Did Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C., block the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden?
Accusations levied by an IRS whistleblower on Wednesday suggest the federal prosecutors did just that, contradicting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent congressional testimony and raising an avalanche of questions concerning the independence of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation. Given the severity of the claims, the U.S. attorney should speak up immediately.
A cryptic letter sent to a slew of congressional committee chairs on Wednesday revealed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower’s claims of political interference in the criminal investigation of a high-profile, politically connected individual. While the letter omitted the specific details the whistleblower sought to present to the oversight committees, unnamed sources reportedly confirmed the criminal case concerned Hunter Biden; they also revealed several more scandalous claims.
In attorney Mark Lytle’s letter to the congressional chairs and ranking members, the Nixon Peabody partner explained that his client, “a career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent,” sought to “make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.” After noting that his unnamed client “had been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020,” Lytle broadly identified three disclosures the whistleblower was prepared to make.
First, the whistleblower’s testimony would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee,” the letter said. Second, according to Lytle, the career IRS agent would reveal the “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.” And finally, the letter claimed the whistleblower had detailed evidence of “preferential treatment and politics” that improperly infected “decisions and protocols.”
Individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” put flesh on the barebones allegations summarized by Lytle. Those sources claim Hunter Biden is the “high-profile” individual under investigation and “that at least two Biden DOJ political appointees in U.S. attorneys’ offices have declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.” The sources further claimed career prosecutors in the Department of Justice tax division had cleared the prosecution of Hunter Biden — something generally required in criminal tax cases.
The whistleblower, who had previously filed complaints with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General, decided to inform congressional oversight committees of the claimed political improprieties after hearing Garland’s March 1, 2023, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, sources claim.
During the Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned Garland on the ability of the federal prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, to pursue criminal charges in a different judicial district, without special counsel authority.
Garland responded that the Delaware U.S. attorney had been advised he has authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.” “If he needs to bring [a case] in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that,” Garland assured.
It was that testimony by Garland, who was reportedly the unnamed “senior political appointee” referenced in Lytle’s letter, that the whistleblower’s disclosures would reportedly contradict. Specifically, sources claim the whistleblower intends to reveal that the Delaware U.S. attorney sought permission to bring tax charges in other districts, but two U.S. attorneys appointed by Biden denied the requests. The whistleblower allegedly also claims that Weiss had asked “to be named a special counsel to have more independent authority in the probe but was turned down.”
Weiss’s supposed need to enlist the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys to move forward with criminal charges seemingly stems from a DOJ policy that criminal tax prosecutions proceed in the judicial district where the defendant lived at the time the pertinent tax returns were filed. And here, Grassley gave a clue of the U.S. attorney offices that allegedly refused to pursue criminal charges when he asked Garland whether the D.C. or California U.S. attorney’s offices had denied a request by Weiss to bring charges against Hunter Biden.
Garland responded that he did not know the answer to that question and did not want to “get into the internal decision-making” of the U.S. attorneys, but that Weiss had been advised he will not be denied anything he needs.
Grassley’s reference to the California and D.C. U.S. attorney’s offices meshes with details of Hunter Biden’s various residences. Before moving to California, the Biden son listed his residence in 2018 as his father’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, but he claimed a D.C. address prior to that. Hunter also rented office space in D.C. for Rosemont Seneca Advisors, one of his many LLCs — another basis for bringing a federal criminal tax case in D.C.
Biden has since moved to California, reportedly living in Hollywood Hills and Venice, establishing connections to the second judicial district Grassley referenced. Both Hollywood Hills and Venice fall in the Central District of California, so The Federalist asked the office of the Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada whether he had rejected recommendations of career prosecutors to charge Hunter Biden. A press representative said they had no comment.
The Federalist also contacted the D.C. U.S. attorney’s press office for comment, and a representative of U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said they neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation.
Whether these two U.S. attorneys prevented the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden is unknown — at least to the public. Weiss, however, knows what happened, and rather than force the whistleblower to suffer through what will surely be months of attempted character assassination, Weiss should clear the record.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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 Presiden
John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, told Congress on Wednesday that taxpayer dollars are flowing into the Taliban’s pockets. The shocking admission was made during a House Oversight Committee hearing about the Biden administration’s disastrous and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
“Unfortunately, as I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban,” Sopko said. “Nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending from the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people.”
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“The lack of cooperation by @StateDept…is unprecedented in the nearly 12 years that I have been the SIGAR.”
Inspector General John Sopko CONDEMNS the Biden Administration for not cooperating with Afghanistan oversight. pic.twitter.com/00pa8w5umY
Sopko explained that obstruction from the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development in the Biden administration has been “unprecedented.” He said both agencies have demonstrated an “abject refusal to allow oversight” of the billions of taxpayer dollars that have been sent to Afghanistan.
“I don’t trust the Taliban as far as you can throw them,” Sopko later said. “The information we’re getting — again, not from the State Department, who isn’t talking to us, or USAID — is the Taliban is already diverting funds.”
“I would just say: I haven’t seen a starving Taliban fighter on TV, they all seem to be fat, dumb, and happy,” he added. “I see a lot of starving Afghan children on TV, so I’m wondering where all this funding is going.”
According to his testimony, the U.S. has “made available” to Afghanistan more than $8 billion since the withdrawal less than two years ago.
Throughout his testimony, Sopko repeatedly returned to the Biden administration’s obstruction. In fact, he said SIGAR has not heard from “anybody in the administration, really,” and said that routine meetings with top government and military leaders that happened in previous administration have ceased under Biden. Now, it’s just “radio silence,” he said.
Sopko’s eye-opening testimony came about two weeks after the Biden administration released its after-action report about the Afghanistan withdrawal. The report blamed former President Donald Trump for what happened under Biden’s watch, completely absolving Biden and his administration.
That blame-game continued on Wednesday prior to the hearing, CNN reported. The White House, moreover, is denying they are obstructing Sopko’s oversight efforts.
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Thelma Dephas of Shiloh Baptist Church in Landover, Maryland, seen taking part in the 20th annual U.S. Capitol Bible Reading Marathon, a 90-hour front to back oral reading of the bible on May 6, 2009, on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. | TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images
The 34th annual National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon will kick off on Saturday, marking the first time the event has taken place at the U.S. Capitol complex since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Spearheaded by the Indiana-based ministry group Seedline International, the National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon will take place on the West Terrace of the Capitol starting at 2 p.m. Eastern time Saturday (April 22) through 10 a.m. April 26. A rotating group of volunteers will take turns reading every word of the Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, in 15-minute slots.
Those hoping to participate can sign up for a time slot online. The National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon’s website outlines the requirements for those hoping to read from Scripture as part of the event, specifically that a volunteer reader “must be a born again Christian, must provide personal transportation” and “must arrive 5 minutes before [their] scheduled reading time.”
While most of the readings will be done by “scheduled volunteer readers,” those “walking by who want to read” will have the opportunity to participate as well. About 98% of the reading slots will be filled in advance.
In an interview with The Christian Post, Keith Davidson, founder and director of Seedline International, said he hopes the event will “draw attention back to the Bible” and remind Americans that “our founding fathers and founding principles of our country were for expressing our First Amendment rights and the freedom of speech.” He expressed gratitude that the event was taking place at the Capitol this year, as the restrictions imposed by the pandemic lockdowns had forced the event to move the National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon to the nearby Faith and Liberty Headquarters for the past three years.
“For us, it’s a privilege to be back outside facing west, viewing the Washington Monument in the background, and just being out on the Capitol steps and on Capitol grounds is just … a good thing; we’re excited about that,” he added.
Davidson told CP that the event “doesn’t stop” in inclement weather unless there is “danger” posed by severe weather. In such cases, participants “move inside the building and continue to read.”
While the Bible Reading Marathon will be streamed on Seedline International’s YouTube channel, there will not be an option for people to read from Scripture virtually as there was last year.
Members of Congress who want to participate in the event might have the opportunity to read from the Capitol, as lawmakers will be in session during part of this year’s event, he told CP.
Davidson said several members of Congress had made an “interested commitment” to reading Scripture as part of the annual event that will also be attended by Christian schools and church groups.
Although Davidson is leading the event, he is depending on a team of “about 35” volunteers to help pull it off. He remarked that “there will be someone there from Seedline around the clock,” meaning that the volunteers will take turns so as not to force one person to remain there for nearly four straight days.
Davidson estimated that “there will be approximately 50” people on Capitol grounds at the opening event, adding, “I would anticipate around 300 or so that would attend at some point but not all at the same time.”
In addition to the National Capitol Bible Reading Marathon, Davidson also helps to organize Bible Reading Marathons at state Capitols nationwide. When asked about his progress in setting up Bible Reading Marathons at state Capitols, Davidson said, “It’s going well.”
“We’ve been in Tennessee, Indiana [and] Pennsylvania. We’re also going to West Virginia, then Louisiana, North Carolina [and] South Carolina is coming on board, and we’ve got some interest in Colorado and possibly Texas,” he noted. “Because of previous riots and so forth, it’s become a little bit difficult to get on Capitol grounds, but we seem to be making good progress on that.”
What’s behind California’s shift to paying for electricity based on income? In a few words, it’s the consequence of California’s futile fight against climate change.
California’s quixotic pursuit to save the planet by reducing greenhouse emissions has had three broad and irrefutable consequences. It has made energy more expensive; costlier energy has accelerated the deindustrialization of the state; and, the best irony of all, the offshored manufacturing has increased greenhouse gas emissions by pushing production to dirty, coal-fired China, with goods then shipped back to California for consumption.
The latest twist in California’s arrogant tale of energy virtue signaling is playing out with a major restructuring in how Californians are charged for their electricity. For decades, consumers paid for electricity — as well as other utilities such as water and natural gas — with a tiered system that charged more for resources used above a baseline amount. For electricity, the baseline was determined by three things: the consumer’s use of electricity, the region, and the season.
This system meant consumers who used a lot of electricity would pay far more for each kilowatt hour of that additional electricity than they would for their baseline allocation.
This tended to hit lower-income consumers who ran their air conditioning too much, though the Golden State also has a separate program to reduce costs for low-income residents known as California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE).
Thus, the California legislature last year passed Assembly Bill 205, which mandated an end to the tiered system of electric rates and instituted in its place a system where each would pay according to his ability to help those in need. (Of course, it sounds better in the original German, “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen.”) The bill goes into effect no later than July 1, 2024, with the stated aim that “low-income ratepayers in each baseline territory would realize a lower average monthly bill without making any changes in usage.”
One unintended consequence of ditching the old baseline allocation scheme is all ratepayers, regardless of income, will now have far less incentive to conserve electricity, since each additional unit of electricity used will be priced the same, with overall prices reduced.
Higher Income Will Pay More
In preparation for the rollout of the new electric charges, California’s big, regulated utilities have proposed their new rate plans to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). Depending on the provider, ratepayers would pay a fixed fee based on three household income tiers, plus charges for electricity use. Household income would be validated by a third party, likely the agency that collects the state income tax, the California Franchise Tax Board. The three proposed household income tiers and their fixed rates are: $28,000 to $69,000 — $20 to $34 a month, depending on the provider; $69,000 to $180,000 — $51 to $73 a month; and more than $180,000 — $85 to $128 a month.
Median household income in California in the years 2017-2021 was $84,097, meaning that an average California family could, under the proposed rate structure, pay a flat fee of $876 per year for their electricity while charges for kilowatt hours used would decline by 33-42 percent depending on the provider. The net effect would be an increase of about $90 a year for the average household and up to $750 more annually for higher-income households. Ironically, households living in homes with rooftop solar would see some of the highest increases in electrical costs under the new rate structure. Lower-income households are expected to see savings of up to $300 per year.
Increasing Fees Rather Than Taxes
One big advantage to California policymakers of heavily regulating public utilities is the ability to use these energy and water corporations as de facto arms of the welfare state.
California’s Constitution requires a two-thirds majority to increase taxes, but a simple majority to increase fees. The CPUC’s total control over California’s utilities means state lawmakers can direct the CPUC to change its rate structures to take more from those earning more and give to those earning less — all without a penny flowing into or out of the state treasury — something that’s particularly attractive today in a state that went from an almost $100 billion surplus last year to an expected $30 billion deficit this year.
And in that, the CPUC commissioners, appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, are willing accomplices in the class struggle for fair electricity bills and energy justice. Of the five commissioners, four are attorneys, with backgrounds in “environmental justice,” air quality, low-income assistance, and climate change — electricity generation, not so much. Though the CPUC’s mission is to ensure “that consumers have safe, reliable utility service at reasonable rates, protecting against fraud, and promoting the health of California’s economy,” it’s clear now that all that really matters is figuring out how to shield low-income voters from the costly consequences of California’s green energy crusade.
Moreover, while the electrical pricing scheme may work as income redistribution social policy, it fails the test of reducing energy consumption — laying bare the fact that California policymakers care more about control than they do the climate.
Chuck DeVore is chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, vice chairman of the Golden State Policy Council, a former California legislator, and a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. He’s the author of “The Crisis of the House Never United—A Novel of Early America.”
A federal judge on Wednesday denied Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s request for a court order to prevent the House Judiciary Committee from questioning a former prosecutor involved in the investigation of Donald Trump. Bragg, however, didn’t just lose on the merits. The court’s 25-page order eviscerated the Manhattan D.A. — and his former prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz.
Two weeks ago, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, issued a subpoena directing Pomerantz to appear before the House Judiciary Committee at 10:00 on April 20, 2023. Pomerantz was previously a special assistant district attorney before abruptly resigning because Bragg had allegedly decided not to seek criminal charges against Trump.
Bragg responded to news of the subpoena by directing Pomerantz not to provide any information about his prior work to the Judiciary Committee. He also filed a complaint in federal court against Jordan and the committee, seeking an order declaring the Pomerantz subpoena invalid. Bragg simultaneously sought entry of a temporary restraining order to freeze the subpoena pending resolution of his lawsuit.
On Wednesday, federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil denied Bragg’s request to stop the Judiciary Committee from questioning Pomerantz. “Mr. Pomerantz must appear for the congressional deposition. No one is above the law,” Vyskocil wrote in a transparent swipe at the New York prosecutor who hung his pathetic indictment on that platitude.
While Bragg posited that the Judiciary Committee lacked a valid legislative purpose to issue the subpoena, Vyskocil rejected that argument. Congressional committees have the constitutional authority to conduct investigations and issue subpoenas, the court explained, and the court’s role is “strictly limited to determining only whether the subpoena is ‘plainly incompetent or irrelevant’” to any legitimate committee purpose. Because Jordan and the committee identified several valid legislative purposes underlying the subpoena, the court held Bragg could not quash it.
The court also held that the “speech or debate clause,” which provides that “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” Senators and Representatives “shall not be questioned in any other Place,” likely would prevent Bragg from suing Jordan and the committee.
Vyskocil also rejected Bragg’s argument that requiring Pomerantz to submit to questioning would infringe on the attorney-client and work-product privilege the Manhattan D.A.’s office held regarding communications Pomerantz was privy to. Here, the court stressed that the indictment of Trump occurred long after Pomerantz had resigned and that any privilege that may have existed was likely waived by Pomerantz publishing his book, “People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account.”
“As its subtitle indicates, the book recounts Pomerantz’s insider insights, mental impressions, and his front row seat to the investigation and deliberative process leading up to” the Trump indictment, the court wrote. Yet Bragg did next to nothing to stop the publication of the book. Under these circumstances, “Bragg cannot seriously claim that any information already published in Pomerantz’s book and discussed on prime-time television in front of millions of people is protected from disclosure,” the court concluded.
It Gets Better
The court’s conclusion, however, wasn’t the highlight of the decision. Rather it was Vyskocil’s summary of how the country arrived at a place where it sees a state prosecutor filing a complaint in federal court against the House Judiciary Committee that includes 35 pages and a vast majority of exhibits that “are nothing short of a public relations tirade against former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump.”
That descriptor alone should give pause to anyone still believing Bragg’s indictment of Trump was righteous. But the opinion highlighted many more facts that confirm the targeting of Trump was a witch hunt.
For instance, it included many excerpts from Pomerantz’s book showing the criminal charges against Trump were ridiculous. So-called “hush money” payments to Stormy Daniels “did not amount to much in legal terms,” Pomerantz wrote. “Paying hush money is not a crime under New York State law, even if the payment was made to help an electoral candidate.”
The book excerpts quoted by the court included numerous additional problems Pomerantz saw with the legal theory Bragg eventually relied upon in charging Trump. Trump and his legal team have been highlighting these same many flaws. And now a federal judge just told the country that the “very experienced, sophisticated, and extremely capable attorney” Pomerantz — who had wanted to charge Trump — agreed with all (or most) of Trump’s legal arguments.
The court also noted that Pomerantz was a “pro bono” attorney for the Manhattan D.A.’s office. This should strike the public as strange, especially in light of the well-heeled credentials the opinion highlighted: his clerkship at the Supreme Court, his work as a federal prosecutor, and his many years as a criminal defense attorney and partner at the prominent New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
While the court omitted any mention of Paul, Weiss’ connections to the Biden administration and Democrats, referring to Pomerantz’s “pro bono” status should raise some red flags.
If not, Vyskocil was more explicit elsewhere in the opinion, such as when she said she was “unmoved by Bragg’s purported concern at the prospect of ‘inject[ing] partisan passions into a forum where they do not belong.’”
“By bringing this action, Bragg is engaging in precisely the type of political theater he claims to fear,” the court wrote.
Beyond chastising Bragg for playing politics, Vyskocil rebuked him for his legal arguments, most devastatingly when Bragg argued the court should quash the subpoena of Pomerantz to ensure the grand jury’s secrecy.
“The secrecy of the grand jury proceedings in the pending criminal case was compromised before the indictment was even announced,” Vyskocil countered, citing CNN’s coverage of the charges against Trump based on leaks.
The court also unleashed a few zingers on Pomerantz. While Pomerantz complains he is in a “legally untenable position” because he will be forced to make a choice between “legal or ethical consequences” or “potential criminal and disciplinary exposure,” the court “notes that Pomerantz is in this situation because he decided to inject himself into the public debate by authoring a book that he has described as ‘appropriate and in the public interest.’”
And in response to Pomerantz making “it abundantly clear that he will seek to comply with Bragg’s instructions” not to respond to the subpoena, the court remarked that Pomerantz “claimed deference to the District Attorney’s command is a surprising about-face, particularly given that Pomerantz previously declined the District Attorney’s request to review his book manuscript before publication.”
What Next?
Those already well-versed in the outrageousness of the indictment will take delight in the court’s ripostes. The question remains, however, whether the opinion’s detailed summary of the flaws in Bragg’s legal theory — as identified by Pomerantz himself — will convince the remainder of the country that the indictment is a sham. Or will they discard Vyskocil’s decision as a Trump-appointee diatribe?
Maybe it will take the Judiciary Committee questioning Pomerantz on those precise weaknesses for the unconvinced to realize that once again Trump is right — it is a witch hunt.
We should know soon whether the questioning will go forward and whether Pomerantz will respond to the questions or follow Bragg’s directive. But if the latter, both Bragg and Pomerantz will find themselves back in front of Vyskocil because the Trump appointee wisely ruled that any future disputes related to the Pomerantz subpoena or other subpoenas related to the Judiciary Committee’s inquiry must be filed in the same case mater.
Vyskocil’s devastating conclusion likely caused Bragg as much heartache as her denial of his motion to declare the subpoena of Pomerantz invalid. For Bragg knows that absent reversal by the Second Circuit, the same outcome awaits further challenges of the House Judiciary Committee’s subpoena power.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is asking lawmakers to support “new legislation that would temporarily block someone who is deemed a threat to themselves or to others from having guns,”writes Axios.
That’s one way of putting it.
Another, more precise, way would be to say Lee supports a law that forces people accused of a precrime to sit down with state-appointed psychiatrists and lawyers and prove their innocence before the government decides if they can keep their guns. If that person says the wrong things, cops can show up at his home, search it, demand the accused hand over his property — not just any property, but property explicitly protected by the Constitution — without offering any evidence that he’s committed, or ever planned to commit, a crime.
