As much as leftists should be hated for agitating racial conflict and violence, there’s something kind of sad, in a pathetic way, in witnessing the disillusionment of true believers finding out they’ve been conned by the very movement they helped push forward.
Such has been the case in recent weeks, between Rihanna’s “sellout” half-time performance at the Super Bowl and the muted response (i.e. no deadly rioting) to the death of Tyre Nichols, leaving some of the Black Lives Matter faithful with heavy hearts.
The Washington Post’s resident race hustler Karen Attiah on Monday bemoaned Rihanna’s “selling out” by performing at the Super Bowl. The ungrateful immigrant singer had said in 2019 that she turned down a previous invitation from the NFL because, “For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler.” She was presumably referring to the league’s punishment of Colin Kaepernick and others who protested by kneeling during the national anthem on game days.
“With Rihanna’s performance and her silence on the issues she claims to have stood for, the true winner of the night was the NFL,” wrote Attiah. “She has shown them, and all racist institutions, that if they can withstand Black protest and outrage for a few years, put on some cool shows and donate to charities, then everything will be hunky-dory…”
Charles Blow wrote similarly in The New York Times last month after a national story about a young black man who died in police custody, following his attempt to flee arrest. Arrests were made of the officers involved, all of them black, and they’ve been charged with the death of Tyre Nichols. This is formerly known as “the judicial process,” but because Nichols’ death didn’t result in another round of calls for reparations and the eternal subjugation of whites, Blow was miffed.
“It was more snuff porn with Black victims, in a country becoming desensitized to the violence because of its sheer volume,” he wrote. “America — and the world — had the realization that police violence was a problem, and then it simply walked away before the work was done and the war was won. … What fell away were the evanescent allies, poll-chasing politicians and cooped-up Covid kids who had used the protests as an opportunity to congregate.”
Wait a second. You mean to tell me the 2020 summer of horror was a manufactured hysteria for political purposes and that once its goal was achieved — the unseating of Donald Trump as president — it all seemed to disappear? No way!
Cold reality is finally setting in. Santa isn’t real after all.
Blow and Attiah might be the last people in America to realize that BLM as a national entity is nothing but a scam — even in the literal sense of the word, as endless stories have come out since 2020 exposing the group’s leaders as frauds and money embezzlers using innocent donations to enrich themselves with expensive homes and private jet travel.
And celebrities like Rihanna who promoted the notion that black athletes, who are paid millions of dollars, are also victims of white supremacy aren’t serious and should never have been taken seriously. Is the NFL in any way noticeably different today than it was in 2020? Of course not. But Democrats have the bulk of the power in Washington, so that put Rihanna and others in a much better mood.
It’s too bad Blow and Attiah had to find out this way.
Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language,” first published in 1755, defines the word “woman” as, “The female of the human race.” And until October of 2022, the word “woman” was still defined as, “An adult female human being” in the Cambridge Dictionary. What transpired on the topic during the intervening 267 years? Not much. Science confirmed what men and women have known since Adam and Eve began talking past each other — not only do the sexes have immutable physiological differences, down to their genetic matter, but they observe, act, and think differently as well.
Yet Cambridge now says the definition of woman is, “An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth” (and the definition of a “man” is someone who “identifies as male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”) How does one use “woman” in a sentence? One of Cambridge’s examples is, “Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth.” Who assigned Mary’s sex? Her parents? God? Evolution? The SRY gene? And what other human characteristics does Cambridge believe can be altered according to one’s feelings? Lexicographers have a responsibility to offer clarity and accuracy — which is, of course, impossible in this case.
When asked about the change, Sophie White, a spokeswoman from Cambridge University Press, told The Washington Post that the editors had “carefully studied usage patterns of the word woman and concluded that this definition is one that learners of English should be aware of to support their understanding of how the language is used.” This is tautological gibberish. Though, in fairness to White, “Wokeish” is a relatively new language.
The Post, for instance, claims Cambridge updated its definitions for “woman” and “man” “to include transgender people.” (Incredulous italics mine.) This also makes zero sense. If Cambridge changed the definition of “black” or “Caucasian” to incorporate “Asian people,” it would not be including a new group, it would be altering the fundamental facts of what makes someone black or white or Asian. “Woman” is not a neologism. Our understanding of “woman” hasn’t been altered by new scientific discoveries. Nothing has changed.
As hard as I try, it is difficult not to bring up Orwell these days. In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell notes that the “struggle against the abuse of language” is often treated as a “sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to airplanes.” But how can we deny that ideas are corrupting language, and language is corrupting thought?
At first, these liturgic declarations of one’s “pronouns” seemed relatively harmless to me. And, not that it matters much, but I’ve been perfectly willing to refer to adults in whatever manner they desire. It’s a free country. Pursue your happiness. It’s not like gender-bending is some new idea. In my real-world experience, I find that most people try to be courteous.
It’s one thing to be considerate and another to be bullied into an alternative reality. But that’s where we are right now. Placating the mob has led to the rise in dangerous euphemisms like “gender-affirming care,” a phrase that means the exact opposite of what it claims. In today’s world, “gender-affirming therapy” means telling a girl she can be transformed into a boy, but “conversion therapy” means telling a girl she’s a girl. The corruption of reality has led to the rise of a pseudoscientific cult that performs irreparable mutilation on kids, with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and life-altering surgeries.
And in their never-ending campaign to smear political opponents, Democrats have latched onto this idea as if it were a universal truth. If a person contends that gender is an unalterable feature of human life these days — a belief shared by all of civilization until about five minutes ago — they might as well be Bull Connor holding a firehose. Only this week, after signing the same-sex marriage bill, our octogenarian president claimed:
We need to challenge the hundreds of callous and cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, terrifying families and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need. And we have to protect these children so they know they are loved and that we will stand up for them and so they can seek for themselves.
Speaking of cynical. Does the president really believe these troubled teenagers “need” mastectomies, facial surgery, and genital removal to feel loved? Or would it be more prudent to let them wait for adulthood to make life-altering surgical decisions? Has anyone ever asked him? Biden is, of course, right that Americans should be free from threats of violence. That includes kids who are now subjected to abuse at the hands of people who have adopted this trendy quackery.
I simply refuse to accept that most Americans, or even more than a small percentage, believe children should be empowered to “choose” their sex. Rather, in their well-intentioned effort to embrace inclusivity — and avoid being called bigots — they’ve allowed extremists to, among many other things, circumvent debate by corroding fundamental truths about the world. And that’s what these dictionaries — once a place we collectively went for definitions and etymologies — have shamefully helped them do.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
Two months after the FBI subpoenaed the laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, the Drug Enforcement Administration searched the office of Hunter’s one-time psychiatrist Keith Ablow and seized a second laptop Hunter had left with him. The timing of the DEA raid and the fact that criminal charges were never filed against Ablow, coupled with whistleblowers’ claims that the FBI buried evidence against Hunter Biden, raises the question of whether the search was a pretext to recover Hunter’s laptop and protect the Biden family.
While the DEA’s recovery of the second Hunter Biden laptop escaped scrutiny over the last nearly three years, a Washington Post article from Saturday brings that laptop into focus — and with it questions about the DEA’s seizure of the laptop and agents’ decision to return it to Hunter.
Back in the News
In a weekend article titled “Some Hunter Biden Allies Making Plans to go After His Accusers,” The Washington Post reported that Hunter and his closest advisers are plotting an offensive for when Republicans assume control of the House of Representatives in January. The strategy sessions to counter what Biden associates frame as “an expected onslaught of investigations by House Republicans” began last September, according to the Post, with a meeting at the California home of Hunter Biden’s friend and lawyer Kevin Morris.
