A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and Presiden
From some of the world’s most iconic views to offering poop maps, San Francisco now disappoints on a Herculean level.
Check out San Francisco now.
Arguably the most beautiful big city in America looks more and more like a ghost town as San Francisco learns yet another painful real estate lesson.
The Wall Street Journal reported on a “fire sale” on the 22-story office tower known as Union Bank. The retail cost of this building should be around $300 million. However, the building will likely sell for about one-fifth; as little as $60 million.
Tenant vacancies have caused the commercial real-estate triage in the City by the Bay. But there is more to the story.
This particular building located at 350 California is 75 percent vacant. Moreover, renovation costs could exceed $50 million. Still a bargain if you could get occupants. Sadly, San Francisco’s government is pushing tenants away rather than attracting them.
“We’re all really on the edge of our seats to see the first office trade in San Francisco,” real estate services executive J.D. Lumpkin told the WSJ. A real estate lawyer warned the paper that the 350 California fire sale could prove “a bellwether for the value destruction in the urban office market nationally,” and not just for San Francisco’s (formerly?) ritzy Financial District.
To blame are high-cost structures based on pre-pandemic valuations, the local tech industry’s embrace of remote work, and what some people euphemistically call “quality-of-life issues.” That’s what honest people call “aggressive panhandlers, violent crime, and open-air drug sales and abuse.” Oh, and sidewalks festooned with poop and dirty syringes.
As I mention on my radio show from time to time, the last time I was in San Francisco, I had about $1000 worth of equipment stolen from my car along with a leather jacket I purchased earlier that day. When I went to the police station to file a report, the officer said “What do you expect me to do? Look for a well-dressed bum taking pictures?!”
I couldn’t help but laugh. But I made that chump fill out my report. I would be damned if they didn’t log the crime against me.
While admittedly the scamdemic caused some problems in commercial real-estate, this bubble burst was expected long before work-from-home hit.
The article continues,
According to the Journal, nearly “$80 billion worth of loans backed by U.S. office buildings come due this year,” and “most will need to be refinanced, at a time of higher interest rates and lower occupancy, threatening lenders with losses.”
City governments have been driving corporations out for decades. Homeless and drug addicts swarm formerly iconic downtowns. There was a time when city leaders kept the riff-raff from these areas. Now they condone it.
Corporate America responded.
Many corporations either have abandoned these cities or they plan to. And who could blame them? Clearly, a state without respect for law and order is no place for corporations to plant their valuable investments, i.e.. headquarters. As we see in San Francisco and elsewhere, when corporations leave, cities begin their death spiral.
Add these corporate losses to the loss of private citizens and it’s a one-two punch that could stop Gavin Newsom’s presidential run before it even gets started.
Remember, I recently predicted Newsom plans to run in 2024? Which is why he’s suddenly vested in the fate of San Francisco.
Operation De-Leftization
Things are so far-gone in SF, Newsom deployed the National Guard to assist in the policing and cleanup efforts.
Newsom unveiled the unprecedented collaboration between the California Highway Patrol (CHP), California National Guard (CalGuard), San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), and the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office (SFDA) to combat the escalating fentanyl crisis in the city. This move comes as a dramatic response to the severity of the situation, highlighting the urgency with which the state government is addressing the issue.
Newsom said his administration will focus on “dismantling fentanyl trafficking and disrupting the supply of the deadly drug in the city by holding the operators of large-scale drug trafficking operations accountable.”
“Two truths can coexist at the same time: San Francisco’s violent crime rate is below comparably sized cities like Jacksonville and Fort Worth—and there is also more we must do to address public safety concerns, especially the fentanyl crisis,” Newsom said.
“We’re taking action. Through this new collaborative partnership, we are providing more law enforcement resources and personnel to crack down on crime linked to the fentanyl crisis, holding the poison peddlers accountable, and increasing law enforcement presence to improve public safety and public confidence in San Francisco,” he added.
Newsom understands that Leftist Democrats look bad, particularly on drugs and crime.
“The San Francisco Police Department has been working hard to stop drug trafficking by making countless arrests and narcotics seizures,” said San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott.
“Despite our ongoing work and close collaboration with the District Attorney, the fentanyl crisis has contributed to hundreds of drug overdose-related deaths.
“We welcome the support of our state partners because when we work together we can make a significant difference to make our city safer.”
“The CalGuard is seeing significant success supporting multiagency task forces interdicting fentanyl across our state,” said Major General Matthew P. Beevers of the California National Guard.
“We expect to achieve the same success working with our partners in San Francisco,” he added.
Currently, the carnage of San Francisco rests squarely on the shoulders of Democrats. However, one or two more conservative-like initiatives and Newsom will be ready to throw his rainbow hat into the ring, If nothing else, reviving the city will give Newsom an actual accomplishment, something Joe Biden STILL doesn’t have. Of course, if Newsom fails, his campaign will be a “no go” at launch.
What’s behind California’s shift to paying for electricity based on income? In a few words, it’s the consequence of California’s futile fight against climate change.
California’s quixotic pursuit to save the planet by reducing greenhouse emissions has had three broad and irrefutable consequences. It has made energy more expensive; costlier energy has accelerated the deindustrialization of the state; and, the best irony of all, the offshored manufacturing has increased greenhouse gas emissions by pushing production to dirty, coal-fired China, with goods then shipped back to California for consumption.
The latest twist in California’s arrogant tale of energy virtue signaling is playing out with a major restructuring in how Californians are charged for their electricity. For decades, consumers paid for electricity — as well as other utilities such as water and natural gas — with a tiered system that charged more for resources used above a baseline amount. For electricity, the baseline was determined by three things: the consumer’s use of electricity, the region, and the season.
This system meant consumers who used a lot of electricity would pay far more for each kilowatt hour of that additional electricity than they would for their baseline allocation.
This tended to hit lower-income consumers who ran their air conditioning too much, though the Golden State also has a separate program to reduce costs for low-income residents known as California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE).
Thus, the California legislature last year passed Assembly Bill 205, which mandated an end to the tiered system of electric rates and instituted in its place a system where each would pay according to his ability to help those in need. (Of course, it sounds better in the original German, “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen.”) The bill goes into effect no later than July 1, 2024, with the stated aim that “low-income ratepayers in each baseline territory would realize a lower average monthly bill without making any changes in usage.”
One unintended consequence of ditching the old baseline allocation scheme is all ratepayers, regardless of income, will now have far less incentive to conserve electricity, since each additional unit of electricity used will be priced the same, with overall prices reduced.
Higher Income Will Pay More
In preparation for the rollout of the new electric charges, California’s big, regulated utilities have proposed their new rate plans to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). Depending on the provider, ratepayers would pay a fixed fee based on three household income tiers, plus charges for electricity use. Household income would be validated by a third party, likely the agency that collects the state income tax, the California Franchise Tax Board. The three proposed household income tiers and their fixed rates are: $28,000 to $69,000 — $20 to $34 a month, depending on the provider; $69,000 to $180,000 — $51 to $73 a month; and more than $180,000 — $85 to $128 a month.
Median household income in California in the years 2017-2021 was $84,097, meaning that an average California family could, under the proposed rate structure, pay a flat fee of $876 per year for their electricity while charges for kilowatt hours used would decline by 33-42 percent depending on the provider. The net effect would be an increase of about $90 a year for the average household and up to $750 more annually for higher-income households. Ironically, households living in homes with rooftop solar would see some of the highest increases in electrical costs under the new rate structure. Lower-income households are expected to see savings of up to $300 per year.
Increasing Fees Rather Than Taxes
One big advantage to California policymakers of heavily regulating public utilities is the ability to use these energy and water corporations as de facto arms of the welfare state.
California’s Constitution requires a two-thirds majority to increase taxes, but a simple majority to increase fees. The CPUC’s total control over California’s utilities means state lawmakers can direct the CPUC to change its rate structures to take more from those earning more and give to those earning less — all without a penny flowing into or out of the state treasury — something that’s particularly attractive today in a state that went from an almost $100 billion surplus last year to an expected $30 billion deficit this year.
And in that, the CPUC commissioners, appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, are willing accomplices in the class struggle for fair electricity bills and energy justice. Of the five commissioners, four are attorneys, with backgrounds in “environmental justice,” air quality, low-income assistance, and climate change — electricity generation, not so much. Though the CPUC’s mission is to ensure “that consumers have safe, reliable utility service at reasonable rates, protecting against fraud, and promoting the health of California’s economy,” it’s clear now that all that really matters is figuring out how to shield low-income voters from the costly consequences of California’s green energy crusade.
Moreover, while the electrical pricing scheme may work as income redistribution social policy, it fails the test of reducing energy consumption — laying bare the fact that California policymakers care more about control than they do the climate.
Chuck DeVore is chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, vice chairman of the Golden State Policy Council, a former California legislator, and a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. He’s the author of “The Crisis of the House Never United—A Novel of Early America.”
A shocking video captured a mob of California youth breaking into a gas station convenience store and then stealing what police say was thousands of dollars of products.
The incident happened early Sunday morning in Compton, California, after a large group of people blocked an intersection as part of a street takeover, with video footage capturing cars drifting in circles and screeching around 2:30 a.m., according to KLTA.
“It’s unbelievable. Unreal. I’ve never seen anything like that happen here,” Greg Johnson, a Compton resident and customer of the Arco Station that was looted, told ABC7 in reaction to the ransacking.
Staff at the Arco said that a clerk there hid in its bathroom while the looting was ongoing.
Unidentified people are seen early Sunday, April 16 breaking into an Arco gas station convenience store in Compton, California. (AIO FILMZ)
Video taken of the incident shows unidentified individuals first crowding around the entrance of the convenience store at the Arco Gas Station and kicking down its glass door to gain entry.
Once inside, people could be seen swiping items from the stores’ shelves, with one smiling individual taking packages of condoms and cigarettes.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said thousands of dollars of products ultimately were stolen and that the store suffered serious damage, ABC7 reported
Deputies at its Compton station were responding to incidents throughout the night, but police said since they are “currently limited with their staffed personnel,” they “couldn’t intervene with the giant takeover groups for safety concerns” and being “outnumbered,” according to the station.
No arrests have been made yet in connection to the incident.
A man is seen taking packages of condoms inside the Arco store in Compton, California, early Sunday. (AIO FILMZ)
Sgt. Clarence Williams of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told the Los Angeles Times that the street takeover near the Arco Gas Station was one of three in the area that night – but that he had never seen a flash mob bust into a store “to that level.”
By the time police arrived, the crowd had scattered, he reportedly added.
Around 100 people were involved, and the area was left covered in trash and tire marks afterward, KTLA reports.
The Arco Gas Station in Compton, California, that was targeted by the mob of youth. (Google Maps)
“It makes me angry,” Norrice Heron, whom KTLA says witnessed the events, said to the station. “It makes me angry when they do that to the streets and put everybody in danger.
An investigation into the footage showing the looting is reportedly ongoing.
Men everywhere seem to experience tension between what they themselves define as good men and the way the surrounding culture pressures them to be real men.
The report of a mass shooting in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2018 was more than a news account of a crime. It was also a story about two young men.
The killer was 28-year-old Ian David Long, a college dropout, divorced former Marine who was unemployed and living with his mother.
He knew the Borderline Bar and Grill held a weekly college night when it would be crowded with young people. He entered the bar dressed in black, a hood pulled over his head. Tossing smoke grenades into the crowd to create confusion, he drew out a pistol with a laser sight and started shooting. A sergeant from the sheriff’s office rushed over to help, but the shooter was waiting for him. After killing the sergeant and 12 other people, Long shot himself.
In the crowd that night was another young man, 20-year-old Matt Wennerstrom, who emerged as the hero of the hour. Sporting a backward baseball cap and a scruffy beard, Matt looked like a typical college student. But what he did was not at all typical.
As soon as shots began booming through the bar, he and about seven other young men grabbed as many people as they could and pushed them under a pool table for cover. Then they piled their own bodies over them to protect them from the hail of gunfire.
One woman, who was celebrating her 21st birthday at the bar that night, told reporters afterward, “There were multiple men who got on their knees and pretty much blocked all of us with their back toward the shooter, ready to take a bullet for any single one of us.”
When the shooter paused to reload, Matt and his friends threw bar stools through a back window and began shepherding people outside. Repeatedly, the young men rushed back into the bar to steer more people to safety.
How did Matt have the presence of mind to respond so quickly to danger?
When a reporter at the scene of the crime asked that question, the young man replied, “My life is taken care of. I know where I’m going if I die, so I was not worried to sacrifice.”
Two young men. One used his masculine strength to take lives. The other used his masculine strength to save lives.
‘Toxic Masculinity’
When the American Psychological Association (APA) issued its first-ever guidelines for counseling men and boys in 2018, it denounced “traditional masculinity ideology” as “psychologically harmful.” Groups like the APA have injected the phrase “toxic masculinity” into the bloodstream of America’s public discourse. The phrase has become a catchall explanation for male sexism, dominance, aggression, and violence.
Few people are claiming all masculinity is toxic. Yet the message men often hear is that there is something inherently defective in the male character. Many men today feel discouraged, devalued, and demoralized.
When I told my class at Houston Baptist University that I was writing a book on masculinity, a male student shot back, “What masculinity? It’s been beaten out of us.” When masculinity itself is portrayed as a problem, the implication is that the solution is emasculation.
“Are men being held hostage by culture war labels and stereotypes that blame them rather than help them?” asks the Christian Science Monitor. In a culture that increasingly blames men, it’s time to find ways to help them instead.
Because of testosterone, men are typically larger, stronger, and faster than women. In general, they are also more physical, more competitive, and more risk-taking. We need to affirm these God-given traits as good when used to honor and serve others.
The APA guidelines make a point of noting that most mass shooters are male, but they overlook the controlled power and aggression used by the heroic men who have stopped mass shooters.
Masculine traits are not intrinsically toxic; they are good when directed to virtuous ends. In a fallen world, the lawful application of coercive force is sometimes necessary to defend the innocent.
Yet we all know that the male strength that makes a man a protector can be distorted and turn him into a predator. The drive to achieve can become egoism and self-seeking. The leadership impulse can be twisted into an impulse for domination and control.
In “Play the Man,” Washington, D.C., pastor Mark Batterson says, “The image of God is our original software, sin is the virus.” The challenge is to sort out which definitions of manhood are part of the original software and which are the virus. Which belong to God’s original design and which are products of sin?
Masculinity: God’s Software or a Sinful Virus?
We might say there are two competing scripts for what it means to be a man. Sociologist Michael Kimmel highlighted the contrast with an ingenious experiment. He started by asking cadets at West Point what it means to be a good man. If someone delivers a eulogy and says, “He was a good man,” what does that mean?
The cadets had no trouble answering: “Honor, duty, integrity, sacrifice, do the right thing, stand up for the little guy, be a provider, be a protector.” Be responsible, be generous, and give to others.
“Where did you learn that?” Kimmel asked. The cadets answered, “It’s everywhere. It’s our culture … it’s the Judeo-Christian heritage. It’s the air we breathe.” Men seem to be innately aware of the software God has coded into the male character.
Kimmel then asked a follow-up question: “What does it mean if I tell you, ‘Man the f-ck up! Be a real man.’”
The cadets shouted, “Oh no, that’s completely different.” To be a real man means to be “tough, strong, never show weakness, win at all costs, suck it up, play through pain, be competitive, get rich, get laid.”
Kimmel has posed the same two questions to thousands of boys and young men in countries across the globe — from single-sex schools in Australia to a police academy in Sweden to former soccer stars at FIFA — and he virtually always gets the same answer.
Men everywhere seem to experience tension between what they themselves define as the goodman and the way the surrounding culture pressures them to be real men. They sense the contradiction between the software and the virus.
The Good Man vs. the ‘Real’ Man
Borrowing from Kimmel’s experiment, let’s give them labels: the Good Man versus the “Real” Man.
It’s not that every trait listed as the “Real” Man is necessarily bad. In a crisis, for example, we need men (and women) who can stand tough and not collapse in tears. But that is meant to be a short-term strategy, not a way of life.
The problem with the stereotype of the “Real” Man is that it is one-sided. When separated from a moral vision of the GoodMan, it can easily degenerate into sexism, dominance, entitlement, and contempt for those perceived as weak — traits we can all agree are toxic.
Of course, men do not respond well to being accused of being toxic — who would? A better course is to ask, “How can we support men in aspiring to live out the ideal of the Good Man?”
Because men are made in God’s image, even those who are not Christian seem to understand that their unique masculine strengths are not intended to enable them to get whatever they want but to protect those they love — to provide, sacrifice, and, if necessary, fight for them.
As a result, when Christians promote a biblical moral vision — the Good Man — they are not imposing an alien standard on men. They are encouraging them to follow their own conscience, to be uncompromising in doing what they instinctively know is right.
As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, people everywhere “show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them” (Romans 2:15).
Our goal should be to support men in living out their innate sense of the biblical software — God’s original design for manhood.
In “The War Against Boys,”feminist philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers writes, “History teaches us that masculinity without morality is lethal. But masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and constructive, and a gift to women.”
But how did there come to be two competing scripts in the first place? Over the course of Western history, society has grown more secular, and so has its concept of masculinity. As a result, men increasingly feel pressure to live by the secular script of the “Real” Man. The most important conversation is not the one between men and women but the one carried out within men’s own heads between these two competing versions of manhood. Ideally, the Good Man should also bethe “Real” Man. But in today’s secular culture, the two have become decoupled.
My goal is to ask how the two scripts were split apart. We will be effective in countering the secular script for men only if we understand where it came from and how it developed. By recognizing that there are two competing scripts, we can cut through many of today’s contentious debates over masculinity. The word “masculinity” has become a trigger word that sets people off in all directions, making it difficult even to discuss the topic objectively.
But a Christian worldview gives us the means to think critically about cultural trends. It provides a perspective that is “in the world but not of it” (John 17:14–19).
A transcendent perspective empowers us to rise above the polarization — to push back against both extremes and consider a dispassionate account of the issues facing men today.
