Christina Bohannan interned at Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection
Democrats lie effortlessly. I assume sociopathy is requisite for the role [US Patriot]
Democratic congressional candidate Christina Bohannan often boasts that she once worked as an environmental engineer. She always fails to mention it was an internship.
On Thursday, the Iowa state legislator, who is running to represent the state’s first district in Congress, told a Pella, Iowa, audience that she worked as an “environmental engineer with the Department of Environmental Protection in Florida doing water quality work.” Her résumé shows this was an internship Bohannan held for four years while studying at the University of Florida. No further experience in the field is listed, and she still holds just an engineering intern license in the state.
Bohannan did not return a request for comment.
As a swing-district Democrat facing off against incumbent Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R.), Bohannan has tried to cultivate the image of a pragmatic moderate, burnishing her apparent engineering credentials to speak to local concerns. In a 2020 letter to the Iowa City Press-Citizen, a Democratic official said Bohannan’s experience was of “critical importance for improving Iowa’s water quality issues.”
Bohannan’s campaign website also says she is a “former engineer.” One progressive group touted Bohannan’s “pro-science policies” and experience as an environmental engineer in its endorsement.
In October, a Wikipedia user who identified as Bohannan’s “State House campaign manager” edited the candidate’s page to add she was an “environmental” engineer, the site’s revision history shows.
Bohannan’s effort to appear moderate has also led her to disavow past policy positions. In August, she scrubbed her old campaign site of endorsements for taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries and opposition to voter ID laws. Around 70 percent of Iowans support voter ID, a 2017 Des Moines Register poll found.
In 2019, Bohannan contributed to a bail fund for illegal immigrants maintained by a group that wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and work toward a “world without police.” She has also opposed school choice as a lawmaker while sending her daughter to a private school.
Before her run for Congress, Bohannan served as a legislator in Iowa’s heavily Democratic 85th district. She has been a professor at the University of Iowa’s law school since 2000. Her résumé lists publications on antitrust and copyright law but nothing about environmental issues.
In July, an internal poll by Bohannan’s campaign revealed the Democrat trailing Miller-Meeks by 1 point, the Iowa-based Gazettereported. About 22 percent of the voters surveyed remain undecided.
After criticism from conservative lawmakers and backlash from citizens nationwide, the Fargo Board of Education on Aug. 18 voted to reverse course on its previous week’s decision to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before its meetings.
On Aug. 9, seven of the board’s nine members, including four newcomers who took office in June, voted to cancel a previous board measure that was instituted in March before the election.
Board vice president Seth Holden said at the Aug. 9 meeting that the Pledge of Allegiance was contrary to the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities.
“Given that the word ‘God’ in the text of the Pledge of Allegiance is capitalized, the text is clearly referring to the Judeo-Christian God, and therefore, it does not include any other faiths such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism,” Holden said, adding that this made the pledge of allegiance a “non-inclusionary act.”
Reciting the pledge is a “non-inclusionary act” and there is text within the pledge that is “simply not true,” Holden added.
“The statement that we are ‘one nation under God’ is simply an untrue statement,” Holden said. “We are one nation under many or no gods.”
Tracie Newman, who is board president, recommended that a member recite “a shared statement of purpose that would bring us all together” at the start of the meetings instead of the pledge, adding that it would be “unifying.”
“I’m just not sure that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is a useful way to begin every one of our board meetings,” Newman said at the Aug. 9 meeting.
North Dakota’s Republican Party called the board’s Aug. 9 vote “laughable” and an “affront to our American values.”
Republican State Sen. Scott Meyer told North Dakota media outlets last week that he would start work on a school voucher bill draft to allow public money to pay for private school tuition.
“These positions like by the Fargo School Board just don’t align with North Dakota values,” he said. “The logical solution is to just give parents that option to help educate their kids.”
Robin Nelson was one of two board members who voted on Aug. 9 to keep the pledge.
“It was a very easy ‘no’ vote from me from the get-go. I knew right away it would be controversial,” Nelson told Fargo’s Valley News Live.
“Our focus should be on our great students and teachers and education, but this is going to detract from that and really shed more negative publicity on the Fargo school district, and quite frankly, we don’t need that.”
Nelson’s words were proved correct. The decision prompted an outcry across the country, which led the board to hold the Aug. 18 meeting to discuss reinstating the pledge.
“That is perpetuating Critical Race Theory, which is against the law in North Dakota,” Fargo parent Jake Schmitz told Fox & Friends last week following the initial vote to ban the Pledge of Allegiance.
“The next logical step in the progression is [they’ll] want to remove it from schools because it’s a non-inclusionary act which is a bunch of [expletive].”
At the special meeting on Aug. 18, the board discussed the volume of angry emails and voicemails directed at members.
Nyamal Dei, a refugee from war-torn Sudan, was among those who received messages from irate citizens.
Dei was one of the seven members who voted on Aug. 10 to eliminate the pledge. At the special meeting, she was the only board member to vote no on reinstatement.
“We won’t be rewarding our children or students in our district for acting in this way,” Dei said at the special meeting.
“But know that this moment will pass. Let’s get back to the work that we are elected to do and that is to find a solution to our teacher shortages, mental health issues, and academic achievement for our students.” (Sounds like you must miss Sudan. Can I buy you an airplane ticket to the toilet from which you came? [US Patriot])
Greg Clark, who also serves on the board, said that less than 20 percent of the “angry messages” were from Fargo residents.
He admitted that his vote to reinstate the pledge was influenced by people who do not live in the district.
“But I hope you’ll forgive me because I truly believe it is in the best interest of our schools to do so,” Clark said.
“The disruptions and the threats must end so that we can have a successful start to our school year.”
Holden voted to bring back the pledge, but not before expressing reluctance.
“Do you concede the battle to win the war?” Holden said.
“I’m also concerned about what might happen to this board in the future because we’re going to have to probably be prepared to take more heat than we normally do for decisions that we make because that there may be a perception of success.”
David Paulson, a former board member who proposed that the pledge be recited before meetings in March when he was still in office, said that the current board members were “misinterpreting” what the words mean.
The March motion passed 6-2. Holden was one of the two who voted no.
“We are misinterpreting the Pledge of Allegiance,” Paulson said at the Aug. 9 meeting.
“The pledge isn’t a show of our patriotism; it’s an affirmation of our commitment and our loyalty to the greater cause, and that greater cause is freedom.”
Fargo Public Schools begins a new school year on Aug. 25.
For a damning picture of the modern left, it doesn’t get much clearer than this.
The Democratic Party, which spent the 2020 presidential election year trashing the police and cheering on rioting mobs wreaking havoc on American cities is now desperately trying to rebrand itself for the midterm election year as the party of loyalty to federal law enforcement agencies hellbent on pursuing former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
But as a Twitter post published Wednesday by a member of the previous Democratic administration shows, all it’s really proving is basic ignorance, or utter contempt, for the foundations the country was built on.
The post was published by Tommy Vietor, now a co-host of the blasphemously liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” but a man who rose to public attention as one of the more abrasively juvenile members of the Obama administration.
The tweet included a link to a CNN report (of course) about the surveillance footage that was taken of last week’s FBI raid on Trump’s home in South Florida’s Mar-a-Lago Club, and a comment from Vietor that probably said more about the mindset of the modern left than Tommy ever intended.
The staff at the Trump household had refused an FBI request to turn off surveillance cameras in the home, which would have left the agents free to do anything they chose without fear of exposure.
“Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information,” Vietor wrote.
Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information. https://t.co/J6l1gtMpMc
He’s “very confused” about an American household disobeying an order from the FBI? And a “direct order” at that?
It’s a good bet he wasn’t at all confused by the George Floyd rioters failing to follow the orders of local police as they set about looting and torching businesses in the name of “social justice” in the summer of 2020.
For many Democrats, anarchy in the streets, theft and destruction of property, even outright murder are completely acceptable (just ask the gangsters who benefited from the bail organization Vice President Kamala Harris supported).
But failing to fall into lockstep obedience with the feds when they show up armed with a search warrant and plenty of weaponry? That passes Vietor’s comprehension.
Naturally, being a blue-checked liberal, Vietor has plenty of simpering sympathizers in the social media world (even the Twitter bots Elon Musk talks about have more brains than that herd), but fortunately for the future of the republic, there were more than a few responses to set Vietor straight:
You say, “No thank you, I prefer to film my home during your official duties.” The official duties of the officer are not private, and first amendment permits filming officers.
Now, it’s easy to dislike Vietor and the rest of the coterie of sophomoric arrogance that surrounded the Obama White House. (The State Department’s Marie Harf was another, along with Harf’s old boss Jen Psaki.)
With Obama administration posts that included membership in the National Security Council and special assistant to the president, Vietor helped saddle the country with the bogus Iran nuclear deal that even Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to the Obama White House, admitted had been sold in an “echo chamber” of mainstream media ignorance. (And to New York Times Magazine, no less.)
But he’s worth paying attention to, if only to see where the leftists of the Obama years are leading their party and — regrettably — the country today.
His podcast is an influential voice in leftist politics — the DigitalTrends website ranked it as the third-best political podcast for 2022. (No. 1 was NPR’s “The NPR Politics Podcast,” which says everything that needs to be said about DigitalTrends’ political preferences.)
To his marginal credit, Vietor appeared to learn something from his Twitter post, as one respondent explained a search warrant does not give law enforcement — even the big, bad FBI — powers to do more than search the premises involved.
“A search warrant authorizes…a search, per 4th Amd. It does not create other powers or cancel out civil liberties,” the user wrote.
“I remember when people used to be skeptical of the police, *especially* when they were dealing with someone we thought was a criminal.”
Vietor seemed to get the message — or maybe he’d just finally realized how cringingly submissive his initial tweet came off and remembered that he’s supposed to be a man.
“Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this ‘order’ because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous,” he wrote.
Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this “order” because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous.
“A little ridiculous” should have been a first reaction to the blatantly political operation. “Outrageous!” “Infuriating!” “Totalitarian BS!” would have been even better.
But for the leftist mindset of 2022, steeped in the openly anti-American tradition birthed by the disastrous Obama years, the initial reaction is not to defend American freedoms but to question why Americans can refuse a “direct order.”
This is a man who served in the Obama White House, remember, where the abuse of power at federal agencies — such as the IRS, with the likes of Lois Lerner; the FBI with the “leadership” of James Comey; and the Justice Department under political grifters like Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch — had to have been considered almost commonplace.
It’s a basic distortion of the country’s foundation of law and order, pervasive among leftists in the mainstream media, in popular culture and in the Democratic Party from local governments through the House, the Senate and the White House:
They have nothing but contempt for the law; they worship orders.
There are many sorry countries, with many sorry histories, where that attitude is the norm. The United States isn’t one of them.
CRT is treason, and teacher’s unions are enemies of the state because they are pushing it and should be tried for treason. It only serves to weaken our country. [US Patriot]
To allow schools to be free of Critical Race Theory (CRT) parents must break the unions, parental rights activists say.
This school year, Moms for Liberty leaders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich have mounted a nationwide campaign to end union control of schools.
“Let’s start the new school year right—by ending the reign of the powerful teachers’ unions who care more about pushing woke ideology and rewriting forms to say ‘birthing parent’ instead of ‘mom’ or ‘dad,’ than they do about improving reading scores or closing the growing learning gaps in our country,” the group’s press release reads.
Teachers have pushed CRT into the classroom at a time when many students are failing to learn how to read, said Justice.
Tina Descovich, cofounder of Moms for Liberty, a pro-parental rights organization. (Courtesy of Moms for Liberty)
According to nationwide surveys, only about a third of 4th Grade students read proficiently at a 4th Grade reading level in 2019.
At the same time, reports of teachers giving children political instruction in CRT, transgenderism, and other left-wing ideologies have increased greatly.
This push comes from teachers’ unions, said Descovich.
Teachers’ unions like the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have long been bastions of Democratic political power, she said.
Rather than ensuring teachers get good pay while giving children a good education, they have focused on making education ideological, said Justice.
“What we’ve seen over the past 40 years in education in America is a real shift away from giving children practicable skills to making them into social justice warriors,” she said.
Moms for Liberty encourages teachers to leave these unions to stop their promotion of left-wing education, Descovich said.
“It’s vital that teachers understand there [are] options out there, they do not have to be a member of the union,” she said.
For many parents, COVID-19 led to new discoveries about schools, Descovich said. During the pandemic, parents got to see the lessons their kids received. Often, they didn’t like what they saw.
“I think they’ve been shocked to see gender ideology being pushed in the classrooms, the division between race, the Critical Race Theory,” she said.
While the pandemic was a time for parents to learn, now is a time for them to act, Moms for Liberty leaders said.
“The start of the 2022-2023 school year is a perfect time to end the woke union bosses’ death grip on innovation, excellence, and freedom in public education,” the Moms for Liberty press release reads.
Union Busting
Moms for Liberty has a two-part strategy to break union power, according to its press release.
It will encourage teachers to leave unions in states where they can do so, and it will inform parents about school performance.
As unions like the NEA have spread across America, they have allied with school system administrators to protect a bloated bureaucracy, said Justice.
“We see more and more money being spent on public schools,” she said. “And yet, the teachers aren’t being compensated better.”
Although the Supreme Court has ruled that it’s illegal to force teachers to pay union dues if they don’t want to, sometimes unions do so anyway.
In many states, even non-union members have to pay unions for their role in collective bargaining. In other states, social pressure to remain in a union plays a major role, said Descovich.
“The unions will say, ‘If you get in trouble, if somebody accuses you of something, the only person that’s going to be there for you with us,” she said.
Money from union dues gives unions immense political power. The National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers gave $29 million combined to Democrats and other liberal groups.
The unions also play a major role in encouraging a left-wing curriculum, Justice said.
Tiffany Justice, cofounder of Moms for Liberty, a pro-parental rights organization. (Courtesy of Moms for Liberty)
“The unions have become the foot soldiers for the Left in America, the very most progressive fringe Left,” she said.
Justice said she strongly believes American teachers are already breaking from the unions.
“I think that the education curtain has been pulled back, and all of America now recognizes that the union bargains for the people at the table, not for the teachers on the ground,” she said.
Parents can also pressure schools to change their curriculum, said Descovich. But often, schools have pushed back against parents.
In union strongholds, some Moms for Liberty supporters have lost their jobs due to union member harassment of their employers, she said.
One mother got the FBI called on her. It has been a struggle to get school boards to listen to parents.
“It’s been about as nasty as you can imagine where there are union strongholds,” said Descovich.
Moms for Liberty has more than 200 nationwide chapters, Descovich said. Despite these setbacks, many chapters have met with success in placing parental rights advocates on school boards.
“The unions need to understand that teachers in schools, their primary duty is to educate children,” said Justice.
Elon Musk has eked out a legal victory in his battle with Twitter, as a judge has ordered information about fake accounts to be handed over to Musk.
Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick handed Musk a defeat as well in ruling that 21 other people from whom Musk wanted data do not have to provide him with information, according to TechSpot.
Information from Twitter’s former head of consumer product, Kayvon Beykpour, must be released.
According to Reuters, Musk’s team of lawyers had identified Beykpour as “a key figure in calculating the amount of fake accounts on the platform.”
Beykpour was fired by current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in May.
“We look forward to reviewing Beykpour’s communications and will continue to seek information and witnesses until the full truth comes out,” said Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, according to Bloomberg.
The issue of fake accounts emerged as a major bone of contention in Musk’s proposed purchase of the social media platform. Twitter estimates that about 5 percent of its accounts are bots. Musk has said the figure is closer to 20 percent.
Musk said he decided not to go through with the $44 billion deal because he could not verify the number of fake accounts. Twitter then took Musk to court to force him to buy the company.
Dan Brahmy, CEO of the Israeli tech company Cyabra, agrees that Twitter has lowballed its number of fake accounts, according to Reuters.
“They have underestimated that number,” he said, putting the share of fake accounts at 13.7 percent.
In a countersuit filed against Twitter, Musk argued that “misrepresentations or omissions” by the company have inflated Twitter’s actual value, The Washington Post reported.
The countersuit said Twitter has 65 million fewer monetizable daily active users — people who can be seeing ads — than the 238 million that Twitter says it has.
Twitter undercounted bots as part of a “scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects,” Musk’s countersuit alleged, according to The Guardian.
Lawyers for Musk and Twitter will meet in court in October to debate whether the deal must be completed, the Washington Examiner reported.
Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was ‘honored’ to co-chair an organization that gave tens of thousands of dollars to anti-police activists
Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who says she opposes defunding the police, co-chaired a left-wing group that gave tens of thousands of dollars to defund-the-police activists, Fox News reported Tuesday.
Abrams in April 2021 became the co-chairwoman of the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, saying in a press release that she was “honored” to join the fund, which works with “Black activists on the ground who understand how racism plays out.” The fund, which is bankrolled in part by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation, has awarded thousands of dollars to activists who support abolishing the police.
Abrams is best known for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election to incumbent Republican Brian Kemp, whom she is again facing in this year’s election, and then falsely claiming that Kemp stole the election from her. Her fellow Democrats, many of whom have called former president Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud an existential threat to democracy, have not criticized her claims.
The Black Voices for Black Justice Fund awarded $20,000 to Education Leaders of Color CEO Sharhonda Bossier, who tweeted in May 2020 that “it means nothing that these elected officials are expressing support for ‘peaceful protests'” and that politicians should instead support efforts to “defund the police.” Bossier repeated the call in April 2021, tweeting, “We spend SO MUCH money on officer training, etc. If we cannot expect that police can respond to incidents without killing people we should… DEFUND & ABOLISH THE POLICE.”
The fund this year gave out awards to Black Lives Matter Global Network founding member Kei Williams, who has repeatedly expressed support for police defunding, and activist William Jackson, who has tweeted, “I’m for abolishing the police.”
Black Voices for Black Justice’s website listed Abrams as its co-chairwoman as recently as November, Fox News found. The site now showcases a picture of Abrams and lists her as one of the group’s two “co-chairs emeriti.”
Abrams’s campaign told Fox that the candidate “does not and never has supported defunding the police.” The campaign did not respond to Fox’s request for comment on whether Abrams disavows the group.
In addition to the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, Abrams remains a board member of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which this year expressed support for defunding the police.
House candidate scrubs radical views from campaign site after bitter primary fight
South Texas Democrat Michelle Vallejo won a bitter primary fight by embracing a slew of far-left policies. Now, the congressional hopeful is abandoning those progressive positions as she approaches a difficult general election campaign.
Vallejo emerged from a tight primary runoff in Texas’s 15th Congressional District in May, defeating fellow Democrat Ruben Ramirez by just 30 votes. At the time, the self-described “progressive small business owner” was openly touting her support for Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, and student debt cancellation—policy positions that landed her endorsements from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.). Vallejo’s campaign site also expressed resentment for America’s “racist criminal legal system” and called to protect “trans and queer South Texans.”
But now, as Vallejo faces an uphill general election battle against Republican Monica De La Cruz, she’s running away from the same policies that helped her attract liberal primary voters just a few months ago. Between late July and mid August, internet archives show, the Democrat updated her campaign site to remove all mentions of “Medicare For All,” a “federal jobs guarantee program,” and the need to “forgive all student loan debt.” Vallejo’s “LGBTQ+ Justice” section, meanwhile, no longer includes the word “trans,” and the Democrat’s border policy blurb now calls to invest in the same immigration enforcement system she used to call “racist.”
Vallejo’s campaign site overhaul is an obvious attempt from the progressive Democrat to rebrand herself as a moderate as she runs in a newly drawn district that President Donald Trump won by nearly 3 points. It’s also an implicit admission that the Democratic Party’s liberal wing has become too “woke” for many South Texas Hispanics—a development that Republicans say has helped them make inroads in the Rio Grande Valley, a historic Democratic stronghold.
Still, Vallejo’s decision to abandon the progressive positions that defined her primary campaign could divide the district’s Democratic voters with November fast approaching. In addition to Warren and Jayapal, Vallejo earned a primary election endorsement from Lupe Votes, a liberal South Texas group that supports Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, student loan cancellation, and other progressive policies. Texas College Democrats also backed Vallejo ahead of the May primary, citing the Democrat’s “unapologetically progressive campaign.” Neither of those groups returned requests for comment. Vallejo’s campaign also did not return a request for comment.
As a whole, almost none of Vallejo’s pre-primary policy “priorities” made it to her general election campaign site.
The Democrat’s health care section used to be titled “Health Care for All” and included explicit support for a “single-payer universal healthcare system.” That section is now labeled “Affordable High Quality Health Care” and replaces the call for Medicare for All with a watered-down pledge to “expand Medicare.”
Similarly, Vallejo removed the word “climate” from her energy policy header. She also replaced her support for a Green New Deal-esque “federal jobs guarantee”—which would cost up to $44.6 trillion—with a line touting the “bipartisan infrastructure law that will bring billions of dollars to South Texas.”
Vallejo also touts her newfound bipartisan bonafides in her updated policy sections on the southern border and Second Amendment.
Her “Immigration” policy blurb—which used to be titled “Embracing the Border + Immigration Justice”—no longer attacks America’s “racist criminal legal system” and calls to “pass a pathway to Citizenship for all 11 million undocumented Americans.” Instead, it states the need to make “an investment in border infrastructure” and only naturalize illegal immigrants “who have worked hard, followed the law and contributed to their communities.” Vallejo added a line to her “End Gun Violence” section, meanwhile, that ensures voters that the Democrat “grew up shooting at gun ranges and hunting on family ranches” and “strongly supports the bipartisan gun safety bill written by Texas Sen. John Cornyn.”
Beyond the border and gun rights, Vallejo’s “LGBTQ+ Justice” policy portion once said “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer South Texans deserve equal protection and justice.” It now reads, “Every South Texan deserves equal protection and justice.” Furthermore, Vallejo’s new segment on “Affordable Education” was once titled “Free Public College and Trade School + Eliminating Student Debt.” The Democrat’s updated version no longer calls to “forgive all student debt,” but it does note that Vallejo is “still paying off her student loans,” which she acquired as an Ivy League student at Columbia University in New York City.
There is one policy position, however, that Vallejo is standing by after her primary win. Both her old and new issue pages stress the need to “end mandatory minimum sentencing, cash bail, solitary confinement, private prisons, qualified immunity, and prioritizing investing in mental health resources and services for our community.”
Vallejo’s decision to abandon her public support for various left-wing policies comes after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added the South Texas congressional hopeful to its “Red to Blue” program, which “arms top-tier candidates with organizational and fundraising support to help them continue to develop strong campaigns and win in November.” It’s unclear if the group had a hand in Vallejo’s flip-flopping, as the DCCC did not return a request for comment.
Vallejo will face De La Cruz in November. The Republican in 2020 narrowly lost to incumbent Democrat Vicente Gonzalez in a closer-than-expected race—Gonzalez subsequently opted to run in a nearby district that is more solidly blue. De La Cruz, who describes herself as a “proud small business owner” and “woman of strong faith,” has raised $2.9 million to Vallejo’s $700,000.
John Bridgeland worked on Obama White House council, cheered Biden victory
On the campaign trail, Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) touts the endorsement of a man named John Bridgeland as evidence of his cross-party appeal.
There are just a few details the congressman leaves out, at least when he’s trying to win over voters in his increasingly red state: Bridgeland worked in the Obama administration, celebrated Joe Biden’s election, and cofounded a nonprofit dedicated to remaking policing.
The founder of “Republicans for Tim Ryan,” Bridgeland has worked on left-wing policy initiatives for years. Former president Barack Obama in 2010 appointed Bridgeland to the White House Council for Community Solutions. Bridgeland also cofounded a firm, COVID Collaborative, that works with the Biden administration on vaccine messaging. In December 2020, Bridgeland wrote an op-ed for the website of Maria Shriver, a Democratic activist and member of the Kennedy family, about how he was “so encouraged” by Biden’s win.
Democrats touting endorsements from nominal Republicans who routinely attack the Republican Party is a familiar strategy. Lawmakers who have been rubber stamps for Biden’s agenda, such as Ryan, are hoping that voters forget their records. Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), who is running in a competitive race this cycle, recently released a list of endorsements from Republicans, several of whom work for the the Lincoln Project, an activist group dedicated to electing Democrats but helmed by individuals who once considered themselves Republicans.
Bridgeland’s endorsement comes as Ryan seeks to separate himself from the president. Biden’s approval rating is 23 points underwater in Ohio—a state that former president Donald Trump won twice. When Biden traveled to Ohio for a speech last month, Ryan scheduled campaign stops hundreds of miles away.
Ryan shared Bridgeland’s endorsement on Twitter and wrote he was “proud” to have Bridgeland on his “team.”
“Republicans for Ryan is a platform for Republicans to sign up to help Tim Ryan. I am a registered Republican and vote in Republican primaries and in general elections,” Bridgeland told the Free Beacon. “I believe in limited, effective government, … civil society and the nonprofit and private sectors, and respecting both individual rights and responsibilities.”
Bridgeland worked from the mid-1990s to 2003 as a senior official in then-representative Rob Portman’s (R., Ohio) office and in former president George W. Bush’s administration. In an op-ed for a local Ohio newspaper, Bridgeland wrote that he supports Ryan’s “love of our democracy” and “many of his policies.”
Bridgeland attacked Ryan’s Republican Senate challenger, J.D. Vance, as “lacking the energy of the U.S. senator he is trying to replace—Rob Portman.” Portman endorsed Vance immediately after Vance in May won the Republican nomination.
Bridgeland’s endorsement of Ryan was leaked to Politico days prior as part of a story about the Ryan campaign’s strategy of appealing to Republican voters. That story also featured Bridgeland speaking favorably about Ryan and how Ryan could make inroads with Republican voters in Ohio. Missing from Politico‘s story was any mention of Bridgeland’s work since he left the Bush administration in 2003.
Ryan did not respond to a request for comment.
Other than Bridgeland, no appointees with experience in Republican politics were appointed to Obama’s White House community solutions council. There, Bridgeland worked alongside the likes of Laurene Powell Jobs and Jon Bon Jovi to provide advice to the president on “innovative community solutions and civic participation by all Americans.”
Bridgeland later cofounded ACT NOW, a nonprofit that works “to reimagine ‘public safety’ … and eliminate the root causes of systemic racism.” ACT NOW’s staff includes Ray C. Kelly, who in 2018 received an award from George Soros’s Open Society Institute-Baltimore.
According to internal voter data obtained by the Free Beacon, Bridgeland voted in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. A June column he wrote for the Cincinnati Enquirer called for new gun control measures. The column also touted his work with a group called the People’s Filibuster for Gun Safety. That group, according to its website, partners with left-wing nonprofits such as the Anti-Defamation League and March for Our Lives to pass gun-control legislation.
Bridgeland’s cheerleading for Biden appears out of step with Republican voters. Following Biden’s State of the Union address in March, Bridgeland celebrated the speech as passionate and “articulating values and ideas that transcend our divisions.” A Reuters poll released Aug. 9 found 86 percent of self-identified Republicans disapprove of Biden.
Ryan will face Vance in November. There is little high-quality polling of the race available, although most political analysts believe Vance is the favorite. Portman’s seat has been held by a Republican since 1999.
John Fetterman linked to creepy anime demon best known for enslaving a child
Republicans and other anti-grooming activists are seething after a photo resurfaced of Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman’s family posing with a controversial anime character best known for enslaving a child.
The photo, which Fetterman posted on Twitter in April 2019, shows the candidate’s wife and three children posing with an exceedingly large man in a creepy demon mask and long black cloak. Experts familiar with the anime genre tell the Washington Free Beacon the masked individual was portraying the character Elias Ainsworth from the Japanese manga series The Ancient Magus’ Bride.
tbc this is NOT me in the mask. I swear, I was in Blair County. You can be sure because, quite frankly, the head isn’t cut off. 🙄🙄 pic.twitter.com/nVHJk1YlMr
Fetterman claims to have been in Blair County, Pa., at the time the photo was taken at the Tekko anime convention in Pittsburgh. Nevertheless, the fact that he would even allow his children to be exposed to a character as creepy and problematic as Elias Ainsworth raised serious questions about his parenting.
Blog posts reviewed by the Free Beacon suggest the series is incredibly problematic due to how it depicts the relationship between Ainsworth, “a seven-foot-tall humanoid with an animal skull for a head,” and Chise Hatori, the 15-year-old orphan he buys at a slave action in London for five million pounds. According to a listicle published on the Comic Book Resources website, this is one of five reasons why “Chise and Eilas are [not] the perfect couple.”
A scathing review posted on tumblr.com awarded the show a score of 3/10 despite acknowledging there was “so much to love” about the anime series. “Chise and Elias could have been terrific characters in their own right but their relationship is marred by their creepy creators’ bad writing,” wrote tumblr user juneboba. “So many things Elias says reeked of things predators actually say to their victims and romanticizing it is gross. He even admits outright that he’s grooming Chise and ‘raising’ her to be perfect for his use.”
The reviewer was especially put off by the fact that Elias kept “invading [Chise’s] privacy and trying to touch and bathe her without her permission,” noting that Elias’s character “understood that what he was doing to a child was morally reprehensible” yet was portrayed as having “saved” Chise by purchasing her at auction and making her his child bride. “That’s not how human trafficking works and glorifying it is despicable,” juneboba wrote.
Fetterman’s decision to glorify the despicable character, months after taking office as lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, is the latest in a series of scandals plaguing the state’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. He was widely criticized, for example, for holding an innocent black jogger at gunpoint in 2013. Fetterman has refused to apologize for his racially charged vigilantism. The candidate suffered a nearly fatal stroke in May after repeatedly ignoring his doctor’s advice and has rarely ventured out on the campaign trail since then. Video evidence suggests Fetterman is nearly as incapable as Joe Biden when it comes to speaking in coherent sentences.
Policy ‘openly discriminates against white teachers based only on the color of their skin,’ lawyer says
Openly rewarding inept and criminal minds is treason in the highest [US Patriot]
Minnesota Public Schools reached an agreement with its teachers’ union to institute a policy that will discriminate against white teachers during layoffs, according to a report from Alpha News.
The agreement, which the union reached in March following a two-week strike, upends the seniority-based layoff system under which teachers who have been employed the least amount of time are the first to be fired. Under the new rules, if a minority teacher is set to be laid off, the district will instead fire the next least senior teacher who is white.
“If [laying off] a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the district shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population,” reads the agreement, which goes into effect next spring.
The justification for the racial discrimination is to “remedy the continuing effects of past discrimination,” according to the school district.
Minnesota Public Schools’ policy is the latest example of teachers’ efforts to institute policies favoring minority teachers in hiring and compensation in order to achieve racial equity. Staff at New York City’s elite Dalton School in 2020 demanded the administration pay off black faculty’s student debt, the Washington Free Beaconreported.
The Minnesota policy also favors minorities when the district reinstates teachers. “The District shall deprioritize the more senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population, in order to recall a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers,” the agreement reads.
James Dickey, senior trial counsel at the Upper Midwest Law Center, told Alpha News the policy is racially discriminatory and unconstitutional.
“The [collective bargaining agreement] … openly discriminates against white teachers based only on the color of their skin, and not their seniority or merit,” Dickey said. “Minneapolis teachers and taxpayers who oppose government-sponsored racism like this should stand up against it.”
Rep. Danny K. Davis rents his Chicago office from a convicted drug pusher
Rep. Danny K. Davis (D., Ill.) rents his district office from a convicted cocaine dealer who was once affiliated with a Chicago drug ring, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Since January 2017, Davis’s campaign account has cut regular $600 checks for “office rent” to Mario’s Butcher Shop, FEC records show. The shop, which is registered as a corporation with the state, lists Mariano “Mario” Lettieri and his wife as the sole members of its board of directors and was at the center of Lettieri’s 1990 conviction for drug trafficking.
Lettieri, whom the Chicago Tribune described as “reputedly tied” to a “crime syndicate,” was sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison after authorities identified him as the primary supplier of cocaine to a major Chicago drug ring led by an ex-cop. The Drug Enforcement Administration reported that Lettieri trafficked as much as 80 pounds of cocaine over a six-month period. Lettieri also allowed heroin to be packaged in his butcher shop’s boiler room and used “rib-eye steaks” as a code word when discussing drug prices.
Lettieri is an odd landlord for Davis, who has long championed efforts to fight drug abuse. Davis in 2006 called for $4 million in emergency aid funds to be allocated to Cook County to address the growing heroin problem in the area. Last year, Davis announced that he had formed a coalition of drug prevention organizations in Chicago to help address the growing opioid crisis. He told the local press that “there is no part of Chicago that is worse hit than the West Side.” The West Side of Chicago is where Lettieri ran his drug operation in the 1980s.
Tumia Romero, Davis’s chief of staff, would not directly address the congressman’s payments to Lettieri but told the Free Beacon that Davis believes in giving people “second chances.”
Davis is no stranger to controversy. In 2005, he took a trip to Sri Lanka funded by the Tamil Tigers, an ethnic terrorist group from that country. He is a close ally of noted anti-Semite and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and once participated in a religious ceremony with Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the controversial Unification Church. Moon, who died in 2012, was a convicted felon who said Jews deserved the Holocaust.
The congressman also attended the 2012 dedication of the Church of Scientology’s Washington, D.C., lobbying office.
Davis, who faced a tough primary challenge this cycle, was boosted by an endorsement from Joe Biden. The longtime congressman won his primary by single digits and is now expected to coast to reelection in November.
Reached for comment, a Mario’s Butcher Shop employee said he would relay the Free Beacon‘s inquiry to the establishment’s owner.
Epps admitted to trespassing, directing protesters to go into the Capitol. ‘I wish I could take that back,’ he told agents.
When James Ray Epps Sr. first called the FBI regarding his January 2021 activities in Washington D.C., he didn’t mention how he implored protesters in several locations to go inside the Capitol, but he later told an agent that he expected a bomb would detonate on a side street near the Capitol.
Those are just two of the revelations in a collection of Epps-related material obtained by The Epoch Times, including FBI interview summaries, FBI audio recordings, transcripts, videos, and photographs.
In two interviews with the FBI in 2021, Epps explained his actions on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. He admitted he was guilty of trespassing on restricted Capitol grounds and confessed to urging protesters to go to—and into—the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Despite the admissions, the FBI never arrested Epps and he was not charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with any Jan. 6 crimes. The non-action has fueled a crop of theories that he might have been working for the FBI or another agency.
Epps, 61, has repeatedly denied those suggestions through his attorney.
Epps recently sold his house and land in Queen Creek, Arizona, because of threats and harassment and moved to Colorado, he told the New York Times in July. According to online records, the Arizona property sold for $2.2 million on April 28, 2022.
Epps at one time was No. 16 on the FBI’s Jan. 6 most-wanted page. His entry was later scrubbed from the list without explanation. He is among a handful of persons of interest to have their photos deleted from the FBI site.
‘Like a Terrorist Act’
In an interview with FBI agents on March 3, 2021, Epps said he brought a first-aid kit in his backpack to Washington because he expected a terror attack.
“Yeah, I thought there might be a problem. That’s why I was there,” Epps told an FBI agent and an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer in a meeting at the Phoenix office of Epps’s attorney, John Blischak.
Blischak told The Epoch Times he would comment after reviewing the FBI interview summary, but had not done so by press time.
“I was afraid they were going to set off an explosion on one of the side streets,” Epps said, according to a recording of the interview obtained by The Epoch Times. “So we tried to stay in the middle, tried to get there early, tried to stay away from the sides. And if something like that happened, I had a first-aid kit. I could help out.”
Epps told the agents the possibility of violence weighed heavily on his mind and he originally did not plan to travel to Washington. It was only when learning that his son, James Epps Jr., was going to the Trump rally that the senior Epps decided to go and keep an eye on his son, he said.
Ray Epps is shown at the lower left on an early FBI “wanted” poster. His photo has since been scrubbed from the FBI website. (FBI.gov/Wayback Machine)
“As time went on, I started getting a bad feeling like something’s gonna happen,” said Epps, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former Oath Keepers leader in Arizona. “There’s a lot of wackies out there. I thought something would happen in D.C. I thought there might be, what do they call them, EOD, something like that?”
Epps might have been referring to an improvised explosive device (IED), which is a homemade bomb that was a favorite weapon of insurgents in Afghanistan during the United States’ long war there. In military parlance, an EOD refers to an explosive ordnance disposal specialist—someone who defuses and destroys explosives.
An agent asked for clarification: “Oh, you mean like a terrorist act?”
“Right, like a terrorist act,” Epps said.
The agents did not press Epps on what led him to believe there would be an explosion, nor did they ask about the two alleged pipe bombs found outside the Republican and Democrat party headquarters, each just blocks from the Capitol. The RNC pipe bomb was placed near the corner of the Capitol Hill Club facing a side street, similar to the description Epps offered.
The devices did not detonate and the FBI has not arrested anyone in those cases.
Epps told the FBI he regretted the things he said in downtown Washington the night of Jan. 5, 2021. He spoke to internet personality Baked Alaska and video podcaster Villain Report, both of whom recorded their exchanges.
“In fact tomorrow, I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested. …I’ll say it. We need to go into the Capitol,” Epps told Baked Alaska, whose legal name is Anthime Gionet.
Epps shouted a similar theme to the crowd at large: “Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Into the Capitol. Peacefully,” he said. The crowd then started chanting, “Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed!”
The FBI agents told Epps that his statements on Jan. 5 were problematic. They said they found him often on video and in photographs from Jan. 5 and 6.
Epps replied: “I’m the tallest guy in the crowd, and I stick out, man. They followed me.” Then he joked, “I could never be a bank robber.”
“We said that the same way,” one of the agents said. “We said, ‘It’s a big guy and every photo we find, he’s in it.’ The night before, that video didn’t help.
“…And the video the night before, what you said basically predicted what happened,” the agent said.
“I wish I could take that back,” Epps replied. He called the statements “really stupid.”
On Jan. 6, Epps was filmed near the Washington Monument imploring the crowd, “We are going to the Capitol, where our problems are. It’s that direction. Please spread the word.”
When speaking to a young man in a red and black mackinaw jacket, Epps said, “When we go in, leave this here [pointing to something]. You don’t need to get shot,” according to a video of the exchange.
First Call to FBI on Jan. 8
Epps first called the FBI on Jan. 8, 2021, after his brother-in-law notified Epps’s wife that a photograph of Epps was on the FBI website. That call to the National Threat Operations Center (NTOC) lasted about 27 minutes, according to an audio file of the call obtained by The Epoch Times.
In describing his activities, Epps never mentioned that he urged the crowds on Jan. 5 to go into the Capitol the next day. He said he went down to Black Lives Matter plaza to try to calm things down after people he suspected were Antifa activists were harassing police.
“I tried to calm them down,” Epps told the FBI operator. “I tried to let them know that, you know, that this is not what we’re here for. We’re here because of the Constitution, not the police. Police are on our side.”
Nor did Epps mention getting on a bullhorn on Jan. 6 and encouraging people to go to the Capitol as soon as President Donald Trump was finished speaking. He would comment on those topics nearly two months later when interviewed by FBI agents.
On the January call, Epps insisted his presence on Capitol grounds was to de-escalate when things got violent.
“I am guilty of being there and probably trespassing,” he said. “But I had a reason. I was trying to calm ’em down. I wanted to be there, but I’m trying to calm ’em down. Anything I can do to help. There’s no call for that kind of behavior. I will be your witness.”
Ray Epps at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before pepper gas is shot into the crowd. “Been a long time,” he said. “Aah, I love it!” (Screen Capture/Rumble)
Epps told the agents he came to Washington to express his concerns about the 2020 presidential election. He said he received five ballots at his Queen Creek address: one each for him and his wife, and three with names he did not recognize.
“We’ve owned the property for 11 years now. I’ve never heard of those three people that came there. I didn’t recognize the names,” he said. “And then when the election went the way it did, I was a little concerned. I mean, how many apartments are there in Arizona, 3 million? And if they’re sending all these ballots to these different apartments. I mean, you know, that’s a concern.”
Epps said he also went to support Trump, although he did not stay at the Ellipse for all of Trump’s speech. He said he followed crowds that left the speech early and walked toward the Capitol.
“People started leaving early after President Trump started speaking. So they were running and it was the same people that was, ‘F Antifa,’ and this and that and the other,” Epps said.
“I believe, just my belief, they were Antifa, the ones that were saying that stuff,” he said. “And they were like running that way and I’m like, ‘Maybe I can calm this down.’ So I went with them.”
Epps said it was his original intention to stay for all of the speeches at the Ellipse.
“I planned on being and word was being passed around that right after he gets done speaking, we’re gonna go to the Capitol. And it was a given,” Epps said. “So spread the word spread the word. So I started spreading the word and I said that to a lot of people there: ‘We’re going to the Capitol right after the president speaks.’”
Perhaps the scene that drew the most attention and speculation about Epps on January 6 was when he appeared at the first breach point of police lines. Some 20 minutes before Trump finished speaking at the Ellipse, an aggressive crowd gathered at a lightly defended barrier on a sidewalk not far from the Peace Monument.
As rioters began yanking at the bicycle-rack barriers, Epps pulled Ryan Samsel back from the front line and spoke in his ear. Seconds after that exchange, Samsel and others knocked down the barrier, causing one officer to fall back and hit her head on the concrete.
“I walked up to him, and I put my arm on him and said, ‘Hey, that’s not why we’re here. Don’t be doing that,’ you know.
“I don’t know who he was. No clue,” Epps said. “I just tried to talk him out of doing what he was doing. And then all of a sudden, it blew up.”
When interviewed by an FBI special agent and a detective on Jan. 30, 2021, Samsel corroborated Epps’s description of their brief verbal exchange, according to a transcript of the session obtained by The Epoch Times. Samsel faces nearly a dozen January 6-related charges in U.S. District Court in Washington.
“Now that guy I talked to,” Samsel said, pointing to a photograph of Epps. “He came up to me and he says, ‘Dude,’ his exact words were, ‘Relax,’ he says, ‘The cops are doing their job.’ That’s exactly what he says to me right there in that picture.”
Inconsistencies in Interviews
Epps’s two interviews with the FBI included some inconsistencies and changed details, according to the recordings and FBI summary documents.
Epps told the FBI on Jan. 8 that his brother-in-law called him to notify him his picture was on the FBI’s January 6 website. During his March 3 interview with FBI agents, Epps said, “Someone contacted me and said, ‘Hey, your picture’s up.’”
When asked about his brother-in-law later in the interview, Epps said, “He didn’t call me, he called my sister.” Then his wife interjected, “That was me. And I can tell you exactly because he sent me a text, actually.”
When asked about who was with him on Jan. 5 and 6, Epps replied, “My son.” A short while later he said, “I think he had a friend there. He did have a friend there. I don’t know his name.”
One of the agents said he recalled that on the Jan. 8 phone call with the FBI, Epps said he went sightseeing on Jan. 7. “No, we did that the day before,” he told the agent. A few minutes later, however, this detail changed. “Oh, you know what? The next day we did, no, we got up that morning and we went to the Vietnam Memorial.”
In both contacts with the FBI, Epps asked if his photo could be removed from the FBI’s Jan. 6 page. In the Jan. 8 call, the FBI operator said she had nothing to do with FBI web content. In the March 3 interview, he was given a more discouraging take.
“That picture is probably still out there, will probably be there forever now,” one of the agents told him.
Epps said the notoriety of being publicly listed as a person of interest had caused problems.
“Well, we’ve felt the repercussions. I mean, we’ve had people come on our business site and try to destroy us,” he said. “I’m an insurrectionist, I’m a traitor. I’ve been called everything in the book, but it’s dying down now—I hope.”
The agents asked Epps if his views had changed since Jan. 6.
