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Posts tagged ‘LEGACY MEDIA’

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon b A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Weak Signal

A.F. Branco | on March 27, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-weak-signal/

Signalgate
A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

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A.F. Branco Cartoon—Signalgate is an issue that the legacy media tried to blow up into a major Trump failure, but it is now turning out to be a huge dud. Hoax journalist Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic was accidentally put on a Signal Chat that never discussed classified information, but he tried to present it as such, giving the media something to deflect Americans away from Trump’s accomplishments.

BRANCO TOON STORE

Pete Hegseth LIGHTS UP Jeffrey Goldberg in Response to Latest Signal Leak and Promise to Release ‘War Plans’

By Cristina Laila – The Gateway pundit – March 26, 2025

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded to Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest Signal chat leak on Wednesday morning.
It was reported on Monday that Jeffrey Goldberg, the anti-Trump editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, claimed he was accidentally added to a secure Signal group chat where top Trump administration officials discussed sensitive military operations against Iran-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
According to Jeffrey Goldberg, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance were in a Signal group called “Houthi PC small group,” discussing plans to strike terrorists in Yemen… READ MORE

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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.


15 Lies Biden Told During His ‘Big Boy’ Press Conference

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JULY 12, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/07/12/15-lies-biden-told-during-his-big-boy-press-conference/

Biden taking questions during a presser.

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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 more than once, 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.”

Even anti-truth CNN admitted this did not occur.

4. Debate Performance

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

Hugh Hewitt Op-ed: Morning Glory: Blue America v. Red America


Hugh Hewitt  By Hugh Hewitt Fox News | Published June 11, 2024 5:00am EDT

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/morning-glory-blue-america-v-red-america

The United States today, effectively and enduringly, is not one but three nations. There is a “Red America” a “Blue America,” and an “I don’t care” America. Rarely do those in Blue or Red America agree on matters political, or reconcile with friends and family estranged because of politics, and increasingly they do not congregate together.

What used to be differences that were accepted and understood have become breaking points among families and former friends.  We are far, far from “civil war” or even 1968 levels of antipathy, but there is a separation between Blue and Red America that is deep and deepening. 

This is most manifest in the struggles of the many businesses that purport to “do news.” Only 32% of Americans say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” according to Gallup in a survey from last October, a low point equaling the previous bottoming out in 2016 and a small decline since 2021 (36%) and 2022 (34%).

CNN GUEST CALLS OUT NETWORK FOR SAYING ISRAELIS RESCUED FROM HAMAS WAS ‘HOSTAGE RELEASE’

The legacy media’s slow motion credibility crash has led to a collapse in audience and revenue for most such platforms. The core reason seems obvious: The legacy media seethes with contempt for “Red America,” and Red America knows that legacy media is overwhelmingly staffed by Blue America. In turn, “Red America” has walked away from those platforms.

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The Red America/Blue America split manifests in the polling in the presidential race, but also on almost every major issue of consequence. Support for Israel is the most salient such issue at this moment, but the same divide separates “pro-life” from “pro-abortion rights camps,” as well as with the divisions over public education’s lurch left, gender ideology and pretty much every cultural and most economic debates.

Before he became one of a handful of the great British statesmen of the 19th, Benjamin Disraeli was a successful novelist. In his “Sybil” from 1845, he wrote about a divide in language that returns to remind us of conditions not just in Victorian England but today in the United States. There existed in the United Kingdom then, Disraeli wrote, “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were inhabitants of different planets.”

This is our condition today, and increasingly any institution that is obviously aligned with one or the other of the two Americas cannot expect the patronage of the other. This legacy media, overwhelmingly, indeed suffocatingly “Blue,” has simply walked away from Red America. Red America noticed. And they have overwhelmingly stopped watching and reading the Blue media.

Video

The assertion that “legacy media” has simply become “Blue media,” cannot be proven  because most employees of “Blue journalism” refuse to admit their POVs, but most people I speak with intuitively know the assertion that “legacy newsrooms are Blue” is true. If we gathered all the creative staff of the old networks, plus CNN, as well as the staffs of the old brands in newspapers, and got honest answers to six questions, we could get this “proven”:

For whom did you vote in 2016 and 2020? Are you “pro-life” or “pro-abortion rights”? Do you own a gun? Do you attend church more than six times a year? Are there two genders? Do you support the State of Israel’s right to exist and right to defend itself?

My guess is that more than 90% of the assembled legacy media journalists would provide “Blue America” answers to at least 5 of these 6 inquiries. Red America, by contrast, would prove the opposite answers in at least 4 of the six. If a news organization is overwhelmingly populated by “Blue America” journalists, Red America viewers, readers and listeners are going to walk away. In fact, they already have.

Now the question is: Does legacy media want to survive? If so, it will consciously change its staffing and its subject curiosity and ruthlessly throttle biased coverage. It isn’t hard to diagnose what has gone oh so wrong with legacy media generally, but it does require great resolve to fix.

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Let it Go: Disney’s Litigation Against Florida Collapses as the Media Shrugs


JonathanTurley.org | April 1, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/04/01/let-it-go-disneys-litigation-against-florida-collapses-as-the-media-shrugs/

It is a familiar pattern. Media outlets pick sides in a legal dispute and then distort the merits of the claims in favor of that party. In the fight between Disney and Florida, the media not only misrepresented a popular Florida parental rights bill (including falsely calling it the “Don’t Say Gay” law) but heralded Disney’s decision to enter the political fray to oppose the law. It then portrayed Disney’s legal moves to block state efforts to regain regulatory control over the company as brilliant and overwhelming. Some of us disagreed on all of those points, including the prospects of Disney’s ill-considered litigation strategy. Last week, that strategy collapsed with a settlement in which Disney decided to just “Let it go” and these same media outlets simply shrugged and moved on.

In a raw muscle play, Disney had its hand-picked board (the Reedy Creek Improvement District) effectively transfer authority to the company just before it was disbanded. Many in the media were thrilled by the move despite the unlikelihood of its being sustained legally.

As I wrote at the time, it would be ridiculous for a court to rule that a company could stop a state from removing special treatment for a corporation like Disney. Even as the company racked up losses in court, the media and legal experts heralded its brilliance and toughness.

