As much as leftists should be hated for agitating racial conflict and violence, there’s something kind of sad, in a pathetic way, in witnessing the disillusionment of true believers finding out they’ve been conned by the very movement they helped push forward.
Such has been the case in recent weeks, between Rihanna’s “sellout” half-time performance at the Super Bowl and the muted response (i.e. no deadly rioting) to the death of Tyre Nichols, leaving some of the Black Lives Matter faithful with heavy hearts.
The Washington Post’s resident race hustler Karen Attiah on Monday bemoaned Rihanna’s “selling out” by performing at the Super Bowl. The ungrateful immigrant singer had said in 2019 that she turned down a previous invitation from the NFL because, “For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler.” She was presumably referring to the league’s punishment of Colin Kaepernick and others who protested by kneeling during the national anthem on game days.
“With Rihanna’s performance and her silence on the issues she claims to have stood for, the true winner of the night was the NFL,” wrote Attiah. “She has shown them, and all racist institutions, that if they can withstand Black protest and outrage for a few years, put on some cool shows and donate to charities, then everything will be hunky-dory…”
Charles Blow wrote similarly in The New York Times last month after a national story about a young black man who died in police custody, following his attempt to flee arrest. Arrests were made of the officers involved, all of them black, and they’ve been charged with the death of Tyre Nichols. This is formerly known as “the judicial process,” but because Nichols’ death didn’t result in another round of calls for reparations and the eternal subjugation of whites, Blow was miffed.
“It was more snuff porn with Black victims, in a country becoming desensitized to the violence because of its sheer volume,” he wrote. “America — and the world — had the realization that police violence was a problem, and then it simply walked away before the work was done and the war was won. … What fell away were the evanescent allies, poll-chasing politicians and cooped-up Covid kids who had used the protests as an opportunity to congregate.”
Wait a second. You mean to tell me the 2020 summer of horror was a manufactured hysteria for political purposes and that once its goal was achieved — the unseating of Donald Trump as president — it all seemed to disappear? No way!
Cold reality is finally setting in. Santa isn’t real after all.
Blow and Attiah might be the last people in America to realize that BLM as a national entity is nothing but a scam — even in the literal sense of the word, as endless stories have come out since 2020 exposing the group’s leaders as frauds and money embezzlers using innocent donations to enrich themselves with expensive homes and private jet travel.
And celebrities like Rihanna who promoted the notion that black athletes, who are paid millions of dollars, are also victims of white supremacy aren’t serious and should never have been taken seriously. Is the NFL in any way noticeably different today than it was in 2020? Of course not. But Democrats have the bulk of the power in Washington, so that put Rihanna and others in a much better mood.
It’s too bad Blow and Attiah had to find out this way.
Three of the 10 counties chosen as beneficiaries of a program from the nonprofit that helped fund the private takeover of government election offices in 2020 are refusing to accept those dollars leading up to the 2024 cycle.
Election officials from Brunswick and Forsyth Counties in North Carolina and Ottawa County in Michigan have chosen not to accept funds from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a program that plans to funnel $80 million in election grants to jurisdictions across the country over the next five years. The alliance is a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, one of two groups that funneled over $328 million of private money from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, known as “Zuckbucks,” to government election offices mostly in the blue counties of swing states, mobilizing Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts and swinging the race in Joe Biden’s favor.
Many of the jurisdictions chosen as recipients for the 2024 cycle lean heavily Democrat and are located in swing states, indicating CTCL is hoping to replicate its successful scheme in the next presidential election in purple states Democrats need to win, such as Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. While CTCL might once again try to hide its efforts by claiming the alliance is also giving money to red counties, expect more than double or triple the funds to be spent on Democratic-leaning counties compared to Republican ones, just like in 2020.
Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck told RealClearInvestigations he will refuse the grant money offered to his county because of transparency concerns. When Roebuck asked the alliance about its criteria for the amount of money given to each county, those running the program refused to give a clear answer.
Tim Tsujii, director of elections for the Forsyth County Board of Elections, told RealClear that Forsyth will not take any grant money because the county has adequate funds to administer its elections. Forsyth and Brunswick Counties will still be part of the alliance, but Tsujii raised concerns about members having to pay a fee for being part of the program.
“There is all this talk about the money going to elections offices and the counties, but what about the money going from the counties to the alliance?” Tsujii said.
To be a part of the alliance, election offices must pay an annual fee, $1,600 for a basic membership or $4,800 for premium, which the CTCL-created program says gives officials access to “coaching,” tutorials, consulting, and any other as-needed handholding, such as revamping voter forms and websites. The alliance also obligates members “to make non-monetary (but highly significant) contributions to the broader activities of the Alliance,” such as participating in its events and sharing election data, documents, and forms.
While the program goes to great lengths to stress its “commitment to nonpartisanship” — “We will never attempt to influence the outcome of any election. Period” — its own founding organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, has demonstrated the catastrophic and deeply partisan consequences of welcoming outside groups to infiltrate government election offices.
These three jurisdictions are not the only beneficiaries raising concerns about the integrity of the alliance and the problems associated with accepting its funds. The town of Greenwich, Connecticut, narrowly approved a $500,000 grant from the program after town representatives and concerned residents wrote a letter to their local newspaper signaling their opposition to accepting the grant. The letter cited outside influence by the partisan groups in Greenwich’s election process as one reason to reject the funds.
As RealClearInvestigations noted:
When [Greenwich] residents heard that its elections office was tapped to receive $500,000 in grant money from the CTCL, a member of the town’s legislative council sent an email to the center seeking more information, including audits of the group’s books, a copy of the group’s annual report, and its conflict-of-interest policy.
The CTCL declined to provide the documents, insisting that its audited financials and conflict policies “are not publicly filed documents.”
The alliance has also failed to disclose how exactly the grant money will be used, instead keeping things vague and saying it will vary depending on each office. But if CTCL’s past is prologue, that could mean working with left-wing third-party groups to create absentee ballot forms, targeting likely-Democratic voters by harvesting and curing their ballots, and crafting automatic voter registration systems. The Center for Tech and Civic Life is already hoping to do this on a much broader scale than in 2020. As The Federalist previously reported, CTCL has an elaborate plan to infiltrate more than 8,000 local election departments across the country by 2026.
That county election officials and town leaders are suspicious of the alliance and are starting to opt out of its grant money should set off alarm bells for other jurisdictions committed to conducting free and fair elections. Unless more localities reject these private funds and memberships, CTCL — under the guise of its new U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence program — will once again undermine election integrity in 2024 and beyond.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
One of House Republicans’ first steps after regaining the majority was to launch an investigation into President Joe Biden’s role in the Biden family’s lucrative pay-to-play business. Corporate media, however, are trying to distract from the first family’s scandals by conflating them with the conduct of the Trump family.
The Washington Post published an article last week, during the height of buzz about the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation, pointing the corruption finger at former President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
“An investment fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is backing ventures that profit the former president and his senior adviser, raising questions of conflict,” the article alleges.
Within days of the report’s publication, corporate media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, and even Rolling Stone featured anti-Trump information on their pages and networks. The point of amplifying the report is twofold. First, it gives the media and their Democrat allies more ammo against Trump’s third presidential run. The Washington Post is clear about that:
Now, with Trump running for president again, some national security experts and two former White House officials say they have concerns that Trump and Kushner used their offices to set themselves up to profit from their relationship with the Saudis after the administration ended.
Second, reports about the Trumps give anyone looking to escape conversations about the Biden family’s well-documented history of enriching their bank accounts with funds from foreign oligarchs an excuse to pivot to their favorite scapegoat.
Already, leftist commentators are claiming the Biden family “deserves grace,” while the Trumps deserve investigation. Despite countless real reports and ongoing federal investigations into the Biden family’s affairs, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan even bizarrely asserted there is “no real evidence” that the Biden family business leveraged Joe Biden’s status for personal profit.
The Political Enemy Playbook
Even before Trump’s White House tenure, the corporate media did everything in their power to make him look like a corrupt politician who was sold out to foreign governments. When they weren’t amplifying the Russia hoax, a fake scandal created and paid for by Democrats, the propaganda press scrutinized Trump’s tweets, twisted his words, and tried to undermine his presidency with lies that won Pulitzers.
They also aided Democrats in orchestrating two sham impeachments against Trump, whom they claimed was guilty of treason. These political attacks were sustained with plenty of negative press coverage of Trump’s sons, daughters, and son-in-law.
Where was the media’s outrage about White House familial corruption when Hunter exploited his father’s political reputation to strike business deals with oligarchs in Ukraine and China and then likely gave a cut to his dad? Joe Biden and his youngest son are the epitomal of the scandal and corruption Democrats and the corrupt corporate media desperately want Trump and his family to be.
There are literal receipts of the Biden family conducting shady business dealings overseas and profiting from relationships with sworn enemies, yet publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times worked overtime to downplay and mischaracterize the findings to save the Biden patriarch from criticism and losing the 2020 election.
They didn’t want the public to know that when Biden was vice president and overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine relations, Hunter received a whopping $50,000 per month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company he had no qualifications to be on. They didn’t want the public to hear that Hunter also raked in millions from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, and they certainly didn’t want Americans to discover that just two weeks after he traveled to communist China on his dad’s Air Force Two jet, Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.
“Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.”
Why COBALT? It’s one of the primary components of EV batteries.
No, for the media, there was no politically advantageous reason to expose that “an arm of the Chinese government” funneled money directly to a company managed by Hunter to compensate him for offering legal representation to the vice-chairman and secretary-general of Chinese energy company CEFC, Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping, the “spy chief of China.” And there was certainly no good reason for them to communicate that Ho, who was arrested, charged, and later convicted for using millions of dollars to “bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC,” made a phone call to James Biden, Joe’s brother.
Instead of covering bombshell stories about the questionable actions of a tight-knit family whose patriarch is in charge of the U.S. government, the propaganda press is still hyper-fixated on the Trumps.
When they aren’t going after the former first family, the media are amplifying the current president’s excuses and shilling for his son, who admitted through his lawyers that the infamous laptop exposing the Biden family’s foreign dealings was his. This investigation, they have claimed over and over and over and over and over, is a politically motivated one. But it’s not.
It’s About Joe, Stupid
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has repeatedly declared Republican investigators are interested in Joe Biden’s “knowledge of and role in his family’s foreign business deals to assess whether he has compromised national security,” not Hunter.
“Evidence obtained in our investigation reveals the Biden family business model is built on Joe Biden’s political career and connections. Biden family members attempted to sell access around the world, including individuals who were connected to the Chinese Communist Party, to enrich themselves to the detriment of American interests,” Comer said in a statement last week. “If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision making, this is a threat to national security.”
Despite the corporate media’s attempts to distract from, stifle, and smear Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family business by going after Trump again, the GOP can’t give up. Unlike when Democrats rallied their partisan network to falsely paint Trump as a Russian asset, this legitimate and evidence-based investigation is essential to determining whether U.S. national security is compromised from top to bottom because of Biden.
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.
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 Donald Trump.
For the third straight year, the black national anthem was performed at the Super Bowl. NFL fans were deeply divided on whether it was appropriate to perform the black national anthem before Super Bowl 57.
Before the Philadelphia Eagles took on the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII at State Farm Stadium in Arizona, 10-time Academy of Country Music award-winner Chris Stapleton sang the national anthem. Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds – a 12-time Grammy Award-winning recording artist, songwriter, and producer – sang “America the Beautiful.”
Emmy-winning actress and singer Sheryl Lee Ralph sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was designated as the “black national anthem” in 1917 by the NAACP.
Reactions on Twitter show NFL fans were staunchly opposed and vehemently supportive of the black national anthem being performed at Super Bowl LVII.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.): “America only has ONE NATIONAL ANTHEM. Why is the NFL trying to divide us by playing multiple!? Do football, not wokeness.”
TheBlaze contributor Delano Squires: “I grew up singing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ during assembly in my all-black elementary school. We also sang the Star Spangled Banner and said the pledge. It’s a beautiful hymn, but I feel like it’s being used by people who think we need a new founding (1619), flag, and anthem.”
Political pundit CJ Pearson: “The National Anthem is for EVERY American. What’s the purpose of a black one? Super Bowl Sunday should UNITE America, not divide it by race. It’s not the 1960s.”
TheBlaze contributor T.J. Moe: “Thank God we played the ‘blacknational anthem.’ Nothing screams unity like separating everything.”
Police officer and podcast host Zeek Arkham: “My ‘black’ National Anthem is the same anthem I’ve been singing since I was a child. The same one children of all races have been singing. My National Anthem never needed a color. Do they want racism to die, or do they want to keep finding ways to divide us all?”
Former GOP candidate Lavern Spicer: “The BlackNational Anthem is the Star Spangled Banner. The White National Anthem is the Star Spangled Banner. The Mixed National Anthem is the Star Spangled Banner. If you live in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, your National Anthem is the Star Spangled Banner.”
Commentator Matt Walsh: “No other country on Earth is ridiculous enough to permit different racial groups to perform their own national anthems before major events.”
Actor Kevin Sorbo: “The @NFL is going to play a black national anthem before the Super Bowl. Seems racist and divisive.”
Radio host Gerry Callahan: “The ‘Black National Anthem’ could be the single best example of corporate cowardice and shameless pandering in American history. You have one national anthem or no national anthem. Roger Goodell is pathetic.”
Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier: “There is no Blacknational anthem. There is no White national anthem. There is no Hispanic national anthem. There is only THE National Anthem. God Bless America!”
Former GOP candidate James Bradley: “Having a black national anthem is just another way that Democrats keep us divided.”
Political commentator Jack Posobiec: “The only thing that can unite America forever is creating separate national anthems for each different ethnic groups. I demand each one be played before every game Especially the Super Bowl.”
There were people who supported the black national anthem being played at the Super Bowl.
Republican strategist Paris Dennard: “‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ was a poem written by Republican, James Weldon Johnson in 1900. His brother put it to music and it was first performed by children at Johnson’s segregated FL elementary school to celebrate Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s birthday – which is today.”
Forbes writer Exavier Pope: “It’s informally called the Black National Anthem, but that’s not the name of the song & when the song is referenced by Black people, we use the formal title of the song. Also, to refuse the song is to dismiss its origin, history, it’s lineage, & all the reasons it STILL matters.”
Journalist Skylar Baker-Jordan: “‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ has been called the Black national anthem for longer than ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ has been the U.S. national anthem. This tweet is for all the conservatives currently or about to lose their s**t over a song praising God and freedom.”
Public education activist Mitchell Robinson: “Please add ‘Black national anthem’ to pronouns, books, schools, LGBTQ folks, and the other harmless things that frighten conservatives.”
Screenwriter Matt Mikalatos: “What’s especially baffling to me is Christians complaining about a hymn playing before the Super Bowl. Maybe they should reflect on the lyrics.”
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" (the "Black National Anthem") has been playing before *every* NFL game this season.
What's especially baffling to me is Christians complaining about a hymn playing before the Super Bowl. Maybe they should reflect on the lyrics. pic.twitter.com/xIe2vtxAhE
A previously recorded version of the black national anthem sung by Alicia Keys was played at Super Bowl LV in 2021. Gospel duo Mary Mary and Youth Orchestra performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during Super Bowl LVI in 2022.
Jason Allen/ISI Photos / Contributor, Nick Cammett / Stringer, Cooper Neill / Contributor, Tim Nwachukwu / Staff, Mitchell Leff / Contributor, Cooper Neill / Contributor | Getty Images
Let’s call it “The Sopranos Bowl.”
Super Bowl LVII, Kansas City’s 38-35 victory, unseated “Made in America,” the finale of the iconic HBO mob series, as the worst ending in television history.
With a little less than two minutes to play and the score tied at 35-35, a would-be Super Bowl classic cut to black, leaving more than 100 million fans pondering what could have been.
Would Philly capo Jalen Hurts rally the Eagles from a three-point deficit and win the game or force overtime? Or did Kansas City underboss Patrick Mahomes and button man Harrison Butker whack the Eagles?
We’ll never know because a referee flagged Philly corner James Bradberry for defensive holding on third and eight at the Philadelphia 15-yard line. The penalty gave the Chiefs a first down, allowed them to drain the clock, and set up a game-ending 27-yard field goal with eight seconds to play.
The unnecessary and unjustified call ruined the Super Bowl.
I don’t care that Bradberry defended the ref.
“It was holding,” Bradberry told reporters. “I tugged his jersey. I was hoping they would let it slide.”
No dice. No way.
It was a horrible call. I’ve watched the replays a dozen times. Chiefs wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster never broke stride. Bradberry’s contact never impeded Smith-Schuster from getting into his route. The refs stayed out of the game for 58 minutes. There were no mystery holding calls in the secondary or along the line of scrimmage. It was a clean game. It was a great game. Until the bogus holding penalty on Bradberry.
I’m not a bitter Eagles fan. I’m a happy Chiefs fan. I lived and worked in Kansas City for 16 years. My mother moved to Kansas City in 1984. I moved there in 1994. The Chiefs are my favorite football team. I bet money on Kansas City winning Sunday’s game. I’m thrilled with the outcome.
It’s the same way I feel about “The Sopranos.” It’s one of my two or three favorite shows in the history of television. It’s right there with “The Wire” and “The Shield.”
But more than anything else, “The Sopranos” is remembered for its trash ending. The screen cut to black. Sopranos fans have spent years arguing whether a hit man in a Members Only jacket clipped Tony Soprano as he ate dinner with Carmela, Meadow, and A.J. as “Don’t Stop Believin’” played on the jukebox.
Endings are important. They can taint the memory of an otherwise perfect story. “The Sopranos” might be the undisputed king of television if not for its blown final episode.
A perfect ending can elevate a TV show. “The Shield” pulled off the greatest finale in history. “Family Meeting,” “The Shield’s” final 72-minute episode, is flawless. Dirty cop Shane Vendrell poisons his wife and kid and then blows his own head off. Dirty cop Ronnie Gardocki is dragged off to jail seconds after finding out his trusted leader, Vic Mackey, snitched to save himself. Mackey forfeits his kids and career, is exposed as a cop killer, and is trapped at a desk job surrounded by federal agents who hate him.
The ending enriched all seven seasons and the 87 preceding episodes of “The Shield.”
Sunday’s Super Bowl was a bitter reminder of what’s wrong with the NFL. Referees have too much influence over the outcomes. They have too many judgment calls to make. The officiating is uneven and inconsistent. Sometimes the games feel manipulated. Calls of pass interference and roughing the passer determine outcomes more than the players.
