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Wisconsin Children’s Hospital Is Stacking Its Bench of Chaplains with Trans Activists

BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 28, 2022

chaplain holding an open bible with hospitals and doctors in the background — **Children’s Wisconsin’s recent chaplain hires are full-fledged left-wing activists who twist religion to advance their preferred social Marxist policies.**

Author Kylee Griswold profile

KYLEE GRISWOLD

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Children’s staff members were first notified of such new hires when fliers were posted around the inpatient units advertising, “Meet Your New Chaplain: Kate Newendorp.” The first tip-off to Newendorp’s beliefs about the sexes was featured prominently on the posters, with a proclamation of her pronouns as “she/her/hers” and those of her fiance, a female who goes by “they/he.”

“Working in a pediatric hospital is a dream come true!!” Newendorp is quoted on the flier. “I am so excited to be working alongside everyone and am pumped to be part of the team. Think of me as your friendly next-door neighbor!”

The poster is just your garden-variety job announcement, but a deeper dive shows that Newendorp’s social Marxist views aren’t confined to a push for preferred pronouns. The new chaplain is all-in for transgender surgeries, abortion, and a rejection of religious teaching when it cuts against her personal comfort.

Despite biblical Christian doctrine affirming the sanctity and humanity of life in the womb, the existence of only two distinct sexes, and the immorality of same-sex relations in both the Old and New Testaments, the new “chaplain” proudly rejects all of this.

“Love Jesus. Be gay. Get ordained,” she wrote on Facebook in June, with pictures of herself in rainbow garb. “What better way to celebrate Pride than being ordained?! Many thanks to my church and classis for being willing to stand for queer folks being included in ministry and for allowing me to follow God’s call.”

Several months later, on Oct. 17, 2022, after announcing her engagement to her female fiance who identifies as transgender, the Children’s Wisconsin “chaplain” spouted off about her church online. “Also, your casual reminder that my validity as an ordained minister is currently under review by my denomination because of the love I feel for my fiancé. Do better Church, because I’m not going anywhere. I was called,” she wrote.

Newendorp doesn’t just reject biblical relationships in her own life; she’s a full-fledged left-wing activist who twists religion to advance her preferred leftist policies. Her Twitter bio announces that she’s a “Chaplain desiring to shake things up” and says she’s “Daydreaming about … a time where God isn’t referred to with male pronouns.” On Facebook, she shared a blasphemous poem called “Jesus at the Gay Bar”:

But she’s also used her religion card to proclaim that loving your neighbor looks like “getting vaccinated and masking up” and voting for Democrats, and that “Abortion is a religious freedom.”

“People of all genders and sexualities have and need abortions. Abortion is healthcare,” Newendorp wrote with misinformation about maternal deaths. “I am an ordained minister who supports a person’s right to choose what is right for their life and their body. I am pastor [sic] who is pro-choice.”

In January, Newendorp started a GoFundMe “on behalf of Jennifer London” to help her fiance “Jensen” undergo a double mastectomy, known in the transgender-activist world by the euphemism “top surgery.”

Since moving to Wisconsin for her role at the children’s hospital, Newendorp appears to have become friendly with the other chaplains, posting pictures of herself going wedding dress shopping with fellow Children’s chaplain Ian Butts. This indicates Newendorp is not the only anti-Christian person installed in a religious role at the hospital to help families deal with life-and-death medical situations.

If Butts’ name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the chaplain who interrogated Children’s staff members who submitted religious exemption requests over the disastrous Covid shot mandate that left many hospitals dangerously understaffed. As part of the invasive vetting process, Butts grilled employees about their religious beliefs to determine whether their theology met his standards for being allowed their First Amendment rights and freedom to make their own medical decisions.

[READ: In Wisconsin, Hospital Shortages Aren’t From Covid, They’re From Vaccine Mandates]

As I reported in these pages at the time, “The questions included the specifics of the employees’ personal religious convictions and their vaccination record, with Butts pressing on what he considered to be contradictions. Two particularly leading questions regarded the specifics of how the employees would keep their patients safe without being vaccinated, implying a moral implication of refusing a vaccine, as well as how they could square working for a hospital that mandated something so contrary to their personal convictions as a condition of employment.”

“We have already seen that Children’s holds little value for respecting deeply held religious beliefs, given their recent COVID Religious Waiver Committee. But this feels like a step too far. This feels like they have actively recruited activists into this field to further their progressive agenda,” one former Children’s Wisconsin employee told The Federalist of the trans activist chaplains. “I think this situation really calls into question who do we want guiding the spiritual development of our children — especially children who are stuck in a hospital, isolated, sometimes alone, and extremely vulnerable and easily impressionable.”

Children’s also recently posted a flier for a “Spiritual Care Intern” named Meg Trimm, who demanded to be referred to by the third-person plural pronouns “They” and “Them.” This chaplain intern was “an LGBTQ+ community educator and LGBTQ+ teen safe space facilitator” who believes “a professional chaplain’s job is not to convert anyone or preach religion, but to empower each person to find and use the hope and resilience systems they already have.”

Like Newendorp, Trimm rejects biblical teaching such as the concurrent depravity and creation in God’s image of people of all skin colors to instead espouse the most radical of left-wing political and theological views. Trimm has shared numerous TikToks of herself “deconstructing my white supremacy,” explaining that “gender is infinite,” proclaiming, “God is TRANSGENDER!!!” and saying, “God has a purpose for your life, and it might be fricken queer!”

“I am deeply concerned with this new infiltration of trans activists into our chaplain and faith-based services,” the former Children’s employee told The Federalist. “We have already witnessed the erosion and lost of public trust in fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work and general mental health counselors due to the rise of activists in these areas. Now parents have to worry about this as well?”

Like other pediatric hospitals that have recently come under fire for mutilative transgender interventions, the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin advertises medical interventions and surgeries for children up to age 16, with no specified age the hospital deems too young. It advertises that its services include “top surgery” (meaning a mastectomy that mutilates a child’s healthy and developing breasts), wrong-sex hormones, and allegedly “reversible” puberty-blocking hormones, although that isn’t what the experts and “science” say.

While the National Health Service used to claim such gender-bending interventions were “reversible,” it has since backpedaled, admitting:

Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria. … It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations. … [Gender-affirming] hormones cause some irreversible changes, such as: breast development (caused by taking oestrogen), breaking or deepening of the voice (caused by taking testosterone). Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility.

If health-care workers in the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin decide it’s “appropriate,” they prescribe puberty blockers to children at their first visit, even if they’ve never been evaluated by a mental health professional. And while the hospital says it doesn’t pump kids full of wrong-sex hormones on the first visit, it “can work to quickly start hormones at a follow-up clinic visit, usually within a few weeks.”

Furthermore, the pediatric hospital states on its “gender health history” form: “We offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients.” Andy Brodzeller, an external communication director for Children’s, failed to explain what “gender affirming Spiritual Support” means despite being asked repeatedly.

“Our chaplains are trained to support and engage families of various faith and personal backgrounds in a health care setting,” Brodzeller said in response to a Federalist inquiry. “They only interact with patients if specifically requested by a family. Families are also always free to seek the services of their own personal faith leader. Regarding your question about parental involvement related to care for gender diverse kids, parents and guardians are essential to all care decisions. Clear, informed consent of all parents/guardians is required before proceeding with all treatments.”

But with trans activist “chaplains” like Newendorp and Trimm stacking the pediatric hospital’s spiritual support bench, and a promise from Children’s to “offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients” (emphasis mine), people in the Children’s community are rightly concerned.

“We have many parents and families at Children’s who are deeply religious and hold traditional Judeo-Christian values. Will these new chaplains be able to serve the need of these families objectively?” the former Children’s employee added. “How will they properly support a grieving parent who is dealing with a child’s traumatic injury? How will they properly counsel a child who may be alone in the hospital due to a single parent working to make ends meet and maintain insurance?”

How indeed.

Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of 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, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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Family, Health, Political, Religion

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NeverTrump’s Latest Attempt to Dismiss Election Concerns is Particularly Dishonest

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JULY 19, 2022

If they want to convince voters outside their bubble, they should try far harder than they did with this report.

Author Mollie Hemingway profile

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

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A group of establishment Republicans released a report last week claiming to make “The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.”

It is not news that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The report’s strawman-slaying title is intended to suggest that concerns about the integrity of that election are without merit. But the report itself simply goes through court decisions and recounts, listing how they turned out. It focuses on questions about “fraud,” rather than the significant and extremely well-substantiated concerns Republican voters have about the election.

“Their methodology obscures the vast majority of actual material to consider if one were honestly engaging the problems,” said Capital Research Center President Scott Walter. His group has documented the significant role played by Mark Zuckerberg’s private funding of government election offices, a massive issue that the report almost completely elided.

Other major issues were also downplayed or ignored, even as court cases and investigative reports vindicate some of those concerns. In just the last few weeks, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, for example, ruled that unsupervised ballot drop boxes and third-party ballot trafficking both violate state law. In its report, the group claimed its conservative Republican bona fides were beyond question, asserting that no members “have shifted loyalties to the Democratic Party, and none bear any ill will toward Trump and especially not toward his sincere supporters.”

In fact, the group is a combination of NeverTrumpers and people who thought the Republican Party had gone off the deep end long before Trump’s arrival. The report uses misdirection and red herrings regarding “voter fraud” to avoid talking about genuine and substantiated concerns regarding illegal voting and election integrity. And it is sourced to left-wing corporate media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, hardly places to go to make any case, much less a credible or conservative one, about the 2020 election.

From the Voter-Rejected Wing of the GOP

Report co-author Thomas Griffith, a former federal judge whose enthusiastic support of Ketanji Brown Jackson was singled out by President Biden in his speech when he nominated her to the Supreme Court, told NeverTrump publication The Dispatch: “The idea is that it’s written by conservatives, for conservatives. We recognize the people who are watching [Morning Joe and CNN] are probably not the people we’re primarily interested in.”

Paul Ryan’s former chief of staff David Hoppe, another co-author, admitted the group got much support for its project from volunteers at high-powered, inside-the-Beltway law firms. Still, corporate media accepted the group’s framing of itself as “conservative.” Even a cursory look at the list revealed that to be overly generous if not completely misleading.

Ted Olson served as former President George W. Bush’s solicitor general, but he is most well known for being the brains and muscle behind the legal campaign to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. When President Trump sought to have his help to fight against the Russia collusion hoax that so undermined the country, Olson declined to help. He did go on television to publicly disparage the president after declining his request. Olson even tried to get Mitch McConnell to backtrack on his policy of not holding hearings for Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement until after the 2016 election. Olson is routinely derided by critics as a “conservative attorney for sale,” and someone who has “always been a hired gun.”

Former federal judge Michael McConnell argued on PBS in support of the second impeachment trial for President Trump.

Former federal judge Michael Luttig is already well known for helping out the Democrats’ Ja 6 Committee. He rather famously left the federal bench for Boeing — “taking his toys and going home,” as some put it at the time — after President George W. Bush didn’t put him on the Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal noted that his resignation letter pointedly didn’t mention the younger Bush.

Luttig also serves on the advisory board of “The Safeguarding Democracy Project,” led by Richard Hasen, an election law professor who criticizes voter ID laws. Its mission statement claims Republicans who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were acting in bad faith, and that election integrity laws passed after the 2020 election “threaten the cornerstone of American democracy.”

Gordon Smith, one of the report’s co-authors, wasn’t even considered a conservative in the old Republican Party back when he served as a senator from Oregon from 1997-2009. Before he became a high-paid lobbyist for the National Association of Broadcasters, he was assessed the fourth most liberal GOP senator after Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, and Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, who officially joined Democrats in 2009. By 2008, when he was defeated, Smith scored only a 33 out of 100 by the American Conservative Union. Just this year, he declined to endorse a Republican for Oregon’s gubernatorial race.

Former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, another co-author, thought the Republican Party was too conservative by 2005, arguing in The New York Times that it had become a party overtaken by conservative Christians. Danforth, an Episcopal priest, was a public supporter of efforts to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. He has said the worst mistake he ever made was supporting Sen. Josh Hawley’s political aspirations.

All of the report’s authors are or were Republican, including Hoppe, but they tend to inhabit parts of the old Republican Party that voters are increasingly rejecting, not just for their weak policy proposals but for their habit of cooperating with left-wing media in its unceasing attempts to undermine the new Republican Party’s political strengths.

The Man Who Lost the Decades-Long Battle for Election Integrity

Two days before the razor-thin 2020 presidential election, report co-author Ben Ginsberg, the long-time dean of establishment Republican election lawyers and former counsel to Bush’s presidential campaigns and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, did one of the most hostile things imaginable to Trump and his voters. He went to The Washington Post to beg Americans to vote for Democrat nominee Joe Biden (“My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump.”) He and other NeverTrumpers represent exceedingly little of the Republican Party outside of the Beltway, but in an election that came down to 43,000 votes across three states, they should get at least some credit — or if you’re a Republican voter, blame — for pushing Biden and other Democrats over the finish line and bringing the country to where it is today.

Ginsberg, it turns out, bears more responsibility for how the election turned out than most, and his op-ed explains why. It wasn’t just that Ginsberg used his Republican pedigree in order to elevate his hatred of Trump when Republican campaigns desperately needed unity and strength. By November 2020, such tantrums were common among the Republicans who used to control the party. No, it was that he went on an absolute tirade against election integrity itself, adopting every Democrat Party talking point against Republican efforts to secure the ballot box. Two days before the 2020 election had even occurred — and long before this report came out last week — his mind was made up. Proof of systemic fraud simply “doesn’t exist.” He compared concerns about election integrity to a hunt for the “Loch Ness monster.”

He praised practices enabling widespread unsupervised voting, including unattended ballot drop boxes, drive-through voting operations, and third-party ballot trafficking. He belittled concerns about even weak and insufficient verification systems, such as signature matches. He said Republican lawyers fighting against such practices were engaging in “voter suppression,” a common Democrat talking point.

Months after Ginsberg’s 2020 op-ed mocking election concerns, Time magazine itself confirmed what many Republicans suspected: the existence of a “conspiracy” by powerful Democrats to push through these unsupervised voting practices, creating an election system to ensure the outcome they desired. As Time wrote, it was “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

The successful effort to change hundreds of laws and processes across the country to enable tens of millions of unsupervised ballots to flood the system was led by Marc Elias, the same Democrat attorney who had been behind the creation of the Russia collusion hoax, the lie that Trump didn’t win in 2016 but stole the election by colluding with Russia.

Democrats had been working for decades to accomplish these changes. For nearly four decades, it was Ginsberg’s job to fight them. As the Republican Party’s top election lawyer, Ginsberg was supposed to be the person responsible for pushing back against coordinated and well-funded Democrat efforts to expand unsupervised voting and to make it difficult to scrutinize the resulting ballots that were far more susceptible to fraud. It’s not surprising that Republicans fared so poorly against the coordinated Democrat campaign to water down election integrity over the last 20 years given that Ginsberg was the guy supposedly leading their fight.

Early on in my reporting for my best-selling book on the 2020 election, I spoke with dozens of Republican attorneys at the state and federal levels who had found themselves battling this widespread and coordinated takeover of the 2020 election. I asked some of them about Ginsberg’s op-ed and work, and how he compared to Elias.

They told me that Elias doesn’t have much going on in his life other than his election work, and he wakes up each morning with big plans on how to manipulate elections. (A look at his active social media presence supports the characterization.) They explained to me that Elias isn’t as good of an attorney as he promotes himself to be, but he’s the type who will argue whatever he needs to for a client. If that means arguing that voting machines aren’t secure — as his group did in 2020 when trying to overturn the results of Rep. Claudia Tenney’s election in New York, he’ll do it. If it means mocking the idea that voting machines aren’t secure — as his group did in 2020 when battling Trump election challenges that same year, he’ll do that too. He takes whatever side of an issue he needs to in order to secure a favorable outcome for his clients.