In the meantime, as Disney itself admitted that it was losing money due to its political agenda, the media heaped praise on the corporation.

When it came to the lawsuits, the media portrayed the moves as brilliant and mocked Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., as outgunned as some of us struggled with how Disney could possibly prevail in the long term.

NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd insisted that Republicans had “better be careful going after Disney.” MSNBC host and former 2020 Biden campaign aide Symone Sanders-Townsend agreed and said “Oh, my money’s on the Disney lobbyists, honey. My money is on the Disney lobbyists.”

On a “Morning Joe,” co-host Joe Scarborough insisted “you can’t beat Disney.” MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch agreed: DeSantis is “fighting a fight he can’t win, and this, to me, is a precursor of him on a bigger national stage. And he’s just stupid. It’s a stupid, stupid play.”

Vox wrote that “Disney is proving to be the foe that will not die.” Another Vox headline read “How Disney just beat Ron DeSantis.”

The problem is that Disney was never winning, but viewers were not told that. The company was gushing money while losing in court. In the end, the Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act continued to garner overwhelming support in the state. DeSantis wrestled control away from Disney’s handpicked board and now Disney has dropped its challenge after suffering a series of losses in court. The Florida changes will be enforced, the new board will continue to regulate Disney, and the transferred authority from Disney’s board is null and void. So, what did Disney gain?

The response from the media? Crickets.

For Disney’s part, it spent millions of dollars, alienated millions of customers, and created precedent against itself. It literally achieved nothing material from its litigation against the state beyond driving up its own costs and reinforcing the regulatory authority against the company. It then walked away.

The order from the top was clear, if belated:

Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door

Media Lie About This Leftist-Linked Voter Roll ‘Maintenance’ Group to Protect Democrats’ Election Machine


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | DECEMBER 18, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/18/media-lie-about-this-leftist-linked-voter-roll-maintenance-group-to-protect-democrats-election-machine/

I voted stickers on Election Day 2020

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Over the past two weeks, regime-approved press outlets have run several articles rushing to the defense of leftists’ latest scheme to inflate voter rolls with likely-Democrat voters: the Electronic Registration Information Center. Otherwise known as ERIC, this organization is a widely used voter-roll “management” system founded by Democrat activist David Becker that was “sold to states as a quick and easy way to update their voter rolls.” In reality, ERIC’s membership agreement places a higher priority on registering new voters than on cleaning up existing voter rolls.

The program inflates voter rolls by requiring member states to contact “eligible but unregistered” residents to encourage them to register to vote. When a state becomes an ERIC member, it is required to submit “all active and inactive voter files,” “all licensing or identification records contained in the motor vehicles database,” and any state files related to “voter registration functions” to the organization, which then compares this information with that submitted by other member states.

It’s after this process that ERIC compiles updated voter-roll information — including lists of voters who have multiple registrations, moved, or died, and lists of “eligible but unregistered” voters — and sends it to member states. As Victoria Marshall wrote in these pages, ERIC mandates that states engage in voter list maintenance “only after [they have] independently validated” the data they receive from the organization. In other words, “if a state does not independently validate the ERIC data, it is not required to clean its voter rolls.”

ERIC’s ties to Becker — who has since resigned from his role as a nonvoting ERIC board member — and its refusal to change its bylaws have prompted a flurry of GOP election officials to withdraw their states from the organization within the past two years. Included in this growing list are the states of Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Texas, and several others. Some of these jurisdictions, including VirginiaOhio, and Alabama, have since formed separate interstate voter data-sharing pacts to serve as an ERIC replacement.

In light of ERIC’s steady collapse, Votebeat’s Jen Fifield and Rolling Stone’s Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng have painted these GOP officials as “conspiracy theorists” and fomented Democrat accusations that these states are struggling to effectively share and maintain accurate voter rolls. While handing out “far-right” and “MAGA Republican” labels like candy on Halloween, these “reporters” weave a web of deception to obscure the organization’s role in Democrats’ election machine.

Both articles’ writers, for example, attempt to pin the source of Republican election officials’ concerns with ERIC on a 2022 Gateway Pundit piece about the organization, which they quickly dismiss as riddled with “conspiracy theories.” Of course, nowhere in their articles do these so-called “journalists” bother to explore one of the — if not the — most alarming details about ERIC: the group’s ties to the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), a Becker-founded nonprofit responsible for interfering in the 2020 election to help Democrats.

CEIR and the Center for Tech and Civic Life collectively received hundreds of millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leading up to the 2020 contest. These “Zuckbucks” were then poured into local election offices throughout the country to push sloppy Democrat-backed voting policies, such as mass mail-in voting and the widespread use of ballot drop boxes. Analyses have shown these grants were heavily skewed toward Democrat municipalities, especially in swing states, effectively making it a giant Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.

As The Federalist previously reported and communication records have indicated, CEIR enjoys a transactional relationship with ERIC, which sends the voter-roll data it receives from states to CEIR. Upon receiving the data, CEIR “then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach.” In other words, CEIR — a highly partisan nonprofit with a history of left-wing activism — is creating lists of potential (and likely Democrat) voters for states to register in the lead-up to major elections.

Convenient how that incredibly important detail didn’t make it into the Votebeat and Rolling Stone articles, isn’t it?

Fifield then took things a step further by advancing the contrived narrative that Republican officials whose states left ERIC are having difficulty sharing voter data with other states and ensuring accuracy within their voter rolls. She bases this claim upon internal documents obtained by American Oversight, a left-wing nonprofit dedicated to “filing open records requests targeting Republican interests.”

Contrary to Fifield’s activist “reporting,” several GOP secretaries of state whose jurisdictions have departed ERIC have publicly testified under oath that they haven’t experienced any issues with managing their voter rolls since withdrawing from the organization. In October, Secretaries of State Frank LaRose of Ohio and Cord Byrd of Florida spoke before a Pennsylvania Senate committee hearing about their respective experiences with ERIC and maintaining accurate voter registration lists since departing the program.

When asked if he thought states can keep voter rolls clean without ERIC, LaRose replied, “100 percent,” and went on to debunk Democrats’ sky-is-falling talking points about what will happen if states withdraw from the organization.

