A grand jury indicted former Loudoun County, Va., Public Schools superintendent Scott Ziegler and former public information officer Wayde Byard following an investigation into the district’s handling of two sexual assault cases involving a student who reportedly identified as “gender-fluid.”

The grand jury charged Ziegler with false publication, prohibited conduct, and penalizing an employee for a court appearance and Byard with one count of felony perjury. The Loudoun County school board fired Ziegler last week after the jury found that “district administrators pursued their own interest instead of that of their students,” National Review reported.

The teenage male perpetrator was reportedly wearing a skirt last year when he entered a women’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School and raped a ninth-grade girl. The district then transferred the perpetrator to Broad Run High School where he sexually assaulted another girl.

Ziegler knew about the rape weeks before he told the Loudoun County school board that the district had no “record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. The school board would go on to allow students to “use restrooms based on their gender identity rather than their biological sex.”

The teenage perpetrator was found guilty in the first case and pleaded no contest to the second.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

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 Gazette reported. About 22 percent of the voters surveyed remain undecided.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Austin Independent School District course says gender is ‘innermost concept of self as male, female, neither or both’

Instead of ruining life for everyone, just send these kids to a special needs facility. We do this for rowdy kids and ones with handicaps like autism. Enough of the attack on children and parents by Marxist enemies of the state (AKA Teachers’ Unions, teachers). They are guilty of child abuse and treason. [US Patriot]

A Texas school district encouraged K-12 teachers to take paid time off, at taxpayer expense, to take a course on “how to create supportive learning environments for LGBTQIA+” students as young as five years old.

The Austin Independent School District’s course material, obtained through a public information request, defined gender identity as the “innermost concept of self as male, female, neither or both,” calling it “one’s authentic identity.” The course also provided an example of a girl who questions her gender identity and asked how teachers should properly respond.

“A 14-year-old youth, who recently asked to be called Ronnie not Veronica, discloses to you a desire to go by ‘they’ pronouns,” one PowerPoint slide read. “Ronnie wants to cut their hair short but isn’t sure how their parents will react, making them feel anxious. Ronnie is also stressed because while they have been dating Julie and ‘came out as a lesbian’ in 7th grade, they have started to have feelings for Ted, who identifies as male, and this is confusing for them.”

The Austin public school district did not respond to a request for comment on the substance of the training course.

The district pushed the teacher training amid a series of fights nationwide over whether students should be taught about gender identity and transgenderism. The Free Beacon reported last year that these debates over sex education at the local level are fueled by liberal advocacy groups that push public schools to promote gender ideology to elementary students. One district spiked a sex education plan in Nebraska after parents discovered it was secretly advised by a Planned Parenthood activist, the Free Beacon reported.

The Austin public school district sparked controversy in June when it defied orders from Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (R.), who labeled its pride parade as “human sexuality instruction,” which requires parents to approve their children’s participation. The district rejected Paxton’s claim and followed through with the parade without parental approval.

The “Be a Beacon” gender course is run by Out Youth, which in a February Facebook post claimed that so-called gender-affirming care for transgender children “saves lives.” The training course cited resources from two prominent LGBT groups that also support children receiving puberty blockers and hormone treatment. The presentation cited a book titled, The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.

“Are you, or parts of you, both? How do you know?” the course asked teachers. “If your anatomy changed overnight to the opposite sex, would it change who you feel yourself to be?”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

In a master-level stroke of inversion, former President Donald Trump has found a new use for his ability to all but ensure the success of Republican candidates.

On Wednesday via Truth Social, Trump unleashed his “endorsements” against three Democrats: Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who is campaigning for New York’s 10th Congressional District, Carolyn Maloney of New York and Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Both Maloney and Nadler are competing for a redrawn 12th Congressional District.

Based upon context, these “endorsements” from Trump can be considered to be either darkly disingenuous or delivered sarcastically with a proverbial wink to his supporters. Judge for yourself.

On Truth Social, Trump wrote first about Goldman, “Lawyer Dan Goldman is running for Congress, NY-10, and it is my great honor to Strongly Endorse him. I do this not because of the fact that he headed up the Impeachment Committee and lost, but because he was honorable, fair, and highly intelligent. While it was my honor to beat him, and beat him badly, Dan Goldman has a wonderful future ahead….”

“….He will be very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party, and will do everything possible to make sure they have a fair chance at winning against the Radical Left Democrats, who he knows are destroying our Country. I would like to thank Dan for fighting so hard for America, and for working so tirelessly to stop “Trump.” He was not easy to beat, but winning against him made me realize just how very talented I am!” he continued.

Trump suggested that Goldman will be a moderate “very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party” a damning descriptor in the uber-radicalized far-left of the 2022 Democrat party.

Minutes later, a similar “endorsement” for Maloney, with some kind words for her opponent Nadler appeared on Trump’s account.

“A vote for Carolyn Maloney in NY-12 is a vote for the future! She is a kind and wonderful person, who has always said terrific things about me, and will support me no matter what I do, just as I supported her very early on. She begged for a check with no quid pro quo, and I gave it to her. In fact, I gave her many….”

According to the Federal Elections Commission, Trump did in fact donate to Maloney’s campaign in 1993, 1994, 1998, 2006 and again in 2009 for a total of $4,000.

He continued and even took aim at Jerry Nadler. “….On the other hand, Jerry Nadler is likewise a hard driving man of the people, whose energy and attention to detail is unlike anyone else in Congress. He is high energy, sharp, quick-witted, and bright. You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man. She will lead our Country into a very GREEN and prosperous future. Carolyn has my Complete and Total Endorsement, she will never let our Conservative Movement down!”

The highlight of the snarky message is definitely the combined swipe at both Maloney and Nadler, “You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man.”

Naturally, Goldman and Maloney both vehemently rejected the “endorsement” from the 45th President. Goldman’s campaign attempted to turn the joke around on Trump in a statement reported by The Blaze.

A student claimed that the Ivy League school obtained her therapy notes without her consent and shared them with a professor who’d assaulted her. That’s not what happened.

On February 8, Lilia Kilburn, a graduate student at Harvard University, made an explosive claim: In the course of a Title IX investigation, the university had obtained notes from her private therapy sessions without her consent—then shared them with a professor who she alleged had sexually assaulted her. The professor, John Comaroff, in turn used the notes to “gaslight” Kilburn and undermine her credibility, she said in a lawsuit against the Ivy League school. Harvard, the lawsuit alleged, “opted to protect its star professor over vulnerable students.”

Within two days of the lawsuit’s filing, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Daily Beast, the Chronicle of Higher Education, New York magazine, Inside Higher Ed, and Gawker all published stories that sympathetically relayed its claims. The coverage prompted a storm of criticism from lawyers and medical ethicists decrying the release of Kilburn’s therapy notes: “If you’re raped on campus,” an op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education said, “don’t seek therapy through your college health center.”

Six months later, it appears Kilburn’s allegation was bunk.

Between May and July, Harvard filed dozens of documents in court telling its side of the story, including several email exchanges between Kilburn and university investigators. They show that Kilburn urged Harvard to get in touch with her therapist, gave the therapist permission to release the notes, and received repeated warnings that anything disclosed would be shared with Comaroff, per Harvard’s Title IX procedures.

None of the national media outlets that amplified Kilburn’s explosive claims have reported on these revelations. Though her story has quietly collapsed in court, it remains the official narrative in the press.

“This is an important case that we continue to follow closely,” the Chronicle of Higher Education told the Washington Free Beacon. “However, we don’t comment on our future coverage plans.” The Daily Beast said that its original story was “accurate and fair” and that it planned to “follow up when there is a significant judicial decision in the case.” Gawker—which all but assumed Harvard’s guilt—did not respond to a request for comment.

Harvard is now asking a Massachusetts district court to dismiss Kilburn’s allegation without a trial. Such a request, known as a motion for summary judgment, is “very unusual this early in a case,” said Ruth O’Meara-Costello, one of Comaroff’s attorneys, who is not a party to the lawsuit. “Harvard is plainly very confident about the facts here and its ability to document them.” Kilburn’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.

The lack of media follow-up means that students will be hesitant to report misconduct, Harvard argued in its filings, out of a mistaken belief that the university will raid their medical records. It also means the original narrative—that Comaroff is a sexual predator protected by powerful men—still hangs in the air.

In fact, the university found no evidence that the 77-year-old anthropologist had committed sexual assault. His critics have nonetheless painted Harvard as a hotbed of misogyny, one hell-bent on silencing women by any means necessary.

Such portrayals pervade stories about campus sexual misconduct, even when the allegations underlying them are weak. The New York Times in 2018 published a 2,600-word article about another Harvard professor, Roland Fryer, whom the university was investigating for sexual harassment. The report—”Star Economist at Harvard Faces Sexual Harassment Complaints”—omitted numerous findings from the investigation that cast doubt on the allegations, including that the complainant “broadly mischaracterized” Fryer’s conduct.

Comaroff is an example of the damage that this sort of reporting can inflict. In May 2020, Kilburn and two other graduate students, Amulya Mandava and Margaret Czerwienski, filed Title IX complaints against the elderly anthropologist, which the Harvard Crimson framed as referenda on “decades-old power structures.” At every turn, coverage of the case has raced ahead of the facts, maligning a professor whom Harvard’s own Title IX process cleared of sexual assault.

That coverage didn’t just besmirch Comaroff but also put tremendous pressure on Harvard to figure out a way to punish him. The school’s initial investigation, completed in August 2021, found only a minor violation of Title IX—an allegedly off-color comment Comaroff made during office hours. But amid continued coverage of the case, Harvard began investigating some of Comaroff’s other comments—which the school determined did not violate Title IX—as potential breaches of its “professional conduct” policy.

“I think it’s clear that Harvard didn’t like the results of the first investigation, which mostly exonerated Professor Comaroff, and was determined to punish him as harshly as possible,” O’Meara-Costello said.  The university placed Comaroff on a semester of unpaid leave in January for allegedly violating both its sexual harassment and professional conduct policies and barred him from teaching required courses for at least a year.  Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.

The sanctions are part of a broader pattern, O’Meara-Costello told the Free Beacon, of universities punishing professors who are exonerated in Title IX investigations but crucified by the media—or by their own students and colleagues. “Once a faculty member is accused of sexual misconduct, even a finding of non-responsibility in the Title IX process is no guarantee that a university will not impose career-ending consequences,” O’Meara-Costello said, adding that she was aware of “multiple cases” like Comaroff’s.

Such cases reflect an ongoing clash between Title IX regulations and the schools that are subject to them. In 2020, the Trump administration put in place rules that strengthened due process protections in campus sexual assault proceedings. Though the Biden administration is trying to claw back those rules—with the support of many universities, including Harvard—there are still limits on how Kafkaesque Title IX offices can be. That’s created an incentive for schools to refer harassment allegations to other bureaucracies, where there is often more wiggle room to mete out punishment.

In May, for example, Princeton University fired a tenured classics professor, Joshua Katz, whom the university’s Title IX office had cleared of sexual misconduct. Rather than accept the results of that investigation, Princeton punted the case to another office—one with fewer due process protections for the accused—which found that Katz had violated a vague “honesty and cooperation” policy. Like Comaroff, Katz had been portrayed in his university’s student newspaper as a serial predator protected by powerful faculty.

These sorts of portrayals were a recurring headache for Harvard. The university made several unflattering appearances in the 2015 documentary Hunting Ground, which claimed to unmask coverups of sexual assault on college campuses. In February 2018, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Harvard had turned a blind eye to decades of harassment by a prominent government professor, Jorge Domínguez. Later that year, the New York Times came out with its exposé about Roland Fryer, who has since been barred from supervising graduate students.

Then in May 2020, the Harvard Crimson reported that three anthropology professors, not just Comaroff, had weathered sexual misconduct allegations over the past decade. Comaroff, the Crimson suggested, was but one node in an “old boys’ network” that preyed on vulnerable women. Though the article noted that three students were “in communication with Harvard’s Title IX office,” it did not name Comaroff’s accusers or detail the allegations against him, which only became public in an August 2020 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

That story, like the Crimson‘s, framed Harvard as a bastion of regressive power structures that protect “powerful men.” With the bad press mounting, Harvard placed Comaroff on paid leave in August 2020 pending a “full review” of the “allegations that have been reported.”

The most serious allegations came from Kilburn, who claimed that Comaroff had fantasized aloud about her being raped and touched her without her consent. Notes from her therapist, she told university investigators, could corroborate those allegations.

“I think [the therapist] should have a bunch of notes or memories for you,” Kilburn said in an August 2020 interview with the university’s Office of Dispute Resolution, a transcript of which Harvard filed in court.

Though media reports have suggested that Kilburn was blindsided by the university’s decision to get in touch with her therapist, the court filings show that she explicitly listed the therapist as a witness Harvard should contact. In a September 2020 email to investigators, she provided the therapist’s contact information, writing that it would “make sense” for “you to speak to” her.

By this point, the court filings suggest, Harvard had warned Kilburn seven times that any material shared with investigators would also be shared with Comaroff, a disclaimer Kilburn acknowledged in writing.

“Both parties have the right to review and respond to all information” that the university “may rely on in the investigation,” one email from investigators said, including “any written information provided by a witness.” On July 6, 2020, Kilburn replied: “Thank you for this information—it is helpful.”

Later in July, Kilburn had two Zoom meetings with the Office of Dispute Resolution, which reiterated that each party would have access to everything the other submitted. Those meetings are recounted in an affidavit from a senior Title IX investigator and in transcripts of the meetings taken by a second Title IX official.

In October, per Kilburn’s written request, the university contacted her therapist, who turned over two sets of notes from her sessions with Kilburn, the court filings show. As the investigation progressed, Harvard continued to remind Kilburn that it was sharing all of the evidence it gathered, including the therapy notes, with Comaroff. There is no record of any objections to those disclosures until after the investigation concluded—and after it became clear that the university hadn’t bought her most lurid claims.

Harvard determined in August 2021 that Comaroff, a scholar of African society, had violated Title IX by warning Kilburn not to travel with her same-sex partner to Cameroon, where lesbians are frequently the target of rape. He conveyed that warning in an inappropriate tone, the investigation found, but not with a sexual intention.

The school dismissed all of Kilburn’s other allegations, including the allegation of sexual assault. It also dismissed the allegations of the other two graduate students, Amulya Mandava and Margaret Czerwienski, who claimed that Comaroff had retaliated against them when they sought to expose his harassment of Kilburn.

But the pressure on Harvard was mounting. All three students were active in Harvard’s Graduate Student Union, which for years had waged a highly publicized campaign for stronger sexual harassment protections. That campaign escalated in fall 2021, energized by the allegations against Comaroff, and received glowing coverage in both the Harvard Crimson and the Boston Globe.

Amid the firestorm, Harvard notified Comaroff in October 2021 that it was hiring an outside lawyer, Alexandra Thaler, to determine whether some of his comments to Mandava had violated the school’s “professional conduct policy,” according to a detailed statement O’Meara-Costello provided to the Free Beacon.

Like at Princeton in the case of Joshua Katz, the second investigation had fewer due process protections than the first one. Harvard did not let Thaler interview any witnesses or consider additional evidence from either party, O’Meara-Costello’s statement said; the university required that she make her determinations based on a truncated excerpt of the evidence that Title IX investigators had gathered, which did not include several findings favorable to Comaroff.

Having reviewed this curated set of findings, Thaler concluded that Comaroff had violated the professional conduct policy by making remarks that Mandava perceived as threatening. The perception was what mattered: Thaler’s report said that Comaroff’s intent was irrelevant to whether he’d violated the policy, according to O’Meara-Costello’s statement.

Thaler did not respond to a request for comment. On January 20, Comaroff was placed on unpaid leave for the spring semester.

The sanctions—and the procedural hijinks that produced them—shocked 38 professors at the Ivy League school who on February 4 issued an open letter defending Comaroff. The signatories questioned how Comaroff could have violated Title IX by “informing students of the risks of gender-based violence.” And they attacked the university for subjecting their “excellent colleague” to double jeopardy, saying it set an ominous precedent for faculty.

Then came the lawsuit.

The complaint against Harvard, filed on February 8 by Kilburn, Mandava, and Czerwienski, didn’t just accuse the school of mishandling Kilburn’s therapy records. It also attacked Harvard’s “deliberate indifference” to Comaroff’s “decades-long pattern of harassment,” and lodged a number of allegations—many of them based on secondhand information—that were not included in the original Title IX complaints.

Those allegations were everywhere in a matter of hours. The New York Times published a piece on the lawsuit the same day it was filed—one of the few that acknowledged Harvard had cleared Comaroff of the worst charges against him. Other outlets were more one-sided. Some, like Gawker and the Daily Beast, seemed to take everything the plaintiffs said at face value.

Within 36 hours, 35 of the 38 professors who’d defended Comaroff withdrew their support, writing in a retraction letter that “we were lacking full information about the case.”

The only ones who did not sign the retraction letter were law professors, who argued that the new allegations—none of which had been investigated—didn’t negate the due process concerns.

But the damage was done. On February 20, more than three-quarters of Harvard’s tenured anthropology professors called on Comaroff to resign. And on July 26, over 250 students and professors signed a petition demanding that Comaroff be barred from teaching, even after his semester-long suspension was up. The petition repeated the allegations that Harvard’s Title IX investigators had dismissed, as well as the others that were breathlessly reported in the press.

It wasn’t just Comaroff’s reputation that was in tatters. It was the Title IX bureaucrats’. Throughout February, students inundated the university with concerns about their own medical records, which Harvard’s Title IX coordinator, Nicole Merhill, tried in vain to quell. On February 10, Merhill issued a statement disputing the media coverage and assuring students of her office’s commitment to confidentiality. A week later, she issued an apology, saying that her initial statement had “contributed to further concerns around trust.”

Those concerns, she added, “included some indicating their hesitancy to seek out resources, including counseling resources,” from the university.

The about-face reflected the lesson of the Comaroff saga: Once a media narrative sets in, it can be very difficult to dispel.

“When Harvard filed its motion for summary judgment, I thought—naïvely, in retrospect—that we would see reporting about whether Ms. Kilburn’s story was actually true,” O’Meara-Costello said. “That completely did not happen.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A new video that focuses on the gender-transition madness sweeping America has resonated with the Twittersphere with more than half a million views as of Wednesday.

The video, posted to Twitter on Sunday on the Libs of TikTok account, shows an unidentified man sitting in the front passenger’s seat of a car as he recounts an experience he said he had with a doctor.

The date the video was made isn’t clear.

“So we just took my 3-year-old son to the doctor for a checkup — my 3-year-old son,” the man begins. “And there’s a reason why I’m emphasizing that, and you’re about to know why.

“So my wife and I are waiting in the room with our son, and the doctor comes in, and he sees my son sitting there at the table, and the first question that he asks him is, ‘Are you a boy or are you a girl?’”

The man said he and his wife exchanged “what the f***” looks of concern and bafflement.

This is really scary. Dad claims doctor asked his 3-year-old if he’s a boy or a girl at a routine check-up pic.twitter.com/rwOVNJeDHU

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 14, 2022

“So luckily my son understands obvious tenets of biology at 3 years old and says that he’s a boy, just like his chart says,” the man said.

“The rest of the appointment I couldn’t even focus because I’m wondering why in the world this guy is asking the question. And then I remembered, ‘Oh, yeah, I live in California.’”

The man noted that his concern is not just based on his experience, but what is taking place around him.

“Call me paranoid, but this is where I think we’re heading based on other things that have happened,” he said.

This is sick & evil.

Boston Children’s “gender clinic” sees toddlers as young as 2 & 3 years old.

Claims babies in the womb know they’re transgender.

Warns parents if they don’t “support” gender identity & trans, it will lead kids to suicide.

pic.twitter.com/r89VQC0sy4

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) August 14, 2022

Federal Appeals Court Rules Transgenderism Is Protected as a Disability

The man referenced a 2018 story from The Washington Times headlined “Religious parents lose custody of transgender teen for refusing hormone treatment.”

In the clip, the man also referenced a 2019 BBC story with the headline, “Texas parents battle in court for custody of transgender child.”

The man also cites a 2019 Heritage Foundation article that said the Equality Act “could lead to more parents losing custody of kids who want ‘gender transition.’”

Reminds me of this video where this mom explained how her toddler came out as trans after the doctor asked if he’s a boy or a girl. https://t.co/8oq461Ntlc

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 14, 2022

“So again, call me paranoid, but I’m wondering if the doctor’s asking the question of my son to see if he can establish a pattern over time that shows that my son wants to be a girl,” the man said in the video.

“But here’s the thing: My son is 3. I’m not even going to let him choose what he wants for dinner. And some days, my son thinks he’s a dinosaur. But I’m not going to let him transition to a dinosaur. …

“I don’t think it’s going to be long before we start seeing parents lose custody of their young kids because they’re not letting them transition to the opposite gender. And I think pediatricians are going to be the ones who are going to start calling it out.”

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.

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.

“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.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

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.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The U.S. Army is expected to fall nearly 40,000 troops short of its recruiting goals over the next two years. Fiscal year 2022 is expected to miss the mark by 10,000 troops, while the number in fiscal year 2023 could reach 28,000. These figures mean that this year is on track to be the Army’s worst recruiting year in almost 50 years.

The Army plans to circumvent the problem by offering $1 billion for its recruiting program and placing more emphasis on the use of its reserve units.

The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Army Recruiting Command for comment, and Maj. Charles Spears of the Combined Arms Center replied to various inquiries about the state of recruiting. Spears offered several reasons for the Army’s recruiting challenges in the years ahead.

First, he said, “only 23 percent of American youth are qualified to serve without a waiver, [noting that] obesity, addiction, medical, and behavioral health are the top disqualifiers for service.”

The Army is also competing with corporate America, he said, adding that “social media’s virtual public square shapes the values and perceptions of American youth, which is increasingly unfamiliar with the benefits of Army service.”

According to Spears, the American population is “increasingly disconnected” from serving in the Army and military service, Spears said. “Oftentimes, influencers [like parents, teachers, and coaches] do not recommend military service.” He also added that “the share of youth who have seriously considered military service is at a historic low of nine percent.”

Finally, Spears said, “the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited the ability of recruiters to interact with prospects in person, [and] also exacerbated academic and physical fitness challenges, limiting the pool of qualified applicants.” As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, there has been a nine percent decrease in Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) scores as well as increased applicate obesity.

In addition to these factors, servicemembers have expressed other concerns that they say have contributed to the recruitment crisis.

Army Boots on the Ground

The Epoch Times spoke to an active-duty Army soldier with over 15 years of service on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. He is gravely alarmed about the Army falling short on recruitment numbers.

“In the past,” he said, “the Army targeted a specific demographic of people based on their values, [and these recruits] were patriots and loved America.” In today’s general population, he doesn’t see the same interest in patriotism. “Much of the country doesn’t love America like it use to,” he said. “And with a military no longer upholding the values, the oaths, or the creeds it once did, what kind of new recruits should we expect [to join the Army]?” he asked.

“From a macro perspective, we had a significant breach of trust in the last election.” By oath, he said, the military swears to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” But the U.S. military has said nothing about the previous election, according to the soldier. “I’m not saying there is a final answer, but as defenders of the Constitution, they owed open and transparent conversation to the force and to the American people,” he said.

Instead, he said, “they happily encourage mandated vaccines, back the transgender issue, and speak out in opposition to the Supreme Court of the United States in regard to Roe v. Wade—all of which are very political.”

In his opinion, “we now have a Department of Defense [DoD] that has taken various political positions that are very much opposed to the heart of America.”

All the while, he said, the size of battalions is shrinking. “Some are less than two-thirds of where they need to be,” he said. And many of those who remain are not “usable deployables.”

He said, “Much of America is missing the fact that the Army is intentionally kicking people out in a precarious way that it knows is unnecessary, because the data shows that it’s unnecessary.” He is under the impression that “our military is intentionally being weakened.”

Rather than watching the military “decay,” he said, “military leadership needs to take action for the good of the America people.” But he’s not convinced this will happen, because “for the most part, the higher-ups are cowards and they lack the personal courage to take the actions needed to put an end to this sad state of affairs.”

As recruiting woes mount and solutions appear scant for the U.S. Army, service members of the nation’s other military branches are equally concerned.

Mishap for the Marines

Maj. Paul Lewis (a pseudonym), a recognized subject matter expert on personnel retention matters within the Marine Corps who previously sounded the alarm on personnel end-strength issues within the DoD, spoke to The Epoch Times once again.

According to Lewis, military readiness has been impacted in the past few years by “a toxic combination of poor leadership and the politicization of the military.” He said there has been “a steady reduction in readiness due primarily to reckless policies that have eroded the trust of the rank and file service-members.

“It really came to light in the wake of COVID when service members began to see that senior leaders chose to put politics ahead of military readiness,” he said. “Senior officers and senior civilian executives have run the military into the ground in the name of career stability and progression instead of keeping faith with Marines and their families.”

Potential recruits are not signing up to serve in the Marine Corps as they have in previous years, and Lewis attributes this to “a rejection of the bureaucratic leadership.” For American citizens to choose to serve in the “all-volunteer force,” he states, “they want to be able to trust that their leadership has their best interest at heart, and that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore.”

According to Lewis, this erosion of trust can be “manifested in the military loss in Afghanistan as well as how COVID vaccine mandates have been enforced in a draconian and illegal manner,” and this according to him has led to “a complete loss of trust and confidence in the leadership.”

In the years ahead, he said, these issues will have an impact on the national security of the United States. “Within the national security apparatus,” Lewis said, “we need a certain number of troops to man the line, this is known as statutory end-strength and is set by Congress, [because] we have defense obligations all over the world with partners and allies.”

“A small gap in readiness, losing 100 or 200 recruits or unplanned departures from the service might be acceptable,” Lewis admitted. “But when you get into the numbers of 40,000 or more in a single year, it’s no longer just a minor blip on how we deploy our military, but it is an unmitigated disaster,” he said. “It will affect every decision made on how we are going to meet our obligations and ultimately we will be increasingly relying on less troops to do the same job.”

In light of losses associated with the mandated vaccine, Lewis said it has become apparent to him that “our leadership is willing to sacrifice military service members, forcing them out the door in the name of financial reprioritization.” He said, “American people need to be aware that the military is using these personnel cost savings to commit additional resources to yet another round of equipment modernization that is lining the defense industries pocket.

“But all the while, they’re losing the individuals qualified to operate these systems,” he said. “For example, you cannot fly an F-35 with a student pilot; you need an experienced pilot with years of operational flight time.

“When the cards are down and we need to face our adversaries, we need experienced warfighters using this equipment,” said Lewis. “Unfortunately, the defense lobby has just about every congressional office enthralled with the idea of higher defense spending with their companies rather than investing in its people.”

According to Lewis, “the American soldier is the country’s most valuable resource, [but] our leadership and our decisionmakers have devalued their people” who serve in the military. “This is sadly exemplified in the dead Marines on the deck in Afghanistan because of poor politically driven leadership.”

If members of the nation’s military were valued, he said, “these same people should be raising legitimate concerns about vaccine efficacy, but they are failing the American people once again.”

Lewis contends that “generational damage” is being done and the core of rank-and-file service members whose families have traditionally served will no longer choose to do so in the future because of the utter betrayal they are facing from their own leaders.

“It’s reckless, like a child playing with fire,” said Lewis. “Do the math: it is impossible to have an all-volunteer force if you don’t have volunteers.” Moving forward, he questions whether the U.S. military will be able to continue to “meet the expectations of the American people and keep the homeland safe.”

Air Force Mission Ignored

A master sergeant currently serving in the Air Force has been a recruiter for nearly a decade. As the military vaccine mandate began to be enforced, he was “alienated from the service” for refusing to take the shot. “Many in the Air Force have stood up for freedoms our entire career, but when our freedom is on the line, who’s going to stand up for us?” he asked. He has witnessed junior airmen break down in tears over being coerced and threatened into taking the vaccine.

Air Force Recruiting Service is facing its lowest recruiting numbers since 1999 according to senior leadership’s public statements, he said. “While we lose decades of experience to mandates and poor leadership decisions,” he said, “we will be forced to ease standards just to continue the mission.” He further added, “I see firsthand in recruiting that the sentiment towards joining the military has been negatively impacted over the last year.”

What’s more, he said, “there is an imbalanced focus on diversity over performance when deciding the fate of an airman’s career. We’re focusing on the wrong things instead of the mission, which is protecting and serving the nation,” he said. “Wokeism combined with bad policies are destroying the military and if we don’t course correct soon, it could cause irreparable harm, in my opinion.”

Navy is Getting Weaker

A Navy lieutenant said, “the DoD has forgotten the first rule of holes—and that’s when you get into one, you stop digging.” According to the recruiter, “the Navy has probably alienated the majority of its recruiting base that you could have always counted on historically.”

Mandatory vaccines are an issue, he said. But “social experimentation” within the Department of Defense is also a problem. For example, in the digital signature of Rear Admiral Alexis T. Walker, he said, “he has his own little personal font with a rainbow hue for his pronouns.” Walker is the commander of Navy Recruiting Command.

The Clinton administration’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was once “a hot button for the military,” he said. “But fast forward nearly 30 years, and transgenders have been normalized.”

To that end, he said, “The fact that you would set a double standard in terms of military readiness where you would claim an unvaccinated service member isn’t ready, but somebody in the middle of a life-changing transition that’s on hormones is ready and is not a threat to readiness, bothers me.”

By his estimation, senior leadership of the military has “bought into a big lie that somehow the population at large wants a military which reflects the population diversity of the country.” He disagreed, stating that “the public simply wants to know that they have a military that’s capable and lethal, and could successfully defend this nation on a moment’s notice.”

Apart from “a few niche areas, like the special warfare communities, military readiness is questionable at best,” he said. “We’ve gone too far into the weeds politically, which has resulted in a weaker, political military force.”

Coast Guard Gone Woke, Too

Continuing to actively serve in the Coast Guard, a “Coastie” with recent experience as a recruiter is very disturbed that he could be “throwing years of dedicated service down the drain” for refusing to take the vaccine. It’s clear that he’s not the only one impacted, as he said, the Coast Guard will fall far short of making recruiting mission this year. While he said it is hard to pinpoint exactly why, the vaccine mandate is a large part of the issue. “There’s definitely been some young folk who said they’re not going to join because they don’t want to get the COVID vaccine,” he explained.

In addition, he said, “The woke culture has bugged some people.” In one example of wokeness infiltrating the Coast Guard, he said, “When writing awards or performance reviews, I can’t even identify myself as a he, [adding that] I can only identify myself by my name, rank, or by they.” He finds it strange that he cannot assume his own gender. Taking diversity and inclusion to this extreme, alongside the vaccine mandate, has hurt retention in his opinion.

The Coast Guardsman strongly believes that “medical and fitness standards that were once non-negotiable are all on the table right now.” When asked about the reason, he goes on to say, “It seems like the average teenager these days has a much higher likelihood of being prescribed antidepressants, asthma inhalers, or attention deficit medications, all of which used to be a hard stop for someone trying to join.”

“But if recruiters can’t make mission and mission execution suffers, eventually something has to give,” he said. “The question that bothers me is how much does race and gender now play into the likelihood of those medical waivers being granted?”

Each anonymous interviewee emphasized that their views do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense (DoD), the Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy, or Coast Guard. The Epoch Times also reached out to the recruiting headquarters for the Air Force, Coast Guard, Marines, and Navy for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee say they have received information from the non-partisan scorekeeper at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) challenging the Biden administration’s narrative that Americans making less than $400,000 a year won’t see higher IRS audit rates.

The remarks came in an Aug. 12 statement that was published as the Democrat-controlled House passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes nearly $46 billion in additional funding for IRS enforcement of the $80 billion or so total funding boost to the tax agency.

Committee Republicans said that the CBO statement they were provided with confirms that, under the new legislation, lower and middle-income Americans will be squeezed harder by the tax man to the tune of at least $20 billion.

‘Supercharged IRS’ Coming For Middle-Income Americans

This figure was arrived at by calculating how much less tax revenue would flow into government coffers if legislators had accepted amendment 5404 (pdf) proposed by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) that explicitly called for none of the funds appropriated under the Inflation Reduction Act to be used to audit taxpayers making less than $400,000 a year.

“The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirms that had this amendment passed and lower- and middle-income taxpayers been protected, revenue in Democrats’ bill would have been reduced by at least $20 billion,” Committee Republicans said.

This confirms that “at least $20 billion of the $124 billion in new revenue expected by a supercharged IRS will be coming from higher audits on low- and middle-income Americans” and that this would be “in addition to existing audits on these income levels.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the CBO with a request for confirmation of the scorekeeper’s assessment and comment, with no response received by publication.

‘Absolutely Not’ Increasing Audit Scrutiny?

Republicans said the CBO statement proves that members of the Biden administration are misleading the public by claiming that lower and middle-income Americans won’t face additional tax audits.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has insisted Republican claims that tax auditors will target lower and middle-income Americans at higher rates are false and politically motivated.

“I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Yellen said in an Aug. 10 letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

“This means that, contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited,” she added.

The IRS chief, too, has insisted that the tax agency would “absolutely not” be increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans relative to “recent years,” according to a letter to members of the Senate on Aug. 4 (pdf).

More Audits ‘Almost Certain’

A previous CBO analysis indicated that, under basically the same funding plan as is featured in the Inflation Reduction Act, audit rates would be restored to levels around 10 years ago and that audit rates would rise “for all taxpayers,” though ones with higher incomes would face the biggest increase.

IRS audit rates have fallen sharply over the past decade, with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) saying in a report that rates in 2019 were about one third of those in 2010 for all income groups, dropping from 0.9 percent down to 0.25 percent.

A CBO estimate (pdf) shows that that the additional $80 billion in funding will bring in around $204 billion in new revenues, including from enforcement.

Despite Yellen’s and Rettig’s insistence that audit rates wouldn’t jump for those making under $400,000, Rachel Greszler, senior research fellow at the Grover M. Hermann Center, wrote in an op-ed for the Heritage Foundation that this is likely not the case.

“Despite the Biden administration’s claims, it’s almost certain that households making less than $400,000 a year would face increased audits under Democrats’ bill,” Greszler wrote.

“And despite estimates from official congressional scorekeepers that the Schumer-Manchin-Biden tax increase indeed would raise taxes on those Americans, the administration has doubled down on the claim,” she added.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said on the House floor that the way Democrats can manage to raise $200 billion in new tax revenues is “with thousands of new agents targeting what I would call Walmart shoppers.”

“They’re real hard working American families. They are my constituents, they are my neighbors in my district. They’re living paycheck to paycheck, struggling with inflation and high gas prices,” Brady said.

