Recently, I wrote a column about Meta’s restoration of free speech protections after the company admitted to censoring users on platforms like Facebook. The company also revealed that it was pressured by the Biden Administration to conduct such censorship. Now, Google has taken the same step in restoring a number of YouTube accounts and pledging to show greater respect for free speech.
Google made the disclosure in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH):
“Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.”
This is another major victory for free speech. Google specifically acknowledged past political censorship and stated that it “values conservative voices on its platform.”
The company, for the first time, admitted that it yielded to comprehensive pressure from the Biden Administration to censor Americans. It acknowledged that the Biden censorship pressure was “unacceptable and wrong” and pledged to resist such pressure in the future.
Meta has substantially reduced censorship by replicating the approach of Elon Musk at X. These changes are a testament to Musk’s legacy in the restoration of free speech on social media. As I previously noted, we need companies like Facebook and Google. These are companies that are big enough to stand up to the European Union (EU) and its unrelenting campaign against free speech.
The censorship on Google and YouTube had a harmful impact beyond the loss of free speech. It suppressed opposing views on Covid policies from the efficacy of masks to the need to shut down our schools.
The very figures claiming to battle “disinformation” were suppressing opposing views that have now been vindicated as credible. It was not only the lab theory. In my recent book, I discuss how signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration were fired or disciplined by their schools or associations for questioning COVID-19 policies.
Some experts questioned the efficacy of surgical masks, the scientific support for the six-foot rule and the necessity of shutting down schools. The government has now admitted that many of these objections were valid and that it did not have hard science to support some of the policies. While other allies in the West did not shut down their schools, we never had any substantive debate due to the efforts of this alliance of academic, media and government figures.
Not only did millions die from the pandemic, but the United States is still struggling with the educational and mental health consequences of shutting down all our public schools. That is the true cost of censorship when the government works with the media to stifle scientific debate and public disclosures.
The disclosure is also a blow to many Democratic members of Congress who long attacked witnesses, including myself, who testified against the coordinated censorship by corporate and government officials. Before the release of the Twitter files, members insisted that there was no evidence of such coordination. Some still deny such coordination despite multiple companies now confirming it.
The greatest challenge, however, still lies ahead for these companies. The EU remains the greatest threat to free speech facing Americans. After Musk purchased X with a pledge to restore free speech, figures like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded that the EU use its infamous Digital Services Act to force X to censor Americans.
The Trump administration has warned the EU about its efforts to censor Americans. Meta and Google can now join X in creating a formidable corporate alliance for free speech. For the first time, the free speech community might have a coalition of government and corporate allies that could stand up to the EU.
There will likely remain a degree of mistrust from the free speech community towards these companies after years of censorship and stonewalling. However, we also need to accept our allies where and when we can find them. Free speech is in a free fall in Europe and many on the left are encouraging similar censorship laws for the United States. We need these companies and should support them as they take meaningful actions in favor of free speech.
The so-called autopen scandal appears to be getting worse for former President Joe Biden as more information comes to light.
Biden, some of his former staffers, and a handful of thought leaders in the Democratic Party have attempted to triage the message about the inner workings of the previous presidential administration. But tangible evidence is mounting that it was effectively run like a kind of politburo.
The New York Times released an interesting report Sunday afternoon that included a short interview with Biden saying he made decisions on clemency that were carried out with an autopen. In the final month of his presidency, Biden pardoned a number of high-profile people and granted clemency to an additional 1,500.
High-profile examples included his son, Hunter Biden, members of the Jan. 6 committee, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley.
“Everybody knows how vindictive [President Donald Trump] is, so we knew that they’d do what they’re doing now,” Biden said in the Times interview. “I consciously made all those decisions.”
Biden insisted that he was “conscious” of all his administration’s decisions (a contention not helped by his rambling responses).
But snippets from the Times’ report calls that claim into question.
“Mr. Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people, he and aides confirmed,” the Times reported. “Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence.”
On Biden’s last day in office Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients gave approval to use the autopen in the cases of Fauci and Milley, according to the Times.
In addition, the Times reported that Biden’s staff who drafted the blubs for acts of clemency admitted that they weren’t in the room with the president when approval for signing them was made.
NYT reporting on Biden pardons starts by repeating him saying he made the clemency decisions…but then buries his staff’s admission that he actually didn’t, and that the staffers sending those decisions to the autopen weren’t actually in the room when Biden allegedly gave his say… pic.twitter.com/woCOJyafxg
Whatever the intent of Biden or this report, it certainly didn’t clear up the suspicion that Biden wasn’t mentally competent to make decisions and that his staff and perhaps other people were essentially usurping executive power they didn’t have. When you combine that with the recent decision by Biden’s White House doctor to continually plead the Fifth Amendment to remain silent at a recent closed doors House hearing and former first lady Jill Biden’s chief-of-staff Anthony Bernal suddenly becoming uncooperative with the autopen investigation it certainly raises suspicion.
And that’s a potentially enormous scandal, even bigger than the media’s coverup of the president’s health. Not only was the country put in danger with an out-to-lunch commander in chief, but members of his staff may have been wielding unconstitutional powers on his behalf.
Trump said to reporters Monday that the autopen scandal may be one of the biggest in American history, and he may be correct.
.@POTUS: "The autopen I think is maybe one of the biggest scandals that we've had in 50-100 years. This is a tremendous scandal… I guarantee you he knew nothing about what he was signing. I guarantee it." pic.twitter.com/ozngUkINSz
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 14, 2025
Cruz may have come to this conclusion based on the testimony of a witness at a recent Senate hearing on the autopen use and abuse. Cruz asked Theodore Wold, a visiting fellow for law and technology policy at The Heritage Foundation, whether an executive order signed by a staffer who autopen signs it without the president’s knowledge is legally binding.
Wold answered, “No.”
‘HAIL TO THE PEN’: @SenTedCruz Torches Biden’s Use of Autopen as an ‘Assault on Democracy’
Since July 2022, the vast majority of Biden’s executive orders—including every single one in 2025—were signed by an autopen, not the president.
Unfortunately, there is very little precedent here to rely on to determine what the status of those pardons is. So, this may end up being more of a political battle than a legal dilemma.
I suspect this is why close associates of Biden are becoming closed lipped. This is about more than just Biden’s legacy or the media’s shame. It’s about whether Biden’s pardons are legally binding. It’s about whether members of the Biden White House misused their power. Did they commit fraud?
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who is the chairman of a Senate committee looking into the autopen use, suggested that’s a possibility.
They may have broken several federal laws: – Fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1001) – Forgery (18 U.S.C. § 471) – Misuse of Government Property (18 U.S.C. § 641) – Conspiracy to Defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371) – Obstruction of Justice (18 U.S.C. § 1503 or § 1512) pic.twitter.com/D9WfO1mQNz
— Senator Eric Schmitt (@SenEricSchmitt) July 14, 2025
One way or another, the American people deserve answers.
Vice President J.D. Vance with Energy Secretary Christopher Wright. (Jim Watson via Getty Images)
The Biden administration issued billions in taxpayer-funded green grants–many to large multinational corporations. Now the Trump administration’s Energy Secretary Christopher Wright ordered a review of 179 recipients to save $15 billion.
Meanwhile, some recipients of the Biden-era green grants told The Daily Signal they plan to proceed with the projects.
One of the biggest sources of green grants under the Biden administration was the Energy Department’s Industrial Demonstrations Program. The program was slated to dole out $6.3 billion to 29 taxpayer-funded projects. Projects listed include spending up to $331.9 million for an ExxonMobil project in Texas; up to $375 million for an Eastman Chemical decarbonization project in Texas; up to $95 million to the Dow Chemical project on the Gulf Coast; and up to $75 million to a BASF project in Texas.
“What we can share is that, as of October 2024, BASF has entered into a cooperative agreement with the DOE for our proposed low-carbon syngas project at our Freeport, Texas site,” Julia Arns, external communications manager for BASF, told The Daily Signal. “With this, we have started Phase 1 of our project: initial planning and analysis. Throughout the entire process BASF will collaborate with the DOE to develop the appropriate deliverables necessary to progress to the following phases.”
Notably on the list, a $500 million subsidy for a project in Vice President J.D. Vance’s Ohio hometown. The Cleveland Cliffs company announced in March 2024 that it would get about $575 million in federal funding for two projects, a $500 million grant for a project in Middletown, Ohio, and another $75 million grant for a Lyndora, Pennsylvania project. Both projects were canceled, CNN first reported. However, a spokesperson from Cleveland Cliff did not respond to inquiries on voicemail and online for this story.
Orsted, a Denmark-based energy company, is on the list to get an Energy Department grant of up to $99 million for a Texas Gulf Coast project that involves capturing carbon dioxide to reduce emissions from sectors such as shipping.
“The DOE award is proceeding to schedule as we continue to develop the project,” Jakob Goetzsche Vesterager, senior media relations advisor for Orsted, told The Daily Signal in a statement. “We’re aware that the program is currently under review, but there have been no changes to the award for Project Star at this time.”
The energy secretary’s memorandum said the department will require recipients of money to “provide written responses and supporting documentation to its information requests within communicated timeframes, and to cooperate with program personnel on any follow up requests, including verbal requests, in a timely manner, to facilitate this review.”
Most of the grants were funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, two major bills passed during the Biden administration. The Industrial Demonstrations Program itself was established in 2020 to boost manufacturing during the last year of the first Trump administration.
“The Biden administration spent money we didn’t have to pay for things we didn’t need,” James Carter, a former deputy assistant secretary of treasury and former deputy undersecretary of labor in the George W. Bush administration, told The Daily Signal.
Regarding the administration cutting an expensive project in the vice president’s home turf, Carter said the administration has shown leadership in putting the national interest ahead of parochial or short-term political interest.
“There are exceptions, but anything enacted during the Biden administration has a bullseye on it,” Carter told The Daily Signal.
The energy secretary’s memo Thursday, titled “Ensuring Responsibility for Financial Assistance,” comes after the White House budget proposal called for cancelling $15 billion in what it calls “Green New Scam” funds.
“Over the past 110 days, the Energy Department has been hard at work reviewing the billions of dollars that were rushed out the door, particularly in the final days of the Biden administration, and what we have found is concerning,” Wright said in a public statement.
“With this process, the department will ensure we are doing our due diligence, utilizing taxpayer dollars to generate the largest possible benefit to the American people and safeguarding our national security,” Wright continued. “Any reputable business would have a process in place for evaluating spending and investments before money goes out the door, and the American people deserve no less from their federal government.”
This year, Cleveland Cliffs–the firm slated to get $500 million for a project in the vice president’s hometown, reportedly laid off 1,200 workers in Minnesota and Michigan, and was reportedly set to layoff another 950 employees in Illinois and Pennsylvania. Job losses shouldn’t be blamed on canceled government subsidies, said Vance Ginn, a former associate director for economic policy for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration.
“These jobs from government subsidies are temporary jobs,” Ginn, now a senior economic fellow with the Pelican Institute, a Louisiana think tank, told The Daily Signal. “During the Biden years, and the Inflation Reduction Act, we saw this green new scheme grow and grow.”
Government subsidies don’t have the strongest track record.
A 2016 Energy Information Administration report said more than 70% of energy-related physical science grants went to solar energy research.
Meanwhile, 29 states require utilities to generate or obtain specific amounts of electricity from renewable energy sources, according to Just Facts, a conservative-leaning fact checking organization.
Still, despite heavy subsidies since 1978, wind supplied about 3.9% of U.S. energy in 2024, while solar provided 2.7%, according to Just Facts, citing the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Office of Energy statistics from March.
A recent episode of 60 Minutes attempted to cast a negative light on the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but in doing so, it inadvertently confirmed what millions of Americans—and President Trump himself—have been warning about for years: our federal spending system is riddled with fraud, abuse, and exploitation, and the problem has reached national security levels. Rather than serving as an indictment of Trump-era reforms, the report only strengthened the case for the America First agenda that emphasizes accountability, transparency, and aggressive oversight of taxpayer dollars.
The segment, which featured interviews with Bryan Vorndran, head of the FBI’s cyber division, and Linda Miller, a fraud expert with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, exposed staggering levels of government waste. But most notably, Miller praised the leadership of tech innovator and DOGE head Elon Musk—appointed by President Trump—who has taken aggressive steps to expose and address the systemic fraud that has long been ignored by previous administrations. Miller applauded Musk’s candor on the issue, stating, “To be honest, Elon Musk coming out and saying, ‘There is a huge amount of fraud,’ I welcome that message completely because finally, someone is actually saying this.” That statement alone marks a turning point in how fraud is being handled under Trump’s second term.
Under the Biden administration, fraud was either downplayed or hidden behind bureaucratic smoke screens. The COVID-19 era, in particular, became a golden age for fraudsters, with billions funneled through unvetted relief programs and pandemic-era stimulus funds. But unlike Biden’s Department of Justice, which largely ignored red flags and delayed investigations, the Trump-Musk partnership at DOGE made rooting out fraud a top priority. They exposed not just individual scams, but a well-organized web of foreign state actors—primarily from China and Russia—using stolen American identities to siphon off taxpayer dollars through fake disaster loans and pandemic relief programs.
Linda Miller estimated that the annual federal losses due to fraud range between $550 billion and $750 billion, and may soon top $1 trillion. These are not simply clerical errors or minor mishandlings—these are industrial-scale operations targeting the very foundation of America’s economic stability. Miller noted, “What we’re really talking about is nation-state actors,” underscoring the growing national security risk these fraudulent networks pose. Organized crime rings are systematically buying and selling American identities on the dark web, using them to drain federal funds that were meant to support real families and businesses.
Cecilia Vega, during the CBS segment, asked FBI cyber chief Bryan Vorndran if the Social Security numbers of nearly every American were truly for sale online. Vorndran’s answer was chilling but truthful: “That is a true statement. All of our personally identifiable information—name, date of birth, former addresses, Social Security number—is available on the dark net and can likely be purchased.” This devastating vulnerability didn’t emerge overnight—it grew under years of weak oversight and bloated bureaucracies unwilling or unable to adapt to 21st-century threats.
But now, under President Trump’s leadership, that culture is changing. Musk’s appointment to DOGE was a direct response to the demands of American voters who are tired of seeing their hard-earned tax dollars squandered by incompetence or corruption. By empowering private-sector experts like Musk and cutting through red tape, Trump has reinvigorated the push to modernize government systems, upgrade cybersecurity protections, and implement real-time fraud detection protocols.
The report also referenced a 2023 case in which $6 billion in pandemic relief funds were stolen by fraudsters using stolen identities. According to Miller, these bad actors monitor natural disasters, collect stolen personal data by zip code, and then immediately apply for disaster loans and grants before legitimate applicants can even respond. This disturbing strategy further illustrates the need for Trump-style reforms: tighter verification systems, cross-agency data integration, and fast-track enforcement tools to shut down abuse before it spreads.
This kind of systemic fraud is exactly what conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater warned about decades ago when they called for limited government, fiscal discipline, and personal responsibility. Today, President Trump is carrying that torch, pushing forward policies that not only root out waste but also protect American citizens from the financial and security threats posed by unchecked government programs.
While the 60 Minutes segment may have aimed to sensationalize, it ended up reinforcing a central truth: the swamp is deeper than we thought, and only bold, unapologetic leadership can clean it up. President Trump’s second-term agenda include
overhauling federal procurement processes,
auditing high-risk spending programs,
and mandating stricter identity verification systems for all federal aid applications.
These reforms are already underway through new executive directives, many driven by DOGE, and they represent some of the most aggressive anti-fraud measures in U.S. history.
In the end, the real takeaway from this report is not a condemnation of President Trump’s leadership—it is a validation of it. By recognizing the full scale of the problem and putting capable, visionary leaders like Elon Musk in charge of solving it, Trump is doing what Washington elites have refused to do for decades: protect the American people from corruption, fraud, and foreign exploitation.
This is precisely why voters returned Donald J. Trump to the White House in 2024—to finish the job he started, restore accountability in government, and once and for all, drain the swamp.
There is a major story developing on Capitol Hill after House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer, R-Ky, revealed that a long-withheld report from the Biden Administration directly contradicted the claims of climate change used to limit increased U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The suggestion is that this was a knowing effort to cap carbon admissions rather than carbon emissions.
The impact that new U.S. LNG exports have on the environment and the economy was reviewed by U.S. Energy Department scientists and completed by September 2023. It appears that neither President Biden nor Secretary Jennifer Granholm liked the science or the conclusions. Rather than “follow the science,” they buried the report while allegedly making claims directly refuted by their own experts.
The report was finished while Biden was still running for reelection and would have likely enraged environmentalists. The draft study, “Energy, Economic, and Environmental Assessment of U.S. LNG Exports,”found that, under all modeled scenarios, an increase in U.S. LNG exports and natural gas production would not change global or U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. It further found that it would not increase energy prices for consumers.
Biden and Granholm reportedly buried the report and then announced a pause on all new U.S. LNG export terminals in January 2024, citing the danger to environmental and economic impacts.
Comer’s office told Fox News Digital that DOE repeatedly declined to provide this study to the House Oversight Committee or comply with other requests for information.
What is most concerning is that our LNG exports help reduce the dependence on Russia and would have decreased the revenues to that country to support its war in Ukraine. However, critics charge that Biden ignored the national security and economic benefits. Supporters note that we still exported a massive amount of LNG.
When the U.S. ramped up exports to Europe, progressive Democrats like Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., went ballistic. This appears to have worked in shelving the study while slowing demands for further increases.
The Biden Administration later released data in December 2024 suggesting that a rise in exports could cause consumer prices to rise by as much as 30%.
There are obviously two sides to this debate. The problem is that it seems that only one side was allowed to be publicly presented by the delay in the release of the study.
During his Tuesday Senate confirmation hearing, Pete Hegseth provided his best case yet on why he’s the perfect man to be President-elect Donald Trump’s defense secretary.
Speaking before the Armed Services Committee, the Army veteran noted how the “the primary charge” given to him by Trump was to “bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense.” He subsequently detailed how he intends to make the Pentagon into an agency “laser focused on warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness.”
“The Defense Department under Donald Trump will achieve Peace Through Strength. And in pursuing these America First national security goals, we will remain patriotically a-political and stridently Constitutional,” Hegseth said. “Unlike the current administration, politics should play no part in military matters. We are not Republicans or Democrats — we are American warriors. Our standards will be high, and they will be equal (not equitable, that is a very different word).”
Since coming to power nearly four years ago, the Biden-Harris Pentagon has made implementing neo-Marxist ideologies such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) a top priority. These policies have undermined military readiness and contributed to the service’s ongoing recruiting crisis.
Hegseth stressed that the Defense Department must “make sure every warrior is fully qualified on their assigned weapon system, every pilot is fully qualified and current on the aircraft they are flying, and every general or flag officer is selected for leadership based purely on performance, readiness, and merit.” He further noted how, “Leaders — at all levels — will be held accountable,” and that “warfighting and lethality — and the readiness of the troops and their families — will be our only focus.”
“That has been my focus ever since I first put on the uniform as a young Army ROTC cadet at Princeton University in 2001,” Hegseth said. “I joined the military because I love my country and felt an obligation to defend it. I served with incredible Americans in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and in the streets of Washington, DC — many of which are here today. This includes enlisted soldiers I helped become American citizens, and Muslim allies I helped immigrate from Iraq and Afghanistan. And when I took off the uniform, my mission never stopped.”
The former Fox News host described the three-prong approach he and Trump will take to restore lethality and efficiency to the military. Specifically, he noted that the incoming administration will focus on bringing back the military’s “warrior ethos,” rebuilding the service’s broken infrastructure, and reestablishing “deterrence” to create peace on the world stage.
Hegseth also responded to Democrat allegations that he’s not “qualified” to serve as defense secretary. The Army veteran acknowledged that he doesn’t “have a similar biography to defense secretaries of the last 30 years,” but noted, “we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’ — whether they are retired generals, academics, or defense contractor executives — and where has it gotten us?”
President-elect Trump “believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm. A change agent. Someone with no vested interest in certain companies or specific programs or approved narratives,” Hegseth said.
The Army veteran reaffirmed that his “only special interest is [America’s] warfighter[s], [d]eterring wars, and if called upon, winning wars — by ensuring our warriors never enter a fair fight.” He further emphasized the importance of the military letting its troops “win” and then “bring[ing] them home.”
“Like many of my generation, I’ve been there. I’ve led troops in combat, been on patrol for days, pulled a trigger downrange, heard bullets whiz by, flex-cuffed insurgents, called in close air support, led medevacs, dodged IEDs, pulled out dead bodies, and knelt before a battlefield cross,” Hegseth said. “[T]his is not academic for me; this is my life. I led then, and I will lead now.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
With the end of the Biden Administration in sight, liberal pundits seem to be striving to prove that the only difference between a lawbreaker and a law-abiding citizen is the ability to get away with the crime. Popular figures on the left from Michael Moore to Keith Olbermann are calling on President Joe Biden to commit overtly unlawful acts in his final 100 days in office, including targeting his political opponents. In one of the few statements of Moore with which I agree, he stated that this is “no joke.” It certainly is not.
It is the same logic used by looters that they have a license for illegality. However, this constitutional looting would endanger not just the Constitution but the country as a whole if Biden were to heed this advice.
In a posting on Substack, Moore told Biden that it was time to yield to temptation and check off a liberal 13-item “bucket list” of demands, tossing aside questions of legality or constitutionality in the process.
“You’re not done. You’ve still got 100 days left in office! And the Supreme Court has just granted you superpowers — AND immunity! You don’t answer to anyone. For the first time in over 50 years, you don’t have to campaign for anything…“You have full immunity! No kidding! No joke! That’s not hyperbole! You can get away with anything! And what if anything means everything to the people?”
The list includes emptying death row, canceling all student and medical debt, halting weapons shipments to Israel, ending the death penalty, declaring the Equal Rights Amendment a constitutional amendment, and granting clemency to nonviolent drug offenders. Other pundits have pushed Biden and Democrats to take some of the actions on Moore’s list before the end of the administration.
Many of these items could only be fulfilled by knowingly gutting the Constitution and assuming the powers of a monarch. That includes just canceling all student and medical debt in defiance of both the courts and Congress.
As discussed in my most recent column, others have added to that bucket list. Take Olbermann who, while insisting that he is fighting to “save democracy,” has called upon Biden to target political opponents like Elon Musk with deportation: “If we can’t do that by conventional means, President Biden, you have presidential immunity. Get Elon Musk the F out of our country and do it now.”
These calls come in the midst of a counter-constitutional movement led by law professors. Moreover, the disregard for such legal authority has been voiced by liberal academics like Harvard Professor Lawrence Tribe. Indeed, his past “just do it” approach was not dissimilar in advice to Biden.
For example, the Biden administration was found to have violated the Constitution in its imposition of a nationwide eviction moratorium through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Biden admitted that his White House counsel and most legal experts told him the move was unconstitutional. But he ignored their advice and went with that of Harvard University Professor Laurence Tribe, the one person who would tell him what he wanted to hear. It was, of course, then quickly found to be unconstitutional.
