Two left-wing nonprofits have combined to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-backed government contracts since President Biden took office, with a vast majority of the money going towards efforts to keep illegal immigrants in the United States, records reviewed by Fox News Digital shows.
The Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based group that views immigration enforcement agencies as a “threat” to civil liberties, has been the primary breadwinner in the past two years, collecting around $350 million from government contracts for immigration services. The Acacia Center for Justice, a newer nonprofit linked to the Vera Institute and another left-wing immigration group, has also pocketed tens of millions of dollars in recent federal contracts.
The progressive groups have landed the contracts amid the escalating border crisis, which recently saw a quarter of a million migrant encounters at the southern border in December, a new high for the Biden-era as the crisis enters its third year. The Vera Institute received a $171 million Health and Human Services-funded contract last March to help unaccompanied minors avoid deportation, the records show. The contract has since paid out around $180 million with supplemental agreements as of December.
Left-wing groups have landed lucrative government contracts to help with the border crisis. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)
The arrangement lasts until March of this year but can hit as high as $983 million if renewed until March 2027. If extended, it will be the largest federal contract the group has received for immigration-related services dating back to the mid-2000s by a wide margin. Vera has secured other large government contracts since early 2021, including a $168 million contract in March 2021 for the same purpose of helping unaccompanied minors avoid deportation. During this time, the group also obtained smaller contracts ranging between $4 million and $12 million from other federal departments.
In addition to its immigration focus, the Vera Institute seeks to end mass incarceration by cutting down on the number of jails, prisons, and detention centers in the United States. The group has also backed defunding the police and has called border security a “threat” to civil liberties.
“Its name should be Vera Institute for Lawlessness, because it’s at war with the law and public safety: calling to defund police, legalize all drugs, and open the border to all comers,” Scott Walter, president of the conservative Capital Research Center, told Fox News Digital. “It’s amazing these enemies of the law get over 90% of their revenue from the government — more than some defense contractors can boast.“
“A sane government would resist these foes of civilization, not fund them, and certainly not help them bring chaos to our poorest, most vulnerable communities,” Walter added.
The Vera Institute of Justice is contracted by the government to provide legal services to illegal immigrants. (Texas Department of Public Safety)
Taxpayer-backed government grants and contracts propel the Vera Institute’s operations. The most recent financial audit on its website shows that between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021, $152 million of the group’s $191 million in revenue came from government sources.
Meanwhile, the Acacia Center for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit started from a partnership between the Vera Institute and Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights (CAIR), has received several “legal services” contracts from the Department of Justice last September that netted the group around $41 million in payments, records show.
The Acacia Center appears to have launched to expand Vera’s work with illegal immigrants detained at the border. However, unlike Vera’s government contracts for unaccompanied minors, the Acacia Center’s contracts do not specify an age group for the legal services, and its partner organization has an adult defense program.
“The objective of the Acacia Center for Justice (“Acacia”) is to expand on Vera’s work over the past twenty years in providing legal support and representation to immigrants facing deportation through the development, coordination and management of national networks of legal services providers serving immigrants across the country,” its website states.
“Acacia’s goals are two-fold: to support immigrant legal services and defense networks to provide exceptional legal services to immigrants and to advocate for the expansion of these programs and the infrastructure critical to guaranteeing immigrants access to justice, fairness and freedom,” the site says. “Acacia will focus the collective power of both Vera and CAIR on delivering accountable, independent, zealous and person-centered legal services and representation to protect the rights of all immigrants at risk of deportation.”
In December, the number of migrant encounters at the southern border surpassed 250,000 – a new monthly high under the Biden administration. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Image)
The second group involved in the Acacia Center’s partnership, Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights, directs an adult defense program that provides information, support, and legal representation to illegal immigrants, according to its website. It also has a detained unaccompanied children’s program that works with minors at the Office of Refugee Resettlement juvenile immigration detention centers in Maryland and Virginia.
The Acacia Center launched last year and received the contracts less than two months after getting a July 2022 determination letter from the Internal Revenue Service, which stated the group’s effective date of tax exemption was Dec. 29, 2021, according to filings. The nonprofits landed the immigration contracts as the situation at the southern border worsened, cumulating into a record high encounters late last year.
In December, the number of migrant encounters at the southern border surpassed 250,000 – a new monthly high under the Biden administration – Customs and Border Protection confirmed to Fox News Digital last week. The figure came after two years of a historic and record-breaking migrant crisis that has overwhelmed communities and officials, caused tensions between cities deep in the U.S. interior over the bussing of migrants, and marked a significant political headache for the administration.
The Vera Institute of Justice and the Acacia Center for Justice did not return Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
Fox News Digital’s Adam Shaw contributed reporting.
Joe Schoffstall is a politics producer/reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Joe.Schoffstall@Fox.com and on Twitter: @joeschoffstall
FIRST ON FOX: A coalition of 20 states and a top conservative legal group is suing the Biden administration over its recently-expanded humanitarian parole program that allows tens of thousands of migrants from designated countries a month into the U.S. — arguing that the program is unlawful. The lawsuit, filed by Texas and America First Legal in the Southern District of Texas, is joined by 19 additional states who are seeking to block the Biden administration’s parole program which allow up to 30,000 migrants from Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela into the U.S. each month.
The Biden administration announced the program for Venezuelans in October, which allowed a limited number to fly directly into the U.S. as long as they had not entered illegally, had a sponsor in the U.S. already and passed certain checks.
Earlier this month, President Biden announced that the program would be expanding to include Haitians, Nicaraguans and Cubans, and that the program would allow up to 30,000 a month into the U.S. It was announced alongside an expansion of Title 42 expulsions to include those nationalities.
Around 60 recently arrived Venezuelan migrants are seen entering a shelter at Bellevue early Wednesday morning, Oct. 12, 2022, in Manhattan, New York. ((Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images))
“We anticipate this action is going to substantially reduce the number of people attempting to cross our southwest border without going through a legal process,” he said.
In the lawsuit, led by Texas and America First Legal and joined onto by 19 additional Republican-led states, plaintiffs argue that the program is illegal given the “exceptionally limited” parole power available to the federal government. The lawsuit notes that parole is limited by Congress to be used on a “case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” — a standard which the lawsuit says the program fails to meet.
“The parole program established by the Department fails each of the law’s three limiting factors. It is not case-by-case, is not for urgent humanitarian reasons, and advances no significant public benefit. Instead, it amounts to the creation of a new visa program that allows hundreds of thousands of aliens to enter the United States who otherwise have no basis for doing so. This flouts, rather than follows, the clear limits imposed by Congress.”
The Biden administration has said the program is one of a number of ways it is expanding lawful migration pathways as a way to combat the ongoing migrant surge at the border that has seen historic numbers hit the border each month –and is calling on Congress to pass a broader immigration reform bill. Separately, it has used humanitarian parole to allow Afghans and Ukrainians into the U.S. in the last year. But conservative critics have said the latest program is illegal, and facilitates rather than stops the migrant surge.
The lawsuit says that the program is also unlawful as it did not engage in the notice-and-comment rulemaking required by the Administrative Procedure Act — by which a number of immigration policies have been at least temporarily struck down in recent years. It also argues that the states “face substantial irreparable harms from the Department’s abuse of its parole authority, which allow potentially hundreds of thousands of additional aliens to enter each of their already overwhelmed territories.”
“Every state in America, especially border states like Texas, is being crushed by the impacts of illegal immigration,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “The Biden open borders agenda has created a humanitarian crisis that is increasing crime and violence in our streets, overwhelming local communities, and worsening the opioid crisis. This unlawful amnesty program, which will invite hundreds of thousands of aliens into the U.S. every year, will only make this immigration crisis drastically worse.”
The lawsuit also marks the latest in a flurry of legal challenges to the Biden administration’s policies by America First Legal — a conservative legal group launched by former Trump White House official Stephen Miller, who he described as being “at the forefront of the legal battle to save America’s borders from complete annihilation at the hands of this lawless administration.”
Miller labeled the Biden program as “pre-amnesty for what would be illegal aliens before they even arrive at our border.” He also compared it to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which granted protection from deportation to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors.
“This is a dramatic escalation in the open borders crusade – not only is Biden freely admitting illegal aliens who arrive at our borders, but he is now going to foreign countries to pre-approve innumerable illegal aliens to flood into our country without any legal basis whatsoever. It is illegal, unconstitutional, and contemptible,” he said.
The states joining onto the lawsuit with Texas are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The new parole program came after more than 250,000 migrants were encountered at the southern border in December, a new record. However, the Biden administration has said it believes that the new measures are already having an effect and that there has been a drop in migrant encounters at the border from those nationalities.
“The December update shows our new border enforcement measures are working. Even as overall encounters rose because of smugglers spreading misinformation around the court-ordered lifting of the Title 42 public health order, we continued to see a sharp decline in the number of Venezuelans unlawfully crossing our southwest border, down 82% from September 2022,” acting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Troy Miller said in a statement last week. “Early data suggests the expanded measures for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans are having a similar impact, and we look forward to sharing the additional data in the next update.“
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security. He can be reached at adam.shaw2@fox.com or on Twitter.
Former President Barack Obama’s office declined to answer questions about whether it is searching for classified documents at his residences after documents have now been found in the homes and offices of President Biden, former President Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.
“We have nothing for you at this time,” Hannah Hankins, the communications director for Obama, told Fox News Digital when asked if searches for classified material were underway.
Former President Obama’s office declined to comment on if they are searching for classified documents at his residences. (Screenshot/YouTube)
Five batches of classified documents from President Biden have been discovered since November from his time as Obama’s vice president. One batch was located at the Penn Biden Center and four at his Wilmington, Delaware, residence. A special counsel investigation into the matter was launched in January by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Five batches of classified documents have been located at President Biden’s residences. (Anna Moneymaker)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida to recover classified documents in August. Former Vice President Mike Pence informed Congress Tuesday that classified documents were discovered at his Carmel, Indiana, residence.
Former Vice President Mike Pence informed Congress Tuesday that classified documents were discovered at his Carmel, Indiana residence. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The office of former President George W. Bush said he turned over all classified documents upon leaving the White House.
Obama has residences in four cities, according to Homes & Gardens: Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts; and New York City.
Patrick Hauf is a politics writer for 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.
“During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill, and careful judgment required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.” ~Nuremberg Code #10
We’ve reached a critical mass of data points and safety signals on the COVID shots from a full two years of it circulating in 5.5 billion people. One must be worse than a conspiracy theorist to ignore them. One now has to be a “coincidence theorist” to chalk up this degree of human suffering that is in immediate need of redress to mere coincidence.
It’s time for Republicans in state legislatures and on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to pay attention to the daily barrage of shocking data points and safety signals. Here is just a sampling of 12 points from the past few weeks, out of many more. Each one alone should have been enough to suspend the shots, terminate the technology in the pipeline, and investigate the actors behind it. Time is of the essence:
1) 17% of children experienced some cardiac symptom after the Pfizer shot: Just how large is the universe of those roped into some risk of cardiac damage? A new peer-reviewed study from Taiwan published in the European Journal of Pediatrics found that 17% of high school children, mainly boys, experienced at least heart palpitations or chest pain from the second dose of Pfizer. These numbers work perfectly with many other surveys showing a significant number of people experiencing arrythmias, tightness in the chest, or shortness of breath. They are also particularly concerning given that a Swiss study and a Thai study showed the proportion of people afflicted with subclinical myocarditis (a ticking time bomb) was much larger than those diagnosed with myocarditis.
2) 20% spike in excess deaths in England and Wales:According to the latest figures from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, deaths for the final two weeks of 2022 in England and Wales were 20% above the five-year average. That is greater than the pandemic itself. It makes no sense why there would be more deaths, long after the vaccines supposedly quelled COVID, than in 2020 and early 2021, at the peak of the pandemic. The U.K. Timesreports that “50,000 more people died last year than normal.” That is the equivalent of 250,000 excess deaths in the U.S. This cannot be COVID; it must be something else. (The data for those weeks: Data from week ending Dec 23, 2022; data from week ending Dec 30, 2022).
3) 0 of 1,1779 COVID hospitalizations in New South Wales were unvaccinated:According to NSW Health, which breaks down COVID hospitalizations and deaths by cohorts of various levels of vaccination, for the two weeks ending Dec. 31, 2022, not a single COVID hospitalization (or ICU admission) was among the fully unvaccinated.
The overwhelming majority were among the boosted. Although 84% of people in Australia have gotten at least one dose of the shot, it’s not 100%, so there is clearly a degree of negative efficacy, which is in itself a safety signal. And although 6% of the deaths were among the unvaccinated (still below their share of the population), it is suspicious how they all seemed to die at home, which makes you wonder if they are placing some of the “unknown” category into the unvaxxed pile by automatically assuming they didn’t get the shots. Dr. Syed has presented evidence in the past that makes it likely NSW Health has been doing that all along.
4) FDA admits massive elevated risk for heart attacks, blood clots, and pulmonary emboli: FDA researchers published the results of a massive observational study of 30.7 million Medicare patients in 2021 and found that people who took the shot found that the shots increase risk of pulmonary embolism by 54%, acute myocardial infarction by 42%, blood clotting by 91%, and platelet disorder by 44%. The claim this is only an early warning signal and downplay the results, but they harmonize with many other surveys, studies, reporting, and an understanding of the shot’s mechanism of action.
5) COVID vax was associated with 22%-74% greater all-cause mortality vs. being unvaccinated in U.K.: Prior to May 2022, the U.K. Health Security Agency published COVID case and death rates, age-stratified, by vaccination status. They terminated these weekly reports after we began using them against the system. El Gato Malo revisited the numbers and calculated somewhere between a 22% and 74% elevated risk of all-cause mortality associated with the vaccinated from September 2021 through April 2022.
As you can see, this portends either negative efficacy or risk outweighing reward even for seniors over 80 who are constantly bombarded with endless boosters. This should not come as a surprise given that Pfizer’s own all-cause mortality analysis in its six-month follow-up of its trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed 21 deaths in the trial group and 17 in the placebo group. The company failed to follow through the rest of 2021 and 2022, but it’s reasonable to presume based on what we know now that the negative efficacy became worse with other variants. It’s also likely that the long-term injuries of the vaccine, which were never followed because of the unblinding of trial participants, came home to roost increasingly over time.
6) New bivalent booster even worse: Remember the boosters that were approved with nothing but antibody tests and 8 blind mice? Well, now there are results of clinical trials for the bivalent booster approved last September, and members of the FDA advisory committee are expressing anger at not seeing this data. It turns out that 1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected, while 3.2% of those with the new bivalent shot got COVID. This in itself demonstrates that not only does the detection of more antibodies not necessarily mean better clinical outcomes, but more antibodies of the wrong type can facilitate infection.
7) Two studies show mRNA shots create wrong antibody class: In yet another possible indication that the shots actually make you more vulnerable to coronavirus, a second study has been published showing the shots create a class switch from IgG1-3 neutralizing antibodies to IgG4 “tolerating” antibodies, which can make someone keep getting the virus and not fight it off. Last month, German researchers, in a groundbreaking study published in Science Immunology, found that some people reinfected with the virus after having had boosters had over 40% of their antibodies composed of IgG4. Now a second peer-reviewed German paper, this time published in Frontiers in Immunology, found this phenomenon even after the original two doses. The shocking thing is that a Pfizer scientist served as the study’s editor and one of Fauci’s staffers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases served as a peer reviewer
8) New bivalent shot caused reactions in large minority of children: Not only do the boosters not work, but according to the CDC’s own V-SAFE adverse reporting app, 49% of the 5- to 11-year-old children who took the bivalent booster shot experienced systemic reactions. These symptoms include fatigue, chills, nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, joint pain, and diarrhea. In 22% of the children, they could not go to school or perform their daily functions after getting the shot. In other words, these children experienced upfront the upper bounds of what the virus would have done to them. And keep in mind that V-SAFE did not monitor lurking serious long-term side effects – all for a shot that doesn’t work.
9) 51% of Democrats believe vaccines behind sudden deaths: Whether the government and media are willing to acknowledge the extent of injuries, the dam is clearly breaking with the general public. Numerous surveys have been showing for months that most people know friends or family killed by the shots. But earlier this month, Rasmussen published a survey broken down by party affiliation. It found that 51% of Democrats nationally believe it is likely the vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths, and 33% believe someone they know personally died from the shot. That is more than the 26% of Republicans and Independents who said the same thing. The reason this is significant is because more Democrats than Republicans received the shot, so these results likely reflect reality.
Furthermore, 31% of Democrats attest to experiencing side effects, and 6% believe they experienced major side effects. This tracks closely with the 7.7% according to the CDC’s V-SAFE who had to seek medical attention (and 33% experienced at least minor side effects). And this is among Democrats who are naturally inclined to defend the shots, which means this is not some right-wing conspiracy but a reflection of widespread reality.
10) VAERS analysis shows 500 injuries with greater safety signals than myocarditis: By now, anyone not under a rock knows that the vaccines could cause myocarditis. But according to a FOIA document obtained by the Epoch Times, in turns out that the CDC conducted its own analysis of VAERS from December 2020 through July 2022 and found that there were over 500 categories of injuries with louder safety signals than even myocarditis. Specifically, as Hebrew University Professor Josh Guetzkow explains, there are 503 AEs with proportional reporting ratios larger than myocarditis and 552 with PRRs larger than pericarditis. Overall, in just a year and a half of Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID jabs, the safety signals were 5.5 times larger than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the US since 2009.
11) The CDC anticipated over 1,000 VAERS reports per day: The agency didn’t make a mistake. Bureaucrats knew from August 2020 that they expected major problems with the vaccine. Prof. Guetzkow, the prolific FOIA sleuth, posted details of documents showing that the CDC contracted with General Dynamics in August 2020 to run the VAERS database. The $9.45 million contract stated that officials expected 1,000 adverse event reports a day, with 40% of them being serious. Again in March 2021, they amended the contract to expand the capacity by another 25,000 a day and to clear a backlog of 115,000 reports just for the first ten or so weeks of the vaccination drive.
12) Disability numbers skyrocket in U.S. and U.K. coinciding perfectly with vaccine take-up: The U.K.’s Institute for Fiscal Studies published a report last month showing that the number of people on disability claims doubled in the U.K. from the summer of 2021 to July 2022.
While this alone doesn’t prove causation, in conjunction with the millions of reported debilitating injuries, the timing of this rise makes the shots the number-one suspect relative to any other possible factor. It is possible that lockdowns are a part of the problem, because the disabilities were heavily weighted toward mental health problems among younger people. However, the doubling of claims across all age groups, with physical ailments being the key cause among the middle-aged, makes it hard to pin this trend exclusively on lockdowns. They also note that this trend of doubling of disability payments “is consistent with the rise being driven by a general worsening of health across the population,” which in itself coincides perfectly with the “significant rise in the number of (non-COVID) working-age deaths from late 2021 through 2022, compared to pre-pandemic years.”
It should be noted that a similar trend is evident in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those in the labor force identifying as having a disability skyrocketed by more than 30% right after the vaccines were introduced to the public. This is unprecedented and did not begin in 2020 with COVID and the lockdowns.
The goal of the CDC and FDA at this point is to create a limited hangout in which they let the pressure mounting against the shots out of the balloon and channel it into a limited concession. For example, the CDC conceded some sort of safety signal for myocarditis, then briefly conceded a safety signal for strokes in seniors on the Friday afternoon headed into the MLK holiday weekend before concluding in a comprehensive study that took all of a few hours that it’s really not a problem.
In reality, there are over 14,000 categories of injuries reported to VAERS affecting every organ system and every inch of the body. If you just take the 1,400+ SERIOUS adverse events noted by Pfizer in its confidential document just 90 days into the vaccination campaign, it would take 10 minutes (reading at the rapid rate of 200 words per minute) to disclose them in a TV commercial. Yet Pfizer is exempt from such disclosures.
Consider the fact that in 1999, Dr. Fauci explained to Congress that you can have a vaccine that is totally fine at first, but then as late as 12 years later, “all hell breaks loose.”
The year is 1999. A virus (HIV) is killing people. Anthony Fauci warns:
"If you give people a vaccine & a year goes by…everybody's fine. Then you give it to thousands of people, & 12 yrs later all Hell Breaks Loose. Then what have you done?"
Update: Since writing this article, it was reported that, “Jerseys for Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov have sold out online days after the 26-year-old refused to wear a gay pride-themed jersey for religious reasons.”
Getty Images
Do you remember when the main goal of LGBT activism was creating an atmosphere of “tolerance and acceptance”? Those days are long gone, and the goal posts have been moved dramatically. Today, if you do not partake in the public, mandatory celebration of LGBT pride, you will be marked and you will be ostracized. If you don’t believe me, just ask NHL hockey player Ivan Provorov.
Provorov, who is from Russia and plays on the Philadelphia Flyers, declined to participate in pregame warmups for the Flyer’s LGBT pride night, since he would have been required to wear a pride-themed jersey.
He explained to reporters, “I respect everybody and I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion [which is Russian Orthodox]. That’s all I’m going to say.”
In other words, if someone identifies as LGBT, that’s their business, and he respects that. He has his own religious beliefs which dictate how he lives, and he would ask others to respect that. Live and let live.
Flyers coach John Tortorella was supportive of Provorov’s choice, explaining that the team made clear where it stood on LGBT pride. As for Provorov himself, Tortorella said that “he is being true to himself and to his religion. This has to do with his beliefs and his religion. That is one thing I respect about Provy, he is always true to himself, so that’s where we’re at with that.”
But not everyone was as tolerant (remember that word?).
According to hockey journalist Pierre LeBrun, if Provorov really respected the LGBT community, he would have participated in the event and worn the jersey. To paraphrase, “Who gives a hoot about his religious convictions? To respect someone means to celebrate who they are and what they do, even if it is in fundamental contradiction to one’s own beliefs and convictions.”
Hockey commentator Gord Miller seconded LeBrun’s sentiments, adding that Provorov should have been banned from playing in the game. After all, he tweeted, “Freedom of expression doesn’t give you freedom from the consequences of your words or actions.”
To paraphrase again, “Failure to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride has serious professional consequences!”
Sports and comedy writer Rachael Millanta was even more blunt, calling Provorov “ignorant, obnoxious, and homophobic,” also referring to people like him as “bigots” who “hide behind their cherry-picked religion.”
Oh, the beauty of open-minded, liberal tolerance!
