Obama-Biden alum Jay Carney arranged the massive gift
Faced with scorn from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos appears ready to “grease” his way into the Democratic establishment with a $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, according to Puck News.
The donation was arranged by Amazon executive and former Obama press secretary Jay Carney. The no-strings-attached gift comes as Bezos faces growing opposition from the left. The gift is the largest ever made to the foundation, which has chosen to forgo the traditional presidential library in favor of building a privately managed presidential center.
Bezos’s donation comes at a difficult political moment for Amazon. Lawmakers from both parties fault the company for its poor treatment of workers and abuse of its market power. The company has also come under fire for banning conservative voices. This year, Amazon banned a book that criticizes transgender ideology and blocked an ad for a book that criticizes the Black Lives Matter movement.
Bezos has tasked Carney, who served as then-vice president Joe Biden’s communications director, to ingratiate Amazon with Democratic lawmakers. Under Carney’s leadership, Amazon’s lobbying team has grown from about two dozen to 250 members. Reuters reported Friday that Carney has successfully lobbied to kill privacy protections for consumers in 25 states.
Amazon is not the only Bezos project to pique the ire of leading Democrats. NASA administrator and former Democratic senator Bill Nelson blamed Bezos’s Blue Origin for causing a delay in a U.S. return to the moon. The space exploration company sued NASA after it lost a major contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Obama’s presidential center is the first presidential library or museum to be run by a partisan nonprofit, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration. Bezos’s ex-wife Mackenzie Scott and Bill and Melinda Gates have already made substantial donations to the center, which presidential scholars worry will become a partisan slush fund.
Activists on Chicago’s South Side said the center will force out longtime neighborhood residents. The center received a tax-free, 99-year lease on almost 20 acres of public parkland from the city of Chicago, for $10 in total. The center will be allowed to charge fees and keep the profits.
Bezos has ramped up his philanthropy over the past four years, pledging millions of dollars to liberal causes and figures. Earlier this year, he pledged $1 billion to conservation efforts and gave $100 million to CNN contributor Van Jones.
Senator slams site in letter exclusively obtained by the Free Beacon
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) is demanding YouTube explain why it stripped ad revenue from a news channel that covered the disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, in a letter exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Blackburn says YouTube’s decision to make a video from the news program Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar ineligible for most ads shows that the company is “working with the CCP to promote its dangerous viewpoints around the world.” She also asks the company to “identify all other instances” when it “has demonetized, blocked, or deleted content at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Blackburn’s letter refers to a video posted on Nov. 18 by Breaking Points that highlighted Peng, who disappeared for two weeks after alleging a high-ranking CCP official had raped her. The Free Beaconreported last week that YouTube’s automatic review and manual review both flagged the video as inappropriate, denying Breaking Points a key revenue source.
YouTube told the Free Beacon the video was not “demonetized,” since advertisers could still place ads on the video if they opted to advertise on the platform’s blacklisted video list. YouTube did not respond to requests for comment on the percentage of advertisers who opt in.
Peng’s case has sparked international condemnation, with the Women’s Tennis Association demanding her release. WTA CEO Steve Simon asked China’s ambassador to the United States to assure Peng’s health and safety on Friday, warning that the association might be forced to pull its business and events from China if Peng’s allegations are not fully investigated.
Chinese state media on Wednesday released a statement purportedly from Peng, in which the athlete recanted her allegation that former vice premier Zhang Gaoli sexually assaulted her. According to the statement, Peng said “I’m not missing, nor am I unsafe. I’ve been resting at home and everything is fine.”
Human rights groups say Peng may be held in “residential surveillance at a designated location,” a common CCP tactic, and was likely pressured to provide the statement.
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach reportedly had a half-hour video call with Peng, and the committee said Peng “is safe and well.” But British anti-slavery activist Luke de Pulford noted on Twitter that Bach apparently has a friendly relationship with the alleged rapist.
John Chisholm inspired progressive prosecutors like Chesa Boudin
“When we pay too little attention to the underlying causes and characteristics of individuals in the criminal justice system, we make significant errors, which can lead to greater problems,” Milwaukee County district attorney John Chisholm wrote in a 2019 paper about criminal justice reform.
That was before Chisholm conceded Monday that he had set an “inappropriately low” bail amount earlier this month when Darrell Edward Brooks Jr., the lead suspect in Sunday’s deadly car rampage in Waukesha, Wis., was arrested for domestic abuse and eluding police. Chisholm has been a leading figure among “progressive prosecutors,” leftwing lawmen who favor diversionary programs and community-building to locking up criminal defendants. His handling of the Brooks case is already sparking blowback to their growing influence over the justice system, much of which has been boosted by financial contributions from the leftwing billionaire George Soros.
Chisholm, who was elected in 2007, supports deferrals for some misdemeanors and “low-level” felonies in order to cut down on incarcerations. And he’s taken credit for inspiring a new wave of prosecutors in cities like San Francisco, St. Louis, and Philadelphia who have enacted similar reforms. Chisholm congratulated San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin following his election in 2019, and the pair spoke at a forum earlier this year on the status of the progressive prosecutor movement.
Chisholm and other progressives support reforms to the cash-bail system, which they say criminalizes poverty. He has acknowledged that his reform-minded approach could put murderers back on the streets of Milwaukee.
“Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody?” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. “You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”
The Milwaukee DA said his office recommended $1,000 bail for Brooks following his arrest on Nov. 5 on charges that he punched his girlfriend in the face and hit her with his vehicle in a gas station parking lot. The woman is identified only by her initials in court papers, which indicate they have a child together. Brooks was also charged with eluding police officers when they arrived to take him into custody.
A review of Wisconsin court records shows Brooks may have been a familiar figure to Chisholm, given that he was arrested and charged about half a dozen times in Milwaukee County during Chisholm’s tenure.
Brooks posted bail on Nov. 11. On Sunday, the 39-year-old aspiring rapper allegedly drove his red Ford SUV into a holiday parade in Waukesha, killing five people. Chisholm said Monday he is reviewing the bail decision for the earlier case, saying it was not high enough for a violent crime.
Brooks’s release this month is not the first time he has been freed after prosecutors lowered his bail. Brooks, whose criminal rap sheet dates back to 1999, was released from jail in February after posting $500 bail on charges of reckless endangerment and felony possession of a firearm. Brooks’s bail was initially set at $10,000 but was drastically lowered because the case was put on hold due to a backlog created by the pandemic.
Court records show that Brooks has two open felony cases in Milwaukee County, both of which involve violent crimes. One is the domestic abuse incident, which occurred Nov. 2. The other dates to July 2020, when Brooks had a fist fight with his nephew over an old cell phone at his grandmother’s house. Brooks fired a 9mm Beretta at his nephew’s car as he drove away from the house. He was arrested with the gun and a small amount of meth.
A search of Wisconsin court records shows Brooks has been charged in Milwaukee County for crimes ranging from marijuana possession to domestic abuse to weapons violations since 2011.
Chisholm has blamed “false information” and “deliberately manipulated” scare stories about rising crime for the sense of unease that is powering opposition to progressive prosecutors. “The progressive message is very difficult to get through,” he has acknowledged, noting that he has repeatedly been the target of “conservative dark money” campaigns aimed at unseating him.
Chisholm has won favorable attention from leftwing criminal justice reformers for collaborating with the Wisconsin public defender, the state unit responsible for representing indigent defendants in court. Chisholm and a coauthor described that work in an extensive 2019 paper for the Harvard Kennedy School.
By their telling, prosecutors, public defenders, and community leaders work together to develop “community-oriented” practices that range from “antiracism” initiatives to diversionary programs for offenders they judge to be “low risk.”
“In most cases, the punitive function of the criminal justice system must be recognized as subordinate to the system’s preventive and remedial functions,” the paper reads. “Punishment is appropriate only when it advances a preventive or remedial purpose.”
Elsewhere in the paper, the pair write that punishment should never be the principal objective of a given defendants’ case, even in “cases which threaten public health and safety in such primary ways that punishment is a key component of the response.”
In a statement which took on a tragic double-meaning after Sunday’s car rampage, the pair wrote that prosecutors should be mindful of stressors and other underlying causes that lead people to commit crimes, particularly when dealing with first-time offenders.
It appears that the man allegedly responsible for the Christmas parade massacre held many antagonistic views toward conservatism and right-wing politics.
That man — identified as Darrell E. Brooks — allegedly drove his SUV through a Waukesha, Wisconsin, Christmas parade on Sunday, killing five and injuring more than 40 people.
Brooks was reportedly released on a low cash bail amount when he committed the attack.
In the past, Brooks — a convicted felon with a long criminal history — has voiced support for the controversial Black Lives Matter organization, according to a report from Heavy.com.
A rapper, Brooks went by the stage name “MathBoi Fly,” and on various social media pages using this name, Brooks voiced support for the above causes, according to Heavy.
In one post, Brooks reportedly quoted black nationalist rhetoric forwarded by Malcolm X.
“…Help African in its struggle to free itself from Western domination. No matter where the black man is, he will never be respected until Africa is a world power,” the quote read.
In another post shared by journalist and author Andy Ngo on Twitter, Brooks allegedly forwarded anti-Semitic views commonly found in black nationalist movements.
Darrell Edward Brooks, the man who was taken into custody by police over the #Waukesha Christmas parade mass casualty incident, expressed hatred of former president Donald Trump in one of his rap tracks. He also expressed black nationalist antisemitic views. #BLMpic.twitter.com/BhT7BrX5mL
The title of the lengthy post reads “HITLER KNEW WHO THE REAL JEWS WERE!”
“The white Jews know that the negros are the real children of Israel,” the post quotes Adolf Hitler as saying.
In another post shared by Ngo and Heavy, Brooks appeared to show support for Black Lives Matter with images of fruit carved with the letters “BLM” and a fist raised.
Predictably, Brooks was also not a fan of former President Donald Trump, according to Heavy.
The convicted felon rapped out the words “f**k Donald Trump” in one of his songs available on SoundCloud.
In Facebook posts, Brooks also voiced frustrations over the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, according to Heavy.
#Waukesha Christmas parade massacre suspect Darrell Edward Brooks posted about knocking white people out, including the elderly. He also expressed apparent frustration over the #Rittenhouse verdict. pic.twitter.com/5499EHEFMF
A friend of Brooks commented on the post, saying of the verdict “[d]oesn’t surprise me, what a joke.”
Brooks responded by saying “frfr…but u rite,I wasn’t surprised 1 bit.”
The 18-year-old Rittenhouse was found not guilty of several charges related to the shooting of three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Aug. 25, 2020.
Rittenhouse was found not guilty after it was determined he shot the three men in self-defense.
To be clear, as of now, there is no evidence or indication that any of these views, including Brooks’ frustration with the Rittenhouse verdict, had anything to do with Sunday’s attack.
As it turns out, Brooks is a convicted felon with a lengthy criminal record.
This is Darrell Brooks, the person of interest in the Waukesha Christmas parade attack. He is a Milwaukee man with a criminal history dating back to 1999 – with numerous violent felonies, court records show. (Wisconsin Department of Justice) Per @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/GD1ekTeFN4
Heavy reported Monday that a Wisconsin Department of Justice background check performed on Brooks contains a whopping 44 pages of his criminal history dating back to 1999.
Should Brooks have been behind bars at the time of the parade massacre?
Brooks has been convicted of a number of crimes over the years, including multiple charges of carrying a concealed weapon, strangulation and suffocation, multiple charges of aggravated battery and resisting or obstructing an officer.
At the time of the attack, he had multiple open charges pending against him, according to Heavy.
So, where did the justice system go wrong in Brooks’ case?
Well, he was hit with several charges on Nov. 5 after ” a woman told police Brooks purposefully ran her ‘over with his vehicle’ while she was walking through a gas station parking lot after he had followed her there after a fight,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
In spite of that, a judge allowed this career criminal back onto the streets Friday for a mere $1,000 cash bail, according to Heavy.
The judge did so despite the fact that one of the charges pending against Brooks is “felony bail jumping.”
Brooks faces a number of other serious charges, including resisting an officer, second-degree recklessly endangering safety with domestic abuse assessments and disorderly conduct and battery (also with domestic abuse assessments), as reported by Heavy.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Darrell Brooks Jr was out on bail after he was charged with purposely running over a woman with his vehicle
For years now, the left has been pushing for reform for the cash bail system, arguing that it disproportionately targets the poor.
There is certainly some truth to that notion, but overall, bail is a system designed to keep dangerous criminals from being set loose on the streets.
Knowing that there is a significant amount of money to lose should they step out of line creates a great incentive to stay out of trouble.
Thanks to the left, the justice system is becoming more and more lenient to criminals who should be given an incredibly high cash bail amount, if they should even be let out at all.
Convicted felons like Brooks who have an extensive criminal history of physical violence and bail jumping shouldn’t be given the benefit of the doubt.
Unfortunately, as the left continues to infect the justice system, cases like this likely will become more and more common.
A Sunday Christmas parade turned tragic in Waukesha, Wisconsin, when an SUV plowed into a crowd of people. According to one Illinois Democrat, the tragedy was due to a court decision she did not agree with.
Mary Lemanski, who serves as the social media director for the Democratic Party in DeuPage County, Illinois, mocked the tragedy and connected it to the not-guilty verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial on Friday.
“It was probably just self-defense,” Lemanski said in a since deleted tweet about the tragedy. She also added the hashtag “#KyleRittenhouse” to make it clear that her disgusting comment was a commentary on Friday’s verdict.
Mary Lemanski, the social media manager for the Democratic Party of DuPage County, Illinois, says the deadly #Waukesha Christmas parade incident is karma.
“The blood of Kyle Rittenhouse’s victims is on the hands of Wisconsin citizens, even the children.” pic.twitter.com/3WkzvSJu5J
According to Fox News, that post was just one in a series of deleted tweets about the tragedy. Another tweet sarcastically suggested the suspect “didn’t want to hurt anyone” and simply “came to help people.”
One tweet was still posted as of Monday morning.
You reap what you sow. It’s sad people died, but when you open the door to vigilante justice, everyone seems threatening.
If Lemanski is trying to use this horrible event to get some cheap laughs, it is completely reprehensible. If she is actually trying to compare the suspect to Rittenhouse, she utterly failed to the make connection.
Rittenhouse had a legitimate argument that he went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to defend a business. While he was there, he was attacked multiple times, and he ultimately had to kill two men and wound another in self-defense.
This story was legitimate enough to lead an objective jury to acquit Rittenhouse of all charges. At the very least, they felt the prosecution could not prove without a reasonable doubt that Rittenhouse was guilty of murder instead of acting in self-defense.
On the contrary, there does not seem to be a logical argument that the suspect from Sunday’s tragedy was acting in self-defense. Barring the emergence of new evidence, it seems the suspect is clearly liable for the five deaths and over 40 injuries he caused.
According to NBC News correspondent Tom Winter, Darrell Brooks, 39, was taken into custody as a suspect in the attack.
NBC News: Five law enforcement officials say that Darrell Brooks, age 39, from Wisconsin is the individual in custody as a person of interest and is being questioned by law enforcement in connection with the vehicle incident in Waukesha.
Brooks is an aspiring rapper with a long criminal record, Heavy.com reported. He past convictions include felony battery and misdemeanor obstruction of an officer, and he has open cases regarding felony reckless endangerment, felony bail jumping and felony domestic abuse assessments.
When Twitter users called out Lemanski for comparing an innocent 18-year-old to a convicted criminal who allegedly plowed into a helpless crowd, her arguments became even more outlandish and disturbing.
Do these comments disturb you?
“I’m sad,” she said, according to Fox News. “I’m sad anytime anyone dies. I just believe in Karma and this came around quick on the citizens of Wisconsin.”
Other users questioned Lemanski’s faulty logic in suggesting every Wisconsin citizen should be held liable for a decision made by 12 jury members. Even if Lemanski believes it was the wrong decision, it would not make sense to pin that decision on every other citizen of the state.
Sadly, Lemanski failed to recognize this flaw and launched into yet another disgusting accusation.
“The blood of Kyle Rittenhouse’s victims is on the hands of Wisconsin citizens, even the children,” she said.
So there you have it. Since Wisconsin prosecutors were unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rittenhouse murdered anyone, completely unrelated children in the state have blood on their hands. This is the argument Lemanski is making.
Leftists like Lemanski pretend to care about American lives, but they simultaneously use tragic deaths to push their outlandish narratives. It is a sick game to play, and people who make such disgusting suggestions as Lemanski need to be called out for their insanity.
EXCLUSIVE: Darrell Brooks Belongs to Black Supremacist Sect of Islam Called ‘The Five Percent Nation’, He Committed Vehicular Jihad
LOOMERED was first to exclusively report the identity of the Waukesha, WI attacker, Darrell Brooks. Our investigative reporting confirmed that he was the attacker and owner of the RED SUV used in Sunday’s Christmas Parade attack that left at least 5 people dead, and dozens more injured.
We were also first to report that his social media was littered with anti-white and anti-Jewish posts that encouraged the killing of White people and posts that celebrated Hitler for being “right about the real Jews”.
This publication was early to note and report Darrell’s ties to Black Lives Matter, and the fact that he used a vehicle to murder people in an act of vehicular jihad. Laura Loomer posted that the suspect was likely a black Muslim, and now we can exclusively confirm that Darrell Brooks is a supporter of The Five Percent Nation, otherwise known as the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGE or NOGE), a sub-sect of Nation of Islam (NOI).
The Five Percent Nation is a black nationalist movement influenced by Islam. Members of the group call themselves “Allah’s Five Percenters”. The Fiver Percent Nation preaches black supremacy and teaches that black people are the original inhabitants of planet earth, and that the white man is an evil devil.
The term “Five Percenter” comes from the “five percent” who are described in Nation of Islam in their “Lost-Found Muslim Leason No.2”.
This lesson categorizes people in the world into 3 categories, where 85% of the world’s population, which includes White people, are described as “uncivilized people, poison animal eaters, slaves from mental death and power, people who do not know the Living God or their origin in this world, and they worship that which they do not know. They are easily led in the wrong direction, but hard to lead into the right direction.”
The other 10% of the world’s population is described as, “the rich, slave makers of the poor-who teach the poor lies, to believe that the Almighty, True and Living God is a spook and cannot be seen by the physical eye. Otherwise known as the Blood Suckers of the poor.”
The last five percent, known as the “Five Percent Nation” are described as, “the poor, righteous Teachers, who do not believe in the teachings of the 10%, and are all wise and know who the living God is, and teach that the Living God is the Sun of man, the Supreme being (the Black Man) of Asia, and Teach freedom, Justice, and Equality to all of the human family on planet Earth.”
When LOOMERED exclusively reported the fact that Darrell Brooks was a wannabe rapper with a link to his YouTube music video which features the SUV he used in the attack, I noticed his rapper name is MathBoi Fly. Youtube has since deleted the video in their active coverup of this anti-white terrorist attack.
Given that Darrell Brooks can barely form a proper English sentence, his name isn’t MathBoi because he’s good at math! However, his rap name is MathBoi Fly because he belongs to the The Five Percent Nation, which teaches that Supreme Mathematics and Supreme Alphabet are the key to understanding humans’ relationship with the universe. These principles were created and founded by “Allah the Father”, formerly known as Clarence 13X, aka Clarence Edward Smith. The Five Percent Nation is a variation of Nation of Islam’s whose followers are predominantly black men. The founder of The Five Percent Nation founded this sub-sect of Nation of Islam after he left the Nation of Islam’s Temple Number Seven in Harlem, New York, the same temple in Harlem where Malcolm X was a minister from 1960-1963.
LOOMERED uncovered Darrell Brooks’s social media pages before they were wiped from the internet in an active coverup by Big Tech and the pro-BLM media. They are actively trying to cover up this act of black supremacist Islamic inspired terrorism against innocent White people in Wisconsin.
Darrell Brooks’s social media posts, particularly one of his Twitter posts from October 2015, prove that he was a black supremacist and a supporter of Malcom X, who was also a Muslim, and a spokesman for the Nation of Islam. However, Malcolm X was later assassinated in 1965 by three members of Nation of Islam. Ironically, two of the three Nation of Islam members who assassinated Malcolm X, Muhammad A Aziz and Khalil Islam, are set to be exonerated this week by the Manhattan district attorney. Malcolm X was assassinated in February of 1965 by three members of Nation of Islam *after* he denounced Nation of Islam in late 1964.
It is worth noting that Darrell Brooks targeted a Christmas parade in an act of vehicular Jihad, which makes his attack an attack on white Christians. His social media posts show that he also had hatred for Jews. In one Facebook post from November 2015 , he said “Hitler knew who the real Jews were.”
The Five Percent Nation doesn’t believe in a God, but they instead believe that the “Asiatic Blackman” is God, and that his name is “Allah”, the Arabic word for God.
This aligns with Darrell Brook’s social media posts which are inherently anti- white and anti- established religion. In one of his Facebook posts that you can’t see anymore because Facebook has decided to participate in this coverup by deleting Darrell Brooks’s account, he said, “religion is White Supremacy”.
Amid a time where the FBI has decided to weaponize their focus and resources on accusing conservatives and parents of being domestic terrorists, this should be a teaching lesson for the FBI, who should instead focus on investigating the actual criminals and terrorists like Black Supremacist Muslim Darrell Brooks who walk among us.
In 1965, the FBI opened a file on the Five Percenters at the height of the Black Power movements in the US during the civil rights era. The FBI described the Five Percenters as a “loosely knit group of Negro youth gangs”, and the official FBI file stated that these people got their name because they are “the five percent of the Muslims who smoke and drink.”
LOOMERED was first to boldly report that Darrell Brooks was a black Muslim and that his weapon of choice was a vehicle, making his terrorist attack on White people an act of vehicular jihad.
I remain deplatformed on all mainstream social media for speaking truth, but I will continue speaking truth to power and I will never be deterred from reporting the truth. What happened in Waukesha, Wisconsin was a black supremacist, Islamic inspired terrorist attack against White people, and LOOMERED is proud to have broken this story first.
SHAME ON THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND BIG TECH FOR COVERING IT UP!
A former New York Times reporter says the liberal newspaper waited until after the presidential election to publish her exposé debunking the narrative that the August 2020 Black Lives Matter riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, did not harm the local community.
The three-day riots erupted in August 2020 after Kenosha police officers shot Jacob Blake, an armed black man who was resisting arrest following a domestic disturbance call made by his girlfriend.
Independent journalist Nellie Bowles said in a Thursday post on Bari Weiss’ Substack channel, Common Sense, that the Times held her story until after the election.
The move is yet another sign that despite their pretense to journalistic objectivity, the establishment media — especially The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and MSNBC — are merely purveyors of left-wing propaganda.
Bowles said she was sent to Kenosha last summer to report on the “mainstream liberal argument” that allowing BLM to destroy small businesses was an appropriate way to promote “racial justice” because the businesses could recoup the costs through insurance. She learned that this was false.
“Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild,” she wrote.
“When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots.”
Sam is an Indian immigrant who owns a family-run car dealership that was destroyed by BLM arsonists. “What did we do to deserve all this?” said Sam. pic.twitter.com/hgDjbIq9pA
“I’m a minority too. I’m a brown person. I have nothing to do with this,” said Sam. The 17 people Sam employed have all lost their jobs “for nothing.” Sam has lost “every dime” he has in last few days. pic.twitter.com/VUN08gImg3
While the corporate media dismissed the vandalism and arson as inconsequential property damage, Bowles was horrified to discover the ravaging impact the BLM riots had on the local community.
“It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered,” she wrote. “Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.”
After filing her piece, Bowles was stunned that the Times delayed publishing her exposé for more than two months.
“Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn’t run. It sat and sat,” she wrote.
“A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.”
Her article spotlighting the devastation of the riots eventually ran — six days after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election.
“Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran,” Bowles wrote. “Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority.
Do you have any confidence in today’s establishment media?
“The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore.”
She continued: “If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.”
Bowles’ chilling revelations offer further evidence that the establishment media are little more than leftist political operatives masquerading as “journalists.”
Essentially, the Times buried this story to promote then-candidate Biden. In so doing, it paved the way for the mass media defamation of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who has been relentlessly smeared as a “white supremacist vigilante” simply for defending himself during the Kenosha riots.
The Times’ action helped establish the left-wing narrative that Rittenhouse had “no reason” to be there because the riots weren’t as bad and violent as he claimed.
This is not the first time the newspaper has come under fire for political bias.
In 2019, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the Times, said the outlet became “unmistakably anti-Trump” in a bid to bolster profits.
Abramson made the observations in her book, “Merchants of Truth,” where she said the Times trashed then-President Donald Trump nonstop because he was a cash cow.
“Though [executive editor Dean] Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson wrote in her book, as excerpted by Fox News. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
Abramson — who was the paper’s executive editor from 2011 to 2014 — said the Times had a financial interest in constantly running negative Trump stories because they made money.
She pointed out that the Times enjoyed a massive “Trump bump” during his first six months in office, when its digital subscriptions surged to more than 2 million — an increase of 600,000 subscribers.
“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated,” she wrote.
Abramson’s comments mirror the observations of legendary journalist Ted Koppel — a liberal who blasted CNN and MSNBC for their nonstop negative coverage of Trump, saying their ratings would tank without Trump.
CNN ratings crash in October, without any regular program averaging 1 million viewers Liberal network shed a whopping 76% of its audience since January! “Cuomo Prime Time” had its worst month since launch and finished behind 15 Fox News and 7 MSNBC shows https://t.co/LCVGdYy8Mwpic.twitter.com/GpBBtQkPVD
Koppel — a former ABC News anchor and winner of 25 Emmy Awards — said liberal outlets needed Trump because he was their holy grail for monster ratings. https://www.youtube.com/embed/0ZOgnHUQ_P8?feature=oembed
“You can’t do without Donald Trump,” Koppel told CNN host Brian Stelter in 2018. “You would be lost without Donald Trump! CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump.”
Chaos erupted Saturday at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport after a gun went off at a Transportation Security Administration screening checkpoint, sparking mass panic as flights were halted.
As a result of the incident, Kenny Wells, 42, is facing charges of carrying a concealed weapon at a commercial airport, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, discharging a firearm and reckless conduct, police said, according to the Daily Mail.
Atlanta Police Department Airport Precinct Commander Reginald L. Moorman said police are hunting for Wells.
Robert Spinden, the TSA’s federal security director for Georgia, said that as a passenger was being screened at about 1:30 p.m., a “prohibited item” was detected, according to CNN.
“During that secondary search, the passenger lunged into his property, grabbing a firearm that was located inside, which ultimately discharged,” Spinden said. “The passenger then fled the security checkpoint through an adjacent exit lane with his firearm.”
“We’re fortunate that when the firearm went off, nobody was seriously injured,” Spinden said.
Three people were injured, according to the TSA. CNN said those injured were hurt in the panic that accompanied efforts to evacuate the area where the gunshot took place.
Airport operations at the world’s busiest airport, which was jammed with holiday travelers, were halted for more than 90 minutes until a clear picture of the incident emerged and it was clear that there was no danger to passengers.
Reports of an active shooter emerged.
Multiple videos showing the aftermath of the incident were posted on social media.
BREAKING: There have been reports of an active shooter at Atlanta Airport. More details coming.. pic.twitter.com/xWmVA3X9a2
BREAKING: Passenger brings gun to Atlanta airport in carry on bag, for some reason grabbed the weapon while bag was being searched and the gun went off.
They say it’s an accidental discharge, but currently they are still searching for the passenger and the gun. pic.twitter.com/PerTPnoorV
Traveler Erika Zeidler said she first noticed some people were running.
“We thought they were late for a flight, and then more and more people started running,” she said. “There was some screaming and then somebody stopped and said, ‘There’s a shooter, you need to go.’”
Should anyone be allowed to bring a gun aboard a plane?
Milaina Latsis of Flowery Branch, Georgia, was at the airport with her mother, two children and their father. Before going through security, they made a bathroom pit stop “and thank God we did,” she said, according to The New York Times.
“It took us a minute to register what was going on, but everyone at TSA was ducking, and we had a clear shot to the exit, so we just ran,” she said. “At this point, it’s just total panic.”She said for a moment, they stood in place. Then, she said, Nathan Hancock, the father of the children, yelled, “Let’s go! Run, run, run!”TSA announced that 2.2 million travelers flew last Friday, the highest total since the pandemic began.
Chinese dominance in the market of an essential ingredient in electric vehicle batteries was helped along by the efforts of Hunter Biden, according to a new report.
As noted by the website mining.com, the Democratic Republic of the Congo holds 51 percent of the world’s cobalt.
The website noted that China’s efforts to corner the cobalt market “could pose a threat to western market participants” based on an industry expert report, saying that the partnership between China and Congo “could pose problems to those in the West.”
All that was in the future when, while Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden was doing business with China through a company called BHR. The company was created in 2013 and was formally named Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company, according to The New York Times.
Hunter Biden and two American associates made up a minority interest in the investment company, the report said, with Chinese investors making up the rest.
A Senate report on Hunter Biden’s activities said BHR “was eventually formed as an investment fund and is reportedly ‘controlled and funded primarily by large Chinese government-owned shareholders’ and is 80% controlled by Chinese entities.”
Are Americans paying the price for Biden family corruption?
In 2016, according to the Times, Hunter Biden’s firm played a key role in helping a Chinese company called China Molybdenum buy Tenke Fungurume, a cobalt and copper mine, from Freeport-McMoRan, an American company. Its role was to partner to buy out Lundin Mining of Canada, a minority partner in the mine.
According to records in Hong Kong, as part of the multi-billion-dollar deal, “the $1.14 billion BHR, through subsidiaries, paid to buy out Lundin came entirely from Chinese state-backed companies.”
Hunter Biden’s investment firm later sold its stake in the mine back to China Molybdenum.
Can’t Make This Up: Hunter Biden firm helped Chinese company secure $3.8B cobalt mines – Earlier this year, his father, President Joe Biden, warned that America’s electric car development could be threatened by China’s control over cobalt https://t.co/KvjytL153I
Skaneateles is solely owned by Hunter Biden, according to a report in the Washington Examiner.
The unusual name for a firm investing in China matches the name of the home town of President Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, who is also Hunter Biden’s mother.
The report noted that the LLC’s address matches a previous residence for Hunter Biden.
Chinese records list Skaneateles as a part owner of BHR, but Chris Clark, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, said that he “no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly, in either BHR or Skaneateles.”
“We don’t know Hunter Biden, nor are we aware of his involvement in BHR,” said Vincent Zhou, a spokesman for China Molybdenum, in an email to the Times.
The United States needs to be tough on #China. How is that possible when the president’s son is helping our enemies? https://t.co/CnU7RqMI65
The Times report said it tried to get White House reaction and phrased its response this way: “When asked if the president had been made aware of his son’s connection to the sale, a White House spokesman said, ‘No.’”
When application of the law is based upon reason instead of emotion, truth prevails.
Andrew Coffee IV, a black man, was acquitted of murder by way of self-defense, as reported by WPBF-TV. On the same day, Kyle Rittenhouse was cleared of murder charges by reason of self-defense.
I mention that Coffee was black only because many have been asking what might have happened in the Rittenhouse trial if the defendant was black. The question is usually asked by those who maintain that the U.S. justice system is systematically racist and therefore unjust.
“If Black Kyle Rittenhouse had shown up at an anti-vax rally with a weapon and the crowd chased him down and he shot two people dead, what would have happened? One, he probably would have been shot dead by police or bystanders, and two, he likely would have been portrayed as a thug and convicted in front of an all-white jury,” journalist David Greenwald claimed.
#BREAKING: Andrew Coffee IV found not guilty of murder, attempted murder in Indian River County SWAT raid https://t.co/O5iFtO36hH
In another reaction, Democratic Rep. Cori Bush goes so far as to claim the judge, jury and defendant are white supremacists.
The judge. The jury. The defendant.
It’s white supremacy in action.
This system isn’t built to hold white supremacists accountable. It’s why Black and brown folks are brutalized and put in cages while white supremacist murderers walk free.
The Coffee case just isn’t getting the same fanfare. Leftists are pretty quiet on that front.
Coffee was found not guilty of the murder of his girlfriend Alteria Woods and the attempted murder of Florida Indian River County sheriff deputies during an early morning drug raid in 2017.
Coffee’s defense claimed the defendant was asleep and thought a flash-bang set off by deputies was gunfire. Coffee claimed he fired his gun because he believed he was under attack.
“I was trying to protect me and Alteria,” Coffee said, according to WPBF. “I thought I was doing that, but I feel I didn’t protect her. I can’t sleep with that … They killed her.”
The prosecution maintained that the deputies announced they were there and Coffee shot at them before they returned fire.
Is reason the foundation of Western Civilization?
The jury, after deliberating over the evidence, including Coffee’s testimony, found the defendant not guilty on the murder charges. They did find him guilty of a felon in possession of a firearm for which Coffee faces up to 30 years in prison.
If Rittenhouse had been a felon carrying an illegal weapon, would he have been convicted of the charge? The question is moot. Rittenhouse was not carrying a firearm illegally, and he did not transport it across state lines, despite myths spread by a number of media outlets.
The equal outcomes in Coffee and Rittenhouse trials were not based on race. They were not based on propaganda. They were based on reason.
Western culture was founded upon the concept of Logos or Word. The Greek meaning of Logos, though nuanced, can be seen as the divine underlying Reason that supports reality. Socrates gave up his life in pursuit of this principle. Jesus, the Logos made flesh, was crucified because a mob — spurred-on by leaders who felt their earthly power was threatened — demanded it.
These days, there is little talk of God or philosophy in mainstream culture. Instead, political ideologues use propaganda to stir the emotions of hate and fear. These negative emotions eclipse reason. When reason is eclipsed, mobs spring up.
A culture that believes math, a rarefied form of logic, is racist is not Western because it has abandoned reason. Where there is no reason there can be no God. Hell is the impossibility of reason.
Throw out reason, and the door to chaos and/or dystopia is opened. Those who would rewrite the U.S. Constitution for their own ends must do it by way of emotion. Reason is against them. They will not prevail so long as jurors continue to rely on reason in reaching verdicts. That’s what they did in the Coffee case. That’s what they did in the Rittenhouse trial.
Thank goodness. And thanks to the jurors. These jurors are true American heroes.
The United States is losing the race to remain on top as China and Russia develop hypersonic weapons, according to a top Space Force commander.
“We’re not as advanced as the Chinese or the Russians in terms of hypersonic programs,” Gen. David Thompson, vice chief of space operations, said Saturday during an appearance at the Halifax International Security Forum, according to Politico.
Noting that China recently had a successful hypersonic weapons test and Russia recently launched its version of a hypersonic missile, he said the United States has “catching up to do very quickly.”
Hypersonic vehicles travel at Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, or faster, but also have advanced maneuverability capability that allows them to dodge existing weapons systems and radar.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall earlier this fall warned that China now had the “potential for global strikes … from space,” according to Air Force Magazine.
Current plans call for the U.S. to have an Army hypersonic missile in 2024 and a Navy one in 2025, according to Politico.
“It should be no surprise to anyone that China is developing capabilities that would be viewed negatively by like-minded allies and partners,” Navy Adm. John Aquilino told reporters at the Halifax forum.
The U.S. Space Force is working to “figure out the type of satellite constellation that we need” to track other countries’ missiles, Thompson said.
“It’s a new challenge, but it’s not that we don’t have an answer to this challenge. We just have to understand it, fully design it, and fly it,” he said.
While Thompson noted that there is no timeline for when those satellites will be operational, he said that’s a changing process and “we’re evolving our approach and our timelines rapidly.”
A senior US General has sounded the alarm on Beijing’s recent hypersonic missile test, warning that China might be able to launch a surprise nuclear attack on America one day. China’s hypersonic advancemennts already overshadow the US. @MollyGambhir tells you more pic.twitter.com/2Fz1hIpnkq
The U.S. Space Force, the country’s newest branch of the armed forces, was created in 2019 under then-President Donald Trump.
Thompson, who was confirmed in his current position by the Senate in September 2020 after being nominated by Trump a month earlier, said although China can push forward with new weapons, red tape hobbles the U.S.
Are rival countries’ hypersonic weapons programs a major threat to the United States?
“The bureaucracy that we’ve built into our defense and acquisition enterprise, not just in space but in other areas, has slowed us down in many areas,” Thompson said.
“The fact that we have not needed to move quickly for a couple of decades — in the sense of a strategic competitor with these capabilities — has not driven us or required us to move quickly.”
U.S. ‘not as advanced’ as China and Russia on hypersonic tech, Space Force general warns While the Pentagon has pushed the development of new hypersonic missiles, the Army isn’t slated to field its first missile until 2024.https://t.co/KaiH77unAN
An FBI SWAT team raided the home of an activist mother of four in Colorado on Tuesday, Nov. 16, knocking down her door, bursting into the house with guns and handcuffing her while she was homeschooling her children.
This is the first known case of the federal government making good on its promise to not only intimidate but actually carry out a raid on a mom who was involved in her local school board politics, said Brannon Howse, who interviewed Sherronna Bishop at Lindell TV Wednesday night.
The U.S. Department of Justice and Attorney General Merrick Garland issued an Oct. 4 memorandum directing federal, state and local law enforcement to look for parents to prosecute nationwide who may have made “threats” and made “harassing” phone calls to school board members nationwide, equating such parents to domestic terrorists.
Now a mother, Sherronna Bishop of Grand Junction, Colorado, has felt the brute force of the FBI’s heavily armed SWAT unit used against her family.
Sherronna Bishop has been active in school board politics throughout Colorado and operates a website that helps educate parents nationwide about their children’s education.
She was at home with her three children about 9:30 a.m. Tuesday when she heard someone pounding on the front door, then using a battering ram to break it down. She said the officers “manhandled” her 18-year-old daughter, pulling her up the stairs by her hoodie, while another officer put her in handcuffs and ushered her out of the house. They proceeded to search the entire house.
UPDATE AS OF NOV. 19: The FBI has filed no charges against Bishop.
Three of Bishop’s four children, ages 8, 10 and 18, were home at the time of the raid, as was her husband, who was also handcuffed. Her 17-year-old son was at his high school.
Besides being a frequent attendee at her local school board meetings, Bishop has also been active in the voter integrity movement in her state and locality. She runs the website Americasmom.net, and on that site she features an article and video under the title We the Parents: How Did We Get Here?
She said she has not been guilty of anything but speaking her mind in accordance with her First Amendment rights.
“This is still the United States of America, where we are able to state what we think and we believe,” she told Howse. “There was some pounding on my door. I didn’t really know what to think, I thought at first it might be some neighbor kids. They were pounding profusely, and then it hit me it was the FBI. I took my kids to their bedrooms. They used a battering ram to bash down my door, they cuffed me. And then proceeded to search and go through my whole home.”
She said the agents would not tell her why they were searching her home. They did leave behind documents related to the search warrant, saying they entered her home because she was suspected of causing “intentional damage to a protected computer, wire fraud and conspiracy to cause damage to a protected computer.”
“I don’t know anything about this. They couldn’t explain any of this,” she said. “I will tell you why: they were at my home to intimidate me, to shut me up, because I was using my First Amendment rights to advocate for [Mesa County Clerk] Tina Peters on the issue of Dominion [voting machines] and the damage done in our election. And they’ll never be held accountable. Instead they will criminalize this woman who has stood up.”
“I know people will say, well Sherronna, why don’t you just shut your mouth… That’s exactly what they hope you will do. I can open my mouth and say whatever I want to say and that is not a criminal action. This is about their desire to shut you down and stop you from saying it.”
“I’m a law abiding citizen, I’m very supportive of law enforcement,” she continued. “I love the Constitution. And what happened yesterday, what happened is something I never imagined I would experience in America.”
Bishop said she uses her website, AmericasMom.net, to educate and inform parents and moms regarding their children’s education.
“And since then we’ve gotten involved in school board races. I love my state. I’m a fourth generation Coloradan. Most recently I’ve been a very vocal advocate of a candidate [Peters]… She’s had to fight for her own life, and a guess now I’ll have to fight for mine.”
Bishop has been part of a group of parents that have been successful in fighting the teaching of critical race theory and school mask mandates.
“Colorado was able to flip nine school boards this year. We were able to get one of our leftists to resign and we also flipped our school board in the election,” Bishop said. “And people like me are considered domestic terrorists now, because we don’t stand for the policies that have been forced upon our children.”
Howse said history will be kind to Bishop.
“I believe you will go down in history as the first mom targeted [by the FBI]. The FBI has said it plans to do this and I believe you are the first mom to have this done to you. Mask mandates, opposing critical race theory, election theft, which Biden said if you question that you are involved in subversion. But I believe you are the first mom to have been targeted and had your door literally busted down while you were homeschooling your kids.”
Bishop said she has always made a point of being transparent.
“I have always made myself available, I’ve never tried to hide from anything and now for them to bash my door down, manhandle my daughter… I think the timing is really interesting, because we don’t want people to be silent because of what happened to me. If anything I want people to be more vocal,… because this is still America and you still have the right to stand up for yourself and your family.”
“I believe elections have consequences, and in this case this illegitimate regime is having serious consequences for all of America.”
Howse asked if she ever thought she would be targeted in this way by her own government.
“No I never thought in America that a suburban housewife and mom would have her door bashed in by the FBI,” she said.
He asked about her three children.
“My kids are very resilient. And part of schooling them has been to teach them the proper role of government and the proper role of law enforcement and I can’t convince them now that the FBI are good guys. And I really have my own doubts about that now. You cannot just say ‘I followed orders’ to go bash someone’s door down. They are responsible for what they are doing.”