“I still have concerns about the election. I do. I mean, I think everybody does,” Epps said. “I think our politicians, some of them need to be in jail. I think you guys need to investigate them. I don’t know. How much of what we get is the truth? I don’t know. Not even worth watching the news anymore. Because they just make it up as they go.”
Epps met twice with the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 Select Committee, including a transcribed interview in January 2022. Committee members seemed satisfied with what Epps told them. No transcript of the session has been released.
“Mr. Epps informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency,” a spokesman said in January.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) grilled top FBI officials about Epps in a January hearing, but received a repeated refrain: “I can’t answer that.”
Former New England Patriots tight end Benjamin Watson gave Democratic Georgia governor candidate Stacey Abrams a lesson on faith and abortion.
Watson played for New England at both the start and end of his NFL career, playing for the Cleveland Browns, New Orleans Saints and Baltimore Ravens as well.
Watson is also zealous about his faith and pushed back after an August tweet from Abrams that said support for abortion was a manifestation of her faith.
“In college, a friend who shared my faith challenged me to think and changed my perspective on abortion. Abortion care is health care. As a person of faith and as the next governor, it’s my responsibility to protect a woman’s right to choose,” Abrams tweeted.
“Respectfully if you identify as a Christian your authority is the Word of God not the opinion of a friend who shares your faith,” Watson tweeted in response.
Respectfully if you identify as a Christian your authority is the Word of God not the opinion of a friend who shares your faith. This ad conveys empathy but it also conveys baseless compromise. If your holy scripture sanctions abortion as it does love/justice/charity explain how https://t.co/B6kw1BjFh5
“This ad conveys empathy but it also conveys baseless compromise. If your holy scripture sanctions abortion as it does love/justice/charity explain how.”
Abrams has been at pains in her campaign to say that support for abortion is not a contradiction to her faith.
“While your faith tradition may tell you that you personally do not want to make that choice, it is not my right as a Christian to impose that value system on someone else,” she said, according to Yahoo.
“Because the value that should overhang everything is the right to make our own decisions, the free will that the God I believe in gave us,” she said.
Watson sees life differently.
Watson spoke about life in a 2021 interview with Baptist Press printed by Kentucky Today.
“We know that human life is different … and that it should be honored and respected. There is something very special about life, and it is a lie from Satan that we can discard our children without consequence,” he said.
“And not just the outward consequence. I’m talking about the inward, just dealing with that life,” he said.
Watson said abortion is not a political issue as much as one about faith.
“I look at this issue as one of justice, and the Bible speaks very clearly about justice and our righteousness over and over and over again throughout Scripture,” he said. “You see God’s heart for justice for the oppressed, for the fatherless, for the widow. And so justice is simply about protecting the vulnerable, giving people their just due.
“There are plenty of verses in Scripture that talk about speaking up for the vulnerable and acting justly. When I think about the preborn child in the womb, there is no other human being that is as vulnerable as a person is in the state. I’m advocating for the preborn child, but I’m also advocating for mothers that are bearing these children,” he said.
John Fetterman is often the sole Pennsylvania Board of Pardons member to vote for freeing murderers
Wayne Covington was sentenced to life in prison after he shot and killed an 18-year-old for money to buy heroin. Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman wants him to walk free.
In June 2021, Fetterman was the only member of the state’s Board of Pardons—which he chairs as lieutenant governor—to vote to commute Covington’s sentence, according to records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. In 1970, Covington admitted to shooting 18-year-old George Rudnycky to death while high, as Covington and an accomplice were robbing Rudnycky for drug money. Covington pleaded guilty to first-degree murder to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Fetterman cast his vote over the pleas of Rudnycky’s family members, who opposed Covington’s release at the killer’s commutation hearing.
One year after the controversial vote, Fetterman is placing his Board of Pardons record at the center of his campaign against Republican Mehmet Oz. His campaign site boasts that he “transformed” the lieutenant governor position “into a bully pulpit for criminal justice reform” and “led the fight to free the wrongfully convicted and give second chances to deserving longtime inmates.” Fetterman, who has said he ran for lieutenant governor solely to lead the Board of Pardons, has specifically called to end life sentences for second-degree murderers who participated in a killing but did not “pull the trigger.”
But in Covington’s case, Fetterman took no issue with voting to release a triggerman who admitted to shooting his young victim—a vote that Pennsylvania attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro did not reciprocate. A review of Fetterman’s tenure on the board, meanwhile, shows that the Democrat has voted to release an array of violent criminals jailed for their roles in brutal murders, a far cry from the “innocent” people Fetterman often says he works to release. Those votes—as well as Fetterman’s unabashed support for George Soros-funded Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner—prompted a letter from 13 Pennsylvania sheriffs who said Fetterman’s crime policy positions “would add to already rising crime rates in Pennsylvania.” Their criticism of Fetterman could plague the Democrat’s campaign as Pennsylvanians deal with a record murder spike.
Fetterman’s campaign did not return a request for comment. The Board of Pardons denied the Free Beacon’s public records request for a video or transcript of the June 2021 hearing, saying that records of the public event are “confidential.” Fetterman’s office, which issued the denial, did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond his support for Covington’s commutation, Fetterman has supported the release of violent criminals Denise Crump and Anthony Eberhardt, pardon board votes reviewed by the Free Beacon show. Crump received life in prison in the late 1980s after she and an accomplice killed a 46-year-old man to “steal his television set, which was then sold for $60 to buy cocaine,” according to the Philadelphia Daily News. Eberhardt also participated in a robbery-murder, which led to the shooting death of a beer distributor.
Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons has faced high-profile recidivism issues in the past. In 1992, board members voted to commute the sentence of serial killer Reginald McFadden, who immediately went on a murdering spree, killing two and kidnapping and raping a third within three months of his release. After that ordeal, Pennsylvanians voted to raise the board’s approval standard from a majority vote to a unanimous one, a move that caused life-sentence commutations to plummet.
Fetterman has called McFadden’s actions “unthinkable.” But the infamous murderer’s post-release killing spree has not stopped the Democrat from backing an amendment to lower the board’s vote threshold to 4-1. Since 2019, Fetterman has cast the sole vote to pardon or commute a sentence at least 27 times, pardon board records reviewed by the Free Beacon show.
In January, Fetterman appointed his campaign political director, Celeste Trusty, as secretary of the Board of Pardons. Trusty supports many of the same criminal justice reform policies as Fetterman, and has called to “disarm the police.” She worked on Fetterman’s campaign through this January, according to Federal Election Commission records.
If you are white and believe in CRT, shouldn’t you kill yourself? [US Patriot]
Faculty at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law have created a database to identify and record efforts to block critical race theory (CRT) being taught in schools across the country.
The database, called the CRT Forward Tracking Project, allows users to “track attacks on critical race theory” and filter the information as part of an effort to “support anti-racist education, training and research,” according to the school.
The project was created by UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program, founded in 2000 as the first law school program in the nation dedicated to critical race theory.
CRT, according to the school, is “the study of systemic racism in law, policy and society,” and suggests efforts need to be made to fix these alleged injustices.
Parents concerned about Critical Race Theory took home these buttons from a school board activist training Jan. 19, 2022 in Sarasota, Florida. (Alexis Spiegelman)
Meanwhile, critics say CRT pushes a controversial worldview related to Marxism that analyzes all aspects of life through a racial lens instead of through the concept of class struggle.
UCLA Law announced earlier this month it would track anti-CRT activity through the database at all levels of government across the nation.
“The project was created to help people understand the breadth of the attacks on the ability to speak truthfully about race and racism through the campaigns against CRT,” said Taifha Natalee Alexander, project director of CRT Forward, in a statement.
The database analyzes these efforts to determine where the activity is happening and how opponents are taking action, such as protesting curriculum at the school board level.
It also includes the type of CRT content being restricted, such as a course being taught at a public school, as well as the institution or group being targeted and enforcement mechanisms being used to regulate the content.
For example, the Placentia-Yorba Linda School Board voted to ban the teaching of CRT in classrooms this past April, ending months of debate in the Orange County district.
Prior to the narrow 3-2 vote, supporters for the ban asserted CRT is a divisive ideology that pushes a political narrative. Other trustees at the April 5 school board meeting, however, claimed such efforts amounted to censorship, according to public comments.
The UCLA program claims that many of those who are against these concepts being taught in K-12 schools are using the term CRT “incorrectly,” and have “affected plans to include ethnic studies more broadly for students before they get to college.”
Chinese-American parents in California rally against Assembly Bill 101, which was later signed into law to make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement, in Los Angeles on April 26, 2020. (Linda Jiang/The Epoch Times)
In 2021, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation making ethnic studies a statewide requirement for high school graduation starting in the 2029–30 school year, amid debate among parents and teachers about whether ethnic studies curriculum includes elements of CRT.
Tracking Results
As of Aug. 2, the UCLA database has screened nearly 24,000 media articles and identified 479 instances of anti-CRT activity since August 2021.
The database team found this activity is “much more pervasive and extensive than generally reported,” according to the school, with such policies either proposed or enacted in 49 states.
The project also found that most anti-CRT proposals have occurred in Florida, Virginia, Missouri, and the U.S. Congress, while local school board measures make up more than 20 percent of the activity in the database.
Signs against critical race theory in front of the Loudoun County School Administration building in Virginia on Nov. 9, 2021. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
Most such measures at the school board level have been introduced in California, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, with Californians enacting five out of the eight proposed measures.
The study also found the most common anti-CRT enforcement measures include withholding funding or issuing fines against individual teachers, administrators, schools, and districts for engaging in “prohibited conduct,” the school says.
CRT Controversy
Noah Zatz, faculty director of the UCLA Law’s Critical Race Studies Program, is helping to spearhead the tracking project. CRT Forward staff also include law librarians and undergraduate and law school research assistants.
“We need critical race theory to understand this assault on racial justice, where even naming structural racism gets portrayed as unfair to white people. And we need CRT to develop legal theories of education and free speech that not only blunt these attacks but place anti-racism at the center of a democratic society,” said Zatz in a statement.
However, opponents contend that CRT is not needed and does not teach hard history, but is instead an approach to analyzing that history with the intent to dismantle modern systems that proponents claim are white supremacist.
A man holds up a sign against Critical Race Theory during a protest outside a Washoe County School District board meeting in Reno, Nev., on May 25, 2021. (Andy Barron/Reno Gazette-Journal via AP)
“Those that are upset about proposed bans on CRT in our schools have been misled to think that states that have banned CRT from being taught will no longer teach about Jim Crow Laws, the displacement of Native Americans, or even slavery in America. This is simply not true,” according to a CRT guide written by former California teacher Kali Fontanilla. “On the contrary, banning CRT will remove a dangerous twisting and rewriting of American history.”
The UCLA project is funded by a $400,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation, a private, Indianapolis-based foundation with about $1.4 billion in assets, according to the nonprofit’s website.
Credit card giant will spend $3 billion on ‘BIPOC businesses in Canada’ and ‘Latinx’ events
American Express in an “Environmental, Social, and Governance” report released August 4 pledged to devote billions of dollars to left-wing social causes.
The credit card giant announced in its report that it would allocate $3 billion to a “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Action Plan,” in addition to the billion dollars the company already earmarked in October 2020. So far, American Express has spent funds on social justice nonprofits, “BIPOC businesses in Canada,” events that refer to Hispanic Americans as “Latinx,” and LGBT sites in New York City. The report also touts the company’s launch of “ByBlack,” a platform that checks whether a business is majority-owned by black people.
American Express has faced scrutiny for allegedly discriminating against white employees. Nick Williams, a former employee, alleges he was fired so that management could fill his position with a non-white worker. Williams has since filed a civil rights suit against American Express.
“Investors and customers should be wary of a company that spends billions on woke initiatives … and is willing to drop trusted vendors and employees based on race,” said a spokesman for Color Us United, a group that opposes “woke” policies at corporations.
The report comes as Republican attorneys general are pushing back against other financial giants’ spending on left-wing causes. Arizona’s Mark Brnovich and 18 other Republican attorneys general are putting pressure on BlackRock in response to its Environmental, Social, and Governance policies. According to a letter from the group, BlackRock’s spending on left-wing causes could represent a breach of its responsibility to stakeholders.
American Express in its report includes a chart that says “inclusion and diversity” is of more “importance to business” than data privacy and security, business ethics, financial resiliency, employee health and safety, stopping bribery, responsible investing, responsible tax practices, public policy, and customer satisfaction, among other things.
American Express beneficiaries include left-wing nonprofits such as the Hispanic Federation and the First Nations Development Institute. Aside from grant funding, the credit conglomerate will also consider race and sexual orientation when deciding suppliers.
The company also announced in the report that it will set aside $500 million for building “more resilient and equitable communities.”
In addition to its spending policies, American Express maintains internal diversity and equity policies. The company’s ESG report boasts that it has maintained “100 percent pay equity across genders” for two straight years. The report also says, however, that female employees’ median pay is 106.7 percent of male employees’ median pay. The company also promotes, hires, and retains women at higher rates than men.
American Express did not respond to the Washington Free Beacon‘s request for comment.
WARNING: Disturbing content. Viewer discretion is advised.
The Oxford English dictionary defines meme as “a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users.” Depending on how rotten your brain is from prolonged exposure to social media, you may or may not be aware that we are in the midst of a “meme war” that will ultimately determine the fate of American democracy.
One of the most significant new developments in this raging conflict is the emergence of the “Dark Brandon” meme, which portrays Joe Biden as a laser-eyed Machiavellian overlord skilled in the art of four-dimensional political chess. It also seeks to expropriate the “Brandon” moniker from Biden’s critics, who embraced the phrase “Let’s Go, Brandon!” in 2021 after a filthy NASCAR journalist falsely claimed that fans at Talladega were chanting in support of winning driver Brandon Brown. (Fact Check: They were chanting, “F— Joe Biden!”)
In any event, the Washington Free Beacon has exclusively obtained a number of avant-garde “Dark Brandon” memes created with the help of cutting edge artificial intelligence technology. Bear in mind: The mainstream media does not want you, the American people, to see these humorous images. Enjoy!
Failed university pageant contestant now running against winner of Miss Ohio pageant
Emilia Sykes, an Ohio state legislator now running for U.S. Congress, filed a lawsuit against Tuskegee University after the historically black institution mistakenly honored her as Miss Tuskegee University in 2006 and revoked her title. Tuskegee University awarded Sykes the victory because her top competitor was mistakenly docked points for a rules violation. The school yanked her crown away when officials realized they had erred in scoring the contest. In reality, Sykes had placed third in the popular vote but was ultimately given second place.
A Democratic congressional candidate sued her college after she lost a hotly contested university beauty pageant, according to court records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Sykes didn’t handle the defeat with grace, according to legal filings. Sykes and her parents filed a lawsuit against school officials, arguing that she was owed at least $75,000 for the psychological stress caused by the embarrassment of losing her crown.
“Sykes has been subjected to extreme mental and physical anguish, is unable to respond to persons who believe she is Miss Tuskegee University, and has experienced public embarrassment and personal psychological distress,” her lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, which was quickly dismissed by a federal judge.
The act of desperation by Sykes could impact her standing with voters, especially as she faces off against an actual beauty queen—the Republican nominee in the district is 2014’s Miss Ohio pageant winner, Madison Gesiotto Gilbert. The lawsuit also offers more evidence to the criticism that Sykes inherited her political career from her parents, who have both been members of the Ohio state legislature and joined Sykes in the lawsuit. The two claimed that their daughter’s pageant humiliation injured their political ambitions.
The question of who received the highest competition score was never disputed. Rather, Sykes claimed that the rightful winner, Calida Joy McCampbell, should have her crown revoked because she spoke over her allotted time during a speech, according to an article in the Tuskegee News from the time. University officials concluded upon review that McCampbell did not exceed her time limit.
That led Sykes and her parents to sue the school, arguing that Tuskegee University officials denied her “due process” when they revoked her title. Sykes and her family claimed the incident resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in damages stemming from the fact that her parents had altered “their busy schedules to be with their daughter” and “expended funds to increase her wardrobe.”
The experience of losing the pageant crown, Sykes and her parents claimed in court filings, resulted in “mental and physical anguish.” Some of that “anguish” was due to the fact, according to Sykes and her parents, that Sykes decided not to “remain on the cheerleading squad” following her loss of the beauty pageant crown.
Her parents also complained in the lawsuit that they had to cancel political fundraisers because of her Miss Tuskegee responsibilities, and that she had already received “gifts or congratulations from the Girls Scouts of America…and U.S. Senator Barak [sic] Obama.” The filing points to myriad local news coverage of Sykes winning the pageant to argue that it was simply too late to take the honor away.
The court disagreed—the lawsuit was dismissed by U.S. district judge Myron Thompson, a Tuskegee native put on the federal court by President Jimmy Carter in 1980. The judge said Sykes and her family were asking the court “to award the title of Miss Tuskegee to [Sykes] despite the fact that she scored lower than another contestant.”
It is unclear when Sykes left the university, but she ultimately graduated from Kent State University back in her home state of Ohio, according to her official biography, on which Tuskegee University is not mentioned.
Sykes did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Gesiotto Gilbert declined to comment.
The lawsuit is not the only time Sykes has relied on her parents for help. Her father, state senator Vernon Sykes (D., Ohio), co-chairs the Ohio Redistricting Commission, the state body in charge of creating the state’s congressional map. Vernon Sykes introduced two proposed congressional maps earlier that would have given his daughter an advantage in her race. Both those maps were struck down by Ohio courts.
Ohio’s 13th district is currently occupied by Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio), who vacated his seat to run for Senate. A May survey of voters in the district found Gesiotto Gilbert, who was an Ohio State University student when she won Miss Ohio in 2014, leading the race by nine points.
Law professors warned that proposal would encourage illegal race discrimination
The American Bar Association on Monday axed a proposal to require law schools to “diversify” their student bodies after more than a year of warnings from law professors that the plan would force schools to violate federal law.
The proposal, first released in May 2021, would have required law schools to submit annual progress reports on minority enrollment to the American Bar Association. Law schools that failed to boost the enrollment of “underrepresented groups” would have been at risk of losing their accreditation.
The proposal underwent three rounds of revisions before finally being withdrawn by the association’s house of delegates, which did not rule out revisiting the proposal at a later date. An early draft had warned that U.S. anti-discrimination laws were “not a justification” for “non-compliance” with the diversity standard, a line that drew criticism from many in the legal community, including from elite universities.
Ten Yale Law School professors said in a public comment filed in June 2021 that the proposal “instructs schools to risk violating state or federal law in order to retain certification.” As late as February 2022, law professors were raising “legal concerns” about the “use of racial balancing or quotas,” according to a memo from the bar association summarizing the feedback it received.
The decision to withdraw the proposal comes as the Supreme Court is gearing up for oral arguments in a landmark affirmative action case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, that could outlaw racial preferences throughout higher education. It also comes as something of a surprise given the association’s relentless focus on diversity.
The association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, has made noise about eliminating the LSAT, a test some say disadvantages minority applicants. And in February, it voted to require law schools to educate students “on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” over the objections from law professors who said the requirement would threaten academic freedom.
The curricular mandate was nonetheless popular among law school administrators, with 150 deans calling on the American Bar Association to implement it. There has been much less administrative agitation for rules about minority enrollment, which law schools have long struggled to boost.
There has also been little consensus on what sort of diversity the American Bar Association should prioritize. Some comments on the now-scrapped proposal said it gave “priority to racial and ethnic diversity at the expense of LGBTQ+ and disability diversity,” according to the February memo, creating a “two-tiered DEI system.” Others attacked “the phrase ‘underrepresented groups,’” which “may exclude individuals of groups that have been limited by a history of discrimination.”
The American Bar Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
John Grande says Connecticut union retaliated against him for refusing to join labor group
A Connecticut gym teacher says his school threatened to fire him after he criticized its mandatory diversity training on “exploring privilege.” But when he filed a grievance against the school, the local teachers’ union dismissed the complaint without explanation.
John Grande filed the grievance against Hartford Public Schools for what he called targeted discipline—including threats of termination and further “Sensitivity Awareness” training—but the American Federation of Teachers Local 1018, which has jurisdiction over this arbitration process for teachers, rejected his plea, his attorney told the Washington Free Beacon. Grande, who has been a gym teacher for 30 years, said the union retaliated against him for refusing to join the labor group.
“Our employee handbook explicitly states that no employee of the Hartford public school system will be disciplined for exercising their right to free speech,” Grande told the Free Beacon. “When asked for my reaction to the training, I expressed my disagreement and was punished for doing so.”
Neither AFT Local 1018 nor the Hartford Board of Education responded to requests for comment.
Grande’s complaint comes as national teachers’ unions embrace race-based lesson plans and training. AFT president Randi Weingarten said last year that K-12 schools do not teach critical race theory but also said her union supports teachers who face backlash for race-based lessons. The National Education Association, meanwhile, pledged its support for schools that teach critical race theory but later removed the statement from its website following backlash.
The school district’s mandatory presentation on privilege, obtained by the Free Beacon, states that “it is critical for everyone to reflect on privilege in this way in order to use our individual and collective privilege(s) for equity and social justice.” The training included an activity for teachers to split into groups and discuss their privilege in eight categories: class, ability, race, gender/sex, sexuality, nationality/citizenship, religion, and “other.”
“If a police car pulls me over, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race,” one example of privilege read.
“I do not fear increased mortality from COVID-19 or standard medical procedures such as giving birth,” another stated.
Grande said he expressed criticism about the training when the school district asked for feedback. Two of Grande’s coworkers reported the gym teacher to the school district after he stated his frustrations about the training seminar.
Frank Ricci, a labor fellow at the Yankee Institute and a former union president of the New Haven Fire Department, said it appears the teachers’ union and school district coordinated to target Grande for his beliefs.
“The Hartford School System, aided and abetted by the teachers’ union, has failed our kids,” Ricci told the Free Beacon. “Instead of focusing on their dismal test scores or bridging the achievement gap, they are focusing on ‘privilege,’ which is nothing more than a distraction for their failed education policies.”
Grande in July filed a complaint at the Connecticut State Board of Labor Relations against AFT Local 1018 over its refusal to take up his grievance against the school. The union has complete control over arbitration of grievances and can reject specific cases. The Fairness Center, a nonprofit law firm that represents Grande at the state labor board, argued the union must represent all teachers equally.
“Officials are refusing to represent him simply because he isn’t a member,” Nathan McGrath, president of the Fairness Center, told the Free Beacon. “John is just asking the union to do its job so he can continue doing his.”
AFT and its PAC have spent a combined$13 million on the 2022 midterm election—all of which went to liberal causes and Democratic candidates.
Fargo, North Dakota’s school board voted Tuesday to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of meetings because it is “non-inclusionary” and “not true.”
Board vice president Seth Holden motioned to axe the pledge, saying it was inconsistent with the district’s “philosophy.” Holden said the pledge “violates board policy” because “there is text within the Pledge of Allegiance which is simply not true.” He argued during the Tuesday board meeting that because multiple religions are practiced within the United States, the country can’t be “one nation under God.” Holden also said it is an “indisputable fact” that “not all U.S. citizens have liberty and justice.” According to Holden, reciting the pledge violates district policy that “school board members should be honest.”
In recent years, school boards across the country have become increasingly critical of the United States and patriotic gestures, as well as more open to progressive conceptions of gender and sexuality. Minneapolis Public Schools, for instance, plans to pour millions into incorporating “ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity” in math curriculums designed for K-5 students. School districts in Maryland and Virginia, meanwhile, have opted to hide information from parents regarding their children’s gender identity.
Holden also argued the phrase “under God” is “non-inclusionary,” as it only applies to Christian and Jewish students. He cited the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion statement to support this argument.
Most of the board members agreed with Holden. Members called the pledge “divisive” and a “distraction,” with one suggesting it be replaced with a “shared statement of purpose.” Another said that reciting the pledge doesn’t contribute to “student achievement.”
Robin Nelson, the only board member to voice opposition to removing the pledge, pointed out that people who did not want to stand for the pledge were not being forced to.
“Please give me the opportunity to stand up at the beginning of meetings and say the Pledge of Allegiance,” she said. “I would respectfully ask that you just don’t participate but don’t deny me that right.”
Former colleagues say ‘it’s not true’ that John Fetterman was an effective mayor
Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D., Pa.), a former mayor who is casting himself as the man who “worked to rebuild” the town of Braddock, Pa., missed more than a third of the borough’s monthly meetings during his time in office, according to public records.
Fetterman skipped at least 53 meetings during his tenure as mayor of the Pittsburgh suburb from 2006 to 2018, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The progressive Democrat missed just 4 meetings in his first three years in office, but peaked at 11 no-shows in 2011 and 9 in 2015. The tally may be higher, but records for the year 2016, when Fetterman first ran for Senate, are illegible.
Fetterman has been dogged for years by criticism of his spotty work history. Jesse Brown, a former Braddock borough council president, said in 2015 that Fetterman “should have been at all council meetings,” but stopped showing up after several confrontations over his duties as mayor.
“He first come in thinking he was in charge of everything,” said Brown, who also criticized Fetterman for taking credit for Braddock’s economic revitalization. “Everything that’s happened in this community, he’s gotten credit for it. The people believe that all this has come about through John Fetterman, but it’s not true.”
Chardaé Jones, who succeeded Fetterman as mayor, said Fetterman’s failure to show up to city council meetings eroded his relationships with councilmembers. “When you’re not present at council meetings, there’s not much of a relationship there,” she toldPolitico.
Fetterman has faced similar complaints as lieutenant governor. State Sen. Tony Williams, the Democratic whip, told Politico that Fetterman often failed to show up to preside over Senate sessions, hampering his ability to forge ties with policymakers.
One area where Fetterman has shown up to work as lieutenant governor could hurt him come November. As lieutenant governor, Fetterman’s only official duty is to oversee the Board of Pardons. Fetterman has embraced the role, voting to free multiple murderers from prison, a record that has drawn criticism from a group of Pennsylvania sheriffs.
Fetterman’s Republican opponent Mehmet Oz seized on Fetterman’s work ethic with the release of a campaign website this month that portrays Fetterman as a slovenly layabout who works from his basement. The Oz campaign launched the site following a report that Fetterman lived off his wealthy father until his late 40s, when he was elected lieutenant governor in 2019.
Fetterman’s truancy has drawn notice on the campaign trail, even before he suffered a near-fatal stroke that has kept him out of public view since May. Black clergy members criticized Fetterman for missing a candidate forum in February, with some speculating he skipped the event to avoid questions about a 2013 incident in which he pulled a shotgun on an unarmed black jogger.
“If there is already suspicion on the part of the community that race may be an issue and he may not be in touch with the community the way he thinks he is, then this only reinforces that by not showing up,” Rev. Mark Tyler, who leads South Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, told the Philadelphia Tribune.
Fetterman, who cast only one vote during his stint as mayor, has defended his record in Braddock, claiming borough council members were “absolute obstructionists” who were “committed to my failure.”
A California teacher who bragged about using his position to radicalize students into far-left “revolutionaries” has been given three years of pay by his school district to resign, according to a report.
Gabriel Gipe, a teacher of Advanced Placement government at Inderkum High School, agreed in January to leave his post with a $190,000 payout from the Natomas Unified School District, according to The Sacramento Bee, citing district records.
Gipe, whose annual base salary is about $60,000, received a final paycheck of about $100,000 after taxes were withheld, according to the newspaper.
The teacher drew outrage from the school district community last year after he was featured in a video by undercover news organization Project Veritas.
In the video footage, Gipe says he gave students extra credit for them to attend left-wing events, including counter-protests to the “right-wing rallies.” He also allegedly kept track of his students’ political inclinations to make sure they drifted further left as time went on.
“So, they take an ideology quiz and I put [the results] on the [classroom] wall. Every year, they get further and further left,” he tells the undercover journalist, who was posing as a left-wing sympathizer.
“I’m like, ‘These ideologies are considered extreme, right? Extreme times breed extreme ideologies.’ Right? There is a reason why Generation Z, these kids, are becoming further and further left.”
Gipe says he displayed on his classroom wall an Antifa flag, which he claimed was “meant to make fascists feel uncomfortable.” The video footage also shows a poster of Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong on a wall in the teacher’s classroom.
When asked about his views on the Chinese Communist Party, Gipe says in the video footage that Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which took place after a disastrous economic campaign that triggered mass starvation and famine, provides lessons for how socialism can take root inside the United States.
“You need propaganda of the deed—your economics—and cultural propaganda as well. You need to retrain the way people think,” he says. “We have to hit both fronts. We have to convince people that this [socialism] is what we actually need.”
Later, when a Project Veritas reporter confronted Gipe on the street, the teacher was wearing a T-shirt with a hammer and sickle on the front. Gipe didn’t respond to the reporter’s questions regarding his persuading of students to adopt far-left ideologies.
Following parents’ outrage, the school district placed Gipe on unpaid leave pending an investigation, acknowledging that Gipe’s “educational approach” was “disturbing and [undermined] the public’s trust.”
An administrative judge later ordered that Gipe be put on paid leave as the district’s investigation continued.
The report of the investigation revealed more details about Gipe’s problematic conduct, including replacing typical AP government curriculum with lectures about communism and pinning photos of students who expressed conservative ideas on a wall next to a swastika.
“You used your position of authority with a captive audience of impressionable teenagers to promote your own political ideology, including advocating or teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism,” the district report reads, according to The Sacramento Bee.
In response to a request for additional information, the Natomas Unified School District officials said in a statement that they have put the matter behind them.
“We have put this behind us and have moved forward,” the statement reads. “What’s most important right now is welcoming our students back to the start of a new school year.”
Glasser portrays Milley as a dedicated military officer with a strong set of values who loathed his unstable and temperamental boss. But despite his commander in chief’s “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms” and “abrupt dismissals,” Milley was determined not to resign for the good of his country. So altruistic.
There was that one time, however, when Milley was so utterly humiliated by Trump that he spent days in his Pentagon office, writing and rewriting a letter of resignation.
The occasion came during the June 2020 George Floyd riots. Members of Black Lives Matter had tried, but fortunately failed, to burn down St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square. Trump, accompanied by several advisers and Cabinet members, famously walked to the church and was photographed as he held up a Bible. Milley was among that group.
The legacy media claimed that a crowd of BLM protesters had been “violently” cleared from Lafayette Square by the U.S. Park Police for the sole purpose of this photo-op. One year later, the inspector general of the Interior Department released a report stating that the USPP had cleared the park to allow fencing to be installed “in response to destruction of property and injury to officers.”
In her new book, of course, Glasser tells readers, “Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.”
Anyway, because members of the military are expected to remain apolitical and he had participated in a “political event,” Milley was filled with remorse.
During a pre-recorded commencement address to the graduating class of the National Defense University, Milley apologized. He said, “I should never have been there.”
“As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched, and I am not immune, as many of you saw the result of that photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week,” he told the graduates.
“I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned, uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”
Upon additional reflection, Milley penned his letter of resignation, which is included in Glasser’s excerpt.
It is a boastful, four-paragraph letter written by a disgruntled subordinate with little sense of self-awareness. He tells the president he’s done some “deep soul-searching” and “can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders.”
“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” he begins. “I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.”
Milley continues, “You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.
“The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.”
“I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal,” Milley writes. He expands upon his own acceptance of all people no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation, then moves on to his patriotism. The implication is, of course, that Trump is racist, bigoted and doesn’t love America.
“Lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships.
“That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order.
“You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.”
Is he calling Trump a fascist? A Nazi? Sounds like it. If Milley thinks Trump damaged America’s reputation, we have to wonder how he feels about Biden’s blunders.
Unfortunately, he never submitted the letter to Trump.
Glasser writes, “Milley had finally come to a decision. He would not quit. ‘F*** that s***,’ he told his staff. ‘I’ll just fight him.’ The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage.”
Trump would have been better off if this coward had resigned. Among other allegations, Milley reportedly told his Chinese counterpart he would alert him if Trump were to plan any surprise attacks.
“Gen. Milley needs to be called in TODAY and asked under polygraph what he said to China.”
I would remind Milley of a certain oath he took a long time ago. He solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
The BLM riots in the summer of 2020 were not peaceful. They were responsible for over $1 billion in property damage. They caused injury and even deaths. It’s one thing to oppose racism and quite another to excuse crime in our cities.
Either you’re for the rule of law and against terrorism, or you’re not.
Standing up for the rule of law and against terrorism isn’t politics, Gen. Milley. It’s your job.
George Gascón recall up in the air after campaign reveals outdated signature-verification process
Los Angeles County officials are rejecting more than one out of every five petition signatures in the campaign to recall radical prosecutor George Gascón (D.), according to a random sample of signatures provided to the anti-Gascón campaign, which says the “shockingly” high rate is because officials are using outdated signature standards.
In July, the Los Angeles County registrar notified the Recall DA George Gascón campaign that a random sampling of signatures revealed a 22 percent rejection rate, 60 times more than the rejection rate for mail-in-ballots during the 2020 presidential election. In response, the recall campaign pushed the registrar to explain what they believed was a “shockingly large rejection rate.”
The campaign obtained public records that show the registrar’s office was training staff to review votes using outdated signature standards, which allow the disqualification of any signature for minor variations compared with the one provided on a person’s voter registration form. In a letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, lawyers for the campaign expressed concerns that these outdated standards were leading to an improperly high rejection rate.
Registrar Dean Logan on Monday said concerns over the signature rejections were “selective outrage” and “a fictitious narrative to misinform and cast doubt.” But Marian Thompson, the attorney who wrote the letter, told the Washington Free Beacon the county clerk has not been forthcoming about the reasons for the rejection rate and refuses to share the precise number of invalid signatures.
“If they didn’t follow the law and apply the same legal standards used for signature verification for vote-by-mail ballots, then we have a legal team assembled to resolve this matter in a court of law,” Thompson said.
Gascón has been mired in controversy since taking office in November 2020. Like many progressive prosecutors backed by the left-wing billionaire George Soros, Gascón moved immediately to end cash bail, lighten sentencing guidelines, and reduce incarceration. His deputy district attorneys sued him weeks later for the drastic changes, saying his prosecutorial approach would violate their oath of office. Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC contributed $4.7 million to Gascón’s campaign.
The movement to recall Gascón began gathering steam as crime spiked in the city. In Los Angeles last year, auto thefts, robberies, and homicides were all up, with the city’s murder rate nearing a 15-year high. In December, former Los Angeles prosecutors began circulating a petition to recall Gascón and gathered more than 715,000 signatures by July. If around 579,000 of those signatures are from registered voters in Los Angeles County, a recall election will be held in November. The signature count is due next week.
In March, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) codified pandemic-era changes to the state’s voting regulations, which reduced mail-in rejection rates by more than 80 percent in the 2020 presidential election. The current standards presume that a signature appearing on a ballot is legitimate. Prior to that change, votes could be rejected if signatures differed even slightly from a voter’s registration.
Los Angeles County is in the process of verifying signatures after a random sampling in July determined there were not enough valid signatures to trigger a recall. The Washington Examinerreported the county has denied the Gascón recall campaign observation rights for the election’s signature count, further obfuscating the verification process. A spokesman for the county registrar said the recall campaign is entitled to review the count when it is over, and that their office’s “focus is on completing the verification within the legal timelines with integrity and appropriate quality review.”
Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told the Free Beacon the registrar’s handling of the count “fuels skepticism.”
“Public officials should embrace transparency,” Snead said. “When they don’t it fuels doubt in the integrity of our electoral system.”
Blindly forgiving criminals has proven to be a bad idea already over and over. Investing in criminal societies just makes them more powerful. It does not change their culture. If they would just cease from being criminals the problems would go away. What am I missing? [US Patriot]
Former New York City prosecutor Jim Quinn, a vocal critic of New York’s 2019 bail law since day one, still hopes state lawmakers face reality and repeal the damaging law.
In his latest report, published under the Manhattan Institute, Quinn shows how earlier ideologically-driven movements aided the birth of the law, how the law drove up re-offending rates and crime, and how the two fixes didn’t solve the law’s root problem.
Quinn is a former executive assistant district attorney at the Queens District Attorney’s Office, one of five district attorney offices in New York’s five boroughs. He worked as a Queens prosecutor for 42 years.
His report came as the debate over criminal justice laws heats up in New York.
Recently, two high-profile Democrats—New York mayor Eric Adams and Albany County district attorney David Soares—joined Republican forces to plead for a special legislative session to fix bail reform and raise the age law, respectively.
So far, Gov. Kathy Hochul and state senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins showed no appetite for it.
Jim Quinn (Courtesy of Manhattan Institute)
“Through this report, I’m trying to get the debate onto something logical and reality. If my numbers are wrong, show me that my numbers are wrong,” Quinn told The Epoch Times.
In April 2019, five months after Democrats regained control of both legislative chambers and the governorship in New York, they crammed major criminal justice laws into the annual state budget.
The new laws are often called bail reform because it eliminates cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.
For those offenses, defendants are to be released after arrest without paying any money.
Advocates pushing the changes say that cash bail punishes poverty and needs to be done away with.
Before the new law took effect, Quinn, a Queens prosecutor at the time, did some data digging to find out how many Queens defendants were locked up in New York jails solely because they couldn’t afford bail.
The number was 398 in June 2019. Among them, 41 percent were held for violent A and B felonies, 33 percent for nonviolent D and E felonies, and 7 percent for misdemeanors, according to the report.
Those held for nonviolent felonies and misdemeanors typically had long arrest records, averaging 14 and 12, respectively, based on the data in the report.
Those numbers confirmed a long-time observation of Quinn’s: New York judges had used their discretion under the old bail law to set bail on low-level offenders who had long arrest records, indirectly protecting the community from more crime.
Most other low-level offenders were released from jails.
“There is no way you could look at this rationally and think that you could release career criminals and expect no impact on crime,” Quinn said.
Early implementation of the new law started in Oct. 2019. In Jan. 2020, New York City jails held 5,809 inmates, a reduction of about 2,000 compared to the month when the law was passed.
Affected offenses include robbery, burglary, grand larceny, drug sale, and car theft.
“If I woke up one morning and found that 2,000 people had escaped from Rikers Island, I would be terrified. I cannot think of anything like that has happened in my 42 years in office,” Quinn said.
This file photo shows a barbed wire fence outside inmate housing on New York’s Rikers Island correctional facility in New York. (Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo)
By Mar. 2020, in New York City, robbery went up by 33.9 percent, burglary by 26.5 percent, grand larceny by 15.8 percent, and car theft by 68 percent, compared to a year ago, according to the report.
The year before that, between Mar. 2018 and Mar. 2019, those offenses had been decreasing.
Quinn didn’t include the months following the pandemic in the comparisons to stay clear of aberrational factors.
New York governors and lawmakers had attempted to fix the bail law twice by allowing judges to set bail on more offenses under particular conditions. The latest fix occurred in April.
However, in the real world, those extra conditions still make it hard for judges to set bail on repeat offenders, Quinn said. Plus, a large pool of offenses remains non-bailable, he said.
Since the pandemic, crime in New York has been on an upward spiral.
For the first week of August, robbery went up by 39.8 percent, burglary by 32.3 percent, grand larceny by 48.3 percent, and car theft by 42 percent, compared to the same time last year, according to data by New York Police Department.
New York lawmakers supporting the bail law often relied on a two percent figure: between Jan. 2020 and June 30, 2021, only two percent of defendants got rearrested for a new violent felony while their cases were pending.
But Quinn questions the logic behind the calculation. He said to accurately measure the impact of the bail law, the focus should be on those who would have bail set under the old law but not under the new law, not the entire defendant population, which dramatically dilutes the results.
Quinn felt his views were often ignored by state lawmakers on the bail law debate, just like city lawmakers ignored his views on closing the Rikers jail years earlier, he said.
Demonstrators call for the closing of the Rikers Island prison as they protest outside City Hall in New York, on Sept. 22, 2021. (Photo by Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)
“The city wanted to close Rikers Island, and it became such a political issue that it really didn’t look at the actual effects. Anybody who opposed the closing of Rikers was called a racist, and that shut a lot of people up. The debate just became poisoned,” Quinn said.
“Another problem is that we lost the PR war because they have this far-fetched notion that district attorneys are these evil people who are only interested in locking people up,” Quinn added.
He said the 2019 bail law grew out of the momentum to close the Rikers jail and ramp up supervised releases in New York City, all driven by advocates under the slogan of “ending mass incarceration.”
“They created a narrative, and the narrative became true.
“The fact is that the Rikers population had been going down for years before these movements. We had a lot of services and programs that we used to keep people from going to jail,” he said.
“But there does come a point where some of these people will never help themselves unless there is a threat of them being sentenced to jail or put in jail on bail.”
“I just think it is important for people to look at this logically, and that is all I am asking for,” Quinn said.
China and Russia are the clear winners of the the carbon-reducing provisions in the Democrats’ latest spending bill that aim to cut fossil fuel emissions by 40 percent by 2030, according to former President Donald Trump’s erstwhile economic adviser.
Stephen Moore, a Trump-era adviser and senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told NTD in a recent interview that the climate-related provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act—now en route to final House approval—would hamstring American energy production and benefit adversaries.
“The two big winners from this bill clearly are Russia and China,” Moore said, adding that he thinks the bill is not just bad for the U.S. economy but it’s “really bad for national security to give up our energy dominance.”
Moore pointed out that China—which is responsible for around five times more carbon emissions than the United States—is now building dozens of massive coal plants and “obviously, they don’t care about climate change.”
As a major exporter of fossil fuels, Russia also stands to gain from efforts to accelerate curbs on U.S. carbon emissions as that would keep crude prices elevated and bolster Russia’s revenue stream, Moore said.
The economist argued that the Biden administration has “basically declared a war on our fossil fuels,” while pointing to Germany’s “experiment” of going all-in on clean energy a decade or so ago that he said “basically led to a complete economic collapse.”
“Let’s not follow in their footsteps,” he said.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to reporters outside the Senate Chamber after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Aug. 7, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Markets or Government Subsidies?
The Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion in climate and energy provisions, with measures like tax credits for buying electric vehicles, making homes more energy efficient, and installing residential solar panels and battery systems.
The measure also reinstates the superfund tax on crude and imported oil, which could lead to higher energy bills for households, and it includes a fee of up to $1,500 per ton for methane emissions.
“More simply, it means that roughly 40 percent of the country’s electricity will come from wind, solar, and energy storage by 2030,” ACP said in the analysis, which projects that the Inflation Reduction Act will, overall, deliver an estimated 525 to 550 gigawatts of new non-fossil fuel power by the end of the decade, up from the current 211 gigawatts.
The bill is also expected to generate over $900 billion in economic activity via the construction of clean energy projects between now and 2030, according to the association.
Moore said that he doesn’t object to renewable sources of energy but argued that market forces rather than government subsidies should be their key driver.
“We didn’t have the government subsidize Henry Ford when he invented cars,” Moore said. “We didn’t have the the federal government subsidize Standard Oil when it started making … gas plentiful and cheap for everyone. So why do we need to have the government throw hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in this industry?”
Moore also argued that, contrary to what its name implies, the bill won’t reduce inflation.
Alliant Energy’s coal plant in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Michigan, on July 4, 2022. (Timothy Gardner/Reuters)
Inflation Reduction?
The Inflation Reduction Act “will increase inflation,” Moore said, adding that, “the reason we have 9 percent inflation today is because of the massive Biden spending spree.”
“There’s two things you don’t want to do when you have massive inflation. You don’t want to spend more government money. And when you’re in a recession, you don’t want to raise taxes. This bill makes both those mistakes,” he said.
Some disagree with Moore about the bill’s impact on inflation.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said in an Aug. 9 interview in The Harvard Gazette that “the tendency of this bill will be to reduce inflation because over time it reduces demand by bringing down budget deficits.”