The false premise of the recent calls is that the Court removed all limits on the presidency in its recent ruling on presidential immunity. The fact that law professors are repeating this clearly erroneous claim is a measure of the triumph of rage over reason today.
As I have previously written, I am not someone who has favored expansive presidential powers. As a Madisonian scholar, I favor Congress in most disputes with presidents. However, I saw good-faith arguments on both sides of this case and the Court adopted a middle road on immunity — rejecting the extreme positions of both the Trump team and the lower court.
As I previously wrote, the Court followed a familiar approach:
The Court found that there was absolute immunity for actions that fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” while they enjoy presumptive immunity for other official acts. They do not enjoy immunity for unofficial, or private, actions.
The Court has often adopted tiered approaches in balancing the powers of the branches. For example, in his famous concurrence to Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), Justice Robert Jackson broke down the line of authority between Congress and the White House into three groups where the President is acting with express or implied authority from Congress; where Congress is silent (“the zone of twilight” area); and where the President is acting in defiance of Congress.
The Court separated cases into actions taken in core areas of executive authority, official actions taken outside those core areas, and unofficial actions. Actions deemed personal or unofficial are not protected under this ruling. It is certainly true that the case affords considerable immunity, including for conversations with subordinates. However, as Chief Justice John Roberts lays out in the majority opinion, there has long been robust protections afforded to presidents.
There are also a host of checks and balances on executive authority in our constitutional system. This includes judicial intervention to prevent violations of the law as well as impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors. What is interesting is not just what is stated but implied. Courts would quickly enjoin such efforts, but figures like Moore suggest that it would not matter. If so, Biden would not only flagrantly violate the Constitution, but then defy the authority of the federal courts. That includes unilaterally declaring an unratified amendment as ratified based on a meritless claim by the far left.
So, President Biden would violate the Constitution, refuse to yield to the courts, and pursue his “bucket list” of priorities without any legal restraints. All would be done in defense of democracy. It shows how the line between tyranny and democracy can be lost in an age of rage.
Mark Zuckerberg meets with President Trump in the Oval Office
Below is my column in Fox.com on the admission of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook yielded to pressure of the Biden Administration to censor citizens. The admission, however, appears more contrived than contrite.
Here is the column:
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Those words from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg came this week with an admission in a letter that his company, Facebook, did yield to pressure from the Biden-Harris administration to censor American citizens on a wide array of subjects.
For those of us who have criticized Facebook for years for its role in the massive censorship system, Zuckerberg’s belated contrition was more insulting than inspiring. It had all of the genuine regret of a stalker found hiding under the bed of a victim. Zuckerberg’s sudden regret only came after his company fought for years to conceal the evidence of its work with the government to censor opposing views. Zuckerberg was finally compelled to release the documents by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and the House Judiciary Committee. Now forced to admit what many of us have long alleged, Zuckerberg is really, really sorry.
In prior testimony before the House Judiciary Committee and other congressional committees, I noted that Zuckerberg continued to refuse to release this information after Elon Musk exposed this system in his release of the “Twitter Files.” Zuckerberg stayed silent as Musk was viciously attacked by anti-free speech figures in Congress and the media. He was fully aware of his own company’s similar conduct but stayed silent. When the White House and President Joe Biden repeatedly claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, Facebook continued to withhold evidence that they too were pressured to suppress the story before the election.
When the censorship system was recently put before the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, the justices asked about evidence of coordination and pressure from the government. In Murthy, states successfully showed lower courts that there was coercion from the government in securing an injunction. The Biden administration denied such pressure and the Court rejected the standing of plaintiffs, blocked an order to stop the censorship, and sent the case back down to the lower court.
Zuckerberg still remained silent.
But Facebook was not silent when it came to censorship, or “content moderation” as the company prefers to call it. While Zuckerberg now expresses “regret” at not speaking out sooner, his company previously sought to sell Americans on censorship.
In 2021, I wrote about the Facebook commercial campaign in which the company attempted to rally young people to embrace censorship. The commercials show people like “Joshan” who says that he “grew up with the internet.” Joshan mocks how much computers have changed and then objects how privacy and censorship has not evolved as much as our technology. As Joshan calls for “the blending of the real world and the internet world,” content moderation is presented as part of this not-so-brave new world. Joshan and his equally eager colleagues Chava and Adam were presented by Facebook as the shiny happy faces of young people longing to be content modified. They were all born in 1996 — the sweet spot for censors who saw young people as allies to reduce free speech.
For years, young people have been taught that free speech is harmful and triggering. We are raising a generation of speech-phobics and Zuckerberg and Facebook wanted to tap into that generation to get people to stop fearing the censor and love “content modification.” It was time, as Joshan and his friends told us, to “change” with our computers.
Now, Zuckerberg and Meta want people to know that they were “pressured” to censor and really regret their role in silencing opposing voices.
It is the feigned regret that comes with forced exposure.
The Facebook files now put the lie to past claims of the Biden administration and many Democrats in Congress. For years, members attacked some of us who testified that we had no evidence of coordination or pressure from the government. At the same time, they opposed any effort to investigate and release such evidence. The evidence is now undeniable.
The Biden administration has long demanded the removal of opposing views on a wide array of subjects. Democrats in Congress pushed Zuckerberg to expand the scope of censorship to include areas like climate change denial. Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is an example of the chilling scope of this effort. Her agency was created to work on our critical infrastructure, but Easterly declared that the mandate would now include policing “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes combating “malinformation,” or information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
Consider that for a second: true facts are censorable if the government views them as misleading.
As I write in my book, President Joe Biden is arguably the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. His administration helped create a censorship system that was described by one federal judge as “Orwellian.” Vice President Kamala Harris has been entirely supportive of that effort.
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in the only election where free speech was one of the principal campaign issues. It should be so again. Harris should have to take ownership of the censorship system maintained by the administration.
In my book, I propose a federal law that would bar the government from using any federal funds to support efforts to censor, blacklist, or suppress individuals or groups. It would take the government out of the censorship business. Harris should be asked if she would oppose such a law and dismantle the current censorship apparatus in the federal government.
Democracy is not on the ballot in 2024, as many have claimed, but free speech is.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, June 18, 2024).
Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.
En route to a recent vacation to New England, I stopped in my old hometown of Princeton, New Jersey, for coffee and picked up a copy of the Town Topics, the local paper where I found my first car and my first job back in the ’80s.
The front-page story was about an attempt on July 10 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations agents to arrest two illegal immigrants from Guatemala. Both men were high risks for hurting someone in future and any sane community would welcome their removal from the streets.
The ICE report was as follows: “ERO arrests twice-removed noncitizen in Princeton while second absconds due to civilian interference.” (Now steeped in Biden-era woke language, ICE calls such men “unlawfully present noncitizens.” Conflating this with another euphemism, I have coined the acronym UNJIP—“Undocumented NoncitizenJustice Involved Person”—for use henceforth. You saw it on the BorderLine first).
One of the Guatemalans, 29, had been deported from the U.S. twice already when he was charged with assault and robbery—in Princeton, so presumably his victims were locals.
What about their safety and their rights? Not surprisingly, the guy didn’t show up for his hearing at municipal court, which issued a warrant for his arrest. So, when ICE picked him up, he not only had entered the U.S. illegally three times (twice after being deported, which is a crime), but he was wanted for a violent crime.
ICE agents spotted the second Guatemalan, a 27-year-old who had been convicted of drunken driving in 2023. But in running after him, they “were blocked by people whose stated goal was to stop the arrest.”
ICE said that the “unfortunate and unacceptable interference from outside actors not only created a dangerous situation for the public and our officers, but also impeded ERO Newark from the performance of our duties.”
ICE is hardly going rogue under the anti-enforcement Biden administration. In its own words, “ERO uses targeted, intelligence-driven leads to prioritize enforcement actions against the most egregious noncitizen criminals who pose the greatest threat to national security, public safety and border security.” They are practically begging to be allowed to do their jobs.
But Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., said, “I was horrified to learn of the ICE raid carried out in Princeton today,” claiming that ICE agents “stopped Hispanic/Latinx residents seemingly at random to interrogate them and demand documentation.”
Coleman said, “This kind of conduct has no place in our community or our country.” Presumably by “this conduct,” she means enforcement of our nation’s laws?
Meanwhile, Princeton Mayor Mark Freda wrote that “ICE activities in Princeton have left our community deeply troubled. We believe that such federal actions, conducted without prior explanation, starkly contradict our core values of respect and dignity for all.”
Really? What about respect for this pair’s next victims? As for “prior explanation,” if ICE had tipped off a town government that opposes everything they do, what are the chances those two guys would still have been there?
And what “core values” is the mayor talking about? Why is it more important to him that no UNJIP ever be subject to the due process of United States immigration law, than that offenders who put their neighbors at risk should have to answer for their actions?
Every other American citizen and legal immigrant charged with assault or drunken driving has to face the music. Why are illegal immigrants allowed to evade responsibility?
This two-tiered justice in “sanctuary” jurisdictions places the ideology of open borders ahead of both local and national interest. It places the shielding of illegal aliens from lawful arrest and due process over the security of the community.
Freda tried to reassure his voters on this point. “We have no involvement with ICE,” he said. “Our police department does not help them. None of our departments help them.”
Well, why not?
Freda was intent on noting “extensive human services and health department programs to help recent immigrants, whether they are documented or undocumented.” This mayor prizes providing services to people here illegally over ensuring safety for everyone (including other illegal immigrants).
“We have to change our mindset about how we deal with ICE,” said Freda at a town meeting on July 16, hinting that not only would town authorities not cooperate with federal agents, but could hinder them.
It is not surprising that one of the Guatemalans had a drunken driving record, which is a common offense among noncitizens. ICE logged more than 43,000 arrests for DUI offenses from 2018 to 2023. Not all caused fatalities, but drunken driving by illegal aliens kills people regularly.
On July 21, a Honduran 18-year-old drunken driver called Axel Flores-Cordova killed teens Rylan Oncale and Taliyah Crochet in Louisiana. The police didn’t report his status, but Flores-Cordova was seven times over the legal alcohol limit and had no driver’s license, so it’s a fair chance he’s an UNJIP.
In Virginia, another 18-year old Honduran, Elvis Jamir Cruz-Ferrera, was charged with involuntary manslaughter for killing college student Lauryn Ni’Kole Leonard, 19, back in February while driving. He was ordered deported in 2018 but didn’t show up for his court date.
Prior to killing Leonard, Cruz-Ferrera had already been caught once speeding and twice driving without a license.
Leonard would be alive but for Cruz-Ferrera’s illegal presence in the U.S. and continued ability to drive a car in spite of his many offenses.
It’s not just drunken driving that’s a risk, it’s uninsured, unlicensed, or criminal use of vehicles by people who should not be here at all, let alone in charge of a car.
On July 31, Jose Aguilar-Martinez, an El Salvadoran here illegally, was charged with carjacking a grandmother in Virginia, then running her over and killing her. ICE has put a detainer on him, meaning they want local authorities to tell them when he’s being released so they can arrest him. But many sanctuary jurisdictions ignore such requests and send these offenders back out on to the streets, despite their being clear, preventable dangers to their own citizens.
Prizing the imaginary rights of UNJIPs to remain in the U.S. over the actual rights of Americans to be safe in their own hometowns makes no sense.
I’m saddened, but not surprised, to see Princeton put ideology ahead of public safety, as do so many leftist-run towns, cities, and states. But instead of rushing to coddle and protect illegal immigrants from the due process that would apply to any American, they should help ICE do the hard work of interior enforcement—or at the very least stop vilifying them for doing their jobs.
Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ordered Iran to strike Israel directly in retaliation for the killing in Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, sources told The New York Times. Haniyeh was assassinated in the Iranian capital Tehran early on Wednesday morning, an attack that drew threats of revenge on Israel and fueled further concern that the conflict in Gaza was turning into a wider Middle East war.
The Palestinian Islamist militant group and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards confirmed Haniyeh’s death. The Guards said it took place hours after he attended a swearing-in ceremony for Iran’s new president. Although the strike on Haniyeh was widely assumed to have been carried out by Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government made no claim of responsibility and said it would make no comment on the killing.
Haniyeh was killed by a missile that hit him “directly” in a state guesthouse where he was staying, Khalil Al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, told a news conference in Tehran, quoting witnesses who were with Haniyeh. “Now we are waiting for the full investigation from the (Iranian) brothers,” Al-Hayya said. Haniyeh, normally based in Qatar, had been the face of Hamas’ international diplomacy as the war set off by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 has raged in Gaza. He had been taking part in internationally-brokered indirect talks on reaching a cease-fire in the Palestinian enclave.
The assassination occurred less than 24 hours after Israel claimed to have killed Hezbollah’s most senior military commander in the Lebanese capital Beirut in retaliation for a deadly rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Two Lebanese security sources said on Wednesday that the body of Hezbollah operations chief Fuad Shukr had been found in the rubble of a building hit by an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Netanyahu made no mention of Haniyeh’s killing in a televised statement on Wednesday evening but said Israel had delivered crushing blows to Iran’s proxies of late, including Hamas and Hezbollah, and would respond forcefully to any attack.
“Citizens of Israel, challenging days lie ahead. Since the strike in Beirut there are threats sounding from all directions. We are prepared for any scenario, and we will stand united and determined against any threat. Israel will exact a heavy price for any aggression against us from any arena,” he said.
The latest events appear to set back chances of any imminent cease-fire agreement in the nearly 10-month-old war in Gaza between Israel and the Iran-backed Hamas. Hamas’ armed wing said in a statement Haniyeh’s killing would “take the battle to new dimensions and have major repercussions.” Vowing to retaliate, Iran declared three days of national mourning and said the U.S. bore responsibility because of its support for Israel.
ISRAEL INVITES ‘HARSH PUNISHMENT,’ KHAMENEI SAYS
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Israel had provided the grounds for “harsh punishment for itself” and it was Tehran’s duty to avenge Haniyeh’s death. Iranian forces have already made strikes directly on Israel earlier in the Gaza war.
Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer told a briefing with journalists that Israel was committed to Gaza cease-fire negotiations and securing the release of Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militants in Gaza. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, at an event in Singapore, sidestepped a question on Haniyeh’s killing, saying a cease-fire deal in Gaza was key to avoiding wider regional escalation. He told Channel News Asia that the U.S. had neither been aware of nor involved in the killing.
Qatar, which has been brokering talks aimed at halting the fighting in Gaza along with Egypt, condemned Haniyeh’s killing as a dangerous escalation of the conflict.
“Political assassinations and continued targeting of civilians in Gaza while talks continue leads us to ask, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on other side?” Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said on X.
Egypt said Haniyeh’s assassination showed a lack of political will on Israel’s part to calm tensions.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the killing and Palestinian factions in the Israeli-occupied West Bank called for a strike and mass demonstrations.
In Israel, the mood was buoyant as Israelis welcomed what they saw as a major achievement in the war against Hamas. Residents in besieged Gaza feared Haniyeh’s death would prolong the fighting that has devastated the enclave.
“This news is scary. We feel that he was like a father to us,” said Gaza resident Hachem Al-Saati.
MESHAAL IS LIKELY SUCCESSOR TO HANIYEH
Haniyeh’s most likely successor is Khaled Meshaal, his deputy-in-exile who lives in Qatar, analysts and Hamas officials said. Under Meshaal, Hamas emerged as an ever more important player in the Middle East conflict due to his charisma, popularity and regional standing, analysts said. Meshaal narrowly survived an attempt on his life in Jordan ordered by Netanyahu in 1997.
Appointed to the top Hamas job in 2017, Haniyeh moved between Turkey and Qatar’s capital Doha, escaping the travel curbs of the blockaded Gaza Strip and enabling him to act as a negotiator in the truce talks or to talk to Hamas’ ally Iran. Three of his sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike in April.
His deputy Saleh Al-Arouri was killed in January by Israel, leaving Yehya Al-Sinwar, the Hamas chief in Gaza and the architect of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and Zaher Jabarin, the head of the group in the West Bank, in place but in hiding.
That assault by Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israeli communities and some 250 people were taken to Gaza as hostages, Israeli tallies say.
In response, Israel launched a ground and air offensive in the coastal enclave that has killed more than 39,400 people, according to Gaza health officials, and left more than 2 million facing a humanitarian crisis.
No end appears to be in sight for Israel’s campaign there as the cease-fire talks falter.
Athletes compete in the 5,000-meter final during the Oregon Relays at Hayward Field on April 23, 2021 in Eugene, Oregon. | Getty Images/Steph Chambers
A federal judge in Kansas temporarily blocked the U.S. Department of Education’s Title IX rule change in several states that would’ve expanded the education civil rights law’s definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
U.S. District Judge John Broomes issued a ruling Tuesday in response to a lawsuit brought by Southeastern Legal Foundation and Mountain States Legal Foundation on behalf of their clients, Moms for Liberty and Young America’s Foundation. The ruling applies to Alaska, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming and a middle school in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
The Trump-appointed judge reasoned that Title IX’s definition of the word “sex” clearly means the “traditional concept of biological sex in which there are only two sexes, male and female.”
Earlier this year, the Department of Education announced new Title IX regulations, slated to go into effect in August. The expansion of the definition of “sex” to include gender identity and sexual orientation prompted several states to sue, fearing the new rule could deprive women of equal opportunities in sports and privacy in bathrooms.
Broomes wrote that “legislative history” surrounding the 1972 civil rights law makes it clear that “sex” meant biological sex, not gender identity and sexual orientation. He added that Title IX prohibits discrimination that awards preferential treatment to one sex over the other but doesn’t prohibit differential treatment in the form of “sex separation” or “sex-specific benefits,” so long as one gender is not treated as inferior to the other.
“The Final Rule would, among other things, require schools to subordinate the fears, concerns, and privacy interests of biological women to the desires of transgender biological men to shower, dress, and share restroom facilities with their female peers,” Broomes wrote.“Moreover, to expand sex discrimination to encompass ‘self-professed and potentially ever-changing gender identity is inconsistent with Title IX’s sex-separation dictates.'”
Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, co-founders of the conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty, celebrated the ruling, declaring, “Gender ideology does not belong in public schools, and we are glad the courts made the correct call to support parental rights.”
“We will always stand up for the rights of parents and the protection of children. All parents must have their voices heard and their right to raise their own children is part of the very fabric of a free America,” the co-founders added. “The federal government has no right to claim our children as their own or to push parents out of the classroom.”
Broomes is not the only federal judge who has blocked the Biden administration’s Title IX rule change. U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves in Kentucky, a George W. Bush appointee, temporarily halted the new regulation in a separate ruling last month.
Reeves’ ruling temporarily blocked the Title IX rule change in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. The decision came about not long after another federal judge in Louisiana, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, temporarily blocked the rule from taking effect in Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi and Montana.
In his ruling, Reeves argued that Title IX’s purpose was to “level the playing field” between men and women in education. The federal judge asserted that the Department of Education’s rule change was an attempt to “derail deeply rooted law.”
“At bottom, the department would turn Title IX on its head by redefining ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity,'” he said. “But ‘sex’ and ‘gender identity’ do not mean the same thing. The department’s interpretation conflicts with the plain language of Title IX and therefore exceeds its authority to promulgate regulations under that statute.”
President Joe Biden walks from the White House to Marine One on March 19, 2021, on his way to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Newly released documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal early evidence and analysis four years ago in which U.S. government officials indicated that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China. These findings in the CDC documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, dating from about six months after the disease’s initial outbreak, are coming to light only now because of the government’s repeated delays in releasing relevant documents through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In addition, federal employees’ use of encrypted private messaging applications such as Signal or WhatsApp to evade records-retention requirements under the Federal Records Act has become commonplace in the federal workplace, despite clear violations (as we will see below).
To date, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, in that post since January 2021, has released minimal documentation under the COVID-19 Origin Act, which President Joe Biden, who appointed her, signed into law in March 2023. The new law requires Haines as director of national intelligence to declassify information about links between COVID-19 and China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology within 90 days of its enactment.
But Haines apparently didn’t make sure such documents were provided to Congress.
Avril Haines is sworn in Jan. 19, 2021, at the beginning of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee as Joe Biden’s pick for national intelligence director. Biden took office the next day. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Heritage’s Oversight Project obtained 1,066 pages of related documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, through the Freedom of Information Act. The intelligence community’s official assessment of the origin of COVID-19, as of June 2023, states that it can’t be determined: “The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19.”
However, the documents released to Heritage’s Oversight Project include a presentation labeled “Overview of COVID-19 Disease” by Dr. John T. Brooks, who was chief medical officer for the CDC’s emergency COVID-19 response, according to his LinkedIn profile. In his presentation, Brooks repeatedly emphasizes the early analysis that the disease originated in Wuhan. According to the documents (page 386), as of May 8, 2020, Brooks was chief of science under the principal deputy incident manager for the government’s COVID-19 Response Organizational Chart.
A slide excerpt from a June 2020 presentation by the CDC’s John T. Brooks entitled “Overview on COVID-19 Disease.” Note the word “Wuhan” in red to the left of the notation SARS-CoV-2.
One document released under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, includes the above slide presentation. It shows that in data files for a COVID-19 sample analysis, staff used the word “Wuhan” in red letters (in the so-called file paths of a phylogenetic analysis depicting patterns and similarities of DNA sequences).
One source in a position to know, who asked to remain anonymous, told Heritage’s Oversight Project that a sole-sourced, unevaluated intelligence report (meaning one without other sources and intelligence collaboration) floated around the intelligence community in late summer 2020. That report specified that the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, site of the Chinese research lab called the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is no evidence that the U.S. government’s underlying raw intelligence on the origin of the coronavirus was shared with congressional committees or declassified under the COVID-19 Origin Act.
Recent releases of documents to Heritage’s Oversight Project—through the State Department and under the Freedom of Information Act—highlight the tenuous timeline of what email traffic in 2020 labeled as an “Updated timeline of PRC coverup (April 28).” (The acronym PRC refers to the People’s Republic of China, the full name of the communist nation.) This email traffic, primarily sent to State Department principals along with several inspectors general and White House officials, detailed what it called the suppression and destruction of evidence: E.g. virus samples destroyed at genomics labs, wildlife market stalls bleached, genome sequence not shared publicly, Shanghai lab closed for ‘rectification’ after sharing genome on its own, academic articles subjected to prior review by the [Chinese] Ministry of Science and Technology, data on asymptomatic ‘silent carriers’ kept secret …
An excerpt from a State Department document details China’s suppression of data on COVID-19.
This situation, in which Congress is falling behind in gaining timely access to information from the Biden administration, highlights the inherent imbalance between the two branches of government. A significant lag of years occurred before the executive branch provided relevant information to the legislative branch.
Jamie Metzl, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, testified March 8, 2023, about China’s record on COVID-19 before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
“Since the early days of the pandemic,” Metzl told lawmakers, “China’s government has destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned brave Chinese journalists, prevented Chinese scientists from saying or writing anything on pandemic origins without prior government approval, actively spread misinformation, and done pretty much everything possible to prevent the kind of unfettered, evidence-based investigation that is so urgently required.”
A slide excerpt from Brooks’ CDC presentation in June 2020 entitled “Overview on COVID-19 Disease.”