These sources noted that Ginsberg, by contrast, usually managed to help Elias and other Democrats in their efforts. They said he was a decent and well-connected Beltway attorney, but he didn’t seem to care much about election integrity, relative to his Democrat counterpart’s efforts. He was a fine lawyer who tended to do a mediocre job, they said. In fact, as soon as he retired, Ginsberg’s written and spoken statements have sounded like they could have come from Elias.

Ginsberg even recently co-founded a group to fight election integrity efforts, claiming that such efforts to ensure transparency and accountability put election officials at risk. His co-founder David Becker, formerly with radical left-wing group People for the American Way, now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one of the two groups Zuckerberg funded during the 2020 election with $419 million. Those funds enabled the private takeover of government election offices in the blue areas of swing states. With Luttig, Ginsberg serves on the advisory board of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, the group opposed to election integrity efforts.

So, What About the Report’s Substance?

The report was presented as an exhaustive look at what happened in the 2020 election. In fact, it only really looked in a cursory fashion at a limited set of lawsuits officially raised by Trump attorneys in the days and weeks after the election.

The report’s co-authors admitted to The Dispatch that the information in the report wasn’t new. Indeed, it’s seemed mostly to be a summation of what law associates might find in Lexis-Nexis — a recitation of legal cases and brief mentions of a few reports and audits in six battleground states. It did not dig deep into any of them, merely restating the circumstances by which cases were dismissed or resolved. And it doesn’t even do a good job with that.

For instance, it characterizes a report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty as finding, “no evidence of widespread voter fraud and no evidence of significant problems with voting machines — in fact, they found that Democratic candidates performed worse than expected in areas with Dominion machines.” Of course, “widespread voter fraud” and “voting machines” are red herrings, intended to divert people from dealing with what actually happened to control the election outcome in Wisconsin.

Contrast the report’s summation of the issue in Wisconsin with the actual first statement from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on its website for election integrity, which says, “It is almost certain that in Wisconsin’s 2020 election the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.” The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has shown that claim isn’t even up for debate, and while that is not “voter fraud,” per se, many Americans would describe the efforts to enable illegal voting methods as “widespread election fraud.”

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s report was a particularly modest account. Other independent analysts and econometricians analyzing Wisconsin have found that Zuckerberg’s meddling had a far greater impact than they realized. Here’s what a team of academics wrote about the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s takeover of government election offices in Wisconsin’s biggest cities:

Without CTCL involvement in Wisconsin in 2020, Wisconsin would be a solidly red state. We estimate that CTCL’s investment in seven Wisconsin counties resulted in 65,222 votes for Biden that would not have occurred in CTCL’s absence. That’s more than three times as big as the final 20,800-vote margin between Biden and Trump in 2020.

Private funding of elections overwhelmingly went to Democrat areas of swing states, produced skewed results, and violated legal requirements prohibiting partisan effects to nonprofit work. The situation in Wisconsin was so bad that leftist activists funded by the Zuckerberg operation led to multiple resignations of local officials in protest.

The report barely mentions, and therefore fails to adequately deal with, Zuckerberg’s funding and what it paid for, merely mentioning that some legal challenges had cited it. This is despite its central role in the outcomes for multiple swing states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia.

The report does a poor job dealing with Georgia as well. In its opening paragraph on Georgia, the report’s authors write, “Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a conservative Republican, conducted a full manual recount of the five million ballots cast, confirming Biden’s victory. At Trump’s request, election officials then conducted a post-certification recount, which also confirmed Biden’s victory. Secretary Raffensperger, with the assistance of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, evaluated and rejected numerous claims of fraud.”

There are multiple major problems with this characterization of Georgia. The report authors didn’t seem to understand, or failed to accurately convey, the situation with the Trump lawsuit filed there. To take just one example from that lawsuit, it alleged a serious problem with illegal voting. Shortly after the election, voting data expert Mark Davis noticed a problem of 40,000 votes cast by people who had registered to vote in a county different from the one they had claimed to move to. It was one of the dozens of categories mentioned in the Trump lawsuit, and in the intervening months, it has been confirmed that more illegal votes were cast in this manner than comprises the margin of victory for the race.

One could perform a recount a thousand times and not detect, much less deal with, that problem. A recount would simply recount the ballots, whether they were legal or not legal. As for the suggestion that Raffensperger took seriously, much less rejected, claims of illegal voting, the evidence does not support the claim. He fiercely fought the campaign’s efforts to determine the precise number of illegal votes during the time they needed the information for their lawsuit. After The Federalist reported on this issue last year, and a television station confirmed the existence of the problem, his office was cagey about whether they were going to investigate, much less do anything about it. His office also made excuses for the illegal voting, suggesting it was not a major concern for his office.

The issue isn’t even addressed in the report, and discussions of the lawsuit and how it was handled are completely inadequate and erroneous. The problem with the lawsuit — which did not allege fraud and which had many substantiated claims — was that it could not get a hearing before Jan. 6. The problems the campaign’s legal team had getting a hearing were Kafka-esque, and the report doesn’t seem to understand what the issues were, much less how they were handled.

Other major issues are neglected in the report. Because of the limited scope and lack of depth to the report, it doesn’t even acknowledge, much less give credit, to a 2022 Pennsylvania court decision ruling that all no-excuse mail-in voting in the commonwealth is unconstitutional. In its discussion of the Arizona audit, which found large and systematic problems in election administration, it quotes the response from the hostile Maricopa County Board of Supervisors as definitive. Likewise, it quotes news articles from the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, and other left-wing media outlets as definitive responses to election concerns. This is laughably unserious.

Reports Like This Harm the Republic

When Luttig went to the one-sided Jan. 6 star chamber, he concluded his remarks by saying that Trump and his supporters were “a clear and present danger to American democracy” because of their ongoing concerns about election security. The report repeatedly asserts that the reason why there is a lack of trust in elections is because of Trump and his supporters. In fact, one of the most important reasons to fight the coordinated campaign to weaken election integrity is that the lack of controls that make fraud easier to commit and more difficult to detect is responsible for the lack of trust in elections.

Following the contentious 2000 election, former President Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker co-chaired the bipartisan Commission on Election Reform. Its 100-plus-page report was called “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections,” and it treated election integrity as vitally important to that goal.

Rather than mocking or dismissing concerns about election integrity as unimportant, the Carter Commission stressed the problems caused by bloated and inaccurate voter rolls, nonexistent or faulty voter-identification procedures, and unsupervised voting. It said these practices threaten elections and democracy, as do misconduct by partisan election officials, the use of inconsistent procedures in different precincts, and an overall lack of transparency. The report noted that mail-in balloting is associated with higher risk of fraud and could also undermine faith in elections.

Making sure that voting is fair is one of the most important issues in the country. That’s why it remains a top concern to Republican voters, even as Washington, D.C., rolls out every member of the establishment to try to force them to fall in line with weak and insecure voting provisions.

If they want to convince voters outside their bubble, they should try far harder than they did with this report.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

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Political

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The Public Education Swamp Refuses to Learn Anything from A Year of Embarrassing Failures

REPORTED BY: ROBERT BUSEK | JUNE 08, 2022

Instead of welcoming self-reflection and accountability, the educational establishment and its media allies are trying to gaslight parents.

ROBERT BUSEK

The 2021-2022 school year is coming to a close. As usual, students, parents, teachers, and administrators are looking over the past year to see what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve.

This year, the educational establishment’s report card is even worse than usual. It has failed to address the learning losses due to unnecessary Covid lockdowns and inspired parental uproar over critical race theory and LGBT advocacy in the classroom. It has suffered a surprising electoral defeat in Virginia and a not-so-surprising legislative setback in Florida, as well as an unprecedented number of school board recall elections. Most damaging of all, close to 2 million students have abandoned government schooling for greener (not to mention safer) pastures.

Faced with such massive public losses, one might think a little self-reflection would be in order. Instead, the educrats, with the help of their friends in the legacy media, have decided to address these serious problems by gaslighting the American public.

Avoiding Accountability at All Costs

The most recent example of this deception comes from the continuing saga of the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) effort last fall to smear parents who complain at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” The now infamous letter and even more infamous Department of Justice memo that followed it represent the depths to which the educational establishment was willing to sink to protect itself from accountability to the families it theoretically serves.

A recently completed independent review exonerated the NSBA’s board from culpability in this fiasco, fixing the blame for “both the ‘origin and substance of the letter’” on former Interim Director and CEO Chip Slaven. The review also found that while unnamed members of the Biden administration “collaborated” with Slaven, it “did not find direct or indirect evidence suggesting the administration requested the letter.”

In an effort to “clear the record,” Slaven recorded an interview last week with Fox News Digital, where he whined about being “betrayed” and “completely backstabbed” by the organization that he led. He also admitted that he disagreed with the NSBA board’s futile efforts to walk back the language of the letter, claiming that “it drenched an already inflamed and out-of-control narrative with another helping of gasoline.”

Neither Slaven nor the NSBA’s announcement bothered to address the elephant in the room: that the

organization sees engaged parents and community members who attend school board meetings as potential threats that need to be watched and possibly prosecuted by federal authorities. When pressed about this during the interview, Slaven lamely defended the substance of the letter he penned by saying, “The word ‘parents’ is not in the letter anywhere,” despite the examples cited in the letter’s footnotes.

The NSBA has offered vague platitudes about “advocat[ing] for local control” and being “committed to parent engagement” as it pursues its “nonpartisan” goals. These attempts to rewrite history come as 25 state school boards have chosen “to withdraw membership, participation, or dues from NSBA.”

Meanwhile, an FBI whistleblower has claimed that “counterterrorism tools” were indeed used against parents in accordance with the DOJ’s memo. It remains unclear whether these efforts continue presently despite the NSBA’s repudiation of the letter and its alleged author.

Legacy Media Provide Covering Fire

Of course, the left-wing corporate media have gone all in to support educrats’ efforts to deceive the public into believing they remain the valiant heroes in this ongoing drama. Lately, they’ve decided to focus their attacks on a favorite target of the left: homeschooling families.

This is hardly surprising, as the number of these families at least doubled during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. What’s more, that number has been largely maintained despite schools re-opening in the fall of 2021.

On Mother’s Day, Keith Olbermann fired an opening salvo in this new campaign against educational choice when he tweeted that a homeschooling mom was “ruin[ing] the lives of five innocent children.” Not to be outdone, MSNBC columnist Anthea Butler initiated a preemptive strike against Kirk Cameron’s upcoming documentary “The Homeschool Awakening” by disingenuously linking homeschooling not just with conservative Christianity, but also with the “segregation academies” of the post-Brown v. Board of Education South.

After grudgingly admitting the recent increase in homeschooling “may [in part] be attributed to Black parents and other diverse groups” who might not otherwise dare to disagree with her leftist party line, Butler ended her hatchet job with a dire warning:

Homeschooling may have greater appeal now because of these debates and the desire for parents to play a big part in their children’s educational life. It may also arise out of pandemic concerns, but parents unfamiliar with the existing networks of homeschooling run the danger of being drawn into Christian conservative networks and theocratic teaching. [Cameron] says that people choosing homeschooling are having an awakening, but the public needs to awaken to the reality that public schools may disappear if people with his extreme beliefs have their way.

The left’s message to parents is loud and clear: Exercise your right to homeschool your kids and you are complicit in the cold-blooded murder of public schooling.

Institutional Suicide

In these efforts, Slaven, Olbermann, Butler, and their comrades studiously deflect from the simple truth: If American government-run schools are dying, it is not a case of murder, but of suicide.

The self-inflicted wounds keep coming despite all the warning signs of the past academic year. Last month, the school district in Kiel, Wis., accused three middle schoolers of sexual harassment for failing to refer to another student by her chosen pronouns. What parent wants to go through that as a consequence of sending his kids to public schools?

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools is planning to adopt a policy to suspend or even expel students who “maliciously misgender” classmates. The vote, originally scheduled for May 26, has been suspiciously delayed until June 16, perhaps so the happy chaos of the last day of school will allow the board to avoid further public scrutiny and outrage.

As kids across the nation start their summer vacations, the battle for their minds and souls rages on. True to form, the educational establishment fights dirty, using cheap manipulation tactics to distract the public from its pursuit of ideological “business as usual.”

Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.

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Wisconsin School District: Parents Are Not ‘Entitled to Know’ If Their Kids Are Trans

REPORTED BY: M.D. KITTLE | MARCH 08, 2022

Madison, Wis. — Parents are “not entitled” to know their kids’ gender identity, according to a recent training session in Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District.

Empower Wisconsin obtained a copy of a training slide from a late February staff development session. The 2021-22 Equity session on Safe Spaces reminds teachers that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.”

“Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student,” the professional development facilitator guide states. Teachers were encouraged to “Talk amongst yourselves!”

The lesson — that teachers know better than parents about what is best for their kids — is not sitting well with some community members.

“We are appalled that ECASD would display such blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children. We are equally dismayed that current school district leadership would pressure teachers into breaking a social contract that we all know and understand—that parents and guardians hold primary responsibility and decision making for the welfare and care of their children,” said parents and school board candidates Nicole Everson, Corey Cronrath, and Melissa Winter in a joint statement.

The district’s training session is also legally suspect. A district court in 2020 issued a partial injunction against Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy allowing children of any age to transition to a different gender identity at school — without parental consent. The full case is now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed the lawsuit on behalf of a group of parents challenging the gender identity policy “that violates the rights of parents to make important healthcare decisions on their children’s behalf.” The policy includes the following provisions:

Children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.
District employees are prohibited from notifying parents, without the child’s consent, that their child has or wants to change gender identity at school, or that their child may be dealing with gender dysphoria.
District employees are even instructed to deceive parents by using the child’s legal name and pronouns with family, while using the different name and pronouns adopted by the child in the school setting.

It’s not clear whether the Eau Claire Area School District has a similar policy.

The school board candidates are demanding district administrators issue an apology to teachers for “placing them at odds with families and also to parents and guardians for breaking the trust and partnership that is critical for thriving students and a stellar school district.”

An apology doesn’t appear to be forthcoming. ECASD Superintendent Michael Johnson issued a statement to Empower Wisconsin asserting the district is upholding its responsibility to maintain an educational environment that is “equitable, safe and inclusive for all students.”

“Our staff often find themselves in positions of trust with our students. The staff development presentation shared extensive data and information to assist our staff members in our ongoing efforts to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all students,” Johnson said in the statement. “The ECASD prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.”

The superintendent said the staff training focused on data showing students who identify as non-heterosexual have a higher incidence rate of mental health issues than heterosexual students. But critics say a school’s commitment to “equity and inclusiveness” does not give license to educators to hide important information from parents and guardians.

Cronrath, Everson, and Winter are among seven candidates, including two incumbents, running for three open seats on the school board next month. The three jumped into the race because they were concerned about the eroding of parental rights in the district. They say Eau Claire schools’ “blatant disregard for parental rights and responsibilities” has been creeping into the district’s classrooms. The latest training session sends three very dangerous messages to parents and the wider community, the candidates assert.

1. Schools are in control of children, not parents and families—When you entrust your child into the walls of ECASD, you no longer have the right as a parent to be informed of major developments in your child’s school life. In fact, you must ‘earn it.’
2. Current Leadership is willing to pit teachers against parents—Open communication between the classroom and home has always been critical to healthy school communities and student development. ECASD is putting teachers in a difficult and dishonest position by instructing them to actively withhold information from parents.
3. What goes on in the walls of ECASD is privileged information—By indicating that information about your child is ‘knowledge that must be earned,’ ECASD is setting a dangerous precedent. If identity questions for your child can be hidden from you, is diet, curriculum, healthcare, inappropriate relationships, mental health concerns, etc. also no longer the business of parents? Just what are parents and guardians allowed to know and when?