In selling his bill, Lee claims that guns can be taken from those accused of having a “psychiatric disorder, alcohol dependence, or drug dependence.” But federal law already prohibits the sale of a gun to anyone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective.” And most people who drink or take drugs don’t have a propensity towards violence. Excessive drinking might be bad for you, but it’s legal. As is grumbling about chemtrails, pondering how to overthrow the government, and hating your neighbors.
Incidentally, if an alcoholic is found guilty of a precrime, Lee’s bill only affords him a single hearing to rectify the situation for each act of suspension, which can be in effect for up to 180 days — even if he pulls his life together, repents, and becomes a devout Seventh-Day Adventist. The state can keep asking for extensions in perpetuity.
Of course, even those with persistent depression, an emotional disorder, aren’t often would-be killers. One in eight Americans takes antidepressants. Yet, one suspects laws like this will only stigmatize depression and make gun owners less inclined to seek help.
More importantly, though, Lee fails to mention in his factsheets that the bill allows the state to take firearms on the basis of a “serious behavioral condition,” which includes “functional impairment that substantially interferes with or limits the person’s role or functioning in family, school, occupational, or community activities.” The incredulous italics are mine, because Lee’s standard, despite his contention that there is a high burden of proof, could include basically anyone who’s met the psychiatric diagnostic criteria for depression and stopped going to a weekly softball game.
Sure, the law includes penalties for false and bad-faith statements by cops and third parties, but those would be all but impossible to prove or prosecute because the basis for the state issuing a “temporary mental health order of protection” is extraordinarily broad.
If someone is threatening others with violence, Tennessee already has numerous laws on the books that allow for arrest. It already has a law that allows for the immediate detention of people deemed dangerous to themselves or others. Every state does. And yet, in numerous recent mass shootings, the perpetrator has been known to the police, and they did nothing.
The Covenant School shooting, Lee maintains, makes it impossible not to act. But it’s important to remember that, as far as we know, nothing in Lee’s proposal would have stopped that shooter. The mother, who never appears to have reported her daughter for mental illness, probably wasn’t even aware that her adult child still owned guns. As far as we know, the killer never threatened anyone publicly before the shooting, nor did she pose a danger to herself. For all we know, the shooting was an act of terrorism or conducted over some personal grudge. We won’t know until, or if, the sheriff in Nashville releases her manifesto.
One suspects that gun controllers will soon cook up studies to tell us red flag laws are amazing, but to this point no major study — including a meta-analysis conducted by RAND Corporation — has conclusively found them to be effective. Many of these state laws are even worse than Lee’s proposal as they are permitted ex parte orders. But even if these laws were useful on the margins, they are a serious attack on the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Red flag laws just give authorities power to work around normal evidentiary standards. Perhaps we should try upholding the tens of thousands of laws that already govern gun ownership before passing new ones.
In his platitude-laden Twitter video, Lee frames himself as a courageous nonpartisan, accusing anyone who opposes his proposal of being blinded by politics. The truth is, the governor’s do-something-ism is about the laziest, most politically motivated breed of leadership imaginable.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Several Republican female lawmakers assembled to promote the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023″ on Capitol Hill Thursday ahead of its passage in the House of Representatives.
The legislation, introduced by Rep. Greg Steube R-Fla., aims to prevent biological males from participating in women’s sports. Educational institutions that receive Title IX funding from the federal government would not be allowed to “permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designed for women or girls.” The bill passed the House in a 219-203 vote, with all the “no” votes coming from Democrats. President Biden has pledged to veto the bill should it reach his desk, blasting it as “discrimination” against transgender student athletes.
“The Administration strongly opposes House passage of H.R. 734,” the White House said in a statement. “For students nationwide, participating in sports and being part of a team is an important part of growing up, staying engaged in school, and learning leadership and life skills. H.R. 734 would deny access to sports for many families by establishing an absolute ban on transgender students—even those as young as elementary schoolers—playing on a team consistent with their gender identity.”
“This is not discrimination against anyone,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., told Fox News Digital in response. “That is the most ridiculous thing to be saying… All we’re saying is, biological women should be competing against biological women. And biological men should be competing against biological men. The bill is very short. It has nothing in it about discriminating against anyone. That’s a red herring if there ever was a red herring.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., pushes back on President Biden calling the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023 “discrimination.” (Fox News Digital)
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., accused Democrats of spearheading a “radical gender fluidity agenda,” while reflecting on her own career as a student athlete.
“The 118th Congress, we are so proud to be in a House Republican Majority, but I am personally proud that America elected the highest number of Republican women ever,” Stefanik said at Thursday’s press conference. “They are strong leaders in our Conference and, particularly on important days like today, we are so grateful for their effective advocacy to get this bill across the finish line. Today, we will pass this historic legislation to protect women and girls in sports. Thank you so much to the incredible work.”
“I know that there are so many personal stories, and in addition to these wonderful women members of Congress, we have tremendous women athletes who are here with us today, who have talked about the unfairness when it comes to biological males competing in women’s sports,” she added. “If you talk to women leaders today, so many had opportunities when it came to sports growing up. I myself played varsity lacrosse, I also rowed crew in high school. To have that opportunity to learn leadership, to learn discipline, to learn teamwork is so, so important. This is about protecting women’s sports, now and into the future. We anticipate this will be passed today. It is a winning issue across America — standing up for the future of women and girls.”
Several GOP members blasted the administration’s agenda to allow transgender females to compete against biological women as backwards.
“Who would have thought all these years later, we would have our Democratic women colleagues, join with a male president, who is fighting against women’s rights?” Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., said at Thursday’s press conference. “This is outrageous. This is crazy. This is dangerous. This needs to stop.”
At a recent hearing for the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, Foxx garnered some attention for declaring there’s “no way” to change one’s biological sex.
Foxx: "[HR 734] says that if you're a biological male, you cannot participate against biological females. It's as simple as that."
— House Committee on Education & the Workforce (@EdWorkforceCmte) April 17, 2023
“There’s not a good definition of what a transgender girl is,” Foxx expanded to Fox Digital. “One cannot change one’s gender. It’s not possible to do. Certainly people can change what they say about who they identify as, but they cannot change their gender. So the term ‘transgender’ is ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous. You can’t go from one gender to another.”
Foxx mused why the idea of there being two biological genders now seems out of the mainstream.
“The Democrats pretend to be the party of science,” she added. “But to just completely dismiss science makes no sense. Why is it a farfetched idea? Partly because the media keeps using the term and acting like it means something.”
Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee business meeting in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., also highlighted the dangers of letting biological males compete against women, sharing how she was raped multiple times as a teenager.
“Before a woman even sets foot in a locker room,” she said. “Before she even sets foot on the court, before she ever dives from the first swim meet, she’s already in a vulnerable position. And we need to protect our women and girls in sports because of these vulnerabilities.”
Mace said she’d be “remiss” if she didn’t drop some expletives.
“We’ve worked too damn hard to put up with the bulls— of the left that wants to take our achievements away from us,” she said.
“I’m a girl mom also, my girl is an athlete,” Mace added. “I cannot imagine her having to be put in that position where there is a biological male in her locker room. Or if she’s trying to compete for a college scholarship where it gets taken away by a man who’s much stronger and much greater physical capabilities than she does. It’s complete and total bulls—. It’s cruel.”
The office of Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., scolded a reporter who insisted the Republican lawmaker’s rhetoric “makes political violence more likely” in the wake of the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Democrats, meanwhile, have blasted the Republican-led bill as “bullying.”
“This bill is about bullying children,” Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, said. “Stop bullying children.“
“House Republicans are choosing to bully and belittle trans children,” Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif added. “This is about attacking a small group of children, and it is shameful.“
Fox News Digital’s Brandon Gillespie and Peter Kasperowicz contributed to this report.
Cortney O’Brien is an Editor at Fox News. Twitter: @obrienc2
EXCLUSIVE: The White House on Thursday dismissed allegations from a whistleblower who claims the Biden administration has mishandled the federal investigation into Hunter Biden, and said President Biden has upheld his commitment to ensure the investigation is “free from any political interference.”
“Since he took office and consistent with his campaign promise that he would restore the independence of the Justice Department when it comes to decision-making in criminal investigations, President Biden has made clear that this matter would be handled independently by the Justice Department, under the leadership of a U.S. Attorney appointed by former President Trump, free from any political interference by the White House,” White House spokesman Ian Sams told Fox News Digital on Thursday.
“He has upheld that commitment,” he added.
The White House comment came after an IRS criminal supervisory agent seeking whistleblower protections said the investigation into Hunter Biden is being mishandled by the Biden administration. The whistleblower is claiming “clear” conflicts of interest, including by giving the president’s son “preferential treatment,” and says politics are “improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, step off Air Force One at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y., on Feb. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation since 2018. The federal investigation into his “tax affairs” began amid the discovery of suspicious activity reports (SARs) regarding funds from “China and other foreign nations.” In 2020, it became known that the FBI had subpoenaed the laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden in the course of an existing money laundering investigation.
Hunter Biden confirmed the investigation into his “tax affairs” in December 2020, after his father was elected president. The investigation is being led by Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss.
Since taking office, the White House has maintained that the president never spoke to his son about his business dealings, and has continued to say that the president was never involved in them. Officials also say the president has never discussed investigations into members of his family with the Justice Department.
Ahead of his presidency, Biden’s campaign proposed a plan to “prevent the president or White House from improperly interfering in federal investigations and prosecutions.”
President Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrive at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington from a weekend trip to Rehoboth Beach, Del., on July 10, 2022. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
On the first day of his administration, President Biden issued an executive order establishing an administration-wide ethics pledge, which required officials to commit to conduct that “upholds the independence of law enforcement and precludes improper interference with investigative or prosecutorial decisions of the Department of Justice.”
But the IRS whistleblower is alleging the investigation into Hunter Biden is being mishandled.
The whistleblower’s attorney, Mark D. Lytle of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Nixon Peabody LLP, wrote to lawmakers in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to say his client has been overseeing the “ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020 and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.”
Lytle informed lawmakers that his client has “already made protected disclosures internally at the IRS, through counsel to the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and to the Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General.”
Lytle said the protected disclosures “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” and involve “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.”
Since President Biden took office, the White House has maintained that he never spoke to his son about his business dealings, and has continued to say that the president was never involved in them. (Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)
Lytle also said his client has also detailed examples of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
“My goal is to ensure that my client can properly share his lawfully protected disclosures with congressional committees,” he wrote, offering to meet in person to provide more detail on his client’s testimony.
The letter was sent to top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, the Senate Finance Committee, and the House Ways and Means Committee.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, as well as business dealings and ventures involving other members of the Biden family. The committee is investigating whether those business arrangements pose a risk to U.S. national security, and whether President Biden is involved.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
IRS Whistleblower on Hunter Biden Wants Protection
As predicted, Republicans turned up the heat on the Biden Crime Family. So, America and the world will soon learn just how far the tentacles go in the Biden family’s corrupt business.
Remember when Barack Obama’s IRS targeted conservative organizations? Lois Lerner got a wrist slap, and all was well with the Leftist world. Oh the irony.
An IRS special agent involved in the federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes is seeking whistleblower protections to provide what are said to be sensitive disclosures about the probe to Congress.
Sensitive disclosures. The same sensitive disclosures the Bidens with help from Fed Chief Janet Yellen fought to conceal, perhaps? But thanks to the Chinese-owned Cathay Bank, the Republicans got a peek under the kimono.
The story continues,
Attorney Mark D. Lytle, a lawyer for the unnamed IRS employee, wrote in a letter Wednesday to a bipartisan group of lawmakers that he represents a “career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent who has been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high profile, controversial subject since early 2020” and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.
While Lytle did not name Biden in the letter obtained by NBC News, a source familiar with the matter who also verified the authenticity of the letter said the investigation in question refers to the federal probe into the finances of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Did not name Biden? How funny is that. Who else could it be that one would ask for whistleblower protection. Certainly not Trump or his kids. If you “drop dime” on the Trump, you get a medal. But if you drop dime on a Democrat, you need witsec.
As for authenticity, MSN isn’t the only source. The letter was previously reported by CBS News and the Wall Street Journal.
What does the IRS agent want to disclose?
Things will get ugly for Hunter Biden and the Biden Syndicate. Because according to Lytle, the IRS special agent is prepared to provide information that would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee”. Let be honest: this testimony will burn more than a “senior political appointee”. I can only imagine the conversation happening with the people involved in the coverups for the Bidens. Which goat will be selected for this suicide mission?
Along with burning at least on Biden appointee, the information provided will reveal failures to handle “clear conflicts of interest” in the case, as well as detail instances of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols.”
FBI Director Chris Wray: Is this thing on?!
We know the DOJ, and specifically the FBI helped the Bidens. But given the potential forensic cavity search this agent may have performed, who knows where this will lead. As one might expect, the Treasury Department and the IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department and IRS declined to comment.
Stay tuned boys and girls. The dam is about to break.
Whistleblower Disheartened: Hunter Biden Still Pulling Strings
It’s hard to grapple how the Bidens continue to get a hard pass for the MANY scandals they’ve orchestrated. Yet, that’s exactly what happens again and again.
In the months before the 2020 election, news of Hunter Biden’s laptop broke. Of course, leftists and the mainstream media branded the scandal a form of Russian disinformation.
Why would Hunter want to admit his drug binges, orgies with Russian hookers that were sometimes financed by dear old dad, Burisma payments, selling access to the Big Guy, or the many other scandalous behaviors the abandoned laptop unearthed? Taking ownership of one’s own wrongdoing is not a leftist skillset.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green just issued a statement regarding more proof of the unethical and often illegal behaviors the Biden family engaged in. Yet, we haven’t seen a Biden indictment, impeachment, or cancellation.
From Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:
We just finished reviewing the financial records in the treasury. What I saw was over 2000 pages of jaw dropping information. There’s basically an enterprise wrapped around Joe Biden involving not only multiple family members, more than we thought there were, but other people as well. Just a complete conglomerate of Lies. These shell companies where money was passing through from foreign countries. China, Ukraine, but many more countries than just those.
There’s a lot of information the American people deserve to know of the Biden family and the crimes they’ve been involved in. And the Oversight Committee has a much bigger investigation to do than we ever thought was possible.
I just saw evidence of human trafficking that involves prostitutes not only from here in the United States, but foreign countries like Russia and Ukraine. This is unbelievable that a President and a former Vice President, not only his son Hunter Biden, but many more family members extending past Hunter Biden and his immediate family.
We’re going to have to really get to work. This is an investigation that needs to be revealed to the American people. And not only do we have questions about Hunter Biden himself, but this is going to extend into developing a web of corruption, a web of fake companies that’s going to reveal money that came in from many foreign countries and went directly into the personal bank accounts of the Biden family where they have financially benefited directly from Joe Biden’s seats of power. We look forward to investigating, exposing for this for the American people and we’ll see where it goes from there.
The Biden crime family participated in human trafficking by soliciting prostitutes from the United States and abroad in countries like Russia and Ukraine.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 18, 2023
Pulling Strings
Of course, at this point we know what the crimes are. The only question is ‘why aren’t these crimes being prosecuted?’. It’s a disheartening situation, to say the least. Especially if you happen to be the whistleblower who stuck your neck out to hold these crooked leftists accountable.
An IRS Criminal Supervisory Agent seeking whistleblower protection claims the investigation into Hunter Biden is being mishandled by the Biden administration. In a letter dated April 19, 2023, attorney Mark D. Lytle of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Nixon Peabody LLP tells members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate that his client has been overseeing the “ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020 and would like to make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.”
The story was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News has since confirmed the story through a source familiar with the investigation that the subject at issue is Hunter Biden.
In Wednesday’s letter, Lytle said his client has already made legally protected disclosures internally at the IRS. The protected disclosures, Lytle notes, “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee.”
Lytle also said his client has information that the investigator failed to mitigate “clear conflicts of interest,” adding that the investigator allegedly allowed preferential treatment and politics to infect decisions and protocols normally followed by law enforcement professionals if the subject was not politically connected.
“My goal is to ensure that my client can properly share his lawfully protected disclosures with congressional committees,” Lytle said in the letter. “Thus, I respectfully request that your committees work with me to facilitate sharing this information with congress legally and with the fully informed advice of counsel.”
Representatives for the first son did not immediately respond to questions regarding the alleged mishandling of the investigation. The president’s son has been under federal investigation since 2018, which is being led by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a prosecutor appointed by former President Donald Trump.
Fox News first reported in December 2020 that Hunter Biden was a subject/target of a grand jury investigation, which was prompted, in part, by Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) regarding suspicious foreign transactions.
He has not been charged with ANY crimes.
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told Fox that efforts by the Biden administration to block efforts to charge Hunter were “deeply concerning.”
“The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has been following the Bidens’ tangled web of complex corporate and financial records. It’s clear from our investigation that Hunter and other members of the Biden family engaged in deceptive, shady business schemes to avoid scrutiny as they made millions from foreign adversaries like China,” he said. “We’ve been wondering all along where the heck the DOJ and the IRS have been. Now it appears the Biden administration may have been working overtime to prevent the Bidens from facing consequences.”
We’ve heard a lot lately about how Republicans don’t care about dead kids — just keep your hands off their guns! The bullhorn insurrection staged by Tennessee legislators, for example, was justified on the grounds that they were JUST TRYING TO SAVE CHILDREN’S LIVES!!!
As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell put it, the bullhorn episode showed “who is trying to protect the children of Tennessee and who isn’t.”
The amazing statistic that’s supposed to make us give up our guns PRONTO is that since 2020, gun violence has become the leading cause of death for American children.
You’re supposed to be thinking of the little kids killed in school shootings, like in Uvalde or the Christian school in Nashville. In fact, the odds that a child will be killed in a mass school shooting are 1 in 10 million.
The trick is that “children” includes 16-to-19-year-old gang members. Exclude 16-to-19-year-olds, and the number of kids killed by guns every year plummets from 2,811 to a few hundred.
It turns out, black teenagers are using guns to kill a lot of other black teenagers.
This will come as a surprise to most people because black-on-black violence is not considered newsworthy. (By contrast, anywhite-on-black violence, even the sort of thing that wouldn’t make local news if the perp were black, will get front-page coverage at The New York Times, international headlines and a call from the president.)
Based on arrests reported in the local news, here are a few recent examples of “children” being killed by gun violence. You will notice that none of these suspected homicides would have been prevented even if Republicans gave up all their guns.
And consider that, in most urban areas, the huge majority of murders never result in any arrests at all. For example, the “clearance” rate for murder — which is much higher than the “arrest” rate — is only 22% in Chicago, 43% in Baltimore and 37% in Philadelphia.
According to police arrests:
— On March 29, 2023, 16-year-old Vincent Lee Bradley III and 17-year-old Devonte J. Pool fired at least 33 shots, gunning down a 16-year-old high school student, Larry Marshall III, in Tacoma, Washington.
— A few days earlier, 16-year-old Lorenzo A. Brooks and 19-year-old Aaron Randolph Carter allegedly shot and killed 18-year-old Jasiah Smith in a Fredericksburg, Virginia, parking lot.
— A week before that, 19-year-old Adrian Daeshawn Granville and 24-year-old Teonjenique Elizabeth Lashay Hudson Howard were shot and killed at the Embassy Suites hotel in Portland, Oregon, by an unknown suspect — the same hotel where 15-year-old Deandrae Barber fatally shot 18-year-old Parnell Badon Jr. on Nov. 19, 2022. (Can’t wait to read the Yelp reviews.)
— On March 7, 2023, two brothers, Jacob Tobias Bryant, 18, and John Aalen Bryant Jr., 20, along with an unnamed 16-year-old juvenile, fatally shot a 17-year-old in Georgetown, South Carolina.
— On Feb. 23, 2023, Keith Melvin Moses, 19, shot and killed a 9-year-old girl, T’yonna Major, and her mother in a shooting spree in Orlando, Florida, that left several others wounded or dead.
— On Jan. 23, 2023, 18-year-old Preston Walls removed his ankle bracelet before gunning down rival gang members, 18-year-old Gionni Dameron and 16-year-old Rashad Carr, at a violence reduction program in Des Moines, Iowa.
