In the previous installments of this investigation into how the Harris-Walz presidential campaign is dishonestly manipulating online platforms, I noted the existence of a Discord server where campaign employees coordinate with a volunteer army to flood social media sites with campaign propaganda. The volunteers also vote en masse on social media to artificially boost Harris-Walz content or downvote content that is harmful to their campaign. Not only is this deceptive and misleading to voters, it’s a clear violation of these websites’ Terms of Service.
In part one and part two of the investigation, I noted this strategy had been successful at manipulating both Reddit and X. Over the past month, one out of every eight of the top stories in the eight-million-member Politics subreddit was planted by the campaign. On X, the campaign appears to have successfully voted down Community Notes accurately calling out the Harris campaign for tweeting out brazen lies.
But one activity I found on the Discord server was particularly concerning. After years of Democrats erroneously insisting that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election and otherwise warning of foreign election manipulation, the Harris-Walz campaign is actively recruiting foreigners to work on the campaign and is even encouraging them to donate to American political causes.
There appears to be no vetting and given that the Harris-Walz campaign’s Discord community overtly engaged in disinformation campaigns, it was ripe for infiltration and abuse by foreign intelligence and other bad actors attempting to influence the election — although I saw no concrete proof of that.
However, my research found multiple foreign nationals actively volunteering for the Harris-Walz campaign. This activity, while permitted by the FEC, raises questions about whether foreigners should be allowed to volunteer for official U.S. political campaigns. Their comments ranged from showing excitement at how they could volunteer to “save democracy” …
… to Canadians sharing their plans to make road trips to Michigan, where they aim to go door-to-door canvassing …
…and asking how they, as foreigners, could donate money to “help fund the Harris-Walz campaign” using a legal donation loophole …
… which was praised by the server’s moderators, who went on to distribute the link to other channels (chats) in the Discord server.
The server’s moderators embraced the foreigners with open arms. Moderators are powerful users in Discord communities — they have the power to delete messages, ban users, and make announcements that reach the entire server’s user base (35,000 individual people at the time of writing). They were overjoyed to see non-American support, and eager to help foreigners learn how they could make a meaningful impact in the upcoming presidential election.
On Oct. 20, 2024, the campaign pinged the abroad group, desperately urging foreigners to spam call Wisconsin voters. Their goal was to reach 5 million telemarketing calls on Kamala’s birthday.
When one foreign user expressed concern about “meddling in US elections,” a moderator quickly assured him this was perfectly legal, and urged him to phone bank for Kamala.
While the Federal Election Commission does prohibit foreign nationals from making monetary donations and contributions to U.S. campaigns directly, it does explicitly allow foreign nationals to volunteer for campaigns as long as they are uncompensated. Unfortunately, the FEC does not account for donation loopholes, which are currently being propagated throughout the Harris-Walz Discord server.
The Harris-Walz staff are clearly teaching foreigners how to skirt FEC regulations. This may not be illegal, but it is enticing foreign nationals to influence American elections — something that Democrats have spent years warning is a serious threat to democracy.
Whether this directly violates election laws is also beside the point for many Americans, who believe foreign nationals should not be allowed to volunteer for U.S. presidential campaigns. American elections should be for Americans, and the Harris-Walz campaign is actively inviting foreign influences into their campaign.
The author runs the popular Twitter account @reddit_lies.
In part one of this investigation into how Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is deceptively manipulating online platforms, it was revealed that the campaign is operating a Discord server that directs hordes of volunteers to use their social media accounts to deceptively push election propaganda. The goal is to artificially manufacture consensus by making pro-Kamala Harris messages on social media appear more popular than they are, and it is often done in violation of the Terms of Service of the social media platforms. In more extreme cases, they are encouraging people to skirt election laws and using these “astroturfing” campaigns to spread disinformation they think will help win the upcoming election.
Yesterday’s report documented how the Harris-Walz campaign has seen great success in manipulating Reddit’s algorithm, but that isn’t the only social media site they’re manipulating. The campaign has also been targeting Elon Musk’s X, perhaps the most influential site for political news. One particular goal, according to a user of the Harris-Walz campaign Discord server, is to get campaign volunteers to swarm the site and “block [community notes] we don’t like.”
Prior to Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the site’s management was known for capriciously removing information and regularly banning users in a way that employed a double standard that heavily disfavored conservative opinion. Musk, a major free speech advocate, sought to institute a more neutral way to deal with misleading tweets, and the “Community Notes” system was born.
Select users who signed up for the program could propose notes to be added to tweets showing that the information was wrong, misleading, or required important context. Other users can then read the proposed notes and vote on whether they are accurate or needed, and if the proposed notes get enough favorable votes, they get appended to the post permanently.
Despite this, virtually none of the false and misleading tweets from Kamala Harris’ campaign have Community Notes appended to them. One likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the Harris campaign is directing volunteers on its Discord server to vote down Community Notes even when those notes accurately say the campaign is being deceptive.
In the “twitter-community-notes” channel found on the Harris-Walz Discord, paid Democrat staffers are also writing dubious Community Notes on X to undermine GOP and Trump messaging. They then encourage volunteers to rate them positively.
Unsurprisingly, these notes are often filled with half-truths, misleading information, or lies, such as explaining how Joe Biden’s son’s brain tumor must have been due to his service in Iraq.
The Harris-Walz server even has a “Twitter (X) Community Notes Training” module, which describes how users can quickly bump up their Community Notes “Rating Impact,” which allows them to write their own Community Notes with a high enough status. They also describe “problems” with Community Notes, such as Joe Biden being tagged in “inaccurate Community Notes,” and how users can rate them negatively.
Since X’s Community Notes upvoting system is designed to mitigate political bias far better than Reddit’s, the Harris-Walz campaign’s attempt to manipulate Community Notes on X hasn’t been as successful.
One Harris-Walz Discord user lengthily expressed his frustrations at the bias mitigation system used by Community Notes (CNs), which was implemented to prevent user manipulation:
While their attempts to abuse Community Notes on X were largely ineffective, it is still a gross violation of X’s Terms of Service, which prohibits artificially amplifying information.
Other Astroturfing Operations
The Harris-Walz Discord server provides access to an app called “Reach” which gives its users access to a database of “entertaining” Harris-Walz campaign content.
X has also introduced “Radar,” a feature that lets users see post volumes on specific topics. Using messaging guidance from three Reach posts, I found evidence of hundreds of astroturfing profiles for the Harris campaign on X. The same search was done on Google with one of the images, suggesting broader reach. While the Google data is larger, it is also likely incomplete while the X data is complete. The scale of this operation continues to grow.
Users can connect their own personal social media accounts to the Reach app, so they can easily repost memes, videos, and other content that promotes the ideals of the Harris-Walz campaign.
While topics relating to current events routinely trend on Reddit and X, other platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, gear themselves towards entertaining content. To target these platforms, the campaign is also using Reach. Unfortunately for them, the content they provide pretty much resembles your liberal aunt’s Facebook timeline.
To people who have spent years online learning the nuances of meme culture, this is fundamentally repulsive. It embodies the inauthentic nature of the modern internet, which has seemingly replaced the “old net” in the last two decades.
Not only do they love flamboyant actors masquerading as American “men,” they also enjoyed actively promoting it during a football game, boosting their post with unrelated hashtags that happened to be trending at the time. This is yet another shady tactic used to bump up social media posts inauthentically, shamelessly employed by official Harris-Walz volunteers.
But at this late stage in the campaign, it would appear spreading inauthentic content and deceptive messages is all the Harris campaign can do.
The author runs the popular Twitter account @reddit_lies.
It was such a fun time last week watching the perpetual drama queens that make up our national news media boil with rage over two newspapers declining to issue meaningless campaign endorsements. But it also revealed something unsettling about the unhealthy degree of emotional investment they have in this race.
Will the media accept the outcome of the election if Donald Trump wins? It’s far from a foregone conclusion that they will. There’s a strong argument they didn’t the last time Trump won. Why should anyone expect them to accept it this time around?
It’s a question these homely nerds are inclined to ask every elected Republican in the shallowest way possible — some variation of, “Will you accept the outcome of this election no matter what?” (I think every restaurant server from now on should ask Jake Tapper the moment he’s seated, “Will you accept the way your food comes out no matter what? It’s a yes or no question.”)
After the appalling behavior they displayed last week, now is a very crucial time to ask them the same thing. If they were this hysterical over management at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times deciding, there would be no endorsement of Kamala Harris this campaign cycle — the type of endorsement that hasn’t mattered for decades — how can they be expected to acknowledge a Trump victory? And if they won’t, what will it mean to the people who are still influenced by them? They will have essentially been told their elections and their government are invalid. These are the things civil wars are made of.
As silly as the media have made themselves look, they’re dead serious. That a major news publication wouldn’t throw its weight behind the non-Trump candidate means nothing to normal people, but reporters in Washington and New York aren’t normal people. Look how they talk. They say things like “Democracy dies in darkness,” and we laugh because it’s corny. But they believe in earnest it’s a sacred oath binding their entire life’s meaning to a cause: maintaining the Washington and corporate power structure to their financial benefit. To hell with everyone else.
If in 2016 the news media eagerly went along with an absurd hoax that Trump won that election in large part because he conspired with the Russian government, what won’t they say when he wins again? They just spent the past three months telling voters that up is down, black is white, and Kamala is popular. They moved on from the attempt on his life like it was a standard news cycle that had run its course.
How could we expect them to concede defeat after everything they’ve done? And yes, a Kamala defeat will be theirs, too. Her campaign is theirs.
It’s a question they’re not ready to answer because, for them, it’s unthinkable.
By now it’s commonplace to note that Kamala Harris often seems out of her depth, like she’s unsure what to say about policy, or how to explain her past positions, or why she hasn’t already done the things she’s promised to do if she’s elected given that she’s the current vice president.
But on one particular subject she’s been consistent and forceful throughout her campaign. She’s adamant that Donald Trump will destroy America if he’s reelected. And not “destroy” in the sense of enact bad policies, but that he’ll round people up with the military and put them in camps. She talks about this all the time now. At one point during her Wednesday evening interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, she became visibly upset after Baier played a clip of former President Donald Trump calling out the weaponization of government and the endless investigations and lawfare he’s been subjected to.
The vice president, her voice rising in outrage, jabbed her finger at Baier and said, “You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.”
At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this week she told the crowd that former President Donald Trump considers anyone who doesn’t support him to be an enemy of the United States. “He is saying he would use the military to go after them.”
Earlier this week, during an audio town hall with Charlamagne Tha God, Harris claimed without a hint of irony that if Trump is elected, he’ll use the Department of Justice “as a weapon against his political enemies,” adding, “You know who does that? Dictators do that.” At one point during the show, she agreed with a caller who said Trump will lock “anyone who doesn’t look white into camps,” replying, “You’ve hit on a really important point and expressed it I think so well.”
That’s just a sampling from this week, but there are many other recent examples. In the waning weeks of the presidential election, Harris has been deploying increasingly extreme rhetoric about Trump and the dangers he poses to the country. Even before Harris seized the Democratic nomination from President Joe Biden, the idea that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy was the refrain of the Biden campaign. Harris has taken that theme and run with it. The purpose of it isn’t just to scare voters into casting their ballot against the former president, or to provoke some unstable would-be assassin into taking a shot at Trump (although some Democrats no doubt see that as a happy by-product of this Trump-as-dictator rhetoric). Its main purpose is to prime Democrat voters for violent resistance should Trump win in November.
Consider the lopsidedness of the rhetoric between the Trump and Harris campaigns. Trump often makes sweeping (and mostly true) statements about the deep state, about the border and illegal immigration, about crime, about how Harris and the Democrats are destroying the country. But when he uses the phrase “destroying the country,” he’s talking about things like crime, homelessness, drug addiction, rampant inflation and the cost of groceries. These things, he says, are the result of policies Democrats have put in place. If you’re looking for someone to blame, he says, blame Biden and Harris, because all these problems are their fault.
But that’s not what Harris and the Democrats are doing with their rhetoric. They’re not making a case that crime and inflation will be worse under Trump because of his policies. Democrats aren’t really interested in policy. What they’re doing is pushing a narrative that Trump is going to be a fascist dictator if he wins office and use the powers of the presidency to go after ordinary Americans. That’s an extreme and frankly unhinged position with no basis in reality. You don’t say things like that unless you’re hoping to provoke a strong reaction, and the reaction Democrats are hoping to provoke is violent resistance to a second Trump term.
After all, if you really thought that Trump would order the military and the Justice Department to round up you and your family, wouldn’t you do anything to stop him? Wouldn’t you take to the streets to save your country and thwart the rise of a fascist dictatorship? At least two would-be assassins have taken the Democrats’ anti-Trump rhetoric seriously. Harris is hoping that many more people will do so between now and Election Day and respond by rejecting a second Trump term — in the streets, if they must.
There’s a precedent for this that Democrats set four years ago. During the BLM riots in the summer of 2020, Harris herself was out in front egging on the rioters, infamously working to raise bail money for those who had been arrested. Of the protests, she said this in a June 2020 interview with Stephen Colbert: “Everyone beware. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day … They’re not gonna let up, and they should not.”
Harris and her fellow Democrats knew that the civic unrest unleashed by BLM and Antifa rioters would damage Trump’s reelection campaign, and they did their utmost to amplify the violence and also justify it by claiming the moral high ground. The protesters and rioters were only reacting to systemic injustice, after all, and as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
All of this only makes sense if you understand that Harris isn’t just a bumbling politician but a left-wing radical, and left-wing radicals have no qualms about using violence as a political weapon. If your goal is to seize and wield political power as part of a revolutionary program to transform America, then who cares if a couple neighborhoods here there get burned to the ground in race riots? Who cares if some young women get raped and killed by illegal immigrants, or a handful of apartment complexes get taken over by criminal alien gangs? Those things on their own might be unpleasant or disturbing, but they’re all in the service of a greater goal, which is the re-shaping of American society. So, it’s all justified.
What Harris and the Democrats are doing with this line about Trump rounding up Americans and putting them in camps is preparing the ground for massive civic unrest in the event of a Trump victory. The purpose of the unrest would be to cripple Trump’s administration before he even takes office, and to disrupt normal life for so many Americans that they will rue the day they ever voted for Trump.
It’s the hecklers veto on steroids, and it’s exactly what Harris is planning for and hoping to provoke if Trump wins.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Last week, Politico ran a headline. Once upon a time, it would have been tempting to attach some superlative to said headline, such as “astonishing,” “remarkable,” or “crazy.” Now such headlines are commonplace and illustrative of the information warfare that defines American politics. Anyway, here it is:
One of the biggest political problems in America is the complete disconnect between what passes for “conventional wisdom” inside the beltway and how most Americans’ perception of reality affects how they vote. Roughly half the country identifies as politically conservative, and beyond that, there are supermajorities involving good chunks of the Democrat party that think that elite opinion has gone too far left on several key issues. And yet, nearly all discussions that take place context of our “media-run state” basically start from the premise that radicalism on the right is a clear and present threat to the republic, whereas radicalism on the left is never threatening to prosperity and our way of life. Rather, it’s just a messaging problem, where the establishment left must be given broad latitude to say whatever it needs to say to get elected and stave off the absurdly broad category of candidates labeled dangerous right-wing extremists. And it doesn’t matter if what is said is fundamentally dishonest because the threat justifies the deception.
This is why an army of fact-checkers, misinformation experts, censors, and journalists — and good luck telling the difference between those four ostensible vocations, as they are frequently rolled into one indistinguishable blob — exists to create the illusion of retroactive continuity between what’s being said now and what we all know actually happened.
And so, we have the headlines such as the one above. In the real world, we’ve had record inflation, and anyone looking to buy a house or car has taken note of the fact interest rates are about three times higher than they were before Harris and Biden took office. But it’s not enough to say that the economy is good; before you can even choke down that obvious falsehood, we’ve moved from an incorrect cause to an offensive effect. The real problem isn’t that people can’t afford groceries; no, the real problem is the voters themselves, who are presumed ignorant for not believing a lie. Without even getting past the headline, you’re experiencing more gaslighting than a winter solstice in Victorian London.
Which brings me to another Politico headline, which even ran on the same day, natch. This time it’s a column by Jonathan Martin, a former New York Times political reporter, who is currently Politico’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. Martin is here to tell us “Here’s What Harris Must Do to Seal the Deal.” To that end, he’s hatched a plan where Harris can “prove to skeptics that she’s committed to bipartisan government” by, among other things, preemptively announcing Mitt Romney is going to be her Secretary of State.
Of course, the idea that Mitt Romney, who for years now has been a professional malcontent who’s entire public persona revolves around attacking nearly all of his senate GOP colleagues, has bipartisan cred is wishful thinking. And that’s without even going into how spectacularly Martin’s proposal validates the concern that ideological extremism is forever a one-way street. In 2012, when Mitt Romney was running for president against Obama, he was a racist, gay-bullying, dog-abusing, extremist who gave his employees cancer. Without exhuming what Martin himself said during Romney’s failed presidential bid, it sure says something that many of his peers who dutifully smeared Romney for threatening a Democratic president’s hold on power have no problems with now soliciting the guy that did all these terrible things to help elect a Democrat president.
Regardless, the whole point of Martin’s cockamamie scheme to retrofit Harris as a bipartisan moderate ultimately boils down to this assessment: “These voters don’t want white papers, they just crave reassurance Harris isn’t a lefty.”
Well, Martin has correctly identified the problem, and he’s even come up with a plan to remedy it — even if an unconvincing, last-minute feint at bipartisanship is unlikely to sway voters. But before we get on with hatching a plan to reassure voters “Harris isn’t a lefty,” Martin is skipping a pretty crucial question that anyone concerned with truth-telling would probably try and address.
Is Harris, in fact, a lefty?
The answer is unequivocally yes. She’s a creature of San Francisco politics, and she had the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate. One of the most effective ads Trump has run so far involves video footage of Kamala Harris saying, in her own words, that taxpayers should pay for the sex change operations of prisoners. Because she’s running away from her liberal record, she’s flip-flopped on several major issues since she was installed as the Democrat presidential candidate because her previously articulated positions were electorally damaging. She’s even now committed to building a border wall, for crying out loud.
Unsurprisingly, Martin and his peers have put precious little pressure on Harris to explain how and why her sudden attempt to hot swap radical leftist policies with more moderate policies is remotely sincere.
To the extent that Martin even deigns to acknowledge this might be an issue, his response is something: “I know from having covered her for a decade that she’s no faculty club progressive, much more comfortable dropping a ‘motherf–ka’ than taking care to say ‘Latinx.’”
I don’t know what world Martin is envisioning where people that swear are somehow so transgressive they’re anathema to people that police gender neutrality. Speaking of gender cops, it’s probably worth mentioning Harris, who I am assured is no “faculty club progressive,” currently has her pronouns listed in her Twitter bio. Regardless, it’s more likely that those that insist neutering the lexicon are very much the same people who consider objecting to use of the word “motherf–ka” a matter of kink shaming.
In case you were wondering, though, the word “Latinx” is used in Harris’ 2019 campaign book, The Truth We Hold, seven times — it’s eight times, if you count the fact the word has its own entry in the index. (It must be said that this is a different book than the one Harris now stands accused of plagiarizing; the book where she stole other people’s ideas amusingly titled Smart On Crime.) Anyway, maybe this is all pedantic. I’m just a guy who CTRL-F’d her book, and Martin probably knows her well enough to have her cell number. As such, I’m sure Martin would advise me to take Harris seriously, not literally.
In any event, I don’t think Martin is intentionally deceiving anyone or endorsing the idea that Kamala should openly deceive people by telling her to present herself as moderate. Alas, he’s not a cartoon villain, and if he was, that would be an easier problem to address. Unfortunately, the fact remains that deception is the logical outcome when journalists’ default assumption is that radicalism among Democrats is something to be massaged and contextualized, not called out for what it is.
As it is, Kamala Harris is pretty radical. If voters are concluding that the supposed mango monster opposing her, who thinks taxpayer-funded sex changes are bad and has long opposed letting millions of largely unvetted illegal immigrants into the country, might be the more moderate choice, well, it’s not an occasion to assail them for noticing the wrong things. It’s an invitation to state the facts fairly for once and get out of way and let democracy take its course.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Vice President Kamala Harris confidently declared during her Univision town hall on Thursday night that she deserved the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee title she currently holds. The allegedly undecided voters who watched the Democrat and corporate media collusion to coup President Joe Biden out of power and replace him with Harris, however, aren’t so sure. One voter in the crowd at the Las Vegas event specifically asked the candidate to soothe his concerns that former President Joe Biden “was pushed aside” during Democrats’ 2024 presidential nomination process.
“I am honored to have earned the Democratic nomination. I am honored to have the endorsement of people from every walk of life,” Harris said, before commencing a rant about how former President Donald Trump would “terminate the Constitution of the United States.”
A voter tells Kamala he has big concerns about her shoving Biden aside and taking his place as the nominee without earning a single vote.
Contrary to her claims, Harris did nothing to “earn” her spot as Trump’s opponent in the race for the White House. Instead, she played a large role in the Democrats’ and the corporate media’s successful attempt to coup the flailing Biden out of future office.
When Biden was successfully couped out of the 2024 race, Harris was quickly handed a list of high-profile endorsements, something she made sure to mention in her town hall answer. But not even a good word from theClintons, Nancy Pelosi, former President Barack Obama, or NeverTrump Republicans can change Americans’ concerns that the VP and her Democrat allies altered the course of the 2024 election against voters’ wills.
Harris recently admitted during her “60 Minutes” sit down that “no one should be able to take for granted that they can just declare themselves a candidate and automatically receive support.”
“You have to earn it,” she explained.
KAMALA: “No one should be able to take for granted that they can just declare themselves a candidate and automatically receive support. You have to earn it.”
The government thinks people are stupid & can’t research for themselves. Well this woman 👇did! She went to the Federal Register and checked out Executive Orders that Presidents have signed, as well as those they revoked.