I don’t believe the NFL is rigged. Nor do I believe former NFL running back Arian Foster’s outrageous suggestion that the games follow a script.
What was scripted was the reaction to Sunday’s game-deciding penalty.
I believe the NFL persuaded Bradberry and the Eagles not to whine about the costly penalty. I believe the league persuaded its television partners to downplay the penalty on Sunday. I don’t blame the NFL for this. It’s smart business. The league’s showcase event botched the ending. Roger Goodell wants fans talking about the magnificent performances of Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, and Nick Bolton, the Kansas City linebacker. It’s better to discuss the coaching brilliance of Andy Reid than the fact that NFL referees are in an impossible position.
Remember the Saints-Rams pass-interference no-call that sent Los Angeles to the 2019 Super Bowl?
The refs swallowed their whistles and let the players decide the game. The refs were ripped. Saints coach Sean Payton whined for months. He wore a Roger Goodell clown T-shirt. A New Orleans fan filed a lawsuit against the NFL (and later dropped it).
The “Nola No Call” in the NFC Championship is more memorable than the Patriots’ 13-3 Super Bowl victory.
Whelp, this time a ref didn’t swallow his flag. He threw it. He directly influenced the end of the game.
The NFL is a television show. Its goal is to create television stars. Its biggest star, Tom Brady, just retired. Patrick Mahomes is the next man up. The NFL is determined to stop a bogus penalty from tainting Mahomes’ second Super Bowl title.
The final episode of “The Sopranos” aired in June 2007, well before the social media matrix distorted truth with controlled narrative. Sixteen years ago, we were all free to rip “Made in America.” Now algorithms and partnerships determine criticism and dissent.
They want us to “fuhgeddaboudit.” That’s Sopranos slang for “forget about it.”
Democrats are working overtime to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next candidate will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A state court judge refused to halt the Texas Bar’s assault on Attorney General Ken Paxton for his decision to challenge several swing states’ execution of the 2020 election in Texas v. Pennsylvania, a little-noticed perfunctory order published in late January revealed.
While the partisan targeting of Paxton represents but one of the many attempts by Democrats to weaponize state bars to dissuade attorneys from representing Republicans, court documents obtained by The Federalist reveal that in the case of the Texas attorney general, the bar went nuclear.
In March of 2022, as Paxton prepared to face Land Commissioner George P. Bush in the May 2022 GOP runoff for attorney general, news leaked that the State Bar of Texas intended to advance an ethics complaint against the Republican attorney general. Then, soon after Paxton prevailed in the primary, on May 25, 2022, the Commission for Lawyer Discipline, which is a standing committee of the State Bar of Texas, filed a disciplinary complaint against Paxton in the Collin County, Texas district court.
While the Texas Bar’s disciplinary complaint represents an outrageous and unconstitutional attack on the attorney general, as will be detailed shortly, the backstory is nearly as troubling — both the machinations underlying the charge against Paxton and, more broadly, the barrage of politicized bar complaints pursued against Republican lawyers who provided legal advice or litigated various issues in the aftermath of the November 2020 general election.
Bars Gone Rogue
The D.C. Bar’s investigation into former Trump administration Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark based on a complaint from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., exemplifies the partisan co-opting of the various professional responsibility boards charged with overseeing attorneys’ conduct.
In Clark’s case, the ethics charge was both “demonstrably false and premised on the fraudulent narratives pushed by the partisan politicians running the Jan. 6 show trial and their partners in the press.” Yet Clark has been forced to fight for his livelihood because the D.C. Bar allowed Democrats to convert a disagreement over Clark’s legal opinion into a question of professional ethics. Clark has attempted to put a halt to the proceedings by moving to remove the case to the federal district court, but Clark’s motion has been stalled there for several months.
More recently, the California State Bar joined in the political witch hunt when it filed a 35-page, 11-count disciplinary complaint against attorney and former law professor John Eastman. The California State Bar’s complaint alleged Eastman’s engagement “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.” As I wrote at the time:
The 11 charges against Eastman prove troubling throughout, with the State Bar of California proposing to discipline Eastman for presenting legal analyses to his client, Trump, and for speaking publicly on his views about the election, with the bar even attempting to hold Eastman responsible for any violence that occurred on Jan. 6. The disciplinary complaint also misrepresents numerous arguments Eastman and others made concerning the 2020 election, falsely equating claims of violations of election law with fraud.
Eastman’s long and costly battle against the California Bar is only beginning. And that is precisely the point of involving state bars: to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next presidential candidate — or senatorial or congressional candidate — will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A Broader Campaign
These efforts are well-coordinated and well-funded, with the group 65 Project launching in March of 2022 ethics complaints against 10 lawyers who worked on election lawsuits following the 2020 presidential election. According to Influence Watch, “65 Project was ‘devised’ by Democratic consultant and former Clinton administration official Melissa Moss,” and is managed by attorney Michael Teter, a former litigation associate with the DNC-connected law firm Perkins Coie. David Brock, of Media Matters fame, advises the group, and the advisory board includes, among others, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
The 65 Project reportedly “seeks to disbar 111 lawyers from 26 states in total,” but is “not targeting any Democratic-aligned attorneys who have challenged election laws or results in the past.” Rather, the project’s sole aim is Republican lawyers, such as Eastman, with the group pushing for Eastman’s disbarment from the Supreme Court Bar.
It is not merely private attorneys the Democrat project targets, however. In September, the 65 Project filed complaints against the attorneys general of 15 states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia, advocating the bars in those states take disciplinary action against the attorneys general for conduct related to the 2020 election.
Texas AG Paxton didn’t make the list, though, because local Democrats had already taken up the charge. And here, the backstory reveals the troubling politicization of state bars is not limited to Democratic-connected groups like the 65 Project or to the bars in leftist locales such as D.C. and California.
Anti-Paxton Crusade
In Paxton’s case, the state bar received at least 85 complaints about Paxton related to Texas v. Pennsylvania. The Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel reviewed the complaints and dismissed them, finding “the information alleged did not demonstrate Professional Misconduct.” But then four attorneys appealed the dismissal, including one who, according to court filings, was the president of the Galveston Island Democrats and a friend of a Democrat seeking to run against Paxton for attorney general in the then-upcoming 2022 election.
An appeals body within the Texas State Board reversed the dismissal of the complaints, and later a fifth complaint was added to the charges against Paxton. Paxton was then forced to respond to the allegations, which itself proved difficult because they consisted of vague rhetoric, such as claims that Paxton “violated his duty and obligations as a Texas attorney” and “filed an utterly frivolous lawsuit,” bringing “shame and disrespect to the State of Texas and the legal community of Texas.”
Nonetheless, Paxton filed a detailed response, expanded on the theories Texas asserted in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case, and provided the bar with an extensive discussion of the factual and legal basis underpinning the court filings. The Texas Bar then handed the complaints over to what Paxton described as “an investigatory panel comprised of six unelected lawyers and activists from Travis County.”
As Paxton’s later court filings would stress, “as a group, the panel donated thousands of dollars to federal, state, and local candidates and causes opposed to Attorney General Paxton.” “What’s more,” Paxton argued in opposing the bar’s case against him, “members of the panel voted consistently in Democratic primaries for over a decade. Several have maintained highly partisan social media accounts hostile to Paxton.”
Unsurprisingly, the partisan panel found “just cause” existed to believe that Paxton had violated a catch-all provision of the Rules of Professional Conduct, namely the canon prohibiting attorneys from engaging “in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”
But in making this finding and filing a disciplinary petition in the state court, the Texas Bar wholely ignored the fundamental flaw in its crusade against Paxton — and one of constitutional dimension: The state bar, as a bureaucratic arm of the judicial branch, violates the Texas Constitution’s guarantee of separation of powers by challenging Paxton’s execution of his duties as attorney general.
Separation of Powers
Paxton concisely exposed this reality in his briefing, first quoting Texas precedent that teaches: “The Texas Separation of Powers provision is violated … when one branch unduly interferes with another branch so that the other branch cannot effectively exercise its constitutionally assigned powers.” “The Commission’s suit against the Attorney General violates the Separation-of-Powers doctrine,” Paxton continued, because the “decision to file Texas v. Pennsylvania is committed entirely to the Attorney General’s discretion. No quasi-judicial body like the Commission can police the decisions of a duly elected, statewide constitutional officer of the executive branch.”
In seeking the dismissal of the state bar complaint against him based on separation-of-powers principles, Paxton’s argument shows the politicization process becomes nuclear when the target is the state’s attorney general, writing: “Unelected administrarors from the judicial branch attempting to stand in judgment of the elected attorney general who is the sole executive officers with the authority to represent the State of Texas in the Supreme Court of the United States.”
While it is bad enough that the state bar has been used as a sword to attack political enemies, such as Eastman in California and Clark in D.C., to deter attorneys in the future from representing unpopular cases or parties, the weaponization of the state bar against a state’s attorney general is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. As Paxton wrote:
No other attorney in Texas, no one else on the planet can bring a lawsuit on behalf of the State … but we’ve got an administrative arm of the judicial branch, unelected state bureaucrats telling the chief legal officer of the State of Texas how he can exercise his sole prerogative and his exclusive authority to bring a civil lawsuit on behalf of the State of Texas.
Yet unelected bureaucrats — many of whom are political enemies of Paxton — have put the attorney general literally on trial for exercising the executive function with which he was constitutionally charged. And while Paxton fully briefed his position — that as a matter of constitutional law and the doctrine of separation of powers, the court lacked jurisdiction to proceed on the bar’s complaint against him — the trial judge summarily rejected Paxton’s motion, merely stating the motion was “denied.”
Paxton has yet to state publicly whether he plans to appeal the denial of his motion to dismiss to the Texas Court of Appeals. But as a matter of principle he should; this case represents not merely an attack on him personally, but on the position of attorney general.
The Federalist obtained copies of the relevant court filings and they are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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.
Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.
“He Gets Us” is spending upwards of a billion dollars on an advertising campaign to expose millions of people, including those who tuned in to the 2023 Super Bowl, to Jesus. But its attempt to win over the world with a modernized version of Christ failed to endear some of those it sought to engage. The first commercial flipped through a series of black-and-white photos of children helping others in need. The 30-second clip ended with the tagline “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults,” a reference to Christ’s teaching about childlike faith in Matthew 18.
“If I could see the world through the eyes of a child, what a wonderful world this would be,” the song narrated.
The second ad featured a slideshow of black-and-white photos depicting heated arguments — most of them political in nature.
“Jesus loved the people we hate,” the video concluded before plugging the He Gets Us campaign website.
These commercials offer the vaguest and most inoffensive and uncontroversial picture of Jesus possible, even to people who already have a distaste for Christianity. In fact, they are part of a larger campaign known for making radical comparisons between Jesus and the U.S. border crisis, which is harnessed by corrupt cartels for profit, and bold conflations of Jesus and his disciples with groups who roam the streets today, “challeng[ing] authority” and “ma[king] a lot of people uneasy,” in an attempt to appeal to current culture.
“We look at the biography of Jesus through a modern lens to find new relevance in often overlooked moments and themes from his life,” the campaign’s website states.
The hope in running these eyebrow-raising ads, campaign representatives disclosed, is to use an updated portrayal of Christ to sympathize with the plights of people who “are spiritually open, but skeptical” of organized religion.
In other words, the ads were deliberately designed to look, walk, and talk like the social justice agenda that has found its way into every American institution in the last decade in a last-ditch effort to appeal to a worldly culture.
Yet the universal messages communicated by these videos were still broadly rejected and smeared.
“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” progressive darling and Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quipped on Twitter shortly after the second “He Gets Us” ad aired, with her tweet garnering nearly 200,000 likes and more than 20,000 retweets as of this writing.
No matter how hard Christian campaigns — especially evangelical ones — like He Gets Us try to win over the world by twisting the Gospel to fit our culture’s standards, they will fail.
Jesus said, 19 “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” John 3:19-21 (NIV)
Do Not Conform to This World
It should come as no surprise that even the tamest of ads that barely mentions Jesus was doomed from the start. Christian campaigns like He Gets Us operate under the premise that repackaging the Gospel to make our society think Christians and Jesus are cool entices people to consider following Jesus. Oftentimes, they go to great lengths to trash their own — faithful Christians — to be viewed and accepted by the same world that despises Christ-followers who hold Biblical views about marriage, sex, family, and life.
He Gets Us was born out of the idea that the Christians of today are not good enough at marketing Jesus. After all, an alarming number of Americans are abandoning church.
“How did the story of a man who taught and practiced unconditional love become associated with hatred and oppression for so many people?” organizers ask on the campaign’s website. As a result, they claim “many of us simply cannot reconcile the idea of that person with the way our culture experiences religion today.” They say:
Whether it’s hypocrisy and discrimination in the church, or scandals both real and perceived among religious leaders, or the polarization of our politics, many have relegated Jesus from the world’s greatest love story to just another tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions.
Anyone who reads his Bible, however, knows our society will never welcome the Good News with open arms. That’s because the Gospel, in its truest form, is offensive to the world. It announces unequivocally that every person is a vile sinner who deserves death and that even the so-called good works we do are tainted by self-interest and are filthy in the eyes of a holy God. It tells of a loving Father who gave up his only Son Jesus to live a perfect life and die the most brutal death imaginable as a sacrifice for the same sort of people who murdered Him. It proclaims that this Jesus miraculously rose from the grave, and it demands that anyone who follows Him must lay down his own comfort and desires and even his very life every single day.
Nothing about this offensive message conforms to our culture. In fact, the written Word of God demands that we “do not conform to the pattern of this world.”
Dressing up the Word of God to appeal to the masses is the exact opposite of what Jesus and the apostles did and what Christians are commanded to do. We are told to sow the seed of the Gospel everywhere and to everyone, to preach Christ crucified — not water down the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of the incarnate God, who detests sin, into someone who perfectly embodies the modern culture.
Jesus Doesn’t Need Rebranding
There is nothing wrong with bringing Jesus to the masses — it’s what we’re commanded to do — but we have to do it well.
Jesus’ mission from God to die for the sins of the world cannot be reduced to a few choice words he said. We care about what Jesus said, but we can’t separate that from what He did. Jesus didn’t just preach love your neighbor or love your enemies or have childlike faith. He rebuked sin, cast out demons, and promised eternal life for those who repent.
That alone is great news that doesn’t need editorializing or tweaking or watering down. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”
He Gets Us sends a different message: that maybe the pure Gospel is something to be ashamed of because maybe the power of God, absent fresh aesthetics and modern social justice narratives, isn’t enough to save.
That doesn’t mean we stop sharing the Good News on whatever platforms we can. There’s certainly a space for Christians to share the love of God — and the gift of new life by grace through faith in Jesus Christ — to the millions watching the biggest sporting event of the year and everyone else. But let’s not squander that opportunity by peddling convenient narratives.
Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.
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.
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 Donald Trump.
A former case manager for a pediatric gender clinic in Missouri recently blew the whistle on the American medical system for “permanently harming” gender-questioning vulnerable children, the New York Post reported.
Jamie Reed, a 42-year-old woman from St. Louis who describes herself as a “queer woman” and “politically to the left of Bernie Sanders,” published an article in the Free Press on Thursday explaining why she walked away from her job at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
Reed, who is married to a transgender man, stated that she “could no longer participate in what was happening” and claimed the medical professionals at the clinic were “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.”
Reed noted that when she started her position, there were approximately 10 calls a month from gender-questioning children, and when she left, there were 50. According to Reed, 70% of new patients were female adolescents who sometimes arrived at the center in groups.
“This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then,” Reed said. “There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.”
Most girls arriving at the gender clinic had “many comorbidities,” including depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, or obesity.
“Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had,” Reed explained. “We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).”
According to Reed, doctors at the St. Louis clinic believed that the children’s incorrect self-diagnoses resulted from social contagion. However, doctors rejected the idea that the children’s questioning of their gender identity might also be a manifestation of social contagion. Instead, they claimed it was “something innate.”
Adolescents who wished to medically transition commonly only needed to see a therapist once or twice, Reed explained. Therapists were even provided a template for writing a letter supporting the child’s transition.
Side effects from the gender transition medications are many, including sterility.
After years of working in patient intake, Reed concluded that “teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.”
“Being put on powerful doses of testosterone or estrogen—enough to try to trick your body into mimicking the opposite sex—-affects the rest of the body,” Reed wrote. “I doubt that any parent who’s ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes.”
Reed said she recently brought her concerns to Missouri’s Republican attorney general.
“He is a Republican. I am a progressive. But the safety of children should not be a matter for our culture wars,” she stated.
Reed called for “a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria” because of the “secrecy and lack of rigorous standards.” She added that referring to transgender treatment as a “national experiment” is incorrect.
“Experiments are supposed to be carefully designed. Hypotheses are supposed to be tested ethically. The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: ‘We are building the plane while we are flying it.’No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft,” Reed concluded.
A spokesperson for St. Louis Children’s Hospital told KMOV, “We are alarmed by the allegations reported in the article published by The Free Press describing practices and behaviors the author says she witnessed while employed at the university’s Transgender Center. We are taking this matter very seriously and have already begun the process of looking into the situation to ascertain the facts. As always, our highest priority is the health and well-being of our patients. We are committed to providing compassionate, family-centered care to all of our patients and we hold our medical practitioners to the highest professional and ethical standards.”
After being swarmed by health providers who enabled her to medically transition as a minor, Prisha Mosley now says she’s been abandoned by the medical community as she attempts to navigate a complicated and painful detransition.
“I was under the impression that my doctors, who were transitioning me, loved me. They said they didn’t want me to die, they were saving my life, they were worried about me, and they wanted me to be healthy and happy,” Prisha told me. “Clearly, they don’t love me. As soon as it’s not profitable, they don’t want to help.”
Prisha has a slew of medical complications dating back to the more than five years she spent on testosterone and a double mastectomy that a plastic surgeon performed shortly after she turned 18. Many of those complications surround her endocrine system, which encompasses the hormones that regulate nearly every process in the body, from metabolism to growth and development, emotions, mood, sexual function, and sleep.
“I was hoping that if I could get my endocrine system working, I could be on less psychiatric medicine because low testosterone and estrogen will cause depression and anxiety, both of which I’m medicated for and don’t really like being medicated for,” she said.
Prisha also hopes that with estrogen supplements, she’ll experience some muscle and fat redistribution. After years of testosterone broadened her neck and shoulders, she now carries more weight in her upper body, which causes her chronic pain. Her throat is sore, she can no longer sing or raise her voice, and she suffers hair loss, as well as hair growth on her body, which she has to treat with costly laser hair removal sessions.