Summers also argued that it would bolster the supply of key commodities in the energy sector, helping push down prices.
Other backers of the bill, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), say the government subsidies for clean energy will have a knock-on effect and boost private investment in the sector and so accelerate cutting carbon emissions.
“This is going to be more massive than people realize,” Khanna told Politico in a recent interview.
“If the government invests $300 billion in solar, wind, batteries, and heat pumps, that has the potential to unlock trillions of dollars in private sector investment in climate,” he added.
Moore argued that the bill is less about the environment and more about money.
“This is a massive, now trillion-dollar, industry. This is about money, folks, this doesn’t have anything to do about cleaning up the environment or keeping our environment safe,” he said.
“This is massive numbers of huge companies and huge investors. They’re going to get very, very rich off of these hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies,” Moore added.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), a fossil fuels industry group, identified six problematic provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that it argued would undermine the industry’s ability to promote energy security for American consumers.
Besides the superfund tax and methane emission fees, the API also noted additional costs imposed on energy companies with the bill’s minimum book tax provisions and increased rental fees on onshore leases.
The group also panned the bill’s omitting of comprehensive permitting reform, which API believes is key for bolstering domestic energy production, lowering costs for consumers, and helping the country meet its emission objectives.
“Glaringly absent in the bill is permitting reform, which is required for America’s infrastructure needs and to bolster critical oil, natural gas, and renewable supplies to meet our current and future energy demand,” said Mike Sommers, API president and CEO, in a statement.
Hiring practices driven by diversity are ‘a recipe for disaster’
Southwest Airlines Co. (AKA SouthWoke Air [US Patriot]) is basking in accolades for its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts, award-winning customer service, and record-breaking quarterly revenues.
Behind the scenes of that rosy picture, heartaches are afflicting Southwest, called “the airline with Heart” because of its heart-shaped logo and a corporate culture steeped in “The Golden Rule,” treating others the same way they’d like to be treated.
But eight current Southwest employees, including three minorities, told The Epoch Times that “woke, leftist” DEI policies, as implemented, have tarnished the cherished Golden Rule principle, fractured a once-cohesive workforce, and, ultimately, may put safety at risk.
Faced with pandemic-related staffing shortages and pressure to add minorities, the company has changed the way it hires, trains, and disciplines workers—mostly to benefit less-qualified new hires representing the diversity rainbow, the employees say.
One Southwest flight attendant, a Hispanic female, said: “They are compromising safety for the sake of race, gender identity, and sexual preference … They’re risking people’s lives because of agendas.”
Southwest, one of America’s largest air carriers, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
Similar issues have spread industry-wide, according to 10 airline employees who agreed to be interviewed. Four are pilots and six are flight attendants; most have 20 or more years of experience. All of them, including two American Airlines pilots, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.
While no one thinks the policies are causing an imminent threat of a plane falling out of the sky tomorrow, all of the interviewees agreed that each time a standard is lowered, or a less-qualified employee is hired, the risk that something can go horribly wrong inches forward a notch or two. In an industry that depends on a near-miracle integration of people, machinery, and computers, even a few deviations can culminate in catastrophe.
Still, some employees worry about what could happen if current trends continue to stress out and distract safety professionals. Said one flight attendant: “It’s a recipe for disaster. I just hope I’m not at work when it happens.”
Us-Versus-Them Mentality
While promoting diversity sounds like a great idea, the inclusionary policies have actually become exclusionary at Southwest, employees say. Disparate treatment has divided their ranks into two distinct camps: those with “desirable” or “approved” personal, social, or political characteristics—and those without.
Minorities or people with leftist political views, varying gender identities, and alternative sexual orientations appear to be given wide latitude. This “protected class” is allowed to bend or break rules, and new hires in these classifications may be given extra chances to pass required skills tests, the employees said.
At the same time, veteran workers—especially those who are white, heterosexual, and conservative—find themselves in the crosshairs for almost anything, including making a personal statement of religious or political beliefs, the Southwest workers said. Even minorities can be shifted into this targeted group if they espouse personal beliefs running counter to causes that the company supports.
“There are two sets of standards: One for us and one for them,” said an experienced flight attendant.
One of her colleagues said: “The company is trying to eliminate anybody who does not agree with their agenda. The last few years, anybody who speaks up against them, they want gone.” That flight attendant said she had no problems at work until she posted her Christian religious beliefs on her personal Facebook page, along with her support of President Donald Trump. A coworker reported the posts to Southwest, and the flight attendant said she has faced repercussions ever since.
She and others say the targeting of conservatives is common—and they point to the recently publicized case of fired Southwest flight attendant Charlene Carter as a prime example.
‘Targeted Assassinations’ of Conservatives
Last month, a federal jury in Texas awarded Carter more than $5 million after finding that Southwest wrongfully terminated her and that her union didn’t live up to its duty to represent her. The company fired Carter after she expressed her pro-life views to a union leader via social media and opposed the union’s pro-abortion activism.
The company supported the union’s political activism, Carter’s suit says, by accommodating work-shift changes for union members so they could participate in the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., in January 2017. Marchers were protesting Trump’s inauguration; one of the primary sponsors of the event was Planned Parenthood. Southwest also showed “solidarity” with the protesters by bathing its airplane cabins in pink lights on some D.C.-bound flights, Carter’s lawsuit says.
Charlene Carter, who was fired from her job at Southwest Airlines, has won a federal case alleging she was wrongfully terminated over expressing her personal religious views. (Courtesy of Charlene Carter)
Documents in the case revealed that some union officials and political activists were singling out dissenting Southwest employees for “targeted assassinations,” meaning that they would try to get the company to fire them, using the company’s social media policy as a bludgeon.
In an interview with The Epoch Times on Aug. 8, Carter, who lives near Denver, Colorado, said she can’t believe that some leaders of Transport Workers Union of America Local 556, who helped set her up to be fired, are still working for Southwest.
Carter also validated her coworkers’ concerns about the disparate treatment of employees who dare to oppose leftist agendas. “I think there are a ton of cases out there just like mine,” she said. Terminated employees from Southwest and other airlines have been continuously contacting Carter for help after learning about the July 14 verdict in her case.
Carter spent five years fighting in court; she thinks she was one of the first casualties of the erosion of Southwest’s unique corporate culture, which she witnessed during the latter part of her 20-plus years at the airline.
“We all loved our jobs; we all loved each other—our CoHearts, that’s what we called each other,” Carter said, pointing out that the airline’s stock ticker is LUV, a nod to its birthplace at Love Field, Texas.
Corporate Culture Shift
But corporate leadership and philosophy shifted. Carter said, her former coworkers tell her the culture is now one where people are fired on a whim, and they’re encouraged to file complaints against each other over perceived insults, such as failure to use the “preferred pronoun” of a person asserting an alternative gender identity.
Employees who face such accusations are presumed guilty, a current flight attendant said, and they risk suspension or termination. “That is how we are treated now,” she said.
“It’s gotten ridiculous,” Carter said. She was astounded to learn that lapel pins, designating preferred pronouns, are being offered to staff.
A fellow flight attendant says the company’s priorities are misplaced.
“We used to be focused on hiring ‘the best of the best,’” she said. “So why is it now that we feel at Southwest Airlines that we have to use the right pronouns and we have to acquiesce to someone’s gender-fluid mentality?”
The DEI Effect
The interviewed employees blame DEI policies for sowing the seeds of division. Ironically, before DEI was implemented, “people were never labeled,” a flight attendant said. “I find it very divisive,” she said, “because now everyone is labeled, divided by race, gender sexual orientation … whatever.”
“This is wrong—all the way wrong,” she said.
The company’s annual report, in its DEI section, says, “Southwest Airlines recognizes, respects, and values differences. … At Southwest, DEI is and always has been a part of our DNA.”
All four major airlines—and many other American companies—publicly disclose DEI-related information, such as data on minority recruitment and the racial makeup of their workforce.
“Every airline is trying to push forward with minority hiring because they want to ‘show that they care,’” aviation analyst Jay Ratliff said. “They’re being asked, ‘How many women are within your pilot ranks? … How many pilots of color?’”
If an airline’s diversity metrics seem low in comparison to their competitors’ numbers, the company’s reputation and bottom line can suffer, Ratliff said.
That’s not necessarily fair, he said, because few people have the ability, interest, and financial means to qualify as a commercial airline pilot. Amassing the FAA-required 1,500 hours of flight time with an instructor can cost $75,000 or more, pilots said.
Last year, United Airlines announced its goals: to train 5,000 new pilots by 2030 at its new flight school, with “at least half of those students to be women or people of color.” The first class of new recruits “exceeded that goal,” with 80 percent of the 30 students fitting that category, the airline said in a report.
Considering that white males make up about one-third of the American population, a Southwest pilot said that composing a class with 80 percent minorities and women looks like “DEI special-status hiring on steroids.”
Scoring Systems Push Diversity
DEI data play a significant role in corporate ESG scores—ratings of a company’s “environmental, social, and governance” performance. It’s a complex—and controversial—way to assess which companies are considered “good corporate citizens.”
Most of the interviewed airline employees believe that the pursuit of ESG scores is driving corporate personnel practices, including ignoring well-qualified male applicants while eagerly hiring less-experienced female and minority candidates.
Increasingly, ESG scores can help determine whether a company sinks or swims. A good ESG score can attract investors, government contracts, and favorable loan-interest rates—benefits that are especially important for the airline industry, in which lucrative U.S. Department of Defense contracts are at stake and profit margins are razor-thin because of astronomical costs for equipment and personnel.
ESG ratings have existed in some form for decades, yet they barely registered a blip on internet searches until a few months ago, amid the Biden administration’s continued push for businesses to address environmental concerns and to institute “green” policies, which weigh heavily in ESG scores and DEI metrics.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced his intent to push back against ESG, calling it “leveraging corporate power to impose an ideological agenda on society.”
Refinitiv, a company that produces ESG scores, says its process for calculating the ratings starts with collecting more than 630 ESG measures from each company’s public disclosures. Other ESG assessors have their own rating systems, which means results can vary depending on which assessment method is being used. ESG advocates are now working on standardizing how these scores are calculated.
Several airline employees said it would benefit their company, their industry, and society in general if ESG scores and DEI programs were abolished.
One Southwest pilot with decades of experience said such measures create unnecessary complications with no positive effect on the airline’s core mission.
“Why do we need DEI programs? Why do we need ESG? A lot of the public isn’t even aware these things exist,” he said. “The passengers just want people like me to get them, and their bags, to the same place at the same time, safely … DEI and ESG do nothing to support that—zero.”
“I need these DEI programs and ESG scores to go out the back of the airplane like the jet fuel that we burn.”
Non-Pilots Hiring Pilots
Southwest’s annual report says it has been “evolving hiring and development practices to support diversity goals.”
Those changes are troubling to the interviewed employees and to the pilots’ union. In a letter to members last month, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association pointed out that, for the first time in the company’s 51-year history, a non-pilot is in charge of hiring pilots. The “system chief pilot” used to have that responsibility. “We are just a single step away” from hiring pilots based upon mere reviews of their resumes, association president Casey Murray wrote to union members. Southwest has about 9,600 pilots, the letter said.
Putting a non-pilot in charge of hiring pilots most likely will affect the quality of the pilots who are being hired, Southwest interviewees said. People who lack specific knowledge of this specialized job would have a hard time telling the difference between a good hire and a bad one, pilots said. One of the interviewed pilots said that the chief pilot told him: “The diversity department has a very strong voice in who gets hired.”
Southwest wants to hire more than 2,000 pilots in the next year, the union’s letter said, questioning whether those new hires will be required to meet Southwest’s traditionally high standards. “Across the entire commercial aviation industry, employers are fighting for an ever-shrinking pool of qualified pilots,” yet Southwest may be at a disadvantage to compete for those pilots. Contract negotiations with Southwest’s pilots are lagging, compared to progress with other airlines’ pilot unions, Murray said.
“Pilots are the fuel that powers Southwest Airlines, and right now Southwest’s supply of fuel is running low. Time is growing critical, and options are becoming limited,” Murray wrote.
Seeking the Best (Non-White) Pilots?
Current pilots also say they have learned that hiring decisions are being driven by a job candidate scoring system; they’re unsure how long it has been in place, how it works, or whether it unfairly elevates minorities. The company controls all of that information.
Still, the employees feel confident in anecdotal evidence suggesting that the scoring system, coupled with other hiring practices, could be producing a pattern of discrimination against men, especially white men who come from military backgrounds—previously highly sought-after job candidates. “We could be wrong, but I don’t think we are,” said one pilot who has military experience.
That pilot said he thinks the vast majority of his colleagues have heard accounts of possible discrimination similar to the following:
When a well-qualified former military pilot applied for a job, Southwest never contacted him for an interview. But the applicant learned that a woman was hired as a pilot, despite having half as much experience in the airline industry.
Further, the man had experience as a captain while the woman had only been a first officer, who sits next to the captain in the cockpit. “It’s a completely different world” when a person shifts into the captain’s chair, said the pilot.
“We’re leaving a lot of people behind who are better-qualified, just because they’re the wrong color, or they’re identified the wrong way. That’s concerning. We’re not putting the best up-front,” he said. “We have people’s lives in our hands. It’s just like with doctors. If you go to a doctor, you want to go to the best doctor you can.”
An American Airlines pilot with decades of experience said he was less troubled than some of the Southwest interviewees who worried about the effects of reduced standards as a result of the increased emphasis on diversity hiring. However, that pilot said he would become very concerned if standards are lowered “to the point where people aren’t flying as confidently.”
A second American Airlines pilot said he has observed that “training is not nearly as comprehensive as it used to be,” he said. “But these people who are starting out are flying with people who are supremely qualified to be flying airplanes—so mistakes can be covered.”
He thinks the reduced standards could eventually cause problems if the hyperfocus on diversity continues: “If you’re looking for a diverse workforce and not a qualified workforce, you’ve got issues. … You haven’t seen any accidents because of ‘diversity,’ but the potential is there.”
All 11 people who were interviewed for this story, including Carter, the ex-flight attendant, said personal traits such as gender and race shouldn’t be part of the equation at all.
“From the cockpit door forward, guys and gals of all ethnicities are after the same thing—and that’s a safe flight,” said one of the American Airlines pilots. “They don’t care who sits next to them as long as they can do the job.”
More Than Snack Servers
Most air passengers think of flight attendants as hospitality ambassadors who make them comfortable with beverages, snacks, blankets, and pillows. But their main purpose is to assist in the rare event of an in-flight emergency.
Six Southwest flight attendants, along with Carter, say they feel less able to perform crucial duties because of the climate in which they’re now operating—and new hires appear to be less equipped to shoulder those responsibilities.
“They have just made it such a hostile work environment. Southwest has made it that way, and flight attendants are afraid to do their jobs,” a flight attendant said. “But you’re supposed to put a smile on your face and pretend that everything is grand.”
The flight attendants describe feeling as though a backstabber is always ready to pounce, to report any action or statement that doesn’t fit the corporate ideology. They’re being held to strict conduct and uniform standards while “accommodations” are extended to people in protected classes, such as a minority woman who was allowed to wear a nose ring—which got a white female in trouble—and a male flight attendant who described himself as “nonbinary”—neither totally male nor totally female—being allowed to wear a skirt that appeared to be shorter than regulations allowed.
The nonbinary employee seemed to be using his position at the airline as a platform for LGBTQ activism and self-promotion, rather than focusing on benefiting the company or its customers, fellow flight attendants said. They shared screenshots of the nonbinary employee’s social media posts. One is a selfie of the mustached man posing in his Southwest uniform, with the comment, “My dress looks better on me than most chicks.”
That employee no longer works for Southwest, flight attendants said. Yet they said they were aware that a couple of employees faced disciplinary action for referring to the nonbinary employee as “he” in a members-only Facebook group for flight attendants.
Antics Embarrass Fellow Flight Attendants
One flight attendant perceives that the company is making skewed, unfair hiring decisions, and creating a level of absurdity that’s hard to stomach. She knows of people who are related to Southwest employees and have college degrees—which go beyond the high-school education requirement for flight attendants—“and they don’t get hired, and yet we have this guy, with a mustache, in a skirt, distracting us all because the company wants to fight over his pronouns.”
Being a flight attendant used to be considered prestigious and classy; Southwest was viewed as “Mount Rushmore,” a pinnacle for flight attendants, who felt proud just to be hired.
“Now the pride is not about the brand of Southwest Airlines,” a flight attendant said. “It’s about how different I can be as an employee of Southwest Airlines—like, ‘Y’all need me more than I need you.’”
Public perception of the role has diminished, not just at Southwest, but across the industry. Airlines grant diversity-based exceptions to people who don’t want to look or act professional, the flight attendants said.
It used to be unusual to see flight attendants behave in ways that brought embarrassment to their coworkers. Now, quite a few of the new hires who were prized for their diversity “are rather risqué,” a flight attendant said. “They become very emboldened; they feel they can get away with this because they are in a protected class.”
Still, Southwest has had to fire employees who pushed the envelope too far, including one minority flight attendant who solicited sex in a social media video and another who videoed herself twerking. In both instances, the videos, provided to the Epoch Times, show the employees in Southwest uniforms.
Such conduct disgusts the flight attendants, and their concern is more than superficial. “If we relax the appearance standards and we’re letting people lower their professional standards, then they obviously are not equipped to handle any type of safety issue that can happen on that plane,” a flight attendant said.
“Where do you draw the line and say enough is enough?”
Commitment, Skills Insufficient
One of the flight attendants who has been targeted for religious and political views said her commitment to her job boils down to this: “I will give my life for my passengers and my crew, if that’s what I need to do. My last words will be, ‘Let’s roll,’” she said, referencing the famous words spoken by a passenger on one of the U.S. airplanes that were hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
She doesn’t see that same level of grit from the new hires. “They don’t have the same tough mentality,” she said. Nor do they have the same work ethic, which might be attributable to differences between the younger and older generations.
The older flight attendant described being busy from the beginning to the end of each flight while many of the new hires tend to just serve one round of drink orders, “then they go back to the back (of the airplane) and sit down for the rest of the flight.”
The new employees aren’t demonstrating mastery of the skills they were supposed to have been taught, or willingness to perform them. A passenger was having a medical emergency but the flight attendant in charge of that section “wouldn’t even come out of the galley to assist,” said one flight attendant. Instead, she and a second colleague had to take care of the ailing passenger.
Such an incident stokes her worst fear: “Somebody’s gonna die. With the lack of training that we’re seeing in the new hires that are coming out … there’s going to be somebody who’s not trained, facing an emergency.”
The irony is that, because of conduct problems and lack of devotion to the job, many of the “check-the-box” new hires either quit or are discharged, the employees said. That’s why it would make more sense for Southwest to be more selective in its hiring decisions—and to make those decisions based on the applicant’s qualifications and commitment to doing a good job, both of which now seem to be lacking.
Too Many Hires, Too Fast?
A flight attendant who is familiar with hiring practices said she is concerned about the speed with which large numbers of new employees were hired in recent months. She is hearing that up to 10,000 employees have been added to the roster, so the airline is now up to pre-pandemic staffing levels.
Her concern: It’s doubtful that the company had the capacity to properly vet and train such a large number of employees, including flight attendants, in such a short timeframe. In fact, she says it’s “mathematically impossible,” (That’s OK, because mathematics is racist anyway [US Patriot]) based on past observations of failure rates among new trainees.
For each class of about 50 flight attendants, about 15 trainees would “wash out,” or not make it through the rigorous testing process, which includes mastering emergency evacuation drills. Considering that, it’s most likely that “the standards would have to be relaxed” to allow large numbers of new hires to complete the process rapidly.
“There’s a mindset that’s changed…it seems like they’re accepting almost any applicant—here’s a body and here’s a checkmark” on the diversity list, she said.
She’s puzzled as to why Southwest pushed so hard to hire so many new flight attendants. “We don’t have all the airplanes that we were expecting to get,” she said. “Then why are we hiring all of these flight attendants?”
Less-Rigorous Training
Today’s training is “a lot shorter and a lot simpler” than it used to be, she said.
Carter said it’s her understanding that flight attendants now must pass only a few tests. In years past, “there were about three tests a week for six weeks,” she said. “You were breathing through a fire hose all of this information.”
She also said that if a trainee flunked a test, that person was given one chance to retake it, “and if you failed, you were done.” Now, Carter has been told that people are being given multiple opportunities for do-overs.
As a result, “I’m hearing from flight attendants that these people don’t understand what our safety is about here.”
Employees say they feel as though core values and common sense are falling by the wayside when they are asked to give wide berth to people asserting that they are gender fluid, or identify with a gender that doesn’t match their biological sex.
“I don’t tell a pilot that I identify as a pilot, and I’m going to fly the aircraft—because there are no facts in that,” a flight attendant said.
While seeing a decline in the flight attendants who seem to be truly vested in their work, the flight attendants say the company is directing them to merely “inform” passengers about violations of safety rules, not to enforce the rules. This is in direct contrast to a few months ago, when flight attendants were required to function as the facemask police to enforce a federal pandemic restriction while it remained in effect.
Presumably in response to customer backlash over the much-despised mask mandates, Southwest has instructed flight attendants to cut passengers more slack. “We’re allowing customers to do as they please, and it’s causing safety issues,” a flight attendant said. People are refusing to remain seated during takeoffs and landings, for example. If something goes amiss, “You become a projectile; you can hurt other people,” the flight attendant added.
Airline Love Affair Ends
A longtime pilot described his passion for his job, and laments how the company killed it.
From the outset, “I was in a love affair with Southwest Airlines. They were smaller and scrappier. They were all bone and muscle. No fat. And I liked that,” he said. “We grew under the nose of American, Delta, and United, despite their tactics … We continued to grow and thrive around a very simple business model that revolved around the Golden Rule.”
That enabled the company to empower all employee groups so they could make decisions benefiting both internal and external customers. They didn’t get sucked into bureaucracies.
But the company crossed a rubicon last year when it took a stand on the COVID-19 vaccine and “woke” policies, he said. Employees were told: “You must get vaccinated and you must accept these diversity and inclusion principles even though it goes against the principles that you grew up with at this company.”
For the veteran pilot, that was a death knell, he said. “It was a complete and total divorce of the culture.”
“The company has destroyed the trust relationship. This is not the Southwest Airlines that I joined. … The love affair is over,” he said. “When you prioritize profits and special interests over people, this is what you get.”
Although the public perception is that many pilots lost their jobs because of vaccine mandates, pilots doubt that’s accurate. In the case of Southwest, many employees sought—and obtained—religious or medical exemptions.
The company still touts the Golden Rule, but that’s mostly lip service, the pilot said. “It’s the thing that allowed Southwest to rise to greatness. It’s less important now. What’s more important? I have to understand that a person’s gender can be on a sliding scale, or maybe they’re just a man who wants to dress as a woman.”
He resents the implication that “hopelessly bigoted pilots like me” need to take a new sexual harassment training module that encompasses LGBTQ considerations. He learned that if a person in that category believes they were looked at in a way that they felt was uncomfortable, “I could be written up, and I don’t even have to say anything,” the pilot said.
Southwest flight attendants were recently required to complete a DEI training or face being put on unpaid leave. That didn’t sit well. The flight attendants say they were already treating people as equally as possible—values embodied in the Golden Rule and basic human decency. “I say this as a minority: I don’t need to be told how to treat people with dignity and respect. I’ve been doing that all my life.”
Distractions Imperil Safety
These programs and the “woke” cultural shift are creating huge distractions, which by themselves pose a threat to safety in ways that most people never think about, the pilot said.
“People take it for granted that takeoffs equal landings. But I can tell you that there are close calls—regularly—where human intervention prevented things from getting really bad. … And the traveling public never knew about it,” the pilot said.
For everyone’s safety, all airline workers must be at the top of their game.
“We need the most qualified people in these safety-sensitive jobs. But it doesn’t stop at the cockpit door,” he said. If any part of the system breaks down because a person was distracted or wasn’t the most qualified person for the job, “the end result is the same if you had an unqualified pilot: the airplane is a smoking hole at the end of the runway and you have 170 people dead—and a lot of angry families.”
“If you crash one airplane, that one crash has the ability to put an airline out of business. When I go to work that weighs on me. All 170 of those lives are in my mind from the time we take off until we land,” he said. “In my mind, disaster is just around the corner.”
Ready for The Worst
Before each takeoff, pilots mentally rehearse how they would react to rare dreaded scenarios, which have actually happened: A maintenance guy doesn’t do his job and the engine falls off the airplane. Or the motor blows up. Or a fire erupts. There is an infinite number of things that can go wrong. But such incidents are exceedingly rare—and when they do happen, a miraculous interplay between humans and technology averts death and catastrophe.
“These are the things we think about,” the pilot said. “And instead, we’ve got people thinking about their special status and how they can get one of their coworkers in trouble?… When you’re cheating the laws of physics every day, DEI has no place.” (Great remark! [US Patriot])
Under these circumstances, it’s infinitesimally trivial to even give a moment’s consideration to a person’s race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or any other trait.
“I will treat that man, dressed as a woman, the same way I would treat a woman dressed as a woman, or a woman dressed as a man. I don’t care,” the pilot said. “Just do your job. Take care of those passengers. And then drag my sorry butt out of the airplane if it comes down to that, because I’m the last one to go.”
In one way, the “new” rules don’t really bother the pilot: He said he was already treating people well. That won’t change, he said. He just hates knowing that at any moment, he could be “written up because I looked at you wrong.”
As a white male, the pilot recognizes he’s “the new minority.”
He says he has to go to work every day and prove “I’m not the hopelessly bigoted, homophobic, misogynist, sexist fossil that they think I am.”
And that’s OK with him.
“I’m fine with that. I don’t care,” he said. “Because I live by the Golden Rule.”
Mandela Barnes’s record to be tested as Republicans home in on anti-police rhetoric, personal issues
Mandela Barnes, a far-left Wisconsin Senate candidate bankrolled by anti-police groups, easily clinched the state’s Democratic nomination on Tuesday, after a friendly primary that effectively ended two weeks ago when his main competitor dropped out and endorsed him.
But the smooth sailing is about to end as he enters the general election against incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson, and the Republican Party homes in on Barnes’s history as a progressive firebrand.
During the primary, Barnes’s opponents avoided attacks on his political record, including his criticism of law enforcement, far-left economic policies, and personal issues such as his tax delinquency. He also attempted to distance himself from some of the more radical policies on the left, telling the Washington Free Beacon that he doesn’t support the “defund the police” movement—even as he raked in his largest donations from Lead the Way 2022, the Working Families Party, and other anti-law-enforcement organizations.
But Johnson will almost certainly highlight Barnes’s controversial policy positions during the general election, according to Republican strategists.
“There weren’t many elbows thrown in that primary,” said Mark Graul, a Wisconsin Republican strategist. “[These issues are] going to come out over the next few months.”
Keith Gilkes, a Wisconsin Republican political consultant, predicted that Barnes will have a “very difficult time appealing statewide coming from that Democratic progressive liberal viewpoint with the voters around the state of Wisconsin outside of Dane and Milwaukee county,” the bluest areas in the state.
Barnes, who was born in Milwaukee in 1986, worked as a community organizer for Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope before entering politics in 2012. He spearheaded a campaign that railed against “mass incarceration” in Wisconsin, and sought to reduce the state’s prison population by half through early release and treatment programs.
Later that year, Barnes was elected to the state assembly in a deep-blue district in Milwaukee, after ousting Democratic incumbent Jason Fields in the primary. Barnes, with backing from the state teachers’ union, argued that Fields was too conservative and campaigned against the incumbent’s support for school vouchers.
As a state legislator, Barnes backed criminal justice reform policies and sponsored a 2016 bill to abolish cash bail in the state, a position his campaign says he still supports. The bill would require Wisconsin judges to “release a defendant before trial” rather than setting monetary bail, unless the court found clear evidence that the individual would “cause serious bodily harm to a member of the community.” Prosecutors would also be prohibited from using “the nature, number, and gravity” of the charges to argue against release.
Bail reform has been a contentious issue in Wisconsin, where six people were killed and dozens injured last year at a Christmas parade in Waukesha by a repeat felon who had been released on low bail shortly before the attack.
Barnes has also taken far-left stances on economic and environmental issues. As lieutenant governor, he led a commission on climate change that proposed divesting state pension funds from fossil fuels, instituting a carbon tax, and requiring schools to teach a racially focused climate justice curriculum.
“He’s much further left than most Wisconsinites are … and I think people are going to learn that over the course of the next three months,” said Graul.
Barnes’s personal record could also be an obstacle. He has been delinquent on property taxes, and blew up at a reporter who asked about the late payments in 2019, claiming that the “check is in the mail.” He was barred from registering his car due to outstanding parking tickets in 2018, and relied on state police to chauffeur him around.
He also misrepresented his college background, claiming he received a journalism degree from Alabama A&M University in 2008. After journalists questioned this claim in 2019, he admitted that he did not graduate due to “a small technical thing” involving his failure to turn in completed coursework.
Republicans are likely to highlight Barnes’s history of controversial statements as well. He once described the U.S. founding as “awful,” citing the legacy of slavery, and was photographed holding a t-shirt reading “Abolish ICE”—a reference to the radical movement to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Barnes’s viability as a general election candidate is also largely untested. His only competitive race has been a 2016 Democratic primary bid for state senate against incumbent Democrat Lena Taylor. Barnes ran to Taylor’s left, and she ended up winning the race in a blowout.
Barnes’s election as lieutenant governor was on a joint ticket with Democratic governor Tony Evers, where statewide general election voters generally pay less attention to the running mate, according to political operatives. Evers beat incumbent Republican Scott Walker in the race by one point.
“The bottom line is [Barnes has] never stood for statewide general election,” said Gilkes. “He ran in a Democratic statewide primary [for lieutenant governor in 2018], but ultimately he was under Tony Evers, which is what everybody was voting for.”
Still looking for hand-outs despite the fact that African people have been immigrating here for over a hundred years. White workers in factories, mines, etc. could be considered slaves as well. Get over yourself and start working on improving yourselves instead of trying to further weaken what is (by far) the most free nation on the planet [US Patriot]
The ACLU and Human Rights Watch want the United Nations to demand that Joe Biden “take immediate, tangible measures,” including reparations, to “dismantle structural racism” in the United States.
The groups are recommending that the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which will meet later this month, order the United States to “provide effective remedies, including reparations for racial discrimination, including ongoing structural discrimination that flows from the legacies of slavery.”
The ACLU, which ostensibly advocates for Americans’ civil liberties regardless of politics, has a long history of defending left-wing policies. The group in April said it would use “the full force of the law” to allow children to undergo transgender hormone treatment. The ACLU is also a top advocate for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. Human Rights Watch also routinely criticizes the Jewish state, with Ben and Jerry’s basing its anti-Israel boycott on advice from a high-ranking Human Rights Watch employee. Ben and Jerry’s parent company overruled the anti-Semitic boycott following widespread criticism.
While the groups note that Joe Biden has criticized “systemic racism,” they say the president has not gone far enough.
“The Biden administration has shown it can name the problem, but the time has come to take bolder action to radically transform these abusive systems and fully implement U.S. human rights obligations,” ACLU human rights director Jamil Dakwar said in a statement.
One such “bolder action,” the groups say, is creating “a commission to study the need for reparations and develop specific remedies for the enslavement of people in the United States and its myriad legacies.” The ACLU and Human Rights Watch want the government to work against anything that has “a racist effect or impact,” such as “mass incarceration” and concentration of wealth.
Barrington Martin II, a national director of the patriotic group Our America, called the groups’ actions “preposterous” and “oxymoronic.”
“There is not one law on the books or any institution within the United States that seeks to oppress or subjugate any individual or group on the basis of race,” Martin told the Free Beacon. “People from all across the world have come to the United States for decades because of the freedom and equal opportunity America offers for all.”
A Democratic senator was overcome with emotion on Sunday as the Senate prepared to pass legislation that would dramatically expand the IRS and permanently solve so-called climate change, the Washington Postreports:
Even before the vote was final, Democratic lawmakers on the chamber floor rejoiced and cheered, shaking hands and hugging, as their Republican counterparts cast their votes and headed for the exits for a month-long summer break. Manchin made a beeline for Schumer’s desk, as the two men leaned their heads together and clasped their hands. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a proponent of climate change provisions, broke into tears.
Schatz praised the passage of what some are calling the “IRS Expansion” bill as a “historic victory for the United States and the planet.” The legislation, which is expected to pass the House later this week, solves climate change by giving Americans earning $300,000 a year tax credits to buy an $80,000 electric SUV for just $72,500. It also allocates $10 million to combat “racial equity issues” within the Department of Agriculture.
Cryin’ Brian is best known for supporting colonialism and exploiting indigenous land; he claims to “represent” Hawaii despite being a white man born in Michigan to a Canadian doctor.
Kirsten Engel’s support for leftist groups could alienate voters
An Arizona Democrat hoping to flip a Republican-held House seat promoted the radical immigration group whose members chased Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) into a bathroom, among other left-wing activists.
Kirsten Engel, a law professor at the University of Arizona, raved about her meeting with Living United for Change in Arizona, praising the pro-immigration group’s “efforts to help register voters.” Activists with the pro-immigration group stalked and filmed Sinema in a bathroom last year in protest over her opposition to a $3.5 trillion spending bill. The group has also called for called for the Phoenix city council to defund the city’s police department.
This was only the latest instance where Engel boosted radical progressive groups. As a state senator in 2020, Engel urged Democrats to “consider donating to, getting involved with, and learning from” several left-wing organizations to advance the Black Lives Matter cause, including the Minnesota Freedom Fund and Showing Up For Racial Justice.
The Freedom Fund has come under scrutiny for posting bail for violent criminals, including a domestic abuser later charged with murder. Showing Up For Racial Justice, a coalition of white civil rights activists, publishes a “defund the police toolkit” and supports other drastic reforms to the criminal justice system. Engel said in support of the groups that it was up to “white Americans” to “commit ourselves to unlearning the racism all around us so we can dismantle it in our institutions.”
Engel’s support for the anti-police groups could complicate Democrats’ efforts to flip Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, a seat that is crucial to maintaining majority control of the House. Engel, who left the state senate last year, will face Republican nominee Juan Ciscomani in November’s general election. Rep. David Schweikert (R.), who currently represents the sixth district, is running in Arizona’s first district after the state’s congressional maps were redrawn.
Engel, who touts her criminal justice reform efforts on the campaign trail, endorsed the Minnesota Freedom Fund and Showing Up For Racial Justice in a June 2020 call-to-action decrying “state-sponsored violence” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
“The broader public is finally becoming aware of the racist violence at the hands of law enforcement that has been so devastating to our brothers and sisters in the Black community,” wrote Engel.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund raised tens of millions of dollars in donations thanks to the help of Democrats like Engel and Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris called on her followers to “chip in now” to contribute to the fund in order to pay for bail for protesters arrested at anti-police protests. Christina Bohannan, the Democratic nominee for a House seat in Iowa, also solicited contributions for the Freedom Fund, the Washington Free Beaconreported.
The Freedom Fund paid the bail for relatively few protesters, and instead used most of its money to free inmates arrested on other charges. The fund helped free a domestic abuser, George Howard, who was later arrested on murder charges in a road rage incident. Another bail recipient, Timothy Wayne Columbus, was freed while in jail on charges of sexually molesting an 8-year-old girl.
Engel’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
‘I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,’ Rep. Cori Bush (D.) told reporters
Joe Biden, whose average approval rating sits at just 39.6 percent, insists Democratic voters want him to seek reelection in 2024. Several members of Biden’s own party, however, are refusing to back the 79-year-old president.
“I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,” Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.) told reporters last month when asked whether she would back Biden in the next presidential election.
Outraged parents launched a lawsuit against Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) in Virginia for teaching inappropriate, sexualized material to children, and other violations of state constitutional rights protecting parents and children.
America First Legal on July 21 served discovery requests seeking answers from LCPS, School District Superintendent Scott Ziegler, and several other school board officials on behalf of 11 parents pressing charges.
LCPS was given three weeks to respond. They did not reply, except in “saying that they’re not going to respond,” said the lawsuit’s main plaintiff, Clint Thomas, to The Epoch Times.
On the first day of the school year, two of Thomas’s daughters were forced to declare their gender pronouns publicly in class. All five of his children have gone through LCPS.
The lawsuit takes aim at LCPS’s Policy 8040 and Regulation 8040, which Thomas says “is trying to stifle [parents] from even knowing if the children are expressing different genders in school.”
Clint Thomas, his wife, and one of his daughters speak to reporters outside the Loudoun County Public Schools administration building in Ashburn, Va., on Jan. 25, 2022. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
“There’s just an overarching theme trying to gain information about private matters in our home, survey after survey being issued, inappropriate surveys being issued asking students about their sex lives.”
Parents have observed “overtly pedophilic, highly sexualized books” in school libraries, and class assignments with “highly sexualized” and “misogynistic” content, Thomas added.
“It’s all basically about race theory, gender theory. … They’ve been forced to sit through homeroom especially during Pride Month and basically watch videos of people who are trying to change their biological sex.”
The parents accuse LCPS of “knowingly, systematically, and willfully violating the Plaintiffs’ fundamental constitutional rights to care for, nurture, and direct the education, moral instruction, and upbringing of their children.”
Public education should be about academic instruction, said Thomas. Values and moral instruction are for the parents to determine.
A parent speaks out against board actions during a Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) board meeting in Ashburn, Va., on Oct. 12, 2021. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)Parents speak out at a rally outside the Loudoun County Public School administration building on June 22, 2022. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
For the past year and a half, Loudoun County has been the main battleground for parents and school boards contending over matters of woke content, CRT, mask mandates, sexualized content, and the forcing of young children to use bathrooms and locker rooms with members of the opposite sex.
During COVID lockdowns in 2021, thousands of parents took notice of what their kids were learning in class, said Thomas. Since then, it’s “just been one thing after another,” prompting parents into action.
Parent protests were galvanized in May 2021 by the sexual assault of a female student by a 15-year-old male in a girl’s bathroom in Louden County’s Stone Bridge High School.
This was exacerbated when State Prosecutor Buta Biberaj tried to jail parent Scott Smith, the girl’s father, for protesting the bathroom policy that led to her getting raped.
The lawsuit between the parents and LCPS is still in the early stages, the father of five said.
He speculates what aim lies at the heart of the woke education agenda fundamentally.
“The liberal agenda is no longer about providing a level playing field,” said Thomas. “It’s really about tearing down everything traditional. I think that’s the ultimate sinister reality of the equity agenda. It’s not about equality … it’s really tearing down America.”
Former President Donald Trump has warned Americans to brace for something “a lot worse than a recession” while blaming the Biden administration’s poor stewardship of the economy for soaring inflation and denouncing the tax hikes in the latest Democrat spending bill.
Trump made the remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday, where the former president raised the alarm on the state of the union.
“Our country is being shot. It’s being destroyed,” Trump told attendees, while touting his administration’s record on the economy and national security.
Trump spoke of “creating the most secure border in American history, record tax and regulation cuts, $1.87 gasoline, no inflation, low interest rates, record growth in real wages, record growth in our economy.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on August 6, 2022. (Bobby Sanchez for The Epoch Times)
Soaring Inflation, Recession
During Trump’s tenure, the highest the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent.
Under Biden, inflation has climbed steadily, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.
In his speech, Trump drew a contrast with the economy under Joe Biden, blaming the president for the highest inflation in decades that Trump estimates is costing American families as much as $7,000 a year.
“After the pandemic, we handed the radical Democrats the fastest economic recovery ever recorded, the history of our country, ever recorded,” Trump continued. “They’ve turned that into two straight quarters of negative economic growth, also known, despite their protestation to the contrary, as a recession.”
Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth are a common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, although recessions in the United States are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using a broader definition than the two-quarter rule.
Despite a number of economists arguing that the United States is in a recession based on the two-consecutive-quarters rule, the Biden administration insists that the economy isn’t in a recession, citing NBER’s consideration of a broader range of indicators.
A key argument against recession made by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others in the Biden administration is that the U.S. labor market remains tight, with unemployment at 3.5 percent and, at 10.7 million, the number of job openings remaining well above the 6 million or so people classified as unemployed.
Joe Biden gives remarks during a meeting on the economy with CEOs and members of his Cabinet in the South Court Auditorium of the White House on July 28, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Worse Than Recession
In his CPAC speech, Trump then issued an ominous warning that, absent a course correction, the recession could spiral into something even worse.
“Just hope that the recession doesn’t turn into a depression, because the way they’re doing things, it could be a lot worse than a recession,” Trump said, echoing similar remarks he made at a rally in Arizona at the end of July, where he warned that “we’re going to have a serious problem” unless political change takes place.
“We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona, warning that “we’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression.”
During his appearance at CPAC, Trump issued a call for urgent action at the polls in the upcoming midterms.
“The future of our country is at stake. We don’t have time to wait years and years. We won’t have a country left. What I used to say about Venezuela is true. We have to save the economy, defeat the Biden, Pelosi, Schumer tax hike, which is happening right now tonight,” Trump continued, referring to the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” that cleared the Senate not long after his speech.
Senators passed the sweeping bill, estimated at $740 billion, in a 51–50 vote on Aug. 7, with the package next going to the House for consideration.
During the deliberations, Senate Democrats rejected an amendment offered by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) that sought to ban any of the $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from being used to target Americans making less than $400,000 per year.
“My colleagues claim this massive funding boost will allow the IRS to go after millionaires, billionaires and so-called rich ‘tax cheats,’ but the reality is a significant portion raised from their IRS funding bloat would come from taxpayers with income below $400,000,” Crapo said in a statement.
Crapo’s amendment was rejected on a party-line vote, with the Democrat bill including softer language that features a non-binding statement of intention not to squeeze more revenue from America’s middle class.
Tax Hikes
According to an analysis by Americans for Tax Reform, a U.S. advocacy group, the spending bill includes a number of tax hikes on American households and businesses.
This includes a $6.5 billion natural gas tax that ATR says will increase household energy bills, a $12 billion crude oil tax that will end up being passed on to drivers in the form of higher gas prices, and a $52 billion income tax hike on mid-sized and family businesses.
In a separate analysis, ATR said that the Democrat bill’s changes to the book tax threaten small businesses.
Elaborating on that theme, economist and author Antonio Graceffo wrote in an op-ed for The Epoch Times that the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” would drive up prices for American households.
“Nearly half of these new taxes will be paid by manufacturers, creating disincentives to produce. Diminished industrial output will drive up the cost of goods and reduce the variety and quantity of goods available on store shelves,” Graceffo wrote.
“Beyond the manufacturing sector, the act increases taxes on businesses in general, which, combined with higher interest rates will decrease new investment and hamper job creation. Ultimately, these increased costs will be passed on to customers,” he added.
‘We Have to Win’
During his CPAC speech, Trump revealed what he sees as the key to bringing the country and its economy back on track.
“We have to win an earth-shattering victory in 2022. We have to do it, coming up in November,” Trump said.
“This election needs to be a national referendum on the horrendous catastrophes the radical Democrats have inflicted on our country,” he continued.
“The Republican party needs to campaign on a clear pledge that, if they are given power, they’re going to fight with everything they have to shut down the border, stop the crime wave, beat inflation, and hold the Biden administration accountable. They have to hold it accountable. Job number one for the next Congress,” Trump said.
The national midterm election takes place on Nov. 8, with 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats up for grabs.
Amid Senate run, Val Demings whitewashes past support for Minneapolis’s far-left city council
Florida Democratic Senate hopeful Val Demings wants voters to know she would never support abolishing the police. Two years ago, she praised a group of radical activists working to do just that as “thoughtful.”
