor of the journal Science wrote this political rant,” says Curry. She even said, “The time for debate has ended.”
“What kind of message does that give?” adds Curry. Then she answers her own question:
Promote the alarming papers! Don’t even send the other ones out for review. If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university and get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute, there was clearly one path to go.
That’s what we’ve got now—a massive government-funded climate alarmism complex.
Foreign funds flowing to the Biden family have reached at least $20 million, according to records the House Oversight and Accountability Committee released Wednesday. Pictured: Hunter Biden and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on April 12, 2016 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)
The tally of foreign money to the Biden family has hit at least $20 million, based on the third round of bank records the House Oversight and Accountability Committee released Wednesday–pointing to millions from oligarchs from Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
Foreign sources sent the money to Biden family members and business associates while Joe Biden was vice president during the Barack Obama administration.
In February 2014 Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina transferred $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a shell company owned by Hunter Biden and his partner Devon Archer. About $1 million was transferred to Archer, and the remainder was used to initially fund a new company account, Rosemont Seneca Bohai.
In July, Archer testified to the House committee that while Biden was vice president, he showed up for a dinner with Hunter Biden’s business associates that included Baturina.
“During Joe Biden’s vice presidency, Hunter Biden sold him as ‘the brand’ to reap millions from oligarchs in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine,” House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in a public statement about the new bank records. “It appears no real services were provided other than access to the Biden network, including Joe Biden himself.”
“Hunter Biden seems to have delivered,” Comer continued. “This is made clear by meals at Café Milano where then-Vice President Joe Biden dined with oligarchs from around the world who had sent money to his son. It’s clear Joe Biden knew about his son’s business dealings and allowed himself to be ‘the brand’ sold to enrich the Biden family while he was Vice President of the United States.”
Comer said the committee will continue to investigate whether “President Biden is compromised or corrupt, and our national security is threatened.”
Archer referenced in his testimony that a Kazakhstani oligarch Kenes Rakishev provided money for Hunter Biden to buy a sports car. The newly-released records show that in February 2014, Hunter met Rakishev at a Washington hotel.
In April, Rakishev wired $142,300 to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, according to the committee’s summary of the records. The next day, a payment was made from Rosemont Seneca Bohai for a sports car for Hunter Biden in the amount of $142,300.
Archer and Hunter Biden arranged for Burisma executives to visit Kazakhstan in June 2014 to evaluate a three-way deal between Burisma, a Chinese state-owned company, and the government of Kazakhstan.
Facebook faced heavy pressure from the Biden White House to censor content on the COVID-19 vaccine. (Photo: Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Facebook staffers were leaking to the White House as the tech company and the Biden administration battled over COVID-19 vaccine content and whether Facebook should be censoring it, according to emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
In an April 18, 2021, email that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, produced to the House Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, executive Nick Clegg told Facebook colleagues that Andy Slavitt, then a White House senior adviser on the COVID-19 response, said Facebook employees were leaking to the White House.
Clegg, who said that he had just had a long call with Slavitt, wrote that “Andy told me in confidence … that internal FB employees are leaking to his team (I assume via Rob F[laherty] accounts of disobliging remarks made about both Andy and Rob by FB decision makers.”
Flaherty was then the digital director at the Biden White House.
Clegg, who is the president of global affairs at Meta, also wrote that Slavitt said Facebook employees suggested that Facebook leadership was planning to manipulate the White House with the data it shared.
“Those remarks [by Facebook decision makers] are coupled with suggestions about how FB should ‘snow’ the White House with info/data about authoritative Covid info in order not to share the most telling/helpful data about content which contributes to vaccine hesitancy,” he added about what Facebook employees were allegedly leaking to the Biden administration.
The leaks occurred at a time when Facebook faced heavy pressure from the Biden White House to censor content on the COVID-19 vaccine. Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the government weaponization subcommittee, has been revealing the extent of the pressure in the “Facebook files” posts he releases on Twitter, sourced from documents and emails Meta shared with the subcommittee.
“These newly subpoenaed meeting notes continue to show the Biden White House’s desire to direct and control content on Facebook,” writes Jordan.
These newly subpoenaed meeting notes continue to show the Biden White House’s desire to direct and control content on Facebook.
More evidence of the censorship-industrial complex.
Brian Rice, vice president of public policy at Meta, responded to Clegg’s April 2021 email, saying, “Rob made an offhand comment about conversations with ‘other people from Facebook’ during a recent conversation, this is clearly what he was referencing.”
Rice added, “I haven’t been part of any conversation that includes disparaging remarks made about Andy, or about any strategy to snow the White House[.]”
Documents obtained by the subcommittee reveal that Facebook temporarily throttled the reach of a popular Tucker Carlson video on the COVID-19 vaccine, even while acknowledging that the video did not violate any of Facebook’s rules. The White House also complained to Facebook about the reach of a popular meme suggesting that those who received the COVID-19 vaccine may later sue for injuries.
Flaherty, the then-digital director at the White House, also asked a question suggesting that Facebook might want to curb the reach of Tomi Lahren, a commentator who had announced she would not get the vaccine, and The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet. “If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see [New York Times], [Wall Street Journal], any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people. You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?” Flaherty wrote in an email to Facebook employees.
According to Open Secrets, Meta employees heavily favor Democrat candidates over Republican candidates. In 2020, the year Joe Biden was elected president, Meta employees gave $6.3 million to Democrats and $578,000 to Republicans.
The emails provided to The Daily Signal also indicate the White House told Facebook YouTube was censoring vaccine content more aggressively.
“Andy [Slavitt] attended a meeting of misinfo researchers (didn’t provide names) organized by Rob F[laherty] on Friday in which the consenus was that FB is a ‘disinformation factory’, and that YT [YouTube] has made significant advances to remove content leading to vaccine hesitancy whilst we have lagged behind,” Clegg wrote in the April 18, 2021, email.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
The Democrat Party is intent on destroying our nation from the inside out. And while the leftists might not come bearing physical weapons, they do have a more insidious kind of attack: ideas.
“It’s the battle of ideas. People are persuaded by socialism and Marxism. Why? Because they never produce what they say they’re going to produce. They produce horror, they produce death, they produce impoverishment. But the promises are endless,” Mark Levin explains.
Because Americans have historically enjoyed the greatest freedoms, they are also at the highest risk for giving them away.
“Liberty takes some explanation. Not to those who don’t have it, but to those who do,” Levin says.
If we’re incapable of even understanding the liberty we have, it becomes much harder to stop it from being taken away — and Levin believes that’s what’s happening right now.
“We are definitely on the road to totalitarianism,” he warns.
But he has a solution.
“We have no control over the culture, and so we need to push back. We have to claw our way back. We have to fight our way back.”
“It is important that we are successful, when it comes to the debate over ideas. It is important that we are successful in passing the word along from our family to our friends to our neighbors to our co-workers. It is important that we quietly in our churches and synagogues and mosques or anywhere else explain to the people who may not understand or even engage in debate,” Levin adds.
Want more from Mark Levin?
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After 40 years of “trickle-down economics,” Joe Biden says, “Bidenomics is just another way of saying restoring the American Dream.”
It’s not often that a politician openly pledges to bring the country back to a time of crippling inflation, high energy prices, and stifling interest rates. But this president is doing his best to keep that promise.
Unsurprisingly, “Bidenomics” is failing to gain traction among voters. This has caused consternation in the media. One thing to remember, though, is that “Bidenomics” isn’t really a thing. Unlike, say, “Reaganomics,” which helped bring about the largest expansion of the middle class in world history, the president does not subscribe to any coherent or tangible set of economic theories or principles. The White House defines its economic policy as being “rooted in the recognition that the best way to grow the economy is from the middle out and the bottom up,” which is just platitudinous gibberish.
“Bidenomics” encompass anything and everything that’s convenient for Democrats. And in this moment, it’s convenient for them to take credit for merely letting people go back to work. Biden, who once claimed that the Democrats $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” plan cost “zero dollars,” isn’t exactly a math whiz. But when he says stuff like “13.4 million jobs have been added to our economy” under his watch, more than “any other president in a full 4-year term,” anyone with even a passing familiarity with the events of the years preceding 2023 knows it’s a lie of omission.
The notion that presidents “create” jobs is itself a fantasy. In this case, though, Biden supported efforts to shutter private businesses during the pandemic, basically closing down the entire economy, not only while running for president but after winning office. When Florida, and other states, attempted to ease some restrictions, President Biden told them to “get out of the way” so that people could “do the right thing.” The pressure exerted on states to “do the right thing” was immense.
All of which is to say that the president and his allies had far more to do with destroying jobs than creating them. We don’t need to relitigate the efficacy of COVID policy here, but approximately 10 million of the jobs that Biden now brags about overseeing are just people coming back to workforce after state-compelled lockdowns.
Then again, if “Bidenomics” had meant doing absolutely nothing, it would have been the president’s greatest political accomplishment. But that would have meant allowing a crisis to go to waste. Instead, what “Bidenomics” did help create was the biggest four-year inflationary spike under any president in 40 years.
By the time the “American Rescue Plan” was passed, there was already too much money chasing too few goods. Tons of people warned about the consequences of dumping more money into the economy. Even when inflation began inching up, Biden dismissed it — “no serious economist” is “suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way,” he said. Democrats, of course, wanted to cram through a $5 trillion progressive agenda spending bill. So when inflation became a big non-transitory political problem, the Biden administration began arguing that more spending would help ease inflation.
Again, the vital to remember about “Bidenomics” is that it makes absolutely zero sense.
Only after inflation became a political issue did the Democrats rename “Build Back Better” the “Inflation Reduction Act.” It still contained all the historic spending, corporate welfare, price-fixing, and tax hikes, but, more importantly, it also still had absolutely nothing to do with mitigating inflation.
Let’s not forget that “Bidenomics” also helped initiate the highest gas prices in history. The president signed a slew of executive orders pausing government leases on public lands, shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, and stymieing drilling in the Gulf of Mexico over concocted “social cost of carbon” externalities, among other restrictions. Despite the uncertainty of the post-pandemic economy, all of this was done in the first weeks of his administration.
None of this is to even mention the hundreds of billions “Bidenomics” “invested” — the enduring euphemism for spending money we don’t have — in social engineering projects that would force us to abandon modernity in the name of “climate justice.” This brand of spending was based on a (misguided) moral prerogative, not any kind of prudent economic decision making, to say the least.
A writer in the New Yorker recently asked, “Why Isn’t Joe Biden Getting More Credit for a Big Drop in Inflation?” Probably because there is no “Bidenomics” policy that has helped lower inflation. Quite the opposite. We’re still trying to recover from the president’s economic policy. It’s the Fed that was compelled to hike interest rates at a level not seen in 30 years to inhibit economic growth partly due to government-induced inflation. It, not Biden, brought down inflation.
Presidents who oversee strong economies, often benefitting from the luck of history or existing policies, will see fewer jobs “created” during their terms because space for growth is limited. Biden was given more economic headroom than any president in history — and blew it. That’s the real legacy of “Bidenomics.”
Legacy media are once again parroting the debunked lie that there is a growing, widespread problem of Republicans threatening election workers. On Monday, Time Magazine published a melodramatic article about congressional Democrats’ “desperate[] push[]” to include provisions in the next federal spending bill they claim will protect state and local election workers. Of course, Time places the blame for this alleged problem on Donald Trump and his so-called “election denying” supporters, and warns that Congress’s upcoming budget is “likely the last chance” Democrats have to “safeguard” the 2024 election.
