The FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago was reportedly part of an investigation into former President Donald Trump removing classified documents from the White House and storing them in his south Florida resort. FBI agents began the raid early Monday morning around 9 a.m. and searched the property until 6:30 p.m., according to News Nation reporter Brian Entin, who cited his sources. The agents arrived in plain clothes — thus appearing to be Secret Service agents — and only notified the Secret Service about the raid right before it began. “That is why it didn’t leak earlier,” Entin explained.
Three of Trump’s lawyers arrived at Mar-a-Lago after the raid began, and the FBI agents did, as Trump claimed, open a safe in his office.
2/3 FBI did not notify secret service about raid until right before. 3 Trump lawyers showed up during the raid. Safe referred to in Trump statement was in his office which is the old bridal suite above the ballroom. It is a hotel style safe. FBI broke it open.
The purpose of the raid was to retrieve classified documents that Trump allegedly removed from the White House, the New York Times confirmed.
From the Times:
Mr. Trump delayed returning 15 boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives for many months, only doing so when there became a threat of action to retrieve them. The case was referred to the Justice Department by the archives early this year.
Eric Trump confirmed about 30 FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago, that nothing was found in Trump’s safe, and the purpose of the raid was to retrieve documents.
The raid does not confirm that Trump has committed a crime. It does, however, signal that investigators convinced a federal judge they had sufficient probable cause that a crime had been committed and that raiding Mar-a-Lago was necessary to retrieve evidence. Legal experts believe the raid must have been approved by the most senior levels of the Justice Department, perhaps even by Attorney General Merrick Garland, because Trump is a former president and raiding his residence would require approval at the highest levels of government.
The White House allegedly did not know about the raid beforehand.
But Republicans say the raid is more evidence the Justice Department has become politicized under President Joe Biden. After the raid, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy promised an investigation into the DOJ should Republicans retake control of the House after the 2022 midterm elections.
“I’ve seen enough,” McCarthy said in a statement. “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization. When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.”
“Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” he added.
Republican politicians and conservative commentators sounded off on Monday after former President Donald Trump released a statement saying that the FBI had raided Mar-A-Lago.
“The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared in a tweet.
The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.
“This is the act of a dictator of a Banana Republic. Republicans NEVER did this to Clinton, although perhaps we should have. With Joe & Hunter Biden paying zero consequence for his actions. This is shameful and MUST STOP. We don’t do this in America. Way over the line,” Glenn Beck tweeted.
This is the act of a dictator of a Banana Republic. Republicans NEVER did this to Clinton, although perhaps we should have. With Joe & Hunter Biden paying zero consequence for his actions. This is shameful and MUST STOP. We don’t do this in America. Way over the line. https://t.co/IrypwN0dRE
“In third world countries and banana republics they prosecute the former presidents/leaders and their staff. Right now, we look beneath them. We are in a race to the bottom,” GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeted.
“Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “But never before in America.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declared that when Republicans regain the majority in the chamber, they will carry out “immediate oversight” of the Justice Department. “Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” McCarthy said in the statement.
Trump, who is widely expected to run for president again, issued a statement on Monday in which he said that, “my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.”
“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024 … and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the incoming Midterm Elections. Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.”
BlazeTV host Mark Levin unloaded on the FBI Monday night, calling the raid on Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, “outrageous” and the “worst attack on this republic in modern history.”
Levin, a former chief of staff to U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, called in to “Hannity” on Fox News Monday to give his reaction to the then-breaking news that FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Federal agents were reportedly searching for evidence that Trump violated federal records-keeping law by allegedly taking classified documents from the White House with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left office.
“First of all, I’m a former chief of staff to a United States attorney general. We would never ever have done this. Ever,” Levin told Sean Hannity. “Number two, it’s 90 days before midterm election. That’s outrageous.”
“Number three,” he continued, “everybody pretty much knows that Donald Trump is going to run in the Republican primary for president of the United States. And so you have a sitting president who wants to run against him and his attorney general acting like this.”
Levin said Graves’ office likely coordinated with the U.S. attorney’s office in Florida and that FBI agents in South Florida would have been the ones who conducted the raid, “if they are playing it by the book.”
“[The U.S. attorney] wouldn’t have done anything without the sign-off of the attorney general of the United States. Period,” Levin emphasized. He also explained that the precision of the FBI raid suggests it had been planned for some period of time, possibly weeks.
For months, watchdog groups have accused former President Trump of violating the Presidential Records Act by improperly handling classified documents. The National Archives has said Trump tore up some documents he was supposed to preserve while in office and took other materials with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office.
Earlier this year, the National Archives and Records Administration recovered 15 boxes of presidential records from Trump’s residence in Florida, which allegedly included “classified national security information.” Trump said the records were given to the Archives upon request in accordance with federal law. But the agency referred the matter to the Justice Department.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has written a forthcoming book that accuses Trump of attempting to flush some records down the toilet, an act that would potentially be illegal.
Levin said the accusations in Haberman’s book and other reports of Trump’s alleged misconduct served as a “pretext” for the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
“There is no justification for sending 30 freaking FBI agents to the former president’s compound in Mar-a-Lago in early morning and conducting themselves this way or in any other cases in which they’ve done exactly the same thing,” Levin said.
“The FBI is corrupt. This guy [Attorney General Merrick Garland] goes after parents. He goes after Republican state legislatures, he goes after states he disagrees with their abortion positions, he doesn’t do a damn thing to protect the border, which is compelled by the Constitution. Nothing.”
“This is the worst attack on this republic in modern history. Period,” Levin continued. “And it’s not just an attack on Donald Trump. It’s an attack on everybody who supports him, it’s an attack on anybody who dares to raise serious questions about Washington, D.C., and the establishment in both parties.”
THE GREAT ONE GOES OFF: ‘The Worst Attack on This Republic in Modern History, Period.’
posted by Hannity Staff – 8.09.22
0:11 / 4:20
Fox News host Mark Levin went off on the FBI and the DOJ for the raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence; Levin says it’s “the worst attack on this republic in modern history, period.”
Watch the clip above. Excerpts from the interview below.
LEVIN: Everybody pretty much knows that Donald Trump is going to run in the Republican primary for president of the United States. And so you have a sitting president who wants to run against him and his attorney general acting like this.
Now, here’s how this worked. Everybody’s guessing. I’ll tell you what happened. This is in the jurisdiction of the US attorney in District of Columbia, who’s also overseeing the January 6 prosecution. Why? Because that’s where the National Archives is, in the District of Columbia. They didn’t send FBI agents from the Washington office down there. They would have used FBI agents in South Florida and they would have coordinated with the U.S. attorney’s office down there if the plaintiff had a book.
This was well orchestrated, so this has been going on for weeks. Now, you keep asking your guests, what’s the justification? There is no justification. What’s he going to say tomorrow? The attorney general. Here’s my guest. We’ve been negotiating with Trump and his lawyers since February when we found out they had this information, we were getting nowhere. And then we know or we heard that some documents were being destroyed. Maggie Haberman, The New York Slimes was on CNN. They’ve been running pictures of hers that she’s going to have in the book of documents being flushed down a toilet. That doesn’t mean a damn thing. It could be anything.
There is no justification for sending 30 friggin’ FBI agents to the former president’s compound in Mar-a-Lago in early morning and conducting themselves this way or in any other cases in which they’ve done exactly the same thing.
The FBI is corrupt. This guy, Garland, goes after parents. He goes after Republican state legislatures. He goes after states because he disagrees with her abortion positions. He doesn’t do a damn thing to protect the border, which is compelled by the Constitution. Nothing.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at The Rosen Shingle Creek on February 24, 2022, in Orlando, Florida. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
If you did a case study of our political and cultural polarization and how radically different the Democratic and Republican parties are, look no further than each party’s poster boy — California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
Earlier this week, GOP darling DeSantis held a press conference where he boldly stated the dangers of transgender medicine — particularly on children. “They are actually giving very young girls double mastectomies, they want to castrate these young boys. That’s wrong,” DeSantis said, “both from the health and children well-being perspective, you don’t disfigure 10, 12, 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria.”
Thursday, DeSantis showed the world that he meant business when he suspended Florida State Attorney for refusing to enforce state law regarding the protection of minors from gender transition treatment.
Meanwhile, in Newsom’s California, a radical bill just passed out of committee Wednesday in the state assembly that would give California courts the right to take “temporary emergency” custody of out-of-state children whose parents won’t affirm their gender identity or are stopping their children from receiving gender transition treatment. If this bill passed, California courts would even turn a blind eye if a child from another state was kidnapped from their parents or legal guardians and taken to California for the purpose of gender transitioning.
While the bill still needs to be voted on by the General Assembly and the State Senate before making its way to the governor’s desk, it’s likely to pass and be signed into law by Newsom who, last fall, celebrated signing bills that would hide abortions and gender transition treatment for California minors from their parents.
Now, rather than just submitting children who are California citizens to this dangerous medical experimentation, Newsom and the California Left are ready to export their radical gender ideology nationwide and become a top travel destination for minors looking for hormonal or surgical gender transition treatment.
While California attempts to become a “sanctuary state” for young people who identify as transgender, states across the country and even the FDA are starting to wake up to the risks of gender transition treatment for minors. In July, the Food and Drug Administration slapped a warning label on puberty blockers after six girls between the ages of five and 12 suffered from severe side effects, including tumor-like brain masses and eye paralysis.
Despite this implicit admission of the weakness and dangers of “gender-affirming care,” the radical transgender ideology train isn’t slowing down in California any time soon. In Wednesday’s committee hearing, 17-year-old Chloe Cole, who medically transitioned to become a male from the ages of 13 to 16 before transitioning back to being a female, testified against the bill. In her statement, Cole referred to her gender transition experience as “irreversible and painful” and that she “really didn’t understand all the ramifications of any of the medical decisions [she] was making.” She also expressed that her doctor “brushed off [her] parents’ concerns about the efficacy of hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries” and “were pressured to continue [her] so-called gender journey.” Despite hearing this heartbreaking testimony, the committee passed the bill 11-4.
On the East Coast, DeSantis is ready to go to the mat to protect children like Chloe from experiencing the same sorrow and regret, while the Left in California are all too eager to help children ignore the care and concern of their parents for the sake of protecting their radical gender ideology.
As major figureheads for their respective political parties, Newsom and DeSantis offer the American electorate a snapshot of two very different paths the country can take. With California and Florida as the examples, Americans will have to choose, come November, if the United States is going to be a nation that protects children or one that experiments on them.
On Thursday, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided it was the time to bring the subtext of the Jan. 6 show trials and related domestic security state activities into the open.
“My guess is that by the end of this process, you’re going to see indictments involving high-level people in the White House, you’re going to see indictments against people outside the White House who were advising them with regard to the attempt to steal the election, and I think ultimately you’re probably going to see the president, former president of the United States indicted as well,” Holder told SiriusXM host Joe Madison.
Holder noted that the U.S. Department of Justice he formerly headed is working with the illegally constituted Jan. 6 Commission towards this goal. We know these entities are also working with the FBI, whose head bit his thumb at congressional oversight repeatedly in a public hearing last week.
Locking Up Opposition Politicians Is What Putin Does
An indictment of former President Donald Trump would be a breathtakingly authoritarian turn. It would amount to the U.S. security state refusing to accept “no” from America’s voters yet again. An indictment would be an unelected and unaccountable federal agency overruling voters’ two-time rejection of impeachment through their elected representatives.
This is the core danger of the administrative state: Its now open propensity to go rogue. It is apparently hellbent now on turning the United States into a banana republic.
Democrats called Donald Trump a fascist, authoritarian, and wannabe dictator for chants at his rallies of “Lock her up,” referring to his opponent Hillary Clinton. At the time, leftists pointed out that imprisoning, interrogating, investigating, and otherwise using government resources to harass and prosecute one’s political opponents was the mark of tyrannical regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s and Adolf Hitler. “Democracies don’t lock up political opponents,” the Washington Post editorial board told us in 2016.
That is still true when the ones pushing the interrogations, investigations, entrapments into committing felonies, show trials in unusual venues with no cross-examination or due process, early morning home raids, excessive detainment, and asymmetrical punishments are Democrats. Democrats are trashing republican institutions, expectations, and guarantees for political purposes, most visibly now in their Jan. 6 effort to destroy the lives of protestors largely charged with misdemeanors and to expand Spygate tactics more broadly.
Spygate Is Setting Up Field Offices In Swing States
It’s not just the de facto head of the opposition party whom powerful government agencies are putting in their sights, it’s down-ballot party leaders. The FBI has gone from using its spy resources to affect the results of presidential elections with Spygate and its Hunter Biden laptop disinformation to using its police powers to affect gubernatorial elections. And these are just the operations we know about.
In Michigan, the FBI openly meddled in the upcoming election by affecting the selection of candidates, arresting and charging the formerly leading Republican candidate for governor for misdemeanors. The FBI raided Ryan Kelley’s home while polls showed him leading the primaries. In the primary election last week, he came in fourth.
The Jan. 6 Committee is now demanding documents and interviews with Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally. The sole allegation against him is that he walked past “police lines,” which could mean anything, as the scene was chaotic and police were woefully understaffed.
This means Mastriano is being targeted for peacefully exercising his rights to free speech and public assembly. The Jan. 6 Committee won’t allow him to record their planned interrogation, a basic feature of legal self-defense and impartial justice. In fact, selectively excerpted video clips and quotes from these secret interrogations have been a constant feature of the commission, further reinforcing its use as a political weapon against the right rather than a pursuit of justice.
Of the 120,000 people the FBI alleges were present on Jan. 6, 2021 — perhaps 1 percent of whom entered the Capitol building — the vast majority were garden-variety Trump supporters, which include numerous state and local officials. State and local lawmakers are a party’s farm team. Subjecting them to investigation for peacefully protesting is a way to kneecap their entire party.
Weeks before the 2020 election, the FBI announced it had foiled an alleged plot to kidnap the Michigan governor.
But now, in 2022, the story is VERY different. What happened, who authorized this operation, and is this typical of the DOJ's domestic terrorism unit?
Put all of this against the systematic refusal of Democrat DAs, judges, and juries to prosecute people who openly engage in political violence from the left. In 2020, leftist rioters who coordinated across state lines and in far greater numbers and criminal activity than Jan. 6 attendees firebombed federal buildings, murdered people, looted, burned down downtowns, and assaulted police officers. Of course, essentially nobody involved in perpetrating the Spygate setup of an American president has been brought to justice, most recently including Michael Sussmann.
This summer, a leftist group has allegedly attacked two dozen pro-life maternal care centers in multiple states and a congressional office and promises to continue, but Wray couldn’t provide almost any information on alleged FBI investigations into it. Despite an assassination attempt on one Supreme Court justice this summer, the DOJ has still not filed charges against the people harassing and threatening justices and their families at their homes. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland failed for weeks on end to enforce laws against such harassment of justices, creating the conditions for the aggression to intensify.
This is unacceptable, and Wray and Garland should be fired. They won’t be, though, and that’s the problem.
The @FBI is too busy hunting down every grandma and goofball who trespassed and took selfies on January 6th.
And too busy harassing Loudoun County parents who dared to speak up at public school board meetings.
Amplifying pre-existing double standards of justice is far beyond troubling, it’s a destruction of the justice system. A country that harshly prosecutes people or lets them off Scot-free based on their political affiliation is a banana republic.
A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system. Its purpose is not justice but population control. The more people see that moving into place, the more likely it is that some guy gets raided by the FBI for political reasons one morning and — God forbid — goes postal because he has no hope for a fair trial after they take him in.
Certainly even more ordinary Americans are realizing through all of this that the entire federal deck is prejudiced against them. Desperation makes people do wild things. Whatever happens, Republicans can be sure it will be wrapped around their necks with ropes of lies to further subjugate them and everyone who votes for them with the further erasure of our constitutional rights and way of life.
Equality Under the Law Is the Nonviolent Way Out
Remember, 75 million people voted for Trump in 2020. This isn’t some fringe Davidian cult, it’s half of the nation’s voters. Democrats are scaring them, for good reason. And Republicans are doing jack nothing to calm things down.