“They will be hit with over 700,000 new audits thanks to a skyrocketing surge in IRS agents,” he added.

“Higher taxes, harassing IRS audits on our Walmart shoppers, no relief from inflation—all as America battles a recession,” Brady said.

The Inflation Reduction Act passed in a strictly party-line vote on Aug. 12, with the bill next heading to Joe Biden’s desk for final approval.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

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.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

More than a third of Americans have drawn on their savings accounts to handle rising prices, taking out hundreds of dollars on average, according to a recent survey by New York Life Insurance Company.

Since January, 36 percent of Americans have drawn an average of $617 from their savings to pay their bills, the company found. Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed expressed anxiety that a recession is approaching, and roughly a third reported being “uncertain” or “anxious” about their personal finances. Respondents cited monthly bills, health care costs, grocery prices, and gas prices as their areas of greatest financial concern.

Voters overwhelmingly blame Joe Biden for the state of the economy. Sixty-four percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Democrats, believe the president’s policy decisions are to blame for soaring costs. While White House officials boasted this week about slowing inflation, prices are still up 8.5 percent from last year, with that number even higher in several key swing states.

Americans are not replenishing their savings accounts as they drain them. The personal savings rate, or the proportion of income people don’t spend or lose to taxes, more than halved between July 2021 and June 2022, falling from 10.5 percent to 5.1 percent. 

To make up for tightening purse strings, Americans are increasingly turning to debt. Americans’ collective credit card debt jumped to $890 billion last quarter, marking the largest yearly increase in two decades. The number of credit cards also hit an all-time high in the second quarter, with more than 500 million in circulation. 

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman’s (D.) campaign for Senate is tapping a far-left activist who has called allowing children to undergo surgical gender transitions a matter of “human rights.”

The Fetterman campaign launched Real Doctors Against Oz Wednesday, an initiative meant to discredit Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate. Val Arkoosh is among the activists taking shots at Oz. Arkoosh, a failed Senate candidate, has a history of pushing gender theory. When she was still a candidate for Senate, Arkoosh sent out an email calling a parent’s right to refuse “gender affirming care” for their children a “gross violation of both human rights and the relationship between a patient and their doctor.” She also falsely claims that it’s legal to discriminate against transgender individuals in employment.

Sixty percent of Americans believe that a person cannot change their gender and a plurality of Americans oppose giving hormone blockers to children. Democratic opposition to parental rights has not worked out well for the party in past elections. Many pundits attribute Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s (R.) upset victory in November 2021 to his focus on expanding parental rights.

Real Doctors Against Oz are criticizing Oz for having ties to the pharmaceutical industry, being pro-life, and promoting supplements during his time as a television host. Oz, meanwhile, is attacking Fetterman for avoiding Pennsylvania voters by running a “John Fetterman Basement Tracker” cataloging the amount of time since his last public event.

Despite the implication of the name of Fetterman’s group, Oz is a real doctor. He graduated from an Ivy League medical school and was later a professor of surgery at Columbia University, where he won a research award.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

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!

Source: The Washington Free Beacon

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.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

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.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Less than 4 percent of Illinois public schools agreed to teach the National Sex Education Standards promoted by Democrats across the United States.

More than 500 of Illinois school districts opted out of the standards, with only 20 districts adopting them, The Center Square reported. The Illinois standards teach elementary students, including kindergartners, about consent, gender identity, hormone blockers, and healthy relationships. Middle schoolers learn about dating violence prevention, different types of sex, and sexual harassment.

The National Sex Education standards have raised parental concerns throughout the nation. Thousands of Massachusetts parents opted their children out of a federally funded sex education curriculum that teaches kindergartners about gay and transgender sex, the Washington Free Beacon reported last November. The Nebraska Department of Education shut out religious groups from the sex ed curriculum development process in October 2021, which included plans to teach elementary school students about gender identity and transgender hormone therapy.

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker (D.) signed a bill aligning the national sex ed standards with those of the state, making Illinois the first state to adopt the standards last August. Pritzker said the law “will help keep our children safe.”

State representative Adam Niemerg, R-Dietrich, however, said the standards are not age appropriate.

“This is well beyond what the conversations that should be happening with our children in schools on this particular issue, when they should be focusing on reading, studying, and enjoying sports,” Niemerg told The Center Square.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

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.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Students can assume different pronouns, have access to other bathrooms, and change their name without parental involvement

Public schools nationwide are telling students they can assume different pronouns, have access to another sex’s bathroom, and change their name without letting their parents know, a violation of federal law legal experts tell the Washington Free Beacon.

Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia bar teachers from “outing” transgender students to parents, as do Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. These increasingly common policies are meant to guard students against parents who, according to Fairfax County schools, “may not yet be supportive of their child’s transition.” But according to Vernadette Broyles, they also violate parents’ right to privacy as codified in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974.

“Privacy rights are held by the parents for the child, not by the child against their parents,” Broyles, president and founder of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, told the Free Beacon. Broyles says Fairfax and Montgomery school officials are “attempting to usurp parental authority,” which is protected by the 14th Amendment. She called the schools’ policies “intentional obfuscation, driving a wedge between children and parents at a time when children need their parents most.” Three other attorneys involved in similar cases cited the same violations of the Constitution and federal law in support of parents’ rights.

The news comes as parents nationwide are filing lawsuits against school districts over the issue. Parents Defending Education, a conservative grassroots group, announced last week it was suing an Iowa school district for refusing to disclose a child’s transgender status without their permission. The district keeps “temporary” files for students’ gender support plans, allowing them to skirt official records requests from parents. Similarly, the Maryland and Virginia school districts instruct their employees to refrain from mentioning a child’s chosen gender identity on school forms or in emails where it could become public.

These policies are designed to conceal when a student begins to identify as a different gender without necessarily changing their physical appearance. To support “social transitions,” teachers are instructed to use a student’s chosen gender pronouns and treat them like their assumed gender, and in some cases giving students access to bathrooms “that correspond with their gender identity.”

Parents Defending Education president Nicole Neily told the Free Beacon the Iowa policy “intentionally evades federal law by placing students’ gender information in a temporary file—information that, if it were included in a child’s permanent file, would be accessible to parents through FERPA.”

The Montgomery County Board of Education is already embroiled in a lawsuit filed in 2019 over the policy. Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued in federal court last year that the policy is unconstitutional and violates FERPA, as well as state law. But the policy’s defenders claim that the same federal law protects a student’s right to privacy, even if the student is a minor.

LeRoy Rooker, a former director for the Education Department’s Family Policy Compliance Office, told Bethesda Magazine in 2021 that claim is false.

“There’s absolutely nothing in FERPA that would say they would violate FERPA by disclosing that to parents,” Rooker said. “The violation would be in not disclosing it if the parents request it.”

Some states have laws that ostensibly guard against such policies. A Virginia bill passed in 2013 protects parents’ rights to raise and educate their children. Fourteen other states have passed legislation along the same lines. In April, two Massachusetts parents sued their school district for violating federal and state law by hiding their children’s gender identity at school.

Parents say those laws haven’t been enough to protect children. Jeff Hoffman, a father of three Fairfax students and chairman of the Fairfax Parents First Coalition, wants the Virginia law to be written into school board policies statewide. Barring that, he called for parents to “put the entire transgender policy” on a ballot referendum for November.

“Fairfax County in Virginia is an example and proof of politically driven transgender policy that is systemically indoctrinated across our American schools,” Hoffman said.

The Free Beacon first reported in July that a Fairfax County faculty training module had directed teachers to forgo parental consent when students as young as kindergarten-age adopt a different gender at school.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

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.

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.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

‘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.

Source: The Washington Free Beacon

Posts shared on Facebook that claim the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) classified monkeypox as an airborne virus, it can cause paralysis, and can last months are false, officials said.

Facebook posts containing the claims reviewed by The Epoch Times show they both have a BBC News logo and credit the World Health Organization and CDC. One of the posts says, “CDC has now classified this disease as airborne and anyone within 15 feet can catch it,” while it adds that it is now being classified as a form of herpes, the illness can last up to four months, and it can lead to paralyzation.

Under the Facebook post, some said the information is fake and one said that it’s “trying to scare us to take more vaccine shots.” The person added, “Only way it can spread is through contact from someone who has it, kissing, sex, cuddling.”

A spokesperson for the BBC told Reuters and The Associated Press the news outlet did not make the images. A spokesperson for the CDC told the Associated Press that the post’s claims “are not correct.”

The CDC, WHO, and other health organizations have not classified monkeypox as “airborne,” and they have said it spreads via close, prolonged contact from one person to another person. Homosexual males are the primary spreaders of the virus, officials say.

CDC spokesperson Kate Fowlie told AP that the virus “is not known to linger in the air and is not transmitted during short periods of shared airspace.” She added, “In the current monkeypox outbreak, we know that those with the disease generally describe close, sustained physical contact with other people who are infected with the virus.”

Transmission is primarily through skin-to-skin contact, and “direct contact with monkeypox rash, scabs, or body fluids from a person with monkeypox,” according to the CDC website.

“Touching objects, fabrics (clothing, bedding, or towels), and surfaces that have been used by someone” infected with monkeypox can also transmit the virus, the agency says.

Paralysis is not generally associated with monkeypox, according to health agencies, and the virus doesn’t last for four months, but rather between two and four weeks, officials say.

Symptoms of the virus include fever, swollen lymph nodes, malaise, and a rash or lesions that may initially be mistaken for chickenpox or a sexually transmitted disease.

As for the claim about it being a form of herpes, monkeypox is classified as a pox virus in the poxviridae family related to smallpox, cowpox, and others. Herpes, meanwhile, is within the herpesviridae family.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

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.”

“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.

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.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

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.”

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.

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.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Viktor Orban kicks off CPAC in Dallas

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.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A report from Joe Biden’s Department of Justice released in June includes a fact that the Biden administration likely regrets publishing.

As it turns out, according to the report, domestic violence is more common in LGBT relationships.

Titled “Violent Victimization by Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, 2017-2020,” the report sought to prove the pervasiveness of anti-LGBT violence.

After listing off a number of stats meant to show this supposed pervasiveness, the report dropped a domestic violence truth bomb: When compared to straight couples, domestic violence is eight times higher among bisexual couples and more than twice as high among lesbian and gay couples.

A 2018 review of studies analyzing “intimate partner violence” published in the National Library of Medicine reached the same conclusion. According to the review, IPV among LGBT couples is “comparable to or higher than heterosexual cases.”

If true, these inconvenient facts would be devastating to the left’s narrative that all family structures are equivalent (because men and women are the same, fathers and mothers are the same, so it doesn’t matter if a kid has a mom and a dad, two dads or two moms).

That being said, it could be the case that the DOJ’s report is completely fallacious. Chad Felix Greene of The Federalist has researched LGBT violence extensively and seems to believe as much.

“I’ve been following [anti-LGBT violence statistics] for years and it is always the same manipulation techniques. The data has never been improved or accurate. It’s maddening,” Greene told The Western Journal.

According to Greene, the biggest problem with these numbers is missing context. In his opinion, there is no reason to assume that “all people have equal opportunity to experience violence.”

The proponents of the LGBT movement seem to be constantly changing the goal posts, underlying assumptions and definitions key to many such statistics in order to further their ideological narrative.

For example, Greene pointed out that in recent years, murders in Puerto Rico have been categorized as U.S. murders, “disregarding the significant cultural differences that cause them.”

Additionally, terms like “simple assault” can be used to inflate “violence” statistics. Physical violence is not necessary for something to qualify as a “simple assault.” If someone were to merely make a gay or trans person “feel or believe they will be harmed,” that could be categorized as simple assault.

Lastly (although many other forms of statistical manipulation are likely used), Greene pointed out that much of the LGBT violence data is “self-reported,” making the numbers more difficult to verify.

“In my experience, these numbers are inflated, not based on objective, measurable data and lack sufficient context to make any determination. The term ‘violence’ is too broad to understand what is being presented,” Greene told The Western Journal.

Major Dem-Run City’s Police Chief Begging for the Violence to Stop

So either the Biden administration is right and LGBT couples tend to produce more dangerous family environments, or it is wrong and completely fudging the numbers in order to fuel an ideological agenda.

Either way, know that when officials in the Biden administration talk about “LGBT rights,” you can’t trust a single word they say.

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 Hill reported 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.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The Biden administration is poised to deny free school lunch funding from a Florida Christian school that refuses to comply with the administration’s LGBT mandates, despite the school’s qualification for a religious exemption.

Grant Park Christian Academy in Tampa, Fla., represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, is suing Joe Biden and Florida agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried for enforcing the Biden administration requirement that schools comply with its LGBT mandates or lose federal school lunch funding.

In May, the Biden administration redefined the meaning of “sex” in Title IX to include sexual orientation and gender identity, forcing schools to permit transgender students to use male or female bathrooms and play sports with either sex in order to receive National School Lunch Program funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than half of state attorneys general rejected the memorandum, with Florida attorney general Ashley Moody saying the Biden administration was “using hungry children to advance a political agenda,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The Florida school refused to substitute gender identity for biological sex, costing them their ability to feed two meals and snacks daily to their 56 students when the fall semester starts. If Grant Park’s application is not approved by Aug. 10, the school will not be reimbursed for the meals it serves students. ADF legal counsel Erica Steinmiller-Perdomo said Fried should not block Grant Park’s school lunch funding, as Title IX provides a religious exemption.

“For five years, this Christian school has received funding to provide nutritious meals to dozens of low-income children in the community,” Steinmiller-Perdomo said. “Commissioner Fried and the Biden administration are trying to rewrite the law and ignore the exemption in an attempt to force this school to choose between violating its religious beliefs or providing lunches to children.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Florida’s governor on Aug. 4 suspended a state prosecutor who has vowed not to enforce laws related to abortion.

Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren of the 13th Judicial Circuit due to “neglect of duty.”

In the order (pdf) outlining the move, DeSantis cites Warren recently declaring he wouldn’t enforce laws that largely prohibit late-term abortions.

Warren and other prosecutors signed a document in June that said “enforcing abortion bans runs counter to the obligations and interests we are sworn to uphold.”

“We decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions and commit to exercise our well-settled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who … provide, or support abortions,” the prosecutors stated.

No other state attorneys in Florida signed the document.

One Florida law bars doctors from performing abortions during the third trimester, or after a fetus achieves viability. Another law bans abortions, with exceptions, after a fetus reaches 15 weeks of age.

Warren “has put himself publicly above the law,” DeSantis, a Republican, told reporters during a press conference.

Warren’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

Policies and Other Statements

The governor’s order also cites how Warren’s office has avoided prosecuting people who commit misdemeanors such as resisting arrest without violence, stating that the policies aren’t “a proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion” and also usurp the authority of the Florida Legislature by not enforcing the law.

The order also notes that Warren in 2021 signed a separate statement with other prosecutors regarding biological males using female bathrooms and vice versa.

The prosecutors pledged to “not promote the criminalization of gender-affirming healthcare or transgender people.” Gender-affirming is a term used to describe sex change operations and other procedures meant to facilitate a person’s change from male to female or female to male.

The joint statement said that bills that criminalize such treatments “do not promote public safety, community trust, or fiscal responsibility,” and suggested that they wouldn’t be enforced.

DeSantis appointed Susan Lopez to replace Warren while the suspension is in place. Lopez was appointed by DeSantis in 2021 to be a judge on the Hillsborough County Court, and she previously served as an assistant prosecutor in the 13th Judicial Circuit.

“I have the utmost respect for our state laws and I understand the important role that the state attorney plays in ensuring the safety of our community and the enforcement of our laws,” Lopez said in a statement. “I want to thank the Governor for placing his trust in me, and I promise that I will faithfully execute the duties of this office.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Biden administration declared a public health emergency for monkeypox on Aug. 4 in a bid to unlock funding and more powers to deal with the virus, which officials say is primarily spreading among homosexual males.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra issued the declaration, saying in an Aug. 4 conference call with reporters that the move will allow for quicker distribution of the monkeypox vaccine. Becerra was joined by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf on the call.

“I will be declaring a public health emergency on monkeypox. … We’re [taking] our response to the next level,” Becerra said, stating  that Americans should take “monkeypox seriously.”

Walensky said the public health declaration will provide more “access to resources” and will “enable personnel to be deployed to the outbreak” in some localities. The emergency will also “further raise awareness” and encourage testing for it.

In the United States, there are “1.6 to 1.7 million” people who are at the “highest risk” of contracting monkeypox, according to the CDC director. She reiterated that homosexual men, namely those who are HIV-positive, appear to have the highest chance.

The declaration comes after officials in New York, Illinois, California, some cities, and the World Health Organization declared respective health emergencies for monkeypox, which is part of the same family of viruses as the one that causes smallpox. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, reportedly overruled an expert advisory committee to make the declaration on July 24, while the U.N. agency confirmed that the virus is in about 70 countries outside of Africa.

Along with Ghebreyesus, the heads of various federal, state, and local health agencies have stated that the large majority of cases are found among homosexual males. However, they’ve also stated that the virus is spreading among other groups, including children.

Earlier this week, the White House named Robert J. Fenton Jr., a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official, to serve as the U.S. monkeypox response coordinator. That move echoes one made in early 2020 to name a response coordinator for COVID-19, with the first being former Vice President Mike Pence.

What It Means

Becerra said the Aug. 4 declaration was done because there has been an increase of about 1,500 new monkeypox cases across the United States in the past week or so.

More than 6,600 monkeypox infections have been reported across the United States, according to the CDC’s data, although the data show that no deaths have been reported so far. Only a handful of deaths from the virus have been reported outside the United States.

Earlier this week, Los Angeles and San Diego counties, as well as New York City, became the latest municipalities to declare local health emergencies over the virus.

But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he’ll resist declaring an emergency for monkeypox, saying that such policies—such as the mandates and lockdowns around COVID-19—are designed to create a climate of fear. It’s not clear if any other Republican governors will follow his lead.

“I’m so sick of politicians—and we saw this with COVID—trying to sow fear into the population,” DeSantis said during an Aug. 3 press conference. “We are not doing fear.

“You see some of these states declaring states of emergency. They’re gonna abuse those powers to restrict your freedom. I guarantee to you that’s what will happen.”

The virus may cause fever, body aches, chills, fatigue, and pimple-like bumps on many parts of the body. The United States saw its first case of the monkeypox virus confirmed on May 18 and now has more than 5,800 confirmed infections.

Scientists say that mass vaccinations against monkeypox won’t be needed and that targeted use of the available doses, along with other measures, could be enough to shut down the expanding epidemic that was recently designated by the WHO as a global health emergency.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this week called for lawsuits against doctors who perform transgender operations.

“They don’t tell you what that is—they are actually giving very young girls double mastectomies, they want to castrate these young boys,” DeSantis said at an event in Florida on Wednesday, referring to such procedures. “Both from the health and children wellbeing perspective, you don’t disfigure 10, 12, 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria, 80 percent of it resolves anyways by the time they get older. So why would you be doing this?”

“I think these doctors need to get sued for what’s happening,” DeSantis said in conclusion. He didn’t say whether his administration would be taking steps to make it easier for individuals to file lawsuits against the doctors.

Earlier this year, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo issued statewide public health guidelines to restrict certain treatments for children and adolescents. It came after the Biden administration promoted its own guidelines on “gender-affirming care,” including hormone drugs, puberty blocker drugs, surgeries, and social transitioning for kids.

And in a letter to the Florida Board of Medicine in June, the Republican governor’s administration called on physicians to stop performing medical procedures on children who are said to have gender dysphoria.

“Available medical literature provides insufficient evidence that sex reassignment through medical interventions is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria,” the letter said, adding that the state “must do more to protect children from politics-based medicine.”

Gender Ideology in Schools

More than a week ago, 22 states filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over a new rule that would threaten to withhold funding to schools for meal programs unless states comply with its policies around the teaching of gender identity and sexual orientation in class.

Republican attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana, and West Virginia have signed the lawsuit.  The challenge was filed (pdf) against the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“The Biden administration’s sweeping rhetoric treats normal practices, such as sex-separated bathrooms and athletics, as ‘discriminatory’ even though DOJ [Justice Department] and the Department of Education treated those as legal, nondiscriminatory practices as recently as last year,” the suit stated.

In Congress, several Republican lawmakers in late June introduced a bill that allows individuals to sue doctors who performed gender transition surgery when they were minors. The measure allows a 30-year statute of limitation in most cases, prohibits federal health funds from going to states that force medical practitioners to perform transition procedures, and makes it clear that federal law cannot be construed to force practitioners to offer such procedures.

“Gender-transition procedures aren’t safe or appropriate for children,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), one of the lawmakers who co-sponsored the bill, said in a news release. “Unfortunately, radical doctors in the United States perform dangerous, experimental, and even sterilizing gender-transition procedures on young kids, who cannot even provide informed consent.”

Naveen Athrappully contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

PUNTA GORDA, Fla.—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he won’t declare a state of emergency over the monkeypox outbreak even though the state currently has more than 500 reported cases.

The governor said at a news conference on Aug. 3 that he doesn’t believe issuing a public health emergency is necessary, nor does he think Floridians should fear the disease.

“Any of the politicians trying to scare you about this, do not listen to their nonsense,” he said. “Anything we deal with from a public perspective, we are not doing fear. We are going to do facts.”

States that declare emergencies are going to eventually “abuse those emergency powers to restrict your freedom,” DeSantis said. “You have to deal with this rationally and do not use it for political gain.

Florida Surgeon General Joe Lapado, who stood with the governor, said that the “efficacy” of the Jynneos vaccine being given out as protection from monkeypox “remains uncertain.”

“You should know there’s very little data on this vaccine,” he said. “We need to learn more and we need to make rational decisions.”

Ladapo said a small study done in Africa in the 1980s showed the Jynneous vaccine was at least 85 percent effective against monkeypox.

He reported that Florida has received about 24,000 doses of the vaccine from the national stockpile and distributed about 8,500 doses.

Florida asked for and received 36,800 doses through July 27, Ladapo said.

The federal government has allocated a little over 109,000 doses to Florida.

The Jynneos vaccine consists of a two-dose series given four weeks apart.

California, New York, and Illinois have declared states of emergency over the monkeypox outbreak. The announcement of an emergency has been known to help with logistics and coordination between state and local departments working to respond to the emergency.

Florida has 525 reported cases, including 372 concentrated in the Miami-Dade and Broward County areas.

Ladapo said “he is certain there are many more unknown cases,” with most being male.

“Somewhere around 98 percent, maybe 99 percent, are men. Just a handful of cases are women,” he said. “All those cases have been transmitted by physical contact, basically sexual contact for the most part.”

“There have been some reports of cases in kids that are connected with adults who have acquired the infection probably from sexual contact,” Ladapo added. “In Florida, we have one case of a health provider who contracted it through a needle stick. There have been no fatalities.”

In July, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared monkeypox a global health emergency with more than 25,000 monkeypox cases reported in at least 78 countries, according to WHO data.

The Biden administration is considering whether to declare a public health emergency in the United States in order to make treatments easier for patients to get.

There are currently 6,326 confirmed cases of monkeypox in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Florida has the fourth-highest number of cases in the country.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

My blood is boiling.

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.

If you want to see Hunter investigated and the Big Guy impeached, then I need your URGENT Contribution of $25, $50, or $100 today!

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.

If you’re as upset as I am, then chip in $50, $100, or $250 today to help me investigate and expose the truth behind Hunter’s and the Big Guy’s criminal enterprise… and those who helped cover it up!

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 I URGENTLY need your help to fight back and win this November with your $100, $500, or $1,000 donation today. Otherwise, Hunter and Brandon are going to keep enriching themselves off the backs of the U.S. government and no one will stop them.

But if I win in November, all bets are off.

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)

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 Beacon reported 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.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

So, using a gay man’s disease to lock down a city/state/etc. and force mail-in voting and fraud. How fitting for democrat-controlled entities. [US Patriot]

The governors of blue states California, and Illinois on Monday joined New York state in issuing proclamations declaring states of emergency in response to the 2022 monkeypox virus outbreak currently spreading primarily among the LGBT population.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, cited similar reasons when he declared a State of Emergency “to bolster the state’s vaccination efforts.”

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, declared the monkeypox virus a public health emergency and the state a “disaster area” in a bid to unlock resources to “aid in the distribution of vaccines.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams also issued an emergency executive order on Monday declaring a local state of emergency to bolster “efforts to educate, vaccinate, test, and treat as many New Yorkers as possible.”

It comes a day after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a statewide executive order to declare a disaster. She said that “more than one in four monkeypox cases” are in New York state. Among other issues, the order provides more leeway on which individuals can administer the monkeypox vaccine, including pharmacists, EMS workers, and midwives.

There are currently over 5,800 monkeypox cases in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In confirmed or presumptive case numbers, Illinois is ranked third most, with 520 cases; California is ranked second, with 827 cases; and New York is ranked first, with more than 1,300 cases. Florida and Georgia both have over 400 monkeypox cases as well.

Read More

Monkeypox Declared Public Health Emergency in New York City

Illinois

“[Monkeypox virus] is a rare, but potentially serious disease that requires the full mobilization of all available public health resources to prevent the spread,” Pritzker said in a statement.

“That’s why I am declaring a state of emergency to ensure smooth coordination between state agencies and all levels of government, thereby increasing our ability to prevent and treat the disease quickly.

“We have seen this virus disproportionately impact the LGBTQ+ community in its initial spread. Here in Illinois we will ensure our LGBTQ+ community has the resources they need to stay safe while ensuring members are not stigmatized as they access critical health care,” he said.

pic.twitter.com/C4lNHWZG4r

— Governor J.B. Pritzker (@GovPritzker) August 1, 2022

On July 23, the World Health Organization declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health “emergency.” Since then, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevent (CDC) has been monitoring the outbreak across the United States and consulting with states.

Pritzker’s office said that declaring a “state of disaster” will expand the resources and coordination efforts of state agencies to respond, treat, and attempt to prevent the spread of monkeypox.

California

California is making use of infrastructure developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to deploy monkeypox vaccine clinics in an outreach effort targeting the LGBT community.

Newsom’s office said the governor’s proclamation will support a “whole-of-government” response to monkeypox, including getting more vaccines and outreach to the LGBT community on accessing vaccines and treatment.

“California is working urgently across all levels of government to slow the spread of monkeypox, leveraging our robust testing, contact tracing, and community partnerships strengthened during the pandemic to ensure that those most at risk are our focus for vaccines, treatment and outreach,” Newsom said in a statement.

“We’ll continue to work with the federal government to secure more vaccines, raise awareness about reducing risk, and stand with the LGBTQ community fighting stigmatization.”

Newsom’s declaration will expand permission already given to pharmacists to Emergency Medical Services personnel to administer FDA-approved monkeypox vaccines.

Virus Spread, Vaccines

The LGBT community and public health experts have expressed concerns around stigmatization, wanting to avoid issues that occurred around the HIV/AIDs virus in the 1980s.

The monkeypox virus is primarily being spread through the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men, a major peer-reviewed study found. But the virus is expected to eventually spread beyond the LGBT community, a World Health Organization official has said.

Monkeypox cases have been reported in a female health care worker and in an infant and a toddler who separately have LGBT parents.

The LGBT community has been resistant to monkeypox being characterized as a sexually transmitted disease. The virus can be transmitted through close but non-intimate contact and through infected bedding and clothing.

However, the current outbreak has primarily been transmitted during sexual activity and is theorized by experts to have emerged at two large-scale LGTB events held in Europe—a rave in Spain and a festival in Belgium oriented around a sex-based subculture.

The Biden administration has delivered more than 7,000 doses of vaccine to Illinois, with 13,000 additional doses expected in the near future, according to Pritzker’s office.

Pritzker called on the Biden administration last month to send more vaccines to Illinois.

“A comprehensive and swift response is key when containing a disease outbreak,” said IDPH Director Sameer Vohra. “These measures will allow the state to deploy all our resources in fighting this disease and will open efficient lines of communication and cooperation across state lines, an essential step in tracking monkeypox and improving tools and processes to prevent and address it.”

There has been a limited supply of the FDA-approved Jynneos monkeypox vaccine in the United States, but the CDC said more supply is expected in the coming weeks. Jynneos is also known as Imvanex or Imvamune.

There is a larger supply of a smallpox vaccine known as ACAM2000 that can be used, but the CDC has warned against its use in people with weakened immune systems and certain skin conditions, and by pregnant women.

Pritzker’s office said that proclaiming the “state of disaster” allows the Illinois Department of Public Health to expand vaccine and testing capacities with the help of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and via state and federal recovery and assistance funds.

“This proclamation will aid in facilitating the complicated logistics and transportation of vaccines across the state to reach the most impacted communities efficiently,” Pritzker’s office said.

“The declaration also authorizes emergency procurements to facilitate the state’s response. The proclamation takes effect immediately and is in place for 30 days.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The federal government is one more of transgenderism’s many online promoters.

A help page on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) website lists resources from government agencies and community organizations that seek to protect and support LGBT children and their networks by providing online advice on sexuality, with content that promotes transgenderism, anal and oral sex, and occult superstition.

“It is critical for the parents, guardians, and other family members of LGBT youth to have access to the resources they need to ensure their LGBT children are protected and supported,” the CDC’s website reads.

The CDC page for “LGBT Youth Resources” offers young people and their friends and families links to websites that promote questioning of gender and sex, as well as to sites with age-inappropriate advice.

One of the links listed by the CDC is the website Q Chat Space, which is designed to be hidden. A green banner across the bottom of the site reads “Click/tap here for a quick escape.” It immediately transfers site users to the Google Search page.

The Q Chat Space website hosts live chats for teens aged 13 to 19 that are “facilitated by experienced staff who work at LGBTQ+ centers around the United States,” the website reads. But the staff aren’t mental health professionals. They are “verified” facilitators.

The CDC’s website describes Q Chat Space as a “digital LGBTQ+ center where teens join live-chat, professionally facilitated, online support groups.”

Q Chat Space’s Instagram page provides the schedule for the live chats, along with the subjects to be discussed with the facilitators.

These subjects include sex change surgeries, a transgender and “nonbinary” sex ed night, an introduction to drag culture, a chat on “having multiple genders,” as well as oral and anal sex advice.

Other chats discuss binge drinking and how teens can drink safely.

“If you do choose to drink underage, it is important to be as safe as possible, have a trusted adult nearby and or the potential to contact emergency services if needed,” Q Chat Space’s post reads.

Still other chats discuss the use of condoms, oral contraceptives, intrauterine devices, preexposure prophylaxis against HIV, as well as other devices.

Many chats promote astrology, tarot cards, and other occult ideas. The site recommends “Self Discovery in Astrology,” “Queering Tarot,” and “vibes + auras.”

A disclaimer at the bottom of the CDS’s webpage states, “These links do not constitute an endorsement of these organizations or their programs.”

The nation’s health protection agency explains further: “Links to non-Federal organizations found at this site are provided solely as a service to our users. … CDC is not responsible for the content of the individual organization Web pages found at these links.”

Directions for Parents

Another website on the CDC’s help page is HealthyChildren.org. This site encourages parents to accept a child’s claim of sexual identity without question.

“Some children have a gender identity that is different from their gender assigned at birth, and many have interests and hobbies that may align with the other gender,” the site reads. “It is natural for parents to ask if it is ‘just a phase.’ But, there is no easy answer.”

The website states that research shows gender identity can’t be changed and that parents must accept the gender identity that children announce.

“When your child discloses their identity to you, respond in an affirming, supportive way,” the site states.

The CDC website states that some young people who identify as LGBT are more likely to experience “negative health and life outcomes.” It then recommends that parents protect and “support” children who identify as LGBT.

The CDC also links to the Trevor Project. This website also announces that users can leave it quickly by pressing the “escape” key three times.

“When someone shares their gender identity with you, it’s inappropriate to assume or try to deduce that person’s sex assigned at birth,” the Trevor Project’s site reads.

The site states that doctors typically “decide” biological sex “based solely on one’s genitals.” Sex might not correspond to gender, the site says.

Using the right words around transgender youth can save lives, the Trevor Project says. It quotes a study that found that people who identify as transgender get less suicidal when referred to with different pronouns.

The site listed several pronouns people could use, including “they,” “ze,” “xe,” and “ve.”

The CDC didn’t respond to a request for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Vera Sharav was only 3 years old when her world collapsed.

She and her family were chased out of Romania and herded into a concentration camp in Ukraine during World War II, where they were left to wait, and starve.

“The cloud of death was always there,” Sharav told The Epoch Times.

Weekly, a list determined who would be sent where; whether it be a death or slave labor camp, she said.

While at the camp, she said her father died of typhus when she was 5, which had been widespread throughout the camps because of the cold and malnutrition.

After three years at the camp, she was rescued in 1944, she said.

“My mother got wind that a few orphans would be transported out of the camp, so she lied and said I was an orphan to save my life, and that’s how I wound up leaving,” Sharav said.

This began what she called her odyssey as a child without parents, left to her own intuition and keen critical assessment of others’ intentions.

“I had to assess who I could trust to take care of me,” she said.

While on a train to the Port of Constanta, Romania, where there were three boats awaiting to take groups of people to Palestine, she befriended a family. However, upon arrival, she found herself assigned a boat with other orphan children that would separate her from the family with whom she felt she could trust. So she rebelled.

“No matter what, I could not be convinced to get on that boat,” she said. “Miraculously, in the end, they gave in to me.”

Seasick, she fell asleep that night, only to wake up to find that the boat with the orphans had been torpedoed by who she said she found out decades later to have been the Russians.

Though she carried guilt for having survived, she was grateful she resisted because that resistance kept her alive, she said.

“I do not obey authority, and it saved my life.”

Weaponized Medicine

These memories returned in 2020 during the web of COVID-19 restrictions that spun out of control with the help of media propaganda, she said.

“So now, when people are obeying authority mindlessly, giving up their rights to make decisions about their own lives and what goes into their own bodies, I think back to that time,” she said.

Today, Sharav is a medical activist and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a network of lay people and professionals who work to uphold humanitarian values and ethical standards established in the Hippocratic Oath, the Nuremberg Code, and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

Most recently, she’s joined with Scott Schara, co-founder of Our Amazing Grace’s Light Shines On, Inc.

Both Sharav and Schara discussed with The Epoch Times what they saw as parallels between the National Socialist regime in Germany and the current medical directives being carried out in the United States through government funding.