“It comes as election officials have faced a titanic upswing in death threats, online intimidation, and abuse,” the article reads.
There’s just one little problem with Time’s fantastical claim: It’s manufactured nonsense.
As I reported in these pages in April, the left’s insistence that there is a widespread conspiracy of Republican voters threatening election officials is simply not true. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Joe Biden’s own Department of Justice (DOJ).
During his August 2022 testimony before the U.S. Senate, Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the DOJ, claimed the agency’s Election Threats Task Force — which was launched in July 2021 to address this alleged “rise in threats” against election workers — had reviewed and assessed roughly 1,000 allegedly “threatening and harassing” communications directed toward election officials. Two days before Polite’s testimony, the DOJ issued a press release disclosing only about 11 percent of those 1,000 communications “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation” and that the “remaining reported contacts did not provide a predication” for further investigation.
“[T]o recap: In a country of roughly 331 million people, the DOJ — in the span of a year — received roughly 1,000 calls alleging threats toward election workers, in which only about 11 percent of cases warranted a federal investigation,” I wrote at the time.
So how exactly does Time justify its claim that there’s been a “titanic upswing” in threats directed toward election workers since the 2020 contest? The first is by linking to a survey from the Brennan Center for Justice — a highly partisan organization engaged in left-wing activism — claiming to show persistent fear among election workers for “their colleagues’ safety.”
The second is by linking to a November 2022 Washington Post article that includes grandiose statements from Democrat election officials pushing the same sky-is-falling narrative. Among those who commented to the Post was Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, whose office proclaimed it had “identified hundreds more threats against her since 2020.” The Post, of course, didn’t bother to mention whether it vetted her assertion to determine its truthfulness.
What’s equally remarkable about the article is the Post’s willingness to bury the truth from its readers. Not until the article’s 22nd paragraph are readers given the actual data from the DOJ on which I previously reported. Even then, the Post attempts to downplay the truth by regurgitating claims from unnamed election officials who say the DOJ and states’ limited number of prosecutions are “just a fraction of the threats they receive.”
Yes, there are verifiable threats made against election workers, however rare. But it also rarely rains in Death Valley, California. That doesn’t mean we should start building Noah’s Ark 2.0 to prepare for a catastrophic flood there.
What we’re seeing is a media-wide effort to take anecdotal incidents of threats and blow them out of proportion to give the appearance that election workers are under constant siege from so-called “election denying” MAGA Republicans. It’s a Democrat strategy designed to both cast their political opponents as extremists and dissuade conservatives who have legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in completely legal forms of electoral oversight (such as poll watching).
Democracy does indeed die in darkness — just not in the way regime-approved media want you to believe.
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
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey on Tuesday declared a state of emergency in the liberal state over a surge of migrants that she says has left social services overwhelmed, and she called for more funding and help from the federal government.
Healey, a Democrat, announced that a state of emergency exists “due to rapid and unabating increases in the number of families with children and pregnant people — many of them newly arriving migrants and refugees — living within the state but without the means to secure safe shelter in our communities.”
The state said there are nearly 5,600 families or more than 20,000 people in the state shelter system. Healey said there are numerous contributing factors, including “federal policies on immigration and work authorization” as well as a lack of affordable housing and the end of COVID-era programs.
Venezuelan migrants gather at the Vineyard Haven ferry terminal on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts on Sept. 16, 2022. The group was moved to Joint Base Cape Cod in Buzzards Bay. (Boston Globe)
Massachusetts is the latest liberal jurisdiction to call for help from the federal government due to a surge of migrants, despite not being anywhere near the besieged southern border. New York City, Chicago and the state of New York have all made emergency declarations this year and called for help in response to a migrant wave.
While the numbers have been only a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of migrants that hit the border each month, those areas have declared themselves overwhelmed and at capacity as migrants arrive. Healey said that in July there were 100 families a day seeking emergency shelter while the numbers leaving shelter has declined by two-thirds since 2019 — and costs are hitting $45 million a month on programs.
“Many of these families are migrants to Massachusetts, drawn here because we are and proudly have been a beacon to those in need,” she wrote in a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
She also blamed “a confusing tangle of immigration laws, an inability for migrants to obtain work authorization from the federal government, an increase in the number of people coming to Massachusetts, and the lack of an affordable housing supply in our state.”
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey delivers her inaugural address moments after being sworn into office during inauguration ceremonies, Jan. 5, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)
Healey called for Mayorkas to press Congress and use executive action to remove barriers for work permits for migrants, “address our outdated and punitive immigration laws” and to provide additional financial assistance to the state.
Mayorkas has echoed many of these calls himself, with the administration as a whole repeatedly calling on Congress to provide additional funding as requested at the border. The administration has urged passage of an immigration reform bill that was introduced on President Biden’s first day in office. But such calls for funding and immigration reform have met with opposition from Republicans and others. Republicans have balked at the inclusion of a mass amnesty for millions of illegal migrants included in the 2021 proposal. Instead, they want to see asylum loopholes closed and more border security, with House Republicans introducing and passing sweeping legislation earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., said last week she was “livid” that New York City was receiving federal funding to deal with migrants instead of states at the border.
“What we’re experiencing here in Arizona is matched only by what folks are experiencing in southern Texas,” Sinema said. “Those are the two communities that are experiencing this crisis. The rest of the country is experiencing some elements of it, but we are experiencing the brunt.”
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security.
In simple terms, police officers in Maryland no longer are able to stop someone on the street or pull over a car just because they smell marijuana. (Photo illustration: RealPeopleGroup/Getty Images)
“They call it dope for a reason,” anti-drug campaigns used to say.
These public service campaigns were referring to the people who use drugs, but a marijuana law recently passed by the Maryland General Assembly shows that the slogan could apply to some legislators too.
That’s harsh, but accurate. Why? Under a statute that took effect July 1, police officers in Maryland no longer may rely merely on the distinctive odor of cannabis to search a lawfully stopped individual or motor vehicle for the presence of the drug that gave rise to the odor.
Maryland lawmakers hastily pushed through HB 1071, now Criminal Procedure Article §1-211, in the waning moments of the Free State’s legislative session when legislators are more interested in leaving than thinking about the bills up for votes. Proponents of this ill-conceived legislation argued that it would eradicate instances of racial profiling on the roads, but detractors warned of an impending surge in criminal activity.
Cannabis odor has been a lawful basis for making a probable-cause search of a car in Maryland and other states where use of marijuana is a crime. When officers smelled the unmistakable scent of marijuana, they used that fact to establish probable cause to search a person, stop a car, or the like, preventing countless handgun-related homicides and deaths related to impaired driving.
Aside from the evident, commonsense conclusion officers have drawn, the Supreme Court and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have recognized that the odor produced by contraband or its manufacturing process—such as the operation of a still to make alcoholic beverages—can establish probable cause that a crime has been committed.
In simple terms, police officers in Maryland no longer are able to stop someone on the street or pull over a car just because they smell marijuana. But the new law doesn’t place the odor of cannabis out of bounds altogether; the smell by itself just can’t serve as the basis for stopping a person or a vehicle.
Once an officer observes other evidence or suspicious conduct or, in the case of a motor vehicle, a legitimate traffic violation, a stop is justified. If the officer has sufficient additional evidence of a crime or other illegality—such as a car’s swaying side to side—the officer might have probable cause to arrest the driver for impaired driving.
To be sure, at that time the officer may search only those areas of a motor vehicle that are “readily accessible to the driver.” This means the officer cannot search the trunk, for example. But the front seat area, including what’s underneath, the console, and glove compartment, is still fair game, as well as whatever a driver could reach in the back seat.
Plus, the officer may call for a tow truck to take the vehicle to an impoundment lot, where, if local procedures require or allow it, police may do an inventory search of the entire car.
Naturally, the American Civil Liberties Union released a statement on the new Maryland law, saying: “For decades, police have been granted the authority to conduct searches based on something that cannot be categorically proven: a claim based solely on their sense of smell. These claims by police have been routinely used to infringe on individuals’ privacy rights and justify racial profiling.”
Although it is true that relying solely on the sense of smell may have limitations and some potential for error, even adults who aren’t trained police officers know what burning marijuana smells like. (If you think the odor of burnt cannabis isn’t unmistakable, you must have been born yesterday.) Moreover, the ACLU’s statement implies a generalization, asserting that police officers’ claims based on their sense of smell routinely have been used to target black individuals and trample on their privacy rights unlawfully.
Making such sweeping generalizations without providing sufficient evidence, such as peer-reviewed studies, is disappointing. But it’s not surprising, considering the source.
Notice also what the ACLU statement avoids: the increased public safety risk of taking yet another tool out of police’s tool bag to catch criminals.
Marijuana odor as probable cause has aided in the discovery of many other types of crimes, not simply the recovery of cannabis. According to the State’s Attorney’s Office in Montgomery County, Maryland, a large percentage of illegal handguns are seized from vehicles that were searched based on the odor of cannabis. In Montgomery County alone, 80% of those firearms are coming off the street because an officer smells marijuana during a traffic stop.
More handguns on the street will lead to increased crime and homicides—which disproportionately will affect black residents of lower-income areas, the same people the ACLU claims this new law protects.
Beyond Maryland’s borders, driving under the influence of marijuana poses a significant threat to public safety across the entire country. Other states that have legalized recreational or medical marijuana have witnessed an increase in incidents related to impaired driving. With the growing accessibility of marijuana, more individuals may be prone to use it before getting behind the wheel, leading to a surge in preventable accidents and fatalities.
Driving under the influence of cannabis has similar effects as drunk driving. One can look at recent data and trends regarding legalization of marijuana in Colorado to shed light on the potential risks of this Maryland law. Colorado found that since lawmakers legalized recreational marijuana in 2013, traffic deaths where drivers tested positive for marijuana increased 138%, while all Colorado traffic deaths increased 29%. Moreover, traffic deaths involving drivers who tested positive for marijuana more than doubled, from 55 in 2013 to 131 in 2020.
Since marijuana was legalized, the percentage of all Colorado traffic deaths involving drivers who tested positive for marijuana increased from 11% in 2013 to 20% in 2020.
These harrowing statistics are just the beginning. What could prompt such a blatant dismissal of public safety? One word: money.
The market for cannabis in Maryland is expected to exceed $11 billion in sales following its legalization July 1. A recent survey conducted among thousands of Maryland residents revealed that the average marijuana consumption in the state surpasses the national average: Nationally, the typical person consumes around 20.2 grams of marijuana per month; Marylanders consume an average of 25.4 grams. The survey also found that cannabis consumers in Maryland are willing to travel between 11 and 20 minutes to obtain their desired products, and are willing to pay approximately $14 per gram of marijuana. This translates to an estimated monthly expenditure of $357 per Maryland user.
Let’s be clear: Maryland’s new law could lead to an increase in crimes involving firearms and a rise in drug-impaired driving offenses. With a staggering 10,000 fatalities across the nation in 2020 alone as a result of alcohol-impaired driving, one only can imagine how many death certificates will be signed in Maryland as a result of rampant driving under the influence of marijuana.