We’re watching federal agencies use their powers not to catch criminals but to criminalize peaceful political views and actions. We’re witnessing a growing campaign to lock people up for their opposition to the ruling political party, which is not only profoundly un-American but profoundly dangerous societally. This is the prosecution of a political cold civil war that could very easily heat up again in another January 6-like outburst, or worse.
As Mike Anton writes, Democrats may want that. But do Republicans? Any who thinks he might after what we’ve been through in the past seven years is either fool or quisling.
If Republicans think this is all going to blow over just because they haul in the FBI director for another no-consequences hearing, or even if they promise yet another goes-nowhere, punishes-nobody investigation of agencies we know are meddling in elections, framing elected officials, and telling elected members of Congress what to do instead of the reverse, they’re idiots. Their only hope of averting even worse political circumstances is to make damned sure they kneecap these scary federal agencies as their top priority ASAP.
We aren’t in business-as-usual Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in crisis times that call for serious leadership, not LARPing as leaders on screens.
Sending billions to Ukraine while China grows stronger and every domestic sector is on fire isn’t serious. Lambasting Joe Biden for inflation while not pledging to pass the policies that reverse it, starting with slashing the federal government’s spending, isn’t serious. Yelling at the FBI director Republicans helped confirm isn’t serious (get better vetting staff, folks). Confirming a Supreme Court justice who obviously hates the Constitution isn’t serious. Not going on a crusade to clean out the FBI and DOJ Agean-stables-style isn’t serious. And pretending the Jan. 6 commission is anything but a miscarriage of justice is disqualifying.
We need the GOP to provide serious leadership, because Democrats are a serious threat to equal justice for all, and that’s going to destroy the country for good if it’s not stopped post-haste. Americans desperately need swift and prudent action to avert even more unthinkably dangerous events. Those who refuse to plan and take that action despite accepting from voters the responsibility to do so will be infamous to history as cowards and traitors.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
The Senate passed the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday afternoon after an all-night session lasted more than 15 hours. The package, negotiated by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Chuck Schumer of New York, passed along party lines, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the upper chamber’s 50-50 tie. The bill includes nearly $370 billion in green energy subsidies and tax credits, nearly $80 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service and a drug price setting mechanism for Medicare. It also establishes a 15% tax on corporations with market caps higher than $1 billion.
Although Democrats have repeatedly argued that the bill will reduce inflation, the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model has “low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation.” In addition, the bill will likely raise taxes for Americans in every bracket, despite President Joe Biden’s pledge to not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. The Inflation Reduction Act will pay down the federal deficit by more than $300 billion, the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found.
Senators voted down 35 amendments and passed two, with the 48 Democrats and Independent Angus King of Maine agreeing that they would oppose all amendments offered during vote-a-rama to offer the legislation its best chance of passing. Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders objected to the agreement, offering amendments that would restructure the child tax credit, but his proposal failed 97-1.
“They’re great amendments. I’m very happy and I think it says something that every Democrat and Republican voted against them. It says I’m doing something right,” Sanders complained, according to Politico. “I’m fighting for you. I think that should be the message — not to come up with a convoluted reason you can’t vote for it.”
“Today, Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with American families over special interests, voting to lower the cost of prescription drugs, health insurance, and energy and reduce the deficit while making the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share,” he said in a statement.
Today, Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with American families over special interests, voting to lower the cost of prescription drugs, health insurance, and energy and reduce the deficit while making the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.
The House of Representatives will take up the legislation when it gets back from recess on Aug. 12, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced. The bill is expected to pass the lower chamber along party lines.
A video clip has gone viral of U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine calling for laws to “support and empower” youths by not limiting their “participation in activities or sports” or “their ability to get gender affirmation treatment” in their state.
Biden Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine: We need to “empower” KIDS to go on puberty blockers and get sex reassignment surgery. pic.twitter.com/CRPRaFYtzK
Levine was speaking in opposition to states such as Florida that have taken steps to limit “transgender care” for children. Early treatments for children include puberty blockers and hormones, some of which were flagged by the FDA last month because of a “plausible” link to a serious brain disorder called “pseudotumor cerebri.”
Reactions on Twitter were so irate that we can’t share the vast majority of them here, so here’s a sample of the more mild responses:
On “Pat Gray Unleashed,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray discussed Levine’s dangerous argument for gender reassignment treatments for children, Texas oil exports, Vice President Kamala Harris sharing “unbelievable campfire stories,” and more.
Watch the full episode below. Can’t watch? Download the podcast here.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A state judge in Oklahoma has refused to dismiss a lawsuit which alleges that a local school board turned off a public microphone because a man used “a Biblical worldview” to frame his comments.
Back in April, Brice Chaffin spoke at a public school board meeting in Stillwater, Oklahoma, about 65 miles north of Oklahoma City and the home of Oklahoma State University. Though the board had not planned to discuss rules related to bathroom use at schools, many in the audience, including Chaffin, elected to speak about the topic nonetheless.
Many residents wanted to weigh in on the issue since the board had recently updated its anti-discrimination policy to include “gender identity,” which meant that students could use the bathroom which corresponds to their “gender [identities],” rather than their biological sexes.
Chaffin began his comments by arguing for the reality of God and the necessity of accepting Jesus. When board members then asked Chaffin to speak about the bathroom topic at hand, Chaffin hinted at his opposition to “gender identity” as a concept and the related bathroom issue by referencing the Bible.
“So, I talked about physical laws,” Chaffin said. “We have spiritual laws. We also have natural laws. Natural law, for instance, one natural law is that on the day God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female. So, we have males and females.”
Chaffin then began to quote from the first chapter of the New Testament book Romans, a chapter often cited to denounce homosexuality.
At that point, school board members interjected once again and asked Chaffin to stay on topic. When he continued to read from Romans, the board silenced the microphone, and Chaffin’s words became inaudible. Security then removed Chaffin from the meeting.
After the meeting, Chaffin, with the help of attorney Maria Seidler, filed a lawsuit against Stillwater Public Schools, members of the Stillwater school board, and Gay Washington, who was acting superintendent at the time.
Jenni White, president of the group Reclaim Oklahoma Parent Empowerment (ROPE), which is also listed as a plaintiff, issued a statement in support of the suit.
“Any member of the taxpaying community has the right to speak at a school board meeting,” White wrote. “If you watch the video, it was clear that Mr. Chaffin was removed because he was predicating his comments on a Biblical worldview. According to the First Amendment our speech is protected from interference by the government and a school board is a governmental entity.”
“I’d just like the school boards to uphold the Constitution as they’re required to pledge upon taking office. Free speech must include religious speech,” White added.
Though the judge dismissed the charges against the school board as a whole, the judge upheld the suit against the district and each individual board member. A pretrial hearing has been scheduled for November. Chaffin and Seidler are not seeking monetary damages from the defendants, but a public apology and remittance for attorney’s fees.
State legislators have since changed state law to restrict students to using the bathroom which is in accords with their biological sex.
Imagine a doctor refusing to treat a patient until he stops engaging in orgies that put him at risk of contracting monkeypox. Well, he would be following the science and data a lot more than those refusing service to those who don’t get the shots or wear masks, but unlike in the latter cases, that doctor would be out of a job and up to his neck in civil rights lawsuits. The time has come to even the score on discrimination and human rights.
Rayne Barton of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, doesn’t have the luxury of avoiding the doctor. With diabetes, chronic heart problems, kidney disease, and spinal stenosis, Barton needs to constantly see doctors and get prescriptions refilled. Yet, as the Epoch Times reports, she has been banned from all Penn Medicine facilities since Feb. 17, 2022, because of mask disputes. On July 22, Hypertension and Kidney Specialists, an independent doctor’s office in Lancaster, called the police on her after she was told to leave the premises during a mask dispute. She was forced to ride in the back of a police car with her hands behind her back, despite her painful back condition.
How is this allowed to happen in America? How can a policy as inhumane, immoral, and illogical as covering one’s breathing holes be allowed to stand after being repudiated for two and a half years? How is free breathing not a basic human right, especially for those with disabilities, or at least covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act and anti-discrimination law? Companies often spend millions of dollars complying with ADA requirements for customers, yet here they can discriminate against trauma victims when it costs them nothing and when they are free to wear masks themselves if they believe they work, a proposition refuted by the very reality of the virus still spreading unrestrained in all of the most masked places in the world.
Most Americans are no longer affected by the masks because the powers at be smartly lifted the mandates for the majority of people headed into the election. But for people affected the most – those with disabilities needing to see the doctor often – it is still a devastating human rights violation. And unless we extirpate this inhumane treatment from our society, it will be reinstated on all of us intermittently.
The Epoch Times reports that Barton is incapable of placing a mask over her face because she is a victim of childhood trauma. She was attacked by a group of boys as a kid and had dirt stuffed down her mouth, which is why she can’t cover her mouth to this day without it triggering a panic attack. Even for medical interventions that have scientific rationale (and don’t have the option of others utilizing it, as does mask-wearing), we always make exceptions for those with disabilities. What has become of us as human beings that we are still engaging in this sort of behavior long after the “my mask protects you but not me” absurdity has been thoroughly debunked?
The time has come to codify medical discrimination into civil rights and ensure that nobody can ever be denied treatment on account of not getting a shot or wearing a mask. There is never a scientific or moral rationale for such a requirement, and it is clear that it is all promoted through the misinformation propagated by the federal government. Masking only became a thing because of government intervention; it therefore must be uprooted with a display of state government power.
The slate is not clean when it comes to the private sector and discrimination law, especially in something like medical treatment, which is often (especially in a hospital) designated as a public accommodation. They cannot discriminate against people even when their behaviors are proven to cause their ailments. Can hospitals turn away the recurring patients who are on their third drug overdose in as many months? Can they refuse to treat the gunshot victim who himself had been involved in multiple gang shootings? Can they deny treatment for monkeypox if the patient attended a super-spreader orgy that is almost exclusively responsible for the spread of the virus? Until they can, there is no moral or scientific rational for allowing doctors to deny organ transplants to people without shots or care for people who don’t cover their human breathing holes.
Emerging from the past two years of COVID fascism without instituting major legal and political protections against abuse of bodily autonomy would be like not addressing box cutters on planes after 9/11. Yet few Republicans care to act. They have a pre-March 2020 mindset about what we face in government, the medical cartel, and the globalist entities like the World Economic Forum and the WHO, all manipulated by China in the background. Policymakers are slyly choosing to subject only medical facilities and the military to continued regulations so as not to enrage the majority of the electorate, but make no mistake, those people are worth fighting for. Also, we will all continue to suffer from assaults on freedom if we don’t push for new civil rights concerning medical freedom. Such a plan would include:
Updating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so that employers, retailers, hospitals, schools, and others would not be able to discriminate against individuals based on refusal to wear a mask or get a shot, just like they can’t discriminate based on sex, race, or religion. We the Patriots USA has delivered a petition to do just that to all the members of Congress. Red states with supermajorities could easily do this on the state level next session.
Subject anyone who forces someone to wear a mask or get a shot to liability for damage from masks or shots.
Threaten the nonprofit status of any hospital that engages in such discrimination.
Pass a patient bill of rights.
Pass a digital health privacy bill of rights.
Remember, none of these policies organically emerged from the free market. They were all ultimately mandated or manipulated by the federal government. States must fight power with power. If we had a true free market, even a minority of doctors who don’t believe in masks would be able to advertise and place themselves on a list for people like Barton to use. But they would be targeted for loss of board certification or even state medical licenses.
It is shocking that even as the Biden administration declares a second public health emergency on top of COVID, Republicans have not even made reversal of these policies a centerpiece of their campaign platforms. Let us not forget the admonition of founder John Dickinson: “All artful rulers, who strive to extend their own power beyond its just limits, endeavor to give to their attempts, as much semblance of legality as possible. Those who succeed them may venture to go a little farther; for each new encroachment will be strengthened by a former.” COVID fascism must be destroyed – root and branch – if we are to have a shot at precluding the next wave of encroachments on our bodies.
Patrick Collins, CEO of TheGunFood.com, says he’s “lost” thousands of dollars worth of ammunition. Why? Because customers’ orders don’t always seem to make it to their doors — especially when delivering with UPS. In fact, he says out of 18,000 rounds of ammunition shipped through UPS, only a third were actually delivered. That’s a lot of ammo to go missing. So, where is it?
Collins joined Glenn Beck on the radio program to detail the issue, the lengths his company has gone to work with the delivery service, and the lack of detailed response or explanation from UPS. Collins said UPS blames the packaging even though his company has always “met and exceeded” all available packaging protocols.
“I have pictures of how the packages are packed (and) within the packages,” he explained. “And I have all of that information. In fact, we changed our protocol here at TheGunFood.com to have our drivers, when they drop off the packages at the centers, they have to actually take a picture of it on the conveyor belt when UPS takes possession of our packages.”
Collins also told Glenn his company isn’t the only one to have ammunition go missing during delivery. “I know quite a few other folks, that have had well over $300,000 of ammunition gone missing. And it’s really changed the way we have to do our business,” he said.
“The Glenn Beck Program” reached out to UPS to ask why ammunition and gun sellers might be having these issues, but the shipping company didn’t exactly answer the question.
“Dear Glenn Beck Program … Regarding your question about shipping ammunition, as a common carrier, UPS transports ammunition that constitutes cartridges and small arms as defined in federal regulations. UPS has safety protocols to help ensure the safe transport of ammunition in our network. We work with our customers to address their concerns including those with packaging. You can find out more about how to ship your ammunition on UPS.com,” Glenn read.
“To [UPS], it’s just a write-off. However, it’s becoming a very expensive write-off. I would like to thank you for bringing a lot of attention to this because it really is a big deal,” Collins said to Glenn. “It impacts people on multiple levels, more than your average citizen would think. Imagine if the police department doesn’t receive the ammunition that they need to serve their civic duties.”
“Well, imagine if you got sloppy with ammunition and you were just kind of losing some from time to time. What would they accuse you of?” Glenn replied. “There’s no excuse. It’s either theft from their own employees or it is part of a hidden policy that is disrupting the flow of ammunition … and their stonewalling here bothers me, because there should be an answer. What happened to it?”
Watch the video clip below to hear more from Glenn. Can’t watch? Download the podcast here.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A 25-year-old biological male who identifies as a woman was forced to leave a Texas cheerleading camp after allegedly choking a female teammate.
The trans-identified cheerleader, Averie Chanel Medlock, was kicked out of the camp held at Ranger College last month in Eastland County, Texas. Police responded to the campus on July 21 following reports of a dispute among members of the cheer team, according to Fox News.
A since-deleted Facebook post alleged that a teammate said Medlock was a “man with a penis” and that a man should not be on the cheerleading team.
“Well guys I’m officially retired as a cheerleader as of last night at 5:30 AM. A girl on the team was being very disrespectful and told me I am a MAN with a PENIS and that [guys] should not be on the team,” Medlock wrote.
“I stood up for myself and she called her mom and dad because she was scared because I [stood] up for myself. Her father said ‘she still has testosterone and a penis and I will kill anyone who comes after my daughter.'”
The father later identified himself as Mike Jones, and posted a comment on Facebook addressed to Medlock, claiming that at “no time did I ever say anything about your race or your gender.”
“I ask you what you would have done when receiving a phone call at 1 o’clock in the morning from your daughter stating they had locked themselves in the room with other girls,” Jones wrote.
In response, Medlock posted a video to Facebook with a caption reading, “This is video evidence that I did not assault her” and urged Jones to “get [his] facts straight.”
Medlock, who was kicked out of the camp and cited by police for misdemeanor assault, later denied the allegations of misconduct. Medlock told The New York Post that there “was no physical contact at all” and was “just trying to talk it out as an adult.” Medlock claims to have not been questioned by the college before being removed from the cheer team.
Eastland County District Attorney Brad Stephenson told The New York Post that there was an assault and that cops handled the incident appropriately.
“There definitely was an assault and it could’ve ostensibly been charged as a class A misdemeanor, but I think they appropriately charged it as a class C misdemeanor,” Stephenson was quoted as saying.