Howse had just concluded a series of interviews with a panel of four retired FBI agents just days before the raid in which they had described similar raids against non-violent patriotic Americans over the last few years, starting with Gen. Michael Flynn in 2016, followed by the pre-dawn raid on author and Trump ally Roger Stone in 2019 and then the violent entering of journalist James O’Keefe of Project Veritas just last week.
“I was on the [FBI] SWAT team for several years,” said Brian Shepard, appearing with three other retired FBI agents at a symposium aired by WVW TV on Nov. 16. “And I can tell you from my experience, and I think all others of the bureau agents here would echo what I’m going to say. We never conducted a search or conducted an arrest of someone who was not a violent offender. And the thought when I heard about what happened with Roger Stone, just outraged me so much that, it just rose up inside me.”
Now, an activist mom has been targeted, raising the question: Has the FBI become the political shock troops for the White House, seeking to harass and intimidate anyone who speaks out against its policies?
Howse said it was obvious that Shepard became emotional when he began talking about how the bureau, he gave the better part of his life to serve, had now taken to bashing down the doors of non-violent American patriots.
“Brian’s reaction is very typical of men in that generation who served in the FBI, and many of those men have responded the same way, because they gave the best years of their lives to the agency, and upheld what they believed were the values of the agency, bravery, integrity and fidelity, and they become emotional when they saw how this has been discarded. They are beside themselves. It happened to others and now it happens to you, within days of our filming [of the panel].”
Bishop said the timing was not lost on her.
“I can’t explain it. I can’t explain being a target, for an agency that typically takes down the cartel, human trafficking, and now I’ve had my children traumatized and if this can happen to me, they’ll come for you too.”
“I made myself completely transparent to them and yet they chose to break down my door, terrorize my kids and try to intimidate me.”
She said the agents took her phone and other devices and kept her handcuffed for at least 30 minutes.
“No, I never had any access to any voting machines. They know I am just a voice, an advocate. We must have been effective. I know the people here, they’re not going to back down, and we’re not going to stop. In times past they never would have moved forward on this, but the narrative in America right now is one that is pushing a progressive narrative of communism. Now you can stay in your home and talk about it privately but you dare not come out and talk about it publicly …or they will send the FBI to your door because according to this regime you are a domestic terrorist.
“We’ve got to stick together and we can’t let these thugs put us into fear and intimidation.”
Howse said he was shocked by the news of Bishop’s experience.
“I could see them moving against someone like me, or Mike Lindell. It is hard to see them coming after someone like you, to come after a mom, who is working at the school board level and the election level, and to bust your door down? This is totally unprecedented by the agency in how they conducted themselves. So even for someone who has studied communism and a color revolution, the way they are doing it and the pace at which they’re doing it, I never anticipated it to move this fast.”
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Officials confirmed that Darrel E. Brooks, 39, was the alleged driver of an SUV that ran over dozens of people, killing five, during a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Sunday evening.
Waukesha Polie Chief Daniel Thompson said Brooks was charged with five counts of intentional homicide. Other charges against the suspect are being considered, he said in a 2 p.m. news conference, adding that the incident was “not a terrorist event.”
Brooks was involved in a “domestic incident” prior to the mass casualty incident, Thompson said, adding there was no police pursuit before he allegedly plowed into the parade. Several mainstream media outlets, citing unnamed sources, claimed there had been.
“We are confident he acted alone,” Thompson also said.
In the incident, five people died and more than 40 were injured, Thompson confirmed earlier Monday. At least 18 children were taken to Children’s Wisconsin hospital in Milwaukee, it said in a statement.
A search of online court records showed a recent open case involving a person named Darrell Brooks, with a birth date that would make him 39 years old. According to the court documents, he is charged with restricting or obstructing an officer, bail jumping, and battery. A $1,000 cash bond was posted earlier this month, the records show.
The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office released a statement on Monday detailing the pending charges against Brooks and said it was conducting an internal review of the decision involving Brook’s bail recommendation.
Police investigate after a vehicle plowed through the Christmas Parade, leaving multiple people injured in Waukesha, Wis., on Nov. 21, 2021. (Mike De Sisti-USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters)Debris litters the street at a crime scene in Waukesha, Wis., on Nov. 21, 2021. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
“The state’s bail recommendation in this case was inappropriately low in light of the nature of the recent charges and the pending charges against Mr. Brooks,” read the statement, which made no reference of the parade tragedy.
Brooks was also reportedly an aspiring rapper, known as “Mathboi Fly,” releasing several songs on YouTube. According to a Twitter page associated with Mathboi Fly, it included photos of a man who strongly resembled Brooks, and a bio for the Twitter page says he is a Milwaukee-based “born and raised” rapper.
Brooks was charged in nearby Milwaukee County on Nov. 5 with two felonies and three misdemeanors in a domestic violence incident in which he allegedly violently resisted a police officer, according to court records. He was also charged with bail jumping, the records show.
About a week later, Brooks posted a $500 cash bond and was released from custody. Other court records suggest his criminal history stretches back to at least 1999.
Brooks in July 2020 was charged with two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm and recklessly endangering safety through the use of a dangerous weapon. In February 2021, his bond was lowered to $500, and he posted it weeks later, the records show.
Videos posted online on Sunday showed a red SUV racing alongside and into the parade, appearing to run over more than a dozen people before crowds ran from sidewalks to help.
Those whose worldview is bereft of universally applied principles, and based solely on tribal allegiances, assume everyone else is plagued by this very deficiency.
The FBI has executed a string of search warrants targeting the homes and cell phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and several others associated with that organization. It should require no effort to understand why it is a cause for concern that a Democratic administration is using the FBI to aggressively target an organization devoted to obtaining and reporting incriminating information about Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies.
That does not mean the FBI investigation is inherently improper. Journalists are no more entitled than any other citizen to commit crimes. If there is reasonable cause to believe O’Keefe and his associates committed federal crimes, then an FBI investigation is warranted as it is for any other case. But there has been no evidence presented that O’Keefe or Project Veritas employees have done anything of the sort, nor any explanation provided to justify these invasive searches. That we should want and need that is self-evident: if the Trump-era FBI had executed search warrants inside the newsrooms of The New York Times and NBC News, we would be demanding evidence to prove it was legally justified. Yet virtually nothing has been provided to justify the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and his colleagues, and the little that has been disclosed by way of justifying this makes no sense.
The FBI investigation concerns the theft last year of the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, yet Project Veritas, while admitting they received a copy from an anonymous source, chose not to publish that diary because they were unable to verify it. Nobody and nothing thus far suggests that Project Veritas played any role in its acquisition, legal or otherwise. There is a cryptic reference in the search warrant to transmitting stolen material across state lines, but it is not illegal for journalists to receive and use material illegally acquired by a source: the most mainstream organizations spent the last month touting documents pilfered from Facebook by their heroic “whistleblower” Frances Haugen.
On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link or on the player below). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.
This not-a-real-journalist tactic was and remains the primary theory used by those who justify the ongoing attempt to imprison Julian Assange. In demanding Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in The Wall Street Journalthat “Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions.” Yet the five-term Senator insisted: “but he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”
This not-a-real-journalist slogan was also the one used by both the CIA and the corporate media against myself and my colleagues in both the Snowden reporting we did in 2013, as well as the failed attempt to criminally prosecute me in 2020 for the year-long Brazil exposés we did: punishing them is not an attack on press freedom because they are not journalists and what they did is not journalism.
What is most striking about this weapon is that — like the campaign to agitate for more censorship — it is led by journalists. It is the corporate media that most aggressively insists that those who are independent, those who are outsiders, those who do not submit to their institutional structures are not real journalists the way they are, and thus are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. In order to create a framework to deny Project Veritas’s status as journalists, The New York Timesclaimed last week that anyone who uses undercover investigations (as Veritas does) is automatically a non-journalist because that entails lying — even though, just two years earlier, the same paper heralded numerous news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Mother Jones for using undercover investigations to accomplish what they called “compelling” reporting.
I am very well-acquainted with this repressive tactic of trying to decree who is and is not a real journalist for purposes of constitutional protection. Many have forgotten — given the awards it ultimately ended up winning — that the NSA/Snowden reporting we did in 2013 was originally maligned as quasi-criminal not just by Obama national security officials such as James Clapper but also by The New York Times. The first profile the Paper of Record published about me the day after the reporting began referred to me in the headline as an “Anti-Surveillance Activist” and then, once backlash ensued, it was changed to “Blogger” (the original snide, disqualifying headline is still visible in the URL).
The Guardian, Jan. 29, 2014
As the New York Times‘ own Public Editor at the time objected, by purposely denying me the label “journalist,” the paper was knowingly increasing the risks that I could be prosecuted for my reporting. Indeed, recent reporting from Yahoo! News about CIA plots to kidnap or murder Julian Assange reported that denying Assange the label “journalist,” and then re-defining what I and my colleague Laura Poitras were doing from “journalist” to “information broker,” would enable the U.S. Government to spy on or even prosecute us without having to worry about that inconvenient “free press” guarantee of the First Amendment.
New York Times, June 6, 2013
All of this demonstrates how dangerous it is to invoke this very same not-a-real-journalist tactic against O’Keefe and Project Veritas. Yet, if one warns of the dangers of the FBI’s actions, that is precisely what one hears from liberals, from Democrats and from their allies in the media: the FBI’s targeting of Project Veritas has nothing to do with press freedoms since they’re not real journalists. They are invoking the authoritarian theory that maintains that the state (or, in this case, the FBI) is vested with the power to decree who is a “real journalist” — whatever that means — and who is not.
There are so many ironies to the use of this framework. So often, employees of media corporations who have never broken a major story in their lives (and never will) revel in accusing independent journalists who have broken numerous major stories (such as Assange) of not being real journalists. At the height of the Snowden reporting, I went on Meet the Press in July, 2013,only for the host, David Gregory, to suggest that I ought to be in prison alongside my source Edward Snowden because I was not really a journalist the way David Gregory was. At the time, Frank Rich, writing in New York Magazine, noted how bizarre it was that the TV personality David Gregory assumed he was a real journalist, whereas I was a non-journalist who belonged in prison for my reporting, given that Gregory — like most employees of large media corporations — had never broken any story in his life. Rich used a Q&A format to make the point this way:
On Sunday, Meet the Press host David Gregory all but accused the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald of aiding and abetting Edward Snowden’s fugitive travels, asking, “Why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” And, speaking to his larger point, do you see Greenwald as a journalist or an activist in this episode? And does it matter?
IsDavid Gregory a journalist? As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he’s covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he’s conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin, or Chuck Schumer. Meet the Press has fallen behind CBS’s Face the Nation, much as Today has fallen to ABC’s Good Morning America, and my guess is that Gregory didn’t mean to sound like Joe McCarthy (with a splash of the oiliness of Roy Cohn) but was only playing the part to make some noise. In any case, his charge is preposterous. As a columnist who published Edward Snowden’s leaks, Greenwald was doing the job of a journalist — and the fact that he’s an “activist” journalist (i.e., an opinion journalist, like me and a zillion others) is irrelevant to that journalistic function. . . . [I]t’s easier for Gregory to go after Greenwald, a self-professed outsider who is not likely to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and works for a news organization based in London. Presumably if Gregory had been around 40 years ago, he also would have accused the Times of aiding and abetting the enemy when it published Daniel Ellsberg’s massive leak of the Pentagon Papers. In any case, Greenwald demolished Gregory on air and on Twitter (“Who needs the government to try to criminalize journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?”).
At the time — both in terms of that exchange with Gregory and my overall reporting on the NSA — I had significant support from the liberal-left (though it was far from universal, given that we were exposing mass, indiscriminate, illegal spying by the Obama administration). But few believed that I ought to be prosecuted on the grounds that, somehow, I was not a real journalist.
So why are so many of them now willing to endorse this same exact theory when it comes to O’Keefe and Project Veritas, or even to justify the prosecution of Julian Assange? The answer is obvious. They are unwilling and/or incapable of thinking in terms of principles, ones that apply universally to everyone regardless of their ideology. Their thought process never even arrives at that destination. When the subject of the FBI’s attacks on O’Keefe is raised, or the DOJ’s prosecution of Assange is discussed, they ask themselves one question and only one question, and that ends the inquiry. It is the exclusive and determinative factor: do I like James O’Keefe and his politics? Do I like Julian Assange and his politics?
This primitive, principle-free, personality-driven prism is the only way they are capable of understanding the world. Because they dislike O’Keefe and/or Assange, they instantly side with whoever is targeting them — the FBI, the DOJ, the security state services — and believe that anyone who defends them is defending a right-wing extremist rather than defending the non-ideological, universally applicable principle of press freedoms. They think only in terms of personalities, not principles.
The FBI’s actions against Project Veritas and O’Keefe are so blatantly alarming that press freedom groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose Board I sit) have expressed grave concerns about it, including on their social media accounts for all to see. Even the ACLU — which these days is loathe to speak out in favor of any person or group disliked by their highly partisan liberal donor base — issued a very carefully hedged statement that made clear how much they despise Project Veritas but said: “Nevertheless, the precedent set in this case could have serious consequences for press freedom” (at least thus far, the ACLU has just quietly stuck this statement on its website and not uttered a word about it on its social media accounts, where most of its liberal donors track what they do, but the fact that they felt compelled to say anything in defense of this right-wing boogieman demonstrates how extreme the FBI’s actions are). The federal judge overseeing the warrants has temporarily enjoined the FBI from extracting any more information from the cell phones seized from O’Keefe and other Project Veritas employees pending a determination of their legal justification.
Committee to Protect Journalists, Nov. 15, 2021
The reason this is such a grave press freedom attack is two-fold. First, as indicated, any attempt to anoint oneself the arbiter of who is and is not a “real journalist” for purposes of First Amendment protection is inherently tyrannical. Which institutions are sufficiently trustworthy and competent to decree who is a real journalist meriting First Amendment protection and who falls outside as something else?
But there is a much more significant problem with this framework: namely, the question of who is and is not a real journalist is completely irrelevant to the First Amendment. None of the rights in the Constitution, including press freedom, was intended to apply only to a small, cloistered, credentialed, privileged group of citizens. The exact opposite was true: the only reason they are valuable as rights is because they enjoy universal application, protecting all citizens.
Indeed, one of the most passionate grievances of the American colonists was that nobody was permitted to use the press unless first licensed by the British Crown. Conversely, the most celebrated journalism of the time was undertaken by people like Thomas Paine — who never worked for an established journalistic outlet in his life — as he circulated the pamphlet Common Sense that railed against the abuses of the King. What was protected by the First Amendment was not a small, privileged caste bearing the special label “journalists,” but rather the activity of a free press. The proof of this is clear and ample, and is set forth in the video we produced on Monday night.
But none of this matters. If you express concern for the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe, it will be instantly understood not as a concern about any of these underlying principles but instead as an endorsement of O’Keefe’s politics, journalism, and O’Keefe himself. The same is true for the discourse surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse. If you say that — after having actually watched the trial — you believe the state failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in light of his defense of self-defense, many will disbelieve your sincerity, will insist that your view is based not in some apolitical assessment of the evidence or legal principles about what the state must do in order to imprison a citizen, but rather that you must be a “supporter” of Rittenhouse himself, his ideology (whatever it is assumed to be), and the political movement with which he, in their minds, is associated.
On some level, this is pure projection: those who are incapable of assessing political or legal conflicts through a prism of principles rather than personalities assume that everyone is plagued by the same deficiency. Since they decide whether to support or oppose the FBI’s actions toward O’Keefe based on their personal view of O’Keefe rather than through reference to any principles, they assume that this is how everyone is determining their views of that situation. Similarly, since they base their views on whether Rittenhouse should be convicted or acquitted based on how they personally feel about Rittenhouse and his perceived politics rather than the evidence presented at the trial (which most of them have not watched), they assume that anyone advocating for an acquittal can be doing so only because they like Rittenhouse’s politics and believe that his actions were heroic.
In sum, those who view the world through a prism bereft of principles — either due to lack of intellectual capacity or ethics or both — assume everyone’s world view is similarly craven. It is this same stunted mindset that saddles our discourse with so much illogic and so many twisted presumptions, such as the inability to distinguish between defending someone’s right to express a particular opinion and agreement with that opinion. In a world in which ideology, partisan loyalty, tribal affiliations, in-group identity and personality-driven assessments predominate, there is no room for principles, universally applicable rights, or basic reason.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/17rlhtzkcSQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
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A leaked audio recording revealed Californiateachers mocking parents over concerns about homosexual and transgender indoctrination at school, said a source who attended a recent teachers union conference in Palm Springs.
The recording, obtained by The Epoch Times, captured two seventh-grade teachers, Kelly Baraki and Lori Caldeira from Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas, Calif., telling other teachers how to recruit students into LGBTQ clubs, also known as “Gay-Straight Alliance” (GSA) clubs, at school.
“It was horrifying to listen to not just one teacher but really all of the teachers in all of these seminars, excoriating parents,” said the source, who goes by the pseudonym Rebecca Murphy.
Murphy attended the California Teachers Association (CTA) conference in late October. She told The Epoch Times the teachers “mocked” parents for their concerns, and suggested they know better than parents about what’s best for their children.
“They laughed at the parents,” Murphy said.
The sold-out CTA conference, billed as the “2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference, Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities,” was held Oct. 29 to 31.
The CTA has hosted similar “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” (SOGI) professional development training for at least the last two years, according to an event notice posted on the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) website, which asks teachers: “Do you have the courage to create a safe environment that fosters bravery to explore sexual orientation, gender identity and expression?”
However, according to Murphy, the purpose of conference in Palm Springs appeared to be about teachers showing other teachers how to undermine the authority of parents and school administrators and conceal activities related to gender inclusion and sexual orientation from them.
The three classes Murphy attended were designed to recruit middle school students to GSA clubs, she said.
“The overarching theme of the classes that I attended were California Teachers instructing other teachers on how to sneak in the LGBTQ+ curriculum in a manner that does not alert parents,” Murphy said.
Caldeira and Baraki led a workshop called “How we run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities,” and they described the obstacles they faced as activist teachers in concealing the activities of these clubs from parents.
In the audio clip, Caldeira advised teachers who lead LGBTQ clubs to maintain an air of plausible deniability so they can play dumb if they are questioned by parents.
“Because we are not official, we have no club rosters. We keep no records,” said Caldeira, who is also an LGBTQ club leader. “In fact, sometimes we don’t really want to keep records because if parents get upset that their kids are coming? We’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe they came?’ You know, we would never want a kid to get in trouble for attending if their parents are upset.”
Baraki backed up Caldeira’s advice, suggesting activist teachers to disguise the nature of GSA clubs by calling them something less obvious. Baraki provided an example of this deception, pointing out she avoided naming her LGBTQ club a GSA. Instead, she called it the “Equity Club” and later changed the name to the “You Be You” club.
The teachers bragged about spying on students’ online searches and activity as well as eavesdropping on their conversations to identify and recruit sixth-grade students into these LGBTQ clubs whose membership rolls are kept hidden from parents.
They suggested that parents who refuse to call their child by pronouns of the child’s choosing should be arrested and charged with child abuse, Murphy said.
Buena Vista Middle School falls under the jurisdiction of the Spreckels Union School District (SUSD). Another nearby district, Salinas Union High School District (SUHSD) has been a center of controversy over its mandatory ninth grade ethnic studies program, which teaches elements of critical race theory.
SUSD Board President Steve McDougall, Superintendent Eric Tarallo, and school board members did not respond to Epoch Times inquiries about the leaked audio. Neither did Caldeira and Baraki.
Anti-Bullying Presentation
Caldeira also discussed a yearly anti-bullying presentation she provides to students along with Baraki, and she said LGBTQ issues were not the only topics they discussed.
“We also covered religious differences, race, cultural backgrounds, family status poverty—everything that is listed in the Parents’ Rights handbook.”
However, when the kids went home and talked to their parents about the presentation, the parents complained about the LGBTQ content. Baraki suggested a different strategy to avoid resistance from parents.
“Next year, we’re going to do just a little mind-trick on our sixth graders. They were last to go through this presentation and the gender stuff was the last thing we talked about. So next year, they’ll be going first with this presentation and the gender stuff will be the first thing they hear about. Hopefully to mitigate, you know, these kind of responses, right?” Baraki said.
Baraki ridiculed a parent who complained she hadn’t planned on having a conversation about sexual orientation and gender identity issues with her middle-schooler but was pushed into it by the school.
“I know, so sad, right? Sorry for you, you had to do something hard!” Baraki told her audience. “Honestly, your 12-year-old probably knew all that, right?”
When a principal suggested to another parent to enroll their child in a private school over the controversy, Caldeira said, “We count that as a win.”
Controlling Morning Announcements
Caldeira also spoke about how she controls morning announcements at the school.
“That’s another type of strategy I can give you,” she said. “I’m the one who controls the messaging. Everybody says, ‘Oh, Ms. Caldeira, you’re so sweet, you volunteered to do that.’ Of course, I’m so sweet that I volunteered to do that, because then I control the information that goes out. And, for the first time this year, students have been allowed to put openly LGBT content into our morning announcement slides.”
She went on to boast about the students she recruited to help with the announcements.
“Three of the kids on the team, two of them are non-binary, and the other one is just very fluid in every way. She’s fabulous. So, it’s actually a nice group,” she said.
Caldeira pointed out more than once that she can’t be fired, and she thanked CTA for her tenure and for providing resources and tools.
“You can’t fire me for running a GSA,” she said. “You can be mad, but you can’t fire me for it.”
“CTA has made it very clear that they are devoted to human rights and equity,” she added.
Caldeira tells teachers, that she and Baraki have acted with “great integrity.”
“We never crossed a line,” she says. “We’ve wanted to, but we never have.”
School Response
After information about the leaked audio was made public this week, Supt. Tarallo, SUSD President McDougall and Kate Pagaran, the principal at Buena Vista Middle School, issued a letter Nov. 19 addressed to the “SUSD Community” that the “UBU You Be You” club has been suspended.
“Any future student clubs will be required to submit an outline of all activities and materials before being allowed to meet,” the letter states. “Student sign-in sheets will be maintained and parent/guardian permission slips will be sent home prior to a club holding a meeting.”
The letter states that “all messaging shared in the morning announcements” will be controlled and distributed by the principal, a practice that “will be in place permanently.”
“Teachers are prohibited from monitoring students’ online activity for any non-academic purpose.”
SUSD will follow state-approved standards and curriculum on all presentations involving “sensitive themes such as sexuality” and “materials of any sensitive themes will be shared with parents/guardians before being shown to students,” the letter states.
The New York Times is much too concerned with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D., Ariz.) appearance, according to three female senators, who call the Gray Lady’s recent coverage of the senator “demeaning, sexist, and inappropriate.”
Sens. Susan Collins (R., Maine), Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.), and Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) wrote a letter to the editor on Friday that criticized the paper of record for in the past two months “publish[ing] four separate pieces analyzing the style and dress of our colleague senator Kyrsten Sinema.”
“Your repeated focus on how she dresses, rather than what she says and does, is demeaning, sexist, and inappropriate,” the senators wrote. “We cannot imagine the Times printing similar pieces on the fashion choices of any of our male colleagues.”
The paper’s allegedly misogynistic reporting on Sinema comes as the senator weighs voting with Democrats to pass their roughly $2 trillion spending bill. The Arizona senator has been the subject of much reporting during the past year, due to her position of power as a swing vote in the evenly divided Senate. Liberal ire with Sinema reached an inflection point in October, when radical activists accosted her in a bathroom over her voting record.
The Times accused Sinema of engaging in “political theater” and “coded speech” while wearing an array of eye-catching outfits, including denim vests, white-caped dresses, and in one particularly memorable instance, a hot pink sweater with the words “Dangerous Creature” written on its front. Three of the four pieces were written by the same Times opinion writer, Tressie McMillan Cottom, who claims Sinema’s “aesthetics are part of the way she courts, manipulates, and plays with public attention as a political figure.”
Virginia Commonwealth’s attorneys frequently let criminals walk
After a registered sex offender was arrested twice in three days on felony charges in Northern Virginia, local leaders are wondering what it takes to land a criminal behind bars when lenient prosecutors backed by George Soros are administering justice.
The serial CVS bandit, Karim Clayton, 44, has a seedy criminal history ranging from menacing a CVS employee with a knife to leading police on a high-speed chase on a major regional thoroughfare.
But Fairfax County prosecutor Steve Descano and Arlington County prosecutor Parisa Dehghani-Tafti—who cruised to victory with six-figure donations from Soros—have brought charges against Clayton at least a dozen times between them, only to abandon their cases or plead him out on paltry misdemeanors with almost no jail time.
“Radical leftist prosecutors like Steve Descano and Parisa Dehghani-Tafti do not represent the public or crime victims,” said Sean Kennedy, president of Virginians for Safe Communities. “Their allegiances lie with criminal defendants first, last, and always.”
A two-year-long spike in violent crime is a political hazard for President Joe Biden and Democrats. Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin (R.) hammered a public safety message throughout his campaign, promising to fully fund law enforcement and fire an inmate-friendly state parole board. Republican candidates in the commonwealth are homing in on a similar strategy ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Thus far, Clayton’s twin arrests in the last week of September have netted him only three months in prison. He was arrested for assault and battery on Sunday, Sept. 26, in Fairfax County and released on bail Monday morning, according to Virginia court records. That case has not yet been resolved. Authorities arrested Clayton the very next day in Arlington County for stealing from a CVS.
Court records show Clayton was sentenced to 12 months in jail after Dehghani-Tafti’s office pled him down to a misdemeanor for the CVS robbery. He can serve nine of those months on probation, however, meaning he will spend just 90 days behind bars.
On a separate occasion in June 2020, Clayton robbed a CVS in Chantilly, Va., in broad daylight. Clayton fled in a 2016 Dodge Journey and led authorities on an extended chase with speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour. The chase ended when Clayton crashed in Arlington.
Clayton faced a felony eluding and disregarding police charge, which Descano’s office pled down to a misdemeanor in September 2020, according to court records. He was sentenced to 180 days in prison, but could log up to 170 of them on probation. He also faced a felony assault on law enforcement charge arising from that event from Dehghani-Tafti’s office, which was abandoned in September 2020.
Apart from his Northern Virginia crime spree, Clayton registered as a sex offender in Washington, D.C., following a 2015 conviction for abuse of a child. He lives one-third of a mile from an elementary school, according to a home address listed on a sex offender registry. He’s been prosecuted in D.C. courts for driving under the influence, tampering with a GPS ankle monitor he was required to wear as a condition of parole, and, as ever, robbing a CVS.
According to a report from a case services agency, prosecutors filed the tampering charge in November 2020 after he was cited for five separate dead battery violations. Offenders are responsible for keeping their ankle monitor batteries charged at all times. Three months later, a D.C. Superior Court judge issued a bench warrant for Clayton after he failed to appear at a hearing on the tampering case.
Those two incidents, plus the high-speed chase through Arlington, are strong evidence that Clayton is a flight risk who won’t cooperate with the judicial process. That usually counts heavily against allowing a defendant to bond out of custody.
Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC donated more than $600,000 each to Descano and Dehghani-Tafti’s campaigns. Soros has also bankrolled successful prosecutorial campaigns in Loudoun County and Norfolk, Va.
Public safety issues contributed to recent Republican successes in Virginia, and Descano and Dehghani-Tafti could prove an albatross for Democratic lawmakers in 2022. Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D., Va.), who represents a Northern Virginia district where Youngkin made gains in November, is a top target for national Republicans.
“Jennifer Wexton has supported radical prosecutors who give deference to criminals, not victims,” said Jeanine Lawson, a Prince William County supervisor challenging Wexton next year who promises to “oppose the woke anti-police agenda and work with law enforcement.”
Zack Smith, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former federal prosecutor, told the Washington Free Beacon that Clayton typifies enforcement patterns that have a trickle-down effect on law enforcement.
“I suspect a large number of crimes simply aren’t being captured because police aren’t going to make arrests,” Smith said. “They’re not going to waste their limited resources arresting someone for a crime they know the prosecutor won’t prosecute, and where they know the person will be released from jail almost instantaneously.”
Progressive prosecutors usually describe offenses like larceny or prostitution as “quality of life” issues, victimless crimes that are better addressed by diversionary programs or social service referrals. Smith takes exception to that idea, noting that Walgreens is shutting down locations around San Francisco due to rampant shoplifting, while other major retailers reduce their hours.
“If you think about it, it’s poor and minority communities that bear the disproportionate brunt of these policies,” Smith told the Free Beacon. “If you’re a middle class family and the closest CVS closes, it’s probably not that big a deal. But if you’re a poor single mother who relies on walking or public transportation, it’s a very big deal.”
This week, we learned that the Biden administration is doubling down on one of its greatest failures, even as Americans make their disapproval so unequivocal that establishment media outlets are struggling to mask it.
The administration has such little fear of blowback that it is working with nonprofit organizations to give a warm welcome to illegal immigrants while some Americans are having to choose between warm homes and stocked refrigerators this winter.
According to whistleblower documents obtained by a Texas lawmaker, these Biden-backed nonprofits are providing comprehensive welcome packets to illegal aliens to help them navigate the interior of the United States.
As American citizens suffer from inflated gas, energy and grocery prices, border hoppers are receiving free hotel stays, plane tickets and coaching on sidestepping TSA photo ID checks.
These services are subsidized by American taxpayers.
The illegal immigrants are supported by the San Diego Rapid Response Network. Jewish Family Services, a partner organization, is providing travel assistance, according to Just the News, which got the whistleblower documents from Republican Rep. Lance Gooden.
JFS told Just the News that it works with the Department of Homeland Security. The group’s most recent financial statement shows that it received $16 million in government support.
This is bad optics for the Biden administration and its progressive Democratic allies, especially considering their insistence that the borders are not open.
According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 38 percent of registered voters approve of President Joe Biden’s job performance, with 57 percent disapproving. On a generic congressional ballot, an indicator of how the 2022 midterms will play out, Republicans lead by 10 percentage points, 51 to 41.
The poll was conducted from Nov. 7 to Nov. 10 among 1,001 adults with a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percentage points.
Inflation was to be expected as a natural consequence of the reopening of the economy. But unhinged Biden administration spending has exacerbated the issue, and Americans are feeling it in the pocketbook despite White House claims that rising prices are a “high class” problem.
The administration has made no effort to explain how forcing trillions of dollars into circulation won’t make the problem worse.
It has, however, made an effort to reward immigrants for illegally entering the country. Why would Biden practically escort illegal aliens around the country other than to stack swing states with new Democratic votes?
Everyone who lives in the U.S. understands why migrants are so determined to get here.
It might even be true that illegal immigrants have surpassed leftists in their appreciation for what America means. After all, the crisis at the southern border gives the lie to the progressive claim that this country is rigged against the people who have it the worst.
Nevertheless, coming here illegally is unacceptable. And the Biden administration is rolling out the red carpet for those who do so while making life harder for citizens.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Americans can stand up and demand their interests be prioritized at the polls next year.
Parents who never imagined running for office battled to win seats on local school boards last week; they won some, but lost many. Their fiercest opponents were the teachers unions.
The media portrayed these school board races as culture wars, but more than anything they were struggles by parents to wrest control of the boards from self-serving unions. For decades, the unions have maintained a tight grip on who gets elected. No wonder school district decisions — about budgets, masking, COVID closures, curriculum and teacher contracts — protect teachers first. Never mind what’s best for kids.
That needs to change. Albuquerque, New Mexico, winning candidate Courtney Jackson told a local newspaper, “the board of education should be the kids’ union,” not a puppet of the teachers union. Jackson decided to run after watching the board discuss when to end lockdowns. The discussion focused entirely on what teachers wanted, never addressing the kids’ needs. “Their interests were not brought up once,” she said.
In Guilford, Connecticut, a small seacoast town, the Guilford Education Association, representing teachers, ran the show. In a questionnaire for school board candidates, the union’s No. 1 question asked candidates to pledge support for “collective bargaining rights.” Question two asked candidates to guarantee unions will be included in all discussions of the schools’ policies and funding. Question three asked candidates to promise to “oppose all proposals that would censor teachers from teaching about inclusion, diversity, and equity.” What about the kids?
All five Guilford candidates who gave the “correct” answers won the union’s backing and prevailed on election night. Their slogan was “Protect Guilford Schools,” but their true goal was “Protect the Teachers Union.” One of the winners boasted of coming from “a long line of educators,” while another promised, “I will listen to our teachers, administrators, and superintendent and respect that they act always in the best interest of our students and schools.”
Nearly everywhere, teachers unions use money and manpower to turn out voters. Challengers need to do the same. The three Albuquerque school board candidates who defeated the union slate went to the local chamber of commerce, other small business groups and Republican party allies for alternate sources of money.
When the results were in, the president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation predicted “a new dynamic on the board,” with some members actually disagreeing with the school district’s employees. Imagine that.
In Colorado’s cities, including Denver and Steamboat Springs, union slates won handily. But in Douglas County, Aurora County and Greeley Evans School District 6, challengers outspent the union and broke its monopoly on school board seats.
After union-backed candidates were defeated in Douglas County, Kevin DiPasquale, president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, predicted big changes. In the past, teachers could just assume the school board “had their backs.”
In Montclair, New Jersey, the mayor, Sean Spiller, serves as president of the state’s largest teachers union but also appointed the school board — a blatant conflict of interest. The board negotiates the teachers’ contract. Last Tuesday, the town voted 70% in favor of replacing mayoral control with an elected board.
That’s an improvement, but electing the board won’t guarantee students become the priority. In New Jersey, the teachers union wields enormous electoral power with the support of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
Although school board elections are often officially labelled nonpartisan, that’s intentionally misleading. In Tennessee and Florida, Republican state lawmakers are pushing legislation to discard the nonpartisan label so voters can see these elections for what they are.
Last week’s elections were just the beginning. Many school districts will elect board members sometime in the spring, instead of on Election Day. That’s by design to keep the public in the dark that an election is even happening, and to discourage turnout.
Parents and other concerned citizens have roughly half a year to gird for these upcoming contests. For anyone who has a child in public school, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R., Colo.) on Wednesday lit into Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Eric Swalwell (Calif.), questioning whether the “jihad ‘Squad’ member” and California lawmaker should keep their committee assignments.
“The jihad ‘Squad’ member from Minnesota has paid her husband—and not her ‘brother’ husband, the other one—over a million dollars in campaign funds,” Boebert said of Omar, who funneled $2.7 million to her husband’s consulting firm during the 2020 election cycle. “This member is allowed on the Foreign Affairs Committee while praising terrorists.”
“My colleague and three-month presidential candidate from California, who is on the Intelligence Committee, slept with Fang Fang, a Chinese spy,” the Colorado congresswoman said of Swalwell, who was implicated in an alleged Chinese “honeypot” operation last year. “Let me say that again: A member of Congress who receives classified briefings was sleeping with the enemy. This is unacceptable.”
Under fire, Dean Heather Gerken issues muted mea culpa
The dean of Yale Law School expressed “regret” Wednesday for her administration’s role in the now-infamous “trap house” incident but stopped short of apologizing to second-year law student Trent Colbert or the Federalist Society for their treatment at the hands of university administrators.
In a law school-wide email, Dean Heather Gerken took “full responsibility” for the “things the Law School administration should have done differently.”
“No student or student group should ever have reason to believe that administrators are acting in a biased or unfair manner, and I deeply regret that this impression was given in this instance,” Gerken wrote, referring to the administration’s public denunciation of an email invitation Colbert sent in September and its alleged suggestions to Federalist Society president Zack Austin that he and his group put Colbert up to the task.
Gerken’s email, which summarized the findings of an investigation by Deputy Dean Ian Ayres, did not mention Colbert by name and attributed the incident to poor communication.
“I have spent every year of my deanship trying to foster an inclusive community and create an environment where students feel called into the community rather than called out,” Gerken said. “The email message from administrators to members of the 2L class”—in which Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove and Diversity Director Yaseen Eldik condemned Colbert’s “racist” message “in the strongest possible terms”—”did not strike the appropriate balance between those two goals.”
Still, Gerken said, Eldik and Cosgrove were merely “attempting to carry out their obligations under University policy whenever discrimination complaints are filed.”
Gerken’s email came less than 24 hours after the legal commentator David Lat reported that Gerken’s renewal as dean had been postponed several weeks in the wake of an unrelated lawsuit filed on Monday against Gerken, Cosgrove, and Eldik. According to the lawsuit, Gerken and Cosgrove retaliated against two students for refusing to make false statements about Amy Chua, whom Gerken in April removed from a teaching post after the Yale Law professor allegedly violated an agreement not to host students in her home.
The source of the current controversy stems from a September email invitation Colbert sent to classmates that invited them to his “trap house.” After fielding complaints that the email was offensive, Cosgrove and Eldik suggested to Colbert he could face trouble with the bar if he didn’t send a pre-drafted apology for his invitation. They also informed him that his membership in the “oppressive” Federalist Society had “triggered” his peers.
Their actions have been the subject of vociferous criticism, including from members of the law school’s faculty. Yale Law professor Akhil Amar, one of the school’s most distinguished scholars, last week called on the school to apologize for its “deplorable” conduct.
Gerken also announced that she had set up a committee to “think about how to maintain our cherished intellectual environment.” That committee, she said, “will address steps we can take as a community to create an environment in which people can disagree as well as our norms surrounding secretly recorded conversations and the sharing of private correspondence without permission.”
Lawmakers concerned taxpayers funding industry ‘powered by Uyghur slave labor’
A U.S. agency formed to counter China’s economic expansionism is facing pressure from the Biden administration to ramp up investments in solar energy projects, including ones that source materials from China, prompting concerns from Republican lawmakers that taxpayers may be funding an industry that is deeply embedded with slave labor.
The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), which was established under the Trump administration to provide a “robust alternative” for countries that might otherwise seek funding from China and other autocratic governments, is currently invested in 18 solar energy projects deriving materials from Chinese companies, according to Sen. Jim Risch (R., Idaho), who has been leading inquiries into the DFC’s China-related financing. That number accounts for 85 percent of the DFC’s active solar projects.
“The entire U.S. government—including the DFC—has to make sure that U.S. assistance and development finance do not touch forced labor in any way, shape, or form,” Risch, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the Washington Free Beacon. “President Biden’s climate agenda should not be powered by Uyghur slave labor.”
Questions about the DFC’s projects come as the agency has faced behind-the-scenes pressure from the White House to increase its financing of foreign solar projects, congressional sources told the Free Beacon. The funding also highlights a growing problem for the Biden administration, whose ambitious climate agenda—and prioritization of a solar industry dominated by China—has complicated U.S. efforts to crack down on human rights abuses by Beijing. Republicans claim that climate envoy John Kerry, who last week dismissed human rights abuses in China’s solar industry as “not my lane,” has been privately lobbying Congress against a bill that would ban goods made with Uyghur forced labor, the Free Beaconreported last week.
The Biden administration “let us know that there is a desire to use DFC to finance solar panel projects,” one Republican congressional aide told the Free Beacon. “But that it’s possible there’s not safeguards in place to ensure solar panels aren’t tied to forced labor.”
China produces more than 80 percent of the world’s polysilicon, the primary material in solar panels. Most of that supply is produced by manufacturers that use or benefit from forced labor of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region, according to a report released this year by Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Center for Justice.
The report, which linked more than 100 companies to labor abuses using public records, concluded that “the vast majority of the [People’s Republic of China’s] solar supply chain is at very high risk of being tainted by forced labour in the Uyghur region.”
In response to these concerns, the Biden administration in June placed trade restrictions on several Chinese solar manufacturers. But congressional sources say the DFC has yet to put forward a strategy to ensure the projects it funds have no labor abuse in their supply chains.
One congressional aide said the DFC should “not assume that just because companies are not on [federal trade restriction] lists or subject to U.S. sanctions that they don’t have a forced labor problem,” noting that details on the extent of the labor abuses are just starting to emerge.
“Because of all the uncertainty about this in the Chinese market, there needs to be more due diligence, more checks, more caution,” the aide said.
In September, the DFC approved a $90 million direct loan to Avaada Sunrays Energy Private Limited, one of the largest green energy companies in India, to build a solar power plant in Rajasthan. While neither Avaada nor the project have been accused of using forced labor, Avaada’s publicly reported business dealings illustrate the difficulty of avoiding contamination in the solar industry supply chain.
Last year, Avaada signed a supply deal with Sungrow, a Chinese company that has sourced materials from JinkoSolar. The Sheffield Hallam University report identified JinkoSolar as one of the major solar manufacturers suspected of using forced labor in the Uyghur region, and flagged Sungrow for having a potentially compromised supply chain.
Foreign policy experts said the China-related funding also undermines the intended purpose of the DFC.
“If this money is investing in Chinese companies, it’s a foreign policy failure. It’s doing the exact opposite of what it is purportedly intended to do,” said Michael Sobolik, an Indo-Pacific fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.
Risch, who has been asking the DFC to explain its vetting process for projects, said earlier this month that he would consider placing a hold on “any future DFC support for solar projects involving Chinese-sourced components or equipment” until the agency provides a clear strategy for ensuring there is no labor abuse in the supply chain.
“We cannot silo off human rights from any policy conversation the United States has—ending modern slavery is in everyone’s ‘lane,'” Risch told the Free Beacon.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), who sponsored a Senate bill to ban products made with forced labor, has also been pushing the DFC to establish safeguards and turn over additional information about its solar projects that source materials from China.