Nancy Pearcey is a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. She has written several bestselling books, which have been translated into 19 languages. The story of Brandon is adapted from her book “Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Live and Sexuality.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and Presiden
The contrast couldn’t be clearer. A devastating train derailment and subsequent toxic fires rock a community in Ohio that President Trump carried by 29 points. Forty days later, President Joe Biden has yet to set foot in East Palestine despite numerous pleas from residents.
A few weeks after the train crash, news breaks about a well-connected bank few have ever heard of crumbling on a Friday afternoon. At a time of the day his supporters say he usually does nothing, Biden is in front of the television cameras telling the world that the U.S. government will bail out Silicon Valley Bank, which is located in a city Biden won by almost 50 points. Biden’s climate buddies and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wine companies are no doubt relieved.
For those keeping score: Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is an emergency that requires Biden to get out of bed before 9 a.m., while the people of East Palestine continue to wait for answers.
Looking at those who work with or benefit from SVB, one begins to understand Biden’s urgency. The White House may say climate is our worst existential crisis, but it looks like green dollars for leftists’ eco-friends required the quickest action.
It’s easy to wonder if President Biden’s actions are driven by the bank’s connection to climate companies. This article highlights a few, noting “Silicon Valley Bank served as a banker to dozens of climate and energy-tech companies, holding their cash on a day-to-day basis and issuing billions of dollars in loans in support of the type of large-scale, one-off projects that are essential to the sector.”
Read it again: Dozens of climate companies. Billions in loans. Holding their cash on a day-to-day basis. Now, it gets interesting.
Steyer once played a key role on a Zoom fundraiser for Biden that raised $4 million dollars. That’s a lot of money for a single conference call. Many of the donors were from Silicon Valley and have deep pockets. That’s why it should be no surprise that when it came time to find someone to oversee $369 billion in taxpayer dollars for green investments, Biden would reach back into Steyer’s world.
Another company reported to have close ties to SVB is Lowercarbon Capital. It doesn’t take long on their website to find their managing partner is a strong Biden ally. They proudly tell you the partner is not only a longtime supporter of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, but “was on their 2020 campaign’s National Finance Committee and is a member of Climate Leaders for Biden.”
Wait, there’s more. According to the reports, another major company with ties to SVB is Sunrun Solar. The company saw money from SVB going back to 2014 and arranged for a loan of more than half a billion dollars less than three months ago.
All this government cheese would be bland without a little wine. Take a moment to appreciate Newsom’s tone-deaf actions about SVB. Not long after Biden’s announcement, Newsom heaped praise on the move, and now we’re starting to see why.
Newsom is the owner of some wine companies, and you’ll be shocked to hear those companies are reportedly held by SVB. And if you can handle one more vomit-inducing dose of hypocrisy, an SVB bank president sits on the board of a charity run by Newsom’s wife.
Joe Biden’s Climate Cult: Membership has its privileges. It’s too bad the people of East Palestine couldn’t get in on the ground level.
Larry Behrens is the Communications Director for Power The Future and has appeared on Fox News, Newsmax and One America News. You can find him on Twitter at @larrybehrens or email at larry@powerthefuture.com.
When Disney began lobbying against a parental-rights bill in Florida that would prohibit public school teachers from discussing sex, sexual orientation, or so-called gender identity with prepubescent kids in kindergarten through third grade, Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed a special session of the legislature to review Disney World’s 50-year-old “independent special district” status to see if it was “appropriately serving the public interest.”
The popular bill — which Democrats and the media dishonestly renamed “Don’t Say Gay” despite the bill never mentioning the word gay or stopping anyone from saying it — passed both houses and was signed by DeSantis. Disney was handily beaten. Nevertheless, DeSantis ended up signing legislation that effectively stripped Disney of control of over 25,000 acres surrounding its theme park and created a new tax district.
Democrats like Jonathan Chait claimed the threat alone was “What Post-Trump Authoritarianism Looks Like,” and MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones noted that the threats showed the GOP had gone “full authoritarian,” and so on. By full authoritarian, he meant that the Florida legislature passed the bill and then the governor signed the bill. Disney, of course, has no constitutional or divine right to be a special tax district. But the notion of “democracy” is highly malleable these days.
It is probably unpopular to say I believe it’s a terribly short-sighted idea to normalize state retribution against speech. Disney should be able to stake any political position it wants without worrying about repercussions from the government — in the same way that Jack Phillips or Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A shouldn’t have to worry about the government punishing them for their beliefs. If Disney’s position is that state-run schools should teach kindergarteners about oral sex and celebrate gender dysphoria despite the wishes of parents, it would almost surely pay a steep economic price.
It is also true, however, that one can understand why DeSantis’ move is popular with conservatives. The entire feigned anger over the incident from leftists is laughable and transparently insincere. Contemporary Democrats have never been reluctant to punish and single out corporations that do not share their political values. Virtually the entire technocratic economic agenda of the contemporary left exists to subsidize industries that produce things they like, mandate consumers buy those things, and punish those who do not. Democrats have never been reluctant to target disfavored companies over their profit margins, to use corporations to compel vaccinations and unions, or to threaten Big Tech companies into accepting government speech codes. The committee chair in the Senate is an open Marxist. Who are they kidding?
This week we learned that Walgreens wouldn’t sell the abortifacient mifepristone in 20 red states that have laws curbing unfettered abortion. Gavin Newsom, the man who presides over a state whose economic controls are beginning to resemble an Eastern European “republic” circa 1975, promised the pharmaceutical company would face consequences and that California would no longer do any business with the chain because it “cowers to the extremists” and “puts women’s lives at risk.”
Walgreens, of course, is not standing in opposition to any California law, much less putting any women’s lives in danger. It’s not lobbying the state to overturn laws that legalize abortion into the ninth month of pregnancy nor staking a position that is at odds with most of the state’s voters — though it has every right to do all those things if it desires. Walgreens has decided not to sell abortion drugs, ones it has never sold in the past, in other states. It is not doing so for any moral reasons. It is trying to avoid legal conflict.
Many Democrats celebrated Newsom’s threat, as they’ve celebrated threats before, because they have zero qualms about compelling or hurting companies. They don’t believe it’s authoritarian. They’re just angry they no longer have a monopoly on the practice.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Los Angeles County, California confirmed it had removed 1.2 million ineligible voters from its rolls thanks to a settlement with the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch, the group announced Friday. Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in 2017 on behalf of itself and four registered voters in Los Angeles County. Election Integrity Project California, Inc., another public interest group, was also a part of the lawsuit.
Under the agreement, Los Angeles had to send 1.6 million address confirmation notices to voters listed “inactive” on its voter rolls. According to the National Voter Registration Act — which requires states to maintain accurate voter rolls — states and counties must remove from their voting rolls voters who do not respond to such mailers and do not vote in the next two federal elections.
In its most recent progress report for complying with the settlement, Los Angeles told Judicial Watch it had removed a total of 1.2 million ineligible voters from its rolls. Last year, the county revealed that 634,000 of its inactive voters hadn’t voted in the past 10 years.
Back in 2017 when Judicial Watch first filed its lawsuit, it argued Los Angeles County had more registered voters than residents eligible to register and the “highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country.” According to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission at that time, voter registration for the county was 112 percent of its adult citizen population.
“This long overdue voter roll clean-up of 1.2 million registrations in Los Angeles County is a historic victory and means California elections are less at risk for fraud,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement. “Building on this success, Judicial Watch will continue its lawsuits and activism to clean up voter rolls and to promote and protect cleaner elections.”
This isn’t the first lawsuit of its kind by Judicial Watch. New York City recently removed 441,083 ineligible voters from its voter rolls after reaching a settlement with the conservative advocacy group. North Carolina also removed more than 430,000 ineligible registrants from its rolls due to a similar lawsuit, and Kentucky agreed to do the same in response to a lawsuit.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation is another good government group that has filed lawsuits to compel states including Michigan and Pennsylvania to clean their voter rolls to guard against potential election fraud.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
A California city council member was arrested for allegedly committing election fraud.
Lodi City Council member Shakir Khan, a Democrat, was arrested on Thursday for multiple election fraud charges, including allegedly stashing 41 mail-in ballots at his home, falsifying voter registration documents, and pressuring residents to vote for him. Investigators claim, based partially on body cam footage of police interviews, that Khan registered 23 people to vote at his home address and used his phone number to register 47 people to vote.
And another Democrat,
Lodi City Council member Democrat Shakir Khan arrested on voter fraud charges related to 2020 Crime of the Century – stash of ballots found at his residence with fake voter registrations. pic.twitter.com/xWeWpUJy2K
These charges stem from the 2020 election, when Khan was elected to the District 4 seat for the Lodi City Council.
Khan also faces charges in a separate criminal case with his brother that include illegal gambling, money laundering, tax evasion, and unemployment fraud. He’s due in court for another arraignment on that case on Feb. 21. Related to the election fraud charges, Khan was released from jail on Friday but must wear a tracking device and stay within California.
Local news reports it’s unclear whether Khan has resigned from the city council over the allegations. Still, the charges he faces related to election fraud are serious. That investigators allegedly found 41 sealed and completed mail-in ballots when searching Khan’s home proves how easy it is for nefarious actors to fix elections when unsupervised mail-in balloting is legal.
As previously reported, mail-in ballots pose a huge risk for election fraud. According to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission, 28.3 million mail-in ballots are still missing across the country from elections conducted between 2012 and 2018. Because there is no way to track these ballots, there is no way of knowing whether they were used fraudulently.
Third-party partisan organizers can also take advantage of such a lax system by harvesting ballots (coaxing voters to fill out ballots on behalf of Democratic candidates, taking their ballots, and dropping them off at election offices), and they do. In fact, Khan allegedly engaged in ballot harvesting by pressuring District 4 residents to vote for him and filling out their ballots.
Requiring all voters who are able to cast their ballots in person would remedy many of the security weaknesses of mail-in balloting. If that were law in Khan’s case, he wouldn’t have been allegedly able to fill out 41 fraudulent mail-in ballots using fake names and addresses and deliver them to be counted. There would have to be actual people showing up at the polls, identifying themselves, and filling out each of their ballots.
Despite the obvious liabilities of switching to all-mail elections, California just became the eighth state to approve all-mail voting for its elections moving forward. As a result of such a disastrous change, expect more cases like Khan’s to spring up.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the attorneys general from 17 additional states should all be disbarred, according to the reasoning of the disciplinary complaint the State Bar of California filed Thursday against former Trump campaign attorney John Eastman. That detail is one of many buried in the 35-page, 11-count disciplinary complaint made public yesterday in the latest lawfare attack on attorneys who deigned to represent Donald Trump.
State Bar of California’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona announced on Thursday the filing of disciplinary charges against Eastman, allegedly arising from Eastman’s engagement “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.” The press release announcing the disciplinary charges further claimed that Eastman “made false and misleading statements regarding purported election fraud,” that provoked a crowd into assaulting and breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The 11 charges against Eastman prove troubling throughout, with the State Bar of California proposing to discipline Eastman for presenting legal analyses to his client, Trump, and for speaking publicly on his views about the election, with the bar even attempting to hold Eastman responsible any violence that occurred on Jan. 6. The disciplinary complaint also misrepresents numerous arguments Eastman and others made concerning the 2020 election, falsely equating claims of violations of election law with fraud.
But it is count two of the disciplinary complaint, charging Eastman with “seeking to mislead a court,” that exposes the California State Bar as a kangaroo court.
“On or about December 7, 2020, the State of Texas filed a Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint in the United States Supreme Court, initiating the lawsuit Texas v. Pennsylvania,” begins count two of the complaint against Eastman. The complaint then explains that in that lawsuit, Texas argued the defendant states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin “usurp[ed] their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their States’ election statutes.” As a remedy, Texas sought an order from the Supreme Court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the Defendant States’ legislatures and remand to the Defendant States’ respective legislatures to appoint Presidential Electors in a manner consistent with the Electors Clause.”
Eastman, on behalf of then-President Trump, sought to intervene in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case, and in that motion, Eastman “expressly adopted the allegations contained in the Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint filed by Texas.” In adopting the allegations Texas made, Eastman, according to the California State Bar, “misl[ed] the Supreme Court by an artifice or false statement of fact or law,” in violation of California’s “Business and Professions Code” that governs attorneys’ conduct in the Golden State.
Under the California State Bar’s reasoning, then, Texas’ attorney general who filed the motion likewise “misled” the U.S. Supreme Court, as did the attorneys general of the 17 other states that supported Texas’ motion for leave to file a bill of complaint. So too would have Sen. Ted Cruz, had the Supreme Court agreed to hear the motion, as he had agreed to argue the case on Trump’s behalf in that circumstance.
While count two represents but one of the 11 distinct charges levied against Eastman, it most clearly exposes the logical conclusion reached when state bars use disciplinary proceedings to conduct lawfare against political opponents.
To date, the bars have limited themselves to targeting just a few attorneys working for Trump, with the D.C. Bar pursuing Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Clark, in addition to the California State Bar’s attack on Eastman. But there is no limiting principle to prevent the bars in other states from pursuing any politician with a law license who happens to represent the wrong person.
That is an extremely dangerous precedent, which is why tomorrow at a press conference called by Eastman’s legal team, some big legal names will condemn the move. The hastily called conference is expected to bring together former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III and John Yoo, a current professor of law at the University of California-Berkley, former general counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and former deputy assistant attorney general. Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and former California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, among others, are also expected at the conference.
Whether the legacy media will cover Eastman’s detailed response to the State Bar of California’s disciplinary complaint or bother to report on his press conference remains to be seen. But if Cruz and the attorneys general impugned by the California State Bar speak out, the corrupt press may not have any choice but to report on the ridiculous theories underlying the disciplinary attacks on Eastman.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The first question any reasonable person asks after a horrible crime is, “What could have been done to stop it?” Yet after every mass shooting, gun controllers suggest unworkable, unconstitutional, completely ineffectual ideas that target people who will never commit a crime.
After the twin mass shootings in California last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom (flanked by armed guards) told CBS News that it was long past time to institute more gun-control laws because the Second Amendment is “becoming a suicide pact.” What he didn’t mention was that California has no functioning Second Amendment. It has passed not only every law Senate Democrats are proposing in Washington, but a slew of others. Anti-gun group Giffords gives California an “A” rating, noting that the state has the “strongest gun safety laws in the nation and has been a trailblazer for gun safety reform for the past 30 years.”
California already has “universal” background checks. California has a 10-day waiting period limit for handgun purchases, a microstamping system, a personal safety test, the ability to sue gun manufacturers even if they haven’t broken any law, an age hike on the purchase of certain firearms including rifles from 18 to 21, “red flag” laws that allow police to confiscate guns without genuine due process, a ban on magazines that hold more than 10 rounds (and legislation held up in courts to confiscate those magazines), among many other restrictions. Short of letting cops smash down the doors of gun owners and take their weapons, California has a law for it. And all it’s done is leave people attending dance halls defenseless.
The day of the Monterey Park shooting, President Biden again called on Congress to pass a federal “assault weapons” ban. So-called assault weapons have been banned in California since 1989. Last year, the state passed another bill making them super-duper illegal: SB 1327. From 1989 until today, gun trends in California mirror those of the nation at large. Which is unsurprising. The Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, despite Biden constantly claiming otherwise, did nothing to alter gun violence trends. Homicide rates began to ebb nationally before the ban was instituted. When the ban expired in 2004, and the AR-15 became the most popular rifle in the country, gun violence continued to precipitously fall — by 2014, gun homicides were the same as they were in 1963 — until the appearance of Covid.
Now, America’s gun death rates have reached a 28-year high as of 2021 “after sharp increases in homicides of Black men and suicides among white men, an analysis of federal data showed,” according to The Wall Street Journal. There are likely numerous societal reasons for this change — since about 45 percent of American households had guns 10 years ago and the number is the same today — but Democrats are busy worrying about stopping gun owners from having barrel shrouds.
Not that it matters to Democrats, but the shooter at Monterey Park didn’t use an assault weapon. He used a Cobray M11 9mm semi-automatic gun — “one of the most useless handguns in existence” — which some reporters referred to as an “assault pistol.” It’s a scary looking, if antiquated gun (out of production since 1990) that, in this iteration, fires one cartridge with a single trigger squeeze like almost every other gun owned by civilians — including AR-15s. The gun was already illegal in California. As is carrying any gun into a no-gun zone. As is murder.
After the killers of Monterey Park (72 years old) and Half Moon Bay (67) struck, Biden, naturally, called on Congress to pass legislation to raise the minimum purchase age for “assault weapons” to 21. Many mass shooters are young men, but the average age of mass shooters is 35. The number of ARs used in the commission of murder in the hands of a person under 21 is a fraction of 1 percent. Like all things Democrats are pushing these days, it’s another incremental way of eliminating gun ownership that has only a tenuous connection to the events that supposedly precipitated the action.
All mass shooters obtain guns illegally, or legally before having any criminal record (or because of a mistake by the police, as was the case in Charleston and elsewhere). Most incidents are perpetrated by young men who have exhibited serious anti-social behavior. In many, if not most, cases, the shooter is already on the cops’ radar because he has threatened others, as was the case from the Parkland shooter to the Highlands Park shooter to the Half Moon shooter and many, many others. In a study of mass shootings from 2008 to 2017, the Secret Service found that “100 percent of perpetrators showed concerning behaviors, and in 77 percent of shootings, at least one person — most often a peer — knew about their plan.” The best thing we can do is uphold laws that already exist.
None of this is to argue that simply because some people ignore laws, they are unnecessary or useless. It’s to argue that laws which
almost exclusively target innocent people from practicing a constitutional right, and do nothing to stop criminals, are unnecessary and useless. The central problem in this debate is that Democrats believe civilian gun ownership itself is a plague on the nation, so it doesn’t really matter to them what gun is being banned or what law is being passed, as long as something is being “done.” Only this past summer, Congress supposedly passed the most vital gun bill in history, yet Democrats are back to acting like nothing has been done.