ERIC “has only existed for the last 10 or 12 years, and states have had this responsibility for a long time to maintain accurate voter rolls,” LaRose said. “States absolutely can maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls if they’re intentional about it. And it’s important to use all the different tools at your disposal.”

LaRose went on to describe Ohio’s various processes of removing deceased voters, noncitizens, and other ineligible voters from its voter registration lists. He also discussed the effectiveness of data-sharing pacts with other states and noted Ohio’s intent to formulate these agreements with more states ahead of the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, Byrd explained how interstate data-sharing agreements have allowed Florida to possess greater control over its voter data, saying, “We know exactly what we’re sharing with the other state [and] they know what they’re sharing with us.” Byrd expressed hope that “through these different [memorandums of understanding] … a consistent standard will be created” when it comes to states exchanging voter data.

ERIC’s role in the left’s get-out-the-vote apparatus is bigger than Democrats are willing to admit — and that’s exactly why their regime-approved media allies will never tell their readers the truth about it.


Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

The Real Conspiracy Theorists About U.S. Elections Are Legacy Media


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | NOVEMBER 29, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/29/the-real-conspiracy-theorists-about-u-s-elections-are-legacy-media/

A bunch of 'I voted' stickers on a surface

Not a week goes by in which America’s ethically bankrupt media aren’t pushing lies about the state of the country’s elections, and their latest attack on Republican voters is no different.

On Wednesday, Stateline joined its fellow leftist “news” outlets in fomenting a Democrat-manufactured conspiracy theory that U.S. election workers everywhere are facing constant harassment from constituents. The insinuation, of course, is that these threats are coming from conservative voters who dared to raise questions about the conduct of the 2020 election.

At the center of Stateline’s hit piece is the recent spate of letters filled with fentanyl and other substances sent to local election offices in states such as Washington, Nevada, and Oregon. Instead of disclosing to its readers the evidence indicating the letters were potentially sent by far-left radicals tied to Antifa, Stateline immediately pivoted from reporting on the issue to advancing the left’s “election workers are under attack” narrative and pinning the blame on former President Donald Trump and his supporters.

“Since the 2020 presidential election, state and local election officials nationwide have been bombarded with threats, as lies perpetuated by former President Donald Trump and his allies around ‘rigged’ elections have fueled conspiracy theories and inspired violent reactions to the bureaucrats and temporary workers who run the United States’ democratic process,” the outlet claimed in hyperbolic fashion.

As I previously wrote in these pages, Democrat claims that election workers have experienced a spike in threats since the 2020 election are primarily based on “surveys” issued by leftist organizations and unsubstantiated statements from Democrat election officials. In November 2022, for example, The Washington Post published an article containing assertions by Colorado Democrat Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office that it had “identified hundreds more threats against her since 2020.” Unsurprisingly, the Post gave no indication that it bothered to fact-check these claims.

Just like the Post, however, Stateline was forced to include data from President Biden’s own Department of Justice showing that Democrats’ sky-is-falling elections narrative is total bunk.

In its article, the outlet discloses that, “As of late August, the U.S. Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force had charged 14 people with making threats to election workers and political candidates since the task force was created in 2021, so far leading to nine convictions that came with yearslong criminal sentences.” August 2022 testimony from a DOJ official and a subsequent agency press release further revealed that out of roughly 1,000 communications directed toward election officials that were deemed “threatening and harassing” by the Election Threats Task Force since the force’s inception, only about 11 percent of those contacts “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation.”

Got that? In a country with a population of more than 335 million people, only about 100 individuals have been investigated by the DOJ for supposedly threatening election workers, and only 14 of them have been officially charged. That doesn’t exactly sound like a widespread crisis.

For a corporate press that loves to toss around the term “conspiracy theory” whenever reporting on legitimate Republican concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections, leftist media outlets such as the Post and Stateline are perfectly fine with fomenting their own conspiracy theories to dishonestly smear their political opponents. In reality, Democrats couldn’t care less about the “security” of American elections. All they care about is acquiring and maintaining power.

The media-wide effort to cast Republicans as threats to “democracy” isn’t just designed to scare away independents and moderate voters from the GOP. It’s to disincentivize conservatives from partaking in legitimate forms of election oversight, such as poll watching.

From elections to lawfare, Democrats have no interest in playing by the same rules as everyone else. And if that means they have to recruit their media allies to push debunked propaganda about Republicans, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.


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

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Male On Women’s Field Hockey Team Hospitalizes Opponent With ‘Significant Facial Injuries’


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | NOVEMBER 03, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/male-on-womens-field-hockey-team-hospitalizes-opponent-with-significant-facial-injuries-2666143872.html/

Field hockey player and ball

A female Massachusetts high school field hockey player was sent to the hospital Thursday for “significant facial and dental injuries” during a state tournament game after a male on the opposing team hit her in the face with a field hockey ball. In the video circulating social media, viewers can see the male player (No. 2) hit the ball, which launches up and hits his unnamed female opponent in the mouth. After the hit, the girl is heard screaming while her teammates look on with their hands laced over their mouths in shock.

The game was between the number No. 12 Swampscott Big Blue and the No. 21 Dighton-Rehoboth Falcons.

According to the Media Research Center, the male player in question is Sawyer Groothuis, who plays for Swampscott and is a “Northeastern Conference All-Star in the women’s league.” The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association handbook effectively allows for men to compete in women’s sports and vice versa.

While speaking with the media, Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey called for the MIAA to take a “renewed approach” to protecting student athletes, but stopped short of saying men should be prohibited from competing in women’s sports.

Rather than highlight the unnamed female players’ injury, at least one local news outlet completely ignored the egregious nature of a man dominating Thursday’s game. In its brief “roundup” of local sporting events, for example, ItemLive ran with the headline, “Big Blue, big-time performance from Groothuis,” and didn’t even mention Groothuis sending the opposing female player to the hospital.

“Swampscott led at the break thanks to a goal from Northeastern Conference All-Star Sawyer Groothuis,” the article reads. “The Big Blue had a corner and the ball was loose in front of the goal. Groothuis was quickest to react, and poked it home for the early cushion. In the second half, it was Groothuis again finding the back of the net and sealing the game.”

