If there’s a grand prize in America’s Dysfunction Olympics, Joe Biden handing a full, cosmic-scale pardon to his own son would be the soaring triple backflip onto a bed of rose petals. What Biden did was political malpractice—wrapped in gold foil. And now Hunter Biden dares to admit this divine clemency a symbol of “privilege.” He then lambasts Donald Trump’s supposed “revenge tour” like a schoolyard victim whining about a bully.
Pardon, Privilege, and the Perverse “Narrative”
Let’s parse the spectacle:
On December 1, 2024, Joe Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon for all federal offenses his son may have committed from January 1, 2014, to December 1, 2024—including tax and gun charges, and even hypothetical future ones. This pardon came after repeated promises that Hunter would not be pardoned. The turnaround smacked of desperation.
Now, Hunter says he’s “incredibly grateful” and “realizes how privileged I am,” but also claims that his father would not have pardoned him had Trump not won. He also invokes the specter of Trump’s “revenge tour,” arguing that he would’ve been the “easiest target,” somehow vulnerable enough to silence the entire Biden clan.
Hunter got off scot-free from genuine crimes (remember, tax evasion and firearm charges are not made-up). Now, he piously “admits” that he was privileged—all while casting himself as a persecuted innocent. That’s not humility; that’s hubris in the shape of a press release.
A Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Swim In It
1. Selective “Justice” for the Elite
If you tell the average American they’ll be jailed for delinquent taxes, ignoring them won’t work; they’ll still get prosecuted. But if your last name is Biden, the rulebook says exception. That’s not theory; it’s been practiced. The Washington establishment has long operated under one law for the powerful, another for the powerless.
Democrats screamed about the “rigged justice system” when Trump was investigated, but now they rig it for their own. That’s not consistency—it’s con artistry.
2. The Political Panic Pardons
Wrapping a pardon like a political grenade isn’t rare. Presidents have always pardoned cronies, allies, or inconvenient truths. But pardoning his own son—and one embroiled in crime, addiction, and scandal—is not just nepotism; it’s betrayal of the public trust. The Left used to pretend pardons are about mercy or reform. But in this case, the only mercy is for the powerful.
3. The “Revenge Tour” Fairy Tale
Hunter claims Trump is on a “revenge tour”—as though Trump sat in some shadow room with a red ledger, marking off names. But which evidence supports that? We saw him challenge unconstitutional actions, purge bureaucrats tied to past vindictive investigations, and strip security clearances from politicized deep-state actors.
That’s not obsession—it’s course correction. Trump doesn’t lash out randomly; he goes after institutional rot. If Joe Biden’s legacy was built on family shenanigans and corruption, then yes, Hunter looked over his shoulder—but that’s on the family for being vulnerable, not on a president for doing his job.
Why Hunter Should Shut His Mouth (And Maybe Hide Under a Rock)
Here’s what’s guaranteed: the more Hunter talks, the worse it gets. If he keeps playing victim, it reminds people why he was pardoned—to defang him as a target. His own words confirm that. And if he speaks with indignation, he resurrects interest in the crimes he claims were swept under the rug. Then, if he rails about Trump, he writes his own invitation: “Put my name back under the microscope.”
Truthfully, if he’s smart (he’s not), he’ll go underground, live quietly, and let Joe’s pardon do its job.
Hunter Claims He Could Have Beaten the Wrap
Hunter alluded that he would have argued that the prior prosecutions were politically motivated or inconsistent, and that every person deserves due process. Let’s call this “The Leftist Defense”, and surely one that Big Tish, Comey, and Jack Smith will all deploy, unsuccessfully. Clearly, Hunter wants the world to believe that Trump’s DOJ would have weaponized charges against him or his family relentlessly—thus the pardon was a shield, not a favor.
Finally, you know that Biden would have used his addiction as an excuse. Addiction has been his scapegoat for years. For him, addiction trump’s culpability, and that mercy has a place in justice.
Rebirth of the Two-Tiered Justice System
If you have power and connections, you go free. If you don’t, you go to jail. That’s the American dream inverted, and it’s rotting from the top down.
A president—even one from the Left—who pardons his own child weaponizes the very office meant to temper excess. It’s one thing to help others; it’s another to help your own at the expense of fairness.
Hunter Biden’s remarks do one useful thing: they confirm what most people already suspected. He got a pardon not as redemption, but as immunity. He’s not a contrite citizen; he’s a walking monument to corruption’s soft power.
He can call it “privilege.” It is. He can blame it on a “revenge tour.” It’s not. He can cry crocodile tears about being a target. He wasn’t. But none of that changes the truth: he got a pardon meant to sanitize him. He got an escape hatch welded shut from accountability. And that, dear reader, is not scandal — it’s statecraft in the wild hands of the well connected.
President Trump Lights Up Antony Blinken For Giving Joe Biden Credit for Historic Peace Deal Between Israel and Hamas (VIDEO)
By Cristina Laila – The Gateway Pundit – Oct 12, 2025
President Trump absolutely lit up Biden’s worthless Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a gaggle aboard Air Force One on Sunday. Trump departed the White House en route to the Middle East after he secured a historic peace deal between Israel and Hamas. Hamas is releasing the 20 living hostages, and Israel will withdraw to an agreed-upon line, thanks to President Trump’s courage and diplomacy. Meanwhile, Antony Blinken is giving Joe Biden credit for President Trump’s historic ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Biden’s DEI hire, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, is comparing black people to disabled people to advance race-dominant districting.
BRANCO TOON STORE – 2026 Calendar – T-shirts – Mugs – Great Gift Ideas
SHOCK: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Compares Black People to Disabled People During Arguments on Race-Based Voting Districts (AUDIO)
By Cristina Laila – The Gateway Pundit – Oct 15, 2025
Joe Biden’s DEI Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is at it again. On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a Louisiana case over race-based voting districts. President Trump’s Department of Justice, through Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon and Solicitor General John Sauer, told the US Supreme Court that race-based congressional districts must end once and for all. The case, State of Louisiana v. Phillip Callais (and the related Press Robinson v. Phillip Callais), stems from Louisiana’s woke lawmakers caving to left-wing judges and creating a second “majority… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
The Department of Justice official who signed off on $2 million in taxpayer-funded payments to disgraced Russia collusion hoax participants left the Department of Justice to help lead the “legal resistance” to President Donald Trump and other duly elected Republicans, new records reviewed exclusively by The Federalist reveal.
FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, sued the Department of Justice over the release of messages detailing their role in pushing the Clinton campaign’s Russia collusion hoax. They said the release of the messages that were written using government resources violated their privacy. The Biden administration rewarded the duo with lucrative payouts. Strozk received $1.2 million in taxpayer funds while Page received an $800,000 settlement.
“[W]e have identified Brian Netter, Deputy Assistant Attorney General as the individual that approved the settlement agreements,” a DOJ official told the Center to Advance Security in America, which had filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2024, when the payouts were publicly announced. Netter was the deputy assistant attorney general for the Federal Programs Branch during the term of President Joe Biden.
Netter currently serves as the legal director at Democracy Forward, a Democrat Party-affiliated group launched in 2017 to fight President Trump with lawfare. The group brags that it took Trump to court more than 100 times in his first term in office. It has continued its use of the courts to win political battles into his second term in office. “Liberal Legal Group Positions Itself as a Top Trump Administration Foe,” touted The New York Times last November.
Marc Elias, the attorney known for his work damaging the integrity of both the 2016 and 2020 elections, chairs the board of Democracy Forward. Elias, as the Clinton campaign general counsel, signed the checks for her campaign’s Russia collusion hoax. To hide the Russia collusion hoax’s origins, the funding was fraudulently run through Elias’s law firm as “legal services.” Clinton was fined only $113,000 for the false claims she made to hide her role. Elias also ran Democrats’ legal effort to destabilize the 2020 elections with the sudden expansion of unsupervised mail-in balloting operations staffed by Democrat-run nonprofit groups.
Other current and recent board members of Netter’s group include former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, former Biden Chief of Staff Ronald Klain, Kamala Harris’ sister Maya Harris, and former leader of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Mindy Myers.
Netter worked for Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice from 2021 through early 2025. He opposed then-former President Trump’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block National Archives releases to the January 6 committee, a lawfare committee comprised only of members appointed by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Netter married Democrat lawyer and activist Karen Dunn in a ceremony officiated by Garland in 2009. Dunn, who played a key role in the Hillary Clinton campaign and was widely considered a likely White House Counsel if Hillary Clinton won her 2016 presidential campaign, specializes in Democrat debate preparation. She co-led President Barack Obama’s presidential debate preparation team for his re-election campaign and led presidential debate preparation for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024. In 2020, she led the preparation of Kamala Harris for the vice presidential debate.
Dunn started a law firm with Jeannie Rhee, one of the attorneys who worked on perpetuating the Russia collusion hoax through the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation. The firm hired Mueller alumnus Rush Atkinson as well.
Dunn clerked for Garland when he was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. Netter also clerked for Breyer and Judge Judith Rogers on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Congressional overseers were upset by the reward given to the hoaxers and demanded to know who signed off on them. They were thwarted by officials who said they didn’t know who had authorized the payments, and declined to respond to Congressional inquiries to find out.
“The American people are rightly concerned about the Biden Administration’s targeting of conservatives while their political allies were given special treatment,” said James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center to Advance Security in America. “These settlements are a prime example of the outrageous abuse of power endured by the American people under Joe Biden.”
Netter did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
The Left’s Safe Space: Where Consequences Go to Die
Let’s start with a universal truth: Leftism is the only ideology where you can openly fantasize about punching Nazis (read: anyone right of Karl Marx) while simultaneously clutching your pearls if someone dares to disagree with you. Ah Leftism: the magical realm where hypocrisy isn’t just tolerated—it’s celebrated.
Take my recent conversation with a conservative friend who, like many, has adopted the “live and let live” approach to his Leftist acquaintances. His reasoning? “She’s not that bad.”
Really? The classic conservative cop-out.
She only wants to dismantle the nuclear family, not the entire Western legal system. She only supports Antifa when they’re firebombing federal buildings, not when they’re (allegedly) firebombing your federal building.
This is the modern Democrat Party in a nutshell: a coalition of useful idiots who’ve convinced themselves that their side is merely “passionate” while the other side is “violent extremists.” But let’s be real—when was the last time you saw a conservative hunt down a Leftist in the streets? Meanwhile, Antifa’s resume includes shooting at ICE officers and ambushing cops. But sure, both sides.
The Myth of the ‘Reasonable’ Leftist
My friend’s argument hinges on the idea that his Leftist pal isn’t “one of the bad ones.” She just posts memes about conservatives being fascists—harmless stuff, really. But here’s the rub: silence is complicity. If she’s not actively condemning the worst of her side (spoiler: she’s not), then she’s enabling it.
Brigitte Macron: A Case Study in Leftist Absurdity
Speaking of delusion, let’s talk about France’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron. Two women were acquitted after being sued for claiming Brigitte was born male. Now, one of them is turning the tables and suing her for fraud. The rumor? Brigitte is actually Macron’s father, who transitioned. Now, I don’t care if Macron married a sentient baguette—just own it. But Leftists can’t handle the truth. They’d rather litigate it into oblivion.
Astroturfing 101: How the Left Manufactures ‘Grassroots’ Outrage
Then there’s Zohran Mamdani, the New York socialist who—shockingly—isn’t actually supported by New Yorkers.
*“Once more, with feeling (and for about the 1000th time): There are NO grassroots movements on the Left. It’s ALL top-down, astroturf funding and organizing. BREAKING: Campaign finance records reveal 72% of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign cash came from out-of-state donors — not local supporters. His donors? Hollywood elites and tech billionaires.”*
Even John Fetterman—a man who dresses like he’s perpetually mid-Napoleon Dynamite cosplay—called Mamdani out for not being a “real Democrat.” The Left is so fractured they’re eating their own. And this is before the 2024 election cycle, where we’ll undoubtedly uncover a decade’s worth of Leftist election “irregularities.”
The Conservative Conundrum: Why We Lose by Playing Nice
Here’s the kicker: Leftists post their insanity because they can. There are no consequences. Meanwhile, conservatives self-censor because we actually have jobs to lose. The asymmetry is the point.
So, the next time a Leftist friend posts some inane drivel about “fascist Republicans,” ask them: Are you cool with Antifa’s violence? The persecution of the unvaxxed? The fact that your ‘movement’ is bankrolled by coastal elites? Watch them squirm.
Because at the end of the day, the only thing worse than Leftist idiocy is conservative silence in the face of it.
Final Thought: The Left isn’t just wrong—they’re dangerously stupid. And until conservatives start treating them like the existential threat they are, we’ll keep losing. So speak up. Or get ready to live in their delusional world.
Joe Biden and most other Democrat leaders embody the Peter Principle: the idea that people in a hierarchy rise to their level of incompetence—and then stay there. Biden’s incompetence is not a fluke.
Biden happens when career advancement is based not on results, but on politics, connections, and staying quiet until it’s your turn. Biden has spent five decades moving up by saying very little, doing even less, and being just bland enough to pose little threat to the hierarchy. When Biden’s flaws were placed at the top of the heap, they were no longer hidden and sadly became national policy.
But while Biden drifted in senility, his party remained razor-sharp in their dedication to Gerson’s Law: “The left always sides with evil.”
Hamas? The Left blames Israel. A black cop shoots a white criminal. Crickets? A criminal illegal alien kills a mother of five? They focus on “compassion for migrants.” There’s a perverse consistency to it: if a situation involves a moral choice, they’ll find the most depraved side possible—and throw a parade for it. Why? Because evil has marketing appeal. It wears victimhood like armor and cloaks power-grabs in the language of “justice.” The Left doesn’t ignore morality. They invert it.
Look at their other leaders. Pelosi made a fortune on the stock market. And let’s not forget that she demanded her hairdresser open her shop during covid. And what of Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, AOC, and the many others.
Even the media operates by a set of laws.
Brandolini’s Law explains why Democrat lies spread faster than the truth can catch them. This law has been codified by the media industrial complex.
It takes seconds to scream “Russia!” or “Nazis!”, but years to unspool the facts. And by then, the lie has already hardened. The same law powered COVID hysteria and the “fine people hoax”, to name a few. The truth behind these rarely get airtime—because lies aren’t just useful, they’re policy. And the worst part? It works, at least for a while, because Hanlon’s Razor gives them cover: “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.”
Americans give them the benefit of the doubt. “They must mean well.” “They’re just misinformed.” No. That might’ve flown ten years ago. But after watching COVID lockdowns weaponized, CRT injected into schools, and the DOJ chase parents like terrorists, it’s clear: this isn’t incompetence. This is intent.
The government
Meanwhile, the government grows more complex and bloated, following Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” But Democrats don’t build from simple foundations. They skip to complexity—mandates, regulations, acronyms, alphabet agencies—none of which are accountable or efficient. The result? Nothing works. Healthcare collapses, education erodes, and immigration becomes a sieve. But it doesn’t matter—because bureaucracy was never meant to fix. It was meant to control.
That brings us to Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: any bureaucratic organization will inevitably be taken over by people more devoted to the institution than its goals. Think teachers’ unions. Think the CDC. Think the DOJ. They no longer care if children learn, if public health improves, or if laws are applied evenly. They care about their funding, their power, their narrative. And anything that threatens that gets silenced.
And just when you think they can’t sink lower, they rely on Sutton’s Law: “Go where the money is.” DEI grift, climate subsidies, COVID funds—Democrats never met a crisis they couldn’t monetize. Follow the money, and you’ll find consultants, activists, and NGOs feeding from the trough while the rest of the country drowns in inflation and fentanyl.
Which leads us to Cynical Law of Government:If the government were in charge of the Sahara, there’d be a sand shortage. And here we are—in a country with vast energy reserves, watching gas prices rise because Biden killed pipelines and begged dictators for oil. He’s not solving problems. He’s manufacturing them—and blaming you for noticing.
Leftist society (minions) are culpable
Let’s not forget Cunningham’s Law: “The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong one.” Democrats abuse this too. They troll. They lie. Then they wait for “fact-checkers” to come to their defense, turning truth into a battlefield where silence is safest.
Even cultural decay follows a formula. Remember Cicero’s Dictum? A nation can survive fools, even ambitious ones—but not the traitor within. Today’s Left undermines America from within—open borders, selective law enforcement, and policies that punish productivity and reward grievance. That’s not a bug. It’s the point.
We were told Biden was the “moderate.” That was the cover story. The real plan was always the bureaucracy. The unelected, the activists behind the scenes. The Deep State isn’t shadowy anymore—it’s openly posting job listings for “disinformation czars” while censoring dissidents. At scale.
And all of it—all of it—runs on the broken logic of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Equity scores, climate targets, test score benchmarks—all twisted into quotas, lies, and metrics manipulated to justify power, not truth. A black student graduates unable to read? Don’t fix the system—just eliminate standards.
We’re watching a regime that obeys laws—just the wrong ones. Not laws of justice, fairness, or logic—but the dark, cynical laws that reward failure, elevate frauds, and mask decay as “progress.”
Biden didn’t invent this system. He’s just the mascot of its end stage. And as the walls crack, the only surprise is how long it held up. Because eventually, Reality wins—no matter how many narratives you write to deny it.
On Sunday it was revealed to the public that President Joe Biden had been diagnosed with a “more aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has metastasized to the bone. Dr. Zeke Emanuel said Monday on MSNBC that it’s more likely Biden “had it while he was president.” That means that on top of the obvious cognitive impairment, Biden may have also been suffering from an aggressive cancer, further calling into question who was actually making key decisions during his administration.
Here are five of the most consequential decisions of the Biden presidency that, in light of this diagnosis, have many Americans asking whether Biden was truly the one behind them.
Appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant after Justice Stephen Breyer stepped down in 2022. Prior to taking office, Biden made nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court a top priority, as pointed out by The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd. Jackson had notable shortcomings — including the inability to define what a woman is because she is “not a biologist.”
Pardons And Commutations, Oh My!
Biden gave preemptive pardons to former Rep. Liz Cheney, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, Adam Schiff and others who sat on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol as well as to the “police officers from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department or the U.S. Capitol Police who testified before” the committee, according to The Lawfare Institute.
Biden also issued pardons to his brother, James Biden, James’ wife Sara, his other brother Francis T. Biden, and his sister Valerie T. Owens along with her husband John T. Owens.
As noted by The Federalist’s Beth Brelje, “To be pardoned for a crime, there must be a crime. None of the people on this list have been charged for the awful ways they harmed people in their official capacities.”
Biden also announced in December that he was granting 39 pardons and 1,499 commutations in what his administration described as the “largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.”
Weeks before that set of pardons and commutations, Biden quietly commuted the sentences of two Chinese spies. In one case, Yanjun Xu was convicted in 2022 for “conspiracy to commit economic espionage; conspiracy to commit trade secret theft; attempted economic espionage by theft or fraud; attempted theft of trade secrets by taking or deception.”
But Biden’s commutation said “it is in the national interest that the term of imprisonment related to the aforesaid conviction not be served in its entirety.”
The Deadly Afghanistan Withdrawal
On August 26,2021, thirteen U.S. service members were killed during what has now become known as the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. The same withdrawal also left thousands of Americans, U.S. allies and their families stranded. A report from the State Department later confirmed that Biden’s execution of the withdrawal “posed significant challenges for the Department.”
Biden rushed the withdrawal which “compounded the difficulties the Department faced in mitigating the loss of the military’s key enablers,” the report found. Biden’s lack of planning “had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security.”
Notably, Biden also left billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment behind for U.S. enemies to use while allowing hundreds of Afghans on the Pentagon’s watchlist to enter the U.S. without proper vetting.
Open Borders
Biden allowed millions of illegal aliens to flood the country — and made it easier for them to do so. As explained by Tristan Justice in these pages, Biden stopped construction of the border wall, “expanded the ‘illegal’ Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program,” reversed “Trump-era executive orders that enforced immigration law,” issued a deportation moratorium, lost track of thousands of children illegally in the country, resurrected an Obama-era parole program for illegals and more.
Despite the urgent need for border security, Biden falsely claimed he lacked the authority to secure the border and said he had “done all I can do.”
As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson pointed out, “A secure border was always within reach” during the Biden years but “Biden and the Democrats sold out their fellow Americans, threw open the borders, and then pretended they had no choice in the matter.”
COVID
Biden issued an announcement about a purported vaccine mandate for private companies employing 100 people or more just months after taking office. Biden also, as reported by Boyd, encouraged businesses “to adopt vaccine mandated and plotted a vaccine passport program that would deny Americans work or access to society based on their Covid-19 vaccination status.” The Biden administration also required all federal employees and contractors to get the vaccine or lose their jobs.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
A.F. Branco Cartoon – After Jake Tapper blasted conservatives for accusing Democrats of ignoring Biden’s mental decline, he comes out with his book “Original Sin”. Explaining how the Democrats and the White House covered up his mental decline as though he weren’t a part of the cover-up.
After Criticizing Any Discussion Of Joe Biden’s Cognitive Decline, Jake Tapper Seeks to Profit from the Cover-up
Margaret Flavin – The Gateway Pundit – Feb 26, 2025
CNN’s Jake Tapper was a harsh critic of anyone who dared to raise the topic of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. But now that he can profit from the coverup he and his fellow “journalists” participated in, Tapper is ready to profit off the deception. Tapper is plugging his new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which is set for release in May 2025. An overview of the book reads:… READ MORE
A.F. Branco Cartoon – DFL (Democrats) are willing to fight to the end for Illegal aliens but not for Minnesota citizens.
BRANCO TOON STORE
Will budget agreement hold? DFLers decry cuts to state health care for illegal immigrants
By Luke Sprinkel – AlphaNews.org – May 16, 2025
DFL legislators lashed out when it was announced that illegal immigrants would no longer be eligible for MinnesotaCare under the deal. Gov. Tim Walz and legislative leaders in Minnesota have agreed to a two-year state budget deal that significantly reduces a looming $6 billion deficit, raises taxes only on marijuana, and is several billion dollars smaller than the state’s record $72 billion budget from 2023. The deal also brings a big change to MinnesotaCare, a state-run health care program for low income individuals. Under a compromise reached by Gov. Walz, DFL legislative leaders, and House Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, adult illegal aliens will no longer be allowed to enroll in MinnesotaCare… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
Data released Tuesday shows that egg prices dropped 12.7 percent last month — the “biggest monthly decline since 1984.” The report follows weeks of President Donald Trump telling Americans that egg prices were falling — welcome news after the cost of eggs rose for 17 out of the past 19 months, according to CNN. But the left-wing legacy outlet is scrambling to process the eggcellent news.
