Whatever happens in the coming 2024 election for president, House Democrats seem very fearful of having to face former President Donald Trump — so much so that they reportedly are trying to pass a law barring him from ever running for office again.
Trump announced Tuesday night that he had filed his Federal Election Commission paperwork to run for president, saying in an address from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, that “America’s comeback starts right now.”
“Two years ago, we were a great nation and soon we will be a great nation again,” he said. “In order to make America great and glorious again I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.”
If elected, Trump would be only the second U.S. president after Democrat Grover Cleveland to serve two nonconsecutive terms in the White House. Cleveland, who was elected president in 1884, lost his re-election bid in 1888 but won in 1892.
There has already been a lot of talk — from people on both sides of the aisle — about how Trump couldn’t win again and shouldn’t even try. But some Democrats in the House of Representatives reportedly want to make sure he has zero chance of returning to the White House.
Politico reporter Nicholas Wu tweeted Wednesday about a preventative measure to have the former president permanently barred from office because he incited an “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021.
Wu said the initiative came from Rhode Island Democratic Rep. David Cicilline, who was also a House impeachment manager.
The tweet said the congressman “is circulating a letter to Dems rounding up support for legislation to bar Trump from office under the 14th Amendment.”
Wu shared Cicilline’s letter, which reads, in part, “This language in our Constitution clearly intended to bar insurrectionists from holding high office in the United States.”
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“Given the proof — demonstrated through the January 6th Committee Hearings, the 2021 impeachment trial, and other reporting — that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection on January 6th with the intention of overturning the lawful 2020 election results, I have drafted legislation that would prevent Donald Trump from holding public office again under the Fourteenth Amendment,” the letter said.
“The legislation details testimony and evidence demonstrating how Donald Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States,” Cicilline wrote.
“It specifically details how Donald Trump engaged in insurrection when he helped to plan and encouraged the insurgence on January 6th despite knowing that the election results were lawful,” Cicilline continued.
The letter goes on to claim that Trump “attempted to intimidate state and federal officials when they did not support his false claims and unlawful plans” and “tried to manipulate [then-Vice President] Mike Pence into unlawfully refusing to certify the election results, despite Mr. Pence’s and legal advisors’ assertion that he held no such authority.”
Cicilline also claimed that Trump “supported the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, refusing for hours to denounce or act against the mob and putting thousands of lives in danger.”
Cicilline says “The legislation details testimony and evidence demonstrating how Donald Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States.” pic.twitter.com/vMIuKQLdfZ
The 14th Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War, reads, in part, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office” who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the [United States government].”
Still, some of the claims in Cicilline’s letter lack veracity. For instance, Trump did release a video on Jan. 6, 2021, telling his supporters to go home.
But even before the Capitol incursion began, he had told the crowd at his rally in Washington to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard today” regarding their concerns about the 2020 election. He did not call for violence.
Trump was not the only Republican to express doubts about the 2020 election. Some GOP lawmakers objected to the certification of the election for Democrat Joe Biden by Congress. But soon, the perimeter around the Capitol was breached and people entered the building.
Also, despite the letter’s claims, the House select committee on Jan. 6 still has not officially “found” that Trump incited insurrection.
House Democrats aren’t the only ones going on the offensive against the former president. The White House launched an attack during Trump’s announcement Tuesday, tweeting from Biden’s account that “Donald Trump failed America.”
It’s clear that Democrats are alarmed about the former president’s 2024 campaign and will be doing whatever they can to destroy his candidacy as soon as possible.
The violent unrest, initially sparked by the Iranian police killing of Jina Mahsa Amini, in mid-September, for not properly wearing her headscarf, has spread over the last two months across the entire country and could threaten the regime’s survival.
Amini was from Iran’s Kurdish region.
One big question is – how much staying power do these protests have?
The other big question is – where is Joe Biden on this crisis?
It is hard to quantify the protests, but videos posted from Iran appear to show protests across the country and continued attacks on symbols of the regime. This includes recent videos of people chanting “death” the authorities, ransacking or firebombing government offices, burning the flags of Iran’s various IRGC proxies; or attacking statues and other visible evidence of the regime.
For instance, images of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei are often seen on fire. Some of the protests have also taken place in smaller towns; showing that this is an awakening across the country and the regime doesn’t have enough forces to deal with all the protests.
[Still] the crackdown continues. Live fire can be heard in some recent videos and some 15,000 people have been detained. While rumors that Iran wants to execute all the detainees have been exaggerated, the regime nevertheless looks to continue to detain people and will kill some of them.
Adding fuel to the fire, The Post continues:
Many voices who in the past use to advocate for some kind of understanding with the regime are now supportive of the protests. The regime seems to have gone one step too far. It is also making missteps in its arming of Russia with drones, which has angered the West…
Marchers in Washington and cities around the world are showing their support for the Iranian people, who continue to peacefully demonstrate for their government to respect their dignity and human rights.https://t.co/2RLjDvgTHdOctober 23, 2022
So we are seeing a historical opportunity to pressure, neutralize or perhaps even topple Iran’s repressive terrorist regime.
But where is Biden?
Well, to his credit, and despite his continued flawed obsession with renegotiating the failed nuke deal, Biden recently said the right thing.
Joe Biden recently appeared to break from America’s stance not to call for regime change in Iran when he said, “We’re going to free Iran.”
However, as is now all too common, his advisors quickly backtracked on his remarks.
Fox continued:
His remarks to an audience in Los Angeles last Thursday were soon qualified by John Kirby, the National Security Council strategic communications coordinator, who noted that Biden was “expressing, again, our solidarity” with Iranian protesters and not outlining a new approach.
But this is absolutely the wrong thing to say and do. And surprisingly, Biden was right when he spoke.
A new report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has called on Biden to go further in strengthening his support for the Iranian people.
“President Biden’s apparent endorsement of regime change in Iran is welcome. But he can go further to support the Iranian people,” wrote Tzvi Kahn, a research fellow at FDD.
Kahn believes that U.S. reticence to call for regime change lies in the Biden administration’s hopes of reviving Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with the country.
The Senate voted on Nov. 15 to terminate the COVID-19 national emergency that was first declared during the Trump administration and has been extended repeatedly during the Biden administration.
The Senate passed a measure in a 62–36 bipartisan vote to end the emergency, which was initially declared on March 13, 2020.
Thirteen Democrats sided with Republicans to approve the resolution, while all the “no” votes were from Democrats. Sens. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) didn’t vote.
“It has now been more than two and a half years since this first-issued proclamation declaring the national emergency concerning declaration and been extended twice by President Biden since the initial declaration, most recently February of this year,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who sponsored the resolution, said on the Senate floor.
“It is with this national emergency declaration, in tandem with other additional powers currently invoked by the president, which this administration is manipulating to super size government powers. And now it’s obvious they need these powers to continue their spending spree to enact their radical partisan agenda and grow government dependency through further expansion of our welfare state.”
Evidence shows the emergency phase of the pandemic has come and gone, including the number of new COVID-19 hospital admissions being near a record low and the number of people with natural immunity, or post-infection protection, rising, the senator said.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) voted against the measure because he said it would harm the federal government’s ability to deal with the pandemic.
The emergency enables the administration to pay for COVID-19 vaccines and other products.
It’s the third time the Senate has approved the measure. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has never held a vote on it.
In a statement, the White House said that even if the House approved the resolution, President Joe Biden would veto it.
“Continuing to protect against COVID-19 and ensuring that our response remains nimble are top priorities of this Administration,” the White House said, adding that terminating the emergency would “unnecessarily and abruptly curtail the ability of the Administration to respond to COVID-19.”
A Biden administration health official suggested this week that the emergency, which is set to expire in January 2023, would be extended. The administration has said it would give 60 days of notice before the emergency ends and the Nov. 11 deadline came and went without such notice.
Sarah Lovenheim, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement that the emergency “remains in effect and as HHS committed to earlier, we will provide a 60-day notice to states before any possible termination or expiration.”
A ‘pervasive and relentless assault on Jewish identity’ is occurring daily
A “pervasive and relentless assault on Jewish identity” is occurring daily at colleges across America, according to a new report from a watchdog group that found assaults on Jewish students and their identity doubled in the 2021 to 2022 academic year, particularly on campuses most popular with Jewish students.
There were 254 attacks on 63 different college campuses with large Jewish populations, with Harvard University, the University of Chicago, Tufts University, UCLA, and Rutgers University having the highest number of incidents, according to a report by the AMCHA Initiative, a Jewish advocacy group that says its findings expose an “insidious,” never-before-revealed campus trend.
While other watchdog groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League, have broadly examined whether campuses are safe for Jewish students, the AMCHA study is unique: It “investigated the nature, scope, and trajectory of the threats to Jewish student identity on U.S. campuses, and it found a staggering doubling of such threats at 60 percent of schools most popular with Jewish students.” Instances of bullying and intimidation towards Jewish students, for instance, tripled in the past year, according to the report, which tracked incidents at more than 100 colleges and universities in total. More broadly, threats to Jewish identity rose 100 to 200 percent from the past year, according to the findings.
With rising anti-Semitism in America making front page news as a cadre of prominent celebrities promote conspiracy theories about Jews, the situation on America’s college campuses is growing bleaker. Anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movements are fueling this anti-Semitic hate, according to the AMCHA Initiative, which determined that campus “faculty and academic departments played a significant role in attacks on Jewish identity.” The latest findings, the AMCHA Initiative warns, signal “a major crisis for American Jewry.”
Incidents tracked by the group range from outright attacks on Jews to efforts to suppress pro-Israel voices and block them from participating in campus organizations, efforts that are reminiscent of the Nazis’ campaign to eliminate Jewish people from public life.
At George Washington University, for instance, flyers stating, “Zionists Fuck Off” were plastered on the campus’s Hillel building, a center for Jewish life. And at the University of Chicago, the Students for Justice in Palestine, an anti-Israel group known to engage in violence against Jews, “launched a campaign dubbed, ‘Don’t Take Shitty Zionist Classes,’ that urged students to boycott several classes containing a ‘Zionist agenda,’” according to the report. A Jewish student at the University of Connecticut was “kicked out of an a cappella group because of pro-Israel remarks she had made on social media.”
“The threats to Jewish student identity come from their peers, professors, and even school administrators, and reach every corner of campus life—the quad, classrooms, dorm rooms, student newspaper, social media platforms, student government, and more,” the report concluded.
At schools where faculty members embraced the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), which wages economic warfare on Israel, attacks on Jewish students were “three to seven times” more likely to occur, according to the report. Around 20 percent of the documented threats to Jewish identity took place during events sponsored by various academic departments, highlighting the danger of institutionalized anti-Israel attitudes.
“More than one-third of anti-Zionist challenges to well-established definitions of Zionism, Judaism, and anti-Semitism took place in programs sponsored by academic departments,” the report found.
The result has been a massive uptick in efforts to bully Jewish students into disavowing their religious identity and support for Israel. Campus bids to “disconnect Zionism from Judaism and from progressive causes nearly tripled,” according to the report, and the “promotion of anti-Zionist Jews as more authentic than Zionist Jews doubled.” These efforts are specifically meant to intimidate Jewish students who support Israel and view the Jewish state as a primary aspect of their identity.
Additionally, “calls to rid the campus of Zionism increased more than six-fold, and attempts to cancel Israel-related events, programs, classes, and trips increased nearly five-fold,” according to the report. Efforts to force Jewish students into rejecting trips to Israel also increased nearly 20-fold.
“The pervasive and well-coordinated attacks on Jewish identity will undoubtedly result in increasing numbers of Jewish students feeling the need to hide their Jewish identity on campus, or to detach from Jewish life partially or completely,” according to the report. “In the long term, the sheer scope of the assault on Jewish student identity—which is negatively affecting the level of communal identification and participation of an entire generation of young Jewish adults—presages a major crisis for American Jewry.”
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, AMCHA’s director, told the Washington Free Beacon these incidents will have lingering effects post college, as “more and more Jewish young people drop pieces of their Jewish identity to stay safe.”
On campuses across the nation, she said, there are efforts to “completely strip Jews of our right to even call out anti-Jewish bigotry when it happens. And the irony here is that at a time when identity politics dominate the college scene and everyone’s individual identities are further defined and further celebrated, attempts are being made to chisel away and erase the Jewish identity and deny us the protections from the harassment that is growing by the day.”
DUBAI (Reuters)—A tanker was hit off the coast of Oman on Tuesday, sustaining minor damage to the hull with no injuries or spillage of the gas oil cargo, Israeli-controlled Eastern Pacific Shipping said on Wednesday and an Israeli official said Iran was responsible.
Three maritime sources told Reuters that a drone was suspected to have attacked the tanker. An Israeli official said Iran was responsible for the attack, using a Shahed-136 drone, the type it has been supplying to Russia for use in Ukraine.
Iran’s Nournews, which is affiliated with the country’s top security body, blamed Israel for the attack and said the “Hebrew-Arab axis” aimed to create a “charged atmosphere” ahead of soccer’s World Cup that starts in Qatar on Sunday.
It was an apparent reference to a regional axis formed when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain forged ties with Israel in 2020, partly driven by mutual security concerns over Iran. The UAE and Bahrain were among four Arab states that had boycotted Qatar in a row that was largely resolved early last year.
Eastern Pacific Shipping, which manages the vessel, said it was investigating the incident involving the Pacific Zircon tanker approximately 150 miles off Oman. All crew were safe and accounted for, it said.
“Preliminary reports indicate the vessel…was hit by a projectile,” said the Singapore-based firm, which is controlled by Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer. “There is some minor damage to the vessel’s hull but no spillage of cargo or water ingress.”
Gulf waters have in recent years seen attacks on tankers that have come at times of heightened regional tensions with Iran. In July 2021, a suspected drone attack hit a petroleum product tanker managed by an Israeli firm off Oman’s coast. Iran denied accusations it was responsible.
According to shipping tracking site MarineTraffic, the Pacific Zircon was last seen off the coast of Liwa, Oman on Monday morning. It departed from Sohar, Oman on Monday afternoon with its destination set as the port of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet said it was aware of an incident in the Gulf of Oman involving a commercial vessel. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said an investigation was taking place after reports of an incident in the Gulf of Oman.
Separately, two sources told Reuters that Greece and Iran reached a deal for the release of two Greek-flagged tankers that had been seized by Tehran in the Gulf in May in response to the confiscation of oil by the United States from an Iranian-flagged tanker in Greece. Ship tracking data showed the vessels underway from Iran.
(Reporting by Maha El Dahan, Ghaida Ghantous and Elwely Elwelly in Dubai, Jonathan Saul in London and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; Additional reporting by Akriti Sharma in Bengaluru and Lina Najem in Dubai; Editing by Toby Chopra, Angus MacSwan, Alex Richardson, William Maclean)
The cost of a Thanksgiving meal has jumped up 20 percent this year, Axiosreported Wednesday.
A traditional Thanksgiving meal for 10 will cost $64.05, a record high, according to an American Farm Bureau survey. Sky-high inflation under President Joe Biden is the biggest cause, the farm bureau found, with economist Roger Cryan saying inflation is “slashing the purchasing power of consumers.”
The report comes as worries increase about the economy under Biden. Some of the largest corporations are cutting jobs even as the holiday season approaches, with layoffs jumping 13 percent in October. Consumer confidence, meanwhile, plummeted last month amid inflation and recession fears. Biden’s policies, including his $2 trillion American Rescue Plan and $400 billion student-loan cancellation scheme, have worsened inflation, economists say.
The price of almost every item in a traditional Thanksgiving meal has increased, Axios reported:
A 16-pound turkey costs about $28.96, almost $5 or 21 percent more than the average cost a year ago and $9.57 more than in 2020, the survey found.
Holiday staples with the biggest price increases include:
• 14-ounce bag of cubed stuffing mix, $3.88 (up 69 percent)
• Two frozen pie crusts, $3.68 (up 26 percent)
• Half pint of whipping cream, $2.24 (up 26 percent)
• A pound of frozen peas, $1.90 (up 23 percent)
• A dozen dinner rolls, $3.73 (up 22 percent)
• 30-ounce can of pumpkin pie mix, $4.28 (up 18 percent)
While the government has warned about a shortage of turkeys because of bird flu, the American Farm Bureau found that inflation is far more responsible for the high prices.
“The supply of whole turkeys available to consumers should be adequate this year,” the report found.
So much for black lives matter, or “When blacks ruled the world.” [US Patriot]
The Washington, D.C., city council on Tuesday voted to dramatically reform the city’s criminal code, reducing penalties for offenses including illegal gun possession and carjacking, even as D.C. has seen a spike in homicides in recent years.
The legislation, which requires the approval of Mayor Muriel Bowser (D.), would eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for most crimes, the Washington Postreported, and lower the maximum sentences for crimes such as carjacking and robbery.
The reforms to the city’s criminal code come as homicides in D.C. spiked 14 percent in 2021 from 2020. The 226 killings in 2021 are more than double the 88 homicides the city saw in 2012.
Tuesday’s vote marks the second time this month that the council approved the legislation, which is required for bills in D.C. to advance. This week’s deliberation over the bill was contentious, as some council members challenged the bill’s provisions that would lower the maximum penalty for carrying a pistol without a license and possession of a gun as a felon to two years in prison.
Councilwoman Brooke Pinto (D.) proposed an amendment that would have increased maximum sentences for illegally carrying and possessing firearms, but it was rejected by a majority of the council. Public safety committee chairman Charles Allen (D.) said the amendment was not supported by data showing it would improve public safety, according to the Post‘s reporting.
“For supporters of this amendment, I hear you saying we need to raise penalties to meet this moment, to send a message. But I ask you to show your work,” Allen said. “At some point, this council needs to reckon with what it means to have one of the highest incarceration rates per capita in the free world and yet endure this kind of violence.”
Criminal justice reform advocates supported the legislation on the basis that it would reduce racial disparities in incarceration. Jinwoo Charles Park, head of a city commission to reform the criminal code, said he opposed the amendment to raise penalties for gun crimes because “increases in the average sentence for these offenses would have a disproportionate effect on African-American defendants,” the Post reported.
Allen has rebuffed characterizations of the legislation as a soft-on-crime reform, saying the purpose of the bill is to rewrite “unclear” criminal laws and address “overlapping charges with inconsistent or missing definitions and elements [and] outdated terminology.”
Other crimes besides murder have surged in D.C., including carjacking, which would see reduced maximum sentences if Bowser signs the bill. Carjackings have tripled since 2019. A doctor was murdered in March after he tried to prevent a carjacker from stealing his car, a city council candidate had his car stolen at gunpoint in January, and in August rookie running back for the Washington Commanders Brian Robinson Jr. was shot multiple times in an attempted carjacking.
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—U.S. Senate Republicans, who failed to win control of the chamber in last week’s midterm elections, on Wednesday voted to keep Mitch McConnell as their caucus leader, a spokesperson said.
McConnell fended off a challenge by Senator Rick Scott, who had run the Republicans’ election organization.
(Reporting by Gram Slattery David Morgan; writing by Katharine Jackson; editing by Paul Grant)
Pennsylvania’s governor-elect rose to prominence by downplaying Republican fears of voter fraud
Pennsylvania governor-elect Josh Shapiro, who rose to prominence by downplaying Republican claims of voter fraud, charged one of his former campaign consultants on Wednesday with “wide scale” forgery of voter ballots.
Shapiro, in his capacity as Pennsylvania attorney general, alleges that Philadelphia political consultant Rasheen Crews duplicated more than 1,000 signatures on petitions to add his clients to Democratic primary ballots for Philadelphia city elections in 2019.
“By soliciting and organizing the wide scale forgery of signatures, the defendant undermined the democratic process and Philadelphians’ right to a free and fair election,” Shapiro said in a statement announcing the charges.