Another side-effect Prisha is seeking medical attention for is severe sexual dysfunction, which is so bad, she says she can no longer use tampons.
“I used to be able to, and now I can’t,” she said. “And that sucks. There’s pain, there’s irregular periods, and atrophy.”
No Medical Professionals Will Help
Hormonal care to fix her endocrine system, she hopes, could help her become more feminine — and perhaps fertile again. But she said every primary care physician, endocrinologist, obstetrician, and gynecologist she’s approached on her insurance list has turned her away or said they can’t help.
“I could call and be rejected every single day,” according to Prisha.
Professional organizations that represent many of these providers claim to offer open, inclusive, supportive care for “transgender” and “gender diverse” individuals. That offering, it appears, doesn’t apply to individuals seeking to detransition.
Prisha isn’t the only detransitioner who feels abandoned by the medical institutions that pushed her into wrong-sex hormones and surgery. Over the past year, Independent Women’s Forum has documented multiple stories of detransitioners who also report being abandoned by medical and mental health professionals after deciding to detransition.
“I reached out to every physician, every therapist who is involved with this, and I haven’t really gotten any help at all,” said Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old who was fast-tracked down a medical transition as a child by a team of eager doctors. Left to navigate the detransition process on her own, Chloe stopped taking testosterone “cold turkey,” and is still struggling with urinary and other complications that doctors have yet to help fix.
Cat Cattinson, a woman who medically transitioned to a wrong-sex identity in her 20s before realizing it was a major mistake, said access to medical care from providers who are knowledgeable is one of the major barriers detransitioners face:
Because of the experimental nature of gender medicine, doctors know very little about the long-term effects of medical transition and even less about the health-care needs of those who detransition. Surgeries, obviously, are irreversible, but hormonal interventions can also have lasting effects requiring treatment to mitigate. Testosterone caused irreversible changes to my vocal cords, resulting in daily discomfort and pain, but most ENTs [ear, nose, and throat doctors] and other voice ‘professionals’ are not informed about how testosterone affects a female voice or how to help someone in my situation.
Prisha doesn’t know why she’s been turned away from so many doctors and medical providers — whether it’s about money, politics, or a lack of knowledge to help. If it’s the latter, one might ask why medical professionals are allowed to put individuals, including minors, on drugs and “treatments” that they’re unable to later undo or address, should that patient change his or her mind.
Whatever the reason, the inability to access medical attention is having a profound effect on Prisha, beyond her physical health.
Prisha’s Mental Health Struggles
Prisha, who attends school in Big Rapids, Michigan, has a long and complicated history with borderline personality disorder, anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses. Now 24, Prisha says she used transitioning as a cover for her deeper-rooted mental health issues.
Since detransitioning, Prisha’s been in dialectical behavior therapy to manage her borderline personality disorder — therapy she credits with saving her life.
“When I treated that, all of the symptoms started getting better,” she said. “Nothing that I did to transition treated those things that were causing me mental suffering.”
But now as a detransitioner, even her therapy treatment is in disarray. A few months back, Prisha lost her health insurance because she couldn’t afford it. Under her new insurance, instead of being charged $10 per therapy appointment, she is being charged $96, an increase she wasn’t aware of for five months. Prisha now owes nearly $3,000 to her therapist, a service she depends on.
Upon going public with her story, Prisha started a campaign to raise money for breast reconstructive surgery, something she wishes to pursue to resolve the “phantom breast syndrome” she often experiences, and to appear more feminine.
But because the surgery is not deemed “a medical necessity,” Prisha would have to pay for it fully out-of-pocket. She would also need at least two surgeries to stretch her skin and reconstruct her breasts, estimated at more than $11,000 each. During this process, Prisha says she was told she would risk losing her nipples, which her plastic surgeon removed and reattached in more masculine positions.
The dream of breast reconstructive surgery and the $4,000 she’s raised for it thus far were put on hold, as Prisha is left using every penny she has to pay for her therapy and basic health insurance coverage.
“I feel like it’s like a bottomless pit — the medical needs, and I need the therapy because I can barely do this,” she said. “And I’m absolutely not going to, once again, medicalize my body without taking care of my mind.”
Now in debt and being rejected by one doctor after another, Prisha is at a loss for what to do. In an act of desperation, she turned to Plume, a company that has raised millions of dollars to connect patients with physicians who can prescribe them “gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy” online, including a “one-time medical letter of support for surgery with a one week turnaround time” for a fee of $150. But this time, instead of affirming her identity as the opposite sex, Prisha sought the help of Plume to get blood tests and hormone treatments to affirm her true sex: a woman.
Screenshot of Plume website.
After paying $99 and scheduling an appointment with a provider, Prisha said she was “ghosted” 40 minutes before the appointment. Plume hasn’t responded to Prisha’s requests for an explanation or even a refund. She suspects the provider canceled last minute because Prisha disclosed that she was “detrans” in initial paperwork she completed just minutes before the canceled appointment. After she submitted her intake forms, “All contact dropped off,” Prisha said. She then took to YouTube to share her devastation.
“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know who to go to because no one will help,” Prisha said through tears. “I was really hoping that they would care about me and help me. I just want to feel better. I just want to be better. I don’t want my body to be like this anymore. I’m in pain. … I can’t take it anymore.”
Independent Women’s Forum reached out to Plume to ask whether the company offers its services to detransitioners. Plume did not respond to our request.
The situation led Prisha to consider self-medicating. But due to her family history with mental illness and addiction, she’s doing everything in her power to resist that path.
“I’m feeling pushed to go that route because no doctor will help me,” she said. “It is deeply triggering my [borderline personality disorder] abandonment and rejection issues. It’s really easy to slip into the mindset that everyone hates me, I’m a medical monster, I’m bad and evil, and I deserve this.”
“It’s just being abandoned,” Prisha added. “I feel abandoned.”
Kelsey Bolar is a contributor to The Federalist and a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum. She is also the Thursday editor of BRIGHT, a weekly newsletter for women, and the 2017 Tony Blankley Chair at The Steamboat Institute. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and Australian Shepherd, Utah.
Anonymous sources were once rarely used in journalism. They would only be cited when trying to preserve someone’s physical safety or report on the most sensitive national security matters, and there was an expectation that such unusual sourcing be reviewed by editors and carefully corroborated whenever possible.
Now anonymous sourcing has become the norm in reporting and is frequently used as a political weapon to disseminate Democrats’ talking points and smear their enemies. The illicit use of anonymous sources to launch libel against Democrats’ enemies ballooned after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, and the tactic was used to develop the Russia-collusion hoax and multiple other smears.
The most recent example may be the Chinese spy balloon news cycle. When word reached the public that Red China spent days hovering over the United States collecting sensitive information, public outrage ensued. Dozens of legislators and governors and Trump demanded President Joe Biden shoot down the balloon as soon as possible.
The Biden administration refused, claiming that neutralizing the airborne threat could cause harm to civilians. This initial claim aired in corporate media, sourced to an anonymous “official” who offered no evidence, that “the balloon did not pose a military or physical threat” to the United States. This decision, once again, drew ire from Americans.
Once the administration finally did shoot down the balloon over the Atlantic, the Biden administration pointed fingers. An unnamed official at the Department of Defense allegedly told reporters at an off-camera press briefing on Feb. 4 that Chinese balloons like this one “transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration.”
That admission kicked off a corporate media frenzy. The press took the Pentagon’s word for it and accused Republicans of a “double standard.” Those who called for the end of the balloon, the press claimed, were hypocrites and Trump even more so because he “failed” to shoot down the spy equipment while in office.
Less than one day later, Trump and several high-level Trump national security officials who would have been briefed about a security breach during their tenure went on the record, with their names behind their statements, to deny any knowledge of Chinese spy balloons surveilling the United States under their watch. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/109812699029727017/embed
“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” Mark Esper, who was defense secretary from 2019 to 2020, told CNN.
Christopher Miller, who was acting defense secretary from 2020 to 2021, admitted “the first time I ever heard of anything like this was this weekend.”
“Had not a clue,” Miller said. “If something like that had happened, that’s like a national security threat.”
“I certainly never became aware that there was a three-bus-sized floating device coming across our country for five days, either as CIA director or secretary of state. [And] I’ve talked to others who are on my teams — they don’t know anything about it either,” said Mike Pompeo, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and secretary of state under Trump.
Robert O’Brien, another former Trump national security advisor, said, “Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue.” Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe outright stated the Biden administration’s anonymously sourced claim was “not true.”
Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe reiterates his statement that there were not 3 Chinese spy balloon incidents under Trump:
Even former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has a history of fabricating intel and smears about Trump, said the Biden administration’s conveniently timed revelation was news to him.
“I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018,” Bolton told Fox News. “I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left either.”
Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, “clarified” two days after the Pentagon’s initial accusation that “we did not detect those threats” at the time Trump was in office. The Narrative™ that Trump failed to shoot down Chinese spy balloons had already made its way onto the pages and TV screens of millions by the time the Biden administration decided to walk back its smears against the previous administration filtered through an anonymous source to compliant media outlets.
On Feb. 7, days after Trump staff denied on the record and one day after the Pentagon claimed Red China’s repeat airborne espionage was only discovered retrospectively, corporate media still insisted spy balloons were “spotted on several occasions during President Donald Trump’s administration, including three instances where they traveled near sensitive US military facilities and training areas.”
The source? “People familiar with the matter” who worked under Trump. The people making these claims were conveniently not named, giving them cover to make any accusations they liked and media to air them with no accountability for either entity.
The Smear Operation Playbook
Classic journalism ethics state anonymous sourcing should be rare because the “public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.” Yet the practice of relying on unnamed information suppliers to communicate breaking news has become commonplace, especially when fronting smears against Democrats’ opponents. As a matter of fact, anonymously sourcing what later prove to be complete lies is often rewarded by the journalism industry today.
The most notable example of anonymous sourcing as a weapon was the Russia hoax. That is a years-long coup led by Democrats and intelligence agencies with the eager help of the corporate media to disqualify Trump from the White House and prevent his presidency from being effective. The Russia hoax also resulted in failed impeachments. It’s fair to say it never could have been pulled off without outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more using unnamed sources to discredit their political enemies.
The Trump years were rife with media manipulation involving anonymous sources. In one dramatic episode, the media claimed to prove that Donald Trump Jr. was sent an email by Wikileaks giving him early access to leaked emails from top Democrats. Not only was the report untrue — CNN never saw the source email to Donald Trump Jr. and instead relied on the word of two anonymous sources who got the date on the email wrong — but the botched CNN report dramatically exposed how anonymous sources can lead to misinformation.
CNN’s faulty reporting was immediately “confirmed” by MSNBC and CBS. Of course, confirming erroneous reporting is an impossibility unless all three news outlets were relying on the same sources, confident that their anonymity would create the false impression that multiple sources could verify the story. In this case, the sources appear to have come from the office of Rep. Adam Schiff, a known liar and key perpetrator of the Russiagate hoax. This issue of multiple news outlets citing the same anonymous source has happened more than once, and it continues to be a problem.
But that failure was just the tip of the iceberg. During the Trump years, the media also claimed Trump’s national security adviser illicitly reached out to Russia’s government before Trump took office; that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was linked to the Russian Direct Investment Fund; that Trump attorney Michael Cohen confessed that Trump “directed” him to lie about contacting a Russian official; that Russia offered members of the Taliban bounties in exchange for killing American soldiers and Trump knew about it; that Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state’s office to “find the fraud”; and many, many more complete fabrications relying on sources who hid their smears behind anonymity.
All of these claims were unvetted, untrue, and should have never been published. Instead, some were showered with praise and status. Others were barely corrected long after the coverage served its political purpose.
Real reporting requires due diligence. Corporate media, desperate to aid Democrats in their conquest of any Americans who disagree with them, have become pipelines of government information manipulation, especially from intelligence agencies. As a result, anonymous sources are easily duplicated and repackaged as “independent confirmation,” and so-called “news” sites are plagued with unverified intelligence and information — or, worse, allegations they verifiably know are untrue.
And they are happy about it. In 2019, then-New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd denounced her employer for being “too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had” quickly about Trump’s nonexistent connection with Russia.
“The idea that you only publish once every piece of information is in and fully vetted is a false construct,” she wrote. “If you know the FBI is investigating, say, a presidential candidate, using significant resources and with explosive consequences, that should be enough to write.”
Her call to normalize the unprofessionalism of partisan actors in newsrooms received amplification from fellow journos. The ubiquitous use and elevation of this unethical practice may have been popularized during the rise of Trump, but it has far outlived his presidency, something that independent media have routinely observed for years.
Today’s media complex relies on readers to keep trusting what it says, regardless of its extremely tainted records. The press doesn’t deserve that kind of benefit of the doubt.
Americans are still unclear on how many Chinese aircraft have compromised U.S. airspace and who let them. What they shouldn’t be unclear about is that the corrupt, untrustworthy, and democracy-threatening corporate media use anonymous sources to advance disinformation operations and push political narratives that often have no relationship to the truth.
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.
The U.S. military shot down an “object” that was flying in territorial waters over Alaska, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Friday afternoon during a White House press briefing.
“I can confirm that the Department of Defense was tracking a high altitude object over Alaska airspace in the last 24 hours. The object was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight. Out of an abundance of caution and the recommendation of the Pentagon, President Biden ordered the military to down the object. And they did. And it came in inside our territorial waters,” Kirby said.
Kirby added that the “object” landed on frozen waters, and that “Fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command took down the object within the last hour.”
He also added that the “object” was “much, much smaller than the spy balloon that we took down last Saturday.”
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby speaks during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Friday. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“The way it was described to me was roughly the size of a small car as opposed to a payload that was like two or three buses sized,” Kirby said.
Kirby said that he doesn’t know of any “outreach” to the Chinese government about the object, and said that the government doesn’t know who owns the unmanned object.
“We do not know who owns it, whether it’s state owned or corporate owned or privately owned,” he said.
President Biden speaks to reporters as he and first lady Jill Biden leave the White House and walk to Marine One on the South Lawn in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 27, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker)
Kirby said that the object was shot down because it was flying at around 40,000 feet and could have posed a threat to civilian aircraft versus the Chinese spy craft discovered last week, which Kirby said was at 65,000 feet and posed no threat to civilian aircraft.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesperson, said Friday afternoon that the military has located a significant amount of debris from the object, stating that it was shot down by an F-22 using an A9X missile out of Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. He said the object entered U.S. airspace on Thursday.
“Debris that’s been recovered so far is being loaded on to vessels taken ashore, cataloged, and then moved onwards to labs for subsequent analysis. And while I won’t go into specifics due to classification reasons, I can say that we have located a significant amount of debris so far that will prove helpful to our further understanding of this balloon and its surveillance capabilities,” Ryder said.
Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
“We have no further details about the object at this time, including any description of its capabilities, purpose or origin,” Ryder added.
Just over a week ago, defense officials said that a Chinese spy craft was spotted over Billings, Montana. After it traveled at high altitudes around 60,000 feet, it was shot down on Saturday by an F-22 using a single A9X missile.
President Biden ordered on Feb. 3 that the spy craft should be shot down whenever the military determined that it’s safe to do so without potentially harming civilians on the ground.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement after the balloon was shot down that “President Biden gave his authorization to take down the surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path.”
U.S. forces recover debris from a shot-down Chinese surveillance balloon. (US Fleet Forces)
“After careful analysis, U.S. military commanders had determined downing the balloon while over land posed an undue risk to people across a wide area due to the size and altitude of the balloon and its surveillance payload. In accordance with the President’s direction, the Department of Defense developed options to take down the balloon safely over our territorial waters, while closely monitoring its path and intelligence collection activities,” Austin said.
Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
Adam Sabes is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Adam.Sabes@fox.com and on Twitter @asabes10.
Last fall, a high school senior in Iowa was suspended for wearing a pro-Second Amendment shirt to her government class, and now her mother is suing the teacher, the principal, and the district. On Monday, Janet Bristow of Johnston, Iowa, a northwest suburb of Des Moines, filed a lawsuit in a U.S. district court alleging that the suspension violated her daughter’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
In late August 2022, Tom Griffin taught his government students at Johnston High School that their rights were “extremely limited” once they entered the classroom, despite the 1969 landmark SCOTUS ruling, Tinker, which affirmed that students and teachers do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Griffin insisted that he would forbid students from wearing any clothing which depicts “guns, alcohol, or any other ‘inappropriate material,'” the lawsuit states.
Bristow’s daughter, identified in the lawsuit only as “A.B.,” was in that class and determined that Griffin had erred in his assessment. Two days later, on September 1, she went to school wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a rifle and the phrase “What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ do you not understand?” emblazoned on the front. Bristow alleged in the lawsuit that A.B. had worn that shirt before without incident and that the girl’s older brother, who graduated from Johnston High School in 2019, also wore the shirt without a problem during his time at the school.
A.B.’s shirtScreenshot of the lawsuit
But Griffin had a problem with the shirt, and he dismissed her from class and sent her to the administration. Bristow soon afterward arrived and discussed the issue with Nate Zittergruen and Randy Klein, both associate principals, and Ryan Woods, the school’s principal. Zittergruen told Bristow that the shirt could be perceived as threatening or offensive, and the administrative team gave A.B. the choice either to change her shirt or face suspension.
Chris Billings, the district’s executive director of school leadership, supported the administration and claimed that the shirt violated school dress code. So, after A.B. refused to change her shirt, she was issued an out-of-school suspension.
Later that evening, Bristow said she received an apology from Superintendent Laura Kacer as well as Billings, who said he had come to realize that the shirt is, in fact, “political speech.”
While Bristow was grateful for the apologies, she does not believe that the issue has been resolved. For one thing, Griffin has neither apologized nor clarified the issue with his class, leaving the impression that “A.B. was wrong and that her opinions were not welcome in the classroom,” the document stated. A.B. also still has the suspension listed on her school record.
In the suit, Bristow is seeking the following forms of relief:
affirmation that clothing featuring firearms “in a non-threatening, non-violent manner” is protected under the First Amendment;
a permanent injunction which will prevent the defendants listed in the lawsuit from ever restricting such clothing again in the future; and
compensation for damages, the costs associated with the legal process, and any other “relief” the court deems “appropriate.”
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 Donald Trump.
