The Democratic Party has the lowest net favorability rating when compared to eight other political figures and institutions, according to an NBC News poll released Monday. Fifty percent of adult respondents to the NBC News poll reported having negative feelings about the Democratic Party, with only 31% saying they have positive feelings — a 19 percentage point net-negative rating. Just above the Democratic Party, with 48% total negative feelings, was Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the poll. (RELATED: Pelosi Says Biden Polls Poorly Because Americans Simply Don’t Know How Good He’s Been)
The new NBC News poll measured 9 different political figures and institutions.
Almost 80% of the poll respondents were registered voters, which NBC stated is another warning sign for the Democrats as they head into the 2022 midterm elections. The results are the highest net-negative rating the Democratic Party has seen in 30 years of the survey being conducted, NBC reported.
The Democratic Party and Harris were ranked alongside Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Disney, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, and former Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, respectively. One thousand adults took part in the May poll, with 750 respondents being interviewed by cell phone. The margin of error is + or – 3.10%. The poll was conducted by Hart Research Associates/Public Opinion Strategies.
The poll also revealed that cost of living, jobs and the economy are the top concerns for Americans. Another poll found in March that Latino support for the Democratic Party was failing as inflation and the economy became a core concern for the demographic.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has spread disinformation repeatedly from the podium while speaking about the Disinformation Governance Board, claiming its “work” was present under the Trump administration.
Psaki’s go-todefense of the establishment of the board under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a continuation “of disinformation-related work that began under the prior administration.” One of the key bodies countering disinformation founded under former President Donald Trump, the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF), was renamed by the Biden administration when he came into office the Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation (MDM) and was modified to focus on domestic rather than foreign threats, two Trump DHS officials told the Daily Caller.
“The CFITF was focused on foreign influence – particularly as it related to elections. The current MDM description from DHS takes the word ‘foreign’ out of the title. It’s clear that MDM, as it’s currently defined, is also looking at domestic communication,” Chad Wolf, former acting secretary of the DHS, told the Daily Caller.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was created in 2018 under Trump to counter cybersecurity threats. In May of 2018, “a Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) was established within CISA’s predecessor agency,” according to CISA’s website, and was tasked with “helping the American people understand the risks from” MDM.
CFITF was modified by the Biden administration in 2021 to officially change its name to MDM, and its “mission evolved to reflect the changing information environment,” according to its website.
The Biden-era DHS, its assistant press secretary and the CFITF did not respond to several requests from the Daily Caller to say why the name change was necessary, and what the new “mission” of the MDM is.
The MDM is now “charged with building national resilience to MDM and foreign influence activities,” the website reads. It also mentions that MDM campaigns are waged by both “foreign and domestic threat actors.”
A “Disinformation Stops With You” resource listed on the website states disinformation can be spread by “foreign states, scammers and extremist groups.” An election MDM resource states “Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state-sponsored elements, as well as domestic extremist groups,” are the primary culprits of spreading MDM.
President Joe Biden stated May 4 the “MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history, in recent American history.”
“When it comes to disinformation, it’s clear that DHS, under President Biden, is making this a core responsibility – to include in the domestic context. They are also politicizing the issue as they have established a Disinformation Governance Board in the Secretary’s office. They have taken control of combating foreign influence away from operating components, where decisions were largely made from career civil servants, and moved that power to the Secretary’s office. On top of that, they have appointed a highly controversial and partisan individual to head that board Nina Jankowicz,” Wolf continued.
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 04: U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas arrives to testify before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, on Capitol Hill on May 04, 2022 in Washington, DC. Mayorkas will address the budget request for fiscal year 2023 for the Department of Homeland Security. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Disinformation Governance Board, which he first mentioned April 27 in a Senate hearing, wants to “develop guidelines, standards, guardrails to ensure that the work that has been ongoing for nearly 10 years does not infringe on people’s free speech rights, rights of privacy, civil rights and civil liberties.” He echoed Psaki in saying that the “work” was being done under Trump, and claimed that the board will focus on foreign surveillance, not domestic.
A DHS spokesperson told the Daily Caller “the Disinformation Governance Board is an internal working group that was established with the explicit goal of ensuring … Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy,” noting that the group has no “operational authority or capability” and that Psaki has said the DHS has worked to address disinformation “for years and throughout multiple administrations.”
Acting Deputy Chief of Staff for the DHS under Trump, Lora Ries, told the Daily Caller that the Biden administration’s DHS focuses on “content” rather than harmful “foreign adversaries,” and that Trump would have never started a Disinformation Governance Board.
Former Deputy DHS Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told the Daily Caller that the board “is an entirely new creation of their own making,” called it the “Ministry of Truth,” and said there is “no way” the Democrats will operate the board “well.”“It is one of the most philosophically alarming things produced by this administration,” he added.
“The Biden Administration has changed the focus from foreign adversaries seeking to harm American cybersecurity and infrastructure to focus on content. This paved the way for this Disinformation Governance Board that will surely be weaponized against Americans. The government should not be the arbiter of truth or ‘misinformation.’ We Americans have learned the hard way that ‘misinformation’ is often just information the left doesn’t like,” Ries said.
“Instead of focusing on foreign terror threats and securing the homeland, particularly the border to prevent such threats from entering the U.S., the Biden Administration appears more interested in using the national security state to target concerned parents at school board meetings and Americans rightly skeptical about government’s own coronavirus disinformation. This administration prioritizes the wrong things. Secretary Mayorkas, like the Biden Administration, has turned inward – away from foreign threats and against Americans, in particular political opponents, who they label as ‘extremists,’” she concluded.
The newly appointed leader of the Disinformation Governance Board, Jankowicz, who will be in charge of determining what disinformation is, has been criticized for spreading disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop. She also supported the Steele Dossier, which Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA officer, said was possibly “part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot.”
Mayorkas and Psaki have defended Jankowicz, calling her an “expert” in disinformation.
Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber’s was easily the most revealing.
“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,”he gravely intoned during his show Monday evening. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it ‘til after the election.”
You don’t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”
“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,” wrote reporter Molly Ball. “Their work touched every aspect of the election.”
And they wanted credit for it, Ball continued, “even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Their aim, they insisted, wasn’t to rig the election but to “fortify” it against then-President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they believed to be a threat to democracy itself.
“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”
The final piece was critical, especially in the waning days of the campaign, when an October surprise in the form of Hunter Biden’s laptop threatened to derail his father’s candidacy and undo the organized left’s hard work.
The New York Post’s exclusive story dropped like a grenade less than a month before Election Day, providing “smoking-gun emails” showing that the younger Biden introduced his father “to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The emails, the Post explained, were obtained from a computer dropped off and apparently forgotten at a repair shop in Delaware. Under the terms of the repair agreement, the store’s owner took possession of the laptop when it was deemed to be abandoned. Twitter and Facebook, though, determined without any evidence that the emails were actually “hacked materials” and thus distributed in violation of their terms of use agreements.
Facebook quickly acted to limit the reach of the story, while Twitter took the extraordinary step of locking the Post’s account and preventing other users from sharing its story or even pictures from it. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Joe Biden presidential campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s, and the younger Biden’s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went on the record a few days later with documents that confirmed the Post’s reporting, which seemed to uncover an international bribery scheme.
It didn’t matter. Once 50 obviously partisan intelligence officials issued an evidence-free statement calling the laptop materials “Russian disinformation,” it was determined that they would be censored in both legacy and social media.
Of course, more than a year after Biden was safely elected, both The New York Times and Washington Post confirmed that the laptop was genuine, but the censorship did its job: A Media Research Center poll of swing state voters confirmed that 16 percent of Biden supporters would have changed their votes had they heard of the laptop story, including 4 percent who would have switched their vote to Trump. This obviously would have swung the entire election to Trump, but that would have been an unacceptable result for the leftist cabal intent on “fortifying” democracy by stacking the deck against him. In light of the Media Research Center’s findings, social media censorship was very possibly the most effective way they did it. And naturally they had to brag about it in Time.
“Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote,” Ball reported. “Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.”
She ultimately concluded that engaging with this supposedly “toxic content” or trying to debunk it was ineffective, so “the solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.”
This research armed liberal activists to pressure social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to far more aggressively and creatively enforce their rules, prompting a crackdown on “disinformation” that was in fact completely accurate. Because it was harmful to the effort to “save democracy” and defeat the “autocratic” Trump, it was censored.
“Democracy won in the end,” Ball concluded. “The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.”
This reveals the real threat of Musk’s Twitter takeover: If it is no longer possible to suppress factual information in the name of rescuing democracy from its alleged enemies, then those enemies (read: Republicans) might start winning more elections. And that is simply unacceptable.
Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.
A new report that analyzed the forthcoming movie from conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza warns that based on the 2020 election, Democrats have a “cunning plan” for the future.
After previewing the documentary “2,000 Mules,” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine wrote that “pesky evidence is starting to emerge of systematic schemes to subvert the electoral process — which must not be allowed to happen again if we are to restore faith in elections.”
Devine called the movie — which debuts next month — “the most compelling evidence to date” concerning the race between then-President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden and said research conducted by the election integrity group True the Vote reveals what appears to be “suspicious ballot harvesting.”
The Western Journal reached out to the Biden White House for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
The research Devine cited relied on sophisticated tracking and surveillance video to reach its conclusions.
True the Vote acquired 3 trillion geo-location signals from cellphones that were near ballot drop boxes and election nonprofits in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 3, 2020 vote.
“Then they went searching for ‘mules,’ operatives who picked up ballots from election NGOs — such as Stacey Abrams’ outfit, ‘Fair Fight Action’ — and then carried them to different drop boxes, depositing between three to 10 ballots in each box before moving to the next,” Devine wrote.
Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, said she chose the term “mule” for the people involved in the operation because “it felt a lot like a cartel, it felt like trafficking … This is in its essence ballot trafficking … You have the collectors. You have the stash houses, which are the nonprofits. And then you have the mules that are doing the drops.”
Devine wrote that the network included individuals in battleground states who collected ballots from organizations that were ostensibly out to help everybody vote and then put them in drop boxes, a few at a time.
“The extent of the operation is jaw-dropping,” she said.
“When a mule is matched with video, you can see the scheme come to life,” she wrote.
Devine noted one snippet from the film.
“A car pulls up at a drop box after midnight. A man gets out, looks around surreptitiously, approaches the box, stuffs in a handful of ballots and hightails it out of there. Then he goes to the next box, again and again,” she wrote.
D’Souza said the efforts of the mules could have swung the election based on his contention that at least 380,000 potentially fraudulent votes were tracked by the project.
“Shockingly, even this narrow way of looking at just our 2,000 mules in these swing states gives Trump the win with 279 electoral votes to Biden’s 259,” he said.
Devine said that’s hard to prove. “There is no way to scrutinize those ballots now and see if they are fraudulent but if we must have drop boxes at election time, they need to be secure and under 24/7 surveillance,” she said.
From @mirandadevine at the New York Post—the newspaper that broke the Hunter Biden story—comes a detailed preview of the evidence in “2000 Mules.” Fasten your seatbelt! @nypost https://t.co/bCAtlcD5zN
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.
As we reach a month of the Ukrainian war amid talks of possible peace, a strategic appraisal is in order. It appears the Russians thought the war would be easy and fast, the Ukrainians would simply roll over and surrender, and the common people would rise up to greet Russians as liberators. Russian strategic decision-making, worsened by ideological bubbles, turned out to be as haunting as British and American misadventures in Iraq and Libya.
The Russian officer attrition in this war is on a level rarely observed in any recent conflict, partially because this level of high-intensity, state versus state, multi-domain total war hasn’t occurred in the last few decades. Russia did not foresee that its old-fashioned special operations tactics are obsolete satellites and drones track their movements. The fact that Moscow did not calculate this in their battle plans is a sign of decline, a far cry from its prestigious officer corps training during the Soviet era. The bulk of the Russian navy and air force are still bafflingly underused and functionally unavailable given the intensity of the conflict, giving rise to the suspicion that the Russians are preserving their top-tier weaponry and platforms in case the war spirals to a continental conflict.
But, somehow, they are still grinding on. If their objective was to stop Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), they have achieved it already. They have also managed to cut off the entire east and south of Ukraine. Russia might still win the war and achieve Ukrainian zonal neutrality, given Russia’s sheer weight.
The Russian rhetorical “denazification” was also recently dropped quietly from the rhetoric. But the demand for Ukrainian neutrality remains and will remain. It was the single major Russian demand. All the other demands were maximalist and malleable, aimed towards negotiation. Ukraine should have taken the opportunity to do a Cold War-era, Austrian-style “neutralitätserklärung,” which would have resulted in the country constitutionally turning neutral, in order to get funding from the European Union and NATO and flourish. Ukrainians have also swallowed their non-achievable EU and NATO membership dream and are currently just as ideologically inflexible and rigid about compromise as Russia.
Long-Term Ramifications
Unfortunately, the long-term ramifications of this war, for the west, are also bleak. Every single conservative restraint and realist gain from the last few years risks being reversed if realists continue to play defense on the rhetorical field of “values” instead of focusing on a narrow, populist interest.
The absolutely mindless idea of a no-fly zone in an active warzone with a nuclear great power was narrowly avoided by 78 experts writing an open letter against it. Incidentally, support for a no-fly zone declines among Americans the moment it is explained.
But the war hysteria in the first few weeks of the campaign, aided by the usual suspects, demonstrated just how close to power and catastrophe these ideologues were. When a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former supreme allied commander of NATO argue for a no-fly zone, one needs to remember they are one step away from real advisory power and might be so again in the future.
A conservative realist grand strategy that focuses on America’s southern borders and argues for Europeans to pay for European defense first needs a realist rhetoric and public relations strategy. It must discuss the public interest, in a language common people will understand and appreciate. Pursuing such a strategy would require a total clean-up of the administrative state and Obama-era holdovers next time Republicans are in power. The hold-outs of liberal internationalism are deeply embedded within the ever-expansive national security bureaucracy.
War Is Burying Liberal Internationalism
Rampant war hysteria has resulted in limited diplomatic maneuverability, a realization that is slowly emerging. As the Financial Times noted, “since Feb 24, the west has been galvanized into more unity than it has shown in years. Yet most of the world is on the side lines waiting to see which way it goes. Not for the first time, the west risks mistaking itself for global consensus.”
No matter how many times fanatical liberal internationalists cry about this war suddenly rejuvenating liberalism, the reality cannot be further from truth. The war proves great powers can deter other great powers and are the only actors that matter, that nationalism is the strongest social force, that interests trump values, norms, and laws. Thus, the war is quite clearly not saving “liberal internationalism” but burying it.
Two of the largest non-western powers are either neutral or tacitly supporting Russia, simply because of the idea that great powers should have their own spheres of influence. The balancing powers in Europe also argued against NATO being a co-belligerent.
Realism Isn’t Isolationism At All
Anglo-American foreign policy realists are not pacifists or isolationists. They simply prioritize a greater strategic threat in China. Wars have their own momentum. The chance of a great power being dragged into war due to foolish or overzealous mistakes of smaller peripheral allies is a far bigger threat, as the current world is functionally similar to a multipolar system prior to the First World War than a relatively binary and Manichean conflict of the Second.
Russia, bogged down in Ukraine already, is not a hegemonic threat comparable to Nazi Germany. The EU’s total population is around 450 million, more than the United States (339 million) and much more than Russia (144 million). The EU’s gross domestic product also dwarfs Russia’s, and just the top four European defense budgets combined are larger than Russia’s. Yet, instead of an actual material pivot to Asia, the United States currently has more than 100,000 troops deployed in Europe.
Globally, the biggest future rival is China. China is almost incomparable in size and power next to previous rivals such as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and even the USSR. There is nothing they would prefer more than the United States being dragged back to Europe. Ultimately, the U.S. objective should be not to prolong the war, but to focus on China as a rising threat. Ukrainian neutrality would have sorted the issue for good. But Russia has already been pushed into the arms of the Chinese due to the war.
By not allowing an amoral balance of power, wherein we let Russia have a small sphere of influence as a grand bargain instead of being over-committed to Europe, Washington risks undercutting its long-term strategic interests by unknowingly accelerating China’s. In a twist of fate, President Joe Biden is now mirroring former President Donald Trump.