The announcement of the indictment just a week after the gubernatorial election could raise questions for Shapiro, who was a strident critic of Republicans who cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. According to an arrest affidavit, Shapiro’s office opened an investigation into Crews in September 2019. It is unclear why it took three years to bring charges against him.
Crews has consulted for dozens of state and local candidates over the years, campaign finance disclosures show. Shapiro’s attorney general campaign paid Crews $2,000 in 2016, according to the Pennsylvania campaign finance database.
Crews’s clients denied knowledge of the forgery scheme, according to the affidavit. Crews allegedly hired individuals to forge signatures to get his clients placed on Democratic primary ballots for municipal elections in Philadelphia. He had the ballot petitions notarized and then filed with the Pennsylvania Department of State.
James Berardinelli, who hired Crews to obtain signatures for a judicial campaign, told Shapiro’s office he was unaware that Crews had included forged signatures on his ballot petition.
At the federal level, Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Pa.) paid Crews $19,075 for a variety of services since 2016. The campaign paid Crews $800 in May to serve as a poll worker, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Evans hired Crews for grassroots organizing, “voter contact,” and “petitions” in the 2016 and 2018 cycles. Evans was elected in a special election in 2016 to replace former Rep. Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.), who resigned from Congress in June 2016 after his conviction on fraud and racketeering charges.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’s Philadelphia chapter paid Crews $50,625 between 2014 and 2016, campaign disclosures show. The Department of Justice accused the union last year of waging an intimidation campaign against rank-and-file members since at least 2014 to force them to vote for incumbent union leaders.
The offices of Shapiro and Evans did not respond to requests for comment.
Americans are running up credit card debt at historic levels as they struggle with soaring inflation.
Credit card balances increased by 15 percent in the third quarter compared with last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, marking the largest jump in more than 20 years.
“With prices more than 8 percent higher than they were a year ago, it is perhaps unsurprising that balances are increasing,” Fed economists said in the report. “Notably, credit card balances have grown at nearly double that rate since last year.”
Total credit card debt reached $930 billion in the third quarter.
Paying off this debt is more difficult right now, CNBC reported:
Meanwhile, “high inflation and high interest rates are making it harder than ever to pay down credit card debt,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst for CreditCards.com.
Not only are credit card balances back to pre-pandemic levels, but consumers are also carrying balances for long periods.
Among Americans who carry credit card debt from month to month, 60% have been in credit card debt for at least a year, according to CreditCards.com.
As the Federal Reserve raises its target federal funds rate, credit card annual percentage rates are climbing, as well.
The news comes as credit card interest rates hit the highest levels on record: The current rate of 19.04 percent is the highest rate that financial services company Bankrate has recorded since it started tracking in 1985.
‘Everyone involved in this disgraceful stunt should be investigated and then either fired or impeached’
The Biden administration’s decision to launch an unprecedented investigation into Israel’s accidental shooting of a Palestinian-American reporter has landed the administration in hot water with Congress, which is signaling it will launch its own probe into anti-Israel bias and politicization at the Justice Department.
Attorney General Merrick Garland and “everyone involved in this disgraceful stunt should be investigated and then either fired or impeached,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) told the Washington Free Beacon. The senator’s comments come just days after the Justice Department shocked the American Jewish community and Israeli government when it announced it would investigate the May 2022 shooting of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American Al Jazeera reporter who was killed during a standoff between Israeli forces and Palestinian terrorists. Congressional investigators want to know who signed off on this investigation and whether it was motivated by anti-Israel bias.
The DOJ’s investigation comes after Israel in coordination with the U.S. State Department conducted its own investigation into the matter. Israel determined Abu Akleh was killed by a stray bullet fired by an Israeli soldier and deemed the death accidental. The State Department said it was satisfied with the investigation, but Biden’s DOJ overrode this assessment on Monday when it informed the Israeli government the FBI would get involved.
Cruz and other congressional officials who spoke to the Free Beacon said the DOJ’s decision to target Israel is the result of the federal law enforcement agency’s politicization under President Joe Biden. Biden Justice Department appointee Kristen Clarke, for instance, came under fire during her Senate confirmation hearing after the Free Beacon revealed she edited a law journal that featured an anti-Semitic black nationalist who peddles conspiracy theories about Jews. The only way to root out this bias, sources said, is for Congress to launch an investigation into the DOJ’s anti-Israel agenda, which has been fueled by a cadre of anti-Semitic lawmakers in Congress known as “the Squad.” These lawmakers, which include Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), pressured the DOJ for months to investigate the Abu Akleh shooting.
Garland is “using the FBI to attack and undermine one of our closest allies at the behest of the anti-Semitic Squad,” Cruz said. “Merrick Garland has already done more damage to the FBI’s credibility and legitimacy than anyone in history, including [Richard] Nixon’s [attorney general] who was literally sent to prison.”
Two senior congressional officials tracking the situation told the Free Beacon that the DOJ should prepare to face its own probe into politicized weaponization.
“We’re going to find out who thought it was a good idea to unleash the FBI on Israel and reopen something that everyone else—including the president’s State Department—had already resolved,” said one of the sources, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
The second source, also not authorized to speak on record, said the DOJ’s probe is the result of the president hiring far-left progressive activists, including anti-Israel agitators, who are now working at all levels of government.
“Biden has seemingly filled every department with woke activists who hate Israel, and now they’re burrowing in,” said the source, a veteran congressional official who works on Israeli issues. “They’re everywhere. It’s going to take years of investigations and work, and ultimately a new president, to even begin to fix the problem.”
Pro-Israel organizations are also applying pressure on Congress to find out why the DOJ decided to reopen the Abu Akleh case.
“It is both shocking and appalling that the Department of Justice has allowed anti-Israel Members of Congress to pressure an allegedly independent arm of the executive branch into this investigation,” Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the nation’s largest pro-Israel advocacy organization, said in a statement.
A senior official with a pro-Israel organization told the Free Beacon the DOJ probe “smacks of politics.” The probe was announced shortly after conservative Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu—who was close with former president Donald Trump—was reelected as the country’s prime minister.
“This investigation, coupled with its being made public coming one week after the midterms, smacks of politics,” said the source, who could only speak on background while criticizing the administration.
A State Department spokesman declined to answer Free Beacon questions about what changed in the time between its assessment the case was resolved adequately and the DOJ’s backtrack. The DOJ declined to comment on the matter.
Israeli leaders have made clear they will not comply with the DOJ.
“Our soldiers will not be investigated by the FBI or by any other foreign country or entity, however friendly it may be,” outgoing Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid said on Tuesday. “The IDF thoroughly investigates any irregular event and is committed to the values and laws of democracy.”
Amid controversies over free speech, the school’s ‘peer assessment’ score pushed it below the competition
Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken is framing the school’s decision to pull out of the U.S. News & World Report law-school rankings as an altruistic one, arguing that the “profoundly flawed” rankings “disincentivize programs that support public interest careers.”
But a closer look at those rankings suggests that Yale, which has over the past year been the locus of a fierce debate about free speech and drawn unwanted attention for its response to campus controversies, may have had a selfish reason to jump ship. The elite law school was starting to slip on one of the key indicators that determine a law school’s overall ranking, according to U.S. News & World Report‘s published methodology, raising questions about how long it would continue to occupy the number-one slot.
The “peer assessment” score is a measure of how deans and tenured professors across the country rate a law school’s quality on a scale of 1 to 5. Accounting for 25 percent of each school’s overall rank, this metric is the single most important factor in U.S. News & World Report law-school rankings—and one reason why Yale consistently lands at the top of them.
For many years, the law school’s peer assessment score hovered between a 4.8 and a 4.9, which meant it usually tied or exceeded Harvard and Stanford’s scores. But in March 2022—amid the free speech controversies, including the administration’s abuse and intimidation of a second-year law student, that thrust the top-ranked school into the national spotlight—Yale’s peer assessment score dropped to 4.6, its lowest in over a decade.
Though the drop didn’t dislodge Yale from its number-one position overall, it did put the school behind Harvard and Stanford in the reputational rankings, a sign that the law school’s perch was more precarious than it once seemed. Further hits to the peer assessment score could have pushed Yale to second or third place for the first time since U.S. News & World Report began ranking law schools, shattering a major source of its prestige.
A few hours after Yale’s announcement, Harvard Law said that it would also be pulling out of the rankings, a decision it claimed had been in the works for “several months.” The school saw a slight drop in its peer assessment score, from 4.8 in 2021 to 4.7 in 2022.
Yale Law School did not respond to a request for comment.
In recent months, Gerken has struggled to fend off a series of public relations disasters related to the political climate on campus and the administration’s response to it.
Between September and October, 14 federal judges, including James Ho of the 5th Circuit and Elizabeth Branch of the 11th Circuit, said they would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School, citing concerns about free speech and intellectual diversity. They pointed to a September 2021 incident in which administrators pressured second-year law student Trent Colbert to apologize for using the term “traphouse” in an email, as well as an incident from early March in which hundreds of students disrupted a bipartisan panel on civil liberties.
The clerkship boycott prompted Yale Law to issue a statement affirming its “commitment to the free and unfettered exchange of ideas,” which outlined a number of steps the law school was taking to protect free speech—a tacit indication that administrators, including Gerken, are aware they have a problem on their hands.
Gerken’s statement about the school’s decision to pull out of the rankings did not address the drop in its peer assessment score. Instead, she blasted an “ill-conceived” system that “stands squarely in the way of progress,” announcing that the “rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession.” As a result, she said, “we will no longer participate.”
Electric vehicles, including those from Tesla, are among some of the least reliable sold in the United States, according to the Consumer Reports 2022 Annual Auto Reliability survey released Tuesday.
Consumer Reports (CR) is a nonprofit research, testing, and consumer advocacy organization.
Each year, the organization surveys members to find out if they encountered any problems with their vehicles in the past 12 months in 17 areas, including the engine, transmission, in-car electronics, and others.
Consumer Reports then uses that information to predict the reliability ratings for new cars from every major automaker for every model sold in the United States.
In this year’s survey, data was collected from owners of over 300,000 vehicles from the 2000 to 2022 model years as well as early 2023 models. Predictions for 2023 models are “based on each year’s overall reliability for the past three years, provided that the model hasn’t been redesigned during that time,” according to Consumer Reports.
In order to predict reliability for new models, those redesigned for 2023, and models with insufficient data, Consumer Reports, “analyzes the brand’s reliability history, the previous generations, and, if applicable, the reliability of models with shared components.”
A total of 24 auto brands were covered in the 2022 survey, which found that hybrid vehicles and mid-sized or large and gas-powered sedans are among the most reliable vehicles sold.
The new Nissan LEAF vehicle is seen in Melbourne, Australia, on July 11, 2019. (Michael Dodge/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, electric vehicles and full-size pickup trucks are among the most problematic.
Among the top 10 most reliable automakers in the survey, seven are headquartered in Asia, according to Consumer Reports. Toyota, Lexus, BMW, Mazda, and Honda were in the top five. Subaru ranked seventh and Acura ranked eighth overall, and Kia ranked ninth.
The highest-ranked domestic brands were Lincoln and Buick, which ranked 10 and 11 respectively, while Volkswagen, Jeep, and Mercedes-Benz ranked the lowest.
Elsewhere, the survey found that owners of electric vehicles reported issues with charging systems, batteries, and electric motors. Of the 11 EV models that Consumer Reports has data on, only four of them have average or better than average predicted reliability, according to the survey. They were the Kia EV6, Tesla Model 3, Nissan Leaf, and the Hyundai Ioniq 5.
Overall, Tesla vehicles ranked 19th place in the overall brand rankings.
The study noted that although the Elon Musk-owned company continues to be the “market leader in EV sales and the manufacturer on which CR received the most data from owners,” some vehicles from the automaker also continue to be plagued with issues with the body hardware, steering and suspension, paint and trim, and the climate system.
The Model 3 again has average reliability while all the other Tesla models—the S, Y, and X—all have below-average reliability.
On the other hand, hybrid-electric vehicles, although not so popular, are much more reliable according to the survey, as are mid-size and full-size sedans.
The new Toyota Corolla Hybrid car during the first press day of the Paris auto show in Paris on Oct. 2, 2018. (Benoit Tessier/Reuters)
Biden Pushes EVs
However, the study noted that “while hybrids tend to be reliable, plug-ins are less so.”
“Both the Toyota Prius Prime and RAV4 Prime have lower reliability scores than their hybrid counterparts, and, in the case of the RAV4, conventional siblings,” the study states. “And the plug-in Chrysler Pacifica hybrid is one of the least reliable vehicles in the survey.”
Overall, the 10 highest-rated vehicles in the survey were: 2023 Toyota Corolla Hybrid, 2023 Lexus GX, 2023 Mini Cooper, 2022 Toyota Prius, 2022 Mazda MX-5 Miata, 2023 Lincoln Corsair, 2023 Toyota Corolla, 2023 Subaru Crosstrek, 2023 BMW 3 Series, and 2022 Toyota Prius Prime.
“With today’s inflated car prices, people are keeping their vehicles longer than ever. A hybrid can provide years of trouble-free miles, and they are a good defense against rising fuel prices,” said Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’s senior director of automotive testing, in a statement. “With a top-rated hybrid, you get solid reliability, better fuel economy, and lower maintenance costs without sacrificing acceleration, ride comfort, or cabin quietness.”
The survey comes as the Biden administration continues to push for more Americans to drive EVs, which are significantly more expensive than traditional combustion engine vehicles, in an effort to reduce pollution and reach its goal of ensuring that half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 are zero-emission vehicles.
However, research from the Energy Information Administration shows that electric vehicles currently account for just over 1 percent of new vehicle sales in the United States.
According to automotive research company Kelley Blue Book, the average price of a new electric vehicle in October 2022 was $64,249 which it said was “well above the industry average” and aligned “more with luxury prices versus mainstream prices.”
Meanwhile, the average price of a new gasoline-powered vehicle was $48,182.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Republicans missed a “generational opportunity” to retake Congress in the midterm elections, and criticized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for placing personal politics above the party’s best interests.
“We had an extraordinary opportunity. We had a generational opportunity. This should have been a fundamental landslide election,” Cruz said on his podcast “Verdict with Ted Cruz” on Nov. 14.
Cruz added: “We should have won the House and the Senate. We should have a 30, 40, 50-vote majority in the House. We should have 53, 54, 55 Republicans in the Senate.”
Republicans lost control of the Senate after suffering losses in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. The GOP is still expected to gain control of the House, though with only a slim majority.
After several races were called Monday night, Republicans are one seat away from the 218-seat majority needed to take control of the House. There are 13 uncalled races left.
Cruz criticized McConnell for the failure of the Republicans to win Arizona’s Senate race with GOP candidate Blake Masters.
“Mitch McConnell pulled the money out of Arizona. We could have won Arizona. We nearly won Arizona. And abandoning Blake Masters was indefensible,” Cruz said.
Republican U.S. senatorial candidate Blake Masters speaks during his election night watch party in Chandler, Arizona, on Aug. 2, 2022. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a political action committee with close ties to McConnell, slashed millions in campaign spending for the Arizona Senate race in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 8 election.
Cruz explained that SLF’s decision was made because Masters had said he would not support McConnell as leader in the next Congress.
“Because Masters said he would vote against Mitch McConnell. And so Mitch would rather be leader than have a Republican majority. If there’s a Republican who can win who’s not going to support Mitch, the truth of the matter is he’d rather the Democrat win,” Cruz said.
During the Arizona Republican primary, Masters called for McConnell to be replaced as GOP leader, saying he would support Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) or Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) for the position.
“I’ll tell Mitch this to his face,” Masters said during a Republican primary debate in June. “He’s not bad at everything. He’s good at judges. He’s good at blocking Democrats. You know what he’s not good at? Legislating.”
On election eve, Masters told The Wall Street Journal he would support a conservative challenger to McConnell if elected, telling the outlet that “we need new leadership” in the Senate.
Had McConnell directed the millions he spent supporting incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in Alaska’s Senate race to Arizona, Cruz said “Blake Masters probably would have won and we would be on the road to a Republican majority.”
U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka (L) speaks alongside former President Donald Trump during a “Save America” rally campaigning in support of Republican candidates in Anchorage, Alaska, on July 9, 2022. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
Murkowski’s challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican who is endorsed by former President Donald Trump, has said she would not support McConnell as leader. Currently, Tshibaka has a 1.38-percent-lead (pdf) over Murkowski but the winner has not been declared.
Masters, in an interview with Fox News on Friday ahead of his defeat, criticized McConnell for not spending money on his race.
“McConnell decided to spend millions of dollars attacking a fellow Republican in Alaska instead of helping me defeat Senator Mark Kelly,” Masters said. “Had he chosen to spend money in Arizona, this race would be over. We’d be celebrating a Senate majority right now.”
“Mitch made a decision: It’s more important to him to have Republicans who will back him than it is to have 51 Republicans,” Cruz said. “I understand why there’s a certain selfishness that justifies that. It just doesn’t make any sense if you give a damn about the country.”
Senate Republicans are scheduled to hold leadership elections on Nov. 16. However, a number of Republicans—including Cruz, Hawley, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah)—are calling for the vote to be delayed until after the Senate runoff election in Georgia is completed.
“It would be insane if we reelect the same leadership two days from now, if we say: ‘Hey nothing happened. Everything’s good. Keep rowing off the waterfall, crash into the rocks, everything’s awesome,’” Cruz said.
The Epoch Times has reached out to McConnell’s office for comment.
The Democrat strategy of using mail-in ballots to vote played a pivotal role in last week’s election results. Pennsylvania Republicans are talking amongst themselves about how to react in the next election. Republicans have two views: get rid of mail-in voting—which seems unlikely with more elected Democrats in power—or learn how Democrats got an avalanche of mail-in votes and employ the same strategy.
The Epoch Times asked the Pennsylvania GOP to discuss the 2022 results and its strategy regarding mail-in ballots in future elections, but it chose not to participate in this story. Pennsylvania Democrats were also asked to comment on their mail-in strategy but did not respond.
In stump speeches and on social media, Pennsylvania Democrats actively encouraged voters to vote by mail in the days before the election. Often supporters would tweet at a candidate that they just mailed in their ballot.
A look at the numbers behind the election show just how much Democrats relied on mail-in voting.
Democrats Asked for More Mail-in Ballots
According to the Pennsylvania Department of State, 1,439,579 voters requested mail-in ballots statewide. Of those, 986,540, or 69 percent, were registered Democrats, and 303,438, or 21 percent, were Republicans. The rest were independents.
In 60 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, 50 percent or more of the requested mail-in ballots were for Democrats. In all counties, less than half the mail-in ballot requests came from Republicans, and often far less. In 29 counties, 29 percent or fewer of the mail-in ballots requested went to Republicans.
When looking at individual counties, the disproportionate use of mail-in ballots by party is clear.
For example, in Philadelphia County, 165,980 mail-in ballots were requested, and of those, 86 percent went to Democrats and just 5 percent went to Republicans. That may not be surprising in a majority Democrat county like Philadelphia, which has 807,979 registered Democrats and just 120,949 registered Republicans, or in Democrat majority Allegheny County, which received 190,684 requests for mail-in ballots, 76 percent of which were Democrat and 15 percent were Republican.
But it is more surprising in majority Republican counties like Washington County, where 68 percent of requested mail-in ballots went to Democrats and just 23 percent to Republicans, or Lancaster County where Democrats requested 58 percent of the mail-in ballots and Republicans requested 29 percent. The rest of the requests in each of these examples went to independents.
More of Pennsylvania’s purple swing voters—independents—supported Democrats in this election. Shapiro received 1,011,783 mail-in votes. But statewide, 986,540 Democrats requested mail-in ballots. It means Shapiro earned 25,243 more mail-in votes than ballots requested by Democrats, meaning independents and possibly some Republicans offered their support.