The incident comes amid growing debate over whether trans-identified athletes who are biologically male should be allowed to participate in women’s sports. The debate has gained national traction after swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male formerly known as William, won the NCAA women’s championship in March in the women’s 500-yard freestyle. Thomas edged out the second-place finisher by nearly two seconds.
At least 18 states have passed legislation to prohibit or strictly limit transgender participation to the athlete’s birth sex, including Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
A stranded Iranian Christian migrant holds the Bible as he prays at dawn in front of a fence reinforced by barbed wire and a wooden barricade at the Greek-Macedonian border near to the Greek village of Idomeni November 30, 2015. | REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis
The Iranian government is actively inciting “derogatory public opinion” against Christianity and other faiths by using Iranian media outlets to spread religious propaganda, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
A new report from the bipartisan federal advisory committee says Iran’s government uses official media, government-linked media and social media to spread “falsehoods and misconceptions” about religious minorities to turn public opinion against these communities.
The report “Religious Propaganda in Iran” attributes the effort to a “systematic campaign to deny freedom of religion or belief to groups that do not conform to the government’s singular interpretation of Ja’afri Shi’a Islam.”
For instance, the government describes some Christians as belonging to an “Evangelical Zionist cult” and uses vague national security accusations to target Christian converts.
The phrase was referenced in the Nov. 3, 2021 ruling by Iran’s Supreme Court, declaring that promoting Christianity and establishing home churches are not crimes and do not amount to national security crimes.
The court’s opinion used the phrase “Evangelical Zionist cult” to refer to the Christian converts whose case it was addressing.
Under Iran’s legal system, a ruling by a Supreme Court branch is not necessarily binding on lower courts.
“This misinformation campaign restricts freedom of religion or belief for religious minorities in Iran,” USCIRF Commissioner Sharon Kleinbaum told The Christian Post.
According to USCIRF, Iranian state propaganda against Christian converts is often disguised as anti-Zionism, and Christian converts are regularly referred to as members of a “Zionist” network.
Officials say the reference to Zionism in this context does not refer to specific allegations of links between Christian converts in Iran and the state of Israel but rather “a broad conspiracy in which Evangelical Christians across the world promote political viewpoints that serve Zionist ideology.”
The report also cites what USCIRF called “Iran’s misinformation campaign against Christian converts,” which officials say seeks to differentiate Christian converts from Armenians and Assyrians as recognized religious minority groups.
Hojjat al-Islam Kashani, a Muslim cleric who serves as the secretary of the Islam-Christianity Dialog Association, told an Iranian media outlet, “What is being promoted today as Christianity is not traditional Christianity, but rather it is Evangelical and colonial Christianity.
“Evangelical Christianity is not a religion. It is a policy-oriented towards colonialism.”
According to the report, Kashani accused Evangelical Christian Iranians of pursuing a political agenda of expansion designed to undermine Iran’s government.
Those political aims of Evangelical Christians have “resulted in their alienation from other Christians, and that Iranian Armenians are opposed to Evangelical Christians,” Kashani said.
Iran’s history is replete with examples of outside intervention by colonial powers in its domestic affairs, so this comment appeals to the sense of injustice some Iranians may feel about foreign meddling in Iranian politics, Kleinbaum said.
“The impact on Iranian Christians is that they cannot rely on the government to uphold its obligations under international law to protect freedom of religion or belief, and are more likely to face discrimination from Iranians who internalize the government’s false messaging,” she added.
In addition to Christian converts, the USCIRF report identifies and reviews the significant themes Iran’s government deploys against Jews, Sunni Muslims, Gonabadi Sufis and Baha’is.
Besides providing data and analysis on religious freedom abroad, USCIRF also provides foreign policy recommendations to the president, secretary of state and U.S. Congress to fight religious persecution and promote freedom of religion and belief. Iran is one of 10 countries recognized by the U.S. State Department as a country of particular concern for tolerating and engaging in religious freedom abuses.
Just one year after Iran signed a historic nuclear deal with the U.S. and other Western nations in 2015, USCIRF reported that religious minorities in Iran, including Christians, continue experiencing severe human rights abuses.
The report found that religious freedom conditions “continued to deteriorate,” with Christians, Baha’is and the minority Sunni Muslims facing the most persecution in the form of harassment, arrests and imprisonment.
Open Doors USA, a watchdog group that monitors religious freedom abuses in over 60 countries, ranks Iran as the ninth-worst country regarding Christian persecution.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Ben Margot
It’s not every day that I praise a book by the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, let alone the longest-serving president of that organization.
But I was delighted to have Nadine Strossen on my Substack recently to talk about her book, “HATE: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship” — and not just because I am one of America’s leading “hate speakers.” (Oh, settle down, girls. That’s according to woke college liberals, the only humans more infantile and narcissistic than Donald Trump.)
Her book is a thoroughgoing, no-holds-barred defense of free speech. This makes her the rarest of creatures: a principled liberal. We should get her DNA in a lab and study it.
Being a liberal herself, Strossen pitches her argument to the left. That’s fortunate, I’d say: These days, the most enthusiastic advocates for censorship are liberals.
Thus, she repeatedly notes that censorship has historically been used by the powerful to crush the “marginalized.”
I couldn’t agree more! On the other hand, the two of us have very different ideas about who’s “marginalized.” Strossen means feminists, gays, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, transgenders, nonbinaries and so on, whereas I mean everybody else, to wit: “cisgendered” white Americans.
Not a certified victim? Don’t even think of applying to Harvard, Princeton or Yale — unless you’ve made a spectacle of yourself carrying on about gun control. Don’t be funny, use hyperbole or engage in any conversation at all with bratty East Coast private-school kids on a college resume-building trip to Peru. (See Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Donald McNeil, fired by The New York Times for this reckless error.)
Every time I’d read a description of this or that “hate speech” ban in Strossen’s book, what leapt to mind wasn’t someone saying only women have two X chromosomes, but the nonstop venom that is directed at white people.
“Hate speech” has been defined as expression that is:
— “persecutorial, hateful and degrading”;
— “insulting [or] holding up to ridicule … specific groups”;
— “likely to expose” people to “hatred or contempt”: “unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification” …
Throughout the country, white schoolchildren are being browbeaten about their “white privilege” and instructed to “unpack” their “white privilege knapsack.” Does that count?
How do you think it would go over if I wrote books with titles like: “Black Fragility,” “Dear Black People” and “The White Friend: On Being a Better Black Person.”
My guess is, not very well. And yet the Priests of High Culture at the Times have effusively — and repeatedly — praised books titled “White Fragility,” “Dear White People” and “The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person.”
These, and dozens more with similar titles — “My Beautiful Black Hair,” “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race,” “Black Girl Magic” and on and on and on — do not bring their authors into disrepute. To the contrary, they are rewarded with instant fame, unbridled praise and immense wealth. (Naturally, their books are assigned reading in college courses throughout the nation.)
Is all this loathing for white people simply the cry of the powerless against the powerful?
Here’s some power for you: Since at least 1973, when Allan Bakke was rejected from the University of California Medical School at Davis with grades and scores that would have won him a fast-track admission had he been black, white Americans have been openly and aggressively discriminated against by the government — and with even greater zeal by corporate America.
White people, if I may call you that, you suck at oppression.
Making both my point and hers, Strossen says that wherever hate speech laws have been tried, it’s the “marginalized” — not the “oppressors” — who get nailed.
Duh. People who think it’s cool to publish books with titles like “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race” don’t exactly exude sweetness and light when talking to actual white people.
Thanks to the University of Michigan being forced to release documents in response to an ACLU lawsuit challenging its “hate speech” code in the late 1980s, Strossen reveals that, during the brief time it was in effect, more than 20 cases were brought against black people for racist speech.
The “irony” of hate speech laws being applied to the people who engage in most of the hate speech has led law professor Charles Lawrence to argue for “hate speech” codes that would apply only to those “in dominant majority groups,” i.e., white people.
See? To me, that sounds like the rule of an “oppressor.”
But like Strossen, I believe in free speech. It’s not the “hate speech” that bothers me; it’s the physical violence and intentional race discrimination against white Americans that’s beginning to get on my nerves.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is facing allegations that the group is promoting a book for elementary school students that normalizes sexual behavior among children, drawing criticism from conservative Christian groups. Conservative news website Breitbart published a report last week about the SPLC’s “Learning for Justice” project, which includes an “LGBTQ Library” with a list of recommended books and practices that are controversial.
Jeff Johnston, the culture and policy analyst for the Colorado Springs, Colorado-based Focus on the Family, denounced the guide as promoting “false ideologies and damaging behaviors for children of all ages.”
“It promotes the false idea that there are not two sexes — male and female — but a variety of ‘gender identities,'” said Johnston in a statement emailed to The Christian Post on Monday.
“It encourages schools to violate privacy and safety in restrooms, locker rooms and showers by allowing students who ‘identify’ as the opposite sex into those spaces. And it urges schools to use curriculums that are radical and sexualized. This is ideology masquerading as education.”
Senior Fellow for Education Studies at the Christian conservative activist organization Family Research Council Meg Kilgannon also took issue with the guide, telling CP that the SPLC “has been in the business of sexualizing children in the name of ‘diversity’ for years.”
Kilgannon directed CP to a 2019 paper by the FRC, updated last year, which documented examples of the SPLC’s “Learning for Justice” program engaging in controversial practices.
“When sexual progressives want to teach children with ‘no normative pressures around sex,’ parents should know that kind of thinking can include the idea that age restrictions on sexual behavior adults and children is a ‘normative pressure,'” she explained.
“SPLC isn’t interested in preserving childhood innocence when they train teachers to implement Queer Theory in classrooms in California and around the country. School systems that rely on teacher training materials from SPLC should be aware of the dangerous political and sexual ideologies SPLC’s ‘free materials’ include.”
One of the recommended books in the guide, which received considerable attention from Breitbart, is Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, which is aimed at younger readers.
“Less controversial than its title suggests, this comic book for kids includes children and families of all makeups, orientations and gender identities, providing an essential resource about bodies, gender and sexuality for young children that will help caregivers guide difficult conversations,”claims the guide.
The comic book features an illustration of a girl having an orgasm, with its author being quoted as wanting “a world with no normative pressures around sex.”
Elsewhere, the guide claimed that “children often know their gender as early as 2 or 3 years old” and that they “do not need to be pubescent or sexually active to ‘truly know’ their gender identity or sexual orientation.”
CP reached out to the SPLC for a response to the book, but a response wasn’t received by press time.
Under the category of “Classroom Culture,” the guide encouraged teachers to wear nametags indicating their chosen pronouns and encouraged the conducting of “pronoun check-ins.”“Collective pronoun check-ins help students learn peers’ pronouns without forcing nonbinary students to come out repeatedly,” the guide continued. “You may say, ‘To make sure we’re referring to each other accurately, let’s go around so everyone can share their name and pronoun.’ This process can help transgender and nonbinary students feel seen, not singled out.”
Launched in 1991 and originally named “Teaching Tolerance,” “Learning for Justice” describes itself as an educational resource project helping schools combat discrimination and celebrate diversity.
“Our free educational resources — articles, guides, lessons, films, webinars, frameworks and more — help foster shared learning and reflection for educators, young people, caregivers and all community members. Our engagement opportunities — conferences, workshops, and school and community partnerships — provide space where people can harness collective power and take action,”its website states.
“Through this continual cycle of education and engagement, we hope that we can build and maintain meaningful relationships with communities and we can all move from learning for justice to creating it.”
A far-left civil rights group, SPLC has garnered much controversy and backlash over its labeling of several conservative Christian organizations, including FRC, as “hate groups.” This became a major point of contention in 2012 when a gay rights activist inspired by the SPLC entered FRC’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and attempted to kill the staff. The SPLC apologized to ex-Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz in June 2018 and paid him $3.3 million in a settlement after wrongfully including him in a report on anti-Muslim activity.
In March 2019, the SPLC fired its founder, Morris Dees, in response to several allegations of sexual misconduct, as well as claims of racist behavior within the progressive group.
Michael Gryboski released the novel “The Enigma of Father Vera Daniel.” For more information, click here.
The Massachusetts State House in Boston, Massachusetts. | Wikipedia/Ajay Suresh licensed under CC BY 2.0
Massachusetts Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has signed into law a measure establishing abortion and “gender-affirming care” as constitutional rights, a move pro-life activists contend will turn the state into an “abortion sanctuary.”
Baker approved Bill H.4930, “an Act expanding protections for reproductive rights,” Friday. The bill’s approval follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 24 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which reversed the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
The bill passed in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives on June 29. The House voted 136-17 to advance the legislation, with 119 Democrats, 16 Republicans and an independent supporting it, while six Democrats and 11 Republicans voted in opposition to the bill. The Senate approved H.4930 in a unanimous vote of 40-0 on July 25.
“Access to reproductive health care services and gender-affirming health care services is recognized and declared to be a right secured by the constitution or laws of the commonwealth,” the bill declares. “Interference with this right, whether or not under the color of law, is against the public policy of the commonwealth.”
The social conservative advocacy group Massachusetts Family Institute claims the legislation ensures the state will protect “abortionists who perform abortions out-of-state, even if they violate other states’ laws.” The group contends the bill will lower or eliminate “safety requirements for pharmacies to dispense abortion pills” and “force[s] state universities to provide the abortion pill to students.”
The group stresses that the bill will also force insurance companies to cover abortion “even if they have religious objections” and prohibits insurance companies “from charging deductibles or copays for abortions but allows them to do so for all other pregnancy-related services.”
“[The bill allows] late-term abortions when a doctor deems a baby ‘incompatible with sustained life’ outside of the womb, which decision is not subject to review by any medical board,” the group stated in a statement.
“This is also an ‘intersectional’ bill, as its legal protections for abortionists extend to organizations who distribute puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, even in states where they have been criminalized for use on children. You might not have realized that Planned Parenthood was also in the transgender hormone business, but they are… aggressively so.”
Baker signed an executive order on the day of the Dobbs decision proclaiming that the state government agencies may not assist other states seeking to impose civil or criminal liability against anyone who performs an abortion in Massachusetts. The governor cited concerns that other states would “impose civil or criminal liability or professional sanctions on health care professionals who provide and persons who seek and obtain reproductive health care services in the Commonwealth as permitted by the laws of the Commonwealth.” He maintained that “health care professionals lawfully providing and persons lawfully seeking and obtaining reproductive health services in the Commonwealth should be protected from legal liability premised on and professional sanctions issued under the laws of other States.”
“Massachusetts remains steadfast in its commitment to protect access to reproductive health care services, especially in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade,” Baker said in a statement.
“The Court’s decision has major consequences for women across the country who live in states with limited access to these services, and our administration took quick action in the hours following that decision by issuing an executive order to protect access here in the Commonwealth,” he added. “This new legislation signed today builds on that action by protecting patients and providers from legal interference from more restrictive laws in other states.”
H.4930 contains language stating that “no person shall be subject to discipline by the board, including the revocation, suspension or cancellation of the certificate of registration or reprimand, censure or monetary fine, for providing or assisting in the provision of reproductive health care services or gender-affirming health care services.”
The enactment of H.4930 occurred in the aftermath of failed efforts to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act in U.S. Congress. The bill would codify the right to abortion into federal law and limit the ability of states to implement pro-life laws. The Women’s Health Protection Act passed the Democrat-controlled House multiple times, most recently on July 15, three weeks after the Dobbs decision. However, the bill failed to gain traction in the evenly divided U.S. Senate, where most legislation requires 60 votes to pass. On May 11, 51 of 100 senators voted against invoking cloture, a procedural step that would enable debate to begin on the Women’s Health Protection Act. The Senate previously rejected the Women’s Health Protection Act in a 48-46 vote on Feb. 28.
Even before Baker signed Bill H.4930 into law, Massachusetts had some of the most permissive abortion laws in the U.S. In late 2020, the ROE Act became law over Baker’s veto. The law codifies the right to an abortion into state law, allows abortions to take place after 24 weeks gestation in the case of a fetal anomaly and permits minors between the ages of 16 and 17 to obtain an abortion without parental consent. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute has identified Massachusetts as one of 16 states with laws protecting the right to abortion.