So, by Provorov following the consistent Christian teachings of the last 2,000 years (or, more broadly, the consistent biblical teachings of the last 3,000+ years), he is an ignorant, obnoxious and homophobic bigot who is cherry-picking his beliefs. The same can be said for the tens of millions of Russian Orthodox Christians who share these beliefs, along with many hundreds of millions of other Christians of like heart and like mind.
In short, you cannot graciously disagree. You cannot respectfully opt out. Instead, you must deny your convictions, rewrite the Bible, run roughshod over your faith and publicly celebrate something you believe to be wrong. Otherwise, you are a crass human being and a small-minded bigot. Those are your only choices!
Already in 2011 in my book A Queer Thing Happened to America, I could point to the Riddle Homophobia Scale, used in schools to evaluate whether the students were “homophobic.” According to the scale, both tolerance and acceptance were considered homophobic, since homosexuality was not something to “tolerate” or “accept.” Instead, the only way not to be homophobic was to embrace a “positive” attitude which called for “support, admiration, appreciation, and nurturance.”
Yes, if you don’t want to be a homophobe, you must admire your lesbian friend. You must nurture your transgender colleague’s new identity. Otherwise, you will be marked.
Are you surprised?
Well, consider this: “The Riddle homophobia scale was developed by Dorothy Riddle in 1973–74 while she was overseeing research for the American Psychological Association Task Force on Gays and Lesbians.” That’s how far back it goes, although it wasn’t widely released until 1994. That’s why I started my article with this question: “Do you remember when the main goal of LGBT activism was creating an atmosphere of ‘tolerance and acceptance?’”
Most young people, including young adults, do not remember this time because they never experienced it. Instead, they have grown up with the choice to celebrate LGBT pride or be branded, to comply publicly or be ousted.
That’s why one of the chapters in my forthcoming book Why Have So Many Christians Left the Faith is titled, “If Gay Is Good, Christianity Is Bad.” That’s how much the tables have turned, even though the testimony of Scripture remains as clear today as it has ever been.
One of my colleagues, who is now a pastor, worked for years as a computer programmer with Bank of America. He told me that little by little, he was getting pushed out of his job through LGBT activism. By the time he quit, every employee, let alone higher-level manager or executive, could see on your bio whether you identified as an LGBT ally. If not, you could virtually kiss your career advancements goodbye.
Provorov is just the latest example of this reverse bigoted, small-minded, judgmentalism which leaves us with only one ethical choice: We will continue to love our LGBT neighbor as ourselves and we will refuse to back down on our convictions regardless of cost or consequence. That’s what Jesus would have us do.
Zachary and William Zulock in a November 2021 photo | Screenshot/Facebook
A now-defunct Christian adoption agency was reportedly used by a same-sex couple in Georgia who were arrested last August on charges of allegedly sexually abusing their two adopted sons and filming the abuse to upload and share on the internet. William Dale Zulock, 32, and Zachary Jacoby Zulock, 35, were charged with child molestation and sexual exploitation following their arrest on July 27 in Loganville, Georgia, after officials with the Walton County’s Division of Family and Child Services joined deputies in a raid at the men’s home. During the raid, authorities said investigators found evidence the Zulocks were “engaging in sexually abusive acts and video documenting this abuse.”
Now an investigation by Townhall has uncovered new details about the Zulocks, including that Zachary was the focus of a pedophilia investigation in 2011 in which he was accused of engaging in sexual acts with a 14-year-old boy in Walton County. That investigation was ultimately shut down and no charges were filed. Since the Townhall report was published, however, authorities have reportedly reopened the 2011 investigation.
It’s unclear whether the earlier allegation was considered when the Zulocks used All God’s Children, a special needs adoption agency located in Watkinsville, Georgia, to adopt their sons in 2018. According to Townhall, All God’s Children, Inc. worked specifically with special needs children who were “considered more difficult to place because they are older, need to be placed with their siblings or have physical, mental or emotional/behavioral challenges.”
While the agency is no longer active, a listing for All God’s Children remained on the Georgia Association of Licensed Adoption Agencies (GALAA) website as of Jan. 23.
Screenshot of the Georgia Association of Licensed Adoption Agencies website. All God’s Children is listed third. | Screenshot
All God’s Children “worked in partnership with the Georgia Department of Human Services to find families for Georgia’s waiting children,” according to a description on AdoptionCenter.us. The Department of Human Services oversees the state’s Division of Family & Children Services (DFCS), Townhall reported.
A family member told Townhall the brothers — now ages 9 and 11 — were raised by struggling heroin addicts. Another relative of the boys said they believe the Zulocks had full knowledge of that information and targeted the boys for that very reason.
“I do think they had every intention, and this is why they adopted them for this purpose,” another family member who was not identified told Townhall.
According to the Georgia Corporations Division, All God’s Children, Inc., was dissolved on Oct. 28, 2022, just weeks after the Zulocks were arrested. Private messages uncovered by Townhall between Zachary Zulock and All God’s Children former executive director Emily Bailey in October 2021 indicate Bailey said the agency was forced to close due to a “combination of factors.”
When Zulock asked Bailey for a recommendation on agencies to possibly help them adopt a girl, Bailey recommended two agencies that are “open to same-sex families,” including Bethany Christian Services, which the New York Times profiled in March 2021 as one of the country’s “largest adoption and foster care agencies.”
The couple frequently criticized the adoption process, taking to social media to rant about a range of related topics, including arguing in favor of reforming America’s foster-care system. Zachary wrote in one February 2021 post, “All kids deserve a loving and safe home.” Another post read, “How many may be tempted by…prostitution?”
In August 2020, he took to Facebook to rant about a speech by Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Cissie Graham Lynch, at the 2020 Republican National Convention in which she defended the rights of Christian adoption agencies to hold “deeply held beliefs.”
Zachary wrote: “And if you have an issue with my family because of who we are and who we love, maybe you shouldn’t be reading this and keep it moving. If we had not been allowed to adopt them, that’s taking ‘our rights away.’”
“What about all the [LGBT] couples out there that have been stopped from adopting?! What about their rights?” he added.
Participants of the annual National Women’s March argue with anti-abortion activists in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building on Jan. 22, 2023, in Washington, D.C., the 50-year anniversary of the court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Pro-life and pro-choice advocates held opposing demonstrations outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building Sunday on the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling, with both sides speaking on where their respective movements plan to go from here.
The Women’s March advocacy group held its “Bigger Than Roe” rally in Madison, Wisconsin and sister marches in other cities throughout the United States as a message to lawmakers that their “movement is strong” and growing. Representatives of various pro-life groups, including Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, Pro-Life San Francisco and Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust held a rally outside the Supreme Court on the same day, two days after the annual March for Life.
The rally honored multiple veteran pro-life activists who spent years performing rescues, a nonviolent direct-action technique that involves illegally entering abortion facilities to actively intervene with its operations.
A couple hundred Women’s March participants arrived at the Supreme Court in the afternoon, and activists on both sides chanted slogans at one another and held up signs revealing their stance on the abortion issue. Slogans from the pro-life side consisted of chants like, “Abortion is murder; Abortion is oppression,” while Women’s March participants yelled, “Abortion is healthcare.”
Some abortion proponents responded to the pro-life activists’ chants by flipping them off or attempting to silence them by using the siren feature on their megaphones. As the day progressed, the crowd began to dwindle, with advocates on both sides eventually departing.
Terrisa Bukovinac, founder and executive director of PAAU, believes that in the absence of Roe — the 1973 ruling that made abortion a national right that was overturned last June — the pro-life movement must “mobilize a massive amount of people for direct action.”
“We will not have change in this country unless we can harness the power of social tension,” she told The Christian Post.
The pro-life progressive activist acknowledged that some pro-lifers are hesitant about engaging in direct action, as they argue that it is a detriment to the movement. However, Bukovinac believes that “We must break through those fears in order to make change.”
“Just the fact that it’s unpopular and difficult to do doesn’t mean that it isn’t what we need to do because it is. It’s the only way,” she argued. “There’s not another way to end an injustice this massive, a global injustice this massive.”
“Historically speaking, it’s the most effective, and it’s in line with our values as pro-lifers. It’s consistent with our beliefs about opposing violence and promoting human equality,” Bukovinac continued. “Direct action is the only way.”
She wants to see the pro-life movement uplift left-leaning activists, asserting that the movement is “ill-equipped” at the moment to effectively reach the political progressives and atheists who typically hold pro-choice views.
She believes the movement needs to make pro-life “leftists” more “visible” and enable them to address the concerns that their fellow progressives have about right-wing politics while still “getting to the heart of the issue,” which is to “end child killing.”
“Right now, there just aren’t enough visible pro-life Democrats, and the only way to make visible the leftist pro-life movement is to mobilize through direct action,” Bukovinac said.
AJ Hurley, director of Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, said that the rally’s goal and subsequent counter-protest was to celebrate the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the pro-life activists who worked for decades to see it overturned.
“So many people sacrificed incredible amounts of time, energy, and money. So many people stood up against the violence of child killing, and they suffered, and so many never saw this day,” Hurley told CP, calling the “legal child killing in America” the “greatest tragedy in human history.”
Hurley said that the goal of the pro-life movement post-Roe should be to make abortion a crime by ensuring that 14th Amendment protections apply to all human beings “from conception to birth.”
“The deathblow, eventually, to abortion is to recognize that 14th Amendment protections apply to every single human being,” the pro-life activist said. “The science is clear that life begins in the womb at the moment of fertilization.”
One Women’s March protestor, Violet Webster, 20, an Ohio native who now resides in New York, called the overturn of Roe v. Wade “alarming,” saying that she feels as if she has “no control over what goes on in [her] body.”
She told CP that she would like to see states pass laws protecting abortion access, citing Vermont as an example. During the 2022 Midterm elections, Vermont residents voted in favor of Proposal 5, an amendment to the state’s constitution that guarantees a “right” to “personal reproductive autonomy” to all individuals in the state.
Webster told CP that she has always been pro-choice, stating that “people should have a say over what they can do with their bodies.”
“I don’t know if, personally, I would ever get an abortion, but I think that people deserve to have the right to choose,” she added.
Another attendee of the march alongside Webster, who declined to share her name, said she attended a Catholic high school where many were pro-life. She disagreed with the argument, particularly from some teenage boys “who don’t have uteruses,” that “people are murdering babies.”
“We’re just protecting women,” she said, saying that the pro-life position treats women’s lives as less valuable than “potential fetuses.”
Bukovinac, a feminist atheist, argued that abortion is “completely inconsistent” with feminism’s values of “equality, nonviolence and non-discrimination.”
“The women, and people in this country, have been lied to about what a pro-life world looks like and about what it is, and who pro-life people are,” she told CP. “But this is not about taking away rights.”
“This is about expanding rights to those who are most vulnerable, and those who are currently, not just being discriminated against, but being discriminated against to a lethal degree by the hundreds of thousands every single year.”
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After yet another discovery of classified documents at President Joe Biden’s private Delaware home, Senate Democrats made it clear on Sunday that Biden can no longer excuse his way out of the scandal.
On Saturday, the White House announced another set of classified material improperly in Biden’s possession, again found at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home. The Justice Department had conducted a “consent” search (the White House claimed the administration requested it) and discovered more classified material, even some dating to Biden’s days in the U.S. Senate.
What are Democrats saying?
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat, admitted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Biden can no longer attack Donald Trump for the Mar-a-Lago classified document snafu.
“Let’s be honest about it: When that information is found, it diminishes the stature of any person that’s in possession of them. It’s not supposed to happen,” Durbin said. “Whether it was the fault of a staffer or an attorney, it makes no difference. The elected official bears ultimate responsibility.“
There’s a standard that we follow when it comes to members of Congress and classified information. The door to my office is closed. The person who presents the document to me takes it out of a locked briefcase, hands it to me and watches as I read it, when I finish reading it, and he takes it back and puts it in the briefcase and leaves the scene. I mean, that’s how carefully we review these documents.
To think that any of them ended up in boxes in storage one place or the other is just unacceptable.
“To think that any of them ended up in boxes and storage in one place or the other is just unacceptable.”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) reacts to FBI investigators finding additional classified material at President Biden's Wilmington, Delaware, home. #CNNSOTU@CNNSotupic.twitter.com/5zxXxiE5Gm
Meanwhile, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) was asked on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” how Biden could have improperly retained classified documents from his days as a senator.
“I don’t really know the answer to that question because I review classified material as a senator on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, but when I do it, it’s always in a classified facility where I don’t have access to the materials other than to sit there and read them,” Kaine responded.
He continued, “That’s why there needs to be this independent investigation and independent prosecutor. How many documents are we talking about? Dozens? A handful or hundreds? How serious are they? Why were they taken? Did anyone have access to them? And then, is the president being cooperative?“
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said that Biden should have “a lot of regrets.” Manchin was responding to Biden’s declaration last week that he has no regrets for retaining the classified documents.
“I think he should have a lot of regrets,” Manchin said.
“I say, whoever’s responsible — I mean, if I hold people accountable, whether it be my chief of staff or, you know, my staff that were doing this and I’m looking at — then I’m going to hold someone accountable, but basically, the buck stops with me,” he added.
Anything else?
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that a majority of American adults — including registered Democrats — support an investigation into Biden’s improper retention of classified documents.
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A new national study conducted by the Trafalgar Group has found that the majority of Americans surveyed would support an investigation into Dr. Anthony Fauci‘s testimonies and his overall management of the pandemic.
In a national survey of over 1,000 likely voters in the general election, respondents were asked if they support an investigation by Congress into Fauci’s “inconsistent testimony about his research leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic” and his “actions in managing the pandemic.” Over 52% of respondents said “yes,” with nearly 46% responding with “no.” Just over 3% said they were “not sure.”
The responses across party lines were wildly different but still resulted in a majority in favor of such an investigation. Just 25.5% of Democrats supported an investigation, with a resounding 70% against. For Republicans, the gap was even wider between the responses. Over 80% of GOP members were supportive of Congress looking into Fauci, while just under 17% were not.
Respondents who do not identify with either major party, who made up a significant portion of those surveyed (25.1%), were still in favor of an investigation by a majority of 56%. The majority of those surveyed were women (53.3%), and Democrats represented the largest portion of party members who participated (39.3%). The survey was conducted between Jan. 9 and 12, 2023, approximately a week before it was revealed that Dr. Fauci made efforts to shut down theories around the origins of COVID-19, in unredacted emails between himself and the National Institutes of Health.
The NIH emails revealed that some officials thought that the COVID-19 virus seemed to be “engineered.”
Actor and political commentator Russell Brand interviewed a whistleblower who said NIH “leadership and 2,400 of its scientists” have benefited from “$1.4 billion of these hidden, secret third-party royalties” over the past 12 years.
The man, Adam Andrzejewski, also said that the billions in grants and funding that the NIH receives each year buy a lot of influence, alleging that Fauci has massively benefited from public money for his own inventions.
“In 2005, the Associated Press got an unredacted database and they found that Fauci had burned down all the firewalls. He had received $45,000 of royalties for an AIDs therapeutic that he had invented,” Andrzejewski said.
Adding that Fauci “had invested another $36 million of taxpayer money to enhance his invention. And once this was exposed, he said he would donate his royalties to charity.”
The FBI recovered an additional cache of classified documents from President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, following a 12-hour search conducted by federal agents on Friday. While this development adds to the scandal surrounding the current president, it does much more: It highlights the ridiculous plot launched to destroy Donald Trump that culminated in the raid of his Mar-a-Lago home.
“Six items” were recovered on Friday from Biden’s Delaware home, which consisted of “documents with classification markings and surrounding materials,” the president’s lawyer said in a statement released after the search. While the “crafty legalese” deployed by the attorney left unclear how many classified documents were contained within the “six items” recovered, Biden’s lawyer confirmed that the documents dated back to the Delaware Democrat’s time as both vice president and senator, so spanning from 2017 to as far back as 1973.
The president’s lawyers had previously searched the Bidens’ Wilmington home (and garage), and while they discovered a handful of other documents marked classified, they apparently overlooked the “six items” the FBI found last week.
The search of Biden’s home followed the discovery in November 2022 of at least 10 classified documents, including ones reportedly marked “top secret.” Those documents also dated back to his days as vice president under Barack Obama and were stored in a closet at a private office building in D.C. But the so-called “think tank” where they were stored, the Penn Biden Center, did not open until February 2018, meaning Biden had kept the classified documents found there at another location for the year following his time as vice president.
That the classified documents Biden removed from the White House and earlier the Senate were not missed at the time and are only now being discovered — at least a decade later for some — and then only after multiple searches of different locations, contrasts sharply with what happened following Trump’s time in office.
According to then-archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero, he watched “the Trumps leave the White House and getting off in the helicopter” at the end of Trump’s term. Ferriero recalled someone was “carrying a white banker box,” prompting Ferriero to ask himself, “What the hell’s in that box?”
Ferriero claimed, “[T]hat began a whole process of trying to determine whether any records had not been turned over to the Archives,” with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) “going through materials transferred from the White House in the chaotic final days of Trump’s presidency.” According to The Washington Post, “officials had noticed that certain high-profile documents were missing,” such as “Trump’s correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that he had termed ‘love letters.’”
The NARA also could not locate the “National Weather Service map of Hurricane Dorian, which Trump had famously marked up with a black Sharpie pen to extend to Alabama,” or the letter Obama had left for Trump upon the change in administrations.
NARA sought the return of these documents, and in January 2022, Trump representatives worked with NARA employees to arrange for 15 boxes of presidential papers to be returned to the archive. Within those boxes were some documents marked “classified,” which led NARA to refer the matter to the Department of Justice.
The DOJ then launched an investigation into Trump, even though when alerted to Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents, NARA made no such referral. A grand jury later issued a subpoena for any presidential documents, and following a search of Mar-a-Lago by Trump’s representatives, those documents were turned over. However, after a source told the DOJ that some documents remained at Mar-a-Lago, the FBI obtained a search warrant and executed a surprise raid on the former president’s home.
This entire sequence began because NARA went looking for missing documents and then, rather than work with Trump to establish his presidential library and to arrange for the documents to be stored under the auspices of NARA’s custody at a mutually agreeable location — something NARA had done for Obama — NARA created a federal criminal case out of the matter.
Had NARA dug through former Senator and then-Vice President Biden’s documents looking for the smoking gun that was not there, they would have discovered the classified documents Biden absconded with too — and likely many more documents that over the last decade-plus years disappeared forever. Ditto for Obama.
The most recent discovery of “six items” containing an untold number of classified documents at Biden’s Delaware home illustrates this point. It also brings into focus the get-Trump scheme launched by a “backbench bureaucrat” that culminated in the raid on the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home.
With this reality now in focus, Americans would be wise to revisit the timeline leading up to the Mar-a-Lago raid because the Trump classified-document scandal bears all the hallmarks of a hoax peddled by the deep-state cabal and their corrupt media partners.
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.
Censorship-hungry Twitter employees vented to the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 that their company wasn’t authoritarian enough when it came to curbing former President Donald Trump ahead of the 2021 Capitol riot, a newly released 122-page memo shows. “The Twitter Files,” however, prove Big Tech went out of its way to suppress the Republican president long before his ban from the platform on Jan. 8, 2021.
When the Twitter staff, or “Tweeps,” gave witness testimony to the J6 Committee last year, they likely didn’t anticipate a fact-check of their public statements against their internal communications. Then Elon Musk acquired the company in October of 2022 and released internal documents exposing Twitter’s key censorship decisions and election meddling.
Some of the material in the revelations dubbed “The Twitter Files” corroborates what these ex-staffers told the J6 Committee about Twitter’s hesitation to ban Trump until Jan. 8. Many of the uncovered documents and communications, however, prove that long before the riot, Twitter treated Trump differently than it did most world leaders.
Tweeps Agree: Big Tech Not Authoritarian Enough
Anika Navaroli, a member of Twitter’s censorship team, told the J6 Committee in anonymous testimony in July of 2022 that Twitter’s decision to delay the permanent suspension of Trump until after the riot was “absolutely indicative and emblematic of Twitter’s hands-off, willfully ignorant approach to the former President’s rhetoric on the service and on the platform.”
Much like hundreds of Twitter employees who wrote an open letter demanding the president’s permanent suspension, Navaroli claimed she lobbied for the curbing of Trump long before he was banned on Jan. 8, 2021, but her demands for action were ignored.
“For months I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that if nothing — if we made no intervention into what I saw occurring, people were going to die,” Navaroli said in her interview with the Democrat-dominated committee. “On Jan. 5, I realized no intervention was coming. As hard as I had tried to create one or implement one, there was nothing. We were at the whims and the mercy of a violent crowd that was locked and loaded.”
The committee has learned that, on January 5th, there were serious concerns at Twitter about anticipated violence the next day.
"I had been begging… and attempting to raise the reality that… if we made no intervention into what I saw occurring, people were going to die." pic.twitter.com/wjAxwra6XQ
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 12, 2022
Navaroli’s frustrations furthered when, after being tasked with evaluating the validity of Trump’s online rhetoric following the Capitol riot, she ultimately dismissed the outgoing president’s tweets as above board under Twitter’s policies.
“I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” Navaroli wrote in a Slack chat with her colleagues on Jan. 8. “I’ll respond in the elections channel and say that our team has assessed and found no [violations] for the DJT one.”
Navaroli wasn’t alone. Another unnamed member of Twitter’s safety policy team told the J6 Committee that Twitter’s censorship teams weren’t equipped to “find a rationale to suspend the President’s account from the service, and ‘stop the insurrection’” on Jan. 6.
“The team was left to respond to rampant incitement on Twitter under its own initiative, once again without clear instruction,” the committee report states, adding later, “This understaffed, ramshackle made [one of the employees moderating content on Jan. 6] feel like she was a security guard hovering over the Capitol, trying to defend the building as the crowd tweeted out its progress during the course of the assault.”
It’s clear from these accounts that Twitter employees tried to find a cause for deplatforming Trump under the Big Tech company’s then-policies. When they failed to obtain the political results they desired, partisan Twitter executives sidestepped free speech loyalists at the company by changing the rules to target Trump alone. The Capitol riot was simply their catalyst.
Months after Navaroli gave her testimony and Trump was barred from Twitter, members of the J6 Committee were still publicly praising her for “answering the call of the Committee and your country.”
Corporate media such as The Washington Post elevated her as “the most prominent Twitter insider known to have challenged the tech giant’s conduct toward Trump.” Business Insider amplified Navaroli with the headline, “Twitter whistleblower who foresaw the violence of Jan. 6 reveals her identity with an omen for the future of US democracy.”