Morris, already famous in the entertainment industry as an attorney for the co-creators of “South Park,” gained notoriety when the New York Post reported that Morris “footed Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes totaling over $2 million.” In addition to Morris, David Brock, a liberal activist, reportedly joined in the September 2022 strategy session. “At one point, Hunter Biden himself happened to call into the meeting, connecting briefly by video to add his own thoughts,” according to the Post.
While not detailing Hunter’s purported thoughts, The Washington Post reported that Morris suggested “it was crucial” “for Hunter Biden’s camp to be more aggressive.” According to Saturday’s article, Morris then described during the September meeting at his California home the “defamation lawsuits the team could pursue against the presidential son’s critics, including Fox News, Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani.” Morris also reportedly “outlined extensive research on two potential witnesses against Hunter Biden — a spurned business partner named Tony Bobulinski and a computer repairman named John Paul Mac Isaac.”
Brock provided more insight, telling the Post: “They feel that there is a whole counternarrative missing because of the whole Hunter-hater narrative out there.” “What we really got into was more the meat of it, the meat of what a response would look like,” Brock said of the September meeting. To aid the efforts, Brock planned to start a new group — since launched — named Facts First USA, which Brock described as a “SWAT team” designed to “ensure that the media and public do not accept the false narratives that flows from congressional investigations.”
More recently, according to the Post, “Brock’s group, Facts First, is engaging with Hunter Biden and those in his immediate circle.” Brock is reportedly “reviewing research that Morris has conducted on Biden’s adversaries, including Bobulinski and Mac Isaac.”
According to The Washington Post, Morris and others are also focused on whether the data claimed to be recovered from the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at the Delaware computer repair store, “was improperly obtained and distributed,” with Hunter and his allies suggesting that the materials released by Giuliani and others may not have originated from the laptop Hunter abandoned at the repair shop. Instead, the help-Hunter crew posits that the information may have been improperly taken from a laptop Hunter left with Ablow, whom the Post frames as “close to Republican activist Roger Stone.” The Post then reported that “Morris has been overseeing a forensic analysis of that laptop to determine if it was the basis of the hard drives that were later distributed by Trump allies.”
Morris began floating a similar tangled conspiracy theory in May 2022, with CBS News reporting, “Morris and his team have been circulating provocative slides that tease a coming counter-narrative to political attacks against the president’s son.” The slides describe a “contextualized theory” positing that “there was no laptop dropped off with Mac Isaac, just a laptop which Hunter abandoned on Feb. 1, 2019, at the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow.”
The New York Post’s Miranda Devine also lighted the conspiracy theory Morris floated in May, writing: “Morris alleges in his scrawled mind map, and in conversations with confidants, that Trump ally Roger Stone and his lawyer, Tyler Nixon, masterminded a plot with Ablow and Mac Isaac to create ‘clones’ of the laptop left in Newburyport to damage Joe before the 2020 election.” Morris pushed the theory based on Stone writing a foreword for Ablow’s 2020 book, “Trump Your Life,” and Ablow’s appearances on Fox News.
But as Devine detailed in her article, the material contained on the MacBook abandoned at Mac Isaac’s business included material created after Hunter had left the laptop with Ablow: “The biggest problem with Morris’ conspiracy theory of the ‘Ablow clones’ is that there are authentic videos and other material unique to the Mac Isaac laptop that were created after Hunter left his second laptop at Ablow’s office.”
Ablow has also dismissed the counternarrative as “a work of fiction,” stating: “I never looked at any laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, much less shared any laptop belonging to Mr. Biden with anyone, ever.” “I wouldn’t know how to access a password-protected laptop if my life depended on it,” Ablow added. Stone reportedly said the theory is “insane conjecture bordering on defamation.” Mac Isaac described it at the time as a “loose effort to muddy the waters.”
In response to Morris’s most recent push, as captured in Saturday’s Washington Post article, Mac Isaac’s attorney, Brian Della Rocca, told The Federalist, “As we have always said, Hunter Biden knows it is his laptop. That is why neither he nor his father have ever actually denied that it is his.” “The night before the story broke,” Della Rocca added, “Hunter’s attorney reached out to John Paul to ask about whether he still had Hunter’s laptop.” What Morris is doing now, Mac Isaac’s attorney claims, is “nothing more than trying to create more of a stir so the story will be worth more in Hollywood.”
Beneath the Surface
Whether crafting a Hollywood story or an offensive strategy to protect Hunter Biden, what Morris and Hunter’s other confidants fail to realize, however, is that by pushing the theory that the material recovered from the Delaware laptop originated from the laptop left with Ablow, they are resurrecting a story that received little scrutiny at the time: the DEA’s raid of Ablow’s office. And since Morris first pushed this conspiracy theory in May 2022, “highly credible whistleblowers” have come forward and accused the Department of Justice and FBI “of burying ‘verified and verifiable’ dirt on President Biden’s troubled son Hunter by incorrectly dismissing the intelligence as “disinformation.”
So, the question arises: Was the DEA’s raid of Ablow’s office a pretext to recover Hunter’s second laptop? And relatedly: Did the DEA return the laptop to Hunter without securing the evidence first for the criminal investigation against the now-president’s son?
While most Americans now know of the infamous laptop Hunter reportedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, shortly after the New York Post broke the news that material recovered from the laptop implicated Joe Biden in Hunter’s shady business dealings, NBC News reported on Oct. 30, 2020: “[A]ccording to two people familiar with the matter, a different Hunter Biden laptop landed in the custody of the DEA in February when they executed a search warrant on the Massachusetts office of a psychiatrist accused of professional misconduct,” the psychiatrist being Ablow.
The February 2020 raid on the office of Hunter’s one-time Massachusetts-based psychiatrist Ablow received only passing mention at the time, with local outlets reporting that the DEA claimed the execution of the search warrant was part of an “ongoing investigation.” Coverage at the time also highlighted the revocation of Ablow’s medical license for alleged “inappropriate sexual activity with patients and illegally giving prescriptions to employees.”
There was no mention of the recovery of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden at the time, or at any time until two unnamed sources told NBC News of that detail on Oct. 30, 2020. Since then, Ablow confirmed that Hunter left his laptop at a bungalow attached to Ablow’s office in 2019, where the Biden son was reportedly staying for intravenous ketamine treatments for his addiction in December 2018 and January 2019.
Ablow reportedly “made repeated efforts to persuade Hunter Biden to retrieve his computer,” with Ablow even contacting Hunter’s attorney to arrange for its return.” However, the second laptop reportedly remained in a safe in Ablow’s basement for a year, and the DEA raided the psychiatrist on Feb. 13, 2020, then returned the computer to Hunter’s lawyer George Mesires.
Red Flags
The timing of the raid and the return of the computer to Hunter’s lawyer raises several red flags, especially since federal charges were never brought against Ablow. First, the Feb. 13, 2020, DEA raid occurred some nine months after the Massachusetts Board of Medicine suspended Ablow’s medical license on May 15, 2019, for purportedly diverting “controlled substances from patients,” among other things. One would think the DEA would act more promptly to execute a search warrant to prevent the destruction of evidence.
Second, the DEA only executed the search warrant after the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena in mid-December of 2019 to seize the first Hunter Biden laptop from the Delaware store owner, raising the question of whether the real goal was to ensure there were no more Biden laptops floating about before the 2020 presidential election.