Slides released under the Oversight Project’s FOIA request detail strong links to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan in early January of 2020, as well as the concentration of COVID-19 cases in early January 2020. Four months into his presidency, on May 26, 2021, Biden announced further investigation into the origins of COVID-19, instructing Haines and the rest of the intelligence community to “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion.”
The Biden administration previously had sought to avoid directly linking COVID-19 to China or other geographic locations. The administration labeled terms such as “Wuhan Flu” as “inflammatory and xenophobic rhetoric” in presidential actions during the government’s continuing response to the disease.
The COVID-19 Origin Act, the bipartisan bill signed by Biden in March 2023, tasked Haines’ Office of the Director of National Intelligence with declassifying information on the origins of the deadly disease.
This slide excerpt specifies COVID-19 cases in China, as of Jan. 20, 2020, from Brooks’ CDC presentation about six months later.
However, with Democrats in control, it took over three years for Congress to conduct oversight investigations into the origins of COVID-19 by establishing the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The panel was created in early 2023, after the new Republican majority in the House took over from Democrats.
It also took over three years for Congress to resume its oversight of gain-of-function research conducted on coronaviruses in China through grants made by the National Institutes of Health, a U.S. government agency, to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit. Such research produces a stronger version of a virus.
This slide excerpt, also from the CDC presentation in June 2020, depicts COVID-19 cases in and outside China.
The revelation that documents on COVID-19 weren’t provided to Congress comes on the heels of disclosures that David Morens, a senior adviser to Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, intentionally sought to avoid disclosure of government records under the Freedom of Information Act. (Morens also was a senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the public face of the government’s response to COVID-19.)
In letters to the National Archives and NIH regarding records retention guidelines and adherence to the Federal Records Act, the House pandemic subcommittee disclosed that Morens deleted emails and used special characters and misspellings to avoid text matches in records requests. Fauci’s adviser also used private emails to facilitate the destruction and withholding of federal records from oversight through records retention or FOIA requests.
To date, Congress has taken little to no action to curb Morens and other federal employees in the programmatic evasion of federal guidelines on retaining records.
In the information age, with an exponential increase each year in records created by the U.S. government’s executive branch coupled with intentional destruction of records, oversight by Congress consistently has failed to obtain documents from the executive branch in a timely and meaningful manner. Blatant violations of the Federal Records Act have become so extreme that some federal employees openly have included Signal and other encrypted messaging applications in parentheses in their email signature blocks, next to cell phone numbers, without fear of penalty or congressional oversight.
Congress should reaffirm its right to quickly access data and information, including classified information, from the executive branch via congressional inquiries and subpoenas. Without this ability, we risk that oversight by Congress will be delayed for years, undermining the purpose of oversight and potentially rendering it ineffective.
Free speech may have taken a beating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling giving Big Government and Big Tech free rein over the First Amendment, but an attorney for the private plaintiffs in the case says the battle is far from over.
NCLA represents the private plaintiffs in the ruling that saw a 6-3 majority in Murthy v. Missouri reverse a lower court’s injunction that blocked the federal government from partnering with social media giants to silence posts it doesn’t like. As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood wrote, the decision — based on an absurd standing argument — effectively frees the Biden administration to continue its censoring operations during the 2024 election.
“The Supreme Court majority has practically erased the First Amendment and permitted government to co-opt private entities, like social media platforms, to accomplish its censorship aims,” NCLA said in a press release following the ruling.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the plaintiffs failed to establish standing because they did not “demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek.”
“Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction,” the decision opines.
‘Truth Can Get You Fired’
But if the past is truly an indicator of the future, it’s difficult to reconcile the standing argument with the speech suppression that occurred, particularly against those who rightly questioned the government’s Covid policies and voiced legitimate concerns over Covid vaccines.
NCLA’s clients, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines, were all censored for daring to challenge the government’s “disinformation” campaign on the pandemic. It cost Kulldorff his job as a respected professor at Harvard.
“I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story — a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic,” he wrote earlier this year in a column for City Journal. Kulldorff had questioned the lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
"Scientific institutions have enjoyed enormous prestige among the public. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the dreadful performance of the experts and institutions, ended this idyll. – @mgurrihttps://t.co/3KcnfTq0Gj
No one was hurt by the government? The majority opinion asserts that while the Big Tech speech suppressors did have content moderation policies and may have been censoring users, the plaintiffs provided no documentation showing the government coerced the social media giants to do so. As censor-in-chief Joe Biden would say, that’s malarkey.
Younes said the ruling is rooted in some “factual errors” by the majority. The Louisiana District Court Judge who on July 4, 2023, issued the injunction against the government said the executive branch“seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty conducted a thorough review of voluminous records showing dozens of agencies communicating with Big Tech companies, according to Younes.
“[There were] probably close to 100 federal officials that we know of who were colluding with, coercing, pressuring, influencing the companies to effectuate their censorship desires,” the attorney said, adding that the justices in the majority appear to have “read the government’s brief and just believed everything they said.”
In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito warned that the government’s conduct was “blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”
“Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.”
Difficult but Not Impossible
While the high court remanded the case to the lower court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” Younes said expanded discovery might just stop the overreaching government yet. NCLA plans to go after government and Big Tech communications involving its clients to show the direct harm caused, as demanded in the majority’s standing argument.
“The district court has shown that it believes in our case and … said this is arguably the most massive attack on free speech in the history of the United States, which I agree with,” Younes said. “The federal government was censoring entire narratives, entire lines of thought. If you questioned the efficacy of the vaccines in 2021, even if you were a vaccine expert like our client, Martin Kulldorff, you would be censored on social media, as he was.”
The case may also get an assist from a presidential candidate. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now running as an independent, had sought to intervene in the Supreme Court case but was turned back by the majority. If anyone knows censorship, it’s RFK Jr., who was blocked from social media as part of what the government and corporate media have described as the “Disinformation Dozen” for challenging the government’s faulty narrative on Covid vaccines. Kennedy has lots of emails showing the Biden administration trying to silence his speech.
As government water carrier USA Today reported, one email shows the Biden administration pouncing after Kennedy suggested baseball legend Hank Aaron’s death may have been caused by his Covid-19 vaccine.
“Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” the digital director for the White House’s Covid response team wrote in an email to an official at Twitter, the publication reported.
Alito also dissented in the court’s rejection of Kennedy’s motion to join the lawsuit, suggesting standing could be a problem and RFK Jr. could help take away that argument.
“[The Supreme Court is] making it very difficult to bring the case, but they’re not making it impossible,” Younes said.
If the Supreme Court won’t stand up to assaults on the First Amendment, Congress must, said plaintiff Jill Hines, NCLA client and co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana.
“After reviewing the shocking and incriminating evidence indicating a massive government censorship scheme, the Justices erroneously determined to allow the government access to social media companies for the purpose of undermining free speech,” she said in the press release. “Congress must act immediately to defund agencies and third parties actively involved in this broadly pervasive and unconstitutional censorship scheme.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told CNN that the group doesn’t know how many Israeli hostages are still alive. During the interview, filmed in Lebanon, Hamdan was asked about the hostages. “How many of those 120 are still alive?” Hamdan was asked.
“I don’t have any idea about that,” he said. “No one has any idea about this.”
Hamdan, a member of Hamas’ politburo, is based in Lebanon but maintains contact with Hamas leadership in Gaza. He spoke about the hostage release cease-fire deal, which has seen little progress since U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled the proposal last month. The Biden administration has pointed at Hamas for being a significant barrier to achieving the deal.
Speaking to reporters at the G7 summit, Biden said: “I’ve laid out an approach that has been endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, by the G7, by the Israelis, and the biggest hang-up so far is Hamas refusing to sign on even though they have submitted something similar.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday claimed Hamas had not accepted the deal, but presented “numerous changes” that went beyond the group’s previous demands.
“Hamas proposed numerous changes to the proposal that was on the table. Some of the changes are workable and some are not,” Blinken said. “As a result, the war will go on and more people will suffer.
“It’s time for the haggling to stop and the cease-fire to start. Israel accepted the proposal as it is, Hamas didn’t. It is clear what needs to happen.”
Hamdan said Israel’s position regarding the cease-fire length is unacceptable to Hamas.
“The Israelis want the cease-fire only for six weeks and then they want to go back to the fight,” Hamdan said, adding that the U.S. “did not convince the Israelis to accept” a permanent cease-fire.
In the interview, Hamdan repeatedly deflected any Hamas responsibility for the war in Gaza or the state of the hostages. Hamdan referred to the “Al-Aqsa Flood” (Hamas’ name for the Oct. 7 invasion and terror attack) as “a reaction against the occupation.”
Asked about recent messages published by The Wall Street Journal, allegedly leaked from Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and stating his determination to continue fighting, Hamdan dismissed them as fake.
“It was fake messages done by someone who is not Palestinian and was sent (to the) Wall Street Journal as part of the pressure against Hamas and provoking the people against the leader,” Hamdan claimed, without providing evidence.
Hamdan also blamed Israel for the mistreatment of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Responding to the testimony of an Israeli doctor who said the hostages had suffered mental and physical abuse, Hamdan claimed, “I believe if they have a mental problem, this is because of what Israel has done in Gaza.”
The Biden administration allocates $900 million to buy “green” school buses in 47 states as the nation’s students struggle academically. Pictured: A banner suggesting school buses don’t need gasoline or other fossil fuels stretches across West 53rd Street as climate activists march Sept. 17 in New York City. (Photo: John B Senter III/UCG/Universal Images Group/ Getty Images)
The Biden administration will hand out $900 million to pay for “green” school buses, as the nation’s public-school students continue to perform poorly in the aggregate.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced the recipients of the funding for school buses designed to fight climate change, with schools in 47 states receiving money for the vehicles
The spending comes as American public-school students continue to struggle to make up for learning disruptions caused by COVID-19 lockdown policies. A 2022 review by the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 31% of eighth grade students met or exceeded grade-level proficiency in reading, a decrease from 2019.
“President Biden believes every child deserves the opportunity to lead a healthy life and breathe clean air, and his Investing in America agenda is designed to deliver just that,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said of the funding for climate-friendly buses. “With today’s latest round of funding, we are transforming the nation’s school bus fleet to better protect our most precious cargo—our kids—saving school districts money, improving air quality, and bolstering American manufacturing all at the same time.”
Kamala Harris on her favorite parts of the Inflation Reduction Act:
"I have a particular fondness, I must tell you, for electric school buses. I love electric school buses." pic.twitter.com/1Ta71U1qnP
The push for green school buses is part of the Biden administration’s broader, $1 trillion-plus climate agenda, which seeks to slash emissions in nearly every facet of American life. Educational outcomes for American students have generally tanked since the pandemic, when some Democrats and teachers unions pushed for prolonged school closures and remote learning. Some of the nation’s struggling school districts were among the awardees announced Wednesday by the EPA.
Just outside the nation’s capital in Maryland, Prince George’s County Public Schools received over $5 million to acquire over 15 green buses, according to the EPA. Only 21% of third graders in the Prince George’s County school system were proficient in math in 2023; less than 10% of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students were proficient in math last year, according to The Washington Post.
In Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia City School District is set to receive more than $8.5 million to buy green school buses, according to the EPA. Philadelphia’s public-school students are also struggling academically, with only 15% of middle school students and 43% of high school students scoring as proficient in math while 24% of middle schoolers and 41% of high school students scoring as proficient in reading, according to U.S. News & World Report.
The Environmental Protection Agency also awarded over $8.5 million to the public school system in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to purchase at least 25 green buses for students. At Bridgeport’s schools, less than 16% of students met the state’s standards in reading and less than 7% in math during the 2022-2023 school year, according to CTPost.
The EPA and the White House did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Biden continues his threat of withholding weapons to Israel in light of his recent poll numbers sinking. Israel seems resolute in its effort to rid Hamas since they slaughtered 1700 of their innocent civilians on October 7th. Biden stated that his support for Israel is unshakable, but the latest polls appear to have shaken that unshakable support.
Why is Biden throwing Israel under the bus?
By Kelly McCarthy – May 15, 2024
Despite the traditional support from American Jewish voters for his party, and despite the US’s long-standing friendly relationship with the only democracy in the Middle East, Joe Biden – or whomever is operating him – has reneged on the billion dollar promise to send assistance to Israel. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco Cartoon – The campus protesters are being organized by leftist organizations bent on destroying the Western way of life. Platforms like TikTok and college professors are a huge part of the brainwashing going on with our youth. Imagine being thought to hate the most free and prosperous country on earth while trying to change it into a tyrannical banana republic Sh*t-hole.
Radical Protest Leader Linked to the Anti-Israel Campus Demonstrations Traveled to Communist Cuba for “Resistance Training”
By Jim Hoft – May 15, 2024
We are witnessing the unification of the radical Islamic and Marxist movement in America. A recent investigation into the highly organized nationwide campus protests across America found that several leaders of the anti-Israel movement traveled to communist Cuba for “resistance training.” The anti-Israel protesters were associated with Black Lives Matter activists who allegedly provided training techniques to the Jew-hating mobs who set up camps on numerous American college campuses. Investigators say BLM leader Manolo De Los Santos is tied to the movement. Manolo De Los Santos hails Hamas’ terror attacks as “heroic,” and calls for the destruction of Israel. 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.
The news keeps getting worse for Democrats. And it’s a pattern they’d better get use to.
Trump mooned Democrats in New York City. It’s only a matter of time before he’s done with these kangaroo courts. But while Democrats attempt election interference, Trump gets stronger with each hit.
Each attempt to get Trump acts as a reminder of the good ol’ days of the Trump administration. The Dow gave back most of its profits over just a few days. This dramatic drop came on the heels of the latest inflation numbers. Apparently, inflation isn’t going down, but instead continues going up.
Just in time for the holiday season, huh?
Back in 2016, Trump explained the situation with illegals. And post-coup, Trump explained that immigration would metastasize, and that’s exactly what happened. Biden fathered an invasion.
Share of Americans who say they support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants
Survey of 6,251 adults taken March through April 2024
A purple bar chart showing the share of U.S. adults who support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, by Race/ethnicity, political affiliation and generation. The data was collected from a survey of 6,251 U.S adults March through April 2024. It shows that 51% of the general public supports this policy. The highest support was Republicans at 68%, and the lowest was Black respondents at 40%. Notably, support decreases with younger generations, with 60% of Boomers or older in favor, compared to 48% of Millennials.
General public 51%
Race/ethnicity
White 56
Latino 45
Black 40
Political affiliation
Republican 68
Independent 46
Democrat 42
Generation
Boomer+ 60
Gen X 53
Millennial 48
Gen Z 35
Data: The Harris Poll; Chart: Axios Visuals
Half of Americans — including 42% of Democrats — say they’d support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a new Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll.
And 30% of Democrats — as well as 46% of Republicans — now say they’d end birthright citizenship, something guaranteed under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
These items are gaining steam due to Trump’s bold stance on immigration. And what balls it takes for him to announce that he would implement mass deportations.
Don’t be surprised to see all these numbers improve as the election nears. Then, when Trump gets back in office, he will no longer allow the propaganda to propagate.
Why it matters: Americans are open to former President Trump’s harshest immigration plans, spurred on by a record surge of illegal border crossings and a relentless messaging war waged by Republicans.
President Biden is keenly aware the crisis threatens his re-election. He’s sought to flip the script by accusing Trump of sabotaging Congress’ most conservative bipartisan immigration bill in decades.
But when it comes to blame, Biden so far has failed to shift the narrative: 32% of respondents say his administration is “most responsible” for the crisis, outranking any other political or structural factor.
Axios Vibe Check: Amid a record number of border crossings, nearly two-thirds of Americans said illegal immigration is a real crisis, not a politically driven media narrative.
What they’re saying: “I was surprised at the public support for large-scale deportations,” said Mark Penn, chairman of The Harris Poll and a former pollster for President Clinton.
“I think they’re just sending a message to politicians: ‘Get this under control,’ ” he said, calling it a warning to Biden that “efforts to shift responsibility for the issue to Trump are not going to work.”
Ouch. There simply is no way to spin this. And Trump doesn’t back down:
Zoom in: Trump has vowed to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” eyeing sweeping raids and detention camps in a plan that would target millions of undocumented immigrants.
Americans typically aren’t eager to deport immigrants who have put down roots in the U.S. But the poll of 6,251 U.S. adults suggests that the dynamic may be changing amid rising fears about crime and violence.
When asked to identify their greatest concern around illegal immigration, Americans most frequently cited:
Increased crime rates, drugs, and violence (21%).
The additional costs to taxpayers (18%).
Risk of terrorism and national security (17%).
The Left claims this data is wrong. However, these are the same people claiming that crime is dropping, while they omit data from the largest crime areas in the country.
Argentinian gang members beat up New York City cops and Democrats say ignore it. They released the guys almost immediately, too.
America is waking up, and Trump is the best alarm clock ever.
Anti-Israel protesters routinely spout untruths about Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre and its aftermath. Here are 10 of the most common. Pictured: An Israeli soldier prays Tuesday next to an army vehicle near Israel’s border with the southern Gaza Strip, where Israel Defense Forces seek to root out Hamas terrorists. (Photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images)
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
Scan news accounts of anti-Israel campus and street protesters. Read their demands and manifestos. Collate the confusion from the Biden administration after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorism in Israel.
Here are 10 of their most common untruths about Oct. 7 and the Israel-Hamas war that followed.
‘Progressive Hamas’
Gay and transgender student protesters in America would be in mortal danger in Gaza under a fascistic Hamas, a terrorist organization that has banned homosexual acts and lifestyles. Anyone protesting publicly against Hamas or its allies would be arrested and severely punished.
Women are segregated in most Hamas-run educational institutions. Under the Hamas charter, women are valued mostly as child-bearers. By design, there are almost no women in high positions in business or in government under Hamas.
‘Colonists and settlers’
Students scream that Israelis are “settlers” and “colonists” and sometimes yell at Jewish students to “go back to Poland.”
But the Jewish presence in present-day Israel is deeply rooted in ancient tradition. Dating back at least three millennia, the concept of “Israel” as a distinct Jewish state, situated roughly in its current location, is ingrained in history.
By contrast, the much later Arab invasions of the Byzantine-controlled Levant and their arrival in Palestine occurred about 1,800 years after the establishment of a Jewish Israel.
‘Two-state solution’
When student protesters scream “From the river to the sea,” that is not advocacy for a two-state solution.
It is a call to eliminate the state of Israel—lying between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—and its 10 million Jewish and Arab citizens. The Hamas charter is a one-state/no-Israel agenda, which we saw attempted on Oct. 7.
‘Occupied Gaza’
The Gaza Strip, adjacent Israel, was autonomous. The Israeli border is closed, but so is the Egyptian border. There have not been any Jews in Gaza for nearly two decades.
So on Oct. 7, Gaza was not occupied by Israel. It was under the control of Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.
After being elected to power in 2006, Hamas canceled all subsequent elections and ruled as a dictatorship. Gaza forbids Jews from entering Gaza and has driven out most Christians.
Israel hosts 2 million Arabs, both as Israeli citizens and residents.
‘Netanyahu is the problem’
The U.S. and Europe claim that the conservative government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is alone behind Israel’s tough response in Gaza to the Oct. 7 attacks. Thus, both the E.U. and the U.S. are doing their best to undermine or even overthrow the elected Netanyahu administration.
Yet, most Israelis support Netanyahu’s coalition government’s agenda of destroying Hamas in Gaza.
There is no evidence that any other alternative Israeli government would do anything differently from the present policies toward Hamas.
‘Targeting civilians’
After murdering nearly 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, Hamas scurried back to Gaza and hid in tunnels and bases beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Its preplanned strategy was to survive by ensuring Gaza civilians would be killed. Hamas has indiscriminately launched more than 7,000 rockets at Israel, all designed to kill Jewish civilians.
Outside assessors have concluded that Israel has not inadvertently killed a greater ratio of civilians to terrorists compared to most other urban fighting conflicts elsewhere, and perhaps even fewer than American engagements in Mosul and Fallujah.
‘Protesters are pro-Palestine’
Increasingly, protesters make no distinction between supporting “Palestine” and Hamas.
Their chants often echo the original Hamas eliminationist charter and recent genocidal ravings of its leadership.
Some protesters wear Hamas logos and wave the terrorist organization’s flag. Many cheered the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7.
‘Anti-Israel is not antisemitic’
When protesters scream to Jewish students to “go back to Poland” or call for the “Final Solution,” or assault them or bar them from campus facilities, they do not ask the Jewish students whether they are pro-Israel.
For protesters, anyone identifiable as Jewish becomes a target of their antisemitic invective and violence.
‘Genocide’
Israel has not tried to wipe out the Palestinian people in the fashion of Hamas’ one-state solution plan for Jews.
Before Oct. 7, some 20,000 Gazans a day requested to work in Israel—on the correct expectation of much higher wages and humane treatment.
If Hamas had come out of its tunnels, separated from its impressed civilian shields, released its surviving Israeli hostages, and either openly fought the Israel Defense Forces or surrendered the organizers of the Oct. 7 massacre, no Gaza civilians would have died.
According to Hamas’ questionable “genocide” figures, roughly 4% of the Gazan population died during the Israeli military response to Oct. 7. At least a third to almost half of those deaths, according to various international observers, were Hamas terrorists.
‘Disproportionate response’
Iran tried to send 320 missiles and rockets into Israel. Israel replied with three.
Hamas launched 7,000 rockets into Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Israelis before the Israel Defense Forces responded in Gaza, often dropping leaflets and sending texts to forewarn citizens.
Israel has been disproportionate only in the effectiveness of its response. Hamas and its Iranian benefactor intended disproportionately to hurt Israel, but utterly failed.
So, Israel proved to be competent and Hamas incompetent in their similar efforts to use disproportionate force.
The Biden administration’s Department of Education unveiled a sweeping set of rules on Friday that effectively erase protections for sex-based spaces by expanding the Title IX prohibition against sex discrimination to include “gender identity” — a term that’s never mentioned in the original law.
A majority of Americans agree that males who claim to identify otherwise should not be allowed to infiltrate girls’ and women’s sports teams. As of now, some 25 states have laws or regulations aimed at keeping boys and men out of female-only spaces, on and off the field. Yet, come Aug. 1, the Democrat regime’s radial redefinition of “sex-based discrimination” poses a threat to sex-based protections and welcomes males into female spaces including athletic competitions, locker rooms, and sex-specific clubs such as sororities, despite state laws.
“The final regulations will help to ensure that all students receive appropriate support when they experience sex discrimination and that recipients’ procedures for investigating and resolving complaints of sex discrimination are fair to all involved,” the rules claim.
The regulations do even more damage, however, such as by undoing Trump-era due process safeguards for those accused of sexual misconduct, which could include merely using accurate pronouns. They also encroach on parents’ rights and threaten academic free speech by incentivizing schools to censor students and teachers with traditional views on sex and marriage, so they don’t lose federal funding.