The Republican-led state legislature passed a Parental Bill of Rights that would prohibit school policies that infringe on a parent’s or guardian’s role as the primary caregiver of their child. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat and the former state superintendent, is likely to veto the bill.

Eau Claire Area School District has a history of overreach. Last fall, school officials worked with the local health czar in removing a 14-year-old girl from school after someone in her class tested positive for Covid-19. The girl and her mom resisted, accusing authorities of abusing their powers. The county health director then sought a court order to have the girl forcibly removed from school.

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BIG NEWS: Justice Michael Gableman Will Release Results from Wisconsin Election Investigation Today — Findings Explosive! Expected Allegations of Criminality

Reported By Jim Hoft | Published March 1, 2022

This morning at 10 AM the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections will hold a much anticipated informational hearing on the Gableman 2020 Election Report. Special Counsel and Former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and Attorney Eric Kaardal will be speaking in front of the committee. From what we are hearing, the findings are explosive. There are also allegations of criminality.

The hearing will be live via WisEye at 10 AM Central.
The War Room will air the hearing today live at 10 AM Central.

** The live feed of the hearing is here.

Following the hearing, Justice Gableman and Attorney Eric Kaardel will hold a press conference. The details are below. We believe this will be at Thomas More Society at Vimeo .

Here is the VIDEO for presser at 1 PM Central–

Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections Hearing Press Conference from Thomas More Society on Vimeo.

** And later today Jim Hoft from The Gateway Pundit and Patty McMurray from 100 Percent Fed Up will interview Justice Gablemand and Attorney Eric Kaardal. INFORMATION IS COMING…

The findings from a sprawling, taxpayer-funded investigation ordered by Wisconsin Republicans into the 2020 election will be turned over to lawmakers and made public on Tuesday, a spokesman for the attorney heading the probe said Monday.
The report from Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice whose work drew bipartisan criticism, was being turned over to Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and the Wisconsin Assembly’s elections committee on Tuesday before being publicly released, Gableman spokesman Zak Niemierowicz said.
The report will be released when Gableman testifies about his findings before the Wisconsin Assembly elections committee, a panel that has hosted several election conspiracy theorists in recent weeks.

There will be a press conference at 1 PM following the Assembly hearing.

Jim Hoft

Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.

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How No-Excuse Absentee Voting Allows Special Interests To Manipulate Voters

REPORTED BY: WILLIAM DOYLE | FEBRUARY 15, 2022

Signs outside every physical polling place forbid electioneering. Each state has some form of restriction on political activities near polling locations when voting is taking place. These restrictions are usually on the display of signs, handing out campaign literature, attempting to influence voters, or soliciting votes within a predetermined distance (typically 50 to 200 feet) of a polling place. A list of the specific electioneering prohibitions adopted by each state can be found here.

Opposition to electioneering is the main reason election integrity advocates oppose allowing political activists to provide food and water to voters waiting in line at polling places. What has been portrayed as a measure to starve and dehydrate suffering voters is really a commonsense prohibition against electioneering. Allowing such practices would allow anybody with a few water bottles or a bag of sandwiches an opportunity to harangue, harass, or otherwise intimidate voters who are waiting in line to cast their ballots.

But nobody has yet come to terms with a new type of electioneering that goes hand in hand with universal absentee voting. We call it “remote electioneering” and define it as an attempt to influence or solicit votes among absentee voters between the time they receive their absentee ballot and the time they submit it to their election office. Obviously, the opportunities for what in normal circumstances would qualify as illegal electioneering multiply considerably with absentee voting, since there is no way of knowing the extent to which partisan activists attempt to influence the behavior of absentee voters.

CTCL’s Goal Was to Influence Absentee Voters

But we have a glimpse of the attitudes of Democrat election activists toward electioneering with absentee ballots through Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) documents, which outline the actions that the major recipients of their Covid-19 Response Grant Program would have to fulfill as conditions of keeping their grant money. By the admission of the activist election officials in Wisconsin who were funded by CTCL in 2020, absentee ballot electioneering was one of their major goals. Grant recipients were required to “Encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in their completion and the installation of ballot drop boxes. They were also to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents” in states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which in 2020 were flooded with no-excuse absentee ballots for the first time ever.

We know that absentee ballot electioneering occurred in areas in these states where CTCL had a substantial presence because it was part and parcel of CTCL’s requirement that absentee voting be promoted, assisted, and increased. Ongoing contact between activist election officials and millions of new absentee voters was not only encouraged in areas that received big CTCL money, it was required.

Wisconsin Illustrates Extravagant Plans

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, which served as the basic template for CTCL’s nationwide efforts during the 2020 election, provides documentation of their extravagant plans to use key election offices to electioneer the absentee vote that they were so intent on promoting.

Election officials in Wisconsin who were “on the street” had enough contact with voters to bemoan the fact that “countless [individuals]” in their municipalities attempted to submit cell phone “selfies” as valid photo ID. Explaining to them that this was not a valid form of photo ID and instructing them on how to properly submit valid ID reportedly “took considerable staff time and resources.”

If election officials had such knowledge, they must have had extensive contact with such low-information absentee voters while they were in the process of completing and submitting their ballots. If this were at the polling booth, it would qualify as illegal electioneering because election officials had “extensive contact” with in-person voters who were completing and submitting their ballots.

A great deal of concern was expressed about “Voters who, understandably, were completely confused about the timeline and rules for voting in the midst of a pandemic and required considerable public outreach and individual hand-holding to ensure their right to vote.” Figuratively “holding someone’s hand” as they cast a vote — whether absentee or in person — seems to be the very definition of electioneering.

The city of Green Bay planned to spend $45,000 to employ bilingual “voter navigators” to help residents properly upload valid photo ID, complete their ballots, comply with certification requirements, and offer witness signatures. But it would be illegal for poll workers to help voters complete their ballots when voting in person. Why should it not be illegal for partisan activists to help people complete their absentee ballots?

The city of Racine wished to create a corps of “vote ambassadors.” Racine officials said they would recruit, train, and employ such paid ambassadors to set up at the city’s community centers to assist voters with all aspects of absentee ballot requests. But how do we know that the diplomatic efforts of such “ambassadors” would not be exercised exclusively on behalf of their own partisan interests when “assisting” in the completion of absentee ballots?

Violating Voting Booth’s Sanctity

The sanctity of the voting booth used to be considered one of the sacred traditions of American democracy, as it protects the right of individuals to determine who will represent them in government. But the kind of Democracy™ that involves the indiscriminate mass mailing of no-excuse absentee ballots is a top-down endeavor, where most of the power, initiative, and agency is on the side of Democrat politicians and leftist election activists rather than voters.

Their plan is to influence, cajole, and incentivize the least civically engaged, least informed, most apathetic individuals within their jurisdictions to fill out absentee ballots in a way that validates the consolidation of Democratic Party power. Absentee ballot electioneering is the key to a more modern way of “stuffing the ballot box” in an era where activists have convinced a significant number of people that their voting rights have been fatally compromised if they are not permitted to cast a ballot in whatever way is most effortless for them.

The fact that opportunities for electioneering are so few at the polling place, and so plentiful during the time that elapses between the receipt of absentee ballots and their submission, suggests another reason those who wish to find new ways to interfere in legitimate elections are the most strident advocates of universal mail-in voting. It also provides yet another reason why people who believe in free and fair elections should spare no effort to resolutely oppose no-excuse absentee voting in 2022.

William Doyle, Ph.D., is principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections. Previously, he was associate professor and chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Dallas. He can be contacted at doyle@rodneyinstitute.org.

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Wisconsin Legislature Passes Resolution Calling for Article V Convention of States

REPORTED BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 26, 2022

Wisconsin became the latest state to pass a resolution calling for an Article V convention of states on Tuesday, with the goal of proposing amendments to the U.S. Constitution that would limit the power of the federal government. Passed by the Wisconsin Assembly last year, the resolution was approved by the Senate in a 17-16 vote, with four Republicans joining all Democrats in opposition. According to the measure, Wisconsin’s legislature seeks to call a convention of states “limited to proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress.”

As written in Article V of the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures are provided the power to call a convention to propose amendments to the nation’s founding document without the approval of Congress. Under the current process, two-thirds of states are required for a convention to be called, with three-fourths of states necessary for any amendment proposed to be ratified.

“Times like these are precisely why the Founders created the mechanisms in Article V,” said state Rep. Dan Knodl. “Federal overreach has thrown our country into chaos, and it’s time for the states to exercise their authority as granted to them in the constitution to restore order, states’ rights, and limited, constitutional government. I’m incredibly proud that our state has officially thrown its support behind this movement.”

State Sen. Kathy Bernier also expressed her excitement at the resolution’s passage, noting how thankful she is that the Constitution provides “the states and the people a framework to step in and save the Republic when Congress will not.”

“Today we sent a message that Wisconsin stands ready to rein in federal overreach,” she said.

In addition to Wisconsin, 15 other states have also passed similar resolutions calling for a convention to address federal term limits, spending, and governmental overreach.

Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at The Federalist and a student at the University of Mary Washington, where he plans to major in Political Science and minor in Journalism. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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ZuckBucks-Connected Private Organization Taught Election Officials To ‘Control the Narrative’ About Mail-In Voting

REPORTED BY: LOGAN WASHBURN | JANUARY 26, 2022

A left-leaning nonprofit instructed public officials how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots in the 2020 election. The National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI) guided officials to sway public opinion in favor of mail-in voting with their “2020 Election Official Communications Toolkit.” The group shared this document with public officials in Wisconsin while working with the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to influence the 2020 election.

CTCL used nearly half a billion dollars from Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg to fund private action within government election offices. They spent most of the money in Democrat-saturated districts, which boosted Joe Biden’s narrow presidential win in 2020. As a partner for the “Zuckbucks” recipient, NVAHI gave public officials advice on how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots.

“Do not repeat myths as a way to refute them,” the document says. “Instead, control the narrative by presenting information that affirms the safety, security, and reliability of mail balloting.”

Mail-in voting is not only proven to be more susceptible to voter fraud and errors than in-person voting, it is well known to favor Democrats over Republicans. It essentially functions as a get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of Democrats, whose voters are less motivated to show up at the polls on election day. Republican voters far prefer to vote in person, accurately believing it is more secure.

The group also told election officials to push mail-in voting by placing articles in media outlets: “Reporters will likely already be writing up voter information guides as well as shaping their articles around how well or poorly the election is running. A proactive op-ed strategy is helpful here,” the document says.
NVAHI explained that officials should target free, popular local news publications: “For all these types of outlets, approach them about whether they would run an article on your behalf about the upcoming election,” the document says.
The organization recommended officials use public information strategies such as “playing up the security” of mail-in voting. NVAHI told election officials to dissuade concerns about mail-in ballots by claiming that they contain “over a dozen security features.”
“Voters may be reluctant to fill out a mail ballot because of concerns they’ve heard about stolen or lost ballots. Assuage those concerns without leaning into them,” the document says.
The guide also tells public officials to “instill a sense of urgency” about mail-in voting, recommending an appeal to popularity: “Voters may be unsure whether voting by mail is right for them. Social proof (showing how many people are taking up a behavior) is a powerful way of making mail-in ballots a compelling option.”
The document also recommended that government election offices use particular slogans for public information campaigns, such as “Voting by mail is easy and secure,” and “Let’s all vote safely. Choose to vote by mail.”

NVAHI partnered with the organization Ideas42 to create this toolkit. According to its website, the group is “a non-profit that uses insights from behavioral science to improve lives, build better systems and policies, and drive social change.” Ideas42 works with CTCL partner Center for Civic Design, along with several offices of government secretaries of state.

After CTCL gave a grant of $1.6 million to the Wisconsin city of Green Bay in 2020, NVAHI gained access to absentee ballots and influence over election preparations in the area. NVAHI Wisconsin State Lead Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed the elections guide to former Green Bay City Clerk Kris Teske in August 2020.

When reaching out to Teske, Spitzer-Rubenstein described the toolkit as “a groundbreaking resource that uses behavioral science insights from our partners at Ideas42 to help you connect with communities and get voters the information they need.”

Spitzer-Rubenstein, who worked for Democrat political campaigns in the past, emailed Teske to ask if his group could “cure” absentee ballots. This means altering absentee ballots after they are filed to allegedly fix errors, rather than counting improperly marked ballots as invalid. When Teske turned down the offer, Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed former Green Bay Mayor’s Office Chief of Staff Celestine Jeffreys, who ordered Teske to open the city elections’ ballot-curing process to NVAHI, a private special interest group.

A 2021 audit of Wisconsin elections found the state had counted enough illegal ballots in 2020 to potentially switch its Electoral College votes from Biden to Donald Trump. Vote curing in the election could have contributed to the state counting illegal votes, the audit found.

Also in 2021, a judge ruled that the state’s 2020 use of ballot drop boxes and ballot harvesting, both of which are only possible with mail-in ballots, was illegal. The majority of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin were votes for Biden, who won the state by a margin of 0.63 percent, or approximately 20,600 votes.

Before election day, Green Bay elections officials gave Spitzer-Rubenstein four out of five keys to the room in which the absentee ballots were stored, former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno told Wisconsin Spotlight.

After the election, Juno expressed concerns that the Central Count location was “tainted by the influence of a person working for an outside organization influencing the election,” according to Wisconsin Spotlight. Teske said she felt that third-party groups such as CTCL and NVAHI excluded the clerk’s office from the election process.

“As you know, I am very frustrated, along with the Clerk’s Office. I don’t know what to do anymore,” she emailed a colleague. “I don’t understand how people who don’t have knowledge of the process can tell us how to manage the election.”

Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He is a correspondent for Campus Reform and an outreach assistant for the Freedom Foundation.

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Wisconsin Parents Join National Crusade To Wrestle Their Kids Back From Left-Wing Government Schools

Reported BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JANUARY 11, 2022

Wisconsin parents town hall with Rebecca Kleefisch

WAUKESHA, Wis. — The banquet hall buzzed with impassioned chatter as parents, friends, first-time school board candidates, and other locals congregated for a Saturday morning town hall that felt more like a strategy session. After two major public school districts, Milwaukee and Madison, shut down yet again and blamed COVID, parents were fired up. Talk of critical race theory, leftist administrators, mask mandates, and school shutdowns hummed through conversations with the kind of first-hand animation that could propel once-complacent Wisconsin parents into a movement of activists capable of unleashing an unquenchable red wave in the Dairy State. They saw what happened in Virginia, and now they want to bring it home.

Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who’s now running to unseat Democrat Gov. Tony Evers in November, organized the event. Although Kleefisch is in campaign mode, the overarching energy of the gathering wasn’t as much, “Help get me elected,” as it was, “How can we get more of you elected?”

Calling All Parents

“We need more parent activists. This is that important,” Kleefisch said while moderating a panel of concerned moms-turned-activists.

One of those moms was Scarlett Johnson, a mother of five who, after discovering the apathy in the Mequon-Thiensville School Board, decided she needed to run for a seat.

“We just started paying closer attention,” Johnson said to the room of eager fellow parents. “I hadn’t attended school board meetings. I vote, but I never voted for a school board candidate.”

But that all changed this last year. Johnson said she and a group of other moms started getting together and doing their research. When they did, they found toxic racial propaganda in their kids’ classrooms, such as teachers assigning books like Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” The moms started making phone calls and sending emails to school officials. “It started a movement,” Johnson said.