Paul J. Larkin directs The Heritage Foundation’s project to counter abuse of the criminal law, particularly at the federal level, as senior legal research fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Read his research.
“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”
— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Here is a pop quiz: If the states ratified an amendment to the Constitution repealing the First Amendment, would we still enjoy the freedom of speech?
That depends on which value prevails: Are our rights only what lawmakers have written down, or are they personal attributes immune from government reach?
When James Madison was crafting the First Amendment, he insisted that the word “the” precede “freedom of speech” in order to manifest the Framers’ belief that the freedom of speech pre-existed the government. The First Amendment is a negative right.
It doesn’t grant the freedom of speech.
Rather, it restrains Congress from abridging a right that preexisted Congress.
So, what is a right, and where does it come from?
A right is an indefeasible personal claim against the whole world.
It does not require a government permission slip or any precondition or community consensus — only the ability to reason.
It belongs to every human by virtue of our existence.
Privileges — like voting or driving an automobile — come from the government. Rights come from our humanity. Madison included the word “the” before “freedom of speech” in order to underscore its natural — not governmental — origins.
If you accept the existence of the natural law — a body of unchanging moral principles universally knowable by the exercise of reason — you accept that natural rights are ours to exercise whether the government is expressly prohibited from interfering with them or not.
So, under the natural law, murder would still be wrong and unlawful, even if the government were to permit itself and others to kill, as, of course, governments have done and continue to do.
Under the natural law, the answer to our pop quiz is that because the freedom of speech is a natural human right, it exists and is free from government interference whether the prohibition on interference is written down or not.
Is natural law in the Constitution?
Yes.
The Ninth Amendment — Madison’s crown jewel — recognizes the existence of personal human rights too numerous to articulate, and it prohibits the government from denying or disparaging them.
The opposite of natural law is positivism.
It teaches that law is only that which has been written down and ratified by the law giver.
Under positivism, there is no natural law restraint upon the government; right and wrong are only and always whatever the government says they are.
Under positivism, the answer to our pop quiz is that the freedom of speech would be fair game for the government to abridge.
The freedom of speech — to think as you wish, to say what you think, to offer what you say — is so normal, so human, so integral to the very existence of each of us, who cares what the government thinks of it?
Yet, today, the government thinks very little of the freedom of speech, even though all in government —from the president on down to a part-time government janitor — have sworn allegiance to the Constitution.
Today, even though the First Amendment only verbally addresses Congress, the freedom of speech is protected from all government infringement —whether local, state or federal; whether legislative, executive or judicial.
President Woodrow Wilson, who infamously had Princeton University students arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence aloud outside draft offices in Trenton, New Jersey, claiming they might deter men from registering for the draft, argued that the First Amendment only restrained Congress, not the president.
Today, such an argument is hogwash.
I offer this brief philosophical and historical discourse on the freedom of speech as background in order to address how this basic freedom is under attack by the government today.
Today, the attacks on free speech are often silent and unseen, as the government attempts to do indirectly what the First Amendment unambiguously prohibits it from doing directly.
In a case involving Facebook now making its way through the federal courts in Texas, we have learned that the Biden administration pressured Facebook executives to suppress free speech about COVID-19 vaccines.
The suppressed speech offered an alternative view to that which the government preferred. Rather than competing in the marketplace of ideas, the government chose to use its bully power to suppress the speech that it hated or feared or with which it disagreed.
This is government interference with speech because of its content.
The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that, except for a state interest of the highest order — protecting the secrecy of troop movements in wartime, for example — the government is absolutely prohibited from interfering with speech because of its content.
The government claims it was just pointing out errors in scientific materials to Facebook. But that is not government’s job.
The government does not enjoy the freedom of speech; only individuals do.
The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of speech so that individuals can decide for themselves what to say and hear.
Facebook is not the government.
It’s free to censor all it wants. But when it does so to get the government off its back, it thereby acquires an attribute of the government, and a court can impose First Amendment restrictions upon it.
Stated differently, if Facebook and the feds are in a mutually beneficial relationship, they will both lose.
The feds will be restrained by a court — as the Biden administration was — for interfering with the content of speech, and Facebook will lose its ability to censor the content of its own bulletin boards.
Why do we elect persons to protect the Constitution who end up cutting holes in it?
What value is the Constitution if the government can negate it?
Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School, was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of New Jersey. He is the author of five books on the U.S. Constitution. Read Judge Andrew P. Napolitano’s Reports — More Here.
President Joe Biden’s flipping puts the flapjack cooks at IHOP to shame. Sadly, he’s not flipping pancakes, but America’s position on sending certain advanced weapons to Ukraine. Pictured: Biden speaks in Philadelphia on July 20. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
President Joe Biden’s flipping puts the flapjack cooks at IHOP to shame. Sadly, he’s not flipping delicious pancakes, but America’s strategic positions on sending certain weapons to Ukraine. Biden’s pattern of initial reluctance to send advanced weapons, followed by a change of heart under pressure from the media and allies, sends a dangerous message to America’s allies and enemies alike that Washington lacks resolve.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Biden has repeatedly stated that the U.S. and its NATO allies would not provide Kyiv with certain weapons, lest it escalate into a direct conflict between NATO and Russia, or even provoke a nuclear war with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yet, time and time again, the president has changed his mind, belatedly agreeing to send Ukraine weapons that may have had a greater impact if he had done so earlier.
In March 2022, Biden said, “The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand — and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say—that’s called ‘World War III.’ OK?”
Biden has not yet sent American pilots with American crews, but he has repeatedly escalated U.S. and NATO involvement beyond his previous “red lines.”
Critics, among them Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., have condemned Biden’s “‘drip-drip-drip’ approach” to arming Ukraine as costing the defense “valuable time.”
“This strategy harms American interests by prolonging the war,” Wicker said.
Here is a list of “red lines” Biden appeared to draw for himself, but later crossed:
1. Fighter Jets
On March 8, 2022, the United States rejected an offer from NATO ally Poland to transfer its Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets to a U.S. base in Germany en route to Ukraine’s air force to combat Russia’s invasion, Reuters reported. The prospect of transporting aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the Pentagon said. Yet in May of this year, Biden told allies that he would support an international coalition to train Ukrainian pilots on Western fighters, clearing the way for Western jets to take the skies over Ukraine.
Russia has maintained air superiority in the meantime, and a Pentagon official reportedly told Ukraine that it would take 18 to 24 months to train Ukrainian pilots on the F-16. U.S. officials said they had higher priorities to prepare for Ukraine’s spring offensive than training the pilots.
It remains unclear what difference Polish MiG-29s would have made had Biden approved them in March 2022, but it seems the U.S. and its allies could have equipped Ukraine far better for the war in the air had Biden greenlit air support more than a year earlier than he did.
2. Patriot Air Defense Systems
On March 10, 2022, the Pentagon announced it would not send the Patriot air-defense system to Ukraine.
“There’s no discussion about putting a Patriot battery in Ukraine,” a defense official said, Defense One reported. “In order to do that, you have to put U.S. troops with it to operate it. It is not a system that the Ukrainians are familiar with, and as we have made very clear, there will be no U.S. troops fighting in Ukraine.”
Yet last December, Pentagon officials told CNN that they were finalizing a plan to send Patriot systems to the embattled country. U.S. troops would train Ukrainians to use the missile systems at a U.S. Army base in Germany. The typical Patriot battery includes a radar set that detects and tracks targets, computers, power-generating equipment, a control station, and up to eight launchers, which can fire four missiles each. A group of 65 Ukrainian soldiers completed their training in March.
3. Multiple Rocket-Launch System
“We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia,”Biden said on May 30, after a Russian TV host warned that providing Ukraine with a Multiple Launch Rocket System would “cross a red line.”
Yet on the very next day, U.S. officials confirmed that America would send that type of missile system, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, to Ukraine.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych told CNN that Ukraine would use the weapons only to defend his country’s territory, not to attack Russia.
4. Tanks
In mid-January, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reportedly ruled out sending U.S. M1A1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. “We should not be providing the Ukrainians systems they can’t repair, they can’t sustain, and that they, over the long term, can’t afford, because it’s not helpful,” Austin’s policy chief, Colin Kahl, said.
Eleven months after Biden emphasized Russian tanks in his remarks on the Ukraine invasion, his administration finally agreed to send 31 M1A1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. The Pentagon approved the first tanks for shipment on Monday.
On Jan. 25, under pressure from NATO partners, such as Germany, who took the position that they would not provide tanks unless the U.S. did, Biden finally agreed to send in the tanks. What about the concerns about maintenance or training? Apparently, they were surmountable after all.
5. Cluster Munitions
Despite Russia’s widespread use of cluster munitions and the fact that the U.S. and other nations were struggling to keep up with Ukraine’s need for artillery shells, in December, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. would not provide cluster munitions to Kyiv. “According to our own policy, we have concerns about the use of those kinds of munitions,” he explained.
Apparently, that changed, too. On July 8, the U.S. announced it would now send cluster munitions, and the same John Kirby took to the podium to praise the effectiveness of the munitions. “They’re using them effectively, and they are actually having an impact on Russia’s defensive formations and Russia’s defensive maneuvering,” he said. “I think I can leave it at that.”
Why the confusion?
“What can explain all this dithering on decisions to send weapons to Ukraine?” Tom Spoehr, director of the Center For National Defense at The Heritage Foundation, asked in comments to The Daily Signal. He attributed the dithering to “an over-fixation on worries about what Russia might do in response.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Certainly, the administration must be mindful not to push the conflict into World War III, but it is also useful to remember who started the conflict, which party has committed so many war crimes that they are now routine, and nearly nightly uses ballistic and cruise missiles to pound non-military targets in Ukraine, such as hospitals, apartment buildings and shopping centers,” Spoehr added.
“In the midst of the Civil War battle of the Wilderness facing Gen. Robert E. Lee, General and future President Ulysses S. Grant told one of his subordinates, “Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do … . Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.’”
“That might not be bad advice for the White House, either.”
Alex Velez-Green, a senior adviser at Heritage, noted that Biden’s flip-flopping might undermine America’s ability to deter China, its major rival on the world stage.
“America’s priority should be to deter China even as it pushes our NATO allies to do more to defend Europe,” Velez-Green told The Daily Signal. “It’s hard to see how Biden’s decision to send certain weapons to Ukraine after previously ruling them out helps with either of those efforts.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
The collapse of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team mirrors the descent of its most famous player, Megan Rapinoe.
Early Sunday morning, the USWNT exited the World Cup in the first round of the knockout stage, losing to an overmatched Sweden team on penalty kicks at the conclusion of a 0-0 tie. It marked the worst finish for the American women’s team in World Cup history.
Our national team has been ranked No. 1 in the world since June 2017 and for all but 10 months since March 2008. The squad has never been ranked lower than No. 2. In the Round of 16, Sweden conquered a dynasty.
Close observers were not surprised. The team has been in mental decay since Carli Lloyd retired (2020) and corporate media anointed the purple-haired Rapinoe as the unquestioned face of American women’s soccer.
For the last three years, the 38-year-old winger has used the team’s spotlight to grow the Rapinoe brand. The game, the competition, and representing national honor all took a back seat to self-promotion, virtue-signaling, so-called social activism centered around the BLM-LGBTQ-Alphabet Mafia, and expressing Trump derangement.