Third, even if there was nothing pretextual or nefarious about the raid on Ablow’s office, that the DEA returned the laptop to Hunter’s lawyer raises other concerns because at the time, and still to this day, Hunter Biden was under investigation. In fact, it was that investigation that served as the basis for the FBI to subpoena the laptop from the Delaware repair store. Given the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden, why would the DEA return the laptop to his attorney?
Given the FBI whistleblowers’ claims that government agents buried incriminating evidence against Hunter Biden, the House oversight committees should pose these questions to the DEA to ensure that federal agency was not also acting as a protect-Biden front. And we can thank Morris and The Washington Post for reminding us of the DEA’s seizure of that second Hunter laptop — something that at the time seemed straightforward but, given the developments over the last six months, now smells suspect.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect that NBC News, not CBS News, first reported on the DEA’s recovery of a second laptop.
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.
Of all the things that the occasionally interesting Kanye West has said over the course of the past week, the one that can’t ever be called sociopathic or pathological is what he said about George Floyd, patron saint of Hennepin County.
But of course, the historical revisionism of Floyd’s death is an enduring priority of the Democrat Party. They can’t justify their political violence without it. So that West more or less told the truth about Floyd has the corrupted national media (a.k.a. the Democrat Party) performing emergency clean-up for their cause.
Like almost everything West says in interviews, his remarks on Floyd on a show last weekend weren’t delivered with much precision. “They hit him with the fentanyl,” he said. “If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that. When he said ‘mama,’ mama is his girlfriend. They said he screamed for his mama. Mama was his girlfriend.”
The bulk of that is demonstrably true, but Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson falsely claimed this week — lie! lie! lie! — that, “None of that is true.”
A separate news article in the same paper said Kanye had made “false claims about the Black man’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police.”
An NBC News report also referred to West’s “false claims” related to Floyd.
Let’s take them one by one.
It’s a fact that Floyd had lethal levels of fentanyl in his blood. The medical examiner’s report said at the time of his death, there were 11 nanograms of the drug per milliliter. That report noted that “severe respiratory depression” — trouble with breathing — is a common symptom of fentanyl toxicity, and that fatal blood levels of the drug have been recorded at as low as 3 nanograms per milliliter. Floyd had nearly four times that.
Also present in his system were methamphetamine, other opiates, and morphine, which the report said, have the effect of “respiratory depression” as well.
West’s assertion that Derek Chauvin’s knee “wasn’t even on his neck like that,” is likely a reference to a line of defense put forward by Chauvin’s legal team. At trial, defense attorney Eric Nelson zoomed in on video from Floyd’s run-in with the police. Nelson suggested that the images showed Floyd’s neck was, at least for some period of time, not in direct contact with Chauvin’s knee, and that when it was, the applied pressure was justifiable for the circumstances. The jury didn’t buy the defense, but the medical examiner’s report said there were no injuries to Floyd’s neck nor to the cartilage of his larynx. There was no bleeding or bruising on his neck. There were, in fact, no injuries to any of his organs at all.
That Floyd referred to his girlfriend as “mama” is also just a fact. And we know that because his girlfriend and drug buddy, Courteney Ross, said so in court. I know that it’s more romantic and thus useful for the media to claim Floyd used his final gasps to call for his mother, but she died in 2018, two years before the incident.
What West didn’t say in the interview was that Floyd also had “severe” heart disease, with some of his arteries blocked by up to 90 percent. His heart was enlarged, and he suffered a history of hypertension. And that leads us to why the medical examiner declared Floyd to have died of “cardiopulmonary arrest,” triggered by the stress of contact with the police. And it’s no small point that the contact was made after the 6’4”, 223 lb. Floyd, hopped up on drugs, attempted to purchase a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. When police showed up, he was panicked, delusional, and either unable or unwilling to cooperate with police. Maybe it was both.
In the end, the medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, did determine Floyd’s death to formally be a “homicide,” though the term in his profession simply means another person was a factor. At trial, Baker said, “In my opinion, the law enforcement subdual, restraint, and the neck compression was just more than Mr. Floyd could take, by virtue of those heart conditions.” In other words, Floyd would have survived the incident if not for his severely compromised heart.
Guess who had no clue that this giant man had a sick and fragile heart before that fateful day? Precisely no one, least of all the police who were tasked with subduing his massive frame in his erratic condition.
Kanye West made no false claims against our lord and savior George Floyd. He told the truth, as sad as it may be.
President Joe Biden’s approval rating sank below 40% in a poll released Sunday, appearing to contradict various reports of the president making a “comeback” among voters. The ABC/Washington Post poll of 1,006 adults, 908 of whom were registered voters, reported that 53% of respondents disapproved of Biden’s job performance while only 39% approved. Respondents gave Republicans double-digit leads when asked who they trusted to handle inflation, the economy and crime. (RELATED: ‘People Are Feeling That’: Chris Christie Reveals Why New Poll Is ‘Bad News’ For Dems)
Multiplereportshave suggested Biden is making a “comeback” among voters, citing an uptick in approval in recent polls. Only 36% of those polled approved of Biden’s handling of the economy, with 74% describing it as “bad.” The economy was seen as highly important by 84% of those responding to the poll, while 76% considered inflation highly important.
The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade did not seem to help the Democrats, according to the poll, with 76% of those who supported the Dobbs ruling saying they were certain to vote as opposed to 70% of those who opposed the ruling.
Gross domestic product shrank by 0.9% in the second quarter of 2022, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, following a 1.4% decline in the first quarter. Two consecutive quarters of contraction is a commonly-used metric to determine if a recession is taking place, according to Investopedia.
The Consumer Price Index rose 8.3% year-over-year in August, following increases of 8.5% in July, 9.1% in June and 8.6% in May.
The poll had a 3.5% margin of error and was conducted Sept. 18-21.
Leftists push their gender ideology on children, yet conservative parents complaining about Drag Queen Story Hour are blamed for starting a culture war.
Can the gaslighting on gender and sexual identitarianism from the left get any more absurd? The Washington Post last month ran a story about how a decision by the community center in McLean, Virginia to co-sponsor a “Drag Story Book Hour” for children during Pride Month has, in their awkward wording, “set off culture wars.”
The May election for three open seats at the community center has attracted nine candidates, including Katharine Gorka, a former Trump administration official who has criticized the diversity, inclusion, and equity policies that resulted in the drag event. WaPo reporter Antonio Olivo observed, with editorial flourish, that this is “an example of how nothing is safe from the nation’s raging culture wars.”
A suburban community center hosts a drag queen story hour (DQSH) for elementary school students, yet it’s conservatives who are the ones stoking the culture war by complaining about it? A Florida school board member last year chaperoned a group of elementary school children on a field trip to a gay bar and the state’s community centers promote DQSH, but it’s conservatives who are the dangerous extremists for supporting a Florida parental rights in education bill?
Drag queens do bizarre, borderline pornographic acts in front of children, but it’s conservatives who are responsible for miseducating and damaging American youth? Come on.
Anything but Innocent
DQSH, as Gorka recently told me, “is not, as the American Library Association dishonestly describes it, an effort to combat ‘marginalization and underrepresentation.’” Rather, as the DQSH website itself declares, it is “drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores” in order to “capture the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.”
That word “play” is a bit concerning, especially given the sexually explicit nature of DQSH, and the many allegations that this pedagogy equates to grooming. A drag performer at one DQSH event in D.C. last year sang shirtless with duct tape on her breasts, sported a thong, and pretended to have fake sperm over her mouth.