In the course of her run for school board, Johnson said she’s been called a white supremacist and received death threats, but noted, “I’m still here, I’m still fighting.”

No Room for Apathy

Parents aren’t just fired up about nefarious actors in the school systems, however. They’re also on the lookout for complacent school board members and district officials. Another mom on the panel, Alyssa Pallow, is getting involved simply because her school board doesn’t seem to really know anything about dangerous ideologies such as critical race theory. Kleefisch agreed, stressing to parents that they don’t have to wait to get involved until one of their kids cracks a textbook or assignment that makes their jaw drop open. “It can be that you’re horrified by the apathy,” Kleefisch said.

“It snowballs,” said another mom, Amber Schroeder, regarding parent activism. “You will inspire people to get involved.” Schroeder and Johnson worked together in the Mequon-Thiensville district to organize a recall election of four school board members.

“People are afraid to do it alone,” Schroeder continued. “Once you realize you’re not alone, a lot more people get involved. … If you build it, they will come.”

A Time for Choosing

Other parents have been shocked to watch their children become casualties in the left’s Covid crackdowns. Mattie Allen stressed the importance of school choice after her kids had a horrible academic year due to lockdowns. Allen’s son spent his first year in school doing it virtually, “which was horrendous,” she said. Her daughter spent one year at Milwaukee Public Schools, where her GPA plummeted, and it was “one of the worst years.” Thanks to school choice, they’re now in a charter school with just one grade per class. “Their school is so open, and I love it,” Allen said, noting that her daughter’s GPA is back up, she’s on the honor roll, and she’s playing volleyball.

But some families aren’t so fortunate. One of Allen’s friends who is stuck with her kids in Milwaukee Public Schools is watching the district once again shut down. This single mom has a first-grader and a third-grader, meaning she had to switch to third shift just so she could fulfill the roles of both teacher and provider. She’s “up all day, up all night,” Allen said, getting choked up. “How do we give all moms that [school choice] option?”

[WATCH: Meet The Parents: How The Moms And Dads Of Loudoun County Took Back Virginia]

Maggie Vinopal, a mom in the Eau Claire school district, has also had enough with the COVID madness, saying school officials are weaponizing Statute 252, a state quarantine law, to punish and quarantine unvaccinated kids. Her healthy seventh-grade daughter has been quarantined four different times for a total of 14 schools days, despite coronavirus posing almost zero risk of severity to healthy children. Anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 is required to “isolate,” Vinopal told The Federalist. But when students come into contact with a positive case, only the unvaccinated have to “quarantine,” despite the ability of the vaccinated to contract and spread COVID.

On the very first day of school, Vinopal’s daughter was seated at the same lunch table as a vaccinated student who later tested positive and had to isolate. While the vaccinated students at the table were allowed to proceed as normal, Vinopal’s daughter was required to quarantine and provide proof of a negative test.

Jumping in the Ring

Covid nonsense like this is what inspired people like first-time Waukesha School Board member Kelly Piacsek to run. When a number of people decided to “abuse our children in the name of science, I got really mad,” said Piacsek, who is now known for holding firm on a decision to end a harmful federally-funded school lunch program in the face of vicious and dishonest attacks. “That’s what motivated me.” Running for school board is “absolutely worth it,” she told parents. “We’ve got to take this on because we have a front-row seat to the consequences.”

Piacsek inspired people like Slinger parent Bill Brewer to run for his school board. Brewer, a veteran, has lived in Slinger for approximately 18 years. He coaches youth football there and is now involved in the league’s leadership. But the school board’s apathy and lack of urgency against dangerous ideologies have prompted him to get involved.

“Marxism doesn’t come and punch you in the face in round one. It creeps in,” Brewer said.
“I just can’t have that, not for my community, not for these kids. They deserve better.”

Brewer said his strategy isn’t so much a campaign “as a giant, three-month listening tour.”
“Once I get elected, that’s not going to stop,” Brewer said.

That seems to be the Kleefisch campaign strategy too. Rather than spending two hours rattling off campaign promises, the gubernatorial candidate opened the floor on Saturday for parents to voice their concerns and asked attendees to fill out cards with the top three issues that matter to them to help guide her policy. That’s more than these weary parents have gotten from Evers, who has worked to keep parents in the dark. In December, the governor — who was the state superintendent of public instruction for a decade — vetoed education transparency legislation that would have required districts to publish classroom materials online. This anti-parent action from Evers followed his school-closing impulse that kept kids home and tanked their academic advancement.

“We need you to be successful and aggressive,” Kleefisch rallied, encouraging the parents fighting in local races. If the energy in the Waukesha banquet hall was any indication, these parents won’t have any problem with that.

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.

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Kyle Rittenhouse Acquitted On All Charges

Reported by BRIANNA LYMAN | REPORTER | November 19, 2021

Kyle Rittenhouse Trial Continues In Kenosha, WI — **(Photo by Mark Hertzberg-Pool/Getty Images)**

Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted Friday of all charges in relation to the deaths Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber.

Rittenhouse was acquitted on the following charges:

CHARGE: First-Degree Reckless Homicide, Use Of A Dangerous Weapon

VERDICT: Acquitted

The charge alleged Rittenhouse was responsible for Rosenbaum’s death under circumstances that showed an utter disregard for human life. The decision by prosecutors to charge reckless homicide rather than intentional homicide indicated the prosecution was unsure what Rittenhouse’s intent was. The charge carried up to 60 years in prison.

—-

CHARGE: First-Degree Recklessly Endangering Safety, Use Of A Dangerous Weapon

VERDICT: Acquitted

This charge relates to Rittenhouse’s alleged reckless endangerment of individuals on scene at the time of the incident, including Daily Caller Video Director Richie McGinniss, who testified he was in the line of fire when Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum. This charge carried a maximum 12 1/2 year sentence.

—–

CHARGE: First-Degree Recklessly Endangering Safety, Use Of A Dangerous Weapon

VERDICT: Acquitted

Video footage of the fatal night showed an unidentified individual, known as “Jump kick man” appearing to try and kick Rittenhouse as Rittenhouse laid on the floor just before Huber moved toward Rittenhouse with his skateboard. Rittenhouse appeared to fire two rounds at the unidentified individual but missed as the man ran away. This charge carried a 12 1/2 year sentence.

—-

CHARGE: First-Degree Intentional Homicide, Use Of A Dangerous Weapon

VERDICT: Acquitted

Prosecutors alleged Rittenhouse intentionally killed Huber, who had been seen on video attempting to hit Rittenhouse in the head with a skateboard and trying to grab Rittenhouse’s gun before Rittenhouse fatally shot him. Prosecutors argued Rittenhouse pointing the gun at Huber and firing was intentional, though Rittenhouse’s right to self-defense trumped the intentional charge. A guilty verdict for first-degree intentional homicide carried a life in prison sentence.

—-

CHARGE: Attempted First-Degree Intentional Homicide, Use Of A Dangerous Weapon

VERDICT: Acquitted

Rittenhouse wounded Gaige Grosskreutz in the arm just after fatally shooting Huber. Grosskreutz was seen in video footage approaching Rittenhouse with a pistol drawn before Rittenhouse fired a single round at Grosskreutz, injuring his arm. The charge carried a maximum sentence of 60 years.

Judge Bruce Schroeder dismissed the charge of possession of a dangerous weapon by a minor Monday. Rittenhouse was 17-years-old at the time of the shooting. The charge only applied if the individual possessed, or was armed with a rifle or shotgun that was a short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun, or if the person was not in compliance with certain hunting restrictions. Schroeder dismissed the charge on the grounds of an exception within the law relating to the gun’s barrel.

Schroeder had previously dismissed a curfew violation charge against Rittenhouse, with the judge agreeing with the defense that the prosecution had not provided sufficient evidenced that a curfew had been in effect.

This is a breaking story and will be updated as information becomes available.

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Rittenhouse Prosecutors Close With Story Backed Up By Neither Evidence Nor Eyewitness Testimony

NOVEMBER 16, 2021 By Eddie Scarry

Closing arguments of Wisconsin state prosecutors against Kyle Rittenhouse can best be summed up for the jury as, “Never mind! Don’t believe the video evidence or independent witnesses introduced in this trial; believe this alternate version of events that we’re telling you right now instead.”

Deliberations start Tuesday, and the jury has two options. It can acquit Rittenhouse based on scores of video evidence and testimony that show and say Rittenhouse shot three men who were chasing him and trying to get his gun. Or it can convict him based on a weird story that contradicts the state’s own witnesses and that requires a belief that 18-year-old Rittenhouse, for no obvious reason, felt like shooting some random people, all white men, that night last August.

During summations on Monday, Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger claimed that Rittenhouse was in Kenosha, Wis., at the time because, “We all know someone like the defendant,” who “enjoys the thrill of telling people what to do without the courage or honor to back it up.”

This is the baby-faced, then-17-year-old jurors saw on video walking around that night with a medic kit calling out “medical” to protestors on the scene who might need assistance and “friendly, friendly, friendly” so rioters would know he posed no threat.

Binger then described Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, as having done no wrong that evening of rioting before he was hunted down by a bloodthirsty Rittenhouse. By contrast, jurors had seen Rosenbaum on video antagonizing others, lighting a dumpster on fire, and repeatedly yelling at someone, “Shoot me, n——!”

It was Rosenbaum whom witnesses said was yelling at bystanders that he would kill them. It was Rosenbaum who someone described as a “babbling idiot.” And it was ultimately Rosenbaum who then chased Rittenhouse into a dark parking lot before finding himself at the wrong end of an AR-15, and who, again, according to a witness, tried grabbing the barrel before being shot.

The overwhelming evidence showed that Rittenhouse shot someone who was pursuing him. After that, he headed in the direction of police as a mindless mob of rioters gathered to take him down. Two more men made attempts at taking Rittenhouse’s gun, with one of them striking him over the head with a skateboard while he was on the ground. The other one pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse.

Binger, however, is insisting to jurors that they disregard the video evidence and his own witnesses. They should instead trust in his personal assessment that Rittenhouse is a person who “enjoys the thrill of telling people what to do without the courage or honor to back it up.” Whatever that means.

If you told me Binger was given this case as part of a humiliating hazing ritual, I’d believe it. I’d even be relieved to know that he followed through with the case against his will and isn’t actually this stupid.

It’s possible that the jury, nervous about more rioting that an acquittal could bring, will choose Binger’s storyline. If they do, it will mean they followed the prosecutor’s suggestion to set aside what they saw on video and heard from Binger’s own witnesses.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People.”

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Wisconsin Parent Goes After Kenosha School District For Illegally Barring Her From Observing Son’s Class

Reported By Kylee Zempel | NOVEMBER 4, 2021

**Photo Alexroberson/Wikimedia Commons**

If there’s one lesson to be learned from the red sweep in Virginia this week, it’s that politicians, schools boards, and education administrators shouldn’t mess with parents, especially on the well-being of their children. Many more school districts across other states still have to learn this lesson, and to that end, one Wisconsin parent is enlisting the help of attorneys to go after her son’s public school.

On Wednesday, counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) sent a letter to the school district of Kenosha, the scene of violent riots last summer and the site of the ongoing trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, threatening legal action if the Kenosha Unified School District does not allow a concerned parent to observe her son’s class as required by federal law.

It started when the mother of a student at the Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum, a public charter school, became concerned about her son’s dropping grades. According to WILL, the student had reported a bevy of classroom disruptions that contributed to his struggle, including fighting, profanities, racial epithets, and property damage, as well as a new math curriculum that does not involve homework nor a textbook.

In September, the mom decided to take action, figuring the best way to help her son succeed would be to observe and understand his learning environment. She requested access to see his classroom for herself, but both the school district and the school reportedly denied her requests multiple times, giving her inconsistent rationale as to why she couldn’t enter.

For instance, Bill Haithcock, the chief of school leadership for the district, allegedly told the mother that an in-person observation by her would serve “no educational program,” ignoring the school’s charter contract, which says, “Parents are important partners in the educational program at KTEC.” Haithcock reportedly further noted that he didn’t think it was the “best idea right now” to “expos[e] the class to an outside visitor.”

However, as the WILL letter notes, the district’s policies and social media pages indicate that many other types of visitors such as mentors, chaperones, and nonprofits are welcomed.

Other times, the school district allegedly told the mother that as a parent, she was “not connected to the educational curriculum” and that allowing her to visit the classroom would open the floodgates of other parents wanting to observe. WILL hopes Kenosha schools change course and “view parents as partners in the education of children.”

According to federal law signed by the Obama administration in 2015, these denials are illegal, as WILL argues in its letter. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, public schools must have systems in place that involve parents in educational settings, meaning the Kenosha district must have a policy that grants parents the “observation of classroom activities.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg of parents’ rights in their children’s education. They also have a right to access curriculum, see progress reports, engage in communication with staff, schedule yearly parent-teacher conferences, and participate in their kid’s classes.

The Kenosha school district does have policies in place for parent involvement and “classroom visits,” yet it has so far stonewalled this concerned parent.

In response to The Federalist’s request for comment, the Kenosha Unified School District’s Chief Communications Officer Tanya Ruder said, “KUSD is aware of the WILL letter and is working with legal counsel to review the matter at hand.” The Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

WILL said it hopes Kenosha schools change course and “view parents as partners in the education of children.”

“Public school classrooms should not be a ‘black box.’ Parents have the right to know what is being taught in classrooms,” said WILL Deputy Counsel Dan Lennington.

This controversy over whether parents are partners in their children’s education or whether they should be staying out of schools has shown to have remarkable electoral significance this week, especially in the Virginia gubernatorial race. After candidate and former governor Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” and doubled down on keeping parental involvement out of public schools, Republican candidate and parent advocate Glenn Youngkin won the race in the same state President Joe Biden won by 10+ points just one year ago.

“Federal and state laws impose simple and straightforward transparency requirements on public schools such as allowing parents to sit in on classes and the right to view curriculum,” Lennington told The Federalist. “But if public schools continue to treat parents as adversaries by concealing what’s going on inside school buildings, they face the real risk of an electoral backlash, like we just saw in Virginia.”

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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Kyle Rittenhouse judge slams ‘vast amount’ of ‘irresponsible and sloppy journalism’ surrounding case

Reported by PHIL SHIVER | November 02, 2021

The judge presiding over the highly anticipated Kyle Rittenhouse homicide trial recently criticized what he called a “vast amount” of “irresponsible and sloppy journalism” covering the events surrounding the case.

While speaking with potential jurors during the jury selection process on Monday, Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder said that those selected for the task may need to disregard much of what they have heard in the media about the case.

“This case has become very political. It was involved in the politics of the last election year,” Schroeder said in the court session, adding, “To this day, you can go out and read things from all across the political spectrum about this case, most of which is written by people who know nothing.”
“The price we pay for having a free press is a lot of irresponsible and sloppy journalism,” he continued, adding that his charge “is not an attack on the media” but a reality check for potential jurors about the need for a fair and impartial trial.
Schroeder said that he has read some things about the case that have been “perfect,” but noted that most of the reporting has either been “sloppy” or “deliberately biased.”
“It can be frightening,” he added while urging jury candidates to abandon their presuppositions and focus solely on the evidence presented at trial. He reminded them that the right to a fair trial is an important right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

What’s the background?

The news comes only days after Schroeder ruled that the men Rittenhouse, 18, fatally shot or wounded on Aug. 25, 2020, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, can’t be referred to as “victims” by prosecutors — but can be called “rioters” and “looters.”

Rittenhouse — then 17 — allegedly took a gun to riots in the city in order to defend local businesses against looting and ransacking in the wake of a white police officer’s shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man. During the mayhem, Rittenhouse shot three men, killing two. Rittenhouse was charged with multiple felonies, including first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted first-degree reckless homicide, and first-degree reckless endangering safety. If convicted, he could serve a mandatory life sentence in prison.