In the regulations, the Biden administration openly admits it relied on the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision to inform its rulemaking. In that case, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined their Democrat-nominated colleagues to expand the prohibition against employment discrimination based on “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
A draft of the rules released in June 2022 received a “record number” of comments from Americans warning that enacting such extensive provisions and redefining terms like “sexual harassment” would bully schools into mandating the spread of radical gender ideology.
In response to Biden’s Department of Education ignoring some 240,000 comments, “a coalition of organizations” including the Independent Women’s Forum andIndependent Women’s Law Center are suing the administration, according to an IWF press release. In 2022 and 2023, those groups sentlegal and policyobjections to the new rule.
“Title IX was designed to give women equal opportunities in academic settings. It forbids discrimination on the basis of ‘sex,’ which it affirms throughout the statute is binary and biological. The unlawful Omnibus Regulation re-imagines Title IX to permit the invasion of women’s spaces and the reduction of women’s rights in the name of elevating protections for ‘gender identity,’ which is contrary to the text and purpose of Title IX,” Director of Independent Women’s Law Center May Mailman said, noting the rules are illegal.
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.
Americans filling their tanks up at a gas station in Alexandria, Virginia, reacted to gas prices rising over 50% since January 2021, when President Biden took office. Rising gas prices under President Biden’s watch have led some Americans to face “painful” and “ridiculous” receipts at the pump, drivers at a Virginia gas station told Fox News.
“There’s no saving,” Donovan said, adding that the cost is “killing” his bottom line. “Gas price has to go back down in order for everybody to really maintain.”
“Paychecks are not rising,” the Virginian said. “It takes about two or three checks to cover all the bills instead of just one.”
Americans filling their tanks up at a gas station in Alexandria, Virginia, reacted to gas prices rising over 50% since January 2021, when President Biden took office.
But one Virginia woman said she’s used to the high costs.
“I don’t really feel it honestly,” she said. “Obviously, nobody wants to pay so much for it, but we need it.”
On Wednesday, gas prices were over 50% higher than when Biden was inaugurated, according to AAA. The national average for a gallon of gas was nearly $3.62, up from $2.39 on Jan. 20, 2021, when the president was sworn in.
Gas prices were 50% higher on Wednesday compared to when Biden took office in January 2021, according to AAA. (Fox News Digital/Megan Myers / Fox News)
“That’s more money out of the pocket that I can be spending on groceries and other everyday items that I need,” Davis, of Washington, D.C., said. “You definitely feel it.”
A Florida man said he can afford the price surges but knows many families are struggling. The cost of filling up his Chevrolet Suburban “drives me absolutely insane,” he added.
“I do fairly well in business, and I just feel for all the people who are trying to make ends meet,” he said. “I can make it work, though it’s painful, but I don’t know how the young family of four gets along. Not just with this inflation, but with all inflation.”
Inflation has cooled from a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022, but has remained persistent, with prices climbing 3.5% year-over-year in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national average for a gallon of gas has also dropped from its June 2022 peak when it surpassed $5, but that’s been rising steadily since March, according to AAA.
On March 11, the White House said “costs have fallen for everyday purchases from a gallon of gas to a gallon of milk,” but several Americans told Fox News they hadn’t noticed lower prices.
Americans at a Virginia gas station reacted to gas prices’ steady increase. Many drivers still felt the pain at the pump, but a few said they were used to the high costs since the COVID-19 pandemic. (Fox News Digital/Megan Myers / Fox News)
“Prices are still super high,” Donovan said. “It hasn’t gone down. They’re just trying to pull wool over the eyes.”
One Virginia woman said she hasn’t felt the pain at the pump as much, but her grocery bills are “ridiculous.”
The cost of several everyday items has dropped from recent peaks, though some are still higher than when Biden entered office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In March, the average gallon of milk, for example, was $3.89, 43 cents higher than in January 2021. The price of eggs was up to nearly $3, an increase of more than $1.50.
Davis, of Washington, D.C., fills up his gas tank at a Virginia gas station. He said he feels the rising prices at the pump. (Fox News Digital/Megan Myers / Fox News)
David, a lifelong Washingtonian, said gas prices and other surging costs are “ridiculous.” He hopes the 2024 election will bring out a candidate willing to work for the people and lower skyrocketing prices.
“We have to do something,” David said. “There’s more people who are in the shelters, in the streets, because they can’t afford it.”
“Everybody who’s come in the White House has some accountability,” he said. “I’m praying that things will turn around as we go into a new season of who’s in the seat of power in the nation’s capital.”
The White House did not immediately provide comment.
Why are those controlling President Biden using him to advance so much of a destructive agenda that it will likely end America as we know it?
If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day?
What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves?
Here are 11 now familiar steps to civilizational destruction:
1. Wipe out a 2,000-mile border.
Allow 10 million foreign nationals to enter unlawfully. Have no audit of any; nullify all federal immigration laws. Let in toxic drugs that kill 100,000 Americans a year. Give free support to those millions who broke the law. Smear any objectors as racists and xenophobes.
2. Run up $35 trillion in national debt.
Keep adding $1 trillion to it each 100 days. Defame anyone wishing to cut wild spending as cruel and inhumane.
3. Appease or subsidize enemies like Iran and China.
Demonize allies like Israel. Allow terrorists to attack Americans without adequate response. See Islam as either similar or superior to Christianity. Make amends to leftist governments for supposedly past toxic American international behavior. Follow the lead of international agencies like the U.N., ICC and WHO to atone for past American neocolonial and imperialist behavior. Recede to second-tier international status, befitting American decline.
4. In a multiracial democracy, redefine identity only as one’s tribal affiliation.
Ensure each identity group rivals the other for victimhood and the state spoils it confers. Reboot all political issues by race and sex oppressors and oppressed. Destroy all meritocratic standards of admission, retention, promotion and commendation.
5. Recalibrate violent crime as understandable, cry-of-the-heart expressions of social justice.
Ensure no bail and same-day release for arrested, repeat violent felons. Empathize with the violent killer and rapist; ignore their victims, especially if they are slain police officers.
6. Emasculate the military by using non-meritocratic standards of race, gender, and sexual orientation to determine promotion and commendation.
Deliberately impugn as racists and insurrectionists the largest demographic in the military who in recent wars died at twice their numbers in the population — so that they leave or never join the military. Encourage retired high officers to slander their commander-in-chief. Cut the defense budget. Stop producing sufficient weapons, but leave billions of dollars’ worth of arms to terrorists.
7. Reinvent the justice system to indict, bankrupt, convict, jail and eliminate political opponents.
Use ballot removal, impeachment, civil suits, and state and federal indictments rather than elections to defeat an opponent. Mob the homes of non-compliant Supreme Court justices, and attack them personally by name.
Members of the Supreme Court, from left: Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas; Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.; and Associate Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh pose in the Justices Conference Room prior to the formal investiture ceremony of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30, 2022. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images)
8. Encourage the fusion of the bureaucratic state with the electronic media to form a powerful force for political audit, surveillance, censorship and coercion.
Marry the FBI to Silicon Valley and hire its contractors to warp the news and hound supposed enemies of the people.
9. Make war on affordable gasoline and natural gas.
Substitute inefficient, unreliable and expensive wind and solar power, even as energy prices nearly bankrupt the middle class.
10. Marry late, but preferably not at all.
Consider males toxic, especially boys. Have no children, or as few as possible. Otherwise, assure children they are entitled, and must be sheltered. Raise them to have grievances against past generations and current norms.
11. Turn world-class universities into indoctrination centers.
Suspend the Bill of Rights on campuses. Train youth to graduate despising their own culture and civilization. Recruit foreign students from hostile nations to subsidize campus commissar bloat. Replace the curriculum with therapeutic propaganda. Ban the SAT/ACT and do not evaluate comparative high school GPAs. Ensure merit does not select the student body. Charge tuition higher than the rate of inflation. Bill the government when students default on their loans.
1. They are delusional and think their socialist and globalist agendas are working and will save us.
2. They are raging nihilists who do not like the U.S. and deliberately want it destroyed as a service to the world. A ruined U.S. is preferable to a strong America.
3. They are Jacobin revolutionaries who are intentionally erasing the old United States as a prerequisite for creating an entirely new America that will arise from the ashes with no trace or even memory of its past.
4. They have no agenda. They are aimless fools and utter incompetents. These bunglers just wing it day-to-day, in response to what their radical media, academic and political masters dictate is necessary for them to retain power. They have no idea of the damage they are doing.
5. A bit of 1-3, but probably not 4.
There is cause for hope among this nihilist remaking of America: the people are fed up and will demand an accounting in the fall.
Editor’s note: This op-ed is adapted from a tweet by the author.
Exchanging biology-based sex education in our schools for woke-appeasing LGBTQ+ pandering will only hurt kids. (Photo: Miguel Sotomayor/ Getty Images)
As suicide rates, sexual assaults, mass depression, and anxiety grip America’s youth, the Biden administration, state legislatures, and public school districts have begun usurping science education with “transgender and gender-nonconforming” curriculum.
Students in over a dozen states no longer have access to biologically based sex education; that’s been replaced by liberal laws and policies requiring classrooms to exchange biologically proven facts with pseudo-scientific advocacy of gender fluidity.
Despite the claims of the U.S. Department of Education, no quantitative studies show gender transition or “gender nonconformity” is a healthy or normal part of human development.
These child-targeted policy prescriptions are often sweetened artificially by using comfortable terminology, such as “comprehensive,” “inclusive,” and “gender affirming” to paint those who disagree with the unscientific, immoral content aimed at minors as bigoted and heartless. If parents respond negatively to the content of these postmodern sex-education revisions, news outlets (which may claim to be unbiased) use those gaslighting terms in their coverage of the outrage.
This effectively gatekeeps any debate about negative consequences by portraying dissidents as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. After all, what kind of monster wouldn’t be inclusive and affirming?
The most recent and flagrant example of this has been seen in Arizona’s Flagstaff Unified School District. Local parents obtained a video of school district staff discussing changes to the sex-ed curriculum that included removing the boy/girl binary.
When parents shared their concerns at the next school board meeting, board President Christine Fredericks responded: “I will never apologize for being inclusive.”
So far, liberals’ strategy of dismissing any commonsense concerns with moral scolding straight out of a 1990s anti-bullying commercial has been effective. Parents who expressed concern about teenage boys pretending to be girls to gain access to girls’ locker rooms were disregarded as backward, uninformed, and unfeeling. When tragedy struck, in part due to these policies and worldviews—as in the sexual assault by a “gender-nonconforming” boy in a girls’ restroom of Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools—parents were scolded again and charged with being bigoted opportunists.
Similarly, after the shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School, in which a transgender assailant slaughtered three 9-year-old students and three staff members at the private Christian school, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded by suggesting that “transphobia” was the true danger.
An LGBTQ+ activist organization called The Trevor Project has intimated repeatedly that the near 40% suicide rate for transgender individuals isn’t due to mental illness and toxic prescriptions. Instead, it’s the result of “bullying,” which also has been redefined to mean “anyone who doesn’t passionately support the child’s transition.” The assertion has been echoed consistently without question by federally funded media outlets such as PBS.
This quantitatively unverified accusation is a key rationale from the Left in why updating sex education curriculum is essential for them. After all, the point of sex ed is to answer students’ questions concerning physiological and reproductive development. These answers in biology-based sex education clearly differentiate men and women, not just in external sexual organs but in development rate, hormone production and balance, and higher susceptibility to certain diseases and conditions.
A postmodern, “inclusive” approach as outlined by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, teachers unions, and massive grants from the Biden administration removes that differentiation altogether.
Separating sex and gender as physicality and mentality, therefore disconnecting behavior from sex by suggesting that your sex comprises your organs whereas your gender is all in your mind, is heinously distant from reality. Naturally produced hormones based on sex govern anatomical systems, behavior, immune response, and reproduction.
The additional foolishness of encouraging minors that changing external appendages somehow certifies a gender change only adds insult to the injury of what was historically a scientifically sound subject.
Although biological sex education warned boys and girls of their higher likelihood of developing cancerous tumors in certain sex-specific organs and advised them to watch for signs at different ages, the new “gender affirming” sex ed does nothing to warn students about the carcinogenic danger of “hormonal treatments” in gender transitions.
The human endocrine system is incredibly fragile; tampering with it can be perilous. Women who seek hormonal treatment for menopause are required to be warned that doing so quadruples their risk of developing cancer. Although the same hormones are injected in transgender treatments, no such carcinogen warning is required or offered in any current “gender affirming” sex-ed curriculum.
None of the biology, anatomy, and physiology, or developmental psychology texts from which I’ve taught have ever provided a shred of evidence justifying the omission or twisting of critical information when instructing students. At that point, you’re no longer a teacher, you’re a sleazy salesman for a pyramid scheme.
The misnamed “sex education” that the Department of Education describes as “safe and supported” is in reality temporal, shallow, and dangerous. As other nations ban transgender experiments on minors, President Joe Biden’s administration has put American children in danger via woke dictate, bastardizing health education into its antithesis.
Sex education in the U.S. is quickly becoming a sick joke, and permanent damage to American children is the punchline.
A left-leaning initiative to turn out the youth vote suggested that the Federal Work-Study Program pay for college students to engage in election-related work, something the Biden administration later did. Pictured: Vice President Kamala Harris meets Feb. 27 with voting activists in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Documents reveal an organization backed by Obama White House alumni such as Valerie Jarrett and bankrolled by liberal dark money donors advocated using tax dollars to pay college students to get out the vote in the 2024 election, doing so before the Biden administration announced the same policy.
The Daily Signal obtained the documents through a public records request in which it sought documents from the Wisconsin Elections Commission related to President Joe Biden’s controversial executive order to promote voting.
In January, an activist with ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a project of the liberal group Civic Nation, contacted officials with the state of Wisconsin and its capital city, Madison, about a need to allow money from the Federal Work-Study Program to pay for students to engage in election-related work. By late February, the U.S. Department of Education and Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the Biden administration was doing exactly that.
A new Wall Street Journal poll of voters in battleground states found former President Donald Trump tied with Biden in a two-way race in Wisconsin, which Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by only about 20,000 votes of over 3.2 million cast.
In a Jan. 18 email, Ryan Drysdale, director of impact and state networks for the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, sent an email to Bonnie Chang, voter outreach coordinator in the Madison city clerk’s office, about U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s plans to revise how taxpayer money may be used.
“Lastly, as you may be aware, the secretary has been working on clarification about Federal Work-Study being eligible for supporting student workers with local election officials and feels confident another letter will come from the WH/Dept of Ed with guidelines,” Drysdale wrote to Chang, referring to the White House and the Department of Education.
The Federal Work-Study Program, funded by the Department of Education, provides financial aid to eligible undergraduate and graduate students at colleges and universities. The youth vote helped stop an anticipated “red wave” for Republican candidates in 2022. It once was perceived as a core Democrat constituency, which is one reason the Biden administration has tried repeatedly to “forgive” student loan debt.
ALL IN asserted that the youth vote was the deciding factor in 2022 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The initiative announced that 394 colleges and universities across 44 states and the District of Columbia were part of its first program recognizing “Most Engaged Campuses for College Student Voting.”
“I was invited to join a meeting with the secretary, the UW-Superior campus team and surrounding local election officials who are exploring both internship and FWS opportunities,” Drysdale wrote to Madison’s Chang, referring to Cardona, the University of Wisconsin in Superior, Wisconsin, and the Federal Work-Study Program.
“There was a lot of excitement even without the FWS component,” he wrote. “They hope to use UWS [University of Wisconsin-Superior] as a case study for other [Wisconsin] institutions and local election officials to learn from. Happy to share more on a quick call if that would be helpful. There’s a big interest from partners and funders about FWS and these types of opportunities so we’ll be following these developments in WI.”
On Jan. 19, Chang forwarded Drysdale’s email about the Federal Work-Study Program, or FWS, to Madison City Attorney Michael Haas. She noted that University of Wisconsin-Madison officials said that “it’s in the federal language that FWS students are not able to work at the polls on Election Day nor engage in GOTV/voter engagement spaces.” GOTV is a reference to “get out the vote.”
That same day, Haas wrote to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe.
“If I understand correctly, there is a request to change the FWS rules regarding work as election inspectors, but I don’t think that has happened yet,” Haas said of Federal Work-Study rules. “In any event, the secretary of state is trying to help make it happen.”
The Wisconsin Secretary of State’s Office, which oversees elections in the state, didn’t reply to inquiries from The Daily Signal by publication time.
Amanda Hollowell, When We All Vote’s national organizing director, was among activists who met Feb. 27 at a White House event with the vice president to talk about turning out voters.
“We have been doing work to promote voter participation for students. And, for example, we have—under the Federal Work-Study Program—[we] now allow students to get paid, through federal work-study, to register people and to be nonpartisan poll workers,” Harris told the gathering at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“As we know, this is important for a number of reasons,” she said. “One, to engage our young leaders in this process and activate them in terms of their ability to—to strengthen our communities. But also, this is the work that we need to do, knowing that so many poll workers have left this work for a variety of reasons that we will also discuss.”
The city of Madison played no role in pushing for a clarification of U.S. Education Department policy on allowing the program to pay students for election work, the city attorney told The Daily Signal.
“City of Madison officials did not lobby the Biden administration to change FWS rules. We have not been involved in that issue except for receiving the email from Ryan Drysdale so I do not [know] details about the FWS regulations or how they changed as they do not affect the city’s operations,” Haas said. “The city of Madison hires a number of UW-Madison students as poll workers and pays them in the same way as other poll workers with city funds.”
The Daily Signal sought comment from ALL IN’s Drysdale and the press contact for Civic Nation. Neither responded. The Education Department referred The Daily Signal to a “Dear Colleague letter” to college administrators, dated Feb. 26, from Nasser H. Paydar, assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education.
In part, the letter says: “The department is today clarifying that FWS funds may be used for employment by a federal, state, local, or tribal public agency for civic engagement work that is not associated with a particular interest or group.”
The documents released to The Daily Signal by the Wisconsin Elections Commission also showed consultation between state officials and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency within the Commerce Department. NIST was putting together its strategic plan to comply with Biden’s executive order on getting out the vote, which it later made public.
The institute is one of at least four federal agencies to make such a strategic plan public. The Justice Department, however, has claimed presidential privilege to prevent public release of its own plan for complying with Biden’s order.
West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner last month eviscerated the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” the election integrity champion told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.
The agency’s work, particularly the extracurricular business CISA has conducted in recent years, has been rightly criticized for its massive overreach. A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”
“Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states.
The report goes on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”
‘Platforms Have Got to Get More Comfortable With Gov’t’
Launched in 2018, CISA was supposed to be “an ancillary agency designed to protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats,” the report notes. By 2020, the agency was “routinely” targeting what CISA officials claimed to be “disinformation” on social media. A year later, the agency had established a formal team devoted to what it decided was “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the latter of which CISA defines as “information based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, factual information that is problematic to the Biden regime.
CISA’s parent agency DHS launched the much-ridiculed and ultimately disbanded “Disinformation Governance Board” in 2022, to streamline the work of colluding with social media providers to shut down speech the government didn’t like or found inconvenient.
A federal lawsuit filed by then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, uncovered troubling conversations between the Biden administration and private companies about the pathways for removing information the government deemed false or misleading. A federal judge in a ruling last year barred the Biden administration from its censorship work, although the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction when it took up the case.
Leaked documents obtained by The Intercept show that Microsoft executive and former DHS official Matt Masterson texted CISA director Jen Easterly in February 2022, saying “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”
But it seems Big Tech was getting pretty comfortable with the Biden administration’s puppet enforcer. The Intercept report showed, among other alarming revelations, that Facebook operated a portal where Homeland Security could report allegations of “disinformation.” CISA also has worked in concert with the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, which is accused of conspiring with state, local, and federal government officials to trample the First Amendment rights of social media users, according to a class-action lawsuit.
“But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created ‘in consultation’ with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students,” The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote in May.
‘Only a Matter of Time’
Facing more public outrage over its unconstitutional actions, the CISA audaciously insisted it merely plays an “informational” role.
As the congressional report notes:
CISA is “working with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach” to curbing alleged misinformation and disinformation.
CISA considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable of physically deploying across the United States.
CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit after CISA and the Biden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional.
CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
The agency’s advisory committee, according to the report, worried that it would be “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” Incidentally, the advisory committee created a “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee whose members included Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s former chief legal officer who was “involved in censoring [the New York] Post’s Hunter Biden laptop” story. Gadde was also “behind the decision to permanently ban former President Trump from Twitter.”
‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’
Geller’s Wired piece took aim at Warner, West Virginia’s outspoken secretary of state who is making a run for governor. At last month’s secretaries of state meeting, Warner “lambasted” CISA and FBI officials for “what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks,” Geller wrote, as if he is not privy to the same public documents and testimony confirming Warner’s assertions. In Geller’s account, the FBI was merely advising Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation.
But how do you square the intelligence community’s “advisory” role after learning Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign prompted a former acting CIA director to “help Biden” by leading 50 colleagues to sign a letter spreading the false claim that damning emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop — published by the New York Post — were Russian disinformation? And all of that just weeks before the election.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the FBI and CISA officials did not respond to Warner’s charges and the meeting quickly went on, Geller reported before he quickly attempted to establish Warner as a dreaded “election denier,” noting that the secretary of state “attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory.”
But Warner is no conspiracy theorist. The West Point graduate served nearly a quarter century in the U.S. Army and then worked with the State Department in Afghanistan, according to his bio. Warner knows about security threats.
CISA’s activities are “the most insidious attack on American democracy that I know of in U.S. history,” Warner told The Federalist in an interview last week. He called the targeting and censoring of state-defined “disinformation” a “psychological operation against the American people” that is “as bad as it gets.”
Warner said he has spoken to CISA officials multiple times but that they have yet to heed his calls for an after-action report on the 2020 election — to truly find out what went right and what went wrong.
A Warning
It appears most state elections officials don’t want to deal with the actual threat of the Biden administration’s disinformation and political silencing campaign.
“They know they will be lambasted by mainstream press,” Warner said. No one wants to be hit with the “election denier” label so effectively applied by the accomplice media. “It’s not easy, not politically expedient for them.”
Warner is one of the few speaking out against CISA and pulling away from involvement with the agency. But Geller worries Warner’s conservative colleagues will join him in breaking ties with CISA, as conservatives in Congress work to cut the budget of the abusive agency.
“It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA,” Geller wrote.
“But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution,” he added.
They need only look at CISA’s record and its rhetoric in the agency’s brief existence to know that Warner’s warnings aren’t merely the stuff of a “right-wing controversy.”
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA director Jen Easterly said at 2021’s RE:WIRED conference.
Apparently running roughshod over the First Amendment isn’t warning enough.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Democrats’ targeting of political opponents entered its next phase Friday, when the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker over covering the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol.
“This is the most humiliated I’ve ever been in my life,” Baker told independent reporter Breanna Morello following his release. My arrest “is for things I said. … That’s what they’re after; they’re [trying] to suppress our speech.”
Just caught up with journalist Steve Baker just moments after being released from federal custody.@TPC4USA details what he’s had to endure at the hands of the corrupt DOJ.
