Vicente Gonzalez’s South Texas district has long history of cartel activity

Before joining Congress, Vicente Gonzalez agreed to legally represent drug smugglers and gang leaders who flooded his border community with illegal drugs. Now, the Texas Democrat stresses the need to stop the flow of drugs and maintain “law and order.”

In 1997, Gonzalez founded his law firm, V. Gonzalez and Associates, through which the multimillionaire Democrat still earns tens of thousands of dollars a year. One year later, Gonzalez was retained to represent Richard Contreras, who pleaded guilty to federal charges after he conspired to import more than 2,200 pounds of marijuana from Mexico, court documents show.

In 1999, meanwhile, Gonzalez was retained to defend Frank Tijerina, the leader of a Texas street gang called the “Corrupt Criminal Mob.” Tijerina was sentenced to 30 months in prison on federal drug charges after conspiring to distribute nearly $420,000 worth of marijuana. Tijerina later pleaded guilty to selling large quantities of meth in a scheme that also started in the late 1990s. In total, Gonzalez agreed to represent an array of felony drug dealers who conspired to distribute eight pounds of MDMA, nearly half a pound of cocaine, and more than 4,000 pounds of marijuana, easily worth millions of dollars.

Gonzalez’s decision to represent high-level drug dealers in his South Texas border community—long a hotspot for Mexican cartels working to traffic narcotics into the United States—is at odds with the Democrat’s rhetoric as a member of Congress. In June 2018, Gonzalez called himself a “law and order member” who “believe[s] in strict border security.” Two months later, the Democrat said he was working to “bring security to our border” and ensure “drugs are not coming across as freely as they are now.” The issue could haunt his campaign as voters sour on resident Joe Biden’s border policies amid record-high illegal immigrant encounters—according to a February Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, just 32 percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of immigration.

A former Border Patrol agent who served in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, which Gonzalez represents, criticized the Democrat for the “stark inconsistencies” between “where he’s at today versus what he did before.” “Most South Texas Democrats act as if they’re not threatened to lose their jobs,” the former agent told the Washington Free Beacon. “[Gonzalez] is on that list—he’s been very comfortable, at least until now.”

Gonzalez’s campaign, which touts his record as an attorney, did not return a request for comment. 

McAllen, Texas, where Gonzalez lives, is no stranger to cartel activity. The city borders the Mexican city of Reynosa, which is known as a “key trafficking point” for “cartel violence.” As a result, the New York Post reported in 2019, McAllen is “‘ground zero’ in the border crisis between the U.S. and Mexico” and even features “a new Maserati dealership and ads for Rolex and Cartier watches” as cartel traffickers look to launder their cash. Roughly two decades earlier—as Gonzalez defended drug dealers in the area—federal agents arrested individuals in McAllen and nearby Brownsville who were implicated in a Mexican trafficking ring that held more than 5,200 kilograms of cocaine, nearly 10,000 pounds of marijuana, and roughly $11 million in cash, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration press release.

Despite the long-standing flow of cartel drugs into McAllen, Gonzalez has criticized former president Donald Trump’s border wall, which he called “useless” and “wasteful.” Instead of funding the wall, the Democrat argued, Congress should send billions of dollars to Central American countries to slow illegal immigration. Gonzalez also said the idea that the wall would “stop illegal drugs from coming to our country” is a “myth.” Former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director Ronald Vitiello disputed that claim, calling the wall an “important” tool that “makes the work of agents safer.”

“It provides an anchor for the operation, it provides an anchor for technology, and it makes the agents safer, because they have the ability to slow people down and have this base of operations,” Vitiello told the Free Beacon. “So saying that doesn’t work is not an informed opinion. It doesn’t comport with my experience and wisdom.”

Gonzalez made big money from his legal career, his financial disclosures show. The Democrat owns an array of rental properties—his latest disclosure lists eight in McAllen, two in Washington, D.C., one in Monterrey, Mexico, and one in Madrid, Spain. Those properties earned Gonzalez at least $235,000 in 2020. Gonzalez also earned a combined $280,000 in “attorney fees” income from his law firm in 2019 and 2020, according to his disclosures.

Gonzalez in 2020 narrowly defeated Republican challenger Monica De La Cruz in Texas’s 15th Congressional District. One year later, he announced his decision to run in the 34th Congressional District in 2022, as the state’s redistricting process made that area considerably more blue. Still, Republicans are hopeful that Republican congresswoman Mayra Flores can give Gonzalez a run for his money in November. 

Flores in June became both the first Mexican-born woman elected to Congress and the first Republican to represent parts of the 34th Congressional District since 1870 after she won a special election against Democrat Dan Sanchez. That race saw Flores best Sanchez in historical Democratic strongholds—the Republican, for example, won in Cameron County, which is 90 percent Hispanic and voted for Biden by double digits less than two years ago. After her win, the New York Times said Flores’s win marked “the rise of the far-right Latina,” citing the Republican’s support for religiosity, strong borders, and traditional values.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the top Republican negotiator for the Senate’s newly unveiled gun control bill, has said he will not take part in a new round of gun control talks concerning proposals aimed at limiting access to certain rifles or expanding background checks.

The lawmaker was asked by reporters on July 12 whether Republicans would negotiate with Democrats on proposals that would limit the availability of some sporting rifles along with other gun control reforms, to which Cornyn simply replied, “No, we’re done,” according to The Hill.

The GOP lawmaker’s comments came shortly after resident Joe Biden on July 11 urged Congress to pass laws implementing a new ban on civilian sporting rifles such as the AR-15, referring to them as “assault weapons,” following the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Highland Park, Illinois.

“We’re living in a country awash in weapons of war,” Biden said at the White House, seemingly in reference to civilian sporting rifles. “What is the rationale for these weapons outside war zones?”

“I am determined to ban these weapons again and high-capacity magazines that hold 30 rounds and let mass shooters fire hundreds of bullets in a matter of minutes,” he said. “I’m not going to stop until we do it.”

‘Gun Control Bill’

Biden also touted the Safer Communities Act passed in June which includes federal funding to enforce red flag laws and enhances background checks for gun buyers between the ages of 18 and 21.

It also makes obtaining guns through so-called “straw purchases”—in which an individual agrees to buy a firearm for someone else who is banned from possessing one—a federal offense and prohibits individuals from obtaining or possessing a firearm for at least five years if they’ve been convicted of a misdemeanor crime or domestic violence in a relationship.

The National Rifle Association has taken aim at the act, stating on Twitter that it is simply a “gun control bill,” adding that “it does little to truly address violent crime while opening the door to unnecessary burdens on the exercise of Second Amendment freedom by law-abiding gun owners.”

Cornyn said on July 12 that he has not had any contact from Democratic senators regarding a new round of talks over legislation.

“It seemed to me to be yesterday the president talked about everything that they wanted but they didn’t get in the bill,” Cornyn said of Biden. “But the sort of things he was calling for don’t have support in the Senate or in the Congress on a bipartisan basis. In other words, they can’t get done.”

Meanwhile, the aftermath of the May 24 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, is still being felt, with family members and friends of the 21 victims demanding to know why it took law enforcement officers 77 minutes to enter the unlocked classroom at Robb Elementary School and kill the gunman, Salvador Ramos.

Parents have reportedly asked to see police body camera footage and listen to the 911 calls made on the day of the shooting, but those pleas have allegedly gone unanswered.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A growing number of hosts are leaving a Spanish-language radio station after it was bought by a group backed by billionaire leftist George Soros.

Nelson Rubio announced his resignation from Radio Mambi on July 12, following Dania Alexandrino and Lourdes Ubieta.

Radio Mambi “has been the voice of the Cuban exile, the voice of conservative men and women who defend freedom, democracy, family principles, truth, and faith in God,” Rubio said during a press conference in Miami. “Many in this community have felt betrayed by the acquisition of this radio by a company financed by the left liberal extremist, George Soros.”

Rubio and Ubieta are joining Americano Media, where Alexandrino already had a show.

“Being faithful to my principles I couldn’t accept being part of any business associated with these leftist activists and their socialist agenda,” Alexandrino told reporters.

Radio Mambi was one of 18 radio stations in 10 cities that was recently purchased by the Latino Media Network from Univision. The stations were said to reach about one-third of U.S. Latinos. The deal was $60 million, all cash, according to the network.

The network, which did not respond to a request for comment, said its funding came from “leading Latino investors” and Lakestar Finance LLC, an investment entity affiliated with the Soros Fund Management, one of the many entities owned or linked to Soros.

‘Relevant Content’

Jess Morales Rocketto, one of the network’s founders, said in a statement that the group “hope[s] to create relevant content for radio and other audio platforms with content that our community can trust and rely on” and “is going to ensure that the Latino community continues to be served with the news and information that local communities deserve.”

The transition to the new ownership will not happen until the Federal Communications Commission approves the deal. The network said the deal is expected to finalize in quarter four of 2023. The network also said it intended to retain employees who work at the stations.

Americano Media bills itself as the nation’s first national conservative Hispanic network in Spanish. It launched in March and broadcasts on Sirius XM, GETTR, and applications, with plans to launch on television soon.

CEO Ivan Garcia Hidalgo said during the briefing that the purchase of Mambi “indicated to us that the Left is trying to silence truth and the conservative narrative, and we offered an opportunity to these great hosts and talent to come to Americano and continue their work.”

“These individuals make up a powerful team that has fled from what will become a voice of oppression and disinformation, to come join a strong network of Hispanics that care deeply about their communities,” he added.

Brazilian journalist Paulo Figueiredo was among others sounding the alarm, telling EpochTV’s “Crossroads” that the Latino Media Network move stemmed from a desire to get Hispanics voting for Democrats again, as more and more have shifted to Republicans in recent elections.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A picture’s worth a thousand…[US Patriot]

Starbucks announced Monday it is closing 16 stores across the country, citing crime and safety concerns at the locations, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The company is shuttering locations in Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.  Each city is governed by Democratic mayors and is undergoing a spike in crime. In a message to employees, Starbucks executives said the company has been getting “a lot” of incident reports of criminal activity, including drug use in stores. “We cannot serve as partners if we don’t first feel safe at work,” they said.

Starbucks, which has lost roughly a third of its value over the past year, also announced it will give managers more leeway with store policy to deter criminals. Managers will be able to close bathrooms to deter drug use and limit customer seating. Starbucks said it will also offer baristas additional training in deescalating conflicts.  

Starbucks’s move comes two years after the company downplayed violence amid rioting following the murder of George Floyd. In May 2020, Starbucks released a public statement praising racial justice activists and quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Kevin Johnson, the company’s CEO, stressed the importance of the “courageous conversations” going on at the time.

Starbucks has worked to quash unionization efforts across the country, and two of the Seattle locations the company is closing are unionized. A Starbucks union leader when interviewed by the Journal said the company should have involved employees in the decision to close the stores.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Montgomery County to teach Southern Poverty Law Center-inspired ‘social justice’ curriculum

This is treason, pure and simple. The oligarchs funding this assault and other assaults like it are the only ones practicing white supremacy [US Patriot]

Maryland’s largest school district next school year will teach elementary schoolers how to combat “privilege” and “systemic racism,” even as about half of its students lack proficiency in math and language arts.

The Montgomery County Board of Education amended its fourth and fifth grade social studies curriculum to include “Social Justice Standards” for “antiracist” education, according to a July 5 announcement. The revised standards, which were developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, lay out scenarios for students to exercise “antibias,” such as responding to a classmate with two mothers or a boy playing with dolls. Students also learn about their “identity” in the context of the “dominant culture” and “recognize unfairness on the individual level (e.g., biased speech) and injustice at the institutional or systemic level (e.g., discrimination).”

The curriculum, which will take effect in 2023-2024 school year, comes as Montgomery County’s most recent report card reveals elementary school students did not meet district-mandated academic achievement goals. Report cards also have not been published since the pandemic.

A mother of a rising fifth grader at Montgomery County Public Schools told the Washington Free Beacon the standards are reminiscent of her upbringing in Poland before the fall of the Soviet Union. She said she doesn’t want her children to carry the heavy burden of indoctrination that she had to bear growing up in a communist nation.

“It’s robbing children of their childhood,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing her job. “I am not against social justice at all. I am not against equality, but I feel like this has to be an organic conversation between a parent and a child. … Adults are pushing their agenda on children. I just don’t think this is the right thing to do. It’s so disheartening and upsetting.”

Democrats and left-wing school officials across the country have advocated for education initiatives to forthrightly teach children about systemic racism. Last week, Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes called the founding of the United States “awful” and said the country must take steps to “repair the harm” through education, the Free Beacon reported. Public school officials in Virginia in 2021 forced teachers to update curricula with lessons on identity and privilege to dismantle “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.” One third grade teacher in California asked students last year to identify themselves as “privileged” or “oppressed.”

Harold Maldonado, the father of a rising fourth grader at MCPS, told the Free Beacon he is “concerned and appalled” at what his child will be taught and is considering homeschooling.

“We as parents need to wake up and see the writing on the wall because our kids are being taught inappropriate things,” Maldonado said. “I want my kid to learn about math and history, and for her to improve her reading, and this is not what education is about.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a wealthy liberal advocacy group, began its effort to remake America’s classrooms in 1991, encouraging “tolerance” education while promoting the work of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, who founded the Weather Underground, a left-wing, militant group responsible for multiple bombings in the 1970s. In 2018, the SPLC published a report titled “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” which suggested educators had not given sufficient attention in curricula to the issue of slavery in the nation’s history. As part of a network of other left-wing groups, the SPLC has developed the standards now known to push critical race theory in schools.

MCPS is in the process of developing similar curricula for kindergarten through third grade to institute by 2026. Its curriculum office did not respond to a request for comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Scholars at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft cut bait

A few years ago, the Koch brothers and George Soros had a dream. What if the anti-war left joined forces with the isolationist right and worked together to bring U.S. foreign policy back to the 1930s? 

From this unholy alliance sprung the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The mission: make America neutral again. Finally appeasers in Washington had a safe space to apologize for Russian oligarchs, Iranian terrorists, and Chinese communists. 

Well, all good things must come to an end.

An all-star in the Koch-Soros foreign policy alliance, Joseph Cirincione, announced on Thursday his resignation from the Quincy Institute: “They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies,” he told Politico.

Cirincione is not just some disgruntled scholar. He is the former president of Ploughshares, a grant-making organization that was not just a recipient of the Soros organization’s politicized philanthropy, but a gatekeeper and driver of it—deciding which pinkos would prosper and which would starve. Mother Jones reports that Cirincione helped connect Quincy to major donors in its early days.

His change of heart on Quincy is surely a weathervane for other elements of the Soros network. Indeed, Soros himself has been signaling in the last year that he favors a much tougher policy on China than the one offered up by the Quincy crowd, which released a major study in June that found the Chinese military build up was nothing to worry about and has warned of the perils of “threat inflation” when it comes to China’s military expansion. 

Soros, by contrast, came very close to endorsing regime change. “It is to be hoped that Xi Jinping may be replaced by someone less repressive at home and more peaceful abroad,” he told an audience at the Hoover Institution in January, calling Xi “the greatest threat that open societies face today.” 

Trita Parsi, a co-founder and executive vice president of Quincy, as well as somebody who could be confused for an Iranian agent—at least according to a federal judge—told Mother Jones he’s bewildered that Cirincione would suggest the think tank was avoiding criticism of Russia. But he acknowledges that Quincy is “not going along with the idea that it’s a good thing to change the objectives in Ukraine towards weakening Russia, because we believe that could lead to endless war.”

As the Quincy Institute demonstrated so spectacularly in Afghanistan, one sure fire way to end endless war is to lose the war quickly and all at once. 

As for the interpersonal drama that we assume is engulfing the Quincy Institute, and the enmity growing between teams Koch and Soros—may that war truly be endless.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The Biden Justice Department has yet to take action against abortion extremists menacing pro-life clinics and members of the Supreme Court. Republican lawmakers are resolved to hold leadership accountable after the midterm elections—even if that means impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), who is in line to take over the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans prevail in November, didn’t take a Garland impeachment inquiry off the table in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon. Jordan cited a range of alleged misconduct, from failure to enforce black-letter law to protect clinics and justices, to secret collusion with leftwing groups opposed to parents protesting woke curricula changes.

“That’ll be a decision that will be made by the entire conference,” Jordan said of an impeachment push.

The oversight planning is a response to conflict roiling the country following the High Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Pro-abortion protesters tried running Justice Brett Kavanaugh out of a downtown Washington, D.C., steakhouse on Wednesday night, weeks after a gunman came to his home planning to assassinate him. And the militant pro-abortion network Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility for more than a dozen acts against pro-life clinics and churches, ranging from vandalism to fire-bombing.

It is a federal crime to demonstrate outside of a judge’s home with intent to influence deliberations. Regular pro-abortion demonstrations outside the homes of the conservative justices seem to fit that bill exactly. The Justice Department has taken no action against protesters as of this writing. Local police told inquiring neighbors that federal agencies are declining to enforce the judicial anti-picketing law, according to a Fox News report.

Jordan wonders whether the Justice Department and the White House are following a template.

“The key question we would like to find out, if in fact the American people put us in control, is was this similar to what happened with parents at school board meetings? In other words, was the Biden White House working with some outside left wing influence groups, and also then communicating that information to the DOJ?” Jordan said.

The Ohio Republican added that a dozen whistleblowers have quietly come forward to speak about the Biden Justice Department and FBI matters, though he declined to get into specifics.

The Free Beacon was first to report that White House aides colluded with the National School Boards Association to push the Justice Department into investigating parents protesting critical race theory and gender ideology as domestic terrorists.

It’s also a federal crime to attack or destroy houses of worship and clinics for pregnant women. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who enforces those laws, has derided pro-life clinics in the past. While Biden administration officials have shared intelligence assessments with clerics and local law enforcement, the administration has yet to make even a single arrest or indictment related to dozens of attacks on churches and pro-life crisis pregnancy centers.

There have been almost 50 documented instances of violence, vandalism, or intimidation at houses of worship and pro-life clinics since the Dobbs draft leaked, according to a June report from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

House Republicans will be better positioned than their Senate counterparts to force Biden officials to cooperate if they stonewall investigators. Senate committee rules incentivize, but do not require, bipartisan cooperation when issuing subpoenas. The House has no such constraints. And House committees have historically taken the lead on compelled testimony and sharing of evidence.

Republican senators are putting public pressure on federal law enforcement to take immediate action. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to FBI director Christopher Wray in June requesting a briefing on the bureau’s efforts to combat pro-abortion extremism.

“Our law enforcement officers are obliged to duly enforce the laws of our country—not just those that are politically suitable to the current administration,” Grassley’s letter reads.

“We’re usually the tip of the spear in terms of shining a light on issues and embarrassing an agency into compliance,” a Republican Senate aide told the Free Beacon. “The more attention they get for ignoring congressional oversight, the worse it looks for them. And that’s a pretty effective tactic for us.”

Outside groups are also pressing GOP lawmakers for accountability. Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, said there is ample reason to remove Garland from office. Davis was nominations chief for Grassley during the Kavanaugh confirmation and led the outside support team for Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.

“When Republicans reclaim the House in January, they must impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland,” Davis told the Free Beacon. “There must be consequences for his dangerous dereliction of duty that has led to highly dangerous attacks on the Supreme Court of the United States.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

WNBA star Brittney Griner is still imprisoned in Russia, and political leaders in America have begun speaking out about efforts to bring her back.

At the same time, Hollywood star Nick Searcy said there are more important priorities.

“Tell you what: when the @joebiden Occupation releases the Jan. 6th political prisoners who have been held in a DC gulag for 18 months without bail, maybe then I’ll give a damn about some basketball player who hates America who is in jail in Russia because of her drug habit,” Searcy wrote on Twitter.

Tell you what: when the @joebiden Occupation releases the Jan. 6th political prisoners who have been held in a DC gulag for 18 months without bail, maybe then I’ll give a damn about some basketball player who hates America who is in jail in Russia because of her drug habit.

— Nick Searcy, INSURRECTIONAL FILM & TELEVISION STAR (@yesnicksearcy) July 10, 2022

Harsh as his statement was, Searcy was correct that Americans should not have their constitutional rights stripped in this country.

Last year, Searcy teamed up with filmmaker Chris Burgard for a documentary called “Capitol Punishment.”

In the documentary, Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin detailed the treatment he received following the Capitol incursion on Jan. 6, 2021.

“They put me in a cell by myself, total solitary confinement, in a cell not much bigger than a walk-in closet,” Griffin said in the film. He remembered being called an “effing white cracker” on multiple occasions.

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In December, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar further detailed the alleged rights violations the prisoners had to endure.

“They have been beaten by the guards. They are called white supremacist,” Greene said, according to the Post Millennial. “They are denied religious services, haircuts, shaving, the ability to trim their fingernails.

“There’s more outrageous things happening there. They’re denied time with their attorneys. They are denied the ability to even see their families and have their families visit there. They are denied bail and being held there without bail.”

While Biden has yet to address these allegations, he said on Friday that he replied to a letter from Griner, The Guardian reported. Griner wrote to Biden about her fear of being stuck in Russia long term, but he reportedly assured her of his efforts to bring her home.

“I was able to read [Biden’s] letter, and it brought [me] so much joy, as well as BG,” said Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner.

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Top Dem Admits Brutal Truth Behind AOC’s Effort to Impeach Clarence Thomas

“I believe every word that she said to [Biden] he understood, and he sees her as a person, and he has not forgotten her, which was her biggest cry in her letter.”

She said Biden promised he is “exhausting all efforts” to get Griner home.

While there is nothing wrong with Biden trying to get Griner home, he should be making the same or more effort to ensure prisoners in the United States are not being mistreated.

By focusing efforts on Griner instead of major issues occurring in America, Biden is showing just how powerful his political bias truly is.

A New York City bodega clerk who has been accused of murder in a scuffle started by the boyfriend of an irate customer tried to avoid a confrontation with the man he killed, according to a new video.

Bodega workers Jose Alba killed Austin Simon during a July 1 scuffle that took place behind the counter of the bodega when Simon instigated the incident. Video showed Alba being pushed, then recovering to stab Simon.

New video obtained by the New York Post showed what took place before the final act of the drama.

“Papa, I don’t want a problem, papa,” Alba, said as Simon walked behind the counter.

Simon was there because his girlfriend had an argument with Alba after trying to buy a bag of chips for her 10-year-old daughter. Her electronic benefits card was declined, which the woman claims was followed by Alba grabbing the bag from the child.

The video shows Alba as the woman asked, “Did you put food?” when he rang up the sale.

“OK, mama, let me do it another time. My God,” Alba said.

“There’s money on there,” the woman said.

The edited footage then incuded the woman cursing at Alba.

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“You can’t touch my daughter. Don’t snatch that out of my daughter, you f****** piece of s***!” she said. The video does not show if Alba took the bag from the girl. It does, however, record the threats that flow from the woman’s mouth.

“I’m gonna bring my n***** down here, and he gonna f*** you up. My n***** is gonna come down here right now and f*** you up!”

“That’s not my fault, it’s not working,” Alba replied and went on serving other customers. When asked if the woman and girl took something, he said he took it back.

Simon then storms in behind the counter.

“What’s up with you? N***** what is wrong with you?” he said.

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Francisco Marte, the founder of the Bodega and Small Business Group, said Alba was “very sorry for what happened.”

“He knew that his life was threatened. He was protecting himself … or we would be looking to bury him today,” Marte said.

This is Jose Alba and he’s being charged with second degree murder by Soros funded prosecutor Alvin Bragg for stabbing a violent ex-con to death who came into the Bodega he was working in and attacked him.

The absolute state of New York.

The absolute state of progressivism. pic.twitter.com/a3q2peim51

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 8, 2022

Alba was originally jailed on $250,000 bail. That was lowered to $50,000 on Thursday, and Alba was back home, according to the New York Post.

In an Op-Ed in the New York Post, Adam B. Coleman summed up why the Alba incident has resonated across New York City.

“Alba understood the reality: No one was coming to save him. He needed police protection, but there was none in sight at that moment,” Coleman wrote.

“Americans used to take solace, perhaps naively, in the knowledge that their right to protect their personhood would always be respected by our justice system, but New York is rapidly proving that presumption false. Jose Alba now must face an uphill battle, fighting to save his good name after being tarred as a murderer and for his freedom, his most cherished asset,” he wrote.

“If Alba is somehow found guilty for fighting back against criminal tyranny, then New Yorkers should understand this new reality: When you’re in danger, no one is coming to save you, and if you try to save yourself, you’re likely to be condemned for it.”

Resident Joe Biden’s administration cannot ignore federal law that says authorities must arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens convicted of certain crimes and/or aliens who are ordered deported, an appeals court has ruled.

Federal law says the attorney general “shall take into custody,” “shall detain,” and “shall remove” illegal aliens convicted of certain crimes and aliens who are ordered deported. But the Biden administration has attempted to prevent the holding and removal of some illegal immigrants convicted of those crimes.

“The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Biden appointee, said in a memorandum in September 2021 outlining new guidance that narrowed immigration enforcement priorities.

Mayorkas also said that immigration agents should not “rely on the fact of conviction … alone” when deciding to take action against an alien.

That has led to a sharp drop in criminal aliens detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said. The memo and others like it has led to a spike in the rescinding of criminal detainers, or orders to local authorities to detain aliens, court documents show. One hundred and seventy aliens had detainers rescinded in Texas between Jan. 20, 2021, and Feb. 15, 2022, with at least 17 failing to comply with their parole conditions and four committing fresh crimes.

“The data show that the Final Memo ‘increases the number of aliens with criminal convictions and aliens with final orders of removal released into the United States,’ and Texas has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that the cost of that reality has fallen on it and will continue to do so,’” the panel said in a ruling dated July 6.

DHS is trying “to claim it acts within the bounds of federal law while practically disregarding that law,” it added.

The panel upheld an earlier ruling from U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee who said the policy had resulted in criminal aliens “roam[ing] free” and ordered the department not to follow the memo.

The Biden administration had appealed, arguing that the lower court order should be overturned because the states lack standing, because they have not suffered any injury, and because any injury that the speculative injury was not traceable to the Mayorkas memo. The appeals court panel disagreed.

Response

Biden “tried to throw out immigration law, saying DHS didn’t have to detain criminal illegals. The court now says he must,” Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

“Had the administration won its stay, it would have gone on releasing criminal aliens while its appeal of the district court’s ruling wound through the courts,” added Dale Wilcox, executive director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which filed a brief in the case. “We are pleased that didn’t happen, and applaud the Fifth Circuit for denying the administration the extra time it sought to violate the law and endanger Americans.”

The administration is expected to appeal, which could send the case to the full Fifth Circuit or to the Supreme Court, which recently ruled the administration can end the Trump era “Remain in Mexico” policy while explicitly avoiding weighing in on whether the detention requirement outlined in federal law is “subject to principles of law enforcement discretion” and whether the administration’s current approach to immigration enforcement violates the provision.

The panel consisted of Judges Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee; Edith Clement, a George W. Bush appointee; and Kurt Engelhardt, a Trump appointee.

Its ruling diverged from an opinion from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in a similar case brought by the states of Arizona, Montana, and Ohio that in April overturned (pdf) a lower court’s nationwide preliminary injunction that blocked the same guidance.

The Fifth Circuit panel said its divergence is explainable by the benefit of bench trial and precedent in other cases brought before the court. “Until there is a contrary ruling from the Supreme Court, we adhere to our precedent and the facts found by the district court,” it said.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Senator Raphael Warnock might have broken campaign finance rules

Democratic Georgia senator Raphael Warnock might have violated federal law by paying campaign lawyers to represent him in a personal lawsuit, Politico reported Wednesday.

Warnock last year paid his campaign’s lawyers, the Elias Law Group, to represent him in a personal lawsuit involving actions before he became a senator. That decision might have breached federal election law, experts say.

This is far from the first time Warnock, who this year will square off against Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a closely watched campaign, has faced legal trouble. Warnock’s ex-wife says the Georgia senator harassed her and neglected their children. As the senior pastor of a Maryland church in 2002, Warnock repeatedly disrupted an investigation into child abuse at a church-sponsored summer camp, leading to his arrest.

Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias, whose law firm represents Warnock’s campaign and received the campaign funds, called the payment “completely legal,” saying the FEC has ruled that spending campaign money on personal expenses is permissible.

None of the FEC rulings that Elias cited, however, says anything about lawsuits in which the events occurred before the officeholder held office, Politico found.

Political law attorney Charlie Spies, a Republican, disagrees with Elias.

“If Warnock is using campaign money to pay for a lawsuit that predates his running for office,” Spies told Politico, “then by definition it existed irrespective of his candidacy and would be impermissible to use campaign funds on.”

“I don’t think his donors are giving for him to fund personal lawsuits,” Spies said.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

‘We should commit ourselves to doing everything we can do to repair the harm,’ says Mandela Barnes

Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes called the founding of the United States “awful” and said the country must take steps to “repair the harm” through education, according to a video of his comments.

“Things were bad. Things were terrible. The founding of this nation? Awful,” said Barnes in a video clip of his remarks from a question-and-answer session in Portage, Wis., on August 19, 2021. “The impacts are felt today; they’re going to continue to be felt unless we address it in a meaningful way.”

The comments, which Wisconsin radio host Dan O’Donnell first reported on Sunday, could fuel concerns about the candidate’s history of controversial statements and far-left policy positions.

Barnes, who serves as Wisconsin lieutenant governor and is locked in a competitive primary race against hedge fund billionaire Alex Lasry and state treasurer Sarah Godlewski, has struggled to distance himself from some of the more radical policies on the left.

He has faced criticism for posing with a T-shirt that called for abolishing immigration enforcement, sponsoring a bill that would eliminate cash bail, and partnering and fundraising with “Defund the Police” groups.

Barnes made the comments about the U.S. founding during a national debate last summer over critical race theory in K-12 schools. Critical race theory argues the United States is systemically bigoted and teaches subjects such as math, reading, and history through the lenses of race and racism.

Many parents have called for banning critical race theory from public schools. Barnes in his speech appeared to defend the curriculum.

“Imagine being so ashamed of how we got to this place in America that you outlaw teaching,” he said.

While the founding of the United States was “awful,” he added, “We are here now, and we should commit ourselves to doing everything we can do to repair the harm, because it still exists today—the harm, the damage. Whether it was colonization, or whether it was slavery.”

This isn’t the first time Barnes appeared to stand up for critical race theory. Last June, he argued that it was no worse than tax dollars going to fund religious education.

“Many of the same people rallying against critical race theory on the basis of ‘indoctrination’ are totally cool with tax dollars going towards religious education,” he wrote on Twitter. “Make it make sense.”

Barnes’s campaign in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon defended his remarks.

“Painting the Lt. Governor’s comment as anything other than a condemnation of slavery is a sad GOP attempt to distract from Ron Johnson trying to literally overthrow the government of this country and strip reproductive rights from millions of Americans,” said spokeswoman Maddy McDaniel.

A Marquette poll in June showed Barnes and Lasry virtually tied in the race, with Godlewski a distant third.

The winner of the Democratic primary, which is scheduled for August 9, will face off against Sen. Ron Johnson (R.) in one of the most competitive Senate races of the midterm elections.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) in a recent fundraising email lied about election forecaster FiveThirtyEight‘s predictions in multiple Senate races, FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver said Tuesday.

“Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight just announced that Democrats are poised to win SIX Senate seats this November,” Pelosi wrote in the email, incorrectly saying the site predicts Democratic victories in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Ohio.

“This is straight-up misinformation,” Silver tweeted in response. “We have Democrats as heavy underdogs in Florida and Ohio.”

Pelosi, who routinely sends out emotionally charged campaign emails, has a long history of making false or misleading statements. Pelosi recently attempted to justify skyrocketing inflation under President Joe Biden by saying that “when unemployment goes down, inflation goes up,” a claim that PolitiFact rated mostly false, and blaming Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inflation started surging under Biden months before Russia’s invasion, the Washington Free Beacon has reported.

Silver’s FiveThirtyEight model projects that Republicans have a 54 percent chance of winning the Senate. The model rates Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada as tossups. The election forecaster says that Republicans have a 90 percent chance of victory in Ohio and a 94 percent chance in Florida. Of the states Pelosi mentioned in her email, New Hampshire is the only one that FiveThirtyEight predicts will stay blue.

Silver’s model for the House predicts that Pelosi will lose her job as speaker, forecasting that Republicans have an 87 percent chance of retaking the chamber.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The firearms industry abandons blue states to avoid crushing regulations

Of all the businesses that are moving out of blue states, those in the gun industry lead the pack.

Storied firearms manufacturers, some of them having operated in northern states for centuries, are now heading South. Remington, founded in 1816 and America’s oldest gun maker, announced in November it was moving its headquarters from New York to Georgia.

In announcing the move, which will include a $100 million investment in a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility and create 856 new jobs, Remington CEO Ken D’Arcy said, “the decision to locate in Georgia is very simple. The state of Georgia is not only a business-friendly state, it’s a firearms-friendly state.”

Also exiting New York is Dark Storm Industries, a gun manufacturer and retailer. They will be moving to Titusville, Florida, where they have begun construction on a new manufacturing plant, bringing up to 75 jobs to Florida.

“If you’re in the gun industry and you have the opportunity to move to Florida, you’re figuring it out, that’s where you want to be,” Dark Star Communications Manager Kevin Elder told The Epoch Times. When the company asked its employees if they would consider moving south, they didn’t hesitate, Elder said, “they were ready to go.”

Dark Star was founded to make firearms that are compliant with New York’s strict regulations, “but they just keep adding on more and more restrictions and more hoops to jump through,” Elder said. “Our clientele is very friendly, and our community, and we try to give back as much as we can. We do a lot of charity work and local law enforcement loves us. But as far as the state itself, they don’t want that kind of stuff up here.”

Elder said that Dark Star’s problems in New York went beyond state regulations to also include banks and payments companies. “We had to change credit card processors,” as well as the company’s bank, he said, because they were denying service to firearms companies, despite their strong creditworthiness.

Tennessee has been another popular destination, attracting Smith & Wesson in September and Troy Industries last May, both from Massachusetts. Even before these moves were announced, Tennessee was already home to more than 20 firearms manufacturing companies.

Smith & Wesson’s move to Maryville, Tennessee, will include a $125 million investment and create 750 new jobs. Among the many reasons cited by CEO Mark Smith were new laws proposed by Massachusetts’ Democrat-led legislature banning the sale, possession and manufacture of “assault weapons” and “large-capacity magazines” for civilian use. Smith noted that these products comprised 60 percent of his company’s revenue.

Steve Troy, CEO of Troy Industries also cited the “changing climate for firearms manufacturers” in Massachusetts, which “determined the need for our relocation to Tennessee.” Troy Industries will invest $7 million in Clarksville, Tennessee, adding 75 jobs.

Other firearms companies leaving blue states include Kimber Manufacturing, which left New York for Alabama; Winchester Centerfire, which left Illinois for Mississippi; Stag Arms, which left Connecticut for Wyoming; and Magpul Industries, which left Colorado for Wyoming and Texas.

The migration of the firearms industry is part of a wider movement by American firms to escape high-tax, high-regulation states like California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey. But gun makers are in a particular hurry to exit these states in response to new laws and regulations seemingly intended to drive them out.

What all of the destination states have in common is that “they are respectful of the contributions that these businesses make to state economies,” National Shooting Sports Foundation Managing Director Mark Oliva told The Epoch Times. “And they are respectful of the Second Amendment rights of consumers who are buying these firearms.”

The firearms industry is a rapidly growing business. “Our last economic impact report showed that we have grown 270 percent since 2008,” Oliva said, “and it’s an industry that continues to grow every year.” About 20 million firearms were purchased in 2021, the second-highest year on record after 2020, when nearly 22 million were sold. Firearms owners are an increasingly diverse group, with women and minorities comprising the fastest growing percentage of new gun owners.

American small-arms makers also supply police and the military. According to the 1933 Buy America Act, the federal government must buy from American companies whenever possible. This has caused many foreign arms makers, including Austria-based Glock, Italy-based Beretta and Czech-based CZG to set up manufacturing in the United States. Beretta initially set up manufacturing in Maryland, but moved to Tennessee in 2016. Glock manufactures in Smyrna, Georgia, and CZG bought Colt Manufacturing in 2021, giving it production facilities in the United States and Canada.

However, efforts to put the gun industry out of business are continuing, both at the federal and state level. Last June, New York State passed a law making it easier for the state and its residents to sue gun makers for injuries caused by the guns they make. New Jersey and California are looking at similar legislation, and in February, grieving parents of elementary school children who were shot in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre successfully sued Remington, the manufacturer of the rifle used in that tragedy, on the grounds that it was marketed improperly under a Connecticut consumer protection law.

Resident Joe Biden has called for nationwide bans of semi-automatic rifles and magazines with more than 10 rounds, has spoken out against the use of 9mm ammunition, and has demanded the repeal of the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which protects the gun industry from lawsuits regarding “criminal or unlawful misuse” of firearms. Biden claimed, falsely, in April 2021 that “the only industry in America, billion-dollar industry, that can’t be sued, exempt from being sued, are gun manufacturers.”

“Resident Biden stood on the campaign stage in one of the early debates and said that firearms manufacturers are the enemy; not an adversary, not an opponent, an enemy.” Oliva said. “That is compelling when our commander in chief views the industry that provides the means to protect our nation, protect our communities, and protect ourselves, as the enemy.”

Source: The Epoch Times

Bee Nguyen called immigration enforcement agency ‘rogue,’ ‘cruel’

A Georgia Democratic nominee repeatedly called to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and argued that carrying out the country’s immigration laws is rooted in “white supremacy” and “xenophobia.”

Bee Nguyen, Georgia Democrats’ nominee for secretary of state, has a long history of anti-ICE rhetoric. From September to October 2020, Nguyen called to abolish ICE on five separate occasions—in one instance, the Democrat called to “shutdown the detention centers,” where illegal immigrants—many of whom have a criminal record—are housed ahead of removal proceedings. In another, Nguyen called ICE “rogue” and “cruel” and contended that illegal immigrant enforcement is conducted “in the name of power, white supremacy, money, xenophobia, and political pandering.” Roughly 30 percent of ICE agents are Latino.