Rittenhouse’s defense team has insisted he was acting in self-defense, and videos of the shootings from that night appear to back up his claims. He later told reporters he doesn’t regret taking a gun to protests on the night of the shootings, saying he “would’ve died” if he hadn’t.

By Monday evening, 20 jurors had been selected, and now the trial is set to be heard.

(H/T: Townhall)

Potential Jurors In The Kyle Rittenhouse Trial Are Scared, And They Have Every Reason To Be

NOVEMBER 2, 2021 | By Eddie Scarry

Kenosha County, Wis., Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder has a fanciful idea: That the trial he’s overseeing that includes murder charges against 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse can be removed from politics. He said so on Monday during jury selection. “We don’t want to fall into the trap,” he said, “that many in the media have, a large percentage of the media, and discuss this as a political trial or that there are bigger factors at stake in this trial.”

How naive. Of course this is a trial of political consequence and of course there are bigger factors at stake. The potential jurors know it, and that’s why during selection several of them expressed concern that their city or they personally might be the targets of rioting or harassment, regardless of the verdict the jury renders. All of the potential jurors are kept anonymous until after the trial is over but here’s a sample of what some of them said during selection:

—One said that no matter the verdict, “half the country will be up in arms about it.”

— Another said, “I’m more afraid of our community and the outsiders of our community that are coming in… It just brings us back to August (2020).” She also said she was “potentially” afraid of reliving riots depending on the verdict.

— A third said it was “scary” to be on a case like this one, specifically citing “riots” and wondering aloud, “Am I gonna get home safe?”

Those are legitimate concerns. We saw what happened earlier this year in Minneapolis, when businesses and restaurants boarded up their storefronts in anticipation of a possible acquittal of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who ultimately was convicted of killing George Floyd. If things don’t go a certain way in politically charged trials like that, despite evidence leading a deliberate jury to the opposite conclusion, well, that might very well mean more rioting, looting, arson, and violence. Potential jurors in the Rittenhouse trial received the message loud and clear that this isn’t just a murder trial. This is about the broader question of whether some types of political violence are acceptable, even necessary.

Rittenhouse is charged with the murder of two men and the attempted murder of a third. All relevant parties are white (sadly robbing the media of a beloved racially charged narrative) and it isn’t disputed that each of them had been chasing the teen and attempting to apprehend his weapon. All of it was in the context of several nights of destructive rioting in Kenosha, which resulted in a total of $50 million in damages to the city. The mayhem was sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man who was wanted for violating a restraining order stemming from claims he had sexually assaulted a woman. Blake is on video resisting his arrest and defying police orders by moving to enter his vehicle as they tried to apprehend him.

The city went up in flames and the national media to this day characterize the chaos as a “Black Lives Matter march” because they, along with leaders in the Democratic Party, believe all of it was justified.

Rittenhouse may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that’s not a crime and it’s not what he’s on trial for. He’s on trial for shooting men who pursued him and made moves to grab his gun, something that is seen on video, testified by at least one witness, and written out in the state’s own complaint against Rittenhouse.

A jury will inevitably render its verdict, but contrary to what the judge says, there’s no way around it— this is a political trial and that should scare the jurors.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People.”

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Wisconsin Elections Commission ‘Shattered’ Laws By Telling Nursing Home Staffers To Illegally Cast Ballots For Residents

Reported By Kylee Zempel | OCTOBER 29, 2021

**Photo Spc. Miguel Pena/U.S. Army 20/20**

Racine County, Wisconsin law enforcement blew the 2020 election integrity question wide open on Thursday after an investigation into one nursing home. It revealed not only that state election officials flagrantly broke the law and ordered health-care employees to help them, but that the problem likely runs much deeper throughout the swing state’s other 71 counties.

An “election statute was in fact not just broken, but shattered by members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said during a Thursday press conference in which he and Sgt. Michael Luell detailed the findings of an investigation into Ridgewood Care Facility. The investigation came about when a woman named Judy signed a sworn affidavit with the Wisconsin Elections Commission after she discovered that her mother, who had died on Oct. 9, 2020 after a period of severe cognitive decline, had voted in the 2020 presidential election. The affidavit was later passed along as a complaint to the county district attorney. Judy alleged that her mother Shirley’s mental state had deteriorated so far that she was having hallucinations and wasn’t able to recall what she had eaten during a day or even what day it was. According to Judy, her mother couldn’t see — her glasses were broken, and she couldn’t even recognize her own daughter — so even if she were of a sound mind, she wouldn’t have known whether someone assisting her with a ballot had voted according to her wishes.

Luell, who led the investigation at the request of the district attorney, found an unusual spike in voting at this care facility: 42 people had voted in the 2020 presidential election. That number is usually 10. Furthermore, in 2020, 38 people had requested absentee ballots, up from the usual 0-3 in normal years.

When Luell attempted to contact the families of these voters to check whether their loved ones had the cognitive capacity to cast a vote, seven replied no, and almost all of them hadn’t voted since 2012. One of the family members said his mother would ask him who he was, meaning she didn’t recognize her own son. She hadn’t voted since 2012 — yet MyVote Wisconsin revealed she voted twice in 2020.

This surge in voting was the result of Wisconsin Elections Commission officials breaking state law. The commission — which is made up of six commissioners, including three Democrats and three Republicans, who are appointed by legislative leaders or the governor and serve as an agency in the executive branch under the governor — authorized nursing home employees to help residents vote, which Luell noted “is a direct violation of law.” According to Luell, employees would ask residents how they voted in the past and then vote according to that party. In other words, if Judy’s mother “could only recall JFK,” staff would vote Democrat for her.

According to state law, however, nursing home staff can’t assist residents with voting. In fact, nobody can help the voter other than a relative or “special voting deputies,” which are people appointed by municipal clerks or elections boards to conduct absentee voting at care facilities. In March, however, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent out a letter mandating that municipalities should not use the “special voting deputy process.”

“Ladies and gentleman, it’s not a process. It’s the law,” Luell said, citing state Statute 6.875.

The original letter was issued under the guise of COVID guidelines. Nevertheless, in September, after the governors’ lockdown orders had expired and the initial shock of the pandemic had passed, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent a letter to all residential care facilities telling the workers how to help residents vote, including even marking the ballot for them, in direct violation of state law. Racine law enforcement looked at 2020 visitor logs and found that other visitors were let into the nursing home throughout the pandemic, about 900 times between the decision in March not to use special voting deputies and November 2020. Those visitors included someone to clean the fish tanks and birdcages and even DoorDash delivery people.

“Those people were allowed into the Ridgewood Care Facility, but heaven forbid we make an exception for special voting deputies,” Luell said.

Under Wisconsin state statute 12.13, breaking these laws about special voting deputies constitutes “election fraud,” which is a felony.

“We’re just one of 72 counties, Racine County,” Schmaling noted. “Ridgeland is one of 11 facilities within our county. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these facilities throughout the entire state of Wisconsin. We would be foolish, we would be foolish to think for a moment that this integrity issue, this violation of the statute, occurred to just this small group of people at one care facility in one county in the entire state. I would submit to you that this needs the attorney general’s investigation,” the sheriff said, calling for the AG to launch an immediate probe into the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

This bombshell investigation is only the latest in the long list of malfeasant actions by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, especially regarding the 2020 election. As Wisconsin radio host and lawyer Dan O’Donnell put it, the commission “was downright derelict in its duty to fairly and impartially oversee an election.”

As O’Donnell documented, the commission unlawfully allowed clerks to “cure” ballots, illegally permitted clerks to go home on election night and return to finish counting in the morning, and illegally told clerks they could relocate polling locations in the weeks before the election.

Furthermore, the commission failed to issue relevant laws and rules for training municipal election workers, special voting deputies, and election inspections. Worse, it failed to investigate voter rolls for the hundreds of thousands there incorrectly, including more than 45,000 first-time voters whose names didn’t match Department of Transportation records, among other issues.

As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway outlines in her new book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” the Wisconsin Elections Commission also wrongly kept third-party candidates off the ballot, including Kanye West and the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins. Third parties can significantly affect elections in the Dairy State.

“Following the [Legislative Audit Bureau] report, what Sheriff Schmaling has uncovered + disclosed might only be tip of the iceberg of fraud in the 2020 election. The Legislature must be given the time, resources, and cooperation of election officials to conduct a complete investigation of allegations,” tweeted Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin following the Racine press conference. “Using elderly residents with cognitive decline to commit election fraud is reprehensible, and should concern every Wisconsinite and American.”
Johnson continued: “If Democrats will stoop this low to impact elections, one can only imagine what else they’re willing to do.”

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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President Donald Trump’s Campaign Makes Last Ditch Effort To Toss Out 50,000 Ballots In Wisconsin

Reported by BRIANNA LYMAN, REPORTER | December 29, 2020

US-politics-DEMONSTRATION-TRUMP / Photo by JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AFP via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump appealed his recent loss in the Wisconsin Supreme Court to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, seeking to toss out 50,000 votes and possibly change the election outcome in the state. The campaign is arguing that 50,000 ballots were counted despite the fact that they were allegedly invalid. The campaign says more than 28,000 votes were counted from people who didn’t provide identification and instead used the state’s “indefinitely confined” status to vote. The campaign also alleged some 6,000 ballots were incomplete or altered which is forbidden by state law.

The campaign is seeking an expedited review of the case ahead of Jan. 6 Congressional review of the Electoral College votes. Jim Troupis, the president’s lead attorney in Wisconsin, said that the Wisconsin Supreme Court didn’t address the merits of their claims in an official statement. (RELATED: Trump Demands ‘List’ Of Republicans In Congress Who Say Biden Won)

STERLING, VA – DECEMBER 13: Supporters gather outside Trump National Golf Club as U.S. President Donald Trump departs following a round of golf on December 13, 2020 in Sterling, Virginia. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)

“Regrettably, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in their 4-3 decision, refused to address the merits of our claim. This ‘Cert Petition’ asks them to address our claims, which, if allowed, would change the outcome of the election in Wisconsin.”

“Three members of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice, agreed with many of the President’s claims in written dissents from that court’s December 14 order,” he continued.

Trump lost the state to President-elect Joe Biden by roughly 21,000 votes. Trump’s campaign filed a suit that sought to invalidate more than 221,000 absentee ballots in Dane and Milwaukee counties for purportedly failing to meet requirements to obtain an absentee ballot. The suit also requested the Republican-led state legislature to appoint pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College.

However, the state Supreme Court rejected the suit, ruling the claims were filed too late and one claim lacked merit. However, three dissenting conservative justices argued that the lateness was moot, and the questions about the legality of the votes demands an answer.

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Kylee Zempel Op-ed: To Democrats, ‘Unity’ Means Doing Everything They Want And Shutting Up About It

The only thing worse than listening to a screaming toddler is seeing his smug, tear-stained but smiling face after his parent gives in to his irreverent outburst and rewards him for his tantrum. That’s all I could think about as I walked the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, Saturday night after several news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.

A hopeful energy pulsed through State Street, the bustling pedestrian mall of restaurants and storefronts bookended by the university and the Capitol. I walked past business after business boarded up tight in anticipation of a fiery post-election purge, but instead, front doors were propped open on the uncharacteristically warm November night as groups of friends chattered and shopped and drank in merriment. No sirens or chanting interrupted my pleasant patio dinner date.

I breathed easier than I would have under different circumstances, I’ll admit. Had the media called the race differently, I likely wouldn’t have left the apartment and I certainly wouldn’t have neared downtown. Underneath that peaceful veneer, however, remains the gross reality that things are calm only because the snotty toddler got his way.

Unity Is a Joke

These are the infantile adults that were told “no” in 2016 by the half of the country they most despised and spent the next four years screaming that everything was unfair and that those who disagreed with them were racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. Instead of biting and hitting, they looted and vandalized, and the equally childish media covered for them.

They promised to “impeach the motherf-cker,” canceled dissenters, and maligned anyone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” They smeared mask rebels and churchgoers as grandma-killers and squawked in our faces that boys are girls, silence is violence, and all women are inherently trustworthy, straight white men be damned. Only now that they think they’ve won do they have any interest in faux “unity.”

In a recent editorial, the Washington Examiner posited, “Biden has a historic opportunity to heal the country’s wounds, and if he wants an admired legacy, he will start now to fulfill the promise of his Delaware speech and bring uniter’s, not dividers, into his administration.” Conservatives who fall for this “unity” schtick are hopelessly naïve.

While things might be quiet now, all hell is sure to break loose again the moment things don’t go in the way of the tantrum-throwers. This is because the wrong side won — or at least the fact that they believe they did proves the point. The toddlers got what they wanted. Their abhorrent behavior was reinforced with their most prized reward: the end of the Trump presidency.

Now rather than watching the thugs tear down and set ablaze our livelihoods, we’re stuck looking at their smug faces instead. It was always going to be one or the other: Elect us and we’ll destroy the country, or elect Trump and we’ll destroy your property.

For this reason, the relative peace in our cities now is a bad omen. This cultural calm is a reminder that, like the short-sighted parent capitulating to her toddler, the electorate traded long-term stability for short-term quiet. We didn’t bring an end to the fearmongering and the incivility; we put the uncivil fearmongers in power, and they have sinister plans for their political opponents.

Political Religion Makes All of Life a Holy War

This all goes back to the infantilization of the left, and it’s not surprising. There’s a reason shop-owners were afraid of spurned Biden supporters but relaxed when they remembered the frustrated Trumpsters had no intention of acting out.

When Trump supporters heard the unwelcome news that Biden would ostensibly be the president-elect, they were bummed. Some were mad, others were suspicious, and others felt defeated and discouraged — but they dutifully returned to their daily grinds, clocking in for work, caring for their families, and carrying on their commitments to their churches. That’s because, for so many on the right, politics is an add-on. Family and faith, however imperfectly, inform civic values, but politics is no replacement for those superior institutions.

For many on the left, that isn’t the case. For those who have chosen to worship at the feet of progressivism as religion, this election was life or death because it was central to everything else.

For a population who has pushed off marriage, disposed of its children, abandoned church, and relinquished its independence to the nanny state and its individualism to identity politics, to lose an election is to lose it all. All battles therefore become moral, meaning victory by any means necessary — including stealing and destroying and sometimes even killing — is justified.

Don’t Let the Leftist Toddlers Get Their Way

That leaves us quite a divided America. How can we ever hope for unity when one side holds theother hostage? Give us what we want, or else. That’s no way to start a mutually beneficial negotiation.

So conservatives are left with a choice. Will we continue caving in to the boisterous toddler until it becomes an unruly and insufferable adult? Or will stand our ground and endure the tantrums until the left tuckers itself out on its own fickle rhetoric and runs its own cities into the soil? Don’t relish the present quiet; realize what it stands for.

Presidents come and go, and if Trump does finally lose re-election after all the legal battles run their course, so be it. The worst thing for our country isn’t a Biden presidency. It’s giving the leftist toddlers what they want.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Photo Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons

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Multiple States Throw Support Behind Texas’ Election Lawsuit Against GA, WI, MI, PA

Reported By Ryan Saavedra | Dec 9, 2020 | DailyWire.com

Eric Schmitt, Missouri attorney general, speaks during a news conference outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Monday, Sept. 9, 2019. A group of 50 attorneys general opened a broad investigation into whether advertising practices of Alphabet Inc.'s Google violate antitrust laws. — Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Multiple states have thrown their support behind a Texas election lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin at the United States Supreme Court which alleges that those four states exploited “the COVID-19 pandemic to justify ignoring federal and state election laws and unlawfully enacting last-minute changes, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit late on Monday night, arguing that “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin destroyed that trust and compromised the security and integrity of the 2020 election.”