As The Federalist reported, federal authorities informed Baker and his legal team on Tuesday of a signed warrant for his arrest and instructed him to self-surrender for “alleged J6 crimes” in Dallas, Texas, on Friday morning. Baker has been at the forefront of reporting on the more questionable aspects of the Jan. 6 demonstrations.
While told he was being charged with “non-violent misdemeanors,” federal authorities declined to disclose to Baker or his lawyers what specific crimes underlie the arrest. According to Blaze News, the feds refused to reveal the charges ahead of Friday’s arrest because “they believe[d] Baker [would] post them on social media.” The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals accused of a crime a right to “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”
After being transported to the courthouse on Friday morning in shackles, Baker was charged on four counts related to reporting on the Jan. 6 demonstrations: Knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; Disorderly conduct in a capitol building; and Parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol building.
Blaze Media Investigative Journalist @TPC4USA has now been taken into FBI custody for his J6 reporting
While egregious, Baker’s arrest is sadly unsurprising. The Marxists running Biden’s Democrat administration have gone to extreme lengths to weaponize the powers of government to target and prosecute their political opponents.
Former President Donald Trump is facing 91 indictments from Democrat prosecutors across four different venues, two of which involve charges from the Biden DOJ. These efforts coincide with Democrat attempts to kick Trump — Biden’s primary political opponent — off the ballot ahead of the 2024 election.
The Biden regime has also targeted faithful Christians. Not only have federal authorities infiltrated Catholic churches to surveil Christians attending Latin Mass, they’ve also imprisoned pro-life Christians who peacefully protested outside of an abortion clinic.
Don’t forget the federal government’s censorship-industrial complex. This heavily funded system is strategically designed to censor and silence dissenting voices online — even if the information these users share is true.
.@TPC4USA's first interview since being taken in by federal authorities with @SteveDeaceShow: "All of this is about the suppression of speech and teaching those of us on the Right side of the political spectrum what we can and cannot say and what is allowed." pic.twitter.com/kl12Ol7zPN
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Since the moment he took office, Joe Biden and his administration have engaged in a full-fledged campaign to weaponize the federal government against their political opponents and people of faith. Recently, 11 anti-abortion protesters were convicted for peacefully protesting and praying at a Tennessee abortion clinic in 2021. Their crime? Arriving at an abortion clinic before it opened and sitting in prayer while handing out flyers that shared the value of human life.
These pro-life activists were convicted under the “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances” (FACE) Act, a 1994 statute that makes it a federal crime to interfere in any way with a person’s attempt to get medical services.
President Biden listens as Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks during an event at the White House, June 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Initially, the FACE Act was passed to protect both the supposed right to access abortions and the right to protest peacefully, as well as the safety of churches and pregnancy centers. Sadly, churches and pregnancy resource centers have been subject to a spree of violent attacks in the wake of the Dobbs decision, to which the Biden administration has turned a blind eye.
However, under the Biden administration’s weaponized Justice Department, the FACE Act is primarily being used to go after people of faith who stand up for what they believe and protest to protect innocent life. Each of these 11 peaceful protesters now faces up to 10 and a half years in prison and fines of up to $260,000 for participating in that day of prayerful protest.
Luckily, Congressman Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, have moved to repeal the FACE Act and replace it with a bill of their own, titled the “Restoring the First Amendment and Right to Peaceful Civil Disobedience” Act, which would prevent the Biden administration from weaponizing the federal government against Christian conservatives.
But the weaponization of government against conservatives and people of faith doesn’t end there. After a man took down a Satanist statute that was placed in the Iowa state Capitol building last December, he was charged with a felony hate crime.
Iowa law defines this as a violation of individual rights, even though the Satanic temple explicitly admits it is not a religious organization with a belief in a higher power. Not only is Iowa making a mockery of the free exercise of religious rights by treating the Satanists as a religious organization, but Iowa is also making a mockery of the justice system by labeling this destruction of property as a hate crime.
Perhaps even more disturbingly, in 2021, the Biden administration released a memo instructing the Department of Justice to go after concerned parents at school board meetings after receiving a letter that compared these parents to “domestic terrorists.” Last year, it was also revealed that the FBI mounted a spying program on traditional Catholics (particularly those interested in the Latin Mass) and identified them as individuals who might be part of the “far-right nationalist movement.”
In the eyes of the Biden Department of Justice, these Christian patriots are the actual threat to the American way of life – not the criminals who are carjacking, terrorizing and even killing everyday Americans in our cities.
Many of these conservative Christians are facing harsher penalties than those who committed acts of arson and vandalism in the BLM riots of 2020 and even the six illegal immigrants who recently assaulted multiple police officers in New York City, five of whom were released on bail.
The administration has clearly made use of the justice system against their political enemies. It’s clear they consider everyone who opposes their views as their enemies as well.
These unprecedented acts of weaponization of the Justice Department prove that the Biden administration is eager to deploy the full force of the federal government against its perceived political enemies while letting real crimes, such as the D.C. riots and the destruction of federal property, go unpunished.
As Americans continue to fall victim to rising crime and violence in their neighborhoods, the Biden administration should focus on keeping our communities safe and putting real criminals behind bars. The Department of Justice should never be used as a weaponized arm of the executive branch to harass, intimidate, and stifle political opposition.
The American people should demand better from the Biden administration. If President Biden continues to go after Christians and other people of faith while letting the real criminals run free, “justice” remains nowhere to be found in the DOJ except for its name.
A push by President Joe Biden’s administration for a two-state solution is falling on deaf ears because Israel is winning the war against Hamas and could end it in less than a month, retired Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt said Monday on Newsmax.
“The Israelis are winning this war right now,” Holt said on “Wake Up America.” “Even Egypt is backing off. And when you’re winning a war, you don’t tend to look at your ally and say, ‘Oh, we’ll stop fighting now.’ They’re going to victory, and then they’re going on their way to Hezbollah.”
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rejected the latest Hamas calls for a cease-fire as it prepares for a final invasion of Rafah, giving the terrorists until March 10 to release the remaining hostages, which are estimated to be in the range of 100 that have yet to be confirmed dead.
“I think what the March 10 thing looks like is: We’re going to continue to prepare the battle space and take care of as many civilians as we possibly can in advance of March 10; we’ll get people diverted, replace them as we prepare for this onslaught, because this is the final push,” Holt said of the Israel position.
“This is no more than the IDF just saying we’re going to take care of civilians, and while we do, you should reconsider your position on the hostages.”
Israel has long condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack and taking of hostages as human shields to use as leverage for its long-sought statehood, brought on by acts of barbaric terrorism.
“I’m not certain if Hamas has any ability whatsoever to do a thing about the hostages, whether they have control over them, whether they’re alive, and what that means, because the International Red Cross and other groups have not produced one ounce of proof of life,” Holt said. “But I think March 10 militarily means we’re going to close the curtain on this chapter of this war.”
Holt said Israel and world leaders have little fear in telling the Biden administration to stay out of their war decisions.
“Openly and on the world stage, you’ve got states now telling the United States and this administration in particular: ‘You’re not going to bully us; you’re not going to – just because you have a political problem at home with your own elections doesn’t mean you get to inflict political damage here in our country where we’ve endured horrific, barbaric attacks that are unprecedented in the modern age and that we would somehow reward the Palestinians’ – who three times by the way rejected a two-state solution, because they want a one-state solution where Israel is driven into the sea, in their words only,” Holt said.
“The administration, its academics, it’s nonpractitioners – it’s folks who know zero about warfare and geopolitics – are looking at polls here domestically with the Arab populations that they have lost for voters.
“They’ve certainly lost a lot of the Jewish vote, and they’re looking at how to fix it. And they want to fix it on the backs of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the Israelis, and it’s quite sick.”
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Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
Democrats are sponsoring a bill that would make Minnesota a “sanctuary state” for immigrants who enter the country illegally artfully sidestepped a question from media Thursday as to whether the legislation will have full support from their DFL colleagues in the state Senate. Democrats outnumber Republicans 34-33 in that upper chamber.
Will all 34 Senate Democrats vote ‘yes’ on illegal immigration ‘sanctuary’ bill?
“North Star Act” chief authors Sen. Omar Fateh and Rep. Sandra Feist intimated they are still working to get full support from their DFL colleagues in both chambers.
A pair of Democrat legislators sponsoring a bill that would make Minnesota a “sanctuary state” for immigrants who enter the country illegally artfully sidestepped a question from media Thursday as to whether the legislation will have full support from their DFL colleagues in the state Senate. Democrats outnumber Republicans 34-33 in that upper chamber.
Will Sen. Omar Fateh, DFL-Minneapolis, chief author of the proposal he’s coined “The North Star Act,” obtain all 34 Democrat votes he needs to pass the bill in the Senate?
“So far I have received a lot of enthusiastic feedback right now,” Fateh told media at a press conference on the bill he and Rep. Sandra Feist, DFL-New Brighton, held at the Capitol Thursday, just four days before the legislative session begins. READ MORE…
The Democrat Party, who claim to be the guardians of Democracy, have done their best to shut down any fellow democrat candidates such as R. Kennedy, M. Williamson, and D. Phillips, from running against Biden. Strangely, they’re likely to find a way to remove Biden at some point and insert a viable candidate of their choosing at a convenient time to elicit the most powerful impact. That sounds like the opposite of democracy to me.
FASCISM: Democrats in Four States Including Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Massachusetts Decide to Have Only Joe Biden on the Primary Ballot
Four states—Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Massachusetts—have decided to force voters with a single option for the Democratic primaries: Joe Biden. The decision, which effectively crowns Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in those states without primary contestation, has incited allegations of disenfranchisement and questions about the democratic process within the party.
The true threat to the demise of our democracy lies with the Democrats, not Donald Trump. The communist party will now decide the Democratic Party’s nominee and who they install into the White House. The Florida Democratic Executive Committee announced that in the upcoming primary elections, the ballot will only feature the name of Joe Biden, effectively excluding any potential challengers within the party. 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.
Iran has crossed the rubicon, when its proxies launched a drone attack that killed three of our soldiers in Jordan on Sunday. The strike marks a clear escalation in the de facto war launched by Iran on the United States, in response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Tehran-backed Hamas on Israel.
Iran will almost certainly ratchet up hostilities in the coming days, weeks and probably months. The window of opportunity for President Biden to tame Iran with decisive action is closing rapidly. Here’s why.
First, Tehran highly likely views the Biden administration as extremely risk-averse and unlikely to engage with it in a direct large-scale kinetic confrontation. Despite the steady escalation of the scope and scale of Tehran-backed attacks on U.S. forces and bases in the Middle East in the past 100 days, Washington’s response has been focused on proportionality and escalation control. Rather than establishing escalation dominance by bringing war home to Iran, the White House authorized only periodic individual strikes on proxy targets.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reviews a group of armed forces cadets during their graduation ceremony, in Tehran on Oct. 10. (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP)
The number of attacks by Iranian militias targeting U.S. military personnel from Oct. 17 to Jan. 29 has reached 165 and the number of injured Americans has climbed to 34, most involving traumatic brain damage. And yet, the key message coming out of the administration has been “We do not seek war with Iran.”
Everyone, from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, to the National Security Council’s John Kirby, to the commander in chief himself has rushed to telegraph to Tehran that the president’s primary goal is to avoid escalation and a wider conflict, rather than to protect U.S. troops and end hostilities. A key tenet of the Western conception of warfare, proportionality, is culturally alien to Iranians. Consequently, they interpret Biden’s measured response as a sign of weakness and acquiescence to aggression.
Second, Iran’s aggression is almost certainly underpinned by its increasing confidence in the imminent viability of its nuclear deterrent. In early January, nuclear expert David Albright, who served as a weapons inspector for the United Nations in Iraq, issued a shocking new report, assessing that Iran needs as little as one week to construct its first nuclear weapon, once the leadership issues the order to do so. According to Albright, Iran has sufficient weapons-grade uranium to build six weapons in one month, and 12 weapons in five months.
The Iranian regime, therefore, probably calculates that its new status of a de facto nuclear power is a sufficient deterrent that will prevent Washington from launching a mass devastating retaliatory strike on Iran proper.
President Biden speaks at the University of Tampa on Feb. 9, 2023. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Tehran likely watched closely the Biden administration’s reluctance to fully back Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. It is because of the threat – likely real, in my assessment – of Putin’s launching a tactical nuclear strike on the battlefield in Ukraine that President Biden ruled out the deployment of forces into the theater soon after Russia attacked Ukraine. The ayatollahs probably believe that Biden’s fear of nuclear Armageddon and of Iran’s strategic partnership with Russia will further influence the White House’s decision calculus regarding the kind of retaliatory measures it is willing to take against Iran.
Third, Iran probably believes it has a sufficient missile and drone arsenal to keep U.S. forces in the region at risk. Iran’s target list includes some 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq, 900 in Syria and an embassy in Baghdad.
Iran has the largest and most diverse missile force in the Middle East, according to the 2019 assessment by Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) titled “Iran Military Power: Ensuring Regime Survival and Securing Regional Dominance.” Designed to “overwhelm U.S. forces and our partners in the region,” Tehran’s “substantial” arsenal includes close-range, short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles that can strike targets throughout the region as far as 2,000 kilometers from Iran’s borders, as far as Israel and southeastern Europe.
Missiles and an Iran flag are displayed at Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) National Aerospace Park in western Tehran, Oct. 11, 2023. (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Moreover, the Iranian state has prioritized its missile modernization, focusing on improvements in range, accuracy, mobility, warhead design and survivability. The employment of improved guidance technology and maneuverability has resulted in increased lethality and precision of Iranian missiles, almost certainly emboldening the regime to act more provocatively.
In its most recent effort to further augment its ballistic missile arsenal, on Jan. 20, Iran launched an advanced satellite, named Soraya, into the highest orbit yet. Carrying a 110-pound payload, Soraya was placed in orbit 460 miles above the Earth’s surface, using a three-stage Qaem 100 rocket. The launch, which was condemned by the U.K., France and Germany in a joint statement, very likely allowed Iran to test an increased lift capacity of its space launch vehicle (SLV) technology – needed to place an object in a higher orbit in space – that is essential for the development of an indigenous long-range strike capability.
Progress in its space program could shorten Iran’s pathway to an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) because SLVs use very similar technologies. If Iran develops a booster capable of ICBM ranges, it can reach the continental United States, if configured for that purpose, warned the DIA. The fact that Iran is deepening ties, including in “the field of military-technical cooperation,” with Russia, which is the world’s leader in space launch and nuclear know-how, makes Tehran’s progress in ICBM development even more alarming.
The flag of Iran in front of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters in Vienna, Austria. (Michael Gruber/Getty Images)
On Monday, Austin vowed that the U.S. will respond to Iran-backed lethal attack “at a time and place of our choosing.” But the president doesn’t have much time to deliberate. Iran clearly doesn’t feel threatened by Biden’s “Don’t. Don’t” counter-strategy and is postured to climb the escalation ladder.
Once Iran achieves an operational capability to deliver a nuclear strike on Israel and Europe – and then, eventually, on the U.S. homeland – it will be nearly impossible to re-establish deterrence without accepting the risk of a broader war. The time to act is now.
Rebekah Koffler is a strategic military intelligence analyst and the author of Putin’s Playbook. She is Managing Editor of an e-mail newsletter for independent thinkers, CutToTheNews.com. Follow her on Twitter @Rebekah0132
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement on Wednesday asserting that the Lone Star State has a constitutional right to defend its sovereignty in the wake of an invasion facilitated by President Biden’s open border policies.
“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now,” Abbott wrote. “President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them. The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration.”
According to the Washington Examiner, more than 10 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended by U.S. border officials since Biden assumed the presidency in January 2021. Those figures don’t even include the estimated 1.7 million “gotaways” who evaded capture upon illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
In his statement, Abbott slammed Biden for facilitating the ongoing invasion and noted how the president’s “refusal to protect the States” has resulted in “more than 6 million illegal immigrants” traversing Texas’ border alone. That figure is greater than the population of more than 30 states.
The Texas governor further underscored the federal government’s obligation to defend states from invasion and the states’ right to defend their sovereignty from outside forces, citing Article IV, § 4, and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution. While the former stipulates that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” the latter recognizes “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”
“James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border,” Abbott wrote. “The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense.”
“For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” he continued. “That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”
Abbott’s remarks appear to come in response to a Monday decision by the U.S. Supreme Court allowing the Biden administration to authorize Customs and Border Protection officials to cut razor wire installed along the border by Texas to stymie illegal immigration. Five of the court’s nine justices sided with the administration, including Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
The Biden administration is failing to properly track foreign ownership of U.S. farmlands and doesn’t appear to have a plan to begin tracking that data, according to an investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).
According to a GAO report detailing the findings of its investigation, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) has failed to consistently share timely data on foreign investments in U.S. agricultural land as required under the 1978 Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA). Further, Pentagon officials told investigators, according to the report, that USDA needs to regularly provide more up-to-date and specific AFIDA data.
“Sharing current data could help increase visibility into potential national security risks related to foreign investments in U.S. agricultural land,” the GAO report, which was published late Thursday, states. “USDA implements AFIDA across field offices and headquarters, but its processes to collect, track, and report key information are flawed.”
The GAO investigation concluded that USDA collects AFIDA data on paper forms filed with county or federal offices, but that its process is “unclear and challenging to implement.” And USDA also has no plans and timelines to create an online AFIDA database despite Congress mandating the agency create one by 2025.
President Joe Biden speaks during a virtual meeting at the White House alongside Agriculture Tom Vilsack in 2022. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
Finally, the government watchdog agency’s review of AFIDA data — the most recent of which is from 2021 — found the USDA has published errors such as reporting the largest land holding associated with China twice.
“This report confirms one of our worst fears: that not only is the USDA unable to answer the question of who owns what land and where, but that there is no plan by the department to internally reverse this dangerous flaw that affects our supply chain and economy,” Congressional Western Caucus Chairman Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., said. “Food security is national security, and we cannot allow foreign adversaries to influence our food supply while we stick our heads in the sand.”
“I will, in my capacity as a member of the Select Committee on the CCP, Chairman of the Western Caucus, and as a member of the House Appropriations Committee, be working to introduce measures aimed at fixing USDA’s internal reporting and data management to identify to Congress, and the American people, exactly who is investing in the over 40 million acres of U.S. farm land reported to have ties to foreign actors,” he continued.
In recent months, Republican lawmakers and local leaders nationwide have increased scrutiny on land purchases by foreign investors. The increasing number of land purchases has sparked concern that foreign companies and investors, particularly those from China, may be establishing a stranglehold of key U.S. food and energy supplies.
“China’s ownership of U.S. farmland is a threat to our food security and national security. An affordable, reliable food supply is critical to our nation’s well-being and prosperity and we must ensure America maintains control of our nation’s resources,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in 2022 after requesting the GAO investigation. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
USDA’s most recent data suggests that, as of 2021, foreign investment in U.S. agricultural land grew to approximately 40 million acres. Additionally, Chinese agricultural investment in the U.S. increased tenfold between 2009 and 2016 alone.
The apparent trend led to House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., leading a letter to GAO Comptroller General Gene Dodaro signed by nearly 130 fellow House Republicansin October 2022, requesting a probe into foreign investment in U.S. farmland and its “impact on national security, trade, and food security.”
“Growing foreign ownership of U.S. farmland, particularly by China, poses a direct threat to our food security and national security,” Thompson and Comer said in a joint statement Thursday.
“Safeguarding our farmland and food supply requires a whole of government approach and we will continue to work with the impacted agencies, related committees, and leadership to continue our robust oversight and to identify legislative vehicles to address the findings of the GAO report,” they added.
Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., delivers remarks at the Capitol on May 30, 2023. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
In February 2023, officials in Grand Forks, North Dakota, rejected a Chinese company’s proposed corn mill that received significant local pushback over concerns about its proximity to a U.S. Air Force base in the area. While the company, Chinese-owned Fufeng Group, was able to purchase 300 acres of land in the area, the local government rejected its building permits, effectively killing the project.
Air Force Assistant Secretary Andrew Hunter said prior to the Grand Forks City Council decision that the project would pose a “significant threat” to national security, but that the Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) concluded it did not have jurisdiction in the case. CFIUS is an interagency taskforce overseen by the Department of the Treasury and tasked with reviewing certain foreign investments that may pose a national security threat.
In addition, a subsidiary of Chinese green energy firm Gotion High-Tech purchased 270 acres of land, including some zoned for agricultural use, in Green Charter Township, Michigan, in August. The land is slated to be used to build an electric vehicle battery component factory, but is located within 60 miles of military armories and within 100 miles from Camp Grayling, the largest U.S. National Guard training facility in the country.
Like its determination in the Fufeng Group case, CFIUS ruled in April 2023 that Gotion’s plans in Michigan are not covered transactions.
“The process to report and track foreign-owned agricultural land is complex and is governed by a 46 year-old law that depends on self-reporting by foreign buyers and sellers of U.S. agricultural land,” a USDA spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “To fulfill our obligations under the law, USDA gathers information from the more than 3,000 counties and county equivalents in the United States, each with their own county clerk and recorder’s office — or none at all — feeding information into more than 50 different state systems.”
“The GAO’s recommendations would require changes by Congress, starting with the funding needed to increase staff and modernize our processes, in addition to a change in data collection mandates down to the county level,” they said. “Any system for tracking land purchases and owners would be complicated, expensive, and create a potential risk to producer privacy, the price of agricultural land, and individual American seller interests.”
Meanwhile, the report was coincidentally published just hours after Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack met with Chinese Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Tang Renjian.
“I look forward to further exchanges and cooperation as we continue to forge a relationship that expands and improves market access opportunities for U.S. farmers and ranchers in China, an important agricultural export market,” Vilsack said.
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
The U.S. Treasury Department building is seen in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, 2023, following an announcement by the U.S. Treasury that it had begun taking measures Thursday to prevent a default on government debt, as Congress heads towards a high-stakes clash between Democrats and Republicans over raising the borrowing limit. | SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
A U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary subcommittee is seeking to question a former official in the U.S. Treasury’s financial crimes enforcement office over revelations the agency urged financial institutions to flag customer transactions linked to phrases like “MAGA” and “Trump” as well as purchases of religious texts.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, sent a letter Wednesday to Noah Bishoff, the former director of an office in the Treasury’s Strategic Operations Division of Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Requesting a transcribed interview with Bishoff, Jordan stated that the subcommittee obtained documents showing that following the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, FinCEN “distributed materials to financial institutions that, among other things, outline the ‘typologies’ of various persons of interest.” He alleges the agency also “provided financial institutions with suggested search terms and Merchant Category Codes (MCCs) for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement.”
“These materials included a document recommending the use of generic terms like ‘TRUMP’ and ‘MAGA’ to ‘search Zelle payment messages’ as well as a ‘prior FinCEN analysis’ of ‘Lone Actor/Homegrown Violent Extremism Indicators,’” the letter reads.
“According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of ‘extremism’ indicators that include ‘transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,’ or ‘the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.’“
Jordan claimed that the documents show that “FinCEN urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”
The findings from the subcommittee suggest federal law enforcement agencies also sought data on transactions at popular sporting goods stores like Bass Pro Shop, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Cabela’s.
