The U.S. House of Representatives has subpoenaed several top Biden administration officials, including the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over the administration’s coordination with Big Tech to censor users.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent the subpoenas on April 28 to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly, and James Rubin, an official at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).
All three have responded inadequately to requests to provide documents, including communications between their respective entities and social media platforms, Jordan said in letters accompanying the subpoenas. CISA and GEC have not responded at all to the requests, while the CDC has not provided any of the requested documents, he said.
“Freedom of speech is one of the most important rights we have in this country,” Jordan told the Washington Examiner. “The collusion between our federal government and Big Tech undermines First Amendment principles and should be investigated.”
The CDC and GEC did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, CISA’s parent agency, said that the department “does not censor speech and does not request that content be taken down by social media companies.”
“Instead of working with the Department, as numerous committees have done this Congress, the House Judiciary Committee has unnecessarily escalated to a subpoena,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email, adding that the agency “will continue cooperating appropriately with Congressional oversight requests, all while faithfully working to protect our nation from terrorism and targeted violence, secure our borders, respond to natural disasters, defend against cyberattacks, and more.”
Collusion
Jordan is working with the Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to probe issues “related to the violation of the civil liberties of citizens of the United States.”
Documents brought to light by reporters who were given access to Twitter’s internal files and produced in a lawsuit filed by several states against the federal government have shown officials were regularly in contact with Twitter and other Big Tech companies on alleged mis- and disinformation, including making requests to crack down on specific users.
The CDC, for example, sent specific posts to Twitter and Facebook, while also adjudicating claims about COVID-19. While doing so, the CDC offered false information about vaccine effectiveness.
CISA official Brian Scully, meanwhile, said in a deposition that officials would route concerning social media posts to Big Tech, with an understanding that the companies would apply their moderation policies and potentially take action.
And Daniel Kimmage, a GEC official, said under oath that his team would regularly meet with Big Tech companies and provide them with information. The team’s focus was foreign disinformation, Kimmage said, though he acknowledged that the GEC flagged concerns about a YouTube channel run by Americans in one instance.
‘Plausibly Alleged’
The Biden administration has maintained that its communications with the social media companies were not coercive. U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said recently he was unpersuaded by the government’s arguments as he rejected their motion to dismiss the suit.
“Plaintiffs have clearly and plausibly alleged that Defendants engaged in viewpoint discrimination and prior restraints,” the judge wrote.
The states that filed the suit are seeking a preliminary injunction that would bar government officials from “taking any steps to demand, urge, encourage, pressure, or otherwise induce any social-media company or platform for online speech, or any employee, officer, or agent of any such company or platform, to censor, suppress, remove, de-platform, suspend, shadow-ban, de-boost, restrict access to content, or take any other adverse action against any speaker, content, or viewpoint expressed on social media.”
The United States is taking “urgent” actions to protect Americans’ data amid growing concerns over security risks posed by TikTok and other foreign companies, a U.S. official said.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Reuters that the government is hiring people to monitor and identify companies that may pose “undue security risks” to the country’s networks or data.
At the Senate hearing on Wednesday, Raimondo said they planned to form a team to do “monitoring, investigation, and enforcement” while safeguarding communications and technology networks.
“I think it is a top priority, and we need to move with urgency,” she said.
“It’s more than one company, and it is a constant, pervasive threat, and we need the permanent tools properly funded with expertise,” Raimondo added.
Raimondo said her department was actively assessing the risks posed by Chinese companies, and that additional resources may be necessary to review export control issues.
“I’ve put over 200 Chinese companies on the entity list in my tenure and we are actively, constantly investigating additional threats, and if we think companies need to go onto the list, I will not hesitate,” she said.
The White House and Raimondo support the Restrict Act. Critics say the bill is overbroad and hurts civil liberties of Americans including the more than 150 million U.S. TikTok users. The Chinese video-sharing app denies it improperly uses U.S. data.
Earlier in February, Sens. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen about the risks TikTok poses to U.S. national security and consumer privacy.
They urged the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is chaired by Yellen, to impose structural restrictions on TikTok’s American operations.
This came after ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, admitted that its employees used the social media app to track journalists, including two American journalists.
“The risks associated with TikTok are not limited to sensitive account data and information collected through advertising trackers, but include the app’s access to hours of personal videos and discussions of tens of millions of Americans, and its control over the platform’s powerful algorithmic recommendation system,” they stated.
“As TikTok plays an increasingly important role in American civic and political life, we should be concerned whether Chinese entities can promote or hide particular topics,” the lawmakers said, adding particularly in the service of the Chinese regime’s political interests.
‘Brainwashing App’
TikTok has more than 100 million users in America, with many earning an income from the app. Some lawmakers and security experts have described the app as “a spy balloon into your phone.”
In line with actions taken by global leaders, the White House on Feb. 20 ordered TikTok purged from all government devices and systems to keep U.S. data safe.
The company, like many organizations in China, is bound by the regime’s National Intelligence Law, which requires all organizations and citizens to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.”
TikTok has said that users’ personal data collected by the app can be remotely accessed in China but denied it had or would ever provide the data to the CCP. The promise has done little to assure security experts who warned against trusting the Chinese regime.
Arthur Herman, a senior fellow at the U.S. think tank the Hudson Institute, previously told The Epoch Times that the app harvests an enormous amount of data that can be used to picture, in the case of the United States, “where American vulnerabilities lie.”
Its algorithms can also turn the app into a “brainwashing app” by filtering content disliked by the CCP, Herman said.
Caden Pearson, Lily Zhou, and Reuters contributed to this report.
Kansas has become the first state to adopt a definition of gender with the passage of legislation that keeps men, no matter what gender they identify as, out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, and other intimate spaces.
It also separates inmates and restricts participation in sports by biological sex.
The move came late Thursday afternoon when the state legislature voted to override Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of S.B. 180, which became known as the “Women’s Bill of Rights.”
Under it, a female is defined as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova.” A male is defined as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.”
It also defines gender words calling for “woman” and “girl” to be used to refer to human females and “man” and “boy” to refer to human males. It defines “mother” as a parent of the female sex and “father” as a parent of the male sex.
The override comes a little over a week after Kelly vetoed the bill on April 20. She vetoed the bill after it was passed by a two-to-one margin between Republicans and Democrats in both the House and Senate.
Kelly said she vetoed the legislation because she was concerned it would open the state up to costly discrimination lawsuits, cause the loss of federal funding, and hurt the Sunflower State’s economy.
The bill garnered widely diverse support with staunchly pro-choice women’s rights groups celebrating the veto.
“Victory!” tweeted the Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF), upon news of the veto override.
In rallying for support of the bill, the national women’s rights organization, which actually helped craft the legislation, wrote on its website: “This bill takes procedural steps to write into law common sense definitions that ensure the meaning of words like ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ aren’t corrupted by unelected bureaucrats intent on pushing gender ideology.”
The group said members sent more than 600 messages to Kansas lawmakers in support of the bill.
Opposition Forces
The legislation also had its lion’s share of opposition, which called it anti-trans and reminiscent of racial segregation in the 1960s.
“It’s the same sayings,” state Rep. John Alcala (D-Topeka) said at a public hearing on the bill. “I don’t want you in my bathroom, I don’t want you drinking out of my water fountain. I don’t want you over at my house. I don’t want my kid hanging out with you.”
Beth Oller, a physician who testified against the bill, said the title was inappropriate and violated women’s rights. “This is no way a women’s bill of rights. The bill does the opposite of protecting women, it causes harm.”
Oller said that medical doctors “for decades have agreed that there is no sufficient way to define what makes a woman.”
“Gender is not binary but is a spectrum of biological, mental, and emotional traits that exist along a continuum,” she said. “Intersex people exist.”
The bill does include a provision that does recognize intersexual individuals. “Individuals born with a medically verifiable diagnosis of disorder/differences in sex development are to be provided available federal and state legal protections,” the legislation states.
Opposition to SB 180 also came from the Kansas Superintendents Association, the United School Administrators of Kansas, and Kansas Legal Services.
The Kansas Coalition Against Domestic Violence also opposed the Women’s Bill of Rights, which specifically cites women’s shelters, rape crisis centers, domestic violence safe havens, and women’s prisons as protected places where biological males identifying as females should be restricted.
Female Spaces in Danger
Following public testimony against the bill by Rev. Carolene Dean, an associate pastor with the Plymouth Congregational Church, Lauren Bone, attorney for WOLF, asked if Dean, a female, “had ever been unfortunate enough to find herself in a domestic violence shelter, rape crisis counseling, or a women’s prison.”
Bone said with many states now opening such places up to men, it has put biological women at “increased risk of further violence and harassment.”
When asked by a Republican lawmaker how many genders there are, Dean replied: “There are as many genders as there are beautiful creations in the world.”
Similar gender-defining bills to the one passed in Kansas are pending in other states, including Oklahoma and Montana.
Nationwide, there have been a number of reports of assaults on women by men identifying as women.
Earlier this month, The Windsor Star reported that a man who identified as a transgender woman was arrested in Ontario on allegations he climbed into bed with a biological woman at a women’s shelter and sexually assaulted her.
There are also several pending civil rights lawsuits filed by attorneys on behalf of female inmates who have reported being raped by men they were incarcerated with because the men claimed to be females. They include one over sexual assaults at the Logan Correctional Center, Illinois’s largest women’s prison.
Last year, as part of a plea deal, transgender prisoner Ramel Blount pled guilty to raping a female prisoner while she was taking a shower. Blount, a biological male who goes by the first name “Diamond,” was housed with women at New York’s Rikers Island prison.
The then 33-year-old admitted to grabbing the female inmate by the neck and holding her down against her will while raping her, according to released statements from the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office.
U.S.A. — In a heated exchange during the House Judiciary Committee‘s Oversight hearing of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on April 26th, Chairman Jim Jordan questioned ATF Director Steven Dettelbach on the upcoming deadline for pistol brace owners.
On May 31st, 2023, millions of American gun owners could potentially become felons for possessing pistol braces, a fact that Dettelbach acknowledged.
Jordan questioned Dettelbach on the impact that this rule change would have on millions of Americans.
Jim Jordan: “..so you told them [American Gun Owners] not once but twice that it was okay, and I’m just asking does it bother you now that [what] you are doing, that you’re making the change that’s going to impact millions of Americans?”
The ATF Director replied that the rule was necessary to address inconsistencies in the definition of pistol braces. He further explained that specific products get presented for classification, and these products sometimes change. Therefore, the rule change was necessary to ensure consistency.
Jordan then accused Dettelbach of contradicting what ATF had previously told American citizens, and now millions of law-abiding citizens will be impacted by this rule change. Dettelbach denied this accusation, stating that only specific products would be impacted, and those impacted individuals would have several options, including detaching the brace from the firearm and keeping both, attaching the brace to another firearm, removing or destroying the brace, getting a longer barrel, turning in or destroying the firearm, or registering the firearm.
Jordan then asked what would happen to those who do not take any of these actions and let the deadline expire.
Dettelbach replied that it would depend on the facts and circumstances of each case, and if a person were unaware, they would not be prosecuted, even though they were now breaking newly created rules. However, if they were aware, they could potentially become a felon.
Jordan also questioned how the ATF would enforce this rule and questioned Dettelbach whether ATF would inspect people at gun ranges or go to manufacturers and look for lists of people they sold braces to. Dettelbach mumbled something about ATF would consider it as one of the charges when doing a search warrant in a drug case and discovering an unlawful item.
Finally, Jordan asked if the Gun Control Act or the National Firearms Act clearly and unambiguously prohibits pistol braces. Dettelbach replied that it doesn’t prohibit anything and calls for increased controls on short-barreled rifles. Jordan cited a court decision this week in the Sixth Circuit, where the court ruled that the statute does not clearly and unambiguously prohibit bump stocks. In that ruling, the court also stated that for a decade, the ATF maintained that a bump stock was not a machine gun part, and the ATF’s own flip-flop on this position is one of the reasons why the court ruled in favor of those opposing the rule.
The exchange between Jordan and Dettelbach was intense.
The ATF’s flip-flopping on rules and Dettelbach’s inability to answer questions about the impact of the rule change on millions of Americans is a serious issue for American gun owners, whose only crime was following those same rules. The lack of accountability and poor decision-making by a rogue federal agency raises concerns about the risk of law-abiding citizens being turned into felons. The exchange was intense, with Jordan accusing Dettelbach of contradicting himself. At the same time, Dettelbach defended the Biden-ATF’s decision, stating that it was necessary to ensure consistency and address inconsistencies in the definition of pistol braces.
Thomas Conroy
Find the original article in its entirety at Ammoland.
During an interview with Sky News Australia, former Olympic champion and Fox News contributor Caitlyn Jenner wasted no time bashing President Joe Biden while praising former President Donald Trump.
Jenner told Sky’s Rita Panahi that an “alpha male” like Trump needed to save America from an otherwise inevitable decline. The gold medal-winning decathlete also expects Biden to lose the next election.
Asked by Panahi what the country would like if Biden did get reelected, Jenner said, “I don’t even want to think about Joe Biden winning again.”
…
Jenner argued that if Biden did manage to win the election, “It would be over for the United States. It would be the end.” She said that while it was “almost the end right now,” the country was “still at the point where if we get the right person in there,” America’s end could be averted.
The Fox News contributor said that while she was friends with Trump, and had attended an event at his Mar-a-Lago resort just a week prior, she would support whoever the Republican Party nominated.
“From my standpoint, I hope that’s Donald Trump,” Jenner said. “What we need right now in the White House is we need kind of like an alpha male that can get in there, [who] knows what he’s doing.”
Jenner was more reserved regarding Fox’s decision to cancel Tucker Carlson‘s show.
“Like anything, you know, businesses change,” she said, reluctant to go further.
Besides giving a wide berth to her employer, Jenner took to Twitter and praised Carlson after his show ended abruptly.
I did @TuckerCarlson first ever episode on Fox News! He was fearless in his pursuit of different perspectives and new stories. I know he will be missed and more importantly, will go on to do great things! pic.twitter.com/lr2iLJy29EApril 24, 2023
The North CarolinaSupreme Court has overruled an earlier decision that declared partisan gerrymandering illegal.
The 5-2 ruling could eliminate as many as four Democrat-held congressional seats, thanks to North Carolina Republicans’ veto-proof majority in the General Assembly.
The court’s prior decision came down when it leaned left.
NEW: as expected, new GOP majority on NC Supreme Court reverses previous court’s ruling that partisan gerrymandering is illegal. This could wipe out four Dem seats, nearly doubling the GOP’s cushion in the House. Full backstory at @CookPolitical: https://t.co/HkgUv9uCuJApril 28, 2023
The ruling is a victory for the GOP state legislature, which brought the case back to the state Supreme Court after Republicans flipped seats on the court in the midterms, giving them the majority. The GOP legislature had also taken the case to the US Supreme Court – where Republicans were pushing an aggressive theory that would limit the role state courts can play in election disputes – and it is unclear whether Friday’s ruling prompts the US Supreme Court to dismiss the case that is before it.
“Our constitution expressly assigns the redistricting authority to the General Assembly subject to explicit limitations in the text,” the new opinion from the North Carolina court said. “Those limitations do not address partisan gerrymandering. It is not within the authority of this Court to amend the constitution to create such limitations on a responsibility that is textually assigned to another branch. Furthermore, were this Court to create such a limitation, there is no judicially discoverable or manageable standard for adjudicating such claims.”
The 5-2 opinion was written by Chief Judge Paul Newby, who was joined by the four other Republican members of the court. Democratic Justice Anita Earls wrote a dissent joined by Justice Michael Morgan, a fellow Democrat.
The ruling is a major loss for the voting rights groups that had challenged the congressional plan that had been drawn by the Republican legislature after the 2020 census, as the ruling will prevent them from going to state court in the future bring claims of extreme partisan gerrymandering against North Carolina maps.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has yet to announce when he’ll be calling lawmakers back to the state capitol for a special session on “gun reform and public safety”, but the Republican is already stumping for his version of a “red flag” law in the hopes of overcoming opposition from GOP legislators and many Second Amendment advocates.
On Monday Lee was asked what he hopes to see from the special session, and the governor once again floated his idea of a “temporary mental health restraining order”; i.e. a “red flag” law.
“What we plan to do is work together with the General Assembly to find a way that will in fact protect the broader public, that will protect the rights of Tennesseans,” Lee told reporters in Chattanooga, according to WKRN. “We believe we can do that.”
Speaking with media at an event to sign the “Forever Homes Act,” which aims to expedite adoptions and encourage them over abortions, Lee discussed what he expects from the special legislative session since last Friday’s announcement. “There needs to be a way to separate those that are a danger to others and to themselves from access to weapons and protect the rights — and particularly the Second Amendment rights of Tennesseans,” Lee said.
I don’t think Lee is some anti-gun commie in disguise who’s just been waiting for the opportune moment to strong-arm Republicans into adopting a gun confiscation measure. This is the same governor who signed constitutional carry into law, after all, and he’s got a good track record when it comes to supporting the right to keep and bear arms. I think Lee’s trying to respond to public pressure to “do something” in the wake of the Covenant School shootings without offending his base of supporters, but while I respect the fact that he’s called for a “red flag” law that does not allow for ex parte hearings and requires the subject of a petition to have access to an attorney, there’s still a fundamental flaw in his plan.
The governor spoke of finding a way to “separate those that are a danger to others and themselves from access to weapons,” but the truth is that if someone truly poses a threat to themselves or other people then simply blocking them from legally possessing a firearm isn’t going to achieve his goal. The subject of a “temporary mental health restraining order” could still pick up a butcher knife, gasoline or matches, car keys, or any number of items that could be used as a weapon. The issue is the supposedly dangerous person, not any guns that they might own.
To that end, Lee would be better off calling for an overhaul of the state’s criminal justice and mental health systems, though that’s a far more complicated and costly issue than passing a “red flag” law and claiming that the issue has been addressed. Still, that’s a more substantive approach to dealing with dangerous individuals, and one that would find more favor with Republicans around the state than his proposal. Already this week Knox County commissioners have rejected a resolution backing Lee’s call for a temporary mental health restraining order, and more opposition is likely to emerge as details of the legislation become available.
I respect that what Lee has outlined offers more due process protections than the vast majority of “red flag” laws that are already in place, but that doesn’t change the fact that the underlying premise is still about taking guns away instead of treating the “dangerousness” of the individual in question. Any gun-centric approach to addressing mental illness or criminal behavior should be non-starter for Tennessee lawmakers. That doesn’t mean they don’t have to sit on their hands and do nothing, but if they’re going to “do something” it should be targeted at dangerous individuals themselves and not any inanimate objects they might own.
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten testified before Congress on Wednesday to defend her union’s role in influencing public policy on school lockdowns. Weingarten told lawmakers, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools. “
A review of Weingarten’s comments in 2020, however, shows she was not the school reopening champion she now portrays herself as.
Weingarten called then-president Donald Trump’s push to reopen schools “reckless,” “callous,” and “cruel.” She also said “there’s no way that you’re going to have full-time schools for all the kids and all the teachers the way we used to have it.”
The Federal Reserve wants more regulatory power after string of oversight failures
(Reuters)—The Federal Reserve issued a detailed and scathing assessment on Friday of its failure to identify problems and push for fixes at Silicon Valley Bank before the U.S. lender’s collapse, and promised tougher supervision and stricter rules for banks.
In what Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr called an “unflinching” review of the U.S. central bank’s supervision of SVB, the Fed said its oversight of the Santa Clara, California-based bank proved inadequate and that regulatory standards were too low.
“SVB’s failure demonstrates that there are weaknesses in regulation and supervision that must be addressed,” Barr said in a letter accompanying a 114-page report supplemented by confidential materials that are typically not made public.
While it was the regional bank’s own mismanagement of basic risks that was at the root of SVB’s downfall, the Fed said, supervisors of SVB did not fully appreciate the problems, delaying their responses to gather more evidence even as weaknesses mounted, and failed to appropriately escalate certain deficiencies when they were identified.
At the time of its failure, SVB had 31 unaddressed citations on its safety and soundness, triple what its peers in the banking sector had, the report said.
One particularly effective change the Fed could make on supervision would be to put mitigants in place quickly in response to serious issues on capital, liquidity, or management, a senior Fed official said.
Increased capital and liquidity requirements also would have bolstered SVB’s resilience, the Fed added. Barr said as a consequence of the failure, the central bank will reexamine how it supervises and regulates liquidity risk, beginning with the risks of uninsured deposits.
Regulators shut SVB on March 10 after customers withdrew $42 billion on the previous day and queued requests for another $100 billion the following morning.
The historic run triggered massive deposit outflows at other regional banks that were seen to have similar weaknesses, including a large proportion of uninsured deposits and big holdings of long-term securities that had lost market value as the Fed raised short-term interest rates.
New York-based Signature Bank failed two days later – the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is due to release its review of that collapse later on Friday – and the Fed and other U.S. government authorities moved to head off an emerging crisis of confidence in the banking sector with an emergency funding program for otherwise healthy banks under sudden pressure, and guarantees on all deposits at the two banks.
SUPERVISION HEADCOUNT FELL
Before the twin failures in March, banking regulators had focused most of their supervisory firepower on the very biggest U.S. banks that were seen as critical to financial stability.
The realization that smaller banks are capable not only of causing ructions in the broader financial system but of doing it at such speed has forced a rethink.
“Contagion from the failure of SVB threatened the ability of a broader range of banks to provide financial services and access to credit for individuals, families, and businesses,” Barr said. “Weaknesses in supervision and regulation must be fixed.”
In its report, the Fed said that from 2018 to 2021 its supervisory practices shifted and there were increased expectations for supervisors to accumulate more evidence before considering taking action. Staff interviewed as part of the Fed’s review reported pressure during this period to reduce burdens on firms and demonstrate due process, the report said.
Between 2016 and 2022, as assets in the banking sector grew 37%, the Fed’s supervision headcount declined by 3%, according to the report.
As SVB itself grew, the Fed did not step up its supervisory game quickly enough, the report showed, allowing weaknesses to fester as executives left them unaddressed, even after staff finally did downgrade the bank’s confidential rating to “not-well-managed.”
The Fed is looking at linking executive compensation to fixing problems at banks designated as deficient on management so as to focus executives’ attention on those problems, a senior Fed official said in a briefing.
While the fallout from the failures of SVB and Signature has slowed, some firms are still feeling the effects, with San Francisco-based First Republic Bank struggling for survival after reporting earlier this week that its deposit outflows after the SVB and Signature collapses exceeded $100 billion.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir, Hannah Lang and Chris Prentice; Editing by Dan Burns and Paul Simao)
(Reuters)—Shares of First Republic Bank plunged to a record low on Friday, losing nearly half of their value after a CNBC report said the troubled lender was most likely headed for receivership under the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
The stock fell as much as 46% to $3.33, giving it a market capitalization of $620 million. Trading in the bank’s shares was halted multiple times.
A Reuters report of a government-brokered rescue deal for First Republic had pushed its shares up as much 6.6% earlier in the session.
According to the report, the FDIC, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are among government bodies that have started to orchestrate meetings with financial companies about a lifeline for the bank.
The government’s involvement was helping bring more parties, including banks and private equity firms, to the negotiating table, one of the sources for the report had told Reuters.
Still, concerns remained that deposit declines at First Republic could worsen and spark a fresh meltdown in the U.S. banking industry even as it recovers from the collapse of two regional lenders last month.
First Republic earlier this week said its deposits had slumped by more than $100 billion in the first quarter.
“The potential worst-case scenario stemming from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank appears to have been averted,” said Mark Haefele, chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, in a note.
“But the problems at First Republic are a reminder that further problems remain possible.”
The San Francisco-based lender’s stock has more than halved so far this week. Since the start of the year, it has lost nearly 97% in value, making it the worst-performing S&P 500 stock.
(Reporting by Medha Singh and Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Devika Syamnath)
Liberal billionaire George Soros and his son nearly max out to Tester
Montana senator Jon Tester bills himself as a moderate Democrat willing to criticize his party’s left-wing elements—like the progressive policies pushed by his latest financial backers, George and Alexander Soros.
The Soroses last month nearly maxed out campaign contributions to Tester, each giving $2,800, according to campaign finance disclosures, making the red-state Democrat the only candidate to whom both father and son have contributed this election cycle. Though the two pour millions of dollars every year into a variety of left-wing causes, their direct political support so far this cycle has been sparse. The elder Soros has given to only two candidates aside from Tester, Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), both of whom are politically safe. His son Alexander Soros has given to only Tester and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.), who this cycle is targeting Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I., Ariz.), a former Democrat, from the left.
Tester’s support from the Soros family highlights the political tightrope he will have to walk in his bid for reelection. Tester, considered one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the 2024 cycle, will need to raise money from major Democratic donors in what is likely to be one of the most expensive Senate races of 2024. But the senator, who recently said that he brings a “dirt-under-your-fingernails perspective to Washington,” will have to avoid embracing left-wing policies unpopular in the Big Sky Country.
The elder Soros gives tens of millions of dollars a year to groups that support the movements to defund police, expand the Supreme Court, and restrict gun ownership. He has contributed $1.45 million to Color of Change, a civil rights organization that has called to defund police. He funds a variety of gun control groups and has stated, “I’m very much against guns.”
Tester has spoken out against those policies, saying the average Montanan views the Democratic Party as “toxic” for ignoring rural voters.
“The defund the police stuff is garbage,” said Tester, who also says he is a “strong supporter of the Second Amendment.” Asked whether he supports packing the Supreme Court, Tester quipped, “Ix-nay on that bullshit-ay.”
Tester’s dilemma—balancing a centrist bent while wooing deep-pocketed Democratic donors—was on display last month following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Tester criticized a federal bailout of the bank and pledged to hold bank executives and regulators “accountable.” But the same day, Tester attended a fundraiser in Palo Alto, Calif., organized by a lawyer for the firm that represents Silicon Valley Bank.
Another fundraiser host serves on the board of the National Resources Defense Council, an environmentalist group that repeatedly sued the Trump administration to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, the Washington Free Beaconreported. The host, National Resources Defense Council board member Nicole Lederer, has said the pipeline “is against the best interest of our country.”
Tester publicly supported the pipeline, saying that it “would have yielded big benefits” for Montana.
President’s son says he can’t afford to pay child support, has been ordered to appear in Arkansas court on Monday
Hunter Biden’s ex-mistress Lunden Alexa Roberts is asking a court to force the president’s son to disclose who is paying for his “stable of American super lawyers,” arguing that his high-priced legal team contradicts his claim that he can’t afford to pay child support.
Biden has retained “some of the most expensive attorneys on planet Earth,” according to a motion filed by Roberts in an Arkansas court on Thursday, including former Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel, prominent Washington fixer Abbe Lowell, and Hollywood celebrity lawyer Kevin Morris.
“If Mr. Biden can afford a Washington DC, Hollywood, Chicago big law, and the best domestic relations attorney on the Texas side of the Texarkana border, he surely must have income for child support purposes,” wrote Roberts’s attorney Clint Lancaster in the filing.
The motion, if approved by the court, could be another political headache for Hunter Biden, who has fought to shield his financial records during the years-long custody battle with Roberts, the mother of his four-year-old daughter. It comes days after the judge ordered both Biden and Roberts to personally attend all future hearings.
“Mr. Biden claims to be nothing more than a Yale educated attorney/artist who is somewhat financially destitute and needs his child support adjusted,” added Lancaster. “However, for an artist living on meager means, Mr. Biden is living lavishly.”
Biden reached a child support settlement with Roberts shortly after his father, President Joe Biden, launched his presidential campaign in 2020. He is now arguing for reducing those payments.
Biden initially denied the baby was his, but a court-ordered paternity test showed he was the father. The Biden family does not publicly acknowledge the child. President Biden has repeatedly claimed—including this week—that he has just six grandchildren, omitting the four-year-old girl from the list.
Roberts recently asked the court to allow her to change their daughter’s last name to “Biden,” arguing that the prestige of the name would benefit the child. Biden is fighting the motion, claiming the move would be damaging to the tot due to the “scorn in the community for the Biden name.”
In the disclosure motion on Thursday, Roberts’s attorneys argued that disclosures about Biden’s legal payments would “show that there is no difficulty that a person with the last name ‘Biden’ cannot fix with a Biden-paid or funded attorney”—bolstering support for Roberts’s name-change request.
Family law attorney Peter M. Walzer told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden’s objection to the name change was “very uncommon” and unlikely to succeed in court.
“I’ve never seen a litigation where a father didn’t want the [child] to take his name,” said Walzer. “This is pretty unique.”
The next hearing is scheduled for Monday. Arkansas Circuit Court judge Holly Meyer ordered Biden and Roberts to show up, saying their absences are causing delays in the case.
Meyer issued the order after Biden’s attorney was unable to answer whether Biden owned the abandoned laptop that became a subject of controversy during the 2020 election. Financial records discovered on the laptop have become an issue in the custody dispute.
Democrats in state have voiced concerns about the Chinese government’s infiltration of Michigan
Michigan Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer’s latest appointee to a powerful state economic board is a nonprofit executive who helped facilitate the deal that brought a controversial Chinese battery company to the Great Lakes State.
Whitmer on Thursday tapped Randy Thelen to serve on the Michigan Strategic Fund, a powerful state board that approves the distribution of public grants and tax breaks to private businesses. Thelen is the CEO of Grand Rapids-based nonprofit The Right Place, which works to drive economic development in western Michigan. With Thelen at the helm, the nonprofit partnered with Chinese battery maker Gotion to help the company acquire land for a western Michigan factory, a controversial project that the state is showering with hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.
Whitmer’s decision to appoint Thelen comes as Michigan residents and elected officials express concern over Gotion’s presence in the state. The Chinese battery giant’s leader is a known Chinese Communist Party member, and the company’s bylaws require Gotion to “carry out party activities in accordance with the Constitution of the Communist Party of China.” Gotion’s ties to the CCP prompted hundreds of Michiganders to hold a rally last week in opposition to the battery plant, and even Democratic lawmakers have questioned Gotion’s Michigan project. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D., Mich.), for example, acknowledged Tuesday that she’s “worried” about the project’s national security implications.
“Am I worried about national security implications? I have to tell you that I am,” Dingell said during a Fox News appearance. “Let us be clear—if you are a Chinese business, the communist government is part of your business. So it’s something that worries me every day.”
Just days before Dingell made those comments, Michigan’s legislature approved $175 million in state funds to support Gotion, $50 million of which will go to The Right Place to secure “site preparation and land acquisition” for the Chinese company’s plant. The Right Place on its website also touts Gotion’s Michigan project, with the nonprofit saying in October that it’s “honored to have played a role in bringing this transformational project” to the state. As Michiganders protested Gotion in recent weeks, meanwhile, Thelen worked to defend his Chinese partner, arguing during an April 5 meeting with local residents that Gotion would merely become one of many Chinese-owned companies in Michigan.
Thelen is related to Gotion vice president of North American affairs Chuck Thelen. The cousins toldBridge Michigan they did not know each other before they worked on the Gotion deal.
For conservative group Michigan Freedom Fund, Whitmer’s willingness to elevate Thelen to an influential state board despite the CEO’s work with Gotion “raises concerns about Gov. Whitmer’s decision-making and signals her disdain for Michigan residents.”
“Rather than making any effort to quell fears of both local and state residents, Whitmer … doubled down,” Michigan Freedom Fund spokeswoman Mary Drabik said in a statement. “Appointing Thelen is a clear signal of where the governor’s priorities lie: with China and rewarding those who stand to profit from the Gotion deal.”
Neither Whitmer nor The Right Place returned requests for comment.
Gotion is not the only Chinese company with impending plans to settle in the Great Lakes State. American auto giant Ford in February announced plans to build a Michigan electric vehicle battery factory in partnership with Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), which will provide technology, equipment, and workers to help build and run the factory. Ford says the factory will nonetheless qualify for lucrative federal subsidies under President Joe Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which the Democrat said would help the United States “compete with China for the future.”
Ford’s use of federal funds to partner with CATL has sparked intense criticism from congressional Republicans, with Florida senator Marco Rubio in March unveiling a bill that would block Ford from earning taxpayer dollars through its Chinese partnership.
“Without additional restrictions, Chinese companies will benefit from the subsidies President Joe Biden claimed would spur domestic manufacturing,” Rubio said. “Hard-working Americans should not be forced to subsidize Chinese companies that make batteries for electric vehicles that cost more than most people make in a year.”
The Internal Revenue Service posted a hiring notice for hundreds of new armed agents amid Republicans’ concerns about the tens of thousands of staffers the agency is hiring with funding from the Biden administration.
The agency is looking for more than 350 “criminal investigation special agents” in all 50 states, with applicants asked to serve minimum 50-hour weeks, engage in “dangerous assignments,” and “carry a firearm,” according to the agency job posting, which was first published in February. The positions are in the IRS’s Criminal Investigation division, which deals with money laundering, terrorist activity, and other cases.
The armed agents “must be prepared to protect him/herself or others from physical attacks at any time and without warning and use firearms in life-threatening situations.”
The description goes further, adding the applicants “must be willing to use force up to and including the use of deadly force.”
The hiring is a part of the tens of thousands of agency employees expected to be hired through the $80 billion the Biden administration allocated to the IRS in the trillion-dollar Inflation Reduction Act.
Democrats have advocated for the funding as a means of increasing government revenues. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that the hiring would bring in more than $200 billion in additional revenue for the government over the next 10 years.
The IRS will hire as many as 87,000 additional employees, a number that sparked outrage among Republicans. Estimates show the majority of new revenue will come from audits and scrutiny of those making less than $200,000.
Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) last year slammed the proposal to hire tens of thousands of new IRS staffers.
“When faced with the decision to spend $45 billion on America’s largest revenue collection agency, or give it back to parents to help them get their kids the help they need, the Senate needs to choose the latter option every single time,” Scott told the WashingtonFree Beacon.
The staffing increase would more than double the current IRS workforce, which has around 78,000 full-time staffers, according to federal data. It would make the IRS larger than the FBI, Border Patrol, State Department, and the Pentagon combined.
New York governor Kathy Hochul on Thursday declared progress in her push to make her state the first in the nation to ban natural gas in new buildings, announcing a budget agreement that would mandate new buildings be “zero emissions” starting in 2025.
The state is “going to be the first state in the nation to advance zero emissions in new homes and buildings,” Hochul said during a speech at the State Capitol in Albany. If the budget passes, natural gas appliances will be banned in new small buildings by 2025 and large buildings by 2028.
“Our budget prioritizes nation-leading climate action that meets this moment with ambition and the commitment it demands,” Hochul said.
Hochul’s announcement comes just months after she and Democrats in the state legislature pledged support for the controversial policy. “We are taking these steps now because climate change remains the greatest threat to our planet, and to our children and grandchildren,” Hochul said in January.
It’s the latest move by Democrats to ban the use of natural gas and the appliances that rely on it. The Biden administration’s Energy Department is advancing regulations that would effectively ban roughly half of gas stoves on the market from being sold.
The controversy surrounding gas stove bans kicked off in January, when a Biden-appointed commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., floated banning gas stoves, citing a study by an environmental group that attributed 13 percent of U.S. childhood asthma cases to gas stoves.
Scientists later criticized the study. Facing backlash, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would not support such a ban. The Washington Free Beacon reported in January that the group behind the now-infamous study worked with the Chinese government to push “an economy-wide transformation” away from gas and oil.
Climate activists not only want gas banned, but also argue the administration must change how it refers to the substance. A climate group recently demanded the Biden administration stop using the term “natural gas” because it sounds too climate friendly. The group, Gas Leaks, suggested saying “fossil gas” or “methane gas” instead.
Progressive California lawmakers bent to political pressure and revived a handful of bills this week to crack down on fentanyl dealers—only to turn around and kill or weaken most of the measures.
With overdose deaths accelerating in California, the State Assembly public safety committee on Thursday blocked two of the bills, which would have strengthened punishments for dealers who kill or seriously injure someone with fentanyl or are caught with enough of the synthetic drug to kill thousands of people. The panel also loosened a proposed ban on dealers carrying guns before punting the bill along with a measure to increase penalties for fentanyl trafficking on social media.
“Despite all the talk, the extremist legislators who opposed these bills guaranteed that innocent Californians will continue to die, victims of drug dealers profiting off poisoning our communities,” Assembly Republican leader James Gallagher said in a statement after the hearing. “These bills were not criminalizing addiction, returning to the ‘war on drugs,’ or any other lie told by the pro-fentanyl lobbyists. They were reasonable, bipartisan proposals to save lives.”
California Democrats, who dominate the state legislature and government, signaled once again on Thursday that they remain committed to a years-long progressive push to roll back criminal penalties for drug-related crimes. That’s despite public pressure to do something about the fentanyl epidemic, which has killed more people in California than in any other state.
The Assembly’s public safety committee only agreed to even debate the bills targeting fentanyl dealers after Republican lawmakers last week threatened to force a floor vote on the measures.
On Tuesday, the California Senate public safety committee—which like its Assembly counterpart is stacked with progressives—voted down for the second time a bipartisan bill that would have let law enforcement advise fentanyl dealers that their pills can be deadly. If those dealers sold fentanyl again and killed someone, they could have then faced second-degree murder charges. A similar law for drunk drivers has been on the books for years.
During Thursday’s hearing in the Assembly, Democrats were often on defense against allegations that they simply oppose action to address the fentanyl crisis. Several progressive lawmakers unfavorably likened the bills on offer to the war on drugs and touted “harm reduction” programs as a superior alternative to jailing fentanyl dealers.
“We are doing something,” said assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D.), the wife of California attorney general Rob Bonta, citing California’s $61 billion investment in harm reduction programs, including widespread distribution of overdose medication and test strips that can detect the presence of fentanyl in other drugs. “Not enough, but we have been doing something.”
Public safety committee chair Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D.) pointed to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new directive for California police officers to start coordinating crackdowns on fentanyl traffickers. Newsom, who has not weighed in on the fentanyl legislation, left the state just ahead of the hearings.
Assemblyman Jim Patterson, the only Republican to present a bill to the committee, criticized Democrats’ harm reduction approach as inadequate.
“The reality is that we have dealers in Fresno with 2,000 pills, that the worst you can do is a misdemeanor,” he told the panel. “They’re out in two days. If we really cared about the addicts, wouldn’t we also care that their dealers are out on the street, churning more and more?”
The committee did advance three relatively incremental measures against fentanyl dealers: one to boost their sentences to match those of cocaine and heroin sellers; another to push law enforcement cooperation against them; and a third to launch a task force to study fentanyl trafficking.
Jones-Sawyer promised a follow-up hearing in May to look at a “holistic” strategy that includes more money for treatment, education, and overdose medication.
In the spring of 2018, Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken happily acknowledged the receipt of a donation from the Texas billionaire Harlan Crow to fund the commission of a portrait of Crow’s friend, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.
In an April 2018 letter to Crow, Gerken thanked him for the gift and described Thomas, a 1974 graduate of the law school, as a “trailblazer.”
“We are so pleased to welcome the justice to our outstanding gallery of portraits,” Gerken wrote. “They will always have a place of prominence at Yale Law School.” Five years later, students and faculty members say they’ve never seen it, and certainly not displayed in a place of prominence.
The portrait exists. Yale commissioned the New York City-based artist Jacob Collins to paint it, and Collins told the Washington Free Beacon that, according to his records, the portrait was being framed in March 2019 and that he believes it was delivered to the school shortly thereafter. Yale acknowledged his gift with a letter of thanks.
Neither Gerken nor a spokesman for the law school responded to requests for comment about the portrait’s whereabouts.
“It was completely understood that the painting would join…the pantheon of paintings,” Crow told the Free Beacon.
Thomas has had a contentious relationship with his alma mater, writing in his autobiography of his feeling that a Yale Law School degree “meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks” and of affixing a 15 cent price sticker to his diploma and tossing it in the basement. In recent years, though, he has visited the school and called his resentments “juvenile.”
Dozens of portraits adorn the walls of Yale Law School, which uses them to honor the law school’s founders as well as distinguished graduates and professors.
The portraits fall into two categories, former law school dean Guido Calabresi told the Yale Daily News in 2015: those that are automatically displayed and those that are displayed by the dean’s discretion. The former includes alumni or faculty members who have served as president of the United States, justices of the Supreme Court, or chief judge of one of the circuit courts—a category that should include Thomas.
All portraits, aside from those of former deans, must be commissioned with outside funding, and Crow in 2018 provided the $105,000 to fund Thomas’s portrait after Yale Law School professor George Priest worked to repair Thomas’s relationship with the school and helped to persuade the justice to sit for the portrait’s painting.
“We’ve had some episodes here where students protest when people come to the law school, that may have something to do with it,” Priest told the Free Beacon. He had not visited the law school since the COVID-19 pandemic and was not aware of whether the painting had gone up, he added.
“It’ll be hung, there’s no doubt about that. We have Abe Fortas’s portrait up, for crying out loud,” Priest said, referring to the Yale Law School graduate and former Supreme Court justice who resigned from his seat in 1969 after revelations that he was receiving payments of $20,000 annually from the family foundation of a Wall Street financier—for the rest of his life—in exchange for unspecific advice.
Typically, the university has marked portrait unveilings with celebratory events. The school in 2017 held such an event for the unveiling of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s portrait, which now hangs in the law school’s largest classroom.
Prior to Crow’s gift, the Yale Daily News noted the absence of Thomas’s portrait. A 2005 report reads: “The walls of the law school display portraits of past Supreme Court justices affiliated with Yale—William Howard Taft, William Douglas, Byron White, Abe Fortas, and Potter Stewart—but Thomas’s portrait is conspicuously absent.”
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito says he thinks he knows who leaked a draft opinion in a major abortion case.
“I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible,” Alito told the Wall Street Journal.
The leaked opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was authored by Alito, a George W. Bush appointee. Politico obtained the draft opinion and published it on May 2, 2022. The final opinion was largely similar. Issued in June 2022, it struck down Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that found access to abortion was a constitutional right.
Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley investigated the breach and concluded in a January report that there was insufficient evidence to determine the identity of the person or persons who disclosed the draft.
“Investigators have been unable to determine at this time, using a preponderance of the evidence standard, the identity of the person(s) who disclosed the draft majority opinion,” she wrote.