You’d like to believe that a girl screaming out in agony and being sent to the hospital after getting a ball to the face would warrant at least brief mention, if not a paragraph. Especially when considering that the ItemLive write-up of the game is about Groothuis and his performance.

But at the end of the day, many local media outlets are just as bad at their jobs as their national counterparts. It doesn’t matter that the aforementioned female athlete got knocked out of a state tournament game because a male decided he wanted to impose his will on women’s athletics. All that matters is advancing the leftist agenda — no matter what.


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

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Media Gin Up Lies About Election Worker Safety To Escape Ballot-Box Accountability

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | AUGUST 08, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/08/media-gin-up-lies-about-election-worker-safety-to-escape-ballot-box-accountability/

A 2016 election party

Legacy media are once again parroting the debunked lie that there is a growing, widespread problem of Republicans threatening election workers. On Monday, Time Magazine published a melodramatic article about congressional Democrats’ “desperate[] push[]” to include provisions in the next federal spending bill they claim will protect state and local election workers. Of course, Time places the blame for this alleged problem on Donald Trump and his so-called “election denying” supporters, and warns that Congress’s upcoming budget is “likely the last chance” Democrats have to “safeguard” the 2024 election.

“It comes as election officials have faced a titanic upswing in death threats, online intimidation, and abuse,” the article reads.

There’s just one little problem with Time’s fantastical claim: It’s manufactured nonsense.

As I reported in these pages in April, the left’s insistence that there is a widespread conspiracy of Republican voters threatening election officials is simply not true. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Joe Biden’s own Department of Justice (DOJ).

During his August 2022 testimony before the U.S. Senate, Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the DOJ, claimed the agency’s Election Threats Task Force — which was launched in July 2021 to address this alleged “rise in threats” against election workers — had reviewed and assessed roughly 1,000 allegedly “threatening and harassing” communications directed toward election officials. Two days before Polite’s testimony, the DOJ issued a press release disclosing only about 11 percent of those 1,000 communications “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation” and that the “remaining reported contacts did not provide a predication” for further investigation.

“[T]o recap: In a country of roughly 331 million people, the DOJ — in the span of a year — received roughly 1,000 calls alleging threats toward election workers, in which only about 11 percent of cases warranted a federal investigation,” I wrote at the time.

So how exactly does Time justify its claim that there’s been a “titanic upswing” in threats directed toward election workers since the 2020 contest? The first is by linking to a survey from the Brennan Center for Justice — a highly partisan organization engaged in left-wing activism — claiming to show persistent fear among election workers for “their colleagues’ safety.”

The second is by linking to a November 2022 Washington Post article that includes grandiose statements from Democrat election officials pushing the same sky-is-falling narrative. Among those who commented to the Post was Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, whose office proclaimed it had “identified hundreds more threats against her since 2020.” The Post, of course, didn’t bother to mention whether it vetted her assertion to determine its truthfulness.

What’s equally remarkable about the article is the Post’s willingness to bury the truth from its readers. Not until the article’s 22nd paragraph are readers given the actual data from the DOJ on which I previously reported. Even then, the Post attempts to downplay the truth by regurgitating claims from unnamed election officials who say the DOJ and states’ limited number of prosecutions are “just a fraction of the threats they receive.”

Yes, there are verifiable threats made against election workers, however rare. But it also rarely rains in Death Valley, California. That doesn’t mean we should start building Noah’s Ark 2.0 to prepare for a catastrophic flood there.

What we’re seeing is a media-wide effort to take anecdotal incidents of threats and blow them out of proportion to give the appearance that election workers are under constant siege from so-called “election denying” MAGA Republicans. It’s a Democrat strategy designed to both cast their political opponents as extremists and dissuade conservatives who have legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in completely legal forms of electoral oversight (such as poll watching).

Democracy does indeed die in darkness — just not in the way regime-approved media want you to believe.


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

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Corrupt Media Fight Election Accountability With Democrat-Manufactured Lies


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | APRIL 24, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/24/corrupt-media-fight-election-accountability-with-democrat-manufactured-lies/

election day voters voting at a polling station
Legacy media claim so-called ‘election deniers’ are constantly threatening and harassing election workers throughout the country. But the facts say otherwise.

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It didn’t take long after the 2020 election for legacy media to conjure up a new smear to use against conservatives. For two years, leftists have employed the malicious term “election denier” to silence any American with legitimate concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections.

Alarmed at the grossly mismanaged election in Maricopa County, Arizona, last fall? According to the media, you’re an “election denier.” Worried about the real voter suppression that took place in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and Harris County, Texas? You guessed it, “election denier.”

But in the lead-up to and following the 2022 midterms, media began incorporating this smear into their next phony narrative, which is that these so-called Republican “election deniers” are constantly threatening and harassing election workers throughout the country. Prior to the Nov. 8 election, for example, left-wing outlets ran hit piece after hit piece warning that Republicans were secretly plotting to disrupt local precincts on Election Day.

And while their doomsday predictions (unsurprisingly) never came true, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from attempting to convince the public there’s a widespread conspiracy of Trump supporters threatening local election officials. Within the past several weeks, NBC News and The New York Times have run exposés highlighting election officials in Virginia and Texas, respectively, who recently resigned amid confrontations with fellow Republican officials.

When it comes to the Times’ reporting, however, the article’s headline distorts the reasoning behind the Texas official’s resignation. While the headline reads, “After Threats and Clashes With Republicans, Another Texas Election Official Quits,” the article tacitly admits that Heider Garcia, the elections director for Tarrant County, resigned due to the county’s “creation of an election integrity task force” — not because of the alleged threats against him.

Other outlets to publish similar articles in recent weeks include The Hill and USA Today.

The Facts Tell a Different Story

While there are certainly cases of threats being made against election workers, the relentless narrative pushed by the corporate press that it’s a widespread problem is not true. But you don’t have to take The Federalist’s word for it. President Joe Biden’s own Department of Justice (DOJ) has all but admitted so.

Back in July 2021, the DOJ launched a task force designed to address this alleged “rise in threats against election workers, administrators, officials, and others associated with the electoral process.” According to an agency press release, the task force would “receive and assess allegations and reports of threats against election workers” and work with U.S. attorneys’ offices and the FBI “to investigate and prosecute these offenses where appropriate.” As part of the initiative, the DOJ also launched an election worker hotline, where individuals can report “suspected threats or acts of violence against election workers” to the agency for review and potential investigation.