“We now know the federal government flagged terms like ‘MAGA’ and ‘TRUMP’ to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms,” Jordan tweeted. “What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop.”
We now know the federal government flagged terms like “MAGA” and “TRUMP,” to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms.
What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop. pic.twitter.com/jjRaVNItWz
One of the sample slides distributed by FinCEN, “prepared by a financial institution,” gave instructions on how to query for transactions like those associated with “small arms,” “sporting and recreational goods and supplies,” and keywords like “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” “Cabela’s” and others, according to the documents.
While Jordan’s letter refers to the Jan. 6 date, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News that the documents linked to House committees’ investigation contained no “specific time frames or limitations for banks searching customer transactions with the terms.” This suggests federal investigators may have expanded their effort to collect data from merchants “beyond” those transactions linked to the Jan. 6 event.
The revelation comes just days after President Joe Biden released the first ad for his 2024 reelection campaign in which he labeled millions of Donald Trump supporters as “extremists” leading up to the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot.
The video released Jan. 4 highlights what Biden calls the “preservation of American democracy” as the “central issue” of the 81-year-old’s reelection campaign.
“There’s something dangerous happening in America,” the Democrat says in the ad’s voiceover. “There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. All of us are being asked right now, what will we do to maintain our democracy?”
Most American voters who are tracking the issue anticipate rising domestic prices for vital goods because of disruptions to commercial shipping in the Red Sea. a survey finds. Pictured: Yemenis lift rifles, Palestinian-Yemeni flags, and Houthi emblems Friday while shouting slogans to protest U.S.- and U.K.-led airstrikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels for disrupting maritime traffic. (Photo: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images)
An opinion survey taken before the recent U.S.-led military action against Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen found strong concern that disruptions in the Red Sea would elevate food and energy prices here at home.
The new polling from TIPP Insights surveyed 1,401 adults about the Houthi rebels’ attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
The survey first established the extent to which respondents were tracking the issue, finding Americans closely divided: 48% said they’re following the issue very or somewhat closely, while 46% said they’re not following it very closely, or not at all. Only 6% say they were unaware of the Houthi attacks on commercial shipping.
Broken down by party line, 52% of Democrats, 49% of Republicans, and 43% of independents said they are aware of the attacks, suggesting this generally isn’t a partisan issue.
Once this baseline was established, TIPP Insights posed three additional questions to those respondents who said they were following the Houthi attacks.
The first question, which got the most dramatic results, asked whether respondents were very, somewhat, not very, or not at all concerned that the attacks might disrupt vital supply chains of commodities such as food and energy.
Fully 89% answered that they were very or somewhat concerned, while only 9% said they were not. The smallest group of respondents in the survey, just 2%, said they had no opinion.
These results remained consistent across all demographics. Although younger voters were marginally less concerned than their older counterparts, the survey found that those concerned still had a significant majority that held across genders and ethnic groups.
In other words, for the roughly half of the U.S. electorate tracking the Red Sea issue, the majority anticipates a rise in domestic prices for vital goods because of the disruptions, which should get the attention of both parties at the outset of 2024.
Given that the price of Brent crude already is creeping up over $80 per barrel because of extended voyages around the Cape of Good Hope to deliver cargoes, this concern is likely to intensify in coming months.
The survey’s second question asked whether respondents placed the primary blame for the attacks on Iran’s Islamist regime, the Israel-Hamas war, or both.
The largest group of respondents, 42%, said they blamed both, and the second largest, 32%, said they blamed Tehran, a result that suggests 74% of American voters consider the Iranian regime at least partially culpable for the turmoil.
Only 15% said they blamed the Israel-Hamas war and, when the response of “both” was accounted for, 57% blamed the war.
It’s worth noting that of the 671 voters surveyed who said they were following the issue and so moved on to the additional questions, the single largest age demographic was 25 to 44, with a total of 230 respondents.
This group was considerably more likely to blame the Houthis’ attacks on the Israel-Hamas war (24%) than were those 18 to 24 (14%), 45 to 64 (12%), or 65 and older (7%), so the real percentage of Americans who blame Israel and the war may be lower.
The third question revealed the starkest partisan divide in the survey. “How confident are you,” it asked, “that President Biden’s Operation Prosperity Guardian will secure commercial shipping in the Red Sea?”
Overall, 52% of respondents said they either were very confident or somewhat confident that Biden would be successful, compared with 41% who said they weren’t confident and 8% who said they’re not sure. That should be welcome news for the president.
Democrats were significantly more confident, with 81% responding positively and only 11% disagreeing. But the numbers for the other political groups tell a different story: Only 26% of Republicans and 41% of independents said they have a degree of confidence in Operation Prosperity Guardian, compared to 68% and 49%, respectively, who said they don’t.
So although Biden’s action has the strong support of those in his base who are following events in the Red Sea, he is underwater on the issue not only with conservatives but also with independents. These survey results could signal broader unease with Biden’s performance as commander in chief.
TIPP Insights conducted its polling as Houthi attacks on commercial shipping were escalating, but before the Biden administration took retaliatory action Jan. 11 and 12.
While the Houthis rebels’ immediate response was muted, they escalated retaliation and struck two commercial vessels in recent days. There are no indications that the U.S.- and U.K.-led airstrikes restored freedom of navigation in the region—in fact, all reports are that shipping is still being diverted in the wake of the airstrikes.
Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, for example, announced a two-week hiatus in production at German factories due to lack of components.
If the Houthi threat isn’t neutralized and this type of stoppage spreads in coming weeks, supply chain disruptions will start to compound in a fashion that may grip the American electorate more broadly as primary voters head to the polls.
Three Republican senators–Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn, Alabama’s Katie Britt, and Florida’s Rick Scott–condemned the Biden administration Friday for reaching out to the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center for guidance on “domestic terrorism.” Pictured: Blackburn speaks Sept. 27 during a press conference at the Capitol on border security. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Republican senators condemned as “deeply disturbing” the Biden administration’s decision to reach out to the Southern Poverty Law Center for advice in combating the “domestic terror threat.”
“Since January 2021, the Biden administration has consistently attempted to weaponize the federal government against its political opponents,” Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “That it would turn to the SPLC to do so is disturbing but unfortunately not surprising, given their shared animosity towards religious freedom and parental rights.”
“The present-day SPLC has devolved into a disreputable, deeply unserious organization that dishonestly attempts to silence anyone across America who disagrees with its far-left activist agenda,” Britt added. “That makes it a natural ally and echo chamber for a president who routinely demonizes Americans who simply have different political beliefs and perspectives.”
The Alabama Republican was responding to The Daily Signal’s exclusive report Thursday that SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged in 2021 that the Biden administration had reached out to her organization in its efforts to combat “the domestic terrorism threat.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. This bias suggests the Biden administration views conservatives as a threat to domestic tranquility, critics say.
“Instead of targeting law-abiding Americans, this administration should be combating the national security, humanitarian, and economic crisis at the southern border—which gravely threatens the safety of our homeland and the well-being of our communities every single day,” Britt said. “I am proud to be a Christian and a conservative, and I’ll continue to fight back against the Biden administration’s radical agenda.”
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., also slammed the Biden administration, noting as well its work with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. The SPLC has echoed Weingarten’s rhetoric in condemning parental rights groups.
“Since he took office, President Biden’s administration has routinely worked with radical individuals and groups like Randi Weingarten and the SPLC to shape dangerous policy that targets Americans based on their religion [or] political views or simply because they rightly believe they should be involved in their child’s education,” Scott told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday.
“It’s wrong and shows just how far President Biden will go in dangerously using the same tactics to weaponize government against its people that we see in Communist China, Venezuela and Cuba,” the Florida Republican added. “I will not tolerate this political targeting and will use every tool at my disposal in the Senate to hold this administration accountable for these despicable decisions.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., also condemned the Biden administration’s move.
“The SPLC, which masquerades as a civil rights organization, is a far-left activist group that has smeared countless conservatives, including religious and parental rights groups,” Blackburn told The Daily Signal. “It is deeply disturbing that the Biden administration would enlist its help to target conservatives as domestic terrorists, marking just the latest example of this administration’s two-tiered system of justice.”
In Video, SPLC Head Brags About Advising Biden
The Daily Signal exclusively reported that Huang, SPLC’s president, is seen in a video bragging to donors attending a fall 2021 meeting that many agencies in Biden’s administration had approached the center to craft a domestic terrorism strategy.
“I think there’s no question that we are unparalleled in our abilities to track and monitor the hate and extremist groups in the country, and I can tell you that we’ve had many agencies in the new Biden administration reaching out to solicit our expertise and our knowledge and information to help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat,” Huang said, according to the video.
The Biden administration’s ties to the SPLC make Huang’s claim credible, and neither the White House nor any of the agencies involved in the administration’s domestic terrorism strategy denied Huang’s claim.
Last year, the FBI’s Richmond office used the SPLC’s “hate group” list to target “radical-traditional Catholics” in an infamous memo. According to the SPLC’s logic, critics say, the entire Roman Catholic Church arguably should be listed as a “hate group” because the SPLC cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church in branding the Ruth Institute a “hate group.”
As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced numerous hits to its credibility, especially on the issue of domestic terrorism.
In 2012, a terrorist gunman used the SPLC “hate map” to target the Christian nonprofit the Family Research Council. He planned to shoot everyone in the building, but the building manager successfully foiled his plan. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept FRC on its map.
Last March, police arrested an SPLC attorney at a riot in Atlanta involving Molotov cocktails, and he now faces domestic terrorism charges. The SPLC also has a long track record of carrying water for Antifa, the violent extremist group involved in the 2020 riots across the country.
Critics on both the Right and the Left long have accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of exaggerating hate in order to scare donors into ponying up cash. In 2019, amid a racial discimination and sexual harassment scandal, a former employee called the SPLC’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
In 2018, the SPLC paid $3.4 million to settle a defamation lawsuit after it branded a Muslim reformer an “anti-Muslim extremist.” The SPLC currently faces another defamation lawsuit for branding an immigration reform organization an “anti-immigrant hate group.”
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, a GOP presidential candidate, condemned the Biden administration Firday for turning to the Southern Poverty Law Center for advice on combating “domestic terrorism.” Pictured: Ramaswamy speaks Dec. 6 during NewsNation’s Republican presidential debate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy condemned the Biden administration Friday over reports that it reached out to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which critics call a far-left smear factory, for advice on combating the “domestic terrorism threat.”
“This is the same organization that added parental rights organizations to its so-called ‘hate map,’” Ramaswamy told The Daily Signal in a written statement. The GOP presidential hopeful was referencing the SPLC’s map plotting mainstream conservative and Christian groups—which it brands “hate groups” or “antigovernment groups”—alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
“The SPLC is a tentacle of the woke-industrial complex,” Ramaswamy added. “I exposed the game in [the book] ‘Woke, Inc.’ Countless companies blacklist law-abiding Americans because nonprofits like SPLC label them members of ‘hate groups.’”
Companies such as Amazon, Eventbrite, and NextDoor have used the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” to refuse their services to conservatives.
“The real problem isn’t that SPLC spouts off its nonsense. It’s that powerful companies & institutions take action based on its judgments,” Ramaswamy told The Daily Signal. “This is an invisible force that fuels the spread of woke-infused cancel culture in America.”
Video Shows SPLC Bragging About Advising Biden
On Thursday, The Daily Signal exclusively reported on a video showing SPLC President Margaret Huang bragging in a fall 2021 donor meeting that many agencies in Biden’s administration had approached the SPLC to craft a domestic terrorism strategy.
“I think there’s no question that we are unparalleled in our abilities to track and monitor the hate and extremist groups in the country, and I can tell you that we’ve had many agencies in the new Biden administration reaching out to solicit our expertise and our knowledge and information to help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat,” Huang says in the video.
The Biden administration’s ties to the SPLC make Huang’s claim credible, and neither the White House nor any agency involved in the administration’s domestic terrorism strategy denied Huang’s claim.
Last year, the FBI’s Richmond office used the SPLC’s “hate group” list to target “radical-traditional Catholics” in an infamous memo. According to the SPLC’s logic, the entire Roman Catholic Church arguably should be listed as a “hate group” because the center cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church in branding the Ruth Institute a “hate group.”
Earlier this week, the White House touted Vice President Kamala Harris’ meeting “with voting rights leaders.” Among the leaders highlighted was Seth Levi, the SPLC’s chief strategy officer.
SPLC’s Lack of Credibility
As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has taken numerous hits to its credibility, especially on the issue of domestic terrorism.
In 2012, a terrorist gunman used the SPLC “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit in the nation’s capital, the Family Research Council. He planned to shoot everyone in the council’s headquarters, but the building manager successfully foiled his plan. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept FRC on its map.
Last March, police arrested an SPLC attorney at a riot in Atlanta that involved the use of Molotov cocktails, and he faces domestic terrorism charges. The SPLC also has a long track record of carrying water for Antifa, a violent extremist group.
Critics on both the Right and the Left long have accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of exaggerating hate to scare donors into ponying up cash. In 2019, amid a racial discimination and sexual harassment scandal, a former employee called the SPLC’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
In 2018, the SPLC paid $3.4 million to settle a defamation lawsuit after it branded a Muslim reformer an “anti-Muslim extremist.” It currently faces another defamation lawsuit for branding an immigration reform organization an “anti-immigrant hate group.”
Exactly one year ago, President Biden declared that 2023 was going to bring the dawning of the age of a “great global transition” to renewable energy. Instead, the data just in shows that the opposite happened: instead of the green energy boom, we had the green energy bust. Or to put it differently: The politicians fought a war against fossil fuels, and fossil fuels won.
Start with the hard reality that in 2023 the world consumed more fossil fuels than ever before. Reuters admitted that despite pledges to shun fossil fuels at the COP-28 climate change conference held several weeks ago: “oil, gas, and coal still account for about 80% of the world’s energy, and projections vary widely about when global demand will finally hit its peak.” Even Biden is acknowledging that oil production continues to hit new highs.
Meanwhile, the developing countries are guzzling oil, gas and coal like nobody’s’ business. It turns out poor countries care more about pulling their citizens out of energy poverty than changing the temperature of the planet in 100 years – as well they should.
China continually pledges to wean itself off of coal and yet its production increased by 3.1% in 2023. Foreign Policy Magazine estimates that China has more than 200 new coal plants under construction with India adding nearly 30 more. The Indian government declared last week that they have no interest in the so-called transition away from coal. China and India are the world’s biggest polluters in the world and their emissions keep getting worse, not better.
Meanwhile, stock returns for green energy have been clobbered. Here is an assessment from analysts at Nasdaq: “Solar energy stocks have been one of the greatest disappointments of the last few years….Stocks in the industry have dropped significantly since the beginning of 2021.”
The investment newsletter Motley Fool recently blasted this glum headline:
Renewable Energy Stocks Got Crushed in 2023.
Whoops.
Oh, and what about EVs? Governments here and abroad are commanding car buyers to stop buying gas-powered cars over the next 5 to 10 years. All new car sales will have to be electric cars.
But so far, fewer than one in 10 cars sold are EVs. Car dealerships around the country can’t get the EVs off the lots and showrooms. Several thousand major car dealers across the nation signed a letter to the car manufacturers requesting fewer EVs.
Other than Tesla, nearly all the other wannabes are in touble. Lucid, Rivian, Nikola, and Fisker are teetering on the cliff of bankruptcy – with each losing 50 to 80 percent of their equity. The Wall Street Journal reported than 30 of the 40 most promising EV startups are either bankrupt or currently unprofitable. EVs are the biggest marketing flop since “New Coke.”
Only one in ten new cars sold are EVs. This is a spectacularly bad performance given that the federal government is still handing out to car buyers a $7,500 check/bribe if they will drive an EV car or truck off the new car sales lot.
Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry continues to fly high. The Permian Basin in Texas is producing more energy to the world than any time in history. In 2023, Exxon and Chevron spent nearly $100 billion swallowing up smaller wildcat firms, acquiring oil fields, drilling rights and infrastructure in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. This is a conclusive market reality test: the big bet is that the oil and gas industry will pump out billions of barrels of more oil in the decade to come.
Argentina just announced one of the biggest pools of black gold discovered in years and the drilling will begin soon. Does this sound like an industry in decline?
Amazingly, the media keeps churning out fake news that the world is right on course with the green energy revolution. It’s the biggest head fake ever. The climate change industrial complex is only gigantic and sustained because of the hundreds of billions of dollars witless politicians throw at it. But their efforts are as futile as trying to stop the rise of the oceans using a thimble.
This isn’t the first green energy bust of the 21st century. The Obama administration tried to fight a war against fossil fuels by subsidizing wind, solar and batteries. The needle barely moved in part because the shale energy revolution clobbered all competitors.
Instead of green, we got red ink: Solyndra and dozens of other green bankruptcies. It turns out private industry and private investors chasing real profits, and not tax dollars, are MUCH better at predicting the future than politicians.
Biden loves to tout the trillions of dollars he’s spent and borrowed as “investments,” as if he and Congress are operating a giant hedge fund. So far the results are miserable.
Maybe we should get rid of all the subsidies and mandates and let the energy markets and consumers sort this out themselves. It’s hard to imagine green energy could do worse under this scenario.
“American democracy is cracking,” warns Washington Post Chief Correspondent Dan Balz in a recent column that presents some ideas to repair it. His suggestions include, among other things, proportional representation, diminishing the power of the Senate, and eliminating the Electoral College. What these three suggestions have in common is a desire to remove any intermediary institutions between the will of the people and government action — otherwise known as “direct” democracy.
These proposals are not new. Indeed, even the framers of the Constitution were familiar with them. But the reasons why such suggestions would significantly erode the republican government envisioned by our Founding Fathers are not new either.
Given Biden’s low approval ratings — especially in important swing states with critical Electoral College votes — as well as broader Democrat fears of a Republican takeover of the Senate, we will likely hear a renewed chorus of voices calling for direct democracy. After all, masses of individuals are much easier to manipulate than smaller families, communities, or even states. Conservatives would do well to arm themselves with the best arguments against such initiatives.
Founders Worked to Curb Direct Democracy
The framers of our Constitution felt quite strongly that direct democracy was something to avoid. In Federalist 10, for example, the Father of the Constitution James Madison warned of “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority” on a government, or what has come to be called the “tyranny of the majority,” in which a majority of the population exerts great coercive power over minority factions.
Again in Federalist 51, Madison wrote: “[I]n the federal republic of the United States … all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.”
Our second president, John Adams, called a unicameral legislative body — in which each member is accountable to his constituents — a “tyranny of the majority.” Adams, reflecting the opinion of that founding generation, argued for “a mixed government, consisting of three branches.” The framers took various steps to disburse power among the federal government, dividing it into three competing branches: executive, legislative, and judicial.
But the founders’ dispersion of governing power also goes beyond the three branches. The 10th Amendment reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In other words, unless the Constitution expressly grants certain powers to the federal government, those powers exist in the states or, even more decentralized, in local communities of Americans.
Later Generations Understood the Threat
A generation after that founding generation, visiting French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville authored an extended survey of American politics and culture, Democracy in America. Tocqueville perceived that the American political system was created to resist the tyranny of the majority, “which bases its claim to rule upon numbers, not upon rightness or excellence.” Thus, Tocqueville writes:
When a man or a party suffers from an injustice in the United States, to whom do you want them to appeal? To public opinion? That is what forms the majority. To the legislative body? It represents the majority and blindly obeys it. To the executive power? It is named by the majority and serves it as a passive instrument.
In other words, the executive branch, even with its disbursed powers, can be influenced by this tyrannical tendency to reflect the opinions of the majority of the people against minority interests at the state or community level. It was thus only through the states and local bases of power and voluntary associations that this tyrannical tendency could be avoided.
A century after Tocqueville’s warnings, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis discussed another way to understand our nation’s default desire to resist direct democracy. Brandeis was one of the first to describe the states as “laboratories of democracy.” In his New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann opinion, he explained how “a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
State and local autonomy served as a means of testing laws and policies to evaluate their effectiveness before implementing across a diverse nation of states, localities, and subcultures. If something works at the micro level, other localities or states — and even potentially the federal government — can appreciate and adopt it.
Constant Temptation of Direct Democracy
Yet such a deliberative process of testing is slow and uneven. And we Americans are often eager for speedy solutions. Political theorists, journalists, and ordinary citizens throughout American history have been frustrated by the Constitution’s manifold methods of distributing power to deter the tyranny of the majority. If a majority of the nation’s populace wants something, they posit, why shouldn’t they be able to get it? After all, as the journalist H.L. Mencken wryly commented, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Such demands especially increase at times of heightened political gridlock in which the country obviously has a particular problem or set of problems but constitutionally mandated laws and procedures thwart attempts to resolve them. When we are all vexed with our politicians for failing to act in what we believe to be the interests of the nation (and its voters), it’s easy to be sympathetic to that line of thinking.
Yet we must beware of this temptation, which reflects what conservative political theorist Russell Kirk calls a manifestation of vox populi, vox dei — the voice of the people is the voice of God. In other words, as long as they constitute a majority, whatever the people want becomes the law of the land.
Direct democracy thus not only represents a threat to freedom, but it is a political order that rejects hierarchies both natural and spiritual. Although these hierarchies are sometimes abused, they serve as a cautionary brake upon the whims of the masses, which — as many revolutions have demonstrated — can be quite violent and destructive. Just look at the French or Russian Revolutions, which ended up terrorizing those they claimed to represent. Millions of dead across the world reveal the problem with direct democracy.
This is the reason for state representation rather than proportional representation in the lower House, a Senate consisting of equal representation by state, the filibuster, the Electoral College, and powers relegated to the states vis-a-vis the 10th Amendment. All of it is an attempt to slow the destructive force of vox populi, vox dei.
As that great French observer of American politics Alexis de Tocqueville observed: “If ever freedom is lost in America, that will be due to the … majority driving minorities to desperation…”
Let’s do everything we can to avoid that scenario.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
More than 300,000 illegal immigrants were encountered by U.S. border officials in December, marking a record for the highest number recorded for a single month.
REPORT: Migrants are camping in people's yards in San Diego, California as the Biden migrant crisis continues to spin out of control.
It didn't have to be this way.
Migrants are now chopping down San Diego residents' trees and using them for firewood. One land owner says the… pic.twitter.com/z9uW5VfOgy
According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources who spoke with Fox News, “more than 302,000 migrants were documented attempting to cross the U.S. southern border” between Dec. 1-31. Totaling more than 785,000 illegal encounters in the first quarter alone, December’s numbers signify the first time CBP has engaged more than 300,000 illegals in a single month.
While the former figure is larger than the population of Seattle, Washington — which, as of July 2022, hosts roughly 749,000 people — the latter is enough to fill America’s largest football stadium “almost three times,” according to The Daily Signal.
In fiscal year 2023, CBP encountered “more than 2.47 million” illegals, marking an increase from the roughly 2.38 million recorded in 2022 and 1.73 million in 2021. An October report published by House Republicans estimates there have been more than 1.7 million “gotaways” since President Biden took office.
