It’s an age-old question that philosophers, theologians, and average Americans like you and me have tried to answer for centuries. Ponderance about theodicy, the vindication of God’s goodness despite the existence of evil, manifests even more prominently in the wake of tragedies like the recent shooting at an Allen, Texas outlet mall that left eight dead and at least seven others wounded.
For Christians, the deaths of eight legally innocent people are a grave reminder that, as Ephesians 6:12 states, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Deranged and demonic people doing deranged and demonic acts are something Christians are warned to expect in a world controlled by evil. Moments of apparent hopelessness like this one are soothed by the promise of an eternal end to death, suffering, and mourning. The fact that God himself plans to wipe away our tears brings a certain kind of peace to worried and weary souls.
For the ruling class, however, shootings like this one are terrifying because they are an enigma. In a desperate plea to satiate their endless hopelessness, leftists try to blame life’s trials and tribulations on what they claim to be the biggest problems society has to offer.
Despite the fact that these “threats” are temporary and fall short during any level of scrutiny, leftists continually invoke sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and other labels to interpret adversity.
False Gods
If you do not understand the inherent presence of sin in the world, someone being possessed by an evil so grim that he will maliciously end lives boggles minds and souls. Followers of Christ certainly don’t know all the specifics on why a 33-year-old man decided to gun down unsuspecting families over the weekend. We do, however, have a moral framework that rationalizes seemingly irrational behavior and grants us unwavering hope all at the same time.
The same cannot be said for the political left and their allies in the corporate media who put blind faith in the things of the world to decipher disaster. That’s why, mere hours after the Allen shooting, unnamed sources and eager corporate media outlets rushed to link the Hispanic gunman to “white supremacy.” That point made zero sense from the beginning but media mouthpieces latched onto it like a drug.
Idolizing false religions like race as the lens through which everything must be looked at will never explain why a Hispanic man opened fire in a predominantly white suburb. Understanding that evil has long crept its way into the crevices and cracks of human souls does. Bad things happen to good people because Adam and Eve ushered in an era of turmoil. Every man, woman, and child who is born and lives in a broken world is afflicted by a spiritual war. If they aren’t fighting against evil forces, they are overcome by them. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the revolting reactions offered by the left following the Nashville shooting at the Covenant School, the left’s scrambling to manipulate tragedies to blame their favorite political targets invites further evil to replace compassion.
Thoughts and Prayers
Leftism is a false religion that hampers not only a person’s ability to understand human suffering but also the remedy for our sorrows. Their visceral reaction to “thoughts and prayers” evidences this. Every time tragedy strikes, social media pages are flooded with comments from the faithful promising to pray for the bodies, minds, and souls of those affected. Unfortunately, this sincere gesture is frequently met with angry squawking that “thoughts and prayers” are excuses for inaction that mean nothing. For people who understand that evil exists and calamity is inevitable, however, “thoughts and prayers” mean everything. To reject the divine power of prayer is to sentence one’s soul and mind to the fear and anxieties about death that plague the sinful human condition.
We live in a broken world populated by broken people in need of a savior. No one can even begin to wrestle with the concept of the death of innocents until they understand that basic principle. There is but one remedy for evil and its name isn’t anti-racism or gun control. It’s Jesus.
The burden of saving the world was lifted from our shoulders more than 2,000 years ago. That doesn’t mean we should opt for complacency in times of crisis but it also doesn’t mean we must rush to disarm ourselves of our best spiritual and physical defenses, as so many try to do after tragedy.
There is redemption and there is hope for those who want it. Let us pray that those weary, searching souls discover there is no fear in death if you live a life with Christ.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-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 Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Parents in a Texas school district are demanding answers from school officials after first-graders allegedly forced their 6-year-old classmate to perform a sex act while they filmed it despite a teacher being in the classroom.
Parents and community members angered by the situation at Plainview South Elementary School in Plainview gathered outside the administrative office of the Plainview Independent School District (ISD) on Monday, according to the Plainview Herald, which noted the protest swelled to as many as 30 people throughout the day.
Family members of the girl involved are planning another protest at 6 p.m. Friday at local Broadway Park, local NBC affiliate KCBD reported.
“A 6-year-old was exposed to things that even adults would have a hard time overcoming,” a protesting parent of another student at the elementary school told the Herald. “This is trauma at its worst, and it is a trickle-down effect because it affects everyone around them.”
Parents and community members angered by the situation at Plainview South Elementary School in in Plainview, Texas, are demanding answers from school officials. (Google Maps)
Parents who were protesting Monday reportedly learned about the alleged April 19 incident after the school district called the parent of the first-grade girl. After receiving the call from the district, the child reportedly told her family that another student had pressured her to perform a sex act.
Heather Gonzales, an older cousin of the 6-year-old girl, told KCBD that the girl’s family noticed a sudden change in her behavior amid indications of distress and complaints of a stomach ache.
The girl reportedly revealed that a boy had exposed himself to her in the school lunch line and that she had also been pulled under a desk and pressured to perform a sex act while another student recorded with a district-issued iPad.
“She said she was hitting him with the poetry book,” said Gonzales, noting that the video showed her cousin did her best to fight back. The girl reportedly claimed the incident did not stop “until they let me go.”
Students play outside Plainview South Elementary School in Plainview, Texas. (Plainview South Elementary School/Facebook)
Gonzales claimed the school district has not provided adequate answers.
“Everything was ‘no comment, I cannot tell you, no comment,’” Gonzales said. “So, you mean to tell me abuse has been happening for a week and a half and these kids are still at the same desk? My cousin is still at a desk with all boys, having to see her abusers every day?”
The students have reportedly since been moved to separate classrooms.
Plainview ISD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez told KCBD that the school made a report and contacted Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) when school officials discovered video of the incident a day after it happened. He said a state investigator came to Plainview the next week and has been working with local law enforcement.
“He had asked that we hold confidentiality because he wanted to be sure that he was able to get the full story from each of the students, the minors, that were involved,” Sanchez said. “All of the steps that we’re required to take, we took.”
The district also released an extensive statement explaining that because minors are involved, “the school system must be very careful in the information it provides,” according to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.
The statement assured that Sanchez, assistant superintendent Yesinia Pardo and South Elementary principal Jennifer Hughey “have visited with the parents/guardians of families involved in a recent incident at South Elementary that is under Child Protective Services and law enforcement investigation.”
The statement also noted that the alleged incident “occurred away from the full vision of the teacher” while she was working with other students.
When the teacher collected the students’ iPads the next day, she noticed one of them had been locked with a password and took the device to the campus administrator. “Inappropriate content was discovered” on the iPad after a tech from the technology department unlocked it, according to the district.
The teacher involved has since been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation, the district said.
“My daughter comes home with bruises and rashes if she doesn’t participate in these little boys’ sick games.”— Plainview South Elementary School parent
Parents who spoke to the Herald during the Monday protest outside the school district’s administrative office claimed the incident with the 6-year-old is not an isolated one.
“There have been multiple moms coming out about stuff that has been happening all year and nothing is being done about it,” one parent said. “It’s hit its peak and that’s why we’re here today, to get answers.”
“My daughter comes home with bruises and rashes if she doesn’t participate in these little boys’ sick games,” another parent at the protest said. “They will punch her, give her Indian burns, they’ll call her names and cuss at her.”
Other parents at Plainview South Elementary claimed the alleged incident with the 6-year-old girl is not an isolated one. (iStock)
“You can’t have your kids in a classroom like that,” one parent said. “You’re worried about the education they are receiving and what they are being exposed to. A lot of parents have parental controls on what their kid is able to watch and see at this age, and we do all of that just for them to go to school and be exposed to stuff they should’ve never seen.”
A spokesperson for Plainview ISD told Fox News Digital that “CPS is continuing its investigation, and we continue to cooperate with CPS and law enforcement, by their request we are not able to comment any further than we have shared.”
Jon Brown is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to jon.brown@fox.com.
I recently wrote about the current wave of rainbow-flavored “insurrections” sweeping through America’s red statehouses. I called them part of a color revolution. Color revolutions, you will recall, are traditionally “popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes, such as those that took place in former Soviet countries such as Ukraine and Georgia in the early and mid-2000s.”
In our American color revolution, the script has flipped. Here, red states are the only rebels standing strong in the face of increasingly authoritarian central power — wrapped, of course, in the rainbow flag.
Tennessee recently made a star out of State Rep. Justin Pearson, the code-switching preacher man with the afro who just a few years ago was a repp tie-wearing prep at Colgate, but this year led an invasion of screaming gun-control protesters into the Tennessee Capitol, shut it down, and got himself expelled (temporarily, of course. Plot twist: The lead characters on this show always win in the end!)
We’ve now seen color revolutionaries take to state capitols in Tennessee, Montana, Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri. This week, the color revolution came to Texas. The radicals are on top. And (if you will excuse my French), thanks to their total effete ineffectuality, red states are getting bottomed, hard.
The Best Little Statehouse in Texas
Showrunners set this week’s episode of “Transurrection” in Texas. Why? They can’t turn Texas blue, right? …Right?
Twitter soon filled up with clips of the state Capitol in Austin getting overrun by a shrieking mob of LGBT cuckoos waving transgender flags and shutting down voting on an important bill. They’ve been keeping Austin weird for years, biding their time, and it finally paid off.
A Texas Republican state delegate on the scene tweeted a video of the mob and reported, “Trans activists are losing their minds, shoving signs into [a Texas conservative’s] face, and allowing spit to spew from their mouths while they scream ‘no place for hate.’” You have to admire their shamelessness, frankly. “No place for hate!” they scream, as they bludgeon their enemies.
The “hate” bill in question, naturally, would ban genital mutilation of children statewide. As we know by now, the idea of not being permitted to permanently sterilize and castrate kids makes sterilized and castrated adults very, very mad. How dare you not let us ritually initiate your son into our family-friendly extreme body modification cult!
A local newspaper reported on the action: “More than one hundred protesters rallied at the Capitol in opposition to the bill Tuesday in anticipation of the floor debate, engaging in chants including, “Protect Trans Kids!” and holding signs reading, “Let Trans Kids Grow Up.”
Am I the only one who notices the irony here? They want to “let trans kids grow up” — by putting them on irreversible puberty blockers that literally stop them from growing up. Logic — like charm, charisma, and good looks — is not this group’s strong suit.
But, as always, their ugly tactics work. “As protesters were removed from the House gallery, Democrats in the House on Tuesday successfully delayed debate on Senate Bill 14, which would ban certain gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors. Using a procedural tactic … the bill was sent back to the House Committee on Public Health, then voted out of the committee again Tuesday evening,” the paper reported, emphasis mine.
They may still lose in the end, but they survived the day.
I feel like I’m watching a new streaming docudrama show on Netflix: “Game of Throngs.” “The Transmandalorian.” “Sex Reassignment in the City.”
Last week’s episode was set in Montana and guest-starred an unknown man in a dress, an impish scamp named Zooey Zephyr. Zooey is not your typical social media starlet; he’s got a strong jawline, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a deep voice. His script, however, follows the Tennessee storyline virtually line for line. Zooey led his “transurrection” over a new Montana bill that would outlaw transgender interventions for children. Just like in Tennessee, he broke the rules, caused a riot, got ejected, and then used the ejection as a battering ram to take down the Republican leadership. Here’s how Fox reported it:
‘The only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,’ Zephyr said when debating SB99. Critics demanded an apology. However, after refusing to do so, Republicans led the chamber in a 68-32 vote last week to bar Zephyr from accessing the House floor. Zephyr cannot enter the anteroom or gallery but can vote remotely. (Emphasis mine)
Even when they lose they win!
How many times can they run this same storyline? Answer: At least 50 times, one for each state that requires it.
I seem to remember some other event a few years back, when protesters holding flags entered a capitol to stop lawmakers from voting on something. If I recall correctly, a lot of them were sentenced to years in prison for daring to block a vote. I will pray none of the nonbinary furries in the Texas Capitol suffer the same fate! They don’t look like they could last five seconds away from their cats.
The foundation of modern American democracy is that all Americans deserve some kind of representation in the rooms where law and policy are made. Not content to control those rooms in states where they dominate the political scene, some Republicans have said, in essence, that representation is a privilege for communities whose chosen lawmakers don’t offend their sensibilities. (Emphasis mine)
I like to picture flustered Republicans hitting the smelling salts and the fainting couch, like Scarlett’s Aunt Pittypat, when the winsome Zoey Zephyr and his merry band of rebels made a bit of noise during working hours.
Hilariously, the title of Bouie’s column is “A Sinister New Page in the Republican Playbook.” Maybe I shouldn’t say this out loud, but: The Republicans don’t have a playbook.
I wish they had a sinister playbook! How can we get them a sinister playbook and teach them how to use it? Because they absolutely do not know what to do in the face of mob rule. They are off balance. Unprepared. And it will only get worse.
One of these was an almost-10-year-old Cassandra Robinson, who in the photos looks like a muscular little boy with long hair dyed green, and wore “a T-shirt that read: ‘inspired by the STRONG WOMEN in my life.’” There is no 10-year-old on Earth who would dream up a sentence like that and want it on a T-shirt. Is his name a cry for help?
End Game
So, what’s the end goal? This is not just about gun control, or the “right” to castrate 8-year-olds.
Here’s what I think it’s obviously about: performing a radical mutilation surgery on the Constitution. Neutering it, for good — irreversibly even. This is the ultimate prize. Of course, it’s incredibly hard to change the Constitution, with good reason. That’s why it’s rarely been done in our history.
There are a few ways to rewrite the Constitution, but all the paths go through the states. You need three-fourths of states to ratify a new amendment. Insurmountable? Democrats already have 20 to 22 blue and purple states. They need 37, and that means the South is the juiciest prize, especially with its rapidly changing demographics.
Even in red states like Tennessee, they’d only need to flip 10 percent of the voters to win the state house. Age and heart disease will take care of the boomer-aged bitter clingers. College indoctrination will take care of the rest. Every four years a new crop of teenage voters arrives ready to make their “voices heard.” Time is on their side, not ours. And they’ve got all the time in the world.
Well, color me reacquainted! “Our Constitution is one of the most difficult in the world to amend. … But the remoteness of the possibility of formal constitutional change today may be as much a product of constitutional culture as constitutional structure: Several generations of Americans have lost the habit and muscle memory of seeking formal constitutional change.” (Emphasis mine)
Got that? The color revolutionaries are developing new muscle memory they will get to flex again and again as they continue dominating us in their weight class. Meanwhile, hordes of radicals are greedily gnawing through the country’s aging superstructure.
The Color of Money
The “tranissaries” of the revolution are obviously well-funded and blessed with a loyal army of loudmouth fanatics willing to win by any means necessary.
Are you?
I don’t know exactly who is directing and funding the revolutionaries. But it’s clear the country’s largest foundations and NGOs have these unsuspecting states in their sights. They have arrayed the full might of their billions squarely at “voting rights” and “defending democracy.” In other words, they are the architects behind activist mobs and the skilled ballot harvesters that have so far netted them win after win — including the White House.
The Macarthur Foundation and Ford Foundation, which funds dozens of grassroots activist groups including something called the “Texas Civil Rights Project,” are on the case with their billions. The Carnegie Foundation is doing its part for the cause, too. And there are many others. These massive bloodless megaliths are cleverly wrapping themselves in the cozy civil rights issue of the day — poor little trans kids (or election overhauls favored by candidates who love that issue) — and winning enormous popular support.
The wealth of America’s greatest old families is being used to systematically strip the place bare, and they’re looting it of everything that’s not nailed down. Including any stray toddlers. Viva la rainbow revoluçion!
It’s time to build a counterrevolution, fast.
Peachy Keenan is a contributing editor and regular essayist for The American Mind, a publication of The Claremont Institute. She is the author of “Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War” (coming June 6th from Regnery). She also writes at peachykeenan.substack.com , and you can always find her on Twitter @keenanpeachy, at least until she is canceled.
Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis signed a new law last week to circumvent red-state bans on abortion and transgender treatments.
While Republican lawmakers ramp up protections for vulnerable teens caught in America’s contemporary transgender craze, Polis aims to make Colorado a destination for impressionable minors to seek permanent procedures from puberty blockers to surgery.
“Here in Colorado, we value individual freedoms, and we stand up to protect them,” Polis said at the bill’s signing ceremony. “I’m excited by the work of advocates and legislators to further Colorado’s reputation as a beacon of freedom, a beacon of choice, a beacon of individuality where we live on our own terms.”
Senate Bill 23-188, signed into law Friday, opens the door for “trans tourism” in the state, allowing minors to seek abortions or “gender-affirming health care services.” In other words, teens seduced by transgender ideology in Kansas, where lawmakers are preparing to ban interventions for minors, may travel to Colorado for sterilizing procedures under Polis’s protection with parental consent. Similar legislation is under consideration in Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill to bar underage transgender surgeries earlier this year but included provisions in the legislation to make the new law toothless.
The Colorado Senate bill signed last week, titled “Protections For Accessing Reproductive Health Care,” also allows minors to abort pregnancies without parental consent.
The new law protects people seeking abortions and transgender interventions who travel to Colorado by prohibiting state or local agencies from penalizing complicit medical providers. The legislation also nullifies extradition requests in other states where such procedures are banned and refuses to recognize out-of-state criminal or civil proceedings relating to these procedures. Previously, Colorado already established itself as a go-to destination for women seeking abortions from Texas and Oklahoma, where it is banned.
While policymakers in other blue states already passed laws to establish their states as abortion “safe havens,” Colorado’s protections for transgender minors seeking life-altering surgeries is a first-of-its-kind. The new law comes as transgender surgeries are expected to become a $5 billion-dollar industry by the end of the decade, according to a report last year from Grand View Research.
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.
If Americans want to understand how genuine “voter suppression” works, they should take a look at the widespread disenfranchisement of voters in Harris County, Texas, during the 2022 midterms.
On Election Day, county election officials’ misadministration of the contest led to ballot paper shortages, delayed openings and temporary closures of voting centers, and an untold number of disenfranchised voters.
“I have never seen anything so egregiously, grossly mismanaged as the elections in Harris County this past year,” said Harris County GOP Chair Cindy Siegel during a recent Texas Senate committee hearing.
For context, Harris County is the third-most populous county in America. While historically favorable to Republicans, county residents have increasingly voted for Democrats in recent election cycles. During the 2020 election, for instance, Joe Biden won the county by 13 points, with Democrats also expanding their majority on the county’s governing commissioners court last fall.
Not long after the polls opened on Election Day, local media outlets began reporting that several Harris County voting centers were experiencing ballot paper shortages, delayed openings, and problems with voting machines.
What Happened in Harris County?
Nearly two months after the election, Harris County released an “inconclusive” assessment detailing the reported problems election workers and voters encountered on Election Day. In addition to ballot paper shortages, the report confirmed that some voting centers “did not open on time,” with reasons ranging from staffing problems to election officials not receiving the keys to their center’s voting equipment prior to polls opening.
The report further revealed that during the early part of Election Day, the county’s ePollbook server “lost replication,” which “prevented the wait time tool from updating the website, prevented the supply team from seeing real-time check in and disabled the sample ballot look up feature.” Such circumstances “had a direct impact on the ability [of county election officials] to see how many voters were being checked-in and what the wait times were” at any voting center.
While the assessment says that 68 precinct election judges “reported running out of their initial allotment” of paper ballots, an investigation conducted by local news outlet KHOU 11 indicates the problem was more widespread. According to the investigation, 121 of the county’s 782 voting centers “did not initially receive enough ballot paper to cover voter turnout.”