“The U.S. and its partners cannot be complicit in Beijing’s international slave labor scheme,” Rubio told the Free Beacon. “Whether it’s shoes or solar panels, we need certainty that we do not buy products tainted with the forced labor of Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang.”
While Republican lawmakers are urging the DFC to focus on supporting solar manufacturers outside of China, some experts say the Biden administration’s haste to implement its climate agenda is forcing it to contend with the industry as it stands now.
“I think the Biden administration is facing the reality that if they want solar to be a meaningful part of their climate agenda, they can’t crack down on China, and they can’t crack down on slave labor, because supply chains run so decisively on this issue through China, specifically through Xinjiang,” Sobolik said.
The Lenin Scholar is slated for a confirmation hearing Thursday
President Joe Biden’s nominee to regulate banks stole hundreds of dollars of merchandise from a discount retail store, according to a police report revealed Wednesday.
Saule Omarova, whom Biden tapped to serve as Comptroller of the Currency, was arrested after she was caught stuffing $214 worth of clothes, shoes, cologne, and belts in her purse at a T.J. Maxx in Madison, Wis., in May 1995. Omarova was 28 years old at the time and studying for her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.
Omarova is slated to appear before the Senate Banking Committee for her confirmation hearing Thursday. If confirmed, Omarova will oversee regulation of the country’s banking system. The police report, published by the American Accountability Foundation, could get her into further hot water with Senate Republicans who say she supports radical economic policies.
Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, has pressed Omarova to turn over a copy of a thesis she wrote on Karl Marx while studying at Moscow State University in the late 1980s. Omarova, who attended the school on a Lenin scholarship, scrubbed her résumé of a reference to the Marx thesis at some point over the last few years.
Omarova, a professor at the Cornell Law School, has said she wants to “end banking as we know it” by requiring bank deposits to be held with the Federal Reserve, rather than private banks. Omarova has also proposed the creation of a federal agency, the National Investment Authority, that would fulfill the goals of the Green New Deal by investing in infrastructure projects. Omarova said one goal of the National Investment Authority would be for oil and gas companies to go “bankrupt” in order to fight climate change.
Omarova will likely need unanimous Democratic support in order to be confirmed, but some moderates have expressed concern about her views. Sen. Jon Tester (D., Mont.), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, said he has not decided whether he will vote to confirm Omarova. Sens. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) are reportedly on the fence about her nomination.
The White House downplayed the theft allegations against Omarova in a statement to Fox News prior to the release of the police report. A White House spokesperson said Omarova has been “fully transparent” about the incident by disclosing it to the Senate Banking Committee, and that her arrest was the result “of a misunderstanding and confusing situation.”
The police report contradicts that claim. According to the report, Omarova “admitted to have stolen the items,” which consisted of four pairs of shoes, two bottles of cologne, two belts, and a pair of socks.
Lockdowns, school closures, universal masking, vaccine mandates; these responses to COVID-19 are “self-destructive” and more politicized than scientific, according to immunologist Steven Templeton.
Templeton once worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for four years. Now he’s an associate professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University. At the inaugural Brownstone Institute conference on Nov. 13, he shared his views with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” on why he has been critical of governments’ responses to COVID-19. The full interview will be premiere on EpochTV in coming weeks.
“When it comes to the point of certain interventions that are sort of weakly supported, and if you go back and look at everything that was published before 2020, and come to this completely different conclusion if you read the things that published later on in 2020, about masks or the ability of lockdowns to stop and end spread indefinitely—long term lockdowns that having devastating collateral damage—and that type of thing. And then you realize how politicized this really has become,” Templeton said.
Templeton said that before 2020, it’s wasn’t controversial that respiratory diseases like COVID-19 could not be completely managed or stopped.
But after 2020, leaders tend to blame the public for the spread of the virus, saying the “pandemic could be contained if we just did the right things and listen to the experts,” Templeton said.
“The problem is, it’s not sustainable,” Templeton said, referring to lockdowns. “It’s not something that everyone can do because some people have jobs where they have to interact with others.”
Parked school busses sit in a lot during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, in Charlotte, N.C., on April 21, 2020. Charlotte. (Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
Templeton likened the pandemic response to an autoimmune disease in a person.
“You want to have a balanced response to infectious disease, but you don’t want to go too far because if you get too far, you start destroying your tissues,” Templeton said. “And I feel as if that’s very analogous to how we handled the pandemic response in a way that was self-destructive.”Read MoreLockdowns, Mandates, and the Future of Public Health: Brownstone Institute Inaugural Conference
Humans cannot avoid COVID-19, like other respiratory viruses, Templeton said.
“You don’t hear politicians say, when there’s a hurricane, we all work together, we can solve this hurricane,” Templeton continued. “Yes, you have to make sure that the damage isn’t as bad as it could be. But it’s just something that has to be survived and endured. And I believe that was the case here.”
Templeton said he supports targeted interventions for vulnerable people, such as increasing ventilation because the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus is an airborne virus. But the universal application is not necessary.
Vaccines are also very important for vulnerable populations since they seem to limit disease severity, but the whole efficacy of the vaccine is unknown because there’s a lot of mixed data, Templeton continued.
“So it doesn’t have this sterilizing effect that people expected,” Templeton said. “The mandates are obviously something that’s controversial, as I believe a lot of scientists don’t believe that these things should be mandated, especially for children.”
“To me, these are political questions, not necessarily scientific. Scientists are human too. So we get involved in politics, and everything we do is affected by that.”
Natural Immunity and Vaccine Immunity
As an immunologist, Templeton said it’s a difficult question to compare natural immunity and vaccine immunity because researchers are still assessing how long-term immunity develops.
“I do know, generally, natural immunity is durable for several reasons,” Templeton said, adding that one of the reasons is the route of infection.
“The route that would provide the most protection against the reinfection—that’s a direct introduction of a virus into the lungs—you have a local response, and there are tissue-specific immune responses that you don’t necessarily get when you inject a vaccine into somebody’s arm,” Templeton said.
He said this was not controversial before 2020, and that’s why scientists have been trying to develop inhalable vaccines for respiratory viruses, such as a mist vaccine for flu.
“The other problem is that viral infections tend to leave kind of what we call an antigen reservoir,” Templeton said, referring to people who test positive after a very long time, even though they’re not symptomatic and they couldn’t transmit to other people. “That signifies that there is some sort of activity that may be stimulating the immune response to develop a strong memory. You just don’t get that with the vaccine.”
This afternoon: “Lockdowns, Mandates, and the Future of Public Health.”
In one of his articles, Templeton also detailed two other differences between natural immunity and immunity acquired through vaccination.
Most COVID-19 vaccines only stimulate immunity against the spike protein, while natural immunity could recognize all parts of the virus, he pointed out.
Another difference is, vaccines, unlike infection, could not stimulate stronger immune responses inside and outside of cells, thus limiting the strength and durability of downstream immunity. That’s why a second dose and a booster are introduced to overcome this.
“Both immunity to vaccination and infection protect against severe disease, but the scope of immunity that develops after infection is broader, generally more durable, and more specific to lung reinfection,” Templeton wrote, “Despite the obvious downsides, misinformation about the inferiority of natural immunity to vaccination persists, likely out of fear that data showing long-lasting protective immunity from infection will promote vaccine hesitancy.”
However, stronger immunity derived from infection comes with an increased risk of severe disease and a higher incidence of long-term effects, especially in older people and those with comorbidities, Templeton pointed out.
Federal health authorities acknowledge natural immunity exists but have continued to claim that the protection from vaccines is better, pointing to a different set of studies, including one from Kentucky published by state and CDC researchers.
Media Contribute to Politicized Pandemic Response
Templeton indicated that media played an important role in contributing to these pandemic responses.
“Talking to people in the community, I got that sense that it’s not that they wanted to dismiss what I was saying, but it was so different from what they were seeing and hearing,” Templeton said. “They just couldn’t really believe it. And it was frustrating.”
Templeton gave an example of a New York Times report.
On July 18, 2020, at a time when schools were deciding how to return to school, the New York Times reported a study from South Korea, claiming children spread the CCP virus as easily as adults.
“Later on, it came out they admitted they could not define what direction transmission was happening within their study, so they had to issue a correction—also the New York Times [did one] a month later,” Templeton said.
But the damage had already been done after this “highly publicized” report and other stories; schools have been closed, people had decided to go remote, Templeton said.
“What I’ve seen in the news media, which was very catastrophic type stuff; I couldn’t believe the level of negativity,” Templeton told “American Thought Leaders,” saying that’s part of the reason he started writing articles.
Templeton has written a series of articles since the pandemic, trying to provide a “different perspective.”
“I didn’t want to look back on this and say that I’ve violated my conscience and didn’t speak up when someone really needed to. And I think I’ll be able to say that, and that’s actually more important than making a difference.”
If there’s been one consistent talking point that President Joe Biden and his allies have employed in pushing Build Back Better, it has been the promise that the wealthy would fund it by forcing them to pay their “fair share.”
“I think it’s about time we started giving tax breaks and tax credits to working-class families and middle-class families, instead of just the very wealthy,” Biden said while pitching his social spending proposal in May.
“I plan on giving tax breaks to the working-class folks and making everybody pay their fair share,” he added.
In September, he tweeted, “I’m sick and tired of the super-wealthy and giant corporations not paying their fair share in taxes. It’s time for it to change.”
I’m sick and tired of the super-wealthy and giant corporations not paying their fair share in taxes.
Well, it turns out the second-costliest item in Build Back Better is a tax break that benefits the wealthiest Americans, primarily in blue states.
The Washington Post reported the $285 billion tax cut would come in the form of increasing the amount people can deduct from their federal income tax bill, based on state and local income taxes paid.
These are known as SALT deductions.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed under former President Donald Trump set a SALT cap at $10,000 and the Democrats want to raise it to $80,000.
Who would benefit from this? People in high tax blue states like New York, New Jersey and California.
The Tax Policy Center calculated that 94 percent of the tax break that would come from the new higher SALT cap would go to the top 20 percent of wage earners.
And broken down even further, the top 5 percent would get approximately 70 percent of the benefit.
Further, an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget determined a Washington, D.C., household of four “making $1 million per year will receive ten times as much from SALT cap relief as a middle-class family will receive from the child tax credit expansion” proposed in Build Back Better.
“We’re debating about whether to give lower- and middle-class families a thousand dollars more a year through the child tax credit, while giving upper-class families $10,000 or more through SALT,” Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the CRFB, told the Post.
“That’s counter to everything the Democrats have been saying Build Back Better is about and everything they said about the Trump tax cuts.”
Do you oppose passing Build Back Better?
Democrats like Biden, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer constantly and falsely berated the Trump tax cuts as a giveaway to the rich, despite provisions like the SALT cap and generous tax breaks for lower- and middle-income families.
Here’s another Build Back Better kicker: Taxes will in fact go up for a significant number of middle-income families, contrary to Biden’s claim only the wealthy will pay.
In Scranton, Pennsylvania, last month, Biden said, “I guarantee you that no one making under $400,000 a year will see one single penny in tax go up. Not one.”
In fact, he described his plan as “a tax cut for working-class people.”
Biden: “The cost of the Build Back Better bill in terms of adding to the deficit is zero, zero, zero. Because we’re going to pay for it all.” pic.twitter.com/sRqBLeD6sA
The left-leaning Tax Policy Center determined “roughly 20 percent to 30 percent of middle-income households would pay more in taxes in 2022,” if Build Back Better became law.
The group estimated that the tax increase for low- and middle-income Americans would not be substantial — $100 or less per year. Those making $200,000 to $500,000 would pay an additional $230 per year.
That, of course, is an increase of more than a penny and certainly isn’t a tax cut.
With the U.S. already flooded with debt, spending unknown trillions to launch open-ended entitlement programs under Build Back Better has been an unappealing prospect from the outset.
And the more we learn, the less appealing, or more accurately, the less acceptable the legislation becomes.
For the past decade, while the U.S. and other world powers have been embroiled in the Middle East, China has been largely diplomatically neutral and militarily absent.
But this spring, the U.S. learned that China was building a suspected military facility port in the United Arab Emirates, The Wall Street Journal reported today.
The UAE is one of the U.S.’s closest Middle Eastern allies, so when this Chinese action was discovered, the Biden administration warned the Emiratis that this could threaten ties between the UAE and the U.S.
After meetings and visits from U.S. officials, construction was stopped, according to the Wall Street Journal’s sources.
There have been suspicions over the years that China would eventually try to assert power in the Middle Eastern region. Many expected it would happen in the Persian Gulf.
“For the past half-century, the United States has essentially dominated international waters in the Persian Gulf uncontested by any Great Power. As in the South China Sea and in the Bab el-Mandeb, however, [Chinese President] Xi may have ambitions to challenge the United States and assert its military influence over yet another strategic chokepoint,” the American Enterprise Institute said in 2020.
The U.S. has also normally made the assumption that the Gulf Cooperation Council would follow its lead, as America has relied on close alliance of the U.S. and the GCC.
“Too often, the State Department has assumed that where it leads, Gulf Cooperation Council members would follow. Arab Gulf states might be frustrated with Washington, but they understood the threat from Tehran meant they had little choice but to grin and bear American arrogance,” AEI said.
But over the past year few years, tensions have arisen between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the real powerhouse and leader of the GCC and much of the Arab world.
Should Middle Eastern countries be forging ties with China?
When Biden came into office, he had harsh words for Saudi Arabia, particularly over the crisis in Yemen and the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
So at this opportune moment, China appears to be reaching into the region.
Sources told The Wall Street Journal that the Emirati government did not appear to be aware of the military nature of China’s construction activity. But China’s actions are still concerning.
http://Emirates”China’s effort to establish what U.S. officials believe would be a military foothold in the UAE—and the Biden administration’s push to persuade the Emiratis to stop the base from being built—reflect the challenges the administration faces in attempting to compete with Beijing globally,” Wall Street Journal reported.
Many are predicting that this is just one more move in the growing competition between China and the U.S. The Middle East is now the regional stage on which this showdown is taking place.
The halt in the construction in the UAE did seem to put the American-Emirati relationship back in a good place, but Emiratis are worried over the fact that they are getting caught in the middle as tension mounts between the U.S. and China.
“We’re all worried, very much, by a looming Cold War,” Anwar Gargash, a UAE presidential adviser, said at an Oct. 2 conference, according to the Wall Street Journal. “That is bad news for all of us because the idea of choosing is problematic in the international system.”
Amid free-falling poll numbers for Vice President Kamala Harris and reports of White House infighting, Harris’ communications director is resigning.
Ashley Etienne, who served former President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will leave her post next month, according to Fox News.
Etienne’s departure produced a White House reaction to the effect that this was nothing special.
“Ashley is a valued member of the Vice President’s team, who has worked tirelessly to advance the goals of this administration,” a White House official said. “She is leaving the office in December to pursue other opportunities.”
But Etienne’s departure comes at a time when a recent USA Today poll gave Harris a 28 percent popularity rating, and even CNN is using the word “dysfunction” to describe Harris.
In its reporting based on sources it did not name, CNN said one source said Etienne “was not a good fit” for Harris and did not play a highly active role in developing a strategy for getting the vice president out of the tailspin that has marked her first year.
According to CNN, “many in the vice president’s circle” think she is being inadequately positioned or prepared.Has Kamala Harris been the worst vice president ever?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
The network also quoted other unnamed sources as saying that the fault is not with Biden and his aides, but that Harris has not been well-served by her staff.
The role of family members in running the office was also cited as a factor in the problems Harris has experienced.
People need to back off @VP Harris. She’s a powerful woman. She’s a powerful Black woman. She’s been given some of the toughest political assignments in the face of two Dem senators who—under the lie of being so-called “moderates”—have blocked $15/hr min wage, voting rights, etc.
“The president selected the vice president because — to serve as his running mate — because he felt she was exactly the person he wanted to have by his side to govern the country,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a Monday media briefing, according to an official White House transcript of her remarks.
As noted by the New York Post, Psaki says race and gender have been used wrongly to attack Harris.
“Some in the right wing who have gone after her because she is the first woman, the first woman of color. I’m not suggesting anyone will acknowledge that publicly, but I think there’s no question that the type of attacks — the attacks on her that certainly, being the first she is many times over — is part of that,” she added at a Wednesday event, according to Townhall.
Kamala Harris is not a victim of racism or sexism. She is unqualified to serve as Vice-President.
That has not stilled the drumbeat of criticism, however.
“It’s hard to screw up being vice president,” Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen wrote Thursday. “But after just 10 months in office, Kamala D. Harris has managed to make herself the least popular vice president at this point in at least 50 years.”
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich equated current Speaker Nancy Pelosi to a “dictator” over her current stint presiding over the lower chamber during an interview this week with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
With House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy widely expected to take the gavel after the Democrats take their beating in 2022, Kirk asked the former speaker and presidential candidate if he had any words of advice for the California Republican.
Gingrich went for the jugular when speaking about Pelosi on “The Charlie Kirk Show.”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9SwyQznSQyc
“I’ve thought about it,” said Gingrich. “I’ve thought about how do you handle certain kind of problems? First of all, I think Kevin’s done a good job overall.”
“It’s very hard job. And he has done a balancing act. He’s faced with a dictator,” he added of Pelosi.
“And I mean this literally: Nancy Pelosi runs a dictatorship,” he said. “She kneecaps people. She coerces them, she does things to Republicans that are a violation of 240 years of American history and she is extraordinarily destructive freedom.”
“She’s a thug,” he added. “She brutalizes people, she runs over them. She establishes rules that are crazy.”
Do you agree that Pelosi is a “thug?”
He also accused House Democrats under Pelosi’s leadership of subverting rules when meeting with “whistleblowers.” He told Kirk that Democrats often conduct their dirty business away from the Capitol so as to avoid having to be transparent by not having their guests check in with the Capitol Police.
“She has established on the House side of the hill a dictatorship, and literally … the Senate today is much freer and much more open than the U.S. House,” Gingrich also said. “It’s truly humiliating. And you can see that everything we think of as freedom is being crushed by the Pelosi dictatorship.”
“I think it’s truly more frightening than the Justice Department, because in the end, if you end up with a Congress which is totally dictatorial, it will then lead to an even more dictatorial government,” he concluded of Pelosi.
Pelosi has of course unilaterally forced her mask mandate on House members. Just this week, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia announced she had accrued $60,500 in Pelosi’s mask fines.
2. The only time I wear a mask is when I have to fly.
I have $60,500 in mask fines from Nancy Pelosi, who is a hypocrite because she does not wear a mask at times.
Here she is during the vote on Infrastructure bill, with her mask down.
Of course, who can forget that Pelosi also initiated a military occupation of the U.S. Capitol grounds earlier this year that lasted months. That occupation was handled by partisan Gen. Russel Honoré:
I salute the urgent, diligent & strategic work that he and his team continue to do in this mission. https://t.co/tHYs94ZDaF
Then there was this week’s Pelosi-backed censure of GOP Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona regarding a meme he posted online.
Is there anything more dictatorial than a tyrant eating ice cream on late-night television while people across the country worry about their next meal? Is there anything more thuggish than a woman whose district was locked down last fall while she enjoyed being catered to by a hairstylist?
BREAKING: Nancy Pelosi’s office has confirmed the speaker got her hair cut indoors in a San Francisco salon, but released a statement claiming she didn’t know she’d done anything wrong. https://t.co/cEEr1p074r
Nancy Antoinette, as some began to call her last year, has taken the speakership in a dangerous direction. Like other Democrats in the COVID era, she revealed herself as little more than a power-hungry bully with no interest in holding historic mores or basic ethics.
As Gingrich so eloquently put it, the woman is a dictator.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced its Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement (JCODE) team joined Europol to arrest 150 people worldwide in Operation Dark HunTor, an effort that seized weapons, drugs and more than $31 million in currencies.
Operation Dark HunTor included arrests across three continents, taking into custody alleged perpetrators across the United States, Australia, and Europe.
A statement from the DOJ noted 65 arrests in the United States, one in Bulgaria, three in France, 47 in Germany, four in the Netherlands, 24 in the United Kingdom, four in Italy, and two in Switzerland.
“This 10-month massive international law enforcement operation spanned across three continents and involved dozens of U.S. and international law enforcement agencies to send one clear message to those hiding on the Darknet peddling illegal drugs: there is no dark internet. We can and we will shine a light,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said.
“Operation Dark HunTor prevented countless lives from being lost to this dangerous trade in illicit and counterfeit drugs, because one pill can kill. The Department of Justice with our international partners will continue to crack down on lethal counterfeit opioids purchased on the Darknet,” she added.
The emphasis in the operation was to decrease the flow of illegal drugs internationally. The results included $31.6 million in both cash and virtual currencies; approximately 234 kilograms (kg) of drugs worldwide including 152.1 kg of amphetamine, 21.6 kg of cocaine, 26.9 kg of opioids, and 32.5 kg of MDMA, in addition to more than 200,000 ecstasy, fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methamphetamine pills, and counterfeit medicine; and 45 firearms, according to the statement.
“The men and women of the department’s Criminal Division, in close collaboration with our team of interagency and international partners, stand ready to leverage all our resources to protect our communities through the pursuit of those who profit from addiction, under the false belief that they are anonymous on the Darknet,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said.
“Only through a whole of government and, in this case, global approach to tackling cyber-enabled drug trafficking can we hope to achieve the significant results illustrated in Operation Dark HunTor,” he added.
FBI Director Christopher Wray also commented on the widespread, multi-national operation and its impact.
“The FBI continues to identify and bring to justice drug dealers who believe they can hide their illegal activity through the Darknet,” Wray said in the statement.
“Criminal Darknet markets exist so drug dealers can profit at the expense of others’ safety. The FBI is committed to working with our JCODE and EUROPOL law enforcement partners to disrupt those markets and the borderless, worldwide trade in illicit drugs they enable,” he added.
Two Democrat senators have launched a last-minute bid to sink the potential renomination of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for another term due to the Trump-appointed policymaker’s reluctance to use the central bank’s tools to fight climate change.
Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) urged President Joe Biden not to reappoint Powell, saying in a joint Nov. 19 statement that the Fed chief “refuses to recognize climate change as an urgent and systemic economic threat” while criticizing his past statements indicating reluctance for central bank officials to serve as “climate policymakers.”
“During his tenure, Chair Powell first ignored climate change and then resisted calls for the Fed to use its tools to fight it, arguing that climate change ‘is really an issue that is assigned to lots of other government agencies, not so much the Fed.’ At a hearing earlier this year, he said: ‘we are not and we don’t seek to be climate policymakers,’” the two senators wrote.
On Twitter, Merkley added, “We need a Fed Chair who recognizes the urgent need for bold climate action. That person is not Jerome Powell.”
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) speaks at a Senate hearing in Washington on April 11, 2019. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
It comes as President Joe Biden last week met with the two leading candidates, Powell and Lael Brainard, the only Democrat on the Fed’s seven-member board, ahead of his decision to appoint one of them to a four-year term at the helm of the central bank, starting next February.
Brainard, a Harvard-trained Ph.D. economist, is widely seen as being more dovish on monetary policy and as having stronger hand on bank regulation. She has also suggested a more active role for the Fed in terms of climate change, telling a research conference in October that the Fed was developing climate-related scenarios for use in bank stress tests and endorsing the use of the Fed’s supervisory guidance to financial institutions to help them mitigate climate risk.
Powell, who was appointed Fed chair by then-President Donald Trump, said in June that climate change does pose “profound challenges for the global economy and certainly the financial system” but rejected the idea that the Fed should take on a prominent role fighting the problem beyond assessing its potential impacts and associated risks.
“Climate change is not something we directly consider in setting monetary policy,” Powell said at a June panel discussion on how the financial sector might address climate risks.
“Central banks can play an important role in building an analysis … to quantify the risks. … But we are not and we don’t seek to be climate policymakers as such,” a role that should be left to elected officials, Powell said at the time.
Climate policy “is not a question for the Federal Reserve,” Powell added.
But Merkley and Whitehouse disagree, arguing that climate “demands action now” and that institutions that are unprepared for the impacts of climate change “stand to lose billions, threatening their balance sheets and the stability of our financial system.”
“Price stability, the safety and soundness of our financial system, and millions of jobs and businesses—all of which are squarely in the Fed’s mandate—are at stake,” the duo wrote.
Still, under Powell’s tenure, the Fed has joined the Network for Greening the Financial System, an international group exploring ways to build climate risk into bank management, supervision, and regulation. It has also started conducting more research on the implications of climate change for the economy and, to that end, established two internal bodies—the Supervision Climate Committee and the Financial Stability Climate Committee—in order to better understand and address climate-related risks for financial institutions and the broader financial system.
Biden is expected to announce his decision on the next Fed chair before Thanksgiving.
Democrats in the House of Representatives early Friday delayed a vote on President Joe Biden’s massive spending bill after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) took to the House floor for over eight hours.
Democrat leaders wanted to vote on the $1.8 trillion bill before the clock struck midnight, but McCarthy started speaking at 8:38 p.m. on Thursday and didn’t stop until 5:10 a.m. on Friday morning.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) informed members during the speech that the House would not hold the vote.
The chamber was set to reconvene at 8 a.m.
McCarthy broke a record set by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in 2018. His speech was 8 hours, 32 minutes; hers was 8 hours, 7 minutes.
“I’m a competitive guy,” McCarthy said as the record was broken. “This one minute feels almost like eight hours now. I want to thank my colleagues for standing with me, for standing with their constituents, as we do everything in our power to stop this bill,” he added.
Some members of the House praised the Californian for continuing to speak.
“GOP Leader McCarthy is showing the American people what real leadership looks like. President Biden and Speaker Pelosi should take notes,” Rep. Fred Keller (R-Pa.) said in a social media post.
But Democrats jeered during the speech and panned the remarks.
“Never in the field of human conflict were so many words listened to by so few people. Good night America—on Friday we pass President Biden’s Build Back Better package and get back to work,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote on Twitter.
Republicans disagree with major portions of the package, including the reinstatement of prior State and Local Tax deduction levels and a broad expansion of government programs.
“This bill promotes welfare without work, imposes unacceptable price controls limiting drug access for seniors, and stunts pharmaceutical innovation,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter.
Democrats say the bill would help struggling Americans.
The legislation “will make health care accessible and affordable for 2.2 million low-income uninsured Americans that exist in the Medicaid ‘coverage gap,’” House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said on the House floor.
He also said it would help low-income Americans with child care and housing and “make clean air and plant life on this planet accessible and affordable for future generations by taking historic steps to combat climate change.”
Democrats can pass the bill without Republican support because the party holds a slim majority in the lower chamber.
The package’s fate is more uncertain in the Senate, where each party holds 50 seats but Democrats can break ties through Vice President Kamala Harris, the president of the chamber.
Democrats can ram the package through using reconciliation to lower the threshold from 60 to 50 but several Democrat moderates, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), have indicated they’re unsure whether they’ll back the bill.
Biden has urged Congress to pass the legislation. Congressmembers recently approved an infrastructure plan crafted with the help of the White House, with over a dozen Republicans in each chamber crossing the aisle.
Parents of teens who say they are transgender are keeping their eyes fixed on a court case that could lead to taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgeries for minors.
One parent, who goes by the pseudonym Charlotte Jacobs to protect the identity of herself and her daughter, told The Epoch Times that she and other parents of teens suffering from gender dysphoria are paying close attention to the case.
“There are no studies that show that this surgery or any type of gender affirming surgery alleviates gender dysphoria … so it’s an elective surgery,” Jacobs said. “Why should taxpayers pay for this?”
Two plaintiffs, minor teenagers known as D.H. and John Doe, sued Arizona Medicaid because Medicaid does not pay for breast removal surgeries. The plaintiffs are seeking a court injunction to stop Arizona Medicaid from complying with its own rules against covering gender reassignment surgeries. Doe was 15 and D.H. was 17 when they filed the lawsuit.
“D.H. and John are unable to obtain the medical care that is a critical next step in their ongoing treatment for gender dysphoria,” states the lawsuit. “As long as the exclusion is enforced, they are barred from obtaining male chest reconstruction surgery.”
Jami Snyder, Director of The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System is listed as the defendant in the case.
D.H. has since turned 18 and has dropped out of the case.
A lower court denied an injunction, ruling the plaintiffs had not shown they were likely to succeed on their claim that their exclusion from coverage violates the Medicaid Act.
John Doe has appealed the case, which is scheduled to go before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Nov. 19 in Phoenix.
“These two kids have a history of mental illness, including suicide attempts,” Jacobs claimed. “And, of course, they’re going to conflate and say that these suicide attempts are because they’re not getting their gender affirming surgery.”
There are also no studies that show undergoing surgeries will prevent these children from committing suicide, Jacobs said.
“In fact, the opposite is true,” she said. “There’s a 19 percent increase in suicide post surgeries.”
An amici curae (friends of the court) brief submitted for teens who had double mastectomies, but now regret the surgeries states they “believed that removing their healthy breasts would resolve their gender dysphoria and permit them to live healthy, well-adjusted lives,” but later learned that surgery “did not resolve the psychological issues underlying their gender dysphoria, but only increased their distress as they realized they had irreversibly altered their bodies based upon ideology.”
One of the teens is Keira Bell, a 24-year-old woman who changed her mind and “detransitioned” after gender reassignment surgery in Britain. She sued Britain’s National Health Service’s clinic for transgender youth—which in three appointments led her into a “devastating experiment” using puberty blockers at 16, and later a double mastectomy. The court later ruled that it’s unlikely that children under 16 can give informed consent for such puberty-blocking drugs.
Jacobs blames transgender activists, the media, Hollywood, the medical community and public schools for promoting the indoctrination of susceptible teens often suffering from depression into believing they should permanently alter their bodies through surgery to be happier. She disagrees with “gender affirming” therapy, which she believes only further indoctrinates already confused kids.
“All this transgenderism is part of the bigger social contagion that is happening, where all over Tik Tok and YouTube you can find before-and-after pictures of young girls with big smiles … of absolute euphoria after they remove their breasts,” she said.
Jacobs said the growing trend among gender dysphoric teens to have their breasts removed, and then post images of their surgical scars on social media is shocking and similar to anorexic girls posting images and videos of themselves getting thinner and thinner.
“YouTube actually was required to take all of those down,” Jacobs said. “But this is the same thing. It’s a social contagion of girls thinking that they’re going to be happy and that their mental illness will be eradicated if they would only cut off their breasts.”
If the court rules in favor of taxpayer-funded surgeries in Arizona, Jacobs expects the case could go all the way to the Supreme Court.
For decades, those pushing global warming/climate change have tried to silence any opposition to their narrative.
Instead of debating the issue, the climate alarmists would rather tar and feather, figuratively speaking, anyone who is brave enough to challenge their assertions.
The most recent example occurred when Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) accused ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods of donating millions of dollars to The Heartland Institute.
Pressley calls Heartland a “shadow” organization, insinuating that Heartland simply does the bidding of Big Oil.
This, however, is completely untrue.
For several years, The Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank, has been a thorn in the side of climate alarmists because Heartland has produced an extensive amount of scientific research that calls into questions many of the absurd, baseless claims made by the likes of Al Gore and John Kerry.
First, Heartland research on climate change has been cited more than 100 times in peer-reviewed journals.
Second, Heartland was opposing global warming alarmism long before ExxonMobil or any other energy company provided funding. Despite Pressley’s claim, Heartland actually ramped up its efforts after energy companies stopped providing funding.
ExxonMobil began donating to Heartland in 1998, four years after Heartland’s first book on global warming was published.
In fact, ExxonMobil stopped donating to Heartland in 2006, two years before Heartland hosted the first International Conference on Climate Change and three years before the first volume in the “Climate Change Reconsidered” series was published.
Third, Heartland has always had science on its side. Claims of a “scientific consensus” in favor of climate alarmism have been debunked again and again.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Heartland’s flagship publications on climate change, the five-volume “Climate Change Reconsidered” series published with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) from 2009 to 2019, were produced without a dime of financial support from any corporations, energy or otherwise.
Yet, these facts don’t matter to the merchants of smear.
All accusations that oil industry funding somehow influenced or corrupted the work of climate scientists or organizations such as The Heartland Institute are based on lies originating in then-Sen. Al Gore’s office and then repeated endlessly in an echo chamber created by Greenpeace and activists posing as journalists in the so-called mainstream media.
In truth, the mission of The Heartland Institute when it comes to climate change is quite simple: follow the facts, not the feelings.
Heartland’s primary objective has always been to educate elected officials, civic and business leaders, and the general public about the true science and economics of climate change. Climate change is far from the only public policy issue in Heartland’s wheelhouse.
Heartland is a highly respected voice on health care, school reform, taxes and budget issues, and other public policy matters. State elected officials in all 50 states rely on Heartland as an objective and credible source of research and commentary on the most important issues of the day.
Moreover, The Heartland Institute doesn’t “deny climate change.” In fact, Heartland documents how climate has changed in the past and continues to change today, and studies its causes and consequences. Along with thousands of highly qualified scientists around the world, Heartland finds the human influence on climate to be small—probably too small to measure against the background of natural variability—and the case for restricting the use of fossil fuels to be very weak.
To be clear, Heartland’s position in the scientific debate, and that alone, is why Heartland has become the primary target of criticism from the Democratic Party and its cronies in the media. The left’s antipathy toward Heartland has little, if anything, to do with funding, ethics, or credibility.
Lastly, The Heartland Institute doesn’t “oppose climate science.” Heartland actually helped create and promote it. Heartland has published thousands of pages of reviews of the peer-reviewed literature in volumes that have been compared favorably to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Heartland has invested more, and published more, and reached more people with real climate science than all but a handful of national organizations in the United States.
Pressley’s attempt to smear The Heartland Institute is based on the fact that The Heartland Institute’s courageous position in questioning climate alarmism dogma poses a viable threat to the left’s climate change narrative, which is integral to their insatiable lust for more power and control over “We the People.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) defended efforts by some in her party to include the State and Local Tax deduction (SALT) during her weekly press conference, breaking her silence on the controversy.
SALT allows taxpayers to deduct their state and local income taxes from their federal tax bill. The program is especially popular for lawmakers representing Democrat-led states with high state income taxes like New York, New Jersey, and California.
SALT has long been a mainstay in the U.S. tax code but was significantly cut by Republicans in 2017.
Under Republicans’ 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which the majority-Republican Congress passed through the reconciliation process under President Donald Trump, the SALT deduction remained but was capped at $10,000.
Now that they hold Congress, some Democrats are fighting fiercely to raise this cap or remove it altogether.
In the original draft of their $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, Democrats hoped to reinstate the deduction. But SALT was not included in the compromise budget bill hammered out by President Joe Biden with Senate moderates Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
Disappointed with this absence, the measure’s proponents have demanded that SALT be reinstated, threatening to not support the bill without the program.
Since the unveiling of the compromise budget, Democratic leadership has been in constant negotiation with various wings of their caucus that were unhappy with one aspect of the compromise or another.
However, Pelosi did not definitively weigh in with her own opinion on the issue until Thursday during her press conference, where she broke her silence and defended the measure.
Republicans and progressives have argued that despite Democrats’ claims that the bill will be paid for by the wealthy, the SALT measure will have the opposite effect. Because higher tax states usually have higher median incomes than other states, the benefits of the SALT deduction, critics say, will go mostly to the wealthy.
A study by the Institute on Tax and Economic Policy seems to vindicate this claim. The study quipped that the program is “not worth its SALT,” finding that the tax deduction would “overwhelmingly benefit wealthy, white households.”
“The vast majority of families would not benefit financially from repeal and most of the tax cuts would flow to families with incomes above $200,000,” the study says.
Asked about these criticisms, Pelosi responded, “As a supporter of that particular measure, I just want to clarify what that’s about.”
“It’s not about tax cuts for wealthy people,” Pelosi insisted, “it’s about services for the American people.”
Education, transportation, and healthcare state-level initiatives funded by state income taxes were “slashed by the Trump administration,” Pelosi said. “We’re just turning that over,” she added.
Pelosi continued, “This isn’t about who gets a tax break, it’s about which states get the revenue they need in order to meet the needs of the people.”
“That is a fight I will continue to make,” she vowed.
Unsatisfied with the response, a reporter pushed on the question, noting that whatever its other benefits, one result of reinstating SALT would be to give the wealthy a tax cut.
Other Democrats Say SALT Too Beneficial to Wealthy
“No, that isn’t the result. That isn’t the result,” Pelosi retorted. “The fact is that the dynamism that is injected into our states—for the people—is what is important here.”
Still, disagreements over SALT, as with so many other programs in the spending bill, continue to divide the Democratic caucus in both chambers.
In one plan introduced by the House Rules Committee, the SALT cap would be raised to $72,500, a more than sevenfold increase from its current level.
But moderate-leaning Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), both from high-tax northeastern states, criticized the plan, arguing with Republicans that it would overwhelmingly affect the rich.
While Sanders admitted that raising the cap to $72,500 is better than making no change at all, he said that the Rules Committee proposal “still is quite regressive.”
The unlikely moderate and progressive duo are instead working on a proposal that would leave the SALT capped at $10,000, but would give an exemption to taxpayers making under approximately $400,000.
According to Menendez, this alternate proposal would exempt around 98 percent of New Jersey constituents from the cap entirely.
And despite Pelosi’s emphatic support for the program, some progressives in the 95-strong progressive caucus agree with Sanders that the budget should not include provisions that would mostly benefit the wealthy, as analysis shows an increased SALT cap would.
Talks over the SALT cap continue, and it is not yet clear what the program will look like in the final draft of the bill.
Because of their razor-thin majority in both chambers, however, Democrats will need the support of all but three members in the House and the support of all 50 members in the Senate to make any changes to the deduction through the larger bill, a difficult task as the issue continues to split the party.
Saule Omarova, nominated by President Joe Biden for the role of one of the top banking regulators, on Nov. 18 tried to portray her recently published proposal to centralize banking as merely an outline of one among many options to consider rather than her own preference.
Her proposal, outlined in an October paper titled “The People’s Ledger,” would have the government take all bank deposits and put them in the Federal Reserve, which would then be able to control who does and doesn’t get a loan (pdf). This would drastically expand government control over finance and exacerbate a number of problems, several experts previously told The Epoch Times.
During her Nov. 18 confirmation hearing for Treasury’s comptroller of the currency, Omarova said her paper was written in the context of “academic debate” around digitizing the dollar “because this seems to be an inevitable solution.”
“The paper seeks to address the implications of that step for the entire financial system,” she said, arguing that it was her job to “expand the boundaries of academic debate and outline potential options for Congress to consider.”
However, ranking member Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) pointed out that that isn’t how she framed her ideas in the paper.
“‘This Article … advocates full migration of demand deposits onto the Fed’s balance sheet,’” he quoted from the paper. “Are you now saying you’re no longer for that?” he asked.
“Senator, what I’m trying to clarify here is the problem this paper was trying to solve,” she replied, making a point that digitization of currency would hurt community banking and give an advantage to the Big Tech and institutional players on Wall Street.
Her paper does mention digitization proposals as well as the idea of allowing people to open Fed accounts without abolishing private banking, Toomey acknowledged. But he stressed that she portrayed the centralization idea as the preferable option in the paper.
“This is what you recommended, and it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that every one of these thought experiments or academic ideas—every one of them—involved dramatic expansion in the power and control of the central government to allocate resources, to control banking, and a corresponding diminution in the freedom of individual Americans and institutions,” he said.
Omarova also addressed her previous statements, in which she said: “The way we basically get rid of those carbon financers is we starve them of their sources of capital,” and “We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.” During the hearing, she said “that was a poor phrasing” and that she was actually talking about “helping workers in this sector to transition to high-paying jobs if we’re looking into the future and the rise of new technologies.”
John Berlau, senior fellow at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, was skeptical of that explanation.
“For someone who chooses her words very carefully, it’s hard to buy that she misspoke,” he told The Epoch Times, noting that Omarova has a record of advocating for such ideas.
Omarova said her previous jobs at a banking law firm and in the Treasury taught her “the invaluable lessons about how financial sausage is made and how that can lead to devastating financial crises.”
She said she would work “to guarantee a fair and competitive market where small and mid-sized banks that invest in neighbors’ homes and small businesses can thrive, and where every community, regardless of wealth geography or history, has access to safe and affordable financial services.”
She stressed that it was up to Congress to decide whether or not to implement her ideas.
Toomey addressed that argument in his opening statement.
“I suspect Prof. Omarova may claim that as comptroller, she wouldn’t have the power to act on all of her radical views. But the truth is the comptroller is a powerful regulator. It wields enormous powers through bank chartering, regulation, enforcement, and especially through its opaque supervision process. The comptroller is also a member of the FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] Board and the Financial Stability Oversight Council, America’s financial super-regulator,” he said.
He called her ideas “a socialist manifesto for American financial services.”
“These are exactly the kind of socialist ideas that have failed everywhere in the world they’ve been tried,” he said (pdf).
Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) defended Omarova as “one of the most qualified nominees ever for this job.”
In his opening statement, he criticized some Republicans who questioned Omarova’s college thesis on Marxist economics during her studies at Moscow State University (pdf). He pointed out that, though born in the Soviet Union, she “renounced her communist citizenship and became an American.”
It is too often overlooked in all the discussions about the “transition” to a net-zero emissions economy that the most consequential transition is that from democratic capitalism to feudal serfdom.
This is the conclusion of American demographer and “blue-collar Democrat” Joel Kotkin, who has highlighted that the supposedly well-intentioned green policies being adopted across the West come at enormous expense to the working- and middle-classes.