Curley spoke with each justice and followed up on leads, none of which implicated justices or their spouses. The marshal said that was why she didn’t require justices to sign sworn affidavits attesting they weren’t behind the leak.
The Supreme Court said the investigation would continue and has not issued any update since.
Alito said that Curley “did a good job with the resources that were available to her.”
He also said that there is not enough evidence to publicly name a suspect.
While he believes he knows the responsible party, “that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody,” Alito said.
He is, however, sure of what motivated the disclosure.
“It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court,” Alito said. “And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside—as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”
The disclosure of the draft triggered widespread protests, including at the homes of Alito and other justices believed to be supportive of his position.
Alito said it was “rational” for people to think they might be able to alter the final outcome of the case if they killed one of the justices. Six of the justices on the nine-justice court were appointed by Republicans, with several regularly siding with the Democrat appointees in high-profile cases. The Dobbs ruling was a 6–3 decision.
The protests violate federal law, but no arrests have been made, even after a man tried to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee who ultimately sided with Alito in the Trump case.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, has said that U.S. Marshals have the authority to arrest anyone in violation of federal law, including the law that forbids “picketing” or “parading” near the residences of judges or justices in order to influence the outcome of a case. But they were told not to arrest the protesters, according to materials obtained by Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) and released earlier this year. Garland said he had not seen the materials.
More than 38 fighter jets and other warplanes from China’s military flew near Taiwan in the latest chapter of military escalation from the regime since it staged war games around the island earlier in April.
The Taiwanese defense ministry announced the incident on Friday in its daily update of Chinese military activities from the previous 24 hours.
Six Chinese navy vessels were also seen around Taiwan from Thursday 6 a.m. to Friday 6.a.m., the ministry added, in what appears to be part of the Chinese regime’s effort to intimidate Taiwan.
The latest flight display comes after the Chinese regime on April 8 sent 42 warplanes and eight naval vessels toward Taiwan as part of three days of military exercises that simulated sealing off the island.
The move was an apparent response to a meeting between Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen and U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
The Chinese regime sees such meetings as encouraging Taiwanese voters and politicians who support formal independence for the island, a step the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) says would lead to war.
According to the Taiwanese defense ministry, on Friday, 19 of the CCP’s aircraft flew across the median line of the Taiwan Strait, and into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ), an area that Taiwan monitors to provide it more time to respond to threats.
The median line serves as an unofficial barrier between Beijing and Taipei, although the Chinese regime does not recognize it. Since last year, CCP military aircraft have regularly crossed this line.
The 19 aircraft included five SU-30 and two J-16 aircraft. It also included a new type of Chinese combat drone that China’s state media says can carry a heavy weapons payload—the TB-001.
The drone flew around Taiwan, according to a map from the Taiwanese defense ministry. It first crossed the Bashi Channel, then up Taiwan’s east, and crossed back toward the coast of China.
The CCP’s state-run media claims the TB-001 is capable of high altitude, long-range missions, and can carry missiles under its wings.
There were no shots fired and while the Chinese aircraft entered Taiwan’s ADIZ, it did not breach Taiwan’s airspace.
Taiwan and China split in 1949 following a civil war that ended with the CCP in control of the mainland. But the CCP claims Taiwan as its territory, even though Taiwan has never been part of the CCP.
The CCP has vowed to claim sovereignty over Taiwan, even if by force. But Taiwan’s government rejects such claims.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Where will the viewers go, will Fox re-emerge in the 8 p.m. time slot, and what is Carlson’s next move?
Two days after his ouster from Fox News, Tucker Carlson broke his silence with a video that had at least 22.1 million views, more than the number of viewers in the 8 p.m. ET hour combined that day, let alone in that time slot on the network.
Fox News’ ratings have been down since the network parted ways on April 24 with Carlson, who anchored the most-watched show not just on that channel but on cable news as well.
The future of the coveted 8 p.m. slot is uncertain, as is whether the network can replicate the millions who tuned in to Carlson.
“Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged 3.25 million viewers in the first few months of 2023. In 2022, the show averaged 3.3 million viewers.
“Tucker Carlson had a unique appeal, due in large part to his unique perspective—or unique, at least, to mainstream/mainstream-adjacent media,” Josh Hammer, Newsweek opinion editor and podcaster, told The Epoch Times.
“How long that trend lasts is anyone’s guess, and many—perhaps most—viewers will come back to Fox. But for now, at least, it helps confirm what many already knew: Tucker’s audience is deeply loyal to him and his brand.”
The 8 p.m. slot on Fox News is now occupied by “Fox News Tonight,” where there will be a rotation of Fox News personalities until a permanent show and host are named. Brian Kilmeade has been hosting this week. Meanwhile, former Fox News host Eric Bolling, who now hosts an 8 p.m. show at Newsmax, saw his ratings nearly triple this week.
On April 24, when Fox News announced Carlson’s departure, 2.597 million viewers tuned in to “Fox News Tonight,” a 577,000 decrease from the 3.174 million viewers who tuned in to Carlson’s show the previous week. Meanwhile, rivals MSNBC’s “All in with Chris Hayes” and CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” garnered 1.387 million and 635,000 viewers, respectively, in the same 8 p.m. hour. Newsmax had an average of 531,000 total viewers, an increase of 385,000 viewers on average from April 17, for its 8 p.m. show, “Eric Bolling The Balance.” NewsNation’s “Cuomo” got just 128,000 viewers.
While Fox News’ primetime shows outperformed those of their competitors, averaging 2.351 million viewers, it was nonetheless a drastic drop with Carlson not being on air.
On April 25, 1.704 million viewers tuned in to “Fox News Tonight,” winning the 8 p.m. hour but with a decrease of 893,000 from the previous night and a decrease of 1.519 million from the 3.223 million the previous week. “Eric Bolling The Balance” got 562,000 viewers, an increase of 31,000 from the previous night and 440,000 from the previous week. “All in with Chris Hayes” got 1.449 million viewers, “Anderson Cooper 360” got 678,000, and “Cuomo” got 156,000.
“Many of Tucker’s fans are probably also big fans of Laura Ingraham,” said Hammer. “Some will go to Newsmax during the 8 p.m. hour, as Eric Bolling’s ratings bump indicates. Some others will probably go to non-cable/internet TV shows for news consumption during that time slot.”
Indeed, it “appears to be the case” that the bump in Bolling’s show can be attributed to Carlson being taken off the air, Bryan Leib, a Newsmax contributor, told The Epoch Times.
“I think Fox viewers have seen Dan Bongino [not have his contract renewed] and now Tucker Carlson be fired and it has been an eye-opener for them,” said Leib. “Fox has always been seeking to censor [Donald] Trump in many ways and a large percentage of the Fox base is very supportive of Trump. Meanwhile, Newsmax does not censor Trump and in fact, they carry all of Trump’s rallies and live events. This is the type of programming Fox News viewers seek, and that is why they are coming over in droves to Newsmax.”
Carlson’s next stop is anyone’s guess. One America News Network, which is not carried by the major cable providers (Xfinity, DirecTV, Verizon Fios), is looking to bring Carlson on board. BlazeTV has expressed a desire for him to join. Even Russian state media outlet RT appeared to offer Carlson a job.
“There’s a point of how much more can Tucker do there is a good question,” media analyst Jon Nicosia, a former editor at Mediaite, told The Epoch Times. “He gets bored pretty easily and I’m not sure this is how he thought it was going to end, but … he can start a podcast tomorrow and have Joe Rogan-level people.”
Nicosia also raised the possibility of Carlson doing a joint venture with Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who was one of Carlson’s final major interviews.
“He’ll reemerge,” said Nicosia.
But will Fox News reemerge in the 8 p.m. hour?
“Fox shouldn’t be counted out quite yet because when Bill O’Reilly left for far different circumstances, at least we know as of now, under a clout of repeated [alleged] examples of sexual harassment … there were concerns, ‘What are we going to do? O’Reilly had been the most-watched person in cable news for many, many years, nearly an entire generation or at least half a generation,’” Curtis Houck, the managing editor of the conservative media watchdog Media Research Center’s blog, NewsBusters, told The Epoch Times.
“Fox News just still has just a unique standing in our body politic that to just suggest that this leaves them dead in the water, as some people have, I don’t really think you can say that,” he added.
Nicosia predicted that Jesse Watters, who helms the 7 p.m. slot at Fox News, will succeed Carlson and that viewers are “basically going to hear Jesse come up and say the same stuff that Tucker said.”
This week Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida made a trip to Israel to sign HB 269, a bill that makes it a felony with up to five years in jail for passing out “offensive” flyers or pamphlets. This move has been widely criticized by free speech advocates and legal experts as a gross violation of the First Amendment. The bill states that anyone distributing “any material for the purpose of intimidating or threatening the owner” could be convicted of a felony “hate crime.” While we often write about the “hate speech” rules on Big Tech platforms, this is far worse. This is the state of Florida violating the First Amendment of the United States.
The legislation came about after activists from a group called the Goyim Defense League made headlines for several years for their activism efforts. The Goyim Defense League’s activism takes the form of distributing flyers that contain “uncomfortable truths” about the individuals who control the mainstream media in the United States. These flyers have been handed out across multiple states, including Florida, and have been met with mixed reactions from the public.
Despite the controversy surrounding the flyers, it is worth noting that they contain no threats of violence or threatening language. Rather, they present what the Goyim Defense League sees as a reality about the individuals who control the mainstream media, and invite readers to consider a different perspective. While some might consider this information to be “offensive,” there is nothing inherently threatening or “intimidating” about the distribution of flyers with factual information on them. The flyers even have a statement on them noting that they are “distributed randomly without malicious intent.”
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition. This means that individuals have the right to express their opinions, even if those opinions are controversial or unpopular. The government cannot censor or punish individuals for their speech, unless it poses an imminent danger or threat to others.
HB 269, however, seeks to criminalize speech that is deemed “intimidating” by the state. This is an extremely vague and subjective standard, and it could be used to silence a wide range of speech that is protected by the First Amendment. It is important to note that the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that speech that some may find offensive is still protected under the First Amendment.
This isn’t the first time Ron DeSantis has signed anti-First Amendment legislation while in Israel. Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 741, also known as the “Combating Public Disorder” bill, into law on May 14, 2019, in Jerusalem, Israel. The signing ceremony took place at the David Citadel Hotel, where DeSantis was joined by several prominent Jewish leaders and members of the Israeli government.
The bill aims to protect religious institutions and their members from discrimination and harassment. However, many have argued that it does much more than that, and that it represents a serious threat to free speech and civil liberties.
One of the main provisions of HB 741 is a requirement that all Florida public schools, colleges, and universities adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes certain forms of criticism of Israel. The definition in question is the one adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which defines anti-Semitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews” and includes examples such as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” and “applying double standards to Israel.”
Critics of HB 741 argue that this definition is overly broad and could be used to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies. They point out that the definition includes language that could be interpreted as equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, even though the two are not the same thing. They also argue that the definition is not necessary, as schools and universities already have policies in place to address discrimination and harassment.
Another provision of HB 741 requires law enforcement agencies to conduct training on identifying and responding to anti-Semitic incidents. Many have raised concerns that this provision could be used to target legitimate forms of protest and dissent. For example, if a group of pro-Palestinian activists were to stage a peaceful demonstration outside an Israeli consulate or embassy, could they be accused of engaging in an anti-Semitic incident?
Perhaps most controversially, HB 741 creates a private right of action for people who believe they have been discriminated against on the basis of their religion. This means that individuals who feel that they have been the victim of anti-Semitic discrimination can sue the alleged perpetrator for damages. This is highly likely to be used to stifle free speech and dissent. For example, a professor who expresses a controversial opinion about Israel could potentially be sued by a student who disagrees with them and feels that their religious beliefs have been discriminated against.
The fact that Governor DeSantis flew to a foreign country to sign both of these bills is absurd. Florida is a state in the United States, and its laws should be signed within the state’s borders. The reality that Gov. DeSantis chose to sign these bills in Israel, a foreign country, raises serious questions about his priorities and commitment to upholding the Constitution for the citizens of the United States and his state of Florida.
The implications of HB 269 and HB 741 are deeply troubling. They could be used to silence political dissent, punish those who criticize government officials, or suppress speech that challenges the status quo. In short, it is a direct attack on the First Amendment and the principles of free speech that are so essential to a healthy society.
We must be willing to engage in open dialogue with those who hold different views, and to stand up for our rights even when it is uncomfortable or unpopular to do so.
This means supporting organizations and individuals who are working to protect free speech, like Gab, and advocating for policies that promote openness and transparency in government. It also means being willing to speak out against efforts to silence dissent or suppress speech even when they come from our own political allies.
The defense of our fundamental rights is not a partisan issue. It is a matter of basic human dignity and freedom and it requires all of us to stand up and be counted. We must remain vigilant in the face of attempts to suppress speech and dissent, and be willing to push back against these efforts wherever they arise. Only by doing so can we ensure that America remains free for generations to come.
Andrew Torba CEO, Gab.com Jesus Christ is King of kings
On April 24, the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” host and Fox News parted ways. Fox News stocks fell by as much as 5 percent on the same day, while Tucker Carlson’s Twitter profile gained about 700,000 followers in less than a week.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Carlson has been routinely criticized for his COVID commentaries that opposed the mainstream narrative.
Yet many would argue that Carlson’s commentaries were a rare source of reason over the past three fear-plagued years.
Prominent cardiologist and leading COVID-19 vaccine critic Dr. Peter McCullough told The Epoch Times that Carlson was “on track” about the significant factors influencing society.
“He made great contributions over the last two years,” McCullough said.
“People recognize that he is genuinely telling the truth, and even if they don’t agree with his interpretation, in general, his comments are factual and reasonable,” Dr. David Bell, public health physician and former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), told The Epoch Times over the phone.
Here is how Carlson weighed in on some of the critical topics throughout the pandemic.
Origins of SARS-CoV-2
Carlson, a prominent voice calling for a thorough investigation into the origins of COVID-19, was among the few eminent TV hosts open to the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak origin.
“Maybe an animal transmitted it to researchers, and the Chinese government didn’t quarantine those researchers. That’s an entirely reasonable possibility, as reasonable as any other explanation,” Carlson suggested in a segment of his show in September 2020.
Hong Kong virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan appeared in the same episode. Yan researched SARS-CoV-2 in China and later fled to the United States. She told Carlson that she believed the virus was engineered and intentionally released to infect the globe.
He was critical of media and political commentary that argued against calling COVID-19 by the name “Wuhan virus” because they claimed it would be offensive and racist.
“Now is not the time to indulge in the lowest and dumbest kind of identity politics,” Carlson said in a February 2020 segment. “In times of crisis, euphemisms kill. You need accuracy and clear language in the way you talk about the threat. It’s essential.”
On Feb. 23, 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported on a classified report from the U.S. Energy Department that concluded COVID-19 likely originated from a lab leak.
“We know perfectly well COVID came from, we’ve known this for years,” Carlson said on his show in 2023, commenting on this report. “One of the very first things we knew about COVID was that it was an engineered virus that escaped somehow, intentionally or not, from a Chinese military biolab in Wuhan.”
COVID-19 Severity
Carlson’s stance on COVID-19 severity has shifted throughout the pandemic.
Early in the pandemic, mainstream health authorities argued that the risks of COVID-19 were “minuscule” and that the flu posed a more significant concern. Carlson, however, citing data from the WHO at the time, expressed concern that the COVID-19 virus could be 30 times more dangerous than the flu and that the health system might be unable to handle this virus.
A subsequent study showed that the COVID-19 case fatality rate is less than 1 percent, significantly lower than the 3.4 percent reported by the WHO early in the pandemic.
“We now know … that the virus isn’t that deadly,” Carlson said in a segment aired on May 22, 2020. “An enormous percentage of coronavirus infections produce mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. They’re asymptomatic. The death toll is a tiny fraction of what we were told it would be.”
Vaccine Adverse Events
Carlson was a leading critic of the push to vaccinate and the censorship of discussing adverse events since the initial vaccine rollouts.
He questioned the efficacy of vaccines and raised concerns about their safety but has not advocated against getting vaccinated.
With the advent of the vaccine rollout, Twitter and Facebook implemented new misinformation policies. Posts about COVID-19 vaccinations deemed to be false or misleading were removed. This also led to the closure of Facebook groups discussing vaccine reactions.
In December 2020, Carlson expressed that these actions would erode trust.
“None of this inspires confidence,” he said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “Censorship will not convince a single person to take the coronavirus vaccine. In fact, it will have the opposite effect.”
At first, Carlson favored vaccination for vulnerable people, but he has been against mandating it.
“I thought that American physicians agreed that compulsory medical care was unethical, it was immoral, and it could never be imposed on anyone,” he said on Jan. 21, 2022.
In April 2021, Carlson cast doubt on vaccine safety after adverse events of blood clotting and bleeding appeared in those who took the J&J vaccine.
On May 5, 2021, Carlson raised concern about deaths after COVID-19 vaccinations. He cited data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), saying 3,362 people died after getting the shots between late December to April 2021.
Lead cardiologist and COVID-19 vaccine critic Dr. Peter McCullough said Carlson would be the first to cite VAERS data on primetime television.
In June 2021, the WHO published its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, writing that “children should not be vaccinated for the moment.”
“There is not yet enough evidence on the use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19,” the WHO added.
“The drugs are too dangerous. There’s not nearly enough data to understand the long-term effects or to show that the benefits are worth the risk that they bring,” Carlson said.
“Judging by the VAERS reporting system, we can be certain that some will be harmed. Beyond that, we can’t be sure. We aren’t even sure what effects this vaccine will have on the elderly—the one group we were told from day one should take the vaccine as quickly as possible.”
Carlson’s most recent comments on COVID-19 vaccines came from the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show aired on April 19, 2023.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a 2024 presidential candidate and the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a not-for-profit activist group for childhood vaccine safety, joined Carlson.
Carlson introduced Kennedy as someone who knew early on that “the COVID vaccines were both ineffective and potentially dangerous.”
Masking
Carlson was initially in favor of voluntary masking.
“Of course, masks work,” he said in a segment in late March 2020, while also raising the concern that masks were becoming difficult to source.
He later changed his take on masking in July 2020, saying there was “no basis of any kind in science” on mask-wearing.
However, Carlson has always been critical of mask mandates, arguing that the mandates were implemented more for political reasons than public health.
In discussing the Virginian lawsuit that ruled to allow parents to opt their children out of wearing masks, Carlson repeated ruling judge Louise DiMatteo’s comments.
“Louise DiMatteo made a highly revealing statement: ‘I’m not going to decide who’s right and who’s wrong on masking,’ she said. ‘This is really about the hierarchy of authority.’ Well, exactly. That really is what it’s about. After more than two years of COVID restrictions, there’s not a huge amount of scientific debate over masks on children,” Carlson said.
“The only debate left, as the judge pointed out, is not to debate over science. It’s a debate about power.”
In January 2023, research gold standard Cochrane published a review concluding masking does not slow the spread of COVID-19.
Lockdowns
Carlson has been critical of lockdowns, arguing that they have been harmful to individuals and society and do not help control the spread of the virus.
Carlson said in a segment on his show in November 2020, “The evidence is in. Lockdowns don’t work. They don’t make us safe. They don’t stop the virus. They do cause enormous harm, though, especially to the poor and the middle class.”
Studies have shown conflicting benefits of lockdowns. For example, a study by the University of California found that early lockdowns prevented infections by 56 percent, but they came with a decline in GDP, employment, customer spending, and satisfaction. Contrastingly, a Johns Hopkins study showed that lockdowns only reduced COVID-19 mortalities by 0.2 percent on average (pdf).
Carlson has also criticized government officials for imposing strict lockdown measures while failing to adequately support businesses and individuals struggling due to the pandemic.
After airing clips of the interview, reporter Linsey Davis spoke to viewers.
“We should note that during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines,” she said. “We’ve used our editorial judgment in not including extended portions of that exchange in our interview,” Davis said.
The claims in question were not listed, and ABC did not return a request for comment.
Davis indicated that at least one dealt with the effectiveness of the vaccines.
“Data shows that the COVID-19 vaccine has prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease,” Davis said. She did not provide any citations for the claim.
“He also made misleading claims about the relationship between vaccination and autism. Research shows that vaccines and the ingredients used in the vaccines do not cause autism, including multiple studies involving more than a million children and major medical associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the advocacy group Autism Speaks,” she added.
Kennedy said that what happened violated the U.S. law that bars some media outlets from censoring candidates for public office.
“ABC showed its contempt for the law, democracy, and its audience by cutting most of the content of my interview with host Linsey Davis leaving only cherry-picked snippets and a defamatory disclaimer,” Kennedy said.
“Offering no evidence, ABC justified this act of censorship by falsely asserting that I made ‘false claims.’ In truth, Davis engaged me in a lively, informative, and mutually respectful debate on the government’s Covid countermeasures. I’m happy to supply citations to support every statement I made during that exchange. I’m certain that ABC’s decision to censor came as a shock to Linsey as well. Instead of journalism, the public saw a hatchet job,” he added.
Before airing the interview, Davis described Kennedy as “one of the biggest voices pushing anti-vaccine rhetoric, regularly distributing misinformation and disinformation about vaccines, which scientific and medical experts overwhelmingly say are safe and effective based on rigorous scientific studies.” She did not mention how the vaccines are increasingly ineffective against newer COVID-19 variants and how the vaccines have been proven to cause serious problems, including heart inflammation and death.
Critics decried ABC’s cutting of Kennedy’s remarks.
“The most outrageous part of this is ABC gets to ream RFK Jr. about vaccines during the interview but then censor his ability to even respond while forcing us to blindly trust them that his claims were ‘false,’” commentator John Ziegler wrote on Twitter. “All this after they were wrong about vaccines stopping transmission.”
Producer Alex Lorusso noted that ABC never censored officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who have made false and misleading claims about vaccine effectiveness, including his claims on ABC in January 2021 that if enough people were vaccinated, herd immunity would be achieved.
“They are going to censor to interfere with the 2024 election, and they won’t even hide it,” Lorusso added on Twitter.
“At the end of this otherwise interesting interview with Robert Kennedy Jr., ABC News admits they censored ‘extended portions’ relating to discussions around the COVID ‘vaccine,’” Townhall writer Scott Morefield wrote on Twitter. “If his claims are so easily disproven, why not simply disprove them instead of resorting to censorship?”
Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, French Montana, and Rick Ross have lengthy rap sheets
What’s happening: A liberal dark money group is hosting a concert Thursday evening ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a truly sickening affair during which journalists dress up and go to fancy parties to mingle with celebs and congratulate themselves for saving democracy.
This particular event—sponsored by Power to the Patients, a health care nonprofit funded by mysterious donors—will feature hip-hop performances by four violent (alleged, at the very least) criminals: Busta Rhymes, French Montana, Rick Ross, and Fat Joe, the group’s celebrity spokesman. Mr. Joe is in Washington, D.C., this week to meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and with Biden administration officials at the White House.
Rap sheets: All of the headline performers at Thursday’s WHCA kickoff event have a long history of legal challenges.
• Fat Joe—Charged with assault and robbery in 1998 for allegedly beating a man with a baseball bat and stealing his gold chain; charged with assault in 2002 after members of his entourage fractured a man’s jaw; credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman inside his Cadillac limo after a concert in 2011; named as a witness in two murder trials; sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion in 2012; bragged that he used to “stick people up” and endorsed violent theft in a 2022 interview.
• Busta Rhymes—Charged with assault in 2006 for beating a pedestrian; charged with assault in 2007 for beating up his former driver; busted for DUI and driving with a suspended license; ordered to pay $75,000 to a fan he allegedly assaulted at a concert; arrested in 2015 for assaulting a gym employee while spouting racist and homophobic slurs; refused to pay his fair share in taxes.
• French Montana—Credibly accused of sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman in 2018, resulting in an undisclosed settlement; credibly accused of sexually assaulting another woman in a Las Vegas hotel room that same year; credibly accused of raping a teenaged model in 2021; sued for negligence earlier this year after 10 people were injured in a shooting while filming a music video; refused to pay his fair share in taxes.
• Rick Ross—Sentenced to five years probation in 2017 after pleading no contest to kidnapping and assault charges; widely denounced that same year for saying he would never hire a female artist because “I would end up f—ing her and f—ing the business up;” arrested for gun possession in 2008; sued that same year for orchestrating a “brutal attack” on a rival artist; refused to pay his fair share in taxes.
Why it matters: Assaulting people is wrong.
Bottom line: A hip-hop cocktail party hosted by a left-wing dark money group, headlined by violent criminals and tax cheats, intended to kick off several days of ceremonial self-congratulation among political journalists. It is a rather fitting reflection of the Democratic Party in 2023.
DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg has come under fire for his close relationship with Beijing
Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chairman for Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, heaped praise on China in an interview with Chinese state television, saying “doors opened” for his movie studio in the communist regime after he learned “the China way.”
Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks, said in a 2017 interview with CGTN America, a subsidiary of the CCP’s propaganda department, that business in China had proved “extremely rewarding.” He praised China’s technological innovation as “way ahead” of other countries, and downplayed concerns about China’s reputation for censoring American movies.
Katzenberg’s friendly relationship with China could present a political liability for Biden, who has come under scrutiny for failing to stand up to Beijing and for his son Hunter’s dealings there. National security officials have warned that the Chinese government increasingly tries to influence American foreign policy through business leaders and other influencers outside government.
Biden may have had a hand in opening doors for Katzenberg in China. In 2012, the New York Timesreported that then-Vice President Biden negotiated with Chinese president Xi Jinping to secure a deal that would open the Chinese market to more American films. Katzenberg, who attended a State Department event with Biden and Xi around the time the deal was sealed, called it an “honor for us and a huge opportunity” to have more access to China. One of Katzenberg’s earliest business partners was Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Communist Party leader and Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Katzenberg’s status in China was on display at a 2015 White House dinner, when the Hollywood mogul was seated at the head table with Xi and a few other American executives.
Katzenberg, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, is the only Biden co-chairman from the private sector. Sens. Chris Coons (Del.) and Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), Reps. Jim Clyburn (S.C.), Veronica Escobar (Tex.), and Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (Mich.) will serve in the role.
Katzenberg has faced some scrutiny over the years for his China ties. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated whether DreamWorks, which Katzenberg founded in 1994, paid bribes to Chinese officials to expand its business. One of Katzenberg’s first projects in China was a film called Tibet Code, which came under fire because it put forth a pro-Beijing view of the longstanding feud between Tibet and China.
Asked in his CGTN interview about China’s well-earned reputation for censoring Western films, Katzenberg said he “was never restricted” by Chinese authorities.
“I’ve never been censored on anything that I have done. Maybe that’s the choices of the kinds of things and the type of content that I make in that there wasn’t any sensitivity around it,” he said.
It’s not that China’s censors have given Katzenberg a free pass. The New York Timesreported in 2013 that Chinese officials visited DreamWorks’s Los Angeles headquarters to sign off on the studio’s “Kung Fu Panda 3.”
“The story line, production art and other creative elements have met their approval,” the Times reported of China’s visit to DreamWorks.
The Biden campaign and Katzenberg did not respond to requests for comment.
Justices ridicule Neal Katyal’s defense of county that seized woman’s home over $2,300 in unpaid taxes
A left-wing lawyer who once defended al Qaeda terrorists argued before the Supreme Court Wednesday that a Minnesota county was in the right when it confiscated an elderly woman’s condo and took all the profits from its sale over a small unpaid tax.
Supreme Court justices appeared unconvinced by lawyer Neal Katyal’s defense of Hennepin County, which contains Minneapolis, according to the Associated Press. The plaintiff in the case, Geraldine Tyler, now 94 years old, didn’t get any of the $40,000 the county received from the sale of her condo. The county seized the property in 2015 over $2,300 in unpaid taxes. Tyler owed $15,000 total with penalties and interest on the unpaid taxes.
“At bottom, she’s saying the county took her property and made a profit on her surplus equity. It belongs to her,” Justice Clarence Thomas said Wednesday.
Justice Neil Gorsuch ridiculed the county’s position that expensive properties could also be seized for minuscule missing payments. “So a $5 property tax, a million dollar property, good to go?” Gorsuch asked Katyal, who answered in the affirmative.
Katyal’s defense referenced historical events dating back to 1272, as well as the Court’s recent striking down of Roe v. Wade, the Associated Press reported. “I just don’t understand what on earth any of that history has to do with this case,” Gorsuch said of Katyal’s historical references.
Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general under the Obama administration, is no stranger to representing controversial defendants. He is known as one of the “al Qaeda 7,” a group of lawyers who represented al Qaeda terrorists against the Bush administration.
He also appeared before the Supreme Court in 2020 to defend Nestlé and Cargill, who faced charges of abetting child slavery at cocoa plantations in Africa.
Katyal, a frequent face on MSNBC, rose in popularity in 2017 for leading challenges against former president Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban on countries including North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela.
It isn’t, according to a survey that cost nearly $90,000
The Biden administration spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to determine whether the construction industry is sufficiently diverse, equitable, and inclusive. It isn’t, the survey found.
Joe Biden’s General Services Administration in November released the survey’s “powerful” findings, which highlighted the glaring need for construction companies “to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in their industry.” While the federal agency did not include the survey’s cost in the release, a contract obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows that the “DEI Survey and Report” cost taxpayers nearly $90,000.
Biden has issued a slew of executive orders on diversity, equity, and inclusion, which require federal agencies to implement “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Strategic Plans” in an effort to advance “equity for all.” The General Services Administration said it commissioned its construction industry survey as a result of those orders. In the subsequent report, agency administrator Robin Carnahan said the effort is part of a push to ensure federal contractors—not just the federal government—embrace Biden’s equity “vision.”
“GSA can’t do this work alone; we need partners—including architects, contractors, and others—who fully understand that DEIA advances the federal government’s mission and is good business,” Carnahan said in the report. “The data-driven report shows that there is much more work to do.”
For Carnahan, a Democrat who served as Missouri’s secretary of state from 2005 to 2013, that work includes advancement “in areas such as recruiting, empowering, and advancing a diverse workforce.” Nearly half of construction companies, the agency’s release laments, were grouped into the survey’s “low to no engagement” category when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion, stressing the need to “advance equity in architecture and construction.” Still, Carnahan identified some bright spots—diversity, equity, and inclusion training, the Biden appointee’s report says, “is becoming a norm for the industry.”
The General Services Administration, which did not return a request for comment, manages transportation, office space, and other logistics for the federal agencies. Its focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion could prompt accusations that it is more concerned with a federal contractor’s politics than its job performance. Prominent Republicans have long argued as much, with former Trump administration secretary of state Mike Pompeo saying last month that equity programs “erode the American commitment to the dignity of hard work.”
“The fairness of playing by the rules is abrogated when government steps in and awards bonuses to people based on something other than the fact that they worked hard and were decent and good,” Pompeo said. “And more importantly, it erodes the fundamental decency—the goodness of doing what is right every day.”
Biden’s diversity, equity, and inclusion push has extended far beyond the General Services Administration. Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, for example, launched a $3.8 billion Department of Agriculture relief program that aimed to pay up to 120 percent of loans for farmers and ranchers of color. A federal judge halted that program in June 2021, saying it “discriminate[d] against farmers because of their race or national origin.” Biden’s Treasury Department, meanwhile, created in October 2021 a “counselor for racial equity” who is meant to “advance equity and advise the Treasury Department on all racial equity policy issues and programs.”
Julie Su is on Capitol Hill auditioning to be Joe Biden’s next labor secretary, but back in her home state of California, businesses are paying what some call the “Su Tax”—a hike in payroll taxes to make up for the massive fraud that took place on her watch during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nearly 60 California businesses and agriculture groups complained last month that their four million-plus members face escalating payroll taxes to bail out the state’s insolvent unemployment insurance fund. The groups warned state legislative leaders that the taxes—which could exceed $400 per worker each year—threaten employee-heavy small businesses and restaurants that were already devastated by California Democrats’ strict COVID-19 lockdowns.
The business groups did not mention Su by name, but they noted how California’s unemployment insurance fund spent up to $31 billion on payouts for fraudulent claims when she was the state labor secretary. After presiding over the fund’s fall into insolvency, Su left to become the Biden administration’s deputy labor secretary.
“California’s businesses … had no control over [the fund’s] mistaken distribution of the employer-funded UI funds–but now California employers are being taxed for these policies,” the groups, led by the California Chamber of Commerce, wrote in a March 23 letter.
Now, with Su seeking confirmation as Biden’s labor secretary, the plight of California businesses underscores swing-vote senators’ concerns about her competence. The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee voted along party lines Thursday to advance Su’s nomination to a vote by the full chamber, but her confirmation remains very much in doubt.
In California, some Republicans have taken to referring to the new costs of doing business as the “Su tax.” While Rep. Kevin Kiley (R., Calif.) was familiar with the term, he preferred a different monicker.
“It’s an incompetence tax: a price private citizens are being forced to pay for their government’s failures,” Kiley told the Washington Free Beacon. “The predicament that small businesses in California now find themselves in—facing double taxation to make up for the government’s negligence—is another example of why Julie Su’s nomination to be our nation’s next labor secretary is so ill-considered.”
Ranking committee member Bill Cassidy (R., La.) during Thursday’s hearing voiced some of the objections to Su’s confirmation that Republican lawmakers and national business groups had raised.
“Julie Su has an extensive record of partisan activism and promoting policies that undermine workers to the benefit of politically-connected labor unions,” Cassidy said. “A qualified Secretary of Labor needs to successfully handle negotiations, manage a department properly, and refrain from partisan activism. I haven’t seen evidence of Julie Su’s ability to do any of those three things.”
At a HELP committee hearing last week, Su insisted that she had moved swiftly to stop California from being defrauded during the pandemic. But her testimony was directly contradicted by federal and California state audits, which found that, under Su, California’s Division of Labor Standards Enforcement failed to act for months to stop the fraud despite repeated warnings.
According to the audits and to Su’s own directives, she tossed safeguards out the window to pump unemployment dollars to the millions of people who were rendered jobless during the state’s long COVID-19 lockdown. Early on, Su suspended a requirement that unemployment insurance recipients check in every two weeks to prove they still qualify for benefits—arguing the state could not otherwise keep up with the staggering number of claims. The unemployment insurance fund also paid claims to parties its own analysis flagged as suspicious—which California’s watchdog deemed a “lax approach.”
A federal audit, meanwhile, found that California transferred one fraudster $1.6 million in unemployment benefits over 164 days.
Ahead of Su’s nomination to deputy labor secretary in January 2021, she acknowledged that her agency wasted as much as $31 billion in pandemic unemployment insurance payments—more than any other state. “There is no sugar coating the reality, California did not have sufficient security measures in place to prevent this level of fraud,” she said at the time.
More than two years later, California’s unemployment insurance fund is still nearly $20 billion in the red. Since federal law decrees that the fund must be replenished, the burden falls on California businesses through a reduction of their tax credits. The businesses—already among the nation’s most heavily taxed and regulated—will pay for the state’s errors starting with a $21-per-employee increase in their payroll taxes. The tax bump will rise every year that the fund remains insolvent, maxing out at $434 per worker, with no exemption for small businesses.
As the business groups pointed out in their letter, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D.) latest budget does not address the fund’s insolvency, and there is no plan in place to make it whole.
“Just as COVID-19 was a statewide public emergency and went beyond individual private employers,” the groups wrote, “the cost of COVID-19 on California’s UI Fund should not fall on private employers alone.”
Claim: Republican politicians are “banning books,” including To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Who said it: President Joe Biden in the video he released earlier this week officially launching his reelection campaign. When he says Republicans are “banning books,” we see a stack of books at the top of which sits a worn paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Context: Journalists and other Democrats frequently complain about Republicans “banning” books. They are almost always spreading misinformation. Usually the book in question has simply been removed from a school’s curriculum—sometimes in response to complaints from parents, sometimes because the school board felt like it.
Why it matters: Perhaps the only things journalists and other Democrats hate more than book “bans” is misinformation, defined (by them) as information that has not been thoroughly vetted by journalists or some unaccountable board of left-wing “experts.”
Nevertheless, they persist in spreading information about a wide range of topics and will do so even more passionately now that the 2024 election is underway.
Analysis: In August 2022, a bunch of liberals started spreading misinformation on social media. They claimed (without evidence) that To Kill a Mockingbird was on a list of books Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) had recently “banned” from Florida public schools.
The Associated Press fact-checked the ridiculous claim, writing: “False. … A school district in Florida’s Palm Beach County removed [To Kill a Mockingbird] from school libraries earlier this year as part of a review, but later returned it, according to district documents. The ‘Banned Book List’ shared across social media this week is also bogus, and includes many titles that aren’t banned in Florida, according to groups that track book bans and challenges.”
As it turns out, a number of schools have recently “banned” (removed from their required reading lists) the Harper Lee novel about a white lawyer who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman during the Great Depression.
As you might expect, the schools are located in and around Los Angeles, Seattle, and Madison, Wisconsin. Their respective boards took action in response to deranged liberal parents who denounced the book’s “white-savior story line,” complained that it “reflects a time when racism was tolerated” and “ignores the reality of black agency in resistance,” whatever that means.
‘We consciously are disrupting people’s lives,’ climate alarmism group says after protest
Here’s a snapshot of the climate history over the past half million years. It’s several years old. We are at the top of the curve and heading downward as we enter a grand solar minimum. The things claimed by the alarmists are the things that will happen if we DO abandon our current energy sources overnight, not if we don’t. Catching photons and wisps of wind do not make nearly enough power. [US Patriot]
A climate activist who shut down a Washington, D.C., highway acknowledged that she’s consciously “disrupting people’s lives” and compared herself to civil rights pioneers who were “not well liked during their time.”
Declare Emergency, a climate alarmism group that conducts disruptive protests in and around D.C. in hopes of urging Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, on Wednesday blockaded a busy section of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. After the demonstration, group spokeswoman Nora Swisher dismissed criticism of the protest, admitting that the “point” of the protest is to ruin people’s days. Swisher went on to argue that those who don’t like her tactics will eventually come around, just as the general public now reveres once-unpopular civil rights pioneers.
“We consciously are disrupting people’s lives today in hopes that we can mitigate more serious destruction down the road. Because that’s the trajectory we’re on right now,” Swisher told FOX 5. When asked if she feared whether the protest would turn people against her cause, Swisher said she “expected” such a backlash and expressed confidence that history would look fondly upon the group. “This has been true of nonviolent civil disobedience movements throughout history,” Swisher said. “The suffragettes, the civil rights movement—they were not well liked during their time. Now, with hindsight, we see that their actions were moral and justified.”
Far-left environmental groups have long pressed the federal government to declare a national climate emergency, but the calls have entered the Democratic Party’s mainstream in recent years. Biden reportedly considered issuing a climate emergency declaration last summer but stopped short, prompting criticism from climate activists. Months later, in October 2022, a group of eight Democratic senators urged Biden to declare the emergency, arguing that he could not reach his emission reduction goals without the declaration.
“We will only achieve these targets if you build off the momentum of the Inflation Reduction Act with strong executive action,” wrote the group, which included Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse, California’s Alex Padilla, and Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen. “We urge you to take the important next step of declaring a climate emergency and unlocking the full tools at your disposal to address this crisis.”
A climate emergency declaration would allow Biden to unlock COVID-esque emergency powers to fight climate change through executive order. Under a climate emergency, for example, Biden could use the Defense Production Act to stimulate green energy generation. He could also deploy the military to build green energy projects near military installments around the country.
Declare Emergency has long blocked highways around D.C., including last year on Independence Day. In October 2022, meanwhile, the group planned a “week of arrest,” which then-leader Donald Zepeda said was necessary to spur climate action. “What people are interested in and concerned about is the sacrifice element,” Zepeda told the Washington Free Beacon. “So I don’t think we’re going to have actions without arrests.”
Residents in D.C. and Northern Virginia can expect similar protests from the group “in the coming weeks and months,” Swisher told FOX 5. Those demonstrations are not likely to make Declare Emergency any friends. One local resident trashed the group’s Wednesday protest in an interview with FOX 5, saying the demonstration forced her to miss a medical appointment for her dog.
“It’s something that’s a very important cause, of course, but you’re now having all these people idle, and you’re also now making them angry,” the woman said. “If you want people to be attentive to your cause, making them angry is not the way to do it, especially at 9 o’clock on a Wednesday morning.”
Lithium battery company Microvast set to receive $200 million from Biden admin
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm declined to rule out giving funding to companies with “material operations in China” on Wednesday after a lawmaker pressed her on the Department of Energy’s $200 million announced grant to a lithium battery company that operates primarily out of China.
Granholm’s testimony comes a week after she told another Senate committee that her department is still reviewing the pending grant to lithium battery company Microvast, which the department announced with great fanfare a few weeks before the midterm election last fall.
Lawmakers have criticized the grant, noting Microvast’s extensive business in China. While the company’s registered headquarters is in Texas, it disclosed in its financial report last year that it operates primarily in China and that the Chinese government “exerts substantial influence over the manner in which we must conduct our business activities.”
Granholm told Sen. Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) on Wednesday that “no state-owned enterprise” in China would receive funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“What about companies that have material operations in China?” Schmitt asked.
Granholm declined to answer directly, saying the DOE is “using this [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] vetting program to be able to identify exactly where the control is of a particular technology … and we want to make sure that we are the beneficiaries of those acts and not others.”
The exchange came after Schmitt pressed Granholm on the proposed grant to Microvast, which was intended to fund a battery separator facility in Tennessee. He told Granholm that the grant was “concerning.”
Although the DOE framed that grant and others as a done deal in an announcement last October—even releasing statements from elected officials praising the funding—Granholm said the awards are still “going through vetting process to ensure that there is no money flowing to countries of concern.”
“Those vetting processes are going on, not a dollar has gone out the door yet,” she told Schmitt.
The DOE has defended the proposed grant, saying that Microvast is an American company headquartered in Texas.
Alejandro Mayorkas attempted to quell staff’s concerns in an internal memo obtained by the Free Beacon
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas admitted in an internal memo that the end of a policy that enables the swift deportation of migrants “will strain our workforce, our communities, and our entire system.”