“The county allotted each of the locations six ballot paper packets, or enough for 600 ballots. But the total votes cast exceeded that amount, sometimes by hundreds of ballots,” the KHOU 11 report reads.
At the committee hearing, Siegel testified that one of the Harris County GOP’s precinct chairs developed a “heat map” purportedly showing that “the majority” of the 121 polls were in “Republican voting areas.”
The KHOU 11 investigation also found that on Election Day, 52 voting centers “received less paper in 2022 than ballots cast in 2018.” Harris County has not disclosed why voting centers ran out of ballot paper. It also remains unknown how many voters were disenfranchised as a result of such issues.
Investigations and Continued Cover-Up
Following the Nov. 8 contest, leading Texas Republicans began demanding answers from Harris County officials over the locality’s Election Day problems. On Nov. 14, GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement calling on the secretary of state, attorney general’s office, and Texas Rangers to “initiate investigations into allegations of improprieties in the way that the 2022 elections were conducted in Harris County,” adding that voters “deserve to know what happened.”
Not long after, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced her office had launched an investigation into the county’s Election Day problems following a request from the Texas secretary of state’s office to help with an inquiry into “possible criminal activity relating to shortages of paper ballots.” After receiving backlash from Texas Democrats, a bureau chief in Ogg’s office defended the investigation, saying Ogg was following state law.
Despite the seriousness of the matter, leading Harris County officials have attempted to stonewall efforts to uncover what led to the administrative failures on Election Day. When pressed by Harris County’s commissioners in January about the ballot paper shortages, Clifford Tatum, Harris County’s election administrator, refused to provide any details, using a lawsuit filed against his office by the Harris County GOP as justification for remaining mum.
County officials have displayed similar evasiveness with local media. Last year, KHOU 11 and a local ABC affiliate filed open records requests with Harris County over records related to the Nov. 8 election. After the Texas attorney general denied a request from Harris County to dismiss the requests last month, the locality filed a lawsuit against the AG’s office last week to keep the records hidden.
Texas Republicans Offer Solutions
In response to Harris County’s extensivetrack record of failed election administration, Texas Republicans have introduced numerous bills this year seeking to enhance the integrity of the state’s elections. If passed and signed into law, SB 1911 would allow any county official responsible for acquiring election supplies who “intentionally fails to provide an election precinct with the required number of ballots” to be charged with a Class A misdemeanor. Said officials could also be charged under the same statute for failing to “promptly supplement the distributed ballots upon request by a polling place.”
Individuals convicted of a Class A misdemeanor are subject to a fine of up to $4,000, a maximum of one year in jail, or both.
Also introduced is SB 1039, which mandates local election officials address inquiries related to election irregularities and provide “explanation[s] and “supporting documentation” when such information is requested by local and state party chairs, candidates, or election judges.
“This is about a catastrophic lack of performance in Harris County,” said bill sponsor and Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt during last month’s State Affairs Committee hearing. “It’s too big to ignore. The state can’t afford this type of problem in Harris County and neither can the residents.”
Additional election integrity bills introduced by Texas Republicans would make illegal voting a felony, withdraw Texas from the leftist-controlled voter-roll management system known as ERIC, and grant the secretary of state the power to suspend and replace an election administrator, among other reforms.
The kinds of Election Day failures displayed in Harris County are notably problematic because of the partisan difference in how Americans vote. While Democrats have made unsupervised, mail-in voting a key facet of their electoral strategy, Republicans prefer in-person voting on Election Day.
If this trend grows, it means that any election misadministration on Election Day will continue to disproportionately harm GOP voters over Democrats. Such circumstances would only further contribute to Americans’ waning confidence in U.S. elections, making accountability for what happened in Harris County all the more necessary.
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
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Republican lawmakers in Texas are pushing legislation that would make it a state felony to cross the border from Mexico illegally and establish a state unit of officers to assist with the arrests of migrants entering the state at places other than ports of entry.
Introduced by Texas GOP state Rep. Matt Schaefer, House Bill 20 would create a “Border Protection Unit” that allows its officers to “arrest, detain, and deter individuals crossing the border illegally including with the use of non-deadly force.”
Schaefer’s bill, which will have to pass both of Texas’ Republican-controlled legislative chambers before the end of May, notes that officers serving in the unit must be U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents, and have law enforcement experience.
The state House proposal would also give officers serving in the unit immunity “from criminal and civil liability for any actions taken that are authorized” under the proposed law. In addition, civilians who have not been convicted of a felony could also be invited by the unit’s chief, which will be appointed by the governor, “to participate in unit operations and functions, but such persons may not have arresting authority unless trained and specifically authorized by the governor.”
National Guard agents place a barbed wire wall on the banks of the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, on the border with Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico, on March 8, 2023. (HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
People arrested for crossing into Texas illegally would face up to 10 years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines for each violation.
Another bill introduced in the state Senate by GOP state Sen. Brian Birdwell, would make it a state crime for people who forgo legal immigration proceedings and cross into Texas illegally.
Birdwell’s legislation, which has received support from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, would “jail a person for a year or two years if the person tried to enter the country a second time” and “also punish the person to life in prison if they had been previously convicted of a felony,” according to the Texas Tribune.
The offices of Schaefer and Birdwell did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the proposed legislation, all of which is seen as a direct test to federal immigration law.
Under current federal law, individuals who are arrested for entering the country illegally could face a misdemeanor charge. Those arrested a second time under current law, could then be charged with a felony and banned from entering the country for a number of years.
Texas GOP House Speaker Dade Phelan said in a statement that “addressing our state’s border and humanitarian crisis” was a priority for lawmakers in the state and that the proposed border police — as well as a proposed Legislative Border Safety Oversight Committee, which would provide border safety policy recommendations and oversight to the new policing unit and work on issues in South Texas — was a “must-pass issue.”
The Republican proposals in the state legislature serve as an extended effort to advance Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to wrangle illegal border crossings known as Operation Lone Star.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during a news conference on Jan. 31, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The $4 billion border initiative from the governor has included an increase in patrols near the border with Mexico, gridlocking traffic with increased commercial truck inspections, and building more barriers along the international boundary. The effort also included directing officers to detain migrants who trespass on private property and bused thousands of migrants to Democrat-led cities, including New York and Washington, D.C.
Civil rights organizations and Texas Democrats were quick to denounce the legislation in the state.
“It is designed to create racial profiling,” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa told The Associated Press. “Something that is just horrendous.”
“I think the underlying fact that it is going to allow people to question our being American in our border communities and across Texas is unacceptable,” Texas state Rep. Victoria Neave Criado, chairwoman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said, according to The Associated Press.
Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital when asked about the proposals in the state.
Since taking office in January 2021, President Biden has watched as illegal border crossings have surged. Many migrants who have turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents and were released into the U.S. interior as they await federal immigration court proceedings.
Migrants illegally cross into the United States via a hole in a fence in El Paso, Texas, on Dec. 22, 2022. (ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images)
There were over 1.7 million encounters of migrants at the border in FY 21 and more than 2.3 million in FY 22. So far in FY 2023, which began in October, there have been more than a million encounters.
The House Homeland Security Committee announced last month that it would hold its first field hearing on the crisis at the southern border on March 15, giving Republicans a chance to highlight what they say is the direct link between the chaos and disorder at the border and the Biden administration’s policies.
Democrats on the committee, however, are reportedly bailing from attending the hearing that would provide lawmakers with a first-hand look at the communities affected by the influx of migrants.
Fox News’ Adam Shaw, Greg Wehner, and The Associated Press contributed to this article.
Four Americans who went missing in Mexico last week were taken in a possible kidnapping, according to the FBI. The agency is seeking public help in locating the four Americans who disappeared on March 3 after they crossed the border from Brownsville, Texas.
“Four Americans crossed into Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico driving a white minivan with North Carolina license plates,” read a statement from the FBI published by Fox News. “Shortly after crossing into Mexico, unidentified gunmen fired upon the passengers in the vehicle. All four Americans were placed in a vehicle and taken from the scene by armed men.” The FBI did not name the four missing individuals.
The Americans “had traveled to the border city of Matamoros for medical procedures,” a U.S. official “citing receipts found in the vehicle” told CNN. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador “offered a similar explanation.”
“The information we have is that they crossed the border to buy medicines in Mexico, there was a confrontation between groups and they were detained,” Obrador said, according to CNN. “The whole government is working on it.”
The region across the border from Brownsville is predominantly run by the Gulf drug cartel, a criminal syndicate and drug trafficking organization in constant conflict with warring factions.
Ken Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, said Monday American officials are working with Mexican law enforcement to bring the four missing citizens home. The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for the safe return of the missing Americans and the arrest of the captors. Tips can be submitted to https://tips.fbi.gov.
Kidnapping of Americans in Mexico is far from unprecedented. The State Department has warned Americans against trips to the Tamaulipas state since at least Oct. 22 with a level 4 travel advisory “due to crime and kidnapping.”
Last year, an American tourist had his foot hacked by a machete after being kidnapped by his taxi driver. In December 2021, six Mexican nationals from a trafficking group in Tijuana were indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury for kidnapping nine victims and murdering six. Three of those reportedly executed were American citizens. In 2013, an American named Shane Andersen was held for $20,000 ransom in Monterrey, Mexico.
Most kidnappings don’t pick up major press coverage. This week’s hostage situation, however, has already driven headlines across the major networks as the U.S. southern border with Mexico continues to spiral out of control.
CBS aired apparent footage of the kidnapping Monday morning.
Escalating violence across the international boundary has amplified pressure on Washington lawmakers to address the crisis.
In February, newly-elected Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made his first visit to the border as the leading figure in the lower chamber. McCarthy blasted the Biden administration’s lethargic response to the crisis at the border where a lack of law enforcement has opened the door to unchecked migration and a flood of narcotics pouring into American communities.
“We don’t even have operational control of it anymore,” McCarthy said at a section of the border wall in southeast Arizona.
The Republican House speaker threatened to launch an impeachment inquiry into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the agency’s failure to secure the nation’s boundaries.
“You cannot tell us this border’s secure when now there is enough fentanyl in this country to kill every single American more than 20 times over,” McCarthy said.
In January, cartel violence reached the doorstep of McCarthy’s own California House district where six, including a baby, were murdered in a “cartel-style execution.”
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.
Democrats are working overtime to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next candidate will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A state court judge refused to halt the Texas Bar’s assault on Attorney General Ken Paxton for his decision to challenge several swing states’ execution of the 2020 election in Texas v. Pennsylvania, a little-noticed perfunctory order published in late January revealed.
While the partisan targeting of Paxton represents but one of the many attempts by Democrats to weaponize state bars to dissuade attorneys from representing Republicans, court documents obtained by The Federalist reveal that in the case of the Texas attorney general, the bar went nuclear.
In March of 2022, as Paxton prepared to face Land Commissioner George P. Bush in the May 2022 GOP runoff for attorney general, news leaked that the State Bar of Texas intended to advance an ethics complaint against the Republican attorney general. Then, soon after Paxton prevailed in the primary, on May 25, 2022, the Commission for Lawyer Discipline, which is a standing committee of the State Bar of Texas, filed a disciplinary complaint against Paxton in the Collin County, Texas district court.
While the Texas Bar’s disciplinary complaint represents an outrageous and unconstitutional attack on the attorney general, as will be detailed shortly, the backstory is nearly as troubling — both the machinations underlying the charge against Paxton and, more broadly, the barrage of politicized bar complaints pursued against Republican lawyers who provided legal advice or litigated various issues in the aftermath of the November 2020 general election.
Bars Gone Rogue
The D.C. Bar’s investigation into former Trump administration Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark based on a complaint from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., exemplifies the partisan co-opting of the various professional responsibility boards charged with overseeing attorneys’ conduct.
In Clark’s case, the ethics charge was both “demonstrably false and premised on the fraudulent narratives pushed by the partisan politicians running the Jan. 6 show trial and their partners in the press.” Yet Clark has been forced to fight for his livelihood because the D.C. Bar allowed Democrats to convert a disagreement over Clark’s legal opinion into a question of professional ethics. Clark has attempted to put a halt to the proceedings by moving to remove the case to the federal district court, but Clark’s motion has been stalled there for several months.
More recently, the California State Bar joined in the political witch hunt when it filed a 35-page, 11-count disciplinary complaint against attorney and former law professor John Eastman. The California State Bar’s complaint alleged Eastman’s engagement “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.” As I wrote at the time:
The 11 charges against Eastman prove troubling throughout, with the State Bar of California proposing to discipline Eastman for presenting legal analyses to his client, Trump, and for speaking publicly on his views about the election, with the bar even attempting to hold Eastman responsible for any violence that occurred on Jan. 6. The disciplinary complaint also misrepresents numerous arguments Eastman and others made concerning the 2020 election, falsely equating claims of violations of election law with fraud.
Eastman’s long and costly battle against the California Bar is only beginning. And that is precisely the point of involving state bars: to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next presidential candidate — or senatorial or congressional candidate — will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A Broader Campaign
These efforts are well-coordinated and well-funded, with the group 65 Project launching in March of 2022 ethics complaints against 10 lawyers who worked on election lawsuits following the 2020 presidential election. According to Influence Watch, “65 Project was ‘devised’ by Democratic consultant and former Clinton administration official Melissa Moss,” and is managed by attorney Michael Teter, a former litigation associate with the DNC-connected law firm Perkins Coie. David Brock, of Media Matters fame, advises the group, and the advisory board includes, among others, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
The 65 Project reportedly “seeks to disbar 111 lawyers from 26 states in total,” but is “not targeting any Democratic-aligned attorneys who have challenged election laws or results in the past.” Rather, the project’s sole aim is Republican lawyers, such as Eastman, with the group pushing for Eastman’s disbarment from the Supreme Court Bar.
It is not merely private attorneys the Democrat project targets, however. In September, the 65 Project filed complaints against the attorneys general of 15 states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia, advocating the bars in those states take disciplinary action against the attorneys general for conduct related to the 2020 election.
Texas AG Paxton didn’t make the list, though, because local Democrats had already taken up the charge. And here, the backstory reveals the troubling politicization of state bars is not limited to Democratic-connected groups like the 65 Project or to the bars in leftist locales such as D.C. and California.
Anti-Paxton Crusade
In Paxton’s case, the state bar received at least 85 complaints about Paxton related to Texas v. Pennsylvania. The Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel reviewed the complaints and dismissed them, finding “the information alleged did not demonstrate Professional Misconduct.” But then four attorneys appealed the dismissal, including one who, according to court filings, was the president of the Galveston Island Democrats and a friend of a Democrat seeking to run against Paxton for attorney general in the then-upcoming 2022 election.
An appeals body within the Texas State Board reversed the dismissal of the complaints, and later a fifth complaint was added to the charges against Paxton. Paxton was then forced to respond to the allegations, which itself proved difficult because they consisted of vague rhetoric, such as claims that Paxton “violated his duty and obligations as a Texas attorney” and “filed an utterly frivolous lawsuit,” bringing “shame and disrespect to the State of Texas and the legal community of Texas.”
Nonetheless, Paxton filed a detailed response, expanded on the theories Texas asserted in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case, and provided the bar with an extensive discussion of the factual and legal basis underpinning the court filings. The Texas Bar then handed the complaints over to what Paxton described as “an investigatory panel comprised of six unelected lawyers and activists from Travis County.”
As Paxton’s later court filings would stress, “as a group, the panel donated thousands of dollars to federal, state, and local candidates and causes opposed to Attorney General Paxton.” “What’s more,” Paxton argued in opposing the bar’s case against him, “members of the panel voted consistently in Democratic primaries for over a decade. Several have maintained highly partisan social media accounts hostile to Paxton.”
Unsurprisingly, the partisan panel found “just cause” existed to believe that Paxton had violated a catch-all provision of the Rules of Professional Conduct, namely the canon prohibiting attorneys from engaging “in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”
But in making this finding and filing a disciplinary petition in the state court, the Texas Bar wholely ignored the fundamental flaw in its crusade against Paxton — and one of constitutional dimension: The state bar, as a bureaucratic arm of the judicial branch, violates the Texas Constitution’s guarantee of separation of powers by challenging Paxton’s execution of his duties as attorney general.
Separation of Powers
Paxton concisely exposed this reality in his briefing, first quoting Texas precedent that teaches: “The Texas Separation of Powers provision is violated … when one branch unduly interferes with another branch so that the other branch cannot effectively exercise its constitutionally assigned powers.” “The Commission’s suit against the Attorney General violates the Separation-of-Powers doctrine,” Paxton continued, because the “decision to file Texas v. Pennsylvania is committed entirely to the Attorney General’s discretion. No quasi-judicial body like the Commission can police the decisions of a duly elected, statewide constitutional officer of the executive branch.”
In seeking the dismissal of the state bar complaint against him based on separation-of-powers principles, Paxton’s argument shows the politicization process becomes nuclear when the target is the state’s attorney general, writing: “Unelected administrarors from the judicial branch attempting to stand in judgment of the elected attorney general who is the sole executive officers with the authority to represent the State of Texas in the Supreme Court of the United States.”
While it is bad enough that the state bar has been used as a sword to attack political enemies, such as Eastman in California and Clark in D.C., to deter attorneys in the future from representing unpopular cases or parties, the weaponization of the state bar against a state’s attorney general is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. As Paxton wrote:
No other attorney in Texas, no one else on the planet can bring a lawsuit on behalf of the State … but we’ve got an administrative arm of the judicial branch, unelected state bureaucrats telling the chief legal officer of the State of Texas how he can exercise his sole prerogative and his exclusive authority to bring a civil lawsuit on behalf of the State of Texas.
Yet unelected bureaucrats — many of whom are political enemies of Paxton — have put the attorney general literally on trial for exercising the executive function with which he was constitutionally charged. And while Paxton fully briefed his position — that as a matter of constitutional law and the doctrine of separation of powers, the court lacked jurisdiction to proceed on the bar’s complaint against him — the trial judge summarily rejected Paxton’s motion, merely stating the motion was “denied.”
Paxton has yet to state publicly whether he plans to appeal the denial of his motion to dismiss to the Texas Court of Appeals. But as a matter of principle he should; this case represents not merely an attack on him personally, but on the position of attorney general.
The Federalist obtained copies of the relevant court filings and they are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the attorneys general from 17 additional states should all be disbarred, according to the reasoning of the disciplinary complaint the State Bar of California filed Thursday against former Trump campaign attorney John Eastman. That detail is one of many buried in the 35-page, 11-count disciplinary complaint made public yesterday in the latest lawfare attack on attorneys who deigned to represent Donald Trump.
State Bar of California’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona announced on Thursday the filing of disciplinary charges against Eastman, allegedly arising from Eastman’s engagement “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.” The press release announcing the disciplinary charges further claimed that Eastman “made false and misleading statements regarding purported election fraud,” that provoked a crowd into assaulting and breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The 11 charges against Eastman prove troubling throughout, with the State Bar of California proposing to discipline Eastman for presenting legal analyses to his client, Trump, and for speaking publicly on his views about the election, with the bar even attempting to hold Eastman responsible any violence that occurred on Jan. 6. The disciplinary complaint also misrepresents numerous arguments Eastman and others made concerning the 2020 election, falsely equating claims of violations of election law with fraud.
But it is count two of the disciplinary complaint, charging Eastman with “seeking to mislead a court,” that exposes the California State Bar as a kangaroo court.