Since the death of his 19-year-old daughter Grace in a hospital in 2021, after having been injected with a combination of drugs that he found out later was part of a federal hospital protocol, Schara called what was happening “genocide.” He has been crusading to tell his daughter’s story and network with others who have had a similar experience while bringing attention to the protocols that he believes amounted to the murder of his daughter, who had Down syndrome.

Under the Nazi regime, Sharav said, medicine was weaponized, as it has been today.

Though the Jews were the primary target, she said, the first medically murdered victims were disabled German infants and children under the age of 3.

This later expanded the operation—titled T4 for the street address of the program’s central office in Berlin—to the disabled of all ages, including the mentally ill and senior citizens, Sharav said.

“The Nazis called them worthless eaters,” she said. “T4 was a concerted effort to be rid of what their propaganda called the ‘economic burden.’”

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Nazism, Fascism, and Socialism Are All Rooted in Communism

Schara pointed to a 2021 Medicare Trustee’s Report, which evaluates the cost of keeping the elderly and disabled federally funded.

“Thirty-nine percent of that federal budget goes to those two groups right now, which is $2.2 trillion a year,” Schara said.

On page 11 of the report (pdf), there is a call for “substantial changes” to address financial challenges.

“The sooner solutions are enacted, the more flexible and gradual they can be,” the report states.

For Schara, the implication, while not overtly stated, suggests a call for eugenics that was supported by academic elites early in U.S. history, and later adopted by Nazi Germany.

Ten years after he took power, Adolph Hitler launched his genocide program that had been introduced in incremental steps with the help of propaganda portraying the regime as heroes, Sharav said.

“What happened to Grace, and what happened to many disabled and elderly in Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States in March and April of 2020 was medical murder,” Sharav said.

‘Built on a Lie’

Genocide isn’t new to the United States, Sharav said, as it was Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Holmes who voted in favor of the 8-1 majority opinion in the 1921 case Buck v. Bell, which upheld the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 and the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, who was alleged to be mentally defective.

Holmes said it would be better to prevent the mentally disabled from being born than to allow them to “sap the strength of the state” or “let them starve for their imbecility.”

“The principle that sustains compulsory vaccinations is broad enough to cover cutting Fallopian tubes,” the justice wrote in his opinion. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Carrie Buck, however, was never actually mentally disabled, Sharav said.

“Arguments for eugenics are always built on a lie,” Sharav said. “But it’s an ideology that continues to poison public health policies.” And he blames this type of thinking for the medical decisions that ultimately contributed to Grace’s death.

‘The Banality of Evil’

As he continues to try to wrap his mind around what happened to his daughter, Schara says he gained some insight from the writings of Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt and her concept of the “banality of evil.”

“It opened up a whole different view of the world for me,” Schara said.

Sharav’s experience made her familiar with the concept. The banality of evil is the normalization of mass murder by making it a bureaucratic routine that is handed down as orders through the chain of command to the person who pulls the switch, gives the injection, or turns on the gas, she said.

“No one called it murder,” Sharav said. “The Nazis were very adept at propaganda and language. The Jews were called ‘spreaders of disease,’ not unlike the epithets thrown at those who didn’t take the jab.”

Throughout 2021, the spread of COVID-19 was blamed on “the pandemic of the unvaccinated,” a phrase that was used by Joe Biden and governors such as North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.

“The whole language of it is dehumanizing,” Sharav said.

‘A Slippery Slope’

Schara applies the concept to the fact that 67 percent of Down syndrome children are aborted in the United States, he said.

“Doctors encourage the mother to get an amnio (amniocentesis) test, and if the test shows Down syndrome or another disability that would complicate the parent’s life, he encourages an abortion,” Schara said.

What Sharav said she’s seen in an unholy union when medicine gets into bed with the government.

“The Hippocratic Oath goes out the window,” she said.

The pledge to “do no harm” got replaced with allegiance to “the greater good,” Sharav said.

The question then remains, who has the authority to decide what’s best for the greater good, Sharav challenged.

What supports the greater good is having respect for the individual, Sharav said, and to pursue policies that advocate for the many over the individual is to open the door to medical practices that will cause harm.

“Look at what Big Pharma is doing now to children, aggressively pursuing them to be jabbed when they aren’t at risk at all from COVID-19,” she said.

It’s a slippery slope that—with the help of advanced technology—society is sliding down rapidly compared to the snail’s pace that it took for Hitler to implement his “Final Solution,” Schara said.

“We’re headed there exceptionally fast,” Schara said. “Today, the ‘Final Solution’ is the reduction of the entire human population under the ‘Sustainable Agenda’ of Agenda 2030.”

Unlike the physical camps that required ink tattoos for identification and guards to manage the prisoners, the new prisons are digital, Sharav said, managed remotely by surveillance through smartphones and cities.

“With smart technology, you can manage billions all at once,” she said. “It’s chilling.”

It’s hard for many to fathom that an elite few would conspire to cause widespread harm, Sharav said.

“People will say, ‘They made a mistake; it was an accident.’ But no, the elite, just like the Nazis, have this arrogance in which they believe they are superior and therefore entitled to rule the rest of us because they think we are inferior,” Sharav said.

Control vs. Faith

Schara said his concern is with an elite ruling class that is godless, believing only in what is measurable and controllable.

He emphasizes his faith in God as a powerful weapon to combat the dark agendas that have escalated beyond the comprehension of the average person, working 60 hours a week just to make ends meet.

“We should not fall trap to the false light that Satan will eventually ride in on to steal more souls. God’s true light protects those who believe,” he said.

“We the People” can reclaim sovereignty by learning to trust in intuition, experience, and the ability to assess lies from truth, Sharav said.

“Stop watching mainstream media,” Sharav said. “They’re all reading from the same script. They have bombarded people with fearmongering, which is exactly the same thing that the Nazis did. That’s how they controlled the population: through fear.”

For Sharav, the mission that has been laid at the feet of people throughout the world is the same as it was for her as a child: “Resist. Wake up. Stop obeying.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

REVIEW: ‘Any Given Tuesday’ by Lis Smith

Lis Smith’s relationship with politics is a lot like Hunter Biden’s relationship with crack cocaine. The high highs, the low lows. The seedy tabloid headlines. The “psychodialed” phone numbers. Addiction is hard to shake, especially when failing has no real consequences.

Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story is Smith’s account of her evolution from Dartmouth nerd dating her politics professor to full-blown campaign crackhead, from a lowly John Edwards volunteer to “one of the top communications aides in the Democratic Party.” (Her words.) The book also chronicles her search for love along the way. Spoiler alert: She has a thing for flawed older men.

Smith is certainly one of the least boring political consultants working today, and probably one of the least insane individuals advising Democratic politicians on how to win elections. That’s not a particularly high bar to clear, but still. Credit where credit is due. As evidenced by her starring role in the Mayor Pete documentary, in which she berates the failed presidential candidate for sounding like “the fucking Tin Man” “reading a fucking shopping list,” Smith is at her best when talking shit about her clients.

The several paragraphs Smith devotes to trashing former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio are particularly inspired. She absolutely roasts the gangly freak as a “childish, intellectually lazy, overconfident … and annoyingly condescending” weirdo with a penchant for “pseudo-intellectual, leftist, ooey-gooey mantras.” Smith recalls that, while interviewing for the job of campaign spokesperson, de Blasio was less interested in her résumé than he was with her “spiritual journey.” He reminded her of the “gross, unshowered guy in college who showed up to Philosophy 101 and hogged 10 minutes of class time to yell about the necessity of seizing the means of production because he’d read one line of a Communism for Dummies book.”

Smith, by contrast, is the foul-mouthed female frat star who pees in parking lots, goes to strip clubs with the boys, and threatens to shove balls down throats.  She’s also a tragic figure. The twitching junkie who can’t stop checking her phone at her twin brother’s wedding to find out “what the fuck is going on with Benghazi.” She is, somewhat refreshingly, an unrepentant DINO squish who has no patience for the woke libs and ascendant socialists gunning for the Democratic establishment. She rejects the “dogma of ideological purity pushed by some on the far-left wing of the party” as “arrogant and close-minded.” She accurately describes Louis Farrakhan as an anti-Semitic “hate monger”—an increasingly taboo opinion among party activists.

Any Given Tuesday is a story about how to succeed by failing. Smith honed her crisis communications skills by navigating her fair share of crises, both political and personal, and becoming “addicted to the drama.” She helped Claire McCaskill win her U.S. Senate race in 2006 despite being the target of a ruthless intraparty retribution scheme. After McCaskill said she didn’t want Bill Clinton near her daughter, Smith recalls, the Clintons literally made the candidate cry by pressuring top party donors to shun her. She worked for former governor Jon Corzine (D., N.J.), whose 2009 reelection bid ended in failure after being tainted by a massive corruption scandal. She fell in love with her boss—Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York.

In recounting the highs and lows of her career in political communications, Smith peels back the curtain on the cozy relationship between Democratic operatives and mainstream journalists. For example, before the right-leaning New York Post could report that she was dating the much older Spitzer, the couple deliberately leaked the story to a friendly outlet, the New York Daily News, which agreed to abide by the strict terms Smith dictated. (Years later, George Stephanopoulos pulled this same stunt on the Washington Free Beacon.) Smith recounts with glee how proud she was to have persuaded a journalist friend to ask Mitt Romney a hard question that elicited an inevitable gaffe.

At the same time, Smith offers a thoughtful critique of the mainstream media—that they’re more interested in viral soundbites and petty personal attacks than they are in substantive policy debates. Yet she triumphantly recalls her success in boosting Pete Buttigieg’s profile during the 2020 presidential campaign using the “unconventional” strategy of engineering viral soundbites and petty personal attacks aimed at then-vice president Mike Pence. Does anyone remember a single detail about Buttigieg’s policy platform? (Me neither.) Maybe that’s just how the game is played these days. Nevertheless, Smith’s borderline fanatical infatuation with Buttigieg—”one of the Democratic Party’s biggest stars”—raises serious doubts about her political instincts.

Meeting the former South Bend mayor was a disorienting experience, Smith writes, like the “day I heard Radiohead for the first time … [their] look, their vibe, and their sound was so different from what I was used to, but it was captivating.” She’d found “the one.” It’s a fitting analogy, given Buttigieg’s appeal to Radiohead’s core demographic: white nerds. For example, Smith recalls how Buttigieg supporters “created an intense online army that would welcome new Pete supporters with ‘digital hugs’ and swarm any Pete detractors with fact checks.” Fun!

Working for Buttigieg, who vastly exceeded expectations, helped restore Smith’s faith in the political process. “Pete … reaffirmed why I’d chosen this line of work in the first place,” she writes. Yet her suggestion that Buttigieg’s campaign was a political triumph as well is borderline delusional. At a time when Democrats are hemorrhaging minority voters, touting a candidate who barely registered a statistically significant level of support among black voters as the future of the party seems ill-advised. The same could be said about Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), another failed candidate beloved by white professionals but hardly anyone else. It’s almost as if the Democratic elites are out of touch with the average Democratic voter.

That is certainly the impression one gets reading Smith’s anecdotes about the early days of the campaign. Far from bolstering her case for why Buttigieg is “the one,” they reveal what most Americans already know. The overeducated professionals who comprise the Democratic Party establishment and mainstream media are a bunch of self-obsessed weirdos easily infatuated with politicians who remind them of themselves. “He’s like JFK. He’s like Obama. He’s a once-in-a-generation talent,” one reporter told Smith after interviewing Buttigieg in 2017. She recalls that during a meeting with Buttigieg and MSNBC executives, she watched as network president Phil Griffin’s “eyes widened as he brought his hand to his mouth to hide the smile forming on his face.”

Smith will almost certainly get her chance to prove the Buttigieg skeptics (i.e., most Americans) wrong, perhaps as early as 2024. She could use another shot at redemption. The 2020 campaign must have felt like “riding bareback on a rocket,” as crack aficionado Hunter Biden so eloquently put it in his own memoir. That high was soon followed by the political equivalent of being held at gunpoint while trying to buy crack in Skid Row: helping disgraced then-governor Andrew Cuomo (D., N.Y.) navigate the sexual harassment scandal that led to his resignation. Smith sounds a regretful tone in the book, but her text messages at the time tell a difference story. “I’m texting w[ith] [MSNBC host] Katy Tur,” she bragged to a group of Cuomo aides and allies in March 2021. “Katy is saying my spin live. Like verbatim.”

It’s a hell of a drug.

Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story
by Lis Smith
Harper, 304 pp., $27.99

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The Pennsylvania Department of State counts 4 million registered Democratic voters in the state and 3.5 million Republicans as of May 2022. But even with 550,000 more Democrats than Republicans, Pennsylvania is not quite a blue state. It is more purple, with 1.3 million registered voters who call themselves libertarian, Green, or “other.” These are the less predictable voters, who make Pennsylvania a swing state, capable of going Democratic or Republican.

And with 19 electoral votes, it is a must-win for presidential hopefuls.

Many, but not all Pennsylvania Republicans, believe Donald Trump is still the person for the job. They say it is vital to regaining the power of the Oval Office.

“It’s absolutely central to our survival,” Schuylkill county author Russell S. Hepler told The Epoch Times. “And 2022 as well. I don’t want to underemphasize this upcoming election, because that’s going to lay the foundation for 2024, for good, or for bad.”

Hepler, a pastor was speaking as an individual, not for his congregation. His book is titled “Yes! We Can Turn This Nation Around!: A Practical Guide for Christian Political Involvement.”

Hepler says the United States is going in the wrong direction.

“If they keep pushing this radical leftist, economic, environmental, and cultural agenda, there isn’t going to be much left to America. When you’ve got a Supreme Court nominee who can’t even define a woman, we know this nation is in serious trouble,” Hepler said. “You can’t survive if you deny reality. That has been the basis for Marxism since its beginning. It’s always based on lies. It’s based on, ‘whatever I say the truth is,’ as the government, as the party, as the big brother.’”

Rick Rathfon, chairman of Clarion County Republican party, agrees that winning is critical for Republicans.

“Look at the mess that Biden has got us into in just 18 months. I mean, we need to take both the House and Senate back in November and to try to restore sanity and dignity in Washington,” Rathfon told The Epoch Times adding that if former President Donald Trump runs, he would support him.

But it will be ugly.

One Party, Two Views

Democrats will be out to destroy Trump from day one, Rathfon said. “They’ve never quit trying to destroy him. Trump did a lot of good things for our country. He absolutely did. But I think it would be a mistake for him to run, just because of the hatred that the Democrats and the mainstream media have for him.”

“I love Governor Ron DeSantis from Florida. I hear that in my travels, and from a lot of state committee people.”

The Pennsylvania Republican Party did not respond to requests for comment in this story.

Sam Faddis is a retired CIA operations officer and author of “Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA” and “Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security.” Faddis has spoken to many Republicans as an organizer of a coalition of more than 75 patriot groups across Pennsylvania that are working together on election reform and other issues.

The majority of Pennsylvania’s Republican voters consider themselves “Make America Great Again/America first” people Faddis said, and they are 100 percent behind Donald Trump on the issues, even if they sometimes have questions about his tactics.

Issues are the center of gravity overwhelmingly for the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, he says.

“There is a gap about the size of the Grand Canyon between those [MAGA] people and a very large number of established Republican politicians sitting in Harrisburg,” Faddis told The Epoch Times.

“While I know the establishment does not want to recognize that fact—they want to continue to pretend like that issue doesn’t exist—for the base, that is kind of the issue.”

The base does not feel like establishment Republicans are representing people and what they stand for, he said.

“We’re over here with Donald Trump again, at least on all of the issues, and you guys want to pretend like 2016 never happened.”

Trump is Different

The problem is that Trump is fundamentally different from any president that came before him in recent memory, Republican or Democrat, Faddis said.

“He’s totally outside the system. He’s not part of the uni-party.”

The establishment in both parties have a general consensus on how America’s government is going to be run, Faddis said. That is, always bigger, always more expensive.

“Donald Trump is a wrecking ball, so of course he has to be destroyed as far as the establishment is concerned,” Faddis said.

If the Republican who runs is not MAGA, their campaign is dead-on-arrival in Pennsylvania, Faddis said. And he believes it would be a waste of time for another MAGA-minded candidate to challenge Trump.

“If Donald Trump runs, he will, head and shoulders, without any question, be the choice,” Faddis said. “There’s no question. I can’t imagine that another MAGA-type person could challenge him in the primary in Pennsylvania and have any hope of winning. That’s not possible.”

If Trump decides not to run, Faddis believes DeSantis would be the number one person that the most voters would instantaneously coalesce around.

“I think that, frankly, would be a smart political move, because in some ways, I think DeSantis is a less controversial guy than Trump, for the middle,” Faddis said.

“I can’t conceive of anybody, even a dyed-in-the-wool guy like Ron DeSantis, beating Trump in Pennsylvania. I mean, DeSantis is very popular here. And I love his policies. But you could not possibly convince the base to walk away from Donald Trump as it stands.”

Primary Fight

Several Republicans indicated that they don’t want to see DeSantis and Trump battle in a primary. For many, it would be like watching parents fight when you love them both and don’t want to choose a favorite.

Toni Shuppe, founder and CEO of Audit the Vote PA, has been investigating anomalies in the 2020 election since right after it happened.

“I personally believe, based on what I found through Audit the Vote, that Donald Trump won in 2020,” Shuppe told The Epoch Times. “I feel like he won the first time, he deserves his second term. I would vote for him if he runs. But I also really like Ron DeSantis.”

For most folks in this story, the dream ticket would be Trump and DeSantis, although not everyone is convinced DeSantis would be willing to take a vice presidential role when he could govern Florida instead.

For Shuppe, the dream ticket would be Trump and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. “DeSantis is young. He’s doing such a good job in Florida. I would like to see Trump and Kristi, and then potentially, eight years of DeSantis,” Shuppe said. “I think, in order to get the country back on track, restoring our constitutional republic, it’s going to take a long time. And I think that that is why a Trump-and-somebody-else ticket makes sense first, followed by eight years of someone like Ron DeSantis. That could really get things moving in the right direction.”

Kurt Dock, a Lancaster Township Republican Committee member, would like to see Trump run, but if he doesn’t, Dock believes the Republican party has strong candidates in Noem and DeSantis.

He says the Democrats have moved too far left.

“When the pendulum swings one way and goes so extreme, it usually comes back just that hard the other way,” Dock said.

“I would like to see someone a little bit more centrist. Not so much to the right. Instead of continuing the alienation, try to get some of the people that are very center, or center-left to come to our side. I don’t think it would be that tough to do.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

PUNTA GORDA, Fla.–Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. told schools to “ignore federal guidelines aimed at preventing discrimination against students based on gender identity, saying they would “vastly expand the application” of Title IX.

In a July 27 letter to superintendents, school boards, private schools, and charter schools, Diaz advised that guidance documents from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture “are not binding law” and asked school officials to “refuse to change their practices.”

The letter accused the federal government of trying to “impose sexual ideology on Florida schools” that would create a risk to the “health, safety, and welfare of Florida students.”

“The Department will do everything in its power to protect the well being of all Florida students,” Diaz said in his letter. “And to vindicate the right of all parents to know what takes place in their child’s classroom.”

The guidelines from the federal government extend protections under the law to include schools’ “obligations not to discriminate based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

In June, Miguel Cardona, U.S. Department of Education Secretary explained in a news release that the guidelines will “ensure all our nation’s students—no matter where they live, who they are or whom they love—can learn, grow, and thrive in school.”

More than 50 years ago, Title IX was enacted to prohibit gender-based discrimination in educational institutions. In June, the U.S. Department of Education released a proposal that stated it would “provide greater clarity regarding the scope” of sexual discrimination. The U.S. Department of Agriculture became involved through the school-lunch programs in May when it was announced that it would begin interpreting Title IX to “include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

In his letter, Diaz warned schools against making certain accommodations for transgender students who “identify” as the sex opposite of which they were biologically assigned, especially when it comes to bathroom accommodations.

“Specifically, for example, nothing in these guidance documents requires you to give biological males who identify as female access to female bathrooms, locker rooms, or dorms; to assign biological males who identify as female to female rooms on school field trips; or to allow biological males who identify as female to compete on female sports teams,” Diaz wrote.

In 2021, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law legislation barring transgender female athletes from competing on high-school girls’ and college sports teams. In April, the governor signed a bill that restricts instruction concerning gender identity and sexual orientation to children in lower grades. Dubbed by critics as the “don’t say gay” bill, it has been challenged in federal court and is still pending.

At a July 27 press conference, the governor took aim at schools that push “woke gender ideology.”

The governor, during the press event, suggested that school systems in other cities and states are included in their instruction suggestions that would encourage students to question their genders.

“Basically, this will be for elementary school kids where they’re instructed to tell them, ‘Well, you may have been a boy, that may have been what you said, but maybe you’re really a girl—that’s wrong,’” DeSantis said of the schools promoting “woke gender ideology.”

He said that Florida has “laid down a marker” to ensure that it’s “not something that gained a foothold here in the state of Florida.”

“The kids are off limits,” he said at the Tampa press conference.

Diaz’s letter told school administrators that the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services was “communicating with schools” and “suggesting they should comply with the U.S. Department of Agriculture guidance.”

He advised schools to ignore what he called “any suggestions” from the state agriculture department that schools display a poster themed “And Justice for All” that would indicate participation in the federal program.

The federal agriculture agency described the posters as a “primary method utilized to inform customers of their rights that displays information relevant” to federally assisted programs.

Diaz’s letter prompted Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, a Democratic gubernatorial hopeful, to hold a press conference on July 29 to address the assertions in Diaz’s letter, as well as to accuse the governor of “creating a fictitious culture war.”

“Manny Diaz and the Department of Education have no oversight over the National School Lunch Program,” she said at her press conference on July 29. “This has nothing to do with bathrooms or locker rooms like Commissioner Diaz has suggested.”

Fried said the governor needs to prioritize the people of the state instead of creating another “manufactured crisis,” because he is “running for president.”

The education commissioner, she said, should focus on the task of “focusing on his job” and addressing the teacher shortage instead of “being Ron’s errand boy.”

The federal school food nutrition program has specific rules and regulations before funds are dispersed to the state, she explained.

“The department, as well as all of our schools, need to be in compliance,” Fried said. “Commissioner Diaz has overstepped his role—he has no oversight when it comes to our feeding programs in the state of Florida—when it comes to our school nutrition program.”

Neither the U.S. Department of Education nor the U.S. Department of Agriculture responded before press time, but the spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education said the Biden administration was responsible for attempting to hold federal programs “hostage.”

“Resident Biden is attempting to force his radical agenda on Florida schools by holding hostage programs our students need,” Alex Lanfranconi, Director of Communications for the Florida Department of Education told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “Our schools have NO obligation to follow this federal guidance and will not be threatened into submission.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Twenty-two states are suing resident Joe Biden’s administration for threatening to zap school-meal program funding unless the states comply with new rules surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation in schools.

The lawsuit represents the latest volley fired in the ongoing battles between state officials and Biden, who they accuse of usurping their authority through his executive orders.

The states complain that a federal nondiscrimination rule, set to take effect Aug. 15, seeks to impose “obligations that apparently stretch as far as ending sex-separated living facilities and athletics and mandating the use of biologically inaccurate preferred pronouns,” said the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, Tennessee, on July 26.

“The Biden administration’s sweeping rhetoric treats normal practices, such as sex-separated bathrooms and athletics, as ‘discriminatory’ even though DOJ and the Department of Education treated those as legal, nondiscriminatory practices as recently as last year,” the suit says.

A fact sheet about the proposed policy cited examples of discriminatory acts, as interpreted by bureaucrats, under the new rule: “Preventing a transgender high school girl [a biological male] from using the girls’ restroom” and “preventing a transgender high school girl [a biological male] from “try[ing] out for the girls’ cheerleading team,” the lawsuit says.

The Tennessee and Indiana attorneys general are heading the coalition of states alleging that Biden and the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the meal program, “issued directives and rules that misconstrue the law and impose unlawful requirements,” the lawsuit says.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provided $2.6 billion to Tennessee last year; in sum, the 22 states received almost $29 billion through the program for low-income schoolchildren, working families, the elderly, and people with disabilities.

Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita railed against the “extreme left-wing agenda” that he believes is fueling these policies.

“They’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding,” Rokita said in a statement.

Rokita says he is, “fighting for Hoosier common sense and the rule of law,” which is what he believes citizens elected him to do.

The White House did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment on the lawsuit, which involves: Tennessee, Indiana, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Before filing suit, attorneys general from 26 states sent a letter to the president on June 14, expressing their concerns.

“By vastly expanding the concept of ‘discrimination on the basis of sex’ to include gender identity and sexual orientation, the guidance does much more than offer direction,” the letter stated.

“It imposes new—and unlawful—regulatory measures on state agencies and operators receiving federal financial assistance from the USDA. And the inevitable result is regulatory chaos that would threaten the effective provision of essential nutritional services to some of our most vulnerable citizens.”

The National School Lunch Program provides meals to 30 million schoolchildren daily.

About 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential childcare institutions receive federal funding to provide subsidized free or reduced-price meals for qualifying children, a news release from Rokita said.

The states’ suit against the Department of Agriculture is similar to a separate federal lawsuit that 20 states, including Tennessee and Indiana, pressed against the Department of Education and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In that case, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the states. The order temporarily blocks the federal agencies from forcing the states to allow biological males to compete on girls’ sports teams.

The court ruled that they won’t be required to eliminate sex-separated showers and locker rooms, nor will they be compelled to use designated pronouns that individuals request.

The school-meals lawsuit against the department seeks the same relief.

In both the Education Department suit and the Agriculture Department suit, the controversial changes did not go through Congress.

Instead, federal agencies created them under an executive order that the president issued in January 2021, requiring policies that would fight discrimination based on “gender identity or sexual orientation.”

The states say they do not deny SNAP benefits based on those factors. But they take issue with memoranda and a “final rule” that both attempt to impose “unlawful and unnecessary new obligations.”

The states “sue to prevent the department from usurping authority that properly belongs to Congress, the states, and the people, and to eliminate the nationwide confusion and upheaval” that the proposed rule has caused, the lawsuit says.

“When will the Biden administration learn that making law is the legislature’s role?” Ohio attorney general David Yost said in a news release.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

So this will be how they rig the next election: Mail-in ballots due to pandemic. [US Patriot]

Two retired U.S. generals, MG Paul Vallely, U.S. Army, and Thomas McInerney, USAF, raised concerns over the World Health Organization’s recent declaration of monkeypox as a global health emergency, alleging potential ulterior motives.

“Each of us should not be alarmed by this alert as the credibility of WHO is in great question based on their actions and notices on COVID-19,” Vallely told The Epoch Times.

“The rare designation means the WHO now views the outbreak as a significant enough threat to global health that a coordinated international response is needed to prevent the virus from spreading further and potentially escalating into a pandemic,” Vallely said.

“Beware of this politically driven global organization that is funded by the global elite.”

Monkeypox

Monkeypox is a disease primarily transmitted through the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men.

“I have decided that the global monkeypox outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a July 23 statement.

Ghebreyesus said that his decision was due to an increase of monkeypox cases in the world, now having been reported in over 75 countries and territories, with over 16,000 infections and five deaths.

A report published on July 23 lays out the reasons that the committee members had for and against declaring monkeypox a global emergency.

“Although the declaration does not impose requirements on national governments, it serves as an urgent call for action. The WHO can only issue guidance and recommendations to its member states, not mandates. Member states are required to report events that pose a threat to global health,” Vallely said.

“WHO Director Tedros is not a medical doctor, he is a Marxist from Ethiopia, totally supported by the Chinese Communist Party. He lied about C-19 from the beginning to cover for China,” Vallely added.

McInerney says that they predicted that the declaration of another pandemic would happen around this time of the year.

“They are right on our predicted schedule,” McInerney said.

“We shall not conform to their guidelines, we must resist lockdowns,” he further stated, “now is the time for America and the world and we the people to say no!”

“Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me!” the general exclaimed.

The Epoch Times reached out to the WHO for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

When you hear that students at Grace Church School in New York City are required to attend chapel for one hour every other week, you may assume that it’s a devout religious institution.

You may think differently, however, when you hear that the prestigious, expensive school recently turned over its chapel to an LGBT “pride” event featuring a star drag queen who goes by the stage name “Brita Filter.”

According to a report in The Post Millennial, the event included “twerking” students in the chapel and people handing out “pride flag” stickers, telling students that if they didn’t take one, they were homophobic.

(Here at The Western Journal, we’re hardly surprised at this turn of events, as we’ve seen plenty of schools bring in drag performers under various guises as part of LGBT “pride” education. We’re opposed to this kind of grooming and will continue to oppose it at every turn. If you do, too, please consider supporting our work by subscribing.)

The Post Millennial article, published Tuesday, indicated the event happened on April 27. The author was Paul Rossi, a former math teacher at the school from 2012 to 2021. He was “relieved of his teaching duties” after blowing the whistle about critical race theory infiltrating the school’s curriculum.

It was the sixth annual “pride” event in the chapel — again, mandatory for students in grades 9-12 to attend — and the main attraction was the aforementioned “Brita Filter.” (Driver’s license name: Jesse Havea.) He’s appeared on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” as a contestant and keeps a high profile on social media.

Havea, who identifies as “pansexual,” danced at the event — and students said they were pressured into dancing along, as well, according to Rossi.

WARNING: The following tweet contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.

Students pressured to celebrate “pansexual” drag queen at school chapel as teacher resigns over misuse of pronounshttps://t.co/3zRewBhnwf

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) July 26, 2022

“There was tons of social pressure to dance along and pretend like it was normal for sure,” one anonymous student said, “whether it be people tapping on shoulders and telling them to stand up or just a collective staring contest at whoever wasn’t totally participating.”

“Immediately upon entering there was a person handing out stickers with pride flags on them, unironically saying ‘take one or you’re homophobic.’”

The event was run by Spectrum, the school’s LGBT affinity group. The students forced to attend could only watch in horror as the drag queen’s plans for them were revealed — to be exposed to a tawdry, revolting performance aimed at normalizing bizarre sexual practices.

“I wondered, is this really happening in a chapel?” one student told Rossi.

The school’s website described the event rather tamely.

22 GOP-Led States Band Together, Say No to Rule That Would Force Schools to Accept Biden Admin’s Trans Agenda

“The audience was treated to a surprise guest — world-renowned drag queen, Brita Filter,” it reads.

“After a performance of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ Brita sat with Director of Vocal Music, Andrew Leonard, to answer questions about drag, representation and what pride month symbolizes.

“Student members of Spectrum shared their own stories and experiences of identity and belonging at Grace, before the Grace Notes closed out the chapel with a performance of Rina Sayayama’s ‘Chosen Family.’”

However, as one of the students who talked to the Post Millennial noted, Havea certainly celebrated pride in more ways than one.

The student said that “it’s notable that this person consistently called themselves fabulous and talented and beautiful. Not just once or twice, but over and over this person reassured themselves that way.”

Here’s a Money magazine profile of Havea, tallying up the costs of being so “fabulous.”

“One student reported that as the performer approached the altar, he was joined by more dancing students, some of them ‘twerking,’” Rossi’s report noted.

Despite the fact the Grace Church School hosted this event, the program also featured a teacher who used the occasion to resign because the school allegedly isn’t inclusive enough in pronoun usage for transgenders.

Uyen Nguyen — who self-identifies as “The Gay Agender Teacher Nguyen,” according to Rossi — announced she was resigning over being misgendered. Nguyen, apparently, wants to be referred to as “they” in the third person.

Nguyen, a student told Rossi, told the students “how much they loved the gay kids at school, and how this has been the most inclusive and accepting place they’ve ever been, but it’s the administration she cannot work with.”

“The administration is not supportive of their identity,” the student told Rossi. “They kept just saying that they were getting misgendered and people weren’t using their pronouns.”

In March, Nguyen told a reporter for the school paper, the Grace Gazette, that pronoun usage had been a “stressor” for her, since faculty had been “slower” to adopt to non-binary pronouns. (She conceded, however, that “almost everyone is trying” and were “well-intentioned.”)

The school’s environment, Nguyen said, “needs work … It has a ways to go before it is a fully safe and inclusive environment for nonbinary or trans people. … I don’t want the students to be feeling those things cause we’re supposed to be creating a safe space for them.”

The school — where tuition runs $46,000 a year — created a safe-enough space that it was willing to do all this in what’s ostensibly supposed to be a religious venue.

One student who attended told Rossi there was “tons of social pressure to dance along and pretend that this was normal for church.”

Even Havea apparently expressed surprise he was there, noting it was the first time he had performed in a church.

Sadly, with the way things are going, it won’t be the last, either.

Criminal exchange [US Patriot]

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.”

Experts: Hunter Biden Could Be Thrown in Jail After Failing to Register as Foreign Agent

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.

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 Beacon analysis 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.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A schism characterized by documents on “grace through separation” has brought forth a lawsuit.

In Florida, 106 churches are suing the United Methodist Church (UMC) because it charged them large amounts of money to leave, according to a recently filed lawsuit.

The National Center for Life and Liberty (NCLL) represents these churches.

The departure price varies from church to church, according to Jonathan Bailie, chief operations and financial officer of the NCLL.

Some congregations must pay more than $1 million, while others must pay less than $100,000, Bailie said. But in previous decades, leaving the UMC was free.

“Churches have been transferring to other denominations, like the Free Methodists, for decades,” he said.

Some of the departing churches owned their buildings before the UMC denomination existed and maintained their buildings without UMC help, the lawsuit states. The denomination still demanded money from these churches.

The churches leaving are conservative, and they’re leaving over procedural and theological issues, Bailie said.

Perhaps the most divisive of these issues has been the biblical view of homosexuality.

Winning and Losing

According to the lawsuit, the case rests on two sections of the UMC’s internal laws.

One law, Section 2548.2, allows any UMC church to transfer to a new denomination without paying the UMC money for the church.

The other bylaw, Section 2553, was added in 2019 in response to potential church departures over positions on sexual morality. It states that the church’s regional conference decides what churches must do to leave the UMC for independence. This provision includes the church’s financial obligations.

“The terms and conditions for that disaffiliation shall be established by the board of trustees of the applicable annual conference,” the church’s book of discipline reads.

The church schism began when the UMC was divided between theological conservatives who believed in traditional marriage and theological liberals who believed in an ever-expanding list of sexual orientations.

In 2019, the UMC’s theological conservatives voted to disallow same-sex weddings and non-heterosexual clergy.

With the win, it appeared that theological conservatives would hold the UMC denomination and that theological liberals would leave, according to Bailie.

The church hastily wrote a law into its discipline that allowed UMC churches to leave the denomination and become independent churches, he said.

“For the most part, it looked like progressive churches would be using that paragraph,” Bailie said.