Massachusetts’ establishment of a right to “gender-affirming health care” comes after a handful of states have passed laws restricting the ability of minors to obtain puberty blockers and gender transition surgeries. Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas have implemented such laws while the head of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters has classified gender transition surgeries for minors as child abuse. The state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an advisory opinion saying the same.
We previously reported at The Gateway Pundit about the lawsuit filed in May by the states of Missouri and Louisiana against ALL of the MAJOR GOVERNMENT PLAYERS in Big Tech Censorship, including Joe Biden, Jen Psaki, Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the NIH, the Department of Homeland Security, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and many others.
The lawsuit alleges, and we all know this is true, that the Biden administration conspired with – and at times outright coerced – Facebook, Twitter, Google, and every other major tech monopoly, to enforce speech and thought conformity on the internet.
We later wrote about a whistleblower who dumped a cache of internal documents from the Department of Homeland Security into the lap of Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Chuck Grassley of Iowa.
The documents confirm that DHS has maintained an ongoing “disinformation” censorship program, targeting anyone with COVID vaccine concerns and 2020 election fraud concerns – and anyone else thinking Wrongthink.
Later, we reported that the federal judge in the suit granted Missouri AG Eric Schmitt and Louisiana AG Jeff Landry permission – at a minimum – to conduct an investigation into multiple Big Tech companies as part of the suit.
Today, Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft formally joined the suit as a plaintiff, alongside the states of Missouri and Louisiana, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University’s Department of Medicine, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, medical ethicist Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines, the Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana.
For Our part, we cannot wait to depose Anthony Fauci, Alejandro Mayorkas, and the rest of the defendants.
This is the biggest opportunity yet for America to uncover the evil and unconstitutional activities of the Federal Government and its Big Tech monopolist co-conspirators.
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
National Security Council coordinator John Kirby was peppered with questions Tuesday over how the Biden administration will respond to the Taliban violating the Doha Agreement.
The United States carried out a successful counterterrorism strike against the leader of al Qaeda over the weekend, killing Ayman al-Zawahiri. American operators were successful partly because al-Zawahiri was “hiding” in plain sight in a wealthy Kabul neighborhood, thus underscoring the type of impunity the Taliban have extended to al Qaeda after the fall of Afghanistan last year.
The close relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda violates the Doha Agreement, a peace treaty negotiated under former President Donald Trump between the U.S. and the Taliban. Specifically, the agreement bars the Taliban from allowing al Qaeda to operate in Afghanistan, a provision the Taliban have clearly violated. With the Taliban in clear violation of the Doha Agreement — a reality Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged — reporters from multiple media outlets grilled Kirby over how exactly the Biden administration will respond.
“What will the repercussions be for the Taliban harboring al-Zawahiri?” ABC News chief White House correspondent Cecilia Vega asked.
“I’m not going to telegraph moves and decisions that we might make,” Kirby responded. “I’m certainly not going to get ahead of anything at this point.”
Kirby, however, disclosed that U.S. leaders have spoken with Taliban leaders for harboring al-Zawahiri, which he admitted is a clear violation of the Doha Agreement. But when NBC News chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander pressed Kirby on whether the Biden administration would hold accountable the Taliban, Kirby obfuscated, saying only that he will not “telegraph punches” and the Taliban know the U.S. is aware they violated the Doha Agreement. Kirby even suggested the Taliban might shape up because they want legitimization from Western powers.
Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and John Kirbywww.youtube.com
Then Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy ratcheted up the pressure.
“You guys gave a whole country to a bunch of people that are on the FBI Most Wanted list. What did you think was going to happen?” Doocy pressed.
Kirby responded by saying he takes “issue with the premise that we gave a whole country to terrorist groups.”
“The Taliban was harboring the world’s number-one terrorist. How is that not giving a country to a terrorist-sympathizing group, if not giving them permission to have terrorists just sit on a balcony?” Doocy pressed.
Engaging in circular reasoning, Kirby then told Doocy the strike against al-Zawahiri is proof the U.S. is not idly permitting the Taliban to harbor al Qaeda terrorists. And in the end, Kirby praised Biden.
“I would go so far as to say not only the American people are safer as a result of President Biden’s decision, but the rest of the world is safer,” Kirby said.
Other reporters asked Kirby similar questions about the Taliban and their violations of the Doha Agreement, but he never offered substantive answers.
Kirby said violations of the agreement will “lead to consequences not just from the United States, but from the international community” — but he never said what any of those consequences would be.
Rutgers University microbiologist Dr. Richard Ebright testified before the U.S. Senate Wednesday that top public health officials lied about dangerous gain-of-function (GoF) research experiments conducted in China. Ebright testified that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other U.S. federal agencies funded research that fit the definition of GoF at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) without proper oversight. His claim directly contradicts those made by numerous public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Live at Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight: @RandPaul noting that gain-of-function research "has the "potential to unleash a global pandemic that threatens the lives of millions" but Congress has not held a hearing on it.
Specifically, Ebright testified that research funded by federal agencies at the WIV in the 2010s violated an NIH pause on GoF research funding between 2014 and 2017. After the pause was lifted in 2017, Ebright claimed that GoF projects which continued did not properly go through the agency’s regulatory process for oversight. NIH and other federal agencies funded various experiments in the 2010s at the WIV which made bat-based coronaviruses more dangerous by increasing their fatality and infectiousness. According to the strict definition of GoF research, those experiments should’ve fallen under the GoF oversight process or been banned by the funding moratorium.
“Gain-of-function research of concern involves the creation of new health threats–health threats that did not exist previously and that might not have come to exist by natural means for tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of years,” Ebright said.
“The statements made on repeated occasions to the public, to the press and to policymakers by the NIAID director, Dr. Fauci, have been untruthful. I do not understand why those statements are being made because they are demonstrably false,” Ebright explained Wednesday.
Ebright’s assertion that the NIH-funded research is GoF work directly contradicts previous testimony by Fauci before the U.S. Senate.
“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci said in May 2021. “Dr. Baric does not do gain of function research and if it is, it is according to the guidelines and is being conducted in North Carolina, not in China.”
Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has frequently clashed with Fauci over whether or not the federal government funded GoF research. Fauci called Paul “entirely and completely incorrect” on the subject.
Wednesday’s hearing, initiated by Paul, was the first American lawmakers held regarding the subject of GoF research. Some experts have theorized that the COVID-19 pandemic could have been spawned by the research taking place at the WIV, claiming it’s possible that the virus leaked from the lab after experimentation by researchers. The epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic began just blocks away from the WIV.
Several Trump-backed candidates came out ahead in Tuesday’s primaries, with some races notching wins for the former president as he publicly eyes a 2024 run. One of the most notable wins for Trump came in Michigan, where his endorsed candidate John Gibbs defeated Republican Rep. Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump in 2020. Gibbs previously worked under Trump as the acting assistant secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and backs the former president’s unfounded claims that the election was stolen.
Meijer is the second House Republican who voted for Trump’s impeachment to lose a primary, with the first coming in June after Trump-endorsed state Rep. Russell Fry beat out South Carolina Rep. Tom Rice.
Other Trump-endorsed candidates who won Tuesday evening include Arizona’s Blake Masters, a venture capitalist running for a Senate seat, Republican Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon and Arizona state legislator Mark Finchem, who is running in the state’s GOP secretary of state primary.
FILE PHOTO: Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters speaks during former U.S. President Donald Trump’s rally ahead of Arizona primary elections, in Prescott Valley, Arizona, U.S., July 22, 2022. REUTERS/Rebecca Noble/File Photo
Attorney General Eric Schmitt also won Tuesday evening in Missouri for the GOP Senate primary. Trump’s “endorsement” in this race was chaotic, with the former president issuing a statement roughly 24 hours before the primary that endorsed “ERIC” – the name of Tuesday’s winner but also the name of his opponent, Eric Greitens, who has been riddled with scandals in recent years. (RELATED: Missouri Governor Resigns Amid Sexual Misconduct Scandal)
In Arizona, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar snagged a Trump endorsement and won Tuesday’s primary, though his race was considered fairly safe ground.
While the former president saw success in Tuesday’s primary, some of his picks are still battling it out as of early Wednesday morning. Trump-endorsed Arizona Rep. David Schweikert is projected to win his race, according to Decision Desk, but former TV news anchor Kari Lake’s race remains too close to call.
Lake is running against Karrin Taylor Robson, who was endorsed by former Vice President Mike Pence.
Overall, Trump has endorsed over 200 candidates across the country, according to The New York Times. In competitive races, his record has been mixed, The Times also noted, perhaps representing the broader debate within the party regarding its loyalty to the former president.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Days before the Capitol riot provoked a years-long effort to impeach, prosecute, and politically malign former President Donald Trump, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney coordinated efforts to deter the very actions she now claims haunt the former president.
Cheney has blamed Trump for not ordering the National Guard to defend the Capitol complex, even though multiple sources confirm that he authorized their deployment days prior to the Jan. 6 rally at the White House and riot at the Capitol. Security officials in charge of the Capitol declined to call up troops to protect it, government records show. Yet Cheney herself seems to have orchestrated opposition to use of the military to quell election-related unrest, allegedly organizing a Washington Post op-ed on Jan. 3, 2021, signed by every living former defense secretary.
“All 10 living former defense secretaries: Involving the military in election disputes would cross into dangerous territory,” the headline read. It went on to threaten any military official who thought any use of the military might be a good idea. “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic,” the op-ed warned.
The op-ed was allegedly organized by Cheney, whose father was secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush before serving as President George W. Bush’s vice president. Eric Edelman, a national security adviser to Dick Cheney, told the New Yorker the Wyoming lawmaker “was the one who generated” the piece for the Post.
Now Rep. Cheney has adopted Trump’s supposed inaction on the National Guard as a primary line of attack. On “Fox News Sunday,” Cheney again depicted Trump as an apathetic leader who dismissed pleas to deploy the National Guard while the Capitol was under siege.
“There are several witnesses who say they met with President Trump on January 4th,” said Bret Baier, “and he offered some 20,000 National Guardsmen to protect the Capitol building on January 6th but the offer was rejected. Is that true?”
“His own acting secretary of defense says that’s not true,” Cheney said, highlighting committee testimony from former Acting Secretary Christopher Miller who told the panel Trump made no order to deploy the National Guard. “So, the notion that somehow he issued an order is not consistent with the facts.”
Except the president did issue authorization for D.C. leaders to call up the National Guard for pre-emptive reinforcements days before the Capitol riot. While Mayor Muriel Bowser took limited advantage of the extra troops, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sergeant at arms rejected or stonewalled the offer six times, according to former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund. Pelosi’s office was reportedly concerned the guard’s deployment was bad “optics” after having spent the prior summer decrying the use of federal law enforcement to put down left-wing insurrections.
When Trump sent reinforcements to secure federal buildings under attack in Portland, Pelosi condemned the extra law enforcement as “stormtroopers.” After days of sustained riots wreaked havoc across Washington D.C., Pelosi called the sight of uniformed troops protecting the Lincoln Memorial “stunning” and “scary.”
The campaign to fight any use of troops to restore order during the left’s widespread and coordinated summer of rage was so effective that Gen. Mark Milley issued an abject apology for merely appearing in uniform at a site that had been ravaged by leftist arsonists.
“My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” Milley said about appearing in front of a historic church across the street from the White House. The night before, left-wing arsonists had targeted the church as part of a riot that besieged the White House and led to the injuring of dozens of Park Police and Secret Service officers.
Bowser’s use of guard troops on Jan. 6 extended to unarmed troops restricted to traffic control and removed from protests.
“[N]o DCNG personnel shall be armed during this mission, and at no time, will DCNG personnel or assets be engaged in domestic surveillance, searches, or seizures of [U.S.] persons,” she directed to law enforcement.
Although Cheney and her colleagues with the Select Committee have sought to indict Trump as responsible for a slow response from the National Guard on Jan. 6, the panel’s own findings have undermined the probe’s point. In December, the committee released a trove of private communications from former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who pledged the National Guard would be ready to maintain order.
“Mr. Meadows sent an email to an individual about the events on January 6 and said that the National Guard would be present to ‘protect pro Trump people’ and that many more would be available on standby,” the committee wrote, as if revealing some grand scandal to help their case.
In June, Miller and former Chief of Staff of the Department of Defense Kash Patel went on Sean Hannity’s program to dispel committee accusations that the president was indifferent to the National Guard.
“Mr. Trump unequivocally authorized up to 20,000 National Guardsmen and women for us to utilize,” Patel said.
Miller, whom Cheney cited as evidence of Trump’s negligence, corroborated Patel’s testimony on air.
“To be clear,” Miller said, “the president was doing exactly what I expect the commander in chief to do, any commander in chief to do. He was looking at the broad threats against the United States and he brought this up on his own. We did not bring it up.”
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.
The campus of Seattle Pacific University, a Christian school located in Seattle, Washington | Seattle Pacific University
A Christian university is suing the attorney general of Washington state over an investigation into its hiring practices that university officials say violate the school’s religious freedom. Seattle Pacific University (SPU) filed suit on July 27 against state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who is investigating potential illegal discrimination over the university’s refusal to hire LGBT applicants based on its statement of faith.
In the 22-page complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma, SPU said Ferguson “is wielding state power to interfere with the religious beliefs of a religious university, and a church, whose beliefs he disagrees with.”
“He is using the powers of his office (and even powers not granted to his office) to pressure and retaliate against Seattle Pacific University,” the suit stated.
The complaint claims that Ferguson’s investigation compels SPU to release “information on internal religious matters and decisions, detailed review of religious hiring practices, communications with ministerial employees, and even the selection of the University’s president, senior leadership, and board of trustees.”
A June 8 letter Ferguson sent to SPU requests that the institution to “[p]roduce any policies governing the hiring, promotion, discipline, and/or termination of University faculty, staff, and administrators, as it relates to their sexual orientation or status of being in a same-sex marriage and/or intimate relationship.”
“The attorney general’s probe inquires into confidential religious matters and is beyond the scope of authority granted under state law and the federal constitution,” attorneys for SPU said in the complaint.
In response to the lawsuit, Ferguson released a statement confirming the civil rights investigation.
“We did not publicize the letter, nor did we announce our investigation. In response to our inquiry, Seattle Pacific University filed a federal lawsuit,” the attorney general stated.
“The lawsuit demonstrates that the University believes it is above the law to such an extraordinary degree that it is shielded from answering basic questions from my office regarding the University’s compliance with state law.”
Ferguson launched the investigation after “[n]umerous Seattle Pacific University students, faculty, and others reached out to my office to file complaints or otherwise express deep concern that the University administration’s policies illegally violate Washingtonians’ civil rights.”
The private evangelical Christian and Wesleyan institution is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church and enrolls around 3,500 students. The institution claims it adheres to the biblical definition of human sexuality. Last year, SPU faced criticism after its board of trustees announced it would continue a hiring policy that prohibits hiring full-time faculty members who identify as LGBT. SPU’s Faculty Senate obtained responses from around 90% of the faculty on the board’s decision to maintain that policy despite objections from some in the school community.
Around 72% of the faculty who responded agreed with the “no confidence” vote regarding the board and its decision, according to The Seattle Times.
“The Board’s decision to maintain SPU’s discriminatory hiring policy related to human sexuality, as well as its manner of delivering that decision, have regrettably compelled the faculty of SPU to pass a vote of no confidence in the SPU Board of Trustees,” the faculty senate said.
In May, SPU’s policies attracted national attention following a student protest over the board’s vote to “retain Seattle Pacific University’s current employee lifestyle expectations regarding sexual conduct.”
“We want the community of SPU to know that this was a thorough and prayerful deliberation,” Board Chair Cedric Davis said in a statement.
“While this decision brings complex and heart-felt reactions, the Board made a decision that it believed was most in line with the university’s mission and Statement of Faith and chose to have SPU remain in communion with its founding denomination, the Free Methodist Church USA, as a core part of its historical identity as a Christian university.”