— On Jan. 4, 2023, 18-year-old Jakari Harps fatally shot 17-year-old Breck Gerard Williams Jr. and 14-year-old Adrian Daniels in west Fort Worth, Texas.
— Right before Christmas last year, 17-year-old Lavon Semaj Longstreet and 18-year-old TaeShawn Adams-Wright killed 19-year-old Johntae Raymon Hudson at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, standing over Hudson’s body and firing “multiple rounds into his body.”
— Earlier in December, 17-year-old Tejuan Johnson and 18-year-old Jaylan Dubose shot and killed 15-year-old Nonaisha Jones and 19-year-old Logan Lawson in the Roselawn neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio.
All these incidents of “children” dying by gun violence consisted of black teenagers killing other black teenagers — and a 9-year-old.
More than half of all black teenagers who died of any cause in 2020 were killed by guns. Black males 15- to 34-years-old were more than 20 times more likely to die by gun homicide than white males that age.
Unfortunately, there is probably no story of less interest to our media (or the president) than the epidemic of black teenagers killing one another. In Jill Leovy’s acclaimed book, “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America,” there’s a full page of racist quotes explaining why, historically, “black-on-black killing drew so little notice.” This one is from a white Tennessean during Reconstruction: “[N-word] life’s cheap now.”
Or, as Cook County (Illinois) State’s Attorney Kim Foxx put it in declining to prosecute a gang shootout, it’s “mutual combat.”
Far from highlighting the crisis of black teenagers shooting one another and declaring a national emergency, the media, corporate America and Democrats mightily egged on black violence after the death of George Floyd. It’s fun for them. They get to watch riot porn from the safety of their lily-white neighborhoods.
The only people who actually give a damn about black people getting killed are the police. And who have the bien-pensants declared war on? You guessed right.
Propose anything that would actually reduce the plague of black-on-black crime, such as arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning criminals, and liberals scream, STOP PUTTING BLACK BODIES IN PRISON!
Needless to say, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, the Tennessee representatives who attacked democracy because they were JUST TRYING TO SAVE CHILDREN’S LIIIIIVES, are huge BLM supporters. They prattle about “ending police violence,” blacks being “lynched by police officers,” and accuse the police of running a “system of white supremacy.”
Jones told Teen Vogue that “more policing does not lead to community safety.” (The thousands of black men who are still alive thanks to Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s more policing policy would disagree.) Instead, Jones proposed “more funding to social workers, public education [and] ending poverty.” (Why didn’t anybody else think of that?)
On NPR, Pearson blamed “white supremacy” for the death of Tyre Nichols. (“White supremacy” is such an awesome force, it even infected the five black Memphis police officers charged with Nichols’ death.)
You want to know who doesn’t care about “our children’s lives,” MSNBC? You, the rest of the media, George Soros-supported prosecutors and the entire Democratic Party. Their motto: “[N-word] life’s cheap now.”
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 Presiden
Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis signed a new law last week to circumvent red-state bans on abortion and transgender treatments.
While Republican lawmakers ramp up protections for vulnerable teens caught in America’s contemporary transgender craze, Polis aims to make Colorado a destination for impressionable minors to seek permanent procedures from puberty blockers to surgery.
“Here in Colorado, we value individual freedoms, and we stand up to protect them,” Polis said at the bill’s signing ceremony. “I’m excited by the work of advocates and legislators to further Colorado’s reputation as a beacon of freedom, a beacon of choice, a beacon of individuality where we live on our own terms.”
Senate Bill 23-188, signed into law Friday, opens the door for “trans tourism” in the state, allowing minors to seek abortions or “gender-affirming health care services.” In other words, teens seduced by transgender ideology in Kansas, where lawmakers are preparing to ban interventions for minors, may travel to Colorado for sterilizing procedures under Polis’s protection with parental consent. Similar legislation is under consideration in Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill to bar underage transgender surgeries earlier this year but included provisions in the legislation to make the new law toothless.
The Colorado Senate bill signed last week, titled “Protections For Accessing Reproductive Health Care,” also allows minors to abort pregnancies without parental consent.
The new law protects people seeking abortions and transgender interventions who travel to Colorado by prohibiting state or local agencies from penalizing complicit medical providers. The legislation also nullifies extradition requests in other states where such procedures are banned and refuses to recognize out-of-state criminal or civil proceedings relating to these procedures. Previously, Colorado already established itself as a go-to destination for women seeking abortions from Texas and Oklahoma, where it is banned.
While policymakers in other blue states already passed laws to establish their states as abortion “safe havens,” Colorado’s protections for transgender minors seeking life-altering surgeries is a first-of-its-kind. The new law comes as transgender surgeries are expected to become a $5 billion-dollar industry by the end of the decade, according to a report last year from Grand View Research.
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.
Conservatives who ran on culture war issues won dozens of school board elections in battleground and Democrat-controlled states last week, but you wouldn’t know that from Politico’s coverage of the races. The outlet claimed pro-parent candidates who ran against racist curricula in classrooms, lockdowns, and radical gender ideology “flamed out.”
Politico not-so-subtly concluded, based on recent school board election results in Illinois and Wisconsin, that “leaning on school-based wedge issues to court primary voters in a crowded White House campaign” won’t bode well for 2024 front-runner Republicans including former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not yet announced his candidacy.
Not long after publication on Monday, the article gained traction with leftist talking heads and organizations such as Rachel Maddow, the Lincoln Project, the nation’s largest teachers union, and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who were thrilled to share about the potential demise of the issues that made them a target of public scrutiny for the last three years.
“Parents, educators, and community members are all looking for candidates who are committed to strengthening public schools, not abandoning them,” the National Education Association’s elections arm tweeted.
The public school activists were specifically thrilled that the publication’s education reporter, Juan Perez Jr., pointed to Democrat wins in recent school board elections as evidence that the right’s culture war issues were a brief and unsustainable phenomenon.
“General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe,” Perez Jr. asserted.
“General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe,” For your information Mr. Perez Jr., in 2023, The Federal Government is funding $45 BILLION for public schools. With approximately 49.7 million students enrolled in public schools in 2023, that’s a whopping $9,375.00 per child. How many PRIVATE SCHOOLS COST LESS, WITH SUPERIOR SCHOLASTIC RESULTS AND SUPERIOR SECURITY?
He evidenced this claim by noting that Democrats and teachers’ unions in both Wisconsin and Illinois celebrated the wins of many of their preferred candidates in the more than 100 races they endorsed. Many of those wins came in districts in or near Democrat stronghold cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee, but that didn’t stop the author from concluding that Republicans “lost big.”
Perez Jr. included data from political action committees that clearly showed candidates on the right claimed several victories but discounted those results by claiming that at least “two conservative national education groups did not dispute that their candidates posted a losing record.”
Just seven paragraphs into the article, Perez Jr. included a half-sentence quote from 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky — “We lost more than we won” — that seemingly backed up his belief that these results “offer lessons to both parties as they eye even more board elections this year.”
“We had an hour-long conversation. [Perez Jr.] left it to one edited half sentence,” Girdusky told The Federalist.
Poorly framing quotes from Girdusky wasn’t Perez Jr.’s only mistake.
Leaning in
Leftist school board wins may have dominated corporate media coverage, but there’s no denying they were rivaled by dozens of triumphs by conservative-backed school board candidates who ran on fighting the radical racial and LGBT indoctrination infecting the nation’s government schools.
Overall, school board candidates endorsed by Girdusky’s 1776 Project PAC won 30 out of their 63 races.
Our endorsed candidates also won 6 races in Illinois last night.
“The seats that we did lose in Illinois were because of a third-party conservative candidate. So it wasn’t that conservatives lost, we split the vote,” Girdusky explained. “It wasn’t a rejection.”
Politico’s article fails to mention this nuance — likely because it would undermine the article’s purpose.
Winning nearly half of the elections it participated in is not “losing big,” especially when readers consider that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Democrats, and their teachers’ union allies in both Wisconsin and Illinois outspent conservative challengers by hundreds of thousands of dollars. They also got a helping hand from corporate media, which gave supporters of left-wing school board members plenty of TV time to help protect eligible seats from pro-parent candidates.
Handpicking the results from one off-year election and selling it as gospel truth about the future of culture war issues in local and national politics isn’t just incredibly ignorant. It’s deliberately deceitful and helps teachers’ unions keep their monopoly on making decisions about children’s lives that should fall under parents’ jurisdiction.
Whether corporate media like it or not, conservative messaging on education resonates with voters and has done so for years now. In 2021, dozens of parents concerned about the rise of racist curricula in government schools curried enough support to secure landslide victories against left-wing incumbents in states such as Texas, Kansas, North Carolina, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and many more. The same momentum was found in 2022 in states like Wisconsin.
Perez Jr. can repeat the prevalent lie that conservatives simply “seized on transgender students to rejuvenate a social agenda,” but the truth is even he couldn’t deny that parents’ frustration with the education bureaucracy is responsible for changing the course of countless elections including Virginia’s gubernatorial race in 2021.
Contrary to what Perez Jr. and his sullen quotes from “GOP activists” would have you believe, the organizations propping up pro-parent candidates aren’t backing down from the culture war. As Girdusky said: “I think that there’s clearly a message there that education is an important issue that Republicans can overperform in substantially.”
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.
2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy angered “CNN This Morning” host Don Lemon during a debate on gun rights for Black Americans while on-air. During the heated exchange, Lemon took offense to Ramaswamy’s statements at an NRA conference last week about Democrats in the South instituting gun laws to prevent African Americans from protecting their newfound rights in the post-Civil War era.
Lemon reduced Ramaswamy’s point to a declaration that the Civil War was fought merely to give Black people gun rights and berated him for it, telling him the statement “insulted” him as a Black American.
CNNs Don Lemon and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy debate the Civil War and Second Amendment. (Screenshot/CNN)
The CNN host further told Ramaswamy that he had no right to talk about the experience of Black people in America because he’s not Black. Ramaswamy pushed back and insisted that Lemon was misunderstanding his point. He also argued that both men should be able to talk about the issue regardless of their skin color.
During the heated crosstalk, Lemon also snapped at his producers who were apparently distracting him over his earpiece.
The intense live debate came after the hosts played a moment from Ramaswamy’s speech to the NRA in Indianapolis. During the clip, the businessman and presidential candidate addressed the crowd, saying, “I want you to raise your hand if you know when the first anti-gun laws were passed in this country. Raise your hand if you do. 1865.”
He continued, saying, “We fought a civil war in this country to give Black Americans the equal protection under the law that we failed to secure them in 1776. But then you wanna know what happened? Southern states passed anti-gun laws that stopped Black people from owning guns. The Democrat Party, then as in now, wanted to put them back in chains.”
After clarifying to co-host Poppy Harlow that he meant that modern Democratic Party policies (he mentioned former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society“) are bad for African Americans much like those post-Civil War gun laws, Lemon stepped in, voicing some major disagreement with Ramaswamy’s statement.
He cut in, saying, “I don’t really see what one has to do with the other — and using the Civil War to talk about Black Americans — that war was not fought for Black people to have guns.”
Ramaswamy clarified his stance, saying, “That war was fought for Black people to have freedoms in this country. Actually, that’s why the Civil War was fought.”
“Actually, a funny fact is — Black people did not get to enjoy the other freedoms until their Second Amendment rights were secured,” he said.
Lemon interjected again, “But Black people still aren’t allowed to enjoy the freedoms as well in this country.”
Ramaswamy dismissed that claim outright, declaring, “I disagree with you on that Don… I think you’re doing a disservice to this country by failing to recognize the fact that we have equality before the laws here.”
Republican presidential candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy speaks to the Merrimack County Republicans at an event in Manchester, New Hampshire on April 13, 2023. (Paul Steinhauser)
Getting a little flustered, Lemon tried to shut down Ramaswamy by claiming he doesn’t have the requisite skin color to make such a statement. The anchor replied, “Well, OK. When you are in Black skin and you live in this country, then you can disagree with me.”
The candidate shot back, saying, “Don, I think we have to be able to talk about these issues in the open regardless of the color of our skin.”
“I think for you to compare 1865 and 1964 — I think it’s insulting to Black people. It’s insulting to me as an African American. I don’t want to sit here and argue with you because it’s infuriating for you to put those things together,” Lemon said.
He then declared, “It’s not right, your telling of history is wrong.” Ramaswamy protested, asking what exactly was wrong, to which Lemon replied, “You’re making people think that the Civil War was fought only for Black people to get guns.”
Lemon called Ramaswamy’s talking points “reductive,” while the guest shot back that the host’s interpretation of the NRA speech was “reductive and actually insulting.”
As Ramaswamy continued, Lemon scolded his producers, who were apparently distracting him on his earpiece during the debate. He snapped, “Hang on, please. I cannot keep a thought if you guys are talking in my ear.”
The debate continued for another minute or so before Lemon concluded, “The fact that I find insulting is that you are sitting here telling an African American about the rights and what you find insulting about the way I live, the skin I live in every day. And I know the freedoms that Black people don’t have in this country, and that Black people do have.”
Ramaswamy protested, stating, “I think we should be able to express our views regardless of the color of our skin. We should have this debate without me regarding you as a Black man.”
CNN’s Don Lemon. (CNN This Morning)
“I think it’s insulting that you’re sitting here — whatever ethnicity you are — ‘splaining to me about what it’s like to be Black in America. I’m sorry,” Lemon said.
The candidate responded, “I’m an Indian American, and I’m proud of it.”
Gabriel Hays is an associate editor for Fox News Digital.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona refused on Tuesday to define a “woman” under oath at a congressional hearing.
At a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) highlighted that Cardona’s job includes enforcing Title IX, which prohibits discrimination — including on the basis of sex — in education programs that receive federal funding. But the Biden administration is seeking to alter Title IX to punish states that protect the integrity of women’s sports by prohibiting transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
“Since Title IX prohibits discrimination between male and female to ensure that each gets appropriate funding, I think it’s important that the country sees that [the government] understands the difference,” Clyde began.
Then he asked, “So can you please tell me, or can you please define for me: What is a woman?”
But Cardona refused to answer the question.
“Our focus at the department is to provide equal access to students including students who are LGBTQ, access free from discrimination,” he responded.
“So what’s the definition of a woman?” Clyde shot back. “You haven’t given me that. You haven’t answered my question.”
According to Cardona, the issue of what differentiates a woman from someone who is not a woman is “secondary” to his job, yet he praised Clyde for rightly establishing the importance of Title IX.
The two men then went back and forth over whether, in Clyde’s words, “a biological male who self-identifies as a woman” should be allowed to compete in women’s sports and whether allowing such students to enter women’s private spaces — such as bathrooms and locker rooms — ensures the safety of female students.
But Cardona repeatedly dodged the questions. Instead, he said that the “perspective of all students should be taken into account when decisions are made around facilities.”
Cardona never provided a definition of a “woman.”
‘What Is A Woman?’: Miguel Cardona Doesn’t Answer Question From Andrew Clyde During Tense Exchange www.youtube.com
The Biden administration is proposing a change to Title IX that would not allow schools that receive federal funding to segregate sports solely based on biological sex.
“Under the proposed regulation, schools would not be permitted to adopt or apply a one-size-fits-all policy that categorically bans transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity,” the Department of Education explained in a statement.
Ironically, the proposed rule ignores how it discriminates against female athletes by possibly forcing them to compete against biological males, a nearly impossible task even for the world’s best female athletes.
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Photo Illustration by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images
Transgender activists and their allies are expressing outrage after restrictions on “dead-naming” and misgendering were deleted from Twitter’s Terms of Service. The policy was enacted in 2018 before tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the popular platform for $44 billion. On Sunday, Musk opined that declarations of preferred pronouns were “virtue-signaling” that could be used as a shield by bad people. Two days later, the policy against misgendering was changed.
Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of GLAAD, told the Associated Press that the change in policy would lead to violence against transgender people.
“Twitter’s decision to covertly roll back its longtime policy is the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike,” said Ellis.
“This decision to roll back LGBTQ safety pulls Twitter even more out of step with TikTok, Pinterest, and Meta, which all maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real-world discrimination and violence,” she added.
Others attacked Twitter with their tweets.
“Twitter lifts it’s policy on targeted misgendering and deadnaming and the freaks are out gleefully misgendering and deadnaming every prominent trans person as an achievement. It’s not about speech, it’s about bullies wanting to harass people because of who they are,” said activist Alejandra Caraballo.
“Every decision Musk makes is bad for free speech, safety, business,” tweeted attorney Nora Benavidez.
“This is absolutely exhausting. Every day something else happens to show just how much people despise trans people and don’t care about what happens to us and it’s really f***ing overwhelming and frightening,”said a user who identifies as a bisexual.
At least one other account called the policy change a “genocidal move.”
Some public schools have changed their policies to include dead-naming and misgendering as “slurs” and threatened to suspend students who refuse to follow the new rules.
“DEAD-NAMING”, is defined as, “Deadnaming is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name. “
Here’s more about Twitter under Elon Musk:
Elon Musk Stuns Hosts with His Brutally Honest Answer About Running Twitter | @RubinReport www.youtube.com
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Screenshot taken from video on the Matt Walsh YouTube channel
The Twitter account of conservative commentator Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire was apparently hacked. The hack was quite obvious because wildly inappropriate content was reportedly posted to the account. According to screenshots shared by journalist Andy Ngô, one of the tweets posted to Walsh’s account referred to Shapiro as “A Closeted Homosexual” who hides “Behind Being Jewish.”
Another post read, “My Pronouns Are That/N****.”
“My Twitter Isn’t Hacked, This Is Just The Real Me Coming Out,” another tweet claimed.
While the tweets have apparently been removed from the account, there is still a link on Walsh’s profile that directs to a song on Spotify called “Sassy Shooters,” and it appears that the banner photo on Walsh’s account has been changed.
Walsh is a prominent and outspoken opponent of radical leftist gender ideology. His Daily Wire documentary “What Is a Woman?” delves into the issue, and he has also authored a children’s book meant to push back against the woke ideology.
“Over the past few months, my friend @mattwalshblog has been threatened to the extent that he’s had to have full-time security at his home to protect his family. Now he’s been hacked. The tolerant and diverse and kind crowd are celebrating, of course,” Shapiro tweeted. “They tell you who they are. Believe them,” he added.
Shapiro screenshotted a few tweets, including one in which Alejandra Caraballo wrote, “Matt Walsh’s account has been hacked. Couldn’t have happened to a more miserable piece of s***.”
“RT IF YOU THINK THAT THE HACK COULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED TO A ‘NICER’ GUY!” the Occupy Democrats Twitter account tweeted.
Over the past few months, my friend @mattwalshblog has been threatened to the extent that he's had to have full-time security at his home to protect his family. Now he's been hacked. The tolerant and diverse and kind crowd are celebrating, of course. pic.twitter.com/JvIrsJyvW4
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.
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) purged its website of numerous videos and documents related to its pediatric gender clinic following public outrage over gender transition procedures being offered to minors there.
Clinic staff encouraged school employees to keep children’s gender identity secret from parents and promoted biomedical interventions for young children in some of the since-removed online resources, which have been saved in online archives.
“In research conducted with colleagues at CHOP, we examined the experience of chest dysphoria and top (masculinizing chest) surgery in transmasculine youth ages 13–21 … Top surgery can vastly improve the lives of transmasculine youth and is critical to their health and well-being,” one document read.
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which operates a gender clinic, removed numerous videos and posts discussing childhood gender transitions, including irreversible surgeries, from its website amid public backlash, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
The CHOP Gender and Sexuality Development Program came under scrutiny in September 2022 after some of its training videos on childhood gender transitions were circulated online, and the clinic said it was tightening its security that October due to threats. Resources including videos in which clinic staff promoted cross-sex medical interventions for minors and advised school workers to keep children’s gender identity secret from their families have since disappeared from CHOP’s website; these pages are saved in online archives, but their links either redirect to error pages or go to pages that have been heavily altered with certain links removed. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: School District Donated To Gender Clinic That Gives Kids Puberty Blockers, Refers Them For Trans Surgeries)
A CHOP webpage linking to a document that promoted “gender-affirming care” for youth, including mastectomies for girls as young as 13, was saved to online archives in June 2022, but that page had been removed from public view by November. The document was produced by CHOP’s PolicyLab, which conducts research and makes public policy recommendations on health care issues.