But they were not as keen on Fetterman, who received 949,616 mail-in votes, that is, 36,924 fewer mail-in votes than the total number of mail-in ballots requested by Democrats.
The FBI’s director on Nov. 15 declined to answer when he was asked whether the bureau had confidential informants among the supporters of then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Did the FBI have confidential human sources embedded within the Jan. 6 protesters on Jan. 6 of 2021?” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) asked Christopher Wray, the director and a Trump appointee, during a hearing in Washington.
“As I’m sure you can appreciate, I have to be very careful about what I can say, about when we do and do not, and where we have and have not used confidential human sources,” Wray said.
“But to the extent there’s a suggestion, for example, that the FBI’s confidential human sources or FBI employees in someway instigated or orchestrated Jan 6th, that’s categorically false,” he added.
Higgins then asked, “Did you have confidential human sources dressed as Trump supporters inside the Capitol on January 6th prior to the doors being opened?”
“Again, I have to be very careful about what I can say,” Wray said.
“It should be a no!” Higgins said.
“Can you not tell the American people: ‘no, we did not have confidential human sources dressed as Trump sources positioned inside the Capitol on January the 6th?’” Higgins said.
“You should not read anything into my decision not to share information about confidential human sources,” Wray said.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) questions FBI Director Christopher Wray in Washington on Nov. 15, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Higgins’s time to question Wray and other Biden administration officials then expired. He did not get to ask more questions later, and no other members pursued the line of questioning further.
Wray, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on Capitol Hill.
The FBI has never confirmed having confidential sources or undercover agents among the crowd on Jan. 6 but court filingsindicate that a number of sources were embedded with the Oath Keepers and other groups whose members took part in the Capitol breach.
Questioned on the matter in 2021, then-FBI official Jill Sanborn said she could not answer.
Officials have also not answered questions about videos that show doors being opened on Jan. 6, enabling people to enter the Capitol.
Later in the hearing, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said she was concerned about people thinking the FBI “is a political tool” and asked Wray to “explain in your words why they should trust their federal law enforcement.”
Wray said that he hears from people outside the FBI that the FBI “does the right thing in the right way” and that he would “stack our workforce up against anywhere in the world, anytime.”
“And the Americans should have deep confidence in those people. And I will add that when it comes to perceptions of the FBI, that the number of Americans all across this country applying to be special agents in the FBI, has been going up, up significantly over the past three years. At a time when, as I hear all the time, law enforcement all over this country is having the opposite experience. And I think that speaks very well of Americans in every state represented on this committee.”
Twitter employees are once again in an uproar after CEO Elon Musk made a ridiculous discovery involving the program’s costs.
Twitter’s San Francisco HQ’s free lunch program was axed by the technology mogul after he discovered they were costing the company close to $13 million a year, the New York Post reported.
One cause noted by Musk for the high expense of the program was the lack of in office attendance.
Former employee Tracy Hawkins, Twitter’s vice president of work transformation, fired back.
“This is a lie. I ran this program up until a week ago when I resigned because I didn’t want to work for @elonmusk,” Hawkins wrote in a Tuesday tweet.
This is a lie. I ran this program up until a week ago when I resigned because I didn’t want to work for @elonmusk For breakfast & lunch we spent $20-$25 a day per person. This enabled employees to work thru lunchtime & mtgs. Attendance was anything from 20-50% in the offices. https://t.co/0OjbeComka
“False. Twitter spends $13M/year on food service for SF HQ. Badge in records show peak occupancy was 25%, average occupancy below 10%. There are more people preparing breakfast than eating breakfast. They don’t even bother serving dinner, because there is no one in the building,” Musk responded in his own tweet.
The move comes after Elon Musk’s decision to lay off a huge portion of the employees at the HQ.
While there may be benefits to a company covering food costs for employees to increase productivity during crunch time, attendance issues clearly prevented this from being a worthwhile investment.
Part of Musk’s plan to get the company back on track includes ending the remote work for employees, unless they have his permission, the Post reported.
In a letter to his employees addressing the economy and its impact on Twitter, Musk wrote, “The road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed.”
This came after the CEO made a similar move at Tesla in June, stating that remote work was no longer acceptable.
One plan to get the company back on track is “Twitter Blue,” with an advertisement for the subscription pitching that it offers “half the ads & much better ones,” according to the Post.
It continued, “Since you’re supporting Twitter in the battle against the bots, we’re going to reward you with half the ads and make them twice as relevant.”
It also boasted that subscribed users would have higher priority in replies, mentions and searches.
While the future of the social media giant is uncertain, increasing productivity and adding new revenue streams while cutting unsustainable expenses are certainly good ways to start.
The only fair remedy to address the fiasco that occurred in Maricopa County on Election Day is a redo.
There is no doubt the candidates most impacted by the 70 polling locations experiencing inordinately long lines due, in part, to vote tabulating machines malfunctioning were Republicans like Kari Lake and attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh.
As of this writing, Lake is about 18,000 votes behind Democrat Katie Hobbs with votes still incoming, though The Associated Press and other major media outlets have called the race for Hobbs.
Hamadeh is much closer, with only approximately 2,200 votes separating him from Democrat Kris Mayes.
Over 2.5 million ballots have been cast statewide in the contest, and more than 1.5 million came out of Maricopa County, which encompasses the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Republican voters showed up heavily on Election Day.
Hamadeh tweeted on Saturday, “REMEMBER: 72%+ of the votes on Election Day in person were Republican. When you have 30% of the tabulating machines failing, causing people to leave the lines and give up. This is voter suppression targeting a political party.”
REMEMBER: 72%+ of the votes on Election Day in person were Republican.
When you have 30% of the tabulating machines failing, causing people to leave the lines and give up.
This is voter suppression targeting a political party.
Despite all the Election Day problems, Lake was able to close Hobbs’ lead from double-digits (about 183,000 votes), based on her advantage in the early voting tallies, to less than a percent (about 12,000 votes) by the Wednesday following the election, thanks to Election Day votes.
In her August primary, Lake took the lead over establishment Republican pick Karrin Taylor Robson the day after the election because of Election Day totals. Robson, like Hobbs, had leapt out to a double-digit lead on election night due to early voting and mail-in ballots.
Unlike the primary race, Lake never had to lead against Hobbs and arguably that was due to vote tabulator machine problems across Maricopa County on Election Day.
This same scene played out tens of thousands of times all across Maricopa County. How many voters were disenfranchised or simply ran out of time? If the majority of ED voters were Democrats, this would be the number 1 news story in America still today. Total joke pic.twitter.com/noY1RRQv0Q
The approximately 18,000 votes separating Lake and Hobbs breaks down to about 250 people being dissuaded from voting per the 70 ill-function polling stations.
For Hamadeh, about 30 people per location would make the difference.
It is entirely conceivable that hundreds of people either left the line or didn’t show up as they heard about the hours-long lines whether through the news or family or friends texting them, etc.
Here is what happened on Election Day in ruby red Anthem, north of Phoenix.
Here is the problem w/ what happened in Maricopa County on Election Day. This is Anthem, north of Phoenix at about 1:15 pm. Ruby red district of about 30K people. Only one polling location. Ballot tabulators not working in the morning. 2 hr wait to vote midday and still at 6 pm. pic.twitter.com/CY35yQWwq5
I was outside a polling location in SE Chandler for 3 hours Tues morning as a campaign supporter; we were told that polling locations in N Gilbert were down, so those voters were being sent to ours…wonder how many never voted at all, on leaving Gilbert?https://t.co/bNmK9rkTPa
The Western Journal received over 20 exclusive videos featuring Arizona voters explaining how difficult it was for them to cast their ballots. One voter had to wait in line for seven hours.
Lake suggested on Election Day the places most impacted by malfunctioning machines and long lines seemed to be Republican strongholds.
After having his ballot rejected numerous times, “he looked at the line, shook his head and then left.”
How many times did this happen in Arizona on Election Day?
The Washington Post later reported there were heavily Democratic polling locations impacted too, but that of course misses the point that Republicans were voting in far greater numbers on Election Day than Democrats.
The results of last Tuesday’s elections are irreparably tainted due to interference on the field of play, if you will.
The only fair response is a redo of Maricopa County.
The American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM) banned members of a pro-life association of health care providers from attending a medical conference last month.
The nurse-midwives group told the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) that their members’ viewpoints on abortion were no longer welcome.
“We are unable to accommodate as your mission doesn’t align with our position statement on abortion,” a staffer wrote in an email to the pro-life association. “We affirm patient autonomy.”
Dr. Donna Harrison, CEO of the pro-life group, told The Daily Signal, a conservative news site, that abortion-performing obstetricians and gynecologists are rare.
About 93 percent don’t perform abortions, according to a 2017 study by the Guttmacher Institute. Some don’t even refer patients for abortion.
However, some groups—including the American College of Nurse-Midwives and the American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ABOG)—have taken up “pro-abortion activism,” said Harrison.
And that, she said, is “one of the greatest threats to maternal health care.”
Obstetricians and gynecologists usually focus on medicine involving pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum care, and gynecology, said midwife Betsy Morton, spokeswoman for the pro-life group banned from the medical conference.
Betsy Morton, a midwife and spokeswoman for the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (Courtesy of Betsy Morton)
“I became a midwife because of the beauty and wonder of birth,” Morton told The Epoch Times.
“Now, I’ve heard people stand up and say, ‘I became a midwife so I can do abortions.’”
Many providers see abortion as a way to help women, Morton said. But women can suffer immensely after the procedure to terminate a pregnancy, she said.
“I’ve cared for women after they had an abortion who are weeping in my arms because of the grief and the pain,” she said.
For the past few years, pro-life midwives have sensed opposition from major groups in their profession, Morton said. In the months after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, tension has increased, she said.
When pro-life midwives asked to use a room for worship at an annual conference of the American College of Nurse-Midwives, the request was denied, she said. But at the same conference, the organization honored a request for “nonbinary” bathrooms.
Post-Roe statements by the American College of Nurse-Midwives make clear that administrators see abortion as a crucial part of care for women.
“ACNM is committed to individual patient autonomy across the spectrum of reproductive health, including abortion.
“This commitment includes advocating to keep abortion access unconditionally safe and legal for all people midwives serve, but especially for vulnerable populations with limited resources and unequal access to quality health care,” reads a statement on the organization’s website.
The American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecologists published a statement suggesting that obstetricians and gynecologists who spread “misinformation” run the risk of having their licenses revoked.
“Misinformation and disinformation about contraception and abortion can create false narratives about essential safe practices in the specialty,” the organization’s statement read.
“Eligibility to gain or maintain ABOG certification may be lost if ABOG determines that diplomates do not meet the standards that they have agreed to meet and that the public deserves and expects,” the statement concluded.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) also announced that if doctors conscientiously object to abortion, they should refer patients to other doctors for the procedure.
“Physicians and other health care providers have the duty to refer patients in a timely manner to other providers, if they do not feel that they can in conscience provide the standard reproductive services that patients request,” its website reads.
A mother admires her newborn. (Courtesy of Amrita Kaur)
But midwives shouldn’t have to promote abortion against their conscience, Morton said. That goes against their rights.
“To say that I have to refer [a patient for an abortion] is going to basically take away my ability to support my patient in the way that I feel like I need to,” she said.
“The threats to decertify OB-GYNs who do not participate in killing their patients will not only worsen the existing maternity care deserts, but also completely ignore the fact that many women do not want to be treated by an abortion provider,” Harrison said in her interview with The Daily Signal.
The Epoch Times reached out to the American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American College of Nurse-Midwives for comment. Neither organization responded by press time.
In a prepared statement, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists told The Epoch Times that the group ended all “special interest” groups nine years ago, not just pro-life groups. That’s why it’s no longer affiliated with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
The statement went on to call abortion “an essential component of medical care.”
In the final days of a Republican controlled Pennsylvania House, the Judiciary Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to move two impeachment articles against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner to the full House, which is expected to vote on it Wednesday.
The articles blame Krasner’s leadership in the district attorney’s office (DAO) as being a direct cause of increasing Philadelphia crime and accuse him of obstructing the impeachment investigation by not sufficiently complying with a subpoena from the Select Committee on Restoring Law and Order.
That select committee released a report of its investigation on Oct. 24 and, although it did not recommend impeachment, it offered a grim look at Philadelphia’s crime.
The report (pdf) looked at rising crime rates, the use of public funds intended for enforcing the law and prosecuting crime, the enforcement of crime victims’ rights, and the use of public funds intended to benefit crime victims in the City of Philadelphia.
‘Shocking Increases’ In Crime Under Krasner
Between Jan. 1, 2021, and Oct. 16, 2022, the report says, 992 people have died as a result of a homicide in Philadelphia. The report compares that to the 557 homicide deaths in 2015 and 2016, combined. Nonfatal shootings have increased, too. In 2022, there have been eight victims of nonfatal shootings who have not yet celebrated their sixth birthdays.
“It is no secret that the DAO and DA Krasner’s progressive policies are the focus of criticism with respect to the increasing crime rate, the handling of criminal cases, and the abject failure to respond, in any meaningful way, to the current crisis,” the report says. “Most troubling to the Select Committee, is what happens after arrests are made—the DAO’s prosecution, or lack thereof,” the report says.
The office categorizes violent offenses as homicides, nonfatal shootings, rape, robberies, aggravated assault, and other forms of assault. To the date of the report, 65 percent of all violent offenses have been withdrawn by the DA’s office or dismissed by the courts, resulting in no prosecution for those crimes. Compared to district attorney’s offices in other Pennsylvania counties, the Philadelphia office withdraws cases much more often.
“No doubt, Philadelphia criminals are emboldened by the knowledge that the likelihood that they will be arrested is slim, and once caught, the likelihood that they will be prosecuted and incarcerated is minimal,” the report says.
Crime at ‘Unacceptable’ Levels
Krasner is in his second term. If the House voted to impeach, the state Senate would conduct a trial, after which, a two-thirds vote from the Senate would be needed to impeach and remove Krasner. The Senate is still a Republican majority, but with 28 Republicans and 22 Democrats in the next session, it is not a two-thirds majority.
“I suspect that we will have bipartisan support for this effort as we have thus far,” Rep. Martina White, a Philadelphia Republican and prime sponsor of the articles of impeachment, said in a press conference after the measure passed from committee. “The investigation and holding Larry Krasner in contempt was bipartisan. Tomorrow, I believe this will also be bipartisan because the people of Philadelphia deserve better than what they receive out of the district attorney’s office. He has not been doing his job well enough for us, endangering the lives of citizens that he’s supposed to serve and protect by prosecuting criminals and making sure that they’re convicted guilty, should the evidence be there. But that’s not what’s happening right now. The district attorney is basically withdrawing cases at an unprecedented level.”
White said she wants to assure the citizens of Philadelphia that they can live the way they deserve, not having to worry about walking out their front door and being carjacked or worrying about sending kids to school only for them to be shot dead on the walk home from the gunfire of gang members who should be locked up in jail and convicted of previous crimes.
“It’s unacceptable,” White said. “And now is the time to act. There’s no reason to wait any longer.”
Krasner’s Words
In a letter sent to the select committee Oct. 21, Krasner—a Democrat whose campaign was funded in part by billionaire George Soros—defended his work.
“Criminologists know what works to prevent crime. It is not love for the NRA, opposition to reasonable gun regulations, or draconian sentences,” Krasner said. “It is investment in communities, fully funded public schools, mental health and addiction treatment resources, economic opportunity, trade school and higher education opportunity, keeping parents in the community (not in jail) when they have committed non-violent, non-serious offenses, and modern police reform, among other things. All leading criminological reports show zero correlation between crime and progressive/reform prosecution.”
Krasner said every decision he makes as district attorney is with the goal of seeking justice and improving public safety.
“Public safety has always been my primary goal, and I have never deviated from more intensely focusing on the most serious and violent offenses. My office has been especially focused on prosecuting violent and serious crimes,” Krasner said. “That is a collaboration with other law enforcement since we cannot charge cases that are not solved by police. While the last full year of data available indicates only 17 percent of non-fatal shootings were solved in Philadelphia and only 28 percent of gun homicides were solved, our current conviction rate for the homicides and gun violence cases that are solved is much higher—nearly 90 percent at the trial level.”
Krasner said his office has achieved these numbers while strictly following the constitutional and legal requirements that protect everyone from wrongful convictions that incarcerate the innocent and allow the guilty to escape.
“Sadly, many traditional prosecutors in Philadelphia and elsewhere have not maintained that high legal and ethical standard,” he said. “It’s harder to win when you don’t cheat, but we are winning.”
The FBI had up to eight informants inside the Proud Boys around the time of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, raising questions as to why agents did not alert authorities beforehand.
The revelation comes from court filings for next month’s trial of five Proud Boy members. They are charged with seditious conspiracy in relation to involvement in the Capitol breach.
The defendants’ lawyers asked the court to drop the indictment or delay the trial in light of the new information, the New York Timesreported:
In the papers, some of which were heavily redacted, the lawyers claimed that some of the information the confidential sources had provided to the government was favorable to their efforts to defend their clients against sedition charges and was improperly withheld by prosecutors until several days ago.
A closed court hearing was held on Monday to discuss the informants in Federal District Court in Washington. Lawyers for the Proud Boys have asked Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who is overseeing the case, to dismiss the indictment—or at least delay the trial to give them more time to investigate the newly revealed informants.
Kelly did not release a decision on the future of the trial by Monday. Defense attorneys argue the information provided by the informants was not “suppressed” or relevant to the trial.
It is not known what information was shared by the informants because of redactions made in the documents. Details are expected in the Dec. 12 trial, unless it is postponed or dropped.
(Reuters)—Corporate America is making deep cuts to its employee base as part of its restructuring efforts to navigate a potential downturn in the economy from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s war on inflation.
Job cuts announced by U.S.-based employers jumped 13% to 33,843 in October, the highest since February 2021, according to a report.
Here are some of the major job cuts announced in recent weeks:
Amazon.com Inc:
The e-commerce giant is planning to lay off about 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, the New York Times reported.
Meta Platforms Inc:
The Facebook-parent said it would cut 13% of its workforce, or more than 11,000 employees, in one of the biggest tech layoffs this year as it grapples with a weak advertising market and mounting costs.
Citigroup Inc:
The bank eliminated dozens of jobs across its investment banking division, as a dealmaking slump continues to weigh on Wall Street’s biggest banks, Bloomberg News reported.
Morgan Stanley:
The Wall Street is expected to start a fresh round of layoffs globally in the coming weeks, Reuters reported on Nov. 3, as the Wall Street bank’s dealmaking business takes a hit.
Intel Corp:
Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger told Reuters “people actions” would be part of a cost-reduction plan. The chipmaker said it would reduce costs by $3 billion in 2023.
The adjustments would start in the fourth quarter, Gelsinger said, but did not specify how many employees would be affected.
Microsoft Corp:
The software giant laid off under 1,000 employees across several divisions this week, Axios reported, citing a source.
Johnson & Johnson:
The pharmaceutical giant said it might cut some jobs amid inflationary pressure and a strong dollar, with CFO Joseph Wolk saying the healthcare conglomerate is looking at “right sizing” itself.
Twitter Inc:
The social media company laid off half its workforce across teams ranging from communications and content curation to product and engineering following Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover.
However, Bloomberg on Sunday reported Twitter was reaching out to dozens of employees who lost their jobs, asking them to return.
Lyft Inc:
The ride-hailing firm said it would lay off 13% of its workforce, or about 683 employees, after it already cut 60 jobs earlier this year and froze hiring in September.