CNN’s David Goldman wrote Tuesday that “For months, President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that egg prices are tumbling. It wasn’t true then, but it’s true now.”
Goldman continues:
“Despite Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ far more conservative estimate that egg prices would normalize in the summer, Trump last month said, ‘as you know, the cost of eggs has come down like 93, 94% since we took office.’ Those percentage declines Trump stated are not close to accurate – but we now know that consumer egg prices were, indeed, falling sharply when Trump made those remarks (the Consumer Price Index data wasn’t out yet to confirm or deny Trump’s claims).”
CNN admits egg prices “were, indeed, falling sharply when Trump made those remarks,” but a few sentences later bizarrely still claims the “timing of his claim” was wrong.
Translation: Trump said something that turned out to be true (egg prices fell), but because we didn’t have the same data at the exact moment Trump said it, he was wrong.
That’s one of the propaganda press’ favorite things to do: dismiss or discredit the truth but then claim credit for discovering it themselves later and grant permission to everyone else to acknowledge it. Goldman’s piece is hardly an outlier. It’s the norm. Take the propaganda press’ coverage of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson are awaiting the release of their new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which details Biden’s decline over four years. The excerpts released thus far read more like a confessional of sins long known to anyone with a set of eyes and ears.
But the book and discussions amongst the left are all happening well after Tapper and the legacy media themselves engaged in the cover-up. The media decided that Biden wasn’t cognitively declining and essentially painted anyone who questioned the narrative as a far-right “conspiracy theorist” not acting “in good faith.”
The examples are endless. But now that Tapper, Thompson, and the rest of them can make a few bucks off telling the truth, they’re willing to do it.
Or take the coverage of masks during Covid. The New York Times’ Zach Montague said in September 2020 it was a “dangerous assertion” to state that wearing masks during the pandemic had “little to no medical value.” Fast forward just over two years when Bret Stephens, writing for The Times, declared, “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” Stephens highlighted a report that found there was “no evidence” masks made “any difference.”
To be clear, it was a “dangerous assertion” to say masks did nothing until the propaganda press decided it was okay to make that same assertion. As the Federalist’s Elle Purnell wrote, outlets like the New York Times “played a significant role in defending the officially sanctioned [Covid] narrative” and “chok[ed] dissent.”
And then, of course, there’s the alternative — where something is true until the media says it no longer is, like the case of the propaganda press running cover for Kamala Harris’ devastating management of the border as vice president.
As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd wrote last year, “Years after acknowledging and even praising President Joe Biden for naming Vice President Kamala Harris ‘border czar,’ corporate media claimed the presumptive 2024 Democrat nominee was never charged with overseeing the logistics of the record-breaking invasion.”
In each case, one pattern remains the same: The truth never changed, only the media’s willingness to acknowledge it. Whether it’s egg prices, Biden’s cognitive decline, mask mandates, or who was in charge of the southern border, the facts don’t seem to matter to the propaganda press.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
President Donald Trump pointed out Monday on his Truth Social account that the war between Russia and Ukraine began during President Joe Biden’s administration.
“The war between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening,” Trump wrote, adding that he “had nothing to do with this war” but is working “diligently to get the death and destruction to stop.”
“If the 2020 presidential election was not rigged, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible war would never have happened,” he continued. “President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to stop, and fast. So sad!”
On 60 Minutes Sunday, Zelenskyy called on Trump to support Ukraine.
“President Trump, being a strong president of a strong country, must be on Ukraine’s side,” Zelenskyy said. “I think it is wrong that America wants to be neutral.”
Zelenskyy also warned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ultimate goal could result in a World War.
“If we do not stand firm, he [Putin] will advance further,” Zelenskyy told CBS News. “It is not just idle speculation; the threat is real. Putin’s ultimate goal is to revive the Russian empire and reclaim territories currently under NATO protection. Considering all of this, I believe it could escalate into a world war. There won’t be a safe place, there won’t be a safe place for [anyone].”
Below is my column on the Biden family pardons in Fox.com. President Joe Biden merely confirmed the worst expectations of his critics. The true condemnation rests with those in the media who enabled the Biden influence-peddling operation.
Here is the column:
At 11:45 am, the media felt the final sting of the Biden scandal. It was delivered by President Joe Biden, who shattered any pretense of principle in pardoning family members allegedly implicated in the influence-peddling corruption scandal.
According to an old fable, a scorpion convinced a leery frog to carry him across a river, noting that he could not sting him since they would both drown. Halfway across, the scorpion struck and the frog asked why he would doom them both. The scorpion replied “I am sorry, but I couldn’t resist the urge. It’s in my nature.”
For those of us who have written about the corruption of the Biden family for decades, the pardons were crushingly predictable. The President simply couldn’t resist the urge. In a city where corruption is a cottage industry, the Bidens have long been in a league of their own, from nepotism to influence peddling to illicit lobbying. In the influence-peddling scandal, millions were generated from foreign sources in virtual plain view.
There were the luxury hotel rooms, a diamond, a sports car, and massive payments called “loans. In the summer of 2019, one Chinese businessman wired Hunter Biden $250,000 using Joe Biden’s Delaware home as the beneficiary address.”
The sense of absolute impunity came out in shake-down communications. For example, there was the WhatsApp message to a Chinese businessman openly threatening the displeasure of Joe Biden if money was not forked over without delay. In the message, Hunter warned:
“I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the Chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
That sense of impunity was due to mainstream media forming a protective shell around the family. The media refused to pursue the scandal despite the Hunter Biden laptop and clear evidence of influence peddling.
In 2020, CBS News’s Lesley Stahl literally laughed mockingly at then-President Donald Trump when he raised the Hunter Biden laptop and what it revealed about the Bidens. (Yet Stahl still recently expressed confusion and alarm that people were abandoning legacy media for new media.)
Reporters assured citizens that the laptop was presumptive “Russian disinformation.” Even after the media belatedly acknowledged that it was authentic, MSNBC and Washington Post analysts were still making the claim last year.
After Republicans in the House detailed millions in payments, the media shifted to claiming that there was no real scandal unless it was shown that Joe Biden actually received money directly. It was a ridiculous claim since courts have long treated money going to family members as the same as going directly to a principal as criminal conduct.
The media continued to protect Biden, as evidence showed that Biden had repeatedly lied about not meeting with Hunter’s clients or not having knowledge of his foreign dealings.
As the media narrative continued to collapse, it latched on the promise of Biden that he would never pardon his son – proof that the President was willing to let the criminal justice system run its course. Biden then was shown to be lying about the pardon promise. After he was forced out of the election, Biden signed a pardon for any crimes over a decade committed by his son.
The media gave muttered “harrumphs” and moved on. Many said that it was understandable for a father of a son who struggled with drugs.
Now, in the final minutes of his presidency, Biden pardoned his other allegedly implicated family members, including James Biden, Sara Jones Biden, Valerie Biden Owens, John Owens, and Francis Biden. James Biden was previously referred for criminal charges for lying under oath to Congress as part of its investigation into the corruption scandal.
The pardons were clearly timed to avoid media scrutiny and questions. While he described the act as one of “conscience,” it was an almost mocking act of corruption.
In a strange way, it passed in Bidenworld as an honest moment. There were no claims of supporting an addicted son or dealing with a pending case. It was done in the final minutes because it was raw and obvious. There is no pretense or apology. Just good old-fashioned corruption Biden-style.
It was as honest a moment as when Biden told a friend that “no one f**ks with a Biden.” There was nothing revealing in this about Biden. He could shrug and say, “It’s in my nature.” The sting instead fell on the media, which trusted Biden not to demean it further with such an unethical and disgraceful final act.
The funny thing is that Biden made it across the river. He boarded his final flight with his family (and himself) protected by the misuse of his presidential authority. However, if he looked out the window, he could see his media allies slipping stunned beneath the waters.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, June 18, 2024).
After a presidential campaign where both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris pushed back on claims that they were trying to shut down much of the fossil fuel industry, Biden waited until the final days of his administration to ban oil and gas drilling over 670 million acres of America’s coastline. President-elect Donald Trump responded that“It’s ridiculous. I’ll un-ban it immediately. I have the right to un-ban it immediately.” It will likely be more difficult than a simple “un-ban” order. Environmental groups will likely push a “sue, baby, sue” campaign to counter Trump’s “drill, baby, drill.”
In his statement, Biden justified the move to counter the “climate crisis.” A White House announcement stated that “President Biden has determined that the environmental and economic risks and harms that would result from drilling in these areas outweigh their limited fossil fuel resource potential.”
The question is whether the order can handcuff Trump in pursuing one of the main parts of his campaign platform to unleash America’s fossil fuel resources.
This is all familiar ground.
Biden acted under Section 12(a) of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), which states that the president “may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the Outer Continental Shelf.”
As noted in a Congressional Research Service report there is an ongoing debate over whether presidents can reverse the withdrawals of prior presidents. Trump faced that question in 2017 when he sought to overturn a ban by President Barack Obama in order to open up Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas and some parts of the Atlantic to oil and gas exploration. Two years later, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska struck down Trump’s order. While acknowledging that the law is ambiguous, it did not find express authority for such reversals. Litigation ran out the clock and Biden later overturned Trump’s executive order.
So, there are grounds to assert this authority of reversal, but it will take years in court. The alternative and preferred route would be Congress. This is an issue that should ultimately rest with Congress. This ambiguous law is unfortunately common in poorly crafted provisions giving presidents sweeping authority. Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has already pledged to “push back using every tool at our disposal.”
They say the U.S. presidency is the loneliest job in the world. Maybe the second-loneliest gig is that of Cabinet secretary in President Joe Biden’s administration.
A piece published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal pulls from dozens of sources who say Biden’s inner circle of trusted aides increasingly kept contact with the president at a minimum, including the people he should have depended on most to consult and advise for the good of the nation.
The president who has spent a good chunk of his term out of the office apparently was not all that keen on meetings with his Cabinet secretaries. In fact, Biden may have met more often with his criminal son’s sketchy clients than he has with his administration’s top managers.
‘Hide the President’s True Condition’
Joe Biden was such a political liability that his handlers hid him away during the 2020 presidential campaign. The man campaigned from his Delaware basement through the brunt of the election year. The cloistered strategy wasn’t as much about protecting the feeble geezer from Covid as it was designed to prevent American voters from seeing what a physical and mental mess Biden really was.
Even the Pravda Press, which was openly rooting for — and covering for — the Democrat gaffe machine, was forced to report on Biden’s bunker campaign.
“Over the past six weeks, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has been running his campaign from his Delaware basement,” CBS News reported in April of 2020, showcasing a fluff piece from The New York Times about how team Biden was attempting to “keep his campaign relevant during the pandemic.”
The occasional programmed Zoom calls notwithstanding, keeping Biden “relevant” (or electable), meant keeping him hidden — literally underground.
That limited contact strategy has defined the octogenarian’s presidential tenure. Biden has held the fewest number of press conferences and media interviews of any president since Ronald Reagan’s first term, and it isn’t close, Axios reported in late June. The publication at the time noted that Biden was about to sit for a “rare interview with ABC News” … “amid growing concern about his age and acuity — and accusations that his inner circle has taken pains to hide the president’s true condition from public view.”
Quaintly, back then Axios and its corporate media bedfellows were still trying to convince Americans not to believe their lying eyes, that there were “two Bidens”: the 81-year-old who had recently froze up like so much freezer peas in his debate with former President Donald Trump, and the virile campaigning Joe.
‘Wouldn’t be Welcome’
It turns out, Biden wasn’t just hiding from voters. He was ducking his own Cabinet.
“Interactions between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted. At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said,” reports The Wall Street Journal in a piece headlined, “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge.”
The story further noted that “cabinet members — including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen — were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.”
To all the Dems freaking out about Elon "running the country," Biden is currently president and no one knows who's running the country.
Like other aging, cognitively diminished seniors, Biden had his “good days, and bad days,” one former aide told the publication. The president has routinely gotten a pass from fellow Democrats and corporate media on his memory lapses, mumbled and jumbled answers to questions, and outright lies. Remember, Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report detailing Biden’s possession and mishandling of classified documents recommended the president not be prosecuted because a jury might well see him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
Meeting with the ‘Big Guy’
But as The Federalist has reported, said “well-meaning elderly man” is alleged to have interacted with Hunter Biden’s suspect clients “countless times.” Devon Archer, the younger Biden’s former business associate, testified before a congressional committee last year that Hunter put his father, vice president at the time, on speakerphone nearly two dozen times while talking to overseas business contacts. Archer discussed Hunter’s involvement on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings and the hefty checks it wrote to a guy seemingly unqualified for the job. Archer and others have alleged Burisma and other “clients” were paying for the Biden “brand.” Aka, access to the vice president.
“Burisma would have gone out of business if ‘the brand’ had not been attached to it,” the New York Post reported, quoting from a readout from panel Republicans.
“Archer talked about the ‘big guy’ and how Hunter Biden always said, ‘We need to talk to my guy,’ ‘We need to see when my guy is going to be here,’ and those types of things,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) told reporters as he left the deposition in July 2023.
There were many more interactions between Vice President Joe Biden and his son’s other business associates, according to the laptop that the Deep State and the accomplice media long claimed did not exist. As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported:
Biden reportedly met with Ukrainian, Russian, and Kazakhstani business partners at a famous D.C. establishment in 2015. The meeting, arranged by Hunter, took place at one of Georgetown’s most famous restaurants, Café Milano… Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thanked Hunter for the introduction to his father.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote in an email released by the New York Post weeks before the 2020 election.
And visitor logs show Hunter Biden’s business pals paid a call on the White House at least 80 times while Biden was VP, Fox News reported. A meeting with the elder Biden at the time involved Chinese businessmen tied to a firm that Hunter Biden had invested in.
Earlier this month, the president issued a sweeping, unprecedented pardon of his multi-felon son, not merely for the serious crimes for which he was found guilty but for crimes that he may have committed during his salad days with Burisma and the other business associates seeking access to the “Big Guy.”
The Disaster of Absence
As president, Biden has held just nine full Cabinet meetings, the Wall Street Journal reported. The numbers include three such sessions in 2021, two in 2022, three in 2023 and only one this year. By comparison, President Barack Obama led 19 Cabinet meetings and President Donald Trump called 25 in their first terms, the Journal noted, using data obtained by former CBS News reporter Mark Knoller.
While White House officials have disputed Biden’s distance and decline, the cloistering of the cognitively slipping president appears to have contributed to some disastrous consequences.
Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat who chaired the House Armed Services Committee in 2021, told the Wall Street Journal that he was shut out of conversations with the president leading up to the administration’s debacle of a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“I was begging them to set expectations low,” Smith, who had misgivings about how the operation would go, told the publication.
The Journal reported that “[f]ormer administration officials said it often didn’t seem like Biden had his finger on the pulse.” Many of us have often been left wondering if the president has had a pulse at all.
Witness accounts and his degenerate son’s own emails suggest Biden had plenty of vim and vigor when it was time to talk about corrupt financial deals. It was the business of protecting and leading America that he seemed disinterested in during his historically awful presidential term.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks about the situation in Syria in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 8, 2024, following a crisis meeting to discuss the sudden overthrow by Islamist-led rebels of President Bashar al-Assad. | CHRIS KLEPONIS/AFP via Getty Images
President Joe Biden said the United States is monitoring rebel groups in Syria following the downfall of the Assad regime and is concerned for the safety of Americans living in the country.
In remarks given on Sunday afternoon, Biden addressed reports that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had fled Syria as rebel forces took over the capital of Damascus.
“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen,” Biden said. “This regime brutalized, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians. The fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice. It’s a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria.”
Biden acknowledged that there was much “uncertainty” facing Syria, noting that there is a chance that extremist Islamic groups might “take advantage” of the power vacuum to take over. Biden promised to continue military efforts against Islamic State elements in the country, to work with regional leaders to maintain stability, and “engage with all Syrian groups” to create “an independent sovereign Syria.”
“We will remain vigilant,” he continued. “Make no mistake: some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human rights abuses,” he added, likely referring to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and U.K., among other groups. In 2018, The U.S. imposed a $10 million bounty on the head of HTS’ leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who has been designated as a terrorist since 2013.
“We’ve taken note of statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent days. They’re saying the right things now, but as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words, but their actions.”
Biden added that his administration was “mindful” that there were Americans present in Syria, including individuals who have been taken hostage, such as Austin Tice, a Marine-turned-journalist, who was abducted by jihadist militants over 12 years ago.
“It is now incumbent upon all the opposition groups to seek a role in governing Syria,” Biden added. “To demonstrate their commitment to the rights of all Syrians, the rule of law, and the protection of religious and ethnic minorities.”
Late Saturday night, after more than a decade of civil war, rebel forces successfully forced Assad to flee the country, ending around 50 years of his family ruling Syria as a dictatorship. Following Assad’s departure, crowds flooded the streets of Damascus, chanting “Allah is great” and shouting anti-Assad slogans, reported The Associated Press.
“My feelings are indescribable,” said Omar Daher, a 29-year-old lawyer, in comments given to the AP. “After the fear that [Assad] and his father made us live in for many years, and the panic and state of terror that I was living in, I can’t believe it.”
Despite the celebrations, some have expressed concern over the potential fallout from the regime collapse, especially for the nation’s vulnerable Christian community and other minority groups. Since the violence began in 2011, Syria’s native Christian population has declined considerably from around 10% of the country, or 1.5 million, to approximately 300,000 at present, reported Crux Now.
Democrats love promising a “peaceful transition of power,” but history—and their actions—tell a different story.
When Obama handed the reins to Trump, he made a big show of professionalism while his DOJ quietly sharpened its knives. Four years of investigations, conspiracies, and obstruction later, the Democrats finally ousted Trump using their COVID-19 coup, complete with ballot-stuffing, midnight counting, and media complicity. But their victory was short-lived, leaving Biden with the unenviable task of ushering in yet another “peaceful transition”—this time back to Trump.
Biden’s Legacy of Chaos
Let’s take stock of what Joe Biden is leaving behind. Start with Bidenflation:
Interest rates that discourage investment, particularly for small businesses. Families struggling to stretch their dollars farther than a triathlete on a treadmill.
Instead of financing our recent $1.8 trillion federal budget deficit by issuing 10- and 30-year bonds, Janet Yellen has instead loaded up on two-year Treasury bills in a what has been described as “a nakedly political effort to avoid a massive jump in mortgage rates.” Mortgage rates created by Bidenflation, I remind you.
Aristotle wrote about “moderation in all things,” but he didn’t anticipate Joe Biden or Leftism. Biden’s economic policies aren’t just unmoderated; they’re unhinged. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is drained to critical levels, energy prices are volatile, and Biden’s administration seems to think solar panels is the answer.
And what of the military? It’s in shambles. Recruitment numbers are dismally low, matched by our stockpile of weapons. We can thank Biden for his proxy war in Ukraine and his failure to manage the Middle East, where Iran and its proxies, including a resurgent Al Qaeda that recently took control of Syria flex their muscles. In short, the world is a much less safe place under Joe Biden.
And then there’s the Department of Justice, which under Biden and Obama transformed from an institution of law to a political cudgel. Public trust in the DOJ is at an all-time low, but Biden isn’t addressing the problem—he’s doubling down, reportedly planning to pardon key players in his administration to shield them from accountability.
The Irony of Democrat Spending
If Biden’s administration were a business, it would be Enron. Trillions of dollars are unaccounted for across multiple agencies. The CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were boondoggles, diverting taxpayer money to pet projects that failed to deliver. Even Biden admitted the IRA was less about reducing inflation and more about funding the global climate agenda. John Podesta, the man controlling $375 billion from the IRA, might as well be handing out blank checks at a lobbyist convention.
Let’s not forget Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who burned $7.5 billion on eight electric vehicle charging stations. That’s a cost-per-station that would make Elon Musk burst out laughing—or crying. And Kamala Harris, armed with $42 billion for rural internet, has accomplished as much as she did at the border: absolutely nothing.
Funding the Resistance?
A recent exposé from Project Veritas revealed EPA adviser Brent Efron bragging about funneling money to tribes, nonprofits, and states as quickly as possible before Trump’s team could intervene.
“It feels like we’re on the Titanic and throwing gold bars off the edge,” he said.
For once, the metaphor fits: Democrats are sinking, but they’re determined to take everyone else down with them.
“We gave them the money because it was harder if it was a government-run program, they could take the money away, if Trump won.”, Efron exclaims.
Even Elon Musk weighed in, calling the video proof that “the U.S. government is actively working to undermine the American people.”
Trump’s Transition Team: From Chaos to Competence
Trump has made it clear that his second term will prioritize results over rhetoric. His administration will cut through the debris of Biden’s failures with laser focus, appointing experts—not diversity freaks—to tackle America’s most urgent problems.
Energy independence will be restored.
Government employees will be expected to actually show up to work as President Trump dismantles Biden’s attempt to prevent 42,000 workers at the Social Security Administration from having to return to the office.
Wasteful spending on unproductive programs will be slashed.
Gone will be the carnival of incompetence that defined the Biden administration. Trump’s team will hit the ground running, undoing four years of damage in record time.
Peaceful Transition This!
Aristotle said, “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” The Biden administration proved to be a masterclass in hypocrisy and self-destruction. And their transition has been no different.
Despite inheriting the worst administration in history, Trump’s first 100 days will be epic. And the transformation of America back to greatness will begin on Day One. A short of adrenalin is about to hit America, and it will last 4 years, challenging the boom of the Clinton years.
If Trump performs as I predict (and he will), Democrats will be hard-pressed to win major elections for the next decade at least.
In short, Trump doesn’t care about the so-called “peaceful transition”. He has a man on his team who can replace NASA. And he appointed others who are equally talented in their own ways. Gone are the DEI appointments, and freak show of the Biden administration. This transition team knows it’s at war with Biden. And like the election, this too will be an easy victory.
Below is my column in The Hill on the Biden pardon and how it might not prove as complete a protection for Hunter Biden — or Joe Biden — as the President had hoped. Ironically, the greatest protection for President Biden in continuing investigations in the influence-peddling scandal could prove that very case that he has denounced that recognized presidential immunity for matters that arise during a presidency. Nevertheless, the action confirms the suspicion that Hunter’s bizarre criminal defense strategy may have been based on the assumption that he had a pocket pardon as insurance against any losses in court.