Predictably, the DOJ did not include any data to justify its claim that there was a “rise in threats against election workers.”

On Aug. 3, the Democrat-controlled Senate held a hearing, titled “Protecting Our Democracy’s Frontline Workers,” in which Judiciary Committee members heard testimony from various federal, state, and local election officials about their experiences working in recent elections. Testifying in the hearing’s first panel was Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Department of Justice.

In his opening statement, Polite Jr. claimed the DOJ’s Election Threats Task Force had reviewed and assessed roughly 1,000 allegedly “threatening and harassing” communications directed toward election officials, including one incident of physical violence against an election worker. Two days prior, however, the DOJ issued a press release revealing that only about 11 percent of those 1,000 contacts “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation” and that the “remaining reported contacts did not provide a predication” for such an inquiry.

“In investigations where the source of a reported contact was identified, in 50% of the matters the source contacted the victim on multiple occasions,” the press release reads. “These investigations accordingly encompassed multiple contacts. The number of individual investigations is less than 5% of the total number of reported contacts.”

The DOJ also claimed the task force had charged five individuals at the time, a number Polite Jr. confirmed during his Aug. 3 Senate testimony.

So, to recap: In a country of roughly 331 million people, the DOJ — in the span of a year — received roughly 1,000 calls alleging threats toward election workers, in which only about 11 percent of cases warranted a federal investigation. On top of that, only five individuals had been charged with any type of crime as of the DOJ’s August 2022 press release.

The Verdict

So why are legacy media continuing to push the lie that election workers everywhere are under constant attack, despite publicly available data showing otherwise? And why are Democrats in states such as Nevada and New Mexico advancing legislation based upon this lie, even when there are federal statutes prohibiting the harassment of election workers?

For Democrats, the strategy is two-fold. The first reason is to further the narrative perpetuated by Biden that “MAGA Republicans” represent an existential threat to democracy and Democrats are the party of virtue, “voting rights,” and normalcy. The left hopes that by painting their political opponents as extremists, they’ll be able to sway moderates and independents to their side, even as their political allies use the justice system to target former presidentschemically castrate children, and collude with Big Tech to censor dissenting voices online.

The second reason is to discourage conservatives with legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in completely legal forms of electoral oversight. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, for instance, the Republican National Committee recruited more than 70,000 new poll watchers and workers ahead of Election Day to “help deliver the election transparency that voters deserve.” And of course, Democrats went ballistic, parroting the same “threat to democracy” talking point.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans actually welcome transparency in the electoral process. The attempt by legacy media and leftist politicos to spin a false narrative about conservatives threatening election workers on a grand scale is an attempt to avoid accountability at the ballot box and cast their political opponents as enemies of democracy. It’s a strategy steeped in falsehoods and smears, which for Democrats is nothing new.


Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

Here Are Leftists’ Disgusting Reactions to the Horrific Nashville Christian School Shooting


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MARCH 28, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/28/here-are-leftists-disgusting-reactions-to-the-horrific-nashville-christian-school-shooting/

Police chief providing an update on the Nashville school shooting
Leftists rushed to politicize Monday’s horrific shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.

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It’s no secret many on the left love to politicize tragedies, but the reaction from some to Monday’s deadly shooting at a Christian school in Nashville has reached a whole new level of malevolent. Local authorities have identified the shooter as Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who pretended to be male and had reportedly attended the school years prior. After entering the Covenant School shortly after 10 a.m., the shooter killed six people before being gunned down and killed by police. Among the victims are three 9-year-old children and three school staff members.

Nashville Police Chief John Drake characterized the shooting as a “targeted attack” and said authorities discovered “a manifesto” and detailed maps of the school showing points of entry. Drake also confirmed “there is some theory” to the idea that Hale’s transgender identity contributed to her decision to target the school but that authorities are still investigating the motive. Police said Hale was considering “another location” to target, but after “a threat assessment by the suspect [and] too much security, [she] decided not to.”

Immediately following the attack, leftists began using the horrific tragedy as an opportunity to promote their radical agenda and spew insensitive remarks.

Joe Biden

During moments of crisis, Americans should be able to count on their president to put aside politics and bring the country together. But not when that president is Joe Biden. After talking about how much he loves chocolate chip ice cream on Monday, Biden used the Nashville shooting to push for more gun control.

“The shooter … reportedly had two assault weapons and a pistol. … So, I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban,” Biden said.

Karine Jean-Pierre

During her remarks in Monday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre not only used the shooting to call for increased gun control, but appeared to blame the tragedy on Republicans.

“How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault-weapons ban?” she asked.

Terry Moran

ABC News Senior National Correspondent Terry Moran wasted no time in seemingly tying the shooting to Tennessee Republicans, who recently passed legislation protecting minors from experimental transgender surgeries, wrong-sex hormones, and drag shows. After providing viewers with details on the shooting, Moran immediately segued into discussing the legislation Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee approved earlier this month.

Mike Wise

Washington Post contributor and former New York Times columnist Mike Wise went out of his way to thank a Twitter user, who referred to Tennessee as “an intolerant state that brainwashes children through religious indoctrination.”

“This is as deep and real as it gets. Thank you,” Wise wrote.

Rep. Don Beyer

The Virginia Democrat blasted Republicans with an unserious and bad-faith attack, saying the GOP thinks drag shows pose a greater physical danger to children than guns do.

Benjamin Ryan

In a now-deleted tweet, independent reporter and NBC News contributor Benjamin Ryan attempted to correlate the shooting with the fact that The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet, is based in Nashville.

“Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, a hub of anti-trans activity by @MattWalshBlog, @BenShapiro, and @MichaelJKnowles,” Ryan wrote.

Anna Skinner

Newsweek Senior Writer Anna Skinner spent her Monday afternoon writing an article titled, “Tennessee Republicans’ Ban on Drag Shows Mocked After Mass Shooting,” in which she spun the news to be about bashing Tennessee Republicans and lamented that so-called “assault weapons” are still legal in the state.