Warner Bros Discovery:
Film subsidiary Warner Bros. Pictures is planning to cut a number of jobs in distribution and marketing that will reduce headcount by 5% to 10%, Bloomberg News reported.
Beyond Meat Inc:
The vegan meat maker said it plans to cut 200 jobs this year, with the layoffs expected to save about $39 million.
Stripe Inc:
The digital payments firm is cutting its headcount by about 14% and will have about 7,000 employees after the layoffs, according to an email to employees from the company’s founders.
Chime:
The online banking firm has laid off 12% of its employees, or about 160 jobs, a spokesperson said.
Opendoor Technologies Inc:
The Property-selling platform is laying off about 550 employees, Chief Executive Officer Eric Wu said, adding that the company had already reduced its workforce by more than 830 positions.
Phillips 66:
The refiner reduced employee headcount by over 1,100 as it seeks to meet its 2022 cost savings target of $500 million. The reductions were communicated to employees in late October.
Chesapeake Energy Corp:
The U.S. shale gas producer cut about 3% of its workforce, sources told Reuters, as the company readies a sale of South Texas oil properties.
Seagate Technology Holdings Plc:
The memory chip firm announced a restructuring plan including reducing worldwide headcount by about 8%, or 3,000 employees.
Arrival SA:
The EV startup said it plans to further “right-size” the organization, which could have a “sizable impact” on its global workforce, mostly in the UK.
The company in July said it may cut up to 30% of workforce in restructuring.
Coinbase Global:
The cryptocurrency exchange said it planned to cut over 60 jobs, in its recruiting and institutional onboarding teams.
The move marks a second round of jobs cuts at the company this year, and comes at a time when cryptocurrencies have been roiled by extreme volatility as investors dump risky assets.
Walt Disney Co:
The media giant is planning to freeze hiring and cut some jobs, according to a company memo seen by Reuters.
“Hiring for the small subset of the most critical, business-driving positions will continue, but all other roles are on hold,” Chief Executive Officer Bob Chapek wrote in the memo sent to Disney leaders.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Akash Sriram and Granth Vanaik; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila, Shounak Dasgupta and Anil D’Silva)
Julie Gunnigle dismissed Free Beacon report that she partnered with abortion clinics that sold fetal organs
Julie Gunnigle (D.), a George Soros-backed prosecutor whose radical pro-abortion stance made waves throughout the campaign, has lost the Maricopa County attorney’s special election to Republican Rachel Mitchell.
Mitchell was winning by 4 points with 94 percent of ballots tabulated when Gunnigle conceded on Monday. The Democrat said the results prove “a continuation of the legacy of corruption within the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.” Mitchell, a veteran prosecutor who has served as acting Maricopa County attorney since March, declared victory in a press release later that day.
“Public safety isn’t partisan,” she said. “All Arizonans demand safe communities in which to live, work, and raise their children.”
Gunnigle took $6,550 from Way to Lead PAC, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Soros’s Democracy PAC. During the campaign, she caught flak following a Washington Free Beaconreport that she partnered with abortion clinics that sold fetal organs. Mitchell allies referred to the story in direct text messages to voters, prompting Gunnigle in a September tweet to dismiss the report as “disinformation.”
The Democratic candidate promised voters that if elected she would not prosecute abortions under the 15-week abortion ban that Gov. Doug Ducey (R.) signed into law in March. She also pledged to form a special division within her office to prosecute police shootings and use of force while dismissing many low-level criminal offenses. Crime is up more than 40 percent over the past two years in Phoenix, Maricopa County’s largest municipality.
Gunnigle also ran for county attorney in 2020, losing to Republican incumbent Allister Adel, who resigned in March. Gunnigle’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Mitchell is widely known for participating as an expert on sex crimes in the 2018 Senate confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She informed senators that “a reasonable prosecutor” would never have relied on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Kavanaugh.
Mitchell will serve two years before she is up for reelection to a full, four-year term in 2024.
NBC News suspended correspondent Miguel Almaguer, the Daily Beastreported Monday, after he reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D., Calif.) husband Paul Pelosi was not in danger when police arrived at his home following a break-in last month.
“After a ‘knock and announce,’ the front door was opened by Mr. Pelosi. The 82-year-old did not immediately declare an emergency or tried to leave his home but instead began walking several feet back into the foyer toward the assailant and away from police,” Almaguer said in his Nov. 4 report. “It’s unclear if the 82-year-old was already injured or what his mental state was, say sources.”
Almaguer’s account of the events contradicted official statements made by police, who said officers arrived to find Paul Pelosi in a struggle with assailant David DePape, who struck him in the head with a hammer. NBC News retracted Almaguer’s report and removed video of it, saying the piece was “removed from publication because it did not meet NBC News reporting standards.”
The retracted report from Almaguer fueled public speculation that DePape might have been an acquaintance of Paul Pelosi. DePape allegedly told police, however, that he was on a “suicide mission” and planned to target Nancy Pelosi and other government officials, not Paul Pelosi.
NBC News is conducting an internal investigation into Almaguer’s retracted reporting, according to the Daily Beast.
Ahead of the midterm elections, Democrats seized on the attack on Paul Pelosi as evidence of the danger of Republicans’ rhetoric, even though DePape, a nudist protester and illegal immigrant from Canada living in Berkeley, did not fit the typical conservative mold. The 2022 election cycle also saw several attacks on Republican candidates and staff, including Rep. Lee Zeldin (N.Y.) and a canvasser for Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.).
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—The Biden administration is asking Congress for $9.25 billion to fight COVID-19 and an additional $37.7 billion to support Ukraine in its war with Russia as part of a supplemental funding request, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.
The administration is also requesting $750 million to fight other infectious diseases and will be seeking additional money for natural disaster relief, the officials said.
“The Congress has an opportunity and obligation to address three additional and critical funding needs that should earn bipartisan support: protecting the American people from COVID-19 and saving lives globally; supporting the people of Ukraine; and helping communities across the Nation recover from devastating natural disasters,” White House budget director Shalanda Young said in letter to House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Doina Chiacu; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
Like a funeral home director on trial for desecrating a corpse (multiple counts)
What happened?
Stroke victim and senator-elect John Fetterman (D., Pa.) wore a suit on Tuesday while visiting the U.S. Capitol building.
How did he look?
Awful—like a funeral home director on trial for trying to form a death metal band using human marionettes.
As the Washington Free Beaconreported last month, Fetterman looks very bad in a suit. He prefers to wear hoodies and cargo shorts—it’s more authentic, but only if you ignore the fact that Fetterman lived on handouts from his rich father until he was 49 years old. He insists on showing off his scrawny legs, which make him look like a polio survivor.
Reporters attempted to ask Fetterman if he’ll ever be able to wear his hoodie on the Senate floor. (Probably not, it’s not a Denny’s, for crying out loud.) The future senator “didn’t answer,” most likely because he remains unable to converse without the assistance of large closed-captioning monitors, and there is no guarantee that his condition will ever improve.
Can I ask one last question?
Sure.
Is Fetterman’s wife… hot?
Great question. Sort of? Usha Vance, wife of senator-elect J.D. Vance (R., Ohio), is way hotter.
Democrat lashes out as church’s eviction scandal takes center stage in runoff battle
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) on Sunday said people who criticize his church for evicting residents from its low-income apartment building “attack the church of Jesus Christ” and are motivated by the “rulers of the darkness of this world.”
Warnock has come under fire following a Washington Free Beaconreport that the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he serves as senior pastor, owns an apartment building that moved to evict residents during the pandemic for as little as $28.55 in past-due rent. Warnock on Sunday alluded to the criticisms while delivering a sermon at Ebenezer, telling the congregation he was “troubled by the folk who have the nerve and the unmitigated audacity to attack the church,” which he called “the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr., America’s freedom church.”
Warnock did not disclose the identity of his foes, or the nature of their attacks. But his comments came just two days after the Free Beacon reported that the Georgia secretary of state is weighing whether to file a formal subpoena against a charity controlled by Warnock’s church for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into its charity registration. Walker’s Republican opponent, Herschel Walker, on Thursday launched the “Evict Warnock Bus Tour” ahead of Georgia’s Dec. 6 runoff election.
Warnock dodged questions about the evictions throughout October, but on Sunday, while he preached at his church, the Democrat suggested something more nefarious was at play.
“We wrestle not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual wickedness in high places that creates hellish situations, and then cause a lot of folk to bite one another,” Warnock said on Sunday. “They attach themselves, even in church. Sometimes especially in church. They poison the warmth of the fellowship with vicious and venomous words. Vicious. And Venomous. Words. Lying. And backbiting.”
Ebenezer pays Warnock a $7,417-per-month, tax-free housing allowance. Its finances are intermingled with the Ebenezer Building Foundation, the charity facing a subpoena threat from Georgia authorities. Warnock is the principal officer of the charity, which owns 99 percent of an Atlanta apartment building that is plagued by filth and maintenance issues.
Warnock said in October that no one has been evicted from the property, a claim undermined by publicly available court records. The apartment building is in the process of evicting seven residents as of Tuesday afternoon, two for just $115 in past-due rent, Fulton County Magistrate Court records show.
The Democratic senator in October also accused Walker of trying to “exploit” the residents facing eviction from his church’s apartment building and of sullying the name of civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. for “short-term political gain.”
The evictions were filed by Ebenezer’s business partner, Columbia Residential, one of the nation’s leading eviction filers. The church tapped Columbia Residential to manage the property on its behalf, the Free Beacon reported.
Warnock and Ebenezer did not return requests for comment.
After seeing his friend getting bullied for his shoes, a New York middle school student decided to step in and help. In a touching act of kindness, the pre-teen used his allowance to buy a brand-new pair of sneakers for his friend.
Bryant Brown Jr., 34, the dean of culture at Buffalo Creek Academy Charter School told The Epoch Times that on Oct 25, Romello Early, 12, placed a box on his desk, stating that it was for his friend Melvin Anderson.
“Then Melvin came into my room,” Brown said. “I told him to open up the box as I thought it was a pair of cleats because he plays football but when he opened the box, it was a pair of sneakers.”
Melvin Anderson (L) and Romello Early (R). (Courtesy of Bryant Brown Jr.)
The delighted seventh grader, who Brown described as—“very humble; always smiling”– called for his friend Romelo, and Brown then snapped a photo of them together.
“It touched my heart,” Brown recalled, “it made me very teary.”
Moved by this sweet act, Brown said that he shared the picture on Facebook, because it meant so much to him.
He wrote on his Facebook post: “This is what I live for … be that helping hand.”
Needless to say, the heartwarming post went viral garnering over 22,000 reactions and some 2,000 shares.
Brown described Melvin as someone who is very quiet.
“When people pick on him, he’s not quick to get mad,” Brown told The Epoch Times. “But when Romello identified what was going on, instead of joining in with the other kids in teasing Melvin, he went home determined to get him new sneakers.”
“I could tell it was upsetting him,” Romello told WGRZ. “It just put a real bad ache in my stomach to see somebody have to go through that, and to be to be picked on just based off appearance.”
Bryant Brown Jr (L) with Melvin Anderson (R). (Courtesy of Bryant Brown Jr.)(L-R) Bryant Brown Jr, Romello “Mello” Early, Melvin Anderson, and Wesley Anderson after Melvin’s football game. (Courtesy of Bryant Brown Jr.)
According to Brown, the big-hearted teenager told his mom, Anita James, to take him to the store so that he could get Melvin the shoes. The following day, Romello gifted Melvin a pair of Nike sneakers that he bought with his allowance.
Melvin has been really appreciative of Romello’s gesture.
Brown, who was raised in Buffalo, was especially touched by Romello’s generosity since it reminded him of his own upbringing.
“I give my brother a pair of sneakers every year for his birthday,” he said, “because growing up, he took care of me.”
Brown left work in the private sector to join Buffalo Creek Academy Charter School in 2019 when approached by the school’s CEO, Dr. Christopher Ralph Manning Jr. to help develop the fledging project. An independent, tuition-free public charter school, Buffalo Creek’s motto is “Sharpen the Mind, Carve the Path.”
The school has now been open for three years and plans to eventually grow from a middle school into a middle/high school, according to its website.
For Brown who teaches youngsters leadership, integrity, focus, and excellence, “it was a no-brainer to work with the school to get back to the community.”
Investment firms, regulators use investor demand as a justification to advance ESG practices
Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investing has not only become a popular investment trend, but also a new front in the culture wars. Market predictions show that global ESG-mandated assets will reach $55 trillion in 2022 and close to $100 trillion in 2025.
But has the recent spike in ESG investing been driven by market demand or something else?
According to a survey (pdf) by Consumers’ Research, 76 percent of retail investors say that they use their investment income mainly to save for retirement or long-term financial stability and to supplement their income. Only 3 percent of retail investors use their investment income to promote sustainability, and only 2 percent use it to make social change.
Lawrence Cunningham, a corporate law professor at George Washington University, stated in a recent report that individual investors place less importance on climate change than institutional investors.
“It is well known that institutional investors vote for environmental shareholder proposals at about twice the rate of individual investors,” Cunningham wrote.
Advocates of ESG investing assert that they’re empowering investors to align their investments with their values. Jonathan Berry, partner at law firm Boyden Gray & Associates and a regulatory litigator, challenges that argument.
“It’s fair to call ESG investing an elite preference, not a majority sentiment,” he says.
Speaking at this year’s Federalist Society convention on Nov. 10, Berry said “the administrative state” is the reason why the ESG has gained so much momentum recently.
“The administrative state encodes elite preferences like ESG because it stands outside of our constitutional system of democratic accountability. This is the core problem with a delegation of legislative power to the executive branch,” he said during a panel discussion at the convention titled “Woke, Smoke, or Smart: Regulators Push for ESG.”
Even if there had been a red wave in the midterm elections, he asserted, it would have a limited impact on the Biden administration’s rule-making agenda. There’s a steady progression of rules that reflect the priorities of the elite, he added.
“In the ESG space, we see rules being justified by reference to shibboleths like climate-related financial risks and diversity.”
Meanwhile, regulators around the world continue to push for the adoption of ESG investing standards. And the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has often used investor demand as a justification for requiring certain ESG disclosures from public firms.
But this investor demand isn’t coming from “mom and pop” investors, Berry says. It’s BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and many other large institutional investors and asset managers that speak on behalf of investors who have money invested with them.
Investors can only pick from the options presented to them by proxy advisors, such as Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis. For example, shareholder proposals related to racial equity saw significant growth in the first half of this year.
In addition, even if individual investors retain the right to vote, their influence is dwarfed by institutional investors, according to Berry.
“ESG is a vehicle for ideological control of capital allocation,” he said.
Driving Value
While speaking at the panel, Dalia Blass, head of external affairs at Blackrock and former director of investment management division at the SEC, noted that there were a “tremendous amount of misperceptions” concerning ESG.
“We are capitalists, and we really believe in the power of the capital markets,” Blass said. “Anything that we have done, from our voting to our views on the transition to a low-carbon economy, we do that as a fiduciary with the goal of driving value returns to our clients.”
Blass cited workplace diversity as an example, and stated that studies have demonstrated a correlation between diversity and a company’s performance. She explained that as a long-term investor, BlackRock seeks diversity because it drives value.
Investor funds are “not captive money,” she noted. “Our investors, if they don’t like what we do, they can redeem their funds.”
Blass also mentioned how much good has been done by the investment management business. Index funds were launched in the mid-1970s. Only 5 percent of U.S. households were invested in the stock market in 1980. It’s now close to 50 percent, she said, thanks to index funds.
Recent studies found that the companies in the ESG portfolios had poor compliance record for both labor and environmental rules. In addition, they underperformed their non-ESG counterparts.
These and many other issues have raised concerns about the objective and value of ESG, as well as stakeholder capitalism in general.
Judge Andrew Oldham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who moderated the panel discussion, said evaluating a company’s success 20 years ago was a simple math.
Now, with the stakeholder capitalism, companies are required to focus on the triple bottom line—people, planet, and profit—which makes accounting more complicated, he said.
Google and other tech companies want you obsessing about conspiracy theories so you won’t look at how they tampered with the 2022 midterm elections
Commentary
What happened to the gigantic red wave that was supposed to crush the Democrats in the midterm elections? Every Republican in the country is blaming everyone else for this disaster, but almost no one is looking in the right place—and that’s exactly how the Big Tech companies like it.
Based on my team’s research, Google, and to a lesser extent, Facebook and other tech monopolies, not only took steps to shift millions of votes to Democrats in the midterms, but they are using their influence to spread rumors and conspiracy theories to make sure people look everywhere for explanations—except at them.
Two days before the 2022 midterm elections, I published an article explaining how Google and other tech companies were shifting millions of votes without people knowing, and I also explained how I knew, without doubt, that this was occurring.
Google isn’t the only culprit, but since they’re the biggest, most aggressive, and most arrogant culprit, I’ll focus on them in this article.
These manipulations (and others) don’t affect voters with strong points of view, but they can have an enormous impact on voters who are undecided (pdf)—the people who decide the outcomes of close elections.
I know Google did these things (and more!) because, in 2022, my team and I were doing to them exactly what they do to us and our kids 24/7: We were monitoring the politically related content that Google and other tech companies were showing to actual voters—our politically diverse panel of 2,742 “field agents,” who were located mainly in swing states.
In particular, we were tracking what Google employees call “ephemeral experiences”—content that appears briefly, affects people, and then disappears. In 2018, in emails that leaked from the company, Googlers were discussing how they might use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban. They know how powerful ephemeral experiences can be. That’s one of the most closely held secrets of Google’s management.
Ephemeral content is ideal for manipulation purposes. If you get a go-vote reminder on Google’s home page (see the image below for an actual go-vote reminder sent to a liberal voter on Election Day), how would you know whether anyone else was getting it? You wouldn’t, and if you didn’t receive such a reminder, how would you know that anyone else had?
A go-vote reminder sent to a liberal voter at 11:25 a.m. on Nov. 8, 2022 (Screenshot via Google)
But we were capturing, aggregating, and analyzing the content that Google and other companies were sending to the computers of our field agents, so we could accurately estimate how many go-vote reminders Google was sending to liberals, moderates, and conservatives. In all, in the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterms, we preserved more than 2.5 million of those persuasive ephemeral experiences.
When we used similar methods to monitor content being sent by tech companies to voters before the 2020 presidential election, we found that Google was sending fewer go-vote reminders to conservatives than to moderates and liberals. Targeted messaging of this sort is a blatant manipulation that can, on Election Day in a national election in the United States, generate 450,000 extra votes for the favored candidate.
In 2020, we reported our findings to members of Congress, and on Nov. 5, 2020, three U.S. senators sent an intimidating letter (pdf) to the CEO of Google that summarized our data. As a result, Google turned off its manipulations. In the Georgia Senate runoffs that followed the presidential election, no one received a go-vote reminder from Google.
But we weren’t so lucky this time around. The article I published just before the election had no effect on Google, and this year, we couldn’t find a member of Congress to send a warning letter, although we came close.
As a result, Google search results remained politically biased on Election Day, and so did the up-next recommendations on YouTube. Google also sent out targeted go-vote reminders in most swing states.
If manipulations like these were being used nationwide in the months leading up to the midterm elections, Google alone might have shifted 80 million votes over time (with those votes scattered over hundreds of elections). We’ll have a more precise estimate of the extent of vote shifting that occurred as we dig into our data in the coming weeks.
That’s why the red wave fizzled—because Google had its digital thumb on the scale for months before the elections.
Look at history. Given inflation, the faltering economy, and President Joe Biden’s low approval rating—not to mention the extensive vote redistricting that Republicans engineered in many states recently (also called gerrymandering)—the Republicans should easily have dominated the Senate races and picked up 60 or more seats in the House (as they did in the 2010 midterm elections when Barack Obama was in office). This time around, they’ll be lucky to end up with a slim majority in the House and an even split in the Senate (which means that it remains under Democratic control).