Nearly every time she opens her mouth, Harris lies to the people she claims she wants to represent. When she’s not spouting falsehoods that she knows her allies in the corporate media will refuse to fact-check, the VP is insulting voters everywhere by playing politics during devastating natural disasters and attempting to distance herself from the crises she helped create.
This young lady says a white liberal told her the MAGA crowd will never accept her
This is awesome. She says she left the plantation and if you don't like it, kick rocks
Just as the voter who questioned the circumstances surrounding Harris’ nomination suspected, the VP did nothing to “earn” his or any other Americans’ trust or vote. Instead, she’s done everything — including pledging to throw her political opponents in prison and trying to nuke the filibuster — to subdue those Americans’ voices and voting power.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
The most important exchange in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate has been almost entirely ignored by the corporate media. Not surprisingly, that’s because it makes Walz look like an authoritarian and a fool in one fell swoop:
J.D. Vance: The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use …
Tim Walz: …[inaudible] threatening or hate speech …
J.D. Vance: … the power of government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship. Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas, and then let’s come together afterwards.
Tim Walz:You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.
J.D. Vance: Tim. Fire in a crowded theater? You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks.
CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell:Senator, the governor does have the floor.
Tim Walz:Sorry.
Ok, let’s unpack what happened here. Walz challenged Vance on Trump’s questioning of the 2020 election results and Jan. 6, and Vance countered by saying that if Walz and his running mate, Kamala Harris, were so concerned about the fate of democracy they wouldn’t be so adamantly pro-censorship. Specifically, Walz has previously said, quite incorrectly from any legal or moral standpoint, that there’s no First Amendment right to “misinformation.”
Walz interjects to, near as I can tell, try and clarify that he was also talking about limiting “threatening” words or “hate speech.” Interestingly, I looked at multiple debate transcriptions, and none of them had this quite audible interjection included — though the first word or two is hard to discern, the part about “threatening or hate speech”is quite clear. In any event, to the extent that Walz is trying to defend himself he’s doing an awful job.
The legal standards for “threatening” speech or incitement might be clearer, but it’s still a fraught issue. As for “hate speech,” he has no idea what he’s talking about. You may not like it, but “hate speech” is absolutely protected speech. The First Amendment is absolutely a right to offend people without legal sanction, even gratuitously. Otherwise, policing speech is just a tool for government oppression. After all, who defines what constitutes “hate speech?” Walz seems to be suggesting he wants to throw people in jail for not using preferred pronouns and the like.
But the coup de grace for sinister ignorance is Walz saying, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.” Now if you know anything about First Amendment issues, the “fire in a crowded theater” line makes civil libertarians break out in hives. Somewhat surprisingly, The Atlantic had a very good article a few years back about the origin of the phrase:
In reality, though, shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater is not a broad First Amendment loophole permitting the regulation of speech. The phrase originated in a case that did not involve yelling or fires or crowds or theaters. Charles T. Schenck, the general secretary of the U.S. Socialist Party, was convicted in a Philadelphia federal court for violating the Espionage Act by printing leaflets that criticized the military draft as unconstitutional.
In a six-paragraph opinion issued on March 3, 1919, Justice Holmes wrote for a unanimous Court that Schenck’s conviction was justified because the leaflets advocated for obstructing military recruiting and therefore constituted a “clear and present danger” during a time of war. “We admit that in many places and in ordinary times the defendants in saying all that was said in the circular would have been within their constitutional rights,” Holmes wrote. “But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
The rest of the article is worth reading for the full history, but in short, arresting people for handing out anti-war literature was justified by comparing it to shouting fire in a crowded theater. Which is unconscionable. Holmes himself later did an about-face on his own reasoning a year later, and the Supreme Court decision above was overturned by the court quite definitively by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. “Fire in a crowded theater” was never a reliable “Supreme Court test” as Walz put it, and it’s been totally inoperable as a matter of law since Walz was in kindergarten.
This is not some small matter here. I have no interest in defending what happened on Jan. 6 (though I do think a great many people have been subject to grossly unfair legal penalties for their participation in the riot, and that this has been done out of partisan spite). But Vance is absolutely correct when he says the Democrat Party’s embrace of censorship is far more threatening than anything on Jan. 6.
How do I know this? Well, to start, unlike Jan. 6, censorship has affected far more people and is an ongoing concern. This publication is involved in a lawsuit with The Daily Wire and the state of Texas against the State Department for promoting Big Tech censorship tools. The State Department justifies what they’re doing as part of a frightening attempt to police “misinformation” — which is routinely defined as any news that liberal academics and federal bureaucrats don’t think is politically expedient.
Earlier this week, Rep. Adam Schiff, who knowingly spread lies about President Trump treasonously colluding with Russia to undermine a fairly elected president, sent a letter to tech companies telling them to censor“false, hateful, and violent content” because it is a “threat” to the upcoming election. But who decides what content is false, hateful, or violent here? Adam Schiff is an especially unworthy judge of these matters, but then again, there’s no elected official that should be deciding who gets to say what. And sending letters that attempt to intimidate private companies into preventing Americans from exercising their most fundamental constitutional right … well, perhaps we live in more civil times, but I have an idea of how the Sons of Liberty would have responded to such a politician.
And it’s not just politicians, the First Amendment is also being actively undermined by the people who, in theory, have the biggest stake in protecting it. Our corporate media’s silence is further proof they quietly agree that the censorship of unruly citizens is necessary. After all, if they continue to do things like refuse a vaccine that doesn’t actually prevent transmission of the disease, stubbornly point out the octogenarian the White House has dementia, and won’t vote for who they’re told to —how exactly do they expect journalism’s current business model to succeed?
The fact remains that fewer people are going to read this very article because it’s being actively suppressed by Big Tech right now. Even if I didn’t have the receipts to show that this publication was being intentionally and unconstitutionally singled out for suppression by the feds, just the fact I typed “vaccine” in the preceding paragraph was probably enough to alert The Algorithms such that this article will forever show up on page six of any relevant search results. The writer in me wants to note the twisted irony of an article warning about the obliteration of the First Amendment being actively censored; the citizen in me just understands this as simple tyranny.
Unlike so many of my peers — alas, I think my parents have taken to telling their friends I sell used cars to spare themselves the shame of admitting I’m a journalist — I’m not going to tell you how to vote. But it is entirely fair to say that Tim Walz and his ilk do not understand the First Amendment, and they sure as hell don’t respect it.
And when people like that get in power, we all lose.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Vice President Kamala Harris will use her short appearance in Atlanta Friday afternoon to falsely blame Georgia’s lifesaving pro-life law for the deaths of at least two women. The untimely passings of Amber Thurman, Candi Miller, and their babies, however, had nothing to do with the Peach State’s protections and everything to do with Democrats and corporate media’s dangerous abortion rhetoric.
Shortly after the articles’ publication, Harris posted a four-part statement to X falsely claiming, “Trump Abortion Bans prevent doctors from providing basic medical care.”
“Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again,” she wrote. “Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
States that limit when life in the womb can be ended do not criminalize treatments for spontaneous loss or complications like those experienced by Thurman and Miller. In fact, every single pro-life law — including the one in Georgia — contains carveouts for abortion procedures like dilation and curettage when they are deemed necessary to save the life of the woman.
Yet, Democrats, with the help of their media allies like ProPublica, routinely assert that doctors are no longer permitted to treat complications, ectopic pregnancies, or miscarriages.
As SBA Pro-Life America’s State Policy Director Katie Danielnoted in a press conference Friday before Harris’ speech, the exceptions built into red-state legislation limiting abortion “rarely changed from the laws pre-Dobbs to the laws post-Dobbs.”
“The test used — reasonable medical judgment in most states, good faith judgment in others — is the test that was used before and is the test that’s used in many others,” she said, noting that physicians had no problems interpreting those exceptions for years, but “somehow, mysteriously two years ago, they stopped being familiar with that test.”
Harris, like many Democrats in recent years, has made abortion a hallmark of her 2024 campaign. She’s tried multiple times on her short time on the campaign trail to claim that Trump has deceived voters by, as ABC News put it, “flip-flopping” on signing federal abortion limits into law, even though the Republican’s 2024 abortion platform explicitly states decisions about ending life in the womb should be left “up to the states.”
It’s Harris’ extremism disguised as ambiguity, however, that is deceiving voters, who are more pro-life than politicians and the media credit them for. She’s refused numerous times to say whether she supports abortion through all nine months of pregnancy and lied about the prevalence of late-term abortions. Harris has long lamented life-saving laws and even co-sponsored the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which seeks to codify abortion through birth. She’s even called the pills that caused Thurman and Miller’s deaths “safe and effective.”
Harris’ radical abortion rhetoric is tricking women everywhere into believing pro-lifers are gatekeeping maternal care. Because of her lies, women like Thurman and Miller believe the abortion pills made even more readily available to them under the Biden administration’s expansions will do them no harm. In reality, the pills can cost them their lives.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
News coverage following Thursday night’s CNN interview with Vice President Kamala Harris predictably recast the episode in ways that were unfamiliar to anyone who watched live and who has even just loosely followed her career in national politics.
New York Times reporter Reid Epstein said Kamala “parried questions from Dana Bash on Thursday without causing herself political harm or providing herself a significant boost.” Aaron Blake at The Washington Post said she “didn’t really stumble or seem to do anything that might hamper her momentum.” Politico’s popular morning “Playbook” newsletter gleaned that the interview “suggested to us how tough Donald Trump’s job is now …”
These are supposed to be the big “takeaways” from the event, but any fair-minded person who watched knows that the reality wasn’t so forgiving. What the taped interview with Nancy Pelosi’s favorite journalist did was reinforce the Kamala we all knew before we were told one day two months ago that she’s a beloved sex symbol — the Kamala who’s in over her head, has no vision for the country, and has no interest in governance.
There’s a reason that Democrats and the media have forced an amorphous, ever-shifting concept of “joy” to be the animating force of Kamala’s campaign. This interview, containing not a single unexpected question, illustrates perfectly why they’ve done so. (Here’s a link to the full CNN transcript for reference.)
Kamala can’t withstand scrutiny.
She implied that she’s never been in favor of banning fracking but when confronted with her position when she ran for president in 2020, she skated past the question to only say she has “made very clear” she’s not in favor of it. In that exchange alone, she used the word “clear” five times. Much like the constant hammering with messages about how average and dad-like Tim Walz is unpersuasive, if you have to repeatedly state how “clear” you’ve been, nobody is convinced.
Kamala can’t articulate an argument for herself.
Confronted with her on-record position to decriminalize unauthorized crossings at the southern border, she started talking about climate policy. “My values have not changed,” she said. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time. We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act.” (Yes, Kamala admitted the “inflation reduction” bill was actually about funding the electric cars scam.)
Kamala can’t even fake a fundamental grasp of critical foreign policy issues.
The war in Israel is just one of two violent global conflicts to break out under the Kamala-Biden administration, and in the almost year since it started, the closest she could come to explaining her depth of understanding about it or how to bring it to an end was to repeat in frustration, “We have to get a deal done.”
— “We have got to get a deal done.”
— “We — we were in Doha. We have to get a deal done.”
— “This war must end.”
— “And we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out.”
— “Let’s get the ceasefire done.”
— “We have to get a deal done.”
— “Dana, we have to get a deal done.”
— “A deal is not only the right thing to do to end this war but will unlock so much of what must happen next.”
Look at all that joy! Damn, that’s a lot of joy!
Kamala looked tired. Admittedly, she’s vice president and simultaneously running for president on a platform that ignores she’s currently in the White House. Oh, and joy. I’d be exhausted, too.
We’re finally getting to see again the Kamala we knew all along.
Jason Miller, senior adviser to former President Donald Trump’s campaign, told Newsmax on Friday that Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent interview on CNN “was weird” and “did not look presidential.”
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for an interview with CNN on Thursday evening, their first with a major news network since launching their campaign for the White House. Miller, in an appearance on “Wake Up America” Friday morning, criticized the “optics” of the interview, saying that “it did not look presidential.”
He said, “There’s a certain threshold that you have to meet when you’re looking presidential. Can you lead this country? Other candidates in the past have had it. I don’t see that with Kamala Harris.”
Miller also said that the interview “was weird” and said that the vice president “looked as though she’d been called in by her teacher in the principal to say, Kamala, you have not been to class one day in three and a half years, it’s time to talk about your record.’ And on that record, she had no good answers.”
He went on to say that Harris was “vague” in her answers and criticized her defense of her recent policy shifts by saying, “My values haven’t changed.”
Miller said, “The ‘my values haven’t changed’ got three mentions, and crime, for example, got zero mentions.”
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Kamala Harris hasn’t been the presumptive Democrat nominee for even a week, and already the press is desperately trying to insist perfectly valid criticisms of her are illegitimate. If you think the media were complicit in attempting and failing to hide Joe Biden’s senility, the attempt to retcon her political career into something that resembles respectable and competent is even more brazen.
“She was never the border czar.”
“She was never considered the most liberal senator.”
“She was never a DEI hire.”
“She doesn’t owe her political career to her powerful boyfriend.”
The dishonesty surrounding all of these issues is worth highlighting, but let’s focus on that last point involving Harris’ relationship with California’s powerful political boss Wille Brown, for no other reason than The New York Times has provided a terrific example of how the lies are coming in hot.
The Times’ “On Politics” newsletter Wednesday — think of it as political talking points for affluent wine moms, a.k.a. the Democrats’ base — was dedicated to combatting “the sexist and racist rumors that have followed Harris for years” with “the facts behind several conspiracy theories and misleading claims about Harris that have spread widely in recent days.”
Nearly the whole thing is an orgiastic recitation of errant nonsense, starting with the fact that the Times is quoting disgraced “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz to make the case that Harris is the victim of a disproportionate amount of online attacks. (Harris’ competitor in the presidential race was shot in the head less than two weeks ago, and, unsurprisingly, there’s been a dearth of media handwringing about the rhetorical climate that may have enabled an actual assassination attempt. That’s because an honest discussion about hateful rhetoric would involve asking basic questions such as, “Why did The New York Times win a Pulitzer for stories based on the false premise that Donald Trump stole an election by treasonously colluding with Russia?”)
But I digress. Again, the real lowlight of the Times article is its discussion of Kamala Harris’ relationship with Willie Brown. One of my favorite things “fact checkers” do is introduce a proposition as false and then try to confirm that falsity by desperately spinning a bunch of inconvenient facts that confirm the proposition is actually true. The entire section on Harris and Willie Brown is a textbook example:
The sexist insinuations point in part to her brief relationship in the 1990s with Willie Brown, who was 60 and the speaker of the California Assembly when Harris was 29 and rising in the Bay Area legal scene. He appointed Harris to two well-paid state board positions and introduced her to his political connections.
When she was campaigning to be San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003, her opponents repeatedly commented on her link to Brown — references that she told The New York Times in 2019 were “frustrating” and “designed to degrade, frankly, the conversation about why we needed a new D.A.”
During the 2003 race, which she won, she told SF Weekly that there was nothing improper about benefiting from her ties to Brown, although she described the relationship as an “albatross hanging around my neck.” She said she “brought a level of life knowledge and common sense” to the board roles, adding that “whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work.”
She said that she had “no doubt that I am independent of him” and that “I do not owe him a thing.”
Just so we’re clear, The New York Times is confirming Harris did in fact have a relationship with Willie Brown, who was 31 years older (and, for what it’s worth, still married at the time). Harris herself admits her career benefited significantly from said relationship. Other Democrats shared the perception she did not earn her positions. And Harris, a lawyer who initially failed the bar exam, can only say that she “brought a level of life knowledge and common sense” rather than actual qualifications to the jobs Brown appointed her to. But it’s a sexist insinuation to insist these facts are rather unflattering to Kamala!
And this is just what The New York Times is admitting. In actuality, the details are far worse than the Times is letting on. Peter Schweizer, an investigative journalist who has worked with The New York Times in the past, details quite a bit on the corrupt nature of the Harris/Brown relationship in his book, Profiles in Corruption, which has been out for four and a half years. And the facts as he lays them out are damning.
Brown, who was repeatedly investigated by the FBI for corruption, was far more involved in Harris’ career ascent than appointing her to two board positions. He was a kingmaker in California, and he was heavily involved in helping Harris get elected as San Francisco district attorney. Brown didn’t do this entirely out of the goodness of his heart. Harris was working for the previous district attorney, Terence Hallinan, and quit when she got passed over for the No. 2 position in the DA’s office.
Hallinan found himself as the subject of criticism from other city officials, but others suggested the controversy was manufactured. “This whole thing is about Kamala Harris,” a source close to Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Cross one of Willie’s friends and there will be hell to pay.” Eventually, Harris ran for DA with Brown’s powerful backing — a former Brown aide managed her campaign, and Brown played a key role in her fundraising, which was incredibly successful. After starting the race polling a distant third, she won the election.
Once in office, Harris then dropped or pled out corruption charges against friends of Willie Brown that Hallinan had been pursuing. There were a number of Brown’s friends let off the hook, but most notably this included a sweetheart plea deal for a notorious city contractor caught defrauding the city by using inferior recycled concrete in sensitive projects such as parking garages and the Bay Bridge. This compromised the structural integrity of those projects and endangered lives. But Harris dropped all the fraud charges and accepted a guilty plea on a single count involving an environmental violation.
“Harris’ office had no explanation for why it dropped the concrete case,” reported the Chronicle. A better explanation is that the contractor in question was generous with campaign donations and had previously been popped for making an illegal $2,000 donation to, yup, Willie Brown.
Anyway, there’s a lot more alarming reporting in Schweizer’s book that’s worth revisiting, and it’s not a stretch to say Kamala Harris has engaged in outright corruption in her career. Suffice to say, when The New York Times takes Kamala Harris at her word that her relationship with Willie Brown was not “improper,” they’re erasing the functional difference between lying and profound ignorance. And when she’s credulously quoted saying, “I do not owe him a thing,” it’s journalistic malpractice to believe her.
To say that Kamala Harris had an affair with a man more than twice her age, leveraged his fundraising prowess and connections to launch her political career, and once in office did his corrupt bidding isn’t sexist. It’s well-grounded in fact.
But facts aren’t something The New York Times is much interested in. Kamala Harris’ late entry into the presidential race means they don’t have much time to use what’s left of their institutional clout to try to dishonestly sway a presidential race.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
It’s clear by now that the U.S. Secret Service is not a very elite security detail. Random, weaponless rallygoers paid more serious attention to the would-be assassin before he fired than the allegedly professional team assigned to Donald Trump on Saturday. Trump’s security detail did not secure him. Someone else did.
The Person who saved Trump’s life — and our nation from dangerous social unrest — is Jesus Christ. It is not random that wind gusts were present in just the right amount to have shifted the bullet’s course from fatal to flesh wound. It is not accidental that Trump turned his head at precisely the right second to avoid sudden death.
To phrase it as Whittaker Chambers did in explaininghis conversion from atheism to Christianity, which began when he watched his toddler eating: “My eye came to rest on the intricate convolutions of her ear — those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature. … They could have been created only by immense design.’ … I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid on my forehead.”
The finger of God was also laid on Trump’s forehead Saturday night, turning it in the precise direction at the precise moment to spare his life. The chances of everything occurring as it did by random chance are impossibly improbable. No, the only Person who saved Trump is the same Person Who saves anyone who is ever saved: Jesus Christ, the God of the universe in human flesh.
He Who Controls Both Body and Soul
The whole world watched a miracle in live-time on global TV Saturday night. We watched in striking color the reality that the life and death of every person — and nation — is held in God’s hands. It is Jesus Christ who proclaims:
[D]o not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.
Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So, everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.
This is why the Christian martyrs often surprised their captors by boldly declaring that no one could put them to death. For the true God promises that “he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” The good man who died saving other people’s lives in Pennsylvania Saturday, Corey Comperatore, believed in Him Who Is “the resurrection, and the life,” and Who promises, “[W]hosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
According to Comperatore’s daughter, he was a “man of God” who “loved Jesus fiercely.” No one took Comperatore’s life. Like his Savior, Jesus Christ, he laid it down for those he loved. Also, like Jesus Christ, he will rise again. In the same chapter of Matthew quoted above, Jesus promises, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” See you in eternity, brother.
The Power of Life and Death Is God’s
Saturday was not Trump’s Day to die. His near-death experience was a very visible divine event displaying to all the world Who holds full power over life and death: Jesus Christ. It is a spiritual shock treatment to increase the faith of those who believe and ignite new faith in those ready to believe.
Even with a highly competent Secret Service, Trump could fall at any time God chooses, to any malady. Like every one of us, he could have — God forbid, of course — a heart attack, an aneurysm, or myriad other fatal events. Not even the world’s best doctors or warriors can stop death. The best they can do is sometimes delay it.
As Proverbs says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, Like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes.” Yes, the king’s heart and his head as well. The psalmist says, “But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head. … I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about.”
No one but God shifted Trump’s head that day, and no one but God decides when Trump will meet his Maker. It’s direct and clear evidence that, yes, there is a God, and he divinely intervenes in human affairs.
Miracles Are Proof God Is Real
Miracles are everywhere. They are proof that God is real. And the fact that He’s real should change all of us every moment of our lives.
Miracles are both a rare and everyday occurrence. Every time a child is conceived is a miracle. That happens hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of times each day. It’s a miracle there aren’t more wars, that millions of people have clean and even hot water, that billions of people can eat enough to stay alive every day. Such quotidian miracles are typically hidden: inside mothers’ bodies, plastic pipes, farmers’ tools, the everyday.
Miracles like the one we saw Saturday are rarer and thus a special call for us all to stop, reflect, and pray. That’s because, if we’re honest, we all understand that any of us could die at any moment and face God’s just judgment, yet so many of us are mercifully spared each minute. This highly visible mercy for our undeserving nation calls for national and international gratitude, repentance, faith, and prayer.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Several top donors to the Democratic Party will withhold about $90 million in promised donations unless President Joe Biden steps aside from his reelection campaign, The New York Times reported.
Donors to the pro-Biden super PAC Future Forward are reportedly holding onto tens of millions of dollars in promised donations, including multiple contributions in the eight figures, two sources who spoke under the condition of anonymity told the Times. These sources estimated the total amount of frozen donations to be around or above $90 million.