“We anticipate that we may experience increased levels of arrivals at our southern border in the coming weeks,” Mayorkas wrote in Thursday’s staff-wide memo, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “This will strain our workforce, our communities, and our entire system.”
Mayorkas is referring to the termination of Title 42, a pandemic-era public health order that allows for the swift deportation of migrants. The policy is set to lapse on May 11, after years of legal battles and inaction from the White House. Mayorkas circulated the memo hours before discussing changes to border policy in a joint press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The memo shows Mayorkas’s efforts to quell his staff’s concerns ahead of a coming migration surge, which one senior Department of Homeland Security official called “an upcoming s— storm.” The southern border could see up to 15,000 crossings a day once Title 42 lapses, which amounts to 5.1 million annually. By comparison, last March saw an average of roughly 5,200 daily illegal border crossings.
Given the expected surge, Republicans have called on the president to keep Title 42 in place, while activists and far-left Democrats applaud its termination. But other Democrats are less enthusiastic, including Rep. Veronica Escobar (D., Texas) who said earlier this month that she is “very concerned for our border communities.”
Mayorkas acknowledged that he anticipates an increase in illegal border crossings in his Thursday press conference but also claimed that new remote processing centers will give asylum seekers greater ability to enter the United States from their home countries. Those new processing centers, Mayorkas said, should disincentivize individuals from attempting to sneak through the southern border.
“You almost feel bad for the secretary. After two years on the job he knows full well the chaos we’re about to face—especially the burden that will fall on frontline officers,” the senior DHS official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Free Beacon. “But the administration pours all efforts into processing under the stated belief it will decrease strain on the border. It didn’t help under COVID rules and Mayorkas’s comments show the White House knows it won’t work when Title 42 ends.”
Mayorkas’s memo echoed much of what he said at the press conference, including an attempt to blame the record-number of border crossings that have occurred under his watch on the nation’s “broken immigration system.” Mayorkas also touted policies that would bar illegal aliens from entering the country for five years and fine them for each repeat illegal entry.
But the senior DHS official noted that both those policies have been on the books for years, and that repeat entry is already a felony.
“The challenges of migration are immense and have been so for decades. We are dealing with a broken immigration system that we need Congress to reform,” Mayorkas wrote. “Through it all, one thing is constant: the heroism, tireless dedication, and incredible talent of our personnel.”
Although morale has been low at DHS since the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term due to the border crisis, the end of Title 42 has left many, according to the senior DHS official, “feeling screwed.” The United Nations estimates that 660,000 migrants are currently in Mexico, most of whom want to eventually enter the United States.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform blasted the White House after Mayorkas’s press conference, alleging his “plan … amounts to the same failed policies that resulted in record levels of illegal immigration, only on steroids.”
“The DHS plan amounts to a massive and illegal scheme designed to accommodate unlimited numbers of migrants in defiance of the department’s statutory obligation to deter and prevent illegal immigration,” FAIR president Dan Stein said. “It is the same failed strategy that has already resulted in more than 7 million illegal entries in just the first 26 months of this administration.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Republican Study Committee package would block the Biden administration from lifting sanctions
Congress is readying a bevy of bills that would effectively kill any hope the Biden administration has of inking a revamped nuclear deal with Iran, according to sources briefed on the matter.
House Republicans on Friday will begin rolling out a series of six bills designed to expand sanctions on Iran and curtail the White House’s ability to waive sanctions in future deals, according to copies of the legislation exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The bills, sponsored by members of the conservative Republican Study Committee, target Iran’s military, government leaders, and financial sector.
The legislative blitz comes as the Biden administration works to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Though the Biden administration publicly claims negotiations with Iran are on standby, lawmakers close to the issue maintain that the White House is still working behind the scenes to secure a new nuclear deal. These talks may have inspired Tehran to step up its military activity and attacks on the United States, the Free Beacon reported this month.
Study Committee chairman Kevin Hern (R., Okla.) said the legislative blitz is a warning to the White House that Republicans have “not forgotten about the Biden administration’s continuing attempts to re-enter the Iran deal.”
Winning approval in the Democrat-controlled Senate could pose a challenge, given Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s hesitance to interfere in the White House’s diplomacy with Iran. But the study committee’s national security task force, led by Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), will “play an integral role” in selling the bills to Democrats and Republicans in both chambers, Hern said. The Republican lobbying campaign will include an “extremely aggressive” push to get the bills included in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, the yearly spending bill that is jointly authored with the Senate, according to several Republican aides.
The study committee’s package would prevent the Biden administration from using executive authority to unilaterally lift sanctions on Tehran—just as the Obama administration did when it skirted Congress to ink the original accord. One of the primary vehicles to stop a new deal is a bill spearheaded by Rep. John James (R., Mich.) that would deem any agreement with Iran as a formal treaty that requires congressional approval. With a split Senate, the Biden administration would likely fail to attract the two-thirds necessary for a treaty to be enacted. This bill alone would neuter diplomacy, stopping the White House from making good on any promises to Tehran.
James’s bill would also expand sanctions on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans. Though the IRGC was designated as a terror outfit in 2019, its vast network of affiliates still remains in the clear. The bill would broaden sanctions by targeting “individuals and entities that provide significant financial or material support” to the IRGC, according to a copy of the measure. Any financial institution that does business with an IRGC front company would also be subject to sanctions under the bill.
“Despite having bipartisan opposition in Congress and no support from our Israeli and Arab allies and partners, President Biden has not fully shut the door on negotiating a flawed Iran nuclear deal,” James said in a statement to the Free Beacon. “My legislation returns congressional accountability to the Iran nuclear negotiations and forces the administration to work with us to find a resolution to address Iran’s nuclear and malign activity.”
A related measure set to be introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R., Colo.) would further widen IRGC sanctions to include the thousands of companies and smaller cells run by the terror organization. This IRGC’s vast network, which extends into Latin America and Europe, remains immune to most American sanctions currently on the books.
A third measure, backed by Rep. Bryan Steil (R., Wis.), would block the Biden administration from lifting terrorism sanctions unless it can prove the individual or entity has ceased engaging in these activities. Given Tehran’s vast regional terrorism enterprise, Iran would be unable to clear this threshold.
Congressional sources familiar with the bill said it is a direct response to the Obama administration’s contested decision to unilaterally skirt terrorism sanctions on Iran via a series of executive licenses.
The fourth bill, authored by Rep. Cory Mills (R., Fla.), would prohibit the Biden administration from lifting existing sanctions on Mahan Air, an Iranian fleet that ferries weapons and militant fighters across the region. Iranian officials are pushing for these sanctions to be lifted as part of any new deal with the United States.
Two other bills, from Wilson and Texas Rep. Pat Fallon (R.), would further isolate the IRGC by cutting off its access to international financial institutions.
Fallon’s bill would make it difficult for Iran’s banking sector to work with global financial institutions, while Wilson’s bill sanctions Iranian government leaders and others involved in the country’s vast security state.
“The Iranian regime continues enriching uranium, oppressing the Iranian people, and exporting missiles and terrorism,” Wilson told the Free Beacon. “Now that the Republicans are in the House majority, we will pass legislation to continue to pressure this brutal regime.”
More than 10,000 federal employees could have access to data revealed by a secretive government surveillance program that has come under scrutiny because of alleged abuses, lawmakers were told by U.S. inspectors general.
At an April 27 House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, lawmakers heard from a panel of three witnesses associated with the U.S. Office of the Inspector General (OIG) responsible for oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The legislation gives intelligence agencies broad powers to conduct surveillance on foreigners suspected of spying for a foreign power or belonging to a terrorist group.
However, bipartisan concerns have been raised because the program also has the ability to collect information about U.S. citizens.
During the hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) queried panelists about how many FBI agents could have access to FISA-acquired data.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) delivers remarks at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2023. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A court-ordered report released in May 2022 revealed that the FBI had made more than 3.3 million queries of Americans under FISA authority. This, in turn, prompted a crisis of confidence in the FBI’s respect for civil liberties among members of both parties.
In his questioning, Gaetz referenced that report.
Addressing each of the three panelists, Gaetz asked, “If I represent to you that we believe there may be north of 10,000 people in the federal government who can perform [FISA] queries, would anyone here have a basis to disagree with that?”
All three answered in the negative.
In a Twitter post featuring a clip of the exchange, House Judiciary Republicans said, “Upwards of 10,000 FBI personnel may have access to section 702-acquired FISA data.
“10,000! Why’s that number so big?”
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) speaks at a House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee hearing, “The Fentanyl Crisis in America: Inaction Is No Longer an Option,” in Washington on March 1, 2023, in a still from video footage. (House Judiciary Committee YouTube/Screenshot via NTD)
Alleged Abuses
The program in question, FISA section 702, has been scrutinized for its alleged abuses. Aside from the incidents uncovered in 2021, the intelligence community (IC) has repeatedly failed audits of its use of FISA.
In 2019, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz investigated a random sampling of 29 FISA cases by the FBI. None of the 29 cases chosen were found to be legitimate.
The FISA is overseen by the FISA court, a secretive body that grants spying authority to U.S. intelligence agents.
To make a FISA query of U.S. citizens, the FBI and other law enforcement agents are legally required to receive the approval of the closed-door FISA court.
In his investigation, Horowitz found that none of the 29 randomly chosen queries had been carried out properly or legally. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said from an earlier conversation with Horowitz that in 25 of the cases, “there was unsupported, uncorroborated, or inconsistent information.” The FBI couldn’t even produce the relevant investigative files in the other four.
“In those 29 applications that were reviewed, the inspector general found over 400 instances of noncompliance with the Woods Procedures,” Biggs said, referencing FBI procedures requiring that FISA requests be “scrupulously accurate.”
Since 2021, the FBI has reduced illegal queries by about 90 percent, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Specifically, the authority for these searches was granted by FISA section 702, an amendment added to the bill’s original text in 2008. That section gave the U.S. intelligence community the power to gather information on foreign agents “reasonably believed to be operating outside the United States.”
But section 702 also gives the IC the ability to make “incidental queries,” queries of U.S. citizens who have communicated with a suspected foreign agent—an authority that lawmakers say is anti-Fourth Amendment.
“Unfortunately for the intelligence community, we have a Fourth Amendment,” Biggs said in his opening remarks.
The House Oversight Committee has a six-member working group trying to hammer out a reformed section 702, which will expire on Dec. 31, 2023, without congressional reauthorization. But during the hearing, Biggs indicated his belief that section 702 may “already [be] beyond repair.”
“FISA section 702 explicitly states that it may only be used to target non-U.S. persons located abroad for the purpose of obtaining foreign intelligence information,” he said. “But it’s clear that the government has used communications acquired through this program to conduct backdoor searches of Americans’ communications.”
During the hearing, the panel heard testimony from Horowitz, who’s part of a watchdog group designed to ensure IC compliance with Americans’ civil liberty protections.
Although safeguards are in place to ensure that Americans’ civil liberties are being respected, Horowitz and other panelists made clear that the IC has repeatedly failed to comply with these safeguards.
Bipartisan Concerns
Republicans have led the charge in substantially revising or even abolishing the FISA.
“The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has shown to be a powerful tool for United States intelligence,” Biggs said. “[But] the United States intelligence community has shown they cannot be fully trusted to retain this power.
“In fact, I cannot think of a single example of a powerful intelligence tool that was not abused in the United States in this way.”
The issue crosses party lines, with many Democrats joining Republicans in calling for reforms. However, Democrats have been less open to full-scale abolition.
“Today, this committee finally gets back to the serious work of keeping Americans safe—safe from those who seek to do us harm and safe from those who might trample on our civil liberties in a quest to keep our country secure, no matter the cost,” ranking Democrat member Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said.
Nadler, who says he has never voted to reauthorize section 702, nonetheless called it “important to national security, especially in today’s threat environment.”
In 2020, prior to revelations about the FBI’s massive illegal spying operations against U.S. citizens, Wray told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that he “wouldn’t lose any sleep” over most FISA queries and warned against “grinding FISA to a halt” with “more scrupulous review.”
The constitutionality of the FISA program has been in dispute for about a decade.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden claimed in 2013 that the U.S. intelligence community, despite the claims of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to the contrary, was carrying out the largest intelligence-gathering operation in human history—all without the knowledge of Americans or their elected representatives.
U.S. authorities rejected multiple people who sought compensation for COVID-19 vaccine injuries, despite diagnoses from doctors, documents show.
Letters from U.S. officials reviewed by The Epoch Times show officials contradicting doctors who treated patients as they turned down requests for payment.
Cody Flint, an agricultural pilot, was diagnosed by four doctors with a severe adverse reaction to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Shortly after being vaccinated, Flint experienced intense head pressure, which led to problems such as perilymphatic fistula, the doctors said.
Flint sent a slew of medical files, including evidence of the diagnoses, to the U.S. Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which compensates people who prove they were injured by a COVID-19 shot.
But administrators for the program rejected Flint’s application in a denial letter, saying they “did not find the requisite evidence that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination caused” the conditions from which he suffers.
Flint, in his 30s, felt his first symptoms within an hour of vaccination. An onslaught of severe symptoms followed while he was flying two days later.
“One second I went from having burning in the back of my neck and tunnel vision to the very next second I was slumped over in my airplane. The best way I know to describe it, it was like a bomb went off inside my head,” Flint said.
CICP administrators told him that “compelling, reliable and valid medical and scientific evidence does not support a causal association between the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, perilymphatic fistulas, increased intracranial pressure, Eustachian tube dysfunction, hearing loss, or loss of eyesight.”
They also tried to pin the problems on barotrauma. Colloquially known as airplane ear, barotrauma happens when air pressure suddenly changes, and is common as planes climb higher in the sky. Barotrauma causes the fistulas and symptoms of the fistulas “began while flying,” administrators wrote.
Flint and his doctors asserted in appeal letters that the barotrauma theory doesn’t hold up because Flint flies low as he dusts crops. Flint’s condition is “not from barotrauma,” Flint’s doctors told the CICP. “As an agricultural pilot, he does not fly more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground which is not of a magnitude to where he is at risk for barotrauma.”
“Elevated intracranial pressure has been recognized as a complication of COVID vaccination, and given the sequence of events, more probable than not, it is the cause of Mr. Flint’s elevated intracranial pressure, which had been documented on lumbar puncture,” they added. “The elevated intracranial pressure led to his perilymphatic fistula. Elevated intracranial pressure is a cause for perilymphatic fistula and more probable.”
The CICP determination was reviewed by a panel that sided with administrators. The panel found that the COVID-19 vaccine “did not cause Mr. Flint to develop bilateral perlympathic fistulas and related symptoms,” Suma Nair, an administrator, told Flint in a final denial letter. “There is no compelling causal connection between the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and the symptomology Mr. Flint experienced; the more likely cause of Mr. Flint’s symptoms is trauma from flying a plane, which would have developed over time.”
Administrators cited no studies or other evidence in their letters.
Nair also said the panel concluded: “given the timeline of symptoms, it was not plausible for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to have caused the otologic and vestibular issues experienced by Mr. Flint.”
“It’s just all comical to me,” Flint told The Epoch Times. “I get the shot, I’m injured within 48 hours, and they say that that makes it implausible.”
Agricultural pilot Cody Flint in a file image. (Courtesy of Cody Flint)
Difficulty Getting Compensation
The case highlights how people who experienced problems after vaccination have struggled to get money from the federal government, even when doctors diagnose vaccine injuries.
Flint is one of 76 people who were rejected as of April 1 because administrators determined they did not “show that a covered serious physical injury was sustained as the direct result of the administration” of a COVID-19 vaccine.
“The CICP may only make such determinations based on compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence,” the program says.
More than 8,100 applications, as of April 1, have been submitted to the CICP for compensation for a COVID-19 vaccine-induced injury or death. Three hundred and sixty-two in total have been turned down. Just 23 have been accepted. All but two are for a type of heart inflammation called myocarditis or a related condition known as pericarditis, both of which U.S. authorities say are caused by COVID-19 vaccination.
Documents on the denials and acceptances have been largely withheld from the public. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, successful in unearthing information about COVID-19 vaccine safety, have yielded few documents. Administrators located 652 records in response to one request seeking all claims and associated documents. They only released 52 heavily redacted documents, citing exceptions to FOIA. A similar request returned a single page that wasn’t already public.
COVID-19 vaccine injuries fall under the CICP, a little-used program before the pandemic that was created by Congress in a 2005 bill, because of a Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act declaration entered during the Trump administration that has not yet been rescinded.
Most administered vaccines in the United States fall under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, enabling people with alleged or actual injuries to take their cases to federal judges in a no-fault system that paid out $4.8 billion between 1988 and 2022.
Decisions on CICP petitions, in contrast, are decided by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)—the same agency that operates the program.
That “potentially creates a conflict of interest,” researchers wrote in a 2022 paper, advising Congress to initiate major reforms by either relocating the program or allowing judicial review of determinations.
Some members, including Sens. Cindy-Hyde Smith (R-Miss.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have expressed interest in reform but no bills have gained traction yet in the divided Congress.
People who apply to the CICP are only eligible for money for unreimbursed medical expenses and lost pay. Survivors of people who die can get death benefits. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program covers past and future healthcare costs, pain and suffering, lost earnings, and legal fees.
The CICP has paid just $6 million to date, including under $5,000 total to the only three people who were injured by COVID-19 vaccines and have been compensated.
HHS and HRSA did not respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Joel Wallskog speaks in a file image. (Courtesy of Dr. Joel Wallskog)
‘All These People Are Going to Get Denied’
Dr. Joel Wallskog was one of the first people to receive Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. He got a shot on Dec. 30, 2020. Within days, he experienced symptoms including a loss of balance, headaches, and leg weakness.
“I was completely healthy, very active,” Wallskog, 53, told The Epoch Times. “Now I take 20 medicines.”
Wallskog was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, or spinal cord inflammation. At least two doctors have concluded the injury was caused by the vaccine, records show.
Wallskog transmitted medical records and supplementary documents, such as a study from National Institutes of Health researchers that discussed reports of neuropathic symptoms following COVID-19 vaccination. The same researchers diagnosed multiple people with vaccine injuries.
CICP administrators rejected Wallskog’s petition.
“The current medical and scientific evidence does not show a causal link between the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and transverse myelitis, other neuro-inflammatory disorders, myelopathy, or thrombotic disorders, including spinal cord infarction,” Dr. George Reed Grimes, director of the HRSA’s Division of Injury Compensation Programs, wrote in the denial letter.
“Furthermore, there is no evidence that your symptoms of lower extremity numbness and tingling with neck flexion, and chronic thoracic pain with weakness and numbness in your legs, is caused by the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine,” he added.
Administrators did not note the doctors’ diagnoses or cite any studies.
One doctor had written in office notes that Wallskog suffered a “significant reaction from Moderna COVID vaccination.”
Wallskog disputed the determination, writing in an appeal that “an exhaustive work-up revealed no other cause of my symptoms besides my Moderna shot.”
An appeal, or request for reconsideration, sends the determination to “a qualified panel, independent of the program,” according to federal law. The panel reviews the determination and sends its recommendation back to the program, which makes the final determination.
Twenty-eight studies have documented transverse myelitis following COVID-19 vaccination, a systematic review published in October 2022 found. Those include case reports of transverse myelitis after a Moderna shot. Researchers said the exact mechanisms for vaccine-induced transverse myelitis remain unclear but posited genetic factors play a role.
Wallskog said that as of now, only people who suffer a narrow set of injuries can expect to be compensated by the U.S. government.
“Many people have this false sense that the CICP is going to be their answer, and it’s not,” he said. “All these people are going to get denied unless they have myocarditis, anaphylaxis, or certain blood clotting conditions.”
COVID-19 vaccines at George Washington University Hospital in Washington in a Dec. 14, 2020, file photograph. (Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Outside Compensation
Vaccine manufacturers are not liable for injuries due to laws like the PREP Act. That leaves people with few options when they’re injured.
Wallskog helped found a group called React19, which describes itself as a “science-based non-profit offering financial, physical, and emotional support for those suffering from long-term COVID-19 vaccine adverse events.”
Drawing from a pool of donated money, the group has so far paid $556,652 to the vaccine injured, with 81 people receiving compensation.
Applicants must provide a medical note or consultation documenting symptoms and signs they’re related to vaccination.
Group officials, including Wallskog, review each application and make a determination during weekly board meetings. They give out grants of up to $10,000.
The donations come from what the group describes as a care fund.
“Unfortunately, the care fund is on hold right now because we’re low on money,” Wallskog said. “I always say we wish we had more money but at the same point we’re doing with React what our healthcare organizations and our federal agencies should be doing.”
The program could help people like Angie Bluford, who did not apply to the CICP because of the one-year deadline. Bluford wasn’t diagnosed with a vaccine injury until 18 months after getting a Moderna COVID-19 vaccination.
React19 is also advocating for reform of the CICP or moving injury claims from the CICP to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, widely considered the superior option. That would require adding the COVID-19 vaccines to the routine immunization schedule, which has already been done; adding vaccines to the vaccine injury table, and congressional approval of an excise tax. Coverage under the national program should be retroactive, React19 says.
Steve Wenger in a file image. (Courtesy of Steve Wenger)
Still Waiting
It’s taken more than a year for some injured people to get a determination.
There were still 7,771 applications pending as of April 1.
One was sent in by Steve Wenger, a project manager whose COVID-19 vaccination caused Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disorder that damages the immune system.
Wenger, who got vaccinated to avoid losing his job, submitted his application in March 2022. He didn’t receive confirmation until July 2022. He’s still waiting for the outcome.
“The CICP cannot estimate when the medical review will begin or how long it may take to complete,” administrators told him in a letter.
“It’s a waiting game,” Wenger told The Epoch Times. “To be honest, I’m waiting on my rejection letter, because that’s what I’m expecting.”
Wenger’s pessimism stems from the high rejection rate and the fact no claims for Guillain-Barre syndrome have been approved despite U.S. authorities acknowledging the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine causes the disorder.
Wenger has been dealing with large medical bills, including thousands of dollars for biweekly treatments with intravenous immunoglobulin, one of the few drugs that have helped those with lingering injuries from the vaccines. Even if CICP approves Wenger’s petition, the money likely wouldn’t last long.
“I’ve read stories that medical debt has just absolutely destroyed people, financially buried them,” Wenger said. “I never envisioned myself being one of those people. But you know, here I am.”
A former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency reveals current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was the driving force behind a since-debunked October 2020 letter signed by 51 national security figures claiming damaging revelations about the Biden family were concocted and planted by the Russian government.
Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that Blinken, then senior advisor to Democrat nominee Joe Biden‘s campaign, was behind the “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” that he and 50 other high-level national security figures signed, which falsely claimed an abandoned laptop computer belonging to Biden’s adult son Hunter, containing evidence of Hunter’s drug use, engagement with prostitutes and possible illegal foreign business deals by the Biden family, was the product of “Russian disinformation.”
The laptop and its contents revealed in a New York Post story in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, threatened to derail Biden’s bid. Media figures blasted the Post, claiming the story was planted by the Russian government. That claim has since been debunked and the contents of the laptop proven accurate.
In response, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, now demand Blinken turn over documents and communications related to the Committee’s investigation of the matter.
In his transcribed interview, Morell testified that on or around October 17, 2020, Blinken served as a senior advisor to the Biden campaign and reached out to him to discuss the Hunter Biden laptop story. According to Morell, although your outreach was couched as simply gathering Morell’s reaction to the Post story, it set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement.
That same day, October 17, Blinken also emailed Morell an article published in USA Today alleging that the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a “disinformation campaign.” The very bottom of the email he sent to Morell included the signature block of Andrew Bates, then-director of rapid response for the Biden campaign.
Morell testified that his communication with Blinken was one of a few communications he had with the Biden campaign, explaining that he also received a call from Steve Ricchetti, Chairman of the Biden campaign, following the October 22 debate to thank him for writing the statement. Morell also explained that the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the public release of the statement. Morell further explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election.
Based on Morell’s testimony, it is apparent that the Biden campaign played an active role in the origins of the public statement, which had the effect of helping to suppress the Hunter Biden story and preventing American citizens from making a fully informed decision during the 2020 presidential election. Although the statement’s signatories have an unquestioned right to free speech and free association—which we do not dispute—their reference to their national security credentials lent weight to the story and suggested access to specialized information unavailable to other Americans. This concerted effort to minimize and suppress public dissemination of the serious allegations about the Biden family was a grave disservice to all American citizens’ informed participation in our democracy.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Two U.S. senators are blowing the whistle and demanding answers after revealing a communist Chinese aircraft company is on the Biden administration‘s list of companies permitted to engage in sensitive military research, development and weapons production with the United States.
U.S. Senators Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., sent a letter to Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Alan Estevez, demanding to know why the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), which had been blacklisted as a national security threat by the Trump administration, is now permitted to engage in U.S. military research and production.
The senators demand COMAC be placed on the Military End Users (MEU) list of companies prohibited from receiving assistance from the United States.
“Spun out of China‘s military, COMAC was initially formed by AVIC as a separate SOE in 2008. Today, AVIC still holds a minority stake (12.35 percent) in the company. Despite this minority ownership, AVIC maintains considerable influence over COMAC, which actively employs AVIC leadership, employees, technology, and facilities,” the senators write.
“COMAC is also a subsidiary of the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC). Multiple defense SOEs operate under SASAC, including AVIC, Aero Engine Corporation of China, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, and China National Nuclear Corporation among others. COMAC also works closely with Western aerospace companies, including firms that produce jet engines and many other components used in commercial and military aircraft. Given the CCP’s commitment to acquire dual-use aerospace technologies through trade as well as forced joint venture and partnerships, these firms, and U.S. national security by extension, are at risk,” the senators add.
The senators warn that Beijing’s “military civil fusion” strategy requires all Chinese companies to use their resources to fuel the regime’s military machine, meaning COMAC’s approval poses a potential national security threat.
“Military Civil Fusion (MCF) enables the CCP to acquire industry expertise through both licit and illicit means. It enables ‘civilian’ entities to engage in sensitive military research, development and weapons production,” Rubio and Scott write.
“This means that Western companies engaging in joint research and trade may be exploited to create or support systems that benefit the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). COMAC’s status as a fully-owned state enterprise, as well as its close relationships with the CCP and other aerospace companies, create a vulnerability that undermines both the national and economic security of the United States,” they write.
It appears COMAC’s approval is a change from Trump administration policy, and the company should have raised red flags with the Biden administration.
“COMAC’s key parent entities are already included on Commerce’s MEU list, and the Trump Administration had included COMAC itself under its “Communist Chinese Military Companies” investment blacklist. Aviation experts have noted that COMAC’s ties to the military are “common knowledge,” which makes the department’s reluctance to proceed with an MEU list addition all the more perplexing,” the senators write.
“Given these realities, and the CCP’s continued application of state-owned enterprises to systematically access dual-use aerospace technologies, we ask the Bureau of Industry and Security to add COMAC to the Military End User List,” Rubio and Scott conclude.
Fox News will share additional documents from the recent case it settled with Dominion Voting Systems to Smartmatic, a second voting systems company that is also suing the network for defamation.
“We will produce the materials as quickly as we are able to,” Winn Allen, a Fox lawyer said during a hearing in New York, CNN reported.
According to The Hill, Smartmatic is suing Fox News for over $2 billion, alleging the network intentionally defamed the company by allowing former President Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to make false claims on the network about the 2020 election.
A trial in the Smartmatic case is likely months away, if not years, however, Fox lost its first bid to toss the company’s suit allowing it to move onto discovery.
“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025,” a spokesperson for the network said in its most recent statement about the case.
“As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on its face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”
The documents are reportedly related to Fox News Corp. (FNC) chairman Rupert Murdoch.
The settlement came just hours before opening arguments in the defamation trial were slated to begin in a Delaware courtroom.
In a statement, Fox News Mediasaid the network was “pleased” to reach a settlement and that it acknowledged “the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”
Who is it that benefits most from school choice? Students in the worst school systems in the country. Who, given the horror stories we hear about some of the education systems in this country are those who suffer the worst education systems in the country? The inner-city children sentenced to mal-education in those appalling urban school systems – also obviously. And the way the demographics of the U.S. work out that means that it’s largely Black children who are given that appalling education by the worst school systems in the country.
So the people who will benefit most from school choice are those Black, poor inner-city children who suffer the most from the worst parts of the current systems. Thomas Sowell has written entire books on how this is so.
NowThis News (running an AP report) highlights the effect of this. Black parents are among those most interested in school choice:
The situation has caused more Black families to leave public schools, opting for homeschooling or private schools that embrace their identity and culture. Public school enrollment of Black students between pre-K and 12th grade has declined each year measured in federal data since 2007.
Now, we’d not say we regard that falling enrollment, entirely on its own, as proof given that the Black child population has been falling over the same time period. But it does look as if the fall in public school enrolment is higher than the population decline.
It’s also possible to query the reason for these choices – toward private schools. AP (and NowThis) are arguing that it’s unwillingness to teach African-American history, to insist on the innate racism of the country and so on that is leading to this choice. Hey, maybe that’s even true although our other investigations find little evidence of that.
The point of school choice though is that parents get to decide upon the schooling they think is best for their children. Parents get to decide on the schooling best for their own children. Period. That’s what school choice means.
So, here we have evidence that school choice is being taken up, desired, and applied for where available, by Black parents. Good. That’s the point of it all. Parents decide. What parents decide isn’t for us to insist upon – for that again is the point of school choice – parents get to decide, not us, the school board or the teachers’ unions.
We’ve seen this before in Texas, where some of the strongest support for school choice is among Black parents. On exactly the same grounds as we opened this piece with – Black children get some of the worst education in this country, why wouldn’t black parents want choice to escape those appalling systems?
We can even be more than a little arch about this. To be progressive is, according to the usual definitions, to be concerned with those worst off in our current society. That makes school choice the progressive choice, doesn’t it? All we’ve got to do now is convince progressives of that truth.
This article originally appeared in Accuracy in Media. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News. Republished with permission.
Chinese ownership of US agricultural lands saw 5000% increase in one decade
The valleys give way to the prairies and the prairies give way to the badlands where fields of golden cinquefoils surrender to the might of towering plateaus of striated bedrock.
The rugged openness of South Dakota presents the quintessential image of the American countryside, a pure distillation of the natural environment that captured the pioneers’ hope for a better future all those years ago.
But how long this countryside remains American is now an open question in these parts.
That’s because Chinese-owned entities, some linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), have been purchasing land here in South Dakota and elsewhere in the country at a breathtaking pace for more than a decade.
Some of the land they gobble up is for farming, other acreage is allotted for energy use, and still more parcels are forebodingly adjacent to sensitive U.S. military sites.
Indeed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates (pdf) that Chinese holdings of U.S. agricultural lands reached more than 352,000 acres in 2020, up more than 5,300 percent from the less than 14,000 acres owned in 2010.
To stem the growing incursion, state governments from across the nation are working desperately to craft legislation that would end the trend once and for all.
Too often however, those efforts are met with stolid resistance from entrenched business interests and, as was the case in South Dakota, are ultimately abandoned to placate private interests.
Cattle graze near Ojai, California, on June 21, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
A Permanent Spy Balloon
Adam Savit heads the China Policy division of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a conservative think tank tasked with the mission of advancing policies that put American citizens’ rights and well-being before other considerations.
He believes that the continued acceptance of CCP-backed acquisitions of U.S. land are an affront to American laws and norms, as well as a violation of equitable international practice.
To allow the regime to continue investing in U.S. land and resources, while U.S. companies are barred from doing the same in China, he says, runs counter to the value of “reciprocity” that so much international trust is necessarily built on.
“If we don’t have access to a resource, opportunity, or institution in the CCP, they should not have access to that in our country,” Savit tells The Epoch Times.
To that end, Savit authored the institute’s latest issue brief (pdf), which tracks state responses to the growing threat posed by CCP land grabs in the United States.
Numerous states are now seeking to bar the CCP or other, similarly aggressive entities, from purchasing U.S. land.
Much of this effort is no doubt a reaction to the alleged national security threat posed by allowing CCP-linked companies to purchase land in close proximity to U.S. military bases, as previously occurred in North Dakota, as well as efforts to buy huge swaths of land and energy infrastructure, as previously happened in Texas.
“This land [near military bases] is a permanent version of that [spy balloon],” Savit says of the CCP’s efforts. “They can station whatever they wish wherever they wish.”
To that end, Savit underscored the necessity of state legislation to help curb the increasing Chinese investments in an area otherwise devoid of meaningful legal protections.
“In most states, there’s no legal barrier to [these purchases] right now and no process to vet or evaluate the side effects of that,” Savit says.
Seeing the struggles of its neighbor to the north, for example, South Dakota sought to insulate itself against similar incursions, with lawmakers crafting a law that would have granted the governor the ability to oversee foreign investments into state land.
Despite initial support from state lawmakers, however, the bill was roundly defeated after all the state’s major agricultural associations and unions lobbied against it for fear of giving too much power to the state’s executive branch as well as concern that the effort could ignite racial animosity toward Chinese Americans and immigrants.
Airmen assigned to the 319th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron from Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota, perform a maintenance check on a drone on June 6, 2022. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Ashley Richards)
States Seek to Repel CCP Influence
South Dakota is not alone. The AFPI report highlights legal struggles underway in 23 states from Arizona to Virginia, totaling 53 separate bills.
In more than a dozen other states, Savit says, some laws already exist that could feasibly be used to prevent the Chinese acquisition of U.S. lands but are never enforced.
The legislation springing up across the country is as varied as the states giving rise to it, and includes efforts to ban investments from CCP-linked entities in Iowa, a law to ban land purchases from revanchist nations like North Korea and Iran in Georgia, as well as a blanket ban on all foreign land buys in Texas, which was recently diluted to apply only to state-linked entities.
Savit believes “there’s no foolproof way” to prevent the CCP regime from getting its hands on American lands but commends the varied efforts of the states to address the issue in their own ways.
“There is no perfect way because each state has its different concerns,” Savit says. “Each state has its different existing laws. Each state has different agricultural sectors. These are all experiments.”
“There is no one-size-fits-all answer. It’s a dynamic challenge.”
US Failing to Track Foreign Investments
The problem of determining who is a legitimate investor and who is a CCP proxy is a particularly daunting task for state governments, however. Particularly at a time when record numbers of Chinese are fleeing the country amid increasingly harsh repression efforts by the CCP.
For Savit and the AFPI, the issue is simple: Those with the resources to make the purchases likely have some connection to the CCP’s regime.
“An investor from China is going to have some sort of connection,” Savit says.
“Our assumption … is that anyone with that capital or able to invest in that way has some sort of direct or indirect connection to the CCP or they’re being leveraged in some way.”
There’s one critical issue with that assumption, however. Namely, that the United States has little to no understanding of who is actually buying the land.
Enter Lars Schonander, a policy technologist at the Lincoln Network think tank.
A sign opposing a corn mill in Grand Forks, N.D., stands near 370 acres recently annexed by the city for the project. Many residents don’t want the project in the city because the owner has reputed ties to the Chinese Communist Party through its company chairman. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Schonander has spent considerable time in recent years tracking what he calls “malign foreign investment” in the United States. That is, investments made by hostile nations in the U.S. with the ultimate goal of exploiting or otherwise undermining the nation’s interests.
The relevant data needed to track such investments, he tells The Epoch Times, is “private but not classified” and can be stunningly frustrating to get a hold of. Simply put, the federal government is not collecting in-depth data about foreign land purchases in the country.
“This plays out strangely specifically when one wants to look at detailed data [of foreign investments],” Schonander says.
“What I’ve discovered is the annual reports have high-level data on how much investors from a given country invest in a year but, you can only know what specific foreign corporations and entities are investing in by going to the private database, which makes it next to impossible if there is a specific project you’re concerned about.”
At present, the only federal law that tracks such investments is the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, which requires foreign entities to report transactions of farmland to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Schonander cautions, however, that the USDA is authorized only to acquire data on land purchases up to three orders of ownership. This means that a series of U.S. shell corporations could be ultimately owned by a foreign entity and the agency would never know.
This issue is magnified, he says, by the huge lag times between an investment being made and it being recorded.
“There’s quite a bit of a lag between people maybe knowing of a certain investment and it actually being in the database,” Schonander says.
“The data is only updated at the end of a year. So, right now, we only have as of the end of last year, the 2021 data. At the end of this year, we’ll have the 2022 data.”
Because of this, Schonander notes, even members of Congress will be working with data that is, at best, a year old.
This is not to say that the government has always been aloof to the need for more granular data on foreign investments.
Schonander notes, for example, that the U.S. Energy Information Administration used to require details each year about foreign investments into U.S. energy infrastructure, but that the single form used to collect that information had been discontinued following the federal government’s budget sequestration in 2011.
“It was quite valuable information because in the more recent reports they had acquisitions and investor data which, nowadays, you’d probably have to either manually collect yourself or pay a data broker for,” Schonander says. “Now we have no idea publicly.”
With that in mind, Schonander says hat collecting more useful data could be as simple as restarting the program to measure such investments using the tools previously set up for the same purpose.
“They have the form and they still have the personnel to set it up,” he says. “They just haven’t sent out the forms in over 10 years.”
A spokesperson for the Energy Information Administration told The Epoch Times that the agency has no plans to reinstate the program. The Epoch Times has also reached out to the USDA for comment.
HHS whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas, who told us about government-sponsored child trafficking at the border, TESTIFIED IN CONGRESS about what she has witnessed.
But this wasn’t the only Congressional reaction to occur this week.
Senator Ted Cruz [R-Texas] and Congressman Chip Roy [R-Texas] sent a joint letter to Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas, after Project Veritas’ #TooYoung investigation showed that the medical facility performs gender transitions on minors as young as nine years old.
Both Senator Cruz and Rep. Roy DEMANDED that Dell Children’s Medical Center provide some answers as to what exactly they are doing to children.
You can read the full letter here: It’s beyond clear at this point: the Congress of these United States is paying close attention to Veritas’ journalism.
They are relying on our investigations to conduct their own inquiries into corruption – be it at the border or at children’s hospitals.
Project Veritas is nowhere near done bringing truth to light and exposing bad actors.
In 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in the New World with a mission to conquer the Aztec Empire. He arrived with a small army of 600 men, but he faced a significant challenge. His men were afraid and they were not sure that they could succeed in their mission. To inspire his men Cortés did something radical – he burned his ships. By doing so he eliminated any possibility of retreat and forced his men to fight for victory or death. This act of burning the ships became a symbol of determination and commitment.
Fast forward to today and we face a similar challenge. We are in a battle for the truth and we are facing a media landscape dominated by a small group of powerful corporations. Traditional media is owned by an oligopoly regime that runs the United States. They control what we see, what we hear, and even what we think. They have their own agenda and it is not at all in our best interest.
Today the news broke that Tucker Carlson, one of the most prominent voices on Fox News, is leaving the network. Regardless of the reasons, his departure from Fox News is significant, and it could be seen as a death knell for traditional media.
Traditional media, including cable news networks like Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, has long been the dominant source of news and information for many Americans. These networks have enormous influence, and they shape the way people think about current events and politics.
Over the past decade there has been a dramatic shift away from traditional media and toward alternative sources of information.
One of the reasons for this shift is the rise of the internet and social media. These platforms have given people access to a vast array of information and have allowed them to connect with others who share their interests and beliefs. This has created a new media landscape, one that is more decentralized and less reliant on traditional media outlets. Those in power quickly realized this after the 2016 election which is why they have invested billions of dollars and countless human resource hours into developing censorship and “fact checking” systems on these platforms.
That’s why we created Gab.com in 2016. We saw this happening and we knew we had to protect free speech online for all people at all costs. We paid the price heavily for it precisely because Gab is the one place that the people in power do not control.
Another reason for the shift away from traditional media is a growing sense of distrust. Many Americans feel that the mainstream media is biased and that they cannot be trusted to provide unbiased information. This distrust has only grown in recent years, as traditional media outlets have become increasingly politicized and polarized.
The departure of Tucker Carlson from Fox News is significant because he was one of the network’s most popular and influential hosts. He had a large following, and his show was consistently one of the highest-rated programs on cable news. His departure is a sign that even the most established and influential media outlets are not immune to the changing media landscape.
While traditional media is not dead yet, the departure of Tucker Carlson from Fox News is a clear signal that it is on the decline. The rise of alternative media sources and the growing sense of distrust in traditional media outlets have created a new media landscape that is more diverse and decentralized. This new media landscape is not without its challenges, as Gab knows all too well—but it offers opportunities for new voices and perspectives to be heard.
Burning the ships of traditional media means that we must abandon the old ways of consuming news and information.We must stop watching the same news channels, reading the same newspapers, and listening to the same radio stations. We must break away from the status quo and embrace a new way of thinking.
We must also turn off traditional media for good. We must stop supporting the oligopoly regime that controls our media landscape. We must stop giving them our attention, our money, and our trust. We must turn to new media platforms like Gab and others as well as independent journalism, and we must support them with our time, our money, and our trust.
Turning off traditional media for good does not mean that we should ignore the news altogether. It means that we should seek out alternative sources of information and take an active role in seeking the truth. We should read independent blogs, watch independent news channels, use independent platforms, and listen to independent podcasts. We should engage in discussions, share our views, and challenge our own biases.
Burning the ships of traditional media and turning it off for good is not an easy task. It requires courage, determination, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. However, it is necessary if we want to create a media landscape that serves the interests of the people, not the oligopoly regime. We must embrace new media and independent journalism, and most importantly we must take an active role in seeking the truth.
By doing so, we can create a better future for ourselves and for generations to come.
Andrew Torba CEO, Gab.com Jesus Christ is King of kings
The Centers for Disease Control are fighting for the power to make you do almost anything under the guise of “public health.” They must not succeed.
n January 2021. the U.S. Centers for Disease Control imposed a nationwide travel mask mandate for persons using conveyances and in transportation hubs. Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF) filed a challenge to the mandate in a federal district court in Tampa, Florida.
In April 2022, the district court struck down the mask mandate on several grounds under the Administrative Procedure Act. Among those grounds was the conclusion that the CDC lacked the statutory authority to impose the mandate.
The CDC appealed that ruling but conspicuously declined to seek a stay of the district court’s order. Thus, the CDC tacitly conceded that the widely hated mask mandate was not, in fact, a matter of life or death. The CDC’s real aim in appealing the ruling is to secure for itself a broad authority to regulate public health under 42 U.S.C. Section 264(a) of the Public Health Service Act.
