It’s not just atrocious polls that suggest President Joe Biden will lose in November; it’s also the behavior of the White House. In just the past few weeks, the Biden administration has rolled out over a dozen new initiatives and rules, many of them – like banning development of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve – likely to impact our country far into the future. It’s a startling avalanche of executive activity.
Call me crazy, but that looks like a White House panicked that its days are numbered.
Who can blame them? A new national CNN poll shows Trump leading the president by six points, one of the biggest gaps yet; more important, Fox News surveys have Trump inching ahead in several critical swing states.
Bad polls, an unpopular president, disruptive protests at home and rising threats around the world, sinking consumer confidence and resurgent inflation; all signs point to defeat in November. Hence, the whirlwind of regulations, which includes the following:
3. EEOC charges of racism against a company because they avoided hiring criminals;
4. More federal help on student loans;
5. FTC preventing the merger of two luxury goods makers;
6. New overtime rules;
7. New regulations detailing airline refunds;
8. New decision restricting drilling in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve;
9. FTC blocking hospital group mergers;
10. New power plant emissions rules;
11. Putting on hold a ban on menthol cigarettes;
12. A revamp of school lunch mandates, reducing sugar and salt.
The Biden administration appears to be preparing for the worst, pushing through policies that could be overturned if passed later in the year. Congress has 60 days to nix rules promulgated by federal agencies with a simple majority; if there’s a red wave, Biden diktats adopted in the traditional “lame duck” session would likely disappear. The Trump administration employed that tool successfully, ditching several policies rolled out late in President Obama’s second term; Biden returned the favor when he came to office.
Some decisions, like forgiving student loans or not banning menthol cigarettes which are favored by Blacks, are obviously meant to attract targeted voters. Others seem to scratch a progressive itch, like the upending of long-standing employment laws.
Voters should wonder: Is all of this activism well-thought-out? The answer is almost surely no. After all, these are the folks that forced Detroit automakers to go all-in on EVs, sure that Americans were ready to abandon their gas-guzzling SUVs.
Consider the FTC, led by the reckless ideologue Lina Khan. Under Khan’s guidance, the FTC has clamped down on corporate merger activity. Most recently, the agency sued to block luxury fashion firm Tapestry’s acquisition of Capri. Tapestry owns Coach, Stuart Weitzman and Kate Spade, while Capri owns the Versace, Jimmy Choo and Michael Kors labels.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill on July 13, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Henry Liu, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition claims, “This deal threatens to deprive consumers of the competition for affordable handbags…” Forgive me, but only a man could utter such nonsense. Any woman will tell you that there are a gazillion handbag makers, and that they compete mainly on style and image, not price. And, frankly, that few of them are “affordable.”
This is one of many examples of the FTC interfering with the normal pursuit of business. Fashion is fickle; companies continually add names and brands to survive. Liu has no idea what he is talking about.
But we cannot dismiss this FTC intervention as insignificant. The Biden White House, just like that of President Obama, is tragically lacking in business leaders, and in common sense.
Lina Khan is a typical progressive Biden appointee, who is now compiling an impressive record of overreach and defeat. She failed to prevent Meta from acquiring the virtual reality company Within, failed to keep Microsoft from buying Activision and will probably fail in her effort to keep grocers Albertson and Kroger from combining. She denies that mergers can create efficiencies and lower costs for consumers. As an undergraduate, she wrote a paper criticizing Amazon for being big; if Khan had been in charge, Americans would not be enjoying the obvious convenience of the world’s largest online retailer.
It isn’t just the FTC which, by the way, is also behind the outrageous and sure to be overturned ban on non-compete agreements. Consider the new Department of Transportation demands that airlines must “immediately” refund money for delayed or canceled flights and reimburse passengers for equipment issues like non-working TVs. Talks about adding headaches to an industry constantly toggling between profits and losses! What the government should be doing is investing in critical air traffic control equipment and infrastructure; let consumers punish airlines that don’t treat them fairly.
Some of the White House’s most enduring and damaging new rules have to do with energy. Biden is desperate to shore up his bona fides with the environmental lobby, and so has added new restrictions on domestic oil and gas development. Consequently, he just banned exploration of a vast swath of Alaska’s huge National Petroleum Reserve, even though the region contains some of our country’s most promising prospects and despite support for drilling from the state’s native population.
In addition, the president’s EPA has recently issued new power plant emissions rules that could force the closure of many coal-fired power plants, even as demand for electricity expands. It also requires by 2032 wide-spread use of carbon-capture technology that does not yet exist on a large scale. Similar rules adopted by the Obama administration were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2016; critics claimed executive overreach. The Biden team’s approach, which could undermine the nation’s energy security, is likely to meet the same fate.
These are not sensible policies; they are the wish-list and fantasies of a progressive White House not likely to pay the price for their damaging meddling. Here’s hoping.
Liz Peek is a Fox News contributor and former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company. A former columnist for the Fiscal Times, she writes for The Hill and contributes frequently to Fox News, the New York Sun and other publications. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter @LizPeek.
As the Biden White House continues to brag about the alleged success of its economic policies, government data shows the country is hemorrhaging full-time jobs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of Americans reporting full-time employment dropped by more than 1.7 million jobs from November 2023 to the end of March 2024, the most recent month for which data is available. That’s a decline of 1.33% over a five-month period. Excluding job losses related to the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, the recent drop in full-time employment is the largest five-month decline since the Great Recession in 2009, 15 years ago.
President Biden visits Nowhere Coffee shop in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, on Jan. 12, 2024, as he touts his Bidenomics agenda. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
Before that, the last time the number of full-time jobs declined this much over a similar period was in 1994.
Despite these remarkable figures, the Biden administration has continued to boast about its economic policies. For example, on April 11, the White House’s official X account claimed, “Under Bidenomics, our economy has created 15 million jobs and unemployment has remained under 4% for the longest stretch in 50 years.”
The Biden administration has made similar claims for much of the president’s time in office. At best, they are wildly misleading.
Although it’s true that total employment has increased dramatically since Biden entered the White House, the vast majority of those jobs were recovered from the coronavirus-related government lockdowns. They are not “created” jobs.
Compared to employment figures recorded in January 2020, immediately prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of jobs added under Biden’s tenure is just 2.98 million, an unimpressive figure compared to many of his predecessors.
During Donald Trump’s first three years in office, the U.S. economy added 6.33 million jobs, more than double the figure recorded in the Biden era. These numbers are made even more remarkable by the fact that, excluding the 2020 coronavirus lockdown, Biden’s government has spent more money in a three-year period than any other president in history.
Two of the four highest federal deficits ever recorded have occurred under Biden, and a third, the $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009, happened while Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Biden’s economic agenda of dramatically increasing the size and power of government programs, raising taxes, and imposing increasingly more regulations on businesses has been a complete and utter failure. Not only has it been killing full-time jobs in recent months, it also is the driving factor behind America’s lingering inflation problem.
As difficult as it is for the Biden White House to understand, when a government consistently spends far more money than it receives in tax revenue and turns to money-printing policies to pay the bills, inflation increases. And when inflation gets out of control, as it has been for years now, most people get poorer. Based on the Consumer Price Index’s inflation estimates, an American family buying $200 worth of groceries in January 2021, when Biden took office, would have to spend $238 today to purchase the same products.
Most Americans can barely afford to pay basic living expenses. The average cost of rent has increased dramatically. The average sales price of a home and the cost of mortgages have skyrocketed.
The cost of purchasing a new car has increased by thousands of dollars in just a few years.
The American people are suffering under the Biden administration’s economic agenda. And based on the recent full-time jobs data outlined earlier in this article, the situation is not likely to improve while Biden’s failing policies remain in place.
While millions of Christians throughout the world celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ this weekend, the Biden administration was busy hawking the demonic ideology of transgenderism.
On Good Friday, President Joe Biden, who claims to be a “devout Catholic,” issued a proclamation declaring March 31, 2024 — the same day as Easter Sunday — to be the “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Because, as everyone knows, we don’t have enough faux holidays commemorating the rainbow mob, right?
“Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans: You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You belong. You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back,” Biden wrote.
Like clockwork, White House officials and prominent Democrat politicians celebrated the declaration. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul took her LGBT obsession a step further by issuing her own proclamation dubbing March 31 a “Transgender Day of Visibility” and illuminating 13 state landmarks in so-called “trans colors” in recognition of the made-up holiday.
Biden’s declaration came the same day it was revealed that children were prohibited from submitting Easter egg designs with “religious symbols” for the administration’s 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” event. According to the guidelines, submissions “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”
An Anti-Christian Pattern
Make no mistake. The White House was sending a message to faithful Christians across America this Holy Week: Your beliefs are no longer welcomed here.
During his presidency, Biden has effectively declared war on Christianity. From prosecuting peaceful pro-lifers protesting outside abortion facilities to infiltrating and surveilling Catholic churches, he and his administration have gone to extreme lengths to persecute Americans who worship God instead of government.