The other side believes that being able to protect themselves, their families, their property, and their community from criminality — and, should it descend into tyranny, the government — is a societal good. They see gun bans as autocratic and unconstitutional, and, also, largely unfeasible. And they’re right.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
The 2022 midterms were the first major elections to occur in California after the Golden State approved all-mail voting in September 2021. Under the new system, all registered voters in the state are automatically mailed a ballot for each election cycle (Californians can still opt to vote in person if they wish). But during California’s first foray into mass mail-in balloting for the 2022 midterms, 226,250 mail ballots were rejected and more than 10 million remain unaccounted for, according to a new report by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Per the report, the most common reason for rejection of mail ballots in the 2022 cycle was late arrival (48 percent of rejects). Under California law, mail ballots must be postmarked no later than Election Day and arrive at the tabulation center within seven days. For the state’s 2022 general elections, more than 57,000 ballots arrived after Nov. 15 (the seven-day mark). Largely as a result of the switch to mail-in balloting, more than 57,000 Californians were disenfranchised. Such voter disenfranchisement is sure to continue as long as the state keeps its vote-by-mail system.
“Mail ballots disenfranchise,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “There are many reasons mail ballots fail ultimately to count. No one casting a ballot at home can correct an error before it’s too late. California’s vote-by-mail demonstration should serve as a warning to state legislators elsewhere.”
Another concerning figure coming from California’s midterm election cycle is that 10 million ballots still remain unaccounted for, after processing all polling place votes and rejected ballots. The assumption by election officials is that the majority of these ballots were ignored or thrown out by recipients. But such an information gap increases the risk of fraud. As the report notes, “The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.”
Unaccounted mail-in ballots are a serious liability for states with all-mail voting. According to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission, 28.3 million mail-in ballots are still missing from elections conducted between 2012 and 2018. While there is no way of knowing whether these missing mail-in ballots were used fraudulently, they still pose a risk to election integrity.
Take ballot harvesting — the practice of third-party organizers collecting ballots from voters and returning them to election offices — for example. States that approve all-mail voting greatly incentivize ballot harvesting, since Democrat doorknockers can coax potential voters to fill out their ballots and hand them over to their newfound Democrat friends on the spot, rather than having to convince voters to do the legwork themselves. Partisan activists may take advantage of such a lax system. And they already do.
All-mail voting also creates more opportunities for chaos, which in turn undermines voters’ confidence. Under a traditional system where voters cast ballots in person, poll workers must account for all election materials and have a log of the number of ballots cast. When problems occur, such as ballots disappearing, the issue is resolved quickly due to the data trail. Not so with all-mail elections.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple states switched to mail-in balloting under the guise of protecting public health. These voting systems were put in place with hardly any safeguards or scrutiny of the risks posed by all-mail elections. Currently, there are eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington — that primarily conduct their elections by mail.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
TSA Officer watches people go through the security checkpoint at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on November 24, 2021 in Arlington, Virginia. FAA expects the number of travelers for Thanksgiving to reach pre-pandemic levels, with more than 53 million people traveling around the holiday. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Parents are advised to be extra vigilant this year in checking what their children bring home on Halloween after agents in Los Angeles seized around 12,000 fentanyl pills packaged in several bags of candy, the latest incident of the deadly drug being disguised as something innocuous.
According to a statement from Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a suspect carrying packages of fentanyl pills attempted to go through a TSA screening at Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday, trying sneak past screening and board a plane. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Narcotics Bureau Detectives and Drug Enforcement Agency agents assigned to the airport discovered the pills inside boxes of Sweetarts, Skittles and Whoppers. The person carrying the drugs fled before he or she could be detained, but the suspect’s identity is known. An investigation into the matter is ongoing.
“With Halloween approaching, parents need to make sure they are checking their kids candy and not allowing them to eat anything until it has been inspected by them,” officials with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department warned in the statement.
“If you find anything in candy boxes that you believe might be narcotics, do not touch it and immediately notify your local law enforcement agency.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported over 71,000 overdose deaths from synthetic fentanyl in 2021, up from 57,000 deaths in 2020.
Last month, New York authorities arrested a New Jersey woman after discovering she had 15,000 rainbow-colored fentanyl pills inside a lego box. The DEA reported the incident was the largest fentanyl seizure in New York City history. The 48-year-old suspect, Latesha Bush, was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on Sept. 30. A criminal complaint filed by the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor (SNP) against Bush charged her with one count of first-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance and one count of third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance.
New York authorities investigating suspected narcotics trafficking stopped Bush’s vehicle and found the two black tote bags and a Lego package containing fentanyl pills in the car. The pills were imprinted with “M” and “30” to resemble Oxycodone pills.
“Disguising fentanyl as candy — and concealing it in children’s toys — will never hide the fact that fentanyl is a deadly poison that harms our communities, our families, and our city,” Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell said in a statement.
Investigators claim Bush traveled from New Jersey to Manhattan in a rental car, and the pills she was carrying originated from Mexico. Investigators said disguising fentanyl as candy or other prescription drugs is a tactic used by the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel, two Mexican drug cartels.
Earlier this month, the DEA announced the results of its One Pill Can Kill initiative, which led to the seizure of more than 10.2 million fentanyl pills and approximately 980 pounds of fentanyl powder from May 23 through Sept. 8. Out of the 390 cases investigated, 51 were linked to overdose poisonings, and 35 were connected to one or both of the Mexican cartels.
In a national survey of 1,000 likely U.S. voters conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC for Rasmussen Reports, 91% of participants said they believe the country’s fentanyl issue is serious, with 73% describing it as a “very serious problem.”
The survey was conducted from Sept. 26 to Sept. 27 by phone, with a margin sampling of error of is +/- 3 percentage points and a 95% confidence level.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a bill signing ceremony at Nido’s Backyard Mexican Restaurant on Feb. 9, 2022 in San Francisco, California. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law that critics say would effectively make California a sanctuary state for trans-identified minors seeking life-altering surgeries and hormones. A prominent legal group contends the new law creates serious parental rights concerns.
Newsom signed into law SB 107 Thursday, which contains several provisions related to “gender-affirming healthcare.” The measure passed the California State Assembly in a 60-19 vote on Aug. 29, followed by a 30-9 vote in the California Senate on Aug. 31. In both cases, the vote fell along party lines, with all support coming from Democrats and all opposition coming from Republicans.
The legislation amends the Sunshine State’s family code to grant a state court “temporary emergency jurisdiction” if a child “is subjected to, or threatened with, mistreatment or abuse, or because the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care.”
Opponents of the law, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, believe the language opens the door for a state court to take a child away from a parent or guardian who refuses to allow their trans-identified children to undergo puberty suppression, cross-sex hormone regimens or body-mutilating gender transition surgeries. The law’s proponents contend that the new law doesn’t give the state courts any additional authority than they already have.
The bill also bars healthcare providers, insurers and contractors from “releasing medical information related to a person or entity allowing a child to receive gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care” when requested by other state law enforcement agencies bringing criminal action against “a person or entity that allows a child to receive gender-affirming health care.”
Additionally, the measure prohibits healthcare providers from releasing medical information if “the information is being requested pursuant to another state’s law that authorizes a person to bring a civil action against a person or entity who allows a child to receive gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a national legal nonprofit that has won cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, is one of several organizations that have expressed concerns about the implications of the new law.
In an Aug. 2 letter to the California Assembly Committee on Appropriations, ADF Senior Counsel Matt Sharp warned that “SB 107 violates parental rights protected by the U.S. Constitution by giving California courts the ability to strip parents who reside in another state of their parental rights if their child travels to California to obtain gender transition procedures.”
“This bill would lead to significant harm to families throughout the country,” Sharp predicted.
Sharp outlined several scenarios that, he believes, could result following the legislation’s passage, such as “an unfit parent about to lose custody could travel to California with the child, give the child puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, and in doing so win custody under SB 107, even if the home-state court has already entered judgment on the case.”
In addition, Sharp claims that “parents whose child visits a relative in California could lose custody of their child forever if the relative persuades the child to identify as a different gender during the visit.”
Another potential consequence of the bill, Sharp claims, involves the deprivation of jurisdiction from courts in other states if “the case involved gender identity and the child travels to California, even if all of the evidence and parties involved in the case are located in the home state.”
“Parents of children who never travel to California could be denied medical information about their child if the child obtains puberty blockers from a doctor in California via telemedicine,” Sharp added, calling the bill California’s attempt to “undermine parental rights [and] pit children against their parents.”
A spokesperson for Sen. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the bill, told Reuters that the legislation “doesn’t give courts (new) authority to take custody from parents of minors seeking gender-affirming care.”
“All the bill does is provide guidance to courts about hearing cases where they already are allowed to do so under California law,” the spokesperson said.
However, the bill does give jurisdiction to state courts for children who travel to California for “gender-affirming healthcare” they can’t receive elsewhere under a category of “emergencies” because the child has been “unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care.”
“State courts around the country have the authority to consider whether to retain jurisdiction over a custody matter involving a child who recently came into the state,” Asaf Orr, an attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told Reuters.
“This typically occurs in instances of domestic violence or other crisis situations. This law simply clarifies that courts should retain jurisdiction in situations where a parent brings their child to California so that they can obtain medical treatment for gender dysphoria from a state that has banned or restricted access to that care.”
Emilie Kao, the senior counsel and vice president of advocacy strategy at Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement that the new law is an “astonishing disregard for the Constitution and the laws of other states.”
“California will now be able to take away custody of children from their own parents — no matter what state they’re from — and deny families the right to access their child’s medical information,” she said.
“Parents have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing and care of their children, which includes making the best decisions regarding their children’s mental, emotional, and physical health.”
Kao warned the new law is the “latest in an onslaught of attacks against parental rights and a demonstration of just how far some governments are willing to go to replace parents as the ultimate decision makers of what’s best for children.”
Other states have passed laws prohibiting children from receiving gender transition surgeries, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas have implemented laws banning children from obtaining such procedures. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton have classified them as a form of child abuse.
The American College of Pediatricians has maintained that “there is not a single long-term study to demonstrate the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for transgender-believing youth.”
The group, which describes itself as a “national organization of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children,” lists “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility” as possible side effects of puberty blockers.
ACP reports that the use of cross-sex hormones is accompanied by “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers.”
Parental rights have developed into a major hot-button issue in American politics.
Some school districts in the U.S., including Leon County Public Schools in Florida and Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, have been sued for policies requiring teachers to affirm trans-identified children’s preferred gender identities without their parental consent. A bill signed into law by Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year instructs school districts not to enact policies that keep parents in the dark about any changes to their children’s mental health.
Florida forbids the adoption of “procedures or student support forms that prohibit school district personnel from notifying a parent about his or her student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being” that “encourage or have the effect of encouraging a student to withhold from a parent such information.”
California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law Thursday night to strip rights away from parents who protest their children’s blind pursuit of destructive surgeries sold to confused minors as “gender affirmation.”
Under Senate Bill 107 introduced by San Francisco-area State Sen. Scott Wiener, California will now become a “refuge” for trans-identifying minors who seek irreversible medical treatment for gender dysphoria. The legislation was supposedly aimed at blocking red states from enforcing laws barring extreme treatments for underage victims, and instead invited those minors to seek surgeries in California.
“In California we believe in equality and acceptance. We believe that no one should be prosecuted or persecuted for getting the care they need — including gender-affirming care,” Newsom said upon signing the bill into law. “Parents know what’s best for their kids, and they should be able to make decisions around the health of their children without fear. We must take a stand for parental choice.”
Except the bill undermines parental choice by empowering the state to strip custody from those who refuse to support their children’s demand for “gender-affirming care,” a euphemism used to describe something that is neither gender-affirming nor caring. Such procedures could range from puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to surgeries leaving a child’s genitals permanently altered. The bill extends California’s reach beyond its borders, enabling minors in other states to pursue treatment on the West Coast away from parental oversight.
Jay Richards, a policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, and Emilie Kao, a vice president and senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, broke down the components of the law in Newsweek.
“California courts will have the power to strip custody from parents, wherever they live, who doubt the wisdom of these experimental and irreversible procedures — if their child so much as steps foot in California,” the pair explained. “It would also allow California doctors to treat minors still in other states. With the advent of telehealth, a child could get a prescription for hormones from a California doctor while at home in Arkansas or in Florida.”
Both states have instituted protections to restrict cross-sex hormones from ending up in the hands of gender-confused minors.
Under California’s new law, parents might not even know whether their children are pursuing these dangerous drugs and procedures. Senate Bill 107 mandates that doctors hide children’s medical information from parents if related to “gender identity,” even if requested by subpoena.
Last week, a coalition of organizations representing parents both in and out of state condemned the law’s reach with a letter to the governor.
“[Senate Bill] 107 makes California akin to the Pied Piper, enticing minor children nationwide to leave their families and run away in pursuit of harmful drugs and sterilizing surgeries, all of which cause irreversible harm to the minds, bodies, and family relationships of America’s precious children,” they wrote. “Children experiencing gender confusion need the love, support, and guidance of their parents. They do not need to be taken from their parents and rushed down a pathway which leads to a lifetime of medicalization and sterilization.”
This summer, researchers at the Heritage Foundation found that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.” The findings contradict a key argument among proponents of aggressive “gender affirmation” who claim minors denied permanently life-altering procedures are more likely to kill themselves.
“There is a 14% increase in suicide rates among young people by 2020 in states that have a provision allowing minors to access care without parental consent relative to states that do not,” explained Heritage Senior Research Fellow Jay Greene. “Easier access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors actually exacerbated suicide rates.”
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.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Wife fatally shoots intoxicated man who was fighting her husband outside couple’s front door and trying to force his way into home. She got gun the day before.
A California woman fatally shot an intoxicated man who was fighting her husband outside the couple’s front door and trying to force his way into their home over the weekend, the Stanislaus County sheriff’s office said. Authorities said it appears 22-year-old Angelo Santana became heavily intoxicated Saturday and tried to force entry into a home in the 500 block of Ashwood Lane in Patterson, which is about a half-hour southwest of Modesto. The house belongs to 50-year-old woman and her 45-year-old husband, the sheriff’s office said. The husband tried to physically restrain Santana, and the two men got into a “significant fight near the threshold of the front-door,” authorities said, citing a review of external and internal video surveillance footage and statements from witnesses.
The wife got a revolver from the upstairs bedroom and “fired all rounds” into Santana, authorities said, adding that she had acquired the revolver only the day before.
“The fight with the homeowner was a pretty violent one,” sheriff’s Sgt. Luke Schwartz told the Modesto Bee via text. “Can only imagine how terrifying it must’ve been for these folks.”
Patrol deputies were dispatched to the home around 10:20 p.m. after a report of shots fired, authorities said, adding that the reporting party got a phone call from a female, Mandarin-speaking neighbor saying she had just shot and killed an intruder.
Law enforcement arrived at the home and found an unresponsive, deceased adult male near the entryway, authorities said.
The husband suffered minimal physical injuries, including scrapes and scratches, during his fight with Santana “trying to defend his home,” the sheriff’s office said.
Investigators have made no arrests, authorities said, adding that preliminary findings indicate the incident was “strictly self-defense” and that the homeowners are fully cooperating with detectives.
Santana had a “history of alcohol substance abuse, wherein he would regularly show-up unannounced trying to find friends and acquaintances of his in the same neighborhood,” authorities said, citing interviews with those familiar with Santana. Authorities also said Santana was not armed at the time of the shooting.
There were no children in the house, Schwartz also told the Bee, which reported that there’s no indication the couple had any previous contact with Santana.
Police in Patterson investigate deadly self-defense shooting youtu.be
A judge has temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that a Christian medical organization claims would force its members to participate in the process of assisted suicide despite its moral objections. U.S. District Judge Fernando Aenlle-Rocha granted a preliminary injunction last Friday halting enforcement of a provision of the state’s Health & Safety Code.
The 19,000-member Christian Medical & Dental Associations and Dr. Leslee Cochrane sued California over a bill that they say removed conscience protections for medical professionals morally opposed to any form of participation with assisted suicide. While Aenlle-Rocha disputed the plaintiffs’ religious discrimination claims, he believes “they are likely to succeed on their Free Speech claim.”
“The ultimate outcome of this requirement is that non-participating providers are compelled to participate in the Act through this documentation requirement, despite their objections to assisted suicide,” wrote Aenlle-Rocha, an appointee of former President Donald Trump.
The judge’s order blocks the state from enforcing the provision requiring a healthcare provider unwilling or unable to participate to “document the individual’s date of request and provider’s notice to the individual of their objection in the medical record.”
While the provision in question still allows doctors not to perform physician-assisted suicide, the policy requires doctors to document the date of the patient’s request for lethal drugs in the patient’s medical record and “transfer the records of that first oral request to a second physician upon the patient’s request.” Plaintiffs argued that the provision requires objecting healthcare professionals “to discuss, refer for, or otherwise participate in assisted suicide.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit religious freedom advocacy organization representing the plaintiffs, celebrated the temporary block in a statement Tuesday.
“Our clients seek to live out their faith in their medical practice, and that includes valuing every human life entrusted to their care. Participating in physician-assisted suicide very clearly would violate their consciences,” said ADF Senior Counsel Kevin Theriot.
“We’re pleased the court followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in NIFLA v. Becerra that clarified First Amendment protections extend to religious medical professionals.”
In 2015, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed the End of Life Option Act, which took effect in 2016 and made California the fifth state to allow residents to end their lives with doctor-prescribed drugs. Last October, California passed Senate Bill 380, which opponents said reduced the level of conscience protections for medical professionals opposed to physician-assisted suicide. In February, CMDA and Cochrane sued California on grounds the new law forces a physician with a patient who requests an assisted suicide to “document the request in that patient’s medical record, even if the physician objects to participating in assisted suicide in any way.”
“In sum, the original End of Life Options Act provided broad protection for conscientiously objecting physicians, but SB 380 eliminates or limits that protection,” read the suit.
“Plaintiffs desire not to participate in assisted suicide in any way, but they fear penalization under SB 380 and action against their medical licenses if they do not.”
California’s historic heat wave pushed temperatures to all-time record highs across the state Tuesday, including in San Jose (109 degrees) and Sacramento (116 degrees), according to the Weather Channel.