Another DQSH event in Portland, Oregon in 2019 showed photos of children “lounging atop of the costumed queens on the floor, grabbing at false breasts, and burying their faces in their bodies.” This is not exactly light-hearted, appropriate public entertainment, notes Gorka.
A Concerning National Phenomenon
It would be more accurate to say that DQSH events bring the culture war directly to America’s children, with an ideological gameplan expressly dedicated to sexualizing our nation’s youth and urging children to consider themselves gender dysphoric. The first DQSH event in the United States was held in San Francisco in 2015. Since then, the events have spread across the country.
As of 2020, the official DQSH website boasted almost 50 independently operated chapters across the United States, including in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It is also supported by the American Library Association, whose extensive resource page includes information on how libraries can resist and censure people in local communities who object to these events.
Terrifyingly, the grooming charge is reality. In 2021, the former president of an organization that served as a sponsor for the Milwaukee Drag Queen Story Hour was charged with possessing child pornography depicting the sexual abuse of underage boys, including toddlers. In 2019, the Houston Public Library admitted a registered child sex offender to read to kids in a DQSH event. Allyn Walker, a transgender former assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, sought to defend people who are attracted to minors.
As I noted in a recent Federalist article, the media and schools aggressively promoting transgenderism have created a national crisis. There has been a dramatic, unprecedented surge in people identifying with sexual identities other than heterosexual.
As Abigail Shrier documents at length in her alarming book “Irreversible Damage,” the consequences for those who seek hormone treatment and/or sexual reassignment surgery are lifelong. DQSH marks an attempt to push the boundaries even further, not only for children entering puberty but to early elementary school and pre-K.
This truly is a national challenge. DQSH now reportedly has chapters in 29 different states, which means there is plenty of local political work to be done. As Gorka notes, “pornographic books such as ‘All Boys Aren’t Blue’ can be found in hundreds of school libraries across the country, thanks in part to the fact that The Young Adult Library Services Association (a division of the American Library Association) put the book at the top of its Teens’ Top 10 book list in 2021.”
Malevolent Gaslighting
This makes the left’s abusive and hyperbolic rhetoric on conservative resistance to DQSH and other grooming activities all the more insulting and infuriating. The Washington Post provocatively featured a political cartoon in April portraying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as responsible for the deaths of trans children. Liberal media outlets are claiming that conservatives should be held responsible for the suicides of children struggling with dysphoria.
Yet who encouraged prepubescent children to think about myopic topics like gender dysphoria in the first place? I certainly never heard of such things when I was in grade school in the 1990s. Who told children that their gender and sexual identity were the most important thing about them, and that misidentifying or misgendering amounted to the worst possible offense? Who is making millions of dollars off lying to and emotionally damaging impressionable, easily-manipulated children?
The answer is those advocating DQSH and the many other ubiquitous forms of sexual and gender propaganda influencing millions of American youth. It is they who are deceiving — and often permanently damaging — an entire generation of Americans for the sake of their own ideological agenda, the normalizing of bizarre, pornographic behavior.
No, conservatives did not inflame the culture war over trans ideology and drag queens. But we sure would like to stop it.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
The lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, has played a major role in some of Twitter’s most controversial decisions, such as removing former President Trump and censoring The New York Post from the platform for reporting an accurate story about the damning Hunter Biden laptop weeks before his father was elected president amid real questions about his involvement in his son’s corruption. Gadde’s political motivations don’t seem to be a mystery. Six days before the 2020 election, Politico profiled her under the headline, “Is Twitter Going Full Resistance? Here’s the Woman Driving the Change.” And it’s pretty clear that she contributed to Twitter making at least one terrible decision. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would later admit the company made a “total mistake” in censoring the story.
By any reasonable measure, Gadde has earned her fair share of criticism — quite literally. Twitter is reportedly paying her just shy of $17 million a year, and one of the main justifications for such exorbitant executive pay, however flimsy, is public accountability. If you must fall on a sword, I imagine an eight-figure bank balance cushions the blow quite a bit. So on Tuesday, Saagar Enjeti, the co-host of the popular online political show “Turning Points,” tweeted a screenshot of the Politico headline about Gadde crying and observed, “Vijaya Gadde, the top censorship advocate at Twitter who famously gaslit the world on Joe Rogan’s podcast and censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, is very upset about the @elonmusk takeover.” Musk himself decided to reply to Enjeti, adding, “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
That same day, Mike Cernovich, who has a large right-leaning Twitter account, noted that Twitter’s deputy general counsel is Jim Baker, who was previously general counsel of the FBI. While at the FBI, Baker played a very controversial role in the FBI’s discredited investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia. (In fact, here’s Baker being asked about the process for FISA warrants, which were used by the FBI to spy on the former president: “Do I need to have every one of those details? I mean these things are already quite long. Look, it’s an art, not a science.”)
Musk responded to Cernovich’s tweet: “Sounds pretty bad…”
These two interactions would be pretty thin gruel for a news story on their own merits, but Musk is the richest man in the world, and obviously what the new owner says about Twitter is noteworthy.
Anyway, you wouldn’t believe what the Washington Post did next! Or maybe you will.
The horror only compounds from there. “Musk’s response Tuesday was the first time he targeted specific Twitter executives by using his nearly singular ability to call attention to topics that interest him,” intoned the Post. “Supporters of Musk, a prolific and freewheeling tweeter with 86 million followers, tend to pile on with his viewpoints.”
To be clear, Musk never said anything specific about Gadde, except to imply her role in the decision to ban The New York Post was wrong — an opinion that isn’t controversial and was publicly stated by Twitter’s previous CEO. As for Baker, Musk was commenting on his previous conduct as a public official, which by any accurate assessment was defined by poor judgment. Regardless, “sounds bad” is not exactly committing to a definitive judgment of the man, much less in his current role at Twitter.
(As for what it says that the FBI’s former general counsel went from a disgraceful role in a spy scandal meant to influence the 2016 election to a lucrative gig at a tech company perhaps best known for its clumsy and dishonest attempts to influence the 2020 election… well, let your imagination run wild. There’s no explanation that isn’t disheartening.)
Neither person was “targeted.” The entire story is more accurately restated by the Washington Post expressing shock and dismay that millionaire tech executives might find themselves receiving public criticism from billionaire tech entrepreneurs. That’s a pretty questionable premise for one of the nation’s most influential news outlets to endorse.
As Mike Solana, no stranger to observing the tech industry, put it, “This is a country of over 300 million people. If the rule for acceptable criticism of powerful executives and state propagandists is ‘can’t lead to *someone else* saying something awful,’ you effectively end all vital dissent. Then, that is of course the point.”
Believe me, when you learn how this story was reported, the notion the Post was trying to stifle dissent is not an outrageous assumption. The Post almost entirely ignored the substance of the criticisms leveled at Baker and Gadde and did not make good-faith attempts to include alternate perspectives.
On Wednesday, Enjeti took to Twitter and blasted the Post’s story, which hinged on his interaction with Musk: “WAPO says I did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Complete BS, they emailed *my producer* at 2am EST…7 hours after @elonmusk replied to my tweet with the following RIDICULOUS questions.” Without waiting for Enjeti to respond, the Post published the story in the middle of the night, less than an hour after asking him for comment.
The questions the Post asked were hilariously loaded. Essentially, Enjeti was asked to explain his villainous behavior:
Does [Enjeti] have any concern that mentioning a specific Twitter exec could result in attacks on that exec? What are the responsibilities here? For example, one of the commenters on the tweets made racist comments against Gadde, and said she should be fired.
What does [Enjeti] hope to accomplish by calling out Gadde and getting Musk involved?