Although we were unable to stop the manipulations in 2022, the good news is that we were able to preserve a treasure trove of incriminating evidence—those 2.5 million politically related ephemeral experiences. In 2023, this large dataset might be used by authorities to go after Big Tech. This will almost certainly occur if Republicans control the House.
And we’re continuing to build a digital shield. By late 2023, we’ll be monitoring the content that tech companies are sending to a representative sample of more than 20,000 voters and children in all 50 U.S. states 24 hours a day, and we’ll report suspect content to authorities and journalists as we find it.
This digital shield—the first of its kind in the world—will protect our democracy and our children from potential manipulation by current and emerging technologies for many years to come.
Finally, a word of advice: In the coming weeks and months, you’ll probably be bombarded with scary stories about how the midterm elections were tainted by rigged voting machines, fake ballots and other dirty tricks, just as you were after the 2020 presidential election. Please try your best to ignore those stories.
Dirty tricks like these are competitive; if one party can use them, so can the other. And even if some of the stories prove to be true (and most won’t), dirty tricks of the sort people talk about online make little difference in election outcomes. Sometimes they shift only hundreds of votes; it’s rare for them to shift thousands.
What’s more, if these stories are spreading like wildfire on social media platforms, that’s only because the tech companies want them to spread. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram (both part of Meta), Twitter, and YouTube (owned by Google) have complete and absolute control over whether stories go viral.
Remember when Twitter and Facebook suppressed stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020? Again, these companies can spread stories or suppress them as they please.
When you see a conspiracy theory spreading, you are often seeing an example of large-scale manipulation by misdirection. The tech companies allow such stories to spread—or even force them to spread—to turn your attention away from the companies themselves. If you think that there were fake ballots, you won’t pay attention to the fact that tech companies might have shifted millions of votes in the midterms.
Sure, ballot stuffing sounds a lot more diabolical than “sending people targeted go-vote reminders,” but don’t let yourself be fooled. Ballot stuffing is a competitive activity that has little net effect. But targeted register-to-vote and go-vote reminders on Google’s home page, which is viewed more than 500 million times a day in the United States, can shift votes by the million.
And that kind of manipulation can’t be counteracted, because it’s controlled exclusively by the platform. People can’t even see that kind of manipulation, and—except for the monitoring my team is doing—it also leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace.
If you see a conspiracy theory blowing up on a tech platform such as Facebook or even on Fox News (which often amplifies scary stories that are spreading online), ask yourself this: Is this story real, or am I being manipulated yet again by the tech lords who have taken control of our democracy (pdf)?
The chances are good that you’re being manipulated—yet again.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
The Nevada Supreme Court on Nov. 14 turned down a request to halt hand counting of ballots in a rural county.
The hand count, which is taking place after all ballots cast in the midterms were tabulated with machines, is essentially a recount or an audit, neither of which are allowed under state law, the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in an emergency motion on Monday.
“Unless enjoined by this Court, this hand count will set a dangerous precedent for future elections by encouraging local officials to make up and implement their own vote counting processes that violate voters’ constitutional right to an accurate election ‘as provided by law,’” the group said.
The state’s top court ruled within hours, denying the petition.
The court noted that the hand count was approved by the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office, according to a response to the emergency motion from Interim Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf.
County officials also differed on what state law allows, saying a hand count that is not an audit or recount is not “expressly prohibit[ed]” by the law.
“Having reviewed the petition and answer, we conclude that petitioner has not demonstrated that our extraordinary intervention is warranted at this time. Petitioner has pointed to no law clearly prohibiting the parallel hand count or precluding any post-deadline revision to secondary vote-counting plans approved by the Secretary,” justices said.
“Further, petitioner did not name the Secretary as a party to this original proceeding essentially challenging her actions or inactions in enforcing the election laws. Under these circumstances, we decline to exercise our discretion to consider this writ petition, and we ORDER the petition DENIED,” they added.
In a statement to The Epoch Times, Nye County officials said, “Nye County is pleased with yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling and looks forward to completing the hand count as approved by the Secretary of State.”
“Although the County has been happy to follow the guidance from and respect the decisions of the Supreme Court, it seems as if the ACLU holds itself to a different standard. So, we are glad the Court has invalidated this most recent attempt to thwart the hand count, given the Court had clearly indicated previously that crafting a compliant hand count process was something for the County and the Secretary of State to work out (and not the ACLU),” the officials added.
A spokesperson for Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, did not return a request for comment.
Nye County started hand counting ballots before the Nov. 8 midterms, enacting a plan approved by the county’s Board of Commissioners, but stopped on orders from Cegavske, who said the hand count could not resume until after polls closed, according to a letter obtained by The Epoch Times.
On Nov. 4, Cegavske asked for more details of the plan to mitigate “significant risks” to integrity.
County workers resumed the count two days after the midterms.
The hand count would be compared to the machine count, Kampf, another Republican, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He said he hoped voters would gain confidence from the results being double-checked.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with a comment from Nye County.
Turning Point USA president Charlie Kirk shared a video Monday from a Maricopa County, Arizona, polling location showing firsthand the vote machine tabulation problems thousands of people experienced on Election Day last week.
County officials stated that day that one-in-five polling voting was having these issues caused by poor ballot print quality preventing the tabulators from reading the votes cast.
The Washington Post reported that ultimately 70 of the county’s 223 polling locations experienced the tabulator reading problem, so over 30 percent versus the 20 percent county officials had originally indicated.
In the video posted by Kirk, who is a strong supporter of Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, a man tries multiple times to get a tabulator machine to accept his ballot.
He first asked, which one he should use, and someone said, “One’s as bad as the other…Choose your poison.”
The voter tried two tabulators, but they wouldn’t accept the ballot.
“It’s never going to go through, is it?” the man said.
This same scene played out tens of thousands of times all across Maricopa County. How many voters were disenfranchised or simply ran out of time? If the majority of ED voters were Democrats, this would be the number 1 news story in America still today. Total joke pic.twitter.com/noY1RRQv0Q
Someone stated that a person who just voted before him had his ballot go through on the first attempt.
“I probably voted for the wrong person,” the voter wryly responded.
Kirk tweeted, “This same scene played out tens of thousands of times all across Maricopa County.”
“How many voters were disenfranchised or simply ran out of time? If the majority of [Election Day] voters were Democrats, this would be the number 1 news story in America still today. Total joke,” he added.
The poll worker in the video did inform the voter he could put his ballot in the “Box 3” slot below the tabulator machine. There it was to be taken to Maricopa County’s central processing facility in downtown Phoenix for later counting.
The polling location in Anthem — a ruby red community of about 30,000 people north of Phoenix — was one of the locations in Maricopa County that experienced ballot tabulator problems on Election Day. Anthem also happens to be the home of The Western Journal.
Arizona Republican National Committee member Tyler Bowyer posted a video from the Outlets at Anthem polling place at about 7:20 a.m. Tuesday morning on Election Day in which the polling site director explained that one of the voting tabulation machines was not working while the other was only successfully taking ballots 75 percent of the time.
“So 25 percent of them are being misread and it could be printer issue or it could be the tabulator itself,” said the director, who wore a badge indicating his name was Richard.
“So when it’s misread you have an option to put it into what’s called ‘Box 3,’ whether it goes downtown and gets read manually or whether it gets refed into our tabulators,” he said.
Long lines in Anthem, Arizona with Poll Workers explaining that the @maricopacounty machines are not working.
Upon hearing this news, a woman responded to Richard that she did not trust her vote to be counted if it was sent downtown. She left the line announcing, “I’ll come back.”
I went over to see how the vote was going at the Anthem polling location at approximately 1:15 p.m. I spoke with Richard who told me the printer issue was fixed and the tabulator machines were now working.
However, it took Lucas McLuhan, who works for The Western Journal, five times to get a tabulator to accept his ballot at approximately 2:45 p.m.
Lucas also had to wait almost two hours to vote, which is what those in line told me when I asked at around 1:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. When I returned at 8:30 p.m. the last of those who had made it into line by 7 p.m. when the polls closed, were still awaiting their chance to cast a ballot.
I would say the line was probably a quarter of a mile long at 1:30 p.m. on Election Day.
Here is the problem w/ what happened in Maricopa County on Election Day. This is Anthem, north of Phoenix at about 1:15 pm. Ruby red district of about 30K people. Only one polling location. Ballot tabulators not working in the morning. 2 hr wait to vote midday and still at 6 pm. pic.twitter.com/CY35yQWwq5
If Kari Lake and some of the other Republican candidates like attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh should come up short, the only fair remedy would be to redo the Maricopa County election.
Sixty percent of Arizona voters live in the county.
Hamadeh tweeted on Saturday, “REMEMBER: 72%+ of the votes on Election Day in person were Republican. When you have 30% of the tabulating machines failing, causing people to leave the lines and give up. This is voter suppression targeting a political party.”
REMEMBER: 72%+ of the votes on Election Day in person were Republican.
When you have 30% of the tabulating machines failing, causing people to leave the lines and give up.
This is voter suppression targeting a political party.
“Who benefits?” is the question many ask when something bizarre like 30 percent of the printers malfunctioning on Election Day happens.
In this case, Democrat Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs may be one of the main beneficiaries.
It could all be coincidence, incompetence, etc., but regardless the only fair remedy if Hobbs “wins” is a Maricopa redo, this time with the election done right.
In it, an Arizona voter recounted the all-too-familiar tale of having an unacceptable number of issues with her ballot, before being graciously offered to have her ballot placed behind “door three” and being transported downtown.
“They offered me Door Number 3 and said those ballots would be taken downtown and counted by hand that night,” the voter said. “I said ‘No thank you.’ I asked if I could spoil my ballot and vote again.
“So I watched as a woman put X’s through my ballot, and she directed me back over to the check-in area. The woman who re-checked me in didn’t confirm anything [or] what had happened to my spoiled ballot.”
The voter was ultimately able to cast her vote, though it did take two hours to do so.
The voter ultimately got her ballot submitted, but even if it didn’t take two hours, it still paints an unflattering picture of those running this election.
If there were just one example of a voter struggling to cast their ballot, The Western Journal might have dismissed it as pure happenstance.
But this is far from the only instance.
If you want to see any of the other damning examples of voter irregularities that The Western Journal has collected, consider joining The Western Journal today as a Premium Member! Doing so will allow you to view all of these videos in one, convenient place.
While you’re taking in all of these voter irregularities, consider teaming with The Western Journal today to shine light on the dark corruption that’s infecting our politics, our culture and our country. Together, we can expose the left and its unprincipled plans for our future.
The word “democracy” appears exactly zero times in the United States Constitution. And yet, no form of government is celebrated with the same fervency as democracy. Recently, the phrase “Our Democracy” has been co-opted by nearly every politician as an attempt to appeal to the populace’s supposedly unshakeable faith in the voting process. Appeals to the fragility of “Our Democracy” are commonly made by political figures hoping to discredit rivals; rivals they unhesitatingly accuse of threatening that ancient Athenian inheritance. A keen extraterrestrial might conclude that many of the developed nations of the world embrace democracy as religion.
But is this unquestioning reverence for a form of political governance healthy, reasonable, desirable? Does such reverence blind us to the shortcomings that democracy may possess relative to other political arrangements and lure us into complacent, even dangerous, self-satisfaction?
Let’s review a few of the major issues that beset democracies. The aim is not to condemn democracy as a form of governance, but to critique it such that we may be better informed of its imperfections. After all, politics of any form must involve human beings and human beings, despite their best intentions, are far from perfect.
1.) Democracy is only as Noble and Reasonable as its Voting Citizens
The first critique of democracy concerns the responsibility that citizens have to exhibit character in daily life and to stay well informed about the issues for which they vote. It does not matter how passionately a citizen may feel about a particular issue; if that passion is not tempered by objective investigation and the application of reason to the issue at hand, the voter abdicates a central responsibility as a citizen. No degree of passion is a substitute for clear-headed thinking. Understanding well the tendency that democratic citizens have towards this failure, Winston Churchill once quipped, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Unfortunately, many citizens of modern democracies fall prey to emotional pleas and assume that heartfelt emotion is sufficient to guide ones voting decisions. The media, with that oh-so-dangerous self-satisfaction, appeals to the smug assuredness of over-confident voters through emotionally manipulative means. The voters are constantly reassured that their viewpoint is the only reasonable one.
Democracy has yet to find a solution to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon where the less a person knows about an issue, the more confident a person is in their knowledge about the issue. A 2018 study by Ian G Anson published in the journal Political Psychology investigated how the Dunning-Kruger effect affects citizens’ perceptions of their political knowledge. Anson examined over two thousand American adults via two online surveys which quizzed the participants on basic political knowledge. Most participants of the study performed poorly and those who performed poorest were more likely to be confident in their knowledge of politics than those that performed well 1.
The Dunning-Kruger effect, combined with patronizing and pandering from politicians and the press, results in a poorly informed, but highly opinionated public. A hyper-emotional public is incapable of cool-headed, rational debate and is, instead, prone to political provocation and manipulation by media and power-hungry politicians.
A successful democracy requires citizens to continuously revisit and revise their understanding of core issues in a level-headed manner. Such revision is best embarked upon with temperance and reason.
2.) Democracy Makes Neighbors Political Adversaries and Makes All Issues Political
A less considered shortcoming is the tendency for democracies to create adversity between citizens who hold differing political opinions. In the United States, this adversity has become so intense between Republicans and Democrats that distrust between members of opposing parties extends far beyond just political issues. Nearly every issue brought to the public eye, whether science, sports, movies, or music becomes irreversibly burdened with political interpretation, intention, and influence. Ideas and concerns submitted by one side of the political aisle are a priori rejected and condemned by the other side before the slightest consideration of the idea’s merits. This effect may be particularly amplified in a democratic political system where there are only two major parties. Then, nearly every political issue inherits a kind of adversity that is more likely to be absent when the number of available choices exceeds two.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes the need to be aware of the tendency people have to view apolitical issues through partisan lenses. As thoughtful citizens we should be cognizant of this tendency when evaluating actions to take to solve these issues. A June 2020 article from FiveThirtyEight detailed the divergence of experiences between Republicans and Democrats during that time2. Republicans generally exhibited less concern about the pandemic while Democrats exhibited greater concern about it. The intent of this article is not to determine which political party was correct or incorrect about the pandemic, but to demonstrate how partisan politics played a crucial role in shaping people’s viewpoints about a major issue. One would presume that the pandemic should never have been a political issue. Instead, the pandemic and its mitigation efforts should have been matters of public health and science.
Ideally, an open scientific investigation and discussion should have been facilitated to find the best solutions to counter the pandemic while maintaining the minimum possible obstruction of freedoms upon citizens. Instead, political parties championed separate causes and blamed the opposition for any and all Covid-19 deaths. This turned the opposing party into literal “murderers” while one’s own party used these deaths to lobby for votes.
This is not to say that there were no valid issues that were brought up during the political chaos. Examples of valid points of disagreement included masking policies, vaccination mandates, lockdowns, and experimental drug treatments. However, actual open scientific debate on these issues was rarely carried out.
The COVID-19 pandemic response is just one example of where the political divide contaminates problem-solving and leads to further distrust between those that share different political opinions. As the political divide in America (and across the West) widens, more and more aspects of society become political, from sports to music to education. Nearly every aspect of life now contains political undertones, which only divides us further and makes cordial political dialogue near impossible. The U.S.’s current circumstance stands as an example of the tendency for democracies to politicize everything and divide its citizenry.
3.) Democracies Incur Great Opportunity Costs
Another drawback of modern democracy is the immense opportunity cost incurred by political campaigns. Time, money, energy, and attention are all consumed by political parties vying to ensure that their candidate is elected. Dozens, hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of people are employed for hours, days, and weeks to assist with a campaign on behalf of a candidate. And consider the fact that in a two-party system, one of these parties’ efforts will effectively be for nothing if it loses. Not only are political campaigns expensive, but they are also getting increasingly MORE expensive. In 2016 the total cost for presidential and congressional races was $7 billion. By 2020 that number doubled to more than $14.4 billion3.
Let’s consider what alternative investments could be made with $14.4 billion. For $400,000 each, $14.4 billion could buy 36,000 homes. Researchers from 23 countries suggest that $14 billion is the additional expenditure needed each year to eradicate world hunger by 2030. The National Cancer Institute estimates that the average cost of first-year cancer treatment is $42,000 4. At this price tag, $14 billion is enough to purchase a year’s worth of cancer treatment for over 330,000 people. Clearly, the extraordinary sums of money spent on political campaigns could be used for a variety of beneficial endeavors. These endeavors could have lasting, meaningful effects on the lives of countless people.
In addition to the monetary cost of campaigning, political involvement incurs a devastating mental toll on losers of election races. Regarding the 2016 presidential election, analysis suggests that in states that voted for Hillary Clinton in November 2016, there were a total of 54.6 million more days of poor mental health than in October 2016 5. Poor mental health leads to lower quality of life and lower productivity. Though poor mental health isn’t exclusive to democracies, it is a heavy opportunity cause to risk the mental health of half the country each election cycle. This problem is particularly strong in winner-take-all elections as in presidential races.
Another significant cost in democracies is the time and energy the politicians spent on campaigning and fundraising for the next election cycle. Not only must politicians work to enact new legislation, but they must also devote considerable resources to ensuring they maintain popular public opinion and are prepared financially for their upcoming reelection campaign. This diverts time, energy, and attention from passing legislation to lobbying voters and campaign donors. According to Rep. Rick Nolan in “60 Minutes” expose from CBS, members of Congress are encouraged to spend thirty hours per week in call centers for their respective parties asking for donations:
Rep. Rick Nolan: “Thirty hours is what they tell you you should spend. And it’s discouraging good people from running for public office. I could give you names of people who’ve said, “You know, I’d like to go to Washington and help fix problems, but I don’t want to go to Washington and become a mid-level telemarketer, dialing for dollars, for crying out loud.”
Interviewer: “You’re saying members of Congress are becoming like telemarketers?”
Rep. Rick Nolan: “Well, 30 hours a week, that’s a lot of telemarketing. Probably more than most telemarketers do.”
This emphasis on fundraising also results in fewer good people running for office according to Nolan – another opportunity cost of the current democratic process. 6
While political engagement is necessary for a functioning democracy, this engagement can incur a heavy cost on the people it purportedly serves. Current democracies risk turning politics into an industry unto itself. When the democratic process becomes an industry unto itself, it ceases to act on behalf of the people and instead serves the political actors.
4) Democracy is Expensive and Politicians Push Costs to Future Generations
The fourth flaw of democracy is the tendency for democracies to become more expensive over time as citizens vote for additional benefits from the government. Once a benefit is provided to citizens they will rarely vote to remove this benefit, especially when it is financed through tax dollars. This is particularly true when the benefit has been provided for several generations. Over time, this leads wealthy societies to become more dependent on the government to provide for the citizenry. Alexander Fraser Tytler, an influential professor of universal history in the 18th century and an expert on the rise and fall of civilizations summarized this tendency:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.” 7-Alexander Fraser Tytler
Tytler suggests that civilizations emerge out of hardship through great faith and courage. This struggle ultimately leads to liberty and abundance in which citizens are largely free to act as they see fit. But while desirable in their own right, liberty and abundance lead to selfishness and apathy when not tempered by discipline. Finally, when in a state of material wealth, a civilization returns to a state of dependence in which the citizenry chooses welfare and handouts over personal responsibility. This allows tyrants to exploit complacent citizens through false promises which leads to the final stage, the stage that defines most of human political history: bondage. Aristotle formulates Tytler’s cycle succinctly:
“Inevitably, masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies invariably give way to tyranny.”-Aristotle
And the prolific historian Will Durant summarized this phenomenon even more simply:
“A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.”-Will Durant
This trend toward dependence is evident in the amount of debt a democratic nation accrues. Consider that nine of the ten most indebted nations are considered democracies by the World Population Review 8,9. Only the tiny Asian nation of Bhutan (considered a “hybrid regime”) is not considered either a flawed or full democracy. The graph below demonstrates that democracies are particularly prone to spending beyond their means. Debt is money borrowed from future generations to pay for the expenses of the current generation. By voting themselves benefit after benefit, citizens vote themselves into being financial liabilities. These liabilities are expected to be paid for by future generations, creating an unsustainable financial trajectory. As we have seen from Tytler’s cycle of civilizations, this unstable financial path can then be exploited by opportunists willing to bribe citizens with additional benefits in exchange for their freedom. This results in a reduction of liberty and prosperity in society.