A temperature readout at an El Dorado Savings Bank in Sacramento, California, on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022.Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The mercury wasn’t nearly as high in Los Angeles on Tuesday (93 degrees) after topping out at 101 degrees Sunday. But according to Marc Brown — anchor for WABC-TV news in Los Angeles — the power still went out at the station Tuesday night:
The loss of power likely didn’t come as a big surprise. Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom asked state residents to curtail electricity usage Tuesday to ease the strain on power grids:
This heat wave is set to be the hottest & longest on record in CA for September.⁰ We are now heading into the worst part of it – the risk of outages is real. Your efforts have paid off so far, but we need everyone to double down to save energy after 4pm. https://t.co/XKRYd9EPQIpic.twitter.com/HtVh5DAjQD
— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) September 6, 2022
Newsom’s video appeal was met with a fair amount of mockery, particularly from commenters who didn’t believe the governor was suffering much under the heat compared to others. In the same way, Brown’s tweet about the power going out at KABC-TV attracted some sarcasm — but the comment that got the most attention came from the Oil & Gas Workers Association:
Get somebody to bring you 5 gallons of wind turbine.
“That had to be the best reply,” another commenter said. “The media is just as complicit in this disaster perpetuated by the alleged administration[s] in Washington and Sacramento. I wonder if ABC’s backup generators are run on windmills and solar panels?”
“Basic incompetence,” another user wrote. “California has all the resources it needs, they just have to execute smarter. Have [U.S. Rep.] Eric Swalwell [D-Calif.] head over [to] the wind turbine farm, lay down one of his notorious potent vigorous farts, and get those turbines spinning. Problem solved, you’re welcome.”
“This may be my favorite tweet in the history of Twitter,” another commenter announced.
“This is my favorite response. Ever,” another user said.
“I think I just fell a little in love with you!!!” another commenter confessed.
Talk about irony: A governor who violated his own Covid lockdown rules by attending a party at a chichi restaurant could sign legislation that puts many fast-food establishments out of business.
Late in August, the California legislature passed a bill that would impose new mandates on certain dining establishments. Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-French Laundry, has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the bill. If it becomes law, the measure would set an example that unions hope to export elsewhere, while raising inflation in the nation’s most populous state. Here’s how.
Separate Minimum Wage
The bill would create a council to mandate a separate minimum wage applying only to certain fast-food establishments. According to the bill, the council could impose a minimum wage for these establishments next year of as high as $22 per hour—an amount nearly 42 percent higher than the statewide minimum wage of $15.50 that takes effect on Jan. 1, and an amount subject to additional annual increases. Creating a higher minimum wage would raise business costs, and help push prices ever higher. As it is, families have struggled to keep up with the current high rate of inflation, with real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) average hourly earnings falling in most months over the past year. Hitting these families with even higher costs for a meal at a fast-food establishment—sometimes the only “luxury” working-class households can afford—would provide ordinary California residents another proverbial kick in the teeth.
The new council of 10 appointed individuals will “establish sector-wide minimum standards on wages, working hours, and other working conditions adequate to ensure and maintain the health, safety, and welfare of, and to supply the necessary cost of proper living to, fast food restaurant workers.” (The bill doesn’t specify whether the “cost of proper living” includes dinners at restaurants like the one Newsom decided to frequent in the fall of 2020.)
To put it more bluntly: A group of unelected bureaucrats will decide how to micro-manage hundreds of businesses across the Golden State. These mandates will of course raise costs for the restaurants, and the restaurants will have no choice but to raise prices in response.
Inefficient, Absurd Loopholes
The requirements in the bill only apply to chain restaurants with at least 100 establishments nationwide, and which serve food in the following manner:
(1) For immediate consumption either on or off the premises.
(2) To customers who order or select items and pay before eating.
(3) With items prepared in advance, including items that may be prepared in bulk and kept hot, or with items prepared or heated quickly.
(4) With limited or no table service. Table service does not include orders placed by a customer on an electronic device.
One could easily envision businesses changing their model to avoid becoming ensnared by the bill’s mandates. For instance, a restaurant could operate like Katz’s Delicatessen in New York City, where customers receive tickets upon entering and pay after eating, on their way out the door. Such a system would mean that restaurants would not meet the “pay before eating” definition contained within the statute, but it also could raise the risk of “dine-and-dash” incidents, which would raise a restaurant’s costs.
Similarly, establishments could try to exempt themselves from the reach of the new council by providing full table service. Of course, providing full table service would raise businesses’ costs (although perhaps not as much as complying with the mandates created by the new regulatory regime), exhaust employees by forcing them to wait on customer tables in addition to their existing duties, or both.
The idea that California could potentially do for fast-food restaurants what a full-service-only requirement has done to New Jersey’s gas stations—whereby McDonald’s and Burger King employees in California could only ask “Would you like fries with that?” while customers are reclined at table—illustrates the absurdity of this bill. Newsom should do his state a favor and veto the measure, sending this ill-tasting legislative creation back to the cooks in the legislature who created this mess.
Chris Jacobs is founder and CEO of Juniper Research Group, and author of the book, “The Case Against Single Payer.” He is on Twitter: @chrisjacobsHC. Previously he was a senior health policy analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a senior policy analyst in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, and a senior policy analyst with the Joint Economic Committee’s Senate Republican staff. During the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, Jacobs was a policy adviser for the House Republican Conference under then-Chairman Mike Pence. In the first two years of the law’s implementation, he was a health policy analyst for the Senate Republican Policy Committee. Jacobs got his start on Capitol Hill as an intern for then-Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from American University, where he is a part-time teacher of health policy. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.
On Aug. 25, the California Air Resources Board, the state’s air quality regulator, announced a ban on the sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. Less than a week later, a heat wave threatened California with seven days of power shortages. So, the state’s grid operator asked electric vehicle owners not to recharge when they come home from work. This is all a painful part of the energy transition, we are told — needed to save the planet.
In its effort to wean itself off fossil fuels, California has found a willing and enthusiastic partner in the People’s Republic of China. Most batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines that make California’s green dreams possible are made in China. California leaders — from former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, and current Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom — have traveled to China to tout their green cooperation with Red China.
The push for electric vehicles (EVs) by California and China raises an intriguing question: Are both sides really weaning themselves off fossil fuels to save the planet and reduce pollution, or might there be an entirely different intention — at least for China?
U.S. climate czar John Kerry, a former senator, former secretary of state, and the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, epitomized American elite opinion when he said on Aug. 30 that China has “generally speaking, outperformed its (climate) commitments” and that the U.S. and China can make a difference for the world by “working together.”
When policymakers and strategists erroneously ascribe to others the same motives that they have themselves, it is called the Mirror-Image Fallacy. Opponents in warfare seek to deceive — the best deception plans are those that show the enemy what the enemy wants to believe. Mirror-Image Fallacy and deception plans can work hand-in-glove.
If China was truly going all-in on EVs to reduce pollution and curb its greenhouse gas emissions, one would expect to see that in its energy consumption profile. Instead, we see something different. Yes, China has been adding wind, solar, and nuclear power, but coal use is also increasing.
From 2010 to 2020, the amount of electricity produced by coal in China rose by 57 percent to 4,775 terawatt hours. From 2010 to 2021 — the latest year available and 2020 having been depressed by the response to Covid-19 — American coal use to generate electricity declined by 52 percent to 899 terawatt hours. U.S. coal power peaked in 2007. China surpassed U.S. coal use in 2006 and never looked back. Today, China generates more than five times the electricity from coal than the U.S., with construction underway or planned in China to build the equivalent of more than the entire operating U.S. coal fleet. By this one action alone, China will wipe out all projected U.S. reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — and then some.
Last year, China consumed 54 percent of the world’s coal. This is the main reason that China emits more greenhouse gasses than all the world’s developed nations combined — which shouldn’t be a shock given that America, Western Europe, and Japan outsourced much of their manufacturing to China over the past 20 years.
Apologists for China’s one-party communist government often cite the fact that China is still a developing nation, with about 200 million Chinese living on $5.50 a day as recently as 2018. It takes energy to be prosperous and prosperous people use energy — lots of it — for cars, air conditioning, heat, air travel, and the internet. Prosperous people, and those who expect to be, don’t typically try to overthrow their governments, either. For the Chinese Communist Party, this is key.
While the Western elite vanguard of the war against climate change sees greenhouse gas emissions as the singular existential threat, the Chinese Communist Party sees greenhouse gas emissions as the necessary byproduct of wealth, power, military might — and compliant subjects.
Were China’s leaders interested in growing their economy while improving air quality and holding the line on carbon dioxide emissions, they’d turn from coal to natural gas. If China expected to be an honest participant in the post-World War II liberal order, then it would have no qualms about increasing its dependence on natural gas.
But China has scant natural gas reserves, and the nearest large exporter, Russia, has built most of its pipeline capacity to serve Europe — which it is now cutting off, showing the danger of relying on foreign suppliers. Other major exporters in the Pacific include the U.S., Australia, and Indonesia, but China’s aggressive foreign policies have alienated these nations. Qatar has significantly increased its liquified natural gas exports to China, but these shipments are vulnerable to interdiction in the event of a conflict — it’s doubtful that much in the way of Chinese imports would make it past the Straits of Malacca.
This last point leads to a final, stunning, and very troubling conclusion. For years, strategists have assumed that China would never start a conflict that would deliberately involve America as an enemy because China imports some 72 percent of its oil, with about 85 percent of that imported oil transiting the Straits of Malacca.
But what if our policy experts have gotten China’s energy strategy all wrong? What if their efforts to reduce their reliance on oil had nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with energy security — with being able to fight a war indefinitely while being blockaded?
In 2019, 45 percent of the oil used in the U.S. was refined into gasoline for cars. Another 29 percent was made into diesel and jet fuel — applications less immediately replaceable by batteries since hydrocarbon fuels have about 100 times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries — one of the reasons why long-haul trucking and commercial jets aren’t likely to be electric anytime soon.
China is well into a program to go electric with respect to passenger vehicles. In China, this practically means that EVs are mostly coal-powered. That still leaves more oil demand than China’s modest domestic oil production can handle, risking the depletion of China’s reputed billion-barrel strategic petroleum reserve in 200 days or so.
Of course, with the onset of Covid-19, China perfected complete control of its population, shutting down travel at will and confining people to their homes. But a war can’t be won on lockdown, and people get restless. Here’s where China’s hidden ace in the hole comes in: coal gasification.
With a technology that matured in the 1920s, Germany under Hitler invested heavily in coal gasification to make gasoline and other fuels — Germany has a lot of coal and very little oil. On the eve of war in 1938, Germany produced just under 10 percent of its oil needs from domestic crude while importing 60 percent from overseas and about 8 percent from overland routes within Europe. The remaining 20 percent of Germany’s need was answered by converting coal to liquid fuels. By 1943, German synthetic fuel production had more than tripled to 42 million barrels annually.
In the 1940s, German synthetic oil was up to 20 times more costly than abundant American crude oil. But wartime necessities required its production. Today, deriving synthetic fuel from coal is about half of the cost of oil at $90 a barrel — but the process to manufacture it produces about double the greenhouse gas emissions by simply refining crude oil into fuels. Simply put, it’s cost-effective but bad for the climate — and China is investing heavily in it to reduce its reliance on imported oil.
A holistic look at China’s energy sector indicates a nation concerned only with energy security and not at all concerned with climate change. That has grave consequences for America’s ability to deter China from an ambitious campaign of military aggression.
Chuck DeVore is Chief National Initiatives Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a former California legislator, special assistant for foreign affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon, and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army (retired) Reserve. He’s the author of two books, “The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America,” and “China Attacks,” a novel.
Students sit in a high school classroom. | Reuters/Stephane Mahe
A federal appellate court has ruled that a California high school must allow a club for Christian athletes requiring participants to sign a “sexual purity” statement opposing homosexuality to meet on campus as an official student group. On Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes over a dispute surrounding its efforts to regain official recognition at Pioneer High School in San Jose.
A 2-1 opinion authored by Judge Kenneth Lee contends that the San Jose Unified School District violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by revoking FCA’s status as an official student club at its high schools in 2019. While the school district cited concerns that the club’s “sexual purity” statement and “statement of faith” constituted violations of the district’s non-discrimination policy, Lee wrote that the school district approved other student clubs whose constitutions limited membership based on gender identity and ethnicity.
The judge, appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump, identified the district’s approval of the Senior Women of Leland High School — open only to girls — as an example of this phenomenon.
“Under the First Amendment, our government must be scrupulously neutral when it comes to religion: It cannot treat religious groups worse than comparable secular ones,” Lee wrote in the majority opinion. “But the School District did just that.”
The FCA’s “sexual purity” statement declares, “God desires His children to lead pure lives of holiness.” The statement also highlights the Bible’s teachings that “the appropriate place for sexual expression is in the context of the marriage relationship” and that “the biblical definition of marriage is one man and one woman in a lifelong commitment.”
“While upholding God’s standard of holiness, FCA strongly affirms God’s love and redemptive power in the individual who chooses to follow Him. FCA’s desire is to encourage individuals to trust in Jesus and turn away from any impure lifestyle,” the statement concluded.
In dissent, Obama-appointed Judge Morgan Christen contends that the FCA lacks standing to “seek prospective preliminary relief, and our court lacks jurisdiction over this preliminary injunction appeal.”
“It is uncontested that student groups like FCA must reapply each fall for official ASB recognition. It is also uncontested that only student club leaders may apply,” Christen wrote.
“Because the District’s nondiscrimination policy cannot cause a real or immediately impending injury to FCA if no students apply for ASB recognition, FCA cannot establish standing without evidence that a Pioneer FCA student has applied, or intends to apply, for ASB recognition for the upcoming school year. FCA failed to make that showing.”
FCA’s statement of faith contains similar language, asking members to affirm the beliefs that “God’s design for sexual intimacy is to be expressed only within the context of marriage,” that “God instituted marriage between one man and one woman as the foundation of the family and the basic structure of human society” and that “marriage is exclusively the union of one man and one woman.”
FCA was an official student club at three San Jose Unified School District high schools for over a decade before Pioneer High School social studies teacher Peter Glasser became aware of the FCA’s statement of faith and sexual purity statement. Glasser took issue with the club’s proclamation that “[t]he Bible is clear in teaching on sexual sin including sex outside of marriage and homosexual acts.” Glasser also opposed the statements’ insistence that “neither heterosexual sex outside of marriage nor any homosexual act constitute an alternative lifestyle acceptable to God.”
The FCA also required its officers to affirm that if they are “found being involved in a lifestyle that does not conform to FCA’s Sexual Purity Statement,” they will need to step down from their FCA leadership position.
Glasser posted the FCA statements on the whiteboard in his classroom, writing that he is “deeply saddened that a club on Pioneer’s campus asks its members to affirm these statements.”
In an email to the school’s principal, Glasser shared additional concerns about FCA’s beliefs stating that “God approves only of relationships between one man and one woman” and that “God assigns our gender identities at birth based on the physical parts He gives us.”
Glasser’s email led to a discussion among the school’s Climate Committee, a group of school leaders including principals and department heads, which culminated with the revocation of the FCA as an official school club. Glasser thought that the organization’s “views on LGBTQ+ identity infringe on the rights of others in my community to feel safe and enfranchised on their own campus, even infringing on their very rights to exist.”
The Climate Committee determined that the FCA statements violated school district policy requiring that “[a]ll district programs and activities within a school under the jurisdiction of the superintendent of the school district shall be free from discrimination, including harassment, with respect to the actual or perceived ethnic group, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, color, race, ancestry, national origin, and physical or mental disability, age or sexual orientation.”
While FCA continued to operate on campus despite lacking recognition as an official club, the organization experienced hostility from school officials, members of the school newspaper and the student community as a whole. Students from the school newspaper took “rapid-fire” photos of participants at FCA meetings and every meeting attracted protests from the student body. Teachers at the school, including Glasser, sought to “ban FCA completely from campus.”
This prompted a lawsuit seeking an injunction “requiring Defendants to restore recognition to student chapters affiliated with” the FCA and alleging violations of FCA students’ rights to free speech, expressive association and free exercise of religion under the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. After a lower court sided with the school district, the 9th Circuit granted the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction and directed the lower court to “enter an order reinstating FCA as an official student club.”
Just as the humanitarian crisis at the border is the predictable result of the left’s open-borders policies, so our crime wave is a consequence of their anti-punitive philosophy of criminal justice.
Since a spate of recent shootings, Democrats led by President Joe Biden have been busy exploiting the tragedies to call for more gun control, go after the “gun lobby” bogeyman, and yell that we must “do something!” about firearm-related crime. They’ve been clear that they aren’t interested in talking about effective solutions that don’t involve gun-grabbing, so they probably also don’t want to talk about who’s responsible for America’s unsettling crime wave: the left.
Meanwhile, as of late Tuesday night, the Associated Press projected that San Francisco voters had handily recalled left-wing District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whose soft-on-crime policies wreaked havoc on the California city.
While a prosecutor recall might seem disconnected from an uptick in mass shootings and subsequent gun-control chatter, the two are intertwined. Just as the humanitarian crisis at the border is the predictable result of the left’s open-borders policies, our crime wave is the inevitable result of their anti-punitive philosophy of criminal justice. And the biggest culprits are progressive prosecutors like Boudin who champion Democrats’ policies and have been installed across the country after being bankrolled by left-wing radicals like George Soros and other groups.
Prosecutors Who Don’t Prosecute
According to a new report out from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF), Soros alone has poured a staggering $40 million into prosecutor races to help elect 75 leftists that have contributed to the crime wave, and he’s just one of many billionaires working to destroy law and order, influence elections, control the media, and otherwise destroy the country.
The left and its skeptics continue to use guns as a scapegoat and say there’s no direct correlation between left-wing prosecutorial philosophies and crime, but the evidence suggests otherwise. According to the LELDF report, more than 40 percent of the roughly 22,500 homicides in 2021 — so more than 9,000 — happened in these 75 district attorneys’ jurisdictions, which accounted for more than one-third of last year’s violent crimes and property crime.