Sam Smith performs onstage during the 65th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 05, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. | Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
This past Monday morning, I was teaching hundreds of ministry school students at Christ for the Nations in Dallas on the topic of demons and deliverance. During the class, I stated that in the days ahead, I believed that satanic manifestations would become much more open and overt in our society. Rather than hiding himself in the culture, the devil will reveal himself more clearly.
After teaching, I got back to my room and began to read headlines and receive emails that confirmed the very thing I was saying. (More on that in a moment.)
Of course, we’ve been seeing this trend for years now.
One prominent example would be the rise of Drag Queens in our culture, some of them in overtly satanic attire, reading to toddlers in libraries, and performing at churches.
Another prominent example would be the “Shout Your Abortion” movement and the celebration of radical, pro-abortion legislation. This is in stark contrast to the old Bill Clinton adage that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a radical feminist group with the acronym WITCH, standing for the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. (I kid you not.) They certainly got their message across!
But most groups are not that overt (even if tongue in cheek), and gay activists learned decades ago that the in-your-face, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” approach was not working. Instead, gay strategists adopted a policy of presenting themselves to be exactly the same as the couple next door, just like you in every way, except gay. (This was laid out in the watershed 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer It’s Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s.)
So, from a strategic viewpoint, most groups wanting to bring about radical change to society do so in more covert, incremental ways rather than announcing, “We’re a terrorist conspiracy from Hell!”
In the same way, Satan doesn’t march around as a huge, horned dragon carrying a pitchfork.
As a senior demon counseled a younger demon in C. S. Lewis’s classic book The Screwtape Letters, “The fact that ‘devils’ are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.”
These days, however, it’s as if Satan is coming out in full force, red tights and all — if not literally, then metaphorically. What else can be said of the performance of “Unholy” at the Grammy Awards this past Sunday night? As the Breitbart headline announced, “Non-Binary Pop Star Sam Smith Performs BDSM, Devil-Themed ‘Unholy’ at the Grammys.” How lovely!
But even that only told part of the story.
As explained in more detail by the American Family Association, “During the annual Grammy Awards ceremony on Feb. 5, originally designed to recognize outstanding artists in the music industry, Pfizer pharmaceutical company felt it fitting to sponsor performers Sam Smith, who claims to be non-binary, and Kim Petras, who claims to be transgender. These two gave the nation a Satan-themed performance of their song ‘Unholy,’ in which Petras performed inside a cage with drag queens dressed in devil costumes, while Smith gyrated in a costume with devil horns sticking out from a top hat.
“The entire ‘performance’ depicted a hellish scene with lots of darkness, blood red colors and flames.”
So, you have: 1. the name of the song, “Unholy”; 2. both lead performers denying their biological realities, one of them wearing devil’s horns; 3. drag queens in devil costumes; 4. BDSM-related themes; 5. and the fires of Hell. I would say that is pretty clear!
No wonder podcaster Liz Wheeler tweeted, “Don’t fight the culture wars, they say. Meanwhile demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan. I could throw up.”
Compared to some other past hits (whose lyrics are virtually unrepeatable in moral circles), the lyrics to “Unholy” are relatively tame. It is the overall message of the Grammy performance that shouts out its depravity loudly and clearly.
Similar to this is the announcement from The Satanic Temple that it is raising funds to provide “free religious [meaning Satanic] telehealth medication abortion care in New Mexico.”
But this could be good news for us as followers of Jesus. The greater the darkness, the clearer our light is seen. May it shine brightly in front of the whole world! And may we shine as lights without shame, without compromise, and without hypocrisy.
And don’t be surprised if, in the days ahead, in front of your very eyes, you witness scenes as if taken straight out of the Bible where, in broad daylight, visibly demonized people get set free in Jesus’ name — dramatically, gloriously, and in full public view.
Things are heating up.
(For a great “holy” version of “Unholy” by a contemporary Gospel artist, go here. It’s titled, “If Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ ‘Unholy’ were a Christian song by Beckah Shae.”)
When Joe Biden accused Republicans of planning to “cut” Social Security and Medicare during his State of the Union address, it was — like virtually all the other things he said — a lie. His claim was tantamount to accusing Democrats of supporting a “plan” to shut down air travel because Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once proposed it.
The president was referring to Rick Scott’s ill-timed “12 Point Plan to Rescue America,” which included, among numerous other nonstarters, a proposal to sunset all federal spending programs every five years. The proposal, contra Biden’s contention, had no support from Republicans and nothing to do with the debt ceiling fight.
None of that means that asking Congress to reauthorize federal spending bills every few years isn’t a great idea. Why would stalwarts of “democracy” oppose revisiting spending decisions made by legislators nearly 90 years ago? No living person has ever voted on them. And though “liberals” are generally more protective of Social Security than the Bill of Rights, entitlement programs aren’t foundational governing ideas, they do not protect our natural rights, nor are they at the heart of the American project. Government dependency is, in fact, at odds with all of it.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of private-sector establishments go out of business, and yet not a single federal government program ever does. While nearly every facet of society embraces cost-saving efficiencies, the federal government perpetually grows. It is madness. Simply as a function of good governance, it would be reasonable for Congress to review the efficacy and cost of existing federal programs, and then make suggestions for reforms or elimination or — yikes — privatization. Forget entitlements. Is there any reason we shouldn’t revisit the billions spent on the obsolete Natural Resource Conservation Service (created in 1935 to help farmers deal with soil corrosion) or the Rural Electrification Administration (created in the same year, when large swaths of rural Americans did not have electricity) or the counterproductive Small Business Administration or the subsidy sucking Amtrak corporation?
Indeed, there is widespread support for Social Security — a Bismarckian import, first championed nationally by corrupt populists like Huey Long to augment retirement. One suspects this is largely because Americans have been compelled by the state to pay into the pyramid scheme. Many people build their retirements around the program. They have no choice. Compulsion is a hallmark of leftist policy, from entitlements to Obamacare to unionization to public school systems. And by forcing participation, we’ve created a generational trap. Voters have been fearmongered into believing that any reform means something is being stolen from them, when no serious proposal has ever cut existing benefits.
In the 1970s, Biden supported re-upping federal spending authorization every four years and requiring Congress to “make a detailed study of the program before renewing it.” Obviously, Biden hasn’t stuck to a single principled position in his entire career. But it is worth noting there was plenty of bipartisan support for sunsetting bills from 1970 through the 2000s — including from Ed Muskie, Jesse Helms, liberal “lion” Ted Kennedy, and George W. Bush.
Until very recently the center of both parties also agreed entitlement reform would be necessary to keep Medicare and Social Security solvent. In today’s Idiocracy, we have a president who argues that a $5 trillion spending bill costs “zero” dollars, so we’re about a zillion lightyears away from responsible governance.
If Social Security is so deeply popular — and everyone saw cowardly Republicans promise Biden they wouldn’t do anything to fix these programs that are bankrupting the country — what’s the problem? Even with the highly remote chance of a sunset law, the chances of reform would be still more remote. Look at how Washington almost perfunctorily lifts the debt ceiling. The only shared principle in D.C. is risk aversion.
Still, if Congress were automatically impelled to vote on existing law, it would create more political space to at least suggest changes and perhaps revisit mistakes. If nothing else, Congress would be marginally more “productive” if it was forced to occasionally deal with existing problems rather than concocting new ways to create them.
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.
When the New York Post dropped its bombshell reporting on documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in October of 2020, Twitter did not reach out to the FBI to ask whether the reporting was Russian disinformation — despite extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference. Instead, according to testimony at Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.
The House Oversight Committee, now in the hands of Republicans, questioned four former Twitter executives on their decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., pushed Twitter’s former global head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to explain the timing of Twitter’s decision to censor the New York Post story.
Biggs noted that in an 8:51 a.m. email on Oct. 14, 2020, Roth had taken the position that the laptop “isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy.” But then, by 10:12, Roth emailed his colleagues with Twitter’s decision to censor the story, stating that “the key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation that this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak operation.”
What cybersecurity experts had Roth consulted between 9 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, the morning the Post story broke, Biggs asked the former Twitter executive.
Roth responded that the experts were ones the Twitter heads were following on the platform. “We were following discussions about this as they unfolded on Twitter,” Roth explained. “Cybersecurity experts were tweeting about this incident and sharing their perspectives, and that informed some of Twitter’s judgment here.”
Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., was incredulous: “After 2016, you set up all these teams to deal with Russian interference, foreign interference, having regular meetings with the FBI, you have connections with all of these different government agencies, and you didn’t reach out to them once?”
“That’s right,” Roth said, noting he didn’t think it would be appropriate.
Instead, Twitter relied on the tweets of supposed national security experts.
Who those experts were, Roth didn’t say, but here we have another strange coincidence: In his testimony on Wednesday, Roth told the committee that a few weeks before the Post story dropped, he had participated in an exercise hosted by the Aspen Institute, with other media outlets and social media companies, that posed a hack and leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden. Roth testified that Garrett Graff facilitated that event.
And at 8:23 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2020, after the Post story broke, Graff tweeted his playbook for how the media should react to “this Biden-Burisma crap.”
Graff followed about some 10 minutes later, tweeting, “Also, what a TOTAL coincidence that this fake Hunter Biden scandal drops the literal day after it becomes clear that both of Bill Barr’s other intended October surprises—the Durham investigation and the unmasking investigation—have fallen apart??!”
Not long after Graff began pushing the “fake” Hunter Biden scandal narrative, Vivian Schiller joined in, calling the Hunter Biden story “nonsense” and claiming Graff’s exercise was “to test readiness of some MSM.”
And who is Schiller? According to Graff, Schiller “designed and ran” the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise that Roth participated in. She was also the former head of news at Twitter, in addition to previously being the CEO of NPR, among other gigs.
In addition to Graff and Schiller, CNN’s consultant and so-called national-security expert weighed in at 8:23 a.m., questioning the “amplifying” of the New York Post’s story, stressing that “amplification is the key to disinformation.”
Natasha Bertrand also tweeted an early morning “warning” that a Russian agent had been “teasing misleading or edited Biden material for nearly a year.”
Bertrand, also known as Fusion Natasha for falling for Fusion GPS’s Steele dossier and Alfa Bank hoax, was joined in pushing the disinformation narrative by The Washington Post’s alleged fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
By 8:30 a.m., Kessler had shared The Washington Post’s policy “regarding hacked or leaked materials,” and told Twitter users to “be careful what is in your social media feeds.”
Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn followed with a 9:07 tweet declaring that the “whole story” was predicated on “false Fox/Giuliani talking points” and pronouncing the Post as advancing “disinformation.”
Twitter’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden story was bad enough before, but to think the executives may have relied on so-called experts like these raises the outrage another octave.
Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker likewise indicated in an email that he had “seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails in another way (i.e., that there is no metadata pertaining to them that has been released and the formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications.)” Baker, however, did not say whether he had spoken with the “cybersecurity folks,” and given that when pushed by the committee he hid behind attorney-client privilege, getting any more answers from Baker seems unlikely.
Beyond learning that Twitter executives opted to rely on the tweets of so-called experts over asking the FBI if the laptop was fake, Wednesday’s hearing consisted mainly of grandstanding — some on both sides of the aisle — and Democrats attempting to make the hearing about Trump when they weren’t complaining that the entire session was a waste of time. One additional salient fact came out, however, in addition to a review of the basics of Twitter’s censorship efforts.
Specifically, Roth clarified for the House committee that the FBI had not previously warned that an expected “hack-and-leak” operation was rumored to likely involve Hunter Biden. Rather, according to Roth’s testimony, the rumor that the hack-and-leak operation would target the Biden son came from another tech company.
Roth claimed in his Wednesday testimony that his Dec. 21, 2020, statement to the Federal Election Commission was being misinterpreted. In that statement, Roth had attested that “since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.” His signed declaration then noted that the “expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
According to Roth, he should have worded his statement differently because it was not the FBI that had raised Hunter Biden as a potential subject of the hack and leak, but a peer company. One would think, however, that Roth would have clarified this point to his lawyer some two-plus years ago when Twitter’s Covington & Burling attorney represented to the FEC in a cover letter that accompanied Roth’s statement that “reports from the law enforcement agencies even suggested there were rumors that such a hack-and-leak operation would be related to Hunter Biden.”
Clearly, the former Twitter executives seek to separate themselves from the FBI, but “The Twitter Files” make that next to impossible to accomplish. And, really, being beholden to the so-called experts tweeting out warnings of supposed Russian disinformation would hardly be an improvement.
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.
After several executive agencies in the Biden administration were sued for refusing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests from conservative advocacy group Citizens United over the White House’s attempt to federalize elections, the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Indian Affairs finally turned over its first batch of requested documents. There’s one problem: More than half of the 54-page document is completely redacted.
“The Biden administration is the least transparent in history, and these absurd redactions are just the latest example. What are they trying to hide from the American people?” Citizens United President David Bossie told The Federalist.
As The Federalist previously reported, in March 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing hundreds of federal agencies to engage in a federal takeover of election administration. It also permitted federal agencies to work with “nonpartisan” third-party entities to get voters registered, yet left-wing dark money group Demos publicly admitted it’s worked with federal agencies, “in close partnership with the ACLU and other allies,” to advance the aims of Biden’s directive.
Such an order set off alarm bells among Republicans and good government groups, reminiscent of the widespread takeover of government election offices by Democratic activists and donors in the blue counties of key swing states during the 2020 presidential election. Through their infiltration of state and local offices, Democrats were able to conduct partisan get-out-the-vote operations and swing the election in then-candidate Biden’s favor. This order is a taxpayer-funded version of that effort, turning federal agencies — including those that dole out federal benefits — into voter registration hubs and partisan get-out-the-vote centers.
Citizens United wanted to find out more about it, which is why last June, it filed FOIA requests with the DOI and State Department seeking email and text messages that mentioned both the executive order and the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits executive branch employees from engaging in election activities. When the agencies failed to comply, Citizens United sued. On Jan. 31, DOI sent its first round of documents per Citizens United’s request.
But the 54-page PDF sent to Citizens United is mostly redacted, save for logistical emails between White House staff and agency department heads. The plan and implementation scheme for the “Promoting Access to Voting” executive order itself are completely redacted.
In a cover letter sent with the documents, the Biden administration defended the redactions under U.S.C. § 552(b)(5), which allows agencies to withhold information under the “Presidential Communications Privilege” (exists to ensure “the President’s ability to obtain candid and informed opinions from his advisors and to make decisions confidentially”) and the “Deliberative Process Privilege” (“protects the decision-making process of government agencies and encourages the frank exchange of ideas on legal or policy matters”).
But according to Jason Foster, president and founder of Empower Oversight, a transparency and government accountability group that frequently files FOIA requests, these redactions are a prime example of the federal government’s blatant over-redacting and censorship.
“Federal bureaucrats do everything in their power to conceal information from the public,” Foster told The Federalist. “Whether it’s over-classification or improper redactions and stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests, they instinctively err on the side of hiding information to avoid embarrassment, conceal misconduct, or cover up corruption. It’s up to Congress to reform the FOIA process, and in the meantime, it’s up to independent organizations to sue aggressively to force the federal government to comply with transparency laws.”
While good government groups can sue over improper redactions, this process can usually take about a year to uncover just one document from a series of files, those familiar with the matter said. Now that Republicans control the House of Representatives, however, they have the power to compel the federal government to produce non-redacted versions of requested documents, a Citizens United official told The Federalist.
During the 117th Congress, nine House Republicans wrote a letter to the White House raising concerns about the executive order, specifically regarding the fact that the order supplants the authority of the states to set election law and administer elections under the Constitution. When asked about the Biden administration’s secrecy over its election’s directive, Freshman Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., who chairs the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, echoed her colleague’s sentiments.
“Everyone should have concerns about this executive order and the involvement of any federal agency in our election process,” Hageman told The Federalist. “First and foremost, elections are the constitutional responsibility of the states, not our federal bureaucracy. This is yet another example of the federal government overstepping its authority and infringing upon states’ rights. Even if this order was well intended — and I have serious doubts that it was — it is unconstitutional.”
Hageman emphasized that the White House cannot get away with such extensive redactions of election-related processes.
“Large-scale redactions are not in the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act,” Hageman added. “This is one of the few tools we have to hold our government accountable. Are we to accept that the information is classified to such an extent that the document is unable to be coherently interpreted? Sunshine is the best disinfectant, and the federal government cannot be allowed to continue to obscure and obstruct.”
Of particular interest in the 54-page document is a draft letter on page 32 from Indian Affairs Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland to White House Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice, formerly President Obama’s national security advisor and “right-hand woman” who is known for her involvement in spying on the Trump campaign in 2015 and lying about it. In that role, she also spread lies about the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, helped Obama staffers target Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and turned a blind eye to the Biden family’s foreign business affairs.
One line in the draft letter reads: “The plan promotes voter registration and voter participation (REDACTED) and the Department’s agency action to achieve these objectives.” The redacted portion might point to a Hatch Act violation, a Citizens United official told The Federalist.
“These documents relating to the Biden White House’s efforts to turn the federal workforce into a partisan voter registration committee must be released to the public in their entirety,” Bossie said. “Congress must investigate this executive order to see if the Biden Administration is violating the Hatch Act on a massive scale.”
When asked why the Interior Department isn’t being transparent with the public about Biden’s federal takeover of elections, the Bureau of Indian Affairs referred The Federalist to the U.S.C. § 552(b)(5) exemptions in the cover letter sent to Citizens United.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
Despite MSNBC treating Biden’s State of the Union address like the royal wedding, you probably didn’t watch it. But it doesn’t matter because … I’ve got the highlights reel!
FUNNIEST DEMOCRATIC BASE SUCK-UP: “I met a young woman named Saria, who is here tonight. For 30 years … she’d been a proud member of Ironworkers Local 44 …”
Good for Saria, but 95% of ironworkers are men. Democrats, can’t you ever give it a rest?
[Note to fact-checkers: Did Neil Kinnock ever know a “Saria”?]
BIGGEST LIE: “[We are] the only nation in the world built on an idea.”
First of all, this hoariest of all cliches, autoloaded into every Democrat’s teleprompter, is patently false. Tons of other countries are based on ideas! Ukraine: We will be a nation of corrupt grifters who suck dry the treasuries of other countries. Canada: Accomplish nothing, be incredibly boring, and have a nincompoop as prime minister. Nigeria: We will send you emails every 15 minutes saying you can share in a $30 million inheritance.
In fact, our country is not a mere “idea.” If it were, we could just give it to other countries. We’ve been trying to do that, often forcibly, by invading and nation-building, forever. It hasn’t worked. They all still want to move here.