“Many transmasculine youth … experience chest dysphoria, which is physical and emotional distress caused by the presence of unwanted breast tissue,” the document read. “In research conducted with colleagues at CHOP, we examined the experience of chest dysphoria and top (masculinizing chest) surgery in transmasculine youth ages 13–21 … Top surgery can vastly improve the lives of transmasculine youth and is critical to their health and well-being.”
The CHOP website also removed the public’s ability to download annual reports on the clinic’s achievements in medicine, outreach and advocacy, which were publicly available as of June 2022 but needed to be requested by email as of January 2023, according to online archives. One such report previously obtained by the DCNF revealed that the clinic had hired a social worker to help minors access “gender-affirming” surgeries by gathering letters of support and requesting that insurance companies cover the procedure.
CHOP’s “Professional Resources for the Gender and Sexuality Development Clinic” web page featured an LGBTQ Education Program section and a video resources section as of September 2021, according to online archives, but neither exist on the current website. An hour-long webinar on adolescent medical transition that advised puberty blockers as young as eight and hormones and surgeries as young as 14 was among the links scrubbed from the page, along with videos titled“Supporting Transgender and Gender Expansive Students” and “Discussing Sexuality and Safer Sex with Trans Clients;” the videos are all currently unlisted on YouTube.
Screenshot/YouTube/The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
A family support and education specialist for CHOP urged school counselors to keep students’ preferred names and pronouns secret from their families and other school staff in the now-removed video on supporting trans students. The same webinar said school bathrooms, locker rooms and sports should be organized based on gender identity rather than biological sex.
CHOP’s Gender and Sexuality Development Program was one of several child gender clinics to come under fire in late 2022 as online activists publicized videos and documents detailing cross-sex medical treatments being offered to children.
Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago came under scrutiny for promoting a “LGBTQ sex shop for teens” that sold sex toys including dildos, vibrators, harnesses and anal toys in its “Beyond the Binary” lessons for local schools, and Boston Children’s Hospitalreceived a bomb threat after unearthed documents and videos revealed the hospital had performed dozens of “gender affirming” mastectomies on children.
The CHOP gender clinic did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Netflix subscriptions. Marriage. Terms of service agreements. Text messages. Social media posts. Pregnancy. Amazon purchases. Aging.
According to our consumerist social catechism, each of these actions is reversible. Click “cancel.” Get a divorce. Dig through your privacy settings and revoke permissions (even though you know you’re never going to). Unsend. Delete. Get an abortion. Return for free with a preprinted label. Get plastic surgery.
For young people raised in this “Ctrl-Z” world, unfamiliarity with the irreversible breeds suspicion, which translates to avoiding commitments. It’s no surprise few of my generational peers are getting married and having kids — although the culture tells us those commitments are still changeable, they’re actually messy to get out of and necessarily close other doors.
We are taught to believe limitations are inherently oppressive and therefore bad. Keeping your options open, on the other hand, is liberating and therefore desirable.
Some limitations, like those of becoming a parent, we choose to enter into and therefore can choose to avoid — which young people increasingly do. Other limitations are innate and unalterable. But to the restriction-averse, that inescapable nature makes those even more threatening. One of those fearsomely unchangeable limits is our biology: We are afraid to be limited by our natural sex.
Here’s how Amelia Blackney, a 13-year-old girl who decided to start going by the plural pronouns “they/them” and identifying as “non-binary,” explained her decision to CNN:
That way it’s like I’m not a part of any gender or I can be both genders at the same time. My pronouns now put me at a place where I can decide between different genders. That feels right.
If limitations are to be avoided — or overthrown — why would you tie yourself down to being either a girl or a boy? Why limit your prospects to growing up to be either a man or a woman? If you could be gender-fluid, all doors remain open to you. You don’t have to choose to be a she or a he, you can be they! Your options become unlimited. Subscription to being a woman, canceled.
Another child, 14-year-old Sylvia Chesak, described how she was “uncomfortable” thinking of herself as “just” a “she,” and chose to use “any pronouns” as a result.
These children, or the adults who egg them on, revolt against the sex they say was “assigned” in infancy. The nonsense language of “assigned at birth” doesn’t only make the wrong assumption that sex is nonexistent until it’s decreed by a doctor. It also makes the subtle implication that by doing the “assigning,” a doctor is imposing a category — a limit — on an infant that is inherently restrictive and must be abolished. Physical limitations like a man’s inability to get pregnant don’t matter, just like the physical limitations of a kid with Coke-bottle glasses who wants to become a pilot don’t matter to the adults telling him he can “be whatever he wants to be.”
One mother wrote in Time magazine about choosing not to call her child, named Zoomer, either a boy or a girl because she didn’t want to impose the “chains” and “restrictions of the gender binary.” Even after her child expressed a desire to be treated as a particular sex, the woman insisted on calling her child “they” in the article.
Elsewhere, she says, “The aim isn’t to create a genderless world; it’s to contribute to a genderfull one.” In other words, rejecting the sex binary isn’t about erasing sexuality, but removing all of its categorical limits.
A Swedish mother similarly explained that she refused to acknowledge her child’s sex “just as I don’t want to decide what they grow up to do…”
Telling children they can be and do “anything” helped create a generation petrified of narrowing their own options. They date around indefinitely to keep options open in case something better comes along. In the same way, kids learn to keep open the “option” of being a boy or a girl or a xe. Your natural sex is bad because it limits your possibilities.
Of course, your possibilities become far more limited when a doctor chops off your breasts or genitals or pumps you with hormones that may permanently alter your voice and body and keep you from ever having children. But just examine the messaging those hormones are marketed by: They’re reversible. You can just stop taking them. Here’s what Google would tell a curious teen, though the fine print is far more complicated than the highlighted answer suggests:
The messaging for puberty blockers is even more overt. Delay puberty, St. Louis Children’s Hospital tells kids, if you want “more time to explore [your] options.” What teen wouldn’t want that?
The reality is, of course, that some limits are outside our control. As for the limits we choose by the commitments we make, it’s far more paralyzing to artificially keep every option open than to choose wisely and live within the natural limitations of an ordered life. For kids getting transed into oblivion, that paralysis may be literal. But for all of us, refusing to commit to decisions worthy of our commitment will leave us lonely, exhausted, and bitter. Eventually, people who don’t want to limit their “options” by getting married usually realize one day that they don’t like any of the options left. Those who never put down roots typically end up adrift.
Thankfully, accepting our finitude is liberating. By recognizing the divine order that confines us, we are freed from struggling against it, and freed to do well in the things that are within our power.
In that latter realm, we have the gift of making choices and commitments, not so that we will avoid ever making them, but so that we may choose what is good. From choosing to work hard, to be loyal friends, to profess our faith, to raise children, to be faithful to our spouses, good choices place obligations on us, many of which are permanent. The fulfillment of those obligations enriches our lives, offering a depth of meaning and satisfaction that “keeping our options open” can never provide.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
A sane person who prefers living in a clean, safe, and prosperous city would see that news and say things are going in the wrong direction, and the people who are responsible for it need to be held accountable.
That’s how popular TikTok user The Blaq Mamba reacted in a video she posted Sunday. “What really saddens me about this,” she said, referring to the closure of one Walmart location in the South Side, “is that this Walmart was built in a predominantly black neighborhood. This is probably about the only major resource as far as like, shopping and access to groceries and access to pharmacy within a 10-block, maybe even a 10-mile radius.” She added, “And what’s really sad to me is how us black folks, we done stole and robbed ourselves out of a f-cking resource that even the elderly people of this community will not be able to have access to.”
She said she was “ashamed and saddened” because “We blame everybody else for our sh-t but then when we are tapped out of resources in our own community, we don’t ever want to look at ourselves and point the finger back at ourselves, and say, okay, maybe we f-cked up. Maybe we shouldn’t have been going in there stealing TVs and going in there stealing electronics and all this other sh-t … We need to do better.”
A person who is perhaps not sane or who is, at minimum, a societal parasite sucking the life and goodness out of everything would react just the opposite. He would excuse the ne’er-do-wells, thieves, and fiends. Instead, he would direct blame at those who refuse to tolerate anti-social behavior.
That’s how deadbeat incoming Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson reacted. (I assume you don’t need me to tell you he’s a Democrat.) Following a weekend of street thugging and mayhem around the once-cherished Millennium Park, during which two teens and a six-year-old boy were shot, Johnson saw no urgency. “I’m saying that people are acting out of desperation,” he said in a remote TV interview, dialing in from what looked fittingly like a jail cell. “We don’t want a society that is acting out of desperation. But you have to pay attention to the cries that people have.” Asked if he condones the rampant looting that has forced countless businesses to close, he said, “What I’m saying is that you can’t condone the looting that corporations continue to do every single day when they take tax dollars from black, brown, white folks all over the city of Chicago so that they can turn a profit.”
Johnson said in a separate statement that it’s “not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
I don’t know about you, but the first thing that comes to mind when I see a teen snatching a handle of Hennessy before climbing a street light is definitely “a society that is acting out of desperation.”
What is there really left to say at this point? There appear to be more Brandon Johnsons than there Blaq Mambas. It’s too bad. Chicago could be a nice place. It used to be. Now it’s another ghetto for people like Johnson to further plunge into squalor.
How many voters understand that the Democratic Party supports legalized abortion through all nine months of pregnancy on demand for virtually any reason? How many voters know this position aligns with only six other countries in the world — three of them, not incidentally, being North Korea, Vietnam, and China?
Indeed, Democrats want to pass a federal law overturning the democratic will of states that ban sex-selective abortions or the dismembering of the post-viable unborn or require parental or guardian notification for minors before getting abortions. Democrats want to allow non-doctors to perform abortions (probably because it’s not medical care) while at the same time stripping real medical workers of their conscience rights by compelling them to participate in the procedure or lose their jobs. Democrats want to eliminate the popular Hyde Amendment that stops the federal government from funding abortions with taxpayer dollars. They believe abortion is vital in ensuring that poorer Americans have fewer children.
Now, maybe a majority of voters aren’t aware of Democrats’ maximalist positions because the media endlessly lies and obfuscates them. And maybe pollsters rarely ask useful questions on the topic — offering absurdly vague queries like “do you support abortion access” or should “abortion be legal” rather than should it be legal until the “due date” or “for any reason” or “after the baby is viable” or “for sex selection” — because the answers are a lot more complicated than they’d like.
And, maybe, after the shock of Roe being overturned — treated by Democrats as if it had been chiseled into magical stone tablets over the past 50 years — the energy and passion of the debate will temporarily reside on the pro-abortion side. And, maybe, if every voter knew all the facts, it still wouldn’t matter. Abortion is a complex and emotional issue.
None of that excuses the inability, or aversion, of national conservatives to make a coherent and compelling pro-life case. Sometimes it feels like Republicans are more terrified by the Dobbs decision than pro-abortionists. Even if pollsters were right about the unpopularity of abortion restrictions, there is this crazy thing that politicians occasionally engage in called “persuasion.” Rather than just chasing around voters for approval, this entails convincing them with arguments.
The problem, it seems, is that too many in the GOP accept the media’s concern trolling or listen to risk-averse advice of the consulting class. Take Wisconsin. On the same day Republicans took a supermajority in the legislature, Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative Dan Kelly by 10 percentage points to flip the state’s Supreme Court. Virtually every outlet treated the race, in which 36 percent of Wisconsin voters showed up, as a national referendum on abortion. Anonymous consultants were recruited to offer off-the-record comments voicing their deep concern about the deleterious effects of the abortion issue. “The drubbing Republicans took in Wisconsin this week revealed how harmful the issue of abortion still is to the party — and will likely remain through 2024,” Politico explained. “Wisconsin Supreme Court election sends message on abortion rights,” says the Washington Post. And so on.
Weird how this dynamic only works in one direction. In 2020, Brain Kemp, who signed a heartbeat bill limiting abortion to the first six weeks a year earlier, easily defeated media darling Stacey Abrams to win the Georgia governorship (in a state that Donald Trump also lost.) Abrams made abortion, along with guns, the central issue of her campaign, carpet-bombing the state with ads. In 2018, Terry McAuliffe also attempted to make abortion the dominant issue of his campaign against Glenn Youngkin. At the time, two of the Washington Post’s most dedicated partisan flaks promised that the race was “our first big test of the new politics of abortion.” Well, Youngkin, who supports 15-week abortion limits, won. Alas, there were no four-bylined handwringing deep dives from the Post about abortion undermining Democrats.
Georgia and Virginia are swing states. Ohio, where Mike DeWine signed a six-week ban in 2019 and won the state by 10 points in 2022, was one not long ago, as well. This is the same state in which pro-life JD Vance easily beat “moderate” Tim Ryan. But Ohio and Virginia teach nothing about abortion. Only the Wisconsin Supreme Court race matters.
This week, the governor of Florida and prospective presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, signed a six-week ban on abortion. One imagines DeSantis will be just as popular among Republicans in his state since the bill passed overwhelmingly in the Florida Assembly. Of course, conventional wisdom says this hurts his presidential chances.
Every GOP president since Ronald Reagan has taken a pro-life position. Even in a post-Dobbs world, the idea that abortion is going to be the determinative factor in the presidential race is likely wishful thinking. Now that Roe has been overturned, the president has even less say over the future of abortion. Abortion has become a state issue. That’s what irks Dems.
Whatever the case, the Republican nominee doesn’t need to impress California voters. They need to convince social conservatives in Virginia, Ohio, and Florida to go out and vote. Does anyone really think DeSantis would be better off politically if he vetoed a pro-life bill? Running from the abortion conversation, as so many Republicans seem to do, creates the impression they don’t really believe in their own stated position. Quite often, that’s probably the case. If you’re going to run as a pro-lifer, allowing the opposition to define your beliefs makes little sense. Especially when making a rational and moral case for protecting viable life, at the very least, isn’t particularly difficult — certainly not when contrasted with the left’s extremism.
Then again, if every Republican lost every race in the country over abortion, it still wouldn’t make killing human beings for convenience any less of a moral abomination or the fight to stop it any less important. A majority position isn’t, by default, moral or decent — quite the contrary. And meaningful political fights aren’t predicated on short-term gains. Overturning Roe took 50 years. The political fight over abortion might take even longer.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
My roots in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania run deep. Growing up here it was rare to see businesses open on Sundays. It was the Lord’s Day. We spent the morning in church, the afternoon with family, and honored God by resting from our regular labor—something God commanded we do in the fourth of the Ten Commandments.
I never thought I would lose my job for honoring the Lord’s Day.
As I matured, I looked for jobs that would respect the Lord’s Day. The United States Postal Service seemed a perfect fit. Not only could I drive the rural routes of my boyhood, it famously did not deliver on Sundays. I could have a good career and respect the Lord’s Day.
It was an ideal job until the Postal Service contracted with Amazon to provide Sunday delivery. At first, we managed to find a workable solution: I would work every holiday that did not fall on the Lord’s Day and take extra route work on weekdays and Saturdays to make up for not working Sundays.
As much as I was able to accommodate the Post Office, stepping in to help other employees when they needed it most, the Postal Service would not accommodate me. If I were a full-time rural carrier, it would be no problem. Full-time carriers have enough seniority to be contractually exempt from work on Sundays. If I had been willing to compromise what I believed and worked just a few Sundays, I would have reached seniority to get a full-time route and gone on to have a long career with the U.S. Postal Service.
Authorities say a mail dropbox outside of a Pennsylvania post office has been struck dozens of times by thieves searching for money and checks. (FOX 29 Philadelphia)
It was either I violate God’s command to me and honor the Lord’s Day by keeping it holy or honor Him and trust Him with the outcome. On the verge of my ideal career, I surrendered all my seniority, unwilling to sacrifice my hope of becoming a full-time carrier at the prospect of refusing God’s decree—even if it meant working just one Lord’s Day.
The response by the Postal Service was brutal. I felt targeted for almost two years. Rather than respect my religious beliefs, the Postal Service chose to make an example out of me. Postal management sent me for eight different “pre-disciplinary interviews” at the main post office. Each one took about two hours out of my work day, and I still had to finish all of my routes—and without overtime pay.
My employer purposefully assigned me more work than the same carriers I had been supporting every Saturday and holiday by working so they could have time off with family. Without explanation or justification, USPS docked my pay. If I had just compromised what I believed about the Lord’s Day—even just a handful of times—all of it would have gone away. Compromising what we believe is never the right choice.
Surely an employer the size of the Postal Service could have found a way to accommodate a single employee’s religious beliefs. Instead, it disciplined me so severely, it was quit or be fired.
Gerald Groff lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and is a former postal employee. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear his case on April 18, 2023. (First Liberty Institute)
Now, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether religious employees like me who work extra shifts, holidays, and cover for his colleagues deserve a religious accommodation in the workplace. Only God knows the final outcome; I still trust Him even if my decision to honor the Lord’s Day cost me my career.
Our nation has a long history of protecting employees from being treated differently just because of their faith. That is something woven into the fabric of our nation, including Lancaster County. The heritage of respect and tolerance our nation has shown to the Old Order Amish and Mennonites who are my neighbors in Lancaster County is a lovely thing. Yet the U.S. Postal Service refused to extend that religious tolerance to me.
I hope the Supreme Court reaffirms our nation’s commitment to providing equal opportunity and fair treatment in the workplace. No employee should be forced to make the same decision the Postal Service forced upon me: faith or job.
Gerald Groff lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and is a former postal employee.
New video has emerged of the “Teen Takeover” of downtown Chicago showing a panicked woman terrorized by a mob of young people who brutally attacked, beat and robbed her.
The video, which was widely circulated on social media as part of a larger “mix tape” of the downtown riot over the weekend, shows a woman appearing to attempt to enter the doorway of 129 Wabash Avenue in Chicago, an apartment building near the city’s Millennium Park.
However, before she gets inside, the woman is surrounded by a large group of people who block the doorway. Some then pounce on her, the video shows.
The woman, identified as 18 to 24-years old, was with a 22-year-old male victim during the attack, Chicago police said.
The mob surrounded the victims and multiple people “struck the victims several times before taking their personal property and fleeing in an unknown direction,” the police report said. No arrests have been made in the incident, while the victims were transported to the University of Illinois Hospital with what were classified as “minor injuries.”
Screenshots of a woman attacked during Chicago’s “Teen Takeover.” (Fox News)
In a statement Monday, the Chicago Police Department said that “the safety and wellbeing of our residents and visitors, including our city’s youth” is the department’s “top priority.”
Investigators are using social media posts to piece together clues on any crimes committed during the downtown chaos over the weekend, the statement added.
(Screenshot of a woman attacked during Chicago’s “Teen Takeover.”)
The department also outlined steps to improve safety, including the “monitoring all activity and police cameras” in an attempt to streamline the “reallocation of resources when necessary.”
“Additional security measures such as bag checks at beach entry points and the curfew for minors at Millennium Park will also be in place. CPD is also working closely with youth and outreach workers for when these gatherings occur,” the department said.
Car window smashed as teens caused chaos in downtown Chicago Saturday. (Fox 32)
Saturday’s “Teen Takeover” saw hundreds of teens and young people descend on downtown Chicago. Video from the chaos showed many of the teens spilling into traffic and vandalizing vehicles, while there were multiple reports of assaults and shots fired in the area.
A large police presence was needed downtown in an attempt to restore order, with the police department vowing that those responsible for crimes during the chaos will be punished.
Teens spilled into downtown Chicago, smashing car windows and attacking tourists. (WFLD)
“The reckless, disruptive and violent behavior that was seen downtown this past weekend will not be tolerated,” the department’s statement said. “We encourage our young people to be safe and responsible as they enjoy their weekends, but anyone engaged in criminal activity will be arrested and held accountable.”
Michael Lee is a writer at Fox News. Follow him on Twitter @UAMichaelLee
Riley Gaines, a former All-American swimmer from the University of Kentucky, didn’t hold back when reacting to President Biden’s promise to veto a bill that would prevent biological males from participating in women’s sports. Speaking with Fox News Digital on Monday just hours after the White House released a statement slamming the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, or H.R. 734, Gaines said Biden’s veto promise was evidence he was putting a “radical minority” ahead of women across the country.