Biden’s old Cold War equilibrium instinct is under siege by his own activist administration, determined to defeat Russian “reactionary imperial patriarchy” and defend foreign borders, statues, and churches — instincts they would never allow at home. The almost theological focus on being a part of a conflict in the far corners of Eastern Europe to ensure the continuation of a liberal democratic revolution is fundamentally undercutting American grand strategy, which historically tried to split Russia and China. Ultimately, pushing Russia to be a Chinese satellite might turn out to be our greatest historic blunder.
Dr. Sumantra Maitra is a national-security fellow at The Center for the National Interest; a non-resident fellow at the James G Martin Center; and an elected early career historian member at the Royal Historical Society. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, and can be reached on Twitter @MrMaitra.
DirecTV announced in January the digital satellite service would no longer carry One America News Network (OAN), owned by Herring Networks. The decision prompted a lawsuit by OAN in response Tuesday, arguing that DirecTV’s refusal to carry OAN could shut it down entirely.
“We informed Herring Networks that, following a routine internal review, we do not plan to enter into a new contract when our current agreement expires,” the company told USA Today two months ago, without expanding on its definition of an “internal review.”
The decision to drop the channel by OAN’s largest distributor is expected to take OAN off DirecTV airwaves by the end of April and threatens the outlet’s ability to operate in a crowded media environment. It’s essentially canceling the network from cable. Six Republican attorneys general last week issued a letter asking DirecTV to reverse its decision to cancel OAN.
The move also signals a sharp escalation of the weaponizing private market power to silence political dissidents. Silicon Valley has already engaged in rampant censorship, complete with a routine purge of those who don’t propagate the party lines.
Former President Donald Trump, who was banned from Twitter and Facebook at the end of his presidency while the Kremlin remains active on both, condemned the corporate censorship on Monday after calling for a boycott of DirectTV last month if the company owned by AT&T follows through on its decision.
“Time Warner, the owner of Fake News CNN, has just announced that they will be terminating a very popular and wonderful news network (OAN),” Trump said in a statement. “Between heavily indebted Time Warner, and Radical Left comcast, which runs Xfinity, there is a virtual monopoly on news, thereby making what you hear from the LameStream Media largely FAKE, hence the name FAKE NEWS!”
Trump may have confused Time Warner and DirecTV. While DirecTV made its plans clear, no reporting as of this writing suggests Time Warner is planning to follow suit. Neither Time Warner nor representatives for OAN responded to The Federalist’s inquiries.
Corporate collusion to strip a network off the airwaves, beginning with DirecTV’s crusade against OAN, would set a dangerous precedent. The left’s strategy to ban its way to a monopoly on discourse includes opposition silencing and self-righteous fact-checking. Never mind strict standards of censoring disinformation would have kicked every leftist news network off air years ago from endless amplification of the Russian collusion hoax alone.
Today it’s OAN. Tomorrow it could be Newsmax, and eventually Fox News, a more likely predicament if the network didn’t make satellite distributors so much money.
But what’s behind DirecTV’s decision to target OAN? As of now, its rival conservative networks remain untouched.
The move ostensibly comes from sealed findings in the corporate powerhouse’s “internal review” of its relationship with OAN. A spokesperson told NPR in January rising programming costs was driving the decision. The review is likely a smokescreen for executives dissatisfied with the network’s narratives, especially its reporting on the 2020 election.
Three days after Election Day in 2020, AT&T, the majority owner of DirecTV, announced that William Kennard, an alum of both the Clinton and Obama administrations, would chair AT&T’s board of directors. Kennard is also listed as an executive board member of the global equity firm Staple Street Capital. In 2018, Staple Street Capital acquired Dominion Voting Systems, the electoral tabulation company that came under fire after the 2020 election.
Fox News and Newsmax retracted their networks’ reporting on Dominion Voting Systems in the aftermath of the 2020 contest. OAN has not.
Is DirecTV’s move to cancel OAN a business decision for the satellite provider? Or is it a political decision? Regardless, the cancellation of entire news networks by satellite providers is a new level of private censorship against non-leftist views.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
The German delegation appeared to laugh at former President Donald Trump during a 2018 United Nations (U.N.) speech in which the president warned about relying on Russian oil. While speaking at the 73rd U.N. General Assembly, Trump criticized Germany for relying on Russian oil exports.
“Reliance on a single foreign supplier can leave a nation vulnerable to extortion and intimidation. That is why we congratulate European states, such as Poland, for leading the construction of a Baltic pipeline so that nations are not dependent on Russia to meet their energy needs,” Trump said. “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.”
Trump made similar comments warning about Germany’s energy dependence during a 2018 meeting with German and NATO leaders.
“It’s very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia,” Trump said. “Where, you’re supposed to be guarding against Russia and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia. So, we’re supposed to protect you against Russia, but they’re paying billions of dollars to Russia, and I think that’s very inappropriate.”
“Germany is totally controlled by Russia because they will be getting 60-70% of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline, and you tell me if that’s appropriate, and I think it’s not,” he said while addressing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Trump approved sanctions to deter the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would allow Russia to bypass Ukraine to get gas to Europe and served as a major geopolitical win for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Upon taking office, President Joe Bidenrevoked the sanctions, only recently putting them back in place following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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.
The twice-failed presidential candidate made reference to the Constitution’s treason clause on Friday while implicitly condemning former President Donald Trump and parts of the Republican Party that she alleged have emboldened Russia’s aggression.
During a radio interview this week, Trump described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “very savvy.” He also described Putin’s decision to declare the independence of two Ukrainian regions as “genius.” And regarding the “peacekeepers” — which were Russian soldiers — that Putin sent into those eastern Ukrainian regions, Trump said, “we could use that on our southern border.” Meanwhile, Russian-state media have reportedly used comments from former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Fox News host Tucker Carlson for their propaganda purposes.
Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Clinton referred to Trump’s comments and said that any American who parrots talking points worthy of being broadcast by Russian propaganda outlets must be called out.
“We have to also make sure that within our own country we are calling out those people who are giving aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin, who are talking about what a genius he is, what a smart move it is, who are unfortunately being broadcast by Russian media, not only inside Russia, but in Europe to demonstrate the division within our own country,” Clinton said.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.
Hillary Clinton: What’s Left Of The GOP Must Stand Against Those Giving ‘Aid’ To Putin www.youtube.com
Later in the interview, Clinton described rhetoric from Trump and other Republican figureheads as “heartbreaking” and “dangerous,” and she repeated the accusation that they are giving “aid and comfort” to Putin.
“I think it’s time for what’s left of the Republican Party that has any common sense not just to say, ‘OK, go help defend Ukraine against Putin,’ but to stand against those people in politics and government, in the media and elsewhere in our own country who are literally giving aid and comfort to an enemy of freedom and democracy,” Clinton said.
Such rhetoric, Clinton claimed, emboldens not only Putin, but also Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“It can’t continue because it plays right into the ambitions of not just Putin, but also President Xi of China to undermine democracy, to literally divide and conquer the West without ever invading us, but by setting us against each other,” Clinton said.
Clinton attributed the development of the problem that she identified as happening because “starting with ascent of Trump, there has been, sadly, a total loss of spine and conscience of too many Republicans.”
“There is also another element. These people are naive in such a dangerous way,” Clinton continued. “I think the naiveté that we saw starting with Trump, but which has now been accelerated, is really hard to understand. But we have to deal with it, and we have to call it out.”
Last week, our Canadian neighbors mobilized their national security apparatus against working-class citizens protesting government overreach. The Biden administration is no doubt taking notes. In fact, the contours of a similar strategy are already emerging in the United States. First, the FBI reportedly tagged parents opposed to critical race theory with a “terrorism” label under the direction of Biden’s Department of Justice. Then, the DOJ revealed plans to stand up a domestic terror unit fixated on “anti-government or anti-authority” ideologies. Now, a new Department of Homeland Security terrorism bulletin classifies Americans as potential violent extremists if they question the administration’s Covid-19 policies or election integrity narrative by spreading “mis- dis- and mal-information” on social media. This should send a chill up Americans’ spines.
The willingness of the U.S. government to classify movements to the right of leftist ideology as “domestic extremism” lays the groundwork for the purging of these citizens from digital platforms — and all of digital life. We are entering a reality in which tech companies target average conservative organizations, users, and speech as part of this push. Just after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Google co-founder Sergey Brin referred to Trump voters as “extremists” and suggested using Google’s tech incubator, Jigsaw, to shape their opinions. In July 2021, Facebook began testing“extremism” warnings on users who engaged with popular, mainstream conservative accounts. This problem is a small outgrowth of a broader one shaping the new digital atmosphere: the efforts of companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and TikTok to skew the political and cultural environment of this nation and its inheritors.
These corporations interfere in our elections, actively undermine our First Amendment freedoms by silencing speech they don’t like, work together to disadvantage or destroy existing or potential competitors, and partner with government actors to intimidate, surveil, and silence Americans. They’re even purposefully poisoning the next generation, targeting American youth with highly addictive content that has been shown to do legitimate harm.
Governments are not the only actors capable of encroaching on Americans’ individual liberties. Private, monopolistic corporations should be held accountable if they violate these liberties to the degree Big Tech has in the past two years alone. Efforts to rein them in should reflect an imperative to protect Americans’ natural rights against abuses flowing from the consolidation of power — whether by the government, private corporations, or a combination of the two. Big Tech’s willingness to shut off direct access to digital information, their demonstrated pattern of information manipulation, and their effect on America’s culture of free speech have decisive political and cultural ramifications.
Censorship against viewpoints to the right of center runs across platforms and is pervasive and accelerating. The Media Research Center found in September 2021 that Twitter and Facebook censor Republican members of Congress at a rate of 53-to-1 compared to Democrat lawmakers. By its own admission, Facebook created two internal tools in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory that suppressed“very conservative” media reach on its platform. Google stifled conservative-leaning outlets such as The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and this publication during the 2020 election season, with Breitbart’s Google search visibility reportedly shrinking by 99 percent compared to the 2016 election cycle. Finally, at least 17 digital platforms banned Trump or affiliated accounts within a two-week span in early January 2021 — all while Chinese Communist Party, Iranian, and Taliban spokesmen enjoy a voice on these American-owned platforms.
To contest this imbalance, conservatives attempted to take matters into their own hands and “build their own” digital platform. Yet when such a company, Parler, developed an app that reached the top of the Apple store in the early days of January 2021, Apple, Google, and Amazon Web Services acted within approximately 48 hrs of each other to vanquish it. Parler has yet to recover a fraction of the users it gained during January 2021. The “build your own” argument wilted in the face of concerted opposition by these entrenched juggernauts.
Further, the distinction between the coercive power of the government and that of a private company is negated when they work hand-in-glove to achieve the government’s ends. Jen Psaki admitted from the White House podium in July that the government was “flagging problematic posts” for Facebook to censor. Within a month, the accounts she and the surgeon general surfaced were removed from Facebook. And that’s just what the two Biden officials admitted out loud. In fact, Psaki again took to the podium in February 2022 to declare that media app Spotify could do more regarding comedian Joe Rogan, intimating the private company should expand its censorship of the podcasting star for platforming views that buck the administration’s Covid narrative.
Less than a month earlier, Biden had called on tech companies to police Covid-related speech. Even at the state level, at least one lawsuit alleges that the Office of the Secretary of State for California worked directly with Twitter to flag and scrutinize a conservative commentator over his election skepticism, ultimately resulting in his suspension in February 2021.
Suppression of conservative speech as a response to political pressure is not limited to social media alone. Online payment processors and fundraising platforms, email delivery services, and web hosting services are all taking their cues from and following in Big Tech’s footsteps. What happens in the future when your individual environmental, social, and governance score or level of climate change compliance is unsatisfactory for every online banking service intent on staying in the good graces of the government? In effect, our country is sleepwalking into a CCP-style social credit system.
This type of control also tears at the cultural underpinnings of our society. The disposition toward freedom of expression is central to the American way of life. Supporting an unpopular opinion in the digital public square or donating to political causes should not mean risking your livelihood. These practices erode our culture of free speech, chill open discourse, and engender self-censorship. In a more concrete sense, Big Tech’s practices result in measurable, destructive effects on the next generation of young citizens. Author Abigail Shrier documents social media’s influence on social contagions of the moment, stating that these sites offer an “endless supply of mentors” to fan the flames of gender dissatisfaction among teen girls.
According to Facebook’s own research, 6 percent of teen Instagram users who reported suicidal thoughts traced their emergence directly to Instagram. Teenage girls in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia are likely developing verbal and physical tics by watching influencers on TikTok who exhibit the same habits, in addition to being fed eating-disorder videos, according to The Wall Street Journal. (As of early 2021, 25 percent of TikTok users in America were teenagers or younger.)
Big Tech companies have proven themselves irresponsible stewards of their government-enhanced power. A recalibration of their relationship to the American people is warranted. The answer exists in solutions that promote human flourishing and arrest the infringement of God-given rights by private entities, such as freedom of speech. American policymakers and representatives should take on Big Tech as uniquely deleterious to a healthy body politic and invest in a diversity of tactics to meet the moment. The aggregate effect of these measures should be far more scrutiny, pressure, and oversight over Big Tech companies.
A comprehensive agenda to end Big Tech’s undue influence over Americans’ daily lives and subversion of their rights is necessary. Measures should confront legitimate anti-competitive behavior by these global oligopolies by enforcing antitrust laws and reforming them where necessary. Lawmakers must also ensure that the government does not continue to use tech companies as their agents to chill speech. The deployment of Big Tech’s ad-tech models — the heart of what allows these companies to manipulate and exploit the data of Americans — merits particular congressional scrutiny.
Additionally, Big Tech executives should be held civilly liable for legitimate instances of fraud and breach of contract, just as GoFundMe’s decision to refund the Freedom Convoy donations instead of dispensing them to charities of their choice was likely influenced by threats of a fraud investigation.
Transparency in content moderation practices, algorithmic impacts, and data use should be non-negotiable for these companies. Americans have a right to know how their data is collected, stored, and shared in plain English. Data privacy and a national data protection framework are also critical to righting Big Tech’s wrongs.
In tandem, Americans should be given new ways to fight back when their rights are infringed upon, as well as obtain prompt and meaningful recourse from Big Tech companies. All companies and tech founders should institute expanded user control mechanisms and design privacy-preserving technologies from the outset in their products.
And finally, these tech companies should no longer be permitted to work directly with our adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party.
Sovereign citizens of the United States do not exist solely to serve the economy or maximize gross domestic product. Despite their success in the stock market, Big Tech companies are actively eroding citizens’ ability to maintain a self-governing republic. Absent drastic measures to arrest the progress of this march toward totalitarianism with a tech face, we risk the welfare of a nation. It must end here.
Kara Frederick is a Research Fellow in the Center for Technology Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Her research focuses on Big Tech and emerging technology policy. She helped create and lead Facebook’s Global Security Counterterrorism Analysis Program and was the team lead for Facebook Headquarters’ Regional Intelligence Team. Prior to Facebook, she was a Senior Intelligence Analyst for a U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command and spent six years as a counterterrorism analyst at the Department of Defense.
Today in Finland, two Christians will stand trial for publicly stating the theological and scientific truth that men and women are different. Finnish Member of Parliament Paivi Rasanen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola stand accused of “hate crimes” for affirming basic Christian theology and natural reality concerning the sexual differences between men and women. One of the three charges against Rasanen includes a count against her for tweeting a picture of a Bible verse in challenging the state church of Finland’s decision to sponsor an LGBT parade. Another charge attempts to criminalize her participation in a 2019 public debate.
If the court finds them guilty, Rasanen and Pohjola could face fines or up to two years in prison. It would also set the precedent of making quoting the Bible a criminal offense in Western countries.
In November, human rights lawyer Paul Coleman told The Federalist that these cases in Finland are a “canary in the coalmine” for freedom of speech in the Western world. Coleman works for Alliance Defending Freedom International, which is assisting the two Finns’ lawyers. “Part of the scary thing about what’s happening in Finland is that it could happen anywhere else,” Coleman said Jan. 23 on the British show GBNews. Many countries have similar hate speech laws, including states and cities in the United States.