“The states violated statutes enacted by their duly elected legislatures, thereby violating the Constitution,” Paxton continued. “By ignoring both state and federal law, these states have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but of Texas and every other state that held lawful elections. Their failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election. We now ask that the Supreme Court step in to correct this egregious error.”

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced late on Monday that his state would back Texas’ lawsuit at the Supreme Court.

“Election integrity is central to our republic,” Schmitt wrote on Twitter. “And I will defend it at every turn. As I have in other cases — I will help lead the effort in support of Texas’ #SCOTUS filing today. Missouri is in the fight.”

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry released a statement calling for the Supreme Court to consider the case brought by Texas.

“Only the U.S. Supreme Court can ultimately decide cases of real controversy among the states under our Constitution. That is why the Justices should hear and decide the case which we have joined representing the citizens of Louisiana,” Landry said. “Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court should consider the most recent Texas motion, which contains some of the same arguments. Louisiana citizens are damaged if elections in other states were conducted outside the confines of the Constitution while we obeyed the rules.”

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement that he expects the Supreme Court to “act quickly in deciding whether to grant the State of Texas’s request.”

“That decision will instruct me as to how the State of Alabama will proceed in our fight to ensure election integrity,” the statement continued. “The unconstitutional actions and fraudulent votes in other states not only affect the citizens of those states, they affect the citizens of all states — of the entire United States. Every unlawful vote counted, or lawful vote uncounted, debases and dilutes citizens’ free exercise of the franchise. The State of Alabama will continue to pursue any legal remedy available to protect her people from such disenfranchisement. Both our rights and our republic demand it.”

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said that after reviewing Texas’ lawsuit: “I have determined that I will support the motion by the State of Texas in all legally appropriate manners.”

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Madison, Wisconsin City Attorney, Mike Haas, Threatens TGP for Posting Article Showing Suspect Numbers of Indefinitely Disabled Votes – He’s Former Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator

Reported By Joe Hoft | Published November 30, 2020 at 1:30pm

Two days ago we reported on suspect ballots in Dane County Wisconsin. President Trump followed up our post with a tweet regarding the subject. This past weekend City Attorney for Madison, Wisconsin, Mike Haas, who did not like our post reached out to The Gateway Pundit.

The City Attorney for the Madison (Wisconsin) Attorney’s Office, Mike Haas, opined on our post in an email to us on Sunday:

I hate to burst your bubble Joe, but the initials are for the Clerk who issues the ballots. So why would it be surprising to see the same initials on so many ballots. It would actually be odd if that was not the case. And those “fake votes” in the photo? Those are actually called Express Votes ballots which are cast using universal voting equipment designed to allow people with disabilities to vote. The comments to your article are threatening violence against a public official and your post is irresponsibly promoting that. If I could access the comments to post this information there I would. So instead I am requesting that you remove the inaccurate information from this post. I am the City Attorney for the City of Madison where this happened and if there are additional threats or actual harassment against our employees we will be holding you accountable.

We found the City Attorney’s response threatening and uneducated. His comment about hating to “burst your bubble” of course was also dishonest and unprofessional. Haas asks why it would be surprising to see the same initials on so many absentee ballots but he doesn’t share how many ballots those initials are on. Is it a couple thousand or tens of thousands – we’d like to know?

Haas claims our article and the comments to it were “irresponsibly promoting violence.” Certainly violence is something we would never promote and do not promote. The Gateway Pundit does not support BLM or Antifa or any violent political organization.

Haas threatens us but neglects to acknowledge our first amendment right to free speech. If something is fishy or fraudulent in Wisconsin concerning the 2020 election, we have every right to report it. We look on reporting the truth as our duty and mandate.

The comments from Haas may not be surprising we discovered. He stepped down as the “embattled Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator” in 2018:

Embattled Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Michael Haas said Tuesday that he will step down and not pursue legal options to challenge the state Senate’s rejection of his confirmation last month, saying “it is time for this foolishness to end.”

Haas also issued a warning, saying Wisconsin risks falling “dangerously behind” in preparing for the fall election in the face of risks and threats to the country’s election systems. He urged the Legislature to approve the hiring of three more staffers at the Elections Commission and said he hopes his resignation will remove any obstacle to that happening.

Is Madison Attorney Haas trying to protect others or is he trying to cover something up? We suspect time will provide that answer.

Joe Hoft

Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft. His posts have been retweeted by President Trump and have made the headlines at the Drudge Report. Joe worked as a corporate executive in Hong Kong and traveled the world for his work, which gives him a unique perspective of US and global current events. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of three books. His new book: ‘In God We Trust: Not in Lying Liberal Lunatics’ is out now – please take a look and buy a copy.

@joehoft

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To Democrats, ‘Unity’ Means Doing Everything They Want And Shutting Up About It

The only thing worse than listening to a screaming toddler is seeing his smug, tear-stained but smiling face after his parent gives in to his irreverent outburst and rewards him for his tantrum. That’s all I could think about as I walked the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, Saturday night after several news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.

Unity Is a Joke

These are the infantile adults that were told “no” in 2016 by the half of the country they most despised and spent the next four years screaming that everything was unfair and that those who disagreed with them were racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. Instead of biting and hitting, they looted and vandalized, and the equally childish media covered for them.

They promised to “impeach the motherf-cker,” canceled dissenters, and maligned anyone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” They smeared mask rebels and churchgoers as grandma-killers and squawked in our faces that boys are girls, silence is violence, and all women are inherently trustworthy, straight white men be damned. Only now that they think they’ve won do they have any interest in faux “unity.”

In a recent editorial, the Washington Examiner posited, “Biden has a historic opportunity to heal the country’s wounds, and if he wants an admired legacy, he will start now to fulfill the promise of his Delaware speech and bring uniters, not dividers, into his administration.” Conservatives who fall for this “unity” schtick are hopelessly naive.

Now rather than watching the thugs tear down and set ablaze our livelihoods, we’re stuck looking at their smug faces instead. It was always going to be one or the other: Elect us and we’ll destroy the country, or elect Trump and we’ll destroy your property.

Political Religion Makes All of Life a Holy War

When Trump supporters heard the unwelcome news that Biden would ostensibly be the president-elect, they were bummed. Some were mad, others were suspicious, and others felt defeated and discouraged — but they dutifully returned to their daily grinds, clocking in for work, caring for their families, and carrying on their commitments to their churches.

That’s because, for so many on the right, politics is an add-on. Family and faith, however imperfectly, inform civic values, but politics is no replacement for those superior institutions.

For many on the left, that isn’t the case. For those who have chosen to worship at the feet of progressivism as religion, this election was life or death because it was central to everything else.

For a population who has pushed off marriage, disposed of its children, abandoned church, and relinquished its independence to the nanny state and its individualism to identity politics, to lose an election is to lose it all. All battles therefore become moral, meaning victory by any means necessary — including stealing and destroying and sometimes even killing — is justified.

Don’t Let the Leftist Toddlers Get Their Way

That leaves us quite a divided America. How can we ever hope for unity when one side holds the other hostage? Give us what we want, or else. That’s no way to start a mutually beneficial negotiation.

Presidents come and go, and if Trump does finally lose re-election after all the legal battles run their course, so be it. The worst thing for our country isn’t a Biden presidency. It’s giving the leftist toddlers what they want.

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Photo Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons

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Yes, Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election In Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania

Reported By John Daniel Davidson | NOVEMBER 4, 2020

In the three Midwest battleground states, vote counting irregularities persist in an election that will be decided on razor-thin margins. As of this writing, it appears that Democratic Party machines in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are trying to steal the election.

As reporters and commentators went to bed early Tuesday morning, all three states were too close to call, but President Trump led former Vice President Joe Biden by comfortable margins—far beyond what had been predicted in the polls. None of the networks called these states because enough mail-in ballots remained uncounted that it could swing either way, but Trump’s position looked good.

Then, something strange happened in the dead of the night. In both Michigan and Wisconsin, vote dumps early Wednesday morning showed 100 percent of the votes going for Biden and zero percent—that’s zero, so not even one vote—for Trump.

In Michigan, Biden somehow got 138,339 votes and Trump got none, zero, in an overnight vote-dump.

When my Federalist colleague Sean Davis noted this, Twitter was quick to censor his tweet, even though all he had done was compare two sets of vote totals on the New York Times website. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed—although on Wednesday it appeared that anyone who noted the Biden vote dump in Michigan was getting censored by Twitter.

Others were quick to note the partisan censorship from Twitter and raise concerns over how 100 percent of a vote dump could possibly go to Biden. But the social media giant has maintained its crackdown on sharing this information. Twitter users could not like or share a tweet from the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh noting the 138,339-vote dump.

Buzzfeed later reported that according to a spokesperson at Decision Desk HQ, the votes for Biden were the result of a “data error” from a “file created by the state that we ingested.” When the state noticed the “error” it updated its count, which somehow gave 138,339 votes to Biden and zero to Trump.

It turns out, the vote dump was the result of an alleged typo, an extra zero that had been tacked onto Biden’s vote total in Shiawassee County, Michigan. It seems the error was discovered only because Davis and other Twitter users noted how insane and suspicious the vote totals looked, and demanded an investigation that uncovered what was either a typo or an incredibly clumsy attempt to boost Biden’s vote count.

There was also something suspicious about the vote reporting in Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016. Initial vote totals there showed Biden ahead of Trump by 29 points, a result that can’t possibly be accurate, as plenty of journalists noted.

After the strange results caught national attention, election officials in Antrim County said they were investigating what they called “skewed” results, working with the company that provides their election software to see what went wrong. The county clerk said they plan to have an answer by Wednesday afternoon.

Then another mysterious all-Biden vote dump happened in Wisconsin. Biden miraculously overcame a 4.1-point Trump lead in the middle of the night thanks to vote dumps in which he got—you guessed it—100 percent of the votes and Trump got zero.

Note the vertical lines in both graphs below:

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign demanded a full recount in Wisconsin, citing “reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results.”

In Pennsylvania, the Democratic scheme to steal the election is a bit different. Rather than vote dumps that impossibly go 100 percent to Biden, Pennsylvania is relying on the Democratic Secretary of State’s plan to count indisputably late mail-in ballots as though they were received on Election Day—even if they have no postmark.

This plan was of course rubber-stamped by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which cited the need for “equitable relief” to address mail delays amid the pandemic.

Note that this isn’t just about ballots that come in after Election Day, but about ballots that come in after Election Day that don’t even have a postmark—that is, there is no way to tell when the ballots were mailed, or from where.

Although it’s true that the long delays we’ve seen for absentee ballot counts are due in part to state laws in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that prohibit the counting of absentee ballots before Election Day, which is not the case in most other states. But the cumulative circumstances under which these absentees ballots are now being tallied is highly suspicious.

Unless election officials in Michigan and Wisconsin can explain the overnight vote-dumps and, in Michigan, the “typo” that appeared to benefit Biden, and Pennsylvania officials can explain their rationale for counting ballots with no postmark, the only possible conclusion one can come to right now is that Democrats are trying to steal the election in the Midwest.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

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National Guard brought to Wisconsin to help ensure peaceful ballot counting in two counties with misprinted ballots

Reported by SARAH TAYLOR } Wednesday, November 4, 2020

The National Guard has been brought in to assist Wisconsin poll workers in two counties.

According to Fox News, poll workers in Wisconsin’s Outagamie and Calumet Counties will transfer votes from at least 13,500 misprinted absentee ballots to “clean ballots.”

The outlet notes that this could possibly delay reporting of final results from the state.

“The state Supreme Court refused to issue a ruling on the ballots at issue,” Fox reports, “which cannot be fed into electronic tabulating machines, and instead told Outagamie and Calumet counties to use the statutorily prescribed method of ballot duplication for counting ballots of this nature.”

Further, poll workers were required to wait until 7 a.m. on Tuesday’s Election Day morning to start duplicating ballots.

In 2016, both Outagamie and Calumet Counties voted to elect President Donald Trump.

In a statement, Outagamie County Clerk Lori O’Bright said, “The duplication process will take additional time, so the public should be aware that election results will be delayed. They will be posted as soon as possible.”

The duplication process for each ballot, according to O’Bright, takes approximately four minutes per ballot.

“Voters don’t need to do anything at this point,” O’Bright added. “Per the court’s decision and following the letter of the law, voters can be assured that all votes will be counted. If a voter cast a ballot with the misprinted timing mark, they can rest assured their votes will be counted.”

The deadline for counting non-provisional ballots is 4:00 p.m. local time on Wednesday.

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Watch: Armed Citizens Move to Defend Kenosha Businesses as Rioters Torch the City

Reported by HANNAH BLEAU | 25 Aug 2020

URL of the originating web site: https://www.breitbart.com/law-and-order/2020/08/25/watch-armed-citizens-move-defend-kenosha-businesses-rioters-torch-city/

armed protesters Wisconsin / Twitter/@VenturaReport

Armed citizens moved to defend businesses in Kenosha Monday night as rioters torched the city, targeting businesses for the second night in a row.

Protests swept the city as arsonists brazenly targeted businesses. Jorge Ventura, a field reporter for the Daily Caller, was on the scene and caught up with armed citizens attempting to stop the angry rioters from destroying businesses:

“F*** you, you ain’t with us” woman yells at armed man who is attempting to stop the mob from looting and vandalizing #Kenosha businesses pic.twitter.com/FkDlqz9w4N

— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) August 25, 2020

“Nobody f–k with the business owners,” one man said in a video showing two armed men walking beside a building.

“They’re probably with you. F–k with the government,” another shouted.

“These guys [business powers] are probably out here with the BLM protesters,” one of the men, hailing from Milwaukee, told Ventura. “They don’t want the government to shoot people. They’re against the government too, probably. The government f–ks them every day. Taxes, shit like that.”

He made it clear that he believes the officer-involved Kenosha shooting incident is “bulls–t” but drew the line at protesters destroying businesses:

Three armed men attempted to protect #Kenosha businesses from being looted and vandalized. #Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/wxcJnqLsnz

— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) August 25, 2020

Several videos from reporters on the ground show protesters vandalizing businesses and buildings completely engulfed by flames:

Dealership cars being smashed with baseball bats by mob #Kenosha pic.twitter.com/CHBGtn1UAz

— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) August 25, 2020

A city in flames tonight. #Kenosha pic.twitter.com/SzOhMJTNF0

— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) August 25, 2020

Local businesses set to flame in #Kenosha pic.twitter.com/nOb29M5Bu5

— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) August 25, 2020

Furniture store in #Kenosha set ablaze by mob. #Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/m4amzmCE68

— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) August 25, 2020

KENOSHA: dozens of vehicle fires were set by #BLM arsonists in Wisconsin tonight

Explosions rocked the neighborhood as fuel tanks combusted due to the flames pic.twitter.com/u3pyKzkzfp

— ELIJAH RIOT (@ElijahSchaffer) August 25, 2020

KENOSHA: The city is burning tonight as dozens of cars have been engulfed in flames after being targeted by #BLM arsonists

This is only one city block, but there were many other vehicles around the city completely destroyed

More than 40 at the very least pic.twitter.com/kJ6qCCqlUf

— ELIJAH RIOT (@ElijahSchaffer) August 25, 2020

BREAKING: Kenosha is once again on fire as National Guard are deployed

a curfew was recently put in place after a state of emergency was declared pic.twitter.com/UjAm2SeWgp

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) August 25, 2020

Another Kenosha garbage truck has been set on fire. pic.twitter.com/hfymZ2FdJW

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) August 25, 2020

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) appeared to stand in solidarity with protesters, referring to the officer-involved incident, which is still being investigated, as “another attack against a Black man” and declaring racism a “public health crisis.”