“The President has declared that science, truth, and common sense no longer matter. In opposing this bill, President Biden is catering to a radical minority at the expense of women, who are 51% of the population,” Gaines said.
President Biden (left) and former All-American University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines (right). (Getty)
“Equal opportunity, privacy, and safety in our sports shouldn’t be controversial. The women who once advocated for Title IX should be outraged as this goes against everything they fought for. Female athletes of all ages, levels, and sports deserve better,” she added.
H.R. 734 has not yet been passed by Congress, but is expected to come to a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives sometime this week.
In a statement, the White House said it “strongly opposes” the bill on the grounds that it would “deny access to sports for many families by establishing an absolute ban on transgender students.”
Members of the House of Representatives participate in the vote for Speaker on the first day of the 118th Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 03, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
It went on to call the bill “discriminatory,” claimed such a law was “unnecessary,” and that it “hurts families and students.”
As part of the bill, educational institutions that receive Title IX funding from the federal government would not be allowed to “permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designed for women or girls.”
The bill says that the sex of an athlete would be recognized only by their “reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” The legislation would allow transgender female athletes to train or practice in a girls’ athletic program, but only if no biological female athlete is deprived of a roster spot.
University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines reacts after finishing tied for 5th with transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas in the 200 Freestyle finals at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships on March 18th, 2022 at the McAuley Aquatic Center in Atlanta Georgia. (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Democrats have made it clear that most or all of them will oppose the bill on the floor. The House Education and Workforce Committee approved the legislation in a 25-17 vote — every Republican voted for it, and only Democrats voted against it.
Fox News’ Peter Kasperowicz contributed to this report.
Brandon Gillespie is an associate editor at Fox News. Follow him on Twitter at @brandon_cg.
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 Presiden
Hundreds of teenagers flooded into the streets of Chicago on Saturday night. In response to the chaos, hundreds of police officers were dispatched to the downtown area after there several cars were damaged by the teenagers. Around 8 p.m., the mob of teens attempted to storm into Millennium Park. However, people under 21 are not allowed access to the park without being accompanied by an adult.
The horde of teens forced police to escort tourists and locals back to their cars at the Millennium Park garage. Teens also reportedly attempted to force their way inside the Art Institute of Chicago in an attempted “teen takeover.”
Officers from the Chicago Police Department, Chicago Fire Department, EMS, and SWAT teams were dispatched to the area. Rowdy teens smashed the windows of several cars by jumping on the vehicles – including a police cruiser. Video shows a vehicle being set on fire.
A man sitting in the driver’s seat of his car was injured and taken to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital after a group of teens beat him as they smashed his vehicle.
Video shows teens standing and dancing on the roof of a Chicago Transit Authority bus. There were reports of bottles being thrown at CTA buses. The CTA said some public transportation was disrupted on Saturday night because of police activity.
Police noted that there were social media posts encouraging teens to fight in the Loop.
🚨#BREAKING: Chaotic Scene Unfolds in Downtown Chicago as Teenagers Vandalize Cars and Gunfire Erupts
📌#Chicago | #Illinois ⁰ There is currently a significant police response taking place in downtown Chicago due to a large group of teenagers causing chaos. They have been… pic.twitter.com/n7xhBpsTKs
WFLD reported that gunfire erupted near the crowds at the corner of Madison and Michigan. Two teenagers were shot. The teens, ages 16 and 17, were shot and rushed to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Both boys are said to be in fair condition with gunshot wounds.
A witness told WMAQ-TV, “It’s heartbreaking, kids fighting, chasing each other, some of them got guns. It’s really heartbreaking when one of them actually gets hurt, and that’s unfortunate, happened last night.”
CBS News reported that “multiple teens” were arrested – all were under the age of 18.
The Chicago Police Department said in a statement, “Last night, CPD monitored activity happening across the city and officers were in place to quickly respond to active incidents and large gatherings. We will continue to have sufficient resources in place as we work to strengthen safety in every neighborhood.”
This was the second night of a crowd of teens taking over Chicago. On Friday night, a mob of teenagers gathered at the 31st Street Beach on Friday night. A 14-year-old boy was shot near the crowds.
WLS-TV reported that at least 29 people had been shot, six fatally, in weekend violence in Chicago.
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Piers Morgan shut down Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) on Friday for accusing female athlete Riley Gaines of using her platform to seek attention. Gaines made national headlines last week after she was accosted by a mob of transgender activists after she delivered a speech at San Francisco State University. The school later praised the transgender activists.
During an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time,” Porter said she “strongly” disagrees with Gaines for advocating against transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. Morgan immediately challenged Porter.
“What has she actually said that is wrong?” he asked.
“I think that what she has done is try to turn this — we talked about people becoming — using things to kind of get likes and get clicks,” Porter responded.
“That’s not what she’s doing,” Morgan shot back. “All I’ve seen her do is stand up for women’s rights to fairness and equality. She actually competed against Lia Thomas, and it was obviously unfair. Lia Thomas won one of the races in the NCAA Championships by 50 seconds against a bunch of biological females who simply couldn’t keep up. That cannot be right. It cannot be fair.”
Instead, Porter said that sporting bodies should decide who gets to compete and said that Gaines is speaking only for herself.
“I think she’s speaking for pretty much every female athlete in the world,” Morgan fired back.
Piers Morgan and Bill Maher say Riley Gaines is standing up for female athletes worldwide, Lia Thomas has no place in women's swimming, and it's wrong to allow transgender athletes to decimate women's sports records:
The former All-SEC swimmer made it clear on Saturday that she is not simply speaking for herself and she is definitely not speaking out to gain attention.
“Hey @RepKatiePorter I’m not speaking up for myself,” Gaines responded on Saturday.
“I’m done playing sports. I’m not fighting for me. I’m actually supposed to be in dental school this year,” she explained. “But I’ve changed my life plans because I see what’s at stake if someone doesn’t fight for the present and next generation.”
Gaines added that she is confused as to why women fight against “sex-based protections.”
“Why is it always women fighting against sex-based protections? That will forever be beyond me,” she said.
Hey @RepKatiePorter I'm not speaking up for myself…I'm done playing sports. I'm not fighting for me. I'm actually supposed to be in dental school this year. But I've changed my life plans because I see what's at stake if someone doesn't fight for the present and next generation https://t.co/4QrPvPbnCC
Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe there is a two-tiered justice system. Last week’s courtroom episodes only validate the public’s perception.
On Friday, President Joe Biden’s allegedly “non-binary” nuclear waste expert, Sam Brinton, was sentenced in a grand larceny case over stealing women’s luggage from U.S. airports. Police say Brinton stole a bag from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas with an estimated worth of around $3,670. Authorities also charged Brinton with stealing luggage at a second airport in Minnesota.
The former Energy Department official took a plea deal over the Las Vegas bag theft Friday, agreeing to pay a $3,670 fine to the victim and a $500 criminal fee — no jail time required. The Minnesota theft remains an open case, with the next hearing scheduled for Monday, according to Fox News.
Contrast Brinton’s slap on the wrist to a pro-Trump meme creator convicted of illegal election influencing last month, and it’s no wonder Americans see a two-tiered justice system. Douglass Mackey faces 10 years behind bars over a 2016 post mocking how low Democrats want to set barriers to the ballot box.
“Save time Avoid the line Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925 and we’ll make history together This November 8th,” the post read. Fine print at the bottom added, “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.”
Federal prosecutors didn’t care that most online users played into the prank by texting the number “Hillary for Prison.” The DOJ indicted Mackey in January last year, 74 months after the 2016 presidential contest.
Brinton’s crime, meanwhile, inflicted real harm on those who lost their luggage.
Asya Idarous Khamsin is a Houston-based Tanzanian fashion designer whose luggage was allegedly stolen by Brinton in 2018. Khamsin went on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” three weeks ago to discuss what happened after her bag went missing. Khamsin said she and her husband saw Brinton wearing clothes resembling the custom-made designs matching the apparel in her lost bag when the pair turned on Fox News in December.
“Oh my God, I was shocked,” Khamsin said. “For more than 40 years, I work[ed] hard. All my work, it’s very paining.”
“I was asking myself how this person got my custom-made designs because it’s one of a kind, and wear them without fear and display in public,” Khamsin added. “I don’t accuse him as a thief, but there is [a] question to be answered here.”
The Texas-based fashion designer went on to share how the lost luggage caused her to miss a show and “let down my people.”
Mackey, on the other hand, is faced with a decade in prison over an online joke.
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 July 1944, 44 delegates from Allied countries came together during World War II in Bretton Wood, New Hampshire. The goal? Devise an international currency system to manage foreign exchange that would disadvantage no country and effectively facilitate post-war rebuilding and commerce. The outcome: The U.S. greenback would be the world’s reserve currency.
It has been almost 80 years since, and all nations have been better off with a United States dollar-dominated world. World gross domestic product (GDP) in 1940 was $7.81 trillion. For 2023, the world GDP is expected to be $112.6 trillion. That is an increase of 1,441 percent. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of this.
China is working overtime to disrupt the dollar-dominated world economy. The significance of the dollar losing its premier position cannot be overstated. The Biden administration should not overlook this.
Most Americans may be unaware of crucial transactions occurring around the globe recently. And who could blame them? All the corporate media’s main headlines have been over the now-public indictment of former President Donald Trump, over factually weak allegations involving hush-money payments to a porn star.
The indictment of a former president is a crossing-of-the-Rubicon moment in American history. But displacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, as China and Russia have both made known is their objective, has analogous ramifications for the world. But while the world watches Trump’s indictment, they are missing China’s transactions with some of our major allies and trading partners in the yuan. Notably, China is doing this with nations that need better stewards.
Bloomberg News reported in February 2023 that the Inevitable Rise of the Petroyuan (yuan used to settle Middle East oil transactions) was a “myth.” One month later, Saudi Arabia and OPEC are now considering just that.
In our republic, the founders “separated the purse from the sword.” With the passing of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, Congress further separated the purse from our elected representatives by giving the Federal Reserve power over the nation’s money supply.
China has no such separation of powers. President Xi Jinping wields both the sword and purse. What that means if the yuan were to become the global reserve currency is giving the Chinese Communist Party effective control over the money supply for the entire world. The United States would still have the dollar, but it would require exchanging for the yuan to transact with other nations.
Inflation and deflation can both have devastating effects on the economy. Deflation is what caused the Great Depression. Inflation, as we all feel the pain currently, caused an entire decade to be lost in the 1970s.
Allowing China to become the facilitator of the currency used in global commerce, such as the dollar is now, would be to give unprecedented powers to a communist dictatorship. The ebbs and flows of the global economic apparatus would be subject to a hostile foreign power that has no issue retaliating against other sovereign nations that disagree with them.
If the Chinese yuan were to become the global reserve currency, it would, in essence, give the CCP the ability to cripple entire nations. With a country as hostile as China, entire sovereign nations would be subject to the whims of the communists who run their countries. The CCP could arbitrarily restrict credit, enact sanctions, block entire nations from global commerce vis a vis foreign exchange prohibition, and use any of the other vast economic warfare tools the global reserve currency brings. Of course, unless nations decide to toe the Communist Party line.
The world would be like when we were younger and our financial life was dependent upon allowances given to us by our parents. Except in this case, instead of doing chores, nations would have to accept genocide, persecution of minorities, and the desecration of civil rights. We can bet governments would likely have to become complicit. That is not out of the realm of possibility when dealing with actors such as communists.
Mackenzie Alan Bettle graduated from Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business with a bachelor’s in business, law, and economics, summa cum laude, and received his Juris Doctorate from Seton Hall University Law School with an emphasis on law and economics. He is a practicing attorney in Phoenix, Arizona. He loves business, politics, economics, law, football, and his two fluffy Havanese dogs, Jack and Kobe.
From high interaction with homeschooled families and graduates in multiple environments, professional and personal, I’ve definitely noticed differences.
Homeschooling rose to 1 in 10 American kids in 2021 due to lockdowns, and the number has remained high even as lockdowns abated. Most families who began homeschooling due to lockdowns say they don’t plan to go back.
Despite the steady increase in homeschooling since its revival in the 1980s, families who choose this way of raising their children often face fearful responses from family and friends. Chief among the concerns is what people often call “socialization.” Sometimes, they mean, “Will your kids have any friends?” Other times, they mean, “Will your kids understand social cues and how to get along with normies?”
Yes, you can find homeschooling kids who dress oddly and don’t know how to carry on a basic conversation. But you can find people like that anywhere. As anyone who attended a public school can confirm, people who can’t make eye contact and are otherwise antisocial persist in that environment, too.
From high interaction with homeschooled families and graduates in multiple environments, professional and personal, I’ve definitely noticed differences. On balance, these differences tend to favor homeschoolers. Here are just seven I’ve observed that are also often obtainable in small schools.
1. Independent Thinking
It’s common for the “good” kids in public school to work hard to learn what the teacher wants and give it to her. They have a tendency to become compliers. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”
Now, homeschooled kids often also want to please Mom and Dad, but the ability to negotiate with a parent in ways one can’t with a teacher often encourages mental independence. They have freedom to read widely and extra free time in which to develop and personalize their sense of self. They also tend to get more long conversations with their parents because of homeschooling’s extremely small class sizes.
All these cultivate independent habits of thought. They teach people to develop their interests and personalities, and to follow arguments all the way to their conclusions. These things also teach students to spend time comparing and contrasting ideas for real, in a way that shapes one’s soul for life, not as a human version of ChatGPT.
Homeschoolers are also used to being unusual. They’re used to being asked questions like, “Do you have any friends?” and given the cold shoulder by public-school kids at events like sports and family gatherings.
Sometimes this turns a homeschooled kid desperate and makes him more peer-dependent, especially if he’s a sociable child and doesn’t spend enough time with friends. So he’s desperate for friends and therefore works overly hard to conform to negative peer pressure. I’ve seen this also with conservative kids. They accept peers’ or culture’s shaming and rejection of their social differences and therefore can more easily turn into antagonists against their own group.
Thus we have entities like Homeschoolers Anonymous, which argues that because some homeschooling families are abusive, homeschooling rather than the family is the problem. (You don’t hear that same argument about public schooling, which has a far higher rate of child abuse than homeschooling does. But I digress.)
If parents observe and address these social dynamics, mostly by helping their children find friends who build them up instead of savage their family’s choices, homeschoolers do tend to emerge into adulthood as independent thinkers. They tend to be quite comfortable with nonconformity, bringing new perspectives into their communities. This strengthens our society, especially now, as political correctness is metastasizing into a totalitarian social credit system.
2. More Practice with Multi-Age Relationships
Since they are so strongly family-oriented, homeschoolers break out of our society’s artificial, factory-school model of corralling people with those who happen to be born in the same calendar year. Homeschooled kids are far more comfortable making friends with anyone, not just those their exact same age.
They drop by for tea at the old lady’s down the block (true story). Bigger kids play comfortably with babies and toddlers. They know how because they have little siblings and cousins they are around more often because they’re not in school all day. This makes many homeschoolers even more socially capable than peers who falsely believe that one can only be friends with a person who looks and acts just like them. It expands their horizons and their relationship skills.
Freedom from same-age exclusivity has academic benefits as well as social benefits. Everyone understands that no person is exactly mentally on track with every other person his age. An 8-year-old may be strong in math but weak in spelling, compared to those of his age. Homeschooling allows the flexibility to meet children academically outside of the “average” peer.
Being too far ahead of one’s class makes bright kids bored, and being too far behind his class makes struggling students despair. Teaching right at a person’s actual level instead of his artificially imposed level is the most effective instruction possible.
3. More Prosocial Habits and Expectations
For decades, parents have moved to the suburbs to raise their kids because they didn’t want their children in environments shaped by poverty. As Thomas Sowell and others have chronicled, America’s urban and rural poor share many antisocial behaviors that keep them down and drag others with them. These include higher rates of violence and nonmarital sex and other coarse and life-damaging behavior such as openly disrespecting authority.
Homeschooling takes the protection of moving to the suburbs a step further. That’s an increasingly prudent step as our entire culture seems hell-bent on downward mobility.
Simply the widespread adoption of smartphones for children immediately degrades entire social ecosystems such as schools, because children are too immature to handle attention-destroying notifications and open internet access. Ten-year-old girls don’t need to see pornographic drawings and get propositioned to join a threesome because their badly parented peers watch YouTube videos of lesbian sex (true stories — from the suburbs).
In an environment like this, sometimes the only possible way to ensure your child actually has a childhood is to homeschool. It would be better if our society decided to protect children from living in social cesspools like this, but most of our parents and institutions have so far refused. That leaves it up to sane parents and churches. Homeschooling is one way to allow children an innocent childhood so they encounter this world’s violence and sex when they are ready.
4. Better Ability to Choose Friends
It’s always been prudent to select one’s companions carefully. Friends strongly affect who you are. Families who pay $50,000 a year for so-called “elite” private schools and then send their children to morally bankrupt Ivies know this. Their values are degraded, but the underlying impetus is correct: One’s companions can determine the course of one’s entire life. This is true for adults and even more so for children.
The thing about public school is that anyone can and does go there. We don’t live in the 1950s, when one could more reliably count on both the average parent and most institutions to be sane and responsible.
Today’s average parent is checked out and lets his kids be mentored by creepy strangers on the internet and other kids who are mentored by creepy strangers on the internet. Today’s average institution is run by apathetic box-checkers whose lack of moral fiber tends to let antisocial people and woke inmates turn everything into an asylum.
This means parents today can’t count on most other people to encourage their families toward the good. Sending children to public school (and allowing them unsupervised internet access) not only prevents parents from carefully selecting their children’s major influences but also ensures their impressionable children will repeatedly encounter sick perversions they are too immature to handle.
Homeschooling (and private schooling) families have far greater control over their companions than do those who allow our degraded public square to mess with their kids’ minds, and therefore can more intentionally manage this key determinant of a family’s character.
5. Better Family Relationships
A complaint I often hear about homeschooling that unintentionally reveals its speaker’s lack of character is: “I just couldn’t be with my kids all day long!” Parents shouldn’t avoid helping their kids mature by farming out their parenting to others. Others don’t do as good a job of it as parents will. It’s also an abdication of their responsibility that has bad consequences for them, their children, their community, and all of society.
Yes, children are annoying. Every person is annoying sometimes. Mature adults realize we’re also annoying sometimes and that a currently annoying person will usually get over it. This isn’t a children problem, it’s a people problem.
Yes, children can be more directly annoying than adults because they are more actively driven by their passions. That’s one top characteristic of immaturity. Yet kids’ natural immaturity isn’t worse because it’s more obvious than most adults’.
When an adult seeks arousal, he might use internet porn, blast loud music in public spaces, or zone out on a video game. A child seeking arousal might wander around whistling or run in circles around the kitchen. He might bang the same song on the piano 20 times a day or tease his sister 30 times just to get a reaction (guess how I came up with these examples).
But Jordan Peterson is right that kids are mostly as annoying as their parents allow them to be. Some parents allow their children to maintain habits of complaining, whining, arguing with parents when they say no, teasing siblings, or fighting. Other parents build and enforce appropriate behavior boundaries in their family life.
By putting family members in more constant direct contact with each other, homeschooling gives parents increased opportunities for character building and habit formation. If parents do this work, it definitely pays off. It also tends to pay off both short- and long-term.
Children who are required by active parents to daily practice self-discipline tend to become better adults — better fellow citizens, better parents, better neighbors, mothers, and fathers. Unlike unparented children, they are also mostly a pleasure to be around — just like adults.
6. More Creative Hobbies and Entrepreneurial Instincts
Because they don’t have to waste so much time being controlled as part of a herd in large classes and schools, homeschoolers tend to have a lot more free time that they don’t spend watching TV. This makes homeschoolers extremely creative and active people, on average, which lends itself to entrepreneurial instincts.
With all the free time they gain from not having to move at a pace constrained by 22 other people, homeschoolers tend to develop strong hobbies and skills. The average homeschooler is involved in more than five community activities such as piano lessons, scouts, and karate, and is more likely to volunteer than public-schooled kids, according to studies.