Future Forward declined to give a statement when contacted with a request for comment about conversations with donors or how much promised money is being held back. An adviser for the group did say that the super PAC expects donors who paused their contributions to resume them once Democrats resolve the uncertainty surrounding the Biden presidential campaign.
Multiple prominent donors to the Democratic Party, including Netflix head Reed Hastings, former Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus, and Walmart heiress Christy Walton, have called on Biden to step aside since his widely criticized performance in his debate against former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, last month.
Will Democrats replace Joe Biden as their presidential nominee?
It’s not that simple, logistically or politically, as long he’s still alive. States have pretty strict rules on last-second ballot changes, but Democrats have always found ways to get courts to rewrite laws for them at the last second. Just look at what they did for Frank Lautenberg and Robert Torricelli in New Jersey. It would be a heavy lift but not an impossible one.
The real problem for Democrats is political: Removing Biden as nominee requires them to deny and reject the election results of their voters in all 50 states after they spent four years accusing everyone else of being “election deniers.” They also will have a very hard time removing Biden as nominee but leaving him in as president. If he’s not mentally fit to be on the campaign trail or debate stage, how on Earth can he be fit enough to remain as president? The downsides of that strategy are immense, with little upside.
And that brings us to the real problem for Democrats: Kamala Harris. They know she’s political kryptonite because she’s both incredibly stupid and extremely unlikeable. Democrat voters can’t even stand her. So, if they manage to get rid of Biden both as nominee and as president, they end up stuck with her, which might even be worse than doing nothing. Do they really want to be in the position of preventing the first female president from running as an incumbent? And can they sideline her while promoting another white dude like Gavin Newsom when their entire party is built around identity politics?
So, the predicament for Democrats right now is they have to somehow find out how to get rid of Biden as the nominee, keep him as president, and prevent the black woman who is currently vice president from being the nominee. I don’t think it’s a needle they’ll be able to thread without resorting to violence and republic-destroying tactics.
Now, they could just reap what they’ve sown, accept the consequences of their choices, and accept losing an election for once — but I’m not holding my breath.
Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.
In 2023, the legislature amended the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA) to add anti-discrimination protections for “gender identity” but failed to revise the corresponding religious exemption, effectively attempting to remove it.
This year, “gender identity” was added to a list of already protected categories of protections in the MHRA. “Sexual orientation” was already protected by the MHRA, but the term “gender identity” was added explicitly. A religious exemption that had already been in place since 1993 “prohibited the state from forcing religious organizations to comply with the anti-discrimination law provisions with respect to protected categories like sexual orientation when those provisions are inconsistent with a religious organization’s sincerely held beliefs,” said Renee Carlson, general counsel for True North Legal. However, the religious exemption was not updated to include the term “gender identity.”
“While we had hoped it was an oversight, the House Judiciary Chair stated on the record that the omission of those words was intentional,” Carlson said. “A discussion ensued during the committee where Democratic legislators not only refused to accept an amendment to protect religious organizations, but also called the amendment to protect religious organizations ‘disturbing’ and ‘disgusting’ after hearing a testimony from a diverse group of testifiers.”
By openly failing to include “gender identity” in the previously established religious exemption, the Minnesota legislation openly attacked religious freedom, but the attack does not stop there. Churches and religious institutions would be directly impacted by this exemption, but so would many unprotected groups served by religious organizations.
“A threat to religious organizations extends well beyond the churches and ministries that the statute protects. Religious organizations often serve marginalized and underserved communities, such as victims of sex trafficking, homeless families, and youth through programs that help kids graduate high school and even go to college. These religious entities in Minnesota meet individual needs and fill gaps that the government could never achieve on its own. To be sure, this was an unprecedented attack on religion and people of faith, but also on the communities that they serve,” said Carlson.
The MHRA could even threaten the existence of some religious organizations whose mission and religious beliefs are inseparable, Carlson added. “For religious organizations and its members, every decision is inextricably bound up in the tenets of its faith tradition. Removing statutory protections for religious organizations from the Minnesota Human Rights Act threatened the existence of all religious entities whose missions are inseparable from their employment practices, catechisms, and governance.”
According to Jason Adkins, general counsel at Minnesota Catholic Conference, the religious exemption was put in place in 1993 and had functioned without any problems until the bill introducing “gender identity” protections. The religious exemption was never meant to compromise anti-discrimination law but was intended to protect the freedom of religious institutions.
“The clear religious exemption provides predictability to religious organizations, potential litigants, and others about the scope of the MHRA and the pluralism of values that it protects, including the autonomy of religious institutions on matters of sexual identity. Anti-discrimination provisions related to sexual orientation and gender identity made it into law in 1993 in part because religious groups did not oppose them due to the inclusion of the exemption. This clarification of law restores the gender identity exemption and ensures that the MHRA is not used as a sword against faith communities,” said Adkins.
After public backlash, both the Minnesota House and Senate voted unanimously to restore religious protections.
While the restoration of the exemption somewhat protects religious organizations, there are many members of religions working in fields not controlled by religious institutions. Christian workers, including teachers, lawyers, and doctors, fear the need to compromise their religious beliefs in order to do their jobs in a way that respects the MHRA. “Our big concern is that doctors may be punished for declining to provide treatments they believe are unethical or harmful. This is not a tenet of a specific religion, but of natural law and universal human rights,” said a medical doctor from the Association of American Physicians.
Despite the religious exemption being restored, legal battles to defend religious freedom are constantly raging in Minnesota. Still in effect are the new standards requiring state-licensed teachers to affirm students’ gender identities. After the MHRA tried to effectively remove the religious exemption, new amendments to the Minnesota constitution intending to attack religious institutions have been proposed.
Doug Seaton, a lawyer at Upper Midwest Law, emphasized the constant need for vigilance in an environment where religious liberty is always under attack. “We have to be constantly fighting these assaults in the dark and bringing them to the light. This attempt ended in success, but it is a lesson in how eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
During a virtual town hall event last week, Paula Collins, who is challenging Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., suggested that supporters of former President Trump be sent to “re-education camps,” according to audio obtained by the Post Millenial.
Collins, a marijuana tax attorney, argued that even if a majority of Democrats are elected to Congress in November, there will still be a need for re-education camps to “put[] it all back together again” after “this MAGA nightmare.”
The uncontested Democrat nominee for NY-21 said, “Even if we were to have a resounding blue wave come through, as many of us would like, putting it all back together again after we’ve gone through this MAGA nightmare and re-educating, basically — that sounds like a, rather, a re-education camp.” She told voters on the call they will need to find “another way to phrase” the concept of “re-education camps” with the general public.
New York Democrat Paula Collins suggests Trump supporters need a “reeducation camp” after the election.
Collins is running for Congress and made the comments in a town hall meeting. pic.twitter.com/6VGNmtlcY7
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 6, 2024
Her remarks have drawn comparisons to a 2016 CNN interview of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, during which she said Trump supporters need “deprogramming.” Clinton said, “At some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.” On her campaign homepage, Collins notes the comparison to Clinton, saying she is honored.
Stefanik called for Democrat leadership to condemn the comments. Stefanik said in a press release, “Joe Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer must immediately condemn this statement.”
My statement calling on Joe Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer to immediately condemn NY Democrat congressional candidate's call to force Trump voters into re-education camps: pic.twitter.com/WPYEsg0Jrx
Instead of retracting and apologizing, Collins blamed the media for airing her controversial remarks. Collins claimed Stefanik is attacking her because she is “panicked.”
The left-wing candidate is using the controversy to fundraise, asking for $250 campaign donations. Asking for campaign donations, Collins writes on her website, “Help me end the MAGA mania.” “Far-right politics” is listed as one of her top issues on her campaign website.
Ratings on Ballotpedia describe Stefanik’s district as “Solid Republican,” based on data from three political analysis organizations.
Federal Election Commission filings highlight the weak chances of New York’s 21st congressional district flipping blue. Collins has just $6,337.93 cash on hand and $11,130 in campaign debt. Meanwhile, Stefanik, who is reportedly under consideration as Trump’s running-mate, boasts nearly $5 million in available funds.
Arianna Villarreal is a summer intern at The Federalist.
Former President Donald Trump managed to pull off a campaign miracle with a wildly successful rally in South Bronx on Thursday night.
The Bronx is the poorest borough in New York City, and South Bronx is the poorest area. Most residents are black or brown, and they vote overwhelmingly Democrat. No Republican presidential candidate has gone anywhere near the area in decades.
On Thursday morning, heavy rains flooded the park where the rally was to be held. Bronx-based Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., tweeted “God is good” upon seeing the weather, believing it would keep Trump crowds away. She also taunted Trump for being the victim of Democrat lawfare, saying he had to rally in the Bronx because he was in the “legal version of an ankle bracelet.”
God is good regardless of political outcomes, of course. In this case, He dried Crotona Park in the Bronx before a raucous crowd of thousands poured in to hear one of Trump’s best campaign speeches yet.
“Certainly, a bigger crowd than I think Democrats would like to see, particularly given this is one of the bluest counties in the entire country,”one CNN reporter conceded upon seeing the crowds.
Trump barely mentioned the NYC show trial he’s being subjected to and mixed campaign staples with a declaration of love for New York City and the country at large. He seemed truly happy and at home.
“I was thrilled to be back in the city I grew up in, the city I spent my life in, the city I HELPED BUILD, and the city WE ALL LOVE — THANK YOU!” Trump said on Truth Social. Trump grew up in Queens but officially moved to Florida in 2019. His effusive praise for New York shows a remarkably positive attitude from the former president, given that the city and state are currently part of a Democrat campaign plot to bankrupt and imprison him.
Trump reflected on lessons from his success in New York City real estate, doling out career advice along the way, during his hour-and-a-half speech. A parade of local politicians and activists announced endorsements and support of Trump. When he discussed his economic and immigration policy proposals for getting the country back on track, he argued that his policies would help everyone in the country. It’s part of a concerted effort by the Trump campaign to drive up votes from black and Hispanic voters who traditionally vote Democrat.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or brown or white or whatever the hell color you are — it doesn’t matter. We are all Americans, and we are going to pull together as Americans!” Trump said.
The contrast with President Joe Biden couldn’t be starker. In three decidedly non-raucous speeches within the last week or so, Biden leaned into racial grievance politics. At a speech at the National Museum of African American History and Culture last Friday, Biden claimed America was beset by “forces trying to deny freedom of opportunity for all Americans.” He claimed there was an “insidious” resistance and an “extreme movement” led by his political opponent to hurt black people. In another disaster of a speech to the NAACP, the White House later had to make 10 corrections to it.
The same day as the NAACP speech, Biden gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, a historically black men’s school in Georgia. In a self-centered speech riddled with some of his familiar falsehoods about his life and family, Biden painted a picture of a racist and evil country. He said the country was under the “poison of white supremacy” and falsely claimed Americans were trying to put forth a national book ban to harm black people.
It’s “natural to wonder if democracy” actually works, he said. “What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black — black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?”
Biden also falsely claimed Georgia doesn’t allow anyone to drink water in voting lines and that black election workers are being constantly attacked.Biden’s message is that the country is evil, racist, and full of hatred and that he will fix it by emptying the Treasury to buy votes.
Trump, who has the benefit of having already had one very successful term as president, acknowledges the very real economic, social, and foreign policies the country faces. But unlike Biden, his optimistic campaign speeches show a man who seems to love the country, love its cities, love its people, and want the country to return to health.
Whether Biden’s race-baiting rhetoric or Trump’s unbridled multi-ethnic optimism will win the day remains to be seen. The speech in South Bronx showed how successful the latter can be.
Special Counsel Jack Smith admitted federal prosecutors tampered with evidence in his criminal case alleging former President Donald Trump mishandled classified documents.
According to a Friday court filing, prosecutors said documents the FBI seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence are no longer in the same order in which they found them, and some are mislabeled and may even be misplaced. A government “filter team” that dealt with the boxes once the FBI took them “was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box,” the special counsel’s office wrote in the filing.
Later the filing says, of early inventories and scanned records of the seized document boxes, “Because these inventories and scans were created close in time to the seizure of the documents, they are the best evidence available of the order the documents were in when seized. That said, there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” A footnote on this last sentence says: “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.”
The filing also suggests the Department of Justice and FBI may have lost and mislabeled some of the documents. When the agencies first took the documents at Mar-a-Lago, government employees used many blank sheets of paper as substitutes and cover papers for what they decided might be classified documents.
After the FBI brought the document boxes to Washington DC, federal employees and contractors began replacing these “handwritten sheets” with proper classified document covers. At that point, the filing says, “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.” This indicates the special counsel’s office disclosed it isn’t sure whether some it lost or mislabeled some of the allegedly classified documents it seized in the Trump raid.
In response, Trump’s defense team filed a motion to dismiss the case over prosecutorial misconduct.
Setting aside the FBI high-tailed it out of southern FLA to conduct the investigation within the confines of the corrupt Washington FBI field office, Smith admits DOJ cannot be sure every place holder corresponds with the correct document. pic.twitter.com/Fxy8MZp2qs
Smith charged Trump last June with 37 criminal counts related to the former president’s handling of classified documents. In July, Smith added three more counts against Trump as Democrats strategize to retain the presidency by imprisoning their chief political opponent in an unprecedented lawfare campaign. New evidence shows the Democrat White House worked closely with the DOJ and National Archives and Records Administration in crafting the documents case against Trump.
The classified documents case is Trump’s largest election-year court battle, as nearly half of the 88 total charges against him currently are related to the records. Federal prosecutors confiscated 33 boxes of documents from the hostile raid on Trump’s home in August 2022, according to Fox News. The Department of Justice has spent more than $23 million in taxpayer dollars for Smith to investigate Trump.
In April, Federalist Elections Correspondent Brianna Lyman outlined three major revelations to emerge from the classified documents case to date, including deep state pressure to move forward with Trump’s prosecution and White House involvement.
“President Biden also retained classified documents after leaving the vice presidency,” Lyman reported. “Yet he was not charged because prosecutors say they believed he would ‘present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’”
The Department of Energy allegedly revoked the former president’s security clearance retroactively once Trump was indicted.
In February, journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported the FBI raid may have been orchestrated to cover up the intelligence state’s role in the Russia hoax. The article posted on Shellenberger’s news website, Public, outlined how intelligence officials fretted over the presence of a classified “binder” in Trump’s possession that former CIA Director Gina Haspel was careful to protect for years.
“Transgressions [the feds might have wanted to cover up] range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian ‘influence activities,’” Public reported.
The binder was “Trump’s insurance policy,” according to an unnamed source cited as “knowledgeable about the case.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
It’s pretty clear at this point that Democrats’ main election strategy against Donald Trump has nothing to do with Joe Biden running a savvy political campaign. Instead, they’re attempting to defeat Trump with a series of obviously politically coordinated lawsuits and criminal charges, hoping this will both drain Trump’s resources and any resulting convictions would tarnish him in the eyes of voters. Suffice it to say, this strategy is not working out well for them — Biden hasn’t led in the polls in six months.
And while there’s a lot to be said about the dubious nature of the charges being brought against him, the point has been driven home by the recent decision by a New York appeals court to reduce Trump’s bond in his civil fraud trial from $454 million to $175 million. Or rather, the issue is what no one is saying about this case: It’s such complete bunk that no one among the legion of Trump’s critics in and out of the corporate media is even trying to defend this case on the merits.
To recap: Trump took out loans over several years, as real estate moguls are wont to do. For him to get approved for those loans, the banks did their own due diligence about Trump’s finances and ability to pay back the loans and decided to give them to him. Trump paid back the loans, and everyone made money.
However, the state of New York, where the current Attorney General Letitia James campaigned for office on the insane premise of convicting Trump without even saying what he was guilty of, combed through the paperwork of these loans and charged Trump with fraudulently inflating the value of his assets to get favorable loan terms. They did this in spite of the fact that no bank has accused Trump of wrongdoing.
The case was decided by a judge who is personally bizarre and professionally incompetent and adversarial. In a case where Trump was accused of inflating the value of his assets, in Judge Engoron’s ruling he concluded that Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s historic estate on 17 oceanfront acres in the heart of the most exclusive neighborhood in America, was worth between “$18 million and $27.6 million.” Even CNN was incredulous about Engoron’s low valuation of Trump’s assets: “Real estate insiders question how Trump fraud judge valued Mar-a-Lago.” For those who believe that Trump inflated the value of his assets to get a loan — this would not exactly make him a unique figure in the business world — Engoron’s judgment is still unreliable.
The ruling against Trump is, in the words of former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, “a fraud case in which there are no fraud victims.” McCarthy’s National Review colleague Dan McLaughlin, who has decades of experience litigating business fraud in New York, notes, “The idea that Trump caused half a billion in damages to his lenders doesn’t pass the straight face test. A tenuous-at-best theory of illegality should not be a springboard for draconian punishment.” (It should also be noted that though McCarthy and McLaughlin are on the right, neither man has much affinity for Trump.)
This case is so obviously politically motivated, and even America’s corrupt media are at a loss to defend this: “An Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of similar cases showed Trump’s case stands apart: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.”
For months now, I have been on the lookout for any notable journalist or pundit who is willing to write an actual defense of Engeron’s judgment against Trump. Outside of a handful of ill-considered tweets from the #resistance crowd, I haven’t seen anything substantive at all. While I pay attention to this stuff much more closely than most, I’m obviously not omniscient. So, I went on X and asked if anyone had written anything substantive defending Engeron’s decision on the merits. (My question was almost immediately retweeted by Dilbert cartoonist and unorthodox political commentator Scott Adams, who has more than a million followers, giving it wide exposure.)
So far, the closest thing I’ve found was this column at the libertarian-ish legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy. Berkeley law professor Orin Kerr defends the ruling, taking a strict read on what the state was allowed to do here. However, even he is conflicted about whether the case should have been brought, admirably and transparently states his opinion is contingent on the fact he’s not an expert in New York law, and concludes, “So if the opinion is wrong, and gets reversed, I certainly don’t mind that.”
Well, Monday a New York appeals court did conclude that Engeron’s opinion was substantially wrong and reduced the bond Trump has to present from $454 million to $175 million. (Incredibly, New York law dictates Trump has to post this still obscene amount before he can further appeal the decision.)
In addition to reducing the size of Trump’s bond, the appeals court also threw out Engeron’s ruling barring Trump from serving as an officer or director of a New York company for three years and the order barring Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump from serving as officers and directors of New York companies for two years. The plan was clearly to slap Trump with an egregious fine while simultaneously hamstringing Trump’s business in ways that would make it harder to raise money to pay the penalty.
Even by the very low standards set by the other Trump charges, what’s happening here is appalling. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado may not bar Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment’s provision against insurrectionists. The fact that there was a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, does not mean we automatically get to presume it was a serious insurrection attempt, much less that Trump has been convicted in a court of law for any crime related to it.
From the beginning, this was a desperate and quixotic attempt to stop Trump from participating in a free election, as well as disenfranchise millions of voters. It was so bad it prompted a unanimous SCOTUS ruling. And yet, in the weeks and months leading up to SCOTUS’s ruling there were dozens of op-eds from ostensibly serious and high-profile commentators assuring us that the unilateral decision by Colorado’s secretary of state was sound constitutional law. Anti-Trump pundits such as David French and many others eagerly staked out a position on this case to the left of avowedly progressive Supreme Court Justices Kentanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor.
As crazy as the Colorado case was, the reaction to it is an instructive comparison. In the Trump civil fraud case, we have an overtly partisan attorney general bringing charges and a solitary judge handing down a verdict so insane that even the regrettably prominent segment of America’s commentariat willing to abase itself at the drop of a hat to stop Cheeto Mussolini is looking at the facts of this case and deciding to steer clear of the blast zone.
While the appeals court’s rebuke of Engeron’s decision is strong confirmation the case is as bad as it seems, it was hardly Solomonic in its wisdom. The reality is that the man leading in the polls to be the next president is still being rung up by the opposition party with an outrageous fine that reeks of an Eighth Amendment violation on a case that never should have been brought. And we should probably throw in a Fifth Amendment due process violation while we’re at it, because the idea that Trump has to pay the state $175 million for the privilege of continuing to appeal in court is something I’m confident the reanimated corpse of James Madison would tell us is exactly the kind of injustice the Bill of Rights was trying to prevent, right before he dies a second time upon finding out about the existence of a federal income tax.
In the end, what’s really telling is that while the “country over party” crowd won’t defend this decision on the merits, they’re also not speaking out about the perversion of justice here. They’re content to let it happen to Trump even if it erodes the very norms and concerns about “rule of law” they insist Trump threatens as president.
Well, people are noticing that this isn’t a very principled position. And based on the polls, voters are coming to the entirely rational conclusion that Trump, for all his considerable flaws, is less of a threat than an establishment that will eagerly distort the law to subvert an election they’re afraid they can’t win on the merits.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
President Joe Biden won most of the delegates up for grabs in the Democrat presidential primaries on Super Tuesday, but the sizable number of votes cast against him in favor of an “uncommitted” option confirm how much sway the loudest, most radical wings of the party have.
Anti-Israel Democrats launched a campaign to vote “uncommitted” or “no preference” (casting a vote for no candidate) out of frustration that Biden’s position toward Israel is insufficiently supportive of Hamas-run Gaza. After gaining traction in Michigan last week, the protest vote — which seeks to use “uncommitted” Democrat votes to call for Biden to oppose Israel’s military response following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks — won close to 19 percent of Democrat primary voters in Minnesota and 12.7 percent in North Carolina, according to the Associated Press. The campaign pulled single-digit percentages of voters in states including Alabama, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Tennessee.
“Democrats are really frustrated,” said Jaylani Hussein, co-chair of Uncommitted Vote Minnesota, on ABC News. “Now it’s starting to cost him immensely.”
“The policy of this war is untenable and it will have consequences, not only for down-ballots but hopefully also in the upcoming election,” he added. “We understand the consequences of leaving the party that we voted for, or the president that we voted for.”