Recall when a trans-identifying shooter murdered innocent Christians, including children, at a Nashville Christian school last year. It wasn’t the victims’ families or their Christian faith the White House and Democrats uplifted after the horrific attack, but the (reportedly anti-white) shooter and “transgender community.” In the weeks following the shooting, Democrats across America’s conquered institutions — from legacy media figures to “Saturday Night Live” — rushed to paint trans-identifying individuals as the victims of transphobic Republicans Why? Because transgenderism is one of the main tenets of Democrats’ pagan faith, meaning any narratives and facts undermining it must be stamped out.
The same worldview underlies the Biden administration’s “Transgender Day of Visibility” stunt, leading the neo-pagans to dismiss and desecrate the holiest day of the Christian calendar.
That’s because Christianity is antithetical to the pagan religion of leftism, which has all its own dogmas, sacraments, rituals, and judgments.
Child sacrifice is sacred.
Antiracism is a creed.
Wrong-sex hormones and mutilative surgeries are the way to (your) truth and life,
and neopronouns are regular recitations.
Faithful leftists give to the poor by giving to the state.
Affirmations of sin are daily expressions of self-worship.
“Pride” is a spiritual celebration.
And wrongthink is confessed through struggle sessions and punished through cancel culture.
The only religious element the left’s neo-paganism doesn’t offer is grace or hope. And unlike Christians, who worship a God who explicitly claims to be the Truth and thus defines it, leftism disregards the idea of objective truth altogether. That’s why, for example, Democrats insist people can change their sex by simple declaration.
Democrats Embrace Paganism
Without objective truth, however, there is no shared understanding of “right” and “wrong,” leading to the justification of immoral behaviors and actions. We see this with the normalization of pedophilia with terms like “minor-attracted persons.”
Or consider Democrats’ defense of surgically and chemically mutilating healthy bodies beyond repair. Similar to how they justify killing unwanted preborn children — and not only justify but celebrate with campaigns like “shout your abortion” — leftists employ subjective arguments like “my body, my choice.” They contend it’s good and compassionate for people to reject their God-given physical embodiment and remake themselves into their own image. Notice the left’s warped religious appeals — and implications.
My colleague John Daniel Davidson further examines these phenomena in his new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. According to Davidson, America’s devolution stems from its embrace of modern secularist ideals and simultaneous abdication of Christianity. He writes:
[T]he radical moral relativism we see everywhere today represents a thoroughly post-Christian worldview that is best understood as the return of paganism, which, as the Romans well understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Christianity after all does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is — and is not — sacred and divine.
The modern Democrat Party champions all the pagan impulses of leftism. Its members regularly disregard objective truth and morality, all while touting their pain-inducing policies as “kind” and “compassionate” — and there’s no tolerance for beliefs that reject their paganism.
Christians must confront and defeat this unholy takeover of American society. Otherwise, they risk sacrificing what’s left of the country to the evil forces seeking to destroy it.
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
Tens of thousands of migrants are expected to flee south from Gaza City in the coming days as Israel continues its campaign against Hamas. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 10,300 Gazans have been killed in the fighting.
The Israeli military continues to tighten its grip on Gaza, working to root out Hamas terrorists in the maze of tunnels beneath Gaza city.
The U.S. says Israel has agreed to daily pauses in fighting to allow aid into Gaza, but both the U.S. and Israel oppose a cease-fire.
There remain roughly 240 Hamas hostages in Gaza, and 10 of them are believed to be Americans. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 10,300 Gazans have been killed in the fighting, though they do not distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas terrorists.
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Netanyahu-addresses ‘pause’ in fighting in Israel-Hamas war
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News’ Bret Baier in a “Special Report” exclusive interview about the pauses in fighting planned to help civilians in Gaza.
When asked if he was surprised by by all the pushback happening across the world, Netanyahu did not hold back.
“Well, the river to the sea, from the river to the sea means there’s no Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, which is a tiny area, by the way, that encompasses Israel. There is no Israel. And so what this congresswoman is calling for is Palestine and genocide, the elimination of the Jewish state, the one and only Jewish state of the Jewish people,” said Netanyahu. “That’s absurd. And I salute the Congress for censuring her. But it’s beyond that. I think the protest that you’re seeing, I’m sure it includes some naive people, but there are a lot of people who know exactly what they’re saying.”
FOX News Channel’s chief political anchor Bret Baier will present an exclusive interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Special Report (weekdays, 6 PM/ET) on Thursday, November 9th. The pre-taped interview will cover the latest on the Israel-Hamas war, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s relationship with President Biden, the potential of ceasefire and global pressure on Israel, among other topics.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained the reasoning behind sending troops into Gaza and calls for humanitarian pauses from other world leaders in an interview with Bret Baier.
“We don’t want to seek to govern Gaza. We don’t seek to occupy, but we seek to give it and us a better future in the entire Middle East. And that requires defeating Hamas. I’ve set goals. I didn’t set a timetable because, you know, it can take more time,” said Netanyahu.
When asked about the United States and how firm the push has been by President Biden and his administration for the humanitarian pauses, Netanyahu says he has not agreed with everything.
“Well, one thing we haven’t agreed to is a cease fire. A cease fire with Hamas means surrender to Hamas, surrender to terror and the victory of Iran’s axis of terror. So there won’t be a cease fire without the release of Israeli hostages,” said Netanyahu.
Netanyahu further addressed the pause pushed by the Biden administration to allow for hostages to safely exit Gaza.
“The fighting continues against the Hamas enemy, the Hamas terrorists, but in specific locations for a given period, a few hours here, a few hours there, we want to facilitate a safe passage of civilians away from the zone of fighting. And we’re doing that,” said Netanyahu.
FOX News Channel’s chief political anchor Bret Baier will present an exclusive interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Special Report (weekdays, 6 PM/ET) on Thursday, November 9th. The pre-taped interview will cover the latest on the Israel-Hamas war, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s relationship with President Biden, the potential of ceasefire and global pressure on Israel, among other topics.
Two Ivy League students have called out their colleges and are demanding them to stop accepting the hate speech they say is running rampant on their campuses.
“The past few weeks have been incredibly difficult. It started with, you know, the usual, the chants and the terrorist sympathies,” Talia Draw, a junior at Cornell University told Fox News.
Draw says those chants have now become death threats.
“Jewish students were truly afraid to go on campus. Students began using pepper spray to defend themselves, not being able to go to classes. People started doing classes from Zoom. I mean, it’s absurd that Jewish students right now feel like they can’t be part of the campus community,” said Draw.
Gabriel Diamond, a senior at Yale University echoed Draw’s concerns on college campuses across the U.S.
“Everywhere on campus, there are signs that say Israel is committing genocide and it says ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, calling for the elimination of the Jewish state,” said Diamond. “Students are, in some cases, afraid to go to classes. And overall, there’s a really, really bad sense in the air that these campuses are not safe spaces.”
Draw added what’s even worse is that it’s not just students spear heading the hate — it’s also coming from professors.
“When you have professors using their captive audience, professors telling their students these biased narratives and shouting out all of these buzzwords without giving any of the context, they are indoctrinating their students,” says Draw. “Why are we having these professors in our Ivy League institutions? This is absurd. We are having anti-Semites in our classrooms indoctrinating our students. And not only that, we’re paying a fortune for it.”
Diamond and Draw say overall, it’s a tough time on campus, a hostile environment, and many students do not feel safe right now.
“It’s time that universities really step up to the challenge and that they take action, not just issue statements, because it’s long past time for doing that and that we restore our campuses to a sense of civility and decency,” said Diamond.
The Islamic Jihad released two hostage videos showing an elderly Israeli woman and a young boy both kidnaped and taken into Gaza on Oct. 7 where they’ve been held ever since.
Richard Hecht, the lieutenant colonel and a spokesman for the Israeli military said this is psychological terrorism.
“Hamas and Islamic Jihad are trying to basically bend the arm of Israel into getting a cease fire. But we understand that it will be incredibly difficult because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says they’re going to push forward with operations inside Gaza until they destroy Hamas leadership and get rid of all of the weapons inside the strip.”
On the West Bank, the Israelis were seen operating in the city of Jenin and claim they have killed ten militants in different cells that are currently fighting inside the West Bank.
When it comes to the hostages, there is some progress taking place in Doha as Qatari negotiators are meeting with the head of Mossad and also CIA director William Burns.
An official with knowledge of that visit says the talks have been progressing well toward a deal.
As the operations continue on the ground and the fighting inside Gaza escalates, Israel is facing other fronts, and that includes a drone attack and a ballistic missile attack today from Yemen.
The Israelis say the arrow defense system was able to intercept one of those missiles that was trying to target the southern city of Bin Laden.
In his recent briefing, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel will not back down.
“We will not stop the fighting until we bring the hostages back. We will do what ever it takes,” said Gallant. “As a father I want to ask the world, “I see those kids as my kids, I will not stop the fighting and I will not stop looking for them until I find them,” Gallant emphasized.
Gallant added that the IDF started using new tactics for dealing with Hamas’ tunnels and said those efforts will improve in the coming days.