Here is the column:
The most shocking aspect of President Biden pardoning his own son, Hunter, may be that it was not in the least shocking, given the history of the Biden family. This abuse of the pardon power was widely anticipated even by his allies as the president repeatedly denied that he would ever do such a thing as he ran for reelection. Indeed, it may be the single most premeditated unethical act in political history.
However, it may not achieve what President Biden most hopes for: a clean slate for his son and himself in this massive corruption scandal.
Roughly two years ago, I wrote about how Biden might suddenly withdraw from the presidential race in 2024 and pardon his son as a lame-duck president. “The pardon-and-apology approach might appeal to Biden not only as an effort to convert vice into virtue but to justify his withdrawal from the election as a selfless act,” I wrote.
I further noted: “Everyone in Washington would win — except, of course, the public: The Bidens would keep alleged millions in influence-peddling profits; Hunter would not even have to pay his full taxes; members of Congress and the media could avoid taking responsibility for burying the reports of corruption.”
I wrote about the pardon option repeatedly because none of Hunter’s bizarre (and ultimately unsuccessful) criminal defenses made sense unless he felt confident that his father would pardon him in the end. Hunter’s taunting Congress with open contempt of a subpoena and his ridiculous defenses in court were not the actions of someone who feared consequences from these investigations. They were the actions of someone with a pocket pardon.
NBC is reporting that Hunter’s pardon was being discussed in the White House for a long time, even as Biden and his staff were steadfastly denying that he would issue a pardon. As with his years of denying knowledge of Hunter’s business dealings and meeting his clients, Biden simply lied over and over again to the public.
The eventual pardon restored what was a sweetheart deal reached with Special Counsel David Weiss that would have given Hunter immunity to the immediate charges and any unnamed criminal charges. It collapsed in court when Judge Maryellen Noreika expressed shock at such a deal and asked the prosecutor if he had ever seen such a deal offered to any other defendant. He admitted that he had not.
Now, President Biden has recreated an even more sweeping immunity grant through his own powers by pardoning his son not only for the crimes of which he was convicted, but of any crimes committed between Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024. Think on that. It would cover anything from perjury to murder.
Now it makes sense why Hunter seemed to be engaged in what I described as a “game of chicken with himself.” As a criminal defense attorney, I noted that wild moves in and outside of the courts would make sense only if he knew that his dad would cover him in the end if everything went poorly — even as the president was assuring the public that he would never do such a thing.
In a final show of contempt for the American people, President Biden waited until a Sunday before an international trip to commit this unethical act. He brushed over his past lies by saying that “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word.” What he actually said, over and over again, was that he would never pardon his son.
For many in the media who helped bury this scandal and showed no interest in pursuing the influence-peddling operation of the Biden family, the pardon was met with uncomfortable shrugs. It is a measure of what you can call “Biden ethics.” In the curious world of Joe Biden, a lie that no one believes is treated the same as the truth. It is likely to work. There may be little interest in pursuing this corruption scandal with so much to get done in the new administration. However, it is not the absolute “get-out-of-jail-free” card that President Biden would like.
Hunter could still be called to testify before Congress or with investigators on the influence-peddling efforts. If he lies, it will be a new crime for which this pardon would not bar prosecution. He would no longer be able to count on a pocket pardon as an insurance policy.
Short of such continued investigation, the Bidens will have achieved something that would have made John Gotti blush. They were able to pull in millions of alleged influence-peddling proceeds. Hunter was showered with gifts and benefits, from a diamond to a luxury sports car. Various Biden family members reportedly received money from the operation. President Biden was himself accused of knowledge and possible benefits from the influence peddling. He will also be protected by this official act.
This is why I once wrote that the Bidens are the GOATs of influence peddling. While influence peddling is the most common form of corruption in Washington, this city has never seen the likes of the Bidens. The only thing greater than their appetite was their sheer audacity.
In this statement on the pardon before fleeing the jurisdiction for a foreign trip, President Biden notably stated that “in trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me.” Indeed, this corruption scandal is as much about the president as it is about his son. And, as the president previously declared, “No one f—- with a Biden.”
While Hunter Biden enjoys the privileges of a sweeping presidential pardon, Rachel Powell, a Pennsylvania mother of eight, is spending the holidays locked away from the people she loves. While President Joe Biden’s corrupt son enjoys a get-out-of-jail-free card erasing a long list of felonies and potential offenses, Powell, marked as an “insurrectionist” for a property damage crime at the Capitol, languishes in a federal prison.
It’s the punctuation mark on the perversion of justice that has defined the Biden years, an era of lawlessness in which “no one is above the law” but this president, his grifting family and his constitution-ripping cronies.
Biden’s unconditional pardon of his ne’re-do-well progeny, issued as Americans were still drowsy from their Thanksgiving leftovers, covers more than a decade of felonies and sundry crimes that Hunter “committed or may have committed.” Legal experts are calling the act of absolution “unprecedented,” exceeding President Gerald Ford’s pardon of the man he succeeded, Richard Nixon, post-Watergate. Even that wide pardon only covered Nixon’s presidency — Jan. 20, 1969 to Aug. 9. 1974.
Joe Biden’s 11-year blanket pardon of Hunter is even more expansive than the pardon Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. pic.twitter.com/9ThNOEGyo5
The only thing surprising about Biden’s broad act of leniency gifted to his crack-addled son is that anyone is surprised by it. But Never Trumpers like Joe Walsh sound absolutely heartbroken that Biden has once again been shown to be the unrepentant liar he is after insisting on multiple occasions that he would not pardon Hunter, who faces sentencing on gun-related and tax evasion felony convictions.
“I said I would abide by the jury’s decisions, and I will do that, and I will not pardon him,” the president told ABC News’ David Muir, press puppet for the Democratic Party and their presidential candidates, in an interview in June.
After hearing that Biden is breaking his word, a dispirited Walsh sounded like a cuckolded lover.
“They’re all like that,” the Trump-hating former Republican congressman from Illinois moaned Sunday evening on MSNBC. “So, the next time any of us complain about anything Trump does, this — this pardon is just deflating. For those of us who have been out there for a few years now yelling about what a unique threat Donald Trump is, for Joe Biden to do something like this, Trump — ‘nobody’s above the law,’ we’ve been screaming.”
Walsh and his fellow Never Trumpers have joined Democrats in their full-throated support of one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history — the politically-driven witch hunts of pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. For nearly four years, Biden’s Department of Justice, led by his Javert, Attorney General Merrick Garland, in arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning hundreds of political prisoners. Like 44-year-old Rachel Powell. The Biden administration and their pals in the Pravda press continue to paint the eventual riots over a rigged 2020 election as a coordinated “insurrection” driven by their No. 1 political enemy: Donald J. Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president of the United States.
‘You’re Going to Take Eight Years of Her Life Away?’
Nearly 1,600 people have been caught up in the Biden Justice Department investigations. More than 500 people“have been sentenced to periods of incarceration,” some on an “obstruction of an official proceeding”charge tossed out earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court. Interestingly, the high court’s ruling found the DOJ employed an “inappropriately broad interpretation” of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The DOJ hit Powell, who became known as the “bullhorn lady” in the press, with the obstruction charge. She also was charged with civil disorder, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, destruction of government property, and entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon — the “ice axe and battering ram” that law enforcement officials say she used to break through a window and “breach the Capitol” as Congress convened to count the 2020 electoral votes. Powell told Newsweek that she “used the axe and the cardboard battering ram to break a window so that some in the group near the tunnel could move to open spaces,” and a bullhorn “to flag a nearby safe haven that she saw on the other side of the glass she had shattered.”
Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence after D.C. District Judge Royce Lamberth threw the book at her in October 2023. Before that, Powell spent years on strict house arrest awaiting trial and sentencing.
“She had an ankle monitor. She was not allowed to leave her home,” said Cynthia Hughes, founder and president of the Patriot Freedom Project, a nonprofit organization providing support to J6 political prisoners and their families. Hughes was interviewed on an upcoming edition of The Federalist Radio Hour podcast. Her nephew, Tim Hale, spent three years in prison on J6-related, trumped up charges, including a year in solitary confinement.
Powell “missed her daughter’s wedding. She missed the birth of her two grandchildren. She couldn’t even go to a doctor appointment if one of her children needed the assistance of her mother,” Hughes added.
Powell’s youngest child was just 7 when she was sent to prison.
While Powell did damage government property, Hughes said she didn’t assault anyone or hurt law enforcement officials during the riot and she had no previous criminal record. Yet, the mother of eight received harsher treatment than many of the Black Lives Matter protesters engaged in riots that burned down government buildings, destroyed private property and brutally assaulted police.
“Yeah, she broke a window but you’re going to take eight years of her life away?” Hughes said. She’s lost her home, she lost custody of her children for a small minute. She had a terrible public defender.”
And now Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence followed by 36 months of supervised release. Hunter Biden, who faced years in prison and more than $1.3 million in fines is a free man. He owes nothing. If it’s any consolation to the J6 political prisoners learning of the pardon from behind prison bars, the younger Biden says he will never forget the kindness bestowed on him by his powerful father and that he will commit himself to “helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
He remains defiant, despite his father’s forbearance.
Jerry Broussard of WhatDidYouSay.org
“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction – mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” Hunter said in a statement to the press.
‘Miscarriage of Justice’
Biden defended his son and his sweeping pardon, insisting that “Hunter was treated differently” under the law. Well, welcome to the club, Hunter. The hundreds of J6 political prisoners his father’s administration has persecuted over the past four years know what disparate treatment feels like.
President-elect Trump has met with some the families of the people he has described as hostages. He has said that he would pardon a “large portion” of the people convicted on federal charges related to the Capitol riots. On Truth Social earlier this year Trump wrote that one of his “first acts as your next president” will be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned.”
Following Biden’s generous gift to his repugnant son, Trump asked on his Truth Social account, “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”
Joe Biden didn’t just pardon Hunter for the gun crimes for which he was convicted. He pardoned Hunter for *EVERY SINGLE FEDERAL CRIME HE COMMITTED* over the last decade—including several years during which Joe Biden was VP and the entirety of Joe Biden’s presidency. pic.twitter.com/wjvwXTL8r6
The president-elect raises a good point. Trump could and should pardon the J6 political prisoners as one of his first acts in office, or at least commute sentences. He likely will stop the prosecutions and end the witch hunt that the Biden administration has carried out. But Biden should spend the last days of his shameful presidency rectifying of the bigger injustices of his time in office. He should pardon the political enemies his DOJ has prosecuted as “insurrectionists.”
He claims his disgraced boy is a victim of politics, “singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.” Many of the protesters who showed up to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are victims of vendetta political politics. That was wrong. It remains so.
But Biden is as political as he is corrupt. So the people locked away on political crimes will have to await deliverance from the man the Biden regime desperately tried but failed to defeat, imprison, even murder.
Trump, unlike Biden, is a man of his word, Hughes said. “He keeps his promises,” the Patriot Freedom Project founder said.
And when Trump does follow through on his promise of pardons, Democrats, Never Trumpers and their accomplice media friends will have no standing to complain.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Below is my column in Fox.com on President Joe Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter of not just his convicted crimes but any crimes that he may have chosen to commit. President Biden has set a standard that is not merely a new low but positively subterraneous for future presidents.
Here is the column:
President Joe Biden’s decision to use his presidential powers to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the President used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past scandals in the abuse of the pardon power, Biden has done lasting damage not just to his legacy but his office.
Despite its noble origins and purpose, the pardon power historically has not been a pristine power used by past presidents. As I have previously written, it was used to benefit the political cronies of past presidents. President Warren Harding was even accused of selling pardons, including to mob enforcer Ignacio Lupo, known as “Lupo the Wolf.” Former president William Clinton waited for the final days of his presidency to pardon his own brother as well as a major democratic donor.
In 2023, I wrote that Biden might follow this same pattern and pardon his son as a lame-duck president. The column suggested that Biden might withdraw as a candidate for office and then take the action as a father: “The pardon-and-apology approach might appeal to Biden not only as an effort to convert vice into virtue but to justify his withdrawal from the election as a selfless act.”
In the 2020 election and throughout his presidential term, Biden repeatedly lied to the American public with an ease and impunity that shocked even many political veterans in Washington. He was repeatedly asked if he knew about Hunter’s foreign dealings, including millions in alleged deals with Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, and other clients. President Biden lied and denied such knowledge. As I detailed in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, he had repeated discussions of these dealings. He is even on tape discussing news stories on the dealings.
President Biden was also repeatedly asked if he met any of his son’s clients. He repeatedly lied. We have pictures and records of dinners and meetings with these clients. Hunter Biden was expressly thanked for his arranging such access to his father.
Few reporters pressed Biden on the corruption scandal, but they were often met not only with denials but angry retorts from the president. When Fox reporter Peter Doocy raised it, the President steamed“Yes, yes, yes. God love you, man — you’re a one-horse pony, I tell you.”
The President continued to lie throughout the election, the presidential debates, and his term.
Then, the press repeatedly asked him whether he would pardon his son. The President was now running for reelection and again lied. He and the White House said over and over again that no such pardon would occur and was not being contemplated. That was also a lie. NBC is reporting that, while issuing these denials last June, there were discussions about the pardon.
The pardon power was written in absolute terms, and a president can even, in my view, pardon himself. However, what is constitutional is not necessarily ethical or right. This is one of the most disgraceful pardons even in the checkered history of presidential pardons. President Biden has lied to cover up a corruption scandal that reportedly brought his family millions in raw influence peddling. His portrayal of his son as a victim stands in sharp contrast to the sense of immunity and power conveyed by Hunter in his dealings.
There were diamonds as gifts, lavish expense accounts, and a sports car, in addition to massive payments that Hunter claimed were “loans.” There are messages where Hunter belies the President’s portrayal of a political witch hunt, including messages like the one to a Chinese businessman openly threatening the displeasure of Joe Biden if money is not sent to them immediately. In the WhatsApp message, Hunter stated:
“I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the Chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
The President has now pardoned Hunter for his convicted felonies and any crimes he may have committed from “Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024.”
It is all now being buried under a sweeping immunity deal and a pack of presidential lies.
President Joe Biden greets Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Week in Woodside, California, on Nov. 15, 2023. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
President Joe Biden met last week for the third time with Chinese President Xi Jinping—the leader of a regime Biden’s own administration has repeatedly declared is engaging in genocide. No White House statement about any of these three meetings has indicated that Biden specifically made this genocide an issue with Xi.
The day before Biden was inaugurated, as this column has noted before, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the People’s Republic of China was engaging in genocide against the Uyghur people in China’s Xinjiang region.
“After careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that the PRC [People’s Republic of China], under the direction and control of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” Pompeo said. “I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.”
“The United States has worked exhaustively to pull into the light what the Communist Party and General Secretary Xi Jinping wish to keep hidden through obfuscation, propaganda, and coercion,” he said.
Two months later, Biden’s State Department issued its report on human rights in China in 2020. “Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” it said.
“These crimes were continuing,” it said.
In April 2022, Biden’s State Department released its report on human rights in China in 2021. It reiterated that “genocide and crimes against humanity” were occurring in Xinjiang. In November 2022, Biden held his first summit with Xi in Bali, Indonesia.
“I’m really glad to be able to see you again in person,” Biden told Xi in public remarks at the opening of the summit. “We spent a lot of time together and—back in the days when we were both vice presidents, and it’s just great to see you.”
Biden also expressed gratitude to this leader of a genocidal regime for having congratulated him on his election. “You were kind enough to call me to congratulate me, and I congratulate you as well,” Biden told Xi.
“So, President Xi, I look forward to our continuing and ongoing open and honest dialogue we’ve always had,” said Biden.
A “readout” on this meeting published by the White House after it was over did mention that Xinjiang had been an issue—but it did not specifically cite the genocide taking place there. “President Biden raised concerns about PRC [People’s Republic of China] practices in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, and human rights more broadly,” it said. Four months later, in March 2023, the State Department released its report on human rights in China in 2022. It once again cited the “genocide and crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang.
In November 2023, Biden and Xi held their second summit in Woodside, California.
“Well, Mr. President, it’s good to see you again,” Biden told Xi at the beginning of the summit.
“And to host you in the United States is a great honor and a pleasure,” Biden said.
The White House “readout” noted that Biden once again mentioned Xinjiang and “human rights abuses”—but it did not specifically cite the genocide. Biden “raised concerns regarding PRC [People’s Republic of China] human rights abuses, including in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong,” it said.
Five months later, the State Department released its report on human rights in China in 2023. Its first sentence said: “Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year in China against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”
This Nov. 16, Biden met with Xi in Lima, Peru. “It’s good to see you and see all of you again,” Biden told Xi in his opening public statement. “You know, one year ago, we met in the Woodside Summit in San Francisco. And I’m very proud of the progress we’ve both made together.” In the readout published by the White House after this summit, there was an unspecific reference to human rights—but not genocide. “The president noted the importance of human rights and the responsibility of all nations to respect their human rights commitments,” it said.
From January 2021, the month Biden was inaugurated, through September 2024, the latest month for which the numbers are available from the Census Bureau, the United States imported approximately $1.79 trillion in goods from China—while running a bilateral trade deficit of approximately $1.23 trillion.
Former President Donald Trump said in an interview with Fox News in February that if he were elected to another term, he would seek to impose tariffs on Chinese imports that may exceed 60%.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, whom President-elect Trump has now named to be his secretary of state, sent out a message on X in August: “Communist China has been able to get away with a campaign of widespread evil,” he said. “From committing acts of genocide against religious and ethnic groups, to spearheading forced sterilization and abortions, as well as dominating crucial minerals and technologies, and impeding the sovereignty of several regional partners, the U.S. will not tolerate these practices.”
Now, Rubio has the opportunity to lead U.S. policy on China in the right direction.
As divided as America may be, this election showed there’s one thing most Americans agree on: Only U.S. citizens should vote in U.S. elections.
Voters this week in eight states — Idaho,Iowa,Kentucky, Missouri,North Carolina, Oklahoma,South Carolina, and Wisconsin — overwhelmingly approved constitutional amendment ballot questions seeking to ensure noncitizens cannot vote in state and local elections. Foreign nationals are already barred from voting in federal elections.
“We’re so often told about how divided we are in the United States, but on Tuesday we had Republicans, Democrats and independents come together in overwhelming numbers declaring that only citizens would be able to vote” in elections, a jubilant Will Martin, Wisconsin state director of Americans for Citizen Voting, told The Federalist in a phone interview this week.
The Badger State’s Citizen-Only Voting Amendment (COVA) was endorsed by more than 70 percent of voters in Tuesday’s election, according to unofficial tallies. Support topped 65 percent in each of the states with COVA questions on the ballot, according to unofficial results reported by state news organizations. In Iowa, the referendum passed with 76 percent support. In South Carolina, the ballot question earned the approval of a whopping 86 percent of voters.
In Missouri, the same ballot question amending the state constitution to make clear only citizens can vote in Show Me State elections also knocked out ranked-choice voting by a two-to-one margin.
Before Election Day, COVA advocates felt confident, but Wisconsin presented the biggest challenge. Jack Tomczak, vice president for Citizen Outreach for Americans for Citizen Voting, told The Federalist that the amendment faced “well-funded” opposition led by the leftist League of Women Voters. More than three dozen leftist groups lent their names and resources to an effort to defeat the referendum. Martin said opponents ran “shameful” ads falsely warning voters that military personnel wouldn’t be able to vote in Wisconsin elections if the amendment passed.
In Idaho, Democrat lawmakers claimed noncitizens could be barred from voting in private elections, including homeowner associations and parent-teacher associations elections. The amendment ballot questions had nothing to do with such races, just as they don’t involve federal election law.
‘Being Diminished’
Opponents, assisted by the accomplice media, pushed the left’s false talking point that foreign nationals voting in elections is nearly nonexistent and that the constitutions in Wisconsin and the other states already bar noncitizens from voting.
“Passage of the amendments marks the latest chapter of Republican’s [sic] ongoing efforts to put unfounded claims of noncitizen voting at the center of a broader political strategy,” Democratic Party mouthpiece NBC News reported this week.
In the words of outgoing acting President Joe Biden, malarky.
As The Federalist has reported, the vast majority of states’ constitutions include language that “every” citizen meeting age and residency requirements is eligible to vote. The amendments demand that “only” U.S. citizens meeting the requirements are electors.
Opponents of the COVA movement insist there’s no difference. The “every” phrasing opens the door to noncitizens being allowed to vote in state and local elections, as is the case in California, Maryland, Vermont and the District of Columbia.
In September, Frederick became the largest city in Maryland to allow noncitizens to vote in its elections. The Board of Aldermen voted 4-1 to give green card and illegal immigrants the right to cast ballots. Kelly Russell was the sole dissenting vote.
“I have talked to many people who worked to get their citizenship in order to vote who do not agree to that, who feel that their efforts and all the hard work that they did is being diminished by this,” she said, according to Fox45 News in Baltimore.
Takoma Park, Maryland, has allowed foreign nationals to vote in local elections for more than 30 years. All told, a dozen Maryland municipalities open the franchise to noncitizens. They can because there’s nothing in the state constitution that prevents them from doing so.
‘Common Sense’ Movement
Wisconsin legislative Democrats have voted en bloc against resolutions to take the citizen-only amendment to the voters. While they insist noncitizens illegally voting in elections isn’t an issue, it is. Noncitizens have voted in U.S. elections and thousands have shown up on state voter rolls this election cycle.
The problems are only magnified by an unprecedented 10 million U.S. Border Patrol encounters with illegal aliens in the nearly four years that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been in office. While it is a felony for foreign nationals to vote in U.S. elections, incidents are difficult to track and not a priority for many prosecutors.
“There are at least 25 million non-citizens in the country according to the Census Bureau and no federal enforcement mechanism to ensure their names don’t appear on the voters rolls,” Paige Terryberry, senior research fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Federalist in September. “Right now, the Biden-Harris administration is using welfare offices, DMVs, Public housing, healthercare.gov and more to register voters, and they aren’t verifying citizenship at these locations. States can act too, but the SAVE Act is the only thing that can fix this problem nationwide before the election.”
Each illegal vote diminishes those of eligible voters.
Since 2018, 14 states have added, or have voted to add, citizenship requirements to their constitutions, according to Ballotpedia.