“As folks across our state are making their voices heard, they should be able to assemble and report on these issues without any fear of being unsafe. If you are exercising that right, please do so peacefully, wear your masks, and keep physical distance as best as you can,” he said on Monday, prior to the second night of lawlessness:

Pete Deates, president of the Kenosha Professional Police Association, blasted Evers for his initial response to the incident, calling it “wholly irresponsible and not reflective of the hardworking members of the law enforcement community, not to mention the citizens of the City of Kenosha.”

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Watch: Kenosha Rioters Attack Man Defending Charitable Association

Reported by ALANA MASTRANGELO | 25 Aug 2020

URL of the originating web site: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/25/watch-kenosha-rioters-attack-man-defending-charitable-association/

Kenosha riots flag (Scott Olson / Getty)

A video published to social media on Tuesday appears to show Black Lives Matter (BLM) rioters attacking a man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as he tried to defend a charitable association with a fire extinguisher.

“Looters assault an older business owner trying to defend his business in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 24, 2020,” read the caption of the video posted to Twitter on Tuesday.

In the video, the man can be seen at the entrance to Danish Brotherhood Lodge 14 — a charitable society that was set on fire by rioters on Monday — with a fire extinguisher, which he then uses to spray at rioters in an attempt to drive them away from the building.

Watch below:

The Danish Brotherhood Lodge can be identified by the archway of the building in the video, which matches photos of the lodge on Google.

“Dude I’m gonna help this guy, I don’t give a fuck if I get beat up,” says the individual who is records the incident.

As the man sprays rioters — who are actively looting — with the fire extinguisher, he is then punched in the head from behind from another individual, causing him to fall to the ground, bleeding from the head. In the next clip, it appears that Good Samaritans have arrived on the scene to assist the man while a crowd has formed around them.

“We are trying to protect ourselves,” argues one apparent Black Lives Matter protester in the video, as the Good Samaritans assists the injured man.

“You don’t understand what terrifies these black men out here, they not making it home to their families,” the protester adds. “Understand, respect, how about that? It’s called respect.”

During the last few days, rioters have taken to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where they looted the city’s businesses as gunshots rang out across the city. Rioters also shot industrial-strength fireworks and hurled dozens of bottles and other objects at National Guard troops who were stationed in front of a courthouse.

The violence that ensued across Kenosha was triggered by an incident on Sunday in which police officers shot a black man seven times from behind as he allegedly refused a lawful order to stop and allegedly attempted to gain entry to a vehicle.

Breitbart News has reached out to the Danish Brotherhood Lodge 14 for comment.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler at @alana, and on Instagram.

Photo: Arson in Kenosha (Getty, file)

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Black Lives Matter Destroys Statue of Immigrant Who Died Fighting Slavery

Reported by JOEL B. POLLAK | 23 Jun 2020

URL of the originating web site: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/23/black-lives-matter-destroys-statue-of-immigrant-who-died-fighting-slavery/

Hans Christian Heg (Phil Roeder / Flickr / CC / Cropped)

Protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement vandalized and toppled a statue Tuesday night in Madison, Wisconsin, of Col. Hans Christian Heg, an immigrant from Norway who died fighting for the Union against slavery.

Local ABC affiliate WKOW reported:

Protesters pulled down the Forward statue that normally stands outside the State Capitol and left it lying in the middle of the road.

…

The same group also tore down the Col. Hans Christian Heg statue a short time later. The group then went on to throw the statue into Lake Monona. Heg fought for the Union during the Civil War and was a stark opponent of slavery during that time.

Tweets of the destruction showed Heg’s pedestal vandalized with the words “BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL” scrawled across it.

The statue was decapitated and thrown into a nearby lake.

WKOW reported that the protesters also damaged a government building.

Heg was a Republican who served as the state prison commissioner, favoring vocational training for convicts.

The Wisconsin Historical Society describes Col. Heg as follows:

Heg migrated to the United States from Norway as a child in 1840 and spent his youth at Muskego, in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. As a young man he went to California in the Gold Rush and stayed from 1849-1851. He returned to Wisconsin in 1851 following the death of his parents in order to care for his younger siblings and manage the family farm.

…

In the fall of 1861 a new Scandinavian regiment was recruited and Heg accepted appointment as its colonel. The 15th Wisconsin Infantry, made up largely of recent immigrants, went into training at Camp Randall in December and left for the South on March 2, 1862.

…

On December 30, 1862, at the battle of Stones River, Heg’s regiment lost more than 100 men. His horse was shot out from under him and his general called him “the bravest of the brave.” In February 1863 Heg was put in command of the entire brigade and pursued retreating Confederate troops through Tennessee, briefly into Alabama, and across the state line to Chickamauga, Georgia.

…

On the afternoon of September 19, 1863, Heg was charging forward at the front of his troops when he was shot in the abdomen. He managed to stay in the saddle for a short time, but loss of blood compelled him to leave the field and move to a hospital behind the lines where he died the next morning.

Democrats hope to win Wisconsin back in the 2020 presidential election.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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Welfare Abusers Get Nasty News from Trump: Time To Go to Work

Reported By Jared Harris | November 1, 2018 at 3:41pm

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/welfare-abusers-get-nasty-news-trump-time-go-work/

Many Medicaid recipients in Wisconsin will now have to work to continue benefiting from the program.

President Donald Trump’s administration approved the work requirements Wednesday. The approval also allowed the state to begin charging monthly premiums of up to $8 for those who make between 50 percent and 100 percent of the federal poverty level, as well as a co-payments for using an emergency room for non-emergency services.

The new rules require childless adults under 50 to work at least 80 hours a month to maintain their coverage. If they do not fulfill these work requirements for a 48-month period, they will lose coverage, The Hill reported.

After being kicked from the program, an applicant would have to wait an additional six months to reapply.

Gov. Scott Walker celebrated the requirements, saying in a tweet “We’re removing barriers to work to help Wisconsinites transition from government dependence to true independence!”

With crucial elections less than a week away, this may have been a risky move for conservatives in the Badger State. Gov. Walker’s opponent this year is Democrat Tony Evers. Evers does not support the work requirements and is already leading in several polls. The fallout from this decision may place him even further ahead. Even if this decision costs Walker the governorship, it needed to be done.

Welfare is seen by many as one of the worst things to impact poor communities. The benefits, which still do not require any work in most states, are said to subsidize unemployment and encourage fraud.

Arkansas is another state that recently instituted a work requirement for Medicaid. The state dropped over 4,000 people from the taxpayer’s payroll after the conditions went into effect.

Need for social safety net programs is slowly disappearing, as nationwide unemployment has been steadily dwindling down ever since Trump’s historic victory in 2016. The unemployment rate recently hit a 49-year low and shows little signs of slowing. More people are now working, and with a slowdown of welfare expansion, the American economy is primed for an even higher upwards trend.

Democrats are planning to undo that hard work, and how far they get with that plan all comes down to how conservative America confronts the democratic blue wave. With a bulwark of liberal voters ready to flood the polls on election day, only a large turnout of Republicans will be able to counter it.

Like many recent stories, the future of this one depends on what happens on Nov. 6.

If Americans confirm the work of the GOP and President Trump, work requirements are likely to increase across the nation. In the case of a Democratic victory, welfare restrictions may become a thing of the past.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jared Harris

Editor

Jared is a husband, dad, and aspiring farmer. He was an infantryman in the Arkansas and Georgia National Guard. If he’s not with his wife and son, then he’s either shooting guns or working on his motorcycle.

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DEAR DEMOCRAT DUMBASSES: Guess WHO Voter Fraud In Michigan FAVORED

Published on December 6, 2016

URL of the original posting site: http://clashdaily.com/2016/12/dear-democrat-dumbasses-guess-voter-fraud-michigan-favored/

Jill Stein was an idiot before. She remains one now.

“Eighty-seven of Wayne County’s decade-old voting machines broke on election day, according to Detroit’s elections director, Daniel Baxter. He told the Detroit News, which first reported the story, that ballot scanners often jammed when polling place workers were trying to operate them. Every time a jammed ballot was removed and reinserted, he suspects the machine may have re-counted it.”

In other words, in an area where the significant majority of people voted for Hillary Clinton, their votes may have been counted twice.

This means that Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan may be even larger than the 10,704 votes initially recorded. — The Guardian

And in Wisconsin? Trump’s lead is up by 26 votes.

THAT was a productive use of taxpayer time, energy and funds.

Yes, Jill Stein is in fact an idiot.

Hillary must be thrilled to lose some of her ‘Popular Vote’ lead.

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In Wake of Paris Terrorist Attacks, Here’s a Map of the States Shutting Their Doors to Syrian Refugees

Reported by Kelsey Harkness / @kelseyjharkness / November 16, 2015

URL of the original posting site: http://dailysignal.com/2015/11/16/in-wake-of-paris-terrorist-attacks-15-states-shut-their-doors-to-syrian-refugees/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=morningbell&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRous6TAZKXonjHpfsX74%2BokW6S2hYkz2EFye%2BLIHETpodcMTcFmMLrYDBceEJhqyQJxPr3NLtQN191pRhLiDA%3D%3D

On Monday and into Tuesday, more than two dozen governors moved to block Syrian refugees from entering their states. (Photo: Kelsey Lucas/Visualsey)

In the aftermath of Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, governors across the United States are attempting to shut their doors on Syrian refugees looking to find a safe haven in the country. As of Monday evening, more than two dozen governors announced opposition to policies that would permit Syrian refugees to enter their states amid concerns they could have ties to terrorists.

Thus far, states whose governors oppose more Syrian refugees include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Maryland, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Kentucky Gov.-elect Matt Bevin, who will take office Dec. 8, also said he opposes resettlement efforts.

The movement, which was overwhelmingly spearheaded by Republican governors, came after French prosecutors discovered a Syrian passport on one of the suspected Islamic State suicide bombers in Paris. That finding raised concerns that terrorists are embedding with refugees to enter Europe and other nations. Do you want

The series of attacks in Paris on Friday night left more than 130 dead and hundreds others injured. French President François Hollande called the attacks an “act of war” and launched airstrikes against ISIS.

President Barack Obama sharply pushed back against the growing number of states attempting to undermine his policies surrounding Syrian refugees, saying Monday at a press conference in Antalya, Turkey, that it would be “shameful” and “not American” to close America’s doors on Syrian refugees.

“When some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful,” he said. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

In September, Obama vowed to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States next year.

As of Nov. 3, there were more than 4 million registered Syrian refugees, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency.

Those issuing executive orders to block refugees pushed back on the president’s narrative while announcing their decision.

“Michigan is a welcoming state, and we are proud of our rich history of immigration,” said Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. “But our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents.”

In a letter addressed to the president, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, “Neither you nor any federal official can guarantee that Syrian refugees will not be part of any terroristic activity. As such, opening our door to them irresponsibly exposes our fellow Americans to unacceptable peril.”

While their responses send a clear message to the president, John Malcolm, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, said the practical implications blocking refugees are limited.

“Governors can certainly order state agencies to stop doing anything to assist federal authorities with their resettlement efforts, but they cannot stop federal authorities from continuing those efforts, nor can they stop immigrants who are lawfully admitted to this country from moving to and settling in those states,” Malcolm said. “They can, however, ask state law enforcement authorities to keep an eye on the refugees who settle in their states, so long as those authorities do so within the bounds of the Constitution.”

“It’s abhorrent for the federal government not to consult with and consider the interests of the states,” added Jim Carafano, a foreign policy expert at The Heritage Foundation. “Particularly the views of governors, as it impacts the welfare and public safety of their citizens.”

Florida Gov. Rick Scott addressed those concerns in a letter sent to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. In that letter, dated Nov. 16, Scott wrote:

[I]t is our understanding that the state does not have the authority to prevent the federal government from funding the relocation of these Syrian refugees to Florida even without state support. Therefore, we are asking the United States Congress to take immediate and aggressive action to prevent President Obama and his administration from using any federal tax dollars to fund the relocation of up to 425 Syrian refugees (the total possible number of refugees pending for state relocation support at this time) to Florida, or anywhere in the United States, without an extensive evaluation of the risk these individuals may post to our national security.

In response, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced legislation on Monday afternoon that would suspend issuance of visas to refugees from countries with a high risk of terrorism until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security meets certain standards. Those standards include fingerprinting and screening all refugees, implement a tracking system “to catch attempted overstays,” and enhancing security measures that are already in place.

“The time has come to stop terrorists from walking in our front door. The Boston Marathon bombers were refugees, and numerous refugees from Iraq, including some living in my hometown, have attempted to commit terrorist attacks,” Paul said in a press release.

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, also called to suspend the refugee program.

“The Syrian refugee program should be suspended until the American people are satisfied that they know exactly who the president is admitting into the country via this program,” Burr said. “There is simply too much at stake, and the security of the American people should be our top priority.”

This article and its accompanying map has been updated to reflect the growing number of governors who do not wish to permit Syrian refugees into their state.

In God We Trust freedom combo 2

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Wisconsin Mob: ‘We Need to Start Killing These Officers’; Punched Police Officer

by Jerome Hudson 3 Sep 2015

URL of the original posting site: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/03/wisconsin-mob-we-need-to-start-killing-these-officers-officer-punched-in-face

Two women in Madison, Wisconsin were arrested Wednesday night after punching and threatening to kill a police officer who was responding to a 911 call about a nearby street brawl.

Within minutes of arriving on the scene, police said the officer attempted to arrest a woman he saw punch a man in the face but was quickly overwhelmed by a mob of people chanting anti-police slurs, including “We need to start killing these officers.”

Police said Nanyamka N. James, 20, attacked the officer in an attempt to free her mother, Latonya B. James, 40, WISCTV reported. The mother grabbed the officer by the throat and punched him in the face, according to a Madison Police Department press release.

One witness told police that they heard the mother repeatedly threatening to kill the officer.

The mother was arrested for battery to a law enforcement officer, possession of pepper spray, and resisting arrest, according to the Madison Police. Nanyamka N. James, who is on parole, was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

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Society

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Scott Walker Saves Hundreds, Perhaps Thousands, of Lives in Wisconsin – Liberals Explode in Anger!

By Onan Coca / 23 July 2015

URL of the original posting site: http://eaglerising.com/21292/scott-walker-saves-hundreds-perhaps-thousands-of-lives-in-wisconsin-liberals-explode-in-anger/#8ZMK2puFTwmpkO4D.99

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Presidential candidate and Wisconsin Governor acted save hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives on Monday when he signed a bill banning non-emergency abortions after 20 weeks. Noting the scientific research that has been done, proving that children as young as 20-weeks (sometimes even younger)can indeed feel pain while in their mother’s wombs, Walker argued that they should not be subjected to such painful torture, as abortion clearly is.

“For people, regardless of where they might stand, when an unborn child can feel pain I think most people feel it’s appropriate to protect that child.”

Sadly Walker is wrong. Abortion activists very clearly don’t care if the child feels pain, if the child can think, or if the child could live outside the mother. All they care about is having the ability to kill their children at any point before they baby is actually born. (Even then some abortion activists argue that they should be able to kill the child when it is partially born, and other activists argue that they should be able to kill children as old as toddlers!)

In Wisconsin baby-murder defenders became apoplectic upon hearing of the new abortion ban. They argue that banning abortions on babies who can feel the horrible pain of being torn to pieces means that women will be hurt. “This law doesn’t only undermine the most basic women’s health services. It’s radical, dangerous, and lacks respect for half the population of Wisconsin,” argued DNC regional spokesperson Kaylie Hanson.

Interestingly enough, this is the same reason that some serial killers believe that murder should not be illegal. Apparently, serial killers believe that laws against murder undermine their basic health (psychiatric) services, and that it doesn’t respect the needs and wants of the serial killer population in America. After all, serial killers are people too.