“We are fighting against evil, we are fighting against an enemy who tries to harm us. We want all Palestinian out of Gaza. This is important in order for us to have freedom of action, we do not want to harm them,” said Gallant.
Gallant said that Israel shares the same goal as America: to eliminate Hamas.
“This phenomenon should stop from exist here and anywhere else. As much as the pressure on Hamas increase, the better the chances we will succeed to release hostages and bring them back home,” said Gallant.
Turkey’s Erdogan, on Israel-Hamas war, says West is ‘too weak to even call for a cease-fire’
Turkey’s Erdogan, on Israel-Hamas war, says West is ‘too weak to even call for a cease-fire’
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is accusing the West Thursday of being “too weak to even call for a cease-fire” in the Israel-Hamas war, a report says.
Erdogan, who previously has called Israel a “war criminal” for its military actions against Hamas, made the comment during a meeting of the 10-member Economic Cooperation Organization in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, according to The Associated Press.
Erdogan said Western nations and organizations are observing these “massacres by Israel” from afar but are “too weak to even call for a cease-fire, let alone criticize child murderers.”
“If we, the Economic Cooperation Organization, as Muslims, are not going to raise our voices today… when will we raise our voices?” he added.
The Economic Cooperation Organization consists of Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Erdogan ripped the West on the same day the White House announced the Israeli military has agreed to honor four-hour daily pauses in fighting to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the new Israeli policy began “today.”
Pentagon confirms four new attacks on US forces in Iraq, Syria following airstrike
Pentagon confirms four new attacks on US forces in Iraq, Syria following airstrike
The Pentagon say U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria have faced four attacks in the hours after the U.S. carried out a retaliatory airstrike on a weapons depot in Syria.
The four new incidents bring the total for attacks on U.S. forces since October 17 to 46, the U.S. military says. Three of the attacks occurred in Syria, with two involving rockets and another being a drone attack. The attack in Iraq used drones, the Pentagon says.
The U.S. reported three minor injuries in one of the Syria attacks, but the other three attacks caused no injuries and no damage to infrastructure. The three servicemembers injured have already returned to duty.
The U.S. sough to deter Iran from entering Israel’s war on Hamas, deploying considerable assets to the region. Critics argue the dozens of attacks indicate that the operation is failing, however.
Squad Dem says humanitarian pause in Gaza not enough: ‘Ethnic cleansing’ happening ‘before our eyes’
Squad Dem says humanitarian pause in Gaza not enough: ‘Ethnic cleansing’ happening ‘before our eyes’
Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., held a press conference demanding a cease-fire in Gaza on Thursday, saying “humanitarian pauses” are not enough.
Bush railed against Israel for allegedly commiting “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians in Gaza.
“The idea that we get a break for 4 hours, a break so that we can have food–I saw someone spoke about it and they said, “thank you for giving us raisins for a few hours.” And then do we go back to bombing?” Bush said. “I never personally called for humanitarian pause, and I’m not going to call for a humanitarian pause, and I don’t want to see even though that is what’s happening. A four hour a day humanitarian pause because what we need is to stop the bombing. What we need is what does that what is that mental anguish when you know? Well, we get a break for 4 hours, but as soon as that 4 hours is over, then what? How dare we treat humans in that way?”
The White House says Israel agreed to a 4-hour daily pause in fighting to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza on Thursday. Nevertheless, both Israel and the U.S. continue to dismiss the idea of a full cease-fire.
CNN’s Van Jones praises GOP for defending ‘Jewish kids’ on campuses, claims Dems in ‘disarray’
CNN’s Van Jones praises GOP for defending ‘Jewish kids’ on campuses, claims Dems in ‘disarray’
CNN’s Van Jones praised the Republican Party for sticking up for “Jewish kids” on college campuses amid the rash of antisemitism that cropped up after Hamas’ attack on Israel last month.
During his commentary on the third GOP presidential primary debate on Wednesday night, the CNN political contributor remarked that Republicans “forcefully” defended Jewish students while claiming that Democrats found themselves in “disarray” over the issue.
Jones made the comments after complimenting former South Carolina governor and 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s performance on the debate stage that evening.
He began, “I thought Nikki Haley gave a masterclass on foreign policy. I thought she gave a masterclass on abortion. If you just took those two clips, you could teach a course on political communication, conversation. She’s a force. She’s a force.”
He began, “I thought Nikki Haley gave a masterclass on foreign policy. I thought she gave a masterclass on abortion. If you just took those two clips, you could teach a course on political communication, conversation. She’s a force. She’s a force.”
The commentator noted that members of the GOP “came very, very forcefully, saying Jewish kids shouldn’t be scared to leave their dorm rooms in this country.”
“I thought that was an important development in the conversation overall,” he added.
House Republican campaign arm accuses Dems of fueling antisemitism: ‘Cause and Effect’
House Republican campaign arm accuses Dems of fueling antisemitism: ‘Cause and Effect’
The House Republican campaign arm is accusing Democrats of fueling “Jewish hate” and antisemitism in a new ad in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent protests in the U.S.
“Extreme House Democrats’ words promoted hate,” the new ad by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) says.
The video includes quotes from ‘Sqaud’ Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., in addition to top progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., about the Israel conflict, which began after a brutal terrorist attack by Hamas early last month.
Those Democrats, and others, have been supportive of Palestinians and critical of Israel’s military response and have called for a ceasefire. The video shows Omar standing by remarks in which she accuses Israel of committing “acts of terror.”
Meanwhile, the video references a statement by Jayapal in which she said Israel is a “racist state.” She later issued a lengthy statement clarifying those remarks, saying she doesn’t believe “the idea of Israel as a nation is racist” but that the country’s “extreme right-wing government” has engaged in racist policies.
Separately it quotes Tlaib saying that progressives cannot back Israel’s “apartheid government.”
Gen Z House Democrat says he regrets not voting to condemn Hamas support on college campuses
Gen Z House Democrat says he regrets not voting to condemn Hamas support on college campuses
Freshman Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., admitted that he should not have voted against a resolution condemning support for Hamas on college and university campuses.
“After days of reflection, multiple conversations with my constituents and local leaders, and a difficult, but important listening session with students at UCF Hillel’s chapter — I have come to realize that I should have voted differently on H.Res. 798, to send a clear message that I stand against antisemitism,” Frost said in a statement earlier this week.
The resolution, a symbolic piece of legislation, criticized “the support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations at institutions of higher education, which may lead to the creation of a hostile environment for Jewish students, faculty and staff.”
It overwhelmingly passed in a bipartisan 396-to-23 vote last week. Only 22 Democrats, including Frost, and one Republican voted against it.
Frost said he was wary of “a few of the falsehoods” he said were in the Republican resolution and that he was hoping to be able to “vote on the Senate resolution condemning antisemitism, that passed unanimously, but didn’t include those falsehoods.”
“I truly worried that this would open the door for Republicans to infringe on the free speech of students and young people. Which is why I chose to support and co-sponsor the House version of that same Senate resolution,” Frost said.
Fox News’ Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report
Hamas adviser tells NY Times he hopes war with Israel is ‘permanent’
Hamas adviser tells NY Times he hopes war with Israel is ‘permanent’
The Hamas terror group told The New York Times that it hopes the war with Israel will “become permanent on all the borders” and the Oct. 7 massacre “succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”
A Times report headlined, “Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War,” featured a subhead that “Hamas leaders say they waged their Oct. 7 attack on Israel because they believed the Palestinian cause was slipping away, and that only violence could revive it.”
The terror group achieved violence, killing at least 1,400 civilians including women, children and the elderly while kidnapping hundreds of civilian hostages. Israel has responded with force, and the Times reported that “carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation” but instead a “necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel.”
The Times spoke with Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, who told the paper that the terror group “succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”
Actress Gal Gadot’s private screening of disturbing film detailing the crimes in Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack in Israel caused brawls outside the venue on Wednesday.
Pro- and anti-Israel demonstrators clashed outside the screening, which was held at Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance. The audience at Gadot’s private screening included multiple Hollywood executives.
The film, which has been shared with the press in Israel and in New York City, is roughly 47 minutes long. It is a compilation of footage from security cameras, cellphones and Hamas’ own recordings showing the brutal atrocities committed on October 7.
White House: Israel expected to begin ‘4-hour pauses’ daily in northern Gaza
White House: Israel expected to begin ‘4-hour pauses’ daily in northern Gaza
The Israeli military has agreed to honor 4-hour daily pauses in fighting to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza, the White house said Thursday.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby announced the move on Thursday. He said the new Israeli policy began “today.”
“We understand that Israel will begin to implement 4-hour pauses in areas of northern Gaza each day, with an announcement to be made three hours beforehand,” Kirby said. “There will be no military operations in these areas for the duration of these pauses.”
The agreement comes after the directors of both the CIA and Mossad met in Qatar for negotiations surrounding such pauses. CIA Director William Burns and Mossad Director David Barnea were in talks with the Qataris for multiple days, an official with knowledge of the visit told Fox News.