But the progressives found ways to maneuver around the vote. Some church conferences put openly practicing homosexual pastors in “abeyance.”

This category meant that although their actions violated church law, the church wouldn’t discipline them until the next churchwide conference could vote on whether to change church law.

At least one recently ordained UMC pastor is a drag queen, under the name “Penny Cost.”

Bishops appoint UMC pastors to churches without churches getting a vote. Any UMC congregation could get an openly active homosexual pastor if its bishop put the pastor under abeyance.

“You are assigned a pastor. It’s not just that this person is being ordained. He could be assigned to your church,” Bailie said.

Abeyance was originally meant to last until the church’s first “post-separation general conference” in 2020.

But church authorities postponed the 2020 general conference until 2024, citing COVID-19. This decision would put the first “post-separation general conference” in 2028.

Some conservative factions weren’t willing to wait nearly 10 years.

Dollars and Division

Florida Bishop Ken Carter wrote in a statement that he blames departing theological conservatives for refusing a “gracious exit.”

“An abrupt separation creates significant issues that could damage benefits and pensions for retired pastors and their spouses who devoted their lives to service,” the statement reads.

“From the perspective of the Florida Conference of The United Methodist Church, our doctrinal standards have not changed and will not change, even as we continue on a journey to be a church that serves all people.”

Theological conservatives responded that they attempted compromise for decades before church authorities broke their trust.

“For decades we have been in fervent prayer, sought compromise, and desired negotiation—all to no avail. We have patiently endured, only to see promises, vows, and polity broken to suit those in power,” the suing churches said in a statement.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Maryland’s largest school district is prohibiting faculty from disclosing information about children’s chosen gender identity from their parents.

Montgomery County Public Schools has provided guidelines for working with transgender children that say a “student’s transgender status is confidential” and cannot be disclosed with their parent or guardian without their permission.

Public schools across the country this year have implemented policies excluding parents from their children’s education, especially with LGBT policies. In Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools prohibited teachers from consulting parents when students as young as kindergarten-age switch genders at school in July. Loudoun County Public Schools in the state issued similar guidelines in April. A California mother sued her daughter’s school district in January after two teachers allegedly coerced her child into adopting a transgender identity without informing her.

The guidelines say school principals and staff should “ascertain the level of support the student either receives or anticipates receiving from home,” helping the student create a gender-identity plan “even when the family is nonsupportive.”

Harold Maldonado, the father of a rising fourth grader at MCPS, told the Washington Free Beacon he is “angry” and “disgusted” that Montgomery County is pushing “inappropriate” sex education on students.

“The Montgomery County Public School System is overreaching, and this borders the line of criminal,” Maldonado said.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

In a 10-page executive order issued on June 15, resident Joe Biden declared war on conversion therapy and pledged to defend the LGBT community from various forms of discrimination.

The order, which was accompanied by a seven-page explanation, is one more salvo in the clash of rights that has arisen in recent years over transgender issues.

The order describes conversion therapy as “efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

Keeping a campaign promise he made to the LGBT community, Biden called for an administration-wide push to eliminate the use of conversion therapy by therapists across the nation. He described it as a “harmful” and “discredited practice that research indicates can cause significant harm, including higher suicide rates…”

“My administration must safeguard LGBTQI+ youth from dangerous practices like so-called ‘conversion therapy,’” said Biden.

The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that there were two million Americans identifying themselves as transgender in 2021—about six-tenths of one percent of the nation’s population.

Twenty states and over 100 municipalities have banned conversion therapy for minors.

To further protect the rights of LGBT individuals from encroachment by other states, Biden is marshaling the resources of 10 departments of the federal government, along with numerous supporting agencies. The list includes the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Housing and Urban Development.

Biden said in his order that the Federal Trade Commission “is encouraged to consider whether conversion therapy constitutes an unfair and deceptive trade practice, and to issue such consumer warnings or notices as may be appropriate.”

Such a designation by the FTC could expose therapists to prosecution.

The aggressive promotion of these and other LGBT policies has provoked a backlash around the country.

In the first quarter of 2022, 238 bills that would “limit the rights” of LGBT  individuals were proposed by legislatures across America—half of which involved transgender people, according to NBC News.

The state proposals aim to limit LGBT curriculum in schools, affirm parental rights, defend religious liberties, and restrict Gender Affirming Care (GAC).

The World Health Organization defines GAC as psychological, behavioral, and medical interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity when it conflicts with the gender the person was assigned at birth.

Biden’s order has aroused strong opposition from former gays and lesbians, clients and their therapists, and civil liberty legal foundations, who say that individuals have the right to voluntarily seek help to be free of unwanted same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria (an uncomfortable state of confusion).

Brothers Road is a Virginia peer support fellowship made up primarily of men seeking to align their sexual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with their personal values, beliefs, faith, commitments, and life goals.

Rick Wyler, the group’s founder, told The Epoch Times, “Many of us have been harmed, sometimes deeply, by therapists who demand that we embrace a gay identity and engage in gay relationships as, supposedly, the only possible path to peace, even if doing so would mean leaving otherwise satisfying marriages or cutting ourselves off from faith communities, beliefs, and traditions that we greatly value.”

Elizabeth Woning of California is a co-founder of the Changed Movement, an international network of people who no longer identify as LGBT.

Woning told The Epoch Times, “So-called ‘conversion therapy’ is a pejorative phrase that is being used to promote state-sanctioned viewpoint discrimination. LGBTQ-identifying people deserve the right to follow their conscience, even when it means receiving support to diminish unwanted sexual feelings.

“Such bans dramatically oversimplify the lived experience of anyone who identifies as LGBTQ. They offer only one route for people to follow, no matter their faith or conscience.

“And so, anyone who doesn’t endorse Gay Pride for their own life is disallowed counseling that addresses trauma and emotional distress related to their sexual identity,” she said.

“In the end, counseling bans cause harm and simply limit everyone’s freedom.”

Nevada therapist Robert Vazzo told The Epoch Times, “Don’t ban anything that is poorly defined and can lead to a witch hunt among therapists whose world view regarding homosexuality is different from the mainstream.”

Vazzo questioned the ability to determine at what point during a counseling session the therapist can be said to be actually practicing therapy and attempting to change a client’s sexual orientation.

“The desire to change one’s sexual orientation is often linked to one’s religious views and having thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are congruent with those views,” he said.

“How a person expresses their sexuality and deals with attractions is a very personal thing, and we especially don’t need Joe Biden and the federal government telling us what we should like, dislike, or try to change in ourselves.”

Vazzo said the courts have consistently affirmed a therapist’s right to give his opinion during a session as part of free speech.

He described Biden’s order as “an assault on both personal and religious freedom.”

Tampa, Florida, recently lost a case that challenged the city’s ordinance banning conversion therapy on First Amendment grounds.

New York City recently ended its ban on conversion therapy because of a civil rights lawsuit.

In a July 13, 2022, statement to The Epoch Times, Family Watch International, an organization which promotes and defends marriage and family values, said of Biden’s executive order, “Elite leftists are seeking to prohibit parents and children from obtaining necessary, and demonstrably successful, care [while] the Biden administration is pushing ‘gender-affirming therapy’ as normative treatment. This ‘therapy’ includes such horrifying procedures as blocking normal adolescent development, administering cross-sex hormones, and performing mutilating surgeries that result in permanent sterilization.

“Federal bureaucrats should not be micromanaging matters of health and wellness, especially as it relates to children. It is the role, responsibility, and right of all parents to determine the upbringing of their children, especially as it relates to their healthy development,” the organization said.

Attorney Mathew D. Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a non-profit organization that provides legal assistance in cases dealing with religious liberty and family issues, told The Epoch Times in an email, “I am confident that litigation will eventually doom these counseling bans … To deny a client the right of self-determination is both unconstitutional and dangerous.”

“The ultimate goal of this movement is to prohibit change-exploring therapies and counsel, and to abolish the Judeo-Christian ethic regarding human sexuality, and even the very understanding of God,” he said.

He pointed out the irony in a system of laws where it is not considered harmful to take puberty blockers, opposite sex hormones, or undergo life-changing surgeries,  yet it is regarded as harmful to learn about the causes of gender dysphoria and how to become comfortable with one’s birth sex.

Staver said that, under some laws banning conversion therapy, or what he calls “change counsel,” a counselor must either tell the client the type of counseling he may desire is not permitted; or even though the client wants to change, the counselor must, by law, override the client’s decision and counsel the client to accept unwanted attractions, behaviors, and identities.

“These laws unconstitutionally restrict only one viewpoint—change—on the subject matter of same-sex attractions, behavior, or identity. The U.S. Supreme Court has never upheld viewpoint discrimination. … Such viewpoint discrimination violates both First Amendment rights of the client and the counselor … [the] government must not censor the viewpoint of any subject matter the client wishes to receive and what the counselor or therapist may provide.”

California therapist Joseph Nicolosi told The Epoch Times in an email, “In a client-therapist relationship, the client is in the driver’s seat. They set their own goals, which the therapist helps them achieve. Politicians have no business telling people that their therapy goals are illegal.

“Everyone should be free to choose a life consistent with their values … no government should bar access to another person’s choice to live consistent with their faith and their values.”

Medical Experts Divided

The American Psychological Association, in a report released in 2009, said therapies used to try to change sexual orientation can be harmful and that most do not succeed.

In a 2018 position statement on conversion therapy and LGBTQ patients, the American Psychiatric Association recommended that “ethical practitioners refrain from attempts to change individuals’ sexual orientation” and “respect the identities of those with diverse gender expressions.”

The psychiatric association said it encourages “psychotherapies which affirm individuals’ sexual orientations and gender identities.”

In a 2018 policy statement, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) stated, “Conversion therapies’ (or ‘reparative therapies’) are interventions purported to alter same-sex attractions or an individual’s gender expression with the specific aim to promote heterosexuality as a preferable outcome…

“These interventions are provided under the false premise that homosexuality and gender diverse identities are pathological. They are not; the absence of pathology means there is no need for conversion or any other like interventions.”

The American Psychiatric Association ceased classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973.

The AACAP statement warned that “there is evidence that ‘conversion therapies’ increase risk of causing or exacerbating mental health conditions in the very youth they purport to treat.”

Biden’s executive order and the current narrative of the professional psychiatric and psychological guilds upon which it is based; have received strong criticism from other medical quarters.

“The habitually misquoted American Psychological Association’s Task Force’s 2009 report (on page 43) stated specifically that modern change-allowing therapy ‘since 1978’ was ‘nonaversive,’ meaning free of infliction of pain or shame,” wrote Dr. Andre Van Mol, MD. in an email to The Epoch Times.

Van Mol, a Board-certified family physician and co-chair of the Committee on Adolescent Sexuality of the American College of Pediatricians, said the Task Force’s report explicitly states on pages 43 and 82, that research meeting scientific standards did not allow attributing harm or help, inefficacy or efficacy, to change-allowing therapy.

“Banning counseling choice for gender dysphoria condemns already at-risk sexual minority youth to experimental and unproven hormonal and surgical gender-affirming therapy (GAT), which permanently and prematurely medicalizes children for a condition that overwhelmingly resolves by adulthood,” he said.

Van Mol stated that GAT has not been proven safe and effective. It does not reduce suicides and is not the international standard of care for gender dysphoric minors.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) have introduced legislation that would allow adults who undergo body-altering gender-transition surgeries as minors to sue surgeons for damages for up to 30 years after the procedure.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Branch says it ‘derives its strength from the diversity of its force’

The Minnesota Army National Guard paid tens of thousands of dollars to advertise in an LGBT publication that has promoted transgenderism and “queer” identities among children.

The National Guard, which operates through the Department of Defense, between 2019 and 2022 awarded $76,951 to Minneapolis-based Lavender magazine, paying for advertising campaigns in an effort to “reach the LGBTQ community” and “lend credibility to the National Guard.” Between May 2021 and May 2022 alone, it paid $22,224 to the LGBT magazine, according to a federal government contract disclosure. The advertising campaign appears to be related to the Minnesota National Guard’s “LGBT Special Emphasis Council.”

The magazine focuses on LGBT issues, and has published multiple profiles on children who identify as transgender. As the National Guard was paying for advertising in October 2021, for example, Lavender published a profile of 11-year-old boy Hildie Edwards, who identifies as “trans nonbinary.” The magazine also publishes a monthly column written by transgender activist Ellie Krug, who in a 2016 piece compared using bathrooms that align with biological sex to the Holocaust. Krug ends the piece by offering to speak at the schools of “trans youth in Minnesota.”

The National Guard is not the only military organization to promote transgenderism under the Biden administration. Republican senators found that the military has subjected service members to nearly six million hours of diversity, equity, and inclusion training. The Army this year coached officers on “when to offer soldiers gender transition surgery,” while the Navy in May published a video that instructs sailors on “proper gender pronouns,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. After combat veterans criticized what they consider the military’s “woke” posturing, left-wing pundits called them racists.

Stephen Rocheford, the president of Lavender magazine, told the Free Beacon that “the reason the MN National Guard and Lavender magazine have a good relationship is because of statistics.” Rocheford pointed to a study commissioned by the magazine that indicated that LGBTQ individuals are overrepresented among the Minnesota National Guard. He said that the magazine has “received positive feedback from Minnesota National Guard leaders” and “from the LGBTQ+ community.”

A spokesperson for the Minnesota National Guard in a statement told the Free Beacon the branch “derives its strength from the diversity of its force” and “has seen an increase in LGBT+ service members.”

In addition to the paid advertisements, Lavender has provided extensive positive coverage for the Minnesota National Guard. The positive coverage is not part of the advertising contract.

The Free Beacon contacted the magazine to inquire as to whether their coverage of the guard was related to their business relationship.

In its 2021 contract with Lavender, the National Guard requires the magazine to ensure the branch is “not associated with drugs, alcohol, adult content, or sites that may damage brand reputation.”

The magazine has run pieces that allege a connection between BDSM sex and Christianity, positively portrayed an organization that distributes LGBT books to kindergartners, and promoted a group that pairs children with LGBT “mentors” without notifying their parents.

Another article in the June 2022 Pride Month issue of Lavender states, “I have been thinking about younger queer kids.” The piece, also by Krug, details the author’s experience as a transgender woman mentoring “queer” middle and high school students on gender and sexuality through a local school district. Krug called the activities “holy work.”

“We need to protect the kids,” Krug’s essay concludes. “It always has to be about the kids.”

The National Guard shares advertising space in Lavender with Planned Parenthood and “gaymortgage.com,” among other advertisers.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Carrie Sheffield, senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, said her organization has had to introduce a Women’s Bill of Rights, which defines what a woman is, in response to transgender ideology and a larger Marxist agenda that aims to destroy Western culture.

“Gender ideology is just one strand of a much bigger, radical, Marxist agenda, and that is critical theory,” she said. “So you’ve got critical race theory, critical gender theory, [and] critical class theory. That’s a bigger assault on freedom,” Sheffield told NTD on July 15 during Freedom Fest 2022.

“[Critical theory] originated in Germany at the Frankfurt School and it was to indoctrinate and to basically destroy Western civilization,” said Sheffield.

The Women’s Bill of Rights was necessary because basic scientific truths are under attack, said Sheffield, pointing to when the recently appointed Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would not define the word “woman.”

“I’m not a biologist,” Jackson said during her confirmation hearing.

“[Jackson] knew it was a hornet’s nest, no matter what she said, that it would be just torn to shreds. So she played it very cautiously. And I think that that’s unfortunate because it just showed how the left has cowed anyone from being able to just speak the most basic commonsense,” said Sheffield.

“The polling is overwhelmingly in our favor, that people say, ‘we reject allowing biological men to compete in biological female sports,’” added Sheffield.

Sheffield said she is not against anyone identifying as they wish in their personal life, but there are biological differences that should be respected, especially in law.

“There are biological realities for women, and they put us at a physical disadvantage to biological men. And the fact that we have to spell this out, I think, is unfortunate,” said Sheffield.

“The definition of what it means to be a woman is under attack, the definition of what it means to be a mother is under attack, in terms of the protections for women and girls that we have been fighting for,” said Sheffield.

Proposed Laws Could Have Opposite Results

Laws under Title IX were created to protect women but are now in jeopardy, she said.

“And now they’re under assault because some people want to allow biological men to come in and take away scholarships and championships and opportunities, and we believe that it’s counter to science and it’s counter to the law,” said Sheffield.

The transgender issue is bringing conservatives and some on the left together, said Sheffield, with the progressive Women’s Liberation Front working with Sheffield’s conservative Independent Women’s Forum.

Because transgender male prison inmates are allowed to self-identify as women and have carried out assaults, Sheffield said, “We see this as an assault on the basic safety and the civil rights of biological women to have places where we are protected, where we have equal protection under the law where civil rights were not violated.”

Democrats in Congress led by Chairwoman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) are once again pushing to change the Constitution and add the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that they say would ensure women’s rights. But conservatives like Sheffield say the move will harm biological women and create unfairness in areas including sports and reproduction, giving transgender males an advantage.

“As women leaders in Congress, we are here today—all these decades later—still fighting this same battle. We won’t stop until we win, when the ERA is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” said Maloney during a speech on the anniversary of the ERA on March 22.

However, Sheffield said attorney and Eagle Forum founder, Phyllis Schlafly, fought against the ERA when it was first introduced because it would achieve the opposite of what it proposes.

“What Phyllis and conservatives said at that time was that if you put this into place, you’re actually going to erase women, you’re going to force biological women into the draft, you’re going to allow men into women’s bathrooms, because it’s not going to recognize that there are actual biological distinctions,” said Sheffield.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The first major peer-reviewed study of monkeypox infections has found that the virus is primarily being transmitted through the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men in the United States and around the world.

The Journal of New England Medicine on Thursday published a study that looked at monkeypox infection across 16 countries between April and June, when cases began to emerge in countries outside of Africa.

The study reported on 528 infections diagnosed between April 27 and June 24, of which 98 percent were in gay or bisexual men with a median age of 38. Of these cases, 95 percent of the infections were suspected to have been transmitted through sexual activity—41 percent also had HIV.

Disease experts and officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) don’t consider monkeypox a sexually transmitted infection but have always said it could be transmitted through intimate contact, such as sex. It can also be spread by close contact and even infected clothing and bedding.

Until this year, monkeypox virus infection in humans has been rare outside of Africa, where it is endemic but mostly spread from animals. But there are now more than 16,000 cases worldwide in countries that mostly have not historically had monkeypox, according to the CDC.

Most of the cases appear to be in North America and Western Europe, where some of the first cases were linked to major LGBT events in Spain and Belgium, considered ground zero for facilitating transmission of the virus.

The leading theory among disease experts is that the monkeypox virus was sexually transmitted at those events.

An uptick in recent U.S. cases suggests transmission occurred at the tail end of Pride Month in late June and early July, based on the study finding that incubation is between three and 20 days (usually seven days).

Former Trump Health Officials Blame CDC

CDC officials were hesitant to recommend canceling marquee U.S. LGBT events, similar to the super spreading events in Europe that occurred the month prior.

LGBT event organizers were also treading carefully in the spring, wanting to avoid stigmatizing the LGBT community. U.S. health officials opted instead to boost targeted messaging to warn gay and bisexual men, who were deemed most at risk.

But officials should have done more, says Dr. Paul Alexander, a former Trump administration health official and researcher.

“All this needed was leadership saying no skin to skin contact, no anal sex, no sex, none for a few weeks and we would have helped this high risk group, but no, it’s political games and now the low-risk general heterosexual population is at risk especially from bisexual males,” Alexander wrote in a blog post.

The blog post also included a Twitter thread by a gay U.S. man recounting in graphic detail his experience with contracting monkeypox during an orgy in Palm Springs.

Alexander expressed concern that bisexual men could facilitate the spreading of the monkeypox virus outside of the LGBT community to heterosexuals. In fact, the CDC has said they know of eight cases in women and two new cases in children—one a toddler and the other an infant, BBC News reported.

“Heterosexuals could spread this if one partner is infected and there is rough abrasive sex that involves tearing of tissue,” Alexander added.

“This is not about being ‘gay,’ the virus is transmitted in bodily fluids and infected pustules and lesions in the infected person, through any tears on the skin or tissue e.g. rectal micro lesions etc,” he continued. “If heterosexuals engage in anal sex and one is infected with monkeypox or another [sexually transmitted disease], the other will get infected if there is tissue tearing.”

Although monkeypox infection generally clears up within a couple of weeks without the need for medical treatment, it has hospitalized some who experience severe anorectal pain, severe sore throats, and acute kidney injury.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

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.

Ms. DeVos:

Thanks so much, Jan.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Vets on Duty chairman Jason Church is ‘laser-focused’ on ‘advocating for a strong national defense’

A coalition of veterans dedicated to strengthening America’s military has been uniformly slammed as racist by their critics. It’s a surprisingly callous take on a group chaired by a Purple Heart recipient who lost both his legs in Afghanistan.

Jason Church, a retired U.S. Army captain, joined with other veterans of the war on terror to ensure the United States retains military supremacy. Their group, Veterans on Duty, is warning that progressive bureaucrats have taken control of the armed forces and are forcing troops to sit through diversity, equity, and inclusion seminars when they should be training for battle. The newly formed nonprofit aims to reverse this trend by recruiting veterans to leadership roles and supporting lawmakers and policies that will help keep the U.S. military battle-ready.

To mark the group’s launch, Church penned a New York Post op-ed laying out these problems and enumerating Veterans on Duty’s proposed solutions. Critics immediately accused him of racism.

The progressive group VoteVets tweeted that Church “makes the same arguments that were made against integration over 70 years ago.” VoteVets, which is  chaired by Jon Soltz, who still has both of his legs, has spent tens of millions of dollars backing Democratic candidates, also slammed Church as a “loser congressional candidate.” Church entered a 2020 special congressional election in Wisconsin in an effort to continue serving his country “even though the Taliban took my legs.”

VoteVets CEO Janessa Goldbeck, who also has both of her legs, struck a similarly harsh note, calling Vets on Duty members “assholes” after saying, “50 years ago these people would have been mad about racial integration. Today they are mad about women and LGBT people in the military.”

At no point in Church’s Post piece does he call for the military to exclude soldiers based on race or sexual orientation. But he isn’t surprised by the reaction to Veterans on Duty’s launch.

“The radical left has long used baseless accusations of bigotry to browbeat dissenters as it bends American institutions to its will,” Church told the Washington Free Beacon. “This tired tactic should be ignored. We are laser-focused on our mission of advocating for a strong national defense and combating progressives’ efforts to corrode the military from within.”

As Church points out, that corrosion couldn’t come at a worse time. In his Post piece, he notes that Iran is close to obtaining nuclear weapons, and the Chinese Navy last year “surpassed our own as the world’s largest,” all while Russia is marching its armies through Ukraine.

Members of the media were also quick to criticize Church’s piece.

“I’m just woke enough to say you … are a fucking idiot,” MSNBC pundit Malcom Nance tweeted at Church. Nance, who tweeted “#DealWithIt” after terrorists killed 13 U.S. soldiers outside Kabul Airport in Afghanistan last summer, called Church “another pro-Trump Summer Soldier begging to be given a public paycheck for exhibiting asshattery & beclownment  above and beyond the Call of Duty.”

“Just imagine how all these right-wingers would have reacted with horror if they had been around when Harry Truman desegregated the military,” tweeted Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist who has not served in the military. “Now that was woke!”

Jeremy C. Hunt, a black military veteran who serves on Veterans on Duty’s board, quickly rebuffed Boot’s accusation. “We care about a military that wins,” Hunt wrote. “If you want an example of modern segregation in the military, look no further than the Biden administration’s racist DEI protocols that you defend.”

Those protocols include instructional videos that teach Navy cadets how to use gender pronouns, and “gender identity” training for Green Berets, the Free Beacon originally reported.

Still, Boot tells the Free Beacon that he stands by his claim “that the right-wingers who today decry the supposedly ‘woke’ military would have opposed the integration of the military in 1948.”

“How do I know? Because that was the conservative position back then,” said Boot, adding that “this whole ‘Vets on Duty’ exercise looks to be mere partisan politics designed to bash Democrats—not a serious attempt to protect the military.”

Jay Kramer, executive director of Veterans on Duty, says that politics is precisely what puts the military at risk.

“At a time of growing threats to the United States, progressive ideologues are pushing radical policies that undermine the men and women of our military,” Kramer told the Free Beacon. “While out-of-touch commentators focus more on messaging than substance, we are joining with like-minded veterans nationwide to do the hard work to ensure our military remains lethal and effective.”

VoteVets and Goldbeck did not return Free Beacon requests for comment. Nance could not be reached for comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

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.”

One of the methods used to expand administrative power has been the declaration of government health emergencies, including the pandemic health emergency, the climate health emergency, the racism health emergency, and the “gun violence” health crisis.

“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.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

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 Post op-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 Beacon report. 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.

READ MORE: I Forced a Bot to Read 1,000 Max Boot Columns and Write a Max Boot Column of Its Own

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The State Department helped fund a film festival in September that featured movies depicting drag queens, incest, and pedophilia, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Queer Lisboa, an international queer film festival held in Portugal, was given $10,000 as part of the Biden administration’s push to “support LGBTQ+ and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Accessibility efforts” abroad, according to a State Department spokeswoman. The festival’s offerings included P.S. Burn This Letter Please, a documentary about drag culture in post-war New York City, Saint-Narcisse, a film about incestuous twins, and Minyan, a movie about a 17-year-old Jewish boy who leaves his parents to explore New York City’s gay scene and eventually has sex with an adult bartender.

The event was one of several bankrolled by taxpayers to promote LGBT acceptance abroad. In the last year, the State Department funded the “first gender and sexuality library in Lebanon,” provided diversity and inclusion consulting to Latin American police forces, and hosted a transgender recognition webinar in Norway, according to an interagency report. The department said locals sometimes pushed back against LGBT promotion, perceiving it as “Western,” “imported,” or “against cultural or religious values.”

The festival also screened a biopic of Harvey Milk, the United States’ first openly gay elected official. Milk, a city official in San Francisco during the 1950s, once dated a 16-year-old boy while Milk was in his 30s. He also tried to get another teenage boy to run away from home to live with him, according to a biography of the politician.

Top officials at the U.S. Embassy in Portugal launched the event as part of the State Department’s effort to implement resident Joe Biden’s “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons Around the World.” The head of the embassy expressed gratitude and said she was “very happy” to support the festival as part of its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

A spokeswoman for the State Department told the Free Beacon their grant also paid for high-profile director and Democratic donor Gus Van Sant to speak at the event and facilitated travel to the luxurious island chain on which it was held. In its initial communication, the department declined to provide a dollar amount for the festival grant.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill to codify same-sex marriage into law.

The Democrat-controlled lower house passed the Respect for Marriage Act (H.R. 8404), a bill that codifies same-sex marriage into U.S. law, with a bipartisan 267–157 vote; 47 House Republicans backed the bill. The bill now heads to the Senate, where 10 Republican votes are needed to overcome the filibuster threshold.

“Specifically, the bill repeals and replaces provisions that define, for purposes of federal law, marriage as between a man and a woman and spouse as a person of the opposite sex with provisions that recognize any marriage that is valid under state law,” reads the bill’s summary on Congress’s website.

“The bill also repeals and replaces provisions that do not require states to recognize same-sex marriages from other states with provisions that prohibit the denial of full faith and credit or any right or claim relating to out-of-state marriages on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin,” the bill’s summary continued.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) introduced the bill on July 18.

The passage of the bill came a month after the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (pdf), a decision that overturned the 1981 landmark abortion decision, Roe v. Wade. The highest court opined in Dobbs that decisions affected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment should be “reconsidered.”

In his concurring opinion to Dobbs’s majority ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas said that “‘substantive due process’ is an oxymoron that lack[s] any basis in the Constitution” and that “the Due Process Clause does not secure any substantive rights.”

For this reason, Thomas said that “in future cases, [the justices] should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” and that “because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Nadler takes the position that same-sex marriage is a “fundamental right” that was targeted by the Supreme Court.

“Three weeks ago, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court not only repealed Roe v. Wade and walked back 50 years of precedent, it signaled that other rights, like the right to same-sex marriage, are next on the chopping block,” said Nadler in a July 18 press release.

“As this Court may take aim at other fundamental rights, we cannot sit idly by as the hard-earned gains of the Equality movement are systematically eroded. If Justice Thomas’s concurrence teaches anything it’s that we cannot let your guard down or the rights and freedoms that we have come to cherish will vanish into a cloud of radical ideology and dubious legal reasoning,” Nadler continued.

Over the last weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) publicly reaffirmed his stance that policies on issues such as gay marriage and abortion should be left to state legislatures to shape. 

Cruz previously voiced opposition to Obergefell v. Hodges (pdf), the 2015 Supreme Court decision in which the 5–4 majority ruled that the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment guarantee the fundamental right to marry to same-sex couples.

“Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history,” Cruz told podcast Verdict+. “In Obergefell, the court said, ‘no, we know better than you guys do,’ and now every state must sanction and permit gay marriage. I think that decision was clearly wrong when it was decided. It was the court overreaching.”

“And had the court not rolled Obergefell, the democratic process would continue to operate: that if you believe that gay marriage was a good idea, the way the Constitution is set up for you to advance that position is to convince your fellow citizens. And if you succeeded in convincing your fellow citizens, then your state would change the laws to reflect those views,” the senator added.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Moderate Democrats will play a key role in the coming midterm election and very likely handle the U.S. House to the Republicans, analysts said.

The main reason for the rebelling moderates is President Joe Biden’s policies.

“This [moderate voting] base is becoming increasingly disenchanted with what seems to be the ongoing failures of the Biden administration on major party platforms such as rising inflation, gas prices, and a pretty weak economy,” Jamie Wright, a political pundit at The Wright Law Firm, told The Epoch Times.

Josh Wilson, a political consultant and ex-aide to former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, shared the view that the state of the economy under Biden is a significant factor in the shift.

Besides this, Wilson also pointed out that the historical pattern of midterm elections for the party of the president will also contribute.

“Simply based on U.S. electoral history, where the president’s political party tends to suffer major losses during the first midterm of the presidential term, it is highly likely that Republicans will see major gains in the House of Representatives,” he said.

Progressive Movement Pushing Moderates Away

For over a decade, progressive activists have been pushing the political spectrum in the United States to the left in various ways, from woke textbooks in the education system to protests on the streets.

As a result, some moderate Democrats found themself isolated and being pushed out.

Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who was a liberal, shared a meme on April 28 explaining how the progressive movement has made him closer to the conservative side. The meme shows the political left moving away from the centers since 2008 while the center and right remaining stationary. As a result, he falls into the area close to the conservative without even changing his political stance.

The meme was liked by over 1.5 million users after Musk shared it on his Twitter account.

Biden, who mainly posed as a moderate during his campaign, followed the progressive movement closely after he came to the White House and adopted policies from the woke agenda.

That deepened the discontent among moderates.

A major factor was the extreme lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates related to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, outbreak.

“You just have one public official who’s never been elected … no scientific citation for any of these mandates, simply telling Americans: ‘do what you’re told,’” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent Democrat, criticized the policies during an interview with The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington on Jan. 23.

The mandates were “all designed to instill fear and confusion in Americans, and it’s just a catastrophic exercise in bad government and manipulation,” he added.

Biden’s Energy Policies and Soaring Gas Price

Another area that moderate Democrats feel upset about is the economic performance during Biden’s presidency, especially the rising inflation and gas prices.

According to CNBC’s All-America Survey, Biden’s economic approval rating dropped 5 points from April’s survey to 30 percent. His approval of the overall handling of the presidency dropped to 36 percent. Of the 800 people across the nation polled by CNBC, 51 percent believe Biden’s efforts to fight inflation are making no difference, and 30 percent think the measures are actually hurting.

The Biden administration has strictly adhered to its climate crisis agenda, rejecting boosting domestic energy production and insisting people should buy electric vehicles as an alternative option amid high gas prices.

However, electric vehicles are unaffordable for many families.

A Consumer Reports survey shows that 52 percent of people say they would not buy an electric vehicle because the costs of buying and maintaining them are too high.

How Moderate Democrats May Act in Midterms

Though the moderates are not as popular in the mainstream media or on some politicians’ priority agendas, they still make up the majority of Democrats, Wright said.

“There is a real power struggle between the moderates and the extreme left within the party. However, moderates still make up the majority,” she said.

She believes it’s important for the Democrat candidates to appeal to the moderate voting base to ensure they don’t leave the party over failed policies.

Wilson believes the moderates will act in two ways—either they won’t show up or vote Republican—and will cost the Democrat Party heavily.

“Democrat members of the Congress seem to be trending more to the left but Democrat voters are not. To be more specific, Democrats in D.C. seem to be putting social issues ahead of economic issues. [However,] most voters want the government to focus on things that impact them daily,” he said.

“It’s more likely that moderate Democrat voters will not vote in the midterm if [they are] extremely fed up, rather than cast a ballot for a Republican,” he said. “If the Republican candidate in those swing districts is also a moderate, they may be able to bring Democrat voters across the line.”

“By not showing up and voting for the Democrat, Democrat voters will absolutely be protesting the current situation and indirectly helping Republicans take control,” he added.

The situation is also likely to put moderate Democrat candidates in harm’s way because “they will be painted as extreme liberals during the campaigns” under the current political climate, Wilson stated.

Masooma Haq and Jack Phillips contributed to the report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The controversial male-to-female transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has been nominated for NCAA’s Woman of the Year.

The award “honors the academic achievements, athletics excellence, community service and leadership of graduating female college athletes,” according to the NCAA’s website. Since it was established in 1991, there has never been a biological male nominee. Thomas beat out around 219,000 biological female competitors for the nomination.

Lia, formerly William, began transitioning in 2019 before the swimmer’s junior year at the University of Pennsylvania after years of competing as a man. Thomas gained national spotlight after winning the Women’s Division I Swimming and Diving Championships 500-yard freestyle event in March, leaping from a 65th ranking as a man to the first place spot as a woman and breaking Ivy League records.

Nearly 60 percent of Americans believe biological males should not be allowed to compete in collegiate or professional women’s sports, according to a June Washington Post poll.

In January, the NCAA Board of Governors mirrored the International Olympic Committee’s guidance on trans athletes, allowing the governing bodies of sports to make their own gender-qualifying rules. FINA, the international water sports federation, had not yet announced their new transgender policies by the time Thomas was permitted to compete and erase records set by outstanding biological women.