As Kotkin wrote in ‘Spiked’ earlier this year, “extreme climate measures have driven the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, construction and energy, while other environmental regulations have boosted housing prices.”
Kotkin’s thesis is that the West is on the road to serfdom. Rather than maintaining our capitalist societies where a large, asset-owning middle-class underpin a stable democratic system, we are becoming stratified feudal societies.
Home and small business ownership are declining, especially among the young and the less well-off, a group of technocratic elites are establishing themselves as permanent rulers in the apparatus of the administrative state, and corporate oligarchs are coming to dominate both the economy and broader society.
People view artist Luke Jerram’s new ‘Floating Earth’ Debuts In Wigan, England, on Nov. 18, 2021. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
This transition has been occurring for some time, but it has been accelerated by the COVID-19-inspired lockdowns and the zeal with which Western governments have thoughtlessly adopted net-zero emissions targets.
Both play out as an aggressive form of reverse Robin Hood asset stripping, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
Australia is now officially committed to a net-zero emissions by 2050 target.
But beyond the slogan “technology not taxes,” the Australian people do not know how the government plans on achieving its newfound ambition.
The UK Treasury, by contrast, recently released a Net-zero Review report (pdf) which provides some detail of how the UK government expects to reach net-zero.
The report includes a surprisingly honest admission from the bureaucracy: “The costs and benefits of the transition to a net-zero economy will ultimately pass through to households through a range of different channels.”
It includes a helpful chart that shows that, regardless of the specific policy or mechanism, the costs of net-zero will always fall on households, that is, everyday mums, dads, and workers.
This insight is evident to many but is too often obfuscated.
The slogan “technology not taxes” is not only meaningless but deceptive too. The range of taxpayer-funded schemes means higher taxes. Subsidising certain kinds of energy, electric cars, or solar panels means higher taxes. Requiring businesses to adopt technology they otherwise wouldn’t mean higher prices and less choice—effectively a tax by stealth.
An electric car owner prepares to charge his car at an electric car charging station in Corte Madera, Calif., on Sept. 23, 2020. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The report also notes that the “highest income households emit around three times as much carbon as the lowest income households.”
But for all their calls for higher-income earners to “pay their fair share of taxes,” the political left doesn’t seem to ask for them to cut their fair share of emissions.
In fact, all too often, “taking action on climate change” just means taking away the jobs, cars, electricity, food, and hobbies of the lowest-income households.
The Telegraph newspaper in the UK, reporting on the Johnson government’s plan to get to net-zero, has noted that lenders could be forced to abide by targets for energy efficiency certification before they provide home loans.
“This could mean more expensive mortgages for homes that perform badly, to encourage the take-up of measures such as wall or roof insulation,” the report said. “However, the government did not provide any extra measures to help support energy efficiency measures for homeowners, after the failure of its Green Homes Grant last year.”
Translation: achieving net-zero will likely require putting mortgages out of the reach of working-class families unless they “upgrade” their homes to make them less carbon-intensive. And the government does not fancy providing any support for such upgrades.
This is the kind of policy that will ultimately be required in Australia. Many homes and older apartments are poorly insulated and require, in the minds of climate zealots, too much heating in winter and too much cooling in summer, increasing their carbon footprint.
A resident stands on a balcony of a public housing apartment in Redfern in Sydney, Australia, on Sept. 16, 2021. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)
The effect is pernicious and regressive. The poorest households will be faced with the choice between paying even more for a home and being condemned to the renter class.
Some on the political left have pointed out that Australia’s emissions reduction efforts to date have essentially been achieved by bribing farmers to not develop their land, but that to get to net-zero will require a far bigger bat.
That is true. And Britain is showing exactly what this means.
Homeownership will only be available to those able to afford certain kinds of technology. Car ownership will only be available to those who can afford expensive electric vehicles. Electricity will become more expensive, and gas could be banned.
As Carlos Tavares, the head of car maker Stellantis, said recently, this will fundamentally change the West.
“I can’t imagine a democratic society where there is no freedom of mobility because it’s only for wealthy people [to own cars] and all the others will use public transport,” he said.
Kotkin’s predictions are now playing out in real time. He is one of a few disillusioned leftists who realise that when the largest corporations, banks, financiers, and technology companies, along with governments, align on a policy that voters never agreed to, it cannot be good for working people or democracy.
Buried in a Senate bill meant to increase U.S. competition with China is a measure that allocates $5 million in taxpayer funds for a “chief diversity officer” at the National Science Foundation.
The provision is part of the United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), a sprawling bill that seeks to increase American manufacturing and shore up the United States’ supply lines to boost competition with China. Republicans object to several portions of the bill, including a passage that awards $5 million annually to the National Science Foundation for a chief diversity officer who would oversee directives such as “establishing a strategic plan for diverse participation” in federal science programs. The official would also collect and report demographic information, such as gender and race, for patent applicants and ensure that any state seeking science-related grants enacts a plan to address “inequity.” States can do that, the bill says, by giving subgrants to close “equity gaps” and boosting enrollment in computer science education coursework for students who face “systemic barriers.”
The diversity officer would be in charge of developing plans to ensure that “traditionally underrepresented populations,” such as native Hawaiians, Alaska natives, and Indians, get access to federal programs. This would also include “historically Black colleges and universities, Tribal colleges or universities, [and] minority-serving institutions,” according to the legislation.
Senior Republican aides who are tracking the legislation said the addition of these measures into a critical national security bill is part of an effort by the Democratic Party’s far-left flank to mainstream their “woke agenda” and progressive priorities centered on race relations.
“This is a thinly veiled attempt to push a radical woke agenda in what the Democrats say is supposed to be a critical national security bill,” said one Republican official, speaking only on background.
A second senior congressional aide said it is “disappointing that Republican lawmakers are helping them” push this agenda by allowing the bill to go to conference, where it can be debated. Republicans, the source said, should unite in opposition to any form of the bill that is used by Democrats to forward far-left priorities, such as the diversity office.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) have been spearheading efforts to see USICA passed and sent to the White House for approval. Democrats attempted on Monday evening to add the legislation as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual defense spending bill, but Senate Republicans blocked this effort due to lingering concerns about the USICA bill. The bill will be taken up by House and Senate leaders in a reconciliation process known as a conference committee, in which the two separate versions of the bill are merged into one bipartisan measure.
The National Science Foundation has long been seen as a bastion for what critics call “woke science.”
The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology stated in a November report on politicization in scientific funding that the National Science Foundation—which has an annual budget of around $8 billion dollars—routinely employs “highly politicized terms” in its documents.
“As of 2020, 30.4 percent of all grants had one of the following politicized terms: ‘equity,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ ‘gender,’ ‘marginalize,’ ‘underrepresented,’ or ‘disparity,'” the report stated. “This is up from 2.9 percent in 1990.”
“The results imply that there has been a politicization of scientific funding in the U.S. in recent years and a decrease in the diversity of ideas supported, indicating a possible decline in the quality of research and the potential for decreased trust towards scientific institutions among the general public,” the report concludes.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt is suing Springfield Public Schools (SPS) for allegedly violating the state’s information transparency law, citing the school district’s unwillingness to provide documents that his office requested on behalf of parents concerned about the teaching of critical race theory.
In a complaint (pdf) filed on Nov. 16, Schmitt alleged that critical race theory has been part of teacher training materials in SPS for at least two years and that the district has violated Missouri’s Sunshine Law to avoid being held accountable by concerned parents.
“Springfield Public Schools provides outrageous, unlawful, and unaffordable fee estimates for Sunshine Law requests so that it does not have to produce records to members of the public,” the complaint reads.
Schmitt said that in response to his request seeking “records relating to critical race theory,” the district demanded a payment of $35,700 to search for, research, and retrieve those records, including $727.50 to search the Staff Google Drive.
Under Missouri’s Sunshine Law, a government entity such as SPS isn’t allowed to demand a deposit for items other than copies, and must produce the copies requested using methods that “result in the lowest amount of charges.” Schmitt is accusing the school district of violating both statutes in their cost estimates.
He also noted that the SPS has publicly acknowledged that they’re instructing teachers and staff on critical race theory. In a December 2020 report (pdf), the district said it had required many administrators and staff members to participate in a one-day “Facing Racism” training, with one of its objectives being “to introduce the components of critical race theory from educational research with applications to the district.”
An “Oppression Matrix” was used in a district-wide training at Springfield, Mo., Public Schools in fall 2020. (Springfield Public Schools/Missouri Attorney General’s Office)
According to the complaint, another training required teachers and staff at SPS to consult an “oppression matrix” and identify which “privileged” or “oppressed” social group they supposedly belong to—a concept popularized by proponents of critical race theory. Yet another graphic that was presented to SPS’s Executive Leadership Team at an October 2020 training stated that the phrase “Make America Great Again,” “police murdering POC (People of Color),” and “celebration of Columbus Day” are examples of “covert white supremacy.”
An “Understanding White Supremacy” graphic was used in an Executive Leadership Team training at Springfield, Mo., Public Schools on Oct. 6, 2020. (Springfield Public Schools/Missouri Attorney General’s Office)
“Parents have every right to know exactly what is being taught to their children, especially when public school systems are implementing components of critical race theory and so-called ‘antiracism’ teachings in teacher training and applying social justice scorecards to math and other core curriculum,” Schmitt said in a statement announcing the legal action, which seeks a court order that would ensure that SPS releases all responsive records and pay a $1,000 fine for Sunshine Law violations.
In a statement released to the press, SPS condemned the lawsuit as a “loud, divisive, and misguided distraction” from the district’s work to promote equity.
“SPS is disappointed by the Attorney General’s decision to use the power of his office to attack public education,” the district stated, arguing that the Sunshine Law request was “extraordinarily broad in scope” and could have diverted “hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of district staff time to search and review thousands of pages of documents.”
“SPS has been very clear: Critical Race Theory [CRT] is not being taught in our classrooms. Our work is focused on equity, not CRT.”
Critical race theory is an outgrowth from Marxism that views society through the lens of a power struggle between white and non-white people, who are labeled “oppressors” and “oppressed,” respectively. Critical race theorists see deeply embedded racism in all aspects of U.S. society, including in neutral systems such as constitutional law and standardized tests, and deem it to be the root cause of racial inequity, or different outcomes for different races.
The tech oligarchs are all in on the “metaverse” as the new system of enslavement and control. The metaverse is an immersive virtual world where people will be working, playing, and existing. The theory is they put on a headset and slip away into virtual “reality” where they will spend all of their time.
Mark Zuckerberg is so invested in making this vision come to life that he has renamed Facebook’s parent company to “Meta” and has dramatically shifted the entire mission of his company.
Disney’s CEO called it “the future” this week and is foaming at the mouth at the thought of having your kids plugged into a Disney “reality” every hour of the day.
The satanic globalist elite envision a future where all of us are plugged into their Matrix that they control all day long. When this happens they can control our minds even more than they do today through their social engineering that goes on in our news feeds and on our television screens. They will determine what “reality” is.
This of course is all part of their much bigger vision for transhumanism. While we are all distracted and sucked into their virtual world for all hours of the day, they will be working hard in the real world to ascend beyond humanity and become “gods.” They will fail of course, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do everything they can to enslave and extort the rest of us while trying.
This is all a lot for many Christians to ponder, but it’s absolutely essential that we start thinking about these things right now so we can have a plan of attack for when these virtual worlds start popping up.
We must prevent our children from participating in the Enemy’s virtual worlds at all costs.
We must build our own parallel virtual worlds using the technology for the glory of God and developed with a moral framework that is grounded in the Word of God.
We must prepare to send virtual missionaries into enemy worlds to spread the Gospel and the Truth of God’s Word.
We must not fear this new technology, we must embrace it early and understand it fully so we can gain an early foothold for the Lord.
It would be foolish to simply ignore this. This is happening. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sometime very soon. You’ll see your children and grandchildren start to take interest in these virtual worlds, which is exactly the target demographic of the elites. They want our children. This isn’t news. The metaverse is just their latest iteration and angle of attack for accomplishing that.
So we must be prepared to offer God-glorifying alternatives. We must answer the call to enter into enemy territory and wage a virtual crusade on the metaverses of Facebook, Google, Disney, and whoever else enters the arena.
God is allowing this technology to be built during our lifetimes for a reason. We must learn, adapt, build, and strategize for how we will use it to bring glory to His name and advance His Kingdom.
A Texas-based company wants to build a large-scale carbon capture system across five states in the Midwest to help its customers reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Navigator Heartland Greenway, of Dallas, announced it had entered into contracts with two industry affiliated companies to begin site development for the proposed multi-billion dollar pipeline project.
A series of public meetings in communities located across the project’s path will take place in late November 2021 through January 2022. The first meeting is scheduled in Rock Rapids, Iowa, on Nov. 29.
The Heartland Greenway pipeline will span 1,300 miles across five Midwest states—South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois—to nearly 20 receipt points.
Navigator says the goal is to reduce carbon output in order to meet global greenhouse-gas emission targets.
“By providing an economic means to reduce the carbon footprint of homegrown biofuels, the Heartland Greenway will enable producers to create a more sustainable, premium product to bring to market,” the company said in a fact sheet.
The project is described as “multi-faceted,” and will assist customers in building CO2 capture equipment.
The liquified CO2 will then be transported over the pipeline for storage in Illinois.
A map of the Heartland Greenway CO2 capture pipeline proposal by Navigator Greenway Heartland. The project will span five states in the Midwest and enable storage of 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide produced by agricultural biofuel and fertilizer companies each year. (Navigator Heartland Greenway image)
Once fully expanded, the system will be able to hold up to 15 million metric tons of CO2—the emissions-equivalent of 3.2 million passenger cars—per year.
“This is the first inning of a long game, and we are 100-percent aligned with our customers’ focus on executing a highly scalable platform that can respond to increasing customer demand and industry change,” said Navigator CEO Matt Vining in a press release.
The first phase of the project is expected to begin service in early 2025.
Navigator said the benefits of the project will include property tax revenue for communities along the pipeline, 8,000 new contract jobs during construction in Iowa, and 80 new permanent jobs after project completion. At the same time, the new technology will increase the “viability and competitiveness” of biofuels and fertilizers.
“The Heartland Greenway is the first substantial, fully integrated CO2 handling system to reach a final investment decision, and we could not be more excited for the path ahead for all stakeholders,” Vining said.
Navigator’s customers include rural agricultural processors from the ethanol and fertilizer industries.
Following the informational meeting, Navigator right-of-way representatives will begin contacting landowners regarding survey activity and easement negotiations, said Ann Marie Welshans, director of right of way for Navigator, in a Oct. 29 letter to stakeholders.
“Our goal is to reach voluntary agreements with the landowners along the project route, though, if we are unable to do so we may need to request the right of eminent domain” through each state’s utilities board, Welshans said in the letter.
A construction easement is an acquired right of use over the property of another for building purposes. Eminent domain is the compulsory purchase of land by a government entity, or private company, with authorization.
“This is a big deal,” said Linda Hasche, whose husband, Daryl Hasche, is president of D & D Hasche Grain and Livestock based in Rock Rapids.
“This is way bigger than people can understand. Right now, there are a lot of unknowns.”
Linda Hasche said the Heartland Greenway project appears to cross two of her family’s three working farms, which comprise 355 acres. The fifth-generation operation produces corn, soy, hogs, and cattle.
The Hasches say that they, and other impacted farmers, are concerned the project may cause harm to the environment and hurt agriculture by preventing CO2, which allows vital photosynthesis to occur, from going into the atmosphere.
Navigator has offered to pay farm owners a one-time settlement of 100 percent crop loss value for the first year during construction, 80 percent for the second year, and 60 percent for the third year.
“You can’t even vote” on the project, Linda Hasche said. “If you say no, they’ll pull the eminent domain card, (but) they still have to compensate the farmers.”
Welshans and media contact Andrew Bates did not respond to requests for comment.
The Justice Department’s watchdog says the nation’s top law enforcement division must do a lot more to restore the public’s faith and dispel the belief among a growing number of Americans that it is a political organization rather than a non-partisan arbiter of cases.
The DOJ “has squandered public trust by straying from its own policies designed to avoid the appearance of political bias and meddling and by permitting some employees to escape accountability for misconduct by leaving the department before investigations were complete, the agency’s chief watchdog is warning,” Just the News reported Thursday, citing the findings of the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.
His office’s criticism of the department comes amid blowback from the public and lawmakers for failures related to the so-called “Trump-Russia collusion” counterterrorism investigation, which has been discredited, as well as the discovery that Attorney General Merrick Garland has tasked the FBI and all 93 U.S. attorneys with assisting in the investigation of parents who complain to school boards about the curriculum being taught to their kids.
Also, the findings come after the FBI raided the homes of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and two of his associates, which alarmed even left-leaning civil libertarians.
“The Department faces a challenge in addressing public perception about its objectivity and insulation from political influence,” Horowitz noted in the report, going on to cite recent polling data indicating a growing number of Americans believe the department has become politicized.
“The Department’s efficacy as the guardian of the rule of law depends on maintaining the public trust in its integrity, impartiality, and ability to effectively administer justice,” Horowitz added.
Just The News adds:
The watchdog cited several recent IG investigations that found the James Comey-era FBI misled the FISA court in the Russia case and wrongly usurped prosecutors’ powers by declining prosecution in the Hillary Clinton email probe. He also noted more recent failures, including continuing FISA warrant problems, a bungled sex abuse case involving female Olympians, and reports the department faced pressure to investigate allegations of fraud and misconduct in the 2020 election.
In many instances, rules and policies in those cases weren’t followed, to the detriment of the department’s reputation and public trust, he noted.
“One important strategy that can build public trust in the Department is to ensure adherence to policies and procedures designed to protect DOJ from accusations of political influence or partial application of the law,” Horowitz noted in the report.
To that end, Horowitz went on to say that the public’s trust has been devastated in large part by the department’s failure to discipline culpable officials and instead allow them to retire before final determinations are made and cases are simply closed without any actions being taken.
“Accountability is particularly challenging in instances where the Department employee retires or resigns before allegations of misconduct can be fully adjudicated,” Horowitz wrote, pointing out that 10 percent of the department’s misconduct cases that were pending before the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility in the years 2017 and 2018 were closed after the staffer resigned or retired.
“We concluded that this FBI practice adversely impacted the FBI’s ability to hold employees accountable for their misconduct, was unfair to employees wrongly accused, and wasted OIG and FBI resources,” Horowitz wrote.
“Adjudicating all cases to conclusion, as recommended by the OIG, will ensure that employees who choose to leave the FBI while under investigation cannot escape a finding of misconduct that could affect potential future employment and other benefits,” he added.
“Another means of strengthening confidence in the Department is ensuring that attorney professional misconduct matters are handled no differently than misconduct allegations made against law enforcement agents or other DOJ employees,” the IG wrote.
“Currently the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, a DOJ component that lacks the same statutory independence and protections as the OIG, has exclusive jurisdiction over allegations of misconduct by Department lawyers that relate to an attorney’s responsibility to investigate, litigate, or provide legal advice,” he said.
“Independent oversight of Department lawyers is a step towards broader accountability and improved public trust in the Department.”
Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert went nuclear on the House floor and took aim at Democrat Reps. Eric Swalwell, Ilhan Omar, and many others.
While speaking from the floor, Boebert called out Swalwell for his past relationship with a suspected Chinese spy.
She also slammed Democrats for voting to censure GOP Rep. Paul Gosar and strip him of committee assignments for posting an animated video depicting violence against Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“Democrat policies are so pathetic and have done so poorly that the left has nothing else to do but trawl the internet looking for ways to get offended and then try to target members and strip them of their committees. This is a dumb waste of the House’s time,” Boebert began.
“But since the Speaker has designated the floor to discuss members’ inappropriate actions, shall we? The Jihad Squad member from Minnesota has paid her husband, and not her brother-husband, the other one, over $1 million in campaign funds. This member is allowed on the Foreign Affairs Committee while praising terrorists,” she declared.
“A Democrat chairwoman incited further violence in the streets outside of a courthouse. And then the cherry on top, my colleague and three-month presidential candidate from California who is on the Intelligence Committee slept with Fang Fang, a Chinese spy. Let me say that again,” she continued.
“A member of Congress who receives classified briefings was from sleeping with the enemy. This is unacceptable,” she concluded.
Boebert then went after Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters and Omar for “inappropriate” behavior that she argued was more worthy of censure than Gosar’s.
“The Jihad Squad member from Minnesota has paid her husband, and not her brother-husband, the other one, over $1 million in campaign funds,” she said of Omar. “This member is allowed on the Foreign Affairs Committee while praising terrorists.
“A Democrat chairwoman incited further violence in the streets outside of a courthouse,” she said of Waters.
Swalwell’s ties to Fang were first revealed by Axios, which reported that Fang helped raise money for Swalwell’s campaign and placed one or more interns in Swalwell’s office.
Republicans have said that somebody who was so egregiously compromised by a foreign power should not remain on the critical intelligence panel.
Back in March, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy filed a resolution aimed at removing Swalwell from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence over past ties to an alleged Chinese spy named Fang Fang.
The two-page resolution says Swalwell “has not denied public reporting that a suspected Chinese intelligence operative helped raise money for Representative Swalwell’s political campaigns” and “other troublesome elements of public reporting.”
McCarthy’s resolution also cites the House rule that “A Member… of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.”
Conspiracy; Unauthorized Access to a Computer; Knowingly Damaging Protected Computer; Voter Intimidation; Interstate Threats
Reward:
The Rewards For Justice Program, United States Department of State, is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information on or about the activities of Seyyed Mohammad Hosein Musa Kazemi and Sajjad Kashian.
Details:
On October 20, 2021, a grand jury in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York indicted SEYYED MOHAMMAD HOSEIN MUSA KAZEMI, also known as “Mohammad Hosein Musa Kazem”, and “Hosein Zamani”, and SAJJAD KASHIAN, also known as “Kiarash Nabavi”, for, among other things, computer intrusion, voter intimidation, and interstate threat offenses, for their alleged participation in a multi-faceted campaign aimed at influencing and interfering with the United States 2020 Presidential Election. In connection with this campaign, the defendants allegedly obtained United States voter information from at least one state election website, sent threatening voter email messages to intimidate voters, crafted and disseminated disinformation pertaining to the election and election security, and accessed, and attempted to access, without authorization, the computer systems of several online United States media entities and states. This occurred from at least in or about August of 2020, to at least in or about November of 2020.
Kazemi is described as an Iranian male born on June 18, 1997. He is between 5’5″ and 6’0″ tall, 180 to 185 pounds, with dark brown hair and brown eyes.
Kashian is described as an Iranian male born on September 17, 1994. He is between 5’5″ and 6’0″ tall, 130 to 140 pounds, with dark brown hair and brown eyes.
THESE INDIVIDUALS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED AN INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT RISK
The public school system has become a major battlefield in the war for the hearts and minds of our children.
It began decades ago, with leftists achieving such lofty goals as eliminating God from the classroom and denigrating America and its founding in the minds of generations of students.
Now they’re out to undermine parental rights and authority in the most fundamental way — by complying with the wishes of gender-confused children against their parents’ will.
In the euphemistic name of “affirmative care,” many schools are using the preferred pronouns and names of these troubled kids over objections from parents.
That’s exactly what happened in Wisconsin, where parents are now suing the Kettle Moraine School District for insisting on their 12-year-old daughter’s “transition” without their consent, NBC News reported.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Waukesha County Circuit Court on behalf of two sets of parents by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and Alliance Defending Freedom.
According to legal filings, the girl was experiencing anxiety and depression and “began questioning her gender” in December 2020, prompting her parents to withdraw her from school and send her to a mental health facility for treatment.
Rather than helping her sort out her confusion, the facility convinced the girl that she was a boy and should begin living as a male.
Her parents were concerned about this and communicated as much to the school as they hashed out the details of her return to the classroom in mid-January.
Are public schools indoctrinating children in leftist orthodoxy?
But instead of honoring the parents’ wishes to put the brakes on their daughter’s “transition,” administrators at Kettle Moraine Middle School informed them that they would use the girl’s chosen male name and pronouns as per the district’s policy.
Given no other choice, the parents withdrew their daughter from school again and kept her home for a few weeks, a decision that would prove fruitful.
“During that time, her demeanor quickly began to change, and about two weeks later, she changed her mind about wanting to transition to a male identity, deciding instead that she wanted to continue using her birth name and female pronouns,” the lawsuit said.
It’s difficult to imagine that she would have so easily discarded her new identity if the school and district had had their way.
WILL said in a statement that the school system denied this family the chance to take the “cautious approach” many doctors recommend, instead pushing the transition process that “can become self-reinforcing and even do long-term harm” to a child.
“The Kettle Moraine School District’s policy disregards these medical professionals and instead takes this life-altering decision out of parents’ hands and places it with educators,” the statement continued.
“By enabling minor students to transition at school over their parents’ objection, the district is effectively making a treatment decision without the legal authority to do so and without informed consent from the parents. This policy violates the constitutionally recognized rights of parents to raise their children.”
Public schools have no problem usurping the rightful authority of parents on this issue or any other because they’re true believers in the power of social engineering.
Children who are physically separated from their parents all day in government buildings are easily manipulated by the adults in charge.
Rather than acknowledging that they work for the taxpayers, teachers and administrators often see parents as obstacles to what is best for their children.
While that may be true in rare instances, the vast majority of children are better served by family members who love them and know them best.
The good news is that transgender ideology is so damaging, so absurd, that parents of all political stripes are taking notice and pushing back.
“You think the parents must be right-wingers or crazy,” Abigail Shrier, who literally wrote the book on the issue, tweeted last week.
“Then, gender ideology comes for your kid and you learn how many forces are stacked against parents. And these parents start to look more like heroes.”
You think the parents must be right-wingers or crazy.
Then, gender ideology comes for your kid and you learn how many forces are stacked against parents.
Shrier’s tweet came in response to footage of a protest at Stanford University, where pediatric psychiatrist and New York Times contributor Dr. Jack Turban is employed — just the kind of “expert” who supports this insanity.
America’s public school system has been a cesspool of the worst ideas and practices for years, but parents are only beginning to see how truly toxic their children’s schools can be.
The lawsuit against the Kettle Moraine School District is exactly the kind of battle we need to fight to put a stop to the madness.
Governmental officials are trying to fool us — again.
Although the Food and Drug Administration has promised “full transparency” in regard to COVID-19 vaccines, it has asked a federal judge to postpone public disclosure of the data it used to license Pfizer’s vaccine, according to attorney Aaron Siri.
The FDA doesn’t want the information fully disclosed to the public until 2076, a whopping 55 years down the road, Siri wrote Wednesday on his Substack.
I’ll be dead by 2076, unless the transhumanists find a way to enslave my consciousness and imprison it in an algorithm.
“FDA asks federal judge to grant it until the year 2076 to fully release Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine data,” Siri, managing partner at the Siri & Glimstad law firm, said on Twitter. “So, the gov’t mandates Pfizer’s product, grants it immunity for injuries, and wants to hide its safety data for 55 years. Who does the gov’t work for?”
FDA asks federal judge to grant it until the year 2076 to fully release Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine data. So, the gov’t mandates Pfizer’s product, grants it immunity for injuries, and wants to hide its safety data for 55 years. Who does the gov’t work for? https://t.co/wT2egkT9Wm
In August, “more than 30 academics, professors, and scientists from this country’s most prestigious universities” — under the banner of the nonprofit Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency — requested the information submitted to the FDA by Pfizer to license its COVID-19 vaccine, Siri wrote. When the FDA ignored the request, his firm filed a lawsuit demanding the information.
To date, almost three months after the FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine, it still has not released a single page, he said.
Is the FDA trying to hide something from the public?
Zero. Zilch. Nada.
The FDA claims it needs the 55 years to produce the 329,000-plus pages of documents Pfizer provided to the FDA to license the vaccine due to, among other things, the need for redactions and challenges to those redactions, according to a court filing on Monday.
The agency took 108 days to review the records Pfizer submitted when it licensed the vaccine, Siri wrote.
If the FDA can conduct an intense review of Pfizer’s documents in 108 days to make sure its vaccine is safe and effective for public consumption, he asked, why would it take more than 20,000 days to make these documents available to the public?
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Great Pyramid at Giza was built in 20 years by 100,000 workers.
The FDA’s promise of “full transparency” must be an inside joke. Agency officials probably think that those of us on the outside, including the 30-plus experts Siri mentioned, won’t get that the joke is on us.
Siri put it straight when he wrote, “Who does the government work for?”
A better question might be, what is it trying to hide?
Don’t get me wrong. I agree with Siri that anyone who wants to get vaccinated should be free to do so. We live in a free country — at least that is what I was taught in school.
However, because we are free, no individual should be forced by the government to partake in any medical procedure. This holds especially true when the government seeks to hide information about the procedure from the public for 55 years.
The U.S. will celebrate its Tricentennial in 2076.
I pray its citizens will enjoy the freedom that is an American birthright.
One of the two protesters arrested outside the Kenosha County Courthouse where the Kyle Rittenhouse jurors deliberated on Wednesday is a self-proclaimed co-chairperson of a Black Lives Matter chapter in Lake County, Illinois, according to her Facebook profile.
Shaquita Cornelius, 34, was charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and marijuana possession as one of two people taken into custody outside of the courthouse.
Her Facebook profile includes an introduction with the words, “MY BLACK BEAUTIFUL, CO-CHAIRMAN OF BLACK LIVES MATTER of LAKE COUNTY IL, OWNER OF SHAYTEEZ & THINGZ.”
Two protesters were arrested outside of the courthouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Wednesday after one of the two perpetrators allegedly bodyslammed a reporter.
On Thursday morning, jurors began their third day of deliberations on homicide and other charges against Rittenhouse in the shootings that ended the lives of two men and wounded a third during rioting in Kenosha on Aug. 25, 2020.
On Wednesday, a demonstration outside the courthouse turned violent.
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
The second individual arrested was a male suspect identified as 20-year-old Anthony Chacon. He wore a T-shirt with the words “F*** Kyle” and was taken into custody after attacking a reporter, according to Fox News.
The Kenosha Sheriff’s Department said Chacon was arrested on charges of battery, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Fox News reported he also is “facing charges related to bail jumping, meaning he has a prior criminal record.”
The sheriff’s department has worked to prepare for what some expect could become a violent response to the Rittenhouse trial verdict.
“At this time, we have no reason to facilitate road closures, enact curfews or ask our communities to modify their daily routines,” the department said in a statement on Tuesday.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin announced on Friday that hundreds of National Guard troops would be active near Kenosha this week as the city, state and country await a verdict in the Rittenhouse case.
Should all violent protesters be arrested?
“Approximately 500 Wisconsin Army National Guard troops are reporting for State Active Duty as authorized by Gov. Tony Evers to support local partners in ensuring public safety in conjunction with hundreds of officers from volunteering law enforcement agencies,” the governor’s office said in a news release.
Evers said in a statement that he is hopeful the situation in the city remains peaceful, and he asked for the public’s assistance with that.
“We continue to be in close contact with our partners at the local level to ensure the state provides support and resources to help keep the Kenosha community and greater area safe,” he said.
“The Kenosha community has been strong, resilient, and has come together through incredibly difficult times these past two years, and that healing is still ongoing,” the governor added.
“I urge folks who are otherwise not from the area to please respect the community by reconsidering any plans to travel there and encourage those who might choose to assemble and exercise their First Amendment rights to do so safely and peacefully.”
Conversation
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, argued that the whole of the Bill of Rights, except the Second Amendment, has been violated over the course of the coronavirus pandemic.
“What’s happened in this country over the last year is kind of this bizarre imposition of totalitarian controls, the deconstruction of the Constitution,” Kennedy told Tucker Carlson on the Fox News host’s program “Tucker Carlson Today.”
“The rise of censorship, the rise of the suppression of religious freedoms, of property rights, closing a million businesses without just compensation or due process, the abolition of jury trials, which are guaranteed by the Sixth and Seventh Amendment for any vaccine company that hurts you, all of these — and the rise of a kind of track-and-trace surveillance state has been troubling to people, both Democrats and Republicans,” said Kennedy, a lawyer and son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
Kennedy was on Carlson’s show to discuss his new book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
He contended that in just one year, nearly all of the rights codified by the founders were taken away.
“During that first year, we literally got rid of every amendment to the Constitution except the Second Amendment,” he said.
Kennedy highlighted that dissenting views from the establishment coronavirus orthodoxy — which are ostensibly protected by the First Amendment — have been shut down by Big Tech giants like Facebook and YouTube.
“Anybody who wanted to criticize the government they got rid of. That’s why we had the Revolution — so that we could criticize the government. And we put that first, and yet it’s gone,” he said.
Kennedy took particular aim at how the free exercise of religion was limited during the pandemic.
Do you think constitutional freedoms were violated during the pandemic?
“They closed every church in this country for a year. … By the way, without any hearing, without showing any science, without notice-and-comment rulemaking, no discussion, no debate,” he said.
Meanwhile, Kennedy noted, liquor stores remained open as “essential businesses.”
“Now, I have no problem with … keeping the liquor stores open, but the liquor stores are not in the Constitution. The churches are,” he said.
Kennedy went on to explain that shutting down businesses around the country “without due process or just compensation” is a “violation of the Constitution.” The Fifth Amendment says that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
He argued that fear was the main tool employed by the government to ensure compliance.
“We have to love our freedom more than we fear a germ. We have to,” Kennedy said. “Even if this was the deadly disease that they say it is, there’s worse things than death.”
“We’re lucky that there was a whole generation of Americans in 1776 who said, ‘It would be better to die than to not have these rights written down.’ And they gave us that. They gave us that gift of that Bill of Rights,” he continued.
Kennedy concluded, “Our kids deserve to have the same Bill of Rights that our parents gave us. And people need — whatever their fears are, they need to put those aside and demand that we get those things back.”
While Americans are having to decide whether they can have turkey for Thanksgiving or not, President Joe Biden has blown through millions of taxpayers’ dollars on personal trips.
Biden’s trips, particularly to his beach home in Delaware, have cost about $3 million just in Secret Service personnel. According to the New York Post, 16 trips to Delaware this year racked up $1.96 million. The other $1.04 million is an estimate from another nine trips that have yet to be accounted for.
Biden has only been in office for 43 weeks, and yet 25 trips have already been accounted for.
“The costs of presidential travel and security is of obvious public interest,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said, according to Fox News.
But is it in the public’s interest to pay for Biden’s trips to his house in Rehoboth Beach?
Fox noted the price of these trips might also be higher since the Pentagon has not announced how much each flight on Air Force One and Marine One costs.
It is becoming increasingly frustrating to some that these costs have not been released.
“[I]t is frustrating that after years of litigation through two presidential administrations, the Secret Service and Air Force are still stonewalling the costs of presidential travel,” Fitton said, the Post reported.
There is no reasonable excuse as to why these costs should not be released. While a $3 million estimate is shocking enough, the public has the right to know exactly how much of their money is going to a president’s personal trips.
Should Biden be taking so many weekend trips?
“Most Americans know that Biden is being hidden because he isn’t fit for office … What they may not realize is that they’re paying insane amounts of money for him to be tucked into bed in Delaware every weekend,” one former Trump White House official told the Post.
Sure, the American people aren’t expecting the president to never leave the White House. But neither should the public be content with paying millions for fun little getaways every other weekend.
Former President Donald Trump was certainly no great example of this. He traveled down to the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida frequently. Some of those trips cost about $3.4 million, individually, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Of course, the president of the United States has a right to protection from the Secret Service when traveling, but it would be good for Biden, and anyone in the presidential position, to look at the costs of travel before just frivolously escaping D.C. for the weekend.
Though Delaware is not far from Washington, D.C., and a weekend may not seem long, remember how many moving parts, people and planes it takes to cart a president around.
Costs build up just because the people traveling with the president have to be paid, housed, fed and have cars and caravans to drive around for protection.
In addition, Air Force One is extremely expensive to fly and maintain.
Add to that, that when Biden wants to go to the beach at his Rehoboth home, the Coast Guard has to be on patrol.
When it comes to the rampant inflation that’s making Thanksgiving dinners – and everything else – more expensive this year, the American people have no one to blame but the Biden administration.
And the Biden administration and the Democratic Party have no one to blame but themselves.
They can’t say they weren’t warned.
That was the takeaway from an opinion piece published Tuesday by The New York Times, where Steve Rattner, a counselor to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers during the Obama administration, took apart Biden and his party for policies that have directly affected the pocketbooks of millions of Americans.
Starting with the American Rescue Plan — which passed in March without a single Republican supporter — Biden and his Democrats have launched programs that have led directly to the pressures American consumers are feeling today, Rattner wrote.
“They can’t say they weren’t warned — notably by Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary and my former boss in the Obama administration, and less notably by many others, including me,” he said. “We worried that shoveling an unprecedented amount of spending into an economy already on the road to recovery would mean too much money chasing too few goods.”
Most people familiar with the iron economic law of supply and demand would understand that. But that basic element of capitalism is likely lost on the New Age socialists of the modern Democratic Party, who seem to think a cloudy victory in the 2020 presidential election, a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives and command of the Senate by a single, tie-breaking vote somehow gave them the power to change the basic realities of human interaction.
As Rattner wrote, “The original sin was the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March. The bill — almost completely unfunded — sought to counter the effects of the Covid pandemic by focusing on demand-side stimulus rather than on investment. That has contributed materially to today’s inflation levels.”
Is inflation hurting your household?
For Democrats in office and their supporters in the mainstream media, inflation gets nowhere near the kind of attention that’s devoted to liberal boogeymen such as “climate change” and “systemic racism,” but it’s an actual, pressing problem for millions of Americans.
About the only Democrat on the national stage who seems remotely interested in the issue is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who published a Twitter post last week calling attention to “the economic pain Americans feel every day.”
By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not “transitory” and is instead getting worse. From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.
For the Biden administration, the answer to that economic pain is passing another bill — this time, regrettably, with Republican help — supposedly to revamp the nation’s infrastructure (but actually containing much more for Democrat-favored groups) with federal money the government doesn’t have.
“Mr. Biden also insists that the much-lauded infrastructure bill he just signed is fully paid for — but it isn’t. Indeed, the infrastructure figures show $550 billion in new spending and just $173 billion of additional offsets,” Rattner wrote.
And then there’s the big daddy of them all, Biden’s so-called Build Back Better plan, the mammoth now-$1.75 trillion spending plan chockablock with progressive priorities such as distributing billions of dollars to illegal immigrants through child tax credits, “clean energy” initiatives and other proposals.
The fact that those proposals are almost guaranteed to be a failure on a national scale for Biden and the American people as the infamous Solyndra solar power plant was for the Obama administration in Fremont, California, in 2011 (but without the possibility of recovery by a future Republican administration) is happily ignored by Democrats and the mainstream media.
With universal Republican opposition, the Build Back Better plan is going to require reconciliation to pass, with only Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (the Cruella de Vil of today’s Democrats) standing between it and the American people.
Being a former high-ranking Democrat, and a man who donated the maximum amount of $2,800 to Biden in both 2019 and 2020, according to the Federal Election Commission records, Rattner isn’t clearly opposed to the spending plans, but calls out the Biden administration for trying to pretend they’re being funded by “budget gimmicks” that will only add to the deficit – and future inflation.
Rattner wants higher taxes. “Given the importance of Mr. Biden’s spending initiatives, the right move would be to add significant revenue sources,” he wrote.
(Considering The New York Times has long ago surrendered its reputation as an actual newspaper to be a propaganda organ for the modern left, that bit about higher taxes is probably the only reason Rattner’s piece got published by the Gray Lady.)
A better, saner answer would be dropping the whole, insane spending plan now, before the Biden administration inflicts even more damage on the American economy than it already has (with the Thanksgiving prices to show it).
Biden already has given Americans plenty to blame him for. And next year’s midterm elections are likely to show it — not to mention the 2024 presidential election.
On Monday, Rattner’s former boss, ex-Treasury Secretary Summers, published an opinion piece in The Washington Post also warning of the dangers of high inflation to the current Democratic project – and predicting it could lead to the return of the Republican Democrats fear most in the world.
“Excessive inflation and a sense that it was not being controlled helped elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and risks bringing Donald Trump back to power,” Summers wrote.
….and shaped policy thinking at the central bank and in the administration.
“While an overheating economy is a relatively good problem to have compared to a pandemic or a financial crisis, it will metastasize and threaten prosperity and public trust unless clearly acknowledged and addressed.”
The former ambassador to Afghanistan under President Barack Obama testified virtually during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday, calling President Joe Biden’s military withdrawal from the country a “stain” on our national honor.
Ryan Crocker now serves as a non-resident senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“We have accrued a great debt there that extends also to the thousands of Afghans who helped us in their mission. The [special immigrant visa] process has let them down,” Crocker testified.
Ryan Crocker, ambassador to Afghanistan under Obama, calls Biden’s disastrous troop withdrawal “a stain…on our national honor.” pic.twitter.com/cv9JTDoBi0
“A member of the advisory committee for a group called No One Left Behind that has for years sought to move interpreters to safety [said] we left thousands behind. And that I think is a stain, again, on our national honor,” he added.
“So we need to figure out ways to go ahead. It won’t be easy. We gave up the leverage we had. We cannot give up the fight.”
“The list of damage to our national security and our values is long. We have allowed the Taliban and al-Qaida to reunite. The threat this poses to our own security is not theoretical — 9/11 actually happened, brought to us from Afghanistan by these same actors,” he wrote.