Martin noted that swing state Wisconsin is a “50-50” state, as evident by former President Donald Trump’s victory in the so-called “blue wall” state by a little over 28,000 votes. Still, the ballot question scored majorities in 71 of 72 counties, Martin said.
The COVA advocate said the issue is part of a sea change in America, a return to basic guiding values.
“Theres a movement in this country toward common sense,” Martin said. “People are tired of people trying to interpret for them, people are tired of being told what to think.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Democrats are worried America elected former President Donald Trump at his worst. Republicans are celebrating that Trump is at his best.
Eight years after the Manhattan real estate mogul and reality television star shocked the world with a triumphant victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump will reclaim the White House as a veteran politician with a full term behind him.
“Figures who once hoped to act as stabilizing forces — including a string of chiefs of staff, defense secretaries, a national security adviser, a national intelligence adviser and an attorney general — have abandoned Trump, leaving behind recriminations about his character and abilities,” CNN reported. “They’ve been replaced by a cohort of advisers and officials uninterested in keeping Trump in check. Instead of acting as bulwarks against him, those working for Trump this time around share his views and are intent on upholding the extreme pledges he made as a candidate without concern for norms, traditions or law that past aides sought to maintain.”
In other words, to CNN, a second Trump term will feature a brash president without the guardrails of closet Democrats to protect them from his impulses that offend the left. But to Trump’s supporters, the presidents-elect past experience with opposition personnel is the guardrail to insulate the duly elected commander-in-chief from deep state interference. Not only will Trump be governing without “The Resistance” undermining him from within, but he’ll be governing with the right people carefully picked in the four years since he left office.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump said Wednesday morning. “I will govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept.”
He knows he can’t accomplish all he wants in his final term if things go anything like his first. Trump was hamstrung for half his previous Oval Office tenure with high staff turnover and fake scandals fabricated by the Democrats alongside a hostile media. Trump’s opposition was so desperate to destroy the president they exploited a new virus to rig election rules in 2020 and launched a cascade of lawfare afterward. His triumphant comeback re-election Tuesday, won in spite of impeachment, bankruptcy campaigns, criminal convictions, and even two attempted assassinations, now has those who initiated such efforts worried about accountability branded as “retribution.” Democrats might not have worried about a potential plot for revenge had they not weaponized the federal and state governments to punish Trump for the crime of winning the 2016 election.
“If you are a commie liberal and think Trump was ‘bad’ pre-2020, take a moment and consider what a post-landslide Trump will look like after you tried to murder him on live television,” wrote Federalist CEO Sean Davis on X. “You’re going to spend the next four years regretting every thing you’ve been up to for the last five.”
Had corrupt Democrats and regime media not used a pandemic to destroy the country and rig a presidential election in 2020, Trump would be on his way out the door today.
But they couldn’t help themselves. And Trump is going to have four more years with the full knowledge of…
Trump was voted back into the White House Tuesday in an electoral landslide, giving him a public mandate to tackle the burgeoning leviathan of the administrative state. This time, the incoming president knows better than to allow the deep state to undermine his agenda supported by the voters. The lessons from his first nine years as a politician fighting criminal and civil lawfare campaigns have, as Chuck Schumer might put it, “unleashed the whirlwind,” and delivered America a commander-in-chief who will be wiser in his second term and better able to avoid the pitfalls of his first.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Pro-life advocate Bevelyn Williams turned herself into a federal prison in Alabama earlier this month. Williams was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for allegedly violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act during a June 2020 protest outside a New York City Planned Parenthood facility. Williams is a Christian wife, a devoted mother, and a woman who has experienced the pain of abortion. She should be pardoned and reunited with her family, and the FACE Act must be repealed.
In 2019, Williams watched in horror as then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law the Reproductive Health Act. That decision to legalize abortion up to birth was disturbing to her, even as someone who’d had multiple abortions. During her sentencing hearing, she made a statement before the judge. In it, she said:
After I got my first abortion, it took a toll on me. … The next thing I know, I am waiting in the room and it’s time. I go to sleep, I wake up, it’s done. But it wasn’t done. You can’t just pull something out, you can’t cut something out of you without the emotional consequences that people have to face every day. And for me, that led me down a very, very dark road of depression.
That emotional turmoil continued as Williams had two more abortions. Yet amid a chaotic life, Williams gave her heart to Christ. Her empathy for those considering abortion led her into pro-life activism. Williams never imagined she’d stand in front of an abortion facility in protest. Once her life was surrendered to Christ, she began to feel deeply for other black women considering abortion. Knowing the pain that comes with abortion, she wanted to reach these women to share her story and to help them choose life.
Now, Bevelyn Williams is facing the second longest sentencing in a series of recent FACE Act-related convictions. Lauren Handy was unjustly convicted in a FACE Act trial in Washington, D.C., in August of 2023 and was sentenced to 57 months, the only defendant to have received a longer sentence than Williams.
Williams, a married mother of a young daughter, was blindsided by the length of the sentence. When her legal team requested, she remain at home with her family during the appeal process, the judge refused, saying, in Williams’ words, that she was a danger to the “streets” and “society.” In her statement before the judge Williams said, “I am loud. I am passionate. But am I violent? No.”
During Williams’ sentencing hearing, prosecuting attorneys referred to Handy’s case, saying that both involved alleged injuries to abortion facility employees. In Willams’ case, at the New York City Planned Parenthood protest, a staffer’s hand was allegedly caught in a door — which government prosecutors presented as Williams doing intentionally. Williams’ attorney disagreed; in his opinion, it was relatively minor.
Bevelyn told the judge, “I didn’t go there with intentions to hurt that woman or anybody else. … I wanted to preach the gospel, and I wanted to use the message that God gave me because I lived it. I’m not judging those girls who go in there ready to get an abortion. I know exactly what it’s like.”
Willams was charged with violating the FACE Act in June 2020 in connection with her interference with individuals seeking to obtain an abortion. The official designation of the offense given to her was “unlawful assembly.”
A three-plus-year sentence for unlawful assembly is egregious. The Biden-Harris administration continues to inflict unjust prosecution against pro-lifers by invoking the FACE Act. The FACE Act was supposedly created to protect pregnancy centers and churches, along with abortion facilities. Yet the FACE Act has been weaponized and used to make an example out of pro-life activists. As Republican lawmakers Mike Lee and Chip Roy wrote earlier this year, “Since its passage, the FACE Act has been used approximately 130 times against pro-lifers — but has only been leveled in defense of churches and pregnancy centers five times, even though churches and pro-life centers are 22 times more likely to be attacked than abortion clinics.”
Kamala Harris, specifically, has leveraged the legal system to jail Americans who engage in efforts to protect preborn children for the majority of her political career. As California’s attorney general, she went after pregnancy resource centers and pro-life journalists, describing peaceful attempts such as Williams’ protest as “outrageous and immoral.”
In her own words, Bevelyn shared her thoughts on Facebook saying, “My family and I remain hopeful and are trusting God through this challenging time. The Bible is clear that persecution will happen, but ministry continues, even in prison. Our job as Christians is to be a light, especially in dark places.”
Pray for our ally in this mission for life, as she sacrificially suffers imprisonment for this cause. We must push back on this persecution and repeal the FACE Act, as Lee and Roy are leading the effort to do in Congress. Not only do our human rights depend on it, but the rights of the innocent babies in the womb as well.
Christina Bennett is a pro-life missionary and activist whose powerful personal story — she was moments away from being aborted — ignited her passion for advocating for life. Currently serving as a Live Action news correspondent, Christina is also a sought-after pro-life speaker, all while living in Connecticut with her husband and son.
They’ve attacked him. They’ve impeached him. They’ve arrested him. They’ve desperately tried to imprison him. They unconstitutionally denied him access to the ballot. They’ve tried to kill him. Democrats have failed at every turn to get rid of Donald Trump. Now the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy and their corporate media allies are turning to the last vestige of hope for the desperate in an extremely tight presidential race: Lies. And name-calling.
‘Do You Think Donald Trump Is a Fascist?’
Democrat presidential hopeful Kamala Harris opened Wednesday night’s CNN town hall with a long tirade in which she warned ostensibly undecided voters that Trump would be a dictator if given another term in the Oval Office.
“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” host Anderson Cooper asked the vice president in the opening moments of the latest long-form, packaged-as-news political ad for the Harris-Walz campaign.
“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” Harris answered as if reciting an unholy wedding vow.
Of course she does. The “Trump is Hitler” narrative is Harris’ — and the left’s — closing argument in a Reader’s Digest presidential campaign for the Democrats. It must be noted that Harris’ abridged quest began with the Democrats’ bloodless coup that removed the demented Democrat president of the United States from his run for a second term.
In an act of corporate media collusion so transparent it burns the eyes, the shameless Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief at The Atlantic, published the hit piece earlier this week that Harris and her team are using in one last-ditch effort to paint the former president as “unfit” to be president again. The smear job, citing bitter former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly, claims, among other outlandish charges, that while in office Trump suggested Hitler “did some good things.” The story, mostly employing anonymous sources, was quickly debunked on the record by multiple people who were in the room with Trump.
As my Federalist colleague John Daniel Davidson wrote, the story “would never have passed muster in a newsroom 20 years ago.” And former Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi aptly noted on X, “The Hunter Biden laptop story couldn’t be repeated by any major outlet because it hadn’t been independently verified. The Atlantic pieces can be repeated by everyone. Weird how that works.”
The Hunter Biden laptop story couldn't be repeated by any major outlet because it hadn't been independently verified. The Atlantic pieces can be repeated by everyone. Weird how that works.
Of course, it’s not weird at all. Painting the former president as the devil has long been the playbook. Lies and empty accusations are just fine, if they’re in pursuit of what the left thinks is right. And what is right to the Democrats is holding on to power by any means necessary.
Just ask the late spawn of Satan, Harry Reid. The nasty, formerly breathing Democrat senator infamously lied about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney not paying his taxes. Reid lied from the Senate floor. When called out on his lie, Reid sneered, “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
‘She May Lose’
That’s the left. It’s what they do. And, yes, sometimes the lies work. But there is political peril for Harris. Voters have heard it all from Democrats, particularly the patently false stuff about Trump and his relationship with the military and service members.
As pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz told CNN’s Kasie Hunt hours before her network’s town hall, Harris runs a real risk of alienating the relatively few undecideds in the race. Luntz said Harris did well in the opening days of her Joe Biden replacement campaign focusing on “why she should be elected.” Remember all those “good vibes” and joy and crap?
“She’s had the best 60 days of any presidential candidate in modern history. And then the moment that she turned anti-Trump and focused on him and said, ‘Don’t vote for me, vote against him,’ that’s when everything froze,” the strategist said.
The polls show as much. Trump in recent weeks has devoured any gap as Harris could no longer hide and had to answer at least some actual questions about her record and her agenda. In Harris parlance, he is unburdened by what has been.
Trump is defined, Luntz said.
“He’s not gaining, he’s not losing. He’s who he is and his vote is where it is,” the pollster said.
“[Harris] is less well defined and if she continues just to define this race as ‘vote against Trump,’ she’s going to stay where she is now, and she may lose.”
But desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess. Democrats haven’t been able to stop Trump to date. So, they’re hoping to deal him a death blow with lies.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
At Ethel Kennedy’s funeral on Wednesday, President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama were caught on camera seemingly discussing Vice President Kamala Harris’ election chances, according to a professional lip-reader hired by the New York Post.
In the video, Biden can be heard telling Obama that “she” is “not as strong” as him, to which Obama responds, “that’s true.” The outlet suggests that the conversation is about Harris’ chances in the upcoming election.
But the White House was quick to dismiss the lip-reading claims, with spokesperson Andrew Bates telling the New York Post, “A ‘lip reading expert’? Did your usual right-wing soothsayer have their out-of-office up?
Only President Biden and President Obama know what they discussed, but this certainly wasn’t it.” Even former Biden White House officials, who are now working on the Harris campaign, denied the claims, saying that it is “not even like [Biden] to say that” and urging the outlet to get “a new lip reader.”
However, this is not the first time Biden has expressed confidence in his own abilities to defeat President Trump in the election. In July, after dropping out of the presidential race, Biden appeared on “The View” and said that polls showed he was still able to beat Trump and that he even believed he could beat the former president if he was still in the race. He also admitted to not fully believing the claims that there was an overwhelming reluctance for him to run again, and instead, suggested that some people just wanted a chance to move on.
But Harris’ reputation among voters seems to be taking a hit, with her negative rating increasing four points in just one month, according to MSNBC national political correspondent Steve Kornacki. And journalist Mark Halperin, speaking on Oct. 8, claimed that he had seen new private polling that showed Harris was “in a lot of trouble.” He went on to say that both Trump’s supporters and Democrats with access to data were feeling “extremely bullish” on Trump’s chances in the last 48 hours. Halperin also pointed out that Harris is in danger of losing key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia.
It seems that the more voters learn about Harris and her policies, the less they support her. Her favorability ratings have dropped, and she is now facing trouble in key battleground states. Biden, on the other hand, continues to express confidence in his abilities but the reality is, he may just be in denial. As noted by the lip-reader, even Obama seemed to agree that Harris is not as strong as Biden.
If the two men who have worked closely with Harris are not convinced of her abilities, why should the American people be? It is clear that Trump still has a strong chance of winning this election, especially now that Harris’ weaknesses are being exposed.
Vice President Kamala Harris confidently declared during her Univision town hall on Thursday night that she deserved the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee title she currently holds. The allegedly undecided voters who watched the Democrat and corporate media collusion to coup President Joe Biden out of power and replace him with Harris, however, aren’t so sure. One voter in the crowd at the Las Vegas event specifically asked the candidate to soothe his concerns that former President Joe Biden “was pushed aside” during Democrats’ 2024 presidential nomination process.
“I am honored to have earned the Democratic nomination. I am honored to have the endorsement of people from every walk of life,” Harris said, before commencing a rant about how former President Donald Trump would “terminate the Constitution of the United States.”
A voter tells Kamala he has big concerns about her shoving Biden aside and taking his place as the nominee without earning a single vote.
Contrary to her claims, Harris did nothing to “earn” her spot as Trump’s opponent in the race for the White House. Instead, she played a large role in the Democrats’ and the corporate media’s successful attempt to coup the flailing Biden out of future office.
When Biden was successfully couped out of the 2024 race, Harris was quickly handed a list of high-profile endorsements, something she made sure to mention in her town hall answer. But not even a good word from theClintons, Nancy Pelosi, former President Barack Obama, or NeverTrump Republicans can change Americans’ concerns that the VP and her Democrat allies altered the course of the 2024 election against voters’ wills.
Harris recently admitted during her “60 Minutes” sit down that “no one should be able to take for granted that they can just declare themselves a candidate and automatically receive support.”
“You have to earn it,” she explained.
KAMALA: “No one should be able to take for granted that they can just declare themselves a candidate and automatically receive support. You have to earn it.”
The government thinks people are stupid & can’t research for themselves. Well this woman 👇did! She went to the Federal Register and checked out Executive Orders that Presidents have signed, as well as those they revoked.
Nearly every time she opens her mouth, Harris lies to the people she claims she wants to represent. When she’s not spouting falsehoods that she knows her allies in the corporate media will refuse to fact-check, the VP is insulting voters everywhere by playing politics during devastating natural disasters and attempting to distance herself from the crises she helped create.
This young lady says a white liberal told her the MAGA crowd will never accept her
This is awesome. She says she left the plantation and if you don't like it, kick rocks
Just as the voter who questioned the circumstances surrounding Harris’ nomination suspected, the VP did nothing to “earn” his or any other Americans’ trust or vote. Instead, she’s done everything — including pledging to throw her political opponents in prison and trying to nuke the filibuster — to subdue those Americans’ voices and voting power.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
The reinvention of Vice President Kamala Harris in this election has been a thing to behold. In politics, candidates often reconstruct their records to secure votes, but Harris appears to have constructed an entirely mythical being. Once ranked to the left of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and viewed as among the most liberal members of the Senate, Harris has sought to convince the public that she is actually a frack-loving, gun-toting, border-defending moderate. This last week, Harris sounded like she has hired Neo as her new campaign manager from the Matrix. When asked “what do you need, besides a miracle?” Neo replied “Guns. Lots of Guns.”
When CBS’s Bill Whitaker expressed shock at her gun-toting persona on the campaign trail, he asked if she actually fired it. Harris then did her best Rooster Cogburn, who noted “Well a gun that ain’t loaded, ain’t much good for nuthin.” Harris said that she has of course fired the gun in her trips to the firing range.
While she was referring to defending her home, Harris’s pledge to gun down intruders stands in stark contrast to her opposition to stand your ground laws. When she was the San Fransisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris was one of the signatories on the District Attorneys’ amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller — in support the handgun ban. The Court rejected the position of Harris and her fellow Democratic DAs and held that there is an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.
Harris’ true grit has delighted activists who are trying to lure male voters back to the Democratic Party. It may not be as thrilling to some in the Biden-Harris Administration including President Joe Biden.
As we have previously discussed, Biden and other Democrats have repeatedly denounced semiautomatics and some have suggested that, with a change in the Supreme Court, they might be banned. While the Administration has repeatedly called for a ban on AR-15s, the most popular weapon in America, President Biden has suggested in the past that he might seek to ban 9mm weapons.
In reference to guns that use 9mm ammunition, Biden declared “there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of thinking about self-protection.”
It is a call that has been echoed in Canada where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government is introducing legislation to “implement a national freeze on handgun ownership.” He said Canadians would no longer be able “to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada,” adding that “there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives.”
While the White House subsequently tried to walk back his comments, Biden saying there’s “no rational basis” to own 9mms makes the new Harris look . . . well . . . irrational. Both Biden and Harris have made sweeping, unsupportable statements about guns and constitutional protections. For example, despite being repeatedly corrected, President Biden continues to repeat the same false statements about bans on weapons when the Second Amendment was ratified.
Likewise, in support of the ban on AR-15s, Harris declared: “Do you know what an assault weapon is? It was designed for a specific purpose, to kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war, with no place, no place in a civil society.”
Yet, courts likely would press a Harris administration on why it is seeking to ban this model when other higher-caliber weapons are sold. AR-15s can handle a variety of calibers. However, they are no more powerful than other semi-automatic rifles of the same caliber and actually have a lower caliber than some commonly sold weapons which use .30-06, .308 and .300 ammunition; many of these guns fire at the same — or near the same rate — as the AR-15. None of these weapons are classified as actual military “assault weapons,” and most civilians cannot own an automatic weapon.
As discussed earlier, President Biden showed the same disconnect as Harris between the factual and the rhetorical basis for some gun-control measures. He condemned “high-caliber weapons” like 9mm handguns and said “a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out — may be able to get it and save the life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.”
Biden has not made any comment on Harris promising to blow away anyone coming into her house with her own Glock.
Yet, before condemning Harris for her implied threat to “blow lungs out of bodies,” Biden should again check both the constitutional and practical statements about handguns.
Gun experts mocked the notion that 9mm rounds blow organs out of bodies, but 9mm ammunition is the most popular handgun caliber in the U.S., with more than half of all handguns produced in 2019 using that round, according to Shooting Industry magazine. If Biden pushed a ban, he would target more than 40 percent of all pistols produced in the U.S., including many Glocks.
Again, in fairness to Harris, she is not the first politician to reinvent herself on the campaign trail. For now, Harris wants to be clear that “I have a Glock, and I’ve had it for quite some time.” For critics, the reload is a bit much given her record. Yet, in a close election, many activists want voters in states like Pennsylvania to know that Harris is the virtual Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hills set. Indeed, you get the impression that she would use her Glock to frack, if only she could.
While 9mm’s have been vilified by the Biden-Harris Administration, it just happens to be one of the most popular guns in the United States . . . and Harris wants people to know that she has one and knows how to use it.
As a politician reinventing herself in a higher-caliber image, she chose wisely. Indeed, other politicians may want to take heed and listen to Deputy Marshall Sam Gerard in U.S. Marshalls: “Get yourself a Glock and get rid of the nickel-plated sissy-pistol.”
The Largest-Ever Survey of American Gun Owners Finds That Defensive Use of Firearms Is Common
The results also confirm that “assault weapons” and “large capacity” magazines are widely used for lawful purposes.
The largest and most comprehensive survey of American gun owners ever conducted suggests that they use firearms in self-defense about 1.7 million times a year. It also confirms that AR-15-style rifles and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, frequent targets of gun control legislation, are in common use for lawful purposes, which the Supreme Court has said is the test for arms covered by the Second Amendment.
The online survey, which was conducted by Centiment in February and March of 2021, was based on a representative sample of about 54,000 adults, 16,708 of whom were gun owners. Georgetown University political economist William English, who commissioned the survey as part of a book project, presents its major findings in a recent paper available on the Social Science Research Network.
The overall adult gun ownership rate estimated by the survey, 32 percent, is consistent with recent research by Gallup and the Pew Research Center. So is the finding that the rate varies across racial and ethnic groups: It was about 25 percent among African Americans, 28 percent among Hispanics, 19 percent among Asians, and 34 percent among whites. Men accounted for about 58 percent of gun owners.
Because of the unusually large sample, the survey was able to produce state-specific estimates that are apt to be more reliable than previous estimates. Gun ownership rates ranged from about 16 percent in Massachusetts and Hawaii to more than 50 percent in Idaho and West Virginia.
The survey results indicate that Americans own some 415 million firearms, including 171 million handguns, 146 million rifles, and 98 million shotguns. About 30 percent of respondents reported that they had ever owned AR-15s or similar rifles, which are classified as “assault weapons” under several state laws and a proposed federal ban. Such legislation also commonly imposes a limit on magazine capacity, typically 10 rounds. Nearly half of the respondents (48 percent) said they had ever owned magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds.
Those results underline the practical challenges that legislators face when they try to eliminate “assault weapons” or “large capacity” magazines. The survey suggests that up to 44 million AR-15-style rifles and up to 542 million magazines with capacities exceeding 10 rounds are already in circulation.
Those are upper-bound estimates, since people who reported that they ever owned such rifles or magazines may have subsequently sold them. But even allowing for some double counting, these numbers suggest how unrealistic it is to suppose that bans will have a significant impact on criminal use of the targeted products. At the same time, widespread ownership of those products by law-abiding Americans makes the bans vulnerable to constitutional challenges.