Groups like Abandon Biden, formed by Muslim Americans calling Israel’s response against Hamas a “genocide,” and Our Revolution, which sprung up from Bernie Sanders’ failed 2016 presidential campaign, are supporting the effort. Last Tuesday, “uncommitted” won more than 13 percent of Michigan Democrats.
“The ‘Vote Uncommitted’ movement is growing, and voters continue to make themselves heard,” Our Revolution Director Joseph Geevarghese wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday. “There is no unconditional support for President Biden, not without an unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.”
The Democratic Socialists of America endorsed the “uncommitted” effort March 3. The group is planning phone banks in support and posted Tuesday night that they have “big pushes coming up in WA, WI and beyond.”
Vice President Kamala Harris called for a ceasefire Sunday, but this was apparently not enough to win over the anti-Israel groups. Meanwhile Democrat and known antisemite Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minnesota where the movement gained the most, has been attacking Biden’s policy on the conflict.
Biden’s unpopularity Super Tuesday went even beyond the mainland. He lost the primary in American Samoa to self-described entrepreneur Jason Palmer, who won with 56 percent, according to CNN.
“We are not supporting Donald Trump,” Hussein said. “As far as the consequences of having President Trump, that’s a reality that we’re willing to accept.”
Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He serves as associate editor for the school paper, The Collegian, served as editorial assistant for Christopher Rufo, and has bylines in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller.
While outlets like The Washington Post have tried to convince Americans that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” it actually dies in Illinois courthouses where judges whose expertise revolves around parking tickets kick former presidents off ballots.
In the left’s latest attempt at election interference, Cook County Judge Tracie Porter kicked former President Donald Trump off the primary ballot on Wednesday — but put her own order on hold because she knows it won’t stand. Porter ruled Trump must be removed from the state’s March 19 primary ballot but stayed her own order until Friday pending a likely appeal.
Porter said the quiet part out loud, ruling that the board of elections, whichunanimously votedagainst removing Trump from the ballot, “shall remove Donald J. Trump from the ballot for the General Primary Election on March 19, 2024, or cause any votes for him to be suppressed.”
The suit was brought by the left-wing group Free Speech For People, which argued Trump is ineligible based on the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. Trump has not been charged with nor convicted of inciting or partaking in insurrection. Still, that hasn’t stopped left-wing activists from attempting to — as Porter would phrase it — suppress voters’ choice for president. The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments challenging the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove Trump from the ballot. A similar case is underway in Maine.
Free Speech for People received donor support from the Tides Foundation, which funnels dark money to left-wing organizations intent on changing the way elections are run to boost Democrat chances. The Tides Foundation received more than $22 million from George Soros.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung lambasted Porter’s decision, saying the campaign will appeal.
“The Soros-funded Democrat front-groups continue to attempt to interfere in the election and deny President Trump his rightful place on the ballot. Today, an activist Democrat judge in Illinois summarily overruled the state’s board of elections and contradicted earlier decisions from dozens of other state and federal jurisdictions,” Cheung said. “This is an unconstitutional ruling that we will quickly appeal.”
Prior to kicking a former president and 2024 front-runner off the ballot, Porter focused on traffic tickets. The state’s Supreme Court appointed Porter in 2021 to be the “At-Large Cook County Circuit Court Judge.” According to the Cook County Democratic Party, Porter has spent time presiding “over minor traffic violations and Class A misdemeanor matters” in the downtown Chicago area.
Judging by Chicago’s ongoing crime crisis, Porter would better serve Illinois residents by continuing to focus on traffic violations — plus gang violence, illegal immigration, and theft — before telling them for whom they’re allowed to vote.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
President Joe Biden has a youth problem. Weeks after the Democrat incumbent was found too senile to face federal charges for mishandling classified documents, a new survey shows Biden losing ground with younger voters.
An Axios-Generation Lab survey out Monday found Biden barely winning voters aged 18 to 24, by 52 percent to 48 percent. According to Pew Research Center, Biden carried 18- to 29-year-olds by 24 points in 2020.
“We don’t know enough yet,” Neil O’Brian, a political scientist at the University of Oregon, told Axios. “But this idea that young people are gonna keep populating into the Democratic Party? There are some question marks around that.”
A survey from The New York Times in December found Trump winning among 18- to 29-year-olds, by 49 percent to 43 percent for Biden. The declining support among young voters comes as Biden tries to cultivate youth turnout with billions in student debt bailouts despite inflation and high interest rates pushing homeownership out of reach. Earlier this month, a CNBC survey of more than 1,000 Americans aged 18 to 34 conducted with Generation Lab found 41 percent think the economy is “poor” and 67 percent are living with family or roommates instead of their own home.
At 81, Biden is already the oldest president to ever hold office. Biden would be 82 by the time of a second inauguration. Trump, on the other hand, will be 78. The November contest will give Americans the unique opportunity to choose between two presidents who’ve already served four years in the White House.
Biden is also losing support among Latino voters. In December, a CNBC poll found Trump winning by five points this historically reliable voting bloc for Democrats. Biden won the majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, according to Pew. First Lady Jill Biden didn’t help her husband’s case for their support two years ago when she compared Hispanics to “breakfast tacos.”
Jill Biden just said Hispanics are as “unique” as tacos.
This isn’t Veep. Which White House speechwriter just won a bet for getting the First Lady to say something like this?pic.twitter.com/DXfJgYz0g5
The statement provoked a condemnation from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
“We are not tacos,” the group said in a statement. “NAHJ encourages [First Lady Jill Biden] & her communications team to take time to better understand the complexities of our people & communities.”
Biden is even losing support among black voters. A Gallup poll released this month found the president’s 47-point lead “is the smallest Gallup has recorded in its polling, dating back to 1999.” Trump is on track to win nearly 1 in 5 black voters, according to Gallup.
The same Gallup poll based on interviews in 2023 found Democrats’ support among 18- to 29-year-olds at its lowest since 2005.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Voters in a few months are supposed to cast a ballot for their preferred presidential candidate. Meanwhile, we just watched one of our major political parties attempt to literally bankrupt the likely nominee of the other and seize his property. Whatever you want to say of America anymore, it can’t possibly be called free, and our elections aren’t anything close to fair.
A Democrat judge linked up with a Democrat district attorney in New York last week, ruling that Donald Trump, who earned more votes in 2020 than any sitting president in history, pay the city about half a billion dollars in penalties and fines, plus forego his right to conduct business or borrow money in the entire state. The pretext for the obscenity is that Trump in his years as a real estate developer routinely defrauded lenders by inflating the value of his assets, a hideous crime that resulted in his victims’ insolvency and buried by insurmountable debt.
Wait, that’s not right. Let me check my notes. Sorry, what actually happened is that the banks who took the risk of financing Trump’s ventures raked in fistfulls of profits and continued chasing him to continue their lucrative partnerships. In other words, the parties “wronged” by Trump got richer.
With each passing day, nearly $100,000 in interest is tacked onto the sentence and the D.A., Letitia “peek-a-boo” James (as Trump calls her for hilarious yet unknown reasons), has gone so far as to threaten state seizure of the former president’s marquee real estate properties should he fail to pay the sum. Trump’s legal team has promised to appeal. But to do that, they would have to secure a bond that’s even higher than amount he’s been ordered to pay.
This is a former president. This is a former president who exponentially increased his support for reelection in 2020, earning 7 million more votes than any sitting president before. This is a former president running for a non-consecutive second term and who has all but in name locked up the Republican nomination. This is a former president whose polling numbers currently show him likely to defeat the sitting one in virtually every swing state that will decide the election.
They’re taking his money — potentially all of the cash he has on hand — revoking his right to participate in an entire state’s economy and threatening to snatch his private property. That’s just in New York. Elsewhere, Democrats are trying to keep his name off the ballot or, if that doesn’t work, put him in prison.
Trump did business in New York for decades. This isn’t a coincidence or a matter of karma catching up. James campaigned for her job promising to pursue the former president, explicitly because he became president.
If becoming president means potentially seeing your whole life’s work confiscated by the political opposition, then elections aren’t fair. This country isn’t free.
A left-wing dark money group masquerading as a Midwestern newspaper selectively clipped the announcement speech for a Wisconsin Senate candidate to frame the businessman as a heartless, clueless elite.
Eric Hovde launched his campaign to unseat Democrat incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin Tuesday. Heartland Signal, a political newspaper based in Chicago, published a 44-second segment from Hovde’s speech when he addressed the crisis on the U.S. southern border.
“It’s not just a humanitarian crisis for our country,” Hovde said. “But do you know how many lives are lost on that journey to get here? How many people’s life savings have been wiped out by the human trafficking cartels? And they’ve lost 100,000 children that they can’t account for.”
“Let me assure you,” Hovde added, “more than a few of them have ended up being sexually trafficked. I know this all too well. My brother and I have homes all over the world, and we have three in Central America that deal with issues like this.”
Heartland Signal, a leftist digital website backed by Democrat donors, posted the clip on X with the caption, “Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there.”
Announcing his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin, Republican Eric Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there. pic.twitter.com/LsQhPWvpAc
The post received more than 383,000 views before a community note was attached to offer accurate context.
“‘Hovde Homes’ are shelters the Hovde Foundation has built around the world to support children – including those who have been trafficked,” the note reads. “They are not residential homes as this post suggests.”
The Midwestern news group published a follow-up post offering the right context. That post, however, received a fraction of the views of its misleading post.
Misleading tweet: 383,000 views Devastating correction: 4,800 views They do it on purpose. pic.twitter.com/1noKDDLksr
Heartland Signal was recently purchased by Future Now Action, a left-wing activist group. Hovde faces four GOP opponents in the Wisconsin Republican Senate primary that concludes Aug. 13 to challenge the two-term Democrat incumbent elected in 2012. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, the state’s other U.S. senator, narrowly captured a third term two years ago by roughly 27,000 votes in the hotly contested swing state that dramatically expanded mail-in voting in 2020.
Immigration is a top issue going into the 2024 election, with Democrats on defense after spending four years turning control of the U.S. border over to international criminal cartels. Last week, House Republicans formally impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for dereliction of his constitutional duties.
On Tuesday, more than a dozen conservatives in the upper chamber penned a letter to demand that GOP Senate chief Mitch McConnell prepare for the Mayorkas impeachment trial.
“It is imperative that the Senate Republican conference prepare to fully engage our Constitutional duty and hold a trial,” they wrote.
The Republican Senate leader faced humiliation this month following the defeat of a border amnesty and mass migration bill.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls “military rule” through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become.
Most importantly, Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, explains how a constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions, under the pretext of countering “misinformation,” rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online. The 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the “two most censored events in human history.” And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal censorship-industrial complex.
The problem here is profound, with deep historical roots that go back to the aftermath of World War II and the creation of the CIA along with a host of U.S.-funded international institutions. But for our purposes, it suffices to understand the problem in its two most recent stages: the period from 1991 to 2014, and from 2014 to the present.
At the outset of internet privatization in 1991, free speech online was seen as an instrument of statecraft. At that time, says Benz, internet free speech was championed by the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments as a way to support dissident groups around the world in their efforts to overthrow authoritarian or disfavored regimes. It allowed the U.S. to conduct what Benz calls “insta-regime change operations,” in service of the State Department’s foreign policy agenda.
The plan worked really well. Among other things, free speech on the internet allowed U.S.-backed groups to assert control over state-run media in foreign countries, making it much easier to overthrow governments. The high-water mark of this way of deploying free speech online, Benz explains, was the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, when governments the Obama administration considered problematic — Egypt, Tunisia, Libya — all began falling in so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions. During that time, the State Department worked closely with these social media companies to keep them up and running in those countries, to be used as tools for protesters and dissident groups that were trying to circumvent state censorship.
But all of that changed in 2014 after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych and there was an unexpected pro-Russia counter-coup in Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Later that same year, says Benz, when the people of Crimea voted to be annexed into the Russian Federation, “that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO.”
Thereafter, NATO, the CIA, and the State Department, together with the intelligence agencies of our European allies, did an about-face on internet free speech. They began instead to engage in what amounted to hybrid or information warfare to censor what they saw as Russian propaganda online. These efforts quickly spread beyond Ukraine and Eastern Europe to include the censorship of populist groups on the right that were emerging across the EU as a response to the Syrian migrant crisis.
By the time Brexit emerged in the summer of 2016, explains Benz, NATO and the foreign policy establishment felt there was a real crisis afoot; the problem was spreading west from Central and Eastern Europe, and it had to be stopped. If it wasn’t, then Brexit might trigger the collapse of the entire EU, along with NATO and the entire constellation of supranational institutions that relied on NATO. The entire postwar architecture of institutions might come crashing down, all because the hearts and minds of the people were being swayed. So went the thinking, anyway. As far as the national security establishment was concerned, citizens were being swayed by Russian and far-right propaganda, and we can’t have that.
Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy." pic.twitter.com/hDTEjAf89T
Under these circumstances, free speech was the last thing that could be allowed to flourish online. Censorship became the order of the day. As Carlson put it, these NATO and EU leaders identified their new enemy as democracy within their own countries — their own voters, in other words: “They feared that their people, the citizens of their own countries, would get their way. And they went to war against that.”
And then Trump was elected. From that moment — and indeed, as we know from the Russia-collusion hoax, even before Trump was elected in November 2016 — the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments, which had done so much to censor and weaponize the internet overseas, turned their attention to American citizens.
Initially, their predicate for domestic surveillance was Crossfire Hurricane, the fatuous notion that Russia had infiltrated the Trump campaign and that Trump was a Russian asset. Once that collapsed, they needed another excuse to spy on and censor Americans who held disfavored opinions or who spread “misinformation,” to put it in the parlance of the censorship-industrial complex. To do that, they had to get around the prohibition against the CIA operating on American soil.
Since they couldn’t very well get away with openly spying on and censoring American citizens, they decided to house the bulk of their censorship operations inside the Department of Homeland Security, specifically in a part of DHS tasked with reducing and eliminating threats to U.S. critical physical and cyber infrastructure. Hence “domestic misinformation” — which is really just a term for opinions and information that the national security state doesn’t like or that run counter to State Department policy — was classified as an attack on “critical cognitive infrastructure,” and could therefore be censored. What it amounted to was an end-run around the First Amendment.
But even DHS couldn’t do this directly, so it outsourced online censorship operations to third parties like the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, which consisted of four separate organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and a firm called Graphika. These private-sector “partners” did the nitty-gritty work of mapping out entire online networks of people who helped spread certain disfavored opinions, or what the censors called “false narratives.” Essentially they were deputized to censor Americans on behalf of the government.
It should come as no surprise that the people behind the EIP censorship network are leftists who hate Donald Trump, despise his supporters, and love censorship. For example, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos is the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. He has compared “over half of the Republicans in Congress” to ISIS, called for Newsmax and OANN to be kicked off the air, and said, “We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.” His views are typical among the managers of the censorship industry.
These managers and their partners inside the U.S. government went about their task with gusto, including a seven-month pre-censorship campaign ahead of the 2020 election. Any content challenging public faith in mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot drop boxes was flagged for violating new rules about “delegitimizing elections.” The censors, along with the government, had strong-armed the social media companies into adopting these rules, as documented in great detail last year with the release of the “Twitter Files.”
Indeed, the “Twitter Files” exposed a massive effort by the federal government to deputize Twitter and other social media companies to do what it could not, at least not legally. But in some ways, the “Twitter Files” just revealed the tip of the censorship iceberg.
We at The Federalist were caught up in all this during the 2020 election. As detailed in a recent lawsuit filed in December by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, the State Department illegally used a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” to censor Americans.
The State Department, through grants and product development assistance to private entities like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, was “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” according to the lawsuit.
In our case, it meant the federal government was using cutouts like NewsGuard to throttle our reporting and commentary on the 2020 election and its chaotic aftermath. Both the GDI and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) developed censorship tools that included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says. The State Department then gave these tools to companies like Facebook and LinkedIn to target disfavored media outlets, including The Federalist.
Through these and other methods, during the 2020 election cycle and the Covid pandemic, the government-backed censorship-industrial complex throttled millions of online posts, suppressing traffic to news sites, and undermined revenue streams for a host of outlets and influencers with disfavored or dissident views.
But this isn’t a thing of the past. All of the censorship infrastructure described above is still intact, still functioning, and is firing on all cylinders right now ahead of the 2024 election. If anything, the censorship-industrial complex is more robust than it was four years ago. Just last week, Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg boasted on CNBC that he currently has some 40,000 employees, which is nearly 60 percent of Meta’s entire workforce, tasked with censoring speech on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Clegg also claimed Meta has spent about $20 billion, including $5 billion in the last year, on its censorship efforts — or what he euphemistically called “election integrity.”
What does that mean in practice? We don’t have to guess. Remember that Facebook infamously censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 at the behest of the FBI. With 40,000 employees now charged with censoring “hate speech” and ensuring “election integrity,” we can be fairly certain that if another Hunter Biden laptop story comes along this election cycle, it too will be quashed by the censors.
Why exactly is our government doing this? It’s not merely a partisan preference for ensuring Democrats stay in power, but something deeper and more insidious. To circle back to Carlson’s interview with Benz, it’s because the national security state has come to regard “democracy” not as the will of the people expressed through elections, but as the constellation of government agencies, government-backed institutions, corporations, media outlets, and nonprofit groups. Protecting democracy, in this view, means protecting these institutions from the people they were putatively meant to serve.
As Benz says at one point in the interview, “The relationship between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland has broken down, and that has played itself out in the story of the censorship industry.”
All of this seems rather complex and dense, at least in the details of how it works. But at root it’s very simple: Those who have power don’t want to be held accountable by the unwashed masses, by “populism,” and certainly not by the results of free and fair elections. They will not tolerate anyone, not even a duly elected president, going against the “interagency consensus” — that famous phrase of Alexander Vindman’s from the first Trump impeachment. They don’t think the people have that right, and they intend to use every tool they have to protect their power and privilege.
The stark truth is that if we don’t defeat and dismantle this censorship-industrial complex, it means the end of our republic and the rise of tyrannical military rule in the United States.
If you think that’s an overstatement, go watch the entire Benz interview and consider it in the context of what we have all seen play out in America over the past half-decade or so. There is no language alarmist enough to convey the gravity of what’s happening here. This is a hybrid war being fought mostly online but with real-world consequences that are every day becoming more obvious. We have to win the war to save our country, but we can’t even fight if we don’t know what’s happening, or how, or why.
About 15 minutes into the interview, I was again reminded of something I once heard the late, great Angelo Codevilla say in a lecture. He said our response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it took a “law enforcement” approach to terrorism that required the creation of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus to detect and stop terrorist attacks. Once the terrorist threat subsided, Codevilla explained, this surveillance apparatus would be turned on the American people and destroy the republic it was supposedly designed to protect.
That lecture was in 2013. Codevilla was right. It’s all happened exactly as he said it would. What happens next is up to us.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
There was never a purer demonstration of how traitorous Democrats are about “defending democracy,” or whatever corny phrase they like to use, than what just happened at the Supreme Court.
At the very end of oral arguments in the Colorado case determining whether the state had the right to remove former President Donald Trump’s name from the 2024 ballot, Justice Samuel Alito asked the state’s solicitor general, Shannon Stevenson, what’s going to happen if other states “retaliate” by, say, removing Joe Biden from theirs. Elected officials in at least six states have suggested it as a course of action.
It’s an obvious question that Stevenson either wasn’t prepared for or knew it would expose her state’s case as a tragic joke. “Your honor, I think we have to have faith in our system that people will follow their election processes appropriately, that they will take realistic views of what insurrection is under the 14th Amendment,” she said. “Courts will review those decisions, this court may review some of them.”
What she said next should have resulted in her being laughed out of the room. “But,” she said, “I don’t think that this court should take those threats too seriously in its resolution of this case.”
Alito challenged Stevenson on whether she thought the suggestion of retaliation, coming from places like Florida, Arizona, and Georgia, all potentially swing states in the next election, was truly unfounded.
“Um, I think we have processes—” she said, before being interrupted.
“We should proceed on the assumption that it’s not a serious threat?” said Alito.
Stevenson said there are “institutions in place” that should “handle” such matters. Asked to specify which institutions, she said, “Our states, their own electoral rules, the administrators who enforce those rules.” She also said voters would have to rely on “courts.”
In essence, to believe this entire case by Democrats is an effort to safeguard democracy, rather than rig an election, is to trust that Republicans would never dare try doing the same. If they did, it would ruin Democrats’ plot. Alternatively, if such threats were made good, we should expect enough opposition to render them neutral.
In fairness, a lot of Republicans are naive morons who time and time again respond to Democrats politically kicking their teeth in by saying, “Well, if we do anything back, we’re no better than them.” So, Stevenson’s is not a terrible gamble.
But there’s a long way to go before the election. Attitudes change, and they will rapidly if Colorado is successful and other Democrat states decide to follow the example of unilaterally determining Trump is ineligible to run for a second term, all because he rejected the accuracy of election results (as Democrats do on a routine basis).
The media’s fixation on the Colorado case has focused solely on the legal merits of the case, when the more urgent matter has always been not what happens if it’s ruled legal to keep Trump off a ballot, but what it means for future democratic elections if he is.
There’s a reason until recently it was not only abnormal but unthinkable in America for one political party to use the justice system to exterminate its opponent. The reason is self-evident— mutually assured destruction. If they can do it to us, we can do it to them. It’s what they do in the Congo and every other war-torn state across the globe.
Alito intentionally invoked that perilous likelihood. Stevenson’s response — “I don’t think that this court should take those threats too seriously” — showed just how seriously Democrats take “defending democracy.”
President Joe Biden said it’s “now clear” that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee in the 2024 race after the former president’s win in New Hampshire.
“It is now clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. And my message to the country is the stakes could not be higher,” Biden said in a statement.
“Our Democracy. Our personal freedoms — from the right to choose to the right to vote. Our economy — which has seen the strongest recovery in the world since COVID. All are at stake.”
Biden also thanked voters who wrote his name on the ballot after he refused to campaign or appear on the state ballot.