SPU is a member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which is opposing a lawsuit filed by former students from over two dozen Christian universities who say they felt discriminated against on their campuses. The lawsuit seeks to overturn religious exemptions to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act that allows faith-based institutions to adhere to scriptural beliefs on sexuality and gender.
Ferguson, who has served as attorney general of Washington since 2013, has a history of bringing charges against Christian entities deemed to have violated the state law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In 2013, Ferguson filed a consumer protection lawsuit against Christian florist Barronelle Stutzman for refusing to provide floral arrangements to a same-sex wedding on the ground that doing so went against her Christian convictions.
After a lengthy legal battle, Stutzman agreed to pay $5,000 to settle the lawsuit and announced her retirement.
When the federal government started a wildfire that burned 432 homes in New Mexico back in May, President Joe Biden promised that the U.S. government would be footing the bill.
“Today, I’m announcing the federal government’s covering 100 percent of the cost,” Biden said during a June 11 speech at the New Mexico State Regional Training Installation Facility in Santa Fe.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case, according to Reuters.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is now telling victims that they need to share the cost of the fire because Biden’s declaration didn’t waive a federal statute requiring cost-sharing.
Lo and behold, the controlled burns got out of control. The resulting fire incinerated 432 residences over a 530-square-mile area, Reuters reported.
The burn damage consisted “of mostly privately owned forests and meadows, much of it held by members of centuries-old Indo-Hispano ranching communities,” the report said.
During his remarks in Santa Fe, Biden made it clear there was a bit of an asterisk to the promise that 100 percent of the cost would be borne by the federal government.
According to a White House transcript of his remarks, the president noted that “we have a responsibility, as a government, as a — to deal with the communities who are put in — in such jeopardy” and vowed that the federal government would cover “100 percent of the cost of debris removal and emergency protective measures for the next critical months.”
However, he added that the funding was intended to “be a strong bridge until we — that we pass the — the Hermit’s Peak Fire Assistance Act.”
If that law passes, it could provide total federal compensation — although not in the near term, given that the legislation isn’t likely to be voted on until the fall. Thus, for the moment, many of the fire victims now have to pay for the damage the federal government caused.
Take Daniel Encinias, a 55-year-old rancher who met Biden during his visit to New Mexico. He’s living in a camping trailer next to the ashes of his Tierra Monte, New Mexico, home. He’s not alone, either: His wife, Lori, his three teenagers and 12 pets are all in there, too.
He was also told by the Department of Agriculture he would get quick support at minimal cost. That’s a good thing because, as with many in his low-income corner of the world, he didn’t have insurance.
That’s not quite how it worked, however.
“Encinias submitted an application to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to fix his well, but was told to share 25% of costs based on a federal statute that could not be waived as it did not fall under Biden’s declaration,” Reuters reported.
“Encinias said he was told by NRCS officials his application would be considered in September and recovery work would begin six to 12 months thereafter if he was accepted.”
“Why the hell am I going to pay anything when I didn’t cause this damn fire?” he said.
After starting New Mexico fire, U.S. asks victims to pay
Encinias, a retired electrician, is doing some of the work himself. As for feeding his cattle, he’s been forced to buy hay because the baler he owns was destroyed in the fire.
The family is surviving on the $37,000 maximum Federal Emergency Management Agency payout for the destruction of their five-bedroom house in the fire.
“I’m hoping that finally something works out where it helps the people,” Encinias said.
Then there’s rancher Kenny Zamora, who saw 170 acres of his forest burned. Following the fire, heavy rains caused debris to slide down hills no longer able to absorb water, leaving his pastures covered in 2 feet of muck.
“If you don’t have insurance, you’re pretty much on your own,” he said.
He’s not kidding. After applying to the USDA’s Farms Service Agency for help to feed his livestock, he was told he wasn’t eligible, with USDA officials telling him the Emergency Forest Restoration Program in the area hasn’t been funded yet.
These two are hardly alone, according to Reuters.
“Many fire-hit families cannot afford sharing at least 25% of costs on the USDA’s Emergency Forest Restoration Program (EFRP) which offers relief such as stabilization of burn areas prone to flash flooding, according to New Mexico State Forester Laura McCarthy. Residents sometimes own large areas of land passed down from 1800s Spanish-Mexican land grants while working blue-collar jobs,” the report said.
“They’re really struggling,” the state forester said.
So, what happens to people like Encinias in the interim?
Don’t ask the local NRCS office in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where Encinias had applied for aid. Its response to Reuters’ request for comment was to direct the wire service to the national office. The national office, however, didn’t respond to the request. Neither did the White House.
Biden made a promise. Yet his administration has been more concerned with getting its mega-spending bills through Congress than with delivering for these ranchers.
“It’s not a gift,” the president said in June. “We have a responsibility to help this state recover, to help the families who have been here for centuries, and the beautiful northern New Mexico villages who can’t go home and whose livelihoods have been fundamentally changed.”
If this really is a responsibility of his administration, he needs to start acting that way.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
The first words spoken on Beyoncé’s new album are “please, motherf***ers.” She repeats the phrase over and over again, adding “ain’t stopping me.”
Please, motherf***ers ain’t stopping me.
“Renaissance,” her seventh studio album, is explicitly crude and profane. A New York Times reviewer described the 40-year-old singer’s 16-song collection as “steeped in black queer bravado.” Wesley Morris, the Pulitzer-winning reviewer, never defined black queer bravado. The reader is left to assume that queer bravado is as endemic to black people as full lips, wide noses, nappy hair, and obscene music.
Beyoncé, the so-called heir to Aretha Franklin’s title as the “Queen of Soul,” has more in common with Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion than the icon who demanded “Respect.”
Beyoncé symbolizes the catastrophic descent of black culture and America’s indifference to its fall.
“Renaissance” is controversial for its use of the word “spaz,” not the filth spewed by a middle-aged married mother of three. Expectations have fallen so low for American black people that no one expects Beyoncé to mature or make music that uplifts black folks.
No. Our only expectation is that she contains her penchant for degeneracy and denigration to black people only.
That explains why Beyoncé will eliminate the word spaz from her latest album. Disability rights advocates complained that the singer’s use of the word “spaz” in the song “Heated” is a slur against people with cerebral palsy. Spastic diplegia causes motor impairment in the arms and legs. The phrase “spazzing out” is mocking what happens to people with spastic diplegia.
I learned all that this morning when I heard the pop singer was editing the song. I did not know the etymology of “spaz.” Now I do. I’m not sure I care.
What I find fascinating about all of this is that people with cerebral palsy care more about policing the way they’re portrayed in the entertainment and media world than black people do.
We’re the only group with absolutely no standards. The entire rap music industry is built on the N-word. It is used repeatedly in nearly every successful commercial rap song. Rappers brag about killing n*****, raping n*****, robbing n*****, dissing n*****. No one cares. Beyoncé uses the N-word in “Heated.” No one cares.
Every minority group aggressively polices how they’re characterized in music, television, and movies except black people.
In 1995, Michael Jackson, the greatest force in the history of music, released the song “They Don’t Care About Us” on the album “HIStory.” It was a protest song. It decried racism. It argued that the government and the powerful elite only pretend to care about the great mass of humanity.
The song included the lyrics “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.”
On June 15, 1995, Bernard Weinraub wrote a piece in the New York Times suggesting that Jackson’s use of the words “Jew me” and “kike me” were anti-Semitic. Eight days later, after issuing two apologies, Jackson agreed to rewrite the song, eliminating the offending words.
On the same song, the rapper Notorious B.I.G. used the N-word twice. Bernard Weinraub did not care about that. Neither did anyone else. We don’t care about us. No one does. I don’t blame non-blacks. If we don’t care, why should they?
Jewish people care how they’re represented. Would they canonize a rap group “Kikes With Attitude”? Would the LGBTQ+ Alphabet Mafia canonize a rap group “Dykes With Attitude”? Does the Alphabet Mafia let anyone drop f****t in casual conversation?
Jewish people have self-respect. The LGBTQ crowd has more respect for itself than black people do for themselves.
We have allowed popular music to define black men as criminals and black women as hoes. Our men sell drugs and our women twerk to the sound of music the way dogs howl when they hear a siren.
Maybe that’s what black queer bravado is? Or maybe it’s not caring how you’re represented in popular culture. Maybe it’s not having a standard of conduct and behavior.
Beyoncé has black queer bravado. She instantly bowed to disability rights advocates while promoting degeneracy for black people.
Quemoy and Matsu, officially known as the Kinmen and Lienchiang Counties respectively, are groups of islands located directly off the coast of mainland Communist China but are under the administration of the Republic of China, Taiwan.
Quemoy and Matsu are not fortified, making their capture by the People’s Liberation Army an easy, but highly symbolic victory.
In the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, also called the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the People’s Republic of China shelled the islands of Quemoy and Matsu Islands in part to probe the extent of the United States’ defense of Taiwan’s territory. During the 1960 Presidential campaign between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon, the defense of Taiwan, as represented by Quemoy and Matsu, became a major issue during three of their debates.
According to recent reports, footage uploaded by civilians in China shows large military movements of troops and equipment as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is expected to arrive in Taiwan.
The large military movements have occurred on major highways and railways throughout the Chinese province of Fujian, directly adjacent to Quemoy and Matsu.
In the last 24 hours, commercial flights have been abruptly canceled from airports in several cities in Fujian province. These airports include Xiamen, Fuzhou and Quanzhou. Xiamen Airlines put out a statement saying that the flight cancelations were due to “regional traffic control” and did not elaborate further.
This could be considered an invasion warning, the military occupation of the Quemoy and Matsu Islands as the first step by Communist China to subjugate Taiwan and eliminate U.S. influence in the Western Pacific.
Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft, and a contributing editor at TGP. Joe’s reporting is often months ahead of the Mainstream media as was observed in his reporting on the Mueller sham investigation, the origins of the China coronavirus, and 2020 Election fraud. Joe was a corporate executive in Hong Kong for a decade and has years of experience in finance, IT, operations and auditing around the world. The knowledge gained in his career provide him with a unique perspective of current events in the US and globally. Joe’s weekday radio show at Realtalk933.com has received rave reviews. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of four books. His new book: ‘The Steal – Volume One: Setting the Stage’ is out now. It addresses the stolen 2020 Election and those activities that led up to November 3, 2020 – please take a look and buy a copy.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Voters leave a polling station after casting their votes during the U.S. presidential election in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, November 8, 2016. | Reuters/Aaron Josefczyk
Politics can be a messy business.
From the varied special interests wielding influence behind the scenes to the undeniable fact that we’re often left with candidates who exhibit demonstrable character defects, the idea of voting our values as Christians can seem like a daunting enterprise.
This reality is one reason why the proverbial phrase “the lesser of two evils” has become a go-to expression each election cycle. It’s an acknowledgment that both political parties fall short of our biblical standards in some way — embodying worrying degrees of corruption, bad ideas, and problematic leadership.
But that phrase is also an acknowledgment that Christians shouldn’t just throw up their hands in surrender, even if our choices are less than ideal. As best we can, we should pursue the application of biblical principles to every area of life, which includes the domain of politics.
How, then, should Christians weigh upcoming elections as they assess who to support at the ballot box?
Thanks to the recent slate of excellent Supreme Court rulings, we at least have a practical blueprint to help inform us as we make our decision.
Here are five areas to sharpen our focus during election season.
Ally to the pro-life community
Protecting unborn life in the womb should be one of the primary motivating factors for any serious Christian. The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization undid the horrors of Roe v. Wade, turning the abortion battle from the national to the state level.
Which politician, Christian or not, will be an ally to the pro-life community?
That’s the question we must ask.
The ones who are hostile to the pro-life community will make it obvious.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for instance, demanded that the feds shut down crisis pregnancy centers by force while her colleagues in the House blocked a congressional resolution to condemn the violence and vandalism directed at faith-based organizations in the aftermath of Dobbs.
Meanwhile, abortion fanatic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D, ghoulishly vetoed millions of dollars from the budget that was allocated by the Michigan legislature to “encourage adoption and support pro-life pregnancy facilities.”
Like I said, they make it obvious.
Religious liberty
What good is religious liberty if you can’t exercise it in a public place? Not good at all, the Supreme Court concluded in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.
Coach Joe Kennedy, if you’ll recall, was canned by his employer, a public school district, for leading a voluntary prayer on the field after each game. The district ridiculously argued that this voluntary prayer, which players from both teams participated in, was a de facto establishment of religion by the school.
It was not.
It was an American citizen exercising his God-given right to praise his Creator free from government interference.
Which politician will rigorously protect the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty and free speech?
This question is all the more important to sort out after we witnessed megalomaniac governors and local officials exploit the coronavirus pandemic to shutter churches and limit attendance capacity for almost a year, even as they allowed abortion clinics and pot shops to remain open and accessible.
Put differently, will the politician be a friend or foe to the Church?
Lest you think such a query is too abstract, remember that Beto O’Rourke, who is currently running for governor in Texas, previously told a CNN townhall audience in 2019 that, if elected president, he would rescind the tax-exemption status of any Christian nonprofit that opposed same-sex marriage.
School choice
In Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Maine, if it is going to subsidize tuition costs for private schools, cannot freeze out faith-based schools from receiving funds as well.
“That is discrimination against religion,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.
Three of Roberts’s colleagues objected to the decision, which means three Supreme Court justices believed that Maine was justified in explicitly barring tax dollars from going toward religious instruction even as the State made tax dollars available to other private institutions.
“Discrimination” is the right word choice.
For voting purposes, any program or law — charters, vouchers, home school protections — that aids Christians in removing their children from the public school system is a win.
Government schools are not values-neutral venues for education. They are temples of worship for humanism, where a secular worldview is at the core of what is taught. If that agenda wasn’t evident already, the relentless reporting by Christopher Rufo exposing the radical gender ideology showcased in the classroom should leave no doubts.
Separation of powers
Civil government isn’t the only form of government, biblically speaking. It’s one form among many.
And throughout Scripture He places different emphases and assigns different roles to each of these jurisdictions. Under this design, tyranny is averted because power is not centralized in any one form of government; it’s decentralized, or it should be anyway.
That’s the road to freedom. But that’s not how Washington, D.C., has functioned lately.
Americans have lost a great deal of their freedoms to unelected bureaucrats who populate the administrative state. No-name pencil pushers are imposing vast regulations on American society by decree, making a mockery of our Constitution’s commitment to “checks and balances.”
A seismic correction, however, could be in the works, thanks to the ruling in West Virginia v. EPA. Here the Supreme Court blocked the Environmental Protection Agency, and, by extension, other government agencies, from snatching power that was never delegated to them by Congress in the first place. As Neil Gorsuch underscored in a concurring opinion, any federal agency endeavoring to regulate “‘a significant portion of the American economy’” must be given an overt mandate by the legislative body. The same determination applies if an agency is trying to “require ‘billions of dollars in spending’ by private persons or entities,” the justice added.
It’ll now be more difficult for some Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fanboy you’ve never heard of to micromanage your life from the windowless office of his D.C. cubicle.
While defanging the administrative state may not be as flashy as the other Supreme Court opinions handed down this term, West Virginia v. EPA is nonetheless a crucial part in upholding the biblical precept of separation of powers. Christians should be suspicious of any politician who doesn’t respect these constitutional boundaries.
One last thing…
This next topic wasn’t addressed in the Supreme Court’s most recent docket, but it remains an indispensable part of how Christians should assess who to back for political office. And that topic surrounds this question: What kind of people will the candidate staff his administration with?
That question is critical because who an elected leader hires to implement his policies reflects that administration’s beliefs and priorities. It’s not a one-man operation, after all.
Which brings us to President Joe Biden.
He appointed a man pretending to be a woman to a key healthcare role at the White House. Admiral “Rachel” Levine, formerly known as Richard Levine, is the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. During an MSNBC interview not too long ago, Mr. Levine said he remains dedicated to empowering “trans youth” to get “gender-affirmation treatment in their state,” which is the euphemistic way of saying he supports pumping adolescents full of puberty blockers and recommending “sex” reassignment surgery if these “youth” convey discontentment about their gender.