The Woman of the Year nominee pool will eventually be narrowed to 30 finalists, with the winner selected in January. Each NCAA member school has the opportunity to nominate up to two athletes for the honor, though a second has to be an “international student-athlete or student-athlete of color.”

The NCAA selects the Woman of the Year based on athletic and academic performance as well as a personal statement and service and leadership work. Thomas holds a national title, so his athletics score is the highest possible on the selection scale.

The service and leadership section asks nominees to list special recognitions received. Thomas has been mentioned in hundreds of news articles since 2019 and was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated earlier this year.

Thomas’s Olympic dreams were dashed last month when FINA banned post-puberty male-to-female transitioners from competing as women. Thomas now plans to attend law school and become a civil rights attorney, citing experiences with gender discrimination.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The party has spent millions to nominate radicals across the country

The Democratic Party is attempting to help nominate a journalist with ties to salacious drag queens and Neo-Nazi “Jew hunters,” according to NBC News. Arizona Democrats last week circulated a press release intended to undermine Karrin Taylor Robson, the GOP gubernatorial candidate running against Kari Lake, a longtime news anchor and Democratic donor who volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008.

Election observers correctly assumed that the reason Democrats were attacking Robson was to boost Lake’s chances of winning the Republican nomination for governor. Given her close ties to the drag queen and Neo-Nazi communities, Lake is presumably the candidate Democrats would prefer to face in November. The party pursued a similar strategy in 2016 by helping Donald Trump win the GOP presidential nomination. Alas, that didn’t work out as they’d hoped.

Trump endorsed Lake last year despite her 2017 comments denouncing his performance at a press conference following the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. Lake told her Facebook followers that Trump “showed absolutely no self-control” during the press conference, which she described as “a train crash … a real $hit$how.” She is currently leading the primary field by 8.5 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Arizona holds its primary on August 2.

Ironically, Lake is now attracting support from some of the same Neo-Nazi types responsible for the Charlottesville rally. In August 2021, she posed for a photo at a campaign event with Ethan Schmidt-Crockett and Greyson Arnold, renowned icons of incel racism. Schmidt-Crockett, for example, recently posted a video in which he announced his plan to “celebrate white history and Christian heritage [by] bringing back some good old Jew hunting.” Arnold, meanwhile, has repeatedly defended Adolf Hitler and argued that the United States fought on the wrong side in World War II.

Lake has also been accused of hypocrisy for her recently established opposition to drag queens. The candidate, who has attacked drag queens as dangerous to children, reportedly maintained a close friendship with a prominent Arizona drag queen named Richard Stevens, aka Barbra Seville. “I’ve performed for Kari’s birthday, I’ve performed in her home (with children present,) and I’ve performed for her at some of the seediest bars in Phoenix,” Stevens wrote on Facebook last month.

Arizona is not the only state in which Democrats have meddled in the Republican primary by backing the most controversial GOP candidate. They helped Doug Mastriano win the GOP gubernatorial nomination in Pennsylvania by running ads touting his pro-Trump credentials. In Illinois, the state’s billionaire governor J.B. Pritzker (D., Ill.) and the Democratic Governors Association spent $30 million attacking Richard Irvin, a moderate black Republican, to spoil his chances of winning the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

The party has even meddled in House primaries by supporting radical candidates. Nancy Pelosi’s House Majority PAC attempted to defeat Rep. David Valadao (R., Calif.), who voted to impeach Trump, by boosting his pro-Trump primary opponent. It didn’t work, but the party’s efforts have been widely criticized. For all their wailing and moaning about the democracy being under assault, Democrats have been actively seeking to promote Kari Lake and Republican candidates who embraced the campaign to overturn the 2020 election.

Good luck!

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has said that the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage was “clearly wrong.”

“Obergefell, like Roe versus Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history,” Cruz told podcast Verdict+. “In Obergefell, the court said, ‘no, we know better than you guys do,’ and now every state must sanction and permit gay marriage. I think that decision was clearly wrong when it was decided. It was the court overreaching,”

Cruz was referring to Obergefell v. Hodges (pdf), the 2015 Supreme Court decision in which the 5–4 majority ruled that the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee the fundamental right to marry to same-sex couples.

The Texas senator takes the position that policies on issues such as gay marriage and abortion should be left to state legislatures to shape.

“Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Obergefell that were moving—some states were moving to allow gay marriage, other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that the states were adopting,” Cruz said.

“And had the court not rolled Obergefell, the democratic process would continue to operate: that if you believe that gay marriage was a good idea, the way the Constitution is set up for you to advance that position is to convince your fellow citizens. And if you succeeded in convincing your fellow citizens, then your state would change the laws to reflect those views,” the senator continued.

The lawmaker’s comments come weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 ruling from the highest court that legalized abortion across the nation, in its June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (pdf).

Cruz, in reference to the concern of court overreach with the Obergefell and Roe decisions, shadowed Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in Dobbs that the highest court should reconsider cases such as Obergefell that are associated with the doctrine of substantive due process.

In his concurring opinion to the majority ruling, Thomas said that “‘substantive due process’ is an oxymoron that lack[s] any basis in the Constitution” and that “the Due Process Clause does not secure any substantive rights.”

For this reason, Thomas said that “in future cases, [the justices] should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” and that “because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Cruz’s comments are not the first time the senator has expressed opposition to the highest’s court’s ruling on same-sex marriage.

In 2015, the then-candidate in the Republican primaries said his opposition to the decision would be “front and center” in his presidential campaign.

“That is very much front and center something I intend to campaign on,” he told NPR in 2015.

“And marriage and religious liberty are going to be integral, I believe, to motivating the American people to come out and vote for what’s, ultimately, restoring our constitutional system,” Cruz said.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

‘This government entity believes that it can shut a citizen out of public life entirely if he challenges them, their decisions, or their authority,’ says lawyer

A Maine parent is suing his local school board after he was banned from district property for speaking out against school library books that promote transgenderism and pornography.

In the wake of those complaints, Shawn McBreairty received a criminal trespass notice from the school district, according to a copy of the notice and the lawsuit. The Maine father of two daughters, who has campaigned against sexualized lesson plans in public schools, said during an April school board meeting that the books were “grooming students on premature sexual ideology,” referencing a pornographic book the library marked as appropriate for all age groups.

The school board demanded that McBreairty leave for playing a recording of a conversation between him and Chairman Heath Miller, saying his descriptions of the books involved “vulgarity and obscenity.” McBreairty said government-run school libraries should not offer the books, which the school board deemed too inappropriate to discuss among adults, to minors.

“I’m not anti-LGBTQ,” McBreairty told the Washington Free Beacon. “I’m not anti-anything, but when somebody tries to use our tax dollars to indoctrinate kids with hypersexual materials, to me, that’s nonsense.”

The Hampden, Maine, school district is one of many nationwide to face pushback from parents over sexual library books. Florida parents in April demanded the Osceola and Orange County school boards remove from the library controversial books such as Gender Queer, the story of a person with “e/em/eir” pronouns, which parents said included “pornographic” details. A Virginia Beach, Va., school district removed Gender Queer and similar books from its libraries after parents complained in May. Parents in Frisco, Texas, also protested sexually explicit books in their children’s school libraries.

McBreairty raised concerns about the district’s Reads Three Reading Challenge, which awards K-12 students for reading books like All Boys Aren’t Blue, which has been removed from libraries in at least eight states for concerns about “sexually graphic material, including descriptions of queer sex,” and Hurricane Child, in which a 12-year-old girl falls in love with another girl.

The criminal trespass notice against McBreairty, which bans him from all virtual and in-person school-related meetings, violates his First Amendment rights, according to the lawsuit. The district should let McBreairty express his ideas and allow the community to judge the books for themselves, said Marc Randazza, who is representing McBreairty in the U.S. District Court for Maine.

“This government entity believes that it can shut a citizen out of public life entirely if he challenges them, their decisions, or their authority,” Randazza told the Free Beacon. “It shouldn’t matter what he’s advocating for. If you can’t advocate your position before the government without being told you’re now locked out of public life, because you challenged us, well, that’s not what freedom is.”

In the recording McBreairty played at the April board meeting, Miller justified pornographic excerpts of a library book in the Hampden High School library, saying, “If you were to read it in the context of the whole book, it would have a different meaning.” The board cited the incident to justify the criminal trespass notice, but no official policy against playing a video or recording during a school board meeting exists, the lawsuit states. Randazza said the board tried to add limitations to its policies to stop McBreairty from criticizing the library books.

The library at the district’s Reeds Brook Middle School offers The Other Boy, a book about a 12-year-old boy who was born a girl and tries to conceal that he is transgender when his family moves towns; Middle School’s A Drag: You Better Werk, the story of a young gay entrepreneur who starts his own junior talent agency with a 13-year-old aspiring drag queen as his first client; and Rick, a book about a boy who joins a “Rainbow Spectrum club, where kids of many genders and identities can express themselves.” It also offers It’s Perfectly Normal: A Book About Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, which McBreairty read at a different school board meeting.

Another district library, Leroy H. Smith Elementary School, includes My Maddy, in which a child celebrates her “genderfluid” parent who is neither a mom nor a dad; My Rainbow, in which a mom “creates the perfect rainbow-colored wig for her transgender daughter”; and Julián Is a Mermaid, about a boy who wants to dress as a beautiful mermaid. It also offers Rise Up: The Art of Protest, which teaches children to protest for “gender equality, civil rights, LGBT rights, refugee and immigrant rights, peace, and the environment.”

“Eight-year-old kids who don’t know how to spell ‘blue’ are basically being asked to do art for protests,” McBreairty said.

The Regional School Unit #22 school district and 2022 Maine Teacher of the Year Kelsey Stoyanova, who crafted the Reads Three program, have appealed to “intellectual freedom” in defense of the library books. But McBreairty said the intellectual freedom argument is a Trojan horse for the Maine Department of Education’s radical agenda.

“Their program is to indoctrinate kids while they’re young without parental permission,” he said. “Don’t try to force that stuff on me or my daughters with my tax dollars.”

Regional School Unit #22 did not respond to a request for comment. Miller did not respond to a request for comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

“Handmaid’s Tale references turn a blind eye to the centuries of oppression people of color … have faced”

A pro-abortion activist group is urging protesters to quit making references to The Handmaid’s Tale, arguing allusions to the book are insensitive to the oppression of minorities. 

“You can’t wear people’s real oppression as a costume. Throw the red cloaks away,” REPRO Rising Virginia said Thursday. “Handmaid’s Tale references turn a blind eye to the centuries of oppression people of color, specifically Black, brown, and indigenous women, have faced regarding their reproductive rights.”

5. You can’t wear people’s real oppression as a costume. Throw the red cloaks away.

Handmaid’s Tale references turn a blind eye to the centuries of oppression people of color, specifically Black, brown, and indigenous women, have faced regarding their reproductive rights. pic.twitter.com/ZHvK1lK8rV

— REPRO Rising Virginia (@REPRORising_VA) July 14, 2022

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel written in 1985, depicts a future in which women have been enslaved by a theocratic government in the United States. Abortion activists have long used the book as a symbol of their movement supporting unrestricted elective abortions, often dressing up in the red costumes donned by the novel’s protagonists. 

REPRO Rising Virginia also urges activists to swap references to “women” for “people” on protest signs to avoid excluding transgender people. 

“It is exclusionary to only center cisgender women in pro-abortion messaging,” the group said. “Not all people who can get pregnant identify as women.”

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, abortion activists have mobilized across the country to protest the ruling. Despite their efforts, very few Americans list abortion as their top issue. In a June Gallup poll, only 1 percent of respondents cited abortion as the most important issue facing the country.

REPRO Rising Virginia rebranded earlier this year after the national lobbying organization NARAL Pro-Choice America disbanded its state chapters to better pursue federal advocacy. The group told Virginia Mercury that they are pivoting to focus on providing transportation to abortion appointments and opening new clinics. 

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

America’s progressive elites have transitioned from “Follow the Science” to “Science is Violence.”

Their senior-most judges will not define what a woman is, nor will their celebrated scholars acknowledge that only a woman can give birth. In fact, to even assert the latter, in our betters’ view, is to render one a dangerous societal menace.

That is one of the takeaways from the recent dumbfounding exchange between Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and U.C.–Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the legal consequences of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the question of abortion to the states.

The back-and-forth, provoked in part by Bridges’ unwillingness under earlier questioning to refer to those who are pregnant as “women,” went as follows:

Hawley: “Professor Bridges … you’ve referred to ‘people with the capacity for pregnancy.’ Would that be women?”

Bridges: “Many women, cis-women have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis-women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy, as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.”

Hawley: “So this [abortion] isn’t really a women’s rights issue …”

Bridges: “We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.”

Hawley: “Your view is, is that the core of this right, then, is about what?”

Bridges: “I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.”

Hawley: “Wow, you’re saying that I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?”

Bridges: “I want to note that one out of five transgender persons have attempted suicide …”

Hawley: “Because of my line of questioning? So we can’t talk about it?”

Bridges: “Because denying that trans people exist, and pretending not to know that they exist …”

Hawley: “I’m denying that trans people exist by asking you if you’re talking about women having pregnancies?”

Bridges [After repeatedly interrupting Hawley’s question with “Are you?”]: “Do you believe that men can get pregnant?”

Hawley: “No, I don’t think men can get pregnant.”

Bridges: “So you are denying that trans people exist.”

The exchange reflected a level of condescension, arrogance, and bad faith on the part of Bridges—an apparent radical left academic and activist who has spent much of her career (pdf) teaching on critical race theory and “reproductive justice”—that was nearly as striking as its substance.

What Bridges illustrated is that progressivism requires one to ignore science, our basic humanity, and what we know to be true, and subordinate it all to a secular regressive anti-faith, of which radical gender ideology has become a sacred and integral part.

Should one dare to call out the insanity of being unwilling to recognize that women and solely women can bear children, such dissent must be treated as hateful, and the dissenters cast as dangerous. To recognize reality must not be permitted. “Submit or you are a transphobe with blood on your hands,” the professor tells us.

This tactic is both cheap and low, but its brazen usage here constituted something of a public service. It made clear that devotees of radical gender ideology cannot debate openly and honestly. When challenged, they drip with contempt, dodge, and resort to ad hominem. This is the best that one can expect from the best they have: academics with the most sterling of credentials, hand-picked by U.S. senators to best represent their position.

The notion that words with which the left disagrees—or truths that if broadly acknowledged would hamper their agenda and undermine their power and privilege—constitute violence, and that therefore those articulating them must be chastised if not punished using force of law or worse, of course arises from the academy. And we are all living on the campus now.

This can be seen in the whole-of-ruling class War on Wrongthink under which we are currently suffering, whereby those dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy over draconian coronavirus policies, critical race theory indoctrination in schools, on matters of election integrity, immigration, or climate are targeted for censorship and silencing if not treated as domestic terror threats by the world’s most powerful national security and intelligence apparatus.

As conditions in America get worse, and the ruling class’s worldview grows ever more radical, expect the censorship to get worse.

What else can you do when the most ardent adherents of your political movement reject biological sex, promote abortion up to the point of birth (infanticide), celebrate drag queen story hour, indoctrinate kids into believing America is a bastion of racist evil, support the freeing of violent criminals while disarming the law-abiding and throwing the book at them should they seek to defend themselves, throw wide open our borders, and cripple the energy industry on which modern life and prosperity relies—and all to predictable disastrous effect?

For normal people seeking a normal society, this is indefensible. Silencing and punishing the ever-growing chorus of critics is the only option.

This is precisely why it’s incumbent upon those who reject such a worldview to speak ever more openly, honestly, and boldly. To remain silent in the face of such crybullies is to be complicit in their totalitarian effort—totalitarian in the sense of its expansive aspiration to control every aspect of our society, starting with our speech, and in the means used to achieve it.

For progressives, it’s clear that every norm and civilizational pillar must be transgressed.

Their fragility is best demonstrated in their every effort to stop you from calling them out on it.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A prominent LGBT activist group on Wednesday argued that social media platforms are not “safe” for “LGBTQ users” and called for increased censorship of right-wing content as a remedy. 

GLAAD, an NGO that formally collaborates with Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok and works to “accelerate acceptance” of the “LGBTQ community,” called on tech companies to amend their algorithms so they don’t “amplify harmful content, extremism and hate.” GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis singled out narratives advocated by “right wing media and politicians” as threats warranting content moderation. The group urged social media companies to prohibit individuals from referring to transgender individuals by their biological pronouns and using their pre-transition names. 

GLAAD issued its call for censorship in its annual “Social Media Safety Index” report, which “provides recommendations for the industry at large and reports on LGBTQ user safety across the five major social media platforms.”

“While Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and other platforms must balance concerns around free expression,” GLAAD said in the report, “it cannot be stated strongly enough that social media platforms must take more meaningful and aggressive action to protect the safety of their LGBTQ users and to staunch the epidemic of hate, falsehoods, and extremism.”

According to GLAAD, opposition to giving hormone treatment and puberty blockers to children qualifies as the “promotion of falsehoods” and “disinformation.”

The organization called people who opposed them on social media “troll-cum-pundits” and accused artificial intelligence of being biased against “LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities.”

Psychologist Jordan Peterson was suspended from Twitter last month after he referred to female-to-male transgender actor Elliot Page as “Ellen,” the celebrity’s former name. Several other influential conservative accounts have been suspended for questioning gender ideology. GLAAD claims that gay and transgender people are censored disproportionately on social media.

Every social media platform rated by GLAAD in the report scored under 50 on a scale of 100 for “LGBTQ safety.” Instagram scored the highest and TikTok the lowest. One category used to determine how safe a website was for gay people is whether it had a dedicated feature for users to list their pronouns on their profiles.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

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.

Pourquoi pas?

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) July 13, 2022

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?”

BIDEN: “Read the polls! Read the polls, Jack! You guys are all the same.” pic.twitter.com/e0G3Sfufwm

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 12, 2022

Related:

Conservative Anti-Trump Magazine The Weekly Standard Announces Closure

If Biden were to run for re-election in 2024, he’d start his second term at the age of 82, smashing presidential age records.

Democrats have quietly circulated concerns about his age and unpopularity.

Kristol repeated his desire for Biden to eschew a 2024 re-election campaign in a subsequent tweet.

A lively (I thought!) podcast with @SykesCharlie.

We discuss just how (predictably) dangerous Trump proved to be, and the failure of Republicans and conservatives to come to grips with this.

Bonus: I make the case for Biden announcing he’s one and done.https://t.co/Ux5LubuqpN

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) July 13, 2022

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.

Isn’t it funny how quickly the Democrats revert to their racist roots when a Black conservative upsets them?

For voicing his legal acumen, Justice Clarence Thomas has been on the receiving end of threats, been called “Uncle Clarence,” was accused of being an angry black man by Hillary Clinton, and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lead a crowd to the chant of “F#ck Clarence.”

All of this disgusting hate has been directed at this man for failing to sit down, shut up, and do as he’s been told. It’s what the Democrats have come to expect from Black America.

Just like the abusive father who shows his true colors when angry, the Democrats have just lost their minds and are showing their true racist colors now that Roe is overturned.

There’s been no better time to educate Black America than now and expose the racism of the Democrat Party. But we need your $25, $50, or $100 donation today to get this message out to the Black community.

My name is Pastor Marc Little, and I am the Executive Director of CURE America Action. We’re the only, Black-run Conservative organization exposing the racism inherent in the Democrat’s agenda and in America’s communities.

My friend, Alveda King (MLK’s niece), laid out the racist hypocrisy when she said this on Fox News.

“You can’t say Black Lives Matter and not care what happens to Black preborn babies.”  – Alveda King

Preach it, Sister King! The Democrats will march and riot when one man is killed by a rogue police officer, but where are these marchers for the 23 million Black babies aborted since Roe?

Listen, Black Americans are getting tired of the racism inherent with their Democrat masters. We have the opportunity to share the truth with Black Americans and educate them as to the true meaning of the latest Supreme Court decisions, but we need your $50, $100, or $250 donation today to make that happen.

The recent Supreme Court rulings over the following issues have helped to expose the inherent racism embedded in the Democrat Party as they oppose:

• Our rights to self-defense,
• Our ability to worship freely,
• Allowing parents to use vouchers so children may attend good, faith-based schools, and
• the ability to protect unborn children in the womb.

Don’t you find it strange that the Democrats are trying so hard to prevent Black people from exercising their Constitutional rights?

In fact, most Black Americans are unaware that Planned Parenthood’s founder established the organization to sterilize Black Americans. These are the conversations we need to be having in Black Communities and NOT just during election years!

This isn’t a right/left issue. This is a right/wrong issue. And the Democrats are WRONG to do this to Black Americans.

That’s why we can’t waste the opportunity we’ve been given to use these Supreme Court cases to show just the true racism within the Democrat Party. These are the reasons we need you to chip in TODAY with a contribution of $100, $500, or $1,000.

Help us strike while the iron is hot, and the motives of the left are being called into question. Only then will we make inroads into the Black community, bringing conservative change to our nation as a whole, and demonstrating that we are all God’s children and deserving of his grace. Please help us today!

God Bless America,

CURE America Action

Few companies have embraced wokeness with as much zeal as Disney. The company has leaped headlong into America’s culture war to become one of the most activist corporations in the United States.

Disney management’s public battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the state’s Parental Rights in Education law — which critics disingenuously called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — drew national attention to the company this spring.

Videos from company meetings leaked in March showed company leaders bragging about Disney’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and its moves to create “canonical trans characters” in children’s programming.

In April, we learned that the Walt Disney Co. had kicked its LGBT activism up a notch by offering a new benefit that will assist employees and their minor children with “gender affirmation procedures.”

And following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, the company immediately assured employees that regardless of where they live, they will be reimbursed for the cost of travel to the nearest state that allows abortion.

What a great work environment for a liberal employee. This company really has their backs.

But what if you’re a conservative?

This is precisely where Disney content producer Jeremiah Daws found himself. The pro-life, conservative Christian recently shared his story with The Daily Wire.

Shortly after his arrival in Hollywood, Daws learned to keep his conservative views to himself. In the late 2000s, he and his brother signed up for a screenwriting workshop.

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“The man who ran the workshop noticed some conservative posts on my social media and invited us to breakfast to let us know we would be blacklisted in Hollywood if people knew we held those beliefs,” he told the Daily Wire.

In 2015, Daws went to work for Disney. He managed to avoid political discussions and got along just fine until the summer of 2020.

In reaction to the riots that had spread throughout the country following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, Disney began sending employees to mandatory diversity and inclusion training sessions.

“That was the last straw” for Daws, he said.

He recalled being told that “as a white, straight, male, I should be quiet and listen” and that “promotions would be on hold for the white men on the team.” He said he’d been instructed to “start casting non-binary children for our photo and video shoots.”

Related:

Leaked Disney Footage: Hidden Sex Message Found in New Kids Cartoon – Can You Spot It?

That fall, Daws read a book that had an impact on him. “Live Not By Lies,” by The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, tells the “stories of Christians who resisted totalitarianism in the Soviet Union.”

Daws told the Daily Wire he felt like he was “living every day promoting a company, a belief system, and even COVID hysteria, that I didn’t agree with. … I was living by lies, putting on this false exterior.”

He quoted Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Daws left the company several months later.

“I just couldn’t lie anymore,” he told the Daily Wire. “I would remove myself from the equation. Living in that kind of environment is soul-crushing. I wanted to be free to express myself without fear of losing my job. I wanted to be in an environment where I could make friends who would accept me as I am, not as they demand me to be.”

Since leaving, Daws has enrolled in trade school and plans to open a machine shop.

“I had hope in the back of my mind that if Disney ever got back to just making magic, maybe I could go back,” he said. “But the lie was still out there. There were 10 years worth of friends and coworkers that still believed I was one of them.”

“It was time to end the lies once and for all. I wanted my next phase of life to be open and truthful. Wherever I worked next, everything would be out on the table.”

Daws said he was pleased by the Supreme Court’s decision last month to reverse the Roe v. Wade ruling. “People have prayed for this day for 50 years,” he said. “We are now on the path to righting this horrible wrong.”

“This was a day to celebrate. I had a small platform among my liberal friends to be a different voice,” he said.

Daws chose that day to “come out” on social media as a conservative. Predictably, his liberal friends responded with “a lot of negativity.”

He was wise to get out.

Although Disney likely tops the list of major U.S. corporations that have adopted a woke agenda, this toxic ideology has spread like a plague throughout corporate America.

As Disney’s executives chase their woke dreams, they’ve forgotten their two primary responsibilities: to provide entertainment to families and to maximize shareholder value. No doubt a portion of the company’s clientele thinks it’s wonderful to include transgenders in films and to add gay characters to Disney classics, but my guess is that the majority of American parents disagree.

That they’ve failed at both is apparent in the price of the company’s common stock, which has been cut in half over the past year.

The pendulum has swung too far in one direction, and ordinary Americans are fed up with identity politics and speech regulation.

Hopefully, voters will deliver a huge “thumbs down” to the woke agenda in November.

SAM BRINTON IS AMONGST THE TOP ONE PERCENT OF EARNERS IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

A high-level hire at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, whose past as a drag queen and defender of underage gay prostitution sites has stirred controversy, is earning a salary in the top one percent of all government employees, according to documents obtained exclusively by The National Pulse.

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by The National Pulse reveals Sam Brinton’s taxpayer funded salary of $178,063, placing him amongst the top one percent of other federal salaries. It is also around five times the national median individual income.

Brinton, who received his job offer in allegedly strange circumstances in January 2022, will also enjoy the top secret “Q clearance” level in the Department of Energy. The designation Top Secret is applied to information, “the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”

The DOE uses its own terminology to classify security clearances, describing the Q-level clearance as “similar to what is completed by other agencies for a Top Secret National Security Information access clearance.”

“Access to Secret Restricted Data requires a Q access authorization,” the agency continues.

The initial job description for Brinton’s post described the position’s security level as “Critical-Sensitive (CS)/High Risk.” The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) describes what this classification entails:

“Potential exists to bring about a material adverse effect on the national security, causing exceptionally grave damage. Any position receiving a position sensitivity designation of CS shall automatically carry with that designation, without further agency action, a High Risk designation.”

Brinton’s personal posts have also revealed the gravity of his appointment, sharing on Twitter on June 29th:

“I lead a staff of hundreds and a budget of millions (with a Nuclear Waste Fund I’m responsible for at over $45 billion) as the leader of the office overseeing the management of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel.”

The revelations follow The National Pulse exposé of appointee Samuel Brinton’s past as a drag queen, LGBTQ+ activist who has “lectured” on kink at college campuses and participated in interviews about fetish roleplay.

The Army suspended a decorated general for criticizing a tweet by first lady Jill Biden, USA Today reported.

The branch released retired three-star lieutenant general Gary Volesky, a veteran of the wars in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan, from advising senior officers because of his June 25 response to a Jill Biden tweet about the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade.

“For nearly 50 years, women have had the right to make our own decisions about our bodies,” the first lady tweeted. “Today, that right was stolen from us.”

“Glad to see you finally know what a woman is,” Volesky replied.

Volesky’s tweet has since been taken down.

Volesky was likely talking about Biden’s support for transgender rights, a cause the military has also embraced. As Russia this year began its bloodthirsty invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Army was training officers on “gender pronouns” and “when to offer soldiers gender transition surgery,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. Top-ranking General Mark Milley, who secretly promised to warn the Chinese People’s Liberation Army about U.S. military actions, has in recent years embraced left-wing causes, saying he wants to “understand white rage” and apologizing for appearing with former president Donald Trump.

This is the second time this month that the Army has punished service members for disagreeing with someone in the Biden White House. The Army announced July 1 that it will deprive soldiers of pay and benefits if they do not comply with the administration’s vaccine mandate.

Volesky, who retired in 2020, received the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest decoration for valor, the New York Post reported. He served as the Army’s chief of public affairs from 2012 to 2014 and commanded the 101st Airborne Division.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Americans’ confidence in major U.S. institutions—including government and the media—is in a state of collapse, falling to an average of just 27 percent across all categories, according to the latest national poll released by the Gallup Organization.

Only the military and small businesses still enjoy the confidence of a majority of Americans.

Although public belief in institutions has been weak for most of the past 15 years, the 27 percent average for all categories is the lowest recorded by Gallup.

The company began measuring confidence in institutions in 1973 and has done so each year since 1993.

The survey figures came after Gallup delivered sobering news on June 22. At that time the company said confidence in the overall direction of the country fell to 13 percent that month, down 3 percentage points from May and 11 points since March when the figure was 24 percent.

It also reported at that time that despite ongoing economic malaise, resident Joe Biden’s job approval rating held steady at 41 percent between May and June.

Gallup’s finding on the issue was called into question by the Civiqs Poll’s daily tracking survey of registered voters which found Biden’s approval rating has sunk to a new record low of just 30 percent, the New York Post reported July 9.

Only in two states, the Democratic strongholds of Vermont and Hawaii, are the president’s supporters more numerous than his detractors.

Gallup also reported on June 29 that although 96 percent of U.S. adults expressed pride in varying degrees about being American, that figure includes a record low of 38 percent who consider themselves “extremely proud” to be Americans, the lowest figure for that description since the company began tracking the issue in 2001.

Another 27 percent of Americans said they were “very proud,” while 22 percent said they were “moderately proud,” and 9 percent described themselves as “only a little proud.”

Four percent said they were “not at all” proud to be Americans.

In the new Gallup survey, Americans expressed less confidence in institutions than they did a year ago, with significant declines in 11 of the 16 examined—and no improvements for any of the institutions.

The biggest drops were regarding the presidency as an institution—as opposed to the job performance of the current president—and the Supreme Court.

Confidence in the presidency is now at 23 percent, which is 15 percentage points lower than 2021.

The Supreme Court came in at 25 percent, down 11 points since 2021. The survey was completed before the court rendered landmark rulings on gun rights and abortion, decisions that have proven controversial.

Confidence in Congress came in at just 7 percent, down from 12 percent a year ago.

The figures for the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court were record Gallup lows.

Five other institutions’ ratings plunged to record lows.

The church and organized religion weighed in at 31 percent, down from 37 percent. Newspapers scored 16 percent, falling from 21 percent. The criminal justice system got 14 percent, after rating 20 percent. Big business came in at 14 percent, falling from 18 percent. The police garnered 45 percent after the 51 percent figure a year ago.

Large technology companies weighed in at 26 percent, down from 29 percent. Gallup has only been measuring confidence in the category for three years.

Small business and the military still enjoy the confidence of a majority of Americans, despite slipping support. Small business came in at 68 percent, down from 70 percent in 2021. The military had a confidence level of 64 percent, which is lower than the previous 69 percent figure.

Confidence in the medical system is at 38 percent, down from 44 percent. The figure for public schools is 28 percent, down from 32 percent. Banks scored 27 percent, a drop from 33 percent. Confidence in organized labor remained steady at 28 percent.

Confidence in television news is down to 11 percent from 16 percent in the 2021 survey.

The new annual survey was carried out by telephone in the first three weeks of June. The respondents were 1,015 adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/confidence-in-us-media-government-and-justice-system-collapsing_4589439.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-07-11-2&utm_medium=email&est=WQ7IxDJu41RqYANJ%2Fie16XB%2BXk6DnxEZqS9ppCdU1MliBuh5UAG6oFEh8n69f%2FYwhg%3D%3D

The Biden administration spent nearly $1.5 million to produce a “transgender programming curriculum” for inmates held in the nation’s 122 federal prisons.

The Justice Department disbursed the funds for a consulting firm to develop a program to help transgender inmates “manage identity concerns during incarceration” and advocate for their “sexual health and safety,” according to a government summary of the contract. The contract also asks the firm to develop a program to help transgender inmates access hormone treatment after they are released.

There are only about 1,200 transgender individuals serving sentences in federal prisons, according to a 2021 Department of Justice estimate, meaning the Biden administration spent roughly $1,250 per transgender prisoner. That is more than the $1,200 checks Americans received during the first round of COVID-19 stimulus payments.

The Justice Department’s $1,496,500 contract is part of resident Joe Biden’s larger, controversial effort to promote transgenderism—even among minors. The Justice Department in March sent a letter to all state attorneys general warning them against restricting transgender hormone treatment for children. That same month, Biden’s State Department announced it would allow individuals to select “X” as their gender when completing passport applications. The administration also released updated guidelines in January that make it easier for transgender inmates to be placed in facilities that match their “gender identity.”

Following a district court ruling last month, a convicted terrorist is set to become the first transgender inmate to receive federally funded sex-reassignment surgery, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The American Civil Liberties Union, a Biden administration ally, waged the successful legal battle on behalf of Cristina Iglesias, who in 2005 mailed fake anthrax to British government office buildings.

The Biden administration’s push for transgender accommodations in federal prisons comes amid a spike in sexual assaults committed by biologically male inmates in women’s prisons. Female prisoners have sued state governments, citing sexual assault concerns, in an attempt to keep male-to-female transgender inmates in men’s prisons.

The funds were first disbursed in 2021 to Nevada-based consulting firm Change Companies, and the contract runs through September of this year. The firm, which creates educational materials for correctional facilities, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department told the Free Beacon it “recognizes the importance of appropriate gender-affirming management and treatment of transgender individuals in its custody.” The department did not respond to a request for comment on whether any of the programs have been implemented in federal prisons.

Justice Department officials recommended that the firm draw on research from left-wing advocacy groups, such as the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), to guide its work. The NCTE dubbed former president Donald Trump’s White House the “Discrimination Administration” and supports Democrats’ Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.” The organization also launched a politically oriented “action fund” in 2017, which has exclusively endorsed Democratic candidates.

The Justice Department programs appear to align with the agency’s most recent guidelines on transgender prisoners. The guidelines, released earlier this year, prohibit prison staff from referring to inmates by biologically accurate pronouns if they identify as transgender. The document defines gender as “a construct” based on “social identity, psychological identity, and human behavior.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Biden campaign surrogate Jerry Harris gets 12 years for solicitation, sexual assault

Jerry Harris, former Biden campaign surrogate and star of the Netflix documentary Cheer, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for sex crimes involving minors. The disgraced cheerleader pleaded guilty in February to sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in a bathroom at a cheer competition and paying another underaged child to send him sexually explicit photos and videos on Snapchat.

Prior to his arrest in September 2020, Harris was one of several celebrity influencers the Biden campaign embraced in an effort to “win back the internet.” In June 2020, Biden appeared with Harris on Instagram Live to discuss “some really important issues facing our country right now, in particular young adults and the black community.” The video, which received more than 300,000 views on the social media platform, was deleted shortly after federal agents raided the influencer’s Illinois home in September. Harris was arrested days later.