In a June 2020 interview with CBS, Demings voiced support for Minneapolis City Council members who pledged to “abolish the Minneapolis Police system as we know it” following the police killing of George Floyd. Demings had no doubt the council members and their activist allies would “come out with a plan” for a new policing system that would “keep Minneapolis safe but also bring the community and the police together in a much needed and long overdue way.”
But days after Demings’s interview, the council voted unanimously to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department without establishing any kind of replacement. In December, the council voted to pull $8 million in police funding as part of its pledge to “transform our system of public safety.” All the while, the far-left groups that demanded those changes made it clear they would not be satisfied until lawmakers abolished “jails, prisons, detention centers, [and] immigration enforcement.”
Now, as Demings fights to unseat Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), the Democrat is running away from her praise for the council. The position earned her praise amid the riots that followed Floyd’s death, when two-thirds of Americans supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, support has plummeted to 31 percent, prompting Demings to use her status as a former cop to argue that she’d never “call abolishing the police ‘thoughtful.'”
Still, many Florida law enforcement officials aren’t buying Demings’s turnaround. 55 state sheriffs have endorsed Rubio, and some say Demings “turned her back on law enforcement” in the wake of Floyd’s death. Demings did not return a request for comment.
On June 7, 2020, days after violent riots subsided in Minneapolis, the anti-police groups Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective hosted a rally in Minneapolis’s Powderhorn Park. During the event, nine Minneapolis City Council members, including then-president Lisa Bender, stood behind a giant “DEFUND POLICE” sign on stage, and announced their “commitment” to “end policing as we know it.”
The next day, Demings defended the council to CBS, expressing confidence in the group’s ability to reimagine public safety in a “safe” and “thoughtful” way. During a CNN appearance that morning, Bender shared her hope for a “future without police.” Pressed on the prospect of having no cops to call during a break-in should Minneapolis actualize that future, Bender said the concern “comes from a place of privilege,” as “calling the police may mean more harm is done.”
Bender’s rhetoric closely resembles language in the Black Visions Collective’s “Minneapolis Without Policing” resource guide, which instructs crime victims to resist “the urge to dial 911,” as the police’s presence “will put people at risk of being jailed, abused, or killed.” The similarity is likely no coincidence—in August 2020, two months after the interview, Bender acknowledged her “long relationship” with the anti-cop group, which began its work to defund and disband police in 2017.
While the Black Visions Collective long had the ear of Bender and other council members, its radical vision for Minneapolis didn’t catch fire until after Floyd’s death. That event prompted the collective’s members to seize on growing anti-police rhetoric, harassing city mayor Jacob Frey (D.) and his liberal counterparts on the council to answer the call to defund police. Days before the nine city council members publicly caved to the collective’s demands in Powderhorn Park, the group planted gravestones with Floyd’s name outside council members’ homes.
It’s unclear if Demings was familiar with the Black Visions Collective when she praised the “community leaders” working with the council to reimagine law enforcement. But the group undoubtedly led the charge to abolish police in Minneapolis, giving politicians like Bender a guide to “eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance” and building “a police-free future.”
“As [prison industrial complex] abolitionists, we organize to dismantle and defund these systems,” the guide reads. “This looks like organizing to abolish police and all law enforcement, including ICE and the military; to stop jail/prison construction and close existing facilities; and to end racist, predictive policing practices that use zip codes to target Black and Brown neighborhoods. It also looks like not calling the police on people, ever.”
Bender and the rest of the City Council advanced many of these policies after the June rally. On June 26, the council unanimously approved a proposal that would have done away with the Minneapolis Police Department in favor of a “department of community safety and violence prevention.” The proposal gave the council overwhelming control over the new department. It also removed the city’s mandatory officer requirement, which meant the council did not have to hire a single cop.
Unfortunately for the Black Visions Collective, the community safety department never came to be. Minneapolis voters had a chance to approve the proposal through a November 2021 ballot measure, which came as the city experienced a surge in violent crime, including the highest number of homicides in two decades. Voters rejected the measure by a double-digit margin.
Following the vote, Bender retreated into privacy. After declining to run for reelection in November 2020, the former president announced she was “logging off for a while” and locked her Twitter account.
But for Demings, distancing herself from the summer of 2020 has proven more difficult. Rubio’s campaign has flooded airwaves with ads saying the Democrat “refused to condemn radicals.” In response, Demings released her own ad, which called the idea of defunding police “just crazy.”
That rhetoric is a far cry from Demings’s earlier comments. She claims her “very thoughtful” comments were directed toward the City Council, not their movement to dismantle police. For former Minneapolis-area police captain David Zimmer, that defense is not a convincing one, as the council in 2020 was well known as “an activist council that had it out for its own police department and was looking for ways to take more control.”
“They were pretty clear with what their intent was,” said Zimmer, now a criminal justice policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment. “They wanted to do away with the police department. And when the Floyd case came about, they felt like they had the power to do it.”
Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, told hundreds of conservatives in Texas on Thursday that his country defeated communism—and now America must do the same.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Orban told the crowd that America is fighting for its life against progressives and globalists, which are communists.
“Don’t be afraid to call your enemies by their name,” he said. “They hate me and slander me and my country, as they hate you and slander you and the America you stand for.”
Orban said the Democrats in the United States were not fond of him and wanted Hungary to move away from being a Christian nationalist state.
“They did not want me to be here, and they made every effort to drive a wedge between us,” he said.
Orban has been criticized as a right-wing Christian nationalist. His anti-immigration stance drew condemnation from the United States and the international community recently after he said Hungarians did not want to become “peoples of mixed race.”
Orban later clarified that the issue isn’t as much about race as it is about culture. While not mentioning the controversy directly, he noted that a Christian politician “cannot be racist.”
‘Lone Star State of Europe’
Orban’s anti-immigration policy earned him a warm welcome in Texas, which is overwhelmed with illegal immigrants under Joe Biden’s border policies.
Orban praised CPAC’s host state of Texas for its independence and freedom, calling Hungary the “Lone Star State of Europe,” much to the delight of the crowd.
The prime minister said that massive immigration is a globalist goal. George Soros, a Hungarian by birth, has an army of followers in institutions across the globe who want to create a post-Western world.
In 2015, Orban said 400,000 illegal immigrants came to Hungary’s borders, but Hungary built a wall and reduced illegal immigration to zero.
Orban’s speech outlined how America and Hungary, which he sees as fighting a common enemy on two fronts, can win against the Marxist movement trying to destroy western civilization. For better or worse, the world looks to America as a great power that will lead the world into the future, he said.
“The West is at war with itself,” he said. “The globalists can all go to hell. I have gone to Texas,” he said, prompting wild clapping and cheers.
Orban said the fight against the far-left starts with understanding that they want to drive a wedge between people and their faith and destroy families. Nazi Germany was able to succeed in a godless environment, he said.
“You must play to win. Play by your own rules,” he said. “This war is a culture war.”
Progressives change language to disguise their Marxist agenda, he said. The ideology wants to destroy the family because Marxism sees it as an oppressive patriarchal system.
Gender ideology and the sexualization of children is an idea of the left meant to harm families. In Hungary, a mother is a woman, and a father is a man. Order is necessary for any free country, meaning law enforcement is respected, he said.
In Hungary, large families are encouraged through tax breaks for having more than two children. With those policies in place, Hungary has seen marriages double and abortions cut in half over the past decade, he said.
“We need a strong America with a strong leader,” he said, adding America must lead the world to defeat the globalists.
The path to victory starts with taking back institutions and turning to faith in God. Orban said America has two years to get ready, alluding to the next presidential election.
Enemies in the media would not view his speech in a favorable light, said Orban, who met with former President Donald Trump before his appearance at CPAC.
“I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: Far-right European racist, anti-Semite strongman, the Trojan horse of Putin, holds a speech at the conservative conference,” he said.
Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, who has taken thousands from teachers’ unions, says parents shouldn’t question teachers
Texas Democratic gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke said this week that “we don’t need to tell” teachers “what version of history” they are “allowed to teach,” a statement similar to a remark that in part cost Democrat Terry McAuliffe the governorship of Virginia.
O’Rourke, who is best known for losing a Senate campaign and a presidential primary, went on to dismiss parental concerns about critical race theory, which he said he had “never heard of before last year.” Instead of asking questions, he said, Texans need to treat a teacher with “the respect that she has earned, that she is owed.”
O’Rourke has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from teachers’ unions.
McAuliffe, who lost the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election to Republican Glenn Youngkin, made a similar statement that likely cost him votes. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe said during a televised debate. At least one poll found before the election that parents of school-aged children opposed McAuliffe by nearly 20 points, The Hillreported in October.
O’Rourke has flip-flopped on critical race theory, which teaches that the United States is systemically racist, several times during his gubernatorial bid. He opposed a Republican bill to ban the theory from classrooms, saying in February that students should learn that “so much of the wealth and opportunity in this state was actually created by people who had no choice in the deal whatsoever.” He said just one month later, however, that he does not think critical race theory “should be taught in our schools.”
Education has become a hot-button issue in the Texas gubernatorial race. Republican incumbent Greg Abbott and O’Rourke have clashed extensively over school choice, with O’Rourke saying the idea of letting parents decide what schools their children should attend is “radical.” A plurality of Texans, including an overwhelming majority of Hispanic Texans, support Abbott’s school voucher program, polls have found.
A Minnesota school district is spending millions of dollars to racially diversify elementary school math lessons as student proficiency scores plummet.
Minneapolis Public Schools will spend more than $2 million to incorporate “ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity” into the K-5 math curriculum, according to a June school board presentation reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The new curriculum, which will be implemented in the fall, “reflects the lived experiences of our Minneapolis students and develops positive math identity,” a school district executive director said at a June 14 school board meeting, by adding “cultural and linguistically responsive materials.”
Less than half of Minneapolis Public School elementary students, 43 percent, are proficient in math, 14 points lower than the Minnesota average.
Minneapolis is not the first school district to prioritize “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives over academics. Public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, in July amended their fourth- and fifth-grade social studies curriculum to include “Social Justice Standards” for “antiracist” education, even though about half of its students lack proficiency in math and language arts, the Free Beaconreported. Seattle’s school district spent $5 million on DEI initiatives, allotting only $4.5 million to math, science, and literacy. Virginia Democrats have proposed eliminating most advanced math courses in the name of equity.
Minneapolis Public Schools approved two contracts with the Math Learning Center to purchase the DEI curricula, one to buy the K-2 math curriculum for an amount not exceeding $1,149,539.35 and one to buy the Grades 3-5 curriculum for an amount not exceeding $1,028,960.55.
The school district solicited parent feedback by dividing parents by race and ethnicity to discuss the proposed changes in “culturally specific” focus groups.
The diversified curriculum has been a “shared priority for a number of years,” Superintendent Ed Graff said at the meeting. The school district told the Free Beacon the math curriculum will “contribute to an understanding of ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity” and “create culturally inclusive materials and learning experiences.”
Update 4:08 p.m.: This piece has been updated with comment from the school district.
University has not said whether it will open a full investigation into Kevin Kruse
Princeton University is “reviewing” the plagiarism allegations against progressive history professor Kevin Kruse, the university’s student newspaper reported on Tuesday—over half a year after they were first raised.
“We are carefully reviewing the concerns that have been shared with the University, and will handle them in accordance with University policy,” Princeton University spokesman Michael Hotchkiss told Daily Princetonian. Hotchkiss did not say whether Princeton would open a full investigation into the allegations.
The review follows months of silence by the university, which says it “overlooked” a December 6 email from the economic historian Phil Magness about possible instances of plagiarism in Kruse’s academic work. Magness didn’t receive a substantive reply from the university until June 17, three days after he published an article in Reason outlining the evidence that Kruse repeatedly plagiarized other scholars’ books.
“We take such allegations very seriously, and we will carefully consider the concerns you have raised,” Deputy Dean of the Faculty Toni Turano told Magness in an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. “Please feel free to send us any additional information to explain and support your allegations.”
In public, Princeton has been much less solicitous. It has not posted an official statement on any university website, nor did it reply to Reason‘s or the Free Beacon‘s requests for comment when the story first broke.
The hushed delays accentuate the contrast between Princeton’s treatment of Kruse and its treatment of Joshua Katz, the star classics professor who criticized the school’s racial politics. University officials condemned Katz—and implied publicly they were investigating him—days after he published his criticisms in a July 2020 essay for Quillette. When they received “new information” about a consensual relationship he’d had with a student over a decade earlier, it took them less than a month to launch a formal investigation, which resulted in his dismissal in May.
The contrast between Katz and Kruse has raised eyebrows among alumni and current students, who say it suggests a political double standard at the Ivy League school.
“Will Professor Kruse face Katz’s fate—stripped of tenure and fired?” Princeton senior Abigail Anthony asked in National Review. “If so, Princeton students will learn a lesson in whom not to copy from. If not, they will learn instead that the rules don’t apply to the people with power and the ‘correct’ opinions.”
Kruse has made a name for himself by accusing conservatives—especially Christian conservatives—of distorting history, prompting the Chronicle of Higher Education to dub him “history’s attack dog.” Those attacks became less frequent after the plagiarism allegations came to light: Kruse, who would regularly post Twitter threads attacking Republicans, has not been active on the platform since June 14.
Gabriel Nadales and Barrington Martin II say young Americans should ‘speak confidently about why they love this country’
After turning away from left-wing politics, a former Antifa activist and Democratic politician are launching a new campaign to challenge what they see as pervasive anti-Americanism among the country’s youth.
Gabriel Nadales, an Antifa protester turned conservative activist, and Barrington Martin II, a former Democratic congressional candidate, launched a half-million-dollar ad buy last week through their new group Our America, aimed at empowering young people across the United States to “celebrate a pride in, connection to, and a responsibility for our community and country.” The organization, whose advisory team includes conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, will also spend $2 million to produce online content that promotes what they say are America’s unifying values: patriotism, freedom of expression, respect, dignity, and equal opportunity.
“Our America is specifically here to give people the full faith and confidence to be able to speak confidently about why they love this country,” Martin, who primaried the late Democratic congressman John Lewis (Ga.) in 2020, told the Washington Free Beacon. “When I say ‘I love this country, it’s one of the greatest gifts in the world,’ you shouldn’t scoff at me when we are all Americans.”
Just 58 percent of Americans ages 18-29 believe the United States is “one of the greatest countries” in the world, according to a Pew Research survey in December, compared with 75 percent of Americans across all age groups. Nadales and Martin aim to bolster patriotic views among young Americans by challenging the narrative, promoted by left-wing media, politicians, and activists, that America is systemically racist and oppressive. Left-wing pundits like MSNBC host Al Sharpton, for example, spent Independence Day criticizing the United States, saying, “We’ve gone from Jim Crow to Jane Crow.” Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes that same month called the founding of the United States “awful.”
Still, almost 90 percent of Americans of all races “love” the United States, Our America polling shared with the Free Beacon shows. Yet the minority of the population who believe America is racist and evil are the loudest voices in the room, Martin said.
Nadales, who came to the United States from Mexico as a child, said his public school education encouraged him to believe that America hates immigrants like himself. Nadales said he was recruited by the left-wing movement Antifa, known for its violent rioting and looting in cities such as Portland during the Trump administration, before he graduated high school.
After he became disillusioned with the group’s political extremism, however, he said he realized the far-left movement is a symptom of the division plaguing America.
“They’re incredibly dangerous, and they represent what is wrong with America today that people are so divided that they’re willing to go fight on the streets and recommend violence against one another,” Nadales said.
Nadales said Our America hopes to provide an uplifting message about the United States, bridging political differences with peaceful civil discourse.
“The American dream is not about having a fancy car,” Nadales said. “It’s the idea that we are not subject to the government. We are free people who are masters of our destinies. We can make our choices and we have the ability to choose to succeed. Your life is up to you and no one can take that away from you.”
Our America, which has 125,000 email subscribers after launching two months ago, will air its ads on TBS, TNT, BET, Univision, and MTV.
Finally…a bit of truth about black culture. Stop blaming; start listening; start learning. [US Patriot]
Black Americans in urban areas are suffering the consequences of the progressive Democrats’ anti-police “soft on crime” policies, despite the fact that these are the communities the policies were supposedly going to help, said Horace Cooper, senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, in a recent NTD interview.
Cooper told NTD that because progressives Democrats are too soft on crime and conservatives are afraid of being called racist by the left, crime has come to an all-time high in urban areas and is disproportionately harming black people.
The black community wants criminals to be prosecuted, said Cooper.
“I would argue that it would be smart to stand up, find out where black Americans are, and champion the kinds of policies and issues that interest them,” he said. “On the issue of crime, black Americans are ready to bring in law enforcement, are ready to increase penalties, and they are ready to stop the violent wave of crime that we see.”
Cooper is also chairman of the board for Project 21, which established a network of black conservative and libertarian leaders in 1992 to highlight the diversity of viewpoints within the black community.
Project 21 has identified 10 key areas for reform that, if accomplished, would help black Americans reach their potential and attain the American dream.
Black Americans Want Less Crime
Cooper said that out of the 10 areas, one of the key issues that need to be addressed is the crime in black communities.
“We have a ‘Blueprint for a Better Deal for Black America’ that we’re releasing this fall, and one of the core issues is going to be the idea of crime control,” said Cooper.
Crime disproportionality affects black communities, and the people who live there don’t support policies like “Defund the Police,” he said.
“During the Rodney King riots, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, there were a lot of voices that came out that said when you saw this violence, when you saw this mayhem, that it was justifiable. It was a natural outworking. ‘This is what blacks just do,’” Cooper said.
“In fact, most black Americans don’t believe that this kind of behavior is acceptable.”
In a Gallup poll conducted in June 2020 at the height of the George Floyd riots, 61 percent of black people surveyed said they wanted to keep the same level of policing in their neighborhoods, and another 20 percent said they wanted more police presence.
Protesters gather in front of a liquor store in flames near the Third Police Precinct in Minneapolis on May 28, 2020. (Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images)
In late 2021, a consortium of news organizations surveyed 800 voters in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died in police custody, and asked them what they thought of the city’s police department. Three-quarters of the black respondents said the city shouldn’t reduce its police force.
Cooper said that Democrats and the Biden administration do not understand what the black community really wants, and instead perpetuate racist ideas about blacks.
“We’re seeing the outworking of that during the Biden administration, this tacit idea that it’s criminals who are the victims, and if you really want to support blacks, you’ve got to support criminals.”
In addition, Democrats install radical prosecutors who double-down on this narrative in Democrat-run inner cities, he said.
“We’re seeing what I would call the ‘woke prosecutors’ who actively say to criminals, ‘there will be no accountability. There will be no punishment.’”
‘Woke’ Prosecutors Won’t Punish Criminals
Cooper said that while black men make up just 7.5 percent of the American population, they commit 40 percent of all violent crime.
“That’s staggering,” he said. “But these woke prosecutors and their supporters, they say, ‘Well, the truth is just America’s unfair, America is bigoted, America systematically mistreats,’ and that these people who prey on the rest of us, ‘They’re not predators. They’re just fighting back.’”
The problem with this narrative is that there is no evidence to support those claims, Cooper said. The way to stop this type of predatory behavior is to punish it, he added.
“Increase the penalty, increase punishment, decrease bad behavior,” he said.
Cooper said that under President Donald Trump, black Americans were doing much better economically, and the number one issue for the community as a whole is not racism, but inflation, and how to give their families a great quality of life, “kitchen table issues,” said Cooper.
Under Trump, black Americans prospered, Cooper said, adding that as a whole, they were able to purchase new vehicles, open new businesses, put aside money for savings, and even take real vacations.
“In the last 18 months, all those trends have reversed,” he said. “And black Americans are being the hardest hit.”
The Deep State Cabal inside the DOJ and FBI went out of their way to hinder the investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 Presidential election. By blocking the disastrous news, it kept America in the dark and aided Biden’s so-called victory.
When America was being distracted with COVID, mandates, lockdowns, and BLM riots, our freedom was being taken away without most people noticing because our government was conspiring against us.
How can we trust our so-called “top law-enforcement” agency to do their job when they actively hid Hunter’s investigation in a RESTRICTED SUBFOLDER on their network?
Now Biden’s handpicked Attorney General has no problem turning a blind eye to the actions of the Biden family. This isn’t just refusing to investigate Hunter’s laptop, this is ACTIVELY HIDING EVIDENCE so no one else would investigate.
That’s why you and I must continue to stand up to them.
We need to let these Deep State hooligans know that we’re going to do the job they were supposed to do. I’m opening up a congressional investigation into the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and exposing the criminality of Hunter and the Big Guy. I told you my blood is boiling, right?
If the DOJ didn’t cover up Hunter’s crimes and the intelligence officials didn’t peddle the lie that Hunter’s Laptop was “Russian Disinformation,”Donald Trump might still be President.
The 18-month-long nightmare we all have been living under Biden’s illegitimate reign would not have happened.
No hyper-inflation. No borrowing trillions of dollars to pay for Marxist social programs. No baby formula shortages or selling of oil reserves to Hunter’s friends in China.
That’s what the DOJ took away from us when they covered for the Biden family’s criminal enterprise.
Here’s the problem. The Swamp knows I’m a woman of my word. They know that I will not rest until Congress finally investigates Hunter and impeaches Joe Biden.
That’s why they have been working overtime to make sure I’m not in Congress after November. From filing lawsuits to kick me off the ballot to donating millions to my Democrat opponent, I’m having everything AND the kitchen sink thrown at me.
Do you really think Nancy Pelosi has ignored the behavior from AOC and the Jihad Squad by mistake?
Do you think the Democrats accidentally forgot to sanction their own member who gave the middle finger on National TV to GOP Members of Congress at the Congressional Baseball game the other day?
Somehow no one is being held accountable for their actions… except me. Because in Washington, some people do as they’re told while I’m fighting to do what Americans expect from their duly elected Representatives—SERVE THE PEOPLE!
That’s why we can’t let Hunter and Brandon get away with it simply because I wasn’t there to lead the charge in Congress. Help me win so I can investigate Hunter and impeach Joe Biden! Please donate today.
Thank you. God Bless America. Marjorie Taylor Greene Congresswoman (R-GA)
Executives at CNN’s parent company are struggling to set a new direction for the network amid declining viewership and the lowest profits in years, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
With former President Donald Trump mostly out of the political picture, CNN has struggled to retain an audience that tuned in for a reliable stream of partisan content directed against Trump.
It has had an average primetime viewership of 639,000 this quarter, a 27 percent drop from a year ago.
The network’s ratings trail even those of MSNBC, which itself has seen a decline in primetime viewership of 23 percent, according to the Times.
Meanwhile, Fox News — the only large media company in the United States generally critical of Joe Biden — has increased its viewership, with a primetime increase of 1 percent relative to 2021.
Executives now expect CNN to make a profit of $950 million this year, well short of the original goal of $1.1 billion, the Times reported.
That would be the network’s lowest yearly profit since before the network reinvented itself with 24/7 criticism of Trump in 2016.
Executives of the media company Discovery have sought to set a new course for CNN after merging with the network’s former parent company, WarnerMedia, earlier this year.
Warner Bros. Discovery management wanted CNN to eschew the network’s “red-hot liberal opining” and instead focus on hard news, Axios reported in February.
Some of the network’s most partisan commentators, such as Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta, are on shaky ground, according to a report in June.
Chris Licht, an experienced television news executive appointed as CNN’s chairman after the departure of Jeff Zucker, has faced questions about his long-term plans for the network.
Some of Licht’s advisers have suggested that CNN sell sponsorships to tech corporations and other advertisers, potentially jeopardizing the network’s claims of editorial independence free of corporate influences, the Times reported.
CNN also is considering expanding its operations in China, a country where freedom of speech is severely curtailed by the communist government.
The collapse of failed streaming service CNN+ has taken a chunk out of the network’s profits. Some personalities the company hired for the service came at a significant expense.
The Times said the network “finds itself facing big questions about how it can continue to expand its business with its moonshot streaming service dead and the traditional TV business in structural decline.”
Warner Bros. Discovery could implement wide-ranging cuts at CNN if the network’s bottom line doesn’t improve.
Licht emphasized at a recent meeting that the network wasn’t considering job layoffs.
“No one has said to me, ‘You’re going to have to go cut this,’” he told employees, according to the Times.
“I think there’s an acute understanding that they don’t know our business,” Licht said of Warner Bros. Discovery executives.
Why do the ugliest protest abortion? What are the odds they would ever need one? [US Patriot]
The Atlanta City Council on Monday voted unanimously to allocate $300,000 in taxpayer dollars for a local organization to fund abortions for the city’s residents, an attempt to get around Georgia’s pro-life laws.
Access Reproductive Care-Southeast, which will receive the money, provides “funding and logistical support” to women seeking abortions. Atlanta’s city government passed the measure to provide abortion funding in anticipation of Georgia’s fetal heartbeat bill, which will ban most abortions after six weeks. Because of the bill, Access Reproductive Care-Southeast will likely use the money to subsidize out-of-state travel for abortions.
The Atlanta measure also handicaps investigations of abortion facilities, saying that “no city funds shall be used to record and/or investigate reports of abortion care” and that police should “place reports of abortion-related care at the lowest possible priority.”
Atlanta is one of several blue cities in red states that have tried to evade pro-life state laws. A group of prosecutors funded by Democratic megadonor George Soros in June signed a letter pledging to flout abortion laws.
Councilwoman Liliana Bakhtiari, who sponsored the Atlanta measure, cited racism and inflation as two reasons the city has to subsidize abortions.
“Some of the legislation we see coming down from the states will predominantly impact people of color,” Bakhtiari told Fox 5 Atlanta. “Cost of living is at an all-time high, inflation rates are through the roof.”
Pro-life advocate Suzanne Guy told CBS46 Atlanta that abortion is not the answer.
“Women deserve real help, real hope, and real resources, and [the Atlanta measure] is not real help for women,” Guy said.
Group backed by Sixteen Thirty Fund to spend $5 million to support Mandela Barnes
Mandela Barnes, a Democratic Senate candidate in Wisconsin, is getting a major boost from a liberal dark-money network despite campaigning on a pledge to crack down on undisclosed funding in politics.
The Family Friendly Action PAC, a group run by Democratic political operatives that announced a $23 million election canvassing operation last week, endorsed Barnes, the presumptive Democratic nominee, on Monday and said it plans to spend at least $5 million to support his race against Republican incumbent senator Ron Johnson. The super PAC is primarily funded by the dark-money organizations Sixteen Thirty Fund and America Votes.
The funding is at odds with Barnes’s professed opposition to undisclosed political spending. The candidate has promised to “stand up to the corrupting influence of dark money” and highlighted the issue as a key plank of his campaign.
The Family Friendly Action PAC on Monday announced its endorsement of Barnes and said it was “proud to support him as he runs to replace Ron Johnson.”
The super PAC received $1.4 million from America Votes and $285,000 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, according to FEC records.
The Sixteen Thirty Fund is one of the largest liberal dark-money organizations and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2020 election. America Votes, another dark-money group, received most of its funding from the Sixteen Thirty Fund in the 2020 cycle, according to Politico.
Barnes has not publicly objected to the Family Friendly Action PAC’s endorsement or spending pledge. The super PAC’s Wisconsin state director Brita Olsen worked as a consultant for Barnes in 2019.
Barnes’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
This isn’t the first time outside groups have moved to help Barnes despite his supposed opposition to dark money and corporate PACs. On June 15, the Democrat posted a note on his website saying he needed help getting positive advertising about his personal background out to the pricey “Milwaukee, Madison and the Green Bay media markets.”
Days later, a group called the Courageous Leaders PAC—funded by Barnes donor Karla Jurvetson—poured more than $400,000 into ads promoting the exact message outlined by Barnes, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Barnes’s campaign also hired Marc Elias, one of the Democratic Party’s top “dark money” lawyers, the Washington Free Beaconreported earlier this year. Elias’s firm works for Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting firm that manages the Sixteen Thirty Fund and similar groups.
Two Maine organizations slated to receive funding from a controversial Biden administration grant program for groups that support a “harm reduction” approach to drug treatment are actively distributing crack pipes to addicts, the Free Beacon learned at visits to these sites.
The Church of Safe Injection, which bills itself as a “nonprofit that fights for the health, rights, and dignity of people who use drugs (PWUD),” will receive funding through a $1.2 million grant the Biden administration awarded to a coalition of Maine groups. A Free Beacon reporter last week picked up a crack pipe and meth pipe at its Lewiston, Maine, office. The organization did not provide a smoking kit, which often includes a mouthpiece, copper wool, and alcohol wipes along with the pipe.
Maine Access Points, another organization set to receive funding through the grant, provided a Free Beacon reporter a bag of a dozen crack pipes in Sanford, Maine, along with foil and a smoking kit that contained a mouthpiece, copper scrubber, lip balm, and instructions on how to smoke crack cocaine. The organization also handed out three meth pipes, a snorting kit, naloxone, fentanyl test strips, and a condom. Maine Access Points has a phone number for each of its five harm reduction facilities in the state. When a Free Beacon reporter texted to ask if the Sanford location distributed crack pipes, an employee responded, “Yes💯😊🥰.”
The explanation emerging from the organizations—which cop to distributing crack pipes and receiving taxpayer funding, but insist they are not using taxpayer funds to purchase the crack pipes—paints a far messier picture than the Biden administration’s haughty dismissal of initial reports on the grant program as “misinformation.”
When the Free Beaconreported in February that the Biden administration was set to fund the distribution of crack pipes through a harm-reduction program intended to advance “racial equity,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra—facing blowback—said that “no federal funding will be used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to put pipes in safe smoking kits.” Likewise, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that crack pipes were “never a part of the kit” and that “we don’t support federal funding, indirect or direct, for pipes.”
The two Maine groups that provided the Free Beacon crack pipes did so separately from their smoking kits. This distinguished the groups from the five harm reduction locations along the East Coast that provided the Free Beacon with crack pipes within their smoking kits.
A spokeswoman for the Church of Safe Injection, Zoe Brokos, told the Free Beacon that the organization has yet to receive the federal funds it was awarded, and plans to use them to purchase “wound care kit supplies such as alcohol pads, gauze pads, and bandages.” Brokos added that her organization will continue to distribute crack pipes and meth pipes but will not use federal grants to fund them.
Maine Access Points did not respond to a request for comment.
Church of Safe Injection and Maine Access Points—in collaboration with MaineHealth, the state’s largest health system, and Amistad, a peer support group for drug addicts—are using the taxpayer-funded grants to facilitate the distribution of drug paraphernalia in each of Maine’s 16 counties, with a focus on LGBT and homeless drug users, according to HHS grant information. The grant is set to be renewed annually through 2023.
Although Church of Safe Injection and Maine Access Points help oversee the HHS grant award funds, the department omitted the two harm reduction groups from the grant recipient announcement, listing only MaineHealth. A local CBS affiliate reported in June that both harm reduction groups are grant recipients, and the groups celebrated the award funding in separate Facebook posts. The government’s omission raises questions as to why the groups were left off the Biden administration’s list of grant recipients. Neither HHS nor the White House responded to requests for comment.
“So bittersweet to share the news that we received this grant in collaboration with Maine Access Points, Amistad, and MaineHealth,” the Church of Safe Injection posted on Facebook in May with a link to the HHS grant announcement. “Bittersweet because so few harm reductionists were chosen throughout the country even though we know that the services provided by syringe service programs and naloxone distribution orgs save lives and make a HUGE difference.”
MaineHealth did not respond to a request for comment.
The Church of Safe Injection launched in 2018 and operated without legal approval from the state before it was certified through Maine’s syringe exchange program in February. The group hosts a “trans harm reduction group” twice a month for “trans and non-gender conforming people who use drugs.” Its founder, Jesse Harvey, died of an overdose in 2020. Kari Morissette, who took over as executive director of the group after the death of Harvey, died in May.
Despite the Biden administration’s assurances that taxpayer funds would not underwrite the distribution of crack pipes, Congress passed bipartisan bills in June and July that bar the administration from funding it.
‘Nation’ correspondent Elie Mystal says Georgia candidate Herschel Walker is ‘what Republicans want from their Negroes’
Far-left political commentator Elie Mystal, a correspondent at The Nation, said in an interview Saturday that Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker (Ga.), who is black, is “what Republicans want from their Negroes.”
Mystal, who is also black, said in an MSNBC interview that Walker is “so clearly unintelligent” and “so clearly doesn’t have independent thoughts” that, if elected, he will “do what he’s told.”
“That’s what Republicans like,” Mystal went on. “That’s what Republicans want from their Negroes.”
This is not the first time Mystal, who has said the Constitution is “actually trash,” has attacked Walker on the basis of race. In an April essay published in The Nation, Mystal called Walker’s candidacy “an insult to Black people” and a “political minstrel show” and said the candidate himself is “an animated caricature of a Black person drawn by white conservatives.”
Mystal is not the first high-profile liberal to take jabs at minorities for going against the Democratic party line. Joe Biden said on the 2020 campaign trail any African American undecided between voting for him or Donald Trump “ain’t black.” Multiple Democrats launched racist attacks against Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas following his concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
More black voters say they “somewhat” or “strongly” disapprove of Biden than say they “approve strongly,” a Washington Post-Ipsos poll found in June.
A man who allegedly pistol-whipped a 70-year-old Asian man earlier this month met his match in a California martial arts center.
According to KXTV, 30-year-old Omari Garland of Faifield, California, allegedly assaulted an elderly man on July 7. Police said he eventually robbed the man at gunpoint and stole his cell phone.
In a video captured by a Ring doorbell camera at the victim’s house, he can be seen unlocking the door and trying to enter his house.
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers may find offensive.
Omari garland the man who pistol whipped a senior citizen at his own front door and robbed him in Fairfield is not as tough as he appears in his video at a local gym where he picks on the smallest person there and then asks for a timeout for himself. pic.twitter.com/p6RV7L2XvA
— Vallejo Crime and Safety (@VallejoCrime) July 29, 2022
A masked man ran up behind him and insisted he “take it out of your pockets.”
As the victim screamed for help, the suspect, identified as Garland, hit him multiple times in the head with the butt of his pistol. He took what police said was a cell phone from the victim and ran off.
Police were able to locate Garland and arrest him, and he was charged with felony robbery. Officers also recovered the victim’s phone, KXTV reported.
According to the Daily Republic, Garland posted his $45,000 bail on July 8, and his initial court appearance for early arraignment was set for Aug. 5.
This fact is important because it means Garland was walking free on Friday when a California martial arts gym called Train 4 Life Center said he entered and signed a waiver to train with them.
In a post on Instagram, the gym said Garland threatened a “much smaller man” and said, “I’ll beat you down.”
The gym said the man who was threatened was a coach, and he agreed to spar Garland for “spar week,” which takes place during the last week of the month.
“So, we let them spar and [Garland] quickly learned he messed with the wrong one, called Time-Out in the 1st round with 1:30 left on the clock…” the post said. “Gym justice served.”
In the video that accompanied the post, Garland can be seen calling timeout, at which point the person taking the video began to chastise him.
“You come into my gym, you call out the smallest guy in my gym, and now you want to call a time out?” he said. He demanded Garland leave the gym.
In the post, Train 4 Life gym said it found through an internal investigation that Garland was the same man accused of assaulting a 70-year-old man on July 7.
While the identity of the man in the video has not been independently verified, the gym said it had a signed waiver proving it was Garland.
“How does Omari Garland FREELY WALK INTO OUR TRAINING FACILITY A MONTH AFTER ASSAULTING AN ELDERLY ASIAN MAN AT GUNPOINT?!” the gym wrote. “Then threaten a much smaller asian man at our facility?!?! Unacceptable.”
Train 4 Life is absolutely correct that Garland had no business walking free after allegedly assaulting an elderly man. He was charged with felony robbery, and there is no reason he should be allowed to walk the streets after posting a relatively low bail.
If the man in the video truly was Garland, he appears to have gotten what he deserved. The smaller coach landed some strong punches on him, and the fact that he called timeout indicated he was certainly not dominating the fight.
Since the Democrat-run state government in California seems unable to hold criminals accountable, it is refreshing to see another citizen teach Garland a lesson in a legal way.
Shaun King’s social justice PAC is going to the dogs. Literally.
Grassroots Law PAC, which the progressive grifter founded to elect soft-on-crime local officials, paid roughly $40,000 since December to the California-based Potrero Performance Dogs, according to campaign finance disclosures. The payments are labeled for “contractor services,” making their purpose difficult to discern. But days after a $30,650 payment in February, King welcomed a “new member of the King family”: an award-winning mastiff bred by Potrero named Marz.
King, who has been hounded for years by allegations of fraud, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Grassroots Law. But the payments for a dog raises questions about whether the former Bernie Sanders surrogate is using PAC contributions the way donors intended.
“This luxury dog expense may not be illegal for a PAC, but it shows little respect for King’s donors,” said Scott Walter, the president of Capital Research Center, which investigates left-wing groups. An heiress of the Hormel meatpacking empire is the PAC’s largest donor. Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife donated millions of dollars to Real Justice PAC, which King launched in 2018 and works closely with Grassroots Law.
Grassroots Law PAC, which aims to “elect candidates who are committed to reducing mass incarceration and police violence,” has spent nearly as much on King’s pet as it has on political candidates. The PAC has contributed around $56,000 to political candidates since 2021. It paid $10,000 to Potrero in December and another $30,650 on Feb. 16.
King has come under fire over the years amid repeated failures at his various social justice endeavors. The mother of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Ohio boy killed by police, said King “robbed” her by holding unauthorized fundraisers in her son’s name. A former King ally, DeRay Mckesson, has publicly accused him of fraud. Real Justice PAC was ordered in December to pay $30,000 to the city of Philadelphia for campaign finance violations in the race to elect District Attorney Larry Krasner (D.).
King has denied allegations of fraud, chalking his failed projects up to poor management or false claims from his enemies. He released an audit in 2019 that said he received a $4,166 monthly salary from Real Justice PAC and “no compensation at all” from Action PAC, the predecessor to Grassroots Law PAC. He said he was “literally the only person” on Action PAC’s staff who does not get paid.
“I have not received a salary or a stipend of any kind for the entire year,” he claimed. “I do it all for free.”
While King said Marz would provide “alertness and protection” alongside duties as a family pet, it appears the thoroughbred is no longer in the activist’s care. Potrero Performance Dogs showed Marz at an American Kennel Club competition earlier this month, where he won Best in Show. The breeder said in a social media post this month that Marz was back in its care because “he’s got a little too much energy to be a family dog so he came back.”
Potrero, Grassroots Law, and King’s media company did not respond to requests for comment.
Democrats continue to say that “democracy is in danger” if voters don’t give liberals the majority in November, but violence by the left has defined the summer politically so far, conservative observers have told The Epoch Times.
As Democrats continue to use the Jan. 6 Committee hearings over the summer to make a special case that somehow conservatives pose a danger to the country, the violence from the left has been ongoing, one victim told The Epoch Times.
The issues affronting progressives are numerous, including the reversal of Roe v. Wade, non-action on a climate change scheme, and the lack of momentum of progressive policies under Joe Biden, which stand out as sources of anger and mounting frustration for leftist activists.
In June, a pro-life pregnancy center in Buffalo, New York, was burned out, allegedly by the radical leftwing, pro-abortion, militant group Jane’s Revenge, said the health pregnancy center called CompassCare, which helps women keep their babies rather than abort them.
“We actually saw the type of [violent] Jane’s Revenge activity happening around our Buffalo location that they were fomenting with their followers” prior to the firebombing of the clinic Rev. James Harden, CEO of CompassCare, told The Epoch Times.
“So we reported it to local law enforcement as well as the FBI two weeks in advance of the firebombing,” added Harden, who said Molotov cocktails were used to set the blaze to the CompassCare clinic.
Harden blames local and national progressive politicians for the violence, calling measures that the state of New York have taken under Democratic Gov. Kathleen Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James to investigate crisis pregnancy centers like CompassCare as “essentially joining Jane’s Revenge in attacking pro-life pregnancy centers.”
A message written on the wall of a pro-choice pregnancy resource center that was set on fire in Longmont, Colorado, on June 25, 2022. (Longmont Police Department)
Jane’s Revenge
The Jane’s group said that they were also responsible for attacks on pro-family clinics in Dearborn, Michigan, Asheville, North Carolina, and more than a dozen other sites around the country in response to the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade.
“You have seen us in Madison WI, Ft. Collins CO, Reisertown MA, Olympia WA, Des Moines IA, Lynwood WA, Washington DC, Ashville NC, Buffalo NY, Hollywood FL, Vancouver WA, Frederick MA, Denton TX, Gresham OR, Eugene OR, Portland OR, among others, and we work in countless locations invisibly,” said the group in a manifesto published on Abolition Media, an anarchist website.
So far, no arrests have been made in connection with any of the acts claimed by Jane’s Revenge manifesto, although the Catholic News Agency has reported that some youths have been arrested in acts of vandalism not associated with Jane’s Revenge.
Jason Rantz, a conservative talk show host in Seattle, told The Epoch Times that several churches and pro-life crisis pregnancy centers have been attacked in Washington state as well, with no arrests other than one that doesn’t seem to be connected to the abortion issue.
Like CompassCare’s Harden, Rantz makes no bones about pointing the finger for the violence at some progressive politicians, but not all.
“We had a story that I broke several weeks ago where a Democrat state Senator up for reelection … she produced a video that was celebrating the vandalism” against a pro-life billboard in Gorst, Washington.
“They don’t really hide their intent to promote this kind of violent response when they don’t get their way politically,” said Rantz.
Pro-abortion terrorist group Jane’s Revenge leaves threats at Harbor Church in Olympia, Washington on May 22, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Harbor Church)
2020 Redux?
Seattle was the scene of some of the worst violence during the Black Lives Matter protest and riots of the summer of 2020, with sections of the downtown area made unhabitable and unpoliceable for over a month.
While stopping short of calling the 2020 riots a dress rehearsal for today’s more targeted and politically-motivated violence, Rantz does think the violence in 2020 and today are connected in that Democrats think they are best served by allowing the violence to continue.
“I also think that as with the case in 2020, that a lot of the Democrats thought that they would benefit politically from the violence so they don’t want to get too involved” in calling for more rational means of political opposition.
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh listens during the first day of his confirmation hearing in front of the U.S. Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington on Sept. 4, 2018. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Targeted Assassination Attempt
The Buffalo center of CompassCare was burned out just days after a California man was arrested near the house of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in an alleged aborted effort to kill the conservative jurist.
Nicholas John Roske was arrested with a black tactical chest rig, and a tactical knife, along with a Glock 17, clips, ammunitions, and zip ties, according to the probable cause statement filed with the court.
The FBI said that Roske traveled cross-country in what they are now saying was an attempt to kill as many as three Supreme Court Justices.
Roske, 26, said that he was upset over the Supreme Court decision that reversed Roe v. Wade which returned the question of abortion back to individual states.
Roske also expressed concern that upcoming decisions by the nation’s highest court would tend to favor conservative views on the Constitution, said an FBI warrant obtained by Fox News.
‘Democracy in Danger’
According to talk show host Rantz, Democrats have become obsessed with the idea that merely having differing views on political issues of the day from those of Democrats somehow threatens the fabric of democracy.
That message was conveyed by Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.), whose re-election campaign sent a handwritten postcard to at least one constituent warning that “Democracy is at stake this election day. Republicans are the problem.”
Postcard from Rep. Jennifer Wexton’s (D-Va.) campaign office sent to a local constituent. (Provided)
The postcard, obtained by The Epoch Times, appeared to have no identification, such as a signature, but just referred to the need to re-elect Wexton or democracy will be in danger. The flip side of the postcard was marked as having been sent by “Jennifer Wexton for Congress.”