Enjeti was rightly disgusted: “This is a great example of how the media smears you. I make a substantive point, randos say something. Now myself and @elonmusk are somehow racist/responsible for them! All to cover up the fact that they substantively agree with censorship.”
Class Warfare
Aside from their desire to prop up an opaque regime of algorithmic censorship produced by an unholy collusion of tech executives and state propagandists, the more benign explanation for the Post’s motivations — and this in no way negates both motives being true — was summed up by Josh Barro: “The idea that the important thing here is the feelings of Twitter employees (especially senior executives) is just so unhinged. Pure class affiliation on the part of journalists, they consider existing Twitter management to be their partners.”
Indeed, class affiliation increasingly explains this bizarre and indefensible media behavior, as well as their growing inability to describe basic realities. Batya Ungar-Sargon has written a very good book on the problem.
However, if there’s a line between class affiliation and class warfare, the corporate media’s pro-censorship crusade has obliterated it. For a long time, I balked at Trump daring to call the media “the enemy of the people,” but it is becoming impossible to ignore that the media’s motives reflect an “Us” vs. “You” mentality. In this case, as Tim Carney notes, “The best way to understand the media is to ask who do they consider ‘us.’ The college educated progressive high-level tech employees are ‘us’ to the average tech reporter.”
As long as we’re talking about class solidarity, it should also be clear that it would be foolish of anyone critical of the current censorship regime to assume that Musk will be a reliable champion of a set of particular values or whatever else you think might be necessary to preserve America’s legacy of prosperity and ordered liberty. There is no need to go out of your way to defend him, he’s just one very wealthy man, and odds are high he will disappoint you. Maybe he won’t sell his soul to China. Maybe he will get us to Mars. But here and now, Musk is more important for what he has revealed than what he has done.
By merely expressing support for a conception of free speech that Americans almost universally agreed on 15 years ago, he threatens to take a battering ram to the doors of The Cathedral. He is a threat to an existing order that corruptly benefits progressive elites, an unaccountable government, and a media too dumb and pliable to realize there’s no glory in defending someone who makes $17 million a year from mean tweets.
It’s not that any thoughtful American doesn’t have serious reservations about an eccentric billionaire presenting himself as a guardian of the right to free speech. The problem is that we’ve been given a choice between Elon Musk and the demented and hostile worldview chronicled in the Washington Post, and the choice is obvious.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education is expected to finalize changes to Title IX rules in the coming weeks to expand the definition of discrimination beyond sex to also include sexual orientation and gender identity. The rule changes will have seismic implications, setting off not just state versus federal showdowns over state laws barring biological males from competing in women’s sports, but also how college campuses handle sexual harassment charges and due process.
While these changes have been anticipated since Biden took office, last week the Washington Post reported the first look at a draft copy of the proposed language, which includes this key sentence:
Discrimination on the basis of sex includes discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
The Post also reported that Biden’s DOE plans to rewrite rules established by President Donald Trump’s DOE, under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, that required schools to recognize the presumption of innocence for those accused of sexual harassment or assault. Some of the DeVos era due process protections that may be targeted or revoked entirely include the right to cross-examination for both the accuser and the accused, as well as the right to full access to all evidence collected by schools in sexual harassment investigations and the opportunity to respond to that evidence.
Candice Jackson, who was Department of Education deputy general counsel during the Trump administration, told The Federalist that these two major changes, to both the definition of discrimination and the definition of what constitutes sexual harassment, will overlap in severely detrimental ways.
“It’s going to affect people’s ability on campus to talk about or debate about single-sex spaces on campus like women’s sports,” Jackson said. “All of a sudden, you’re in a position where even having a discussion or even trying to advocate for keeping women’s sports single-sex could get you called a harasser.”
Jackson said loosening the definition of sexual harassment moves beyond handling alleged rapes and into the realm of academic freedom.
“You’re now talking about the ability on campus to have important discussions on what gender identity discrimination means,” she said.
But as the rules are finalized, the return of campus kangaroo courts is likely to be overshadowed by the current culture war spotlight on women’s sports. With biological males winning national women’s titles, states that have recently passed laws protecting women from unfair male competition are likely to face the pressure of losing their Title IX funding. Jackson said she thinks this time will be different. She expects states to refuse to back down, as they have on other issues where the federal government wields its funding hammer.
“There is enough disagreement at a fundamental level about whether or not it is now ever OK to provide separate comparable services and activities for boys and girls and men and women that this is this is going to be a bit of a showdown, probably needing to be revisited by the Supreme Court,” she said.
Madeline Osburn is managing editor at The Federalist. Contact her at madeline@thefederalist.com or follow her on Twitter.
While claiming its aggressive collection of confidential information on private citizens is “narrowly tailored” and without a nefarious purpose, Democrats on the Jan. 6 Committee selectively leaked communications of a private citizen to smear political opponents.
Last week, CNN and the Washington Post published text messages between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, who goes by “Ginni,” and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged in the days leading up to and on the day of the Capitol riot.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ginni reportedly urged Meadows days after the 2020 contest when news organizations began to call the race for former Vice President Joe Biden. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Out of the 29 of more than 2,300 text messages released from Meadows’ vast trove of data handed to the Select Committee, not one, the Washington Post conceded, included a direct reference to the sitting justice as the weaponized probe sought to dox a private citizen for petitioning her government.
“The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results,” the Post reported with the paper adopting Pelosi committee’s framing to indict private political views as a blockbuster scandal.
While the committee has made an open point to prosecute those who publicly sought to cast doubt on the fairness of the 2020 election results, the committee’s targeting of Ginni Thomas for privately petitioning government officials on her own marks further escalation of the probe’s assault on civil liberties, and makes Thomas case all the more unique.
CNN reported Monday the committee will now seek an interview with Ginni, who has become the latest to be dragged before lawmakers for exercising dissident views, even in private. But the probe’s latest request is just as much targeted at Ginni, a long-time conservative activist who has never concealed her activism, as it is her husband.
The left’s racist disdain for Justice Thomas has never been a well-kept secret by a virulent left frustrated by the mere existence of a black conservative, let alone one on the high bench. Attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record on lenient sentencing for child sex crimes are cruel and racist. Baseless criticism of Justice Thomas is warranted, however, for his political heresy, starting with his own confirmation process three decades ago.
Publication of the text messages provoked immediate calls for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from any cases related to the Jan. 6 investigation for the crime of his wife’s public political views raising concerns over an election with record mail-in voting and last-minute rule changes. New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even demanded Justice Thomas resign or face impeachment.
As outlined Tuesday in The Federalist by former Thomas Law Clerk Wendy Long, however, judges are never asked to recuse themselves over political views, whether their own or their spouse’s.
“Leftists in Congress and the media hyperventilate over every tidbit showing that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, is involved in national conservative politics – most recently, that she pushed for integrity in the 2020 election,” Long wrote. “This isn’t news, and it has nothing to do with Justice Thomas’s ability to be a fair and impartial jurist.”
Instead, Long explained judicial recusal is about “mainly financial, legal, personal, or professional interests of the Justice or a family member.” Not personal politics. The strategy of the modern left, however, has been to intimidate the courts into submission to extremist and anti-Constitution politics. Consider the last three nomination battles: Justice Brett Kavanaugh was slandered as a serial gang rapist, Amy Coney Barrett was depicted as a character in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Stephen Breyer was pressured to retire while Democrats were in power to replace him.