Pentagon confirms ‘multi-rocket attack’ on US forces near Baghdad embassy
Pentagon confirms ‘multi-rocket attack’ on US forces near Baghdad embassy
Pentagon officials confirmed that a “multi-rocket attack” targeted U.S. and coalition forces near the U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad, Iraq on Thursday.
Military officials say the attack occurred on Wednesday and no injuries or damage to infrastructure has been reported. It was the 42nd attack on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17.
Iran-backed terrorist groups have ramped up aggression toward U.S. forces in the region amid Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza. The U.S. has transfered considerable assets to the region in an effort to deter Iran and its terror proxies from joining the conflict.x new
Israeli brigade kills 50 Hamas terrorists in Gaza City operation: IDF
Israeli brigade kills 50 Hamas terrorists in Gaza City operation: IDF
Israeli Defense Forces say a brigade of Israeli soldiers killed 50 Hamas terrorists during an operation in the heart of Gaza City on Thursday.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari says the Israeli division has been operating in Gaza city for several days. The city is the both the heart of the Gaza Strip and a key command structure for Hamas.
“Division 162 has been operating in recent days in the center of Gaza City in the area of the security quarter of the Hamas organization,” Hagari said in a statement. “Givati Brigade combat team forces eliminated over 50 terrorists.”
In addition to the 50 terrorists, Israel says “intelligence documents were found and a number of significant tunnel shafts, factories for the production of anti-tank missiles, and anti-aircraft launchers were destroyed.”
The IDF says Gaza City played host to Hamas’ central intelligence headquarters as well as its air defense headquarters.
MI couple recounts fearful escape from Gaza during war outbreak
MI couple recounts fearful escape from Gaza during war outbreak
A Detroit-area couple trapped in Gaza like hundreds of other U.S. citizens described the roar of bombs and the fear of not making it home after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
Unable to leave, Zakaria and Laila Alarayshi hunkered down.
“I was crying,” Zakaria Alarayshi, 62, told reporters Wednesday at the Arab American Civil Rights League offices in Dearborn, Michigan. “Everyone was scared. Bombs everywhere. When I go to sleep, we cannot sleep. Maybe I’ll sleep in a chair for 30 minutes a day.”
He feared the bombs eventually would find them.
“If I’m going to die, OK, I don’t care. Die, die,” he said.
The Alarayshis were among the U.S. residents who were able to evacuate from Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas militant group surprise attack on southern Israel and the subsequent Israeli bombing campaign and ground invasion.
Some 500 to 600 U.S. citizens had been trapped in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the White House. President Joe Biden said 74 Americans with dual citizenship were evacuated on Nov. 2.
Iran launched waves of cyber attacks against key Israeli companies after Oct. 7 massacre: Report
Iran launched waves of cyber attacks against key Israeli companies after Oct. 7 massacre: Report
Iranian hacking groups launched cyber attacks against key Israeli companies in the wake of the October 7 massacre by Hamas last month, according to a new report.
Hackers linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted Israeli companies with ties to transporation, logistics and technology, according to a Thursday report from the Messenger. The hacks have largely taken the form of site outages, but they have also attempted to wipe data from Israeli computers.
The hacking efforts have yet to yield any major successes for Iran, but it is yet another threat posted by the Middle East power.
The U.S. has sought to deter Iran and its proxy terrorist organizations from joining Israel’s war against Hamas, deploying an array of assets to the Eastern Mediterranean and Iraq and Syria.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected calls for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war on “The View” Wednesday, instead throwing her support behind “humanitarian pauses.”
“Remember, there was a ceasefire on Oct. 6 that Hamas broke by their barbaric assault on peaceful civilians and their kidnapping, their killing, their beheading, their terrible, inhumane savagery,” Clinton said.
“It did not hold because Hamas chose to break it,” she added.
“Hamas is a terrorist organization,” she said, adding that Hamas has “consistently broken cease-fires over a number of years.”
Also important, Clinton emphasized, was that “Israel should conduct itself by the laws of war and do everything it can to prevent and limit civilian casualties.”
Clinton also argued that a cease-fire would not uphold the laws of war.
“But a cease-fire done prematurely benefits those who do not abide by any laws, by any rules, by any human character value about the value of life,” she said.
Fox News’ Jeffrey Clark contributed to this report
Germany marks 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht with pledge to protect Jews amid antisemitism surge
Germany marks 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht with pledge to protect Jews amid antisemitism surge
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz marked the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht on Thursday, pledging to protect Jews against the current surge in antisemitism.
Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was the anti-Jewish pogrom that preceeded the Holocaust in Germany. Scholz stated in a speech that the time to make good on the promise of “Never Again” is now, according to the Agence France-Presse.
“This is about keeping the promise given again and again in the decades since 1945,” Scholz said.
He then went on to address the rising antisemitism in Germany and the world, saying “It outrages and shames me deeply.”
The U.S. military says it destroyed an Iran-linked weapons depot with an airstrike in Syria on Thursday.
The Pentagon says Iran-backed terrorist organizations in the region had used the depot to carry out attacks on U.S. bases in Syria. Since October 17th, U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked 42 times.
Houthi rebels in Yemen shot down a U.S. MQ-9 reaper drone in Yemen on Wednesday, the Pentagon says.
The U.S. military has carried out multiple airstrikes in Syria in retaliation against drone attacks on U.S. bases as well as attacks on Israel. The drone is believed to have been on an intelligence-gathering mission when it was shot down.
US reaper drone shot down near coast of Yemen
Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have harried Israel’s war against Hamas alongside Hezbollah.
The U.S. has warned Iran and its proxy terrorist groups not to intervene in the conflict.
Israel says it has no plans to ‘reoccupy’ Gaza after Hamas war
Israel says it has no plans to ‘reoccupy’ Gaza after Hamas war
Israel says it does not plan to “reoccupy” Gaza nor control it for long following the end of its war against Hamas.
A senior Israeli official made the comments to reporters on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“We assess that our current operations are effective and successful, and we’ll continue to push,” the Israeli official said. “It’s not unlimited or forever.”
“It’s not Israel’s intention to reoccupy Gaza or control it for a long time. The idea behind Israel going in militarily is to destroy Hamas’ ability to threaten us,” the official added. “We understand that will take time and that, even if we complete this phase of our military operation, we’ll still have to take some action against their remaining military infrastructure.”
The statement comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised eyebrows earlier thiis week by stating that Israel would control Gaza’s security for an “indefinite period” following the war.
President Biden had previously warned that a full reoccupation of Gaza would be a “mistake.”
The Israel Defense Forces said Thursday soldiers found a Hamas-operated weapons production and storage facility inside a residential building next to a child’s bedroom.
The facility was used to produce and store unmanned aerial vehicles and weapons, the IDF said, and was located inside a residential building near schools in the center of the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in northern Gaza.
Explosives and operational plans were found right next to a bedroom that belonged to children, according to the force.
Fox News Digital’s Yael Rotem-Kuriel contributed to this report.
Head of Hamas’ anti-tank missile unit killed in Israeli fighter jet strike: IDF
Head of Hamas’ anti-tank missile unit killed in Israeli fighter jet strike: IDF
Ibrahim Abu-Maghsib, the head of Hamas’ anti-tank missile unit in the Central Camps Brigade, was killed in a fighter jet strike Thursday, Israeli officials announced.
The terrorist is accused of directing and carrying out “many anti-tank attacks” against Israeli citizens and military members, the Israel Defense Forces said.
Intelligence with the IDF and the Israel Securities Authority determined Abu-Maghsib was killed in the strike.
The Israeli Navy also struck Hamas anti-tank missile launching posts used to attack IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip as part of the assistance offered to forces on the ground.
The White House sent a memo to news organizations telling to push back on Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry into Joe and Hunter Biden’s foreign influence peddling. The media are willingly complying. Pictured: President Joe Biden departs the White House and approaches the press corps on June 28. (Photo: Bill O’Leary, The Washington Post/Getty Images)
When President Joe Biden’s aide Ian Sams wanted to leak his strongly worded memo to “Editorial Leadership at U.S. News Media Organizations,” he chose CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy, who is one of many enthusiastic White House spinners at CNN. Darcy and CNN didn’t have enough self-respect to push back on Sams for implying they needed to be lectured on going soft on Republicans.
Instead, in reporting this administration’s “breaking” list of demands, the incredibly servile Darcy claimed Sams was right.
“While news organizations have published innumerable fact checks on the matter, they have also often failed to robustly call out the mis- and disinformation peddled by Republicans in their coverage,” wrote Darcy. It’s “frustrating officials in the Biden White House who believe that the news media should be doing more to dispel lies that saturate the public discourse.”
Try to figure out how the press can publish “innumerable fact checks” and yet they still “robustly” failed to “call out” misinformation. Neither the Sams memo nor the Darcy report elaborated on which “lies” about the Bidens are “saturating” the discourse.
Conservatives on Twitter mocked this memo, as if the pro-Biden media needed a public whipping, as if they haven’t been carrying barrels of Biden water for years.