Wexton is being opposed by GOP nominee and Vietnamese refugee, Hung Cao.
Cao, a retired special forces operator who left the Navy as a captain—one rank below the flag rank of admiral—took umbrage at the apparent suggestion by Wexton’s campaign that he would endanger democracy.
“Jennifer Wexton should immediately apologize for her campaign’s claims,” said a Cao campaign spokesman in a statement to The Epoch Times.
“Hung Cao has fought for our country honorably for 25 years. He’s put his life on the line for his fellow Americans to protect our constitution. Wexton ought to be ashamed of her campaign slandering an immigrant to this country who wore our uniform in combat,” added the campaign.
A police officer mans a shooting scene after a gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress during a baseball practice near Washington in Alexandria, Va., on June 14, 2017. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Congress Targeted
The Capitol Police stepped up security for this year’s Congressional Charity baseball game, citing threats by leftist climate activists who have threatened to disrupt the game if climate bills aren’t passed by Congress, or at least are on the verge of passing.
“The real violence being committed at this baseball game is by Congress, by Manchin, by his Republican allies and by everybody in Congress who’s failing to take action on climate change, therefore consigning millions of people to die and millions more livelihoods to be destroyed,” said Dan Sherrell, an organizer for the protest at the baseball game.
The threats came years after the game was targeted by a left-wing gunman in 2017, who opened fire on a practice field for the Congressional baseball game, critically wounding then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and three others before being killed by Capitol Police.
The 66-year-old former construction worker and Bernie Sanders supporter, James T. Hodgkinson, attempted to kill Scalise and others because he “hated Republicans,” according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
Accepting Political Violence?
A pre-print of a study published in July, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, found that “[s]ubstantial minorities of the [US] population endorse violence, including lethal violence, to obtain political objectives,” with nearly 8 million people in the United States at least “somewhat willing” to kill others to advance their political goals.
Published at MedRxiv, the paper concentrated on concepts like QAnon, Donald Trump, stolen elections, and Western European traditions as justifications by conservatives who find political violence acceptable.
Yet the paper also found that the largest minority of people who feel political violence is justified are those who find race-based violence justifiable.
“More than a third of respondents (36.2%) reported that violence was at least sometimes justified ‘to prevent discrimination based on race or ethnicity,’” with nearly 10 million Americans saying that violence was always justified to prevent racial discrimination.
With the contemporary expansion of the meaning of words like “discrimination,” to encompass concepts such as “microaggressions,” it’s much easier to see how violence is becoming more commonplace in a future that appears bleak, observers say, even as progressive seek to further expand definitions to widen their dispute on conservatives.
“When you have Joe Biden, two weeks ago, asking Merrick Garland to investigate crisis pregnancy centers for fraud, it’s an all-out war on these pregnancy centers,” said Harden, who points out that they provide their services for free so fraud would be impossible—unless you redefine the meaning of the word fraud.
Harden was referring to a provision in a July 8 executive order “to protect people seeking reproductive health services from fraudulent schemes or deceptive practices.” Biden has appointed Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta to head up the Department of Justice’s task force on abortion. Gupta has been accused in the past of calling crisis pregnancy centers like the one Harden runs “fake clinics,” raising worries that the DOJ will try to shut down pro-life clinics under an expanded definition of fraud.
“It’s like a dystopian novel,” said Harden.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House and Hochul, James, and Wextons’ offices for comment.
TURNS OUT IT HAS BEEN THE RADICAL LEFT TAKING INSTRUCTION FROM THE KREMLIN.
The only demonstrable evidence of Russian interference in U.S. politics came quietly out of the U.S. Department of Justice today, with the unsealing of an indictment charging a Russian national with “orchestrating a years-long foreign malign influence campaign that used various U.S. political groups to sow discord, spread pro-Russian propaganda, and interfere in elections within the United States.”
The New York Timesreport on the subject buries the names of the groups allegedly utilized by the Russian government in the scheme, namely the “Uhuru Movement” of St. Petersburg, Florida, which is part of a wider entity known as the African People’s Socialist Party.
Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that from “at least December 2014 until March 2022, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a resident of Moscow, together with at least three Russian officials, engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign targeting the United States. Ionov is the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow and funded by the Russian government. Ionov utilized AGMR to carry out Russia’s influence campaign.”
“Ionov allegedly orchestrated a brazen influence campaign, turning U.S. political groups and U.S. citizens into instruments of the Russian government,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The Department of Justice will not allow Russia to unlawfully sow division and spread misinformation inside the United States.”
Ionov is alleged to have used his control over a handful of groups such as the Uhuru movement, in order “to spread pro-Russian propaganda under the guise of a domestic political organization, and to interfere in local elections,” the DOJ says.
One example cited stems from January 2016, when Ionov apparently guaranteed “financing for — and ultimately funded — a four-city protest tour undertaken by U.S. Political Group 1 in support of a ‘Petition on Crime of Genocide against African People in the United States’.”
In 2017 and 2019, Ionov is alleged to have supported two St. Petersburg, Florida, political campaigns, as well as further instructing Russian handlers of his campaigns. He is charged with conspiring to have U.S. citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government – a crime with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Meanwhile, on a Facebook live post, Uhuru movement chairman Omali Yeshitela divulged that police had “handcuffed me and my wife,” before going on to discuss potential funding from “anyone else who wants to support the struggles for Black people.”
Ionov has previously been accused of raising funds for convicted Russian spy Maria Butina, who is now a Member of the State Duma in Russia. Butina targeted conservative groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) having been given a student visa by the Obama administration.
With an expected GOP takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives following November’s midterm elections, Republicans in the chamber are poised to launch a slew of investigations aimed at dialing up the pressure on the Biden administration over a range of issues—from border security to Hunter Biden to the origins of the pandemic.
Domestic concerns faced by everyday Americans—most notably a historic inflation rate—will be key priorities, according to Chair of the House Republican Conference Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
House Republicans will take the administration to task on alleged “policy failures that have created an inflation crisis, energy crisis, border crisis, and crime crisis impacting every American family,” Stefanik told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
Big Tech’s censorship of conservative voices will also be scrutinized, she added.
On the foreign policy front, the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the United States and abroad, and U.S. strategy toward Iran are set to come under focus.
Republicans are already laying the groundwork to take on “an aggressive oversight role” next year by issuing preservation notices and document requests so a potential GOP majority “will be ready to hold the Biden administration accountable from day one,” a House GOP leadership aide told The Epoch Times in an email.
House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) (C) speaks at a press conference, was joined by House Republican Whip Steve Scailse (R-LA) (L) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), following a Republican caucus meeting, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 8, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Oversight Committee
Many of the inquiries are expected to be spearheaded by the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the chamber’s main investigative panel that has broad authority to scrutinize various facets of the administration.
The committee’s ranking member James Comer (R-Ky.), who is poised to take the chair should the Republicans flip the House, foreshadowed an ambitious agenda by a GOP-led panel.
“[W]e will return the House Oversight and Reform Committee to its core mission of rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government and holding the Executive Branch accountable,” Comer told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
Another committee member Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) had a clear message for the Biden administration via email to The Epoch Times: “Their days of corruption, fraud, and abuse will no longer be met with blind eyes.”
Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, attends the ceremony honoring 17 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, on July 7, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hunter Biden
Chief among a GOP-led House Oversight Committee’s priorities is an investigation into Hunter Biden and his foreign business dealings.
For more than two years, the president’s son has been at the center of growing controversy over his overseas business activities, including in Ukraine, Russia, and China, conducted while Biden was vice president in the Obama administration.
Hunter is currently the subject of a federal investigation being run out of Delaware and, according to a recent CNN report citing unnamed sources, it is “nearing a critical juncture.”
Hunter has previously denied wrongdoing, and the elder Biden has maintained that he has never discussed Hunter’s business activities with his son.
The president’s son’s extensive financial dealings with foreign individuals and businesses, raise concerns about conflicts of interests, illegal lobbying, and whether his ties influenced U.S. foreign policy during the Obama administration, critics say.
Republicans have honed in on Hunter’s work for Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, while his father was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine, and Hunter’s dealings with several Chinese companies and businessmen with links to the Chinese Communist Party.
“We will continue to conduct oversight of Hunter Biden and the Biden Family’s pattern of peddling access to the highest levels of government to enrich themselves,” Comer said.
“They have racked up over 150 suspicious activity reports for their foreign business deals, which is a national security threat,” the lawmaker said, referring to a CBS report saying that U.S. banks had flagged more than 150 financial transactions involving Hunter or the president’s brother, James, for further review by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Some of the transactions involved large wire transfers, the report said.
“We need to know if resident Biden benefited financially from these deals and if he is beholden to the interests of foreign adversaries,” Comer said.
An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China’s central Hubei Province on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
COVID-19 Origins
The ranking member highlighted that the committee would continue to investigate the origins of COVID-19, focusing on the possibility that the pandemic was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
“Growing evidence shows COVID-19 likely originated from the Wuhan Lab and the Communist Party of China covered it up,” Comer said.
An array of circumstantial evidence has prompted some officials and scientists to point to the WIV as the most likely source of the pandemic. These include the WIV’s gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, reports that staff members became sick with symptoms consistent with both seasonal flu and COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, before the Chinese regime acknowledged the outbreak, and that a WIV public database of 22,000 samples and viral sequences was taken offline in September 2019 before the onset of the pandemic.
The Chinese regime’s persistent refusal to allow outside access to the lab and its data has made it nearly impossible to fully investigate the lab leak theory.
Domestically, the potential role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in aiding WIV’s activities has been viewed with particular alarm by Republicans, who are looking to intensify the inquiry. The NIH has previously funded WIV via New York-based health nonprofit EcoHealth, including one grant that amounted to what experts have described as gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
“We will seek to hold U.S. government officials accountable for any wrongdoing, and ensure Americans’ tax dollars aren’t being used on risky research at unsecure labs,” Comer said.
Border Patrol agents apprehend a large group of illegal immigrants near Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 20, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Other Key Priorities
The ongoing struggle by the administration to control the flow of illegal immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border is set to become another focal point for Republicans serving on the House Oversight Committee, and other panels.
“We will also continue our oversight of Biden’s border crisis that has led to historic illegal immigration, a surge of deadly drugs pouring across the border, and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars,” Comer said.
With a GOP-led House Energy and Commerce Committee, Biden’s energy policies amid a deepening global squeeze on oil and gas are expected to come under close scrutiny.
“We will build on our robust oversight over how the administration is censoring conservative speech, shutting down American energy and increasing gas prices, abusing its public health emergency powers, [and] colluding with political allies like teacher’s unions,” a spokesperson for Energy and Commerce Republicans told The Epoch Times in an email.
Meanwhile, a Republican-led House Financial Services Committee would focus on probing regulatory agencies’ alleged efforts to impose a “far-left agenda” on the U.S. financial system, as well as the Biden administration’s implementation of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan, said Laura Peavey, communications director for the House Financial Services GOP, in an email to The Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
The ‘harm reduction’ clinics allow addicts to use illicit drugs under supervision
The Biden administration is considering federal support for legalized injection sites, according to a report.
Dr. Rahul Gupta, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the White House is “enthusiastically waiting” for the Department of Justice to rule on the legality of clinics that allow people to use illicit drugs with supervision. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Gupta’s “eyes lit up” when asked about injection sites, which are illegal under federal law. The comments came in response to questions about a 2019 Justice Department ruling that shut down a Philadelphia injection site.
Gupta’s reported openness to legalized injection sites is emblematic of the White House’s focus on “harm reduction,” an ideology that aims to make drug use safer for addicts, rather than prevent consumption. The Washington Free Beacon in February reported that the Biden administration was set to fund the distribution of crack pipes through its $30 million harm reduction program. The Times later reported that the Free Beacon story “derailed” the Biden administration’s drug policy in response to public backlash.
New York City in November opened the country’s first injection sites, which the Biden administration allowed to operate. The privately run centers supervise drug users to prevent and treat overdoses. The Justice Department’s forthcoming decision on the Philadelphia injection site could lead to a boost in sites around the country and allow federal funding.
Gupta spoke to the Times in Manchester, N.H., a city that has pushed back against privately run needle exchange programs. Elected city officials criticized the New Hampshire Harm Reduction Coalition for a lack of coordination with its government. The city council last year banned needle exchanges in parks by a 12-1 vote.
Paul Lessard, 58, grew up in Manchester and worked for the New Hampshire Department of Transportation before he retired and later found himself homeless last year. Lessard said he has seen drug addicts on several occasions rush to grab used needles out of the exchange boxes that are intended to be discarded. The city’s drug addicts, he said, have become increasingly violent.
“I was in the alleyway the other day and some girl stripped down totally naked and she was freaking out and going through the motions,” Lessard told the Free Beacon. “I walked by her and said, ‘Please don’t touch me.’ She was fucked up on something.”
Federal support for injection sites would likely face backlash in Congress. Although the Biden administration continues to claim crack pipes are not funded through its harm reduction programs, Congress advanced two bipartisan bills this year that ban federal funding for crack pipes. The Daily Caller in July obtained crack pipes at a harm reduction center in New York City that received funding through the Biden administration’s $30 million harm reduction grant program that launched in May. A Caller journalist was reportedly asked to smoke crack in a supervised room in the New York Harm Reduction Educators center.
Before he joined the Biden administration, Gupta expressed skepticism about harm reduction sites. As West Virginia’s public health commissioner, Gupta supported the decertification of a harm reduction program in Charleston described by the city’s mayor as a “needle mill” that increased crime.
Ivy League law school will force students to write physical messages on a bulletin board after the listserv turned toxic
After a year of high-profile scandals, Yale Law School is retiring an all-student listserv that became a breeding ground for progressive activism and online pile-ons, citing the value of “face-to-face” interaction.
If students want to “debate important questions,” the dean of Yale Law School Heather Gerken announced in an email on Wednesday, they can post on a physical bulletin board in the law school’s hallway.
“Debate and dialogue are the touchstones of an academic institution,” Gerken said. The new forum will force students to “take time to reflect before posting, a habit that lawyers and members of a scholarly community must practice.”
Gerken’s announcement caps an annus horribilis for the Ivy League law school, which has seen near-nonstop scandals since 2021. The listserv played a role in many of those scandals: It facilitated a week-long pressure campaign against the Yale Law Journal over its alleged racism, as well as a public shaming campaign against Trent Colbert, the second-year law student who used the term “trap house” in an email. It also helped gin up outrage about a bipartisan panel on civil liberties hosted in March, which ended up needing police protection after hundreds of protesters disrupted the event.
“The listserv was a cesspool,” said Zach Austin, who served as the president of the Yale Federalist Society this past year. “Dean Gerken’s rhetoric is spot on: I hope students, left and right alike, take it to heart.”
The listserv’s demise comes just weeks after a controversial administrator, Ellen Cosgrove, retired from Yale Law School, prompting speculation that Gerken was taking steps to avoid a repeat of the scandal-filled year. Cosgrove, the law school’s associate dean, sat idly by while protesters disrupted the March panel. A few months earlier, she and another administrator pressured Colbert to apologize for his “trap house” email, an episode the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus likened to Mao’s cultural revolution.
As the scandals piled up, some students took to the listserv to bemoan the bad press—which only generated more of it. “What the actual fuck,” Yale Law’s Asian-American student group posted in response to Marcus’s article, calling her Mao comparison “offensively racist.” The post was one of several statements from the listserv highlighted in the Washington Free Beacon’s coverage of the trap-house saga, which kept the law school in the news for nearly a month.
These online dynamics are not unique to Yale. When the Federalist Society chapter at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law invited the conservative writer Josh Hammer to campus, the law school’s listserv devolved into profanity and public shaming.
“I’d be completely unsurprised (and in fact, willing to bet) that Joshie Hammer fucks (or at least tries to fuck—he probably was rejected repeatedly) we the trannies in his free time,” one student emailed the listerv. “Or—more likely—he just wants (and needs) to get just fucked in the ass . . . Maybe our lovely, idiotic FedSoc board is experiencing a similar dilemma within their own psychosexual selves.”
In the wake of such blowups, some law schools are scrapping their listservs altogether.
“Unsurprisingly, most of our peer schools no longer use listservs like these,” Gerken said. “They deploy other, more focused means to share information on events and opportunities with the community.”
The death of the listserv means the resurrection of an old Yale Law School tradition: In the days before email, students and faculty would post their views on a bulletin board, nicknamed the “Wall,” in the law school’s main hallway. That system, which Yale Law School is bringing back, “provided a healthy reminder that human beings are on the receiving end of the messages people send,” Gerken said. “Indeed, sometimes students would run into the very people with whom they were debating and speak face-to-face.”
The listserv’s death has left Austin cautiously optimistic.
“I wouldn’t call it a square deal yet,” he told the Free Beacon. “But if Gerken keeps leading like she has been this summer, then there’s a glimmer of hope that next year will be better for friends of free speech.”
Rep. Sanford Bishop considered joining Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic organization
A Democratic congressman running in a competitive House race once praised Nation of Islam leader and infamous anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan as “impressive” and said he considered joining Farrakhan’s organization.
Rep. Sanford Bishop (Ga.), who has served in Congress since 1993, made the comments during a 2005 interview series with the former leader of the NAACP, the Jewish Journalreported this week.
Bishop said he met Farrakhan after graduating from college, while the two were attending an event at Morehouse College in 1968.
“Of course, I had the opportunity for the first time to be acquainted with a man known as Minister Louis Farrakhan, who was so impressive that night that people stopped in mid-stride,” said Bishop during the interview. “I was just so taken by his message and his manner that I rushed out to the mosque the next day to hear him.”
The interview could be an obstacle for Bishop in his closely contested race against Republican challenger and Air Force officer Chris West. Bishop’s remarks drew criticism from Jewish leaders who noted Farrakhan’s history of anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric.
Bishop said he considered joining the Nation of Islam, a group led by Farrakhan that mixes black nationalist ideology with some elements of the Muslim religion. The organization also promotes anti-Semitic, anti-white, and anti-gay conspiracy theories. Bishop said his father opposed the idea and encouraged him to “pause” and reconsider it.
“I had so much exposure, so many influences, and of course when I even mentioned the possibility of joining the Nation, my father, he had a real time with that,” he said.
Bishop, who was raised Christian, said he didn’t end up joining the group and went on to learn about different religions, including Judaism.
The Jewish Journal noted that Bishop declined to denounce Farrakhan when asked by the Daily Caller in 2018.
Bishop told the Jewish Journal that he “denounce[s] anti-Semitism just as I denounce all forms of racism.” The congressman added that he has “been a strong supporter of the State of Israel” and has “the support of the Georgia Jewish community.”
Farrakhan has been dubbed the “most popular anti-Semite in America” by the Anti-Defamation League. Farrakhan preaches that “Satanic Jews” have “infected the whole world with poison and deceit.”
“To my Jewish friends, I shouldn’t use the word ‘friends’ so lightly, you have been a great and master deceiver, but God is going to pull the covers all off of you,” said Farrakhan in one 2017 speech.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Jewish Journal that Bishop’s praise for Farrakhan seems consistent with some of the congressman’s policy positions.
Bishop, who supported the Iran nuclear deal, appears to have “no concerns about a regime that crushes human rights, religious freedoms of its own citizens, executes gays, threatens nuclear Holocaust against [the] Jewish state, and continues to support and deploy terrorist assets from Iraq to South America,” Cooper said. “No surprise then he would have no problem with Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and anti-American rhetoric.”
After a video published by the White House made its way online Monday, Twitter users noticed some strange things about the video’s editing and resident Joe Biden’s appearance.
In the 11-minute video, multiple cuts interrupted Biden’s speech, giving the impression he must have messed up repeatedly during the recording. Additionally, Biden rarely blinked and his voice sounded hoarse the longer he continued talking.
Delivered virtual, pre-recorded remarks to the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives Conference, the president discussed his administration’s efforts to support police officers and ban assault weapons.
“To me, it’s simple. If you can’t support banning weapons of war on American streets, you’re not on the side of police,” Biden said.
Many cuts were used to stitch the White House video together, an editing choice of which conservatives gladly made fun.
The Daily Wire’s official Twitter account also mocked the president’s lack of blinking, while one of the outlet’s hosts suggested Biden could have consumed a stimulant drug before the recording.
White House: If you don’t blink for the whole video, we’ll give you ice cream Biden:pic.twitter.com/5v8n4t5PBC
Joe Biden would not be the first Democrat president to be injected with uppers in the White House. And it would make sense considering Biden was already 21 years old when it was happening to this guy: pic.twitter.com/e39mwAYI4Z
Another user posted two back-to-back clips of Biden, contrasting his physical appearance and voice. The first showed the president supposedly looking normal, while the aforementioned second video looked off.
Here’s the two videos back and forth. Pay attention to his physical appearance and his voice. Again, both supposedly from today, both only a few hours apart. What the hell is happening here? 🧐 pic.twitter.com/VjB2pjJZPn
— Five Times August (@FiveTimesAugust) July 27, 2022
In the video addressed to the NOBLE conference, Biden bragged about his 2021 American Rescue Plan, which provided upwards of $350 billion to cities and states struggling economically after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
The stimulus package bill cost a total of $1.9 trillion, according to SmartAsset.
“Over $10 billion of that money, of that funding, is being used to keep cops on the job, build new training facilities, enhance gun investigations and prosecutions and violence intervention programs,” Biden said.
He also used his praise for the police as a political opportunity to double down on Democratic criticism of Donald Trump’s alleged role on Jan. 6, saying the former president “lacked the courage to act.”
“The Capitol police, the D.C. metropolitan police, other law enforcement agencies were attacked and assaulted before our very eyes, speared, sprayed, stomped on, brutalized and lives were lost,” Biden said. “And for three hours, the defeated former president of the United States watched it all happen as he sat in the comfort of the private dining room next to the Oval Office.”
“You can’t be pro insurrection and pro cop. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro democracy. You can’t be pro insurrection and pro American.”
CORRECTION, July 28, 2022: The Western Journal has changed the headline of this article to include the fact that Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine held by Russia since 2018 on espionage charges, is also part of the proposed trade and not only Brittney Griner. We also removed the reference to Viktor Bout as a “known Russian terrorist,” an error for which we apologize; Bout was convicted on four terror-related conspiracy charges, but has not been found guilty of any actual acts of terror. We have also added a link to the original DOJ statement regarding Bout’s conviction in 2011, which we originally omitted, as well as including the full text of that statement at the bottom of the article for context, and included some additional information about Whelan’s history for context.
Resident Joe Biden is offering to exchange a Russian known as the “Merchant of Death” for WNBA star Brittney Griner and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.
In February, Griner was detained by Russian authorities in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport after vape canisters containing cannabis oil were found in her belongings.
Months later on July 7, Griner pleaded guilty to drug possession and smuggling in a Russian court. In Russia, the penalty for such a crime is up to 10 years in prison.
Whelan was arrested in 2018 on espionage charges and has been in Russian custody since. He has consistently denied the charges, but was convicted in 2020 and received a 16-year sentence.
According to an exclusive report from CNN, the Biden administration has been debating how to handle the situation for “months” and has finally come to a solution.
Three anonymous sources claim that the Biden administration is offering to exchange Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout for the two-time Olympic gold medalist and Phoenix Mercury star.
The Department of Justice is reportedly opposed to Biden’s decision to release Bout but the president’s authority overrules any opposition from the department.
In 2011, Bout was convicted on charges of “conspiring to kill U.S. nationals; conspiring to kill U.S. officers and employees; conspiring to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles; and conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” according to a statement from the DOJ at the time.
“Today, one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers is being held accountable for his sordid past,” then-Attorney General Eric Holder said at the time. “Viktor Bout’s arms trafficking activity and support of armed conflicts have been a source of concern around the globe for decades. Today, he faces the prospect of life in prison for his efforts to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to terrorists for use in killing Americans.”
“As the evidence at trial showed, Viktor Bout was ready to sell a weapons arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries,” Preet Bharara, the then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said after Bout’s conviction. “He aimed to sell those weapons to terrorists for the purpose of killing Americans. With today’s swift verdict, justice has been done and a very dangerous man will be behind bars.”
Despite Bout’s many crimes, one senior administration official told CNN that negotiations for the exchange were ongoing. The official said a “substantial offer” was first communicated in June.
It remained unclear whether the deal would go through, the official then noted.
“It takes two to tango. We start all negotiations to bring home Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained with a bad actor on the other side. We start all of these with somebody who has taken a human being American and treated them as a bargaining chip,” the official said.
“So in some ways, it’s not surprising, even if it’s disheartening, when those same actors don’t necessarily respond directly to our offers, don’t engage constructively in negotiations.”
The entire text of the DOJ’s 2011 news release regarding Bout’s conviction follows:
International arms dealer Viktor Bout was found guilty today of conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) – a designated foreign terrorist organization based in Colombia – to be used to kill Americans in Colombia, announced the Department of Justice.
“Today, one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers is being held accountable for his sordid past,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “Viktor Bout’s arms trafficking activity and support of armed conflicts have been a source of concern around the globe for decades. Today, he faces the prospect of life in prison for his efforts to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to terrorists for use in killing Americans.”
“ As the evidence at trial showed, Viktor Bout was ready to sell a weapons arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries,” said U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara. “He aimed to sell those weapons to terrorists for the purpose of killing Americans. With today’s swift verdict, justice has been done and a very dangerous man will be behind bars. I would like to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who investigated this case on three different continents and helped to bring Viktor Bout to justice.”
Bout was arrested in Thailand in March 2008 based on a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court. He was subsequently charged in a four-count indictment in May 2008 and extradited to the Southern District of New York in November 2010. Bout was convicted today of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals; conspiring to kill U.S. officers and employees; conspiring to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles; and conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. The three-week jury trial was presided over by U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin.
According to the indictment and evidence presented at the trial:
Since the 1990s, Bout has been an international weapons trafficker. As a result of his weapons trafficking activities in Liberia, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control within the Department of Treasury placed him on the Specially Designated nationals list in 2004. The designation prohibits any transactions between Bout and U.S. nationals, and freezes any of his assets that are within the jurisdiction of the United States.
Between November 2007 and March 2008, Bout agreed to sell to the FARC millions of dollars’ worth of weapons – including 800 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), 30,000 AK-47 firearms, 10 million rounds of ammunition, five tons of C-4 plastic explosives, “ultralight” airplanes outfitted with grenade launchers and unmanned aerial vehicles. Bout agreed to sell the weapons to two confidential sources working with the DEA (the “CSs”), who represented that they were acquiring them for the FARC, with the specific understanding that the weapons were to be used to attack U.S. helicopters in Colombia.
During a covertly recorded meeting in Thailand on March 6, 2008, Bout stated to the CSs that he could arrange to airdrop the arms to the FARC in Colombia, and offered to sell two cargo planes to the FARC that could be used for arms deliveries. He also provided a map of South America and asked the CSs to show him American radar locations in Colombia. Bout said that he understood that the CSs wanted the arms to use against American personnel in Colombia, and advised that, “we have the same enemy,” referring to the United States. He also stated that the FARC’s fight against the United States was also his fight and that he had been “fighting the United States…for 10 to 15 years.” During the meeting, he also offered to provide people to train the FARC in the use of the arms.
The evidence presented at trial included a recording of the March 6, 2008 meeting between Bout, the CSs, his former associate Andrew Smulian, and others. Smulian was charged along with Bout in the government’s March 2008 complaint and pleaded guilty in May 2008 to the four conspiracy counts of which Bout was just convicted. Smulian cooperated with the government and, along with the two CSs, provided testimony at the trial.
Bout faces a maximum sentence of life in prison on counts one through three, including a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison for count three. He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison on count four.
Bout is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Scheindlin on Feb. 8, 2012.
The case was investigated by the DEA, with assistance from the Royal Thai Police; the Romanian National Police; the Romanian Prosecutor’s Office Attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice; the Korps Politie Curacao of the Netherlands Antilles; and the Danish National Police Security Services.
This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Anjan Sahni and Brendan R. Mcguire from the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs provided assistance.
After a long week of constant violence, the Portland, Oregon, police chief took to Twitter with what amounted to a plea to criminals in the community to stop their behavior.
“The violence shown last night toward officers and over the weekend is shocking and reprehensible. In the last four days, officers have been shot at, had suspects fight with them, run over by a vehicle and another almost run over,” Chief of Portland Police Chuck Lovell posted to Twitter on Tuesday.
Several violent acts overwhelmed the city’s police department last week, Fox News reported.
One such incident involved a suspect hitting two police cruisers with his truck and almost running over a cop. The suspect, who was confronted by police for reports of gunshots nearby, escaped in his vehicle.
A separate incident saw an officer get hit by a vehicle during a stolen vehicle investigation. The officer was rushed to the hospital for their wounds, according to KGW-TV.
Portland cops were also involved in an altercation with a domestic violence suspect, resulting in the criminal’s death after he pulled out a gun.
Lovell continued his Twitter post by trying to remind the city — including its criminals — that his officers “deserve to go home at night” alive. Law-abiding citizens don’t need to be told that.
Officers are answering 911 emergency calls trying to help people. They deserve to go home at night to their loved ones. They deserve and need the community’s support as they continue to help make a difference in this city.
Rank-and-file members of the department aren’t happy either.
“It’s beginning to get frustrating for the officers and hopefully members of the community are getting frustrated, as well,” Portland police Officer Derek Carmon told KGW.
Crime in the liberal city has gotten worse over the past two years, especially after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. Because of this, Portland has seen its fair share of “defund the police” and other social justice movements.
The coronavirus pandemic did not help matters either as citizens were told by the federal and state governments to coop up inside their homes for several weeks.
Despite the City Council’s attempt to appease activists by cutting funding for the Portland Police Bureau in 2020, the city did not see a decrease in violence.
In fact, continued violence forced the city council to add $5.2 million worth of funds back into the police department in November 2021, PBS reported.
Just a month ago, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling led riotous protesters to damage local businesses.
A network of progressive prosecutors boosted by the left-wing billionaire George Soros is rushing to defend a Virginia prosecutor who lied to reduce a career criminal’s prison sentence.
The Soros-funded group slammed circuit court judge James Plowman for removing Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney Buta Biberaj (D.) from a robbery case. Plowman took the unprecedented step of throwing the progressive prosecutor and her team off the case after discovering she had withheld information about a 19-year-old burglar’s criminal record in order to “sell” a lenient prison sentence. In an amicus brief to the Virginia Supreme Court, Fair and Just Prosecution said the judge trampled on the prosecutorial discretion of Biberaj, whom voters elected “to reverse the course of mass incarceration.”
The missive is the latest instance in which Fair and Just Prosecution has waved off attacks on its left-wing prosecutors. Biberaj in 2020 signed on to defend Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) after a circuit judge demanded she submit written justification for the charging, dismissing, or settling of cases. Biberaj last December also joined dozens of progressive prosecutors to support Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón (D.), who is facing a recall and a lawsuit from his deputies over his radical sentencing policies. Gascón and Dehghani-Tafti returned the favor and this month signed on to Biberaj’s appeal.
Soros has donated more than $40 million since 2014 to help elect liberal prosecutors who have moved to lighten bail and sentencing guidelines in half of America’s largest jurisdictions. But voters are turning on progressive prosecutors as crime rates skyrocket across the country. Biberaj, who ran with nearly a million dollars of aid from Soros, has come under fire for her handling of child endangerment and domestic abuse cases, freeing offenders who are a danger to the public. Her prosecutorial approach has generated a recall effort.
Kevin Enrique Valle was initially charged in Loudoun in May 2021 with two felony burglaries, a crime that carries a minimum five-year prison sentence in Virginia. But he had been arrested the same month for 10 other burglaries. Given the charges and his past convictions as a minor, Valle could have faced decades in prison. But those charges were not written up, and Valle entered into a plea agreement with Biberaj’s office, which sentenced him to just six months in prison. Plowman called the plea deal “an overt misrepresentation by omission.”
In its amicus brief, Fair and Just Prosecution painted Plowman’s court order as political retaliation, since he had formerly held Biberaj’s office as commonwealth’s attorney in Loudoun County. Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares (R.) said in a letter that the Loudoun County Court “has rightfully lost confidence in Ms. Biberaj, her deputies, and her office’s ability and willingness to effectively seek justice in this matter.” Biberaj responded by telling Miyares to “stay in your lane.”
In addition to campaign support, Soros has thrown tens of millions of dollars at justice reform groups that provide professional development to progressive prosecutors. The Tides Center, a criminal justice reform group, since 2016 has received more than $30 million from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, funneling its donations to third-party entities like Fair and Just Prosecution.
Biberaj has participated in three Fair and Just Prosecution-sponsored trips since her election. She joined Dehghani-Tafti and Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) at the group’s annual convention in Durham, N.C., shortly after the three progressive Virginia prosecutors won their elections in 2019. One year later, she traveled with the group to New York City along with Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.). Many of the same prosecutors, including recently recalled San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin (D.), attended a symposium months later in Los Angeles, though Biberaj was not present. This May, she attended a Fair and Just Prosecution junket in Washington, D.C.
Virginians for Safe Communities told the Washington Free Beacon it is “fast approaching the signature threshold” to trigger a recall election for Biberaj.
“We expect to file with the court by Labor Day and put Buta Biberaj on trial for her negligence, misuse of office, and incompetence in her duties,” said Sean Kennedy, the group’s president. “Buta Biberaj has alienated everyone in Loudoun County, including law enforcement, Democratic Party officials, and even her own staff, so she has to rely on her Soros-funded travel buddies to defend her.”
Top Democrats in Loudoun County have signaled they are ready to back a prosecutor other than Biberaj in the next election, whether through a recall or during the next commonwealth’s attorney election in 2023, the Free Beaconreported in June.
The number of Americans who say universities are leading America in a positive direction has dropped 14 points in the last two years, according to a survey released Tuesday.
Varying Degrees, an annual survey released by the left-leaning New America think tank, found just over half of Americans, 55 percent, say higher education has a positive influence on the United States, down from 69 percent in 2020. While Republicans showed the greatest drop, plummeting from 61 percent in 2020 to 37 percent in 2022, self-identified Democrats’ confidence in colleges also declined 7 points.
Elite universities have been the subject of numerous controversies related to their ideological posturing. Georgetown sanctioned law professor Ilya Shapiro following his criticism of resident Joe Biden for appointing a Supreme Court justice on the basis of race. Princeton University ousted a renowned conservative professor who had received tenure, and Yale Law School has been rocked by calls from liberal students to harass conservatives on campus.
Many U.S. colleges are home to self-described liberal professors. At Harvard, for instance, 82 percent of professors surveyed this year called themselves either “liberal” or “very liberal,” compared with just 1 percent who identified as conservative.
Fewer Americans believe the government should fund higher education, declining by 6 percentage points over the past two years.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) admitted Thursday that she does not have the votes to pass a public-safety bill, a blow to vulnerable Democrats who are trying to run against accusations that the party wants to defund the police.
Pelosi canceled a planned vote this week on a bill that would fund grant programs for local police departments to hire additional police officers.
The policies were introduced by two vulnerable Democrats, Reps. Abigail Spanberger (Va.) and Josh Gottheimer (N.J.). But other Democrats and left-wing activist groups bristled at the proposals. The Congressional Black Caucus opposed extra funding for police departments, citing alleged shootings of unarmed black men. Other interest groups, such as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, chaired by “defund the police” proponent Maya Wiley, called the proposals part of a “discriminatory criminalization-first approach to public safety.” Those disagreements led Pelosi to cancel a vote because she lacked enough Democratic “yeas.”
The bill’s failure presents a critical blow to vulnerable Democrats fighting back against accusations that their party is anti-law enforcement. Spanberger’s proposal was introduced with Rep. Tom Rice (R., S.C.) in a rare act of bipartisanship on the sensitive issue of policing. Although Democratic leadership says the House will revisit the bill in August, congressional insiders say a vote is unlikely given the high number of legislative priorities.
Republicans intend to take advantage of Pelosi’s decision by painting Democrats as weak on crime. Republican campaign ads across the country include clips of their opponents and Democratic leaders calling for cuts to police departments.
“Democrats never miss an opportunity to remind voters they hate the police,” a National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon.
Polling shows that the “Defund the Police” slogan, adopted by many Democrats after the death of George Floyd in 2020, damaged the party’s reputation with voters. An April Gallup poll found Americans more concerned with violent crime than at any time in the last six years, prompted by historic spikes in shootings and homicide in 2020 and 2021.
Peach State Democrat forced to go out of state to find a sheriff surrogate for a new ad
Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams is out with a new ad that uses a “former deputy sheriff” to argue that Abrams’s opponent is making the state “less safe.” There’s just one problem: That officer never served in Georgia.
In a July 12 ad titled “Dangerous,” Abrams’s leadership PAC, One Georgia, employs a “former deputy sheriff”—who is identified only as “Dennis”—to claim that Republican governor Brian Kemp “may talk tough” but “makes us less safe.” But “Dennis” never patrolled the mean streets of Atlanta—or any Georgia street, for that matter. “Dennis” is LGBT attorney and Democratic activist Dennis Collard, a Florida native who worked as a police officer in the Sunshine State from 1994-1999, his LinkedIn shows. Collard—who, according to his LinkedIn, uses pronouns he/him—went on to join an Atlanta-based law firm in 2003, roughly 13 years before he founded his own divorce firm in Atlanta.
This is far from the first time Abrams has been forced to go out of state in search of political support. Just 14 percent of the $50 million she’s raised for her campaign against Kemp came from Georgia residents. Nearly half of that money, meanwhile, came from Washington, D.C., California, New York, and Delaware. Abrams in May called Georgia “the worst state in the country to live.”
Jackson County sheriff Janis Mangum, who is one of more than 100 Georgia sheriffs to endorse Kemp, said she was “not surprised at all” to hear that Abrams struggled to recruit a police officer who served in the Peach State.
“I’m not surprised by that at all when you’ve got someone who talks about defunding the police. Defunding the police would be the worst thing for anybody to do in our state—it’s just absolutely ridiculous,” Mangum told the Washington Free Beacon. “And for somebody to think like that, I don’t know that you’re going to have any law enforcement officers get behind you.”
Abrams, who did not return a request for comment, has faced criticism over her role as a board member of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which supports defunding police. Shortly after Abrams joined that board in May 2021, the foundation launched its “Answer the Uprising” initiative, which funds groups working to “transform, defund, [and] abolish police.” The foundation has, for example, funneled $200,000 to the Louisville Community Bail Fund, which later paid $100,000 to free an anti-police activist charged with the attempted murder of a Jewish mayoral candidate.
Abrams has attempted to distance herself from the foundation by claiming she does not agree with its position on defunding police. According to the foundation’s website, however, the group’s “Answer the Uprising” initiative was “fully supported by Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Board of Directors, which recently named seven new changemakers to the Board, including Stacey Abrams.”
Prior to her political career, Abrams authored eight romance novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery. CBS in 2019 reached an agreement to turn one of those novels, Never Tell, into a TV drama. The 2004 romantic fiction book is heavy on both sex and sexual misconduct, a Free Beaconanalysis found.
Abrams went on to serve as a state legislator and ran a failed campaign against Kemp in 2018. The Democrat lost by 2 points but never conceded defeat, instead calling the election “stolen” due to “voter suppression.” Collard also filmed an ad for Abrams four years ago, filed a campaign finance complaint against Kemp in 2019, and contributed $500 to Abrams’s campaign in March.
‘My greatest fears came true,’ local Democrat said of congressional hopeful Greg Landsman’s taxpayer-funded program
On the campaign trail, Ohio Democrat Greg Landsman touts a taxpayer-funded program he spearheaded to raise preschool teachers’ pay. A year into that program’s existence, however, teacher wages lagged behind as executives raked in six-figure salaries.
Landsman in May boasted that he “led the charge to pass the Cincinnati Preschool Promise,” a program that raised property taxes in part to “create better-paying jobs for preschool teachers.” But one year into that program, participating teachers were not making the $15 an hour that Landsman and other Preschool Promise organizers advertised—even as three of the program’s executives raked in six-figure, taxpayer-funded salaries, the Cincinnati Enquirerreported in 2017.
Despite the program’s early shortcomings, Landsman is using his former role as a Preschool Promise “strategic adviser” to propel a run for Congress, arguing that his work on the program proves he’ll “never stop fighting for our children.” But not everyone is convinced. Buckeye Institute research fellow Greg Lawson told the Washington Free Beacon that while competitive executive pay is important, voters are justified in questioning an organization that fails to prioritize its “frontline workers.”
“This is one of the concerns we always have when we’re talking about new programs. … You want to limit those kinds of administrative costs,” Lawson said. “Perception matters. It’s going to be hard to justify spending more money if people are going to look back and say, ‘Well, why did you spend this over here?'”
Landsman’s campaign did not return a request for comment. Preschool Promise defended its decision to prioritize executive salaries—a board member in 2017 told the Enquirer that the lucrative wages were “needed to attract quality employees” and that the program did not have the funds to “responsibly” pay teachers $15 an hour. The explanation did not suffice for Democratic city council candidate Michelle Dillingham, who voted for the program and now works as an organizer for the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers.
“We are not where we’d like to be a year into this. My greatest fears came true,” Dillingham said one year after voters approved the tax hike required to create Preschool Promise in November 2016. “You can’t pay their workers 15 bucks an hour? That’s offensive to me. We were promised a living wage.”
Following his work as a Preschool Promise adviser, Landsman joined the Cincinnati city council in January 2018. He went on to support a number of controversial proposals. As homicides reached an unprecedented high in Cincinnati in the summer of 2020, for example, Landsman penned a motion to pull $200,000 from the city’s police budget, a proposal that a local NBC affiliate described as “basically the definition of defunding.” Around the same time, the Democrat signed onto another motion that endorsed ending cash bail, a policy he said he supported because George Floyd’s death “changed something” in him.
Landsman is running for Congress after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recruited him to challenge Rep. Steve Chabot (R.) in Ohio’s First Congressional District. He did not face an opponent in the state’s May primary and will square off against Chabot, who is a top target for Democrats as they look to retain control of the House, in November. Chabot has a slight financial advantage in the race—he’s raised $1.3 million to Landsman’s $1.1 million.
‘This Book Is Antiracist’ is key element of curriculum at Lower Manhattan Community Middle School
A New York City public school encouraged students as young as 10 years old to keep a list of all the “microaggressions” they witnessed, both at school and in their own families, according to materials from the school’s curriculum reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The same students were also asked to list their gender identity—”cisgender,” “nonbinary,” or “trans”—as well as their sexual orientation on a graded worksheet.
The sixth-grade humanities curriculum from Lower Manhattan Community Middle School, where just 31 percent of students are white, required students to read Tiffany Jewell’s This Book Is Anti-Racist, one of only five books assigned for the 2021-2022 year. The book contains 20 lessons on “how to wake up, take action, and do the work”—including the work of confronting the police, which Jewell suggests white students can do without ending up “in jail or harmed.”
“If you are a Black, Brown, or Indigenous Person of the Global Majority, you will need to decide how each outcome could end for you,” Jewell writes in a chapter called “Choosing My Path.” “White people, this is not something you need to do because you are at the center of the system.”
From Tiffany Jewell’s ‘This Book Is Anti-Racist’
The book also asks students to surveil their friends and family for racist behavior. “Grab your notebook,” one “activity” instructs readers. “Look and listen for the microaggressions around you. Write them down and note your observations.” Another activity asks students how “folx” in their families “resisted” or “contributed to racism,” defined as the “systemic misuse and abuse of power by institutions.”
The curriculum, which went into effect August 2021, came as parents across New York City were mobilizing against critical race theory in public schools—and as education officials across the country were denying that there was any such thing.
“Critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, asserted in July 2021. Parents “are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”
One month earlier, New York Regents chancellor Lester Young stated that critical race theory “is not our theory of action” and assured parents that “we are not preparing young people to be activists.”
Jewell’s book belies that assurance. “We will work together, in solidarity, to disrupt racism and become anti-racist accomplices,” the preface reads. “There are many moments to pause in this book so you can check in with yourself and grow into your activism.”
The curriculum could spell legal trouble for the school, which is already under investigation for separating seventh and eight-graders into racial affinity groups. That practice prompted a civil rights complaint in December from the watchdog group Parents Defending Education; on July 13, the Department of Education announced it would investigate the middle school over the complaint.
“It’s astonishing that administrators at Lower Manhattan Community seem determined to create a racially hostile educational environment on top of the civil rights investigation that was just opened,” said Nicole Neily, the president of Parents Defending Education. “Parents who were once proud of the school’s academic performance compared to other New York City public schools are now concerned—justifiably so—about the school’s increasing fixation on race.”
Those concerns come amid steep enrollment declines—and budget cuts—in New York City’s public schools. With enrollment down 8 percent since 2020, schools have lost $215 million in funding this year alone, forcing widespread layoffs and larger class sizes.
Divisive curricula like the one at Lower Manhattan Community School have exacerbated that exodus. One parent told the Free Beacon that their child would not be returning to the middle school this fall on account of an assignment that required sixth-graders to disclose their “social identities”—including their sexual orientation—on a worksheet. Though students did not have to “write something for every category,” instructors collected the worksheet for a grade.
Such lessons aren’t the product of a few school administrators run amok but reflect the race-conscious worldview of the New York City Department of Education. In June 2020, then-executive superintendent of Manhattan public schools Marisol Rosales hosted a panel on dismantling “systemic racism in our schools,” which held up Lower Manhattan Community School’s “mission statement on race” as a model for the entire school system.
“To undo the legacy of racism and oppression in this country that impacts our school community,” the mission statement reads, Lower Manhattan Community Schools works to instill “anti-racist beliefs and practices.”
The school’s sixth-grade humanities curriculum is a microcosm of what that education looks like in practice. Three of its five units concern “identity,” with Jewell’s book listed as a “key text” for unit one. The “social identities” worksheet was part of a broader lesson on “the dominant culture,” which consists of “people who are white, middle class, Christian and cisgender.”
Whoever does not fit into this “box,” Jewell writes, is “part of what’s called the ‘subordinate culture.’” Her description of that culture is exhaustive, albeit studded with solecisms: “Folx included in the ‘subordinate culture,’ include Black, Brown, indegenous People of Color of the Global Majority, queer, transgender, and nonbinary folx, and cisgender women, youth, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, and non-Christian folx, neurodiverse folx, folx living with disabilities, those living in poverty, and more.”
“The people who want to talk about racism all the time are the racists,” said Maud Maron, who served as an elected representative for parents in the district where Lower Manhattan Community School is located. “The people who suffer are the kids who get cheated out of a wholesome school experience and hours of learning that should be focused on academics instead of race indoctrination.”
Lower Manhattan Community School did not respond to a request for comment.
The focus on race extended to the seventh-grade social studies curriculum—ostensibly devoted to early American history—which used “anti-racist” guru Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning as its main textbook, according to a syllabus for the 2021-2022 school year reviewed by the Free Beacon.
These curricula do not seem to have soothed racial tensions at Lower Manhattan Community School, which is 41 percent Asian, 15 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent black.
A group of parents and administrators in April began planning a “restorative justice circle” to address alleged incidents of racism that had taken place over the school year, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon. The incidents included a black student calling a South Asian student “Indian Boy,” an Asian student touching a black student’s hair, and a “rumor” that a white student “used the N-word.”
The school eventually canceled the circle after a parent objected that it would “violate students’ privacy” and “possibly put current students at risk”—and after parents started to litigate the incidents over email, replicating the racial catfighting that had consumed the classroom.
One parent questioned the wisdom of discussing the transgressions of Asian students at a time when anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise. It didn’t go over well.
“African Americans have been facing race-based violence for 500 years in this country, and still face it every day,” another parent responded. “So I’d ask you to please be sensitive to that fact during discussions and emails with our group.”
Houses in the United States are taking longer to sell as bidding wars have decreased and demand has dipped, according to real estate brokerage firm Redfin.
For the four weeks ending on July 17, the typical home was on the market for 19 days before being sold, one day more than the same period in 2021, Redfin said in a July 21 statement. This is the first time in two years that the median time on the market has registered a year-over-year increase.
Despite fewer homes coming onto the market compared to 2021, the total number of homes on sale had the largest increase since August 2019.
“Buyers, who earlier this year had to race to beat the competition, can now take their time touring homes and perhaps even wait to see if sellers drop the price,” Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather said in the statement. “Still, few homes are being listed, so if your dream house hits the market, you should negotiate hard, now that you have the power to.”
Of the home offers written by Redfin agents in June, 49.9 percent had competing offers. This is the lowest measure since May 2020 and the first time the bidding-war rate has slipped lower than 50 percent since then.
The term “bidding war” refers to competition between real estate buyers.
The decline in bidding wars in June was the fifth straight monthly fall. The 49.9 percent rate was also lower than the rate of 65 percent in June 2021, per a July 20 statement.
According to Jenny Dedrick, a Redfin real estate agent in Minneapolis—where the bidding-war rate fell to 45.7 percent in June from 65 percent in June 2021—home showings have “dramatically decreased.”
Homes that had 20 showings in May are now getting just one showing and sometimes none at all, she said.
Home Price Appreciation
The housing market is also caught up in an affordability crisis as rising home prices make it tougher for people to buy a house. According to the National Association of Realtors, affordability fell to its lowest level in 16 years in May.
Although home price appreciation has softened in recent months, William Yu, an economist at the University of California–Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, told The Epoch Times that he doesn’t expect any drastic fall because of the imbalance in supply and demand.
“We probably won’t see a crash like the ones we saw in 2007, 2008, and 2012. Back then, there was an oversupply,” he said. “This time, there is a shortage of housing supply.”
Yu advised buyers who are waiting for prices to plummet further to not expect too much of a decline.
According to a report released in July by nonprofit Up for Growth, there’s a shortage of 3.8 million homes in the United States, which is twice the deficit compared to 2012.
Deputy National Cyber Director Camille Stewart has called for a race-focused defense agenda
Solving “perceived” systematic racism by implementing systematic racism. Sounds like a democrat. Stop looking for hand-outs and start lending a hand. [US Patriot]
Resident Joe Biden’s incoming cyber defense deputy has claimed that “systemic racism” is one of the greatest threats to U.S. cybersecurity.
Camille Stewart, a former Google strategist whom Biden reportedly tapped for White House deputy national cyber director, has argued that “our #NatSec apparatus must be a part of dismantling systemic racism,” and “pursuing anti-racist and anti-hate policy outcomes” should be a chief national security focus for the administration.
Biden’s new hire is likely to stoke concerns from Republican legislators that his administration has been more focused on pushing a race-focused ideological agenda than on traditional national defense issues—such as the increasing risk of cyberattacks from Russia, Iran, and China. The Department of Justice said in June it is bracing for more cyberwarfare from adversarial countries. Last month, the FBI revealed it intercepted an Iranian-backed cyberattack against Boston Children’s Hospital, and Russian hackers targeted an American satellite company in Ukraine earlier this year.
Stewart, who served as policy adviser for the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, has criticized the United States as an intrinsically racist society in her writing and on social media.
She claimed that the U.S. economy “lost $16 trillion b/c of Racism against Black Americans,” and warned in 2020 that “SYSTEMIC RACISM WILL RUIN THIS DEMOCRACY,” arguing that systemic racism was a part of “every institution not just the criminal justice system.”
“[Solutions] to cybersecurity challenges will never reach their full potential until systemic racism is addressed and diverse voices are reflected among our ranks at all levels,” Stewart wrote in a 2020 column for the Council on Foreign Relations titled “Systemic Racism Is a National Security Threat.”
She added that “communities of color are disproportionately affected by cyberattacks that target critical infrastructure.”
In a 2020 column for the Hill, Stewart said the Biden administration’s efforts to combat systemic racism “must be woven into leadership priorities, processes, structures, and domestic and international strategy.”
Stewart proposed that U.S. foreign policy leaders be encouraged to “talk about systemic racism in the U.S on a global stage” and acknowledge the “detrimental effects of racism at home and in U.S. foreign policy towards regions of the world.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A White House press release on Monday said Stewart was “regarded as not only an expert but also as an inspiration, especially to women and underrepresented minorities.”
Republican lawmakers have objected to other recent hires by the Biden administration, including U.S. special representative for racial equity and justice appointee Desirée Cormier Smith, who claimed white diplomats lack empathy and humility.
What began as a situation involving a woman barricaded in a hotel room has morphed into a Twitter campaign to free Baltimore-area resident Shanteari Weems, who admits she shot her husband.
The incident began Thursday night at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C.
According to a police affidavit, the smoke detector went off in Weems ‘ hotel room and is believed to have been triggered by a gun being fired.
A hotel staff member who responded “observed blood on the wall” after entering the room.
When police responded, Weems would not let them in. The man in the room called out that he had been shot. Weems remained barricaded inside the room for about 30 minutes, according to WRC-TV.
After police forced their way into the room, Weems offered a justification for shooting the man, who she said was her husband of five years, according to The Washington Post.
She said children at the daycare she runs in Maryland told her that her husband had molested them. Weems said she reported the allegation to the proper authorities.
Police said a notebook with comments about the shooting included one from Weems that said, “I’m going to shoot [victim], but not kill him.”
Weems said she shot her husband because during their argument over the allegations, he rose and came towards her.
Weems has been held in jail pending a hearing Monday, which enraged some activists on Twitter.
People across social media platforms are yelling “Free Her” after Shanteari Weems was arrested for shooting her husband. Weems owns a day care center & alleges her husband was molesting some of the children at said establishment.https://t.co/a6IfNq653D
“Free her” – Americans tell police to free woman and Daycare owner, Shanteari Weems, who shot her husband for allegedly molesting children at the centerhttps://t.co/SqaE2hMFGP
— 🇺🇸KossyDerrickEnt (@KossyDerrickEnt) July 24, 2022
Weems, 50, of Randallstown, operates a daycare in Owings Mills, according to the Baltimore Sun.
The Baltimore Sun did not release the husband’s name but said he was a former Baltimore Police officer who retired department in 2005 and served as a contractor through 2008.
Police said the man’s wounds are not life-threatening.
Sgt. Gladys Brown, of the Baltimore County Police, said the daycare is closed “while an investigation moves forward.”
“Baltimore County detectives are currently monitoring the recent developments in Washington D.C.,” Brown said in a statement. “Due to the sensitive circumstances leading up to this incident, the Baltimore County Police Department continues to support the families impacted.”
Weems faces charges of assault with intent to kill and assault with a dangerous weapon.
Two of Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes’s biggest donors are major funders of the “defund the police” movement and bankrolled a successful campaign to remove law enforcement from schools in crime-plagued Oakland, California.
Barnes’s leadership committee—a political fundraising committee that candidates often use for personal expenses unconnected to their campaigns—raked in 13 percent of its donations this year from millionaire real estate developer Wayne Jordan and his wife, Quinn Delaney, according to Federal Election Commission records.
The couple is heavily involved in left-wing and anti-police activism through their charity, the Akonadi Foundation.
The funding could complicate Barnes’s attempts to distance himself from the increasingly unpopular “defund the police” movement. Barnes, who serves as Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, previously partnered with anti-cop groups, sponsored a bill to end cash bail, and took $28,000 in campaign donations from an organization that supports defunding police, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
But Barnes’s campaign told the Free Beacon in February that he “does not support defunding the police.”
Jordan and Delaney, who contributed $10,000 in May to Barnes’s leadership committee Leading the PAC and $5,800 to his campaign, are prominent in the progressive activist world.
The couple founded an Oakland-based nonprofit group, the Akonadi Foundation, that in 2020 pledged $12.5 million to fight to “fix school discipline,” remove police from schools, and close juvenile detention centers. In June 2020, the Oakland Unified School District board voted to dismantle the school system’s police department—and even temporarily shut down a popular police volunteer mentorship program for students—because it claimed the presence of officers was “fundamentally undermining the economic and public health of the Black community by restricting access and opportunity.”
The Akonadi Foundation went even further than objecting to law enforcement in schools, arguing that police departments should be defunded entirely.
“To address police violence instead of reforming we need to defund police & invest in non-police solutions,” said the Akonadi Foundation in a June 4, 2020, Twitter post, adding in another post that “cities across the U.S. need to defund the police and invest in communities of color.”
The decision to remove police security from schools was one of several anti-law enforcement initiatives adopted in Oakland and neighboring areas that preceded a massive crime spike in the city.
The city recorded over 130 homicides last year, the highest since 2006, and residents have decried a sharp increase in youth crimes, with kids as young as 11 committing car jackings and robberies, according to reports. In May, officials reportedly recovered 15 pounds of fentanyl and over $100,000 from drug traffickers operating out of a school parking lot in Oakland.
America’s current education system is antiquated, wasteful, and “bent on saving and serving itself,” argues former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
She is one of the very few department heads to have advocated for the abolition of the agency she ran. Education gaps have only widened since the establishment of the federal Department of Education under President Jimmy Carter, she says.
Two years of remote learning have now put children months, if not years behind during this pandemic. “You couple the learning losses with the mental health challenges, and you have a disaster looming,” she says.
DeVos is the author of the new book, “Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.” Tonight, she breaks down creative new approaches to schooling being adopted in states like Florida and Arizona that could soon change the game for millions of children across America.
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Below is a rush transcript of this American Thought Leaders episode from Jul 21, 2022. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Jan Jekielek:
Betsy DeVos, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Ms. Betsy DeVos:
Thank you, Jan. It’s great to be with you.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s been several years since we spoke last. You were the Secretary of Education at the time and you were getting, I think it’s an understatement to say a ton of flack for just about anything that you were trying to do. And now, you’ve written about it in your book. What is it like to be outside of government now? How has your life changed?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, I’ve been busy writing this book, which is about how we actually fix American education. And it’s been very, I would say, energizing and cathartic at the same time. And I’m continuing to advocate for kids and for their family’s ability to direct their own child’s education as I had for 30 years before I went to Washington.
So in that regard, not much has changed. I just am able to do it now with a different perspective and a different set of experiences. And I’m working with governors and state legislators and some of our federal elected officials as well to really promote and advance policies that are going to empower families to do just that.
Mr. Jekielek:
So tell me about this different perspective. What is it that you, what were the big lessons of being in an administration?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, it only confirmed further for me what I knew before even going there. And that is the federal government does not do education well. It is not involved in education in a good and positive and constructive way. It is really the purview of the family and the most local units of government that really have to be able to take charge of and control for the kids’ education.
And we’re seeing this happen now in more meaningful ways across the country with Arizona being the most recent state, the first state to enact a universal education freedom policy, which is going to change the life trajectories for thousands of kids in that state. I’m very excited about that. I’m also excited about how that’s going to continue to build momentum in other states for the policy changes necessary to do that same thing.
Mr. Jekielek:
And so it’s interesting to me, because you are the head of a large federal department. Of course, education is left to the states, but there’s been all sorts of federal mechanisms created to be able to influence the states with time, right?
Ms. DeVos:
Yes. Well, people often don’t realize the fact that only 8% or 9% of funding for K-12 education comes from the federal government and yet the regulations and all of the policies that directly impact state and local education are far beyond that 8% or 9%. And so there are a lot of strings attached to the money that government sends and funds for K-12 education.
I contend that that money is better spent when directed by families from the state level as well. And I use the metaphor of a backpack. Kids go to school every day with the stuff they need for the day. Metaphorically, we should attach the funds that are already being spent on that child to that child’s backpack, for that family to figure out, is there assigned school working for them? If not, let’s figure out where is going to work.
And K-12 education is the least disrupted industry in our country. And it is an industry. We spend $750 billion a year on K-12 education, and we continue to get poorer and worse results in spite of the fact of spending more and more and more money. If we would empower families with those resources to make those buying decisions, we will get the creativity and ingenuity and entrepreneurship we need in K-12 learning experiences that we haven’t had to date with a 175-year-old industrial model approach.
Mr. Jekielek:
What place is there, if any, for a federal department of education? I’ve had someone on the show very recently who simply said, “Do away with it all.”
Ms. DeVos:
I concur with that. I think the department should not exist. It was a payoff to the teachers unions that Jimmy Carter made in 1979 or ’76 when he was running for election. And it was actually affected or implemented in 1979. We have since then spent over $1 trillion at the federal level alone with the express goal of closing the achievement gaps. Not only have those gaps not narrowed one little bit, by most measures they’ve actually widened.
And so there is no compelling reason for having a federal department of education. There are a couple of laws that we need to make sure are followed, protecting civil rights and making sure children with disabilities have the kinds of supports they need. But those don’t need to exist in a federal department. They can exist in another already established department and be overseen very well in those places. The federal department of education does not add any value to kids’ educations.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re perhaps the first department head I’m aware of who’s advocating for the abolition of the department that they headed.
Ms. DeVos:
I did while I was there. I said, I would be very happy to work myself out of a job. And in fact, the last two budgets that we presented to Congress actually sought to block grant all of the funds to the states and local districts. Congress didn’t take it up seriously to even debate it. I hope they do.
I think it’s a very worthy discussion, particularly with how we’ve seen the system act and respond this last two years when families have had a front row seat to see firsthand the failings of the system.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to talk about this Arizona law that you mentioned earlier. It’s obviously a major development. Before we go there, I just want to touch a little bit on this past administration. You actually quit following January 6th. You said that President Trump had crossed the red line. I want to give you a chance just to kind of say your piece, like what exactly happened so people understand what your position was very clearly before we continue.
Ms. DeVos:
Well, to put it a little more in context, following the election in November, during the rest of November and December when there was debate happening around a second COVID relief package, there was a very real opportunity to get a school choice, education freedom provision included in that bill. But The White House was not focused on doing those kinds of things and advocating for that kind of policy.
And so what could have been wasn’t, and my role, my job, focusing on doing the right things and everything we could for students, I’d pretty much come to the end of what we could possibly accomplish. And on January 6th, when I saw what was happening and I didn’t hear the president say the things that he could have or should have said, at least what I felt, to put an end to what was happening.
And when he turned his back on his vice president, it was kind of a line in the sand for me. I also felt we should have been taking victory laps about all of the accomplishments of the administration, of which there were so many. And instead we were focused on this. And so I’m always a forward looking person. That’s what I continue to do. And that’s what I think we need to do.
Look ahead. Let’s learn from what we did in the past, but let’s keep moving forward and doing the right thing for, in my case, the right thing for kids and more broadly the right thing for Americans.
Mr. Jekielek:
So again, you started talking about this Arizona law. A number of people are saying this is groundbreaking. There’s been nothing like this before. So, tell me a bit about this law. Do you see this as the future for the American child and where should it go from here?
Ms. DeVos:
Yeah, so the Education Savings Account is what Arizona just passed and Governor Ducey signed into law. That means that for all 1.1 million students in Arizona, if their families decide that the school to which they’re assigned is not working for them, they can take 90% of what the state would spend on that child and use it to buy that child’s education.
They could use it to go to a different school, one that requires tuition, a faith-based school or another private school of some sort. Or they could use it to customize their child’s education and maybe buy a couple of classes at one place, maybe buy a virtual class, maybe a couple of classes at a charter school, let’s say. Any combination of those things, or perhaps some things that haven’t yet even been developed.
In Arizona during the lockdowns, there were many families, many of them in the urban areas that started to band together in small cadres or consortiums of families and basically start up what I would refer to as a 21st century one-room schoolhouse with multi-age kids. They would hire a teacher that was looking for a different experience. And for them, if that’s working, they need to have the opportunity to continue to pursue that kind of experience for their children.
And like I said, the system has been so one size fits all for 175 years. We haven’t really wrapped our heads around what education in the K-12 years could really look like for kids, because we haven’t had the kind of creativity that we’ve seen in every other industry. This in Arizona, and I think there will be other states that will soon follow, we’re going to see that creativity really fostered and growing in ways that we can’t predict today.
Mr. Jekielek:
So you’re just making me think of something bizarre that I heard fairly recently. Basically, in a school where all the teachers were not in school. This is in New York, basically. One of the moms is describing this situation. The parents banded together and created one of these schoolhouses in that same school. And they said, how bizarre an experience was that? The teachers couldn’t come and actually, some of these teachers were somehow involved in the creation of this as well.
So on the one hand, the actual system wasn’t really functioning except perhaps virtually, although, certainly not at a hundred percent. And on the other hand, there were people creating these sorts of things. In some cases, even employing people that were involved in the educational system in the first place. What do you make of this?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, I think it’s just one example of people finding solutions to problems. And I’ve used the example recently of a small school that I’m familiar with in West Michigan. I live in Michigan. It’s cold in the winter in Michigan. And yet there’s this small school where the kids are outside all day, all year long and they’re learning outside and they choose to do this. It is an outdoor school by design. And the teachers who are there are choosing to be there.
And I use it as one small example of thinking about solutions that we need to be much more open to because we know kids learn differently. They have different needs. And parents again have had front row seats to that in the last couple of years. And they’ve seen if distance learning was just the ticket for their child or if it was a disaster. They’ve seen in many cases, curriculums that they didn’t want their children to be exposed to.
And in other cases, they’ve seen curriculums that were very low in their expectations of what a child could do. And the parents may know that their child is capable of much more. They should have the opportunity to find the solution that’s going to work for that child to unlock that child’s full potential.
Mr. Jekielek:
For all intents and purposes, from everyone that I’ve heard, the distance learning didn’t work for most kids. It worked for a few kids that were very self-directed, but it didn’t work for most of them. And I guess, the other part of the previous question, these teachers weren’t in school. And so this is one of the reasons the parents had to start organizing. But what about the fact that these teachers weren’t in school in the first place? There’s a lot of contention about that, right?
Ms. DeVos:
And I think many of them had longed to be in school. They knew that their kids were falling further and further behind, but the system in many cases precluded them from doing that. There were a lot of teachers who I think have walked away from teaching because they’ve become so frustrated by the system.
And in an education freedom environment like Arizona is just creating, teachers are going to become the most valued part of that equation. And there are going to be opportunities for them like they’ve never seen before. Opportunities for them to be really creative themselves about solving problems for families and kids, or addressing needs.
And I’m just very excited about what it can mean for students in Arizona and more broadly, how it’s going to continue to drive change. Because we know that this is a very winning issue for families, for everyone … Like three out of four Americans say, “Money for students should follow the student to where that student goes to school.” You cannot deny the power behind that sentiment.
And when that actually happens at a scale to really make a difference, again, we’re going to see creativity and experiences for kids in their K-12 learning that we haven’t even begun to dream of because we’re just so stuck in this one-size-fits-all old model that is no longer working for way too many kids across the country.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re expecting because of this new legal structure around the funding for students, all sorts of new models will spring up. Teachers will be able to enter them, figure new things out. It’s sort of like this innovation land in education.
Ms. DeVos:
Absolutely, absolutely. And Florida is one state where they’re farthest along with the greatest number of students. They’re going to continue to expand those opportunities for kids. But we’re only at the tip of the iceberg as to what that could look like.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to touch a little bit more on this, the learning during the pandemic. I think you were urging schools to open very early on. And I think you even threatened to withhold funding as part of the urging, so to speak. How did that end up playing out in the end?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, there was no ability to withhold funding at the federal level. But we did everything we could as an administration to urge and encourage schools systems, all of those involved to find the solutions, to get kids back to learning.
And again, we don’t even begin to understand the breadth and magnitude of the learning loss and the impact, the negative impact on kids, particularly the most vulnerable kids, low income kids, many kids from minority families. They’re the ones who have been most hurt by the system’s behavior during the pandemic. And you couple the learning losses with the mental health challenges, and you have a disaster looming.
Again, this is the ideal time for states to change their policy, to support funds going to the families for their children’s education, not to systems or buildings that are going to simply double down on doing the same thing, the same way over and over again, with more money and expect different results. It’s not going to happen. It hasn’t happened in the last 30 years. It’s not going to happen tomorrow because the system is bent on saving and serving itself.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is something that’s been really troubling me. This arguably a generational crisis caused by these two years for some students of almost a complete loss of education. I forget what the numbers are exactly. But some significant percentage of students is almost a complete loss in the prime of their lives, so to speak, or their childhood lives. One way to deal with it is to adopt new, innovative methods. But have you thought about how America and frankly, every country that’s faced this is actually going to deal with this?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, I believe you’re only going to deal with it when you interject creativity and entrepreneurship into it to solve problems because you are not going to get a different result by doing the same thing. And we’ve seen families actually start to address these issues because they did so out of necessity during the pandemic. We should support those and many more who are suddenly attracted to something different because they’ve seen the opportunities.
And the reality is that the traditional system or systems, they’re going to ultimately make changes because they’re going to see the competition. They’re going to have benchmarks to be able to compare themselves to, they’re going to make changes that are ultimately going to benefit kids too. But you have to allow for the families to make those choices and those decisions in order to foster that kind of change.
Mr. Jekielek:
Were there any policies that you instituted while you were a secretary of education that you felt just didn’t work out the way they were planned or things that you wish you had done differently now with a bit of hindsight, like looking at it?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, I wish we had been able to get the federal tax credit to support education freedom passed and accomplished. Short of that, everything else we did was really focused on doing the right thing for students. And our work on Title IX on making sure that kids, when they are on campuses and they have an issue with sexual misconduct, that they have a framework that is fair, that is balanced, that is going to treat everyone fairly and with respect, and put the one who brings it forward in control of what happens next.
That and other issues on which we regulated or dealt, those are all … The current administration, the Biden administration is trying to undo all of those and turn us backward. This is a travesty for students, and we have to speak up. We have to push back against this effort to totally upend all of the progress that we made on behalf of students.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s kind of a fundamentally different view of how education should function, isn’t it? I mean, we saw this debate that saw Glenn Youngkin win in Virginia.
Ms. DeVos:
And Terry McAuliffe said that parents didn’t have any business in their knowing or directing what was going on in their child’s schools. I mean, he said he doubled down on it.
[Sound bite/Terry McAuliffe]:
So I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take their child, make their own decision.
[Sound bite/Speaker 4]:
You vetoed it, to our parents. You vetoed it.
[Sound bite/Terry McAuliffe]:
I stopped the bill that I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.
Mr. Jekielek:
Do you feel like that’s the MO here with undoing these pieces? Or what do you think the operating principle is here?
Ms. DeVos:
It’s a very, very left wing, far left of the Democrat party that is really driving these policies. And they are really turning back and doubling down on the disastrous policies that the Obama administration advanced. It would totally reverse everything that we did. It would also expand the definition of biological sex to gender identity, and basically anything you decide at any point in time. And it would decimate women’s sports, ultimately.
Mr. Jekielek:
So we also have this situation where there’s a lot of people that are advocating against school choice, who actually send their kids to private school. And this has always struck me as kind of a bizarre dichotomy.
Ms. DeVos:
Well, it’s a total hypocrisy. It’s for people who consistently fight against low income and middle income parents being able to make these decisions, they’re making those decisions themselves. And the fact that they blatantly do so without apology is, to me, I cannot fathom it or understand it. I don’t. These are the very kids they profess to want to help. And yet they consistently protect and defend a system that denies those families those opportunities.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to talk a little bit about higher education, about college. New York University right now, it’s like, a year is something like 80 grand, $80,000. It’s very difficult to access for the majority of Americans, or frankly, anybody. And so does that make sense?
Ms. DeVos:
No, it doesn’t make any sense. And the cost of higher education has continued to skyrocket and you saw it take off dramatically when the federal government, when they federalized student lending under the Obama administration, ostensibly to pay for Obamacare.
Not only has it not paid for anything to do with Obamacare, it has cost American taxpayers, most of whom never went to college or took out student loans, billions and billions of dollars. It is an unsustainable model. It is out of control. And now you have an administration that’s trying to wipe away all kinds of student debt.
You cannot do that. The president cannot do that. He cannot legally do that on his own. And you cannot say with a straight face that wiping out a bunch of student debt is a good policy, because it is not fair to the two out of three Americans who didn’t go to college, who will ultimately have to pay those bills. And it’s not fair to the students who took out student loans and have faithfully paid on them, or the families that save for their children to go to college, or for the veterans that served and earned their college funds.
It makes zero sense. And even if you said it did make sense and you wiped it away, where does that leave you? You haven’t solved anything. You’re going to have students next year taking out student loans and you’re going to have the same problem all over again.
So this is an issue that Congress and the administration have really got to deal with. It is unsustainable the way it has gone. There is no accountability on the part of higher ed institutions for what kind of quality or what kind of outcomes they are serving up. And there’s just no governor on what they can charge for a tuition.
Mr. Jekielek:
And for those of us uninitiated, what are the nuts and bolts of how that worked? How did that Obama policy basically create this trend?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, there used to be private lenders that were backed by the federal government for certain students. And that worked. It worked for everyone, but the federal government took over all student lending in 2010.
And at that point … And so they send all the student loans directly to the schools and then the schools take out what they’re going to take out. And if there’s some left over, then the students get it. But very often the students don’t understand the implications of that. And they will go and spend it on things that are not related to education, which is not a good decision either.
And so the whole model is it’s not a logical or defensible model for the long term.
Mr. Jekielek:
But how did that actually balloon these? Just the university-
Ms. DeVos:
Well, because they’re on the government’s balance sheets as though they’re all good loans that are going to be fully repaid. And in many cases, they’re not. And in many cases, students have elected and Congress has continued to adopt all of these repayment plans that are based on a student’s income versus what they actually owe. And so they’re ultimately paying back pennies on the dollar from what they have borrowed and someone somewhere has to pay that.
Mr. Jekielek:
So I guess the big question here is, American education already prior to COVID was in rough shape. And we’ve talked a little bit about this already. And so now we have this prototype in Arizona, but we don’t know for sure how that’s going to play. What are you suggesting states do?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, I’m suggesting all states adopt policies that are going to give parents and families the freedom to direct their children’s education, to choose where their child gets their K-12 education. And I’ve cited Arizona as the most recent state, the first state to do a universal model in approach.
But there have been many other states that have been very forward leaning on this. Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, there are a lot of states that have undertaken these programs. They’ve been at smaller scales. But Florida, as I said, is the most advanced in this, has the greatest number of students in programs, going to schools other than their assigned schools.
And interestingly, the districts where students are the highest number or percentage of students are going to schools other than their assigned school, the students who are remaining in their assigned schools are actually the outcomes, the achievement levels are actually improving.
I argue there has not been a definitive study on this, but there’s a couple of reasons, logical reasons. First, the kids have left if that school wasn’t working for them. They’re choosing to go somewhere else that is working. And the kids who are still staying there are the beneficiaries of leadership now making decisions and changes that they refuse to or wouldn’t make before, because they have other schools and other experiences now to benchmark themselves against.
And they’re actually improving opportunities for kids within the traditional schools as well. It’s a win-win for everyone. And the system that continues to defend the monopolistic government run system cannot fight back against these arguments because they are obvious and they are proliferating in many states where these policies have been adopted.
Mr. Jekielek:
So you’re very obviously against Critical Race Theory, Praxis, within education K to 12, I suspect any area. Now, what do you make of the fact that some of the most woke schools are actually the elite private schools? And so, we talk about school choice, the opportunity. Ostensibly, these are the schools that anybody would dream of coming, yet they’re the ones that have seemed to be hit by this ideology, perhaps the most. I mean, obviously not empirically, but that’s what people are telling me. So what do you think of this?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, this is a problem all over the place, and that’s why I think parents need to be demanding and expecting radical transparency around curriculum. And while many of these elite private schools are experiencing the same type of phenomenon or families have finally found out about it, there are many other schools, faith-based schools in states across the country that have been doing a great job of preparing and educating students and giving families opportunities at much lower costs than these elite private schools.
Many people, when we talk about choosing a private school through an education freedom model, immediately go to these, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year schools. But there are many, many schools that educate children at a much lower cost, $10,000, in some cases less, and have a faith-based grounding that are doing a good job and families want to be able to make those choices as well.
And so these policies can support whatever families decide is going to be the right environment and the right setting for their kids.
Mr. Jekielek:
So you’re seeing this correlation between them being faith based and having the more classical education model, basically. That’s what you’re saying?
Ms. DeVos:
Well, there are a lot of classical models that there’s classical charter schools, there’s classical Christian schools. And that focus, I think, have been reawakened and is going to continue to grow. The opportunity to access those opportunities is only going to happen for all families if they’re empowered to make those choices with policies that support that.
Mr. Jekielek:
Got it. Any final thoughts as we finish up?
Ms. DeVos:
Just again, thanks for the opportunity to be here. My book is really about how we fix American K-12 education and how we can make learning a great experience for every child. And I hope that folks will enjoy it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, Betsy DeVos, it’s such a pleasure to have you on.
A New York man was released from jail without bail hours after he tried to stab Rep. Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.), a foregone conclusion because of a bail reform law passed in 2019.
The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office in Rochester, N.Y., charged David Jakubonis with attempted second-degree assault and released him before his trial, according to a Thursday press release. Jakubonis, an Iraq war veteran who was inebriated, used a small weapon with two sharp prongs to assault Zeldin, telling the representative, “You’re done,” when he swung at him during a campaign speech for veterans in Perinton.
His words as he tried to stab me a few hours ago were “you’re done”, but several attendees, including @EspositoforNY, quickly jumped into action & tackled the guy.
“After being charged with a felony for last night’s attack, the man who tried to stab me was instantly released back onto the street due to New York’s insane cashless bail law,” Zeldin told the Washington Free Beacon. “Too many people throughout our state have suffered violent attacks and even death, as a result of criminals who were allowed to walk free because of soft-on-crime bail policy. We must repeal cashless bail in New York!”
Attempted assault is a felony in New York, but criminal justice reform legislation passed in 2019 bars judges from setting bail because the charge is “nonviolent,” the New York Timesreported. Zeldin predicted his assailant would be released shortly after the incident due to state law.
In another case in June, a New York City offender stabbed two Subway passengers the day after he was released from jail for brandishing a knife at police.
The attack comes as elected officials face increased threats of violence in the United States. In 2017, a far-left gunman shot up a practice for the Congressional Baseball Game in Washington, D.C., nearly killing House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (La.). A left-wing group threatened this year’s upcoming game, warning of “serious consequences” if it doesn’t get its way.
Zeldin is running to unseat New York Democratic governor Kathy Hochul in November. Members of Zeldin’s campaign staff restrained Jakubonis until law enforcement officers arrived and took the assailant into custody. The congressman was uninjured.
Along with other U.S. states, New York saw crime rise over the past two years. Zeldin’s assault took place on the outskirts of the city of Rochester, which set an all-time record for homicides in 2021. The FBI reported the United States in 2020 had its largest ever annual homicide increase, up 30 percent from 2019.
Zeldin is one of two Jewish Republicans in Congress. The Empire State had a record number of assaults against Jews in 2021, as anti-Semitic incidents have reached an all-time high nationwide, the Anti-Defamation League reported in April.
Update 6:46 p.m.: This piece has been updated with a comment from Rep. Zeldin.
Illinois set to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue
Illinois Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker celebrated the departure of two GOP billionaires and one of the state’s biggest businesses in remarks delivered last weekend to a group of Democrats gathered in the Sunshine State.
Pritzker opened remarks at a Florida Democratic Party event by calling Ken Griffin, the CEO of hedge fund Citadel, a “spoiled rich kid” and arguing that Griffin’s decision to relocate his company to Florida stemmed from disappointment over his preferred gubernatorial candidate’s loss last month in the Republican primary. “Griffin announced he was taking his toys and leaving Illinois,” Pritzker told the Tampa Bay crowd. “Again, really sorry about that.”
Griffin, who was not long ago the richest man in Illinois, cited Florida’s lower crime rate and more hospitable business environment as reasons for the move, which cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in annual income tax revenue. A spokesman for Citadel said that the hedge fund’s employees paid more than $1 billion in taxes to Illinois over the past decade.
While his remarks drew attention from the mainstream press, Pritzker’s comments about Griffin and another billionaire, former Illinois Republican governor Bruce Rauner, were largely overlooked.
It’s a curious political argument from Pritzker, a governor facing reelection in November and who has seen three major companies announce plans to decamp from Illinois in the past two months: Caterpillar, Boeing, and Griffin’s Citadel. The remarks were an obvious attempt to position Pritzker as an alternative to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.), so his decision to highlight the businessmen who have chosen to take their companies to Florida from Illinois is puzzling.
Pritzker mocked Rauner, who moved to Florida in 2018. Rauner, whose net worth is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, paid $50 million in state income taxes in 2016 alone. “He’s your problem now,” Pritzker said. “Sorry about that.”
Citadel was the third major Illinois employer that recently announced its intention to leave the state. In May, Boeing announced it was moving its headquarters to Virginia from Chicago. The following month, Caterpillar, which has been headquartered in Illinois for nearly 100 years, said it would move 230 jobs in the state to Texas.
Several leaders in the Illinois business community cite rising crime in Chicago as a primary reason why they consider leaving the state. Murders in Chicago rose by 60 percent in 2021 compared to the previous two years. Shootings were up 66 percent and car theft was up 19 percent during the same time period.
A spokeswoman for Pritzker did not respond to a request for comment about whether he celebrates the departure of all billionaires from Illinois, or just Republican business leaders.
Democrats who attended Pritzker’s speech included Rep. Val Demings (D., Fla.), who is now running statewide for Senate. Demings did not respond to a request for comment about whether she agrees with Pritzker’s assessment of Griffin.
Pritzker faces reelection in November against Republican Darren Bailey and is rumored to have presidential aspirations.
Women Against Abuse discouraged black domestic abuse victims from calling the police. Yes, you read that right.
It was just two months after the death of George Floyd that one of the largest domestic violence nonprofits in the United States, Women Against Abuse, brought in several diversity consultants to conduct a racial-equity audit. The goal of the audit, Women Against Abuse told staffers, was to become “a fully inclusive, multicultural, and antiracist institution.”
By November 2020, the organization, which is ostensibly devoted to “serving all survivors,” was offering to pay “BIPOC” employees more than their white counterparts and discouraging black abuse victims from calling the police. Its employees were also at war with each other, bickering over whether Jews are a persecuted minority group and whether there is such a thing as a non-racist white person.
Those events prompted Nicole Levitt, an attorney with the group’s legal center, to file a discrimination complaint against her employer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that it “berated, humiliated, and subjected” her to “mandatory thought reform efforts.”
“Women Against Abuse used to be liberal,” Levitt told the Washington Free Beacon. “Now it’s illiberal.”
This story is based on Levitt’s discrimination complaint, Women Against Abuse’s response to it, and materials from the equity audit that Levitt shared with the Free Beacon. It reveals how the leading domestic violence nonprofit in Philadelphia descended into dogmatism and infighting, obsessing over identity as domestic homicides in the city reached an all-time high of 43 in 2021—more than double the previous year.
That obsession manifested in avant garde policies that led the group far astray from its core mission. The policies weren’t just the product of employee activism, but of outside consultants—including Ragina Arrington, now the chief executive officer of the Clinton Foundation’s Global Initiative University, who since July 2020 has been helping Women Against Abuse conduct its equity audit.
Arrington began this work as a senior officer at Philanthropy Unbound, one of two diversity consultancies retained by Women Against Abuse in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The consultants soon injected race into every crevice of the organization, transforming it from the inside out.
Leftwing nonprofits across the country have undergone similar transformations. From the Sierra Club to the Guttmacher Institute to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Intercept’s Ryan Grim reported last month, progressive advocacy groups have “effectively ceased to function,” as their outward-facing missions fall prey to internal tumult.
Women Against Abuse is a case study in how that tumult is generated, as activist employees bring in well-heeled diversity consultants who in turn empower the activists.
The consultants doing this work are increasingly mainstream, as Arrington’s institutional ascent demonstrates: She left Philanthropy Unbound for the Clinton Foundation two years after beginning work with Women Against Abuse, and has continued consulting for the domestic violence nonprofit from her new perch, creating a direct line between the two groups.
The Clinton Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to Arrington, Women Against Abuse hired Crossroads, a diversity consultancy that specializes in dismantling “white supremacy culture.” Formerly known as Crossroads Ministry, the consulting group has worked with a wide range of organizations—including the Presbyterian Church—to “institutionalize accountability.”
The stakes of this consultant-led metamorphosis are high. Women Against Abuse provides a panoply of services to abuse victims, from housing and legal representation to child care, case management, and crisis counseling. It is also the primary domestic violence shelter in Philadelphia, according to materials from the audit reviewed by the Free Beacon, and helps the city government coordinate efforts to address domestic violence, which surged across the country amid the pandemic.
After the consultants got involved, however, Women Against Abuse began hosting presentations on defunding the police, whom it discouraged non-white victims of domestic violence from calling.
“It is often unsafe for Black victims, victims of color and immigrant victims to reach out to police for help,” the group posted on its website in the summer of 2020, given the “inherent racism” of law enforcement.
“The police have never been the solution to violence against women,” asserted one PowerPoint presentation, which staffers were required to attend in May 2021. The presentation—”Defund the Police: Safety Planning”—counseled a “restorative justice” approach to domestic violence that used “community-based organizations.”
Women Against Abuse did not respond to a request for comment about whom victims should call instead of police.
The group also jettisoned its membership in the Sanctuary Institute—effectively an accrediting body for domestic violence nonprofits—which outlines best practices for working with trauma victims. The audit found early on that those practices were a “safe harbor from confronting white supremacy,” according to a July 2022 PowerPoint presentation summarizing the audit’s progress, because they focused on comforting people—not on holding them “accountable to things like micro-aggressions and white supremacy behaviors.”
“I’m concerned about them getting rid of that model,” said Levitt, a licensed therapist who counseled trauma victims before she became an attorney. “Who knows what they’ll replace it with?”
The relentless racialism didn’t just affect Women Against Abuse’s policies, but also its office culture. In February, Levitt filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that her employer had created a “racially hostile work environment”—in part by asking white staffers to sign a statement affirming that “all white people are racist and that I am not the exception.”
“In the name of ‘equity’ and ‘anti-racism,’” the complaint reads, Women Against Abuse “instituted race-focused programming under which employees are discriminated against, segregated, and barraged with negative racial stereotypes.”
The group’s transformation began in July 2020, when the then-executive director of Women Against Abuse, Jeannine Lisitski, hired Arrington as a part-time diversity consultant.
“In a commitment to transparency (to counteract white dominant values like secrecy!) I’m reaching out to share an update about the work that we are doing as an agency to move closer to our goal to become an anti-racist organization,” Lisitski emailed staff on July 15, 2020. As part of that work, Arrington would facilitate racial “affinity spaces for ongoing healing and conversation.”
Lisitski also announced that the Women Against Abuse would be working with Crossroads to conduct a multiyear “equity audit,” which Arrington would help to facilitate. The audit is ongoing to this day, according to the July 2022 PowerPoint, and Arrington has remained involved with it, serving as a liaison between Crossroads and Women Against Abuse.
The audit came as staffers were at each other’s throats over issues of race and identity—including the issue of whether Jews counted as an oppressed group. On July 23, 2020, a member of the legal center circulated an article about anti-Semitism in the Black Lives Matter movement. Levitt chimed in to endorse the article, writing that, with anti-Semitic violence on the rise, “I hope as an organization we would stand against this as well.”
Her email elicited a torrent of vitriol from her colleagues, one of whom called it “a slap in the face of every brown and black person.”
Anti-Semitism “is not woven into the fabric of American society,” another staffer said. “White Supremacy is.” Whatever fear Jews feel, the staffer added, is “nothing compared to what black Americans feel.”