A very loud Hoorah to Governor Walker. Way to protect the people of your state even in the face of stiff, liberal opposition. Way to defend life and stand against evil – even if it could cost you political points in the not so distant future. We urge every GOP candidate (and every Democrat politician as well) to stand for life and to support laws which would inhibit or end abortion in America. We must stop this American genocide against our innocent children.

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Ann Coulter Letter: “ISIS: 0; Ted Kennedy: Too Many To Count”

Commentary by Ann Coulter | Wednesday Jul 8, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://humanevents.com/2015/07/08/isis-0-ted-kennedy-too-many-to-count/?utm_source=coulterdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

ISIS: 0; Ted Kennedy: Too Many To Count

In the days leading up to July Fourth weekend, Americans were hysterically warned about an ISIS attack in the United States. Congressman Peter King, for example, somberly advised Fox News viewers that “this is the most concerned I’ve seen the FBI and Homeland Security” since 9/11.

And, once again, the weekend came and went without anyone in America being killed by ISIS, but a lot of people being killed by immigrants — legal, illegal, second generation and anchor babies. There’s no way to know exactly how many Americans were killed July Fourth weekend as a result of the country’s immigration policies, because the media don’t trust us with the truth.

But the holiday weekend kicked off with the news that an illegal alien from Mexico, Francisco Sanchez, had shot and killed 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle on Wednesday on a San Francisco pier. The most surprising aspect of the crime was that we were told right away that Steinle’s suspected killer was an illegal alien. Usually, we only find out that the perp was an immigrant years later when the Spanish translators show up in court.

The day after Steinle was shot to death, the Associated Press reported that members of the Mexican mafia and their associates — Loribeth Martinez, John Mendoza Jr., Kristopher Sanchez and Veronica Sanchez — had been arrested for the murder of two people, Traci Lynn Lemley and Jeremy Carrico, in San Antonio, Texas.

Also on Thursday:

– A fifth suspect in a shooting in Las Vegas, Benjamin Hernandez, was arrested. He joined Yors “Cuete” Garcia-Mier, Nicholas Pedro “Silent” Cortes, Miguel “Trips” Salazar and Jeiszon Valles in jail for the killing.

– In New Jersey, an illegal alien from Ecuador was indicted for attempting to murder his ex-wife by stabbing her with a steak knife in front of one of their children. (Gosh — I hope all those kids were born here, so the media can start referring to them as “American citizens” right away.)

– The bodies of two Americans, Michael Careccia and his wife, Tina, were dug out of the Arizona desert, and Jose Valenzuela, was arrested for their murder.

– An illegal immigrant from Mexico, Juan Francisco de Luna Vasquez, murdered his wife with a hammer in Laredo, Texas. Vasquez had previously been charged with assault, making terroristic threats, DWI and evading arrest. It just sounds awful to be living in the shadows like that!

That was Thursday. And I didn’t even include drunk driving fatalities, a specialty of our Latin American immigrants. (It may not be a good idea to pluck people from the Mayan jungle and put them directly on American roads and highways.)

On Friday, as Americans worried about the imminent ISIS attack:

– Prudencio Juan Fragos-Ramirez, an illegal alien in Washington state, was accused of murdering an 18-year-old and her toddler son, then setting the pair on fire.

– Irina Kolenkina, a Russian immigrant who does not speak English, was ordered to stand trial for the murder of her husband in Vienna, Wisconsin. Kolenkina had to be put into restraints because she became so combative upon her arrest.

– Illegal immigrant Sinar Roblero Escalante found out he would get off scot-free for killing a 24-year-old man in East Naples, Florida, 10 years ago in a car accident. After the crash, Escalante had fled the scene on foot. He went on the lam and is believed to have hid out in Mexico for at least part of that time — thus, outlasting the statute of limitations. Escalante was recently re-arrested after being caught in his car with a baggie of cocaine on his lap.

– In another immigration success story, Andrew Romero assaulted a prison guard in New Mexico last week. Romero is awaiting trial on charges that he murdered Rio Rancho Police officer Gregg Benner.

– On our nation’s birthday, it was reported that Brogenet Cinor, a Haitian voodoo priest, was arrested for child rape in Florida.

– On Monday, an illegal alien from Mexico engaged in a fatal hit-and-run accident in Bellingham, Washington, then fled the scene of the accident. Witnesses described a “short Hispanic man” running from the car, which was littered with empty beer bottles and a case of Modelo Especial. The illegal farm worker doesn’t speak English, but he was able to ask for an attorney in Spanish.

In related news, a non-elderly woman in Washington state became the first person to die of measles in the U.S. since 2003.

On the bright side, heading into the July 4 weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that it is reconsidering its policy of releasing convicted criminal illegal aliens into the public without warning. This was the agency’s lightning-fast response to the murder of 21-year-old Grant Ronnebeck by a Mexican illegal alien in Arizona last January.

Apolinar Altamirano had been released by ICE because the charge on his conviction sheet was “burglary,” which our public servants deemed a “nonviolent” offense. But burglary was merely the charge Altamirano had agreed to in a plea bargain. His actual crime, according to the victim, was to break into her home with two accomplices, steal all her belongings, kidnap and rape her.

Mexico really is sending us its best people!

Some of these crimes were committed by legal residents — even “citizens.” But without Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act, combined with Justice William Brennan’s 1982 anchor baby invention, the “Mexican mafia” would not be living in America, much less be “citizens.”

Just as America’s immigration policies began favoring people from cultures as different from ours as possible, we also began providing government assistance to any loser immigrants and refusing to deport the criminals.

There’s no question but that the only reason any of this week’s criminal immigrants are in America at all is because of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act.

Now go back to worrying about ISIS.

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Opinion

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Starnes: School Tells Kids to Pretend They’re Muslims

Published April 15, 2015, By Todd Starnes, Fox Nation

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://nation.foxnews.com/2015/04/15/starnes-school-tells-kids-lets-pretend-were-muslims

Let’s pretend we’re Muslims — that was the assignment in a world history class at Union Grove High School in Wisconsin. Students were told to provide examples of how they practice the Islamic faith and the struggles they face.

One parent reached out to EAG News, accusing the school of indoctrination. This is the same school that once told kids that conservatism meant restricting personal freedoms.

So here’s the question: Were students ever told to pretend they were Jewish or Christian or Hindu? It seems to be a straightforward question – but one the local school district will not answer.

For quite some time, I have been exposing the Islamafication of American public schools. The Muslim faith has been given accommodation while the Christian faith has been marginalized.

As I wrote in my book, God Less America, Islamic advocates are waging what they call a stealth jihad in our school system. And if left unchecked, they will be successful in undermining the Judeo Christian values upon which our great country was founded.

Watch Todd’s Report Below:

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School district distributes lesson plan that compares Ferguson protests with Boston Tea Party

By Howard Portnoy on December 4, 2014

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/12/04/school-district-distributes-lesson-plan-compares-ferguson-protests-boston-tea-party/#xlqYWMgtEUZzkAfu.99

I was under the impression that the Boston Tea Party was no longer taught in the nation’s schools because it is insulting to American Indians. Obviously I was mistaken:

After protesters in Ferguson, Missouri looted shops, burned police cars, and harassed reporters in the wake of a grand jury decision they disagreed with, the Madison Metropolitan School District in Madison, Wisconsin circulated a guide to teachers offering tips about how to talk about Ferguson with students.

Calling the Ferguson riots “a teachable moment for our students,” the Madison teacher’s guide encourages educators to use the resources and articles linked in the document, “to help frame the issues in Ferguson in a historical perspective.”

One of the resources linked in the document is a blog post by a Michigan teacher from August that compares the Ferguson riots and looting to the Boston Tea Party. Another resource linked was an article from The Atlantic titled “Reparations for Ferguson” that compared police officers to predators. [Emphasis added]

OK, let’s back up here and take a closer look at this comparison. The Boston Tea Party was a carefully planned and organized protest by the Sons of Liberty against a scheme by the British Crown to impose unfair taxes on the colonists. The Ferguson protests were a spontaneous, if predictable, mob reaction to a shooting death, egged on by “community organizers,” that resulted in the wholesale destruction of property in the predominantly black St. Louis suburb. About the only thing the two events have in common is that both can fairly be described as protests.

While we’re on the subject of education, this protester in New York City could certainly stand to do some work in remedial spelling:

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By WhatDidYouSay.org

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Education

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Union Households Not Happy with Their Union Bosses

Scott Walker drove a stake through the heart of public employee unions in Wisconsin and survived a viscous onslaught from Democrats and their union owners in the process.

The UAW got their clock cleaned in Chattanooga, TN in a union election at Volkswagen plant, a plant where the management was not only not hostile to the union, but welcomed them and worked with them to organize their workers. Then the recent SCOTUS decision that held that public employee unions like SEIU and AFSCME could not organize home health care workers.

The bottom line isn’t going unnoticed, although it is going unpublicized. For example, in Wisconsin, every school district that complied with Act 10, the legislation curtailing public employee union contracts, no tax increases were necessary to fund schools and districts that had been facing huge deficits were suddenly facing balanced budgets or surpluses.

A number of districts in very liberal cities signed contract extensions with their teachers unions to avoid Act 10.

In every one of those districts teachers were laid off and taxes were either increased or budgets slashed in other areas to pay for teacher benefits.

This week, a new wrinkle got publicized although we had to stumble across it as opposed to hearing about it on a major news outlet. Not even FoxNews reported it. The Oregon Catalyst reported the follow good news for tax payers and bad news for union bosses.

Because of a deal struck by Governor John Kitzhaber, Oregonians won’t have the opportunity to end forced union dues in the public sector this year. However, a just-released public opinion poll makes it clear that if the Public Employee Choice Act had been on this November’s ballot, most voters likely would have supported it.

The poll, conducted for National Employee Freedom Week (August 10-16) asked adults across America:

“Should employees have the right to decide, without force or penalty, whether to join or leave a labor union?”

Nationwide, 82.9 percent of respondents answered Yes. Of the 500 respondents in Oregon, a resounding 84 percent answered Yes.*

This poll may be surprising to some, but not to us here at CurmudgeonCentral! because we’ve followed the results of right to work legislation, most recently in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Teachers Union and AFSCME, the two major public employee unions lost up to 75% of their membership and millions of dollars in dues. The biggest losers in the lost dues was the Democratic Party, because their largest donors are unions.

It’s time for conservatives to take heart and start working toward granting the right to work in states where unions still hold the workforce – and the taxpayers – captive. Given the alternative, workers would prefer to spend the outrageous amounts collected by their unions and given to Democrats on their families than on their union bosses lavish lifestyles.

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Delegates begin planning for changes to U.S. Constitution

http://minutemennews.com/2014/06/delegates-begin-planning-changes-u-s-constitution/

The significance of the work undertaken by The Mount Vernon Assembly to prepare for a future Convention of the States was not lost on the 94 official and participating delegates, mostly Republicans, who filled the House chamber.

“Nothing like this has occurred in over two centuries, though certainly the founders of this nation assumed it would have happened long ago,” said Indiana Senate President David Long, R-Fort Wayne, an organizer of the meeting.

Article V of the U.S. Constitution requires Congress call a Convention of the States for proposing constitutional amendments if legislatures in two-thirds of the states (34 states) request one. If the convention approves an amendment, it then can be ratified by three-fourths of the states (38 states) and added to the Constitution without additional congressional approval.

However, because an Article V convention never has been called, there are no clear procedures on how it would begin, what rules the convention would follow or whether it could be limited in scope.

The Mount Vernon Assembly, which organized last December at George Washington’s Virginia estate and is planning to change its name to the Assembly of State Legislatures, has taken it upon itself to start answering those questions to ensure a future Convention of the States gets off on the right foot.

“It has been a failure on the part of state legislatures for not stepping up for the past 200 years and saying, here’s how we’re going to do it, so that’s what we’re doing,” said state Rep. Chris Kapenga, a Wisconsin Republican.

“It’s time we accept the responsibility given us because there’s little debate in state legislatures, or in the public, that something’s not right in Washington.”

Throughout the morning, delegates discussed their organizing principles and whether they were being too deliberate in their planning.

Kapenga pushed back on the few lawmakers who wanted to jump ahead to debating amendment proposals that someday could be considered by a Convention of the States.

“This is the Constitution of the United States — we have to be very cautious and go through this process where we make sure anything that we put down is debated and discussed, and debated and discussed, and the final product is solid,” Kapenga said.

In the afternoon, delegates organized into four committees to begin tackling detailed planning questions for a Convention of the States, including how many delegates each state should have, whether states must send Congress an identical request and whether past state calls for Article V conventions, such as those submitted by Indiana in 1861 and 1979, are still valid.

State Sen. Jim Arnold, D-LaPorte, was appointed co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He will help shape answers to those questions and others ahead of the assembly’s December meeting, where its proposed rules for a Convention of the States will be approved.

Ultimately, the Convention of the States, if one ever is called, must decide whether to accept the rules and procedures proposed by the Assembly of State Legislatures.

Long said regardless of that decision, the work of planning and preparing for a convention has reminded states of their rights under America’s federalist system of government and their role in the constitutional amendment process.

“States’ rights has never been, nor should it ever be, a partisan issue,” Long said. “It is instead a constitutionally based concept that has made us the great country that we are today — 50 independent states, governed separately but united together.”

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Wisconsin’

BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Wisconsin’s premier children’s hospital has had its fair share of scandal, particularly with regard to religious liberty and leadership, but the bar just keeps getting lower: Children’s Wisconsin is now hiring trans activists as chaplains and “spiritual care interns.”

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BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JULY 19, 2022

From the Voter-Rejected Wing of the GOP

The Man Who Lost the Decades-Long Battle for Election Integrity

So, What About the Report’s Substance?

Reports Like This Harm the Republic

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REPORTED BY: ROBERT BUSEK | JUNE 08, 2022

Avoiding Accountability at All Costs

Legacy Media Provide Covering Fire

Institutional Suicide

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REPORTED BY: M.D. KITTLE | MARCH 08, 2022

Madison, Wis. — Parents are “not entitled” to know their kids’ gender identity, according to a recent training session in Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District.

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Reported By Jim Hoft | Published March 1, 2022

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REPORTED BY: WILLIAM DOYLE | FEBRUARY 15, 2022

CTCL’s Goal Was to Influence Absentee Voters

Wisconsin Illustrates Extravagant Plans

Violating Voting Booth’s Sanctity

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REPORTED BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 26, 2022

Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at The Federalist and a student at the University of Mary Washington, where he plans to major in Political Science and minor in Journalism. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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REPORTED BY: LOGAN WASHBURN | JANUARY 26, 2022

Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He is a correspondent for Campus Reform and an outreach assistant for the Freedom Foundation.

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Reported BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JANUARY 11, 2022

Calling All Parents

No Room for Apathy

A Time for Choosing

Jumping in the Ring

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Reported by BRIANNA LYMAN | REPORTER | November 19, 2021

Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted Friday of all charges in relation to the deaths Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber.

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NOVEMBER 16, 2021 By Eddie Scarry

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People.”

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Reported By Kylee Zempel | NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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Reported by PHIL SHIVER | November 02, 2021

What’s the background?

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People.”

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Reported By Kylee Zempel | OCTOBER 29, 2021

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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Unity Is a Joke

Political Religion Makes All of Life a Holy War

Don’t Let the Leftist Toddlers Get Their Way

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Embattled Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Michael Haas said Tuesday that he will step down and not pursue legal options to challenge the state Senate’s rejection of his confirmation last month, saying “it is time for this foolishness to end.”

Is Madison Attorney Haas trying to protect others or is he trying to cover something up? We suspect time will provide that answer.

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