“On or about December 7, 2020, the State of Texas filed a Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint in the United States Supreme Court, initiating the lawsuit Texas v. Pennsylvania,” begins count two of the complaint against Eastman. The complaint then explains that in that lawsuit, Texas argued the defendant states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin “usurp[ed] their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their States’ election statutes.” As a remedy, Texas sought an order from the Supreme Court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the Defendant States’ legislatures and remand to the Defendant States’ respective legislatures to appoint Presidential Electors in a manner consistent with the Electors Clause.”
Eastman, on behalf of then-President Trump, sought to intervene in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case, and in that motion, Eastman “expressly adopted the allegations contained in the Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint filed by Texas.” In adopting the allegations Texas made, Eastman, according to the California State Bar, “misl[ed] the Supreme Court by an artifice or false statement of fact or law,” in violation of California’s “Business and Professions Code” that governs attorneys’ conduct in the Golden State.
Under the California State Bar’s reasoning, then, Texas’ attorney general who filed the motion likewise “misled” the U.S. Supreme Court, as did the attorneys general of the 17 other states that supported Texas’ motion for leave to file a bill of complaint. So too would have Sen. Ted Cruz, had the Supreme Court agreed to hear the motion, as he had agreed to argue the case on Trump’s behalf in that circumstance.
While count two represents but one of the 11 distinct charges levied against Eastman, it most clearly exposes the logical conclusion reached when state bars use disciplinary proceedings to conduct lawfare against political opponents.
To date, the bars have limited themselves to targeting just a few attorneys working for Trump, with the D.C. Bar pursuing Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Clark, in addition to the California State Bar’s attack on Eastman. But there is no limiting principle to prevent the bars in other states from pursuing any politician with a law license who happens to represent the wrong person.
That is an extremely dangerous precedent, which is why tomorrow at a press conference called by Eastman’s legal team, some big legal names will condemn the move. The hastily called conference is expected to bring together former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III and John Yoo, a current professor of law at the University of California-Berkley, former general counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and former deputy assistant attorney general. Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and former California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, among others, are also expected at the conference.
Whether the legacy media will cover Eastman’s detailed response to the State Bar of California’s disciplinary complaint or bother to report on his press conference remains to be seen. But if Cruz and the attorneys general impugned by the California State Bar speak out, the corrupt press may not have any choice but to report on the ridiculous theories underlying the disciplinary attacks on Eastman.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Four Republican Texas state representatives asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday to review new transgender student policies for public schools. State Representatives Bryan Slaton, Brian Harrison, Tony Tinderholt, and Mark Dorazio signed a letter calling on Paxton to examine the Texas Association of School Boards’ (TASB) 2023 “radically pro-transgender” guidance, according to a copy of the letter tweeted by Slaton.
The representatives accuse TASB of disseminating legal advice that seems to discourage schools from reporting child abuse, denies parental rights, and claims female students don’t have legal protection to a private restroom or locker room, the letter stated.
“This radically pro-transgender legal advisory appears to encourage school districts to refrain from reporting child abuse and obscure information regarding children exhibiting gender dysphoria from their parents,” the four congressmen stated. “This document also makes a bold declaration that says young girls would have no law protecting them from having a school district permit a biological male to enter their restroom or locker room.
The TASB legal advice is “highly concerning” as it “may be effectively creating state policy,” they said.
The school board association said that having a transgender child use separate gender-neutral facilities could make some students “feel that such an arrangement negatively singles them out and isolates them from their peers,” according to the document.
“Consequently, the transgender student may request to use communal sex-specific facilities that match the student’s gender identity. There is no law that prohibits a district from granting the transgender student’s request to use these facilities,” TASB advised. “If other students or their parents object to the use of a sex-specific facility by a transgender student, a school district may be able to amicably address the competing interests by making individual-user facilities and private areas available for all students.”
The decision on whether students should play on sex-specific sports teams is in murky waters, according to the TASB letter. Despite Texas law requiring students to play on teams separated by their biological birth, TASB advises school districts to “assess each request individually and determine the best course of action based on a thorough evaluation of all of the issues and potential risks, and in consultation with the district’s attorney.”
TASB also counseled schools on the legality behind preventing unsupportive parents from knowing about their child’s gender dysphoria and choosing a different name or pronoun.
“Texas educators typically work with parents to decide on appropriate accommodations for transgender students. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that transgender students are at particular risk of harm, including self-harm, when a parent disagrees with the student’s gender identity,” the document stated.
“As such, a student may request that a district employee not tell his or her parent about the student’s gender identity. School officials should proceed with caution in this case, in accordance with district policy regarding student counseling, crisis intervention, and child abuse,” TASB added.
Immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally sleep on a sidewalk near a migrant shelter on January 06, 2023, in El Paso, Texas. President Joe Biden visited El Paso on Sunday for his first-ever visit to the border in his decades-long career in politcs. U.S. Border authorities took into custody some 2.5 million illegal migrants in 2022, the highest number on record. | John Moore/Getty Images
Critics of the Biden administration’s handling of the immigration crisis at the U.S. southern border say President Joe Biden’s trip to Texas and Mexico amounted to a “photo-op” and expressed concern that the administration’s policies will only exacerbate the humanitarian crisis.
President Joe Biden visited the southwest border for the first time Sunday, as concerns grow about the high volume of illegal immigration negatively affecting U.S. citizens and border communities. Statistics compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol show there were 465,034 encounters between migrants and law enforcement officials at the southwest border in the first two months of fiscal year 2023, which began in October. By comparison, just 339,682 encounters occurred during the same period in fiscal year 2022.
Biden’s border visit occurred against the backdrop of his administration’s efforts to abolish Title 42, which enables border officials to quickly turn away migrants seeking entry into the U.S. due to public health concerns posed by the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered Title 42 to remain in place as the justices are slated to hear a case involving the matter later this year. The abandonment of Title 42 is expected to cause the number of illegal border crossings to increase to an even higher figure.
The president announced his intention to visit the border city of El Paso, Texas, in a press conference last week. During the address, Biden laid out actions his administration was taking to address the surge at the U.S.-Mexico border, including the expansion of a parole program allowing Venezuelan migrants with sponsors in the U.S. to come to the country for two years and receive work permits as long as they pass a background check to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
The president predicted that expanding the parole program to three additional countries will “substantially reduce the number of people attempting to cross the southwest border without going through the legal process.” He contended that since the establishment of the existing parole program, “the number of Venezuelans trying to enter America without going through a legal process has dropped dramatically from about 1,100 per day to less than 250 per day on average.”
When Biden arrived in El Paso, Gov. Greg Abbott gave him a letter declaring that “your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late.”
Abbott added, “Your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies.”
Hand-delivered a letter to President Biden today during his first visit to the border.
His trip is billion too little & 2 years too late.
“Even the city you visit has been sanitized of the migrant camps which had overrun downtown El Paso because your Administration wants to shield you from the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis,” he wrote. “This chaos is a direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted.”
Abbott elaborated on the consequences of mass illegal immigration at the southwest border, including the emboldening of the drug cartels engaged in “trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings.” He told the president “when you finish the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso, you have a job to do.”
The Texas governor urged Biden to “comply with the many statutes mandating that various categories of aliens ‘shall’ be detained, and end the practice of unlawfully paroling aliens en masse,” stop “sandbagging” Title 42, “aggressively prosecute illegal entry between ports of entry, and allow ICE to remove illegal immigrants in accordance with existing federal laws,” immediately resume the construction of the border wall separating the U.S. from Mexico and “designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.”
Newly elected Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., issued a statement of his own, characterizing Biden’s visit to the border as a “photo-op,” suggesting that any calls for border security from the administration ring hollow as long as the president continues “pushing for amnesty for millions of immigrants who have crossed into the U.S. illegally.” McCarthy vowed that “House Republicans will hold him and [Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro] Mayorkas accountable for creating the most dangerous border crisis in American history.”
Biden is making his first border visit of his life—a photo op—while pushing for amnesty for millions of immigrants who have crossed into the US illegally.
House Republicans will hold him and Mayorkas accountable for creating the most dangerous border crisis in American history.
Ahead of Biden’s visit to the border, the Democratic mayor of El Paso declared a state of emergency, citing the impacts of the migrant surge on his city. Critics of the Biden administration previously attributed the rise in illegal border crossings, which began at the beginning of his presidency in 2021, to the abandonment of the Migrant Protection Protocols that required those seeking asylum in the U.S. to remain in Mexico while their asylum claims were adjudicated.
During his speech last week, Biden touted the CBP ONE app, which enables migrants “to schedule an appointment at a port of entry and make their asylum claim there without crossing the border unlawfully.” Additionally, the White House released a fact sheet last week outlining additional actions the administration was taking to reduce illegal immigration at the southwest border.
Specifically, the fact sheet proclaimed that “… individuals who attempt to enter the United States without permission, do not have a legal basis to remain, and cannot be expelled pursuant to Title 42 will be increasingly subject to expedited removal from their country of origin and subject to a five-year ban on reentry.”
“DHS and DOJ are surging asylum officers and immigration judges to review asylum cases at the border more quickly — with the aim of reducing initial processing times from months to days,” the document added. The administration also intends to mobilize “faith-based and nonprofit organizations supporting migrants, including those providing temporary shelter, food, and humanitarian assistance.”
One of the things I get asked from time to time by readers is, what can ordinary people on the right, Christians and conservatives, do to help save the country — besides voting on Election Day?
It’s a good question, and it comes from the very understandable feeling of helplessness many people feel about the direction of the country and, let’s be honest, the collapse of Western civilization that’s now well underway. It’s especially easy to get frustrated after an election cycle like the one we just had, in which Republican leaders thoroughly botched it and left things more or less where they were before the voting. Put another way, if voting doesn’t really change anything in our so-called democracy, what will?
There’s an answer to this question, but you’re not going to like it. The plain truth is this: You’re going to have to save the country yourselves. Donald Trump isn’t going to save it. Ron DeSantis isn’t going to save it. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that a GOP majority in Congress is going to save it.
By all means, keep voting in national elections. Keep making your voices heard at the ballot box. But salvation won’t come from Washington, D.C. If America is going to be saved, or even just parts of it are to be saved, then ordinary men and women, God-fearing patriots all across the country, are going to have to do it themselves, one town at a time. And they will have to do it the old-fashioned and unglamorous way, by taking over the local institutions of civic life, organizing and winning elections for city council and school board, finding reliable and competent people willing to be candidates and staff and volunteers.
It’s going to be a long, thankless slog, but there’s no other way. Neither is there any guarantee of success. I speak here only of towns and suburbs, not of cities, many of which have become unlivable after decades of failed Democrat governance and leftist policies. Conservatives who can manage it should move to places where they can join with other like-minded Americans to take back their communities and instill a civic culture that reflects their beliefs.
We got into this situation through passivity, and only a sustained effort at the local level will get us out. For decades, conservatives did nothing while the left marched through academia — and then kept right on marching, down from their ivory tower and into the public square, into the schools, the libraries, corporate boardrooms, local police and fire departments, even the churches. These people have radical views far outside the American mainstream but nevertheless control all our institutions. If you want them back, you’ll have to take them back, post by post.
This is not the kind of thing the right likes to hear. By temperament and principle, conservatives would rather be left alone to run their businesses, raise their families, worship in their churches, and build up their charities and local communities. Unlike liberals and leftists, they tend not to be ideologues. They are not trying to fundamentally change the country. They mostly want to be left alone.
But of course, they will never be left alone. The woke radicals will never stop — until someone stops them. A kind of conservative radicalism, or at least activism, is going to be required to accomplish that.
A good example of what I’m talking about is playing out in the small central Texas town of Taylor, population about 17,000. Taylor, some 35 miles north of Austin, is a rather conservative place of the sort you can find all over the country. It recently made national headlines over its traditional Christmas parade; a longstanding town tradition organized by a coalition of local churches. Last year, organizers accidentally approved a parade float for a group calling itself Taylor Pride, which the parade committee naively mistook for the name of a group that was just proud of their town. What they got instead was a float featuring two men dressed in drag, dancing suggestively in what paradegoers assumed was going to be a family-friendly event.
Parents and attendees were understandably perturbed. To ensure it didn’t happen again, the consortium of local churches that runs the parade sensibly decided that this year, parade floats must be consistent with traditional biblical and family values. The point wasn’t to exclude any individuals or groups from attending or even participating, but to ensure the floats were family-friendly and not — like the Taylor Pride drag queen float — contrary to Christian teachings.
The City of Taylor responded by announcing it would stage its own separate LGBT-friendly “holiday” parade, on the same night as the traditional Christmas parade, on the same route, following right behind it. The decision was made not by the elected members of the city council, who are accountable to voters, but by the municipal staff who actually run things. There was no public notice or deliberation and no consultation beforehand with members of the city council. The municipal bureaucracy acted on its own authority to use (or rather misuse) public funds and resources to sponsor a parade that was wildly out of step with the community at large.
Kevin Stuart, a Taylor resident and assistant professor of political science at the University of St. Thomas, wrote about all this recently in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the problem in Taylor has deep historical roots. The outsourcing of decision-making to so-called experts has been happening in American towns and cities for more than a century, such that professional bureaucrats now run small towns across America like “ideological colonizers.”
“There is now a yawning ideological gap between the people who live in American towns and the professionalized cadre of city staff who pass through those towns on their way up the career ladder,” writes Stuart. He goes on to argue that residents of towns like Taylor are partly to blame for ceding too much political power to an expert class whose interests and values don’t align with the people they’re supposed to serve.
He’s right about that — and also about how “communities can’t remain strong if they are unwilling to defend common sense and get involved in the political process.” The lesson of Taylor’s dueling Christmas parades is that even in small, conservative towns in deep-red states like Texas, conservatives can’t be complacent. As I wrote last month about the Taylor fracas, there’s nowhere Christians can run and hide from the left. They have to stand and fight.
In Taylor, that means residents who until now might have never been involved in local politics will have to roll up their sleeves, give up some weekday evenings, and get involved. They will have to put up their own conservative candidates and vote out of office the city councilors who empowered a woke municipal bureaucracy. They will have to fire the cadre of leftist bureaucrats who run things and replace them with their own people. They might even have to change the city charter so that elected members of the city council actually do the work of the public in City Hall, not an unelected city manager who sees the job as merely a steppingstone to a bigger city.
The same goes for the library, the school board, and every other local institution in every American town like Taylor. Conservatives have to take them over if they can. To answer the question we began with, that is what ordinary people can do. And they have to start now. No one is coming to help, and time is running out.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Peter Doocy reports on growing crisis with Title 42 expected to end. Video footage obtained by Fox News shows a Border Patrol facility in El Paso, Texas, overwhelmed with migrant arrivals. State Rep. Tony Gonzales shot the video at the Border Patrol Central Processing Center on Friday. At that time, around 4,600 migrants were in federal custody despite capacity being only 1,040.
In a video taken Friday from Rep. Tony Gonalez, R-Tex., a Border Patrol Central Processing Center is seen at over four times its capacity with migrants. (Representative Tony Gonzalez)
The footage shows migrants crammed into the processing facility, many of them sprawled out on mattresses on the floor.
Migrants crammed into a processing facility. (Representative Tony Gonzalez)
A voice of the intercom can be heard calling out names while the migrants wait.
El Paso, like many towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, continues to witness an influx of migrants into its community. The city is also expecting a surge of migrants when Title 42, a Trump-era immigration policy that reduced the number of asylum seekers the U.S. would allow under the COVID pandemic, expires on Dec. 21.
Fox News’ Lawrence Richard contributed to this report.
Bradford Betz is a Fox News Digital breaking reporter covering crime, political issues, and much more.
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A Texas teacher and two aides have been arrested for allegedly abusing a 5-year-old special needs boy in 2021.
Three instructors employed at the Liberty Independent School District (ISD) were taken into custody in mid-November for alleged crimes committed during an alleged shocking incident on April 15, 2021. Teacher Melody Michel LaPointe, 47, and teaching assistants Tarah Michelle Tinney, 33, and Augusta Danielle Costlow, 27, were charged with four counts each of abandoning or endangering a child in imminent danger of bodily injury, a second-degree felony.
All three women were booked into the Liberty County Jail, and their bond was set at $60,000 each. All three are reportedly out on bond.
The teacher and instructional assistants are accused of isolating a special needs student in a room at a Liberty Independent School District facility. The 5-year-old boy was deprived of food and began eating his own feces and drinking his own urine, according to court documents.
The three instructors were reportedly responsible for the care of the young victim.
The indictment identified the victim as “R.W.,” and stated the instructors “intentionally abandoned [R.W.] in a place under circumstances that exposed [R.W.] to an unreasonable risk of harm, and under circumstances that a reasonable person would believe would place the child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment.”
Law & Crime reported, “The document explains that the alleged conduct involved confining R.W. ‘to an isolation room where he fell causing bodily injury’ and then failing to ‘voluntarily deliver the child to a designated emergency infant care provider’ as required by law.”
A spokesperson for Liberty ISD issued a statement on the disturbing accusations.
We immediately reported the matter to law enforcement and CPS, removed the educators who continued to work for us from the classroom, and conducted a comprehensive investigation. Based upon our investigation, we reported the educators to the State Board for Educator Certification and shared our results with law enforcement officials.
KTRK-TV reported, “According to a spokesperson for Liberty ISD, the two assistants were put on administrative leave during the investigation last year and then resigned once the investigation was completed. LaPointe, the main teacher in the classroom, was able to find work at another school district. She was recently working as a teacher for Bonnie P. Hopper Primary School in Goose Creek CISD.”
On Nov. 17, officials at the Hopper Primary School informed parents of the teacher’s arrest.
“In an effort of full transparency, we want to inform our families of an incident that occurred yesterday during dismissal. A teacher at Bonnie P. Hopper Primary School was arrested yesterday by Liberty County constables. The cause for arrest occurred in Liberty County and is not affiliated with Goose Creek CISD in any way. The teacher is currently placed on administrative leave with pay, pending the outcome of an investigation, after which the District will take appropriate disciplinary action. As this is a pending legal matter, Goose Creek CISD will allow the legal process to proceed and refrain from further comment. We want to ensure our families that the safety and security of your children is our #1 concern. We thank you for your continuous support of our campus and our district.
One of the comforting fictions conservatives are increasingly tempted to tell themselves is that if they just move to a red state or county, the insanity of the woke left won’t affect them and their family. Ensconced in safely Republican communities, perhaps they’ll be free not just from disastrous Democrat policies but also from the pernicious sexual propaganda of the left. For conservatives with children, this is especially important.
But it’s a mirage. There is no American town or hamlet remote or red enough to prevent the infiltration of leftist ideology, which today often comes from institutions that in an earlier era would have been seen as the guardians of a decidedly Christian civic virtue. Not only are left-wing activists taking over these institutions, but they are also working to ban conservatives, and especially Christians, from the public square altogether.
There is nowhere today that conservatives can run and hide from the left. They can either surrender or stand and fight.
Consider what’s playing out in the small town of Taylor, Texas, population 16,807. Situated about 40 miles northeast of deep-blue Austin, it has long been precisely the sort of place conservative families might move to raise their children — a quiet and peaceful town full of churches in a deep-red part of the Lone Star State.
For decades, Taylor has staged a Christmas — not “holiday” — parade down Main Street. The Taylor Christmas Parade of Lights is a beloved tradition that for the past 10 years or so has been organized under the auspices of the Taylor Area Ministerial Alliance, or TAMA, a coalition of local churches.