Cultivating personal interests is not only good in itself, but it also leads to other goods, such as a penchant for social and economic entrepreneurship. Homeschooled students are used to being self-directed and managing their own time and interests. That makes them more likely to develop their own creative pursuits and I think explains why there are so many homeschooling families running high-traffic channels on YouTube.
7. A More Individual Personality
Some combination of the high personalization and high control of one’s time in homeschooling, as well as the lack of personality flattening that comes from harsh peer pressure, seems to make homeschoolers often very much more developed individuals. This reality is a bit ineffable, partly because it’s so varied in its expression.
While most people seem to come out of public schools slotted into some mass marketing consumer profile — punk, valedictorian, LGBT, SJW, jock, geek, nerd, or some other role defined and assigned by corporate conglomerates — homeschoolers tend not to fit into these kinds of boxes very easily.
Partly I think it’s because they have less awareness that these boxes even exist, because of their lower exposure to mass media through both screens and peers. Partly I think it arises out of their years of freedom to deeply explore nooks and crannies of human existence that aren’t part of mass culture, like Victorian clothing, historical re-enactment replicas, or Scottish literature.
Sometimes this reality manifests in slight oddities, like wearing nonstandard clothing, taking longer pauses in a conversation (or being more likely to monologue at people), knowing swing and folk dance steps, and not getting pop culture references. But I prefer these kinds of oddities to encountering a bearded man in a dress or to hearing some crappy song blare out of someone’s speakers that sounds essentially like every other crappy song that has blared out of speakers since the 1960s.
This also makes homeschoolers really interesting people to talk to. They have actual interests in their lives and unusual ways of seeing the world because more of their ideas haven’t come to them via the dreary mass marketing that in our society badly substitutes for legitimate culture. So no, often homeschoolers don’t act like zombies who download their brains from the corporate cloud, but that’s a good thing.
If Americans want to understand how genuine “voter suppression” works, they should take a look at the widespread disenfranchisement of voters in Harris County, Texas, during the 2022 midterms.
On Election Day, county election officials’ misadministration of the contest led to ballot paper shortages, delayed openings and temporary closures of voting centers, and an untold number of disenfranchised voters.
“I have never seen anything so egregiously, grossly mismanaged as the elections in Harris County this past year,” said Harris County GOP Chair Cindy Siegel during a recent Texas Senate committee hearing.
For context, Harris County is the third-most populous county in America. While historically favorable to Republicans, county residents have increasingly voted for Democrats in recent election cycles. During the 2020 election, for instance, Joe Biden won the county by 13 points, with Democrats also expanding their majority on the county’s governing commissioners court last fall.
Not long after the polls opened on Election Day, local media outlets began reporting that several Harris County voting centers were experiencing ballot paper shortages, delayed openings, and problems with voting machines.
What Happened in Harris County?
Nearly two months after the election, Harris County released an “inconclusive” assessment detailing the reported problems election workers and voters encountered on Election Day. In addition to ballot paper shortages, the report confirmed that some voting centers “did not open on time,” with reasons ranging from staffing problems to election officials not receiving the keys to their center’s voting equipment prior to polls opening.
The report further revealed that during the early part of Election Day, the county’s ePollbook server “lost replication,” which “prevented the wait time tool from updating the website, prevented the supply team from seeing real-time check in and disabled the sample ballot look up feature.” Such circumstances “had a direct impact on the ability [of county election officials] to see how many voters were being checked-in and what the wait times were” at any voting center.
While the assessment says that 68 precinct election judges “reported running out of their initial allotment” of paper ballots, an investigation conducted by local news outlet KHOU 11 indicates the problem was more widespread. According to the investigation, 121 of the county’s 782 voting centers “did not initially receive enough ballot paper to cover voter turnout.”
“The county allotted each of the locations six ballot paper packets, or enough for 600 ballots. But the total votes cast exceeded that amount, sometimes by hundreds of ballots,” the KHOU 11 report reads.
At the committee hearing, Siegel testified that one of the Harris County GOP’s precinct chairs developed a “heat map” purportedly showing that “the majority” of the 121 polls were in “Republican voting areas.”
The KHOU 11 investigation also found that on Election Day, 52 voting centers “received less paper in 2022 than ballots cast in 2018.” Harris County has not disclosed why voting centers ran out of ballot paper. It also remains unknown how many voters were disenfranchised as a result of such issues.
Investigations and Continued Cover-Up
Following the Nov. 8 contest, leading Texas Republicans began demanding answers from Harris County officials over the locality’s Election Day problems. On Nov. 14, GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement calling on the secretary of state, attorney general’s office, and Texas Rangers to “initiate investigations into allegations of improprieties in the way that the 2022 elections were conducted in Harris County,” adding that voters “deserve to know what happened.”
Not long after, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced her office had launched an investigation into the county’s Election Day problems following a request from the Texas secretary of state’s office to help with an inquiry into “possible criminal activity relating to shortages of paper ballots.” After receiving backlash from Texas Democrats, a bureau chief in Ogg’s office defended the investigation, saying Ogg was following state law.
Despite the seriousness of the matter, leading Harris County officials have attempted to stonewall efforts to uncover what led to the administrative failures on Election Day. When pressed by Harris County’s commissioners in January about the ballot paper shortages, Clifford Tatum, Harris County’s election administrator, refused to provide any details, using a lawsuit filed against his office by the Harris County GOP as justification for remaining mum.
County officials have displayed similar evasiveness with local media. Last year, KHOU 11 and a local ABC affiliate filed open records requests with Harris County over records related to the Nov. 8 election. After the Texas attorney general denied a request from Harris County to dismiss the requests last month, the locality filed a lawsuit against the AG’s office last week to keep the records hidden.
Texas Republicans Offer Solutions
In response to Harris County’s extensivetrack record of failed election administration, Texas Republicans have introduced numerous bills this year seeking to enhance the integrity of the state’s elections. If passed and signed into law, SB 1911 would allow any county official responsible for acquiring election supplies who “intentionally fails to provide an election precinct with the required number of ballots” to be charged with a Class A misdemeanor. Said officials could also be charged under the same statute for failing to “promptly supplement the distributed ballots upon request by a polling place.”
Individuals convicted of a Class A misdemeanor are subject to a fine of up to $4,000, a maximum of one year in jail, or both.
Also introduced is SB 1039, which mandates local election officials address inquiries related to election irregularities and provide “explanation[s] and “supporting documentation” when such information is requested by local and state party chairs, candidates, or election judges.
“This is about a catastrophic lack of performance in Harris County,” said bill sponsor and Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt during last month’s State Affairs Committee hearing. “It’s too big to ignore. The state can’t afford this type of problem in Harris County and neither can the residents.”
Additional election integrity bills introduced by Texas Republicans would make illegal voting a felony, withdraw Texas from the leftist-controlled voter-roll management system known as ERIC, and grant the secretary of state the power to suspend and replace an election administrator, among other reforms.
The kinds of Election Day failures displayed in Harris County are notably problematic because of the partisan difference in how Americans vote. While Democrats have made unsupervised, mail-in voting a key facet of their electoral strategy, Republicans prefer in-person voting on Election Day.
If this trend grows, it means that any election misadministration on Election Day will continue to disproportionately harm GOP voters over Democrats. Such circumstances would only further contribute to Americans’ waning confidence in U.S. elections, making accountability for what happened in Harris County all the more necessary.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves 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
The mother of a New York City murder victim shouted down Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., during a House Judiciary Committee field hearing on Monday, warning the lawmaker not to “insult my intelligence.”
The mother, Madeline Brame, was one of many witnesses to testify before the committee during Monday’s hearing highlighting the crime problem in Manhattan. Goldman attempted to use the time granted to him to question Brame to instead criticize the hearing itself, arguing it was a “coverup” for Republicans attempting to defend former President Donald Trump.
Goldman, who served as impeachment counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, sought to explain his view of the situation to Brame after other Democrats had stated that Republicans were using the witnesses as “props” to defend Trump.
“We’re not insulting you. Your experiences are devastating, but the problem is, is that this is a charade to cover up for an abuse of power. [Republicans] are going around incessantly, outside of this hearing, about Donald Trump, and the purpose of this hearing is to cover up for what they know to be an inappropriate investigation [into District Attorney Alvin Bragg],” Goldman said.
Madeline Brame shouted down Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman during a House Judiciary field hearing in Manhattan on Monday.
Rep. Dan Goldman got more than he bargained for when questioning witness Madeline Brame during Monday’s congressional field hearing in Manhattan.
“Can I respond to you, please?” Brame asked as Goldman attempted to move on.
“Not right now, because I only have 20 seconds, I’m sorry. But I, I do–” Goldman said.
“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Brame interjected as Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, attempted to maintain order. “You’re trying to insult me like I’m not aware of what’s going on here. I’m fully aware of what’s going on here, OK? That’s why I walked away from the plantation of the Democratic Party.”
Brame had testified earlier about Bragg’s mishandling of her son’s murder case. Her son, Army Sgt. Hason Correa, was beaten and stabbed nine times by multiple people in 2018. The prosecution for the cases dragged on for more than four years, and Bragg ultimately removed the indictments against two of the suspects in favor of lesser charges. Two others ended up receiving life sentences.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has sued House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan for opening an investigation into his office. Jordan held a hearing highlighting New York City’s crime problem on Monday. (Associated Press)
Brame argued that Bragg’s office has only served to escalate the city’s crime problem, showing no “measurable results” in lowering the city’s violent crime rate.
Anders Hagstrom is a reporter with Fox News Digital covering national politics and major breaking news events. Send tips to Anders.Hagstrom@Fox.com, or on Twitter: @Hagstrom_Anders.
A shocking video captured a mob of California youth breaking into a gas station convenience store and then stealing what police say was thousands of dollars of products.
The incident happened early Sunday morning in Compton, California, after a large group of people blocked an intersection as part of a street takeover, with video footage capturing cars drifting in circles and screeching around 2:30 a.m., according to KLTA.
“It’s unbelievable. Unreal. I’ve never seen anything like that happen here,” Greg Johnson, a Compton resident and customer of the Arco Station that was looted, told ABC7 in reaction to the ransacking.
Staff at the Arco said that a clerk there hid in its bathroom while the looting was ongoing.
Unidentified people are seen early Sunday, April 16 breaking into an Arco gas station convenience store in Compton, California. (AIO FILMZ)
Video taken of the incident shows unidentified individuals first crowding around the entrance of the convenience store at the Arco Gas Station and kicking down its glass door to gain entry.
Once inside, people could be seen swiping items from the stores’ shelves, with one smiling individual taking packages of condoms and cigarettes.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said thousands of dollars of products ultimately were stolen and that the store suffered serious damage, ABC7 reported
Deputies at its Compton station were responding to incidents throughout the night, but police said since they are “currently limited with their staffed personnel,” they “couldn’t intervene with the giant takeover groups for safety concerns” and being “outnumbered,” according to the station.
No arrests have been made yet in connection to the incident.
A man is seen taking packages of condoms inside the Arco store in Compton, California, early Sunday. (AIO FILMZ)
Sgt. Clarence Williams of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told the Los Angeles Times that the street takeover near the Arco Gas Station was one of three in the area that night – but that he had never seen a flash mob bust into a store “to that level.”
By the time police arrived, the crowd had scattered, he reportedly added.
Around 100 people were involved, and the area was left covered in trash and tire marks afterward, KTLA reports.
The Arco Gas Station in Compton, California, that was targeted by the mob of youth. (Google Maps)
“It makes me angry,” Norrice Heron, whom KTLA says witnessed the events, said to the station. “It makes me angry when they do that to the streets and put everybody in danger.
An investigation into the footage showing the looting is reportedly ongoing.
The FBI and federal prosecutors announced Monday the arrests of two New York residents who allegedly ran an undisclosed Chinese government police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.
Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping have each been charged with conspiring to act as agents of China’s government, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
Breon Peace, the U.S. Attorney for that office, said China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) “has repeatedly and flagrantly violated our nation’s sovereignty, including by opening and operating a police station in the middle of New York City.”
“Two miles from our office just across the Brooklyn Bridge, this nondescript office building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in Lower Manhattan has a dark secret. Until several months ago, an entire floor of this building hosted an undeclared police station of the Chinese National Police,” Peace said. “Now, just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing. It would be unthinkable.”
Two New York residents were arrested by FBI for allegedly running an undisclosed Chinese government police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.. (US DISTRICT COURT: EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK)
“Here’s what we know happened inside the secret police station in Lower Manhattan. At the very least, the station was providing some government services, like helping Chinese citizens renew their Chinese driver’s licenses,” Peace continued. “But to do even that, the law requires that individuals like the defendants who act as agents of a foreign government give prior notice to the attorney general before setting up shop in New York City. That didn’t happen.”
“More troubling, though, is the fact that the secret police station appears to have had a more sinister use on at least one occasion,” Peace added. “An official with the Chinese National Police directed one of the defendants — a U.S. citizen who worked at the secret police station — to help locate a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent living in California. In other words, the Chinese national police appear to have been using the station to track a U.S. resident on U.S. soil.”
“The two defendants whose arrests we’re announcing today destroyed evidence of their communications with the Chinese national police when they learned of the FBI’s investigation,” Peace also said. “These two defendants knew they had something to hide, and they obstructed justice in an attempt to prevent the FBI from learning the full extent of what they were up to.”
Peace said his office and the FBI’s New York Field Office are the “first law enforcement partners in the world to make arrests in connection with the Chinese government’s overseas police stations.”
Both defendants in the case were arrested at their homes in New York City this morning, he said.
Two New York residents were arrested by FBI for allegedly running an undisclosed Chinese government police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. (US DISTRICT COURT: EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK)
Michael Driscoll, Assistant Director-in-Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, said “Not only was the police station set up on the order of MPS officials, but members of the Chinese consulate in New York even paid a visit to it after it opened.”
Peace said “before helping to open the police station in early 2022, Lu Jianwang had a longstanding relationship of trust with [Chinese] law enforcement, including the MPS.”
“In 2018, Lu was enlisted in efforts to cause a purported Chinese fugitive to return to China,” Peace continued. “The victim of that effort reported that he was repeatedly harassed to return to China. That victim received threats of violence against his family in the United States and MPS officers harassed a victim’s family in China.”
The Justice Department earlier described the announcement as a “significant national security matter.”
The defendants are scheduled to appear in court this afternoon before a magistrate judge.
“Thanks to our investigation and arrest today with the FBI, the defendants will be held accountable,” Peace said. “And the MPS is on notice that we will not tolerate similar threats to our national sovereignty.”
Peace also announced charges Monday against 34 MPS police officers belonging to a task force called the “912 Special Project Working Group.”
They are accused of conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment.
Two New York residents were arrested by FBI for allegedly running an undisclosed Chinese government police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.. (US DISTRICT COURT: EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK)
“This task force isn’t a normal police force. It doesn’t protect people or combat crimes, it commits crimes targeting Chinese democracy activists and dissidents located outside of the People’s Republic of China, including right here in New York City,” he said.
“This task force operates as an Internet troll farm, creating thousands of fake online personas, which they use in a coordinated plot to harass dispatch, reach and threaten dissidents and activists throughout the world,” Peace added. “People who the PRC perceives as threats to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Peace said in one instance, in an online video conference on the topic of countering communism — which was held on a U.S. technology platform – “task force officers flooded the video conference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at Chinese dissidents.”
“In addition to threatening and harassing Chinese dissidents, the MPS officers use their fake online personas to spread official Chinese government propaganda and narratives to counter and overwhelm the dissidents’ pro-democracy speech,” he added, describing that with their exposure, “the world now has a unique, never before seen view of how the PRC government deployed this army of Internet trolls.”
Two New York residents were arrested by FBI for allegedly running an undisclosed Chinese government police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.. (US DISTRICT COURT: EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK)
The Justice Department also said in this scheme, the “on several occasions, the defendants used online personas to contact individuals assessed to be sympathetic and supportive of the PRC government’s narratives and asked these individuals to disseminate Group content.”
A third federal criminal complaint unsealed Monday charges an additional ten individuals, including a former China-based employee of a U.S. telecommunications company — with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and unlawful conspiracy to transfer means of identification.
“As alleged, Julien Jin and his co-conspirators in the Ministry of Public Security and Cyberspace Administration of China weaponized the U.S. telecommunications company he worked for to intimidate and silence dissenters and enforce PRC law to the detriment of Chinese activists in New York, among other places, who had sought refuge in this country to peacefully express their pro-democracy views,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Carolyn Pokorny for the Eastern District of New York said in a statement.
The complaint, which builds on charges announced by the Justice Department in December 2020, “reveal that Jin worked directly with and took orders from defendants at the MPS and the Cyberspace Administration of China to disrupt meetings on the Company-1 platform and that the co-defendants had targeted U.S.-based dissidents’ speech on Company-1’s platform since 2018.”
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 Presiden
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 Presiden
Biden is putting the final nail in the coffin of Title IX for women’s sports.
Under President Joe Biden’s pernicious proposed rule announced last week, female athletes will no longer have federal protection against sex discrimination in the women’s category of sport. From elementary through middle school, teams designated for girls only are essentially banned. For policies at the high school and college levels, female athletes will have to prove they are at an unfair disadvantage to keep any trans-identifying male off the team and out of their locker rooms.
Despite what Biden claims, Title IX was never about “fairness” as the controlling standard. From its inception until now, Title IX protection has always been about equal opportunity for female student-athletes denied the same benefits as their male peers on the basis of our natural sex.
Biden will have none of that. Men are the new women. Transgender identity is the new sex. Real women had better make way for any men claiming our identity. Males declaring “womanhood” have the upper hand in civil rights claims under his proposal. A male’s feminine feelings and desire for sports participation are prioritized over any psychological turmoil foisted on female athletes suffering the injustice. The disadvantage in sports goes one way, keeping female athletes off the playing field and faced with sexual intimidation in the locker room.
When Biden finalizes these rules, Title IX will be Title None, offering none of the equal opportunity assurances this landmark civil rights law has guaranteed women and girls for the past 50 years.
The perverse rendering of Title IX categorizes a trans-identifying male as a female athlete. Lia Thomas, who swam for three years on the University of Pennsylvania men’s team as Will Thomas, is now “female.” Under Biden’s rules, any “sex-related criteria,” such as having a penis, has nothing to do with defining who can be on a female team.
President Has Not Found Middle Ground
The president hasn’t found a “middle ground,” as some are claiming. Biden is caught in the snare of a binary sex reality of XX and XY chromosomes that no human can re-construct. Title IX requires male and female teams; therefore, all participants are either male or female. Any biology student understands that even a lifetime of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and mutilating surgeries that try to mimic the body parts of women will never make a male into a female.
Nevertheless, Biden world wants you to think it is possible to have “fairness” in women’s sports by declaring “sex-related criteria” are merely secondary to being a woman athlete. Let’s be real, no Lia Thomas menstruates, and any Lia Thomas can manipulate performance in competition to claim entry would be “fair.”
Women Betrayed
Sadly, some “women’s organizations” such as Champion Women, the Women’s Sports Foundation, and the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, who claim to represent the interests of female athletes, are now betraying us. They’ve surrendered our status as women — naturally born human females — to the ideology of a trans-crazed culture declaring that any man can make a better female athlete in women’s sports, so long as it is “fair.”
If every women’s team has a Lia Thomas or two, that’s all it would take to make it fair. I bet some coaches are already scouting, salivating at the chance to bring their teams from the bottom of the pack to near the top of the conference, like UPenn did with Thomas on the team.
Liberated women need to wise up to the insidious sex discrimination that these so-called women’s sports organizations are condoning. They are betraying your dignity and equal opportunity under federal law. There is no middle ground in a federal mandate that sidelines female athletes in their own sports — at any age, sport, or level of competition. You might as well scrap sex-separated sports altogether — which is what Biden’s rule is apt to force many to do.
Title IX is Title None under this perverted version of sex discrimination. It’s the reason 20 states and counting have already passed protections for female athletes, keeping girls’ sports for girls only — all of which could be tossed out under Biden’s Title IX policy, throwing women and girls under the bus.