Rapinoe’s handlers and major corporations partnered with corporate media to cast her as “The Great Gay Hope,” the alternative-lifestyle Muhammad Ali.
Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Carli Lloyd, and Alex Morgan were all better players than Rapinoe. But none of them can match Rapinoe’s knack for drawing attention to herself for sleeping with women — her superpower, the behavior that makes her a legendary icon.
The same forces that have attempted to make Brittney Griner the Nelson Mandela of basketball insisted that “The Great Gay Hope” take a victory lap on the national team long past her expiration date.
To no surprise, the strategy backfired. Rapinoe acted as a locker-room cancer. She diminished the importance of competition. Throughout the World Cup, the U.S. women failed to play with passion and precision. In four games, they scored four goals and won just one match.
Fox Sports broadcaster Alexi Lalas repeatedly warned that the U.S. team would lose. Lloyd, working alongside Lalas, blasted the team after it laughed off and celebrated following a disappointing 0-0 tie with Portugal in its final group match.
The team had the wrong attitude. The team mirrored its star, Rapinoe, who was being crowned with commercials and feature stories promoting the legend of Megan Rapinoe. The World Cup was a coronation of Rapinoe … until it wasn’t.
On Sunday, with a chance to off Sweden with a penalty kick, Rapinoe missed the entire net wide right. She smirked and laughed in embarrassment. Two other U.S. women missed their kicks as well. But those women earned their spots on the roster. Rapinoe was on the team and on the field because of social pressure and a never-ending marketing campaign. She hadn’t earned the right to fail. The opportunity was bestowed on her.
When it was over, when the No. 1-ranked team in the world completed its epic collapse, supporters of “The Great Gay Hope” refused to pivot. ESPN aired a three-minute feature story on Rapinoe narrated by her “fiancee,” WNBA player Sue Bird.
The Worldwide Leader in Sports carried on as if Rapinoe had stuck a Kerri Strug-like landing, scored 61 points like Kobe, or ricocheted into the end zone like John Elway.
“The Great Gay Hope” crashed and burned. She took her teammates with her.
When asked for her greatest memory of her “legendary” career, she pointed to the lawsuit she and her teammates filed against the U.S. Soccer Federation over alleged pay inequality. Gender pay inequality is a myth and a lie, no different from other popular corporate media narratives like climate change and the alleged genocidal homicide of unarmed black men.
But the truth is irrelevant in the making of an Alphabet Mafia icon. Megan Rapinoe is the George Floyd of soccer. Racism and sexism are the only things that prevented them from being president and vice president of the United States.
Or maybe Rapinoe is just another narcissistic, greedy, entitled celebrity.
Could you imagine Joe Montana or Michael Jordan summarizing their careers by referencing a contract dispute?
Rapinoe is a fraud. She’s the Colin Kaepernick of soccer. Her attitude poisoned the women’s national soccer team. Let’s hope her side effects don’t linger.
The government-funded pundits at National Propaganda Radio (NPR) seem to have a toxic fixation with race.
On Tuesday, the outlet blamed the success of American country music on racial prejudice. In a podcast episode titled“How racism became a marketing tool for country music,” NPR brought on a historian to outline the myriad ways country music is a vehicle for white supremacy. The host, Britany Luse, introduces the episode by previewing questions to Amanda Martinez, a country music historian at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Luse wants to know “how country music became this symbol of racism” and why country music stars remain popular despite artists who currently lead the charts “peddling racist rhetoric today.”
“Is racism really what it takes make country music number one?” Luse asks. “I wanted to know how country music became this symbol of racism.”
The episode went to air over recent allegations of racism against country music stars currently at the top of the charts. Jason Aldean’s recent number-one hit, “Try That In A Small Town,” drew controversy over the suggestion that inner-city riots such as the record-devastating outbursts that erupted in 2020 wouldn’t be tolerated outside major metropolitan areas. Aldean didn’t try to hide the message, as if he even needed to.
“That sh-t may fly in the city. Good luck trying that in a small town.”
“Unfortunately, I think that these three very successful songs at the top of the charts only encourages the country music business to continue what it’s always done,” Martinez said, “which is making a product for a white conservative base.”
Aldean, Martinez added, is “calling for a suppression of those calls for greater freedoms” embedded in the 2020 riots.
According to NPR, the song is racist because of its condemnation of deadly uprisings brought about by Black Lives Matter under the righteous banner of social justice.
The podcast host also brought up Morgan Wallen, because he used the N-word one time, and Luke Combs, because the song that has him in the number three spot is apparently adapted from a black queer woman. While social justice warriors might otherwise be flattered by Combs’ tribute to 1988 Grammy winner Tracy Chapman, the cancellers have to see victimization in everything, so they manufacture a narrative about race so they can continue to label everything “white supremacist.” NPR has now decoded country music as a primary pillar of systemic racism, courtesy of the taxpayer.
“I think we’re continuing to see conservatives kind of hold up country music as supposedly morally superior to an alternative, youth-oriented black popular music,” said Martinez.
But let’s examine the obscenity that’s come to define rap music.
“Fukumean,” currently the number one rap song in the country by Gunna, is an anthem about the rapper’s own superiority and unapologetic determination to stay at the top of the social hierarchy.
F-cking this b-tchh like a perv, smack from the back, grab her perm. Ice the burr, sh-tin’ on all you lil’ turds.
In 2020, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” which stands for “Wet A– P-ssy,” topped the Billboard charts for at least four weeks. The lyrics are so obscene that they are not suitable for publication. Readers can read them here.
But more specifically, let’s examine some rap lyrics about Jews. In 1989, a militant rap group called Public Enemy released “Welcome to the Terrordome.” The lyrics read, “Crucifixion ain’t no fiction: so-called chosen, frozen/Apology made to whoever pleases. Still, they got me like Jesus,” followed by “Backstabbed, grabbed a flag from the back of the lab, told the ‘rab, get off the rag.”
In 2017, Jay-Z’s “Story of O.J.” played on Jewish stereotypes of financial dominance.
You wanna know what’s more important than throwin’ away money at a strip club? Credit. You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This how they did it.
Rap music has also mocked Arabs and Asians. Ice Cube released “Black Korea” in 1991, deriding “funky little stores” run by Asian-Americans.
Every time I wanna go get a f-ckin’ brew I gotta go down to the store with the two Oriental one penny countin’ motherf-ckers that make a n-gga mad enough to cause a little ruckus … Pay respect to the fist or we’ll burn your store, right down to a crisp.
Now let’s look at some of the commentary from NPR celebrating the genre. In June 2020, NPR published a list of 50 songs deemed significant to black history that they claim “lift music itself” and represent the “spirit of resistance” against racial injustices. To NPR, rap music represents a revolutionary response in support of a righteous cause, and country music represents the worst elements of American racism.
NPR’s Pattern Of Divisive Coverage
The racial lens through which NPR produces coverage has driven the government outlet to produce some bizarre takes on race. In the summer of 2020, NPR flat-out invented a racist crime altogether.
“Rightwing extremists are turning cars into weapons, with reports of 50 vehicle-ramming incidents since protests erupted nationwide in late May,” NPR tweeted. The story featured an image of a Buick sedan surrounded by demonstrators. Local coverage of the incident revealed it was the protestors, not the driver, who will face charges after the altercation. It was the driver who was assaulted by armed rioters.
Just two weeks prior, the outlet published commentary that called on followers to begin “decolonizing your bookshelf.” NPR claimed it was “Republican leaders” the following year who were trying to “ban books.”
In essence, "decolonizing your bookshelf" is about actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long, says @itsjuanlove. https://t.co/pbSBx8Z4So
Guests on NPR in 2020 also declared the George Floyd riots “‘Acts of Rebellion’ Instead Of Riots” and authored books on the “Defense of Looting.” In the “All Things Considered” podcast that same year, host Sacha Pfeiffer characterized then-President Donald Trump’s initiative to promote patriotic education as an exercise in “cultural division.” Federalist Editor Joy Pullmann reported the comment came after Trump said this:
We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world
In 2019, an NPR affiliate also decried struggling to pronounce foreign names as “racist.”
If someone wanted to incite a race war, they would pull from the NPR playbook, inserting an element of racial animus into every story. The pattern of coverage from the taxpayer-funded outlet reveals an agenda on race that’s far more corrosive to national discourse than if Aldean had even tossed the N-word into his number-one hit.
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.
Part four of the “Facebook Files” published by Rep. Jim Jordan on Monday shows a top FBI agent who was coordinating censorship strategy with Silicon Valley tech companies may have committed perjury in November testimony.
FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, who serves as the bureau’s “main conduit between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and Big Tech,” according to Jordan, was deposed last fall as a central player in the government censorship case Missouri v. Biden. Chan testified that he was only aware of one meeting between Facebook employees and the FBI about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, but internal Facebook documents show him participating in an additional “secret follow-up call.”
THE FACEBOOK FILES PART 4. FBI LIED ABOUT MEETING WITH BIG TECH REGARDING NY POST’S HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY
Internal FB docs reveal that an FBI Special Agent made false statements in testimony about the FBI’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story
In his November deposition, Chan admitted to an Oct. 14, 2020 meeting with officials at Facebook related to the first Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post. The Post revealed emails from the laptop that indicated then-candidate Joe Biden had been lying when he claimed to have never spoken about Hunter’s business with him “or with anyone else.”
At the Oct. 14 meeting, Laura Dehmlow, the FBI’s section chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, offered “no comment” when Facebook asked whether the laptop was real, Jordan explained. Facebook quickly announced it was “reducing” the “distribution” of the story until the platform completed a third-party fact check.
Dehmlow told House lawmakers in July that in a meeting with Twitter earlier on Oct. 14, someone from the FBI had acknowledged the laptop’s authenticity before other officials at the bureau switched their answer to “no comment.” That became the FBI’s official response when other companies such as Facebook asked whether the laptop was real, even though the agency had confirmed the laptop’s authenticity as early as November 2019, according to IRS whistleblowers.
In November, Chan recalled Dehmlow’s response at the Oct. 14 meeting where Dehmlow offered Facebook no comment on the legitimacy of the laptop. Chan told lawmakers that was his only meeting on the matter with the social media company. Internal records from the company made public by GOP House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, however, reveal another apparent meeting between Chan and Facebook employees.
One employee recalled having an Oct. 15 discussion with Chan as a “follow up” to the meeting with the Foreign Influence Task Force on Oct. 14. The employee asked Chan for any updates or changes on the legitimacy status of Hunter Biden’s laptop. While Chan testified in his deposition that he had “no internal knowledge” of the FBI’s investigation into the infamous laptop, records from Facebook reveal Chan told employees he “was up to speed on the current state of the matter within the FBI.”
Those weren’t Agent Chan’s only inconsistent statements. Agent Chan also claimed in the deposition that he had “no internal knowledge of [the FBI’s] investigation” involving Hunter Biden’s laptop. pic.twitter.com/eGf4gfx3wW
Previous installments of the “Facebook Files” exposed corporate-government collusion between Facebook and Biden White House officials collaborating to censor information about Covid-19, includingcontent that was “true.” Records show the Biden administration pressured Facebook to take down “humorous or satirical content that suggests the vaccine isn’t safe,” among other claims about side effects even if they were “true.”