Last year, as a result of an oversight in the application process, an LGBT advocacy group called Taylor Pride was included in the parade. The oversight in this case was that the old ladies who volunteer to organize the parade and process float applications had never heard of a group called Taylor Pride and didn’t realize what it was. (And no wonder, before the summer of 2021 the group had never staged a public event.)
By the time parade organizers found out, it was too late. Two men dressed in drag, one as a female Santa and the other scantily clad in glitter, were suggestively gyrating to dance music on the Taylor Pride float as it rolled down Main Street in the annual Christmas parade — as it happened, right in front of a float for Saint Mary’s Catholic School, which was full of children.
Parents and attendees were understandably outraged. Soon after the parade, TAMA decided that in the future, parade entries must be consistent with traditional biblical and family values, and made an announcement to that effect ahead of this year’s parade. The point, as TAMA’s statement made clear, was not to exclude any individuals or groups from attending or even participating in the parade, but to ensure the floats were family-friendly and not contrary to Christian teachings.
In response, the Taylor City Council announced it would stage a separate, city-sponsored parade, calling it the “Very Merry Holiday Parade and Celebration” — on the same night as the traditional TAMA parade, following immediately behind it on the same route, for the express purpose of giving Taylor Pride and other LGBT groups a parade of their own. As a recent post on the City of Taylor’s official Facebook page explained, the city is doing this because “we are committed to being inclusive and diverse in the City of Taylor.”
A spokesman for the city has since falsely characterized the situation to at least one local news outlet, saying TAMA had “made it clear that they did not want certain people to be a part of the parade,” and, “They were going to go in a little bit of a different direction … and make it a little bit more exclusive.”
This is exactly the opposite of what’s happened. The only thing that’s changed is that TAMA has realized that LGBT groups like Taylor Pride have targeted their town and attempted, with some success, to infiltrate and undermine their traditional civic celebrations of Christmas. So they decided to push back and insist on the survival of their traditions. Good for them.
The point here is that Taylor might as well be every conservative community in America. It’s located in Texas’s 31st Congressional District, one of two congressional districts in Texas that have never been represented by a Democrat. Voters there just reelected Republican Rep. John Carter for the 11th time. He ran unopposed. Taylor also sits in Williamson County, where nearly every elected office is held by a Republican.
Indeed, Taylor is the last place in the country where a family attending a Christmas parade organized by a coalition of local churches would expect to see two men in drag dancing inappropriately on a float rolling down Main Street. Yet like many such towns across the country, the city council and municipal staff are eager to prove just how enlightened and woke they are. Send in the drag queen holiday floats.
By now, Christians in Taylor must surely know that next year, there will be only one parade down Main Street in December — and it won’t be the Taylor Christmas Parade of Lights. Unless they vote the city council out of office and clean house in City Hall, traditions like the Christmas parade will soon be a thing of the past there, another lost battle in a never-ending war of attrition waged by the left. Same goes for the public library and the public schools. If conservatives don’t take them over, the left will.
It might just be one small town in Texas, but Taylor stands as a cautionary tale. It isn’t enough to move to a red state or a Republican district. You are going to have to fight the left, and win, or surrender to them. There is nowhere left to hide.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
In a direct rebuke to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s radical abortion agenda, the City Council of Hobbs, New Mexico, unanimously voted last week to become a sanctuary city for the unborn. Overwhelming support for and passage of the ordinance mean abortion is now classified as murder and outlawed within Hobbs city limits. It also means that any blue politicians or abortion facilities that try to go against the city’s wishes could face an uphill legal battle.
The vote was vehemently opposed by Lujan Grisham, who called the architects of the ordinance “out-of-state extremists.” The governor’s reaction is no surprise considering her own history of abortion extremism.
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Lujan Grisham signed an executive order designating $10 million in taxpayer funds toward the development of an abortion facility in Doña Ana County, an area that shares a border with El Paso, Texas. That was just a couple of months after Lujan Grisham signedan executive order “protecting medical providers from attempts at legal retribution” for granting abortions and refusing to comply with other states’ abortion extradition laws.
“As more states move to restrict and prohibit access to reproductive care, New Mexico will continue to not only protect access to abortion, but to expand and strengthen reproductive health care throughout the state,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “Today, I reaffirm my resolve to make sure that women and families in New Mexico — and beyond — are supported at every step of the way.”
Since then, abortion dominated the state’s political scene and even became a focal point in Lujan Grisham’s re-election race against Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, the CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, one of the nation’s largest dealers of abortion, previously told Reuters that Lujan Grisham’s friendliness toward abortion led her to consider relocating some of their Texas facilities closer to the border with New Mexico.
The goal was to offer abortion to women in neighboring Texas cities such as Lubbock, which voted to become a sanctuary city for the unborn in May of 2021, following the Lone Star State’s ban on abortion via the Texas Heartbeat Act.
Residents of Hobbs, a nearly 40,000-person town, however, weren’t taking any chances on getting swept up in Lujan Grisham’s pro-abortion executive spree. The pro-life community in Hobbs as well as the nearby city of Clovis revolted with the introduction of ordinances designed to protect unborn babies.
The threat of legal challenges thanks to widespread support for those sanctuary city ordinances, Hagstrom Miller confessed, “has given her pause about operating in eastern New Mexico.”
“In this post-Dobbs era, where anti-abortion folks are emboldened, I want to be sure we’re in a place where our patients can be safe, where our doctors and our staff can be safe,” she said.
The Clovis City Commission postponed its vote on the ordinance allegedly so it can “perfect the language to better protect against litigation.” “We hope this sends the message to our state legislature that there are pro-life cities out there and we want to self-determine on this issue,” Clovis Mayor Mike Morris said shortly after a vote to advance the ban.
If Clovis passes the ordinance, it will join Hobbs and a myriad of other towns that all recently decided to push back against Democrats’ abortion extremism.
“Between Governor Abbott’s resounding defeat of Robert Francis O’Rourke to four more municipalities joining over fifty towns with existing sanctuary city for the unborn ordinances, this is an exciting time for Texans as we work to end abortion,” Texas Right to Life President Dr. John Seago told The Federalist. “Additionally, as the abortion industry looks to target Texas women from just outside our borders, it is equally exciting that Hobbs, New Mexico has joined the fight and passed the ordinance to keep the desperate abortion industry out of their city limits.”
The pro-life movements in Texas and New Mexico have been so effective recently that they’ve even earned the wrath of the Biden White House.
“We have been very clear about what MAGA extreme Republicans are trying to do when it comes to a woman’s rights to choose,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a recent trip to New Mexico with President Joe Biden. “They’re trying to take that away, clearly, and in the most extreme ways. What it’s doing is it’s putting women — women and girls’ lives at risk.”
This article was updated on 11/16 to reflect that members of the Clovis City Commission are no longer unanimously “expected to vote in favor of the ban.”
“The Ordinance, as it stands now, is ready. The commission, however, is unready and unwilling,” Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative, told The Federalist.
Dickson also said that Clovis Mayor Mike Morris is facing backlash after he was “pressured by several Republicans to push things past the election and even past the legislative session.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Over the weekend, a church in Texas became a lightning rod for protesters and counter-protesters alike when it invited members of “all ages” to a drag event to support so-called “trans and exploring” minors.
On Saturday evening, the First Christian Church of Katy, Texas, an affiliate of the Disciples of Christ denomination, held a bingo event featuring drag queens that was billed as fun for the whole family.
“We create a place for people to feel welcomed and understand that there will always be people who disagree with us,” said Reverend Heather Tolleson, the pastor of the church.
The purpose of the bingo event — and the adults-only drag show later that night — was to raise funds for the church’s “Transparent Closet,” a resource where “trans and exploring teens, youth and young adults” can find cross-sex clothing, shoes, and accessories such as makeup.
The church itself claims to be “a place where all are welcome,” and nearly all of the events and ministries listed on its website refer to LGBTQ issues in some way.
However, the all-ages drag event outraged many others in the community, including parents and members of other churches, who claim that drag queens and those who sponsor them have no business marketing such entertainment to children.
Rebecca Clark, a member of the Fort Bend-based County Citizens Defending Freedom, denounced the drag bingo event.
“We are done tolerating the exploitation and sexualization of our children in this country,” Clark told the Epoch Times.
“Drag queens and children don’t mix,” added Sarah Feigleson of CCDF. “These events are happening in your back yard. Stand up and raise a respectful ruckus.”
Along with CCDF, members of the Proud Boys protested the event, as did other churches. Several Catholics prayed the rosary.
On the other side of the street stood supporters of the family drag bingo day. Members of Antifa wore all black and obscured their faces. Others who were not associated with Antifa proudly showed their identities and their support for exposing kids to LGBTQ-themed entertainment.
“Drag in itself is just a costume,” said one unnamed man wearing a face mask and holding a pride flag. “It’s no different than someone dressed up like a superhero at a comic convention or someone who puts on a Halloween costume.”
Both sides were heavily armed, and a steady police presence remained in the middle of the road to help keep the peace during drag bingo night. There were no reports of violence or arrests, and only church members were allowed to enter the property.
Though the event itself was controversial, there was yet another aspect of it that drew further ire from critics. The event was originally supposed to feature drag queen Tisha Flowers, aka Jaysen Kettl. Not only does Kettl now don a macabre persona when dressed as Flowers, but he also has a troubling past. Back in 2004, Kettl, then 17, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit capital murder after administrators at his school learned that he and at least one other student had plotted to commit a mass school shooting. Thankfully, the plot was foiled before anyone could carry it out.
However, once Kettl’s criminal history was made known, the church quietly removed him from event promotions. It is unclear whether Kettl attended the event.
Despite the controversy, the event sold out and was deemed a success, Rev. Tolleson claimed.
Earlier this month, a Washington Post editorial acknowledged there was “no end in sight to the procession of buses inbound” to Washington, D.C., and praised Mayor Muriel Bowser for earmarking $10 million for the nearly 10,000 illegal immigrants who have arrived in the capital — about 15 percent of whom intend to remain there.
The Biden administration pretends it has the burgeoning problem of illegal immigration under control. Late last month, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that people aren’t just walking across the border. And just last week, Vice President Kamala Harris insisted the border was “secure.”
Much of the national media are happy to play along with this deliberate deception. The same corporate media that last year blithely ignored the federal government’s mass, midnight airlifting of illegal immigrants to New York; Jacksonville, Florida; and points beyond are now obsessed when a southern governor flies 50 Venezuelans to swanky Martha’s Vineyard.
In their eyes, when the administration ships tens of thousands of illegal immigrants under cover of darkness, it’s no big deal. But if the Post spots 50 people flown into Martha’s Vineyard, somehow, it’s a “crisis.” The media never accused the administration of using migrants as pawns or being inhumane, yet the latter is doing exactly what Texas and Arizona are on a vast scale.
The Post’s editors argue that “state and local officials nationwide must accommodate a flow of migrants — in schools, shelters, streets” as if there is no alternative. They seem unaware that for 250 years, the United States had an immigration law and that, for much of that time, the executive branch did its job, enforcing the law and defending our border.
What the open-borders, sanctuary-city crowd are at last realizing is that their blank checks can be cashed. New York and Washington’s social services are drowning under a mere 10,000 arrivals each. They’re lucky not to be El Paso (population 684,000), which is dealing with 1,400 illegal migrants arriving per day, or Yuma (population 97,000), which has received 250,000 so far this year.
Mayor Bowser’s $10 million might sound like a lot but putting just 200 people in hotel rooms in Washington at $200 per night comes out to upwards of $15 million annually, and educating the “about 70” new illegal immigrant children now enrolled in D.C. public schools will cost a couple million more for the first year. What happens next year?
New York City already has 7,600 migrants in its homeless shelters, which are 99 percent full, and is struggling to find housing for 5,000 new arrivals. As if trying to put out a fire with an eye-dropper, the city has opened a $6.7 million “welcome center” in Manhattan to receive migrants arriving by bus. Cost estimates for housing the city’s noncitizens already exceed $300 million a year. To complicate things, New York requires residents to spend at least 90 days in a shelter before being eligible for housing vouchers. It also requires a background check to verify applications. This normally takes a month, but it will presumably longer to process illegal immigrants who have no records that can be checked.
Even assuming all the new arrivals actually claim asylum, the average wait for an initial hearing in New York is over three years. In the meantime, they will be public charges on the city’s schools, hospitals, and housing. How long will New York taxpayers put up with this? Well, Mayor Eric Adams has admitted that the city is reaching the end of its rope, and officials are now said to be reconsidering their “right to shelter” commitment to house unlimited foreign indigents on top of New York’s plentiful home-grown needy.
New York and Washington actually look tough compared to Chicago. Mayor Lori Lightfoot proudly signed a “Welcoming City” ordinance in February 2021 to stop city police from working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But when the first busloads of 50 migrants arrived in early September, she packed them off to neighboring Burr Ridge without telling its mayor.
Later, when 500 migrants arrived in Chicago, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared an emergency and called out the National Guard. Coincidentally, Chicago has suffered almost the same number (491) of murders this year, but that’s not considered an emergency worthy of mobilizing the guard.
How long will this game of pass-the-parcel continue? Migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion. However, that does not require those who enter illegally to stay here — on the taxpayer’s dime — until our overwhelmed immigration courts can get around to hearing their cases. Under the Migrant Protection Protocols, they could be housed outside our borders while their cases are considered. Even if not, ICE has to be allowed to do its duty, and those who fail to file for asylum or whose cases are denied after due process should be quickly deported as the law requires. It’s time President Biden stopped denying the crisis at the southern border and accepted the truth. Only then can we work for a national solution to the ongoing migrant crisis.
A former State Department official, Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Affairs.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has announced that a group of migrants was bused from the Lone Star State to Chicago, Illinois. The governor had already been busing migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C., and New York City, though the trips are undertaken voluntarily. Now, the Windy City will be another destination for migrants who opt for such a trip.
“President Biden’s inaction at our southern border continues putting the lives of Texans—and Americans—at risk and is overwhelming our communities,” Abbott said, according to a press release. “To continue providing much-needed relief to our small, overrun border towns, Chicago will join fellow sanctuary cities Washington, D.C. and New York City as an additional drop-off location. Mayor [Lori] Lightfoot loves to tout the responsibility of her city to welcome all regardless of legal status, and I look forward to seeing this responsibility in action as these migrants receive resources from a sanctuary city with the capacity to serve them.”
The first bus of migrants transported from Texas to the nation’s capital arrived in April, and earlier this month, the first bus arrived in the Big Apple. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has twice requested the deployment of the D.C. National Guard to assist amid the migrant influx, but both times the Pentagon has rebuffed the mayor’s requests.
“As a city, we are doing everything we can to ensure these immigrants and their families can receive shelter, food, and most importantly protection. This is not new; Chicago welcomes hundreds of migrants every year to our city and provides much-needed assistance,” a spokesperson for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is without any shame or humanity. But ever since he put these racist practices of expulsion in place, we have been working with our community partners to ready the city to receive these individuals.”
NEWS: Today, the City of Chicago received confirmation that approximately 60 migrants were traveling to Chicago by way of Texas. Chicago is a welcoming city and as such has collaborated across various departments and agencies to ensure we greeted them with dignity and respect. pic.twitter.com/wJWEDtXLgZ
A Texas store clerk fought back against a robber who attacked her with a knife last week, shooting the suspect multiple times and landing him in the hospital. Beaumont Police got a call about a robbery in progress at the Everest Food Mart in the 2800 block of Eastex Freeway around 11:30 p.m. last Friday, KBMT-TV reported. While police were on their way to the scene, the station said they were told the store clerk shot the robber multiple times. Police arrived at the store within minutes of receiving the initial call, KBMT said.
Image source: KBMT-TV videos screenshot
Officer Haley Morrow told the station’s news crew at the scene that a store clerk called and said a man entered the store with a knife and robbed her, KBMT reported, adding that the clerk suffered minor injuries. A preliminary investigation determined the robber displayed a knife and attacked the clerk prior to her shooting him, the Port Arthur News reported.
Officer Morrow emphasized to the station that crime victims have the right to defend themselves.
“Essentially, you know, we see the aggravated robberies often; in a lot of cases what we don’t see is … a victim fight back and defend themselves,” she noted to the KBMT. “But, you know, we want to make sure that people understand that they do have that right.”
Officer Haley MorrowImage source: KBMT-TV video screenshot
The suspect was identified as 62-year-old William Coleman of Beaumont, KBMT said, adding that he was taken to an area hospital for treatment for serious injuries. Coleman later was charged with aggravated robbery, the station said.
Once Coleman is released from the hospital, he will be taken to the Jefferson County Jail and held on a $250,000 bond, KBMT reported.
Democrats love to talk about democracy — mostly about how it’s under threat from Republicans and “Christian nationalists” and anyone who opposes their agenda. But at least on a rhetorical level, they seem to cherish democracy and rightly think that a government of the people, by the people is the surest safeguard against tyranny.
In practice, though, they hate democracy and will use every tool at their disposal to subvert and destroy it. Hardly a day goes by that Democrats don’t proclaim as much by their actions. Just look at their response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last month, which triggered laws in more than a dozen states banning or placing new restrictions on abortion. Voters in those states elected the people who passed these new laws, which in many cases are broadly popular. By overturning Roe, the court breathed new life into the democratic process, returning an issue to the American people that an earlier Supreme Court had snatched away from them.
But Democrats don’t really want democracy when it comes to abortion, which they consider sacrosanct. They have no qualms about protecting it from regulations by state lawmakers through the raw exercise of federal executive power, if need be. This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland threatened to sue states that have outlawed or restricted abortion since the end of Roe, and he also said the Justice Department would try to get a judge to toss a Texas lawsuit that would block newly issued rules from the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services forcing doctors to perform abortions in emergency rooms.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Garland’s DOJ said last week it had launched a special task force to “evaluate state laws that hinder women’s ability to seek abortions in other states where the procedure remains legal or that ban federally approved medication that terminates a pregnancy.” The task force will also “oppose state efforts to penalize federal employees” who perform abortions “authorized by federal law.”
What could that mean? Well, take a look at the lawsuit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just filed against HHS. The administration is trying to use the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) to force ER doctors to perform abortions, even if it contravenes state laws outlawing the procedure. EMTALA was passed in 1986 as a way to prevent “patient dumping,” or turning away people who couldn’t pay, and it requires hospitals that receive Medicare money (which today is all of them) to treat people who show up at an ER in need of emergency treatment.
The Texas lawsuit argues the Biden administration is trying to “use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic,” and that “EMTALA does not authorize — and has never authorized — the federal government to compel healthcare providers to perform abortions.”
Garland and HHS claim that EMTALA preempts state law, but it’s unclear what that means in the context of the new HHS rules. If a state legislature passed a law saying that emergency rooms are prohibited from treating patients who have no health insurance, then yes, EMTALA would preempt that.
But as Paxton’s lawsuit rightly notes, the law says nothing about abortion, nor does it say anything about which specific treatments a hospital ER must administer. It only states that Medicare-participating hospitals have to provide “stabilizing treatment” for “emergency medical conditions,” and it specifically defines both of those terms in the statute.
For Democrats, though, laws passed by representatives of the people don’t carry as much weight as rule by administrative fiat. On July 11, the Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued “guidance” purportedly reminding hospitals of their obligations under EMTALA. But the guidance was much more than a reminder, and it was accompanied by a letter from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra that amounted to an abortion mandate for hospitals, asserting powers under EMTALA that simply don’t exist anywhere in federal law.
First, Becerra’s letter claims that if an ER doctor determines that “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve [an emergency medical condition as defined by EMTALA], the physician must provide that treatment.”