The politicians who make grand promises to their constituents rarely pay the cost incurred by said promises. Instead, future generations foot the bill for policies that were often passed simply to gain temporary public approval. Sly politicians prey upon the shortsightedness and emotionality of voting citizens, ultimately buying votes with hard-earned capital from future generations.
Conclusion
In conclusion, democracies come with flaws like all forms of government. Democracy’s tendency to reflect the vices of their citizenry and pit citizens against each other means that democratic nations should focus on the education and ethics of their populaces. Consequently, their voters can make informed and moral choices when selecting elected leaders. The high opportunity cost of political campaigns and the propensity for democracies to accrue large amounts of debt is also a serious flaw in democratic governments. Laws that limit campaign contributions and government spending constraints could mitigate these issues, though this is easier said than done. Voters and representatives alike will need to be cognizant of future generations when considering any increase in government benefits.
Overall, no form of government is perfect. It can be trendy to ridicule democratic government given the current state of the western world. However, let us refrain from unreflective and reckless criticism. Perhaps Winston Churchill’s wise assessment of the system is most appropriate:
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”-Winston Churchill
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Authorities say student Christopher Darnell Jones killed three, wounded two others
(Reuters)—Police were searching the University of Virginia campus and the area around the school on Monday for an “armed and dangerous” suspect who was wanted in a shooting that left three people dead and two wounded.
University police identified student Christopher Darnell Jones as the suspect in the shooting that unfolded at about 10:30 p.m. local time on Sunday at the school in Charlottesville, Virginia, attended by 25,000 students.
On Monday, law enforcement teams from multiple agencies conducted a search on and around the sprawling campus for the suspect, University of Virginia police said in a series of tweets, telling students and staff to shelter in place until further notice.
School President Jim Ryan said in a letter posted on social media that he was “heartbroken” by the shooting, adding that classes were canceled for the day.
“This is a message any leader hopes never to have to send, and I am devastated that this violence has visited the University of Virginia,” he wrote.
Jones was wearing a “burgundy jacket, blue jeans and red shoes”, and may have been driving a black SUV, authorities said.
Police did not disclose details about the shooting and have not identified the victims.
Jones, who Ryan said is a student at the school, was listed as a player on the school’s football team in 2018.
The shooting is the latest in a wave of gun violence on U.S. college and high school campuses in recent years. The bloodshed has fueled debate over tighter restrictions on access to guns in the United States, where the Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms.
A shooting in 2007 at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, about 150 miles (241 km) southwest of Charlottesville, left 33 people dead including the shooter and 23 injured in one of the deadliest mass shooting at a university in U.S. history.
(Reporting by Jyoti Narayan in Bengaluru and Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Toby Chopra and Chizu Nomiyama)
Disgraced crypto guru continues a storied tradition
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Sir Isaac Newton
What happened: Sam Bankman-Fried, the digital guru who earlier this year pledged to spend as much as $1 billion in support of Democratic candidates, is under federal investigation after the cryptocurrency exchange he founded declared bankruptcy amid accusations of fraud and financial mismanagement.
Why it matters: Bankman-Fried is the latest in a long line of Democratic megadonors to be accused of egregious criminal acts.
By the numbers:
• $5,700,000 — The amount Bankman-Fried, aka “SBF” or “the next Warren Buffet,” donated to President Joe Biden’s campaign and other Democratic-aligned entities in 2020.
• $40,000,000 — The amount SBF donated to political candidates and committees during the 2022 election cycle, the vast majority of which were aligned with the Democratic Party.
• $15,600,000,000— Bankman-Fried’s estimated net worth on Nov. 8, 2022.
Assuming he is ultimately charged and convicted of orchestrating a financial scam, Bankman-Fried will live in infamy alongside the following Democratic megadonors of degenerate disrepute—the giants upon whose shoulders he once stood.
Harvey Weinstein
• The once-beloved Hollywood mogul donated almost $600,000 to Democratic candidates and committees since 2000, and hosted a number of celebrity fundraisers for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
• Serving a 23-year sentence for rape and currently on trial for multiple sex crimes. Reporting suggests Weinstein’s atrocious behavior was an open secret in Hollywood. The serial offender routinely exploited his influence among Democratic politicians and their allies in the media to bury stories about his predatory behavior. In 2017, Weinstein reached out to Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to President Joe Biden, for “damage control advice.”
Jeffrey Epstein
• The prolific pedophilia aficionado donated more than $150,000 to Democratic candidates and committees, including a $10,000 contribution as recently as 2018, several months before his arrest on sex trafficking charges.
• He courted prominent journalists, cavorted with liberal billionaires, and wrote checks to Ivy League universities. Former president Bill Clinton took several trips on Epstein’s private jet, aka “The Lolita Express.” (Not to be confused with Democratic megadonor Ron Burkle’s private jet, aka “Air F—k One,” on which Clinton has also flown many times.)
• The sex criminal “hanged” “himself” in his jail cell in 2019. Earlier this year, his female accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell received a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. She was among the prominent figures who attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to failed hedge-fund manager Marc Mezvinsky in 2010.
Ed Buck
• The longtime liberal activist donated more than $500,000 to Democratic candidates and committees.
• Buck was sentenced in April to 30 years in prison for luring young men to his home, sexually assaulting them, and (in at least two cases) injecting them with a fatal dose of methamphetamine. Federal authorities described Buck as a “violent, dangerous sexual predator” who exploited “vulnerable victims—men who were drug-dependent and often without homes—to feed an obsession that led to death and misery.”
Bernie Madoff
• The once-beloved investment guru donated $200,000 to Democratic Party committees and candidates including Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer.
• Madoff defrauded his investors, including several prominent charities, of nearly $65 billion while orchestrating the largest Ponzi scheme in history. He pleaded guilty to 11 felonies in 2009 and was sentenced to 150 years in federal prison, where he died in 2021.
Is there a questionable relationship between Sam Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt FTX, Ukraine, and the Democrats? In the aftermath of the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange, new questions are being raised surrounding these connections, from crypto partnerships to the billionaire’s contributions to Democrats.
But is there something behind the curtain or was it a group of young people in over their heads?
It All Begins with ‘Aid for Ukraine’
In March, the Ukrainian government established a crypto donations website, allowing Kyiv to convert digital token contributions into fiat money that would be deposited at the National Bank of Ukraine. The Ukraine government maintained a goal of $200 million. By October, it had raised more than $60 million.
The contributed funds have been used to purchase everything needed for the war effort, such as digital rifle scopes, medical supplies, field rations, fuel, military clothing, and other critical items.
The initiative, known as “Aid for Ukraine,” garnered the support of FTX, staking outfit Everstake, and Ukraine’s Kuna exchange. It has been powered by the Ministry of Digital Transformation.
“At the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, FTX felt the need to provide assistance in any way it could. By setting up payment rails and facilitating the conversion of crypto donations into fiat currency, we have given the Central Bank of Ukraine the ability to deliver aid and resources to the people who need it most,” Bankman-Fried said in a statement in March. “We are grateful for the opportunity to work with Sergey [Vasylchuk] and the Everstake team as they continue to work tirelessly in helping Ukrainians as they suffer from this conflict.”
Days after the launch of the Ukraine–FTX collaboration, U.S. President Joe Biden announced an extra $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine, bringing the total contribution to $2 billion since the start of the administration. In total, it’s estimated that the United States has given more than $60 billion to Kyiv.
While it’s unclear if reports that Ukrainian officials have invested in FTX are accurate, many are seeking an explanation as to whether Ukrainian officials have used funds delivered to Kyiv through FTX to funnel money to Democratic campaigns.
Bankman-Fried’s Donations to Democrats
Bankman-Fried was the second-largest Democratic donor for the 2021–22 cycle, donating $39.8 million. This was behind George Soros’s total donations of $128 million. Bankman-Fried gave the most amount of money to the Protect Our Future PAC, a group that “endorsed Democratic candidates such as Peter Welch, who won his bid to become Vermont’s next senator, and Robert J. Menendez of New Jersey, who secured a House seat,” according to Fortune. But this past summer, Bankman-Fried suggested that he could’ve spent $1 billion on the midterm elections to support the Democrats, although he stepped away from this proposition.
In the first half of 2022, he contributed $865,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $66,500 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and $250,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
In addition, Bankman-Fried made multiple visits to the White House. According to White House visitor logs, he met with White House counselor Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12. The FTX founder also met with Charlotte Butash, a policy adviser to the White House deputy chief of staff, on May 13.
Mark Wetjen, the head of policy and regulatory strategy at FTX, who served as a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under former President Barack Obama, also attended some of the meetings.
Visitor logs also show that Bankman-Fried’s younger brother, Gabe, made visits to the White House on March 7 and May 13. His first appointment was with Nathaly Maurice, special assistant to the president and director of partnerships at the White House. His second visit was with Butash.
Gabe had previously worked as a Capitol Hill staffer and is the founder and director of Guarding Against Pandemics.
Bankman-Fried has been open about his attempts to influence public policymaking, explaining that he’s championing crypto regulations, including legislation that would codify licensure for crypto assets. The bill, the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act of 2022, was proposed by Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) in August. A key aspect of the legislative pursuit is that it would allocate crypto regulatory power to the CFTC. Bankman-Fried donated $5,800 to Stabenow’s campaign in February.
“One in five Americans have used or traded digital assets—but these markets lack the transparency and accountability that they expect from our financial system. Too often, this puts Americans’ hard-earned money at risk,” Stabenow said in a statement. “That’s why we are closing regulatory gaps and requiring that these markets operate under straightforward rules that protect customers and keep our financial system safe.”
So everything that has transpired between Bankman-Fried, FTX, Ukraine, and the Democrats has raised some eyebrows. Billionaire CEO Elon Musk is also intrigued by the latest developments.
“Was FTX being used to launder money for the Democratic Party?” a Twitter user asked.
Alex Bornyakov, the deputy minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, took to Twitter on Nov. 14 to dismiss this “narrative.”
“A fundraising crypto foundation @_AidForUkraine used @FTX_Official to convert crypto donations into fiat in March,” he tweeted. “Ukraine’s gov never invested any funds into FTX. The whole narrative that Ukraine allegedly invested in FTX, who donated money to Democrats is nonsense, frankly.”
A fundraising crypto foundation @_AidForUkraine used @FTX_Official to convert crypto donations into fiat in March. Ukraine’s gov never invested any funds into FTX. The whole narrative that Ukraine allegedly invested in FTX, who donated money to Democrats is nonsense, frankly 🤦♂️
Is there truth to any of the speculation that Ukraine funneled money to Biden through FTX or that there was anything iniquitous in the Ukraine-FTX partnership?
A cryptocurrency expert, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Epoch Times that there isn’t much credence to the suggestions. Although Bankman-Fried was a significant Democratic donor, the downfall of FTX was because of mismanagement, poor decision-making, and a lack of experience and corporate controls. It was an enormous financial firm that was run by 20-somethings.
The other factor was that FTX’s assets were denominated in volatile cryptocurrencies, and many of these tokens’ valuations crashed in 2022. FTX’s balance sheet, which was obtained by the Financial Times, shows that its assets were comprised of joke coins or unreliable tokens, including TRUMPLOSE, the Brazilian Digital Token, Oxygen (OXY), and FTT (FTX’s native coin).
In recent months, FTX has been acquiring troubled assets throughout the crypto and tech industries. In May, Bankman-Fried revealed a 7.6 percent stake in Robinhood, but the value had tumbled by more than 5 percent since the purchase.
It has been a year of turmoil for a wide array of crypto firms, such as Coinbase, crypto lending firm Celsius, BlockFi, and Singapore-based crypto trading platform Three Arrows Capital—which Bankman-Fried bailed out with a $750 million credit line.
“We’re willing to do a somewhat bad deal here if that’s what it takes to sort of stabilize things and protect customers,” he said in June.
The FTX scandal will likely have a domino effect in the sector. BlockFi, a crypto lender, revealed that it had large exposure to FTX. The Wall Street Journal also reported that BlockFi is exploring a bankruptcy filing, citing people familiar with the matter.
There’s growing concern that Gate.io and Crypto.com could be the next two giants in the crypto ecosystem to experience financial troubles.
Some cryptocurrency traders learned that Crypto.com sent more than 320,000 ETH ($400 million) to Gate.io last month. But the former stated that it was a mistake.
“The ETH transfers were made over three weeks ago, on October 21st to Crypto.com’s whitelisted corporate account at Gate.io. Crypto.com proceeded to withdraw the funds back to its cold wallets over the following days,” Crypto.com said in a statement. “The entirety of ETH was successfully withdrawn by Crypto.com and returned to our cold storage. The team at Gate.io assisted us by increasing our daily withdrawal limits with them. Fund movements from Crypto.com custody systems are only possible between approved and whitelisted addresses attached to our cold wallets, our hot wallets, and our corporate accounts at third-party exchanges. In this particular case the whitelisted address belonged to one of our corporate accounts in a third-party exchange instead of our cold wallet. We have since strengthened our processes and systems to better manage these internal transfers.”
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek also downplayed any industrywide contagion fears, explaining in an “ask me anything” event on YouTube that “we never engage as a company in any irresponsible lending practices, we never took any third-party risks.”
FTX’s implosion has resulted in massive losses for pension plans, sovereign wealth funds, and investment firms.
The Epoch Times reached out to FTX, but the company didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A federal appeals court on Nov. 14 entered a ruling against the student loan forgiveness program announced by President Joe Biden’s administration earlier this year.
Erasing student loan debt would be “irreversible,” a panel of the St. Louis-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled, entering an injunction against the administration pending an appeal.
The panel consisted of U.S. Circuit Judges Bobby Shepherd, a George W. Bush appointee; Ralph Erickson, a Donald Trump appointee; and Steven Grasz, another Trump appointee.
They sided with Missouri and five other Republican-led states that had sued Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona after the announcement of the program, alleging that it was illegal for the executive branch to enact such widespread loan relief.
Biden administration officials have said that the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 grants the authority for the relief, which is expected to cost about $400 billion and apply to tens of millions of Americans.
The appeals court ruling came after U.S. District Judge Henry Edward Autrey, a George W. Bush appointee, rejected the states’ suit, finding that they lacked standing to sue on behalf of the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA).
The three appeals judges disagreed, finding that MOHELA is effectively an arm of the state of Missouri and even if it wasn’t, the financial effect of the administration’s debt discharge still threatens Missouri because it would affect the state’s Lewis and Clark Discovery Fund, a capital fund that can support projects at colleges. The fund receives money from MOHELA.
“Due to MOHELA’s financial obligations to the State treasury, the challenged student loan debt cancellation presents a threatened financial harm to the State of Missouri,” the panel stated. “Consequently, we conclude Missouri has shown a likely injury in fact that is concrete and particularized, and which is actual or imminent, traceable to the challenged action of the Secretary, and redressable by a favorable decision.”
The ruling follows a separate appeals court decision to temporarily block the program and U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, finding it unconstitutional and vacating it.
After Pittman’s ruling, dated Nov. 8—the same day as the midterm elections—the administration stopped accepting applications for the program.
“Courts have issued orders blocking our student debt relief program. As a result, at this time, we are not accepting applications,” the program’s webpage states.
Administration lawyers have already appealed that ruling and the government will hold onto information from the 26 million borrowers, including the 16 million who have already been approved for relief, “so it can quickly process their relief once we prevail in court,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
Joe Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Nov. 14 for the duo’s first face-to-face meeting of Biden’s presidency. They discussed the future of Taiwan, human rights in China, and global competition but appeared to reach no new ground on any of the issues.
“We had an open and candid conversation about our intentions and our priorities,” Biden said after the meeting, which took place on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia.
“He was clear, and I was clear that we’ll defend American interests and values, promote universal human rights, and stand up for the international order, working in lockstep with our allies and partners.”
Biden told Xi that the United States would continue to “compete vigorously” with China by investing in domestic manufacturing and allies, according to a statement issued by the White House.
Biden also explained to Xi that China and the United States would need to cooperate on transnational challenges, including climate change, economic instability, and health and food security.
White House Journalist Assaulted
Moments before Biden and Xi were set to hold their discussion, a White House TV producer shouted a question to Biden, asking if the president would raise concerns about China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang and elsewhere. A member of the Chinese delegation immediately grabbed the journalist and shoved her toward the exit in an attempt to forcibly remove her from the room. White House aides physically intervened and said the woman should be allowed to stay.
AFP White House reporter Sebastian Smith filed a travel report detailing the issue.
“Right at the end as we were being ushered out, the pool TV producer called out to President Biden, asking whether he would raise human rights during the talks,” Smith wrote. “Instantly, a man from the Chinese side (he was wearing a white COVID mask with a Chinese flag on it) yanked the producer backward by the backpack. She lost balance without falling and was pushed toward the door. Two White House staff members intervened, saying the producer should be left alone.”
The incident is the latest in physically aggressive incidents by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) diplomatic staff. Last month, leaders of the Chinese Embassy in Manchester, England, including Consul General Zheng Xiyuan, grabbed a Hong Kong rights protester from the sidewalk, dragged him onto the consular grounds, beat him, and pulled his hair out.
Hongkongers holding a rally were dragged into the Chinese Consulate and beaten by the staff in Manchester, England, on Oct. 16, 2022. (Screenshot of Hong Kong Indigenous Defense Force)
Diverging Talking Points on Rights, Taiwan
After the meeting, Biden responded to a question about Xi’s increasing reliance on such authoritarian tactics. Biden said Xi was the same as he has always been.
“I didn’t find him more confrontational or more conciliatory,” Biden said of Xi. “I found him the way he’s always been: direct and straightforward.
“We were very blunt with one another about places where we disagreed or where we were uncertain of each other’s position.”
Notably, the White House stated that Biden raised concerns about the CCP’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, although the CCP’s readout of the meeting didn’t mention any discussion of human rights.
Likewise, there was apparent disagreement on the issue of Taiwan, which the CCP claims is a rogue province of China that must be united with the mainland.
Biden said the United States is committed to maintaining peaceful cross-strait relations and that neither Washington nor Beijing should attempt to unilaterally change the status quo regarding Taiwan.
Far from promoting peace and stability, the CCP’s readout of the meeting said there could be no peace with an independent Taiwan.
“Cross-Strait peace and stability and ‘Taiwan independence’ are as irreconcilable as water and fire.”
An FBI official involved in pressuring Big Tech companies to censor information must sit for a deposition, a U.S. judge ruled on Nov. 14, rejecting an attempt by the Biden administration to shield the official.
Elvis Chan, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s San Francisco office, might not have been involved in the communication that led to Facebook suppressing the first story about Hunter Biden’s laptop computer, according to U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty.
But Chan might still have information about which FBI officials were involved, said Doughty, a Trump appointee.
“If Chan played no role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, then such information will be made clear in his deposition,” he stated in a four-page ruling.