In July, Chief Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana delivered a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden, prohibiting administration officials from collaborating with tech titans to censor dissenting speech on social media platforms. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals later issued a stay on the injunction, with oral argument scheduled to take place Thursday, leaving federal officials free to continue working with tech companies to censor Americans online in the meantime.
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 average increase in the price of gasoline was 30 cents per gallon in the past month — and could complicate President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection strategy, the Daily News reported Monday. More trouble for Biden’s campaign could come as the price hikes may also intensify as planned cuts in OPEC+ production, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and Russia, take hold in international markets, with high summer temperatures also contributing to higher energy demand, which would further drive up prices.
Currently, the average gas price is $3.83 per gallon, up from $3.53 one month ago, according to AAA and an average level not seen since October. Prices are still significantly lower that an all-time high of $5.01 per gallon in June 2022.
Republicans have criticized Biden’s green policies, connecting the issue to the higher cost of gasoline, the Daily Caller reported. Biden has hoped to rely heavily on “Bidenomics” as a strong point going into next year’s election.
Rising oil prices threaten to intensify inflationary pressures that continue to be a feature of the American economy, the The Wall Street Journal reported. The rising energy prices usually cause higher prices in other sectors by making transportation and the production processes more expensive.
Biden released tens of millions of barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) last year in an attempt to control surging gas prices before the midterm elections. That decision means that the SPR, which is generally meant to serve as a supply in case of war or some other national emergency, could now take decades to refill to peak levels, according to the Daily Mail.
Last week the Biden administration delayed refilling the SPR due to higher oil prices and unfavorable market conditions.
Mike Pence lashed out Monday at President Joe Biden after a chilling Wall Street Journal report revealed a combined Russian and Chinese naval force had last week patrolled the Alaskan coast just outside U.S. territorial waters.
The fleet — the largest such flotilla to approach American shores — was made up of 11 Russian and Chinese ships, and was shadowed by four U.S. destroyers and P-8 Poseidon aircraft, the Journal reported.
The former vice president in the Trump administration — now a 2024 GOP presidential contender — blamed the incident on Biden’s weak leadership.
“Under President Biden, Russia and China threaten to conquer their neighbors & their new Axis is now operating together off the American coast. China & Russia & their ‘no limits’ partnership now conducts joint blue water naval operations off the American coast & the arctic north,” Pence wrote on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter.
“America needs a new Commander-in-Chief who understands the threat and will build a much bigger navy, new shipyards and a military fitted to the widening threats of the 21st Century. The enemies of freedom only understand strength,” Pence wrote.
The blatant aggression comes amid heightened tensions between the United States and China and Russia, particularly surrounding Taiwan and Ukraine, The Hill noted.
The Journal reported a spokesperson for the U.S. Northern Command confirmed the stunning report, but didn’t provide details on the number of ships or the precise location of the Chinese and Russian ships.
“Air and maritime assets under our commands conducted operations to assure the defense of the United States and Canada. The patrol remained in international waters and was not considered a threat,” the official told the Journal.
Alaska’s GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan applauded the U.S. response amid a “new era of authoritarian aggression,” the news outlet reported.
According to the Journal, Russia’s Defense Ministry on Friday said Russian and Chinese vessels had carried out drills involving communications training, helicopter landings and takeoffs from the decks of each other’s ships — and in a joint anti-submarine exercise in which a mock target was detected and destroyed.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington told the Journal the patrol wasn’t aimed at Washington.
“According to the annual cooperation plan between the Chinese and Russian militaries, naval vessels of the two countries have recently conducted joint maritime patrols in relevant waters in the western and northern Pacific Ocean. This action is not targeted at any third party and has nothing to do with the current international and regional situation,” said the Chinese embassy spokesman, Liu Pengyu, the Journal reported.
The USS John S. McCain, the USS Benfold, the USS John Finn, and the USS Chung-Hoon responded to the flotilla, tracking its movement, the Journal reported. The four destroyers were in addition to the American maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft.
The American Academy of Pediatrics launched a review of the evidence on transgender “care” but is endorsing the experimental medical interventions anyway. Pictured: Protester holds a sign supporting “gender-affirming care” in New York City on June 25. (Photo: Erik McGregor, LightRocket/Getty Images)
Imagine the Food and Drug Administration announces a new drug with some known side effects and no proven benefits and says, “We’re not quite sure this is safe for the public. We need to run more tests, but until we learn more, everyone should take it anyway.” COVID-19 vaccines notwithstanding, the American public would rightly mock such guidance, and the FDA commissioner might find a pink slip when he returns to his desk.
Yet something very similar to this just happened at the American Academy of Pediatrics. The academy bills itself as the top organization for pediatricians in the United States, and it has formally endorsed the idea that children can consent to experimental “transgender” medical treatments that will leave them stunted, scarred, and infertile.
On Thursday, the academy voted to confirm its 2018 policy statement supporting “gender-affirming care,” but it also authorized a “systematic review of the evidence,” in part, to develop an expanded set of guidance for pediatricians.
As The New York Times’ Azeen Ghorayshi reported, this “systematic review of medical research on the treatments” follows “similar efforts in Europe that found uncertain evidence for their effectiveness in adolescents.” Indeed, many European countries have withdrawn their support for childhood gender interventions, embracing a “watchful waiting” approach.
The American Academy of Pediatrics admits that more research is warranted but endorses the experimental “treatments” anyway. In what world does that make sense?
Like so many other pro-transgender organizations, the academy claims that the best evidence supports “gender-affirming care,” the euphemism these activists use to refer to a wide variety of interventions that aim at making girls look like boys and vice versa.
“Gender-affirming care” involves pumping kids with “puberty blockers”—drugs like Lupron, which the FDA has not approved for gender dysphoria (the persistent condition of painfully identifying with the gender that is the opposite one’s biological sex); or “cross-sex hormones” (testosterone for girls, estrogen for boys) that introduce a hormone imbalance, a condition that endocrinologists would otherwise recognize as a disease. (Endocrinologists treat the endocrine system, which uses hormones to control metabolism, reproduction, growth, and more.)
Psychiatrists, endocrinologists, neurologists, and other doctors testified in support of a Florida health agency’s rule preventing Medicaid from funding various forms of “gender-affirming care,” such as “puberty-blockers,” cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries.
“Patients suffering from gender dysphoria or related issues have a right to be protected from experimental, potentially harmful treatments lacking reliable, valid, peer-reviewed, published, long-term scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness,” Dr. Paul Hruz, an endocrinology researcher and clinician at Washington University School of Medicine, wrote in a sworn affidavit.
Hruz notes that “there are no long-term, peer-reviewed published, reliable, and valid research studies” documenting the percentage of patients helped or harmed by transgender medical interventions. He also notes that attempts to block puberty followed by cross-sex hormones not only impact fertility but also pose risks such as low bone density, “disfiguring acne, high blood pressure, weight gain, abnormal glucose tolerance, breast cancer, liver disease, thrombosis, and cardiovascular disease.”
Hruz and other doctors argue that the medical interventions often described as “gender-affirming care” are experimental and that the organizations that present standards of care supporting them—the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Endocrine Society—represent more a political and advocacy effort than an objective analysis supporting these alleged treatments.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is right to launch a systematic review of the evidence, and it should embrace caution in light of that review. If there is no concrete evidence that these experimental and life-altering drugs will actually help children in the long run, then the academy should stop recommending them until it uncovers the facts. Otherwise, it is needlessly putting children at risk and encouraging medical malpractice that will lead more “detransitioners” like Chloe Cole to file lawsuits after they realize the harm doctors have done to their bodies in the name of this destructive ideology.
Left-wing media were shown to be wrong about “Sound of Freedom” last week when the FBI announced a major child-trafficking bust, less than a month after the film was released. Pictured: The FBI and Chattanooga, Tennessee, police work together on the effort to eradicate the scourge of child trafficking. (Photo: FBI)
While 126 more suspects in child trafficking and child sexual exploitation are eating prison food today, many legacy media outlets are eating crow.
Less than a month after liberal and left-wing media outlets slammed the child sex-trafficking docudrama “Sound of Freedom” for supposedly being a rallying point for “QAnon supporters,”conspiracy theorists, and “Dads with Brainworms,” the FBI announced the arrests of 126 suspects in a massive child-trafficking investigation.
The FBI, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and state and local law enforcement agencies collaborated in “Operation Cross Country XIII,” resulting in the rescue of “59 actively missing children,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a prepared statement on Aug. 1.
Given the increased prominence of child sex trafficking and exploitation over the past two decades in the United States, a rational individual would think that NPR (which receives government funding and passes itself off as an “independent and unbiased” news source) would mention the 22 times it had covered child sex-trafficking arrests in the past decade, but that’s not the case. Instead, NPR featured the criticism of professors who claimed that a movie drawing attention to the evils of child trafficking would make victims “more invisible and more vulnerable to exploitation.”
Is “Sound of Freedom” remotely close to a political hit piece of conspiracy and wacky nonsense that outlets like Jezebel and The Guardian built it up to be? No—not even close. “Sound of Freedom” tells the story of Tim Ballard (portrayed by actor Jim Caviezel), a man who dedicated his life to fighting child sex trafficking—by starting the organization Operation Underground Railroad.
Does NPR at least give the same treatment to other movies it considers “political advocacy” films? No, it doesn’t. NPR recently described the pro-abortion movie “Happening” as “timely and urgent,” free of the bothersome quotes of critics who might take issue with the movie’s portrayal of pro-life and pro-choice cultures.
When reporting on a subject, one might expect relevant data and statistics concerning the subject at hand to figure prominently. None of the outlets that were scathingly critical of “Sound of Freedom” cared to mention the Department of Health and Human Services’ estimates that anywhere from 240,000 to 325,000 women and children are trafficked in the U.S. annually.
While NPR endeavored to find angry professors to quote in its piece, victims of sex trafficking are noticeably absent. Perhaps a victim of the ruthless practice might have a unique perspective on Angel Studios’ portrayal of the subject.
“Fox and Friends” interviewed trafficking survivor Donna Hubbard from Woman at the Well Transition Center, who praised “Sound of Freedom” and called on lawmakers to act on the issue.
Emma Waters, a research associate with The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family told The Daily Signal that she isn’t surprised by the Left’s dismissive attitude.
The attempts by mainstream media and leftist outlets to discredit … ‘Sound of Freedom’ are less surprising when you consider four of the main areas that aggravate child sexual exploitation: the porous southern border, unaccountable social media platforms, child pornography, and broken families.
What woke ideologues don’t want to admit is that when people mock the traditional family and encourage soft-on-crime policies, it’s children who suffer exploitation and abuse.
(The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
What should be a nonpartisan issue and an open space for praising the brave men and women who rescue children from the horrors of trafficking has become a pointlessly contentious issue because a Christian film studio produced a movie that resonates more with conservatives and independents than the latest “Indiana Jones” movie at the box office.
It took less than one month for “Sound of Freedom” to prove why it was worth making, why we need to be constantly alert, and why Americans continue to lose trust in the legacy media.
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.
President Joe Biden’s White House demanded an increase of censorship from Facebook in 2021, new emails reveal — confirming once again that the administration believes Americans are stupid.