“I want to thank all those who wrote my name in this evening in New Hampshire. It was a historic demonstration of commitment to our democratic process. And I want to say to all those Independents and Republicans who share our commitment to core values of our nation — our Democracy, our personal freedoms, an economy that gives everyone a fair shot — to join us as Americans,” he added.
“Let’s remember. We are the United States of America. And there is nothing — nothing — we can’t do if we do it together.”
Biden championed changing Democratic Party rules to put South Carolina first on Feb. 3, arguing that Black Democrats, the party’s most reliable base of support, and other voters of color needed to play a larger, earlier role in the primary. But Biden also won South Carolina’s primary in 2020, reviving his campaign after a blowout loss in New Hampshire, whose electorate is whiter and older than the rest of the nation.
New Hampshire Democrats rebelled against the new plan and pushed ahead with a primary on Tuesday, alongside the state’s Republicans. The Democratic National Committee has said that as a result of the rules violation, the contest won’t award delegates that ultimately select the nominee.
Biden shunned the primary as a result, but his allies organized hundreds of volunteers — and got help from a super PAC — to spread the word that New Hampshire Democrats could still write in his name.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
It’s the morning of the Iowa caucus and, in the words of the Des Moines Register, “Donald Trump retains a commanding lead.” This comes according to the outlet’s latest poll, which shows Trump with a staggering 28-point advantage going into the “coldest caucus” in years.
This should chill the Beltway most of all. The Des Moines Register now puts Ron DeSantis in third place at 16 percent, down four points to Nikki Haley, a number just outside the margin of error. This is a shocking failure on the part of DeSantis, a successful populist who tapped an army of Beltway pundits to put nearly all the campaign’s eggs in the Iowa basket. But add DeSantis’ 16 points together with Haley’s 20, and Trump is still up by double digits. Consider also that many millions more ad dollars were spent touting DeSantis and Haley.
Republican voters just prefer Trump. In RealClearPolitics’ polling average, Trump is at 52.5 percent in Iowa and 61.4 percent nationally. He leads by double digits in New Hampshire. Sure, Haley and even DeSantis could over-perform the polls in Iowa, head into New Hampshire and South Carolina with momentum, over-perform there, and cruise into Super Tuesday on March 5 with an influx of cash and confidence.
The odds are low but not impossible. There’s a path if you squint. Yet it requires convincing an enormous swath of the Republican electorate — which has moved further and further into Trump’s corner over the last year — to suddenly pivot.
In 2016, Trump led Iowa by about five points in RCP’s final average. He lost by about three points to Ted Cruz. Trump was polling just under 30 percent. Nationally, he hovered around 35 percent. Well over half of the Republican primary electorate preferred a candidate other than Trump as the caucus kicked off.
DeSantis, according to RCP, was at one point about 13 points behind Trump. He’s now almost 40 points behind the former president nationally.
Democrats’ lawfare coincided with a rise in the polls for Trump. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the indictments were always going to make it difficult for another GOP candidate to poll more competitively. To her credit, Nikki Haley has been steadily eating away at DeSantis’ comfortable second-place position since the fall. (DeSantis led in New Hampshire until Haley started gaining on him in mid-September.) In Iowa, nearly half of Haley’s voters say they would vote for President Biden over Trump. She likely has a ceiling in most states that’ll make it tough to compete down the line.
Ultimately, if Iowa shakes out anywhere near the polling, it will mark the beginning of the end for DeSantis’ much-anticipated political experiment: Can Trump be defeated by a candidate with all the benefits and none of the baggage?
Perhaps the most frustrating takeaway from DeSantis’ slump is that we still don’t know the answer to that question because he allowed Beltway vest aficionados and their friends in the donor class to steer his career off course. When Trump finally attacked Vivek Ramaswamy two days before Iowa, the long-shot candidate’s response was a vision of what could have been for DeSantis.
“Yes, I saw President Trump’s Truth Social post,” Ramaswamy posted on X. “It’s an unfortunate move by his campaign advisors, I don’t think friendly fire is helpful. Donald Trump was the greatest President of the 21st century, and I’m not going to criticize him in response to this late attack.”
He added, “I’m worried for Trump. I’m worried for our country. I’ve stood up against the persecutions against Trump, and I’ve defended him at every step,” later concluding, “I want to save Trump & to save this country. Let’s do it together. You won’t hear any friendly fire from me.”
Back in September, The New York Times reported on a memo from an anti-Trump PAC helmed by Club for Growth President David McIntosh. The memo, McIntosh wrote, “shares findings from our attempts to identify an effective approach to lower President Trump’s support among Republican primary voters so we can maximize an alternative candidate’s ballot share when the field begins to consolidate.”
The takeaway from their research was perhaps the most important observation of the primary cycle, though should have been obvious from the moment every candidate entered the race.
“Broadly acceptable messages against President Trump with Republican primary voters that do not produce a meaningful backlash include sharing concerns about his ability to beat President Biden, expressions of Trump fatigue due to the distractions he creates and the polarization of the country, as well as his pattern of attacking conservative leaders for self-interested reasons,” McIntosh wrote. “It is essential to disarm the viewer at the opening of the ad by establishing that the person being interviewed on camera is a Republican who previously supported President Trump, otherwise, the viewer will automatically put their guard up, assuming the messenger is just another Trump-hater whose opinion should be summarily dismissed.”
Whatever you think of Ramaswamy (he previewed a potential Iowa surprise in an interview with The Federalist here), his response to Trump captured the lesson of that memo almost effortlessly. He’s been doing it for months.
On DeSantis, a popular and successful governor with a healthy war chest, that approach to Trump would almost certainly have improved his odds. It’s why Florida voters loved him. Politically, at least, running against Trump didn’t need to mean attacking him. The governor’s approach didn’t need to change. (I say this as someone endlessly sympathetic to the merits of DeSantis’ arguments on this particular question.)
The McIntosh memo should have been understood by DeSantis’ campaign before it ever launched. Republican voters who see Democrats relentlessly trying to put Trump in prison don’t trust GOP politicians who proactively attack him, often echoing the same critiques made by the same people who pushed the Russia-collusion hoax.
It looks like DeSantis will lose Iowa and New Hampshire. As of now, at least, it looks like Nikki Haley will too. Easily. If that’s the case, it’s remarkable how much money and effort was invested in campaigns that got the biggest question wrong from the beginning, especially the one campaign that should have known better.
Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the weekly news show “Counter Points: Friday” and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.
URBANDALE, Iowa — With four days and a few hours to go before the starting gun of the presidential nominating season, Donald Trump Jr. rallied the troops in suburban Des Moines on behalf of his frontrunner father.
Motivation was a hard commodity to come by on a cold and gray January day, with the remnants of the first heavy snowstorm of the season mucking up the streets with dirty slush. But the troops — warriors for former President Donald Trump — are hearty stock, like Hawkeye Cauci veterans around the state. After all, some of these folks have been showing up to this curious exhibition of representative democracy for more than 50 years, and they take their role as first-in-the-nation ambassadors of the presidential nomination chase very seriously.
We’ll see just how serious Iowa’s Republican voters are come Monday, caucus day, when the high is expected to drop below zero. By 7 p.m. Iowa time, when this internationally watched political pageant gets underway, temperatures could plummet to as low as minus-15 degrees with a wind chill of Ouch!
But if the 2024 presidential campaign and the past eight years have taught us anything, it’s that there are people in this deeply divided republic who would crawl through broken glass, barbed wire, and solid ice to vote for the former president. Still, Trump, rolling into the caucuses with a 50-point lead over his nearest challengers nationally and up by at least 35 points in Iowa, isn’t taking anything for granted.
“That’s why this Monday is so critical. We’ve got to send a message,” Don Jr. told the gathering of some 80 Trump supporters and reporters gathered at Urbandale’s Machine Shed restaurant. The event was organized by the Des Moines Bull Moose Conservative Club.
“I understand it’s going to be minus-4, but if I can get my Florida butt back up here … everyone can get back up here,” the president’s eldest child said.
The Trump campaign, unlike eight years ago, is taking nothing for granted. Forget the polls, turnout is the thing, campaign officials say.
“We’ve got to treat Monday as if we’re 10 points back,” Trump Jr. admonished. He said the left, establishment Republicans, and the Trump-hating corporate media are counting on caucus-goer apathy to diminish expected big numbers for the former president. A smaller margin of victory, perhaps driven by Trump supporters believing the win is in the bag, is a narrative Trump’s opponents would pounce on heading into next week’s New Hampshire Republican presidential primary, the thinking goes.
In short, Trump is beatable.
His opponents pointto Iowa 2016, when Trump took the political world by storm, but finished tied for second with Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas won the caucuses in a much more crowded field of candidates.
‘Night and Day’
But much has changed in eight years. Trump may be the same Trump in many ways, but he’s a much different candidate coming in. The Iowa surprise for Cruz ultimately meant little. Trump went on to claim the GOP nomination, win the presidency, and become the subject of the left’s unrelenting loathing. He’s battle-tested, with arguably more political scars than any presidential candidate in the republic’s history.
Moreover, the Trump ground game in Iowa is significantly improved, more nimble, and much better organized than it was during his first presidential run. It’s so good, in fact, Trump can’t even seem to believe it.
“I was with the president all last week and he asked me that exact question [about whether the ground game has improved since 2016], and I told him it’s the difference between night and day,” said Iowa state Sen. Brad Zaun, a Des Moines-area Republican who was the first state elected official to endorse Trump in 2016 and again this year.
Zaun may be a bit biased, but the Trump ally was a frequent witness to the campaign’s Iowa operations in 2016, as he has been this campaign cycle. The senator said there’s a professionalism and an organizational focus this go-round that wasn’t there eight years ago.
The campaign’s suburban Des Moines headquarters has been hopping for months, with an army of volunteers working extended shifts seven days a week. There’s a greater emphasis on data, and an almost manic drive to connect with grassroots conservatives in every corner of the kick-off caucus state.
“It’s vastly improved,” said John Humeston, a caucus captain for the Trump campaign in Ankeny. “They’ve got a great staff that started early.”
Trump caucus captains are charged with turning out the voters. They’re given a list of Iowans that have shown support, or even a passing interest, in the former president. Humeston said his list is six pages long. He and his fellow volunteers place plenty of calls in the evenings.
At the headquarters, it’s a little like the Frank Capra Christmas classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life”: Instead of angels getting their wings, Trump volunteers ring a call bell every time an Iowa voter commits to caucusing for the frontrunner.
“Caucus captains have to find 10 new ones to bring to the caucus,” Humeston said. “It gives everyone more of a goal.”
There’s a lot more money involved, too.
Big Money, Bigger Stakes
In 2023, Republican presidential candidates and outside groups spent nearly $105 million on ads in Iowa, NBC News reported. It’s a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the $10.2 billion in total political advertisement expenditures that AdImpact projects for the 2023-24 election cycle.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and the super PACs backing her presidential quest lead the money chase, spending a combined $30 million according to the NBC News report. Haley, who served as Trump’s United Nation’s ambassador, has helped turn Iowa’s airwaves into a blanket of campaign ads.
The campaign for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent $2.3 million on ads in Iowa, while pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down has kicked in at least $17.6 million, according to the AdImpact figures. Trump’s campaign has spent north of $4 million, while super PAC MAGA Inc. has dropped $11.4 million in its Iowa ad campaign.
The former president has spent comparatively less time in the Hawkeye State than most of his rivals, focusing on periodic large-scale rallies and foregoing the small retail politics events at the core of the long caucus campaign season. A New York Post article recently quipped that “Trump is outsourcing his Iowa campaign to surrogates.” Prominent supporters including Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, and cancel culture target Roseanne Barr have been barnstorming Iowa on behalf of their candidate in recent days.
DeSantis, meanwhile, has made campaign stops in each of Iowa’s 99 counties, fulfilling his promise to do the “Full Grassley.” Chuck Grassley, Iowa’s senior U.S. senator, has for decades made it his annual mission to pay a call on Iowans in every county.
Haley, too, has made scores of campaign stops in Iowa, and fellow GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy last month celebrated the “double Grassley.” The Ohio entrepreneur, who has essentially made Iowa a second home since entering the race nearly a year ago, has held at least two campaign events in each of the 99 counties. Ramaswamy is running a distant fourth in Iowa, at south of 7 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls.
DeSantis has bet heavily on Iowa, devoting a significant share of his campaign’s staff and volunteers to his Hawkeye State operations. Despite the investment and time, DeSantis is polling at 15.5 percent to Trump’s 53 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics average of Iowa Republicans. The popular Florida governor is running third in Iowa, just behind Haley, who is polling at 17.8 percent. After being seen as the strongest Republican challenger to Trump, DeSantis shook up his campaign in August as he lost traction in the polls.
‘Double Forms of Justice’
As the New York Post notes, Trump’s supporters get why he’s not been as present on the campaign trail as his rivals. The former president has had his share of distractions this campaign season, with a host of legal problems tying up much of his time. He’s been busy fending off a long list of charges across four indictments that threaten to send him to prison for the rest of his life — charges brought by Democrat President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice and his leftist prosecutor allies in a naked political quest to dispose of Biden’s No. 1 political opponent.
It’s the attack on Trump and the rule of law that has so many of his Iowa supporters ready to brave a brutally cold winter’s evening in Iowa to caucus for their candidate. Beyond their concerns about the economy, inflation, and the debacle at the Southwest border, Trump backers at the Machine Shed Thursday afternoon said they’re tired of what they see as a two-tiered system of justice under Biden.
“The politics of this current administration, the double forms of justice that are just so obvious, it just doesn’t seem like America,” said Suzanne Spooner of nearby Granger when asked about her greatest concerns this election year. “I think our country is a mess. I think President Trump did a good job of getting us in a better space than we’ve ever been in before, and I support getting things back on track again.”
Members of the Trump army, particularly the caucus captains, say they’re ready to help bring home a big victory Monday night for the former president in his latest pursuit of the White House. Trump’s son reminded them that there’s not a moment to lose.
“We have an opportunity to do something, but we have to do it now,” Trump Jr. said. “Let’s get out there on Monday. Let’s make sure everyone shows up. Let’s decide this thing early. Let’s finish this thing strong.”
M.D. Kittle is an award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Will 2024 be worse than 2023? It may not seem possible that Biden can devastate America any worse than he already has but he’s got a whole year left to do it.
Bidenomics: Number of Americans Upside-Down on Auto Loans Continues to Climb
Bidenomics has been a disaster for the American economy, with massive inflation, high interest rates, and high credit card debt. The lack of consistent savings for most Americans drives down the standard of living even further.
One segment of the market that has been especially negatively impacted is auto loans. Upside-down auto loans, which occur when the borrower owes more than the vehicle is worth, have reached a new high with an average of $6,054 in November. High interest rates have also contributed to auto repossessions. Shockingly, rates for used cars averaged 11.6 %, and new cars at approximately 7.4%.
It’s no surprise why so many people can not afford to… READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
If it wasn’t obvious before now that the left will do anything to stop Donald Trump from winning a second term in the White House, the events of the last few days should leave no doubt in any American’s mind. Democrats, including President Biden, are prepared not only to rig the 2024 election in broad daylight but also to twist the U.S. Constitution and undermine the republic so they can hold on to power.
As most everyone knows by now, an infamous 4-3 majority of the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that voters in their state will not be allowed to cast a ballot for Trump in next year’s presidential election. The court’s outlandish claim is that Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot because Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says candidates who have “engaged in insurrection” are prohibited from holding public office.
According to the court, which is dominated by left-wing ideologues appointed by Democrat governors (all the judges on the Colorado Supreme Court are Democrats, some are just more radical than others), Trump meets this definition because he “incited” a riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Never mind that Trump has yet to be convicted of a crime associated with Jan. 6 (or any crime for that matter) or that the 14th Amendment doesn’t include the president or vice president in a list of offices to which its Section 3 provision applies. For the leftists on the Colorado Supreme Court, it’s enough to declare Trump an insurrectionist and viola! He’s off the ballot — all in the name of “defending democracy.”
David French called it a “bold, courageous decision,” but setting aside the constitutional/legal debate, consider what it means practically. About 1.4 million Coloradans voted for Trump in 2020. All those voters, if they want to vote for Trump again this time, have been disenfranchised by the court. That’s bad enough, but the left’s strategy here is larger than just one state. Before the ink was dry on the Colorado ruling, California Democrats leapt into action. The lieutenant governor, Eleni Kounalakis, sent a letter to Secretary of State Shirley Weber asking her to “explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.”
Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 riot, this week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and rule on the case before the lower court issues a ruling. As Byron York noted, Smith’s frantic brief doesn’t state the obvious: “He’s rushing to try Trump so Trump can be convicted and jailed before the election.”
Plenty of smart people have pointed out the glaring problems with the Colorado Supreme Court’s interpretation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Namely, it stipulates Congress must establish a procedure for barring someone from office for engaging in insurrection, which Congress did, twice, first in 1870 and again in 1948. In the latter instance, Congress created a criminal insurrection law, 18 U.S.C. § 2383, which is the enforcement mechanism for Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The key point here is that Trump has not been charged or convicted under that statute, which means the U.S. Supreme Court will almost certainly overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s garbage ruling.
But set aside the legal fight because it doesn’t matter to the left. For Biden and the Democrats, this isn’t really a question of what the Constitution does or doesn’t say. This is a question of power and how far they will go to keep it. From the politicized court ruling in Colorado to the four criminal indictments against Trump amounting to 91 felony charges to Biden’s statement last November that he’ll use the Constitution to ensure that Trump “will not take power” and will not “become the next president,” what we have amounts to an open conspiracy to rig the 2024 election by preventing voters from casting a ballot for the likely GOP nominee.
It’s not too much to call this a coup or a color revolution. If Democrats get away with this, we won’t be able to say we have a republic anymore for the simple reason that we won’t have anything like free and fair elections. Democracy in America will be reduced to something like Democracy in Iran or Russia, where only regime-approved candidates are allowed to appear on the ballot.
And don’t think this will end if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Colorado decision. The Democrats will see it as a mere setback, not a defeat — and certainly not a deterrent. When they say, as they have been quite often lately, that Trump will never leave office if he wins next November, or that 2024 will be our last election ever if Trump prevails, they’re really talking about themselves. What they say Trump will do if he becomes president again is what they’re doing right now, before a watching world.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
A new set of anti-Trump talking points has been cropping up in the corporate press recently, warning of the horrors that will come to pass if Trump wins the election. Most of it is shameless fearmongering, but there’s something else going on too.
Democrats are afraid that if Trump is elected he’ll do to them precisely what they’re currently doing to him. When Trump fearmongers in the media cry out with one voice that Trump will weaponize the Justice Department and the courts, rig our elections, and shred the Constitution, it’s pure projection. Because that’s exactly what they’re doingright now in a desperate bid to prevent Trump from winning office again.
It should go without saying that this suddenly ubiquitous media genre is extremely dangerous. As my colleague Mollie Hemingway aptly put it in response to a hysterical Trump-as-dictator piece by Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, you might as well call it “assassination prep.”
That’s according to their own logic. After all, these people claim the republic itself is at stake and that we’re about to descend into autocracy. Liz Cheney went on NBC News over the weekend to flog her new book and warn in dire tones that in a second Trump term there’ll be “no guardrails that can stop him.” She says if Trump wins, he’ll become a fascist dictator, never leave office, and plunge the United States into tyranny.
She’s not alone in this absurd belief. The prospect of dictator Trump is more or less the entire theme of a new special edition of The Atlantic, ominously titled “If Trump Wins,” for which the magazine’s writers dutifully churned out two dozen essays fantasizing about the hellscape America will become if Trump is ever allowed back into the Oval Office. Nearly every facet of our national life would be left in ruins, they say, and America will be changed forever.
CNN’s Jake Tapper was apparently so scared out of his wits by these essays, he brought some of the writers and editors onto his show to talk about their prognostications of doom for the republic under Trump — including, Tapper said with a straight face, “how women could be targeted” under a Trump “retribution presidency.”
Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg replied to Tapper that a second-term Trump would be “bent on revenge,” because he “knows how he was thwarted” the first time. Well, yes — but not necessarily in the way Goldberg means it.
Trump was certainly thwarted the first time around — not thwarted in some dictatorial scheme but in the normal exercise of his office. A deeply corrupt media establishment — including the likes of Tapper and Goldberg — worked hand-in-glove with anti-Trump elements in the federal bureaucracy to peddle the Russia-collusion hoax in an unprecedented attempt to oust him from office or, failing that, undermine his presidency. During the 2020 election, many of these same elements succeeded in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. And after Jan. 6, 2021, they have cheered on the blatant weaponization of the justice system unleashed by Biden and the Democrats.
You almost have to admire the audacity of Democrats actively doing to Trump everything they say Trump will do to them if he regains the White House. You can’t get more on-the-nose in this regard than a triple-bylined piece that ran in The New York Times on Monday warning, “Mr. Trump’s vow to use the Justice Department to wreak vengeance against his adversaries is a naked challenge to democratic values. Building on how he tried to get prosecutors to go after his enemies while in office, it would end the post-Watergate norm of investigative independence from White House political control.”
It’s almost like the Times is trolling its readers with this. Surely the reporters and editors behind this laughable piece of agitprop know that this is exactly what the Biden Justice Department and powerful Democrats nationwide are now doing to Trump. The idea that Merrick Garland is some sort of straight-shooting attorney general is a joke. Not one person in America really believes it.
So, what do Democrats and their media courtesans do? They lean into the gaslighting, claiming over and over in the most outlandish terms that a second Trump term will bring about everything that’s happening now under President Biden. Why? Because they’re desperate. They know that owing to the weakness and corruption and unpopularity of the current president, there’s a chance Trump just might win next year. That’s why Democrat attorneys general and federal prosecutors want so desperately to convict him of a crime, any crime, and why editors and writers at the Times and The Atlantic will say almost anything to scare voters with horror stories about what will happen if Trump wins.