That was news to Levitt: She’d lived in Israel during the Second Intifada, she said in a follow-up email, where “I was personally shot at” and “some of my friends died.”
Things went downhill from there. In November 2020, Women Against Abuse solicited applications for a “Racial Equity Audit Task Force” to help Arrington and Crossroads “eradicate” bias. True equality, the group made clear, would require white members of the task force to earn less than others.
“All task force members will receive a small stipend every pay period,” Women Against Abuse told staffers in a November 10 email. “Due to the nature of this process and the additional emotional labor of unearthing many biases that negatively affect individuals with their shared identity, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) staffers will receive a larger stipend.”
“I was astounded they would do something so blatantly illegal,” said Levitt, who included the incident in her discrimination complaint. Multiple civil rights laws, including Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibit pay discrimination on the basis of race. Responding to the complaint, Women Against Abuse told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that it would be ending the race-based stipend scheme.
The audit proceeded from the assumption that Women Against Abuse was steeped in racism—and that it was powerless to rectify that racism without the consultants’ help. “Your organization is caught up in a power arrangement that maintains racial inequality,” a handout from Crossroads reads. “Your organization’s ‘solutions’ to racism are ultimately a part of the problem and do not affect change at a root level.”
To come up with better solutions, Crossroads surveyed staffers in August 2020 on how Women Against Abuse “harmed,” “exploited,” and “disempowered” people of color. Several respondents singled out the Sanctuary Institute principles for criticism, according to the July 2022 PowerPoint from the audit. Others complained that the group’s legal center “centered around [a] criminal justice system that harms POC,” and that Women Against Abuse expects staffers “to respond to upper management requests ASAP.”
The audit also included a series of “skills-building sessions” moderated by Arrington, who spent each session dissecting a different aspect of “white supremacy culture.” People of “all identities” could participate in the sessions, Arrington told staffers in an April 2021 email, because “white supremacy culture is a smog that we all ingest, digest, and push back out to the people around us.” The constituent particles of that smog, her email continued, include a “sense of urgency” and “objectivity.”
Though the skills-building sessions were optional, the racial affinity spaces were not, Levitt said. Arrington facilitated many of these spaces, including the legal center’s white affinity space, which in April 2021 drew up a “full value contract” it asked all white attorneys to sign.
The contract, a draft of which was reviewed by the Free Beacon, asked the attorneys to abide by 15 commandments. “Assume good intentions” was one. “Own that all white people are racist and that I am not the exception” was another.
Levitt refused to sign the contract—or attend any more of the segregated meetings.
“I found the idea of being separated into groups by skin color to be inherently racist and regressive, not to mention against the law,” Levitt said. “I refused to take part in the scapegoating and demonizing of an entire race. Anyone with a sense of history will tell you that things didn’t tend to go well when that happened.”
Ruling against EPA sets precedent for a series of lawsuits against agency overreach
As the Biden administration reels from a string of recent legal defeats, political analysts hail the U.S. Supreme Court’s latest ruling, West Virginia v. EPA, as but one component of a new, broad-based approach that the courts are taking to halt a century-long effort by progressives to empower the administrative state and rule Americans by bureaucratic decree.
Dating back to President Woodrow Wilson 100 years ago, progressive presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, have worked to transfer law-making authority from Congress to their executive agencies. Wilson, the father of modern-day progressives, believed the Constitution, with its separation of powers, was an outdated document and that professional bureaucrats were superior at decision-making, compared to the time-consuming and compromise-ridden process of passing laws through elected representatives.
Wilson wrote in the 1887 article “The Study of Administration” that “the many, the people, who are sovereign [under the Constitution] have no single ear which one can approach, and are selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn or foolish.”
“The greatest revolution since the Constitution in many ways has been this movement away from legislatures into agencies,” Matthew Spalding, Dean of Hillsdale College’s Graduate School of Government, told The Epoch Times. “The crisis here is the movement away from consent,” as Americans increasingly lose their right to have a voice in setting the laws and regulations that control their lives.
In 1984, for example, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that came to be known as the Chevron Doctrine, ruling that federal agencies had the authority to decide the scope of their power in situations where congressional authorization was ambiguous. Since this ruling, Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council, the courts have sided with federal agencies in cases where the authority of agencies was challenged.
Now, for the first time in a century, a series of rulings from federal courts have put up a roadblock to halt administrative encroachment. Two factors have brought about this change. First, the appointment by the Trump administration of 234 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices. And second, the Biden administration’s unusually brazen attempts to push federal agencies well beyond their legal authority in order to impose a left-wing agenda on the United States without popular consent.
West Virginia Ruling
In the case of West Virginia v. EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) attempted to force America’s electric utilities to switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration had no authority to do so.
“For years, unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state have been trying to destroy our fossil fuel industries by transforming the EPA into a communist-style central planning authority because they know they can’t get their radical environmental policies passed through Congress,” said West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore in an official statement, lauding the decision as “a victory for the rule of law.”
“Part of the problem is Congress writing these broad laws that leave a lot of room for interpretation by the agencies that are supposed to execute the laws,” William Shughart, senior fellow at the Independent Institute, told the Epoch Times. “That has led to this explosive growth in the administrative state. The West Virginia ruling applies the brakes to that growth.”
‘Major Questions Doctrine’
One of the key components of this Supreme Court ruling is the “major questions doctrine.” This is the concept that agencies, which are unelected by and unaccountable to the public, cannot make up rules on issues of major importance to Americans without clear authorization from elected representatives.
“The Supreme Court decision speaks to the legal flaws with trying to mark an entire industry for termination,” Jonathan Berry, a partner at Boyden Gray & Associates, told The Epoch Times. “What the Supreme Court is saying is that when you take on initiatives of major economic or political significance, those measures have to be authorized by a clear statement from Congress.”
“One of the most profound aspects of this ruling is its portability across regulatory regimes,” Berry said. In rendering its West Virginia decision, the Supreme Court looked at prior rulings, including those against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “The common thread across those cases is the executive branch using an administrative agency to wade into policy areas beyond what Congress authorized,” Berry added.
In August 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the CDC did not have legal authority to ban landlords from evicting non-paying tenants. In January of this year, the Court ruled that OSHA did not have authority to force employees of large companies to take the Covid-19 vaccine.
“What we’re seeing here is extremely significant,” Spalding said. “The way the Court works is they do these things in different cases here and there, but they’re putting a doctrine together that ultimately builds up to a larger case. The heart of the matter is the unconstitutionality of essentially shifting legislative authority outside of the legislative branch into these agencies.”
“There are already tons of lawsuits out there that have been winding their way through the legal system for years,” Bonner Cohen, senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The Epoch Times. “Some of those lawsuits will eventually make it to the Supreme Court, but a lot of them may be dealt with at lower court level simply because people can now point to the precedent that was set in West Virginia v. EPA.”
Administrative Overreach
Last week, a Trump-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked orders by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) that attempted to force states to, among other things, allow transgender children to compete in sports in schools according to their gender identity rather than their gender at birth. Twenty state attorneys general brought a suit against the DOE directive, arguing that the authority to decide such policies “properly belongs to Congress, the States, and the people.”
Two other areas where administrative overreach by the Biden administration will likely be challenged next are a directive from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding “green accounting” (that is, accounting that factors environmental costs in the financial results of operations) and gun control initiatives from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).
In a case that closely parallels West Virginia v. EPA, the SEC issued a directive that all listed companies must provide audited reports on the greenhouse gas emissions of their operations, as well as those of their suppliers and customers. In addition, companies must detail their strategies to reduce such emissions. Critics believe this will open companies up to a rash of environmental lawsuits and actions by activist asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey was among the first state officials to threaten legal action in response.
The ATF has been attempting to expand the legal definition of which gun parts constitute a firearm in an effort to implement a Biden administration initiative, which failed to pass Congress, against unregistered homemade guns, thus turning a formerly legal practice into a felony. A lawsuit against this has already been filed by the Gun Owners of America. In addition, the ATF was found to be keeping records of “several hundred million” gun purchases, despite the fact that Congress explicitly outlawed a federal gun registry.
Loss of Public Trust
Such attempts to circumvent public consent by legislating through unelected federal agencies inevitably lead to a loss of public trust in government.
“If there’s no consent, no responsibility, no check-back system, then you really are undermining public confidence in that process,” Spalding said. Regarding the ATF and gun control measures, a June poll by NPR/Ipsos found that, while most gun owners said they would accept universal background checks, they “harbored a deep distrust of government.”
“The more that this administration steps over the line and claims for itself powers that the peoples’ representatives in Congress have not given it, the more we should expect a decline in trust and in legitimacy,” Berry said.
As the courts begin to push back against administrative overreach, however, the backlash from the political left has been escalating, including demands for “packing” the Supreme Court with more left-leaning judges, or even abolishing the Court altogether.
Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, President Biden stated, “We cannot allow an out-of-control Supreme Court, working in conjunction with extremist elements of the Republican Party, to take away our freedoms and our personal autonomy.” A recent survey by Rasmussen and the Heartland Institute found that, in the wake of the EPA decision, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the pro-Second Amendment Bruen decision (regarding concealed weapons), most Democrats and younger voters see the Court as a racist and sexist institution and want to pack it with progressive judges, remove it, or replace it.
“These findings clearly show that most Democrats and young Americans do not respect the sanctity of the Supreme Court when it issues decisions that run counter to their agenda,” Heartland Institute Research Fellow Chris Talgo told The Epoch Times. “As a former U.S. history and American government teacher, I can say without a doubt that our education system is not teaching the basics when it comes to civics. Most American students cannot name the three branches of government, let alone understand the role of separation of powers. This does not bode well for the future of freedom, seeing as how young voters are hostile to the very institutions that preserve our freedom.”
The Justice Department, for example, permitted weeks of intimidating protests outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices after the opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade was prematurely leaked prior to the formal ruling. Following the arrest in June of an armed man who was charged with attempted murder at the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) demanded that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland “detail the steps the Department of Justice is taking to protect our Supreme Court Justices in the wake of an unprecedented harassment and intimidation campaign.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was criticized for taking weeks to bring a bill protecting Supreme Court justices and their families to a vote, even after the alleged assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh. When the bill was put to a vote, 27 Democrats voted against it.
Granting Power to Experts
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who disagreed with the majority in the West Virginia case, argued that the courts must defer to the EPA, which she deemed the “expert agency,” and allow the agency to interpret the scope of its own power. Critics of this approach, however, remain skeptical of granting too much power to experts and question whether administrators are in fact experts when it comes to issues like national energy policy or making personal medical decisions.
“These are career government employees,” Cohen said. “They are not experts.”
“Look at the experience the country had during the pandemic, where we had such experts as Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and Dr. [Deborah] Birx and others throughout the federal government who completely mishandled the public health response to COVID-19,” Cohen said. “If these are the experts, we need to free ourselves from experts, because they got it spectacularly wrong.”
“Anytime you encounter the word ‘emergency,’ anytime you encounter the word ‘crisis,’ be careful,” Cohen said. “It may in fact be a crisis because those things happen, but it may be nothing more than a pretext for a power grab.”
“The invocation of an emergency is not a justification for combining the powers of government into a single person,” Berry said. “That’s the definition of tyranny.”
After controversial vote, state legislators Brittany Pettersen and Yadira Caraveo are running for Congress
A pair of Democrats running for Congress in Colorado voted to weaken the state’s penalty for felony murder as Denver experienced a near-record spike in homicides.
In the spring of 2021, state legislators Brittany Pettersen and Yadira Caraveo backed a bill that made felony murder in Colorado a Class 2 felony instead of Class 1. As a result, criminals convicted of felony murder in the state can no longer be sentenced to life without parole; instead, they may receive just 16 years in prison. The Democrats’ votes came as homicides in Denver spiked to near-record highs—in 2020, the number of killings in the city rose to 95, up from 63 the year before. In 2021, Denver experienced 96 homicides, the highest number seen in four decades.
Roughly one year later, both Pettersen and Caraveo are running to represent Denver’s suburbs in Congress. But with crime on the rise in Colorado, addressing public safety has become a top issue in the Centennial State, meaning the Democrats’ decisions to lower the state’s felony murder penalty could haunt them as they navigate a difficult political environment under resident Joe Biden. Just 30 percent of Colorado voters approve of Biden, while 55 percent disapprove, according to Civiqs. Biden in 2020 won the state by 14 points.
Arvada, Colo., deputy chief of police Ed Brady said criminals “have been emboldened” by Democrats in the state legislature.
“I think all of the efforts that have been led by our state legislature, by our governor, to be more offender-focused and less victim-focused—that has caused crime to increase greatly,” Brady, who is running for sheriff in Jefferson County, a northwest Denver suburb, told the Washington Free Beacon. “When our state becomes more concerned about the impacts of crime on the offender than they do the victim, that’s how we become a state without a control on crime.”
Neither Pettersen nor Caraveo’s campaigns returned requests for comment.
Before Democratic governor Jared Polis signed the Pettersen and Caraveo-backed bill in April 2021, a criminal who participated in a violent crime that resulted in the death of a person—say, for example, a burglary gone bad—could be charged with Class 1 felony murder and sentenced to life in prison even if that criminal did not directly kill the victim. Now, a criminal who fits that description cannot face life behind bars, a development that Brady called “concerning.”
In addition to Pettersen and Caraveo’s 2021 felony murder votes, the pair of Democrats voted in 2019 to make the possession of four grams or less of fentanyl and other hard drugs a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Colorado prosecutors called on state lawmakers to exempt fentanyl from the bill, as four grams of the drug is equivalent to 13,000 deadly doses.
But the bill’s sponsors refused, and opioid overdose deaths in the state rose by 54 percent in 2020. Two years later, five people died of fentanyl overdoses in a suburban Denver apartment, including two victims who left behind a four-month-old baby. That tragedy sparked a Pettersen-sponsored bill aimed at addressing Colorado’s fentanyl crisis, but possession of less than four grams of fentanyl is still a misdemeanor under that legislation.
Pettersen and Caraveo both ran unopposed in the state’s June primary elections. Come November, Pettersen will face Republican Erik Aadland in Colorado’s Seventh Congressional District, while Caraveo will square off against GOP challenger Barbara Kirkmeyer in the eighth district. Aadland told the Free Beacon he would not have voted to reduce Colorado’s felony murder penalty, a decision that he said “undermines the leverage that law enforcement has.”
“Denver is now number one in the country for auto theft, it’s number one in the country for bank robberies. This is because progressives are soft on crime,” Aadland said. “We’ve got to fix the government at every level to hold people accountable, uphold the rule of law, enforce the law, and support law enforcement.”
ANALYSIS: Does wearing a fancy top hat indoors to conceal your unsightly bald dome make you dumber?
Washington Post columnist Max Boot wears a fancy top hat—indoors and outdoors—to conceal his freakish bald head. It may or may not be making him dumber, given the profoundly stupid tweet he posted while attempting to insult a group of veterans who actually did serve their country in uniform.
“Just imagine how all these right-wingers would have reacted with horror if they had been around when Harry Truman desegregated the military,” Boot wrote on Twitter, the social networking platform. “Now that was woke!”
Boot’s ridiculous and racially charged comment came in response to a New York Postop-ed written by Jason Church, a retired U.S. Army captain. Church argued that our military should focus more on preparing for armed conflict with bad actors around the world and less on embracing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ethos of government bureaucrats.
“The Navy is producing instructional videos on gender pronouns while its poorly maintained ships crash at sea,” wrote Church, citing a Washington Free Beaconreport. He also suggested—quite reasonably—that lowering the military’s physical fitness standards in the name of “inclusivity” was not a good thing. Other changes designed to make the military more “woke,” Church argued, have “weakened training, lowered morale,” and “diminish[ed] the fighting spirit, cohesiveness, and reputation of America’s Armed Forces.”
Boot, who never served in the military but has written several books about war, had responded with the cerebral heft of a Salon commenter, and Church let him know it. “With respect to @MaxBoot, this is beneath you and the Post,” he wrote. “We are right to be worried about politicizing the military and @VeteransOnDuty will voice these concerns. Smugly dismissing this as bigotry is cheap and wrong.”
Church, who joined the Army in 2011 and received a Purple Heart in Afghanistan, is the chairman of Veterans on Duty, a national membership organization dedicated to “exposing how the woke revolution in the services works” and compelling the military to “get back to basics” by electing like-minded policymakers.
Jeremy C. Hunt, a black Army veteran and member of the Veterans on Duty board, also blasted Boot’s smug commentary. “We care about a military that wins,” he wrote in response to Boot’s tweet. “If you want an example of modern segregation in the military, look no further than the Biden administration’s racist [diversity, equity, and inclusion] protocols that you defend.”
Boot attempted to defend himself, once again channeling the intellectual rigor of the Salon comments section. “Diversity makes the military stronger,” he wrote. “Will you criticize Trump as well as Biden?”
Church, Hunt, and their fellow Veterans on Duty members fought for democracy by defending their country against foreign enemies. Boot “fights for democracy” by writing boring columns in the Post.
On Sunday, for example, Boot defended Biden’s meeting with bone-saw dictator Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, whom the president once pledged to make a “pariah” until flip-flopping as soon as rising gas prices threatened Democratic prospects in the midterm elections.
George Soros boosted District Attorney Alvin Bragg in his campaign for office
Facing criticism from across the political spectrum, a Manhattan district attorney boosted in his campaign for office by George Soros, has moved to drop murder charges against a bodega worker caught on camera defending himself from a violent assault.
The office of District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D.) filed a motion to drop the second-degree murder case against Jose Alba, a middle-aged employee who used a knife to subdue an assailant assaulting him at work, according to the New York Post. The Manhattan prosecutor’s office said it could not prove Alba had been unjustified in his use of deadly force after his more physically imposing attacker lunged behind the counter, threw him against a wall, and grabbed him by the collar, the motion states. Bragg had initially set Alba’s bond at $250,000, an unprecedented move for an office that has largely abandoned cash bail. New York City mayor Eric Adams had opposed the charges, saying Alba acted in self-defense and was “following the law.”
The motion is one of the only times Bragg has reversed course under pressure. In June, the mother of a murdered Army veteran castigated a Bragg attorney in court to no avail after the prosecutor sentenced her son’s killer to just seven years in prison. Bragg has evaded accountability for many other assault cases, even amid public outcry. His office has not issued further charges in the case, though the assailant’s girlfriend had pulled a knife from her purse and stabbed Alba, according to the bodega worker’s attorney.
Soros in 2021 donated more than $1 million to Bragg’s campaign, helping to elect the Harlem native as part of a decade-long push to install liberal prosecutors across the country. The progressive megadonor has spent more than $40 million to place dozens of left-wing prosecutors in half of America’s largest jurisdictions, a June Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund report found, ousting many career prosecutors in the process. In cities and municipalities nationwide, the prosecutors have radically overhauled bail laws and pursued lightened sentencing.
Bragg handily won his November election by 67 percentage points, promising to reduce incarceration. He told prosecutors in a memo shortly after taking office to avoid prison sentences for most felony cases except under “extraordinary circumstances.”
In the past three years, homicide has shot up 52 percent in New York City, according to the latest NYPD crime data. Shootings are up more than 100 percent, and car theft is up 91 percent. The city in 2021 recorded nearly 500 homicides—the most it’s seen in a decade.
Update 3:13 p.m.: This piece has been update with additional information.
Vice President Kamala Harris compared restrictions on abortion to America’s history of chattel slavery during a speech on Monday at the NAACP’s national convention.
“We know, NAACP, that our country has a history of claiming ownership over human bodies,” Harris said after criticizing the Supreme Court’s June ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. “And today, extremist so-called leaders are criminalizing doctors and punishing women for making health care decisions for themselves.”
Harris’s remarks were met with faint applause.
The vice president’s speech aligns with the rhetoric of both left-wing activists and media outlets. MSNBC has alleged a connection between pro-life policies and slavery, and the ACLU wants to legalize abortion up to birth in order to “end forced pregnancy.” Harris’s tenure as vice president has been marred by awkward gaffes and poorly worded statements.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stood by Harris’s comments during a press conference on Monday.
“She is correct,” Jean-Pierre said. “Today’s decisions are criminalizing doctors and essentially taking the rights away from women, taking the freedom away from women. Really taking away people’s privacy.”
San Francisco Public Schools released data last month painting a bleak picture of academic achievement in the famously liberal city.
For the 2021-2022 school year, just 47 percent of eighth graders were deemed ready for high school. Twenty-eight percent of students in the San Francisco Unified School District are “chronically absent”—a proportion that has doubled since the 2019-2020 school year. Two-thirds of African-American students fall into that category.
Despite the declining academic performance, San Francisco city officials have debated whether or not to rename schools or remove murals dedicated to important figures in American history. Three progressive members of the San Francisco school board were recalled earlier this year after parents opposed the district’s focus on social justice issues over education.
In English Language Arts, 42 percent of students in the district scored below proficient, with 72 percent of African Americans and 66 percent of “Latinx” at reading levels deemed unsatisfactory for their grade levels.
San Francisco schools in 2021 refused to disclose the percentage of students ready for college or a career after graduation. The district has yet to release data on the percentage of students on track to graduate and is withholding its 2022 report until the following year, according to the performance analysis report released in June.
Only Asian students in San Francisco are more likely than not to be prepared for high school. The proportion of students prepared has dropped 13 percent since 2021.
A local government official in a Pittsburgh suburb is facing an assault charge after police say she attacked an officer who responded to a complaint at her home.
Bellevue Borough councilwoman Sabreena Miller faces charges of aggravated assault and resisting arrest, according to WPXI-TV.
Police went to Miller’s home on Saturday after a 3:47 a.m. report of a stabbing.
Upon arrival, they found John Miller, Sabreena’s husband, with a wound to his right leg that was bleeding onto the floor. John Miller told police he dropped a knife, leading to the cut.
Police took a look around and came upon two knives on the kitchen floor, as well as pools of blood.
An officer encountered Sabreena Miller, who asked why he was there and ordered him to leave.
After explaining the circumstances, the officer said Sabreena Miller began to scream at him and tell him he had no right to be there. He said he smelled alcohol on her breath.
head during a stabbing investigation in her home over the weekend. officer told her that he was called there and said her husband was bleeding from a stab wound at the front door, the station reported. The officer also said he smelled alcohol on Sabreena Miller’s breath as she
Police also noticed that Sabreena Miller had scratch marks on her neck.
Miller is accused of punching an officer in the back of the head and struggling with him to the point where both officers responding needed to subdue her prior to arresting her, according to court documents.
John Miller told police he and his wife quarreled because she wanted to mix narcotics with the alcohol she had consumed and he “did not what her to mix the two for her safety,” according to CBS.
Police said John Miller denies he was stabbed despite the wound that required hospital treatment at Allegheny General Hospital.
Sabreena Miller was sent to Allegheny County Jail.
John Miller also faces assault charges for the scratches found on Sabreena.
Kathy Coder, a former council member, said she was “saddened to hear about Sabreena’s behavior and the altercation,” according to WTAE-TV.
“Sabreena is a talented young woman who has been highly engaged in the community and has made many positive contributions to Bellevue. Hopefully, she and John will use this as a learning experience and will seek help, as needed, so these types of issues will not plague them and impede their bright future. Many people believe in them and will always be there to support them,” Coder said.
In running for office, Miller said part of her platform was “applying accountability in a way that avoids blame culture, and instead encourages improvement and collaboration.”
The new district attorney in San Francisco fired at least 15 employees from the prosecutor’s office after her left-wing predecessor Chesa Boudin was recalled last month.
“Today, I made difficult, but important changes to my management team and staff that will help advance my vision to restore a sense of safety in San Francisco by holding serious and repeat offenders accountable and implementing smart criminal justice reforms,” DA Brooke Jenkins said in a statement about the firings.
Jenkins added in a statement that she “promised the public that I would restore accountability and consequences to the criminal justice system while advancing smart reforms responsibly”
“My new management team … with decades of prosecutorial experience at the highest levels, will help our office deliver on that promise. I have full faith and confidence that these women will promote and protect public safety while delivering justice in all of its various forms,” she said.
Among those who were fired include former San Francisco Managing Attorney Arcelia Hurtado, who headed the city’s Innocence Commission. Hurtado expressed her disappointment on Twitter, invoking her ethnicity and sexual orientation.
“After over 2 years of tireless and devoted service to the City and Cty of SF, I was unceremoniously fired without cause via phone by the Mayor’s appointed DA,” she wrote. “I am the highest-ranking Latina/LGBTQ member of the management team at that office. I will continue the fight 4justice.”
Other staffers to lose their jobs at the district attorney’s office included Rachel Marshall and Simin Shamji, reported KRON-4.
Recall
Boudin was recalled on June 7 amid criticism of a citywide surge in crime, homelessness, and drug usage in public. Jenkins quit Boudin’s office in 2021 after joining in 2014.
And last month, Boudin told San Francisco Chronicle he became a scapegoat for the spike in crime.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin looks on during an election-night event in San Francisco on June 7, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“A lot of my supporters and endorsements and donors and Democratic clubs that were behind me are urging me to run now, or in 2023,” Boudin said. “I’m committed, as I always have been my entire life, to doing the work to support our communities, to fight for a fairer system of justice.”
Controversial billionaire investor George Soros’ network of left-wing organizations provided Boudin with $600,000 for his 2019 election, according to the Washington Times. However, after he was recalled, a spokesperson for Soros said that he never contributed to Boudin.
“We disagree with any analysis that labels any prosecutor as a ‘Soros prosecutor’—each candidate stands on their own,” a spokesperson told the Washington Free Beacon. “Justice & Public Safety PAC, the political action committee through which Mr. Soros supports prosecutor candidates, has not supported—in the past or in the present, directly or indirectly—Boudin.”
But according to the Free Beacon report, Smart Justice California Action Fund donated about $180,000 to oppose Boudin’s recall. That group got funding from the California wing of the Justice & Public Safety PAC.
Donors in California, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Stacey Abrams has raised almost $50 million for her gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. Just $7 million (14 percent) of that fundraising haul came from residents of that state, however, according to an analysis by Washington Free Beacon alum Lachlan Markay.
Nearly half the money raised by Abrams’s campaign and leadership committee ($22.7 million) came from donors in three deep-blue states and one liberal territory that wants to be a state but never will: California ($10.2 million), Washington, D.C. ($6.4 million), New York ($3.6 million), and Delaware ($2.5 million). The result is not entirely surprising given that Abrams recently described Georgia as “the worst state in the country to live.”
Those astonishing figures stand in stark contrast to the fundraising numbers posted by Abrams’s opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp (R., Ga.), who has raised most of his campaign funds from in-state donors. More than 83 percent of the $31.5 million raised by Kemp’s campaign and leadership committee came from Georgia residents, the analysis found.
Axios reports, smartly and briefly:
If the trend holds, Abrams would be the only Georgia gubernatorial nominee from either party since at least the 1990s to receive a majority of campaign funds from out of state, according to an Axios analysis of campaign finance records.
Abrams, a dangerous election truther who committed violence against our democracy by falsely declaring herself the winner of the 2018 gubernatorial election, is widely expected to lose to Kemp again in November.
Swing-district candidate Greg Landsman owes thousands in federal loans
The state of Ohio is going after a tax-happy Democratic candidate for unpaid business taxes, according to court documents.
The state in March filed a tax lien against Greg Landsman, a Cincinnati councilman and Democratic candidate for a competitive House race, ordering him to pay interest on unpaid taxes he owes through his firm Landsman & Associates. But while Landsman struggles with tax delinquency, he voted over a four-year span on the Cincinnati City Council to raise taxes and fees at least eight times—even as he acknowledged that Ohio families were “struggling” with taxes.
The state taxes are not the only debt Landsman owes the government. His business in 2020 received a $16,647 Paycheck Protection Program loan that has not been paid or forgiven. The firm is owned entirely by Landsman and listed only one employee on its loan application. The loan went entirely to payroll, according to data provided by the Small Business Administration.
Landsman helped pass seven tax and fee increases in June 2018 alone, even though he acknowledged at the time that “the average homeowner is really struggling with their property taxes.” The city councilman voted five months earlier to hike property taxes for city residents, citing the city’s multimillion-dollar budget shortfalls. Landsman’s Republican colleagues warned against the tax hike, which brought in $7 million for the city.
“We can’t ask working-class families to keep footing the bill. They can’t afford it,” Councilman Jeff Pastor (R.) told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Dan Lusheck, a spokesman for the Ohio GOP, said Landsman’s financial malfeasance would make him a perfect fit with Democrats in Washington, D.C.
“Greg Landsman, who has proven incapable of managing his own finances, would only perpetuate the economic disaster caused by Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden’s inability to govern,” Lusheck told the Washington Free Beacon.
As Democrats confront an unfavorable midterm election cycle, Landsman’s history of left-wing proposals could be a liability for his campaign to win Ohio’s First Congressional District. After national Democrats tapped the city councilman last year to challenge Rep. Steve Chabot (R.), Landsman has faced criticism over his proposals to eliminate cash bail and defund the city’s police department budget in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The Democrat’s proposals came amid a surge of violent crime in the city.
The tax lien against Landsman & Associates is for $656 with an interest rate of 3 percent. Landsman’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee listed Ohio’s First Congressional District as a top target in the midterms. Landsman, who ran uncontested in the state’s May primary election, will face off against Chabot in November.
Company wants to bid on government infrastructure contracts but is wrong color and gender
A Florida small-business owner is suing the Biden administration for racial and gender discrimination in connection with the $1.2 billion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which Biden signed into law in November 2021.
Christian Buckner, a disabled immigrant, filed a federal lawsuit yesterday, challenging a stipulation in the law that declares him ineligible to bid on $37 billion in government infrastructure contracts solely because his is white and male. Buckner is represented by the Equality Under the Law Project, which has won all three of its prior racial discrimination cases against the Biden administration.
“If resident Biden really wants to help disadvantaged small business owners, then he should help new businesses struggling to survive or small business owners who have a disability like me,” stated Buckner, who came to the United States to escape communist repression in Romania in the 1970s. “Helping groups based on race and gender is never fair. I expect more from my government.”
As part of the Infrastructure Act, $370 billion was allocated for roads, bridges, and other transportation projects. Of that amount, at least 10 percent was set aside for businesses owned by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals,” which Federal regulations define as black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, some Asian Pacific Americans and women. Excluded from this group are white men and men from places like North and West Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Buckner’s small business, called Project Management Corporation, wants to bid on government infrastructure contracts but will be excluded from those that are set aside for designated groups.
“The U.S. Constitution guarantees equality under the law, meaning that all Americans need to be treated as individuals and not members of racial groups,” Daniel Lennington, Buckner’s attorney, told The Epoch Times. “The U.S. Supreme Court and courts around the country have repeatedly struck down attempts to give preference based on race and gender.”
The Biden administration cannot be faulted for lack of trying, however. In June, 2021, a federal appeals court struck down a Biden administration initiative to use racial criteria in giving federal payouts to restaurant owners. Soon thereafter, a federal court blocked Biden’s attempt to allocate farm relief funds according to race.
During Biden’s presidential campaign in 2019, he spoke out against an American society that he claimed discriminated against women and non-whites. “It’s an English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture,” he stated. “It’s got to change.”
“At the core of the Biden Administration policies is their firm belief in the theory of systemic racism,” Lennington said. “They need to implement these quotas and set-asides and preferences in order to satisfy their own belief in this idea that America is a systemically racist place and that America continues to perpetuate racism against non-white individuals.” Ignoring a consistent string of losses in federal courts, the Biden Administration “is going to keep doing it and they don’t care how many courts strike them down,” Lennington said. “They are dedicated to this philosophy.”
While both the federal government and private companies are legally prohibited under the 1964 Civil Rights Act from discriminating on the basis of gender and race, this practice is becoming increasingly common. In April 2021, United Airlines announced that half of its new pilot hires would be women and “people of color.”
“We want to make sure that we are tapping into a big deep talent pool and not limiting ourselves to just one section of the pond,” Chief Communications Officer Josh Earnest stated when announcing the new policy.
Federal law does allow racial discrimination if it is “narrowly tailored” to compensate for specific cases of discrimination. Racial discrimination against black farmers by the U.S. Department of Agriculture was alleged in 2021, based on the charge that three-quarters of applications for assistance from white farmers were approved but only 37 percent of black applicants were approved. However, if racial discrimination was the cause of this disparity, narrowly tailored remedies require that the government compensate the specific individuals who were discriminated against and not target entire groups of people.
“We believe that the government may cure past discrimination by finding the victims of discrimination and remedying what was going on,” Lennington said. “But what’s happening here is that the government is choosing racial groups and giving benefits to them based on perceived discrimination. Our Constitution, our entire system of government is dedicated to the proposition that government ought to treat everyone equally as individuals. The law demands equal treatment, and we’re holding the Biden Administration to that legal principle.”
Race-based and gender-based quotas for federal contracts date back to the 1970s, indicating that, after having been in use for half a century, they are neither narrowly tailored nor are they achieving their goal. The Buckner lawsuit demands that such criteria be removed from the Infrastructure Act.
Resident Joe Biden is losing support from some of his biggest backers.
Bill Kristol, who founded and edited the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, became a fierce critic of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and led the NeverTrump movement.
In 2018, Kristol co-founded The Bulwark, whose coverage is largely centered around criticism of Trump.
Two years later, he endorsed Biden in the Democratic primary, calling it a “simple choice,” and in the general election.
On Wednesday, however, Kristol argued that Biden should announce he won’t run for re-election.
He said on Twitter that a retirement announcement by Biden would bolster the Democrats’ chances in the 2022 midterm elections and lead to a Democratic victory in the 2024 presidential race.
Straightforward from here:
1. Biden announces not running again.
2. 2022 focus turns to R extremism, Ds do well in Nov.
3. Inflation subsides, Ukraine defeats Russia, Biden is successful 1-term president.
4. Younger moderate D defeats Trump or Trumpist in ’24.
As the president’s popularity drops further and further amid historic inflation and other crises, even liberals are increasingly giving him the cold shoulder.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll indicated that 64 percent of Democratic voters want someone else than the incumbent as their nominee for president in 2024.
Biden snapped at a reporter who asked him about the poll at a White House event Tuesday.
“Read the polls, jack! You guys are all the same,” he said.
“What’s your message to Democrats who don’t want you to run again?”
At the now-defunct Weekly Standard, the neoconservative ideologue became a crucial proponent of President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The invasion has since become regarded as one of the worst foreign policy disasters in U.S. history.
Kristol reinvented himself by aligning with progressive Democrats as a Trump critic after the 2016 GOP primary, establishing himself as a mainstay on liberal cable channels such as CNN and MSNBC.
Democrats are still struggling to distance themselves from the “defund the police” movement.
But we all remember who was encouraging cities to slash funding. It seems some Democrats continue to harbor a grudge against the men and women who protect us.
Newly released footage reveals what one Florida Democrat did when she was pulled over for speeding.
From Daily Wire:
A Florida Democratic politician cursed a police officer and sped away after being pulled over for speeding in a newly released police video…
“I am Vice Mayor Beverly Perkins from the city of Pompano Beach. Y’all need to find something better to f***ing do,” Perkins says as she speeds off in her white Audi.
Jump to the end of this YouTube video to see her insult:
The vice mayor of Pompano Beach, Democrat Beverly Perkins, was pulled over for speeding in Fort Lauderdale.
The police officer, according to the footage, was polite and professional. But Perkins curses at him and doesn’t even stick around.
Imagine being so entitled. Most Americans know they need to show respect and cooperation with a cop, if they’re pulled over.
Otherwise, that officer might write you a big, fat ticket.
But this Democrat leader seems to think she is above the law. Where have we seen that before?
The officer even went ahead and gave her only a warning, not a ticket. But she still treated him like dirt and sped off.
When news of this interaction came out, she didn’t even properly apologize. She wrote, “If any exchange on my part, the conversation with the police officer, is perceived as being disrespectful, then I do apologize.”
If!? She straight up cursed him out. Who in their right mind doesn’t realize that was disrespectful?
This comes as leading Democrats try to pretend like they weren’t fanning the flames of the defund movement two years ago.
Thanks to them, major cities saw a rise in crime, because police lost billions (in some cases) from their budget.
And that’s not even touching the resentment and hate against cops the left spread across the entire country during that time.
This woman is only making it worse. And she doesn’t seem to care.
Key Takeaways:
A Florida Democrat cursed out a cop and sped off after being pulled over.
The vice mayor insulted the cop and later offered a flimsy “apology.”
This comes after Democrats pushed the anti-cop, “defund” movement.
A Democrat U.S. senator locked in one of the nation’s tightest reelection campaigns is now the target of a Federal Election Commission complaint for using campaign funds to pay for decades-old personal lawsuits. (RELATED: Raphael Warnock Used Millions in Federal Cash to Dismantle Atlanta Jail)
The National Republican Senatorial Committee filed the complaint against U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) over Warnock’s use of campaign funds to defend himself in a personal lawsuit over allegations that took place 15 years ago.
Atlanta-area resident Melvin Robertson filed the suit against Warnock in 2019, claiming in 2005 and 2008 that Warnock, in his role as a pastor and over a decade before he was elected to the Senate, enlisted homeless people to conspire against him.
The suit was quickly dismissed. Warnock used campaign funds to pay the Elias Law Group, a top Democratic law firm, $66,000 to fight the case, and an additional $1,183 to another law firm.
Elected officials and political candidates can use campaign funds to defend themselves in lawsuits, but only if the lawsuit “arose directly from campaign activity or the candidate’s status as a candidate.”
The NRSC argues Warnock cannot use campaign funds to pay for the suit “because the conduct that gave rise to the lawsuit occurred long before Warnock was a candidate for federal office, the conduct had nothing to do with Warnock’s now-status as a candidate and officeholder.” (RELATED: Are These 5 Senate Seats Likely to Flip in November?)
“If Warnock is using campaign money to pay for a lawsuit that predates his running for office, then by definition it existed irrespective of his candidacy and would be impermissible to use campaign funds on,” Charlie Spies, who previously served as counsel to Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign and to the Republican National Committee, told Politico.
“Like a true Washington politician, Raphael Warnock is using the trappings of his office to fund his personal lifestyle. Senator Warnock clearly violated FEC rules and used his campaign account on personal expenses,” said NRSC chairman Sen. Rick Scott.
“The NRSC will continue to hold Senator Warnock accountable, not only for his flagrant abuse of his office, but also for his continued support of Joe Biden’s agenda that is crushing Georgia families with record-high gas and grocery prices,” added Scott.
Warnock faces former NFL player and Republican nominee Herschel Walker in a closely-watched November race. Polls show the race is a virtual tie and too close to call.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Federal prosecutors have indicted a violent convicted drug trafficker for fentanyl distribution after a Virginia prosecutor boosted by the left-wing billionaire George Soros released the felon without bail just a day after his arrest.
Alpha Kamara last week was charged and taken into federal custody for conspiracy to distribute 400 grams or more of fentanyl, according to a Justice Department filing unsealed on Monday. The indictment supersedes charges brought by Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.), who on June 27 filed charges against Kamara for the same case, only to release the offender without bail one day after his arrest.
The Justice Department’s decision to charge Kamara ensures Descano’s office won’t mishandle the case. Descano has a history of releasing offenders before trial, dropping charges, and reducing sentences—sometimes with deadly consequences. His office last year dropped felony charges for a man who was charged later for killing two homeless men and wounding three others in New York City and Washington, D.C. In June, the prosecutor released on probation a violent repeat offender who went on to beat an elderly homeless woman to death at a bus stop.
Descano’s soft-on-crime approach is typical of Soros-backed prosecutors, who have in the past decade received more than $40 million in donations from the Democratic megadonor. Soros contributed more than half-a-million dollars to Descano’s campaign, along with fellow far-left Virginia prosecutors Buta Biberaj in Loudoun County and Parisa Dehghani-Tafti in Arlington County, dwarfing any other donation amounts in the races and helping to oust veteran prosecutors. Fueled by citizens’ concerns over rising crime and lenient prosecution, recall efforts have spawned in each of the three Virginia counties, as well as in major cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the Bay Area, city residents in June voted out far-left prosecutor Chesa Boudin by double digits. Top Democrats in Virginia are similarly courting candidates to challenge Biberaj.
Virginia State Police arrested Kamara on June 26 following a high-speed chase involving a stolen vehicle that ended in a crash on a highway interstate. State troopers seized a loaded 9 mm handgun and more than two kilos of fentanyl pills from the wrecked car, and Kamara was charged with driving without a license, failing to stop at the scene of an accident, resisting arrest, eluding police, grand larceny auto theft, and possession with intent to distribute a schedule I substance. He had been out of federal prison and on supervised release for just three days before his June joyride, having served slightly less than the length of his five-year sentence.
Descano’s decision to release Kamara before his trial surprised prosecutors who spoke with the Free Beacon, given his criminal record. Virginia Republican attorney general Jason Miyares said the release was “just another example of the criminal-first, victim-last mentality pushed by far-left prosecutors.”
“Fentanyl has rapidly become one of the most dangerous opioids to infect neighborhoods across our country,” Miyares said. “Nationally, we’ve lost 105,000 Americans to overdoses from opioids, most commonly fentanyl. Continually letting repeat offenders get back onto the street only encourages more crime and creates even more victims. I am grateful for our partners in the DOJ stepping up when these local prosecutors fail to do their jobs.”
The 25-year-old felon’s first brush with law enforcement came in 2018, when he was sentenced to five years in prison as part of a major federal crackdown on Blood gang members and violent drug dealers in Northern Virginia. Operation Tin Panda, a joint effort between the FBI and ATF, resulted in 36 convictions and seized scores of firearms and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and assets, as well as hundreds of pounds of drugs, including cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin. The federal agencies greenlighted the operation following a series of murders and violent incidents in Prince William County.
It is unclear whether Descano will pursue the charges he initially filed against Kamara. The Virginia prosecutor would have to wait until federal prosecution is completed. A preliminary hearing for the county charges is scheduled in August. Descano’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Descano during his tenure has abolished cash bail, told his attorneys to avoid mandatory minimum jail sentencing, and declined to prosecute many misdemeanors. A policy memo he distributed in his first year as Fairfax County’s top prosecutor urged assistant commonwealth’s attorneys to seek misdemeanor charges over felonies whenever appropriate. He has reportedly told his staff that they “will never get in trouble for prosecuting light.” In one fraught meeting, Descano reportedly told one of his prosecutors to reduce a 20-year sentence by 5 years and to not “listen to victims” because they tend to be “overly dramatic.”
In Fairfax, Virginians for Safe Communities has gathered more than half of the roughly 30,000 signatures necessary to trigger a special election.
“It is stunning that Steve Descano would cut loose a fentanyl-dealing gun felon after Kamara endangered the lives of the public and law enforcement,” said Sean Kennedy, the president of Virginians for Safe Communities. “The citizens of Fairfax need to know that the single biggest threat to public safety is the chief prosecutor and his disregard for the laws and lives of this commonwealth.”
Drug overdose deaths have risen nationwide since 2019, driven by new synthetic opioids like fentanyl, according to the CDC. The Drug Enforcement Administration reported synthetic opioid-related deaths shot up 56 percent from 2020 to 2021.
Fairfax County has yet to release its annual police report. Preliminary data show homicides were up 40 percent last year and are on pace to be higher in 2022.
Kamara is in the custody of the U.S. Marshals and being held without bond pending trial.
A growing number of hosts are leaving a Spanish-language radio station after it was bought by a group backed by billionaire leftist George Soros.
Nelson Rubio announced his resignation from Radio Mambi on July 12, following Dania Alexandrino and Lourdes Ubieta.