These DAs’ decisions produce consequences even in the areas they don’t oversee, however, since there’s nothing keeping released offenders in the prosecutors’ jurisdictions. Light sentences, low cash bail, and other slaps on the wrist send criminals right back onto their streets and those of their neighbors.
“These radical activists now preside over 72 million Americans and 40% of US homicides,” said LELDF President Jason Johnson, noting that Soros has already spent another $1 million to date this year to boost his preferred prosecutors. “Soros is using that campaign money and the hundreds of millions more for supporting organizations to quietly transform the criminal justice system for the worse, promoting dangerous policies and anti-police narratives to advance his radical agenda.”
The country saw the effects of progressive prosecutors up close over the last holiday season. The Waukesha parade murderer didn’t need a firearm. To kill six people and injure 62 more, he needed only a vehicle, a soft-on-crime district attorney’s office that let him out on a pittance of bail, and leftist policies that “guaranteed” offenders would kill people. It’s evil like that, enabled by leftist policy failures, that expose America’s crime problem as being so much bigger than a few psychopaths with guns.
Democrats’ Progressive Dream
But the rise in crime is much bigger than Soros and 75 district attorneys too. More fundamentally, it’s the predictable result of a long list of so-called leftist policy goals and beliefs that are prevalent not only among the radicals of the left, but also among the mainstream Democrat Party.
For a particularly grotesque example, look at cities in blue bastion California — particularly Boudin’s San Francisco, where the sidewalks are littered with used needles, passed-out junkies, and homeless encampments, and street sightings of human feces number in the tens of thousands each year. Facing an explosion in shoplifting, retailers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco were helpless to do anything but reduce store hours. As a Wall Street Journal article noted in October 2021, “Walgreens has closed 22 stores in [San Francisco], where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.”
That little $950 tidbit is courtesy of Democrats’ woke Proposition 47, which more than doubled the amount a person could steal before facing a felony. In other words, Prop 47 reclassified felonies as no-biggie misdemeanors. Crime in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that even Democrat Mayor London Breed was forced to admit that the left’s soft-on-crime approach has led to “all the bullsh-t that has destroyed” San Francisco.
Meanwhile, in 2021, Los Angeles experienced its highest number of homicides in 15 years, and looters ran rampant on that area’s train tracks, with some railroad companies reporting a “160% increase in criminal rail theft,” and “approximately $5 million in claims, losses and damages” to the train companies alone.
The Left’s Culture of Crime
The crime wave isn’t confined to California, though. It’s swept through Democrats’ strongholds across the rest of the country too. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd wrote in January, “New York, D.C., and Chicago all saw ‘record-high‘ murders in 2021 while Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; Louisville, Kentucky; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, ‘had their deadliest years on record.’”
And let’s not forget the scores of rioters, looters, and vandals who went unpunished after the 2020 summer of rage that resulted in billions of dollars in damages. In fact, rather than condemn them, prominent Democrats including our very own Vice President Kamala Harris helped bail out of jail those who were caught. It was Minneapolis Democrats who voted to dismantle its police department in 2020, enabling a crime wave there. And Democrat lawmakers joined the chorus of those calling to “defund the police,” only stopping when they realized that abhorrent position could hurt them politically.
It’s hard to take Democrats’ tired calls for gun control seriously anyway, given their debunked talking points and faulty logic. But it’s especially disqualifying for the left when you take into account all the lawlessness and violence they enable as hallmarks of their criminal justice platforms. If voters in far-left San Francisco can see it, it’s a safe bet the rest of the country can too. America’s culture of crime belongs to Democrats, and no amount of gun control can fix it.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
IT Support Technician Michael Hakopian (R) distributes computer devices to students at Hollywood High School on August 13, 2020, in Hollywood, California. With over 734,000 enrolled students, the Los Angeles Unified School District is the largest public school system in California and the 2nd largest public school district in the United States. | Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
A bill passed by the California state Senate lifts requirements for schools to report certain students’ behaviors to the police, an action the legislation’s sponsor says will reduce the criminalization of K-12 students, while some argue the bill could compromise students’ safety.
“Under existing California statutes, educators are mandated to report a broad range of student behavior to law enforcement, including things as minor as possession of cannabis or alcohol,” the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, said.
“Teachers and other school personnel are denied the discretion to decide how to handle various kinds of behavior based on the specifics of the particular incident. The result is unnecessary student contact with law enforcement, leaving students less likely to graduate high school and more likely to wind up in jail or prison,” he added about the bill that passed on May 26.
Bradford’s office did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.
Senate Bill 1273 eliminates a previous requirement that school administrators report drug and alcohol-related incidents, leaving the response to substances on campus up to educators. The bill also exempts students from a provision that states any person who “willfully disturbs” a public school or school meeting is guilty of a misdemeanor and is subject to a fine of up to $500. Bradford claimed that this law “led to the arrest of a student for an offense as simple as knocking on classroom doors when class is in session.”
The legislation retains a provision mandating that teachers report students to law enforcement if the pupil is in possession of a firearm, discharges a firearm in a school zone, or brings a certain type of weapon to school. Certain weapons, however, were removed from the mandatory reporting requirement, such as airsoft guns, box cutters and razor blades.
Under the bill, requirements for reporting students to law enforcement before or after an expulsion or suspension for certain incidents are also eliminated. The bill also repealed provisions detailing the school’s response to a student who behaves in a verbally or physically threatening manner. Instead, educators will now choose whether to report the student to the police.
A previous provision required any employee of a school district or county superintendent of schools attacked or threatened by a student or with knowledge of such an incident to report it to the authorities. Failure to make a report was considered an infraction punishable by a fine of up to $1,000. Any act intended to inhibit the filing of a report could result in a fine ranging from $500 to $1,000.
Bradford and the bill’s sponsors felt this provision mandated that schools report even minor behavior considered physically or verbally threatening to the police. The American Civil Liberties Union, a co-sponsor of the legislation, alleged that even “minimal” contact with law enforcement is harmful to young people, stating they are less likely to graduate school and are more likely to end up in jail or prison.
“These harms fall disproportionately on students from marginalized groups: Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students, as well as students with disabilities, are disproportionately referred to law enforcement, cited and arrested,” the ACLU wrote in a statement after the bill passed.
“As many California educators seek to support students by responding to behavioral issues with needed services, regressive ’90s era ‘tough on crime’ laws that reach beyond federal requirements remain in place that legally mandate school officials to notify law enforcement of a broad range of behaviors including possession of a controlled substance or alcohol,” the advocacy group continued.
The California State Sheriffs Association (CSSA) argued in a statement opposing the bill that removing requirements for educators to report unlawful behaviors interferes with student safety and prevents successful collaboration between schools and law enforcement.
“School officials and law enforcement should work collaboratively, especially when it comes to students whose behavior violates the law and jeopardizes school safety,” the CSSA stated. “Removing requirements that information about these incidents be shared with law enforcement runs counter to that notion and impedes law enforcement from being able to best protect our schools.”
Long the nation’s chief abortion provider, Planned Parenthood has branched out. Its latest endeavor? Sterilizing America’s youth. Planned Parenthood has quietly been in the gender transition business since at least 2017. Today, more than a third of its offices — 239 clinics in more than 40 states — provide transgender services. And it’s not stopping there.
While those seeking puberty blockers or surgical procedures are referred elsewhere, Planned Parenthood is offering access to cross-sex hormones, promoting gender ideology in sex ed programs, and establishing “well-being centers” in local high schools. The organization is looking to cash in on gender transition for years to come.
Easy Access
Just how readily does Planned Parenthood provide the gender-confused with cross-sex hormones? Consider the case of detransitioner Helena Kirschner. She received testosterone during her first visit — without blood work or a mental health referral.
Sadly, Kirschner is not the exception. Offices guarantee that patients can receive hormones without an evaluation of their mental health. They also promise that, in most cases, patients can expect same-day prescriptions.
Already thousands of kids are getting hormones like candy. Three California regional offices of Planned Parenthood recorded almost 4,000 gender-related visits from July 2019 to June 2021. In one California region, more than 750 cycles of hormones were prescribed in a year. These numbers are not representative for California; other Planned Parenthood offices in the state don’t even bother reporting these services.
Planned Parenthood offices state they only offer hormones to minors aged 16 or older with parental consent, but that is not the whole truth. In California, minors may receive “sensitive care,” like transition services, without parental permission. Given Planned Parenthood’s past deception, there’s no reason to think the organization won’t bend its own rules for profit.
And that’s just California. Thirty-three states plus D.C. have laws that, to some degree, allow minors to obtain routine health care without parental consent. In states where “gender affirming care” is deemed “medically necessary,” minors may be able to transition without parents knowing. And hormones may just be one Planned Parenthood appointment away.
All of this is deeply troubling. Despite Planned Parenthood’s deceptive marketing, transition is not proven to be the best medical practice. We know that 88 to 98 percent of gender dysphoric kids will reconcile with their biological sex if allowed to go through puberty “untreated.” Moreover, those who do transition are estimated to be 19 times more likely to commit suicide than their peers.
Comprehensive Sex-Ed
Even before Planned Parenthood helps minors transition, it teaches them to desire it. Across the country, schools hire Planned Parenthood or its affiliates to lead sex ed. And its reach is not insignificant. Nationally, 1.2 million students receive Planned Parenthood’s affiliate sex ed programming each year, according to the organization’s last annual report.
While curriculum requirements vary by state, these programs promote everything from abortion and the morning-after pill to gender fluidity and transition. By indoctrinating youth, the abortion giant creates the demand it needs to profit from gender services.
Well-Being Centers
But creating demand does not stop with sex ed. Planned Parenthood wants to cement a permanent school-to-clinic pipeline. In 2019, the abortion giant announced it would open 50 “wellbeing centers” in Los Angeles high schools. These centers will offer “health and wellness education services, sexual health services,” and more. Innocuous as these services appear, they exist to market Planned Parenthood’s services. Handpicked staff will provide transition support and chemical abortion.
Ultimately, Planned Parenthood’s rapid expansion of services should raise alarm. Planned Parenthood is no longer a danger just to the pregnant and the unborn, but to every teen as well.
Legislation Needed
Thankfully, state and federal policymakers can help protect minors from falling prey to these “services.” By enacting bills like Arkansas’ SAFE Act, states could stop Planned Parenthood and others’ efforts to mislead minors. Instead of passing bills that undermine parental rights (as California has done), states should work to ensure parental rights are upheld and respected.
In Congress, members must remain vigilant against the Equality Act, which would make the school-to-surgery pipeline a permanent fixture of American society. Lawmakers should also consider Hyde-like riders to ensure the Biden administration can’t redirect federal dollars to help Planned Parenthood sterilize our kids.
Elected officials who haven’t been bought out by woke corporations can learn from the far-left’s tone deafness. Policies that protect kids and empower parents are popular with voters, especially parents. By championing parents and children, legislators can stop bad actors like Planned Parenthood from preying on the vulnerable.
Jared Eckert is a research assistant in The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family. Emma Sofia Mull is a graduate of the think tank’s Young Leaders Program.
A pair of neighborhood dads in Los Angeles, California, have taken matters into their own hands to fight soaring crime in recent months. But now, they say they’re “tired of it” and have decided to pack their bags with their families and ditch the area. The two neighbors, identified only as Michael and Josh in recent report by local news outlet KTTV-TV, have retrieved a stolen car, fought off robbers, and tracked thieves with AirTags, all within the span of 18 months. Yet still, brazen criminals continue to stalk and harass their Playa Del Rey condo complex time and again.
“The number of instances that have happened in the year and a half that I’ve lived here has been in the half-dozen range, and I’m tired of it,” Michael told the outlet in an interview. “I’m tired of losing our property.”
The latest robbery served as the straw that broke the camel’s back for Michael, who said he plans to move to Texas. Thieves reportedly broke into a locked parking garage and stole his elderly neighbor’s car. Only 12 hours later, another neighbor spotted it about a mile down the road at a homeless RV camp. So, Michael and his neighbor Josh grabbed a spare key and hopped in a car and drove down Jefferson Avenue to retrieve the stolen vehicle. They soon spotted it, and once they figured out how to drive the Toyota Prius, they were off.
“It was nice to get the car back for the owner,” Josh said, smiling. “Win one for the good guys.”
Fed up with LA crime, neighbors take action into their own handswww.youtube.com
But prior to their heroic and blissful win, the neighbors had taken several losses. KTTV reported that thieves had made off with several padlocked bikes stored in the same parking garage.
One time, Michael encountered a thief and decided to confront him. Surveillance video shows the dad tackling the criminal to the ground and ripping the bike from his hands — but even that didn’t stop him. The thief was back a couple days later to steal more property. Josh opted to start tracking the whereabouts of his e-bikes with Apple AirTags, small coin-sized devices that can attach to items and signal their location to a connected Apple phone or computer. Three were taken: one to Marina Del Rey and two others to the homeless RV camp.
“I tracked it to that encampment, called the cops, they came and helped me retrieve it,” Josh said. “It was being disassembled as [we] walked up at a bike chop shop.”
Per Los Angeles rules, authorities stopped towing illegally parked RVs during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing encampments to rapidly clutter neighborhoods. The moratorium was finally lifted last week following a city council vote. But much damage had already been done. Members of the community claim the encampments quickly became epicenters for crime and debauchery.
“They’re ruining the environment,” said one Playa del Rey resident, Lucy Han, during the council meeting. “They’re defecating, they’re urinating in the area. … There’s human sex trafficking. We’ve had four shootings.”
KTTV said the Jefferson Avenue encampment is even home to a meth lab.
The pervasive crime has reportedly caused “good guys” like Michael and Josh to “hit the road for good,” the outlet noted.
Michael said: “We’re making that move partially because what’s going on but partially because it just feels like L.A. is going backwards, not forwards.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Davis Joint Unified School District in Davis, California, pushed leftwing distortions of gender and critical race theory through its Office of School Climate, which taught staff that “gender is a scam” and advertises the White Privilege Conference on March 9-12, 2022. The office is “responsible for supporting district staff and recommending and piloting ways to address structural oppression and to enhance school climate, equity, diversity, and inclusion,” according to their website.
The district, which includes approximately 8,500 TK-12 students throughout 16 different schools, also recently voted to adopt an Ethnic Studies requirement, which a press release notes will “explore issues of identity, analyze systems of power” and “examine social movements.”
Distortions Of Gender
The district’s site features a number of different resources that pushed radical leftwing distortions of gender. One presentation called “Supporting LGBTQ+ Students and Staff” was given to staff members at Harper Junior High School in May 2021 by two of the school’s teachers, both of whom use “they/them” pronouns. One also uses the abbreviation “Mx.” in lieu of Mr., Ms., or Mrs.
One slide bore a pride flag with transgender colors and black and brown stripes, both of which “sought to further represent the queer and trans identities of black and brown people.” Another one linked to a video titled “Gender is a Scam,” which compels audiences to “decolonize their language,” while a linked article called “15 Things LGBTQ people of colour want you to know” tells you “Why you might be guilty of white fragility.”
The slideshow instructed staff to use the pronouns they/them until someone says his pronouns and told them that “Posters/flags that support LGBTQ+ people are just the beginning” before going on to ask, “does your curriculum center primarily white/cis/straight voices?” The same slide warns against using medical and scientifically accurate terminology in regard to gender.
Meanwhile on the office’s LGBTQIA+ Supports page, a link to the activist group Human Rights Campaign promoted “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Picture and Middle School Books,” some of which are even aimed at children in pre-k. A link to the USC Rossier School of Education’s site “Students and Gender Identity Guide for Schools” also features a “Gender Identity Glossary for Schools” with woke vocabulary terms like “deadnaming,” “gender expansive,” “polygender,” “third-gender,” and “two spirit.”
Critical Race Theory and the White Privilege Conference
The office also promotes a trove of critical race theory resources intended for students, families, staff, teachers, and administrators under the subheading “Anti-Bias and Racial Justice.” The site opens by promoting free webinars from Embrace Race, a left-wing organization aimed at young children. Their webinars bear titles like “Addressing Racial Injustice with Young Children” and “RaceTalk among White Families Post-Floyd. Now What?”
The White Privilege Conference, a project of The Privilege Institute, is also promoted to staff members. The annual conference, not to be confused with the institute’s similarly named White Privilege Symposium, intends to provide “an opportunity for participants to discuss how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life while giving strategies for addressing issues of privilege and oppression and advancing social and economic justice.”
Last year’s conference hosted Robin DiAngelo, who discussed the subject of her latest book “nice racism,” which condemned all white people, including the far-left white people who comprise her audience, as definitionally racist.
The conference featured myriad workshops each day, which boasted titles like “Critical Race Theory/Critical Race Feminism: Creating a Plan of Action during the Biden-Harris era,” “A Good Womyn is Hard to Find,” and “The Making & Remaking of Whiteness.” The institute also hosts the Youth Action Project, with one-day institutes geared towards middle schoolers and high school students.
The district’s office also advertises the 1619 Project curriculum alongside a site called Learning for Justice, which they note “offers excellent, teacher-developed classroom curriculum.”
‘Dismantle White Supremacy’
Included under the heading “For Teachers, Staff, and Administrators” are K-12 frameworks for anti-bias and social justice education from Learning for Justice, a project of the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center whose mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and “strengthen intersectional movements” by pushing critical race theory into schools.
One such video from The New York Times titled “A Conversation with White People on Race” features white people expressing guilt over their alleged privilege, with one person remarking “We’re all implicated in a racist system, and I play my part in it as a white person.”
The office adds that they have a library of books and videos for staff, including one titled “Cracking the Codes and Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.”
Meanwhile, students and families are also directed to a number of critical race theory-inspired resources, including one link to a site titled “100 Race-Conscious Things You Can Say To Your Child To Advance Racial Justice,” which includes quotes of things parents have told their children when discussing race. Particularly striking is number 53, which makes the claim that “if you are White and you commit a crime … police might say ‘that was wrong, don’t do that again,’ and that’s all…but if you are Black and commit the same crime, they might arrest you and you might go to prison.” One quote under the subtitle “police violence” discusses black victims of police brutality, writing“The man who killed them didn’t like brown skin. He had white skin like us.”