Any politician or party who defends mutilating children over feelings they’ll eventually grow out of has tilted the “evil” in “the lesser of two evils” balancing act unequivocally to one side of the electoral scale … which means that balancing act no longer exists.
The Biden administration has similarly made news by hiring a guy at the Department of Energy’s nuclear waste division who shows up to work in stilettos, a dress, lipstick, and goes by the pronoun “they.” The same dude reportedly brags about his bizarre sexual fetish that involves animal role-playing. It’s called “pup-play,” if you’re interested.
What this means in the context of voting is that we may not like the candidate at the top of the ticket and may even find his personality obnoxious, but that should not automatically be a dealbreaker.
If the candidate is going to hire personnel who champion the unborn, who respect religious liberty and Christian education, who seek to scale back the size and scope of civil government, and who aren’t trying to subvert the biological differences between men and women and castrate kids in the process, then these are all strong factors to consider before casting a ballot.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Students eat lunch in the cafeteria at a middle school in San Diego, California March 7, 2011. | (Photo: REUTERS/Mike Blake)
More than 20 state attorneys general have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for threatening to withhold funds for the National School Lunch Program from schools that do not comply with the Biden administration’s LGBT ideology.
On May 5, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service announced its intention to interpret “the prohibition on discrimination based on sex found in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972” to include “discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
In a memorandum published that same day, the agency informed state and regional directors of all Food and Nutrition Services programs of the policy change. The department cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County finding that the provision of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination based on sex also applies to sexual orientation and gender identity as the justification for the new interpretation of Title IX.
As a result of the USDA’s interpretation of Title IX, “state and local agencies, program operators and sponsors that receive funds from FNS must investigate allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation” and “update their non-discrimination policies and signage to include prohibitions against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.”
The FNS administers the National School Lunch Program, which provides low-cost and free lunches to 29.6 million children at nearly 100,000 public and nonprofit private schools in the fiscal year 2019.
On Tuesday, Tennessee’s Republican Attorney General Herbert Slatery joined 21 other Republican attorneys general in filing a lawsuit against the USDA and its top officials in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee Knoxville Division. The attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The states contend that USDA’s interpretation of Title IX would cause the plaintiff states to lose federal funding for the National School Lunch Program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) Program.
Describing the USDA as the latest example of the Biden administration’s “misinterpretation” of Title IX, the lawsuit states that the final rule issued by the department requires states to ensure that “no person, on the grounds of sex, including gender identity and sexual orientation, race, color, age, political belief, religious creed, disability, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be otherwise subject to discrimination under SNAP.” The final rule takes effect on Aug. 15.
Additional guidance issued by the USDA requires “FNS nutrition assistance programs, state or local agencies, and their subrecipients” to post a nondiscrimination statement. The statement.
The complaint argues that language in the additional guidance indicates that while “the old policy prohibited discrimination only ‘in any program or activity conducted or funded by USDA,’ the new policy seemingly implies to each program-administering ‘institution’ as a whole.” It warned that “the USDA Memoranda and Final Rule [will] Irreparably Harm Plaintiff States.”
The lawsuit listed plaintiff states’ “laws or policies that at least arguably conflict with” the USDA’s final rule.
Tennessee state law asserts that “[a] student’s gender for purposes of participation in a public middle school or high school interscholastic athletic activity or event must be determined by the student’s sex at the time of the student’s birth.” The state law also provides a right of action against schools that permit “a member of the opposite sex to enter [a] multi-occupancy restroom or changing facility while other persons [are] present.”
The complaint urged a federal judge to issue “a declaratory judgment holding unlawful the Department’s Memoranda and Final Rule” and a “declaratory judgment holding that Plaintiffs are not bound by the Department’s Memoranda and Final Rule.”
The complaint also sought a declaration that the department did not have the authority to penalize and withhold federal funds from Title IX and Food and Nutrition Act recipients that “continue to separate students by biological sex in appropriate circumstances.”
The plaintiff states requested similar declarations preventing retaliation against Title IX and Food and Nutrition Act recipients that “maintain showers, locker rooms, bathrooms, residential facilities, and other living facilities separated by biological sex or regulate each individual’s access to those facilities based on the individual’s biological sex.”
The states also want the court to prohibit retaliation against schools that “do not require employees or students to use a transgender individual’s preferred pronouns,” “maintain athletic teams separated by biological sex or” assign individuals to teams based on biological sex.
The lawsuit comes a month after 26 state attorneys general wrote a letter to President Joe Biden outlining their concerns with the USDA’s administrative action and asking the administration to rescind the guidance.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack defended the agency’s actions as part of a commitment to “administering all its programs with equity and fairness and serving those in need with the highest dignity.”
“A key step in advancing these principles is rooting out discrimination in any form – including discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,” he added. “At the same time, we must recognize the vulnerability of the LGBTQI+ communities and provide them with an avenue to grieve any discrimination they face. We hope that by standing firm against these inequities we will help bring about much-needed change.”
A Texas store clerk fought back against a robber who attacked her with a knife last week, shooting the suspect multiple times and landing him in the hospital. Beaumont Police got a call about a robbery in progress at the Everest Food Mart in the 2800 block of Eastex Freeway around 11:30 p.m. last Friday, KBMT-TV reported. While police were on their way to the scene, the station said they were told the store clerk shot the robber multiple times. Police arrived at the store within minutes of receiving the initial call, KBMT said.
Image source: KBMT-TV videos screenshot
Officer Haley Morrow told the station’s news crew at the scene that a store clerk called and said a man entered the store with a knife and robbed her, KBMT reported, adding that the clerk suffered minor injuries. A preliminary investigation determined the robber displayed a knife and attacked the clerk prior to her shooting him, the Port Arthur News reported.
Officer Morrow emphasized to the station that crime victims have the right to defend themselves.
“Essentially, you know, we see the aggravated robberies often; in a lot of cases what we don’t see is … a victim fight back and defend themselves,” she noted to the KBMT. “But, you know, we want to make sure that people understand that they do have that right.”
Officer Haley MorrowImage source: KBMT-TV video screenshot
The suspect was identified as 62-year-old William Coleman of Beaumont, KBMT said, adding that he was taken to an area hospital for treatment for serious injuries. Coleman later was charged with aggravated robbery, the station said.
Once Coleman is released from the hospital, he will be taken to the Jefferson County Jail and held on a $250,000 bond, KBMT reported.
Teacher’s unions in Florida are concerned about a new state policy which will allow veterans without a college degree to receive a five-year voucher to teach at a state public or charter school. According to reports, Florida currently has more than 4,300 teaching vacancies with a new school year fast approaching. In an effort to fill some of these essential positions, the state has adjusted the requirements for military veterans in the hopes of attracting some of them into the classroom.
Veterans who wish to apply for the teaching voucher must have:
Minimum of 48 months of active-duty military service with an honorable/medical discharge
Minimum of 60 college credits with a 2.5 grade point average
Passing score on a Florida subject area examination for bachelor’s level subjects which demonstrate mastery of subject area knowledge
Employment in a Florida school district, including charter schools
The policy went into effect on July 1 and offers fee waivers for military spouses as well, though contrary to some reports, spouses are still subject to the same requirements as other civilians.
While many teachers acknowledge that the shortage is dire and that fewer and fewer recent graduates are electing to become teachers, many Florida teachers’ union members are unhappy with the new policy for veterans, particularly the education requirements.
“We are always fighting to lift our profession up,”Carmen Ward, president of the Alachua County Education Association and a member of the Florida Education Association, said. “We have a lot of veterans that work currently in our schools. However, they have four-year degrees. Because it is an academic position, it requires that the person who is teaching the subject matter have academic experience with that subject matter.”
“And not to mention that teachers have pedagogy,” Ward added. “It is not just a science, but an art to be able to teach children to read. We do not believe that anyone, regardless of their education, can be a teacher in a classroom.”
Tina Certain agreed.
“It’s not that I’m against the service that veterans provide to our country,” Certain said. “I just think that to the education profession, we’re lowering the bar on that and minimizing the criteria of what it takes to enter the profession.”
“You can’t just throw a warm body in a classroom. That’s not the answer,” said Barry Dubin, president of the Sarasota County Teachers Association.
“We owe the freedoms we enjoy as Americans to our military veterans, and I am focused on ensuring Florida is the best state in the nation for those who have served to find great jobs, start or grow businesses and support their families,” DeSantis said in a statement. “Business is booming in Florida, and employers are looking for the leadership skills, training and teamwork military veterans bring to the workforce.”
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The left is at it again, and conservatives need to be on high alert. The left has been pushing for a national popular vote to elect the president of the United States for years. Since 2017, 10 more states have either signed the National Popular Vote bill into law or approved the bill in one state legislative chamber. This should be a grave concern because it directly undermines the electoral system established by our Constitution. If not stopped, the American system of presidential elections will be changed potentially forever.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It has been enacted by 15 state legislatures plus Washington, D.C., and passed in 41 legislative chambers in 24 states. For the proposal to become the law of the land, enough states totaling at least 270 electoral votes would be required to enact the law, and states would then commit their electoral votes to the candidate with the most popular votes nationally, regardless of which candidate won at the state level.
The states that have enacted the compact represent 195 electoral votes: Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, California, New York, and the District of Columbia. States with passage in one chamber include Arkansas, Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Successful passage in all of these states represents 283 electoral votes, enough to change the law and make our presidential election decided via popular vote rather than the Electoral College.
Democrats have long been unhappy with the electoral process, unless, of course, their candidate won. When their candidate loses, debate begins anew about how unfair the Electoral College is. The argument is always the same. Since we conduct our elections by democratic process, it makes sense to elect our nation’s executive according to the will of the majority with a voting plurality.
Five times, presidential candidates have won elections without the popular vote: John Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), George W. Bush (2000), and Donald Trump (2016).
Minority and Less Populated Areas Would Lack Representation
The commonly heard sentiment during election cycles is “every vote matters.” However, what is not fair is that if the president is elected based on a plurality, then the minority would not have a chance of having their candidate elected. Only the concerns and interests of more heavily populated areas, such as the East and West coast cities, would be represented. Interests of the minority and less populated areas would naturally be set aside and of little interest to future presidential candidates. Worse, the executive would be beholden and accountable solely to the majority.
This condition was not the intent of our founders. Their intent was to ensure that the nation’s highest executive, as well as the executive branch, represented the interests of all Americans regardless of political affiliation. A future president would need to appeal to those concerned about not just national but also regional issues.
Further, the Electoral College provided a means to disburse and decentralize power. State electors are elected just days before and are unknown until just prior to an election to prevent undue influence to stay true to the people’s votes in their states. Our founders framed it so as to prevent collusion and cabalist (their word) behavior, preclude violence, and thwart involvement of foreign powers.
Cabalism Comes to Light
Following the 2020 election, our founders’ concerns came to light and fruition. Our national elections have been fraught with cabalist behavior, undue influence, numerous forms of cheating, as well as foreign interference. The tyranny they feared came to pass, driven by collusion among the administrative state, the legislative branch, legacy media, Big Tech, and nongovernmental organizations. An independent executive branch separate from the legislature has become an illusion.
In Federalist Paper 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “the process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of the president will never fall with a lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue and a little arts of popularity may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first owners of a single state, but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole union.” Hamilton would have been appalled today to have witnessed the travesty undermining his sentiment.
So why does all this matter?
An Oppressive Majority
It matters because the idea of a national popular vote is gaining steam and if adopted by enough states, the Electoral College will become irrelevant. Minority voter interests will no longer matter at the national level. Only the whims of the majority will. And the result will be precisely why Socrates opposed a democratic form of government. Once a majority is established, it finds a way to remain permanent, and the majority class will become oppressive to the minority class. There will be no means to overturn the majority, no matter how skewed the majority’s view may be.
The implications for the country are vast and would make the United States just another oppressive tyrannical state. The ultimate reason for the success of the U.S. was that its founders held a belief that we are created and guided by a higher power, and they recognized that men are inherently corruptible. They implemented controls to prevent those with ambitions from achieving outright power over the minority, thus making the U.S. unique among nations.
Left Looks to Crush the Right
The left’s tactics are in high gear, accelerating in an attempt to overwhelm conservatives and Republicans to a tipping point at which the left acquires complete control and the right becomes powerless.
The left’s all-out assault has become abundantly clear since President Joe Biden took office. As soon as Democrats attained the presidency and the narrowest of majorities in the House and Senate, they pressed forward with their agenda, nearly unimpeded had it not been for the likes of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and perhaps divine intervention.
Whether changing voting laws in its favor, creating crises to circumvent the laws already in place, continually flooding the courts with litigation designed to throw sand in the gears of transparent elections, or changing the electoral process altogether, the left’s efforts to gain and retain control, by any means necessary, will not relent.
In addition to ongoing election integrity efforts across the nation, it is imperative that conservatives push back attempts to advance a national popular vote. It is incumbent upon individual citizens to tell their state representatives that it is not the desire of the people to circumvent the constitutional process for electing our president.
Failure to stop a national popular vote could take generations to reverse.
Andrew Morgan is a former deputy assistant secretary of the Army, a senior executive within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and a retired U.S. Navy captain. He received his MBA from George Washington University and master’s from National Defense University.
In 2016, psychologist Dr. Peter Langman compiled biographical data on 56 American school shooters. He found that 82% had grown up in dysfunctional family situations, usually without two biological parents at home. The trend has sadly continued. The shooter in Uvalde, Texas, hadn’t lived with his father in years. The Sandy Hook shooter hadn’t seen his father in the two years leading up to that massacre.
Last month, new research from the Institute for Family Studies demonstrated, once again, how important fathers are, especially for boys. For example, boys growing up without their dads are only half as likely to graduate from college as their peers who live with their dad at home. Strikingly, those numbers remain steady even after controlling for other factors such as race, income, and general IQ. Boys without a dad at home are also almost twice as likely to be “idle” in their late twenties, defined as neither working nor in school, and are significantly more likely to have been arrested or incarcerated by the time they turn 35.
These are only a few of the data points which demonstrate that fatherlessness is one of the most pressing crises our culture is facing. Why doesn’t our culture talk more about this?
One reason is that this crisis intersects other “third rails.” Our culture got to this point via the sexual revolution, which encouraged promiscuity by redefining freedom and prioritizing autonomy over responsibility. When sex outside of marriage becomes normal, it is mostly women who are left on their own to raise the resulting children.
There are other contributing factors as well, many of which were made possible by legislation. Divorce has been largely destigmatized, not in small part by making it legally easier. The legal demand for same-sex “marriage” brought with it the demand for same-sex parenting, which by definition asserts that kids do not need both a mother and a father. Certain forms of assisted reproduction likewise assert that children are less the fruit of a committed marriage than they are a commercial process.
And now here we are, with 32% of American boys growing up in homes without their biological dads. If there’s anything that we should learn from the grim outcomes of this social experiment, it is that dads aren’t replaceable. This was true from creation, but even more so in a fallen world with each of us born with a fallen human nature. We only learn to grow from socially, emotionally, and spiritually immature children into adults so that we can live together in a healthy way by seeing healthy behavior modeled and by having unhealthy behavior corrected.
Scripture passages affirm that mentoring in righteousness requires demonstration, as much or more than just explanation. Christ repeatedly told his followers to “do as He did.” When He washed His disciples’ feet, He offered it as an object lesson: “I give you an example, that you also should do as I did to you.” Paul told believers in Corinth and Ephesus to be “imitators” of him, just as he was an “imitator of Christ.”
In other places, Scripture even points to modeling and mimicry in sex-specific ways. In his letter to Titus, Paul instructed men to be “dignified” and “self-controlled” and to “urge the younger men to be self-controlled.” He also told the older women to “teach what is good” and to “train the younger women” to be “self-controlled,” “pure” and “kind.”
That, of course, is another cultural third rail. We are so desperate to pretend sexual difference isn’t built into our biological reality, we simply cannot abide the suggestion that our genders are critically important in parenting. But the numbers don’t lie. As Dr. Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, puts it, “[T]here is no such thing as ‘parenting.’ There is mothering, and there is fathering—children do best with both.”