“At the same time, our complete withdrawal has degraded our intelligence capabilities. The strike in Kabul on what was supposed to be an Islamic State target but wasn’t foreshadows the future,” he added.
Crocker also said Afghan women and girls will “pay the price” for America’s failures in Afghanistan.
“We urged Afghan women and girls to step forward, into parliament, private enterprise, the classroom and the military. They did. And now they will pay the price for our lack of strategic patience,” he said.
“That has already started. Afghan interpreters and others provided direct assistance to our military and civilian personnel. They were critical to our efforts, and put their lives and those of their families at risk by working with us. … We left thousands behind.”
The former ambassador concluded with a shocking story that encapsulated the changes in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
“One of the projects that had the greatest impact in Afghanistan cost the least amount of money. It was the reconstruction of Ghazi Stadium in Kabul to FIFA standards, meaning that it could host World Cup matches,” he said. “For a soccer mad country, this was huge. But there was a deeper meaning.”
The stadium is now used by the Taliban to “carry out public punishments after Friday prayers, including beheadings and the stoning of women.”
Ai Weiwei is an artist and human rights activist whose dissident activities against the Chinese Communist Party led to his incarceration and eventual exile from his native country. He’s a figure who knows totalitarianism when he sees it.
When he appeared on Margaret Hoover’s “Firing Line” on PBS for an interview which aired Friday, it wasn’t a surprise that he saw it in the United States. The surprise: It wasn’t from former President Donald Trump, but from wokeness instead.
Host Margaret Hoover — a conservative commentator who was staunchly anti-Trump during the 2020 campaign — thought Ai would actually go for the former president, judging by the fact she read from a part of his autobiography which compared Trump with communist China’s most notoriously totalitarian leader.
“In your book, you were describing the directives of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution that would be distributed publicly every night,” Hoover said.
“And then you write — this is your quote — ‘They served a function similar to Donald Trump’s late-night tweets while in office. They were the direct communication of a leader’s thoughts to his devoted followers, enhancing the sanctity of his authority.’
“So, do you see Donald Trump as an authoritarian?” she asked.
He didn’t seem to think so.
“If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you,” Ai said.
“You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.”
“Many things that happen today in the U.S. can be compared to the Cultural Revolution in China … like people trying to be unified in a certain political correctness. That is very dangerous.”
When asked what he thought had gone awry with political correctness, Ai said, “It’s very philosophical. With today’s technology, we know so much more than we really understand.
“The information [has] become jammed. But we don’t really — and really have the knowledge, because you don’t work. You don’t — you don’t have to act on anything. You just think you’re purified by certain ideas that you agree with it. That is posing dangers to society, to an extreme divided society.”
Ai, again, is a man who knows authoritarianism. He was kept in what was known as “residential detention” for 81 days by the Chinese Communist Party in 2011, something that he documented through his art:
Ai Weiwei, the renowned Chinese contemporary artist, “reconstructed” his daily life in detention in series of scene models. He’s being closely watched by 2 Chinese officers in PLA uniform at all times when he was eating, sleeping, taking shower or using toilet.
And he espies this in America? Perhaps not yet — but you can see where the similarities arise.
There’s the stilted jargon of “wokeness” — the “speaking as a [insert group identification here]” statements, the unpleasant souls who seek to educate you in when you should use “person of color” and when “BIPOC” is more apt, the too-frequent use of words like “cisgender” and “gaslighting.”
More importantly, there’s the punishment when you use the wrong language.
Just look at Dave Chappelle stating obvious biological facts or the preposterous Yale Law “trap house” fiasco. If you’re guilty of one of these solecisms, the transgressor is expected to publicly grovel at the feet of society for a chance at rehabilitation — you know, just like people who fall out of line in authoritarian states.
Sometimes, you don’t even need to do anything to have to apologize. All you need is “privilege.” If you’re adjudged to be in possession of any, you’re going to have to wear cultural sack-cloth, like someone from a bourgeois background who wanted to get anywhere in a Marxist regime.
One doesn’t need to be thrown into a Chinese jail for 81 days to recognize all of this as a form of soft authoritarianism. It doesn’t hurt, though.
For the second time in less than a week, dozens of children in the Washington, D.C., area were given the wrong dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
According to WTOP-TV in Washington, almost 100 students at South Lake Elementary School in Montgomery Village, Maryland, received a diluted amount of the pediatric Pfizer vaccine during a clinic on Nov. 10.
Parents of 98 children were notified by phone of the mistake on Monday. To make up for the diluted amount, the kids who received the incorrect dosage will receive an additional shot this Wednesday. If the child can’t attend that, their parents will have to schedule a make-up dose appointment when they can.
Even though this is the second such child vaccination hiccup in the same area in a week, the story still hasn’t gotten much mention nationally — in part, no doubt, because it doesn’t fit the narrative for some outlets or because tech giants like Google are demonetizing publications that do run with this. (The Western Journal is dedicated to fighting this — and if you appreciate our coverage, please consider subscribing.)
“The Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services learned on Saturday that the affected children received an amount of Pfizer’s pediatric vaccine that was diluted more than recommended. The staff person realized their mistake and notified officials,” the department said in a news release Monday.
“Health officials consulted with the Maryland Department of Health and Pfizer, who recommended that the children receive an additional dose as soon as possible.”
“We apologize for the error, and we are offering another opportunity for the children to be revaccinated,” said Dr. James Bridgers, acting Montgomery County health officer, in the statement.
“We are confident that this is an isolated situation, and staff have already received additional training on reconstituting and administering pediatric doses,” he added.
“Staff will continue to receive weekly updates on clinical guidance for the administration of vaccine doses to this age group.”
Do you believe children should be given the vaccine?
However, the Montgomery County Council said they were “extremely concerned” about the kids being given the wrong vaccine.
“We shared our concerns directly with our Acting Health Officer Dr. James Bridgers, who has assured us that the department is conducting a top-to-bottom review of this issue and has identified human error as the cause of the diluted doses,” the council said in a statement, according to WTOP.
“We understand the anxiety and distress that this mistake has caused for the students who received these diluted doses and their family members, and we will continue working with our public health team to make it right. The Department of Health and Human Services is reaching out to the families impacted and has scheduled an additional vaccination clinic at the school on Nov. 17.”
The incident came just a week after another D.C.-area vaccination issue involving diluted Pfizer doses, this one in Loudoun County, Virginia — ground zero for bad news involving minors as of late, apparently.
Unlike the situation in Maryland, however, this was less of a mistake and didn’t involve public schools. According to Washington’s WRC-TV, Ted Pharmacy in Aldie, Virginia, was giving children between the ages of 5-11 a diluted dose of the vaccine used for kids aged 12-17 on Nov. 3 and 4.
Given that the dose for the older kids has a purple cap and the dose for the younger ones has an orange cap, the dilution seems to be of an intentional nature. This is especially true given that one mother, Dasha Hermosilla, said she asked the pharmacist if it was OK to give her 7 year old a shot out of a vial with the purple cap and they said yes. A quick internet search revealed this was incorrect.
“Nothing says that you can change a purple to an orange,” Hermosilla said. “I had this pit in my stomach that, like, what did they just do to my daughter?”
Officials later acknowledged that Ted Pharmacy had given the incorrect dosage to 112 children.
“The pharmacy who administered the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination to your child last week has been removed from both state and federal COVID-19 vaccination programs,” said Loudoun County Department of Health Director David Goodfriend in a letter.
In that case, officials said the diluted vaccine ended with kids getting a lower dose than they should have; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance said parents could either restart their child’s vaccine series in 21 days or go ahead with a second dose using the orange cap as scheduled.
These are two events in one metro area over the space of one week. It’s not even counting the children who’ve been given adult doses of the vaccine in Garland, Texas, or Miami-Dade County, Florida.
None of these instances have resulted in a serious reaction that we know of — yet. The problem is that if they keep happening, the likelihood something does occur increases significantly.
And the media wonders why some parents still have questions about vaccinating their children?
The Department of Justice (DOJ) must address deepening concerns that it’s not insulated from political influence, the agency’s watchdog stated in a new report.
The DOJ failed to follow policies and procedures designed to protect it from accusations that it’s politicized or partially applying the law in a number of cases, including while investigating Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election and in leaks to the media, Inspector General Michael Horowitz noted.
“Numerous national events in the past year have crystalized the urgency for the department to address this challenge in a meaningful way,” he wrote, including the discovery that the DOJ under the Trump administration obtained communications to and from members of Congress and accusations that protesters were cleared from Lafayette Square in Washington on June 1, 2020, for political purposes.
Such events “have all raised questions about the department’s objectivity and impartiality” and “negatively impacted the perception of the department as a fair administrator of justice,” Horowitz said.
As proof, the watchdog cited a 2020 poll from the Pew Research Center, which found favorable views of DOJ among Democrats dropped sharply during the Trump administration. Republican views grew more favorable during the same time.
DOJ officials didn’t respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
Critics on both the left and right have said the DOJ in recent years has acted wrongfully. Democrats repeatedly criticized the department during the Trump era, including over its bid to lower the jail sentence of Trump ally Roger Stone. Republicans also found problems with the agency, in particular over its handling of the probe into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia that relied heavily on the now-discredited Steele dossier.
Attorney General Merrick Garland testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington on Oct. 27, 2021. (Tom Brenner/AFP via Getty Images)
Just this week, fresh strong reactions were triggered after a whistleblower said internal documents showed the DOJ used counterterrorism tools against parents.
The documents “prove that the FBI was, in fact, using counterterrorism tools to investigate concerned parents who have attended school board meetings—which directly contradicts Attorney General Merrick Garland’s sworn congressional testimony,” Parents Defending Education said in a statement.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Epoch Times that the DOJ “has had a cloud hanging over its credibility for years.”
“From the [Hillary] Clinton email investigation to the Russia probe and targeting parents exercising their First Amendment rights at school board meetings, there’s not been much to boost the public’s confidence that DOJ is apolitical. The inspector general’s assessment seems right on the money to me,” he wrote in an email.
“I hope the department, and its components like the FBI, begin turning a corner to regain some of their previous non-partisan, beyond-reproach reputations. The inspector general also said that he needs testimonial subpoena authority and the ability to independently investigate attorney misconduct. Those two things will go a long way toward ensuring bad apples at FBI and the department are truly held accountable.”
President Joe Biden’s administration released nearly 95,000 illegal immigrants into the U.S. interior between January and October without court dates, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Nov. 16.
Instead, the illegal aliens were given notices to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office within 60 days. Typically, aliens are given a notice to appear in court at a future date to try to convince a judge to let them stay in the country.
Between Jan. 1 and Oct. 31, 94,581 illegal immigrants were given notices to report, Mayorkas told a Senate panel in Washington.
“We have discontinued issuing notices to report,” he said.
ICE had previously declined to say how many illegal immigrants received the lower-level notices, which directed aliens attempting to secure asylum to show up at an ICE office within 60 days of being released.
ICE told The Epoch Times earlier this month it was mailing packets, including notices to appear in court, to approximately 78,000 aliens who were released with notices to report.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined to answer why the remaining 16,581 aliens weren’t getting the packets, referring The Epoch Times to ICE. An ICE spokesman referred comment to DHS.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who asked Mayorkas for the figure, noted that an untold number of additional aliens had evaded detection and are inside the country with no notice.
“We still have a lot of people that we do not know where they are in this country,” she said.
A Border Patrol agent picks up four illegal immigrants from Haiti who have just crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into Del Rio, Texas, on July 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Under the Biden administration, illegal immigration has exploded. Apprehensions at the southern border have already set new records for a fiscal year and a calendar year. About 1.7 million arrests have already taken place in 2021. A number of aliens have been arrested and ejected multiple times.
Of those arrested, about 1 million were expelled or removed and about 375,000 remain in the country, Mayorkas estimated.
Matthew Tragesser, spokesman at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told The Epoch Times in an email that the figures Mayorkas laid out during the hearing were “alarming and unprecedented.”
“Mayorkas has eviscerated our interior immigration enforcement apparatus—meaning that once an illegal alien enters our country, they become virtually impossible to remove,” he wrote.
Mayorkas has issued a series of directives to ICE in recent months, including ordering them to not arrest illegal immigrants at “protected areas” such as food banks and shelters.
Approximately 1.2 million illegal immigrants in the nation have received final orders of removal, or deportation orders, from a judge.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked Mayorkas if they should be removed, given they have received due process.
“We cannot remove 1.2 million individuals, nor can we remove more than 11 million undocumented individuals unlawfully present in the United States who might not have final orders of removal,” Mayorkas said.
“I would not necessarily accept the fact that all of them have received due process,” he added. “I do believe individuals who pose a public safety, pose a national security threat, who pose a border security threat should be removed and we should be smart and effective in our use of resources.”
Grassley took to Twitter after the hearing, writing that the “rule of law requires enforcement of law,” and Mayorkas’s “refusal to do his job is one of the many reasons for Biden border crisis.”
Scottsdale, Arizona’s governing school board has voted to replace Jann-Michael Greenburg as president over an online “dossier” that he and his father allegedly had kept on parents critical of school board policies.
During a Nov. 15 emergency session, the Scottsdale Unified District No. 48 Governing Board voted 4–1 to appoint Patty Beckman to serve as president for the remainder of 2021.
Greenburg cast the dissenting vote.
It’s been an “incredibly difficult week,” said board member Zack Lindsay after the vote. “I find some of the allegations [against the Greenburgs] very troubling.”
The so-called Greenburg dossier was allegedly kept by Mark Greenburg and later shared by Jann-Michael, reportedly by accident.
The dossier now is the focus of an investigation by the Scottsdale Police Department.
Jann-Michael Greenburg, former president of the Scottsdale, Arizona, School District Governing Board, goes through papers at an emergency meeting on Nov. 15, 2021. The board voted to replace Greenburg as president amid allegations that he and his father kept an online dossier of outspoken parents against critical race theory and mask mandates. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Jann-Michael Greenburg said he will remain on the board until “we have all the facts” at the conclusion of the investigation.
He opened the Nov. 15 emergency meeting by saying: “I am reassured the Scottsdale Police Department is investigating this matter. There appears to be bad actors involved and I am confident our law enforcement will quickly resolve these issues.”
More than 100 concerned parents gathered outside of school district offices on Nov. 15 and demanded Greenburg’s resignation.
“Resign, Resign, Resign,” one parent’s sign read.
Arizona state Rep. Joseph Chaplik held a press conference before the meeting. He called for an independent investigation of anyone involved in the alleged dossier, which targeted parents “simply for opposing critical race theory and mask mandates.”
“I’ve seen the Greenburg file and it doesn’t look good for Mr. Greenburg,” Chaplik said.
The dossier allegedly contained parents’ identifying information, including Social Security numbers, mortgage documents, divorce papers, personal background checks, family contact information, as well as photographs of their children.
Scottsdale parent Amanda Wray said she came forward after the dossier with her family’s private information went public. Like many other parents at the Nov. 15 gathering, Wray said she didn’t expect Greenburg, a Scottsdale attorney, to resign willingly.
Amanda and Daniel Wray of Scottsdale, Arizona, say their private identifying information was included in an online dossier that Jann-Michael Greenburg, former president of the Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board, and his father allegedly kept on parents who opposed certain board policies. The Wrays, and more than 100 other concerned parents, attended an emergency meeting of the board on Nov. 15, 2021, to replace Greenburg as president. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
“He’s a career politician. He was not here for children. This was a stepping stone,” Wray said. “I think he’s going to dig his heels in tonight.”
Her husband, Daniel Wray, said he found the contents of the alleged dossier “disturbing.”
“I know there’s an investigation. It feels criminal, but I’m not the one to say,” Wray said.
In a Nov. 15 open letter, SUSD Superintendent Scott Menzel said the board “acted in light of the information recently revealed that a dossier containing sensitive information on SUSD parents was allegedly created and maintained in publicly accessible Google drive folders by Mark Greenburg, the father of Jann-Michael Greenburg, and shared by the latter.
“The focus of the Governing Board should remain solely on improving educational opportunities for each and every one of our District’s 22,000 students. The decision this evening ensures that with new leadership this will be the top priority,” Menzel wrote.
Menzel said the district has launched an independent forensic investigation into whether any district resources were used to “create, maintain or modify the dossier.”
He said the district is fully cooperating with the police investigation.
“The existence of these files is disturbing and unacceptable. The Board, in fulfilling its duty, has the obligation to be honest, fair, caring, and respectful. Further, it must avoid conduct that creates the appearance of impropriety or conduct unbefitting a public official,” Menzel said.
Menzel said the dossier’s contents, including “disparaging descriptions” of parents who share differences of opinion on board policies, is inconsistent with district core values of inviting “civil discourse regarding educational matters.” He stressed that board members don’t have unrestricted access to student information protected by federal law.
In a Nov. 12 letter to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, state Rep. Shawnna Bolick requested an immediate investigation into the alleged Greenburg dossier.
Bolick, in the letter, said Mark Greenburg is the “owner” of the online dossier with personal information on 47 people, including videos posted of him on Google Drive allegedly stalking parents at a school board meeting on Aug. 24.
“In the same video, Mark Greenburg acknowledges ‘they’ hired a private investigator ‘who’s writing down all of their [license] plates,’” referring to parents attending the meeting.
“A reasonable question to ask Mr. Greenburg is who is ‘they?’” Bolick wrote.
“I cannot imagine any legitimate action that would justify collecting and sharing personal identifying information as purported to have happened.”
In a related Nov. 12 letter sent to Menzel and the five SUSD School Board members, Bolick asked for their full cooperation in the police investigation.
“If any of you were part of this cyberstalking/doxing escapade allegedly undertaken by the Greenburg household, I would advise you to cooperate with law enforcement and resign immediately to allow a truly dedicated Scottsdale taxpayer to serve honorably in your school district,” Bolick wrote.
As the investigation gets underway, a community letter requesting Jann-Michael’s resignation has garnered more than 1,500 signatures.
If Jann-Michael refuses to resign, “we may have to go in front of (the Greenburg’s) house and show them how we really feel. We’re kind of mad,” said Miki Klann, who asked parents to sign the petition at the Nov. 15 meeting. The petition requires 21,000 signatures, she said.
The backlash against Jann-Michael is part of a national trend of parents becoming increasingly involved in school boards, largely in response to the infusion of the quasi-Marxist critical race and gender theories into class curricula.
The heated debates prompted the National School Board Association to pen a letter to President Joe Biden requesting that the Justice Department investigate parents who allegedly make threats against school board members and staff. The letter compared parents who opposed critical race theory to domestic terrorists.
Shortly after the receipt of the letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a national effort targeting parents over the alleged threats. Garland’s announcement led to outrage among parents and Republicans. School board associations in several states quit the national board in response.
President Joe Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency, a critical federal official charged with overseeing large banks, declared war on the fossil fuel industry: “We want them to go bankrupt,” said Saule Omarova.
Omarova isn’t alone in her desire for financial institutions to discriminate against the energy producers that make their existence possible. Progressive activists and Wall Street financiers are teaming up to promote environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing practices that place political whims on a pedestal—at the expense of our lives and livelihoods.
The Biden administration’s endorsement of this brazen anti-energy movement threatens Americans’ money and future—and could have unsettling ripple effects throughout our economy.
Here’s how it works: Pension funds invest the money of retirees and future retirees. Fund managers should make the smartest investments they can in order to ensure retirees have enough money to live on. But under ESG, they’re not making the smartest investments, they’re making investments that align with their political ideology. If that’s not bad enough, they’ll vote with a small but vocal minority of activist shareholders to adopt resolutions or replace board members—often against the best interests of the majority of shareholders.
Take ExxonMobil, for example. An activist hedge fund called Engine No. 1, which owns just 0.02 percent of Exxon’s shares, forced a takeover and replaced three board members with climate alarmists who will advocate for expensive and ineffective greenhouse gas reduction programs instead of working for the good of Exxon and all its shareholders.
Energy discrimination through ESG investing threatens to withhold capital and discourage investing in companies deemed politically unpalatable by progressives. This, of course, primarily means energy producers—regardless of the fact that America provides fuel for the world using the best pollution control technology available, not to mention fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Discrimination against the businesses powering America has advanced primarily through activists’ public shaming campaigns and big corporations’ virtue-signaling PR angles, but the elite class wants to force American businesses to march in lockstep on climate change. Pushing ESG from the federal level is an arbitrary and indefensible restriction on free speech and a threat to the men and women depending on their investments and pensions for retirement—that’s the vast majority of us.
Activists claim that ESG funds—those branded as having a better social impact, though there are no universal standards that define ESG—perform better financially than traditional investments. However, studies supporting this claim are riddled with methodological errors, and this trend is simply too new to understand long-term effects.
Selecting investments based on political preferences, no matter how seemingly virtuous, goes against decades of investing wisdom. Diversified investments are almost universally agreed to be the strongest investments long-term, which means that limiting investment opportunities for retirement funds and pensions will also limit the return on investment for retirees.
One well-constructed study reveals this by analyzing higher education investments. Professor Daniel R. Fischel finds (pdf) that the cost of complying with energy discrimination campaigns is significant enough to prevent universities from reaching their investment goals. Higher fees, limited diversification, and compliance costs add up—and likely don’t influence the public’s behavior or opinions.
Worse yet, recent legal analysis suggests ESG investing may actually rise to the level of illegal collusion that violates longstanding consumer protection laws. When all the major players are conspiring to follow the same political practices, to the extent that law-abiding businesses can’t access financial services, the free market is no longer truly free.
But do these principles help stop climate change? The answer is categorically no. According to climate data models used globally, even enacting each and every tenet of the Green New Deal wouldn’t produce any meaningful temperature change. Eliminating all fossil fuels and all man-made carbon dioxide emissions would result in less than two-tenths of a degree temperature difference. So even the biggest and loudest campaigns to force divestment from fossil fuels would have a microscopic impact—if any at all.
The only real effect of this energy discrimination movement would be worse poverty, a higher cost of living for everyone, and—ironically—more pollution. That’s because denying capital or investments to American energy companies won’t eliminate our need for fossil fuels, our only significant source of the affordable, reliable energy we need. It will just transfer energy purchases to overseas producers.
It makes little sense, if the environment is really the progressive wing’s top priority, to give power, influence, and money to countries that pollute with abandon and maintain poor human rights records. Instead, we should continue to produce energy here in the United States, taking advantage of our environmentally conscious and efficient energy industry—while also producing energy cheaply and maintaining our national security and international negotiating power.
Biden campaigned on equity and fighting poverty. Unfortunately, his administration’s fixation on climate alarmism and micromanaging investors will create more poverty by making energy—and everything we buy—more expensive.
The Biden administration should reject discrimination of all forms, including energy discrimination.
Sens. Michael Testa and Joe Pennacchio introduced a bill that would prevent critical race theory (CRT) from being taught in New Jersey public schools, according to a statement. The bill would also prohibit public school teachers from engaging in political, ideological, or religious advocacy in their classrooms.
The bill specifies that critical race theory cannot be taught in schools “as part of a curriculum, course of instruction, or through supplemental instructional materials that promote concepts related to CRT,” the statement said.
The bill (pdf) specifically lists a number of concepts related to critical race theory that are prohibited from being taught in New Jersey public schools. For example, it bans teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior to another one; a person of a certain race or sex is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive; or a person should be discriminated against based on their race or sex.
Schools are also forbidden from teaching that a person’s moral character, values, or beliefs are determined by race or sex, the bill said.
The measure also singles out as prohibited teaching the concept that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of their race or sex.”
Taxpayer money should be spent on teaching students basic concepts such as “mathematics, science, English, history, and civics and not on political or ideological indoctrination,” the bill stipulates.
“Providing an education in a democracy is best done by teaching students how to think, rather than telling them what they should think,” the bill said.
The measure encourages schools to present diverse views on controversial issues in the classroom and to foster open discussion.
According to the bill’s provisions, schools would have the right to teach the history of an ethnic group, provide “the impartial instruction on the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, or geographic region, or historical documents,” as well as engage students in “the impartial discussion of controversial aspects of history.”
Teachers would be required by the bill to “provide students with materials supporting both sides of a controversial issue being addressed and to present both sides in a fair-minded and nonpartisan manner,” the bill said.
The measure gives the state government the authority to withhold state funding from a school district that knowingly violates the rules specified in the bill.
“Critical race theory is a thinly-veiled effort to legitimize discrimination under the guise of an intellectual social theory,” Testa said in the statement.
“Every student should be empowered through lessons emphasizing the opportunity they have to succeed through their own hard work, individual merit, and the personal character they demonstrate to others,” Pennacchio said in the statement.
“In many classrooms, however, we’ve heard of teachers engaging in political advocacy and pushing partisan ideologies when they should have been teaching math, science, history, and literacy, “Pennacchio noted.
How CRT Is Being Taught
Some states passed laws banning critical race theory from being taught in their schools, but there are educators who teach other educators how to “back-door it” into the classrooms.
The Zinn Education Project has collected the names of nearly 7,500 educators who vow to keep pushing CRT into classrooms despite the passage of laws banning CRT in a growing number of states.
Screenshot from a webinar where Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad (top L) taught Florida educators how to slip CRT into classrooms, regardless of subject matter during a webinar sponsored by Florida Atlantic University on Sept. 20, 2021. (Patricia Tolson/The Epoch Times)
In September, Florida Atlantic University sponsored a webinar where Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad—an associate professor of language and literacy at Georgia State University—taught educators in Miami Dade, Broward, Martin, and Palm Beach counties how to creatively slip critical race theory through the back door of any classroom, regardless of subject matter.
Earlier this year, a parent from Chatam, New Jersey, who discovered that her children were being taught critical race theory in disguise in a number of classes, requested that the board of education set up an open discussion on this topic, according to “Tap Into.”
What teaching critical race theory “is calling for is ostensibly using racism to fight racism and that makes no sense in no world,” the parent said at the board of education meeting in a video posted by Tap Into.
Critical race theory is an offshoot of a Marxist branch of thought known as critical theory developed in the 1930s by a group of Marxist scholars first associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and later with Columbia University in New York.
Originally, Marxism divided people into two opposing classes: the bourgeoisie with capital and the proletariat, with a goal of instigating struggle between them. However, with industrialization, class mobility increased and that process started as early as the mid-19th century. For example, a supposed member of the proletariat is no longer among the proletariat if the person buys public equity in a company or starts their own business.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Tuesday placed a hold on President Joe Biden’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, saying he does not fully understand the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“Nicholas Burns has a long career in public service, but it is a career defined by the failure to understand the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party,” Rubio said of the procedural move in a statement.
Rubio, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a senior member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said that Burns has “displayed no remorse or concern” about his current business relationships with “nationless corporations” operating in China.
“Burns is exactly the type of nominee I expect from President Biden given this administration’s weak approach toward China, including lobbying against my bipartisan Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.”
Longtime diplomat Burns, 65, formerly served as U.S. ambassador to NATO and Greece.
Rubio added, “The last thing we need is another caretaker of American decline in the room with the Chinese Communist Party.”
It comes weeks after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has placed a hold on more than two dozen of the president’s picks, reportedly signaled that he does not intend to block Burns’ confirmation, according to Bloomberg.
Burns at his Senate confirmation hearing last month called China the “most dangerous competitor” to the United States and said the Chinese regime’s “genocide in Xinjiang,” abuses in Tibet, its “smothering” of Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms, and “bullying of Taiwan” must stop.
He also said China’s military threat to Taiwan was growing, but that maintaining the One China policy was the smartest and most effective way to deter China from exercising force over the self-ruled democratic island.
“This is a policy that can succeed if we execute it consistently and with some strength,” Burns told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, adding that the most important deterrent was for the United States to maintain its military standing in the Indo-Pacific.
Still, he said Congress and the executive branch had every right to “expand our arms provisions to Taiwan.”
The Epoch Times has contacted Burns and the Biden administration for comment.
Rubio’s hold on Burns also comes one day after Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping engaged in talks in their first virtual summit as heads of state. Both leaders did not reach any “breakthrough” on issues concerning both nations in the three-hour talks.
A mandatory ninth-grade ethnic studies curriculum at a school district in California’s Monterey County pushes dark and controversial political themes and imagery, says a critic of the program.
Kelly Schenkoske, a parent of homeschooled children and an opponent of ethnic studies and critical race theory (CRT), told The Epoch Times the ethnic studies curriculum being taught at schools in Salinas Union High School District (SUHSD) promotes anti-American, anti-Christian, and Marxist ideas.
The Epoch Times obtained a copy of the curriculum from Schenkoske who filed a California Public Records Act request through her attorney Craig Alexander. It was verified as legitimate by Kali Fontanilla, a former SUHSD teacher.
“So many parents don’t know what’s happening,” Schenkoske said.
Schenkoske claims the teaching materials contain anti-Christianity ideology while promoting other spiritual traditions. She said the curriculum also focuses on “counter-hegemony,” a concept developed by Marxist philosophers to target dominant social structures, such as capitalism.
CRT concepts are also clearly included on page 92 through 96 of the curriculum in excerpts from the article “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth” and page 97, featuring a diagram from “Examining Transformational Resistance Through a Critical Race and LatCrit Theory Framework: Chicana and Chicano Students in an Urban Context.”
“It’s absurd. This is propaganda schooling in every way, shape and form,” Schenkoske said.
SUHSD President Phillip Tabera and district superintendent Dan Burns did not respond to Epoch Times inquiries.
Schenkoske pointed out several examples of this dark imagery, including the work of Ernesto Yerena Montejano and Frank Shepard Fairey a contemporary street artist, illustrator, activist, and founder of OBEY. Fairey is also known for creating the famous Barack Obama “HOPE” poster.
The first page “Unit 2 Readings” on “Colonization and Dehumanization” in the SUHSD Ethnic Studies curriculum contains an illustration of a communist raised fist, the socialist rose and an OBEY symbol.
An illustration of a skull with American flags for eyes on Page 136 depicts the crucifixion of Jesus with pistols near both hands of the Christ figure nailed to a cross and hovering above a bottle with a skull-and-crossbones. Under Christ’s arms, dollar-signs and roots drape down near his sides.
“This particular drawing is offensive because it shows the crucifixion of Christ, with guns on either sides of his hands pointed outward, as if Christ Himself were holding and aiming them,” Schenkoske said.
The imagery, she said, is “biased propaganda” that some children in the district are currently being forced to learn.
“It’s offensive to Christians. It’s ridiculous,” she said.
The drawing also shows horses holding Britain’s Union Jack flag, a Spanish ship, sets of shackles surrounding Africa, vultures clasping hearts in their talons, and pigs.
“This is like looking at a representation of a nation that they believe should be dead,” Schenkoske said.
On the next page, a similar skull has “$” signs in its eye cavities. It shows military drones by the Liberty Bell, surveillance cameras, bulls, spilled oil barrels and burning oil wells with the heading “Colonization and Dehumanization.”
The image paints America and its flag in a negative light, Schenkoske said.
“This curriculum, and this image specifically, attacks capitalism,” she said.
On Page 46, the curriculum contains a chart from “Rethinking Ethnic Studies” that under “Religion” lists Christians as the “privileged/hegemonic” group responsible for “creedism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism” forms of discrimination.
The chart lists “Muslims, Jews, non-major world religions, atheists and indigenous spiritual traditions” as “oppressed/marginalized” groups. The chart lists “religious freedom/regenerating indigenous spiritual traditions” as a form of resistance to this “oppression.”
Under “Class” the chart calls for the “redistribution of wealth,” and a “shift in economic thinking.”
Parents Sue the State
Meanwhile the Californians For Equal Rights and three San Diego parents recently joined the Californians For Equal Rights Foundation (CFER) to sue the State of California over its statewide ethnic studies program for allegedly violating their constitutional right to freedom of religion.
CFER and parents Eric Gonzales, Steve Houbeck, and Jose Velazquez filed a lawsuit on Sept. 3 against the state government and its agencies, including the State Board of Education and the State Department of Education. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond was also named in the suit.
The co-plaintiffs allege that prayers to Aztec and Ashe gods in the state-approved Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) violate the California Constitution’s free exercise of religion and no government aid clauses.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation (Assembly Bill 101) on Oct. 8 making ethnic studies a statewide requirement for high school graduation starting in the 2029–30 school year. The new law also requires junior high schools to offer at least a one-semester course in ethnic studies, commencing with the 2025–26 school year.
The previous day, San Diego Superior Court Judge Eddie Sturgeon denied CFER’s petition for a Temporary Restraining Order “partially because AB 101 had not been signed into law at that time,” Wenyuan Wu, CFER’S executive director, told the Epoch Times in an email on Nov. 10.
“Our lawyers sent the court and defendants additional documents proving our case. The State of California emailed them asking to be dropped from the case, because the State doesn’t think it has legal standing in the case.
“But we don’t plan to drop the State of California from the list of defendants,” Wu said in the email.
Schenkoske declared in writing to the court that she would testify as a witness about the content in SUHSD ethnic studies program which documents the Aztec prayers.
Schenkoske states in the declaration that she learned through a public records act request SUHSD’s ethnic studies curriculum, has already incorporated the “In Lak Ech affirmation,” also known as the “Aztec prayers” that are being challenged in the lawsuit.
The California State Board of Education (SBE) met Nov. 3 and 4. The lawsuit was the first item on the agenda but discussion on the issue was held in closed session.
Aztec Chants Versus Christian Prayers
At a recent SUSHD board meeting, Schenkoske criticized the district allowing activism to seep into the classroom.
“Since when did public education become a political activist organization?” she asked. “Our government should be neutral. Our political ideologies should be left out of the classroom. It is time we all start questioning what every news media source says. It is time we start questioning what our teachers are doing in the classroom.”
She told the board the ethnic studies program teaches students about the Aztec god of human sacrifice. She later told The Epoch Times the lesson is on page 12 of local lesson plans and is included in the state curriculum.
The Aztecs believed Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of the sun, war “fed on human blood and hearts,” so they held human sacrifice ceremonies at which they cut open the bodies of prisoners or slaves and offered the victims’ hearts and blood to Huitzilopochtli, according to Brittanica.
“And this a god you want to pray to? “I mean, really?” asked Fred McCuistion, another parent at the same meeting.
If someone were to suggest reciting the Lord’s Prayer after the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning, “people would be having a cow,” McCuistion said.
Schenkoske pointed out that amid the ongoing CRT debate, Aztec dancers showed up in the parking lot before one school board meeting and often perform dances at school events in the district.
(Courtesy Kelly Schenkoske)
Critical Race Theory
Critics of the ethnic studies program claim it is based on CRT and pushes neo-Marxist ideology.
CRT has gained traction among left-wing activists and academia, but opposition from conservatives, Christians, parents and intellectuals reached a fever pitch over the summer and early fall. Opponents argue that teaching CRT in schools will further divide American communities along racial and political lines.
According to the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, CRT originally developed from critical legal studies, which formed in the 1970s. As described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, critical theories are largely rooted in ideas inspired by Marxism, with stated objectives such as explaining “what is wrong with current social reality” and providing “achievable practical goals for social transformation.”
While Karl Marx focused on class struggles between the “bourgeois” and the “proletariat,” CRT focuses on the struggle between white “oppressors” and “oppressed” other races. It uses “privilege,” “intersectionality” and other terminology to describe these concepts.
A Floridaschool board member has filed a criminal complaint regarding a “disgusting,” sexually graphic book—found to exist in the media centers at three schools in Flagler County—which she believes violates state obscenity laws.
Flagler County School Board Member Jill Woolbright said she became aware of the book after seeing a video by a parent who read from the book at a school board meeting in Pennsylvania, “and it was disgusting.” The video bears a “GRAPHIC WARNING.”
According to a recent report, the book by George Johnson—”All Boys Aren’t Blue”—has already been removed from libraries in eight states. The North Kansas City school district pulled four of Johnson’s books from four high schools earlier this month following complaints from parents. On Nov. 8, Spotsylvania County Public School Board Members unanimously voted to have multiple “sexually explicit” books, including Johnson’s, removed from their libraries after concerned parents discovered the books were in the schools through a library app. Johnson himself begins his memoir with a content warning.
Woolbright discovered there were copies of the book in the media centers of three Flagler County schools, two copies at Flagler Palm Coast High School, one copy at Matanzas High School, and one copy at Buddy Taylor Middle School.
“In our county, we only have two high schools and two middle schools, and thankfully there were none in the elementary schools,” Woolbright said.
Now concerned, Woolbright conducted an internet search for the book and looked to see if the public library had a copy.
“Lo and behold,” Woolbright said. “They did.” After checking the book out of the library, Woolbright said she looked at the table of contents and saw two specific chapters that caught her eye. The first is Chapter 11, titled, “Boys Will be Boys.” She was appalled to find that the entire 15-page chapter—“not a paragraph, not a blurb, but a whole chapter described graphically this incestual encounter with a teenage cousin that came to his bed at night.”
A photo of the first page of Chapter 15—”Losing My Virginity Twice”—from the book by George Johnson on Nov. 14, 2021. (Jessico Bowman)
In Chapter 15—”Losing My Virginity Twice”—Jonson provides an extremely graphic recount of a sexual encounter he had with another man as an adult, giving readers detailed, step-by-step descriptions on how to perform numerous sexual acts.
“So I had enough information for me to know that this is not appropriate for any minor,” Woolbright said.
She then began researching policy regarding the selection of textbooks in Flagler County. While there are some guidelines regarding textbooks, she found nothing regarding media center books that would be available to students through the school library.
“So I sent an email off to county office with a lot of questions asking about a handbook asking about our policy and procedures on how we decide what media center books go into effect,” Woolbright said. The response she received said “it was a question that probably all the school board members would be interested in” and she should bring it up at a workshop.
Woolbright also searched state statutes, finding that Florida State Statute 01006 says it is the responsibility of the school board not only to provide oversight on all instructional materials used in a classroom but for books that wound up in the school libraries as well.
Woolbright also read Florida’s criminal statute regarding “any person who knowingly sells, lends, gives away, distributes, transmits, shows, or transmutes” or knowingly has in their possession for viewing any lewd or obscene materials to minors—including books—is guilty of a felony of the third degree.
Now “extremely upset,” Woolbright raised questions at a school board workshop regarding how they vet books and how they decide which books will be banned and if there are any banned books so far with county schools and policies and procedures. According to Woolbright, that was when Curriculum Director LaShakia Moore admitted they don’t even have any policies regarding books in the media centers and that they planned on getting together with the media center specialists in the county and start preparing. Woolbright asked to schedule a workshop to get started on that. While three out of the five board members voted for the workshop two said they don’t believe in any form of censorship and that they believe anything should be available to the children.
“So I’m like, OK. So at least I got a workshop,” Woolbright said.
Next, Woolbright called others to join her at her weekly three o’clock appointment with the superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt to share what she had learned. She called Curriculum Director LaShakia Moore, Assistant Superintendent Bobby Bossardet, Kristy Gavin the school board attorney, and the superintendent secretary. Only Gavin bothered to show up.
“So I played the video that I saw,” Woolbright said, admitting that she left the room because she didn’t want to hear it again. When the video was over they opened the door.
“They were visibly disturbed,” Woolbright said, “so we sat and talked for a long time. I said that under no uncertain terms I wanted whoever was responsible for placing those books in our schools to be held accountable and that I wanted them removed.
“The school board never approved this book getting into the schools that I’m aware of,” Woolbright insisted. “I believe that it was a crime and that it was a felony and I was assured they would take care of it.
However, while the title of the book has disappeared from the district’s catalog and two of the four books have been “removed from circulation,” she was told that the other two books—which had been checked out by students—“were still at large.”
“I had given them a week to act on it,” Woolbright said.
Unwilling to wait any longer, Woolbright contacted the Flagler County Sheriff’s Department and filed a criminal report, including a five-page witness statement.
During the course of investigating this story, The Epoch Times became aware of posts on the author’s Twitter page that appeared to be threatening Woolbright.
Screen capture of Twitter post from Keka Araujo dated Nov. 15, 2021 (Patricia Tolson/The Epoch Times)
“So now [a] Group of rednecks in Palm and Flagler Counties are insinuating that @IamGMJohnson is inciting violence,” Keka Araujo posted on Nov. 15. “Here’s the problem with that… This Black man was minding HIS BUSINESS and here comes racist Jill and her minions disrupting his peace.”
Johnson asked Araujo to “finish her!” in a reply.
While Araujo claims the threatening post was on “A PRIVATE GROUP ON FACEBOOK,” the comments actually appear on both of their very public Twitter pages. It is against the law (pdf) in Florida to threaten anyone through social media, including Facebook and Twitter.
“It should go without saying that harassment, assault, and credible threats of violence are all crimes in the state of Florida, regardless of political motivation,” Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw told The Epoch Times. “Several Florida school board members, including Democrats and Republicans, have reported receiving threats and harassment from activists on both ends of the political spectrum. This is wrong, and anyone who is a victim of a crime should report it to their local police department.”
Screenshots of the potentially threatening posts and information on the social media accounts were sent to the sheriff’s department.
The deputy was also informed that several people, including a Flagler County student named Jack Petocz, are “organizing a student-led protest” to take place at the Jan. 16 school board meeting. According to Petocz’s Twitter post, he is accepting donations of Johnson’s book which he plans to distribute at the meeting.
Screen capture of Twitter post about protest being organized by Flagler County student Jack Petocz to distribute copies of Johnson’s book from Nov. 13, 2021 (Jessico Bowman)
“Here’s the thing, as soon as one of them passes one to a kid, that’s federal law,” Woolbright said. “Giving that book to children under 16, that’s federal law.”