Nguyen’s calls to abolish ICE continued into January 2021, when resident Joe Biden took office. The United States went on to experience a surge in illegal immigrant encounters. In 2021, for example, the country hit a record-high 1.73 million illegal immigrant apprehensions. That number is on pace to exceed 2 million this year.

Nguyen’s anti-ICE activism could prompt political peril as voters sour on Democrats’ immigration policies, which critics say have emboldened cartel-connected smugglers. On Tuesday, police arrested two illegal immigrants over their alleged role in the deaths of more than 50 migrants in San Antonio, which marked the worst migrant death incident ever recorded in the United States. Those Mexican nationals never left the country after their travel visa expired and possessed an assault-style rifle, multiple handguns, and a shotgun.

According to a July 2021 Federation for American Immigration Reform poll, 61 percent of Georgia voters hold the Biden administration responsible for the ongoing “border crisis,” while 54 percent say that mass amnesty proposals pushed by Democrats would “encourage more people to enter the country illegally and make an already difficult situation worse.” Roughly 50 percent of respondents, meanwhile, said they would be less likely to vote for Georgia’s Democratic senators should they support mass amnesty.

Nguyen’s campaign did not return a request for comment.

In addition to Nguyen’s abolish ICE push, the Democrat vocally opposed the 287 (g) program, which enables state and local law enforcement to assist federal immigration authorities. Atlanta’s Gwinnett County participated in the program for years but ended its involvement after Democrats won the county’s sheriff race. The program has allowed local law enforcement to take violent criminals off the streets—in 2020, for example, the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office encountered a Guatemalan national charged with felony murder and a Mexican national charged with rape and aggravated child molestation, according to ICE reports.

Nguyen’s statewide run in Georgia comes roughly five years after the Democrat joined the state legislature, replacing Stacey Abrams, who resigned in favor of a failed gubernatorial campaign. Nguyen won a primary runoff by 54 points in late June and will face Republican incumbent Brad Raffensperger in November. Her candidacy is backed by both Abrams and Rep. Hank Johnson (D., Ga.), who has compared Jewish settlers to termites and expressed concern that stationing thousands of Marines on the island of Guam would cause it to “tip over and capsize.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

GOLIAD, Texas—Sheriffs in Texas are experiencing the impact of the border crisis in their counties every day—whether it’s armed cartel operatives smuggling illegal immigrants, vehicle pursuits resulting in crashes and deaths, or drug overdose deaths from fentanyl brought across the southern border.

In Goliad, Sheriff Roy Boyd sits 200 miles from the Texas–Mexico border, between McAllen and Houston—a major transport corridor of illegal immigrants and illicit goods.

As a 29-year law enforcement veteran in the region, Boyd said he’s never seen a border crisis so bad or border-related crime so egregious.

“There’s no end to it,” he told The Epoch Times on June 23. He monitors 16 cartel-operated sites in his county that are currently dormant, but have been used to stash illegal immigrants on their way to Houston. Currently it’s mostly carloads of illegal immigrants being smuggled straight through his county to the city.

“It’s a movement of individuals from third world countries, all over the place, into our country. But the farther you get into it, the more you realize it’s all done by design—and it’s at the design of the federal government.

“We’re in a transformation of America from a free Republic to moving to something that’s more of a Marxist state.”

Since resident Joe Biden took office in January 2021, border authorities have apprehended more than 3.2 million illegal border crossers, according to Customs and Border Protection data. An additional 800,000 or so have been detected, but evaded capture.

When asked how allowing millions of people from more than 160 countries through the southern border results in the transformation to communism, Boyd harkened back to the 1960’s and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.”

“LBJ sold the war on poverty to the Democratic National Party … and the DNC’s response was, ‘Why would we give those people something for nothing?’” Boyd said.

LBJ responded by saying he’d have them voting Democratic for 200 years, Boyd said, paraphrasing an infamous quote that has been widely attributed to the former president.

“This is nothing but a replication of the soft enslavement of people through entitlement,” Boyd said. “Because if you understand psychology and you look at the history of things, this is how it functions. Once it starts, it’s hard to stop.”

Trevor Loudon, a communism expert and contributor to The Epoch Times, said in a previous interview that the communists’ main enemy is the United States.

“And if you can’t bring it down through nuclear weapons, you bring it down through illegal immigration, which is maybe just as effective in the long run,” Loudon said.

“This is an orchestrated, communist assault on America, to destroy America’s borders, to create confusion in America, to overwhelm the system politically.”

Loudon said an additional 15 million to 25 million Democratic voters would ensure perpetual Democrat control of government.

“You will have a one-party state in America. And that is the plan. That is why they are doing this,” he said.

“This is Marxist. This is Leninist. And this goes back to American politicians cooperating with hostile foreign powers in the destruction of America. And their No. 1 weapon is illegal immigration and overwhelming the border.”

Traditionally, noncitizens have voted about 80 percent Democratic and 20 percent Republican, according to a 2014 study by Old Dominion University.

“We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections,” the study concluded.

“Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.”

Now, the number of non-Hispanic illegal aliens entering the United States is increasing at the same time that Hispanics are skewing more Republican, as evidenced by Rep. Mayra Flores’s recent win in south Texas.

It’s illegal for non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections, however, for years there’s been a push for municipal elections to accept noncitizen voters, including visa holders.

Loudon said Eliseo Medina, a labor union activist and former immigration consultant to President Barack Obama, is a main driver of the illegal immigration movement.

In 2009, Medina spoke at the America’s Future Now progressives’ conference in Washington.

“[If] we reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters,” Medina said. “Can you imagine … [even] if we get 8 million new voters that care about our issue and will be voting—we will create a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.”

Fourteen municipalities currently allow noncitizens to vote, including 11 in Maryland, two in Vermont, and one in San Francisco.

A recent court ruling quashed a New York City law that would have allowed at least 800,000 noncitizens to vote in municipal elections.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams allowed the measure to become law on Jan. 9.

“I believe that New Yorkers should have a say in their government, which is why I have and will continue to support this important legislation,” Adams said in a statement at the time. “I believe allowing the legislation to be enacted is by far the best choice, and look forward to bringing millions more into the democratic process.”

Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and former member of the Federal Election Commission, said allowing noncitizens to vote “cheapens and diminishes” the concept of citizenship.

“The whole point of the open borders crowd is to do two things: one, extinguish the line between legal and illegal aliens in this country. And second, to frankly get rid of the whole concept of citizenship,” Spakovsky said in a previous interview.

Biden has said he wants a pathway to citizenship for all illegal immigrants in the United States.

Boyd said the Biden administration is working hard to purge conservative and constitutional thinkers at the federal level and replace them with people with a socialist mindset.

“But always remember, as Stalin said, the aim of socialism is communism,” Boyd said.

He said his focus remains in Goliad to protect his county and make it an unwelcoming place for criminals. The sheriffs in the region try to work together to “help each other to fight this massive wave of criminal activity,” he said.

“We don’t deal with immigration, we’re not tasked with it, we’re not authorized with it, we don’t want anything to do with it.

“But we’re fighting all the felonies that are being brought to our doorstep as a result of the national policy that’s causing this problem. And to be quite honest with you, I have no faith in the federal government.”

“My faith is in our Lord and Savior. One day we’re going to meet the end and we’re going to have to answer for what it is we’ve done, and so I want to have a good answer when I get there.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Major cities across the United States saw a violent Fourth of July weekend, with reports saying that at least 50 people were shot in Chicago, children being shot in Houston, and more in Baltimore.

Authorities told NBC Chicago on Monday that nine people died and another 48 were shot across Chicago over the weekend. Last year, more than 19 were shot and killed and 100 more were injured during the same time period.

That included a mass shooting in Chicago’s Parkway Gardens on the 6500 block of South Martin Luther King Drive Monday morning, according to officials. A 17-year-old was counted among those who were shot, authorities said.

Authorities in Indianapolis, Indiana, told WISH-TV said that 11 people were shot in 10 incidents over the Fourth of July weekend.

And the Baltimore Police Department said it is investigating separate shootings in the city that left nine people shot and two dead over the weekend, according to WBAL.

A 14-year-old boy was injured in one of the shootings, officials told the Baltimore Sun. Police say the boy, who was not named, was shot in his hip at around 4 p.m. while he was in the backyard of a home.

In Houston, a 5-year-old was killed in a drive-by shooting that also left an 8-year-old injured in the Greenspoint neighborhood, police told ABC13.

From Friday night through Sunday night, there were 24 shooting incidents across New York City, officials told PIX11. That’s a 60 percent increase over last year’s numbers, where there were 19 victims shot.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said that at least 16 people were shot and five were killed since Friday, according to KMOV.

2 More Kids Shot

Two children were among six people who were wounded Saturday night in an apparent drive-by shooting, police in eastern North Carolina said.

Officers responded to a home for a report of shots fired around 9:30 p.m. Saturday, the Clinton Police Department said in a news release. They found six people suffering from apparent gunshot wounds.

A preliminary investigation suggests the suspects arrived in a car and drove past the home, where people were gathered outside. They circled the block and then opened fire toward the home, striking the victims in what appeared to be a targeted attack, according to the news release.

Last year, the FBI said that homicides in the United States in 2020 increased nearly 30 percent over the previous year, representing the largest single-year jump since the agency started keeping track of statistics.

Homicides and non-negligent manslaughters climbed an estimated 29.4 percent to 21,570, an increase of 4,901 over 2019, FBI data showed. It is the highest estimated total since the early 1990s, when homicides stayed above 23,000 a year as drug wars played out in many places in the United States.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Video footage surfaced online that appeared to show a crowd of people at a Somali cultural event in Minneapolis booing “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) over the weekend.

Omar, who came to the United States as a Somali refugee, made an appearance at a concert featuring Somali singer Suldaan Seeraar at the city’s Target Center. As soon as she arrived on stage, the boos began, according to footage posted online.

Some yelled at her, “Get out!” and “get the [expletive] out of here.”

“It was an honor to welcome you to our incredible city,” the Democratic congresswoman said in a Twitter post alongside a 14-second clip. The clip ended moments after the audience started to boo loudly.

Longer videos suggested that the crowd booed her for about a minute after she and her husband came onto the stage. “OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, we don’t have all night,” Omar said at one point as the crowd kept booing.

Unclear Why

Some people suggested that it’s because of Omar’s support for Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court decision that decriminalized abortion nationwide, support for LGBT causes, and other left-wing causes. Omar is currently the whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

It’s not clear what prompted the response, and neither Omar nor her office has issued a public comment about the matter. The Epoch Times has contacted Omar’s office several times for comment about the boos.

Following last month’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Omar said she would fight to codify it into law. She’s also publicly backed proposals to expand the Supreme Court and end the Senate filibuster to pass abortion laws.

“In almost half of this country, states are ready to ban abortion,” Omar said during a protest following the decision. “Outright ban abortion.”

And several weeks ago, amid dismal polls, Omar told reporters that she will “of course” back resident Joe Biden if he decides to run for president in 2024.

“This’s what she gets for trading her Godly, Conservative values for the sinful LGBTQIA’s & the promiscuous abortionists,” wrote Shukri Abdirahman, a Republican Somali refugee and military veteran who is running to unseat Omar from her 5th Congressional District

Another Republican candidate, former NBA player Royce White, suggested that Somalis in Minnesota were upset with Omar because “they’re being misrepresented by bourgeois puppets, chosen by the establishment to exploit identity politics. In other words, Ilhan Omar is a sellout and I called it months ago.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, one nation evermore!

SOURCE: The Epoch Times (see VIDEO)

A former governor of New York said Sunday that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has far less influence on voters than the media leads people to believe.

Former Democratic Gov. David Paterson dismissed any influence Ocasio-Cortez might have during a Sunday interview on WABC radio’s “The Cats Roundtable,’ according to the New York Post.

Paterson served as New York’s governor from 2008 through 2010 after the resignation of scandal-plagued Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

During the show, Paterson was asked by host John Catsimatidis about the results of Tuesday’s Democratic primaries in New York state. As noted by the New York Post, far-left Democrats endorsed by AOC fared poorly in the contests.

After Catsimatidis  asked if the losses marked “the rise and fall of AOC,” Paterson replied, “I don’t know if there ever was a rise, John.”

“I think AOC defeated a congressman who was notably absent from his district a lot, so she outworked him and she beat him, and then she became this overnight, national success,” Paterson said.

Paterson was referring to former Rep. Joe Crowley, who was defeated by Ocasio-Cortez in a June 2018 primary.

“But really, there’s no evidence that it had any coattails, not in this 2022 primary, but not even in the 2020 elections,” Paterson said. “I think she is really a phantom of the media. The media projects her.”

Paterson noted the easy win by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in the primary last week as evidence that moderation is more important to New Yorkers than extremism.

“If you look at the gubernatorial primary, Hochul got 66%, [New York City Public Advocate] Jumaane Williams gets 16%, and so she beat the progressive by 50 points, and the other 18% or so went to [moderate US Rep.] Tom Suozzi,” Paterson told Catsimatidis.

Paterson also said Ocasio-Cortez deserves neither sole credit nor blame for Amazon not coming to Queens in 2019.

“She was given credit for stopping Amazon from coming into New York. It had nothing to do with her,” Paterson said. “It had to do with the legislators being angry that Governor [Andrew] Cuomo had never told them that he was negotiating with them and took all the credit for himself.”

As the show ended, Paterson gave a summary.

“My overall thought to your original question about AOC,” Paterson said, “is [that] AOC are just three letters in the alphabet.”

Related:

Warren Demands Biden Exploit Loophole That Would Allow Abortions in Banned States

A second referendum on any possible influence could come in August, when New York voters face primaries for congressional seats, according to The New York Times.

Ocasio-Cortez is backing Democratic challenger Alessandra Biaggi over the more moderate incumbent Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney in New York’s 17th District.

As the show ended, Paterson gave a summary.

“My overall thought to your original question about AOC,” Paterson said, “is [that] AOC are just three letters in the alphabet.”

Related:

Warren Demands Biden Exploit Loophole That Would Allow Abortions in Banned States

A second referendum on any possible influence could come in August, when New York voters face primaries for congressional seats, according to The New York Times.

Ocasio-Cortez is backing Democratic challenger Alessandra Biaggi over the more moderate incumbent Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney in New York’s 17th District.

Fans at a concert featuring Somali singer Suldaan Seeraar weren’t too happy to see far-left squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar take the stage at the Target Center in Minneapolis on Saturday night.

“How’s everybody doing in Minneapolis?” shouted the congresswoman. Audience members at the sold-out venue responded with boos and calls for Omar to “get the f**k out of here” and to “go home.”

The calls began anew every time Omar tried to speak. I guess they’re not as proud of her as she is of herself.

WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers may find offensive.

Ilhan Omar got booed onstage at a concert featuring Somali singer Soldaan Seraar in Minnesota last night.
People in the crowd chanted “Get out!” & shouted “Get the f*ck out of here!”. pic.twitter.com/sggii7h6sO

— Leftism (@LeftismForU) July 3, 2022

Although Omar must have been quite beside herself, she continued smiling through the humiliating reception. According to one account, she was booed for nearly ten minutes.

She was booed for nearly 10 minutes. pic.twitter.com/1iGqrupDu3

— Shukri Abdirahman (@ShuForCongress) July 3, 2022

Omar is best known for hating America, her anti-Semitic tweets, marrying her brother so he could obtain U.S. citizenship and describing 9/11 as “some people did something.”

She was widely criticized in April for mocking a group of Christians who sang worship songs on an Easter flight.

I think my family and I should have a prayer session next time I am on a plane. How do you think it will end? pic.twitter.com/5696Erwsl5

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) April 17, 2022

The moment I formed my opinion about Omar came in February 2019, just one month into her first term in Congress. Her sense of moral superiority and her complete lack of grace was on full display as she questioned then-U.S. Special Envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.

Related:

Victory for Sanity – Supreme Court Defeats Liberal Agenda in Ilhan Omar’s Backyard

During the exchange, Abrams tried to explain his answers and Omar repeatedly cut him off, with a sharp, “Yes or no.”

“Yes or no. Do you think that massacre was a fabulous achievement that happened under our watch?” she asked Abrams.

“That is a ridiculous question, and — no,” Abrams answered.

“I will take that as a yes,” Omar said.

Many Americans find it appalling that someone with such unpatriotic and disrespectful feelings toward our country sits in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Unfortunately, Omar is expected to cruise to victory in November. Politico rates MN-5 “Solid Democratic.”

Anyway, watching this repellent woman get taken down a peg by her own people was simply delicious and couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.

‘Defund the police’ advocate Cori Bush says her vehicle has been shot at three times since 2014

The controversial congresswoman, a proud member of “The Squad,” has shelled out tens of thousands of dollars on private security while continuing to advocate for “defunding the police.” Bush’s critics, she said, need to “suck it up.”

In any event, she is clearly not doing enough to protect the security of her vehicle, according to an analysis by Twitter user @JusticeDemWatch. Based on news reports and Bush’s posts on social media, her car has been attacked on at least five occasions since 2014, when she claimed a bullet was fired through the trunk of her car during a protest in Ferguson, Mo.

In June 2019, the congresswoman posted a series of bizarre tweets in response to what she described as a suspicious encounter with a black vehicle.

“The black car with tinted windows sent to crash into me the other day was yet again, an unsuccessful attempt to stop me,” wrote Bush, who was a candidate for Congress at the time. “So tell ya boss & ya buddies I only get more fired up each time.”

The congresswoman had a message for the “cowards” who tried to get her: “I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOU & I’M NOT GOING TO STOP!” Bush proceeded to announce that she was not suicidal and asked her followers to demand an investigation should anything happen to her.

“If I choke, fall down stairs, die in my sleep, car accident, ‘accidental’ shooting, suicide etc. INVESTIGATE,” she said. “I don’t need sympathy, I need people to know this stuff is real and it has never stopped. Not a conspiracy theory.”

Bush’s car was allegedly shot a second time in June 2020. “My car took the bullets. I am safe,” she wrote in a Twitter post that included photos of a white Hyundai SUV with a flat tire and a damaged door handle.

“A bullet went through my door handle on one side of the car, another went through my tire on the other side,” she wrote. “I’m committed to taking us from ‘surviving St. Louis’ to ‘living it.'”

Two months later, Bush’s SUV was allegedly broken into and ransacked. The only item missing was the bullhorn she often used at anti-police protests. The Washington Post reported Bush’s account of the incident, describing it as “the kind of not-so-subtle message of intimidation that the activist turned congresswoman-elect has gotten used to over six years of being a leading Black Lives Matter organizer.”

Bush’s car was shot again in January 2022 in St. Louis. Her spokesman told CNN the congresswoman was not in the car at the time and there was no evidence that she was targeted. “Any act of gun violence shakes your soul,” Bush wrote in a Twitter post thanking supporters for their concern. “That’s why our movement is working to invest in our communities, eradicate the root causes of gun violence, and keep everyone safe.”

It is not clear how defunding the police would accomplish any of her stated goals.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

House Republican Study Committee (RSC) chairman Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and 15 GOP colleagues are challenging the legality of State Department grants—of as much as $500,000 each—to international “organizations committed to the practice and spread of atheism and humanism.”

Their challenge is contained in a June 30 letter to resident Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken concerning the department’s competitive grant process issued in April 2021 for “Promoting and Defending Religious Freedom Inclusive of Atheist, Humanist, Non-Practicing and Non-Affiliated Individuals” in South Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

“To be clear, atheism and ‘humanism’ are official belief systems.

“As an initial matter, therefore, we would like to know what other United States government programs supported with appropriated funds are being used either to encourage, inculcate, or to disparage any official belief system—atheist, humanist, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise,” Banks and the other signers told Blinken.

“It is one thing for the department to be tolerant and respectful of a wide range of belief systems, and to encourage governments to respect the religious freedom interests of their citizens. It is quite another for the United States government to work actively to empower atheists, humanists, non-practicing, and non-affiliated in public decision-making,” the signers continued.

“Any such program—for any religiously-identifiable group—in the United States would be unconstitutional.

“In addition to its constitutionally dubious legal foundation, we also question how such a grant or cooperative agreement program advances the foreign policy interests of the United States,” the signers wrote.

A State Department spokesman could not be reached for comment.

In addition to Banks, the signers include Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas), Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.), Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), Rep. Tim Burchett (R- Tenn.), Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.).

In countries with a dominate religious culture such as the Middle East and parts of North Africa where Islam dominates, the signers warned Blinken that providing U.S. tax dollars to groups promoting non-Islamic faiths is likely to be perceived by local populations as subversive funding ”from a foreign power designed to shatter local religious and cultural relationships.”

In addition, the signers told Blinken they have reviewed other similar official State Department Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) documents that “violate both the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, but also the No Religious Test Clause of Article VI of our nation’s constitution.”

The funding provided to the organizations selected by the department would be used to support building “networks and advocacy groups” for atheists, according to the official notice.

“This would be analogous to official State Department promotion of religious freedom ‘particularly for Christians’ in China, with the express goal being to build a corresponding missionary network,” the signers told Blinken.

“Obviously, this goal that would never pass constitutional muster and would be derided by radical Leftist bureaucrats in your agency as completely out-of-bounds.

“So why is this atheist NOFO not viewed with similar objection,” the signers asked.

“Americans rightly discern this as a part of the broader effort on the part of your administration to promote radical, progressive orthodoxy abroad. Atheism is an integral part of the belief system of Marxism and Communism,” the signers said.

The letter to Biden and Blinken regarding State Department grants to support atheism and other religious belief systems follows revelations last week that officials are preparing to appoint a Special Representative for Equity and Justice.

The appointment is part of Biden’s government-wide “Equity Action Plan” that mandates all federal departments and agencies to appoint such officials.

Congressional Republicans criticize the plan as a thinly disguised effort to use the federal government to promote Critical Race Theory (CRT), the controversial view that the color of an individual’s skin determines their values and how they perceive people of other ethnicities.

In addition to the U.S. Embassy in Germany flying a Black Lives Matter flag, the Republicans pointed to the U.S. Vatican City Embassy flying an LGBT pride flag, which they describe as “a transparent provocation at tenets of Christianity,” and the State Department’s creation of a new gender classification for use on passports for individuals of “unspecified or another gender identity.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/house-gopers-demanding-answers-on-why-grants-going-to-boost-atheism-overseas_4570158.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-07-03-4&utm_medium=email&est=IHP%2FtcGq%2F1ZQFheBBLU5kaH8w9U%2BxT4j16CIXyFcbYSlYOmoJyf%2Bc0rtZpunMgTxkA%3D%3D

The governors of Virginia and Maryland responded to a letter from the Supreme Court’s top security official calling on them to provide more police resources to prevent protests outside the homes of justices following the landmark ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Left-wing protesters have continued to appear outside their homes since the ruling. Over the July 4 weekend, more protesters were seen picketing outside the justices’ homes, located in suburban areas in Virginia and Maryland.

“The governor agrees with the Marshal that the threatening activity outside the Justices’ homes has increased,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin spokesperson Christian Martinez said in a statement after Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley called on the governor to “enforce state law” that prohibits demonstrations outside the homes of justices.

“He welcomes the Marshal of the Supreme Court’s request for Fairfax County to enforce state law as they are the primary enforcement authority for the state statute,” the statement added, adding that Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to “do his job” by enforcing federal laws.

“Every resource of federal law enforcement, including the U.S. Marshals, should be involved while the Justices continue to be denied the right to live peacefully in their homes,” according to the statement. However, from the statement, it’s not clear if Youngkin’s administration is going to take concrete steps to provide more law enforcement at their homes.

Another Response

After receiving Curley’s letter on Friday night, a spokesman for Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan responded by saying that Garland needs to act.

“Two months ago, Governor Hogan and Governor Youngkin sent a letter calling on Attorney General Garland to enforce the clear and unambiguous federal statutes on the books that prohibit picketing at judges’ residences,” Hogan spokesman Michael Ricci wrote on Twitter. “A month later, hours after an assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh, the Department of Justice finally responded, declining to enforce the laws.”

The spokesman was referring to an incident involving 26-year-old Nicholas Roske, a California man who was arrested at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home last month and allegedly told officials that he was plotting to kill the justice because he would support overturning Roe v. Wade and support expanding Second Amendment protections.

“Now a different federal official is writing to us with conflicting information,” his statement continued. “Had the marshal taken time to explore the matter, she would have learned that the constitutionality of the statute cited in her letter has been questioned by the Maryland Attorney General’s office.”

Hogan has instructed Maryland State Police to further review law enforcement options after the letter was sent, Ricci said.

Federal law stipulates that it’s illegal to attempt to influence a judge’s ruling or interfere with their duties. But the Department of Justice has, so far, failed to take action against the constant protests outside the homes of Republican-appointed justices including Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, and Kavanaugh.

The demonstrations, meanwhile, come amid rampant vandalism and arson attacks against churches, pregnancy centers, and pro-life groups. Some left-wing extremist groups have said they will carry out more attacks if their demands aren’t met. Last weekend, dozens of people were arrested across the U.S. following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Blue states believe their abortion policies can bring companies back

Amidst predictions of a political “red wave” in the upcoming mid-term elections, an economic wave has been building for years with no end in sight as companies flood out of blue states and into red states.

And as a result of its political divisions, America appears to now be dividing itself into prosperous, high-growth states and states that are suffering a chronic decline. But Democrat-run states believe their abortion policies could be a key factor in attracting companies back.

Caterpillar and Citadel, which in June announced their exit out of Illinois, are only the latest firms to leave high-tax, high-regulation states. Tesla, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, and Remington are also among the hundreds of companies flocking out of California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey to business-friendly places like Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Tennessee. Relocating companies have spanned industries including tech, finance, media, heavy manufacturing, autos, and firearms.

“There is a great migration going on, and I expect it to accelerate,” Glen Hamer, president of the Texas Association of Business, told The Epoch Times. “When the Caterpillars and the Elon Musks relocate, it’s an advertisement to the entire country and the entire world that something positive is going on in that state. And there is a multiplier effect.”

According to a 2022 survey of 700 CEOs, the top states for business were Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, and North Carolina. The worst were California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington.

Even companies like Apple, which did not move its headquarters to Texas, chose to establish its second-largest campus for employees there. Amazon selected Houston as one of its prime hubs. Ford, Volkswagen, and Nissan chose Tennessee as the location for major new manufacturing facilities. And in some cases, entire industries like firearms, which are being targeted by legislation and lawsuits in blue states, are moving south.

“It’s a broader trend that we’ve been tracking for the last 15 years,” Lee Schalk, Vice President of Policy at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), told The Epoch Times. ALEC tracks state economic trends in their annual report, “Rich States Poor States.”

“You won’t see companies moving to states like New York, California, and New Jersey,” Schalk said. “They’ll be moving out of those states into neighboring states, where the policies are a little bit better, or they’ll be making the big move to places like Texas, Florida, North Carolina.”

“Texas was one of the first states to recover all the jobs it lost during the pandemic,” Hamer said. “Now we have a workforce that is at an all-time high, and the economy has diversity and strength. Whether it’s energy, manufacturing, health care, technology, finance, you name it, the Texas economy is firing on all cylinders.” Texas has attracted 250 new corporate headquarters since 2015, Hamer said.

When jobs leave, people leave with them. According to the U.S. Census, Democrat-run states California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois together lost 4 million people between 2010 and 2019, the so-called “leftugees.” During the same period, the states with the greatest influx of people were Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Arizona.

States have been able to attract companies by cutting taxes, reducing red tape, and establishing right-to-work policies. In 2013, North Carolina passed a landmark tax reform package to cut corporate and personal income taxes. The business income tax there is now 2.5 percent and will be phased out entirely over the next several years.

Contrary to expectations that states would bankrupt themselves by cutting taxes, an influx of companies and new residents often boosts state revenues from property taxes, sales taxes, and personal income taxes, even when the percentages are reduced. Florida attracted 624,000 new residents in 2020, along with more than $40 billion in income, equating to an estimated $23.7 billion in new tax income. Florida has enjoyed two decades of net in-migration, amounting to a total income gain of $197 billion.

North Carolina’s latest budget included a deal to phase out corporate income taxes while also giving teachers a raise and even padding its “rainy day fund,” Schalk said. “North Carolina has been able to do that because not only have they been bold on lowering taxes, but they’ve also gotten the spending side under control.” And when companies move in, they bring intangible benefits with them as well.

“Any sort of civic organization loves it when they hear that a blue chip company like Caterpillar is relocating to our state,” Hamer said. “It means these executives are going to be serving on all sorts of different boards of directors, the local art museum, opera, or the chamber of commerce. When companies relocate their individuals, they become deeply ingrained in the community. They contribute time and treasure to activities that make the community more vibrant.”

The reverse is also true for states that are losing businesses and population, creating a vicious circle where continuously hiking taxes fails to bring in more revenue because the tax base gets depleted and quality of life suffers. According to a report based on IRS data by Wirepoints, an Illinois-based economic research organization, the cost of losing companies and people is stark for states like Illinois, which has lost population for 21 straight years.

Since 2020, that state has lost a total of $535 billion in income that moved away, which equates to about $25 billion in lost tax revenue during that period, and $4 billion in 2020 alone. Illinois’ problems include a loss of 114,000 residents in 2021, a string of 21 consecutive years of state budget deficits, a $313 billion deficit in public pensions, and the second-highest property tax rates in the country.

“Illinois is stuck in a vicious downward spiral it can’t hope to escape from without fundamentally changing how it governs,” the Wirepoints report states. “Structural property tax reform, reductions in pension debt, slashing units of local government—the state needs to do all these things if it wants to convince Illinoisans to stay and persuade other Americans to move in.”

Reducing violent crime would also help. Escalating crime was reportedly a factor, one among many, in Citadel’s decision to leave Chicago for Miami. Ken Griffin, the hedge fund’s CEO, had been one of Illinois’ richest residents and had given more than $600 million in charitable donations to educational, cultural, medical, and civic causes in the state.

“It’s the beauty of the 50 laboratories of our democracy,” Schalk said. “We’re able to quickly see what’s working and what’s not working across all issue areas. Unfortunately, I don’t see the high tax and high spend states changing their ways.”

“We can see an acceleration of hostile business policies in states like California, Illinois, and New York,” Hamer said. “It’s a race to increase taxes, increase regulation, and make it more difficult for people to live their lives. When you contrast that with states like Texas and Arizona, the gap is just widening and we’re seeing the great migration as a result.”

Republican Representatives in Washington are attempting to grant even more economic power to states in energy production. The GOP introduced the Federal Land Freedom Act last year, which would take authority to approve oil leases and permits away from the federal government and “give each state the right to develop all of the energy resources on the federal lands located within that state’s borders.”

Recently, however, blue states appear to be waking up and looking for ways to boost their competitiveness. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently stated, “some businesses may have left the state, come on back! It’s a point of pride that we welcome you back.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy sent personal letters to more than 50 companies in red states, appealing for them to come to New Jersey. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont made a similar attempt. These governors are highlighting one regulatory advantage that they believe will give them an edge over conservative states: their permissive policies toward abortion.

Murphy’s letter to companies in Georgia stated that “The overturning of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy—and the chilling effect this decision will have on your ability to attract and retain top female talent by being located in a state which has refused to recognize women’s reproductive freedom—cannot be ignored.”

Alyana Alfaro Post, Murphy’s press secretary, said, “Governor Murphy encourages businesses looking to stand with their employees to look at New Jersey, a state where they can be confident that the rights of women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and voters will always be protected.”

“We’re a family-friendly state that respects women,” Lamont stated in a video pitch. “I know some of you are in states like Texas, which are outlawing a woman’s right to choose. We have codified, we are protecting a woman’s right to choose … any of you business owners thinking about making a move, give me a call. I’d love to hear from you.”

Source: The Epoch Times

Iowa’s Mike Franken says cabal will use schools to win elections for Republicans

Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Mike Franken says there’s a Republican-led, capitalist-evangelical plot to “dumb down” youth through “a war on education,” designed to gain an electoral advantage in the years to come.

During a campaign event in Red Oak last week, Franken told voters Republicans are uniting “the über-capitalists … and the ultra-right evangelicals” on educational issues to “make people dumb and lemmings.”

“Is this what Newt Gingrich wanted everybody to do in the ’90s?” Franken said, according to a video of the event obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “Dumb down America as much as we can because the demographics are working against the Republican Party? It’s true. It appears so.”

Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told the Free Beacon he found Franken’s remarks “laughable” and that the Senate candidate “is falling for the teachers’ union line.”

“As a Ph.D. in European history and author of more than 40 books, I find it laughable that Franken thinks I could be anti-learning. I participated in the launch of President Reagan’s dramatic report A Nation at Risk in 1983,” Gingrich said. “The teachers’ unions and their Democratic Party loyalists have fought against reform every step of the way. Children should not be trapped in terrible schools that cripple their future. Parents have the right to know what is being taught to their children.”

Franken did not respond to a request for comment.

The retired Navy vice admiral, who served under former president Barack Obama and as a military adviser to former senator Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.), has no stance on public education listed on his campaign website. He has, however, taken strong stances on increasing abortion access, expanding Medicare, and combating climate change. The Iowa Unity Coalition, which has endorsed Franken, supports tuition-free college education for all state residents. A Harvard University study in 2014 found that a Massachusetts tuition-free program lessened students’ college completion rate.

Republicans have made education a significant election issue, as parents have expressed concerns over a public education system they believe has abandoned the teaching of core academic subjects and doubled down on racially divisive rhetoric and courses. The Republican National Committee in 2021 adopted a resolution that condemned critical race theory and “antiracist” school curricula. Congressional Republicans in January put forth as part of their midterm platform a Parents’ Bill of Rights, which would publicly disclose state education budgets and curricula.

Franken did not elaborate on his opposition to Republicans’ education platform, which could potentially alienate some Iowa voters concerned with radical teachings about America’s history in schools. The state House in 2021 entertained a bill that would have banned the New York Times‘s 1619 Project from public education.

Franken’s Democratic nomination this year was unexpected. In 2020, he lost a primary race to Theresa Greenfield, who would go on to lose her election to Sen. Joni Ernst (R.). Franken in June bested Democratic candidate Abby Finkenauer to win the party’s nomination for 2022.

Having raised nearly $3 million thus far for his campaign, Franken will face Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.) in November.

A Grassley campaign spokeswoman said Franken’s comments were “lockstep with the Biden White House,” which in 2021 “orchestrated a memo from the National School Board Association in an effort to intimidate parents by unleashing federal antiterrorism surveillance tools on them at school board meetings.”

“Mike Franken didn’t read the memo from last November’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, the near upset gubernatorial race in New Jersey or the school board recall election in his dream state of California,” Michaela Sundermann told the Free Beacon. “Waging a war on parents is not a winning strategy. Chuck Grassley fights for the fundamental right of parents to have a say in their child’s education.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

From Fox News:

A business owner in Chicago, Illinois tells Fox News Digital that skyrocketing crime in the city forced him to quit doing business in town adding to the list of individuals and businesses that have fled Illinois over the past couple of years amid surging crime…

“We would do thousands of jobs a year in the city, but as we got robbed more, my people operating rollers and pavers we got robbed, our equipment would get stolen in broad daylight and there would usually be a gun involved, and it got expensive and it got dangerous,” Rabine told Fox News Digital.

How unbelievable. Crime is getting so bad in Chicago that road workers were being robbed at gunpoint… in broad daylight.

Criminals stole expensive equipment, disrupting work as they robbed these employees.

Gary Rabine, who owned 13 businesses in the state, said enough is enough.

He, along with many other business owners, is leaving Chicago and the state.

This isn’t some odd coincidence. Both the left-leaning Governor of Illinois and the Mayor of Chicago have turned a blind eye to rising crime.

It’s getting so bad that a seemingly endless parade of residents is fleeing even nice parts of the state.

The costs related to all this crime were making jobs twice as expensive. That is unimaginable.

How can any leaders, regardless of party, allow this kind of thing from happening? How can Mayor Lightfoot just sit back and watch criminals get away with robbing law-abiding citizens?

But that is just what Democrats are doing, all over the country. Their “woke” politics are putting hardened criminals ahead of hard-working citizens.

And these leftists refuse to admit such policies are driving people away. There is only so much a person can take before they are forced to leave.

Nobody can blame them. The scary reality is, that wherever Democrats have power in state and local governments, this happens.

Unless serious law-and-order leaders take over, the trend will only continue.

Key Takeaways:

• Numerous small businesses are fleeing Chicago due to rising crime.
• In some cases, criminals are robbing workers in broad daylight.
• The state’s left-wing governor and the city’s mayor are to blame.

Source: Fox News

https://thepatriotjournal.com/city-exodus-small-business-chicago/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=actengage&seyid=9303

The book exposes Soros’s connection to US media infrastructure and politics

From his responses, it’s clear that George Soros is a sociopath. [US Patriot]

Matt Palumbo, author of “The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros,” details billionaire George Soros’s connection to American politics, and illustrates how Soros controls not only what is written about him, but also influences how the American public perceives news events.

Soros created a financial concept called reflexivity, which Palumbo said is “brilliant,” because it can cause what Soros wants in the finance sector to happen.

“But expectations set reality and Soros realized, ‘Well, that’s true of media as well.’ If you tell people what to expect, they’re going to reinterpret reality,” and that can be used to affect how people interpret news events, Palumbo said during a recent interview for EpochTV’s “Facts Matter” program.

How Soros Spent $18B to Control the Media, Defund the Police, and Elect Liberal Prosecutors

“For whatever reason, if people think something’s going to happen, it actually will happen,” and Soros applied this to media companies’ coverage to make people believe something that did not actually happen, happened, said Palumbo.

Soros-backed media agencies use this concept to create false narratives and make people believe in something that did not actually occur. The reason Soros is able to have this level of influence is that he gives tens of millions of dollars to the U.S. media infrastructure.

There are many Soros-linked mainstream media organizations including, “ABC, CBS, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, I mean, it is a very long list. Type Soros’s name and just look at how they cover him, and if it’s ever anything negative, it’s ‘anti-Semites say: negative claim,’” said Palumbo, adding that their coverage always seems to favor Democrats and Soros.