The list isn’t exclusively focused on race, however, also promoting left-wing distortions of sex with quotes like“You know, some people are born with penises but feel like girls on the inside and some people are born with vaginas but feel like boys on the inside. We can’t always tell if someone is a boy or a girl just by looking at them and that’s okay.”
“Guidelines for Strong White Allies” is also included on the district’s list. Among the guidelines were requests for “resources,” “money,” and even “your body on the line.” Author Paul Kivel also told “white allies” to “understand and learn from the history of whiteness and racism” and to “assume racism is everywhere, every day.”
An anti-racist book list for children promoted by the district explains how parents can ease children into CRT by first starting “very gently” with entirely unobjectionable books that “just show kids that racial diversity exists.” The goal, however, is to eventually employ books that discuss “racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.”
The district’s previous superintendent John Bowes signaled his belief in the leftist claim that America is fundamentally racist when, after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, he sent out a message explaining that he was reminded of the need to “rid our country of the systemic bias and institutional racism that exists in all parts of our society.” He went on to explain that “public education, including DJUSD schools, are part of the solution.”
Davis Joint Unified School District’s promotion of both critical race theory and leftist distortions of sex are part of a broader leftwing push in K-12 institutions throughout the country. In California alone, other districts have lied about teaching CRT, hosted LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, paid extremist organizations to “disrupt whiteness,” and promoted material that tells students to use witchcraft against those who say “all lives matter.”
The politicized nature of California’s government schools, along with general concerns regarding quality of education, may lead some to support a recently launched bipartisan campaign to pass a school choice initiative in the golden state.
Neither Superintendent Matt Best nor Climate Coordinator Kate Snow responded to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
A top official with Union Pacific revealed last week that the company could move its rail operations from Los Angeles County unless law enforcement stops thieves from raiding shipping containers. Last week, a viral video showed how thieves are pillaging through shipping containers in the infamous Logan Heights neighborhood. Tens of thousands of destroyed packages littered the area around the rail tracks.
Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLApic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K
Adrian Guerrero, general director of public affairs, sent a letter to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón demanding his office stop the “spiraling crisis of organized and opportunistic criminal rail theft.” Shockingly, Guerrero revealed that “over 90 containers are compromised per day.”
“Since December 2020, UP has experienced an over 160% increase in criminal rail theft in Los Angeles County. In several months during that period, the increase from the previous year surpassed 200%. In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020,” Guerrero explained. “Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties moving trains.”
However, the actual crimes are not the only issue. Guerrero explained that far-left criminal justice policies have exacerbated the problem and emboldened criminals.
Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine. These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals. In fact, criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence. Without any judicial deterrence or consequence, it is no surprise that over the past year UP has witnessed the significant increase in criminal rail theft described above.
According to Guerrero, UPS and FedEx, which utilize Union Pacific’s rail services, are seeking to divert their business away from Los Angeles County — and Union Pacific may join them.
“Like our customers, UP is now contemplating serious changes to our operating plans to avoid Los Angeles County,” Guerrero wrote, adding that such a “drastic change” would significantly impact the national supply chain.
Guerrero went on to say that Union Pacific understands “the well-intended social justice goals” of Gascón, but demanded he “hold these criminals accountable.”
In response, Gascón’s office claimed they are committed to ensuring the safety of Los Angeles County’s infrastructure. In a statement, the office also said many cases are not prosecuted due to “insufficient evidence.”
“Some cases presented to our office by Union Pacific have been filed, such as burglary and grand theft, while others have been declined due to insufficient evidence. We make charging decisions based on the evidence,” the statement said.
However, Guerrero explained in his letter to Gascón that despite over 100 criminals having been arrested while actively vandalizing trains, Union Pacific “has not been contacted for any court proceedings.”
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald speaks at a news conference about the fatal shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan on Dec. 1, 2021. | YouTube/Click On Detroit WDIV
A 15-year-old suspect in the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan that left four students dead and seven others injured was charged as an adult with four counts of first-degree murder and other charges, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said Wednesday.
At a press conference where she expressed condolences to friends and family of the victims, McDonald named the suspect, Ethan Crumbley, just once.
In addition to charging him with four counts of murder for the deaths of students, Tate Myre, 16; Hana St. Julian, 14; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; and Justin Shilling, 15; Crumbley was also charged with one count of terrorism causing death, seven counts of assault with intent to murder, and 12 counts of possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
McDonald said there remains a lot of evidence to review and more charges could be forthcoming before explaining why they made the decision to charge Crumbley as an adult.
“First the seriousness of the crime this person committed under Michigan law. There are crimes that the Legislature says is so serious that a person who commits them can automatically be charged as an adult. First-degree murder is the most serious of all those crimes,” she said.
McDonald added that “there are facts leading up to this shooting that suggest this was not just an impulsive act.”
“Those facts are not appropriate for discussion right now because it could affect the prosecution of this case,” she said.
Some of those facts might be related to concerns being raised by the school community as early as Nov. 4 when someone threw the head of a deer into a locked courtyard at the school while on the roof, as noted in a letter from Oxford High School Principal Steve Wolf, stating there was “no threat on campus.”
“Before school began this morning, we identified graffiti on the cement outside our pool entrance doors. We immediately notified security, the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office and our custodial staff. This vandalism was created by an individual with red acrylic paint very early this morning and did not contain any threats or any concerning messages,” Wolf wrote.
“Security personnel reviewed camera footage and confirmed this person did not gain access into the building, as OHS is locked and secure. Unfortunately, this person did throw the head of a deer into a locked/inaccessible courtyard while on the roof. The deer was from a nearby location off-campus, likely struck from a vehicle prior to today … With the help from the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, we did identify and locate the suspect. At this time, this is a police investigation, and we can assure our students, staff and parents the suspect is not a threat to our building,” the letter added.
Concerns were also raised in a Nov. 12 letter about troubling social media posts about Oxford High School. An alleged screenshot of Crumbley’s now deactivated page on Instagram appears to threaten Oxford with death.
In an interview with ABC 7, Oxford High School student Treshan Bryant said while he didn’t know Crumbley personally, he knew he was being bullied.
“I’ve seen him around the school. He’s a kid, he’s been picked on and stuff like this. And when a kid has been picked on, people bullying him, you’re going to get this,” he said. “You’re going to get this reaction.”
In capping off her reasons for charging Crumbley as an adult, McDonald said it was about public safety.
“Charging this person as an adult is necessary to achieve justice and protect the public,” she said. “Any other option would put all of us at risk of this person because they could be released and still a threat.”
The video below shows the suspect when he was a child.
The Los Angeles Unified School District Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity prepared a presentation that told students critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools while the district made presentations that did precisely that. The district also mandated that teachers take an “antiracism” course taught by a known critical race theorist who told them to “challenge whiteness.”
LAUSD Lies, Denies That Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught In Schools
A LAUSD presentation titled “Critical Race Theory and Racism in K-12 Education” starts out by defining the theory as a “Theoretical Framework through which researchers and scholars try to understand how structural and racial inequities exist and endure in our society.”
The PowerPoint implores students to rename a headline referring to critical race theory, “since we now understand that Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools.” A separate document, which claims “there is no evidence that CRT is widespread in K-12 education,” is also listed on LAUSD’s website.
Although administrators at LAUSD claim CRT isn’t taught in their schools, the district created lesson plans that embed the corrosive theory in their very own classrooms, all after the district brought in a critical race theorist to tell teachers how to “challenge whiteness.”
K-12 Students Subjected To Critical Race Theory By Diversity And Equity Team
The LAUSD Office of Human Relations, Diversity and Equity introduces its advisory lessons by highlighting their desire to speak with students “about power, privilege, oppression, and resistance.” The section of the website labeled “Human Relations, Diversity & Equity” lists several critical race theory-inspired presentations, including slideshows that teach Thanksgiving is evil and propose an alternative holiday.
One presentation told students to check their privilege and included a video called “What is Privilege.” It shows people engaging in a privilege walk, an activity that I had to do six years ago as a freshman at my California high school. In it, people line up and take steps forward or backward depending on their answer to a series of questions. It is incredibly easy to manipulate the results through selective questioning in order to make people believe CRT’s sweeping claims of privilege and oppression based on skin color.
The presentation claims that white people, among others, are uniquely privileged, before telling students how to become an ally of left wing social justice movements. There’s also a slideshow about the Black Lives Matter movement that includes a note signed by the LAUSD Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team. The presentation mocks the phrase “all lives matter” in a comic.
It also includes the infamous tagline “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and featured a grab bag of intersectional insanity, imploring students to “celebrate queer people,” “dismantle patriarchal practices,” and undermine “hetero normative thinking.” One graphic demanded that our society “fund counselors not cops” and “mandate black history and ethnic studies.”
The presentation discussed white supremacy, which it defined as “The belief that white people are better than other races” and claimed that “Some systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.”
The administrators are evidently not fazed by the irony of peddling the conspiracy theory that America’s schools are fundamentally controlled by hegemonic white supremacy while they, as influential members of the nation’s second-largest school district, engender animosity against their white students by offering a state-sponsored crash course on racial identity politics.
A wide variety of other presentations also peddled the same themes and pushed for CRT.
Teaching critical race theory and then lying about its presence in schools isn’t new. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, has claimed CRT isn’t taught in schools after her organization boasted of teaching it on national television.
LAUSD Enshrines Core Tenets of Critical Race Theory
One slideshow focused on the Cleveland Indians changing their name, claiming that various teams were named after racial slurs and that Native Americans are the only people group whose identity has been turned into a mascot, conveniently forgetting about teams such as the Minnesota Vikings, Boston Celtics, and Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
A whole section on the LAUSD website is dedicated to “Election, Insurrection, and More.” One slideshow focused on “domestic terrorism,” invoking Jan. 6, 2020. It also features discussion of white supremacist domestic terrorism, while making no mention of Black Lives Matter riots or the rape and murder-infested Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
When asked why the Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team told students that CRT is not being taught in schools despite teaching it themselves, the team’s coordinator Judy Chiasson avoided the issue, responding, “We encourage students to hear different perspectives, become critical thinkers, and build camaraderie across identities so they may become the leaders of tomorrow.”
LAUSD Brings In Known Critical Race Theorist
Lest you believe these presentations were simply the handiwork of a rogue team of far left administrators, turn your attention to this memorandum from the LAUSD that mandates that teachers take a course dubbed the “Anti-Racist Journey.”
During the training, Howard tells teachers to “celebrate people of color,” and then discusses the need to “challenge whiteness,” which he bizarrely connects to ideas of merit and individualism. As Howard and one facilitator guide notes, “Whiteness’ … does not mean an indictment of white people and refers to a majority perspective and construct.”
But critical race theorists frequently use the term to secure this indictment. Psychoanalyst Donald Moss published an article claiming that whiteness is a “parasitic condition” without a “permanent cure,” while Noel Ignatiev, the communist and Harvard lecturer who founded the journal “Race Traitor” and claimed that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” argued that “abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”
Yet we’re somehow expected to believe that these critical race advocates are just trying to end racism. They’re not being anti-white. They’ve simply constructed an ideology around attributing some of the worst evils to “whiteness.”
In the face of the district’s lies, there might be reason to rejoice. It might be an indicator that even school districts in incredibly far-left areas have realized just how quickly they’re losing ground on the issue among decent people of all races. By lying, LAUSD might’ve accidentally admitted a greater truth about critical race theory: that parents and voters can stop it.
Howard, the LAUSD School Board, and Superintendent Reilly did not respond to requests for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
California – A 16-year-old boy died while taking his math class on Zoom last April reportedly 27 days after taking his second shot of Pfizer vaccine according to VAERS data released on October 1, 2021.
On July 13, the boy’s mother filed a report with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — run by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — indicating her son died 27 days after receiving his second dose of Pfizer’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine in April.
In the “Diagnostic Lab Data” section of the VAERS entry, the mother wrote, “He had no previous symptoms. I was with him one hour before and my assistant saw him 20 minutes prior and he did not show any irregularities.”
Per the report, the child’s second dose was administered on April 3, and the boy died on April 27.
The entry also indicates that the child had not been diagnosed with any allergies, pre-existing conditions, illnesses, disabilities, or birth defects, and had not been taking any medications prior to his death. He apparently stayed in the hospital for eight days, and it’s unclear how he participated in the Zoom class, or if he was released prior.
The logic of vaccine mandates eludes me, particularly in the health care sphere.
The country is, at present, gearing up for what should be (God willing) the last major winter wave of COVID-19. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment for the frontline medical professionals — the ones who braved SARS-CoV-2 in its early stages, the ones Americans applauded from apartment balconies in those grim, confusing early days.
The administration and some politicians — usually Democrats — are convinced that zero-tolerance vaccine mandates are one of the critical components when it comes to blunting the force of that wave. Plenty don’t agree. Some COVID survivors — and researchers — maintain that natural immunity provides more protection than the vaccine does. Some have moral objections to the vaccine. Some don’t trust the speed with which it was developed. Some believe the mandates to be an infringement on bodily autonomy.
Does the reasoning behind vaccine mandates hold water? Does it matter? The point is that forcing the recalcitrant is a difficult task for the COVID hawks on the left, particularly given their dire predictions about ICU usage this winter and a labor shortage that doesn’t seem to be abating. The solution, therefore, is to force health care professionals to take the vaccine or consider themselves out of a job as we approach the all-hands-on-deck moment.
You may perhaps begin to see the problem here. Granted, the intent was to force unvaccinated health care professionals to swallow their objections and take one for the team. Instead, the practical effect is that the team is getting winnowed down — as proven by the case of Dr. Christopher Rake.
According to The Sacramento Bee, Rake is an anesthesiologist at UCLA Health hospital system in Los Angeles who has become a vocal social media critic of COVID vaccines. UCLA Health executives decided they had had enough of that and had him escorted out of his workplace Oct. 4 — but not without Rake livestreaming the whole affair.
“They are escorting me out of the building,” Rake said in the video, posted to Twitter on Tuesday by Beverly Hills Courier staff writer Samuel Braslow. The doctor asked for the title of the men escorting him out, although he didn’t get it.
“This is what happens when you stand up for freedom and when you show up to work, willing to work, despite being unvaccinated, and this is the price you have to pay sometimes,” Rake said, turning the camera on himself.
Then he sketched out his plan: He’s going to keep fighting the mandatory vaccination regime, no matter what it costs him.
“But what they don’t realize is that I’m willing to go lose everything,” he said. “Job, paycheck, freedom, even my life for this cause.”
UCLA anesthesiologist Dr. Chris Rake, a COVID-19 vaccine mandate opponent, was escorted out of the UCLA medical plaza yesterday and placed on unpaid administrative leave for refusing to get vaccinated or request an exemption.
“Be well. United we stand, divided we fall,” Rake concluded.
The UCLA Health System requires workers to have a COVID-19 vaccination or “an exemption in accordance with University of California policy and a state public health order issued on Aug. 5, which only exempts workers on the basis of religious beliefs or medical reasons,” according to the Bee.
“Those out of compliance are subject to progressive discipline, including restricting access to work sites and being placed on leave,” a UCLA representative told McClatchy Newspapers, the Bee’s parent company.
Rake’s profile was still listed on UCLA Health’s website as of Monday morning Eastern Time, indicating he hadn’t been terminated. However, there’s been ample time for “progressive discipline,” given he began speaking out against vaccines publicly as early as August.
While he was once a frontline hero for his work with COVID, Rake said at an anti-vaccination rally in Santa Monica Aug. 29, “this year I’m a zero.”
“They want to force a vaccination or medication or treatment into my body that I don’t want. So they’re telling me, ‘Take the jab or we take your job,’” Rake said.
“And I’m here to say no. That’s not OK.”
He also urged those who are vaccinated to consider the implications of vaccine mandates and said he wanted them with the cause “because they deserve medical freedom.”
“Many of them are going to wake up when the government says, ‘hey, by the way, you need a third booster shot,’” Rake said. “And you know, they say, ‘I felt pretty bad after that second one, can I just pass?’ No. You are now out of alignment with what the government wants and cannot go to your child’s baseball game, you can’t go to the movie theater, you can’t go to the grocery store. They’re going to take everything away.”
UCLA Health responded with a tweet saying, “These comments do not represent the views of UCLA Health. Unvaccinated people are more likely to contract COVID-19 & we encourage employees to be vaccinated. We adhere to the state public health order requiring health care workers to be vaccinated or undergo regular testing.”
Dr. Christopher Rake, an anesthesiologist from UCLA medical center, tells the crowd, “They want to force a vaccination or medication or treatment into my body that I don’t want. So they’re telling me, ‘Take the jab or we take your job.’ And I’m here to say no. That’s not ok.” pic.twitter.com/wP2kZyS1o7
I’m not a medical expert, but I don’t agree with Dr. Rake’s position — and it’s a moot point anyway, given the fact I’m fully vaccinated and I’m unaware of any way to pull the Pfizer solution out of my arm at this point. However, I agree with Dr. Rake’s ability to state his position — and to live by it. If UCLA Health was testing him, there was no reason to escort him off of their property. He plays no role in administering or championing vaccines. He plays a vital role in the operation of the emergency room. This shouldn’t be difficult.
And yet, it is. Because of vaccine mandates in health care, hospitals have lacked the requisite nurses needed to deliver babies. Outside the medical field, law enforcement officers are leaving their jobs. Experienced members of the military are considering leaving the service.
We once celebrated our frontline medical workers for keeping us alive. Now we have to hope there are enough of them left as we’re told COVID cases are “overwhelming hospitals” — all because of what the vaccine mandate hath wrought.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Bureaucratic ignorance fuels the public’s institutional distrust, particularly when it comes to elections. Polls are open in California for voters to determine whether to recall Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, and residents are eagerly casting their ballots.
But some voters are worried that their votes will not be counted — including two women who went to vote in Woodland Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles. Estelle Bender, who lives in nearby West Hills, told KTLA-TV that she and others at the polling place were informed that they had already voted even though that had not.
Asked how shocked she was, the 88-year-old responded, “Very. I went to El Camino High School to vote, got there at 10:30, gave her this and she scanned it and said, ‘You voted.’ And I said, ‘No I haven’t.’ And she said, ‘This has been happening all morning.’