One could suggest that the Republicans are rushing into impeachment and devaluing its seriousness. But you could not credibly forward this argument if you are a Democrat or a member of the “mainstream media,” which twice devalued impeachment against Donald Trump.
The “PBS NewsHour” doubled down on the Darcy spit-and-polish approach by putting Sams on taxpayer-funded TV so he could repeat all the Carvillesque talking points in his memo.
No “fact-checker” at PBS was going to lift a finger as Sams proclaimed the polar opposite of the truth: “The truth is that the president was never in business with his family and that these lies and false attacks that are coming from Republicans, with no evidence, no evidence to back them up, are in fact lies.”
PBS co-host Amna Nawaz should have at the very least challenged Sams to specify what’s a “lie” and made him answer for Biden’s lies in the final 2020 presidential debate: “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China … the only guy who made money from China is this guy [Donald Trump]. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China.”
Biden also denied Trump’s allegation in the first 2020 debate that Hunter made “a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow, and various other places.”
Back in August 2019, Biden boldly proclaimed, “I have never discussed with my son, or my brother, or anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses, period.”
The contents of the Hunter Biden laptop underlined the dramatic dishonesty of this statement, as has the testimony to those supposedly “lying” House Republicans. They documented that Joe Biden lied about never discussing the family influence-peddling business on at least 16 occasions. He lied to reporters. In a perfect world, one would expect the entire media would object and correct the record.
The Sams memo implies that our “objective” media are far too objective. That’s ridiculous. But it’s clear that Democrats—inside and outside the White House—expect journalists to practice 100% compliance with Democrat spin. Professionalism equals propaganda.
A federal judge is being applauded for a surprise July 4 ruling stating the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment during the COVID-19 pandemic. U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty ordered an injunction on Independence Day to prevent White House officials and federal agencies from meeting with tech companies about social media censorship, arguing past actions likely violated the Constitution.
“I think that language reflects that this was a stunning rebuke, but also an appropriate one,” former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told “America’s Newsroom” Wednesday.
The holiday injunction was in response to recent lawsuits from Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general. The suits allege that the White House coerced or “significantly encourage[d]” tech companies to suppress free speech during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Former WH press secretary Jen Psaki was named by a judge in a ruling on the Biden administration and efforts to combat COVID-19 misinformation. ((Left:REUTERS/Leah Millis, Right:REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo))
Several federal officials and agencies – including some of Biden’s Cabinet members and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre – have been barred from contacting social media companies in efforts to suppress speech. The injunction, which was obtained by Fox News, states that the government’s actions “likely violate the Free Speech Clause” and that the court “is not persuaded by Defendants’ arguments,” dealing a significant blow to the White House.
“I read this opinion yesterday, I couldn’t stop saying thank you. Finally,” OutKick founder Travis said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. “This is going to be incredibly difficult for the Biden administration to overturn.”
“It’s unbelievable the amount of information, and the discovery that we were able to obtain through this particular case should concern all Americans, irrespective of their political ideology, their party affiliation,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry remarked earlier on the show.
“The judge basically spells it out. He does it in this great 120-page opinion. He takes things step by step. He says, look, the government went out there and censored America’s speech on COVID-19, on vaccine policies, on mask mandates, on election questions, in the Hunter Biden laptop.”
“This is a completely direct violation of the First Amendment.”
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” Doughty wrote.
“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the injunction adds. “In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
The injunction also claims that “the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech,” but that issues the case raises are “beyond party lines.”
“Viewpoint discrimination is an especially egregious form of content discrimination,” Doughty argued. “The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”
The cases could mean that interactions between tech companies and government officials may be significantly limited in the future. Exceptions might include national security threats or criminal matters on social media.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House, Google, Meta and Twitter for statements, but has not heard back. The Department of Justice declined to comment.
Some critics have challenged the ruling, with a Washington Post article warning the judge’s decision could “upend years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies.”
Ratcliffe agreed with the sentiment but argued the judge is not the one to blame.
“The problem is in this case that the years of good work have been upended by social media executives and government officials who have abused that and the examples that we’ve just talked about. It’s ironic because The Washington Post is actually a coconspirator in that. It was the mainstream media, ironically, that was complicit in this abuse of the First Amendment and suppressing Americans’ free speech. So they did it to themselves that that’s the problem.”
“My take is that this is going to hold up on appeal, because everything that the plaintiffs in this case allege has been proven largely to be true,” Ratcliffe argued. “When you think about, with respect to COVID-19, everything from the origins of the lab leak, the efficacy of certain treatments, the transmissibility. You just heard President Biden talking about pandemic of the unvaccinated. All of that was frankly, wrong, and yet Americans ability to engage in honest debate about it was suppressed. And so you have these agencies with social media working to suppress the truth and amplify lies.”
“As the judge says, I truly do believe this is the greatest infringement on our First Amendment rights that any of us have seen occur in any of our lives. It cannot be allowed. And we’re finally getting judges pushing back,” Travis said.
Fox News’ Andrea Vacchiano contributed to this report.
Madeline Coggins is a Digital Production Assistant on the Fox News flash team with Fox News Digital.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told his conference that the White House was still “dug in” on its stance in debt limit negotiations despite a Monday night meeting that both sides hailed as “productive,” according to a source familiar with this morning’s remarks.
“Members were told to remain flexible for next week” in case they have to return to vote for a new debt limit bill, the source said. “McCarthy said the White House is dug in on raising taxes and [increasing] spending but by a smaller amount than they would like.”
It lines up with reporting that White House negotiators have countered Republicans’ demand to cut spending to 2022 levels and cap it at 1% growth for the next decade with an offer to freeze current spending levels into the next fiscal year, with caps for one or two following years.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy talks to reporters as he returns from a House Republican conference meeting on May 23, 2023. (Getty Images)
According to the source, McCarthy told members they have to “keep negotiating” and urged House Republicans to “stick together.”
He did not, however, offer fellow lawmakers any “points of agreement” forged between the White House and House GOP negotiators despite having roughly a week until the U.S. government is likely to run out of cash to pay all of its obligations.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, left, met with President Joe Biden, right, at the White House on Monday evening to discuss the debt limit. (Getty Images)
McCarthy later told reporters when he left the closed-door meeting that “we’re not there yet” in terms of a deal. He and Biden held their first bilateral meeting on the debt limit since February on Monday evening, with teams for both getting together afterward to continue working on a compromise.
Both House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, front, and Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., called the meeting productive afterward. (Getty Images)
But it appears both sides were still far apart as of Tuesday morning – though McCarthy expressed optimism that a deal could still be struck by June 1.
“They still want to spend more money next year than we spent this year. That’s a red line,” the speaker said. “We could still finish this by June … we’re trying to condense everything in a short time frame. The House passed the bill. The Senate never passed a bill. So, now it’s more difficult because of what else we have to negotiate from a lot of different perspectives. But we can still finish in time.”
The Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to newly released White House emails.
President Joe Biden’s administration actively pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to internal White House communication records obtained by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.
In an email dated April 14, 2021, then-senior adviser to the president’s Covid response team, Andrew Slavitt, voiced dissatisfaction to a Facebook official that a video of Carlson questioning the left’s universal demand that people get the Covid jab was “Number one” on the platform, to which said official responded that they’d look into the matter. Later that same day, the Facebook representative informed the White House that while the “Tucker Carlson video does not qualify for removal under [Facebook’s] policies,” the company would label the clip with “a pointer to more authoritative COVID information” and work to limit its reach on the platform.
Facebook’s efforts did not meet the administration’s demands for greater censorship, however. In response to the representative, White House Director of Digital Strategy Robert Flaherty questioned how Carlson’s video didn’t violate Facebook’s existing policies and pressured the company to turn over information on the efficacy of its censorship practices.
“How was this not violative? The second half of the segment is raising conspiracy theories about the government hiding that all vaccines aren’t effective,” Flaherty claimed. “Moreover, you say reduced and demoted. What does that mean? There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many? How effective is that?”
“Not for nothing but last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection,” Flaherty added in an apparent reference to the platform’s handling of claims pertaining to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and subsequent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the Biden White House’s habit of using Big Tech to silence dissenting voices on Covid-related information didn’t just stop at Carlson. A separate batch of emails released by the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general reveals a concentrated endeavor between the administration and Facebook to reduce the “virality of vaccine hesitancy content,” even if such posts contained factually accurate information.
“As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation,” a Facebook representative told Slavitt in a March 21, 2021, email. “This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level … but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking. We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”
In addition to Facebook, Twitter was also a major player in the collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech to further squash free speech online. In an email dated August 11, 2022, Flaherty admonished Twitter for allowing posts contradicting White House claims to circulate on the platform, writing that “if your product is appending misinformation to our tweets[,] that seems like a pretty fundamental issue.”
Flaherty separately accused Twitter in a December 2021 email of “Total Calvinball” and “bending over backwards” to tolerate disfavored speech after the company refused to comply with demands from the administration to censor a video.
“This case is about the Biden Administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with social media companies [to] suppress speech it disagrees with,” said Missouri AG Andrew Bailey in a statement. “I will always fight back against unelected bureaucrats who seek to indoctrinate the people of this state by violating our constitutional right to free and open debate.”