America is a nation of British Protestants, based on beautifully written governing documents, from John Winthrop’s 1630 sermons to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Demographically, it remained about 80% to 90% white, 10% to 20% black and overwhelmingly Protestant for several centuries.
Thus, in 1776, King George referred to the American Revolution as “a Presbyterian war,” and, in 1900, Mark Twain said of the British and Americans, “We have always been kin: kin in blood, kin in religion, kin in representative government, kin in ideals, kin in just and lofty purposes.”
(Maybe after 18 semesters studying Emmett Till and redlining, schoolchildren could be taught this.)
The “America is an idea” scam is meant to convince us that our country is nothing special and we have no right to prevent anyone else from moving here.
BEST HECKLE: “It’s your fault!” — when Biden talked about fentanyl “killing more than 70,000 Americans a year,” adding, “let’s launch a major surge to stop fentanyl … at the border.”
MOST SURREAL MOMENT: Getting Democrats to applaud “American.”
“And when we do these [government] projects … we’re going to buy American.” [WILD APPLAUSE]
(OK, maybe they were cheering for yet more government pork.)
LEAST BELIEVABLE CLAIM (This was a very competitive category!): Pointing out Tyre Nichols’ parents in the audience, Biden said he’d never “had to have ‘the talk’ that brown and black parents have had to have with their children.” And why would you, with a son like Hunter?
You’ve probably heard me say this before, but I don’t think “the talk” is taking. My evidence is this: Every famous case of a black person being killed after an interaction with police has NOT involved hyper-politeness on the part of the arrestee.
E.g.:
— Michael Brown (tried to grab officer’s gun, refused to stop, then turned and charged at him);
— Breonna Taylor (boyfriend was shooting at cops);
— Daunte Wright (refused to be handcuffed, despite a warrant for his arrest, attempted to drive off with an officer dangling from his car window).
MOST REFRESHING MOMENT: “Let’s also pass the bipartisan Equality Act to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity.”
Finally, an American president courageous enough to support poisoning and mutilating confused adolescent girls.
WORST ADVERTISEMENT FOR BIG PHARMA: Maybe ease up on the Adderall, Mr. President. Biden was like the Energizer bunny on crack, one moment curing cancer and the next talking about airline luggage fees.
MOST ADORABLE ATTEMPT TO BLAME LIBERAL INSANITY ON JAN. 6: Plagiarizing this part of his speech from MSNBC, Biden claimed that a druggie’s hammer attack on Paul Pelosi was inspired by Jan. 6.
“Just a few months ago, unhinged by [Trump’s] ‘big lie,’ an assailant unleashed political violence in the home of the then-speaker of the House of Representatives, using the very same language the insurrectionists used as they stalked these halls and chanted on Jan. 6th.
“Here tonight in this chamber is the man who bears the scars of that brutal attack, but is as tough and as strong and resilient as they get.
“My friend, Paul Pelosi.”
San Francisco, the city that sells tourists a human feces walking map, has decriminalized crime, and hands out syringes, tinfoil and pipes to drug users. In this 100% Democrat-controlled, liberal utopia, Pelosi’s attacker, David DePape, was the prototype of the Bay Area good citizen.
The mentally ill nudist advocate with a history of drug use lived in a bus with a Black Lives Matter sign and a flag with pot-leaf symbols and the LGBTQ rainbow. Crazy people, like DePape, babble enough nonsense that partisans can claim he’s anything — BLM, QAnon, a Trump supporter, a standard-issue Democrat or Napoleon Bonaparte.
But it’s California liberals who allowed this nut-bag to walk the streets.
MOST ANNOYING CLICHE: “My fellow Americans, we meet tonight at an inflection point.” At least he deftly avoided, “Asking for a friend.”
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 Donald Trump.
Like Nero bragging about rebuilding Circus Maximus after burning it down, Joe Biden took to the podium tonight to take credit for solving a slew of problems he helped create.
At the top of his State of the Union address, the president boasted that he had “created more jobs in two years than any president created in four years.” No president — not Joe Biden nor Donald Trump — creates jobs. But Biden’s contention was exceptionally misleading, considering he inherited an economy that had been unplugged by an artificial, state-induced shutdown. If the government compels businesses to shutter, it doesn’t “create” jobs when allowing them to open.
On more than one occasion during the night, a mercurial Biden contended that Covid-19 had shut down the economy. No, states did. Politicians did. Biden was an aggressive proponent of those shutdowns. During the 2020 presidential campaign, the president regularly attacked Republican governors for opening too early and for ignoring federal health officials. Even in August of 2021, after it was clear that shutdowns hadn’t saved any lives, Biden was still criticizing Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis for rejecting a new round of Covid authoritarianism, telling him to “get out of the way” of those trying to “do the right thing.”
Three years ago, the unemployment rate was at 3.5 percent. Today, Biden reminded us that it was at a historic low of 3.4 percent. More than 30 million people lost their jobs to Covid lockdowns. Biden claims to have “created” 12 million jobs during the past two years. The one big difference is that the labor participation rate still hasn’t recovered to pre-Covid numbers. It’s great that people are working again. But millions fewer are in the market for jobs.
Biden also boasted that Americans were seeing “near” historic unemployment lows for black and Hispanic workers. These historic lows were achieved before Covid lockdowns. So, if Biden deserves credit for this, doesn’t Trump? Of course, there is no specific Biden economic policy that brought us near-historic unemployment lows for minorities or an unemployment rate 0.1 percent lower than the previous administration. Washington wasted trillions of dollars propping up an economy that it previously shut down.
Speaking of spending, Biden claimed that the preposterously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which you might recall was initially called “Build Back Better,” had helped alleviate spiking prices. Only when inflation became non-transitory, and a politically problematic issue, did Biden begin arguing that more spending would mitigate inflation. And only then did Democrats rename their bill, which was crammed with the same spending, corporate welfare, price fixing, and tax hikes — all long-desired progressive wish-list items. “The Inflation Reduction Act is also the most significant investment ever in climate change,” Biden said during his address, as if this sentence made any sense.
Presidents are often unduly blamed or given credit for economic events beyond their control. But it is no accident inflation took off as Democrats pumped hundreds of billions into a hot economy (in the case of the “infrastructure” bill, with the help of Senate Republicans) and aggravated foreseeable problems with policies that disincentivize work and undercut energy production. All this led to the biggest inflation spike since 1982. We are still at historic highs. A slew of products that consumers rely on still remain atypically expensive, and fears of additional price hikes have started to seriously corrode consumer confidence.
Biden lied that “25 percent” of the national federal debt was incurred by the previous administration when most of that debt was driven by entitlement programs passed, expanded, and revered by Democrats. And he misled the nation by claiming that his administration had “cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history,” when, in fact, those “cuts” were sunsetting pandemic emergency spending that Democrats had complained wasn’t enough.
Biden went into his well-worn platitudes and myths about how the rich don’t pay taxes — “[n]o billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a school teacher or a firefighter!” — and proposed higher rates on the wealthy and corporations. He also promised to micromanage the economy with a slew of new regulations that would interfere in voluntary contracts struck between employees and employers and consumers and businesses.
Biden implored Congress to pass the PRO Act, a bill that would empower the government to impose unions on businesses and workers who want no part of them. Biden hawked an entire menu of crude economic populism — including price controls and protectionist trade policies that would undermine growth, competition, job creation, and innovation while driving up the cost of virtually every construction project in the country.
There were numerous lies, half-truths, and deceptions. There was a slew of antiquated economic ideas and sloganeering. But, surely, the president’s biggest lie of the night was to claim, “I’m a capitalist.”
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.
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 Donald Trump.
A new poll found that a record percentage of Americans say they are doing worse financially under President Joe Biden’s leadership. 41% of respondents to the ABC News/Washington Post poll said they were financially worse since Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, the highest figure for the question in 37 years that it has been polled. Only 16% of respondents said that they were better off. By contrast, under the Trump administration the poll found that 25% of respondents said they were better off while only 13% said they were worse off.
The poll also found that former President Donald Trump would easily defeat Biden in a hypothetical matchup, with 48% of respondents saying they would vote for Trump and only 44% saying they would vote for Biden. When narrowed to registered voters, the margin only shrunk by one percentage point.
The poll is the latest data point in the debate roiling the Democratic Party whether to have Biden run for another term or to replace him as the party’s candidate for the 2024 election. Many are pointing to his advanced age as a problem that might dissuade many voters from supporting his reelection campaign.
Of respondents who said they were Democrats or independents who lean Democrat, only 44% supported Biden as the party’s nominee in 2023. Nearly half, 49%, said that the party should choose another nominee.
The president angrily lashed out at a reporter in July after he asked him to respond to polling showing many Democrats didn’t want him to run again.
“They want me to run,” he exclaimed and yelled at the reporter. “You guys are all the same. That poll showed that 92% of Democrats if I ran would vote for me.”
Biden is likely to tout his economic policies during the State of the Union speech on Tuesday. While the unemployment rate remains low, wage growth has been minor and mostly undone by the plague of high inflation.
The poll also found that 53% of Americans disapproved of Biden’s job performance and only 42% approved of his performance.
Here’s more about the damaging Biden poll: Breaking down the recent ABC News/WaPo poll ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union l ABCNL www.youtube.com
The United Nations announced plans to release a report in June regarding “perceived contradictions” between “the right to freedom of religion or belief (FoRB)” and “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI).” The report aims to push governments to “fully comply” with international human rights law to “protect and empower” the participation of LGBT+ people in religious communities, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
Sounds like more “One World Government” push.
The U.N. requested calls for input from all interested governments, religious leaders, academics, activists, and human rights organizations regarding “perceived points of tension” between FoRB and SOGI. Respondents were requested to indicate any policies or laws protecting discriminatory religious practices.
One question asked, “What are the key trends or significant instances of discriminatory or abusive practices by individual providers of goods or services in the public sphere against LGBT+ and gender-diverse persons that rely on religious narratives?”
The report’s findings will be shared during the 53rd session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in June. It will also include “recommendations to States and other relevant stakeholders to fully comply with their obligations under international human rights law to protect and empower LGBT+ persons to pursue happiness, exercise and enjoy all their human rights, and choose how to contribute to society on an equal footing with everyone, including through effective participation in religious, cultural, social, and public life.” In charge of the report is Victor Madrigal-Borloz, an independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, who has been a longtime LGBT+ advocate.
The U.N.’s announcement argued that religion has “historically been used to promote, enable, and condone institutional and personal violence and discrimination against individuals based on sexual orientation or gender identity (real or presumed); repress sexual and gender diversity; and promote cis-gendered and heteronormative norms of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
According to the U.N., such practices cannot be “justified” under human rights law. The upcoming report aims to “introduce voices from LGBT-inclusive belief systems” to “better recognize and protect LGBT+ persons’ access to faith and spirituality.”
Grace Melton, senior associate in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at Heritage, told the DCNF that the report could result in the “politicization” of religious freedom.
“My biggest concern is the premise of the report which seems to suggest that freedom of religion and rights based on sexual orientation are the same,” stated Melton. “But certainly as a function of international law, they are not the same. Freedom of religion or belief, or freedom of conscience, is an internationally protected human right. It’s codified in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is a legally binding treaty.”
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, a fellow for the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, told the DCNF that the U.N.’s report is a “bold attack” against religious freedom.
“Despite saying that we shouldn’t have these rights pitted against one another, but when you keep reading on you see that the author of the report really does see [rights and religion] as being in conflict,” Picciotti-Bayer said.
“This narrative is not only harmful because it could make people doubt the importance of religion in their own lives and their communities, but it’s also harmful because it will undermine really important social protection,” Picciotti-Bayer added. “Religion and religious freedom is a stabilizing presence, and for the cases where religion is being misused to oppress, the answer isn’t to shut down religion entirely.”
Neither the U.N. nor Madrigal-Borloz responded to a request for comment, the DCNF reported.
Hollywood is in desperate need of new ideas. Take Sunday’s Grammy Awards, for example. If there were ever a spectacle that could simultaneously be described as demonic and trite, it would be Sam Smith’s performance of “Unholy,” which rang the final death knell for the satanic-ritual-as-art trope.
As Federalist contributor Isabelle Rosini wrote, it was as boring as it was unoriginal. Stiletto-clad devils? Latex pants? Whips? Women in cages? Bursts of flame to signify — in case it wasn’t clear enough — that Smith was singing from the pit of hell? “Been there, done that,” artists ranging from Lil Nas X to Lady Gaga would say.
And it all fell flat. Despite the media’s attempts at running interference — with all the typicalRepublicans–pounce framing — the awards show was decidedly uninteresting, and this points to a broader crisis within the arts world itself. There is nothing it can produce that will shock the American public, quasi-satanic orgies and all.
Modern American culture has become a willing collaborator to the arts world — from Hollywood to the Oval Office, from TikTok to the public school classroom — thanks to the ascendancy of leftist orthodoxy in cultural and political institutions. Art can no longer be subversive once the political and broader media establishments espouse its values, whether those be sexual perversion or anti-religious bigotry.
Thus art has ceased to be interesting or subversive. Instead, the arts world and the establishment have merged — First Lady Jill Biden presented at the award show after all — producing mediocre content according to its tastes. If art wants to become subversive again, it must reject the values most prized by our modern culture. It must discard the idols of the left, from sexual deviancy to bitter racism. It must trash wokeness. Until it comes up with a fresh message, expect a continued mass exodus.
Reactionaries who really want to buck establishment tastes are congregating not in an art museum or mosh pit — but, ironically, at church. As Julia Yost described last summer in an op-ed for The New York Times titled “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” pandemic-weary Manhattanites have rebelled against leftist orthodoxy by embracing traditional morality and the Catholic Church:
By 2020, the year of lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, progressivism had come to feel hegemonic in the social spaces occupied by young urban intellectuals. Traditional morality acquired a transgressive glamour. Disaffection with the progressive moral majority — combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion — has produced an in-your-face style of traditionalism. This is not your grandmother’s church — and whether the new faithful are performing an act of theater or not, they have the chance to revitalize the church for young, educated Americans.
Comedian Tim Dillon has noticed the same phenomenon. “All the cool kids now are unwoke and some of them are going back to Christianity because it’s the only way to be rebellious — because everybody’s blue-haired, non-binary, talking about piss orgies,” Dillon said in a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.
That to be “transgressive” in this day and age means attending church and rediscovering religious orthodoxy is quite the plot twist, but it’s encouraging for the West’s prospects. Let’s hope this trend continues, and that so-called artists like Sam Smith and his tired satanism shtick get the red, latex boot.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
Republicans convened the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday to evaluate the “front lines of the border crisis” but Democrats were less than cooperative in the GOP’s efforts to hear from two chief patrol agents.
“President Biden and his administration have created the worst border crisis in American history,” committee chairman Republican Rep. James Comer said in his opening remarks.
Comer and several other GOP members on the committee pointed to President Joe Biden as the reason millions of migrants, including suspected terrorists, illegally cross the border. Witnesses — CBP Chief Patrol Agent of the Tucson sector John Modlin and Chief Patrol Agent of the Rio Grande Valley sector Gloria Chavez — confirmed this in their testimonies.
“In the Tucson sector, interviewing people post-arrest, what became the most common response [from migrants] was that they believed that when the administration changed that the law changed and policy changed and that there was an open border,” Modlin said.
The chiefs agreed that border security measures like the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (often referred to as the “Remain in Mexico” policy), which Biden eliminated with the stroke of a pen at the beginning of his term, were “effective” at combatting the staggering number of illegal migrants flooding the border.
And staggering those numbers are.
“We went from what I would describe as unprecedented to a point where I don’t have the correct adjective to describe what’s going on,” Modlin said.
Democrats Opt for Smears over Accountability
House Democrats, who had two years to give Biden’s disastrous border the oversight it required but failed to do so, were less interested in asking the CBP officials questions and far more interested in criticizing Republicans for suggesting that Democrats’ lax border policies are responsible for the worst migrant influx in U.S. history.
Before the hearing, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security tried to obstruct oversight by Republicans by keeping CBP officials from testifying. Democrats joined in their attempts to taint the GOP’s investigation into the border crisis with smears that Republicans wanted “to amplify white nationalist conspiracy theories instead of a comprehensive solution to protect our borders and strengthen our immigration system.”
The “QAnon caucus” and “anti-immigrant” name-calling continued in the hearing after ranking Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin launched another round of politically motivated attacks in his opening remarks.
The same Democrats who bought into and promoted the border patrol whipping lie claimed that Republicans “demonize migrants” and refuse to fund the border through Democrats’ omnibus wish list. Washington D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton even went so far as to blame the GOP for the El Paso Walmart shooting.
Despite Democrats’ attempts to turn the hearing into a political circus painting the border crisis as a funding problem, instead of a policy problem, the witnesses confirmed that the U.S. southern border is comprised in a way it’s never been in the past.
Cartels ‘Leveraging Chaos’
A large part of the Republicans’ border inquiry centered on the Biden administration’s failure to secure the border against cartels, which Chavez said have become “more active” in trafficking humans and drugs into the U.S. in “recent years.”
“Cartels are leveraging chaos at the border. They are using their human smuggling operations to overwhelm U.S. Border Patrol agents with large migrant groups, often placing migrants in peril,” Comer said. “They create these diversions at the expense of human life to traffic dangerous narcotics like fentanyl, across our southern border. These deadly drugs then make their way into communities across the United States and poison our neighbors and our children.”
“No one crosses the border in Tucson sector without going through the cartels,” Modlin confirmed in his testimony. Chavez testified the same about her district.
“[Migrants are] pretty much confined to whatever those cartels require to be able to see their family member again,” she said.
Democrats tried to claim that the problems at the border are a “humanitarian crisis, not a criminal one.” Yet, none of them mentioned the connection between cartels’ illegal activities and migrants, including the criminals’ lack of care for the men, women, and children who have to bribe them for passage to the U.S.
“What my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are failing to recognize is in order to get here, [migrants] have to deal with a group of people that is not interested in human rights. They place no value on humanity. If they can make money on it, they will exploit it,” Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong said. “I think one of the mistakes we make quite often is we talk about [cartels] like they’re drug cartels. They’re in the business of making money and whatever the path of least resistance is, is how they make money.”
Cartels’ billion-dollar migrant smuggling business, Modlin and Chavez said, deliberately puts illegal border crossers in danger so Border Patrol agents will leave their posts to conduct rescue missions.