But this is nothing more than a cheap word game. Abortion isn’t a “stabilizing treatment,” and nowhere in federal law is it construed as such. Becerra is conflating Democrats’ loose rhetoric about abortion — that it’s “reproductive healthcare” or “women’s health” — with the straightforward reality of the federal EMTALA statute, which says nothing about abortion and, to the contrary, specifically includes a mention of an “emergency medical condition” as one that threatens the life of an unborn child.
Second, Becerra’s false claim that EMTALA preempts state abortion laws is contradicted by the plain language of the law itself, which says it doesn’t preempt state law “except to the extent that the requirement directly conflicts with a requirement” of EMTALA. But abortion is not a requirement of EMTALA and doesn’t even fit the law’s definition of “stabilizing treatment” for an “emergency medical condition.”
In a decent country, Texas would easily win this lawsuit — and the Justice Department would never step in to try to get it thrown out. But Democrats are committed to subverting the democratic process at both the state and federal level in order to preserve some shred of their abortion regime. They’re trying to preempt state laws they don’t like by twisting the meaning of federal laws that don’t have anything to say about abortion.
Remember that the next time you hear President Biden or some other leading Democrat talk about “threats to democracy.” They don’t care about democracy, they care about power. And they will use every ounce of it they have to advance their policies — the will of the people be damned.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
The American Academy of Pediatrics called for “reproductive justice” and advocated for pediatricians helping minors get abortions without their parents’ knowledge in the July issue of its official journal Pediatrics. Like other pro-abortion advocates who exploit young and vulnerable girls to advance their agenda — as in the recent viral story of the 10-year-old Ohio rape victim — the article used the story of a 14-year-old Guatemalan immigrant girl to argue for a more “holistic approach to reproductive rights that considers factors such as race, language, and socioeconomic status on the reproductive health of women.”
According to the article, the girl experienced complications after taking the abortion drug misoprostol and went to a facility that gave her a surgical abortion and helped her with the “judicial bypass” process so she could do it without her parents’ knowledge. After the abortion, the girl received a Nexplanon implant — a type of birth control that increases the chance that any pregnancy that occurs will be ectopic and puts the female at greater risk of blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes.
The academy’s takeaway from this story, which it foisted upon its readers, was that the “pediatric community” should “advocate for reproductive policies that expand access to care for adolescent patients.” In other words, it thinks doctors should push for making it easier for kids to abort their own children. Further, the American Academy of Pediatrics wants to hide this from minors’ parents and couches its concern in terms of the “deeply intertwined social, economic, and cultural barriers” of racial minorities.
“Now more than ever, training programs should ensure that pediatric residents competently provide culturally sensitive, nonjudgmental counseling around abortion care, contraception, and judicial bypass,” the article said.
Dr. George Fidone, who has a large private practice with five clinics in Texas, told The Federalist that the journal has become increasingly left-leaning. “Years ago the lead article might be on meningitis or pneumonia or a new vaccine or whatever,” he said. “Now it’s all about trans health, gender fluidity, how we’re supposed to counsel people, starting at very young ages, about the notion of gender fluidity or whatever.”
The article also said the academy “joined 38 other physician groups in opposing the passage of Texas Senate Bill 8,” which prohibits abortions after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected.
“So the American Academy of Pediatrics is advocating for the wholesale murder of unborn children,” Fidone said. “What? What has the state of our academy become?”
Olivia Hajicek is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at Hillsdale College studying history and journalism. She has covered campus and city news as a reporter for The Hillsdale Collegian. You can reach her at olivia.hajicek@gmail.com.
The full 77-minute video has been released from the day 19 children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The full video, which includes a hallway surveillance camera and a bodycam from one officer, was obtained by the Austin American-Statesman. The outlet posted the four-minute edited collection of excerpts on its website. It posted the full video on its YouTube page.
The edited video begins with the gunman crashing the pickup truck he was driving, and then moving to the school after shooting at witnesses across the street and firing shots in the school parking lot.
WARNING: The following video contains images and audio that viewers will find disturbing.
“The video tells in real time the brutal story of how heavily armed officers failed to immediately launch a cohesive and aggressive response to stop the shooter and save more children if possible. And it reinforces the trauma of those parents, friends and bystanders who were outside the school and pleaded with police to do something, and for those survivors who quietly called 911 from inside the classroom to beg for help,” Statesman reporter Tony Plohetski wrote.
“The kids are running,” a woman calls out during the video in a 911 call, adding “Oh my God.”
Panic-stricken screams are heard as a woman orders children into their rooms.
The excerpt then continues with the shooter entering the school, peering around a corner to rooms 111 and 112, before sauntering down the hallway holding his rifle. The video captures one boy emerging from a bathroom. The boy peers around the corner and looks at the shooter, who is farther down the hall, before running away upon hearing the first shots.
Officials have said in the next two and a half minutes, about 100 rounds were fired, according to the Daily Mail.
Gunfire continues.
A few moments later, the first officers arrive.
Three officers approach the classroom warily with drawn weapons. A burst of gunfire erupts, sending the officers running. One officer holds his head as if he was struck.
The clip video then cuts to 19 minutes later, then 31 minutes later, as more officers with guns and a ballistic shield arrive. Officers continue to wait. Four shots are heard.
“They’re making entry,” an officer says, but nothing happens.
At 12:30 p.m. local time, an officer squirts hand sanitizer from a wall-mounted dispenser and rubs his hands together. Officers appear to be discussing alternate ways to enter the classroom.
At 12:50, officers breach the classroom, killing the gunman.
NEW: Recently, I viewed the hallway video from Robb Elementary School and I'm equally as haunted today as I have been. As journalists, we argue for transparency, but rest assured that once it is finally released, it is as wrenching as it seems. https://t.co/M49gOQGLmt
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has proposed two charges against the Border Patrol agents involved in the alleged “whipping” of migrants in Del Rio, Texas, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The first charge is for “poor judgment” for instructing noncitizens “to go back to Mexico, or words to that effect,” while the second is for “unsafe conduct” for maneuvering the agent’s horse “in a way that caused a noncitizen to fall backward into the Rio Grande River … thereby compromising the safety of the noncitizen, yourself, and your horse.”
These proposals are not yet final, and CBP is expected to announce the results of its investigation into the agents as soon as Friday, according to people familiar with the matter not authorized to speak publicly. It’s unclear how many agents will be charged.
“You knew or should have known that using your horse to block a noncitizen from exiting the water at the boat ramp created an unsafe situation, particularly for the noncitizen, but also for you and your horse,” the charges read.
“We consider that your misconduct received significant media attention and had a negative impact on the reputation of the Agency,” the charges added.
Several Democratic politicians characterized the images as “whipping,” as well as some migrant advocacy groups and human rights organizations. The White House also repeatedly condemned the behavior of the agents that day.
US Border Patrol agents try to stop Haitian migrants entering an encampment on the banks of the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas.
US says it will ramp up deportation flights for migrants flooding into Del Rio as authorities scramble to alleviate a burgeoning crisis
CBP sent out proposed disciplinary actions, an anonymous Department of Homeland Security source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told the DCNF. An announcement on the results of the investigation is “imminent,” according to Fox News.
“From the beginning, they had been convicted by the White House and DHS, so we figured something was coming,” National Border Patrol Council President for the Del Rio border sector Jon Anfinsen previously told the DCNF.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas promised to complete the investigation in “days, not weeks.” But, the results have yet to be shared nearly a year later.
“But for them to claim that it was going to be resolved in days and weeks was, frankly, a joke from the beginning to decide if these guys had done something wrong, despite no investigation having been done. So they’re trying to save face and propose some kind of discipline just so they can justify their claims from day one,” Anfinsen said.
Neither CBP nor DHS responded to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Ahandful of Texas counties on Tuesday declared the ongoing border crisis an “invasion” and called on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to do the same, citing constitutional authority for states to act in self-defense in the face of federal inaction.
Speaking in rural Kinney County, which includes a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, officials from Kinney, Uvalde, and Goliad counties said the Biden administration has refused to secure the border and enforce the law, and that although Abbott has done much to support local communities in south Texas most affected by the crisis, he needs to do more. Namely, he needs to follow their lead and declare an invasion.
County officials of course can’t do anything about illegal immigration on their own, but their argument is that Abbott, as governor of Texas, can. They cite Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which says that states can’t do things like conduct foreign policy or engage in war, “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit delay.”
Those three words, “unless actually invaded,” are the crux of the argument. The idea that states have the constitutional power to act on their own to enforce immigration law and police the border has been gaining ground for some time now. Former Trump administration officials such as Russ Vought and Ken Cuccinelli, both now at the Center for Renewing America, have made a case for unilateral state action on the border.
HUGE.
Our constitutional solution to the border crisis is live!
For the first time in U.S. history an INVASION has been declared (outside of Congress) by several counties in Texas.
— Center for Renewing America (@amrenewctr) July 5, 2022
Cuccinelli, former acting deputy Homeland Security secretary under Trump, was at the press conference on Tuesday in Texas. “This is the first time in American history that a legal authority has found, as a matter of law, that the United States is being invaded,” he said, later adding, “What we’re talking about is an operation that looks a lot like Title 42.”
That is, declaring an “invasion” means that state law enforcement, at the direction of the Texas governor, would directly arrest and expel to Mexico illegal immigrants in much the same manner as Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection does now under Title 42, the pandemic health order that allows federal authorities to expel illegal immigrants with minimal processing.
So far, Abbott has been reluctant to take this route, instead attempting lesser measures such as arresting and prosecuting illegal border-crossers for criminal trespass or ordering onerous state inspections at ports of entry as a way to pressure his Mexican counterparts into stopping migrants in Mexico before they cross the border.
These lesser measures, however, haven’t done anything to stem the flow of illegal immigration, which continues, month over month, to set new records. Perhaps it’s time for Abbott to listen to these local officials, and also to people like Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who was also at the press conference Tuesday and said, “We should declare an invasion and, as Texas, turn people away.”
Arguably, Abbott already bought into this more expansive constitutional interpretation of state authority when he struck security agreements with the governors of the four Mexican states bordering Texas back in April. (Never mind that the agreements were mostly for show, given the corruption of Mexican officialdom in these states.) After all, Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution says that states are not allowed to “enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded.”
By entering into security agreements with “another State, or a foreign Power,” it would seem Abbott has tacitly acknowledged not only that his state has been “actually invaded,” but that he has the constitutional authority to act in its defense. If that’s the case, why not take the next step and avail himself of the considerable law enforcement (and military) resources at his disposal to secure the border and expel illegal immigrants?
Maybe Abbott, secure in the state capital of Austin, is just taking longer to reach this conclusion than the people of south Texas, who are bearing the brunt of the border crisis. Indeed, among the hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border illegally every month now are a not insignificant number of people who do not want to be arrested, and whose presence on U.S. territory could reasonably be considered hostile. Unlike the migrant families who turn themselves in to the first Border Patrol agent they see, these people often attempt to evade the authorities, which gives rise to things like high-speed chases through small towns and over private lands. Across Texas border communities, this has become a serious and worsening problem since President Biden took office.
Del Rio, Texas 3 pursuits at the same time 2 on the same road just a few miles apart. Texas DPS arrested both smugglers🇺🇸💪 pic.twitter.com/RJSpP7pKUP
Some of those chases end in damaged property; some end in fatal car crashes. Sometimes the attempt to evade detection ends not with a chase but a horrifying tragedy like the one in San Antonio last month, where 53 migrants were found dead in a tractor-trailer.
Corporate media outlets, to the extent they cover the border crisis at all, will likely only mention efforts to declare the crisis an invasion in order to mock it or smear the people arguing for it as racists and bigots. But it is not some crackpot idea. In February, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued a legal opinion affirming that the border crisis constitutes an invasion and that the governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, has the authority under the Constitution to secure its border with Mexico.
In his legal opinion, Brnovich argued that the meaning of the word “invade,” as used in Article I of the Constitution, “covers the activities of the transnational cartels and gangs at the border—they enter Arizona ‘in [a] hostile manner’; they ‘enter as an enemy, with a view to … plunder’; they ‘attack,’ ‘assail,’ and ‘assault’; and they ‘infringe,’ ‘encroach on,’ and ‘violate’ Arizona.”
Ducey, like Abbott, has thus far balked at the idea of using state law enforcement to police the border directly. But as the crisis drags on, each month breaking the previous month’s record for arrests, border-state governors might be forced to test the limits of their authority. The incentives to do so are only going to mount as the crisis worsens.
And anyway, if there’s a constitutional question to be settled here, why not step forward now, set down a marker, enforce the law, and see how it plays out? If states really have no power to repel an invasion, no ability to defend their people and police their borders in the face of federal inaction, then we might as well admit now that we no longer live in a constitutional republic, and that states, whatever they once were, have been reduced to nothing more than administrative units of a centralized regime in Washington. There’s a word for such a political arrangement: empire.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
A new report says that the Texas school shooter told fourth graders what was coming after he shot his way into their classroom Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. The report from KENS-TV was based on the account of a fourth-grade pupil it did not name. The gunman killed 19 children and two adults before he was killed in a shootout with law enforcement. The fourth grader explained that the ordeal began with a gunshot.
“He shot the next person’s door, and then, we have a door in the middle, and he opened it. And then he came in. He crouched a little bit, and he said, ‘It’s time to die,’” the boy said.
The boy was doing all he could to survive.
“When I heard the shooting through the door, I told my friend to hide under something, so he won’t find us. I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.”
Four boys hid with the child who spoke to KENS, partially shielded by a tablecloth. The boy recounted a harrowing moment near the end of the ordeal.
“When the cops came, the cop said, ‘Yell if you need help!’ And then one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard, and he came in and shot her,” the boy said.
“The cop barged into that classroom, and the guy shot the cops. And the cops just started shooting,” he said.
Then came silence.
“I just opened the curtain. And I just put my hand out,” he said. “I got out with my friend. I knew it was the police when I saw the armor and the shield.”
The boy recalled the actions of his slain teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles.
“We were scared, and the teacher started telling us we can pray,” Timothy Silva, 8, told CBS.
His second-grade teacher alerted the students, he said.
“She started yelling, and I didn’t think it was a drill because they would have announced it. The teacher just went out there and started yanking on our door to go hide.”
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Wet clothes sit along the river where migrants have crossed from Mexico into Del Rio, Texas (Jennie Taer//Daily caller News Foundation)
A nongovernmental organization in a small Texas town is working to keep up with large numbers of migrants in need of their support ahead of Title 42’s end and is hoping they can sustain their efforts. The Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition has had to exponentially increase its aid supplies and hopes it can continue to sustain what is already a large number of migrants seeking support after the pandemic health policy ends, the group’s director, Tiffany Burrow, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Title 42, the Trump-era policy used for expedited expulsions of certain migrants during COVID-19, is set to end May 23, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is preparing to accommodate 18,000 migrants each day when the order is lifted.
The organization, based out of Del Rio, Texas, is already seeing numbers similar to when it was helping handle the thousands of Haitian migrants who arrived last September, Burrow told the DCNF.
“So, for March, 5,028 [migrants] with 33 countries represented. Before I left, we were at 3,500, which is a pretty significant number for us. When we had the 16,000 underneath the bridge, that month was at 3,549. So, March was huge, and April was a significant month as well,” Burrow said.
Rather than having to obtain “cases “of water and supplies for the migrants, the group is now having to ensure they have “pallets” of supplies to handle the large number of migrants, Burrow said.
The faith-based organization helps facilitate travel for migrants released from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody, but doesn’t pay for their transport.
Biden Admin Unveils Plan To Deal With Expected Massive Migrant Surge
The plan includes 6 pillars to address the migrant flows, including CBP having the capability to hold around 18,000 migrants at a time in custody by May 23, when T42 is set to end.https://t.co/XPtGl3pJge
The number is not as high as the average numbers of migrants encountered in March and April, but it’s still enough to “knock … most field operations for several stations” out of commission, Anfinsen said.
“We are just handling it one day at a time, so some days we are able to be in the field, and other days we aren’t,” he added.
Burrow emphasized the element of danger migrants face during their journeys as a result of the cartels in Mexico and the trauma they carry once they get to her.
“There are more really unfortunate cases that are coming through. As long as cartels are involved, I think we are going to continue to see more situations like what we’re seeing right now,” she said.
School librarians from across Texas gathered last week in Fort Worth for an annual convention that featured a pair of men in drag and symposiums about teaching kids to become “anti-racists” and embrace other social justice ideologies. The program for the Texas Library Association (TLA) 2022 four-day conference titled “Recover, Rebalance, Reconnect” featured a lineup that included adult entertainers Justin Johnson — dressed in full drag as “Alyssa Edwards” — and “Jenny Skyy,” aka Joseph Hoselton.
The conference was held last Monday through Thursday.
Johnson, who rose to fame after appearing on the television series “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” was the “After Hours Keynote” speaker last Monday, while Hoselton led “Drag Queen Storytime” to promote “literacy and community collaboration through dynamic storytelling and music.”
Other featured speakers at the conference included author Ibram X. Kendi, best known for his book How To Be Anti-Racist. The event offered workshops on “Building Community Relationships for LGBTQIA+ Patrons” and “diversifying” library collections with themes of “identity, culture, diversity, bias, and social justice.”
Another workshop involving Mesquite Independent School District librarian Rochelle Menendez, titled “Socially Conscious Conversations in the Elementary Library,” sought to “explore the opportunities we can offer in our library to help students become anti-racists, allies, and fluent in the language and ideas of social justice.”
With more than 6,000 members from school and government libraries across Texas, TLA is a charitable nonprofit group promoting libraries in Texas. It was founded in 1902 and made up of librarians and library workers from taxpayer-funded libraries.
The controversial “Drag Queen Storytime” events have made their way around American libraries in recent years, with one event in Philadelphia featuring a performer calling himself “Annie Christ,” a play on the term anti-Christ.
The trend has spread to the United Kingdom, where books about “feminist fairytales and gender fluid novels” are read to “young children.”
Drag Queen Story Hour started in San Francisco, California, in 2015, where it was launched to provide “positive and unabashedly queer role models” for children. It has chapters in 40 states and other countries. Drag Queen Story Hour is even promoted by the United Nations.
Mary Elizabeth Castle with Texas Values, a nonprofit social conservative family watchdog group, says seeing the trend pop up at a librarian’s conference — even in a conservative stronghold like Texas — isn’t that shocking.
“It’s very disappointing to see drag queens perform at the Texas Librarians Association conference, however, it’s not surprising,” Castle told The Christian Post. “We have seen drag queens try to perform at local libraries, school libraries in Austin and in Houston.”
“This has been going on a very long time.”
Like other parents, Castle questioned why the TLA would even book such guests.
“I’m just very disappointed that, at the annual conference for librarians who are in charge of the books that your kids can check out, they would have this type of adult entertainment at their conference,” she said.
The TLA conference also featured several events focused on what they described as “book bans” in response to parent protests in December over plans to offer the 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The novel by American author Stephen Chbosky contains graphic depictions of minors engaged in sexual activity, including an underage sexual assault. Despite protests from parents, the McKinney Independent School District opted to keep the book on library shelves.
In March, the TLA launched Texans for the Right to Read, a grassroots coalition against efforts to ban certain books across the state. In that vein, TLA’s conference offered events such as “Fighting Challenges and Protecting the Right to Read” and “Let’s Play Banned Books Jeopardy & Charades.”
Reports from the conference claim that in 2021, there were over 700 challenges to library and school materials and nearly 1,600 books were challenged or removed.