The bombshell emails come as a result of an investigation launched last year by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and then-Missouri AG and now-U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt to uncover collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech companies to censor Covid-related posts they deemed misinformation. In addition to obtaining communication records unveiling such corruption, the investigation has scored numerous legal wins allowing Louisiana and Missouri to depose high-ranking administration officials such as Anthony Fauci under oath about their role in these efforts.
According to a transcript of Fauci’s November testimony, the man claiming to “represent science” somehow couldn’t recall relevant information about his role in the federal government’s disastrous Covid response “at least 174 times.” The deposition ranged from topics such as Fauci’s bid to smear authors of “The Great Barrington Declaration,” to his role in attempting to “discredit any theory” that Covid resulted from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves 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
As the year winds down, the border is about to break wide open. In less than a week, the Biden administration’s last remaining tool to control illegal immigration, left over from the Trump administration, will be taken away.
Title 42, the public-health order invoked by President Trump during the pandemic that allowed immigration officials to quickly expel most migrants caught crossing the border illegally, will end on Dec. 21 by order of a federal judge. Once Title 42 is gone, federal agencies at the border will have no choice but to process and release nearly every illegal border-crosser. It will represent a full return to the Obama-era “catch-and-release” policy. Border Patrol estimates they could see as many as 14,000 arrests per day in the coming weeks, which would totally overwhelm the border.
For migrants, there is now every incentive to do just that. Word of Title 42’s demise has almost certainly reached migrants in Mexico already, who now know that if they cross the Rio Grande, they will be allowed to remain in the United States, with work authorization, for years while they await the outcome of an asylum hearing.
Biden, who repealed or severely curtailed nearly every one of Trump’s border policies upon taking office in January 2021, has no plan for what to do now. Axios reported this week on a vague plan circulating among Biden officials for a temporary (five-month) moratorium on asylum, but the plan hasn’t been approved. It’s unclear how it would even be implemented with less than a week to go before Title 42 ends.
Many of them are from Nicaragua, which means they can’t be deported to Nicaragua (the U.S. has no deportation agreement with the authoritarian dictatorship of Nicaragua’s president-for-life Daniel Ortega), and they can’t be expelled to Mexico, which refuses to take back Nicaraguans. So, the U.S. is just letting them in, giving them a court date for an asylum hearing years from now, and releasing them. Never mind that many of these migrants, by their own admission to reporters, are economic migrants who have no valid asylum claims.
Back in August, my colleague Emily Jashinsky and I reported on the migrant encampments and shelters in the Mexican border towns of Matamoros and Reynosa across the Rio Grande from Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, respectively. Most of those migrants were Haitian, although they had been living in various South American countries for years, with legal status. They came to the border for a chance to get into the U.S. and pursue what one of them told us was “the American dream, a dream for all Haitian people.”
The reason so many had been waiting in Mexican shelters was that they feared being deported back to Haiti, where they hadn’t lived in many years, or because they had already tried to cross and been expelled back to Mexico under Title 42. They could not afford to pay the cartels for multiple river crossings, and so they were waiting, they told us, for U.S. policy to change.
Their wait is almost over. Once the threat of expulsion under Title 42 is gone, there will be little to hold them back. The border will become a chaotic, ungovernable disaster. We will likely see the appearance of tent-like refugee camps on the U.S. side of the border, as we saw in Del Rio, Texas, in the fall of 2021. To put the figure of 14,000 arrests per day into context, three years ago, during the 2019 border surge, President Obama’s DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson, said that 1,000 apprehensions a day “overwhelms” the system and that he “cannot imagine” what 4,000 arrests per day would look like.
2022 was the worst year for illegal immigration in U.S. history. 2023 will be worse yet. As long as the Biden administration maintains its open-border policies, illegal immigration will increase, the cartels that profit from migrant smuggling will get rich, and the border will descend into chaos.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Research for a new book out next week reveals an implicit bias present throughout the White House press corps: Reporters attending in-person briefings rank 12:1 Democrat to Republican.
“Every seat was filled for the first time in over a year as the social distancing rules resulting from the COVID pandemic were relaxed,” Fleischer wrote in an excerpt shared exclusively with The Federalist. “By a ratio of 12:1, the seats were occupied by Democrats!”
Fleischer drew upon research solicited by the D.C.-based investigative firm Delve, which combed through publicly available data.
“I guess the good news is that the ratio wasn’t 24:0, like it was during my encounters with students at Columbia Journalism School. It was only 12:1,” Fleischer wrote. “No matter how you cut it, the White House briefing room does not look, sound, or register to vote like America.”
Towson University tenured Professor Richard Vatz, who specializes in political persuasion and rhetoric, told The Federalist that Fleischer’s discovery “echoes findings over many decades.”
“In major media survey after major media survey [1962-1996, journalists of ‘national media,’ ‘Washington Press Corps,’ etc., were found to be overwhelmingly liberal, and in poll after poll they voted for Democrats,” Vatz said.
Vatz cited a 1982 survey from the State University of California at Los Angeles which polled 1,000 journalists across 50 daily newspapers and found that only 25 percent of those interviewed voted for then-President Ronald Reagan. More than a decade later, a 1995 joint study from the University of Colorado’s Media Studies Center and Cornell University’s Roper Center surveyed “Washington-based bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents” and found that 89 percent voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Only 7 percent reported voting for George H.W. Bush, and 2 percent for Ross Perot. Half identified as Democrats, and only 4 percent Republican.
“America would be well served to have a robust press corps representing different outlets, considerations, and, most of all, questions for the president on down,” Curtis Houck, the managing editor of Newsbusters at the Media Research Center told The Federalist. “Having watched press briefings for the last six years, it’s no surprise that the White House press corps tilt left as, along with a built-in geographical bias living in a far-left city, they have zero perspective or belief that their mindset might be wrong and/or self-serving.”
Steve Krakauer, another media critic and author of the Fourth Watch newsletter, also told The Federalist that the media’s geographic bias embedded in the Acela Corridor is a key variable when evaluating press corps perspectives.
“On the face of it, political affiliations of these reporters don’t necessarily connect to problems with their coverage, or invalidate their coverage,” Krakauer said, while conceding the media has leaned left for decades. Krakauer argued, however, that the media’s left-wing bent has grown far worse over the past seven to eight years driven primarily by geographic bias and a visceral reaction to Donald Trump. The press, Krakauer said, has begun to allow personal perspectives to infect their reporting with the belief that, “well, there’s a higher mission here. Now we have to save democracy.”
“It’s changed not because affiliations have changed in that room but because of how they’ve allowed their biases and their points of view to seep into their coverage in ways that never did nearly as much in Ari’s time,” Krakauer said.
Vatz said the partisan makeup of the White House press corps unfairly skews what the media offers nationwide attention.
“The effect on media coverage is that certain topics in major media do not even get covered if they rebound to Republican advantage, and when pro-conservative-interest topics do get covered, they are spun negatively,” Vatz told The Federalist.
Vatz highlighted the corporate coverage of last week’s “star witness” before the House Committee on Jan. 6 who made a series of uncorroborated allegations related to Trump’s conduct the day of the Capitol riot. Trump, former White House aid Cassidy Hutchinson claimed based on third-hand hearsay, attempted to hijack the presidential limousine and drive himself to the Capitol by assaulting a Secret Service agent.
“ABC Evening News did not even mention,” Vatz said, “that the Secret Service had indicated that President Trump did not grab the steering wheel and lunge at agents in ‘The Beast,’” after agents told reporters they were prepared to go under oath refuting Hutchinson’s claims.
Vatz’s analysis was backed up by a report from Houck at the Media Research Center. Analyzing network coverage the morning after Hutchinson testified, Houck found, “ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, and NBC’s Today spent four minutes and 42 seconds on Hutchinson’s claim, but only two minutes and 33 seconds on the pushback from her colleagues and the Secret Service, including offers from the latter to have the agents involved testify under oath that none of that was true.”
While Trump dealt with a hostile press corps that turned daily coronavirus press conferences into sparring matches over whether the term “Chinese coronavirus” was racist, President Joe Biden has enjoyed far friendlier treatment. Biden’s rare press conferences have been full of soft-ball questions from pre-selected reporters who’ve given the White House little grief for keeping the president away from the media. Data from the American Presidency Project show Biden is one of the least accessible presidents in modern American history, having conducted only 16 total press conferences since taking office last year, including nine alone and seven as joint affairs.
Trust in the media, meanwhile, has collapsed to a new low, according to Gallup. In its latest survey findings on institutional trust released on Tuesday, Gallup reported that just 16 percent of Americans trust “newspapers” with a 30-point gap between Republicans and Democrats. Thirty-five percent of Democrats said they maintained a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, which is still a three percent drop from last year, while only 5 percent of Republicans said the same.