Not only are the attacks on Thomas purely political, they’re hypocritical. Will Democrats calling on Justice Thomas to refrain from his official duties as a jurist similarly demand a probe into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leveraging her position in Congress to rake in millions? Will journalists married to people in power recuse themselves from coverage on any issues their spouses conduct even minor work on? Probably not. It’s all theater.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
In 2014, Rolling Stone published a story about a female student named “Jackie” who claimed she was raped at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia.
“The 9,000-word story prompted a wave of outrage and revulsion,” said the Washington Post. The fraternity in question was graffitied within hours, protesters descended upon the campus in Charlottesville, Va., the university president suspended Greek life until the following year, and elected officials condemned the incident.
“University of Virginia Contends With Outrage Over Horrific Rape Reports,” Time Magazine headlined. CNN reported on the story and the university’s swift reaction to it, as did ABC News. The Huffington Post also picked up the story.
The story, we now know, later unraveled, leading to a retraction from Rolling Stone and massive defamation lawsuits. But not before the appalling tale of a helpless young woman being brutally assaulted on an educational campus shook Americans’ sensibilities. No one was disagreeing that, if true, the incident deserved horror, outrage, and efforts to try and keep such abuses from happening again.
The Story We Should All Be Up In Arms About
Just seven years later, a similarly harrowing tale has emerged just 100 or so miles away from U-Va., in Loudoun County, Va. An investigation from The Daily Wire earlier this month reported allegations from Loudoun County father Scott Smith that in May, “a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.”
“A boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio, related to an incident that day at that school,” according to Smith’s attorney.
But instead of receiving national outrage across the political and media landscape, the alleged incident was reportedly covered up by the Loudoun County School Board for months. In a June meeting, board members insisted they didn’t know of any such assaults. After showing up to a school board meeting in protest, Smith was arrested and smeared as a “domestic terrorist.”
Days after the Daily Wire investigation broke, another report alleged the school district had been failing to report sexual assault claims for years. Meanwhile, LCPS appears to have quietly transferred the alleged rapist to another school, where he has since been accused of another sexual assault of a female student.
Where Is The Outrage?
Where is the outrage? A search for “Scott Smith Loudoun” returns zero results on the Washington Post’s website, despite Loudoun County’s close proximity to the Post’s home city. On Tuesday, the Post finally published something on the story, but failed to mention Smith by name and initially failed to admit that the alleged attacker identified as “gender fluid.”
A search for “Scott Smith Loudoun” or “Loudoun sexual assault” returned no results from The New York Times on Wednesday. The extent to which CNN covered the story was to say “[Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn] Youngkin on Tuesday promised action following parental outrage over two recent alleged assaults in public schools in the state’s Loudoun County,” immediately after a paragraph of damage control for Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe’s statement that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Can you imagine if, instead of discovering holes in the U-Va. story, additional coverage had revealed that the school had been covering up other sexual assault allegations for years? Or, if the allegations in the Rolling Stone story had been true, can you imagine if U-Va. had quietly moved the rapists to another fraternity and tried to cover the whole thing up? Or tried to smear Jackie and her family as “domestic terrorists”?
The Loudoun County incident has all the ingredients of a horrifying scandal worthy of the front pages of every newspaper in the country. It should provoke our outrage, not as conservatives, but as caring and compassionate human souls whose sympathies are pricked by the horrors allegedly endured by an innocent 15-year-old girl.
If We Can’t Agree Rape Is Bad, What Can We Agree On?
Ensuring the safety of young girls — in their places of learning and elsewhere — should not be controversial. But the loudest voices on the left, the same ones who screamed “Me Too” from the rooftops of their Hollywood mansions, are too allegiant to the fringe demands of transgenderism to speak up. Many voices in the middle, even, seem too cowardly to come to the defense of young women like Smith’s daughter.
In a widening partisan divide, if we can’t agree that young girls being raped at school is an outrage, what can we agree on? Does the left hate conservatives with such vitriol that, once voices on the right speak up for a young girl’s right to bodily safety, that issue is suddenly anathema, tainted by the fingerprints of concerned parents slandered as domestic terrorists?
Plenty of other common-sense perspectives that any Democrat nominee would have supported up to a couple of years ago have suddenly become “radical” conservative positions too: funding police departments, not segregating kids in school based on race, having international borders, or allowing people to make their own medical decisions without government coercion. Any of these should have been enough to make Americans stop and wonder why the rules of the game are changing so drastically — and who is changing them.
But even for those who had yet to notice, the harrowing tale from Loudoun County Public Schools — and the subsequent shrug that legacy media, Democrats, and the Me Too crowd gave it — should settle that the biggest war in America right now isn’t between Republicans and Democrats, nor between blustering, blundering congressmen battling over whether to sell your children’s future for $3.5 trillion or $1 trillion.
The biggest war in America is between the allegiances we’ve always taken for granted — those of the family, church, and local community — and a conglomerate of forces that will stop at nothing to break them down. Sacrificing a 15-year-old girl’s right to basic safety at her school on the altar of fringe identity politics is just part of that fight.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
PORTLAND, OR – AUGUST 1: A protester burns an American flag in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in the early morning on August 1, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Friday was the second night in a row without police intervention, following weeks of clashes between federal officers and …Nathan Howard/Getty Images
The far-left Washington Post blackmailed the country Thursday with a threat framed as analysis that says only a landslide victory for Joe Biden can save us from violence.
Because the Post piece is both fake news and irresponsible, I’m not going to compound those sins by linking it here. The Post’s tweet advertising the piece (which I also won’t link) sums up the threat perfectly: “The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis,” the tweet reads. “In every scenario except a Biden landslide, our simulation ended catastrophically.”
Only a Biden landslide can save America from a national catastrophe.
In other words…
That’s a nice country you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
The Post’s bald-faced threat is couched in a piece of analysis that does not even attempt to be serious, especially in a country where, as I write this, countless Democrat-run cities are on fire thanks to Black Lives Matter and Antifa, two left-wing terrorists groups who operate as Brownshirts for the Democrat Party and media outlets like the Washington Post — who regularly encourage and protect these domestic terrorists.
Even more ludicrous, the Post’s threat is only made possibly by way of its cherry-picking of “experts.”
They make it all so official-sounding. I’ve emphasized the howlers:
President Trump has broken countless norms and ignored countless laws during his time in office, and while my colleagues and I at the Transition Integrity Project didn’t want to lie awake at night contemplating the ways the American experiment could fail, we realized that identifying the most serious risks to our democracy might be the best way to avert a November disaster. So we built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around, and asked them to imagine what they’d do in a range of election and transition scenarios.
A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.
I swear I’m not making that up. I know it sounds like something I’d make up, especially something as hilarious as a “Transition Integrity Project” operating from the same Washington Post hellhole that led the fake news propaganda jihad for the Russia Collusion Hoax coup plotters. But it’s all real. I swear. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
Anyway, the Transition Integrity Project’s war games (can you believe they used the term “war games?”) are staffed only with ringers. The “accomplished Republicans” are all — and I do mean all — bitter, half-witted, Trump haters: Michael Steele. Bill Kristol. Trey Grayson.
On the other side are only Biden loyalists: John Podesta. Donna Brazile. Jennifer Granholm.
Not even one disgruntled Bernie Bro.
Not even one.
So the Transition Integrity Project asked six people who f–king hate Donald Trump something about Donald Trump and the answer is not looking so good for Donald Trump.
Transition Integrity Project?
More like the Transition Rigged Project.