The sentence is a blow to the Democratic Party, which has a long history of associating with sexual deviants. Last month, for example, Democratic donor Ghislaine Maxwell received a 20-year sentence for abusing and trafficking underage girls at the behest of Jeffrey Epstein, the scofflaw pedophile who “committed suicide” in 2019. Maxwell was a longtime friend of former president Bill Clinton, who gifted her a signed copy of his post-White House memoir and made numerous trips aboard Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.” In 2010, Maxwell attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to failed hedge-fund manager Marc Mezvinsky.

In 2020, the Democratic Party lost one of its most prolific benefactors when Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein received a 23-year sentence after his conviction on charges of rape and sexual assault. Prior to his arrest in 2018, Weinstein consulted Anita Dunn for “damage control” advice. The longtime Biden adviser is viewed as a likely contender to replace White House chief of staff Ron Klain after the midterm elections.

Less than a year before Weinstein’s arrest, another prominent Democrat was sent to prison for child sex crimes. Former congressman Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) received a 21-month sentence after pleading guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor. Weiner, the disgraced husband of longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, was accused of “[asking] a girl who he knew to be 15 years old to display her naked body and engage in sexually explicit behavior for him online.” His shockingly degenerate behavior, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon‘s Alana Goodman, prompted the FBI to reopen its investigation into Clinton’s private email server, a development that likely contributed to her humiliating defeat in the 2016 election.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

State senator Tiara Mack says she’s shaking her butt for ‘black girl magic’

Democratic Rhode Island state senator Tiara Mack on Thursday posted a series of flyers saying she will “twerk for trans rights,” among other reasons.

Mack was responding to a video posted on Monday by influential Twitter account “Libs of TikTok” that shows the state senator “twerking”—dancing in a provocative manner that involves shaking her butt and thrusting her hips. Mack in response blasted “the media” for “trying not to cover the real issues.”

“Not on MY watch,” she wrote. “I #TwerkFor joy, abortion justice, body autonomy, trans rights, and intersex rights.” She then posted the flyers.

While Mack will likely win reelection in her heavily Democratic state Senate district, Democrats face a surprisingly tough race in one of the deep-blue state’s congressional districts. Republican Allan Fung is polling ahead of all potential Democratic nominees in Rhode Island’s Second Congressional District, a seat the GOP has not held for 30 years. The Rhode Island Republican Party is using the Mack controversy to fundraise.

Other causes for which Mack shakes her butt include “the human right to safe housing” and “black girl magic.”

Links to donate to Mack’s reelection campaign accompany the flyers.

Mack faced extensive backlash for the twerking video, with user @nikki_1968, who describes herself as “an admirer of Michelle and Barack,” writing, “I’m not a conservative and I’m disappointed. Where do we draw the line on the behavior of public figures?”

“Girl,” Mack responded. “I have an Ivy League degree and am a state senator.”

This is not the first time the senator has tried to combine politics and sex. Mack, who calls herself a “Queer Educator,” this year pushed a state bill to teach 11-year-olds about “pleasure-based sexual relations.” Rhode Island parents spoke in “overwhelming opposition” to the bill, which one mother told the Providence Journal was “disgusting and inappropriate.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Maine’s Biden-funded lesson described transgender person as ‘someone who the doctors made a mistake about when they’re born’

The Maine Department of Education cited George Floyd’s death to defend its Biden-funded sex education lesson that taught kindergartners about transgenderism, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Facing criticism from parents, the department in May scrubbed a lesson plan from its website that described a transgender person as “someone who the doctors made a mistake about when they’re born.” But privately, the department dismissed opposition to the lesson plan, which received funding through resident Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, as a “political disparaging of our education system” and insisted that teaching elementary-age students about transgenderism “is more important than ever to end this cycle of violence and hate.”

“We have to stand firm against hate,” Kelli Deveaux, then-associate commissioner of public education, wrote to all department employees in a May email that was obtained through a public information request. “Two years ago we were all shocked to witness the murder of George Floyd, this weekend 10 people were murdered in Buffalo because of their race.”

The Maine sex education debate is the latest in a series of fights nationwide over whether public schools should teach children about LGBT issues. Liberal advocacy groups funded by top Democratic Party donors have pushed school districts across the country to teach gender identity and transgenderism to elementary students, the Free Beacon reported last year. A group of Nebraska parents last year discovered through public information requests that their children’s sex education curriculum was secretly reviewed by a Planned Parenthood activist and excluded religious groups, the Free Beacon reported.

The state’s transgender lesson was a part of an online module, Maine Opportunities for Online Sustained Education (MOOSE), which the Maine Department of Education established in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic as students transitioned to remote learning. The module, which the state spent $2.8 million to develop, contains optional online lesson plans that are written by teachers for students. Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which Congress passed in March 2021, funneled additional funds to the MOOSE program.

The Maine Education Department removed the LGBT lesson and placed it under review, Deveaux said in the internal email to employees, due to “one inartful sentence in which the teacher is explaining what LGBT stands for.” The department faced public pushback after the lesson plan was the subject of a Maine GOP ad launched in opposition to Democratic governor Janet Mills, who campaigned on her pro-LGBT record in a tight race for reelection this year. Clips of the lesson also went viral on Twitter.

“Some people, when they get a little bit older, realize what the doctors said was not right,” Maine kindergarten teacher Kailina Mills, who is not related to the governor, said in one now-deleted video lesson. “They might say the doctors told me I’m a man, but I’m really a woman.”

In another section, transgender activist Jazz Jennings read from her children’s book, I Am Jazz, which details how she transitioned from male to female starting at five years old.

“I have a girl brain, but a boy body,” Jennings read. “This is called transgender. I was born this way.”

Shawn McBreairty, a Maine father of twin daughters who has campaigned against critical race theory and sexualized lesson plans in public schools, said the Maine Department of Education is pushing radical gender ideology on young students.

“We shouldn’t be spending taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate kids through the hypersexualization of minors,” McBreairty told the Free Beacon.

The Maine Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment about the internal emails. Deveaux, the associate commissioner who sent the emails, left the Maine Department of Education this month. The department did not respond to questions on whether Deveaux was fired.

The department designed the lesson plan to teach kindergartners that people “want to be free to love whoever they want—whether that’s men, women, non-binary people, transgender people, or anyone else they choose.” Among other activities, kindergarten students were instructed to advocate for LGBT causes through artwork.

“Even though some people refuse to let LGBT+ people love freely, LGBT+ activists have used their voices, their art, and their bodies to fight for their freedom,” the lesson stated. “Today, you’re going to do the same thing. You are going to write and/or make art to show what love means to you. For people in the LGBT+ community, love means freedom. What does it mean to you?”

The lesson linked to two videos that promote pride parades as a “party” and “celebration,” including the Blues Clues Pride Parade episode that shows a cartoon drag queen singing about animal families with gay, nonbinary, transgender, asexual, bisexual, and pansexual members. Students were then told to design their own pride parade float.

The lesson recommended LGBT-themed literature for young readers, including My Princess Boy, a story of a boy who likes to wear princess dresses, and Pride Puppy, which follows a “protagonist of ambiguous gender” through a Pride parade. Another recommendation, Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity, teaches there is a difference between children’s bodies and gender identity.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether it supports Maine’s decision to pull the lesson plan.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

China’s military would seek to prevent the United States from mobilizing its forces in the Pacific in the event that war broke out between the two countries, according to the highest-ranking officer of the Marine Corps.

“This competition is going to go on for a while, and we’re going to have to figure out a way through it long term,” said Gen. David Berger, commandant of the Marine Corps, during a talk at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, in Washington on July 7.

US Marine Corps Modernization Efforts

The Marine Corps is currently undertaking a series of dramatic and, at times, controversial changes in its force design as part of an effort to develop advantages against near-peer opponents like China’s People’s Liberation Army.

The effort comes after more than 20 years of counter-terrorism operations in which the Corps has often benefited from battlefield superiority in terms of intelligence and materiel.

Berger said that the Corps “got comfortable” with such operational superiority during the Global War on Terror, and needed to relearn how to operate in a truly contested environment in which even seemingly simple logistical efforts could be impeded by malign Chinese operations.

To do that, he said, it would need to balance its funding and training priorities between meeting threats in the present and preparing for those of the future.

“It’s causing us to approach risk in a different way, managing near term and long term,” Berger said.

“We could pull everything forward and be absolutely 100 percent focused on this week [but] mortgage the future, or the inverse and not really be worried about this afternoon and just looking down the road.”

Berger added that Chinese military capability is “on a very different level” than it was just 10 years ago, and that the Corps’ extant processes “were not designed with that in mind.”

As such, Berger’s efforts to modernize the force have focused on strategically divesting from legacy systems and procuring new platforms needed for extra flexibility in the hopes of being ready for a fight with the Chinese regime by 2030. The new, leaner Corps is hoped to be more decentralized and distributed in preparation for a potential conflict in the expansive Indo-Pacific theater.

Logistics

To that end, however, Berger said that issues taken for granted when fighting terrorists would be anything but a given when fighting China. Foremost among those issues are logistics and the intensive art of ferrying troops and materiel when they are needed to be across an ocean while under constant pressure from Chinese forces.

“When your backside is protected, [logistics is] not your first thought,” Berger said. “But when you assume that your backside is threatened, now it’s in the first part.”

When reviewing intelligence reports on potential operational pathways, Berger said, he now asks to see the logistics for maneuvers “in the first paragraph.”

“I think logistics in a contested environment is a huge challenge for us,” Berger said. “It’s not insurmountable, but we need to acknowledge that, like we’re going to do to them, they’re going to challenge our sustainment.”

With that in mind, Berger said that the United States’ allies and partners would be essential components of national strategy, not just in terms of building a fighting force, but also in sustaining that force. In a potential conflict with China’s communist regime, he said, the United States would need to rely on nations like Japan and Australia to assist in maintaining supply chains and coordinating forces even as China sought to disrupt the nation’s ability to deploy its resources.

“Realistically, [China’s] going to challenge us back in our port[s] or beyond,” Berger said. “They’re going to try to slow our mobilization; they’re going to do everything that they can to slow us down as far back as possible.”

Preventing that from happening, to begin with, learning to operate in the so-called “gray zone” of competition and conflict that falls short of conventional military hostilities, Berger said, is of paramount importance.

‘You Can Win Before Firing a Shot’

“We’re learning our way through how do you deter malign activity below the threshold of a hot war and how do you measure that, because it’s not a ‘win,’ [it’s] measuring a negative,” Berger said.

As such, actioning intelligence and creating adaptable and resilient systems are vital to the Corps’ ability to defend the nation and carry the fight against the enemy, Berger said. And whether China or America could perform that task better would determine the outcome of such a conflict.

“You can win before firing a shot,“ Berger said. “If you’re organized for it. If you can think deeply enough about it.”

“We have to be actively learning because the world is moving at a velocity where if you think you’re comfortable today or tomorrow, you’ll be left behind.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Seth Dillon will not back away from making fun of irrational and dangerous ideology

Seth Dillon, CEO of the satire news website The Babylon Bee, said the company’s goal is to show the irrationality of the popular narratives that pervade modern culture by making jokes about the issues of the time, from Roe v. Wade to the fact that a Supreme Court nominee could not define the word “woman.”

“Rationality itself is under attack. It’s not just free speech. There are people who have abandoned rationality on purpose, and are trying to get you to go along with agreeing with them that two and two make five,” Dillon said during a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.

Dillon’s goal with The Babylon Bee is to make people laugh and question their own thinking, he said, but he’s found the company taking on a more important role.

“The goal was to make people laugh, and to make them think a little bit, to be subversive the way that satire is supposed to be subversive, to poke holes in the popular narrative,” said Dillon. “The goal wasn’t to be on the front lines of some kind of big battle but that is where things are at.”

Although clearly satire, The Babylon Bee has been attacked as being fake news, banned on some platforms, and subjected to “fact-checks.”

Fact-Checking Satire

“The issue that we’ve had with the fact-checkers is that if they had just gone to our pieces and said, ‘Hey, this is a viral piece of content, you may have seen it going around. This is satire. Laugh, it’s satire,’ that wouldn’t have been detrimental to our business,” Dillon said.

“The problem was that they were out there saying, ‘Oh, these guys have managed to pull off these tricks before. They’re duping you. They’re presenting you with fake news. They’re pretending to be satirists, but they’re really deceivers, and it’s a hub for disinformation.’”

One of the fact-checking companies told Dillon they only fact-check an article if they get hundreds of people asking the company if a headline is true.

Dillon said when he questioned this fact-checker about where they were getting their complaints about The Babylon Bee articles, the fact-checker could not give him an answer and stopped responding to his emails.

“There’s no question in their mind that we are legitimately satire,” Dillon said about the fact-checkers, “but they use the fact-checking as an excuse to try to vilify us as being someone who’s out there trying to mislead the public.”

“This is not merely innocuous content moderation where they’re saying, ‘This is lewd or indecent content, we’re taking it down,’” said Dillon. “It’s viewpoint discrimination under the guise of benign content moderation.”

What Is a Woman

In order to poke fun at Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson for saying she couldn’t define the word “woman” during her confirmation hearings, The Babylon Bee produced a video in which a young boy is asked to spell the word “woman” during a spelling bee. He asks the judges for the definition, and they can’t give it to him.

“When you play it out, what a sketch like this allows you to do is take the absurdity of the absurd position that someone holds and put it into a practical context, like an everyday context where it’s exposed for how absurd it really is,” said Dillon.

“She said, ‘I’m not a biologist,’ but what’s a biologist got to say about it? You know, as far as gender ideology goes, your sex, your biological makeup has nothing to do with your gender at all,” he said.

Dillon has found that the public is hungry for The Babylon Bee’s type of humor.

“I think that comedy that pushes back, and is willing to make jokes that you’re not supposed to make, is really refreshing right now,” he said.

Comedians who push back on the “woke” narrative, like Dave Chappelle, are the ones audiences want to listen to and that are gaining popularity, but they’re attacked for “punching down.”

“Punching down is a derogatory term to describe jokes made at the expense of people who have less power than you,” said Dillon.

Included in this way of thinking is that these groups should not be made fun of because they are weaker and more victimized in society, said Dillon.

“I think it’s the most absurd thing in the world to try to put yourself in the mindset when you’re writing a joke, stopping yourself and thinking to yourself, ‘You know what, I can’t joke about those people, they’re beneath me.’ That’s just a ridiculous condescending thought to have,” said Dillon

‘Safeguard Against Insanity’

The Babylon Bee was accused of punching down when the website jokingly named the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender woman, “man of the year” in one of its headlines.

“Well, this is a white male, high ranking government official, for one thing, and this is an idea that’s being foisted on us from the top down,” said Dillon, who believes his website is justified in joking about Levine.

“I think it’s a real sign of not just, you know, mental, but also spiritual immaturity, to be incapable and unwilling to examine yourself and laugh at yourself,” said Dillon

All of the jokes are meant to make people laugh and to expose irrational and dangerous ideology, not to be cruel, said Dillon.

In addition, the indoctrination of young children with the current transgender ideology is having a detrimental effect on children, he said.

“You can call it cruel because it hurt somebody’s feelings, but I think that it’s actually a safeguard against insanity, which is harmful,” said Dillon

Twitter suspended The Babylon Bee’s account over the Levine “man of the year” article and said if The Babylon Bee deleted the tweet, the account would be reinstated.

Deleting the tweet would mean acknowledging that The Babylon Bee engaged in hateful conduct, Dillon said, and he doesn’t agree with that assessment.

“That’s why we’re not [deleting] it,” he said.

Dillon stands firm about people’s right to free speech.

“You either have to be compelled to say what we want you to say or remain silent and censor yourself. When we’ve reached that point, that’s where I say that’s a hill worth dying on,” said Dillon.

Some of The Babylon Bee’s satirical headlines, including “Pants Sales Plummet as Everyone Working From Home” or “Progressive Church Announces New Drag Queen Bible Story Hour” have come true after the headlines were published.

Opposing Transgender Indoctrination of Children

“There’s this weird thing happening, where it’s becoming difficult for us to make jokes that are so absurd [that] they don’t come true because we’re kind of on this fast track towards insanity,” said Dillon

“I quoted [English writer G.K.] Chesterton, who said that the world has become too absurd to be satirized,” said Dillon.

Currently, with school children being indoctrinated with transgender ideology and some communities having drag queens come in full garb to do story time, or instructions being sent home with kindergarteners about masturbation, Dillon believes sane people need to voice their opposition because this is harmful to young developing minds.

“There’s a moral obligation you have as a parent to insulate your children from things that would corrupt their innocence to the extent that you can. You certainly don’t want to be exposing them to it, or indoctrinating them, or trying to normalize behavior that you know is lewd or indecent,” he said.

Dillon said he is shocked that more people are not outraged about this type of indoctrination, sexualization, and grooming of young children.

The people doing the indoctrination are “pretty open about their motivations and their purpose, their mission is to stir up the queer imagination in children,” said Dillon.

“The culture of what is accepted by the left is getting more and more extreme, but they are not willing to be made fun of,” Dillon said, adding that this is the reason The Babylon Bee is targeted by the left.

“There’s no tolerance on the left for jokes about their sacred cows. So there needs to be a two-way street, where the jokes are allowed to flow in both directions, because they’re very vicious in their humor about conservatives, about Christians,” he said. “They are willing to dish it out but they can’t take it.”

Recently, Dillon personally backed the creator of the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, who exposes the left’s obsession with transgender ideology.

“What Libs of TikTok is doing is, I think, important journalistic work that a lot of journalists are neglecting,” said Dillon. And the reason the left has targeted the account is that it is exposing their amoral agenda

A Meeting With Musk

In December 2021, Dillon, along with The Babylon Bee’s Editor in Chief Kyle Mann and Creative Director Ethan Nicolle, sat down for a longform interview with Elon Musk.

“I asked him, what do you think is so harmful about [woke ideology] and he said it’s divisive, it’s exclusionary, it’s hateful, it gives mean people an excuse to be cruel, while armored in false virtue,” Dillon recalled.

Musk told the leaders of The Babylon Bee that he is a free speech absolutist, and because he is in the financial position to buy Twitter, wants to ensure that true public discourse is allowed to happen on the platform, said Dillon.

“That’s the reason that he’s interested in and taking over Twitter, because wokeness is a lot of the driving force behind compelling certain speech, pressuring people to censor themselves. Otherwise, they’ll be canceled and deplatformed. He sees free speech as being vital for the health of a society,” added Dillon.

The Babylon Bee will continue to speak out against irrational attempts to cancel what they are doing, said Dillon.

“The best way to subvert, the best way to push back on that, is to speak the truth boldly and not censor yourself,” said Dillon.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Catherine Cortez Masto presents award to self-described ‘faglicious homo’ for hosting ‘Drag Queen Story Time’

Nevada Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto quietly honored a drag queen and self-described “faglicious homo” for his years of work with children at a local library.

During a June 26 “Drag Queen Story Time” event in Reno, Masto’s office presented a “certificate of commemoration” to drag queen Miss Ginger Devine, a Washoe County Library tweet shows. Devine, who also goes by Reverend Divine and whose real name is Christopher Daniels, has performed as a drag queen in the Reno area for more than a decade and has read to children at local libraries since at least 2019. In a 2010 blog post, Daniels described himself as a “Broadway loving, Project Runway watching, rainbow scarf wearing, footlong Subway sandwich eating faglicious homo.”

Cortez Masto has yet to publicly promote her award to Daniels and did not interact with the library’s tweet that revealed the honor, suggesting the Democrat is hesitant to weigh in on the controversial “Drag Queen Story Time” program as she faces a difficult reelection bid against Republican Adam Laxalt.

On the same day as the library’s event with Daniels, for example, Cortez Masto accused Republicans of working to end same-sex marriage and pledged to stand with “LGBTQ communities.” But the senator has refrained from discussing more hot-button, “culture war” issues such as drag queen story hours and critical race and gender theory, even as she praises far-left activists who say Nevada “should be teaching” critical race theory in public schools. Laxalt, meanwhile, has called to keep critical race theory out of the state’s schools and “protect students and teachers from indoctrinated bigotry.”

Cortez Masto did not return a request for comment.

Prior to his drag career, Daniels attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he minored in LGBT Studies and Women’s Studies and worked for Sex Out Loud, a campus organization that teaches students “all about the world of kink, including role play, kinky toys, and bondage.”

For years, Daniels wrote and managed a “Confessions of a Drag Queen” blog that detailed his experiences as a performer in Reno. In one post, Daniels discussed how he “get[s] so much more action as a drag queen” than he does “as a guy.” In another, Daniels wrote that he “almost got into a fight with a 10 year old” at a Reno roller rink and arcade—where he said the “average individual in the establishment was 8″—because a “band of stupid 10 year old boys” objected to his song request of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

“Now … I am not entirely sure what happened next. I think it was the combination of flashing strobe lights, the pain in my calves from bracing myself on the floor, or perhaps Mars was in retrograde but I basically went off on this ten year [sic] and started screaming and ranting while skating around the rink. From what I remember it went something like this,” Daniels recalled.

“‘Uh excuse me you prepubescent choir boy. What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck can you do?'” Daniels asked the child. “‘I can buy porn, cigarettes, and liquor and enjoy them at my leisure if I desire. I can drive, vote, and gamble if I want to. Join the 21st century you 8 year old Justin Bieber worshiping wannabe. Cyndi Lauper is TIMELESS so shut the fuck up and sit down.”

In addition to his rousing roller rink stories, Daniels has dismissed concerns from the “parental units of America” that sexually explicit materials are “influencing the young impressionable minds of the youth.” Daniels called the complaint “bullshit.”

“I would really like the parents of America who are outraged to remove the pole from your sphincter and get the fuck over it,” Daniels said in 2010. “Are you kidding me with all of this? Take a look around. Television shows are increasingly featuring more violence, more sex, and more foul language; a reflection of our society which as of late has more violence, more sex, and swears a hell of a lot more.”

Daniels has also delivered “sermons” as “Reverend Divine” at Reno’s Center for Spiritual Living, a religious science group that believes “in the healing of the sick through the power of this Mind.” In a 2017 appearance at the center, Daniels called drag queens “God’s sacred messengers on this earth.” The comment came after Daniels retired from performing as a drag queen in 2014—roughly five years later, he returned as Miss Ginger Devine in a show he called “The Come On Her Back Tour.”

“When all of a sudden, God parts the clouds and he shines a light and tells you to take your wig off the shelf, don your best hooker heels, and go to church, you don’t question the good Lord, you just do,” Daniels said in 2017.

Daniels did not return a request for comment on his award from Cortez Masto. The incumbent Democrat will face Laxalt in November after both candidates handily won their June primary elections.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

ALLEGATIONS OF POLITICAL INFLUENCE SWIRL AROUND SAM BRINTON.

Department of Energy employee has reportedly alleged that the agency allowed “substantial irregularities” to influence its hiring process of Samuel Brinton, a controversial appointee whose work as a drag queen and LGBTQ+ activist has come under scrutiny.

The National Pulse first revealed Brinton’s drag queen alter ego – “Sister Ray Dee O’Active” – in early February. Yesterday, we revealed how Brinton had defended underage gay prostitution website Rentboy.com in a 2015 op-ed.

On February 2nd, an anonymous Department of Energy (DOE) whistleblower sent a letter to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Deputy Inspector General Norbert Vint, alleging that “prohibited personnel practices” were utilized in tapping Brinton for the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition.

“Undue political influence and preferences were applied” at the DOE to select Brinton for the position, which the employee also alleged Brinton was was potentially unqualified to hold, the letter claims.

Brinton’s “background is limited to select advocacy work and an academic background at the graduate-degree level which together satisfy requirements for the competitive placement of a qualified GS-11 in federal career service, not a high-standing member of the SES,” explained the employee. SES is short for Senior Executive Service, a civil service grade equivalent to general officer or flag officer rank.

“There is concern that making personnel selection decisions for career positions based on political considerations and gender-fluid identity as means of exerting political influence over the workforce, and at the expense of other better qualified candidates, is not the intent of the U.S. civil service laws or the U.S. constitution,” continued the letter, signed by a “Long serving public servant at the U.S. Department of Energy.”

MUST READ: EXC: Top New Biden Staffer Defended Underage, Gay Prostitution Website Raided By Feds in Jaw-Dropping 2015 Article.

Accordingly, the letter requested the OPM to conduct an “immediate investigation” into the hiring process surrounding Brinton.

The National Pulse unearthed an op-ed from Brinton, where he defended a male escort website raided by federal agents for enabling prostitution and having lax age requirements.

The National Pulse has reached out to OPM for comment on this story, as well as to ascertain whether or not any investigation has commenced.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) in a recent fundraising email lied about election forecaster FiveThirtyEight‘s predictions in multiple Senate races, FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver said Tuesday.

“Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight just announced that Democrats are poised to win SIX Senate seats this November,” Pelosi wrote in the email, incorrectly saying the site predicts Democratic victories in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Ohio.

“This is straight-up misinformation,” Silver tweeted in response. “We have Democrats as heavy underdogs in Florida and Ohio.”

Pelosi, who routinely sends out emotionally charged campaign emails, has a long history of making false or misleading statements. Pelosi recently attempted to justify skyrocketing inflation under President Joe Biden by saying that “when unemployment goes down, inflation goes up,” a claim that PolitiFact rated mostly false, and blaming Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inflation started surging under Biden months before Russia’s invasion, the Washington Free Beacon has reported.

Silver’s FiveThirtyEight model projects that Republicans have a 54 percent chance of winning the Senate. The model rates Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada as tossups. The election forecaster says that Republicans have a 90 percent chance of victory in Ohio and a 94 percent chance in Florida. Of the states Pelosi mentioned in her email, New Hampshire is the only one that FiveThirtyEight predicts will stay blue.

Silver’s model for the House predicts that Pelosi will lose her job as speaker, forecasting that Republicans have an 87 percent chance of retaking the chamber.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A Virginia school district is prohibiting teachers from consulting parents when students as young as kindergarten-age switch genders at school.

Fairfax County Public Schools is instructing teachers and administrators to forgo parents’ permission when a student requests to use a bathroom or locker room associated with his or her so-called gender identity, according to screenshots of a mandatory faculty training module obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The district will also allow schoolchildren without parental consent to change their names and on its virtual learning portal “identify as male, female, or nonbinary.” Teachers could not proceed with the “Supporting Gender-Expansive and Transgender Youth” training until they checked the correct boxes, regardless of their personal beliefs.

Fairfax County Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment. A county teacher said it was unclear what penalties teachers face for refusing to comply.

The teacher training module is the latest instance in which a public school board has implemented controversial policies without parental consent. A New Jersey public middle school forced students to watch a video about hormone treatment without notifying parents beforehand, the Free Beacon reported in March. Parents have informed the Free Beacon their children “socially transitioned” to another gender at school without their knowledge.

The news comes as parents nationwide have agitated for more oversight of public education. A Fairfax County School Board meeting in June saw dozens of parents turn out to oppose handbook rules that suspend students starting in fourth grade for using the wrong pronouns to refer to gender-nonconforming classmates. The school board adopted the handbook amid parents’ objections that the rules violate the First Amendment by compelling speech.

Three parents with children in the school district have formed an ad hoc “shadow board” to monitor and rebut the Fairfax County School Board. Its first meeting, which was held opposite the county school board’s own meeting on Thursday, discussed recent lawsuits the district faces for sexual assault accusations, the prospect of sex education becoming co-ed to accommodate transgender students, and pushback by left-leaning education groups after Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin (R.) initiated a tip line to report “divisive practices” in public schools. The Virginia Association of School Superintendents, which is now headed by Fairfax superintendent Scott Brabrand, called in a March 10 letter for the tip line to be “terminated.”

Members of the so-called shadow board say the current school board is out of step with parents’ demands for quality education for their children.

“It is unconscionable that even with plummeting standardized test scores and record-level teacher vacancies in Fairfax County Public Schools, board members remain hyper-focused on politicizing education,” Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a Fairfax mom of three and shadow board member, told the Free Beacon. “This recent ‘gender-inclusive’ training, meant to indoctrinate teachers and keep parents from knowing critical information about their own children, is irresponsible and borderline criminal.”

Luke Berg, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, told the Free Beacon the teacher training is also unconstitutional.

“Policies like this violate parents’ constitutional right to raise their kids,” Berg said. “We are currently suing two Wisconsin school districts over similar policies, and I’m aware of roughly 10 other lawsuits around the country on the same topic, including two in Virginia—one against the Harrisonburg City school district and another against Loudoun County Public Schools.”

Republican members of Congress including Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Rep. Jim Banks (Ind.) have written companion pieces of legislation to stop such policies. The Empower Parents To Protect Their Kids Act, which was introduced in the Senate in October and in the House in June, cuts federal funding for schools that conceal information about students’ gender identity from parents or pressure students to go through with a gender transition.

“Schools should never be allowed to impose radical, harmful gender ideology on children—especially without parents’ knowledge and consent,” Cotton said.

“Our schools are a place for math and history education, not gender theory indoctrination,” Banks said. “No parent should have to worry that their child’s school is enabling, promoting, or facilitating a child’s ‘gender transition’ behind their back.”

Fairfax County Public Schools lists hundreds of job vacancies on its website. Pass rates for reading, science, and math students in the county are down by around 10 percent or more as of the 2020-2021 school year, according to Virginia Department of Education data. This year’s pass rates have not yet been listed.

“These board members’ overt negligence—including the prolonged exclusion of our children from in-person learning—is not a partisan issue, it is a parents’ issue,” Lundquist-Arora added. “We need to vote them out in November 2023.”

Fairfax County’s transgender youth training module follows model policies for the treatment of transgender students disseminated in 2020 by Virginia’s Department of Education. In that document, school districts were encouraged “to communicate openly” with parents about their child’s gender identity, except when those parents do not approve of their child transitioning.

“When a student informs the school about their transition or requests a change to their name and gender, it is recommended that a point-of-contact, or a multi-disciplinary school team if needed, meet with the student (and parents/guardians if the parents/guardians are affirming of the student’s gender identity) to develop a plan to accommodate the student’s needs and requests,” the model policy states. “There are no regulations requiring school staff to notify a parent or guardian of a student’s request to affirm their gender identity, and school staff should work with students to help them share the information with their family when they are ready to do so.”

The state education department policy supports concealing the students’ gender switch at school, citing privacy and safety concerns. “Privacy and confidentiality are critical for transgender students who do not have supportive families,” the policy says. “If a student is not ready or able to safely share with their family about their gender identity, this should be respected.”

Update 7/6/2022 at 11:26 a.m.: This piece has been update with additional comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

SAM BRINTON, RECENTLY HIRED BY THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, HAS A NUMBER OF DEEPLY CONCERNING VIEWS ABOUT YOUNG PEOPLE AND SEX WORK.

A recent, high-level hire at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy defended a controversial gay prostitution website with a track record of allowing children to be promoted for sexual services on the platform, The National Pulse can reveal.

The revelations, from unearthed op-ed, follow The National Pulse exposé of appointee Samuel Brinton’s past as a drag queen, LGBTQ+ activist who has “lectured” on kink at college campuses and participated in interviews about fetish roleplay.

In an article published on September 15th on the pro-LGBT+ website Advocate, Biden’s latest top nuclear hire dives into a defense of the “Rentboy.com” website, which shuttered following an August 2015 illegal prostitution raid. “Rentboy” is a colloquial term for young men who have sex with older men in exchange for money, often under dubious circumstances.

“…the dissolution of Rentboy is more dangerous than the website ever was.”

– Biden appointee Sam Brinton.

Brinton, who now serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy, defended “Rentboy.com” in a September 2nd, 2015 op-ed in Advocate magazine: “The Real Ramifications of the Rentboy Raid.”

The article followed Department of Homeland Security officials raiding Rentboy’s Manhattan offices and arresting chief executive Jeffrey Hurant and six employees on charges of promoting prostitution. The following year, the CEO of the site, which connected male prostitutes and escorts with potential clients, was indicted on a charge of promoting prostitution which he ultimately pleaded guilty.

The U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York’s indictment also revealed the site’s negligence regarding underage sex work, particularly across Asia.

It detailed how Rentboy employees described the age verification process as a “gray area,” as they “did not always remove advertisements when the advertisers failed to provide identification.”

“In one case, after an escort agency failed to provide photo identification for an escort, a RENTBOY.COM employee advised the escort agency that he had deleted photographs with the face of the subject escort, but left the advertisement online and left photographs that showed only the escort’s body,” explained the indictment.

MUST READ: REPORT: Whistleblower Demands Investigation Into Biden’s Nuclear Drag Queen Hiring Process, Alleging ‘Substantial Irregularities’.

“In another case, after a different escort agency refused to provide identification for several escorts who appeared underage, the same RENTBOY.COM employee “suggested to [him] to crop the faces of those super young escorts,” continued the indictment, which also noted that the company never reported the cases to law enforcement agencies.

Concerning posts in Asia, Rentboy “failed to comply with its own standards requiring age verification,” even ignoring “employees [who] complained to RENTBOY.COM management about the quantity of underage escort advertisements.”

Despite the deeply concerning developments, Brinton wrote in defense of the website:

“…sex work disproportionately affects the LGBT community. Transgender people engage in sex work at a rate 10 times that of cisgender (nontrans) women. And many LGBT youth engage in sex work just to survive. A 2013 Center for American Progress report suggests that LGBT youth are more than three times as likely to have engaged in survival sex.”

“In another email, another RENTBOY.COM employee speaking about the Asia-market ads said “Christ … talk about copyrighted and underage pies! TONS in that area … ALWAYS,” detailed the indictment, which also revealed that company executives never acted on these concerns.

Instead, “RENTBOY.COM employees reviewing Asia advertisements were also told by the defendant JEFFREY HURANT and other RENTBOY.COM managers to apply lesser standards in doing age verification of Asia-market advertisements.”

“As was summarized in one email, “In Asia ok to approve them … unless you see a baby … : ),” continued the indictment.

Brinton firmly defended the company, claiming that “the dissolution of Rentboy is more dangerous than the website ever was,” and concluding:

The rent boys weren’t harming anyone. But now these young men might have to return to communities and homes which have rejected who they are. And that’s when the real danger begins.

“The federal government’s recent attack on Rentboy.com is a devastating assault on some of the most vulnerable members of our community — young adults who, for the first time in their lives, were able to earn a secure living safely through Rentboy after surviving family rejection and homelessness because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” begins the article.

MUST READ: REPORT: Whistleblower Demands Investigation Into Biden’s Nuclear Drag Queen Hiring Process, Alleging ‘Substantial Irregularities’.