“Florida law enforcement is perfectly capable of responding to crimes in Florida,” Pushaw said, “and we are confident that the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office will be able to investigate and respond appropriately.”
Monica, a parent in Flagler County, has also filed a report with the sheriff’s department.
“I found out there were books in the library that were completely inappropriate, particularly this one called All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Monica told The Epoch Times under the condition of anonymity. “So I actually bought the book. I had seen excerpts from it and how inapproriate they were but I wanted to see for myself, not just the excerpts themselves but what came before and after them. It’s really inappropriate. It’s shocking that this book would be in a school library and it’s actually against Florida law that this is available to children without parental consent.”
Monica filed her report with the Flagler County Sheriff’s Department on Nov. 15. Monica said the name of the deputy who took the report, which appears on the report itself, is “A. Pierre.”
“He wasn’t happy about it,” Monica said. “He told me I couldn’t file the report. That I had to go to the school’s resource officer because it’s an internal matter.”
Monica told the deputy that because she feels it’s a violation of Florida’s obscenity laws, it’s a legal matter and her responsibility to file the report.
Monica also told the deputy that people planned of distributing copies of the offensive book at the Nov. 16 school board meeting. “That’s also against the law, distributing sexual content to minor children,” she told him.
“Parents have the right to object to their children being exposed to explicit content like this, because parents have the right to make education decisions for their own kids,” Pushaw told The Epoch Times. “The special session this week will strengthen protections for parents’ rights and empower parents of public school students in Florida.
“It’s noteworthy that the Department of Justice (DOJ) memo was issued in response to the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) letter to President Biden on September 29, in which the organization explicitly blamed opponents of critical race theory and forced masking mandates,” Pushaw said further. “The framing of the NSBA letter suggests that parents who criticize radical left-wing indoctrination or oppose the unscientific policy of muzzling schoolchildren are uniquely dangerous. The letter ignores the fact that liberal activists who support CRT and forced masking have been disrupting school board meetings, harassing elected officials they disagree with, and threatening conservative school board members.
However, Pushaw said the DOJ memo “conveniently ignores the conservative school board members and parents who have experienced harassment and threats from the left.”
“This shameful double standard has been established for some time,” Pushaw noted. “Violent left-wing protests are acceptable to liberals, but parents who protest the progressive agenda are smeared as potential ‘domestic terrorists’ who must be intimidated into silence.”
Johnson responded to The Epoch Times, saying: “What exactly do people think the journalist Keke Araujo is going to do? She is a writer. We ‘finish’ people with our words. Anyone with reading comprehension can see the tweet I responded to wasn’t threatening. Keke said she was going to write about her and I told her to do it. So it’s just another attempt to throw rocks (like filing a criminal complaint against my book against her own board policy) and then trying to hide your hands when the folks you attack respond. I’ve explained several times why this book is appropriate for teens. Teens will experience many of the same things I did. My book is not what harms them. Pretending they aren’t already experiencing these things in the real world and then removing resources that can help them is what harms them.”
Despite Florida’s obscenity laws, Johnson said “Woolbright’s effort is wrong because she solely has no right to deny teens and other parents who want the book the right to access it. Period.”
When asked if he had reviewed Florida’s obscenity laws, Johnson said “I have as well as my attorneys,” and that his lawyers disagree that the book would be in violation.
The Epoch Times reached also out to Flagler County Schools Superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt for comment. She did not respond.
The Epoch Times will be covering developments at the Jan. 16 Flagler County School Board meeting.
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) publicly released a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland questioning contradictory claims by the Department of Justice (DOJ) about Hunter Biden’s connection to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interests.
The son of President Joe Biden has been in the spotlight since the 2020 election, when a laptop recovered at a computer repair shop revealed distasteful information about the private life and business dealings of Hunter Biden.
However, Hunter Biden was in the crosshairs of the DOJ long before the 2020 presidential election: In a 2018 court filing, the DOJ expressed its intention to gather information under the standards set out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on one of Hunter Biden’s many foreign business associates, Chi-Ping “Patrick” Ho (pdf), who is associated with CCP intelligence services.
The DOJ’s request to gather this information was approved by a federal court.
In Dec. 2017, Ho was charged with international bribery and money laundering for the China Energy Fund Committee, a subsidiary of one of China’s largest corporations, which itself has extensive links to the CCP. Ho was a top executive at the firm.
In March of this year, Grassley and Johnson submitted a request to the DOJ, now led by Biden-appointed Garland, asking for information related to investigations concerning Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships.
Following that request, the DOJ sent a belated reply to the senators in July, telling them that the DOJ is “not in a position to confirm the existence of the information that is sought” (pdf).
Now, Grassley and Johnson are asking the DOJ to reconcile these conflicting claims.
“Based on the extensive relationships between and among Hunter Biden and individuals connected to the communist Chinese regime, our letter requested ‘all intelligence records, including but not limited to, all Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-derived information,’” wrote the senators.
“Our request was based, in part, on reporting and a federal court filing by the Department that said it had obtained at least one Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant relating to Patrick Ho, indicating his potential counterintelligence threat to the United States,” the letter added.
The senators then cited the DOJ’s own words from its 2018 filing, which reads in part, “The United States intends to offer into evidence, or otherwise use or disclose in any proceedings in the above-captioned matter, information obtained or derived from electronic surveillance and physical search conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.”
“Despite this sworn acknowledgement by the Department you oversee, your July 12, 2021, response to our letter denied knowing whether the Department even possessed the information,” Grassley and Johnson continued.
The duo then blasted the DOJ for the apparent contradiction.
“Both statements cannot be true. Either the statement in your July 12, 2021, letter is true—that the Department is unaware of whether it possesses the relevant material—or the Department’s February 8, 2018, statement to federal court that the Department is aware of the fact that it possesses the relevant material is true,” Grassley and Johnson wrote. “Therefore, one statement is false.”
To reconcile this inconsistency, Grassley and Johnson have demanded an official DOJ response to their letter by no later than Nov. 22 and for the DOJ to “either amend [its] July 12, 2021, letter to correct the inaccurate statement or confirm in writing that the Department’s February 8, 2018, court filing stating that the Department possesses FISA-related information on Patrick Ho was an inaccurate statement to federal court.”
Thus far, the DOJ has not publicly responded to Grassley’s and Johnson’s allegations in the letter.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the letter.
The Chairman of the House Committee on January 6th has numerous ties to extremist groups in America.
Rep. Bennie Thompson – chairman of the Congressional January 6th Commission – praised a program sponsored by a separatist Nation of Islam faction as “absolutely important,” The National Pulse can reveal.
Thompson, who has also supported the extremist secessionist group the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), joined the New Nation of Islam’s (NNOI) radio program in April 2014.
Ahead of Thompson’s hour-long long discussion with the “Son of Man,” the leader of the NNOI, he praised the radio program as “absolutely important”:
“Your program is absolutely important to people in southwest Mississippi that’s why I think it’s so good [unclear] and I appreciate the opportunity of being on it.”
“There’s no substitute for accurate information, and that’s why your show is so important because what you’re saying is what’s already out here. You can put opinions on it, but nobody can ever say that the facts you present were anything other than the facts,” Thompson reiterates roughly one hour into the program.
The NNOI website reveals that the “Son of Man” is a follower of the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, who led the Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1934 to 1975 and counted Malcolm X and anti-semite Louis Farrakhan as mentees:
“In 1973, the Son of Man visited Muhammad’s Temple where he heard and accepted the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He attended Temple #27 in Los Angeles, California. After the Honorable Elijah Muhammad passed in 1975, the Son of Man realized, thanks to the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, that he is the Son of Man whom that teaching was designed to raise from a dead level to a living perpendicular.”
Among the demands called for by the NNOI are a “separate state or territory of our own”:
“WE WANT our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves, to be allowed to establish a separate state or territory of our own – either on this continent or elsewhere.”
“Since we cannot get along with them in peace and equality, after giving them 400 or more years of our sweat and blood and receiving in return some of the worst treatment human beings have ever experienced. We believe our contributions to this land and the suffering forced upon us by white America more than justifies our demands; and our complete separation in a state or territory of our own,” adds the NNOI before insisting:
“We know that the above plan for the solution of the black and white conflict is the best and only answer to the problems between the two peoples.”
Allyn Walker – a transgender person – has been pushing “dignity” for pedophiles upon students.
A transgender professor from Old Dominion University has been placed on leave after a video of them advocating in support of people sexually attracted to children went viral on social media.
In the video, Professor Allyn Walker provided a positive stance on people termed “MAP” or Minor Attracted People. In an interview with Prostasia Foundation, Walker argued that stigma surrounding pedophilia “can lead to harm.”
The interview also led to Walker defending the term MAP because “the group want other to use” this term for their sexual attraction and inclination towards children. Despite having worked with victims of sexual violence, Walker went on to argue that the criminal processing system of pedophiles/MAPs cultivates institutional harms.
Walker has studied non-offending MAPs, leading to the release of a book urging for “dignity” for pedophiles. After an outcry regarding Walker’s beliefs and behaviors, Old Dominion University placed the professor on leave “for their safety.”
“Old Dominion University has placed Dr. Allyn Walker on administrative leave, effective immediately, from their position as assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice.”
Reactions to Dr. Walker’s research and book have led to concerns for their safety and that of the campus.
Furthermore, the controversy over Dr. Walker’s research has disrupted the campus and community environment and is interfering with the institution’s mission of teaching and learning.
“I want to state in the strongest terms possible that child sexual abuse is morally wrong and has no place in our society,” said ODU President Brian O. Hemphill, Ph.D. “This is a challenging time for our University, but I am confident that we will come together and move forward as a Monarch family.”
The actions we are taking today are motivated by our obligation to maintain a safe and conducive learning environment for our students, faculty, and staff.”
Dr. Allyn Walker has released the following statement:
“I want to be clear: child sexual abuse is morally wrong and inexcusable crime. As an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice, the goal of my research is to prevent crime. My work is informed by my past experience and advocacy as a social worker counseling victims. I embarked on this research in hopes of gaining understanding of a group that, previously, has not been studied in order to identify ways to protect children.”
The FBI on Nov. 6 searched the Mamaroneck, N.Y., home of James O’Keefe, the founder of the video-sting group Project Veritas. As reported by the New York Times, authorities also searched the homes of two O’Keefe associates. It’s all part of an investigation stemming from the reported theft last year of the diary of Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter.
Addressing the FBI’s action last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson attributed the raid to O’Keefe’s possible role in “embarrassing the president’s kid” and called on free-speech advocates to speak up. “Maybe someone should say something — maybe,” Carlson said.
Something has, indeed, been said. Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, tweeted this past Wednesday:
I’m sorry, but this is worrying from a press freedom perspective—unless & until DOJ releases evidence Protect Veritas was directly involved in the theft. Because if there is none, then the raids could very well be a violation of the Privacy Protection Act. https://t.co/37iOywqwUm— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) November 10, 2021
Before plowing into the legal wrinkles, here’s a summary of the facts surrounding the case: Before the 2020 election, a conservative website called the National File published pages of an item purporting to be Ashley Biden’s diary. The Trump administration’s Justice Department launched an investigation, according to the Times, after a Biden family representative claimed that some of Ashley Biden’s items had been stolen. On Nov. 5, the Times reported that federal agents had searched two locations in an operation that targeted “people who had worked” with Project Veritas in connection with the diary; O’Keefe disclosed that his group had received a grand jury subpoena. Next came the raid at O’Keefe’s home, where agents seized two of his phones.
Project Veritas has told its version of events — first in a Nov. 5 video, then in a Sean Hannity interview with O’Keefe and his lawyer Paul Calli, and finally in a 16-page motion to U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres. In 2020, according to the filing, two tipsters contacted Project Veritas and claimed to have obtained items that Ashley Biden had allegedly left behind in a Florida location. The source claimed that it had “lawful possession” of the material, Calli said on “Hannity,” with O’Keefe noting that his group didn’t “know whether it was stolen or not.”
Project Veritas purchased the rights to the diary, according to Calli. Then the organization made efforts to authenticate the diary, O’Keefe said in the video. But it ended up killing the story, “because, in part, we could not determine if the diary was real,” O’Keefe said.
The group tried to return the diary to a lawyer for Ashley Biden, said O’Keefe, but the lawyer declined to verify her ownership. So Project Veritas “arranged” to have the item delivered to law enforcement. “Despite an internal belief that the diary was genuine, Mr. O’Keefe and Project Veritas could not sufficiently satisfy themselves with the diary’s authenticity such that publishing a news story about it would meet ethical standards of journalism,” Project Veritas wrote in its filing.
As to how National File ended up with the diary: It “claimed to have received the diary from a ‘whistleblower’ at another news organization that had chosen not to report on the diary,” alleges the Project Veritas motion. Tom Pappert, National File’s editor in chief, said that his organization heard from an individual he identified as a whistleblower at Project Veritas who was “upset by the … decision to spike a story that had been thoroughly vetted, in the words of our whistleblower.” That vetting, claims Pappert, included a phone call that Project Veritas had taped with Ashley Biden in which she confirmed that the diary was hers. (Attempts to secure comment from a Biden family representative were unsuccessful.)
Shortly before National File published the purported diary pages, it called O’Keefe to ask for the recording of that call, according to Pappert. Asked how O’Keefe responded, Pappert said, “not happily.” Nothing that National File learned from the whistleblower, said Pappert, “could be construed as criminality” on part of Project Veritas.
Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer for Project Veritas, emailed, “Project Veritas does not know how National File obtained the materials it published. Project Veritas does not employ the person National File has publicly suggested is the whistleblower.” (Pappert maintains his organization hasn’t suggested the identity of the whistleblower.)
So were the feds justified in conducting the raids? Project Veritas says no — that it was engaging in First Amendment newsgathering activities that should be protected from “heavy-handed tactics” (per its filing). “It appears journalism itself may be on trial,” O’Keefe said in the Nov. 5 video.
Such activities do enjoy protection under federal law. The Privacy Protection Act (which Timm cited in his tweet) passed into law in response to the landmark case Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, in which the Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional for police to search a newspaper’s materials in a hunt for evidence of criminal wrongdoing. The law sought to correct this outrage, prohibiting searches and seizures of “any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication.”
Note the law’s agnosticism regarding whether the target may or may not qualify as a “journalist.” It applies to any person — whether O’Keefe or Bob Woodward — who’s out to disseminate information. Which is to say, it protects acts of journalism, even when they’re executed by people whose journalistic credentials may be iffy.
Another set of protections springs from the Justice Department’s guidelines regarding the issuance of subpoenas to the news media. Those provisions historically required top-level Justice Department approval — often from the attorney general personally — to subpoena members of the news media. The Biden administration strengthened those protections even further in July, essentially announcing that federal prosecutors will no longer pursue “compulsory legal process” — subpoenas — “for the purpose of obtaining information from or records of members of the news media acting within the scope of newsgathering activities.” The new policy includes a narrow exception for instances when members of the media themselves are “under investigation for a violation of criminal law.”
In a letter to the Justice Department, Project Veritas’s attorneys argued that the seizure of O’Keefe’s phone violated those protections. Not so, responded Justice: “[T]he Government hereby confirms that it has complied with all applicable regulations and policies regarding potential members of the news media in the course of this investigation, including with respect to the search warrant at issue.” In a Monday letter to the Justice Department attorney general, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) requested, among many other things, a “detailed description” of steps taken to comply with the applicable regulations.
Torres on Thursday issued an order that the Justice Department confirm that it has paused its extraction of data from O’Keefe’s phones, as Dhillon tweeted:
BREAKING! The federal court has just ordered the DOJ to STOP extracting data from our client, journalist James O’Keefe’s phone, and ordered a hearing. Counsel for Project Veritas asked the court to do this yesterday! pic.twitter.com/nBrmf4myuj— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) November 11, 2021
As this blog has noted on many occasions, the Supreme Court has ruled that publishing information that had been obtained illegally is protected by the First Amendment, on the condition that the news outlet didn’t participate in unlawful activities and the material was newsworthy. “A stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in Bartnicki v. Vopper. The Committee to Protect Journalists on Monday issued a statement citing “overreach” by law enforcement, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press requested that the court to unseal documents filed in connection to the O’Keefe search warrant.
“I’ve never said anything positive about Project Veritas in my entire life,” says Timm. “That shouldn’t matter here.” The key thing, he says, is whether the Justice Department has probable-cause evidence that Project Veritas was involved in criminality. If they do, says Timm, “I don’t think journalists should have big concerns.” The point being: The Justice Department had better have some goods.
Speaking to Dana Perino on Fox News, Mike Rowe posited that the reason for the massive number of people who have left their jobs and not looked for replacement jobs is a “topography that ultimately encourages people to not work.”
Perino noted that more than 4.4 million people quit their jobs in September but reports said there were over 10 million job openings. She asked, “Why are all these people quitting their jobs but not taking the other jobs?”
“Look, I mean, the honest answer is the 300-page book I can’t get around to finishing, but in general, I think it’s coming down to the ever-evolving definition of what a good job is, the expectations that most people have when it comes to determining what they want to do with the useful part of their life,” Rowe answered. “Money, incentives, disincentives, uncertainty, it’s all swirling around.”
“And look, it’s really tempting to get on the back porch and scream at the kids to get off the lawn vis-a-vis laziness and all of the other work ethic things that I do love to talk about,” he continued. “But we can’t blame people for acting in their own interests. And if we lay out a topography that ultimately encourages people to not work, then I’m afraid that’s the fault in our stars. We’re not going to do it. And so that’s part of the problem. But ultimately I think it’s a real complex thing.”
“Fundamentally, though, you can’t argue with the numbers. 10.4 million open jobs,” he stated. “That has to mean, among other things, that opportunity is not dead if we can simply get around to making a more persuasive case for the opportunities we have. “
Perino asked, “So if parents or grandparents or young people are watching, this program or ‘How America Works’ on Fox Business, what could they learn maybe start to change that perception of what is a good job?”
“I think so much of the debate always — the way we set the table, is here are the employers and here are the employees and here’s the gap and here’s the problem,” Rowe replied. “The shows I work on all attempt to remind the rest of us how much skin we have in the game. So on ‘How America Works,’ for instance, tonight we look at salt production. We meet the men, a guy named Raul Flores, down in Carlsbad, New Mexico, to get a better understanding of how reliant we are on salt and what it takes to get it out of the ground and on to the roads so interstate commerce can exist. It’s a real simple look at that job. It’s also a very clever recruiting mechanism, because when you look at a show like this, you see people who love their jobs; you see them prospering; you see them moving the needle and contributing in a meaningful way to society.”
“So my thing is to try and get to 300 million other people who are daily unimpressed with the fact that the lights come on when we flick the switch or the poop goes away when we flush the toilet. We have to remember we’re all connected,” he concluded.
Thursday press conference set to expose top Chuck Schumer staffer, White House doctor and others caught, plus display more than 50 lbs. of pedophilic paraphernalia seized in the sting.
WHAT: Predator DC Season 2 Press Conference Announcing Dozens More Busts
WHEN: Thursday November 18, 2021, High Noon
WHERE: Predator DC HQ, 1599 N Colonial Ter Arlington, VA 22209
PREMIERING SOON: Following on the first Season of Predator DC, which exposed 18 DC-area sexual predators, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have carried out another sting operation catching dozens more pedophiles attempting to sexually abuse children. In this case, Predator DC made use of both a male and female decoy posing as underaged teens online.
Busted In Sting: Scott Mexic (Far Left), Andrew Koneschusky (Top Middle), Cid Praderas (Bottom Middle), Mark Hotz (Top Right), Mark Milford (Bottom Right)
For Season 2, Predator DC cooperated with local law enforcement to ensure the criminal prosecution of the predators caught in their sting. “We can’t thank the brave men and women of the Glenarden Police Department enough” Jack Burkman said. “In particular, we owe a great deal of gratitude of Sgt. Shelby and Cpl. Covington” added Jacob Wohl.
Throughout the sting operation, sex predators brought a bevy of paraphernalia which they planned to use in the course of their molestation of decoys who they believed to be underaged teens. This included high heels, lingerie, condoms, sex toys of all kinds, booze and narcotics. Predator DC seized more than 50 pounds of the paraphernalia in cooperation with law enforcement, to prevent it from being used by the predators on other children.
Andrew Koneschusky, age 40, served as the national press secretary for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Prior to that, he served as the national press secretary for disgraced Former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Currently, as a Partner at CLS Strategies, he lobbies for Qatari state-owned media company Al Jazeera and drone manufacturer DJI. Koneschusky came to Predator DC’s sting house, rigged with hidden cameras, to have sex with a decoy posing as an underaged teen boy.
Predator DC’s hidden cameras rolled as Koneschusky (age 40) poured alcohol and clanked glasses for Predator DC’s decoy posing as an underage teen boy.Hidden cameras captured the moment that Koneschusky began stripping naked while demanding that the decoy show him his genitals.
Koneschusky’s arrival at the sting house in a suburb outside Washington DC came after he exchanged a series of very sexually explicit messages with the decoy who he believed to be an underage teen boy.
Andrew Koneschusky was confronted by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl as he stood half naked, demanding to see the decoy’s private parts.
Koneschusky also brought narcotics known as ‘poppers’ to use on the boy he believed to be underaged. The FDA says they are tracking ‘increases in deaths and hospitalizations’ related to poppers.
Just before his arrival at the sting house, Koneschusky sent the decoy this photo, showing the poppers he planned to use on the boy he believed to be underaged.
The operation nabbed dozens of DC-area sexual predators who happen to be in positions of power, public trust and great influence. This included many people who possess top-secret security clearance.
Predator DC Producer and co-Host Jacob Wohl peers out a top story window with binoculars to get a closer look as a sex predator arrives at the sting house.
Scott Mexic, age 64, had a long and storied career as an operations officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, spying oversees from Europe to Afghanistan. In recent years, he’s taken up a second career in investment banking, currently serving as a principal at CIH International and as a partner at Ingenris, LLC. At Ingenris, Mexic recently led the purchase of British Telecom’s Latin American assets. Mexic traveled across state lines to Predator DC’s sting house to have sex with a girl who he believed to be just 15 years old.
Scott Mexic (age 64) looks over as he’s interrogated by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman after coming to meet a 15 year old girl.
Mexic, like many of the predators caught in the sting, came bearing neatly wrapped gifts for the decoy, who he believed to be a 15 year-old girl home alone while her father traveled out of town on business. Mexic lavished the decoy with food and bottles of wine. He also brought an aroma therapy device, balloons filled with disturbing written messages, an herbal aphrodisiac known as ‘Blue Lotus’, edible marijuana and a sex toy. He admitted during the interrogation that he planned on drugging and then molesting a 15 year old girl.
Jacob Wohl cuts open the packaging of the sex toy brought by Scott Mexic, as Mexic (off-screen to the left) watches.
Mexic stated that it was his “first time” coming to meet an underaged teen from the internet for sex. All but one of the other Predators said the same.
Mexic shed his sweater and watched as Jacob Wohl opened one of the many wrapped gifts brought for the decoy posing as a 15 year old girl.
The depraved nature of the predators caught in Season 2 was shocking to the show’s producers Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, as well as the show’s allies in law enforcement.
One predator, an official for the State of Maryland, stripped naked upon entering the home to meet an underaged teen girl. Jacob Wohl handed him a towel to cover up with, before interrogating him.
Cid Praderas, age 66, has worked as an engineer for NASA for the past two decades. After sending numerous pictures of his genitals to Predator DC’s decoy posing as an underaged teen, Praderas came to the sting house for sex.
Praderas (age 66) pretended to be confused about where he was when confronted by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman for questioning.
After exiting the sting house, Prederas stuck around in the neighborhood attempting to warn other perverts as they converged on the sting house.
Praderas captured on camera as he roved through the neighborhood, flashing his lights and honking his horn to warn fellow pedophiles that a sting was underway.
Cid Praderas’ efforts to warn other perverts as they approached the sting house were short lived, as he was swiftly pulled over and apprehended by officers from the Glenarden Police Department.
In some cases, predators spent hundreds of dollars on inappropriate gifts for the decoy, who they believed to be an underaged teen.
Mark Milford brought a bag of gifts for the decoy posing as an underaged teen, but quickly left the sting house when confronted by Wohl and Burkman.
Milford (age 62) looks at chat logs showing images of his genitals that he sent the decoy who he believed to be an underaged teen girl.
Milford sent some of most explicit chats ever encountered by Predator DC.
Milford walks away from the sting house with his eyes cast down as he carries away his bag of gifts.
Mark Hotz, age 62, works as an official at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency which regulates banks. He came to the sting house to have sex with Predator DC’s decoy posing as an underaged boy.
Hotz (age 62) puts on his shoes as he’s interrogated by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman.
Many more Predators were caught in Season 2 of Predator DC. Some of those not discussed in this press release include a White House Doctor and a DOJ official, among many others.
A sampling of more of the pedophiles caught red-handed and interrogated in Season 2 of Predator DC.
SEASON 1 FINALE: Predator DC’s Season 1 Finale airs this Wednesday at 9 PM EST on PredatorDC.com.
IMPORTANT: Thursday’s press conference will expose the perverts caught in Predator DC’s second season. Exclusive content from the filming of Season 2 will be unveiled for the first time. The Predator DC cast and crew will be available for questions from the media.
ALL SUBJECTS ARE PRESUMED INNOCENT UNLESS AND UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY IN A COURT OF LAW.
To report an incident or suspicious situation that may involve the sexual exploitation of children, file a report on the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)’s website at www.cybertipline.com, or call 1-800-843-5678.
A recent training session for ballot reviewers in Seattle, Washington, provides the perfect illustration why Democrats should never be allowed to set the nationwide voting standards.
Post Millennial reporter Katie Daviscourt shared video of an official with King County Elections discussing a mail-in voting envelope that was missing a ballot from the Nov. 2 election.
Instead, there was a candidate statement page taken out of the voter guide for the defeated Seattle mayoral candidate Lorena Gonzalez with an “L” or checkmark with a “+” sign written at the bottom.
“If there had been no handwriting at all, we would have just called this superfluous materials and we wouldn’t bring it before the board,” the official said.
But given the markings, the election official brought it before the voter board for review.
She further noted if the “voter” had circled Gonzalez’s name on the page, then there would not even be a question. The vote would count, because intent is clear.
WOW! During a review board, officials in Seattle admit that if someone were to write a candidates name on a napkin their vote would be counted.pic.twitter.com/EXHjuxtmGJ
“So, even if someone took a napkin and wrote the office, the race, and their selection, that would be enough?” the official was asked.
She replied, “That would be enough and we would count that as a vote.”
With the Seattle mayor’s post being officially nonpartisan, the race featured Gonzalez, the progressive president of the Seattle City Council, versus Bruce Harrell, a former City Council president.
Harrell won with a crushing 61.9 percent of the vote to 37.8 percent for Gonzalez, according to Ballotpedia.
As The New York Times noted in an April 2020 report, Democratic-dominated Washington state is one of only five states in the country where elections are conducted entirely by mail. (The state also offers same-day voter registration up to Election Day, according to the secretary of state’s office website.)
So, the standards for counting a mail-in voter matter there even more than most places. And as the video shows, those standards are so low as to be non-existent.
The bottom line is Democrats do not care about voter fraud.
In the name of preventing “voter suppression,” they will count any kind of vote.
That is why it is vital that House Resolution 1, the “For the People Act,” or any variation close to it, must never become law.
Do you think a ballot should be required to vote?
The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, stated at the Election Integrity Virtual Conference at Regent University in the spring, “H.R. 1 is the worst bill I’ve ever seen and the most dangerous bill I have ever seen when it comes to elections.”
The legislation, which passed the House in March with no Republican support, would overturn voter ID laws, which are present in 34 states.
Other changes included in the bill would require states to allow same-day voter registration, ballot harvesting and automatic voter registration.
Automatic voter registration would mean large numbers of the millions of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. would be registered to vote if they have any interaction with a government agency, such as obtaining a driver’s license or attending a state university.
What the nation needs after all the uncertainly and questions surrounding the November 2020 elections is more confidence in the process, not less.
Believe it or not, people do cheat, and the easier you make it to cheat, the more cheating you’ll get.
Requiring voters to actually use a ballot is a pretty baseline rule. At least the number of ballots mailed and to whom they were sent can be tracked.
With a napkin or any other piece of paper, this is not true and should never be counted.
As the trial for 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse drew to a close, leftists continued their efforts to revise history in favor of their narrative. That included lead prosecutor Thomas Binger, who praised a crowd full of violent rioters on Monday.
During his closing argument, Binger said that the mob in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was composed of “heroes.”
Binger describes the mob in Kenosha that was burning the city as a “crowd full of heroes” who tried to stop an “active shooter” in Kyle Rittenhouse.
Since the riots in the city over the justified police shooting of Jacob Blake took place over a year ago, some people might need a refresher of what happened. Luckily, The Post Millennial editor Andy Ngo posted videos on Twitter showing Binger’s “heroes” committing various acts of arson.
WARNING: The following videos contain vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
The trial of accused teen shooter Kyle #Rittenhouse in #Kenosha, Wisc. has brought in a new round of gaslighting mainstream press coverage that obfuscates how violent the BLM-Antifa riots were there. Video by @Julio_Rosas11: pic.twitter.com/zCGGB864td
BLM rioters also threatened to kill people who attempted to protect businesses and promised to “burn your shop down too.”
Armed BLM rioters attacked & threatened to kill the group protecting a gasoline station as fires and violence engulfed #Kenosha, Wisc. in August 2020: pic.twitter.com/hrUUGUzf00
Flashback August 2020 in #Kenosha: “We’ll burn your shop down too”
For days, the city was under siege by rioters who rampaged through the streets destroying property, starting fires & promising violence against the locals. #Rittenhousepic.twitter.com/m41xhcbowt
Sarcasm aside, lies like these are incredibly dangerous. By calling these criminals “heroes,” Binger is trying to demonize Rittenhouse for defending himself against them.
To anyone who has seen videos from the Kenosha riots, Binger’s characterization of the mob is ridiculous. Sadly, not everyone has seen those videos, and those who are ill-informed about the riots may believe Binger’s lies.
In reality, the three men who attacked Kyle Rittenhouse were far from heroes. According to NBC News, Rittenhouse testified that Joseph Rosenbaum chased him after previously telling Rittenhouse and others he would “cut your f—ing hearts out.” Rittenhouse said he killed Rosenbaum in self-defense.
Were the rioters in Kenosha “heroes”?
Rittenhouse testified that Anthony Huber, the second man he killed, was beating him with a skateboard and attempted to take his gun before he shot him. Gauge Grosskreutz, whom Rittenhouse shot and injured but did not kill, allegedly pointed a pistol at Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse shot him.
Binger attempted to argue the men were trying to strip Rittenhouse of his gun to protect others, but he failed to provide convincing evidence to prove that point. Rittenhouse said he did not kill anyone until he felt his life was in danger, and there has been no evidence presented that would prove his claim false.
It is now up to the jury to decide whether or not Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, and they should be allowed to reach their own verdict without the fear of outside influence. But as they deliberate, they should not be swayed by Binger’s blatant misrepresentation of the rioters that night.
The Twitter executive responsible for blocking stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop is one of several advisers to the Aspen Institute’s disinformation commission.
Yoel Roth is one of several questionable advisers to Aspen’s Commission on Information Disorder, which on Monday released its much-anticipated report. Commission members include Katie Couric, who recently acknowledged that she edited comments on National Anthem protests out of a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to preserve the justice’s reputation with liberals. Another commissioner, Rashad Robinson, helped fuel actor Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax.
Commission members’ censorship of legitimate news stories could undercut their lofty mission. The commission blamed “decreasing levels of public trust” in public institutions for the crisis, which it dubs a “whole-of-society problem that can have life-or-death consequences.” Its report calls for Congress and the White House to take action to counteract disinformation.
Roth, the head of site integrity at Twitter, blocked access to an Oct. 14, 2020, New York Post article regarding emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Roth told the Federal Elections Commission he blocked the story in part because the intelligence community had briefed him that foreign governments might release hacked materials prior to the election. No evidence has emerged that Biden’s laptop was stolen or hacked, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has since acknowledged that the company should not have blocked links to the story.
The Aspen Commission report criticizes Twitter and other social media companies for failures to rein in disinformation but does not cite Twitter’s censorship of the Biden article.
The tech billionaire who funded the commission, Craig Newmark, has sponsored research that pushed disinformation about Biden’s laptop. Newmark paid for a study from New York University that asserted that social media companies are not biased against conservatives. The report defended Twitter’s decision to block the Hunter Biden laptop story and pushed the unsubstantiated claim that the news reports were based on “stolen” documents.
Undisclosed in either the Aspen Institute report or the New York University study is that Newmark donated more than $100,000 to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
Robinson, the president of the racial justice group Color of Change, repeatedlycirculated the false claim that Smollett, who is black and gay, was attacked by two white Trump supporters who hurled bigoted slurs at him. Robinson pushed the hate crime allegation even after evidence emerged that Smollett staged the attack.
Another commission adviser, Renee DiResta, advised American Engagement Technologies, a tech company that created fake online personas to stifle the Republican vote in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama. The company, which was funded by progressive tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, created fake Russian bots to follow the Republican candidate. DiResta denied knowledge of the Alabama initiative and later joined another tech company, New Knowledge, that took part in the disinformation project.
The Aspen Institute did not respond to requests for comment.
Alejandro Mayorkas ‘not familiar’ with Democrats’ favorite immigration talking point
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday claimed not to be familiar with one of the Democratic Party’s favorite immigration talking points regarding children held in “cages” at the U.S. border with Mexico.
“How many children have been in the Biden cages in calendar year 2021?” Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) asked Mayorkas during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Senator, I respectfully disagree with your use of the term ‘cages,'” Mayorkas responded.
Cruz was referencing the “kids in cages” talking point, which Democratic politicians relentlessly repeated during the Trump administration to describe the Obama-era practice of detaining immigrant children in cage-like structures while their parents were processed by the legal system. The practice has continued under President Joe Biden, despite his pledge to end it, as illegal immigration has surged to record levels on his watch.
“Fine, you can disagree with it,” Cruz said. “I’ve been to the Biden cages, I’ve seen the Biden cages. How many children have you detained at the Donna [Texas] tent facility in the cages you built to hold kids? How many children have been in those cages?”
Mayorkas insisted that he not only disagreed with the term, he also didn’t know what it meant. “I, respectfully, am not familiar with the term ‘cages’ and to what you are referring,” he said.
General Motors, set to welcome Biden to Michigan factory, has paid Jeff Ricchetti nearly $200K to lobby White House and Congress
After paying the lobbyist brother of a top White House aide nearly $200,000 this year, auto giant General Motors has won an official visit from the president to showcase its new electric vehicle factory.
Jeff Ricchetti, the brother of Biden’s longtime political consigliere Steve Ricchetti, has disclosed $160,000 in payments from General Motors since President Joe Biden took office to lobby the White House and Congress on electric vehicle tax incentives, according to his firm’s lobbying disclosure forms. The investment appears to have paid off—on Wednesday, Biden will attend the grand opening of the company’s new electric vehicle factory as part of his push for Congress to “approve big tax incentives for zero-emission vehicles,” precisely what Ricchetti was paid to push for.
Steve Ricchetti has been one of Biden’s closest advisers for nearly a decade and played a leading role in framing the administration’s infrastructure negotiations. Neither the White House, Jeff Ricchetti, nor General Motors responded to requests for comment on Jeff Ricchetti’s role in arranging the visit.
Ricchetti has cashed in on his family ties to the administration. Ricchetti has already brought in $2.4 million in lobbying fees this year, double his 2020 haul of $1.2 million, according to numbers compiled by OpenSecrets. Ethics experts have criticized the Biden administration for allowing Steve Ricchetti to work on issues his brother is being paid to lobby the administration on.
“Steve Ricchetti ought to completely recuse himself from any part of the legislation that his brother’s firm is lobbying on, and then have the White House not take calls from his brother,” said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics chief and Democratic candidate for office.
The lobbying disclosure forms show General Motors paid Ricchetti’s firm, Ricchetti Incorporated, to lobby on “issues related to tax incentives for electric vehicles and charging stations,” “the availability of semiconductors,” and “climate policy that affect the automobile industry.”
General Motors has received outsized attention from the Biden administration since bringing on Ricchetti. After the company hired Ricchetti in February, the president hosted its CEO for an April summit on semiconductors. One month later, the company met with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo about semiconductors. Ricchetti’s lobbying disclosures show he was paid to lobby the Department of Commerce for General Motors in the weeks prior to those meetings.
Three of Steve Ricchetti’s children work in the Biden administration, prompting Politico to label Biden’s White House “the Ricchetti administration.” Walter Shaub, White House ethics chief during the Obama administration, said the Biden administration’s decision to permit nepotism amounts to a “f— you” to ethics experts.
General Motors said it was “excited to welcome” Biden for the opening of its Factory ZERO in Detroit. The longtime company factory has been repurposed to focus entirely on electric vehicles and will be used as the backdrop for Biden to promote tax incentives for electric vehicles included in his spending plan, according to Reuters.
Biden’s visit to General Motors is his latest trip to companies with close ties to his administration. Biden has also visited electric battery manufacturer Proterra, where his energy secretary Jennifer Granholm was on the board of directors.
It’s not hard to hide things in a 2,135-page document, and that is exactly what the Democrats tried to do in their new spending bill.
It has already been quite a fight for the Biden administration to get Democrats to back the $1.75 trillion bill. There was disagreement over the timing of the bill and its relation to the rest of the president’s Build Back Better plan.
But now the discovery of a provision, tucked on page 1647, may cause even more disagreement over the legislation.
The provision would end the requirement of a Social Security number in order to get child tax credits. This would mean that billions of dollars could be doled out in child tax to credit to just about anyone. Illegal immigrants would be able to claim child tax credits with this new provision.
“No credit shall be allowed under this section to a taxpayer with respect to any qualifying child unless the taxpayer includes the name and taxpayer identification number of such qualifying child,” current law regarding child tax credits stipulates.
Steven Camarota, a researcher with the Center for Immigration Studies, told Fox News he estimates that repealing this requirement could lead to about an extra $2.3 billion in payouts to illegal immigrants for child tax credits.
Camarota also estimated a big payout for all the illegal immigrants who have U.S.-born children.
“[W]e estimated that illegal immigrants would receive $8.2 billion in cash payments from the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which is part of budget reconciliation bill, also referred to as the Build Back Better (BBB) Act,” Camarota wrote for CIS.
This massive spike in payouts is also a result of the new program increasing the child tax credit maximum payment.
Should Congress pass this bill?
“The new program significantly increases the maximum cash payment, which is referred to as a ‘refundable credit,’ from $1,400 per child under the old ACTC to $3,600 for children under six, and $3,000 for children six to 17. The new CTC is only extended for one year in the BBB, after which the maximum for all children would be $2,000,” Camarota wrote.
But even if the CTC payout decreases again next year, the payouts will still be significantly higher if the requirement of a Social Security number is eliminated.
“The elimination of the SSN requirement also allows the more than 600,000 illegal immigrants encountered at the border in family units or as unaccompanied minors and released in FY 2021 to receive cash payments from the new CTC,” Camarota wrote.
These CTC payouts are not be confused, however, with Biden’s previous idea to pay those immigrant families that were separated at the border because they “deserve some kind of compensation.”
This amount of payouts for child tax credits is going to be damaging. Keeping the whole immigration argument out of it, just on the financial side this kind of extra spending is irresponsible.
Biden’s whole bill is already $1.75 trillion, and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the whole Build Back Better plan could massively increase the deficit.
“CBO estimates that enacting this title would result in a net increase in the deficit totaling $150.7 billion over the 2022-2031 period. That increase in the deficit would result from an increase in direct spending of $151.5 billion and an increase in revenues of $0.8 billion,” the CBO announced Monday.
Despite all this, though, Democrats still seem to be determined to pass this spending bill this week.
“Yes, we intend — that is our plan to pass the bill the week of Nov. 15, as is indicated in our statements that were made at the time of passing the infrastructure bill, and we’re very proud of that,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Nov. 9, according to the New York Post.
So in the midst of our economy still hobbled and recovering from COVID, and inflation hitting a 30 year high, Democrats want to throw billions more away.
One of the prosecution’s star witnesses in the homicide trial of Kyle Rittenhouse has a long criminal rap sheet, and some charges he faced were dropped just before the trial began last month, according to a report.
Gaige Grosskreutz, who was shot and injured by Rittenhouse during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last summer, was called by the state in its attempt to prove that Rittenhouse acted maliciously.
Prosecutors portrayed Grosskreutz, 28, as an upstanding citizen who was serving as a paramedic during the riot.
Grosskreutz admitted during cross-examination that Rittenhouse only shot him in the arm after he drew a gun on the teen.
WISCONSIN—Rittenhouse trial:
Defense: “With your arms up in the air, he never fired?”
Gaige Grosskreutz: “Correct.”
Defense: “It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun…pointed at him that he fired?”
Grosskreutz also admitted to Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger that he did not have a valid gun permit at the time of the incident.
Gaige Grosskreutz, who was shot in the arm by #Rittenhouse, is asked if I he had a permit to carry the firearm he had when he rushed toward the teen. “I did,” he responds. He is asked if the permit was actually valid.
A new report claims Grosskreutz has a criminal record spanning more than a decade.
He has been accused of burglary, drink driving, carrying a loaded gun while intoxicated, domestic abuse, prowling and trespassing, the Daily Mail reported.