Two-thirds of the respondents who reported owning AR-15-style rifles said they used them for recreational target shooting, while half mentioned hunting and a third mentioned competitive shooting. Sixty-two percent said they used such rifles for home defense, and 35 percent cited defense outside the home. Yet politicians who want to ban these rifles insist they are good for nothing but mass murder.
Owners of “large capacity” magazines likewise cited a variety of lawful uses. Recreational target shooting (64 percent) was the most common, followed by home defense (62 percent), hunting (47 percent), defense outside the home (42 percent), and competitive shooting (27 percent).
Politicians who favor a 10-round limit argue that no one except for criminals and police officers really needs a larger magazine. Yet respondents described various situations, based on their personal experiences, where “it would have been useful for defensive purposes to have a firearm with a magazine capacity in excess of 10 rounds.” These ranged from muggings and home invasions by multiple attackers to encounters with wild animals.
Maybe these gun owners were wrong to think the ability to fire more than 10 rounds without reloading was important in those situations. But judging from the responses that English quotes, they had cogent reasons for believing that. Bans on “large capacity” magazines routinely exempt current and retired police officers, on the theory that they are especially likely to face threats (such as multiple assailants) that may require more than 10 rounds. It strains credulity to suggest that ordinary citizens never face such threats, and this survey provides further reason to doubt that assumption.
Thirty-one percent of the gun owners said they had used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on multiple occasions. As in previous research, the vast majority of such incidents (82 percent) did not involve firing a gun, let alone injuring or killing an attacker. In more than four-fifths of the cases, respondents reported that brandishing or mentioning a firearm was enough to eliminate the threat.
That reality helps explain the wide divergence in estimates of defensive gun uses. The self-reports of gun owners may not be entirely reliable, since they could be exaggerated, mistaken, or dishonest. But limiting the analysis to cases in which an attacker was wounded or killed, or to incidents that were covered by newspapers or reported to the police, is bound to overlook much more common encounters with less dramatic outcomes.
About half of the defensive gun uses identified by the survey involved more than one assailant. Four-fifths occurred inside the gun owner’s home or on his property, while 9 percent happened in a public place and 3 percent happened at work. The most commonly used firearms were handguns (66 percent), followed by shotguns (21 percent) and rifles (13 percent).
Based on the number of incidents that gun owners reported, English estimates that “guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year.” That number does not include cases where people defended themselves with guns owned by others, which could help explain why English’s figure is lower than a previous estimate by Florida State University criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Based on a 1993 telephone survey with a substantially smaller sample, Kleck and Gertz put the annual number at more than 2 million.
Although less than one in 10 of the defensive gun uses identified by English’s survey happened in public places, most of the respondents (56 percent) said they had carried handguns for self-defense. More than a third (35 percent) said they did so “sometimes,” “often,” or “always or almost always.” About the same percentage reported that they had wanted to carry handguns in circumstances where local rules prohibited it.
At the time of the survey, the ability to legally carry handguns in public varied widely across jurisdictions. Some states had highly restrictive laws that gave local officials wide discretion to reject carry permit applications, a policy that the Supreme Court recently deemed unconstitutional. Even after that ruling, some states plan to enforce licensing requirements and/or location restrictions that make it difficult for residents to carry handguns for self-defense. Depending on your perspective, the results of this survey demonstrate either the wisdom or the injustice of that strategy.
English’s survey also asked about incidents in which respondents believed that the visible presence of a gun had neutralized a potentially violent threat. He says that category would include, for example, “a situation in which a combative customer calmed down after noticing that shop owner had a handgun on his or her hip, or a situation in which a trespasser cooperatively left a property when questioned by a landowner who had a rifle slung over his or her shoulder, or a situation in which a friend showed up with a firearm to help [defuse] a dangerous situation.”
Nearly a third of gun owners reported such incidents, and some said they had witnessed them more than once. English says the results imply “approximately 1.5 million incidents per year [in] which the presence of a firearm deterred crime.” That estimate, of course, depends on the respondents’ subjective impressions, so it is probably less reliable than the estimate of explicit defensive uses, which itself is open to the usual questions about the accuracy of respondents’ interpretations and recollections. But even taken with the appropriate measure of salt, the results suggest that competing studies may grossly underestimate the defensive value of guns.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – After giving 174 billion to Ukraine, Biden tells flood victims of Helene, We’ve given all we have. It appears that Trump and Elon Musk acted more like effective leaders than Kamala or Biden. Kamala did pretend she was talking on the phone, not plugged in, though, while Biden was hanging out at the beach – Again.
Joe Biden Tells Americans Suffering in Flood Disaster Zone… “No.” There Won’t be More Resources Coming… “We’ve Given Them All We Have” (VIDEO)
By Jim Hoft – Sept 30, 2024 – The GAteway Pundit
Another devastating disaster hit the southern United States this week and the Biden-Harris administration is nowhere to be found. The Southeastern United States was plunged into devastation after Category 4 Hurricane Helene, the strongest hurricane to ever strike Florida’s Big Bend region, unleashed catastrophic destruction across six states. Helene’s ferocious winds and torrential rains have claimed at least 95 lives, left millions without power, and trapped countless families in floodwaters, particularly in North Carolina, where entire communities have been cut off from vital resources… READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Disrupting communications is a military strategy that has been deployed during wars throughout history. It’s also what the federal government has done to rural Americans as part of its war on Elon Musk, a tech billionaire whose support of free speech has put him at odds with the Biden administration and other powerful Democrats. The decision to cut rural Americans off from broadband communications had already been strongly criticized as harmful, politically motivated, and completely without merit even before Category 4 Hurricane Helene wrought destruction last week in some of the most remote areas of Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
Now the FCC’s war on Musk may have turned deadly. The death toll is already at 138 Americans across six states, with many hundreds still missing. Among the serious problems facing rural victims is an inability to communicate with potential rescuers as roads are washed out, telecommunications are down, electricity is out, and people are facing fatal flooding.
It didn’t have to be this way.
In 2020, the Federal Communications Commission awarded Musk’s Starlink an $885.5 million award to help get broadband access to 642,000 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. A subsidiary of SpaceX, Starlink is a satellite internet system delivering high-speed internet to anyone on the planet. The plan would work out to less than $1,400 per linkup, same-day delivery of the necessary hardware, and only a few hours to get up and running.
Some 19,552 households and businesses in North Carolina would have had access to Starlink if they desired. Of the 21 worst-hit counties in North Carolina, the FCC-funded Starlink program would have served all or part of 17 of them, according to multiple officials. The FCC suddenly canceled that grant in 2022, a few months before Joe Biden suggested that the federal government find ways to go after Musk, a former Democrat who began criticizing some of the Democrat Party’s support of censorship of and lawfare against political opponents. After a challenge from SpaceX, the FCC reaffirmed its decision to cancel the award in 2023.
Democrat FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel implausibly claimed to believe that Starlink couldn’t provide the service it had promised, a claim that didn’t pass the smell test for many industry observers at the time it was made. Starlink and its military counterpart were in wide use by other government programs. What’s more, at this moment Donald Trump and Elon Musk are rushing Starlink kits to remote North Carolina on their own. So are other Americans doing relief operations. And the White House is claiming it is also going to send Starlink kits to the area.
“The @FCC would rather Americans die, than approve a very inexpensive way to connect people in disaster areas. They should be ashamed,” Maye Musk, the mother of Elon Musk, said on X. “Biden, Harris and the FCC are also punishing people in disaster areas and rural areas. Shame on them,”she added.
Other agencies also joined Democrats’ anti-Musk efforts. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the Department of Justice pursued multiple attacks on Musk and his companies. The Federal Trade Commission began harassing X by making myriad questionable document demands, including requests for information on the journalists who worked on the project exposing how previous leaders of Twitter had colluded with the federal government to censor American speech and debate. The National Labor Relations Board went after Tesla over its dress code. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are also investigating Musk and his companies.
The FCC’s politically motivated cancellation of the contract in 2022 left rural Americans with no options.
The cancellation “is without legal justification,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who voted against canceling the award, said at the time. “[I]t will leave rural Americans waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide.”
The FCC’s political action against Musk isn’t the only Biden administration action harming Americans who were ravaged by Helene. Joe Biden named Kamala Harris the Broadband Czar in April 2021 and placed her in charge of a $100 billion slush fund for broadband projects. At the Commerce Department, a $42.5 billion subset of that program was launched in 2021, with guidance written to limit the ability of Starlink to compete for contracts. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program was supposed to fund programs in all 50 states. It has been a complete failure.
More than three years later, not a single rural American family or business has been connected to broadband through the program. At best the groundwork will begin four years after the launch and won’t finish until 2030 at the earliest. For that much taxpayer money, Starlink could be provided to 140 million people, and without the wait, observers noted.
The FCC’s anti-Musk efforts come at the same time that the Democrat-run agency fast-tracked a shocking application by a group backed by the Democrat Soros family to purchase more than 200 radio stations across the country. Federal law requires applicants with significant foreign ownership, as the Soros group has, to go through significant paperwork and security reviews prior to receiving licenses for radio stations. They didn’t follow the law and yet the FCC fast-tracked the approval for the first time in its history.
“Your last name should not determine how the government treats you, and very clearly that’s what is happening here,” said Carr of the FCC’s politicized actions on behalf of the Soros group and against the Musk group.
The border czar has some explaining to do. But don’t count on a complicit corporate media to ask Democrat Party presidential hopeful Kamala Harris to answer questions about the mayhem the Biden-Harris administration has caused with their deadly open border policies.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, intends to press the point, however. His office has detailed the “breadth and depth” of the destruction in a new 36-page white paper titled, “America Invaded: How the Biden-Harris Border Crisis is Fundamentally Transforming the United States.” The Texas Republican and his constituents in the Lone Star State’s 21st Congressional District have lived with the damage for nearly four years, as have so many other places in the nation dealing with a tsunami of illegal immigrants that has brought the border to their backyards.
“This document lays out the breadth and depth of the continuing damage to our country — which has morphed from a strong nation built on the rule of law that welcomes immigrants in accordance with that law, to a lawless, dangerous, and unrecognizable collection of individuals without common bond,” Roy said in a press release announcing the report’s release.
My team compiled a summary of the Border Invasion perpetrated against the American people by the Harris-Biden regime – and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Our country is being torn apart – from dangerous fentanyl to lawless criminals, from known terrorists to death and abuse… pic.twitter.com/Sx0JwITFRR
The numbers are breathtaking. According to the report, Since President Joe Biden and his No. 2 took office, more than 8.5 million illegal immigrants have crossed the U.S. southwest border, approximately the population of the state of Virginia. The Biden-Harris catch and release program has sent at least 5.6 million illegal aliens into the interior of the country, while some 1.9 million “got-aways” have slipped the attention of “distracted and exhausted” U.S. Border Patrol agents. All told, more than 7 million illegals have poured into the United States on the Biden administration’s watch.
‘Terrible Scourge’
Deadly fentanyl, horrific crimes, and a mountain of dead bodies have accompanied wave after wave of illegal immigrants. According to the report, fentanyl drug overdoses (poisonings) claimed the lives of 75,000 Americans in 2023 — “an average of over 200 deaths a day.” The epidemic is brought to you by the Mexican drug cartels and killer chemicals made in China smuggled across the border.
“Almost all of us know someone — a family member, a friend, or a neighbor — who has been affected by the terrible scourge of opioid overdose, especially from fentanyl,” said Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes following last year’s First Regional Family Summit on Fentanyl. “These deaths have torn apart families, schools and communities, and we grieve for the loss of so much life, talent and goodness.” Utah alone counted 541 dead from drug overdoses in 2022, with opioids like fentanyl accounting for three-quarters of the fatalities, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
There are thousands more victims of myriad crimes, including some of the more heinous homicides and assaults on record, Roy’s report points out. Consider the families of Laken Riley,Kayla Hamilton, 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was reportedly lured under a bridge, assaulted for two hours and strangled to death by two illegal immigrants. The little girl’s body was found bound and stripped in a Houston bayou.
“While Border Patrol has intercepted increasing numbers of criminals, DHS [Department of Homeland Security whistleblowers revealed on August 11, 2024, that as many as 950,000 violent criminals have gone unidentified,” the Roy report states. “In some cases, CBP did not collect DNA for nearly 70% of illegal border crossers.”
Welcoming Terrorists
On Sept. 10, 2001, the nation was ill-prepared for the hell that was about to hit it. The border crisis, security officials warn, has potentially planted the seeds of another 9/11.
As the Roy report notes, terrorists are “streaming cross the border in record numbers.” In fiscal year 2023, 169 known or suspected terrorists were arrested at the southern border. How many “got-away” terrorists slipped through is anyone’s guess.
“At least 99 illegal aliens on the terror watchlist were released into the U.S. after being apprehended at the southern border between fiscal years 2021 and 2023,” the report notes.
“Alarmingly, individuals and groups with known or suspected ties to terrorism have capitalized on our porous border by smuggling foreign nationals, some of whom originate from terror-prone countries, into the U.S.,” the report continues.
Meanwhile, drug cartels have been emboldened. According to Roy’s report, the criminal operations are hauling in more than “$13 billion a year off human trafficking alone.” The abuses are horrifying. A U.S. Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s Management Alert issued last month showed the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of up to several hundred thousand illegal immigrant children, many at risk of being victims of “trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
“Mexican cartels have joined forces with Chinese crime syndicates to produce fentanyl and traffic it into American communities,” the white paper states.
‘Absolutely Bizarre’
None of this should be surprising after Biden rolled out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants even before he took office. In one of his first orders of business, Biden pledged a 100-day moratorium on deportations and moved to protect the sanctuary cities — that have been invaded by the illegal immigrants — from ICE and other federal law enforcement authorities. Early on, Biden urged illegals seeking asylum to “surge” to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million,” Biden said at an Iowa campaign event in 2019, CNN reported. “The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre.”
Contrary to the gaslighting by Democrats and their allies in corporate media, Biden made his vice president “border czar” and placed her in charge of investigating the “root causes of migration,” which, it turns out, are Biden-Harris border policies.
As illegal immigration became a top concern of the American people — and a significant political liability for Biden and Harris, who stepped over the octogenarian’s political corpse on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination — the gruesome duo have awkwardly tried to distance themselves from a crisis of their own making. Even Democrat Party press agent CNN has had to begrudgingly report that the new “Build that Wall” Kamala Harris running for president sounds nothing like the sanctuary candidate for president in 2019 and the vice president under Biden.
Paying the Cost
The Biden-Harris border debacle has come with a huge cost for the U.S. taxpayer. The Roy report shows the tab for the southwest border states has been draining, with Texas alone forced to spend $13 billion on border security initiatives “to do the job the federal government refuses to do.” Biden has fought Texas’ efforts to secure its border in federal court. As of January, “60 Texas counties have invoked disaster declarations over the border crisis, and 50 Texas counties have passed resolutions declaring an invasion,” according to the report.
“What many people fail to comprehend is that Texas is facing a real threat to the safety and security of our citizens,” Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told the Center Square. “This is not an immigration policy debate playing out but a constitutional threat to the sovereignty of Texas.”
The border crisis is gobbling up billions more dollars in lodging costs for illegals, the report notes. Sanctuary city New York City alone has spent more than $1 billion housing the influx of immigrants. And the health care system, public schools and social service agencies are facing unanticipated costs in caring for illegal aliens. A House committee report earlier this year on the impact of illegal immigrants on social services asserts nearly 60 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants “use one or more major welfare programs.”
‘Flames Have Spread’
The long list of victims include illegal immigrants themselves. In fiscal year 2022, according to the report, a record 853 foreign nationals died attempting to cross the southwest border. That number includes the deadliest human smuggling case in U.S. history when 53 people, including eight children, were “cooked alive” in a tractor-trailer beneath the San Antonio sun.
Last year, there were more than 8,000 migrant deaths recorded on migratory routes worldwide, the deadliest year in history, according to the Migration Data Portal.
Sadly, the report asserts, the invasion has been carried out in the name of naked politics. America is much less safe because Democrats under Biden-Harris have attempted to harvest the next crop of leftist voters. The regime has fought tooth and nail against legislation like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which would require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote. As The Federalist has reported, Virginia recently removed more than 6,300 foreign nationals from its voter rolls. Texas did the same, clearing potentially 6,500-plus noncitizens from its voter database.
The white paper calls for passage of the Secure the Border Act, not the failed Senate bill Biden and Harris have pressed for that lawmakers have called a “joke.” As critics note, among the many warts of the “deal” is the fact that it would commit to law up to 5,000 border crossings per day before the president shuts down the border.
“Radical progressive Democrats have caused the worst border crisis in recent history, and the flames have spread to almost every state and locality in the nation. This crisis is rooted in a fundamental desire to remake and cement one party rule built on dependence on the state,” the report states.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
President Joe Biden has vowed to veto the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which simply requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. His promise was made in reaction to congressional Republicans who want to include it with any continuing resolution required to fund the next fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1. The president’s adamant opposition to what most Americans support demonstrates just how much Democrats are dedicated to making it easier to cheat in elections.
On Dec. 16, 2020, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, I held a hearing titled, “Examining the Irregularities in the 2020 election.” In spite of the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the election irregularity deniers, there were many indisputable irregularities.
In Wisconsin, 170,000 faulty absentee ballots in Milwaukee and Dane County were improperly counted by election clerks. Representatives of the far-left “Zuckerbucks” program — which is designed to pour left-wing dollars into local election offices, benefiting their Democrat candidates — imposed such heavy-handed direction in Green Bay that the local election clerk resigned from the stress and allowed Zuckerberg’s minions to run the election. “Democracy in the Park”was allowed in Madison, where activists unlawfully collected 17,300 ballots. Seniors in nursing homes voted without the required voting deputies present, bordering on elder abuse for political gain. As was the case in other states, election observers were not allowed to effectively observe the election process.
More recently, as one of many examples of states cleaning voter rolls, Virginia cancelled 6,303 noncitizens’ voter registrations.
Unfortunately, the election irregularity deniers have been so effective — aided and abetted by the corporate media — that these abuses have not only been ignored, but those who wish to cheat in the 2024 election have been able to devise new election fraud schemes. Absent media scrutiny, Republicans are undertaking efforts to stop them.
In one of the most closely contested states, Wisconsin’s governor vetoed nine election reforms passed by the Republican legislature and designed to restore confidence in our state election system. The Wisconsin Election Commission refuses to remove more than 4 million ineligible voters from our out-of-date voter roll (Wisconsin has approximately 3.5 million eligible voters). Election integrity starts with clean voter rolls, and by refusing to clean up Wisconsin’s, Democrats are clearly stating that they’d rather leave room for fraud than increase confidence in our election system.
Following a pressure campaign from Senate Republicans and the Republican National Committee (RNC), Nevada just removed 90,000 voters from its lists. If Nevada can do it, why can’t the Badger State?
Biden’s Executive Order to Register Voters
Nationally, the potential for election interference and voter fraud seems to be growing, with minimal attention being paid to it. Let’s start with President Joe Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to register voters. Does anyone seriously believe these registration drives will be done in a nonpartisan manner? How many taxpayer dollars will be spent registering individuals most likely to vote for the party of big government and more deficit spending?
The RNC and Trump campaign recently sued the Biden administration to stop this partisan activity. Will courts intervene in time?
States Cleaning Voter Rolls
The Democrats’ open border policy is guaranteed to result in widespread voter fraud. Democrat presidential nominee Harris’ vice-presidential pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, signed a law giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. That license, together with a utility bill, is all someone needs to register to vote in Minnesota. Democrats claim that because it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, illegal immigrants won’t register. We should be highly skeptical of that being an effective deterrent. Last week, the RNC sent a demand letter to Minnesota’s secretary of state following the revelation that a noncitizen in Minnesota received a ballot that he hadn’t even asked for. That is unlikely to be an isolated incident.
After all, Ohio just purged 499 illegal immigrants from its voter rolls following a multi-phase audit. But that’s in a state with Republican leadership that actually believes in election integrity and wants to make it difficult to cheat. Elsewhere, Boston officials disclosed that 70 illegal aliens contacted county election officials asking to be removed from voter registration lists. How did those Massachusetts noncitizens get registered, and how many remain on the registration lists? While it’s good to see officials in some states taking the lead to purge their voter rolls, there is much more work to be done.
Laundering Donations
In March 2023, journalist James O’Keefe first reported on a campaign financing violation dubbed “smurfing.” Unbeknownst to the “donors,” Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports show in some cases tens of thousands of small dollar donations being made in their names, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. One example in Wisconsin detailed five “smurfs” making a combined total of 28,471 donations, worth $401,326. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., was a recipient of 531 of those donations, worth $5,147. No wonder Democrats report a resounding lead in small dollar donations!
My Senate staff has been pressuring the FEC to investigate these violations, but the FEC won’t even acknowledge whether they are investigating. Republican attorneys general such as Jason Miyares in Virginia have thankfully launched concurrent investigations to demand answers and stop this unfair practice.
Presidential Election
For well over a year, I have publicly expressed my doubts that Biden would be the Democrat nominee. I would generally add that whoever replaced him would immediately be placed on a pedestal and declared the new messiah. But even I am astonished by the extent to which my prediction has come true. Former President Donald Trump is not running against Kamala Harris, he is running against the entire corporate media, who are coordinating their efforts to defeat him.
This is not a new phenomenon. Remember the Russia hoax, which the corporate media cheered on? How about Google manipulating search results to favor Democrats and suppress Republicans? Most “journalists” in corporate media today are merely advocates for the left. Honest, unbiased reporting has largely gone the way of the dinosaur.
As alarming as the reality described above is, I have not written this column to discourage, but as a call to action. The RNC and Trump campaign have recruited 157,000 poll workers and poll watchers across the country ahead of November. Join the effort at ProtectTheVote.com, and make sure to get out and vote as soon as your state allows. We can beat the forces arrayed against us if we turn out in numbers that are too big to rig.
Attorneys General from Texas, Idaho, and 14 other states filed suit against the Biden-Harris administration on Friday over a new policy that would allow 1 million illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship without having to first leave the United States.
America First Legal also joined the lawsuit against the policy titled “Keeping Families Together,” which took effect on Monday. The policy, first announced by the White House in June, would allow 500,000 families and another 50,000 stepchildren under 21, already in the country illegally, to apply for lawful permanent residence while paroling in place.
The AGs and Stephen Miller of AFL said that violates the Administrative Procedures Act, among other issues.
“Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the federal government is actively working to turn the United States into a nation without borders and a country without laws. I will not let this happen. Biden’s new parole workaround unilaterally grants the opportunity for citizenship to unvetted aliens whose first act on American soil was to break our laws. This violates the Constitution and actively worsens the illegal immigration disaster that is hurting Texas and our country,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement.
AGs from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming also joined onto the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
The suit accuses the Biden-Harris administration — “dissatisfied with the system Congress created, and for blatant political purposes” — of trying to create its own immigration system.
Further, it says “DHS ‘cannot use that power to parole aliens en masse,’ which is precisely what PIP amounts to.” The suit says that the policy “incentivizes illegal immigration.”
Said Miller, “It is brazenly unlawful, a deadly accelerant to the ruinous border invasion, and we will use every lawful tool to stop it.”
On Thursday, the Biden administration marked the second anniversary of the passage of the so-called Inflation (Reduction) Act (IRA) by announcing the results of the first round of “negotiations” between Medicare and pharmaceutical manufacturers. According to the announcement, Medicare will save an estimated $6 billion on the selected prescription drugs in 2026, when the price controls take effect, with seniors saving another $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs.
But as with many things in Washington, things aren’t what they appear. For starters, these “negotiations” were conducted on anything but a level playing field. As noted previously, these “negotiations” included a maximum price the government must pay — meaning price controls — with companies that do not want to participate in this rigged process facing the option of taxes of up to 1,900 percent of the revenue of the products in question or dropping out of the Medicare and Medicaid programs entirely.
To put it bluntly, “the program represents a ‘negotiation’ in the same way a robber ‘negotiates’ with employees at the bank.” Other elements of this process to establish socialist-style price controls make it far less ideal than advertised.
Democrats Used the Cash Grab to Fund Climate Pork
As noted, the administration claimed Medicare will save money from the “negotiations.” But where will that money go? Not to seniors, that’s for sure.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the IRA cut Medicare spending by a net $254.8 billion. That money didn’t go back into Medicare but instead funded other programs created in the law, such as myriad climate pork projects and money for 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service employees to audit taxpayers (including seniors).
The left will try to claim the law doesn’t reduce Medicare benefits, which misses the point entirely. The law takes dollars dedicated to helping seniors and instead spends that money on other totally unrelated projects. At a time the Medicare program remains functionally insolvent, Democrats’ raid actively harmed seniors by diverting dollars that could have been used to bolster the program’s solvency.
As harmful as they were, Congress’s actions in 2022 echoed what Democrat lawmakers did with Obamacare a dozen years before that and have proposed in other contexts as well: raiding Medicare to pay for other government spending. For the left, Medicare is much less a solemn obligation to seniors than it is a slush fund designed to be pillaged to expand government elsewhere.
Biden Bails Out Insurers with Taxpayer Billions
In the past few weeks, the Biden administration had to announce a “demonstration project” — i.e., government bailout — designed to “stabilize” premiums due to changes resulting from the IRA. A combination of richer benefits and structural changes in the law meant that many standalone prescription drug plans apparently submitted much higher premium proposals for next year. As a result, the administration hatched an insurer bailout to prevent massive premium hikes from landing in seniors’ mailboxes weeks before the November election.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated the bailout will cost $5 billion this year alone, just about wiping out all of this year’s supposed “savings” from the drug “negotiations.” Moreover, the “demonstration” project is scheduled to last another two years, meaning the final cost could come to $15 billion or more.
Of course, the cost of this bailout won’t stop Democrats from spending all the supposed Medicare “savings” from the IRA on green pork, IRS agents, and other projects. Likewise, Democrats seem uninterested in the inconvenient-to-them fact that this multibillion-dollar bailout is of questionable legality.
Price Controls Will Mean Fewer Drugs
It might surprise those on the left, but companies and investors generally respond to incentives. When the federal government decides to pay less for drugs, it will get fewer drugs in the future. Estimates vary on the degree to which the IRA’s drug pricing provisions will affect pharmaceutical research, but they don’t vary on the direction — all signs point to fewer new drugs being created. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that more than a dozen fewer drugs will get developed. Another independent estimate of legislation similar to the IRA put the number at well over 100. Companies have alreadyannounced ways they are scaling back investments in response to the law’s price controls because, as one CEO put it, “there will be no economic return from doing” more research.
Whether the IRA will lead to one fewer drug, 100 fewer drugs, or 1,000 fewer drugs, the drug not created is the one that could save your life. Of course, often people won’t know if the IRA prevented a treatment that could have helped them. While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want voters to believe they will get “free” savings, the American people will pay for the IRA for years to come, both in years of their lives through higher costs and lives not saved through drugs never developed.
Chris Jacobs is founder and CEO of Juniper Research Group, a policy consulting firm based in Washington, and author of the book “The Case Against Single Payer.” He appeared in the 1995 “Jeopardy!” Teen Tournament and is on Twitter: @chrisjacobsHC.
The House Republican leadership is hitting back at the White House over its plans to save $6 billion on prescription drugs through Medicare, calling it “price fixing,” The Guardian reported. The White House announced Thursday it had negotiated some drug prices down by as much as 79%. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in 2022, allows Medicare to negotiate prices for some of the most costly drugs that the program covers for 66 million people. The new prices will go into effect in 2026.
GOP House leaders responded in a statement. Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La.; Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.; Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn.; and Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., said the Inflation Reduction Act was a failure and that Americans continue to feel its “disastrous effects.”
“Among the most egregious provisions of the law is the mandate from bureaucrats to artificially set prescription drug prices, which is already doing untold damage to the American health care system,” the statement read. “Patients are seeing fewer choices, higher prices, and fewer cures, while the American pharmaceutical industry — which currently leads the world in the development of new medicines — is now in jeopardy of losing its competitive advantage on the rest of the world.”
The administration said people covered by Medicare, which mostly serves Americans ages 65 and over, would also save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs for the prescription medicines in 2026. They include widely used diabetes treatments Januvia and Jardiance, blood thinners Eliquis and Xarelto, and leukemia drug Imbruvica. The officials did not provide further detail on the new prices or say why the full $6 billion in savings would not be passed to patients.
The Republican House leadership said price fixing has always failed.
“The Biden-Harris Administration says it wants to lower prices for families, but their prescription drug price fixing scheme has accomplished just two things: driving up health care costs and crushing American innovation in medicine,” the statement read.
Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen has discovered more than 3,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote in the state. His office is now taking steps to remove noncitizens from the rolls.
“I will not tolerate the participation of noncitizens in our elections,” Allen said in an Aug. 13 press release. “We have examined the current voter file in an attempt to identify anyone who appears on that list that has been issued a noncitizen identification number.”
Allen’s office found 3,251 registered voters with noncitizen ID numbers issued by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the release. His office is telling local administrators to “inactivate and initiate steps necessary to remove all individuals who are not United States citizens” from the voter file.
Allen worked with “other state agencies that collect noncitizen identification numbers” and checked them against voter registrations, Laney Rawls, Allen’s director of communications, told The Federalist. She said Allen has made this a “priority” since taking office in January 2023.
Some of these potential noncitizen voters may have become citizens after initially getting noncitizen ID numbers, according to the release. Allen’s office will inactivate these registrations and allow those who have since become citizens to update their registration with an Alabama driver’s license number, non-driver ID, or the last four digits of their Social Security number, according to Rawls. Allen’s office is still working to determine when the noncitizen ID numbers were issued, Rawls said.
The federal government has denied “repeated requests” to help with the investigation, according to the release. Allen began contacting the DHS’s Citizenship and Immigration Services division in November 2023, requesting a list of noncitizens living in Alabama to cross-reference with the state voter file, according to Rawls.
“The Office also contacted the White House administration for assistance in getting this data and our requests have been denied,” Rawls said. The “lack of cooperation” prompted Allen to try and solve the issue on his own.
“I am hopeful that in the near future the federal government will change course and be helpful to states as we work to protect our elections,” Allen said in the release. Allen’s office is sending the registrations at issue to Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall for “further investigation and possible criminal prosecution.”
“This is not a one-time review of our voter file,” Allen said. “We will continue to conduct such reviews to do everything possible to make sure that everyone on our file is an eligible voter.”
“Unfortunately, the federal government limits the power of states to require proof of citizenship at the time of registration,” Rawls said. Still, Allen has directed local boards of registrars to require an Alabama driver’s license number, non-driver ID, or Social Security number when registering voters.
“Allen has also demanded answers from state and federal agencies conducting these expanded voter registration efforts on how they plan to keep noncitizens from registering to vote in Alabama,” Rawls said.
Allen previously warned citizens of registering to vote through Vote411, citing concerns over data privacy. The Federalist reported that Vote411, which masquerades as a nonpartisan group, uses voter registration forms to shuttle users to a left-wing data harvesting operation.
In Tennessee, Secretary of State Tre Hargett’s election coordinator Mark Goins sent letters to more than 14,000 potential noncitizens in June, telling them to either update their information or request the state remove them from voter rolls.
Doug Kufner, communications director for Hargett’s office, told The Federalist at the time that Goins found these registrations after comparing voter registrations to data from the state’s Department of Safety and Homeland Security.
“This data indicates the person may not have been a U.S. citizen at the time of the transaction. The person could have been naturalized since applying for a driver’s license,” Kufner said at the time. “Tennessee law makes it clear that only eligible voters are allowed to participate in Tennessee elections.”
The letters instructed new citizens on how to correct their records, but that didn’t stop the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation from threatening to sue, according to The Associated Press. Hargett’s office sent follow-up letters, clarifying it would not remove registered voters who did not respond to the initial mailing.
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
Democrats traded one liar for another when they replaced their presumptive 2024 presidential nominee President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris may not quite live up to her counterpart’s long history of selling whoppers as truth, but there’s no doubt that she has fibbed far too often without consequence or accountability.
Democrats’ new darling likely wants voters to be “unburdened by what has been.” But not even her jumbled babble or unintelligible chattering can keep Harris’ radical track record and history of deception under wraps. Here’s a look back at some of Harris’ biggest lies to date.
20. Harris Claims It’s Trump, Not Her, Who Will Weaponize DOJ
One of Harris’ most repeated talking points since she’s become a presidential nominee states that if Trump wins the White House in November, he will use the Department of Justice to target his political opponents.
“[Trump] will weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies,” she said behind the vice presidential podium. “He will round up peaceful protestors and throw them out of our country. And even, quote, ‘terminate’ the United States Constitution.”
Kamala Harris is deranged. She says President Trump will "weaponize the DOJ against his political enemies" (exactly what she's doing), prosecute "peaceful protesters" (exactly what she's doing), and ignore the Constitution (exactly what she's doing).
It’s the Biden-Harris administration, not Trump, however, that has a track record of weaponizing the federal government against its ideological enemies and destroying the Constitution.
VP Harris gives shoutouts to pro-abortion groups endorsing her and Biden ahead of the anniversary of SCOTUS overturning Roe.
“Extremists in Congress plan to ban abortion nationwide. Nationwide. But I have news for these extremists … President Biden and I will not accept that.” pic.twitter.com/vNl7D6GmH6
Congressional Republicans also have repeatedly failed to make progress on passing a popular 15-week abortion limit, making them much less likely to embrace a national halt on abortions.
18. Harris’ Fracking Flip-Flop
Shortly after the vice president became the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee, Harris’ campaign went after former President Donald Trump for exposing her radical belief that the U.S. should ban fracking.
“Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,” Harris’ campaign said in a statement in July 2024.
“She would not ban fracking,” the campaign reaffirmed to Politico.
Harris, however, is on the record in 2019 during her first failed presidential run claiming that she is “in favor of banning fracking.”
Kamala Harris' campaign: Harris does not support a fracking ban.
Kamala Harris herself: "There's no question. I'm in favor of banning fracking."
17. Harris’ Team Falsely Claims J.D. Vance Endorsed Project 2025
Harris’ rapid response team used a 2021 “Federalist Radio Hour” clip to assert in July 2024 that Trump’s vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance supports Project 2025.
JD Vance endorses Project 2025: “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power… I don't think there's a compromise that we're gonna come with… Unless we overthrow them in some way, we're gonna keep losing” pic.twitter.com/2sVHp4i1ek
The podcast, however, was published in 2021, nearly a year before The Heritage Foundation launched the project in 2022.
16. Harris Denies Biden’s Obvious Decline
Harris spent months ahead of Biden’s disastrous debate performance and resignation from the 2024 presidential race reassuring Americans that her counterpart’s age did not affect his ability to govern.
“I’ll tell you, the reality of it is, and I’ve spent a lot of time with Biden, be it in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room and other places — he is extraordinarily smart. He has the ability to see around the corner in terms of what might be the challenges we face as a nation or globally,” Harris told ABC News in January.
Yet, Democrats’ coup-like candidate-replacement operation hinged on Biden’s obvious decline. One poll found that, of the 70 percent of voters who believe there was a cover-up of Biden’s decline, 92 percent believe Harris was complicit in the cover-up.
15. Harris Accuses Trump Of Trying To Cut Medicare, Social Security
Harris incorrectly claimed at a July 2024 American Federation of Teachers conference that “Trump and his allies want to cut Medicare and Social Security.”
Even partisan Politifact was forced to admit that Trump’s 2024 platform explicitly states that “under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.”
14. Harris Repeats ‘Book Ban’ Falsehoods
During her American Federation of Teachers address, Harris accused Republicans who want to keep sexually explicit content off of school and library shelves of attacking “the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history, including book bans.”
“Book bans in this year of our Lord 2024,” she remarked.
In the context of taxpayer-funded classrooms, there is no such thing as “banned books.” The inappropriate stories Democrats claim are prohibited from circulation are still widely available to readers via publishers and booksellers.
13. Harris Allies Lie About Her Border Czar Appointment
After years of acknowledging and even praising Biden for naming Harris “border czar,” Harris’ allies in the White House and corporate media claimed in statements and fake fact-checks that she was never charged with overseeing the logistics of the record-breaking invasion.
DEI Press Sec Karine Jean-Pierre denies that Kamala Harris was named Border Czar and says it’s a lie
Yet here is Joe Biden in 2021 personally appointing Kamala Harris as head authority tasked to handle the situation at the Southern Border and to personally speak on his behalf pic.twitter.com/LAqtd0T0Rv
Biden’s statements and the propaganda press’s fawning coverage of Harris, even as she did little to fulfill the role, however, prove that she was the “border czar” in their eyes until it wasn’t politically convenient for them anymore.
12. Harris Wrongfully Asserts NCAA Women’s Brackets Were Banned Until 2022
During the 2024 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, Harris incorrectly claimed that female teams were excluded from brackets until 2022.
“OK, a bit of a history lesson — do you know that women were not, the women’s teams were not allowed to have brackets until 2022?” Harris told Spectrum News in April 2024. “Think about that, and … talk about progress, ya know, better late than never, but progress.”
Sports Fan Kamala Harris claims the NCAA women's basketball tournament was "not allowed to have brackets until 2022."
While it’s true that the NCAA women’s tournament did not take on the March Madness branding until 2022, brackets for female competitors date back to the “early 1980s.”
Harris’ and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s social media accounts also directly contradict the VP’s claims by showing that the pair filled out women’s basketball brackets in 2021.
11. Harris Repeatedly Lies About Georgia Voting Law
During a March 2024 speech lamenting Republicans’ election integrity efforts, Harris inaccurately claimed that Georgia’s legislature passed a law banning water in poll lines.
“In Georgia, extremists passed a law to even make it illegal to give people food and water for standing in line to exercise their civic duty and right to vote,” Harris claimed.
Kamala Harris is still repeating the complete lie that it's "illegal to give people food and water for standing in line" to vote in Georgia pic.twitter.com/qyMNqm0ax3
Kamala Harris once again repeats the debunked LIE that it's "a crime" in Georgia "to give people food and water who are standing in line to vote." pic.twitter.com/e8TU8kb14i
Georgia’s election security law specifically bans political interest groups from using water to sway voters in line. Election workers are exempt from this restriction.
10. Harris Falsely Blames Republicans For Wisconsin Abortion Limit
“In this beautiful state of Wisconsin, after Roe was dismantled, extremists evoked a law from 1849 to stop abortion in this state,” Harris said at a Milwaukee rally in January 2024.
Vice President Kamala Harris: “These extremists want to roll back the clock to a time before women were treated as full citizens — Wisconsin to the 1800s. … After Roe was dismantled, extremists evoked a law from 1849 to stop abortion in this state.” pic.twitter.com/h1Geb4lXkU
Even the fake fact-checkers at Politifact admitted that “Republican lawmakers didn’t have to lift a finger to put the 1849 provisions back into effect.” Instead, the overturn of Roe v. Wade sent the preexisting law through the court appeals system, in which the latest ruling claimed the 1849 law does not ban abortion.
9. Harris Fibs About Florida’s History Curriculum
“They want to replace history with lies,” Harris said at the Ritz Theatre and Museum in Jacksonville in July 2023. “Middle school students in Florida to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery.” Harris had peddled the same lie the previous day in Indianapolis.
KAMALA HARRIS: "In the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught enslaved people benefited from slavery!"
7. Harris Lies About Bailing Out Violent Criminals
Harris told WCCO 4 News in October 2022 that claims she helped bail out the 2020 rioters who led the months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis were “misinformation.”
“People are playing political games right now. We’re 18 days away from midterms. And we have sadly not seen a lack of misinformation and disinformation, and I think this is another one of those examples,” the VP said.
Kamala Harris says it's "misinformation" that she promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a far-left organization that has bailed violent criminals — including accused murderers and rapists — out of jail.
Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike, however, benefitted when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested during the 2020 summer of rage.
“As promised, we will not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year,” Harris claimed in September 2022.
Kamala Harris says questions about how to pay for Biden's multi-trillion-dollar spending sprees and giveaways are "distractions."
She then repeats the repeatedly-debunked lie that Biden's plan "will not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000/year." pic.twitter.com/KxADd3QURJ
Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, however, found that Democrats’ misnomered Inflation Reduction Act will do “nothing to bring the economy out of stagnation and recession, but … will raise billions of dollars in taxes on Americans making less than $400,000.”
5. Harris Repeats Election Security Falsehood
When Georgia Republicans sought to pass an election integrity bill that would fortify the state’s elections, Harris lamented, “Across our nation, anti-voter laws could make it more difficult for as many as 55 million Americans to vote,” Harris claimed in a January 2022 remarks at the Atlanta University Center Consortium. “That is one out of six people in our country.”
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection investigation, however, later found no evidence that the horseback unit used their reins to strike migrants.
3. Harris Says ‘Almost Impossible’ For Rural Americans To Photocopy
While arguing against voter ID laws in an interview with BET News in 2021, Harris claimed that it’s “almost impossible” for rural Americans to make a photocopy.
Kamala Harris absurdly says it’s “almost impossible” for rural Americans to photocopy their ID pic.twitter.com/J94IuGBFLv
Flashback to the time Kamala Harris claimed she told her mother that she wanted "fweedom" when she was a child at a civil rights march but the entire story was plagiarized from MLK. pic.twitter.com/IsUVwxVLrn
In June, @KamalaHarris tells Jimmy Fallon an apparently plagiarized story about demanding “freedom” while in a stroller at a civil rights march pic.twitter.com/bw7N1qXiz5
1. Harris Claims Jussie Smollett’s Race Hoax Was A ‘Lynching’
Despite serious doubts and a lack of evidence that actor Jussie Smollett was truly attacked in 2019 by a pair of racist, MAGA-loving men who tried to hang him by a noose, Harris called the alleged incident an “attempted modern-day lynching.”
.@JussieSmollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know. I’m praying for his quick recovery.
This was an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.
The so-called hate crime was, in fact, later found to be staged by Smollett. Harris, however, did not retract her support or “lynching” statement even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.
Below is my column in the New York Post on President Joe Biden’s call to reform the Supreme Court by ending lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.
Here is the column:
President (and Supreme Court Chief Justice) William Howard Taft once said, “presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever.” But not if Joe Biden has his way. Indeed, both the president and Court as we know it could be gone.
In a failed attempt to save his nomination, Biden offered to “reform” the Court by imposing an 18-year term limit that would jettison the three most senior conservative justices. ith only six months left in his presidency, Biden’s efforts are likely to fail, but, unfortunately, could set the stage for activists under a Harris Administration in seeking to change the Court forever.
For more than 50 years, Biden staunchly refused to play politics with the Supreme Court and support calls for “reforms” from the left of his party.
For a politician who has long been criticized for changing positions with the polls on issues from abortion to criminal justice to gun rights, the Court was one of the few areas of true principle for Biden. Even though he refused to answer questions on packing the Court in the 2020 election, he ultimately rejected the call as president.
Yet Biden’s final principle fell this month when facing the premature and involuntary end of his candidacy. Faced with being a one-term president, the Supreme Court would have to be sacrificed. Biden opted for the least of the evils in pushing for term limits rather than court packing. It was the more popular option for Biden to yield on. Voters have always loved term limits.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 67% of Americans, including 82% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans, support a proposal to set finite terms for justices. But there were few law professors and even fewer Democratic members clamoring for term limits until conservatives secured a stable majority on the Court. Then, suddenly, the Court had to be “reformed” without delay.
It is no accident that the first three justices who would be term limited off the Court are conservatives: Clarence Thomas (after 33 years on the Court), Chief Justice John Roberts (after 19 years), and Justice Samuel Alito (after 18 years).
Think, however, about the iconic decisions we would have lost with term limits in place. Liberal Justice Williams Douglas’s 36 years on the Court would have literally been cut in half. He would have been kicked off in 1957. His famous opinions like Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), striking down bans on contraceptives, would not have been written — an ironic result for those seeking limits after the Court’s ruling in Dobbs.
Likewise, liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s tenure would have ended in 2011 before she wrote her famous dissent Shelby County v. Holder (2013), defending voting rights.
Anthony Kennedy’s term would have ended in 2011 rather than 2018, before he wrote opinions such as United States v. Windsor, striking down the Defense of Marriage Act.
Obviously, other justices could have written opinions in these cases, but the point is that many justices wrote their best opinions after 18 years on the Court. Moreover, the Framers clearly wanted these positions as lifetime appointments as an added protection against political pressure or influence.
For more than two centuries, presidents have struggled with the Supreme Court, but none (until now) have attempted to end life tenure on the Court. Presidents have served as the firewall for the anger and radicalism that has periodically engulfed the Court. Now President Biden is leading the mob for changing this institution for the first time since its founding.