“The man next to me was arguing the same thing. So as I left, I did the provisional ballot.”
Bender said she “saw two women walking toward me as I left and I said, ‘Don’t be surprised if they tell you how they voted.’ And she said, ‘They’ve already done that.’”
She said she was “really angry” and suspicious that this issue was targeting Republicans.
“I asked the couple, the young women that I talked to and I said, ‘Are you by any chance Republicans?’ She said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Well so am I.’”
Another voter, Monica Almada, told KNBC-TV that she had the same issue when she tried to cast her ballot at the Disabled American Veterans 73 Vote Center in Woodland Hills.
“My confidence is not the same as it used to be about the voting system,” she told the outlet.
There is no empirical evidence to support that this technical error is targeted toward Republicans, but this incident certainly is raising alarm bells. In response to the KTLA report, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder released a statement.
“The voters who experienced this issue were offered and provided a provisional ballot- the failsafe option to ensure no one is turned away from voting,” it said.
If people are running into issues at their polling places, they should discuss it with the staffers there and then get in touch with their county’s registrar office.
It’s clear that situations like the one in Woodland Hills will only create more distrust in the American electoral process and could result in voters deciding to stay home. But these incidents should not deter anyone from casting their ballots in the California recall election.
Cameron Arcand is a political commentator based in Orange County, California. His “Young Not Stupid” column launched at The Western Journal in January 2021, making Cameron one of the youngest columnists for a national news outlet in the United States. He has appeared on One America News, and has been a Young America’s Foundation member since 2019.@cameron_arcand
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
California Gubernatorial Race; Conservative Larry Elder is up against Gavin Newsom a wealthy leftist elitist funded by Big Tech, Hollywood, and the mainstream corporate media.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Pastor Ché Ahn speaks at Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, 2019. | Facebook/Harvest Rock Church
A California pastor who has challenged his state government over worship restrictions and church closures in response to COVID-19 believes such restrictions are rooted in Marxist ideology.
In an interview with The Epoch Times published Saturday, Pastor Che Ahn of Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, asserted that “When the pandemic happened, I think a lot of what I would call left-wing governors, you can call Democrat or liberals, but I feel they’re more left-wing, I think they seized the opportunity to really control society and one of the areas that I think they really like to control is the church because historically, the church has been the most outspoken against government control in this country.”
While many proponents of limiting the number of people who can attend in-person church services point to public health concerns as the justification for their actions, Ahn attributes the restrictions to a more sinister motive: “Marxism is a religion. Humanism is a religion. It is putting the human at the top instead of God, and so, [socialism] will do everything possible to get people to reject worshiping the true God.”
“That’s why we’re having such a battle in our nation against the values of our Founding Fathers who are mostly Christians and you know they had biblical values, Judeo-Christian values. So that’s why I feel there is an assault going on,” he asserted.
Over the past year, Ahn has found himself among several pastors clashing with the government over coronavirus worship restrictions. California implemented particularly strict restrictions on worship services during the coronavirus pandemic. The state faced criticism for not imposing similar restrictions on secular businesses, which led to some pastors to designate their churches as “strip clubs” so they could remain open during the pandemic.
In addition to limiting the number of people who could gather for in-person worship services, the state prevented people from conducting at-home Bible studies, which prompted Ahn to file a lawsuit against the state. Pastor Ahn took his challenge against the ban on all forms of in-person worship to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and later to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered the district court to rehear the case in light of its ruling in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo that struck down coronavirus worship restrictions in New York state.
In April, more than a year after the coronavirus pandemic first began to spread in the U.S., California lifted its mandatory restrictions on religious services, changing the language on capacity limits regarding worship services from “mandatory” to “highly recommended.” In response to this move, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, who represented Harvest Rock in its legal proceedings, expressed relief that California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom “finally dropped his draconian restrictions on churches.”
In May, the state of California was ordered to pay Harvest Rock Church $1.35 million in attorneys’ fees and legal costs that the church incurred as a result of its litigation against the state. Last month, a federal judge ordered the state to pay $1.6 million in attorneys’ fees to South Bay United Pentecostal Church and an additional $550,000 to a Catholic priest who also sued the state over its worship restrictions.
At the same time, the same federal judge issued an injunction preventing Newsom and other state officials from “issuing or enforcing regulations” against churches and places of worship in response to the pandemic. Although Ahn was threatened with fines and jail time for holding in-person worship services in violation of public health orders, he maintained that he made the right decision by defying the state’s restrictions in his interview with The Epoch Times.
“Thank God that we chose to be open, defying [Newsom’s] orders because we feel strongly that the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, and no one’s above the Constitution, even our president or governor, and the Constitution protects our right, not only for free speech but for us to assemble, to worship, and they will not interfere with a free exercise thereof, ” he said.
Ahn is not the only person warning about the advance of Marxism in the U.S. In a recent interview with The Christian Post, Kevin McGary, the co-founder of Every Black Life Matters, said “Marxism is really what we’re fighting on all fronts at the moment,” specifically noting its prominence in American education.
Even as churches in California no longer face the strict worship restrictions they were subject to at the beginning of the pandemic, Newsom could still face political consequences for the restrictions he imposed during the height of the pandemic. His private dinner at an upscale French restaurant, which took place as coronavirus restrictions prevented Californians from eating out, resulted in allegations of hypocrisy and accelerated the effort to recall him.
The recall campaign gathered enough signatures to force a recall election, which is scheduled to take place Sept. 14. California voters will be asked if they want to remove Newsom from office. If a majority vote to oust him, the votes for replacement candidates will be tallied. In such a scenario, the replacement candidate that receives the most votes would become governor.
The most recent poll of the recall election, conducted by Democratic pollster Change Research in June, found that 54% of California voters oppose the recall election compared to 40% who support it. However, a June poll from Republican pollster Moore Information Group found a plurality of likely voters (49%) support the recall effort and 46% oppose it. The most recent nonpartisan poll, conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California in May, found that 57% of Californians oppose the recall while 40% would vote in favor of it.
An “America First” rally that had been scheduled for Saturday in Anaheim, California, was canceled, and city officials were jubilant over the news.
A Twitter post from the city announced the cancellation, noting that the city was a prime mover in ensuring that the event featuring Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia would not take place.
“The city of Anaheim shared public safety concerns with the operator, and those concerns were shared by the operator,” the statement said.
Then came a hint at the real reason.
“As a city we respect free speech but also have a duty to call out speech that does not reflect the city or our values,” the statement said.Advertisement – story continues below
When the city was called out for picking and choosing which brands of free speech were permitted, the city insisted safety concerns it did not elaborate upon were the real reason.
“Please help us share accurate information. We uphold free speech every day in Anaheim. As a city, we enjoy the same right of free speech and can note when something doesn’t align with our values. To be clear: public safety concerns are why this is not still on,” the city said in a statement.
Many on Twitter noted that this decision smacked of censorship.
Saturday’s canceled rally was to be held at the Anaheim Event Center, a privately owned facility, according to KNBC-TV.Advertisement – story continues below
The event had been scheduled at venues in two other southern California cities — Laguna Hills and Riverside — but each backed out, KNBC reported.
“I recognize this was a divisive issue in our community, and I am glad it has been resolved,” Riverside Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson said, adding that she commended a venue that canceled the event.
The Laguna Hills venue, the Pacific Hills Banquet & Event Center, is also privately owned.
However, the Riverside Convention Center, which also canceled the rally, is owned by the city. That means the cancellation could face a serious legal challenge, KNBC reported.
Greene and Gaetz did hold a protest event outside Riverside City Hall on Saturday.
“They may try to shut down our venues, but we will take this fight to them in the courts, in the halls of Congress and, if necessary, in the streets,” Gaetz said, according to KCAL-TV.
Donald Trump won the last election and he’s gonna win the next one!
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Imagine if someone had said these words in October:
“In the midst of everything COVID, people were sort of putting down that cause of death as COVID … It is important to go back and do this accounting to see if COVID was actually the cause of death.”
It would have taken five minutes for Snopes and PolitiFact to cancel this person entirely. They would have been branded a conspiracy theorist, a blackguard, a scoundrel. If they had any platform, it would be taken away posthaste. You could even make a case there would be Facebook and Twitter censorship involved — this being COVID-19 misinformation, after all.
But those words were spoken Friday by University of California San Francisco professor of medicine Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert. She was speaking to San Francisco’s KPIX-TV regarding the announcement that Santa Clara County, California, had revised its official COVID-19 death toll downward by 22 percent.
According to KPIX, the announcement was made after the county “refined its approach in reporting the data.”
Santa Clara County — home to San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley — is the sixth-largest among California’s 58 counties in terms of population, with 1,927,470 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by Cubit.
This isn’t minor, in other words.
Before refining its approach, the county had recorded 2,201 COVID deaths. Now, that’s been reduced to 1,696.
“It is important to go back and do this accounting to see if COVID was actually the cause of death,” Gandhi said, according to KPIX.
“I think that transparent communication is an upside, I mean, in the sense that it’s true that if we did this across the nation, it would bring our death rate lower. A downside of that, could be that people will say, ‘Well, it wasn’t as serious as you said.’”
Gandhi added she thought this was going to encourage coronavirus vaccine holdouts to get vaccinated.
“Because a lot of people have kind of said, ‘I’ve heard people are dying anyway of COVID, what’s the point?’ And it is very important to say, ‘No, did they die of COVID or were they in the hospital for something else and they died of that?’” Gandhi said. “That helps people say, ‘Oh, the risk of breakthrough infection is so low I want to go ahead and get vaccinated.’ So I think it’s very good for vaccine hesitancy.”
Santa Clara County wasn’t the only county in California to reassess its data, either. According to KGO-TV, Alameda County revised its numbers downward in early June, saying it had an over-count of COVID deaths greater than 400 individuals. On June 4, the number of deaths in the Bay Area county attributed to COVID-19 dropped from 1,634 to 1,223. Alameda County, home to Oakland and Berkeley, is the seventh-largest in the state in terms of population with 1,656,754 residents.
“According to the Health Department, the 25% decrease was made to comply with the state’s definition of a COVID-19 death, which requires COVID-19 to be a direct or contributing factor or a situation in which it can’t be ruled out,” KGO reported.
“Alameda County previously included any person who died while infected with the virus in the total COVID-19 deaths for the County,” wrote Neetu Balram with the Alameda County Health Department in a news release dated June 4.
By way of example, Balram wrote:
“Using the older definition of COVID-19 deaths, a resident who had COVID-19 but died due to another cause, like a car accident, this person would be included in the total number of reported COVID-19 deaths for Alameda County. Under the updated definition of COVID-19 deaths, this person would not be included in the total because COVID-19 was not a contributing factor in the death.”
At the time, another doctor at the University of California San Francisco, epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford, told KGO he was “betting it’s very specific to Alameda County, which had a lot of cases early on and had to do a lot of on-the-fly definitions and systems and now they are being brought into alignment.”
Gandhi apparently didn’t think that was the case after Santa Clara reported its revised total. KPIX reported that “Gandhi believes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may soon ask all counties to do the same as Alameda and Santa Clara Counties and that the nation could also see a drop in its COVID-19 death toll.”
This is what voices — mostly conservative voices — have been saying for over a year. Even raising the issue, however, got one branded as a conspiracy theorist.
Take the state of Washington. In May 2020, during a media briefing, Dr. Katie Hutchinson of the Washington State Department of Health announced that some people who obviously hadn’t died of COVID were being included in the state’s death totals.
“We currently do have some deaths that are being reported that are clearly from other causes,” Hutchinson said. “We have about five deaths — less than five deaths — that we know of that are related to obvious other causes. In this case, they are from gunshot wounds.”
If there were five deaths that they could identify as just being from gunshot wounds — out of 1,078 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the state at the time — that still doesn’t speak well of the state’s reporting mechanisms. That means, as the conservative think tank Freedom Foundation pointed out at the time, there were likely individuals who died of other causes more anodyne than a gunshot wound who were being counted among COVID deaths.
Yet, Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee blasted anyone who questioned whether there was over-counting going on.
“The problem is you got some people out there who are fanning these conspiracy claims from the planet Pluto,” Inslee said, according to KOMO-TV. “And it’s just disgusting what they’re trying to say of all these crazy deep-state malarkey. Who are kinda suggests that this not a problem in our state. I find that hard to accept with the number of dead in our state. So, that’s a problem. And I hope it gets resolved.”
This is such “deep-state malarkey” that jurisdictions now revising their COVID death toll downward include [checks notes] two famously liberal Bay Area counties in California, one home to Berkeley and the other the center of Silicon Valley. These stories were out there if you looked — individuals who died of gunshot wounds or motorcycle accidents that were counted as COVID victims. If you raised questions, however, you were branded a conspiracy theorist.
Even now, Gandhi seems to lament the fact Santa Clara County’s deaths have been revised downward: “A downside of that, could be that people will say, ‘Well, it wasn’t as serious as you said,’” she told KPIX.
Why would that be your reaction? And, perhaps more importantly, why would nobody with a brain be surprised to hear the same reaction from editors, politicians and members of the medical and scientific communities?
After a year of lockdowns based on an unholy alliance among untruthful media, scientists with zero sense and a power-hungry left, we’re left with the conclusion that big numbers drove public policy in a direction all of these entities wanted — in an election year when the left was tarring the sitting president with blame for all things COVID.
While the numbers weren’t ginned up to create a crisis that didn’t exist, it’s not as if politicians and scientists acted with alacrity to fix obvious deficiencies in reporting COVID deaths, either. Santa Clara and Alameda Counties are emblematic of how wrong some jurisdictions got it.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has signed a short-term contract with the non-profit division of Endeavors to provide temporary shelter and processing services for families who have not been expelled and are therefore placed in immigration proceedings for their removal from the United States,”said in a statement the ICE acting Director Tae D. Johnson.
“The $86.9 million contract provides 1,239 beds and other necessary services. The families will receive a comprehensive health assessment that includes COVID-19 testing.”
Endeavors is a non-profit organization which provides direct care, migrant wellness support, case management, home study and post-release services, staffing, and holistic programming for unaccompanied migrant children and families. Endeavors has served migrants since 2012.
“Our border is not open. The majority of individuals continue to be expelled under the Centers for Disease Control’s public health authority,”continued ICE acting Director in his statement.
Project Veritas Exclusive Photos From Inside Texas CBP Facility Show Horrific Border Crisis
In a stunning revelation of how horrific conditions at the border have become, Project Veritas released exclusive photos Monday from reportedly inside one of the border’s detention facilities.
The never-before-seen photos are said to have been taken from inside a Customs and Border Patrol facility in Donna, Texas. In the images (scroll down for more) you can see asylum seekers in tight spaces wrapped in space blankets, lying shoulder to shoulder on the floor.
The facility currently houses thousands of immigrants that travel illegally across the border and is beyond its capacity. Indeed, according to the Project Veritas source that provided the photos, “there are eight pods with eight cells each in the facility. At any given moment,” the source explained, “an average of 3,000 people in custody here.”
In addition, the source tells Project Veritas that the immigrants are “separated by age or physical size depending on room. Fifty were Covid positive in these cells over the last few days. There have been multiple sexual assaults, normal assaults and daily medical emergencies.”
Courtesy: Project Veritas
Axios also reported horrible conditions at the same facility. In a report Monday, Axios quoted Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) who recently toured the Donna facility and described the conditions as “terrible for the children.” The Congressman added that Border Patrol agents are “doing the best they can under the circumstances” but are “not equipped to care for kids” and “need help from the administration.”
A reported 15,500 children are now in federal custody at the border.
Though Representative Cuellar was unable to take pictures, he was able to gain a tour of the facility. But he’s one of the few to have seen the conditions directly. Indeed, there has been what appears to be a deliberate and coordinated effort to keep journalists out of the facilities.
Meanwhile, an attorney representing migrant youth in the custody of the U.S. government was recently denied a tour of the Donna, Texas facility. Naha Desai told CBS News, that she interviewed children who said they were hungry and never saw the sun. “Some of the boys said that conditions were so overcrowded that they had to take turns sleeping on the floor,” she explained.
On March 2nd, the Donna complex was said to be holding more than 1,800 people — 729% of its pandemic-era capacity, which is designed for 250 migrants, according to CBS. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security head is calling on volunteers to assist CBP at these facilities complaining that the most number of migrants in 20 years have arrived.
New York, California, and numerous other states could soon become some of the highest tax places in the world if the Biden Administration gets its way. The Biden tax plan that Congress is debating this week would raise the top income tax rate to 39.6% from its current 37% today.
And that’s not all…
Biden wants to place a new payroll tax of 15% on earnings over $400,000 (or $200,000 each for a married couple.) This combined payroll and income tax hike would bring the marginal tax rate on an additional hour of work to 54%.
State and city taxes can no longer be deducted from federal returns. As such, high-tax states like New York, California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, Iowa, Arizona and New Jersey would all see marginal tax rates approaching 70%.
Meanwhile, if California and New York get their way, taxes could go even higher. Both states are discussing ways to shore up their disastrous finances. In California, the General Assembly is considering raising the state income tax to 16.5%. And, in New York, the embattled Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed a two percentage point hike. This would raise income taxes in New York City to 15.5%.
As economists at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity point out, if New York and California are successful with their tax hikes, they will officially become home to some of the highest tax places in the world.
Hey, who needs Bernie Sanders when President Joe Biden is willing to go so far left and turn us into a socialist state?
To be clear — higher taxes is not a sustainable path forward for America. Instead, we need pro-growth policies that will generate more wealth for the country as a whole, instead of onerous taxation that will discourage prosperity.
The Biden tax hikes, the largest since 1993, should not be approved.
REPORT: California Moves to Give CoVID Relief Checks to Undocumented Immigrants, Foreign Nationals
posted by Hannity Staff – 6 seconds ago
Leaders in California moved this week to pass a new $7.6 billion CoVID relief package, with some funds reportedly going towards undocumented workers and foreign nationals across the Golden State.