They also crave power. For people like Cheney and Kagan and Goldberg and every other establishment player, Trump’s great crime wasn’t anything he did or said on Jan. 6, it was that he won the election in November 2016. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Democrats and the permanent regime in Washington were supposed to remain in power forever. Trump had the audacity to win, and they can’t let it happen again.
In that effort, they’re willing to do and say almost anything. Throughout Trump’s stint in office, Democrats, establishment Republicans like Cheney, and nearly every major media outlet worked overtime to trample norms, bend the rules, break various laws, and undermine a duly elected president simply because they were incensed that they weren’t in power.
Remember that when they say what Trump will do in a second term. They’re doing it right now.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
The biggest loser of Thursday night’s debate between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom was us, the voters. For far too long party officials have had a stranglehold on how candidates are vetted, presented, and nominated. If the “Red vs. Blue State” debate was successful, it could have been the jumping-off point for other networks, third-party candidates, or donors to sponsor and create better opportunities for voters to see candidates in more diverse settings and formats. Sadly, it was unsuccessful for everyone involved.
Kudos to Sean Hannity for making it happen and kudos to Newsom for showing up to a forum he knew would be tilted toward DeSantis. Despite his actual performance, Newsom is the only person in his party that would have agreed to debate in that environment in the first place. Could you even imagine Vice President Kamala Harris in place of Newsom last night? It might have ended her political career. The reality is we know the White House would have never, ever allowed her to appear.
It’s hard to be critical of Hannity’s handling of the debate chaos because, short of cutting their mics off, there wasn’t much he could do besides appeal to both men several times to stop behaving like toddlers. It is unbecoming of governors, let alone presidential candidates, to talk over one another, and keep repeating the same statistic or practiced line. Still, Hannity deserves credit for pulling it off despite the fact that Trump and those around him aren’t thrilled he gave DeSantis the prime-time opportunity. Hannity has spoken openly about his personal relationship with Trump and his family, but he gave DeSantis airtime and a unique venue anyway.
Wearing the Hat vs. the Jersey
If you watch sports or attend games in person, you know the difference between a fan who is wearing a hat and the one who is wearing a jersey. A hat doesn’t have your favorite player’s name on it, just the team. A jersey has a specific player’s number and (with few exceptions) their last name. Fight in the stands? Most likely between fans who have jerseys on, not hats. In primary season, political pundits, donors, and early supporters have jerseys on, but regular voters who are living their lives mostly have hats on, or are willing to switch jerseys when the primary dust settles. How you think this debate went for DeSantis largely depends on whether you are wearing a DeSantis jersey or a GOP hat.
If you are wearing the DeSantis jersey, you think he crushed Newsom and embarrassed him with several references to the French Laundry incident and Newsom’s kids going to in-person private school while the rest of his state’s children were at home. You thought it was a nice touch when he talked about San Francisco police officers approaching him and thanking him for his support of law enforcement because they don’t get that in California. You were giddy when he pulled out both his paper props from his suit jacket to shame Newsom over the graphic nature of a book and a print-out of a San Francisco human feces map. If you have a DeSantis jersey on, it was a good event, even if all he got was major screen time without Nikki Haley zinging bad one-liners at him all night.
If you are wearing the GOP hat, maybe you didn’t see it the same way. You saw a presidential candidate that had some shades of Marco Rubio circa 2016 getting wrecked by Chris Christie. The repetitive talking points and stats in the face of a full-on frontal assault by Newsom is troublesome. You saw a guy who practiced all the stories he was going to tell last night (father-in-law, French Laundry, Newsom kids in person at private school) and still couldn’t tell them well.
You were thinking: if Trump told these exact same stories they would have landed with such force that Gavin’s White House dreams might have died on that stage last night. You also might be thinking that if Nikki Haley told those same stories she would have raised millions more dollars for her campaign. You saw a guy with a friendly moderator not be able to shift on the fly and bury Newsom when everything (data, history, and truth) was on his side. You also know that Donald Trump wouldn’t need to pull out crumpled paper to embarrass Newsom. He could have told those exact two stories without the props just as effectively.
A friend of mine who wears a GOP hat, not a jersey, texted me, “I don’t think he is good on his feet” during the debate, and he isn’t alone in that assessment. GOP hat-wearers are very perceptive and watched DeSantis Thursday night wondering if he has the stand-up skills to go to metaphorical war with whomever is occupying the other podium.
I am not sure last night moved the needle for DeSantis but how it’s perceived is very different by those wearing DeSantis jerseys versus those wearing GOP hats. It was a wasted opportunity for some much-needed change of the political process and for both participants.
Aaron DeCorte has worked in sales and marketing for more than 25 years. His wife is a 9-1-1 operator for their local police department.
Democrats have one huge, unavoidable problem. And his name is Joe Biden.
According to recent polls, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump would beat Biden if the 2024 election were held today. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday shows Biden with 46 percent and Trump with 48 percent among registered voters, still within the margin of error and too close to call. However, a new Fox News poll, also out Wednesday, shows that in a head-to-head, the former president would prevail with 50 percent to Biden’s 46 — a number Trump has never garnered in a Fox poll going back to October 2015.
Do these numbers and thin margins mean anything? Maybe not. We are still a year from the election. And if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that polls are traditionally garbage and are used far more often as tools to shape public opinion than to reflect it. But there are deeper and far more meaningful insights to mine from the survey, and they don’t spell good things for the Democrat Party.
For instance, it’s worth noting that not only does Biden appear to be losing generally to Trump, but the incumbent is losing his own dependable voters to his rival. Polls show Biden is hemorrhaging black, Hispanic, suburban, and young voters — all demographics that reliably vote Democrat. It could have something to do with how Biden has handled major crises he’s either caused or exacerbated. According to Quinnipiac, voters disapprove of his response to the Hamas attack and subsequent fallout (54 percent disapproval to 37 percent approval), his economy (59 to 37 percent), his foreign policy (61 to 34 percent), his border crisis (65 to 26 percent), and his response to the Russia-Ukraine war (49 to 47 percent).
The implications are simple. Voters are confronting a rare moment in U.S. history in which they can actually compare what it’s like to live under the leadership, or lack thereof, of the two major presidential candidates. Do they want Bidenomics or the affordable grocery and gas prices of the Trump era? Do they want war in the Middle East — or Eastern Europe or the South China Sea — or peace? Do they want an open border or national security? The Trump-Biden decision is an increasingly easy calculation for voters to make.
So, Democrats are stuck. And they did this to themselves, largely by closing off the possibility of a primary and instead committing to dragging Joe’s corpse across the finish line.
And yes, that really is the strategy. It’s not that Biden is a strong candidate by any measure, save for maybe his incumbency, but again, even that’s in doubt after his disastrous first term. He’s a demonstrably weak candidate, especially compared to Trump — another reality easily extrapolated from the polls.
On the Republican side — which, in contrast to Democrats, is still choosing to slog through primary election theatrics — the second-tier candidates are a notable governor and former governor, both beloved by their states and beyond. And Trump is still leading them by some 50 points. He’s got 48 points on Ron DeSantis and 51 on Nikki Haley. If prominent leftist governors such as Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer were to challenge Biden for the Democrat nomination, there’s no way he’d have that kind of lead.
This week there have been murmurs of a potential challenger — just maybe not who you would have expected. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on Capitol Hill hobnobbing with Sen. Chuck Schumer on Wednesday and refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he’ll run for president. This after he divulged last week that the parties did approach him last year. And you can see the twinkle in Democrats’ eyes at the thought of dumping weak, old Biden for his antithesis. Here’s Schumer flirting with The Rock on X after their meeting, posting cutesy little lyrics from one of the actor’s Disney roles.
But while Democrats might view The Rock as an exit strategy, they still have a monumental problem to overcome: Voters aren’t just fed up with Biden, they’re fed up with Democrat policies both foreign and domestic.
There’s no denying Democrats have become the party of mass illegal immigration. Every town is a border town, and even urbanites are done with the Democrat policies overrunning their cities with aliens who suck resources dry. Speaking of cities, left-wing policies have destroyed them, from Portland and Seattle to Washington, D.C. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies have caused violence in these places to skyrocket, with carjackings up more than 100 percent since last year and violent crime up 40 percent in our nation’s capitol. In fact, just this week D.C.’s disaster of a mayor declared a state of emergency because youth violent crime has gotten so bad. Meanwhile, Democrats have also become the party of inflation, war, no-limits abortion, transing kids, weaponizing the federal government, terrorist sympathizing, and every other anti-America policy position you can imagine.
That takes a strong leader to overcome. Sure, The Rock does a magnificent job at the role he plays in every movie, but he’s not that leader. And besides, would today’s Democrat Party really vote for a candidate who’s a Joe Rogan bro and friends with Trump supporters?
So, Democrats are left to lie with sleepy Joe in the bed they made for themselves. It’s hard to feel sorry for them.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
There’s a simple pattern that the media follow when covering each new crisis that pops up during Joe Biden’s catastrophic presidency: A calamity occurs either domestically or abroad, and rather than examining the cause, the media instantly frame Biden as a hero at battle.
War in Ukraine? “Joe Biden Marshals U.S. Allies Against Russia” (Newsweek).
Obscene gas prices? “Biden’s frustration with soaring prices” (Washington Post).
War in Israel? “Why this Israel-Gaza conflict is so complicated for Biden” (CNN).
Folks! He’s frustrated, folks. It’s complicated for Biden, folks.
The New York Times’ David French offered up that same spa treatment for the president this week under the headline “Joe Biden knows what he’s doing.” In the piece, French implored his readers to “consider” all it is that Biden “confronts”: a war in Ukraine, another one in the Middle East, plus the ever-present threat from China. “And keep in mind,” he said, “Biden is managing these conflicts all while trying to make sure that the nation emerges from a pandemic with inflation in retreat and its economy intact.”
Folks! Keep it in mind, folks. Biden is trying, folks. He’s managing lots of complicated problems, folks. It’s frustrating to the president, too, folks.
Honestly, I felt the same way under President Trump when he was confronted by two hot wars, record inflation, and impossible energy prices. He did the best he could to manage the challenges he faced — the struggles he endured.
Wait, that’s not right. There were neither wars nor inflation during Trump’s term. The U.S. was energy independent, and gas was cheap precisely because he flooded the market with oil for the taking. My mistake!
Actually, now that I think about it, I recall that despite a remarkable period of global calm and even a historic peace deal reached between Israel and the Arab world, the Trump era was marked by nonstop hysterics from the media about our supposedly shaken allies and emboldened foes. (i.e., Trump demanded that Western Europe live up to his part of the NATO bargain and made it known that the U.S. cannot solve all of the world’s problems, especially when large parts of the world don’t see them as such.)
But back to Biden. He’s not confronting or managing a series of events that happened to him. He and his party actively created them. Or, at minimum, they created an environment that anyone could have predicted would lead to them.
Russia has long insisted that NATO stop expanding along its border. The second Biden got into office, he pushed for Ukraine’s membership. Israel had its country under relative control for years right up until Biden’s team gifted Iran, the Jewish state’s greatest threat, $6 billion worth of goodies. We were energy independent until Biden said we couldn’t be. The economy was working itself out until Biden and his party thought it would be a good idea to pump hundreds of billions of dollars more into Covid-era welfare (“childcare” and “living assistance”). And let’s not start on the electric vehicle scheme, wherein car companies grabbed another round of multi-billion-dollar taxpayer funds, courtesy of Biden, for a product that barely works (and for which manufacturers are now rolling back their production of).
Biden isn’t a knight of the kingdom off to slay a dragon. He’s a dunce screwing up everything. He doesn’t get to turn the economy and international stability into ruins and then get credit for saying he takes it all very seriously.
He’s not “struggling” or “managing,” and it’s not “complicated.” Biden is the struggle. He is the thing to manage. He is the complication.
Failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton believes half of the country needs to be forcibly re-educated to abandon the ideology that led them to vote for former President Donald Trump.
In a sitdown interview with CNN on Thursday, Clinton — who infamously said in 2016 that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables” — alleged that “MAGA extremists” who only “take their marching orders from Donald Trump” deserve to be brainwashed.
“When do they break with him?” Clinton pondered aloud. “Because at some point, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen.”
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who conducted the interview, nodded in response.
Hillary Clinton calls for Trump Supporters to be reeducated: "At some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members." pic.twitter.com/ao3foysSL4
The longtime sore loser implied that she’s used to partisan “bitter battles” over issues like “gun control and climate change and the economy and taxes.” When it comes to engaging with the GOP under Trump, however, she can’t stomach it without suggesting mass indoctrination.
“There wasn’t this little tail of extremism waving, you know, wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today,” Clinton insisted.
The former secretary of state not only accused GOP politicians and voters of saying and doing things that “they know better than to say or do,” but suggested those who dissent from Democrats’ preferred narrative should face consequences.
“It will require us defeating those most extreme measures and the people who promote them in order to try to get to some common ground where people can, again, work together,” Clinton said.
Clinton claimed Trump voters “don’t like migrants, maybe they don’t like gay people or black people or the woman who got the promotion at work” and that they are being emotionally and psychologically manipulated by the top Republican.
“It’s a classic tale of an authoritarian, populist, who really has a grip on the emotional, psychological needs and desires of a portion of the population,” Clinton said. “And the base of the Republican Party, for whatever combination of reasons — and it is emotional and psychological — sees in him someone who speaks for them.”
Clinton said propelling Biden to victory in 2024 and returning power to old-guard, establishment pawns, “the right people inside the Republican Party,” are the only ways to quell Trump-era populism.
“It is like a cult and somebody has to break that momentum. And that’s why I believe Joe Biden will defeat him and hopefully then, that will be the end and the fever will break,” Clinton said.
Removing Trump from the equation, Clinton assured Amanpour, will get Republicans “to get back to fighting about issues among themselves and electing people who are least responsible and accountable.”
Long before Clinton complained about Trump voters to CNN, members of the current regime including President Joe Biden, his White House, Democrats in Congress, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and other officials named Trump voters and “domestic extremism” or other coded words used to disparage them as the nation’s biggest threat. Their collective campaign against what they deemed Republican wrongthink has manifested in the political prosecution of their No. 1 political opponent and his supporters.
A new report from Newsweek alleges that the FBI is singling out supporters of Republican frontrunner former President Donald Trump as domestic extremists. FBI data reviewed by the publication specifically suggests “nearly two-thirds of the FBI’s current investigations are focused on Trump supporters and others suspected of violating what the FBI calls ‘anti-riot’ laws.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Crossmark CIO Bob Doll joins ‘Mornings with Maria’ to discuss a number of investment topics including slowing Treasury yields and the Federal Reserve’s inflation fight.
As the White House continues to tout the alleged achievements of the president’s “Bidenomics” agenda, a growing amount of data indicates that a gigantic economic crisis could be right around the corner.
Most disturbingly, one important economic indicator that’s currently flashing hasn’t appeared since the 1930s, during the height of the Great Depression. If the White House and Congress do not cut inflation-causing government spending soon, the results could be catastrophic.
President Biden speaks about inflation in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec 13, 2022. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Historical Context
In 2020, during the height of the coronavirus government lockdowns, President Donald Trump and the Democratic-led Congress spent vast amounts of money to keep the economy, financial system and stock market afloat. Trillions of dollars in additional government spending occurred, all of which was financed with debt and money printing.
The never-before-seen levels of money creation were fueled by policies set by the Federal Reserve, which encouraged Congress to spend more money and kept interest rates extremely low, despite warnings from economists about the threat of future inflation.
When President Biden entered the White House in January 2021, it appeared that the economic crisis caused by the pandemic lockdowns would end soon. A COVID-19 vaccine had been developed, and many states had already started reopening or preparing to reopen their economies.
‘Varney & Co.’ host Stuart Varney argues House Republicans led by Rep. Matt Gaetz moved spending and budget policy backward. But rather than return spending to normal levels, Biden and congressional Democrats — with the blessing of the Federal Reserve — opted to keep government expenditures significantly higher than they had been prior to the pandemic.
The decision to continue high levels of government spending, coupled with the Fed’s choice to keep interest rates low and the fallout from the crisis in Ukraine, caused inflation to soar to levels not experienced in four decades. Prices for nearly all consumer items, from eggs and milk to gasoline, skyrocketed.
Not Since the Great Depression
In an effort to fix its mistakes and curb out-of-control inflation, the Fed started dramatically increasing interest rates in 2022, a policy that has continued thus far in 2023.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, center, watches his inaugural parade in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 1933. FDR was elected in a landslide in 1932 amid the Great Depression. (AP Photo, File)
Meanwhile, the Biden administration and Congress have kept government spending much higher than pre-pandemic levels.
As a result of these policies, the inflation rate has dropped, but not enough to deflate prices. Most consumer goods and services, as well as rent and housing prices, remain much higher than they were before the pandemic started.
Incredibly, however, the money supply — the amount of cash, checkable deposits and bank savings accounts — has substantially decreased. That means even though prices are still going up, the amount of money available is continuing to drop, putting an unprecedented strain on American families.
Sandbox Financial Partners Director of Investments and VP Blake Millard provides insight on the recession countdown clock on ‘Making Money.’ The latest economic data shows the annual M2 money supply growth rate has been negative for the past three quarters, meaning the amount of money available is shrinking rapidly. In the past 110 years, the only other time Americans have seen the money supply drop this sharply was in the early 1930s, during the height of the Great Depression.
There is a significant difference this time around, however. In the ’30s, when the money supply annual rate turned negative, prices dropped as well. In our current situation, prices are still going up despite the collapse in the money supply. To the extent we’re seeing it today, this has never occurred before.
Panelists Carol Roth and Nancy Tengler provide insight on the state of the U.S. economy on ‘The Evening Edit.’
Household Savings
The reduced availability of money caused by the Fed’s policies and the Biden administration’s inflationary spending has created a dire situation for American families. Increasingly more people are eating into their savings and going into debt to cover basic living expenses, like food, utilities and housing.
Survey data from the Federal Reserve shows the bottom 80% of income earners, representing the vast majority of Americans, now have less in real household savings than they did prior to the pandemic. And savings for top income earners will likely fall below pre-2020 levels within the next 12 months.
The combination of higher prices and reduced availability of money has caused people to depend on credit cards and other forms of consumer debt at higher numbers than we’ve ever seen. In the spring, Americans’ collective credit card debt topped $1 trillion for the first time in history.
Circle Squared Alternative Investments founder Jeff Sica explains why consumer spending will dramatically decline before the holidays on ‘Varney & Co.’ Higher prices, more government spending and debt, and lower levels of household savings — that’s what Bidenomics actually looks like.
Congress and the Biden administration are currently in the midst of a battle over spending. If a deal isn’t completed soon, the government could shut down temporarily. Now is the time to reduce spending and bring fiscal sanity back to Washington, D.C. — before it’s too late.
The U.S. economy is walking on thin ice. If prices and inflation don’t come down soon, something that can only occur if Congress and the White House reduce spending, then the U.S. is soon going to find itself in yet another massive economic crisis.
If that occurs, I hope Americans remember who deserves the blame.
Now that one of the 2 million Democrat prosecutors chasing Donald Trump has filed a court motion to make it illegal for him to talk about the election, is it okay to laugh anytime Joe Biden frames 2024 as a referendum on “democracy”?
Monday night would have been a good time to exercise that rule. Speaking at a fundraising event on Broadway, the president told “FOLKS!” in attendance that he’s running for reelection because “democracy is at stake” and “on the ballot once again.”
It’s gotten so corny, and yet if there weren’t pollsters, consultants, and all of the media telling every Democrat in the country that it’s a line that works for their voters, he wouldn’t be saying it.
Yet, it’s Democrats who come up with a new way to shut down the few remaining options and avenues the American public has to express their opinions and choices on virtually everything. They do it on the daily. Just last week, Special Counsel Jack Smith requested that a federal judge in Washington, D.C., place a gag order that would prevent Trump from disparaging Smith’s Jan. 6-related case against him, even in political terms.
“[T]he defendant has repeatedly and widely disseminated public statements attacking the citizens of the District of Columbia, the Court, prosecutors, and prospective witnesses,” Smith wrote in the filing. “Through his statements, the defendant threatens to undermine the integrity of these proceedings and prejudice the jury pool…”
He asserted that Trump has a “history of inflammatory and misleading statements” that “would cause others to harass and harm perceived critics or adversaries.” One of those supposedly dangerous statements was a social media post wherein Trump said, “Joe Biden directed his Attorney General to prosecute his rival. This is not an independent Justice Department, this is not an independent special counsel. This is being directed by the Commander-in-Chief.”
Smith said that remark was made “without any basis,” even as none other than the New York Times wrote in April last year for its millions of readers — does Jack Smith have a subscription? — that Biden has told his associates he wants indictments against his predecessor and that he wanted his attorney general “to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.”
It wouldn’t be until seven months later that Trump would launch his own reelection campaign, but everyone knew he was going to do it, and everyone knew that when he did, he would instantly become the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
That’s the context dismissed by Jack Smith as “without any basis.”
The motion comes just a month after the judge in the case, Tanya Chutkan, has already sided with Smith on a similar motion regarding “inflammatory statements.” She said there were limits to what Trump could say “whether it will affect a political campaign on either side.” In essence: Even if Trump’s campaign is partly or wholly about the case against him, he can’t talk about it.
When Democrats aren’t limiting what Trump can talk about in a national election, they’re trying to get his name removed from state ballots. When they’re not doing that, they’re suppressing what their dissenters can say on the Internet. When they’re not doing that, they’re trying to shrink the Internet by icing out would-be customers from renting space.
If you don’t agree with Democrats on anything, what are you supposed to do? Where are you supposed to go?
Democracy really is at stake. Biden and his party are working to eliminate it as an option altogether.
Automatic voter registration (AVR) may sound obscure, but it’s a fast track to permanent Democrat power — so, naturally, activists are working around the clock to pass it in the states and Congress.
Modern elections are usually won by the party that turns out the bigger base. Left-wing strategists believe their victory hinges on astronomically high Democratic turnout. Whether that’s true or not matters less than their perception that it worked to oust President Donald Trump in 2020 and saved the left from catastrophe in the 2022 midterms, even when Republicans won the popular vote nationwide by a bigger percentage margin than Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
Under normal rules, eligible Americans must register to vote on their own initiative, usually at their county registrar or online through the state motor vehicle department. It’s a simple, fair thing to ask people to show an interest in voting and then verify their identity before they cast a ballot; that’s how our country has run elections for nearly 250 years.