Section 264(a) authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC, to make and enforce regulations to
prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, [CDC] may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.
Reading this together with the rest of Section 264 reveals that these measures are intended to support the CDC’s quarantine and isolation authority. In other words, the statute grants the CDC a limited power to prevent infectious disease from entering the country or from crossing state lines, and imposes strict obligations on the government to ascertain that a person subject to this authority is actually infected with disease.
Nowhere, however, does the law authorize the CDC to intrude into the lives of tens of millions of healthy Americans in response to an endemic pathogen.
The CDC claimed that the word “sanitation” justified its federal travel mask mandate, however this was but a post hoc rationale. Nowhere in the rule did the CDC mention the word “sanitation.” It only did so after the Health Freedom Defense Fund filed its lawsuit challenging the rule.
Statutory interpretation requires that words be known by the company they keep. In the case of Section 264(a), those words are fumigation, disinfection, extermination, etc. The district court concluded that what these words share in common is that they refer to active measures to identify, isolate, and destroy the disease itself.
By contrast, the CDC argues that “sanitation” means anything related to preventing disease. But this unprecedentedly wide claim of authority offers no limiting principle. Can the CDC dictate how much sugar we can consume, regulate how much we exercise, or add vitamin D to our drinking water systems—all of which would boost our immune systems thereby enhancing protection from illness? Can the CDC mandate the use of prophylactics and other intimate hygiene measures to prevent the spread of AIDS or monkeypox? Could the CDC mandate vaccination against any given pathogen as a condition of boarding a conveyance?
Under a doctrine of Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resource Defense Council, Inc. (1984), courts are generally required to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous or unclear statute that the agency is charged with enforcing. While the CDC has not invoked Chevron in its appeal of the mask ruling, Chevron nevertheless casts a long shadow over the question of the CDC’s statutory authority.
First, there is nothing unclear or ambiguous about Section 264(a)—it plainly relates to inspecting, isolating and destroying infected or contaminated “animals and articles” in pursuit of preventing the “introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases.” While the statute authorizes other measures, those measures must align with the measures clearly delineated; otherwise, the rest of the words in the statute would be rendered meaningless, because any public health measure one can possibly imagine could be justified by the word, “sanitation.”
Second, the Chevron doctrine is rooted in a presumption that agencies (which are part of the executive branch) will interpret statutes in accordance with the president’s constitutional obligation to ensure that laws are faithfully executed. Chevron implicitly demands that an agency, and the administration overseeing its decisions, act in good faith. But recent history has shown that agencies cannot be trusted to do so.
Unfortunately, recent administrations have taken advantage of Chevron deference by reaching into a grab bag of long-extant statutes and claiming sweeping powers that were never previously recognized. This increasing tendency to legislate by executive fiat has given rise to what is known as the “major questions” doctrine—i.e., when an agency claims a previously-unheralded power with major impacts on the economy or personal liberty, a court should closely examine the agency’s reasoning to determine whether the statute in question actually confers the new authority claimed by the agency.
In the case of the travel mask mandate, there are ample reasons to conclude that the CDC did not interpret its authority in good faith.
First and foremost is that federal public health officials never previously claimed authority to govern the conduct of millions of individuals, and never previously claimed any authority to directly impose regulations purporting to prevent the person-to-person transmission of an endemic pathogen. Likewise, the CDC failed to articulate what measure in Section 264(a) authorized the mask mandate. As noted above, the CDC only seized onto the word “sanitation” after HFDF challenged its claim of authority in the district court.
Second, the CDC never cited any evidence that requiring millions of laymen to don a medical device would do anything to prevent the spread of an aerosolized virus. Indeed, the CDC’s own statistics from its COVID data tracker demonstrate that the mask mandate changed nothing about the trajectory of COVID-19 among the states.
While the CDC has conducted randomized controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating lack of efficacy of masks in curbing the spread of influenza, the CDC chose not to conduct RCTs on masks and the spread of COVID-19. Surely, the burden of proof is on the CDC to justify its mask rule in advance of any rule making.
The recent publication from the prestigious Cochrane organization, reviewing all available RCTs, showed, once and for all, no evidence that masks control the spread of viral respiratory illnesses. And dozens of additional studies demonstrate the failure of masks in controlling these infections.
Against this backdrop, it is clear that our judiciary needs to vigorously scrutinize broad claims of power over our lives by public health officials, whether under the major questions doctrine (for federal agencies) or the 14th Amendment (for state agencies).
If the CDC is empowered to mask us, then CDC may dictate virtually anything in the name of a “public health” emergency. Surely, Congress never intended to grant such immense authority.
The FBI has ruled out a full release of Audrey Hale’s documents.
What I was told is, her manifesto was a blueprint on total destruction, and it was so, so detailed at the level of what she had planned.” That was Nashville City Councilmember Courtney Johnston, in reference to Audrey Hale, a woman who thought she was a man.
On March 27, Hale walked into the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, and murdered Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs, also 9 and the daughter of Chad Scruggs, senior pastor at the Covenant Presbyterian Church. Police shot Hale dead, but she left behind a “manifesto” that could explain her motive, the primary question in any murder case. From the start, it was kept under wraps and subject to speculation.
According to Johnston, “It’s really not even a manifesto, it’s diaries of a mentally ill person.” The councilwoman, a real-estate agent, did not explain how she was qualified to diagnose Hale, who carefully planned the attack for months. “Her mental illness is not something that should be used for entertainment,” Johnston added, “and I don’t understand these claims that law enforcement is hiding something.”
A search of Hale’s residence turned up 20 journals, five laptops, two memoirs, five Covenant School yearbooks, seven cell phones and other materials. Johnston was on record that the FBI had ruled against releasing the manifesto in its entirety. So the FBI is indeed hiding what is most crucial to the case, evidence of motive.
According to Johnston, “that document in the wrong person’s hands would be astronomically dangerous.” So it was the “document” that was dangerous, and trans-friendly activists also sought to suppress its release. For example, Charles Moran, of the Log Cabin Republicans, advocates for equal rights for LGBTQ+ Americans, warned of “serious consequences” if the manifesto were to be made public.
Johnston’s colleague, Nashville City Councilman Robert Swope, told the New York Post that the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit is working “in tandem” with the Metro Nashville Police Department to complete “a very in-depth analysis of certain aspects of the shooter’s life.”
According to the councilman, “the manifesto is going to be released. It’s just a matter of when. There are some incredibly brilliant psychological minds and psychological analysts combing through her entire life.”
Hale’s manifesto has yet to be revealed, but a key reality is perfectly clear.
With all its money, resources, and those allegedly brilliant minds, the FBI did nothing to prevent domestic terrorist Audrey Hale from murdering six innocents, including three children. That failure is no surprise.
In 2009, Major Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, was communicating with al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al Awlaki about killing Americans. As the government report Lessons from Fort Hood explains, the FBI knew all about those communications, but someone in the FBI’s Washington, D.C., office judged that Hasan was not a threat and called off the surveillance.
On November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas, Hasan murdered 13 unarmed American soldiers—14 counting the unborn child of Private Francheska Velez. In similar style, the FBI did nothing to prevent the terrorist attack in San Bernardino in 2015 that left 14 people dead, or Orlando in 2016, with 49 dead.
Consider also the case of Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson, who was carefully tracking Republican members of Congress.
On June 14, 2017, as the representatives practiced baseball at a field in Virginia, Hodgkinson opened fire on them with an SKS 7.62 rifle and a 9mm pistol, wounding five and nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). The FBI, then under Andrew McCabe, passed off Hodgkinson’s attack as a mere case of “suicide by cop,” a ludicrous claim that drew criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Hodgkinson shot first at unarmed civilians. Audrey Hale shot first at innocent children and the teachers and staff who sought to protect them. With Hale’s manifesto in the hands of the FBI, relatives of the victims might consider the FBI’s record of concealing evidence in murder cases.
By 2023, the FBI had failed to make the material public, and announced no suspects. Consider also the case of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, a possible leaker of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
On July 17, 2016, Rich was gunned down on a Washington street. The FBI showed no interest in the basic questions of motive, means, and opportunity, but quickly grabbed Rich’s laptop computer. In 2020, the bureau admitted that it possessed the computer and with the murder still unsolved the FBI seeks to delay release of the computer’s contents until 2088, a proxy for never.
In the run-up to the so-called Trans Day of Vengeance, Hale murdered six people, including three children. As their parents might note, open condemnations of this terrorist act are hard to find.
Joe Biden failed to condemn the shooter, name any victims, or attend any funerals. Biden’s press secretary proclaimed “our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now.”
The FBI failed to call the Nashville atrocity a hate crime and, at this writing, the bureau is keeping the murderer’s manifesto under wraps. If anyone called it a coverup it would be hard to blame them.
Meanwhile, Nashville officials say autopsies should be ready in 12 weeks. Those documents will let the murder victims testify from the grave.
The former Fox News host used his platform of the most-watched program on cable news to relentlessly alert viewers of the danger from our border policies, and he didn’t sugarcoat anything.
The news that Tucker Carlson and Fox News have “parted ways” did more than just send shockwaves through the cable news business. It removed Carlson from a number of critical roles in which he has served the nation the last six years: educator, investigator, and a check on corruption and power. Nowhere has this function been more important than in bringing attention to the causes and effects of the crisis at our borders.
Why were Carlson’s broadcasts on the immigration issue arguably more important than the many other topics he discussed? Because the issue concerns America’s past, present, and future like no other. It is an existential problem in the most literal sense. The way we address it or ignore it today will have serious ramifications for America in the years and decades to come.
Plenty of other news shows cover the border crisis. Unlike most others, Carlson didn’t just play video clips and shrug his shoulders at the problem. He asked difficult, probing, and politically incorrect questions, including “Who is responsible for this?” and “Why would we choose policies that make our country bankrupt and out of control like this?”
For the heresy of speaking the truth about what is plain for any objective person to see, Carlson was vilified by those who profit from lies and deception. In 2019, he was predictably attacked as a racist and xenophobe for saying, “We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided.”
To radical antiborders activists, there is gold in such a statement. It can be twisted and manipulated into whatever pushes their agenda forward. If Carlson’s statement is taken in context with the data, however, it is factually correct.
At the start of this year, even when factoring in tax revenue paid by illegal aliens, the gross negative economic impact on the country from illegal immigration is more than $150 billion. We are undeniably weaker financially as a nation as a result of our foolishness in not protecting our borders.
Tucker’s critics tried to spin his “dirtier” comment by suggesting he accused immigrants of being physically unclean. This is false and disingenuous. One of the consequences of allowing rampant, unchecked illegal crossing of our border is the harmful effect it has on our environment.
CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images
This is inconvenient for the forces that seek revolution in America, because runaway illegal immigration and climate change activism are both high priorities. Despite this, there are now muted admissions within the environmentalist movement that mass migration will inevitably increase migrants’ greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, in fiscal years 2011 and 2012, when Arizona was experiencing over 120,000 border apprehensions, more than 65,000 pounds of border trash was being collected annually. That’s more than 32 tons of garbage—plastic water bottles, abandoned vehicles, human waste, medical products and much more—on the ground. Given the Biden Administration’s near-complete abandonment of border enforcement in the years since, the damage to our desert ecosystems is compounded.
Carlson used his platform of the most-watched program on cable news to relentlessly alert viewers of the danger from our border policies, and he didn’t sugarcoat anything.
“What’s happening at the border is not a crisis . . . this is an intentional act,” he said last year. “This is the [Biden] Administration bringing felons, violent criminals, into our country on purpose. Why would you do something like that? Only to destroy it.”
Some coverage of Tucker’s departure sounded like an obituary, as if his voice had been silenced and he would not be heard from again. That is almost certainly not the case. He will return, most likely in a bigger and better way than before.
That should be celebrated by people who seek truth and transparency, even if they disagree with his opinions. In a world run today by too many who are weak and cowardly, Tucker represents boldness and courage. His persistence on the border issue is indispensable.
Massaging a U.S. election by conspiring to concoct a disinformation campaign must be as actionable as Dominion’s postelection claim of $757 million in damages. That’s exactly what happened in 2016.
Fox News is reeling, both financially and with respect to its talent, after being drawn into a long lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.
The network just settled for an astounding $757.5 million and soon after released Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated host.
The voting machine company had alleged some of Fox’s hosts had either promulgated, or allowed their guests to push, a false narrative that the corporation’s voting machines were “fixed” and misreported the vote count in some precincts of the 2020 presidential election.
In other words, Dominion walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars on the accusation that some raving guests and a few Fox journalists insinuated, falsely, that the machines had thrown the election to Joe Biden.
Yet no one argues that such post facto accusations influenced the election. The postelection dispute instead was over whether a news organization was responsible for all that its hundreds of guests and hosts say that proved later to be not substantiated, false, or defamatory.
Fox settled with Dominion reportedly to avoid messy revelations of its internal texts and to stop the hemorrhaging of its brand.
But by doing so, the network may have inadvertently set a dubious standard that any speculative opinion, voiced in public media, however nutty and later proven to be inaccurate, will be actionable.
If that is the standard, we are going to see a lot more costly lawsuits.
Compare Dominion’s writ with the twin “Russian collusion” and “Russian disinformation” hoaxes.
Lots of journalists and guests on network news, cable, public broadcasting, and internet news sites ran daily with the utter lie that the concocted Christopher Steele dossier was accurate.
Four years later, they were still claiming that Donald Trump had won the 2016 election only by enlisting the aid of the Russians—as an “asset” and puppet of Vladimir Putin.
All that was demonstrably untrue.
No one on these news shows ever produced any information validating the dossier, much less offered apologies to those whose lives they ruined, as in the case of Lt. General Michael Flynn and Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.
The steady two-year drumbeat of media and DNC-fabricated untruths neutered the first two years of the Trump Administration.
Robert Mueller’s $40 million, 22-month special counsel “investigation” leaked wild and lurid rumors of Trump indictments to come, and yet ultimately found no proof of collusion.
No matter. The agendas of the Democratic Party’s collaboration with the media were fulfilled. The Trump Administration was wounded, forced on defense to reply to countless new fabrications, and smeared to the point of caricature.
The incumbent president went into the 2020 election crippled by years of media-voiced lies about collusion. Given all that, did these miscreants learn anything the second time around?
No. They redoubled their efforts. This time, the new farce was “Russian disinformation,” even as the playbook of smearing remained the same.
First, once again, the Left enlisted the media. It helped to spread the lie that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was a product of “Russian disinformation” aimed at helping Donald Trump.
Second, once more, the FBI helped to further what the agency knew was a lie. So the agency either persuaded or paid social media companies in Silicon Valley to suppress news that pointed to an authentic Biden laptop—whose contents revealed embarrassing details about Joe Biden’s (“The Big Guy”) apparent quid pro quo profiteering with foreign nations.
Twitter was hired as a news suppressor. The FBI paid the company $3 million to suss out “disinformation.”
Joe Biden’s campaign operative, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, tapped former interim CIA Director Mike Morell on the eve of the 2020 presidential debate to round up 50 former senior intelligence officials.
The “experts” publicly promulgated the lie that the laptop “bears the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.” Then, as planned, Biden in the debate used the experts’ phony consensus—dreamed up by his own campaign team—to play the victim of Trump/Russian disinformation.
He blasted Trump as a demagogue who unfairly had suggested Biden and his family were trading influence for cash.
One conservative poll suggested that the farce influenced enough voters to have changed the election. Again, no one has apologized—not the current secretary of state, not the former interim CIA Director, not the 50 experts who signed the bogus letter.
Massaging a U.S. election by conspiring to concoct a disinformation campaign must be as actionable as Dominion’s postelection claim of $757 million in damages.
Did not Twitter, the FBI, CNN, and MSNBC knowingly try to influence an election by spreading what they must have known was an absurd lie?
Almost no one after the election swallowed the notion that Dominion had rigged its voting machines. But millions before the election may have been swayed by the Biden campaign and the media-generated lie that the authentic Biden laptop was part of a Russian intelligence operation.
And that lie, unlike the Dominion charge of postelection defamation, might have changed history.
Julie Su, who presided over an estimated $31 billion in fraud as California’s labor chief, heads for a full Senate vote to lead Joe Biden’s Labor Department.
The Senate workforce committee in charge of vetting her qualifications for the post narrowly cleared her nomination for Senate approval on Wednesday, voting 11-10 along party lines.
The committee’s vote tees up a contentious vote on the Senate floor that is by no means certain to go Biden’s way. A handful of Democratic moderates, including Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Mark Kelly (Ariz.), and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), have yet to commit to supporting her.
Su, who currently serves as deputy secretary of labor, has been dogged by her California record since Biden nominated her for the post in February. During her time overseeing California’s Employment Development Department during the state’s pandemic lockdowns, Su froze checks on unemployment claims and failed to stop payment to suspicious accounts, leading to an estimated $31 billion in fraudulent payouts. California’s unemployment insurance fund is now in a nearly $20 billion hole.
Su also worked to implement California’s Assembly Bill 5, known as the anti-gigworker law, which cracked down on many of the state’s independent contractors by forcing them to reclassify as employees.
Senate workforce committee chair Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) praised her record as a staunch union ally ahead of the vote, noting her support for raising the minimum wage.
“I think Julie Su currently and in her role in California and throughout her life has made it clear she’s prepared to stand up for working families,” Sanders said.
Republican ranking member Bill Cassidy (La.) questioned Su’s competence in light of the fraud that happened under her watch, noted her lack of experience with complex and high-stakes contract negotiations, and said he worried she would bring an anti-business bias to the job.
“Julie Su has an extensive record of partisan activism and promoting policies that undermine workers to the benefit of politically-connected labor unions,” Cassidy said. “A qualified Secretary of Labor needs to successfully handle negotiations, manage a department properly, and refrain from partisan activism. I haven’t seen evidence of Julie Su’s ability to do any of those three things.”
Silas House says all Trump supporters are bigots. That’s about two-thirds of Kentucky.
Kentucky’s Democratic governor wants a left-wing writer who believes Appalachia is “homophobic” and says a majority of his state’s voters are “bigots” to be his state’s “ambassador to the rest of the world.”
Gov. Andy Beshear (D.) on Monday named author Silas House Kentucky’s poet laureate during a ceremony in which he praised the writer’s “unique gift” and said “we’re gonna be blessed to have him as our literary ambassador to the rest of the world.” House has a long history of criticizing the political and religious beliefs held by many of his fellow Kentuckians—especially former president Donald Trump’s supporters, who he once told to kiss his “gay country ass.”
House is a risky choice for Beshear, who faces a dicey reelection bid this November. Kentucky hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996 and swung for Trump by nearly 26 points in 2020. Beshear won his first term in 2019 by just over 5,000 votes. He has since kept President Joe Biden at arm’s length, saying in December that his re-election campaign “isn’t going to be about national figures.”
House often takes to Twitter to voice his left-wing views and disdain for conservatives. On May 15, 2019, House wrote, “If you support Trump you’re a bigot. Just claim it.” And on June 28, 2019, House wrote, “Unfortunately, Appalachia IS part of the reason Trump is in office. Unfortunately, the region as a majority IS homophobic. We can deny it all we want, but it’s true.”
Much of House’s writing revolves around critiques of evangelical Christianity, a faith embraced by nearly 50 percent of Kentuckians. House wrote an essay last November for Time warning that “the Christian nationalist forces that terrorized me as a child have grown only more powerful” and reflected on his youth spent “raised in a church of terrorists.” Those “Christian nationalist forces,” House alleged, now include Republican members of Congress who “terrorize LGBTQ children.”
House offered his vision for what a Republican-led future could look like in his 2022 novel Lark Ascending. The book follows the journey of a young gay man who attempts to flee to Ireland after the United States is “overrun by extremists.” Beshear praised the book at the Writers’ Day event, citing it as an example of how House “tells his Kentucky story.”
That “Kentucky story” also includes a run-in with Beshear’s father, former Gov. Steve Beshear. House crossed paths with the elder Beshear during a 2011 anti-coal mining protest at the governor’s mansion. He wrote about his experience in a New York Times op-ed entitled “My Polluted Kentucky Home,” in which he lamented how teachers told him to “change my accent if I wanted to get ahead in the world. Never mind that I had nearly perfect grammar and spelling.”
Neither House nor Beshear’s office responded to a request for comment.
Though his political commentary is largely devoted to criticizing Republicans, House has also boosted Democrats. In a 2019 essay for Salon, House wrote about how Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign was an inspiration for “gay Christians” such as himself. In the essay, House once again inveighed against evangelicals.
“The thing that none of them realize is that every time they allow their judgment to rear its head, support for Buttigieg grows even stronger among many potential voters,” House wrote.
Buttigieg would later drop out of that cycle’s Democratic presidential primary and ultimately only received 2.5 percent of the vote.
Tehran falsely claims the United States is in cahoots with the Islamic State
An Iranian court on Wednesday ordered the United States government to pay more than $1 billion in fines for terror strikes that Tehran now says were American-ordered.
The court determined “the U.S. government as well as some American officials and institutions must pay $312,950,000 in damages” to the families of those killed in a 2017 terror strike on Iran’s parliament and a popular holy site. The court “also set $9,950,000 for material damages, $104 million for moral damages caused to the plaintiffs, and $199 million for punitive damages,” according to Iran’s state-controlled press.
Iran is blaming the United States for a spate of attacks that are known to have been carried out by the Islamic State, a rival terror organization that is at odds with Iran’s clerical regime. Iranian officials claim the American government is in cahoots with the Islamic State, and is chiefly responsible for the 2017 attack that killed 17 and wounded 50 others.
The judgment is likely payback for the U.S. government’s 2021 seizure of around $7 million in Iranian assets, which were paid out to the victims of Tehran’s terrorism enterprise. The United States also successfully petitioned the International Court of Justice in March to toss a case that would have barred further payments from Iranian coffers.
Iran’s countersuit names former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, former U.S. general Tommy Franks, the CIA, U.S. Central Command, and the Treasury Department as defendants. Lockheed Martin and American Airlines also are named in the suit.
A co-chair for Joe Biden’s newly announced reelection campaign has connections to the Chinese government.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Disney and DreamWorks, will be one of the national co-chairs for the president’s 2024 campaign, Biden announced Tuesday. In his years as a corporate CEO, Katzenberg inked deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Chinese companies. Katzenberg visited the country every month for years while working out the deals.
Katzenberg took several meetings with then-vice president of China Xi Jinping, Fox News reported:
Perhaps most infamously, when Katzenberg was at DreamWorks in 2012, the company announced a multi-billion-dollar deal with the Chinese government to build a production studio in Shanghai.
The deal, which effectively increased the number of U.S. films that could be released in the Chinese market each year, came just days after then-Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping met with then-President Barack Obama in Washington.
Xi, now the head of China’s ruling Communist Party, traveled after the Obama meeting to Los Angeles, where he met with Katzenberg and both men were featured at a ceremony inking the deal.
Biden also played a central role in pushing Hollywood’s entry into Chinese markets during the Obama administration, meeting with Xi multiple times during the Chinese leader’s trip to the U.S. in 2012 — with Katzenberg often showing up.
Biden’s elevation of Katzenberg to the role comes a month after the administration moved to allow schools with Chinese-funded Confucius Institute chapters to circumvent a ban on receiving federal funds.
San Diego leaders are requesting state funds to buy three hotels for the city’s homeless at a cost of $383,000 per room, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
The wealthy city, where homelessness has surged to record highs in recent months, will apply for the funds from California governor Gavin Newsom’s (D.) latest $736 million round of funding from his homelessness grant program. City officials were unfazed by the cost of the plan, with commissioner Ryan Clumpner calling it “a fantastic value proposition.”
Commissioner Stefanie Benvenuto called the value of the purchases “incredible when you see the cost at the door.”
San Diego is eyeing the hotel purchases despite the recent failure of a similar initiative. In 2020, city commissioners approved the purchase of two hotels to house homeless people at $278,000 to $353,000 per room. A newly opened affordable housing apartment project cost $51.1 million in total, or $583,000 per room. Still, downtown San Diego’s homeless population reached a new record high earlier this year of nearly 2,000 people.
“They’re nuts,” Bob Rauch, a San Diego businessman whose company owns and operates hotels, told the Union-Tribune of the city’s leaders. “They overpaid last time during a pandemic, and they’d be overpaying again.”
Meanwhile, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass’s (D.) latest budget proposal includes $1.3 billion for the city’s nearly 41,000 homeless, which equates to $32,000 per person. The per capita Los Angeles income is $39,380.
A similar trend has played out on the state level. California Democrats have spent some $20 billion over the past five years to address a growing homelessnes crisis.
Last month, Newsom proposed a ballot initiative to approve a minimum of $1 billion each year to house homeless people who are mentally ill.
According to the federal government’slatest count, California holds nearly a third of the nation’s homeless—multitudes more than any other state.
Earlier this month, a legislative committee approved a bipartisan request for an audit of where local, state and federal funds to address homelessness are going and what the dollars are accomplishing.
Waiver program lets colleges who host Confucius Institute chapters circumvent a ban on receiving federal funds
The Biden administration is quietly helping American universities that host China’s Confucius Institute on their campuses circumvent a ban on receiving federal funds.
The Defense Department in late March announced that it would grant waivers to allow schools to host chapters of the Confucius Institute, a Chinese Communist Party-backed program that Beijing uses to peddle influence and steal intellectual property from American universities. The department’s waiver program is a response to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which barred American colleges and universities from receiving federal dollars if they maintain Confucius Institute chapters.
Lawmakers say the Defense Department is subverting federal law.
“The Chinese Communist Party is subverting U.S. institutions and Joe Biden is sabotaging legislation to stop them,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Select Committee on China, told the Washington Free Beacon. Banks added that the Biden administration has essentially “greenlit China’s espionage and malign influence operations on college campuses.”
The workaround comes amid warnings from the intelligence community that American colleges are a “soft target” for Chinese spies. China has opened at least 100 Confucius Institutes in the United States since 2008, with China pouring more than $158 million into them. The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have repeatedly warned that these outposts are “ultimately beholden to the Chinese government” and pose an espionage risk.
But American schools have been hesitant to cut ties with their Confucius Institutes, lest they miss out on the $426 million China has injected into American higher education since 2011. This money funds an array of research projects, with a large portion also coming in the form of gifts to various schools.
Confucius Institutes ostensibly promote cultural exchange and offer language programs. But lawmakers maintain they actually “limit a school’s autonomy by censuring political debate and preventing discussions on certain topics, such as Taiwan and Tibet.” These CCP outposts also maintain “contracts with U.S. universities [that] forbid activities that violate Chinese law and require the contract remain confidential, limiting effective oversight.”
The NDAA’s bipartisan funding prohibition, which is set to take effect October 1, was meant to force American universities into dropping Confucius Institutes to keep lucrative Pentagon contracts. But the waiver program offers them a lifeline and comes amid parallel efforts by higher education lobbyists to pressure the Biden administration into easing reporting requirements on foreign donations, like those coming from China.
Schools seeking a waiver only need to send the Pentagon a letter affirming that their Confucius Institute supports “academic freedom” and “openness.” The schools are also given leeway to self-report to the Defense Department about any changes that may be made to the institution’s relationship with these CCP outposts.
Universities that have active partnerships with the Pentagon also must “demonstrate that it has adequate measures in place to secure information, including information generated by scientific research,” according to the guidance. This includes cybersecurity firewalls and prohibitions on Confucius Institute staff gaining access to sensitive research projects.
This could prove difficult for a number of American schools that have been infiltrated by Chinese spies.
Stanford University, for instance, took in $1.9 million from the Defense Department in 2022 to study “multiphase detonation of liquid aeropropulsion fuels,” which could apply to advanced military technologies such as hypersonic missiles. The school also employed a Chinese researcher who was acting as a spy for the CCP’s military, according to federal authorities.
The Justice Department has warned at least 60 top colleges that they are susceptible to Chinese espionage operations.
Banks says that his committee is “working overtime” to push back against the waiver program and “win a game of oversight whack-a-mole against a president who is running cover for China.”
Climate activists are pushing the Biden administration to stop companies from using the term “natural gas,” arguing that use of the word “natural” makes the energy source appear overly green.
Environmental group Gas Leaks is working to change the way Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission regulates the use of “natural gas” in marketing materials, Bloombergreported Wednesday. For the group’s campaign director, Caleb Heeringa, the term misleadingly suggests that the energy source is clean and should thus be replaced by expressions such as “fossil gas” and “methane gas.”
“There’s nothing natural about fracking; there’s nothing natural about thousands of miles of pipelines and there’s nothing natural about the indoor air pollution that is associated with gas,” Heeringa said.
Despite Heeringa’s claims, natural gas does occur naturally. The colorless, odorless fuel source forms when decomposing plants and animals are subject to underground heat and pressure. Its name was adopted in the 1820s, Bloomberg noted, to distinguish it from gas produced via unnatural means, such as by burning coal and oil.
It’s unclear how Biden’s Federal Trade Commission will react to Gas Leaks’s efforts—the agency declined to comment. But Biden administration officials have taken cues from liberal climate activists in the past.
In January, for example, Biden’s pick to serve on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., threatened to ban gas stoves after an environmental group published a study attributing 13 percent of U.S. childhood asthma cases to gas stove use. Academics later criticized that study, and when Trumka’s threat prompted swift backlash, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would not support such a ban. Still, Biden’s Energy Department has moved forward with regulations that would effectively ban at least half of all gas stoves on the U.S. market from being sold.
Should Biden’s Federal Trade Commission entertain regulatory action targeting the use of “natural gas” in marketing materials, the effort will certainly attract pushback. The American Gas Association defended its use of the term Wednesday, telling Bloomberg that “natural gas” has “a history of use colloquially and in reference works, legislation, and academic journals.”
Natural gas is “instantly recognizable to customers for what it is: the name of a vital source of energy for tens of millions of Americans,” association general counsel Michael Murray said.
It was a dream come true—or rather about to come true—when the Halls bought their forever home. It had everything they needed and more: five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a family room, a dining room, a roomy garage, good schools, and a good neighborhood. Sure, a fixer-upper, but they felt up to it. Prentiss Hall, a home improvement contractor, made it his life project, and everybody lent a hand—his wife, Tawanda, and six children, cousins, and friends.
“We were really excited,” Tawanda told The Epoch Times.
They negotiated the price down to $67,000—a bargain, perhaps, but the home demanded a daunting amount of “tender love and care.”
“The house had been sitting there for a while. I guess it had mold in it, and it needed new windows and doors and electric,” Tawanda said.
“The city made us get all kinds of permits to get the house up to code. So we went in there and just started working.”
It took about a year before they were able to move into the home in the quiet Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan. And it was several years before they felt “comfortable” with it, she said.
The result was worth it.
“It was a dream home. It was big enough … for our family to be there, we had plenty of rooms, big enough to have our holiday dinners, and everyone can come and be comfortable,” she said.
For a Detroit girl, it was nice to have a peaceful place to live, away from all the noise and hustle.
“We just hoped and planned to stay and grow and raise grandchildren and, you know,” she paused.
“But—,” her voice trailed into a sigh.
Shattered Dreams
Several years in, the Halls got into financial trouble. Tawanda’s handicapped brother and her sick mother moved in with them even as all their money still went into improving the house.
“We just had a lot of things happening at once,” she said. “Before I knew it, I was behind on all my taxes.”
Property tax on the 3,700-square-foot home ran over $5,000. In a few years, the debt ballooned to over $22,000, including interest and fees.
In February 2018, Oakland County foreclosed on the home.
The next month, the county put the Halls on a payment plan of $650 a month intended to allow them to get the house back. They prepaid a few months in advance and were told that they don’t need to worry about timely payments as long as they caught up on the payments by February 2019, according to court documents reviewed by The Epoch Times (pdf, pdf).
In June 2018, however, the county suddenly transferred the property to the city of Southfield, which had a preferential right to buy foreclosed properties for the price of the debt.
The Halls were informed they had to move out.
Four months later, the city gave the property to a private company, Southfield Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative, for $1.
In early 2020, the house was put on the market and then sold for more than $300,000.
To the Halls’ shock, they learned they were not entitled to a single penny of that payout.
“I feel like someone stole from me and my family,” Tawanda said.
Less than a month later, Prentiss Hall passed away. Loss of the house put him under enormous stress, and his health deteriorated, she said.
Widespread Problem
Thousands of Americans have been put in a similar position—losing their homes and other properties over tax debts that only represented a small fraction of the property value.
In most of the country, such a practice is illegal. Local authorities are allowed to foreclose on properties over unpaid taxes, but they are required to sell them and return the owners everything above what they owe.
There are 12 states plus the District of Columbia that allow governments to keep the whole property and all sales proceeds: Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Alabama, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Arizona, and Oregon.
A foreclosure sign is posted in front of a home for sale in Stockton, Calif. on April 29, 2008. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Another nine states have various loopholes, mostly allowing the government to keep such properties for public use (like in Alaska, California, Idaho, Nevada, Ohio, and Rhode Island). Montana allows the government to keep all proceeds from the sale of commercial properties, not residential ones. Texas allows governments to sell properties at a discount in some circumstances. Wisconsin allows governments to keep the properties, but if they sell them, excess proceeds go back to the original owners, according to Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a nonprofit that has been tracking and litigating the issue.
Between 2014 and 2021, this practice has cost homeowners over $860 million in home value—equity—spread over some 6,200 homes. But those are only the cases PLF was able to document by looking at the more populous counties in the 12 states and only at homes for which there was enough information available. For thousands more, there wasn’t enough information. And there are untold more the PLF hasn’t looked at yet.
Most of the lost equity was wasted by selling the houses at a deep discount. About $30 million actually ended up in government coffers, while another about $280 million was pocketed by private investors that buy property tax debt from governments and then foreclose on the homes and sell them, based on data from nearly 4,700 property sales.
Legal Battle
For PLF lawyer David Deerson, the issue boils down to theft.
“It’s true that the government can take your property with few limits, but one of the limits is, whatever it takes, it has to pay you for it,” he told The Epoch Times.
Governments have been defending the practice on “legalistic” grounds, in his view.
“It’s commonly understood that property rights are not created by the Constitution. They’re protected by the Constitution, but they’re created by other sources of law, such as state law.”
Thus, governments have argued property owners don’t own the value of a property in excess of a debt unless the specific state law says so.
“There can’t be a property right in equity because if you look at the way the statutes are written, they don’t provide you with a chance to get your equity back,” Deerson explained the argument.
PLF and a lineup of legal and advocacy groups across the political spectrum disagree.
“In every single other context you can possibly imagine, equity is treated as a property right,” he said.
In a divorce, equity in a home is treated as part of the wealth being divided. In a private foreclosure, the bank cannot take a penny beyond what it’s owed.
“Of course, they have to pay you back the surplus equity. Why? Because you have a property right to it,” Deerson said.
“Equity isn’t treated as a property right only if it’s the government itself trying to take it.”
In 2020, PLF secured a ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court that outlawed the practice of governments keeping extra proceeds from tax foreclosures in the state. That should have resolved Tawanda’s case, but the government has continued to litigate the issue in federal courts.
In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which covers Michigan, ruled the practice unconstitutional, but the state government appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, leaving the case pending.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court announced it would pick up a similar case in Minnesota, where a 94-year-old grandmother lost her condo over some $15,000 in unpaid taxes and fees. The local government sold the condo for $40,000, again keeping every penny.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, on March 23, 2023. (Richard Moore/The Epoch Times)
PLF is in the process of arguing the case before the Supreme Court, with the first hearing scheduled for April 26.
The case, Tyler v. Hennepin County, could decide the fate of Tawanda Hall and thousands of others.
“I’m hoping that they can change the law because it’s unfair to a lot of families who put their lives into their homes,” Tawanda said.
‘Wrong’ Argument
While the issue may seem clear-cut, courts have been split on it for decades.
In Nebraska, for example, the state’s Supreme Court has affirmed the practice. So did, last year, the federal appeals court for the Eight Circuit, which covers several states that allow the practice—Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota.
It was the split between the Sixth and Eight Circuits, both stemming from PLF cases, that likely prompted the Supreme Court to pick up the issue, according to Deerson.
He didn’t think the Nebraska Supreme Court was malicious in its ruling.
“We just think the court got it wrong,” he said.
The court indicated that “basically because this process has been in place for a long time that it must be constitutional,” he said.
“That is not a principle of law that we agree with.”
Governments have also argued that the threat of losing the whole property serves as a deterrent against tax delinquency. In that sense, the lost equity could be seen as a form of penalty.
That still wouldn’t pass constitutional muster, according to Deerson.
“Yes, the government can charge fines, but they have to be proportional to whatever the offense committed was. And failing to pay your taxes—it’s not a crime; it’s a civil infraction,” he said.
If a government were to try to confiscate a house as a form of a tax delinquency fine, “then it certainly looks like an excessive fine which is prohibited by the Eight Amendment of the Constitution,” he said.
Falling on Hard Times
Usually, there’s no criminal intent in tax delinquency, Deerson noted.
“It’s usually a result of simply not being able to afford it or not understanding the process.”
Kevin Fair, for example, quit his job at a locksmith service to care for his wife, suffering from multiple sclerosis.
“I didn’t want to leave her by herself, and I couldn’t afford to hire somebody to come over and watch her, so I quit my job to stay home with her, and we used what little money we had in savings to pay the medical bills and etc.,” he told The Epoch Times.
Kevin Fair is facing eviction and a loss of over $50,000 in equity in his home over some $5,000 in overdue taxes. (Courtesy of Pacific Legal Foundation)
In 2014, he missed the $588 property tax bill on their small house in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. The tax lien was bought by a private investor, Continental Resources, which then started to pay his tax bills and pile up 14 percent interest on top of them.
By 2018, the debt snowballed to more than $5,000. Fair was informed that he either pays the sum in a few months or the company would possession of his house which, according to PLF, was worth about $60,000.
That wasn’t feasible for Fair, whose wife passed away and who now lives off a $900 monthly in Social Security.
His monthly bills alone can run up to $600, leaving precious little to live on.
“This month right now, I don’t have any money. Period. I am broke,” he said.
“I eat a lot of lunchmeat and stuff like that because that’s the only thing I can afford. And if they kick me out of the house … I’ll be wandering around on streets.”
PLF was able to negotiate for Fair, now 66, to be able to stay in the house while the Supreme Court case is pending.
Fair said he would be willing to move if he could keep the extra cash after the house is sold. Alternatively, he hopes he could work out a deal with the company that now owns his home—paying it rent, for example.
“It just doesn’t seem right for them to be able to do this,” he said.
Hard to Challenge
In some jurisdictions, tax foreclosure laws have gone virtually unchallenged.
“People who’ve failed to pay their property taxes for reasons you can imagine are often some of the people who are least capable of fighting back against government abuse,” Deerson said.
“I mean, people aren’t intentionally neglecting to pay their property taxes. They’re not gleefully ignoring the law. They’re often elderly, they’re impoverished, they’re ill, or they’re dealing with an illness in their family. And for the same reasons that they’re struggling to keep up with their property taxes, they’ll also struggle to find adequate representation to understand what their rights are and what they can do to push back.”
In Massachusetts, for instance, PLF represented several clients in situations similar to Fair’s, with a private company buying their debt and then foreclosing on their homes. In all such cases, the company agreed to settle the case before the courts got a chance to consider the law’s constitutionality, according to PLF’s attorney Josh Polk.
“We’re talking about a huge cash cow here. Investors are able to purchase a tax lien for a couple thousand dollars and then go on and sell the property for hundreds of thousands of dollars, taking a massive windfall at the expense of taxpayers,” he told The Epoch Times.
“And so it’s unsurprising that they’re eager to settle rather than take this up to the Massachusetts Supreme Court.”
A few years ago, the state’s highest court “seemed to signal that it wanted to hear the issue but had not been presented an opportunity,” Polk said. “And so we were anxious to give it the opportunity.”
The case of Alan DiPietro could just do the trick.
In 2014, DiPietro bought five lots totaling 34 acres.
“I wanted to bring my alpacas over,” he told The Epoch Times.
He’s been raising the South American animals since 2008 for their fine fleece, and the property gave him hope to finally bring the business to some semblance of profitability.
Instead, the town of Bolton, Massachusetts, buried him under a pile of red tape, including a lawsuit over his supposed disturbance of a wetland on his property.
Before long, he was behind on his taxes.
Alan DiPietro faces eviction from his land and a loss of over $300,000 in equity over about $60,000 in overdue taxes. (Courtesy of Pacific Legal Foundation)
What started with missed payment of $6,116 in 2017 expanded to about $60,000 in just four years.
He tried to sell one of the lots to pay off the debt, but the town wouldn’t issue him the permits necessary to make the lot suitable for sale. The town reasoned he couldn’t get the permits because he was behind on taxes.
“I said, ‘Well, I’m trying to sell this to pay the taxes. If you give me the permits, I’ll sell the property, the one lot, and I’ll pay the taxes,’” he said. “Well, they didn’t like that idea.”
He tried other ways: Cut some timber on the land and sell it—the government blocked it; grow hemp on the land—the government blocked it, he said.
“They just used it as a leverage against me. They knew that they didn’t have to deal with me.”
In the end, the local government foreclosed on the property and proceeded to evict DiPietro.
“We’ve been fighting it in the state court,” he said.
The case has been on hold pending the resolution of the PLF’s Supreme Court case.
‘Take the Money and Run’
If the case goes his way, DiPietro would still lose the land. But since it’s worth some $370,000 in PLF’s estimate, he’d at least have money to start anew.
“I don’t have much choice at this point. I’d rather have something than nothing,” he said. “Obviously, I’d rather stay here and continue what I was doing, but the way the town has been, you know, I might be happy just to take the money and run.”
He’d run far, too.
“I’d probably move south. I think I’d be done with Massachusetts,” he said.
The atmosphere in the state has gotten too controlling, he suggested.
“I’ve lived here my whole life, and unfortunately, the people around here … they’ve got some crazy ideas about what they can and can’t tell their neighbors to do. It’s not really a live-and-let-live situation anymore. There are some people who think that they get to dictate every part of your life,” he said. “I get 34 acres. I’m farming it. I’m not harming anyone. I don’t need them making up issues to come over and harass me about. It’s just not how I want to live anymore.”