“The $7.6 billion proposal, spearheaded by Gov. Gavin Newsom, includes 5.7 million payments of $600 each to low-income Californians making less than $30,000 a year and $2.1 billion in grants for small businesses. Of the massive sum of checks, 565,000 payments will be delivered to people who did not receive the federal government’s previous $1,200 stimulus check in the Golden State, many of whom are residing in the country illegally,” reports the Washington Examiner.
“This budget is going to be creating long-term obligations to the undocumented,” said Republican State Sen. Jim Nielsen.
Others praised the program.
“I think it’s a great step forward. It’s an acknowledgment of all these low-wage workers … that they are working hard, and they have been disproportionately impacted through unemployment,” Democratic state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo said. “I think there is room to include more who are still not covered either by our state or by the federal [programs].”
CALIFORNIA PLEADIN’: Joe Biden Backs Newsom as Recall Movement Grows, Approval Drops 18%
posted by Hannity Staff – 2.15.21
The White House fiercely defended California Governor Gavin Newsom Wednesday as the recall movement against the leading Democrat grows over his handling of homelessness, crime, drug abuse, and the CoVID pandemic.
“In addition to sharing a commitment to a range of issues with @GavinNewsom from addressing the climate crisis to getting the pandemic under control, @POTUS clearly opposes any effort to recall @GavinNewsom,” posted White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
“When they have to call out the big guns like that it means they know they’re in trouble,”said the finance director behind the recall movement. “That he had to get them to come out in a White House tweet to say that they don’t support the recall, is more evidence that they’re in trouble.”
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CALIFORNIA REVOLT: Newsom Approval Plummets, Just 31% Back CoVID Response, Down 18%
posted by Hannity Staff – 2.03.21
California Gavin Newsom got some more bad news this week when a new poll showed his overall job performance plummeting as he struggles to handle a series of crises across the Golden State; including CoVID, homelessness, and rising crime.
“People are reevaluating how well Newsom is doing handling the pandemic,”said Mark DiCamillo, director of the survey. “Once your job performance rating starts to decline, it’s more difficult to put it back in the right direction. You kind of accumulate negatives over time.”
“The poll, released Tuesday morning, also found that just 31% of those surveyed thought that Newsom and other state government leaders had done an excellent or good job handling the pandemic, while 23% said they had done a fair job, and 43% called it a poor job,” writes the LA Times.
Newsom’s overall approval rating is now 46%, down from 64% just four months ago.
White House senior adviser for COVID response Andy Slavitt had a hard time coming up with an answer this week when he was asked why California hasn’t fared better against the coronavirus than Florida, despite the Golden State’s lockdown policies.
“I want to start with what we just saw,” MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle said at the outset of the Wednesday interview. “Contrast states like Florida and California. California [is] basically in a lockdown and their numbers aren’t that different from Florida.”
New numbers coming out of both states have suggested, to the surprise of many public health experts, that states with harsh lockdown policies have not been more successful at combating the virus than states that adopted more open approaches.
Slavitt, appearing confounded, responded, “Look, there’s so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that’s just a little bit beyond our explanation.”
Then, without providing evidence, he claimed, “What we do know is that the more careful people are, the more they mask and social distance, and the quicker we vaccinate, the quicker it goes away and the less it spreads.”
“But, we have got to get better visibility into variants — we don’t know what role they play — umm, large events, etc.,” he continued.
“But as we all have learned by this time, this is a virus that continues to surprise us,”he added. “It’s very hard to predict. And all around the country, we’ve got to continue to do a better job, and I think we are, but we’re not done yet.”
The Biden administration, which endorses restrictive lockdown measures, has targeted Florida in recent days, floating the idea of imposing a domestic travel ban on the state to mitigate the spread of more contagious virus variants. The notion immediately drew ire from Republicans in the state of Florida, including Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio.
DeSantis shot back, saying the potential plan “stinks to high heaven,” and blasted the Biden administration for employing a blatant double standard, contrasting the potential travel ban with Biden’s lax immigration enforcement.
“It is a huge contradiction and you can’t square wanting opening borders for illegal aliens, but then also restricting U.S. citizens from basically traveling around the country as they see fit and I think the American people see the hypocrisy in that,” he said.
Rubio wrote a letter to Biden slamming the idea as “an outrageous, authoritarian move that has no basis in law or science.”
“Instituting a travel ban, or any restriction of movement between the states, would be an outrageous, authoritarian move that has no basis in law or science. Instead, it would only serve to inflict severe and devastating economic pain on an already damaged economy,” the senator said in a statement.
During a human trafficking investigation in California, called “Operation Lost Angels,” the FBI recovered 33 missing children, eight of whom had been sexually exploited,the agency said.
For the operation, which began Jan. 11, the FBI worked with more than two dozen law enforcement and non-governmental partners “to identify, locate, and recover missing children, particularly those who have been or were suspected of being sexually exploited and/or trafficked.”
Of the underage victims recovered, eight were being sexually exploited at the time of recovery, the agency said in a statement, as part of Human Trafficking Awareness Month.
“Two were recovered multiple times during the operation while on the ‘track,’ a common term used to describe a known location for commercial sex trafficking. It is not uncommon for victims who are rescued to return to commercial sex trafficking either voluntarily or by force, fraud, or coercion,” it said.
“The FBI considers human trafficking modern day slavery and the minors engaged in commercial sex trafficking are considered victims,” said Assistant FBI Director Kristi K. Johnson.
As part of the operation, a suspected human trafficker was arrested on state charges and multiple investigations were launched.
In the 2020 Report on U.S. Government Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons, the State Department warned about “the increasing number of people vulnerable to exploitation by traffickers due to the instability, isolation, and lack of access to critical services caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“The effects of COVID-19, as with other catastrophic events, are disproportionately impacting communities suffering from systemic or generational inequality – the same communities traffickers often prey upon,” the report said.
The FBI also revealed that its caseload for trafficking-related crimes, for both sex and labor, had increased significantly in the past several years. Last year, the agency started 664 human trafficking investigations across the country, arresting 473 people. As of last November, there were more than 1,800 pending trafficking investigations, including those involving minors exploited through commercial sex trafficking, the FBI said.
The Tallahassee Police Department, Florida, announced last November that more than 170 people were charged as part of a two-year investigation uncovering a sex trafficking network in the state.
“Operation Stolen Innocence,” a secretive probe into the commercial trafficking of a teenaged girl, began in November 2018 when police investigators saw images of a child being posted on a website advertising sex for money.
Last October, the U.S. Marshals rescued 27 missing children in Virginia as part of nationwide operations to save exploited children. The Department of Justice announced at the time that the five-day law enforcement effort, called “Operation Find Our Children,” took place throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The Los Angeles Times published an analysis of President-elect Joe Biden’s forthcoming policies and concluded that he wants to “make America California again.” Not the Ronald Reagan version: rather, the contemporary left-wing bubble.
The Times noted:
California is emerging as the de facto policy think tank of the Biden-Harris administration and of a Congress soon to be under Democratic control. That’s rekindling past cliches about the state — incubator of innovation, premier laboratory of democracy, land of big ideas — even as it struggles with surging COVID-19 infections, a safety net frayed by the pandemic’s toll, crushing housing costs and wildfires, all fueling an exodus of residents.
There is no place the incoming administration is leaning on more heavily for inspiration in setting a progressive policy agenda.
California has also supplied Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). But it is less a “model” of a particular set of policies than an example of what the left does when it no longer has an opposition.
California is one of the wealthiest states — and also one of the poorest, with a disproportionate share of the nation’s welfare cases. The middle class is emptying out — taking with it the state’s traditionally Republican constituency.
Geographer Joel Kotkin wrote in 2018:
Rather than serving primarily as a role model, California today should be seen as much a cautionary tale. We certainly produce great wealth, but also far too much poverty. To be sure, California is now home to four of the 15 richest people on the planet and 70 percent of the 56 billionaires under 40; the Bay Area remains the most prodigious producer of high wage tech-related jobs.
But for much of the middle and working classes, more serious has been the erosion of higher-wage blue collar jobs, which have dropped by 500,000 since 2000 and by over 300,000 since the Great Recession alone. In contrast, minimum or near-minimum wage jobs accounted in 2015-16, notes the state’s Business Roundtable, for almost two-thirds of the state’s new job growth.
As companies began fleeing the state’s high-tax, high-regulation environment, then-Gov. Jerry Brown acknowledged the problem, but quipped that “smart people figure out how to make it.”Increasingly, they “make it” in other states, like Texas.
In very basic ways, California is utterly dysfunctional. Last year, it had to implement rolling blackouts because solar and wind energy, the result of years of “green” policy, could not provide the power to keep the lights on in a heat wave.
The Democrats who run the state are sheltered from the consequences of their policies by the fact that talented people are still drawn to Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the Golden State’s unparalleled climate. Thanks to the success of Big Tech and Wall Street, the state has a projected budget surplus of $15 billion in the middle of a global economic crisis.
California is expected to lose one congressional seat after the latest census, which showed the state losing population.
‘Our normal procurement process has been deviated from given the exigency of the situation’
‘We could open champagne tomorrow morning at our conference call’
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it received 848 pagesof documents revealing the contract materials and communications related to a $1 billion contract for face masks between the California Office of Emergency Services and the Chinese Communist Party linked BYD. BYD reportedly has been barred by law from some federal contracts for providing faulty electric vehicles and lithium batteries to American buyers.
The documents reveal that the Office of Emergency Services Assistant Chief Counsel admits that they deviated from their normal procurement process for this contract. Additionally, in the contract between Office of Emergency Services and BYD, BYD uses a different name, Global Healthcare Product Solutions, LLC., and BYD provides no liability or warranty for the masks if they are faulty.
The records were produced in response to a Judicial Watch California Public Records request sent to the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services for all records and communications related to the state’s contract for masks with BYD.
The records include an April 7, 2020, email from the Office of Emergency Services Assistant Chief Counsel Jennifer Bollinger to Oscar Su, Senior Director of BYD America, in which Bollinger states, “Our normal procurement process has been deviated from given the exigency of the situation.”
In an April 6, 2020, emailStella Lu, the president of BYD Motors (the guarantor of the masks) tells Mark Ghilarducci, the director of the Office of Emergency Services that they should, “open champagne tomorrow morning at our conference call,” where they will finalize the purchase by California of $1 billion worth of BYD masks.
On April 7, John Zhuang, counsel for BYD and BYD’s lead negotiator, sent the finalized contracts to Bollinger, who led the negotiations for the Office of Emergency Services. Bollinger replied, “This is very exciting!!! We will circle back today with the signature as soon as we can.”
In an amendment to the master agreement, BYD had to refund $247 million to California of the $495 million down payment they had received apparently because they weren’t able to meet the deadline of receiving National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) certification for their N95 masks. The certification deadline was extended from April 30, 2020, to May 31, 2020.
On March 28, 2020, Brian Stansbury, a member of the board of the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System, emailed Grady Joseph of the CA Office of Emergency Services and Paul Teng of Himalaya Capital in order to introduce Joseph to Teng, saying, “Grady as we discussed the pension system for the City of San Francisco – the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System (SFERS) – reached out to our investment partners to see how they can help in the fight against COVID-19.
Teng responded, offering to assist with the procurement of N95 masks: “Paul I would like to introduce Grady Joseph Assistant Director of Recovery Operations for Cal OES from the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. We know Grady is in good hands and want to thank you for your partnership.”
Teng later responds, “Hi Grady, nice to meet you through email though I wish it was under better circumstances. We have a deep relationship with BYD which is now the largest mask maker in the world capable of producing 10MM masks a day. I have just facilitated an order between BYD [redacted] to procure 4 MM in N95 masks and 3 MM surgical masks that will be delivered over the next three weeks or so in batches. Happy to make the same connection as well. My number is below if you need to reach me.”
Brian Stansbury, a member of the board of San Francisco Employees Retirement System (SFERS), introducedPaul Teng of Himalaya Capital (with whom SFERS reportedly had invested $200 million and which Stansbury calls their “investment partners”), to Grady Joseph, Office of Emergency Services Asst. Director Of Recovery Operations to help in the procurement of face masks. Teng tells Joseph that Himalaya has a “deep relationship” with BYD, which he claims, “is now the largest mask maker in the world.” Oscar Su, a BYD executive introduced by Teng to Joseph and another Office of Emergency Services official, responds, “Thanks Paul for the introduction.”
According to the “Equipment Master Supply Purchase Order Agreement” effective April 7, 2020, BYD lists the “Seller” to the State of California as a Wilmington, DE-based company called Global Healthcare Product Solutions, LLC. The contractstates that the “Buyer will support the Seller’s efforts to obtain the National Institute for Occupation Safety and Health (“NIOSH”) certification for the N95 masks purchased under this Agreement.” A provision of the contract calls for BYD Motors, a subsidiary of BYD Co, Ltd, to be the Guarantor of the contract, in the event the Seller breached the “Guaranteed Material Obligation” of the contract.
Pursuant to a “Sweatfree Code of Conduct” provision of the contract, the Seller guarantees that no material furnished to the Buyer “have been produced in whole or in part by sweatshop labor, forced labor, convict labor, indentured labor under penal sanction, abusive forms of child labor or exploitation of children in sweatshop labor…” In a “Nondiscrimination” clause of the contract, the Seller agrees to not “unlawfully discriminate” against any employee based on “ancestry” or “religious creed.” The provision also calls for the Seller to adhere to the “Fair Employment and Housing Act.”
California’s Office of Emergency Services had to provide a 50% down payment totaling $495 million(one-half of the total $990 million contract) under the payment terms of the contract.
According to a purchase order, Global Healthcare Product Solutions (the Seller) is a subsidiary of BYD International Development based in Los Angeles. BYD was to supply 300 million N95 masks at a unit price of $3.30 each.
In an April 3, 2020, email exchange between Bollinger and BYD’s counsel, Zhuang, Bollinger asks Zhuang why BYD is using a company called “Global Healthcare Product Solutions, LLC” as the “contracting entity” for the masks. She notes that “I understood this to be a contract directly with BYD North America.” Zhuang then responds, saying, “BYD’s contract manufacturing division started Global Healthcare Product Solutions earlier this year to sell healthcare products in the US … They picked the name because they wanted folks to recognize it as a business that sold healthcare products, not to be conflated with the EV [Electric Vehicle] / clean energy business.”
In the master agreement, under “Limits of Liability” section, the contract notes that “In no event shall Seller be liable for any consequential, special, incidental, indirect or punitive damages …” In the contract provision titled “Limits on Warranty,” the contract notes that Seller … makes no warranties or representations … as to the Equipment … provided for under this Agreement …” The contract contains a provision that “Seller warrants that no gratuities … were offered or given by the Seller, or any agent or representative of the Seller, to any officer or employee of the Buyer with a view toward securing the Agreement …”
California purchased a total of 300 million N95 masks from BYD for $990 million on April 7, 2020.
In an April 2, 2020, email,Trevor Houser of “Frontline Support” connects multiple BYD and the Office of Emergency Services representatives. Frontline Support shares the same address in Oakland, CA, as Rhodium Group, where Trevor Houser is listed as a partner. Rhodium describes itself as “an independent research provider” combining “economic data and policy insight to analyze global trends.”
In an April 24, 2020, email, Shige Honjo from “Frontline Support” provided advice/directives to BYD on quality control measures for the masks that were to be provided to the Office of Emergency Services, describing various metrics that BYD should supply to ensure that the masks being provided met certain standards. These metrics included, “Product cleanliness spec – number and size of particles allowed, blemish, etc.” and “Reliability specs – when does filtration become no good, how many times can the straps be stretched out, etc.”
The BYD representative in charge of handling shipments of the masks to the Office of Emergency Services is Sean Li, Procurement and Logistic Supervisor of BYD Coach and Bus LLC.
In an email on March 21, 2020, a California lobbyist named Mark Weideman sent Gov. Newsom’s Chief of Staff, Ann O’Leary, a copy of an article about BYD titled “A Chinese Electric Car Maker Backed by Warren Buffett Re-Tooled to Make Face Masks When Covid-19 Hit – Now It Says It’s the World’s Largest Mask Factory.” Weideman says in his email that BYD was willing to “donate” 50,000 masks to California, along with hand sanitizer, and asked if someone could “notify GGN” [presumably Governor Gavin Newsom] so they could “hopefully execute on BYD’s offer to help California, a place they and their unionized workforce call home for their North American operations.” Abby Browning of the Office of Emergency Services responds to Weideman, noting she’d been forwarded his email from O’Leary, and said, “I am happy to help you facilitate this donation.” Weideman replies to Browning, “Yes, address and receiving information would be great. I am copying Frank Girardot and Nancy Liu with BYD who can help coordinate logistics.”
In an April 24, 2020, email exchangeamong the Office of Emergency Services officials handling delivery of 3.4 million masks from BYD, CA Office of Emergency Services Dep. Director Mitchell Medigovich notes that “The physical count will be at the airport and upon movement into the warehouse for inventory and QC [quality control], we will notify receipt and if there are any deficiencies. We are only checking 1% due to volume.”
“The documents show how a well-connected and controversial Chinese firm was able to get a leg up on a billion-dollar mask contract with California politicians,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
A California restaurant owner blocked in a public health bureaucrat with his truck earlier today after the government thug gave him a citation for operating his business against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s unconstitutional edicts.
The owner of the Breda & Barley restaurant in Covina, a suburb of Los Angeles, used his truck to block in a public health official who fined him for serving customers in an outdoor setting. A viral video shows the restaurant owner telling a police officer about the situation.
“If we can’t work, he can’t work,” he said.
“When I go to the bank, do I tell the bank the health department said it’s okay? The health department said I don’t have to pay you. The health department said I can’t make a living… Is that what I tell the bank? What do I tell my employees?” the restaurant owner added.
The video can be seen here:
Big League Politics has reported on the tyranny in California where left-wing bureaucrats have exploited media-generated pandemic hysteria to enact totalitarian social controls, prompting a backlash from constitutional sheriffs:
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco is pushing back against California Governor Gavin Newsom’s latest round of COVID-19 lockdown insanity.
People are getting fed up with surrendering to fear. Patriots are beginning to stand up to left-wing COVID tyranny.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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