While accused of hate crimes, Rasanen and Pohjola emphatically affirm their love for all people as beautifully created in God’s image and deeply loved by a God who sent his own Son to die an excruciating death to atone for every sin, including all sexual sins. Their aim is not hate but love, they say, another core teaching of Christianity, which also commands its adherents to “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.”
Both are also charged for a booklet Rasanen wrote and Pohjola published in 2004. Pohjola told The Federalist in an exclusive in-person interview in November 2021 that he asked Rasanen to write the booklet because she was qualified, as a medical doctor and the wife of a pastor. That booklet affirms the classic understanding of sex as reserved solely for marriage, and marriage as comprising one man committed to one woman for life. In spring 2019, the two were suddenly served with criminal charges for writing and publishing this booklet decades ago, well before Finland passed its hate crimes laws on behalf of powerful special interests who dispute the differences between the sexes and their role in procreation. Rasanen and Pohjola have been summoned several times by Finnish police to be interrogated separately for hours about intricate details of their theology.
In their interrogations, the police demanded that Rasanen and Pohjola recant their beliefs. Both refused. Both have also noted the contrast between their country’s claim to be a free and modern democracy that allows for full and open debate and the way they have been treated, as thought criminals.
“If I’m convicted, I think that the worst consequence would not be the fine against me, or even the prison sentence, it would be the censorship,” Rasanen said in a statement ahead of her trial. “I will continue to stand for what I believe and what I have written. And I will speak and write about these things, because they are a matter of conviction, not only an opinion. I trust that we still live in a democracy, and we have our constitution and international agreements that guarantee our freedom of speech and religion,”
Christians all over the world are praying for Pojhola and Rasanen, including corporately in their churches. On Jan. 23, free speech supporters rallied in front of the Finnish embassy in Oslo, Norway, to show support for Rasanen and Pohjola. Several of the protesters filling the street carried signs that said “Finland: Freedom of speech?”
Several members of the U.S. Congress led by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said in a public letter that the Finnish government’s prosecutions of these Christians for their religious beliefs “raise serious questions regarding the extent of Finland’s commitment to protect religious freedom for its citizens.” Roy’s office is closely watching the trial, as are many other U.S. and international human rights organizations.
Pohjola was recently elected the bishop of the Lutheran non-state church in Finland. He was kicked out of the state church approximately a decade ago for upholding Christian teachings on the differences between the sexes. The small non-state church in Finland is growing, while the large state church is shrinking.
The Federalist is monitoring the trial today and will be covering its outcome.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
The House Select Committee established to probe the Capitol riot is not interested in probing the Capitol riot. According to a Federalist analysis of the 84 subpoenas publicly issued by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee on Jan. 6, only 8 have targeted individuals or groups with any connection to the Capitol riot. The rest have taken aim at former government officials and private citizens in a smear campaign for exercising their constitutional right to protest.
The 84 subpoenas do not include the more than 100 seeking the telephone records of individuals whose identities remain under seal, both from the public and from those whose privacy the committee seeks to violate.
“Every member of this committee is dedicated to conducting a non-partisan, professional, and thorough investigation of all the relevant facts regarding January 6th,” said Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney upon accepting Pelosi’s appointment as vice chair. “We owe it to the American people to investigate everything that led up to and transpired on January 6th.”
Except the committee absent of Republican-appointments at Pelosi’s direction is far from non-partisan, and the probe’s investigation is far from focused on the security failures at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Born in the ashes of a 9/11-style commission blocked by Republicans when Democrats refused a genuine investigation of violence on Capitol Hill, Pelosi’s Select Committee on Jan. 6 has remained faithful to its central purpose. That purpose is seeking retribution against political dissidents while offering a smokescreen to Pelosi’s own culpability in her failures to reinforce Capitol security. Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., made that much clear last summer in an interview with CNN.
“If you look at the charge that we have in the resolution, it says the facts and circumstances around January 6. I don’t see the speaker being part and parcel to that,” Thompson said.
According to Thompson, Pelosi’s apparent refusal to approve activation of the National Guard not once, but six times, according to testimony from former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, fails to fall under the umbrella of “facts and circumstances around January 6.”
Meanwhile, federal agencies run by Democrats have colluded with Pelosi’s deputies in the House to block a genuine investigation of the security failures at the Capitol by Republican lawmakers kicked from the speaker’s select panel.
Earlier this month, House Republicans penned a letter to Pelosi outlining at least four times last year the speaker’s deputies denied to provide records shedding light on the security decisions of Jan. 6.
“There is irony in the fact that the same time House Democrats are holding witnesses in criminal contempt of Congress for raising genuine questions of legal privilege,”wrote Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, “you continue to obstruct Republican access to House records relating to the security preparedness of the Capitol complex.”
In October, the FBI similarly stonewalled GOP lawmakers who requested the same briefing given to members of the Select Committee.
Out of the 84 subpoenas issued by the panel, for which its authority remains questionable after Pelosi barred GOP appointments, at least one targeted a private citizen with no connection to any of the events on Jan. 6, whether it be the turmoil at the Capitol or the Trump rally at the White House.
Andrew Surabian, a Republican operative working to unseat Cheney in Wyoming, was subpoenaed by the lawmaker’s committee last week.
“During the time period that the rally was being organized, Mr. Surabian was overseeing a Super PAC in support of Republican Senate candidates in Georgia,” Surabian attorney Daniel Bean said in a statement. “Mr. Surabian is a close friend to Donald Trump Jr. and is running a Super PAC that opposes the reelection of one of the members of the committee. Accordingly, we believe this is nothing more than harassment of the Committee’s political opponents and is un-American to the core.”
Eight subpoenas from the committee have sought information more directly related to the Capitol unrest, including subpoenas to three right-wing groups and their leaders. Proud Boys International LLC, Oath Keepers, 1st Amendment Praetorian, and each of their chairmen have been summoned by the probe.
On Wednesday, Nicholas Fuentes and Patrick Casey of the America First Movement were handed subpoenas based on the committee’s suspicions of involvement in the chaos that unfolded at the Capitol.
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.
Have you ever wondered what disgraced former deputy FBI directors do after trying to stage a coup and lying under oath? Apparently, they give talks about “protecting democracy” at top-rated institutions of higher learning. Indeed, this last Thursday the University of Chicago invited former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe to join a panel of partisans to discuss the Jan 6 “insurrection.”
The dossier he used to obtain the surveillance warrant was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and, in an ironic twist, was itself the product of Russian disinformation. McCabe and his allies in corporate media justified all sorts of similar illegal and undemocratic tactics to discredit and attempt to unseat President Trump.
Of course, neither the University of Chicago nor McCabe acknowledged the irony in him discussing the integrity of “democracy” in America on Thursday evening. In fact, what McCabe said at the University of Chicago event on Jan. 6, 2022 is even more shocking than his invitation to speak in the first place. Below are four of the most appalling assertions and policy proposals McCabe made at the public event.
1. Conservatives Are in The Same Category As Islamic Terrorists
McCabe likened conservatives to members of the Islamic Caliphate: “I can tell you from my perspective of spending a lot of time focused on the radicalization of international terrorists and Islamic extremist and extremists of all stripes… is that this group shares many of the same characteristics of those groups that we’ve seen radicalized along entirely different ideological lines,” he said.
McCabe went on to describe the rise of the Islamic caliphate in Syria and how Islamic extremists were radicalized across socioeconomic, educational, and racial lines, likening it to the “mass radicalization” of the political right across demographics. That’s right, according to McCabe a grandma who shares a Federalist article on Facebook and your uncle with a “Let’s Go Brandon” coffee mug are in the same category as a jihadist who killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub.
2. Parents at School Board Meetings Pose A ‘Threat To National Security’
“Political violence [is] not just confined to the Capitol,” McCabe asserted. “It’s going on in school boards around the country. It’s going on in local elections. It’s happening, you know, even to health-care workers.” According to this politically protected former FBI no. 2, the “political violence” occurring recently at school board meetings and during local elections is a “very diverse and challenging threat picture.”
If you haven’t heard already, Democrats are branding parents who oppose child mask mandates and racist critical race theory indoctrination as “domestic terrorists.”
McCabe said moms and dads who stand up for their children’s health and education at school board meetings in ways Democrats disagree with are very dangerous. So dangerous that it is actually “essential” we have a “rapid and complete response by law enforcement at the state, local and federal level to this sort of political violence…”
Holding America’s parents “accountable” is not enough for McCabe. He wants to make sure that federal agencies also put “out that message that this sort of conduct that both horribly victimizes individuals, but also serves to undermine our democratic process” is “considered a threat to national security [that is] not tolerated.”
3. McCabe Wants More Surveillance of ‘Mainstream’ Conservatives
“I’m fairly confident,” McCabe said, “[that] the FBI [and other agencies] have reallocated resources and repositioned some of their counterterrorism focus to increase their focus on right-wing extremism and domestic violent extremists. And I think that’s obviously a good idea.”
But McCabe wants more. McCabe asserted that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI need to stop merely focusing on the “fringes of the right-wing movement,” in order to “catch this threat” of the “right.”
“Are you going to catch this threat if your focus is only on the traditional, right-wing extremist, those groups that we know about, the quote-unquote, fringes of the right-wing movement?” asked McCabe. “And I think the answer to that is no.”
“It’s entirely possible that when the intelligence community and the law enforcement community looks out across this mainstream,” McCabe continued, “they didn’t assume [on January 6] that that group of people — business owners, white people from the suburbs, educated, employed — presented a threat of violence, and now we know very clearly that they do.”
McCabe wants to get around constitutional obstacles that restrict the abuses of federal agencies. He explained that the path to granting the feds more power to spy on and punish “extremists,” a.k.a. conservatives, is by implementing federal penalties against “domestic terrorism.”
A measure like this would grant domestic agencies the intelligence capabilities of the international terrorism-focused National Counterterrorism Center. It would, McCabe says, “give investigators the ability to begin investigating when folks are plotting or planning or organizing to use violence for the purpose of coercing the population or influencing government…”
Joshua Geltzer, President Joe Biden’s advisor on “countering domestic violent extremism,” made the same proposal in a 2019 hearing before a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee. In his proposal, Geltzer suggested that we need to “polic[e] [tech company] platforms to remove not just incitement to violence, but also, the ideological foundations that spawn such violence.”
McCabe claims these proposed federal laws against domestic terrorism can be implemented without infringing on Americans’ First Amendment right to free speech. That seems quite impossible, however, given Geltzer is proposing government oversight of social media, for example. It is even more difficult to believe when you consider that Democrats are not going after real domestic terrorists and have literally defined parents speaking out at school board meetings as national security threats. As McCabe said himself, to Democrats, the extreme right is the mainstream right.
4. McCabe Believes No One Is Above The Law (Except Himself)
Ironically, one of McCabe’s last remarks was a proclamation of equality under the law. “Whether you are a Trump supporter or a Biden supporter, right, left, or otherwise, we should all be able to agree on the principle that no one is above the law,” stated McCabe.
“… [F]rom the lowliest trespasser on January 6, up to the highest-ranking government officials who may have been aware of a plan that would ultimately lead to violence in the Capitol––those people should be held accountable, period,” he announced. “And if we can’t do that, that is just another sign that we are becoming a non-functioning democracy.”
Ironically, McCabe’s firing for repeatedly breaking the law was expunged from the record only because he settled with a partisan Biden Department of Justice. If no one is above the law, as McCabe claims to support, then he would be in jail. Of course, McCabe is above the law. Only dissenting conservatives, in his view, deserve the suspicion and wrath of unelected federal agencies.
Disturbingly, the University of Chicago does not care about national introspection post-January 6, 2021. If it did, it would not have invited McCabe, of all people, to speak about “protecting democracy.”
UChicago allowed McCabe to spin lies about what truly happened one year ago and filtered student questions via Zoom, refusing to ask him any tough questions. Consequently, McCabe was given a platform to teach young, impressionable college students without question that the federal government should be weaponized against fellow Americans whom leftists brand as “extremists.”
To the elites in America — Democrats like McCabe, university administrators, and professors – January 6 is the key to labeling their political opponents as dangerous, “white supremacist extremists” and enacting new policy accordingly. America’s universities are now indoctrination machines that shape the minds of the next generation. Academia openly exploits its power and rewrite history to serve their illiberal agenda.
Sadly, McCabe’s dishonest version of January 6 is happily accepted by the academic elites who invited him Thursday night. His frighteningly despotic views and policy prescriptions will likely be accepted and implemented by his young listeners.
Evita Duffy is a senior contributor to The Federalist, co-founder of the Chicago Thinker, and a senior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evitapduffy@uchicago.edu
Former Trump administration State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus clearly made House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff uncomfortable when she pressed him on Tuesday about his promotion of the debunked Steele dossier.
Last week, special counsel John Durham charged Igor Danchenko with five counts of lying to the FBI. Danchenko is a Russian national who worked at the liberal Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and is believed to be a primary source of information contained in the infamous anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. That document was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and was used to help launch the Russia probe in search of ties between the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
Ortagus, who was a guest-hosting ABC’s “The View” on Tuesday, questioned Schiff about his promotion of the Steele dossier and the false narrative underlying it.
“You’ve been really prolific over the past few years being the head of the Intel Committee. You defended, promoted, you even read into the Congressional Record the Steele dossier,” Ortagus said.
“And we know last week the main source of the dossier was indicted by the FBI for lying about most of the key claims in that dossier. Do you have any reflections on your role in promoting this to the American people?” she asked.
Schiff first responded in a reasonable fashion, saying any who lied to the FBI should be prosecuted.
He then defended his conduct.
“We couldn’t have known, for example, people were lying to Christopher Steele. So it was proper to investigate them,” Schiff said.
The congressman added that one benefit of the investigation was learning that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had given polling data to Russian intelligence. Schiff was playing pretty fast and loose with the facts. According to The Associated Press, Manafort gave polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant, who allegedly passed it along to Russian intelligence.
“But Mueller’s team said it couldn’t ‘reliably determine’ Manafort’s purpose in sharing it, nor assess what Kilimnik may have done with it,” the AP reported.
That sort of exaggeration by Schiff was typical throughout the Russia probe.
Ortagus reminded Schiff that Manafort was removed from the campaign in the summer of 2016 when questions arose regarding his past lobbying work for pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs. Further, it should be noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, though filled with Democratic investigators, “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated” with Russia, according to the Justice Department’s Mueller report.
Ortagus then brought the conversation back to Schiff’s role in promoting the whole collusion false narrative and the dossier.
“You may have helped spread Russian disinformation yourself for years by promoting this. I think that’s what Republicans and what people who entrusted you as the Intel Committee chair are so confused about your culpability in all of this,” Ortagus said.
“Well, I completely disagree with your premise,” Schiff responded. “It’s one thing to say allegations should be investigated, and they were. It’s another to say that we should have foreseen in advance that some people were lying to Christopher Steele, which is impossible of course to do.”
The Californian sells himself short. He was constantly out in front of the cameras claiming he was privy to intelligence that he could not share with the public validating the collusion charge. For example in March 2017, NBC “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd asked Schiff if there was anything beyond circumstantial evidence suggesting the Trump campaign’s connection to Russia.
“I can tell you that the case is more than that and I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” Schiff said.
Further questioned whether he had seen direct evidence, the representative responded, “I don’t want to get into specifics but I will say that there is evidence that is not circumstantial and is very much worthy of an investigation.”
.@RepAdamSchiff on Trump/Russia connection: "There is more than circumstantial evidence now…and is very much worthy of investigation." pic.twitter.com/qvw7drsqQX
Despite making claims like that for many months, Schiff never came forward with such evidence, even after Mueller issued his report.
On Tuesday’s showing of “The View,” the Democrat pivoted away from discussing the dossier to raising the issue of the 2019 House Democratic impeachment of Trump and the Capitol incursion to prove investigating him was justified.
You’ll recall it was during the impeachment hearing that Schiff famously made up his own fanciful version of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to build his case that the American leader conducted a shakedown to secure an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden’s shady dealings in Ukraine. This performance was even after Zelensky himself said he felt no pressure from Trump’s call and his country launched no investigation into the Bidens.
Schiff told Ortagus, “None of that is undercut. None of that serious misconduct is in any way diminished by the fact that people lied to Christopher Steele.”
“No. I think just your credibility is,” Ortagus shot back.
Schiff then opted for the verbal attack of a schoolboy, saying, “I think the credibility of your question is in doubt.”