Castle says new policy guidance put forth by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath and the Texas Education Agency allows school boards to adopt books to be put into libraries and gives power to parents to bring book titles to the board for a vote on removal.
“I definitely encourage parents to look at that model policy on the Texas Education Agency website and plead their school board to adopt this policy that puts the power back in the parents and the school board to have control over what type of books are in the school libraries,” said Castle.
As reports emerged Tuesday of a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion indicating a potential overturn of the controversial 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, Castle warned of a coming “reckoning in our nation of a lot of harms and ills that a lot of these anti-family and anti-life policies are causing.”
“I have a lot of hope that Roe v. Wade will be overturned this summer, and with that, our society will begin to rethink the body, rethink sexuality, and actually turn to more helpful and wholesome ways of looking at human beings,” she said.
A pair of neighborhood dads in Los Angeles, California, have taken matters into their own hands to fight soaring crime in recent months. But now, they say they’re “tired of it” and have decided to pack their bags with their families and ditch the area. The two neighbors, identified only as Michael and Josh in recent report by local news outlet KTTV-TV, have retrieved a stolen car, fought off robbers, and tracked thieves with AirTags, all within the span of 18 months. Yet still, brazen criminals continue to stalk and harass their Playa Del Rey condo complex time and again.
“The number of instances that have happened in the year and a half that I’ve lived here has been in the half-dozen range, and I’m tired of it,” Michael told the outlet in an interview. “I’m tired of losing our property.”
The latest robbery served as the straw that broke the camel’s back for Michael, who said he plans to move to Texas. Thieves reportedly broke into a locked parking garage and stole his elderly neighbor’s car. Only 12 hours later, another neighbor spotted it about a mile down the road at a homeless RV camp. So, Michael and his neighbor Josh grabbed a spare key and hopped in a car and drove down Jefferson Avenue to retrieve the stolen vehicle. They soon spotted it, and once they figured out how to drive the Toyota Prius, they were off.
“It was nice to get the car back for the owner,” Josh said, smiling. “Win one for the good guys.”
Fed up with LA crime, neighbors take action into their own handswww.youtube.com
But prior to their heroic and blissful win, the neighbors had taken several losses. KTTV reported that thieves had made off with several padlocked bikes stored in the same parking garage.
One time, Michael encountered a thief and decided to confront him. Surveillance video shows the dad tackling the criminal to the ground and ripping the bike from his hands — but even that didn’t stop him. The thief was back a couple days later to steal more property. Josh opted to start tracking the whereabouts of his e-bikes with Apple AirTags, small coin-sized devices that can attach to items and signal their location to a connected Apple phone or computer. Three were taken: one to Marina Del Rey and two others to the homeless RV camp.
“I tracked it to that encampment, called the cops, they came and helped me retrieve it,” Josh said. “It was being disassembled as [we] walked up at a bike chop shop.”
Per Los Angeles rules, authorities stopped towing illegally parked RVs during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing encampments to rapidly clutter neighborhoods. The moratorium was finally lifted last week following a city council vote. But much damage had already been done. Members of the community claim the encampments quickly became epicenters for crime and debauchery.
“They’re ruining the environment,” said one Playa del Rey resident, Lucy Han, during the council meeting. “They’re defecating, they’re urinating in the area. … There’s human sex trafficking. We’ve had four shootings.”
KTTV said the Jefferson Avenue encampment is even home to a meth lab.
The pervasive crime has reportedly caused “good guys” like Michael and Josh to “hit the road for good,” the outlet noted.
Michael said: “We’re making that move partially because what’s going on but partially because it just feels like L.A. is going backwards, not forwards.”
The Biden administration has threatened to take “immediate action” against Texas after the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton designated puberty blockers and the castration of children child abuse under state law and Gov. Greg Abbott decided to investigate parents who allow their gender-confused children to undergo such procedures.
“This is government overreach at its worst,” President Biden said in a statement last week. “Like so many anti-transgender attacks proliferating in states across the country, the Governor’s actions callously threaten to harm children and their families just to score political points. These actions are terrifying many families in Texas and beyond. And they must stop.”
Biden said the Department of Health and Human Services has put the state of Texas “on notice that their discriminatory actions put children’s lives at risk.”
The same day, the HHS issued new guidance saying such restrictions likely violate federal civil rights laws. HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra released a statement, announcing he has directed his team “to evaluate the tools at our disposal to protect trans and gender diverse youth in Texas, and today I am announcing several steps we can take to protect them.”
“HHS will take immediate action if needed,” Becerra continued. “Any individual or family in Texas who is being targeted by a child welfare investigation because of this discriminatory gubernatorial order is encouraged to contact our Office for Civil Rights to report their experience.”
In a formal opinion last month, Paxton said that certain sex-change procedures and treatments “can legally constitute child abuse under several provisions of chapter 261 of the Texas Family Code.” Such procedures include castration, the removal of healthy body parts, as well as the prescription of experimental puberty-blocking drugs, among others.
“Beyond the obvious harm of permanently sterilizing a child, these procedures and treatments can cause side effects and harms beyond permanent infertility,” he stated.
“The medical evidence does not demonstrate that children and adolescents benefit from engaging in these irreversible sterilization procedures.”
Paxton added that allowing such invasive procedures in an attempt to make a child appear more like the opposite sex, like removing private parts, “would deprive the child of the fundamental right to procreate, which supports a finding of child abuse under the Family Code.”
“Because children are legally incompetent to consent to sterilization, procedures and treatments that result in a child’s sterilization are unauthorized and infringe on the child’s fundamental right to procreate,” Paxton continued.
“The lack of authority of a minor to consent to an irreversible sterilization procedure is consistent with other law. The federal Medicaid program does not allow for parental consent, has established a minimum age of 21 for consent to sterilization procedures, and imposes detailed requirements for obtaining that consent.”
Last August, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jamie Masters published a letter asserting that “genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery is child abuse, subject to all rules and procedures pertaining to child abuse.”
Masters’ letter came after Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott requested that the agency “issue a determination of whether genital mutilation of a child for purposes of gender transitioning through reassignment surgery constitutes child abuse.”
The response to Covid-19 has accelerated a growing divide between parents and schools, which is mostly to say between parents and teachers’ unions. From denying students the ability to learn in-person to forced masking to teaching divisive, historically inaccurate curriculum based on critical race theory (CRT), the trend has been to sideline parents from their children’s educations.
In response to this, states are taking action to ensure parents remain the primary decision-makers for their kids. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a parents’ bill of rights in June 2021. Missouri is considering a similar proposal and in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued 11 executive orders on his first day in office, two of which were related to education. Indiana is considering a parents’ bill of rights as part of a push to banish despicable materials that kids shouldn’t be taught.
At the national level, Sen. Josh Hawley has also proposed a Parents’ Bill of Rights, although so far it has not gained any traction. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, now president of Young America’s Foundation, declared “2022 is the Year of the Parent.” In other words, there’s a growing appetite among parents to take a more active role in education, whether through supporting legislation to empower them or taking the initiative to join their local school boards.
On Thursday, January 20, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott added Texas to the list of states attempting to tackle the divide when he announced his own Parental Bill of Rights, which will be voted on and perhaps enshrined into Texas’ constitution in January 2023. The initiative consists of seven points clarifying the fact that parents, not school boards or unions, are in charge of their kids’ educations.
In announcing the proposal, Abbott said, “The role of parents is being diminished by government itself across the U.S. Parents are losing a voice when it comes to their children’s education and health matters. Many parents feel powerless to do anything about it. That must end … Under the Parental Bill of Rights, we will amend the Texas Constitution to reinforce that parents are the main decision-makers in all matters involving their children.”
A key point in Texas’ proposed amendment, which could serve as a model starting point for other states reads, “Expand parents’ rights to access course curriculum and all material that is available in any education setting for their student through online posting and other methods so parents know what topics will be taught.” While Texas parents can currently get those materials, it requires an information request rather than the click of a mouse.
Submitting an information request is an unnecessary burden, particularly in an age in which schools are teaching children to be racists, encouraging them to be climate change alarmists, and pushing ludicrous and dangerous ideas about changing your sex or being “two-spirit.” Granted, two of those occurrences are from California, a state parents should just move away from rather than attempt to reform.
Even in Texas, though, there are leftist salvos in the culture war. Just last October, a mom in Keller, who with her husband had moved their family from California to avoid such things, discovered their new town’s library was offering a book featuring graphic depictions of oral sex. Parents in Leander, a town north of Austin and part of its greater metropolitan area, also discovered books with depictions and illustrations they don’t want their children to have access to without their permission.
While all these initiatives are worthy ideas, and Abbott’s proposal is the strongest yet, the jury is still out on whether they will resolve the issues parents are seeing with schools.
For starters, parental bills of rights require parents to actually be involved, which doesn’t always happen, even in the age of Zoom schooling. As a result, these various bills, amendments, and executive orders could result in nothing more than “won’t somebody please think of the children” activity. As the great men’s basketball coach, known for also educating his players, John Wooden said, “Never mistake activity for achievement.”
Elected officials such as Abbott, DeSantis, and Youngkin may be leading the nation on this front, but they’re doing so in response to their constituents. Youngkin’s victory was likely sealed, in fact, when his opponent Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Given that Youngkin’s implicit message is “Stop messing with our kids, you freaks!,” the tide on parents shipping their kids off to school and hoping for the best seems to be turning.
Parents’ bills of rights could still turn out to be gimmicks, an activity that doesn’t lead to achievement, but our kids’ educations are not the government’s job. But at least for those of us who do send our kids to government-run or -funded schools, such measures offer us a way to take more charge and ensure that we approve of what’s being taught in the classroom and offer recourse for times when we have legitimate criticisms.
The work is still up to us parents, but governors and legislatures can give us the tools we need to do that work more effectively.
Richard Cromwell is a writer and senior contributor at The Federalist. He lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife, three daughters, and two crazy dogs. Co-host of the podcast Coffee & Cochon, you can find him on Facebook and Twitter, though you should probably avoid using social media.
Self-absorbed congressional Democrats held a group therapy session on Capitol Hill on Thursday as they work tirelessly to immortalize Jan. 6 as an annual day of doom, but the rest of us are old enough to remember a few more times when riots and protests overwhelmed government buildings with no such theatrical response.
More than a few times, actually. The 2020 summer of rage was more or less “incited” by these same top Democrats, who race-baited as if their lives depended on it, and even our vice president, who helped bail violent rioters out of jail. It featured a number of these attacks on the government (which strangely weren’t called attacks on democracy at the time).
Not all of these demonstrations were allegedly a response to the Minnesota death of George Floyd, however. Left-wing demonstrators have long made a habit of attacking, infiltrating, and occupying government buildings. It started long before Jan. 6, 2021, and continued long after.
Didn’t think so. One of them was compared to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 by our vice president. The other one barely made the news and was referred to as a mere “sit-in.” Both were attacks by political activists on government buildings.
On Oct. 14, 2021, climate activists breached the Interior Department, with demonstrators who were left outside struggling with law enforcement officers as they reportedly tried to force their way in, shouting “Go inside! Go inside!” Some activists vandalized a building, while others pinned police against a wall. The ordeal resulted in a number of injuries, according to multiple sources, with a police officer being transported to the hospital.
2. President Moved to Bunker After White House Fence Breach
In June 2020, then-President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and their son Barron were reportedly rushed to a secure bunker when a group of protesters breached temporary barricades that had been set up around the White House complex.
Secret Service reportedly arrested and charged at least four protesters with unlawful entry at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
3. Wisconsin Capitol Overwhelmed
In 2011, thousands of people opposed to Republican Gov. Scott Walker filled the Wisconsin state Capitol, screaming in opposition to the governor’s budget repair bill.
4. Portland Federal Courthouse Overtaken by Violence
The federal courthouse in Portland has been a repeated target of violent Antifa rioters. In July 2020, a mob began setting fires inside the fence protecting the courthouse, shaking the fence, launching projectiles over it, and even trying to take it down. Several people even breached it, with rioters launching projectiles and flashing lasers at the federal police officers who responded.
The next month, the courthouse was shut down completely over domestic terrorism threats that someone might drive a vehicle filled with explosives into the building.
Antifa had previously attempted to menace people inside the federal courthouse on the afternoon of March 11, yelling “come outside,” “you don’t scare me b-tch,” “death to America,” and “f-ck the United States” while hurling water and other liquids inside the glass doors, banging on them, and attempting to get inside.
5. Democracy Halted at the Texas Capitol
In July 2013, an unruly mob of pro-abortion demonstrators interfered with the democratic process when thousands of them occupied the Texas Capitol and screamed at the top of their lungs, “grinding the Senate to a halt” with the noise.
6. SCOTUS Police Lines Breached, Senate Overwhelmed by Anti-Kavanaugh Activists
During the dustup over now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation to the Supreme Court, which was radically amplified thanks to the Christine Blasey Ford circus, demonstrators forced their way past law enforcement, breaching police lines at both the Senate and the Supreme Court, where they stormed the steps and beat on the doors.
After announcing that he planned to vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation, then-Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., was accosted on an elevator by several women, who shouted in his face and wouldn’t let him move.
At the beginning of October, shortly before the Senate voted to confirm Kavanaugh, a mob of protesters took over a part of the Hart Senate Office Building, which is part of the Capitol complex.
Some even made their way into the gallery during the final vote.
7. Senate Bombed by Left-Wing Terrorists
Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg, two left-wing extremists, along with five others planted a bomb outside the Senate chamber inside the U.S. Capitol, where it detonated and caused $1 million in damage in 1983.
On his last day as president, Jan. 20, 2001, Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of the violent pair, spurred on by his Democrat buddy Jerry Nadler. As Tristan Justice wrote:
According to the New York Post in 2001, New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, who today serves as the House Judiciary Committee chairman, played a ‘crucial role’ in Clinton’s decision to commute Rosenberg’s sentence. Nadler’s rabbi, a Nadler spokesman at the time told the Post, gave ‘compelling information from [Rosenberg’s] parole hearing’ to the Manhattan congressman, who, in turn, passed on the material to the White House counsel’s office. That transfer, the Post reported, played a ‘key role’ in the president’s decision to include Rosenberg on his list of 140 last-minute pardons just moments before George W. Bush took the White House.
Each of the women served only 16 years of her long sentence. Rosenberg escaped 42 years of a 58-year sentence, and Evans trimmed 24 years off her 40-year sentence.
8. Senate Chamber Breached by Biden Himself
In now-President Joe Biden’s farewell address to the Senate in 2009, he claimed to have broken into the chamber and sat in the vice president’s chair when he was 21 years old. The first time he stood on the Senate floor was when he visited with friends in the early 1960s, he said.
“I remember vividly the first time I walked in this chamber. I walked through those doors, but I walked through those doors as a 21-year-old tourist,” Biden claimed. “In those days, you could literally drive right up to the front steps. … I drove up to the steps and there had been a rare Saturday session. It had just ended. So I walked up the steps, found myself in front of what we call the elevators, and I walked to the right to the Reception Room.”
“There was no one there. The glass doors, those French doors that lead behind the chamber, were open. There were no signs then. I just walked,” Biden continued. “…I sat in the presiding officer’s chair. I was mesmerized.”
He was then caught by a Capitol Police officer. I wonder if Biden thinks his self-guided Capitol tour “borders on sedition“?
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
IT Support Technician Michael Hakopian (R) distributes computer devices to students at Hollywood High School on August 13, 2020, in Hollywood, California. With over 734,000 enrolled students, the Los Angeles Unified School District is the largest public school system in California and the 2nd largest public school district in the United States. | Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
At least 26 state school board associations have distanced themselves from the National School Board Association after it urged the Biden administration to use federal law enforcement agencies against parents who oppose the teaching of controversial curriculum in public schools by labeling them as potential “domestic terrorists.”
The national grassroots organization Parents Defending Education says the states that have distanced themselves from the NSBA’s letter include: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Out of these, 12 states — Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin — have taken further action to withdraw membership, participation or dues from the NSBA.
PDE wrote to NSBA member states for their comment on the Sept. 29 letter sent to them by NSBA Interim Executive Director Chip Slaven, which critics believe likened activism of concerned parents to “domestic terrorism.”
The letter said the NSBA had asked the U.S. Department of Justice to mobilize law enforcement agencies to respond to “threats and acts of violence against public schoolchildren, public school board members, and other public school district officials and educators” as actions of “domestic terrorism.”
While some school board members across the nation have publicly shared incidents of threats they’ve purportedly received from angry residents, critics believe the request to get federal law enforcement involved is unwarranted and an attempt to silence parents. Specific examples of concerning actions included the disruption of school board meetings “because of local directives for mask coverings to protect students and educators from COVID-19,” the incitement of “chaos” at school board meetings by “anti-mask proponents,” and the confrontation of school boards by “angry mobs” that have led boards to “end meetings abruptly.”
John Halkias, the director of the NSBA’s Central Region, wrote to Slaven the same day, on Sept. 29, sharing his belief that “the Board of Directors should have been consulted before a letter like this was sent out publicly, and no less to the President of the United States and the National Press.”
“I also agree that the letter took a stance that went beyond what many of us would consider to be reasonable and used terms that were extreme, and asked for action by the Federal Government that many of us would not request,” he added. “In fact in a recent press conference, the White House Press Secretary stated that when these incidents occur, it is a matter for local law enforcement and local authorities, and NOT the federal government.”
In an Oct. 2 email, NSBA President Viola Garcia told the organization’s board of directors that “NSBA has been engaged with the White House and the Department of Education on these and other issues related to the pandemic for several weeks now.”
Five days later, the Department of Justice published a memorandum directing “the Federal Bureau of Investigations, working with each United States Attorney, to convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders within 30 days” to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”
Republican members of Congress also criticized the memo.
“As someone who was born in the Soviet Union, I am … disturbed, very disturbed, by the use of the Department of Justice as a political tool, and its power as the police state to suppress lawful public discourse,” Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., said in a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing. “The FBI is starting to resemble old KGB with secret warrantless … surveillance, wiretapping and intimidation of citizens.”
A Fort Worth, Texas, parent supportive of teaching critical race theory in classrooms recently reportedly threatened other parents during a school board meeting, saying he’s got “over 1,000 soldiers ready to go” and that he’d be “locked and loaded” next time.
Officers were called on to escort the enraged parent, Malikk Austin, from the Fort Worth Independent School District board meeting on Nov. 9 after he turned around to face other parents in the room and shouted at them repeatedly, Fox News reported.
“For those who got an issue with this critical race theory equity, this is something I fought for, for my children,” Austin, who is black, said at the start of his remarks.
“How dare you come out here and talk about the things that my daddy and my grandparents went through, the lynching, the oppression, Jim Crow, and my kids are still being afflicted by this. How dare you come out here and challenge me on critical race theory,” he continued looking at other parents in the audience.
“Look up the word, ‘racism,’ this is something deliberately done to people of African descent,” he added. “They’re shackling us down. This hate, fear, [inaudible] ain’t gonna work no more.”
“We are not our ancestors. I got over 1,000 soldiers ready to go,” Austin then threatened, as seen in video of the contentious meeting.
A separate video posted on Twitter shows Austin warning, saying, “I’ll bring my soldiers with me next time … locked and loaded.”
He can be heard repeating the phrase “locked and loaded” several times as officers walk him out of the building.
A Far-Left activist in an FWISD Board meeting threatened parents all because they were criticizing CRT. The activist said that he would bring 1000 soldiers and that he will be "lock and loaded" next time. pic.twitter.com/VmqNaQQh10
Parents at the meeting reportedly told Fox News that Austin’s comments made them feel threatened and unsafe.