Contrary to the White House’s claims, Biden and his administration have done nothing to stymie the ongoing invasion at America’s southern border. In fact, the administration has actively sought to prevent border states such as Texas from enacting measures designed to halt foreign nationals’ infringement upon their sovereignty.
Last year, for example, Biden’s Department of Justice sued Texas for placing barriers in the Rio Grande River to prevent illegals from streaming onto their land. More recently, the DOJ threatened to file a lawsuit against the Lone Star State if it enacts legislation that would authorize state and local law enforcement to “arrest, jail and prosecute [individuals] suspected of entering the U.S. unlawfully.”
I’m so damn sick and tired of seeing these videos with NOTHING being done.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have failed to use their majority to enact significant border policy changes in spending bills or hold Biden and officials such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas accountable for their intentional destruction of America’s southern border. In November, for instance, eight GOP representatives voted with Democrats to block a resolution introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to impeach Mayorkas for his allowance of the disaster to continue unaddressed.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Workers could lose their jobs under a proposed Biden administration change to overtime rules. Employers may prevent cost increases by eliminating jobs, automating job functions and shifting more work onto remaining salaried employees. (Photo: Jetta Productions Inc./DigitalVision/Getty Images)
The Biden administration is trying to hike the threshold under which hourly-wage work regulations apply by about $25,000 per year. The proposed overtime rule threatens to throw millions of workers out of their salaried jobs and into hourly work, leading to lost flexibility and autonomy, benefit and wage cuts, and job losses.
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that hourly employees be paid 1.5 times their usual rate for any hours worked over 40 in a given week. Employees who receive regular salaries, regardless of the hours they work, are exempt from overtime requirements, so long as they pass a duties test and are paid a minimum salary level. (Certain occupations like teachers and lawyers are exempt altogether.)
If the rule is finalized, employers who have salaried employees earning between the current threshold of $684 per week ($35,568 per year) and the proposed threshold of $1,158 per week ($60,209 per year) will have to decide whether they will convert them to hourly workers, trade salary increases for benefit cuts or eliminate their jobs. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 12.3 million workers fall in this range.
Since the cost of living and wages vary significantly across the U.S., and the proposed overtime rule sets the same salary threshold throughout, workers in lower-cost areas would face the greatest consequences. For example, while fewer than 50% of workers in the District of Columbia, Massachusetts and Washington state have earnings below the proposed threshold, more than 70% of workers in Arkansas, Mississippi, South Dakota and West Virginia have earnings below the proposed threshold.
Given the massive increase in the salary threshold, and the fact that the proposal includes automatic future increases, most employers will have to make major changes to their workforces, including:
Workers may lose their jobs. Employers may prevent cost increases by eliminating jobs, automating job functions and shifting more work onto remaining salaried employees. A study of recent overtime rule changes in the U.S. found a three-to-one ratio of employment losses to income gains and an increase in inequality.
Employers may reduce workers’ benefits, hours or base pay. Employers could keep compensation constant by reducing or eliminating benefits like retirement contributions and paid time off. Moreover, a study showed that employers have responded to forced wage increases by reducing workers’ hours enough that employers no longer have to provide them with health insurance. Or employers could do what IBM did in response to an overtime lawsuit settlement: Reduce workers’ base pay by 15% while keeping total compensation unchanged.
Many workers could experience smaller, less consistent paychecks. When workers are converted to hourly employees, they get paid only for the hours they work. Where a salaried employee may take two hours off for a child’s doctor visit without any change in pay, an hourly worker would receive a smaller paycheck.
Moreover, employers may maximize efficiency by altering work schedules. In California, an increase in the minimum wage left workers with fewer hours and significantly smaller paychecks. Employers also resorted to on-demand scheduling, changing workers’ start times and total hours.
A loss of flexibility and remote work options. Legal liabilities make it difficult and risky for employers to allow hourly employees to have flexible schedules or to work remotely. Consequently, parents currently able to leave work an hour early to pick up kids from school and to finish up work at home could lose that option. Young workers who want to come in early or leave late to learn the ropes and make a good impression could be prohibited from doing so, and shift managers who want to trade Sunday for Monday shifts would no longer have that option because their employer would have to pay them each time-and-a-half.
Workers could be pushed into underground employment and lose workplace protections. The rule proposes a 159% increase in the overtime threshold in Puerto Rico—a level that encompasses more than 90% of Puerto Rico’s formal workforce. With many workers in Puerto Rico already pushed into underground employment due to costly labor market regulations, the proposed regulation could cause many Puerto Rican workers to lose their formal jobs and the workplace protections that come with them.
In addition to the millions of workers adversely affected by this regulation, the economy at large would suffer. A Congressional Budget Office study of a similar proposed overtime increase found that its benefits were far less than its costs. Overall, it would raise prices for consumers, lower family incomes and reduce employment.
Instead of imposing costly new regulations in an attempt to force employers to pay higher wages for the same work, policymakers should enact policies that help workers produce and earn more while also keeping doors open to flexible work opportunities.
Mexican and U.S. officials have agreed to work together more closely to tackle record migration at their shared border, the countries’ governments said in a joint statement Thursday, a day after high-level talks on stemming record numbers.
Following a visit to Mexico by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the countries said they would seek to strengthen a sponsorship initiative for Venezuelan, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Haitian migrants and look to tackle the root causes of migration.
The delegations, who are set to meet again in Washington next month, also discussed regularizing the situation of beneficiaries of the U.S. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program – the so-called Dreamers who were brought into the country illegally as children – and long-time undocumented Hispanic migrants living in the United States.
The talks came after the U.S. temporarily shuttered some border crossings to redeploy agents toward enforcement, sparking a trade slowdown and criticism by Republicans of the Biden administration’s border policies. Immigration and the border are expected to be top issues in the U.S. 2024 elections, where President Joe Biden, a Democrat, is running for a second term.
Earlier Thursday, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the two parties had agreed to keep border crossings open after the temporary closures.
“This agreement has been reached, the rail crossings and the border bridges are already being opened to normalize the situation,” Lopez Obrador told a morning press conference.
Lopez Obrador said Wednesday’s meetings with the U.S. delegation were “direct,” and he praised the Biden administration’s relationship with Mexico.
‘Faith in God’
More than half a million migrants this year crossed the dangerous Darien Gap jungle connecting South America with Central America – double last year’s record – with many fleeing crime, poverty and conflict to seek better prospects in the United States.
The latest of a series of caravans of migrants and asylum seekers, many with small children, is slowly walking across southern Mexico, heading towards the U.S border. Lopez Obrador estimated that the caravan counts some 1,500 people but some activists and local media have put the figure at 7,000.
“We have to have faith in God,” Honduran migrant Marvin Mejias said as he traveled with his son, who has had foot surgery. Mejias said he hoped the governments had reached a deal which would help him enter the U.S. and be able to work there.
Lopez Obrador said the issue of fentanyl, a powerful and deadly opioid that Mexican cartels have been trafficking into the U.S., was “hardly discussed” in Wednesday’s meeting.
The United States has been pressing Mexico to do more to combat fentanyl trafficking, while Mexico has been pushing for stronger U.S. controls to prevent U.S. firearms from reaching the powerful cartels.
The Heritage Foundation is suing the Treasury Department under President Joe Biden, seen here on Dec. 13, for communications about redefining the term “recession.” (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Treasury Department under President Joe Biden has refused to hand over documents showing how officials decided to alter the definition of a recession after the first two quarters of 2022 saw declines in gross domestic product, the traditional definition of a recession.
The Heritage Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request on July 6, asking Treasury for internal communications containing the terms “recession,” “alternative definition of recession” and “alternative recession measurements.” (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
The Treasury Department first asked Heritage to narrow the scope of its request, which Heritage did. Yet Treasury failed to hand over the documents, so Heritage filed a lawsuit on Dec. 1, claiming the department violated the Freedom of Information Act.
“The Treasury’s job is to collect taxes and allocate revenue per the dictates of Congress, not engage in Orwellian word games to distract from the economic failures of the leftist agenda,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow with Heritage’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday.
The lawsuit quotes the International Monetary Fund, which notes that while “there is no official definition of recession … most commentators and analysts use, as a practical definition of recession, two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product.”
In the first quarter of 2022, U.S. inflation-adjusted GDP declined by 1.6%, and it declined by an additional 0.6% in the second quarter of last year.
In July 2022, however, the White House stated that “it is unlikely that the decline of the GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”
“This position is in extreme tension with conventional wisdom and the position of the Board of the Federal Reserve,” the lawsuit states.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit that aims to determine America’s business cycles, defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.” The bureau claimed that the decline in 2022 did not fit its definition.
The White House has repeatedly claimed that the economy is improving due to Biden’s economic policies it brands “Bidenomics.” President Joe Biden has touted declines in the rate of inflation—which in this case do not mean that prices have declined, but that they are rising at a slower pace—as if they meant inflation is no longer a factor affecting Americans.
“The Biden administration clearly isn’t too proud of their destructive ‘Bidenomics’ if they are hiding documents related to the most basic questions,” Mike Howell, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and a signatory on the lawsuit, told The Daily Signal. “If ‘Bidenomics’ was so great, why do we have to sue them for this?”
Since Biden took office in 2021, inflation has outpaced wage increases in 27 of the past 31 months. According to Antoni, the Heritage researcher, the average American worker pays $4.97 per hour under Biden in the hidden tax of inflation, effectively doubling how much he or she pays in federal income tax. The typical American family with two parents working has lost more than $5,000 in annual income.
A Monmouth University poll surveying 803 U.S. adults between Nov. 30 and Dec. 4 found that 68% of respondents disapproved of Biden’s handling of inflation.
Israel is considering a plan to pump seawater into Hamas’ tunnel system underneath the Gaza Strip, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing U.S. officials. The Israel Defense Forces has assembled five large seawater pumps capable of transferring thousands of cubic meters of water per hour from the Mediterranean Sea into the tunnels, according to the report. Work was reportedly completed on the pumps around the middle of November. They are located roughly one mile north of the Al-Shati Camp along northern Gaza’s coastline.
Israel first informed the Biden administration of the plans in early November, the officials said, with discussions on the effectiveness of such an operation and the potential environmental impact, including on the Strip’s water supply. The officials said the reaction in Washington was mixed, with some supporting it and others privately expressing concerns, although “there wasn’t necessarily any U.S. opposition to the plan.”U.S. officials said that they didn’t know how close Israel was to carrying out the plans, with a final decision on whether to proceed still pending.
Israel has discovered around 800 tunnels so far during the Gaza ground operation that began on Oct. 27, with 500 of them destroyed or sealed. The IDF has also destroyed hundreds of miles of tunnels in addition to the shafts.
Hamas kidnapped over 200 people during the Oct. 7 massacre, with 137 still being held hostage.
A source familiar with the plan said that a flooding process over weeks would allow for Hamas terrorists and potentially hostages to move out.
“We are not sure how successful pumping will be since nobody knows the details of the tunnels and the ground around them,” the source said. “It’s impossible to know if that will be effective because we don’t know how seawater will drain in tunnels no one has been in before.”
The WSJ reached out to an IDF official, who declined to comment on the report, saying only that “The IDF is operating to dismantle Hamas’ terror capabilities in various ways, using different military and technological tools. “Republished with permission from Jewish News Syndicate.
A voter arrives at a polling place on March 3, 2020, in Minneapolis for that year’s presidential primary. Legitimate voters shouldn’t have to worry about whether their votes are canceled out by fraudulent ones. (Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
You can see it with your own eyes. But Democrats and their left-wing media allies call it a “fantasy.” What is it?
A Lawrence, Massachusetts, voter who had been turned away from the polls on Election Day and told he had already voted found out he was the victim of fraud. He checked the footage on the video camera outside his front door and saw that a woman had removed mail-in ballots from his mailbox. He called police.
It’s happening in many places. On Tuesday, Fight Voter Fraud Inc., a nonprofit voter rights group, appeared in Connecticut Superior Court to demand the arrest of a woman alleged to have been caught on video committing mail-in ballot fraud in the 2019 Bridgeport Democratic mayoral primary and again in the 2023 primary. The group, protesting that city officials pretend there’s no problem, also called on the Connecticut legislature to appoint a special prosecutor.
A staggering 60% of likely voters nationwide consider election cheating a problem, according to Rasmussen Reports. Yet the Left denies it’s happening. The Washington Post calls it a “myth” and a “fantasy offense.” Worst of all, the federal government is suppressing the evidence and censoring anyone who complains about election cheating.
Never-before-seen emails released by the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 6 reveal that a government-sponsored task force is muzzling public figures, thousands of ordinary Americans, and media outlets like Newsmax and The Babylon Bee when they report election irregularities. The emails show that officials within the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department—”the deep state”—organized the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020, recruiting academics at Stanford University and the University of Washington to question election honesty and then instruct social media companies such as Google, Facebook, and YouTube to label the postings as “misinformation” or take them down entirely.
Don’t be fooled by the name Election Integrity Partnership. This task force does the opposite, silencing concerns about election integrity.
In 2020, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich objected when the state of Pennsylvania adopted new election rules during the COVID-19 pandemic that, in his view, invited cheating. He tweeted, “Pennsylvania Democrats are methodically changing the rules so they can steal the election.”
When Nicole Malliotakis was running for Congress in 2020 from Staten Island and southern Brooklyn, N.Y., she posted on Facebook: “Be sure to vote tomorrow because we’re not only taking on Max Rose, Nancy Pelosi & Bill de Blasio. We’re taking on Dead Democrats, too!”
The Election Integrity Partnership disagreed and instructed Facebook to remove Malliotakis’ post, which it did. Even if Malliotakis were wrong about dead people voting, she has a right to raise the issue. In fact, Malliotakis was correct. A Staten Island grand jury subsequently identified numerous instances of fraud in the race for City Council there, including a ballot submitted on behalf of a dead person.
The emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud just when Democrats were pushing many states to adopt new election rules in the face of COVID-19. Americans were entitled to hear the pros and cons of those rules. They still are.
The First Amendment bars government from censoring. So, what did the government do? It outsourced the censorship to the Election Integrity Partnership. All the same, it was government calling the shots, telling third parties to censor on its behalf. Louisiana and Missouri are suing to stop the federal government’s censorship scheme, and that case is now in the Supreme Court.
Kate Starbird of the University of Washington, a member of the Election Integrity Partnership, told NPR she regrets the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation, and the lawsuit will dampen the Election Integrity Partnership’s future censorship operations.
No worries. Russian President Vladimir Putin is said to be running for reelection in March 2024. Putin, President Xi Jinping of China, and other dictators who don’t tolerate complaints about election rigging will find the Election Integrity Partnership very handy.
It has no place in America.
Tell our leaders to crack down on election fraud, instead of censoring its critics.
Tens of thousands of protesters have flooded city streets across Spain since October in sustained demonstrations opposing a socialist takeover of the Spanish government. Protesters are showing their opposition toward an amnesty deal between Spain’s socialist President Pedro Sánchez and treasonous Catalan separatists, who violated the Spanish constitution in 2017 by attempting to secede from Spain. By striking a deal to free incarcerated and exiled Spanish criminals, Sánchez was able to secure a third term in power.
The protests are organized by Spain’s conservative People’s Party and Vox, its further right, populist party. In an interview between Vox President Santiago Abascal and Tucker Carlson last week, Abascal explained that the amnesty deal is a crime “against the constitution” and “national unity.”
Ep. 40 Spain’s descent into tyranny seems eerily familiar. Opposition leader Santiago Abascal is one of the few people standing up to it. We traveled to Madrid to talk to him.
TIMESTAMPS: 1:11 Santiago Abascal 2:23 The end of democracy in Spain 8:43 “Are you ready to go to jail… pic.twitter.com/fE4zrYrqAC
But the massive demonstrations are not just in defense of the Spanish Constitution, Abascal explained; they’re about what an illegal third Sánchez term means for Spain, namely a failing Spanish economy, two-tier justice, mass illegal immigration from Muslim countries, speech policing, globalism, the demonization of Spanish history, and loss of Spanish identity.
Where Are the American Demonstrations?
The problems faced by Spaniards are strikingly similar to those facing Americans. The American left hates our heritage so much they torched American cities and destroyed historical statues and monuments for an entire summer.Our corrupt president, Joe Biden, was able to take power thanks to a rigged election, and his administration has weaponized the federal government against his most prominent political adversary, former President Donald Trump, and anyone in ideological opposition to the Democrats.
The Biden administration’s disregard for border security encourages mass illegal immigration at the Southern Border, exposing the public to dangerous criminals and additional economic burdens while the middle class struggles to stay afloat amid increasing taxes, inflation, and gas prices. And despite the public’s rapidly increasing suffering, Biden prioritizes sending billions of tax dollars to foreign wars and international green energy projects.
All these things, but particularly the federal government’s targeting of conservatives and its assault on election integrity, should be sparking massive protests. Yet they aren’t. Unlike Spain, America was founded on the idea that human beings have God-given, inalienable rights. Freedom of speech and assembly are not just First Amendment givens in the United States, but part of our culture. So why aren’t conservatives protesting?
Using fear and intimidation, the left is scaring conservatives into giving up their freedom to assemble. One of the primary fear tactics is to severely punish those who, on Jan. 6, 2021, opted to protest Democrat’s election-rigging practices, such as mass mail-in balloting and Big Tech censorship. As newly-released Jan. 6 footage further reveals, many of the Jan. 6 protesters accused of rioting were peaceful.
Yet federal courts openly admitted to making examples out of peaceful protesters in order to “deter others.” J6 demonstrators have been harassed by federal agents, held in solitary confinement, and demonized by the Jan. 6 Committee, Biden, and the corporate media.
Conservatives aren’t just afraid — they’re also hopeless.After witnessing the Marxist race riots of 2020 and the erasure of their civil liberties during Covid, many Americans no longer recognize their homeland. A recent Harvard Harris poll shows that 80 percent of GOP voters feel the country is headed in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, a July 2023 poll reported that 86.92 million Americans find “somewhat” or “very” difficult to pay their household expenses, with the middle class being the most affected income bracket.
How many times have we heard friends and family members say, “The country is lost?” This fear and despair are understandable, but the stakes have never been higher. Bravery and self-sacrifice are necessary to defend a nation against forces wishing to destroy it. As Abascal explained to Tucker:
“The nation isn’t just made up of all the Spaniards here today, it’s not just the people you can see walking down the street. Our nation is our history. It’s in the cemeteries where our forebears rest. The nation is the sum of the living, the dead, and those yet to be born… I think that what we do today, even if we aren’t victorious as we hope, can make it so that others in the future, our children, future generations, can achieve that victory. [Then] it will have all been worthwhile.”
Spain Understands The Stakes
Spain has first-hand experience with communism. When communists controlled Spain, both in the lead-up to and during the civil war in the 1930s, it resulted in the persecution of Spanish intellectuals, clerics, and Christian laypeople. Spanish communists began their anti-Christian hate by banning all religious schools, removing crucifixes from classrooms, and deeming all religious marriages invalid in the eyes of the state. Eventually, they started burning Catholic Churches and mass executing Catholic religious and laypeople. Property rights were thrown out, and conservatives were unjustly convicted in kangaroo courts and executed. By the end of the war, a reported “13 bishops, 4,172 priests, 2,364 monks and friars and 283 nuns and sisters,” and an unknown number of laypeople were killed.
The wounds inflicted by Spanish communists are still raw. The memory has not died. So, in 2022, Spain implemented its “Democratic Memory” law, an Orwellian piece of legislation that mandates a pro-leftist view of the Spanish Civil War and the post-war period. Through “criminal and economic sanctions for dissidents,” the law effectively eradicates “academic freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of education,” writes Hermann Tertsch, a Vox Member of the European Parliament.
Like in America, Spanish leftists brand anyone who contradicts their history narratives as thought criminals. According to Abascal, leftists have also created a two-tier justice system and “are now arresting young people for protest[ing] … saying they don’t have permits.” Unfortunately for the left, these fear tactics have not been entirely effective, as the ongoing protests demonstrate, perhaps because too many Spaniards know what communist control looks like.
In America, we are blessed not to know. However, that blessing is also a curse. We don’t appreciate how easily a free nation can fall into tyranny. Unable to oppose or even recognize tyranny, younger generations have lost touch with the American revolutionary spirit after sending generations of Americans to spend their formative years in reeducation camps run by cultural Marxists (aka public school and the university system).
Perhaps a way to regain America’s lost fortitude is by watching conservative freedom fighters in Spain. We may not have the national memory of communists burying priests alive or defiling and decapitating nuns, but we can look to Spain for motivation.
Indeed, the Spanish protests should inspire Americans, and Spanish history should be a warning.If we resign ourselves to failure or allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence, the consequences will be nothing short of complete national destruction.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
The wheels are starting to fall off the green energy bandwagon. The rose-colored glasses are clearing up and reality is sinking in.
The giant push toward a net zero utopia is not practical and has been a complete disservice to the American consumer. Components of the green movement are experiencing major setbacks, namely offshore wind, electric vehicles (EVs), and investments.
Offshore wind projects are struggling to secure financing and stay on track. The biggest blow came last month, when the world’s largest offshore wind developer Ørsted canceled two major projects off the New Jersey coastline, taking the wind right out of Gov. Phil Murphy’s green energy sails. Ørsted is also suspending work on offshore projects in Maryland and Delaware.
The EV market is also losing steam. Sales are slumping and manufacturers are scaling back on production. (Anna Moneymaker/Pool/Getty Images | Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Among the wave of cancellations are projects in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Connecticut. Several other projects are on the ropes and a host of companies are paying millions to break their contracts.
The industry hit another snag recently when Germany-based Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy pulled the plug on its wind turbine blade facility in Portsmouth, Virginia. Siemens Gamesa, one of the world’s leading suppliers, says, “development milestones to establish the facility could not be met.”
According to BloombergNEF, at least half of U.S. wind contracts have or are at risk of being terminated. The causes are typically due to skyrocketing inflation, high interest rates, choked supply chains and financial troubles.
Ford Motor Company stands to lose $4.5 billion on its EV business for 2023 and will be delaying many of their EV investments.
General Motors said it was restructuring EV goals, Honda shelved plans to develop affordable EVs with GM, and Hertz said it will slow their rate of purchasing them due to high repair costs. Elon Musk is even considering putting off plans for a $1 billion plant in Mexico.
Most, if not all, manufacturers are reporting major losses per EV sold. Ford lost $62,000 per vehicle in the third quarter; one luxury electric vehicle company lost an astounding $430,000. Countless others are losing tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle, quarter after quarter.
Car dealers are slashing EV prices. EVs sit on lots nearly twice as long as internal combustion engines. Even industry-leader Tesla has been shaving thousands off their retail prices due to unmet sales expectations.
This kind of loss is not sustainable for any company.
The EV market is niche. Those who want one have one. But the rest of America is not convinced they would be better off with an EV on account of a multitude of reliability factors. Nor can they afford the steep price tag.
Consequently, the last few months have seen stock prices drastically dropping in companies across the green spectrum. From wind to solar to EVs to fuel cells, investors are abandoning the “green” energy ship in droves. It might be sinking.