Having boasted about so much with so little pushback from the media, it was refreshing to see his feet actually held to the fire for once.
Randy DeSoto has written more than 2,000 articles for The Western Journal since he joined the company in 2015. He is a graduate of West Point and Regent University School of Law. He is the author of the book “We Hold These Truths” and screenwriter of the political documentary “I Want Your Money.”@RandyDeSoto
Federal agents arrested Igor Danchenko, the primary researcher of a dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, as part of Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Danchenko was taken into custody on Thursday, the New York Times (NYT) first reported. He was employed by Steele’s firm, Orbis Business International, but was previously investigated during the Obama administration as part of a probe into suspected Russian intelligence officers operating in Washington, DC. Before his time at Orbis, Danchenko worked as a Russia analyst at the liberal Brookings Institute, where he became known for accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of plagiarizing his economics dissertation.
Danchenko is charged with five counts of making false statements to investigators.
As part of his work on the Steele dossier, Danchenko claimed to have interviewed six individuals with knowledge of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. However, during a 2017 FBI interview, Danchenko contradicted many of the dossier’s key assertions. As a result, the FBI concluded that “the reliability of the dossier was completely destroyed,”according to Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Danchenko has defended his work on the Steele dossier, describing it as “raw intelligence from credible sources” in a 2020 interview with NYT. The dossier served as primary evidence for the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) warrant request for Trump campaign aide Carter Page, a Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General report found.
As part of his investigation into the origins of the DOJ probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government, Durham has targeted the production and dissemination of the Steele dossier. He indicted former Perkins Coie and Democratic National Committee attorney Michael Sussmann in September for lying to the FBI’s top attorney during a meeting in which Sussmann passed along allegations against the Trump campaign.
U.S. Marine veteran James Kilcer, who thwarted an attempted robbery in an Arizona convenience store last week, received an award Tuesday from the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office while wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt. He was also sporting a red “Make America Great Again” hat, apparently in support of former President Donald Trump.
Sheriff Leon Wilmot presented Kilcer with the YCSO Citizen’s Valor Award, “For extraordinary heroism and exceptional courage while voluntarily coming to the aid of another citizen during an incident involving criminal activity at extreme, life threatening, personal risk in an attempt to save or protect human life,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release.
“The YCSO Citizen’s Valor Award is the highest award for citizens whose actions warrant recognition.”
Surveillance video of Kilcer stopping the robbery at the Chevron convenience store early in the morning on Oct. 20 went viral. The now-U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground employee had just purchased some Gatorades and other items and was talking to the clerk when the suspects came in, Kilcer told the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.
“I heard the door start opening forcefully and my ‘Spidey senses’ or whatever kind of tingling, and I turn around and saw they were coming in real quick,” he said.
The veteran turned around and his military training kicked in as he sought to disarm the robber.
“I was ready: I saw it coming,” Kilcer said. “The minute my hands closed around it, I never lost contact with the gun. And I pulled him down.”
ZERO FEAR: When this Yuma, AZ veteran saw some criminals pop in guns high — he didn't wait for things to potentially go south.
“The Marine Corp taught me not to [mess] around,” he later said.
He held the suspect down until law enforcement arrived. The person arrested was a 14-year-old juvenile who has now been charged with one count of armed robbery and one count of aggravated assault.
“Kilcer served as a tactical air operations technician in the Marine Corps and was deployed to Afghanistan during his time in the military. He credits his actions to his Marine Corps basic training and mindset,” DVIDS reported.
“I guess I was just in the right place at the right time,’’ Kilcer said. “I was doing what needed to be done.”Advertisement – story continues below
While appearing on Fox News on Friday, the Arizonan also waded into the political when he ended the segment, saying with a smile to host Dana Perino, “And remember, [Jeffrey] Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
The Marine who stopped the corner store robbery in the viral video was just on Fox News.
Randy DeSoto has written more than 2,000 articles for The Western Journal since he joined the company in 2015. He is a graduate of West Point and Regent University School of Law. He is the author of the book “We Hold These Truths” and screenwriter of the political documentary “I Want Your Money.”@RandyDeSoto
President Joe Biden, left, meets with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and committee chairs to discuss the coronavirus relief legislation in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 5, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Stefani Reynolds – Pool / Getty Images)
President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda is supposed to tax the wealthy to help the middle class. If you don’t believe me, just ask Biden, who’s more than willing to tell you about it on his Twitter account.
To be fair, I’m assuming the messages aren’t written by Biden himself, a man who seems like his relationship with technology involves yelling at his phone, either asking Siri to find his slippers or telling Scotty to beam him up. However, whoever tweets for him stays on message when it comes to the president’s tax-and-spend plan.
“We’re going to pass a historic middle class tax cut — and we’ll do it by making those at the top pay their fair share,” one tweet from Sunday read. “I know the crowd on Park Ave might not like it, but it’s time we give people in towns like Scranton — the folks I grew up with — a break for a change.”
“From health care to child care, my Build Back Better Agenda will lower everyday costs for middle class Americans,” a tweet from this Monday read.
“I’m not looking to punish anyone, I just think it’s only fair that the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share once again. Then, we’ll use that money to invest in the middle class,” a tweet from last week reads.
“For me it’s pretty simple: It’s about time working people got the tax breaks in this country,” a tweet from the day before that read. “That’s the Build Back Better Agenda.”
From health care to child care, my Build Back Better Agenda will lower everyday costs for middle class Americans. pic.twitter.com/eqzWKmw1wy
I’m not looking to punish anyone, I just think it’s only fair that the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share once again. Then, we’ll use that money to invest in the middle class. pic.twitter.com/xZYMMUo5yi
If someone has to repeat themselves this much, it’s usually because they’re lying — and, lo and behold, the Joint Committee on Taxation seems to have confirmed that.
According to a media release from the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday, the Joint Committee on Taxation — a non-partisan congressional tax scorekeeper — found that almost every income level below the threshold the Biden administration said would be immune would take a hit.
Furthermore, the committee’s analysis found the vast majority of taxpayers would see no benefit from the plan in its current form.
According to the analysis, by the calendar year 2023, nearly 5 percent of those making between $40,000 and $50,000 would see a tax increase. Nine percent of those making between $50,000 and $75,000 would see an increase, 18 percent earning between $75,000 and $100,000 would see their taxes go up and 35 percent of those earning between $100,000 and $200,000 would be subject to a hike.
The media release also noted that the benefit most people see will pretty much be nil.
In 2023, two-thirds of all taxpayers won’t get see any kind of real benefit from the legislation, either seeing their tax bill changed by less than $100 or getting a tax increase.
By 2027, this number would balloon to 85.5 percent, with huge swaths of the middle class seeing a sizable tax increase; these numbers are projected to stay mostly steady until 2031.
Meanwhile, the Joint Committee on Taxation also found that hiking corporate taxes would hit middle-class Americans hard, too.
“Within 10 years of a corporate tax increase from 21 percent to 25 percent, 66.3 percent of the corporate tax burden would be borne by lower- and middle-income taxpayers with income well below $500,000,” an August media release from the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee read.
“This statistic becomes only more striking in absolute number of taxpayers. Of the more than 172 million taxpayers who would bear the burden of the increased corporate tax rate, 98.4 percent, or about 169 million, have incomes under $500,000.”
Of course, the charge from the left would be that this doesn’t take into account what the spending these tax hikes will pay for is going to buy for the middle class. Beyond the fact these “investments” never bring back the kind of returns that are promised, Biden promised a middle-class tax cut. At least in the plan’s current form, it doesn’t look like it’ll end up delivering — no matter what the president says.
Do you know who did lower taxes on the middle class? Former President Donald Trump.
Joe Biden may have spent much of the campaign whining about Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which slashed taxes across the board. Most of the outrage focused on the fact he didn’t soak the rich: “Tax experts estimate that over the long run, 83% of Trump’s tax giveaway will flow to the top 1% of earners in this country,” Biden’s campaign website read.
And yet, in March of 2020, MarketWatch reported that “Americans paid almost $64 billion less in federal income taxes during the first year under the Republican tax overhaul signed into law in late 2017 by President Donald Trump, with some of the sharpest drops clustered among taxpayers earning between $25,000 and $100,000 a year, even as the overall number of refunds dropped during a turbulent tax season” in 2019.
Biden plans on taking that away. In return, he’s offered nothing of substance — except, as promised, he’s soaking the rich. And the upper-middle class. And some people in the middle class, too. But mainly the rich. See, priorities!
Biden may not be giving people in towns like Scranton — the folks he grew up with — a break the same way Trump did. But at least they can watch as his administration takes (and then squanders) Park Avenue’s money. He’ll be squandering Scranton’s money, too, but at least they get the joy of class-based schadenfreude out of the deal.
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.
U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, holds a press briefing about the U.S. military drawdown in Afghanistan, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., September 1, 2021. / Getty Images
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark Milley secretly promised to warn the head of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army before the United States would carry out any “attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
The shocking anecdote is described in a new book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, which discloses the extent to which the Pentagon worked to subvert former president Donald Trump’s foreign policy goals. Trump’s rhetoric toward China, according to a Washington Post summary, increasingly alarmed Milley, who suspected the president might order a surprise strike.
“I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley reportedly told Gen. Li Zoucheng, on Oct. 30, 2020. Milley went on to highlight the close relationship between the two men, saying, “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Milley never informed the president of the conversation. He called Li again on Jan. 8, 2021 to “address Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6,” according to the Washington Post.
“We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine,” Milley told Li. “But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”
Milley’s fears—which later proved erroneous as there is no evidence Trump attempted to, or even considered a strike against China during his last days in office—were in part prompted by the then-president signing an order to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by Jan. 15, 2021. That order never went through, but, according to a summary of the book by CNN, “Milley could not forget that Trump had done an end run around his top military advisers.”
A spokeswoman for the Joint Chiefs declined to comment.
Out of fear that China could “lash out” against the United States, Milley sought to unilaterally defuse tensions between the two countries on Jan. 8, 2021. He called the chief Navy official in charge of America’s Indo-Pacific Command and told him to postpone scheduled military exercises. That same day, Milley spoke with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), who grew concerned Trump might order a nuclear strike.
“What I’m saying to you is that if they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do? And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?” Pelosi said, adding that Trump has “been crazy for a long time.”
Milley responded by saying, “I agree with you on everything,” and assured her that the military would not authorize any military strikes, which, according to Costa and Woodward, meant he “was overseeing the mobilization of America’s national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world.”
According to the book’s authors, Milley considered President Joe Biden’s “50 years” of experience in politics as reason to “always give him decision space,” even as the White House agreed with the previous administration on a full withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan.
“Here’s a couple of rules of the road here that we’re going to follow,” Milley said in private remarks to the Joint Chiefs. “One is you never, ever, ever box in a president of the United States.”
Milley’s comments during a June congressional hearing, in which he defended the teaching of critical race theory in the armed services, sparked outrage and accusations that he was overseeing a politicization of the military.
“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” Milley said in his testimony. “I have read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin—that doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”
Remember when House Democrats accused former President Donald Trump of pressuring Ukraine to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden while leveraging military aid as collateral during a phone call with Ukraine’s president in 2019? I do. The accusation prompted Trump’s first impeachment on the grounds of “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress” that December, according to the U.S. Sun.
Now, two years later, it’s President Joe Biden who’s responsible for talks with world leaders, talks like the one House Democrats used to attack Trump. And, to afford Biden similar scrutiny to what Trump received, one particular aspect of Biden’s last call with now-former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani seems especially interesting.
Biden’s final call with Ghani came on July 23 — three weeks before Kabul fell to Taliban forces and Islamic extremism toppled 20 years of democratic progress in the country. The two discussed “military aid, political strategy and messaging” for approximately 14 minutes, Reuters reported on Tuesday after reviewing what it said was a transcript and audio of the exchange provided by an anonymous source. One particular aspect of the leaked transcript appears especially damning for Biden, as the New York Post pointed out.
The Post noted the transcript shows Biden “pressured” Ghani to “‘create the perception’ that the Taliban weren’t winning, ‘whether it is true or not.’”
“I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said during the call, according to Reuters.
“And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
Biden’s pressuring went a step further, however, according to Reuters.
If Ghani could successfully fool the public into thinking the Afghan government had plans to control what Reuters called the “spiraling situation” of the Taliban’s resurgence, Biden would offer aid.
“We will continue to provide close air support, if we know what the plan is,” Biden said, according to Reuters.
The outlet added that, just days before the call, the U.S. supported Afghan security forces with air strikes against the Taliban. The Taliban maintained that these air strikes violated the Doha peace agreement signed under the Trump administration.
To provide some context, the Taliban had already advanced into approximately half of Afghanistan’s district centers at the time of the phone call, the Post noted. Just three weeks later, the nation’s capital would be directly threatened by Taliban forces. Ghani fled just before the city fell. But before that would happen, Biden advised Ghani during their exchange to employ prominent Afghan political and military figures — including former Afghan President Hamid Karzai — to further generate the sense of security, the Post added.
“That will change perception, and that will change an awful lot, I think,” Biden said, according to Reuters.
At another point in the conversation, Biden said a change in the Afghan government’s strategy would do more than help “on the ground,” Reuters reported. It would generate support for the Ghani regime internationally.
“I’m not a military guy, so I’m not telling you what that plan should precisely look like, you’re going to get not only more help, but you’re going to get a perception that is going to change,” he said, according to Reuters.
It was never OK to give Afghans or our allies a false sense of security in light of the danger steadily progressing across the country.
Afghan civilians and U.S. allies alike (particularly those in Europe) have since succumbed to a grim reality in one way or another — either being forced to flee their homes, scramble to return to their home countries (if residing there on behalf of another nation) or stay behind in the Taliban’s wake.
And it makes our president look like a liar.
Now, as September begins, the aftermath of the U.S.’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan seems clearer every day.
Our allies are furious with us, Gold Star families mourn the loss of our 13 heroes killed in action during an ISIS suicide bombing outside of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport and several Americans and U.S. allies have since been left behind in the region.
We can only expect things to get worse from here.
Amid the bombshell leaked transcript of Biden and Ghani’s exchange that’s likely to make headway in the news, it’s reasonable to wonder whether Biden’s coercion and deception will stick to his image or roll off his shoulders as if he’s covered in Teflon.
Considering the establishment media’s — and our elected officials’ — histories of handling Biden with kid gloves, the likely answer is already clear.
Taylor Penley is a political commentator residing in Northwest Georgia. She holds a BA in English with minors in rhetoric/writing and global studies from Dalton State College. As a student, she worked in government relations and interned for Georgia’s 14th congressional district. She previously published an article with Future Female Leaders and published her rhetorical analysis of President Reagan’s Berlin Wall Speech in a collegiate journal. She seeks to study journalism or communication in graduate school.
The Senate on Tuesday passed its bipartisan infrastructure bill, moving what would be the largest public works package in decades one step closer to becoming law months after negotiations first began. The bill, which advocates praised as the largest investment in America’s infrastructure since the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, passed 69-30. Nineteen Republicans joined every Democrat in voting for the package.
The legislation, titled the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), was on a glide path to passage after beating a Senate filibuster Sunday night, when 68 senators voted to end debate.
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the bill’s lead Democratic negotiator, said Monday on the Senate floor that the bill would “make America stronger and safer, create good-paying jobs and expand economic opportunities across the country,” and praised her colleagues for their commitment to reaching an agreement. “This is what it looks like when elected leaders take a step toward healing our country’s divisions rather than feeding [them],” she added.
The IIJA costs $1.2 trillion over eight years, $550 billion of which is new government spending, and puts hundreds of billions of federal dollars toward roads, bridges, ports, broadband and more. It was led by Ohio Sen. Rob Portman on the Republican side, and was the product of negotiations among 22 senators and President Joe Biden.
“[This is] landmark and needed legislation in fixing our roads, railroads, our ports, electrical grid and more,” Portman said on the floor. “I’m proud of what was done on that … It will improve the lives of all Americans. It’s long-term spending to repair and replace and build assets that will last for decades.”
Talks first began with West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, but collapsed after she and the White House could not agree on the overall size and scope of the bill. Negotiations then shifted to the bipartisan group, but remained precarious for weeks as they struggled to compromise on how to finance the new spending and what it should cover.