Alan DiPietro feeding his alpaca. (Courtesy of Pacific Legal Foundation)
Like many others, he had no idea that in Massachusetts, the government gets to keep foreclosed properties wholesale.
“It’s just legal theft. I mean, it’s bad enough you have to pay the property tax on something you already own, but then they’re going to take everything? I was just amazed,” he said.
“And unfortunately, I’ve been left with zero options. If I could have sold, I probably would have moved out of here several years ago already, you know? It’s a funny thing. It’s like they want me out, but they give me no options to leave.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled Tawanda Hall’s name. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
The House of Representatives approved a Republican plan to temporarily raise the debt ceiling while cutting future spending with a vote of 217–215 on April 26.
In a departure from regular order, the vote came less than 24 hours after the bill was formally introduced into the House and just 12 hours after a late-night committee, where the bill was revised by Republicans along party lines.
The move irked Democrats, who complained that there was little opportunity to read the bill and its amendments, let alone debate them.
Republican leaders portrayed the move as a starting point for a discussion on federal spending with Democrats, who hold both the Senate and the White House and can reject the legislation if they choose.
The vote is a win for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who engineered a majority vote among the fractious Republican caucus in the narrowly divided House. Four Republicans voted against the bill. Two Republicans and two Democrats didn’t vote.
Start of Negotiations
McCarthy’s stated aim is to use the bill to force President Joe Biden to negotiate over cuts to federal spending, something the president has refused to consider.
Republican Caucus Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) repeated that goal at a press conference hours ahead of the vote.
“President Biden has been missing in action on the debt ceiling, refusing to negotiate, and putting our economy and the livelihoods of hardworking American families at risk,” Stefanik said. “President Biden must work with us who represent the American people to address our nation’s spending and debt crisis.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) leaves the office of U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 27, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“House Republicans are selling out hardworking Americans in order to defend their top priority: restoring the Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest and corporations at a cost of over $3 trillion,” White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt said in an April 26 statement.
The president will veto the Limit, Save, Grow Act if it reaches his desk, according to an April 25 White House statement.
What’s In The Bill
The measure would raise the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, temporarily relieving anxiety about the prospect of a default on the nation’s financial obligations. The increase would expire on March 31, 2024, requiring another vote in less than 12 months.
The bill would reduce discretionary spending to the 2022 level, limit spending increases to 1 percent annually for 10 years, and reinstate work requirements for some recipients of SNAP and Medicaid. It would also rescind most green energy tax cuts and reduce bureaucratic obstacles to domestic energy production.
Despite the spending cuts and caps, some House Republicans were leaning against voting for the bill on the day before the vote. The speaker spent the evening of April 25 wrangling votes from reluctant caucus members.
Then, during the early morning hours of April 26, Republicans on the House Rules Committee, the only committee to debate the bill, introduced three amendments that appear to be aimed at mollifying holdouts.
One amendment would reinstate work requirements for some recipients of SNAP and Medicaid in 2024, a year sooner than planned.
A second would preserve three biofuel tax credits while other green energy tax credits were rescinded by the bill. At least 10 members from Midwestern states, known for the production of corn used to make ethanol, had reportedly objected to the removal of the credits.
The third would rescind certain funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, including those designated for green building construction, Energy Department loan guarantees, deferred maintenance for national parks, air pollution reduction, and a neighborhood access and equity grant.
Republican leaders, who had insisted that no changes would be made to the bill, attempted to downplay the 11th-hour amendments as “technical changes.”
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) in the Capitol building after attending the State of the Union in Washington on Jan. 30, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
“In the initial draft, it repealed all of the tax credits, but some of those tax credits were not part of the [Inflation Reduction Act],” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told reporters just hours before the vote. “So the intention wasn’t to get rid of all of those, just the ones that were created in the IRA.”
Changes to the work requirement provisions were made merely to align the start dates of the requirements across various federal programs, according to Scalise.
“The bill was closed,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) said. “There’s nothing of substance that was changed in the bill.”
‘Extortion’ or Starting Point?
Democrats objected to the bill largely because of its perceived effect on government programs. Although the bill enumerates few specific spending cuts, Democrats believe that the overall level of spending reduction can’t be achieved without slashing services for veterans, working people, and the poor.
“This is extortion, not a negotiation,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said of the bill’s hurried passage. “You’re saying if we don’t agree to all these draconian cuts, they’re going to hurt people that we fight for every day on this side of the aisle.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said during the floor debate, “It’s hypocrisy for my Republican colleagues to say that they somehow suddenly care about the debt when they passed a 2017 tax scam that increased the deficit by $2 trillion. And nearly half of those tax cuts went to the top 5 percent.
“But now all of a sudden, they care about debt, and they want to cut nutrition assistance to nearly 3 million women, children, and seniors.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) denied any attempt at coercion, portraying the bill as the first offer in a negotiation.
“We’re saying we just want to talk, here’s our opening proposal,” he said.
“We don’t expect you will take everything or agree with everything. We know you control the United States Senate. We know the president of the United States has a veto, but you’re going to talk with us. We’re going to have a real discussion about what we need to do as a country.”
NEW YORK—Former President Donald Trump should be forbidden from sharing evidence produced during his criminal case with the media or the public, prosecutors said in a filing this week.
Prosecutors with the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on April 24 asked New York Justice Juan Merchan to enter a protective order that would limit what materials Trump can view and where he can view them. The order would also make clear that the discovery materials can not be disseminated to reporters or posted on social media platforms.
“Defendant has a constitutional right to speak publicly about this case, and the people do not seek to infringe upon that right. That said, neither defendant nor defense counsel have a First Amendment right to speak publicly regarding materials they receive through discovery,” Assistant District Attorney Catherine McCaw said in the 30-page filing.
Trump was indicted by a grand jury, acting on charges presented by Bragg, on April 4.
Prosecutors have said they expect to start handing discovery materials to defense lawyers after the order is entered. The parties have been unable to agree on all aspects of an order.
Prosecutors said Merchan should enter an order that requires any materials and information provided to meet discovery obligations be used solely for preparing a defense in the case, noting that Trump has since sued former lawyer Michael Cohen and could try using some of the materials in that litigation.
The order would bar any person who receives the materials from copying, disseminating, or disclosing them to any third party, with an exception for workers employed by defense lawyers, including prohibiting people from posting the materials on social media sites like Trump’s Truth Social and Elon Musk’s Twitter.
It would also prevent Trump from viewing some materials outside the presence of his counsel, a necessity given how sensitive some of the materials are and given how Trump is under federal investigation for allegedly mishandling classified records, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors expect to produce substantial discovery, including minutes from the grand jury, materials obtained in response to grand jury subpoenas, and forensic images of two cellphones obtained from a witness.
The forensic images could not be viewed by Trump at all without permission from prosecutors if Merchan agrees to enter the order as proposed. That’s due to much of the content that was imaged, such as vacation photographs, having no relation to the case, prosecutors asserted. If permission is granted, Trump would be able to look at the relevant materials in a room with his lawyers.
Trump should also be advised on the record about the terms of an order once one is entered, McCaw said. Prosecutors have said they could charge Trump if he violates a future order.
“Should the defendant fail to abide by these terms, it could have the effect of being in contempt of court,” McCaw said during Trump’s arraignment.
The order would not prejudice the defense because they would still have access to all of the discovery, prosecutors said.
Trump’s lawyers said in that hearing that they were working to negotiate details of a protective order and that disagreements included where Trump would be able to view the sensitive materials.
“I know the D.A. said the review by the defendant would have to be in the attorney’s office. That will not happen,” Joseph Tacopina, one of the lawyers said. “I thought it was in the attorney’s presence. We would most likely meet at the office of President Trump.”
Merchan said at the time that he would not weigh in since negotiations were ongoing.
“If you reach an impasse and you need my help in resolving anything, let me know and I’ll try to help out,” he said.
Trump’s lawyers told outlets this week that they plan on lodging a response to the new filing next week.
A Senate Democrat is facing an ethics complaint after allegedly using taxpayer resources unlawfully in connection to her reelection campaign.
Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., announced her reelection earlier this month, sharing a campaign video on her Twitter.
I ran for office to solve problems, fight for hardworking Nevada families, and make a real difference in people’s lives.
Our work in the U.S. Senate is just getting started — that’s why I’m officially launching my re-election campaign today! pic.twitter.com/rKv62KfqqQApril 5, 2023
However, because the campaign account video appears to have included footage of the senator in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, she may have violated federal law, according to the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust.
“Senator Rosen is clearly using video taken in her official capacity in an official government building for campaign purposes in violation of federal law and Senate ethics rules,” Kendra Arnold, executive director of the right-leaning watchdog group, wrote to the committee’s chairman, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., and vice chairman, James Lankford, R-Okla., in the complaint, which was first obtained by the Washington Examiner.
“The law is broad — not only does official resources include any use of title and video taken in government buildings, but it does not allow for a senator to evade the law by re-posting video obtained from a news outlet,” the complaint added. “The law is clear and the image above speaks for itself — there are no facts that can excuse this violation.”
Senators are barred from using official resources for campaign or political activities, according to federal law. Official resources may include government buildings, like Senate offices, the Capitol Building or also staff, websites and social media accounts.
“This is an important rule because it not only protects taxpayer-funded resources from abuse, but it also protects the integrity of official proceedings by reducing the incentive for senators to use them for political purposes,” the watchdog wrote in its complaint. “It is important that the authority of the federal government not be used for campaigning. Therefore, we urge the committee to stop Senator Rosen from using official resources in her reelection campaign.”
The Democrat has pushed back against the allegations.
“[T]he video and the tweet are consistent with Senate ethics policies,” Rosen’s Senate spokesman Renzo Olivari told the Washington Examiner.
Rosen is the only declared Democrat candidate running for Nevada‘s Senate seat in 2024.
Two Republicans, ex-congressional candidate and civil rights attorney Ronda Kennedy, and Las Vegas realtor Stephanie Phillips, have entered the Nevada Senate primary.
ALERT – Could your state be next? In yet another insane proposal in the left’s radical ‘gender bending’ agenda, a bill in the Minnesota Legislature is changing the definition of “sexual orientation” to include pedophilia.
This is an extreme and radical move that would make pedophiles a legally protected class of people in the state. And it isn’t getting the attention it deserves.
This sickening bill, promoted by 17 of the state’s Democrats, is working its way through the legislature.
It has a growing list of sponsors and has already had its “second reading,” which means it can appear on the floor for a vote at any time.
Does this make the state’s Democrats “sexual groomers” of children?
It seems so.
It’s also a natural, if perverse, continuation of the extreme ideology which makes gender identity and transgenderism a priority for the left.
The bill shows how their slippery slope works at the state level, which eventually moves to other states, and then to the federal government.
First, you create a law that makes sexual orientation a protected class by prohibiting discrimination of any kind based on sexual orientation. In Minnesota, as in many other places, that law has been around for a while.
Laws like that are used to support countless far-left lawsuits, discriminatory quotas and all the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that are wreaking havoc across America.
Then you quietly amend that law to remove a provision that excludes pedophilia as a legitimate sexual orientation.
In this case, they have deliberately stricken the provisions of the current law that specifically carved out pedophilia from the definition of sexual orientation.
The current law says: “Sexual orientation does not include a physical or sexual attachment to children.” [emphasis added]
But in the new Democrat proposal, that line will be removed, essentially making pedophiles a protected class along with transgender people and every other sexual orientation the left can invent.
Pedophiles will also get the same legal protections against discrimination as gays and lesbians, who legitimately deserve it, and be lumped together with them in the same legal category.
While this amendment to current law won’t make pedophilia “legal” (yet) in Minnesota, discrimination against pedophiles will be prohibited if this bill becomes law.
You will be subject to lawsuits if you discriminate against pedophiles. You have to hire them, house them, and serve them in your restaurant regardless of your objection to their evil desires. They will have more rights than you. Because they are pedophiles.
Strom adds: “anybody who wants to opt out of affirming crazy people will be turned into targets of lawsuits and harassment.”
And legalization will come soon after. He continues: “…the next stop is going to be explicitly legalizing pedophilia.”
Strom notes how this part of the left’s slippery slope works, too:
Once the Rubicon of declaring children mature enough to make lifetime medical decisions at ages as young as 8 it makes no sense to assert that they aren’t mature enough to engage in “consensual” relationships. If you can get permission from a child to sterilize and mutilate them, why stop there? They have been essentially declared adults in sexual matters.
He concludes, not wrongly: “The Democrat Party is becoming the party of sexual groomers. It really is that simple.”
ANALYSIS – Global military spending reached an all-time high of $2.24 trillion in 2022, according to a leading defense think tank.Eastern Europe saw the sharpest rise in spending, driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
However, increasing tensions due to Chinese belligerence in the Pacific also contributed to the sharp increase.
The U.S. and China are by far the biggest defense spenders in the world.
However, military expenditure in Europe saw its steepest year-on-year increase since the end of the Cold War, up 13 percent, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI, said on Monday.
Russian military spending grew by an estimated 9.2 percent in 2022 to around $86.4 billion – equivalent to 4.1 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022, up from 3.7 percent of GDP in 2021.
Ukraine’s military spending reached $44.0 billion in 2022. At 640 percent, this was the highest single-year increase in a country’s military expenditure recorded in SIPRI data.
As a result of the rise and the war-related damage to Ukraine’s economy, military spending as a share of GDP shot up to 34 percent of GDP in 2022, from 3.2 percent in 2021.
But some European countries have been ramping up military spending for a few years.
“Many former Eastern bloc states have more than doubled their military spending since 2014, the year when Russia annexed Crimea.”
Still, Russian threats to Europe are only part of the equation.
“The continuous rise in global military expenditure in recent years is a sign that we are living in an increasingly insecure world,” said Dr. Nan Tian, Senior Researcher with SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program.
“States are bolstering military strength in response to a deteriorating security environment, which they do not foresee improving in the near future,” Tian added.
And Chinese (and Russian) threats in Asia are also significant factors.
According to Al Jazeera, “Japan and China led military spending in Asia and Oceania, which amounted to $575bn. SIPRI said military expenditure in the region had been rising since at least 1989.”
China reportedly remains the world’s second-largest military spender, spending an estimated $292bn in 2022. This was 4.2 percent more than in 2021 and is part of a massive, years-long military buildup.
However, as I have explained before, Chinese military spending is significantly higher, based on actual purchasing power (bang for their buck) and deliberately opaque and misleading statistics provided by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Meanwhile, Japan spent $46bn on the military in 2022, a 5.9 percent increase over last year. SIPRI said it was the highest level of Japanese military spending since 1960.
Tensions in East Asia have risen over the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory. China also lays claim to almost all of the South China Sea, a major maritime trading route, parts of which are also claimed by countries including the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia.
Japan and China are also embroiled in a dispute over the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands, which lie northeast of Taiwan.
Tokyo also has a long-running dispute with Moscow over the Northern Territories, which lie northeast of Hokkaido and were seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Russia calls them the Kuril Islands.
The United States is still considered the world’s largest military spender with reportedly 39 percent of total global military spending.
But since the defense spending figures for China are deeply underestimated, these global percentages are also questionable.
The U.S. increase was largely driven by “the unprecedented level of financial military aid it provided to Ukraine,” SIPRI’s Nan Tian said.
Still, according to SIPRI, the U.S. defense budget was only up 0.7 percent to $877bn in 2022. The U.S. figures for 2023 will be higher.
And thanks to China and Russia, they need to be.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
One of the suspects arrested in a domestic terrorist attack on a Georgia police training center works as an attorney for a prominent liberal group the FBI recently used as a source for claims Catholics are involved in domestic terrorism.
Now members of Congress want answers as to what the FBI is doing to combat anti-police violence by liberals, and why an apparent FBI partner was involved in the violence.
Twenty-three of them were charged with domestic terrorism under Georgia law. The FBI’s Atlanta Field Office is now determining if any federal laws were broken in the attack.
But according to Atlanta police, one of the individuals charged with domestic terrorism is an employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The SPLC is a notorious leftist group, known for decades for issuing reports claiming mainstream conservatives are domestic terrorist groups. Critics, including some on the left, allege the SPLC determines who is a “hate group” based on what they believe will bring in donations from liberal donors, with prominent conservatives topping the list.
The SPLC is so successful in tagging mainstream conservatives as deadly “hate groups” one of its supporters carried out an attempted mass shooting at the Washington, D.C. offices of the Family Research Council, a mainstream conservative Christian organization.
Despite the alleged terror attacks carried out by its followers, and now its employees, the SPLC is still a go-to source for media organizations and the FBI in painting conservatives and Christians as terrorist threats in need of monitoring.
“On January 23, 2023, the FBI’s Richmond Field Office published an analysis report that identified traditional Catholics as “violent extremists,” which cited the support of the SPLC. In 2021, DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis published a bulletin regarding a national threat report, citing an SPLC assessment on extremists,” the House Committee on Homeland Security reports. (RELATED: Tucker Carlson Shares Straight to the Point Message With ‘Professional Christian Leaders’)
After the arrest of a SPLC employee on domestic terrorism charges, Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark E. Green, M.D., R-Tenn., Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence Chairman August Pfluger, R-Texas, and Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability Chairman Dan Bishop, R-N.C., issued a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding documents, communications and answers on their agencies’ response to the attack, and the involvement of a top SPLC employee.
“Upon providing the requested documents and information, please provide a briefing to Committee staff as soon as possible, but no later than May 4, 2023. We also request that the FBI notify the Committee as soon as it determines whether any participants in the violent attack at the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center site committed any federal crimes,” the lawmakers write.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson issued his first public comments since it was announced that he would be departing the network earlier this week, appearing outside his home in Florida with his wife.
“Retirement is going great so far,” he joked to the Daily Mail, which published photos of him and his wife outside of his Boca Grande house while driving a golf cart. “I haven’t eaten dinner with my wife on a weeknight in seven years.”
When asked about his future plans, Carlson again joked: “Appetizers plus entree.” According to the Mail reporter, he drove away in the golf cart with his wife without elaborating on what he is going to do next.
Neither Fox News nor Carlson have provided any details about why he suddenly left the network after hosting one of the top-rated cable news programs for years. A news release issued by the company said the two parted ways and said it would use a rotating slate of hosts for a temporary show during the 8 p.m. timeslot until a new host is named.
There has been speculation that a lawsuit filed by a former producer, Abby Grossberg, may have been one of the reasons for his departure. She claimed Carlson fostered a toxic work environment in which producers allegedly would make vulgar remarks, although Carlson hasn’t responded publicly to the allegations, and a Fox News spokesperson told news outlets that the company “will continue to vigorously defend Fox against Ms. Grossberg’s unmeritorious legal claims, which are riddled with false allegations against Fox and our employees.”
Other than Grossberg’s claim, a number of anonymously sourced articles have asserted that Carlson may have been let go for a number of reasons. On Tuesday evening, a Vanity Fair report—which The Epoch Times cannot authenticate as true—alleged that Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch removed Carlson after remarks he gave at the Heritage Foundation over the past weekend.
“I have concluded it might be worth taking just 10 minutes out of your busy schedule to say a prayer for the future, and I hope you will,” Carlson said in the keynote speech. The former Fox News host also made note of what he described as widespread moral decay across society and issued warnings about the future of Western civilization.
While Fox has shed big-name hosts with little damage in the past, the ouster of Carlson comes at a precarious moment for the network, said Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.” Carlson was the person there who best excelled at exciting the base of the Republican Party, she said.
“If Carlson now begins attacking Fox as ‘corporate media’ that despises its Trump-supporting viewers, he could cause the network to begin bleeding viewers” as it briefly did after the 2020 election, Hemmer told The Associated Press this week.
Carlson was named to replace O’Reilly on the day O’Reilly was fired. It may take some time for Carlson’s replacement to be known: Fox took a year, using guest hosts, before naming Jesse Watters as its 7 p.m. host last year. Watters was an immediate hit, and Fox learned that the audience likes to be part of the selection process.
“People are creatures of habit,” conservative talk show host Erick Erickson said. “Fox will offer another host who speaks into the audience’s concerns. There’ll be a dip, just like after O’Reilly, but I expect the host will be competent enough to earn the audience’s trust quickly.”
Several current and former Fox hosts reacted to Carlson’s exit this week. Both Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly criticized the move and said it would harm Fox News in the long-term—with Beck saying that the move is tantamount to “suicide.”
“I don’t know what drove Fox News to make this decision, and it was clearly Fox News’s decision because they’re not letting him say goodbye,” Kelly said Monday. “That’s my supposition. That’s not inside knowledge … I think this is a massive error. I think this is a massive misjudgment of what their audience wants.”
Current host Sean Hannity, whose show appeared after Carlson’s, said during a radio show that he doesn’t know what caused the two parties to part ways.
“My phone has been blowing up all day. The hard part for me is I don’t have a clue … I have no idea. Was it Tucker’s decision? Was it Fox’s? Was it a mutual agreement that they had? I don’t know,” he said.
A Fox News spokesperson has not returned a request for comment.
Arizona Attorney General’s Office (AGO) has confirmed that it is still investigating whether or not Katie Hobbs violated the law while serving as Arizona Secretary of State.
The investigation stems from Hobbs’ decision in March last year to suspend an online portal called E-Qual for individuals running for legislative and congressional seats, allowing them to gather signatures on the nominating petitions that qualify them for such seats.
In an emailed statement to the Arizona Daily Independent, a spokesperson for the AGO said due to the ongoing probe, records relating to the matter are being withheld from the public.
“Regarding the public records request you submitted on 11/30/22 & 2/15/23, this is an active investigation and therefore we are unable to release any records pursuant to the best interest of the State,” the statement read.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office did not respond to multiple requests from The Epoch Times for comments.
In March 2022, Hobbs said she was taking down the E-Qual online system more than two weeks before the nominating period was set to end so that it could be reprogrammed to account for the new districts that were drawn by the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission for the 2022 elections.
Brnovich Condemns Shutdown
However, then-Attorney General Mark Brnovich condemned the early shutdown as illegal, stating that the then-Secretary would face civil and criminal liability if she did so.
In a letter to Hobbs, his office asked the Secretary to swiftly “fix the system” and stated that she would violate Arizona law if she temporarily took E-Qual offline, warning her that doing so would be “either a class 6 felony or class 3 misdemeanor.”
Arizona law states that the Secretary must “provide a system for qualified electors to sign a nomination petition and to sign and submit a citizen’s clean elections five dollar contribution qualification form for a candidate by way of a secure internet portal.”
“The system shall allow only those qualified electors who are eligible to sign a petition for a particular candidate to sign the petition and only those qualified electors who are eligible to give a qualifying contribution to that candidate to do so and shall provide a method for the qualified elector’s identity to be properly verified,” it adds.
That pertains only to candidates for statewide and legislative offices, according to the law.
Hobbs’ aide Murphy Hebert fired back in a statement to local media at the time, stating, “The fact that the system may need to be offline for a period of time for updates to the system or, here, due to redistricting requirements beyond the control of our office, doesn’t amount to a violation of the statute.”
Legal Dispute Ongoing
Hobbs’s office later filed a motion (pdf) in Maricopa County Superior Court, arguing that in order to be eligible to sign a legislative or congressional candidate’s nomination petition, a voter must reside in the particular district where the candidate seeks to run and that to do so, the E-Qual portal needed to be updated.
“The AG’s position is baseless,” Hobb’s lawyers wrote in the motion, arguing that the then-Secretary did not violate state law and that Brnovich was threatening her with legal action “just for doing her job.”
“The Court should enjoin Defendants and their agents from initiating civil or criminal actions against the Secretary for doing so. The Court should also award the Secretary her attorneys’ fees and costs for having to bring this action,” her lawyers wrote.
Democrat Kris Mayes won the Arizona Attorney General race last year, replacing Brnovich. Hobbs was sworn in as governor on Jan. 2.
While it is unclear why there is a delay in concluding the probe into Hobb’s actions as Secretary of State, Mayes office did confirm to the Arizona Daily Independent that it would “provide any public records” on the ongoing investigation “as they become available to the public.”
Stanley K. Ridgley exposes extracurricular brainwashing in higher education.
xposing woke academia is both infuriating and amusing. Stanley K. Ridgley, a professor of management at Drexel University, has a knack for unearthing the horror of leftist, racialist, feminist, transgenderist grooming of immature minds on university campuses, and for caricaturing the groomers. His sarcasm will leave you rocking with laughter just after you’ve gasped with horror.
Ridgley’s unique focus here is on university administrators and support staff—the nominal non-educators who have hijacked extracurricular activities and spaces to indoctrinate students in socially destructive politics. In the first line of his preface, he declares “one of the great subterfuges in American history.” In historical terms, he ranks this subterfuge with Nazi book-burning and Communist authoritarianism.
Relatedly, Ridgley shows how the groomers on American campuses draw inspiration from Maoism. Recently, David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith proved the Maoism of wokeism in the epistemological sense. Ridgley exposes the pedagogy of wokeism. Ridgley shows us, in visceral detail, how woke American “educators” implement Maoism—brainwashing, show trials, censorship, demonization of independent thought, collectivism, and transnationalism.
A better title for the book might have been Woke Groomers, but Ridgley chose Brutal Minds, which sounds too much like a movie title to me. Nevertheless, Ridgley wields the term insightfully and entertainingly, starting in the preface:
Brutal minds are distributed across the campuses as faculty and bureaucrats, and the worst of the lot go by the name of ‘student affairs’ . . . the bureaucrats who self-celebrate as they say, ‘I finally get a chance to use my master’s degree’.
Ha! Laugh and get a serious point at the same time. Ridgley confirms the point many times over: universities are serving themselves and a political fringe by selling radical degrees of no use outside the academic-political complex—and so the system amplifies itself.
Ridgley is helpfully specific about the brutal actors: the perversely self-described “antiracists,” “educationists” who “view themselves as educators of society,” the Chronicle of Higher Education, the American College Personnel Association (ACPA), the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), the Social Justice Training Institute, facilitators radiating “superaffirmation” and “hypercourtesy,” educators who want you “to personalize the correct information from the readings,” off-campus consultants “with more than 20 years of diversity and equity work.”
Just listing these charlatans gets me mad, so let me remind you of how funny Ridgley is.
The ACPA . . . has established an institute where it trains student affairs staff from across the nation to impose thought-reform programs in their residence life programs . . . Does this sound absurd? That an undistinguished group of worker bees intends to ideologically transform an institution in which they serve only as ancillary support staff? Don’t these student affairs people just manage dorm room assignments and organize games of Ultimate Frisbee? Yes, it’s absurd. But if you had frustrated ambition and an online master’s degree in counselling, would you be happy with scheduling karaoke night at the dorm?
Additionally, Ridgley is helpfully specific in warning us of the euphemisms that these brutal minds invent to disguise vices as virtues.
“Educating for freedom,” “transformative education,” “student learning, “student development,” “Privileged Identity Exploration,” and “Dissonance Provoking Stimulus” are fig-leaves for brainwashing.
“Critical pedagogy,” “antiracist pedagogy,” and “social justice education” are “unauthorized psychotherapy sessions conducted quite often by unlicensed personnel under false pretenses.”
The good news is that these coercive faculty are usually restricted to the awful schools of education, schools of social work, many in public health, and always a significant contingent in sociology departments . . . The bad news, however, is bad. The critical pedagogues, antiracists, and fellow-traveler bureaucrats have seized much of the commanding heights of education—the university administration.
In the second half of the book, Ridgley analogizes higher education to Cerberus, the three-headed dog of the underworld. (How Western-centric of him!) The three heads are: America’s 1,200 schools/departments of education (which produce a quarter of all master’s degrees), student affairs offices, and their nonprofit enablers such as ACPA.
In a particularly alarming but funny section, Ridgley tabulates some data on the woeful GRE scores awarded to students of education, and breaks down the noneducation that schools of education actually teach.
The impression that emerges from these graduate programs in higher education administration is that you can be admitted to a graduate program by showing up with a pulse, take classes of a sort, interview a half-dozen folks who work down the hall from you, write a 150-page essay on it, and be called ‘Doctor.’ This is the glorious EdD, the ‘Doctor of Education.’
Somebody forward this page to Dr. Jill Biden.
Ridgley shows how higher education fulfills Robert Lifton’s eight steps to “thought reform”—control of information, mysticism, demand for purity, demand for public confessions, framing of ideology as science, heavy semantics, subordination of the individual to doctrine, and group adjudication of the individual’s existence.
Another useful heuristic is Ridgley’s “three characteristics of a pseudoscientific doctrine.” These bear quoting in full, to help consumers of mainstream media and popular culture, not just academic vomit.
1. If you disagree, you are a blasphemer or heretic. 2. It can’t be tested or disproved. 3. The basic goals are utopian—vague, wholesome, agreeable expressions. Peace and unity, inclusion and belonging, doing the work of antiracism.
Similarly, Ridgley reduces the student affairs pedagogy to three steps: subterfuge (“We don’t want to brainwash you, we just want you to have fun!”), hook (“Admit your privilege to gain promotion”), and hammer (“Ally with us or we’ll call you racist”).
What can be done? Ridgley doesn’t shy from prescription. He often makes the point that much of what the woke groomers are doing is dishonest and harmful enough to warrant civil suit, criminal prosecution, or defunding—if only state and federal authorities were not so woke or indecisive.
In the conclusion, he states that “administrators are vulnerable in just those two areas—the fear of bad publicity connected to them, and the fear of legal exposure.” One organization in which I have been involved to expose universities to publicity and legality is Alumni and Donors Unite.
Ridgley offers 15 steps for reforming university administration. These are unashamedly interventionist and invasive, such as forcing student affairs officers to take lessons in civics, and prohibiting membership in ACPA and NASPA.
He isn’t naïve about the challenges.
. . . you can expect the university and its allies at places like the Chronicle of Higher Education to blow smoke . . . by framing the campus dispute as (1) academic freedom under assault, or (2) university under pressure from the ‘far right’ and ‘bullies,’ or (3) minority students and faculty are just ‘exhausted’ at the latest efforts to ‘marginalize’ them and undermine ‘diversity and inclusion’ efforts.
We’ve got a long way to go, but one cannot read this book without feeling optimistic about the substance and style on our side.
Shortly after Joe Biden announced his reelection bid on Tuesday, the GOP released an AI-generated video showing what the future might look like under a second Biden term.
The ad shows AI-generated images that depict China invading Taiwan, hundreds of banks collapsing, border migrant surges, and authorities closing San Francisco due to crime. Throughout the ad, text on the screen asks viewers to consider “what if” a series of frightful events might occur if Biden gets a second term.
“What if international tensions escalate?” the text reads. “What if crime worsens?”
“Who’s in charge here?” an AI voice asks. “It feels like the train is coming off the tracks.”
Biden on Tuesday released a video message to announce his reelection campaign. In the ad, he framed his campaign as a fight for freedom and democracy, saying America “needs to get the job done.” The video showed footage of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, and demonstrations after the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Biden faces the lowest support for reelection from within his own party of any president in recent history. Just 38 percent of Democrats said the party should nominate Biden for reelection, while 57 percent want to find someone else.
Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama garnered more than 70 percent of their own party’s support for a second term.
The 80-year-old president faces mounting issues in his quest for four more years. Federal investigations into his son Hunter, who an IRS whistleblower said is receiving “preferential treatment,” have raised questions among voters about the family’s ethics.
Biden announced Monday that he selected Julie Chavez Rodriguez to run his campaign. Rodriguez’s experience includes helping run Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed 2020 presidential campaign.
USAID may use taxpayer dollars to cover an ‘awardee’s rent in Geneva or Rome or Paris,’ lawmakers say
The Biden administration is stonewalling a congressional probe into whether the U.S. Agency for International Development wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on hotels, lobbying services, and luxury airfare.
USAID refuses to tell Congress how much of the $15 billion it doled out to foreign entities in 2022 was ultimately spent on items unrelated to humanitarian projects. The agency’s opacity could mask the fact that USAID grant recipients are wasting taxpayer dollars on frivolous expenses, a pair of lawmakers claim in an oversight letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
“Indirect costs, which can include rent for a partner’s corporate headquarters, lobbying costs, and other miscellaneous expenses can easily exceed 25% of an organization’s total award,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas) wrote to USAID last week in a letter ordering the agency to stop obstructing congressional efforts to investigate this spending.
There is no way to know exactly how much USAID has wasted on these expenditures because the agency has been blocking a congressional investigation for more than a year, according to the lawmakers. Ernst and McCaul described the agency’s behavior as “troubling” and said the House Foreign Affairs Committee intends to discover if taxpayer funds are being “wasted on paying for awardee’s rent in Geneva or Rome or Paris.”
The foreign aid agency has a history of misallocating funds. An inspector general determined in 2019 that just 43 percent of the agency’s awards “achieved, on average, just half of their intended results.” USAID, whose budget President Joe Biden increased by 10 percent after taking office, also has a history of supporting organizations that work alongside terror groups and maintaining links to militant organizations like Hamas. The agency’s spotty oversight record has long been a source of concern on Capitol Hill, and with Republicans now in control of the House, Congressional investigators are ramping up efforts to hold USAID accountable.
Ernst and McCaul’s investigation hinges on Negotiated Indirect Cost Rate Agreements (NICRA), a little-known contract carveout that permits U.S. government grantees to spend a substantial portion of taxpayer dollars on things like lobbyists, hotel stays, and even first-class airfare.
In theory, NICRAs restrict how much money federal grantees spend on extraneous items, but these costs “have ballooned due to a lack of stewardship and care” under the Biden administration, the lawmakers say.
USAID is supposed to renegotiate these NICRA rates every year to ensure taxpayer funds are not being wasted on frivolous projects. But the agency has let oversight fall to the wayside, as it failed to hire more officials to keep up with ballooning expenditures. Just 7 federal employees are responsible for reviewing nearly 6,000 transactions to more than 300 organizations.
Ernst and McCaul, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, are particularly interested in USAID’s lies to Congress about the NICRA database it maintains.
Ernst first inquired about the payments in November 2022 but did not hear from USAID until February 2023, when the agency claimed it “does not have a system to track or report on this data.” Later that month, Ernst discovered a public NICRA database and presented the information to USAID, which subsequently confirmed the database does exist.
The agency then claimed it was “legally restricted from sharing an implementing partner’s proprietary information, including its NICRA” and threatened the senator with “civil and criminal penalties” if she pursues an investigation.
Ernst again called the agency’s bluff mid-February, saying that “congressional oversight on federal agencies spending and contracting negotiations most certainly does not violate federal law, including the acts listed in your response.”
After that exchange, USAID provided a third explanation for its refusal to cooperate with Congress, saying it “protects the confidential business information of its implementing partners, including NICRAs,” and would not disclose this information.
The pair now have plans to grill USAID administrator Samantha Power over the issue, according to congressional sources who said the Republican-controlled House committee is poised for a fight with the agency.
(Reuters)—U.S. stocks sank on Tuesday as a downbeat UPS forecast exacerbated investor concerns about a slowing U.S. economy, while a plunge in regional First Republic Bank’s deposits added to jitters about the health of the banking sector.
United Parcel Service Inc shares fell 9.8%, on track for their biggest one-day drop in more than eight years after the courier company forecast full-year revenue at the lower end of its earlier outlook as it navigates a weakening economy.
This helped push the Dow Jones Transport Average index down 3.6% and UPS rival FedEx Corp lost 3%.
This added to worries for investors waiting for quarterly results from megacap technology companies including Microsoft Corp. Also of concern was data showing U.S. consumer confidence fell to a nine-month low in April.
“Investors have been trying valiantly to hold it together in the midst of a big earnings and economic data week and a big Federal Reserve week next week,” said Carol Schleif, chief investment officer for BMO Family Office based in Chicago.
Traders largely expect the central bank to hike rates by 25 basis points on Wednesday after its Federal Open Market Committee meeting.
Investors are “trying to parse every piece of data this week for its influence” on the path for interest rates, Schleif noted.
The KBW Regional Banking index dropped 3.4%, while the broader S&P 500 bank index fell 2.4% as First Republic shares tanked 41%, hitting a record low.
The beleaguered lender reported a more than $100 billion flight in deposits in the first quarter following the biggest banking crisis since 2008 last month.
“People are trying to figure out the health of the regional banks in general. Is there a canary in the coal mine? It’s really important for mid-size businesses in the country that the regional banks to stay healthy,” said Schleif.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 320.58 points, or 0.95%, to 33,554.82; the S&P 500 lost 57.86 points, or 1.40%, at 4,079.18; and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 203.41 points, or 1.69%, to 11,833.80.
Of the S&P 500’s 11 major industry sectors, materials was the weakest, down 2%, followed closely by consumer discretionary and industrials, both down around 1.8%.
General Motors Co reversed early gains to fall 3.8% after the automaker cautioned that price gains over 2022 will not last as the year goes on, even as it lifted its full-year profit and cash flow forecasts.
On the bright side, PepsiCo Inc shares rose 2% after it raised its annual revenue and profit forecasts, helping consumer staples stocks outperform.
While estimates for first-quarter S&P 500 earnings have narrowed to a 3.9% decline from expectations for a 5.1% decline at the start of April, according to data gathered by Refinitiv, some of the biggest companies have yet to report results.
Shares in Alphabet Inc were down 1% and Microsoft slipped 1.8% ahead of their results due after the market close.
Three-month Treasury yields jumped while longer-duration yields fell as investors balanced worries about the U.S. debt ceiling with rising concerns about the regional banking sector and the possibility of an imminent recession. [US/]
Declining issues outnumbered advancers on the NYSE by a 4.78-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 3.39-to-1 ratio favored decliners.
The S&P 500 posted 22 new 52-week highs and seven new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 33 new highs and 324 new lows.
(Reporting by Sinéad Carew in New York, Sruthi Shankar and Ankika Biswas in Bengaluru; Editing by Vinay Dwivedi and Richard Chang)
Auto giant’s head of government affairs has defended partnership with Chinese battery maker
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has a new adviser: Ford’s top electric vehicle lobbyist, who has defended the auto giant’s use of taxpayer funds to build batteries with Chinese technology.
Granholm earlier this month tapped Ford lobbyist Christopher Smith to serve on her Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, which guides Granholm on how best to achieve a “global clean energy revolution.” As Ford’s chief government affairs officer—a role Smith will keep while serving on the board—Smith has lobbied an array of federal entities on green policies. Ford’s most recent disclosure, for example, shows that Smith lobbied the Energy Department on electric vehicles and greenhouse gas emission regulations just days before Granholm announced his status as an advisory board member.
Smith’s inclusion on the board comes as Ford attempts to fend off congressional scrutiny of its partnership with a Chinese battery maker. The company in February announced its plan to open a multibillion-dollar battery factory in Michigan alongside Chinese manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), which will provide technology, equipment, and workers to help build and run the factory. Ford says it will use the factory to receive lucrative subsidies and tax breaks under President Joe Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act, despite provisions in the massive climate package aimed at preventing China from receiving funds.
After congressional Republicans attacked Ford’s taxpayer-funded Chinese partnership, the auto giant deployed Smith to defend the arrangement. In a March 6 op-ed, Smith said Ford’s Chinese partners will have no “control of the plant” and will not directly receive taxpayer funds. But Ford itself has admitted that CATL will provide personnel “to help with operations,” and any federal subsidies Ford receives through the plant will no doubt help the company pay to license its Chinese partner’s technology.
While Smith’s explanation seems to have satisfied Granholm, it has not pleased top China hawks on the Hill. Days after Smith’s op-ed, Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio introduced legislation aimed at barring Ford from using taxpayer funds to build batteries with Chinese technology.
“Without additional restrictions, Chinese companies will benefit from the subsidies President Joe Biden claimed would spur domestic manufacturing,” Rubio said. “Hard-working Americans should not be forced to subsidize Chinese companies that make batteries for electric vehicles that cost more than most people make in a year.”
The Energy Department did not return a request for comment. Ford told the Washington Free Beacon that the Biden administration is “aware” of Smith’s lobbying work. The company also claimed it does not have a “partnership” with CATL, given that its deal with the Chinese battery maker does not give it direct ownership in the Michigan factory. That structure, congressional Republicans have argued, is meant to exploit a loophole that allows Ford to receive taxpayer funds while still taking advantage of Chinese manufacturing.
During his first month in office, Biden issued an executive order aimed at curbing the “revolving door” between government and corporate interests. Under the order, former lobbyists who are appointed to serve in the administration must wait two years before they can work on issues they lobbied on in the past. But Smith will continue to manage Ford’s government affairs while simultaneously advising Granholm, an arrangement that marks an “obvious conflict of interest,” according to Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust executive director Kendra Arnold.
“In this case, there’s an incentive for [Smith] to advise on issues based upon what’s profitable for his company, not what’s best for the American public,” Arnold said. “It’s essentially like giving a corporation an open avenue to lobby.”
Beyond his ethics pledge, Biden has placed climate change at the center of his administration, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to fight what he calls the “climate crisis” and usher in a “green energy economy.” China’s iron grip on the green energy supply chain, however, has plagued that effort. China made about 75 percent of the world’s lithium batteries in 2021, prompting Ford to acknowledge that it must partner with the communist nation to “build more EVs faster.”
Ford’s Chinese partner, CATL, is one the primary drivers of China’s green energy dominance. The company has led the global electric vehicle battery market for six years in a row, a market position it owes in part to China’s communist government. China has over the years showered the company with investments, subsidies, and favorable regulations, and CATL’s CEO, Robin Zeng Yuqun, also served on a Chinese Communist Party advisory committee.
Biden has promised that his Inflation Reduction Act, which includes $370 billion in climate spending, would help the United States “compete” with companies like CATL, not help those companies gain a foothold in the U.S. market. The law includes provisions that bar auto manufacturers from receiving tax credits if their vehicles contain battery components that were manufactured by a “foreign entity of concern,” including China. But Ford seems to have found a way around that provision by structuring its deal as a licensing agreement rather than a joint venture, meaning the company’s Chinese partner does not have direct ownership. For Missouri Republican congressman Jason Smith, that structure “appears to leverage a loophole in the IRA rules.”