“Absolutely, it made me feel threatened,” Hollie Plemmons, a stay-at-home mother of three, said. “I’m scared and I’m afraid he’s going to do something.”
“Everyone there felt threatened,” Carol Guarneri, a grandmother of four students, added. “This gentleman was profoundly angry, he was not putting on a performance. When he made the statement that he had his thousand soldiers and they’d be back locked and loaded, it was very frightening to me.”
“I was thinking about calling my husband and having him come to the parking lot because I was afraid to come to my car,” she recalled.
According to Fox News, Guaneri claimed that Austin had attended a school board meeting in August wearing “tactical gear.” Fox noted that Austin can be seen wearing the gear at the 39-minute mark in this video.
When reached for comment, Austin reportedly told Fox News that it was not his intention to threaten anyone.
“First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, need to be implemented,” he argued, adding that “locked and loaded” is “a term I used when I coached football. It means, ‘Prepare and get ready.'”
A Texas teenager who allegedly shot a classmate and a teacher on Wednesday was freed on bail Thursday as his family members tried to paint the suspected shooter, Timothy Simpkins, as the victim of bullying. In the shooting, which followed a fight, Simpkins, 18, has been accused of wounding a 15-year-old boy multiple times at Timberview High School in Arlington, Texas, according to The Dallas Morning News. Teacher Calvin Pettitt was injured when he was shot in the back while trying to break up the fight. Two other people were injured in the incident. One student was grazed on the arm by a bullet, and a teacher fell in the confusion of the fight and its aftermath.Advertisement – story continues below
Cint Wheat, a cousin of Simpkins, posted on Facebook that “At the end of the day my lil cousin was bullied I don’t know to feel about this he not no bad kid.”
Carol Harrison Lafayette, who identified herself as a family member and said she would speak for the family, said Simpkins had been robbed at the school in the past, according to the Morning News.
“He was robbed,” she said. “It was recorded. It happened not just once, it happened twice. He was scared, he was afraid.”
“There is no justification of anybody … being hurt,” she said.
“We have to take a look at the fact that bullying is real. And it takes us all. And I do apologize. We ask as a family for forgiveness of any type of hurt.”
Simpkins lives in a $400,000 home with his grandmother and drives a $35,000 Dodge Challenger, according to the Daily Mail.
“He was able to get things that other teenagers cannot have; because he wore nice clothes, because he drove nice cars, he was like a target,” Lafayette told the outlet.
Simpkins had been held by police on a $75,000 bond on three charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, but Thursday, the bond was posted, and he left Tarrant County Jail, the Daily Mail reported.
Timothy Simpkins released on bail less than one day after his school shooting.
Four people were hurt in the shooting including two teachers and two students. One 15-year-old boy was critically injured.
One Twitter poster who said her brother was a victim was outraged that Simpkins was freed.
The Daily Mail reported that Pettitt was still hospitalized with a wound that narrowly missed his aorta, and the 15-year-old Simpkins allegedly was fighting with was in critical condition.
This is how the Shooting started, a fight broke out and Timothy George Simpkins Started shooting. He is currently missing, Arlington Police say he may be driving a 2018 Silver Dodge Charger LP: PYF6260 pic.twitter.com/p9lvR8tJo6
A police report outlines what allegedly took place, according to the Daily Mail: “Multiple teachers and coaches were working to break up the altercation between Simpkins and the juvenile victim. Once the fight was broken up, the juvenile witness observed Simpkins go to an orange backpack and retrieve a black firearm.
“The witness observed Simpkins point the firearm at the juvenile victim and sees Simpkins shoot, from her account, seven to eight times. The witness then observed the juvenile victim fall to the ground.’
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
FILE – In this Sept. 1, 2021, file photo, women protest against the six-week abortion ban at the Capitol in Austin, Texas. A federal judge on Wednesday, Oct. 6 ordered Texas to suspend the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., which since September has banned most abortions in the nation’s second-most populous state. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via AP, File)
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Texas to suspend the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., calling it an “offensive deprivation” of a constitutional right by banning most abortions in the nation’s second-most populous state since September. The order by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman is the first legal blow to the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8, which until now had withstood a wave of early challenges. In the weeks since the restrictions took effect, Texas abortion providers say the impact has been “exactly what we feared.”
In a 113-page opinion, Pitman took Texas to task over the law, saying Republican lawmakers had “contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme” by leaving enforcement solely in the hands of private citizens, who are entitled to collect $10,000 in damages if they bring successful lawsuits against abortion providers who violate the restrictions. The law, signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, prohibits abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which is usually around six weeks, before some women even know they are pregnant.
“From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution,” wrote Pitman, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama.
“That other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide; this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.”
But even with the law on hold, abortion services in Texas may not instantly resume because doctors still fear that they could be sued without a more permanent legal decision. Planned Parenthood said it was hopeful the order would allow clinics to resume abortion services as soon as possible.
Texas officials swiftly told the court of their intention to seek a reversal from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously allowed the restrictions to take effect.
The lawsuit was brought by the Biden administration, which has said the restrictions were enacted in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the order “a victory for women in Texas and for the rule of law.”
The law had been in effect since Sept. 1.
“For more than a month now, Texans have been deprived of abortion access because of an unconstitutional law that never should have gone into effect. The relief granted by the court today is overdue, and we are grateful that the Department of Justice moved quickly to seek it,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Texas Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, said the order was not unexpected.
“This is ultimately the legacy of Roe v. Wade, that you have activist judges bending over backwards, bending precedent, bending the law, in order to cater to the abortion industry,” said Kimberlyn Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the group. “These activist judges will create their conclusion first: that abortion is a so-called constitutional right and then work backwards from there.”
Abortion providers say their fears have become reality in the short time the law has been in effect. Planned Parenthood says the number of patients from Texas at its clinics in the state decreased by nearly 80% in the two weeks after the law took effect. Some providers have said that Texas clinics are now in danger of closing while neighboring states struggle to keep up with a surge of patients who must drive hundreds of miles. Other women, they say, are being forced to carry pregnancies to term. Other states, mostly in the South, have passed similar laws that ban abortion within the early weeks of pregnancy, all of which judges have blocked. A 1992 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court prevented states from banning abortion before viability, the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
But Texas’ version had so far outmaneuvered the courts because it leaves enforcement to private citizens to file suits, not prosecutors, which critics say amounts to a bounty.
“This is not some kind of vigilante scheme,” said Will Thompson, counsel for the Texas Attorney General’s Office, while defending the law to Pitman last week. “This is a scheme that uses the normal, lawful process of justice in Texas.”
The Texas law is just one that has set up the biggest test of abortion rights in the U.S. in decades, and it is part of a broader push by Republicans nationwide to impose new restrictions on abortion.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court began a new term, which in December will include arguments in Mississippi’s bid to overturn 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing a woman’s right to an abortion. Last month, the court did not rule on the constitutionality of the Texas law in allowing it to remain in place. But abortion providers took that 5-4 vote as an ominous sign about where the court might be heading on abortion after its conservative majority was fortified with three appointees of former President Donald Trump.
Ahead of the new Supreme Court term, Planned Parenthood on Friday released a report saying that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, 26 states are primed to ban abortion. This year alone, nearly 600 abortion restrictions have been introduced in statehouses nationwide, with more than 90 becoming law, according to Planned Parenthood.
Texas officials argued in court filings that even if the law were put on hold temporarily, providers could still face the threat of litigation over violations that might occur in the time between a permanent ruling.
At least one Texas abortion provider has admitted to violating the law and been sued — but not by abortion opponents. Former attorneys in Illinois and Arkansas say they sued a San Antonio doctor in hopes of getting a judge who would invalidate the law.
___
Associated Press writer Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed to this report
Saying that Kara Bell was a bit upset at board members of the Lake Travis Independent School District in Austin, Texas, is a bit of an understatement. No, Bell — a local mom and former board member candidate — was livid during the school board meeting last week over a middle school library book she deemed sexually explicit, KXAN-TV reported.
Image source: KXAN-TV video screenshot
And watching video of Bell reading a passage from the book to the board, some might be inclined to argue that she’s on to something.
“Take her out back, we boys figured, then hand on the t***ies, put it in her cornbox, put it in her cornhole, grab a hold of that braid, rub that calico,” she recited to the board, before adding, “You can find that on page 39 of the book called ‘Out of Darkness,’ which you can find at Hudson Bend Middle School and Bee Cave Middle School.”
“Out of Darkness” is a 2015 young adult novel by Ashley Hope Pérez, the station said.
Bell continued, “All right, not gonna lie, had to Google ‘cornhole’ because I have the game in the back of my yard. But according to Wikipedia, ‘cornhole’ is a sexual slang vulgarism for anus. The term came into … use in the 1910s in the United States … its verb form ‘to cornhole,’ which came into usage in the 1930s, means to have anal sex.”
Image source: KXAN-TV video screenshot
Then she blasted the board members: “I do not want my children to learn about anal sex in middle school! I’ve never had anal sex! I don’t want to have anal sex! I don’t want my kids having anal sex! I want you to start focusing on education and not public health!”
At that point Bell’s microphone was cut off, but her school board takedown can still be heard on video: “You are not public health officials; you are supposed to be educating our children! Do not teach them about anal sex!”
Here’s the clip of Bell going off. Content warning: Language:
The school district told KXAN the book in question was removed from both middle school libraries and that its contents will be reviewed.
“A district possesses significant discretion to determine the content of its school libraries,” the district spokesperson told the station, citing school board policy. “A district must, however, exercise its discretion in a manner consistent with the First Amendment.”
The spokesperson added to KXAN that the “district shall not remove materials from a library for the purpose of denying students access to ideas with which the district disagrees. A district may remove materials, because they are pervasively vulgar or based solely upon the educational suitability of the books in question.”
The district told the station it doesn’t know how long the review of the book will take.
The station said “Out of Darkness” is about a love affair between a black boy and a Mexican-American girl amid a 1937 explosion in East Texas that killed nearly 300 schoolchildren and teachers, citing an NBC News article published just after the book was released.
Jonathan Friedman of Pen America, which KXAN said is a nonprofit that “defends diversity, inclusion and free expression in literature,” told the station that many books with sexually explicit content have holistic value that includes diverse viewpoints and exposing young people to the realities of the world.
“Central Texas is one among many areas in the country that have become hotspots for these eruptions of local anger and disagreement,” Friedman added to KXAN. “I think to pretend books that deal explicitly with sex or sexual assault are in some way a threat to young people are doing them a disservice. This is about having access for young people to a wide variety of literature that people from different backgrounds are reflected in.”
Friedman also took direct aim at moms and dads, telling the station that “you have a small contingent in many cases of parents who decide that they disagree, and that they must know better than those who are in the classroom.”
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows spoke with Sean Hannity Wednesday night on the current crisis along the US-Mexico border, labeling Joe Biden a hypocrite for supporting vaccine passports while dispersing illegal migrants across the USA.
“Obviously there is no explanation. Joe Biden is missing in action. He’s ignoring what’s happening in our cities. He would rather support mandates and passports in New York and give people coming across our southern border a free pass,” said Meadows. “He’s providing buses, jobs, but he’s not providing any protection to American citizens.”
“It’s really very hypocritical, but why should we be surprised?” he added.
Meadows’ remarks echo those from Ted Cruz, who said the people of Texas “are pissed.”
“This is the biggest super-spreader in the country,” said Hannity. “Any American that’s infected because Joe’s not enforcing the laws of this country, you can blame Joe Biden.”
“You’re exactly right. People across the state of Texas are pissed. People are dying, and Joe Biden doesn’t care. Kids are getting assaulted; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t care… We’ve had over a million illegal immigrants in the last six months, and they don’t care,” said Cruz.
“They released 7,000 migrants into McAllen, Texas all of whom were positive with COVID. That’s 5% of the population of the city,” concluded the Senator.
A new video shows up to 1,000 illegal immigrants were held for processing outdoors under a bridge near the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday as the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector in Texas continues to experience a surge of people crossing the border.
Fox News reporter Bill Melugin tweeted, “This is the largest group of migrants we’ve ever seen being held by Border Patrol under Anzalduas Bridge in Mission, TX. Looks like it could be up to 1,000 people. We can only get a look at the area with our drone. There’s a popular Rio Grande crossing area nearby.”
NEW: This is the largest group of migrants we’ve ever seen being held by Border Patrol under Anzalduas Bridge in Mission, TX. Looks like it could be up to 1,000 people. We can only get a look at the area with our drone. There’s a popular Rio Grande crossing area nearby. @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/AsAygsO966
Townhall.com reporter Julio Rosas also shared photos of the scene on Twitter, saying, “I’ve seen Border Patrol’s processing site underneath the Anzalduas International Bridge in Mission, TX off and on since March.
“I can say this is the most illegal immigrants I’ve seen at the site at one time. It’s close to 100 degrees out right now.”
Rosas also shared a video from Sunday night of another group, saying, “Another night in La Joya, TX another large group of illegal immigrants turning themselves over to Border Patrol. There are well over 150 people here. There is also a lot of sneezing and coughing among the group.”
Another night in La Joya, TX another large group of illegal immigrants turning themselves over to Border Patrol. There are well over 150 people here. There is also a lot of sneezing and coughing among the group. pic.twitter.com/cFkwdD8qnT
“Can’t stress enough that I’ve never seen such a large group at one time who have as many individuals who appear/sound to be sick,” he said.
The report comes as the delta variant of the coronavirus has led to a spike in new cases in recent weeks while President Joe Biden’s administration welcomes illegal immigrants into the country. Last week, authorities said a charity in the border town of La Joya had rented an entire hotel to house illegal immigrants who have tested positive for COVID-19, giving no notification to the local community.
“Police in La Joya, TX, a Border town, announce a charity has rented an entire hotel here for COVID-positive migrants,” Fox News State Department Correspondent Rich Edson tweeted Wednesday night. “They say they only found out when a family, showing symptoms and staying there, ate at a restaurant next door. A customer flagged down a police officer.”
A later post added, “They’re advising La Joya to mask up and distance.”
“The La Joya Police Department said a patrol officer was waved down Monday by someone concerned about a group that appeared to be sick at a Whataburger fast food restaurant,”Fox News reported late Wednesday night.
“The officer found a family inside who were coughing and sneezing and not adhering to health guidelines, including the wearing of masks, authorities said during a news conference,” the report said.
La Joya Police Sgt. Manuel Casas said his department and the city had not been notified of the situation.
“We did not know this,” he said. “No one told the city of La Joya. No one told the police department that these people were here, and no one told us that these people were possibly ill.”
The reported individuals were staying at Texas Inn & Suites after being released by Border Patrol.
President Joe Biden repeated a talking point that called Republicans’ election reform bills the greatest threat to democracy “since the Civil War” and compared Jan. 6 rioters to Confederate soldiers during a Tuesday speech.
Biden spoke at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia Tuesday afternoon. He called GOP election integrity efforts “an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty” and “an assault on who we are.” The president referred to his oath of office, where he swore to protect the country against both foreign and domestic threats.
“Bullies and merchants of fear, peddlers of lies, are threatening the very foundation of our country,” Biden told the crowd. “The assault on free and fair elections is not just a threat. Literally – I’ve said it before – we’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole.”
He also compared Jan. 6 rioters to Confederate soldiers.
“Confederates, back then, never breached the Capitol, as insurrectionists did on January 6,” the president said.
“Has anyone in the White actually read the Voter Law in Texas?“
Biden’s comments echo those of White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who also compared Republican election reform efforts to the Civil War during Monday’s press conference.
After polls revealed that around 75% of Republicans questioned the outcome of the 2020 election, state Republican legislatures and governors introduced legislation attempting to reform voting laws and restore trust in the election process. The process has been politically fraught and, in each state, often garnered national media attention.
Most recently, a group of Democratic lawmakers from Texas — one of the states attempting to pass election reforms — fled the state to prevent Texas Republicans from reaching the two-thirds quorum necessary to pass legislation.
A Texas father took action with his licensed firearm over the weekend after allegedly catching a man peeping at his young daughter through her bedroom window and fondling himself. The father, along with his wife, reportedly confronted an intoxicated man who was inappropriately touching himself outside their 10-year-old daughter’s window late Sunday night, according to KTRK-TV.
The child spotted the man first and screamed, alerting her parents to the situation. When they came running into the bedroom, the couple said they saw the man looking into their child’s window. The parents, both armed with handguns, then ran into the front yard and attempted to detain the “peeping Tom.”
The father reportedly told Harris County Sheriff’s deputies that he and his wife instructed the man to lie down in the grass and wait for police to arrive, but the suspect didn’t listen. Instead, he fled across the street to a Valero gas station, and the couple followed him. At the gas station, the father recalled to KTRK that while he went inside to ask the attendant to call the police, his wife held the suspect at gunpoint. The suspect, however, was able to wrestle with the mother and take her gun away. The father said he exited the gas station to find the man pointing a gun at his wife — and that’s when he opened fire, striking the man three times.
According to the sheriff’s office, the suspect was taken to a nearby hospital in critical but stable condition. No other injuries were reported.
Deputies noted that both the husband and wife are licensed handgun carriers.
The mother, who wishes to remain unidentified, later recalled the terrifying details of the incident to KPRC-TV.
“She looks over at the window and this guy is at her window,” the mother said of her daughter. “I can’t say that he tried to take my daughter’s innocence. He took my daughter’s innocence.”
Then describing what was going through her mind when the suspect wrestled with her in the gas station parking lot, she said, “He is wrestling with me, with my gun, and I’m like, ‘I’m not going to let you get my gun, you are not going to kill me or shoot me.'”
“My husband just said he heard a ‘ca, ca,’ but by that time the guy had already grabbed me, got my gun, and pulled it on myself,” she said.
“We didn’t want this guy to get shot,” the mother added. “We were waiting for police to detain him because I’m pretty sure if he did this to my children, he’s doing it to a lot of other children out here.”
“We are praying for the suspect and we are also praying for his family,” the mother went on to say. “Because [just like how] we have children, a mother, a father, grandparents, and friends, and other family — he does, too.”
The father, who also wishes to remain unidentified, reportedly told KTRK that his daughter had complained about someone watching her through the window in the past, but he didn’t believe her. He added that while he pursued the suspect across the street, the man pleaded with him, saying he “wouldn’t do it again.”
The incident will now reportedly be referred to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office for a grand jury review.
Nebraska State Patrol Troopers will help Texas law enforcement manage the border crisis, Gov. Pete Ricketts announced Saturday. The Nebraska Republican said he is sending around 25 state troopers to Del Rio, Texas, to assist the state’s Department of Public Safety for a maximum of 16 days, according to Ricketts.
“Nebraska is stepping up to help Texas respond to the ongoing crisis on their border with Mexico,” Ricketts said in a statement.
“The disastrous policies of the Biden-Harris Administration created an immigration crisis on the border,” Ricketts added. “While the federal government has fallen short in its response, Nebraska is happy to step up to provide assistance to Texas as they work to protect their communities and keep people safe.”
Texas state troopers watch over Venezuelan immigrants before they are taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents on May 19, 2021 in Del Rio, Texas. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
The assistance from the Nebraska state troopers was announced in response to Texas emergency management official’s request for help through the multi-state partnership Emergency Management Assistance Compact, according to Ricketts.
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration over the border crisis in southern Texas. The order directed law enforcement officials to prosecute illegal immigrants under all applicable laws and claimed that illegal immigration caused damage to private property and hurt landowners in the region.