It was late July when Portman announced that the group had reached agreement on the “major issues,” and that Republicans were ready to move forward.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema speaks after the bipartisan bill cleared its first procedural vote in July. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The bill cleared its first procedural vote hours later with the support of 17 Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a clear indication that it had the necessary support to beat a filibuster and pass. Two days later, 16 Republicans joined Democrats in officially voting to begin debate.
Senators originally sought to pass the bill last week or over the weekend, but were blocked from doing so by Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty, who refused to forgo hours of scheduled debate. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the bill would add $256 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years, arguing that the legislation was not fully paid for, unlike what its negotiators previously said.
Hagerty’s delays earned praise from former President Donald Trump on Sunday, who had repeatedly tried to intimidate Republicans into opposing the package. In multiple email statements he disparaged McConnell for supporting the bill, calling it a “disgrace” and the “beginning of the Green New Deal,” and floated backing primary challengers against other Republicans who backed it.
With the IIJA’s passing, senators are now set to take up their budget resolution, keeping them in Washington for another marathon session with dozens of politically tricky amendment votes and eating into their prized August recess. The mammoth resolution, unveiled by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday, addresses priorities omitted from the infrastructure bill including health care, climate change and immigration and as outlined costs $3.5 trillion.
“This legislation in so many ways begins to address the working families of our country,” Sanders said on the Senate floor Monday. “But in one important way, maybe the most important, is as we address the needs of our people in health care and education and climate, we are going to create many millions of good-paying jobs that the American people desperately need.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders authored Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget, which he has acknowledged will likely pass on party lines. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
While Republicans unanimously oppose the reconciliation package, Senate rules allow for Democrats to pass it with just a simple majority vote, meaning that it could pass strictly along party lines if their caucus all votes for it.
McConnell on Tuesday accused Democrats of playing “Russian roulette with our country” and said the budget would be the “largest peacetime tax hike on record.”
“This new reckless taxing and spending spree will fall like a hammer blow on workers and middle-class families,” McConnell said. “If all 50 Democrats want to help [Budget Committee] Chairman Sanders hurt middle-class families … well, that’s their prerogative, but we’re going to argue it out right here on the floor at some length.”
Several progressives, however, have sought to tie the bipartisan bill with the reconciliation package, with some in the House hinging their support for the former on Senate Democrats passing the latter. In an attempt to hold her narrow majority together, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she will not bring the bipartisan bill up for a vote until the Senate passes the reconciliation package as well, despite moderates urging her to bring up the infrastructure package as soon as possible.
Others have also been critical of the infrastructure bill, which was adopted as a substitute for the $715 billion surface transportation bill that the House passed in July, arguing that it inadequately invests in climate, housing, child care and more.
Oregon Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio, the chair of the House Transportation Committee, reportedly called the bill “crap” after a deal was reached, lamenting the fact that it omitted large swaths of the transportation bill he authored and disregarding the White House’s endorsement of it.
“I could give a damn about the White House. We’re an independent branch of government,” he told reporters in July. “They cut this deal. I didn’t sign off on it.”
A Florida man who breached the Senate floor on Jan. 6 while carrying a Trump flag was the first Capitol rioter sentenced with a felony offense.
Prosecutors are seeking a minimum 18-month sentence for Paul Allard Hodgkins. In a July 14 court filing, they alleged that he, “like each rioter, contributed to the collective threat to democracy” as they forced lawmakers, reporters, staff and Vice President Mike Pence into hiding as they convened to certify President Joe Biden’s victory.
He was sentenced to eight months in prison.
Video footage described in the report shows Hodgkins, 38, sporting a Trump T-shirt and flag on the Senate floor. At one point he took a selfie with the self-described shaman, who is also awaiting trial for participating in the riot.
Rioters enter the Senate Chamber on January 6. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Lawyers for Hodgkins had argued that the court of public opinion was enough punishment to avoid a prison sentence.
“Whatever punishment this court may provide will pale in comparison to the scarlet letter Mr. Hodgkins will wear for the rest of his life,” his lawyer, Patrick N. Leduc, wrote in a filing on July 12.
That filing likens Hodgkins’ actions to those of Anna Lloyd Morgan, a 49-year-old from Indiana who was the first of hundreds to be sentenced. She pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in June and was given three years of probation.
Hundreds of rioters stormed the Capitol as Congress sought to certify President Joe Biden’s victory. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Though Hodgkins was never accused of assaulting anyone or damaging property, prosecutors noted that when he boarded a bus from Tampa, Florida, to D.C. he had rope, protective goggles and latex gloves, and said that demonstrated that he was prepared for violence.
Prosecutors also said, however, that Hodgkins deserved leniency for immediately coming forward and pleading guilty to his obstruction charge, which carries a maximum sentence of two decades. But they noted that “time and time again, rather than turn around and retreat, he pressed forward.”
“When a mob is prepared to attack the Capitol to prevent elected officials from both parties from performing their constitutional and statutory duty, democracy is in trouble,” Federal District Judge Randolph Moss said Monday. “The damage that they caused that day is way beyond the delays that day. It is a damage that will persist in this country for decades.”
Leduc argued in his filing that Hodgkins was “a man who for just one hour on one day lost his bearings” and “made a fateful decision to follow the crowd.” It also noted former President Abraham Lincoln’s attempt to reconcile immediately after the Civil War.
“The court has a chance to emulate Lincoln,” Leduc wrote.
On Thursday, Arizona Republicans issued a major announcement related to the audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 general election results. During the proceedings, Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann, along with state Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen, gave the floor to auditors who announced that as many as 74,000 absentee ballot mail-in records are missing in addition to a great many vote irregularities found by the audit.
“… as many as 74,000 absentee ballot mail-in records are missing in addition to a great many vote irregularities found by the audit.“
Fann began the hearing by introducing three individuals who played key roles in the state audit.
Lead auditor Doug Logan first introduced a video clip that detailed the process and emphasized the security measures that were taken to ensure the audit could proceed safely.
Former Arizona Secretary of State and Arizona Senate liaison Ken Bennett then provided specifics of the audit, including how many ballots were received and examined, how data was collected and examined from voting equipment and which security protocols were enforced while the audit took place.
The liaison noted that the examination of duplicate ballots was a particularly strenuous process. Duplicate ballots are typically produced when a ballot becomes damaged or is improperly marked.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said that he was undecided on his retirement in a new interview. Speaking with CNN in an interview published Thursday, the 83-year-old Breyer answered “no” when asked if he knew when he would retire. He gave two reasons that would contribute to an eventual decision: “Primarily, of course, health,” Breyer said. “Second, the court.”
Liberals have urged Breyer to step down at the end of the court’s current term so that President Joe Biden can name a younger, liberal justice to the bench while Democrats hold a Senate majority. But Breyer told CNN that he was happy as the court’s highest-ranking liberal, saying that it had “made a difference” to him.
The nine Supreme Court justices in April, 2021. Breyer sits in the front row, second from the right. (ERIN SCHAFF/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
He has also warned against packing the Supreme Court, warning in April that doing so could further erode Americans’ trust in it. He defended the court’s refusal to hear former President Donald Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election, noting that the “court is guided by legal principle, not politics.”
Breyer has been on the court since 1994, longer than any justice except for Clarence Thomas, who was confirmed in 1991.
Increased enforcement of a ban on imported products made with forced labor has led to cargo stoppages and complaints from importers, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers are charged with enforcing the ban on goods, such a cotton and tomato products from the Xinjiang region of China, where Uyghurs are detained in forced labor camps. The bans were first put in place during the Trump administration in an effort to remove forced labor from import supply chains, the WSJ reported.
The ban on cotton from the region has had an impact on retailers who rely heavily on the commodity and must prove their supply chains don’t rely on slave labor, the WSJ reported. Importers have three months from the time of detainment to prove products pass CBP standards, if not, cargoes will be exported or abandoned.
Retailer Uniqlo Co, had a shipment of men’s shirts detained in January at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach because customs officers suspected it violated the December ban on Xinjiang cotton, according to internal CBP documents, the WSJ reported.
This photo taken on June 2, 2019 shows buildings at the Artux City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center, believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, north of Kashgar in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. (Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)
Uniqlo objected, providing documents that showed the cotton came from Australia, Brazil and the U.S., the WSJ reported. But CBP still did not release the cargo, citing that the company was unable to prove the shirts weren’t made using forced labor.
Representatives for the retail industry say the burden of proof is too high and that expectations are unclear, the WSJ reported.
“It turns U.S. jurisprudence on its head. As opposed to innocent until proven guilty, it is now guilty until proven innocent,” said Nate Herman, senior vice president of policy at American Apparel & Footwear Association, the WSJ reported. ”Companies don’t know what they are trying to prove because they don’t know what part of the shipment triggered the detention or why it was in violation.”
One possible factor for the lack of transparency and stalled imports could be a shortage of CBP staff, which “limits its ability to pursue forced labor investigations,” a Government Accountability Office report said in October.
Trade lawyers and business groups said they expect more import bans and disputed shipments, due to an increasing focus on human rights, the WSJ reported.
“As President Biden made clear at the recent G7 summit, the United States will not tolerate modern-day slavery in our supply chains,” said Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas in a press release Thursday. “This Withhold Release Order demonstrates we continue to protect human rights and international labor standards and promote a more fair and competitive global marketplace by fulfilling the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to ending forced labor.”
Suzi Voyles is no stranger to elections. And after monitoring voting in Atlanta-area Fulton County, Georgia, for two decades, Voyles said that the highly contentious 2020 election proved to be unlike any other. Voyles testified that as she thumbed through a stack of mail-in ballots last November, strangely “pristine” ballots printed on stock paper different from the others seized her attention.
What did these ballots have in common?
Voyles testified that each ballot contained uniformly filled-in ovals, and every one presented an identical crescent-shaped “void” inside them — indicating the ballots weren’t filled in with pencil or pen, but rather by toner ink.
“Every single ballot was absolutely identical and they appeared to be printed with some sort of marking device,” Voyles said. “And the fact that there was a little eclipse in an oval that was void in exactly the same spot in all these ballots, we didn’t see any differentiation — even when it came to the Senate candidates or when it came to some of the referendums on the back.”
“Everything was precisely the same. I’ve never seen that before in 20 years,” Voyles said. She added that these suspicious ballots had no creases or folds indicative of other mail-in ballots extracted from envelopes.
Voyles wasn’t alone in her testimony.
According to RealClear Investigations, at least three other Fulton County poll workers reported that they encountered the same enigma in other stacks of absentee ballots and have joined Voyles in “swearing under penalty of perjury that [the ballots] looked fake.”
Eight months later, we see the same suspicion resurging in the Republican stronghold that unexpectedly flipped blue for the first time since 1992. Using affidavits to convince a state judge to warrant a closer inspection of ballots for potential illicit election activity, election integrity advocates assert that Biden’s late surge of 12,000 votes was manufactured — and for good reason.
“We have what is almost surely major absentee-ballot fraud in Fulton County involving 10,000 to 20,000 probably false ballots,” Garland Favorito, poll watcher and a lead petitioner in the case against fraudulent ballots, told RealClear Investigations.
“We have confirmed that there are five pallets of shrink-wrapped ballots in a county warehouse,” he added, reiterating his claim.
As questions surrounding the legitimacy of the 2020 election outcome continued in Georgia, as well as other states, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ordered on May 21 that 147,000 ballots be unsealed and asked that officials guard the warehouse containing these ballots until an inspection date could be set, according to the report. Unfortunately, the warehouse’s security was breached only eight days later. According to Favorito, “The front door was [found] unlocked and wide open in violation of the court order.”
County officials did confirm that security motion detectors were triggered shortly after deputies left the premises, but said the room containing the ballots was “never breached or compromised.”
Still, Favorito — and likely many others — would not be convinced and Favorito seeks to obtain security footage to supplement the investigation, the report states.
Still, all of the contention brewing in the Peach State appears to reaffirm many suspicions that have arisen since Nov. 3 — and may validate Voyle’s bombshell claims. We can’t allow our officials to ignore their obligation to ensure fair, ethical elections for all Americans.
If we do, we have surrendered the most integral aspect of our republic.
Taylor Penley is a government relations intern and student studying English, rhetoric and global studies. She plans to graduate in May 2021 and begin a master of arts program in political science this fall.
In contrast with brief comments from President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris prior to Memorial Day, former President Donald Trump released a statement on Monday to remind Americans of the reasons behind the holiday.
“On this Memorial Day, we remember the fallen heroes who took their last breaths in defense of our Nation, our families, our citizens, and our sacred freedoms,” Trump wrote in a statement.
“The depth of their devotion, the steel of their resolve, and the purity of their patriotism has no equal in human history. On distant battlefields, in far-off oceans, and high in the skies above, they faced down our enemies and gave their lives so that America would prevail,” the former president added.
Trump also highlighted the “supreme sacrifice” given by many armed forces personnel who have served the nation.
“They made the supreme sacrifice so that our people can live in safety and our Nation can thrive in peace. It is because of their gallantry that we can together, as one people, continue our pursuit of America’s glorious destiny,” he said.
Trump referred to the service of America’s fallen heroes as “immortal,” highlighting loyalty to those who have paid the ultimate price with their lives on the battlefield.
“We owe all that we are, and everything we ever hope to be, to these unrivaled heroes. Their memory and their legacy is immortal. Our loyalty to them and to their families is eternal and everlasting,” he said.
In contrast to the “woke” promotions highlighted in recent military ads, Trump referred to the nation’s military personnel as warriors.
“America’s warriors are the single greatest force for justice, peace, liberty, and security among all the nations ever to exist on earth. God bless our fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Coast Guardsmen, Airmen, and Marines. We honor them today, forever, and always,” Trump said.
The former president’s statement serves as a follow-up to his Thursday attacks on the Biden administration before Memorial Day.
“With Memorial Day Weekend coming up, tomorrow people start driving in the biggest automobile days of the year,” Trump said in the statement.
“I’m sorry to say the gasoline prices that you will be confronted with are far higher than they were just a short number of months ago where we had gasoline under $2 a gallon.”
Trump’s statement also strongly contrasted Twitter posts by both Biden and Harris entering the holiday weekend.
Biden tweeted, “Stay cool this weekend, folks.” He later added a more traditional Memorial Day statement.
Harris simply posted Friday, “Enjoy the long weekend.”
The vice president’s initial post angered many on social media who found her whimsical words offensive, as Memorial Day commemorates Americans who have died in the armed forces.
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. Attorney John Durham (Youtube screen capture/Fox News)
Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to probation on Friday for altering an email about former Trump aide Carter Page’s relationship with the CIA. District Court Judge James Boasberg ordered Clinesmith to receive 12 months of probation and perform 400 hours of community service, a sentence far more lenient than the three to six months in prison sought by John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut.
Clinesmith, who was an assistant general counsel in the FBI’s cyber law branch, pleaded guilty on Aug. 19, 2020 to altering a June 2017 email he received from a CIA employee regarding Page. The CIA employee wrote that Page had been “a source”for the spy agency through 2013. Clinesmith forwarded the email to FBI colleagues but altered the document to say that Page was “not a source.”(RELATED: Carter Page Wants A Say At Kevin Clinesmith’s Hearing)
Clinesmith helped the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team, which investigated possible links between the Russian government and Trump campaign, draft applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants on Page. He later joined the special counsel’s team, but was removed after the Justice Department inspector general found that he sent text messages criticizing President Trump following the 2016 election.
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 02: Carter Page, former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, speaks to the media after testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on November 2, 2017 in Washington, DC. The committee is conducting an investigation into Russia’s tampering in the 2016 election. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Boasberg said that Clinesmith’s actions “undermined the integrity of the FISA process,” but that he believed that Clinesmith was remorseful and did not alter the email to harm Page. Boasberg said that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court’s “reputation has suffered from this incident.”
The IG blasted the FBI for providing misleading information to the FISA Court in order to obtain warrants on Page, a former Navy officer who joined the Trump campaign in March 2016. The Crossfire Hurricane team relied heavily on unverified and since-debunked allegations from Christopher Steele, a former British spy who investigated the Trump campaign on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC. Prosecutors asserted that Clinesmith had not taken full responsibility for his actions. They noted that he has claimed that he believed the alteration to be accurate at the time.