“I am alarmed about how Ford has structured this project in the context of the IRA’s clean vehicle credits and am concerned that other automakers may seek to use loopholes in the IRA to avoid guardrails meant to protect American enterprise and workers,” the congressman wrote in an April 17 letter to Ford. “Ford’s announcement that it will build the plant in Michigan with the help of CATL has not alleviated those concerns.”
Updated 4/26, 11:31 a.m. to include comment from Ford.
The liberal billionaire George Soros quietly revived his lobbying efforts to boost Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, providing a much-needed boost for the Democrat as he launches his 2024 campaign.
Soros’s Open Society Policy Center spent $1.6 million lobbying the White House and Congress to support the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act, according to lobbying disclosures filed this month. It marks a return to K Street for Soros’s group, which hasn’t lobbied since 2020.
“George Soros’s Open Societies Network has exercised enormous influence over this administration since day one, particularly in support of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act,” said Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center, which monitors Democratic advocacy groups.
“The reopening of the Open Societies lobbying shop, which was once the second largest lobbying group in the nation, indicates that the Open Societies network plans to continue doing what it does best: accumulating power,” Thayer told the Washington Free Beacon.
The lobbying provides support for Biden as some of his landmark legislation faces bipartisan opposition. Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.V.) recently said he may vote for a GOP-backed measure to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $1.7 trillion to fund various green energy initiatives. Biden is likely to tout his passage of that bill and others in his 2024 campaign, which he launched Tuesday with the slogan “Finish the Job.”
Soros could stand to gain financially from many of Biden’s green initiatives, the Capital Research Center reported. Soros’s hedge funds have invested billions in companies like Rivian Automotive, a California electric car maker that, in an ironic twist, laid off 6 percent of its workforce last year due to high inflation.
Lobbying is only one way Soros wields influence over Democrats. The billionaire is one of the party’s biggest campaign donors, and funnels tens of millions of dollars each year to advocacy groups that advance progressive causes.
Open Society’s lobbyists have maintained access to the White House throughout Biden’s first term. Micaela Fernandez Allen, a former aide to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi who leads Open Society’s lobbying arm, met on Dec. 15 with Rachel Chiu, an official at the White House office of political strategy and outreach, according to White House visitor logs.
According to lobbying disclosures, Allen has lobbied the White House on implementation of the American Rescue Plan, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and CHIPs Act. She also met with the White House regarding bills to rescind the Inflation Reduction Act.
Allen has also lobbied Congress on national security bills, including the proposal to repeal the authorization for use of military force in Iraq.
Open Society did not respond to a request for comment.
A World Health Organization (WHO) official warned on Tuesday that there was a “huge biological risk” in the capital of Sudan after one of the fighting parties took control of a laboratory containing samples of deadly diseases.
Dr. Nima Saeed Abid, the WHO’s representative in Sudan, told a United Nations briefing in Geneva via video link from Port Sudan that the central public health laboratory in Khartoum—which stores disease pathogens for polio, among others—has been seized by armed forces and technicians are unable to secure the hazardous materials after being removed from the building.
Abid expressed concerns that fighters “kicked out all of the technicians” from the laboratory, adding that he believes the building is now completely under the control of one of the fighting parties as a military base.
Abid did not say which of the fighting sides had taken over the laboratory, which also reportedly contains a major blood bank.
“That is extremely, extremely dangerous because we have polio isolates in the lab. We have measles isolates in the lab. We have cholera isolates in the lab,” Abid said. “There is a huge biological risk associated with the occupation of the central public health lab in Khartoum by one of the fighting parties.”
The expulsion of technicians and power cuts in the Sudanese capital means “it is not possible to properly manage the biological materials that are stored in the lab for medical purposes,” the WHO said.
The lab is located in central Khartoum, close to flashpoints of the fighting that pits Sudan’s military against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group that grew out of the notorious Janjaweed militias implicated in atrocities in the Darfur conflict.
Ceasefire
The announcement comes as the ongoing conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and RSF was paused temporarily after both sides agreed to a three-day ceasefire.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement on Monday that the nationwide ceasefire between the army and paramilitary group will begin at midnight local time and follows “intense negotiations over the past 48 hours.”
While previous attempts at a temporary ceasefire between the two rival groups have failed, officials hope the latest pause to the fighting will serve as the basis for negotiations regarding a permanent end to the conflict.
On Tuesday, a Reuters witness reportedly heard sporadic gunfire in the city of Omdurman, adjacent to the capital, the outlet reported. Explosions were also reported in Bahri, across the Nile.
The latest ceasefire is the fourth effort to stop the fighting since the Sudan conflict started on April 15. The fighting mainly impacts the capital city and the Darfur region, where numerous hospitals have shuttered, according to the Sudanese Doctors’ Syndicate.
“If the violence does not stop, there is a danger that the health system will collapse,” the U.N. agency warned last week.
Death Toll Rises
Health officials have warned that critical life-saving care for an estimated 50,000 severely malnourished children has been disrupted by the fighting in the country, which already has some of the highest malnutrition rates among children in the world.
Meanwhile, the warfare has also prompted multiple countries, including the United States, to evacuate their diplomatic staff and shut down their embassies.
The WHO said more than 450 people have been killed in the fighting and at least 4,000 wounded. The conflict has also destroyed hospitals, limited food distribution, and cut power supplies in a nation already reliant on aid for an estimated third of its population—or about 16 million people, according to U.N. figures.
“The humanitarian needs in Sudan were already at record levels before this recent eruption of fighting … some 15.8 million people—that’s about a third of the population—required humanitarian assistance,” said Jens Laerke, spokesman of the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
CASH COW: Pro-Transgender Medical Professionals Cashing-In on LifeLong Patients
• Dr. John Steever, Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center [New York, NY]: “In the beginning, it’s a lot of doctor visits. But, you know, after a while, you space it out. It’s like, every six to twelve months? Which yeah, is being a patient. But that doesn’t seem so bad.” • Dr. Steever: “The permanent effects of testosterone are things like facial hair, body hair, enlargement of the clitoris, clitoromegaly, and the last one is vocal pitch drop — and so those are effects that once they happen, don’t reverse.” • Dr. Matthew Warnken, Pharmacist, 38th Street Pharmacy [Austin, TX]: “For a female going to male, if they would continue — you’d have to continuously take testosterone pretty — well, for the rest of their life.” • Dr. Warnken: “If there’s enough changes to the physical body [from undergoing gender transition treatment], I don’t know if they [patients] would be able to, you know, have a baby, naturally speaking.” • Nora Scott, Licensed Social Worker, Dell Children’s Medical Center [Austin, TX]: “I can say from here as well, there’s a lot of folks at our clinic who are on the autism spectrum … [There is] a heavy amount of crossover between folks who are somewhere on the spectrum and also somewhere on the LGBTQIA spectrum.” • Prisha Mosley, De-Transition Advocate: “I was under the impression that I was going to take a cure and be healed, and I didn’t understand as a mentally ill child that I was signing up for lifelong medicalization. I didn’t conceptualize the idea that I was going to be injecting this [medication] every two weeks, forever.”
[NEW YORK – Apr. 25, 2023] Project Veritas released a third video in its series exposing pro-transgender medical workers today — with this report revealing how the transgender “health” industry functions and profits off underage patients on a long-term basis.
Dr. John Steever, who was featured in an earlier Veritas report, is seen talking about how young individuals are subjected to prolonged gender transitions.
“In the beginning, it’s a lot of doctor visits. But, you know, after a while, you space it out. It’s like, every six to twelve months? Which yeah, is being a patient. But that doesn’t seem so bad,” he said.
Dr. Matthew Warnken, a pharmacist in Austin, Texas, echoed what Dr. Steever said.
“For a female going to male, if they would continue — you’d have to continuously take testosterone pretty — well, for the rest of their life,” he said.
Dr. Matthew Pabis, who is another New York-based medical professional featured in this Veritas investigative series, believes there may be a connection between people on the spectrum and their desire to change genders.
“It was a person on the spectrum as well, 21-years-old. At the time, he was coming here for mental health, and he came down here and he just sat down, and I’m like, ‘What are you here for?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I saw you do transgender.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He’s like, ‘Well I think I need to get my penis cut off,’” Dr. Pabis said.
“I was like, ‘You know, transitioning is not easy.’ It doesn’t happen like this. You have to inject yourself with hormones. You have to take pills. You have to do bloodwork. You know, if he makes it then let’s do it, and he’s getting his vagina next week, in one year!”
Nora Scott, a licensed social worker at Dell Children’s Medical Center, corroborated Dr. Pabis’ statements.
“I can say from here as well, there’s a lot of folks at our clinic who are on the autism spectrum … [There is] a heavy amount of crossover between folks who are somewhere on the spectrum and also somewhere on the LGBTQIA spectrum,” she said.
Caila Hoopes, who is a nurse at the Phoenix Children’s Medical Group in Arizona, discreetly explained to a Veritas journalist how their facility handles parental consent when it comes to transitioning minors:
Caila Hoopes, Nurse, Phoenix Children’s Medical Group [Phoenix, AZ]: True hormone therapy there is, like, long-term possible side effects of like — it is life changing and is difficult to come back from. It also requires parents to be onboard.
Veritas Journalist: Really? You–
Hoopes: So, here are my words. You have to — we have to have one parent’s consent. If we know that there’s another parent who’s not on board, we can’t start hormone therapy.
The sooner we join together to save our civilization, the easier the path.
or the first time in history, the ruling class of a powerful nation has abandoned its fellow citizens. What is happening in America today is more than a return to feudalism, although the new economic model into which we’re being herded is correctly compared to feudalism. The reality is actually much worse: America’s elites view ordinary citizens as no longer necessary. Because of globalism, they are replaceable. Because of automation, they are superfluous. Because of environmentalism, they are unsustainable.
These factors explain what is otherwise inexplicable: Constitutional conservatives and Christians, and the values they profess, are now stigmatized by establishment institutions as often, if not more often, than they are praised. Nationalism and religious faith empower individuals and communities to resist a ruling class that has abandoned them. That makes them a threat. They recognize that the ideology of America’s ruling elites is itself leading to disaster. They recognize that America’s elites have decided the nation’s middle class is disposable, and this is the real reason they are pushing an agenda of woke degeneracy and extreme environmentalism, designed to lower birthrates and reduce standards of living.
It’s hard to imagine how America’s elites could get things more wrong. Their transhuman and transnational vision is provoking a clash of civilizations at the same time as they are destroying the human foundation of their own civilization. Nations where nationalism or religion remains the prevailing ideology are not about to emasculate their populations and eviscerate their energy sectors.
If America’s elites attempt to impose this agenda worldwide, the world will fight back. Do they intend to win this clash with robots? Because if they reduce America to a geriatric, poverty-stricken nation, ruled by a handful of billionaires, robots are all they’re going to have left at the rate we’re going.
The elites who have betrayed their own people are not invincible. America’s historical legacy has built a cultural unity and resiliency that should not be underestimated.
While America’s tradition of assimilation is under attack by an elite-driven obsession with multiculturalism, it remains the robust product of more than 200 years as a successful melting pot. Moreover, America’s Bill of Rights offers protection to people still fighting for the values of faith, family, and freedom—values that are not as easily undermined as they are in other Western nations with less explicit constitutional safeguards.
Winston Churchill titled the third volume of his World War II memoirsThe Grand Alliance. It described an alliance against a threat more obvious and imminent than the one we face today, uniting partners more intrinsically opposed than those who need to join together today. Instead of Western democracies uniting with Communist Russia to fight the fascist dictatorships, we have merely to unite a critical mass of Americans who want to save their nation from an elite that has declared war on their way of life and their future.
This isn’t as hard as it seems for two reasons. First, because most Americans don’t want to live in a degenerate culture. They don’t want to live in a culture that has devolved to cater to society’s lowest, most abnormal, deviant, hedonistic, psychotic, sociopathic, dishonest, crooked, lazy, defiant, bizarre, militant cohorts of individuals, regardless of the fact they’ve become politically organized and demand equality of outcome in every imaginable context. Most Americans understand the inherent necessity and benefits of nuclear families, hard work, and immutable standards for achievement and recognition. There is a deep, latent unity among Americans. It needs only a few sparks to immolate the thin film of oil on the surface.
Second, what is the nature of this oil that smothers America’s ocean of common sense and unity? It is a fractious coalition of fanatics and lunatics, relatively small in number, who harbor an innate antipathy toward each other that is only held in check by rivers of money flowing to them from globalist billionaires, opportunistic corporations, environmentalist pressure groups, and government unions. Their resources are money and anger. They win elections because all that money, and all that anger, is used to brainwash voters into thinking that tolerating decadence and chaos is compassion, people who oppose extreme tolerance are bigots, and recognizing the indispensability of fossil fuel is, somehow, “fascist.” The brainwashing, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, is wearing thin.
The only thing normal Americans have to do in order to bring America’s swing voters back to the side of common sense is to promote an attractive vision. It is not enough to just explain how bad things have gotten. To begin that process they may start, they must start, by bringing the secular and religious wings of the common sense coalition together.
In his 2017 book,The Strange Death of Europe, British journalist Douglas Murray suggests those forces still extant in Western societies and still resisting the derangements of our time—the secular and the religious—put aside their differences and unite to save Western civilization.
Finding a new synthesis of Western culture capable of addressing the questions of the 21st century may be a topic of active debate in think tanks. Still, to date, it hasn’t filtered down to retail politics. On the street, politicians trying to overcome woke insanity have limited themselves, at most, to rolling back the insanity. They have not expressed a new vision for America that unites religious and secular conservatives.
This is regrettable, but it also presents a tremendous opportunity.
If religious and secular conservatives reached a consensus, the political agenda they would share would necessarily have attenuated the most extreme positions held by either side, which in turn would attract millions of independent voters. Although it would still be declared extremist by elites who would now see their plans endangered as never before, in reality, it would form a new political center. It would be an irresistible force.
Vivek Ramaswamy, who at the very least is the second most interesting Republican candidate currently running for U.S. president, has made a centerpiece of his campaign answering the question of what it means to be an American. His positions are unequivocal. For example, there need to be clear limits to what we tolerate as normal. The prerequisites for prosperity include clean fossil fuel, and that is nonnegotiable. Meritocracy is the only equitable way to deliver equal opportunity to everyone. Freedom in America, as embodied in the Bill of Rights, must be defended. These are unifying issues because they reject the establishment’s manipulative narrative of anger, resentment, fear, and perpetual crisis, and instead, envision a future of growth and greatness.
Consider the wondrous possibilities a healthy political coalition could express to an electorate desperate for hope. Imagine a political platform centered on deregulation and infrastructure investments to deliver abundant and affordable energy, the foundation of all prosperity. Imagine a foreign policy oriented to helping all nations achieve these gains, instead of being limited to “renewables” that condemn them to poverty, famine, tyranny, and war.
Optimism is contagious. Imagine a strong and united America beginning to harvest the resources of the moon and the asteroids. Imagine a culture that celebrates beauty and talent again. Imagine a generation of youth inspired to work hard so they can play a meaningful part in the brilliant unfolding story of a proud nation in a peaceful world. Imagine good things happening from now on, not out of naïveté, but as the product of practical investment and steadfast resolve.
The sooner we join together to save our civilization, the easier the path.
(Reuters)—Walt Disney Co will begin a second wave of layoffs on Monday involving thousands of jobs, as part of efforts to eliminate 7,000 positions and save $5.5 billion in costs, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The company will cut “several thousand” jobs through Thursday, with the latest round of reductions bringing the total number of jobs culled to 4,000, Disney officials say.
The cuts will occur across the company’s business segments, including Disney Entertainment, ESPN and Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, according to the sources, but are not expected to affect hourly frontline workers employed at the parks and resorts.
An internal memo seen by Reuters said the layoff notices will continue over the next several days.
“The senior leadership teams have been working diligently to define our future organization, and our biggest priority has been getting this right, rather than getting it done fast,” Disney Entertainment co-chairmen Alan Bergman and Dana Walden wrote in the memo to staff.
“We recognize that it has been a period of uncertainty and thank you all for your understanding and patience,” they said.
Disney announced its layoff plan in February, together with a reorganization that returned decision-making to its creative executives. Its goal is to create a more streamlined approach to its business.
The entertainment industry has retrenched since its early embrace of video streaming, when established media companies lost billions as they launched competitors to Netflix Inc.
Media companies started to rein in spending when Netflix posted its first loss of subscribers in a decade in early 2022, and Wall Street began prioritizing profitability over subscriber growth.
On March 27, Disney began notifying employees affected by the workforce reductions, and said a second, larger round would follow in April. A third round is anticipated before the start of summer.
(Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles; Editing by Sonali Paul and Bernadette Baum)
WASHINGTON (Reuters)— Joe Biden will veto congressional efforts to overturn his policy to waive solar tariffs on four Southeast Asian nations for two years, White House officials told Reuters on Monday.
In June, Biden waived tariffs on solar panels from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam in an effort to create a “bridge” while U.S. manufacturing ramped up.
Last week a U.S. House of Representatives committee voted in favor of restoring the tariffs on the solar panels from the four countries, reversing Biden’s suspension. That legislation is expected to come up for a full vote in the House.
The White House argues that Biden’s policy has worked and points to an increase in domestic solar production since Biden came into office.
“This legislation would sabotage U.S. energy security. It would undermine our momentum in creating a massive new domestic industry. It would sideline workers who are fired up to build these projects and operate them across the country,” Ali Zaidi, Biden’s national climate adviser, told Reuters.
“It’s not about slowing things down. It’s about fundamentally undermining our progress towards increased energy security and having the tools we need to attack the climate crisis,” he said.
The United States is on track to increase domestic solar panel manufacturing capacity 8-fold by the end of 2024, another official said.
Biden does not plan to issue an extension on the tariff waivers after the 2-year period has concluded because domestic manufacturing has taken off.
“Given the strong trends in the domestic solar industry, the President does not intend to extend the tariff suspension at the conclusion of the 24-month period in June 2024,” the White House said in a “Statement of Administration Policy” obtained by Reuters before its official release.
“If Congress were to pass this joint resolution, the President would veto it,” it said.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Nick Zieminski)
‘We don’t foresee coordinating a U.S. Government evacuation for our fellow citizens’
The State Department says that it has no plans to evacuate the 16,000 American citizens in Sudan as fighting between the country’s military leaders plunges the country further into chaos.
The U.S. military on Saturday evacuated the 100 officials working at the U.S. embassy in Khartoum, citing danger to embassy staff. But speaking to reporters over the weekend, a State Department official said that evacuation efforts would not extend to civilians.
“As a result of that uncertain security picture, as a result of the unavailability of the civilian airport, we don’t foresee coordinating a U.S. Government evacuation for our fellow citizens in Sudan at this time or in the coming days,” undersecretary for management Ambassador John Bass told reporters over the weekend. “We don’t anticipate those security conditions are going to change in the near term.”
Saturday’s evacuation was conducted without the approval of Sudan’s Rapid Security Forces, which comprise one side of the warring military factions.
“They cooperated to the extent that they did not fire on our service members in the course of the operation,” Bass said. “I would submit that’s as much in their self-interest as anything else.”
Over 400 people have been killed since fighting broke out between Sudan’s military and a rival paramilitary force. The conflict is a battle between former allies, Sudanese Army chief Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Burhan and paramilitary leader Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. The pair splintered this month over disagreements about the nation’s direction and how certain paramilitary forces would be integrated into the larger military. The warring generals together led a military coup in 2021.
American citizens who want to flee the country have limited options at this time, according to Lieutenant General D.A. Sims, director of operations for Joint Staff J3, which coordinated the embassy evacuation.
The U.S. military is eying plans to “potentially make the overland route out of Sudan potentially more viable,” Sims said. The Pentagon is currently “considering actions that may include: use of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities to be able to observe routes and detect threats.”
Naval assets could also be deployed outside the Port of Sudan to help Americans who arrive at that location, Sims said.
Still, the State Department maintains that it has no plans to organize a larger scale operation like the 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan that left 13 Americans dead. So far, one American citizen has been killed as the conflict rages on.
Tucker Carlson’s Monday departure from Fox News was not mutual, as the network suggested, with the anchor reportedly being fired and blindsided by the dismissal.
“He was totally surprised,” a source who called Carlson’s departure a “firing” told Mediaite. “He had no idea.” The Los Angeles Times reported that the firing was initiated by Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and other executives.
Sources for the Los AngelesTimes told the outlet Carlson’s firing is related to a discrimination lawsuit filed by a former producer for his show:
The Los Angeles Times’s source said the firing was not directly related to Fox Corp.’s settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, which last week agreed to pay $787.5 million for spreading false claims about its voting machines during the 2020 election.
The news “hit like a bomb inside the network, shocking even staffers close to the ex-prime time host who had no idea this was coming,” Mediaite reported.
The reports contradict Fox’s Monday statement saying the company and Carlson “have agreed to part ways.”
“We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” the statement said.
Carlson has not commented publicly on his separation with the network.
Fox Corp.’s stock price fell in the hours after the announcement.
The network said Carlson’s last program of Tucker Carlson Tonight was Friday and that an “interim show” will start Monday night hosted by rotating personalities. A new host has not been named.
In Carlson’s last show on Friday, the host told viewers, “We’ll be back on Monday,” further suggesting Carlson lacked forewarning that he would be parting ways with the network.
Carlson advocated an isolationist national policy on the program, often questioning the United States’ aid to Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion of the country. The show frequently topped charts and was often the highest-rated cable news show.
Michael Morell pushed lies about Trump days before organizing effort to smear Hunter’s laptop as ‘disinformation’
The former spy who pushed the false notion that Russia was behind the release of Hunter Biden’s emails at the behest of Joe Biden’s adviser also used his perch at the Washington Post to help the Democrat’s presidential campaign.
As a contributing columnist for the Post, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell published numerous articles before the election attacking former president Donald Trump and pushing various claims about Russian disinformation. Morell called on Trump’s intelligence chief, John Ratcliffe, to resign in his final Postcolumn on Oct. 12, 2020, a week before he concocted the Hunter letter. In an Oct. 11 piece, Morell said Trump’s financial debt raises national security concerns. In August 2020, Morell made the disputed claim that “the Russians infiltrated Trump’s 2016 campaign.”
Morell was carrying water for the Biden campaign behind the scenes, too. The former intel official admitted in a recent congressional interview that he was behind an Oct. 19, 2020, letter that cast the release of Hunter Biden’s laptop days earlier as a probable Russian disinformation campaign. Morell said he organized the letter, which was signed by 50 other former intelligence officials, after a conversation with Biden adviser Tony Blinken, now the secretary of state. Morell told lawmakers he undertook the initiative to help Biden “win the election.”
The Post has penalized columnists for campaign connections more tenuous than Morell’s. In 2011, conservative columnist George Will came under scrutiny after his wife began advising Rick Perry’s presidential campaign. The Post’s ombudsman found that Will did not use his column to improperly boost his wife’s client, but said the columnist should have disclosed his wife’s work. The ombudsman wrote that “readers need to be able to judge for themselves if any conflict of interest could bias a journalist, even an opinion columnist.”
“A cynic would say none of this is surprising,” Tim Graham, the Media Research Center’s director of media analysis, said of Morell and the Post. He noted that the Post describes Morell’s CIA service in the George W. Bush administration to make Morell look bipartisan. “It’s that ‘career official’ spin that helps them present people like Morell as less partisan.”
A spokesman for the Post noted Morell’s final column for the paper was Oct. 12, 2020, several days before he orchestrated the Hunter Biden letter, but did not provide additional comment. Morell had contact with Blinken before he published his final columns. He interviewed Blinken on his podcast on Sept. 22, 2020, and told lawmakers that he had a “fairly close” relationship with the Biden aide.
Morell, who was at one point under consideration for Biden’s CIA chief, said he got the idea to write the Hunter Biden letter after an email or phone call with Blinken on Oct. 17, 2020, three days after the New York Post published its first story on emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Morell said that call “triggered” him to write a letter that portrayed the laptop release as a Russian ruse. That theory has largely been discredited. Biden abandoned his laptop at a computer shop in April 2019. The shop owner provided it to the FBI, Trump allies, and journalists.
According to Morell, Blinken sent him a USA Today article that said the FBI was investigating whether the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Morell said he then contacted former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos before starting the letter, according to a transcript reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Morell testified that the Biden campaign helped strategize the release of the letter. The retired spymaster told an aide to former CIA director John Brennan, another signatory, that the campaign wanted the letter to go to a Washington Post reporter. It eventually appeared at Politico, which published the letter under the headline, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
Biden cited the letter during a debate with Trump on Oct. 22, 2020, but made no mention of his campaign’s hidden hand. Morell said Biden aide Steve Ricchetti, who now serves in the White House, thanked him for the letter after the first debate.
Morell, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, leaned on a deep network of former spies to gather signatures for the letter. Many of those were from his consulting firm, Beacon Global Strategies, including former CIA director Leon Panetta, former CIA official Jeremy Bash, and former Defense Department official Mike Vickers.
Morell wrote some of his Post columns with signatories to the letter, including Vickers and former CIA officer David Priess. An Oct. 11, 2020, column with Priess asserted that Trump’s financial debt posed a national security risk. His Oct. 12, 2020, article with Vickers asserted that Trump intelligence director John Ratcliffe should resign. Democrats would later assail Ratcliffe after he disputed Biden campaign claims that Russia was involved in the release of Hunter’s emails.
The City of Portland, Oregon, last week reaffirmed its commitment to giving a $5 million grant to an “anti-racist” group that won’t say what it plans to do with the money.
The city in 2020 agreed to fund the progressive advocacy group Reimagine Oregon to the tune of $1.9 million a year, with no end date specified. At the time, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler (D.) called the grant the “centerpiece” of his budget proposal. Three years later, the organization has not said what it plans to do with the grant money. Nor has it spent a penny of the nearly $5 million in taxpayer funds, which are now sitting, untouched, in city coffers.
Formed by black activists in 2020, Reimagine Oregon outlines policy ideas to “dismantle systemic racism” through policies such as defunding the police and redistributing wealth. Last week, Portland city commissioner Mingus Mapps (D.) proposed terminating the grant and redirecting the money to other causes. But after fierce blowback from local black activists, the commission and mayor tanked his amendment on Wednesday.
Mapps, the only black member of the Portland city commission, told the Washington Free Beacon he was disappointed by the opposition to his proposal.
“I was trying to push these dollars out to African-Americans,” Mapps said. “We have to be more competent at the basics of government.”
Portland lawmakers’ recommitment to Reimagine Oregon comes after high-profile “anti-racist” and equity groups have come under fire for their murky finances and shoddy track records. One co-founder of Black Lives Matter Global Network, the umbrella group for the grassroots movement, secretly bought a $6 million house with the group’s funds. Another BLM executive allegedly stole $10 million for his own use.
Commissioner Carmen Rubio blamed the city for preventing Reimagine Oregon from accessing the funds and claimed that a city agency will submit a plan for the grant money in May. “That’s when we will all learn” how the group intends to spend $5 million, Rubio said.
Reimagine Oregon does not appear in the IRS directory of tax-exempt organizations and boasts just one staff member: Justice Rajee, a podcaster who is also running this year for a local school district board seat. The group was reportedly organized under the umbrella of a few nonprofits, including Urban League Portland and the Coalition of Communities of Color.
Urban League Portland and Reimagine Oregon did not respond to a query about its legal status.
Formed at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Reimagine Oregon was feted by media and politicians in its early days.
Then-Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D.) met with members of the group and promised to put racial equity at the focus of state laws moving forward.
“Racism and these racial disparities impact every part of our culture and our economy and the pandemic has further exacerbated these disparities,” Brown said at a July 2020 meeting.
Bowing to pressure from the group, Wheeler cut $15 million from the Portland Police Department—$5.2 million of which he would later restore, as Portland reeled from rising crime.
But Reimagine Oregon has largely fizzled out since then, barely even updating its website. Last September, the group posted a notice that promised a report “detailing the outcomes and discussing the story, findings and next steps for Reimagine Oregon,” without any other specifics.
After Mapps made his proposal to roll back the years of unspent funding and put it elsewhere, Rajee posted a new statement saying Mapps’s proposal “has demonstrated that [city leaders] cannot be trusted to hold to the City of Portland’s stated Equity Goals & Strategies.”
“There is already an effort to pit community members against each other in pursuit of these resources,” Rajee’s statement said.
He added that when Mapps began looking into Reimagine Oregon’s funds, “I made it clear to commissioners that pitting Black people and the many issues that impact our well-being against each other, is one of the most deplorable tactics of institutional anti-black racism we experience.”
The city will now funnel the cash through a city bureaucracy focused on small business, which will ostensibly coordinate with Reimagine Oregon to implement the anti-racist group’s goals. Still, lawmakers acknowledged that they don’t know where the money will ultimately go.
But according to Rubio and the mayor, Reimagine Oregon has nothing for which to apologize. The pair says the city is to blame for not giving Reimagine Oregon ready access to the money in the first place.
Here’s how the White House could make your mortgage more expensive
If you’ve worked hard to maintain good credit, Joe Biden is about to make your future mortgage more expensive.
A Federal Housing Finance Agency rule set to take effect on May 1 will increase monthly mortgage fees for borrowers with good credit scores. Those higher fees will be used to subsidize individuals with bad credit scores.
The administration claims the change will help support low-income home buyers. But others say it’s part of the White House’s ongoing effort to remedy racial differences in home ownership.
Whatever the rationale, the result is clear: Borrowers with strong credit will likely wind up paying thousands of dollars more over the course of their mortgages, thanks to the Biden administration’s policy.
Here’s how the rule change will work:
When an individual takes out a mortgage, the interest rate they pay generally reflects two things: the federal funds rate set by the Federal Reserve and something called a loan-level price adjustment. The latter functions like a car insurance premium that goes up after you’ve had an accident.
In short, riskier borrowers with low credit scores or income pay more each month for their mortgage. These borrowers will still pay more after May 1 but much less than they paid before. In order to compensate for that lost revenue, borrowers with strong credit will see their monthly increase to roughly $40 a month on a $400,000 mortgage. That’s an extra $14,400 over the course of a standard 30-year mortgage.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency regulates federal mortgage guarantor giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which are both quasi-government agencies—meaning those fee hikes will be reflected for most consumers who seek to take out a mortgage with a bank. A majority of mortgages are eventually secured by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, resulting in the two companies holding tremendous influence over conventional mortgage rates.
According to former Federal Housing Finance Agency director Mark Calabria, shaping the policy to benefit anyone with lousy credit lets the Biden administration avoid offering sweetheart deals to minorities, which would violate federal law.
“The Biden administration is definitely trying to create more of a cross subsidy between good credit and bad credit, that’s the intent,” Calabria said. “They are essentially trying to discriminate by race within the legal rules they have and minorities tend to have lower credit scores.”
A review of the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s recent rule proposals make it clear that increasing minority—in particular black—home equity is at the heart of a variety of agency initiatives.
On April 19, the Federal Housing Finance Agency proposed a series of rules targeted at “Fair Lending, Fair Housing, and Equitable Housing Finance Plans.” Most of the proposals would “codify existing FHFA practices” but also add requirements for lenders related to increasing minority homeownership. Some objectives of the rules include “reducing the homeownership gap for an underserved community” and “reducing disparities in negative outcomes for an underserved community in servicing, loan modifications, and loss mitigation.”
In those proposals, the Federal Housing Finance Agency states that part of the reason it wishes to boost minority homeownership is to generate wealth for those communities.
Because lenders heavily rely “on certain credit attributes in the current mortgage underwriting process,” black home loan applications are denied at a higher rate than every other ethnic group in the country, including Hispanics and native Indians. Neighborhoods with higher concentrations of blacks also see lower home prices, the Federal Housing Finance Agency notes.
“Their view is you didn’t build that credit. It’s part of their general belief that credit scores are due to societal facts out of their control,” Calabria said. “It’s legitimate for people to be kind of offended and angry at some of this.”
Stephanie Sanders Sullivan would help lead U.S. efforts to combat Chinese influence in Africa, if confirmed
Joe Biden’s pick to serve as ambassador to the African Union twice failed the Foreign Service Officer Test and said she struggled in particular with the “English grammar section.”
In a July 2021 interview with Ghana’s CitiTV, then-United States ambassador to Ghana Stephanie Sanders Sullivan recounted her “strange” first attempt to complete the Foreign Service Officer Test, a written exam required for most career diplomats.
“I couldn’t even get through the English grammar section, which was my forte,” said Sullivan, a native English speaker and Brown University graduate. The diplomat, who Biden nominated last November to serve as the chief envoy to the entire African continent, said she bombed the test because she “was on village time.” Though it’s not clear what “village time” means, Sullivan says she left a third of the questions blank, leading her to fail the exam. Nevertheless, she persisted.
“There’s a little bit of that ‘Little Engine That Could’: I think I can, I think I can,” Sullivan told the interviewer. “So, the next year I tried again, and I also didn’t pass.”
The ambassador to the African Union has grown increasingly important as Washington attempts to strengthen ties with the continent as a bulwark against Chinese influence. The CCP’s Belt and Road initiative entices developing countries with the promise of infrastructure projects and low-interest loans, which often leave the nations in debt to Beijing. Senior American officials have visited an African nation four times in 2023 alone in an effort to shore up alliances on the continent. Vice President Kamala Harris recently concluded a high-profile African tour.
Sullivan’s exam failures are just two of many missteps that have come to light during her confirmation process. Sen. J.D. Vance (R., Ohio) last Thursday took to the Senate floor to criticize Sullivan’s history of advocating for left-wing causes such as transgender rights and confronting “systemic racism.” Vance questioned whether Sullivan, whose diplomatic career includes stints as ambassador to the Republic of the Congo and deputy assistant secretary for African affairs, is qualified for the post.
A Senate source told the Washington Free Beacon other conservative lawmakers have reservations about her qualifications as well. Vance’s objections put Sullivan’s nominations in peril and may force Democrats to put her up for a traditional floor vote, meaning she would need 60 votes and some Republican support.
As ambassador to Ghana, Sullivan raised the pride flag at the American embassy and held a “diplomatic mission pride event,” despite the “ever present” COVID-19 pandemic. During a virtual Fourth of July celebration in 2020, Sullivan decried George Floyd’s death and said “it falls to us, this generation, to recognize the pervasiveness of systemic racism.”
Moves such as those, Vance charged, are part of a broader pattern by the White House of “moralizing and lecturing countries that don’t want anything to do with it.” Biden’s 2024 budget proposal, for example, earmarks nearly $400 million to help advance “inclusive and responsible technology development” for the LGBTQ community in Africa.
“If you’re in Ghana, what do you want: a lecture from a woke white woman in America, or do you want someone to help you build hospitals, roads, and bridges? It’s an easy answer,” Vance said.
The State Department defended Sullivan’s nomination on Thursday and said her past activism is consistent with the Biden administration’s broader foreign policy goals. “There’s a lot of areas as it relates to Africa where there’s immense potential for cooperation, whether it be addressing climate change, deepening economic and trade ties,” a spokesman said.
Judge demands Hunter Biden make public appearance in custody hearing
An Arkansas judge ordered Hunter Biden on Monday to personally show up in court in May to address questions about his laptop, including whether financial records on it belong to him.
Circuit Court judge Holly Meyer gave the order as part of Hunter Biden’s drawn-out custody battle with Lunden Alexis Roberts over their four-year-old daughter. It would be his first public appearance in the case—the Bidens have steadfastly refused to acknowledge the child’s existence, and Hunter denied that he was the father until a court-ordered DNA test proved otherwise.
“I want both of your clients at every hearing that I conduct,” Meyer told the attorneys for Biden and Roberts during a virtual hearing on Monday. “I will no longer allow us to dismiss clients from these hearings, because it is interfering with the progress of this litigation which is taking way too long to get over simple points.”
Meyer issued the order after Biden’s attorney was unable to answer whether Biden owned the abandoned laptop that became a subject of controversy during the 2020 election. Financial records discovered on the laptop have become an issue in the custody dispute.
Hunter Biden’s presence at the Arkansas court could create a political headache for the White House and the Biden family. He has reportedly gone to great lengths to avoid getting served with legal papers from Roberts.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Brent Langdon, asked the judge on Monday to block an expert witness from discussing the financial records on the laptop, saying “there has never been an acknowledgment” from Biden that the laptop belongs to him.
“Well let’s clear that issue up right now,” said Meyer. “Is it your client’s laptop or not?”
Langdon said it was “not my client’s laptop as far as I know. He’s never accepted that that’s his laptop.”
The judge responded that Biden and Roberts needed to show up to all future court dates so questions like this could be addressed. The next hearing will take place on May 1.
At the May hearing, the judge is expected to rule on outstanding motions, including a name change request from Roberts asking to change their daughter’s last name to “Biden.” Biden has demanded that the court block the name change, claiming the move would be damaging to the child due to the “scorn in the community for the Biden name.”
Family law attorney Peter M. Walzer told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden’s objection to the name change was “very uncommon” and unlikely to succeed in court.
“I’ve never seen a litigation where a father didn’t want the [child] to take his name,” said Walzer. “This is pretty unique.”
Walzer said Biden’s motion sounded like it was motivated by personal interest rather than concern for the child’s well-being.
“He doesn’t want the child to have his name because it’s embarrassing to him, [but he] couches his legal briefing in terms of the child’s interest,” said Walzer. “From his paper’s it’s ‘all about me.’”
“From his papers, it’s ‘all about me.’”
Marshall H. Moore, an Arkansas-based custody attorney with Moore, Giles and Matteson, agreed.
“Normally it is just the opposite situation where the father is asking that the child be given the father’s last name,” he told the Free Beacon. “Off the top of my head, I can’t remember ever filing such a motion in 40+ years of practice.”
U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) subpoenaed a top FBI official on April 24 after he said she refused to answer questions.
Jordan subpoenaed Jennifer Leigh Moore, the FBI’s executive assistant director of human resources, after Moore “refused to answer questions during her transcribed interview about the FBI’s retaliation against brave whistleblowers who have come forward to raise concerns about abuses they have seen at the bureau,” according to Russell Dye, a spokesman for Jordan.
Jordan contacted Moore in 2022 as he investigated allegations of misconduct within the bureau, including allegations from whistleblowers that the FBI was working to purge employees with conservative views. The purge allegedly was taking place through security clearance revocations and indefinite suspensions.
“Many of the formal notices for these adverse personnel actions have been signed by you,” Jordan said at the time, adding that information suggested that Moore had also retaliated against at least one whistleblower who made disclosures to Congress.
Jordan requested a transcribed interview and the preservation of materials relating to the allegations.
Despite another request before 2022 ended, Moore didn’t sit for an interview, Jordan said after Republicans took control of the House.
Jordan warned Moore in a January missive that a subpoena was an option if she wouldn’t stop her “obstruction.”
“We reiterate our request that you appear promptly for a transcribed interview. The Committee is prepared to resort to compulsory process, if necessary, to obtain your testimony,” he wrote.
While Moore ultimately sat without a subpoena, she didn’t answer at least some questions, according to the new update.
Dye told The Epoch Times in an email that the interview took place on April 24. He declined to say whether Moore answered any questions.
“Executive Assistant Director Moore voluntarily answered questions from members and their staffs about the FBI’s security clearance adjudication process for several hours. She did not discuss the details of specific individuals whose cases are still under review to protect the integrity of the process and the privacy of the individuals,” an FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.
“The FBI recognizes the importance of congressional oversight and remains fully committed to cooperating with Congress’ oversight requests consistent with its constitutional and statutory responsibilities.”
Jordan has also sought testimony from a slew of other current and former officials, including former FBI official Timothy Thibault, as part of investigations into the executive branch.
He recently subpoenaed Lisa Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, as he probes how the agency has approached Twitter following Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform.
Jordan also became embroiled in a court case after issuing a subpoena to Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, after a grand jury, presented with charges by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, indicted former President Donald Trump.
Bragg dropped a case aimed at blocking the subpoena on April 21 after a judge ruled against him.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by major oil companies to move a series of climate change-related lawsuits against them out of state courts and into federal courts, where they hoped to have better odds.
The justices denied (pdf) a total of five petitions from BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Suncor Energy, and Sunoco LP over lower court rulings that keep their cases in the state court where they were originally filed.
These companies are accused of causing climate change damages to properties owned or operated by the state of Rhode Island; the counties of Boulder, Colorado and San Mateo, California; and the cities of Baltimore, Maryland, Boulder, Colorado, and Honolulu, Hawaii.
A separate appeal by the oil companies challenging lower court decisions in climate accountability lawsuits brought by the states of New Jersey and Delaware is still pending before the Supreme Court.
Justice Samuel Alito, who owns oil stocks, recused himself from Monday’s decisions. Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated that he would grant the petition for the case involving Colorado municipalities and Suncor and Exxon.
The lawsuits, backed by the Biden administration, are largely seen as an effort to force through environmental regulations from the bench, as opposed to having elected lawmakers craft and pass laws that address the issue.
In the Colorado case, for example, the plaintiffs argued that the oil companies should pay reparations for forest fires and drought, which they claimed to be a result of climate change caused by the use of fossil fuel products.
The companies, according to court filings, allegedly engaged in concealing and misrepresenting “the dangers associated with the burning of fossil fuels despite having been aware of those dangers for decades.” These practices “contributed to excessive burning of fossil fuels,” which in turn led to “increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” and forced the municipalities to spend more taxpayer’s money on maintaining roads and fighting forest fires.
In March, the Biden administration weighed in the case in favor of the plaintiffs. Following an invitation from the Supreme Court seeking guidance on the matter, the U.S. Office of the Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar recommended that the high court reject the companies’ petition and allow the case to proceed in Colorado state court.
Specifically, Prelogar said the Biden administration decided that “state-law claims like those pleaded here should not be recharacterized as claims arising under federal common law,” and therefore, the companies’ petition should be denied.
This is a change from the policy of the Trump administration, she said.
Meanwhile, the companies have urged the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that leaving this matter to the discretion of state courts would disrupt the economy on a national, if not a global, scale.
“If respondents’ unprecedented effort to transform state courts into global climate-change regulators succeeds, every state court in the Nation will be empowered to use state law to unilaterally impose its own view of energy and environmental policy nationwide and, indeed, worldwide,” wrote Theodore Boutrous, a lawyer representing Chevron, in a court filing for the California case.
“Respondents’ claims expose the energy sector to vast, indeterminate monetary relief that will deter investment and employment across the industry and the broader economy, and cause disruption to the global economy,” the document added.