“Tennessee Republican legislators are getting slammed after at least three children and three adults were killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville private school on Monday,” Skinner wrote. “Twitter users assailed state GOP officials in the wake of the bloodshed.”

Kyle Griffin

MSNBC Executive Producer Kyle Griffin published a tweet evoking similar absurdity.

Hayes Brown

MSNBC Opinion Writer Hayes Brown took a page from Griffin’s playbook and politicize the tragedy. In his column, Hayes bizarrely argued that “much of [America’s] gun policy is presaged on the idea that guns are cool,” and “[t]hat was the unspoken understanding behind the rapid spread of the AR-15.”

Republicans “think that their toys, their totems of masculinity, their props for playing the hero, are more important than the lives lost,” he wrote.

While now titled, “The gap between GOP gun rights fantasy and Nashville’s reality,” the article originally displayed the headline, “6 are dead in Nashville. Let’s revisit how much the Tennessee GOP loves guns.”

Josephine Harvey

In a so-called “news” article titled, “Gun-Loving GOP Congressman From Nashville Torched For Response To School Shooting,” Huffington Post Senior Reporter Josephine Harvey attempted to create a controversy surrounding GOP Rep. Andy Ogles — who represents the district that includes the Covenant School — by bringing up a 2021 Christmas photo of Ogles’ family holding firearms.

In her article, Harvey claimed the picture is a “gun-glorifying Christmas photo” and went on to cite tweets from leftists attacking Ogles for posting it on Facebook well over a year ago.


Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

Schumer: To Protect Democracy, I Need the One Network I Don’t Control to Stop Airing Raw Footage of Congress


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MARCH 08, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/schumer-to-protect-democracy-i-need-the-one-network-i-dont-control-to-stop-airing-raw-footage-of-congress-2659535408.html/

Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer complaining about Tucker airing J6 footage

Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer is calling on the owner of Fox News to prevent network host Tucker Carlson from releasing any more footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol that House Democrats hid from the public for two years. Carlson’s team reviewed more than 40,000 hours of video from that day and on Monday aired previously unseen footage that contradicts numerous falsehoods peddled by Democrat politicos and corporate media.

On Tuesday, Schumer melodramatically told reporters that Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch “has a special obligation” to bar Carlson from airing more unedited footage from Jan. 6 “because our democracy depends on it.”

The comments echo remarks Schumer gave during a temper tantrum on the Senate floor earlier in the day, in which he accused Carlson’s Monday night program of being “one of the most shameful hours … ever seen on cable television” and similarly called on Murdoch to prohibit the release of more Jan. 6 footage.

Why the demand for censorship? According to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Jan. 6 was supposedly “the worst attack on [American] democracy since the Civil War.” If the country were as close to forfeiting democracy as Democrats often claim, don’t the American people deserve to see as much footage as possible from that day? Not according to Democrats. That’s because the footage Carlson released shows their J6 narrative was not only overblown but in some instances completely false.

[READ: Tapes Show Ray Epps Lied To Congress About Whereabouts During Jan. 6 Protests]

Within the footage Carlson released on Monday night were clips showing Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died of natural causes the day following the J6 riot, walking around the complex “after Democrats and the media claimed he was brutally murdered” by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. The New York Times, for example, claimed in its original report on Sicknick’s death that he died — right there, big and bold in its headline — “From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage.”

As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported, Democrats’ House select committee, which was used as a political show trial to their benefit, also helped fuel such conspiracies over Sicknick’s death.

In addition to surveillance footage of Sicknick, Carlson also released clips showing Capitol law enforcement giving VIP treatment to Jacob Chansley, known as the “Q-Anon Shaman.” As The Federalist separately reported, the footage shows Chansley being escorted by Capitol Police officers “to multiple entrances throughout the building,” with some clips appearing to show officers checking “for unlocked doors.”

“They helped him. They acted as his tour guides,” Carlson said. “We counted at least nine officers who were within touching distance of unarmed Jacob Chansley. Not one of them tried to slow him down.”


Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Biden’s New ‘Equity’ Executive Order Is Systemic Racism In Disguise


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | FEBRUARY 20, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/20/bidens-new-equity-executive-order-is-systemic-racism-in-disguise/

Biden signing bipartisan spending bill

In a newly signed executive order designed to use federal agencies to forcibly guarantee equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity for Americans, President Joe Biden tacitly admitted his administration is collaborating with a prominent leftist group to advance neo-Marxism throughout the U.S. government.

Signed on Thursday, the order, titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government,” seeks to expand the administration’s so-called “equity-advancing requirements for agencies.” Equity is a term regularly employed by leftists to cover up their true goal of dismissing merit and real equality in favor of discrimination on the basis of skin color.

A prime example of “equity” in action can be seen in Virginia, where several high schools in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties admitted to withholding National Merit awards from deserving students in order to avoid hurting the feelings of those not awarded. As The Federalist reported, “Asian American students are highly represented among the recipients, and some believe withholding the awards to be an act of racially motivated biases against Asian students.”

Under Biden’s new executive order, federal departments are instructed to embrace such ideology to construct a so-called “fair” and “inclusive” economy, which would include investing in areas where the administration claims federal policies have “historically impeded equal opportunity … in ways that mitigate economic displacement.”

Buried within the order, however, is a directive for federal agencies to implement what’s called the “Justice40 Initiative.” While the document doesn’t specify what the mission of Justice40 is, a quick trip to the group’s website reveals it to be nothing more than an effort by left-wing activists to advance neo-Marxist policies under the guise of “environmental justice.”

“The Justice40 promise seeks to create an equitable recovery for Americans facing challenges created by aging infrastructure, a frayed social safety net, natural disasters, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” the organization’s website reads. “Justice40 must address inequities that hinder a sustainable, just society, and that disproportionately harm low-income and communities of color across America.”

Back in July 2021, Biden officially adopted Justice40’s stated goal of providing at least 40 percent of federal investments “in climate and clean energy” to these so-called “disadvantaged communities.” In other words, the administration is distributing taxpayer money to certain jurisdictions based on racial demographics.

The policy is eerily similar to Covid-related guidance the administration released in December 2021, in which health-care providers were advised to prioritize racial and ethnic minorities in the dissemination of Covid treatments such as monoclonal antibodies.