Anthony Scarpelli, an assistant U.S. attorney, said during the hearing that Clinesmith’s lies about Carter Page were “more egregious” than those told by George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide who pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI. Speaking at Clinesmith’s hearing, Page said that the “manufactured scandal and associated lies caused me to adopt the lifestyle of an international fugitive for years.”
“I often have felt as if I had been left with no life at all. Each member of my family was severely impacted.”
Page has sued the Justice Department, FBI, Clinesmith and other current and former FBI employees over the inaccurate FISA applications.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a majority of Republicans voted Tuesday in favor of Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s motion to dismiss the impeachment trial against former President Donald Trump. As senators prepared for the impeachment trial, Paul introduced a motion arguing that the trial is unconstitutional since Trump is now a private citizen and exempt from facing removal from office. However, five Republican senators and every Senate Democrat voted to table the motion, pushing Trump’s impeachment trial forward.
THESE FIVE GOP SENATORS VOTED TO TABLE THE MOTION:
Maine Sen. Collins
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney
Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse
Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) heads to the Senate floor before being called into session on January 26, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
“I think there will be enough support on it to show there’s no chance they can impeach the president,” Paul told reporters before the vote. “If 34 people support my resolution that this is an unconstitutional proceeding, it shows they don’t have the votes and we’re basically wasting our time.” (RELATED: Rand Paul Will Force Vote On The Constitutionality Of Trump’s Upcoming Senate Trial)
President Trump issued 73 pardons and commuted the federal sentences of 70 other people in the final hours of his administration, headlined by former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. Trump also granted relief to rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, who were convicted on weapons charges, as well as to former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick, a Democrat, was convicted of mail fraud, wire fraud, and racketeering. He was serving a 28-year sentence. Trump through the White House press secretary cited Diamond and Silk and Pastor Paula White, strong supporters of his, as backers of commuting Kilpatrick’s sentence.
Elliott Broidy, the former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, received a full presidential pardon. He was convicted on one count of conspiracy to serve as an unregistered agent of a foreign principal. Trump invoked Rep. Devin Nunes of California and Ambassador Richard Grenell, among other friends of the White House, as supporters of the pardon.
The last-minute acts of clemency cap four years of controversial pardons of supporters and allies, including former 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Republican operative Roger Stone, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign aide George Papadopoulos, former Reps. Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins, and Charles Kushner, father of the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.
Other recipients of Trump pardons who raised eyebrows included former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, four Iraq War veterans convicted in a Blackwater shooting, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, and Scooter Libby, who had served as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Trump pardoned Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two former border patrol agents whose cases had long been championed by immigration hawks.
Trump has also occasionally issued pardons to further the goals of criminal justice reform, such as when he granted clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, a first-time nonviolent drug offender who spent 21 years in prison. “That means you can do whatever you want in life,” Trump told her in the Oval Office earlier this year. He had previously commuted her life sentence in 2018.
Death Row Records co-founder Michael “Harry O” Harris was granted early release from prison, where he had served three decades for attempted murder and cocaine trafficking. Rapper Snoop Dogg praised the move. These acts of clemency have generally received more positive reviews than Trump’s pardons of political supporters and personal associates, rekindling the former reality TV star’s once-chummy relationship with Hollywood.
Kim Kardashian West has visited the White House to advise Trump on less famous people who could benefit from pardons and commutations. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, tweeted Wednesday night that he was “more interested” in seeing Trump’s pardons than President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees.
A number low-level drug offenders were included in the current Trump list. Some supporters had hoped he would strike against the “deep state” by pardoning WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Edward Snowden, who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency while a federal contractor. They were not on the pardons list.
Trump has also used the pardon power to strike back at the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller, which the president has regularly described as the “Russia hoax.” This led to the pardons of Manafort, Stone, Papadopoulos, and, to a lesser extent, Flynn. Trump repeated the phrase “Russian collusion hoax” in announcing a full pardon for Paul Erickson. Mueller’s final report did not establish the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 presidential election.
Bannon was charged with defrauding donors who hoped to help privately fund the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, a key Trump campaign promise. Bannon, a staunch proponent of the president’s populist and nationalist variant of conservatism both before and after serving in the White House, has denied the allegations. He had yet to stand trial.
In the days leading up to the final pardons, there was rampant speculation that Trump might pardon family members or even himself. Acts of clemency for Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, or Ivanka Trump, three of the president’s adult children, were thought to complicate any political future they or their spouses might be entertaining. The constitutionality of a presidential self-pardon has been debated by legal scholars.
Trump was reportedly warned by top aides not to pardon anyone involved in the “Stop the Steal” rally prior to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by die-hard supporters of the president who were protesting the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory. The House voted to impeach Trump for inciting the riot, and a Senate trial will follow after he leaves office, potentially paving the way for legislation to prevent him from running again in 2024. Five people died in the riots.
Trump has steadfastly maintained the election was stolen due to widespread voter fraud, though he has in recent days acknowledged “a new administration” will be taking power at the conclusion of his term. The slew of pardons beginning in December were also seen as a concession that his time in the White House was coming to a close.
US President Donald Trump gestures during a Keep America Great Rally at Kellogg Arena December 18, 2019, in Battle Creek, Michigan. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
On his last full day in office, President Donald Trump enjoys a 51 percent approval rating, according to Rasmussen Reports, one of only about three polling firms that have a proven track record for legitimacy and accuracy. Most of the other polls are crap. Rigged. Fake. Not worthy of anyone’s time.
Trump’s disapproval rating sits at just 48 percent.
There are a lot of media polls that show Trump’s approval rating in the low forties, and even in the thirties. But, over the course of the last few election cycles, we have learned that these are almost all fake polls, rigged polls, polls that in no way reflect reality.And we know this because when the ultimate poll is taken on Election Day, the media polls are all wrong. The whole point of media polls is to mislead, demoralize, and deceive the American people into believing Trump is less popular than he really is.
Time and again, Rasmussen has proven to be reliable and accurate, which tells us the insanity of the Capitol Hill riot and the corporate media’s determination to blame the president for it — even though he expressly called on that crowd to be respectful and peaceful, even though he almost immediately called for the anarchy to stop once it began (which is more than any Democrat has ever done) — is not penetrating into the electorate at large.
People don’t trust the media and are not listening to the media, and why should they? The media have lied about everything for nearly a decade now.
So basically, all this unfounded left-wing hysteria is affecting absolutely nothing outside the corporate media bubble, even though the hysteria has gone so far that we now have to look at the kabuki theater of the military shutting down Washington, D.C., which includes fences covered in razor wire. This is all being done in an effort to fool people into believing Trump supporters are some sort of danger to His Fraudulency Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Oh, and did you know there is no evidence of any threats against His Fraudulency? That’s right, none.
What’s more, in this particular poll, Trump’s job approval rating has actually INCREASED since the Capitol Hill riot. What had been a 47 percent approval rating on January 7 is now a 51 percent approval rating, a bump of four points in approval.
Because Wednesday is Trump’s last full day in office, this will be Rasmussen’s final tracking of his daily approval numbers.
I do hope that those of you still naïve enough to be fooled by the fake news media pay attention to this poll. One trick the fake media are quite good at is delivering the impression they can still shape public opinion and move that needle. But what more proof do you need of how impotent the modern-day media are than this poll?
For two weeks the public have been gaslit by every corner of the dominant culture into believing Trump called for a riot and that Washington, D.C., is under imminent threat of attack by Trump supporters (when the truth is that there’s zero evidence of any kind of attack). To back up this nonsense, His Fraudulency and Capitol Hill Democrats have basically declared martial law around the White House, and what’s the result…
Trump’s approval rating has INCREASED and he leaves office with a perfectly respectable 51 percent.
Don’t let the media grifters and liars fool you. The only power they have left is to gin up violence in Democrat-run cities.
No one else is paying attention.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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.
President Donald Trump called for his supporters to remain peaceful during the transition of power during the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden in a statement released on Wednesday.
“In light of reports of more demonstrations, I urge that there must be NO violence, NO lawbreaking, and NO vandalism of any kind,” the president said in a statement to reporters that was first published by Fox News.
Trump reminded his supporters that he did not stand for violent protests amid reports that there were other uprisings planned around the country.
“That is not what I stand for, and it is not what America stands for,” he said. “I call on ALL Americans to help ease tensions and calm tempers.”
Trump’s message was released Wednesday afternoon as the House of Representatives, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, moved to impeach the president on the basis that he incited the mob of his supporters to attack Capitol Hill.
A senior Trump adviser told Fox News that the president wanted Big Tech companies to “join with him” to secure a peaceful transition of power.
“This is a critical time in our nation’s history and surely we can all come together to deliver this important message and not continue to play partisan politics,” the adviser told Fox News.
Denouncing partisan hypocrisy, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio slammed Democrats on Wednesday for their use of a double standard when it comes to objecting to an election.
Jordan spoke as the House moved forward with the process of impeaching President Donald Trump, citing last week’s Capitol incursion and Trump’s words and action before, during and after the violence. Jordan is among the Republicans opposing impeachment, which is likely to pass the House. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said impeachment is unlikely to make it on the Senate calendar until after Trump’s term in office has ended.
Jordan said that Republicans who last week wanted to voice objections to the Electoral College vote that gave President-elect Joe Biden his victory were only doing something Democrats have done before.
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“In his opening remarks, the Democrat chair of the Rules Committee said that Republicans last week voted to overturn the results of an election. Guess who the first objector was on Jan. 6, 2017? First objector: the Democrat chairman of the Rules Committee,” Jordan said, referring to Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts.
“And guess which state he objected to? Alabama. The very first state called. Alabama. President Trump, I think, won Alabama by like 80 points,” Jordan said, before consulting notes and saying that Trump in fact won the state by 30 points.
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.
On Oct. 18, 2020, Twitter banned the account of Dr. Scott Atlas for defending President Donald Trump’s position on mask mandates. In his tweet, he cited scientific studies, and the tweet contained absolutely no false information.
Also in October, Twitter banned the account of The New York Post for accurately reporting on a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Today we know these were just the first salvos in this evil company’s assault on American liberty.
For all its talk about safety, community, and the health of discourse, we see today that Twitter acts in favor of one interest and one interest alone: its own, even when it means destabilizing the American people. On Friday, the company permanently banned Trump from its platform and began a purge of conservative voices. They claim this is needed to protect America from a coup. That is a farcical lie. They did it because their political enemies such as Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley are now out of power, and they mean to keep it way.
As a private company, Twitter is free to do as it pleases. And I am free to call them what they are: ashill for communist Chinathat seeks the destruction of America. Do you doubt that? Then explain why Iran can call for Jews to be killed on Twitter’s platform and China can spread propaganda about how rounding up Uyghur men and forced sterilization of Uyghur women is actually good, but Donald Trump can’t tweet. It is evil. And anyone defending Jack Dorsey’s death machine is complicit.
We live in two Americas right now. In Republican-led Florida and Texas, economies are open, people go to restaurants and movies, small businesses can prosper. In Democrat-led New York and California, lockdowns are crushing the people. They are not allowed to gather in person, only on big tech platforms. Guess which outcome Twitter prefers?
Now compare the effects of COVID on these two Americas. There is no rational way to argue that the lockdowns led to better results.
I want to put this as clearly as possible. Twitter attempted and largely succeeded in silencing dissent to policies that were against its own interests. They don’t care about the suicides, overdoses, missed cancer screenings, or poverty caused by these actions, they only care about money and power. Blood is dripping from Jack Dorsey’s hands across the globe and here at home as he counts his billions.
Feckless Democrats and faux conservatives applaud or look the other way at Twitter’s actions because it serves their purposes; the poor, blind fools have no idea that they will be next. This has nothing to do with the Constitution, or laws, this has to do with Dorsey being a liar who orchestrates mass disinformation campaigns on the American people. Twitter’s safety guidelines have nothing to do with safety, they have to do with profit.
I am not writing here about Section 230, or legislative approaches to rein in Big Tech. That can come later. I am writing to make it clear that Twitter has played a central role in destroying Americans’ lives through lockdowns, lying to them about Hunter Biden to win an election, and enabling the world’s most brutal regime to practice genocide in peace.
Twitter doesn’t want to serve you; it wants to rule you. And it is well on its way.
Now Big Tech is seeking to deplatform Twitter’s competitor, Parler. Politicians and journalists are cheering for censorship and suggesting that cable operators should ban conservative news outlets. You see, these people know what is good for you and what isn’t. They just want to protect you from dangerous information. To them, you are a child and they are your parents, the only difference being that you pay them an allowance.
Now we Americans have no choice. Now we must convene our secret meetings in person, far from the peering eyes of Big Tech and its Chinese overlords, for whom it will do anything. Consider the fact that in many places in America meetings are literally illegal right now. Everything changed on Friday. The cards all stare up at us from the table now. Twitter’s goal is to create for our children an America our parents would not recognize.
Twitter is the enemy of freedom, the enemy of liberty, and the enemy of the American people. It must be treated as such.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Marcus is the Federalist’s New York Correspondent. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.
(Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)
First Lady Melania Trump broke her silence Monday after the Capitol riot, condemning violence and urging Americans to “listen to one another, focus on what unites us, and rise above what divides us.”
Rioters supporting President Donald Trump stormed the United States capitol Wednesday, committing acts of vandalism and postponing the certification process as members of Congress were forced to evacuate the building. Melania Trump did not comment on these events until Monday when she issued a statement that began by emphasizing how the coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on American lifestyles.
“I am disappointed and disheartened with what happened last week,” she said. “I find it shameful that surrounding these tragic events there has been salacious gossip, unwarranted personal attacks, and false misleading accusations on me – from people who are looking to be relevant and have an agenda. This time is solely about healing our country and its citizens. It should not be used for personal gain.”
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 06: Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
The First Lady said that her heart “goes out to” those who died during the riots, naming Air Force Veteran Ashli Babbit, who was shot by a police officer in the United States Capitol, as well as Benjamin Philips, Kevin Greeson, Rosanne Boyland, and Capitol Police Officers, Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood.
“I implore people to stop the violence, never make assumptions based on the color of a person’s skin or use differing political ideologies as a basis for aggression and viciousness,” she said. “We must listen to one another, focus on what unites us, and rise above what divides us.”
Melania Trump said it is “inspiring” to see so many Americans show “passion and enthusiasm in participating in an election,” but urged Americans not to “allow that passion to turn to violence.”
“It has been the honor of my lifetime to serve as your First Lady,” she said, nodding to her upcoming departure from the White House. “I want to thank the millions of Americans who supported my husband and me over the past 4 years and shown the incredible impact of the American spirit. I am grateful to you all for letting me serve you on platforms which are dear to me.”
Rioters sing National Anthem / Richie McGinniss / Daily Caller
Patriots enlist and defend their country. They work hard, do their best, raise good families. They help their neighbors. They perform civic duties. They grit their teeth and pay their taxes. Then they show up and vote. They compete, they win or lose, but they do both with grace. These are some of the things patriots do.
Patriots do not storm their own Capitol over a lost election. They do not bum rush members of Congress. They do not assault strangers. They do not push and shove police officers and trash federal buildings. These are things criminals do, and criminals of any political stripe deserve one thing: the rule of law.
Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation’s capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
While Congress convened Jan. 6, 2020, to certify the electoral votes for President Elect-Joe Biden — an act that has been performed, for the most part throughout history, peacefully and without incident — the city outside swelled as tens of thousands of protestors whipped themselves into a #stopthesteal frenzy. Eventually, many of them descended on the Capitol building, hellbent on disrupting the American constitutional process. (RELATED: GOP Congressman: ‘This Is A Coup Attempt’)
As this summer’s political protests escalated into rioting and lawlessness, many of us pointed out how unacceptable that was for any reason. This situation is no different. Every single one of the people who stormed that building and participated in that rank, un-American lawlessness should be in jail. There are prodigious photos and video evidence. Law enforcement officials should find them and prosecute them, all of them, no exceptions.