“Chan had authority over cybersecurity issues for the FBI in the San Francisco, California region, which includes the headquarters of major social-media platforms and played a critical role for the FBI in coordinating with social-media platforms related to censorship. Even if Chan played no role in the Hunter Biden laptop communication issue, he may have knowledge of who did, and his deposition is nonetheless warranted.”
Doughty, in October, ordered depositions of multiple government officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Chan. Documents produced in discovery and publicly available information show or indicate that the officials were involved in Big Tech censorship, he said.
In his order, he said plaintiffs established that Chan “has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to COVID-19 and ancillary issues of COVID-19” and that he was “identified as the FBI Agent who communicated with Facebook to suppress a story about the Hunter Biden laptop.”
Government lawyers have tried to block several depositions, including that of Chan, an assistant special agent in charge (ASAC). In a motion to block Chan’s deposition, they pointed to a letter from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, that states that Chan didn’t advise Meta to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“Based on this newly received evidence, the Court should amend the Deposition Order, and withdraw its authorization of a deposition of ASAC Chan,” the lawyers stated.
Plaintiffs, including the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, opposed the motion, telling the court that they never claimed that Chan advised Facebook to specifically suppress the story but that Chan was involved in the communication that led to the suppression.
“Moreover, there are additional compelling reasons to depose Chan—including that he is the principal point of contact between social-media platforms and the FBI Section that combats so-called ‘disinformation’ on social media; that he routinely organizes and participates in oral meetings with social-media platforms about election-related disinformation; and that he has openly boasted about coordinating with social-media platforms to combat misinformation and disinformation,” they stated.
The first deposition took place on Nov. 10, according to court filings. They’re all due to take place by the end of the year.
A concerned parent, Darcey Geissler, has brought attention to an assignment that her son received in a Fairfax County school. In a “lesson” on persuasive writing, students were given an anti-gun essay to evaluate, rather than something with more neutral content, so that the students could focus on the persuasive writing aspect. There was no sample essay with an opposing viewpoint presented.
Though this sample essay is ostensibly meant to be just a learning tool, it does parrot many worn out talking points that disarmament radicals have used over the years. It claims that the Second Amendment is about hunting, that the existence of modern police forces makes the Second Amendment obsolete, and that citizens defending themselves from imminent danger while police are, at best, minutes away, is somehow “tak[ing] the law into their own hands.”
It even mentions the Brady Campaign, and simply describes it as “an organization to prevent violence,” without any mention of their radical policy proposals, such as gun bans, and restricting the right to self-defense, or their junk lawsuits that attempt to bankrupt the firearms industry. Most recently, Brady partnered with the Mexican government against the rights of law-abiding Americans.
All this is not surprising, coming from a school system in a county that is hostile to the Second Amendment rights of its own citizens. In 2020, the county banned firearms in many county owned and operated locations, including its extensive public parks. While disarming law-abiding citizens, the ordinance they passed was not about safety or security. There were no measures ordered to prevent armed criminals from ignoring the arbitrary boundaries (as criminals do), such as metal detectors or increased police presence. This carry ban is currently the subject of an NRA-backed lawsuit.
This situation underscores the value of parents and guardians being involved in passing on American values, such as respect for the Second Amendment, to the next generation. Government schools in Fairfax County, despite being funded with taxpayer dollars, certainly will not.
The United Arab Emirates is engaged in a longstanding espionage attempt to compromise the United States government, according to three intelligence officials interviewed by The Washington Post.
The Gulf Arab nation’s interference in American politics takes the form of political bribery as well as more traditional espionage, as per a report reviewed by the officials in question, according to the Post.
Agents of the Middle Eastern kingdom rely on “campaign contributions, susceptibility to powerful lobbying firms and lax enforcement of disclosure laws intended to guard against interference by foreign governments” according to a verbal summary of the report described to the Post and published Saturday.
Lobbyists for the Emirates have been paid more than $154 million by the country’s government since 2016, according to the Post’s summary of the report.
The country has directed even more money towards universities and think tanks, with an expectation that they’ll produce content amenable to Emirati interests.
The United Arab Emirates is nominally friendly to the United States, with three American military bases in the nation and 5,000 American service members stationed there, according to the American Security Project.
The interference isn’t new.
The document on Emirati espionage operations described subterfuge that dates back through multiple presidential administrations, according to the New York Post.
The report on the espionage described well-financed operations that have succeeded in bribing three former U.S. intelligence and military officials to spy on American politicians, journalists and American companies to advance Emirati interests.
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Intelligence sources didn’t provide a copy of the report on Emirati subterfuge to The Washington Post directly.
Three former American intelligence and military officials were convicted of violating export laws by working for a state-controlled Emirati company that hacked computer systems in America and around the world last year, according to the Associated Press.
The oil-wealthy nation has responded to global energy shortages by cutting its own production, according to Reuters.
The UAE isn’t a democracy.
Power in the nation is held by a dynastic council of hereditary emirs, and the country holds a dismal 17/100 score in Freedom House’s democratic rankings.
The UAE and its neighbor Saudi Arabia have an antagonistic relationship with Iran, and seek American security assistance with hopes of influencing their Shia Muslim rival.
The hesitance of Gulf Arab nations to produce the oil needed to meet American energy needs has spurred some leaders to question the longstanding security relationship.
Three Democrats introduced legislation that would withdraw all American personnel from Saudi Arabia and the UAE in October, according to Military.com.
A town in New Hampshire just set a new standard for the new normal.
In an era where distortions of sexual reality has become commonplace — supporters of Lia Thomas making a mockery of women’s athletics for instance, or Sports Illustrated sporting “transgender women” in its previously iconic swimsuit issue — it might seem like even the outrage is getting old.
But along came a pageant in Derry, New Hampshire, to take things to a new low.
In a betrayal of good faith, good sportsmanship and good sense, the Miss Greater Derry Scholarship Program last week crowned 19-year-old Brian Nguyen its winner for 2023. It was an undeniable win for Nguyen and the small circle of dismayingly deluded individuals who think overweight men compare favorably to lithe young women in evening gowns.
For the sane segment of humanity, however, it was a time for utter disbelief.
Obvious aesthetics aside, the young women here were competing in a contest they had every right to believe they had a chance of winning, and a contest specifically designed for their age and their sex.
As it turns out, they’d clearly been defrauded.
It’s surprisingly hard to find coverage of the Greater Derry Disgrace outside conservative media and the scholarship program’s Facebook page and seemingly impossible to find a justification for the decision, so the only way to judge the judges here is with the naked eye. And in this case, that’s more than enough.
It’s worth noting here that the Greater Miss Derry competition, according to its website, operates “within the guidelines of the Miss NH and Miss American Organizations.”
“The Miss Greater Derry Scholarship Pageant is a preliminary event to the Miss NH and Miss America Pageant.”
Maybe. But it seems like someone has missed the point.
What exactly possessed the pageant to besmirch a quarter-century tradition of providing scholarships to “young women between the ages of 17 and 24 living in the Greater Derry area recognizing their outstanding achievements in scholastic aptitude, talent, character, community service and poise …” by naming as winner a contestant who obviously flouts the very first criterion of being among the “young women” of Greater Derry?
Maybe it was the way Nguyen’s eyes lit up with that oh-so-bewitching charm that made him a winner over his competitors?
Was it the careless poise of his pose? The alluring way he turned to face the camera, the fetchingly girlish brawn of his right shoulder peeking like a lumberjack’s tease between his sash and the garnet of his gown?
Or was there some other element of personal magnetism and innate charm that put him head and shoulders above the flowers of New England’s young womanhood with whom he shared the stage?
(Besides the fact that he literally is head and shoulders above them.)
A biological male won “Miss Greater Derry” which is a beauty pageant in New Hampshire under the “Miss America” organization. pic.twitter.com/aME4Gd4bhm
Again, it’s been difficult to find anyone from the Greater Derby Scholarship Program to defend the decision — a miscarriage of justice like this deserved much greater news attention.
(The Western Journal has reached out to the contest organizers for comment.)
But it’s damn near impossible to imagine any standard the decision could satisfy other than caving to the rule of the contemporary mob.
Considering this is the world where medical professionals — men and women literally sworn to “do no harm” — talk openly about mutilating minors, where “drag queen story hour” is not only tolerated but actually welcomed about by liberal school administrators, and where the transient principles of the “transgender” movement are treated as gospel, it’s sadly not surprising that a women’s pageant has been won by a man. But it’s still infuriating.
Because what’s happening here is a sham. A con meant for public consumption — and the only ones who pay a real price are the young women being hurt.
This is no particular slam on Mr. Nguyen. He’s young. He’s either been deluded into thinking that pretending he is a woman actually makes him a woman, or he’s been convinced that he has every right to try to win a scholarship that was never meant for him and that he has every reason to expect he’ll be awarded it.
A better man would know better, of course, even at the age of 19. But a better man wouldn’t be wearing dresses and trying to win a tiara in the first place. With any luck, Nguyen will grow out of it.
The enablers at the Miss Greater Derry Scholarship Program are a different story.
They’re doing Nguyen no favors by pretending his sense of entitlement is justified. They’re certainly doing no favors to the young women who competed in good faith for a scholarship only to lose out to a patently unqualified competitor.
But they are contributing their part to New Hampshire and the country: a new example of a new standard for a new normal in the Brave New World of the woke.
Daytime sheriff’s deputy patrols will soon be a thing of the past in Tehama County, California, a small rural inland county north of Sacramento.
A statement from the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office said it can no longer cover all shifts in the roughly 65,00-person county.
“Beginning November 20, 2022, the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office will suspend day-time patrol services to its designated areas of responsibility within Tehama County. This added reduction of services is necessary to manage a catastrophic staffing shortage throughout the agency,” according to a release from the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office.
The statement noted that deputies can make more money elsewhere, making it hard to recruit.
A report in SFGate said a deputy in Tehama County would make between $52,000 to $62,000, not counting overtime. It noted that in Solano County, the pay is around $82,000 a year.
“Over the past several years, the sheriff’s office has had difficulties with recruitment and retention of employees, which has been directly linked to pay disparities. A drastic rise in attrition, coupled with the inability to present enticing recruitment efforts have resulted in an unprecedented staffing shortage,” the statement said.
Shortages have forced the office to shift around those employees it has.
As of 20 Nov., California’s Tehama County Sheriff’s office will no longer provide daytime patrols due to the lack of staffing. #Hiringhttps://t.co/ZDXEymGIfv
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“Most recently, staffing shortages in the custody division have forced the sheriff’s office to reassign deputies from the operations division to fill vacancies within the courts and jail facility,” the release said.
“This unfortunate, but necessary restructuring has left the operations division with insufficient staff to sustain 24-hour patrol services,” the release said.
“Sheriff’s officials have met with officials from the California Highway Patrol to discuss the parameters of emergency response within Tehama County. While the final details are still underway, the CHP will be responding to life-threatening emergencies during the hours that the sheriff’s office is unable to provide patrol services,” the release said.
“The sheriff’s office will maintain patrol services during the night-time hours. Deputies assigned to night shift patrol will triage and respond to the open, non-emergency calls for service that come in throughout the day,” the release said, holding out hope that full patrol services might return.
“Obviously, response times are going to be affected,” Lt. Rob Bakken of the Sheriff’s Office said, according to KRCR-TV. “And we’ve made the decisions to limit, as much as we can, the dangers to public safety. But not having deputies on the streets, obviously, is not beneficial to the public.”
A post on the Facebook page of the Tehama County Deputy Sheriff’s Association laid the blame at the door of the county Board of Supervisors.
“We have spoken the Board for several years and warned them that staffing levels are too low. Rather than take swift and decisive action, they have delayed and allowed too many good employees to leave,” the post said.
The action comes as the country’s largest community, Red Bluff, population 14,710, already has a violent crime rate of nearly 9.79 per 1,000 residents, making it less safe than 97 percent of cities in the country, according to Neighborhood Scout.
After Tuesday’s elections, entities owned and managed by Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan have lined up against President Donald J. Trump. There is now a “coordinated effort” across the New York Post, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal against Trump.
The Post is running columns by longtime Trump hater John Podhoretz and gun grabber Piers Morgan bashing the 45th President. Podhoretz’s piece also lashes out at Blake Masters as an “election-denier,” and ludicrously asserts that we shouldn’t support candidates Mitch McConnell doesn’t like. Morgan, meanwhile, is urging Republicans to “dump Trump.” Unfortunately for him, Americans conservatives don’t tend to listen to foreigners that want to eradicate our Second Amendment.
The Sun Wot Won It.
Rupert Murdoch has long tried to use his media empire to swing elections. In 1992, his Sun tabloid infamously took credit for the Conservative Party victory in the election with the headline ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It‘. They relentlessly tried, during the 2016 Republican primary, to prop up any Republican not named Donald Trump. It didn’t work.
Conservatives have more options than one tabloid, a Wall Street newspaper, and a television channel. The strength of independent conservative media means unelected globalist billionaires won’t decide who represents the Republican Party. It’s a blessing. Rupert Murdoch supports giving citizenship to over 10 million illegal immigrants. He does not share our values.
Ryan’s Revenge.
The list of people lining up against Trump right now is simply an indicator of how large of a threat he remains to the globalist elite. Fox Corporation board member Paul Ryan, for example, has been actively agitating against Trump.
He attacked Trump before the mid terms, saying he wouldn’t be the 2024 nominee. He was able to make this “prediction” because a long-standing plan involving key establishment figures has been well underway for over a year. In Fox’s “coverage” of Ryan’s attack, they failed to disclose to their audience that he is a board member of their parent company. Fox has a bad habit of hiding their employees’ and even guests’ conflicts of interest. For example, Karl Rove was a panelist on Fox’s Election Night coverage commenting against Trump-endorsed candidates without disclosing his super PAC spent millions opposing them. It’s corrupt.
Before the results were even in, Ryan tried to blame Trump for Republican underperformance. Think about it – the RINO establishment runs bad campaigns, throws money against their own candidates, fails to gear up for any election fraud challenges, and immediately has a strategy ready to blame Trump? It almost all seems intentional. It’s high time someone asked the question as to whether the GOP intentionally threw some of these races, just so they could have this fight.
It’s also strange how the former president gets the blame for defeats when he’s not the one in charge of the Republican Party’s apparatuses for election senators and congressmen. Where is the talk of the poor “candidate quality” of Mitch McConnell’s favorites? Just look at RINO Joe O’Dea in Colorado. He lost his senate election by nearly 12 percent. A week before the election, a longtime McConnell adviser Josh Holmes wrote that O’Dea is running a campaign that is “hall of fame material.”
A Fox in the Hen House.
McConnell declined to support Blake Masters in Arizona. His Senate Leadership Fund spent zero dollars supporting Masters race. Instead, McConnell spent $9 million against Republican Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska.
Any blame on Trump for Republican underperformance also runs against the facts. Analysis revealed that in 2018 “without Donald Trump at the head of the ticket, Republican voters were much less enthusiastic, and the total House vote for Republican candidates fell by nearly 20% from 2016.” Two years later, with Trump on the ballot “Republican turnout for House races was bound to increase significantly over the depressed levels of 2018… Republicans did better, gaining an estimated 21.9 million.”
We saw this again on Tuesday with Mehmet Oz underperforming Trump in parts of Pennsylvania. They want to blame disappointing results on Tuesday on Trump as simply a means to preemptively crush a 2024 bid, without mentioning people like Murdoch, McConnell, and Karl Rove. And that’s because those people control much of the flow of information on the political right.
If Rupert Murdoch got his say, the Republican Party will go back to the days of his board member Paul Ryan. They don’t want “Trumpism without Trump.” They want a Republican Party without any of the populist reforms brought by President Trump. We should be wary of any other candidate the establishment wants to prop up.
They are also purposefully stoking the flames of war between allegiances to Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Every ounce of energy directed between the two is a gallon of fuel not going into the long overdue war against McConnell and Murdoch. Getting the America First base to kill off each other is communist strategy 101.
If this News Corp/Fox Corp collusion is an indicator of what the 2024 primary will look like, then Donald Trump is back to being the outsider candidate. Donald Trump needs to seize this opportunity as the outsider to recapture the energy of the 2016 campaign. The system is aligned against him and his voters.
We don’t accept foreign interference in our elections. The Murdochs will regret sticking their Aussie thumbs on the scale.
While Democrats and some election observers have raised concerns about the possibility of a so-called red mirage—an appearance of Republican leads in midterm races on election night that will dissipate when mail-in ballots are counted—the real problems with mail-in voting are of a different nature, election experts have told The Epoch Times.
Early voting by mail promotes tribalism within politics and encourages people to vote without knowing nearly all that they could about the candidates and issues, one scholar said.
Some of those raising concerns about the use and misuse of early and mail-in voting have invoked a familiar narrative about Trump-influenced so-called election deniers who are allegedly hostile to, and seek to undermine, democracy itself.
But the real problems with mail-in voting have little to do with the possibility of dishonest attempts to parlay the appearance of victory into actual victory, and more to do with the replacement of the traditional institution of voting, and all its civil and cultural implications, with a remote process little attuned to the vagaries of campaigns and the substance of issues in the lead-up to election day, election observers say.
Upending an Institution
“I have never liked extended or mail-in voting. The public ritual of voting is important to me, to show people your support for the act of voting. I also don’t like early voting because it encourages the tribalism in our politics,” Andrew E. Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, told The Epoch Times.
When citizens send in their votes early by mail, Smith pointed out, they typically act on pre-formed party loyalties and affiliations rather than making decisions based on carefully following the news and assessing the state of the economy, diplomatic relations, and other issues on which candidates base their platforms, right up to the date when they would vote in person if they did choose that route.
“When you cast your vote six weeks before an election, you can miss many of the events that come up during the campaign, but you have no chance to reconsider your vote,” Smith continued.
“The Fetterman-Oz debate this year was certainly an example,” he added, referring to the Oct. 25 debate in which Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman gave a widely criticized performance marked by vague, halting, and sometimes incoherent answers to moderators’ questions and to the arguments of his GOP opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.
When asked to explain his stated support for fracking, a practice that he said in a 2018 interview he opposed, Fetterman answered, “I do support fracking, and … I don’t, I don’t, I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking.”
The timing of the debate came in for criticism because as of the date of the debate, officials had already received 635,428 of the 1,310,189 mail-in ballots that people had requested, according to the U.S. Elections Project.
In agreement on this point is Mark C. Smith, Director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University in Ohio, who noted that the sheer length of time allotted for early voting in Pennsylvania—50 days—made it inevitable that some citizens would make up their minds about the Senate race without having watched the debate and become informed about the extent of Fetterman’s health issues and how far is he from a full recovery from the stroke he suffered in May.
“I find early voting problematic for that reason. I can’t speak for others, but I want to cast a ballot with as much information as possible. Much can happen in 50 days. I always do my best to vote on election day,” Smith said.
Mixed Assessments
Early voting has its proponents, such as David Carlucci, a former New York State Senator who now works as a political consultant, who emphasized what he sees as its role in a fair and transparent electoral process.
“Mail-in voting is necessary for providing all Americans the opportunity to have their voice heard in elections. In-person, single-day voting creates many barriers for workers, lower-income individuals, those lacking transportation, or individuals not in their jurisdiction on election day,” Carlucci said.
“That being said, early voting does extend the counting timeline further than in years past, meaning that we will most likely not know the results on Election Day night. This year, the number of mail-in ballots surpassed those [received] in 2018 [as of] two days before election day,” he conceded.
Carlucci also acknowledged that he does see the possibility of a “red mirage” that may have serious consequences for the political climate and for people’s trust in the electoral system.
“Unfortunately, that is a downside for early voting,” he said.