But it’s not just Justice40’s mission that’s tied to neo-Marixst ideology. Several of the group’s listed “movement leaders” have pushed policies and ideas embraced by radical leftist organizations such as Black Lives Matter. On her Twitter profile, Justice40 leader Cassia Herron proclaims she is a “lover” of “revolutions,” and has several posts calling to defund the police.

“We want to defund the police and distribution of wealth,” a July 7, 2020 tweet reads.

Also listed as a Justice40 “movement leader” is Jacqueline Patterson, who during Trump’s presidency in December 2020 seemingly compared the Covid jab rollout to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the U.S. government secretly conducted experiments on black American men for decades without informing them of viable treatment options. Over a year later, when Biden was in office, Patterson tweeted she was fully vaccinated “from the black batch” and boosted, adding that the risk of Covid “seemed worse with not getting vaccinated.”

The collaboration between the administration and Justice40 represents the latest nail in the coffin of legacy media’s narrative that Biden is some sort of unifying moderate who advances centrist policies. Shortly after his inauguration, for instance, Biden signed an executive order reversing the “Mexico City Policy,” which prevented nongovernmental entities receiving U.S. taxpayer money from using such funds to promote or perform abortions.

Moreover, America’s commander-in-chief has consistently issued racially divisive statements, such as comparing Republicans opposed to his party’s proposed takeover of U.S. elections to segregationists.

“So I ask every elected official in America, how do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?” Biden asked during a January 2022 speech. “Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”


Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Leftists Regurgitate ‘Uncle Tom’ Smear to Dim Clarence Thomas’ Legacy, But It Won’t Work


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | FEBRUARY 16, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/16/leftists-regurgitate-uncle-tom-smear-to-dim-clarence-thomas-legacy-but-it-wont-work/

Justice Clarence Thomas doing an interview at the Library of Congress
No matter what the left throws at him, Clarence Thomas will be remembered as one of the greatest Supreme Court justices in U.S. history.

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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is routinely the target of deranged smears from American leftists, and sadly, this week has been no exception with the return of the “Uncle Tom” attack.

On Tuesday, the Georgia Senate successfully passed SB 69, which, if approved by the state House and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, would allow for the placement of a monument of Thomas on the grounds of the state capitol. In remarks to his colleagues, bill sponsor and GOP Sen. Ben Watson spoke to Thomas’ character and praised the justice for living a life “marked by tremendous achievement,” saying:

This native son of Georgia deserves a place of honor and recognition on our Capitol grounds, a place where future generations of Georgians can learn valuable lessons from his legacy and gain inspiration and belief that their lofty dreams are obtainable too in America, regardless of the circumstances into which they are born.

Meanwhile, the upper chamber’s Democrat members couldn’t have been less enthused. Not only did every single Democrat senator vote against the bill, but several of them used the opportunity to slander the Supreme Court’s most senior justice.

While some Democrats such as Sen. Nan Orrock went after Thomas’ judicial career by calling his service on the nation’s highest court “problematic,” the comments from leftist hacks like Sen. Emanuel Jones were much more vitriolic. During his unhinged diatribe, Jones referred to Thomas, the second black American to serve on the Supreme Court, as an “Uncle Tom,” and said he betrayed “his own community.”

“I’m just trying to tell you what we have in the African American community when we talk about a person of color that goes back historically to the days of slavery and that person betraying his own community — we have a term in the black community,” Jones said. “That term that we use is called ‘Uncle Tom.’ An Uncle Tom … talks about a person who back during the days of slavery sold his soul to the slave masters.”

A Pattern of Racist Attacks

Unfortunately, Jones’ Tuesday rant is just the tip of the iceberg. Through the years, so-called “progressive” Democrats have hurled a barrage of racist and degrading attacks at Thomas for the crime of daring to think for himself.

During a 2014 interview, for instance, Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi didn’t just call Thomas an “Uncle Tom”; he also claimed the justice “doesn’t like black people” and “doesn’t like being black.”

But it’s not just Democrat politicians lobbing racist insults at Thomas. Prominent legacy media members such as MSNBC host Joy Reid have also joined in on the smear campaign in recent years. After then-President Donald Trump forecasted plans to take his 2020 election challenges to the Supreme Court shortly after the Nov. 3 contest, Reid openly questioned the legitimacy of the court and invoked the “Uncle Tom” slur by referring to Thomas as “Uncle Clarence.”

“So, I think what scares people is that if [Trump] decides to do something that legally makes no sense … but if they somehow manage to stumble into the Supreme Court, do any of you guys trust Uncle Clarence and Amy Coney Barrett and those guys to actually follow the letter of the law?” Reid asked her colleagues. “No! I mean, it’s a completely politicized Supreme Court that you can’t just trust that they’re going to do the right thing.”

In addition to Reid, actor Samuel L. Jackson is among those who has levied the “Uncle Clarence” slur against Thomas.

[READ: Why The Racist Left Smears Clarence Thomas As An ‘Angry Black Man’]

Thomas Is a National Hero

Unlike many of today’s social justice warriors who love to feign “oppression,” Thomas grew up in an era of real oppression. Born into abject poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, Thomas was raised by his grandparents in Savannah during the height of segregation. With his biological father missing from his life, Thomas’ grandfather assumed the role, providing his grandson with a foundation for hard work and discipline.

Despite the harsh circumstances of his beginnings, Thomas would go on to excel in academics, attending the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School. After spending years working in the legal profession, Thomas was nominated by President George H.W. Bush to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1989. Not long after in 1991, he was nominated and confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court (no thanks to Democrat partisans like then-Sen. Joe Biden), where he has faithfully served for the past 31 years.

If we lived in a world where Democrats earnestly stood by their professed belief in championing the success of non-white people, Thomas wouldn’t be getting one statue, but a hundred. His journey to success is something that shouldn’t just be celebrated but shared to inspire others to overcome adversity and chase their dreams with hard work and strong principles. Then again, leftists’ racial pandering isn’t about helping people.

For Democrats, Thomas’ devotion to the Constitution and willingness to do right by the American people stands in the way of their conquest to centralize government power in the hands of a few elites. His originalist jurisprudence is a roadblock to that goal, therefore making it perfectly acceptable in their eyes to use any tactic, no matter how grotesque, to undermine him.