Siemens Energy stock is down 45%; Ørsted, 67%; Power Inc., a hydrogen fuel cell producer, 71%; Charge Point Holdings Inc., an EV charging company, 70%; Blink Charging Co., another EV charging company, 72%; and Nikola Corp., maker of heavy-duty EVs, has gone from $65 a share in mid-2020 to the current price of less than $1 per share.
A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that such companies are “finding it more difficult to secure financing than at any time in the past decade.”
We need to read between the lines here. The green energy revolution is not working, nor is central planning. You cannot force Americans to buy cars they don’t want any more than you can force energy transitions that aren’t viable.
Green energy is wholly inadequate to meet the needs of all Americans, and turns out, is insanely expensive.
The World Economic Forum says that getting to net zero by 2050 will cost an extra $3.5 trillion a year. The U.S. has already poured hundreds of billions into the effort and continues to keep shoveling. All on the backs of the American taxpayer, to save a mere fraction of temperature. Maybe.
Heritage Foundation’s chief statistician estimates that even if all fossil fuels were eliminated from the United States, not even 0.2 degrees Celsius would be salvaged.
Kristen Walker is a policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, visit www.theamericanconsumer.org or follow us on Twitter @ConsumerPal.
Gender dysphoria is a disability that requires accommodation, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services says, based on one court ruling. (Photo illustration: SB Arts Media/Getty Images)
The Biden administration has been known to stretch the law beyond a plain reading to support a desired policy outcome. Take the longstanding federal law that criminalizes the shipment of abortion drugs, for example. The Justice Department argues that the law doesn’t mean what it says. Wrong.
Or how about Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—crafted to guarantee sex equality in education—which the Department of Education argues permits biological boys to compete on female athletic teams? Wrong again.
Now, the Department of Health and Human Services is arguing that gender dysphoria is a disability under federal law. And that disability, HHS argues, requires accommodation. How does HHS reach that conclusion? By relying on one decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, a decision not followed by any other federal appellate court. It’s also a decision about which certain justices of the U.S. Supreme Court expressed significant concern.
On Sept. 14, the Department of Health and Human Services published a proposed rule to amend section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which is the federal law that prohibits disability discrimination in any program conducted by federal agencies or receiving federal funding.
There is much good in the proposed rule to be sure, including updates on obligations concerning web and mobile accessibility, service animals, facilities, and medical care. But the proposed rule also adopts the rationale of the 4th Circuit in Williams v. Kincaid to justify extending the definition of disability to include gender dysphoria.
The Department agrees that restrictions that prevent, limit, or interfere with otherwise qualified individuals’ access to care due to their gender dysphoria, gender dysphoria diagnosis, or perception of gender dysphoria may violate section 504.
There’s just one problem: Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act excludes the exact disorder HHS is trying to shoehorn into its interpretation. That law reads:
For the purposes of sections 791, 793, and 794 of this title, the term ‘individual with a disability’ does not include an individual on the basis of—(i) transvestism, transsexualism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, or other sexual behavior disorders.
Happily for the Biden administration, the appeals court in Williams held (inexplicably) that “gender dysphoria” and “gender identity disorder” were two different things.
In the case, inmate Kesha Williams, who was born a male but “identifies” as a transgender woman, sued Sheriff Stacey Kincaid of Fairfax County, Virginia, based on alleged mistreatment at the county jail.
Williams sued under both the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act (or ADA), a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including employment, education, transportation, and places open to the general public. The Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act contain identical, exclusionary language on “gender identity disorders.” The two laws often appear together when a claimant alleges discrimination based on disability.
Williams’ contention was that as Fairfax County sheriff, Kincaid violated both laws by refusing to accommodate Williams’ “gender dysphoria.” Williams argued that the sheriff did so by assigning the inmate to men’s housing, failing to offer hormone therapy, and permitting “persistent and intentional misgendering and harassment.”
Because the ADA clearly doesn’t provide disability protections for “gender identity disorder,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, writing for the 2-1 majority, engaged in a contorted legal analysis before concluding that gender dysphoria wasn’t actually a gender identity disorder. To reach that conclusion, Motz didn’t look to the statute’s plain language at the time of its enactment. Instead, she focused on a much more recent change by the American Psychiatric Association on gender-related psychiatric diagnoses—one not envisioned, anticipated, or incorporated by the original drafters of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990.
This change first appeared in 2013 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). This manual is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States. At that time, the American Psychiatric Association replaced the term “gender identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria.” The change focused the diagnosis on the distress that some people who consider themselves transgender experience (and for which they may seek psychiatric, medical, and surgical treatments) instead of on an individual’s desire to be a gender other than the one he or she was born as. Motz determined that this change was good enough to stretch the Americans With Disabilities Act well beyond the limits of what Congress determined the law ought to bear originally.
In sum, the APA’s removal of the ‘gender identity disorder’ diagnosis and the addition of the ‘gender dysphoria’ diagnosis to the DSM-5 reflected a significant shift in medical understanding. The obsolete diagnosis focused solely on cross-gender identification; the modern one on clinically significant distress … Put simply, while the older DSM pathologized the very existence of transgender people, the recent DSM-5’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria takes as a given that being transgender is not a disability and affirms that a transgender person’s medical needs are just as deserving of treatment and protection as anyone else’s.
Motz and the other judge in the majority argued that the concept of “gender identity disorder” as used in the statute encompassed all “cross-gender identification,” but the current American Psychiatric Association-defined concept of “gender dysphoria” is defined by stress that goes beyond “being trans alone.” So, Motz concluded in her opinion, “gender identity disorder” as a category “no longer exists,” thereby rendering the statutory exclusion without any effect.
In his dissent, Judge Marvin Quattlebaum argued that the majority’s focus on this linguistic change ignored the plain text of the Americans With Disabilities Act at the time of its enactment in 1990. And that plain text explicitly excluded “gender identity disorders.” In Quattlebaum’s view, Motz was incorrect to focus on an apparent shift in medical understanding, something she argued had rendered the exclusion of “gender identity disorder” as obsolete.
The Supreme Court denied review in Williams on June 30, but Justice Samuel Alito was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas in strenuously dissenting from this denial. Alito wrote that the case presented a question of “great national importance” that required prompt review. He added:
The Fourth Circuit’s decision makes an important provision of a federal law inoperative and, given the broad reach of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act, will have far-reaching and important effects across much of civil society in that Circuit. Voters in the affected States and the legislators they elect will lose the authority to decide how best to address the needs of transgender persons in single-sex facilities, dormitory housing, college sports, and the like.
As seems typical for the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services relied on a single, problematic ruling—one based on faulty reasoning and subject to withering criticism—for the purpose of advancing its preferred social policy interests. HHS intends that all entities covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act now must make accommodations for any feelings of stress or discomfort that result from a person’s “assigned” (i.e., birth) sex.
If the proposed HHS rule is finalized, it would open the door for those who consider themselves transgender and feel clinically distressed to receive requested accommodations in bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, prisons, same-sex housing, preferred pronouns, and more.
The public comment period on the proposed HHS rule closed Nov. 13, and the Biden administration now must wade through over 5,200 comments received before drafting and issuing a final rule.
The administration shouldn’t rely on another faulty interpretation of federal law. Instead, it should rescind the proposed HHS rule immediately.
Regulations created in a time of energy scarcity aren’t applicable to a time of energy abundance and decrease innovation in energy efficiency, yet the Biden administration is abusing those regulations to fight so-called climate change. Pictured: President Joe Biden speaks at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Week on Nov. 16 in San Francisco, California. (Photo: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
Americans have experienced appliance inflation over the past few years, and it could be about to get worse as the Biden administration continues its onslaught of appliance regulations. While blaming Washington bureaucrats is always a reasonable response, in this case, any problems that they are causing is a result of them exercising the authority granted to them by legislation passed at the height of the 1970’s energy crisis—the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act.
The act gives the Department of Energy authority to regulate nearly everything in a household that uses energy. While it doesn’t require the Department of Energy to continuously impose ever stricter standards, the reality is this is precisely what it does. Worse, this trend has worsened in recent years as the Biden administration freely uses the act to advance its extreme agenda with ever stricter government standards, using climate change as a primary justification.
While the Energy Policy and Conservation Act does grant the secretary of energy broad authority, current law also requires that certain factors, like the effect on cost and competition, the amount of energy saved, and the need for energy conservation in general be taken into account. Unfortunately, Washington bureaucrats not only routinely ignore these requirements in any meaningful way but choose instead to focus on extraneous alleged benefits like climate change.
This could be expected, perhaps, because the underlying justification for the efficiency regime established by the act has largely dissipated over time. The act was born out of a time of perceived energy scarcity. But today, America has hundreds of years of known energy reserves, and new technology is allowing for new discoveries and more efficient use of existing reserves all the time. In justifying the policies that act ultimately set in place, President Gerald Ford laid out three broad policy objectives. These included reducing oil imports, ending American vulnerability to economic disruption by foreign suppliers, and developing energy technology and resources to supply a significant share of the free world’s energy needs.
In each case, America has achieved Ford’s objectives.
The Energy Policy and Conservation Act Has Lost Relevancy
In 1975, net imports of crude oil were close to 6 million barrels per day. By 2020, the United States had become a net exporter. Geopolitical shocks and cartels, specifically the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, which produces about 40% of the world’s crude oil, can still have a near-term impact on American energy prices. However, due to the large amount of energy on global markets, energy disruptions do not present the sort of systemic threat that policymakers feared in the 1970’s.
The extent to which the United States economy remains vulnerable is purely a function of energy restriction policies—like Biden’s recent decision to ban energy development in parts of Alaska—and have nothing to do with energy efficiency. Further, American technologies like fracking, the nation’s vast coal resources, and commercial nuclear reactors not only can keep America energy independent but also grow its role as a global supplier of energy.
Further, appliances of all sorts are becoming more efficient because that is what people want. While the consuming public considers many attributes of the purchases they make, including capability and upfront cost, efficiency is clearly something Americans value. The government does not need to compel efficiency; the market demands it.
America Is in an Era of Energy Abundance, Not Scarcity
America has ample energy reserves. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, in 2020, the United States held over 373 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude oil reserves, which would provide the U.S. with over 50 years of supply. The same is true for natural gas. The agency estimated in 2020 that the U.S. held 2,925.8 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas. At current consumption levels, that equates to nearly 100 years of supply.
Further, new discoveries are always occurring that would expand this supply over time, which is demonstrated by the growing availability of unconventional sources like oil shale. According to Energy Information Agency, the U.S. currently holds 195.5 billion barrels of crude oil and 1,712.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in unconventional reserves.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, conventional and unconventional reserves combine to provide nearly 300 years of energy supply at current consumption levels. These energy resources do not even account for uranium deposits, which are widely spread throughout the U.S., nor for advancements in other energy generating technologies.
Any regulatory regime promulgated out of fears regarding energy scarcity simply can no longer be justified.
Compelled Efficiency Standards Reduce Competition
Energy efficiency regulations do not simply alter standards; they can effectively remove products and technology from the marketplace and reduce competition. This is antithetical to Congress’ wishes as evidenced by Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which makes clear that maintaining a competitive market for the covered products is an essential element of the cost-benefit calculation. Yet ultimately, most rules have a tremendous effect on the market. Whether it’s gasoline engines, light bulbs, furnaces, or showerheads, every American will ultimately experience less choice in terms of price, availability, and capability. In some cases, such as with incandescent light bulbs and some refrigerants, this is already the case.
What DOE does not appreciate is the positive benefit that technological competition and product variation has on long-term market health, something even the White House has acknowledged. According to a White House memo published on July 9, 2021, “Healthy market competition is fundamental to a well-functioning U.S. economy.” It goes on to point out that insufficient competition will lead to higher prices and lower quality.
By removing entire classes of technology and product lines from the market, efficiency standards limit incentives to lower prices, or even to increase efficiency further, because the regulation will have captured a substantial portion of the market for the preferred technology. Further, the efficiency standards eliminate opportunities for firms to specialize in specific offerings to gain market share. While some firms may retool to compete, it is unlikely that the market will support the same number of firms when they all must adhere to strict regulatory standards. This will almost necessarily lead to fewer firms offering fewer choices.
Fewer firms and less technological competition will be bad for consumers and is antithetical to Energy Policy and Conservation Act. Having a lower-priced option that may be less efficient competing against a more efficient higher-priced option will engender competition to develop technologies that move prices lower and efficiency higher overall. By eliminating half of the equation, these compelled standards eliminate an essential force to move technology forward.
Congress, right or wrong, sought to improve consumer product efficiency when it passed the act, but it was not seeking to empower the DOE to, in effect, ban products.
Empower Americans, Not Washington
None of this is to argue that energy efficiency does not have value. It obviously does. However, that value is best determined by American consumers and businesses calculating the value of long-term savings against the near-term costs.
The flexibility to assess economic tradeoffs is even more important to low-income Americans. According to the United States Office of Management and Budget, “some research indicates that energy efficiency regulations adversely affect lower-income consumers more than those who earn a higher income.” Scholarly research shows further that energy efficiency regulation hits lower-income Americans harder than energy taxes, which are recognized as being generally regressive.
Indeed, marketplace choice provides the precise sort of flexibility that American consumers depend on to manage home economic challenges.
The DOE often attempts to justify increased near-term costs with alleged savings. Unfortunately, these savings are generally averages for an entire market and often do not account for variability for costs like installation fees and retrofits. The fact is that some families will necessarily incur much greater costs than others, and DOE rarely reflects this reality.
This is a critical point when assessing how a proposed standard will affect individual Americans—especially those facing economic challenges. Each individual American is perfectly capable of weighing for himself the value of additional efficiency against the additional costs associated with most compelled efficiency upgrades. Indeed, Americans are making those decisions, and many are opting for greater efficiency, which makes imposing these costs on everyone even less rational and justified.
Conclusion
Given America’s energy abundance, the value of efficiency to consumers, and the importance of consumer choice, the president, be it President Joe Biden or a future president, should direct the secretary of energy to cease all efficiency-related actions pending a review and certification that those actions are consistent with the word and spirit of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. Simultaneously, Congress should begin work to significantly curtail, if not completely repeal, the act’s energy efficiency provisions.
The conditions that gave rise to the act in 1975 are clearly no longer in place. Further, like most regulations, federal bureaucrats have taken the authorities granted them by Congress to expand their power far beyond what anyone intended. The time has come for policymakers to stop complaining about ridiculous efficiency regulations and finally do something about it.
In its latest attempt to interfere in state and local elections, the Biden administration is deploying federal agents to monitor polling places in several states during Tuesday’s off-year elections.
The U.S. Constitution charges states — not the federal government — with primary oversight and administration of elections. But according to the highly politicized Department of Justice, state and local election officials can’t be trusted to uphold the law. Thus, the agency has decided to forcibly inject itself into the process.
According to a Monday press release, the DOJ is dispatching federal observers from its Civil Rights Division to “monitor for compliance with the federal voting rights laws” in numerous jurisdictions throughout the country. Among those listed are Union County, New Jersey; Pawtucket and Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Madison County and Panola County, Mississippi; and Prince William County, Virginia.
Regarding Union County, a U.S. district court approved a consent decree proposed by the DOJ earlier this year that forces local election officials to provide “a comprehensive Spanish-language election program for voters” during the state’s Nov. 7 elections. The consent decree — which also authorized federal observers to monitor polling places throughout the county — was filed in conjunction with a DOJ lawsuit, which claimed that a failure by Union County officials to provide such materials constituted a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
“The Civil Rights Division enforces the federal voting rights laws that protect the rights of all citizens to access the ballot,” the DOJ claimed. “The division regularly deploys its staff to monitor for compliance with the federal civil rights laws in elections in communities all across the country.”
Okay, I’ll say it. This is the closest we, as a nation, have come to pure Socialism.
In addition to New Jersey, Virginia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and several other states will decide the outcome of critically important elections on Tuesday.
This is hardly the first time the DOJ has concocted this type of election meddling. In fact, the agency carried out this same scheme during last year’s midterm elections. As Victoria Marshall wrote in these pages, most of the 64 jurisdictions the DOJ “monitored” during the 2022 elections are “Democrat strongholds or swing districts in states with key midterm contests such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.”
Much like last year, the jurisdictions being surveilled by the DOJ on Tuesday are mostly Democrat strongholds. During Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, for example, Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe won Prince William County by nearly 15 points over now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican. Similarly, Union, Pawtucket, and Woonsocket Counties all went to Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election.
The DOJ’s increasing efforts to “monitor” local and state elections appear to be aimed at curtailing GOP poll watchers’ legitimate right to oversee U.S. election administration. After it became clear more conservatives were going to partake in this legal form of election oversight, legacy media began running hit pieces leading up to the 2022 midterms warning that so-called “election denying” MAGA Republicans volunteering as poll watchers were plotting to disrupt elections throughout the country.
While the left’s doomsday predictions (unsurprisingly) never came true, that hasn’t stopped regime-approved media from furthering the lie that election workers are under constant threat from Republicans. Even the Biden DOJ’s own data shows that there is no widespread threat to election workers. Nonetheless, so-called “journalists” continue to parrot their Democrat allies’ falsehoods without a second thought.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
The Internal Revenue Service opened an audit into the American Accountability Foundation, a conservative nonprofit that has exposed the Biden administration. Pictured: Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Danny Werfel testifies before the Senate Finance Committee at the U.S. Capitol on April 19. (Photo: Kent Nishimura, Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)
The Internal Revenue Service has moved to audit a conservative group that has exposed the radicalism of some of President Joe Biden’s nominees to senior administrative posts, and in so doing, led him to withdraw their candidacies.
The American Accountability Foundation has exposed numerous Biden nominees, and it published emails showing that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., had encouraged the IRS to target conservative organizations, including AAF, for extra scrutiny and investigation.
“Senator Whitehouse has repeatedly called for the IRS to investigate AAF—by name,” AAF President Tom Jones told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Monday. “Attacking groups like ours has been a priority for Senator Whitehouse and it appears the Biden admin has heeded his calls.”
“We’re auditing your organization’s Form 990 for the tax year ended December 31, 2021,” an IRS revenue agent wrote in a Sept. 14 letter to AAF. The organization provided a copy of the letter to The Daily Signal.
The IRS insisted it does not launch audits for partisan reasons. A spokesman said he could not confirm the audit.
“Under the federal tax law, federal employees can neither confirm nor deny that a particular organization is or is not being audited,” IRS spokesman Anthony Burke told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Monday. “We’re precluded from disclosing tax return information.”
Burke directed The Daily Signal to IRS Publication 556, which explains the examination of returns.
“AAF is being attacked because it is successful,” Jones said. He mentioned a few of the Biden nominees AAF criticized whose nominations Biden later revoked.
When Biden nominated David Chipman to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, Jones unearthed allegations that Chipman, who had served as a special agent at ATF until 2012, had remarked that “African American agents … must have been cheating” because they passed an exam. Biden withdrew Chipman’s nomination after AAF revealed the alleged comments.
When Biden nominated Gigi Sohn to join the Federal Communications Commission, AAF purchased billboards and ran newspaper and digital ads opposing her nomination. AAF highlighted the Fraternal Order of Police’s opposition to Sohn, which noted her statements indicating “serious animus towards law enforcement officers.” Sohn withdrew her nomination following the scrutiny.
AAF also warned that Saule Omarova, then a nominee for comptroller of the currency, had apparently joined a self-declared Marxist group on Facebook in 2019. Biden also withdrew her nomination.
“Whether it is Gigi Sohn at the FCC, David Chipman at the ATF, Saule Omarova as Biden’s bank czar, there are numerous people who have been exposed because of AAF’s work,” Jones told The Daily Signal. “Apparently, the administration has decided they want to stop that by weaponizing the IRS against us.”
In 2010, conservative groups reported waiting longer than usual to receive verification for tax-exempt status from the IRS. Groups claimed the IRS had targeted them for their political and ideological stances, but the Obama administration denied any ideological discrimination. In October 2017, the Department of Justice settled two cases in the IRS targeting scandal. In a class-action lawsuit involving 428 conservative plaintiffs, the IRS agreed to pay $3.5 million.
Five Democratic mayors wrote to President Joe Biden calling for a meeting to discuss the illegal alien crisis their cities are facing. Pictured: Illegal aliens line up outside the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on Aug. 2. (Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Five Democratic mayors have asked President Joe Biden for a meeting to discuss the illegal alien crisis their cities are facing. The mayors of Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City sent a letter to Biden on Saturday “requesting an urgent meeting with you to directly discuss ways we can work with your administration to avoid large numbers of additional asylum seekers being brought to our cities with little to no coordination, support, or resources.”
The mayors, all of whom lead sanctuary cities with the exception of Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, told the president they need four things. First, they are asking for additional federal funding.
Mayors Brandon Johnson of Chicago, Karen Bass of Los Angeles, Mike Johnston of Denver, and Eric Adams of New York City, and Turner begin the letter by thanking Biden for the $1.4 billion in federal funding for food, shelter, and additional services for illegal aliens. But that’s not enough, according to the Democratic mayors.
“Cities have historically absorbed and integrated new migrants with success, but the challenges brought by the new border arrivals are due not only to the high numbers, but also the diversity of nationalities, the large share arriving as families, and the overwhelming number who seek asylum,” the mayors write. “Given the impact this crisis has had—and continues to have—on state and local budgets, we respectfully advocate for additional funding.”
According to the five Democrats, Denver is spending about $2 million a week on shelter for illegal aliens, New York City has spent more than $1.7 billion, and Chicago has spent more than $320 million.
In order to help the illegal aliens arriving in their cities while still providing services to citizens, the mayors have asked Biden for “$5 billion to cover the expenditures our cities have already incurred and to continue serving the growing number of people arriving in our communities.”
$5 Billion. Hey, I think I have a better plan. SHIP THEM ALL BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM. That ought a cost a few thousand dollars.
Isn’t it interesting that all these Leftist loves to get in front of a camera, with a microphone, virtue signaling how much they love illegal aliens. However, when it comes actually take care of them, they scream unfair, and “send more money.” SHIP ‘EM BACK AND SEAL THE BORDER!
Additionally, the mayors have asked Biden to “[a]ccelerate approval of work authorization and adjudication for eligible applicants.” Specifically, the leaders are asking Biden to remove barriers to work authorization so applicants can receive approval to work within a 30-day window. Furthermore, the Democrats have asked the president to “increase access to work authorization.”
“Our strong request is that anyone who has arrived in this country and is approved with an Alien Registration Number, or A-Number, has the ability to work,” they write.
Finally, the five mayors have asked Biden to “[a]dopt a collaborative federal approach around coordinated entry.”
The mayors say they are “confident that we could lead a coalition of cities that could identify shared available capacity, welcome newcomers in a way that would set them up for success and relieve the burden on border cities and destination cities receiving far greater numbers than can be supported.”
The mayors of Denver and Chicago met with senior Biden administration officials at the White House on Thursday to discuss the current crisis their cities are facing. Adams, the New York City mayor, was originally slated to attend the meeting, but canceled his trip to Washington unexpectedly Thursday morning.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the two mayors met with White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and senior adviser to the President Tom Perez, along with other officials from the White Houseand the Department of Homeland Security. Jean-Pierre described the meeting as a “constructive conversation.”
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American Family Association
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