“There are a lot of migrants out there that are out there requiring rescue. So, a lot of times, our agents are out there rescuing people, being task-saturated in rescues, abetting frontline operations, so therefore cartels take advantage of that,” Chavez said.
Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the proliferation of fentanyl in the U.S. is a serious issue that needs addressing. What the representatives did not agree on is that it’s Biden’s policies that embolden the cartels to manufacture and smuggle fentanyl into the states.
Multiple Democrat representatives tried to blame the proliferation of fentanyl on U.S. citizens who are often selected to bring the drugs to the United States. Rep. Katie Porter even had the audacity to argue that because CBP is seizing more fentanyl now than it was before 2020, border security under Biden is a “success.”
“Regardless of who’s bringing it across the border, U.S. citizens, ports of entry, between ports of entry, not ports of entry, the drugs that are killing people in my communities are being made by the cartels,” Armstrong pointed out.
Modlin and Chavez both said their agents are overworked and overwhelmed by the crisis. Unless there’s a national policy shift on the border, the historic crisis is only going to get worse.
“What happens on the border affects the entirety of the country,” Modlin said.
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 and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Such a smash success has Joe Biden’s presidency been so far that even the Chinese are sending up balloons. That’s more or less what Biden will say, over and over, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. The economy is humming. Inflation is cooling. Electric vehicle sales are raging. There has never been a more orderly southern border.
It will all sound very scary to viewers who will rightly begin to question their own sanity. Or perhaps it will make you feel like everyone else is getting ahead while you’re inexplicably falling behind.
Don’t panic. When confronted with these anxieties, there are steps you can take to re-ground yourself in reality. For instance, when Biden says something confusing — something like, “Folks! Energy costs are down, folks!” — remember to yourself that this is a lie. As of Monday, national gas prices averaged higher per gallon than a year before. It’s more than a dollar per gallon higher than it was in January 2021, the month Biden was inaugurated.
Biden will likely also mention “steps” he has taken to control the unabated flow of hundreds of thousands of destitute migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In that stupefying moment, take a deep breath and refer to this chart maintained by Biden’s own administration, showing that December had the highest number of illegal aliens encountered by border agents — ever. That month, there were more than 250,000 migrants who unlawfully crossed into the U.S. The month before, almost 235,000. That’s nearly half a million migrants throwing themselves into the care of the American taxpayer in just two months’ time. They openly say they’re here because of Biden.
Democrat congressmen will leap to their feet and clap with ferocity when Biden says inflation is down. (Or even that higher prices are actually a great thing!) He might even say costs increased less than 6 percent from this time last year. If you feel a spinning sensation, close your eyes, count to 10, then look at this data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The less-than-6 stat is if you exclude food and energy prices.
In other words, if you don’t account for the things you depend on to survive, inflation really isn’t that bad! By itself, food cost is actually up more than 10 percent. It’s probably close to 12 — and maybe much more. Energy is up more than 7 percent. Mind you, this has been a year of rising costs, where each month it’s been more expensive to simply live than it was the same time a year before.
Biden’s vertigo-inducing speech will surely go on for what feels like an eternity, earning applause for assertions that are the exact opposite of reality. But remember, this too shall pass.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday failed to slow down the House Republican push for new oil and gas leases on federal land, after GOP lawmakers shot down her attempt to require further study of the public health impacts of energy extraction.
The House National Resources Committee met Tuesday to adopt its work plan for the new Congress. Included in that plan is language that says the Biden administration has leased fewer federal acres for oil and gas development than “any presidential administration” since the end of World War II.
“The Committee will examine the lack of oil and natural gas leasing on federal lands in the western United States, including focusing on administrative actions that have created permitting delays and disincentivized production on federal lands,” the committee’s plan said.
Before adopting the plan, Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., offered an amendment that would require the committee to collect “public health data and other impacts of new drilling on federal lands.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., failed to convince Republicans that new drilling on federal land should be linked to a study on public health. (Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“There is a failure to acknowledge the disproportionate impact that these changes have on communities of color and other frontline communities,” Ocasio-Cortez said. She added that there should be “no objection to gathering better data on the health impact of these policies.”
But Republicans pushed back and said her proposal ignores the health benefits that energy development has delivered to people for generations.
“How can you ignore the millions of people around the Earth that have had clean water, indoor plumbing, lights, electricity provided to them, making their lives better, extending, literally extending their life span, lifting them out of poverty by having access to electricity that’s been provided by coal, oil, gas, or other fossil fuels?” said Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont.
“It simply can’t be ignored – their lives are better, their lives are longer as a direct result of that,” he said. “So to sit there and to say that we should be trying to eliminate these fuels is absolutely absurd, ridiculous.”
Rep. Thomas Tiffany, R-Wis., pressed that point by asking Ocasio-Cortez if her amendment would require a study of all health impacts, good and bad, or just the bad ones.
Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., was one of several Republicans who rejected Ocasio-Cortez’s push for a health study. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) ( (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images))
“I do not dispute the inclusion of any positive health impacts,” Ocasio-Cortez replied. “But of course, there is a large degree of concerning information about potential health impacts, breathing impacts, cancer exposure, etc.”
Tiffany replied that her response made it clear she’s only interested in the negative health effects of drilling.
“I will not be able to support this amendment because there was a ‘but’ in there, in the answer,” he said. “It is not focusing on also the good things that have happened…”
Other Republicans similarly saw the amendment as an effort to block new leasing on federal lands. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., mocked the amendment as an attempt to force climate change theory into the GOP’s effort to ensure the U.S. controls its destiny and shores up its national security by ensuring ample energy supplies.
“I’m not here to deny climate change, I don’t think anyone here is,” Boebert said. “It happens four times every year, we’re very, very much aware of that.”
Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., squared off in the hearing over new public drilling on federal land. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images/Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Ocasio-Cortez stressed that her amendment is not a proposal to “stop drilling.” She said her amendment language is neutral and that it could allow a study on both the positive and negative health impacts of drilling and said it’s critical to consider this factor for families.
“I have visited with families who say that they will be near an extraction site, and at different times of the day their lungs start burning,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I personally represent an area of the country that has some of the highest childhood asthma rates in the world.”
“People deserve to know if they’re being poisoned, people deserve to know if there is no health impact,” she added.
The chairman of the committee, Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., closed the debate by saying his committee would be crossing into the jurisdiction of other committees if it accepted Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment.
“The gentlelady almost had me with this amendment,” Westerman said. “We all care about public health, we all care about safety. I think that’s our duties as members of Congress.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment failed to be adopted as part of the committee’s work plan in a party-line 15-21 vote.
Pete Kasperowicz is a politics editor at Fox News Digital.
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 Donald Trump.
A student has reportedly been suspended by a Catholic high school for the remainder of the school year for believing that God created two genders and protesting against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms.
Since November, Josh Alexander has allegedly been suspended from St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Renfrew, Ontario. Alexander was allegedly punished by the school for organizing a protest against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms. Alexander said he launched the demonstration after two girls at his school confided in him that they were uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with biological males. Alexander, an 11th-grade student, was reportedly barred from attending St. Joseph’s Catholic High School for the remainder of the school year.
Alexander informed The Epoch Times that St. Joseph’s Catholic High School told him that his attendance at the school would be “detrimental to the physical and mental well-being” of transgender students. Alexander said the school labeled his beliefs as “offensive” and “bullying” because there was a transgender student in his class. Alexander insists that he has no plans to be violent in defending his ideology, and doesn’t feel as though he is bullying anyone.
“Offense is obviously defined by the offended. I expressed my religious beliefs in class and it spiraled out of control,” Alexander explained. “Not everybody’s going to like that. That doesn’t make me a bully. It doesn’t mean I’m harassing anybody. They express their beliefs and I express mine. Mine obviously don’t fit the narrative.”
He said, “This whole issue isn’t about identity. It’s about biology and morality.”
Alexander told The Post Millennial, “They’re using it as a technicality to say that they’re not disciplining me, and it’s just a form of exclusion to protect the other students.”
However, Alexander is already enrolled at St. Joseph’s Catholic High School, which reportedly bars him from enrolling at any other education programs.
Alexander said, “I am unable to do any other form of education because as long as I’m enrolled in the Catholic board, I’m not allowed to take an alternative route of education. So I’m enrolled, but I’m not allowed to attend school. So right now I actually have no form of education.”
Alexander stated that he plans to file a human rights complaint on the grounds of religious discrimination.
Alexander is appealing his suspension. However, his appeal is reportedly being held up because Alexander previously asked for parental independence so as not to drag his parents into this quandary.
Alexander’s lawyer James Kitchen said, “He does live with his parents and they have an excellent relationship. He seeks guidance from them and they gladly give it to him. But he runs his own life. And that’s actually by design, because that’s how his parents raised him to be.”
St. Joseph’s Catholic High School principal Derek Lennox and Mark Searson, the director of education for the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board, both said they could not comment on the situation.
Indian Catholic devotees offer the way of the cross prayers after an Ash Wednesday service at Saint Mary’s Basilica in Secunderabad, the twin city of Hyderabad, on March 5, 2014. | AFP via Getty Images/Noah Seelam
Christians faced harassment in more countries than any other religious group amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, according to a recent Pew Research study finding an increase in 45 countries where followers of Christ face social or government abuse or violence since 2012.
The data on restrictions to religion around the globe, released last November, was featured in a Jan. 27 report showing that Christians face harassment in over 155 countries in 2020, an increase from 110 in 2012. The organization’s definition of “harassment” can include a wide range of actions, including verbal abuse to physical violence and killings committed by governments, social groups or individuals. The study captured “cases where individuals or groups feel singled out or unable to express their religious belief or nonbelief.” The study rated 198 countries and territories by their levels of government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion using the same 10-point indexes used in the previous studies.
Pew’s Government Restrictions Index (GRI) measures government laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs and practices, while its Social Hostilities Index (SHI) measures acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society. Researchers sifted through over a dozen publicly available data sources for the report, including the U.S. Department of State’s annual peports on international religious freedom and annual reports from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Overall, physical harassment related to religion occurred in more than two-thirds of countries in 2020, the research shows. Muslims faced harassment in 145 countries, an increase from 109 in 2012. Jews, who make up 0.2% of the global population, face harassment in 94 countries, up from 71 in 2012.
The study found that Christian groups were “targeted by private individuals and organizations in nine countries” as Christians were often blamed for the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In Turkey, an Armenian Orthodox church’s door was set on fire, and news reports said the man told police that he acted because “they [Armenian Christians] brought the coronavirus” to Turkey,” the Nov. 27 Pew report states.
“In Egypt, conspiracy theories blamed the pandemic on the Coptic Orthodox Christian minority, which international Christian observers said exacerbated the discrimination the minority group already faced.”
In India, two Christians were beaten and killed while in police custody for violating COVID-19 curfews in Tamil Nadu, according to the U.S. State Department’s annual international religious freedom report.
The study also found a nine-fold increase in countries where non-religious people face harassment. Pew named the United States among 27 countries where “religiously unaffiliated people” were harassed in 2020.
“Restrictions on religion don’t just affect those who are religious. Religiously unaffiliated people also are harassed because of what they believe,” states the Jan. 27 report by research analysts Sarah Crawford and Virginia Villa, which focuses on harassment against the religious unaffiliated.
Pew study says religiously unaffiliated face harassment in the US | Screenshot/Pew Research
The report also found that the religiously unaffiliated faced harassment in 12 majority-Muslim nations and six majority-Christian countries.
Forms of government harassment for atheists, according to Pew, included atheist groups in Croatia — a majority-Catholic country — who alleged the presence of the cross and other Roman Catholic symbolism in public buildings like hospitals and courtrooms were unconstitutional.
And in countries like Pakistan, where Islam is the state-sanctioned religion, atheists are not given a “no religion” option for their identification cards, although the “government requires people to state their religious affiliation.”
Examples of social harassment cited by Pew included a political satirist in Lebanon who called atheism the “religion of donkeys” during a program on a TV channel backed by that nation’s Christian Free Patriotic Movement political party.
While the rise of the religious “nones” isn’t new, Pew predicts the trend could result in the number of Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to as low as 35% of all Americans by 2070.
The Pew findings come as the global persecution watchdog organization Open Doors reported last year that over 360 million Christians experienced high levels of persecution and discrimination across the globe.
But even as more people shy away from identifying with any religion, many of those who report no religious affiliation still partake in a wide variety of religious and spiritual practices and beliefs.
According to a 202 Baylor University study, many “nones” still attend religious services, pray, meditate, believe in God or a higher power, have religious experiences, and believe in Heaven, Hell and miracles.
Hollywood’s not-so-secret LGBT agenda was on full display at the Grammys last night. From the eyesore that was Harry Styles’ “clowncore” jumpsuit; to Beyonce dedicating her win to her uncle and the “queer community” (of which she is not a part); to Kim Petras narcissistically crowning himself the first transgender “woman” to win in the Best Pop Duo/Group category, the only way viewers could escape the gay was if they turned off their TVs.
For those who powered through the ceremony, they would have also been subjected to the unsightly and openly satanic performance of “Unholy” by Petras and Sam Smith, who calls himself “nonbinary.” While Petras danced around in a cage surrounded by she-devils (or they-devils?), a latex and high heel-clad Smith led a group of witchy women in a dance clearly intended to mimic devil worship. That Madonna — a woman who looks less human and more diabolic than ever thanks to some gnarly plastic surgery — introduced the performance is fitting.
In her introduction, Madonna smugly alluded to the “controversy” that would soon occur on stage. Though the performance was certainly as depraved, tasteless, and oversexed as the lyrics to the sinful “Unholy” might call for, my main complaint is not that Smith, a gay man, and Petras, a man who purports to be a woman, were flaunting Satanism and anti-family values on live television.
My main complaint is just how boring, unoriginal, and self-congratulatory the performance was.
These days, full-fledged embrace of Satanism and sado-masochism is nothing new or out of the ordinary for Hollywood. Anything that was going to come after Lil Nas X’s “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” music video, featuring a lap dance with the devil, and accompanying Satan shoes would be hard to top. Even so, Hollywood’s pop and hip-hop darlings continue to seize on satanic imagery for their lyrics, performances, and promotional materials as often as they adopt new gender identities or advocate to normalize transgenderism.
But is it just me or is the shtick getting old?
When I watch a performance such as the one described above, I instinctively know that it was both made and not made for someone like me. The twisted minds behind the Grammys want to induce shock and outrage. They revel in any disgust they can produce in conservative and God-fearing viewers, myself included. In the way that this performance was crafted to provoke conservative, churchgoing Americans, it was actually tailor-made for me.
On the other hand, such a flagrant celebration of Satanism, adultery, and LGBT “values” could only gain such a thunderous round of applause at an event like the Grammys — an event filled with a populace so out-of-touch and enslaved to the LGBT agenda and its hatred of God and beauty that they wouldn’t know good art if it slapped them in the face, Will Smith style.
Petras and Smith’s performance, and Hollywood award ceremonies more broadly, are occasions meant to draw crude political lines. If you found the performance distasteful, you are a hateful bigot. If you thought that the performance was a brilliantly subversive triumph for two rich and famous members of the oppressed classes (gay and trans), then you are open-minded and on the right side of history.
So instead of taking the bait, instead of clutching our pearls and (rightfully) condemning the abominations on our TV screens, what if we just called out Hollywood for making bad and boring art?
If you can get past the hypersexed and satanic elements of today’s popular music, you will soon realize that the music itself is objectively bad. It’s boring, trite, and desperate, so embarrassingly eager to shock that it ends up talking about the same few topics (drugs, sex, money) in increasingly debased yet unimaginative and unintelligent ways.
Of course I felt disgusted seeing Sam Smith stuffed in latex like a sausage and singing about adultery. But in no way was I surprised that yet another pop singer thought it would be cool and edgy to promote Satanism. My boredom with Hollywood has officially become stronger than my disgust.
We should not dismiss the open embrace of Satanism and anti-family values in Hollywood. We should continue to denounce it. But in addition to clutching our pearls, we should use our outrage as fuel to create genuinely beautiful art. And I’m not talking about art as thinly veiled political manifestos. I’m talking about art that honors the human spirit and gets at what it means to be a creature made by God, called to partake in both the joy and suffering that comes along with being made in his image.
Dante, Michelangelo, C.S. Lewis — these artists created for the greater glory of God, and think about what wonderful feats they were able to accomplish. Feats that speak to all of humanity, not just the oppressed few.
The call for conservatives to make their own art has been strong and steady in recent years. Many have responded and are doing great work. But we need to ramp up our efforts because this much is clear: Hollywood is full of uncreative, boring clowns.
What will we leave behind for posterity?
Isabelle Rosini (@IsabelleRosini) is a public relations specialist living in Washington, D.C.
Instead of uniting Americans around the threat of China’s military provocations, the spy balloon episode produced a fog of misinformation and partisan finger-pointing.
If there was any doubt that we are engaged in some sort of cold war or contest for global superiority with China, the emergence of the CCP surveillance balloon over the United States should eliminate that. There’s no question China is being intentionally provocative.
And why wouldn’t it? The CCP is paying close attention. Chinese leaders have correctly assessed America is so politically and culturally dysfunctional that blatant acts of provocation can be done with impunity because blatant acts of hostility will just become more fodder for our domestic political disputes.
Our lack of national unity has been a national security problem for a long time, but as far as China’s concerned, it became abundantly clear just how bad a problem it was in 2020. The media and those otherwise responsible for “fortifying” our elections decided we weren’t allowed to say Covid came from Wuhan and started banning people from social media for saying the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. Regardless of the fact that China’s irresponsible behavior was to blame for the deaths of millions of Americans, it became an important domestic political priority to convert a global plague into baseless accusations of racism so it could be used as a cudgel in a presidential election.
Similarly, when the local media first noticed the surveillance balloon over the northern states, there was clearly a scramble by the Defense Department — which by all appearances was aware of the balloon and could have shot it down over the Aleutian Islands but let it continue, hoping civilians wouldn’t notice — to avoid having to explain why it was forced into doing something reactive as a result of public outcry. And since the president is responsible for national security matters, this made him look like he wasn’t doing his job, either.
What could be done so the DOD could avoid having to explain any failures here to avoid public doubt and fear? And what could Biden, who already looks tremendously weak on foreign policy after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and his failure to preempt the Russian invasion of Ukraine, do to minimize domestic political blowback?