“Rentboy.com may or may not have broken the law. I don’t know,” concedes Brinton, adding “but I do know, from the frantic emails filling my inbox, that the raid on its headquarters has thrown many gay, bisexual, and transgender young adults into turmoil as their main source of income has been ripped away due to irresponsible and archaic views of sex work.”

Brinton is also an active member of the Washington, D.C. chapter of a drag queen society known as the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” which lists him as the principal contact on its 2016 and 2018 tax forms. During the group’s “Lavender Mass 2021,” Brinton can be seen referring to Anthony Fauci, who was declared a “saint,” as “Daddy Fauci.”

The new Biden-Harris nuclear official has been involved in LGBTQ+ activism since college and was interviewed by Metro Weekly about the group, where he emphasized he is the “slutty one”.

“The Sisters mission is in complete alignment with my passion for removing the guilt people feel every day (unjustly placed on them, let your freak flag fly!) and the joy the Sisters bring is so, so, so beautiful,” he added.

In a separate interview, Brinton explains how he roleplays as a “pup” handler.

“I actually have trouble when we transition from pup play to having sex,” Brinton explained.

“Like, ‘No, I can’t have you whimper like that when we’re having sex,’ because I don’t want to mix that world. It’s interesting, because he doesn’t have to come out of pup mode to have me fuck him. I personally have to bring him out of pup perception for me. But then I’m still treating him as a submissive to me.”

Taylor Silverman is grateful for all the anti-Semitic Instagram comments.

The 27-year-old amateur skateboarder made waves earlier this year when she spoke out against biological men participating in women’s sports. A self-described Zionist who is rarely photographed without a Star of David necklace, Silverman wasn’t surprised that online backlash quickly turned anti-Semitic. But she’s a little surprised by how much of it came from her friends.

“If I hadn’t spoken up, I would still be friends with people who are blatantly, and proudly, anti-Semitic,” Silverman tells the Washington Free Beacon. “I’m grateful I did, because it showed which of my old friends are anti-Semitic pieces of trash.”

The friendly fire was only part of the backlash Silverman faced for speaking publicly about her experience competing against transgender athletes. It wasn’t a political protest. Silverman had been skating for a decade, and only just began to feel that the skateboarding community was making space for women. But as soon as the community began to take shape, she felt it come under attack.

“The first time I lost to a trans man, I thought people would recognize it was unfair and speak out. The second time, I thought, ‘Someone has got to do something about this!’ The third time, I realized: I am somebody. And so, I spoke up.”

In a May 11 Instagram post, Silverman recounted losing first place in the 2021 Red Bull Cornerstone Contest to Lillian Gallagher, only the latest instance where she had gone up against transgender competitors.

“I am sick of being bullied into silence,” Silverman wrote in the post, which also included a screenshot of a concerned email she sent to Red Bull. “A biological man with a clear advantage won the women’s division,” Silverman wrote to Red Bull sports marketing manager Erich Drummer. “This took away the opportunity that was meant for women to place and earn money.”

Red Bull never responded to her email. But the trolls did.

“This argument is transphobic as fuck and shows what type of person you are,” one commenter wrote. “Hopefully you give up on life soon since you’re bad at everything,” added another.

Soon, the hateful comments began popping up on Silverman’s other posts.

“Taylor the type of girl to rat someone out at the camps just to get some extra bread,” reads one comment on a photo of Silverman at the Dead Sea, an apparent reference to the Holocaust. “It’s chill I can say this too I’m an actual Jew not some token ass white girl,” the commenter added.

Silverman’s Instagram feed is an object lesson in what happens to those who take the unpopular position on hot-button issues. The comments beneath her photos are a minefield of the left’s choice insults: “transphobe” and “TERF,” “colonist” and “Free Palestine!” As Silverman sees it, most of the vitriol comes from the same place.

“It’s anti-Semitism and misogyny disguised as some kind of social justice,” she says. “They’re just going with the latest trendy word to get away with hateful shit.”

Silverman is no stranger to being attacked for her faith. The anti-Semitism she faced in the classroom was one of the things that motivated her to complete high school at home. During the pandemic, she left her skating team after teammates sent her videos of Hitler and told her Jews “deserved” anti-Semitism. Going solo meant losing out on free gear and help with travel and competition expenses. But that hasn’t slowed her down one bit.

In fact, Silverman travels so much these days that she never knows what to say when people ask her where she lives. But whenever she can, she gets back to her hometown of Kalamazoo, Mich. It was there, as a newly minted, 16-year-old homeschool kid who missed playing sports, that Silverman first picked up a skateboard. It’s where she learned to ollie, and where she entered her first skating competition.

It’s also where she learned firsthand that the skating community isn’t always the safest place for young women. As a novice, Silverman says she “was treated horrifically” by male skaters and “faced everything from bullying to sexual assault at the skatepark.” When she first started entering local competitions, they often didn’t have separate contests for women. It was only after she started winning, and traveling to bigger events around the country, that she began to meet and befriend other female skaters.

“It was exciting to me when there were women’s divisions, and girls were showing up,” Silverman says, recalling the excitement she felt at the chance to “meet and hang out with women who were passionate about the same things as me.”

It was a desire to protect this community that led Silverman to speak out—and landed her in the middle of one the most controversial issues of the day. The NCAA came under fire for its decision to let male-to-female transgender athletes participate in women’s sports after University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas—who swam in the men’s division until 2019—began competing as a woman. In recent months, the International Rugby League and the International Swimming Federation have barred transgender athletes from participating in women’s events.

In many ways, skateboarding is more gender-blind than other sports where transgender athletes have become a flashpoint. It’s one of Silverman’s favorite things about the sport. Anyone from anywhere can pick up a board and go, no matter their race, age, or gender. But, as Silverman is quick to point out, that doesn’t change the fact that transgender athletes have a competitive advantage.

She points to studies that show male-to-female transgender athletes remain faster and stronger than their peers even after undergoing hormone therapy. And she can rattle off the physical differences that give male skaters a competitive advantage: They have higher centers of gravity, denser bones, and carry less body fat than women.

But while Silverman is certainly concerned with how gender affects competitive fairness, her fight isn’t about titles or prize money. It’s about empowering young girls.

“Skateboarding has been male dominated for so long, it’s intimidating for girls,” Silverman says. Women’s divisions offer aspiring female skaters a chance to practice their skills away from the “pretty misogynistic” skateboarding culture. If girls feel like there’s no place for them in the skating community, Silverman says, they simply won’t show up.

Her fight could soon take on greater urgency. In June, the Biden administration proposed changes to Title IX that would allow students to participate in school events based on their assumed gender identity, rather than biological sex. Critics of the proposal say that the changes cut against the core of Title IX, which was meant to boost women’s equality.

Like many critics of these rule changes, Silverman is particularly frustrated with female athletes who are pushing to upend women’s sports in the name of progress.

“The people who are advocating for this, I don’t think women’s feelings or safety is on their radar at all. I don’t think they care about us at all,” she told the Free Beacon. “The women who advocate for this, I think they’ve lost touch with any kind of feminism, and it’ll come back to bite them in the ass one day. Hopefully they realize they’re giving up their own rights, and their daughters’ rights.”

Even though this issue is making waves in Washington, Silverman doesn’t see herself as a partisan warrior. “This isn’t a political issue,” she says. “It’s a commonsense issue.”

Silverman makes it abundantly clear that she doesn’t see her position as “anti-trans” but as “pro-woman.” She doesn’t care if skate competitions have open divisions where people of all genders can compete against each other, nor would she mind if there were dedicated divisions for transgender skaters. She doesn’t relish the fight—she just wants a solution.

Though she admits it’s been an “overwhelming” month of media exposure and online harassment, Silverman has no trouble seeing the good in her experience. Marveling that she’s spent the past month “touring around the country fighting for women,” she sounds like she just won the lottery. Whether she’s talking about the inspiring people she’s met or recounting tales of online harassment, her optimism never seems to waver.

It’s not the demeanor you’d expect from someone who’s been tossed into the fray. But to Silverman, it’s the only way to stay sane.

“A really good way to cope with the craziness we’re going through,” she says, reflecting on our present moment, “is to laugh.”

Source: The Washington Free Beacon

House Republican Study Committee (RSC) chairman Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and 15 GOP colleagues are challenging the legality of State Department grants—of as much as $500,000 each—to international “organizations committed to the practice and spread of atheism and humanism.”

Their challenge is contained in a June 30 letter to resident Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken concerning the department’s competitive grant process issued in April 2021 for “Promoting and Defending Religious Freedom Inclusive of Atheist, Humanist, Non-Practicing and Non-Affiliated Individuals” in South Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

“To be clear, atheism and ‘humanism’ are official belief systems.

“As an initial matter, therefore, we would like to know what other United States government programs supported with appropriated funds are being used either to encourage, inculcate, or to disparage any official belief system—atheist, humanist, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise,” Banks and the other signers told Blinken.

“It is one thing for the department to be tolerant and respectful of a wide range of belief systems, and to encourage governments to respect the religious freedom interests of their citizens. It is quite another for the United States government to work actively to empower atheists, humanists, non-practicing, and non-affiliated in public decision-making,” the signers continued.

“Any such program—for any religiously-identifiable group—in the United States would be unconstitutional.

“In addition to its constitutionally dubious legal foundation, we also question how such a grant or cooperative agreement program advances the foreign policy interests of the United States,” the signers wrote.

A State Department spokesman could not be reached for comment.

In addition to Banks, the signers include Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas), Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.), Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), Rep. Tim Burchett (R- Tenn.), Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.).

In countries with a dominate religious culture such as the Middle East and parts of North Africa where Islam dominates, the signers warned Blinken that providing U.S. tax dollars to groups promoting non-Islamic faiths is likely to be perceived by local populations as subversive funding ”from a foreign power designed to shatter local religious and cultural relationships.”

In addition, the signers told Blinken they have reviewed other similar official State Department Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) documents that “violate both the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, but also the No Religious Test Clause of Article VI of our nation’s constitution.”

The funding provided to the organizations selected by the department would be used to support building “networks and advocacy groups” for atheists, according to the official notice.

“This would be analogous to official State Department promotion of religious freedom ‘particularly for Christians’ in China, with the express goal being to build a corresponding missionary network,” the signers told Blinken.

“Obviously, this goal that would never pass constitutional muster and would be derided by radical Leftist bureaucrats in your agency as completely out-of-bounds.

“So why is this atheist NOFO not viewed with similar objection,” the signers asked.

“Americans rightly discern this as a part of the broader effort on the part of your administration to promote radical, progressive orthodoxy abroad. Atheism is an integral part of the belief system of Marxism and Communism,” the signers said.

The letter to Biden and Blinken regarding State Department grants to support atheism and other religious belief systems follows revelations last week that officials are preparing to appoint a Special Representative for Equity and Justice.

The appointment is part of Biden’s government-wide “Equity Action Plan” that mandates all federal departments and agencies to appoint such officials.

Congressional Republicans criticize the plan as a thinly disguised effort to use the federal government to promote Critical Race Theory (CRT), the controversial view that the color of an individual’s skin determines their values and how they perceive people of other ethnicities.

In addition to the U.S. Embassy in Germany flying a Black Lives Matter flag, the Republicans pointed to the U.S. Vatican City Embassy flying an LGBT pride flag, which they describe as “a transparent provocation at tenets of Christianity,” and the State Department’s creation of a new gender classification for use on passports for individuals of “unspecified or another gender identity.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/house-gopers-demanding-answers-on-why-grants-going-to-boost-atheism-overseas_4570158.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-07-03-4&utm_medium=email&est=IHP%2FtcGq%2F1ZQFheBBLU5kaH8w9U%2BxT4j16CIXyFcbYSlYOmoJyf%2Bc0rtZpunMgTxkA%3D%3D

Blue states believe their abortion policies can bring companies back

Amidst predictions of a political “red wave” in the upcoming mid-term elections, an economic wave has been building for years with no end in sight as companies flood out of blue states and into red states.

And as a result of its political divisions, America appears to now be dividing itself into prosperous, high-growth states and states that are suffering a chronic decline. But Democrat-run states believe their abortion policies could be a key factor in attracting companies back.

Caterpillar and Citadel, which in June announced their exit out of Illinois, are only the latest firms to leave high-tax, high-regulation states. Tesla, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, and Remington are also among the hundreds of companies flocking out of California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey to business-friendly places like Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Tennessee. Relocating companies have spanned industries including tech, finance, media, heavy manufacturing, autos, and firearms.

“There is a great migration going on, and I expect it to accelerate,” Glen Hamer, president of the Texas Association of Business, told The Epoch Times. “When the Caterpillars and the Elon Musks relocate, it’s an advertisement to the entire country and the entire world that something positive is going on in that state. And there is a multiplier effect.”

According to a 2022 survey of 700 CEOs, the top states for business were Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, and North Carolina. The worst were California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington.

Even companies like Apple, which did not move its headquarters to Texas, chose to establish its second-largest campus for employees there. Amazon selected Houston as one of its prime hubs. Ford, Volkswagen, and Nissan chose Tennessee as the location for major new manufacturing facilities. And in some cases, entire industries like firearms, which are being targeted by legislation and lawsuits in blue states, are moving south.

“It’s a broader trend that we’ve been tracking for the last 15 years,” Lee Schalk, Vice President of Policy at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), told The Epoch Times. ALEC tracks state economic trends in their annual report, “Rich States Poor States.”

“You won’t see companies moving to states like New York, California, and New Jersey,” Schalk said. “They’ll be moving out of those states into neighboring states, where the policies are a little bit better, or they’ll be making the big move to places like Texas, Florida, North Carolina.”

“Texas was one of the first states to recover all the jobs it lost during the pandemic,” Hamer said. “Now we have a workforce that is at an all-time high, and the economy has diversity and strength. Whether it’s energy, manufacturing, health care, technology, finance, you name it, the Texas economy is firing on all cylinders.” Texas has attracted 250 new corporate headquarters since 2015, Hamer said.

When jobs leave, people leave with them. According to the U.S. Census, Democrat-run states California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois together lost 4 million people between 2010 and 2019, the so-called “leftugees.” During the same period, the states with the greatest influx of people were Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Arizona.

States have been able to attract companies by cutting taxes, reducing red tape, and establishing right-to-work policies. In 2013, North Carolina passed a landmark tax reform package to cut corporate and personal income taxes. The business income tax there is now 2.5 percent and will be phased out entirely over the next several years.

Contrary to expectations that states would bankrupt themselves by cutting taxes, an influx of companies and new residents often boosts state revenues from property taxes, sales taxes, and personal income taxes, even when the percentages are reduced. Florida attracted 624,000 new residents in 2020, along with more than $40 billion in income, equating to an estimated $23.7 billion in new tax income. Florida has enjoyed two decades of net in-migration, amounting to a total income gain of $197 billion.

North Carolina’s latest budget included a deal to phase out corporate income taxes while also giving teachers a raise and even padding its “rainy day fund,” Schalk said. “North Carolina has been able to do that because not only have they been bold on lowering taxes, but they’ve also gotten the spending side under control.” And when companies move in, they bring intangible benefits with them as well.

“Any sort of civic organization loves it when they hear that a blue chip company like Caterpillar is relocating to our state,” Hamer said. “It means these executives are going to be serving on all sorts of different boards of directors, the local art museum, opera, or the chamber of commerce. When companies relocate their individuals, they become deeply ingrained in the community. They contribute time and treasure to activities that make the community more vibrant.”

The reverse is also true for states that are losing businesses and population, creating a vicious circle where continuously hiking taxes fails to bring in more revenue because the tax base gets depleted and quality of life suffers. According to a report based on IRS data by Wirepoints, an Illinois-based economic research organization, the cost of losing companies and people is stark for states like Illinois, which has lost population for 21 straight years.

Since 2020, that state has lost a total of $535 billion in income that moved away, which equates to about $25 billion in lost tax revenue during that period, and $4 billion in 2020 alone. Illinois’ problems include a loss of 114,000 residents in 2021, a string of 21 consecutive years of state budget deficits, a $313 billion deficit in public pensions, and the second-highest property tax rates in the country.

“Illinois is stuck in a vicious downward spiral it can’t hope to escape from without fundamentally changing how it governs,” the Wirepoints report states. “Structural property tax reform, reductions in pension debt, slashing units of local government—the state needs to do all these things if it wants to convince Illinoisans to stay and persuade other Americans to move in.”

Reducing violent crime would also help. Escalating crime was reportedly a factor, one among many, in Citadel’s decision to leave Chicago for Miami. Ken Griffin, the hedge fund’s CEO, had been one of Illinois’ richest residents and had given more than $600 million in charitable donations to educational, cultural, medical, and civic causes in the state.

“It’s the beauty of the 50 laboratories of our democracy,” Schalk said. “We’re able to quickly see what’s working and what’s not working across all issue areas. Unfortunately, I don’t see the high tax and high spend states changing their ways.”

“We can see an acceleration of hostile business policies in states like California, Illinois, and New York,” Hamer said. “It’s a race to increase taxes, increase regulation, and make it more difficult for people to live their lives. When you contrast that with states like Texas and Arizona, the gap is just widening and we’re seeing the great migration as a result.”

Republican Representatives in Washington are attempting to grant even more economic power to states in energy production. The GOP introduced the Federal Land Freedom Act last year, which would take authority to approve oil leases and permits away from the federal government and “give each state the right to develop all of the energy resources on the federal lands located within that state’s borders.”

Recently, however, blue states appear to be waking up and looking for ways to boost their competitiveness. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently stated, “some businesses may have left the state, come on back! It’s a point of pride that we welcome you back.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy sent personal letters to more than 50 companies in red states, appealing for them to come to New Jersey. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont made a similar attempt. These governors are highlighting one regulatory advantage that they believe will give them an edge over conservative states: their permissive policies toward abortion.

Murphy’s letter to companies in Georgia stated that “The overturning of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy—and the chilling effect this decision will have on your ability to attract and retain top female talent by being located in a state which has refused to recognize women’s reproductive freedom—cannot be ignored.”

Alyana Alfaro Post, Murphy’s press secretary, said, “Governor Murphy encourages businesses looking to stand with their employees to look at New Jersey, a state where they can be confident that the rights of women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and voters will always be protected.”

“We’re a family-friendly state that respects women,” Lamont stated in a video pitch. “I know some of you are in states like Texas, which are outlawing a woman’s right to choose. We have codified, we are protecting a woman’s right to choose … any of you business owners thinking about making a move, give me a call. I’d love to hear from you.”

Source: The Epoch Times

A transgender activist who creates widely distributed educational resources for nonbinary students called for a “Supreme Court assassination challenge” on the same day Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Eli Erlick, a founder of Trans Student Educational Resources (TSER) and creator of a popular “Gender Unicorn” graphic for “gender fluidity,” tweeted and later deleted the remark on Friday, when the High Court delivered its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Since 2011, Erlick and the “youth-led” organization have helped implement transgender policies in dozens of school districts, including Wisconsin, New York, and Texas. The group backs sweeping “structural change” as opposed to “equality,” which according to its website, “reinforces systems of white supremacy, transphobia, and injustice.”

Following the leaked Dobbs decision in May, pro-abortion activists have targeted pro-life offices and crisis pregnancy centers across the country. Vandals firebombed pro-life buildings in Wisconsin and New York and defaced four pro-life churches in Washington State. Fears heightened in June when an armed California man was arrested outside the home of Brett Kavanaugh and later confessed to plans to assassinate the justice.

Assassination threats, sometimes from accounts with thousands of followers, erupted on social media on the day the Court ended constitutional protection for abortion.

“Can someone kill Clarence Thomas??” an account with more than 14,000 followers tweeted. The post hadn’t been taken down as of this article’s publication.

Another user said, “i’m going to assassinate supreme court justice Clarence Thomas,” in a tweet that has since been taken down. The account is no longer visible.

After deleting the assassination post, Erlick, who has more than 10,000 followers on Twitter, called out conservative pundit Ann Coulter for having joked six years ago that someone should “rat poison” former associate justice John Paul Stevens.

“The right only wants to defend the Supreme Court when it leans conservative,” Erlick tweeted.

Erlick was named one of Glamour magazine’s 2017 Women of the Year and has received breathless media coverage since transitioning and becoming a political activist as a teen.

Violence has only worsened since the Dobbs ruling. Protesters in Los Angeles assaulted police with fireworks and a makeshift blow torch, injuring four officers. In Phoenix, others attempted to storm the state capitol building while its Senate was in session, smashing windows and tearing down a fence in the process.

Some Democratic politicians, meanwhile, have fueled institutional distrust. In Washington, D.C., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) on Friday stood outside the Court, shouting “illegitimate” and urging supporters “into the streets.” In Chicago, Democratic mayor Lori Lightfoot said, “Fuck Clarence Thomas!” in front of a crowd at the Windy City’s annual Pride parade.

Erlick, who is currently a Ph.D. candidate in “political philosophy, social movements, and trans history” at the University of California, Santa Cruz, did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment. Neither did TSER. The Trans Youth Equality Foundation also did not respond to a request for comment.

“Critical thinking requires carefully considering the source,” Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Free Beacon. “The ‘Gender Unicorn’ graphic makes profound claims about the fundamental metaphysical nature of mankind. The source doesn’t particularly appear to be a balanced and disinterested sage, to say the least.”

Update 4:13 p.m.: This piece has been updated with an additional comment.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/transgender-activist-who-created-gender-unicorn-calls-for-supreme-court-assassination-challenge/

A 29-year-old biological male beat a teenage girl to the top prize in the women’s division of a New York City skateboarding contest, sparking criticism from skateboarders about biological men competing in women’s sports.

Ricci Tres, who was born male but now identifies as female, on Saturday won a $500 prize for beating 13-year-old Shiloh Catori in the Boardr Open. Four of the six finalists were girls between the ages of 10 and 17.

Tres’s domination of the Boardr Open comes less than a week after the International Rugby League prohibited male-to-female transgender rugby players from competing in women’s matches. The International Swimming Federation announced last Sunday that it would restrict transgender athletes from competing in women’s events. The federation made the announcement after transgender swimmer Lia Thomas won multiple victories against biological women. Meanwhile, the Biden administration last week proposed Title IX changes that will effectively abolish sex-separate activities and spaces.

Tres’s victory reminded female skateboarder Taylor Silverman of her losses to transgender athletes in women’s events.

In at least one case, Silverman wrote last month, the decision to include biological men “took away the opportunity that was meant for women to place and earn money.”

“I am sick of being bullied into silence,” Silverman wrote.

Nearly 60 percent of Americans say that transgender athletes should be banned from professional women’s sports, according to a Washington Post poll released last week.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/adult-biological-man-beats-teenage-girl-to-win-womens-skateboarding-contest/

‘One would have thought that racial discrimination on buses was a thing of the past’

When a gay activist group handed out free bus and ferry tickets to “self-identifying Trans, Black, and/or brown” people headed to New York’s Fire Island over Juneteenth weekend, it said the goal was “transportation equity.” But lawyers tell the Washington Free Beacon that the move likely ran afoul of civil rights laws that ban race and gender identity discrimination, reflecting a broader rift between elite mores and legal safeguards.

The Black and Brown Equity Coalition of Fire Island says it works to foster “a sense of belonging” on Fire Island, a mecca for New York’s gay and transgender community. It advertised the free tickets in a Facebook group—the “Boys of Fire Island”—posting on June 17 that the tickets would “make our events look more like the queer community at large.”

“One would have thought that racial discrimination on buses was a thing of the past,” said Michael Buschbacher, a former Justice Department official now working in private practice. “Apparently not.”

The ticketing plan is rife with potential civil rights violations, Buschbacher and others told the Free Beacon, including potential violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans racial discrimination in private contracting, as well as New York State’s Human Rights Law, which bans discrimination in public accommodations based on race and gender identity. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Equity Coalition is bound by both laws.

In the run-up to the holiday weekend earlier this month, the Equity Coalition asked two public accommodations, Bay Bus Fire Island and Sayville Ferry Service, to provide the group with 54 free tickets for “volunteers and staff” running events on the island, according to an email from the group to the bus service reviewed by the Free Beacon. The Equity Coalition then distributed those tickets based on race and gender, the group’s Facebook post suggests.

The Equity Coalition is extreme even by the standards of other progressive groups. It launched its own pride parade, the coalition’s website states, after learning that Fire Island’s main parade would include police officers. It also trumpets the importance of “white accomplices” to its social justice work, which involves helping those “most impacted by racism, transphobia, xenophobia, colonialism, white supremacy culture, and hyper-capitalism.”

“The work that we are doing requires amplifying BIPOC voices but to make progress we also need white accomplices,” the group’s website says. “Thank you to our white accomplices!”

The free tickets reflect the race-conscious consensus that has formed throughout public and private bureaucracies, even—and perhaps especially—those that claim to be concerned with race discrimination. The Biden administration in 2021 allocated billions in pandemic relief funds to minority owned-restaurants, and multiple states, including Utah, in January gave minorities first dibs on scarce COVID-19 drugs in the name of “health equity.”

Such schemes have proliferated amid concerns that they violate federal law: Utah was told that racially rationing COVID drugs was illegal but did so anyway with the blessing of the Biden administration.

As blue states extend civil rights protections to more and more groups, these clashes between law and policy may become more frequent, if the Equity Coalition is any indication. New York in 2019 updated its human rights law to preclude discrimination based on gender identity. Offering free tickets to transgender people—but not cisgender people—is a “presumptive violation” of that law, said Dennis Saffran, a New York City attorney who served as general counsel to the New York State Division of Housing and a special assistant to the New York State attorney general.

The law covers organizations that are leasing public accommodations, Saffran added, not just the accommodations themselves. If New York courts treat the Equity Coalition as a lessee of the bus and ferry services, it can be hit with penalties and even lose tax-exempt status in the state.

It could also lose its federal tax-exempt status, another lawyer said. The Equity Coalition is part of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, PODER Inc., “a Spanglish, nonpartisan organization that is building local power, block by block.” The Internal Revenue Service has revoked the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that violate anti-discrimination law, the lawyer noted. Though nonprofits can give out gifts based on race, they can’t racially discriminate in contracts or employment.

“If these tickets are being provided in exchange for an agreement to perform work of some sort on Fire Island,” Buschbacher said—as the email to the bus service suggests—”then there’s a good chance that this discriminatory program is therefore illegal.”

The Equity Coalition did not respond to a request for comment.

A representative of Bay Bus Fire Island, John Luc, said the coalition never told the bus company that it planned to distribute the tickets based on race and gender identity.

“That sort of thing is really frowned upon here,” Luc told the Free Beacon.

Update June 28, 10:48 p.m.: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Michael Buschbacher said the Equity Coalition could lose its federal tax-exempt status. We regret the error.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/a-gay-activist-group-gave-free-bus-tickets-to-minorities-and-trans-people-it-likely-violated-civil-rights-law/

Rep. Sharice Davids (D., Kan.) has cited “the ongoing public health emergency” to justify skipping out on in-person votes—while attending fundraisers and staying in $1,000-a-night hotels across the country.

Davids’s campaign has spent more than $20,000 on out-of-state hotel stays this cycle, often at swanky hotels. Davids last August attended a Napa Valley fundraiser with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) a day before missing an in-person vote on legislation related to a report on federal programs for Native American children. She is one of only four Native American members of Congress. The congresswoman claimed she was “unable to physically attend” House proceedings “due to the ongoing public health emergency” brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

There are no rules limiting members of Congress from using proxy voting. But Democrats have been accused of abusing the loophole, which Pelosi instituted early in the pandemic. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) said the “overwhelming majority” of members who vote by proxy are “lying” when they cite the coronavirus pandemic for missing votes.

Davids has voted by proxy on at least nine occasions, which often coincided with out-of-state appearances. In October, she voted in absentia for a bill related to domestic violence the same day she attended an event with Jill Biden in Kansas City. Two months later, she cast proxy votes on bills regarding China’s genocide against Muslims and synthetic opioids while traveling on Air Force One to an event with resident Joe Biden.

Davids’s campaign paid $3,632 to the Kimpton Rowan in Palm Springs on Nov. 16, which overlapped with fundraisers hosted by Pelosi and Equality PAC, an LGBT group that supports Davids. The hotel charges up to $650 per night. Davids, who was raised by a single mother who served in the Army, voted by proxy two days after the trip on a bill to provide maternal care to female veterans.

Davids stayed in March at the iconic Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, which promises an “experience of luxury and elegance” for rooms ranging from $1,073 to $6,664 per night. It is unclear whether Davids stayed at the Waldorf for a fundraiser or some other event. Her congressional office and campaign, which spent $4,447 for the trip, did not respond to requests for comment.

There are no legal restrictions on campaigns paying for candidates’ lodging, even at the country’s swankiest resorts. But extravagant campaign spending has opened candidates up in the past to criticism for seeming out of touch with voters. One ethics group accused Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) of using his campaign coffers as his “personal piggy bank” to pay for dinner at premier restaurants and lodging at fancy hotels. Republicans assailed Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R., N.C.) last year after his campaign paid for his stay at the Waldorf Astoria in Orlando.

Davids had seemingly little reason to worry about coronavirus at the time of her trip to Napa, where Pelosi’s husband was recently arrested for drunk driving. Davids tested positive for coronavirus on Aug. 6, weeks before her California swing. The party drew scrutiny after video emerged of maskless attendees being served by masked waiters.

Davids’s visits to California appear to have paid off, even as she touts “grassroots energy” for her campaign and an “incredible wave of support from Kansas.” She has raised $459,846 from donors in California, according to campaign finance records.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/not-in-kansas-anymore-dem-rep-skips-votes-to-attend-ritzy-fundraisers/

Send them to the Island of Misfit Toys. We’ve got bigger problems. We need not accommodate the very, very few by subjugating the many. [US Patriot]

The Biden Education Department on Thursday proposed changes to Title IX that would allow students to participate in school events based on their gender identity, regardless of biological sex.

The proposed changes will effectively abolish sex-separate activities and spaces, including bathrooms and locker rooms. They would also define misuse of gender pronouns as a form of sexual harassment. The Education Department cited the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County to justify its interpretation of Title IX, claiming schools may not discriminate against a person based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The department withheld a likely more controversial proposal that would allow transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports, saying it will provide the rule at a later date.

The hesitation signals caution on the part of the Biden administration, which had twice delayed rolling out the changes. Polls have found a majority of Americans oppose transgender athletes participation in women’s sports. Critics say the Biden administration’s changes are bad for women.

“A shift from biological sex to gender identity means that girls and women will be forced to accept the presence of biological males in what have always been single-sex spaces.” said Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach for Parents Defending Education. “Dignity and respect matter for everyone but so do fairness and safety, and these proposed changes represent a total rejection of fairness and safety in the name of ideology.”

The regulations also deliver on resident Joe Biden’s campaign promise to bring about a “quick end” to the Trump administration’s Title IX ruling. The Trump-era regulations preserved due process protections for students accused of sexual misconduct, which Education Department has now reversed. The Biden-era proposal strips students of such protections and “reverts back to an ‘inquisitorial’ model,” according to Sanzi, “in which the Title IX coordinator gets to be the sole investigator as well as the judge and jury.”

“The Biden administration made the decision to deliberately target the rights of accused students,” Sanzi added.

Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of Title IX. In a press release marking the occasion, the Education Department claimed the proposed rules ensure “fairness for all parties, respect for freedom of speech and academic freedom, respect for complainants’ autonomy, and clear legal obligations that enable robust enforcement of Title IX.”

The Education Department’s proposed changes come as schools across the country grapple with policies pertaining to transgender students. The Washington Free Beacon reported last week that parents have voiced constitutional objections to a Virginia school district’s decision to suspend students who use the wrong pronouns for transgender peers.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/no-girls-allowed-biden-education-department-proposes-radical-title-ix-changes/

A New York school district is standing by a sex-ed lesson that instructed students to discuss terms such as “face fuck,” “coochie slayer,” and “professional raw dogger.”

The Croton-Harmon school district says its teachers should discuss these sexual terms, which were part of a lesson plan this month for a district high school’s 10th grade health class, so that students can learn “the importance of using respectful language” about sex. A photo of these phrases on a classroom whiteboard, which also included “ejaculate and evacuate,” “bust one in me,” and “rearrange my insides,” circulated on social media, sparking outrage from parents. The school district, however, is refusing to back down.

Look what’s being taught in 10th grade at a Westchester HS & in schools around NY, according to many concerned parents who contacted me. Inappropriate, vulgar & criminal sexual content needs to be banned from classroom. Stick to core academic subjects. #revengeofthenormalpeople pic.twitter.com/XBmYvBhQ69

— Rob Astorino (@RobAstorino) June 14, 2022

“Learning experiences such as this one are important for our students, and we trust our highly trained, dedicated, and passionate professionals in their facilitation of these experiences,” the district said in a statement last week.

Some of the phrases appear to be obscure slang for graphic descriptions of sex: One of the terms—”charzarding”—is defined only in Urban Dictionary.

The Croton-Harmon school district did not respond to a request for comment.

The incident marks the latest in a series of controversies over how sex education is taught to schoolchildren around the country. Liberal advocacy groups funded by Democratic Party donors, including the Sexuality Information and the Education Council of the United States, have pushed school districts nationwide to teach elementary school students about gender identity and transgenderism, the Washington Free Beacon reported last year.

The Westchester County school district’s sex education plan sparked heated debates at a June school board meeting. One parent whose daughter was in the classroom said, “I frankly do not see the connection of using this level of vulgarity in the classroom and teaching the concepts that the administration says are the goals.”

Some state Democrats, meanwhile, have come to the school district’s defense. Peter Harckham, a New York state senator present at the meeting, defended the school and thanked its teachers for their “sensitive conversations and professionalism.”

The health curriculum for district high schoolers includes a Planned Parenthood-produced video about consent that only portrays same-sex couples. The Trans Student Educational Resources’ popular “Gender Unicorn” graphic, which claims that “gender identity” and sexual attraction are on a spectrum, is also listed in the curriculum. The middle school curriculum, meanwhile, includes several lessons about transgenderism and an activity in which students create an exhibit on LGBT issues for the Museum of Natural History.

The New York district’s push for sexualized health lessons comes as the Biden administration advocates in favor of sex transitions for children through hormones and surgery. The White House in June released a plan to counter Republican states that attempt to ban transgender hormone treatment for minors, which have already been met with lawsuits from LGBT groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Rob Astorino, a New York Republican gubernatorial candidate who shared the photo of the vulgar terms, said he is concerned parents are unaware of the growing instances of overly sexualized lesson plans.