A watchdog group called the Media Research Center (MRC) has documented Soros’s ties to media infrastructure. “Soros has spent more than $52 million funding media properties, including the infrastructure of news—journalism schools, investigative journalism, and even industry organizations,” according to an MRC report.

Many left-wing groups, including media companies, get funding via Soros’s Open Society Foundation. That group is known to fund progressive initiatives like Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police, as well as political candidates and district attorney campaigns, said Palumbo.

Soros’s foundation claims to promote democracy and individualism, but in reality, it supports a more radical agenda, said Palumbo.

“There is what they say things are and what they really are,” Palumbo said about the Open Society Foundation

Alexander Soros, George Soros’s son, heads the Open Society Foundation, which in 2017 was given $18 billion by George Soros to fund progressive causes. They have chapters all over the world, including an office in New York.

Palumbo cites Soros’s disguising himself as a Christian during his early years in Hungary before the rise of Hitler, when Jews were being purged, to explain the possible reason for Soros’s support of leftist ideology.

Before the rise of Hitler, Soros was taken in by a Christian man, who swore to authorities that Soros was his godson. Soros worked with the man to confiscate Jews’ property.

In a 1998 interview with “60 Minutes,” host Steve Croft asked Soros if he felt any guilt about confiscating property from Hungarian Jews, to which he replied that he did not.

“I was 14 years old, and I would say that that’s when my character was made. … That one should think ahead, one should understand and anticipate events, and when one is threatened, it was a tremendous threat of evil, I mean, it was a very personal experience of evil,” Soros said.

When questioned further about whether it was difficult knowing fellow Hungarians were being sent to death camps after he helped take away their property, Soros said it was not difficult in any way.

“Not at all, not at all. Maybe as a child, you don’t see the connection. But it created no, no problem at all,” said Soros. “I was only a spectator. The property was being taken away. So, I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”

In his research, Palumbo also found that many people who once worked for Soros’s Open Society Foundation later went on to work for media outlets.

In addition, Soros has funded campaigns for many Democratic politicians and progressive district attorneys, backing those who will get the results Soros wants.

“If you elect a DA, they have total autonomy on all those things, so it’s just hey, I want the law changed, I back a guy who wants to change it exactly the way I do, he goes in and changes it overnight,” said Palumbo

“But when you’re in a DA’s race, and there’s a couple of hundred grand spent with each person normally and then you drop 1 or 2 million,  you actually can buy an election that way. And it’s happened time and time again. There in fact are cases where the challenger just drops out, because they know there’s no point,” said Palumbo.

The reason a broader swath of the public does not know who Soros really is is that he controls these organizations with money.

“It’s sort of an implied contract, where, ‘I’ve gotten money from this guy before, am I really going to badmouth them in my report?’ And a lot of people just choose not to,” Palumbo said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/author-matt-palumbo-lays-out-how-george-soros-has-significant-control-over-media-narratives_4551166.html?utm_source=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2022-06-30&utm_medium=email&est=TBnJ7BmSvfyKvbWgBgyNMLrsof2g5yUZs3YZDWt1ZQqZceu%2Fcn12swngxrq2N92FSQ%3D%3D

KINNEY COUNTY, Texas—Kinney County sheriff’s deputies responded to a suspected smuggling vehicle on a county road early in the morning on June 29. During the ensuing pursuit, the fleeing driver lost control of the vehicle and flipped it.

The driver, a Mexican national wearing a cartel-related medallion, was taken into custody and is facing at least seven felony charges, according to Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe.

Of the five passengers, all illegal immigrants, one female was taken to the hospital in Del Rio for non-life threatening injuries, while the remaining four declined medical treatment.

Coe said Border Patrol told him they could take the four uninjured illegal aliens into custody for processing only if they had been checked medically first.

“Well they had declined any type of medical help,” Coe told The Epoch Times. “So I can’t let them walk the streets. I can’t say, ‘Hey, go, be free.’ Because I still have to protect the Constitution and protect the people in the county.”

Coe said he loaded the three males and one female into his truck and drove to Eagle Pass, about an hour away, and dropped them off at the port of entry between the United States and Mexico.

In response to a question by The Epoch Times about the sheriff’s move, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the sheriffs in Texas play a “vital role” up and down the border.

“I applaud all of our sheriffs for having to respond in unprecedented conditions. And that’s causing all of us to use unprecedented action,” Abbott said during a press conference in Eagle Pass on June 29.

“And so whether it’s doing what that sheriff in Kinney County is doing, or what we’re doing, such as turning back more than 20,000 people, we all have our own tools and strategies that we use to either turn back or to return people across the border.”

Coe said he agrees with Abbott that local law enforcement shouldn’t have to be tying up so many resources on the border issue.

“But to let them go, undocumented, unaccounted for, just go because of a policy—I couldn’t do it. It’s going to be the exception rather than the rule. But at the same time, if Border Patrol won’t take a group for whatever reason, I don’t have a choice.”

He said he’s not sure if there will be any legal ramifications—”We’ll see what happens.”

Kinney County deputies have arrested 66 smugglers so far in June as the county remains a thoroughfare from the U.S.–Mexico border to San Antonio.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/texas-sheriff-drives-4-illegal-aliens-to-international-bridge-deports-them_4567764.html?utm_source=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2022-06-30&utm_medium=email&est=tfStmd0vnUutQkif9a%2F65g9EaQzHOdBcCrYDgUsk1Vn7jsu3MUXAuR12eZtZ%2FhCU5w%3D%3D

Why not start using the border for munitions testing; waste disposal (especially nuclear); etc.? [US Patriot]

The Supreme Court gave the Biden administration the green light on June 30 to end the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that requires non-Mexican asylum-seekers arriving at the southern border to wait in Mexico for processing.

Resident Joe Biden’s decision to nix the program didn’t violate a 1996 migrant detention law, the court held, noting that the administration’s memorandum rescinding the program should have been examined by the lower courts.

The 5–4 opinion (pdf) in Biden v. Texas, court file 21-954, was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and comes as record numbers of illegal aliens are streaming across the U.S. border with Mexico, overwhelming the capacity of U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deal with them.

Roberts’s opinion was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Brett Kavanaugh. Breyer, 83, retired from the court at noon on June 30 and was replaced by Biden appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kavanaugh also filed a separate concurring opinion. Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett both filed separate dissenting opinions.

Texas and Missouri had argued that Biden broke the law by ending the program.

Upon taking office, Biden cut off enrollments in the program, part of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) created by Congress under then-President Bill Clinton. In 2018, the Trump administration said it would enforce the program to crack down on the practice known as catch-and-release, in which individuals would make fraudulent asylum claims knowing they would be released into the United States and be able to stay for years before their court appearance.

Under Biden, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a memorandum on Jan. 20, 2021, saying it would “suspend new enrollments in the [MPP] pending further review of the program.”

“Aliens who aren’t already enrolled in MPP should be processed under other existing legal authorities,” it reads.

Days later, Biden signed three new executive orders aimed at undoing Trump-era immigration policies. One of them, Biden said, “orders a full review of the previous administration’s harmful and counterproductive immigration policies, basically across the board.”

But in August 2021, at the urging of the two states, Texas-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, ordered the government to enforce the MPP policy until “lawfully rescinded.” The Biden administration had failed to properly justify ending the policy and to uphold a 1996 law requiring the detention of certain migrants, the judge held. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit affirmed Kacsmaryk’s ruling.

On May 2, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of asking the attorneys involved in the case to provide post-hearing submissions to the court. Both the Biden administration and the two states opposing it in the high-stakes litigation filed briefs arguing that the court does have the power to decide the central legal questions in the case, The Epoch Times reported.

In his new opinion, Roberts wrote that “the Government’s rescission of MPP did not violate” section 1225 of the Immigration and Nationality Act” and reversed the decision of the lower court, remanding the case “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

By incorrectly interpreting the section as a command, the appeals court needlessly injected itself into administration affairs and “imposed a significant burden upon the Executive’s ability to conduct diplomatic relations with Mexico,” Roberts wrote.

The district court would force the administration “to the bargaining table with Mexico, over a policy that both countries wish to terminate, and to supervise its continuing negotiations with Mexico to ensure that they are conducted ‘in good faith.’” The law doesn’t allow the lower court “to tie the hands of the Executive in this manner,” the chief justice wrote.

In his dissent, Alito wrote that even though Congress gave the administration the option of returning “inadmissible aliens to Mexico while they await proceedings in this country,” the Biden DHS instead violated the law by releasing in the United States an “untold numbers of aliens who are very likely to be removed if they show up for their removal hearings.”

“This practice violates the clear terms of the law, but the Court looks the other way,” he wrote.

Christopher Hajec, director of litigation at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), a nonprofit public interest law firm that filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, shared his views on the new ruling.

“We are certainly disappointed with the Court’s decision today,” Hajec told The Epoch Times by email.

“We think it was wrong on the merits and wrong on jurisdiction. Nevertheless, there are two silver linings. On the merits, the Court made clear that the lower courts in this case have yet to decide, and should decide, whether Biden’s extreme parole policies are lawful. We think they clearly are not. Also, on jurisdiction, the Court still left open a path for states and other parties to get relief from Biden’s disastrous immigration policies, though that path is narrower than before.”

Judy Rabinovitz, special counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, praised the ruling.

“The Supreme Court was right to reject the spurious argument that this cruel policy is statutorily required,” Rabinovitz said in a statement. “While, as noted in the decision, the case will return to the district court, the Biden administration can and should move forward swiftly to finally terminate ‘remain in Mexico’ for good—a result that has been long, and unjustly, delayed.”

The U.S. Department of Justice didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-allows-biden-administration-to-end-trumps-remain-in-mexico-asylum-policy_4565236.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-30-3&utm_medium=email&est=Xodv3Q9nnt9ZaB7%2ByGooAS7ZqhRBeHFiM42IocVr0YoZFsooSx%2B3gdtBYJvzhNX98Q%3D%3D

Dozens of progressive prosecutors, many of them funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros, have signed onto an open letter signaling their intention to defy state laws that would impose limits on abortion. 

Since Friday, 87 prosecutors have signed a letter published by Fair and Just Prosecution, a Soros-funded progressive legal nonprofit, stating that they will “decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions and commit to exercise our wellsettled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who seek, provide, or support abortions.” Twenty-eight of the document’s 87 signatories, roughly a third, have ties to Soros, per the Washington Free Beacon‘s analysis, having either received direct contributions from the billionaire or been championed by his network of political organizations. 

Soros has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past decade to get candidates aligned with him elected as top prosecutors. The Free Beacon reported that Soros has helped elect prosecutors in half of the United States’ largest legal jurisdictions. Many of the areas where Soros-backed candidates have won now face issues with rising crime.

The prosecutors who signed the letter hail from 30 states and the District of Columbia, with millions of Americans under their jurisdiction.  

“Enforcing abortion bans runs counter to the obligations and interests we are sworn to uphold,” the letter reads. “It will erode trust in the legal system, hinder our ability to hold perpetrators accountable, take resources away from the enforcement of serious crime, and inevitably lead to the retraumatization and criminalization of victims of sexual violence.”

Prosecuting violations of abortion laws represents a “mockery of justice” that “prosecutors should not be part of,” the letter concludes.

Many of the prosecutors who signed the letter have taken fire for being soft on crime and letting free offenders who went on to commit grievous crimes. Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón lessened penalties for repeat offenders within his jurisdiction and was later sued by the union representing the county’s deputy district attorneys over the policy changes. San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin is also a signatory of the letter. Boudin was defeated in a recall election earlier this month after critics accused him of being too soft on crime.

Soros darling prosecutors in Northern Virginia also featured among the letter’s signatories. Constituents have launched recall campaigns against county prosecutors Steve Descano, Buta Biberaj, and Parisa Dehghani-Tafti for mishandling cases and letting serial offenders back on the streets.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/soros-funded-prosecutors-pledge-to-defy-pro-life-laws/

A George Soros-backed prosecutor in Virginia released on probation a violent repeat offender who went on to kill an elderly homeless woman—the third case of its kind in the jurisdiction this year.

Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) in October charged Chante Antonio Jones with assault and battery before releasing him on recognizance, slapping him with just a $212 fine and one-year period of supervised probation. Police on Monday arrested Jones for beating 63-year-old Michelle Huntley to death at a bus stop where she had taken shelter.

The brutal killing last week is just the latest instance in which bail reform and lightened sentencing by so-called criminal justice reform prosecutors have brought deadly consequences. The Washington Free Beacon reported that Descano’s office dropped felony charges against a man who was later charged with killing two homeless men in Washington, D.C., and New York City in March. Two months before, another gunman, whom Descano had pleaded out on misdemeanors in 2020, killed an 18-year-old at a bus stop.

“An innocent Virginian lost their life because of the criminal-first, victim-last mentality pushed by far-left prosecutors,” Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares (R.) told the Free Beacon. “Continually giving repeat offenders light sentences and allowing them to quickly get back onto the street only encourages more crime and creates more victims.”

Jones, who is also known as Siddiq Khashi Salam, is a repeat offender with more than a dozen charges in Fairfax County in the past three years, including larceny, public intoxication, and indecent exposure. Huntley, who was affectionately called “Mama” by residents, according to ABC 7, was found around midnight on June 17 with evidence of trauma to her upper body. First responders rushed her to the hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries days later. Police records show Jones’s assault-and-battery charges stemmed from punching someone in the face months before on a block close to the Huntley killing.

Descano’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Jones has been charged with aggravated malicious wounding for Huntley’s death (a class-two felony carrying a minimum 20-year sentence), pending a medical examiner’s report.

Through his Justice and Public Safety PAC, Soros dropped more than half-a-million dollars in 2019 to help elect Descano, along with other left-wing Virginia commonwealth’s attorneys like Loudoun County’s Buta Biberaj and Arlington County’s Parisa Dehghani-Tafti. Each pushed out veteran prosecutors who had served decades in their counties, promising in their campaigns to reduce incarceration and oppose many felony convictions.

Homicides in Fairfax County are set to outpace their 2021 levels, with 12 so far compared with 10 by this point the year before. The rate last year jumped 40 percent from 2020. A full annual police report, however, has not been released by the county in 2022.

Descano’s approach to criminal justice, which has enabled repeat offenders, is now fueling recall efforts in Northern Virginia.

“This abhorrent crime was totally preventable,” Sean Kennedy, who is running one of the recall efforts, told the Free Beacon. “Virginians for Safe Communities is dedicated to seeing justice done and removing Steve Descano from office for violating his oath to uphold justice and protect the public. … Like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Steve Descano poses a clear and present danger to public safety in Fairfax County.”

The recall effort has amassed more than half of the roughly required 30,000 signatures to trigger a special election to remove Descano from office, according to Kennedy.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/soros-prosecutor-freed-violent-offender-now-charged-with-killing-homeless-woman/

Christian Beaman died Friday following a drive-by shooting in the city, which injured two others.

While Mayor Lori Lightfoot gets glowing praise in predictable corners for her profane attack against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Caldwell had a different message for the mayor of the crime-riddled Windy City:

Crack down on crime and “uncuff” the police.

Mediaite further reports:

“My heart aches for you,” Hannity told the Fox News contributor after highlighting his brother’s death, as well as a five-month-old victim of shooting violence in Chicago. The two were among at least 20 who were shot over the weekend in the Windy City.

Caldwell said he hopes Lightfoot makes his brother’s death a priority and shared that the suspects are four Black men who were driving an SUV.

The Fox News contributor became understandably emotional while speaking so soon after his brother’s death, fighting back tears and sharing details about the young man. Beaman was looking at colleges he wanted to attend before his life was cut tragically short.

After Hannity expressed that his Fox News colleagues are praying for Caldwell and his family, Caldwell thanked the network, which he referred to as a “family.”

https://www.americanliberty.news/media/fox-news-personality-shares-message-with-chicago-mayor-after-brother-murdered/alnstaff/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=8921

Former president hires one-term city council member who was ousted for supporting defund police initiative

Former president Barack Obama has a new top staffer at his foundation—a far-left activist who was ousted from the Minneapolis City Council for supporting an initiative to defund police.

On Monday, former Minneapolis council member Phillipe Cunningham thanked Obama after starting a “new role at the Obama Foundation as the deputy director – U.S. lead of global leadership programs.” The move comes just months after voters ousted Cunningham, who backed a failed measure to defund city police, from the Minneapolis City Council in November. Cunningham in June 2020 also spoke at a defund-the-police rally, where the activist and nine other council members pledged to “end policing as we know it.” Cunningham’s opponent, LaTrisha Vetaw, said that pledge made her feel “silenced” and called public safety “the only issue” in the race.

Obama’s decision to ignore voters in deep-blue Minneapolis and hire Cunningham for a top position contradicts the former president’s rhetoric on the defund-the-police movement. Obama in November 2020 said he would not defund police and criticized activists who use the phrase. But Obama appeared alongside Cunningham at a virtual town hall when the activist was openly calling to defund police—during that June 2020 event, Cunningham stressed the need to “completely transform our public safety system.”

Resident Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president, claimed last year that those who say Democrats want to defund police are “lying.”

As part of the Obama Foundation, Cunningham will head the U.S. branch of the group’s global leadership programs, which aims to provide “emerging leaders” with “values-based leadership development frameworks to help build their skills and scale their work across public, private, and nonprofit sectors.” It’s unclear how Cunningham’s values align with the program—the Obama Foundation did not return a request for comment on the hire and whether the group agrees with Cunningham’s position on defunding police.

Republican National Committee spokesman Nathan Brand said Obama’s new hire shows “there is no daylight between the looney left and the Democratic Party establishment.”

“With radical defund-the-police leaders like this in charge, it is no wonder Democrats are alienating more and more Americans and are set to lose in November,” Brand told the Washington Free Beacon. “From that perspective, Dems couldn’t have picked a better person to lead these efforts.”

Cunningham, a biological woman who transitioned as a college junior, became the first transgender man of color to be elected to public office in the United States in 2017. Roughly three years later, following George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020, the then-councilmember stood behind a giant “DEFUND POLICE” sign at a Minneapolis rally and argued that the city’s residents could “keep our own community safe” without police. Cunningham also praised those who “threw the first bricks at police officers” during the Stonewall Riots in New York City.

One year later, as the defund police movement lost popularity, Cunningham did not back down. In 2021, Cunningham backed an unprecedented amendment to dismantle the city’s police department. The measure, which Minneapolis voters rejected by double digits, would have replaced the city’s police department with a “Department of Public Safety” and called to abolish the city’s minimum funding requirements for police.

Cunningham’s decision to back that amendment came as Minneapolis experienced a surge in violence. In the last week of 2021, the city notched its 96th homicide, just one murder shy of its record level seen in 1995. That trend has continued into this year—in late April, Minneapolis had 9 murders in 10 days, putting the city on track to surpass its 1995 numbers.

Obama has worked with far-left activists beyond Cunningham. Defund-the-police organizer and MSNBC contributor Brittany Packnett Cunningham served on the former president’s policing task force. She later argued that rising crime rates are the police’s fault.

“This rise in crime is not the fault of the movement, it’s actually the fault of the police,” Packnett Cunningham said during a June 2021 MSNBC appearance. “This has been our point all along—why should we keep funding systems and institutions that keep rendering themselves ineffective?”

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/this-far-left-activist-was-too-woke-for-minneapolis-but-not-obamas-foundation/

Protesters injured more than 2,000 officers in summer 2020 alone

An anti-police activist said at a Tuesday Washington Post forum that activist attacks on police “literally” are “not happening.”

“I’m always interested when the police are, like, I don’t know, nervous about stuff,” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson said at the forum, because “the community is not—we’re not attacking the police. That literally is just not happening.”

Protesters, many with ties to the BLM movement, injured more than 2,000 police officers in summer 2020 alone, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

Mckesson’s claim about attacks on police is not the only false assertion he made at the forum.

“The number-one killer of the police is COVID today, and that’s because they are anti-vaxxers,” Mckesson said, “and then the second is suicide.”

In fact, firearm fatalities were the second-highest on-duty cause of death for law enforcement in 2021, a 36 percent jump from 2020, the Free Beacon reported in January.

Mckesson’s claims are only the latest debunked Post narratives regarding law enforcement. The Post in May falsely said that George Floyd, who died when a police officer kneeled on his neck, was shot to death in police custody.

https://freebeacon.com/media/black-lives-matter-supporter-says-attacks-on-police-are-just-not-happening/

Lawmakers, former officials say change will let Iranian terrorists come to US

The Biden administration altered federal law to make it easier for individuals who have worked with designated terrorist groups to legally enter the United States.

The State and Homeland Security Departments last week amended federal immigration laws to allow foreigners who provided “insignificant material support” to designated terror groups to receive “immigration benefits or other status,” according to the policy published in the Federal Register. Examples of individuals who would fall into the new category, according to the announcement, include individuals who provided “humanitarian assistance” or “routine commercial transactions” to terror groups.

The policy shift is fueling concerns that the Biden administration wants to make it easier for individuals who work with or for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force that has killed hundreds of Americans, to enter the country. Notice of the change came several days before the Biden administration and hardline Iranian government resumed talks aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal.

A State Department spokesman said the law was amended to help vulnerable Afghans, who might have inadvertently worked with terror groups, gain refuge in the United States following the Biden administration’s bungled withdrawal that left the Taliban in power. Lawmakers and former U.S. officials, however, say the new regulations are so broadly written that they would apply to organizations like al Qaeda and the IRGC. The policy change is also raising red flags as U.S. officials, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, face credible death threats from Iran.

The rule does not specifically mention Afghanistan but is written to cover all U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as the IRGC and al Qaeda, experts told the Free Beacon. The Taliban is not designated as a foreign terrorist organization, leaving lawmakers and former U.S. officials concerned the changes extend far beyond vulnerable Afghans and cover those tied to some of the globe’s most violent terror groups.

Gabriel Noronha, a State Department special adviser for Iran during the Trump administration, said that “the Biden administration is claiming this regulation is all about Afghanistan, but they didn’t even mention Afghanistan once in their action, and have made no serious attempt to limit the scope to the situation there.”

“Instead,” said Noronha, who is a fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America think tank, “this looks like a massive watering down of our immigration restrictions against members of terrorist organizations.”

The State Department says the changes are limited to Afghanistan, but would not say why the country is not mentioned once in the new order.

The changes “are an effort to address issues related to Afghanistan,” a State Department spokesman, speaking only on background, told the Free Beacon. “The circumstances between Afghanistan and Iran are very different.” The new rules “are not applicable to people who have received military-type training from [foreign terrorist organizations], including IRGC conscripts.” Rather, the administration is trying to make it easier for those tangentially tied to terrorism to legally enter the country, the official maintained.

When the Free Beacon requested additional information and an explanation as to why the IRGC or similar groups would not be covered by the changes, the State Department declined to answer, saying, “We have no further information or comments to share.” This lack of clarity is fueling concerns about the policy change.

Noronha and others who spoke to the Free Beacon say the broad reference to “foreign terrorist organizations” leaves open the possibility that groups like the IRGC and al Qaeda would benefit from the relaxed immigration guidelines. The revamped guidelines do not specifically include restrictions on either of these groups. “At best this is a horribly written regulation. At worst, it’s an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of Congress and the American people and make it easier for terrorists to come to America,” Noronha said.

Richard Goldberg, who under Trump served on the White House National Security Council as the director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction, said that any effort to loosen restrictions on terror-tied individuals is worrying amid Iran’s threats to kill U.S. leaders.

“Given Iran is actively plotting to kill former American officials, the administration should carefully explain if and how this [rule] might apply to a potential affiliate of the IRGC, and provide a high-level commitment to take all necessary steps to bar any potential IRGC associate from admission to the United States,” Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, told the Free Beacon.

Republican lawmakers agree with this assessment. Five Republican foreign policy leaders who spoke to the Free Beacon expressed concerns the administration is trying to quietly grant concessions to Iran as it reenters nuclear talks.

“It’s outrageous that the Biden administration is lifting the blanket ban on individuals who have provided support to terrorists from entering the United States,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Free Beacon. “The timing raises concerns coming just a few days before the latest round of Iran talks. Resident Biden should end these failed negotiations once and for all and return to a policy of maximum pressure, rather than continuing to make concessions to the terrorist regime in Iran.”

Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he and his colleagues worry the Biden administration is attempting to grant concessions to Iran via backdoor changes to American laws.

“What do Americans gain by letting members of Iran’s terrorist army cross our borders?” Banks asked.

Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), a combat veteran and also a member of the Armed Services Committee, said the change is purely about “appeasing terrorist groups—whether it’s the IRGC, Houthis, or Taliban.”

Reps. Lisa McClain (R., Mich.) and Pat Fallon (R., Texas), both Armed Services Committee members, expressed shock at how broadly written the new regulations are.

“In what world is it an acceptable decision to allow terrorists into our country?” Fallon asked the Free Beacon. “Instead of ending the nuclear talks with Iran all together, Joe Biden has decided to bend over backwards to the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. Before it is too late, I urge them to immediately reconsider this foolish decision.”

Update June 29, 3:31 p.m.: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the Biden administration made no formal announcement of the policy change.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/the-biden-admin-just-made-it-easier-for-terrorists-to-enter-the-united-states/

As more students fail to meet academic standards in Seattle, public education officials in the city are proposing that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs receive more funding than core academic subjects.

Seattle Public Schools would spend more than $5 million on so-called DEI initiatives, including a “racial equity analysis tool” and an after-school program for black male students who are “referred to as kings,” according to a district budget proposal for the 2022-23 school year. The budget allots a little more than $4.5 million for core academic subjects, such as math, science, and literacy. More than half-a-million dollars would be cut from the science budget as well. The school district lists “racial equity,” “engaging students of color,” and ensuring disciplinary policies are not used “as a substitute for culturally responsive behavioral and social emotional supports,” among its guiding principles for the budget.

The decision to prioritize DEI programs comes as students’ proficiency in reading and math has fallen 6 percentage points and 16 percentage points, respectively, since 2019. Test scores from last year found nearly 56 percent of Seattle students are not competent in science and about 57 percent are not competent in math. Just 30 percent of black students and 18 percent of Native American students are meeting grade-level standards. Public school officials in the region have blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for learning losses.

The Seattle school district’s budget recommends around $1.3 million for scholarships and programs in “Native Education,” about $1.5 million for “African American Male Achievement,” and nearly $1.3 million for the “Department of Racial Equity Advancement.” Another $600,000 would be set aside for “Ethnic Studies and Black Studies,” a district representative told the Washington Free Beacon, as well as $650,000 for a Latino academic support and cultural studies program. In addition, each of the district’s three budgetary goals has to do with improving educational outcomes just for black students.

Under the proposed budget, however, math and literacy courses receive around $1.6 million each, and science courses get $1.3 million—around $850,00 less than the district’s DEI programs.

When asked why the “Native Education” would receive more funding than science classes, a spokesman told the Free Beacon budget allocation is “a complex process that involves community input, stakeholders, students, etc.” The total Seattle school district’s budget is around $1.14 billion.

Parents across the nation in recent months have agitated against the rise of race-based educational movements like critical race theory and “antiracist” instruction in public schools. Some have gone as far as to sue school districts, alleging the movement’s are fomenting a new form of racial discrimination. The issue became particularly salient during last year’s Virginia gubernatorial election, with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin pledging to ban critical race theory being taught in public schools.

School districts as far away as Madison, Wis., are pursuing similar budgetary initiatives to Seattle, allocating tens of thousands of dollars a year for a Native American land-acknowledgment plan, among other measures.

Seattle Public Schools’ budget, as recommended by the school board, was introduced in June and will be voted on in July.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/seattle-public-schools-plan-to-spend-more-on-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-than-core-academic-subjects/

At least 50 people were found dead in an 18-wheeler truck carrying suspected illegal immigrants on a remote back road in southwest San Antonio, according to officials.

William McManus, the city’s police chief, said that a city worker was alerted to the situation by a cry for help shortly before 6 p.m. on Monday.

Officers arrived at the site of the tractor-trailer rig near the intersection of Cassin Drive and Quintana Road and found a body on the ground outside the vehicle, which had a door that was partially opened.

Another 16 people, four of whom were children, were taken to hospitals with heat-related illnesses, Fire Chief Charles Hood said, adding that they were hot to the touch and dehydrated. He also noted that no water was found in the truck.

“They were suffering from heat stroke and exhaustion,” Hood said. “It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer, but there was no visible working AC unit on that rig.”

Temperatures approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Texas city on Monday. Temperatures can rise drastically inside vehicles on hot days.

3 Taken Into Custody

McManus said three people were taken into custody but it was unclear if they were linked to any human trafficking efforts. They were not found with the truck and their involvement is not yet clear, he said.

However, he noted that the truck was a presumed migrant smuggling attempt into the United States. A federal investigation has been launched following the find, led by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, he added.

A spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed that the HSI is leading “an alleged human smuggling event” in coordination with local police.

“This is nothing short of a horrific human tragedy,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said late on Monday at a press conference near the scene.

Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, in a post on Twitter, called the deaths of the migrants in the truck a “tragedy in Texas.” He said consular officials would go to the hospitals where victims had been taken to help “however possible.”

A spokesman for the Honduran foreign ministry told Reuters the country’s consulates in Houston and Dallas would be investigating the incident.

Ebrard said two Guatemalans were hospitalized and Guatemala’s foreign ministry said on Twitter that consular officials were going to the hospital “to verify if there are two Guatemalan minors there and what condition they are in.”

Immigration Policies Blamed

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott attributed the deaths to Biden’s immigration policies. In a blunt post on Twitter, the Republican governor wrote, “These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.”

Jack Staton, a former senior official with ICE’s investigative unit who retired in December, told Reuters that the I-35 highway near where the truck was found runs through San Antonio from the Mexican border and is a popular smuggling corridor because of the large volume of truck traffic.

He said that illegal immigrants have been intercepted in the area regularly since July 2017, when 10 people died after they were traveling in a tractor-trailer that San Antonio police found in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The driver of the truck was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the human smuggling operation.

Resident Joe Biden said in a statement on Tuesday that “initial reports are that this tragedy was caused by smugglers or human traffickers who have no regard for the lives they endanger and exploit to make a profit.”

“This incident underscores the need to go after the multi-billion dollar criminal smuggling industry preying on migrants and leading to far too many innocent deaths,” he said. “In Los Angeles two weeks ago, I announced that the United States has launched a first-of-its kind anti-smuggling campaign with our regional partners. In the first three months, we have made over 2,400 arrests, and that work will only intensify in the months ahead.”

Biden said his administration “will continue to do everything possible to stop human smugglers and traffickers from taking advantage of people who are seeking to enter the United States between ports of entry.”

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/at-least-46-people-found-dead-in-a-truck-carrying-suspected-migrants-in-san-antonio-reports_4562593.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-28&utm_medium=email&est=3fzUKBquXTiVf3Q7yLjG0URGSPTxiEMw6PgGuNkWgEjDY07r5KIZcCFKvlaRfrvQXg%3D%3D

It’s part of the whole college experience. Eager young minds, animated in discussion, engaging in robust classroom debate.

It got lively, boisterous—even explosive at times—as bright pupils with great expectations shared, tested, and contested ideas about the world. This was the university, the crucible of learning, the engine of ideas.

How times have changed.

Today, that experience has turned heavy (the crucible cold and unyielding) in many colleges and universities, where discussions are dampened by theories like postmodernism, putting a chill on that wistful classroom experience.

Few know this better than those who’ve been silenced.

The schools themselves are doing the silencing.

Michiganite Maggie DeJong, 26, now graduated, studied art therapy counseling at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where postmodernism was taught as part of its curriculum.

Because of her viewpoints on contentious issues facing America today, ones impacting the lives, livelihoods, rights, and security of countless individuals—such as abortion, defunding the police, and Black Lives Matter—the school took administrative steps to bring her bright mind to heel.

They slapped DeJong with a “no contact order,” the college’s equivalent of a restraining order, usually reserved for those threatening violence.

“There is a view that is becoming more prominent on campuses, that speech is ‘violence,’” DeJong’s attorney Gregg Walters told The Epoch Times. “You cannot issue an order saying your protected speech is a violation of some code of conduct.”

DeJong, along with the Alliance Defending Freedom, is now suing the school for violating her First Amendment rights to free speech and religious belief. Her Christian beliefs are part of what shape her worldview. DeJong is seeking a change in the school’s policy, vindication from the no contact order, and remediation for damages.

She was also denied due process.

“Even in the legal system, you get a chance to defend yourself,” added Walters. “She wasn’t given any type of hearing date to defend us, they were just issued.”

DeJong engaged in discussions in classroom settings, which was expected of her, in ways that were topically appropriate, discussions about “race relations,” “religion,” and “the postmodern theoretical framework,” she said. Until a student who didn’t like what she was saying made a formal complaint.

And her views were collected from social media for over a year. Classmates took screenshots from her Instagram as “evidence.”

“I was participating in these discussions, but they found views offensive that were from my Instagram that regarded pro-life discussions,” she told the newspaper, adding that those views were “conservative views that millions of Americans hold that are being discussed right now.”

She defended Kyle Rittenhouse and denounced critical race theory on social media, drawing the ire of fellow students.

“Proof” of ideological impiety in hand, administrators issued DeJong no contact orders preventing her from having any contact, direct or indirect, with three students, on or off campus.

“It’s the university’s version of a restraining order,” said Walters, adding that schools are not allowed to issue them. “Not in these circumstances. In other circumstances [it may be allowed], perhaps for protection against physical violence, threats of violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, but when it comes to protected speech, absolutely not.”

Adding insult to injury, DeJong’s teacher followed up by sending an email to some 30 of her classmates, informing them she was being investigated.

This pressure successfully chilled her speaking, effectively silencing her from further discussion, even in the classroom.

“I was living in fear with my speech and so I was very scared to even defend myself, and so I remained very quiet,” she said, adding that she felt “sadness for what was going on.”

Punishment with such impunity flies in the face of university tradition: to seek truth. Now, the prevailing postmodern ideology holds that truth is relative; all discourses are constructs, tools of power; logic itself is a construct, a construct of the West, so logical debate can’t reach fruitful conclusions but can only serve the powerful, the privileged.

Only power struggles exist, between oppressor and oppressed.

Hence, speech equals violence when uttered from people like DeJong—so the postmodern mantra goes.

Not all agree.

“The more we talk about speech being ‘violence,’ the more we see extreme reactions to legal speech,” said Walters. “And in case of Maggie’s speech, there are millions of people that would agree with the positions that she took.

“To treat that as if it were something worthy of a no contact order is just absolutely wrong. It was protected speech, and universities cannot censor speech based on religious and political viewpoints.”

The university’s punitive approach to learning, he added, reinforces victimhood behavior rather than encouraging civil discourse.

“I went in with the mindset that it’s university, so diversity of thought should be welcomed,” DeJong added. “It should be a marketplace of ideas where you can engage in dialogue … where you’re truly picking things apart and learning, and learning from other people.

“Freedom of speech, the First Amendment, needs to be upheld within university systems so that students can fully engage in the marketplace of ideas.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/student-slapped-with-no-contact-order-by-university-for-speaking-christian-values-in-class-discussions_4551426.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-27-3&utm_medium=email&est=r%2F%2B5qeFcfa6uJjDsD4wh9zRUP9d%2BocbSI%2BTH1orFc7iBY1HZcd6mtwaJd%2FSInijDaQ%3D%3D

A group of parents in Maryland’s largest school district have a proposal to prevent school shootings that doesn’t require banning guns.

The group, Vigilance Not Vigils, is calling on Montgomery County to lift its ban on school resource officers—law enforcement agents assigned to respond to emergencies in local schools. The district defunded its resource officer program in March 2021, following complaints that officers disproportionately arrested minority students. Montgomery County Public Schools have seen an uptick in violent incidents since the district pulled resource officers, including the county’s first school shooting in January.

Montgomery County replaced resource officers with community engagement officers, who work outside school buildings and are assigned to multiple schools. These off-site officers, whom schools contact through 911, are often delayed responding to incidents. Montgomery County parent Dana Noga told the Washington Free Beacon that engagement officers are a poor substitute for the resource officers they replaced—and that students feel their absence.

“Kids cannot learn if they don’t feel safe,” said Noga.

Montgomery County is one of the only school districts in the Washington, D.C., area without a resource officer program. All 25 district high school principals opposed County Executive Marc Elrich’s decision to pull resource officers from schools. But Elrich brushed aside their objections, claiming the move was necessary to protect minority students.

But a Montgomery County Police Department memo obtained by the Free Beacon shows that resource officers did not target black and Hispanic students. Between August and December, resource officers made just 11 arrests in Montgomery County Public Schools. Six detainees were white students, while four were black.

Don Bridges, president of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said there’s no validity to charges of racism against resource officers.

“I have been a man of color my entire life, and I can’t begin to tell you about the hundreds and maybe thousands of kids of color that I’ve had positive relationships with, how many weddings I’ve gone to, how many graduations, and how many cookouts,” Bridges told the Free Beacon.

Montgomery County lawmakers pledged to redirect resource officer funding toward new mental health programs and restorative justice training. The county said it would place 50 social workers in schools, but has only hired 33.

Bridges said preventing school shootings requires both resource officers and mental health programs.

“When we look at these parents in Texas who paid the ultimate price, the thing we should be saying is that we should be using both,” Bridges said. “Our kids are dying, and we need to look at things differently.”

Brandon Grubb, who graduated from Montgomery County’s Magruder High School in 2021, agrees that mental health and school resource officer programs are not mutually exclusive.

“There were blinders on to think that removing the resource officer program and replacing it with a mental health program was the answer, especially since the mental health program was not implemented in a timely manner,” Grubb wrote in a letter to the Montgomery County Council and the Board of Education, which was obtained by the Free Beacon.

The push to increase resource officers is gaining traction at the national level. Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) on Wednesday introduced a bill that would redirect American Rescue Plan funds to double the number of officers in schools across the country.

But Anita Cox, a Montgomery County Public Schools parent and leader of Vigilance not Vigils, says the push for resource officers needs to begin closer to home.