It is a testament to what I call “an age of rage” in my new book. After years of supporting the Court when it was setting aside conservative precedent, liberals now want the Court changed to dump or dilute the majority. It is unlikely to end there. After sending Thomas, Roberts, and Alito packing, many want to go further and pack the Court itself.
Democratic leaders such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have called for outright court packing — a proposal that Vice President Kamala Harris has suggested that she might support. Where Biden is a political opportunist in belatedly joining this movement, Harris is a true believer from the far left. If she is elected, the Congress is still likely to be closely divided. That will only increase pressure to convert the Court into an alternative avenue for social and political reform.
Harvard professor Michael Klarman warned that all of the plans to change the country were ultimately dependent on packing the court. With the 2020 election, he stated that Democrats could change the election system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.”
Notably, if Biden were to seek this change as a legislative matter without a constitutional amendment, future Congresses could short terms further from 18 to 8 years or even less.
In his speech, Biden declared that he wanted the membership of the Court changed with greater “regularity.” If Congress has this authority, it could change the occupants of the Court faster than a South Beach timeshare condo. That is clearly the opposite of what the Framers intended, but Biden insists that these times are different, and democracy will only be safeguarded by attacking one of our core stabilizing institutions.
According to the Washington Post, the president made his pledge in a Zoom call to the left-wing Congressional Progressive Caucus, chaired by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and co-chaired by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). It did not succeed in resuscitating his candidacy.
The pledge will be dead on arrival with Congress. What is left is a King Lear-like tragedy of a president, betrayed by those closest to him, and wandering the land for continued relevance. History will show a pitiful figure who offered up the Court as the cost of staying in power, only to lose his candidacy and his legacy.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
Years after acknowledging and even praising President Joe Biden for naming Vice President Kamala Harris “border czar,” corporate media claimed the presumptive 2024 Democrat nominee was never charged with overseeing the logistics of the record-breaking invasion.
Biden first charged Harris with leading “our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border” in March 2021. At the time, he claimed the former California attorney general and senator was “the most qualified person to do it.” Harris didn’t do much with the title and task. Yet, even her delayed first and only(and heavily staged) visit to the border received celebration from her allies in the press.
This kid-glove treatment intensified recently when corporate media accused those critical of Harris’ failure to do anything but exacerbate the Biden administration-incentivized invasion of making the VP a “convenient scapegoat.”
“Harris’s job was meant to be narrow,” The Wall Street Journal insisted, “and over the years Harris has fulfilled it by announcing tranches of private investments by companies like Pepsi, Cargill and Nestle in Central America.”
Axios insinuated in an X post on Wednesday that Republicans are wrong to point out Harris’ border failures because the Democrat “never actually had” the title border czar.
The outlet’s complaints that the Trump campaign and Republicans like House GOP Chair Elise Stefanik have unfairly labeled Harris’ role, however, fall short in the face of its own reporting, which repeatedlyreferred to Harris as Biden’s border czar.
Axios added an editor’s note to the storyshortly after publication with a notice stating three years later it “was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar.’”
Why, other than the usual motivations for the corporate media to deliberately distort the narrative, would publications like Axios lie about something its own pages contradict? It’s because the border has been and continues to be a “political grenade” for the Democrats who wrecked it. Stef W. Kight explicitly stated in her latest story thatshe aimed tosignal it “has become even more critical for Harris to find a clear border message, fast.”
“Making a clear immigration pitch to voters could be critical for Harris’s campaign,” Kight repeated, before noting that illegal border crossing activists are invigorated by Harris’ rise on the ticket because she is “personally well-versed and invested in the issue.”
Politifact, known for aiding Big Tech’s censorship efforts by printing fake fact-checks designed to demonize political dissenters, even joined in the propaganda dogpile when it claimed that Harris was merely “assigned to tackle immigration’s causes, not border security.”
USA Today, similarly, published a “fact-check” that deemed the claim that Harris was the presidential pick to oversee the skyrocketing number of illegal crossings “exaggerates the vice president’s role in addressing migration at the southern border.”
One quick look at Biden’s border czar pronouncement in 2021 suggests the opposite.
Biden noted that he was tasked with a “similar assignment” to “determine the best way to keep people from coming is keep them from wanting to leave” during the Obama administration.
“The Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.”
Harris also explicitly emphasized in her acceptance that “we will enforce the law.”
The real border story continues to be that the Biden administration ushered in the deadliest invasion in the world without facing any accountability. Corporate media, however, are more interested in running propaganda to help Democrats’ 2024 election chances instead of covering how Americans are suffering the consequences — like violent crime,fatal drugs, and infrastructure problems — that are directly linked to the ongoing influx of illegal border crossers.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
With some hard work, pluck, the right boyfriend, and a bit of genetic luck, Kamala Harris has found her way onto the presidential ballot without having to secure a single primary vote. Don’t tell me the American Dream is dead.
Sure, Harris is a demagogue who speaks in cringy, swirling, impenetrable platitudes. And sure, according to Joe Biden, Kamala was an identity hire. But “Morning Joe” says we’re not supposed to talk about any of that. So, let’s discuss her record and stated positions.
It seems like a lifetime ago that Biden named Harris his running mate. What you may not recall is that the media tried to gaslight us into believing the California senator was another apolitical dealmaker.
Former Clinton fixer George Stephanopoulos said Harris was “the middle-of-the-road, moderate wing of the Democratic Party.” The New York Times called her a “pragmatic moderate,” while the Associated Press focused on her “centrist record.” And so on.
A “small c conservative,” one Washington Post columnist wrote. The only problem was, according to GovTrack, Harris’ record in the Senate was to the left of red-diaper baby Bernie Sanders. She was least likely of any senator to join in any bipartisan bills.
That’s fine. Bipartisan bills are the pits. Harris wasn’t handed a Senate seat by her former beau and California political kingpin Willie Brown to waste her time legislating with a bunch of pinheads. She was there to run for the presidency. In her truncated first term, few excelled more at smearing their political opponents. Remember when Harris moderately accused Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape?
This false perception of moderation stems from Harris’ time as prosecutor and AG. Harris liked to brag about using “a huge stick” as a prosecutor in San Francisco, where she regularly threatened poor parents with jail time in her efforts to craft social policy — which wasn’t her job. It’s true that Harris threw a lot of people in jail to bolster her political fortunes. Some of them likely innocent. And judging from her disposition, she would throw a lot of more people into jail, if she could.
When pro-life journalist David Daleiden published videos of Planned Parenthood executives nonchalantly discussing the selling of body parts, Harris had his home raided, seized evidence, and then tried to throw him in prison. She later teamed up with the abortion mill to write legislation that would squash the free speech rights of other pro-lifers.
Like any good authoritarian, Harris enforces whatever laws she sees fit to enforce whenever she sees fit. One of the reasons Kamala allegedly opposed the nomination of Neil Gorsuch was that the judge “consistently valued legalisms” — which is to say, respected the Constitution — “over real lives.”
Kamala was never one for legalism. When candidate Biden argued that Harris’ promise to issue an executive order unilaterally banning access to certain guns would be unconstitutional, she retorted: “I would just say: Hey, Joe, instead of saying ‘No we can’t,’ let’s say yes, we can,’” before cackling at the very notion that presidents couldn’t do whatever they wanted.
As a national candidate, Kamala said she believed immigration laws should be treated as civil, rather than criminal, offenses. So, of course, Biden gave Kamala the job of border czar — she did not perform admirably, to say the least — where she noted that one of the “root causes” of the problem was a “lack of climate resilience,” before sending corrupt regimes hundreds of millions of dollars.
As a candidate, Harris supported abolishing private health insurance — “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on,” she told CNN. In addition to nationalizing health care and education, Kamala wants the government to control the manufacturing sector, the auto industry, food … and any industry that emits carbon.
Harris was in favor of getting rid of the filibuster to overturn state voting laws, nationalizing abortion on demand until birth, and passing the Green New Deal — an authoritarian takeover of the economy written by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which would not only ban all fossil fuels force Americans to retrofit every building in in the country, eliminate air travel and meat, create government-guaranteed jobs, among many other authoritarian measures.
Perhaps the only thing that grosses out the vice president more than individual rights are practicing Catholics.
Kamala is the kind of person who will raise money to bail out race rioters out of prison but try to stop orthodox Catholics from serving on the bench. “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Knights of Columbus?” is basically what Kamala asked Brian Buescher, a Trump judicial nominee.
It wasn’t a big jump for a senator who treats charitable Christian organizations as fifth columnists to co-sponsor of the “Equality Act,” which would have compelled religious hospitals to perform gender transition surgeries and shut down religious foster care organizations, among other things.
On foreign policy, we don’t really know, though we can guess. This week, Harris wouldn’t even greet Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. She reportedly won’t sit behind him during his speech to Congress. A few weeks ago, the same Kamala said antisemitic pro-Hamas campus protesters showed“exactly what the human emotion should be.” In the past she has openly protested with Islamic Republic propagandists from the National Iranian American Council. To be fair, in some ways her disposition comports more with the latter than the former.
When I say Harris is an authoritarian, I’m not contending she’s Hitler. I am saying she is a fan of obedience to authority, especially of Democrat-run government, at the expense of personal freedom in ways that are deeply un-American. That’s a bad trend in politics, in general, but it’s difficult to think of many politicians more wedded to the idea than Kamala Harris.
The fact that it took so long for Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign after the agency came under scrutiny for its failure to stop a would-be assassin from wounding former President Donald Trump shows that no one is in charge of the country right now, Jason Miller told Newsmax on Tuesday.
“Why wasn’t it done a week ago,” Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, asked “National Report.” He said that “the fact of the matter is that [President] Joe Biden has been MIA, [Vice President] Kamala Harris has been MIA … . Nobody is in charge of our country right now. That is the problem.”
Miller emphasized that “if you think this is an issue, what do you think [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing right now? What do you think [Chinese President] Xi Jinping is doing right now? What do you think the radicalists that are being funded by Iran are doing right now? They are looking at us up and down like a slab of meat and that we are there to be taken advantage of.”
He stressed that “how the heck does Cheatle even stay in that job for a … week and a half after this assassination attempt without taking any responsibility, without saying any clear actions that are going to be done to correct this situation so that something like this won’t happen again.”
Miller said it was just “mind boggling” to watch Cheatle sit in that chair at the hearing yesterday “with no answers, no remorse, no cognitive awareness that this was a massive problem that they tried to assassinate” Trump.
He added that “clearly at the top [of the Secret Service] there are some structural issues that had to be addressed. My question is you would think that there were others [in addition to Cheatle] who were equally as incompetent.”
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Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
If you need further proof that Democrats will go to extreme lengths to rig elections in their favor, look no further than the silent coup that occurred Sunday, when it was announced that Joe Biden would not seek reelection this November.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” read a letter posted by Biden’s X account. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
The whole episode resembles a storyline from a dystopian horror film. For years, Democrats and their legacy media allies pushed endless propaganda claiming a mentally declining Biden possessed the rigorous stamina required to be president. Just last month, media hacks were parroting debunked talking points put out by the White House claiming videos showcasing Biden’s frailty were “cheap fakes.”
And then the June 27 debate against Donald Trump happened. Realizing they could no longer hide Sleepy Joe’s mental decline and worrying that his cratering approval rating could cost them the 2024 election, the Democrat political machine jumped into action.
These political forces suddenly acknowledged what the general public has known since before the Delaware Democrat assumed the presidency. In a seemingly coordinated campaign, left-wing media acolytes, Democrat politicos, and Hollywood snobs spent the following weeks feigning a newfound concern about Biden’s ailing health and demanding he drop his reelection bid to “protect democracy.”
While Biden initially resisted calls to step aside, the Democrat-led pressure campaign was too big to overcome. Biden — or whoever is running things in the White House — dropped his reelection bid, tossing the 2024 nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris (or whoever the leftist oligarchy controlling the nomination process ultimately decides is the candidate). Like clockwork, these same forces are now praising him for the decision. For the party of “democracy,” it doesn’t matter that millions of Democrat primary voters are now disenfranchised. The machine got what it wanted.
A Repeat of Democrat Election Rigging
Much like their concentrated bid to remove Biden from the 2024 ticket, Democrats’ efforts to rig the 2020 contest involved participation from a variety of left-wing actors, both public and private. Under the guise of Covid, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, which then siphoned the funds into local election offices. These “Zuckbucks” — which were heavily directed toward “blue” municipalities — were used to advance Democrat-backed voting policies, amounting to what was effectively a giant Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.
Around the same time, leftist election officials in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin circumvented their states’ respective legislatures by unilaterally changing election procedures regarding unsupervised practices such as mail-in balloting and the use of ballot drop boxes. Several of these actions were later determined to be illegal by state courts.
Democrats’ election rigging got even worse leading up to the November 2020 election. The New York Post’s release of a bombshell report revealing potentially incriminating information about Joe Biden found on Hunter Biden’s laptop prompted one of the largest censorship campaigns in modern American history. Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter suppressed the story with encouragement from the FBI, which had authenticated the laptop a year before the Post published its story.
Equally alarming were the efforts by 51 former intel officials to squash the laptop story by baselessly claiming it bore all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” The CIA reportedly solicited signatures for the letter, which Biden used during a debate with Trump to dismiss criticisms about the laptop’s contents, which detailed the Biden family business. One of the letter’s signatories claimed under oath that a phone call he had with then-Biden campaign official Antony Blinken in the weeks before the election prompted the letter’s creation.
These actions don’t even include the Justice Department’s reported bid to delay an investigation into Hunter over concerns that it could impact the 2020 election.
Expect Nothing Less This November
Democrats’ 2020 and 2024 election-rigging schemes are two sides of the same coin. Both cases show that there is no task the party of “democracy” won’t undertake to ensure its hold on state power. (In fact, Democrat efforts to rig the 2024 general election have been underway since Biden took office.)
Leftists’ success in removing Biden from the 2024 ballot should serve as a wake-up call to normie America about the security of our elections. The Democrat Party is a political force seeking total control over every facet of our government and society. Hoping they’ll play fair this November is a fool’s errand.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
President Joe Biden speaks at the NAACP’s national convention Tuesday in Las Vegas. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Conservative pundit Michael Knowles says that President Joe Biden demolished his own plan to brand former President Donald Trump as a “threat to democracy” after the assassination attempt on the Republican presidential nominee.
“What the near-assassination of Trump did is, it took all the wind out of the sails of the Biden campaign,” Knowles said in an interview at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.
Knowles, a Daily Wire host, pointed to the fact that Biden publicly said he was thankful Trump survived the shooting, which injured the former president and two rallygoers and killed a third.
Biden’s reelection bid “is premised entirely on the lie that Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, that Trump admires Hitler, that he is, in some way, the second coming of Hitler, and his political project is an existential threat to our sacred democracy and the Constitution and the country,” Knowles said mockingly on “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast.
“The moment Biden said, ‘I’m so grateful that Trump is OK,’ he admitted that was all a lie,” Knowles explained. “You wouldn’t be happy that Hitler was OK. You wouldn’t be happy that the existential threat to your country [was] OK. So, that campaign went away.”
Watch the full episode of “The Kevin Roberts Show” to hear Knowles and Roberts discuss the future of Trump’s campaign ahead of the November elections.
MILWAUKEE — The man who would be vice president formally introduced himself to a jubilant Republican National Convention on Wednesday evening in Wisconsin — and to voters nationwide. And he had a very compelling story to tell.
Sen. James David “J.D.” Vance, R-Ohio, former President Donald Trump’s freshly minted running mate, accepted the nomination and addressed his fellow Republicans, his fellow Americans. What many heard was a guy who, despite being a millennial millionaire, shares an all-too-common upbringing in impoverished rural America. Vance, the author of the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy, literally wrote the book on it.
At 39, Vance is one of the youngest vice presidential candidates in American history, nearly 40 years Trump’s junior. The significant age spread is by design in an election year where, once again, two elderly men — at least at the moment — are the major party standard bearers on the ballot.
From Humble Beginnings
By many measures, Vance is the epitome of the American Dream. He grew up in poverty, a “family tradition” in rust-belt Middletown, Ohio, and in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. The son of a drug-addicted mother and a father who left him, Vance, as they say, rose above his circumstances. He went to college on the G.I. Bill after serving in the Marines and the Iraq War. He earned his law degree from Yale and made a very comfortable living in venture capital. Vance’s bleak memoir was made into a movie in 2020, a couple of years before his successful Senate run.
“Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I would be standing here tonight,” Vance told the thousands of conventiongoers assembled at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum and the millions more watching across the country.
God and Mamaw
While his parents were absent from much of his childhood, Vance said he had God.
And Mamaw.
The senator’s “guardian angel” grandmother raised him. She was tough as nails, Vance said, a Christian woman who loved the Lord nearly as much as she loved the “F word.” Mamaw once told her grandson that if she ever caught him again hanging out with a kid who was a notorious drug dealer in town, she’d run the boy over with her car.
“And she said, J.D., no one would ever find out about it,” Vance recalled. The convention hall erupted in laughter, then echoed with a chant of “Mamaw.” The GOPers love them some Mamaw. They seemed pretty taken by her successful grandson too.
The Republican vice-presidential candidate said he made it out of the generational poverty that has trapped so many of his family and friends. He escaped through hard work, with the help of his guardian angel, and by the grace of God, Vance said. Every now and then, he said, he’ll get a call from a relative back home asking if he remembered this person or that. As a face in time fills his mind, Vance said he’s often told that the old neighbor or schoolmate has died of a drug overdose.
‘Failed and Failed’
“As usual, America’s ruling class wrote the check. Communities like mine paid the price,” he said. He then took aim at the members of said ruling class — Democrats and Republicans — who have over the last generation-plus enriched themselves while average Americans have suffered. The people on the list of D.C. elites include Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. None more, Vance stressed, than career politician Biden, hungry for another term in a rematch with Trump.
“For decades, that divide between the few — with their power and comfort in Washington — and the rest of us only widened. From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who governed this country have failed and failed again,” he said.
There is, of course, according to Vance, one exception to the governing class rule: businessman Donald Trump, who in 2016 ran on nothing short of a revolution to “drain the swamp.” Vance wasn’t on board the Trump train then, blasting Trump as “reprehensible” during his first run. Vance has had a change of heart since those early days, becoming one of the more ardent defenders of Trump’s vision of “making America Great Again.” Biden’s curious victory in 2020 put the MAGA agenda on hold. Trump’s new running mate sounds like he is champing at the bit to help the former president bring it back and make the case, particularly in the critical swing states, for a return to Trumpenomics and homeland sanity.
“It’s about the auto worker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying your jobs,” Vance said. “It’s about the factory worker in Wisconsin, who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship.”
“It’s about the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators across the world when he could buy it from his own citizens right here in our own country,” Vance hammered.
Trump’s running mate wasn’t simply speaking to the party; he was attempting to connect with what he called the “cast aside and forgotten.” In the tradition of Trump.
The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway, also covering the convention with wife and Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway, told me in a “Federalist Radio Hour” podcast that the GOP establishment types aren’t happy with the Vance VP pick, a good sign Trump made the right call.
Meanwhile, Democrats and their corporate media public-relations firms have spent the past couple of days trying to diminish Trump’s lieutenant, as the corporate media are wont to do. The Atlantic’s Stuart Stevens lamented Ohio transforming from a swing state to a dependable red. He decried the Buckeye State’s abandonment of weak-kneed RINOs for Trumpicans like Vance.
“But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation was the result of a hostile takeover; that implies there was a fight. The truth is that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values,” Stevens whined.
The old guard, Vance tried to convey to voters, is part of why this republic is in so much trouble.
‘The American Story’
David Arredondo, former chairman of the Lorain County Republican Party, part of the Cleveland metropolitan area, told me Vance brings pluses and minuses to the ticket, but a lot more positives than negatives.
“He checks all the boxes,” Arredondo said. Vance is young and a veteran. And Vance’s experience with poverty and family drug addiction, Arredondo said, makes him relatable to voters billionaire Trump needs to win the election.
“It’s the American story of the person who started from nothing and became great,” he said.
David Arredondo, former chairman of the Lorain County Republican Party
As the former county GOP chairman noted, Vance won a lot of Ohio hearts and minds following the devastating train derailment in East Palestine in early 2023. He was there. So was Trump, handing out bottled water and standing with a broken community as Biden and his competence-challenged transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, were slow to show up to the conservative-leaning community near the border of Pennsylvania. Biden waited a year. He was not well received.
“Vance’s quick response to the train derailment and advocacy for local residents landed him in the spotlight and earned him a front row seat in the news for months. Trump joined Vance and other Ohio lawmakers on Feb. 22, 2023, to shake the hands of local residents and distribute water, food and other supplies to those desperately in need of necessities,” Fox News reported shortly after Trump announced Vance as his second-in-command.
Vance closed with a vow to the “cast aside and forgotten.”
“To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and every corner of our nation, I promise you this: I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from,” he said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., speaks during a Get Out The Vote meet and greet at IATSE Local 80 on March 4, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Nick Pope is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff called on President Joe Biden to leave the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday. Schiff—a high-profile Democrat—made a public appeal to Biden to quit the race so that a different candidate can be on the ticket against former President Donald Trump in November, the congressman told the Los Angeles Times. The California Democrat, who is also running for Senate, becomes the 21st congressional Democrat to have called upon Biden to drop out following the president’s disastrous performance in his first presidential debate against Trump in June, according to The New York Times.
Biden“has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history, and his lifetime of service as a Senator, a Vice President, and now as President has made our country better,” Schiff said in his statement to the Los Angeles Times. “But our nation is at a crossroads. A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November.”
The decision about whether to stay in the race “is President Biden’s alone,” Schiff told the outlet, adding that he thinks it is time for Biden “to pass the torch” to a different candidate and “secure his legacy of leadership.” However, Schiff made clear to the outlet that he will still support Biden or whoever else may be on the ticket in November.
“I will do everything I can to help them succeed,” Schiff told the Los Angeles Times. “There is only one singular goal: defeating Donald Trump. The stakes are just too high.”
The internal Democratic effort to push Biden out of the race is reportedly back on after the failed assassination attempt against Trump on Saturday altered the nation’s political landscape. Numerous national, swing state and internal polls show that Trump is currently in the driver’s seat as November draws closer, prompting a major Democratic concern about Biden’s prospects and even the outcomes of key congressional races down the ballot.