Navaroli’s testimony, along with other witnesses, helped Democrats conclude that “Trump’s suspension ended the preferential treatment Twitter gave his account for years” and that Big Tech failed to prevent violence by delaying its permanent ban on Trump until after the Capitol riot.
“The former employee’s testimony confirms that Twitter saw President Trump’s potential violent incitement of his supporters as a cause for concern even prior to Election Day but chose not to take effective actions to prevent him from using the platform in this way. Moreover, this failure to act was consistent with Twitter’s longstanding deferential treatment of President Trump,” the report states.
Twitter Did Treat Trump Differently
The effort to permanently bar Trump may have concentrated around the Capitol riot and culminated with a mad scramble on Jan. 8, as Navaroli suggested. Still, as “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi noted in part three of the exposé, “the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.”
Executives such as Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former legal and policy executive Vijaya Gadde, and Twitter’s recently fired general counsel and FBI veteran Jim Baker spent months building a network that could quickly respond to suppression requests and easily strike violative content and users.
“[T]he firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6,” Taibbi noted.
The treatment Trump received from Twitter’s top censors may have been different, but it was far from the “deferential treatment” the J6 Committee concluded had occurred. Contrary to Tweeps’ testimonies, Trump faced several bouts of censorship including Twitter reducing the reach of his tweets, shadowbanning him, labeling his tweets with warnings, and temporarily suspending his account long before the Capitol riot.
As independent journalist Bari Weiss noted in part five of “The Twitter Files,” the Big Tech company was far more eager to justify that kind of censorship against Trump than to use it against actual dictators.
Twitter staff and executives were so overcome with their hatred for Trump that they were willing to create a reason to deplatform the president. What those employees didn’t anticipate is that their shenanigans would be blown open by “The Twitter Files” mere months after they gave sworn testimony to Democrats in Congress.
As evidenced by “The Twitter Files,” there was nothing stopping Tweeps from deplatforming Trump. In fact, Twitter, cheered by the same Democrats, worked for years to silence its political enemies at whatever cost.
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.
Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” shares a clip of Rebel News’ Ezra Levant and Avi Yemini asking all the hard questions about COVID transmission and vaccine efficacy of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
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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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Republican congressmen introduced a resolution earlier this month to authorize American military action against the terroristic drug cartels that have overwhelmed Mexican government forces and trafficked the number one killer of adults 18-45 into the United States. That resolution is fast gaining support in the House.
Reps. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) introduced a resolution on Jan. 12 to “authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for trafficking fentanyl or a fentanyl-related substance into the United States or carrying out other related activities that cause regional destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.”
Unmitigated crisis
TheBlaze previously reported that fentanyl is the leading killer of adults ages 18-45. 10% of the significant drop in life expectancy recently noted in the U.S. has been attributed to the corresponding spike in opioid overdoses, which exceeded 80,000 in 2021. Rep. David Trone (D-Md.) said in September that “It’s equivalent to one 737 (jet) every day going down, no survivors. It’s a mind-boggling number of deaths.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2019 to 2020, opioid-involved death rates increased by 38% and synthetic opioid-involved death rates went up by 56%. The Congressional Joint Economic Committee concluded last year that the financial damage of the opioid crisis, after adjusting for inflation, carried a cost to the U.S. economy in 2020 of approximately $1.47 trillion, representing a $487 billion increase over 2019 and a 37% increase from 2017.
“Not only are these paramilitary transnational criminal organizations responsible for killing an unprecedented number of Americans, but they are actively undermining our sovereignty by destabilizing our border and waging war against U.S. law enforcement and the Mexican military,” added the Florida Republican.
Crenshaw claimed that the cartels are at war with the U.S., “poisoning more than 80,000 Americans with fentanyl every year, creating a crisis at our border, and turning Mexico into a failed narco-state.”
“It’s time we directly target them,” said Crenshaw. “We cannot allow heavily armed and deadly cartels to destabilize Mexico and import people and drugs into the United States. We must start treating them like ISIS – because that is who they are.”
The “Authorization for Use of Military Force Cartel Influence Resolution” would enable the president to lay waste to the cartels. According to the legislation, the criminal groups fit for annihilation include the: Sinaloa cartel; Jalisco New Generation cartel; Gulf cartel; Los Zetas cartel; Northeast cartel; Juarez cartel; Tijuana cartel; Beltran-Levya cartel; and La Familia Michoacana or Knight Templar cartel.
Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines told Fox News earlier this week that some of these Mexican cartels effectively control vast stretches of the U.S. southern border.
“Unless this situation changes and we take back control from the cartels, for the trafficking coming across our border, it will only get worse,” said Lines.
The cartels whose drugs have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans are getting increasingly brazen, especially as the efforts by Mexican military and police force repeatedly prove wanting, despite receiving billions of dollars in assistance from the U.S. since 2006.
The Council on Foreign Relations noted in a report last year that Mexico has seen over 360,000 murders since 2006, when the government declared war on the cartels.
At least 10 Mexican military personnel and one Culiacan policeman were slain earlier this month after authorities arrested the son of Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Parts of the country were transformed into warzones.
Sinaloa Cartel firing a .50 Cal Barrett anti-materiel rifle at a plane of the Mexican Air Force near the Culiacán Airport following the arrest of El Chapo’s son Ovidio pic.twitter.com/tF7PX6aeDE
Waltz told Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures” earlier this month, “They are defeating the Mexican army. These are paramilitary entities with billions and billions at their disposal.”
Extra to dealing in death and violence, the cartels have also exacerbated the crisis at the border. Arizona Republic reported in December that cartels “have increased their involvement in migrant smuggling over the past decade, transforming the operation into a multibillion-dollar enterprise.”
They have played a significant role in violating American sovereignty by helping to smuggle illegal aliens into the U.S. U.S. Customs and Border Protection indicated that so far, this fiscal year, over 717,660 illegal aliens have stolen across the border. 2.37 million were encountered crossing the border last year, and another 1.7 million were reported crossing the year before.
Recognizing the need to put these cartels in the ground, Reps. Jake Ellzey (R-Texas) and Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas) signed on to cosponsor the legislation on Jan. 17. Just the News reported that Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) will similarly cosponsor the resolution. To go into effect, the resolution must be passed by both the House and the Senate and then signed by the president.
It is unclear what impact this war measure will have on China, America’s preeminent adversary, which is reportedly involved with the cartels’ manufacture of fentanyl. According to Craig Singleton, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “since approximately 2013, China has been the principal source of the fentanyl flooding America’s illicit drug market.” The Republican Study Committee in the previous Congress indicated that “a significant portion of China’s fentanyl manufacturing … moved to Mexico where cartels set up their own operations to produce fentanyl using precursor chemicals from China.”
It doesn’t require a degree in rocket science to realize our country is polarized. Not just politically speaking, but socially, emotionally, religiously, spiritually, and in every way possible.
So much so, that many of us have lost our perspectives along the way. This is indeed an inflection point, because due to our much-splintered societal focus- everything we thought we knew has changed.
In recognition concerning events of late, I’m reminded of these words adapted from 15th century writer John Heywood: “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” Simply put, you can’t see the problem- because you’re concentrating too hard on it.
Sometimes the answer isn’t what you want to believe. Considering the recent Damar Hamlin incident in which the 24-year-old Buffalo Bills’ safety suffered a cardiac arrest on the field as they began their skirmish- it provides the perfect preface.
By all accounts, Hamlin’s condition prior to the game was sound with no health challenges or issues. In high school, Hamlin led his team to a 15-1 record. According to npr.org, he also helped his school garner a ”WPIAL Class AAAA championship and PIAA state title during his final year in high school. In his career thus far with the Bills, he has played in all 15 games so far, tallying 91 tackles (tied for second-most on the Bills), six tackles for loss, two pass breakups and 1.5 sacks this season.”
So why isn’t this the question: “Why would a perfectly healthy football star suddenly have a massive heart attack?”
Before you go into the sports media-buzz rhetoric about the violence of the game being a factor or an accessory culprit, think about these examples:
In August of 2022, a 20-year-old Canadian hockey player died after collapsing during a tournament. According to an article on people.com, Eli Palfreyman, the captain of the Ayr Centennials collapsed in the locker room during a pre-season game. Chest compressions were administered by his trainer but were unsuccessful. He died shortly after being taken to the hospital. The article continued: “Per Shantz, his father told the athletes, “The happiest day in Eli’s life was when he was named captain, and he said you cannot take a shift off the rest of the year because Eli’s spirit will be pushing you to do your best every shift, and I want to see it.”
Shantz added of the emotional meeting, “Then the mother spoke and, you know, the tears were just flowing everywhere when a grieving mother speaks about her son. And instead of going inward, she just talked about us and everything that we did. She was there, she saw it and she just praised us. She said, ‘I know how hard you worked to save Eli.’”
Despite the understandable shock, sadness and disbelief, the question still isn’t being taken under consideration, so I ask again, “how could he possibly be dead at 20?”
Next up is the rising MMA star Victoria Lee.
At only 5 ft 5, and 115 lbs., Victoria Sun-hei Lee was nicknamed, “The Prodigy.” The ONE Championship star was the third in her family to compete, following older sibling’s fighters Angela and Christian Lee. After only her third year in MMA, her short-but-amazing career spawned 3 fights, culminating in 3 wins and zero losses. She had recently paused her meteoric rise to focus on graduating, having not quite finished high school.
Getting her start at age 11, her future looked bright, promising and historic. Fellow Hawaiian UFC fighter Dan Ige was disappointed by the reaction of some concerning the 18-year-old’s sudden death, when he spoke in the MMA Junkie section at CNN.com:
“Was it the vaccine? Was it mental health? Was it this? Was it that? Like, give them freaking respect, because that’s their tragedy, that’s their loss. … Give them some respect.” Pleaded Ige. “An 18-year-old girl passes, and they’re going to mourn that for the rest of their lives. We’re going to wake up Monday and f*cking read the newspaper, ‘What’s next?’ They have to mourn that. It’s an absolute tragedy. They were definitely weighing on my heart, and the only thing you can do is pray for them, because she’s gone, and there’s no bringing her back.”
Tragically, the only answers that we received concerning the mysterious death of one so young is, “no cause of death is shared.” While the tragedies these families suffer is no doubt unimaginable, we find ourselves with more questions than answers. And despite not knowing the causes of death, many are quick to dismiss the vaccine.
Question Everything!
According to the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) it was revealed that there was more than 5,000 deaths and adverse reactions from the experimental vaccines. Although this article records several untimely deaths of youth in the prime of their lives, we are discovering more tragic fatal cardiac episodes striking our young people almost daily.
For many, we chose to dismiss the governmental push to take an unapproved, unproven, untested chemical and inject it into our bodies. For others, they chose to ignore the science and follow the rhetoric, despite the limited testing and lack of results (positive or negative) thus far. As it stands by example, vaccine deaths occur even more in those vaccinated than in those that are not. For instance, vaccination matters, even as it comes to light that more people who were vaccinated against COVID-19 died in August than those who weren’t vaccinated, according to an analysis by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).
Cox undertook the analysis for The Health 202, which is published by The Washington Post. Kff.org reads: “The share of COVID-19 deaths among those who are vaccinated has risen. In fall 2021, about 3 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted. But by January 2022, as we showed in an analysis posted on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, about 4 in 10 deaths were vaccinated or boosted. By April 2022, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show that about 6 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted, and that’s remained true through at least August 2022 (the most recent month of data).”
To date, millions have taken the vaccines, as well as the boosters. Some out of fear; others out of caution, no doubt impatient concerning what the virus could do. Based on the real science, based on what we’ve learned since then, many are now realizing they should have waited longer.
If you find it fascinating that Joe Biden’s 2016 through 2018 tax returns have been removed from his website, join the crowd.
The reason those particular years hold lots of interest lies in the numbers. Below is a graphic from Fox News that posts the Bidens’ income from when Joe Biden played VP for Obama in 2016. Then, the graphic shows how the Biden’s feasted in the post-Obama years, leading into his ill-fated run for and ultimate coup to “win” the presidency.
But the numbers are even more fascinating when you look at Biden’s 2019 returns:
Biden’s return shows that DOCTOR Jill made $944,737 in taxable income in 2019 and paid $299,346, or a 31% tax rate, in federal income taxes. So, in 2017 and 2018, the Bidens took in $15,651,242. That’s almost $8 million per year. What could have possibly driven up the Biden’s income by more than 20 times their income in 2016?
Two words: Hunter Biden.
It’s very convenient that the Bidens chose these specific years to “perform maintenance” on the returns. Believe it or not, that is the excuse given for taking down their taxes. Not the revelation that Hunter Biden claims he paid The Big Guy almost $50,000 a month for rent.
And as we’ve learned, Biden claimed about $21,000 in rental income for 2017 and $0 for rental income for 2018. If Hunter Biden’s declaration is true, Joe and Jill made almost $600,000 from March 2017 to the end of the year, and about $100,000 in rental income in 2018 thru Feb of that year.
Which Biden is lying? Either way, both Bidens have some explaining to do.
Links on JoeBiden.com to the Biden’s federal and Delaware tax returns from 2019 can still be viewed on the website. And I suspect they left 2019 up, since those returns had the most reasonable earnings for a do-nothing brain-dead moron and his narcissistic wife. As for 2016 to 2018 returns, click those buttons and you get redirected to a Democrat donations page.
Amended returns?
Could we see Joe and Jill Biden file amended returns? Because I’m betting, they will try to correct the record with a “no harm no foul” amended return. And this return will include Hunter Biden’s money. What excuse can they use? I have no idea. But nobody takes down returns for “maintenance”, unless by “maintenance” you mean SPIN!
How much media coverage do you expect from this development? If you believe as I do, you don’t expect much coverage since the players are Bidens. However, if this were Trump you can bet this would be the lead, i.e., the top story for media.
Discrepancy?
The Federalist asked the same questions I’m asking. Who bought this many Biden books? Because neither I nor they believe Biden sold enough books to enter 8 digits of income.
From The Federalist:
The same media that ignored Hunter’s laptop has shown a complete incuriosity about these entities, accepting the premise that Joe and Jill raked in $13 million from their book deal to generate their huge increase in income. We simply don’t know if that’s true, though. What we do know is that their book sales were dismal.
Perhaps sensing smoke starting to build just before the election, USA Today published a “fact check” piece that attempted to support that the Bidens earned “$15.6 million … from speaking fees and book deals” in the years 2017 through 2019 and that “more than $10 million of that total income was profits from Biden’s memoir ‘Promise Me, Dad’ and $3 million in profits from Jill Biden’s book.”
Follow the source link provided to that $10 million number, though, and you’ll end up at Joe Biden’s campaign website with financial disclosure links to only their individual returns — no S-corporation tax returns. So, in reality, readers were left with a smokescreen. (Now the financial disclosure links for 2016, 2017, and 2018 have even been changed to connect to a Democratic National Committee fundraising site via ActBlue rather than the tax documents.)
I noted back in 2020 that, “While (Joe Biden’s) financial disclosures reasonably support the $2.7 million of net income reported by CelticCapri in 2018, a notable $8.7 million gap exists between its $9.5 million net income in 2017 and the $809,709 of disclosed income in that year from book tour and related speaking events. Since his disclosure covers only part of 2017, we lack the insight into other income that may explain it.”
I agree with The Federalist that the USA Today article is meant to provide cover for the Bidens. Sadly, it’s a feeble attempt for cover should anybody actually look more closely at these book deals.
There is nobody alive at this point who could possibly ignore the dangers of the mRNA COVID shots. Rather than taking them off the market and immediately investigating who knew what and when, the same companies are now filing with the FDA to immediately introduce more mRNA shots into the market. They will immediately be championed by every county and state health department and promoted by every pediatrician until they’re in the arms of every newborn baby. The mRNA flu and RSV shots are just around the corner, and if states do not place legal barriers to their release, they could possibly do even more damage than the COVID shots, if that is even possible.
Moderna is so brazen and shameless that even as millions are suffering from their first mRNA shot, the company is announcing that its new RSV mRNA shots are … you guessed it … 84% effective. Well, judging by the COVID shot that they said was 94% effective from day one but in fact is now suffering from a bout with negative efficacy, we can only imagine how “safe and effective” a jab that is advertised as “only” 84% effective might be. Pfizer’s Albert Bourla also announced the company will have an mRNA flu shot out in June or July and then another combo coronavirus/flu shot based on an mRNA platform sometime later in the year.
After Moderna leaked the top-line results of its own in-house study (no third-party studies needed, of course), Stephane Bancel, the company’s CEO, told CNBC at Davos that the company was able to complete all three phases of the RSV vaccine clinical trial in just one year (instead of six to eight years) and will now file for expedited approval with the FDA so that it’s on the market for this coming fall. A nice follow-up to his revelation that the company already worked on the COVID vaccine before the virus had a name!
Moderna CEO Explains How Their Vaccine Has Your Cells Produce a "Key Protein of the RSV Virus"
"We started the Phase 1 for the RSV vaccine in Jan 2021. And we are just 24 months after announcing Phase 3 positive data. So think about how we have [reduced that] from 6-8 years." pic.twitter.com/SCpn1a4Yov
Consider the fact that RSV was the poster child for a failed vaccine in the 1960s and the pharmaceutical industry has been unable to produce an effective shot for 55 years. Yet we are to believe that the company was somehow able to magically crack the code, and of course, it won’t replicate any of the problems the COVID shot induced. Has anyone ever wondered how a company that failed to bring a single product to market for eight years could abruptly become the star player in the biggest pandemic ever and then suddenly have more than a dozen mRNA products ready to go?
Well, after we solve the question of how Moderna seemed to have patented the sequence for the COVID virus in a cancer drug the company was developing in 2016, perhaps we can discover the secret to its success.
Maria Bartiromo: 'Why is Moderna's patented sequence in the Wuhan coronavirus?' Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel: 'We're looking into it.' Maria: 'OK. Thx for all your help!'
Incidentally, 11 months after Maria Bartiromo asked Bancel about Moderna having patented the sequence, he still has not gotten back to us about the reason behind the great coincidence. What we do know is that a company that seems to ascertain the future more than a Biblical prophet is now asserting that there will be more pandemics and is making it clear it now has mRNA production in every continent.
DAVOS WATCH: Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna says “the pandemic is still ongoing” and “we all know” there will be other outbreaks and pandemics
He also lays out his plan to build more MRNA Vaccine factories on every continent across the globe #wef23pic.twitter.com/IuqiXpcw3T
Even before discussing the RNA platform, we must realize that RSV is the worst candidate even for a traditional vaccine. One of the things we should all have observed from the COVID shots is that rapidly evolving RNA viruses are prone to mutation, and the antibody responses stimulated by shots don’t seem to be a good match for respiratory viruses. This is why even the CDC admits the flu shot was only 16% effective last year, which makes us wonder if the real number is in negative territory. Suboptimal antibodies or a mismatch of classes of antibodies can create immune imprinting and allow the body to either tolerate the virus more or serve as a Trojan horse to enhance the virus, which is what happened with the old failed RSV shot.
The RSV vaccine of 1967 was an utter disaster, resulting in the hospitalization of 80% of the infants and toddlers in the clinical trial. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, on its website, explains that the RSV shot was a textbook example of misfiring antibodies creating antibody-dependent disease enhancement, whereby the “antibodies act as a ‘Trojan horse,’ allowing the pathogen to get into cells and exacerbate the immune response.”
“In clinical trials, children who were given the vaccine were more likely to develop or die from pneumonia after infection with RSV,” states the website of the prominent children’s hospital. “As a result of this finding, the vaccine trials stopped, and the vaccine was never submitted for approval or released to the public.”
Now let’s get to the mRNA platform. While it’s true that many of the problems with the COVID shots stem from the spike protein, which is why every version of the shot out on the market is problematic, the mRNA itself is also dangerous. What should be self-evident to anyone at this point based on literature that was published pretty early on is that there is no shutoff or modulator of the mRNA coding your body. So even if it doesn’t code your body to produce something as harmful as a pathogenic spike, there is no ability to ensure the mRNA doesn’t go throughout your entire body producing that protein, tissue, or code for an unlimited period of time and in unknown quantities. Almost nothing is purely good in unlimited quantities and unlimited locations in your body for an unlimited period of time.
This is before we even focus on questions of the pro-inflammatory nature of the lipid nano particles delivering the mRNA, the polyethylene glycolcasing around it causing autoimmune and allergic reactions, and numerous other materials that have never been properly studied. Then of course there are a number of studies that indicate a substantial risk of the mRNA reverse transcribing into DNA:
Shouldn’t we conclusively rule out the concerns of DNA transcription raised in these papers before truncating the next mRNA development from eight years to one year?
Thus, aside from targeted therapies for terminally ill patients, clearly mRNA is not ready for prime time and must be banned, because clearly the system will not self-regulate. Vaccination has become a cult with no qualification, circumspection, modulation, or balanced rational thought. As Mike Ryan, an Irish doctor who serves as executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme, recently said, “Vaccination is about protecting yourself, but it’s also an inherently altruistic act — you’re vaccinating yourself in order to be part of an immune group that will then protect those who can’t be vaccinated.” It’s therefore quite obvious they will target the RSV shots to children with even more cultish devotion than the COVID shots.
Everyone knows that babies are more vulnerable to RSV and the flu than to COVID. The companies will engage in full-court press to get this shot in the arms of every baby. Blocking mandates is not good enough. We have more than enough information to demonstrate that these shots are dangerous and are not ready for prime time. Every state must ban its own health department from purchasing, promoting, recommending, or marketing these shots. Furthermore, every state needs a commission of diverse voices to shadowbox the FDA and make its own recommendations, similar to what Governor Ron DeSantis established under the guidance of Dr. Joe Ladapo.
Most Republicans are willing to fight intrepidly against abortion, even when it’s politically unpopular. Yet mRNA shots are like a forced abortion because the minute they are permitted, even if they are not mandated, there is no enlightened consent. Unsuspecting parents, pregnant women, and seniors will be pressured into getting them. We still don’t know the extent to which they might shed on other people. Also, there is a robust effort from a $26 billion industry to inject them into the beef supply.
Most of all, while states create a backstop against federal-pharma experimentation, it’s incumbent upon Republicans in the House to repeal pharma’s legal immunity to liability. That is the best way to ensure that vaccines are safe and we can discover any malfeasance in court. Absent these reforms, they will continue to experiment upon our children. And what do they care if countless lives are lost or injured? They’ll just produce the mRNA to “fix it,” like they are planning with their much-anticipated mRNA cure for heart attacks!