“Instead of trying to go to Congress to look for a way to end this, we need to go down the street,” Cox said.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/send-in-the-cops-maryland-parents-call-for-more-school-security/

Ken Griffin is fleeing Democrat-run Illinois. He’ll take over $200 million in annual income tax revenue with him, and that’s just his personal share. 

Illinois’s richest resident, hedge-fund CEO Ken Griffin, announced on Thursday that he—and his company, Citadel—are packing up shop and heading to Miami, citing a better corporate environment and rising crime rates in Chicago.

The move, which Griffin announced in a letter to employees, will deprive Democrat-run Illinois of hundreds of millions of dollars in annual income tax revenue, a company spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon.

Griffin alone—who is worth approximately $25 billion—pays over $200 million in state income taxes every year, the spokesman said, and Citadel employees have themselves funneled over $1 billion to the state over the past decade.

Citadel is the third major corporation to announce plans to leave Illinois in the past two months.  Caterpillar said earlier this month that it would move its headquarters from Illinois. The announcement followed Boeing’s decision in May to move its headquarters to Arlington, Va., from downtown Chicago.

Griffin’s announcement comes as Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, faces reelection in November. Pritzker and Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, also a Democrat, are grappling with a spike in violent crime. Murders in the city were up 60 percent in 2021 relative to two years prior, while shootings were up 66 percent and car theft was up 19 percent over the same time period, according to statistics compiled by the Chicago Police Department.

Griffin has spoken publicly about the rising crime rate and its impact on his colleagues. “If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here,” he told the Wall Street Journal in April. “I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from.”

Pritzker spokeswoman Emily Bittner told the Free Beacon that “countless companies are choosing Illinois as their home, as we continue to lead the nation in corporate relocations and had a record number of business start-ups in the past year.” Bittner pointed to Kellogg, which announced this week that it would move its corporate headquarters to Chicago.

A top donor to Republican candidates and causes whose giving has ramped up dramatically over the past decade, Griffin has announced plans to spend approximately $40 million in the upcoming midterm elections. His move back to Florida—he was born in Daytona Beach—is also a boon to state governor and GOP star Ron DeSantis, who has welcomed an influx of high-income earners and companies thanks in part to the fact that the state has no income tax.

In his letter to colleagues on Thursday, Griffin said that he has already relocated his family to Miami, which he described as a “vibrant, growing metropolis that embodies the American Dream,” and that he looks forward to “rapidly expanding Citadel in a city so rich in diversity and abounding with energy.” Many Citadel employees, he said, had asked over the past year  to relocate away from Chicago—”to Miami, New York, and our other offices around the world.”

Citadel is one of several major hedge funds that have announced plans to relocate to Florida over the past two years, including Melvin Capital Management and D1 Capital Partners.

Update 3:07 p.m.: Boeing is moving its headquarters to Arlington, Va., not Washington, D.C. as originally stated. We regret the error.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/heres-how-much-tax-revenue-illinois-will-lose-from-citadels-decision-to-cut-bait/

In a stirring and spot-on campaign email, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis declares war on the Far Left calling it a “Radical Vigilante Woke Mob.”

While I’ve seen my share of them over the years and sent out a few myself, campaign fundraising emails are notorious for appealing to the hard-core base of both parties.  

So, most of them are taken with a grain of salt by political observers.

However, the email I just received from the DeSantis re-election campaign really hit home. It accurately defined and summarized the aggressive domestic threat posed by the extreme Left to our nation’s very core:

Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.

This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.

A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.

We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.

We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”

DeSantis omitted the LGBTQ brainwashing of our young children and the collusion of major woke companies like Disney in doing so, but he has been at the forefront of battling both these evils in Florida.

The DeSantis campaign continues, noting something that impacted me directly on the huge social media platform LinkedIn: “We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.”

And of course, the last piece of the massive leftist effort: “We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.”

Referring to himself as the “Governor of the Free State of Florida,” DeSantis then goes on to make his pitch for how he will fight this grave threat to America, at least in Florida, with “faith, with reason, and with freedom.”

And of course, he asks for our financial support.

In my view, this email accurately and effectively summarizes the threat we face from the extreme Left in America today. DeSantis is on the front lines of this battle in Florida, but he also seems to be preparing to take the fight nationally as well.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

https://www.americanliberty.news/politics/florida-governor-goes-to-war-against-radical-vigilante-woke-mob/pcrespo/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=7766

When we hear the term “Red Flag” we immediately think DANGER. 

Danger, riptides, falling rocks, exploding volcanoes – or something that can truly harm us. 

However, red flags, when woven into the law become even more dangerous than any of the immediate physical threats above. They create a legal framework that permits the state to take your freedom – and to do so without due process.

The arguments for these laws, on their face, seem sound, sane, and quite reasonable. 

Politicians call them “extreme-risk protection orders” – who would think that sounds unreasonable? But be assured, these laws are a dangerous abrogation of our constitutional rights – rights like those enshrined in the Second and the Fifth Amendments to The U.S. Constitution – and now Congress wants to impose yet another unconstitutional restriction on the entire nation.

So why are these laws so bad?

• There is no evidence that red flag laws reduce gun violence
• They violate the due process guaranteed to all Americans
• These laws put law enforcement officers at extreme risk
• These laws are effectively penalizing people for what they might do – not what they have actually done
• There is often no time-limit on how long the state can keep a law-abiding citizen’s firearms

With the as-yet determined legislation pending in the US Senate – we’ve seen the media tout the advantages of red flag laws as a tool – primarily to stop mass shootings. However, there is no evidence that these laws accomplish this goal. In fact, gun crime has risen in most places where these laws have been enacted – and red flag laws have fallen far short.

Imagine you argue with your neighbor and they know that you or your spouse own firearms, and the next day officers show up at your door demanding that you turn over all of your guns. 

You have no choice, your home is invaded, your rights suspended, and now the burden of getting your property and rights back falls to you. You have no right to an attorney, none will be provided, and any resistance may result in being arrested – or subjected to force. 

Can you imagine the impact this would have on your life? It is an almost unimaginable horror, and it is already taking place in cities and towns in at least 14 states today.

Imagine further the position that law enforcement officers are placed in. They must now enter homes to confiscate firearms from people that have committed no crime. The danger we place our law enforcement officers in as we demand they carry out such a task must be seriously weighed against the benefit. In this case, these laws have shown no positive impact, so the benefit is a mere pipe-dream. Endangering lives in pursuit of utopian dreams is not something that our law enforcement officers signed up for nor deserve – and allowing the federal government to force local law enforcement into such situations is short-sighted at best.

Then there is one of the most disturbing aspects to all of this: taking people’s rights away for what they might do. It is clearly reminiscent of science fiction like Minority Report or 1984, but also reminds us of the tactics used by the totalitarian regimes we saw die in the 20th century. How long do you think it will be until a social media post critical of those opposed to gun rights means you’ll have your guns taken? You wouldn’t have to wait at all, because it already happened to a man in Broward County, Florida.

Those who are using the latest tragedy in Uvalde, TX to push for this legislation are the same people who believe all guns should be banned – and confiscated. They are rejoicing as they see their dream being carried out in Canada – where American Constitutional protections do not exist. 

It is not mere hyperbole to draw a line from suspension of Second Amendment rights and the historical tyranny that then falls upon the disarmed – much as was done in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia,  Communist China, or even more recently in Rwanda.

These laws seem like an excellent solution, and thus we are at risk of being subjected to them as lawmakers from both parties bow to what they perceive as a vast public outcry for them…but it would be a huge mistake.

The danger of such legislation is that once you give the government powers – or in this case, give up your liberty – then you can kiss that liberty goodbye forever.  You can also count on the state to abuse that power from time to time, ruining lives – and continuing to fail in accomplishing the goal of protecting American children. The threat of the state seeking to protect us all cannot be understated.

But an even larger danger looms, as the tools to safeguard our republic are wrested away from every American…

We’ve already seen red flag laws used by ex-lovers, political opponents – and who else? The state may decide to deem entire swaths of the populace as “dangerous” – then what?

https://www.americanliberty.news/second-amendment/red-flag-laws-and-why-they-should-scare-us-all/jfotis/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=7766

Spot fails to mention star witness’s work for radical group that wants to defund police, teach CRT

A new Chuck Schumer ad uses a “former Republican” to attack Nevada’s Republican U.S. Senate nominee Adam Laxalt. Unmentioned is the star witness’s work for a far-left group that supports Laxalt’s opponent and wants to defund police.

In the ad, Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC features testimony from “Patty,” a “business owner” and “former Republican” who slams Laxalt as “wrong for Nevada.” The ad does not reveal that “Patty” is former Nevada state senator Patricia Farley, who began caucusing with Democrats more than five years ago in 2016. Two years later, Farley joined Battle Born Progress, a liberal nonprofit that works closely with Laxalt’s opponent, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D.). The group under Farley has taken a number of radical liberal positions on hot-button issues—a far cry from Schumer’s portrayal of Farley as a disillusioned conservative entrepreneur.

In July 2020, for example, Battle Born Progress called to end the “school-to-prison pipeline” and “save money” by “defunding school police.” One year later, group executive director Annette Magnus said Nevada “should be teaching” critical race theory in its public schools because “young people need to know this information.” Battle Born Progress also opposes voter ID requirements and supports late-term abortion. Cortez Masto said in November that she was “so glad” to speak at the group’s annual fundraising event.

Schumer’s willingness to omit Farley’s status as a liberal activist—and his decision to criticize Laxalt using a “Republican” figure—suggests the Democratic leader is concerned by Cortez Masto’s reelection chances. Resident Joe Biden won Nevada by 3 points in 2020, but his political standing has since deteriorated in the Silver State as Democrats navigate record-high inflation, gas prices, and illegal immigrant encounters. Fifty-six percent of Nevada voters disapprove of Biden, compared with 32 percent who approve, according to Civiqs.

Senate Majority PAC spokeswoman Veronica Yoo told the Washington Free Beacon the ad identifies Farley “as a local business owner and former Republican because those are the facts.” Yoo did not answer questions about Farley’s work with Battle Born Progress.

Farley in 2014 ran for state Senate as a Republican, receiving 57 percent of the vote. Two years later, she announced she would change her party affiliation to nonpartisan and caucus with Democrats, a decision she said stemmed from her disappointment with “party politics.” Farley’s subsequent political contributions and employment history, however, tell a different story.

In May 2018, just months after declining to run for reelection, Farley made her first federal political contribution—to failed Democratic congressional candidate Pat Spearman. Three months later, Farley donated to Nevada Democratic senator Jacky Rosen.

In October 2018—one month before leaving the state Senate—Farley joined Battle Born Progress as the president of its state PAC, Nevada Values. The group quickly launched a six-figure ad attacking Republican state Senate leader Michael Roberson. Roughly one year later, in December 2019, Farley endorsed Pete Buttigieg for president, saying the former South Bend, Ind., mayor “is offering bold solutions to our nation’s biggest problems.” She went on to contribute $1,500 to Buttigieg’s PAC, and has not contributed to a Republican at the federal level.

Still, Farley told the Free Beacon she is a “current independent” who is “not interested in pushing partisan political agendas” and “only care[s] about giving Nevadans the facts they need to make an informed decision.” While Farley also claims in the ad that she “used to work with Adam Laxalt in the state government,” she later told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she had “few personal interactions” with the Republican.

Farley still serves as president of Nevada Values as of February 2022, the PAC’s latest campaign finance disclosure states. Nevada Values is registered as a Battle Born Progress affiliate and uses the same mailing address, email address, and phone number as the liberal nonprofit.

Both Laxalt and Cortez Masto cruised to victory in Nevada’s June 14 primary elections, and the pair will now face off in November. Cortez Masto holds a strong financial advantage—she has $9 million on hand to Laxalt’s roughly $2.1 million.

https://freebeacon.com/elections/new-schumer-attack-ad-trots-out-liberal-activist-as-former-republican/

Columnist Naomi Wolf, author of “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” asserts that after two years of pandemic policies, people in free societies are behaving more like those in authoritarian societies.

Wolf maintains that America is now less free, and becoming almost unrecognizable.

“A handful of bad actors” including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Big Tech, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) used the pandemic to “exploit the crisis in such a way as to reengineer our free democratic open societies, especially in the West, especially in the United States, into a post-free society, a post-humane society,” said Wolf during a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

Related Coverage

‘We Don’t Have America Anymore’—Dr. Naomi Wolf on CCP-Style Technocratic Authoritarianism in the US

The Biden administration in April extended the 2-year-old coronavirus public health emergency for another 90 days.

Wolf said, based on history, the ongoing lockdowns and extension of the public health emergency indicate society is in the last phase of a tyrannical takeover, because with emergency powers, laws protecting liberty can be suspended.

According to Wolf, there are 10 steps every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10, said Wolf. Some of the other steps include demonizing whistleblowers and critics, calling dissent “treason,” “espionage,” or “subversion,” and controlling the media narrative.

During the last two years of lockdowns and mandates, Big Tech and the elites have profited while the average Americans have seen the American Dream slowly “closing” on them, she said.

“And so often, when a democracy is dying, or a regime is turning the screws on freedoms to create an established new form of tyranny, it happens intentionally in a very incremental way,” said Wolf. “And you really see this from 1930 to 1933 in Germany.”

She said humanity is witnessing the formation of a two-tier society of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, in which people who would never discriminate against others based on categories of race and sex are now discriminating against the unvaccinated.

“Suddenly, they’re happily embracing a discrimination society in which some people are cast as clean and valuable members of society and other people are ostracized and marginalized and ‘othered’ and described as sort of dirty and causing infection to others,” said Wolf.

She argues that big tech companies had an active role in creating these perceptions and in “shaping legislation and certainly in presenting the drama of COVID and lockdowns to us, and then the vaccine rollout, in such a way as to change human behavior and to change human society,” said Wolf.

Wolf cited the emails between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing Facebook’s role in getting the right public health “messages out” during the lockdowns.

People had no choice but to rely on tech platforms while they were locked down, and Big Tech used that to manipulate the public, said Wolf.

“What I do trace in the book is how there was a vast profit that tech companies made by suppressing human assembly, by helping to message that it was unsafe or unlawful to gather in person,” she said. “And when you understand that big tech companies are competing with human beings gathering in human spaces, you understand why there was a vested interest in suppressing human assembly.”

Wolf thinks big tech companies will not stop at just harvesting data on the computer, but that they want to dominate peoples’ bodily autonomy with vaccine passports.

“What these companies want more than anything is to leave the parameters of your computer and to colonize other currently non-colonized spaces, notably the human body,” said Wolf.

This would give these companies and governments the ability to switch off peoples’ access to commerce, travel, and other goods and services if they did not comply with a particular mandate, Wolf added.

Some forms of digital tracking and surveilling are already here in the United States, she said.

“You’re now expected to swipe these QR codes just to see the menu, or just to get in. And the QR code uploads your data to a central database,” she said, adding that she’s seen the software “that maps the relationships of everyone sitting at that table, and then builds databases and networks of relationships.”

Wolf said that on a scale of one to 10 on the Chinese social credit system, the United States is currently at a three.

“There’s a change that’s happened in American cities in the last two years,” she said.

Because most people around the world, particularly in U.S. cities, use digital apps to travel, do banking, and shop, a digital social credit system similar to China’s is imminent, she said.

Our data is being harvested and used by the “global technocratic elite” to control human behavior, said Wolf.

“We’ve assumed that the worst it can be is data are harvested from us with everything that we choose to do using our free will as human beings,” said Wolf.

“But what I’ve seen is that digital technology has its own logic, and it isn’t restricted by what human beings want to do. So once digital platforms and their oligarchical masters can figure out how to change people’s behavior to suit technology, there’s nothing, moral or ethical, that will keep them from changing people’s behavior to suit their technology, and to suit their business plans,” she added.

The pandemic has revealed how this type of digital control is playing out, because humans, before the prevalence of digital technology, did not choose to “socially distance” to fight pandemics, said Wolf.

“The dream of our digital overlords is for technology to tell humans what to do, and that’s exactly where we’re at,” said Wolf.

While some people might label her a conspiracy theorist, her opinions are based on a long career as a journalist, political consultant, and now tech CEO, Wolf said. Furthermore, she has witnessed firsthand the powerful elites making historical decisions under the radar, she said.

Wolf was well acquainted with this group of powerful people until recently when she was ejected from their circles for writing oppositional pieces on lockdowns.

“But it’s really true that the global technocratic elite have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow Germans or Americans or Russians or Chinese, and they now are able to align above the level of nation-states,” she said.

For example, one of the WEF’s goals is to make nation-level decision-making less and less important, and the World Health Organization’s goal is to make public health decisions on a global scale, bypassing countries’ own authorities via the pandemic treaty, said Wolf.

“These technocratic elites really do believe that they can order the world better than you and I and that they have the right to,” she said. “That’s really scary.”

Little by little, humanity’s tolerance for cruelty and authoritarianism has grown.

“The war wasn’t just on us as a political entity, the war was on American culture, and is on American culture,” she said. “And they’ve succeeded largely, unless we wake up, because we were a kind, decent, inclusive culture that respected other people’s boundaries and freedoms. … And now a CCP-style cruelty is something that we tolerate.”

What people believe is largely determined by the news they consume, said Wolf, and many people only watch news outlets that give a skewed picture of pandemic treatments and policies, largely funded by wealthy people like Bill Gates.

“I do trace in ‘The Bodies of Others’ how millions of dollars flowed and are flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the BBC and the Guardian and NPR and other formerly very credible, objective news outlets.”

Because most people get slanted news coverage, the country is more divided and many people on the left refuse to consider any other narrative or look at primary source documents, because they believe only government sources are giving them “scientific” information, said Wolf.

This skewed messaging has been able to convince people that the mandates and lockdowns are more American and important than liberty or critical thinking.

Wolf said the most brilliant aspect of the pandemic messaging was that it was framed altruistically.

“You know, ‘You’ve got to exclude those people for the good of the community,’ or ‘You’ve got to mask yourself and your child to save your child,’” said Wolf. “This really brilliantly upended American culture because it cast freedom as selfish.”

Now that those in power have effectively conditioned people to be fearful and submissive, they can keep reinstituting emergency powers, she argued.

“That’s what emergency law means,” she said. “They can do whatever they want, basically. It’s a weaponization of boards of health, it’s a weaponization of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the [Department of Health and Human Services].”

Wolf said although the situation is dire, people can do something to push back against this tyranny by being informed about what is really going on in the country, assembling in groups, and getting involved politically on the local level.

As it stands now, “I will say that each side is being fed narratives and stereotypes about the other that would persuade each side that the other is absolutely insane and dangerous, dangerously insane,” said Wolf.

“I get that conservatives think, ‘liberals don’t know what a woman is.’ That is not actually literally true, and liberals think ‘conservatives all want to torch our democratic processes, storm the Capitol, and are misogynist, racist thugs who are trigger happy,” said Wolf.

The last two years have conditioned people to fear each other and so the conversations that would have normally occurred when people gathered are not happening and keeping the country divided, said Wolf. She said she will gladly talk to people on the right.

“People I love think I’m doing something wrong in even talking to conservatives and libertarians. That’s very dangerous. The left, especially, has decided that you’re morally complicit if you have a conversation across the aisle,” Wolf said. “That is censorship, that is cancel culture, that’s un-American, that is an importation from Communism.”

She urges people to remember what makes America unique and a beacon to other nations: to remember we are the great experiment where neighbors talked to each other, listened, and didn’t “rat” each other out if they did not agree with each other, Wolf said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/we-dont-have-america-anymore-author-naomi-wolf_4545628.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-21-3&utm_medium=email&est=Ti3V30R3w%2F2JuDx47eYvzpeLpt8HYqj3OhnaBBsqKEGiN5KT8OMKfPTbD%2FFjf51nfw%3D%3D

More than 50,000 residents left San Francisco last year, the highest population decrease of any major U.S. city.

Between July 2020 and July 2021, 54,813 people exited the Bay Area—a 6.3 percent decline resulting in San Francisco’s smallest population in a decade. High housing costs, rising crime, and rampant public vagrancy likely fueled the exodus, as residents have soured on the Golden City’s liberal leadership.

Voters in a June recall election ousted radical prosecutor Chesa Boudin for his soft-on-crime approach. Two-thirds of Asian Americans opposed Boudin, spurred on by his failure to quell attacks against seniors in their communities.

Driven by worries over public safety, a majority of Bay Area voters disapprove of Democratic mayor London Breed, according to a June San Francisco Examiner poll. Breed slashed the city’s police budget by $120 million in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death but reversed course 18 months later, making an emergency request to beef up law enforcement funding as crime soared.

The homicide rate in San Francisco has shot up 37 percent in the past two years. A retail theft wave garnered national attention last year, following California’s move to lessen penalties for shoplifting. Seventy percent of San Franciscans think their quality of life has declined, and 88 percent believe homelessness has worsened in recent years.

Rising housing costs are another major factor being cited for the decline. Some blame the zoning policies of the liberal city for inflating the cost of living, exacerbating homelessness.

Other liberal-run, large cities grappling with crime and homelessness have seen substantial declines in population as well. The 15 fastest-growing U.S. cities sit in states run by Republican governors. And some San Francisco-based companies are fleeing California for red states.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/tens-of-thousands-flee-san-francisco-as-liberal-leaders-struggle-with-crime-and-homelessness/

The Biden State Department this month named its first ever special representative for racial equity and justice. The newly minted envoy, Desirée Cormier Smith, once slammed white diplomats for being overly “protective” of the United States and lacking the “empathy” of their minority counterparts.

Smith, a self-described “Black activist,” made the comments in an October 2020 interview. At the time, Smith served as senior policy adviser for Open Society Foundations, the think tank funded by Democratic billionaire donor George Soros. The State Department on Friday announced Smith’s appointment to the post, which was created to “confront systemic racism and injustice around the world.” The State Department described Smith as a “racial justice expert with a deep and steadfast commitment to equity and justice for all.”

Smith may have to temper her racially charged views in her new role. The State Department prohibits statements that show “hostility toward an individual because of his or her race.” Department guidelines also prohibit discriminatory harassment in the form of “racial epithets, ‘jokes,’ offensive or derogatory comments, or other verbal or physical conduct based on an individual’s race/color.”

In an interview with the Black Diplomats podcast, Smith discussed her earlier work as a foreign service officer. She said her white colleagues displayed an “ownership” mentality when awarding visas to foreign applicants. White diplomats, Smith said, “were so protective of the United States, and they didn’t want anybody who could sully the image of the United States because it’s this perfect shining city on a hill.”

“We also come with a certain humility that I would say that a lot of white foreign service officers lack,” Smith said of her fellow minority diplomats. “We approached it with so much more empathy.”

Smith has spoken openly about her activist role at Foggy Bottom, where she has served as senior adviser in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.

“Black activists like myself are still working through the United Nations to defend human rights and freedoms for all,” Smith wrote in a column for the Grio in March. She said she worked “relentlessly” to elect a critical race theory scholar, Justin Hansford, to the United Nations Permanent Forum of People of African Descent.

Smith is not the only Biden State Department official to come under fire for controversial statements.

Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, the department’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, complained in a 2020 podcast interview about the “white male-dominated” national security field. She said that as a minority woman, she was “probably better prepared than my male colleagues, certainly my European-American colleagues.”

Jalina Porter, who until recently served as deputy spokeswoman at Foggy Bottom, has said the ​​”largest threat to U.S. national security are U.S. cops.” Porter left the State Department earlier this month.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-state-department-racial-equity-rep-says-white-diplomats-like-america-too-much/

Fox Business host Larry Kudlow didn’t hold back on a recent segment of his show and told his audience the full extent of the Biden Administration’s failing economic policies.

In part of the segment, Kudlow gives an insight into the latest Fox News poll numbers which show waning confidence in the President’s ability to lead an economic recovery.

He also refuted a common talking point the left often uses about wealthy individuals and major corporations not paying their fair share of taxes.

Notably, Kudlow actually agreed on a few observations recently made by resident Biden about issues plaguing the nation – before highlighting the fact that Biden’s own policies have led to the problems he wants to solve.

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https://www.americanliberty.news/economics/fox-business-host-exposes-true-impact-of-bidens-economic-policies/alnstaff/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=7381

University’s approach to Kevin Kruse provides stark contrast to its treatment of Joshua Katz

Princeton University learned in December about plagiarism allegations against one of its star progressive professors, emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show, but it does not appear to have taken action against him in the intervening six months.

On Dec. 6, the economic historian Phillip Magness emailed Princeton’s dean of faculty, Gene Jarrett, with evidence that Princeton historian Kevin Kruse plagiarized several passages of his 2015 book One Nation Under God.

“I am sharing this information in the interest of academic integrity,” Magness wrote. The email contained detailed comparisons between Kruse’s book and a 1956 New York Times article from which Kruse appears to have lifted passages without attribution.

The university never replied to Magness’s email, Magness told the Free Beacon, and has not announced an investigation of Kruse. Jarrett did not respond to a request for comment.

The university’s treatment of Kruse—a historian known for his searing criticism of conservative media—contrasts sharply with its scorched-earth approach to Joshua Katz, the classics professor who was fired last month after raising hell over the school’s racial politics.

That contrast raises questions about political double standards at the Ivy League university, which has denied that its firing of Katz had anything to do with ideology.

Katz was a Princeton pariah: His biting criticism of the school’s political correctness drew flak from students, faculty, and staff, including Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber. The university even condemned Katz as a racist in its 2021 freshman orientation programming, doctoring one of his quotes to make him seem racially insensitive. It began investigating him within a month of receiving “new information” about a consensual relationship he had with a student in 2007, for which he had already been punished in 2018.

Kruse, on the other hand, is a darling of the online left. He frequently posts Twitter threads debunking conservative “lies” and, in 2017, mocked a member of the Trump administration for plagiarizing his master’s thesis.

“We’d expel a student who pulled this,” Kruse tweeted.

Kruse may have plagiarized his own thesis, Magness argued in a June 14 Reason article, on top of his 2015 book. Passages in Kruse’s 2000 doctoral dissertation are almost indistinguishable from those in two 1996 monographs: Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta by Ronald Bayor and The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas Sugrue.

Magness highlighted these similarities in another email to Princeton on June 7, this time addressed to the dean of research, Pablo Debenedetti. Debenedetti replied that he forwarded the email to Jarrett’s office, which never circled back to Magness.

Plagiarism is a “very serious charge at Princeton,” the school’s academic integrity policies state. “It can result in disciplinary probation, suspension, or expulsion.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/double-standards-princeton-turns-blind-eye-to-plagiarism-from-woke-professor/

Two police officers—one a 22-year veteran and the other a rookie—were shot and killed in the Los Angeles County city of El Monte late Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. The suspect is also dead. The mayor said the officers were “essentially ambushed.”

LARRY ELDER

Two police officers—one a 22-year veteran and the other a rookie—were shot and killed in the Los Angeles County city of El Monte late Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. The suspect is also dead. The mayor said the officers were “essentially ambushed.”

The El Monte officers were identified Wednesday as Cpl. Michael Paredes and Officer Joseph Santana. Paredes, the longtime veteran of the department, is survived by his wife, daughter, and son, police said. Santana, who previously worked as a public works employee and with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department before joining the police department in his hometown, is survived by his wife, daughter, and twin sons.

Per FOX news sources, the gang member who fatally shot two El Monte PD officers was on probation for felon with a firearm after he received a bare minimum sentence in a plea deal under Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon last year, despite having a previous strike on his record.

Today’s Larry Elder Show guest is John Gardner, a launch operation specialist II (Starship) at SpaceX.

Follow EpochTV on Facebook and Twitter

https://www.theepochtimes.com/robberies-and-homicides-up-when-is-biden-going-to-call-it-the-putin-crime-wave-the-larry-elder-show_4538451.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-17&utm_medium=email&est=TTCFkBVhQ5%2BQJQUQS1AGq7mFS4IzRnaGr6yM%2BW%2Fa4qMXluglGsww7LtQCTiMLjtWSw%3D%3D

by Pastor Andrew Isker

We are now back to a national average gas price of $5.00/gallon. This is a subject of serious concern for almost everyone. Conservatives will (rightly) point to the Biden Administration’s hostility toward domestic oil production and distribution as the primary cause of the growing crisis, yet struggle to frame the problem in terms other than “the naïveté of environmentalist policy.” While the American ruling class is indeed dominated by extremely stupid people, its environmentalism is not “oh whoops we accidentally made gas cost way too much, who could have predicted that!”

           Allowing it to be framed that way while giving conservative satirists plenty of low-hanging fruit to work with, is a massive mistake. It is easy to poke fun at the stupidity of people like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and AOC. And that’s entirely the problem. These people are not sincerely-yet-naively attempting a solution to what they see as a truly apocalyptic disaster. It is a major mistake to assume they are ever operating in good faith. None of these people actually believe this stuff. They all have massive multimillion-dollar homes on coastlines they say will not exist by the end of the decade. It has been demonstrated ad nauseum that these people fly around in private jets, expending more fossil fuels in a single vacation than the average person will in their entire lives. You have to understand these are deeply cynical people. They do not care about the stuff they say they do. But what do they care about?

           The most important filter to understand politics, especially politics in the Current Year, is Friend/Enemy distinction. Do not look at what these people say, look at what they do. And, look at who benefits from what they do or who is harmed by what they do. Who are the enemies of the occupational regime? Obviously, they will never explicitly state who it is they seek to destroy. Unless the pharmaceutical cocktail that allows the current president brief moments of lucidity is badly messed up, you are never going to hear him say “we want to totally impoverish and destroy the American middle and working class.” But every single day the actions of the regime speak as clearly as possible.

           You need to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt. They are not stupid, at least not the ones that truly matter. They are not misguided. They are not simply mistaken. They are intentionally malicious. It is not the naïveté of bleeding-heart liberals who get teary-eyed at the thought of punishing violent criminals that have caused the ruling regime to empty prisons and violent crime to exponentially increase. Yes, the naive liberal useful idiots who give them power are easily deluded by propaganda, but those who wield power know exactly what they are doing. They want the people they hate to be punished. They want white women and their babies to be run over by violent criminals who never should have been let out of prison. They want violent criminals to be released back into the wild, they want police to be terrified to fight them, and they want you to go to prison if you ever have to defend yourself against them. These are not accidents caused by well-meaning-but-naive libs—this stuff is by design.

           “Climate change” is no different. For his entire presidential campaign, Joe Biden read carefully crafted scripts about reducing the use of fossil fuels, cutting oil production, increasing “clean energy,” etc. That the cost of gasoline is nearly triple what it was when he took office is not some accident of the inscrutable forces of the free market. The people who rule the American people want gasoline and diesel to be unaffordable for most of the country. Regular people—with jobs and families and mortgages—those people are the enemies of the regime. They want things to be more expensive for you. They want you to suffer.

           They not only don’t care if you are impoverished, but it also brings them sick pleasure. You are their enemy. They want to destroy you. This should have been evident during the Wuhan Flu, the Mostly Peaceful Summer of George, and the Most Secure Election in History. What were those events, in truth? Whether you believe those events were 100% organic or they were operations of alphabet agencies and aligned NGOs or (most likely) some mixture of both, it doesn’t matter. What matters is both who benefited from these events and who was harmed. Who benefited from the lockdowns? Megacorporations, especially trillion-dollar hedge funds like Blackrock, which got the overwhelming majority of newly printed trillions (while you got a couple of tiny checks). In short, the greatest constituency of the regime benefitted from everything that happened in 2020. Every industry got hundreds of billions for almost nothing, Big Pharma got a huge boon, and the military-industrial complex now likewise gets to cash in on an absurdly expensive (even by War on Terror standards) proxy war with Russia. Everyone who was already filthy rich got even richer, all at your expense. Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and especially billionaire retailers like the Waltons and Bezos raked in the dough while their competitors were shut down.

           And who was harmed by the events of 2020 (and beyond)? The greatest enemy of the regime, that’s who: the middle class, the people who have spent their entire lives toiling away to build businesses that provide services and goods and jobs for their neighbors, who donate to the things that make their communities worth living in, churches, local sports teams, youth activities, and service organizations. The regular people who have a stake in the places they live, who love their country and their neighborhoods, who want to live in peace and quiet, who simply want good order. That is who the regime hates the most. The few Norman Rockwell Americans who have the audacity to still exist. The regime was happy to allow your businesses to be locked down, while their billionaire friends could stay open. The regime was happy to allow organized violent revolutionaries to burn down your neighborhoods with almost no arrests and no investigation into the machinations behind the scenes. All of this while spending years holding men without trial in solitary confinement for walking through wide-open doors to the U.S. Capitol and spending years investigating an understandably overly exuberant protest of a fraudulent election. You need to filter everything that happens today through the friend/enemy distinction and politics becomes absolutely crystal clear.

           This is why it cost so much to fill up your car and your grocery cart. The people in power hate you and your family. They are stupid and incompetent, but even worse, they are malicious. If you are a normal person, who just wants to have a job and home and family, who loves his country and loves his God, the people in power do not want you to exist. They want to make life as hard as possible for you. They do not want you to have children. And if you somehow can even have children, they want the children you do have to be groomed into disgusting freaks. You have an enemy that hates you. Do not ever forget it.

           But you also have friends. The good news is that more and more people are starting to see they no longer live in the America they grew up in. More people are beginning to see that the America of “at the end of the day everyone is an American on the same team and we just disagree about some things” is dead. And while this is a great tragedy it is a necessity. We have to realize the thing we love is gone before we can begin to bring it back. And many people are now beginning to have that realization.

           This is the very first step in things being made right again. Now you can organize around this principle, knowing who your friends are and who is on your side. From there you can build churches, build neighborhoods and towns, build communities dedicated to rebuilding Christian civilization, communities that will have the strength to weather together the difficult years to come. One in which you can recognize who your friends are and who your enemies are, only then will you have the ability to fight and build.

Andrew Isker is the pastor of 4th Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, MN. He is a graduate of Minnesota State University and Greyfriar’s Hall Ministerial Training School, and he has served churches in Missouri, West Virginia, and Minnesota. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Boniface Option. Andrew, his wife Kara, and their five children reside in his hometown of Waseca, MN. He can be found on Gab @BonifaceOption.

Published in Bold Christian Writing

In the race to become the top prosecutor in Maine’s largest county, George Soros-backed candidate Jacqueline Sartoris defeated incumbent Jonathan Sahrbeck.

With 94 percent of precincts counted, Sartoris collected 15,209 votes, or 65 percent, to Sahrbeck’s 8,069 votes in the June 14 Democratic primary, according to local radio station WMTM. Since they were the only two candidates seeking the office, Sartoris is expected to be elected as Cumberland County’s district attorney in the November general election.

The billionaire Soros is known for his efforts to bankroll the campaigns of progressive state and local prosecutor candidates across the country.

In the month before the primary, a Soros-backed super-PAC spent nearly $384,000 opposing Sahrbeck and supporting Sartoris, a whopping amount that’s almost five times the combined total spent by both candidates and unheard of in local prosecutor races.

While both candidates are registered Democrats, they hold different views on top priorities.

Sahrbeck, a career prosecutor, said most crimes in the county are fueled by either drug addiction or mental health issues, so he wanted to leverage the criminal justice system in a way to get more people into court-ordered treatment programs, according to a virtual candidate forum hosted by Portland Center for Restorative Justice.

To Sartoris, an environmental-lawyer-turned prosecutor, a district attorney’s top job is to set prosecution policies. Her vision is to reduce jail and prison populations through office-wide policies that set when to charge crimes, what charges to file, and how to resolve the charges, according to the same forum.

“People are mostly unaware that prosecutors have an incredible amount of power in the system. We, in fact, have the greatest power in the criminal justice system,” she said at the forum.

In contrast, Sahrbeck disagrees that the top prosecutor is a “policy position.”

He said prosecutors should judge every case on its own merits (such as the crime committed, the history of the offender, and the victim,) and make a prosecutorial decision that’s best in the interest of justice, which includes the interests of offenders, victims, and the broader community, according to the candidate forum.

Sahrbeck raised $49,177 in his reelection bid, twice as much as Sartoris, according to the campaign finance data published by Maine Ethics Commission.

However, about a month before the primary, the Soros-backed Democracy PAC II poured $300,000 into the newly formed Maine Justice and Public Safety PAC. The latter ended up spending $383,945 on mailers and digital ads opposing Sahrbeck and supporting Sartoris, according to data by Maine Ethics Commission.

Soros is the principal donor to the Democracy PAC II in this election cycle, contributing $125 million, or 99 percent of the total, according to finance data published by Federal Election Commission.

Super PACs such as Maine Justice and Public Safety can raise and spend unlimited money on communications opposing or supporting candidates under the protection of free speech. But they can’t communicate directly with candidates and must follow certain finance disclosure rules.

For more than two decades, Republican Stephanie Anderson held the top prosecutor job in Cumberland County, which includes Maine’s largest city, Portland.

After Anderson announced her retirement in 2018, Sahrbeck, a Republican-turned-independent candidate at the time, was to face Jon Gale, a Democrat, in the general election.

However, just a week before the election, Gale dropped out of the race over sexual misconduct allegations.

As a result, Sahrbeck was elected with just 26.7 percent of the votes.

Last September, Sahrbeck changed his party registration again, this time to Democrat. He said his record as a district attorney reflects the Democratic values of addressing root causes of crime, according to the above candidate forum.

While in office, Sahrbeck created a diversion program, a veterans treatment court, and a community network called the Cumberland County Coalition on Substance Use Prevention.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/soros-backed-challenger-ousts-incumbent-prosecutor-in-maine-race_4536454.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-16-1&utm_medium=email&est=m1obtF5V4jp42n2YnoLnFEa8exhJTEwgD1NQZ1%2FT%2F3JwX6AeUw4m6PNaBanlvqXfCQ%3D%3D

The Justice Department official who investigates attacks on reproductive health care facilities has been a staunch critic of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, dozens of which have been vandalized by abortion supporters over the past month. 

Civil rights division chief Kristen Clarke criticized the centers following a Supreme Court decision issued in their favor in 2018. Clarke said the centers, which counsel pregnant women on alternatives to abortion, were “harmful” and “predatory” against women of color. She also referred to them with the hashtag, “ExposeFakeClinics.” 