Protesters gather on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Pro-Trump protesters entered the U.S. Capitol building after mass demonstrations in the nation’s capital during a joint session Congress to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
The reason why is simple: The peaceful transfer of power is a hallmark of western democracy. It is the cornerstone of everything we love. It is apple pie. It’s lining up and shaking hands when the clock hits zero. We have ways to resolve political disputes, including election disputes. What happened in Washington is not on the list. If we want to end the cycle of political violence — and it has become a cycle — now is the time to set the precedent. (RELATED: ‘Tried To Disrupt Our Democracy, They Failed’ — McConnell Slams Rioters Who Stormed Capitol Building)
The left excused this summer’s rioting as “mostly peaceful.”The same could be said of the events in Washington. It’s irrelevant. “Mostly” is not the standard to which we should aspire. Political violence is wrong. Period. This was true in 2016 when the #NotMyPresident rioters disrupted the Trump Inaugural and it’s true today. Rule of law is an essential element of our peaceful transition of power. The people who stormed that building do not represent the vast majority of America.
Fox News host Sandra Smith talks to former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) about Wednesday’s Capitol Hill riot
Former Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy said Thursday that he’s “not real sure anymore” what the Republican Party “stands for” as he blamed President Donald Trump for the Capitol riot Wednesday.
“If you really wanted to ask me a tough question, ask me what the Republican Party stands for,” Gowdy told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
Gowdy said he did not know what role, if any, Trump would continue to play in the Republican Party but suggested the president incited the riot.
“Did you listen to the president’s speech yesterday?” Gowdy asked Fox News host Sandra Smith.
“Then you tell me. Who said that? Who said go fight? Who blamed Mike Pence and blamed Republicans and said the election was stolen?” Gowdy asked.
Gowdy joins other prominent Republicans who have chastised Trump for the destruction and violence. There have been calls to impeach Trump after rioters stormed the Capitol building, bringing chaos and violence to the Electoral College vote certification proceedings.
Former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suggested Trump was to blame for the riots by encouraging his supporters to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election. Republican Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney claimed Trump “lit the flame” of the riot.
Gowdy said people should not blame the police for not reacting swiftly enough to the threat.
Police officers in riot gear walks towards the U.S. Capitol as protesters enter the building on Jan. 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation’s capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Gowdy said he did not want to speculate if Trump was determined to start a riot.
“I can’t tell you what was on the president’s mind. I can tell you that he said ‘let’s march together to the capitol,’” Gowdy continued. “So I don’t blame the cops when tens of thousands of people are told an election was stolen from them and then they decide to scale the walls of the people’s house. I don’t blame the cops for that. I blame the people who did it.”
Rioters brawl with police officers after storming the Capitol Building (Screenshot/Twitter Elijah Schaffer)
Chaos is erupting in the Capitol Building as police officers whip out guns while rioters supporting President Donald Trump storm the building.
HuffPost’s Matt Fuller tweeted that guns have been drawn in the chamber as hundreds of rioters storm the Capitol, tearing down four layers of security fencing and breaching the building.
Meanwhile other rioters engaged in an all-out brawl with police as officers struggle to keep up with the mass rioting.
Earlier video shows rioters smashing through glass doors at the Capitol Building as hundreds of rioters descend upon the capitol.
The Madison building on Capitol Hill was evacuated minutes after the breach, Politico reporter Melanie Zanona said on Twitter. Zanona followed her tweet up noting the Capitol is on complete lockdown and tear has has been dispersed after those on the floor of the House were told to “get down on your chairs if necessary.”
Steven Nelson of the New York Post reports that there are other protesters in the building as well taking cover from the select few who discharged the fire extinguisher.
US-politics-DEMONSTRATION-TRUMP / Photo by JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AFP via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump appealed his recent loss in the Wisconsin Supreme Court to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, seeking to toss out 50,000 votes and possibly change the election outcome in the state. The campaign is arguing that 50,000 ballots were counted despite the fact that they were allegedly invalid. The campaign says more than 28,000 votes were counted from people who didn’t provide identification and instead used the state’s “indefinitely confined” status to vote. The campaign also alleged some 6,000 ballots were incomplete or altered which is forbidden by state law.
STERLING, VA – DECEMBER 13: Supporters gather outside Trump National Golf Club as U.S. President Donald Trump departs following a round of golf on December 13, 2020 in Sterling, Virginia. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)
“Regrettably, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in their 4-3 decision, refused to address the merits of our claim. This ‘Cert Petition’ asks them to address our claims, which, if allowed, would change the outcome of the election in Wisconsin.”
“Three members of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice, agreed with many of the President’s claims in written dissents from that court’s December 14 order,” he continued.
Trump lost the state to President-elect Joe Biden by roughly 21,000 votes. Trump’s campaign filed a suit that sought to invalidate more than 221,000 absentee ballots in Dane and Milwaukee counties for purportedly failing to meet requirements to obtain an absentee ballot. The suit also requested the Republican-led state legislature to appoint pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College.
However, the state Supreme Courtrejected the suit, ruling the claims were filed too late and one claim lacked merit. However, three dissenting conservative justices argued that the lateness was moot, and the questions about the legality of the votes demands an answer.
The only thing worse than listening to a screaming toddler is seeing his smug, tear-stained but smiling face after his parent gives in to his irreverent outburst and rewards him for his tantrum. That’s all I could think about as I walked the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, Saturday night after several news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.
A hopeful energy pulsed through State Street, the bustling pedestrian mall of restaurants and storefronts bookended by the university and the Capitol. I walked past business after business boarded up tight in anticipation of a fiery post-election purge, but instead, front doors were propped open on the uncharacteristically warm November night as groups of friends chattered and shopped and drank in merriment. No sirens or chanting interrupted my pleasant patio dinner date.
I breathed easier than I would have under different circumstances, I’ll admit. Had the media called the race differently, I likely wouldn’t have left the apartment and I certainly wouldn’t have neared downtown. Underneath that peaceful veneer, however, remains the gross reality that things are calm only because the snotty toddler got his way.
Unity Is a Joke
These are the infantile adults that were told “no” in 2016 by the half of the country they most despised and spent the next four years screaming that everything was unfair and that those who disagreed with them were racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. Instead of biting and hitting, they looted and vandalized, and the equally childish media covered for them.
They promised to “impeach the motherf-cker,” canceled dissenters, and maligned anyone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” They smeared mask rebels and churchgoers as grandma-killers and squawked in our faces that boys are girls, silence is violence, and all women are inherently trustworthy, straight white men be damned.Only now that they think they’ve won do they have any interest in faux “unity.”
In a recent editorial, the Washington Examiner posited, “Biden has a historic opportunity to heal the country’s wounds, and if he wants an admired legacy, he will start now to fulfill the promise of his Delaware speech and bring uniter’s, not dividers, into his administration.” Conservatives who fall for this “unity” schtick are hopelessly naïve.
While things might be quiet now, all hell is sure to break loose again the moment things don’t go in the way of the tantrum-throwers. This is because the wrong side won — or at least the fact that they believe they did proves the point. The toddlers got what they wanted. Their abhorrent behavior was reinforced with their most prized reward: the end of the Trump presidency.
Now rather than watching the thugs tear down and set ablaze our livelihoods, we’re stuck looking at their smug faces instead. It was always going to be one or the other: Elect us and we’ll destroy the country, or elect Trump and we’ll destroy your property.
For this reason, the relative peace in our cities now is a bad omen. This cultural calm is a reminder that, like the short-sighted parent capitulating to her toddler, the electorate traded long-term stability for short-term quiet. We didn’t bring an end to the fearmongering and the incivility; we put the uncivil fearmongers in power, and they have sinister plans for their political opponents.
Political Religion Makes All of Life a Holy War
This all goes back to the infantilization of the left, and it’s not surprising. There’s a reason shop-owners were afraid of spurned Biden supporters but relaxed when they remembered the frustrated Trumpsters had no intention of acting out.
When Trump supporters heard the unwelcome news that Biden would ostensibly be the president-elect, they were bummed. Some were mad, others were suspicious, and others felt defeated and discouraged — but they dutifully returned to their daily grinds, clocking in for work, caring for their families, and carrying on their commitments to their churches. That’s because, for so many on the right, politics is an add-on. Family and faith, however imperfectly, inform civic values, but politics is no replacement for those superior institutions.
For many on the left, that isn’t the case. For those who have chosen to worship at the feet of progressivism as religion, this election was life or death because it was central to everything else.
For a population who has pushed off marriage, disposed of its children, abandoned church, and relinquished its independence to the nanny state and its individualism to identity politics, to lose an election is to lose it all. All battles therefore become moral, meaning victory by any means necessary — including stealing and destroying and sometimes even killing — is justified.
Don’t Let the Leftist Toddlers Get Their Way
That leaves us quite a divided America. How can we ever hope for unity when one side holds theother hostage? Give us what we want, or else. That’s no way to start a mutually beneficial negotiation.
So conservatives are left with a choice. Will we continue caving in to the boisterous toddler until it becomes an unruly and insufferable adult? Or will stand our ground and endure the tantrums until the left tuckers itself out on its own fickle rhetoric and runs its own cities into the soil? Don’t relish the present quiet; realize what it stands for.
Presidents come and go, and if Trump does finally lose re-election after all the legal battles run their course, so be it. The worst thing for our country isn’t a Biden presidency. It’s giving the leftist toddlers what they want.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urged his colleagues to vote to override President Donald Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Tuesday.
Trump vetoed the NDAA last week, and the House of Representatives has already voted to override the veto with a two-thirds majority, making the Senate the final hurdle for approving the funding. The NDAA passed the Senate originally with a 84-13 majority on December 11, but the grounds have shifted somewhat.
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has vowed to filibuster any attempt at an override on the NDAA bill until McConnell allows a vote on the $2,000 COVID-19 direct relief payments. Trump called for the increase from $600 to $2,000 last week, a proposition Democrats have endorsed but many Republicans have not. (RELATED: The Numbers In Georgia Point To Two Tossup Races)
“McConnell and the Senate want to expedite the override vote and I understand that,”Sanders told reporters Monday evening. “But I’m not going to allow that to happen unless there is a vote, no matter how long that takes, on the $2,000 direct payment.”
The House voted in favor of the increase to $2,000 on Monday, leaving McConnell and the Senate as the final obstacle. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer attempted to pass the $2,000 increase by unanimous consent during Tuesday session, but McConnell blocked the move.
Trump originally objected to the NDAA because Congress refused to include provisions in the bill that would dismantle Section 230, the law that governs how internet companies moderate third-party content. Trump also objected to provisions in the bill seeking to rename military bases currently named after Confederate figures.
House Speaker Pelosi And Senate Minority Leader Schumer Hold Media Availability On Capitol Hill
Key Democrats came out in support of President Donald Trump’s last-minute demand that $2,000 in direct payments to Americans be included in the coronavirus stimulus bill. Trump declared in a video posted Tuesday that he would not sign the recently passed bill in its current form, instead demanding the extra payments along with the elimination of several items he considered “wasteful.”
Responding to Trump’s video Tuesday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi supported the idea while also pointing out that the president never called for a specific payment amount during months of negotiations.
“Republicans repeatedly refused to say what amount the President wanted for direct checks,” Pelosi tweeted. “At last, the President has agreed to $2,000 — Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it!”
“That’s great!”Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders responded, including Pelosi’s tweet. “I first introduced a bill to provide a $2,000 direct payment with @SenKamalaHarris & @EdMarkey 7 months ago. Now, Mr. President, get Mitch McConnell and your Republican friends to stop opposing it and we can provide working class Americans with $2,000. Let’s do it.”
Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote that an amendment to include the payments is “ready to go.”
To which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded, “I’m in!”
Schumer had initially seemed to support passing the bill as-is, but appeared to change his mind.
After months of negotiations, Congress on Monday passed the sweeping $2.3 trillion package that includes $900 billion in coronavirus stimulus as well as $1.4 trillion to fund the government through October. If he changes his mind, Trump has until December 28 to sign the bill.
White House Holds COVID-19 Vaccine Summit (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Kingdom of Morocco has agreed to normalize relations with Israel, making it the latest in a string of majority-Muslim countries to do so.
Senior advisor to the president Jared Kushner told reporters shortly after the president’s announcement that Morocco — like other signatories onto the Abraham Accords — will immediately open liaison offices in Israel, start scheduling direct flights from the country to Israel, and foster “cooperation” between companies in both nations. He confirmed that in addition to Morocco’s decision to normalize relations, Trump had also signed a proclamation recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara.
“This comes on four years of very, very hard work and diplomacy,” Kushner stated. “We have peace sprouting in the Middle East.”
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 11: (L-R) U.S. Treasure Secretary Steven Mnuchin, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Advisor Jared Kushner, speak in the Oval Office to announce that Bahrain will establish diplomatic relations with Israel, at the White House in Washington, DC on September 11, 2020. The announcement follows one last month by Israel and the United Arab Emirates that they would seek to normalize relations with each other. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images)
Kushner called the announcement a “part of the president’s efforts to bring peace and prosperity to the world,” and stated that other countries in the region “want to keep this progress going.” He claimed that the more majority-Muslim countries begin to interact with Israel, the less Islamic terror groups will be able to justify their actions.
Trump has touted the Israel “peace deals” as some of his administration’s greatest accomplishments. Prior to the Morocco announcement, the Trump administration had helped foster normalization negotiations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Somalia.
This is a developing story and will be updated with new information as it becomes available.
A new criminal complaint in Georgia, filed in the Fulton County Superior Court by State Republican Chairman David Shafer and President Donald Trump on Friday, alleges that tens of thousands of votes cast in the presidential election were fraudulent, thus violating state election code and creating “systemic failure.”
These votes, in congruence with the reduced scrutiny applied to mail-in ballots through “unconstitutional” litigation filed by Democrats in Georgia and difficulties contesting ballots during tabulation, the lawsuit states, have created “substantial doubt regarding the results of the election” and require a complete do-over election.
“Georgia officials who have fecklessly asserted that the general election was an ‘amazing success’ ‘with no credible evidence of irregularity’ are undermining public confidence in the integrity of our elections,” Shafer warned in his announcement of the lawsuit.
“Our lawsuit does not rely on theories about the voting machines. These theories will be explored in other lawsuits. Instead, we painstakingly show thousands of examples of ‘low tech’ voting irregularities and fraud sufficient in scale to place the election result in doubt,” Shafer continued.
According to the lawsuit, “a sufficient number of illegal votes” were “jointly and severally, improperly” counted by election officials despite their disqualifications. These votes violating Georgia state law, the plaintiffs argued, mostly fall on the shoulders of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who is “required to maintain and update a list of registered voters within this state.”
Instead of properly updating the voter registration lists, the lawsuit alleges that these fraudulent votes included:
2,560 felons
66,247 underage registrants
2,423 people who were not on the state’s voter rolls
4,926 voters who had registered in another state after they registered in Georgia, making them ineligible
395 people who cast votes in another state for the same election
15,700 voters who had filed a national change of address forms without re-registering
40,279 people who had moved counties without re-registering
1,043 people who claimed the physical impossibility of a P.O. Box as their address
98 people who registered after the deadline
10,315 people who were deceased on election day (8,718 of whom had been registered as dead before their votes were accepted)
305,701 people who, according to state records, applied for an absentee ballot past the deadline (more than 180 days before the election)
92 voters whose absentee ballots were cast before they even requested one
13 people who weren’t registered voted with absentee ballots
2,664 absentee ballots were mailed from elections offices before the earliest date permitted by law
50 peoples’ absentee ballots were counted despite being returned and accepted before the earliest allowed date
2 people whose ballot applications were rejected voted anyway
217 people who voted by absentee ballots were “applied for, issued, and received all on the same day.”
Some of these numbers, the complaint alleges, could be higher but can’t be verified by the plaintiffs because the election officials responding in the lawsuit “have the exclusive capability and access to data to determine the true number of Double Voters.”
Instead, the lawsuit includes sworn affidavits from dozens of witnesses backing up these claims and lists out examples of acknowledged election incompetence and resignations by officials specifically in Fulton County, home to Atlanta.
It also shows comparisons of data from 2016, demonstrating the state’s extremely low rate of rejected absentee ballots in 2020 of .034 percent, compared to the 2.90 percent rejection rate in 2016, and the 3.46 percent rejection rate in 2018. They allege this is a direct result of the Democrats’ “Consent Decree” which changed the absentee ballot process and made it more difficult on election officials by tripling the number of people required to provide a ballot rejection.