“Freedom is our essence, our brand name — the abiding idea that right here, anyone from anywhere can accomplish anything,” so said the stunt double for Gordon Gekko’s hair, Gavin Newsom, upon being sworn in for his second term as the governor of California. Never mind that California was the exemplar of draconian lockdown policies designed to stop Covid, nor that businesses are fleeing the state, nor that it’s using “1984” as a roadmap. If Gov. French Laundry says it’s true, as he’s taking shots at potential future presidential rivals in Florida and Texas, it must be true.
And maybe it is true on Earth-2. California was once the home of innovation and a bastion of America’s independent spirit. The expression “As goes California, so goes the nation” didn’t gain currency because it was incorrect. But as another expression says: That was then, this is now. For in the now, it’s southern states and governors who are leading the way on freedom, empowering citizens, rebuilding infrastructure, and returning to the lost ideal of just leaving people alone.
When it comes to policies that actually promote freedom, states like Florida, Texas, and, God willing, my own Arkansas are doing much more to promulgate the free expression of the American spirit than Beijing on the Bay. How do we know this? Well, while actions speak louder than words, the actions of the governors of those states show they’re not afraid to put their money where their mouths are.
When Ron DeSantis was sworn in for his second term as governor, in a previously purple state in which he won reelection by almost 19 points, his inaugural speech proclaimed Florida as a bastion of freedom, but he has the stats to back it up. From fighting indoctrination masquerading as education to battling woke corporate excess to remembering that conservation is a conservative value, he has a record.
When Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was elected the first female governor of Arkansas by a margin of roughly 27 points, was sworn in, she immediately began issuing executive orders fighting racism masked as education while urging the legislature to enshrine the orders so that future governors could not rescind them. She repealed five executive orders left in place by her Republican predecessor, Asa Hutchinson, regarding Covid. And she instituted a promotion and hiring freeze for state workers and made it impossible for state government agencies to issue new regulations without her approval.
And when Greg Abbott, who dealt Robert Francis “Novice Air Drummer” O’Rourke his latest defeat, was sworn in for his third term as governor of Texas, the new technology and innovation hub of America, he sounded the alarms on indoctrination, public safety, and the crisis at America’s southern border as well as offering a positive vision for the future of Texas. He stressed the need to focus on infrastructure and ensuring that the state’s power grid is prepared not just for the next four years “but for the next 40 years.”
Texas’ population has grown to more than 30 million people while California’s population has declined. And it’s no wonder why; it must be reassuring to these ex-Californians that their new home is being proactive in preventing the rolling brownouts of their former state. They can also take solace in the fact that Abbott didn’t give into Covid hysteria and has helped foster a climate that has drawn more than a few businesses from the Golden State to the Lone Star State.
It’s not just Texas that’s growing, but also Florida. Being open for business during the disastrous response to Covid propelled the state to the leader of the pack for growth for the first time since 1957. (Arkansas is also growing, and being home to the world’s largest retailer — and non-governmental employer — helps, though that company may soon need to be reined in akin to how DeSantis reined in Disney.)
Factor in Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia in 2021, and it really seems like these southerners are onto something. Whereas conservatives in the past just wanted to be left alone, so do conservatives in the present day. However, with regulatory and Big Business busybodies unwilling to leave us alone, we need executives who will fight back.
The future of the country isn’t found in an office, it’s found in our communities, the place closest to us that we also tend to ignore, but at this moment, we also need pugilists who are willing to stand up for normalcy and vibrancy. The freshly sworn-in trio in the South is offering us that. As California goes, so goes the nation is one possibility. But if we pay attention and keep electing leaders like these, the other possibility is that as goes the South, so goes the nation.
Freedom is neither an essence nor a slogan, it’s a way of life that must be protected.
Richard Cromwell is a writer and senior contributor at The Federalist. He lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife, three daughters, and two crazy dogs. Co-host of the podcast Coffee & Cochon, you can find him on Facebook and Twitter, though you should probably avoid using social media.
It’s been a good year for classical Christian education. New school starts are up threefold, a book on classical education became No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and on Jan. 26, Fox Nation will release season two of a popular series on classical Christian education, “The Miseducation of America.” Of course, with growth comes attention. What is unusual this time is that someone with ties to our movement — one of our own — draws focus to a growing divide.
On Jan. 12, in the online journal Current, Jessica Hooten Wilson asked, “Is White Supremacy a Bug or a Feature of Classical Christian Education?” It should come as no surprise that, within her mainstream academic ecosphere as a scholar at Pepperdine University, she gets pressure. “I experience regular pushback from those who perceive [classical Christian education] as white, Western-only, and male-dominated.” She proceeds to cast aspersions on a few people and organizations — including, indirectly, mine. Her accusations become a pretext for her thesis: “If the classical Christian school movement is to survive — let alone flourish — we must oppose all forms of racism and misogyny and stand with the beauty, goodness, and truth that we hold up for our students.” I’ll take her up on that charge.
Hooten Wilson is a staccato note at the end of a new tune within our circles. Her article praises those groups she believes are taking the right steps. So far, I’ve heard no one publicly state the thesis so clearly as she does: “We should peruse the authors of the works and, if applicable, the editors or introductory writers to ensure an assortment of voices … as well as an equality of both sexes. If we look at the table of contents of a textbook or a reading list for a semester and find not a single woman or person of color in that list, then that curriculum is misrepresenting the classical Christian tradition.”
Choosing the Classical Canon
For the better part of three millennia, philosophical, theological, and literary authors labored to create the classical canon, representing countless cultural influences. Over much of this same time period, learned scholars have made lists of those that deserve “canon” status. It is unclear if there are minorities or women in Cassiodorus’ list of authors (400 A.D.), or Leonardo Bruni or Battista Guarino’s lists (humanists from the 1400s) — they don’t use those categories. Mortimer Adler and his team of about 40 renowned scholars chose the most widely recognized list of books in our time based upon their contribution to “the great conversation.” Adler’s merit-based criteria required a work to have changed the course of history and to have developed the collective Western mind. What Adler’s team did not do is look to race or sex as criteria.
The Western classical tradition has long included people of every race and sex in a particular way: The tradition deals with a body of texts that address the universal truths about the human condition, rising above our culture’s current quest to silo everyone into an intersection of identity.
Whatever your identity may be, the long journey toward Aeneus’ destiny amplifies the tension between duty and desire. The hilarity of twins unknown to each other, living in the same city, begets “A Comedy of Errors,” no matter your race or sex. Would Hooten Wilson tell the young women and minorities in our schools that they cannot fully converse with these texts because their voices are not represented in them? Shall our schools sacrifice universal human dignity on the altar of token inclusion? Hooten Wilson limits her criteria to women and minorities. Some, like Kimberle Crenshaw, will not be satisfied with this attempt to diversify our reading lists — there will always be one more disaffected group.
Duped into Old-Fashioned Racism and Sexism
By Hooten Wilson’s standard, we must scrape and scrape until we find a “fair” representation of “diverse” contributors. “I am especially excited about the number of women that we added to the Middle Ages list. … Classical schools should look through their reading lists to make sure women and persons of color are not excluded from their curriculum.” Classical Christian education should not be duped by the spirit of our age into old-fashioned racism or sexism. This spirit was cultivated not by our tradition, as Hooten Wilson claims, but rather by the Frankfurt School.
During the 1930s, a group of cultural Marxist scholars set up shop at Columbia University. The Frankfurt School set out on a mission to end the influence of Christianity in our culture. Their thickly veiled product called critical theory deliberately divides us by whispering one small lie, presented in two axioms: For a person to relate to anything, or gain from anything — in this case an intellectual tradition — it must have elements that “look like them” and match their “identity.” And, a second axiom follows: Thus, if something does not contain “diverse and inclusive” elements, it is racist or misogynist. These fruits of critical theory travel down a circuitous path from the Frankfurt School, to Hooten Wilson’s proposal, to a few classical educators who take incremental steps toward critical theory — all of this under the trendy label of “inclusiveness.”
True Liberation Through Classical Christian Education
Classical education was created to, and has, liberated the minds of countless people groups in history, and it is capable of doing the same in America today — and beyond. It has been at the forefront of the march for freedom and education; for individual rights apart from race or class or sex. If we let the very toxin that infects progressive education get into our classrooms, we’re doomed. This toxin was created and propagated by those who hate our tradition. Should we voluntarily drink it?
My daughter recently graduated from New Saint Andrews College. This is one of the institutions that those in Hooten Wilson’s camp label “misogynist.” The college seeks to uphold and respect traditional Christian femininity, which displeases feminists who seem to hate femininity. Misogyny? When my daughter brought her friends to our home over Thanksgiving, I remember listening to the conversation and thinking, “Where do these women come from? They’re strong, bright, extremely well-read, fluent in ancient languages, and honoring of Christian truth — including their God-given womanhood.” None were weak women. All seemed faithful, happy, and confident. I don’t think any of them would want Hooten Wilson’s prescription for their reading list.
Is Racism a Bug or a Feature in Classical Christian Education?
The Frankfurt School’s purpose was to deconstruct. To do so, they inserted a “bug” in our educational system: critical theory, and all of its descendent forms. Some in our movement now offer a batch of code that has this bug embedded deeply within it — in the form of reading lists. By Hooten Wilson’s reckoning, these groups are heading in the right direction. The rest of us are not. Will our institutions continue to follow her lead by adopting coded terms like “Kingdom Diversity”? Or will we recognize the code as a virus and say, “No thank you. The classical Christian tradition is above all that nonsense — and the nonsense of white nationalists, by the way. May a plague be on all your racist houses.”
If classical Christian education is to survive, it has to reject the foolishness of our age and embrace Christ’s way alone. Christ’s church favors neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.
The humanities are great because they unite. They are universal. Women and non-Europeans are now, in our present time, contributing to classical Christian education in spades. I work so that all children can rise up and join the great conversation without barriers.
“Identity,” however, won’t fit here. Check it at the door. We are Christ’s. We are classical. Those who want to be loved by the spirit of our age will become intoxicated by it, and slowly die of its poison.
David Goodwin is the editor of The Classical Difference magazine, the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, and the co-author of The New York Times no. 1 best seller “Battle for the American Mind.” You can find him at Substack.
Adam Schiff and a group of Democrats introduced a proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision, one of the greatest free-speech victories in history.
It’s just a political stunt, of course, as Schiff doesn’t have the votes. But it does reflect the authoritarian outlook of the contemporary left on free expression. From the day the decision came down, 13 years ago this week, Citizens United was a rallying cry for those threatened by unregulated discourse. President Barack Obama infamously, and inaccurately, rebuked the justices during his State of the Union for upholding the First Amendment. Since then, Democrats have regularly blamed the decision for the alleged corrosion of “democracy.”
Recall, however, that Citizens United decision revolved around the federal government’s banning of a documentary critical of 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton before the Democratic primary elections. At the time, McCain-Feingold made it illegal for corporations (groups of freely associating citizens) and unions (ditto) to engage in “electioneering” a month before a primary or two months before a general election. It was outright censorship. In oral arguments, then-Solicitor General of the United States, now-Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan initially contended that the federal government had the right to censor books that “express advocacy.”
Also recall that “campaign finance” laws — speech codes, in reality — were written by politicians and defended by a media encumbered by any limitations on their own free expression. These detestable laws prohibited groups of citizens from assembling and pooling their resources to engage more effectively in what is the most important kind of political expression at the most vital time, right before an election.
Schiff’s amendment would overturn Citizens United, and thus the First Amendment, and empower state and federal governments to enact “reasonable, viewpoint-neutral” limitations on speech that “influences” elections.
For one thing, even a wholly neutral restrictions on political speech were possible, they would still be restrictions on expression. It doesn’t matter one whit if you find those restrictions “reasonable” or “neutral.” The right of free speech isn’t contingent on fairness or outcomes or your good faith limitations. It is a free-standing, inherent right protected by the Constitution, not prescribed to us by the state in portions. It’s amazing that this has to be said.
Moreover, do Democrats trust Kevin McCarthy’s conception of “reasonable”? Because I don’t. Nor do I trust Hakeem Jeffries or that weasel Schiff, who has already personally engaged in censoring dissent. As Lois Lerner could tell you, any law empowering bureaucrats to define political speech will be arbitrarily enforced and, inevitably, abused. The only “viewpoint-neutral” position on speech is that it’s none of the state’s business.
Then again, not even the amendment is neutral. Section 4 of Schiff’s proposal offers an exemption to the “press.” Who is the press? Bureaucrats, no doubt, will make that determination. Schiff knows that most large communication companies already work for Democrats. The big studios produce movies and documentaries with one ideological viewpoint; and major news outlets give one side billions in in-kind contributions. The amendment would strip one group of its power to compete in the marketplace of ideas. “By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority in Citizens United, “the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice.”
Schiff’s amendment could also be used to strip people of anonymity. “Dark money” has been a bogeyman of the left for years, treated as one of the most corrosive elements in contemporary politics — even though leftists are more reliant on anonymous big-dollar money than conservatives. Of course, the expectation that private citizens have any responsibility to publicly attach their names to political speech — as Publius might tell you — is destructive nonsense.
“Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority,” the 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission famously noted. It “exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation … at the hand of an intolerant society.” There are entire genres of mainstream “reporting” that exist to dox heretics and punish dissent and engage in struggle sessions. Leftists want to create as many Brendan Eichs as possible to chill speech.
Schiff claims he wants to “return power to people” by allowing the state to prescribe the way they can participate in political debate. Schiff’s amendment includes restricting corporations from spending “unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.” Corporations have been banned from donating directly to candidates since 1907. But why shouldn’t private entities, groups of people, be allowed to “influence” politics? Anyway, you can already imagine the malleability of the word “influence.” Will California ban corporations from influencing green policy? Or only from influencing cultural policy? Boy, I wonder.
A decade ago, politicians would give us some perfunctory words about the importance of free expression. Those days are gone. The bogus panic over “disinformation” — without free will, you guys are far too susceptible to bad ideas — has given them the excuse to wring their hands over the dangerous excesses of the First Amendment.
These days a person can contribute as much money as they please to any independent group that shares their values. The notion that there should be restrictions stopping you from airing those views, whether you’re a billionaire or a poor student, is fundamentally un-American and authoritarian.
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 Christian charity worker in Malta could face jail time after he claimed that his faith enabled him to turn away from a homosexual lifestyle he no longer wanted.
Matthew Grech, 33, faces potential fines and imprisonment for allegedly falling afoul of his country’s ban on “conversion practices” when he explained to a local media outlet last year how he left homosexuality behind because he came to believe it was wrong.
“I was invited by this new emerging platform in Malta called PMnews to share my story and to discuss sexuality in general,” Grech told Fox News Digital, noting that he was “surprised” when police later called him early on a Sunday morning and ultimately served him with a prosecution order summoning him to court on Feb. 3.
Legal counsel for Grech maintains that his case is the first of its kind and threatens to set in motion a legal “domino effect” that could endanger freedom of speech and religious liberty throughout the Western world.
Matthew Grech, 33, faces a court date on Feb. 3 in Valletta, Malta, for allegedly advertising “conversion practices” when he gave an interview about his life. (Christian Concern)
‘Domino effect’
According to a transcript of his interview with PMnews Malta, at no point did Grech invite anyone to attend therapy to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, though he was critical of the Maltese law and explained how he came to believe that homosexuality is not an identity, but rather a practice that was incompatible with his Christian faith.
“They knew my stance around homosexuality and sexuality in general, so they wanted to hear a little bit more about it because many shun the other side of the story,” Grech said. “But these guys wanted to explore it because they’re for freedom of speech, and they don’t like it when viewpoints are shut down simply because they are unpopular.”
Grech said that after LGBT activists with ties to the Maltese government and the Malta Gay Rights Movement (MGRM) reported him to police for the interview, he now faces up to €5,000 in fines or up to five months in prison if convicted of violating Article 3, Section 3 of Malta’s Affirmation of Sexual Orientation, Gender and Gender Expression Act, which makes it “unlawful for any person” to “advertise conversion practices.” The journalists who interviewed him also have upcoming court dates and face potential criminal sanctions for their part in conducting the interview.
MGRM did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment by time of publication.
Grech faces a court date on Feb. 3 in Valletta, Malta, for allegedly running afoul of the country’s ban on advertising “conversion practices.” (Sylvain Sonnet via Getty Images)
Grech is slated to appear before the Court of Magistrates in Valletta on Feb. 3, where he will be assisted in legal defense by the Christian Legal Centre (CLC), a London-based nonprofit that focuses on cases of religious discrimination against Christians.
Andrea Williams, chief executive of the CLC, said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital that Grech’s treatment by Maltese authorities is discriminatory and violates “his Christian freedoms and fundamental right to free speech.”
Grech’s lawyers plan to argue that his prosecution is a violation of his right to freedom of expression guaranteed under both the Constitution of Malta and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
“The domino effect of ‘conversion therapy’ bans began in Malta,” said Williams, who warned that the case threatens to set a precedent that could spread to other Western countries “unless robust action is taken.”
European Commission headquarters lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag in support of the LGBT community in Brussels, Belgium, on May 16, 2020. (NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images)
Malta, an island nation between Sicily and the coast of North Africa, was the first country in the European Union to criminalize practices that would seek to “change, repress or eliminate a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity and/or gender expression.”
The legislation, which passed unanimously in 2016, resembles conversion therapy bans throughout the world, including in 20 states and more than 100 municipalities in the U.S.
Many such bans in the U.S. apply only to minors and carve out exemptions for religious counseling, though some in other countries prohibit consenting adults from seeking help from anyone for unwanted sexual attractions and behaviors.
“They want to ban Christian counseling in churches simply because it does not conform to their religion. They claim not to be religious, but I can tell you that they are just as religious as everybody else.” — Matthew Grech
In Canada, therapists who provide any form of counseling to repress or reduce “non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behavior” or “non-cisgender identity” could face up to five years in prison, according to a law put in place last year that prompted protests from thousands of churches throughout North America because of its scope.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participates in the annual Pride Parade in Toronto, Ontario, in 2016. (Rick Madonik/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
The Conservative Party-led U.K. government announced this week a plan to debate legislation to add transgender identity to Britain’s conversion therapy ban, which before applied only to sexual orientation.
The United Nations has deemed conversion therapy as tantamount to torture, and U.N. Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Victor Madrigal-Borloz called for a global ban on it in 2020.
‘Simply barbaric’
During a 2020 interview similar to that which led to his prosecution, Grech recalled how his gentle personality and boyhood musical interests made him a target growing up among other boys, who bullied him and mocked him as gay. He said he would assume that label as an identity and go on to become involved in sexual relationships with other men in an attempt to find male acceptance, but that he began to desire a new lifestyle upon becoming a Christian.
Grech became involved with the U.K.-based International Federation for Therapeutic and Counseling Choice (IFTCC), an organization that aims “to promote a caring, nonjudgmental environment where people who choose to move away from their unwanted feelings and behaviors can find the support they’re seeking,” according to its website.
He is also a trustee of Core Issues Trust, a group that works closely with IFTCC and supports “men and women with homosexual issues who voluntarily seek change in sexual preference and expression.”
Grech believes activists worldwide are using conversion therapy bans to silence dissenting opinions. (Christian Concern)
Grech says there many others like him who have “very valid reasons” for seeking to move away from unwanted sexual feelings, but fears such individuals are increasingly being marginalized and driven underground by the effects of overbroad conversion therapy bans.
“To deny people access to spiritual or secular support in any context is barbaric,” he said. “It’s simply barbaric.”
Grech believes the activists propelling the sort of conversion therapy ban enforcement he is facing “don’t just want to ban forced help or support, they want to ban our views altogether.”
“They want to ban Christian counseling in churches simply because it does not conform to their religion,” he said. “They claim not to be religious, but I can tell you that they are just as religious as everybody else. They do have a belief system, they do have a very specific vision.”
LGBT campaigners join Gay Liberation Front veterans marking the 50th anniversary of the first U.K. Pride march in 1972 on July 1, 2022, in London. (Mark Kerrison/Contributor via Getty Images)
Despite its small size, Grech noted that Maltese culture is seen as a “forerunner” and “pioneer” in Europe, consistently ranking at the top of ILGA-Europe’s list of most progressive countries.
Parliamentary Secretary Rebecca Buttigieg announced last week that Malta is strengthening its conversion therapy law by adding an amendment to redefine the advertising clause “to include the publishing, advertising, displaying, distributing, referral and circulation of any material promoting the practice,” according to the Times of Malta.
“So it is concerning the other countries will follow suit, but we need to alert other nations and to show them what the real face of a conversion therapy ban is,” Grech said. “It’s just a foothold for these LGBT lobbies to get into churches and to get the pastors and get the gospel ministers to shut up and conform, and it’s just simply not sustainable.”
‘The idol of our generation’
Grech noted the irony that the first case of his kind should be in Malta, which has a notable position in the history of his faith. One of the first Roman colonies to convert to Christianity, the island featured in the New Testament as the place where the apostle Paul was shipwrecked and left unharmed from the bite of a venomous snake that emerged from a fire.
“That story speaks to us to this day, because when Paul arrived in Malta, a fire was set because it was cold, and a snake fastened itself against his arm,” Grech said, referencing the story in Acts 28. “He shook it off, told it where it needs to go, and it went back to the fire.”
“People at first thought he was being judged by the gods because that snake fastened itself around his arm, but when they saw that nothing happened to him, they changed their minds,” he said.
The apostle Paul shakes a viper off of his arm into the fire, as recounted in Acts 28. (ZU_09 via Getty Images)
Grech likened the biblical story to his legal battle and the spiritual struggles of people like him who fight to maintain their faith despite their feelings amid what he sees as the tightening grip of opposition from government and the culture.
“I believe that as we survive this snake that is trying to poison us and harm us, as we look toward God, who is able to save us and redeem us, people will shift their perspective,” he said.
“We believe in the best for our nation, but there has been an idol that has been set up, and it needs to come down,” Grech added. “We are facing the idol of our generation, and we’re saying, ‘We’re not going to bow down to you, no matter what the cost.'”
Jon Brown is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to jon.brown@fox.com.
So now CNN wants to look into The Big Guy? This is the beginning of the end for Biden and “the Biden name”.
Things are heating up for the Bidens. What you will note is how the Democrats begin distancing themselves as a Party from the Bidens, and start to leave Joe and Hunter swinging in the wind. Watch for the small signs.
Just recently CNN actually mentioned that Joe Biden lied about not knowing any of Hunter’s foreign business partners.