Clarke’s stance on the centers offers a potential explanation for the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate a string of attacks on pro-life centers since the May 2 leak of a draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) asked Attorney General Merrick Garland last week to investigate the incidents as acts of domestic terrorism. Garland has yet to open an investigation, even though he said on Sept. 6 he would investigate crimes against “reproductive health center[s]” under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act). 

Clarke oversees investigations of potential FACE Act violations. She charged nine people under the statute in March for blocking the entrance to a Washington, D.C., abortion provider. 

The attacks on crisis pregnancy centers, churches, and other pro-life organizations have run rampant since the leak of the Roe v. Wade draft opinion last month. Twenty-four crisis centers have been vandalized or set on fire since the leak, according to a group that tracks the incidents. In the latest assaults, a facility in Buffalo was firebombed on June 7. A center in Gresham, Ore., was hit with an “incendiary device” over the weekend. 

The attacks are part of a broad intimidation campaign by left-wing activists upset that Roe may be overturned. Activists have protested outside the homes of conservative justices. A radical left-wing group hatched plans to shut down the Supreme Court using tactics that “stretch the bounds of constitutionally protected speech.” One abortion supporter attempted to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week. 

Clarke showed her opposition to crisis pregnancy centers following a Supreme Court ruling in June 2018 that struck down a California requirement that the centers inform patients about state abortion services. 

“The anti-choice movement will stop at nothing,” wrote Clarke, using left-wing activist jargon to refer to pro-life groups. She added the hashtags, “#EndTheLies” and “#ExposeFakeClinics.”

Clarke also said the centers prey on women of color. She said the Supreme Court decision would have “harmful consequences for women, especially women of color who are often targeted by predatory [crisis pregnancy centers].” 

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights group Clarke led at the time, alleged that crisis pregnancy centers “target some of the most vulnerable women in communities today.” 

Asked about Clarke’s tweets, Rubio said she should be disqualified from overseeing any eventual investigation into the crisis pregnancy center attacks. 

“Kristen Clarke never should have been confirmed,” Rubio told the Washington Free Beacon. “Her disdain toward the very people now under threat was predictable and it should be disqualifying. Attorney General Garland should make clear that Clarke will have no involvement in any of these cases as those move forward.” 

The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment about Clarke or whether the agency is considering investigations into the attacks. 

Clarke has a long history of making controversial statements about issues she now oversees as civil rights chief. She wrote in support of the movement to defund the police in 2020 but denied to Republicans during her confirmation hearing that she wanted to defund police departments. In 2019, Clarke criticized the Chicago police department for requesting access to the cell phone of Jussie Smollett, the actor found to have staged a hoax in which he falsely claimed Trump supporters attacked him because he is black and gay. Clarke has criticized conservative Supreme Court judges, many of whom are now the target of left-wing radical protesters. She claimed that Kavanaugh’s presence on the bench would be “dangerous.” She called him a “man who harbors such bias, rage, fury and is so easily unhinged.”

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/pro-life-facilities-are-under-attack-a-top-doj-official-called-them-fake-clinics/

Minority voters have turned on Joe Biden, Quinnipiac also finds

Fewer Americans support a ban on so-called assault weapons than Quinnipiac has ever recorded, the pollster reported on June 8.

Americans are about evenly divided on whether the government should ban assault weapons, the poll found, the lowest show of support for such a ban since February 2013, when Quinnipiac first started asking about it.

These results come even as mainstream media outlets and Democratic politicians, including resident Joe Biden, have ramped up calls for an assault-weapon ban in light of recent mass shootings and ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

A plurality of respondents, including most Republicans and independents and 31 percent of Democrats, told Quinnipiac that mental health issues are the main cause of mass shootings committed by young people. Only 19 percent of all respondents say “the availability of guns” is the main cause. A majority of Americans, meanwhile, oppose any efforts to limit the number of firearms in the country.

Only 32 percent of respondents approve of how Biden has handled gun violence, just one aspect of Biden’s dismal approval ratings. Only 33 percent of Americans approve of the president’s performance, while 55 percent disapprove. A wide majority of independents—61 percent—frown on what the president’s doing.

Minority voters have turned on the president, the poll found, in line with previous polling. Nearly 60 percent of Hispanics disapprove of the president. Biden’s approval among blacks, meanwhile, cratered from 63 percent in May to just 49 percent this month.

A plurality of voters told Quinnipiac that they want to see the Republican Party retake control of Congress this year.

https://freebeacon.com/guns/support-for-assault-weapon-ban-is-lowest-ever-recorded-poll-shows/

Supreme Court justices have in the past few weeks faced a thwarted assassination attempt, tense protests outside their homes, and death threats. Yet some Democrats in Congress don’t think they need extra security.

The Senate in May unanimously passed a bill to provide armed security for the families of Supreme Court justices following the leak of a draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. House Democrats responded by stalling the bill for more than a month, even as leftist groups drafted battle plans to shut down the Supreme Court and an assassin traveled across the country to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Democrats finally gave in on Tuesday and brought the bill to the House floor. The vote was 396 to 27. All “nos” were Democrats. Here are their names:

1. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D., Ohio)

2. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.)

3. Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.)

4. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D., Texas)

5. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D., N.Y.)

6. Rep. Chuy Garcia (D., Ill.)

7. Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D., Texas)

8. Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D., N.J.)

9. Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D., Ariz.)

10. Rep. Steven Horsford (D., Nev.)

11. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.)

12. Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D., Mich.)

13. Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.)

14. Rep. Tom Malinowski (D., N.J.)

15. Rep. Marie Newman (D., Ill.)

16. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.)

17. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D., N.J.)

18. Rep. Donald Payne (D., N.J.)

19. Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D., Colo.)

20. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.)

21. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D., N.J.)

22. Rep. Albio Sires (D., N.J.)

23. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.)

24. Rep. Norma Torres (D., Calif.)

25. Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D., N.Y.)

26. Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.)

27. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D., N.J.)

Update 5:06 p.m.: This piece has been updated to correct Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s state. She represents New Jersey, not Virginia.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/here-are-all-27-democrats-who-voted-against-protecting-scotus-judges/

Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney Buta Biberaj misled court in order to ‘sell’ plea bargain, judge says

A Virginia judge has kicked a George Soros-funded prosecutor off a case involving potentially a dozen burglaries in multiple counties, saying the prosecutor’s office had concealed criminal records to “sell” a plea bargain.

Loudoun County circuit court judge James Plowman said the office of Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj (D.) was “deliberately misleading the Court and the public” about “a possible 12 burglary crime spree spanning 4 counties over 10 days.” In a plea agreement, Biberaj’s office failed to note the offender had recently pleaded guilty to felonies and had pending charges and prior convictions as a minor, according to Plowman. Fox 5 on Saturday first reported on the judge’s order to remove Biberaj from the case.

“The Commonwealth is deliberately misleading the Court, and the public, in an effort to ‘sell’ the plea agreement for some reason that has yet to be explained,” Plowman wrote in his order.

The unprecedented move highlights the lengths to which so-called justice reform prosecutors will go to reduce bail, lighten sentencing, and avoid felony convictions—as well as the growing backlash to their approach. The Washington Free Beacon reported how other Soros-funded prosecutors in Virginia such as Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) and Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) dismissed or declined to prosecute a serial looter on nearly a dozen charges related to larceny.

The soft-on-crime approach can sometimes prove deadly. Descano’s office last year refused to bring felony charges against a man who attempted to abduct and rape a hotel housekeeper, preferring to plead him out on misdemeanors of assault and battery. Less than a year later, the same man was charged with killing two homeless men and wounding three others during a nine-day shooting spree that spanned New York City and Washington, D.C. Biberaj in 2021 released a man charged with domestic violence on a $5,000 bond. He was charged two months later for brutally murdering his wife with a hammer.

Concern with the Soros prosecutors’ handling of crime has generated two recall efforts. One of the groups leading the charge, Virginians for Safe Communities, is hoping to get thousands of signatures from voters to spark a special election. Biberaj dismissed the recalls in a Washington Post op-ed on Friday, referring to her opponents as “outside special interests.”

Soros contributed more than $860,000 to Biberaj through his Justice and Public Safety PAC in 2019, helping her win by a 2-point margin, though she had no prosecutorial experience. The Democratic megadonor similarly boosted Descano and Dehghani-Tafti, donating six-figure sums to each of their campaigns.

Biberaj’s office charged the burglar, Kevin Enrique Valle, with two felonies in Loudoun last year but, according to Plowman, Valle had also been arrested for burglaries in three other Virginia counties in May 2021—one of which occurred the same day as the Loudoun burglary. Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Michele Burton had not noted the other burglaries in the plea agreement. Plowman called the plea deal “an overt misrepresentation by omission.”

“The explanation highlights a lack of knowledge of the facts of the case or the ability to apply basic legal principals,” Plowman wrote in his order. “Biberaj and the Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office is hereby REMOVED AND DISQUALIFIED from further prosecution as counsel of record in this matter.” He has authorized the Fauquier County commonwealth’s attorney’s office to take up the case.

Descano’s office in a court hearing on Monday chose not to prosecute Valle on one of his three burglary charges in Fairfax County from last year.

By her own standards, Biberaj has not always been consistent in her sentencing. Last year, she sought jail time for a man who was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest at a school board meeting. The man had been protesting a sexual assault case involving his daughter, who was raped in a public school bathroom.

Update 5:47 p.m.: This piece has been updated to reflect recent court filings.

https://freebeacon.com/courts/virginia-judge-kicks-soros-prosecutor-off-case-for-concealing-criminal-records/

Donny Ubiera spent night in jail for brandishing a knife at cops

A New York City man was charged with attempted murder after he stabbed two Subway passengers last weekend. The unprovoked attacks occurred just one day after he got out of jail, where he spent a night after he brandished a knife at police.

Donny Ubiera, who has 14 prior arrests that include charges of assault, on Wednesday flashed a large knife at officers in Queens before fleeing the scene. He was later apprehended and charged with criminal possession of a weapon, a misdemeanor. Ubiera on Thursday was let go on “time served,” according to the New York Post. The next day, he stabbed two people on the Subway, leaving them with wounds that required medical attention. One is still in critical care.

“This is nothing if not predictable,” New York Police Department commissioner Keechant Sewell said in a Sunday statement in which she blamed Ubiera’s release on city prosecutors’ soft-on-crime approach to criminal justice. “Your police are doing their job. We keep arresting him.”

The stabbing spree reflects how a wholesale embrace of criminal justice reform policies, which include fewer prosecutions and increased diversion from prisons, can threaten the safety of communities. In Queens, where the incidents occurred, District Attorney Melinda Katz (D.) has touted the effectiveness of her office’s approach and boasted that in her first year she declined to prosecute 26 percent of all violation arrests, many of which were for lower-level offenses. She also bragged about refusing to prosecute participants for “failure to socially distance or wear a mask” in “peaceful protests” during summer 2020, saying such prosecutions would have “disproportionately affected communities of color.”

Crime data show the decision has not been without consequences. Over the past three years, homicides in New York City have shot up 52 percent, shootings are up 104 percent, and car theft is up 91 percent, according to the NYPD. Former Queens district attorney Jim Quinn (D.) in a February New York Times op-ed made the case that the justice reform policies have most harmed black Americans. Sixty-five percent of murders and 74 percent of shootings in the city in 2020 involved black victims, and black New Yorkers were the most victimized by felony assault and rape.

Ubiera first struck Friday morning, slashing a 62-year-old passenger in the face and hand. That passenger later received stitches for the wounds. The attack spilled so much blood that the train car had to be taken out of service, according to the Post. Ubiera on Saturday cut another passenger’s neck, sending the victim to the hospital.

“His record demonstrates that each time he is involved in unprovoked violence against innocent victims, the criminal justice system has him back to the streets and the subways rather than jail or psychiatric treatment,” Sewell said of Ubiera’s record. “He inevitably targets another victim.”

Ubiera in January threatened with a large knife a store employee in Queens who had attempted to stop him from shoplifting beer.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/new-york-city-subway-stabber-was-released-from-jail-day-before-attack/

Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams sits on the board of a foundation that funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to an anti-Israel activist who has praised terrorists and encouraged violence against Jews.

Abrams joined the Marguerite Casey Foundation board in May 2021, business filings show. Roughly six months later, the foundation announced its 2021 cohort of “Freedom Scholars,” a group of “leading thinkers and scholars … in critical fields including abolitionist, Black, feminist, queer, radical, and anti-colonialist studies.” Included in the group was UCLA professor Robin D.G. Kelley, a leading Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activist who works with groups that collaborate with Palestinian terrorists.

Kelley, who received $250,000 through the program, praised the Palestine Liberation Organization—a U.S.-designated terror group—as “revolutionary combatants” and “models for those of us dedicated to Black liberation and socialism” in a 2016 article. Three years prior, Kelley encouraged Palestinians to use violence against Israelis, calling the notion that Palestinians should only protest non-violently a “bludgeon to beat down Palestinian organizations.” Kelley also advisesthe U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a group that operates to advance the BDS movement on college campuses. The campaign’s fiscal sponsor, Al-Awda, works with Palestinian terrorist organizations such as Hamas to grow BDS and routinely hosts convicted Islamic jihadists at its events, the Jerusalem Post reported in 2019.

Abrams’s role in funding Kelley provides a startling window into how the Democrat could handle the BDS movement and larger issues of anti-Semitism on Georgia’s college campuses should she defeat Gov. Brian Kemp (R.) in November. As governor, Abrams would appoint members to the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, which oversees the state’s public colleges and universities. Georgia legislators passed a law in 2016 that forbids the state from contracting a person or company that promotes a boycott of Israel, but a federal judge struck that law down in May 2021. Abrams opposed the law as a state representative and reportedly refused to meet with pro-Israel activists at the time.

It is unclear whether Abrams was directly involved with the grant to Kelley. When she joined the foundation’s board in 2021, she emphasized that a major part of her role would be determining “how the philanthropic network targets its contributions.” Neither Abrams nor the foundation responded to inquiries on her involvement with the Freedom Scholars program. Abrams has earned more than $52,000 from the foundation since 2020, her financial disclosures show. 

In addition to Kelley’s anti-Israel activism, the professor has called himself a “communist for life” and argued that capitalism is inherently racist. The Marguerite Casey Foundation also awarded $250,000 to a pair of academics—Angelica Chazaro and Ananya Roy—who advocate for the abolition of prisons and private property, respectively. 

In May 2021, the foundation launched its “Answer the Uprising” initiative, which aims to fund groups working to “transform, defund, [and] abolish” police. The initiative was “fully supported by Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Board of Directors, which recently named seven new changemakers to the Board, including Stacey Abrams,” the foundation said in a press release. One year before Abrams decided to join the group’s board, the foundation gave $200,000 to the Louisville Community Bail Fund, which later paid $100,000 to free Quintez Brown, an anti-police activist charged with the attempted murder of a Jewish mayoral candidate.

Abrams ran unopposed in Georgia’s May primary election and will face Kemp in November after the Republican defeated Trump-backed challenger and former senator David Perdue by 52 points in his own primary bid. Her campaign against Kemp is not her first—the Democrat lost to Kemp by roughly 2 points in 2018 but never conceded defeat, instead arguing the election was “stolen” due to “voter suppression.” After her loss, Abrams launched a nonprofit “voting rights” group that sued Georgia’s secretary of state to challenge the validity of the election. That lawsuit blasted the state’s use of “unreliable” voting machines and even alleged the machines “switched” votes from Abrams to Kemp.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/how-stacey-abrams-helped-funnel-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars-to-an-israel-hating-terrorist-sympathizer/

Criminals will continue to own guns illegally whether or not the government says it’s OK. Law-abiding citizens, however, will continue to abide by the law — to an extent — regardless of whether or not they agree with it.

So, the individuals hardest hit by gun control measures aren’t gang members or mass shooters. It’s the good guys who could be stopping such criminals.

When an entire community is devoid of guns, they are much more susceptible to a mass-shooting attack. A large group of gun-control activists learned that lesson the hard way in Washington, on Saturday.

WATCH: Momentary panic ensued at the March For Our Lives rally in D.C. Saturday when someone yelled “gun shot” around a large crowd: https://twitter.com/7NewsDC/status/1535755369267462144

FULL DETAILS: https://t.co/1yobvebK7u pic.twitter.com/eA1XYRVHqJ

— 7News DC (@7NewsDC) June 11, 2022

During a “March For Our Lives” rally in the nation’s capital, one of the attendees yelled “gunshot,” which led to absolute chaos.

A video from the event showed attendees scrambling to escape, running into and over each other as they attempt to flee.

Thankfully, however, it was a false alarm and no shots had in fact been fired.

According to WJLA-TV, police later arrived and “neutralized the individual.” Presumably, this individual was the one who started the frenzy with a false alarm.

Alert: An individual interfered with a permitted event on the Washington Monument grounds. The individual was detained by officers. No weapons were involved and there is no risk to the public.

— USPPNEWS (@usparkpolicepio) June 11, 2022

“An individual interfered with a permitted event on the Washington Monument grounds. The individual was detained by officers. No weapons were involved and there is no risk to the public,” the U.S. Park Police tweeted.

Thank God there wasn’t actually a shooter in attendance at the event.

If there had been, thanks to the zealous anti-gun nature of those in attendance, they would have had no way to defend themselves.

Related:

Chinese State Media Trumpets AOC Quote Bashing America

Now, for a moment, imagine if this same scenario happened — and it was actually a real active-shooter incident — at an NRA event or some other pro-gun rally.

Most likely everyone in the crowd would have been strapped.

Any potential mass shooter wouldn’t stand a chance.

If the activists in Washington, want to feel safe from now on, marching for gun control isn’t the solution.

Buying a gun is.

Sheriff David Clarke is working overtime to stop the left’s latest gun-grabbing plot.

Clarke partnered with The League for Law Enforcement to activate a grassroots army as election season kicks into high gear. (RELATED: Police Group Begins Airwave Bombardment Ahead of Midterms)

The objective, as outlined in his email to supporters, is two-fold:

• Fight to protect and secure our cherished, constitutionally guaranteed 2nd Amendment right to keep & bear arms, AND
• Support the brave men and women of Law Enforcement who risk their lives daily to serve and protect our families.

Radical leftists in Congress are fighting to undermine both, buoyed by progressive activists. They are determined to see gun control signed into law before a potential red tsunami crashes into Washington.

Republicans may have the edge in the race to reclaim the Legislative Branch. However, Democrats are relying on a tried and true strategy to cling to power.

Divide and conquer.

Their tactics come straight from the Saul Alinsky playbook “Rules for Radicals.”

While speaking on Saturday, gun control advocate David Hogg claimed putting more police officers in schools poses a risk to non-white children.

“Realize that putting more cops in schools actually may be a form of endangering our students as well — for the students that don’t have the privilege of having my skin color, or the fact that I am an American citizen,” Hogg proclaimed, in a lecture to the audience.

The Democratic-ruled U.S. House has already passed a bloated gun omnibus bill containing six proposals that would not have stopped the Uvalde massacre. 

These Republicans Surrendered on Gun Rights

Although the Protecting Our Kids Act faces daunting odds in the U.S. Senate, the left maintains constant pressure on Republican senators by utilizing ridicule, conflict, power and fear — all of which have a greater impact than ideas on people.

For the left, politics is a full-time profession. Make no mistake, their campaign to create a new system won’t end on Election Day 2022. Even if the GOP cruises to victory on Nov. 8.

Fortunately, Sheriff Clarke and The League know the most important lesson for fighting back: playing offense.

The League’s ads counterattacking the radical left are running on Fox News and Newsmax to act as a clarion call. Ultimately, complacency is the biggest threat right now to the conservative movement.

Resident Biden knows this. Motivating his base is the only strategy left that might save his party from a midterm thumping. That’s why he’s telling gun control advocates to keep marching. It’s also why the White House refused to condemn protests outside conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes, despite its blatant illegality — and the foreseeable assassination attempt against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

Enabled by Biden? – Armed Leftist Extremist Arrested at Justice Kavanaugh’s Home Was There to Kill

Biden understands that Democrats can still win this election. If they do, the far-left will continue to push for outlawing and confiscating firearms from law-abiding Americans under the guise of doing anything to protect innocent children. (RELATED: Biden’s Rhetoric on Guns is Far From ‘Reasonable’)

“They’re using … Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, to disarm responsible gun owners like me and you,” Sheriff Clarke warned American Liberty News.

“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this is a fight we cannot afford to lose,” he stressed.

The Democrats’ war on cops and brazen disregard for the Bill of Rights may seem routine. But the reality of two more years of unchecked Democratic rule would be untenable.

And as Clarke asked in an ad for The League, “If voters don’t hold Democrats responsible for their disastrous policies, who will?”

Expect Clarke and The League’s vocal opposition to the leftist agenda to intensify through Election Day. And their commitment to liberty and law and order to continue long after.

The only question is: will you join them?

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

https://www.americanliberty.news/commentary/police-group-intensifies-ad-blitz-against-lefts-gun-grabbing-plot/phouck/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=6225

REVIEW: ‘The War on the West’ by Douglas Murray

“Who was the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Saul Bellow is alleged to have quipped some time in the early ’90s. Deploying what in today’s meme-ified political culture would probably be described as a clap back, the sportswriter and essayist Ralph Wiley responded: “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.”

Bellow would later plead the defense of journalistic misunderstanding and misrepresentation. But let’s—for the sake of argument—stick to the oversimplified, if rather unfair, version of the story: Wiley schools grumpy old reactionary. Viewed from 2022, the interesting thing about the exchange is Wiley’s appeal to universalism. Today, such an approach to culture has become passé in fashionable left-wing circles. To be woke is to espouse the importance of “lived experience,” to indulge in the very “fencing off” that Wiley denounced, and to obsess over the differences, say, between the Zulus and the Russians, rather than claim that a book could transcend them. In other words, to the in crowd of elite progressives, sticking up for a great work of European literature and what it offers to whoever might pick it up—whether they happen to be in St Petersburg or Soweto—is more than a little “problematic.”

What happened? When did the tables turn? And why do those of us who still believe in that universalism suddenly find ourselves out of step with the ideas that seem to dominate public life? More broadly, why is the West beset by a sometimes paralyzing self-loathing? These are some of the questions Douglas Murray answers in The War on the West, a book he describes in its introduction as being “about what happens when one side in a cold war—the side of democracy, reason, rights, and universal principles—prematurely surrenders.”

In his previous works, Murray, a British author now based in America, has tackled questions of cultural and identity politics on both sides of the Atlantic as well as immigration and radical Islam in Europe. The War on the West is designed for readers who, though they may see a great deal of folly in the woke reckoning that has become increasingly hard to ignore in recent years, might see it as an unserious sideshow. Murray urges readers to avoid the temptation to dismiss debates about race, history, and identity as “fringe” or trivial “culture wars.” To do so, he argues, is to “misinterpret the aims of the participants or downplay the role it will have in the lives of future generations.” At stake, he argues, is whether the West will be crippled by self-hatred and kill the goose that lays the golden egg, or whether we appreciate the West’s intellectual and cultural inheritance and use its strengths to our advantage.

The aggressors in Murray’s war come from within, and the battleground is all around us: everywhere from the pre-school classroom to the art gallery. Murray details the woke assault on a series of overlapping fronts—race, religion, history, and culture—and is at his best when picking apart the inconsistencies, fallacies, and hypocrisies in the assailants’ arguments.

Whether its the feted Ibram X. Kendi’s tautological definition of racism or the embarrassing historical ignorance of many of those put forward to argue for a statue to be brought down or a building to be renamed, there is very little there when the woke warriors’ arguments are subjected to a light grilling. As Murray demonstrates, the aggressors are also far more parochial than they think they are. Western history is, in their view, indelibly stained by racism. The rest of the world? Less so. “If other countries do have any racism, it must be because the West exported the vice to them,” says Murray, paraphrasing the argument.

Often, the mindlessness of the cultural and historical vandalism is so self-evident that Murray need do little more than lay out his opponents’ views. One of the dreariest scenes in The War on the West is a discussion at Cambridge University’s Churchill College on the “Racial Consequences of Churchill.” The panel was historian-free, and the participating academics were liberated to make all manner of ridiculous claims, recounted by Murray: The British Empire was “far worse than the Nazis” argued one; another argued that victory over the Nazis wasn’t a big deal given that “all we really did was we shifted from an old version of white supremacy to a new version of white supremacy”; a third snarkily pointed out that, actually, Churchill was at home, not on the front lines, during the Second World War. (The great wartime leader was in his late 60s when he became prime minister and, as Murray points out, saw action on four continents as a young man.)

A panel discussion at a Cambridge college is, of course, a fairly low-stakes affair in the grand scheme of things, but it is illustrative of the offensively ahistorical arguments that are tolerated if they are in keeping with the vogue for wokeness. Elsewhere, a more serious and sustained attack on Churchill and his legacy is underway. Once a universally admired national hero, the great statesman now faces a reckoning. It is an illustrative example for the British author (and this British reviewer), for, as Murray puts it: “If what Churchill did in his life doesn’t count for anything, then it is hard to see how any human action counts for anything. If Churchill’s good points cannot outweigh any bad points, then no one can ever do enough good in their lives.”

But that, of course, is the point. The bold choice of target reveals the scale of the assailants’ ambitions: “Perhaps more than any other single figure, he has been seen as an example of a great man—and a great man produced by the West.” If Churchill can be toppled, “anything might be forced upon a people so subjected and demoralized.”

Many of these arguments will be familiar to readers, but the value of The War on the West is in the shocking effect of the full battle report. Murray successfully conveys just how comprehensive the attack on Western values, culture, and history really is. The effect is energizing: a warning against the complacent eye-roll that is so tempting when faced with the latest woke insanity.

Applying present-day standards to historical figures is a fruitless pursuit no matter the target, but, as Murray identifies, it is the unevenness with which these tests are applied that gives the game away. Karl Marx’s racism and anti-Semitism, for example, has not led to the kind of reassessment that great Western leaders have been subjected to.

The War on the West will leave those who recognize the threat it identifies hungry for more. Murray fights back against the iconoclasts with vigor. But if, as Murray correctly identifies, wokeness resembles a godless religion—filling a need for cosmic meaning and its dogma trotted out unquestioningly—then there will be limits to the success of such appeals to reason. Here, Murray risks falling into the same trap as the New Atheists, who sometimes appeared to think that an especially witty enough debate-hall zinger would be enough to bring thousands of years of monotheism tumbling to the ground.

But where The War on The West is most valuable is in explaining the importance of the clash in question. A culture that finds it hard to say anything nice about itself is not one with a bright future. Does that mean the West is perfect? Of course not. But, as we are discovering, self-loathing is not a foundation on which to build a healthy society.

The War on the West
by Douglas Murray
Broadside Books, 308 pp., $27.99

Oliver Wiseman is deputy editor of The Spectator World, the U.S. edition of the world’s oldest magazine.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-west-gets-a-wake-up-call/

When he talks about racism in the U.S. justice system, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) often cites the case of his older brother—a “first-time,” “nonviolent” drug offender who was sentenced to life in prison due to a “pandemic of racism,” according to the senator.

Warnock has compared his half-brother, whose full name is Keith Coleman, to black victims of police shootings, attributed his imprisonment to the “stigma of color and criminality,” and praised his early release in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a day of “hope” for the justice system.

But hundreds of pages of court records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon tell a more complicated story: Coleman was a cop with the Savannah Police Department when he was convicted of facilitating a cross-country cocaine trafficking operation in 1996 and 1997—and once warned that he could send a drug dealer’s “black ass” to prison if the dealer didn’t pay Coleman more money.

The details conflict with Warnock’s accounts, which omit that Coleman was a police officer and portray him as a victim of law enforcement corruption rather than a participant in it.

“[My brother] was a first-time offender, convicted of a nonviolent drug-related offense, in which no one got hurt, no one died, no one even got high because the federal government basically created the sting operation,” said Warnock in a June 2020 speech to the American Jewish Archives.

After the death of Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old black man who was fatally shot by an Atlanta police officer while resisting arrest in 2020, Warnock said, “It has become too common to counsel families grieving from unjust loss, like that of Rayshard Brooks, or to grieve from separation.”

“I have known this pain personally, and my family has experienced it over the last 22 years of my brother’s incarceration,” Warnock said.

The records also highlight the tension between the senator’s public statements railing against police misconduct and his personal efforts to support a family member convicted of police misconduct.

Warnock has denounced “lawless vigilantes pretending to be police,” and opined during a sermon that “you can sometimes wear the colors of the state and behave like a thug.” Yet he has also lobbied for years to free his brother and privately sought a presidential pardon from former president Barack Obama.

In November 1995, the FBI launched an undercover sting campaign called “Operation Broken Oath” to investigate whistleblower tips about dirty cops within the Savannah Police Department, according to a pretrial investigative report by the bureau. The probe ensnared nearly a dozen police officers who agreed to provide paid security for undercover FBI agents and informants posing as cocaine traffickers.

One of these officers was Coleman, who quickly became a ringleader in the illegal scheme, using his police-issued handgun and car to escort the purported drug dealers as they drove kilos of cocaine to airports, hotels, and warehouses, according to prosecutors.

Coleman reportedly recruited four fellow cops to provide security, boasting to them the operation was bringing in cocaine by the “goddamn truckloads.”

“I know my guys,” Coleman told one undercover agent, referring to the officers he recruited. “They loyal to me and they gonna do whatever I tell them.”

Coleman negotiated and distributed the illegal payoffs for the security services, often pocketing portions of the money that was intended to go to the other cops, according to prosecutors.

Coleman “continued to push for more work and more money.” He demanded higher payments after an undercover agent posing as a drug dealer offered him $1,500 for one cocaine-trafficking job.

“If I knowed I was fucking with a motherfucker off the corner who can’t afford [to pay me] no more than $1,500, his black ass would be in prison,” said Coleman, according to an audio recording cited in the court records.

Coleman later demanded that the purported drug traffickers place the payments in envelopes instead of handing him stacks of cash, arguing that this was a better way to avoid detection.

“No counting by the car,” he told them. “[Some witness] might want to mail some shit to 60 Minutes. … ‘I saw police taking some money by a car. Why would he be doing that?’”

Prosecutors allege Coleman received $46,000 in dirty payments and helped traffic a total of 28.2 kilograms of cocaine between November 1996 and March 1997.

On Nov. 21, 1997, Coleman was convicted by a jury of conspiring and attempting to aid and abet the distribution of cocaine, and with carrying a firearm during a drug trafficking offense. He was sentenced to life in prison, and two of his co-conspirators were sentenced to 17 years and 19 years, respectively.

Court records cited Coleman’s possession of a weapon, his abuse of power as a police officer, and his recruitment of other cops as justification for a longer sentence.

Coleman fought and appealed the conviction on numerous grounds over the years. He claimed in court filings that he was “incarcerated for an offense/act that the law does not make criminal,” arguing that “conspiracy to attempt” is not a recognized crime. He said the FBI selectively targeted him because of his race while ignoring corruption among white police officers. He criticized his lawyer as providing ineffective counsel. And he argued that the federal government had no jurisdiction in the case “because he was not arrested in any fort, magazine, arsenal, needful building,’ or other federal enclave,” according to one motion to dismiss. None of the appeals were successful.

Outside, Warnock also intervened to help his brother. He wrote to then-president Obama, asking him to pardon Coleman. In that letter, which was included in the case file, Warnock noted that Coleman was a police officer, a detail he has not mentioned in public forums.

“As his brother and as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, I stand ready to directly provide and coordinate, through my network of contacts, the resources and support he will need to turn a second chance into real success,” wrote Warnock in the letter to Obama, which was included in Coleman’s court filings. While that appeal was unsuccessful, Coleman was released in June 2020, after serving 22 years, due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19 in prisons.

The Warnock campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/raphael-warnock-blames-brothers-drug-conviction-on-systemic-racism-court-records-tell-a-different-story/

Illegal alien residents of Massachusetts have won their long-waged bid for driver’s licenses from the Bay State.

On June 9, the Senate followed a vote by the House two days earlier to override Gov. Charlie Baker’s recent veto of a bill to issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.

The Massachusetts law, entitled the Work and Family Mobility Act, will go into effect on July 1, 2023. Under it, illegal aliens living in Massachusetts will still have to pass both a written and road test before obtaining a license.

Baker, a Republican, said in a statement that he opposed the measure out of concern that it could potentially lead to noncitizens registering to vote.

In a statement explaining his veto, Baker also said he was concerned with tasking the state’s registry of motor vehicle workers with the job of deciphering foreign documents and their authenticity.

“The RMV does not have the expertise or ability to verify the validity of many types of documents from other countries,” Baker said.

Five Senate Democrats joined the three Senate Republicans who voted against the override. State Sen. Bruce Tarr, one of the Republicans to vote against it, said he sees giving illegal residents driver’s licenses as a message that not only is it okay to come to America and break the law, but that anyone who does so will be rewarded for doing so.

But the concerns weren’t enough to thwart the Democratic-nominated state Legislature. The House voted 119–36 and the Senate 32–8 to override Baker.

The measure garnered the backing of the Massachusetts Major City Chiefs of Police and a majority of the state’s sheriffs and district attorneys. They and the bill’s supporters hail the move to give illegal citizens driver’s licenses a move towards making roadways safer throughout America.

Massachusetts state Sen. John Keenan, a Democrat, said he’s hoping that as more states grant driver’s licenses to their “undocumented residents,” it will lead to a nationwide movement.

There are already 16 states that issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.

The passage of the bill is historic even for a liberal state such as Massachusetts.

For 15 years, immigration advocates unsuccessfully pushed Massachusetts to issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. In the course of the last year, the residents themselves have held large, bold protests demanding driver’s licenses, many holding signs outside of the statehouse bearing messages written in a foreign language.

Last year, at a protest outside of the state capital in Boston, Yamila Ruiz, a native and legal resident of Argentina, spoke about the trauma she experienced when she was 12 of watching her father being arrested for driving without a valid U.S. license.

“We had to live through the agonizing fear he was going to be deported and that we would never see him again,” she said.

There are an estimated 200,000 illegal immigrants currently living in Massachusetts.

In February, 19 mayors from around the state, including Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, signed a letter endorsing licenses for what the letter referred to as undocumented workers.

“All Boston and Massachusetts adults deserve access to driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status,” the mayors said in a joint statement. “I support the Family Mobility Act because it will make all of us safer.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/illegal-aliens-set-to-get-drivers-licenses-in-massachusetts_4528539.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-12-4&utm_medium=email&est=ElE0CDTN%2B1WZWXx9vuIMw0%2BviIJYaeht3%2BQPoaZ0Qv%2BevrtudYz%2Fcn6XexhQp5cjxw%3D%3D

The National Rifle Association (NRA) and Gun Owners of America (GOA) both issued statements Sunday after a bipartisan group of senators announced they’d reached an agreement on a gun control and safety package.

“Here we go again, Republican legislators compromising your rights and getting nothing in return,” GOA wrote in a Twitter post, referring to proposals in the framework deal. “Federal dollars to bribe your state legislators into enacting unconstitutional ‘red flag’ laws, which could allow a court to seize your weapons, without any due process, simply based on anonymous tips.”

It added that the bill would entail “wait periods and extensive review for those under 21 seeking to exercise their Second Amendment rights … we will not allow the government to make those who can vote and fight our wars second class citizens.”

The proposal, which has the backing of 10 Republicans in the Senate, includes initiatives to support state crisis intervention orders, an enhanced review process for gun buyers under the age of 21, expansions on various mental health programs, a ban on straw purchases, and other measures.

Notably, the framework bill includes a red flag provision giving “resources to states and tribes to create and administer laws that help ensure deadly weapons are kept out of the hands of individuals whom a court has determined to be a significant danger to themselves or others,” according to a news release from the senators on Sunday.

The NRA, meanwhile, said that it is “committed to real solutions to help stop violence in our communities. We encourage our elected officials to provide more resources to secure our schools, fix to our severely broken mental health system and support law enforcement,” according to a statement released to Fox News.

“As is our policy, the NRA does not take positions on ‘frameworks’. We will make our position known when the full text of the bill is available for review,” the NRA added.

But overall, the group will “continue to oppose any effort to insert gun control policies, initiatives that override constitutional due process protections and efforts to deprive law-abiding citizens of their fundamental right to protect themselves and their loved ones into this or any other legislation,” the statement continued.

Resident Joe Biden, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and various gun control activists lauded lawmakers for the bipartisan agreement. Biden and Democrats signaled that while they support the bill, they want even more gun-control policies enacted.

“Today, we are announcing a commonsense, bipartisan proposal to protect America’s children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country,” 20 senators said in a news release on Sunday. “Families are scared, and it is our duty to come together and get something done that will help restore their sense of safety and security in their communities.”

The measure does not include more controversial gun control measures pushed by Democrats such as bans on semiautomatic rifles or magazines that hold 10 rounds or more, or raising the age to purchase certain firearms like AR-15-style rifles from 18 to 21.

“Today’s announcement of a bipartisan gun-safety framework is a good first step to ending the persistent inaction to the gun violence epidemic that has plagued our country and terrorized our children for far too long,” Schumer said in a statement. “Once the text of this agreement is finalized, I will put this bill on the floor as soon as possible so that the Senate can act quickly to advance gun-safety legislation.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/gun-rights-groups-respond-to-senators-bipartisan-gun-control-framework_4528531.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-12-4&utm_medium=email&est=7tCmINgATYjKcxZWpek4Uhk0a%2B9SZtWGlAevrQVIdtygmzsZwuQ9P7bk9P6lLa609g%3D%3D

Representatives for George Soros no longer want to be associated with disgraced prosecutor Chesa Boudin now that he’s been rebuked by the liberal voters of San Francisco, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Hours after Boudin was recalled by double-digits on Tuesday, representatives for the liberal billionaire contacted the Free Beacon to reject its characterization of Boudin as a “George Soros darling.” The Soros representatives from public relations firm BerlinRosen say he never contributed to Boudin, and that it is wrong to label Boudin a “Soros prosecutor.”

“We disagree with any analysis that labels any prosecutor as a ‘Soros prosecutor’—each candidate stands on their own,” said the BerlinRosen representative. “Justice & Public Safety PAC, the political action committee through which Mr. Soros supports prosecutor candidates, has not supported—in the past or in the present, directly or indirectly—Boudin.”