The answer was obvious: Just go to the well for this one and blame Trump. Of course, that strategy depends on having a wholly credulous media that innately trust conflicted and compromised government officials who care more about political fallout than the safety and security of their country. So naturally, the accusation that the Trump administration looked the other way while several other Chinese spy balloons transited the U.S. was all over the media last week before anyone asked any real questions about whether this was fair or accurate.
After days of top Trump officials, including Trump’s CIA head Mike Pompeo and the former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, publicly denying the story, we’re now getting a situation so absurd it demands the mixing of metaphors: a backhanded walkback.
Monday morning, CNN was up with the story, “Chinese spy balloons under Trump not discovered until after Biden took office.” If you’re inclined to believe the national security apparatus under Trump would have been a little more aggressive in confronting China’s provocations, as most realists are, now the blame has shifted so as to portray the Trump administration as too incompetent to even notice what was going on.
There remains a possibility that this version of events is true. But the way this issue was dealt with by immediately pointing the finger at the previous administration, and then admitting the accusations that made it to the press were devoid of important context, is infuriating, less than reassuring, and difficult to believe.
As for how politics might enter into this transparently insulting and unserious media narrative, it’s probably worth noting that the aforementioned CNN story was written by Natasha Bertrand, a reporter so credulous that she earned the nickname “Fusion Natasha” because she wrote so many inaccurate stories about Trump-Russia collusion that appeared to be fed to her by Fusion GPS, the dodgy opposition research firm behind the so-called “dossier,” as well as other dishonest partisan sources.
Bertrand also holds a special place in President Biden’s heart for her, well, “politically helpful” journalism on Hunter Biden’s laptop. When the New York Post broke that story in October of 2020, Bertrand, then at Politico, wrote up the now-infamous story “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The article was cited by Joe Biden himself on the presidential debate stage while he was brazenly lying about his knowledge of his son’s corruption, and the broader media used her article to dismiss the need to look into the scandal. Of course, even some of the “former intel officials” Bertrand cited now admit they knew all along the laptop was real and declared it was Russian disinformation anyway.
To bring this full circle, it’s probably worth noting that some of the most damning allegations of Hunter Biden’s corruption involve him being financially compromised by the CCP and President Biden’s personal role in those deals.
“..some of the most damning allegations of Hunter Biden’s corruption involve him being financially compromised by the CCP and President Biden’s personal role in those deals.“
Suffice to say, the situation we’re in where we have a Chinese spy balloon floating over the United States and we’re unable to trust the information we’re getting from our inept government and the corrupt media that enable it is a horrible one to be in. The end result of their excuse-making and blame-shifting is that a great many people feel more confused and less safe than when they first learned of the balloon.
National security threats can’t be used to play political games, yet that’s all we’ve seen for several years. The baseless accusations of Russia collusion under Trump were leveraged for domestic partisan political gain at the expense of actively poisoning our relationship with a hostile nuclear power with which we’re now mixed up in a war in Eastern Europe. And now we can’t bring ourselves to even speak forthrightly about the national security threat posed by communist China because it would have bad electoral ramifications for the same bad actors that regularly instigate domestic political tumult and sleepwalked into the war in Ukraine.
These bad-faith attempts of the Biden administration and the media — for once “collusion” is the right word — to examine every serious foreign policy development through a self-interested political lens have simply got to stop. Uniting Americans and the world at large around the threat China presents militarily and economically needs to be a much higher priority. And that’s simply impossible so long as China can exploit the fact that its every provocation will trigger a blizzard of dubious and divisive information coming straight from our government and sympathetic partisans in the press.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Some Democrats are leaking their disdain for Vice President Kamala Harris to the press, with a few political bigwigs arguing openly that Harris is a major liability for 2024. Harris is struggling to “define her vice presidency. Even her allies are tired of waiting,” The New York Times headlined in an article Monday. That’s because one of the few issues that some Democrats are in agreement on — whether they’re allies of the vice president or not — is that she is a disappointment, at best, the Times reported.
Vice President Kamala Harris (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
“But the painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”
Even some Democrats who were supposed to be supporters of Harris “confided privately that they had lost hope in her,” according to The Times. Democratic fundraiser John Morgan was one of the few voices to speak out on the record against Harris, arguing that her weakness as vice president will be “one of the most hard-hitting arguments against Biden.”
The argument only becomes stronger because of the president’s age, Morgan said.
“It doesn’t take a genius to say, ‘Look, with his age, we have to really think about this,’” he argued.
Joe Biden is already the oldest president ever to serve in office at 80 years old. Morgan also took aim at Harris’ record of achievement as vice president.
“I can’t think of one thing she’s done except stay out of the way and stand beside him at certain ceremonies,” he said.
“I can’t think of one thing she’s done except stay out of the way and stand beside him at certain ceremonies,” one political analyst said of Vice President Harris and President Biden. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Multiple polls reflect Harris’ general unpopularity with voters, with roughly 39% of Americans saying they approve of the vice president’s job performance, according to polling site FiveThirtyEight.
Harris has gained a reputation for flubbing speeches and speaking vaguely. One recent speech that Harris gave in honor of two former NASA astronauts was savaged on social media for sounding “like a 5-year old” wrote it.
“They strapped into their seats and waited as the tanks beneath filled with tens of thousands of gallons of fuel,” Harris told the audience.
“You’re gonna literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes!” Harris said. “With your own eyes! I’m telling you, it is gonna be unbelievable.”
Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.
Jeffrey Clark is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. He has previously served as a speechwriter for a cabinet secretary and as a Fulbright teacher in South Korea. Jeffrey graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a degree in English and History.
The remains of the China spy flight shot down by the U.S. over the Atlantic Ocean this past weekend are heading to an FBI processing lab in Quantico, Virginia, senior U.S. government sources tell Fox News.
The balloon remnants are set to be analyzed in the coming days.
Possible Chinese spy balloon debris has been spotted on the coast of South Carolina, and police are asking area residents to report other possible sightings.
The news comes as China admitted Monday that a second balloon spotted over Latin America is theirs, alleging that the aircraft is “civilian” in nature and shifted off course because of weather and its “limited self-steering capability.”
A China spy flight drifts above the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of South Carolina, with a fighter jet and its contrail seen below it on Saturday, Feb. 4. (Chad Fish via AP)
“With regard to the balloon over Latin America, it has been verified that the unmanned airship is from China, of civilian nature and used for flight test,” China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters Monday. “Affected by the weather and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course and entered into the airspace of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
A photo taken in Aynor, South Carolina, of the Chinese spy flight being shot down. (Fox News)
Congressional leaders also are poised to receive a top-level briefing on the intelligence gathered from the suspected Chinese spy balloon — which was said to be carrying sensors and surveillance equipment — as well as President Joe Biden’s decision to shoot it down.
Possible debris believed to be from the Chinese spy flight shot down off the coast of South Carolina. (Facebook/Brady Deal)
Republicans on Capitol Hill have demanded a closer look at Biden’s decision-making throughout last week, which saw the Chinese spy balloon cross the entire continental United States before being shot down.
The Biden administration has argued that the U.S. gained significant intelligence on the craft by allowing it to transit the U.S.
Fox News’ David Spunt, Jake Gibson and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.
An Ohio school district’s board abruptly canceled a high school musical production that contained non family-friendly lyrics, an appearance of Jesus, and gay characters, several outlets reported this week.
“When we found out it was canceled, everybody was just heartbroken. Honestly, it was terrible. Everyone was just crying,” Riley Matchinga, a senior playing a lead role in the school’s production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” told Fox 8.
“The Cardinal Local School District has decided that its spring musical production will not be ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.’ Its dialogue and song lyrics contain vulgarity and are therefore not suitable for our pre-teen and teenage students in an educational setting,” Cardinal High School Superintendent Jack Cunningham said in a statement acquired by the same outlet.
Though two of the characters in the musical are gay male parents, the district denies the decision was based on discrimination, the outlet also said.
Middlefield Ohio’s Cardinal High School drama department had been working on the spring production for weeks when the Cardinal Schools Board of Education pulled the curtain on it, Geauga County Maple Leaf reported Tuesday.
“Cast members have invested hours of their time in rehearsals, characterization lessons, and group and individual voice lessons. The crew has spent equal time creating and building set pieces, scenery and props. The decision to shut this production down is heartbreaking,” Mandi Matchinga told the school board in a letter, as reported by Maple Leaf.
Matchinga is a volunteer assistant director for the musical, a former teacher in the district, and the mother of two participants.
The musical’s cancellation caught the attention of award-winning actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson, best known for his roles in “Modern Family” and “Ice Age: Collision Course.” Ferguson was an original member of the “Putnam County Spelling Bee” Broadway company.
“The message that this sends to them, that that is not ‘family appropriate’ or ‘family friendly,’ rather, is toxic and harmful and kind of abusive,” Jesse Tyler Ferguson said in an Instagram video shared by Playbill Thursday.
Feguson also told the outlet he and other in the original Broadway cast members are “working on connecting with the [Cardinal High School] cast via Zoom.”
The musical’s director, Vanessa Allen, told Maple Leaf she was scheduled to meet with Superintendent Cunningham to select a different production for performance in late April or early May.
One of the most well-known female surfers in the world has publicly slammed a recent decision by the World Surf League to allow men to compete as women.
Bethany Hamilton has been participating in international surfing competitions since at least 1998. In 2003, when she was just 13 years old, she lost her left arm after a tiger shark attacked her while she was practicing. Despite the significant setback, Hamilton quickly returned to the surfboard and the competitive circuit. She wrote about her experience and her deep, abiding Christian faith in an autobiography that inspired the 2011 film “Soul Surfer,” starring Helen Hunt, Dennis Quaid, and Carrie Underwood.
Over the weekend, Hamilton, now 32 and a wife and mom of three, released a video message on Instagram criticizing the WSL’s decision to allow so-called “transwomen” to compete against female surfers so long as their testosterone levels remain at or below 5 nmol/L for at least one year. WSL claimed that the rule change, which passed unanimously, now accords with “Olympic guidelines.”
But Hamilton challenged the premise of such guidelines, proffering a series of questions that she believes have not been addressed by those advocating for men in women’s sports. “Is a hormone level an honest and accurate depiction that someone indeed is a male or female?” Hamilton wondered. “Is it as simple as this?”
Hamilton also asked, “How is this rule playing out in other sports, like swimming, running, and MMA?”
Finally, she addressed the larger issue at play: Who exactly is “pushing for” these changes and who benefits from them? According to Hamilton, it’s not “the girls currently on tour,” most of whom do not “support … this new rule” but who do “fear being ostracized if they speak up.”
Hamilton insisted in the video that she has “love for all of mankind, regardless of any differences” and that she thinks the best solution would be to offer “a different division” for so-called “transgender” competitors, “so that all can have a fair opportunity to showcase their passion and talent.” If WSL does not create a separate division, Hamilton fears that women’s sports may be doomed within “15-20 years.”
Because of her concerns, Hamilton affirms in the close of the video: “I personally won’t be competing in or supporting the World Surf League if this rule remains.”
Though Hamilton has received a lot of criticism on social media, including accusations of “transphobia,” she has also received an outpouring of support. Fellow surfer Shane Dorian responded, “Speak your truth! Thank you for being brave enough to stand up for what you believe,” while swimmer Riley Gaines Barker — who has spoken out against “trans” competitor Will Thomas, aka Lia Thomas — added, “THANK YOU for using your platform to share this. I can’t express how inspiring this is.”
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 Donald Trump.
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 Donald Trump.
MTN News and @MMtTreasures video screenshot composite
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A viral video depicting what appeared to be an explosion over Billings, Montana Friday night was met both with skepticism and concern amid widespread reports of a Chinese spy balloon flying over the state earlier in the week.
“We’re monitoring the situation. I’m talking to our National Guard to find out if they have additional information,” Gov. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) told Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson in an on-air interview shortly after the video was posted.
Later in the evening, the City of Billings reported on its Twitter account that they confirmed with Montana’s Disaster Emergency Services and Gov. Gianforte that there were no explosions “in, around, or across” the state. In addition, the City of Billings said the video “cannot be substantiated.”
The “explosion” video, posted by an account called @MMtTreasures, appeared to show a vertical pillar of white smoke or vapor, a flash of light, and something falling from the sky. In the text accompanying the video, @MMtTreasures also describes seeing a jet and witnessing what she described as an “explosion.”
“Ok, so here’s what I just caught on video I [sic] few minutes ago out my window. I saw a jet go by so fast and then explosion in the sky. Holy crap! Billings MT.”
Ok, so here’s what I just caught I few minutes ago out my window. I saw a jet go by so fast and then explosion in the sky. Holy crap! Billings MT. pic.twitter.com/swr8ERC6pf
Dolly Moore, the woman who posted the video, described her experience in an interview with MTN News on Friday night, which was shared in a report by KRTV.
“All I could think was, oh my gosh, this is happening again from two nights ago with the spy balloon over Billings,” Moore said in the interview.
By 9:45 p.m. on Friday night, Yellowstone County Sheriff Mike Linder, had made contact with Moore.
Linder said at that time that they believed the video was legitimate, according to a report by NBC affiliate KULR. The sheriff also reportedly added it was difficult to tell exactly what the video showed and that there was no evidence of an aircraft going down nor any evidence of an actual explosion over Billings.
Senator Steve Daines (R-Mont.) also says there has been no confirmation of an explosion over the state or the city of Billings, per KULR‘s reporting on Saturday.
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), responded to the City of Billings tweet, saying he was “still following all these events closely and will keep Montanans informed as any new information becomes available.”
I am still following all of these events closely and will keep Montanans informed as any new information becomes available. https://t.co/Ja9avfxt1J
Gianforte did not address the video in an interview on Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends Saturday morning.
“Honestly, if this had been up to Montanans, we would have taken it out of the air the moment it came into our sovereign airspace,” Gianforte said, referencing the balloon seen in the area long before the unsubstantiated “explosion” video posted Friday night.
Gianforte also noted the Biden administration’s seeming failure to take action on the Chinese spy balloon, “endangers the American people and emboldens our enemies.”
In a recent addition to the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi revealed to the public how Twitter — the preferred social media platform of politicians, academics, and journalists — co-opted the algorithmic blacklist of a bipartisan neoliberal propaganda outfit known as Hamilton 68.
Hamilton 68 was a digital dashboard that, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky recently discussed, was used to perpetuate and mainstream the myth of Russian interference in American politics through algorithmic censorship and suppression.
But it wasn’t just egghead professors, left-wing activist journalists, and the tragically narcissistic (Adam Schiff) who perpetuated the thoroughly repudiated lie that Russia determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election by hijacking the internet.
Hamilton 68 was of unique interest to the unelected members of the American government who staff the national bureaucracy and compose the federal civil service. It was — and likely still is — used by these bureaucrats on a regular basis to substantiate and launder bogus intel into the government’s policy-making narrative to further establish a rule of permanent bureaucracy and chip away at the democratic nature of the American republic.
Amanda Milius, a former member of the Trump administration and the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Content at the State Department, recently confirmed this when speaking to The Federalist.
Outsourcing Intelligence Makes Being Corrupt Easier
According to Milius, from the day Hamilton 68 went online, senior officials at the State Department were elated because it enabled them to effectively outsource large swaths of their information sourcing for communications. Naturally, this was a huge time saver since “everything [was] 100 times redundant,” and having access to pre-sourced and verified intel from somewhere you trust while trying to maintain a fast-paced digital communications bureau with 24-hour access to the rest of the world would be a massive time saver.
Once the department began to process intel from Hamilton 68, they insisted that they could “use it as a tool to track all the Russian misinformation, which at that moment in 2017, was the shiny ball of foreign policy.”
Milius noted that with the election of Donald Trump, there was a distinct shift in the bureaucracy’s expressed priorities. Previously, the federal government had been preoccupied with the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), but along with Trump’s ascension to the presidency, federal agencies began to place a disproportionate emphasis on utilizing “public-private partnerships” to root out alleged Russian influence.
Another former senior government official recently suggested that information-based operations, a practice that in the digital era found its roots in the GWOT, was found to be useful in the domestic private sector as well. And this is likely how Hamilton 68 came into being. Individuals who had acquired specific skills while serving the country brought those skills home and began using them in service of political goals.
And Milius’ experience with the State Department’s “bot detection” efforts that were meant to keep tabs on people spreading Russian disinformation online substantiates this. She affirmed that the public-private partnership between the federal bureaucracy and Big Tech, in particular, established a sense of comfort and familiarity between the two bodies. Because bureaucrats were able to “take free trips to Silicon Valley and hang out with people from Google and Facebook and Twitter,” the managerial elite in both entities knew they were operating on the same wavelength.
This additional face time likely provided both groups reassurance that their ideological goals were similar and that they would have allies in the quest to delegitimize and stonewall Trump’s presidency.
Swamp Creatures Tend to Be Lazy
Once Hamilton 68 came online, an inordinate amount of attention was placed on 644 Twitter accounts that were flagged as “bots” spreading “Russian disinformation.” Thanks to Taibbi’s reporting, it is now publicly documented that these accounts were overwhelmingly run by American citizens and other Western civilians with no connection to Russia whatsoever. But to people involved in conservative politics at the time, it was clear that Hamilton 68 was a con.
“It was run by the teams that ran Russiagate, so this was yet another arm of their public attack on Trump and Trump supporters,” Milius said. “I was looking at the list of users, and I was like, ‘Bro, my secret handle is on there. Like all my friends are on there. I know these people. They’re not bots.’”
Milius stated that the individuals behind Hamilton 68 were directly providing “someone or multiple people” at the State Department with the lists of accounts being algorithmically monitored.
Such collusion would indicate the government was effectively taking orders from a politically biased third party about which private citizens it should monitor, suppress, and allow to be libeled by the corporate media.
And despite the fact that — as we now can deduce — the people behind Hamilton 68 knew what they were doing was fraudulent, the users who were algorithmically placed on these curated lists had information about them used to source not only news stories about a malicious foreign presence in American domestic issues but as the basis for intel used in reports within federal agencies.
Furthermore, the data analytics included alongside Hamilton 68’s information were frequently drastically inflated to manufacture a sense of severity, Milius said, further indicating to her and to some of those with whom she worked that the entire operation was bogus. When data analysts in the State Department would compare the analytics provided by Hamilton 68 with the actual data from the monitored accounts’ traffic, they would find massive discrepancies, she noted. The people behind Hamilton 68 were blatantly lying, and if people looked in the right places the lies fell apart.
But because their numbers were few and leadership enjoyed the convenience of pre-sourced intel, Hamilton 68 continued to be utilized by the State Department.