AVR transforms that opt-in system into an opt-out mess by adding virtually everyone with a heartbeat to state voter rolls, instantly and dramatically expanding the pool of registered voters for the left to cynically tap into. Don’t want to be added to a publicly accessible list? Too bad — it’s on you to take the initiative to unregister, Democrats say.
How many voters are we talking about? 158 million ballots were cast in 2020. Yet Demos, the think tank of the far left and an AVR champion, estimates there are as many as 77 million eligible-but-unregistered individuals nationwide — folks who couldlawfully vote but may notuntil they’re registered to vote in their respective states. Not every one of them would support Democrats if registered, of course, but even winning a fraction would be enough to ensure Democratic presidential wins for a generation or longer. That’s why AVR is supported by the Brennan Center, the origin of the left’s most odious election “reforms,” and the Center for American Progress, which boasted in 2018 that AVR could add 22 million newly registered voters nationwide in just its first year. Note that Minnesota’s recent election law includes AVR alongside “non-English voting materials” and the pre-registration of 16-year-olds to vote. To hear leftists crow, you’d think the United States never ran a free election in centuries without AVR laws. The LGBT Movement Advancement Project, which dinks red states for their voter ID laws, considers AVR essential to the health of a state’s “democracy.”
Conservatives have been too shortsighted to pay attention, but leftists have been tapping this goldmine for years. Of the 23 states with AVR laws, only three are consistently run by Republicans: Georgia, West Virginia, and Alaska. Michigan enacted AVR in 2018 after a lobbying campaign by the ACLU, Sierra Club, United Auto Workers, and socialist group Our Revolution. In my home state of Virginia, where legislators are capped on the number of bills they may introduce in a single session, Democrats made introducing AVR a top priority when they held total power in 2020. It passed on a partisan split.
Incoming congressional Democrats, fresh from retaking the House of Representatives in 2018, demanded Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, D–Calif., “expand automatic voter registration across the country” as part of their “upcoming democracy bill.” They got their wish with the 2019 “Voting Rights Advancement Act,” then again with the 2021 “For the People Act” and “Automatic Voter Registration Act,” and most recently with the 2023 “Freedom to Vote Act.”
Recall that running elections and maintaining voter rolls are the duty of the states, not Uncle Sam, yet Democrats would force all 50 states to severely bloat their voter files. America’s voter rolls are already in bad shape, despite (mostly red) states’ best efforts to clean them up.
Georgia recently announced it removed 432,000 inactive voters from its rolls since 2021. Virginia removed 114,000 inactive voters in 2021; Oklahoma another 90,000 in 2019; Kentucky dropped 127,000 in 2023; Arkansas may remove 300,000 inactive voters this year; Pennsylvania dropped 180,000 in 2023; and Rhode Island removed another 60,000 inactive voters earlier this year. Texas and Mississippi are weighing bills that would allow them to more aggressively cull inactive voters from their rolls.
States are required by law to keep accurate voter files, to the left’s chagrin. Ohio, which culled 116,000 inactive voters from its rolls in 2021, knows best how much leftists loathe what they call “voter purges.” In 2017, then-attorney general Eric Holder tried to block Ohio from removing inactive voters as one of the last acts of the Obama administration — only to lose the next year in a landmark Supreme Court ruling.
The truth is obvious: Democrats don’t want accurate voter rolls; they want swollen voter rolls. Left-wing NPR admits as much. This is bad election policy, and it isn’t cheap. Nevada’s AVR policy cost taxpayers $4.8 million to implement, plus more to maintain it.
It’s no surprise that the left’s big-money donors are in on the action. We’ve traced hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2017 to implementing AVR in the states from the Tides Foundation, Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the Joyce Foundation (whose board once included then-Sen. Barack Obama), and the Carnegie Corporation. One six-figure Carnegie grant to the University of Southern California is even tagged for studying “the state-level impact of automatic voter registration … [on] the national Latino electorate.”
For Republicans, fighting AVR is a no-brainer. To the detriment of election integrity, Congress and the states have already made registering to vote and casting a ballot extremely easy. What we need are cleaner voter rolls and more secure elections, not a public subsidy for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote machine.
Hayden Ludwig is director of research for Restoration of America.
Former Deputy National Security Adviser KT McFarland told Newsmax on Wednesday that if House Republicans began impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden, it could give Democrats the political cover they need to select a new nominee for 2024.
“Maybe what happens is, as they look into what he [Biden] said [in emails using a pseudonym] — and impeachment allows you to look at a lot of corners that otherwise Congress and congressional committees couldn’t look into — what if they start finding stuff?” McFarland said on Newsmax’s“Wake Up America.” “And then you marry that up with Joe Biden, who’s clearly declining very rapidly mentally and physically, that gives the Democrats every excuse they need to jettison Joe Biden.”
The National Archives and Records Administration on Tuesday acknowledged its possession of approximately 5,400 emails that contain pseudonyms that Biden was known to use during his time as vice president. The agency’s confirmation of the existence of the records came in response to a June 2022 Freedom of Information Act request by the Southeastern Legal Foundation. The nonprofit constitutional legal group requested emails relating to the accounts of Robin Ware, Robert L. Peters, and JRB Ware — pseudonyms Joe Biden was known to use in the Obama White House.
“The reason Joe Biden wants to cling onto this [the presidency], and, obviously, he likes the perks of office, but all the people underneath him — all the advisers, the Cabinet officers – they want to keep Joe Biden in place because they’re running the show,” McFarland said.
“If [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom, somebody else, gets the nomination, somebody else, some other Democrat, gets elected, these guys are out of a job. So that’s why they’re pushing to keep Biden in as long as he’s got a pulse.”
Commenting on White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s exchange with CNN host Jake Tapper, in which Tapper was pressing Jean-Pierre about Biden’s age and stamina, McFarland said, “I think they’re [CNN] reading the tea leaves.”
“I think they’re looking at Joe Biden and saying he’s vulnerable, he’s weak, he’s aging very quickly, and so, if somebody’s going to make a move, they’ve got to start making a move now,” she said. “I think CNN, all the other mainstream media, they’re going to start hedging their bets.”
A new Siena Research poll shows less than half of New York Democrats want their party to nominate Biden as their 2024 presidential candidate. Just 47% said the party should pick Biden, versus 46% who said the Democratic Party should pick someone else. The remaining 7% were unsure.
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
As we wait for the political show trials of Donald Trump to begin, it’s good to remember a hard and fast rule: Quotes and summaries of events reported by the corporate media are always either half wrong or deliberately misleading.
A perfect example of that truism was provided this week by Axios’ Mike Allen, who claimed Monday that Georgia Democrat prosecutor Fani Willis included an “Easter egg” in her I’m-a-very-serious-lawyer indictment. Allen said that a specific portion of the documents had “a twist” that “could spoil” Trump’s legal team’s effort to have the entire case moved to federal court, a move that could possibly secure him a more favorable jury (as opposed to the pool of “marginalized, underserved and disadvantaged” voters he would surely get in Fulton County).
That “twist” is an open letter Trump sent to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in September 2021, which was after the former president was out of office, thus supposedly undercutting the Trump team’s assertion that the criminal charges are purely federal in nature, rather than addressable at the county court level. In that letter, the indictment notes, Trump solicited Raffensperger to “unlawfully” undo the 2020 election outcome “and announce the true winner.”
On or about the 17th day of September 2021, DONALD JOHN TRUMP committed the felony offense of SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH BY PUBLIC OFFICER, in violation of O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-7 and 16-10-1, in Fulton County, Georgia, by unlawfully soliciting, requesting, and importuning Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a public officer, to engage in conduct constituting the felony offense of Violation of Oath by Public Officer, O.C.G.A. § 16-10-1, by unlawfully “decertifying the Election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner,” in willful and intentional violation of the terms of the oath of said person as prescribed by law, with intent that said person engage in said conduct. This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
The New York Times on Saturday also reported the supposed “Easter egg,” which the paper said “could spoil Mr. Trump’s argument that he was intervening in the Georgia election as part of his duty as a federal official,” since he was a private citizen and not president at the time that he published the letter.
Whether this is a federal or local-level issue is beside the point. I didn’t even remember that letter to Raffensperger, which was also published in a fundraising email put out by Trump’s Save America PAC. And because of that media rule mentioned above, I went back to find exactly what it said. Naturally, what it actually said is not the way it was portrayed by the indictment nor the way it was portrayed by Fani Willis’ fangirls in the media.
The letter said that new evidence of “Large scale Voter Fraud” in Georgia had been reported in a local newspaper called the Georgia Star News, with an attached article claiming that more than 40,000 absentee ballots counted in DeKalb County were improperly tallied because they had not been documented upon their receipt by the appropriate official, as required by state election rules. “I would respectfully request that your department check this,” Trump wrote in the letter, “and, if true, along with many other claims of voter fraud and voter irregularities, start the process of decertifying the Election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner.”
None of that context is in the indictment, nor the Times article, nor the Axios report. And it’s essentially the same request from Trump that he delivered in the now infamous “perfect phone call” he made to Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials in January 2021.
The media enjoy short-handing that hourlong conversation as an effort by Trump to get the secretary of state to fabricate votes. The New York Times ominously wrote at the time that the president “pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to ‘find’ him enough votes to overturn the presidential election and vaguely threatened him with ‘a criminal offense.’”
That’s not what happened there, either. In the call, Trump is audibly frustrated nearly to the point of tears, which is a little embarrassing for him, but the pressure amounts to asking over and over again for Raffensperger and Georgia election officials to examine claims of mass voter fraud, which he believes will uncover enough votes in his favor.
“I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine it,” Trump says to Raffensperger. “And you can reexamine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find answers, not people that don’t want to find answers.”
“Well, you better check on the ballots because they are shredding ballots, Ryan,” Trump says to one of Raffensperger’s lawyers. “I’m just telling you, Ryan. They’re shredding ballots. And you should look at that very carefully.”
At another point, Trump says, “No, they [all the ballots scanned by a particular poll worker] were 100 percent for Biden— 100 percent. There wasn’t a Trump vote in the whole group. Why don’t you want to find this, Ryan? What’s wrong with you?”
The call ends with Trump stating, “We just want the truth,” which he says is that, “I won by 400,000 votes, at least. That’s the real truth. But we don’t need 400,000 votes. We need less than 2,000 votes.”
As for being “vaguely threatened” with a “criminal offense,” nobody received a threat. Trump said it would be a “criminal offense” for election officials, including Raffensperger, to have knowledge of ballot tampering and not report it. Trump did say he believed there had been ballot tampering but at no point did he say there would be a prosecution or that he had the evidence to back up his claim.
Yeah, it’s an uncomfortable conversation to listen to. But let’s not pretend it didn’t follow an election year from the ninth circle of hell. Trump might have instead tried to plant a false story with the FBI about Biden conspiring with a foreign power to fix the race but everyone copes with losing in their own way.
In the September 2021 letter to Raffensperger, Trump asked for an investigation. That’s no different than what he asked for in January of that same year. Nobody would call that criminal behavior. And that’s why the media will lie about the Trump political trials every single day.
If saying an election is “stolen” and “rigged” is illegal then all these Democrats need to be locked up.
Four indictments of Donald Trump have so far done no more to stop him than two earlier impeachments did. He remains easily the front-runner in the Republican primaries, and in some polls is running equal with President Biden. But now a theory defended by able legal scholars has emerged, arguing that Trump is constitutionally disqualified from serving as president.
Even if Trump secures enough electoral votes to win the presidency next year, legal Professors Michael Paulsen and Will Baude argue, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution would disqualify him from federal office. Former Judge Michael Luttig and Professor Laurence Tribe have enthusiastically seconded the theory. While their theory about the continuing relevance of the Constitution’s insurrection clause strikes us as correct, they err in believing that anyone, down to the lowest county election worker, has the right to strike Trump from the ballot.
Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment is a load-bearing constitutional pillar erected during the Reconstruction period. Section 3 deals with the treatment of former state and federal officials, and their allies, who had taken sides with the Confederacy in the Civil War:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Although Section 3 unquestionably applied to Confederates, its text contains nothing limiting it to the Civil War. Rather, it has continuing relevance to any future “insurrection or rebellion.” Although it does not explicitly refer to presidents or presidential candidates, comparison with other constitutional texts referring to “officer[s]” supports the interpretation that it applies to the presidency too.
Section 3 distinguishes between “rebellion” and “insurrection,” and we have a contemporary guide to the meaning of that distinction. In the Prize Cases (1863), the Supreme Court declared that “[i]nsurrection against a government may or may not culminate in an organized rebellion, but a civil war always begins by insurrection against the lawful authority of the Government.” “Insurrection” therefore refers to political violence at a level lower or less organized than an “organized rebellion,” though it may develop into that. Trump may have been an “insurrectionist” but not a “rebel.”
But was he even an “insurrectionist”? In their Atlantic piece, Luttig and Tribe find the answer obvious: “We believe that any disinterested observer who witnessed that bloody assault on the temple of our democracy, and anyone who learns about the many failed schemes to bloodlessly overturn the election before that, would have to come to the same conclusion.”
But that view is not universally shared. Finding “disinterested observers” in a country marked by passionate disagreements over Donald Trump is no easy task. Despite the scenes of the attack on the Capitol and extensive investigations, the American people do not seem to agree that Trump took part in an insurrection or rebellion. Almost half the respondents in a 2022 CBS poll rejected the claim that the events of Jan. 6 were an actual “insurrection” (with the divide tracking partisan lines), and 76 percent viewed it as a “protest gone too far.”
Other considerations also call into question the claim that Trump instigated an “insurrection” in the constitutional sense. If it were clear that Trump engaged in insurrection, the Justice Department should have acted on the Jan. 6 Committee’s referral for prosecution on that charge. Special Counsel Jack Smith should have indicted him for insurrection or seditious conspiracy, which remain federal crimes. If it were obvious that Trump had committed insurrection, Congress should have convicted him in the two weeks between Jan. 6 and Inauguration Day. Instead, the House impeached Trump for indictment to insurrection but the Senate acquitted him.
The Senate’s acquittal is the only official finding by a federal or state institution on the question of whether Trump committed insurrection. The failure of the special counsel to charge insurrection and the Senate to convict in the second impeachment highlights a serious flaw in the academic theory of disqualification.
According to Luttig and Tribe, it appears self-evident that Trump committed insurrection. They assume Trump violated the law without any definitive finding by any federal authority. According to their view, he must carry the burden of proof to show he is not guilty of insurrection or rebellion — a process that achieves the very opposite of our Constitution’s guarantee of due process, which, it so happens, is not just provided for by the Fifth Amendment, but reaffirmed in the same 14th Amendment that contains the disqualification clause. It would be like requiring Barak Obama to prove he was native-born (a constitutional prerequisite for being president) if state election officials disqualified him for being foreign-born.
The Electoral College Chooses Presidents, Not State Officials
If this academic view were correct, it would throw our electoral system into chaos. One of the chief virtues of the Electoral College system is that it decentralizes the selection of the president: State legislatures decide the manner for choosing electors, with each state receiving votes equal to its representation in the House and Senate. States run the elections, which means that hundreds, if not thousands, of city, county, and state officials could execute this unilateral finding of insurrection. A county state election official, for example, could choose to remove Trump’s name from printed ballots or refuse to count any votes in his favor. A state court could order Trump barred from the election. A state governor could refuse to certify any electoral votes in his favor. The decentralization of our electoral system could allow a single official, especially from a battleground state, to sway the outcome of a close race in the 2024 presidential election.
Allowing a single state to wield this much power over the federal government runs counter to broader federalism principles articulated by the Supreme Court. In our nation’s most important decision on the balance of power between the national government and the states, McCullough v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall held that a single state could not impose a tax on the Bank of the United States. Marshall famously observed that “the power to tax is the power to destroy.”
Marshall may well have frowned upon single state officials deciding to eliminate candidates for federal office on their own initiative. The Supreme Court lent further support for this idea in United States Term Limits v. Thornton (1995), which held that states could not effectively add new qualifications for congressional candidates by barring long-time incumbents from appearing on the ballot. Writing for the majority, Justice Stevens argued that allowing states to add term limits as a qualification for their congressional elections conflicted with “the uniformity and national character [of Congress] that the framers sought to ensure.” Allowing state election officials to decide for themselves whether someone has incited or committed insurrection, without any meaningful trial or equivalent proceeding, would give states the ability to achieve what term limits forbid.
Congress Has Other Means of Enforcement
We are not arguing that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment lacks the means of enforcement (though not every official who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution has such enforcement power). Each branch of the federal government can honor Section 3 in the course of executing its unique constitutional functions. Article I of the Constitution allows Congress to sentence an impeached president not just to removal from office, but also disqualification from office in the future. Congress could pass a statute disqualifying named insurrectionists from office — we think this would not qualify as an unconstitutional bill of attainder — or set out criteria for judicial determination.
Using its enforcement power under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, Congress could conceivably establish a specialized tribunal for the handling of insurrectionists. The president could detain suspected insurrectionists, subject ultimately to judicial review under a writ of habeas corpus, or prosecute them under the federal law of insurrection and seditious conspiracy. Federal courts will have the ultimate say, except in cases of unilateral congressional action, such as lifting a disqualification by supermajority votes, because they will make the final judgment on any prosecutions and executive detentions.
We are not apologists for Trump’s spreading of baseless claims of electoral fraud or his efforts to stop the electoral count on Jan. 6. But as with the weak charges brought by the special counsel, the effort to hold Trump accountable for his actions should not depend on a warping of our constitutional system. Prosecutors should charge him with insurrection if they can prove it and have that conviction sustained on appeal. Congress should disqualify Trump if it can agree he committed the crime. Ultimately, the American people will decide Trump’s responsibility for the events of Jan. 6, but at the ballot box in 2024’s nominating and general elections for president.
John Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, Nonresident Senior Fellow at The American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at The Hoover Institution. Robert Delahunty is a Fellow of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life in Washington, DC.
Of all the terrible things about Nikki Haley — her enthusiasm for more foreign war funding, her deference to corporate cultural assault — the cringe-worthy attempts to hype her status as a woman (A mom! A wife!) and Indian (“I’m a minority first!,” “I’m as diverse as it gets!”) are the least offensive. But it’s still really, really bad.
Her whole campaign is Hillary 2.0.
Haley currently polls nationally at less than 5 percent, and it’s the same in early Republican primary states Iowa and New Hampshire, so there aren’t a ton of reasons to spend time thinking about her. But it’s truly awe-inspiring that there exist Republicans who still believe there’s anything to gain from the party’s voters by rubbing their faces in identity politics rot.
When have Republicans ever showed any appetite for it? They haven’t. They don’t care. It’s only interesting to the extent that ethnic minorities and women who run for office as Republicans are contrary to the racist media’s preferred narrative. Outside of that, it’s meaningless and has no bearing on a voter’s decision to trust any given candidate with power.
Haley has already disqualified herself for the nomination by cheering on more war between Ukraine and Russia, stupidly undermining the only Republican senator trying to uphold the law that abortions not be funded with taxpayer money, and ceding authority to corporations that promote gross left-wing social causes.
It’s only a bonus that she thinks there’s something novel or compelling about being a nonwhite woman. In an interview with Politico published Thursday, Haley was asked about the first GOP presidential debate next week. “The fellas are going to do what the fellas are gonna do,” she said.
See? Because she’s not one of the fellas. She’s a woman! She’s unique! It’s cool!
At the Iowa State Fair last weekend, Haley walked around in a shirt that said, “UNDERESTIMATE ME — THAT’LL BE FUN.”
Get it? She’s a woman! And she’s in the primary up against nothing but men! And she’s a minority! Whoa! Brave!
Also at the fair, she responded to one question by declaring herself “a minority first,” which proved she’s “as diverse as it gets.” (For good measure, she threw in that “minorities are smart.”)
Haley continues to desperately milk the teat of Don Lemon having said on CNN a whole six months ago that she “isn’t in her prime.” At this moment, her campaign’s merchandise store — yes, Nikki Haley swag actually exists — features six items with reference to the “in her prime” remark. A personal favorite is the set of drink can koozies that say, “Past my prime? Hold my beer.”
You go, lady candidate!
Some other fun products include a “women for Nikki” shirt; a T-shirt that says, “If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman” (with the word “woman” in italics); and multiple other items that say, “Sometimes it takes a woman” (a paraphrase of Hillary Clinton’s 2019 bleat, “It often takes a woman…”).
It’s as if Haley is running an experiment to see how hard she can make Republicans wince. During her campaign launch, she said in her speech, “I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”
Is Nikki Haley a woman, yes or no? Yes or no. Look at me. SAY IT.
An unofficial slogan of the Haley campaign is some variation of, “Send a bad-ss woman to the White House.”
July 3: “It’s time to send a bad-ss Republican woman to the White House.”
June 30: “We need to send a bad-ss Republican woman to this White House.”
June 4: “It’s time to put a bad-ss woman in the White House.”
Hey, now, SHE’s a firecracker! You don’t wanna mess with HER!
Motherhood, marriage, and heritage don’t overwhelm Republican voters because none of it is impressive. Those qualities are either basic human goals or matters of pure luck of the draw. But if Nikki Haley wants to run as Hillary Clinton 2.0, she’s doing just fine. The outcome will be the same.
Lawmakers say speculation that Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are considering retirement make the 2024 presidential election outcome more crucial, The Hill reported.
The Court is made up of nine justices, with a 6-3 conservative majority, after former President Donald Trump filled three vacancies: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. They helped form the majority to overrule Roe v. Wade in June 2022, allowing states to outlaw abortion.
“It’s critical. President Biden, who I feel confident will be reelected, needs to be able to put more judges on the bench, federal judges, including Supreme Court. It is absolutely critical that the Senate remain in Democratic hands,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who will retire at the end of next year, told the Hill.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told the Hill that the next president will likely “have a chance to appoint another member of the court. … I expect that you’d see, over the course between now and the end of the next [presidential] term, probably another retirement or two.”