The Soros effort to distance the billionaire from Boudin came just hours after San Francisco voted the liberal prosecutor out of office. The recall election received nationwide attention and was viewed as a political rejection of radical criminal justice reform policies. Boudin’s short tenure in San Francisco coincided with a spike in violent crime, as well as homelessness, public defecation, and looting.

The Free Beacon has characterized Boudin as a “Soros prosecutor” in the past and never received a correction request from the billionaire’s representatives. This is likely because, while it is true that Soros has never directly contributed to his campaigns, Boudin is one of Soros’s favorite prosecutors. The Soros-funded group Fair and Just Prosecution, for example, has Boudin featured in its “meet the movement” section.

Soros additionally funds a network of liberal organizations that raised Boudin more than $600,000 for his election, according to the Washington Times, and contributed directly to groups fighting to oppose his recall.

Smart Justice California Action Fund donated almost $180,000 to oppose Boudin’s recall. The group received funding from the California Justice & Public Safety PAC, which was stood up in 2018 thanks to $3.65 million from Soros.

Fair and Just Prosecution, the group that features Boudin as a face of its movement, is funded by the Tides Center, which received more than $30 million from Soros’s Open Society Foundation between 2016 and 2020. The liberal justice reform group has hosted conferences that feature its favored prosecutors. Boudin attended one of those conferences in December and stood shoulder to shoulder for a group picture with district attorneys that have received direct funding from Soros, including Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon.

The Soros representatives contended that having ties to his massive network of political organizations doesn’t mean a prosecutor is affiliated with the Democratic megadonor.

“Our disagreement is particularly strong when the [Soros prosecutor] label is applied to an elected official who participates in an event or an organization that has a second or third degree association with Mr. Soros,” said representative Alex Navarro-McKay. “Candidate X joins Org A which gets funding from Org B which gets from Donor C? Bluntly, it’s a ridiculous contortion.”

Soros has developed a political network that is designed to hide direct connections between groups and donors. He is a founding member of the Democracy Alliance, which uses secret meetings to direct funding from its millionaire and billionaire members to a select number of organizations selected by leadership. All of the donations, however, are made by individual members rather than the Democracy Alliance as a whole, which hides the sum of money being directed.

The BerlinRosen representatives declined to provide further comment on Soros’s opinion of Boudin.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/soros-stiff-arms-chesa-boudin-after-san-francisco-voters-kick-him-to-curb/

The Jan. 6 select committee launched a full-frontal assault on former President Donald J. Trump and his “riotous mob” of supporters on June 9, claiming Trump orchestrated the violence at the Capitol in early 2021 as part of a “coup” to remain in power and nullify the 2020 election results.

The two top officials on the nine-member panel described Trump as so unstable after Jan. 6 that staff openly discussed the possibility of him being removed from office using the 25th Amendment.

In the first of a series of public hearings to detail findings from its nearly year-long investigation, the committee issued blistering statements and accusations that sounded like the foundation for possible criminal charges against the 45th president of the United States.

“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the committee, during a livestream broadcast from Washington D.C. “A brazen attempt … to overthrow the government. Violence was no accident.”

The first 60 minutes of the hearing was everything expected: hyper-partisan, with strong anti-Trump rhetoric, accented by video clips that were short on context and long on emotion. A Capitol police officer and a filmmaker testified in the second hour of the hearing.

If anyone expected a detached, academic review of alleged evidence to support what appears to be the committee’s foregone conclusion, they were left in shock.

Anyone who looked for acknowledgment of the killing of Ashli Babbitt by Capitol Police, the police beating and death of Rosanne Boyland, or any of the myriad examples of excessive force by police, was sorely disappointed.

There was no balance on this night.

Repeats False Claim that Police Were Killed

Testimony from Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards gave the appearance of linking the Jan. 7 death of police officer Brian Sicknick to her colleague being sprayed with mace at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled Sicknick’s death was from natural causes, caused by a stroke. Sicknick was hospitalized the night of Jan. 6 after witnesses at the Capitol noticed him exhibiting possible signs of a stroke.

Thompson reinforced the point after a break in testimony, saying the audience included “some of the family members, friends, and widows of the officers who lost their lives as the result of the attack.”

Four people died at the Capitol on Jan. 6. All were Trump supporters. Babbitt, 35, an Air Force veteran, was shot to death by Lt. Michael Byrd. Boyland, 34, was crushed in a stampede after police unleashed gas in the Lower West Terrace tunnel.

Kevin Greeson, 55, died of a heart attack, although a witness said he was struck by a projectile when a police grenade or other munition exploded near him. Benjamin Phillips, 50, had a stroke. None of those names was mentioned at the hearing.

The Democrat-heavy committee wrapped its work in patriotic language and spoke of its support for the Constitution against the domestic enemies of America.

Comments from Thompson and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) ridiculed the notion of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. They quoted former Republican Attorney Gen. William Barr, who called the idea “[expletive].”

Thompson referred to the nation as a “shining city on a hill,” borrowing language and sentiments from former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s 1988 State of the Union address.

It was not the America that came to Washington to protest on Jan. 6 that was being spoken of, but the nation that is prosecuting those whom they claim tried to overthrow the government and quash the 2020 election results.

“It was domestic enemies of the Constitution who stormed the Capitol and occupied the Capitol,” Thompson declared.

Blame on Proud Boys, Oath Keepers

The hearing made clear the committee lays blame for the alleged “insurrection” at the feet of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two pro-Trump groups charged by federal prosecutors with seditious conspiracy to obstruct the counting of Electoral College votes by a joint session of Congress. Thompson referred to the groups as racist, anti-government militias—terms the groups reject.

“This was like in the Soviet Union: show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes told The Epoch Times from the Virginia City Jail, where he is being held without bond. “Now they’re going to gather what they think is going to be damning evidence.”

Rhodes said the “big tell” from the hearing came when they showed a still image of him with former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio in a D.C. parking garage on Jan. 5, 2021. The inference was that the men were having a meeting. “That’s an absolute lie,” Rhodes said.

The committee presentation did not include full video evidence showing that the “meeting” lasted fewer than 10 seconds and consisted of a handshake and brief pleasantries.

Video distributed by criminal defense attorneys shows that Rhodes made no reference to the Capitol or events happening in Washington. Chairman Thompson referred to a Department of Justice claim that “someone” in the parking garage made reference to the word “Capitol.” Whomever that was, it was not spoken between Rhodes and Tarrio, the video shows.

The committee showed a video clip of a group of Oath Keepers walking in a military-style “stack formation” up the east steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6. Prosecutors have said one of the Oath Keepers’s goals was to search for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.). Oath Keepers have said that is not true.

What was not shown is how the Oath Keepers a short time later intervened in a volatile standoff between a Capitol Police officer armed with a rifle and angry protesters in the Small House Rotunda.

According to several Oath Keepers and video evidence from journalist Stephen Horn and other sources, the group got in between the potential combatants and calmed the situation. Rhodes said one of the Oath Keepers on scene told him the situation was about to go critical, given the officer’s demeanor.

Trump Tweet Started it All?

Meanwhile, Cheney said the upcoming committee hearings will detail a “sophisticated seven-part plan” that Trump devised to keep himself in power. Part of the effort involved a “massive effort to spread false information” about the 2020 election.

She said that a post Trump made on Twitter asking people to come to Washington for a rally that’s “gonna be wild” was the catalyst for the Proud Boys to allegedly plan an “invasion of the Capitol.”

One of the hearings will feature former White House aides, one of whom resigned due to Trump refusing to tell the mob to leave the Capitol, Cheney said. The White House chief counsel threatened to quit several times, she said.

After lashing out at Trump for most of her speech, Cheney warned her colleagues of lasting damage to those who supported the 45th president.

“There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain,” she said.

Rhodes has predicted for months that the Jan. 6 committee’s top goal is to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024 by criminalizing free speech, concocting alleged conspiracies, and tying him to everything bad that happened that day.

“They’re just strapping all of it together as though Trump planned it from the very beginning,” Rhodes said.

Anyone wanting to understand the effort to oust Trump from the public square should read Rep. Thompson’s February 2021 federal civil lawsuit against Trump, his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, Rhodes said. It contains the blueprint for the actions and strategy that the Jan. 6 Select Committee is now using against Trump and his supporters, he said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/jan-6-committee-takes-aim-at-trump-alleging-a-coup-carried-out-with-proud-boys-oath-keepers_4524218.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-11&utm_medium=email&est=OxcmhDJ073w6LLVqFGZCiSmxbkisBp5nLhJ49gZTIMEzfYhzOjFUkZ0S0V5RKiAbFA%3D%3D

According to a White House statement, President Biden so far has appointed more federal judges than any president since John F. Kennedy.

Last year, Biden surpassed the most judicial confirmations in the last 40 years. A recent wave of confirmations means he’s appointed the most judges at this point in a president’s second year in office—the highest in nearly 60 years. To date, the Senate has confirmed nearly 70 Biden appointees to the federal bench.

For people of faith worried about religious freedom, they should not only pay attention to how many, but also the ideology of the judges being confirmed. They must know this: President Biden’s record on judges is alarming. The nominees he’s put forward have raised serious red flags when it comes to religious liberty.

First on the list is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court at the end of the current term. First Liberty thoroughly reviewed Jackson’s record and our analysis revealed significant concerns about her judicial philosophy. Multiple red flags in the record suggest she could be hostile to religious liberty.

For example, Jackson was one of the most frequently reversed judges on the D.C. federal district court. The high rate at which appellate courts have overturned her decisions signals that Jackson frequently engages in judicial activism—intervening where she should not—and gets the law wrong on constitutional matters. Jackson has been endorsed by virtually every liberal activist group in America, receiving praise from Planned Parenthood, Center for Reproductive Rights, American Civil Liberties Union, American Atheists, Human Rights Campaign, Demand Justice, and other radical organizations.

But the Supreme Court is not the only place where Biden has put forth a radical nominee.

We cannot ignore those picked for the federal district and circuit courts. Remember, these courts have immense influence in protecting our freedoms—including religious liberty. The Supreme Court only takes about 65 cases each year, which means lower court judges decide a vast majority of cases.

Of the 66 Biden nominees confirmed so far, 16 have been confirmed to appeals courts, just one level below the Supreme Court. Biden is surpassing many of his recent predecessors. Only President Trump appointed more circuit court judges at this point in his presidency:

First Liberty reviewed the record and background of several Biden nominees to important vacancies on appellate courts. We uncovered that while in private practice, many of these judicial picks—who are now sitting on the federal bench for life—have expressly worked against Americans’ First Freedom.

Similar to Judge Jackson, Biden has selected nominees whose resumés show they’ve worked for radical activist organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, the latter being infamous for labeling political opponents as “hate groups” or “extremists.”

It does not appear Biden’s momentum is slowing down any time soon. More nominees could be confirmed in the coming weeks and months. Just this week, two appellate court nominees advanced to the full Senate for a final vote. About 20 total are waiting for a Senate vote. Slightly more than a dozen are pending a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing or vote.

In the most recent wave of nominations, President Biden announced three picks for appellate court judgeships on the Sixth Circuit, Seventh Circuit and the influential D.C. Circuit—often referred to as the “second highest” court in country. Approximately 50 district and appellate court vacancies still do not have a nominee.

Religious Americans alarmed about the judges being confirmed need to look at the bigger picture, however. Biden has been able to effectuate some change. But it does not mean he’s completely overhauled the composition of the judiciary.

Biden judges currently comprise less than 10% of the judiciary. If he filled every vacancy right now, there would be 140 total Biden judges. That’s still only about 16% of all district and appellate courts. If we compare this to his predecessors, Biden would be the president with the lowest total number of confirmations dating back to Gerald Ford.

Because federal judges make critical legal decisions about your religious liberty, First Liberty’s team of experts continues to keep a close eye on judicial vacancies and remains committed to our work of analyzing and evaluating the records of the nominees to America’s federal courts.

If our legal experts uncover any nominees who have a radical or unacceptable record on religious freedom, we will provide the facts and information to prevent those nominees from being on the federal bench for life.

https://firstliberty.org/news/more-judges-confirmed-than-any-president-since-jfk/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=story-2-button&utm_campaign=fli-insider

AG Kwame Raoul says enforcement of drug crimes, truancy is discrimination

Democratic Illinois attorney general Kwame Raoul launched an investigation into the state’s largest school district for punishing minority students who commit crimes such as drug possession.

Raoul’s office on May 18 began probing Township High School District 211 for civil rights violations after ProPublica, a left-wing journalism organization bankrolled by billionaires, investigated Illinois schools’ ticketing program for students who have committed violations such as drug possession, truancy, and disorderly conduct. A student who receives a ticket usually has to pay a fine. ProPublica found that Hispanics, who make up 26 percent of the student body, have received around half of 120 truancy tickets, while blacks, who make up 6 percent of students, have received 10 percent of tickets.

Amy Meek, the head of the AG’s Civil Rights Bureau, said districts can still violate civil rights law even if they do not intentionally discriminate against “certain groups of people,” ProPublica reported.

Meek’s office may be taking its cues from university activists, who have argued that grades and enforcing school rules are racist because of disproportionate adverse effects on minority students.

District 211 superintendent Lisa Small said in a statement that punishments are “implemented regardless of the student’s race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, or other factors” and that the police are involved only when an offender breaks the law or threatens school safety. Small told the Daily Herald that school disciplinary measures have been effective at mitigating drug use, boosting school attendance, and building positive relationships with law enforcement.

The Illinois attorney general’s office did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/democratic-illinois-ag-targets-schools-for-punishing-drug-possession-disorderly-conduct/

Mayor’s call comes even as far-left DA says action was ‘self-defense’

Democratic Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney, who during last year’s historic crime wave cut police funding, wants to throw a man in jail for defending himself during a mass shooting, even as the city’s far-left district attorney admits the man was acting in self-defense.

Prosecutors told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Gregory Jackson, 34, shot Micah Towns, 23, leading Towns to return fire and kill Jackson. In the melee that followed, a third man, Quran Garner, 18, pulled a gun and began firing into a nearby crowd. While police told the Inquirer that “the precise sequence of the confrontation was unclear” and that more gunmen might have been involved, the incident left 3 people dead and 12 wounded.

Kenney said during a virtual gun-violence briefing that “anybody who fired a gun that day should be locked up.” The mayor said Towns, who remains hospitalized in critical condition, is partially responsible for escalating the shooting because he didn’t walk away from the fight.

Kenney’s call to jail Towns comes as mainstream media sources claim that “a good guy with a gun” is “a myth” and “a deadly American fantasy.” Towns is far from the only armed individual to try to stop a mass shooting, however. Just weeks earlier, an armed off-duty Border Patrol agent helped evacuate Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, during the May 24 mass shooting at the school.

Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.), a soft-on-crime prosecutor who has received more than a million dollars from liberal megadonor George Soros, blasted the mayor’s words, saying Towns was acting in self-defense.

Kenney is “not a cop” and “not an attorney,” a Krasner spokeswoman told the Inquirer. “We cannot invent crimes that don’t exist and facts that aren’t true.”

The mayor’s stance on fighting gun crime does not involve providing more resources to law enforcement. As Philadelphia last year saw homicides reach an all-time high, Kenney reduced the police force’s budget by 2.4 percent.

Kenney’s office did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/democratic-philly-mayor-wants-to-arrest-man-for-defending-himself-during-mass-shooting/

What’s Happening:

In the wake of recent shootings, Democrats have pushed extreme limits on Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

It seems Democrats think the only way forward is to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights. Republicans disagree.

And a team of House Republicans is introducing a bill that will encourage responsible gun ownership—not right guns from law-abiding citizens’ hands.

From Fox News:

House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik is introducing legislation aimed at promoting gun training and safety in the wake of several mass shootings across the United States…

“As Democrats rush to push their radical gun control agenda, I am proud to lead the charge in introducing legislation to promote gun training and safety,” Stefanik told Fox News Digital.

In a move that will have many asking, “Why haven’t they tried this before?” Republicans are introducing a bill that will encourage gun safety.

The bill will incentivize Americans to receive gun training and encourage them to purchase gun safety and storage equipment.

The goal is to allow Americans to safely exercise their gun rights, rather than deprive them of the ability to purchase and own firearms.

In short, the bill will offer tax deductions for Americans who enroll in firearm courses or buy gun safes.

The bill also bans the left’s so-called national gun registry, by stating taxpayers do not have to “provide any information” to the government.

And government officials can only hold onto tax deduction information for three years.

This is the kind of clever, common-sense bill that all congressmen should embrace. The kind of bill past Republicans and Democrats would have compromised to pass.

But these days, Democrats are in no way interested in compromise. It’s either their way or the highway.

We might not see something like this passed… until we get rid of this liberal majority.

Key Takeaways:

• House Republicans introduced a bill encouraging firearm safety.
• It would incentivize Americans to get gun training and own gun safes.
• The bill also bans the creation of a firearm registry.

Source: Fox News

https://thepatriotjournal.com/gop-2a-alternative-stefanik/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=actengage&seyid=5663

More than one-third of state attorneys general have come out in defense of Florida’s ban on sanctuary cities.

After a federal judge halted enforcement of the Florida legislature’s ban, which Gov. Ron DeSantis (R.) signed into law in 2019, the state appealed the decision, and 17 attorneys general filed an amicus brief on the Sunshine State’s behalf.

“Sanctuary cities have become havens for illegal aliens and all the social, economic, and criminal costs that illegal immigration entails,” Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (R.), one of the brief’s signatories, said Tuesday in a statement. “The Florida law simply required local law enforcement officials to comply with federal immigration law.”

At least a dozen states have banned cities from impeding immigration enforcement against undocumented immigrants. Nearly half of voters see illegal immigration as a critical threat to U.S. interests in the next 10 years, according to a poll conducted by Morning Consult and Politico. Illegal immigration has skyrocketed under the Biden administration. Customs and Border Patrol encountered a record 1.6 million illegal immigrants during the 2021 fiscal year, and officials expect that number to rise to 2.3 million in 2022.

DeSantis in 2019 said he was proud to “uphold the rule of law and ensure that our communities are safe” by keeping sanctuary cities out of Florida.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/17-state-ags-defend-desantiss-ban-on-sanctuary-cities/

A majority of New Yorkers say their city is headed in the wrong direction under Democratic mayor Eric Adams, according to a Siena College poll released Tuesday.

Fifty-six percent of respondents said the city is headed in the wrong direction, while an overwhelming majority—70 percent—said they feel less safe than when the pandemic began. Adams’s approval rating, meanwhile, is underwater: Just 29 percent of New Yorkers said his performance has been “excellent” or “good,” while 64 percent said it has been “fair” or “poor.”

Spectrum News NY1, which commissioned the poll, published the results on the same day that residents in another leftwing city are pushing back against their far-left leaders. Radical San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin (D.), whose soft-on-crime policies led to the release of a serial criminal who went on to kill two people, on Tuesday faces a recall effort organized by members of his own party, who say he is too extreme even for famously liberal San Francisco. Recent polling indicates that a majority of San Franciscans want Boudin out.

While Adams said this week that shootings in New York are trending downward, overall crime jumped 28 percent last month, Spectrum News reported Friday. Grand larcenies, burglaries, robberies, and gun arrests all rose.

While Adams has said addressing homelessness is a priority, 49 percent of New Yorkers said he’s doing a poor job on the issue. Forty-five percent said he’s also doing a poor job on fighting crime.

New Yorkers are similarly unhappy with Democratic state leaders, including Governor Kathy Hochul. A plurality of respondents, 46 percent, said the state is heading in the wrong direction, and a majority, 54 percent, called Hochul’s performance only “fair” or “poor.”

The poll respondents are far from the only New Yorkers to show their dissatisfaction with left-wing leadership. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Yorkers have fled the Empire State in droves, with many heading to Republican-led states such as Texas and Florida.

Many former Gothamites told the New York Post they left the state because of leftwing policies such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and high taxes. The state’s tax base shrank in 2020 by $19.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/another-liberal-city-is-losing-faith-in-its-liberal-leadership/

Abortion activists firebombed a pro-life pregnancy center outside Buffalo, N.Y., the latest in a series of attacks on pro-life offices and churches since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

The pro-life organization CompassCare reported that early Tuesday morning, activists smashed windows and set fires in the group’s Amherst, N.Y., medical office. The assailants graffitied the phrase “Jane Was Here” on the building, a tagline associated with a group called Jane’s Revenge that has claimed responsibility for attacks on pro-life institutions across the country.

The attack comes as Supreme Court justices and pro-life advocates face heightened threats this month of leftwing violence over the Court’s looming Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. Jane’s Revenge took credit for the firebombing of a pro-life office in Wisconsin last month. And anarchists who vandalized four churches in Washington State claimed association with Jane’s Revenge. The Department of Homeland Security has warned law enforcement about potential violence against justices, clerks, and even clergy members in the wake of the Dobbs ruling. Pro-abortion violence is not the only kind tacitly supported by the left. The Washington Free Beacon reported on Tuesday how two Ivy League lawyers who lobbed a Molotov cocktail into a police car during the summer 2020 riots worked out a sweetheart plea deal last month with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department.

CompassCare CEO Jim Harden condemned the attack and called for Democratic New York officials to protect pro-life organizations.

“Because of this act of violence, the needs of women facing unplanned pregnancy will go unmet and babies will die,” Harden said.

The Supreme Court is expected to overturn Roe‘s recognition of a right to abortion in the Dobbs case, returning the issue of abortion access to the states.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/abortion-activists-firebomb-another-pro-life-office/

New York Democratic governor Kathy Hochul on Monday signed a bill that bans individuals under 21 from purchasing semiautomatic rifles, even though a U.S. circuit court just weeks before declared a similar law in California to be unconstitutional.

The bill, one of 10 sweeping gun-control measures that Hochul signed in the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, raises the minimum age to buy a semiautomatic rifle, including the popular Ruger Mini-14 and SKS, from 18 to 21. New York, which as of 2020 has the fifth-lowest gun homicide rate in the nation, already bans people under 21 from owning handguns.

The mass shootings have galvanized blue-state politicians to restrict gun rights. In addition to Hochul’s moves, Democratic legislators in California and New Jersey are considering additional gun restrictions.

New York’s under-21 ban is startlingly similar to a California law that a U.S. circuit court struck down in May. The Ninth District Circuit Court of Appeals on May 11 ruled that California’s law banning individuals under 21 from purchasing semiautomatic rifles is unconstitutional.

“America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army,” Judge Ryan Nelson wrote. “Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.”

In addition to the under-21 ban, New York now requires any resident seeking to buy a semiautomatic rifle to get a license, bans bulletproof body vests, and mandates that social media platforms “provide a clear and concise policy regarding how they would respond to incidents of hateful conduct,” among other measures.

https://freebeacon.com/guns/new-york-passes-gun-ban-weeks-after-federal-court-declares-similar-law-unconstitutional/

(DHG) — The liberals are back at it again… it seems like cancelling Dr. Seuss was not enough!

An innocent patriotic brand selling hilarious “I Do Not Like You Sleepy Joe” Mugs on their website has enraged Liberals and boy are they angry.

They’ve gone to social media to rant about how owners of said mug are “losers” and how it is just like the “racist” Dr. Seuss books. Simply hilarious!

Little did they know that their social media rants would completely back fire!

As soon as conservatives got wind that the site was being “cancelled”, demand skyrocketed.

Owner Tyler W. had this to say: 

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Thanks to them, sales have been FLOODING in. Seems like everyone loves our new mug!

The Libs are truly evil trying to take down a small business in times like these!”

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https://www.conservativens.com/misc-533816901646078104513?utm_campaign=BabylonBee-Dedicated&utm_medium=Native&utm_source=BabylonBee

Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) is taking out a Spanish-language radio ad to warn voters about a George Soros-backed company’s purchase of Hispanic radio stations in Miami in order to “infiltrate” the state with leftist ideology.

“Warning, voters! The Left is taking control of our local media,” reads an English translation of the DeSantis campaign’s ad, which will run on stations set to be acquired by a conglomerate financed by the left-wing billionaire. “George Soros, known for financing extreme leftist causes, is now financing the purchase of Hispanic radio stations right here in Miami.”

The Latino Media Network, backed by Soros’s Lakestar Finance, last week agreed to purchase 18 Hispanic radio stations across the country, including the conservative Radio Mambi in Miami. The acquisitions by the conglomerate, which is led by Democrats and left-wing activists, come amid increasing concerns within the Democratic Party about Republicans winning over Latino voters.

“The Soros-funded radical Left is running a scheme to manipulate local media in Florida to push their Marxist agenda on voters,” DeSantis said in a tweet promoting his ad. “In Florida, we reject the professional Left and their attempt to infiltrate our state and will always stand for truth and freedom.”

Helen Aguirre Ferré, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, denounced the Latino Media Network’s purchase of conservative Hispanic radio stations.

“Miami’s Radio Mambi has always been a pillar for conservative discussion in Miami,” Aguirre Ferré said. “The efforts by the far left, financed by George Soros, to silence conservative voices confirms the importance of the fight Hispanics are waging against Marxist ideology in Florida. The hastily arranged takeover of Radio Mambi shines a light to what lengths socialist interests will go to advance their agenda on America.”

Hispanic voters, historically a left-leaning demographic, are moving to the right, polls show. About 750,000 fewer Hispanics voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 than for Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to the Wall Street Journal. A poll conducted in March by the Journal found Hispanics favor Republican candidates for Congress over Democrats by 9 percentage points.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/desantis-raises-alarm-over-soros-backed-buyout-of-hispanic-radio/

Democratic megadonor funneled more than $40 million to elect 75 prosecutors in the last decade

George Soros spent more than $40 million in the past decade to elect scores of liberal prosecutors in half of America’s largest jurisdictions, many of which are now roiled by crime.

The Democratic megadonor has backed 75 so-called justice reform prosecutors through direct contributions, PACs, and other third-party entities, the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund revealed in a June report. Though many had little prosecutorial experience when elected, they represent 72 million Americans in some of the nation’s most populous municipalities. Ten Soros prosecutors, including Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.) and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon (D.), received $13 million in just the last four years, going on to win races where they had vastly outraised their competition—sometimes by as much as 90 percent. In each race, Soros was the single greatest donor to the campaign.

“Our study shows for the first time, Soros’s funding and installation of these district attorneys is fundamentally dismantling the criminal justice system as we know it,” Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund president Jason Johnson told the Washington Free Beacon.

The report discloses the power progressive criminal prosecutors wield in the American justice system—and the potential effects of that influence on crime. The FBI in 2020 reported its highest single-year increase in homicides—a 30 percent jump from the previous year. A year later, 12 cities, including Krasner’s Philadelphia and Soros-backed district attorney José Garza’s Austin, Texas, broke their all-time homicide records. According to the report, more than 40 percent of homicides and a third of all violent and property crimes in 2021 occurred in jurisdictions run by Soros prosecutors.

From cities like Seattle and Los Angeles, to wealthy suburbs near Washington, D.C., to provincial counties in Mississippi and Wisconsin, the prosecutors have radically overhauled bail laws and pursued lightened sentencing in an effort to reduce incarceration. Soros began his quiet effort to remake America’s criminal justice system in 2014, donating $50 million to the ACLU for justice reform activism. He followed up in 2016 by funneling more than $3 million into seven local campaigns, including to Cook County district attorney Kim Foxx (D.), the controversial Chicago prosecutor known for dropping charges against Jussie Smollett, who committed a hate crime hoax.

Johnson told the Free Beacon career prosecutors are becoming a thing of the past as former tax attorneys and ACLU lawyers have ascended to top prosecutorial positions on Soros’s dime.

Soros’s network of justice reform groups includes more than 500 PACs, dark money groups, and nonprofits, the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund report notes. Some, such as the Drug Policy Alliance, where Soros serves as chairman, are open about their affiliation. Others, like the Tides Center, are “donor pass-through organization[s],” which launder donations from Soros’s philanthropic juggernauts, including the Open Society Foundations, to subentities and political PACs.

Through a cluster of statewide public safety PACs, Soros donated more than a million dollars each to Krasner, Gascon, Foxx, and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg (D.). He also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Virginia prosecutors Buta Biberaj (D.) and Steve Descano (D.), both of whom have received scrutiny in office for failing to prosecute violent criminals and allowing repeat offenders to victimize others. In a New York Times op-ed last week, Descano also pledged not to prosecute illegal abortions if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this month.

Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares (R.) told the Free Beacon the ascent of Soros prosecutors has changed criminal law in many jurisdictions overnight and made communities less safe.

“Instead of trying to change the law through elected officials, these groups are electing prosecutors who simply ignore it,” Miyares said. “They’ve replaced DAs that follow the law with radical extremists with an agenda that makes our communities less safe and emboldens criminals.”

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund cited a Free Beacon report in March that revealed Descano’s office had dropped felony charges against a man who attempted to abduct and rape a hotel maid in 2020. One year later, the same man was charged for killing two homeless men and wounding three others during a nine-day shooting spree in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The looming threat to public safety has inspired recall efforts against Descano, Biberaj, and Soros-funded Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) in Virginia.

“Soros prosecutors now preside over 20 percent of Americans with the same disastrous results we have seen in Virginia—violent criminals and sexual predators roam the streets victimizing innocents,” Sean Kennedy, the president of Virginians for Safe Communities, which fielded a recall effort against the prosecutors, told the Free Beacon. “As San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin faces his fate in a recall today, VSC knows that Northern Virginia’s Soros prosecutors will face the same public reckoning soon as the American people want safety first.”

Other prosecutors have participated in junkets, symposiums, and even lavish retreats put on by Soros-funded entities. More than 20 Soros prosecutors, including Gascon, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby (D.), and St. Louis circuit attorney Kim Gardner (D.), traveled with Fair and Just Prosecution, a Tides Center subentity, in 2019 to Germany and Portugal, where they learned about “drug decriminalization and harm reduction approaches.” The Vera Institute of Justice, a think tank funded by millions from Soros’s Open Society Foundation, treated Mosby and Foxx the same year to an all-expenses-paid spa retreat during work days.

The Vera Institute and other think tanks funded by Soros also promote these progressive prosecutors’ tactics while shielding them from bad press. New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice has the public relations firm BerlinRosen on retainer for district attorneys it works with, according to the report.

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund anticipates Soros will spend millions more to reelect Gascon and to install other candidates in Raleigh, N.C., and Alameda County and Orange County, Calif., this year.

Voters in San Francisco issued the first check against Soros prosecutors during a recall election Tuesday, with 60 percent ousting San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin (D.) after a little more than two years in office.

Update 7:09 a.m.: This piece has been updated with the result of the San Francisco recall election.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/report-soros-prosecutors-run-half-of-americas-largest-jurisdictions/

A mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to advertise in USA Today, which claims it “represents the voice of an entire nation.”

China Daily has since October 2021 spent $287,500 advertising in USA Today, according to filings with the Department of Justice. The iconic American newspaper is the latest news outlet to partner with the Beijing-controlled newspaper, which in recent years has paid outlets like Time, the Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Policy magazine millions of dollars to publish articles as part of Beijing’s aggressive propaganda campaign in the West.

The USA Today–China Daily partnership comes amid heightened scrutiny over the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to shape Americans’ views of Chinese culture and its domestic and foreign policy. Newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post ended advertising deals with China Daily because of foreign influence. Human-rights groups have criticized American news companies for publishing China Daily articles that tout the Chinese Communist Party’s policies in Tibet, Hong Kong, and other disputed regions.

The U.S. government has also cracked down on China Daily and other Chinese state-controlled news agencies. The Justice Department in 2020 required China Daily to disclose details of its payments to American companies, showing more than $19 million spent on advertising and printing costs since November 2016.

The influx of advertising revenue is a much-needed boost for USA Today, which last year saw the steepest readership decline of any major newspaper—a 62 percent dropoff in circulation from 2020 to 2021. Time and the Los Angeles Times, two other companies working with China Daily, have also seen declines in subscriptions and advertising revenue. China Daily between November 2021 and April 2022 spent $1,618,143 on advertising. The newspaper paid $649,603 to Time, $315,540 to Financial Times, $306,000 to the Los Angeles Times, and $117,000 to Foreign Policy, according to its filings with the Justice Department.

USA Today did not respond to questions about where it has published China Daily content, but American news companies have typically republished China Daily articles online or in physical copies of their publications. Time, for example, publishes China Daily articles at a “paid content” section of its website, as well as in a printed insert in its magazine called “ChinaWatch.” Time has not always disclosed that the Chinese government paid for the printed inserts, which are designed to look like other news articles in the magazine.

USA Today also did not respond to questions about potential conflicts of interest in its China Daily arrangement. But the newspaper insists its advertisers do not influence its news coverage.

“We will not blur the line between advertising and editorial content. We will provide appropriate disclosures, exercise transparency, and avoid actual or implicit commercial endorsements by our journalists,” reads USA Today‘s code of ethical conduct.

“When sponsorships of news are appropriate, we will not allow them to determine, change, or restrict content.”

https://freebeacon.com/media/voice-of-a-nation-usa-today-takes-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars-from-ccp-mouthpiece/

A drag queen, a communist, and a domestic terrorist rally support for San Francisco’s radical DA as recall looms

SAN FRANCISCO — A drag queen, a communist, and a domestic terrorist walk into a bar. They are joined by several dozen supporters of Chesa Boudin, the radical district attorney who faces a recall election on Tuesday. The mood is lively despite recent polling indicating a majority of the city’s voters want him gone.

Juanita MORE!, the drag queen activist and “denizen of the limelight,” is first to arrive at Zeitgeist, the “unapologetically punk dive” and beer garden in the city’s Mission District. MORE! could be in the running to be named the inaugural drag laureate of San Francisco, an official position created days earlier by Mayor London Breed (D.).

Angela Davis, the former FBI most-wanted fugitive and Communist Party vice-presidential candidate whose other accolades include the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize, takes a seat in the back with her assistant. A Washington Free Beacon reporter is among those instructed by Boudin aides to prevent overeager admirers from pestering Davis, who recently returned from a gig in Denmark where she had been invited to lecture the Danes about their role in promoting “racial capitalism.”

Boudin arrives moments later with his father, domestic terrorist David Gilbert. Gilbert was paroled last year after disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo (D., N.Y.) commuted his 75-years-to-life sentence for felony murder. Boudin’s father and mother, Kathy Boudin, were convicted for their roles in a 1981 armored car robbery that left two police officers and a Brink’s guard dead. Just 14 months old when his parents were arrested, Chesa was raised by Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Naturally, he ended up at Yale Law.

The demographics of the crowd are about what you’d expect: boomer hippies, dirtbag leftists, trust fund kids, weirdos. Gilbert and Davis chat in the beer garden until she is called to the microphone to rally the faithful. Like most San Francisco residents, they’re wearing face masks outside.

“I am convinced that we are the majority,” Davis says toward the end of a low-energy speech before she is hustled off to another scheduled appearance. A poll conducted days earlier for the San Francisco Examiner suggests otherwise: 56 percent of likely voters favor recalling Boudin, while 62 percent disapprove of his job performance as district attorney. “Barring a literal miracle, Boudin is done,” writes Gil Duran, the paper’s editorial page editor.

The district attorney takes the stage and phones it in. Whereas most left-wing radicals are at least somewhat charismatic, Boudin is just another boring nerd, a Marxist Mitt Romney. His admirers in the local and national media may describe him as “a potential left-wing superstar,” but he’ll never be accepted into the Squad. “One of the reasons I know we’re going to win is that my wife Valerie told me that a long time ago and she’s never wrong,” the politician yucks.

“There’s a lot of pundits, a lot of journalists who think they know it all, who are telling us that it’s over,” Boudin says. This elicits a few angry boos and one emphatic “Fuck them!” That’s about as punk rock as it gets. He goes on to denounce the recall effort, spearheaded by the former chairwoman of the San Francisco Democratic Party, as the work of “Republican billionaires.” He boasts of talking to voters in Spanish, a language he mastered while working as a translator for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, and touts an internal poll showing the race tied at 47 percent. He has one simple question: “Are we gonna win?”

Many of Nancy Pelosi’s constituents are hoping the answer is no. Breed, the city’s Democratic mayor, is probably one of them, even though she won’t come out and say it. She has been feuding with Boudin since late last year, when the district attorney opposed her efforts to be “less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city,” where burglaries are up almost 50 percent since 2019. Mary Jung, the lifelong Democrat leading the recall effort, last year celebrated the birth of her granddaughter amid a spate of anti-Asian hate crimes and worried it wasn’t safe to go out for walks with the stroller.

San Francisco certainly doesn’t feel very safe. Walking south from Tenderloin to City Hall in broad daylight, you will encounter an array of drug dealers and eventually lose count of all the people openly lighting up or tying off or passed out in the middle of the sidewalk. You’ll see tent encampments in practically every side street and alley. Garbage and filth everywhere. (Maybe that’s why everyone wears a mask outside.) You’ll try to convince yourself that San Franciscans are just unusually negligent about picking up after their large dogs.

Boudin’s defenders seem to think that because most of the city’s problems predate his election in 2019, it would be unreasonable for voters to conclude he’s not the right Democrat to fix them, or to question his radical approach to criminal justice reform, which critics argue has been too accommodating of actual criminals at the expense of victims. A major catalyst for the recall effort was the case of Troy McAlister, a serial criminal who killed two women while driving drunk in a stolen vehicle on New Year’s Eve in 2020. McAlister was free after Boudin’s office in April of that year negotiated a plea deal on an armed robbery charge, even though he had been arrested multiple times afterwards, including for car theft just days before the fatal crash.

“That was the last straw,” says Richie Greenberg, an activist who spearheaded an earlier unsuccessful campaign to recall Boudin. “He should have resigned. It would have spared the city all of this mess.” Even in a progressive bastion such as San Francisco, Boudin is “not even on the spectrum” in terms of what voters are willing to tolerate, Greenberg tells the Free Beacon during an interview at a coffee shop near the sprawling homeless assemblage and open-air drug carnival outside the U.S. Health and Human Services building at United Nations Plaza. “The majority of San Franciscans are just horrified by what we have been subjected to and why we’re saying we have to stop this.”