Until then, you have the chance to weigh in and oppose Biden’s Title None rule. Any self-respecting woman unwilling to sacrifice our status on the altar of trans-madness and any father who cares about his daughter’s opportunities should make their voices heard.
Doreen Denny is senior advisor to Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization.
To support their left-wing agenda, corporate media occasionally allow members of the conservative movement or Republican Party to appear for a few moments on camera to give an illusion of balance. These select few are always significantly outnumbered by the legion of left-wing activists who dominate these programs and have to really use their time smartly and effectively to fight the propaganda and agenda-pushing that dominate our press.
In the case of Brendan Buck, the corporate media are engaged in a deliberate disinformation operation against the public. They have mislabeled him as someone representative of Republican voters when, in fact, he parrots some of the most preposterous Democrat talking points and ignores obvious facts to push back against those talking points.
Buck trades on the fact that he was a longtime top aide to former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Like many of the old-guard GOP establishment operatives, he has had to deal with the widespread voter rejection of the Romney-Ryan era he helped craft. For him, this has included joining with left-wing critiques of those who supplanted the former GOP leaders. It is not surprising, therefore, that Democrat activist Chuck Todd frequently uses Buck on his Sunday morning news panel for NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The panel this past week also included Democrat activist and NBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend; Valerie Jarrett’s daughter Laura, who is a legal analyst at NBC; and an anchor from the left-wing PBS “NewsHour.” Buck was ostensibly supposed to balance out those three and the hard-core partisan Todd.
Instead, he allowed every single left-wing talking point to pass by without even a slight reproach. In some cases, he joined in enthusiastically.
For example, Todd led a subliterate discussion about Tennessee on Sunday. In the real world, the situation was that a trans-identified shooter in Nashville murdered three Christian children and three of their caregivers. Left-wing activists, including three elected Democrats, responded by orchestrating a takeover of the legislature in an attempt to restrict self-defense rights. The manner in which they led this takeover of the legislative assembly included violations of rules for which they were removed from committees and, in two cases, the legislative body. Many in the propaganda press have willfully lied about these facts to push a left-wing narrative.
So, in Chuck Todd’s world, this story meant there were “loud echoes from our recent past in the south and in the ’60s,” and it “felt like a whole bunch of people who just don’t deal with dissent.” He allowed Sanders-Townsend to falsely claim, “What is happening in Tennessee, and frankly across the South, is in fact Jim Crow.” She even said the potential pardon of a man convicted in a self-defense shooting of a Black Lives Matter demonstrator “is an assault.”
Now, I’m no fancy-pants Republican media strategist, like Buck’s bio claims he is. I don’t have a single day, much less decades, of experience in Republican messaging, as Buck has. And I certainly don’t get paid the big bucks to fight four left-wing activists on NBC while posing publicly as the representative of the majority of the country that is not represented by those activists. But I know literally any Republican on Earth could have done a better job than Brendan Buck did in this circumstance.
He said, and I quote, “Yeah. Well, this is again a situation where there’s no infrastructure. There’s nobody calling the shots. We are being defined as extreme, and it’s why Republicans are on the run in just about everywhere across the country.”
By the way, he said “again,” because earlier in the program he had joined with his left-wing buddies as they spouted falsehoods about which party’s abortion views are, in fact, extreme.
Are you kidding me? Now, do I expect Todd or Sanders-Townsend or any other Democrat activist to push a narrative of Republicans being extreme and on the run? Of course, I do. But why is Brendan Buck, Paul Ryan’s longtime aide, pushing this falsehood?
Just a cursory review of the most recent news shows this is simply not true. The Associated Press wrote just last week in an article headlined “North Carolina state lawmaker switches parties, gives GOP supermajority,” that, “A Democrat in the North Carolina state House switched to the Republican Party on Wednesday, giving the GOP veto-proof control in both chambers of the legislature and handing Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper a setback in trying to block hardline conservative policies in his final two years in office.”
Buck may agree with his super-duper best friend Todd that Republicans are just so extreme for supporting safe streets, biological reality, protection of children, sane foreign policy, constitutional order, and the like, but outside the confines of that NBC studio, there’s a very different world he should probably think about visiting. A world with Republicans, for one thing, but also a world where Democrats are forced to flee the party that Buck thinks everyone is running to:
Cotham, a former teacher and assistant principal who had served in the House for nearly 10 years through 2016 before returning in January, announced her decision at a news conference at North Carolina Republican Party headquarters. ‘I will not be controlled by anyone,’ Cotham said as she announced she would switch her party registration to the GOP. She said the Democratic Party is no longer a big tent party and tries to bully its members. She said that she was considered a ‘spy’ and a ‘traitor’ and that the turning point was when she was criticized for using the American flag and praying-hands emoji on social media and on her vehicles.
The range of topics corporate media are eagerly dishonest about is reaching a level that is a serious threat to the republic. In service of a Democrat agenda, they lie with alarming frequency about nearly everything — including crime, abortion, radical gender ideology, racism, taxes, foreign policy, gun rights, civil liberties, free speech issues, freedom of religion, the right to protest, due process, dueling standards of justice, and other important issues.
Those lies affect political and policy outcomes with devastating effects on the American people.
The GOP establishment from the past may be having a temper tantrum about how unpopular the views of the Romney-Ryan era are, but they need to have that tantrum on their own time, not during these limited opportunities to push back against the vile lies of the corporate media.
Democrats and their media organs have enough tools for disinformation. There is no need for Brendan Buck to be one of them.
Nowadays, it seems like in order to create a successful horror movie that isn’t a sequel in a legacy franchise, filmmakers have to incorporate at least two of the following: gore, vulgarity, and demonic possession. The horror genre drastically over-utilizes guts, gorgons, and naked gals, typically leaving something to be desired from the writing. The genre seems to rely more on eliciting physical responses than contributing to broader cultural discourse. And in this way, horror films are more akin to amusement park rides than they are art.
This is partly why “Nefarious,” a new movie executive produced by conservative commentator Steve Deace and directed by Christian filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, is a breath of fresh air — the film actually has substance.
Based on Deace’s best-selling novel “A Nefarious Plot,” the film is set on the scheduled day of execution for convicted serial killer Edward Wayne Brady, who is required by the state of Oklahoma to receive a final psychiatric evaluation before taking a seat on the electric chair. Brady, having “incontrovertible evidence, a confession, a jury of peers, and 11 years of legal wrangling” paving the road for him on death row, may be suffering from a severe mental ailment and, therefore, ineligible for execution.
Dr. James Martin, the highly accredited psychiatrist tasked with providing Brady with an “impartial review,” approaches the evaluation with the requisite hubris of a highly credentialed millennial. But his preconceived understanding of the situation and his secular worldview prevent him from engaging with the true nature of the reality presented before him. And seeing as how Brady is very explicitly possessed by a demon named “Nefarious,” this makes a dominant theme of the film readily apparent: Evil is all around us, in both the often unnoticed ignorance of modern banality and in glaringly obvious manifestations.
In explaining the process of demonic possession, Nefarious makes clear it relies on a series of “yeses” in which an individual gradually acclimates himself to the normalization of evil. He says, “We offer up a series of temptations, gradually increasing in terms of duration and intensity, degree of moral inequity.”
The implication is that seemingly small moral infractions like petty theft and religious ambivalence pave the way for greater misdeeds by numbing our hearts and senses to the damaging effects of evil. This concept is further explored in the “three murders” Nefarious tells Martin he will have committed by the time Brady is scheduled for execution.
The twist is that these murders are products of the casual cruelty contemporary society extols as virtues. Thus, Martin wasn’t aware he had already committed two of the three; he was under the impression he was simply living life in the 21st century. Nevertheless, Martin signing off on the euthanasia of his sickly mother — granting her “death with dignity” — and pressuring his girlfriend to abort their child because he isn’t “ready to be a father” are both tacit acts of killing.
When forced to confront his immorality and the evil nature of his actions, Martin recites what may as well be the Nicene Creed of liberalism, protesting, “This is my life. I can live it the way I want.”
Throughout the psychiatric evaluation, Nefarious reveals to Martin that his goal is to spite God by using man’s free will to usher in an era of darkness so his master can become the metaphysical hegemon. Subsequently, “Nefarious” serves as a sort of inversion of the Passion story in which the eponymous demon acts as the “dark messiah.” Nefarious, a dark spiritual being, forcibly inhabits a body that is not his own and uses it to wreak havoc and cause misery. Nefarious also makes clear to Martin that he needs him to commit Brady to death so the demon’s spiritual form may be unleashed to usher in an era of demonic rule; an innocent man must die for the damnation of us all, so the story goes.
It just so happens that after being thoroughly creeped out and violently strangled by Nefarious, Martin is convinced Brady is the one behind everything, is a dangerous madman, and the world would be safer without him in it. Signing off on Brady’s psychiatric evaluation, subsequently indicating he is mentally fit to stand execution, Martin commits his third murder and may or may not have ushered in the end times; we are left to wonder.
What makes “Nefarious” such a fascinating movie is that it uses outlandish means to make heartfelt and relatable pleas about our culture’s spiritual woes. It is undeniable our civilization is currently enduring a crisis of faith, causing people to become rudderless and dependent upon self-actualization and charlatans for deeper meaning.
Too often, we lack the vocabulary to engage in meaningful conversations about this very topic. So, despite it being crucially important, we simply don’t discuss it. But just as often, where words fail, art succeeds, and “Nefarious” is the rare horror film worthy of being called art partly because of its ability to adeptly address truly existential cultural woes.
“Nefarious” hits theaters across the country on April 14.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.
Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is the largest individual creator on YouTube. His main channel has 144 million subscribers. His most popular video, a recreation of the Netflix hit “Squid Game,” has amassed an astonishing 401 million views. He is admired for his generous charity work and trusted by millions of parents worldwide, who allow their children to watch his kid-focused videos that consist of pranks, over-the-top challenges, and reaction videos.
However, an emerging controversy involving one of his closest friends and longtime co-creator Chris Tyson — who has recently come out as being on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) — is threatening his brand. Millions of young children are being groomed into uncritically accepting transgenderism and trans activism at an impressionable age, unbeknown to many parents who allow them to watch MrBeast videos unsupervised.
My two older kids — aged 7 and 9 — have been fans of MrBeast for some time. The content was wholesome and we’ve had some wonderful conversations about giving back while watching some of his charity videos. I try to make sure that they watch educational videos where possible, but to be honest, most videos on MrBeast’s main channel are just big, loud, dumb, vacuous stunts that have zero educational value and are just fun. Kids need that too.
But the fun stopped six months ago. Chris started wearing nail polish in a video. He grew more and more effeminate, wore ladies’ sweaters, grew out his hair, and manicured his nails. My children started noticing. My daughter commented on Chris’ over pronounced hand gestures to show off his nails. Both she and my son began talking about it. My son said, “He’s acting weird.” My daughter said, “He wants everyone to see his nails and hair. He keeps showing them off. He drops things on purpose just so he can pick them up with his nails.”
After Chris’ shocking transformation in this video, it was no longer possible to ignore the issue. This, of course, is what he wanted. He projected his transformation into our home and demanded that we “have more conversations” about his new lifestyle choices “in the future.” So we did. We spoke about why he thinks he’s a woman, what will happen to his wife and child, and if we still want to watch MrBeast. The result was that my children just wanted silly videos. They found his transformation weird and they felt overwhelmingly sad for his wife and kid. They didn’t want to watch it anymore. MrBeast was always just mindless fun, after all.
All Fun and Games
It has always been the eclectic cast of supporting characters that have made the videos so engaging. There is Chandler (who first appeared in 2018), who is childish — he is afraid of pickles and counts goldfish crackers with sliced cheese melted over the top as a meal. He often appears in videos with his fun and relatable family. Then there is Nolan, a newer member of the group (he first appeared in 2020) who is impish and cheeky and often elevates videos with his all-in, high-energy persona.
At the center of the MrBeast universe are Jimmy and Chris. The pair are childhood friends, and in a 2020 interview, Jimmy revealed that Chris was the very first subscriber to his channel. Chris is integral to the MrBeast brand and he has recently taken over as the host of the highly popular MrBeast Reacts channel. My kids enjoyed watching Chris from the start. He was the most masculine and outdoors-orientated of the group.
In one popular video from 2020, the group goes camping and the humor is largely derived from how soft and incompetent the rest of the team is compared to Chris, who acts like a tour guide, scout leader, and parent to the whole group. While the group flounders, Chris, who grew up enjoying an outdoors lifestyle in North Carolina, states “I’m a mountain man, I’m enjoying myself, we’re going to make it to the top.” Needless to say, when the group hunkers down for the night, tent-raising duty falls to Chris.
This parental instinct came naturally to Chris, who welcomed his first child in June 2020 with his wife Katie, whom he married in 2018. Because of this practical masculinity and sense of humor combined with his general southern-man sensibilities, it came as a massive shock to fans of the show when five months after the birth of his child, Chris announced he was bisexual.
Sexuality Becomes a Theme
Chris’ announcement dovetailed with a broader introduction of mature themes into the MrBeast universe. Also in 2020, core member Karl Jacobs was added to the group. In several interviews, Jimmy has stated that he added Karl after pressure from Chris, who had formed a close bond with him. Karl often presents a childlike and camp persona in MrBeast videos. In 2020, he stated that he believed he was asexual, then in 2021 he awkwardly claimed to be heterosexual. Regardless of his sexuality, what mattered was that the dynamic of the MrBeast crew and content had changed. Sexuality was to the fore and became increasingly visible onscreen.
The close relationship between Karl and Chris fueled rumors that the two were in a relationship. This is something Chris has denied. Still, many fans have blamed Karl for Chris’ evolution, giving rise to the term “the Karl effect.” Speculation surrounding their relationship has increased after Chris finally confirmed in March 2023 that he and his wife Katie had separated. Immediately after the announcement, he reaffirmed that he is bisexual but that he is not involved with Karl. On April 6, Chris announced that he is gender non-conforming and on HRT.
Public Transition
As expected, the backlash online has been intense. There has been abuse directed at Chris by former fans who feel betrayed by his actions. Chris, for his part, has leaned into the typical culture war talking points, mentioning how proud he is “seeing conversations started” because of his actions. His conversion has aligned with a new political awakening and his Twitter account is now littered with the usual talking points one would expect to find from a recent convert — he supports defunding the police and gun control, advocates for trans rights, calls conservative news outlets “grifters,” and thinks orange man bad.
The issue is neatly summed up in a viral tweet by influential drama news channel host Keemstar, who, after chastising critics who left negative comments, stated “This decision is a decision only Chris can make. Do better!” Of course, Keemstar is correct that mindless abuse is unacceptable, but he pushes the completely false idea that Chris’ decision is a private matter. It isn’t. His transition has been playing out in millions of family sitting rooms worldwide.
And make no mistake, despite his good charity work and overall pleasant demeanor, Jimmy is complicit in projecting this adult content into millions of homes. Jimmy is MrBeast and all editorial decisions start and end with him. He has taken a political stance on a massively divisive topic and quietly slipped it into his programming under the radar of many trusting parents. Further, both Jimmy and Nolan have made their support public. Karl has been even more vocal, saying of fans who have questions about the transition: “F-ck the goofy mother f-ckers keep runnin your own stuff.” YouTube has expressed support as well, so it appears unlikely that Chris will leave the show.
What MrBeast is doing is sinister and will have far-reaching consequences. He is grooming an unsuspecting generation of children into uncritically accepting transgender and trans activism at a vulnerable age. Due to the unrivaled reach of MrBeast and the unparalleled and often unmonitored access he has to millions of kids across the globe, he is now, without a shadow of a doubt, the leading source of child-focused, transgender content in the world.
It is imperative that all parents are made aware of this and given the choice of whether they consent to this content. After all, Chris said he wants to have a conversation. Parents need to know that this time, it isn’t an invitation, it’s an ultimatum.
Dr. Eoin Lenihan is an independent educator and extremism researcher. His work has been featured on AlJazeera and Fox News. He has also written for Arutz Sheeva, Quillette, The Post Millennial, and The Daily Caller. His peer-reviewed paper “A classification of Antifa Twitter accounts based on social network mapping and linguistic analysis” was published in Social Network Analysis and Mining, and it is the largest academic quantitative analysis of Antifa to date. You can find more from Eoin on Twitter: @EoinLenihan and on his website: http://www.eoinlenihan.weebly.com.
The suspect facing charges of leaking U.S. military intelligence documents searched classified intelligence reporting for the word “leak” after the story broke.
Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking documents the Department of Defense says contain “sensitive and highly-classified material,” was charged Friday with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and willful retention of classified documents.
Selfie of Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old National Guard Airman accused of leaking classified information. (Facebook)
According to an FBI affidavit, Teixeira used his government computer to search for the word “leak” not long after news about the disclosures first broke.
“According to a second U.S. Government Agency, which can monitor certain searches conducted on its classified networks, on April 6, 2023, TEIXEIRA used his government computer to search classified intelligence reporting for the word ‘leak,'” the affidavit reads. “The first public reporting regarding the Government Information appeared on or around April 6, 2023.”
Teixeira was looking for classified reporting on intelligence agencies’ assessment of the identity of the leaker, the FBI indicated.
Relatives of Jack Teixeira leave John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse following his arraignment on April 14, 2023, in Boston. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
A criminal complaint obtained by Fox News on Friday says the FBI on Monday interviewed a member of a social media platform who told a special agent that an individual – later identified to be Teixeira – began posting on the platform “what appeared to be classified information” starting in December 2022. The postings, the person said, appeared on a group aimed at discussing “geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars.”
Media outside John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse before the arraignment of Jack Teixeira on April 14, 2023, in Boston. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Teixeira, wearing handcuffs and khaki prison jumpsuit, was read the charges against him on Friday shortly after 10 a.m. local time during an appearance in federal court in Boston. He did not enter a plea and was ordered detained pending a detention hearing set for Wednesday, April 19, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.
Relatives of Jack Teixeira leave the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, in Boston, on April 14, 2023. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
The appearance at the federal courthouse comes after Teixeira was taken into custody by the FBI Thursday at his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts.
President Biden said Friday he has directed military and intelligence agencies “to take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive information, and our national security team is closely coordinating with our partners and allies.”
Fox News’ Greg Norman and Marta Dhanis contributed to this report.
Timothy Nerozzi is a writer for Fox News Digital. You can follow him on Twitter @timothynerozzi and can email him at timothy.nerozzi@fox.com
A.F. Branco 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 Presiden
Those of us that remember this classic scene from the 1987 film “Raising Arizona,” still laugh when we think about the convict uttering those ridiculous words. Ridiculous, we said. Crazy, we thought. Common sense and a little 7th grade biology told us that men could not get pregnant, have periods, let alone experience menstrual cramps. However, that was then- this is now.
Somehow, the invention of the internet that provided billions of people with limitless information daily has now replaced what was once ‘elementary knowledge’ with what equates to a panel discussion. Contrary to what was once believed, common sense is not so common.
At a recent University of Pittsburg event in March, Former University of Kentucky swimmer and Independent Women’s Forum spokesperson Riley Gaines addressed a group concerning winning her competition against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological man. During her speech, Gaines directed a question to the school’s anthropologist, Professor Gabby Yearwood.
The exchange was recorded in an article in the Washington Examiner:
“I actually have a question for you. You being an anthropologist, which anthropology is the study of human civilization,” Gaines said as the anthropologist noted that his area of study includes a focus on biology.
“So, if you were to dig up a human, two humans, in 100 years from now, both man and woman, could you tell the difference, strictly off of bones?” Gaines questioned.
The anthropologist said, “No,” as those in attendance burst into laughter.
“I’m not sure why I’m being laughed at if I’m the expert in the room,” the anthropologist said. “Have any of you been to archaeological sites? Have any of you studied biological anthropology? I’m just saying, I’ve got over 150 years of data. I’m just curious as to why I’m being laughed at.”
As Gaines began to explain that she had “put a lot of research into this,” the anthropologist cut her off to say: “I have a Ph.D.”
The crowd once again began to laugh. Video of the interaction went viral as Twitter users responded, suggesting the anthropologist was “either incompetent or lying.”