Christians can challenge the growing public safety crisis that is fatherlessness, and we must start in the Church. We must affirm, in word and in action, that there are men and there are women and that both matter in parenting. We have to de-normalize absent dads, challenge men to take responsibility for their sexual choices and for their children and fill in the gaps whenever and however necessary.
No matter if our technologies and cultural dogmas pretend otherwise, every child has a father. These new statistics show, again, that every child needs their father. We have no right to deprive them of
John Stonestreet serves as president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He’s a sought-after author and speaker on areas of faith and culture, theology, worldview, education and apologetics.
Few people in America were following the passage of the $280 billion handout for huge chip manufactures and the 5G industry, but the politics surrounding the bill, as well as the bill itself, perfectly exemplify the “uniparty” dynamic. To begin with, GOP leadership had no problem with this corporate welfare bill and worked together to craft it. However, McConnell promised to hold up the bill unless the Democrats committed to forgoing budget reconciliation, a process through which they can pass liberal priorities without the need for 60 votes. Well, McConnell and 17 other Republican senators eagerly provided the votes for the “chips-plus bill,” and Schumer responded by announcing his plans to pass budget reconciliation to remake our economy!
Leftists love over-taxing and over-regulating certain businesses while granting endless corporate welfare to other industries in order to create transnational monopolies. The semiconductor and 5G industries embody everything conservatives are worried about with the corporate masters – ties to China, privacy concerns, health concerns, outsourcing American jobs, creating monopolies, and funding woke global corporations that hate our values and use the funding as well as the technology against our best interests.
In comes the “chips and science” bill (HR 4346), a $280 billion package for the science and tech cartels that includes $54 billion in five-year grants for manufacturing and design of semiconductors and 5G wireless deployment, plus $24 billion in tax credits for new semiconductor manufacturing facilities through 2026 and funding authorizations to bolster U.S. scientific research. These are some of the wokest and wealthiest companies. Intel, which aggressively lobbied for the bill, already earned $79 billion in revenue last year. Yet 17 Republicans, including Leader McConnell, joined every Democrat sans Bernie Sanders and voted for this earth-shattering and expensive bill with lightning speed.
Even if one agrees there is a need to somehow pick winners and losers, we should have at least secured provisions ensuring that China can’t steal our technology, that the jobs and supply chain remain here in the United States, and that these companies can’t promote wokeness, and we should have addressed oversight issues of privacy and health concerns with 5G. Rather than addressing the insane regulatory burden that has broken our domestic supply chains, this bill will further incentivize and invest in the current globalist system that sells out America to China. Absent large-scale policy reforms, more funding of supposed “American” tech giants is tantamount to funding China. The GOP’s answer to everything we don’t like is to add more spending to it.
To make matters worse, in the final days, the bill added hundreds of pages and hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the broken “science” agencies that should be shuttered. This includes a five-year $102 billion authorization for the National Science Foundation, Commerce Department, and National Institute of Standards and Technology to increase investments, which represents a $52 billion increase in baseline spending of these bloated and unnecessary agencies. It also includes billions of extra funding for “basic energy sciences” and “environmental sciences.” It appears that McConnell and company still “trust the science.”
In other words, even in the minority under a very radical and unpopular Democrat regime, Republicans think that the base spending bills weren’t enough and desire to increase funding for everything that is wrong with government. Republicans will wax poetic today about inflation, yet when it came to the issues that mattered – COVID, Ukraine, and now a massive Big Tech bill – they not only fail to filibuster big budget bills, but they will even vote for new massive spending bills while in the minority. At least in the past they used to be righteous in the minority and screwed conservatives only after winning elections.
Although there are some House Democrats who are at least consistent in their hate for big business and will oppose this corporate welfare, Republicans plan to supply the votes.
A source on Capitol Hill tells me 10 Democrats are opposed to CHIPS…
But 38 House GOP plan to vote yes & put this bill over the top.
— Scott T. Parkinson (@ScottTParkinson) July 27, 2022
This is part of a broader betrayal of passing red-flag laws, flirting with gay marriage, and passing an NDAA funding the woke and broke military that is mandating the shots on soldiers.
To add insult to injury, McConnell originally promised that if Democrats didn’t give up on plans to pass budget reconciliation, he would block passage of the chips bill. A budget reconciliation bill is the only maneuver by which Democrats could attempt to ram through a transcendent policy change without facing a filibuster, assuming they keep every Democrat senator in line. Yet McConnell then votes for the bill, and within hours of its passage yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced plans to pursue a reconciliation resolution.
After months of a stalemate with Senator Joe Manchin, Schumer announced plans to pass a $370 billion “climate and energy” bill, funding the Great Reset, three years of subsidies for the health care cartel under Obamacare, and more handouts for Big Pharma. They are calling it “the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” because it purports to pay for the spending with tax increases, and somehow that would reduce inflation.
Note that McConnell said he would blow up the chips bill if Dems tried to do budget reconciliation pkg for social spending plan. Chips passes. Manchin/Schumer immediately announce agreement on reconciliation measure
Thus, when Democrats pass that bill next week and all these same McConnell Republicans vote against it, just know that McConnell gave up his leverage and is responsible for that massive tax-and-spend giveaway to woke industries because he agreed to pass another massive corporate welfare bill. Nor do they have any plans to hold up the NDAA or the fiscal year 2023 budget bill when it comes due at the end of September. But fear not. Spend the next few months campaigning for this same party so that none other than a Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is waiting for you as the reward for your hard work.
The White House was confronted Wednesday over previous comments a top Biden administration adviser made that contradicts the administration’s narrative on “recession.”
On Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced the U.S. economy shrank 0.9% in the second quarter of 2022, thus meeting the standard definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction. The National Bureau of Economic Research, however, has not officially declared a recession.
In anticipation of the BEA’s report, the White House has been downplaying the accepted definition of recession. According to White House officials, two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth is not the “technical” definition. Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, strongly reiterated this claim during the White House press briefing on Tuesday.
“Two negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession. It’s not the definition that economists have traditionally relied on,” Deese said. “There is an organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research, and what they do is they look at a broad range of data in deciding whether or not a recession has occurred.”
In 2008, when he worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Deese said the “technical” definition of recession is, in fact, two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction.
“What Senator Clinton has said is that of course economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth,” Deese said in March 2008.
Brian Deese, yesterday: "Two negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession.”
Deese, 2008: “Economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.” pic.twitter.com/MzVk7drq3v
The comments were made as then-President George W. Bush tried to alleviate recessionary fears. At the time and as Deese’s comment reflect, Democrats seized on the moment to emphasize the unfortunate economic circumstances to help Democrats in the 2008 presidential election.
Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about the glaring contradiction on Wednesday, asking why the White House wants to “redefine” the word “recession” while at the same time downplaying the inflation crisis.
“If things are going so great, though, then why is it that White House officials are trying to redefine ‘recession?'” Doocy asked.
When Jean-Pierre claimed the White House is not redefining recession, Doocy pulled out Deese’s 2008 remarks.
“What changed?” Doocy asked. “What’s the difference other than who the president is?”
Jean-Pierre, however, did not directly respond to the question, instead reiterating the Biden administration’s recession narrative.
Doocy: "If things are going so great, why are White House officials are redefining recession?"
Jean-Pierre: "We are not."
Doocy: "It's two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth… How is that not redefining recession?"
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, WhatDidYouSay.org.
I see the pro-abortion crowd is still bragging about their “10-year-old rape victim,” lamenting that the poor kid had to travel all the way from Ohio to Indiana to get the abortion. They make it sound like a trek from Iran to Iraq in the 13th century.
I don’t expect coastal liberals to know this, but Ohio is next to Indiana. The drive from the child’s home in Columbus, Ohio, to the abortionist in Indianapolis takes 2.5 hours. The cost of the gas was probably a greater trauma for the family than the trip.
But as long as they’re going to keep talking about how hard it is to get an abortion in Ohio, I’m going to keep talking about how hard it is to assimilate the third world to first-world norms about women and children.
Child rape, gang rape, incest — it’s been a long time since we’ve seen much of that in the United States. Of course, there are lots of things we thought had been abolished a hundred years ago that our immigration policies are bringing back.
Indeed, the precise reasons people doubted “10-year-old rape victim” (until we found out the rapist was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala) were:
1) We grew up in America, where such crimes were freakishly rare;
2) We are being systematically lied to about the new cultures being brought in by mass third-world immigration.
In its treatment of women, America is rare even among Western nations.
Toward the end of “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville attributes “the unusual prosperity and growing strength” of America to “the superiority of their women.”
This admirable creature, he said, was the product of Protestantism combined with self-government and the spirit of freedom. “Amongst almost all Protestant nations young women are far more the mistresses of their own actions than they are in Catholic countries. … [S]he has scarcely ceased to be a child when she already thinks for herself, speaks with freedom, and acts on her own impulse.”
Cut to: The mother of the 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio adamantly defending her child’s rapist.
Women rallying around the menfolk — who are rapists — is something else that’s new to Americans. But such behavior is disturbingly well-known to police and prosecutors who deal with large immigrant populations.
“Hispanic rape victims are unlikely to report victimization to the police because in their families the male is the head of the household, and women are subordinate to men,” criminal justice professor Shana L. Maier writes in her book “Rape, Victims and Investigations: Experiences and Perceptions of Law Enforcement Officers Responding to Reported Rapes.”
She continues: “Because maintaining the honor of the family is important, Hispanics and Latinos are more likely than other racial/ethnic groups to blame the victim. The victim, not the perpetrator, is blamed for bringing dishonor to the family.”
With the media actively covering up the crimes of immigrants, it may take a while to notice, ladies, but American men were the best you ever had it.
Let’s check in with de Tocqueville again. “[A]lthough a European frequently affects to be the slave of woman,” he wrote, “it may be seen that he never sincerely thinks her his equal. In the United States men seldom compliment women, but they daily show how much they esteem them.”
And he was comparing America to Europe — forget primitive tribesmen.
After your government undertook a massive program to relocate the Hmong people from Laos to Minnesota (and elsewhere in the U.S.), local law enforcement and medical authorities began to notice a striking upsurge in gang rape and forced prostitution. At one St. Paul clinic, a pediatric nurse calculated that Hmong girls were about six times more likely than other victims to have been raped by five or more people.
But their families blame the child rape victims. “In Hmong culture,” the Associated Press matter-of-factly explained, “a girl who loses her virginity before marriage may be looked down upon by her own relatives, even if she is forcibly raped.”
Thus, one Hmong mother’s response to her 12-year-old daughter being gang-raped by at least 10 men (also Hmong, of course) was not to call the police. To the contrary, when the girl limped home after an especially brutal episode, her mother said to her: “You’re just a little slut.”
This is their CULTURE.
Our culture sparkles and gleams, even compared to advanced European democracies, as noted by de Tocqueville. Among the interesting facts about America, he cited was this: “In America a young unmarried woman may, alone and without fear, undertake a long journey.”
Not anymore, ladies! Sorry, but the rich needed cheap labor and the Democrats needed voters.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The first lady of Ukraine was in Washington last week to be feted by the Biden administration, Congress, and the corporate press. Olena Zelenska, the attractive and patriotically dressed wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was given the Jackie Kennedy/Michelle Obama treatment by fashion columnists while also helping to reinforce the message that Ukraine’s effort to defend itself against Russian aggression is a battle for democracy and the survival of the West. This is an easy story to tell a receptive American audience. Since the war began in February, American sympathy combined with the stiffer-than-expected struggle put up by Ukrainian forces and Zelensky’s deft public relations campaign has reinforced the message that the Kyiv government is a democracy whose defense is essential to Western security.
Yet the question to be posed about this is not whether Russia and Putin are bad but whether Ukraine is the paragon of democracy Biden says it is.
Congress recently passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine in May with bipartisan support. Grassroots Republicans and even portions of the Democratic base have been critical of the way Ukraine’s security has come to dictate national priorities. That $40 billion is likely to be only the first installment of a steady flow of aid to pay for the $10 billion per month that the war is costing Kyiv.
That’s what made the appearance of a story about Ukraine in The New York Times this past week, which showed a different side of Zelensky’s government, so significant. The story, titled “Zelenskyy Fires Two Top Law Enforcement Officials,” buried the lead. The Times emphasized the fact that this was the first government shakeup in Kyiv since the war started as well as the fact that one of the two people fired was a boyhood friend of Zelensky. But while that is true, the substance of the story was that the sympathy and support for the Russians among a not insignificant portion of the Ukrainian population and members of the security services has damaged the war effort.
An earlier story in the Times discussed how paranoia about potential Russian spies had spread throughout Ukrainian society. The latest dispatch made clear just how much of an issue this had become. It’s one thing to report about 200,000 spy allegations being submitted to Ukrainian authorities every month. Zelensky’s sacking of security measures made clear how “treason” cases have become something of an obsession for the Ukrainian government.
Even more alarming is the fact that several hundred of these treason investigations involved security personnel. Many Ukrainian officials, including those who were employed by the prosecutor’s office, remained behind in Russian-occupied territory and are now working for Moscow.
Still, that partly explains the large number of Ukrainian personnel helping the Russians. But the way this vast security state has been empowered by the war to turn its malevolent gaze on Ukrainian citizens — whether guilty of sympathy for Moscow or not — is chilling.
Previously, Ukraine was widely acknowledged to be as corrupt as the rest of the former Soviet Union, with a fledgling democratic system that was far from entirely free. Even after Zelensky became president, newspapers that were critical of his government were shut down. Since the war started, journalists have struggled to retain their ability to report freely and fairly.
That the majority of Ukrainians want their country to remain independent is obvious. So is their willingness to fight to prevent their nation from falling under Putin’s thumb. But the ability of the Russians to get so many Ukrainians to sympathize with or aid their assault on Ukraine illustrates that what is going on is, in part, a civil war as well as a foreign invasion.
Yet equally true is the fact that the Ukrainian state that is being defended so bravely is still deeply flawed and possessed of attributes antithetical to democracy. Though some of its problems would be present in any country at war and under direct attack, the more we learn about Ukraine, the less it resembles the Jeffersonian democracy that Biden tries to conjure up in his speeches on the subject.
While sympathy for Ukraine and hostility to Russia is understandable, these are factors that ought to be taken into consideration if the United States is to undertake the kind of financial commitment in this war that is starting to remind us of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or, at least, it should if Americans are to be permitted to have a debate about making such a dubious commitment.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
Buyers from the People’s Republic of China purchased $6.1 billion in real estate last year, the most of any foreign buyer. Many of these purchases over the past few years have been of farmland or ranchland near U.S. military bases.
Revelations from a groundbreaking exclusive CNN story published on July 23 about telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei installed in rural America suggest that Chinese land purchases could pose a severe national security threat as well.
CNN chronicles the Chinese government’s more than decade-long effort to establish a massive electronic intelligence and jamming capability in the U.S. adjacent to military installations and in Washington, D.C. Such a system could deliver a crippling electronic Pearl Harbor against American nuclear weapons systems and strategic communications vital to deterring and defeating a military surprise attack. The report details how China’s state-supported telecommunications giants, Huawei and ZTE, sold cell tower equipment and routers, often at a loss, to small, rural telecommunications providers in the heartland. Much of the made-in-China equipment was installed adjacent to the land-based leg of America’s nuclear triad — the 400 Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) — in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
Chinese telecommunications equipment presents four threats:
real-time communications intelligence,
real-time imagery intelligence,
offensive signals jamming,
and internet attacks.
In the age of software reprogrammable digital electronics, cell tower transmitters and receivers can be remotely reconfigured to listen to nearby military transmissions. Cell tower transmitters can be ordered to broadcast on certain frequencies used by the military, a tactic known as jamming. Similarly, cell towers’ connectivity to the internet could be used to overwhelm or degrade internet service in the early hours of a conflict. Many of the cell towers installed cameras in recent years to provide real-time traffic and weather conditions. Many of these cameras also monitor traffic around sensitive U.S. military installations.