So even though Joe Biden’s supporters are right now — I mean right now as I write this — burning down a whole bunch of Democrat-run cities and Joe Biden has said almost nothing to stop them and PLENTY to encourage them, the Transition Rigged Project talked to six people who fucking hate Donald Trump and came to this bottom line [emphasis added]:
In every exercise, both teams sought to mobilize their supporters to take to the streets. Team Biden repeatedly called for peaceful protests, while Team Trump encouraged provocateurs to incite violence, then used the resulting chaos to justify sending federalized Guard units or active-duty military personnel into American cities to “restore order,” leading to still more violence. (The exercises underscored the tremendous power enjoyed by an incumbent president: Biden can call a news conference, but Trump can call in the 82nd Airborne.)
Yep, the 82nd Airborne, y’all.
Here’s something else the Transition Rigged Project war gamed:
In the “narrow Biden win” scenario, Trump refused to leave office and was ultimately escorted out by the Secret Service — but only after pardoning himself and his family and burning incriminating documents.
Let me tell you what’s happening here…
If Trump wins, the organized left, and you can bet that includes media outlets like the Washington Post, intend to declare war on us. On you and I.
Not political war.
War-war.
That’s what they’re doing now.
That’s what the Democrat Party’s and the media’s Brownshirts in Black Lives Matter and Antifa are doing right now in Kenosha and Rochester and Minneapolis and Portland and will do in any other place where an excuse can be found or manufactured.
The war is a hot war. If Trump wins re-election it’s going to get hotter.
The Washington Post is warning us — not just that there will be a war if Trump loses, but that we will be blamed for the war.
Hey, we warned you if you didn’t pay for protection your store would burn down.
Hey, we warned you if you didn’t vote for Joe Biden your store and your home and your car and your life would burn down.
This is not a drill.
This is a threat.
Take this threat seriously.
Prepare yourself.
Prepare yourself before it’s too late to prepare yourself.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
For the second time in recent days, China took a major step to put pressure on North Korea to resolve its standoff with the United States over North Korea’s missile development efforts. The Chinese government announced Monday it will implement the sanctions that were imposed against North Korea by the United Nations on Aug. 5.
The Security Council sanctions block nations from accepting North Korea’s primary exports, including coal, iron, iron ore, lead and seafood. The sanctions also target other revenue streams, such as banks and joint ventures with foreign companies. The sanctions could cost North Korea a third of its $3 billion annual export revenue.
Although China did not block the sanctions at the U.N., it was unclear until the announcement whether China, which is North Korea’s largest trading partner, would implement them. China also faces possible action from President Donald Trump, who has said he may order an investigation into allegations of unfair Chinese trade practices.
“It is obviously improper to use one thing as a tool to imposing pressure on another thing,”Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Monday. “There will be no winner from a trade war, it will be lose-lose.”
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China’s action to implement the sanctions came days after a state-run newspaper said that if North Korea attacks the United States, it will fight any war that results on its own.
“China should also make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten U.S. soil first and the U.S. retaliates, China will stay neutral,”the Global Times editorial said.
Throughout the escalation of tensions between the United States and North Korea, China has called for restraint.
“The current situation on the Korean Peninsula is complicated and sensitive,”Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said in a statement Friday.
“China hopes that all relevant parties will be cautious in their words and actions, and do things that help to alleviate tensions and enhance mutual trust, rather than walk on the old pathway of taking turns in shows of strength, and upgrading the tensions,”he said.
Writing in The Washington Post, David Von Drehle said China needs to emerge from the North Korean-American showdown with a win.
” … the audience of greatest concern to China — namely, the other leading countries in the region, including Japan, India, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam — faces the urgent question of whether they can trust a rising China to share in safeguarding their sphere. If the problem of Kim isn’t defused, those nations are sure to seek even deeper alliances with the United States while building their own military capacity. China’s regional influence will shrink rather than grow,”he wrote.
Mauricio Morales-Caceres mugshot / Montgomery County State’s Attorneys Office
An illegal alien from El Salvador, Mauricio Morales-Caceres, faces life in prison without parole after being convicted of stabbing acquaintance Oscar Navarro, father of two, “at least” 89 times with a 15-inch butcher knife and tearing out his liver with his bare hands — but no comments on this shocking murder by a foreign national, who smiled cheerfully in his mugshot, are allowed, according to the Washington Post.
Illegal alien Morales-Caceres, 24, started by stabbing Navarro in the back before stabbing him in the face, then his head, and then his chest, according to prosecutors.
Standing before an image of the extremely gruesome murder scene, prosecutor Douglas Wink said Morales-Caceres sawed through his victim’s body to tear out his liver and place it on his chest.
“The defendant took the knife and sawed,”he said. “This man reached in with his bare hands and took out his liver. He probably thought it was his heart. He ripped out his liver and left it on his chest for the police to see.”
The Washington Post buried the fact that Morales-Caceresis is an illegal alien.
They also shut down the comments section, explaining: “We turn off the comments on stories dealing with personal loss, tragedies or other sensitive topics.”
The murder took place in December 2014.
“Should Morales-Caceres ever get out of prison, every indication is that he would be deported to his native El Salvador,”The Washington Post reports in an aside. “Prosecutors earlier said he entered the United States illegally. And since his stay at the Montgomery County jail, immigration officials have lodged a detainer on him, an indication they would move to have him deported at the end of a prison sentence.”
If El Salvador decides they won’t take Morales-Caceres back, should he ever be released, the U.S. would likely turn him loose onto American streets — thanks to the overreaching Supreme Court ruling, Zadvydas v. Davis (2001). As the Center for Immigration Studies writes:
In order to eliminate what it considered the “constitutional threat” of the potentially indefinite detention of deportable aliens, the Court held that “once removal is no longer reasonably foreseeable, continued detention is no longer authorized by statute.” The Court then arbitrarily decided that six months was all that was necessary for determining an alien’s deportability… Put simply, a reviewing court’s definition of “reasonably foreseeable” now determines the release of deportable aliens back onto the streets.
So, should Morales-Caceres be freed from prison before his life sentence concludes and El Salvador refuses to welcome him back, it’s only six months until he’s free to haunt American neighborhoods once more.
Two buttons for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign that could create trouble for Hillary Clinton’s campaign amid a renewed debate over the use of the Confederate flag have surfaced.
It’s unclear if the Clinton-Gore Confederate flag campaign button that has been prominent on social media was an official part of their 1992 presidential campaign. And Hillary Clinton isn’t clarifying, nor is her team responding to questions about her husband honoring the flag as Arkansas governor in 1987.
Credit: eBay
TheBlaze left phone and email messages with the Clinton campaign Monday inquiring whether the button, and other similar designs sold on eBay, was part of the official campaign of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. TheBlaze also asked if the former Arkansas first lady opposed now or opposed then an act signed by her husband honoring the Confederate flag. The Clinton campaign did not respond to either question.
The Confederate battle flag has become an issue following last week’s shooting massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The Confederate flag is still flown on the South Carolina Capitol grounds. After increasing calls for its removal, Gov. Nikki Haley (R) on Monday called for the flag to finally come down.
Republican presidential candidates were reluctant to take a firm stand on the matter over the weekend. Hillary Clinton spoke about race relations on Friday in San Francisco, but did not mention the Confederate flag, according to the campaign’s transcript. Clinton did, however, call for the flag to be removed from the South Carolina capitol in 2007 during her first presidential campaign.
As for the 1992 buttons, the Washington Post speculated on whether they were part of the official 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign.