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/chesa-boudin-on-the-ropes/

Biden DOJ asks judge to go easy on Ivy League firebombers

On the cusp of nonstop, around-the-clock (primetime!) coverage of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, a couple of domestic terrorists are actually getting their day in court, and it is informative to see how Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is handling their prosecution.

Recall Garland’s breathless declaration, during his confirmation hearings, that “150 years after the Department’s founding, battling extremist attacks on our democratic institutions also remains central to its mission.”

Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were arrested in the “mostly peaceful” protests following George Floyd’s murder. The two lawyers handed out Molotov cocktails to the crowd, and Rahman tossed one into a police car before fleeing the scene in Mattis’s van. They reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors in October 2020 that wiped out six of the seven charges against them. Those prosecutors, nonetheless, sought a maximum 10-year sentence and argued that the incident qualified for a so-called terrorism enhancement that would turbocharge sentencing—a determination with which the U.S. Probation Office concurred.

Ginning herself up to distribute explosives to the crowd, Rahman gave a video interview in which she declared, “This shit won’t ever stop until we fuckin’ take it all down,” adding that “the only way [the police] hear us is through violence.”

Then, Garland and the U.S. attorney for New York’s Eastern District, Breon Peace, who’s handling the prosecution, took office, and you won’t believe what happened next!

In mid-May, the same career DOJ prosecutors who argued for that 10-year sentence were back in court withdrawing their plea deal and entering a new one that allowed the defendants to cop to the lesser charge of conspiracy. It tosses out the terrorism enhancement entirely.

The new charge carries a five-year maximum sentence, but the prosecutors are urging the judge to go below that, asking for just 18 to 24 months on account of the “history and personal characteristics of the defendants” and the “aberrational nature of the defendants’ conduct.” Because, you know, Mattis graduated from Princeton and New York University Law School and was an attorney at the white-shoe law firm Pryor Cashman, and Rahman was a public-interest lawyer whose “best friend,” Obama administration intelligence official Salmah Rizvi, guaranteed the $250,000 required to release her on bail.

Law360, which reported on the events, calls the new deal an “unusual step.” James Trusty, a former prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s criminal division, broke it down for us this way: “Swapping in a softer plea agreement after having gone through the plea hearing is an exceedingly rare event in federal court.” It can happen, he said, if there is “truly some new development or understanding about the defendants that merits a fresh look.”

In this case, the new development is the political persuasion of the folks running the Justice Department, and for them, Mattis and Rahman are the right kind of domestic terrorists—the ones whose cases and conduct will never be the subject of a congressional hearing or plastered from wall to wall on cable television.

Remember their names, and the special treatment they received at the hands of the Biden Justice Department, when the broadcasts begin on Thursday and when Garland next has the gall to feign concern about political violence directed at our democratic institutions.

Mattis and Rahman Change of Plea Hearing by Washington Free Beacon on Scribd

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/how-the-left-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-domestic-terrorism/

Treasurers work to expose what they consider a misuse of state retirement funds

After failing to advance their agenda by passing laws in Congress, progressives have found that they can impose their will on Americans just as effectively through our financial system. And while some state officials have recently started to fight back, they are heavily outgunned.

The world’s largest asset managers, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, have signed on to the global Net Zero Asset Management Initiative and together use the $20 trillion of other people’s money that they manage to pressure companies whose shares they own into pursuing environmental and social-justice causes. Progressive state pension fund managers in California, New York, Maryland, and even Texas are doing the same with the trillions in retirement funds that they manage.

The various elements of this ideology have come together under the umbrella of “environmental, social and governance” finance (ESG), and its advocates now include the world’s largest banks, asset managers, pension funds, rating agencies, proxy agents, as well as numerous international corporate clubs including Climate Action 100+, the Global Investors Statement to Governments on Climate Change, the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.

ESG also has the support of the Biden Administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission, which announced it will require all listed companies to provide extensive reporting on their greenhouse gas emissions. It has the support of the Department of Justice, which just declared it would focus on “environmental justice,” and the Department of Labor, which announced it will no longer enforce a Trump-era regulation that barred private pension managers from including political causes such as ESG in their investment decisions.

The collective goal of these groups is to leverage their financial power to enforce the behavior that they want to see, targeting in particular fossil fuel producers and the gun industry. “Behaviors are going to have to change,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink stated in a panel discussion last March. “You have to force behaviors and, at BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors.”

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $10 trillion in assets under its management. In his 2022 letter to CEOs, Fink wrote that “every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world.” Bloomberg News reported that ESG financial assets are growing exponentially and will reach $50 trillion by 2025, representing more than one-third of the $140 trillion in assets under management worldwide.

But some state officials see the ESG movement as a misuse of money that was entrusted to asset managers by pensioners. A study by the Boston College Center for Retirement Research reported that ESG investing reduced the returns to pensioners by 0.70 to 0.90 percent per year, largely because ESG investment funds, which are actively managed, charge higher fees than non-managed index funds. This means higher profits for asset managers, less money for retirees.

And for all the added costs, many question whether ESG investing is doing much for the causes it claims to support. A research report by Columbia University and the London School of Economics stated that companies in ESG funds have “worse track records for compliance with labor and environmental laws, relative to portfolio firms held by non-ESG funds.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called ESG “an outrageous scam,” adding that “it has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”

“If BlackRock has their own money and they want to be activist investors, I think people have the right to deploy their own capital as they see fit,” said Scott Fitzpatrick, Missouri State Treasurer. “The problem here is that it’s other people’s money they’re using, and people don’t want their retirement money used for political purposes.”

Increasingly, state officials are discovering how state pension money is being used to support “the religion of global climate change,” said Derek Kreifels, CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation. “Now we’re seeing the veil drop on how they’re weaponizing it. Now they’re starting to include all these other [social] issues as well.”

Activist asset managers vote the shares they manage to influence corporate executives, and this explains to a great extent why Disney, a producer of family entertainment, now advocates for sex education in elementary schools; why Delta, Coca Cola, and Major League Baseball fought against Georgia’s voter I.D. law; and why Citibank has fought against laws restricting abortion in conservative states and has curtailed lending to gun makers and retailers—all of which are political causes that have nothing to do with running their businesses. The Wall Street Journal reports that activist asset managers are now putting pressure on Walmart, Lowe’s, and TJ Maxx to take a stand against abortion restrictions.

But for all the headline-grabbing statements from CEOs on political and social issues, progressive asset managers have been content to operate quietly behind the scenes in boardrooms, shareholder meetings, and global conferences.

“If they were ever to admit what they’re really doing, they would be creating untold liability for themselves,” Fitzpatrick said. “It’s inviting lawsuits galore for people who can say, ‘you have violated your financial duty to us.’”

“As an asset manager, the only thing you have is trust,” said Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks. “If you violate that trust, your business is gone. The investment managers that are pushing this agenda are ultimately risking the very franchise that they’re using to drive it.”

By colluding against fossil fuel companies, Oaks said, banks and asset managers “are actively implementing economic sanctions. We need more capital going into oil and gas production and there are great opportunities there to make money. Why isn’t the money going there? Why aren’t capital markets working, like they have in the past? It’s because of ESG.”

One by one, conservative states are starting to push back through legislation and legal actions. Kreifels said that 23 states have taken some form of action, 13 of which have introduced formal legislation, to prevent state money from being used to support political causes. This, The New York Times wrote, has had a “chilling” effect on progressive initiatives, though how much of an effect remains to be seen.

In May, Oklahoma passed the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, modeled on laws that were passed in Texas last year, which bars the state from conducting business with banks or asset managers that discriminate against fossil fuel companies. A similar bill in Oklahoma does the same for those that discriminate against gun manufacturers.

Last week, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron issued a legal opinion, stating that the use of state pension money for “environmental, social and governance” was a conflict of interest and was “inconsistent with Kentucky law governing fiduciary duties.” Cameron criticized the “increasing trend among some investment management firms to use money in public and state employee pension plans – that is, other people’s money—to push their own political agendas and force social change.”

In December, Florida revoked proxy authority for asset managers, meaning they no longer have discretion to vote the shares that they manage for Florida pensioners. Gov. Ron DeSantis stated that this “will clarify the state’s expectations that all fund managers should act solely in the financial interest of the state’s funds.”

In November, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich launched a formal investigation into progressive financial institutions’ “anticompetitive conduct,” accusing them of “threatening and intimidating companies if they do not comply with their left-wing agenda.”

Also in November, Louisiana barred JPMorgan from underwriting its municipal bonds because of its policies against gun manufacturers. West Virginia and Texas recently passed legislation blocking finance companies that discriminate against fossil fuel producers from municipal contracts.

“Next week, we’ll be sending out letters to financial institutions that are going to be put on a list that is going to bar them from contracts in the state of West Virginia,” said Riley Moore, West Virginia’s State Treasurer. “We’re an energy state and this is an existential threat to our economy.”

“We need energy independence in this country,” Moore said. Countries in Europe are now realizing that their green energy policies have caused unaffordable price spikes for fuel, led to a risk of blackouts when the wind doesn’t blow, created a dangerous dependence on countries like Russia, and in many cases actually increased the carbon footprint. “It’s because they rushed into this ESG nonsense,” he said “You can call it sustainable, but it can’t sustain a grid.”

In addition to what many see as a misallocation of state pension money, there are the bigger legal and societal issues around using the financial system to “force behaviors.”

“This seems to me to be using Wall Street to accomplish what the left was unable to accomplish through democratic means,” said Nebraska State Treasurer John Murante. If progressive policies had public support, they could enact laws democratically through Congress, he said. Instead, “they’re going around the democratic process and attempting to do indirectly what they were incapable of doing through persuasion and logic and reason.”

ESG investing would lose in the court of public opinion “because it’s incredibly unpopular. ESG is the 2023 version of CRT,” Murante said, referring to Critical Race Theory in schools. “It has been integrated into institutions without people knowing about it, but when they become aware of it, there is genuine national outrage.”

Going up against the world’s largest financial institutions and the Biden administration is a formidable task for state finance officials, however, and they have a long and difficult road ahead. But Murante says he’s feeling optimistic.

“We have three profound advantages on our side,” he said. “First, we’re right on the issues; second, we’re right on the law; and third, we have the people with us.”

“It’s a David and Goliath situation,” Kreifels said. “But David won.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/state-officials-fight-wall-street-to-protect-pensioners-from-esg-scam_4512853.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-07&utm_medium=email&est=8KfclgYz1mtoM562vJ7ko0XiREnyZJjhdHeY%2BpO0VbK9wnt0XsAX%2BagYGcmGy4ibsA%3D%3D

consider myself one of the lucky ones as I had walked by the propane tank bombs that never exploded at Columbine High School. My friends weren’t as lucky. As parents gathered at my old elementary school to pick up their children, I will never forget the look of worry and desperation as my friend’s dad asked me, “Pat, have you seen him?” This father coached my soccer team growing up. He was always calm, direct and confident. He wasn’t that day, and he would never see his son alive again.

This was more than 23 years ago. At Columbine, the perpetrators used pipe bombs and firearms, (some obtained illegally) and tried to kill many more with propane tanks. This happened in the middle of the assault weapons ban, mind you.

Fast forward to the recent events in Buffalo and Uvalde. Last week, I cried as I dropped my kids off at school. I cried more as I read news stories and reflected. Haven’t we learned anything since that tragic day at Columbine?

While some have learned lessons from the tragedy, many politicians have not. The assault weapons ban, and other “gun control” measures didn’t save my friends, nor did a flashy sign declaring my school a “gun free zone.” A brave and heroic teacher did save many lives at my school. Yet, after every tragedy like this, Democrats immediately start beating the gun control drum. Sadly, many Republicans start looking for gun control policies to say they “did something.” They need to start looking through a different lens. Instead of restrictions and control, they need to empower citizens, teachers and parents to solve this problem.

An overwhelming amount of mass shootings occur in places where citizens are banned from carrying firearms. As more and more people realize this is a problem, states have started to adopt policies to allow people to equip themselves to protect our children.

While this is a step in the right direction, many times the training requirements are steep, and the incentives are practically non-existent. Teachers often have salary incentives for obtaining advanced degrees and additional certificates. Why don’t we have similar incentives in place for those who want to protect our children?

I personally like the idea of School Resource Officers (SROs). One of the reasons I continue to drop my kids off at school is because of its outstanding SRO. However, this can be controversial for some parents. Locking doors, tempered glass, site assessments, communication systems and resiliency training are not controversial, but they aren’t always done. It’s because of a lack of incentives, since most schools don’t have to compete for enrolling students.

When I shop for a car, I look for lots of things, but one of the most important to me is making sure it has features that will protect my most precious cargo, my children. The car market has responded to parents like me by providing all sorts of safety features. If we had more school choice the education environment would be different. Schools could have SROs or not based on market signals. Each school could feature different safety measures, whether site security or trained staff, and they could incentivize staff to go through the training.

Instead of seeing parents with the look of worry and desperation, I want to see parents with the look of being empowered. Empowered about restoring our God-given, constitutional rights and duties to protect ourselves, our families and our communities. We all need to work together to reverse the alarming trend of mass shootings, and take meaningful measures that will secure our schools, places of worship, and other vulnerable spaces that are often exploited by the worst of humanity. I, for one, will never stop working on finding solutions to this problem.

https://dailycaller.com/2022/06/03/neville-i-survived-columbine-here-is-what-we-need-to-do-to-stop-school-shootings/?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=215567297&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_69uYb7-MnfdWPWrz7Hw-s7fBV8sE9CJ3p1gXYWKHe7VX0MeT0wJ_V5f_S01DHKrM-phkH96W3TYbfpRcjqft4u_rwoQ&utm_content=215567297&utm_source=hs_email

REVIEW: ‘An Abolitionist’s Handbook’ by Patrisse Cullors

Patrisse Cullors does not care what you think about her slush fund, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. “Even an anti-capitalist organization will still have to deal with money—sometimes quite a bit of it,” the self-described Marxist writes in An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World. “Be as transparent as possible—but make no apologies for salaries and other expenses.”

Unfortunately, this is the extent of the BLM cofounder’s financial advice in her new book, a how-to guide for aspiring abolitionists. If you’re looking for tips on how to raise tens of millions of dollars in charitable donations and funnel $970,000 to an LLC owned by the father of your child and $840,000 to your brother’s security firm, you will have to look elsewhere. Ditto for readers eager to learn how they can leverage their activist careers to accumulate $3.2 million in real estate, including a $1.4 million Malibu compound and an Atlanta-area “custom ranch” fitted with a private airplane hangar.

Instead, much of Cullors’s advice could readily fit in a self-help book on the discount rack at a Barnes & Noble: “Say Yes to Imagination,” “Allow Yourself to Feel,” “Forgive Actively, Not Passively.” While the injunctions might seem anodyne, Cullors believes these practices will help activists usher in a future without prisons, police, and courts. “Mind, body, and soul should be calibrated before you take over the world,” as Cullors puts it. In a way, the book is reminiscent of Jordan Peterson’s bestseller 12 Rules for Life, except it’s for people who want the country to burn.

While Cullors’s charitable self-dealing has made her a controversial figure, her abolitionist movement is still a big tent. Worried about pollution? Ecologist magazine says the U.S. military is one of the world’s largest polluters. Concerned about so-called animal rights? Uncle Sam subsidizes the meat and dairy industries. Think Spotify is making too much money off the hard work of garbage indie rock bands? U.S. courts protect the predatory behavior of record labels and streaming services, so you should be an abolitionist, too.

Ultimately, for Cullors, the United States is a “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” and incapable of reform, so abolitionists must resist its hold on every aspect of society, including your morning coffee. “Start your day by making your own free-trade pour-over in a handmade coffee pot?” Cullors asks her readers. “It’s still connected to white supremacy.”

Before you accuse Cullors of speaking in abstractions, though, she makes clear that her hatred of America is grounded in facts. We lead the world in arms exports. We have the largest prison population. We fight wars. We enslaved people. That’s all on top of the United States’ “active genocide of the indigenous people of Turtle Island” (the BLM term for North America). To put it simply, we’ve had “400 years of sadism.”

Speaking of sadism, did I mention Cullors’s prose? In a section about the power of incisive writing, she points to James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s “hot knife of words continually slicing through the butter of ideas like racism, white supremacy, and social justice.” There’s a line about how if you’re careful with the “fire” of conflict, “the heat can nourish you.” “Center” is her favorite verb, so on every other page someone or something is centering something else.

There’s also the typical therapeutic and social justice language that a reader with a trained eye can navigate, but I invite anyone to figure out what this means:

Our practice toward grounded responsiveness offers a model for both our personal and our movement relationships. We can choose to center our values over our reactive vitriol. We can choose to be in community and model a new approach toward naming requests.

Readability aside, the book’s biggest weakness is the dissimilarity between Patrisse Cullors the wise abolitionist educator and Patrisse Cullors the hack political activist.

The author who calls on readers to fight the U.S. government is the same person who hosted a party at BLM’s $6 million L.A. compound, which the organization secretly purchased with an influx of cash after George Floyd’s death, to celebrate Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020. The writer who advises activists to “respond” rather than “react” called New York magazine’s coverage of her organization’s profligate spending “right-wing disinformation” and said black media outlets that picked up the reporting were not “actually black.” And the author who says abolitionists should “practice accountability” failed to file her organization’s federally mandated 990 tax documents and called charity transparency laws “triggering” and “unsafe.”

In other words, she’s no Nancy Brophy, the 71-year-old author of How to Murder Your Husband,who was convicted last month of murdering her husband. But maybe that’s an unfair standard—most writers can’t live up to all their guidance. And on the issue of accountability, at least, maybe Cullors practices it in less publicized ways:

There are multiple times in my life where I have been accountable for the harmful conditions that were created in a dynamic. The moments when I have been accountable are the moments when I feel more present for connection. It is a truly amazing moment when you hold yourself accountable and find the peace on the other side.

Here’s to hoping Cullors continues to hold herself accountable for the harmful conditions that were created in a dynamic, feels more present for connection, and finds peace on the other side.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/how-to-fight-racism-on-turtle-island/

The Cult of Safety Demands the Blood of Children

It has now been more than a week since a godless psychopath murdered 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The ruling regime has continued a full-court press to disarm the American people in the aftermath of the shooting. But as details of the attack continue to be released, it has become clear the very people who the regime says should be the only people with firearms, demonstrated a tremendous deficiency of courage.

Despite changing their story more than a meth-head begging for money, one thing has remained certain: the police waited nearly an hour to go into the room where a psychotic murderer unloaded on a class of fifth-graders, dooming any wounded children to bleed to death. Allegedly, the Uvalde chief of police had personally ordered his officers not to breach the door of the classroom the killer was in, due to the danger he presented to his officers—officers with shields, helmets, and body armor, no less.

This level of cowardice is astounding, even for a society that has done all that is possible to stamp out any display of courage and masculine virtue. That not one, single officer would disobey the most egregiously cowardly orders is still something truly shocking. But we have suffered under two years of Wuhan Flu biomedical tyranny. The most basic rights of Americans were flagrantly violated with almost no resistance from anyone bearing authority, and the idea that men—who occupy these positions that require courage—are instead filled by those without a single shred of it, is not something that should be difficult for us to recognize. Everyone who had the authority to say “No! You may not do this!” Is someone who lacked the masculine virtue to say “No! You may not do this!” There were no sheriffs who told their tyrannical governors to pound sand. There were no judges who had the backbone to apply the law that respects the rights of the people. There were precious few pastors who dared to declare the prerogative of the church to meet to worship in obedience to God, over and against the diktats of an authoritarian state. There were very few doctors who were willing to break protocol when doing so would mean the difference between life and death (and also quite possibly the end of their careers). Anyone who had legitimate power to wield, to tell these tyrants “NO!”, refused to wield it. I had an elderly congregant who was refused access to his wife suffering from Alzheimer’s, who, without him had no idea where she was, and because of this isolation and intense anxiety, died days later. Doctors “just following safety protocols” killed her and countless others.

Just as the phenomenon of the mass shooting demonstrates the social, cultural, and spiritual collapse that has taken place in the last two generations—these things never happened before the 1990s despite even more widespread availability of even more deadly firearms—the cowardice shown by the Uvalde Police Department is an indication of just how far we have fallen. Safety is the driving force of everything. Officer safety. Public safety. And of course, who can forget the much-maligned safe space? Everything about the life of the American is dominated by safety above all else. The German WWI veteran and author, Ernst Jünger, wrote in his essay “On Danger” that:

The bourgeois person is perhaps best characterized as one who places security among the highest of values and conducts his life accordingly. His arrangements and systems are dedicated to securing his space against the danger that at times, when scarcely a cloud appears to darken the sky, has faded into the distance. However, it is always there: it seeks with elemental constancy to break through the dams with which order has surrounded itself.

Now, it might seem like the use of the term “bourgeois” sounds like something a filthy communist swine might say, but we should understand it in the mode of the soft, pudgy, suburbanite man whose main concern in life is whether he has enough entertainment to consume in his free time. That is the man that Jünger describes. The man whose existence bears a close resemblance to the obese, androgynous humans hovering around on futuristic mobility scooters sipping on bottomless big gulps in the movie Wall-E. Such a man’s chief end is to dwell in safety. Forget the fact that an existence within the world God has created, particularly after The Fall, is an existence that must grapple with the reality of danger. The danger is inescapable. Modern materialistic, consumerist man believes our society has triumphed over danger. But no amount of technological progress is ever going to protect you from a dangerous world. You may think you have walled yourself off from danger. “Death will never enter my cul-de-sac!” But inexorably it does. It may appear in the form of evil men, hellbent upon destruction. It may appear in the form of a disease that the hubris of modern medicine can do nothing to solve. You live in a dangerous world and much wealth has been expended to make you believe that you do not.

The people who rule you want you to believe the world has no danger. They want you to be soft. They want you to believe you never will have to defend yourself. They want you to believe your safety matters more than anything else in life. They want you to be the kind of people who will rob the young of the very best years of their lives so you can hang on to a few more months of decrepitude. The demonic mantra of the worshipper of the god of safety is “you will give your life for mine”. It is the total antithesis of the most fundamental Christian ethos which is “my life for yours.” The people who demanded the country be shut down for years so they could enjoy their safety while entire school years were canceled, while there was no senior year of football, no prom, no graduation, no freshman year of college, no weddings, no funerals, and nothing but isolation and despair, these people who did this are no different from the cowardly cops of Uvalde who stood outside for an hour listening to the screams of children.

The spiritually sick society of modern America is not only a factory for psychopaths, it is also an assembly line of geldings. It was not always this way. We are within living memory of entire generations who gladly rushed into danger because duty and virtue compelled them to. There is a reason why people so often compare the soft and effeminate men today to the men who stormed the certain death of Omaha beach. There is a reason why cowboys like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood built the moral imagination of older generations of Americans. This was even the subject of a hysterical feminist screed, blaming toxic masculinity in the church for the rise of Donald Trump. Older generations valorized heroism, almost like God had created them to do so!

You may recall, that God created Adam to guard and defend the garden and everything in it. So often that verse is translated to make man’s basic God-given purpose to be a gardener. No. God created Adam to be a warrior. To face danger, to defend his domain against threats like a lying, talking serpent. Adam failed, and in his failure, we have been subjected to even greater dangers since. But this did not change what God created men to be: warriors.

But be not dismayed! Even as a sick and demented, soft culture has done all that it can to banish any semblance of masculine virtue; even as they have done all that they can to snuff out the fire inside men’s souls, they can never eradicate it any more than they can make the Mississippi flow north. No matter what they do, it is there.

I took my father, who served in the U.S. Army in the 60s, and has only gone to the movie theater once this millennium to see a movie this past weekend. I despise Hollywood and so does he, but I knew Top Gun: Maverick would be a movie we would enjoy. Yes, the plot was as predictable as it could get. Yes, the dialogue constantly skirted the border of cheese-fest like an F-18 flying in a canyon under the radar. None of that mattered. It was a celebration of masculinity (even with the token girl as the permission slip allowing for unbridled machismo). Fighter pilots, laughing in the face of stuffed-shirt authorities concerned with safety above all. Men who directly disobeyed orders to do heroic, selfless deeds. It was a celebration of all the things that made America great. A celebration of selfless Christian virtue buried beneath the veneer of hotshot womanizers. Of course, these things do not exist anymore in reality. The U.S. Navy was quick to point out:

[the U.S. Navy spokesman] said the Navy allowed the production to use planes, aircraft carriers and military bases even though he said the real Top Gun pilots aren’t the cocky rule-benders portrayed in the film, people who “would never exist in naval aviation.” Instead, they’re studious air nerds who toil away for hours in the classroom and participate in intense training flights at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada, the site of the actual Top Gun school.

No, the current U.S. military is much more concerned with conforming whatever scant remains of masculine and Christian virtue still exist in the armed forces to the rules and regulations of HR harridans. The Pentagon cares much more about whether we have enough black trans lesbians piloting fighter jets than things like winning wars.

But the fact that such a movie can be made, and that it is experienced incredible success is a testament to the fact that men willing to face danger still exist. The Border Patrol Agent who did what the Uvalde Police refused to do exists. Kyle Rittenhouse exists. And many of you reading this have the fire burning within your souls, begging for an opportunity to show valor. Take heart, as the hard times created by soft men come, such opportunities will soon abound. But in the meantime, you must reject the cult of safety. You must find even the smallest ways to prepare yourself to take up the mantle of the courageous men who preceded you. You must diligently work to become a man worthy of the honor of giving your life for others. You live in a dangerous world and you must become a good and dangerous man.

Jalina Porter: 2021-2022

The State Department deputy spokeswoman who called police the “largest threat to U.S. national security” is leaving her job after a 16-month stint that was marred by public gaffes and internal battles with her colleagues.

Jalina Porter will “transition out” of her job as the State Department’s number-two public face, spokesman Ned Price announced in a press release late Monday. It is unclear if Porter, who has a history of anti-cop rhetoric and reportedly clashed with career State Department officials, is shifting elsewhere in the Biden administration or exiting.

Porter entered the role under a cloud of controversy after the Washington Free Beacon unearthed a series of social media posts in which she claimed the “largest threat to U.S. national security are U.S. cops; Not ISIS, not Russian hackers, not anyone or anything else.” In other posts obtained by the Free Beacon, Porter said, “I’m so tired of terrorist cops” and promoted a video directed at the Los Angeles Police Department that states, “Suck my dick and choke on it.”

While Porter apologized for her remarks, which were made before she entered public office, it came to light that she clashed with career State Department officials who viewed her as unprepared for press briefings and prone to make policy gaffes that caused diplomatic headaches. State Department and diplomatic insiders who spoke to the Free Beacon said it is strange for the department to announce the departure of a top official without stating what her next role will be.

“Jalina was never a good fit and was in over her head from the beginning,” one State Department source, who requested anonymity to discuss personnel matters, told the Free Beacon. “On that, I blame the woke crowd that made the hiring decision without regard to actual qualifications or experience.”

“Needless to say,” the source added, “career staff will be relieved to not have to deal with her temperament and abuse. A lot of credit goes to the Free Beacon for exposing her poor treatment of colleagues and staff.”

A senior congressional source familiar with State Department debates over Porter told the Free Beacon that the State Department’s lack of clarity on Porter’s future hints that she could have problems finding employment elsewhere in the administration.

“It’s clear they don’t want to admit publicly what everyone already knows: Jalina was unqualified, blamed everyone else for her repeated gaffes, and alienated everyone in the building,” said the source, who would only discuss these conversations on background. “A statement like this is almost unheard of and it’s a blaring red siren to the rest of the administration that she has very few options for transferring for very good reasons.”

Porter’s most recent misstep came in May—less than a month before the State Department announced her resignation—when she offered herself up as a cohost on the daytime talk show The View via an Instagram post sent during the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“On the Black Moon Solar Eclipse in Taurus, it’s time to make some manifestations,” Porter wrote from her personal account, glamonthehill, in a post that was later removed. “I see me being a co-host on @theviewabc in my near future. Send me good vibes and lots of love, y’all.”

Government ethics experts who spoke to the Free Beacon said it was inappropriate for Porter to use her standing as a public official to solicit a television job. Porter later told the Free Beacon that her post “was intended as a light-hearted, personal social media post and nothing more.” A State Department official said the post does not violate its ethical guidelines.

Porter struggled at times to answer questions from reporters, most notably in October 2021, when she claimed that the Biden administration was engaged in discussions related to “Palestine.” The verbal slip-up stunned career State Department officials who said Porter upended decades of long-standing U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by making reference to “Palestine,” which does not exist and is not used as a term by the U.S. diplomatic community.

The State Department was forced to walk back her comments after the Free Beacon reported the gaffe, saying, “There is no change to our policy” on the issue.

As the policy blunder fueled chatter in the foreign policy community, a career State Department official who works on these issues told the Free Beacon that Porter’s inexperience was causing internal strife.

“She often goes off script from established policy and agreed upon talking points, causing gaffes that confuse allies and journalists alike,” the source said at the time. “Career State Department staff have grown increasingly frustrated, as we are often the ones having to clean up after her verbal messes. It’s gotten to the point where the building doesn’t know what to do with her or how to help her.”

In a May 2021 dust-up, Porter singled out Israel for criticism after unverified and later discredited reports alleged that Jewish settlers set fire to Palestinian farmlands. Asked about the comment during a State Department briefing, Porter said it is “critical for Israel to refrain from any unilateral steps that certainly would exacerbate tensions or take us further away from peace”—a statement that appeared to break with longstanding U.S. policy urging all sides in the conflict to move toward peace.

The State Department also walked back those remarks.

Porter previously served as an aide in the congressional office of former representative Cedric Richmond, who served as a top White House adviser until last month. Porter also worked for the Truman National Security Project, a left-leaning foreign policy think tank.

After Washington State passed a law to constrain police officers, state drivers are refusing to pull over when asked by cops.

Northwest News Network recorded nearly 1,000 failure-to-yield incidents in 2022. Patrol officers have described a sharp rise in motorists fleeing traffic stops, speeding away sometimes in stolen cars, according to one county police chief. Washington House Bill 1054, which Governor Jay Inslee (D.) signed into law last year, has banned police from pursuing traffic violators in their cruisers, unless the officer is granted permission by a supervisor or the perpetrator is suspected of being under the influence or having committed a violent offense, is causing imminent danger, or must be identified.

“Something’s changed. People are not stopping right now,” a Washington State Patrol sergeant told theAssociated Press. “It’s happening three to five times a shift on some nights and then a couple times a week on day shift.”

The change comes as elected officials have passed laws to restrict traditional policing tactics involving the use of force and the duty to intervene in cases of officer misconduct. More than half of U.S. states instituted such reforms since the killing of George Floyd in May 2020.

Washington State Republican lawmakers and law enforcement leaders criticized the police bill, saying it has hamstrung the efforts of law enforcement to preserve public safety, according to the AP.

Democratic state lawmakers, however, lauded the bill, with its chief sponsor saying he doesn’t “believe pursuits in a 21st century policing system are needed.”

Crime data for Washington are not yet available. Homicides, often considered the leading indicator of a crime tendency, were up 46 percent in 2020.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/drivers-in-washington-state-dont-have-to-stop-for-cops-anymore/

‘Reparations Task Force’ recommends free health care, child support forgiveness for black residents

Black Californians could enjoy child support forgiveness, free college, free health care, fewer police, and a long-term “truth and reconciliation commission” should Golden State lawmakers pass the proposals outlined this week by the state’s Reparations Task Force.

Following a 2020 law to study the subject, a panel of left-wing academics and policymakers on Wednesday released their findings on how California can remedy the harm against the state’s black residents caused by slavery and discrimination. All black Californians are eligible for the benefits of the program if they can prove they are “descendants of African Americans enslaved in the U.S. or of free Black people living in the country before the end of the 19th century.” A new state agency, called the California African American Freedmen Affairs Agency, would provide genealogical tests for residents.

The 492-page report lists the task force’s “preliminary findings and recommendations.” The final report is scheduled to be released in July of next year.

Here are eight of the most radical proposals:

1. Child support forgiveness

The panel recommends that California eliminate overdue child support owed to the government by black parents who no longer have custody of their children. Black Californians would also no longer need to “reimburse the state for current or past government assistance” related to child support.

The panel also recommends the elimination of all interest payments on past child support owed by black Californians.

Under current California law, families that receive government assistance such as food stamps must deduct the cost of those programs from court-ordered child support payments. If an individual in California does not pay child support, he is essentially fined for forcing his child to use state services. The logic of the current law is that the state should not pay for financial support that a parent otherwise provides.

2. Establish a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission,’ destroy ‘anti-black memorials and monuments’

The task force recommends the establishment of a commission named after the 1996 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created following the end of apartheid to identify human rights violations against the majority black population during their time living under white-only rule. The task force also recommends the state “create forms of acknowledgement and apology for acts of political disenfranchisement” and destroy all “anti-Black memorials and monuments,” presumably identified by the task force.

Pervasive “police violence against and extrajudicial killings of African Americans occur in California as they do in the rest of the country,” the panel concludes. As part of an effort to help heal the state’s black community, the panel recommends the state fund art that acknowledges the “trauma of state-sanctioned white supremacist terror.”

3. Free college education

The task force recommends the state eliminate tuition for all California colleges, as well as offer funding to create black-owned K-12 schools and colleges. Black Californians should also receive scholarships to “cover four years of undergraduate education” at presumably any university in the country, the task force finds.

The task force also recommends that the state “identify and eliminate racial bias and discriminatory practices” in standardized tests, including the SAT, LSAT, and the state Bar exam, with no elaboration on how this would be done. To further “antiracist” education in the state, all California schools must adopt a curriculum that “advances the ideology of Black liberation.”

4. Trees in black neighborhoods for ‘shade equity’

In the name of ending so-called environmental racism, the task force recommends the state fund the “planting of trees to create tree shade equity.”

5. Less McDonalds, more Whole Foods

The task force wants to “reduce the density” of fast-food restaurants, and promote the opening of “healthy retailers,” such as Whole Foods and farmer’s markets, in majority-black neighborhoods.

6. Decrease the police

The task force calls for an end to “discriminatory policing and particularly killings, use of force, and racial profiling” of black Americans. That means a review of every incarcerated black Californian “to determine whether they have been wrongfully convicted or have received longer or harsher sentences than white people convicted of the same or similar crimes.”

The task force recommends fewer police in black communities. The “scope of law enforcement jurisdiction” must be curtailed and replaced with “more funding for prevention and mental health care.” Law enforcement should also issue fewer citations at liquor and tobacco stores in black neighborhoods.

7. Free health care

Black Californians should be entitled to free health care, the task force finds. All black Californians who suffered from the country’s “anti-Black health care system” should be entitled to financial compensation as well.

To create more black doctors and health care professionals, the task force recommends that the state engage in more affirmative action programs and a “race-conscious public health policy.”

8. Cash payments to close ‘racial wealth gap’

On top of all the new forms of welfare and assistance outlined in the task force report, black Californians are entitled to cash reparations intended to shrink “the racial wealth gap.” The exact dollar amount is not specified.

The state must also provide funding and “technical assistance” to “Black-led and Black community-based land trusts to support wealth building and affordable housing,” as well as raise the minimum wage beyond the state-mandated $15 per hour. The task force also recommends the creation of a state fund “to support the development and sustainment of Black-owned businesses.”

Update 8:45 p.m.: This piece has been updated since publication.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/california-state-panel-recommends-free-health-care-child-support-forgiveness-for-black-residents/

A lawyer who represented Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann in his defamation lawsuits said he has joined Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal team, stating there will be at least 10 suits filed against companies and prominent figures.

“I’ve been hired to head the effort to determine whom to sue, when to sue, where to sue,” Todd McMurtry, Rittenhouse’s new lawyer, told Fox News on Thursday.

Without elaborating on what companies or individuals might be sued, he added, “We’re going to look at everything that’s been said, determine which of those comments are legally actionable, and proceed from there.” In the interview, he confirmed between 10 and 15 “solid cases.”

Rittenhouse was acquitted on two counts of homicide, one count of attempted homicide, and other charges in connection to the fatal shooting of two men and another during riots and often violent protests in August 2020. His lawyers said that video footage—which showed the three chasing and attacking Rittenhouse—confirmed that he acted in self-defense.

McMurtry singled out Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying the social media firm issued a “factually false” designation that the Rittenhouse-involved shooting was a “mass murder” incident. When the company issued that designation, it was decried by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board as an “alarming resort to censorship.”

The Epoch Times has contacted Facebook for comment. In late 2021, after Rittenhouse was acquitted, Facebook reversed one of its policies on the Rittenhouse case, with a spokesperson telling news outlets that it “will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse.”

“Let’s just use for an example what Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg said about [Rittenhouse]. They said that he was involved in a mass murder incident,” McMurtry told Fox News. “This was not a mass murder incident. It was clearly factually false.”

He explained, “To call somebody a mass murderer is seriously defamatory. And then to use the power of social media to basically … censor any views that would take opposition to that mass murderer statement is a serious effort to destroy his character. And it was seriously mistaken and seriously defamatory.”

Meanwhile, in proving damages for Rittenhouse, McMurtry told Fox that the teen “can prove that his job prospects are permanently diminished” by the companies and individuals he may sue.

“Not to mention what they call perpetual reputational harm, which means that Kyle is never going to have an interaction with anybody where they don’t know who he is. And this is going to follow him around for the rest of his life,” he said.

McMurtry represented Sandmann after he filed defamation lawsuits against a number of legacy news outlets, including CNN and NBC, after a video showed him in the midst of a confrontation with a Native American activist.

Sandmann has since reached settlements with NBC, CNN, and the Washington Post after reports, citing heavily edited viral videos that claimed he and other teens harassed the activist in early 2019. But the full video showed that it was the activist, Nathan Phillips, who approached the teens as he was chanting and beating a drum while Sandmann stood still and slightly smiled.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/sandmann-lawyer-joins-kyle-rittenhouse-team-says-mark-zuckerberg-a-top-target_4508488.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-03&utm_medium=email&est=7ZzqkS1Q%2FF4sJ%2BpmJwPX48%2BBajl6tlUGj2jzBn%2FyEqQoyjF9oNv3sLZsy30htEvYGg%3D%3D

Arizona 2020 Election Results May Have Been Different, Election Integrity Group Says

With the 2022 midterm elections around the corner, scrutiny of the 2020 election continues to raise questions about election integrity, including a newly identified anomaly in Maricopa County, Arizona.