He also has a history of disobeying and lying to police.
Six days before he testified about his encounter with Rittenhouse, a DUI charge against him was dropped on a technicality, according to the Mail.
This prevented the defense team from questioning Grosskreutz about his criminal past. The jury likewise heard nothing about it.
Nine days before he was shot by Rittenhouse, Grosskreutz was arrested for filming vehicles in a police parking lot in West Allis, Wisconsin, the Mail reported.
“Gaige made clear his anti law enforcement views,” officer Ryan Stuettgen wrote in the police report of the incident.
In 2012, Grosskreutz was arrested in New Berlin, Wisconsin, for allegedly burglarizing a home and stealing three video game consoles. The police report of the incident noted that officers suspected Grosskreutz of being dishonest with them.
In 2010, Grosskreutz was allegedly involved in an incident in which he hit his own grandmother in the face and smashed a lamp against a wall.
The jury in the Rittenhouse trial began deliberations on Tuesday morning following closing arguments on Monday.
On Oct. 27, Attorney General Merrick Garland sat before Congress and claimed the FBI would not be flagging parents protesting at local school board meetings as potential domestic terrorists.
Whistleblower documents released on Tuesday, however, suggest this may have been an outright lie.
The documents, sent to House Republicans by an anonymous FBI staffer, show that the FBI’s counterterrorism and criminal investigative divisions were tracking threats against teachers by flagging certain instances with “threat tags.”
Questions over whether or not the FBI was improperly investigating parent protesters first arose after Garland sent an Oct. 4 memo to the FBI directing the agency to track “threats” against public school officials. This memo came shortly after the National School Boards Association penned a letter to President Joe Biden demanding he treat “the growing number of threats” against school board members as acts of domestic terrorism.
Garland claimed during his Oct. 27 testimony that his memorandum did not rely upon the NSBA’s letter. However, according to Fox News, recently released internal emails show that both the White House and the Department of Justice coordinated with the NSBA prior to the release of Garland’s memo.
Following its release, Republicans quickly became concerned over Garland’s order, given that the attorney general had no examples to point to as credible “threats” against school officials. This led many to believe the target of these orders was actually the growing number of parents protesting against critical race theory, masking policies and other left-wing policies spreading throughout the American school system.
Concerns that such “threats” were being overly exaggerated seemed to be confirmed by the NSBA itself on Oct. 22 when the group apologized for its letter, saying “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
Did Garland lie to Congress?
According to CNN, Garland dismissed accusations that his order would be used to target parents, claiming the directive he gave the FBI was merely meant to respond “to concerns about violence, threats of violence, other criminal conduct.”
Here is the clip of AG Merrick Garland telling Congress that he “could not imagine any circumstance” that parents complaining about their school boards would be “labeled as domestic terrorism.”
“That’s all it’s about, and all it asks, is for federal law enforcement to consult with, meet with local law enforcement to assess the circumstances, strategize about what may or may not be necessary to provide federal assistance, if it is necessary,” Garland told Congress.
Given the leaked documents, these claims appear to be outright false.
The documents show that the FBI set up an investigative process to track potential threats against school board members and teachers by assessing “threat tags.” Whether or not these “threat tags” are being or have been applied to protesting parents remains unclear.
According to one of the leaked documents, threat tags are to be used in all “investigations and assessments of threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
In a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal, the FBI maintained it “has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now.”
In a letter addressed to Garland, House Republicans are demanding the attorney general provide answers regarding the whistleblower documents and his Oct. 27 testimony.
🚨🚨🚨#BREAKING: Whistleblower Discloses Explosive Documents Showing FBI Using Counterterrorism Tools to Investigate Parents pic.twitter.com/HpbdtinJQo
“We are now in receipt of a protected disclosure from a Department whistleblower showing that the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division is compiling and categorizing threat assessments related to parents, including a document directing FBI personnel to use a specific ‘threat tag’ to track potential investigations,” House representatives said in the letter.
“This new information calls into question the accuracy and completeness of your sworn testimony.”
“This disclosure provides specific evidence that federal law enforcement operationalized counterterrorism tools at the behest of a left-wing special interest group against concerned parents.”
Three corporate CEOs are making a name for themselves – as ‘woke’ enemies of the people.
Ed Bastian of Delta Air Lines, Ryan Marshall of PulteGroup, and AT&T CEO John Stankey are just the latest CEOs to announce they are going SJW.
Delta CEO Bastian stated after a Georgia voting bill was passed, “After having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill, coupled with discussions with leaders and employees in the Black community, it’s evident that the (voting) bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong,” said Bastian.
Bastian is perpetuating the lie that voting integrity is somehow racist. Additionally, according to insiders, Mr. Bastian has made it apparent that he will pursue what he perceives to be “Delta’s values” inside the company.
Will Delta go as far as AT&T?
John Stankey, the CEO of AT&T, told the company’s 230,000 employees in an April 2021 email that white employees should read an article saying that they are racist, to confess their ‘white privilege’ and acknowledge ‘systemic racism,’ and engage with this Marxist struggle session or suffer penalties in their performance reviews.
Stankey coerced his workers to use AT&T’s “anti-racism portal” where they are told “American racism is a uniquely white trait and that black people cannot be racist.”
An AT&T senior employee that blew the whistle to journalist Chris Rufo described the pressure to take the anti-racism training. “If you don’t do it, you’re a racist,” said the whistleblower.
Walmart has launched a similar critical race theory training program that denounces the United States as a “white supremacy system” and teaches white hourly-wage workers that they are guilty of “white supremacy thinking” and “internalized racial superiority.”
Ryan Marshall of PulteGroup has made it mandatory that recurring meetings and announcements of a Diversity and Inclusion Board begin at the company. According to one insider, despite Mr. Marshall’s mandatory Diversity and Inclusion Board, “there doesn’t appear to be any accomplishments of the Diversity Board,” and its “likely just a smokescreen while black employees aren’t actually seen or heard from in any real way that changes this company.” Marshall, like many of these CEOs, may be using these diversity struggle sessions as a way to weed out employees that are not completely subservient liberal yes men and yes women.
One CEO, Marc Lobliner of MTS Nutrition, is standing up to the woke mob. When Disneyland’s Snow White ride was under fire from the left online, because Snow White was “kissed without her consent,” Lobliner tweeted, “CANCEL DISNEY!!!! They’re as woke as anyone. Let them eat themselves.”
Lobliner has been standing tall against the leftist insanity.
“Political views shouldn’t affect how we think of others. But the ‘woke’ cancel those who disagree,” said Lobliner. “Liberals are easy to fool. They just want to be on team woke.”
Lobliner is the creator of the Outright Bar and the Chief Marketing Officer of TigerFitness.com.
When the right supports CEOs that stand up for America and conservative values, the culture war gains supply lines, and becomes a fight that patriots can win.
Christina Karaoli Taylor, Multicultural Competency Trainer, CKT Cultural Strategies: “I challenge you [journalists] to stop thinking in terms of objective journalism. We’ll discuss why that’s not really feasible anymore.”
Ron Treviño, CBS Houston News Anchor: “I don’t really care if people trust us or not, we still have to do our job. Whether they trust us is the least of my concerns — whether they trust me or not.”
Grady Tripp, Tegna Chief Diversity Officer: “At this point, if you’re not listening to a podcast, or looking at a video, or reading any of the information that’s out as far as equality and social justice and race, you don’t care…The other thing is we’re going to be holding stations accountable, right? We’re going to be holding stations accountable because we know it’s important to the organization. KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] are going to change, right? KPIs are going to reflect diversity and inclusion from a representation standpoint.”
Brett Mauser, Former CBS San Antonio Promotions Producer and Whistleblower: “I don’t want to destroy the news. I don’t want anybody to get fired. I want people to change and realize that they are supposed to be objective.”
Mauser: “Teaching journalists at a national level, ‘Don’t be objective.’ To me, that was what journalism always was: to be objective. In my mind, if journalism is not objective, it’s not journalism — it’s propaganda.”
Mauser: “This mindset has been able to grow and infect what was supposed to be the fourth pillar of society. The journalists are supposed to be our watchdogs. They’re the ones that are supposed to be protecting us from tyranny and supposed to be going out there and finding out and giving us the truth.”
Mauser: “I would tell people — my friends, family — you can’t trust the news. ‘You’re being manipulated. Well, how do you know? I work in the news!’”
CBS San Antonio RESPONDS: “A journalist’s job is to present the truth and report the facts, not cater to opinions. Our inclusivity program makes our journalism stronger, particularly for communities that have not been well-served by our industry. We will continue this important work.”
[SAN ANTONIO – Nov. 16, 2021]
Project Veritas released a new video today featuring an interview with CBS San Antonio [KENS 5] whistleblower, Brett Mauser, who exposes his colleagues and outside corporate partners for promoting a political ideology rather than objective journalism in the newsroom.Play
In one instance, Christina Karaoli Taylor, CKT Cultural Strategies’ Multicultural Competency Trainer, was brought in to train CBS San Antonio journalists and defined the expectations.
“Much of what we’re gonna talk about today is going to center around the main code of ethics of journalism. And a couple things — during this workshop and throughout your day, I challenge you to stop thinking in terms of objective journalism. We’ll discuss why that’s not really feasible anymore. But [think] in terms of accuracy, fairness, and transparency — always striving for objectivity is not feasible,” Taylor said.
“That was the one that blew my mind. Teaching journalists at a national level, ‘Don’t be objective.’ To me, that was what journalism always was: to be objective. In my mind, if journalism is not objective, it’s not journalism — it’s propaganda,” Mauser said.
Ron Treviño, who serves as one of CBS Houston’s [KHOU] most experienced and main news anchors, was recorded admitting that he is indifferent about conveying trust to the public through his reporting.
“I don’t really care if people trust us or not, we still have to do our job. Whether they trust us is the least of my concerns — whether they trust me or not,” Treviño said.
“To me that seems like — that’s part of the job. That you need trust to be able to do your job. Your job is to inform. If you can’t trust who you’re getting the news from — you’re not doing your job,” Mauser said in response to watching Treviño’s statement.
On another occasion, Tegna’s Chief Diversity Officer, Grady Tripp, can be seen describing how employees should be evaluated more heavily on their adherence to a political ideology rather than their skillset in journalism. Tegna is the parent company of CBS San Antonio and CBS Houston, along with 62 other news stations across the country.
“At this point, if you’re not listening to a podcast, or looking at a video, or reading any of the information that’s out as far as equality and social justice and race, you don’t care…The other thing is we’re going to be holding stations accountable, right? We’re going to be holding stations accountable because we know it’s important to the organization. KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] are going to change, right? KPIs are going to reflect diversity and inclusion from a representation standpoint,” Tripp said.
“It’s about the narrative. It’s about pushing an agenda,” Mauser said to Project Veritas founder and CEO James O’Keefe in response to watching Tripp. “It feels almost threatening, doesn’t it?”
Mauser expressed concern for the state of journalism in the United States after witnessing these behaviors at CBS San Antonio on a regular basis.
“This mindset has been able to grow and infect what was supposed to be the fourth pillar of society. The journalists are supposed to be our watchdogs. They’re the ones that are supposed to be protecting us from tyranny and supposed to be going out there and finding out and giving us the truth,” he said.
“I would tell people — my friends, family — you can’t trust the news. ‘You’re being manipulated. Well, how do you know? I work in the news!’”
Mauser explained to O’Keefe why he decided to come forward to Project Veritas.
“I don’t want to destroy the news. I don’t want anybody to get fired. I want people to change and realize that they are supposed to be objective. They are being told by another company and by their parent company to ‘not be objective’ — to be divisive. I just want them [CBS San Antonio] to admit they have a problem.”
In response, CBS San Antonio made the following statement when asked for comment:
“These assertions by a former employee are a severe misunderstanding of what valuing inclusivity, diversity and equity in a newsroom means. This lack of understanding is exactly why we’re doing this training. A non-news employee secretly taped inclusivity training where our journalists were given tools and information and shared perspectives on how we can better serve all our audience. A journalist’s job is to present the truth and report the facts, not cater to opinions. Our inclusivity program makes our journalism stronger, particularly for communities that have not been well-served by our industry. We will continue this important work.”
About Project Veritas
James O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2010 as a non-profit journalism enterprise to continue his undercover reporting work. Today, Project Veritas investigates and exposes corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions to achieve a more ethical and transparent society and to engage in litigation to: protect, defend and expand human and civil rights secured by law, specifically First Amendment rights including promoting the free exchange of ideas in a digital world; combat and defeat censorship of any ideology; promote truthful reporting; and defend freedom of speech and association issues including the right to anonymity. O’Keefe serves as the CEO and Chairman of the Board so that he can continue to lead and teach his fellow journalists, as well as protect and nurture the Project Veritas culture.
Project Veritas is a registered 501(c)3 organization. Project Veritas does not advocate specific resolutions to the issues raised through its investigations.
The Biden administration conveyed its intention Monday to pause new oil and gas drilling for twenty years within a ten-mile radius of the Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, which already prohibits oil and gas drilling within its borders, drawing objections from the 24th Navajo Nation Council, which represents allottees of oil and gas leasing within the perimeter and which favors a five-mile protective radius instead.
Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, which is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an International Dark Sky Park, contains structures inhabited by the ancient Puebloan peoples from roughly 850 to 1250 AD.
The administration’s announcement comes after Congress approved a one-year ban on oil and gas leasing within a ten-mile perimeter of the park as part of the 2021 spending bill passed in December 2020.
According to a press release from the Department of the Interior, the proposed move “would not affect existing valid leases or rights and would not apply to minerals owned by private, State, or Tribal entities.”
Yet the Navajo Nation Resources and Development Committee Chair Rickie Nez, representing the Navajo communities of T’iistsoh Sikaad, Nenahnezad, Upper Fruitland, Tsé Daa K’aan, Newcomb, and San Juan, expressed concern about the pause’s impact on Navajo allotment owners who may wish to open their land to oil and gas development.
“We must ensure the livelihood of Navajo allotted land owners in the greater Chaco Canyon area are maintained. The Navajo Nation through a resolution has provided a compromise to also protect this sacred area from mineral development. The Biden Administration has to work with us to find a solution that meets our needs and that is this 5-mile buffer zone,” Nez said in a press release from the Navajo Council.
“Tribal nations do better when they make their own decisions,” Biden said before mentioning the proposal for the ten-mile buffer zone as part of his remarks to the White House Tribal Nations Summit.
In Interior’s press release, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said the proposal was “a great example of how Tribally-led conservation can advance the nation’s goal of addressing climate change.”
Navajo Council Speaker Seth Damon, representing the communities of Bááhaalí, Chichiltah, Manuelito, Red Rock, Rock Springs, and Tséyatoh, had a different perspective.
“The Biden Administration bypassed previous requests to Congress for field hearings and for leaders to hear directly from our Navajo families affected in the Chaco Canyon region,” said Damon as part of the Navajo Council press release.
“It is important that the federal government consider and work with our Navajo allottees to further advance development. The Administration must respect our tribal sovereignty and what the government to government relationship entails,” he added.
His concerns were echoed by Mark Freeland, a Navajo council delegate representing the communities of Becenti, Lake Valley, Náhodishgish, Standing Rock, Whiterock, Huerfano, Nageezi, and Crownpoint.
“The Interior Department unilaterally made this withdrawal proposal without proper tribal consultation, now directly affecting our families on the Navajo Nation,” said Freeland in the press release.
By contrast, the All Pueblo Council of Governors (APCG), composed of the leaders of New Mexico and Texas’s twenty Pueblo nations, voiced its strong support for the Biden administration’s move, which it argued would protect vital artifacts and heritage from the ancient Pueblo and other tribes.
“On behalf of the 20 Pueblo Governors, we are overjoyed by the actions of President Biden and grateful to Secretary [Deb] Haaland for honoring the responsibility of each Pueblo Leader to protect Pueblo culture. Today’s announcement is the result of continuous prayers and the commitment to steward mother earth, our Sacred Trust,” said Wilfred Herrera, Jr., chairman of the APCG and former governor of the Laguna Pueblo nation, as part of an APCG press release.
Interior Secretary Haaland, the first top executive branch official of Native American ancestry since Charles Curtis served as vice president to Herbert Hoover, also belongs to the Laguna Pueblo nation.
A spokesperson for the APCG stated it did not have sufficient time to answer more detailed questions from The Epoch Times about the move, including the Navajo Nation’s concerns with it.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R.-Az.) and other Republican congressmen also objected to the move.
“Today’s latest land grab by the Biden administration will strip hundreds of Navajo Allottees of their rights to their lands by imposing an unscientific and overreaching buffer around Chaco Canyon. We heard from these allottees directly and urged the DOI to listen and reject this reckless policy. This action is another attack on America’s energy independence by the Biden administration. They are determined to shut down federal lands to all energy development while begging foreign countries for more oil. Americans reject this America Last policy,” Gosar said.
“Clearly President Biden prefers relying on our foreign adversaries for essential energy rather than domestic producers,” said Rep. Bruce Westerman (R.-Ark.)
The disagreement over lands near Chaco Canyon is one skirmish among many in the long-running conflict between Democrats and Republicans over the future of fossil fuels.
In April 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns throttled the nation’s economy, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) responded to a tweet about oil prices going negative by tweeting that “you absolutely love to see it.”
Ocasio-Cortez later deleted her tweet.
At an October meeting of the House Committee on Natural Resources, Ranking Member Westerman challenged Democrats on the committee to speak up if they did not ultimately seek to end domestic oil and gas production altogether.
FBI spokesperson says bureau not ‘in the business of investigating parents who speak out’
An unnamed whistleblower disclosed documents suggesting that the FBI is using its counterterrorism resources to investigate parents or individuals who threaten school board members, teachers, or other staff, according to a letter sent by the House Judiciary GOP dated Tuesday.
The GOP letter included copies of the documents allegedly sourced from the FBI whistleblower that included an email sent by Carlton L. Peeples, who serves in the bureau’s Inspection Division, saying that the Counterterrorism and Criminal Division “created a threat tag, EDUOFFICIALS, to track instances of related threats.”
“We ask that your offices apply the threat tag to investigations and assessments of threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” the email reads. The email was signed by Counterterrorism Division Assistant Director Timothy Langan and then-Criminal Division assistant director Calvin Shivers.
In their letter on Tuesday, the Judiciary Republicans said that Attorney General Merrick Garland testified in front of a House panel that the FBI and Department of Justice were not using counterterrorism resources to target threats against school board members. However, the newly unveiled document, they argued, disproves Garland’s comments.
An FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times on Tuesday evening that the bureau “has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now.”
“The FBI’s mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. These are dual and simultaneous and not one at the expense of the other,” the spokesperson said. “We are fully committed to preserving and protecting First Amendment rights, including freedom of speech. The FBI’s focus is on violence and threats of violence that potentially violate federal law.”
Before a counterterrorism investigation can be opened, there has to be information that indicates the possible use of violence or force, or a potential violation of federal law, the FBI spokesperson continued.
But according to House Judiciary Republicans, the whistleblower’s disclosure is evidence that federal law enforcement used counterterrorism resources at the behest of a “left-wing special interests group” to go after parents, referring to a letter that had been sent by the National School Boards Association several weeks ago linking parents who are concerned about school curriculum to domestic terrorists. It further said that the FBI and federal agencies should use the PATRIOT Act and other tools to go after parents.
After the initial letter was sent by the National School Boards Association, Garland issued a memorandum directing the FBI to address an alleged “spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” and create “dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting” on the matter. But on Oct. 23, the school boards group issued an apology to the White House over the language included in the letter.
Now, the whistleblower’s disclosure “calls into question the accuracy and completeness” of Garland’s testimony before the House Judiciary panel last month.
“If … you were aware of the FBI’s actions at the time of your testimony,” the Republicans wrote, the document “shows that you willfully misled the committee about the” Department of Justice’s use of counterterrorism tools to target parents.
During the House Judiciary Committee hearing, Garland denied allegations that his agency would label concerned parents as domestic terrorists.
“Justice Department supports and defends the First Amendment right of parents to complain as vociferously as they wish about the education of their children, about the curriculum taught in the schools,” he told lawmakers on Oct. 21.
Garland also suggested that Republicans were mischaracterizing his memorandum, saying it only pertains to threats of violence aimed at school employees and teachers.
“This is not about what happens inside school board meetings,” the attorney general remarked. “It’s only about threats of violence and violence aimed at school officials, school employees, and teachers.”
After the National School Boards Association issued its initial letter, dozens of school boards around the United States have cut ties with the group. On Monday, the Kentucky School Board Association said its members voted to withdraw their membership.
A Kenyan man who formerly worked as a home health care worker is now on trial after police say he killed 18 women in the Dallas, Texas, area over a two-year period.
But prosecutors say he might have killed as many as 24 women — and potentially more beyond that.
Billy Chemirmir, 48, was arrested in 2018 after the smothering death of 81-year-old Lu Thi Harris in her home. Police say Harris’ death was discovered after another woman, 91-year-old Mary Bartel, survived an attempted smothering by a man alleged to be Chemirmir in the Dallas suburb of Plano, The Dallas Morning News reported.
In that attack, Bartel said a man matching the defendant’s description forced his way into her apartment at an assisted living facility and tried to suffocate her with a pillow. She survived, but her attacker, allegedly Chemirmir, made off with jewelry, according to the Associated Press.
During the attack, the accused allegedly told Bartel, “Go to bed. Don’t fight me,” the AP reported.
A trial has begun for a man charged with killing 18 older women in and around Dallas, and stealing jewelry and other valuables. Billy Chemirmir, 48, is being tried in one of the deaths. His attorney has called the evidence against him circumstantial. https://t.co/0ffSoHjga7
Law enforcement officials from Plano have stated that the attacks on Harris and Bartel match other killings where elderly women were victimized inside of their homes and had possessions stolen. Chemirmir was arrested at his north Dallas apartment in March 2018.
Police say they found evidence linking him to both Harris and Bartel during his arrest.
Do you think Chemirmir should face the death penalty, if convicted?
But soon after he was taken in, the suspicious deaths of other elderly women came to light, and detectives began looking at Chemirmir in those cases. The Associated Press reported that Leah Corken, 83, was found dead in her apartment in Dallas.
Corken was believed to have died of a stroke, but her daughter said she had doubts about that assessment.
Billy Chemirmir has been charged with killing 18 older women across the Dallas area over a two-year span. Most of the victims were killed at independent living communities for older people, where Chemirmir allegedly forced his way into apartments. https://t.co/CviNtyDV7L
The woman told the AP that on the night before her mother had died, her hair was well put together and they had enjoyed a movie and gone shopping. When her body was found, her hair was in disarray, and her makeup was found smudged on a pillow.
“I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know,” M.J. Jennings told the AP. “I didn’t know it was murder.”
Prosecutors in Chemirmir’s murder trial, which began this week, say the deaths of more elderly women living at assisted living facilities were scrutinized. In each death, the victims shared something in common beyond age and gender.
Their jewelry and other valuables had been taken.
With the possibility that they might be dealing with a serial killer, police focused on hundreds of deaths. Eight of the women he is charged with killing all lived at the Tradition-Prestonwood Independent Living facility in Dallas. The other ten victims each resided in or north of Dallas.
One more death at the Tradition-Prestonwood facility is linked to Chemirmir, who was kicked off the property for alleged trespassing in 2016 after his release from jail on an unrelated matter. Prosecutors say he might have entered the homes of the victims by posing as a handyman, People Magazine reported.
The alleged killer faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The prosecution has declined to seek the death penalty, but more suspicious deaths are being probed.
Prosecutor Glen Fitzmartin, in his opening statement to jurors on Tuesday, said the defendant is guilty of “stalking, smothering and stealing,” according to the AP.
Attorneys for Chemirmir did not offer an opening statement, the Morning News reported. The defendant has denied any involvement in the slayings.
Chemirmir is originally from Kenya, but he has permanent legal resident status in the U.S.
A New Hampshire student is suing his high school for violating his right to free speech and religious beliefs after being disciplined for stating there are only two genders.
The freshman and football player for the school, identified as “M.P.” in the lawsuit, received a one-game suspension for violating the school district’s transgender student policy.
The student made the comments on a school bus and then later in a text exchange with another student off school grounds.
The student’s attorney, Ian Huyett of the Manchester-based Cornerstone Policy Research, said his client is seeking permanent relief from the school policy under protections for free speech and religious belief in the state constitution.
Huyett said the student is a practicing Catholic and has the constitutional right to hold the belief that there are only two genders.
“As the United States Supreme Court has said, students do not check their First Amendment Rights at the schoolhouse gate,” said Huyett.
“In New Hampshire,” he added, “we have a strong tradition of our state supreme court holding that our state constitutional protections are more protective of individual liberties than the corresponding federal right.”
District Superintendent Dave Ryan released a statement on the matter noting that the district had only just learned of the lawsuit on Nov. 9 and is in the process of reviewing it with legal counsel.
“We will be able to share a statement once we have completed that review,” Ryan said.
Calls made by The Epoch Times to the Exeter Regional Cooperative School Board, which enacted the gender policy, were not returned.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed on Nov. 4, the matter originated from a conversation the teenager was having with another student on a school bus.
It was about a request a female classmate made during their Spanish class that they use only non-binary pronouns in Spanish to address her.
It was another female student, said Huyett, who took offense to comments she overheard his client make in a conversation he was having with another student on a school bus ride home. They included the Spanish language not having non-binary pronouns.
According to Huyett, that student obtained his client’s phone number and initiated a texting debate over the issue. That student took screenshots of the texts and gave them to the school.
The following morning Huyette said his client was pulled out of class and told he was being disciplined for violating the school’s gender policy.
In another pending lawsuit against a New Hampshire school’s gender identity policy, a parent of a Gilford School District student was angered to learn the district’s policy permits and encourages school officials to hide disclosures students make about their sexual orientation from their parents.
The parent’s attorney, Rick Lehmann of the Concord law firm Lehmann Major List, said his client is also challenging the district’s policy for officials to issue no-trespass letters to anyone who doesn’t use non-gender pronouns on school grounds.
Huyett says he expects there will be more lawsuits to come in New Hampshire on the issue because so many public schools have adopted policies similar to the one being challenged.
Huyett’s legal fees in the case are being fully funded by the Cornerstone Policy Research, a nonprofit organization founded by 2020, and now 2022, New Hampshire Republican gubernatorial candidate Karen Testerman.
Testerman said she founded Cornerstone because too many New Hampshire residents with Christian values were underrepresented in legal and political matters. She said what happened to Huyett’s client is a prime example.
“It’s disturbing to have schools trying to control people’s thoughts by instituting this propaganda through alphabet policies,” she said.
The New Hampshire cases are the latest in a steady stream of lawsuits around the U.S. on school policies on the use of preferred pronouns.
Earlier in March, Virginia gym teacher Tanner Cross was suspended after refusing to use preferred pronouns of students over pronouns consistent with their original biological gender.
A judge later lifted the suspension and the Virginia Supreme Court, in ruling on an appeal of the court decision, ruled that the suspension violated the teacher’s First Amendment rights.
Also in March, an appeals court in Ohio sided with a college professor who claimed his right to religious beliefs were violated when he was disciplined by the Shawnee State University where he taught for refusing to call a transgender student by her preferred pronouns.
In the recent U.S. landmark case The United States vs. Varner, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the courts have no authority to compel the use of preferred pronouns because no federal statute gives them that authority.
Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Virginia Foxx of North Carolina are seeking access to communications between the Department of Education and the National School Boards Association over a letter from the latter comparing protesting parents to domestic terrorists.
In a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona exclusively shared with the Washington Examiner, the representatives demanded the department turn over all communications with the NSBA, the Department of Justice, and the White House regarding the September letter asking President Joe Biden to investigate protesting parents as domestic terrorists.
Jordan told the Washington Examiner the push for accountability from the agency is important because “moms and dads should be the ones making decisions about their kids, not the government. This idea that somehow the government is smarter than parents is ridiculous.”
The NSBA has since apologized for the September letter, which infamously prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to issue a memo forming an FBI-DOJ task force to investigate parents protesting at school board meetings. Emails later showed the White House had coordinated with the NSBA on the release of the letter.
Jordan and Foxx are the ranking members for the House Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Education and Labor, respectively.
The letter asks for communications between administration officials and the NSBA regarding the appointment of the association’s president, Viola Garcia, to the National Assessment Governing Board, which publishes the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “nation’s report card.”
Another January 6th Commission member is compromised by the CCP
Rep. Elaine Luria – a member of the Congressional January 6th Commission – has six-figure investments in a Chinese Communist Party-linked tech firm flagged by the U.S. State Department for aiding the regime’s military and espionage capabilities, The National Pulse can reveal.
The Virginia Congresswoman‘s most recent financial disclosure reveals an investment worth $250,000 to $500,000 in Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant whose executives include powerful members of the Chinese Communist Party.
LURIA DISCLOSURE.
Alibaba has also been involved in the “research, production, and repair of weapons and equipment for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)” and has a “deep record of cooperation and collaboration” with China’s “state security bureaucracy,” former Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation Christopher Ford revealed.
The State Department has also flagged the company as a “tool” of the Chinese Communist Party, aiding in its build-up of “technology-facilitated surveillance and social control.”
Significantly, the modern “China Model” is built upon a foundation of technology-facilitated surveillance and social control. These techniques for ruling China have been – and continue to be – in critical ways developed, built, and maintained on behalf of the Party-State by technology firms such as Huawei, Tencent, ZTE, Alibaba, and Baidu. As these companies export their products and services to the rest of the world, the security and human rights problems associated with this “China Model” are progressively exported with them.
Companies including Alibaba “have no meaningful ability to tell the Chinese Communist Party “no” if officials decide to ask for their assistance – e.g., in the form of access to foreign technologies, access to foreign networks, useful information about foreign commercial counterparties, insight into patterns of foreign commerce, or specific information about the profiles, activity, or locations of foreign users of Chinese-hosted or -facilitated social media, computer or smartphone applications, or telecommunications,” the report adds.
Yesterday, The National Pulse revealed how Rep. Adam Schiff, another Jan 6th commission member met with a Chinese Communist Party official previously responsible for spearheading the regime’s foreign influence operations on a visit to Washington, D.C. sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation.
Furthermore, the Chairman of the Commission, Bennie Thompson, has a history of backing extremist guerilla warfare groups in America. Read more here.
There is, understandably, bi-partisan concern about the decision. It allows foreign nationals to fund signature collecting, qualify measures and financially support campaigns to amend or create statutory law. (And in some states, even amend its Constitution.) Imagine foreign nationals in China, Russia, or even Iran legally funding multiple ballot measures in battleground States in 2022 or 2024. And why? For their own financial gain and political agenda.
I’ve spent my career running ballot measures in almost every state and several abroad. As someone who sees a lot of them – Indian and non-Indian gaming, tax increases, energy, healthcare reform, and more – an equally concerning threat is the impact on voter turnout.
Anything that motivates turnout – even at the margins of an already historically active electorate – can have a massive impact on election results. It is a statistical fact that ballot initiatives and referenda, particularly controversial measures, can increase voter turnout by five to 10 percent.
That’s what happened in Arizona last year.
In 2020, Arizona’s proposition 207 to legalize the recreational use of marijuana drove more voter participation than Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as you see in the chart below.
A closer look shows that Arizona flipped in favor of Biden on the coattails of recreational marijuana. If Prop. 207 was a “Presidential candidate” in Arizona it would have won by over 200,000 votes. The post-election analysis shows proposition 207 drove hundreds of thousands of young, Democratic voters who also cast votes for Joe Biden.
Another concerning aspect is money – ballot measure committees can accept an unlimited amount.
Individuals, committees, associations and businesses are allowed to contribute as much as they want to support or oppose a ballot measure, as long as it’s disclosed on the campaign contribution/expenditure report, which most states require.
Thankfully, given the FEC ruling only applies to federal issues on individual state’s ballots, the states retain some authority and autonomy to help backstop the FEC’s decisions and mitigate the potential for Election Day manipulation by foreign actors.
Each state sets its own rules for ballot measures. That includes the process for qualifying a measure, the number of signatures required, what can and cannot be a subject on the ballot, the level of financing disclosures or transparency and more.
States must take a thoughtful look at this new FEC policy and how it might impact wider results on Election Day, particularly in Presidential election years.
In all their various forms, ballot measures are an essential part of the direct democracy process. History has shown that direct democracy – although not perfect – has resulted in dramatic social and economic changes that legislative bodies didn’t have the courage to do themselves. But it is reserved for state and local citizens and not foreign nationals.
If the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial weren’t already aware of the high-stakes politics surrounding their deliberations, Judge Bruce Schroeder has made it absolutely clear.
In his instructions on Monday, Schroeder emphasized that the jury must make its decision on its own, without interference from anywhere — especially not from President Joe Biden.
“You will pay no heed to the opinions of anyone — even the president of the United States or the president before him,” Schroeder said.
The Aug. 25, 2020, shooting was a national story from the moment it took place, with the mainstream media, leftist activists and major figures in the Democratic Party rushing to paint the then-17-year-old Rittenhouse as a savage racist hellbent on causing trouble among demonstrators protesting a police shooting of a black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
At an Aug. 30, 2020, news briefing, in fact, then-President Trump was asked if he would “condemn the actions of vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse.”
Trump has rarely been accused of being overly judicial in his choice of words, but this time, his answer was dead on.
“We’re looking at all of it. And that was an interesting situation,” he said.
Do you think Kyle Rittenhouse should be acquitted?
“You saw the same tape as I saw. And he was trying to get away from them, I guess, it looks like. And he fell, and then they very violently attacked him. And it was something that we’re looking at right now, and it’s under investigation.”
In other words, after giving a brief summary of what it “looks like” on video seen by virtually the entire country, Trump concluded only that “it’s under investigation.”
Unfortunately for the cause of the American system of justice, Trump’s then-Democratic opponent Joe Biden and his presidential campaign showed no such restraint.
In an Aug. 27 interview with CNN, Biden acknowledged his own ignorance about the case, but immediately suggested through his response to a question from Anderson Cooper that Rittenhouse was a “militia” member who had gone to Kenosha with criminal intent — and, of course, Biden then attacked Trump for not attacking “white supremacy.”
And that was no slip of the tongue in the middle of a television interview.
In a Twitter post published after the first Trump-Biden debate (a debacle moderated by a disastrous Chris Wallace of Fox News), Biden used Rittenhouse’s image in a video, again attacking Trump for allegedly failing to denounce “white supremacists.”
Nothing like a presidential campaign ad to poison a jury pool.
Rittenhouse’s mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, took to Fox News’ “Hannity” program last week to blast Biden for the ad.
“When I saw that, I was in shock, I was angry,” she said.
“President Biden don’t know my son whatsoever, and he’s not a white supremacist. He’s not a racist. And he did that for the votes.”
“And I was so angry for a while at him and what he did to my son. He defamed him,” Rittenhouse said.
That’s putting it mildly.
Fair-minded Americans should be disgusted at the political posturing that’s surrounded the Rittenhouse case, as left-wing politicians and media outlets that normally drip with sympathy for criminal defendants howl for the blood of a teenager who defended himself while caught in a potentially deadly situation.
And fair-minded Americans should be praying that those jurors in the case really are immune to the politics outside the courthouse.
To come to a just verdict, they need to disregard everything but the facts of the criminal case and how they apply to Wisconsin self-defense law.
That means disregarding the intense political pressure that’s surrounding the case from the left.
And it especially means disregarding statements from the man now in the White House.
If you go to work at one New York City school, a teacher said, it’s OK to wear a Black Lives Matter t-shirt — but don’t you dare wear a shirt that says “Proud Zionist” with the flag of Israel on it.
According to a report in Sunday’s New York Post, Jeffrey Levy — a teacher at MS 51 in the extremely woke neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn — says he was told by the school’s principal not to wear the shirt in school, even though Black Lives Matter and women’s rights shirts have been donned by other staff members.
In a discrimination complaint Levy filed, he said principal Neal Singh told him that students and staff at the school complained about the “Proud Zionist” shirt and a previous “Back the Blue” pro-police tee he wore.
“Singh told me that my t-shirt with an Israeli flag on it and the words ‘Proud Zionist’ were ‘politically explosive,’” read his complaint, which was filed Sept. 30 with the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity at the New York City’s Department of Education.
“He told me that Zionism involves the retaking of Palestinian land and is ‘offensive,’” the complaint added.
“Schools are not public forums for advancing personal political views, and per Department of Education regulations, employees are prohibited from using schools for the purpose of political expression,” said Department of Education spokeswoman Katie O’Hanlon.
Is anti-Semitism a serious problem in NYC?
“This principal’s request followed complaints from students and staff and is consistent with policies around political neutrality in schools.”
There’s a question as to whether or not the shirts were in violation of city school regulations.
“School buildings are not public forums for purposes of community or political expression,” Chancellor’s Regulation D-130 reads.
“While on duty or in contact with students, school personnel may not wear buttons, pins, articles of clothing or any other items advocating a candidate, candidates, slate of candidates or political organization/committee.”
Levy argued “Proud Zionist” doesn’t violate that, given that it has nothing to do with political expression or advocating for a candidate — noting in his complaint Zionism is a religious movement in support of the creation and maintenance of the state of Israel.
However, he highlighted in his complaint that, to the extent that it was political, there was a clear double standard at work at MS 51.
“Singh has permitted other staff to wear attire with ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ‘Feminism is the radical idea that women are people,’ ‘Feminist’ and [female Supreme Court justices] ‘O’Connor & Ginsburg & Sotomayor & Kagan,’” his complaint read.
“Singh’s definition of politically explosive attire appears limited to Jews only,” the teacher said.
“None of my attire, actions or beliefs endanger the emotional or physical safety of students or staff, which Singh accused me of … I have conducted myself professionally and have always respected the beliefs of all while doing my job neutrally and without bias … His attempt to threaten and intimidate me is anti-Semitic.”
Both Levy and the group Americans Against Antisemitism — headed by former state Assemblyman Dov Hikind — provided the Post with pictures of some of the shirts worn by other teachers; the Post’s article included one which said “Feminist.”
In a video for Americans Against Antisemitism, one which says “Black Lives Matter” can also be seen.
BREAKING: NYC Public School Teacher’s Job Threatened for Wearing Zionist T-shirt to School
Teachers there wear BLM and other political t-shirts, but only the Zionist was threatened!
“How insulting. This is sick. This is pathetic. This is anti-Semitic,” Hikind told the Post regarding Levy’s treatment.
“You can’t say you’re a proud Jew and supportive of the people and the State of Israel?”
Hikind, who is a Democrat, said the city’s Department of Education was “representing the extreme left, the radical wing of the Democratic Party” by having different standards for “Proud Zionist” t-shirts than it did for “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts.
“There should be one standard for all. But this is what’s going on in our city,” Hikind said.
Indeed, this is one of the more unfortunate problems of the de Blasio years in New York City — with anti-Semitic hate crimes up and city hall taking an unusually strong interest in cracking down on Orthodox Jewish communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is only a complaint at the moment, but it’s certainly a complaint that’s entirely believable given the priorities of the city’s leadership.
What gets defined as “politically explosive” only runs one way for the woke, after all — and support for Israel, unfortunately, very much runs that way.
The budget reconciliation package pushed by Democrats creates a new expanded child tax credit (CTC) that would pay illegal immigrants some $10.5 billion next year. All immigrants with children are eligible, regardless of how they got here and whether their children are U.S.-born. This includes the roughly 600,000 unaccompanied minors and persons in family units stopped at the border in FY2021 and released into the country pending a hearing. Cash welfare to illegal immigrants is not just costly; it also encourages more illegal immigration.
Although it is referred to as a “refundable credit,” the new CTC, like the old additional child tax credit (ACTC) it replaces, pays cash to low-income families who do not pay any federal income tax. The new program significantly increases the maximum cash payment from $1,400 per child to $3,600 for children under 6, and to $3,000 for children ages 6 to 17. After 2022, the maximum payment would be $2,000 per child, but advocates hope the much larger payments will be extended.
In an analysis conducted in October, my colleague Karen Zeigler and I estimated that illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children would receive $8.2 billion from the new CTC. However, we had assumed that the new program, like the old ACTC, would require children claimed as dependents to have Social Security numbers (SSNs). But reconciliation (page 1452, line 14) would permanently repeal this requirement.
Illegal immigrants are able to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. In the case of the old ACTC, they simply acquired an individual taxpayer identification number, which is not hard, and then claimed their payment. In practice, only illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children could receive payments under the old system, since as American citizens those U.S.-born children receive SSNs. The permanent elimination of the SSN requirement means that even illegal immigrants whose children are also illegally in the country can receive the new expanded credit.
If the reconciliation bill is passed, we now estimate illegal immigrants whose children are also illegally in the country will receive $2.3 billion from the new CTC, for a total of $10.5 billion in cash payments to illegal immigrant parents. This includes illegal migrants here in 2020 and those stopped and then released into the country in 2021. These payments are not related to the huge cash settlements the administration is planning to pay illegal immigrant families separated at the border during the Trump administration.
Receipt of payments under the new CTC would be all the easier because reconciliation also eliminates the work requirement of the old ACTC for next year. In the past, some illegal immigrants who worked off the books sometimes had trouble demonstrating employment income. Dropping the work requirement makes it even simpler for them to receive payments.