The Buried Truth
The thing to remember here is that Gaines isn’t engaging a student or simply a bystander or even a visitor- Yearwood was a certified University anthropologist- Pitt’s gold standard of academia. In most cases, such a degree generally takes about four years of study to complete, certainly covering basic human biology and bone structure. One might wonder how Gabby would still have a job- and one would be correct to wonder. Regardless of the clear picture of this “expert’s” obvious ineptitude, the Left never says die.
One week later, Gaines was invited to speak at the San Francisco University chapter of Turning Point USA, once again sharing her experience of competing against Thompson. Almost immediately things took a turn for the worse. The New York Post records Gaines’ harrowing experience this way:
“Swimmer Riley Gaines on Saturday threatened to take “legal action” after saying she was assaulted by trans-rights protesters during a speech about protecting women’s sports at San Francisco State University.
“The campus police did nothing. The dean of students was there and did nothing. There will be no repercussions unless I have something to do with it,” Gaines told “Fox & Friends Weekend” host Rachel Campos-Duffy.
“I will be pursuing legal action. These people need to face repercussions.” The former NCAA swimmer and 12-time All-American champ said a mob of demonstrators attacked her while she spoke about including trans athletes in women’s sports during Thursday’s Turning Points USA event at SF State.
Dramatic video Gaines shared on Twitter shows her being ushered out of a classroom and into a hallway by security as protesters chase after her. One of the activists gets in front of her and shouts, “Trans rights are human rights” and “Yeah, you f–king transphobic bitch — I f–king see you!”
“The prisoners are running the asylum at SFSU…I was ambushed and physically hit twice by a man,” she tweeted. Additional footage shared on social media shows security blocking Gaines from a mass of protesters before she was escorted to a safe room, where she said she was barricaded “for three hours.”
“Truthfully, I think these people resort to anger, both verbally and physically, and violence because they know they don’t have reason on their side,” Gaines told Campos-Duffy. “They cannot debate me with logic or science or any kind of data that supports their argument, so they resort to personal attacks.”
It seems that in the blink of the societal eye everything has changed.
It was only back in 2005 when we were introduced to the TV series “Bones” about the cases of a well-known female forensic anthropologist. Running for nearly 11 years, episodes centered on FBI case files surrounding mysteries concerning often limited and/or badly degraded human remains. In episode 8 season 1, an FBI agent she works with brings her an old freezer he claims contains a human body. Upon prying open the door and seeing the body, the agent asks, “he or she?” Within seconds of looking at the body’s pelvic region, the anthropologist replies, “she.” To be clear, this deduction was not based on years of case study, or even the acumen that led to her notoriety. This was in a nutshell, basic human biology.
It appears we collectively knew these basic truths like ten minutes ago; only now, the same group collectively denies what we all once professed to know. Despite that, there are still many that consider acknowledging ‘preferred gender’ instead of ‘confirmed gender’ to be a hill worth dying on. Oddly enough, it is those very same individuals that during the Pandemic reminded us ad nauseum to “follow the science,” that now choose to ignore that same “science” when it is no longer politically expedient or beneficial.
Yet, if we’re being honest, “they” do not shoulder all the blame.
Many of us elected to heed the “science” rhetoric despite available truths and data to the contrary. Wearing masks and sheltering in place was no more substantiated science then, than mutilating children is “gender-affirming” care, or men playing God over their bodies by pretending to be women is now.
When that husky man in “Raising Arizona” complained of menstrual cramps, we certainly thought it was funny. If we knew then what we are seeing now, we would have never laughed. Brave men and women like Riley Gaines, Matt Walsh and others are discovering what is truly an inconvenient truth: the Trojan Horse dismissal of films like “Tootsie” and “To Wong Foo”, the Caitlyn Jenner’s, the RuPaul’s and those men lamenting over their bodies challenged with what only women can experience has led us to this. The only way to exterminate this “transfestation” is to combat it with truth. The first inoculation must begin in our own homes. America, we have work to do.
Oh the irony. But real women need to “grow a pair”. Yes, BALLS.
I know this action flies in the crotch of what real women might find necessary. But I say to these ladies, at times real women must “man up”!
If that concept challenges your sensibilities, then real women in America should understand that the competition–the hairy underarm crowd–manned up. Literally.
Feminists have enlisted the help of “former men”. And the two factions have joined to wage war against real women. Which brings up an interesting point.
Can trans-men be real toxically masculine?
Imagine is real men chased a feminist into a bathroom and held her hostage for a couple of hours? I would consider that behavior toxically masculine.
That reality happened to Riley Gaines, a real woman. She was ambushed last week when a trans-activist, aka LGBT thug attacked her. She ran for her life and was forced to hide until authorities rescued her.
I don’t have a toxicity meter. But I’m betting this action by the so-called “trans-activist” would damn near peg that meter. As for masculinity? Well, I suspect both the trans-activist thug and that male swimmer who beat Gaines are both loaded with masculinity.
Yet, not a single outcry from the vagina-hat wearing #MeToo crowd over these obvious cases of toxic masculinity. Apparently, as long as you pretend to be a woman you can keep your balls and not be considered toxically masculine. Even when you behave toxically masculine.
To be clear, fake women target real women with no repercussions.
Gaines felt the wrath of the LGBTQIA simply because she fights to protect the rights of real women. While Gaines finished second to a fake-female swimmer, she fights for women in almost all sports. How does the feminist movement ignore the obvious? Fake-women will destroy real women in sports, if they allow this to continue.
So one must ask, what is the real agenda of feminists? Because if helping women is the goal, they suck at it.
Real men to the rescue.
While Leftists accuse real men of being toxically masculine, it is we who fight for the rights of women. Real men have always valued real women, even before having to use the adjective “real” to separate actual women from the brain-damaged body-dysphoric. Real men exalt women; always have and always will.
I suspect that fake women and feminists hate that they can’t be real women. Thus, subject to the adulation of real men. Further, I have always contended that feminists take girly men as their boyfriends, but they seek real men for physical pleasure. But I digress.
Real women to the rescue?
Olympic legend Sharron Davies is leading calls to boycott Nike over its campaign with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney — which she ripped as “literally a kick in the teeth” to women.
“We can protest,” the retired UK swimmer told GB News late Thursday of the divisive campaign she says reflects the “total disdain that women are being treated with.”
“It’s what’s left for us at the moment because nobody really seems to be listening to the general public,” she said.
Three years ago, my office, the Mississippi Office of the State Auditor, learned through a whistleblower tip that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds may have been misspent by the Mississippi agency handling that money. Several months later and after an investigation by my team, we revealed the startling truth: Tens of millions of welfare dollars had been embezzled.
TANF funds were used in Mississippi to pay for drug treatment at a luxury Malibu resort for the friend of the head of the agency dispersing the funds. It paid for an investment in an experimental concussion drug company. It financed religious concerts with no proof they were attended by the needy, nice cars for the heads of an influential local nonprofit — along with paying off a speeding ticket for one of them — and excessive rent for property owned by the people handing out the money.
And of course, national outlets from ESPN to the late-night comics picked up on our discovery that Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre was paid $1.1 million on a contract requiring him to give speeches he never gave. He also successfully lobbied for $5 million in welfare funds to be spent on a volleyball court at his alma mater where his daughter played.
All told, this was the largest public fraud in state history. Local and federal prosecutors took our findings and indicted six of the culprits. We arrested them, and five have pleaded guilty. The FBI continues to investigate the case, working with our entire case file and my team to get to the bottom of everything.
Nationwide Problem
Sadly, large fraud schemes in poverty alleviation programs have streamed across the headlines of newspapers around the country lately. In the last couple of months, federal prosecutors indicted two nonprofit executives in Minnesota for stealing $250 million from a program to feed hungry kids. In June of 2022, the New York Post reported the head of a New York nonprofit was paid millions in taxpayer funds to house the poor while living in an expensive high-rise and funneling taxpayer money to his for-profit businesses. The list goes on.
Now that Republicans have taken the majority in the U.S. House, they have a fresh opportunity to explore why the billions taxpayers spend on the poor are so prone to this sort of abuse. In November, House Republicans sent a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra arguing, “The Mississippi case is emblematic of a systemic problem: TANF lacks necessary guardrails making it susceptible to fraud.” They asked HHS to describe what they were doing to prevent the problem in the future.
This was a great start, and Republicans should double down on efforts to extirpate fraud from these kinds of programs. Connected powerbrokers who happen to run a nonprofit should not be the primary beneficiaries of our government’s spending for the poor. The House Ways and Means Committee should hold hearings to identify the best policy changes for these programs.
Proposals for Improvement
Here are a few ideas to get them started: Federal monitors should ensure state agencies are policing the nonprofits that take funds, tighter restrictions should be placed on how TANF can be spent (poverty programs should be focused on getting people into the workforce — period), and state agency heads should sign documents under penalty of perjury attesting to the number of poor people who were helped by their spending.
Finally, HHS should regularly report improper TANF spending to Congress. As House Republicans have noted, “Nearly every government assistance program is required to report improper payments on an annual basis, TANF is not.”
Voters expect government to act quickly to stop fraud in these programs. The belief that influence peddlers have rigged government spending for their benefit is bipartisan. Putting a stop to these sorts of schemes in poverty programs would appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans. Billions of dollars are spent across hundreds of these programs, so the savings could be massive if Congress gets this right. And most importantly, hard-earned taxpayer dollars might actually benefit the poor in our country.
Shad White is the 42nd State Auditor of Mississippi.
Does Generation Z take anything seriously? Earnestness is “cringe,” being in love makes one a “simp,” and ambition makes one a “try-hard.”
There is a “deeper ideology lurking in the minds of younger millennials & Gen Z,” as Esmé Partridge writes, “the rejection of idealism in all its forms.” Disenchanted with the world, plagued by hopelessness and nihilism, we have become a generation of zombies — a group of youth that is too dead to live and too alive to die.
No Purpose or Place
In the 1920s, famed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described his lost generation as one that had “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, and all faith in man shaken.”
A century later, Gen Z finds itself in a similar position. The past haunts us, and a stormy future looms over the horizon. Even in our happiest moments, we’ve come to expect something bad just around the corner. Anxiousness afflicts many Zoomers — more than half of us already think humanity is doomed.
Though we share similarities with past generations, Gen Z is unique. Some argue Zoomers will eventually outgrow their crazy beliefs in the same way hippies eventually got jobs and created families. Millennials, however, are only getting more liberal as they age, breaking one of the oldest rules in politics. According to a recent Gallup poll, roughly 1 in 5 Gen Z adults says he or she is LGBTQ.
First and foremost, Gen Z craves distinction. They want to differentiate themselves from the masses by changing the world through fighting climate change, institutional racism, capitalism — you name it. This might explain why 1 in 4 people aged 16-25 wants to become an influencer when he or she grows up.
Why the thirst for power and status? Humans need goals that require effort to attain. We are like archers who need a clear and higher target. The popularity of figures such as Jordan Peterson shows that, especially for young men, it is no longer clear what that target is.
A Developmental Crisis
In the book “iGen,” Jean Twenge observes that more than previous generations, Zoomers aren’t growing up. We don’t have a meaningful target anymore. Gen Z is dating less, quitting jobs, not attending church, and spending half its waking time online. If Zoomers need attention, they use Instagram. Bored? Netflix or Youtube. Horny? Pornhub. Hungry? UberEats.
It’s not surprising that pundits like Jesse Singal and Jonathan Haidt blame social media for Gen Z’s stunted growth. Apps such as TikTok and Instagram have no doubt profoundly affected us, but blaming social media for Gen Z’s mental health epidemic is only half-correct.
Before we had Instagram, we had liberalism. As Patrick Deneen once wrote, “It is less a matter of our technology ‘making us’ than of our deeper political commitments shaping our technology.”
Jaded and Conformist
Inauthenticity has reached its peak with Gen Z. To be part of the in-group, a Zoomer must adopt a live-and-let-live attitude and remain blasé at all times, unattached to all people and things. Like Gen X, they avoid sincerity, choosing instead to be ironic, humorous, or just plain passionless.
For Zoomers, being serious is “cringe.” They dislike partisan politics because it’s rooted in taking differences seriously. Gen Z is disproportionately liberal not because they are passionate card-carrying Democrats — although some of them are — but because they are apathetic. They just want to be left alone by what the media portray as Bible thumpers, old white politicians, and conservatives.
It is revealing that the only time Gen Z ever seems mobilized to take things seriously is when a police officer kills a black man or abortion is restricted. Gen Z is so well catechized into its political religion that within minutes, like a flock of sheep, millions of Zoomers suddenly start sharing infographics, donation pages, and memes all over social media. Gen Z only cares about a particular issue when a so-called victim group is allegedly oppressed, or there’s a threat to its autonomy. As soon as the latest political trend goes away, Zoomers stop caring.
A Generation Without Love
The sexual revolution of the ’60s didn’t bring about communism, as Wilhelm Reich hoped, but capitalism in the sexual market. Now driven by a desire for recognition, Zoomers want sexual empowerment above all else.
To that end, Zoomers avoid caring about finding relationships. As one study found, “only one in 10 Gen Z members say they are ‘committed to being committed,’” preferring solitude (or situationships) to real relationships.
Since seeking commitment is now perceived as exerting pressure, young people must put up a facade of unseriousness and just look for green flags so as not to alienate the person they desire.
Even in a relationship, the psychoanalyzing doesn’t cease. Zoomers analyze texts, obsess over appearance, and worry that their romantic interests are dating other people from Tinder. This perpetual state of uncertainty is so exhausting that many are choosing to either throw out sexual rules completely or abstain from relationships altogether.
Repressed and Insecure
With religious values and sexual norms no longer fixed, many Zoomers struggle to nail down a sense of worth and are thus insecure. Not expressing their real personalities or feelings, these Zoomers live in a perpetual state of “LARPing” and suffer from main character syndrome.
Given their repression of “cringe” thoughts and feelings the in-group might not like, Gen Z’s higher likelihood of engaging in self-harm is unsurprising. To escape the torturous emptiness so many Zoomers find themselves in today, many reach for a razor blade or a smartphone. Either Zoomers gobble down drugs for mental illness, harm themselves, or vainly attempt to produce a sense of self with endless selfies and videos for their followers.
The Zoomers’ obsession with “mental health” and “normalizing” certain behaviors is a byproduct of their unstable self-image. Without knowing how to make sense of their emotions, they outsource the task of understanding themselves to therapists.
Godless and Selfish
More than anything, Gen Z wants to feel alive. They turned out in droves to support BLM in 2020 because it enabled them to experience the emotional highs and lows of religion without the responsibilities. As Twitter user Zero HP Lovecraft wrote, “Christians are persecuted by bureaucrats, tamely and passively,” while black people “are persecuted by cops with guns and gas grenades. … Only one of these is exciting.” In other words, one belief system feels boring and uninteresting, the other eventful and real — hence why many gravitate toward the latter.
Even many modern so-called Christians, as Rod Dreher observed, use religion as “a psychological adjunct to life, a buffer to the harshness of the materialistic, individualistic lives they actually want to lead.” In the context of Zoomers, that makes religion — and its secular woke derivatives — a supposed stimulant for attaining health and well-being. Since Gen Z now worships the “God within,” there has been a rise in gnostic beliefs, self-improvement and wellness cults, astrology and tarot, and, of course, LGBT orthodoxy.
In our post-religious society, life has been reduced to a biological process that must be optimized for the sake of social approval. Instead of prayer, we use painkillers. Instead of aspiring toward good works that glorify God, we engage in meaningless activities that glorify ourselves. And out of that reality has emerged the next undead generation. The horde of Gen Z zombies is mindlessly marching, ready to mobilize but not thrive.
Forrest Robinson is a student at Gordon College in Wenham, Ma. He frequently posts threads on his Twitter @Foz89107323.
The trove of recently leaked intelligence documents related to the Ukraine war should prompt Americans to start asking tough questions about our involvement in that conflict, which one of the documents, a Feb. 23 overview of fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region, describes as a “grinding campaign of attrition” that has reached a “stalemate.”
U.S. taxpayers have poured nearly $80 billion into this war over the past 14 months. At what point are we allowed to ask whether a “stalemate” in a “grinding campaign of attrition” is a good deal for Americans?
Above all, Americans should demand the bipartisan Washington consensus that supports indefinitely funding the war explain what our strategy is, define what the American interest is in it, and detail how they plan to achieve something beyond an interminable war of attrition that risks pulling us into direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia. At the very least, the American people deserve more than inane platitudes from Antony Blinken about “Ukrainian victory” and “standing united with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” as if total Russian defeat and withdrawal is a realistic outcome.
The classified documents lend some urgency to these questions because they reveal, among other things, a severe shortage of air defense weapons in Ukraine — so severe it could mean the difference between an ongoing stalemate or a Russian victory in the coming weeks or months. Without adequate air defenses, Russian warplanes will be able to bomb Ukrainian positions at will, which in turn might make Ukraine’s planned spring offensive impossible. No wonder, then, that earlier this month the Biden administration pledged $2.6 billion to rush air defense systems to Ukraine.
What the documents also suggest, as if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is that the war has not been an unbroken chain of brilliant underdog battlefield victories for Ukraine and crushing defeats for Russia, as the corporate media and the Washington political establishment have led us to believe. It rather seems like chaotic and indecisive butchery on both sides, with weapons and cash pouring in not just from the U.S. but from all over the world sustaining a large-scale war of attrition with no end in sight. Behind the scenes, according to the leaked documents, U.S. officials are predicting only “modest territorial gains” from Ukraine’s big spring counteroffensive, the recent surge of U.S. weapons and air defense systems notwithstanding.
One of the results of this slow, grinding warfare has been the rapid expenditure of munitions, at least on the Ukrainian side. U.S. weapons stockpiles are now badly depleted, and our defense industrial base is taxed to the point that we have been unable to deliver some $20 billion in promised military supplies to Taiwan. This of course raises the question of China, which the Biden administration, along with Republican leaders in Congress, refuse to talk about candidly in the context of the Ukraine war.
What is the plan if (and really, when) Beijing decides to invade Taiwan? No one seems to have an answer — or even seems willing to acknowledge there’s a problem. Nor do our political leaders have an answer to the increasingly obvious reality that U.S. sponsorship of Ukraine is pushing Moscow into Beijing’s arms and helping to accelerate a China-led coalition to challenge the U.S. dollar reserve currency status and usher in a truly multi-polar world.
Meanwhile, economic uncertainty prevails here at home, with inflation continuing to hit American families hard, U.S. banks failing, and talk of an impending recession setting markets on edge. As mentioned above, since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, American taxpayers have given Ukraine about $80 billion — and counting. That includes nearly $50 billion in direct military assistance, many orders of magnitude more than we give even our closest allies like Israel, which got just $3.3 billion in military aid in 2020.
Setting aside the larger question of how this war will end (spoiler alert: it’s almost certainly going to end with a negotiated political settlement), there’s the narrower question of what, exactly, the American taxpayer has been purchasing with all this largesse. The Ukrainian state is famously corrupt, which hasn’t changed under President Zelensky and indeed might be far worse now given the sheer volume of U.S. dollars washing through the country. Is Ukraine going to emerge from this as a functioning democracy allied with the West, a reliable partner and not a dangerous welfare case? Is there any reason so far to think that will be the case?
And why isn’t there any transparency about the aid and cash we’ve sent? We’re told by White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby that, yes, there are indeed a small number of U.S. special forces operating inside Ukraine, but they’re only there “to help us work on accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine,” and are not “fighting on the battlefield.” Presumably, that should mean we have more clarity about where weapons and cash are going inside Ukraine. But if that’s the case, no one in Washington will talk about it.
From where the situation stands now, it seems like the U.S. taxpayer has unwittingly bought nothing more than a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, one that increasingly runs a very real risk of ending in a nuclear showdown. Absent a hard push from Washington for peace negotiations — the one thing our leaders seem unwilling even to consider — we’re left with bad options all around: escalation and inevitable U.S. involvement on the one hand, or total abandonment of Ukraine on the other.
The only real question, at this point, is how many more tens of billions will American taxpayers have to spend to find out how this ends?
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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