Soon, Biden’s blind eye will be declared a bona fide lie. Things will only get worse from there. Democrats will pretend to be outraged by these “new revelations”, and game on.
For now, one has to speculate at what made CNN finally jump ship like rats fleeing the Titanic. It seems unlikely that the Network decided to join in some journalistic integrity. But there are plenty of other ideas. Perhaps Obama finally gave the kill order for his old bro.
CNN Handlers gave the directive….Ruin his career….We can't have him run in '24…. Republican led House is going to dig up DIRT. . Drive it home to all viewers…..all 10 of them….ratings down the drain. .
Are we supposed to congratulate CNN for finally telling the truth, albeit in the face of way too much proof to remain in denial? Or do we just welcome them to the show?
Either way, Biden’s name will never ring quite the same!
“I Give You My Word, As a Biden!”
I’m pretty sure that catch phrase started with Biden’s first big lie, which coincidentally was told on Biden’s first day in Congress. That’s when Biden’s first wife was killed in a tragic accident, most likely a form of vehicular homicide and suicide. It’s quite believable that Mrs. Biden turned into traffic on purpose in an effort to kill herself and her children. Her newborn daughter was also a casualty of the accident.
The lie wasn’t centered around Mrs. Biden’s postpartum depression. In fact, it was glossed over because Joe Biden blamed the other driver, claiming his wife and daughter were murdered by a drunk driver! Boy, did that lie gain traction over the years. So much so that it ruined the life of the truck driver. He spent decades trying to clear his name, fighting off death threats, and being publicly crucified. To this day, his daughter speaks out in defense of her father. But I digress.
Here’s what CNN says about Biden’s word:
For years, as Joe Biden has sought to assure the American public he deserves their trust, he’s relied upon a go-to phrase meant to underscore his credibility: “I give you my word as a Biden.”
But that’s not the only way the Biden family name has been used. The president’s brothers have invoked it in their private business pursuits over the years to suggest access to power and influence, according to a CNN review of court documents, emails and video recordings as well as interviews with former business acquaintances.
A year after Biden was elected, for example, his youngest brother, Frank, boasted in a speech to medical professionals gathered in Boston of the “bully pulpit” he was afforded due to “my brother Joey,” and vowed to help attendees “get federal dollars.” Just three months ago, Frank Biden was an invited keynote speaker at a medical conference in Venice, Italy, where he gave advice to a group lobbying the federal government – a trip he acknowledged he did not pay for but declined to say who did.
Biden’s son, Hunter, meanwhile, has bluntly acknowledged in a memoir that his last name was a “coveted credential” helping him land a lucrative and controversial gig as a board member for a Ukrainian energy company when Joe Biden was vice president. That company, Burisma, “considered my last name gold,” Hunter Biden wrote.
With Republicans taking charge of the House of Representatives this month, the Biden name and what it stands for are expected to be at the center of a wide-ranging oversight inquiry into alleged influence peddling and potential conflicts of interest, even as the GOP has turned its immediate attention to Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The partisan probe is likely to delve deeply into the contents of a laptop computer that Hunter Biden purportedly discarded at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019. A digital copy of the laptop’s hard drive has been broadly shared among right-wing operatives and was provided to CNN by Jack Maxey, a former co-host of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show. It appears to contain a massive trove of information detailing, among other things, how Hunter Biden worked to put his business associates in the same room as his famous father. Hunter Biden has not confirmed or denied that the laptop was his.
At least one email from the laptop – cited in a November report released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee – shows Hunter Biden acknowledging that his family lineage was one of his major selling points. As he discussed a Chinese business deal in September 2011, Hunter Biden told a colleague that a potential business partner’s apparent fondness for him “has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name.”
Of course, Hunter is exactly right about that.
The Biden last name is the underlying tie between all of this corruption. But for some reason, CNN still wouldn’t give Republicans the satisfaction of acknowledgement. Instead, they continued to promote this narrative that Republicans don’t have all the facts.
When it comes to modern politics, I think it’s fair to say that 90% of fact is fiction, and 90% of fiction is actually fact. Think about it, what are some of the facts, according to the left? Global warming, the ‘advantages’ of green energy, the idea that babies aren’t living beings before they are born… we could go on. But the point is, leftists do not present these ideas as opinions, but rather as hard core truths.
On the flip side, how many Republican “conspiracy theories” have panned out to be the facts? The vaccine is dangerous. The virus is benign without underlying factors. The pandemic was a scam. Hunter’s laptop links the Big Guy to China. Again, the list goes on. Which makes it no surprise that CNN still tried to paint Republicans as out of touch.
CNN adds:
Republicans have suggested that Biden’s son and brothers illegally used their family connections for profit but have so far offered scant evidence to support that claim. Joe Biden has repeatedly said he never discussed his son or brothers’ business dealings with them.
“The President has pledged to restore ethics to the White House and has established the most rigorous ethics guidelines of any administration in history, consistent with his commitment to ensure government works for the American people,” said Ian Sams, a White House spokesperson. “Unlike in the previous administration, no family member has or will serve in the administration or be involved in government decision making.”
Hmmm. Funny. I’ve yet to see an email from Don Jr. working out the terms of selling his father to China. And trust me, if it existed, Democrats would have presented it by now.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
After the 14-year-old was found being sexually assaulted in another state, a judge kept her from loving parents because they questioned her transgender identity. Then she was trafficked again.
In August 2021, by concealing a teen’s newly asserted transgender identity from her parents, Virginia’s Appomattox County High School participated in a chain of events that led to that girl falling into the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice.
When the FBI found Sage (last name of the family withheld for privacy) in Maryland, where she was victimized by a sexual predator, a judge refused to return her to her parents on the grounds they were abusing her in not affirming her as male. Housed in the boys’ quarters of a children’s home away from her parents, she told her mother, she was assaulted again. The girl soon fled, then was brutally sex-trafficked again until her rescue in Texas by law enforcement.
Sage’s Law, or the Child Protection Act, is being introduced this week in the Virginia House of Delegates by Delegate Dave LaRock in honor of this young teen from Appomattox County, Virginia. Sage hopes sharing her story will help protect others from the abuse she suffered at the hands of predators, precipitated in part by the very institutions that should have protected her.
School policies and state laws that encourage concealing information from parents’ purport to protect vulnerable minors. In practice, as tragically demonstrated by Sage’s case, such policies open the door to predators by removing children’s greatest protection from their lives.
Sage’s Law aims to shut that door in three ways. It would require schools to notify parents if their child asserts a gender different from his or her sex; it prevents school counselors from withholding or encouraging minors to withhold information about a child’s gender identity; and it clarifies that raising a child according to his or her biological sex, including decisions about a child’s mental and physical health, may not be construed as abuse.
Sage’s story, compiled from months of interviews, reports, and records, has been lived by countless other families torn apart in the name of gender ideology by activist schools, judges, anddoctors. This is a story of the unbearable cost of parent-exclusion policies, but also of a mother’s love and relentless determination to save her child.
Institutions that Should Protect Endanger Instead
Sage is a slight, pretty, 15-year-old girl with elfin features and an edgy style. Recently, reflecting back on her transgender identification, she told her mom: “I don’t know who I was. I’m a totally different person now. I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends.”
That self-reflection is consistent with the research showing that upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty. Children who are “affirmed” as the opposite sex, however, particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization. Sage’s comment also reflects the reality of social contagion, fueled by social media and increasingly recognized internationally as a factor in the exponential rise in the number of children identifying as transgender.
Yet states such as California allow children as young as 12 to make their own health-care decisions, without their parents but under the authority of the state. In January, Virginia delegates Candi Mundon King, Nadarius Clark, Michelle Maldonado, Sam Rasoul, and Marcus Simon filed a similar bill authorizing courts, social workers, and medical professionals to withhold information from parents and consent to medical procedures for “mature” minors.
The consequences for children and families in states such as California that construe not “affirming” as abuse are particularly dire. In October, progressive Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman announced she would reintroduce her 2020 bill to criminalize parents who do not affirm their child’s transgender identity as guilty of abuse, potentially resulting in the loss of custody.
School Policies Endangering Students
Michele adopted Sage, her biological granddaughter, after the death of her son. Like many gender-dysphoric children, Sage has a history of trauma from that early childhood loss. Related health problems became severe at times, requiring therapy and medical treatment. Her daughter’s previous schools notified Michele when concerns arose, she said, enabling her to have Sage’s treatment adjusted. But when her daughter entered Appomattox County High School in early August 2021, Michele says she was cut out of the loop.
Unbeknownst to Michele, her then-14-year-old’s taste at the time for boys’ clothing, which she described to her mother as simply “dressing emo,” was accompanied by her assertion at school that she was a transgender boy. School records, shared by the family, indicate school staff were calling Sage by her chosen male name and pronouns and at her request concealing this from her parents. Sage recalls her school counselor telling her during the first week of school that since she identified as male she could use the boys’ bathroom.
School records also indicate bullying, although they do not capture the severity of what Sage eventually told her mom: boys were following behind her in a group, touching her, threatening her with knife violence and rape, and even shoving her up against the hallway wall. On Aug. 23, according to school notes, reports were received from students and teachers that Sage had used a boys’ bathroom and encountered hostile boys there. The school counselor met with Sage the next day to direct her to use the nurses’ bathroom for safety reasons.
Sage’s statement that “all the boys at this school are rapists” prompted the school to review hallway footage outside the bathroom, showing that several boys had entered while she was inside. On Wednesday, Aug. 25, the counselor and school resource officer called Sage into a meeting, where she became so emotional that the counselor recorded concern Sage might be “a risk to herself due to being so upset when leaving school.”
Only at this point — after meeting alone with her daughter, after two days had passed and knowledge of the incident had reached all the way to the superintendent, according to the school records — did the school finally contact Michele, she said, still without revealing the male identity her daughter was asserting.
Michele recalls finding a school hall pass labeled with a new name that August evening and Sage telling her for the first time that she was identifying as a boy at school. As Michele sat with her on the floor, Sage tried to stop the tears as she told her mother a group of male students had “jacked” her up against the wall of the boys’ bathroom and threatened her with violence, and that she was terrified of what they would do. Michele tried to comfort her, assuring her she could stay home while they figured out how to handle the bullying.
That night, Sage disappeared. She was found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault. That was just the beginning of her family’s ordeal.
Excluding Parents Invites Predators
As Michele’s case illustrates, school policies that exclude parents from critical knowledge of their child’s mental health remove a child’s greatest safeguard from his or her life. While this author could find no such policy posted on the Appomattox High School or school board websites, the school’s actions to “affirm” Sage’s stated gender, name, and pronouns and to permit access to bathrooms of the opposite sex are all consistent with the directives of former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2021 model policies. So is the choice to deceive parents.
In fact, the Northam policies direct that an entire gender transition team and plan be set up for such a child, all in secret from the parents if the child so wishes. This guidance was revoked in 2022 by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but Virginia Democrats and LGBT groups are fiercely contesting the transparency and parental consent required by the new proposed guidance.
Yet school counselors, unlike parents, have at best an extremely limited knowledge of a child’s mental, emotional, and physical needs. They also have neither the constitutional authority nor the expertise to determine a child’s best interests.
Children who identify as transgender have well-documented mental health co-morbidities and rates of adverse psychiatric events. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), has raised alarm at the “pitched battle” engendered by professionals who “triangulate” or set children in opposition to their parents.
In Sage’s case, by withholding information about her daughter’s gender identity and related issues, including the severe bullying related to Sage’s transgender exploration, the school destroyed vital opportunities for Michele to discern warning signs in time to assess and respond before tragedy struck.
Predators know transgender kids are vulnerable prey. Sage told Michele months later that some of the transgender websites to which a school counselor referred her linked to “creepy” older men and pornography.
One mother told this author that as soon as her daughter identified online as “female to male,” multiple suspicious “sugar daddy” accounts reached out to her on social media. Roblox, the wildly popular children’s gaming site, has transgender chat rooms with a panic button to “hide your screen from your parents.” Sage, her mother says, was lured to meet sex traffickers by online predators posing as friends.
A Court-Enabled Tragedy
The first call from the FBI came late at night on Sept. 2, her mother recounts: Sage had been found. Michele says investigators told her Sage had been trafficked into Washington, D.C. and then Maryland for nine days of horrific, brutal sexual abuse.
Driving through the night, their backseat full of stuffed animals and cozy blankets, Michele and her husband Roger arrived early the next morning at the Baltimore Courthouse. They were stunned to hear that their child, who had just survived unspeakable trauma, was being held in a juvenile detention cell and that they were being summoned to a hearing late that afternoon before Judge Robert Kershaw. When they entered the courtroom, Sage appeared from the penitentiary remotely, on screen, with only court-appointed attorney Aneesa Khan, an assistant public defender, present in person. “I love you, baby!” Michele cried to her daughter, who responded “I love you too, Nana.” To their shock, Khan spoke up and alleged on Sage’s behalf that she did not wish to return home and had been “both emotionally and physically abused by his parents in connection with [his] expressed male gender identity and desire to live as a trans male.”
Michele had only found out about this claimed male identity the night her daughter disappeared. Yet Michele was willing to use any name or pronoun to bring her home. Sage later told her, Michele says, that Khan “told me to tell the judge my parents hit me, starved me.” Sage also told Michele that Khan “didn’t care how much [Sage] had to lie…but they were going to win this case” to remove Sage from her parents’ custody and place her in a Maryland foster home that would affirm her as male.
Michele is a Virginia Court-Appointed Child Advocate (CASA) with years of experience supporting troubled teens, and she and Roger were quickly cleared of abuse charges. But the allegations were used to take custody of their daughter and bar them from seeing her.
The Cruelty of Ideology
Rather than treat Sage as a victim of horrific sex trafficking and return her to her family, the court dealt with her as a runaway, providing grounds for temporary custody in Maryland. Significantly, under the Interstate Juvenile Compact, even if allegations of abuse are made, juveniles are to be returned to their home state, which is presumed to better be able to assess the child’s needs. Judge Kershaw delayed this return for two months, which led to Sage’s next trafficking episode.
Instead of receiving treatment for her profound physical and emotional trauma, Sage was kept for days in solitary detention as a runaway, then transferred to the Catonsville Children’s Home. Per Judge Kershaw’s order, she was housed according to her “expressed male gender.” Michele says she eventually learned from Sage that she was the only girl in male quarters and that she had been repeatedly assaulted there.
Kershaw held multiple hearings focusing on Sage’s claimed male identity and Khan’s efforts to demonstrate gender identity abuse, including calling two Appomattox school counselors to testify against Sage’s parents. While his final ruling on Nov. 10, 2021, reluctantly conceded lawful custody to the parents, Kershaw opined at length that “more likely than not” Sage had “endured emotional abuse and neglect by his parents,” including “misgendering” and “misnaming.” Astonishingly, Kershaw cited as evidence of parental abuse “running away from Virginia to Maryland,” when in fact Sage was abducted, raped, and trafficked across state lines.
While Sage was in The Children’s Home, Michele says she sent letters and cards multiple times a week and tried countless times to reach her by phone, especially on Sage’s 15th birthday. Months later, Sage commented: “I missed you so much, but I tried not to because you didn’t want me back.” Horrified, her mother asked what she meant. She learned from Sage that Khan had told her that, because she was transgender, Michele didn’t want her anymore — and that not one of her cards or messages had ever reached her daughter.
Sage also eventually told her mother that, while living at the foster home, she skipped classes every day and would “smoke weed and do drugs” with kids she had met. Sage also relayed later that Khan had told her “I don’t give a sh-t if you do drugs, I just want to win this case.” Sage also said Khan had visited the home of one of Sage’s Maryland school friends to enlist her support in contacting Sage, claiming Khan had won the case and resulting in knowledge of Sage’s case spreading around the school.
In a text to a friend at the time, Sage referenced Khan’s intent: “going to the court of appeals, and the supreme court.” It is difficult to avoid Michele’s conclusion that “[t]he only best interest [Sage’s] attorney had was for herself. To put my traumatized child on center stage to push her political or gender agenda!”
Michele begged the court to provide treatment for the trauma Sage had endured and had found placement for her by mid-October, approved by Virginia social services, in Youth for Tomorrow’s program for young victims of sexual exploitation. The judge rejected it because they would treat Sage as a girl.
Not until Nov. 10 did Judge Kershaw approve placement in North Spring, a residential treatment facility that would affirm her claimed male identity. Frightened of being locked in the facility and believing her mother no longer wanted her, Sage texted a friend, “im gonna dip” (leave). On Nov. 12, 2021, Sage says, she cut off her court-required GPS monitor and ran away to meet an online “friend” in Texas she thought was 16.
Once more, the unspeakable happened. Sage fell into the hands of a predator who, police told Michele, raped, starved, drugged, and brutalized her. This time she disappeared for months. For the second time in less than four months, Michele had no way of knowing if her daughter was even alive. But Michele never stopped searching. Finally, a tip she discovered on social media led Texas marshals to her daughter’s rescue in Dallas on Jan. 24, 2022.
For the first time since that conversation on the floor of Sage’s bedroom on Aug. 25 the year before, mother and daughter were able to talk. On the plane ride home, Michele listened as Sage began to unburden her heart, grieving over what she learned but overcome with gratitude that her daughter was alive and restored to her.
Affirmation by Intimidation
Upon her return to Virginia, Sage entered North Spring, the lock-down facility negotiated by the court, with Michele driving four hours each way for her weekly allotted visit. Sage was heavily medicated, suffering from constant nightmares, and fearful of both residents and doctors. Sage told her mother that her counselor also pressured Sage to tell Michele she wanted a “gender-affirming” mastectomy.
Yet, during one of Michele’s visits, Sage asked if her mother could secretly take her to buy girls’ clothes, stating she didn’t want to be a boy anymore, but she was scared to tell the doctors. Pressured by North Spring to let them treat her daughter, Michele reached out to Josh Hetzler, an attorney with Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center, who secured her daughter’s return. After nearly a year of horror, she was finally home safely.
The road ahead is a long one of healing both physically and emotionally. There are confusing lapses in concentration and persistent, terrifying nightmares. In a safe, loving home, surrounded by her pets and easing into at-home learning and therapy sessions, the painful recollections emerge unpredictably, as do the panic attacks. Michele doesn’t press, letting Sage open up at her pace, whether to her or to her beloved uncle Cory, who has moved home to support her.
As she begins to process her ordeal, Sage now desires to protect others from the horrors she experienced. Michele’s heroic, unrelenting determination to save her daughter has turned not only to helping her heal but to preserving other families from what hers endured. Advocates have rallied to help fund legal action through The Gavel Project, and to craft policies that will help protect others.
Sage’s Law
Many children never escape the clutches of sex traffickers. Had it not been for her mother’s relentless love and determination, Sage might never have been found. Michele calls it a miracle. In the starkest of contrasts, the actions of ideologues played a part — twice — in her daughter falling into the traffickers’ hands.
Sage’s public school could have been transparent to Michele about her daughter’s struggles. The court could have returned her to Virginia without furthering a quest to make legal history. The children’s home could have protected her from assault and access to drugs. And doctors could have treated trauma, not pressed living as the opposite sex and mutilative surgery on a victim of sexual abuse. All along, it was her mother who truly had Sage’s best interest at heart.
Sage was failed by adults who thought they were helping but were blinded to their own cruelty by their ideology. Michele tells of countless parents who have reached out to her with their own stories of families and bodies destroyed by school counselors, courts, and doctors who may spend minutes with a child, but assert they have the expertise and authority to usurp decisions from parents who have poured a lifetime into their care.
Sage has shown great courage in sharing her story, and it is time for lawmakers to take a stand for her and many other children by passing Sage’s Law. There is only one acceptable response to her story: never again.
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, who is facing wide-ranging probes into his business dealings, once noted that he and other family members “quarantined” at his father’s home, where classified documents were recently found.
In his memoir published in April 2021, the president’s son said he and other close family members spent election night on Nov. 3, 2020, at the Wilmington, Delaware, home. Hunter Biden wrote that he, his children, his wife Melissa Cohen, and his half-sister Ashley Biden and her husband Howard Krein watched coverage of the presidential election together as votes were counted.
“You would have loved the scene on election night, too, even though the night would’ve driven you nuts, not least because the vote counting dragged on for days,” Hunter Biden wrote in the memoir.
“Yet one of the benefits of waiting so long for the race to be called was that we all waited it out together, at Mom and Dad’s house — Melissa and the baby, my girls, Natalie and Hunter, Ashley and Howard,” he continued in the passage. “More than waiting together, we were also quarantined together. There was no escaping one another.”
President Biden with his son Hunter Biden after attending Mass on Johns Island, South Carolina, on Aug. 13, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
In addition to the revelation that Hunter Biden quarantined at the home during the 2020 presidential election, additional evidence has surfaced showing he has spent time at the home on numerous other occasions. Hunter Biden was notably seen traveling with his father from the White House to Delaware on Dec. 16, 2022, just four days prior to the search of the residence that yielded the classified documents. According to the White House, the president’s attorneys searched the Wilmington home and found the documents on Dec. 20.
Hunter Biden also spent time in Wilmington on at least five other instances since his father took office, according to various media reports of his whereabouts. For example, on March 26, 2021, Daily Mail reporter Rob Crilly tweeted footage of Hunter Biden traveling with the president to Wilmington.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday that it had obtained photos placing Hunter Biden at the Delaware home on July 30, 2017, shortly after his father departed the White House with documents from his tenure. The pictures showed Hunter Biden driving in his father’s 1967 Corvette Stingray, which the president told reporters was parked next to where the classified documents had been found last month.
President Biden and his son Hunter Biden celebrate at an election rally in Wilmington, Delaware, after it was announced that he had won the presidential election on Nov. 7, 2020. (Reuters/Jim Bourg)
The White House first revealed last week that a series of classified documents, including some marked “top-secret,” dating back to Biden’s time as vice president had been discovered at the Penn Biden Center. Later in the week, the White House acknowledged a second batch of classified documents was found in the garage of the president’s Wilmington residence.
“As the President said, he takes classified information and materials seriously, and as we have said, we have cooperated from the moment we informed the [National] Archives that a small number of documents were found, and we will continue to cooperate,” the president’s lawyer Richard Sauber said Thursday in a statement.
“We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake,” he added.
Hunter Biden, Melissa Cohen and Baby Beau with POTUS on trip to Wilmington today pic.twitter.com/MhwEiZAY79
Then, on Saturday, Sauber disclosed that yet another batch of five documents were discovered at the home despite earlier assurances from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre that the search had been completed.