One indicator that it isn’t official is that it lacks a union “bug,” the little marker showing that a piece of campaign material was printed in a union shop. If you look at other Clinton-Gore buttons, nearly all — but not all — have a bug somewhere …
The politics then were less complicated than they are now. It’s believable that Clinton and Gore might have had a Confederate button, though we don’t know for sure that they did. What the reemergence of the buttons now shows, if nothing else, is that the history of the rebellious South continues to resonate and continues to evolve, year by year, as a component of American politics.
In 1987, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton signed Act 116. It had little consequences other than to reaffirm the state’s language that honored the stars on the Arkansas flag as commemorating the Confederate flag. The act specifically says, “The blue star above the word ‘ARKANSAS’ is to commemorate the Confederate States of America.”
The Washington Post’s dystopian fantasy provides a certain amount of amusement, since anyone who follows Ted Cruz for any length of time would know that this approach would be antithetical to his concept of constitutional government and the rule of law. It’s still useful as both a way to take the temperature of the center-left as it becomes more frightened of its allies than its opponents, and a measure of the split developing on that side of the political spectrum as Barack Obama becomes unmoored from constitutional checks on power:
DEMOCRATS URGINGPresident Obama to “go big” in his executive order on immigration might pause to consider the following scenario:
It is 2017. Newly elected President Ted Cruz (R) insists he has won a mandate to repeal Obamacare. The Senate, narrowly back in Democratic hands, disagrees. Mr. Cruz instructs the Internal Revenue Service not to collect a fine from anyone who opts out of the individual mandate to buy health insurance, thereby neutering a key element of the program. It is a matter of prosecutorial discretion, Mr. Cruz explains; tax cheats are defrauding the government of billions, and he wants the IRS to concentrate on them. Of course, he is willing to modify his order as soon as Congress agrees to fix what he considers a “broken” health system.
That is not a perfect analogy to Mr. Obama’s proposed action on immigration. But it captures the unilateral spirit that Mr. Obama seems to have embraced since Republicans swept to victory in the midterm elections. He is vowing togo it alone on immigration. On Iran, he is reportedly designing an agreement that he need not bring to Congress. He already has gone that route onclimate change with China.
The issue isn’t Obama’s upcoming abuse of power as much as it is that the next Republican will abuse it in the same way. The Post’s editorial board supports Obama’s position on immigration reform, as they state in the editorial, and they’re probably not all that unhappy with the agreement with China. They are not usually fans of Obama’s foreign policy and resistance to accountability, but otherwise support the current administration’s policies, and usually its approach.
That much is apparent in the rest of the editorial. It treats the lack of bipartisanship as something that is a more recent development in the Obama administration, and Barack Obama as someone naturally inclined toward bipartisanship with his statement three years ago to immigration activists that he had to work through Congress to achieve reform. That, however, was an excuse Obama gave to shrug off an uncomfortable truth: Obama could have gotten immigration reform passed easily in the first two years of his presidency. That had a significant amount of support among Republican caucuses, especially in the Senate, and Obama could have gotten that bipartisan agreement on his terms, thanks to Democratic control of Congress.
How did Obama use those two years? He rammed through three Democratic legislative projects that the GOP vehemently opposed: Dodd-Frank, ObamaCare, and the stimulus bill with the supposed “shovel-ready jobs” that Obama later admitted never existed. Democrats locked the GOP out of the crafting of the stimulus bill; when Republican leaders complained to Obama, he replied, “I won.” That was in February 2009, just days after taking office. The track record of Democratic triumphalism on ObamaCare speaks for itself, except for the parts where Jonathan Gruber now speaks for it a lot more honestly than Democrats ever did. Gruber proves that the rank and file Democrats that the Post attempts to warn here are pretty comfortable with the ends-justify-the-means approach, at least until it becomes obvious.
Yes, Democrats should worry about what Republicans might do with precedents for abuse of power, but it’s doubtful that they care at this point. It would have been far more useful if the Washington Post’s editorial board had concerned itself from the beginning about precedents on executive authority and unilateralism when it came to policies the Post liked more than their concern over Republicans who opposed them.
President Obama has surely fallen from grace. In 2008, when Senator Obama addressed crowds, the people fawned uncontrollably. In the earliest days of his presidency, countless Americans proudly adorned “Hope” tee shirts emblazoned with the Dear Leader’s image- a practice I always felt was a bit creepy. Within the first month of his presidency, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Why? Simply for being Barack Obama- the left’s political Messiah.
Now, even the staunchest supporters of Obama can only utter defenses of his actions. To the left, he is no longer the champion for good, for “hope,” for “change”; instead, those who defend the president have adjusted their tones. “He’s not so bad,” is the general message.
Even the notoriously liberal Washington Post has lost that loving feeling. They have called Obama out for his enormous “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” lie. And now, they’re taking issue with his promises of executive action to address immigration.
The Washington Post’s editorial board recently addressed the issue of executive orders. It reads: (emphasis added)
Obstinate, hopelessly partisan and incapable of problem-solving, Congress is a mess. But that doesn’t grant the president license to tear up the Constitution. As Mr. Obama himself said last fall: “If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so. But we’re also a nation of laws.” To act on his own, the president said, would violate those laws.
Mr. Obama now seems to be jettisoning that stance in the name of rallying his political base. He is considering extending temporary protection from deportation to millions of illegal immigrants, including the parents of U.S.-born children and others who have lived in the United States for years. Conceivably, this would give Democrats a political boost in 2016. Just as conceivably, it would trigger a constitutional showdown with congressional Republicans, who could make a cogent argument that Mr. Obama had overstepped his authority.
Before we hail the Post for having finally come to their senses, it should be noted that the editorial board predicates their criticism of Obama with a hefty amount of criticism for those ne’er-do-wells in the GOP who simply won’t be good lapdogs and cave to Democrats in rewarding criminals with citizenship.
The WaPo reads:
STYMIED BY congressional paralysis, President Obama is reportedly considering unilateral action to address — though surely not fix — the nation’s immigration policy mess and the more recent surge of minors streaming across the southwestern border.
The president’s frustration is understandable. Faced with a genuine humanitarian crisis, Congress’s failure to pass a workable fix is unconscionable. In the Republican-controlled House, the GOP bowed to its most extreme lawmakers in passing measures that have zero chance of becoming law — and would have paved the way for deportations of blameless young people raised in this country after being brought here by their undocumented parents. In the Senate, the intransigence of both parties yielded no bill at all.
We ought to be very clear: there is no obligation for any party to do the bidding of another. Congress is supposed to work together to find solutions; while the above criticism briefly lays blame on both parties, let’s get something straight: last week, Republicans in the House passed a border bill. Period. If Democrats in the Senate refuse to get to work in making a deal with Republicans to pass some meaningful legislation, that’s on them. Republicans did their job; Democrats need to put up or shut up.
Similarly, when people discuss the so-called “Republican-led government shutdown,” they must also accept that the House and the Senate wanted two different things. That they could not come to an agreement speaks to the radicalism of the Democrat Party- not to the dysfunction of Republicans who continually sought deals with the intransigent Democrat-controlled Senate.
It’s great that people are starting to recognize the awful shortcomings of our nation’s tyrant; however, when are we going to see some semblance of balanced discussion concerning blame?
Our country is heading in the wrong direction. With one party at war with itself over the cowardice of the moderate faction, with another party dominated by radicals who have long-ago purged their ranks of pragmatists, with a president who hopes to remedy our nation’s failings with his trusty pen and phone and with a media firmly entrenched in left-wing zealotry, we are in serious trouble.
If we are to save this nation, we must strictly adhere to the Constitution by forbidding dictatorial rule and refuse to continue with the kind of failed, liberal policies that have devastated this country both financially and culturally.
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Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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