Arizona Law requires that, to be considered valid, ballots must be received by the county no later than 7 p.m. on Election Day.

But newly uncovered records documenting the Maricopa County 2020 general election show that while more than 20,000 ballots were transported from the U.S. Postal Service after Election Day, Maricopa County only rejected 934 late ballots in its “Early Voting Rejections Summary” document.

This means more than 19,000 late, invalid ballots should have been rejected. That is significant because it is enough to potentially sway the results of Arizona’s presidential election, which rested with a final tally of Joe Biden winning the state with 10,457 more votes than Donald Trump.

It is impossible to know if the results would be different if the late ballots had not been counted in Maricopa County.

The Early Voting Rejections Summary is just one of the documents telling the story. County documents were obtained by Verity Vote, a group of citizen volunteers with data research and investigation backgrounds who have been investigating the 2020 election results throughout the country.

Verity Vote recently released a report detailing this investigation.

How Ballots Move

To understand the anomaly, it is important to know how ballots are moved in Maricopa County, which uses dropboxes and early mail-in voting.

A truck driven by a Maricopa County Elections Department employee picks up ballots at least once a day.

The collection truck starts at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center. The truck has some space for more ballots but is already loaded with some early in-person ballots and ballots that were placed in a dropbox.

The driver goes to the post office and picks up more ballots, then takes the truck to Runbeck Election Services where all ballots are given an incoming scan.

It is here, at the scan, that the “Inbound Receipt of Delivery” document is generated. This receipt of delivery shows the date, time, and names of the employees delivering and receiving the ballots, and it itemizes the number of ballots that came from the post office, dropboxes, and early in-person voting.

In response to some document requests, Maricopa County made the Receipt of Delivery documents available for public inspection for dates spanning Oct. 13 to Nov. 6, 2020.

From that collection of documents, Verity Vote noticed that documents from Nov. 4, 2020—the day after the election—were missing. Verity Vote requested Maricopa County provide the Receipt of Delivery for that day, first with a few phone calls, then with written requests. It should have been a simple request because all the other dates were already public. But this request went to a county attorney.

“After numerous delays, multiple follow up emails, and phone calls, county employees informed Verity Vote that the records were with legal counsel pending review,” the report says. “It took nearly seven months to get the documents.”

The Nov. 4 Receipt of Delivery shows 18,000 ballots were picked up from the Post Office the day after the Nov. 3 election.

The form has three colors of ink. A Runbeck Election Services employee printed his first name only, Brandon, in blue. The ballots arrived at “9:30” on “11-4-20” and the paper is signed in the same blue ink by the receiver, but the signature is illegible.

A row listed as “lates” should show how many ballots are late. The four columns in the late row have numbers in blue ink but are scribbled over and cannot be read.

Another signature, scrawled in red ink, is also illegible. It denotes the person who delivered the ballots.

Even though the document is dated Nov. 4, one day after the election, at the top of the page, above the margin, someone has written “Election Day” in black ink in what looks like different handwriting from the rest of the page.

The county also documents receiving 1,000 ballots on Nov. 5 and 1,500 ballots on Nov. 6. Combined with the 18,000 ballots found on Nov. 4, the total documented late ballots were 20,500.

A letter from County Recorder Stephen Richer, responding to Verity Vote’s document request, indicated that the Nov. 4 receipt the county provided is not the only receipt for ballots the county received that day.

“This document does not represent the complete universe of Maricopa County inbound receipt delivery forms from Nov. 4, 2020. We cannot be certain, but we believe that the remainder of these forms were transferred to the treasurer’s office to be stored and sealed with ballots,” Richer wrote. If so, it indicates there are more mailed ballots that were not counted in the Early Voting Rejections Summary, and presumably would have been counted in the results.”

Another anomaly is the number of ballots collected Nov. 4, compared to other surrounding days.

Voters were instructed to mail ballots by Oct. 27 to be sure their ballots arrived on time. By Oct. 30, the number of ballots coming by mail dropped sharply, but then spiked the day after the election.

On Oct. 28, the county received 58,500 ballots from the post office, then:

• Oct. 29: 14,500
• Oct. 30: 10,500
• Oct. 31: 6,000
• Nov. 1: 1,500
• Nov. 2: 1,000
• Nov. 3: 2,500—Election Day. In order to be counted and valid, the ballot must be received by the county no later than 7 p.m.
• Nov. 4: 18,000 late, invalid ballots
• Nov. 5: 1,000 late, invalid ballots
• Nov. 6: 1,500 late, invalid ballots

Yet Maricopa County rejected just 934 ballots for lateness.

Maricopa County responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment with an email promising the communications director in its Elections Department would “reach out.” The Epoch Times will report when they do.

Arizona has 11 electoral votes. In the final tally, Biden had 74 more electoral votes than Trump, according to the official record at the National Archives.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/arizona-2020-election-results-may-have-been-different-if-20000-invalid-ballots-had-not-been-counted-report_4502315.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-01-2&utm_medium=email&est=SieDA6evjQ6d1TKbpd8x9iNORun62%2Bz30MPqsR6C9gyxbcLUcRDNTnN6tW1Kdcn7Jw%3D%3D

Democrat resident Joe Biden does not support “hardening schools” as a means of protecting children from mass shooters, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday.

The comments from Jean-Pierre come after an 18-year-old Latino male murdered 19 children at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last week.

“I know there’s been conversation about hardening schools,” she said. “That is not something that he believes in. He believes that we should be able to give teachers the resources to be able to do the job that they’re meant to do at schools.”

WATCH:

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says proposals that deal with “hardening schools…is not something that” President Biden “believes in” b/c “the problem is with guns” in America. pic.twitter.com/l19Mo0Yw3h

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 31, 2022

The man who shot up the school in Uvalde “walked in unobstructed,” Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Regional Director Victor Escalon said. “So from the grandmother’s house, to the (ditch), to the school, into the school, he was not confronted by anybody.”

Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that the school resource officer was not inside the school when the attack happened.

Jean-Pierre also said during the press conference that “background checks” were needed to “make sure that our communities are protected” and to make sure “that our children are not going to school feeling unsafe.”

The man who attacked the elementary school in Texas last week passed a background when he purchased the weapons that he used.

Approximately 80 federal agents had responded to the shooting last Tuesday but were instructed by local law enforcement to wait and not go after the attacker.

“After approximately 30 minutes passed, however, the federal agents opted of their own volition to lead the ‘stack’ of officers inside the school and take down the shooter,” NBC News reported.

A source told the network that the breaking point for the federal agents was when they saw that parents were trying to get into the building themselves to pull their children out.

Latino Border Patrol agent Jacob Albarado had just sat down for a haircut when his wife, who was a teacher at Robb Elementary School, texted him and told him what was happening and asked him for help.

“There’s an active shooter,” she said. “Help. I love you.”

The New York Times reported that Albarado’s barber gave him a shotgun and that Albarado then ran out of the barbershop and sped to the school.

This report has been updated to include additional information. 

https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-biden-does-not-support-hardening-schools-to-protect-children-from-mass-shooters?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cnemail&seyid=4329

Actor and outspoken Christian Kirk Cameron recently blasted America’s public school system in an interview with Fox News.

Cameron — whose new documentary “The Homeschool Awakening” premieres Monday, June 13 — told Fox News, “The problem is that public school systems have become so bad. It’s sad to say they’re doing more for grooming, for sexual chaos and the progressive Left than any real educating about the things that most of us want to teach our kids.”

Thus, as Cameron explained in the interview and in his movie, the solution to the poor quality of public education is to homeschool your kids. He also took issue with those who say only experts, or the government, should be responsible for American school children’s education.

“And that’s just a fundamental difference in the way that we look at who has been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of raising our children. … Is it the parents or is it the government?” he said to Fox.

Cameron also blasted public education for “destroying” certain institutions and patriotism in America.

“And you can take your pick. Just go down the list. The things that are destroying the family, destroying the church, destroying a love for our great country: Critical Race Theory, teaching kids to pick their pronouns and decide whether or not they want to be a boy or a girl, the 1619 Project,” he said.

“If we send our children to Rome to be educated … we shouldn’t be surprised if they come back Romans,” he added. “If we want them to love God and love their neighbor and feel gratitude and thankful that they live in the United States of America, the freest country on earth, then you’ve got to teach them those things. … I realized that there was no better way for our family to do that … than to bring them home and join in with this rich, robust community, with tons of curriculum to be able to have the flexibility and freedom to raise our kids the way we wanted them to be raised.”

The father of six admitted some days are more difficult than others, but said that it was worth it.

“Yes, there are hard days,” he explained. “Yes, there are times when you just feel like pulling your hair out. But it’s nothing compared to wanting to go back and do it all over again. If you see that your children went down a road and you can’t pull them back, [asking] … how did they lose their faith? How did they get pulled into an ideology that undermines everything that is going to lead to their success?”

“They learn to reject God … they learn to reject our country. And how did that happen? Well, that’s the kind of regret that we don’t want as parents,” Cameron added. “And so, if we’re willing to put in some extra effort and time now, we will be so glad that we did and we’ll lift our hands in gratitude and say, ‘Thank you that I woke up and I saw the light.’ And millions of parents are.”

Leftist critics of Cameron have suggested that he is allegedly taking part in a racist plot to segregate society — even if unwitting.

Sort by Best

• kmann332151 day ago: And with all the children going to private schools or being homeschooled, we probably have education budget surplus, right? So the government can offer vouchers, offer a tax cut, or even put in school security systems. Reply17
  • ShadowBaby🍩☕🎺🎵1 day ago: That’s what I’ve been saying – we’re freeing up resources, right? By removing the kinds of kids the establishment hates anyway, right?Reply4Show 1 more reply
• steve34911 day ago: What a great evening with several actors speaking out in support of America and dedication to The Lord. Thank you Kirk.Reply21
• leftistsmakemequeasy1 day ago“And that’s just a fundamental difference in the way that we look at who has been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of raising our children. … Is it the parents or is it the government?” Bingo.Reply211 reply
• CinziaV1 day ago: Kirk has been championing homeschooling for a long time and he is absolutely 💯% correct. God bless him. Keep it up Kirk!Reply22
• kgraham4606341 day ago: I home school my boys in the in the 1980’s and 1990’s because I saw what the public schools were teaching back then. My eldest went to Cal-Poly and got his Computer Engineering Degree and my middle son got his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and then received his Master also at Cal-Poly. They have g…See moreReply40
  • TheWayisNarrow1 day ago: I homeschooled my four in the 90’s and they are all successful. One is a systems manager for programming code for Comcast, one is a chiropractor, another is a paralegal soon to be court reporter and the other a CFO of family business and homeschools her children. They are all literate and patriotic…See moreReply2
  • blsinsc53721 day ago: Congratulations on your Family’s success! I would bet that with such a grounded foundation, your boys would have been equally successful had they remained in Public Schools but with YOU there to guide them. One of my college Professors said at the beginning of a semester “I can only give you the …See moreReply1

https://www.dailywire.com/news/kirk-cameron-public-school-is-destroying-the-family-destroying-the-church-destroying-love-for-our-great-country?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cnemail&seyid=4329

Border Patrol agents arrested two illegal aliens in less than 24 hours who have been convicted of sex crimes in the United States, Customs and Border Protection announced on Friday.

The two men, who had been deported, attempted to cross into the country as part of larger groups of migrants in the Del Rio, Texas, sector of the southern border on the mornings of May 24 and May 25.

The first man, a Mexican national, was convicted of sexual assault in 1998 and sentenced to 17 months in prison. The second, who hails from El Salvador, was sentenced to a year in prison in 2012 after a statutory rape conviction.

CBP has arrested in the 2022 fiscal year nearly 6,000 migrants who have been convicted of one or more crimes in the United States or abroad, according to agency data. Of those arrests, 177 have been convicted sex offenders.

The number of illegal aliens attempting to enter the United States, including those with criminal backgrounds, has skyrocketed since President Joe Biden took office. In the 2021 fiscal year, 488 illegal aliens with sex crime convictions were arrested at the southern border compared with just 156 in the 2020 fiscal year and 58 in the 2019 fiscal year.

Border Patrol has arrested 5,985 migrants with criminal convictions in the 2022 fiscal year. Should that rate of arrests continue, Border Patrol will arrest more criminal migrants this fiscal year than in the previous five.

The Washington Free Beacon has reported on plummeting deportations of illegal immigrants under the Biden administration. In 2021, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 55,590 illegals, the fewest number in five years.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/two-deported-sex-criminals-nabbed-in-less-than-24-hours-on-southern-border/

Serial looter committed serious crimes, never spent a day in prison

Two George Soros-backed prosecutors in suburban Washington, D.C., bounced a serial looter who committed multiple grand larcenies and assaulted a cop between their offices for years without a felony conviction.

Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) and Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) since 2020 dismissed or declined to prosecute a 25-year-old Maryland resident for nearly a dozen charges related to larceny. The looting incidents amounted to thousands of dollars in stolen merchandise and include felony offenses, including two grand larcenies and one assault on a police officer, making the offender eligible for years behind bars. The prosecutors found the looter guilty of just a few misdemeanors. No verdict levied more than a few hundred dollars in fines, and he served no time in prison.

The out-of-state offender, Ronald Thomas, spent virtually no time in jail after his arrests thanks to bail reform policies instituted by Descano and Dehghani-Tafti. At least five times he was charged for committing crimes in one jurisdiction while on pretrial release in another. He was twice charged for committing larcenies within a day of having similar larceny charges dropped—with one of those incidents happening in the same county.

The case exemplifies the degree to which lightened sentencing can embolden repeat offenders. Studies have shown that releasing defendants before their trial increases crime. A few years after Cook County, Ill., instituted bail reform, a 2020 study by the University of Utah found a 45 percent increase in the number of released defendants who were charged with committing new crimes and a 33 percent bump in released defendants charged with violent crimes.

“When you lower the likelihood of pretrial detention through bail reform, you increase the number of pretrial defendants who are going to be out on the street,” Rafael Mangual, a senior fellow and head of research for policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon. “There’s going to be an increase in crime.”

Those subsequent crimes also tend to be more violent. “You always hear about the nonviolent drug offender or the nonviolent property crime,” Mangual said. “The reality is that there’s actually a lot of overlap between who commits violent offenses and who commits lower-level misdemeanors.”

Thomas is no exception. In between when his Virginia cases were opened and dropped, he was charged with theft, robbery, and assault in neighboring Maryland.

Democratic megadonor George Soros donated more than half-a-million dollars to Descano’s and Dehghani-Tafti’s 2019 campaigns, helping them oust veteran prosecutors who had served a combined 60 years in their counties. Both ran on a progressive criminal justice platform, promising to end cash bail in most cases and reduce incarceration. They’ve kept those promises and pointed to a general crime decrease as proof of their platform’s success. Their critics have countered that fewer convictions can mask the true crime rate.

“You can’t claim crime has decreased when you’ve also bragged about not prosecuting over 20 types of crimes,” Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares (R.) told the Washington Free Beacon. “The crime hasn’t gone away—only the prosecution.”

Miyares also told the Free Beacon the Virginia prosecutors’ pattern of light prosecution will lead to more victims.

“Just because a crime is ‘nonviolent’ does not mean there was no victim or that no innocent life has been affected,” Miyares said. “These far-left prosecutors repeatedly dropped charges against a serial larcenist and allowed him to commit more crimes and victimize more Virginians because they prioritize ideology instead of public safety.”

Descano and Dehghani-Tafti did not respond to a request for comment.

In the past few years, states such as New York and New Jersey have passed laws allowing for pretrial release in most cases. Cities including Philadelphia and San Francisco have followed suit. San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin (D.) abolished cash bail in 2020 and has opposed many felony convictions, including for drug-dealing charges, robberies, and larceny. The liberal prosecutor is now facing a recall effort amid a spike in homicides, violent shootings, overdoses, and retail theft.

Thomas carried out his larceny spree as attitudes toward looting shifted since the summer of 2020. Politicians, activists, and writers on the left defended the practice during riots around race that summer in America’s cities. In one notable example, NPR interviewed the writer Vicky Osterweil, whose 2019 book In Defense of Looting argued the practice was a “joyous and liberatory” response to the injustices of a “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society.” Reports showed many looters came from out of state to participate and often escaped without charges—an outcome underwritten by progressive bail laws and lightened sentencing guidelines.

Virginia changed its law for larceny sentencing in July 2020 under former Democratic governor Ralph Northam, doubling the felony threshold from $500 to $1,000. Liberal criminal justice reform groups such as Justice Forward Virginia and the Virginia ACLU had long advocated for the move. Justice Forward in 2021 also backed ending third-strike felonies for petit larceny, noting the “disparate racial and economic impacts that such legislation creates among people of color and the poor.”

Even given the raised sentencing threshold in Virginia, one of the grand larcenies Thomas allegedly committed in Fairfax totaled $4,000—more than four times the new felony threshold. Former members of the Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorneys’ office who spoke with the Free Beacon said choosing not to prosecute felony grand larcenies is rare.

Arlington County has yet to publish its 2021 annual crime report. In 2020, property destruction, auto theft, robbery, and assault all rose in the county. Fairfax County in 2021 saw an uptick in violent crimes, including a 40 percent increase in homicide.

The Free Beacon reported in March how Descano’s office in 2021 dropped felony charges on a man arrested for attempting to abduct and defile a hotel housekeeper. One year later, the man was arrested again after he allegedly killed two homeless men and wounded three others during a nine-day shooting spree in D.C. and New York City.

Those who oppose Descano, Dehghani-Tafti, and Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney Buta Biberaj, another Soros-backed prosecutor, launched efforts to recall the trio in 2022. The groups, Stand Up Virginia and Virginians for Safe Communities, say they are motivated by the dangers liberal prosecutors pose to public safety.

“Yet another career criminal victimizes the community with total impunity because a radical prosecutor-activist handed him a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Virginians for Safe Communities president Sean Kennedy. “This case is not the exception any longer, it’s the rule.”

Thomas was extradited to Montgomery County, Md., on May 24, according to the Fairfax County Detention Center. He is set to stand trial in June on charges of second-degree assault, theft, and robbery, as well as in July on charges of theft valued at more than $1,500. He was charged in Prince George’s County, Md., in 2020 for theft, only to have those charges dropped a year later.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/why-the-looting-wont-stop/

Friend,

Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.

This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.

A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.

We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.

We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”

We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.

We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.

Well, friend, the time for listening and watching from the sidelines is over.

This enemy has taken over media, educational institutions, corporate boards, professional sports, foundations, and professional institutions. They have left no corner of our lives untouched. But all hope is not lost.

We The People still have a say. We know the truth, you and I, about America and the country she is and can be. We must fight to defeat these false pretenses and predetermined narratives.

I am choosing to counter this enemy with faith, with reason, and with freedom. As Governor of the Free State of Florida, I have chosen to lead with a vision that builds America up rather than tears it down.

Together we can ensure that our children are raised to know they live in the greatest state in the nation, the greatest country in the world and that they have an opportunity to continue making them even greater.

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to get off the sidelines and fight for the rights you know were given to man by God Himself – the time is NOW.

If you’re with me, friend, chip in any amount to help me defeat this enemy. I can’t do it without you. I promise you; I will never stop fighting.

Sincerely,

Ron DeSantis

Paid by Ron DeSantis, Republican, for Governor.

What’s Happening:

Ever since a Supreme Court draft leaked to the public, radical abortion activists have been flipping out. They have violated federal law to harass the court, all so it would vote the way the mob wants.

(Not that Joe Biden is investigating these crimes.)

But news has come out that the protests have not changed the court’s opinion. So, one extremist group is hatching another scheme to “paralyze” the court.

From The Washington Free Beacon:

A radical leftwing group is laying plans to shut down the Supreme Court in response to a leaked opinion that overturns Roe v. Wade, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

#ShutdownDC is planning to block streets adjoining the Court to prevent the justices and their staff from reaching their chambers. Organizers acknowledged their operations go beyond constitutionally protected activity, and they referenced the likelihood of arrests and clashes with law enforcement during a Tuesday night briefing the Free Beacon monitored.

Uh, really? A group calling itself “#ShutdownDC” claims they are going to “shut down” the Supreme Court.

Sounds scary, right? How will this group of radicals do that? By blocking the roads into the building…

Oh…

They do know that the justices don’t have to be in the literal building to do their job, right? That, in the age of Zoom, they can virtually meet and give their rulings?

Blocking roads won’t stop the court from handing out a ruling the left doesn’t like. But I do find it ridiculous that these leftists feel empowered to do this.

Just a year ago, supposed conservatives bombarded the Capitol and are being treated worse than Gitmo prisoners.

The reason these idiotic leftists are even planning this, with seemingly no intervention from Capitol Police or the Feds, is because Democrats are allowing it.

This news is being circulated openly online. Where is the response from our law enforcement? This seems to go far beyond constitutionally-protected speech.

Why haven’t the local authorities warned them not to do this? Why isn’t the FBI investigation actions aimed at “shutting down the Supreme Court”?

Those are the real questions Americans must be asking.

Key Takeaways:

• A leftist group plans on “shutting down the Supreme Court” over Roe v. Wade.
• “ShutdownDC” will blockade roads to the court, cutting off access.
• This kind of protest is not protected by the First Amendment.

https://freebeacon.com/courts/shut-it-down-radical-leftwing-group-plans-to-blockade-supreme-court/

Joe Biden suggested he wants to ban 9mm handguns in remarks to reporters on Monday at the White House’s South Lawn.

As he visited Texas over the weekend, officials “showed me an x-ray … he said, ‘a 22-caliber bullet will lodge in a lung and we can probably get it out … and maybe save a life. A 9mm bullet, blows the lung out of the body,’” Biden said.

“So the idea that these high caliber weapons—there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection, hunting–and remember, the Constitution, the Second Amendment was never absolute,” said Biden.

The Second Amendment of the Constitution reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s not clear why Biden was making reference to 9mm ammunition, which is primarily used in handguns, not rifles—or if he was confused with another cartridge caliber. Although a small number of AR-15-style rifles take 9mm rounds, officials said Uvalde shooter Salvador Ramos used .223 rounds, which are typical for that type of firearm.

Later in his comments to reporters, Biden appeared to rule out the possibility of issuing an executive order for new gun restrictions. Members of Congress, he said, need to come to an agreement on passing gun legislation.

“I can’t dictate this stuff. I can do the things I’ve done and any executive action I can take, I’ll continue to take. But I can’t outlaw a weapon. I can’t change a background check. I can’t do that,” he said.

In 2021, Biden suggested that he wanted to eliminate all 9mm handguns, which are exceedingly common firearms, and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. According to Shooting Industry magazine, 9mm pistols accounted for 56.8 percent of all pistols in the United States as of 2019.

“The idea you need a weapon that can have the ability to fire 20, 30, 40, 50, 120 shots from that weapon, whether it’s a, whether it’s a 9mm pistol or whether it’s a rifle, is ridiculous,” the president said in July of last year. “I’m continuing to push to eliminate the sale of those things, but I’m not likely to get that done in the near term,” Biden added.

And during a fundraiser in 2019, Biden issued a similar comment: “Why should we allow people to have military-style weapons including pistols with 9mm bullets and can hold 10 or more rounds?”

While U.S. troops are issued pistols that take 9mm rounds, the standard service rifle of the U.S. Armed Forces is the M16, which fires a 5.56mm cartridge.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-suggests-he-wants-to-ban-9mm-pistols_4500998.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-05-30-4&utm_medium=email&est=ehTbrrXnCyMfKQXr64wZHcrKE7%2FUCw3%2FSVBuBJj5Bdoj8mEBfr3GAlcQ7qBzt1pz1w%3D%3D

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) gave an impassioned defense of the Second Amendment during the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Texas, days after a man murdered 19 children at an elementary school.

Cruz’s remarks come after an 18-year-old Latino attacked Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday before being killed by an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent. The response by local enforcement officials has been the focus of most of the criticism following the tragedy as numerous mistakes were made.

“If children are the picture of innocence, then the lunatics and the monsters like this one, the one who would deliberately murder children, they are the picture of evil,” Cruz said. “The anguish of those families right now is unimaginable. The very worst pain on Earth. All of us in Texas need to come together and comfort those families right now. We need to love them, embrace them, and take care of them.”

Cruz said that it was important for officials to understand what was driving tragedies like the one in Uvalde because “when we were growing up, this kind of thing didn’t happen.”

“Kids may have worried about getting into a fist fight at school, maybe a bloody nose at recess, but we never worried about a psychopath coming into our classrooms to commit murder.” Cruz slammed “the elites who dominate our culture” for pushing the notion that “firearms lie at the root of the problem.”

“It’s far easier to slander one’s political adversaries and to demand that responsible citizens forfeit their constitutional rights than it is to examine the cultural sickness giving birth to unspeakable acts of evil,” Cruz said. “It’s far less comfortable to ask why despair and isolation and violent hatred is so prevalent in America. It requires a sick soul to drive a truck into a crowded sidewalk, to plan a bomb at a marathon, or to fly a plane into a building. It requires a sick soul to open fire in a movie theater or in a church or in a school. A speeding automobile in the hands of a madman is as deadly as is a jet airplane.”

“Tragedies like the events of this week are a mirror forcing us to ask hard questions, demanding that we see where our culture is failing, looking at broken families, absent fathers, declining church attendance, social media bullying, violent online content, desensitizing the act of murder in video games, chronic isolation, prescription drug, and opioid abuse and their collective effects on the psyche of young Americans is both complicated and multifaceted,” Cruz continued. “It’s a lot easier to moralize about guns and to shriek about those you disagree with politically, but it’s never been about guns.”

Cruz noted that for millions of Americans, the Second Amendment is not an abstract theory, they live in conditions that require them to protect themselves from evil. Cruz said that the Obama White House reported that firearms “are used defensively to stop a crime between 500,000 and one million times every single year.”

“Taking guns away from these responsible Americans will not make them safer, nor will it make our nation more secure,” Cruz said. “In an age where elites embrace defunding the police, when homelessness runs rampant, when gangs dominate entire communities, and when radical district attorneys refuse to prosecute violent crime in cities across America, rarely has the Second Amendment been more necessary to secure the rights of our fellow citizens.”

Cruz noted that there are plenty of major cities across the U.S. that have strict gun control laws and yet are still violent and among some of the most dangerous places in the U.S.

Cruz also cited a quote from John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, who wrote, “Out of the 101 countries where we have identified mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranked 66 in the per capita frequency of these attacks and 56th in the murder rate.”

Cruz noted that the Uvalde attacker passed a background check and that solutions offered by Democrats to address the problem would not have stopped the tragedy.

Cruz noted that Democrats filibustered legislation that he created in 2013 with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that “was designed to take the guns out of the hands of felons and fugitives and those with serious mental illness.”

“Grassley-Cruz did three things,” Cruz explained. “First, it would mandate that the Department of Justice conduct an audit of federal agencies to make sure that all felony convictions have been reported to the database. Second, Grassley-Cruz would create a gun crime task force at the Department of Justice, specifically to prosecute felons or fugitives who tried to buy firearms illegally. In 2010, there were 48,000 felons and fugitives who tried to illegally buy guns. The Obama Department of Justice prosecuted only 44 of them. That is indefensible. Third, Grassley-Cruz would’ve authorized $300 million for school safety improvement grants to harden our schools. When Grassley-Cruz came to the Senate floor for a vote in 2013, 52 senators voted yes, including nine Democrats. It was the most bipartisan piece of comprehensive legislation before the Senate.”

“So, why didn’t Grassley-Cruz pass into law if a majority of the Senate voted for it? Because Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats filibustered it,” Cruz concluded on the matter. “If you want to talk about policy proposals that could have stopped at least some of these mass murders, Grassley-Cruz is a perfect example.”

In closing his speech, Cruz said, “We must not react to evil and tragedy by abandoning the Constitution or infringing on the rights of our law-abiding citizens.”

“Now is not the time to yield to panic or intimidation or fear,” he said. “Now is not the time for lies. It is not the time for empty political gestures. Now is the time for unity. Now is the time for love. And now is the time for action to protect our rights, to stop those with evil in their hearts and to do everything humanly possible to protect our children and to protect our families.”

WATCH:

https://www.dailywire.com/news/ted-cruz-gives-fiery-defense-of-second-amendment-were-not-responding-to-tragedy-by-giving-up-rights?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cnemail&seyid=3949

A Feature, Not a Bug…

In the last two weeks, there have been two mass shootings in the United States, and the second took place this week at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. These shootings have reignited the regime’s already intense desire for a disarmed populace. Even before the bodies of the dead children had been removed from the school, our mentally diminished President spoke to the nation, demanding that rifles (which he is not even able to accurately describe) be confiscated across a 330 million person country spanning an entire continent. This despicable man, and the legion of sociopathic ghouls arrayed behind him, are clearly overjoyed that there is a classroom full of young children lying dead in Texas. They don’t actually care about the anguish of parents who will never see their child grow up. Their deaths are merely a political prop for the most evil people on the planet.

It is hard to fully comprehend just how totalitarian such designs are. But these are the very same sadistic freaks who successfully locked those 330 million people in their homes for weeks or months, and then (mostly successfully) restricted their ability to provide for their families if they refused to get an extremely dangerous mRNA injection that does not even accomplish its intended purpose. All you are to them is a guinea pig or a rat in a social experiment. You do not matter. Your children do not matter. You only exist to provide them with power.

You must understand that school shooters and other mass shooters are an extremely acute symptom of the disease that horribly afflicts the American nation. You live in an incredibly sick society, and since you are born into it and live in it every day, you go about your life mostly unaware of just how dreadful things really are. It is imperative for the people who manufacture the inversion of reality that you perceive everything through the lens of the now. This is why “The Current Thing” has such memetic power: it attacks reality distortion at its source, where obsession over what is, right now, cuts you off from any sense of historical perspective. In the case of mass shootings, the exclusion of historical perspective keeps the masses from noticing that mass shootings are a very recent phenomenon and that decades ago, when the United States had vastly more liberal gun laws, and anyone could even purchase fully automatic submachine guns in the mail, this never happened. The question you should ask is, why not? What exactly was different about America 90 years ago compared to today?

The answer to that question is fairly obvious. Modern American society is a factory for psychopaths. The young man in the North American Continent is planted in a field fertilized by atomization, loneliness, and hopelessness. Many have never met their father, and most do not have anything remotely close to a “good relationship” with him. Most have no meaningful connection to the community in which they live, nor even the nation they inhabit. In school, they are social outcasts, driven to niche internet communities for the only semblance of human interaction in their lives. They are marinated in hardcore pornography from before they have even reached pubescence. They know (or at least perceive) that they will never know the love of a flesh-and-blood woman. They are on the kind of pharmacological cocktail that any premodern society would only ascribe to witchcraft and demon possession. They have nothing to live for and no one who loves them. Given how many young men our nation is producing like this, the question we ought to be asking is not “why does this happen?” but rather “why does it not happen a lot more?”

America is an incredibly sick nation. There is a spiritual sickness that pervades everything like a dark cloud. The people who dominate every institution in our nation have held this power for at least sixty years. For these sixty years, they have treated this nation as a grand social experiment. They have made the natural family, the very bedrock of human civilization, an antiquated, outdated institution that we have progressed beyond. They have financialized and commodified all of human life, uprooting people from their homes and extended families, and making them mercenaries chasing after a rapidly devalued dollar. They have exported the industry of the nation impoverishing the heartland of the country and leaving them to languish in despair. They actively cheer the deaths and replacement of the hated population, while at the same time denying this was ever their intent. They have introduced racial and ethnic strife, and in the chaos actively undermined rule of law. Sixty years of full-spectrum control by utopian social engineers have transformed the most affluent society in human history into hell on earth.

This did not happen by accident. These people are motivated by a deep hatred of humanity. Like the geriatric that currently occupies the Oval Office who well represents them, they simply do not care how much people suffer. You might think the progressive is merely mistaken, deluded by ideology. This is not the case. They have had more than sixty years to see the full extent of human misery their ideology produces when applied to the healthiest and most prosperous conditions. They know what they are doing.

But what is to be done? The utopian bugmen that dominate our nation must be overcome. You must personally re-capture the same spirit of Christian America that built a great nation. You must do all within your personal sphere of influence to rebuild the things that our enemies have destroyed. You must rebuild churches dominated by liberals and weak-willed conservatives. You must rebuild neighborhoods and communities with people who, like you, love the nation that their great, great-grandparents built and who want to worship the same God who gave them such strength. You must devote your life to both retaking what institutions you can, and creating alternatives for the institutions you can’t. It is not simply enough to decry that the libs have ruined everything—of course they have, they are like cancer! You must have a vision for your people, you must provide for them the thing they have taken away: hope for the future. We can again have the world that the liberal globalist regime has destroyed. A world where the fear of the Triune God pervades the land and not hopelessness and despair. You can have a world where things like mass shootings never happen again, but you must devote yourself to a life of repentance, faith, and an unquenchable passion for the true, good, and beautiful things God has given.

Andrew Isker is the pastor of 4th Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, MN. He is a graduate of Minnesota State University and Greyfriar’s Hall Ministerial Training School, and he has served churches in Missouri, West Virginia, and Minnesota. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Boniface Option. Andrew, his wife Kara, and their five children reside in his hometown of Waseca, MN. He can be found on Gab @BonifaceOption.

Published in Bold Christian Writing and Uncategorized

At least 21 people were shot, including four fatally, across Chicago from Friday to Sunday morning, officials confirmed.

In one mass shooting incident, five people were seriously wounded after a fight broke out early Sunday morning in the Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. Five people aged 16 to 33 were on a sidewalk on South Karlov Avenue at around 1:30 a.m. when a fight broke out and a shooting ensued, police told local media outlets.

A 16-year-old girl was shot in the back, a male and female—both aged 21—were shot in the arms, a 21-year-old man was shot in the left side of the body, and a 33-year-old male was shot in the face. No suspects have been arrested.

In another part of Chicago, a man whose age is not known was shot and killed in Englewood on the South Side. Officials said he was on a sidewalk on South Carpenter Street when someone shot him in the head and body, according to local media reports.

On Saturday, two males were killed after they opened fire in Englewood at around 5 p.m. on South Bishop Street, police said. After they shot each other, both males were transported to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where they were pronounced dead. One of the shooters was identified as 29-year-old Derrick Washington, authorities said.

Another person was shot and killed on the South Side on Saturday at around 1:30 p.m. on West 63rd Street, according to police. The man’s age and identity were not provided, and no suspect has been taken into custody, police said.

Last weekend, one person was killed and another 26 were wounded in shootings across Chicago, which has among the strictest gun control laws in the United States. In 2022, there have been 899 shooting incidents, according to Chicago Police Department data.

Earlier this month, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that in response to recent shootings, “I’m not gonna rest, and I know the superintendent and the entire department shares my resolve that we’ve got to do more to give people confidence and make them feel safe because they are safe,” according to local media.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/21-shot-4-dead-across-chicago-over-memorial-day-weekend-police_4498668.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-05-29-3&utm_medium=email&est=jvVQAxakzqs9X2l3doyee7kPSENVFxNlvJDHw6zPWDs57Y6ZpfTnYKWbPghbVD20fA%3D%3D

No doubt that the Buffalo shooting is tragic and motivated by hate, but retired Vanderbilt University professor Carol M. Swain believes we need to address the underlying issues that create this type of hate and division. She said our leaders need to bring people together by promoting an American identity instead of pushing identity politics.

“In that book, “The New White Nationalism,” I argue that we needed to reject identity politics and multiculturalism,” Swain said during an interview with NTD’s Capitol Report. “In America, we need to focus on the American national identity. And I think that that is where we need to be.”

“I think we are responsible, that because we are not addressing issues and grievances and problems in a way that brings people together, we are creating an atmosphere where these types of incidents will continue to occur,” Swain said.

On May 14, Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old white male, shot and killed 10 at a supermarket and left three injured; 11 who were shot were black. Gendron described himself as a white supremacist.

According to the manifesto Gendron posted online, he said he chose Buffalo because of strict laws governing gun ownership there and because it has a large black population.

Swain said the Buffalo incident should be looked at in the context of broader hate crimes. She also thinks that there needs to be less focus on inclusion, equity initiatives, and the differences among groups, and a greater focus on what unites us as Americans.

“What happened was tragic. But we also need to look at the subway incident, we also need to look at the hate crimes that take place involving other groups. And we need to look at ourselves and our leaders and how they’re responding,” Swain said.

“Right now, we have the critical race theory, the diversity, equity, inclusion being pushed upon the population in a way that divides people, it creates racial animosity and hatred.”

Swain said political leaders are stoking divisions and allowing those on the left who vandalized business and federal buildings in the 2020 riots to get away with violence.

“As long as politicians see political advantage to dividing people along racial lines, I think you’re going to have young people, you know, that have grievances, and they see racial double standards, and they get angrier and angrier,” Swain said.

“What we find is that, in this environment, the political parties are divided to a large extent. The Democrats see political advantage to dividing people along racial and ethnic lines. And with the Republicans, they’re too afraid to stand up.”

A crucial step toward building unity is allowing for free speech and open dialogue, she said.

“Unfortunately, we have created a society where people can’t talk. We would be much better off if we could talk freely,” said Swain.

“If we stood up for principles, old-fashioned Judeo-Christian principles, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, if we kept taking things back to principled responses, then I think there would be less animosity,” she added.

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden went to Buffalo to visit the community that lost loved ones in the shooting. In his speech, the president called the shooting in Buffalo an act of “domestic terrorism,” invoked the Jan. 6 incident, and lumped the two together under the banner of white supremacy.

Swain called Biden’s remarks “pandering” saying, “When I look at Jan. 6, [it] has nothing to do with this young man in Buffalo, absolutely nothing.”

The vast majority of Jan. 6 protesters said that they were at the Capitol to voice their objection to the 2020 election irregularities and lack of election integrity.