Republicans, meanwhile, have zeroed in on whether Hunter Biden had access to the classified information — which included intelligence regarding Ukraine, Iran and the U.K. — in the aftermath of the discovery of the documents in the president’s home. Hunter Biden is currently under federal investigation and faces congressional inquiries regarding his business dealings.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed career prosecutor Robert Hur to serve as a special counsel to investigate the president’s handling of classified documents.
Fox News’ Pat Ward contributed to this report.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
Ioan Gruffudd plays William Wilberforce, the 18th-century English abolitionist. | (Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films)
This month, January 2023, marks the 250th anniversary of the classic hymn, “Amazing Grace.”
The Museum of the Bible writes: “It was January 1, 1773. John Newton led his congregation down the road from the parish church in Olney, England, to Lord Dartmouth’s Great Hall to sing … and the hymn he wrote for this day was special. It spoke of his conversion, of his self-proclaimed wretchedness, and of the saving power of God’s grace. Since then, the words of ‘Amazing Grace’ have struck a chord with millions across cultures and generations, and its popularity has never wavered.”
The museum based in D.C. now has a section dedicated to the anniversary of this amazing hymn.
In the hymn, John Newton, a former slave-trader now converted, indeed describes himself as a “wretch,” who was amazed that God would extend His grace to one such as he.
He became a minister after his conversion, and one day, a politician came to visit him for personal guidance. That man was William Wilberforce, who had recently been converted to faith in Jesus.
Everybody should know who William Wilberforce was — one of the greatest Christian statesman of all time.
He was a longtime Member of Parliament, who worked tirelessly (with a group of like-minded associates that became known as “The Clapham Sect”) to end the slave trade of the British Empire and then to free all the slaves therein. By the time of his death in 1833, Wilberforce was successful. But it took him about half a century.
Author Dr. Os Guinness once said, “When Wilberforce died, he was described as ‘the George Washington of humanity.’”
William Wilberforce was born in 1759 and inherited considerable wealth which placed him among the landed nobility of England. He was indeed a polished gentleman, and he first ran for Parliament and won at the age of 21.
But not until his conversion a few years later did he begin to take life seriously.
After committing his life to Christ, he briefly dallied with the idea of leaving politics to serve God. But John Newton counseled Wilberforce to stay and let God use him in politics. Newton declared, “The Lord has raised you up to the good of His Church and for the good of the nation.”
I shudder to think about someone like Wilberforce seeking guidance today among some modern ministers, who might easily convince him that Christians and politics shouldn’t mix. But John Calvin Coolidge, an often-overlooked president, once said, “If good men don’t hold office, bad men will.”
Soon after meeting with Rev. Newton, God put it on Wilberforce’s heart to fight against slavery. Working to uproot it was a daunting task because the slave trade brought enormous wealth to those involved.
After much prayer, Wilberforce felt that this indeed was the very voice of God speaking to him, calling him to this important mission. He was also concerned by the godless immorality of the age. In 1787, he wrote in his diary: “Almighty God has set before me two great objectives, the abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” (“Manners” would be comparable to “morals” in modern parlance.)
In an interview I once did with the late Chuck Colson, prison reformer and Wilberforce admirer, he told me: “[Wilberforce] stood up on the floor of the Parliament influenced by his new Christian conviction, took a stand that was enormously unpopular because all of the vested interest opposed him, including the government, and for 20 years he waged that battle.”
Kevin Belmonte, author of William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity, observes, “Wilberforce had to travel with an armed bodyguard.” But Wilberforce persevered — despite whatever personal cost he must pay.
Colson said, “One day in 1807 in a February snowstorm, the votes were cast to abolish the slave trade. While members of Parliament were jumping up and down for joy, they looked over and there was Wilberforce, head bowed at his desk, praying, thanking God for what He had done.”
But Wilberforce wasn’t finished. He then set out to emancipate the slaves, who, even after this vote, were still in chains throughout the British Empire. This was a battle to last for another 25 years.
Because of health problems, he had to resign in Parliament in 1825, but the movement he began to free all of the slaves in the British Empire continued without his direct involvement — and when he was already on his death bed, in 1833, he received word that the Parliament decided to free all of the 800,000 slaves throughout the British Empire.
Wilberforce is a great example of what Jesus can do through those fully committed to Him in whatever position in which He has placed them — when God’s “amazing grace” gets ahold of a life wholly committed to Him.
Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is the executive director of the Providence Forum, an outreach of D. James Kennedy Ministries, where Jerry also serves as senior producer and an on-air host. He has written/co-written 33 books, including George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Providence Forum founder Peter Lillback, Ph.D.) and What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.). http://www.djkm.org? @newcombejerry www.jerrynewcombe.com
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The 2022 midterms were the first major elections to occur in California after the Golden State approved all-mail voting in September 2021. Under the new system, all registered voters in the state are automatically mailed a ballot for each election cycle (Californians can still opt to vote in person if they wish). But during California’s first foray into mass mail-in balloting for the 2022 midterms, 226,250 mail ballots were rejected and more than 10 million remain unaccounted for, according to a new report by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Per the report, the most common reason for rejection of mail ballots in the 2022 cycle was late arrival (48 percent of rejects). Under California law, mail ballots must be postmarked no later than Election Day and arrive at the tabulation center within seven days. For the state’s 2022 general elections, more than 57,000 ballots arrived after Nov. 15 (the seven-day mark). Largely as a result of the switch to mail-in balloting, more than 57,000 Californians were disenfranchised. Such voter disenfranchisement is sure to continue as long as the state keeps its vote-by-mail system.
“Mail ballots disenfranchise,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “There are many reasons mail ballots fail ultimately to count. No one casting a ballot at home can correct an error before it’s too late. California’s vote-by-mail demonstration should serve as a warning to state legislators elsewhere.”
Another concerning figure coming from California’s midterm election cycle is that 10 million ballots still remain unaccounted for, after processing all polling place votes and rejected ballots. The assumption by election officials is that the majority of these ballots were ignored or thrown out by recipients. But such an information gap increases the risk of fraud. As the report notes, “The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.”
Unaccounted mail-in ballots are a serious liability for states with all-mail voting. According to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission, 28.3 million mail-in ballots are still missing from elections conducted between 2012 and 2018. While there is no way of knowing whether these missing mail-in ballots were used fraudulently, they still pose a risk to election integrity.
Take ballot harvesting — the practice of third-party organizers collecting ballots from voters and returning them to election offices — for example. States that approve all-mail voting greatly incentivize ballot harvesting, since Democrat doorknockers can coax potential voters to fill out their ballots and hand them over to their newfound Democrat friends on the spot, rather than having to convince voters to do the legwork themselves. Partisan activists may take advantage of such a lax system. And they already do.
All-mail voting also creates more opportunities for chaos, which in turn undermines voters’ confidence. Under a traditional system where voters cast ballots in person, poll workers must account for all election materials and have a log of the number of ballots cast. When problems occur, such as ballots disappearing, the issue is resolved quickly due to the data trail. Not so with all-mail elections.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple states switched to mail-in balloting under the guise of protecting public health. These voting systems were put in place with hardly any safeguards or scrutiny of the risks posed by all-mail elections. Currently, there are eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington — that primarily conduct their elections by mail.
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.
Soon after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he gave a few reporters access to the tech giant’s internal communications, resulting in scandalous revelations about Twitter’s routine collusion with and censorship direction from the FBI — revelations you likely haven’t heard much about from the corporate media.
“The Twitter Files” showed that this symbiotic relationship between the feds and a so-called private company involved the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 election, the silencing of Covid dissenters, and even the squelching of regime-challenging journalists, among other bombshells. According to the communications, the federal government paid Twitter some $3,000,000 for its assistance.
Notwithstanding these explosive revelations, backed up by the internal communications of high-level Twitter executives, the corporate media have ignored the scandals. But why?
Here are five reasons the corrupt press has refused to adequately cover “The Twitter Files.”
1. Giving Credence To Trump’s 2020 Election Claims Would Be Unforgivable
Accurate coverage of “The Twitter Files” would require the media to report on the FBI’s role in burying the Hunter Biden laptop story shortly before the 2020 election. Among other things, “The Twitter Files” revealed the FBI met monthly and then weekly with Twitter’s team, warning them of various foreign efforts to interfere in the election. Those internal communications, when coupled with an earlier statement Yoel Roth, the then-head of Twitter’s site integrity, provided to the Federal Election Commission, establish the FBI was behind Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden story.
“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,” Roth stated. “During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” Roth said, adding that from those meetings he learned “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” Roth then explained that those “prior warnings of a hack-and-leak operation and doubts about the provenance of the materials republished in the N.Y. Post articles,” led Twitter to conclude “the materials could have been obtained through hacking.”
When Roth’s statement is read together with the internal emails establishing that Twitter banned the New York Post’s blockbuster reporting under the guise that the materials had been hacked, the FBI’s responsibility for causing the censorship of this politically explosive story is clear. And because the FBI knew Hunter’s laptop had not been hacked and that the materials on it were authentic, by prompting the censorship of the story, the FBI knowingly interfered in the 2020 election.
Or as Donald Trump put it on Truth Social after “The Twitter Files” broke: “The biggest thing to come out of the Twitter Targeting Hoax is that the Presidential Election was RIGGED — And that’s as big as it can get!!!”
For the press to honestly cover “The Twitter Files,” then, would require it to give credence to Trump’s “RIGGED” claims — something it just cannot stomach. Instead, the corrupt media have responded to “The Twitter Files” with silence or spin.
2. Being the Press Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
A second reason the press refuses to cover “The Twitter Files” stems from the corrupt media’s inability to acknowledge its own bias, wrongdoing, and hackery. To report on the many scandals exposed by the files would require media elites to face their own involvement in censoring news and their failings as so-called journalists.
While historically, journalists stood in unity with their fellow reporters, when Twitter and other tech companies censored and then deplatformed the New York Post, the press — in the main — remained silent. In contrast, when Musk temporarily suspended reporters’ accounts who had posted location tracking information in violation of Twitter’s new rules, a thud sounded as the same journalists collectively collapsed on their fainting couches.
Not only did these supposed standard-bearers of journalism not condemn the censorship, most ignored the story. Those that did not ignore it, such as NPR, discussed not the details of the scandal, but their justification for ignoring it. “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR intoned.
Covering “The Twitter Files” now would be an implicit admission that they were wrong not to report on the laptop story and that they were equally amiss in failing to condemn the censorship of the Post.
“The Twitter Files” also raise an uncomfortable set of questions for news outlets, namely: Did the FBI warn legacy media that supposed Russian disinformation, in the form of potentially hacked materials involving Hunter Biden, would drop? Is that why they ignored the story and allowed the censorship of the Post to go unchallenged?
Reporting on “The Twitter Files” would force legacy outlets to confront the potential reality that the FBI had played them and that they were willing to trust the government rather than be a check on its abuse.
“The Twitter Files” also vindicate Musk and counter the media narrative that his Twitter takeover spelled the beginning of the end for the tech giant. Not only did the avalanche of predicted hate speech not materialize, but under Musk’s leadership, Twitter’s newfound transparency has served both the public interest and a (functioning) free press. Reporting on these facts, then, would require the press not only to acknowledge its own failings but to apologize to Musk and admit their own complicity — things they are apparently unable to do.
3. Condemning the Feds Would Shut Down Sources and Hurt Their Heroes
The media are likely also ignoring “The Twitter Files” to protect their sources — both literally and figuratively.
Many of the same FBI agents and governmental officials, such as Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who pushed for Twitter to censor speech probably serve as regular sources for the legacy media. This scenario is especially likely if the FBI pushed for the press to censor the Hunter Biden story, as it had with Twitter and Facebook. Reporting on “The Twitter Files” would thus force the media to hammer some of the same individuals who give them valuable leaks. Condemning those individuals could shut down various source networks the corrupt media can’t risk.
The media likely also don’t want to “hurt” their sources or the FBI agents who pushed the Russia disinformation lie to tech companies because they see themselves on the same anti-Trump team.
Just as the media refuse to condemn the Department of Justice and FBI agents involved in pushing the Russia-collusion hoax because the press favored the unwarranted attacks on Trump that hamstrung his administration, the leftist media silently applauds the FBI’s interference in the 2020 election because it helped deny Trump a second term.
In this regard, the legacy media and the deep state share the same worldview — that the ends justify the means. The media will thus keep mum about what the FBI did because they’re grateful that intelligence agencies destroyed Trump’s chance to defeat Biden by prompting the censorship of the October surprise.
4. The Russian Bogeyman Must Be Preserved at All Costs
Ignoring “The Twitter Files” also helps the media preserve their Russia, Russia, Russia narrative.
The various “Twitter File” threads revealed several damning details concerning Russia’s supposed interference in American politics. First, they exposed how the FBI and federal intelligence agencies used Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election to push for more resources and collaboration with tech giants. Second, the files revealed that, notwithstanding federal agents’ claims, there were no systemic efforts by Russia to use Twitter to interfere in the U.S. elections. To the contrary, the internal communications showed the FBI pushing for evidence of Russian interference and Twitter executives countering that they weren’t seeing issues.
Third, as detailed above, “The Twitter Files” exposed that the Hunter Biden laptop story was not only not Russian disinformation but that the FBI used that excuse anyway to prompt censorship of the story.
Fourth and finally, the internal Twitter communications showed that the trending of the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was not prompted by Russian bots or Russian-connected accounts and that Democrats such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Schiff’s claims to the contrary were false. Those communications also revealed that even though Twitter negated the Russian-interference theory — telling politicians point blank that the evidence showed #ReleseTheMemo was trending because of organic interest in the hashtag — Democrats and the media continued to push that false storyline.
Reporting on “The Twitter Files” would require the media to first acknowledge they were wrong in their #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag coverage. But what’s more, covering Twitter’s internal communications would force the press to dispel the notion that Russia is the bogeyman behind every Republican candidate and every negative story about Democrats.
Corrupt media need to maintain Russia as the bad guy for future elections, however, and to counter future scandals affecting Democrats. Accurate reporting on “The Twitter Files” would lessen the effects of any later resort to a Russia, Russia, Russia narrative — and the press can’t have that.
5. Reporters Prefer Their Role as Propagandists to Journalists
While there are many practical reasons the press refuses to report on “The Twitter Files,” as a matter of principle, it all comes down to one: The legacy media have none.
The so-called journalists working at outlets that were once the standard by which all journalists were judged today value politics more than they do their professional obligations. Informing the public and providing a check on the rich, the powerful, and the politicians are no longer the end goals of corrupt reporters; rather, they seek to use their power to advance their own personal beliefs and agendas.
In short, the reporters refusing to cover “The Twitter Files” prefer their role as propagandists to journalists.
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.
While the GOP and conservative media have largely moved on from Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and the systemic failures that occurred in Maricopa County on Nov. 8, court testimony and eyewitness reports from the Lake trial include allegations that Arizona’s largest county violated state law by failing to implement chain-of-custody documentation for Election Day ballots, resulting in a mysterious 25,000 extra votes added to Maricopa County’s official tally within a 24-hour period — more than the margin of victory between Lake and gubernatorial victor Katie Hobbs.
It was about 10:00 on election night when Maricopa County’s ballot tabulation vendor, Runbeck Election Services, received its first truckload of Election Day drop box ballots. While Runbeck received seven truckloads total (the last was completed about 5 a.m. the following morning), Runbeck staff thought it odd the deliveries did not come earlier throughout the day. But that wasn’t the only glitch. There were no chain-of-custody forms delivered with the ballots, a stark departure from typical procedure.
According to Runbeck employee Denise Marie, prior to Nov. 8, drop box ballots were “delivered in red bins with a chain of custody form” from the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center (MCTEC), which listed how many ballots were delivered.
But on election night, “instead of receiving the ballots in red bins, the ballots from the drop boxes had been placed in mail trays and loaded onto mail cages. MCTEC did not include the Maricopa County Delivery Receipt forms with any of the Election Day drop box ballot deliveries. There were no chain of custody forms with the ballots and no count of the number of ballots that were delivered,” Marie wrote in a sworn affidavit.
Maricopa County Co-Director of Elections Reynaldo Valenzuela even testified that while the county’s election workers count drop box ballots and record the counts on documents as required by law prior to Election Day, they did not count the ballots retrieved from drop boxes on Election Day itself. During the Lake trial, Valenzuela was asked whether Maricopa County election officials know the precise number of drop box ballots on Election Day, and he told the court, “On Election Day, no, because we’re not doing drop box courier process at that time. It’s a different process for Election Day.”
According to Lake attorney Kurt Olsen, this is in direct violation of Arizona state statute, which requires the county recorder to maintain records that log the chain of custody for ballots “during early voting through the completion of provisional voting tabulation.”
Per Arizona’s Election Procedures Manual, when ballots are taken from drop boxes, they must either be counted at the local vote center or be placed in secure ballot transport containers to be taken back to the county for tabulation. When the county recorder or elections official opens the container, he or she must count the number of ballots inside and note it on a retrieval form.
Because Maricopa County tabulators received more Election Day drop box ballots than they had ever received before, as County Recorder Stephen Richer testified, they removed the ballots from the ballot transport containers without counting or recording the number on a retrieval form for each drop box, as witnessed by Republican poll watcher Leslie White. This is a violation of the chain-of-custody requirements the county recorder is tasked with implementing.
The ballots were then put in mail trays and loaded onto mail cages, which were then put on trucks and delivered to Runbeck to be scanned and counted, according to supply-chain auditor and Lake trial witness Heather Honey. And notably, according to Marie’s sworn affidavit, this loading of ballots into the trucks also occurred without any documentation or record of the number of ballots on each.
Since Maricopa County failed to create its own chain-of-custody documents for the Election Day drop box ballots, Runbeck made its own (called “MC Inbound Receipt of Delivery Forms“), which logged the seven truckloads of drop box ballots on election night. On the delivery forms, Runbeck estimated the total number of Election Day drop box ballots to be 263,379 by multiplying the maximum number of ballots a mail tray can hold by the number of trays received, as Honey explained to The Federalist.
Runbeck CEO Jeff Ellington gave his staff a similar estimate of the number of ballots received via an email on Nov. 9, saying, “we started getting mail packets dropped off from Maricopa around 10pm last night and received mail packets about every hour through sunrise this morning. Likely between 250 and 275K packets were dropped off at the polls yesterday.”
At a press conference that evening, Richer affirmed Runbeck’s estimate by saying the county had received an unprecedented 275,000 drop-off ballots on Election Day. That same day, Maricopa County reported the total number of ballots cast in the 2022 general election to the Arizona Department of State: 1,136,849 ballots, with 407,664 ballots left to count — 1,544,513 ballots total.
However, on that same day, around 5:30 p.m., Maricopa County asked Runbeck to calculate the total number of Election Day drop-off ballots received, according to Marie, who was tasked with running the tabulation herself. Marie found that Runbeck’s records showed 298,942 drop box ballots had been received and scanned on Election Day.
As a result of such a discrepancy between the estimate and the official tally, Maricopa County sent a new vote tally to the Arizona secretary of state’s office on Nov. 10 (earlier that day, Richer had sent an email to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors admitting he could not reconcile the differences between the county’s numbers and the secretary of state’s listing, demonstrating that even the supposed expert official in charge of the counting process couldn’t figure out where the extra ballots came from). Instead of the original 1,544,513 total ballots reported for the 2022 general election in Maricopa County, the secretary of state’s website now listed 1,569,603, a more than 25,000-vote discrepancy with no explanation. That same day, Maricopa County gave another press conference, stating it had received 292,000 Election Day drop box ballots without batting an eye.
What This Means
Arizona law requires the county recorder to show the origins and chain-of-custody documents for every drop box ballot obtained. According to Runbeck employee Denise Marie and Maricopa County Co-Director of Elections Reynaldo Valenzuela, Maricopa County violated state law by failing to create any chain-of-custody documentation for the drop box ballots received on Election Day. Because of this failure, no records exist to dispute or reconcile the discrepancy between the number of ballots Runbeck first reported (263,379) and its final tally (298,942), a more than 35,000-vote change. As Olsen remarked in his closing argument for the Lake trail, “If you don’t have a count from MCTEC when those ballots are being transported to Runbeck, how do you know whether that count is secure?”
Nor do there appear to be chain-of-custody documents, a violation of Arizona law, showing how Maricopa County was able to add more than 25,000 ballots to its final tally. That addition is more than Hobbs’ margin of victory, which was about 17,000 votes.
“On November 9th, the reported count is 25,000 ballots less, which is beyond the margin here, than on November 10th,” Olsen said. “So the day after the election, they put out what the count is and then magically 25,000 ballots appear on November 10th, and well, hey, that’s the race.”
While part of the argument Lake’s attorneys used in their lawsuit seeking to challenge Arizona’s gubernatorial election was that Maricopa County violated its own Election Procedural Manual by failing to implement chain-of-custody documentation, Arizona Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson rejected the claim due to the county’s assertion that such chain-of-custody documents exist, even though it failed to produce them. At the time of the trial, Maricopa County hadn’t fulfilled a public records request for the documents.
But while such documents do exist for drop box ballots counted prior to Election Day, no such chain-of-custody paperwork exists for the Election Day drop box ballots themselves, Honey reiterated to The Federalist. The judge did not consider this alleged violation of state law and ruled against Lake’s challenge, saying she failed to present clear and convincing evidence of widespread misconduct.
Arizona has an impossibly high bar for overturning elections on the grounds of misconduct, as the judge himself noted. Lake not only had to allege misconduct but intentional misconduct, such to affect the outcome of the election. Lake has since filed two appeals — one with an appeals court, the other with the Arizona Supreme Court. The appeals court agreed to expedite her case.
When asked about its alleged failure to implement chain-of-custody documentation for the Nov. 8 election, Communications Manager for the Maricopa County Elections Department Matthew Roberts told The Federalist: “There are robust tracking and security procedures in place to document and ensure proper chain-of-custody of early ballots on Election Day. These policies and procedures were followed on Election Day, as well as throughout the early voting period. At no point during the process were chain of custody policies broken or procedures not followed and documented.”
The Maricopa County Elections Department did not respond to The Federalist’s request for documentation of the chain-of-custody process for the Election Day drop box ballots.