“Kids who can’t get into a rated-R movie are now learning about twisted and dangerous sex acts,” Astorino told the Free Beacon. “If someone was caught teaching kids this stuff in a park, he or she would be arrested as a sex offender.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/not-safe-for-school-ny-district-defends-x-rated-sex-ed/

Retired U.S. Army Major General Paul Vallely is vigorously sounding the alarm against a potential communist takeover of the country and is also very concerned about the mandatory COVID vaccination of all members of the military.

Vallely asserts that there have been many adverse reactions within the force since the rollout of the vaccines, singling out the risk of blood clots and heart problems with the jabs.

“The mandatory vaccines and boosters … under Department of Defense guidance and directives to the commands throughout the Armed Forces have caused a great deal of controversy. Number one: those that declined mandatory vaccination under the First Amendment religious rights,” Vallely told The Epoch Times.

He believes that there is no need to force COVID vaccines on them, as “these are the healthiest men and women we have in the country.”

“They can take [the vaccines] as an option, but we’ve got to stop this mandatory vaccination. It’s hurting the armed forces. And of course, our enemies see that—the Russians, the Chinese, the cartels. And then [there’s] the wokeism, the teaching of critical race theory. So there are a lot of things going on that are affecting the status and the readiness of our forces right now. I’m very worried about that.”

According to U.S. Army Public Affairs, 97 percent of the active army and 88 percent of the army reserve is completely vaccinated. It also states that 2,846 exemption requests have been refused and there have been 3,330 official reprimands, as of April 13. However, an anonymous whistleblower told The Defender that the actual vaccination rates may be significantly lower.

The Army had separated 669 soldiers “for refusing the lawful order to receive the COVID-19 vaccine,” as of May 19.

Vallely served for 31 years in the U.S. Army and retired in 1992 as the deputy commanding general for the U.S. Army Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has over 15 years of experience in special operations, psychological operations, and civil-military operations.

He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and earned his commission in the Army in 1961, at the height of the Vietnam war.

After serving two combat tours in Vietnam, Vallely also served in several other overseas theaters in Europe and Pacific Rim countries. Vallely also served on U.S. security assistance missions and civilian–military relations tours all over the world.

Time Spent on CRT and Communist Ideology Could Be Used for Gun Training

“I think the Russians and the cartels and the Chinese, they’re letting us destroy ourselves from within. They don’t have to even do anything. It’s self-destruction within our own government. They see that, and of course, that makes us very, very vulnerable when we have critical race theory and ideology and what we call indoctrination, rather than putting forth the training and education that has to go on within our military,” Vallely said.

He believes that there “absolutely” is an agenda to transform the republic, that the country is being dismantled from within, and that a socialist takeover has already made substantial progress.

“When you take away to teach a critical race theory and communist ideology, you’re taking away from the time that could be used for learning how to shoot better, how to operate airplanes better, take care of airplanes through maintenance; and even within the medical corps of the armed forces, it has affected many the doctors and nurses. So it’s a terrible thing. They need to stop it right now. They need to stop enforcing the mandates,” he stated.

“This is terrible tyranny that’s going on.”

How to Stop a Communist Takeover

Despite the gloomy prospects, Vallely keeps a positive spirit and thinks that if the country is to be preserved, Americans need to awaken and act, starting at the local level—and quickly turn the tides before it’s too late.

“We have to have the sheriffs and the governors enforcing the 10th Amendment. We need to have that happen. I’m not sure that the elections are going to be fair in November.

“People have to stand up before we are led into a really bloody civil war. And that’s what it’s looking like.”

Vallely further asserted that there are “high-tech oligarchs” that, behind the scenes, want to “change the direction of this country, and they’re doing it. They’re dismantling this country. They don’t believe in our Constitution, for example they don’t care about the First Amendment or Second Amendment. They want to completely dominate the society culturally.”

Vallely is now the chairman of Stand Up America US Foundation and the Legacy National Security Advisory Group. He is a founding member of the Citizens Committee on National Security and is the founder of Nemo Arms incorporated in Boise, Idaho.

“2022 is the awakening of America. We need to wake up to see what’s happening to our country and to our government—the demolishing of our Constitution, increased burglaries, crime, and deaths within our cities. We got to enforce the law. These are all things that are on the table that must be done to turn the country around. If not, we’ll be destroyed,” Vallely concluded.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/people-have-to-stand-up-before-we-are-led-into-a-really-bloody-civil-war-former-us-major-general-paul-vallely_4546269.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-23-1&utm_medium=email&est=bDM0I89cUm%2F30nojeh7gA17jQ%2BQPboEzYmIZ8N2oHM11rO9s1uDnXZFAHOk1%2BKIttw%3D%3D

Desertions have exploded within the United States Navy since President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

More than twice as many sailors deserted their Navy posts in 2021 than in 2019, according to Task and Purpose.

157 sailors deserted in 2021, a hefty increase on the 98 who abandoned their posts in 2020. 63 sailors deserted in 2019.

A poor quality of life for enlisted sailors has fueled the Navy’s desertion crisis.

Sailors stationed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center revealed they were billeted without hot water and air conditioning for months to the Navy Times earlier this year.

Five sailors stationed aboard an aircraft carrier under constant construction committed suicide in a time span of ten months, according to Military.com.

Living had become mentally arduous on board the ship due to constant noise and the havoc of endless construction.

Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russell Smith had dismissed sailors’ concerns in a visit to the George Washington, insisting that they persevere in a living situation that had already driven members of the crew to suicide.

Three Navy commanders were relieved of command in one week in June alone.

Those fired included the captain responsible for the Navy’s only basic training installation.

The Navy said “lost confidence” caused the firings, falling back on a term often used to justify the firings of military officers without revealing a specific reason.

Senior Navy leaders testified to Congress on quality of life issues within the branch earlier this year, with lawmakers questioning the treatment and living standards afforded to junior enlisted sailors.

As the effects of a mental health crisis and desertion spree plague the Navy, the Biden administration has doubled down on new programs to promote critical race theory and gender ideology within the branch.

A Navy video on using the correct progressive gender pronouns was distributed within the branch in June.

Related:

China Launches Third Aircraft Carrier but There’s Something That Immediately Sets It Apart from Anything Else on the Seas

The world is LAUGHING: Navy goes full-WOKE under Biden pic.twitter.com/NjeZLgRTpF

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 21, 2022

The men and women who signed up for America’s Navy deserve better than this.

They require leadership closely attuned to solving the serious problems wreaking havoc on the Navy.

Not social experimentalists using their power to create a progressive playground.

Val Demings hopes ‘Gamers for Demings’ posts on Chinese app TikTok will take down Marco Rubio

Florida Democratic Senate hopeful Val Demings is promoting a popular “children’s game with a sex problem” to court voters in her race against Republican incumbent Marco Rubio.

Demings in March used Chinese app TikTok to share the first installment of her “Gamers for Demings” series, which used the children’s game Roblox to depict a virtual version of the Democrat running through Florida. The post came just weeks after the BBC highlighted the game’s “sex problem.” Roblox—which two-thirds of U.S. children between the ages of 9 and 12 reportedly have played as of 2020—came under fire for hosting user-generated sex games known as “condos,” where gamers’ avatars can have virtual sex. In one instance, the BBC reported, a “naked man, wearing just a dog collar” and a leash, was “led across the floor by a woman in a bondage outfit” as a man “wearing a Nazi uniform” looked on.

Demings’s decision to use Roblox and TikTok to promote her campaign shows how Democrats are widening their political strategy to use unorthodox means of communication. Demings is far from the only Democrat on TikTok, a Chinese-owned app that has sparked bipartisan security concerns. Fellow Democratic Senate candidate Tim Ryan (Ohio) has posted videos of himself lip-syncing on the platform, and Sens. Jon Ossoff (D., Ga.) and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) are also active users. In February, resident Joe Biden moved to address TikTok’s security risks—but he’s also used influencers on the app to sway public opinion, even inviting some to film in the White House.

After Demings’s first Roblox-themed TikTok post, a popular Roblox news account on Twitter praised the Democrat, asking if a “Robloxian” could “be Florida’s next senator.” Demings’s communications director responded to say the campaign was “proud to launch Gamers for Demings,” and the Democrat went on to share two more Roblox posts in the following months. One, which Demings posted in April, shows her blasting off into space on a virtual rocket. Another, shared on June 11, depicts a virtual Demings dancing with LGBTQ flags under a “Happy Pride Month” banner. That post includes the hashtags “PrideMonth,” “roblox,” “LGBTQ,” “foryourpride,” “fyp,” and “valdemings.”

It’s unclear how Demings expects to use a game most popular with preteens to attract voters. Her campaign did not return a request for comment.

In addition to concerns over Roblox’s sex problem, the game has faced criticism for exploiting child labor. Roblox allows its users to create, share, and play their own games within the Roblox platform. As a result, the Guardian reported in January, Roblox has made millions off of the work of children with no formal contracts in place.  

Demings is widely favored to face Rubio in November but will first have to emerge from an August primary race. Neither candidate has a strong financial advantage—both Demings and Rubio have raised roughly $30 million and hold roughly $13 million on hand as of March 31. Rubio is polling at 49 percent, 9 points better than Demings’s 40 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/val-demings-promotes-childrens-game-with-a-sex-problem-to-court-voters/

In a stirring and spot-on campaign email, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis declares war on the Far Left calling it a “Radical Vigilante Woke Mob.”

While I’ve seen my share of them over the years and sent out a few myself, campaign fundraising emails are notorious for appealing to the hard-core base of both parties.  

So, most of them are taken with a grain of salt by political observers.

However, the email I just received from the DeSantis re-election campaign really hit home. It accurately defined and summarized the aggressive domestic threat posed by the extreme Left to our nation’s very core:

Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.

This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.

A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.

We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.

We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”

DeSantis omitted the LGBTQ brainwashing of our young children and the collusion of major woke companies like Disney in doing so, but he has been at the forefront of battling both these evils in Florida.

The DeSantis campaign continues, noting something that impacted me directly on the huge social media platform LinkedIn: “We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.”

And of course, the last piece of the massive leftist effort: “We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.”

Referring to himself as the “Governor of the Free State of Florida,” DeSantis then goes on to make his pitch for how he will fight this grave threat to America, at least in Florida, with “faith, with reason, and with freedom.”

And of course, he asks for our financial support.

In my view, this email accurately and effectively summarizes the threat we face from the extreme Left in America today. DeSantis is on the front lines of this battle in Florida, but he also seems to be preparing to take the fight nationally as well.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

https://www.americanliberty.news/politics/florida-governor-goes-to-war-against-radical-vigilante-woke-mob/pcrespo/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=7766

Corporate executives tell workers stick to business, leave politics at home

In an indication that corporate progressivism may be reaching its high-water mark, CEOs for the first time are pushing back against activist employees, in some cases going so far as to fire them rather than steer their companies into the mire of “woke” politics.

Last week, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell became the latest executive to say he has had enough. He invited employees who felt “triggered” by controversial ideas to accept a severance package and leave the company.

The cryptocurrency technology company’s new mission statement says that it “will never ask that our employees adopt any specific political ideology as a requirement for our workplace … We recognize that hurt feelings are inevitable in a global organization that is optimizing for team outcomes above individual sentiment. The ideal Krakenite is thick-skinned and well-intentioned.”

Powell told “Fox & Friends” that of the company’s 3,000 employees, about 30 have chosen to accept the four-month severance pay and leave, citing their need to express political or social beliefs in the workplace. Comments from the remaining 99 percent of Kraken employees regarding the policy to keep politics out of the workplace were “overwhelmingly positive,” he said.

“I think everyone is ready to get back to work and stop being distracted.”

“Suddenly, nobody has any interest in this anymore, and companies are responding accordingly and starting to drop ‘woke,’” said Scott Shepard, director at the National Center for Public Policy Research. “I don’t think this is the end of woke, I don’t even think it’s the beginning of the end, but to borrow from Mr. Churchill, I do think it might be the end of the beginning.”

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space exploration company, joined the chorus on June 16. After several employees publicized a letter denouncing Musk’s campaign to acquire Twitter and steer the social media platform away from censorship, SpaceX responded by firing them.

The employees publicly criticized Musk’s efforts as “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” for SpaceX. After firing those responsible, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell emailed employees that the efforts against Musk’s Twitter acquisition “made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views. We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.”

The Athletic, a sports news website owned by The New York Times, told its staff this week to stick to sports and drop the political activism.

“We don’t want to stop people from having a voice and expressing themselves,” Paul Fichtenbaum, the publication’s chief content officer, said in a directive. “We just need to keep it from tipping over into the political space.”

Some employees disagreed. A staffer quickly responded in protest. “What about Black Lives Matter? Is that a social cause? Who will write about athlete protests? What about trans athletes in sports?”

Political activism can take a toll on companies, both internally and externally. Walt Disney Co. has proven to be a cautionary tale for corporate leaders. In March, CEO Bob Chapek bowed to activist employees and announced that the family entertainment company would fight to support sex education for children in elementary school, while company executives revealed the intention to add LGBT content to kids’ movies and shows.

That action sparked a backlash from conservative employees and led to parents canceling subscriptions and theme park visits.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to Disney’s harsh criticism of a state law banning sex-ed in kindergarten through third grade by revoking the tax-advantaged status of the company’s theme park in Orlando. Meanwhile, shareholders watched with alarm as Disney stock fell from $130 per share in March to about $94 currently, a 28 percent drop that’s well in excess of the 18 percent decline in the S&P 500 over the same period.

Citibank’s pro-abortion and anti-gun advocacy also drew the attention of state lawmakers. Texas passed legislation in June 2021 that barred banks that discriminate against fossil fuel companies or gun makers from underwriting state bonds. And Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain threatened Citibank with similar treatment in March over its policy of paying travel expenses for employees who go out of state to circumvent Texas’s anti-abortion laws. Texas is the second-largest issuer of municipal bonds in the United States. Other states such as West Virginia have passed similar laws.

In response to employee protests over controversial programs, such as comedian Dave Chappelle’s stand-up comedy show “The Closer,” Netflix told employees in May that it would no longer tolerate efforts to censor content that staff find objectionable.

“We support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with; we program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices,” the company stated. “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

Netflix took that action after it lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of this year and projected that it would lose 2 million more in the second quarter.

“It turns out that alienating the majority of your customer base is terrible for business,” Shepard said. “You can sort of get away with that when the market is reaching new highs and interest rates are nothing, so you can borrow and make up for the lack of profits.”

But in today’s environment, with markets tumbling, interest rates rising, and a potential recession looming, “suddenly the luxury of alienating your customer base doesn’t exist anymore.”

In addition to efforts at SpaceX to refocus employees toward company business, Musk is also working to revamp his target acquisition, Twitter, into a more inclusive platform. Last week, he communicated to employees that the platform must be open to all political points of view and that conversations that represent legal free speech, however offensive, should be permitted on Twitter. He’s expected, if the sale of the company goes through, to fire many of the progressive pro-censorship executives.

Many organizations, even the most progressive ones, are finding that taking up divisive racial and gender agendas is causing employees to turn on each other. Politico reported in November 2020 that “following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey, and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear, and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.”

Left-wing internet publication The Intercept lamented that the election of resident Joe Biden was supposed to mark the start of a golden era for the progressive moment. Instead, “Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations … It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function.”

The Washington Post fired reporter Felicia Sonmez in early June for incessant public attacks on a fellow staff writer and on the paper itself, accusing them of racism and sexism. In response to Sonmez’s critical tweets, Executive Editor Sally Buzbee initially issued an advisory to all staff that “we do not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues either face to face or online.”

When that failed to rein in Sonmez, the Post fired her for “insubordination, maligning your coworkers online and violating the Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”

Companies are learning that they are often hurting their own brands and losing customers by taking up highly controversial political positions. And like Chapek, many CEOs are finding themselves unprepared for the harsh world of social-justice politics.

The executives of Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Microsoft, Levi’s, and Major League Baseball chose to protest voter ID laws in Georgia, with MLB even removing its All-Star game from Atlanta. Delta CEO Ed Bastian first supported the law, then turned against it in response to left-wing threats to boycott the airline.

But few companies followed Disney into the fight over child sex education, and so far, few companies have waded into the abortion debate, despite indications that the Supreme Court could decide to overturn Roe v. Wade, sending decisions on abortion law back to state legislatures.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/ceos-start-to-push-back-against-woke-employee-bullying_4545883.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-21-1&utm_medium=email&est=xguET43BDajtt3XB1NkEJYLlu6Z3uZ57CowCtKs%2BAsdhMxv62pDcrEJTfYIRIfPnyg%3D%3D

Columnist Naomi Wolf, author of “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” asserts that after two years of pandemic policies, people in free societies are behaving more like those in authoritarian societies.

Wolf maintains that America is now less free, and becoming almost unrecognizable.

“A handful of bad actors” including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Big Tech, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) used the pandemic to “exploit the crisis in such a way as to reengineer our free democratic open societies, especially in the West, especially in the United States, into a post-free society, a post-humane society,” said Wolf during a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

Related Coverage

‘We Don’t Have America Anymore’—Dr. Naomi Wolf on CCP-Style Technocratic Authoritarianism in the US

The Biden administration in April extended the 2-year-old coronavirus public health emergency for another 90 days.

Wolf said, based on history, the ongoing lockdowns and extension of the public health emergency indicate society is in the last phase of a tyrannical takeover, because with emergency powers, laws protecting liberty can be suspended.

According to Wolf, there are 10 steps every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10, said Wolf. Some of the other steps include demonizing whistleblowers and critics, calling dissent “treason,” “espionage,” or “subversion,” and controlling the media narrative.

During the last two years of lockdowns and mandates, Big Tech and the elites have profited while the average Americans have seen the American Dream slowly “closing” on them, she said.

“And so often, when a democracy is dying, or a regime is turning the screws on freedoms to create an established new form of tyranny, it happens intentionally in a very incremental way,” said Wolf. “And you really see this from 1930 to 1933 in Germany.”

She said humanity is witnessing the formation of a two-tier society of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, in which people who would never discriminate against others based on categories of race and sex are now discriminating against the unvaccinated.

“Suddenly, they’re happily embracing a discrimination society in which some people are cast as clean and valuable members of society and other people are ostracized and marginalized and ‘othered’ and described as sort of dirty and causing infection to others,” said Wolf.

She argues that big tech companies had an active role in creating these perceptions and in “shaping legislation and certainly in presenting the drama of COVID and lockdowns to us, and then the vaccine rollout, in such a way as to change human behavior and to change human society,” said Wolf.

Wolf cited the emails between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing Facebook’s role in getting the right public health “messages out” during the lockdowns.

People had no choice but to rely on tech platforms while they were locked down, and Big Tech used that to manipulate the public, said Wolf.

“What I do trace in the book is how there was a vast profit that tech companies made by suppressing human assembly, by helping to message that it was unsafe or unlawful to gather in person,” she said. “And when you understand that big tech companies are competing with human beings gathering in human spaces, you understand why there was a vested interest in suppressing human assembly.”

Wolf thinks big tech companies will not stop at just harvesting data on the computer, but that they want to dominate peoples’ bodily autonomy with vaccine passports.

“What these companies want more than anything is to leave the parameters of your computer and to colonize other currently non-colonized spaces, notably the human body,” said Wolf.

This would give these companies and governments the ability to switch off peoples’ access to commerce, travel, and other goods and services if they did not comply with a particular mandate, Wolf added.

Some forms of digital tracking and surveilling are already here in the United States, she said.

“You’re now expected to swipe these QR codes just to see the menu, or just to get in. And the QR code uploads your data to a central database,” she said, adding that she’s seen the software “that maps the relationships of everyone sitting at that table, and then builds databases and networks of relationships.”

Wolf said that on a scale of one to 10 on the Chinese social credit system, the United States is currently at a three.

“There’s a change that’s happened in American cities in the last two years,” she said.

Because most people around the world, particularly in U.S. cities, use digital apps to travel, do banking, and shop, a digital social credit system similar to China’s is imminent, she said.

Our data is being harvested and used by the “global technocratic elite” to control human behavior, said Wolf.

“We’ve assumed that the worst it can be is data are harvested from us with everything that we choose to do using our free will as human beings,” said Wolf.

“But what I’ve seen is that digital technology has its own logic, and it isn’t restricted by what human beings want to do. So once digital platforms and their oligarchical masters can figure out how to change people’s behavior to suit technology, there’s nothing, moral or ethical, that will keep them from changing people’s behavior to suit their technology, and to suit their business plans,” she added.

The pandemic has revealed how this type of digital control is playing out, because humans, before the prevalence of digital technology, did not choose to “socially distance” to fight pandemics, said Wolf.

“The dream of our digital overlords is for technology to tell humans what to do, and that’s exactly where we’re at,” said Wolf.

While some people might label her a conspiracy theorist, her opinions are based on a long career as a journalist, political consultant, and now tech CEO, Wolf said. Furthermore, she has witnessed firsthand the powerful elites making historical decisions under the radar, she said.

Wolf was well acquainted with this group of powerful people until recently when she was ejected from their circles for writing oppositional pieces on lockdowns.

“But it’s really true that the global technocratic elite have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow Germans or Americans or Russians or Chinese, and they now are able to align above the level of nation-states,” she said.

For example, one of the WEF’s goals is to make nation-level decision-making less and less important, and the World Health Organization’s goal is to make public health decisions on a global scale, bypassing countries’ own authorities via the pandemic treaty, said Wolf.

“These technocratic elites really do believe that they can order the world better than you and I and that they have the right to,” she said. “That’s really scary.”

Little by little, humanity’s tolerance for cruelty and authoritarianism has grown.

“The war wasn’t just on us as a political entity, the war was on American culture, and is on American culture,” she said. “And they’ve succeeded largely, unless we wake up, because we were a kind, decent, inclusive culture that respected other people’s boundaries and freedoms. … And now a CCP-style cruelty is something that we tolerate.”

What people believe is largely determined by the news they consume, said Wolf, and many people only watch news outlets that give a skewed picture of pandemic treatments and policies, largely funded by wealthy people like Bill Gates.

“I do trace in ‘The Bodies of Others’ how millions of dollars flowed and are flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the BBC and the Guardian and NPR and other formerly very credible, objective news outlets.”

Because most people get slanted news coverage, the country is more divided and many people on the left refuse to consider any other narrative or look at primary source documents, because they believe only government sources are giving them “scientific” information, said Wolf.

This skewed messaging has been able to convince people that the mandates and lockdowns are more American and important than liberty or critical thinking.

Wolf said the most brilliant aspect of the pandemic messaging was that it was framed altruistically.

“You know, ‘You’ve got to exclude those people for the good of the community,’ or ‘You’ve got to mask yourself and your child to save your child,’” said Wolf. “This really brilliantly upended American culture because it cast freedom as selfish.”

Now that those in power have effectively conditioned people to be fearful and submissive, they can keep reinstituting emergency powers, she argued.

“That’s what emergency law means,” she said. “They can do whatever they want, basically. It’s a weaponization of boards of health, it’s a weaponization of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the [Department of Health and Human Services].”

Wolf said although the situation is dire, people can do something to push back against this tyranny by being informed about what is really going on in the country, assembling in groups, and getting involved politically on the local level.

As it stands now, “I will say that each side is being fed narratives and stereotypes about the other that would persuade each side that the other is absolutely insane and dangerous, dangerously insane,” said Wolf.

“I get that conservatives think, ‘liberals don’t know what a woman is.’ That is not actually literally true, and liberals think ‘conservatives all want to torch our democratic processes, storm the Capitol, and are misogynist, racist thugs who are trigger happy,” said Wolf.

The last two years have conditioned people to fear each other and so the conversations that would have normally occurred when people gathered are not happening and keeping the country divided, said Wolf. She said she will gladly talk to people on the right.

“People I love think I’m doing something wrong in even talking to conservatives and libertarians. That’s very dangerous. The left, especially, has decided that you’re morally complicit if you have a conversation across the aisle,” Wolf said. “That is censorship, that is cancel culture, that’s un-American, that is an importation from Communism.”

She urges people to remember what makes America unique and a beacon to other nations: to remember we are the great experiment where neighbors talked to each other, listened, and didn’t “rat” each other out if they did not agree with each other, Wolf said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/we-dont-have-america-anymore-author-naomi-wolf_4545628.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-21-3&utm_medium=email&est=Ti3V30R3w%2F2JuDx47eYvzpeLpt8HYqj3OhnaBBsqKEGiN5KT8OMKfPTbD%2FFjf51nfw%3D%3D

100% waste of time spent on the one percenters [US Patriot]

The Navy is training its members to create a “safe space” by using proper gender pronouns in a new instructional video modeled after a children’s show.

“Hi! My name is Jony, and I use he/him pronouns,” Naval Undersea Warfare Center engineer Jony Rozon, who sports a rainbow-colored t-shirt, states in the video’s opening.

The official training video is meant to emphasize “the importance of using correct pronouns as well as polite etiquette when you may not be sure of someone’s pronouns,” according to the Navy, which late last month published the video online. The Defense Visual Information Distribution Service touts the video as an “official U.S. Navy video” posted by Air Force staff sergeant John Vannucci.

The video is the latest bid by the military to foster a more sensitive environment for its members and staff. The Army mandates similar gender identity training and trains officers on when to offer subordinates gender-transition surgery, the Washington Free Beacon reported in March. These programs are part of a larger push by the Biden administration to make the military more welcoming to transgender individuals.

The nearly four-minute Navy video emphasizes how members can create “a safe space” for their colleagues by using “inclusive language” that signals they are “allies” who “accept everybody.” Service members must take these steps to ensure they do not “misgender someone.” The Navy also warns staff against pressuring an individual to disclose his or her gender pronouns, saying that colleagues may still be in “the process of discovery” and not yet ready to provide this information.

“A pronoun is how we identify ourselves apart from our name, and it’s also how people refer to us in conversations,” notes engineer Conchy Vasquez, who hosts the video along with Rozon.

“Using the right pronouns is a really simple way to affirm someone’s identity. It is a signal of acceptance and respect,” adds Rozon.

The hosts go on to discuss how Navy members can create “a safe space for everybody” through the use of proper gender pronouns.

“Instead of saying something like ‘Hey guys,’ you can say, ‘Hey everyone,’ or ‘Hey team,'” Rozon says.

“Another way that we could show that we’re allies and that we accept everybody is to maybe include our pronouns in our emails or, like we just did, introduce ourselves using our pronouns,” Vasquez says.

Navy members are warned against pressuring colleagues to provide their gender pronouns.

“Some people may be going through the process of discovery, and they are not ready yet to tell you what their pronouns are, and that’s OK,” Vasquez says. If a colleague does not want to disclose gender pronouns, Navy members should “continue to use general-neutral language.”

The video also addresses what should be done when a person “misgender[s] someone.”

“I think the first thing to recognize is that it’s not the end of the world. You correct yourself and move on, or you accept the correction and move on,” Vasquez says. “The most important thing I can tell you is do not put the burden of making you feel good about your mistake on the person that you just misgendered.”

Service members are instructed to practice memorizing a person’s gender pronouns by going “through a progression of three good things about the person using their pronouns.”

“Let’s say the person chooses to use ‘they,'” Vasquez says. “Then you will in your mind go, ‘They have a nice shirt. They have a nice smile. They are really smart.’ So that kinda sticks in your brain.”

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/pride-month-heres-how-the-navy-is-training-sailors-on-proper-gender-pronouns/

Ohio Democrat takes page from GOP firebrand Lauren Boebert in attempt to distance himself from party

What do you do when running for office as a Democrat in resident Joe Biden’s America? Talk like a Republican—at least if you’re one Ohio Senate candidate.

From praising former president Donald Trump on trade to sounding the alarm about the southern border, Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) is trying his hardest to avoid being lumped in with the rest of the Democratic Party. Earlier this month, Ryan proposed a House resolution that would designate fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.” That resolution appears to be lifted from a bill proposed the day before by one of the most right-wing members of the House, Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert (Colo.), who also called fentanyl “a weapon of mass destruction that is destroying our nation.”

Ryan, who will face against Republican nominee J.D. Vance in November, is considered a long shot by political analysts. Trump won Ohio by more than 8 points in 2020 and the seat Ryan is running for is occupied by a Republican, the retiring Sen. Rob Portman.

His strategy highlights the difficulty for Democratic candidates trying to pitch themselves as moderates in the current political environment. Biden is the most unpopular president at this point in his term in almost a century, according to the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, a fact largely driven by skyrocketing inflation. For Ryan, executing this strategy could prove difficult: FiveThirtyEight also found that Ryan votes in line with Biden’s position 100 percent of the time. 

“Any Democrat running this November is gonna have a tough time running with Biden as president,” said Democratic political consultant Dick Harpootlian, a longtime friend of Biden, when asked about Ryan’s conservative messaging. “Biden is beset by huge issues and problems that are not playing well in America right now. I mean, we saw it in 1994 after [former president Bill] Clinton did well in 1992.”  

At campaign stops around Ohio, Ryan seeks to distance himself from the Democratic Party by offering a moderate and pragmatic message. In May, Ryan was conspicuously absent from a Cincinnati event where Biden spoke about the necessity of passing a domestic manufacturing bill. The White House later said Biden and Ryan were “in close touch.”

“We’ve got to get away from the Democrat-Republican thing, all these stupid fights,” Ryan said at a campaign event last month. “And we can only do that by being Americans first. China and Russia, they want us to keep fighting with each other. And to me, it’s playing right into their hands.” 

Ryan’s rebrand attempt began in April when he released an ad claiming he has spent his entire political life “sounding the alarm on China” and voting “against bad trade deals.” That ad backfired after left-wing Democrats accused him of xenophobia against Chinese Americans. 

Following the Biden administration’s announcement that it would end Title 42 restrictions on the southern border—a federal power first used by Trump that gives law enforcement the ability to rapidly deport migrants—Ryan called the decision “wrong and reckless,” breaking with top Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.).

“Prematurely ending this policy without a path forward does nothing to keep Americans safe, support our Border Patrol agents, protect asylum-seekers, or bring about the comprehensive fix our immigration system needs,” Ryan said at the time. He has also called a “strong border” a “basic American value,” a stark contrast to his rhetoric in 2018 when he said Trump’s “zero-tolerance immigration policy” showed he didn’t have an “ounce of humanity.”

His change of heart could be a product of problems on the minds of Ohio voters. As one of the states hardest hit by the opioid crisis, many voters in Ohio blame the Biden administration’s lax border policies for the influx of fentanyl there. Ryan’s rhetoric on the issues, however, hasn’t been followed by action in the House. Although Ryan introduced a fentanyl resolution nearly identical to Boebert’s Republican proposal, for example, he has yet to cosponsor her bill—a move that would increase its likelihood of passing.

Ryan’s office did not respond to a request for comment asking whether he plans on cosponsoring the Republican bill.

Shortly after Vance clinched the Ohio Republican Senate nomination in May, Ryan offered praise for Trump—who endorsed Vance in the Republican primary.

“I agreed with Trump on trade,” Ryan says in an ad that debuted earlier this month. “I voted against outsourcing every single time. We’ve gotta get tough on China. Let’s make things in Ohio again.”

Ryan sent a letter on June 10 to Biden demanding the White House not lift any tariffs against China, alleging that such a move would “strip the U.S. of leverage in negotiations” and “inundate American companies with a slew of imports they may not be able to withstand.” He implored Biden to “prioritize American workers and American manufacturing companies.” The letter came after reports that Biden was considering lifting many of the tariffs in an effort to lower inflation.

As the midterms approach, Ryan seems to have pivoted on trade issues as well. During the Trump administration, Ryan called the China tariffs just a way for Trump to “look tough.” In an interview with the Washington Post, he called Trump’s actions “abominable and must be revised immediately.”

“[Trump’s tariffs are] designed to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy, for minimal gain,” Ryan tweeted in July 2018.

Vance has labeled Ryan an opportunist and dishonest. Ryan has responded by saying he is happy to talk about his past comments on a variety of issues, including trade.

“My record is very, very clear,” Ryan said last week. “We can squabble about some of the details of it, how things are implemented and all the Washington stuff in the details we have to deal with. But my record is very, very clear on this.”

Update, June 21, 11:15 a.m.: This piece was updated with additional information on Ryan’s voting record.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/tim-ryans-master-plan-for-midterms-run-like-a-republican/

A middle school in Massachusetts has been banned from calling itself Catholic for insisting to fly gay pride and Black Lives Matter (BLM) flags, which church leaders say embody an agenda that contradicts Catholic values.

Nativity School in Worcester, Massachusetts, is no longer allowed to identify as a Catholic school, according to a decree issued by the bishop of the Diocese of Worcester. The school is also prohibited from hosting mass and sacraments on its campus or sponsoring these activities in any church building within the diocese.

“The flying of these flags in front of a Catholic school sends a mixed, confusing and scandalous message to the public about the Church’s stance on these important moral and social issues,” Robert McManus, the Bishop of the Diocese of Worcester, wrote in the order.

“It is my contention that the ‘Gay Pride’ flag represents support of gay marriage and actively living a LGBTQ+ lifestyle,” McManus explained. “This is also true of ‘Black Lives Matter.’ The Catholic Church teaches that all life is sacred and the Church certainly stands unequivocally behind the phrase ‘black lives matter’ and strongly affirms that all lives matter.”

The bishop also noted that the Black Lives Matter organization “seeks to disrupt the family structure in clear opposition to the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

The BLM activist group, whose co-founders have described themselves as “trained Marxists,” initially declared on its website that it wants to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” The dismantling of traditional family structure remains a key tenet of Marxism.

Nativity has been displaying gay pride and BLM flags since early 2021, and continued to fly them after McManus was made aware of them this March and demanded their removal.

McManus wrote that as a diocesan bishop, he has the authority to determine whether a school claiming to be Catholic is acting in a way that is contrary to the Catholic teachings, and that Nativity’s defiance leaves him “no other option but to take canonical action.”

In response to the decision, Nativity claims that flying the flags is meant to show support for “marginalized people,” which is aligned with Catholic values.

“The flags simply state that all are welcome at Nativity, and this value of inclusion is rooted in Catholic teaching,” Nativity School President Thomas McKenney said in a statement. “Though any symbol or flag can be co-opted by political groups or organizations, flying our flags is not an endorsement of any organization or ideology, they fly in support of marginalized people.”

The school said it has no plan to take down the flags and may appeal the decree through “appropriate channels.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/massachusetts-school-stripped-of-catholic-status-for-refusing-to-take-down-gay-pride-blm-flags_4543193.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-20-2&utm_medium=email&est=jL1SfIIIk3AWkAz0CTlIp%2Fl2%2BK2yFqMSab8ZUcHN8GTlWw58gq5zHuH%2FCPLFqYBKjQ%3D%3D