Moreover, leading Democratic donors are reportedly freezing about $90 million in donations to a major pro-Biden political action committee (PAC) unless or until Biden gets out of the race. However, the president has so far shown no intention of stepping aside to make space for a different candidate to run against Trump, as he and his campaign have both vociferously dismissed suggestions that he should quit as an elite narrative that is out of touch with how voters feel about the president and his record.
Schiff, one of the leading promoters of the debunked Russiagate investigation into Trump, won the Democratic primary for the Senate seat currently occupied by fellow Democrat LaPhonza Butler. The late Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein formerly occupied the seat, to which Butler was appointed by Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom after Feinstein passed away in September 2023.
CNN contributor and former Biden White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said Monday that Democrats need to “turn their fire” on former President Donald Trump to win the election, just days after he survived an assassination attempt. Bedingfield immediately backtracked, but the Freudian slip was another example of the inflammatory rhetoric Democrats and left-wing corporate media deploy against Trump and his candidacy.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper played a recent clip from President Joe Biden’s sit-down interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which Biden became angry that the media apparently won’t talk about the “18 to 28 lies” Trump told during the debate.
Anderson, noting that Biden’s team is receiving internal polling data suggesting Biden is doing poorly among voters and losing any potential chance of winning, asked Bedingfield how much longer this scenario for Democrats can continue.
“It shouldn’t go on much longer if Democrats want to win this election,” Bedingfield said. “Joe Biden became the nominee by the votes of voters who voted in the Democratic primary. He has said many, many times after having been questioned many times about this, that he’s not stepping down, and he is going to be the nominee.”
“At some point, Democrats have to decide that they want to try to win this election and turn their fire on Donald Trump. I think there is — I shouldn’t have said ‘turn their fire.’ I apologize. That was not the phrase that I meant. They need to turn their focus on Donald Trump,” Bedingfield said.
It has been less than 72 hours since Trump avoided near-certain death by half an inch and a local former fire chief was brutally murdered while shielding his family from gunfire. It’s been less than 48 hours since Biden himself called for people to “lower the temperature” and “cool” “down” the rhetoric following the near assassination. But already, left-wing media and Democrats are returning to the inflammatory language they’ve used to describe Trump for years.
Biden told donors recently, according to Politico, that he’s “done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Biden and other Democrats have repeatedly called Trump a “threat” the both “democracy” and “the very soul of this country.”
Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.
Seeking to assuage concerns among Democrats that he’s mentally incapable of taking on Donald Trump this November, Joe Biden held a “big boy” press conference during Thursday’s NATO summit — and did it not disappoint.
Not content to just step on his own tongue morethanonce, the president spewed some of the most outrageous mistruths of his presidency (so far). From claiming Trump is his vice president to rewriting history on Afghanistan, the lies were almost nonstop.
1. Rising Prices
Biden claimed that “overall prices fell last month.”
That statement is false. According to PBS News, “Wholesale prices in the United States rose by a larger-than-expected 2.6 percent last month from a year earlier.”
2. ‘Vice President Trump’
Biden falsely claimed that he picked Donald Trump as his vice president.
“I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president [if I didn’t] think she was not qualified to be president,” the Delaware Democrat said.
Biden picked Kamala Harris, not Trump, to be his vice president.
3. Zelensky or Putin?
When confronted by a reporter on a moment from earlier in the day when he mistakenly referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Biden claimed, “I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, Zelensky.’ And then I added five other names.”
Biden blamed his travel schedule as the cause for his poor debate performance against Trump.
“The next debate, I’m not going to be traveling 15 time zones a week before. Anyway. That’s what it was about,” the president said.
Contrary to his claim, Biden did not travel through 15 time zones a week before the debate. The president returned from his overseas Europe trip on June 15 and spent the week before the debate prepping at Camp David.
5. Trump’s NATO Comments
Biden distorted comments about NATO Trump issued at a recent rally in Florida.
“I think he said at one of his rallies, don’t hold me to this, recently, where, ‘NATO — I just learned about NATO,’ or something to that effect. Foreign policy’s never been his strong point,” the president claimed.
That characterization is false. When describing his mindset prior to his first NATO summit in 2017, Trump said, “I didn’t want to be obnoxious because I felt, you know, it was the first time I’d ever done this. I went; I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was too much before, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out. Like about two minutes. And the first thing I figured out was they weren’t paying.”
6. Hamas’ Popularity
While discussing the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, Biden contended “[t]here is a growing dissatisfaction in, on the West Bank, from the Palestinians, about Hamas,” and that the terrorist group “is not popular now.”
Polling has shown that the majority of Palestinians support Hamas and approve of its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
7. Endorsements
Biden claimed that the United Auto Workers Union “just endorsed me.”
That statement is misleading. The group endorsed Biden for president nearly six months ago on January 24.
8. U.S. Presence in Afghanistan
Biden whitewashed his prior support for the United States having a military presence in Afghanistan.
“You may recall, I still get criticized for it, but I was totally opposed to the occupation and trying to unite Afghanistan,” the president asserted. “Once we got bin Laden … we should’ve moved on, because it was not in our — no one’s ever going to unite that country.”
As noted by left-wing CNN, “In the early years of the war, Biden, then a U.S. senator for Delaware, was a vocal public supporter of the US having a sustained military presence in Afghanistan and engaging in extensive ‘nation-building’ there — and he explicitly rejected the idea of a narrow military mission targeting terrorists.”
9. Bad Poll Numbers
Biden claimed that “[t]here are at least five presidents running or incumbent presidents who had lower numbers than I have now later in the campaign.”
Even The Washington Post’s “fact-checkers” admitted this isn’t true.
“According to the presidential ratings tracked by FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s approval rating, 36.8 percent, at this point in his presidency is lower than any other presidents besides George H.W. Bush (36.7 percent) and Jimmy Carter (33.9 percent),” the Post reported. “Gerald Ford had an approval rating slightly higher. All three lost.”
10. Growing Economic Pains
Biden downplayed the notion that his policies are responsible for America’s ongoing economic pains.
“As you recall, understandably, many of you and many economists thought my initial initiatives that I put forward, ‘can’t do that, it’s going to cause inflation, things are going to skyrocket, debt’s going to go up,’” the president said.
Contrary to his insinuation, inflation skyrocketed after Biden took office and implemented far-left economic policies.
11. Illegal Border Crossings
Biden regurgitated the lie that “border encounters have gone down over 50 percent,” and the “current level is lower today than when Trump left office.”
That isn’t true, as illegal border crossings have exponentially risen to record highs under Biden’s presidency.
12. Trump’s Foreign Policy
The Democrat president contended that “[f]oreign policy has never been [Trump’s] strong point.”
That statement is inaccurate. During his presidency, Trump secured peace agreements between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors, re-established a working coalition among like-minded nations in the Indo-Pacific region to counter Chinese aggression, and decimated ISIS, among other achievements.
13. Classified Documents
While speaking about his prior interactions with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, Biden suggested he turned over “all” of his notes to federal officials upon leaving office.
“I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping than any world leader … and by the way, I handed in all my notes,” the president claimed.
Biden did not, in fact, turn over all classified materials in his possession upon leaving office. Federal officials discovered boxes of classified documents in Biden’s Delaware beach home, including records that dated back to his time in the U.S. Senate.
14. Child Gun Deaths
Biden claimed, “More children are killed by the bullet than any other cause of death.”
That assertion is misleading. Data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contends the leading cause of death among minors is firearm-related incidents but considers 18- and 19-year-olds as “children” in its analyses. When using the actual classification of minors (individuals under the age of 17), the leading cause of death among children is motor vehicle-related incidents.
15. Trump’s Russia Comments
Biden claimed Trump told Vladimir Putin, “Do whatever the hell you want,” regarding Russia’s invasion of Eastern Europe. But that’s not accurate.
Trump’s remarks came during a South Carolina rally, during which he recounted a story from when he was president and speaking with a NATO member. Trump purportedly told this state that he would withhold U.S. support if they didn’t pay their minimum defense spending obligations.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
The vaunted saviors of democracy in the Democratic Party were ready to throw out all the norms this summer to make sure voters keep them in power. Unfortunately for them, the calendar is not their friend. With just four months before the general election ends, Democrats and their advocates in the media began floating the idea of changing the primary rules just ahead of the finish line. Calling for a “blitz primary,” two influential Democrats this past week unveiled a plan to essentially redo the primary.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the Truman Balcony of the White House on July 4, 2024. (Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, would have one month to campaign to delegates of the Democratic National Committee ahead of the Aug. 19 convention. Star-studded candidate forums would be held weekly. The nominee would be selected via ranked choice voting at convention.
It’s an entirely new process, thrown together on the fly. One that seeks to preserve power by disenfranchising the party’s own voters. And one that requires them to find an extra-constitutional way to oust a sitting president of their own party – since Biden has made it clear he’s not going anywhere, at least for the moment.
It’s not going to work this time. You don’t get to redo your primary because someone had a bad debate or the truth is suddenly exposed. You don’t get to change the rules the moment it looks like you won’t win. They are stuck with Biden-Harris.
Too many voters have had enough of the gaslighting, the dishonesty, and the hyperbole of Democrats in government and media since the debate exposed their duplicity. The debate was an a-ha moment for many voters (excepting, of course, those who tune in to Fox News. You all saw this coming from a mile away). Since the debate, the truth that Democrats have so desperately tried to hide has been on full display.
More voters may now come to realize that for Democrats, gaming the system is par for the course. They aren’t protectors of democracy. They’re protectors of power.
Even as the party made former President Trump’s alleged “threat to democracy” a central theme of the race, the president’s party is quick to jettison democratic processes that don’t augment their power. Apparently, democracy is expendable when Democrats are at risk of losing power.
Throwing out the votes of Democratic primary voters? Just the beginning.
Threatening to restructure the Supreme Court when rulings don’t go their way? Or to eliminate the Electoral College when their message isn’t appealing broadly enough? They don’t think twice. Banning, censoring and gagging a presidential candidate whose message they don’t like? No problem.
But this time it’s different. Voters are catching on. How is this saving democracy? Voters understand you don’t get to redo your primary just because someone had a bad debate. You don’t get to rewrite the rules every time your party suffers a setback.
Democrats are likely stuck with Joe Biden and Kamala. Harris. Time is too short. It’s too late to change the campaign finance rules that govern Biden’s campaign fund, or the party rules that govern who can be on the ballot in each state. More importantly, there is no mechanism to force Biden out simply because he might lose. Although Democrats have likely frantically looked for one.
As the ugly truth sets in, debate watchers who trusted their government and their media have to be asking serious questions. If Trump is such a threat to democracy, why are Democrats the ones breaking all the norms?
Several top donors to the Democratic Party will withhold about $90 million in promised donations unless President Joe Biden steps aside from his reelection campaign, The New York Times reported.
Donors to the pro-Biden super PAC Future Forward are reportedly holding onto tens of millions of dollars in promised donations, including multiple contributions in the eight figures, two sources who spoke under the condition of anonymity told the Times. These sources estimated the total amount of frozen donations to be around or above $90 million.
Future Forward declined to give a statement when contacted with a request for comment about conversations with donors or how much promised money is being held back. An adviser for the group did say that the super PAC expects donors who paused their contributions to resume them once Democrats resolve the uncertainty surrounding the Biden presidential campaign.
Multiple prominent donors to the Democratic Party, including Netflix head Reed Hastings, former Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus, and Walmart heiress Christy Walton, have called on Biden to step aside since his widely criticized performance in his debate against former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, last month.
Democrat officials have launched a disinformation campaign about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, misattributing policies nowhere to be found in the project and falsely linking them to former President Donald Trump.
The project is a policy roadmap for a future Republican administration created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and outlined in a nearly 1,000-page document highlighting long-held conservative priorities. The left’s fearmongering campaign comes amidst panic in the Democratic Party, which has fractured over Biden’s cognitive decline and abysmal election polling.
“[Project 2025] is a dangerous takeover by Trump and his allies to pass his extreme MAGA agenda,” Biden recently said on X, including a video that claims the project “would allow employers to stop paying overtime for millions” and “enact a national abortion ban.”
The claims are massive distortions of the project’s actual policies. The outline, in reality, suggests “calculat[ing] the overtime period over a long number of weeks” with the goal of giving workers greater flexibility in their schedule.
A national abortion ban is nowhere to be found in the policy outline, which insists conservatives should “recogn[ize] the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations.”
The project encourages “complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion” and notes that “alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.”
The Biden campaign has doubled down on efforts to attribute the project to Trump, even creating a webpage that calls the policy plan “Trump’s Project 2025.” Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from the think tank’s policies.
“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
The website, nevertheless, insists that Trump plans on “reinstating and expanding [the] racist Muslim ban,” “arming teachers,” and “raising the retirement age.” It also claims Project 2025 will put “families’ access to IVF treatments … in jeopardy” and “cut Social Security.”Not one of these policies is contained anywhere in Project 2025.
Other Democrats have participated in the fearmongering.
“They’re going after IVF,” Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed on MSNBC in February. “They also want to control … what they call recreational sex. … This is so clearly a patriarchal theocracy.”
Project 2025 makes no mention of in vitro fertilization (IVF) or “recreational sex.” Mentions of “God” and “Christian” are limited to religious freedom, tax exemptions, work as “service to God,” and “God-given individual rights to live freely,” contrary to AOC’s claims of theocracy.
Celebrities on the left have joined in the misinformation campaign as well.
Hollywood actor Mark Hamill, a longtime Democrat fundraiser and Biden supporter, spoke out against Project 2025 in a recent post, writing, “With fear for our Democracy, I dissent.”
The actor included a graphic of Trump with a laundry list of goals supposedly outlined in the project, including ending no-fault divorce, banning African American studies, banning contraception, banning Muslim immigration, cutting social security, raising the retirement age, and court packing.
Project 2025 responded with an enumerated list of 30 “myths vs. facts,” clarifying Hamill’s more misleading claims.
“Mandate for Leadership calls for LOWER taxes for ALL Americans. Individuals spend their money in more productive ways than the government does,” the post noted, debunking the assertion that Project 2025 calls for higher taxes for working-class people.
MYTHS VS. FACTS ABOUT PROJECT 2025
We are not affiliated with former President Trump. We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations.
“Mandate for Leadership’s plan would not eliminate the FDA or the EPA, and NOAA’s functions would be transferred to other agencies, the private sector, and states and territories,” the post clarified about misleading claims on government agency policy.
But regardless of the facts about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Democrats and their supporters will continue to lie about the policy plan’s substance and inaccurately link the plan to Trump in an attempt to derail his presidential campaign.
Monroe Harless is a summer intern at The Federalist. She is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.
As the Republican-controlled House is expected to take up a bill Wednesday aimed at making sure only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections, President Joe Biden is signaling he would kill the measure should it miraculously survive the Democrat-led Senate. Biden isn’t likely to need the veto pen. Democrats will, however, be forced to explain why they oppose the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which requires documentary proof of citizenship to vote for president and members of Congress.
And while they have gotten plenty of cover from corporate media in asserting that foreign nationals — including illegal aliens — are rarely ever caught voting in federal elections, such explanations may not sit well with U.S. voters who overwhelmingly support prohibitions on noncitizens voting in federal elections. Most Americans, too, according to polls, are deeply concerned about the tsunami of illegal immigrants that has swamped U.S. communities on Biden’s watch. Exactly why the Biden administration has kept the border door wide open isn’t lost on anyone who has been paying attention for the past three and a half years.
“Democrats say it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. That’s true. It’s also illegal for someone to illegally enter our country, but that hasn’t stopped millions and millions of people,” U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., told me Tuesday during an interview on the “The Vicki McKenna Show” in Milwaukee and Madison.
‘Petri Dish’ for Noncitizen Voting
Steil, the chairman of the House Committee on Administration, which passedH.R. 8281 in May, wants to remind anyone who will listen that Democrats already support foreign nationals voting in local elections, as they are allowed to do in Washington, D.C. Most House Democrats earlier this year voted against a measure that would have barred illegal immigrants and other noncitizens from voting in local elections in the nation’s capital. The bill is deemed dead on arrival in the Senate.
Not surprisingly, just 28 of the 500-plus foreign nationals voting in last month’s D.C. primary elections registered as Republicans, according to The Washington Post.
In a first, noncitizens are voting in D.C. Here’s what it means to them.https://t.co/1IcyuKSRdy
Steil said Democrats want to use noncitizen voting in local elections, currently allowed in a handful of states, as a “Petri dish” to test on the American people.
“In a period of time that we know that millions of legal and illegal immigrants in the country are not eligible to vote in federal elections, it’s important to enforce the laws on the books,” the congressman said.
Honor System
As it stands under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as the “motor voter law,” voters may simply check a box on the federal form affirming they are U.S. citizens and meet other eligibility requirements. Democrats prefer the honor system. In opposing the SAVE Act, they have noted the tough penalties for foreign nationals who lie about their citizenship status in registering to vote: a fine, up to five years in prison, or both, according to federal code.
But Democrats know it is difficult to track false claims of citizenship, a longtime problem. A 2014 story by WHYY, a Philadelphia public radio station, reported on a fact that remains a significant issue in the Biden presidency a decade later: “Illegal immigrants lie to get asylum status in U.S.”
But they certainly wouldn’t lie to vote in federal elections, Democrats insist.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said at the May 8 press conference in introducing the SAVE Act.
‘The Only Reason’
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has introduced a similar measure in the Senate. He cut to the chase in a post Tuesday on his X account.
“The SAVE Act would prevent non-Americans from illegally voting, protecting the votes of American citizens. The only reason to oppose it is because you want non-Americans illegally voting,” Lee wrote.
Biden, meanwhile, is pushing Democrat legislation loosening voter integrity laws.
“The President has been clear: he will continue fighting to protect Americans’ sacred right to vote in free, fair, and secure elections,” the White House said in its opposition statement to the SAVE Act.
The SAVE Act would prevent non-Americans from illegally voting, protecting the votes of American citizens.
The only reason to oppose it is because you want non-Americans illegally voting. https://t.co/Ld4QqGPMu8
But how “free, fair, and secure” are U.S. elections without documented proof of citizenship?
Biden and his fellow Democrats in D.C. appear to be backing a losing issue. A national poll conducted last year for Americans for Citizen Voting by RMG Research Inc. found that 75 percent of respondents opposed allowing foreign nationals to vote in their local elections. A recent poll found 68 percent of North Carolina voters supported a state constitutional amendment barring foreign nationals from voting in elections. North Carolina voters will vote on the citizens-only question on November’s general election ballot.
“This is a moment in time that we should all realize that we should maintain U.S. elections for U.S. citizens and requiring documentary proof of that citizenship is how you actually enforce the law,” Steil said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Project 2025, a suggested roadmap for a second Trump Administration pulled together by the Heritage Foundation, is a nearly 1,000-page document written by a bunch of think tankers and right-wing policy experts running the gamut of conservatism.
President Joe Biden says the document “should scare every single American.” Democrats, one strategist told the Washington Post, need to “instill fear in the American people.” Donald Trump and his surrogates are already distancing the candidate from the effort.
So, I decided to read it. Listen, it wasn’t easy. But the chances that Biden, or any other person fearmongering about it, understands what’s in it, is highly doubtful.
For starters, most of the Project 2025 “mandate” is just a compendium of long-held conservative wishes for government.
The Associated Press warns the effort champions a “dramatic expansion of presidential power.” Yet, nothing in Project 2025 is even on par with Biden’s unconstitutional loan “forgiveness” plan. The alleged presidential abuses the media lays out are well within the president’s power. They’re just policies Democrats happen to dislike.
Project 2025, we are warned, suggests the firing of as many as 50,000 federal workers — which is well within the purview of the president. It will never happen, unfortunately.
Project 2025 suggests eliminating the Department of Education and its “woke-dominated system of public schools.” Conservatives have been promising to get rid of the Department of Education since Ronald Reagan first ran for the presidency. It will never happen.
Project 2025 suggests prohibiting the FBI from “fighting misinformation and disinformation.” Great! The state shouldn’t be in the business of dictating speech. Not only do bureaucrats have no monopoly on truth; they are highly prone to abusing power. This would not have been controversial even a decade ago.
Moreover, curbing the DOJ’s efforts is limiting executive power.
Project 2025 also suggests deactivating FBI investigations that are “contrary to the national interest.” The Department of Justice — now engaged in lawfare against Democrats’ main political rivals, parents, and pro-life protesters among others — exists within the executive branch. It should always presumably act in the national interest.
Project 2025 also proposes ending the “war on fossil fuels.” This, too, has been a mainstream GOP position since Democrats began openly promising to dismantle our energy economy. If voters don’t like it, they can vote of the party that promises “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.”
“Project 2025 is not a game, it’s white Christian nationalism,” the star of “The Avengers” and budding Christian theologian Mark Ruffalo warns. “It is the Sharia Law of the ‘Christian’ crazy people who aren’t Christian at all but want to control every aspect of your life through their narrow and exclusionary interpretation of Christ’s egalitarian, inclusive, and kindly teachings.”
Project 2025, you may be surprised to learn, does not feature a single mention of “Jesus” or “Christ.” It does champion long-held social conservative positions on religious freedom, abortion, marriage, and so on.
The policy guide features eight mentions of “God” in the entire document, most of those noting our “God-given individual rights to live freely.” Though this might be offensive to Politico writers or “New Right” intellectuals who’ve abandoned “liberalism,” it is one of the foundational ideas of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
“Christian” is mentioned seven times in the Project 2025 mandate. One, a warning about the left’s threats to tax-exemptions on churches and religious schools. Another mention suggests doing more to protect minority “Middle Eastern Christians” in foreign policy. Another reference reminds us about the COVID-era authoritarians who shut down “churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar.”
Faith is also touched on in a section about attacks on religious freedom that “compel a Christian website designer to imagine, create, and publish a custom website celebrating same-sex marriage but cannot compel an LGBT person to design a similar website celebrating opposite-sex marriage.” There is nothing extreme about that statement.
Now, obviously there are numerous other nods to socially conservative policy that comports largely with orthodox Christian positions. Not everyone in the right-center coalition might agree them–especially on abortion. Trump doesn’t even embrace them. So much for MAGA extremism. You’re free to agree or disagree with the suggestions, but there is nothing weird or unique or new about faith informing politics. Moreover, none of these policies undermine the rights of other citizens.
And though I strongly disagree with plenty of the economic and trade ideas found in Project 2025, that’s not what the left is taking issue with, of course. They’re feigning horror at decades-old social conservative positions and warning us about authoritarian policies that aren’t actually found anywhere in Project 2025.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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