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.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
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A Tuesday report by the Government Accountability Office revealed that the Department of Defense failed its fifth audit in a row after it could not account for at least $220 billion in government-furnished property, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
The DOD has been mandated by federal law to complete audits since 1994; however, the mandate was ignored for decades due to the agency’s massive size, according to Military.com. Since launching its first independent audit in 2017, the Pentagon has never passed. The Pentagon failed its fifth audit in November after the agency could not prove expenditures for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. To perform this year’s overall audit of the DOD, which was expected to cost $218 million, the agency aggregated 27 separate audits conducted by approximately 1,600 auditors. According to Military.com, the auditors performed 220 in-person site visits and 750 virtual site visits.
The GAO’s study reported that auditors first alerted the DOD in 2001 that the agency failed to keep track of its government-furnished property.
“DOD’s lack of accountability over government property in the possession of contractors has been reported by auditors for decades,” the GAO report stated. “This longstanding issue affects the accounting and reporting of GFP and is one of the reasons DOD is unable to produce auditable financial statements.”
In 2014, the Pentagon reported that the estimated value of its GFP was at least $220 billion. However, according to the GAO’s study, that figure is likely “significantly understated.”
“For example, in fiscal year 2016, we reported that the Army indicated the actual number of these GFP assets is unknown and that actual quantities may be greatly different than the Army’s documented property records reflect,” the GAO report noted.
The GAO claimed that the DOD is the “only major federal agency that has been unable to receive an audit opinion.” Pentagon comptroller Mike McCord stated that he is “disappointed” the agency only made slight progress toward a clean audit this year.
“I would not say that we flunked. The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want,” McCord said.
The DOD did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
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A graphic sex education program endorsed by Planned Parenthood continues to be promulgated in some Idaho middle schools, despite outrage expressed by parents, according to the Idaho Freedom Foundation. The program, entitled “Reducing the Risk,” is meant primarily for ninth-graders, according to its website, and it consists of a 16-part curriculum that aims “to help high school students delay the initiation of sex or increase the use of protection against pregnancy and STI/HIV if they choose to have sex.” The website later claims, “The major focus is the development of attitudes and skills that will help teens prevent pregnancy and the transmission of STIs, including HIV,” hinting that the program subordinates abstinence and prevention education in favor of mitigating the risks associated with promiscuity.
The sexual behaviors the program mentions are laid out in minute detail. One video included in RTR is called “Condom Sense,” which was produced by the Trojan Condoms brand ten years ago. The cartoon video features an unmarried man and woman engaging in a series of sexual activities and a disembodied narrator who warns against condom misuse.
“Keep your condom on until you ejaculate,” the narrator advises at one point, as a cuckoo bird suggestively shoots out of a nearby wall clock.
The video even shows the fornicating couple engaging in sex underneath bed covers and inside a car with obscured windows. The bed and car are rocking rhythmically to assure all viewers that the two are having sex, in case there was any doubt.
Both “Condom Sense” and RTR in general subtly endorse LGTBQ+ lifestyles. The logo Trojan opts to use for its YouTube account features the silhouette of a trojan helmet colored to match the latest gay and transgender flag, and screenshots of slides included in the fifth edition of the RTR program indicate that it encourages students to participate in “roleplay activities” that may make them uncomfortable, especially for those who are “sensitive” to same-sex relationships or who are gay, “transgender or gender nonconforming.”
The program also manipulates language to confuse students and mislead parents. In perhaps the most egregious example, “Reducing the Risk” does not use “abstinence” to refer to refraining from sex until marriage. When used in the program, “abstinence” refers to avoiding pregnancy and guarding against sexually transmitted diseases. The Idaho Freedom Foundation claimed that creators of the program changed the definition of “abstinence” so that RTR would comport with Idaho law and standards, which require schools to teach “abstinence-only” or “until marriage” sex ed curricula.
The Center for American Education, affiliated with IFF, also made other observations about the language used in “Reducing the Risk.” According to a slideshow presentation CAE obtained via information request, the word “marriage” was used only once in 120 slides. However, the presentation freely used terms like “vaginal sex,” “oral sex,” “anal sex,” “dental dams,” “condoms,” and “masturbation.” It also suggested that behaviors such as “anal sex using a condom and water-based lubricant” and “having sex while drunk or high” carry only “some risk.”
🚨🚨 Idaho school children are being shown graphic simulated sex videos produced by Trojan Condoms, which are part of the Planned Parenthood sex Ed curriculum. This curriculum has been adopted by Moscow Public Schools. @MattWalshBlog
When parents in Potlatch, Idaho, a small town of about 800 people located an hour south of Coeur d’Alene, discovered the contents of RTR, they became outraged and expressed their concerns at a school board meeting last November. That night, the board voted to remove the program for eighth-graders for this semester. It also voted to permit parents to opt their children out of such programs going forward and to have access to all materials that will be taught.
While Potlatch parents scored a small victory in the fight to keep graphic sexual material from their young children, other Idaho districts are still continuing to implement the program. As of last fall, the “Condom Sense” video and other RTR material are still being shown in 14 different Idaho schools, and the program website boasts that it is being taught in other supposedly conservative areas of the country, such as Montana; Duval County, Florida; Wyoming; San Antonio, Texas; Sedgwick County, Kansas; and West Virginia. Idaho is likewise a solidly red state, with a Republican governor, a Republican state legislature, two Republican U.S. congressmen, and two Republican U.S. senators.
IFF did not say whether any of the state or federal officials in Idaho had a comment about RTR. The “Supporting Education” initiative listed on the official website for Gov. Brad Little (R) makes no mention of “Reducing the Risk” or sex education at all. While it does claim that the state has a “moral obligation to our students in Idaho,” it did not specify what that “moral obligation” means or what it might look like in practical form.
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Geraldo Rivera, a left-wing Fox News Channel personality, suggested on “The Five” that the “AR” in “AR-15” stands for “automatic rifle” — he gave the answer after Greg Gutfeld asked Rivera what “AR” stands for. Rivera suggested that owning an AR-15 is about people being macho and claimed that there is not a legitimate purpose for owning one, aside from perhaps being used in sport clubs.
“Those most passionate about ‘gun control’ tend to know the least about guns,” the Daily Caller tweeted when sharing a clip of Rivera.
Greg Gutfeld: "What does 'AR' stand for?"
Geraldo Rivera: "It is automatic rifle."
Greg Gutfeld: "No, that's not what it is."
Geraldo Rivera: "All I know is AR-15s have no place in American society."
“Heard the Daily Caller and fellow travelers are ranting about my incorrect definition on-air of ‘AR’ as in AR-15. Whatever. Point is, there is no place (other than sporting clubs and similar skilled settings) for assault rifles. They’re substitute appendages,” Rivera tweeted.
NPR has indicated that the “AR” traces back to, ArmaLite, Inc. and stands for ArmaLite Rifle. The modern AR-15-style weapons made by gun manufacturers are semi-automatic — the guns have become a significant point of societal debate, with opponents often referring to them as “assault weapons” and calling for them to be banned.
Back in 2021, Rivera suggested that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York “outshines every other member of Congress in eloquence and passionate sincerity.”
And last year, the left-leaning TV personality described then-Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a Republican, as “a once-in-a-generation stand up hero.” Cheney, who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, lost her 2022 GOP primary and departed from office earlier this year. She was one of the two Republican lawmakers who served on the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 episode.
The use of DNA to arrest Bryan Kohberger for the murder of four college students in Idaho reminds me that it’s time to bring the death penalty back in a big way.
Notwithstanding the absence of a single example, the possibility of executing the “wrong man” has been the left’s main line against the death penalty for decades. It’s the only argument that has ever lessened Americans’ support for capital punishment.
Well, guess what? Thanks to the miracle of DNA, now there’s no risk! The murderer can usually be identified with greater than 99.99% accuracy.
Good news, right? Nope! As we now know (also with 99.99% accuracy), liberals never cared about executing the innocent. They just want to spring killers.
Until fairly recently, DNA was a one-way ratchet, used to free criminals, but rarely to catch and convict them.
Recall that DNA fingerprinting was only invented in 1984. The first time DNA was ever used as evidence in a U.S. court was in 1987. Courts weren’t sure what to make of this “novel” technology, and of course, it was treated like witchcraft by the O.J. jury in 1995.
Back then, genetic evidence was used primarily to overturn jury verdicts from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s by poking holes in the prosecution’s theory of the crime.
The media whooped about every overturned conviction, falsely claiming the prisoner had been PROVED INNOCENT.
Hardly.
Suppose a child molester/murderer was convicted in 1998 based on the following evidence:
— Witnesses saw him abduct the child;
— Tire tracks by the body matched those on the defendant’s truck;
— His knife blade corresponded to the victim’s wounds;
— The child’s teddy bear was found in the defendant’s truck bed;
— When arrested, the accused had a written suicide note in his pocket, confessing to the crime;
— A strand of hair found on the defendant’s shoe was “consistent with” the victim’s hair.
If DNA testing later proved that the hair was not, in fact, the child’s, the conviction could be overturned. Who knows? The jury might have put a lot of stock in that strand of hair! Throw in allegations of “prosecutorial misconduct” or “ineffective assistance of counsel,” and stand back for the celebrities and nuns holding candlelight vigils!
The DNA didn’t prove “innocence”: It proved a strand of hair “consistent with” the victim’s did not belong to the victim after all. An overturned conviction may be “legal innocence” — like a Bronx jury refusing to convict — but it’s not “factual innocence.” Least of all did it warrant the words “proved innocent.”
The party ended when DNA began being used against criminals.
In 2018, investigators finally caught the Golden State Killer, who’d terrorized women across California in the 1970s and ’80s, murdering at least 13 people and raping dozens of women. Law enforcement ID’ed him by putting his DNA into two genealogy databases, GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. It turned out to be Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., a former cop.
Normal people: Hurray! We got him!
Liberals: WE MUST PREVENT THE POLICE FROM USING DNA TO CATCH MURDERERS!
Wait a second! Weren’t you the ones worrying yourselves sick about the possibility of executing the innocent?
Until very recently, The New York Times op-ed page fairly bristled with columns insisting — in defiance of the evidence — that there were innocents on death row.
GUESS WHAT, NEW YORK TIMES? You can relax! There’s no danger of an innocent person being “strapped into an electric chair, or walked into a gas chamber, or injected with poison,” as Bob Herbert put it in 1994.
Forget human fallibility: We’ve got scientific infallibility. Trust the science, liberals!
Of course, as soon as DNA started being used to catch criminals rather than release them, the ACLU threw a fit, demanding that genealogy websites like Ancestry.com cease cooperating with law enforcement. No fair locking up killers!
As the Times explained: “Privacy advocates … have been worried about genetic genealogy since 2018.” Since 2018 … hmmm, why … oh, I see. That’s the year DNA was used to catch the Golden State Killer. Yeah, that sucked.
Google and Facebook know when we’re menstruating, we’re forced to undergo proctological exams at the airport, self-driving cars are careening onto sidewalks and killing pedestrians, but WE MUST PROTECT THE SERIAL KILLER’S PRIVACY!
This is the left’s specialty: Coming up with new ways to make life worse without enriching it. So now law enforcement has to face another pointless hurdle to solve heinous murders.
What possible explanation is there for this mentality other than that liberals want murderers on the streets? (Just not their streets.)
Genealogical websites merely allow forensic scientists to identify distant relatives of the person who left DNA at a crime scene — such as on the knife sheath lying next to one of the four murdered students in Idaho — in order to put some people in the ballpark and take others out. There’s no danger of getting the wrong man. To the contrary, DNA steers investigators away from the wrong man.
True, it will make life much harder for rapists, child molesters and murderers. It will put an end to “serial killers,” who will now get caught after their first kill. I’m trying to fathom who else would have a problem with it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democratic Party.
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.
We live in an age of great compromise and confusion, especially regarding the Christian faith. In some ways, that means we live in the same sort of day and age that every Christian has lived in since Christ ascended to Heaven approximately 2,000 years ago.
The New Testament authors, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the immediate decades following the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, were acutely aware of the need to defend the pure teaching of the faith against those who would undermine its doctrine and application.
In 1 Timothy 4:1, Paul writes that “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.”
God knew what He was doing when He gave the Church such strong warnings.
But while there is no doubt that false teaching and heresies have always plagued the Christian Church, each era has its own battles to fight. In the early Church period, they had to deal with Gnosticism, Christological errors, and confusion about the Holy Spirit.
Thankfully, in our day and age, we have creeds and confessions, like the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed, which set forward the clear, uncompromised principles of historical, orthodox Christianity. Or, if you are a Baptist, we have the Baptist Faith & Message 2000.
Still, even though we have these statements, false teaching abounds. One particularly pernicious strain of corrupted Christianity is what’s known as “theological liberalism.” The late R.C. Sproul warned that “We are living in a day when liberal theology has made deep inroads in the church.”
Even if you don’t know its name, I’m confident you’ve encountered some of its teachings — like those who deny the reality of the resurrection of Christ. So, to better equip you to spot and counter theological liberalism, let me explain what it is and why it’s dangerous.
What is theological liberalism?
In his book The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805 – 1900, Gary Dorrien explains,
“The idea of liberal theology is nearly three centuries old. In essence, it is the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority. Since the 18th century, liberal Christian thinkers have argued that religion should be modern and progressive and that the meaning of Christianity should be interpreted from the standpoint of modern knowledge and experience.”
In other words, the starting point of theological liberalism is that it trades the external, objective, God-given standard of the Bible in matters of faith for an individual’s personal, subjective opinion and experience.
This is an exact inversion of the Christian faith. We know who God is and what He wants from mankind because God speaks — and speaks first. Theological liberalism trades “Thus saith the Lord” for “So saith man.”
Summarizing Dorrien’s book, pastor and theologian Kevin DeYoung provides six other characteristics of theological liberalism along with the rejection of external authority (in addition to the one above). He says it argues that:
“Christianity is a movement of social reconstruction.”
“Christianity must be credible and relevant.”
“Truth can be known only through changing symbols and forms.”
“Theological controversy is about language, not about truth.”
“The historical accuracies of biblical facts and events are not crucial, so long as we meet Jesus in the pages of Scripture.”
“The true religion is the way of Christ, not any particular doctrines about Christ.”
DeYoung concludes that “Liberals believe they are making Christianity relevant, credible, beneficial, and humane. Evangelicals in the line of J. Gresham Machen believe they are making something other than Christianity. That was the dividing line a century ago, and the division persists.”
What does this look like in practice? Theological liberalism denies key doctrines like the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture. They deny that the Bible is, in the words of Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, “to be received as the authoritative Word of God” and that “Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit” and serves as the final rule of faith and practice.
Because it denies the truthfulness and reliability of Scripture, it denies the historical creation account, events like the flood, the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, and often the resurrection of Jesus itself.
In other words, theological liberalism largely rejects the supernatural and miraculous events recorded in the Bible as fact, calling them fiction instead. Furthermore, it denies essential doctrines like original sin and the indwelling sin in all mankind, which makes the sacrifice of Christ on the cross unnecessary.
Finally, in our present moment, theological liberalism is often seen in the rejection of the creation order and biblical sexual morality. Denominations that deny the truthfulness of God’s Word almost always end up rejecting what it teaches about sex and marriage when the world pressures it to compromise. This is why many of the major “mainline denominations,” like the Presbyterian Church of the United States (PCUSA), most United Methodist churches, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, American Baptists, and the Episcopal Church, are all LGBT-affirming.
Make no mistake about it: Once a denomination, church, pastor, or Christian leader adopts the core teachings of liberal theology, progressive (Bible-denying) political positions will be adopted as well.
Why theological liberalism is dangerous
The main reason theological liberalism is so dangerous is that it destroys the Gospel. What is the Gospel? It is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16), the message that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24), and that this salvation is found only in Jesus Christ, the “lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29).
Liberal theology denies that man is so sinful he needs a savior. It tells us that we can’t trust the Bible as God’s Word and that Jesus might not have been anything more than a good teacher who set an example for moral living. Theological liberalism is a “religious system” that has been constructed to help sinful man feel better about himself, not show him that he is a rebel on the way to Hell and then reveal a gracious, God-sent, God-incarnate savior.
Thus, the danger of theological liberalism is that it sends people to Hell. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s a biblical fact. This is why Paul warns that false teaching is, in fact, the teaching of demons — because it comes from Hell and damns man to Hell in the final judgment.
J. Gresham Machen was a faithful theologian in the 20th century. He wrote a best-selling theology book calledChristianity and Liberalism that is still well-known and well-read today. In this book, Machen warned that liberal Christianity isn’t just a compromised form of Christianity, but really another religion altogether — and a false one at that. He argues that “despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.”
In other words, it’s not Christianity — and it’s not even close to being Christian.
Sproul agreed with Machen, warning that “Liberalism stands in every generation as a flat rejection of the faith. It must not be viewed as a simple subset or denominational impulse of Christianity; it must be seen for what it is — the antithesis of Christianity based on a complete rejection of the biblical Christ and His Gospel.”
Jesus warned His followers to “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:13).
Theological liberalism represents the “broad gate” that ultimately leads to destruction. Why? Because it follows in the footsteps of the serpent, who, in the garden planted the deathly seed of doubt in the form of “Did God really say?”
As faithful Christians, we reject this question and confidently claim, “Yes, God really did say” — He said we are fallen, Jesus Christ is the savior, the Bible is trustworthy, men are men and women are women, marriage is between a man and woman, Heaven and Hell are real, and the only way to eternal life is to repent of our sins and trust in the finished work of Christ on the cross.
That’s the narrow gate. It might sound fantastic — and it is. But it is the way that leads to life. So, reject theological liberalism, which is no Christianity at all, and, as the Apostle Paul admonishes us, “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Timothy 4:16).
William Wolfe served as a senior official in the Trump administration, both as a deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon and a director of legislative affairs at the State Department. Prior to his service in the administration, Wolfe worked for Heritage Action for America, and as a congressional staffer for three different members of Congress, including the former Rep. Dave Brat. He has a B.A. in history from Covenant College, and is finishing his Masters of Divinity at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Follow William on Twitter at @William_E_Wolfe
Four Republican Texas state representatives asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday to review new transgender student policies for public schools. State Representatives Bryan Slaton, Brian Harrison, Tony Tinderholt, and Mark Dorazio signed a letter calling on Paxton to examine the Texas Association of School Boards’ (TASB) 2023 “radically pro-transgender” guidance, according to a copy of the letter tweeted by Slaton.
The representatives accuse TASB of disseminating legal advice that seems to discourage schools from reporting child abuse, denies parental rights, and claims female students don’t have legal protection to a private restroom or locker room, the letter stated.
“This radically pro-transgender legal advisory appears to encourage school districts to refrain from reporting child abuse and obscure information regarding children exhibiting gender dysphoria from their parents,” the four congressmen stated. “This document also makes a bold declaration that says young girls would have no law protecting them from having a school district permit a biological male to enter their restroom or locker room.
The TASB legal advice is “highly concerning” as it “may be effectively creating state policy,” they said.
The school board association said that having a transgender child use separate gender-neutral facilities could make some students “feel that such an arrangement negatively singles them out and isolates them from their peers,” according to the document.
“Consequently, the transgender student may request to use communal sex-specific facilities that match the student’s gender identity. There is no law that prohibits a district from granting the transgender student’s request to use these facilities,” TASB advised. “If other students or their parents object to the use of a sex-specific facility by a transgender student, a school district may be able to amicably address the competing interests by making individual-user facilities and private areas available for all students.”
The decision on whether students should play on sex-specific sports teams is in murky waters, according to the TASB letter. Despite Texas law requiring students to play on teams separated by their biological birth, TASB advises school districts to “assess each request individually and determine the best course of action based on a thorough evaluation of all of the issues and potential risks, and in consultation with the district’s attorney.”
TASB also counseled schools on the legality behind preventing unsupportive parents from knowing about their child’s gender dysphoria and choosing a different name or pronoun.
“Texas educators typically work with parents to decide on appropriate accommodations for transgender students. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that transgender students are at particular risk of harm, including self-harm, when a parent disagrees with the student’s gender identity,” the document stated.
“As such, a student may request that a district employee not tell his or her parent about the student’s gender identity. School officials should proceed with caution in this case, in accordance with district policy regarding student counseling, crisis intervention, and child abuse,” TASB added.
Demonstrators lead the way at the 2022 March for Life in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, 2022. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
For those of us who have been working for years on the pro-life cause, this is a very special and joyous Sanctity of Human Life Month.
It’s the first one since the Supreme Court in June 2022 struck down Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion. Instead of the latest protest against Roe’s cruelty and unconstitutionality, this month-long observance and the annual March for Life on January 20 will be celebrations.
We still have much to do to protect innocent human life from the abortion industry. The battle is underway state by state and even city by city.
But Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a game changer. The highest law of the land as interpreted by the highest court in the land is no longer hostile to the pro-life viewpoint. It’s no longer defensible to pretend that a baby in the womb is not human and is therefore disposable. Those who continue to advocate for abortion must make the immoral case that some human lives are not worth protecting. That should be a steep hill to climb in a nation with a Christian heritage.
Like slavery, abortion violates the moral law given us by our Creator. God’s law states that all human life is sacred because we are made in His image. Many of America’s founders, including Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, predicted that slavery’s inherent conflict with God-given liberties would one day end it. It took a terrible civil war, but slavery was finally abolished.
The arguments for abortion are also unsustainable. That’s why the pro-life movement has never given up. Pro-life doctors, nurses and scientists have been reminding everyone that at the moment of conception, a new human life springs into being with his or her unique genetic code.
So what if academia, Hollywood, the media and corporate America use their enormous clout to push the fiction that human life is not in fact human? Proverbs 31:8 admonishes those of us who have voices to “speak out for those who cannot speak.”
We must tell the truth, promote adoption, provide more help to mothers who keep their babies, and shore up marriage, the surest family structure in which a child can thrive.
We need to make sure that the legal system, as the enforcement arm of the representative democratic republic in which we live, is no longer abused to justify the taking of innocent human life.
This means persuading millions of our fellow Americans that abortion is not the answer to an unwanted pregnancy. It means letting women who have had abortions know that Jesus offers forgiveness, peace, and new life.
I recall vividly the day that my wife, Bonnie, and I saw the film “Silent Scream” at a theater in Orlando around 1990. This powerful movie depicts a fetus — a tiny human being — desperately trying to avoid the abortionist. Few people can watch it and walk away unaffected.
Our growing faith and clarity about abortion were driving forces in the creation of an investment fund, in 1994, for Bible-believing Christians, Timothy Plan, which pioneered Biblically Responsible Investing.