The Deep State Is a Hammer; Everything Else Is a Nail
Even Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, knew that Hamilton 68 was bogus. There is no reason to believe that GS-15s in the State Department had a good-faith reason to accept it at face value. After all, bureaucrats overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton in 2016, so why wouldn’t they take a chance at sabotaging someone they believed would lead the U.S. down the wrong path?
Milius contends that the political bias of entrenched bureaucrats who make decisions in federal agencies played a key role in deciding to utilize a tool like Hamilton 68, subsequently prolonging the narrative of Russian collusion.
“They wanted [Russian collusion] to be true so badly,” she said. “They felt like they were freedom fighters. In their minds, every Trump appointee was probably a Russian plant because, in their minds, Trump was a Russian plant.”
“The whole media pretended that this Russaigate thing was real. It didn’t just affect citizens. It affected everyone who worked in Washington, D.C., which includes everybody that worked with the [State] Department, the CIA, and more,” she continued. “These people were going home at night being told Trump and his people were Russian agents and then would come into work with the idea that they were going to save America from us.”
If Trump and everyone affiliated with him are Russian assets, and Russian assets pose an existential threat to the country, why wouldn’t a well-meaning new hire at the State Department who wants to grow in his career treat an intelligence briefing sourced from Hamilton 68 with the utmost importance if his boss told him to?
What Else Is Being Used Against Us?
Whether they were conditioned by their superiors and Big Tech or not, hundreds if not thousands of entries and mid-level bureaucrats perpetuated the lie the Russian government hijacked American politics. They, along with the corporate media and the universities, went along with this narrative to weaponize society against people — American citizens — who supported a democratically elected president from a major political party.
Taibbi’s reporting shows how Hamilton 68 was used by Big Tech and the corporate media to perpetuate the myth of Russian collusion by unfairly suppressing and regulating speech online. Milius’ experience at the State Department indicates how it was used to weaponize one of the most important parts of the federal government against the American people.
Both narratives likely only give us a look under the hood. We know about the Hamilton dashboard — which is still operational, albeit under the slightly different moniker of Hamilton 2.0 — solely because of the “Twitter Files,” and we know of the use of Hamilton 68 at the State Department because of people like Milius who are willing to share their stories.
We have no reason to believe Hamilton 2.0 isn’t being used by the government, nor do we know whether systems similar to the Hamilton dashboard are being used to curate lists of people on platforms other than Twitter.
But we do know that unelected members of the government are weaponizing themselves against the American people in collaboration with the private sector as they chip away at our democratic republic. This is irrefutable.
So, the question remains: what else is the U.S. government using to monitor its citizens while mobilizing against domestic targets who have done nothing wrong?
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.
I went looking for aliens in Roswell two years ago on a reporting trip to New Mexico. The aliens might not exist, but the conspiracies certainly do.
In 1947, a rancher discovered a field of debris wider than a football field after a July thunderstorm at the height of the U.S. flying-saucer wave. Air Force officials initially said the material was from a flying disc before claiming it was a crashed weather balloon, but many remain skeptical of the government’s explanation given that such balloons don’t leave behind a wide area of destruction.
The military acknowledged the debris was part of a secret atomic project in 1994, but records remain classified. Though President Donald Trump said in 2020 he’s heard “very interesting” things about Roswell, he refused to declassify any documents.
Now, more than 75 years after the incident, more questions are arising over an apparent airborne espionage object 1,000 miles north of Roswell.
On Thursday afternoon, NBC News revealed that a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon is hovering over Billings, Montana. The supposed weapon of espionage had apparently flown from the Alaskan Aleutian Islands and over Canada before making its way to airspace above the U.S. nuclear arsenal. According to NBC News, the balloon was spotted over the state that’s home to 150 warheads on Wednesday, near where the Chinese have been buying up American farmland.
“The U.S. military has been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northern U.S. for the past few days,” NBC reported. “Military and defense leaders have discussed shooting it out of the sky, according to two U.S. officials and a senior defense official.”
Defense officials told reporters that military leaders refused to shoot the balloon down because a widespread debris field would pose a threat to civilian life in the rural state. According to The Wall Street Journal, President Joe Biden was briefed on the issue on Wednesday.
If the Pentagon knew the surveillance tool was on its way to the nuclear arsenal, however, why didn’t the president have it shot down when it was over Alaska? Was Biden’s Wednesday briefing his first? Why wasn’t he told sooner? Why didn’t officials inform the public when it crossed into U.S. airspace? Did our government maybe not catch the balloon and are now covering for their own negligence? And why didn’t the Canadians shoot it down?
Even more troubling is why the Chinese would have a surveillance balloon over Montana in the first place, considering Beijing’s advanced satellites in low-earth orbit that provide all the bird’s eye images they need. Are they sending a message before Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to the Chinese capital next week? Is espionage through TikTok not enough? We might not have ever known about the balloon had the press not snapped a photo of it.
We don’t know what happened at Roswell, and we probably never will. Was it actually a weather balloon that crashed? Was the object part of a military experiment? Could it have even been from a foreign government? Was it from the Empire — either an alien one from a galaxy far, far away or Red China?
Will Billings be the new Roswell?
SEE MY COMMENTARY BELOW
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
A.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 Donald Trump.
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With the exception of the COVID shots, there is perhaps nothing in the economy that has gotten more tailwind in terms of government support than electric vehicles. Whether it’s the subsidies, the mandates, the inflation of the cost of gasoline, or the construction of cumbersome electric charging infrastructure, the government has done everything it can to turn a product that is inherently costly and impractical into something accessible to the public. Yet despite it all, a new study shows fueling these cars is more expensive than most gas-powered cars, even with record high gasoline prices, which were induced by policies from the same green energy. Now is the time to end all subsidies and mandates on behalf of this pathetic industry.
It’s truly hard to quantify the degree to which government has propped up green energy and products that never would have gotten off the ground in the free market. Between making gasoline so expensive and making gas cars more expensive with fuel efficiency mandates on the one hand and subsidizing electric vehicles and all their required infrastructure on the other hand, electric cars have every reason to succeed. Heck, all blue states are even signaling the end of gas-powered cars altogether, and some are even mandating it. The subsidies reached a tipping point with the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which offers a subsidy of $7,500 per electric vehicle. But a new study shows that it still costs more to fuel an EV after spending so much more for the original purchase.
“Typical mid-priced ICE car drivers paid about $11.29 to fuel their vehicles for 100 miles of driving,” concluded a study from consulting firm Anderson Economic Group. “That cost was around $0.31 cheaper than the amount paid by mid-priced EV drivers charging mostly at home, and over $3 less than the cost borne by comparable EV drivers charging commercially.”
Oh, and let’s not forget that time is money. You have to spend an average of $18 per charge and spend 15 minutes per 100 miles traveled. Good luck on your family road trip this summer with the baby screaming in the car who was woken up after finally taking a nap, thanks to the incessant need to stop.
The only benefit the Michigan-based consulting firm found to fueling EVs over traditional cars was, of course, among the high-end luxury cars used by the elites promoting these products.
This is astounding given the record-high gas prices this past year, especially for winter months. This means that even after spending more money for the purchase of an EV, you are saddling yourself with a boondoggle to maintain. The problem for the parasitic, venture socialist industry is that the very regressive green policies that are harming the oil and car industries are doing even more damage to the electric grid. Thanks to the war on coal, oil refineries, and pipelines and the stagnation of nuclear energy by the same radical eco groups, electricity prices are skyrocketing even more than gasoline. All that “investment” in solar and wind is not there for us during our time of need. Now we face the prospect of electric grid failures more acutely than even oil and gas shortages.
Just consider what would happen during these heat waves if we only had electric vehicles. California grid operators warned people during last summer’s heat wave to ease off charging their cars. Now imagine if they had their way and 100% of cars were electric and 100% of the electricity was generated from wind and solar. Well, you’d be stuck at home … which is exactly how they want it.
Biden’s signature legislation last year handed out over $50 billion to the electric vehicle industry, including $7.7 billion for EV charging stations and $10.3 billion in grid and battery subsidies. But just like money can’t buy you love, it also can’t buy you efficacy, efficiency, or safety. Despite all of the corporate welfare for green energy, it’s still natural fuels from the earth that are holding up Texas’s grid during this cold spell and ice storm in the northern part of the state.
Texas Grid Snapshot… yet 8 out of 10 new projects are wind and solar
What was powering northern Texas during the ice storm? As the Energy Information Administration data shows, natural gas was the star player while wind collapsed, despite Texas throwing tens of billions of dollars at it.
As for efficiency, a 2021 study shows that even if EVs were more economical post-purchase in terms of fueling per mile, there are fewer miles to monetize those returns. According to the paper from the Bureau of Economic Research, the average family EV only racked up 5,300 miles per year, less than half the 13,476 miles per year driven by normal privately owned cars. Thus, the savings in operating these cars was always a mirage because they are just driven less. They could never possibly replace internal combustion vehicles, just like wind and solar cannot replace oil, gas, and coal for electricity and fuel. Yet the government has mandated automobile manufacturers to quadruple the market share of EVs in their fleets.
Then, of course, there is the issue of safety. Recently, it was found that during Hurricane Ian, electric vehicles caught in the storm surge in southwest Florida were suddenly exploding. DeWalt’s new no-turn electric mower also seems to have problems, as one model caught fire on the opening day of Equip Expo 2022. These are the sorts of issues that are worked out when a product has to rise or fall in the free market without a permanent guarantee of income. But with endless subsidies, we can only imagine the economic and societal problems from an EV-only road show.
Moreover, what this all demonstrates is that EVs were never meant to replace traditional cars to fulfill our needs and standard of living. They are serving as a Trojan horse to break our standard of living so that we will “own nothing and be happy,” as the WEF officials like to say. They want us to pay a fortune for cars and then barely be able to drive them because of the cost of electricity that they are concomitantly and artificially increasing thanks to other global warming regulations and market distortions.
Oh, and of course, no action taken against our prosperity, liberty, and mobility is complete unless it helps China. We all know China controls 76% of global EV battery production, and the nickel, cobalt, and lithium used to produce these batteries are all produced abroad. So now we are subsidizing China and other bad actors to make the rope that hangs our economy, which is pretty much in line with every other government policy. All they need now is to absolve these companies of product liability, and they will be just like the COVID shots. So why do Republican governors continue to service the electric vehicle scam? Why do they continue to place the boot of government on the scale toward these loser vehicles? The time has come for red states to completely divest from the green energy scam.
First Son Hunter Biden seeming admittance that the laptop at the center of a federal investigation belongs to him late Wednesday in a letter from his lawyers prompted widespread criticism of mainstream media organizations that dismissed it as unreliable and even Russian disinformation.
“Hunter Biden admits infamous laptop is his. Not Russian disinformation, not a ‘plant’ as his father and 51 dishonest former intel officials pretended,” journalist Miranda Devine, who authored the book “Laptop from Hell,” tweeted, referring to the 51 intelligence experts who signed a letter casting doubt on the scandal in 2020.
“So Hunter Biden is now admitting, after three years, that everything on the laptop is real? Bold strategy. Especially after Democrats & their media allies spent years arguing Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation,” Outkick founder Clay Travis wrote.
First Son Hunter Biden finally admitted the infamous, scandalous laptop belongs to him late Wednesday in a letter from lawyers seeking a criminal probe. (CBS Sunday Morning)
Writer Kelly Jane Torrance asked, “How many people and publications is it that owe the @NYPost an apology?”
Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, wrote letters to the Justice Department and the Delaware attorney general on Wednesday calling for investigations into Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and John Mac Isaac, who owns the computer repair shop where Biden is said to have left his laptop. Biden’s lawyers also sent cease and desist letters to others who obtained and disseminated the laptop’s contents.
Lowell argued in the letters that Mac Isaac and the others had no right to inspect the contents of Biden’s computer, much less make copies of it to share with the media. He told Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich on Thursday, however, that the letters requesting the investigation were not an admission that the laptop belonged to his client.
🚨NEW: attorney for Hunter Biden tells me letters requesting investigation into the laptop repair store owner, Rudy Guiliani, and others, are NOT an acknowledgment that the laptop is, in fact, Hunter's: pic.twitter.com/RPbksqNR0v
CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post and NPR did not immediately respond when asked if any corrections or statements would be issued in the wake of Hunter Biden’s apparent admission. Those outlets have all verified the laptop’s legitimacy to some degree in their own reporting in the years since 2020.
The laptop saga began in October 2020, when the New York Post reported about a 2015 email from a Ukrainian energy executive to Hunter Biden, thanking him for introducing him to his father, that it obtained from the hard drive of Biden’s laptop. Joe Biden was vice-president at the time of the message, and his son then enjoyed a lucrative position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, raising concerns of attempted influence-peddling with his powerful father.
The laptop’s content included a peek into Biden’s overseas business dealings, as well as more sordid material like homemade sex tapes and videos showing him using illegal drugs.
The laptop was widely dismissed by print and television outlets, especially The New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC and CNN, and in an astonishing display of coordination, Twitter and Facebook blocked or limited sharing of the New York Post’s article about Biden; Twitter even locked the New York Post out of its account for weeks.
Then-CNN host Brian Stelter hypothesized the emails could be “made up” and the story was simply the “right-wing media machine” in action. “60 Minutes” host Lesley Stahl told then-President Trump in 2020 that the laptop couldn’t be “verified,” and NPR announced it wouldn’t “waste our time” on “stories that are not really stories.”
The Washington Post eventually did a stunning about-face in its coverage of the laptop, but didn’t inform readers of the truth until well after President Biden had occupied the White House.
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ paper largely kept its readers in the dark as to the seriousness of the Hunter Biden scandal.
The Post first addressed the Biden controversy on Oct. 14, 2020, the day the New York Post broke its story, using a variation of the “Republicans pounce” trope to frame the story, running the headline, “Three weeks before Election Day, Trump allies go after Hunter — and Joe — Biden.”
Right out of the gate, the report expressed heavy skepticism towards the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s emails and sowed doubt in the GOP sources who first obtained the laptop. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler also authored a skeptical “explainer” of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the paper published multiple opinion pieces urging readers to dismiss the controversy altogether.
The New York Times and The Washington Post both eventually verified Hunter Biden’s laptop after big tech dismissed the New York Post’s bombshell reporting during the 2020 presidential election. (Getty images | New York Post)
In March 2022 the Post finally authenticated thousands of emails from the laptop in a lengthy report about Hunter Biden’s “multimillion-dollar” financial ties to the Chinese energy company CEFC China Energy.
Much like the Post, the New York Times also confirmed the authenticity of the laptop in March 2022, well after the Gray Lady reported on it skeptically during the 2020 campaign. Politico, NBC News and CNN also eventually verified the laptop.
The New York Post covered the news Thursday with a front-page story headlined, “It’s mine.”
There is not enough criticism in the world to go around regarding how the Biden campaign and their corrupt allies in the media responded to the Hunter Biden laptop news in October 2020. pic.twitter.com/ep3RRXT4pl
Hunter Biden authorized John Paul Mac Isaac to access his laptop data. Then he failed to retrieve the laptop. At that point it became abandoned property. & free game. https://t.co/MvrSOpf7Tw
Right before the election America’s top intel veterans (e.g., 5 former CIA Directors) published a letter that Hunter’s laptop was Russian. The media repeated the absurdity as fact. Joe cited the absurdity in the debates to silence the matter. Hunter now admits the laptop was his.
An upcoming hearing for the House Oversight Committee will focus on Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s original story. Other House investigations are expected to focus on Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Those investigations are likely to rely heavily on the contents of the laptop.
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., is probing Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC) John Kerry’s secretive negotiations with his Chinese counterparts.
Comer informed Kerry in a letter sent Thursday afternoon that the committee, under his leadership, has opened an investigation into Kerry’s role in the Biden administration and, in particular, his high-level climate negotiations with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To date, Kerry has ignored information and document requests from Comer and other committee Republicans sent when they were in the minority.
“To date, you have failed to respond to any of our requests,” Comer wrote to Kerry. “Yet, you continue to engage in activities that could undermine our economic health, skirt congressional authority, and threaten foreign policy under the guise of climate advocacy.”
“The Committee requests documents and information to understand your role and provide necessary transparency over the SPEC and its activities,” he continued. “As a member of the President’s cabinet, you should be representing the United States’ interests. Your statements, however, consistently show disregard for American national security and taxpayer dollars.”
Climate envoy John Kerry attends a United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021. (Reuters/Yves Herman)
President Biden appointed Kerry to be the U.S. SPEC, a position that hadn’t previously existed and which didn’t require Senate approval, shortly after taking office in early 2021. The SPEC office is housed at the State Department and has an estimated $13.9 million annual budget with approval for 45 personnel.
Kerry’s position gives him a spot on the president’s cabinet and National Security Council. Since taking on the role, he has traveled worldwide, attending high-profile climate summits and diplomatic engagements in an effort to push a global transition from fossil fuels to green energy alternatives.
Despite the high-level role leading the Biden administration’s global climate strategy, Kerry’s office has been tight-lipped about its internal operations and staff members, sparking criticism from Republicans, including Comer, who have demanded transparency for such an important office.
“We are left with an insufficient understanding of your office’s activities, spending, and staffing,” Comer continued. “To enable long overdue oversight of your office, please provide the following documents and information.”
The Oversight Committee chairman added that Kerry has been too soft on China’s human rights violations “while promoting climate negotiations that the CCP does not even appear interested in entering.”
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., leads an organizational meeting on Tuesday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Kerry has been blasted for various comments that have appeared to downplay vast human rights abuses tied to China’s green energy supply chain. After he was asked in November 2021 about how slave labor was reportedly employed by solar panel firms in China, Kerry said he had to stay in his “lane” when negotiating with Chinese officials.
“Well, we’re honest about the differences,” Kerry said at the time. “We certainly know what they are, and we’ve articulated them, but that’s not my lane here… My job is to be the climate guy and stay focused on trying to move the climate agenda forward.”
Since assuming the SPEC position, Kerry has engaged in various private talks with Chinese counterparts, including two 2021 meetings that took place in China. Following a regional climate summit in April 2021, Kerry told CNBC that solving climate change was “not about China.”
“This is not about China. This is not a counter to China,” he told the outlet. “This is about China, the United States, India, Russia… a bunch of countries that are emitting a pretty sizable amount.”
China accounts for about 27% of total global emissions — nearly tripling the total in the U.S., the world’s second-largest emitter, according to Rhodium Group — and continues to approve and construct a large amount of coal power plants.
The SPEC office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
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