In part three of what he deemed the “Facebook Files,” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released more communications obtained from Facebook detailing the immense pressure the Big Tech company received from the executive branch to limit what Americans saw online. Emails show Courtney Rowe, then-White House director of strategic communications and engagement for Covid-19 response, praising Facebook in April 2021 for offering the White House suppression data “broken down by region and demographics.” One sentence later, she petitioned the Big Tech company to answer, “how do we work with you all to push back on it[?]” because she believed that “if someone in rural Arkansas sees something on FB, it’s the truth.”
Jordan said Rowe “mocked Real America’s ability to determine what’s true and what isn’t” because the Biden administration “didn’t think you were smart enough to decide for yourself.”
In April 2021, Biden’s then-Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty also sent Facebook several suppression demands to censor right-wing commentators and publications. According to Flaherty, outlets like the Daily Wire are “polarizing” and not “authoritative news source[s].”
“You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?” Flaherty questioned.
On behalf of the White House, Flaherty even asked Facebook to reduce visibility for the New York Post, which debuted reporting about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” and Biden family corruption six months earlier.
“I’m curious – NY Post churning out articles every day… What is supposed to happen to that from Policy perspective. Does that article get a reduction, labels?” Flaherty asked the censors.
Flaherty eventually concluded that his preference for controlling online speech was to convince Facebook to “kick people off” of the social media platform.
“We’re keen on what platforms are doing to reduce the spread of bad information, that platforms are not funneling people towards bad content,” Flaherty wrote. “That’s our primary concern.”
The censors at the Silicon Valley giant explained that they couldn’t “remove” every user or post deemed problematic by the White House but eventually agreed to demote certain posts even when the posts did not explicitly violate Facebook’s terms and conditions.
Facebook claimed that posts complaining about the “government overreach” of the Biden administration’s Covid jab mandates were reduced because they fed a “vaccine negative environment.”
“The company ADMITTED to the White House that it reduced content of certain posts – even if the posts didn’t violate the company’s terms and contained TRUE information,” Jordan explained.
Weaponizing the censorship industrial complex against Americans isn’t the only time Biden and his Democrat cronies have revealed their belief that Americans are stupid and can’t think for themselves. As early as 1988, Biden was telling voters to their faces that they were not credentialed enough to criticize him.
“I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” then-Sen. Biden infamously proclaimed to a voter who asked him to explain his lies about his academic track record.
The ruling regime’s contempt for Americans was made even more abundantly clear during the pandemic. While Democrats demonstrated their disdain for their voters with hypocritical visits to hair salons and fancy restaurants during the height of lockdowns, Biden tried to force Covid shots on hardworking Americans who he apparently thought were not educated well enough to thoughtfully reject the jab.
BIDEN: The choice to be unvaccinated "has been fueled by dangerous misinformation on cable tv… I call on the purveyors of these lies and misinformation to stop it. Stop it now." pic.twitter.com/gVKxunkrjK
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Alina Habba, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, told Newsmax he has every right to question the results of the 2020 election. Habba made her comments on “National Report,” Friday.
“Trump has every right to question the integrity of the election,” she said. “He had every right to do so at the time, I think millions and millions of Americans still to this day also share that sentiment that there may have been issues in the 2020 election.”
“We’ve seen documentaries come out on it. We’ve seen a lot of facts that result in this continual belief that things were not done exactly appropriately, and the president did what he wanted to do and what he needed to do in the way that he was advised by some …
“But imagine any politician who feels that that somebody has lied or that there’s been a fraud, not being able to challenge that fraud and what that means for our country. That’s their job, and he was the sole person in the executive branch who had the power to do so.”
As for reports that said Trump was irked at his arraignment when the magistrate referred to him as “Mr.” Trump as opposed to “President” Trump, Habba said: “To be honest, if President Trump got upset every time somebody disrespected him, I think he wouldn’t be able to wake up every morning.
“So you know he didn’t mention it to me directly, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I think it’s incredibly disrespectful.”
She said she favors moving the trial outside the Democrat-dominated Washington, D.C.
“So, I do think that should be done,” she said. “I think that would be the smart thing strategically to do.”
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Demonstrators listen to a speaker at an “Our Bodies, Our Sports” rally for the 50th anniversary of Title IX at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. The June 23, 2022, rally — organized by several women’s athletic groups — was held to call on President Joe Biden to put restrictions on transgender “women” and “advocate to keep women’s sports female.” (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Jess Hilarious, a well-known comedian and personality, has recently created quite a stir in the world of social media. She dared to voice her opinion on a trending video where a transgender “woman” claimed that “womanhood” and menstruation were not exclusive to biological women.
Hilarious responded with the simple truth that only biological women can menstruate and bear children, and quite rightly so.
Comedienne Jess Hilarious — seen here performing onstage at a taping Wednesday of iHeartRadio’s “Living Black 2023 Block Party” in Inglewood, Calif. — isn’t buying into the transgender “woman” ideology. (Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Let’s not tiptoe around the facts. Biological men, or in layman’s terms, individuals born with male genitalia, can never and will never have the capacity to give birth to children or menstruate. It’s not an opinion or a debate, but a cold, hard fact of biology. We need to face reality, instead of diving deeper into an abyss of unscientific thinking.
What is truly confounding is the muddled state of the discourse surrounding women’s identity. Women, throughout history, have fought countless battles for recognition and rights. And now, we’re embroiled in a debate questioning the very definition of what constitutes a woman. Have we suddenly discarded centuries of biological understanding and scientific knowledge in favor of a more subjective, individualistic interpretation?
What’s the future holding for us, then? Should we expect more such redefinitions? If an individual identifies as another race, alters their skin color and claims they’re “transracial,” will we accept it without question?
Suppose someone identifies as wealthy without having a single dime in their bank account. Are we to consider them “trans-wealthy”? And where does this end? If a person starts identifying as a dog, a cat or any other creature, will we be required to play along and call them “trans-animal”? The fundamental issue is this: The intensity of your feelings, however genuine they may be, cannot change reality.
“The intensity of your feelings, however genuine they may be, cannot change reality.”
Consider this hypothetical scenario: A century from now, an archeologist excavates the skeletal remains of a transgender “woman.” Scientific analysis, independent of any subjective biases, would incontrovertibly reveal the skeleton to belong to a biological man. Yet, in our current culture, we’re asked to suspend our disbelief and affirm that a person who identifies as a woman is, indeed, a woman. Are we not treading on treacherous ground?
The situation is undoubtedly confusing, even frustrating. However, it’s vital to maintain perspective and not let absurdity take root. A biological man, regardless of the quantities of estrogen he consumes, regardless of the breast or buttock implants he acquires, regardless of wigs, fake eyelashes, name changes or women’s clothes, will never be a biological woman.
Is that too difficult to grasp? Or has society become so immersed in this collective delusion that we’ve forgotten the simplest of truths? We need to pause, step back and scrutinize the path we’re treading. Do we want a world governed by feelings over facts, where reality can be reshaped according to individual whims and wishes?
It’s time to reaffirm our commitment to biological realities and reject the sociocultural illusions that threaten to subvert them. Let us not blur those lines for the sake of momentary societal trends. Being a woman is not merely a matter of identification, but a concrete, biological reality that we need to acknowledge and uphold.
The idea that our biological identities can be overwritten by personal feelings sets a dangerous precedent. It undermines the empirical facts of our existence, breeding confusion and potentially harming societal progress in the long run.
It’s imperative that we maintain balance in our approach to this discussion. We should stand firm and remain grounded in biological realities. It’s about recognizing that while everyone has the right to identify as they wish, there are some truths that simply cannot be altered.
We need to draw the line between affirming one’s identity and denying biological facts, lest we risk veering into a realm where anything and everything is subject to personal interpretation and feelings. We must face the challenge head-on, with a robust commitment to truth and reason.
The Biden administration has lost contact with 85,000 unaccompanied alien children within the U.S. Pictured: A Venezuelan migrant girl holds a doll while walking on the banks of the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico, on Dec. 27, 2022. (Photo: Herika Martinez/AFP/Getty Images)
Congressman Chris Smith is preparing to introduce legislation that will require the federal government to locate the 85,000 migrant children it has lost contact with within the U.S.
“This is all about accountability and effective interventions for these kids,” Smith, R-N.J., told The Daily Signal.
The draft legislation is focused on “locating, establishing contact with, [conducting] wellness checks, and [investigating] trafficking” of the 85,000 migrant children, Smith said.
In February, The New York Times reported that even though the Department of Health and Human Services checks on all unaccompanied minors who cross the border illegally “by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors,” data obtained by the newspaper “showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children.”
“Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children,” the Times reported.
Smith expressed concern that the individuals who agree to act as sponsors for the children within the U.S. could take advantage of the lack of accountability and exploit the children. Unaccompanied migrant children remain in the custody of HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement until they are placed with a parent or sponsor, but the agency “does not monitor or track the whereabouts of children after they are released from our care,” Robin Dunn Marcos, director of the office, told members of Congress during a hearing in April.
The children with whom the Biden administration has lost contact “need to be protected from… these terrible traffickers who will exploit them, rape them, put them into forced labor of some kind,” Smith said. “And so, it’s a very real problem that’s happening all over the world, [and] happening right here in our backyard.”
Smith explained the importance of the forthcoming legislation during a July 25 screening of the anti-human tracking film “Sound of Freedom” on Capitol Hill. The bill aims to “investigate any suspicion of human trafficking related to the approximately 85,000 unaccompanied minors who were released from federal government custody and with whom subsequent contact has been lost,” he told the crowd at the film screening.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sponsored the screening of the film that drew lawmakers and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Smith says McCarthy has received a copy of the draft legislation and is confident the speaker will bring the bill to the floor of the House for a vote after it is formally introduced.
Smith worked to craft the legislation with Eduardo Verastegui, producer of and actor in the “Sound of Freedom,” and Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Severino previously served as the director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights.
Among the 85,000 children, a “percentage of those kids, we have reason to believe, were already being trafficked for labor and sex trafficking purposes,” Severino told The Daily Signal, adding that it is a “national scandal” that the people HHS handed these children over to are “unwilling to account for where those kids are now.”
“It says that [the Department of Homeland Security], HHS and FBI must report to Congress as to the whereabouts of these children… who they are with, and whether or not the people who are taking care of them are criminals,” he said. “And third, how many of those kids have been trafficked.”
The New Jersey congressman plans to introduce the legislation soon after he ensures all lawmakers who wish to co-sponsor the legislation have the opportunity to do so, and says he hopes it will gain bipartisan support.
Smith has been a member of Congress since 1981 and says he has been working on combatting human trafficking since 1995. In 2000, Smith authored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which provided the federal government with tools to combat human trafficking.
America has “good laws,” to combat human trafficking, Smith said, but the “problem is we have not had a faithful implementation [of the laws] and the kind of aggressive work by the executive branch that it warrants.”
Customs and Border Protection reports encountering more than 423,000 unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office.
It “may be embarrassing to the Biden administration that lost the [85,000] children to shed light on that fact, but tough luck,” Severino said. “They lost the kids. They should be responsible for finding them.”
After so many Americans have watched “Sound of Freedom,” which has now grossed $155 million at the box office in one month, the “American people are demanding action,” Severino said. “This bill is the start of saving children from the clutches of some of the worst evil devised by man.”
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.
FIRST ON FOX:Devon Archer told congressional investigators that Hunter Biden used then-Vice President Joe Biden as “defensive leverage” to send “the right signals” to his foreign business partners, while selling him as “the brand” that offered “capabilities and reach,” as well as a “unique understanding of D.C.”