“As to what could make the field of reporters more diverse, it is very simple,” Vatz told The Federalist. “Pressure the president of each news organization to insist on disinterest coverage — there is some evidence that this is beginning at CNN, for example, but it could happen at the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere as well.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
Taliban fighters atop vehicles with Taliban flags parade along a road to celebrate after the US pulled all its troops out of Afghanistan, in Kandahar on September 1, 2021 following the Talibans military takeover of the country. | JAVED TANVEER/AFP via Getty Images
The Biden administration, which had been saying for weeks that the number of Americans still left behind in Afghanistan and urgently want to be evacuated was about 100, has now increased the number to about 200. State Department spokesman Ned Price said last week that while the U.S. airlifted out dozens of people in the past couple days, more people had come forward in recent weeks expressing a desire to leave and the number is somewhere between 100 and 200, The Washington Times reported.
Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, criticized the Biden administration.
“For weeks, their official number was ‘about a hundred’ and it magically never changed — as Americans slowly got out the total number never went down. Now they say more than 300 Americans are still in Afghanistan,” Sasse was quoted as saying.
The number quoted by Sasse includes Americans who, according to the State Department, haven’t said they want to leave. Price, however, claimed that the “proven ability” of the U.S. in airlifting people out is behind the higher number of people wanting to flee.
Following the drawing down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban quickly seized control of much of the country, taking the capital Kabul in August and forcing the government to flee. Afghanistan’s interim government includes more than a dozen leaders who are designated terrorists and ex-Guantanamo detainees.
Meanwhile, Aman Khalili, an Afghan interpreter who helped rescue Biden in 2008, when he was a senator, after a helicopter he and other senators were riding on had to make an emergency landing in Afghanistan, was able to escape earlier this month. U.S. veterans worked with former Afghan soldiers and Pakistani allies to help Khalili cross the border into Pakistan with his family, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“Aman helped keep me and other Americans safe while we were fighting in Afghanistan, and we wanted to return the favor,” said Brian Genthe, a combat veteran, was quoted as saying. “He’s a blessing.”
Last month, the Taliban declared they will carry out executions and other brutal punishments, including amputations, under Islamic Sharia law as part of their rule in Afghanistan.
“Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security,” Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, a member of the Taliban’s interim government and chief enforcer of the group’s strict interpretation of Sharia law, told The Associated Press. “Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments. No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”
Turabi, who is under U.N. sanctions, also said the new government may consider carrying out such punishments in public. The Taliban have banned all demonstrations and have violently cracked down on protests, including beating women and killing demonstrators. The Taliban are arresting, and in some instances executing, people they perceive as their enemies, Christian missionary David Eubank, a former U.S. Army Special Forces and Ranger officer, said in an earlier interview with CBN News. Eubank also said recent photos and video suggest they’re killing as many as 30 to 40 people at a time.
“They [the Taliban] are hunting down people right now, trying to get all the names of anyone they perceive as an enemy,” Eubank said, adding that the enemies include “people who work with the U.S. government, people who are with other governments, people who work with nongovernmental organizations they don’t agree with.”
What do you call it when the country’s largest school board association secretly coordinates with the Biden White House before issuing a formal request that the administration use the FBI to investigate dissenting parents as potential “domestic terrorists,” and then, five days later, the Justice Department issues a memorandum to the FBI to do just that?
The old-fashioned word for it is corruption — corruption of our institutions, the rule of law, the administration of justice, the separation of powers. It is also an egregious abuse of power on the part of the Biden administration, which apparently has no qualms about calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland when the president’s political allies need a little muscle.
In a contentious congressional hearing on Thursday, Garland confirmed that the basis of his Oct. 4 memorandum, which directed the FBI and U.S. attorney’s offices to launch a task force to combat what Garland called a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” was a letter that the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent to the White House on Sept. 29.
That is, Garland’s evidence that there’s a “disturbing spike” in these kinds of threats is the NSBA letter itself, which was produced after weeks of collaboration with Biden’s White House. This is the same letter in which the NSBA urged the Biden administration to use tools like the Patriot Act to target parents who show up at school board meetings to complain about mask mandates and critical race theory curricula, as if they were “domestic terrorists.”
Biden AG Merrick Garland concedes that he started targeting parents for "possible domestic terrorism" because the NSBA sent a letter. pic.twitter.com/ZDvhZ6vDzO
Incredibly, the news about NSBA’s collusion with the White House broke while Garland was testifying Thursday. During his testimony, Garland insisted that, the NSBA letter notwithstanding, he “can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children,” nor any circumstance in which those instances “would be labeled as domestic terrorism.”
We are left to understand then, that the role Garland envisions for the DOJ in all of this is — what? His memo cites no instances of violence or threats of violence against school board members, and Garland himself admitted before Congress that the basis of his memo was the NSBA letter.
But the vast majority of incidents cited in the NSBA letter didn’t involve attacks or threats of any kind. A few cases involved local law enforcement, but nothing cited in the letter comes close to “domestic terrorism” or anything that would justify the involvement of the FBI or the DOJ. For the most part, the letter cited cases in which parents disrupted school board meetings by protesting, often because they were not given an opportunity to speak out on issues that directly affect the education of their children.
The letter of course didn’t cite instances where school board members have threatened parents, Like this one:
To be clear, the DOJ has no role whatsoever in policing the interactions of parents and local school boards. Whatever happens at those meetings, however contentious they might get, they are entirely under the purview of local and state authorities. For Garland to even suggest that federal prosecutors might get involved is itself a scandal and an egregious abuse of power.
That’s what this is really all about. Set aside the details of the machinations between the Biden White House and the NSBA and the DOJ. What it comes down to is a coordinated effort by the left — including the most powerful law enforcement official in the country, the attorney general — to intimidate parents into silence.
Want to show up and speak out at your local school board meeting? Maybe hold a protest sign in the parking lot? Well then, you might just get a knock on your door from the FBI. Better think twice about that.
These are parents who have every right, by God and the U.S. Constitution, strenuously to voice their opposition to mask mandates, critical race theory, transgender ideology, and all the other nonsense that woke school boards and teachers are trying to foist on their kids. In fact they have a duty to do so.
But instead of listening to the concerns of such parents, the top brass at the NSBA decided to call in a political favor to the White House, which in turn let loose the Justice Department. Through it all, the corporate media executed a PR campaign on behalf of Biden and the school boards.
And why are they trying to intimidate parents into silence? Because when all’s said and done, the leftist ideologues who sit on school boards, work in the White House, and push paper for Garland’s Justice Department don’t want parents to have a say in how public schools are run and what children are taught. As far as they’re concerned, your children don’t belong to you, and their education is not your concern.
The message from the left is clear: comply, stay quiet, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll leave you alone. For now.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
A new report from Emily Miller now reveals the British Military is rescuing “anyone left behind” in Afghanistan following Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from the region.
“The British are saving their comrades in arms from Afghanistan. Pres. Biden won’t even rescue American citizens left behind. The Royal Air Force (RAF) this week started flying combat interpreters to safety. Biden refuses to use the assets of the U.S. military. Instead, he tasked the State Department to use diplomacy s to convince the Taliban to let people leave. Biden’s policy has been a total failure,” writes Miller.
“The UK military is rescuing hundreds of its Afghan combat interpreters, according to an exclusive report in The Telegraph. They plan to spend several weeks rescuing the Afghans who worked side-by-side with British military during the 20-year war,” she adds.
“It’s shameful that these men who are loyal to the United States are hiding from the Taliban, while those who worked with British forces are flying to safety. Biden has to take action and use military flights to rescue people,” concludes the journalist.
Multiple lawmakers from both parties “angrily stormed out” of a classified briefing on Afghanistan this week after Biden administration officials failed to answer simple questions about its ongoing evacuation efforts, CNN reported. Citing three anonymous sources, the network said that both Republican and Democratic members of Congress “grew frustrated” after officials from the State Department, Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and Office of the Director of National Security “failed to answer their basic questions.”
The walkout reportedly occurred during a Wednesday morning briefing for members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Though CNN did not specify the exact questioning, the report seemed to note the frustration revolved around the administration’s failure to offer precise information regarding the number of American citizens who still remain in Afghanistan following the U.S. military’s official withdrawal last month.
A day after the last U.S. plane departed Afghanistan on Aug. 30, President Biden said in a speech to the American public that “about 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan with some intention to leave.” Since then, the administration has continued to say that roughly 100 Americans still remain in the now Taliban-controlled country.
But some lawmakers said “they do not understand that accounting, given the department has said that they evacuated more than 75 Americans from Afghanistan through evacuation efforts in the last few weeks,” CNN reported.
In any case, the administration has apparently been vague and imprecise with its information both in public addresses and in private meetings with lawmakers.
Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, confirmed to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday that “everybody walked out” of the intelligence briefing earlier that day. He added that either the administration is “not being transparent” or officials don’t “know the answer to that question” regarding the number of Americans still stranded.
“The fact is, I believe there’s still hundreds of Americans still left behind enemy lines. The majority of the interpreters that you and I talked about for so long did not get out,” McCaul said. “And now we’re getting reports of executions, beheadings of their families and themselves, horrific stories.”
“I don’t think they know all the answers, quite honestly,” he declared of the administration.