In a statement to the media outlets following Monday’s decision, Boutrous said he is confident that the suits will ultimately be dismissed.
“Climate change is an issue of national and global magnitude that requires a coordinated federal policy response, not a disjointed patchwork of lawsuits in state courts across multiple states,” he said. “These wasteful lawsuits in state courts will do nothing to advance global climate solutions, nothing to reduce emissions, and nothing to address climate-related impacts.”
In response to plunging test scores that have been made worse by the pandemic, states across the country have been implementing school choice reforms that are making public funding of schools portable.
In October 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, informally known as the “nation’s report card,” revealed that test scores nationwide have plunged to the lowest levels in the last 30 years in reading, while recording the biggest drop ever in math since the assessments began in 1990.
Some states are implementing reforms by creating education scholarship accounts, or ESAs. Such funding allows students to take public dollars out of failing school systems and use them for tuition and other education expenses via private schools, homeschooling, and tutoring.
ESAs are primarily targeted at lower-income students in households that cannot afford tutors or that need tuition assistance in order to afford private schools.
But universal ESAs that are available to students regardless of household income are becoming an increasingly popular option for some states.
As of March, there are 11 states with some type of ESA program, EducationWeek reported.
The school choice nonprofit EdChoice is calling 2023 “the year of universal school choice,” as 31 state legislatures are considering bills to either expand or start school choice programs, many of which include ESA options.
“Parents aren’t asking for school choice, they’re demanding it. Many states and schools will get left behind if they’re not receptive to the school choice movement, because it’s not stopping anytime soon,” Darrell Jones, president of the Stanley M. Herzog Charitable Foundation—which concentrates on Christian education—told The Epoch Times in a statement.
President Joe Biden speaks at Brookland Middle School in Washington on Sept. 10, 2021. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo)
Lawmakers in states as diverse as West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and Florida are listening to parents, said one expert.
“When you see a state like West Virginia adopt an education savings account that is available to nearly every child in the state, … lawmakers and families in Arizona say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have the nation’s first education savings account program. There’s no reason that these options should not be available to the low-income children outside of Tucson,’” Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times.
The general result has been a land rush business in ESAs, he said, with Florida, Iowa, Utah, and Arkansas following West Virginia.
“I think what we can kind of take from this is that policymakers who believe that conservative solutions are the best answer to the assigned school system are looking to school choice as an indicator of their commitment to conservative answers,” added Butcher.
Impact on Upcoming Elections
Experts who spoke with The Epoch Times said that these reforms will have a large impact on federal races, including the 2024 presidential race, regardless of whether the candidates believe in conservative solutions.
“First of all, I’ll especially guarantee that this will be a major issue in the 2024 presidential race,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Epoch Times.
“Second, when they reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, you will see a big move towards really opening up the system everywhere,” he added.
Gingrich said that one of the driving forces behind the school choice movement is the renewed emphasis on parental rights in education, which he says he believes carries about an 84 percent approval rating.
One national pollster agrees with that general assessment, but would not cite specific numbers.
“The pandemic really opened up eyes for what happens in classrooms for parents all across the country. As a parent myself, it was concerning,” Trevor Smith, chief research officer for WPA Intelligence, told The Epoch Times. “The pandemic was the catalyst to the change.”
Smith said that candidates across the country are busy crafting their positions on school choice no matter what level of government that they seek to represent.
A special meeting is held to discuss critical race theory with the Temecula Valley Unified School District Board and invited experts in Temecula, Calif., on March 22, 2023. (Brad Jones/The Epoch Times)
School Choice a Wedge Issue for Women
The issue has the potential to drive a wedge in an important voting block for Democrats, one expert said.
Today, women are evenly divided between the abortion issue and school choice, political commentator and former strategist Dick Morris told The Epoch Times.
“I think that while the abortion issue is the focus of single women, there is an increasing movement among married women with children to focus on school choice. And I think that that’s going to be fundamental,” Morris said.
Smith at WPA said that while he hasn’t polled the numbers, he generally agreed with that assessment. Morris also broke down the demographics.
“When I say unmarried women, it makes no difference if they are unmarried, widowed or divorced or separated. And if they’re married, it makes no difference if they’re married or just cohabitating,” Morris added.
Both Morris and Gingrich cited the threat that ESAs pose to one of the biggest players in federal education policy—teachers unions—as a key driver of the 2024 campaigns.
Allowing students to take federal dollars out of failing public school systems and move them to competitive schools could be a game changer, they both agreed, really weakening the power of teachers unions.
“I think we have to realize the seminal role, the founding role that teachers unions play in the leftist revolution going on [in] the country. The ‘woke’ culture starts with teachers in elementary school, with students nurtured by them until they go to left-wing colleges,” Morris said.
Freedom Versus Bureaucracy
Gingrich noted that public employee unions, such as teachers unions, have created a dangerous schism today that looks a lot like the country’s antebellum period, prior to the Civil War.
“What you’re seeing is almost a little bit scary in that it’s like the 1840s and 50s, where the free states and the slave states were drifting apart,” Gingrich said. “Today, you’re seeing the left wing bureaucratic cities and states are drifting in one direction, and everybody else is going in a different direction.”
Gingrich predicted that in the next few years, 50 to 60 percent of the country will have ESA school choice programs, while the entrenched bureaucratic teachers unions will control the rest.
He said the outcome would be both “really bad” and “really expensive” for schools in the deepest Democrat cities, still dominated by teachers unions.
“What you have is this very deep difference about the nature of America, with most—but not all—Democrats still trapped in a unionized bureaucratic model, where the government gets to coerce you,” said Gingrich, “and the Republicans and some Democrats increasingly moving towards a model of freedom, where you have real choices, and you have real power.”
Law enforcement officials are facing increasing pressure to release the manifesto of Nashville, Tennessee, school shooter Audrey Hale, with a U.S. lawmaker accusing the federal government of delaying its release.
Local officials said that Hale, a female who used transgender pronouns, left behind a suicide note, journals, and other materials. However, none of that has been released to the public, and a motive hasn’t been publicly identified in the case.
“It’s been very perplexing to all of us involved,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) told Fox News on April 24. “It seems that certain information is flooded into the marketplace immediately if it fits the narrative, so to speak. If the information does not fit the narrative, it seems to get suppressed.”
The Tennessee Republican said that even he doesn’t “know what’s in the manifesto,” adding that “it’s certainly taking a long time to figure out whether and what information should be released.”
“I think people do deserve to know what took place, what was in the mind of this sick person that committed these heinous murders,” he said. Three adults and three 9-year-old children died in the attack at The Covenant School.
Hagerty was responding to a question by a Fox News host about the manifesto being called “too dangerous to release.” The question appeared to refer to comments by Nashville Metropolitan Council member Courtney Johnston, who told the New York Post on April 20 that the manifesto is a “blueprint on total destruction” and said “that document in the wrong person’s hands would be astronomically dangerous.”
Johnston didn’t elaborate on its contents and said the entirety of the manifesto won’t be released to the public.
“I personally don’t want to know the depths to which her psychosis reached,” Johnston said, referring to Hale. “When I’m told by an MNPD [Metro Nashville Police Department] high-ranking official that it keeps him up at night, I’m going to defer to that person in that agency that I don’t need to read that.”
MNPD “is leading this investigation … any and all information that may or may not be released will be at the direction of MNPD,” an FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times on April 24.
MNPD officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
More Calls for Release of Manifesto
Like Hagerty, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and several other Republicans have also called for the document to be released to the public.
The shooter’s notes “could maybe tell us a little bit about what’s going on inside of her head,” Burchett told the New York Post. “I think that would answer a lot of questions.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) told the paper that if the documents don’t make it to the public, “then we need to investigate why.”
Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 23, 2021. (Sarah Silbiger-Pool/Getty Images)
Hale, 28, was a former student at The Covenant School, where she fatally shot three children and three adults on March 27, officials said. Police identified the victims as Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Hallie Scruggs, 9, William Kinney, 9, Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.
Hale was killed by police within minutes of the first call of an active shooter.
Since the shooting, a range of conservative commentators have publicly called for Hale’s manifesto to be made public and have accused the federal government of delaying its release as part of a coverup to keep the public from knowing about the dangers of transgenderism. About a week after the Nashville mass shooting, a 19-year-old male who reportedly identified as female was arrested in Colorado with detailed plans for several school shootings.
Over the weekend, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy reacted to reports indicating that the FBI is slow-walking the manifesto’s release.
“It’s a shame that President Biden has not yet even reached out or visited the victims or their families. … They better release that manifesto,” he told Fox News.
“This was a hate crime under any other guise,” he said, adding that he plans to “go down to Nashville … to make sure that we actually get that released.”
Assessing Shooter’s Mental Health
Days after the shooting, Nashville Police Chief John Drake said that Hale was suffering from mental health issues and was under a doctor’s care for an unspecified emotional disorder. Her parents didn’t know that she had multiple weapons hidden in the house, Drake added.
The Metro Nashville Police Department said in a statement earlier this month that Hale’s writings would be “under careful review by the MNPD and the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit based in Quantico, Virginia,” while the “motive for Hale’s actions has not been established and remains under investigation by the Homicide Unit in consultation with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.”
From that statement, it isn’t clear when—or if—Hale’s writings will be released. But the department said that Hale “considered the actions of other mass murderers,” without elaborating.
FBI officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
The only member of Congress with an advanced degree in AI is urging caution as other lawmakers and industry leaders rush to regulate the technology.
Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) is one of only four computer programmers in Congress, and the only one with a doctorate in artificial intelligence—and he says the rush to regulate is misguided. Obernolte said that his larger concerns about AI center around the potentially “Orwellian” uses of the technology by the state.
Recently, a coalition of technology leaders like Twitter owner Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook, among others, called for a total shutdown of AI research and development. This followed the release of ChatGPT 4, an extremely powerful artificial intelligence chatbot that has, among other milestones, completed tests like the bar exam in the 90th percentile and passed the SAT.
The release of ChatGPT 4, easily the most powerful consumer AI on the market, prompted fears that AI was getting much more intelligent much more quickly than expected. In their letter, tech leaders called for a six-month shutdown of new AI development and called on Congress to regulate the technology.
Obernolte sat down with The Epoch Times to discuss AI, saying that regulation is ill-advised and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of AI technology.
“I’m not standing up and saying we shouldn’t regulate,” Obernolte emphasized. “I think that regulation will ultimately be necessary.”
The ChatGPT logo at an office in Washington, DC, on March 15, 2023. (STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
But he said that lawmakers need to ensure that they “understand what the dangers are that we’re trying to protect consumers against.”
“If we don’t have that understanding, then it’s impossible for us to create a regulatory framework that will guard against those dangers, which is the whole point of regulating in the first place,” Obernolte said. “Right now, it’s very clear that we do not have a good understanding of what the dangers are.”
Others in Congress have called for prompt action on the issue.
“This is something that is going to sneak up on us, and we’ll get to the point where we’re in too deep to really make meaningful changes before it’s too late,” Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) told Fox News.
He and others from both parties have raised concerns over the potential for AI to take over jobs previously done by humans. Others worry about the so-called “Singularity,” a predicted moment in AI development where AI will supersede human intelligence and capabilities.
AI Not Likely to Take Over the World
Obernolte said that the letter from tech leaders “is helpful in calling attention to the emergence of AI and the impacts it’s going to have on our society.” But he observed that for laymen, the greatest fears around AI are like those displayed in the Terminator movies, a series about AI taking control of human computer networks and destroying the world in a nuclear apocalypse.
“The layman probably thinks that the largest danger in AI is an army of evil robots rising up to take over the world,” he said. “And that’s not what keeps thinkers in AI up at night. It certainly doesn’t keep me up at night,” Obernolte said.
Before Congress can even consider regulating, Obernolte said, it needs to “define danger” in the context of AI. “What are we afraid might happen? We need to answer that question to answer the question [of how and when to regulate].”
A screenshot of the letter signed by innovator Elon Musk and others warning against the dangers of rushing artificial intelligence development. (Screenshot by The Epoch Times)
One big fear that Obernolte cited is the development of “emergent capabilities” in AI. This describes a situation where an AI is able to do something it was not initially programmed to do. But Obernolte said this isn’t as big of an issue as some say, as it follows similar trends observed in primate brains.
“One of the things that [AI critics are] alarmed about is what they call emergent capabilities,” Obernolte explained. “So the ability of an algorithm to do something that you didn’t train it to do, you didn’t even think that it would be able to do, and all of a sudden, it’s able to do it.
“That’s very frightening and alarming to people,” he continued. “But if you think about it, it shouldn’t be that alarming, because these are neural nets. Our brain is a neural net. And that’s the way our brain works. You know, if you look at it, primate brain sizes, you know, as you grow the brain size, all of a sudden things like language begin to emerge … and we’re discovering the same things about AI. So I don’t find that alarming.”
Obernolte said the real function of ChatGPT 4 only bolsters his position.
“If you look closely at ChatGPT 4, it reinforces the veracity of what I’m saying,” Obernolte said. “AI is a tremendously powerful and efficient pattern recognizer.
“ChatGPT 4 is designed to take in this enormous amount of language, images, and prose in order to synthesize answers to questions,” he said. “If you think about what what has alarmed [AI critics], in the context of all of the data it’s been trained to recognize patterns in, it becomes a lot less alarming.”
AI Can’t Think or Reason
Another important aspect of AI that Obernolte pointed to is its inability to pass the Turing test or reason independently.
This is important because if AI cannot reason like a human being and act independently, it poses little risk to humans. Almost all fears about AI involve AI becoming independent from humanity and working against the interests of humanity.
But so far, Obernolte noted, the technology can’t even reliably mimic a human being.
Proposed by World War II British codebreaker Alan Turing, the Turing test describes a machine’s resemblance to a human being. For an AI to “pass” the Turing test, human beings speaking to it via chatbox should not be able to tell that they are speaking to an AI. The test was proposed as a measure of the refinement of AI technology.
An AI robot titled “Alter 3: Offloaded Agency,” is pictured during a photo call to promote the exhibition entitled “AI: More than Human,” at the Barbican Centre in London on May 15, 2019. (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
Many see the Turing test as the gold standard for measuring AI intelligence. Thus far, no AI is able to pass the Turing test.
Obernolte opined that even if in the future an AI could pass the Turing test, that would not necessarily mean it was a “thinking, reasoning entity.”
It is a matter of philosophical debate whether AI could ever have motives or carry out independent actions in the same sense as human beings. And for at least the foreseeable future, Obernolte said, there’s no reason to worry.
“Certainly ChatGPT 4 cannot pass the Turing test,” Obernolte said. “It may be the case that ChatGPT 6 or 7 can pass the Turing test. It might be that it can. You could sit for an hour, talking back and forth, and not be able to determine whether or not it’s a person or a computer—that still will not mean that we have created a thinking, reasoning entity.”
Regulating Would Empower US Foes
Obernolte said that shutting down U.S. research into AI technology would only serve to empower American enemies.
“In the most draconian case, let’s say that tomorrow I introduced a bill that required everyone in the United States of America to stop development of AI that was anything beyond the capabilities of GPT 4,” Obernolte said. “But we would still have bad actors in the United States who saw financial gain in continuing development of advanced AI that would continue to do it and flout the law. We would still have foreign adversaries using it.”
Soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army’s Honour Guard Battalion march outside the Forbidden City, near Tiananmen Square, on May 20, 2020 in Beijing, China. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
Thus, Obernolte said, AI development would still occur—it would just occur among black marketeers and U.S. adversaries.
“It’s undeniable that we would put our country at greater risk of attack from advanced AI if we stopped our development of it,” he said. “Because when we resume it, our AI is not going to be as advanced as those of the people that didn’t stop. So it’s just not realistic to say, ‘Everyone stop what you’re doing.’
“Let’s talk about this,” he added. “I’m glad that we’re talking about it.”
‘Orwellian’ Uses
Obernolte said he’s not afraid of AI becoming independent and destroying humanity, but he is concerned about the “Orwellian” uses the technology could have.
“I do worry about some other very real dangers that, in their own way, are just as consequential and hazardous as robots taking over the world, but in different ways,” Obernolte said.
For one, he cited AI’s “uncanny ability to pierce through personal digital privacy.”
The result, he said, could be to help government or corporate entities predict and control behavior.
Obernolte noted how AI could put formerly disaggregated data together “and use it to form behavioral models that make eerily accurate predictions about future human behavior. And, by the way, give people clues on how to influence that future human behavior.”
“It’s already being done,” he added, pointing out the social media companies whose whole business model revolves around the collection and sale of personal data.
On a corporate level, Obernolte said this could mean a few major players form a “monopoly” over data with effectively insurmountable barriers to entry.
But the effects could be far worse if a state got hold of the technology, he predicted.
“I worry about the way that AI can empower a nation state to create, essentially a surveillance state, which is what China is doing with it,” Obernolte said. “They’ve created essentially the world’s largest surveillance state. They use that information to make predictive scores of people’s loyalty to the government. And they use that as loyalty scores to award privileges. That’s pretty Orwellian.
“So this is a disruptive way that government can use it,” he added. “And as we have learned to our misfortune in the history of our country, we need to put guardrails around government as well as industry.”
Fox News on Monday confirmed that it “parted ways” with popular primetime host Tucker Carlson, offering no explanation why.
“FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” said a news release from the news channel.
The release said that his departure from the network is effective immediately. Carlson’s last show was on Friday, April 21. It means that Carlson will not have the opportunity to host a final Fox News show and bid his viewers farewell.
In Carlson’s place, “Fox News Tonight” will air starting at 8 p.m., a time slot that Carlson has held since April 2017. That will be “an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named,” said Fox’s news release.
On Twitter, Carlson did not make any reference to his departure from the channel.
Other details about Carlson’s departure were not made public. The Epoch Times has contacted a Fox News spokesperson for additional comment.
For years, Carlson’s show had been among the most popular in all of cable television, often generating more than 3 million viewers per episode. In March, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” drew the highest audience on cable television, averaging 3.251 million viewers per show, according to Nielsen data.
His ratings also spiked in early March when he aired never-before-seen footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach, the Nielsen numbers show. In one of the clips aired on his show, it appeared to show “Q Shaman” Jacob Chansley being escorted by Capitol Police through the premises.
Carlson’s segments that were published on Fox News’s YouTube page would often generate millions of views each. For example, a recent post titled, “Tucker Carlson: The Biden admin is incentivizing bad behavior,” netted more than 600,000 views in two days.
Carlson joined Fox News in 2009, first working as a contributor. Between 2012 and 2016, he served as the co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend” before starting his primetime show a year later.
He soon became Fox’s most popular personality—eclipsing Sean Hannity, who comes on an hour later—after replacing Bill O’Reilly in Fox New’s prime-time lineup. Before Fox News, he appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and PBS—and he also co-founded the Daily Caller, which was launched in 2010.
Last week, another popular Fox News host, Dan Bongino, announced via his podcast that he, too, is leaving Fox News.
“The show ending last week was tough. It’s not some big conspiracy theory, I promise you. There’s no acrimony,” Bongino said last Thursday. “We just couldn’t come to terms on an extension. That’s really it.” He added: “I really enjoyed myself there. They were good for me for ten years.”
“It’s a sad day. They did give me the opportunity to do one last show, I don’t want you to think they showed me the door,” he continued. “That’s on me, not on them, but I thought it was best to go this way for now.”
In a statement to several news outlets after Bongino’s departure, Fox News said: “We thank Dan for his contributions and wish him success in his future endeavors.” The company did not explain why it was parting ways with Bongino, who was a former New York City Police Department official and U.S. Secret Service agent before entering the media business.
After it was announced Carlson would be leaving the network, Fox Corporation’s stock dropped about 4 percent by midday trading.
This is a breaking news story. Check back for developments.
Susan Rice is stepping down as the White House’s domestic policy adviser, the Biden administration confirmed in a statement on Monday.
“I surprised a lot of people when I named Ambassador Susan Rice as my Domestic Policy Advisor,” Joe Biden said in a statement about the departure of Rice, a former Obama administration official.
Biden added that “Susan was synonymous with foreign policy, having previously served as National Security Advisor and UN Ambassador. But what I knew then and what we all know now—after more than two years of her steady leadership of the Domestic Policy Council—it’s clear: there is no one more capable, and more determined to get important things done for the American people than Susan Rice.”
The president then touted Rice’s “tireless efforts” that included expanding the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, and taking “historic actions to reduce gun violence and advance police reform.” His statement also credited Rice with implementing policies that bring “equity” to the federal government, reversing some Trump-era immigration policies, capping insulin prices, and more.
Then-President Barack Obama, accompanied by, from left, then-Secretary of State John Kerry, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and then-national security adviser Susan Rice, speaks during a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, on March 31, 2016. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo)
“As the only person to serve as both National Security Advisor and Domestic Policy Advisor, Susan’s record of public service makes history,” Biden stated. “But what sets her apart as a leader and colleague is the seriousness with which she takes her role and the urgency and tenacity she brings, her bias towards action and results, and the integrity, humility and humor with which she does this work. I thank Susan for her service, her counsel and her friendship. I will miss her.”
Rice also issued a statement appearing to confirm her departure from the Biden administration. She did not say what her future plans might be.
“I am deeply grateful to @potus for trusting and empowering me to serve as his Domestic Policy Advisor,” Rice wrote on Twitter after the White House announcement. “I love the team @DPC and in the @WhiteHouse. There are no more dedicated public servants. I am so proud of all we have been able to accomplish together for the American people.”
Rice had served as the U.N. ambassador at the start of the Obama administration but later became Obama’s national security adviser during his second term in office. She’s been in charge of the White House Domestic Policy Council since Biden took office in January 2021.
Over the years, Rice has drawn criticism from congressional Republicans after she characterized the 2012 attacks on Americans—including the U.S. ambassador—in Benghazi, Libya, as part of a protest instead of a planned terrorist attack. Rice was also accused of spying on former President Donald Trump’s then-national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
In Biden’s Monday statement, he did not say when her last day will be. Reports citing anonymous sources said she will depart the administration in late May.
This is a breaking news story; check back for more updates.
On dialysis and potentially facing death, a 41-year-old homeschooling mother of seven young children has been rejected as a candidate for a life-saving kidney transplant by Emory Healthcare Inc. of Atlanta.
The reason? The woman, who has already had COVID-19, refused to receive the COVID-19 vaccine on religious and medical grounds.
To protect her privacy, the patient will be referred to in this article as Jane Doe.
Emory Healthcare did not respond to a request for comment.
Affiliated with Emory University, Emory Healthcare is one of the leading organ transplant centers in the South.
According to Liberty Counsel (LC), a national non-profit legal organization helping Doe, she was referred to Emory by her nephrologist after suddenly coming down with end-stage kidney disease.
The seriousness of Doe’s condition necessitates her undergoing dialysis three times a week to keep her alive.
Following an evaluation by one of the transplant center’s nurse practitioners, Doe was initially found to be an acceptable candidate for a new kidney, even though Doe reported she had not been vaccinated against COVID-19.
Life or Death Decision
Doe’s hopes were soon dashed when, after another consultation with Emory staffers, a social worker informed her that she could not move forward to the transplant program’s “active waiting list” until she took the shot.
Mat Staver. (Courtesy of Liberty Counsel)
Emory Healthcare is one of 35 percent of the nation’s transplant centers that are still requiring their patients to be vaccinated for COVID-19, according to a Liberty Counsel analysis.
This is despite the fact that on April 11, President Joe Biden declared the national emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic officially over.
On April 17, LC sent a letter to Emory Healthcare requesting that no later than April 30, Doe be granted religious and medical exemptions from its COVID-19 vaccination mandate and asked that she be reactivated and placed on the kidney transplant active waiting list.
Religious Convictions
The nine-page letter alleges that every available COVID-19 vaccine is associated with aborted “fetal cell lines.”
It cites evidence from the public health departments of North Dakota and Louisiana as proof.
Doe, a devout Roman Catholic, is opposed to ingesting or being injected with such vaccines based on her religious beliefs.
The Liberty Counsel also informed Emory Healthcare that there were strong medical reasons for Doe’s refusal to get the jab.
Standing on Natural Immunity
The demand letter stated that Doe had already recovered from a bout with COVID and that her antibody numbers were actually stronger than those found in many people who were fully vaccinated for 90 days.
LC cited several published, scientific, peer-reviewed studies as evidence.
“Because of her (Doe’s) acquired natural immunity and documented SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and other factors, (Doe) respectfully requests that the Transplant Team and/or Committee permit her to obtain an exemption from the COVID-19 vaccinations because of the risks associated with vaccinating someone with such a high antibody count,” the letter said.
In an April 20 press release, Liberty Counsel called the risk of blood clots, myocarditis, and other heart issues associated with the COVID-19 vaccines as one of the bases of Doe’s medical objections.
LC also stated the legal position that, since there are no Food and Drug Administration-approved COVID shots available, and all the current vaccines are under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), Emory cannot lawfully condition providing a transplant upon a patient taking a shot.
A facility of Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, Ga., on April 28, 2020. (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Citing federal law, LC said in its letter to Emory that all individuals to whom a EUA product is offered must be informed they have a choice of whether or not to take it.
“The statutorily required Fact Sheets for each of the EUA COVID-19 vaccines acknowledge that individuals cannot be compelled to accept or receive the vaccine,” the letter said.
A Plea for Mercy
Liberty Counsel chairman and founder Mat Staver said in the press release, “It is unconscionable to deny anyone a religious or medical accommodation from an experimental injection, especially someone who needs an organ transplant. Emory should be ashamed of its actions and reverse this unreasonable policy.
“Emory needs to do the right action immediately and allow this woman to receive the kidney she needs to save her life.”
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will likely face more legal challenges over its latest emissions standards, which are projected to lead to two-thirds of new car sales being all-electric vehicles by 2032.
“Once it’s published as a final rule, it will undoubtedly be challenged again, just like the last set of rules was challenged,” Steven Bradbury, a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and a former general counsel at the Department of Transportation (DOT), told The Epoch Times.
“At that point, there may be a ruling by the D.C. Circuit [Court of Appeals] on the earlier challenges that would help inform how the court would handle a new challenge,” he added.
Currently, three interrelated legal challenges are pending in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The challenges are to the EPA’s current emissions rules seeking to make half of new car sales be all-electric by 2030, EPA’s waiver to California to allow the state to set its own emissions rules, which mandates 100 percent zero-emission new vehicle sales by 2035, and fuel economy requirements by Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
And some petitioners of the current legal challenges have already spoken up.
American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), the main trade association representing oil refineries for gasoline and other petroleum products, said EPA’s new emissions rules would “effectively ban gasoline and diesel vehicles.”
“The Agency should withdraw this rule and work collaboratively with the fuel, petrochemical, and vehicle industries to find cost-effective ways to reduce emissions while maintaining competition, U.S. energy and national security, and choice for consumers,” wrote AFPM President and CEO Chet Thompson in a statement on April 12, the same day EPA announced the proposed new emissions rules.
AFPM didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ inquiry about whether the organization planned to file a new legal challenge, but referred to its statements.
Also on April 12, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said that the new EPA emissions rules were “enormously problematic.” “Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a closer look at the proposed rule, and we’ll be ready to once again lead the charge against wrongheaded energy proposals like these,” he said, hinting at potential legal action.
His spokesperson didn’t confirm or deny potential legal petitions to The Epoch Times. The attorney general’s office in Texas, another Republican-led state currently challenging EPA emissions rules finalized in 2021, hasn’t responded to The Epoch Times’ inquiry.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey speaks at an event in Inwood, W.Va., on Oct. 22, 2018. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Agency Power at Question
In his statement, Morrisey also questioned whether the EPA has the statutory authority to set the emissions rules.
When setting the emissions rules, EPA claimed statutory authority under the Clean Air Act. In addition, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has specified carbon dioxide as a type of greenhouse gas; that has led to some believing that the IRA has given EPA additional authority, a view that Jonathan Adler, a law professor and director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at Case Western Reserve University, disagrees with.
According to him, the IRA doesn’t give EPA new authority because the definition applies to provisions that are not related to EPA’s regulatory authority.
“The EPA does have the authority under current law to regulate greenhouse gases from automobiles. The question is how far that extends. And does that allow them to adopt rules that either mandate or dramatically encourage the use of electric vehicles?” Adler told The Epoch Times.
While the Clean Air Act (CAA) authorizes EPA to regulate emission standards, DOT’s NHTSA controls fuel economy as per the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (EPCA).
According to Bradbury, EPA’s role in fuel economy is limited to measuring and reinforcing the standards NHTSA sets. In his view, the EPA’s setting the limit on the amount of carbon dioxide a car can emit per mile traveled is the equivalent of imposing an MPG requirement due to “a direct and constant relationship between EPA’s carbon dioxide emission limits and NHTSA’s fuel economy standards.”
Therefore, EPCA and CAA overlap in some ways. “I don’t think that means EPA can properly move the Department of Transportation out of the way and, in effect, set fuel economy standards for cars,” said Bradbury, adding that this viewpoint hasn’t been tested in court, but will be heard when the pending legal challenges reach argument stage in the D.C. Circuit Court.
Adler agrees.
“You have these two statutes that are focused on two different questions that happen to overlap,” he said. “It will certainly be something that will have to be resolved in court for sure.”
“When it comes to electric vehicles, you’re dealing with something that can be thought of in both terms because electric vehicles both result in lower emissions but also have a lot to do with energy conservation because they don’t use fossil fuels,” he added.
The Environmental Protection Agency in Washington on Dec. 12, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
‘Real-World Economics’
Bradbury said that CAA talks about the costs of regulation and asks for practical rules.
“The statute says EPA is supposed to take into account the costs of regulation. They are supposed to come up with a practical rule and weigh the benefits,” he added. “It doesn’t say anything about using Section 202 of the Clean Air Act to try to force a complete transformation of the industry and force it to electrification.”
A similar practicality requirement is in place for NHTSA, he said. “Congress made it clear that the fuel economy standards have to take into account real-world economics.”
In his view, EPCA, a response to the Arab oil embargo in retaliation against the United States’ support of Israel during the Arab–Israeli War, is “not an environmental statute.” “It was really a concern about national security and our dependence on foreign oil. And it was also a concern about preserving the markets for transportation options for America’s families, the vitality of the auto industry, etc.”
“When Congress created the fuel economy program in the 1970s, it was very careful and made it very clear in the statute, I believe, that it did not want NHTSA’s fuel economy standards to undermine the health and vitality of the automotive industry,” he said.
“Because, of course, the auto industry in the U.S. is a major part of our industrial base. There are not just the hundreds of thousands of jobs that the automakers are responsible for; there are millions of jobs in all the companies that supply inputs to the automotive industry.”
In 2022, several months after EPA’s emissions standards for light-duty vehicles in model years 2023 through 2026 became final, NHTSA released corresponding fuel economy requirements, increasing MPG requirements by nearly 10 miles per gallon on average for 2026 over 2021 models. Bradbury said NHTSA will likely soon release an updated MPG requirement to go along with EPA’s latest rules for car models in years 2027 through 2032.
“So when EPA goes first with these rules, EPA is getting out in front of DOT and is usurping DOT’s role to set fuel economy standards by, in effect, setting its own fuel economy standards,” he said.
“So here again, we have an old statute enacted for very different purposes or reasons being used today by the Biden Department of Transportation for a very different purpose—one that Congress never contemplated, never approved—which is trying to force through regulatory fiat a massive wholesale transformation in the industry from internal combustion engine production vehicles to electric vehicles,” he added, referring to EPCA.
The Epoch Times has contacted EPA for comment.
President Joe Biden speaks in Irvine, Calif., on Oct. 14, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Possible Legal Outcomes
A 30-day period of public comments is underway on the latest EPA emissions standards. Once it’s published as a final rule, petitioners have 60 days to file their complaints to the D.C. Circuit Court. So they will likely file petitions before the pending challenges, which have not reached the argument stage, render any decisions.
According to Bradbury, the petitions may have one of the following outcomes: the D.C. Circuit may reject the challenges; it may send the rules back to EPA to reconsider if it finds that the agency needs to address any neglected factors; or it may hold that the agency doesn’t have authority from Congress and strike the rules down based on the “major questions doctrine”—an agency must have clear authorization from Congress before it can decide a major issue of national importance.
After the ruling of a three-judge panel, the parties could seek review by all judges in the whole D.C. Circuit, which is rare, or by the Supreme Court as a next step. Bradbury said if the D.C. Circuit rules that the EPA doesn’t have sufficient authority or strikes the rules down based on the major questions doctrine, those types of decisions would be more likely to be taken up by the Supreme Court because they are big decisions.
Consumer Choice and National Security
As a part of the initiative to achieve President Joe Biden’s executive order on tackling climate issues, the standards would “significantly reduce climate and other harmful air pollution, unlocking significant benefits for public health, especially in communities that have borne the greatest burden of poor air quality,” according to the EPA.
However, the Energy Information Administration, a principal agency responsible for official energy statistics, projected the market share of electric light-duty vehicles—including battery electric and hybrid electric—to be between 10 and 30 percent by 2025, according to its annual energy outlook released last month.
“I think the fundamental thing is: people don’t want to buy these cars,” Diana Furchtgott‑Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times. “Because they don’t want to have to stop 45 minutes to charge [EVs] up. They’re more expensive; they’re smaller. And they have very limited range and don’t fit people’s lifestyles.”
A driver recharges the battery of his Tesla car at a Tesla Super Charging station in a petrol station on the highway in Sailly-Flibeaucourt, France, on Jan. 12, 2019. (Pascal Rossignol/Reuters)
Only 5.8 percent of new vehicles sold last year in America were electrics, and she pointed out further that two-thirds of last year’s new EV car sales were from Tesla. “So people don’t really want to buy these other vehicles.”
“Here, it’s a question of forcing people, people don’t want to buy this but they’re forcing them to do so,” she added.
According to a new Gallup poll earlier this month, 41 percent of adults said they would never buy an EV. Four percent said they currently own an EV, and an additional 12 percent said they were “seriously considering” buying one.
A Pew Research poll conducted in July 2022 found that 55 percent of Americans opposed phasing out new gasoline cars and trucks by 2035, while 43 percent were in favor of that. The poll also showed that people were divided on whether Biden’s climate policies were taking the country in the right direction: 49 percent said it was right versus 47 percent who said it was wrong. Among Democrats, a majority—79 percent—supported Biden’s climate policies, and a majority of Republicans—82 percent—said those policies were taking the country in the wrong direction.
According to Furchtgott‑Roth, an economist and a former deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at DOT, China has increased its carbon emissions by more than 5 billion tons in the past 16 years. Due to the use of cleaner natural gas, the United States has seen its carbon emissions decline by over 1 billion metric tonnes during the same period.
“Moving our energy-intensive manufacturing abroad to China doesn’t help global emissions because the emissions come off made in China rather than here. And goods are produced in China with coal-fired power plants rather than here with clean natural gas,” she added. “This is making China’s economy stronger and America’s economy weaker.”
A worker puts away equipment after coming out of the Datai coal mine in Mentougou, west of Beijing, on Jan. 8, 2020. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
AFPM’s Thompson agrees.
“It’s unconscionable that the Administration would propose this knowing full well that China controls 80% of global battery production capacity, and even with robust U.S. investment to fortify our own electric grid and grow our battery supply chains by a magnitude of 10, we will not come close to overtaking China’s dominant position and will be left more dependent and financially beholden to them as a result,” he said in a statement on April 12, while calling the new EPA standards “bad for consumers, the environment, our freedom of mobility, and U.S. national security.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said the new EPA emissions standard “kills jobs” and would make the United States fall behind China. “It sums up all these things that they’re doing: the entire effort of this administration is to make us beholden to China, undermine our growth,” he told The Epoch Times.
“These EPA rules, all of the IRA subsidies can be turned back,” he added.
In response to a query from The Epoch Times on whether the new rules will aid China, the EPA defended the proposed standards, saying that they are “in line with the direction the American auto industry is already going.” The industry has made significant investments in zero-emissions vehicles, which the administration is building upon, an EPA spokesperson said.
Auto Industry’s Reaction
America’s automobile industry supported the EPA’s previous rule that would lead to half of new car sales being all-electric by 2030. But the industry was worried this time when EPA took it further by accelerating that goal to 60 percent by 2030 and 67 percent by 2032.
“To be clear, 50 percent was always a stretch goal and predicated on several conditions,” John Bozzella, CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents large U.S. and foreign automakers, said in a statement on April 12. “Those included supportive policies like the manufacturing incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (that have only just begun to be implemented) and tax credits to support EV purchases and affordability.”
But in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times on April 17, Bozzella’s tone seemed to have softened.
“Customer affordability is a key condition for a successful EV transition (along with charging, critical mineral availability, and utility capacity), so that’s why we’ve been focused on making the 30D incentive as broadly available to as many customers and on as many EVs as possible,” he said, referring to the EV consumer credit of up to $7,500 under the Inflation Reduction Act.
The auto industry’s embrace of Biden’s EV push was a misstep, according to Bradbury. “I think they cooked their own goose.”
“At this point, they’re probably regretting that because even though they publicly made commitments to transition to electric vehicle production as quickly as they can, and are incurring enormous expenses to do that, they can’t really meet these benchmarks that are being mandated. And at some point, something’s got to give,” he added.
He described the industry’s reaction as “political.” “They’re sort of testing the political winds or predicting the political winds. And I think they think the push for green technology and electric vehicles is here to stay.”
In addition, the industry welcomed the U.S. government’s mandate to force consumers to accept EVs so they could achieve global economies of scale, since they were also selling EVs in Europe and China, according to Bradbury.
The new EPA rule is “going to have enormous dislocating costs across the economy, just massive costs,” he added.
“For a rule like that, I think it’s classic under the major questions doctrine that the Supreme Court should require that there be a clear and express authorization from Congress to do something like that, and that [authorization] certainly does not exist.”
A transgender lawmaker from Montana has been censured in the House after the individual made “hateful rhetoric” while debating a bill ending transgender procedures for minors.
The SB 99 bill, also known as the “Youth Health Protection Act,” bans minors in the state from receiving surgical procedures, puberty blockers, and hormones.
“The only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a Democrat, said during the House debate on Tuesday, referring to the chamber’s opening prayer. Zephyr is the first transgender lawmaker in the history of the Montana Legislature.
House Majority Leader Sue Vinton called Zephyr’s comments disrespectful. In the evening, the Montana Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative lawmakers, demanded that Zephyr be censured for “attempting to shame the Montana legislative body and by using inappropriate and uncalled-for language during a floor debate.”
“This kind of hateful rhetoric from an elected official is exactly why tragedies such as the Covenant Christian School shooting in Nashville occurred,” the caucus said in an April 18 press release.
“Combined with former Montana Supreme Court Justice Jim Nelson’s recent calls for ‘jihad’ and a ‘fight to the death’, there is unmistakable evidence of a desire for some to engage in violence over political beliefs. This must stop.”
On Thursday, Speaker Matt Regier did not allow Zephyr to speak against a bill that sought to define male and female in binary terms in the state code. On Friday, Zephyr was once more prevented from speaking on a bill that sought to block minors from seeing porn online.
Regier’s decision to prohibit Zephyr from speaking was taken after consultation with other lawmakers, according to The Associated Press. Though Democrats raised objections, the decision was eventually upheld in party-line votes.
Protecting Minors
SB 99 seeks to “prohibit certain medical and surgical treatments to treat minors with gender dysphoria.” A person is prohibited from “knowingly” offering medical treatments to a minor to address the child’s perception that their gender or sex is different from their birth gender or sex. Such treatments include surgical procedures, puberty blockers, and doses of testosterone or other androgens.
Physicians or health care professionals who violate these rules will be deemed as having engaged in “unprofessional conduct.”
As such, they will be subject to an “appropriate licensing entity or disciplinary review board with competent jurisdiction in this state. That discipline must include suspension of the ability to administer health care or practice medicine for at least 1 year.”
Health care professionals who provide the banned treatments to minors will be “strictly liable to that person if the medical treatment or after-effects of the medical treatment result in any injury, including physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological harms, within the next 25 years.”
The minor or their legal guardian can bring a civil action for the injury the minor has suffered. They can seek compensatory damages, injunctive relief, and punitive damages.
The Youth Health Protection Act has been passed by the House. It is now in the hands of the state governor who has indicated that he intends to sign it.
State Laws
Like Montana, other states are also passing bills to protect minors from transgender-related issues. Earlier this month, the Republican-controlled Texas Senate passed the SB 12 and SB 14 bills.
SB 14 seeks to end gender modification on children in the state. It also bans health care providers from performing sex change surgeries or offering puberty blockers to minors unless medically necessary.
SB 12 seeks to halt drag show performance in front of children. It bans male performers from exhibiting themselves as females and female performers from exhibiting as males amidst minors.
In Kentucky, lawmakers passed into law SB 150 last month that blocks transgender procedures for minors. The bill was earlier vetoed by the state governor.
It is possible that both Garland and Blinken will have to answer for their alleged malfeasance. Both might easily be impeached and forced from office.
Doubtless your mother used to tell you to count your blessings. It was good advice. Your situation may be bad. In the case of the United States, things indisputably are bad, and worsening. You know that. But look on the bright side. Sure Merrick Garland, the first American Gothic attorney general of the United States, is a partisan horror show, withholding real protection from Supreme Court justices who are threatened by violent criminals even as he stigmatizes as “domestic terrorists” parents who criticize their local school boards and orders the FBI to conduct dawn raids on critics of the regime. He is a horrible man and a dangerous partisan hack, the very instantiation of the two-tier application of the law that has made such a mockery of justice during Biden’s tenure.
But again, look on the bright side. Garland will soon be gone. And remember, he almost made it to the Supreme Court. Obama nominated him in the waning days of his administration. But Donald Trump had other ideas and—let’s give credit where credit is due—Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made sure that Garland’s nomination got lost when Republicans held the majority. I am no fan of McConnell’s, but I try to remember to say a little prayer for him whenever I list my intentions. By scotching Garland’s ascension to the Court, McConnell did the country a huge favor.
I say Garland will “soon” be gone. Most of my readers will assume I mean on or about January 20, 2025, when the next Republican president assumes office.
It might take that long. But recent developments have me wondering whether he might make his congé even earlier.