Other powerful films have also carried the pro-life message. In 2018, Timothy Partners, Timothy Plan’s advisor, bought out a theater in Orlando to show the movie “Gosnell” to our local community. Starring Dean Cain, the film exposes the evils committed by Kermit Gosnell. He was a West Philadelphia-based doctor convicted of murdering infants who were born alive and of manslaughter for the death of a woman patient.
In March 2019, our firm bought out seven theaters in Orlando to show the movie “Unplanned.” It’s about the story of former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson, who became a pro-life champion. We gifted 500 tickets that were snapped up within 24 hours. At the movie’s conclusion, we asked the audience to remain for a couple of minutes while we introduced the directors of 11 pro-life, crisis pregnancy centers that we support.
I am sharing this to encourage others to use whatever tools and influence they have to steer us toward a truly pro-life culture in which all lives are deemed sacred.
The end of Roe is a huge victory we should celebrate. It is also a clarion call to “speak out for those who cannot speak.”
Art Ally is the founder of the Timothy Plan family of Biblically Responsible Investing funds.
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Andrew McCabe, a former top FBI official, is advising the Biden administration not to cooperate with congressional inquiry into President Joe Biden’s improper retention of classified documents. Such obstinance, McCabe boasted last Friday, “could drag things out.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan announced last Friday an investigation into President Joe Biden’s alleged “mishandling” of classified documents. The investigation will focus on “conducting oversight of the Justice Department’s actions” regarding the discovery of the classified documents. Jordan wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland:
It is unclear when the Department first came to learn about the existence of these documents, and whether it actively concealed this information from the public on the eve of the 2022 elections. … It is also unclear what interactions, if any, the Department had with President Biden or his representatives about his mishandling of classified material. The Department’s actions here appear to depart from how it acted in similar circumstances.
Speaking with Anderson Cooper on CNN, McCabe said that Garland should not cooperate with congressional oversight.
“I certainly would advise them, if they were willing to listen to my advice, I would advise them to take a very hard line against that,” McCabe said of cooperating with congressional oversight.
“There is a clear precedent here of not sharing information, from an ongoing criminal investigation, with Congress. And I think the DOJ is in a very strong position to resist on those grounds,” he continued. “Who knows what comes of that resistance? Maybe DOJ leadership starts getting subpoenaed. And ultimately, that fight will end up in the courts. And that could drag things out.”
Ironically, what McCabe said is the exact reason why Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) admitted he is “not a fan” of special counsel investigations.
“I think the way we handle these investigations of wrongdoing — I’ll call it that — in the political realm is we just do it completely backwards. I think Congress ought to be able to have access to all the information — do their oversight,” Johnson said Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
“If there is evidence of wrongdoing, then we should refer that to the Justice Department. Then the investigation should take place,” he explained. “What happens nowadays is the investigation begins, Congress never gets access to the information, and as a result, the American public never understands the truth of these situations.”
For seven decades, Miss Universe has been owned by men — and it will continue to be owned by one. The new male owner, however, attended the latest contest in a sparkly, floor-length gown showcasing after-market cleavage.
The new transgender-identifying owner of the worldwide beauty pageant made a backward speech about empowering women during the televised contest over the weekend (where Miss USA R’Bonney Gabriel was crowned). Anne Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip, a man who purports to be a woman and the CEO of Thailand-based media distribution company JKN Global Group, which bought the Miss Universe Organization for $20 million last year, dolled himself up as a woman on stage and framed his new ownership of the organization as a win for feminism.
“It has been 70 years that Miss Universe Organization run by men. But now, time is up, is the moment really, for women to take the lead,” Jakrajutatip said. “Welcome to the new era of the global women’s empowerment platform. Welcome to the Miss Universe Organization. From now on is going to be ran by women, owned by a trans woman, for all women, for all women really around the world to celebrate the power of feminism.”
Anne Jakrajutatip, the new owner of Miss Universe, delivered an empowering speech yesterday: “Welcome to the new era. From now on it’s gonna be run by women, owned by a trans woman, for all women around the world.” pic.twitter.com/TJXV8EPkAv
Jakrajutatip’s new ownership of Miss Universe is no win for feminism. Rather, it’s completely the opposite. A man parading around as a female and telling women they should feel empowered because their femininity can be worn as a costume or replicated based on a man’s whims is a slap in the face to women everywhere.
Beauty pageants exist to showcase the unique embodiment of women, which naturally excludes men. When organizations such as Miss Universe allow for those biological differences to be reduced to theater or “womanface,” then traditionally women-only spaces and contests are eradicated — as even the concept of womanhood is chipped away.
Whether it’s a local YMCA pool, a high school bathroom, a state prison, or college athletics, female safety, privacy, and competition are being sacrificed to appease males, many of whom are mentally ill. Pretty soon, beauty pageants will crown men instead of women — as already happened in New England. And “Miss” Universe herself might soon be a “Mr.”
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.
Last week, conservative journalist Andy Ngo published screenshots of the singer’s Instagram page. On the left, Smith is seen handsomely seated with his prestigious Oscar. The ensuing photos highlight his attempt to transition into someone who is “non-binary,” or a person who believes he was born a third sex or above the sexes altogether. The logic defies everything we know about human biology down to the binary nature of our chromosomes.
British pop star Sam Smith has been documenting their powerful transition from being a gay man to becoming a #trans nonbinary person. pic.twitter.com/TckztWIT4H
No one seems to know what a woman is these days, but does anyone even remember what a man is? Smith’s progression in Ngo’s photos underscores the erasure of cultural masculinity declared “toxic” by millennials. When you lose sight of what it means to be a man — what it means to look like a man, act like a man, and live like a man — you de facto lose the values that form the foundation of healthy masculinity. But our culture doesn’t even know what a man is.
Around this time last year, my Federalist colleague John Daniel Davidson provided a definition.
“If we’re going to defend manliness as good and virtuous and necessary for a healthy republic, then we need to be clear about what it is and what it is not,” he wrote, continuing:
Yes, men should be physically strong. They should also exemplify traditional masculine virtues like courage, independence, and assertiveness. But why? Not so they can sh-tpost about how ripped or good-looking they are compared to libs, but so they can protect and defend those who are weak.
That is the organizing principle behind the entire concept of manliness: it is not a style or a pose or an adornment. It is a way of being, of living according to the principle that you are responsible for the welfare of others, and should sacrifice yourself for their sake.
What does that mean in practice? It means stepping in to help those in need, whether it’s a woman being harassed or a stranger whose car has broken down. It means risking your own safety to protect someone being attacked, instead of just filming the attack on your phone and posting it online like a beta.
It also means marrying and remaining faithful to the same woman your entire life, and raising a family with her. It means working whatever hours and at whatever job in order to provide for that family. It means going to church every Sunday, whether you feel like it or not, to pass your faith on to your kids. It means getting up in the middle of the night to feed a colicky baby. It means taking your two-year-old daughter to swim class and singing all the songs — your own sense of dignity be damned.
I’m not sure I could write a better definition, amplifying the stoic virtues of physical strength, mental fortitude, and sacrificial living driven by a desire to strengthen the weak and protect the vulnerable.
Where we break is sexuality, and writing as a gay man, I know we don’t see eye to eye on certain fundamental differences. I may never live up to the picture of masculinity Davidson’s worldview prescribes, and I may never have children, but we can agree to disagree like adults. And that’s where the left has gone mad.
Gay men are often allergic to any kind of conversation surrounding masculinity because they’ve been mocked by a class of macho men as “queer,” a slur-turned-term-of-endearment that now qualifies one for the left’s privilege points. True masculinity, however, extends safety for the victims. Those who vilified it never truly understood the concept.
Before Davidson’s column, I’m not sure I remember even thinking critically about manhood — perhaps during a conversation with my father in high school. But beyond that, these discussions seem to have been choked out by a culture eager to dismiss masculinity as universally toxic.
If you question Smith’s regression — the legitimacy of it, the integrity of it, and even the consequences of it — you’re a heretic to the woketopian ruling class that’s hellbent on dictating acceptable speech.
But it isn’t just Smith. There’s a deeper mentally disturbed current pulsing beneath the decline of healthy masculinity and femininity. Consider that nearly 60 percent of people who call themselves “non-binary” report having a mental health issue. And that’s despite both difficulties in diagnosing mental illnesses and the fact that gender dysphoria itself is a mental sickness included in the latest psychiatric manual of mental disorders, meaning the real percentage is far higher.
See for yourself. How is this not a mental illness? Why are we not allowed to call it that? And why on Earth is it unacceptable to ask questions about the twisted state of the sexes?
These people are obviously struggling with a pain that’s very real. Their so-called gender identities might be made up, but their pain undeniably exists. Contrary to parental blackmail by family therapists, data shows gender-confused people are even more likely to commit suicide if they move forward with some kind of transgender transition.
The intolerance of questions surrounding gender dysphoria is baked into the elimination of masculine virtues, which promises peace and coexistence — or the allure of a projected $5 billion surgical industry by the end of the decade. But we need to understand what in the world is going on with men, and we need to be able to ask these questions.
Men today are not working. Their suicide rates are rising as high as their testosterone levels are falling low: While men make up nearly half the population, they represent 80 percent of suicides, and testosterone levels have dropped by double digits since the 1980s.
Men’s low testosterone levels reflect a population that’s not eating right, not exercising right, and not acting on their underlying ambitions. They’re becoming apathetic pot smokers stuck in the pursuit of cheap dopamine hits through Netflix and porn. And these low “T” levels are threatening fertility, which is already on the decline, in the long term, while guaranteeing a generation of fat, lazy men with no hormonal motivation in the short term.
The death of masculinity — its public execution brought about by its supposed toxicity — is the existential crisis nobody’s talking about.
Note: this is the first post in the author’s new conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness.If you liked this post and the topics addressed, consider subscribinghere.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. 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.
FIRST ON FOX: A government watchdog filed a federal complaint over the involvement of the White House Counsel’s office in President Biden’s growing classified documents scandal. Fox News Digital has learned that government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) filed their complaint with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics on Tuesday.
“The American public will not tolerate a two-tiered system of justice – with well-connected insiders subject to a lower standard of scrutiny than the normal citizen,” PPT director Mike Chamberlain said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
Protect the Public’s Trust, a government watchdog, filed a federal complaint over the White House Counsel’s Office’s involvement in President Biden’s growing classified documents scandal. (Screenshot)
“President Biden promised the most ethical and transparent administration in history,” Chamberlain said. “If the White House compounded a scandal involving possible mishandling of classified documents by improperly using taxpayer resources for his personal benefit and putting White House attorneys in positions that created conflicts of interest, we could be witnessing a serious betrayal of the public’s already-plummeting trust.”
“It also creates the spectre of possible obstruction of a congressional investigation, depending on the legal basis for the intervention and any future privileges claimed by the White House on this escalating scandal,” he added.
In the complaint, which was first obtained by Fox News Digital, PPT alleged that “taxpayer resources may have been inappropriately used by senior White House lawyers, including Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber, to personally benefit Joe Biden.”
In the complaint exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital, PPT alleged they “believe taxpayer resources may have been inappropriately used by senior White House lawyers, including Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber, to personally benefit Joe Biden.” (The Image Direct for Fox News Digital)
“We further believe that the apparent representation of Mr. Biden by the White House Counsel’s Office in this matter creates an untenable conflict of interest for that office,” the complaint reads.
“The result, intended or not, could be to reduce transparency into the mishandling of state secrets and foreclose disclosure of communications between White House Counsel staff while acting on behalf of Joe Biden in his capacity as a citizen facing the prospect of criminal prosecution,” it continues.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, weighed in on the complaint, asking why the president’s special counsel was with Department of Justice (DOJ) officials gathering the classified documents.
“Why was White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber accompanying DOJ officials while they collected classified documents at the Biden residence?” Jordan asked. “Mr. Sauber’s role raises serious concerns about the integrity of the Justice Department’s investigation.“
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
The complaint comes as Biden weathers the growing classified documents scandal that saw the discovery of two batches of documents in the Penn Biden Center and the president’s Wilmington, Delaware garage next to his Corvette. (Joe Biden for President)
The complaint comes as Biden weathers the growing scandal that saw the discovery of two batches of documents in the Penn Biden Center and the president’s Wilmington, Delaware garage next to his Corvette.
The White House has also been under fire for the lack of visitors logs at the president’s Delaware home. They told Fox News Digital on Monday that the logs do not exist.
George Washington University (GWU) law professor Jonathan Turley says that President Joe Biden’s lawyers are “likely witnesses in a criminal investigation” as the probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents continues.
Houston Keene is a politics writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Houston.Keene@Fox.com and on Twitter: @HoustonKeene
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.
It may be MLK Day, but Democrats aren’t here for all that “content of character” stuff.
Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee, long in the running for being the vapidest member of Congress (oops, did I just commit a crime?), has introduced legislation that could make political criticism by white people against minorities a federal crime.
In what can only be called a convoluted mess, the bill proposes that a white person who “vilifies” any non-white person and has their words end up on social media, accessible by “persons who are predisposed to engaging in any action in furtherance of a white supremacy inspired hate crime,” would themselves be committing a federal crime.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has introduced a House Bill to criminalize “conspiracy to commit white supremacy,” which includes any criticism of non-white people that influences (such as something published or said online) someone who commits a hate crime. https://t.co/QD93bVJmA9pic.twitter.com/ROwLtvYIha
The provision is so broad that you could drive a Mack truck through it. What is a “white supremacy-inspired hate crime” under this statute? How is “replacement theory” defined? Because what Democrats call “replacement theory” as a way to silence Republicans is often not replacement theory at all but is just a reiteration of Democrat-admitted aims to use immigration to influence elections. Further, the use of “or” in section (B) is important because it leaves “vilifies” as a stand-alone qualifier. What is the limiting principle there? If I post on social media that Shelia Jackson Lee is an incredibly ignorant, abusive person who has a long history of treating her staff like dirt, does that mean I’ve “vilified” her under this proposed law? It would certainly seem so.
Then there’s the conspiracy angle to deal with. It does not appear that there’s actually any requirement that the “two or more persons” targeted under this statute have any real connection to one another. If someone commits a “white supremacy-inspired hate crime” against a person and I’ve likewise been politically criticizing that same person on social media, even justifiably, I would have now committed a federal crime myself.
This law, if it were to pass, would be used to quash valid political criticism against any non-white person or group (the Black Lives Matter organization, for example) because such criticism could leave those levying it liable to federal charges. Forgetting that such would be a blatant breach of the First Amendment, it also exposes a wild totalitarian desire by Lee and those who think like her.
And that’s exactly why Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy should put it up for a vote. Put this ridiculous, reductive garbage on the floor, and make every Democrat go on record.
Established in 1636, Harvard, located in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. | Courtesy of Harvard University
One of the nation’s most historically prestigious universities is offering a course that instructs students how to provide healthcare services to “infants” who “identify” as LGBT.
The Harvard Medical School course, dubbed “Caring for Patients with Diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, and Sex Development,” includes a course description that outlines how students will learn to provide “high-quality, culturally responsive care” for “patients [who] identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex or asexual.”
“Clinical exposure and education will focus on serving gender and sexual minority people across the lifespan, from infants to older adults,” according to the description on the Harvard.edu site.
Screenshot: Harvard.edu
The four-week elective course is designed to reflect Harvard Medical School’s Sexual and Gender Minority Health Equity Initiative, which aims to “foster excellence caring for patients with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and sex development.” The initiative’s stated goal is to provide “high-quality, holistic health care for sexual and gender minority patients of all ages.”
It’s unclear what criteria Harvard uses to determine whether an infant is considered a “gender or sexual minority.“
The university did not immediately respond to a request for clarification Friday from The Christian Post.
As part of its Physician Competency Reference Set (PCRS), the Harvard course also offers learning goals for students to “acquire the knowledge, attitudes and skills needed to provide sensitive and affirming care” to patients from all backgrounds.
The course description lists Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as the main meeting location for the 2022-23 academic year. Both course directors, Alex Keuroghlian and Alberto Puig, also work for the hospital.
Massachusetts General is among several in the nation to offer transgender surgical services. In 2020, doctors at the hospital sought approval to perform a first-of-its-kind surgery to attach the penis of a dead man onto a woman who identifies as transgender.
The operation, which has yet to be approved, would involve attaching an organ donor’s penis to the groin of a biological female.
Another partner in the course, Boston Children’s Hospital, came under fire last year after an activist shared videos of the hospital purportedly offering “gender-affirming hysterectomies” and other services to minors. A March 2022 paper revealed 65 double mastectomies were performed on minor girls at the Center for Gender Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital between 2017 and 2020.
Despite nearly two centuries of a strong Christian heritage, Harvard has, in recent years, strayed further away from its theological roots and even hired an atheist as its chief chaplain in August 2021. Harvard Medical School made waves in a 2020 tweet promoting one of its panel discussions when the school referred to women as “birthing people.” As part of a discussion on “maternal justice,” Harvard Medical School’s Postgraduate and Continuing Education proclaimed, “Globally, ethnic minority pregnant and birthing people suffer worse outcomes and experiences during and after pregnancy and childbirth.”
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Republican Sen. Ron Johnson called out NBC News anchor Chuck Todd on Sunday for his contentious attitude toward the Wisconsin lawmaker’s suggestion that Hunter Biden may be guilty of any wrongdoing.
On “Meet the Press,” Todd first asked Johnson whether he agrees with the special counsel investigation of President Joe Biden. After Johnson explained why he is generally “not a fan of special counsels,” the conversation quickly turned to the merits of a Hunter Biden investigation.
“Senator, do you have a crime that you think Hunter Biden committed, because I’ve yet to see anybody explain. It is not a crime to make money off of your last name,” Todd told Johnson.
When Johnson did name potential crimes, Todd quickly shifted the conversation to Jared Kushner, implicitly accusing Johnson of being one-sided. He also accused Johnson of “targeting” Hunter Biden. At that point, Johnson had enough.
“Chuck, you know, part of the problem — and this is pretty obvious to anybody watching this — is you don’t invite me on to interview me, you invite me on to argue with me,” Johnson said. “You know, I’m just trying to lay out the facts that certainly Sen. Grassley and I uncovered. They were suppressed. They were censored. They interfered in the 2020 election. Conservatives understand that.
“Unfortunately, liberals in the media don’t. And that’s part of the reasons our politics are inflamed is we do not have an unbiased media. We don’t. It’s unfortunate,” he added. “I’m all for free press. It needs to be more unbiased.”
After crosstalk between Todd and Johnson, the NBC anchor took a shot at his guest.
“Look, you can go back on your partisan cable cocoon and talk about media bias all you want. I understand it’s part of your identity,” Todd accused.
Full Johnson: ‘There is nothing [for the special counsel] to interview me about’ www.youtube.com
At the end of the interview — after Todd attempted to connect the riots in Brazil to Jan. 6 and Donald Trump — Todd said he looked forward to hosting Johnson for an in-studio interview.
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After Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest during the Bills’ Jan. 2 matchup against the Cincinnati Bengals, people all over the world bowed their heads in solemn prayer for his life and health. While the offer of “thoughts and prayers” for a frightening situation is commonplace, those thoughts and prayers seem to have taken root in this instance. Hamlin’s teammate, quarterback Josh Allen, opened up about a “spiritual awakening” that has occurred in his team’s locker room and in his own heart since the incident.
Allen, 26, makes a regular appearance with NFL Network co-host Kyle Brandt on the podcast “Kyle Brandt’s Basement,” and on the Jan. 10 episode, the two discussed Hamlin’s continued recovery and God’s role in it.
“I said this in my press conference the other day,” Allen told Brandt, “[There was] just kind of a spiritual awakening really for me and … for a lot of other people that maybe didn’t have the strongest belief or wasn’t one of the biggest, strongest Christian followers.”
The “spiritual awakening” is not surprising considering the severity of Hamlin’s medical crisis. Not only did first responders and training staff perform CPR on Hamlin right there on the field, but his uncle Dorrian Glenn later reported that Hamlin had to be resuscitated twice in the minutes and hours that followed his collapse. But despite the precariousness of his health that night, Hamlin has since made a remarkable recovery. He was discharged from the hospital within a week and is now recuperating in Buffalo.
“I’ll be the first to admit, like, I haven’t been the most devoted Christ follower in my life,” Allen admitted to Brandt. “I’ve had my different beliefs and thoughts and ideas and stuff like that, but something got ahold of me there, and it was extremely powerful that, you know, I couldn’t deny it.”
The two men then discussed an event that occurred at the Bills’ next game, an event that Brandt described as “some sort of miracle.” The Sunday after Hamlin’s collapse, the Bills took the field to play against the New England Patriots for their final regular-season game. On the opening kickoff, Bills kick returner Nyheim Hines ran the ball back 96 yards for a touchdown. While the play itself was worth celebrating, fans were quick to note that it occurred exactly three years and three months after Hamlin, who wears No. 3, made the team’s last kickoff return for a touchdown.
In discussing Hines’ touchdown, Allen later told reporters: “I was just going around to my teammates saying, ‘God’s real.’ You can’t draw that one up, write that one up any better.”
Allen told Brandt that he grew up Methodist in Firebaugh, California, and attended church regularly with his family, but as he grew older, he hadn’t made practicing his faith a priority.
“It’s been so long since I’ve actually been to church. I went this last offseason one or two times, but not as much as maybe I should,” Allen added.
However, he also indicated that Hamlin’s collapse and subsequent recovery may have stirred many hearts to return to church and make Christian faith a higher priority. “I think this conversation that we’re having right now, we’ve had all these conversations in our locker room,” he said. “It’s been really cool to see how guys have been moved and touched by this whole instance and situation and to see the country come together in support for Damar and maybe having those talks.”
And Allen isn’t the only member of the Bills organization to discuss the religious component of the Bills’ and Hamlin’s recent events. Head coach Sean McDermott has openly shared his belief that God deserves the glory for Hamlin’s improvement. “Glory to God for His keeping Damar and his family in the palm of His hand over the last couple of days and His healing powers,” McDermott said on Jan. 5.
Two days earlier, football analyst Dan Orlovsky — a self-described “follower of Jesus” — prayed spontaneously for Hamlin during a live broadcast on ESPN. His fellow panelists likewise closed their eyes, folded their hands, and joined him in that prayer.
Though these examples of religiosity may be anecdotal, Allen indicated that there is hope that they could lead to a revival of faith among athletes and nonathletes alike.
“To hear some of these stories and just feelings from our guys, to be going through this situation, it’s been really cool to see that unfold in front of us,” Allen stated. “Again, I can’t chalk it down to anything else but a higher power. Yeah, I’m extremely moved. I don’t really have the words to explain it.”
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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