Despite their best efforts, the left’s bid to slander the legacy of this great man will fail. No matter what kind of rhetorical garbage they throw at him, Clarence Thomas will be remembered as one of the greatest Supreme Court justices and public servants in U.S. history. His understanding of what it means to be a judge and adherence to the Constitution have rightly garnered him adoration from millions of Americans. And that is something the left will never be able to change.


Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

The Left Unmasks Its Desire To Destroy Families — And The Nation — With Sexual Chaos


REPORTED BY: CARINA BENTON | APRIL 04, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/04/the-left-unmasks-its-desire-to-destroy-families-and-the-nation-with-sexual-chaos/

Hollywood

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once again led the way in protecting parental rights in education last week when he signed into law a bill that prohibits age-inappropriate “classroom instruction” on “sexual orientation and gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade. The legislation also requires parental consent for any health care services offered at school, and school districts “may not prohibit or discourage parental notification of or involvement in critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.”

Contrary to the fear-mongering, there is nothing controversial about this law. Yet it certainly does throw a spanner in the works for the radicals, neurotics, and degenerates in control of corporate America, the establishment media, and Hollywood, who are evidently on board with schools serving as platforms for perverts, predators, and groomers. The obscene obsession with hypersexualizing children that exploded about two years ago needs to be understood in the context of the left’s wider agenda to promote moral relativism and sexual deviance, a campaign they have been gaslighting Americans into accepting as “progressive.” Decades ago, Marxists ditched class warfare and economics in favor of sexual politics and culture as a vehicle for executing revolution. Ever since, they have been shrewdly redefining marriage, family, sexuality, and gender, to the point where “tolerance” and “diversity” now means foisting porn, perversion, and predators on our families. Those who won’t stand for it are cunningly condemned as bigots.

Although the tactics have changed, the underlying objective is no different from the philosophy of their ideological forebears in Communist hellholes like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: the fundamental transformation of society by co-opting and perverting the nuclear family, the most influential societal unit, and the bedrock of Judeo-Christian values.

A Nationwide Trend

Brainwashing school-aged children as young as five into becoming transgender-affirming disruptors of the nuclear family is not just a thing happening out west in crazy CaliforniaOregonColorado, and Washington State. In VirginiaMichigan, and Texas, parents have expressed disgust and outrage over sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In Connecticut, eighth graders were given a foul school assignment asking them to share their sexual desires in the form of pizza toppings. A couple in Florida accused their 12-year-old daughter’s elementary school of covertly coaching her in gender confusion, which they believe led to her suicide attempt.

After last year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe learned the hard way that parents don’t want this trash for their kids. It turns out white suburban women don’t take kindly to school boards covering up the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl by a “gender-fluid” student. Then there’s the Wisconsin teacher who apparently used a link in her email signature block to redirect students to an LGBT resource site and sex toy shop, and the Missouri teacher charged with sending dozens of nude photos and videos of himself to students, including a girl under 15.

Against this stunning backdrop, the U.S. Senate is poised to confirm the catastrophic Biden administration’s Supreme Court nominee, a radical judge with a 25-year career history of leniency toward individuals convicted of possessing or distributing child pornography. The left-wing media was quick to normalize and defend this disturbing trend, while endeavoring to humanize the depraved pedophiles in question.

A recent op-ed in The Hill spelled out the horrific reality behind the euphemistic phrase “child pornography.” It is the recording of violent acts of torture committed against terrified, defenseless pre-pubescent children and even infants by adult men, and distributed for the sadistic pleasure of the sickos who consume it, perpetuating a fiendish and expanding industry.

The Shift to Cultural Marxism

From the classroom floor to the Senate floor, none of this is a coincidence. Over the course of the 20th century, cultural Marxists realized that the class warfare narrative was never going to lure enough Americans to achieve a fundamental transformation of this nation. Despite the Soviet Union directing and subsidizing communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies, trade and teachers’ unions, and even churches and seminaries beginning in the 1930s, classical Marxism proved a flop. The left’s tactical response was two-fold:

  • Firstly, in reimagining Marxism in terms of sex and culture, they used maneuver warfare to simply attack the hill from a more advantageous position.
  • Secondly, pushing the falsehood that the Red Scare was just a conspiracy of the early 1950s deluded Americans into thinking the communist threat was a hoax when, in truth, it never went away.

Meanwhile, whether the battleground is economics or culture, the greatest threat to the twisted Marxist ideology has always been the Christian family. Christians know, as St. Paul writes, that every family in heaven and on earth receives its true name, not from the state, or a party, or society, or some fanciful “village,” but from God the Father. Hence the repression of religious families, the laicization of schools, and the prohibition of religious education that began with the Bolsheviks. In the 1950s, under the Khrushchev regime, Nikolai Ilyachev, the chief ideologist for a reinvigorated antireligious propaganda blitz, summed it up well when he stated that “in Soviet society, a family is a cell of Communist education or a refuge of backward conceptions.” The left’s contempt for those who remain faithful to God’s commandments and the truth revealed by Christ has never changed.

With Your Eyes Clear, Stand Up and Fight

Resisting the soul-destroying lies being force-fed to innocent children means supporting candidates who fear God more than some punk journalist, and who are bold enough, DeSantis style, to stand up to the Marxist schemers waging this cultural revolution. The politically suicidal Republicans and moderate Democrats flirting with the idea of supporting a historically unpopular Biden administration’s pedo-lenient Supreme Court pick might want to simultaneously start researching their post-political career options. 

Most importantly, we must return to Christ. He is the only remedy for the sickness and squalor rotting this country from within. So read the Bible, pray, catechize your children, go to church, and yank your kids out of the rainbow-parading, gender expansive-promoting indoctrination camps posing as schools.

Every communist who has ever haunted the earth understands that to control society, you must control the family. They ironically possess a deeper, albeit disordered, appreciation of the mustard seed principle than do many Christians. The nuclear family, the smallest societal unit, has the potential for the most profound cultural influence. As Pope Leo XIII explained, family life is “the cornerstone of all society and government.” It’s time to reinvigorate our Judeo-Christian heritage and start using the Marxists’ tactics against them.


Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.

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