A few days ago, it was reported that an unnamed, senior IRS special agent was seeking whistle-blower status in connection with the ongoing investigation of First Son Hunter Biden, who has serious tax problems.
According to a letter from the agent’s lawyer to several House and Senate committees, the agent laid out multiple examples of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject [i.e., Hunter Biden] were not politically connected.” The agent’s allegations also “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” and “involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case” against Hunter Biden.
An “unnamed senior political appointee,” eh? Well, that unnamed status didn’t last long. On Thursday, the New York Post reported that the international man of mystery was none other than Merrick Garland himself.
Back in March, Garland had insisted to Congress that the investigation into Hunter Biden’s extracurricular activities was free from political interference. David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney investigating the case, had full autonomy, Garland said. Quoth Garland, “The U.S. attorney has been advised that he has full authority to make kind of those referrals you’re talking about or to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary, and I will assure that if he does, then he will be able to do that.”
It was not reported whether that claim was greeted with titters. I assume that the echoing claim from the White House, that the investigation would be “free from any political interference by the White House,” was greeted by at least restrained and incredulous laughter.
Thierry Monasse/Getty Images
What does it all portend? Probably about the same thing that the revelation last week regarding Secretary of State Antony Blinken portends. Blinken, it transpired, was the origin of the campaign against the story, first reported by the New York Post, about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell.” Forget about the salacious bits—the drugs, the guns, the whores. More damaging were the emails detailing some of the Biden family’s corrupt business dealings with various foreign entities, dealings that clearly implicated the “Big Guy,” Joe Biden.
The Post bombshell was detonated a scant two weeks before the 2020 presidential election. It promised disaster for the Biden campaign. What to do? Remember the 51 former intelligence specialists, including such senior figures as former CIA director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who signed a letter testifying that the laptop bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”?
According to the sworn testimony of Michael Morell—a senior Democratic operative—it was he, working hand-in-glove with Blinken, then a Biden campaign official, who organized the letter and helped shut down the story. Why did he do this? Two reasons. He wanted to help Joe Biden in his debates with Donald Trump, so he wanted the story buried. Beyond that, he said, he wanted Biden “to win the election.” What better way to help than to use the power of the state to censor the media and thereby suppress an unflattering story, one that would probably have altered the outcome of the election?
It is possible that both Garland and Blinken will have to answer for their alleged malfeasance. Both might easily be impeached and forced from office. If they are, it will be a signal that the Regime is about to expel Joe Biden and find another candidate for 2024. I don’t really expect that to happen, though anything is possible in this increasingly yeasty situation. More likely, I think, is that our deeply ensconced two-tier system of “justice” will prevail, just as it is, for the benefit of Hunter Biden. More’s the pity, but the longer such outrages continue, the more definitive the reverse peristalsis of swampy denizens in Washington, D.C. will be in November 2024.
The gender dysphoria fad shows no signs of abating.
Fads aren’t always harmful things. Hula hoops, goldfish swallowing, and flagpole sitting have come and gone and generally were not toxic. In the 1970s, various eating disorders were the rage. But they were treated as physical disorders and serious mental health problems. Writing in Psychology Today, Dr. Emily Deans observed, “Eating disorders in adolescents are strongly predicted by the earlier presence of depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety.” Her treatment recommendations included, “A personalized approach, based on treating underlying depression, anxiety, nutritional deficiencies, and teaching that our bodies deserve to be nourished with proper, whole foods can be surprisingly effective.”
But today, bulimia and anorexia are passé and have been replaced by gender dysphoria, which is being used as a political cudgel by many with a nefarious agenda. In fact, the organized nature of the movement has left many parents in a horrible position. For example, in Washington State, SB 5599 was just passed, which allows the state to legally take children away from their parents if they don’t consent to their child’s gender transition surgeries. Washington State Senator Marko Liias issued a statement that summed up the new law. “Under current law, if a child who has run away from home goes to a licensed shelter, that shelter is required to notify the parents unless a compelling reason applies. The bill allows certified shelters to contact the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) in lieu of parents in certain additional instances, such as when a youth is seeking reproductive health services or gender-affirming care.”
But what is the depth of the problem?
A staggering 99.4 percent of the population does not have the physical traits that cause someone to become transgender, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBTQ advocacy group. The 0.6 percent of the adult population who are gender dysphoric—a condition that causes extreme distress—certainly deserve empathy and respect.
Much of the gender dysphoria battlefield takes place in our schools, which have become breeding grounds for this dangerous fad. To that end, Congress passed H.R. 5 in late March. Among other things, the bill, which prevailed in a 213-208 vote, would give parents the right to inspect the books and other reading materials in the library of their child’s school. It would enable them to know if the school operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities that permit an individual whose biological sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designed for individuals whose biological sex is female. The bill also enables parents to know if their child’s school allows an individual whose biological sex is male to use restrooms or changing rooms designated for individuals whose biological sex is female.
An article that purports to denounce H.R. 5 inadvertently sells the bill. In “Republican education bill would increase interference in classrooms.” Aileen Arrreaza laments, “H.R. 5 would create more problems than it solves.” And that is just the point. It is supposed to create problems, much in the same way that the cops create problems for bank robbers who are caught in the act.
Sadly, however, H.R. 5 seems to be dead in the water; chances are slim that it will make it through our divided Senate.
So it is left to individual states and school districts to empower parents to fight the gender dysphoria onslaught.
In Montana, SB 99 would ban the chemical and surgical mutilation of minors. The bill has passed the state legislature and the governor has indicated he will sign it.
In Utah, HB 228, “would ban certain health care professionals from providing conversion therapy to minors. The bill defines conversion therapy as subjecting patients to physically invasive or painful treatment to change their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Perhaps ground zero for normal is Florida whose strong Parental Rights in Education Act was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis just a year ago. The act strengthens the power of parents as to how they choose to raise their child, and the types of things their child could be exposed to while they are at school. The bill, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its detractors, is in the process of being extended.
If enacted, HB 1069 will additionally protect students and school faculty members from being “forced to use a person’s preferred pronouns and gives the state Department of Education additional oversight over instructional materials used in the classroom to teach reproductive health.”
Sadly, not all states are like Florida, and no state is more unlike Florida than California. Introduced in February, Assembly Bill 1314, would simply have required that schools in the Golden State let parents know that their child is suffering from gender dysphoria or incongruence. It would have allowed parents to support their children and be involved in the life-changing decision to transition. The bill required teachers and administrators to inform parents within three days if their children asked to be treated as a member of the opposite sex.
But AB 1314 went absolutely nowhere. On April 10, Assembly Education Committee chair Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance) confirmed that the committee will not take up the bill. “I will not be setting AB 1314 for a hearing, not only because the bill is proposing bad policy, but also because a hearing would potentially provide a forum for increasingly hateful rhetoric targeting LGBTQ youth,” the Assemblyman said.
Without debate, the bill won’t get a vote unless a legislative majority asks for one—highly improbable when there is a Democratic supermajority in the state Assembly.
California set the pace for bad law back in September 2018 when it passed AB 2119, providing that the “rights of minors and nonminors in foster care . . . include the right to be involved in the development of case plan elements related to placement and gender affirming health care, with consideration of their gender identity.”
The American College of Pediatricians trashed the bill, concluding, “This bill facilitates children being railroaded into dangerous protocols lacking proven long-term records of safety and efficacy for a condition that usually desists.”
The dysphoria zealots are organized and will stop at nothing to achieve their takeover of America’s families. In fact, a Christian teacher in California was fired recently for standing up to them. Jessica Tapias explained that under her school district’s policy (Jurupa Unified School District in Riverside County), students have a right to privacy. If they choose to share with a teacher that they are transitioning, or that they wish to be referred to by a specific pronoun, the teacher is required to keep that information from parents.
“I don’t believe [kids] should have this ‘privacy’ to where their parents are being left in the dark about some very pertinent information about their well-being,” Tapias said.
She added that she also had barred students with “male genitals” from accessing the girls’ locker room in violation of district rules related to transgender students.
Tapias isn’t blithely accepting the district’s decision to fire her. She said she plans to sue, claiming religious discrimination. She said, in her role as a physical education teacher she was “expected to lie to parents about their children’s preferred pronouns and their gender transitions—and that was something she said she could not abide by given her strong religious convictions.”
Interestingly, the teachers unions have been mum on Tapias’ firing. In fact, the unions are in the forefront of exploiting gender dysphoria.
For example, the website of the NEA-affiliated Oklahoma Education Association includes an “LGBTQ+ Advocacy Toolkit” web page for its members.
The guide tells teachers that the “expression of transgender identity, or any other form of gender-expansive behavior, is a healthy, appropriate and typical aspect of human development.” The document also states that children begin expressing gender identity “between the ages of two and four years old” and instructs teachers that they should never encourage a student to express their gender based on a student’s sex even if there is concern that a student “lacks capacity or ability to assert their gender identity or expression (e.g., due to age, developmental disability or intellectual disability).”
If a teacher believes a student’s parents may not support their male child identifying as a girl, or vice versa, the NEA guide provides instructions on ways to keep parents out of the loop as school officials work to transition the child.
Elsewhere, the guide similarly declares, “Any decision to raise the topic with parents must be made very carefully and in consultation with the student. In some instances, a school may choose not to bring the subject up if there is a concern that parents or caregivers may react negatively.”
And so forth, ad nauseam.
The group Do No Harm recently published the results of a study which found that “the United States is the most permissive country when it comes to the legal and medical gender transition of children.”
During an interview with Fox News, Dr. William Malone, a board-certified endocrinologist, said that doctors who find the procedures risky fear scrutiny from politicians and reputable medical associations.
“We are dealing with what may be the biggest medical and ethical scandal of modern times,” he told Fox News Digital. “Transgender medicine is big business, and youth who are transitioning today will be medical patients for life—for the next 60-plus years. Mental health among youth is at an all-time low, making them particularly vulnerable to solutions that suggest an ‘easy fix.’”
Yes, mental health among youth is at an all-time low.
Gender dysphoria may not be the only reason for the failing mental health of today’s young people, but it certainly is one of them. As such, it’s time for parents, school boards and state legislatures to pull the plug on this dangerous fad.
Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared at For Kids & Country.
In the past, the debate over Western Civ and the American tradition turned on identity politics but in Arkansas, they are focused on the needs of the young, as they should be.
n easy and effective way to create an unhappy, mistrustful, pessimistic young adult is to deprive him of any tradition, any heritage or cultural background, or historical shadow. Strip him of a usable, meaningful past and he reaches his maturity at a disadvantage, with no heroic occasion and larger-than-life personages in mind, no lineage he can claim, no descent that has resulted in him. The American founders are just empty names; the language that he speaks never echoes Alfred Tennyson or Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost. He may live in Pennsylvania or the Bay Area, but the years 1776 or 1849 strike no resonant note in his head.
Lots of Millennials are in that condition. The world they inhabit has no depth, no time but the present. The voices of the ages—Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rembrandt—don’t speak to them. Millennials wish to be brave and stalwart, but no warrior models inspire them. They want to fall in love, but the great love stories from Odysseus and Penelope forward don’t show them how. They’re on their own, and they struggle.
It didn’t happen by accident. Millennials went through high school and college after the Western Civ curriculum had been dismantled. The roadmap of American literature (Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, et al.) was already scrapped, the highlights of classical music shelved, the whole idea of a syllabus of common masterpieces discredited. The educators broke down the old canon and put no new canon in its place.
What a terrible thing to do to a 17-year-old. How irresponsible it was for teachers not to tell him that he lives in the wake of Paradise Lost and Vincent Van Gogh and the Empire State Building, that achievements of beauty and sublimity await his attention. He should have been assured that the wide, wide world he would soon enter contains works of genius and insight, ample evidence that things better than social media await him.
Those works would have been a resource in adulthood, helping him absorb the disappointments of a rejection, a job not obtained, money running short, life options shrinking. Aging would be more comprehensible. Love and death, too. A living tradition might also have improved his speech and elevated his tastes, turning him into a more discerning consumer and savvy citizen.
This brings us to the state of Arkansas, where a remarkable effort is underway. Governor Sarah Sanders’ Department of Education has released a new version of English Language Arts standards, which I worked on and which are now up for public comment. They promise to give students precisely the Big Picture of the past that prior cohorts of American students missed. Note the breadth of reading that the following standards demand:
Identify themes in works of American literature (1930-present), including the ways American writers incorporate ancient and religious stories into their writings.
Identify themes in works of American literature, noting the dominant traits from Puritan, Colonial, American Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernist, and Contemporary periods.
Identify themes in works of British literature, marking the dominant traits from Medieval, Renaissance, Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern periods.
The new model also includes a recitation requirement from sixth grade forward. The sentences are clear and direct, the command sweeping. Chaucer, Marlowe, Donne, Wordsworth, Franklin, Douglass, Twain, Pound, Millay, Hughes, Stevens—they’re all included. Taken together, these standards ensure a solid literary formation for Arkansas graduates, an acquaintance with Shakespeare, Swift, Blake, Emerson, and the rest.
Having to study multiple literary periods and movements, and to memorize great poems and speeches every year, students will assimilate the past not as a jumble of this thing and that. No, they will see it as what we noted above: a canon, a whole, superior and uplifting, the best, the most eloquent and smart and affecting—and they’ve got it. They will leave high school ready to talk about Romantic poetry and the Harlem Renaissance, ready to recite “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and “Because I could not stop for Death.”
Secretary Jacob Oliva and his team have provided Arkansas students a lifelong gift, though the process isn’t over yet. Public comment on the new version has to be examined and appraised. Changes may be made. The literary-historical elements must remain, however . . . they must.
In the past, the debate over Western Civ and the American tradition turned on identity politics: Is the old model too Dead White Male? What it should turn on are the spiritual and emotional needs of the young, one of those needs being faith in a coherent, meaningful universe. An education model built on a multi-century chronology of great books, poems, characters, and plots hands them that faith. What’s going on in Arkansas should spread to every state in the country.
Every mass killing begins as a social or economic justice movement seeking to redress a historical grievance narrative.
In recent years, again and again, public figures find themselves apologizing for saying “All lives matter.” Bizarrely, activists become outraged at the phrase. A Democratic candidate for president apologized in 2015 when he used the phrase at a symposium. Black Lives Matter activists booed and disrupted the event. In 2016, the president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling apologized for using the phrase. A Tennessee principal apologized for using the phrase in 2021. When a man shouted, “All lives matter!” during a 2020 D.C. protest, a BLM protester beat him with a baseball bat. Over and over, the mob meted out punishment and coerced apologies from anyone suggesting “All lives matter.”
Everyone knows the media reports differently on crime depending on the identity of the victims and the perpetrator. But the selective prosecution of perpetrators is even more troublesome. Despite the lavish attention the FBI and the Justice Department spends on “hate crimes,” the Justice Department does not seem interested in protecting people victimized because of their Christian faith.
From January 2018 to September 2022, the Family Research Council identified 420 hostile acts against U.S. churches including vandalism, gun attacks, and arson. A Catholic advocacy group reports “at least 309 attacks against Catholic churches in the United States” with no arrests in all but 25 percent of the cases. And the FBI has apparently failed to arrest any suspect for anti-Christain attacks following the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade. There’s a sense that it’s open season on any target of leftist prejudice.
Indeed, it’s become quite popular to label those who resist or complain about race-based politics and anti-Christian rhetoric as “fascist” or “semi-fascist.” The label plays an indispensable role in the very successful libel campaign against Christains, conservatives, and people with European features. It’s a loosely defined group on which one may permissibly project blame for every social ill. Poverty, crime, pollution—it matters not. A public official can always deflect attention from his own failings by projecting blame on the “oppressors.” The process of demonizing and marginalizing a target group can take decades. Like the first few kernels of popcorn, the early violence seems random and unconnected. But once normalized, the violence moves too quickly to stop.
American schools rarely teach about the demagoguery that paves the way for genocide. Out of such ignorance, leftist mobs whip themselves up into a frenzy of “antifascist” fervor without bothering to examine whether their own social justice movement might be spinning towards something very dark.
Leftists fantasize that they would have had the courage of Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel operator who risked his life during the 1994 Rwandan genocide in order to protect targeted Tutsis. They fantasize they would have risked everything like Oscar Schindler. Preventing the next Hitler or Rwanda-style genocide, we’re so often told, begins with social justice. Look around, they tell us, and you will awaken to the reality that, “racism is a causal factor in the social and economic outcomes . . .” And those who have awakened to this reality sometimes adopt the slang corruption of the verb “woke.”
Not so fast. Every genocide, including Rwanda, began with a kind of “awokening.” Every genocide begins as a social or economic justice movement seeking to redress a historical grievance narrative. To test whether you have the courage to resist, we must first confront three truths common to all genocides of the 20th century.
First, all genocides begin with a social justice movement that claims moral justification from the supposed historical sins of the target group. Second, the perpetrators of genocides always believe themselves to be the true victims entitled to a kind of preemptive self-defense. And third, a genocidal social justice movement can arise in any society which permits and facilitates an echochamber in which bigotry against the target group is normalized.
Yes, any society—including the United States.
In a sense, the term “social justice,” is a contradiction in terms. Justice, true justice, is meted out at the individual level. You cannot arrest and prosecute somebody just because they share the same skin color as the person who broke into your home. In fact, international norms prohibit collective punishment of communities based on the sins of their peers or ancestors. Any movement that seeks to punish innocent people because of their religion or skin color peddles evil.
It’s easy to sit in a movie theater and fantasize about how one would have resisted now-extinct Nazis. But in the lead-up to a genocide, one does not have the benefit of hindsight. In the moment, cruelty seems justified. It’s not bigotry if the race or group you’re taught to hate struck the first blow. No genocide ever succeeded without first convincing collaborators that the target group had it coming.
Rwandans justified the slaughter of Tutsis because of their alleged privilege and power left over from collaborating with Belgian colonizers. And the Rwandan government is still angry at Ruseabagina for drawing attention to the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis. Almost 30 years after the genocides in Rwanda, Ruseabagina found himself tortured and imprisoned on trumped up charges only to be released last month for the first time. The Rwandan government never forgot that Ruseabagina stood in the way of the wanton massacre of Tutsis and their sympathizers. So in 2020 the ruling government in Rwanda engineered a ruse to kidnap and imprison him for his sins.
In Cambodia, to justify murdering approximately 3 million of their countrymen, the ruling communists pointed to the social injustice between the haves and have-nots. As noted by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, “Income inequality was rampant. Cambodians living in the urban areas enjoyed relative wealth and comfort while the majority of Cambodians toiled on farms in the rural communities . . . anyone considered an intellectual was targeted for special treatment. This meant teachers, lawyers, doctors, and clergy were the targets of the regime. Even people wearing glasses were the target of Pol Pot’s reign of terror.”
In Russia, Stalin’s communists whipped up a frenzy of envy against poor peasants who had managed to turn small-plot farms into successful small businesses. But these successes, according to the communists, could only be explained through the exploitation of their now-jealous and resentful neighbors. These neighbors gleefully participated in the murder of millions in the 1930s.
Hitler also insisted that his anti-Jewish efforts were punching up, not down. He accused Jews of secretly controlling everything including the sprawling British Empire. In 1941, he proclaimed England to be “a State orientated entirely in the interests of a comparatively small and thin upper stratum and the Jewish clique with which it is allied. The interests of the broad masses are of no weight in determining the orientation of this State.”
As you read this, you might feel a little uncomfortable with a comparison between the fashionable bigotry of present-day America with genocide-enabling demagoguery of the past. Indeed, there’s been enough casual bigotry within American universities and government that most of the victims have internalized the propaganda into shame. This is why you see so many whites apologize over and over again for being white.
Indoctrinators posing as “diversity” trainers have fanned out across business and government to lead discussion sessions shaming employees for their skin color. In one example that came to light in 2021, Coca-Cola forced its employees to sit through training that encouraged its staff to be “less white,” by which it meant, “less ignorant,” and “less oppressive.” The U.S. Military Academy at West Point now offers instruction to soldiers on “understanding whiteness and White rage.” Yes, our government trains our own soldiers to believe that their countrymen with European features are infected with dangerous rage. These are racial steriotypes used to justify official action. It’s a sign of the madness of any social justice movement when its adherents seeek to make race discrimination and racial stereotyping seem normal and just.
It’s time to start resisting the toxic racial demagoguery of the new Left. Assigning collective blame to any group—particularly because of religion or race, is immoral and un-American. It’s time to end this madness. All persons should be judged on the basis of their own actions, not their skin color or faith. We must complain and push back when powerful people casually express bigotry against any race or religion. We should contradict racial stereotypes and resist making generalizations about anyone based on their skin color. Any time you hear “white privilege,” in the workplace or school, you should immediately file a discrimination complaint. It’s a slur intended to stoke resentment and racial strife.
And above all else, we must insist that all lives do matter.
A journalist on Friday asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre what Joe Biden’s new “environmental justice” executive order will do for the devastated town of East Palestine, Ohio, prompting Jean-Pierre to ramble on for almost two minutes without answering.
“That’s a very good question,” Jean-Pierre said. “Look, I think what’s important to note about this environmental justice [executive order] is the president’s continued support in his climate agenda, his ambitious climate agenda. He has the most ambitious climate agenda that [sic] any other president in history, and one way that you can look at this today is that he’s continuing to deliver on that ambitious agenda, and he’s not done yet, right, this is a continuing, a continuation of what he’s promised the American people.”
Jean-Pierre carried on in the same vein for almost another minute.
The press secretary was announcing Biden’s decision to grade all government agencies on their “efforts to advance environmental justice” through a scorecard. The initiative will likely be of little assistance to East Palestine, which is still suffering from a Feb. 3 train derailment that contaminated the area with toxic chemicals. The Biden administration received widespread criticism for its handling of the crisis, with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg taking three weeks before visiting East Palestine. The president himself still has never shown up in the Ohio town.
“This is just delivering … on how he sees moving forward with dealing with climate change,” Jean-Pierre said. “That is gonna be our focus.”
While Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency has declared East Palestine safe, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers investigating the area reported falling sick with headaches and coughing, the Washington Free Beaconreported this month. Town residents have reported similar symptoms.
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday blocked new restrictions set by lower courts on a widely used abortion pill, a decision welcomed by President Joe Biden as his administration defends broad access to the drug in the latest fierce legal battle over reproductive rights in the United States.
The justices, in a brief order, granted emergency requests by the Justice Department and the pill’s manufacturer Danco Laboratories to put on hold an April 7 preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas. The judge’s order would have greatly limited the availability of mifepristone while litigation proceeds in a challenge by anti-abortion groups to its federal regulatory approval.
“As a result of the Supreme Court’s stay, mifepristone remains available and approved for safe and effective use while we continue this fight in the courts,” Biden said in a statement issued by the White House.
“The stakes could not be higher for women across America. I will continue to fight politically driven attacks on women’s health,” Biden added.
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito publicly dissented from the decision. Alito, in a brief opinion, wrote that the administration and Danco “are not entitled to a stay because they have not shown that they are likely to suffer irreparable harm in the interim.”
Biden’s administration is seeking to defend mifepristone in the face of mounting abortion bans and restrictions enacted by Republican-led states since the Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized the procedure nationwide. Alito authored that ruling.
The current case now returns to the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is set to hear arguments on May 17. The losing side after the 5th Circuit rules could appeal the case back to the Supreme Court.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. agency that signs off on the safety of food products, drugs and medical devices, approved mifepristone in 2000. The challengers contend that the FDA illegally approved mifepristone and then removed critical safeguards on what they call a dangerous drug.
Mifepristone is taken with another drug called misoprostol to perform medication abortion, which accounts for more than half of all U.S. abortions. The drug also has other uses, such as the management of miscarriages.
Erik Baptist, an attorney for the conservative religious rights group Alliance Defending Freedom representing the pill’s challengers, said, “Our case seeking to put women’s health above politics continues on an expedited basis in the lower courts.”
The case could undercut federal regulatory authority over drug safety.
“I continue to stand by FDA’s evidence-based approval of mifepristone, and my administration will continue to defend FDA’s independent, expert authority to review, approve and regulate a wide range of prescription drugs,” Biden said.
The 5th Circuit on April 12 declined to block the curbs ordered by Kacsmaryk but did halt a part of the judge’s order that would have suspended FDA approval of the drug and effectively pulled it off the market.
The Supreme Court had faced a self-imposed deadline to act by 11:59 p.m. EDT (0359 GMT on Saturday) before restrictions on mifepristone ordered Kacsmaryk would have taken effect. Alito, who handles emergency matters arising in a group of states including Texas, last week issued a temporary pause of Kacsmaryk’s injunction until Wednesday and then extended it two more days.
A CHALLENGE TO THE FDA
Anti-abortion groups led by the recently formed Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and four anti-abortion doctors sued the FDA in November.
The FDA has called mifepristone safe and effective as demonstrated over decades of use by millions of Americans, adding that adverse effects are exceedingly rare.
Abortion rights groups praised the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday but said the case is not over.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Nancy Northup, president the Center for Reproductive Rights.
The restrictions, if they had been allowed to take effect, would have rolled back actions taken by the FDA in recent years to make it easier to access mifepristone after confirming the pill’s safety and efficacy. Those actions include in 2021 allowing it to be distributed by mail, and in 2016 approving its use up to 10 weeks of pregnancy instead of seven weeks, reducing the dosage required and cutting the number of in-person doctor visits from three to one.
Current drug labels for mifepristone would have had to be adjusted to account for the restored limits on its use in what could have been a months-long process, the Justice Department and Danco had said.
The restrictions would also have suspended the approval of the pill’s generic version made by GenBioPro Inc, which accounts for two-thirds of the mifepristone used in the United States for medication abortions.
A former Christian legal activist, Kacsmaryk had a long track record of opposing abortion before the U.S. Senate confirmed him in 2019 to a life-tenured position as a federal judge.
Since last year’s Supreme Court decision, 12 U.S. states have put in place outright bans while many others prohibit abortion after a certain length of pregnancy. The latest Republican-led move came in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis on April 13 signed a new law that bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
Kacsmaryk’s decision conflicted with an order also issued on April 7 in a separate case from Washington state directing the FDA to keep mifepristone available in 17 states and the District of Columbia.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York and John Kruzel in Washington; Additional reporting by Kanishka Singh and Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Will Dunham)
REVIEW: ‘Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children’
In the debate over medical treatment for children struggling with gender identity issues, who is watching out for the child patients? This question is one of several Hannah Barnes raises in Time to Think, her new book about the rise, decline, and fall of Britain’s Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) for children with gender dysphoria.
GIDS, the only gender clinic for children accredited by England’s National Health Service, was founded in 1989 by child psychiatrist Domenico Di Ceglie as a counseling service designed to help and support children struggling with gender identity issues and their families. Barnes, a BBC journalist and investigative reporter, follows the clinic’s transformation from a counseling service in the 1990s to a pill mill for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in the 2010s and beyond.
Barnes describes how, along that path, the tiny clinic’s mostly male patients—many of whom had exhibited opposite-gender behaviors from an early age—grew exponentially over the course of almost 30 years. The patient profile changed dramatically, and the service began receiving many more natal girls whose gender dysphoria had emerged as they neared puberty. Over a 10-year period between 2009 and 2019, Barnes writes, the gender clinic reduced requirements for psychosocial assessment of patients, reduced the age for prescribing puberty-blocking drugs, and became a major revenue source for the Tavistock and Portman health trust with which the clinic was affiliated.
Barnes’s book shows how groupthink creates blinders for even the brightest and most well-intentioned professionals. As clinicians in the Netherlands and United States began prescribing puberty blockers to children with gender dysphoria, GIDS came under greater and greater pressure to follow suit. Groups such as the Mermaids support group for families of transgender children and the Gender Identity Research and Education Society put political pressure on GIDS doctors to refer younger children for puberty blockers and hormones. Agency leaders enjoyed the positive press the clinic received and the revenue it generated. The clinic’s “gender-affirming” approach brought accolades from transgender activists.
But as the number of referrals grew, so did concerns regarding the children. While puberty blockers were originally regarded as fully reversible, researchers began questioning their effects on bone density and brain development in minors. In many cases, patients presented at the clinic with a recent history of gender dysphoria and also histories of parental conflict, time spent in foster care, suicidal ideations, extreme anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and sexual abuse. Often, parents or children came to the clinic pushing for an immediate referral for puberty blockers. A few parents expressed opinions that they’d rather have a trans child than a gay child.
Many GIDS staff raised questions. Were the children’s gender identity issues causing their co-occurring mental health issues, or vice-versa? Were some youth identifying as trans because they were ashamed of a same-sex attraction? Were young children truly able to give informed consent to procedures that would affect their adult sex lives at a time when they had no idea what that meant? Or as the judge in the Keira Bell case challenging the ability of children to give informed consent to these treatments put it: “How is it possible to have an age-appropriate discussion about the loss of orgasm with a young person who has never had one?”
Soon it became apparent that almost all children who were put on puberty blockers went on to receive cross-sex hormones, leading the clinic’s director to ask—but not answer—an important question: Were puberty blockers truly giving these children “time to think” or were they pushing them down a road inevitably leading to cross-sex hormones and surgery? Recognizing that many children with gender dysphoria adjust to their bodies and their sexuality as they become young adults, professionals at GIDS expressed concern that they might be harming children. At the same time, Barnes estimates that at least 70 percent of young teens were being referred for puberty blockers.
Those who spoke up were ignored or labeled transphobic. A court later found that GIDS executives instructed staff not to report any child protection concerns to the official responsible for child safeguarding.
Following investigations by BBC journalists, critical court decisions, and finally an NHS-instigated inquiry by preeminent pediatrician Dr. Hillary Cass, the Tavistock gender clinic is closing. But Barnes’s work raises significant lingering questions. The book paints a politically charged environment in which activists push to medicalize gender treatment for children; parents suffer seeing their children in distress; young patients threaten self-harm if not prescribed puberty blockers; and medical providers have financial incentives to provide a medical option. Given those circumstances, whose job is it to ensure that decisions are taken in the child’s best interests?
In the Keira Bell case that brought much attention in Britain to the issue of transgender medical treatment for children, the trial judge ruled that a court should make the decision regarding whether a child has the capacity to give informed consent to such treatment. That ruling was overturned on appeal. More recently, however, NHS created a multi-disciplinary group to fully review the circumstances of children under 16 who might be candidates for puberty blockers. The reviews are intended to ensure that children are safeguarded from harm and that their best interests are made a priority.
Events at Tavistock mirror what is happening in the United States. Trans activists push to shut down any questioning of medical intervention for children with gender dysphoria. When the New York Times published a series exploring both sides of the issue, GLAAD and other activists, including many Times staffers, complained that the coverage was transphobic. The reports of Jamie Reed, the whistleblower who worked at the child gender clinic at Washington University in St. Louis, reflect many of the concerns raised by Tavistock clinicians. As in the United Kingdom, there is a confluence of patients, parents, providers, and activists pushing to further medicalize the treatment of gender dysphoria in children.
Children with gender dysphoria want solutions. Parents want to see their children happy. Physicians want to help. But amid this wave, who is going to take responsibility for objectively deciding what is in the child’s best interests?
Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes Swift Press, 466 pp., $25 (paper)
Tom Rawlings is an Atlanta-based attorney and principal of Child Welfare & Justice Transformation, International.
REVIEW: ‘Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence’ by James Bamford
Journalists’ writing about American intelligence is fraught with danger. They usually have few, if any, unauthorized, active-duty sources. Rarely do they have access to working-level officials, especially within the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the eavesdropping National Security Agency, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which oversees counterespionage investigations of U.S. citizens. Long gone are the days when foreign correspondents rubbed shoulders with and even befriended operatives on the cocktail circuit. Polygraph exams can question press contact.
Back in Washington, senior intelligence and FBI officers, as is their wont, sometimes blab. They have enough routine contact with the rest of Washington to associate more freely with journalists. Polygraphs aren’t particularly troubling for them—such tests are really meant to instill fear among the rank and file.
Congressional members and staff, who can have access to a considerable amount of classified material, can be more loquacious with the press, especially when they think the White House is playing them. And senior Executive Branch officials, especially those in the White House, can leak as a matter of protocol. Most journalists on the intel beat become captives of the institutions that they cover. They can’t afford to alienate the officials who feed them.
Rarely do you get a journalist who takes the time to meld open-source, relatively unknown information with bits of classified information from disgruntled, authorized, or retired officials. The color of unimportant things—what a room or inside of a building may look like, personal habits of American or foreign officials, or the initialisms or names of hidden offices, units, or projects that suggest deeper knowledge—is a hallmark of this reporting. Nonetheless, if done well, if enough open-source material exists on a sensitive subject, the resulting tapestry might even be a passable verisimilitude of the truth.
More or less, this was James Bamford in 1982 when he published The Puzzle Palace, the first book to try to limn a picture of the NSA. He undertook arduous and clever open-source research. He had some color and texture from those who’d worked at Fort Meade. The NSA is a weird, humorless, middle-brow, semi-military institution where severe compartmentation is the norm; describing it truthfully should be deadly dull. Bamford juiced it up. His personal biases, however, were mostly checked.
The Bamford of today is different. He has become—perhaps he always was—a deeply ideological journalist, who takes what he can find, throws it all into a blender, and weaves a story damning his intended target. He no longer checks himself: What he writes was probably determined long before the “facts” were gathered. Conspiracy defines his work. And Spyfail is chock-full of interwoven foreign plots playing off complicit Americans.
His gravamen: U.S. counterintelligence has utterly fallen apart, in great part because it has become so politicized and captive to powerful interest groups. Foreigners can now influence U.S. elections; unlucky foreigners get scapegoated by the FBI, which is reliably incompetent and zealously politicized. Bamford’s primary target in this book—there are several, but the one that probably fills the most pages and pumps the author’s blood the fastest—is Israel. Israel and Jewish Americans allied with the country are constantly, in Bamford’s telling, working against the interests of the United States, bending the political establishment, on both the national and state level, to their will and often violating the law.
Israel has been a bugaboo for Bamford since his second book on the NSA, Body of Secrets, published in 2001. The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 during the Six-Day War featured prominently. Bamford is convinced the attack was intentional; he exuberantly discounts the evidence, including the official American report, that it was accidental.
In the last 20 years, he has made it crystal clear that he sees the American system as systemically rigged in Israel’s advantage, where senior U.S. officials routinely deceive and lie to protect the Jewish state—the not-too-subtle suggestion that such actions arise from Jewish economic and political clout, especially within the Democratic Party.
In Spyfail, Bamford is obsessed with Jewish influence. “Approximately two hundred thousand expat Americans in Israel, about the population of Fort Wayne, Indiana, would nevertheless play an important role in the very narrow 2016 U.S. presidential election,” he tells us. It’s not clear whether Bamford thinks this army of pro-Trumpers had a telling effect on the presidential election primarily by organizing in Israel and raising money from non-Americans, which is illegal, or by going to America and campaigning and collecting cash there or deploying nefarious Israeli covert-action methods (there are a number of ex-Mossad officers always doing malevolent things against Uncle Sam); it seems to be all three.
In Bamford’s breathless rendition of history, “throughout the summer and into the fall of 2016, Israel massively and illegally interfered in the U.S. presidential election. A top agent of Netanyahu was secretly offering intelligence and other covert assistance to Trump to get him elected; foreign cash in untold amounts was being pumped into Republican Party coffers, while Israelis, foreigners with no connection to the United States, were heavily involved in the U.S. presidential campaign. All with virtually no oversight or scrutiny by the FBI or the U.S. media.” In other words, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, not to mention all the other hungry online news outfits, missed the greatest espionage-influence operation in the history of the United States. Or as Bamford puts it in one of his calmer moments: “While the American media and political system fixated on Putin and his armies of cyber warriors, trolls, and bots, what was largely missed in 2016 was that Israel had developed a great deal of experience in secretly manipulating elections around the world.”
When reading Bamford, while unwinding his interconnected stories of dastardly intrigue, one thought repeatedly crossed my mind: He doesn’t get out much in Washington.
The Washington press corps is often lazy, even the best journalists love to be fed stories, TV news has become mind-numbing and herd-like, the FBI has a decades-long track-record of unimpressive counterespionage, and congressmen are too often proof that men and women of little talent and intelligence can do well in America. But really, would any sentient individual remotely familiar with the capital’s army of lib-left national security and foreign affairs reporters and columnists believe they wouldn’t have tenaciously gone after a story of such Israeli malevolence? In a heartbeat, journalists at National Public Radio would have reduced the number of stories about transgenderism, racial exclusion, and police brutality to make room for this one.
The silliness of Bamford’s conjectures when he rises above his granular storytelling reveal a journalist disconnected from Washington, horrified by U.S. politics, and not particularly well-versed in foreign affairs. Hyperbole and alarmism intertwine, most often about Israel’s sinister intentions. Bamford sees, for example, Bibi Netanyahu’s opposition to Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran in a novel light. “In so doing, Israel, for its own benefit, was deliberately putting Americans at risk of becoming involved in a nuclear war.” I’ve read these pages repeatedly and I can’t tell who would have exchanged nuclear missiles if Jerusalem had been successful in preventing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the executive agreement in 2018; nothing atomic has so far blown up.
Israeli-Jewish obsessions aside, Spyfail isn’t easy to read, in great part because the author is determined to detail us to death. An ocean of extraneous details is surely meant to carry the reader along, suggesting investigative vigor and authority. Occasionally, when we aren’t hacking our way through the underbrush, Bamford can say wise things. On the Steele dossier, which for a time drove the Russia investigation of Trump, he writes what should have been in the intro to all reporting and commentary about the former member of MI6: “In [Christopher] Steele’s case, it had been seven years since he left the government and nearly a quarter of a century since he served in Moscow. He had not even traveled to Russia or any of the former Soviet states, his areas of supposed expertise, since 2009. Whatever in-country contacts he might have had, therefore, were likely dead, long gone, or impossible to reach without greatly risking their safety. … For Steele, with no direct, physical access to in-country sources, he, like most ex-spooks, was left to spy from the comfort of his high-backed office chair, relying instead on often questionable and unreliable second- and third-hand sources.”
Bamford also makes a fairly persuasive case that Maria Butina, the supposed Red Sparrow on the Washington cocktail circuit, was railroaded by the FBI and the Justice Department. The bureau’s penchant to create terrorist and espionage cases out of unformed clay (some might call this “entrapment”) certainly appears to have happened with her.
But the better moments in Spyfail don’t save it. If you have a section in your personal library for conspiracy-mongering, then this work should be in it. Otherwise, go read a Le Carré novel—the anti-American and anti-Israeli biases and conspiracies arrive in much better prose and wittier cynicism.
Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence by James Bamford Twelve, 496 pp., $32
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Stanford University has taken more than $27 million from Chinese entities since the start of 2021
Stanford University has raked in more than $27 million from Chinese entities since the start of 2021, underscoring the Communist Party’s influence-peddling operations at major American colleges.
The funding came through 42 donations throughout 2021 and into early 2022, according to the latest figures publicly available through the Education Department’s reporting database. The database does not specify the exact source of the funding, beyond the country of origin, but details the total amount of every gift and contract from the CCP as part of federal reporting requirements. Stanford did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for further information about the donations or its partnerships with China.
The opacity of this funding—and the millions of dollars China hands out to a range of prominent U.S. universities—could place Stanford in Congress’s crosshairs as the Republican-controlled House ramps up investigations into Chinese influence-peddling. Stanford University is not the only university raking in cash from China—the University of Delaware, which houses the Biden Institute, since 2017 has taken more than $6 million from the country. The House Select Committee on China is eyeing a potential probe into the Chinese Communist Party’s supply of more than $426 million to U.S. universities since 2011, according to sources who spoke to the Free Beacon.
Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Select Committee on China, told the Free Beacon that Chinese funding for American schools has skyrocketed under the Biden administration because the administration stopped enforcing a federal code governing how foreign gifts and donations are reported. Lobbyists representing American schools have been pressuring the administration to relax regulations governing the reporting of foreign donations. The administration also nixed several federal investigations into CCP influence at U.S. universities, Banks said.
“Colleges are likely pocketing even more than reported,” according to Banks. “Even worse, the Biden administration shut down all ongoing investigations into the Chinese Communist Party’s influence efforts at our universities. House Republicans need to force Joe Biden’s hand and pass legislation to crack down on foreign influence at our universities.”
National security analysts have also been sounding the alarm over China’s presence in American higher learning. The country has been the largest source of foreign donations to U.S. universities since 2013, according to congressional information, and tuition from Chinese students is worth an estimated $12 billion per year.
Michael Sobolik, a China expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, said that “American higher education is addicted to funding from China,” money that he says “greases the skids for CCP malign influence in our colleges, like espionage, IP theft, and censorship.”
While Stanford is not the only university raking in Chinese cash, the school has publicly battled the perception that it is a breeding ground for Communist Party espionage.
In 2021, for instance, the school opened up a Chinese studies center that hosted “scholars, guests, and programs affiliated with groups backed by the Chinese Communist Party,” the Free Beaconreported at the time. The Stanford-run institute also has ties to China’s Peking University, which work alongside the Communist Party’s defense industry and nuclear weapons program.
That same year, federal authorities accused a Chinese researcher working at Stanford of secretly working as a member of China’s military. The researcher, Chen Song, “destroyed documents in a failed attempt to conceal her true identity,” according to prosecutors.
Concerns about China’s influence at Stanford come against the backdrop of the university’s parallel work on behalf of the Pentagon. The school in 2022 took in $1.9 million from the Defense Department to study “multiphase detonation of liquid aeropropulsion fuels,” which could apply to advanced military technologies such as hypersonic missiles—weapons of great interest to China. Other Pentagon grants revolve around work on the Air Force’s technology and science sectors.
Banks and other lawmakers say that China’s foothold at Stanford could endanger the operational security of these delicate Pentagon-funded research projects, particularly because the Communist regime is bent on stealing proprietary American research.
“It’s outrageous that schools like Stanford are taking millions from Beijing while partnering with [the Defense Department],” Banks said. “While some institutions like Purdue, a hypersonics research hub in my state, cut off all ties with its [Chinese] Confucius Institute over espionage concerns, not all schools take national security seriously, and the White House is making it easier than ever for them to cozy up with China.”