These payments represent an enormous inducement to illegal immigration. We estimate that 78 percent of illegal immigrants with children have income low enough to receive cash payments averaging $5,300 per family, or about $2,600 per child next year. To place these numbers in perspective, the median income in the current top illegal immigrant-sending countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador is $3,000 to $4,000 a year. The cash payment we are offering to virtually anyone who arrives with a child, whether they work in the United States or not, is roughly equal to—or in some cases exceed—what migrants could earn in their home countries in one year.
In addition to creating large costs for taxpayers and encouraging illegal immigration, the elimination of the SSN requirement would seem to be an invitation to fraud, as tax filers now simply need to provide a name and date of birth for a child. The only other requirement is that they check a box on their returns indicating they lived in the United States for half a year, though there is no enforcement mechanism for this provision. Partly in response to a 2011 report from the Inspector General for Tax Administration showing that illegal immigrants made extensive use of tax credits, Congress included provisions in both the 2015 PATH Act and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act designed to restrict illegal immigrant receipt of such programs. This included the requirement that the qualifying child have an SSN. The budget reconciliation effectively undoes those changes.
To be sure, most illegal immigrants who come to America do in fact work. But the welfare benefits we give to them certainly incentivizes even more illegal immigration. The list of things we have failed to do to enforce our immigration laws is so long that it can’t even be summarized here. But if we want to understand why a record 1.7 million people were apprehended at the border in FY 2021, we need to look no further than the large cash payments the House plans to give illegal immigrants.
Ohio’s attorney general on Monday filed a lawsuit against Meta, formerly known as Facebook, accusing it of violating federal securities law by misleading investors in claiming that its products don’t harm children’s health and wellbeing.
Attorney General Dave Yost filed the lawsuit (pdf) on behalf of the state’s pension fund—the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS)—and Facebook investors.
The suit accuses Facebook of having violated federal securities laws by having “knowingly exploited” children for profits, while “purposely misleading the public” that its products don’t harm children, and that the company had taken steps to stop the spread of misinformation and harmful content.
“Facebook said it was looking out for our children and weeding out online trolls, but in reality was creating misery and divisiveness for profit,” Yost said in a statement. “We are not people to Mark Zuckerberg, we are the product and we are being used against each other out of greed.”
Dave Yost in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 6, 2018. (Justin Merriman/Getty Images)
A Meta spokesperson told news outlets, “This suit is without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen in October shared a series of internal documents from the company that showed it was aware its platforms “facilitate dissension, illegal activity, and violent extremism, and cause significant harm to users, especially children,” but still refused to correct the issues, Yost said in the complaint.
The complaint also cited a series of company documents published by The Wall Street Journal in September. Among them were documents that showed Facebook did not tell the public about its internal studies that repeatedly found that Instagram users, mainly teenage girls, suffer from negative effects, including worsened body image issues, anxiety, and depression.
Zuckerberg said on Oct. 25 the leaked documents provided to the Journal and other news outlets paint a false picture of the findings of the studies, and that its products also bring benefits to its users.
The lawsuit alleges that Zuckerberg and other company officials purposefully lied about the safety, security, and privacy of its platforms.
Facebook had admitted in those internal documents that, “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” Yost’s office noted in a release.
According to the complaint, the revelations resulted a devaluation in Facebook’s stock of $54.08 per share, causing Facebook investors to lose more than $100 billion within about a month.
Yost’s lawsuit is seeking to recover the loss in shareholder value and is demanding that Facebook change its practices to make sure it will no longer mislead the public about its internal practices.
Mitch Landrieu will oversee $1.2 trillion in infrastructure spending
President Joe Biden’s pick to oversee $1.2 trillion in infrastructure spending is a top adviser to a trade organization that seeks Chinese investment in American infrastructure.
Mitch Landrieu serves as strategic adviser to the United States China Heartland Association, which supports cultural and business exchange between China and 20 states in the American heartland. The association frequently partners with Chinese Communist Party front groups that operate abroad.
Landrieu’s position with the Heartland Association could raise eyebrows given the organization’s promotion of Chinese investment in domestic infrastructure projects. American officials have expressed concern that the Chinese government and state-linked companies use infrastructure investments in foreign countries to influence policy abroad. Heartland Association chairman Bob Holden, the former Democratic governor of Missouri, this year urged Chinese investment in U.S. infrastructure, saying it presents a “win-win” for both sides.
Landrieu is an unpaid adviser to the Heartland Association, according to Executive Director Min Fan. Fan said that the association’s advisers—a list that includes Export-Import Bank nominee Reta Jo Lewis—”are all Governor Holden’s friends who agreed to be consulted when we need their advice.” Fan told the Washington Free Beacon that she is not aware of Landrieu’s providing any advice to the Heartland Association.
Biden on Sunday appointed Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans, to serve as infrastructure coordinator, a position in which he will supervise spending on roads, bridges, ports, and other infrastructure across the country. The White House says Landrieu’s work on rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina makes him qualified for the post.
The Heartland Association has worked closely with two Chinese Communist Party organizations, the China-United States Exchange Foundation and the Chinese People’s Association for Relations with Foreign Countries. An executive with the China-United States Exchange Foundation serves on the Heartland Association’s board of directors.
CIA director William Burns testified this year that in his previous role as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he severed ties with the Exchange Foundation because of its efforts to influence American policymakers. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo last year cancelled a diplomatic event sponsored by the Chinese People’s Association for Relations with Foreign Countries, saying the group sought to “malignly influence” state and local leaders to advance China’s foreign policy goals.
While the Heartland Association does not disclose its financial backers, the group has touted partnerships with Chinese automotive glass maker Fuyao Group and solar panel maker Wanxiang New America.
Event will feature Chinese military contractors behind hypersonic missile test
A scion of the Bush family is lending his influence and family name to boost a Chinese government contractor blacklisted by the U.S. government for its links to the Chinese military.
Neil Bush, the son of President George H.W. Bush, is a cosponsor of the International Symposium on the Peaceful Use of Space Technology that begins Nov. 18 in Beijing. Three co-chairmen of the forum are executives with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), a state-controlled contractor that builds China’s military and space equipment. A subsidiary of CASC reportedly developed a hypersonic missile that the Chinese military tested in August. American officials called the nuclear-capable missile a “national security crisis” because of its ability to evade detection.
Bush’s sponsorship of the space symposium adds a veneer of respectability to the event amid growing concerns about China’s increasingly aggressive military and space activities. The Trump and Biden administrations have prohibited American companies from doing business with CASC because of its position in the Chinese military-industrial apparatus. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which tracks China’s military activities, rates CASC a “very high risk” to foreign nations’ security because of its links to China’s military and intelligence services.
Bush has extensive business ties in China and has worked closely with some of the country’s propaganda organizations. He chairs the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations, which is cosponsoring the space symposium. The Bush Foundation received $5 million in funding in 2019 from the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a leading think tank in the Communist Party’s propaganda network. Bush’s business partner, the Chinese real estate investor Wang Tianyi, is executive chairman of the space symposium.
“Bush is basically a power broker. He’s an access point for the Chinese to leverage,” said Brandon Weichert, a space security analyst and author of the book Winning Space.
Weichert said the space symposium follows “the classic Chinese model” of using academic and business forums to recruit experts and investors in the West.
“One of their big missions is to get Western talent and investment to come to China to do cutting-edge research and development,” Weichert told the Washington Free Beacon.
A spokeswoman for the Bush-China Foundation said they are not concerned by CASC’s links to the Chinese military, saying that the symposium will focus on the development of space technology for use in the health care industry.
“We are not concerned because it is not relevant to the content of this particular conference, which is unrelated to China’s military and is instead focused on global space technological advancements and rules-setting,” said Leslie Reagan, the communications director for the Bush-China Foundation.
Reagan said that Bush does not have a financial interest in the space symposium and that neither he nor the foundation are paid to take part in the event.
Bush is also linked to China-focused think tanks with ties to business leaders and the Biden administration. In 2019, Bush served as an honorary vice chairman of the annual gala for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a think tank that facilitates dialogue between American and Chinese leaders. High-level Biden officials—including CIA director William Burns, National Security Council official Kurt Campbell, Ambassador Nicholas Burns, climate envoy John Kerry, and State Department deputy secretary Wendy Sherman—served as vice chairs for the gala alongside Bush.
American policymakers disagree about whether the United States should collaborate with China on space exploration, with critics expressing concern that China would steal technology from their American counterparts. Some in President Joe Biden’s orbit have urged cooperation between the United States and China on space research, including NASA administrator Bill Nelson.
“We should collaborate, no doubt about it,” Bush said about the space symposium in a recent interview with the Center for China and Globalization, a Communist Party-linked think tank.
There is some indication that the organizers of the space symposium concealed the CASC officials’ links to the organization. An itinerary for the symposium lists the officials’ affiliations with various international space organizations. But a review conducted by the Free Beacon shows the officials—Wu Yansheng, Yuan Jie, and Yang Baohua—serve as chairman, president, and vice president of CASC, respectively.
The China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics, a CASC subsidiary, reportedly launched a hypersonic missile in August, the Financial Timesreported. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the test “very concerning” and said it shows China is “expanding rapidly in space, in cyber and then in the traditional domains of land, sea and air.” The Chinese missile, which surpasses American technology, cannot be detected by radar. It has raised concerns in some circles that China is developing war plans, or may use its military might to invade Taiwan.
“We do not have at present either the capability to reliably track that attack or to put up a reliable defense against a Chinese hypersonic attack,” Weichert, the space security expert, told the Free Beacon.
In addition to his business interests in China, Bush has been one of Beijing’s biggest defenders against allegations of human rights abuses. Chinese state-controlled media have used some of his remarks in their propaganda efforts, such as his criticism in 2019 of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. Bush dismissed protesters’ complaints about a Communist Party-backed national security law and questioned whether the U.S. government was propping up pro-democracy demonstrations. The Chinese government has since used the law to arrest dissenters and shut down news organizations that criticize it.
An organizer for the event did not respond to questions.
Two minority students say law school deans Heather Gerken, Ellen Cosgrove, and Yaseen Eldik retaliated against them when they refused to slime ‘Tiger Mom’ Amy Chua
The Yale Law School administrators at the center of the “traphouse” incident are now the subject of an unrelated lawsuit alleging that they “worked together in an attempt to blackball two students of color from job opportunities as retaliation” for their refusal to make damning statements about a professor. The suit charges that their actions violated the university’s harassment policies, which prohibit the administration from taking “any adverse action” against a person “who has reported a concern” or “participated in an investigation.”
The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court on Monday, alleges that the law school’s dean Heather Gerken, associate dean Ellen Cosgrove, and diversity director Yaseen Eldik retaliated against two students after they refused to “make knowingly and materially false statements” against Amy Chua, a Yale Law professor who has courted, and attracted, controversy.
When the students refused, Gerken and Cosgrove allegedly asked a professor not to offer them a prestigious fellowship—in part by suggesting that both students were untrustworthy. In conversations with the two students, Eldik and Cosgrove also allegedly suggested they would suffer career repercussions for their refusal to comply.
The alleged tactics mirror those displayed by university administrators in their handling of the now infamous “traphouse” controversy, in which they suggested to second-year law student Trent Colbert that his refusal to apologize for an allegedly racist email might cause him trouble with the bar.
The new case centers on an entirely different Yale Law School controversy that resulted in Gerken removing Chua from a teaching post for allegedly violating an agreement with the administration not to host students in her home.
The main evidence against Chua came in the form of a “dossier” disseminated by a law student who alleged that the plaintiffs had attended and then lied about secret dinner parties at Chua’s residence. Instead of investigating those allegations—which the plaintiffs deny, and which professors characterized as “unpersuasive”—Cosgrove and Eldik told the plaintiffs they had a “moral obligation” to confirm the claims made against Chua in the dossier, according to the lawsuit.
At an April 2021 meeting, the administrators also threatened to tell a professor who had offered the students a fellowship about the allegations against the students unless they turned on Chua, a threat Cosgrove and Gerken made good on days later. The suit accuses Eldik, Cosgrove, and Gerken of making “defamatory statements” that they knew to be false.
A spokeswoman for Yale Law School said the lawsuit is “legally and factually baseless” and that the university would “offer a vigorous defense.”
President Joe Biden’s latest some $2 trillion social spending plan will add trillions to the national debt, make inflation worse, and hurt traditional energy businesses. These were the contentions of a group of Heritage Foundation policy scholars.
During a press briefing on Nov. 12, they reviewed the president’s Build Back Better policies.
The original Build Back Better proposal called for $4 trillion in spending. Some progressives said it was not big enough. But opposition from Senator Manchin (D-W.Va.) required the proposal’s price tag come down.
Heritage Foundation experts lambasted both the recently passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the latest $1.75+ trillion social and environmental spending proposal. The latter is pending in Congress.
“The White House’s newly released framework,” the Heritage Foundation said in a statement, “returns to a tried-and-true way to obscure the true cost of the legislation: the budget gimmick. Progressives claim the bill is a compromise when in reality, it is a profoundly radical document that would massively expand federal power, promote a variety of left-wing causes, kneecap the economic recovery, and waste a tremendous amount of taxpayer money.”
The White House Press Office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
At the same time, a high Biden administration was recently predicting the latest package would pass Congress, which might take up the issue next week. Still, Heritage Foundation officials said it would be toxic.
Katie Tubb, an energy analyst, warned that spending billions of dollars proposed for alternative energy companies would repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration, which spent billions of taxpayer dollars on loan guarantees for the Solyndra solar energy company. The company later defaulted.
“I’m not sure why we are expecting this to be any different this time around,” she said.
Tubb contended much of the economic growth over the last few years has come from traditional energy sources. This Biden plan, she added, would punish those industries.
“Why is that important? Because Americans get 80 percent of their energy from traditional sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas,” she said.
Tubb argued, “these are legal industries in the United States that contribute to the wellbeing of the United States, yet you wouldn’t know this by the way this administration talks.”
Tubb warns Build Back Better policies conflict with most of the president’s constituents “because, as you increase energy prices, you increase the cost of almost every product and service.”
She also said Build Back Better would hurt right to work states, states in which workers can’t be required to join unions.
This Biden’s original social spending proposal included $555 billion for environmental programs and $400 billion to pay for universal pre-school and cap child care costs at seven percent of income for most families and $200 billion to expand the child tax credit for families that earn up to $150,000 from $2,000 to $3,000 per child or $3,600 for those under age 6.
Several Heritage Foundation officials also complained that the five infrastructure/stimulus plans that have been passed since the outbreak of COVID last year are too much. And while one or two of these packages may have been justified, they are now excessive, they said. They are adding too much to the debt and will hurt efforts of some private sector firms to recover, especially in the energy sector, they noted.
David Ditch, a Heritage Foundation federal budget policy analyst, said the latest Biden plan is part of a number of spending plans since the start of the pandemic that have “already added $5 trillion to the national debt.”
It would also be the “greatest expansion” of government welfare programs in history, according to Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation analyst.
“The deficit spending has consequences because we have massive structural consequences that will keep growing,” Ditch contended.
“There’s also no way to escape the fact that Build Back Better would increase deficits in the first five years. It’s really important to understand that every important economic headwind we face now would be worsened by Build Back Better,” according to Ditch.
Rachel Greszler, another Heritage Foundation analyst, said most of the Biden child care programs discourage the use of religious, or faith-based, child-care programs.
“To qualify, they would have to take most of the faith out of their programs. None of them are going to do that because the reason they set them up was to be in line with their faith.”
She also said the proposal will primarily benefit urban “high income families” at the “expense of more rural low-income areas.”
Still, a Biden administration official on Nov. 11 said the $2 trillion proposal is in good shape. Vice President Kamala Harris, in a speech in France, predicted the package “is poised to pass soon.”
“Just before I traveled here,” Harris added, “our Congress passed a landmark piece of legislation to make a historic investment in our nation’s infrastructure. Another bill that will support our nation’s working families and help us meet our climate commitment is poised to pass soon.”
The David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) has become the latest conservative victim of cancel culture after The Breakers, the world-famous resort hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, informed the organization it will no longer host its events because it’s “too controversial.”
“After a 20-year relationship with The Breakers resort, the Freedom Center was informed that we would no longer be allowed to have our annual Restoration Weekend event at the resort due to the Center being too controversial,” DHFC President Michael Finch told The Epoch Times.
“This is yet another egregious example of cancel culture and the shutting down of free speech.”
Cancel culture refers to the phenomenon or practice of publicly rejecting, boycotting, or ending support for specific individuals or organizations based on their views or actions.
Islam expert and Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes expressed outrage on Twitter, saying conservatives “must boycott” The Breakers “until it apologizes.”
The Breakers was the site of DHFC’s latest Restoration Weekend, which concluded Nov. 14.
Among the speakers were Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, Manhattan Institute scholars Heather Mac Donald and Christopher Rufo, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, journalist Andy Ngo, Center of the American Experiment President John Hinderaker, and authors Victor Davis Hanson and Dinesh D’Souza.
DHFC, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization, was founded in 1988 by former 1960s radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz and his longtime collaborator, the late Peter Collier.
The center describes itself as “unique among conservative think tanks whose emphasis is on public policy and institutional reform in that it sees its role as that of a battle tank, geared to fight a war that many still don’t recognize.”
It says that for years, “the Center has been warning that the political left has declared war on America and its constitutional system, and is willing to collaborate with America’s enemies abroad and criminals at home to bring America down.”
Horowitz, 83, didn’t attend this year’s Restoration Weekend because he’s recovering from surgery.
In a statement, he blamed cancel culture for the hotel’s actions.
David Horowitz speaks at CPAC in Washington on Feb. 12, 2011. (CC BY-SA 3.0)
DHFC events at The Breakers have featured five members of presidential cabinets, including three U.S. attorneys general and half a dozen military heroes, including two Medal of Honor recipients, Horowitz said.
“We are a very American, patriotic organization whose efforts on behalf of this country have been recognized, appreciated, and supported by its elected leaders. Yet this year we have been informed by the Breakers’ management that we are too controversial and will not be welcomed back again.
“When the corporate power structure joins an anti-democratic ruling party to perform its dirty work in shutting down free speech and demonizing its political opponents, you have the classic definition of a fascist regime.
“Like many other Americans, we will not be silenced or intimidated by these tactics. And we will conduct our fight by calling our would-be silencers by their right names.”
Approached by The Epoch Times, The Breakers confirmed it had severed its business relationship with DHFC, but denied that politics had anything to do with it.
“For over a century, our resort has proudly hosted organizations of all ideologies and agendas, regardless of their special interests,” Sara A. Flight, the hotel’s communications director, said in an emailed statement.
“We have always bestowed the highest level of hospitality with unquestionable inclusivity. Politics has never factored into our company’s business decisions.
“Over the past few years, our management team has reviewed the heightening logistical and operational requirements of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s annual program, and on that basis, the decision has been made not to extend a contract moving forward. In the interest of our clients’ privacy, we do not share information regarding conferences and their specifications.”
The Breakers, a palatial oceanfront hotel with intricate paintings on its high ceilings, was modeled after the Villa Medici in Rome. It was founded in 1896 by gilded age industrialist Henry Morris Flagler, a co-founder of Standard Oil Co. who led the development of Florida as a vacation center.
The Breakers is located in Palm Beach, less than 3 miles north of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s private club.
Palm Beach has taken on a special significance to the GOP because Republican donors and operatives now regularly congregate in the coastal town to meet with the former president and strategize.
“Palm Beach is the new political power center, and President Trump is the Republican Party’s best messenger,” senior Trump adviser Jason Miller told CNN in April.
(Disclosure: The author of this article has spoken at DHFC events at The Breakers and contributes to that organization’s publications.)
Educators pursuing a career as a middle or high school English teacher should be “trained in anti-racism,” according to a newly released set of teaching standards created by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
The NCTE last revised its standards for educators preparing to teach English language arts (ELA) in grades 7 to 12 in 2012. The professional organization said that since then, literacy demands “have changed the landscape significantly” and that “the issues of justice, equity, and diversity” have become central for English teachers and learners.
The latest NCTE standards, released last week, replace the term “social justice” in the 2012 version with “anti-racist” and “anti-bias” based on “expert advice,” according to the council. It now recommends that prospective English teachers “apply and demonstrate knowledge of learners and learning to foster inclusive learning environments that support coherent, relevant, standards-aligned, differentiated, and antiracist/antibias instruction to engage grade 7–12 learners in ELA.”
“Bigotry, discrimination, oppression, divisiveness, and racism are part of the world in which future teachers of English are working,” NCTE President Alfredo Celedon Lujan said in a statement announcing the standards. “These new standards seek to support educators as they prepare to go into the classroom.”
When it comes to the definition of racism, the council defines racism in America as the “systematic mistreatment and disenfranchisement of people of color who currently and historically possess less power and privilege than white Americans.”
“Racism … and other forms of discrimination continue to be a part of American society, continuing to affect all students and their education,” the council declares, asking that teachers “explicitly push for anti-racism by participating in ongoing professional development for educators to succeed in countering racism and other forms of bigotry.”
Anti-racism is one of the concepts popularized by proponents of critical race theory (CRT), an outgrowth from Marxism that views society through the lens of a power struggle between white and non-white people, which proponents assign the labels of “oppressors” and “oppressed,” respectively. CRT advocates see deeply embedded racism in all aspects of American society and deem it to be the root cause of racial inequity, or different outcomes for different races.
Rather than teaching children tolerance, it requires discriminatory “antiracist” practices to solve the perceived inequity, according to CRT advocates. As explained in Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 book “How to Be an Antiracist,” discrimination should be considered “anti-racist” so long it is “creating equity.”
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi.
The NCET didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The council will be holding its annual convention next week, featuring guest speakers such as former first lady Michelle Obama and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leading author of The New York Times’ controversial “1619 Project,” a collection of historically revisionist literature promoting the idea that the United States is an inherently racist nation founded to preserve slavery.
High oil prices are a symptom of economic and monetary imbalances, not a consequence of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decisions.
Throughout history, we have seen how OPEC cuts have done little to elevate prices when diversification and technology added to rising efficiency. Likewise, OPEC output increases don’t necessarily mean lower prices, let alone reasonable ones. OPEC helps but doesn’t solve price issues, even if they would probably like to.
The problem in the oil market has been created by years of massive capital misallocation and underinvestment in energy—the result of extremely loose monetary policies directed by governments that have penalized capital expenditure on fossil fuels for ideological reasons.
Misguided activism and political nudging in the middle of monetary injections have created bottlenecks and underinvestment that hinder both security of supply and a technically feasible competitive energy transition.
Massive injections of liquidity have caused a double side effect: rising malinvestment in non-productive activities and, now, a large inflow of capital into so-called “value” areas—more money directed to relatively scarce assets. Energy has gone from a consensus underweight stock rating to a large overweight, exacerbating the price increase. The marginal barrel of oil has risen almost 60 percent in a year, despite supply rising in tandem with demand.
According to JP Morgan, the required capital expenditure in energy required to meet demand is $600 billion for the period 2021–2030. This “cumulative missing capex” is part of the problem.
The other important problem is artificial demand created by chains of stimulus plans. As I explained in this column, adding enormous energy-intensive infrastructure plans to a re-opening economy where some supply bottlenecks have been worsened generates the same effect on energy prices as a huge speculative bubble.
Political intervention has also created an important impact on the price of a marginal barrel of oil. Threatening to ban domestic development of energy resources in the United States or announcing the prohibition of fossil fuel investment in some European summits makes the net present value of the long-term marginal barrel higher, not lower. Why? Because those threats aren’t made with sound technical analysis and robust supply and demand estimates, but with political agendas. Any serious engineer that understands the importance of security and supply and technology development understands that a successful energy transition to a greener economy requires solid and realistic targets and policies that avoid an energy crisis. Those have been forgotten.
OPEC is benefitting from high oil prices, but not as much as one would think. The OPEC Reference Basket average is $68.33 per barrel year-to-date, a large 68.4 percent increase over the same period last year, but still massively below the elevated levels prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, OPEC and non-OPEC supply has risen in tandem with demand. Global oil supply in October increased by 1.74 million barrels per day to average 97.56 million barrels per day compared with the previous month. The U.S. liquids production growth forecast for 2021 has been revised up by 19,000 barrels per day and expected to be 17.57 million barrels per day in 2021. Imagine where oil and gas prices would be if the political threats to ban or severely penalize domestic production had been enforced.
Let’s not forget that OPEC has also revised down the estimates of global oil demand to 96.4 million barrels a day in 2021. Supply remains ample, and the U.S. administration should see that Russia and the United States are expected to be the main drivers of next year’s supply growth. Without Russia and the United States, production prices would soar no matter what OPEC partners or Saudi Arabia alone do.
We’re suffering the combination of misguided energy policies, excessive money creation, and ill-timed giant construction plans. OPEC and its partner Russia may alleviate this, but not change it dramatically. Furthermore, as time passes and underinvestment becomes more severe, OPEC’s ability to curb prices weakens. We can’t forget that OPEC and Russia account for less than half of the total world supply. They matter, but putting two more million barrels a day of supply into the market doesn’t solve the long-term price problem.
Energy prices will decline with more technology, investment, and diversification, not empty political threats.
A recent episode prompts me to ponder the fact that Facebook is becoming a force for censorship that might leave even some Communist Party of China members shamefaced.
Last week, I passed along a prospective editorial opinion column to The Epoch Times on behalf of two colleagues who are partners at a boutique law firm in Ottawa. Epoch Times editors liked the content and after giving it their professional scrutiny and suggesting some clarification, posted it on the outlet’s website.
The folks at the law firm were delighted and wanted their work to get even wider attention so they sought to pay to have it boosted on Facebook. Here’s the answer they got back:
“Your ad was rejected because it doesn’t comply with our advertising policies. To learn more, view your ad in Account Quality. You can request a review if you think your ad was incorrectly rejected.”
The “failure to comply” rejection, bear in mind, came from the very same social media company whose policies of profiting from gross violations of user privacy led to it being fined almost US$5 billion in 2019. That would be the Facebook whose advertising policies let it inundate you with “friend” requests from individuals having such unlikely names as Lotsa Hotsa Buttishaken, not to mention newsfeed scams from all manner of fly-by-night shysters.
And what, you might well ask, was so egregious about the opinions expressed in the law firm partners’ column that they violated Facebook’s pristine standards? Did they advocate legalized free delivery of your stupefacient of choice with every order from Skip the Dishes? Was it a slightly more outré call for, oh I don’t know, say, decriminalizing slavery? Did it seek to convince the world in general that Holocaust deniers really aren’t, you know, such horrendous idiots once you get to know them? No, no, and nothing even remotely close.
The column made three straightforward points. 1. The boutique law firm in question has been swamped with calls from panicking Canadian workers and students terrified of losing their jobs or their academic years if they fail to comply with COVID vaccine mandates. 2. The problem the callers face isn’t one that can be solved at a legal level yet, but it can be redressed at the political level, and indeed is a function of the political response to the pandemic. 3. The people pleading with the law firm to help are, to a person, responsible, thoughtful citizens of Canada, not the conspiracy theorist wingnuts said to be the sole opposition to vaccine mandates.
They are nurses, they are doctors, they are clergy, they are university students, they are public servants.
“Given their roles and responsibilities, if they are all wingnuts, we have an even bigger problem in Canada than COVID presents,” the lawyers wrote.
Think about this. Here you have two legal beagles, both of whom have made representations in the Supreme Court of Canada and recently won a major freedom-of-conscience case against the federal government, arguing that something’s amiss with the vaccine mandate scheme that requires serious and immediate attention. They submit that contention by writing to the editing standards of a professional publication that is committed, on its front page, to Truth.
They don’t denigrate vaccines. They don’t counsel reckless lawbreaking. They do counsel people to stand for their rights and engage the democratic political process to do so. Yet Facebook, with its impeccable track record of meeting sterling standards of integrity and beyond-reproach content management, won’t permit the widest possible distribution of that opinion.
Now, there’s a fair argument from a libertarian perspective that Facebook is free to accept or reject whatever content it likes, and equally free to refuse any emolument to overcome its resistance to publication. That would actually be an argument if Facebook itself didn’t insist that it is not a publisher but rather just a platform where like-minded or contrary-minded contributors can freely engage.
Given that, its rejection constitutes nothing less than raw suppression of an opinion that it dislikes and does not want to see in the public domain, never mind the opinion being based on verifiable facts drawn from the experience of the writers, and from their knowledge of both law and politics.
The issue, of course, is that the full problem isn’t Facebook. It is what’s happening as dissenting arguments across North American society are stifled by a myriad of means. Facebook, admittedly, is one tool in that toolbox. But, like the Communist Party of China, it is a very large, very powerful, and extremely ubiquitous hammer.
Within the CPC, the sheer magnitude of its membership numbers opens the possibility of minor disagreement, at least within the Party’s hard red line. Now Facebook, despite its high-minded invocation of “quality” and “policy,” is busily drawing red lines of its own around the opinions dissenting citizens of democratic countries can, and cannot, promote.
Even if that causes no shamed faces in China, it should leave North Americans outraged.
A Texas hospital announced that it has suspended the privileges of a doctor who posted concerns on social media about COVID-19 vaccine mandates and suggested that ivermectin may be able to treat the virus.
Dr. Mary Bowden, an ear, nose, and throat doctor at Houston Methodist Hospital, posted what was called “dangerous misinformation” that’s “not based in science” about the virus, the hospital announced on Twitter. The firm didn’t elaborate on the so-called misinformation and didn’t explain how her social media claims aren’t scientifically factual.
“Dr. Mary Bowden, who recently joined the medical staff at Houston Methodist Hospital, is using her social media accounts to express her personal and political opinions about the COVID-19 vaccine and treatments,” Houston Methodist, which drew national headlines for becoming one of the first hospital systems in the United States to mandate vaccines for all its employees earlier in 2021, wrote on Twitter.
Patty Muck, a spokesperson for the hospital, confirmed to media outlets over the weekend that Bowden’s privileges were suspended.
“The physician’s privileges at Houston Methodist have been suspended,” Muck wrote in an email to the Washington Post.
When contacted by The Epoch Times, a separate spokesperson for the hospital sent a statement that echoed several of its Twitter posts. The spokesperson didn’t elaborate on the suspension.
Last week, Bowden wrote on her Twitter account that “vaccine mandates are wrong” and included a screenshot of a message that apparently came from an individual who told her that “what the government is doing to its citizens in the United States is incomprehensible.” She also used her account to suggest that the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin may be able to treat COVID-19 symptoms.
In recent weeks, podcaster Joe Rogan and Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers both publicly confirmed that they took ivermectin after they were each diagnosed with COVID-19. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) haven’t recommended the drug to be used for treating the virus.
“Ivermectin might not be as deadly as everyone said it was. Speak up!” Bowden said on Nov. 10.
Bowden’s attorney, Steve Mitby, told local media outlets that the doctor has treated more than 2,000 COVID-19 patients and said she isn’t against vaccines.
“Like many Americans, Dr. Bowden believes that people should have a choice and believes that all people, regardless of vaccine status, should have access to the same high-quality health care,” Mitby said.
Speaking to local media outlet Click2Houston, Bowden, who also runs her own private practice, BreatheMD, said she had a “great relationship” with Houston Methodist.
But the “issues with vaccines and ivermectin really go against patient autonomy and their right to choose their treatment,” she said.
“All of my comments are backed by clinical experience,” Bowden told the Houston Chronicle. “I have been open seven days a week since the pandemic began, performing over 80,000 COVID tests and treating over 2,000 patients with COVID.”
Mitby’s law firm didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
For most Americans, the first 10 months of the Biden administration have been a disaster. A new report suggests Vice President Kamala Harris is one of those Americans who is suffering through the administration’s incompetence.
West Wing aides are growing increasingly frustrated with “entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus” from Harris and her staff, CNN reported Sunday. The outlet interviewed almost three dozen current and former staffers for Harris, administration officials, donors, advisers and Democratic Party operatives, and they reportedly painted a discouraging picture.
“Harris is struggling with a rocky relationship with some parts of the White House, while long-time supporters feel abandoned and see no coherent public sense of what she’s done or been trying to do as vice president,” CNN reported.
At the same time, the outlet said Harris’ supporters are equally frustrated with White House officials who they feel are not putting Harris in a position to succeed.
“Kamala Harris is a leader but is not being put in positions to lead,” a top donor to President Joe Biden said. “That doesn’t make sense. We need to be thinking long term, and we need to be doing what’s best for the party.
“You should be putting her in positions to succeed, as opposed to putting weights on her,” he said, speaking indirectly to Biden. “If you did give her the ability to step up and help her lead, it would strengthen you and strengthen the party.”
However, when the president has given Harris a chance to lead, she has largely failed to do so.
He tapped Harris to lead the response to the border crisis in March, The Associated Press reported. Since then, Harris has visited the border just one time, and it was far from the areas where illegal immigration is at its highest.
Border agents are still facing huge numbers of illegal border crossings, some of which are committed by convicted criminals.
Do you think Harris will run for president in 2024?
But according to a former aide to Harris, her sinking approval rating is not due to her own failures, but rather systemic racism within the Biden administration.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a white man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” the aide said.
These comments show just how dysfunctional the relationship between Biden and Harris is. Members of Biden’s own party are turning on him and accusing him of racism because of the incompetence of his administration and particularly his vice president.
Obviously, none of this is helpful optically to an administration that is already floundering. For that reason, multiple White House staffers attempted to cover for Harris after the damming report.
“For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country — from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted Sunday night.
For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country—from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband.
White House chief of staff Ronald Klain also joined in on the action by retweeting a sycophantic celebration of Harris from Mayor Robert Garcia of Long Beach, California.
“Our @VP Kamala Harris just finished a highly successful trip where she strengthened diplomatic relationships,” the tweet said. “She takes on the most complex assignments because she’s capable and smart. She’s a great leader who also happens to be funny and kind. And that’s the tweet.”
Our @VP Kamala Harris just finished a highly successful trip where she strengthened diplomatic relationships. She takes on the most complex assignments because she’s capable and smart. She’s a great leader who also happens to be funny and kind. And that’s the tweet.
Scramble as they might, those within the walls of the White House cannot hide their dysfunction forever. Americans are growing increasingly tired of Biden, Harris and the entire administration just 10 months into it, and tensions are rising between its own members.
Greta Thunberg actually hit the nail on the head for once. She described the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow with remarkable accuracy.
“The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah,” Thunberg tweeted.
On Nov. 13, about 200 countries agreed to a deal that is supposed to cut down on emissions worldwide.
The pact outlined that greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030. Countries represented at the conference agreed that emissions needed to be reduced quickly and that they would report annually.
However, though an agreement was reached and signed, no one is being fooled into thinking this is actually going to be all that effective.
“COP26 has closed the gap, but it has not solved the problem,” Niklas Hoehne, a climate researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said, according to Nature.com.
Climate change talks always target fossil fuels, of course. This conference particularly seemed to be on the warpath against coal. But thanks to India and China, coal is still going to be burning.
In a last-minute change, India and China insisted that the agreement be re-worded from “phase out” of coal to “phase down” of coal, CNBC News reported.
This caused an outcry from other countries, since China and India are two of the world’s greatest coal burners.
Should Biden have stayed home from the COP26 conference?
“China and India are going to have to explain themselves to the most climate vulnerable countries in the world,” said Alok Sharma, a U.K. lawmaker who led the COP26 negotiations, according to The Guardian.
The whole conference is largely recognized as a failure and a weak agreement, rather than a great victory. The Guardian ran a headline saying, “It could have been worse, but our leaders failed us at COP26. That’s the truth of it.”
At the foundation, any agreement like this that is not legally binding is not going to be terribly effective. Add to that the fact that China and India, two of the world’s greatest carbon polluters, are going to do what they want anyway, and you begin to question what the conference accomplished at all.
As far as climate change, the conference really only accomplished “blah, blah, blah.” But it highlighted some important geopolitical stances, particularly China’s and America’s.
Though there have been warnings that climate change will end our planet and doomsday is approaching if we don’t lower carbon emissions, some countries like China have decided that they are powerful enough to just ignore it. In fact, China’s President Xi Jinping didn’t even show up to the conference.
This just goes to show that so much of the activity regarding climate change is just political posturing. And the most powerful players are making their stances known. Jinping not showing up to COP26, along with China’s representative pressuring for the change of wording in the pact, are clear signals that China sees itself as powerful enough to just do whatever it wants.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Biden is trying to take extreme climate change action. It’s more political posturing — just on the other side of the spectrum as China. While Jinping is flexing his muscles, Biden is trying to play nice and appease all the other kids on the playground.
Particularly leading up to the COP26 conference, Biden wanted to show the world that he was taking climate change very seriously, so that he wouldn’t be too heavily criticized.
“The whole world is watching. If these bills don’t come to pass, then the U.S. will be coming to Glasgow with some fine words … not much else. It won’t be enough,” Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a climate adviser for the United Nations Secretary General, told the New York Times in October.
Climate change is a significant political vehicle. Biden’s administration is trying to play nice with China on this issue, in hopes of bettering the relationship.
John Kerry, the U.S.’s climate change envoy, and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, made a good show of agreeing that the countries will work together on cutting emissions.
“Both sides will work jointly and with other parties to ensure a successful COP26 and to facilitate an outcome that is both ambitious and balanced,” Xie said.
This greased the wheels ahead of Jinping and Biden’s upcoming virtual meeting. Biden seems to be desperately trying to keep China calm and happy with the U.S. COP26 was just one more way to try to smooth things over with China.
So, while the COP26 conference and pact may be considered an environmental failure, there was plenty going on under the surface. China and the U.S. did not waste this opportunity to show the world where they stand in relation to each other and everyone else. China made sure to come out as the strong man calling the shots, while Biden kept the U.S. looking tentative and unsure of itself.
Even if the planet is in imminent danger, climate change meetings are just a political outlet at this point for the power players. This conference was just a ploy.
Remember all of the CNN and MSNBC talking heads coming up with unique and funny ways to take away former President Donald Trump’s phone when he would tweet something problematic?
The good news is that they can reprise all of those jokes again. The bad news, for them, is that they’ll have to use them against an administration they generally support — and in a high-stakes matter where that tweet could end with one of the new administration’s most divisive policies getting nixed.
In a Friday ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that stayed President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s retweet of an MSNBC host was used as evidence that the administration used a rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as a “work around.”
The three-judge panel found “the Mandate’s true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary,” as per the ruling penned by Circuit Judge Kurt Engelhardt.
The ruling declared the mandate was “the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a ‘grave danger’ in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat.
“The Mandate’s stated impetus — a purported ’emergency’ that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to — is unavailing as well. And its promulgation grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” the court concluded.
Part of the court’s reasoning had to do with one of Klain’s retweets, this one from MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle.
“OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations,” she tweeted Sept. 9. Klain retweeted it later that day, according to the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.
OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.
This, the court said, was some proof the Biden administration knew they lacked the authority for a vaccine mandate.
“After the President voiced his displeasure with the country’s vaccination rate in September, the Administration pored over the U.S. Code in search of authority, or a ‘work-around,’ for imposing a national vaccine mandate,” the court stated.
“The vehicle it landed on was an OSHA [emergency temporary standard]. The statute empowering OSHA allows OSHA to bypass typical notice-and-comment proceedings for six months by providing ‘for an emergency temporary standard to take immediate effect upon publication in the Federal Register’ if it ‘determines (A) that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards, and (B) that such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.’”
The citation for the “work around,” of course, was Klain’s retweet.
It isn’t the only reason the 5th Circuit issued a thoroughgoing destruction of the ruling, as an editorial from the board of The Wall Street Journal noted.
“The court’s opinion takes apart the OSHA mandate every which way — on constitutional, statutory and procedural grounds,” the editorial, published Sunday, stated.
“The Constitution gives states, not the federal government, the police powers to regulate individual behavior to protect public health and safety. The Administration tried to circumvent this limitation on federal power by conscripting private employers via an OSHA ’emergency temporary standard.’”
However, Klain’s retweet provides an important glimpse into what the White House was thinking when it implemented the widely hated mandate — and it could end up helping destroy it as the case continues in the courts.
As GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz noted at the time, the retweet was “Foolish” and said it meant the “Biden admin knows it’s likely illegal (like the eviction moratorium) but they don’t care.”
Important.
Foolish RT from WH chief of staff. He said the quiet part out loud.
Biden admin knows it’s likely illegal (like the eviction moratorium) but they don’t care. https://t.co/AlfmYtuvhp
But like the eviction moratorium that was struck down by the Supreme Court in August, the administration hoped it would stand up for long enough that it would scare people into getting the vaccine. The problem is that if you say that part out loud, it can induce a court to notice just how flawed the mandate is.
This isn’t the only time Klain has had Twitter issues, either. Last month, the chief of staff retweeted a Harvard economist who called inflation and supply-chain issues “high class problems,” adding a millennial-ish “This,” along with two fingers pointing down, to the tweet:
Mind you, he’s far from the only problematic member of the Biden administration. Vice President Kamala Harris has been handed several major issues as tests of her seaworthiness, and on all of them she’s ended up sinking. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin oversaw the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has made a bungle of the border crisis.
All of these things loom much bigger than a retweet by the chief of staff, but it speaks to a culture of general incompetence in the administration. Funny how, during the last administration, CNN and MSNBC would have seized upon this — just like they would joke about how the president’s phone should be taken away. They seem strangely silent on it this time.
You can trot out the Klain jokes all you want, media. After all, this is twice now he’s said the silent part out loud on social media — and one of those times, it may have affected a court ruling. Strange how the Don Lemons and Joe Scarboroughs of the world don’t want to recycle their own material.