Radio Mambi “has been the voice of the Cuban exile, the voice of conservative men and women who defend freedom, democracy, family principles, truth, and faith in God,” Rubio said during a press conference in Miami. “Many in this community have felt betrayed by the acquisition of this radio by a company financed by the left liberal extremist, George Soros.”
Rubio and Ubieta are joining Americano Media, where Alexandrino already had a show.
“Being faithful to my principles I couldn’t accept being part of any business associated with these leftist activists and their socialist agenda,” Alexandrino told reporters.
Radio Mambi was one of 18 radio stations in 10 cities that was recently purchased by the Latino Media Network from Univision. The stations were said to reach about one-third of U.S. Latinos. The deal was $60 million, all cash, according to the network.
The network, which did not respond to a request for comment, said its funding came from “leading Latino investors” and Lakestar Finance LLC, an investment entity affiliated with the Soros Fund Management, one of the many entities owned or linked to Soros.
Lourdes Ubieta. (Courtesy of Americano Media)Nelson Rubio. (Courtesy of Americano Media)Dania Alexandrino. (Courtesy of Americano Media)
‘Relevant Content’
Jess Morales Rocketto, one of the network’s founders, said in a statement that the group “hope[s] to create relevant content for radio and other audio platforms with content that our community can trust and rely on” and “is going to ensure that the Latino community continues to be served with the news and information that local communities deserve.”
The transition to the new ownership will not happen until the Federal Communications Commission approves the deal. The network said the deal is expected to finalize in quarter four of 2023. The network also said it intended to retain employees who work at the stations.
Americano Media bills itself as the nation’s first national conservative Hispanic network in Spanish. It launched in March and broadcasts on Sirius XM, GETTR, and applications, with plans to launch on television soon.
CEO Ivan Garcia Hidalgo said during the briefing that the purchase of Mambi “indicated to us that the Left is trying to silence truth and the conservative narrative, and we offered an opportunity to these great hosts and talent to come to Americano and continue their work.”
“These individuals make up a powerful team that has fled from what will become a voice of oppression and disinformation, to come join a strong network of Hispanics that care deeply about their communities,” he added.
Brazilian journalist Paulo Figueiredo was among others sounding the alarm, telling EpochTV’s “Crossroads” that the Latino Media Network move stemmed from a desire to get Hispanics voting for Democrats again, as more and more have shifted to Republicans in recent elections.
WNBA star Brittney Griner remains imprisoned in Russia, and many people have argued resident Joe Biden and his administration are not doing enough to bring her home. NBA star LeBron James said she should be questioning her desire to return at all.
In a trailer for a new episode of his talk show “The Shop,” James suggested Griner may feel like she has been abandoned by the United States.
“Over 110 days,” James said. “Now, how can she feel like America has her back? I would be feeling like, ‘Do I even want to go back to America?’”
According to NPR, Griner was initially arrested on Feb. 17, at an airport near Moscow after staff allegedly found vape cartridges containing marijuana in her luggage.
On Thursday, Griner pleaded guilty to drug charges in a Moscow-area court, CNN reported. The charges could carry a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
“She decided to take full responsibility for her actions as she knows that she is a role model for many people,” Griner’s legal team said in a statement.
“Considering the nature of her case, the insignificant amount of the substance and BG’s personality and history of positive contributions to global and Russian sport, the defense hopes that the plea will be considered by the court as a mitigating factor and there will be no severe sentence.”
While James was not the first to suggest the U.S. government should do more to help Griner avoid having to stay in a Russian prison, he took his comments further than most by saying he would question a return to the country if he were Griner.
Multiple conservative commentators torched James on Twitter following his comments.
“LeBron James thinks America is so bad Brittney Griner might prefer to just stay in a Russian prison for a decade,” The Daily Caller editor David Hookstead wrote on Twitter. “People on ESPN act like this clown is a genius. In reality, LeBron is incredibly stupid.”
LeBron James thinks America is so bad Brittney Griner might prefer to just stay in a Russian prison for a decade.
People on ESPN act like this clown is a genius. In reality, LeBron is incredibly stupid. https://t.co/ShPS4Pym86
LeBron James, professional idiot, says he would question ever returning to the United States if he’d been arrested in Russia like Brittany Griner. https://t.co/L2CAJivkpj
USA Today interviewed David Whelan, whose brother is being held in a Russian prison for a spying charge he denies. Whelan said the condition of Russian prisons is abysmal.
“When they talk about buildings being Stalin-era, they’re not kidding,” Whelan said. “Prisoners have to maintain the cleanliness of their cell, and so it was at first quite filthy, since the previous occupant had not seemed concerned about cleanliness. You are allowed a weekly shower and a daily walk.”
He said guards show “no interest in nutrition” for prisoners, and friends or family members often have to bring in food for many of them.
Meanwhile, James is enjoying the NBA off-season in America. According to contract information from Sportrac, he is set to be paid a base salary of more than $44 million dollars for the season starting later this year.
Starbucks announced Monday it is closing 16 stores across the country, citing crime and safety concerns at the locations, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The company is shuttering locations in Seattle,Los Angeles,Portland, Ore.,Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Each city is governed by Democratic mayors and is undergoing a spike in crime. In a message to employees, Starbucks executives said the company has been getting “a lot” of incident reports of criminal activity, including drug use in stores. “We cannot serve as partners if we don’t first feel safe at work,” they said.
Starbucks, which has lost roughly a third of its value over the past year, also announced it will give managers more leeway with store policy to deter criminals. Managers will be able to close bathrooms to deter drug use and limit customer seating. Starbucks said it will also offer baristas additional training in deescalating conflicts.
Starbucks’s move comes two years after the company downplayed violence amid rioting following the murder of George Floyd. In May 2020, Starbucks released a public statement praising racial justice activists and quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Kevin Johnson, the company’s CEO, stressed the importance of the “courageous conversations” going on at the time.
Starbucks has worked to quash unionization efforts across the country, and two of the Seattle locations the company is closing are unionized. A Starbucks union leader when interviewed by the Journal said the company should have involved employees in the decision to close the stores.
Montgomery County to teach Southern Poverty Law Center-inspired ‘social justice’ curriculum
This is treason, pure and simple. The oligarchs funding this assault and other assaults like it are the only ones practicing white supremacy [US Patriot]
Maryland’s largest school district next school year will teach elementary schoolers how to combat “privilege” and “systemic racism,” even as about half of its students lack proficiency in math and language arts.
The Montgomery County Board of Education amended its fourth and fifth grade social studies curriculum to include “Social Justice Standards” for “antiracist” education, according to a July 5 announcement. The revised standards, which were developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, lay out scenarios for students to exercise “antibias,” such as responding to a classmate with two mothers or a boy playing with dolls. Students also learn about their “identity” in the context of the “dominant culture” and “recognize unfairness on the individual level (e.g., biased speech) and injustice at the institutional or systemic level (e.g., discrimination).”
The curriculum, which will take effect in 2023-2024 school year, comes as Montgomery County’s most recent report card reveals elementary school students did not meet district-mandated academic achievement goals. Report cards also have not been published since the pandemic.
A mother of a rising fifth grader at Montgomery County Public Schools told the Washington Free Beacon the standards are reminiscent of her upbringing in Poland before the fall of the Soviet Union. She said she doesn’t want her children to carry the heavy burden of indoctrination that she had to bear growing up in a communist nation.
“It’s robbing children of their childhood,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing her job. “I am not against social justice at all. I am not against equality, but I feel like this has to be an organic conversation between a parent and a child. … Adults are pushing their agenda on children. I just don’t think this is the right thing to do. It’s so disheartening and upsetting.”
Democrats and left-wing school officials across the country have advocated for education initiatives to forthrightly teach children about systemic racism. Last week, Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes called the founding of the United States “awful” and said the country must take steps to “repair the harm” through education, the Free Beaconreported. Public school officials in Virginia in 2021 forced teachers to update curricula with lessons on identity and privilege to dismantle “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.” One third grade teacher in California asked students last year to identify themselves as “privileged” or “oppressed.”
Harold Maldonado, the father of a rising fourth grader at MCPS, told the Free Beacon he is “concerned and appalled” at what his child will be taught and is considering homeschooling.
“We as parents need to wake up and see the writing on the wall because our kids are being taught inappropriate things,” Maldonado said. “I want my kid to learn about math and history, and for her to improve her reading, and this is not what education is about.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a wealthy liberal advocacy group, began its effort to remake America’s classrooms in 1991, encouraging “tolerance” education while promoting the work of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, who founded the Weather Underground, a left-wing, militant group responsible for multiple bombings in the 1970s. In 2018, the SPLC published a report titled “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” which suggested educators had not given sufficient attention in curricula to the issue of slavery in the nation’s history. As part of a network of other left-wing groups, the SPLC has developed the standards now known to push critical race theory in schools.
MCPS is in the process of developing similar curricula for kindergarten through third grade to institute by 2026. Its curriculum office did not respond to a request for comment.
Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes III is challenging the House Jan. 6 Select Committee to let him testify on a live broadcast so he can pit the truth as he sees it against the committee’s “pack of lies.”
“Public televised testimony, that’s the only condition,” Rhodes said.
“If I were given a chance to give an opening statement, I’m writing up what I would give them,” Rhodes told The Epoch Times on July 10. “If they decline to accept my offer, I’m going to go ahead and publish my opening statement.”
Rhodes said he does not expect the committee to accept his offer because his appearance would be a free-wheeling discussion, not a scripted presentation.
“They should jump at the opportunity, but they won’t because they don’t want that,” he said. “What they want is what you’ve seen, which is just a scripted, controlled, pre-screened show trial. They’re only going to put people in front of the public that they know are going to say what they want them to say.”
“I want to push back,” Rhodes said. “I want to cut back against this false narrative. They don’t want the truth. That’s why they won’t let me just get up there, unscreened, uncoached, and just answer[ing] questions because they don’t want the truth out.
“If they were concerned with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, they would welcome the opportunity to talk to me because I pled the Fifth on everything from election time on back in February. I answered no questions about anything after election night.”
‘Waive My Fifth Amendment Rights’
The Select Committee next meets on July 12 in Washington D.C.
The panel might hold a prime-time hearing on July 14. It plans to cover the issue of domestic extremism and the roles allegedly played by the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys on Jan. 6, 2021.
Unlike his previous appearance before the committee, Rhodes said he would drop his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and answer questions, but only if the hearing is on a live broadcast.
“So I’m going to do it now and waive my Fifth Amendment rights and do that in front of the public,” Rhodes said in a call from the Alexandria City Detention Center in Virginia, where he is being held pending trial. He is charged with seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, among other counts.
Rhodes was first charged in a superseding indictment on Jan. 12, more than a year after the unrest at the Capitol. He, six other Oath Keepers, and one associate were charged in a new superseding indictment (pdf) on June 22.
Prosecutors say the Oath Keepers conspired to “oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” by “breaching and attempting to take control of the Capitol grounds and building” to prevent, hinder or delay certification of Electoral College votes by a joint session of Congress.
Oath Keepers and their attorneys say the seditious conspiracy charge was concocted out of whole cloth by misreading and twisting messenger chats, phone calls, and online meetings. They say the Oath Keepers were in Washington D.C. that day to provide security for conservative VIPs speakers at events supporting President Donald Trump.
Their transportation of weapons to nearby Virginia was part of the group’s preparations for what they believed could be the situation where the president invoked the Insurrection Act due to an Antifa attack on the White House, Rhodes said.
Incomplete Narratives
Rhodes said the committee has already shown deception when discussing the Oath Keepers. He pointed to a hearing when a still image of him was shown in a Washington, D.C., parking garage with former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio on Jan. 5, 2021. Had the committee shown the full video of the event, it would have been clear that the so-called meeting between the men was a mere handshake with no discussion, Rhodes said.
“They showed a still photo of me talking to Enrique Tarrio instead of the video, which has me walking up and saying hello and walking away because it wasn’t my meeting; it was somebody else’s meeting,” Rhodes said.
The video shows that the contact between Tarrio and Rhodes lasted less than 30 seconds, although it has been described in prosecution documents as a 30-minute meeting.
Rhodes said Tarrio was in the garage to speak with Bianca Gracia of Latinos for Trump and attorney Kellye SoRelle. They wanted to ensure he had legal representation after his arrest for setting fire to a Black Lives Matter banner in Washington D.C. in December 2020.
Enrique Tarrio, Chairman of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, in a garage in Washington, in a still image taken from a Jan. 5, 2021, video. (Saboteur Media/Handout via REUTERS)
Rhodes said he was part of SoRelle’s three-man security detail. SoRelle, who also serves as general counsel for the Oath Keepers and Latinos for Trump, had received death threats, Rhodes said.
“It was their conversation, so I stepped down,” Rhodes said. “I was there for security only for Kellye SoRelle.”
Rhodes said part of his motivation to speak out publicly was the recent indictment of Michael Greene, a friend who ran security operations for the Oath Keepers in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6. Greene, 39, of Indianapolis, was charged with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and three other counts.
According to FBI summaries of those meetings, Greene’s interviews with FBI agents in May 2021 contradict many of the accusations against the Oath Keepers.
Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes III said the group was doing event and personal security on Jan. 6, 2021; not plotting to attack the Capitol as alleged by federal prosecutors. (Epoch TV)
“He is a totally innocent man who was operations lead that day; a friend of mine, straight up, excellent, awesome Army veteran and ex-cop,” Rhodes said. “A totally innocent man. They’re just persecuting him.”
Greene had every right to be at the Capitol on Jan. 6 because the Oath Keepers were providing security for a “Stop the Steal” rally in Area 8 on the Capitol lawn and for a Latinos for Trump event two blocks away. Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexander had a permit for the Capitol rally and for the erection of a stage.
“He (Greene) was supposed to be on Capitol grounds. He’s supposed to be right there in Area 8, which is on Capitol grounds,” Rhodes said. “That’s where he was supposed to be, to go and protect the venue that Ali Alexander had reserved there. So he was supposed to be on Capitol grounds. And now they’re indicting him for trespass. It’s just ridiculous.”
Event Security, Not Conspiracy
Rhodes said the Oath Keepers presence in Washington D.C. that day was no different than for what they had done for pro-Trump rallies in November and December 2020.
“Our guys dressed the same and did the same thing,” he said. “The difference is that two of our team leaders decided to take their people inside the Capitol of their own volition. That’s the only difference. Their behavior and ambition was the same, to protect people at events in Washington D.C., which they did.”
Oath Keepers provided security in the VIP area at the Ellipse where Trump spoke on Jan. 6. They were then tasked with escorting Alexander and speakers, including Roger Stone, from the Ellipse to the Capitol for an event that was on the calendar well before the president’s speech was booked, Rhodes said.
Two groups of Oath Keepers did enter the Capitol.
Prosecutors claim they were searching for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Rhodes said there was no plan for anyone to go into the Capitol. One of the groups intervened between an armed U.S. Capitol Police officer and an angry crowd, de-escalating the situation, he said.
Rhodes ridiculed the charge by prosecutors that the Oath Keepers used a military “stack formation” to ascend the east steps of the Capitol. Oath Keepers have been shown on video walking with hands on each other’s shoulders in a line.
“That formation going up the steps is not a military formation. I was an infantry man, airborne infantry,” Rhodes said. “That’s not a military formation. That’s a PSD (personal security detail) technique to get through a crowd.”
The Oath Keepers have used the technique at other crowded venues to move their protectees through masses of people, he said, including an event in Atlanta in 2020.
“They use the loaded term of ‘military stack.’ No, it’s a PSD detail. You don’t go through a crowd like that if you’re in the military.”
Preparations Were for Antifa, Not to ‘Attack the Capitol’
The Oath Keepers did have weapons and ammunition stockpiled in Virginia and had “Quick Reaction Forces” (QRF) on standby. Prosecutors claim the QRFs were to attack the Capitol. Rhodes said the Oath Keepers in the QRFs were available to extract other Oath Keepers or protectees from Washington if there was a large attack by Antifa.
The weapons were there only if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act and called up militias to defend the White House, Rhodes said. Antifa had made threats to assault the White House and eject Trump by force, he said.
“We’re gonna have well-trained Oath Keeper combat vets with their weapons outside D.C. but ready in case the President invokes the Insurrection Act and calls us up as the militia, which completely lawful,” Rhodes said.
Plea Deals and Coercion
The three Oath Keepers who took plea deals and are cooperating with prosecutors were coerced with threats of long prison sentences, he said.
A letter sent to defendants and their attorneys in May by prosecutors Kathryn Rakoczy and Justin Sher said that if Oath Keepers defendants are convicted at trial, they could face life in prison under sentencing guidelines related to terrorism. A copy of the letter was obtained by The Epoch Times. The letter also set the deadline for accepting plea-agreement offers.
Noted defense attorney and Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said the attempt to link seditious conspiracy to sentencing guidelines for treason “is absurd.”
Rhodes said in at least one of the three plea deals, the defendant had told family members he was terrified of the prospect of life in prison. The seditious conspiracy charge includes a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.
“They scared the [expletive] out of these guys and coerced them into pleading for something they didn’t do,” Rhodes said. “There’s no [expletive] conspiracy. Did he go into the Capitol? Yes, like a dumb ass, he went into the Capitol. But there was no conspiracy.”
Rhodes said the Select Committee is making it nearly impossible for any of the Oath Keepers to get a fair trial. Recently U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rejected a motion by Oath Keepers defendants to move their trials from D.C. to Virginia.
“The only way we can get any possibility of a fair trial in this country is if we are out of D.C.,” Rhodes said. “I think it’s a foregone conclusion.
“A D.C. jury is going to vote along political lines,” he said. “We walk in there, we’ve got horns, demon tails, already, the ‘evil Oath Keepers.’ They’ve been conditioned over 13 years in the leftist media to hate us. And these are all inside-the-beltway Democrats.”
Overtly Anti-Racist
Rhodes said he would like to address what he called the defamatory smear of the Oath Keepers by Select Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who called the group “white supremacists.” Rhodes said that the Oath Keepers’ rules ban any racial discrimination and that he does not tolerate such attitudes in the group.
On Jan. 6, 2021, the Oath Keepers vice president was a black police officer, he said. Greene, the former police officer who ran Oath Keepers security in D.C. on Jan. 6, is also black.
“We’re overtly anti-racist, and they have to know that. They’ve defamed us on purpose,” Rhodes said. “So since that moment on, there has just been a relentless campaign of defamation, mischaracterization of Oath Keepers—even demonization.”
Rhodes said that he believes the Select Committee’s true goal is to see former President Trump indicted for Jan. 6. The committee and the Department of Justice will work on that goal together, he said.
“They work hand in glove like two different fingers on the same iron fist,” he said.
The Florida Democratic Party’s annual leadership conference is sponsored by Big Pharma giant and COVID-19 vaccine pusher Pfizer, The National Pulse can reveal.
Taking place July 15th through 17th, the event and gala count Pfizer as one of its lead corporate sponsors in addition to Democratic campaign and lobby groups. ActBlue – the prominent payment processor for Democrats and Black Lives Matter – is also a sponsor, in addition to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
The “Leadership Blue” event, hosted in Tampa, convenes Democratic candidates for office and Florida Democratic Party (FDP) officials from across the state for training seminars and meetings.
Pfizer’s sponsorship appears to pose yet another conflict of interest given the company’s role as a COVID-19 vaccine maker which still enjoys government protection against legal challenges over their MRNA therapies.
Furthermore, despite obscuring results from its pharmaceutical trials and studies suggesting natural immunity confers better protection than COVID-19 vaccination, the company has continued to receive approval on its vaccines and boosters from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Meanwhile, Floridian Democrats have criticized state Governor Ron DeSantis for failing to implement COVID-19 vaccine mandates for businesses and schools – a policy that directly affects Pfizer’s profits. The pharmaceutical giant has spent a record-breaking amount on lobbyists throughout COVID-19, strategically tapping former government employees with ties to Joe Biden, to push for authorization of its vaccine.
In 2019, the company spent $11,000,000 on lobbying efforts before increasing the total to $13,150,000 – the highest total since 2010.
In 2019, the company retained 77 lobbyists before the total grew to a team of 102 lobbyists in 2020. So far in 2021, Pfizer has declared 92 lobbyists.
Pfizer’s sponsorship also follows the event moving from its original location of Disney World to the Tampa JW Marriott due to pressure from LGBTQ activists over Disney’s initial refusal to condemn Governor DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Scholars at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft cut bait
A few years ago, the Koch brothers and George Soros had a dream. What if the anti-war left joined forces with the isolationist right and worked together to bring U.S. foreign policy back to the 1930s?
From this unholy alliance sprung the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The mission: make America neutral again. Finally appeasers in Washington had a safe space to apologize for Russian oligarchs, Iranian terrorists, and Chinese communists.
Well, all good things must come to an end.
An all-star in the Koch-Soros foreign policy alliance, Joseph Cirincione, announced on Thursday his resignation from the Quincy Institute: “They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies,” he toldPolitico.
Cirincione is not just some disgruntled scholar. He is the former president of Ploughshares, a grant-making organization that was not just a recipient of the Soros organization’s politicized philanthropy, but a gatekeeper and driver of it—deciding which pinkos would prosper and which would starve. Mother Jones reports that Cirincione helped connect Quincy to major donors in its early days.
His change of heart on Quincy is surely a weathervane for other elements of the Soros network. Indeed, Soros himself has been signaling in the last year that he favors a much tougher policy on China than the one offered up by the Quincy crowd, which released a major study in June that found the Chinese military build up was nothing to worry about and has warned of the perils of “threat inflation” when it comes to China’s military expansion.
Soros, by contrast, came very close to endorsing regime change. “It is to be hoped that Xi Jinping may be replaced by someone less repressive at home and more peaceful abroad,” he told an audience at the Hoover Institution in January, calling Xi “the greatest threat that open societies face today.”
Trita Parsi, a co-founder and executive vice president of Quincy, as well as somebody who could be confused for an Iranian agent—at least according to a federal judge—told Mother Jones he’s bewildered that Cirincione would suggest the think tank was avoiding criticism of Russia. But he acknowledges that Quincy is “not going along with the idea that it’s a good thing to change the objectives in Ukraine towards weakening Russia, because we believe that could lead to endless war.”
As the Quincy Institute demonstrated so spectacularly in Afghanistan, one sure fire way to end endless war is to lose the war quickly and all at once.
As for the interpersonal drama that we assume is engulfing the Quincy Institute, and the enmity growing between teams Koch and Soros—may that war truly be endless.
The Biden Justice Department has yet to take action against abortion extremists menacing pro-life clinics and members of the Supreme Court. Republican lawmakers are resolved to hold leadership accountable after the midterm elections—even if that means impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), who is in line to take over the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans prevail in November, didn’t take a Garland impeachment inquiry off the table in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon. Jordan cited a range of alleged misconduct, from failure to enforce black-letter law to protect clinics and justices, to secret collusion with leftwing groups opposed to parents protesting woke curricula changes.
“That’ll be a decision that will be made by the entire conference,” Jordan said of an impeachment push.
The oversight planning is a response to conflict roiling the country following the High Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Pro-abortion protesters tried running Justice Brett Kavanaugh out of a downtown Washington, D.C., steakhouse on Wednesday night, weeks after a gunman came to his home planning to assassinate him. And the militant pro-abortion network Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility for more than a dozen acts against pro-life clinics and churches, ranging from vandalism to fire-bombing.
It is a federal crime to demonstrate outside of a judge’s home with intent to influence deliberations. Regular pro-abortion demonstrations outside the homes of the conservative justices seem to fit that bill exactly. The Justice Department has taken no action against protesters as of this writing. Local police told inquiring neighbors that federal agencies are declining to enforce the judicial anti-picketing law, according to a Fox News report.
Jordan wonders whether the Justice Department and the White House are following a template.
“The key question we would like to find out, if in fact the American people put us in control, is was this similar to what happened with parents at school board meetings? In other words, was the Biden White House working with some outside left wing influence groups, and also then communicating that information to the DOJ?” Jordan said.
The Ohio Republican added that a dozen whistleblowers have quietly come forward to speak about the Biden Justice Department and FBI matters, though he declined to get into specifics.
The Free Beacon was first to report that White House aides colluded with the National School Boards Association to push the Justice Department into investigating parents protesting critical race theory and gender ideology as domestic terrorists.
It’s also a federal crime to attack or destroy houses of worship and clinics for pregnant women. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who enforces those laws, has derided pro-life clinics in the past. While Biden administration officials have shared intelligence assessments with clerics and local law enforcement, the administration has yet to make even a single arrest or indictment related to dozens of attacks on churches and pro-life crisis pregnancy centers.
There have been almost 50 documented instances of violence, vandalism, or intimidation at houses of worship and pro-life clinics since the Dobbs draft leaked, according to a June report from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
House Republicans will be better positioned than their Senate counterparts to force Biden officials to cooperate if they stonewall investigators. Senate committee rules incentivize, but do not require, bipartisan cooperation when issuing subpoenas. The House has no such constraints. And House committees have historically taken the lead on compelled testimony and sharing of evidence.
Republican senators are putting public pressure on federal law enforcement to take immediate action. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to FBI director Christopher Wray in June requesting a briefing on the bureau’s efforts to combat pro-abortion extremism.
“Our law enforcement officers are obliged to duly enforce the laws of our country—not just those that are politically suitable to the current administration,” Grassley’s letter reads.
“We’re usually the tip of the spear in terms of shining a light on issues and embarrassing an agency into compliance,” a Republican Senate aide told the Free Beacon. “The more attention they get for ignoring congressional oversight, the worse it looks for them. And that’s a pretty effective tactic for us.”
Outside groups are also pressing GOP lawmakers for accountability. Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, said there is ample reason to remove Garland from office. Davis was nominations chief for Grassley during the Kavanaugh confirmation and led the outside support team for Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.
“When Republicans reclaim the House in January, they must impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland,” Davis told the Free Beacon. “There must be consequences for his dangerous dereliction of duty that has led to highly dangerous attacks on the Supreme Court of the United States.”
WNBA star Brittney Griner is still imprisoned in Russia, and political leaders in America have begun speaking out about efforts to bring her back.
At the same time, Hollywood star Nick Searcy said there are more important priorities.
“Tell you what: when the @joebiden Occupation releases the Jan. 6th political prisoners who have been held in a DC gulag for 18 months without bail, maybe then I’ll give a damn about some basketball player who hates America who is in jail in Russia because of her drug habit,” Searcy wrote on Twitter.
Tell you what: when the @joebiden Occupation releases the Jan. 6th political prisoners who have been held in a DC gulag for 18 months without bail, maybe then I’ll give a damn about some basketball player who hates America who is in jail in Russia because of her drug habit.
— Nick Searcy, INSURRECTIONAL FILM & TELEVISION STAR (@yesnicksearcy) July 10, 2022
Harsh as his statement was, Searcy was correct that Americans should not have their constitutional rights stripped in this country.
Last year, Searcy teamed up with filmmaker Chris Burgard for a documentary called “Capitol Punishment.”
In the documentary, Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin detailed the treatment he received following the Capitol incursion on Jan. 6, 2021.
“They put me in a cell by myself, total solitary confinement, in a cell not much bigger than a walk-in closet,” Griffin said in the film. He remembered being called an “effing white cracker” on multiple occasions.
In December, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar further detailed the alleged rights violations the prisoners had to endure.
“They have been beaten by the guards. They are called white supremacist,” Greene said, according to the Post Millennial. “They are denied religious services, haircuts, shaving, the ability to trim their fingernails.
“There’s more outrageous things happening there. They’re denied time with their attorneys. They are denied the ability to even see their families and have their families visit there. They are denied bail and being held there without bail.”
While Biden has yet to address these allegations, he said on Friday that he replied to a letter from Griner, The Guardian reported. Griner wrote to Biden about her fear of being stuck in Russia long term, but he reportedly assured her of his efforts to bring her home.
“I was able to read [Biden’s] letter, and it brought [me] so much joy, as well as BG,” said Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner.
“I believe every word that she said to [Biden] he understood, and he sees her as a person, and he has not forgotten her, which was her biggest cry in her letter.”
She said Biden promised he is “exhausting all efforts” to get Griner home.
While there is nothing wrong with Biden trying to get Griner home, he should be making the same or more effort to ensure prisoners in the United States are not being mistreated.
By focusing efforts on Griner instead of major issues occurring in America, Biden is showing just how powerful his political bias truly is.
A New York City bodega clerk who has been accused of murder in a scuffle started by the boyfriend of an irate customer tried to avoid a confrontation with the man he killed, according to a new video.
Bodega workers Jose Alba killed Austin Simon during a July 1 scuffle that took place behind the counter of the bodega when Simon instigated the incident. Video showed Alba being pushed, then recovering to stab Simon.
New video obtained by the New York Post showed what took place before the final act of the drama.
“Papa, I don’t want a problem, papa,” Alba, said as Simon walked behind the counter.
Simon was there because his girlfriend had an argument with Alba after trying to buy a bag of chips for her 10-year-old daughter. Her electronic benefits card was declined, which the woman claims was followed by Alba grabbing the bag from the child.
The video shows Alba as the woman asked, “Did you put food?” when he rang up the sale.
“OK, mama, let me do it another time. My God,” Alba said.
“There’s money on there,” the woman said.
The edited footage then incuded the woman cursing at Alba.
“You can’t touch my daughter. Don’t snatch that out of my daughter, you f****** piece of s***!” she said. The video does not show if Alba took the bag from the girl. It does, however, record the threats that flow from the woman’s mouth.
“I’m gonna bring my n***** down here, and he gonna f*** you up. My n***** is gonna come down here right now and f*** you up!”
“That’s not my fault, it’s not working,” Alba replied and went on serving other customers. When asked if the woman and girl took something, he said he took it back.
Simon then storms in behind the counter.
“What’s up with you? N***** what is wrong with you?” he said.
Francisco Marte, the founder of the Bodega and Small Business Group, said Alba was “very sorry for what happened.”
“He knew that his life was threatened. He was protecting himself … or we would be looking to bury him today,” Marte said.
This is Jose Alba and he’s being charged with second degree murder by Soros funded prosecutor Alvin Bragg for stabbing a violent ex-con to death who came into the Bodega he was working in and attacked him.
Alba was originally jailed on $250,000 bail. That was lowered to $50,000 on Thursday, and Alba was back home, according to the New York Post.
In an Op-Ed in the New York Post, Adam B. Coleman summed up why the Alba incident has resonated across New York City.
“Alba understood the reality: No one was coming to save him. He needed police protection, but there was none in sight at that moment,” Coleman wrote.
“Americans used to take solace, perhaps naively, in the knowledge that their right to protect their personhood would always be respected by our justice system, but New York is rapidly proving that presumption false. Jose Alba now must face an uphill battle, fighting to save his good name after being tarred as a murderer and for his freedom, his most cherished asset,” he wrote.
“If Alba is somehow found guilty for fighting back against criminal tyranny, then New Yorkers should understand this new reality: When you’re in danger, no one is coming to save you, and if you try to save yourself, you’re likely to be condemned for it.”
Social media companies gear their platforms towards inciting conflict [US Patriot]
Warren Farrell, author of the book “The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It,” has found that being “dad deprived” is a leading factor in males’ increased mental illness, addiction, and suicide.
He links the mass shootings in 53 developed countries to boys and men who lacked a father figure, and he specifically mentioned six mass shootings that have occurred in the United States in the 21st century.
“All six of those mass school shootings that have killed more than 10 people have been done by boys, and all six of them have been done by boys who have been ‘dad deprived,’ from Sandy Hook right on through to the Texas shooting,” Farrell said during a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
Farrell was referring to the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and the May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
He said that girls are growing up in the same environment as boys, with access to the same media, video games, and guns and dealing with the same mental health issues, but they aren’t committing any of the shootings.
Farrell has made it a part of his mission to educate lawmakers about the importance of fathers in the lives of children, especially young boys. His efforts have resulted in Florida and Kentucky enacting laws that acknowledge the crucial role of the father, especially in the case of divorce.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a single mother living with her child or children is the second most common living arrangement in the United States, a number that has doubled in the past 50 years.
As of 2020, 21 percent of children, or about 15.3 million, lived with their mother only, compared to 11 percent, or 7.6 million, in 1968.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a press conference held at the Cox Science Center & Aquarium in West Palm Beach, Florida, on June 8, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
States Taking Action
The Florida Legislature recently passed HB 7065, which allocated $70 million in funding to provide a wide array of family and youth support through the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) and the Department of Children and Families (DCF).
“There are more than 18 million children in our country who live without a father in their home,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis when he signed the bill into law on April 22. “This has a severe impact on children and often leads to dropping out of school, crime, and substance abuse. Incredibly, there are those who diminish the importance of fatherhood and the nuclear family—we will not let that happen in our state. I am proud to say we are doing everything we can to support involved fatherhood in Florida.”
In 2018, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin signed a bill into law that automatically presumes both parents will share equal custody of children in the case of divorce, while still providing judges with the discretion to limit shared custody if one of the parents is unfit.
Farrell said it’s good that Florida and Kentucky have taken these steps, but that by and large, the crisis of fatherlessness is still being avoided.
Farrell mentioned the work of psychologist Richard Warshak, who found that children who spend time with both mothers and fathers after divorce had better outcomes later in life, and that the presence of the father was more important than economic variables.
Farrell said Warshak’s study found that 100 percent of academics agreed that children who were raised without a father had the biggest problems.
A father reads to his daughter in this file photo. (Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock)
Farrell said he served on the board of the National Organization for Woman (NOW) in New York City and has spoken all around the world about women’s issues, so he tends to be in line with Democratic thinking on such issues.
When he went to Iowa during the 2020 presidential election to speak with the Democratic candidates, Farrell said candidates John Hickenlooper and Andrew Yang both agreed with him about the epidemic of fatherlessness.
“Their campaign managers, when they started to see that their candidates were agreeing with me, both of their campaign managers came up to me and said, ‘Warren, we can’t afford to have our candidates speak out on the importance of boys having fathers and a lot of father involvement, because we’re afraid to alienate our feminist base.’”
This was not a surprise to Farrell who, having worked in a leadership role of a feminist organization, had seen this type of thinking and the marginalizing of fathers before. These organizations do not put the interests of the children first, but rather the mother, Farrell said.
After the Divorce
Farrell said children do better after a divorce when they spend an equal amount of time with both the mother and father, and especially when there is communication and balanced input from both parents. Each parent brings strengths to the raising of a child: mothers tend to set boundaries and praise their children while dads enforce boundaries and allow children to take risks, said Farrell.
“In their enforcement of the boundaries, [dads] build the discipline for the child to accomplish the postponed gratification and the focus on the attention to detail,” he said. “Children raised predominately by dads are far less likely to have ADHD because they’re required to focus on the actual thing that they’re doing.”
A boy plays with toy dinosaurs with his father in this file photo. (fizkes/Shutterstock)
The boys that committed these mass shootings at schools suffered from not having a caring, strong male role model. In addition to that, boys are often told their feelings don’t matter, which leads to emotional toxicity, said Farrell.
“Boys who are fatherless, very frequently they are not likely to have that postponed gratification that emanates from boundary enforcement. Therefore they start not doing as well in school,” said Farrell.
He said he’s talked to boys in high school, and the boys said what they learn about in school when it comes to male–female issues is toxic masculinity, without any understanding of the sacrifices that males made that led to that toxicity, as well as the concept of “the patriarchy,” said Farrell.
Modern Feminist Ideology Hurting Boys
Farrell said boys are suffering because they are being told that their masculinity is bad.
“The world was not dominated by a patriarchy. It was dominated by the need to survive, and in order to survive, both males and females were restricted in their roles,” said Farrell, adding that feminism blames men for societal problems and does not take into account the sacrifices they make for their families.
“We are constantly giving boys a negative image of themselves that is leading to a low self-esteem, that is leading to their needing compensations,” he said.
Demonstrators attend the “March4Women” during International Women’s Day in London on March 8, 2020. (Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)
Farrell said that while trying to do good, he also blames himself for being on the board of directors of the NOW for three years, where these detrimental feminist ideas that hurt boys, and ultimately girls, were spread.
Farrell began his work for equal rights of women because he believed in the credo, “I am woman, I am strong,” but now he said he doesn’t support feminism because the feminist movement has changed to, “I am woman, I’ve been wronged.”
This type of thinking is hurting boys, he said, and it needs to change so both boys and girls can benefit from a father’s full input in their lives.
Advice for Single Mothers
Farrell advises all single mothers to let the biological father know he is very much needed, and he will respond well.
“When you say, ‘I see now what the positive value of your roughhousing, you’re teasing, you’re allowing our son or daughter to take a risk of walking into a lake and maybe getting lost,’ and what that does, then, the dad will say, ‘Alright, if I can be appreciated, now I’ll be back,” said Farrell
If the biological dad is not able to be involved, Farrell suggests enrolling boys in groups or team sports, where other male role models can help shape their character.
He advises parents to connect with their children, to listen instead of trying to fix their children’s problems, and to have family dinner nights free of media so they can practice these listening skills and deepen the relationship.
“Empathetic parents who are only empathetic create children who are self-centered, thinking that only their needs are being paid attention to,” he said. “So you have to both be empathetic and require of your children that they also listen to your perspective.”
Based on his work with counseling couples, Farrell said that listening needs to extend beyond children to the spouse or former spouse so there is respectful, healthy communication.
Co-parenting couples must realize that no parent intends to harm their child, said Farrell.
Adults must “learn how to hear those that we are not initially inclined to hear and to know how to be criticized by the people we love without becoming defensive,” said Farrell.
Law enforcement aware large crowds would be travelling to Capitol from the Ellipse, documents show
The man whose posting on social media warned authorities that agent provocateurs from Antifa and Black Lives Matter would be at the U.S. Capitol dressed as Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, is a self-described government informant tied to former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.
Rosenstein warned about a “soft coup” against then-President Donald Trump in fall 2020.
On Jan. 4, 2021, an account under the name @JohnHereToHelp posted on Twitter that Antifa and BLM agitators were being bussed from Baltimore to Washington to cause trouble at the Capitol on the day of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse.
“Pantifa/BLM, Balt./DC branches, are already bussing people in to disturb Jan. 6,” the post read. “Orders [were] given to dress like ‘MAGA,’ blend in [and] cause trouble, especially around cameras. At night, arson has been ordered. All to be blamed on Trump supporters attending. Please be careful.”
The post caught the attention of an assistant commander in the Intelligence and Counterterrorism Branch of the United States Park Police, who forwarded it to officials at the U.S. Capitol Police, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies.
The now-suspended Twitter account belonged to Ryan Dark White, also known as Jon McGreevey.
McGreevey has described himself in court papers and interviews as a former Department of Justice informant who supplied information on corruption in the federal government, law enforcement, and the Trump administration.
He once used the name Ryan White as a cover but now identifies as McGreevey. He is running for federal office in Maryland.
JohnHereToHelp’s original post was shared more than 6,000 times before it hit the radar of the Park Police.
At the time, McGreevey had more than 120,000 followers on Twitter, according to an archived version of his page stored at the Wayback Machine.
Twitter later suspended his account.
“There are multiple replies to this comment that says BLM/Antifa will wear MAGA hats backwards, wear camo, and attempt to blend in with MAGA crowd,” the Park Police official wrote to his colleagues on January 5, 2021.
The Wayback Machine archive of White’s post shows nearly 600 replies, but the replies are not visible from links on the website.
Infiltrator Warning
The emails, part of a trove of documents obtained in 2021 through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Judicial Watch, show that federal law enforcement knew that infiltrators could be among the crowds at the Capitol.
They also back up anecdotal reports of BLM and Antifa activists from Oregon, Maryland, and other states causing disruption and committing vandalism on Jan. 6.
Trump supporters tangled with alleged Antifa provocateurs in several spots on Jan. 6, including the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol.
Victoria White of Rochester, Minnesota, scuffled with a man attempting to break an arched window adjacent to the Capitol’s tunnel entrance.
As the tightly-packed crowd chanted “[expletive] Antifa,” White wrestled for control of the red wooden club wielded by the man, who wore a green helmet with Trump stickers.
“I’m like, ‘We don’t do that. We don’t do that. Trump supporters, we don’t do that,’” White told The Epoch Times in an interview for an upcoming documentary, “The Real Story of January 6,” on Epoch TV.
“And then there’s other people [who said] ‘No, we’re all on the same team.’ I’m like, ‘No. No, we’re not.’
Victoria White lunged to grab a club from a protester as the crowd shouted “[expletive] Antifa!” at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Screenshot via The Epoch Times)
“Who brings something like that to a Trump rally, let alone to break out the Capitol windows?” White said. “That’s not us. That’s not what patriot Americans do. We don’t do that stuff.”
After another man got control of the club and began smashing the window, White helped pull him down before she was pulled away by other bystanders.
Members of the crowd vented anger at the vandals. “We are not Antifa!” one protester shouted. A man with a green stocking cap pulled over his MAGA hat pulled what appeared to be a stereo speaker from a backpack, spurring more howls of protest from the crowd.
At the same window, the crowd shouted at a man dressed all in black. “No, no, Antifa!” a woman yelled from the crowd. “Antifa’s breaking the windows! Antifa’s breaking the windows!”
While conducting a live stream on January 6, independent journalist Tayler Hansen recognized a protester in a gas mask from her appearance at riots in Portland, Oregon.
“I recognize you from Portland,” Hansen told the woman as she quickly turned away from the camera.
“So you’ve got Antifa here, too. You have Antifa and Trump supporters within the same vicinity here for the same thing. This is absolutely [expletive] crazy.”
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch include other disclosures that run counter to the prevailing Jan. 6 narrative that a mob incited by Trump rampaged to the Capitol to storm the building and upend the counting of Electoral College votes.
A “Daily Operational Snapshot” circulated by U.S. Park Police on Jan. 5 noted multiple events planned for the area around the Capitol.
“Large crowds expected to gather at and travel between the Ellipse and the U.S. Capitol,” the document said.
This map shows the multiple events planned at or near the Capitol on January 6. (Wayback Machine/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)
Other scheduled events included a Freedom Rally, Jericho March, the March for Trump, and the “Wild Protest.”
A MAGA Rally Map Guide said of the Wild Protest: “We the people must take to the U.S. Capitol lawn and steps and tell Congress #DoNot Certify on #Jan6!” U.S. Park Police circulated a copy of the map to other agencies.
The WildProtest.com website said, “The Congress cannot certify this fraudulent Electoral College. Our presence in Washington D.C. will let Members of Congress know that we stand with Rep. Mo Brooks and his colleagues in the House of Representatives who will bravely object to the certification of the Electoral College.”
The activist group ShutDownDC circulated a statement asking people to call hotels and demand they cancel reservations of “people coming to town to undermine democracy on Jan. 6.”
Whistleblower Role?
McGreevey posted on social media and his own website that he was a longtime informant for the Department of Justice.
He said he worked under Rosenstein, who became a central figure in the Trump Russiagate scandal.
According to McGreevey, Rosenstein ran what was nicknamed the “Dirty Tricks Squad” out of the Baltimore office of the U.S. Attorney.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington did not respond to a request from The Epoch Times for comment on McGreevey’s warning about Antifa or his allegations about Rosenstein and the Department of Justice.
McGreevey accused the federal government of conducting illegal surveillance on journalists, federal judges, political rivals, and other Americans, planting evidence in criminal cases, and other criminal acts.
In August 2020, he warned of a “covert coup” to be carried out by Democrats via the forthcoming presidential election.
McGreevey also made other explosive allegations in 2021 court papers, accusing Vice President Mike Pence, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and others of sexual impropriety.
McGreevey said the DOJ had scrubbed online and offline records of his academic achievements and military service.
He is one of 10 Republicans on the ballot in the primary for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. The primary will be July 19.