“There will be irreparable damage to the Citizens of Georgia through their loss of confidence in the integrity of the election process by virtue of the illegal votes included in the tabulations of the Contested Election, which outweighs any potential harm to Respondents,” the lawsuit states.
According to Shafer, the number of these votes the lawsuit identified without the extra information held by the Peach State’s election officials still largely outnumbers Joe Biden’s just under 12,000-vote lead in the state, legally qualifying Shafer and Trump’s request for an audit of absentee signatures to ensure they match those on record with the Secretary of State’s office.
“Under Georgia law, we must show that the number of unlawful votes exceeds the purported margin of victory. It does not require us to show for which candidate the unlawful votes were cast,” he wrote.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
Rudy Giuliani said there are two ways the Trump legal team is getting a “major censorship” of its widespread voter fraud allegations. He told Newsmax on Friday that the Trump camp is equally focused on presenting evidence to state legislatures as it is on court hearings, but it is facing an uphill battle because of judges who won’t hear the cases and media that won’t air its presentations.
“We’ve got a lot of evidence. We don’t have a lot of time,” Giuliani said. “The public has only a small idea of the kind of evidence that we have.”
The Trump legal team, led by Giuliani, and its allies have endured dozens of losses, and they are turning to presentations of witnesses to state legislatures in places such as Arizona and Michigan. The team had one such event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, this week, and the Trump team said a judge in Nevada will allow Republicans to present their findings at a hearing on Dec. 3.
As it stands now, President-elect Joe Biden has 306 Electoral College votes, and President Trump has 232. More than one state would have to flip for Trump to emerge as the winner. Time is running out as states are certifying their votes ahead of an Electoral College meeting in mid-December.
A federal appeals court in Philadelphia on Friday rejected Trump’s latest bid to challenge the 2020 election results. However, Giuliani insisted that because the team got its presentation before GOP lawmakers, “in essence, we accomplished the purpose of that case.” He added that the Supreme Court “can now take a look at it.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed off on the certification of Biden as the winner of the state and its 20 electoral votes on Tuesday, but a Pennsylvania appeals court judge ordered state officials on Wednesday not to take any more steps toward certification as part of a separate lawsuit brought by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly and others trying to invalidate all mail-in ballots, which were mostly cast by Democrats. Wolf’s administration asked the state Supreme Court to intervene.
In addition, dozens of GOP state lawmakers proposed a resolution on Friday disputing the 2020 election results.
The former New York City mayor also remarked on how media outlets gave coverage to Trump calling into the Pennsylvania presentation, but Giuliani claimed that if there were witnesses against Trump, “every single one of those witnesses would be on for days like they did during the phony impeachment hearings.”
Mike Coppola/Getty Images for National Committee on American Foreign Policy
Former Vice President Joe Biden has apparently decided that he would pick Obama Administration Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken as Secretary of State in a prospective Biden administration. Blinken supports reentering the dangerous Iran nuclear deal which the Obama administration ardently supported, and has claimed that Iran was complying with the deal; he also has slammed President Trump for making decisions he felt were best for America’s interests without caring whether other nations were offended, saying, “Everyone’s running in the other direction.”
In an interview with France 24’s Marc Perelman in 2019, Blinken stated:
I think it’s very unfortunate that the United States pulled out of the agreement that Iran for all of the things that we don’t like that it does; was complying with that agreement, with the nuclear agreement. From Iran’s perspective, I imagine that at a certain point, they were no longer getting the economic benefit they bargained for in making the agreement, that they might decide to resume their nuclear program. That seems to be the point that they reached.
Perelman asked, “So Iran has withdrawn from some parts of the agreement; they say we’re still complying with the agreement, are you concerned that this could be the last step before Iran effectively gets out of the agreement?”
Blinken answered:
Well, at some point you’re in the agreement or you’re not in the agreement. They’ve said they’re staying in yet they’re starting to do certain things that are proscribed by the agreement. And so at some point, the other parties, the European parties, Russia, China, will have to decide if Iran is, in fact, still complying with the agreement. But what’s so troubling about this, Mark, is it basically puts us back in the situation we were in, potentially, before the agreement was reached; that is, Iran on the threshold of having the capacity very quickly, to develop a nuclear weapon, and the United States and other countries faced with that, having to decide what to do about it: let them do it or take action to stop them. That was a bad choice and the nuclear agreement created a third choice, which was actually putting real constraints for a long period of time on Iran’s nuclear program. But now that’s falling apart; we’re back to where we started.
He posited, “President Trump decided to tear up an agreement that Iran was actually complying with. And I say this cognizant of all the other things that Iran does, the destabilizing activities throughout the region, support for terrorism, its horrific record on human rights; all of those things that we don’t like and it continues to do, but the one thing it actually was doing in good faith was complying with the nuclear agreement and that’s the one thing we’ve now torn apart.”
Iran so far has refused to allow United Nations inspectors to interview key scientists and military officers to investigate allegations that Tehran maintained a covert nuclear-weapons program, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said in an interview Wednesday. … The IAEA and its director-general, Yukiya Amano, have been trying for more than five years to debrief Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, an Iranian military officer the U.S., Israel and IAEA suspect oversaw weaponization work in Tehran until at least 2003. Mr. Amano said Tehran still hasn’t agreed to let Mr. Fakhrizadeh or other Iranian military officers and nuclear scientists help the IAEA complete its investigation.
In October 2017, famed attorney Alan Dershowiz noted:
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently stated that it could not verify that Iran was “fully implementing the agreement” by not engaging in activities that would allow it to make a nuclear explosive device. Yukiya Amano of the IAEA told Reuters that when it comes to inspections, which are stipulated in Section T of the agreement, “our tools are limited.” Amano continued to say: “In other sections, for example, Iran has committed to submit declarations, place their activities under safeguards or ensure access by us. But in Section T, I don’t see any (such commitment).”
It is well established that Tehran has consistently denied IAEA inspectors access to military sites and other research locations. This is in direct contravention to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and bipartisan legislation set out by Congress, which compels the president to verify that “Iran is transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the agreement.”
In November 2019, after the U.S. had pulled out of the nuclear deal, AP reported:
Uranium particles of man-made origin have been discovered at a site in Iran not declared to the United Nations, the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Monday as it confirmed a litany of violations by Tehran of the 2015 nuclear deal. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran has begun enriching uranium at a heavily fortified installation inside a mountain, is increasing its stockpile of processed uranium, and is exceeding the allowable enrichment levels. All such steps are prohibited under the agreement Iran reached with world powers to prevent it from building a bomb.
Blinken criticized President Trump’s penchant for making decisions that he considered best for America without the support of other countries, saying, “It’s really not leadership if no one is following and if everyone is running in the other direction.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden isn’t used to getting real questions. On Friday, Biden appeared dumbfounded as to why a reporter was asking the projected Democratic presidential-elect a question as the press pool was being scurried away by staff.
“Mr. Biden, the COVID task force said it’s safe for students to be in class. Are you going to encourage unions to cooperate more to bring kids back to classrooms, sir?” asked CBS reporter Bo Erickson.
“Why are you the only guy that always shouts out questions?”Biden said.
It was a bizarre episode for the 78-year-old Democrat, who enjoyed the least amount of media scrutiny on the campaign trail of any modern candidate running for president. While serious revelations were emerging, revealing Biden’s role in his son’s potentially criminal overseas business dealings, reporters asked hard-hitting questions such as what kind of ice cream Biden purchased at a pit stop.
Erickson was also one of the few reporters to ask Biden about the scandals plaguing his campaign, bombshells suppressed by Big Tech and either ignored or dubiously delegitimized by other mainstream outlets. When pressed on the issue, Biden lashed out at the media. Erickson’s treatment of the former vice president Friday was the same treatment the media offered to President Donald Trump and his staff throughout the entire last four years, which was on full display again in the White House briefing room on the same day.
Meanwhile, one would be hard-pressed to find California Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, at any point throughout the entire general election campaign taking a single question from a reporter during a press conference.
The media gave a preview of how it would treat a Biden administration on Monday, when Biden began speaking with reporters, who lobbed him softball questions. Joe Concha, a media reporter for The Hill, dubbed the incoming presidential press corps “The new marshmallow media in the Biden era,” in a column published Thursday.
“Any press conference Biden has held since capturing the Democratic nomination has consisted mostly of questions about President Trump and very few questions about Biden’s own worldview, record, policy stances or perspective on important issues such as trade, foreign affairs, gun control, immigration, education, or taxation as it relates to repealing the Trump tax cuts,” Concha wrote. “Of the 12 questions Biden received Monday, there were zero follow-ups. Zero interruptions during answers. Zero questions about any of the issues above, which rank as among the top concerns on voters’ minds, along with the coronavirus.”
Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
There is honor among thieves. There has to be, if they are to be successful. Even lawbreakers require some sort of law, both in reality, where organized crime requires organization, and in fiction, where it is a standard trope that the Guild of Assassins (or whatever) has rules. The wicked still need some virtue to be effective, although it must be severed from the whole of virtue.
This explains a lot about politics. The rules and organization necessary for societal or group survival and success are not the same as justice; indeed, they may be nothing more than a predatory morality that enables cooperation in oppression.
Governments often begin as the biggest band of brigands around, and many never rise much beyond that. As Augustine put it in “The City of God,” “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” He illustrated this point with the tale of a captured pirate who told Alexander the Great that the difference between piracy and Alexander’s empire was only of scale.
Adherence to the norms and manners of the ruling class does not assure personal virtue or political justice. This is obvious to those on the outside, but members (and aspiring members and hangers-on) of the ruling class have an interest in not seeing it. This willful blindness also explains a lot about the recent election.
The Biden campaign told us that the election was about the soul of the nation. A multitude of Democrats, media figures, and Never-Trump leftovers told us that it was about restoring decency to the White House. Even now, in apparent victory, they remain appalled that anyone voted for President Trump, let alone more than 70 million Americans—don’t we know how indecent he is? But it is not that we think Trump is decent, it is that we doubt that his opponents are.
We suspect that by decency they mean nothing more than the professional civility of the educated class, and we know that true decency is more than civility. It is certainly more than not being Donald Trump.
This is not to say that civility does not matter. Conservatives know that manners matter. Manners can force us to be restrained, to at least make a show of treating political opponents with respect, and by inculcating these habits, they can make us better.
But manners can also be weaponized. They can become tools of exclusion that keep those with different beliefs and backgrounds out. They can conceal great wickedness behind a pleasing mask.
There is a persistent temptation to focus on the superficial form of decency (as manifest in politeness) over the substance of virtue. So we are treated to lectures on decency from men who have cheated on a succession of wives or traded in the wife of their youth for a young research assistant—and from a presumptive vice president who slept her way into politics.
Nor is such wickedness confined to personal sins; it extends throughout political positions. Consider the Democratic Party’s fanatical support for abortion. There is nothing decent about tearing a baby limb from limb and displaying her still-beating heart on a tray—if decency encompasses support for unrestricted, taxpayer-funded late-term abortion, then to hell with decency and the decent.
Likewise, the bipartisan establishment embrace of China is indecent, unless decency merely means civility in the service of ruling-class interests. There is nothing decent about closer bonds with the Chinese Communist Party and the genocidal totalitarian slave state that it runs. All the civility and cheap consumer goods in the world cannot wash away that guilt.
The pretense of decency also asks us to ignore that our ruling class is neither civil nor trustworthy. The same people who spent years suggesting that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election are now outraged that he has not conceded this one. And remember when Senate Democrats accused Brett Kavanaugh of being a high-school gang-rape mastermind?
Remember when the media tried to destroy a high school student for smiling awkwardly while wearing a Trump hat? Remember when they told you the most expensive riots in American history were mostly peaceful? Remember all the times they’ve called you and your friends and family ignorant, racist bigots—as epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s consigning you to an irredeemable basket of deplorables?
The response to this litany of leftist indecency is predictable—what about this and that and the other thing Trump did and said? Well, what about them? People who have concluded that our leaders are corrupt and indecent will not support them just because Trump is also indecent.
Furthermore, Trump will soon be out of office, while our elites will remain in their positions in media, academia, entertainment, business and government. Without President Trump, what excuse will they then have for their failures of virtue and justice?
Trump leaving office will not make America more decent if it just returns power to those whose garb of civility covers corrupt hearts. What is needed is not further recriminations over Trump, but a commitment to seek justice and the common good. This renewal must be led by those who have the power to shape institutions and culture.
I don’t say this to deny the need for all of us to repent of our sins. I merely state the obvious, which is that those with the power to shape the culture bear the most responsibility for it. If we are as indecent a nation as they say, then perhaps the likes of New York Times writers, Ivy League professors and pop stars should spend less time lecturing Trump voters and more time in sackcloth and ashes.
Nathanael Blake is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist. He has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.
Photo Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
Only 50 percent of likely voters say the 2020 election was not stolen by Democrats, while 47 percent said it is likely Democrats stole the election.
There are polls and then there are poLoLs. Fox News, New York Times/ Siena, Washington Post/ABC, Quinnipiac, NBC/Marist, Reuters/Ipsos, Monmouth, Politico/Morning Consult… Those are all poLols — totally useless liars and propagandists who have gotten three election cycles so horribly and deliberately wrong, only a fool would pay attention to them. Liars. Damned liars. PoLoLs. Get away from me with your poLoLs.
And don’t even get me started on that useless clown Nate Silver.
Based on their track recorded — you know, actual merit, I trust IBD/TIPP, Susquehanna, Trafalgar, and Rasmussen… Those are pollsters. Those are polls. And when Rasmussen tells us a whopping 47 percent of likely voters believe the Democrats stole the election, I am confident in passing that along.
“How likely is it,” Rasmussen asked 1,000 likely voters between November 17-18, “that Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure Biden would win?”
Only 50 percent said it was not likely, while a whopping 47 percent said it was likely.
Not at all likely: 41 percent.
Not very likely: 9 percent.
Somewhat likely: 11 percent.
Very likely: 36 percent.
There’s another way to look at this… only 41 percent are certain the election was not stolen from Trump.
The partisan breakdown is not exactly what I expected with 75 percent of Republicans — 75 percent! — saying it is very (61 percent) or somewhat (14 percent) likely the election was stolen.
Get this… 30 percent of Democrats — Democrats! — say it is very (20 percent) or somewhat (10 percent) likely the election was stolen from Trump.
Of course 69 percent of Democrats say it is not at all (61 percent) or not very (8 percent) likely the election was stolen from Trump. Still, that 30 percent of Democrats who say it was stolen is pretty remarkable.
On the issue of whether Trump should concede, 61 percent say he should, while 33 percent say no.
Eighty-four percent of Democrats, 37 percent of Republicans, and 59 percent of unaffiliated voters say Trump should concede. But 57 percent of Republicans disagree, which mean they want him to keep up the fight.
When asked the all-important question of whether “your friends and neighbors think Trump should concede,” only 51 percent say yes, while 30 percent say no — 18 percent are unsure.
The reason the “friends and neighbors” question is important is because America’s top pollsters believe that question is a more accurate reflection of the true intent of the person being surveyed. Now that we live in an increasingly fascist country where roving bands of left-wing Brownshirts will either get you fired, or blacklist you, or physically assault you for supporting Trump, people have become shy about telling pollsters the truth of their Trump support. So…
Let me repeat this…
Only 51 percent say Trump should concede.
LOL.
Democrats and their media minions are losing the public relations battle, and losing it badly.
Someone still needs to explain to me why four deep blue cities — Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Milwaukee all of a sudden stopped counting when Trump was in the lead. Never in my life have I seen the counting stopped like that. And when the counting restarted, Will you look at all those Biden votes!
Brother, that stinks to high heaven, and until I hear an explanation that makes sense — No, no… You know what, there is no explanation that would ever make sense of that. So until the votes in those states are audited in detail with transparency, I will never completely accept the outcome of a Biden victory.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
![Former President Donald Trump speaks at the 2018 UN General Assembly [PBS News Hour screenshot]](https://images.dailycaller.com/image/width=960,height=411,fit=cover,f=auto/https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Screen-Shot-2022-03-07-at-5.34.08-PM-e1646692491203.png "Former President Donald Trump speaks at the 2018 UN General Assembly [PBS News Hour screenshot]")
Political cartoon by A. F. Branco ©2021.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.
What Did You Say? 
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