The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into this threat was so sensitive that senior policymakers in the White House and Congress weren’t told until 2019. Soon after, the Federal Communications Commission issued a rule banning small telecoms from using certain kinds of Chinese manufactured equipment. In 2020, Congress appropriated $1.9 billion to rip out and replace about 24,000 pieces of Huawei and ZTE equipment in rural America. But none of it has yet been removed, and carriers insist that the federal government is $3 billion short of making them whole. Chinese telecommunications equipment remains a ticking timebomb, with resistance to its removal ranging from economic justifications to cries of xenophobia.
How did we get here? The Chinese Communist Party practices strategic mercantilism, fostering key technologies with dual-use civilian and military applications while driving competing industries in other nations out of business.
In the 1970s, the world’s two largest manufacturers of telecommunications gear were headquartered in the U.S.: Western Electric and ITT. Less than two dozen years ago, the two largest were U.S.-based Lucent and Canada’s Nortel. America saw its manufacturing dominance slip from producing one-third of the world’s telecom equipment in 1997 to barely more than one-tenth today. The People’s Republic of China played a key role in that decline. In 1979, China declared its telecommunications industry as strategic and stated that it required “absolute control.” In 1982, China imported 100 percent of its telecommunications equipment. By 2000, it was self-sufficient, importing no foreign equipment.
China’s path to dominance was simple: It leveraged Western demand for quarterly profits by telling foreign suppliers that they had to manufacture the products they sold to China in joint ventures with Chinese firms. China then built its supply chain to provide the inputs for these joint ventures as well as to steal the intellectual property with the goal of eventually being able to make high-end equipment. The result is that today, U.S. telecommunications service providers rely almost entirely on Chinese or European suppliers—with China routinely offering cheaper prices.
The Importance of Real Estate
Voluntarily purchasing problematic Chinese equipment is one thing, but what happens when China controls real estate near military bases or important government facilities?
An odd 2017 deal illustrates the importance of strategic real estate. That year, China offered to pay the entire $100 million cost to build the National China Garden on 12 acres at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. Concerns voiced by American counterintelligence officials resulted in the project being rejected just before construction was due to begin. Among their misgivings: The proposed pagoda on one of D.C.’s highest points would be built from materials shipped to the U.S. in diplomatic pouches, meaning no import inspections.
This Chinese project attracted attention because it was on federal land in the nation’s capital. On the other hand, purchases of land in private transactions frequently escape attention until after the fact.
But the $2.6 million land purchase is a good thing, some might argue. The Chinese firm plans to invest another $700 million in the area and generate 200 jobs—besides, America has a trade deficit with China, and those dollars must go somewhere, so why not see them reinvested in the U.S.? Further, it’s not like the Chinese can pack up American land and take it back to China with them. And, while some express concern about China owning agricultural land (Chinese interests now own 192,000 agricultural acres worth almost $2 billion), even if China were to decide to divert all production to China or cease agricultural operations, production could easily be restarted.
The CCP Problem
But what most Americans don’t know is that every Chinese company with 50 or more employees must have a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official embedded in it. This CCP political officer is a looming presence in any firm hailing from a nation with no rule of law other than what CCP officials say it is. Thus, while the Fufeng Group likely has legitimate business purposes for investing in Grand Forks, so too does the CCP have strategic military purposes for using Fufeng’s North Dakota base for its own purposes.
In April, U.S. Air Force Major Jeremy Fox wrote an unofficial memo highlighting concerns that the Grand Forks perch was well sited to intercept military communications between “unmanned air systems” and “space-based assets.” A USAF spokesman subsequently downplayed Major Fox’s concerns as his “personal assessment of potential vulnerabilities.”
Similar concerns have been expressed about the purchase of a 130,000-acre ranch on the border with Mexico near Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas. The site is home to a wind turbine project that, due to its connection with the Texas grid, could be used to disrupt the state’s electric system. Further, the land—which features a large airstrip, as do many Texas ranches—could be used to coordinate activities with the transnational drug cartels across the border.
In both cases, in North Dakota and in Texas—and on any other large agricultural or industrial facility—equipment might be positioned for purposes other than purely commercial reasons. And, since Chinese nationals and companies must obey the CCP, if they don’t cooperate, they risk losing everything up to and including their freedom and their lives.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told CNN that the FBI opens a new China counterintelligence investigation every 12 hours with about 2,000 active investigations, excluding cyber theft, which is a criminal matter.
Retired U.S. Navy Capt. James “Kimo” Fanell was the chief of intelligence for the Pacific Fleet and notes that large parcels of land or industrial sites could host signals intelligence or electronic warfare equipment such as jammers. He observed, “While our Customs inspectors are hardworking people, they’re overloaded, especially today with the Biden administration’s de facto open border policies. The idea that a strategic adversary could buy land near U.S. military bases does not pass the commonsense test.” He added, “We’ve got to do better as a nation to defend our citizens from these kinds of obvious threats.”
Given the sluggishness of the American response to the grave danger posed by communist China—a response slowed over fears of being accused of racism or by economic arguments made by well-funded lobbyists for Chinese interests or U.S. multinationals—it doesn’t take much to imagine the varied nature of attacks we might see on the homeland during the first few days of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
The time for talk is over; we need action.
Chuck DeVore is Chief National Initiatives Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a former California legislator, special assistant for foreign affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon, and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army (retired) Reserve. He’s the author of two books, “The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America,” and “China Attacks,” a novel.
Students at a New York City public school, March 2022. (Getty Images)
A New York City public school encouraged students as young as 10 years old to keep a list of all the “microaggressions” they witnessed, both at school and in their own families, according to materials from the school’s curriculum reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The same students were also asked to list their gender identity—”cisgender,” “nonbinary,” or “trans”—as well as their sexual orientation on a graded worksheet.
The sixth-grade humanities curriculum from Lower Manhattan Community Middle School, where just 31 percent of students are white, required students to read Tiffany Jewell’s This Book Is Anti-Racist, one of only five books assigned for the 2021-2022 year. The book contains 20 lessons on “how to wake up, take action, and do the work”—including the work of confronting the police, which Jewell suggests white students can do without ending up “in jail or harmed.”
“If you are a Black, Brown, or Indigenous Person of the Global Majority, you will need to decide how each outcome could end for you,” Jewell writes in a chapter called “Choosing My Path.” “White people, this is not something you need to do because you are at the center of the system.”
From Tiffany Jewell’s ‘This Book Is Anti-Racist’
The book also asks students to surveil their friends and family for racist behavior. “Grab your notebook,” one “activity” instructs readers. “Look and listen for the microaggressions around you. Write them down and note your observations.” Another activity asks students how “folx” in their families “resisted” or “contributed to racism,” defined as the “systemic misuse and abuse of power by institutions.”
The curriculum, which went into effect August 2021, came as parents across New York City were mobilizing against critical race theory in public schools—and as education officials across the country were denying that there was any such thing.
“Critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, asserted in July 2021. Parents “are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”
One month earlier, New York Regents chancellor Lester Young stated that critical race theory “is not our theory of action” and assured parents that “we are not preparing young people to be activists.”
Jewell’s book belies that assurance. “We will work together, in solidarity, to disrupt racism and become anti-racist accomplices,” the preface reads. “There are many moments to pause in this book so you can check in with yourself and grow into your activism.”
The curriculum could spell legal trouble for the school, which is already under investigation for separating seventh and eight-graders into racial affinity groups. That practice prompted a civil rights complaint in December from the watchdog group Parents Defending Education; on July 13, the Department of Education announced it would investigate the middle school over the complaint.
“It’s astonishing that administrators at Lower Manhattan Community seem determined to create a racially hostile educational environment on top of the civil rights investigation that was just opened,” said Nicole Neily, the president of Parents Defending Education. “Parents who were once proud of the school’s academic performance compared to other New York City public schools are now concerned—justifiably so—about the school’s increasing fixation on race.”
Those concerns come amid steep enrollment declines—and budget cuts—in New York City’s public schools. With enrollment down 8 percent since 2020, schools have lost $215 million in funding this year alone, forcing widespread layoffs and larger class sizes.
Divisive curricula like the one at Lower Manhattan Community School have exacerbated that exodus. One parent told the Free Beacon that their child would not be returning to the middle school this fall on account of an assignment that required sixth-graders to disclose their “social identities”—including their sexual orientation—on a worksheet. Though students did not have to “write something for every category,” instructors collected the worksheet for a grade.
Such lessons aren’t the product of a few school administrators run amok but reflect the race-conscious worldview of the New York City Department of Education. In June 2020, then-executive superintendent of Manhattan public schools Marisol Rosales hosted a panel on dismantling “systemic racism in our schools,” which held up Lower Manhattan Community School’s “mission statement on race” as a model for the entire school system.
“To undo the legacy of racism and oppression in this country that impacts our school community,” the mission statement reads, Lower Manhattan Community Schools works to instill “anti-racist beliefs and practices.”
The school’s sixth-grade humanities curriculum is a microcosm of what that education looks like in practice. Three of its five units concern “identity,” with Jewell’s book listed as a “key text” for unit one. The “social identities” worksheet was part of a broader lesson on “the dominant culture,” which consists of “people who are white, middle class, Christian and cisgender.”
Whoever does not fit into this “box,” Jewell writes, is “part of what’s called the ‘subordinate culture.’” Her description of that culture is exhaustive, albeit studded with solecisms: “Folx included in the ‘subordinate culture,’ include Black, Brown, indigenous People of Color of the Global Majority, queer, transgender, and nonbinary folx, and cisgender women, youth, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, and non-Christian folx, neurodiverse folx, folx living with disabilities, those living in poverty, and more.”
“The people who want to talk about racism all the time are the racists,” said Maud Maron, who served as an elected representative for parents in the district where Lower Manhattan Community School is located. “The people who suffer are the kids who get cheated out of a wholesome school experience and hours of learning that should be focused on academics instead of race indoctrination.”
Lower Manhattan Community School did not respond to a request for comment.
The focus on race extended to the seventh-grade social studies curriculum—ostensibly devoted to early American history—which used “anti-racist” guru Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning as its main textbook, according to a syllabus for the 2021-2022 school year reviewed by the Free Beacon.
These curricula do not seem to have soothed racial tensions at Lower Manhattan Community School, which is 41 percent Asian, 15 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent black.
A group of parents and administrators in April began planning a “restorative justice circle” to address alleged incidents of racism that had taken place over the school year, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon. The incidents included a black student calling a South Asian student “Indian Boy,” an Asian student touching a black student’s hair, and a “rumor” that a white student “used the N-word.”
The school eventually canceled the circle after a parent objected that it would “violate students’ privacy” and “possibly put current students at risk”—and after parents started to litigate the incidents over email, replicating the racial catfighting that had consumed the classroom.
One parent questioned the wisdom of discussing the transgressions of Asian students at a time when anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise. It didn’t go over well.
“African Americans have been facing race-based violence for 500 years in this country, and still face it every day,” another parent responded. “So, I’d ask you to please be sensitive to that fact during discussions and emails with our group.”
The Women’s March claims that the word “women” includes transgender women. A transgender woman is a biological man who identifies as a woman.
“We got some transphobes BIG mad the other day so let us spell it out for you: ‘Women’ is a term that encompasses cis & trans women. When we talk about ‘people who can give birth,’ it’s because those people aren’t all women! They’re girls, trans men, & non-binary ppl,” Women’s March tweeted on Tuesday.
Some of y'all really struggle with the concept of "assigned sex” vs "gender identity" and it shows!!
“Some of y’all really struggle with the concept of ‘assigned sex’ vs ‘gender identity’ and it shows!!” the group added. “Women’s March is committed to creating equality for women & a feminist future for all. We fight for rights that primarily (but not exclusively!) impact women. We fight for a world where ALL women are safe from gender-based violence, discrimination, and hate.”
The Women’s March received significant pushback after it declared in a tweet last week that “Trans women are women.”
“The point of tweets like this is to demoralize actual feminists, so that we stop fighting for women and girls. Don’t let it demoralize you,” Abigail Shrier tweeted last week in response to the Women’s March’s claim.
The point of tweets like this is to demoralize actual feminists, so that we stop fighting for women and girls.
“Misinformation,” Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon tweeted.
“No, they aren’t. There are massive differences between women and trans women. We can be respectful to trans people while not abandoning reality,” Megyn Kelly tweeted.
“If the point of this slogan is to reject treating ‘trans women’ and ‘women’ as separate or distinct categories of people, then the slogan undermines itself, because it refers to them as separate categories… thus implying some distinction. Otherwise, they’d say ‘women are women'” Michael Tracey commented.
If the point of this slogan is to reject treating "trans women" and "women" as separate or distinct categories of people, then the slogan undermines itself, because it refers to them as separate categories… thus implying some distinction. Otherwise they'd say "women are women" https://t.co/7LEYMUiuON
Country star John Rich — one half of the popular duo Big & Rich — penned a decidedly anti-woke song he dubbed “Progress” that rails against left-wing politics and culture and stands up for traditional American values. However, Rich told Just the News that he foresaw a problem getting a song that tells leftists to “stick your progress where the sun don’t shine” played on the radio and distributed to the masses. Mainly because the music industry also leans left.
So, Rich did an end-around on Friday, bypassing the music industry’s gatekeepers and instead releasing “Progress” on Truth Social — the platform started by former President Donald Trump — and on the Rumble video platform.
In just a few hours, “Progress” jumped to number one on iTunes, Just the News said, besting the likes of Billie Eilish and Lizzo and Beyonce. A quick glance Tuesday at PopVortex revealed that “Progress” is indeed the top song on the American iTunes charts.
“Here I am with no record label, no publisher, no marketing deal,” Rich told Just the News. “I just got a song that speaks to a lot of people, and Truth and Rumble pushed it out there. And man, I’m really proud of what we did today.”
A lyric in “Progress” takes aim at the forces that conspire to “shut down our voices,” and Rich explained to the outlet that he’s “talking about Twitter and YouTube and Facebook. And I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna reach out to Truth Social and reach out to Rumble because they still allow free speech over there.’ Why would I launch this song on the platforms that I’m railing against in the lyrics?”
Rich added to Just the News that his launch experiment is “bypassing this machine that they’ve built, going right around the machine, going right to the people. It means that if you bring the right content, and you have people like Truth and Rumble that will get that message to your core audience, you can beat the machine that’s been put in place to keep people like me shut down.”
He also told the outlet that “the problem with country radio” isn’t the DJs or others at country music stations; instead “it’s the people way up the food chain that run the conglomerates that have bought up 90% of all of our radio stations … a big [contingent] of them … do not like anybody bucking their woke system.”
Still, Rich added to Just the News that “there’s a few good ones in there. And when I say ‘good,’ I mean, you know, ‘lean conservative.’ They want free space; they want artists to be heard.”
The author of “Progress” revealed to the outlet how his new song was born.
“I’m watching what I consider to be the dismantling of our country at a lot of different levels,” Rich told Just the News. “And when you sit back and look at it, the vast majority of it’s being perpetuated on us under the banner of ‘progress.’ Like in the name of progress we’re going to send gasoline through the roof so you have to buy an electric car. In the name of progress, we’re going to let anybody and everybody into our country, and if that means we get overrun with fentanyl and every other bad thing, well, so be it. Because that’s progressive: You need to be open-minded and open borders in the name of progress. They target our kids in the name of progress; they do all these things that are actually the opposite of that. They’re regressive. They’re not constructive, they’re destructive.”
Here are the lyrics:
There’s a hole in this country where its heart used to be And Old Glory’s divided on fire in the street They say Building Back Better will make America great If that’s a wave of the future, all I’ve got to say
(chorus) Stick your progress where the sun don’t shine Keep your big mess away from me and mine If you leave us alone, well we’d all be just fine Stick your progress where the sun don’t shine
They invite the whole world to come live in our land And leave our countrymen dying in Afghanistan They say let go of Jesus, let government save And you can have back your freedom if you do what we say
(chorus)
They shut down our pipelines, and they shut down our voices They shut down our Main Streets, and they shut down our choices They bent us all over, but it’s all over now ‘Cause we’ve figured it out, we ain’t backing down
(chorus)
Here’s Rich playing “Progress” live on on “Fox & Friends” and explaining its origins:
Fox & Friends : John Rich’s ‘non-woke’ song hits number one on iTunes youtu.be
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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