“President Biden’s open-border policies have paved the way for dangerous gangs and cartels, human traffickers, and deadly drugs like fentanyl to pour into our communities,” Abbott said in a statement. “Meanwhile, landowners along the border are seeing their property damaged and vandalized on a daily basis while the Biden Administration does nothing to protect them.”
Abbott’s disaster declaration ordered all federally contracted facilities holding migrants who illegally entered the country to close, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported. The Biden administration threatened to sue Abbott for discriminating against the federal government if he enforces the closure.
Ivory Hecker, the Fox affiliate reporter who went off-script during a Monday report that went viral, has been fired from her job at the Texas network. Hecker, who stated that “Fox Corp.” was “muzzling” her and stopping viewers from receiving “certain information,” now states that the station has been trying to prevent its reporters from covering hydroxychloroquine and its use in treating COVID-19 patients.
Hecker, a general assignment reporter, said Tuesday that she was fired after the viral report. In an interview with the Daily Beast, Hecker said that she lost her job via text after an initial suspension. KRIV-TV confirmed to the outlet that Hecker is no longer employed at the station and slammed her for going to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas with the allegations.
In a statement, the station said, “FOX 26 adheres to the highest editorial standards of accuracy and impartiality. This incident involves nothing more than a disgruntled former employee seeking publicity by promoting a false narrative produced through selective editing and misrepresentation.”
Hecker told the outlet that she has no interest in working for another news corporation after this experience.
“I have been longing to part ways with this strange, slightly unhinged corporation since last August when I realized what they were,” Hecker admitted. “The piece with Project Veritas doesn’t touch what they did. Fox 26 knows I’m fearless. … I have zero interest in working for another corporation. They all toe the same line.”
The Project Veritas interview in question featured Hecker speaking with O’Keefe about what she said was an agenda in quashing reporting that didn’t follow the line of corporate headquarters.
According to the Daily Beast:
In one piece of surreptitiously recorded footage, Fox 26 assistant news director Lee Meier was seen explaining why the station does not do more stories on Bitcoin. In the clip, Meier said it’s “an editorial choice” to not cover the cryptocurrency because it likely would not appeal to the station’s early-evening broadcast viewership.
“I have passed on Bitcoin stories by almost every single reporter for our five o’clock audience, because that’s not our five o’clock audience,” Meier stated. “So, there are lots of reasons. If I know our numbers are tanking from five to six and in one particular segment… I may say, yeah, and Bitcoin for poor African-American audience at five, it’s probably not going to play. That’s a choice I’m making.”
Reacting to Meier’s rather mundane remarks about the incentives of broadcast news, Hecker declared to O’Keefe: “I want out of this narrative news telling! I want out of this corruption!”
Hecker also said that the station attempted to prevent her from covering hydroxychloroquine in treatment of COVID-19 patients:
In a recorded call with Meier and Fox 26 vice president and news director Susan Schiller, Hecker was told she “failed as a reporter” for not looking at the “latest research” on the drug before boosting a post from a local doctor hyping it as a COVID-19 treatment.
“You need to cease and desist posting about hydroxychloroquine,” Schiller told Hecker.
Station management’s critical comments to Hecker appear to center around an August Facebook post the reporter shared last August, featuring Dr. Joseph Varon’s claim that he used hydroxychloroquine to “good success.”
In the call with her bosses, Hecker claimed the studies downplaying the effectiveness and safety of the drug made Varon’s comments more newsworthy. At the same time, she brought up Dr. Stella Immanuel, noting that she also referenced clinical research about hydroxychloroquine’s efficacy in her story about the controversial doctor. Immanuel, who believes sex with demons makes you sick, baselessly insisted that the anti-malarial drug is a “cure for COVID,” drawing praise from Trump but bans on social-media platforms. Hecker’s reporting on Immanuel at the time was largely sympathetic, painting her as a victim of “mass censorship.”
“They sent me to interview Dr. Joseph Varon, a highly respected doctor who did 1,600 media interviews,” Hecker told The Daily Beast. “They banned me permanently — after my interview — from covering COVID-19 medical treatments.”
Texas has passed a law creating an “1836 Project” aimed at promoting values considered fundamental to state identity, as well as the launching of an advisory committee aimed at promoting “patriotic education.”
Gov. Greg Abbott signed HB 2497 earlier this week, saying in a statement posted to Twitter that “we must never forget why Texas became so exceptional in the first place.”
“The 1836 Project promotes patriotic education about Texas and ensures that the generations to come understand Texas values,” said Abbott. “Every newcomer to Texas who gets a driver’s license will also get a pamphlet that outlines Texas’ rich history.”
“The law also establishes the Gubernatorial 1836 Award to recognize students’ knowledge of the founding documents about Texas history.”
Lucy Meckler, campaign manager for the Next Generation Texas initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told The Christian Post that she supported the new law, calling it “a unique and robust way to educate Texans on our state’s founding principles, rich history, and diverse culture.”
“[The 1836 Project ensures] that all voices have the ability to participate in the creation and dispersing of Texas history and civics education to the public,” Meckler said.
“At a time when our state is struggling with a civic literacy crisis and growing rapidly in population, it is more important than ever to ensure that every Texan has the opportunity to learn about what makes this state so great.”
According to the law, the advisory committee will have nine members who are “reflective of the diversity of the state,” with the governor, lieutenant governor, and speaker of the House each picking three people to serve a two-year term.
Topics that the project is expected to promote under Texas history will include: “the indigenous peoples of this state, the Spanish and Mexican heritage of this state, Tejanos, the African American heritage of this state, the Texas War for Independence, Juneteenth, annexation of Texas by the United States, the Christian heritage of this state, and this state’s heritage of keeping and bearing firearms in defense of life and liberty and for use in hunting.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott speaks at a news conference in Austin, Texas, U.S., June 6, 2017. | (Photo: REUTERS/Jon Herskovitz)
Critics of the Texas law include Valerie Street, president of the Texas Progressive Action Network, who told CP that she considered it “an unnecessary piece of legislation.”
“Texas state history is already part of public school curriculum,” she said. “We agree wholeheartedly with the need for Texas students to be given opportunities to deepen their knowledge of history.”
“Our hope, however, is that the history we provide in our schools be full, accurate and whole and we share concerns that our state is still struggling to overcome a tendency toward the whitewashing of that history and a failure to bring in the lesser-heard, lesser-known perspectives that are just as integral a part of our story.”
EDUCATION DESIGNED BY THE RADICAL LEFT
Regarding the criticism of the 1836 Project, Meckler told CP that the law “does not gloss over Texas’ unique history but instead embraces it.”
“In addition, the bill specifically mentions that ‘The 1836 Project is composed of nine members reflective of the diversity of the state,’ ensuring that all voices have the ability to participate in the creation and dispersing of Texas history and civics education to the public,” Meckler said.
The name alludes to “The 1619 Project,” a New York Times Magazine series of essays arguing that slavery continues to influence the United States in various ways. While many pundits and scholars have critiqued the 1619 Project for its historic inaccuracies, it nevertheless has been featured in the curricula of some public school districts throughout the country. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter who headed the project, said in a series of Twitter posts last year that it was “not a history” but rather a challenge to “the national narrative.”
“The crazy thing is, the 1619 Project is using history and reporting to make an argument. It never pretended to be a history,” she tweeted at the time. “We explicitly state our aims and produced a series of essays. Critique was always expected, but the need to discredit it speaks to something else.”
On Wednesday, The Washinton Times reported that the U.S. Department of Education has been “inundated” with over 35,000 complaints in response to the Biden administration’s plan to urge K-12 schools to teach the 1619 Project and critical race theory.
Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, signs Senate Bill 8 into law, which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, usually around six weeks gestation. | Screenshot: Facebook Watch/Office of the Governor Greg Abbott
Texas has become the latest and largest state to enact a “heartbeat bill” that would ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is usually at around six weeks gestation.
“Our Creator endowed us with the right to life,” Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott proclaimed as he signed Senate Bill 8 into law Wednesday. “Yet, millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion. In Texas, we want to save those lives.”
The heartbeat bill is now LAW in the Lone Star State.
This bill ensures the life of every unborn child with a heartbeat will be saved from the ravages of abortion.
Slated to go into effect on Sept. 1, Senate Bill 8 states that “a physician may not knowingly perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” Physicians are also prohibited from performing an abortion if they failed to perform an ultrasound to detect a fetal heartbeat.
The bill also allows individuals to take civil action against an abortionist who “performs or induces an abortion” and any person who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion, including paying for or reimbursing the costs of abortion through insurance or otherwise.”
At the signing ceremony, Abbott praised the Texas Legislature for crafting a bipartisan bill “that ensures that the life of every unborn child who has a heartbeat will be saved from the ravages of abortion.” The governor also thanked the Legislature, singling out the bill’s authors, Sen. Bryan Hughes and Rep. Shelby Slawson. In addition, he expressed gratitude for the pro-life groups who “worked tirelessly during the course of the session to make sure this bill got passed,” thanking them for “everything they do to cultivate a culture of life in Texas.”
The crowd gathered around Abbott erupted into cheers and applause after he signed the bill. After he declared that “the Texas heartbeat bill is now law in the Lone Star State,” more cheers and applause broke out.
Senate Bill 8 passed the Texas House of Representatives on May 6 by a vote of 83–64 and the Texas Senate approved the measure, with House amendments, on May 13 by a vote of 18–13. In both chambers, one Democrat broke from his party to support the legislation, which no Republican opposed.
Pro-life groups quickly praised Abbott for signing Senate Bill 8, with Texas Right to Life predicting that the measure will “save thousands of lives,” characterizing it as “a vital step in the road to abolishing all abortions in Texas.” While praising the legislation as a “landmark victory,” the pro-life advocacy group urged the state Legislature to embrace additional pro-life measures before the legislative session concludes.
Meanwhile, pro-abortion groups slammed the measure and vowed to fight it. Alexis McGill Johnson, the president of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the U.S., described Senate Bill 8 as “cruel and extreme.”
Johnson expressed particular concern that the bill includes “a dangerous provision that allows ANYONE from any state to sue an abortion provider and others who help someone get care.” She cited the law as proof that “access to abortion has never been more at risk,” promising that “we’re going to fight back like hell.”
Heartbeat bills have previously faced resistance from the judicial branch in several states, including Mississippi, Georgia and Missouri. Abbott’s signing of Senate Bill 8 comes two days after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up a case involving Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. The case has major implications for the pro-life movement as the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide nears its 50th anniversary.
The passage of Senate Bill 8 comes as Texas House Republicans face criticism for failing to consider a bill that would ban sex changes for children younger than 18 years of age. With less than two weeks to go, the Texas Senate approved a similar measure that still awaits approval from the House. The push to pass such a bill comes as the state’s 87th Legislative Session is scheduled to come to an end in less than two weeks.
Senate Bill 8 is one of several pro-life state laws signed into law so far this year. Late last month, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute released a report finding that more than 500 pro-life bills had been filed in the first four months of 2021, with 61 of those bills becoming law.
In addition to the legislative action taking place at the state level, individual communities in Texas have taken steps to protect the right to life. Two dozen Texas cities have declared themselves “sanctuary cities for the unborn,” completely outlawing abortion at the local level. Earlier this month, the city of Lubbock, Texas, became the largest “sanctuary city for the unborn” in the country. The city of more than 200,000 people faced a lawsuit shortly thereafter.
A sign for internet payment transaction portal PayPal stands outside the eBay Germany headquarters on December 17, 2009, in Kleinmachnow, Germany. | Sean Gallup/Getty images
Companies that do business in Texas have signed a statement opposing two bills that would ban boys who identify as female from competing in girls’ sports and ban the use of experimental puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and the genital mutilation of minors suffering from gender dysphoria.
Forty-three companies have deemed the bills as “divisive” and signed a statement advocating for trans-identified athletes to compete in girls’ sports and for minors to be able to obtain elective cosmetic surgeries such as double mastectomies, phalloplasties and orchiectomies (testicle removal).
“We are concerned to see a resurgence of efforts to exclude transgender youth from full participation in their communities, to criminalize or ban best-practice medical care that is proven to save lives, or to exclude LGBTQ people in a variety of other settings, including accessing healthcare, filling a prescription, or seeking legal representation,” reads the statement posted on the website Texas Competes, an LGBT advocacy organization.
Signatories to the statement include Amazon, American Airlines, Apple, Dell Technologies, Dow, Facebook, IBM, Levi Strauss & Co, Microsoft, PayPal and United Airlines.
Texas Competes says it’s “not a political or lobbying organization” but rather a coalition of 1,400 companies that do business in Texas seeking to “provide a unified voice for the Texas business community on the clear economic and business case for a Texas that offers fair treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.”
The statement, signed by the 43 businesses on April 19, comes as Texas lawmakers seek to advance SB 29, which would require “public school students to compete in interscholastic athletic competitions based on biological sex.” The Texas Senate has already passed the bill. The legislation is now under consideration in the state’s House of Representatives.
Texas lawmakers are also working to pass SB 1646, which would amend “the definition of abuse of a child” to include “administering or supplying, or consenting to or assisting in the administering or supplying of, a puberty suppression prescription drug or cross-sex hormone to a child, other than an intersex child, for the purpose of gender transitioning or gender reassignment.” The Senate has yet to vote on this legislation.
The 43 companies asserted that such bills, if they were to become law, would ” … send a message that is at odds with the Texas we know, and with our own efforts to attract and retain the best talent and to compete for business. We will continue to oppose any unnecessary, divisive measures that would damage Texas’ reputation and make our customers, our visitors, and our employees and their families feel unwelcome or unsafe.”
The companies also expressed support for “the inclusion of LGBTQ people in nondiscrimination laws, including policy that would update Texas’ nondiscrimination laws to include LGBTQ people.”
Eighty-six companies based across the United States (including some that are listed in the Texas Competes statement) have signed onto a separate yet similar statement crafted by the LGBT activist organizations Human Rights Campaign and the Freedom for All Americans Education Fund. The statement, titled “Business Statement on Anti-LGBTQ Legislation,” expressed deep concern over “the bills being introduced in statehouses across the country that single out LGBTQ individuals — many specifically targeting transgender youth — for exclusion or differential treatment.”
“Laws that would affect access to medical care for transgender people, parental rights, social and family services, student sports, or access to public facilities such as restrooms, unnecessarily and uncharitably single out already marginalized groups for additional disadvantage,” the statement asserted. “They seek to put the authority of state government behind discrimination and promote mistreatment of a targeted LGBTQ population.”
Signatories include Adobe, Airbnb, Amazon, American Airlines, Apple, AT&T, Bayer, Ben & Jerry’s, Capital One, Dell, Dow, Dropbox, Facebook, Gap, GoDaddy, Google, Hilton, IKEA, Levi Strauss & Co, Marriott, Microsoft, Nike, Oracle, Patreon, PayPal, PepsiCo, Peloton, Pfizer, T-Mobile, Twitter, Uber, Verizon, Wells Fargo and Zillow.
So far this year, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee have enacted legislation banning biological males who identify as female from competing in girls’ sports. Additional bills are under consideration in more than two dozen states. The Arkansas state Legislature recently passed a bill that would ban minors younger than 18 from being prescribed experimental puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and having genital mutilation surgeries. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who was expected to sign the bill into law, actually vetoed it. Lawmakers later overrode Hutchinson’s veto. The Alabama state legislature approved similar legislation last month but it has yet to be signed into law by the governor.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has signed a short-term contract with the non-profit division of Endeavors to provide temporary shelter and processing services for families who have not been expelled and are therefore placed in immigration proceedings for their removal from the United States,”said in a statement the ICE acting Director Tae D. Johnson.
“The $86.9 million contract provides 1,239 beds and other necessary services. The families will receive a comprehensive health assessment that includes COVID-19 testing.”
Endeavors is a non-profit organization which provides direct care, migrant wellness support, case management, home study and post-release services, staffing, and holistic programming for unaccompanied migrant children and families. Endeavors has served migrants since 2012.
“Our border is not open. The majority of individuals continue to be expelled under the Centers for Disease Control’s public health authority,”continued ICE acting Director in his statement.
Project Veritas Exclusive Photos From Inside Texas CBP Facility Show Horrific Border Crisis
In a stunning revelation of how horrific conditions at the border have become, Project Veritas released exclusive photos Monday from reportedly inside one of the border’s detention facilities.
The never-before-seen photos are said to have been taken from inside a Customs and Border Patrol facility in Donna, Texas. In the images (scroll down for more) you can see asylum seekers in tight spaces wrapped in space blankets, lying shoulder to shoulder on the floor.
The facility currently houses thousands of immigrants that travel illegally across the border and is beyond its capacity. Indeed, according to the Project Veritas source that provided the photos, “there are eight pods with eight cells each in the facility. At any given moment,” the source explained, “an average of 3,000 people in custody here.”
In addition, the source tells Project Veritas that the immigrants are “separated by age or physical size depending on room. Fifty were Covid positive in these cells over the last few days. There have been multiple sexual assaults, normal assaults and daily medical emergencies.”
Courtesy: Project Veritas
Axios also reported horrible conditions at the same facility. In a report Monday, Axios quoted Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) who recently toured the Donna facility and described the conditions as “terrible for the children.” The Congressman added that Border Patrol agents are “doing the best they can under the circumstances” but are “not equipped to care for kids” and “need help from the administration.”
A reported 15,500 children are now in federal custody at the border.
Though Representative Cuellar was unable to take pictures, he was able to gain a tour of the facility. But he’s one of the few to have seen the conditions directly. Indeed, there has been what appears to be a deliberate and coordinated effort to keep journalists out of the facilities.
Meanwhile, an attorney representing migrant youth in the custody of the U.S. government was recently denied a tour of the Donna, Texas facility. Naha Desai told CBS News, that she interviewed children who said they were hungry and never saw the sun. “Some of the boys said that conditions were so overcrowded that they had to take turns sleeping on the floor,” she explained.
On March 2nd, the Donna complex was said to be holding more than 1,800 people — 729% of its pandemic-era capacity, which is designed for 250 migrants, according to CBS. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security head is calling on volunteers to assist CBP at these facilities complaining that the most number of migrants in 20 years have arrived.
New York, California, and numerous other states could soon become some of the highest tax places in the world if the Biden Administration gets its way. The Biden tax plan that Congress is debating this week would raise the top income tax rate to 39.6% from its current 37% today.
And that’s not all…
Biden wants to place a new payroll tax of 15% on earnings over $400,000 (or $200,000 each for a married couple.) This combined payroll and income tax hike would bring the marginal tax rate on an additional hour of work to 54%.
State and city taxes can no longer be deducted from federal returns. As such, high-tax states like New York, California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, Iowa, Arizona and New Jersey would all see marginal tax rates approaching 70%.
Meanwhile, if California and New York get their way, taxes could go even higher. Both states are discussing ways to shore up their disastrous finances. In California, the General Assembly is considering raising the state income tax to 16.5%. And, in New York, the embattled Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed a two percentage point hike. This would raise income taxes in New York City to 15.5%.
As economists at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity point out, if New York and California are successful with their tax hikes, they will officially become home to some of the highest tax places in the world.
Hey, who needs Bernie Sanders when President Joe Biden is willing to go so far left and turn us into a socialist state?
To be clear — higher taxes is not a sustainable path forward for America. Instead, we need pro-growth policies that will generate more wealth for the country as a whole, instead of onerous taxation that will discourage prosperity.
The Biden tax hikes, the largest since 1993, should not be approved.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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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
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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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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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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