Archer’s comments came during a transcribed interview before the House Oversight Committee on Monday. Fox News Digital obtained the more than 140-page transcript of Archer’s interview, which took place behind closed doors.
Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, arrives at the O’Neill House Office Building before testifying to the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Monday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Archer told investigators that Hunter Biden used his “very powerful name” to “add value” in pitching and securing foreign business ventures.
Archer said Hunter Biden “would not be so overt,” or “overtly” say “we’re going to use my dad for this,” but instead, Archer said that he would use the name to “get leverage.”
“Defensive leverage that the value is there in his work,” Archer said.
“The value that Hunter Biden brought to it was having — you know, there was — the theoretical was corporate governance, but obviously, given the brand, that was a large part of the value,” he continued. “I don’t think it was the sole value, but I do think that was a key component of the value.”
Devon Archer golfing with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in 2014. (Fox News)
Archer told investigators that Hunter put his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, on speakerphone while meeting with business partners at least 20 times. Archer described how Joe Biden was put on the phone to sell “the brand.”
“You aren’t talking about Dr. Jill or anybody else. You’re talking about Joe Biden. Is that fair to say?” Archer was asked.
Archer replied: “Yeah, that’s fair to say… Obviously, that brought the most value to the brand… It was Hunter Biden and him,” Archer said. “We would discuss having, you know, an understanding of D.C. and that was a differentiating component of us being able to raise capital.”
Devon Archer, a former longtime business associate of Hunter Biden, is set to testify before Congress.
He added, “It wasn’t as specific as, you know… the vice president’s son, but obviously, the brand carried.”
When asked if Archer and Hunter Biden would tell business partners they had “unique access” because of Vice President Biden, Archer said: “Yes, we would say we had unique understanding of D.C. and how it operates and how that, you know, could positively reflect on the terms of our business.”
Archer served on the board of Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings alongside Hunter Biden beginning in 2014 and received $83,000 a month for his work.
Referring to Burisma, Archer told investigators that Hunter Biden used the “brand” of Joe Biden for having “doors opened,” which “sent the right signals” for Burisma to “carry on its business and be successful.”
“My only thought is that I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it,” Archer said.
When pressed, Archer clarified that he believed Burisma was “able to survive” for as long as it did “just because of the brand.”
“Because people would be intimidated to mess with them,” Archer explained.
“In what way?” Archer was asked.
“Legally.”
From left: President Biden, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer. (Fox News)
President Biden and the White House have repeatedly denied ever being in business with his son, and have repeatedly said Joe Biden never discussed the businesses and never had any knowledge about his son’s business dealings.
But Archer testified that then-Vice President Biden attended dinners with Hunter’s foreign business associates — including with an executive of Burisma Holdings.
One dinner, Archer recalled, took place in the spring of 2014 at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Archer, Eric Schwerin, the mayor of Moscow’s wife Yelena Baturina and other business partners attended.
That dinner took place just weeks after Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, an LLC linked to Hunter Biden and his associates.
Archer also recalled a dinner in the spring of 2015, again at Cafe Milano. This time, Archer said Vadym Pozharskyi — an executive at Burisma — attended the dinner.
Meanwhile, as for Burisma, Archer testified that he and Hunter Biden attended a board of directors meeting in Dubai on Dec. 4, 2015.
On the sidelines of that meeting, Archer testified that Burisma CEO Mykola Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharskyi asked Hunter to make a phone call to “D.C” to address “pressure” the company was facing.”
Archer said Burisma had “several pressure issues,” saying that was “kind of a theme” of the company, noting the issues involved 23 million pounds of “capital tied up in London,” U.S. visa issues and the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the firm.
“They requested Hunter, you know, help them with some of that pressure,” Archer said. “You know, government pressure from Ukrainian government investigations into Mykola, et cetera.”
Hunter Biden, left, and Mykola Zlochevsky. (Getty Images)
Fox News Digital previously reported that on Nov. 2, 2015, just weeks before the board meeting in Dubai, Pozharskyi emailed Hunter Biden, emphasizing that the “ultimate purpose” of the agreement to have Hunter on the board was to shut down “any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine,” referring to Zlochevsky, who also went by Nikolay.
“The request is like, can D.C. help?” Archer said, adding, however, that the request was not specific to “can the big guy help.”
“It was always this amorphous, can we get help in D.C.?”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, pressed Archer, saying: “The request was help from the United States Government to deal with the pressure they were under from their prosecutor, and that entailed the freezing of assets at the London bank and other things that were going on in Ukraine?”
“Correct,” Archer said.
When asked why Burisma would ask Hunter for help, Archer said he was “a lobbyist and an expert and obviously he carried, you know, a very powerful name.”
After the Burisma executives asked for help, Hunter “called his dad,” Archer said, adding that he “did not hear this phone call.”
When asked if Hunter Biden calling the vice president of the United States to “do something” about the pressure Burisma was facing would “cause off some serious alarm bells for influence peddling, conflicts of interest,” Archer testified: “Right.”
Archer testified that he was “left out” of “black box D.C. types of conversations.”
But just five days after Hunter Biden called then-Vice President Joe Biden from Dubai, Joe Biden took a trip to Ukraine.
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
During that trip, the former vice president made a statement: “It’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”
Archer testified on other details related to joint ventures with Hunter Biden.
Meanwhile, Archer was pressed on an FBI FD-1023 form, which contained allegations that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden “coerced” Zlochevsky to pay them millions of dollars in exchange for their help in getting Shokin fired.
Biden has acknowledged that when he was vice president, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire prosecutor Shokin. At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, and at the time, Hunter had a highly lucrative role on the board receiving thousands of dollars per month.
The then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion of critical U.S. aid if Shokin was not fired.
Biden allies maintain the then-vice president pushed for Shokin’s firing due to concerns the Ukrainian prosecutor went easy on corruption and say that his firing was the policy position of the U.S. and international community.
The FBI form said Pozharskyi said the reason Hunter Biden was hired was “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
Archer was not familiar with that arrangement and suggested Zlochevsky could have been referring to payments he made to Archer and Hunter Biden.
President Biden and his son, Hunter. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Archer said he was not aware of a $5 million payment to Joe Biden from Zlochevsky and said the Burisma CEO could have been boasting or exaggerating to give “the impression of access.”
Archer’s testimony comes as part of the House Oversight Committee’s months-long investigation, which Republicans say has yielded evidence related to the Biden family’s alleged foreign business schemes — including that the Biden family and its business associates created more than 20 companies and received more than $10 million from foreign nationals while Joe Biden served as vice president.
Meanwhile, the White House released a statement following Archer’s testimony Monday:
“It appears that the House Republicans’ own much-hyped witness today testified that he never heard of President Biden discussing business with his son or his son’s associates, or doing anything wrong,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams told Fox News Digital. “House Republicans keep promising bombshell evidence to support their ridiculous attacks against the President, but time after time, they keep failing to produce any.”
In February 2022, Archer was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for defrauding a Native American tribal entity and various investment advisory clients of tens of millions of dollars in connection with the issuance of bonds by the tribal entity and the subsequent sale of those bonds through “fraudulent and deceptive means,” according to the Department of Justice.
The Justice Department, over the weekend, sought to set a date for Archer’s sentence to begin.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
A Portland, Oregon, doctor knocked unconscious while walking in the city says her attack highlights ongoing problems with homelessness, mental illness and police shortages.
Multnomah County, where Portland, Oregon, is located, reportedly lost more than $1 billion in income between 2020 and 2021 as a result of residents fleeing the state amid surging crime, homelessness and safety concerns. Data analysis conducted by Oregon Live showed that 14,257 tax filers and their dependents left Multnomah County during the first year of the pandemic in 2020 and took a record $1 billion of income with them. The data showed that higher earners were more likely to leave since their jobs could be done remotely during coronavirus shutdowns, and the average income of people leaving was 14% higher than people who left the year before.
Before 2020, Portland had experienced 15 consecutive years of growth, Fox 12 Oregon reported.
The homeless crisis in Portland, Oregon, has continued to spiral out of control and several Portland business owners have sounded the alarm about the issue and the crime associated with it. (Hannah Ray Lambert/Fox News Digital)
The 2020 exodus came at the same time that crime in Portland began spiking and the city broke its homicide record in 2021 and then again in 2022. In addition, the homeless crisis in Portland has continued to spiral out of control and several Portland business owners have sounded the alarm about the issue and the crime associated with it.
“Our city is in peril,” Portland business owner Katherine Sealy told Fox News Digital in December. “Small businesses [and large] cannot sustain doing business in our city’s current state. We have no protection or recourse against the criminal behavior that goes unpunished.”
Tents cover an open space near the Steel Bridge in Portland, Oregon, on July 7, 2023. (Hannah Ray Lambert/Fox News Digital)
Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office reported a 50% increase in homelessness from 2019 to 2022.
The flood of residents leaving Portland appears to have continued since the pandemic as Portland lost 8,308 people from July 2021 to July 2022. Census data shows that Portland lost the sixth-most residents in the country over the past year, Fox 12 Oregon reported.
“It’s like Portland died,” longtime Portland resident Larry May told Fox 12 Oregon in May.
The 2020 exodus came at the same time that crime in Portland began spiking and the city broke its homicide record in 2021 and then again in 2022. (George Rose/Getty Images)
Wheeler’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Andrew Mark Miller is a reporter at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.
America First Legal is demanding documents from the Department of Justice related to the Southern Poverty Law Center and concerned parents. America First Legal is probing to see whether the DOJ had any role in the SPLC targeting of parental rights groups or if the DOJ is planning to use the SPLC to intimidate parents into silence. Pictured: Attorney General Merrick Garland listens as President Joe Biden appears behind him via teleconference on Aug. 3, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A conservative group is demanding answers about whether the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden is repeating its 2021 strategy of targeting concerned parents after the Southern Poverty Law Center just added concerned parents to its “hate map.”
SPLC staff have met with Biden at the White House, and the administration has adopted the “book banning” rhetoric many activists use to slam parents concerned about sexually explicit books in school libraries.
“The Biden administration, including the Department of Justice, has demonstrated that it will work with outside political organizations to trample on the rights of parents who exercise their constitutional rights by speaking out on the woke takeover of America’s public schools,” Ian Prior, senior adviser at America First Legal, told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday.
“The SPLC’s move to designate parent organizations as ‘hate groups’ is eerily similar to the activities of the National School Boards Association in the fall of 2021, and America First Legal intends to fully investigate any coordination between the SPLC and the Department of Justice,” he added.
America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act request, asking the DOJ to turn over documents related to the SPLC and SPLC staff.
Prior had referred to a letter from the National School Boards Association to Biden, in which the school board group likened parents who protest school district policies to domestic terrorists. The letter encouraged Biden to use the Patriot Act against those parents. Later documents revealed that the White House had worked with the school boards association to draft the letter. The DOJ issued a memo urging the investigation of concerned parents, following the letter.
The DOJ ultimately rescinded the memo, and the National School Boards Association apologized for the letter. But, as The Daily Signal recently reported, recent developments suggest the SPLC may be fulfilling the association’s role in another round of attacks on parents.
On June 6, the SPLC added parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty to its “hate map,” branding them “anti-government extremist groups” and part of an “anti-student inclusion movement.”