Republican Rep. Michael McCaul discusses the FBI director stating that the agency is concerned that terrorist networks may reunite in Afghanistan. McCaul calls the situation "dangerous." pic.twitter.com/7sTza2eTMU
In response to a request for comment, a State Department spokesperson told CNN that “as a general matter, we do not comment on communications with Congress, especially those conducted in a classified setting.”
One gets the disconcerting sensation that leadership is absent from the gates of the nation.
“I’m not supposed to take any questions,” said the president recently at FEMA headquarters as he was briefed on actions to help those slammed by Hurricane Ida.
Wallace Henley, former Senior Associate Pastor of 2nd Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. | Photo by Scott Belin
A Fox News writer noted, “President Joe Biden has repeatedly implied that his handlers set the rules and determine when and where he’s allowed to take questions from the press, leading observers to ponder who is actually calling the shots behind the scenes.”[1]
And who is telling the president which reporters to call on at press conferences?
White House staffs often suffer the delusion that the voters elected them.
It is the way of hubris, and there is hardly a greater bastion of hubris than the White House. Every time presidents forget this, they vacate their seat in the gates and give it to the bureaucracy.
However, it takes a strong president to tell the gate-usurpers to get out of the way.
A wise leader will give due consideration to the advice of his or her staff. But a foolish leader loses functional leadership when he or she becomes a sycophant of aides, assistants, counselors, cabinet officers, functionaries, and all the other animals who inhabit the zoo of big agencies — the White House being the biggest animal house of all.
When the leader hands over his or her place in the gates to the functionaries, the Don Beard maxim becomes true. Don and his wife, Mary Kay, were important players in the founding, with Charles Colson, of Prison Fellowship. Both had served prison time, and both were thoroughly converted followers of Jesus Christ. They served with me in two churches where I was pastor.
Don had seen chaos in prisons he had inhabited, and, when things got wild in any institutional setting, would say, “the inmates are running this place.” Then he would turn serious, pointing out the need for strong leadership to arise and manage the situation.
Sadly, the Biden White House “inmates” seemed to have seized the gates of leadership, and the president has become the sycophant rather than the superior. If this be the case, there is chaos in the gates. Biblical history shows that whatever happens in the gates of leadership, for good and bad, determines what happens in the city, and what happens in the city dictates what happens in the nation.
The gates always are up for grabs. A Darwinian strain constantly runs through places of great power like the White House, in which the survival of the fittest becomes a wrestling match, or a shoving contest to see who can snuggle up closest to the president in the gates.
On top of all the other crises America faces, now comes this threatening issue about who controls the president. Who really sits in the gates of the nation at this precarious moment?
As I noted in a previous column, cities, in antiquity, were to be sanctuaries of order. They were walled off from the chaos outside. Mighty gates maintained the order of the city. But everything depended on who occupied the gates, and what they were willing, or could be bribed and cajoled to allow in. According to Isaiah 14, Lucifer’s aim is to “overthrow cities” to achieve his goal of bringing chaos to the world. That assault works its way incrementally through institutions crucial for the cosmos-order of society — families, churches, schools, businesses, civil governments right up to the White House itself.
To fend off the assault on the gates by hubristic bit-players, a leader must discern the pretentious from the principled advice that should be heeded. That leader must give attention to the character he invites into the gates with him or her because, as Proverbs 29:8 (MSG) puts it, “A gang of cynics can upset a whole city; a group of sages can calm everyone down.”
As a low-level presidential aide in the Nixon White House, I had the privilege of serving under two “sages.” One was Harry S. Dent, who at one point had been in Nixon’s inner circle. However, Harry ultimately found himself banished from that elite group. He later found the reason was because senior people said Harry was “too much of a ‘Boy Scout’.”
After leaving the White House, Harry, an able lawyer, went to Bible College, and became the leader of the Billy Graham Center in North Carolina. Harry was a “sage” and Nixon’s presidency might have been saved had the president insisted Harry was going to sit in the “gates.”
I also worked under the leadership of another great Washington “sage” — Dr. George Shultz. Our team had been charged by the president to help school systems in 11 southern states implement the largest school desegregation in history. Emotions were intense, chaos threatened, violence loomed. I traveled with Shultz in those states as he gave counsel to leaders in government, business, and education. I watched his wise and calm guidance put cooling streams on blistering landscapes. And by the way, school systems in all 11 states were peacefully integrated in the fall of 1970.
Richard Nixon had been smart enough to pull George Schultz into the gates of power with him.
Joe Biden, as any president, must seek good counsel, but because of his issues with aging — whether merely perceived or actual — he does need wise advisors, and he needs to be able to discern the hubristic from the truly humble public servants.
Pray that he will surround himself with “a group of sages.”
Wallace B. Henley’s fifty-year career has spanned newspaper journalism, government in both White House and Congress, the church, and academia. He is author or co-author of more than 20 books. He is a teaching pastor at Grace Church, the Woodlands, Texas.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued scathing advice to Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis (Fla.) and Greg Abbott (Texas): Get control of the Delta variant in your states or “get out of the way.” Both of the Republican leaders have been outspoken in their opposition to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s newly updated guidelines recommending universal masking in schools and high-transmission areas.
A Wednesday report from Yahoo! News detailed Psaki’s Tuesday press briefing from the White House, as COVID-19 case counts in Florida and Texas have risen to the point that they currently account for one-third of all infections across the United States. Psaki, who insisted that the Biden administration has offered assistance to both governors to get the spread under control, appeared to suggest that the states’ leaders have yet to accept the White House’s help.
“But if you aren’t going to help, if you aren’t going to abide by public health guidance, then get out of the way and let people do the right thing to lead in their communities, whether they are teachers, university leaders, or private sector leaders or others who are trying to save lives,” she said Tuesday in response to the questions about the rising confirmed COVID-19 case numbers in both Florida and Texas.
The outlet added, “Asked to clarify what she meant by having the two governors ‘get out of the way,’ Psaki elaborated, ‘That means don’t ban, don’t make it harder for people to put requirements on masks — or asking for vaccination status — into law.”
She added, “Leaders are going to have to choose whether they’re going to follow public health guidelines or they’re going to follow politics.”
Elsewhere in her Tuesday remarks, Psaki said that President Joe Biden would likely speak directly to DeSantis about the state’s rising COVID-19 numbers — but only if they “thought it would make a difference.”
“But I don’t have any expectation or prediction of a call between them,” she hastily added.
In a statement on Psaki’s remarks, the DeSantis administration said:
She might want to brush up on the Constitution and learn more about the role of a state governor. As it turns out, freedom matters. Every day, nearly a thousand Americans relocate to Florida — mostly fleeing from the ever-changing, contradictory COVID restrictions pushed by federal bureaucrats on lockdown states. By contrast, Governor DeSantis keeps up with the latest research and makes data-driven decisions. If he had ‘gotten out of the way’ as Psaki suggested, and let the CDC run our state, many of those lives might have been lost — as we saw with the tragic situation in New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where the age-adjusted death rates are significantly higher than in Florida.
A spokesperson for the Abbott administration in Texas has yet to issue public remark on Psaki’s admonitions.
President Joe Biden’s administration apparently does not want to be caught off guard with tough questions by the media during its press briefings. According to the Daily Beast, Biden’s communications department has requested that reporters submit their questions to the White House staff in advance of press secretary Jen Psaki’s daily briefings, presumably to avoid being scrutinized by reporters with difficult questions.
The issue was reportedly discussed during a White House Correspondents Association meeting last Friday. Reporters are allegedly upset over the White House’s request, fearing it plays into the perception of coordination between the West Wing and media.
“That’s not really a free press at all,” one White House reporter said, according to the Daily Beast.
“While it’s a relief to see briefings return, particularly with a commitment to factual information, the press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” the reporter added.
Indeed, WHCA leaders instructed to reporters to either “push back” against the requests or not comply altogether.
In contrast to the Trump administration, which jettisoned daily White House press briefings almost completely, Biden and his communications team promised to restore the daily briefings and have thus far delivered on that promise.
Biden’s administration claimed that asking reporters for their questions ahead of time is not an attempt to dodge questions, but rather to understand the pulse of reporting on any given day.
“Our goal is to make the daily briefing as useful and informative as possible for both reporters and the public,” a spokesperson told the Daily Beast. “Part of meeting that objective means regularly engaging with the reporters who will be in the briefing room to understand how the White House can be most helpful in getting them the information they need. That two-way conversation is an important part of keeping the American people updated about how government is serving them.”
Meanwhile, Eric Schultz, who served as a deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, claimed the Biden communication team’s request is fairly normal, allowing staff adequate time to prepare for the daily briefing.
“This is textbook communications work. The briefing becomes meaningless if the press secretary has to repeatedly punt questions, instead of coming equipped to discuss what journalists are reporting on,”Schultz told the Daily Beast. “In a non-COVID environment, this would happen in casual conversations throughout the day in lower and upper press. One of the few upsides to reporters hovering over your desk all day, is that you get a very quick sense of what they’re working on.”
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