Neither Alito or Thomas has said he is mulling retirement. Thomas, who has served on the Court for nearly 32 years, is the oldest justice on the Court at 75. Alito, who has served since 2006, is 73.
“I do think that the 2024 election is important,” said Brian Fallon, co-founder and executive director of left-wing judicial advocacy group Demand Justice. “I do think Alito and Thomas will be getting up there in age, and there’s quite a real possibility that replacements for them could be in order in the next four-year presidential window.‘
“It’s hugely important to win the upcoming election, and I think the court will be more salient of an issue than ever. It’s important to win the next election because if there is going be an opportunity to replace a Thomas or Alito, you don’t want to miss it by not winning a Senate race here or there and preventing us from filling a seat.‘
“But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that the court’s balance is going to be shifted anytime soon just by winning a few elections.”
Everyone was assured by Democrats and our always helpful media that the sticky sweet plea deal for Joe Biden’s lowlife son Hunter was proof positive that “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!!!1!1!”
ABC “The View’s” Sunny Hostin: “It shows no one is above the law, which is important, not even the president’s son.”
Obama 2012 deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter: “[I]t shows that no one is above the law and what taking responsibility looks like.”
Washington Post: “The sitting president’s son being held accountable for underpaying his taxes illustrates that no one is above the law in the U.S. system.”
And now look: overwhelming evidence that actually, no, Hunter Biden apparently is above the law. And that’s not just when he’s high on crack.
The House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday released the transcript of an interview with high-level IRS investigating agent Gary Shapley who testified that the Justice Department, under both presidents Trump and Biden, “provided preferential treatment, slow-walked the investigation, did nothing to avoid obvious conflicts of interest in this investigation” into Hunter’s shady, questionable as hell business dealings. Included in Shapley’s exhaustively detailed testimony was a 2017 text message uncovered in the years-long investigation from Hunter to a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,”Hunter wrote. It’s not clear what transaction he was referring to, but like the nasty little weenie that he is, he used his daddy’s status as a high-profile political figure to threaten the communist. “[I]f I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
Hunter mentions “my father” more frequently than David French gets off to Ukraine.
Throughout Shapley’s testimony, he names lawyers and officials within the IRS and FBI who admitted there was enough evidence to trigger more intensive investigations into Hunter (search warrants), which would, in turn, likely lead to criminal prosecutions (tax fraud), but that time and time again, they declined to pursue the matter.
“[W]hatever the motivations, at every stage decisions were made that had the effect of benefiting the subject of the investigation,” Shapley said, referring to Hunter. “These decisions included slow-walking investigative steps, not allowing enforcement actions to be executed, limiting investigators’ line of questioning for witnesses, misleading investigators on charging authority, delaying any and all actions months before [the 2020 election] to ensure the investigation did not go overt well before policy memorandum mandated the pause.”
He said his supervisors repeatedly deferred to the Justice Department regarding the investigation’s progress and that the DOJ consistently denied advancements and even tipped off Hunter’s lawyers as to what information the government knew, giving him a chance to conceal more incriminating material or concoct some feasible defense.
The New York Times reacted to this explosive testimony by noting that“Taken at face value, the message would undercut President Biden’s longstanding claims that he had nothing to do with his son’s international business deals.”
But that’s only if you take it at “face value,” folks!
The president knew what his son was doing. He was complicit and probably profited from it. The only reason we don’t know for sure is because, according to Shapley’s testimony, FBI agents deliberately avoided asking witnesses about it. On the one occasion that an agent did ask Hunter associate Rob Walker about Joe Biden, Walker said he believed Hunter had orchestrated a business meeting wherein his dad made a quick appearance for the purposes of bolstering the chances of “making a deal work out.”
“And, inexplicably,” Shapley said, after Walker confirmed this, “the FBI agent changed the subject.”
“The law” isn’t applied by artificial intelligence. It’s applied by people. And those people make decisions based on their predispositions. If those predispositions are to protect the ones who in turn protect the people applying the law, then it’s not equal justice. This is otherwise known as “The Way Washington Works.” If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re not, expect the FBI, the IRS, and every other federal agency to bear down until your last breath.
Going after a presidential political opponent has consequences, says former President Donald Trump. And now, he says, the gloves will come off.
The “seal” for going after your political opposition as the U.S. president is broken, Trump vowed Monday as he heads to Miami for a Tuesday court appearance on an unprecedented federal indictment of a former commander in chief.
Trump wrote in a Truth Social post: “Now that the ‘seal’ is broken, in addition to closing the border & removing all of the ‘criminal’ elements that have illegally invaded our country, making America energy independent, & even dominant again, & immediately ending the war between Russia & Ukraine, I will appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, & all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & country itself!”
Trump defenders have been hailing his administration for not going to the level of prosecuting his political opponents, despite some suggestions otherwise with both former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and then-2020 presidential candidate Biden.
Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani had found allegations of bribes with Ukraine as House Democrats sought myriad impeachment actions against then-President Trump.
Giuliani denounced special counsel Jack Smith’s claim in a brief and harried news conference Friday announcing the first ever indictment of a former president, saying “there’s one system of laws” and that “applies equally to everyone.”
“Well, of course, that’s the most ridiculous, idiotic statement to make on a day in which we find out that the Bidens took a $10 million bribe from a Ukrainian Mykola Zlochevsky, which I could have told you, you know, and did tell [the DOJ] three years ago,” Giuliani told Newsmax‘s “Saturday Report.”
“And they followed up on none of the evidence I gave them. They were hoping that people would disappear or die. It’s extraordinary.”
Giuliani added the Pittsburgh attorney general was looking into the case before it was taken away from him by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, who gave it to the “U.S. attorney in Delaware, who didn’t do a thing about it.”
The left doesn’t hide its goal of running our elections in secret. After all, democracy today effectively means “rule by Democrats.” The first step in transforming a free republic into a dictatorship is to brand the party’s enemies a security threat to the regime. The objective is to establish a police state built on terror with the power to arrest its critics on the pretext of national security.
New legislation would do exactly that: empower Democrats to bar poll watchers, brand Trump voters domestic terrorists, and use the Justice Department to remake local law enforcement into tools of the security state.
Whether they succeed hinges on whether conservatives will stand against the left’s lies.
Potemkin Villages
In late April, Senate Democrats introduced the Election Worker Protection Act to direct Justice Department funds for “the identification and investigation of threats to election workers”; expand the definition of “voter intimidation” laws to include “the counting of ballots, canvassing, and certification of elections”; and encourage the removal of “poll observers who are interfering with … the administration of an election.”
These measures are designed to bar conservatives from overseeing and, when necessary, challenging election results — a fundamental element of fair and impartial elections — using “security” to mask the country’s transition to despotism.
Operatives know that the bill isn’t likely to pass the Republican-controlled House. So they’ve turned to a tried-and-true tactic: pressure campaigns designed to fool and browbeat lawmakers into believing there’s a wave of popular support for a measure ginned up by Activism Inc.
Take the bill’s endorsees.
There’s the American Federation of Teachers.
the anti-super PAC End Citizens United (itself a super PAC).
Issue One and Democracy 21, both fans of stifling free speech through campaign finance restrictions.
Voices for Progress, a front for the multibillion-dollar “dark money” Tides Nexus.
and the phony “faith” group NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, among others.
Fifteen secretaries of state — all Democrats — also back the bill.
Anatomy of a Campaign
But the lead driver is the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE), an astroturf coalition created to bully Republican lawmakers into rolling over for activists seeking to gut our elections and even imprison those who fight back.
CSSE presents itself as a grassroots, “cross-partisan” effort by concerned citizens, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. CSSE is run by the Brennan Center, a front for election “reforms” ranging from felon voting, to banning free speech as “disinformation,” to using taxpayer funds to register new Democrats.
The committee claims one right-leaning supporter among dozens: the sometimes-libertarian R Street Institute, a think tank often employed as a gun-for-hire for the left’s election “reforms.” The rest of CSSE’s backers are gilded denizens of the swamp.
That list is topped by ex-Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, who oversaw the commonwealth’s last-minute election law changes under cover of Covid-19. Lori Augino formerly led the National Vote at Home Institute, the group responsible for making vote-by-mail an article of faith among Democrats. Edgardo Cortes, a Brennan Center adviser, previously ran Virginia’s elections under Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe and was an activist for the left-wing Advancement Project.
The Elections Group is a consulting firm run by ex-Chicago election chief Noah Praetz and Jennifer Morrell, who previously advised eBay founder and Democratic mega-donor Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropy, Democracy Fund.
The Protect Democracy Project was created in 2017 by ex-Obama staffers to litigate the Trump administration into oblivion. Its counsel and CSSE representative, Orion Danjuma, is a former ACLU racial justice attorney.
States United was formed to counter Trump’s election lawsuits months before the 2020 election took place, battling state audits and issuing the first legal brief explaining why Mike Pence had no authority to reject electors. It’s a front for the Voter Protection Program, which fights voter ID laws and lobbies for automatic and same-day registration policies.
PEN America supports free speech in classrooms — so long as “free” means promoting critical race theory and hypersexualized gender ideology. The Alliance for Securing Democracy is a front for the German Marshall Fund, an international left-wing funder, and is led by Obama and Clinton cronies including John Podesta.
Despite its name, the Bipartisan Policy Center was seeded by the left-wing Hewlett Foundation and is almost entirely led by Democrats. Similarly, the Committee of Seventy is a supposed conservative watchdog group that’s actually run by Never Trumper Al Schmidt and promotes the left’s redistricting policies.
Hypocrisy on Display
None of these groups operate in the mainstream conservative movement, nor are they actually “nonpartisan.” Yet the left is masterful in lending its political groups unfounded credibility thanks to its control of the media and government.
In March, for instance, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a federal organ meant to help states administer their elections, hosted a glowing panel discussion on CSSE featuring “cross-partisan” panelists, each hailing from activist groups.
The EAC is overseen by two Democrats and two Republicans, one of whom (Ben Hovland) is a CSSE member. Hovland, a Democratic Trump appointee, blasted the president for challenging the 2020 results. He supported the $400 million “ZuckBucks” scandal that juiced voter turnout in Democrat-heavy districts with private funding from a partisan billionaire. (Twenty-four states have since banned the practice, and the House is weighing a similar measure). Hovland’s also appeared in policy events run by leftist advocacy organizations and in chummy interviews with the Center for American Progress.
Yet it was the EAC’s other Republican commissioner, Donald Palmer, who was recently castigated by the left for attending a confidential meeting of Republican secretaries of state on election policy. If the meeting had been run by Democrats, Palmer would be a hero, not a villain.
Policing the Police
CSSE produces advisory content for law enforcement to crack down on supposed threats to election workers. Its pocket guides for Georgia and Utah, for example, remind officers of state laws protecting administrators from harassment, yet the CSSE name and logo marked prominently on the documents remind one more of propaganda than helpful cheat sheets.
CSSE’s bizarre “training videos” are like the television show “24” for leftists. One video, darkly titled “What Election Violence Could Look Like,” sets up a scenario in which a bearded white man (the Proud Boy-esque Trump supporter) makes vaguely ominous comments to a female elections official (the victimized person of color), complete with finger guns in a slow-motion drive-by. Only a strong female cop, probably equipped with her standard-issue CSSE election law guide, can put an end to his reign of terror.
The whole scenario is absurd political theater meant to establish a smokescreen for passing unpopular and extreme measures that would further federalize our elections. And perhaps that’s the point. Democrats have long played upon imaginary fears to instill unity in the ranks before launching a major policy push.
It’s much easier to repress the opposition when they’re dehumanized. Will conservatives be next?
The more obvious it becomes that our domestic political struggles are actually part of a much larger spiritual war over the fate of western civilization, that we are today engaged not so much in a political fight as a religious battle between good and evil, the stronger the urge seems to be among Republican politicians to deny this reality and take refuge in the comforting political narratives of the past.
A perfect case in point was a tweet last week from Kari Lake’s permanent campaign, which managed in one fell swoop to channel the deeply misguided political analysis of the entire neocon Washington establishment: “No one is saying not to fight the culture war. But it’s simply not the most critical issue heading into 2024.”
“The GOP must show the country how it plans to turn the economy around & prevent World War 3,” she added. “We need to take this country back from @JoeBiden before we can take our culture back from his friends.”
Ah, yes. The comforting fiction that if we can just show voters how we plan to turn the economy around, surely then we’ll regain power, surely then we’ll have a mandate from the people — and then (and only then) we can “take our culture back.”
With apologies to Lake, who before the midterms seemed to have a bright political future in the emerging populist GOP, this is absolute nonsense. On the one hand, it’s a desperate cope, the embodiment of the stale, low-energy politics that have kept conservatives out of power in Washington for most of the last three decades. On the other, it’s a textbook neocon talking point, pretending the culture war is a distraction when in fact it’s the only war whose outcome really will decide the fate of our country.
Ironically, it’s also an example of the kind of politics that Lake herself purported to defy. She made a name for herself during the midterm cycle by taking on the political establishment and attacking the corporate media’s false narratives about 2020 and much else. Lake isn’t the politician you’d think would fall into this trap, yet she did. Why?
The best explanation has nothing to do with Lake in particular but with the tendency of all politicians to want to explain the problems we face and offer practical solutions. The economy is bad, here’s how we fix it. The cities are filled with dangerous lunatics, here’s how we make our streets safe again. The border is overrun with illegal immigration, here’s how we crack down and secure it.
Republicans are more naturally susceptible to this way of thinking because, unlike Democrats, they tend to be less rabidly ideological and less committed to fundamentally altering America and bringing about political and social revolution. But this way of thinking — that our most pressing problems just need common-sense policy fixes that normal people support! — is woefully inadequate for our current moment.
Put simply, the big mistake in thinking the culture war isn’t the most critical issue heading into 2024 is that all of American politics is now one big culture war. The culture war is the only issue because the cultural war is everything now. When one side stakes its claim to political power on offering abortion up until birth and transgender operations for 8-year-olds, and holds out these policies as proof of its moral authority, we’re way past arguing over how to get the economy back on track. There’s no going back to that kind of politics.
Tucker Carlson hit on this at the end of his big speech at Heritage recently. He compared the values of the political left to the values of the Aztecs, who sacrificed children to their bloodthirsty gods — and he wasn’t wrong. Our politics, he argued, have shifted profoundly in a relatively short period of time. Instead of arguing over the best means to bring about an agreed-upon common good, we no longer agree about what the common good is. Forget about whether Republicans or Democrats are right about the ideal marginal tax rate. We can’t even agree on whether men and women exist as meaningful categories. And if we don’t get that question right, you can forget about economic prosperity, much less anything like a republic or a constitutional system of government.
What the neocons and establishment politicians don’t seem to understand is that the culture war has become a grinding war of attrition that will end with the complete destruction of one side. There is no way to reconcile the vision of the common good espoused by the transgender movement, on the one hand, and orthodox Christians, on the other.
The culture war in America is not some luxury good that Republican politicians can sample now and then. It has consumed our politics by revealing deep, uncrossable chasms in our national life. So, we now find ourselves in a different kind of struggle. Call it a culture war, a religious war, a battle between good and evil, or all of the above. It’s a war for survival between two competing and irreconcilable visions of what America should be.
Any politician on the right that doesn’t understand that, who thinks we just need to show voters our plan for getting the economy back on track, needs to step aside and make room for leaders who know what time it is, that the hour is late, the day now far spent, and the time for fighting has come. The culture war is now the big tent. Those who embrace it, who delve into the fray without apology, will be the next crop of leaders on both the right and the left.
Keep this in mind as we march toward the 2024 election cycle. The cast of buffoons and egomaniacs on the Republican side will feature mostly candidates who don’t understand or don’t want to admit what’s happening. They will say things like, “No one is saying not to fight the culture war. But it’s simply not the most critical issue heading into 2024.” And when they say that, they’ll be doing you a favor. You can then safely ignore whatever else they say because you’ll know at that point they’re either a fool or a coward, and all they have to offer is defeat.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Even if Democrats really were concerned about our convoluted election regulations, no serious person thinks New York’s district attorney has a case against Trump.
As the saying goes: If even Never Trump Jonah Goldbergdoubts your wisdom in bringing criminal charges against the former president, then you know it’s a stupid case.
Nobody actually says that, but it’s one of many indicators that the indictment potentially coming this week from Democrat New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg (yes, that’s his actual name) is so absurd as to make anyone wonder if our justice system really is a joke.
Trump on Saturday announced that he expected to be arrested soon in relation to the very old, very stale, very tiresome allegation that he violated campaign finance laws when he reimbursed his lawyer for a payment made to a porn actress in order to supposedly cover up a past affair. The accusation is that Trump did it to protect his campaign and intentionally neglected to publicly disclose the payment, as would be required by law.
I think Democrats have no interest whatsoever in campaign finance violations and really just enjoy thinking about Trump’s sex life. But even if they really were concerned with the integrity of our convoluted election money regulations, no serious person thinks Bragg has a case. That’s evidenced no less than by the fact that the people who considered pursuing this charge previously eventually dropped it— including Bragg!
While Trump was in office and Bragg was a U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, his office looked at this very case and decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. It’s a horse that has been beaten to death, resuscitated, and beaten again. Then smacked on the rear one more time.
But persecuting Trump has no downside for Democrats chasing fame. And now is as good a time as any. The historic nature of putting a former president in handcuffs as he campaigns for another term is too good for a low-rent prosecutor to pass up.
Not so good for a republic that wants to last another year, let alone 200, but that’s never top of mind for people like Bragg.
Try to wrap your mind around it. The former president, the likely Republican presidential nominee in 2024, might be seen on live national television cuffed, placed in the back of a squad car, and taken to a police station for his mug shot. All this over campaign paperwork that would any other time be resolved with a corrected filing and, perhaps, a penalty fee.
And that’s only if you presume Trump is guilty. Rational people think he might have tried hiding an affair, but that it’s absolutely possible it was for other reasons. (I wonder if anyone has ever in American history tried hiding an affair for reasons outside of protecting his prospects to be elected U.S. president. Interesting question, but far from settled!)
If Bragg brings an indictment, that’s one up for him and another one down for faith in America.
Three of the 10 counties chosen as beneficiaries of a program from the nonprofit that helped fund the private takeover of government election offices in 2020 are refusing to accept those dollars leading up to the 2024 cycle.
Election officials from Brunswick and Forsyth Counties in North Carolina and Ottawa County in Michigan have chosen not to accept funds from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a program that plans to funnel $80 million in election grants to jurisdictions across the country over the next five years. The alliance is a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, one of two groups that funneled over $328 million of private money from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, known as “Zuckbucks,” to government election offices mostly in the blue counties of swing states, mobilizing Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts and swinging the race in Joe Biden’s favor.
Many of the jurisdictions chosen as recipients for the 2024 cycle lean heavily Democrat and are located in swing states, indicating CTCL is hoping to replicate its successful scheme in the next presidential election in purple states Democrats need to win, such as Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. While CTCL might once again try to hide its efforts by claiming the alliance is also giving money to red counties, expect more than double or triple the funds to be spent on Democratic-leaning counties compared to Republican ones, just like in 2020.
Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck told RealClearInvestigations he will refuse the grant money offered to his county because of transparency concerns. When Roebuck asked the alliance about its criteria for the amount of money given to each county, those running the program refused to give a clear answer.
Tim Tsujii, director of elections for the Forsyth County Board of Elections, told RealClear that Forsyth will not take any grant money because the county has adequate funds to administer its elections. Forsyth and Brunswick Counties will still be part of the alliance, but Tsujii raised concerns about members having to pay a fee for being part of the program.
“There is all this talk about the money going to elections offices and the counties, but what about the money going from the counties to the alliance?” Tsujii said.
To be a part of the alliance, election offices must pay an annual fee, $1,600 for a basic membership or $4,800 for premium, which the CTCL-created program says gives officials access to “coaching,” tutorials, consulting, and any other as-needed handholding, such as revamping voter forms and websites. The alliance also obligates members “to make non-monetary (but highly significant) contributions to the broader activities of the Alliance,” such as participating in its events and sharing election data, documents, and forms.
While the program goes to great lengths to stress its “commitment to nonpartisanship” — “We will never attempt to influence the outcome of any election. Period” — its own founding organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, has demonstrated the catastrophic and deeply partisan consequences of welcoming outside groups to infiltrate government election offices.
These three jurisdictions are not the only beneficiaries raising concerns about the integrity of the alliance and the problems associated with accepting its funds. The town of Greenwich, Connecticut, narrowly approved a $500,000 grant from the program after town representatives and concerned residents wrote a letter to their local newspaper signaling their opposition to accepting the grant. The letter cited outside influence by the partisan groups in Greenwich’s election process as one reason to reject the funds.
As RealClearInvestigations noted:
When [Greenwich] residents heard that its elections office was tapped to receive $500,000 in grant money from the CTCL, a member of the town’s legislative council sent an email to the center seeking more information, including audits of the group’s books, a copy of the group’s annual report, and its conflict-of-interest policy.
The CTCL declined to provide the documents, insisting that its audited financials and conflict policies “are not publicly filed documents.”
The alliance has also failed to disclose how exactly the grant money will be used, instead keeping things vague and saying it will vary depending on each office. But if CTCL’s past is prologue, that could mean working with left-wing third-party groups to create absentee ballot forms, targeting likely-Democratic voters by harvesting and curing their ballots, and crafting automatic voter registration systems. The Center for Tech and Civic Life is already hoping to do this on a much broader scale than in 2020. As The Federalist previously reported, CTCL has an elaborate plan to infiltrate more than 8,000 local election departments across the country by 2026.
That county election officials and town leaders are suspicious of the alliance and are starting to opt out of its grant money should set off alarm bells for other jurisdictions committed to conducting free and fair elections. Unless more localities reject these private funds and memberships, CTCL — under the guise of its new U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence program — will once again undermine election integrity in 2024 and beyond.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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