The SPLC attacked parental rights groups for opposing the leftward lurch in education that the SPLC itself supports—transgender lessons, sexually explicit books in school libraries, and critical race theory, which frames America as an institutionally racist country and blacks as inherently oppressed. The SPLC advocates such education through its Learning for Justice program.
As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups.” It tars religious freedom organizations, such as Alliance Defending Freedom, as “anti-LGBTQ hate groups,” and that smear inspired a gunman to target the Family Research Council for a terrorist attack in 2012.
Two days after the SPLC released its “hate map” and list of “hate groups” for 2022, the White House on June 8 released a strategy “to Protect LGBTQI+ Communities.” That strategy cites “federal threat monitoring” showing that LGBT individuals face threats “increasingly tied to hate groups and domestic violent extremists.” The Biden administration’s strategy also announced that the DOJ will take “an all-of-Department approach to protecting LGBTQI+ rights,” touting the DOJ’s United Against Hate initiative.
If in fact they are “United Against Hate”, then why are they united around only one group of people? If you are united against hate, shouldn’t you be united against all hate, regardless of political affiliation?
The strategy also aims to “shield LGBTQI+ Americans from book bans,” announcing that the Department of Education would seek to counter efforts by parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty to protect children from sexually explicit books in school.
Biden personally met with SPLC staff six times since January 2021, according to White House records, and SPLC staff attended White House meetings at least 11 times in that same period. America First Legal cites these and other pertinent facts in its Freedom of Information Act request.
The legal organization cites Daily Signal reporting on the chilling threats Moms for Liberty has received after the SPLC attacked the parental rights group. Moms for Liberty received various threats, including messages such as “I will personally eradicate you from Massachusetts,” and “piece of s— fascists like you deserve to be dragged against a wall and force-fed hot lead. Eat s— and die.”
“At the behest of its leftist teacher union allies, the Biden administration has weaponized the federal domestic intelligence community and law enforcement to intimidate parents, deter them from protecting their children, and undermine their First Amendment rights,” the request notes.
America First Legal is asking the DOJ to hand over records of meetings with SPLC staff, particularly the staffers who meet with Biden officials at the White House, records of communications with SPLC staff, all records relating to the SPLC’s 2022 “hate” report, and all communications referencing SPLC, Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and terms related to parental rights.
People on Thursday wait to enter the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., for the hearing of former President Donald Trump on charges he conspired to subvert the 2020 presidential election. (Photo: Stefani Reynolds/AFP/ Getty Images)
The federal judge who will oversee former President Donald Trump’s case in Washington related to challenging the 2020 election outcome has a reputation for being tough on Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendants.
An appointee of Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has ruled against the Trump administration in the past, as well as against Trump as an individual. After his third indictment on Tuesday, the 45th president will be arraigned in the District of Columbia on Thursday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya. However, if the case goes to trial, Chutkan would preside.
Here’s four things to know about Chutkan.
1. Hunter Biden’s Old Law Firm
Although Chutkan, 61, earned a reputation for taking a hard line on sentences for Jan. 6 rioters, her background before the bench is one of defending accused criminals – white-collar defendants and those who couldn’t afford lawyers. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she received her bachelor’s degree in economics from George Washington University and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, according to her court biography. In law school, she was the associate editor of the law review and a legal writing fellow. After three years in private practice, Chutkan was hired by the District of Columbia’s Public Defender Service, where she was a trial attorney and supervisor. After 11 years with the public defender, she joined Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, a Democrat-leaning law firm, where President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, previously worked. While there, she specialized in litigation and white-collar criminal defense. She also represented clients in antitrust class-action litigation.
In late 2013, Obama appointed Chutkan to the federal district court post in the District of Columbia. The Senate voted 95-0 to confirm her nomination in June 2014. This final vote came after a more contentious cloture vote of 54-40.
2. Jan. 6 vs. George Floyd Riots
Chutkan was indignant about comparisons between the riots that broke out in cities across the country after the May 2020 police-involved killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. She even invoked the “mostly peaceful” narrative for describing the riots by Black Lives Matter and Antifa militants.
“People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man. Some of those protesters became violent,” Chutkan said during an October 2021 court hearing.“But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”
The AP has reported that Chutkan was the only judge of about two dozen presiding over prosecutions of some 600 Jan. 6 defendants who routinely imposed sentences that exceeded what federal prosecutors had asked for. She either matched or exceeded prosecutors’ recommendations in 19 of the 38 sentences after other judges handed down sentences more lenient than what prosecutors asked for.
Special counsel Jack Smith, the Trump prosecutor, might have been fortunate in getting the judge, as the AP reported on her reputation toward Capitol riot defendants since June 2022.
In cases where federal prosecutors didn’t even seek jail time against Jan. 6 defendants, Chutkan nonetheless sentenced them to between 14 and 45 days. Chutkan argued that jail and prison sentences would deter future “anti-democratic” factions.
“Every day, we’re hearing about reports of anti-democratic factions of people plotting violence, the potential threat of violence, in 2024,” she said when sentencing one defendant to five years, according to the AP. “It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transition of power and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment.”
3. ‘Presidents Are Not Kings’ Ruling vs. Trump
In November 2021, Chutkan ruled against Trump, who as a plaintiff filed an emergency motion to prevent the National Archives from providing information to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol. Trump lawyers argued giving records to the committee would undermine privileges aimed at protecting a president’s ability to have candid conversations. Chutkan ruled against Trump.
“His position that he may override the express will of the executive branch appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power ‘exists in perpetuity,’” Chutkan wrote in her opinion. “But presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president.”
4. Two Rulings vs. Trump Administration
In 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, Chutkan ruled that the Office of Refugee Resettlement must allow a juvenile illegal immigrant in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to have an abortion. That was in the case of Garza v. Hargan.
In 2019, Chutkan ruled that Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, illegally delayed the implementation of the “Equity in IDEA” (Individuals With Disabilities Education Act) regulations that update how states calculate racial disparities in special education.
In its first full day in office, the Biden administration canceled a modest grant to help persecuted Christians in Nigeria document atrocities against them. By contrast, Esther Bitrus, who was kidnapped by Boko Haram Islamic extremists in 2014 in Nigeria, listens as then-President Donald Trump hosts her and other survivors of religious persecution from 17 countries around the world at the White House on July 17, 2019. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“If we keep quiet, we are going to go extinct,” says Catholic Bishop Chipa Wilfred Anagbe of the Diocese of Makurdi in Benue state, Nigeria.
In June, the Congressional Values Action Team caucus met with Anagbe and the Rev. Remigius Ihyula who shared their testimonies of atrocities committed against Christians in Nigeria by Islamic extremists and about the complacency of the Nigerian government. The meeting rallied support behind House Resolution 82, introduced by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., expressing the sense of Congress that the Biden administration officially redesignate Nigeria as a “country of particular concern for grossly violating religious freedoms and appoint a special envoy for Nigeria and the Lake Chad region.”
An estimated 5,621 Christians worldwide were killed for their faith last year. Of those, 90% were Nigerian, according to a January report by Open Doors International, a nonprofit group that advocates on behalf of persecuted Christians. The report says, “Militant groups such as Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province, and other Fulani militants inflict murder, physical injury, abduction and sexual violence on their victims.”
Western media commonly frames the violence in Nigeria as a “herder-farmer” conflict “propelled by climate change and resource scarcity,” despite U.S. government reports that “one of ISIS’s largest and most powerful regional branches … controls broad swaths of territory and has killed or displaced thousands of people in Nigeria and neighboring countries.” Records show Fulani militants attacking Christian communities, burning churches, summarily killing schoolchildren, kidnapping priests for ransom, and often executing them. Twelve Nigerian state governments officially adhere to Islamic Sharia law, “contributing to discrimination and violence against Christians,” according to International Christian Concern.
The Religious Freedom Institute’s Nigerian Atrocities Documentation Project in an April report shared a survivor’s account of an attack in Zangon Kataf in Kaduna state. He “disclosed that the terrorists who attacked his community were seen in Hilux vans shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ while shooting,” the report explained. “That day, about 42 persons were killed and over 300 houses were razed. The attacks did not in any way suggest that it was a conflict between Fulani herdsmen and indigenous farmers.”
There is a problem of mislabeling the crisis, said Richard Ikiebe, a Nigerian who is president of the International Organization for Peace Building and Social Justice, at a July 19 press conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by the International Committee on Nigeria. “Stop saying that it’s a farmer-herder clash. And stop saying that it’s a poverty issue … and stop saying it’s a climate change issue.” Those issues are involved, he added, but they are not the core issue.
The State Department denies that religion plays a role in these massacres. In its “2022 Report on International Religious Freedom: Nigeria,” it stated, “While much of the violence involved predominantly Muslim herders and, depending on location, either predominantly Christian or Muslim farmers … banditry and other criminality, not animosity between particular religious groups or on the basis of religion, were the primary drivers of intercommunal violence.”
In just the past month, “37 Christians have been killed by Fulani militants and other terrorist groups in Nigeria’s Benue state,” International Christian Concern reported July 24. Another report by Nigerian-based research and investigative rights group Intersociety said that more than 1,000 Christians had been killed in the first 100 days of 2023 alone.
Soon after becoming secretary of state in early 2021, Antony Blinken repudiated the Trump administration’s emphasis on religious freedom, declaring that “there is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others.”
In its first full day in office, the Biden administration canceled a modest grant to help persecuted Christians in Nigeria document atrocities against them. In contrast, the independent and bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom explicitly recommended the U.S. government “[r]edesignate Nigeria as a ‘country of particular concern,’ or CPC, for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA)” in its 2021 annual report, as it has every year since 2009.
Still, the U.S. State Department removed Nigeria from the “country of particular concern” list in 2021 without explanation just before Blinken traveled to Nigeria.
Smith, the New Jersey lawmaker, pressed the administration’s U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, Rashad Hussain, about Nigeria’s de-designation at a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing last month. “I share your concerns. I don’t think we have much disagreement in terms of the substance of what’s happening on the ground,” Hussain said.
“The killings of people, even pregnant women and children, and the occupation of their lands to cause the cessation of all economic activities mirror the pattern of jihadi elements like Boko Haram in other parts of Nigeria,” Anagbe said in his July 18 testimony at that House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing.
In response to the atrocities, a bipartisan group of 14 members of Congress have co-sponsored House Resolution 82, which seeks to redress the administration’s cover-up.
“It is imperative that the State Department take action by adding Nigeria as a [country of particular concern] and make clear that the U.S. government condemns the continued egregious actions in Nigeria,” said Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., a co-sponsor of the resolution.
The resolution echoes the cries of Anagbe that we cannot remain silent while Nigerian civilians are being killed in large numbers for their faith.
“Nigeria is the regional anchor of West Africa … and when Nigeria is unstable, the entire region is unstable,” said Eric Patterson, the president of Religious Freedom Institute, in his testimony before the subcommittee. “We also do not want to see falling dominos of failing states, millions of destitute refugees, and a global petroleum shock. Nigeria’s friends care about Nigeria, both because it will affect the United States sooner or later, and because the citizens of Nigeria deserve justice and peace.”
Max Primorac is director of The Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy. He previously served as acting chief operating officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development. From 2009 to 2011, he was a senior adviser to the Afghan government.
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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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