While acknowledging that mail-in voting is imperfect, Smith said that he does see ways to make the process more secure. Certain localities have helped light the way toward a more transparent and trustworthy system, he suggested.
“Several states, like Georgia and Arkansas, now require voters to provide additional information beyond signatures that can be verified by state authorities,” he said.
Where margins are tight and the final electoral math comes down to a few thousand or a few hundred votes, the suspense is likely to go on and potentially strain the political process. But, in the current midterm elections, Smith predicted that in some states in-person voting will yield margins so large that it will be possible to call the elections safely, on the grounds that the number of mail-in ballots yet to be counted is insufficient to change the outcome.
“This will drain the drama out of some of the situations,” he said.
Painful lesson for GOP leaders who tout in-person voting
PHILADELPHIA—Call it “the White Wave.” A flood of white envelopes containing mail-in ballots lofted Democrat candidates to victories in several key Nov. 8 races.
Case in point: Democrat John Fetterman will occupy Pennsylvania’s coveted U.S. Senate seat instead of Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz.
In that race—and several others—mail-in ballots acted as a breaker against the “Red Wave” of wins that Republican leaders had hoped would wash across the nation at a time when Congress and the White House are both Democrat-controlled.
The lopsided numbers in the Fetterman-Oz race starkly reveal how key the mail-in segment of the electorate has become despite Republicans’ emphasis on in-person voting.
Based on unofficial tallies available as of Nov. 9, Oz drew 500,000 more voters to visit the polls on Election Day than Fetterman did. But that margin wasn’t enough.
Fetterman’s mail-in total exceeded 868,000–quadruple Oz’s total in that column. The result: a 655,000-vote difference in Fetterman’s favor.
Mail-in Pros and Cons
Jacob Neiheisel, professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, told The Epoch Times in a Nov. 9 interview that it appears to be a tactical mistake to encourage one method of voting while discouraging others.
“You want your supporters to use anything they can,” he said. “That’s Election Day voting, early voting, absentee … whatever tool is most effective for you.”
He thinks that might help deliver more Republican victories and counteract the Democrats’ effective use of mail-in voting campaigns.
However, Neiheisel harbors concerns about early voting methods, such as mailing in ballots or voting in person weeks ahead of Election Day.
While he thinks it’s great to make it easy for citizens to exercise their right to vote, Neiheisel worries about pitfalls.
“What happens if the candidate dies before election day? What happens if new information comes in that might have changed your mind?” he asked.
Fetterman, for example, may have benefited from votes that were mailed before voters could see his Oct. 25 debate with Oz. Pennsylvania rules vary by county, but some places allow voters to submit absentee ballots and mail-ins up to 50 days prior to an election.
That means many votes were cast well before Fetterman stammered his way through the showdown, laying bare the apparent effects of the stroke he suffered in May and raising questions about whether his health could withstand the rigors of a U.S. Senate job.
However, early voters “tend to be super-engaged,” and very partisan, Neiheisel said, so it’s likely that few of them would wish they could change their already-submitted choices.
Many Reasons for Victories, Defeats
Although the mail-in ballots certainly were a major factor in Oz’s defeat, Neiheisel said campaign successes and failures are always multifaceted. He noted that Fetterman appeared to use social media more effectively than Oz did.
Fetterman used Twitter and other platforms to neutralize Oz’s attacks, and also “painted Oz as an outsider from the get-go,” Neiheisel said, aggravating voters who resented the notion of sending “a New Jersey guy” to represent the Keystone State in the U.S. Senate.
Fetterman is a lifelong Pennsylvanian and former small-town mayor before he took on his current role as lieutenant governor. He created feelings of connectedness with voters by using lingo that might be called “Pittsburghese.”
On his Twitter feed, Fetterman repeatedly referred to supporters as “yinz,” a Pittsburgh version of the folksy Southern expression, “y’all.”
Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, told The Epoch Times that even before former President Donald Trump and other GOP leaders expressed distrust in the security of mail-in balloting, Republican voters seem to have preferred in-person voting.
He thinks part of the Republican emphasis on getting voters to show up at the polls on Election Day reflects their acknowledgment of a longtime reality—”Republicans know that they don’t generally do that well” with absentee and mail-in balloting, Bullock said.
“For whatever reason, Republican voters don’t trust anything other than showing up in person.”
It remains to be seen whether GOP leaders will try to change that.
Joe Biden announced a multimillion-dollar “Climate Gender Equity Fund” at the U.N. COP27 climate conference in Egypt on Nov. 11, with the stated aim of boosting women’s participation in climate change issues.
The fund will have an initial seed funding of $6 million, with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Amazon each contributing half of the funding. The project aims to “leverage private sector contributions” to ensure women have the capital, network, and technical skills necessary to scale and develop climate solutions, according to a Nov. 11 fact sheet released by the White House.
“The Fund is enabled by USAID’s commitment to gender-responsive climate action, including its allocating more than $21 million from the Gender Equity and Equality Action (GEEA) Fund, surpassing its $14 million COP26 commitment,” the fact sheet stated.
Amazon’s $3 million contribution is part of the company’s $53 million fund that seeks to accelerate women’s climate innovation. Amazon will act as the founding partner of the Climate Gender Equity Fund.
In a statement, Kara Hurst, vice president of worldwide sustainability at Amazon, said there are gender inequalities that persist in climate finance that need to be addressed, and women entrepreneurs must have an “equal seat” at the table on such issues.
“We’re proud to collaborate with USAID and the Biden administration to help scale women-led climate solutions globally. This is just one part of our broader Climate Pledge goal to reach net zero carbon by 2040,” she said.
In August, Biden signed the $430 billion climate spending bill, which sets aside $386 billion for green energy tax credits and subsidies.
Anti-Fossil Fuel Stance
Biden’s new climate fund comes as he increases the ongoing attack against fossil fuels. At a rally on Nov. 6, Biden said, “No more drilling,” following an exchange with a climate protestor, insisting that no new oil drilling has formed under his administration.
During his presidential election campaign, Biden promised to eliminate fossil fuels. In a debate with then-President Donald Trump, Biden pledged to shift the country away from oil. After becoming president, Biden canceled the Keystone Pipeline project and issued an executive order blocking new drilling leases on federal properties.
In an interview with Fox News, Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil & Gas Association, called Biden’s “no drilling” remark aligning with the present administration’s hostility toward fossil fuels.
“Americans deserve energy security, and it’s time our federal government treated oil and natural gas like an asset, not a liability,” he said.
According to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, Biden ranks top on the list of presidents when it comes to issuing the fewest acres of land for federal oil and gas leases since the late 1940s.
In June, the Department of Interior announced a five-year oil and gas leasing plan according to which the agency has the power not to hold any new lease sales until the end of 2028.
Man who facilitated Iraq’s first free election, on needed election reforms
Election integrity was paramount on Jan. 30, 2005, when Iraq held its first free election in years to choose an entirely new National Assembly. Retired Marine Reserve Colonel Frank Ryan, today a Republican state representative in the Pennsylvania House, had been called out of retirement and was responsible for pulling together election security with the interim Iraqi government.
It was important that voting was simple for citizens and that they had confidence in the results.
People waiting to vote in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2005. (Frank Ryan)
Ryan was one of the few Americans permitted at Iraqi polling places. He attended the Iraqi government meeting when they were counting the ballots that election night.
“They did a tremendous job of making sure that they had a bipartisan group of people monitoring the counting of the ballots,” Ryan said. “And by the way, we got the electoral results done the same day. Just saying.” In the end, some people were disappointed their candidate didn’t win, but there were not accusations of fraud, Ryan said, because the election had a robust system of controls.
“We worked with the Deputy Minister of National Security, and the Multinational Force Iraq, to make sure that we had all the polling places covered,” Ryan told The Epoch Times. “We had the rules of engagement relative to the counting of the ballots. We had tremendous security of all the ballots. We knew how many were issued at the polling places. We had complete control. And then obviously, the ultimate control was the dye on the finger to determine that you’ve already voted.”
Frank Ryan in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2005. (Frank Ryan)
Voting was risky. The insurgency, al-Qaeda, said they were going to kill anyone who voted. There was no mail-in balloting, yet nearly 75 percent of Iraqis showed up in person to vote. Each voter dipped their finger in purple ink, a stain to prevent people from voting twice. A group of women in their 70s stood together, Ryan recalls, and they held their ink-stained index fingers up. “They were showing that they weren’t going to be intimidated.”
The night before the election, a rocket hit the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, killing two Americans who worked there and wounding five others.
“One of the deputy ministers in national security called me up the morning of the election, and he was crying. I said, ‘Are you OK?’ and he said, ‘Today, my mother voted freely for the first time in her life. I wanted you to thank the American people for the sacrifices that they’ve done for the Iraqi people so that we can be free. And please tell those families that their children did not die in vain.’ And I started to cry, to think it meant that much to him.”
The dye on their hands was not going to come off in a day, Ryan said. It was going to be there for a while. “They knew they could be executed for it, and they didn’t care. Voting meant that much to them.”
The privilege of voting and trust in the results cannot be taken for granted.
“The entire framework of our nation as a republic is based upon trust that people have in the system, that the elections are fair and secure,” Ryan said.
Leaving Office to Get Things Done
As a state representative, Ryan, who is also a certified public accountant, has worked on legislation to improve election controls and build voter trust. With Republican Rep. Seth Grove, he worked on Pennsylvania House Bill 1300 in 2021, an election reform bill vetoed by Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf.
This year, Ryan announced his retirement at the end of his term in December. But he is not done working on election security. “I think I can have a bigger impact on public policy outside of the legislature, than from within it,” Ryan said, adding that it is a sad truth that it is hard for legislators to get things done. “I intend to work specifically on election security and internal controls, and the elimination of property taxes for schools.”
Ryan believes he can better mobilize public support around these issues as a private citizen.
“Even the Democrats I’ve talked to want safe and secure elections,” Ryan said. “Democrats and Republicans want to get this fixed, but sometimes they get pressure from their leadership who are being leaned on by outside influences or special interest groups.” Ryan is writing a book about this issue. “It’s going to be about how special interest groups control the agenda in Harrisburg and in D.C.”
When he thinks about election reform, Ryan looks at issues through the lens of his accounting experience.
He would like to see reconciliation by the precinct, comparing the number of voters to the number of ballots cast, and details defining each extra ballot.
It is expected that every county will have a surplus, Ryan explained. If a voter makes a mistake, their ballot is voided, and they are given a new one. Now that voter accounts for two ballots. This should be tracked. The legislation Wolf vetoed called for this and other types of audit mechanisms. Each county handles elections a little differently, he says, and there should be some uniform guidelines for how things are done. He also believes voters should be required to show identification.
“There are too many flaws in the processes,” Ryan said. “If the elections are not close, everybody’s got full faith and confidence in those results. Like there’s no doubt in my mind that Fetterman won. I’m not happy about it. People didn’t ask me if I was happy about the results. But I do believe they were accurate. But if you were to tell me the race was within 20,000 votes, I wouldn’t be able to make that same assertion.”
That is why election security processes must be reformed, he said.
“I accept the results because I believe that it was the will of the people,” Ryan said. “And that’s my responsibility, to make sure that the election systems accurately reflect the will of the people. That’s the constitutional provisions that I swore to uphold when I became a United States Marine on Dec. 18, 1969.”
Cameras at the vote counting facility in a Nevada county still counting midterm election votes stopped broadcasting overnight, officials said on Nov. 10.
The livestream computer application that provides the feeds “lost connection with” the cameras at 11:24 p.m. on Wednesday, according to Bethany Drysdale, a spokesperson for Washoe County.
All staff members left for the night about an hour before the issue and none returned until 7 a.m. on Thursday morning, county officials said.
The connection was restored just before 8 a.m. on Nov. 10.
The Washoe County security administrator was said to have reviewed security cameras at the building, which run on a different system. The cameras showed that no person entered the ballot room or Registrar’s Office while the live feeds were cut off.
A review of staff badges also indicated that no one entered the ballot room or office.
“In the future we will look for a solution that would prevent software disruptions or simply not offer a courtesy livestream feed,” Drysdale said in a statement. “Washoe County has been at the forefront of trying to innovate election transparency, but we have moved from an election night to a much longer election timeframe. The technology we are using to provide this livestream cannot keep up with these demands. We suggest enhancing transparency with security cameras rather than courtesy livestream cameras in future elections.”
Washoe County is among multiple counties in Nevada that have not yet completed tallying for the midterms, even though polls closed on Tuesday night.
Some 100,000 ballots, all cast by mail, remained uncounted as of Thursday afternoon, the Reno Gazette Journal reported. That included more than 50,000 ballots in Clark County.
State law requires election officials to count absentee ballots as long as they were postmarked by Election Day and received by Sunday.
In the latest tranche of votes, reported Thursday by Washoe County and other jurisdictions, Democrats Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Nevada Secretary of State hopeful Francisco Aguilar gained more votes than their rivals, former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt and Republican Jim Marchant, according to KOLO-TV.
Laxalt still leads Cortez Masto by about 9,000 votes while Aguilar has about 5,350 more votes than Marchant, according to results posted by the office of the Nevada Secretary of State.
Laxalt and the senator have each said they’re confident they will be the winner when the vote count is finally done.
That race could end up determining which party controls the Senate, which is currently split 50–50. Democrats can break ties through Vice President Kamala Harris, the president of the upper chamber.
Two other races—Arizona and Georgia, the latter heading to a runoff—remain uncalled. The race in Alaska is uncalled but Republicans have the top two vote-getters.
In light of the clown show that was the election on Tuesday I wanted to share some of my thoughts on what I see as the path forward from here. I made a post on Gab yesterday that got tens of thousands of engagements both on and off Gab. I think it’s important to analyze why this post resonated so widely and where we go from here.
I see everyone on the right fighting about Trump vs DeSantis for 2024 and I just laugh to myself. The presidency in 2024 is a pipe dream, with DeSantis or Trump on the ticket. To be frank I don’t know if we’ll ever see a Republican president again. Millions and millions of illegals pouring over our border and being distributed to key swing states. An electorate trained to believe that hundreds of thousands of mail in ballots appearing is normal. Demographics is destiny. He who controls the machines controls the outcome. We didn’t fix 2020 and we didn’t build the wall so don’t expect another “free and fair” election.
One thing I noticed in the thousands of replies of this post is the unity across the generations. If you know anything about the Gab community, or perhaps from your own experience with the people in your own life, it’s that Boomers and Zoomers rarely agree on anything especially when it comes to political strategy.
On this subject though there seems to be a mass consensus across every generation from young to old: between election fraud, citizen disenfranchisement via decades of illegal aliens invading our country, and the Regime’s total control over the flow of information and censorship of any dissent: Republicans have zero chance of winning the Presidency in 2024.
Millions of people are waking up to the reality that a small percentage of the population controls 98% of the flow of information and news to the people. This is incredibly important. No other political issue matters more. He who controls the media controls the minds of the masses. It’s that simple.
In Russia, where gay propaganda is banned, 70% of people oppose gay marriage and that number has been increasing in recent years.
In America, where opposition to LGBT is heavily censored, 70% of people support gay marriage and that number has been increasing in recent years.
Democracy is purely about information control.
As the top commenter on this post pointed out, German conservative revolutionaries like Oswald Spengler realized this in the early 1900’s.
Democracy has become a weapon of moneyed interests. It uses the media to create the illusion that there is consent from the governed. The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. The notion of democracy is often no different than living under a plutocracy or government by wealthy elites. -Oswald Spengler
Democracy also appears to be when the Godless unmarried whores of Babylon select your leaders so they can continue to slaughter their children. 66% of Democratic voters answered “never ” when asked how often they attend religious services. 68% of unmarried women voted Democrat in this election and broke Democrat by a whopping 37 points.
The fact that there is even a “debate” about why murdering babies and castrating/sexualizing children is morally, legally, and philosophically wrong is all you need to know about the state of this country. We deserve God’s righteous wrath and we are getting it.
People like Fetterman “winning” is just another Regime humiliation ritual on the American people. They have that much control over our country that they can have Biden installed in the Presidency and Fetterman—who has literal brain damage—installed in the US Senate.
We have to remember that the people in power are rootless cosmopolitan globalist elites. They don’t see themselves as Americans. They see themselves as “global citizens.” They have no pride in our country. They hate it, they hate us, and they want to humiliate Americans while extracting as much of our resources, labor, and military power as possible.
The Path Forward: Balkanize and Build
Voting harder isn’t going to cut it. We have to build. The existing system will collapse. It’s not a matter of if, but when. When that happens we need to have Christian infrastructure in place to fill the power vacuum. The Amish have had it right this entire time. Their communities are growing and thriving. They will continue to do well. We must become a form of neoamish, building sovereign communities and families away from Babylon. Technology is okay and a good tool. It’s something we can use to our advantage to communicate, build, and engage in commerce with one another.
We are the new pilgrims. We must move to deep red states, push them further right, build, and secure a future for our families. Forget politics at the national level. That rigged game is over. Focus on state and local elections, not what is going on in DC.
Conservatism has failed. It has been trying to conserve a country and a culture that is never coming back and has long been gone. The future of the West depends on those of us who are going to build. Build our own infrastructure, our own families, our own communities, our own parallel economy, and our own strongholds of deep red states. We’ll build a wall around the borders of those states if that’s what it comes to. We need to accept exile from Babylon and get to work.
Imagine if you took all the energy you wasted focusing on the midterm election circus for the last six months and started a business, learned a new skill, built something with your hands, or grew a ton of food in a garden. Shift your focus and energy to building wealth, sovereignty, and security for your family. Many people on Gab did this and are doing this right now.
As someone who has been building for six years now, I’m not going to tell you this is easy. I myself got caught up in the midterms despite knowing that the deck was stacked against us. I won’t make that same mistake again.
Thousands of families are starting and growing businesses in the Parallel Economy on Gab. You can view many of them here. I encourage you to support them and I encourage you to support us on our journey to build a parallel economy and the free speech infrastructure to support and maintain it. You can do so by upgrading to GabPRO, buying merchandise from our shop, or running ads on Gab to grow your business.
Finally I want to remind you not to despair. Jesus Christ is on the throne. We are His people, the actual Chosen People–of every race, nation, and creed. We have and will continue to overcome the challenges of history in the face of evil and his Kingdom will continue to advance as we disciple all nations.
Andrew Torba CEO, Gab.com Jesus Christ is King of kings
The commissioner of the agency tasked with border security said Nov. 11 that Joe Biden’s administration is trying to force him to resign.
Chris Magnus, head of Customs and Border Protection, told news outlets that Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, informed him that he must step down or he will likely be fired.
Magnus has refused to resign.
“I expressed to him that I felt there was no justification for me to resign when I still cared deeply about the work I was doing and felt that that work was focused on the things I was hired to do in the first place,” Magnus told the Los Angeles Times.
“I am excited about the progress I made and look forward continuing that work,” he added.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
CBP is part of DHS.
Both Magnus and Mayorkas are appointees of Biden.
Mayorkas took his position in early 2021, shortly after Biden assumed office. Magnus, the former police chief of Tucson, Arizona, assumed office in December 2021 after a 50–47 vote by the U.S. Senate.
Under Biden, illegal immigration has skyrocketed as the president and Mayorkas reversed or altered key Trump-era policies and efforts, including construction of the border wall and deportation rules.
In October alone, Border Patrol agents apprehended nearly 210,000 illegal aliens, with almost 87,000 others evading agents, according to provisional CBP data obtained by The Epoch Times.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Homeland Security, was among those voicing support for ousting Magnus.
“Don’t stop there! Clean house,” he said in a statement.
Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), a member of the House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Homeland Security, said that Mayorkas should have resigned a long time ago.
“Secretary Mayorkas and President Biden have failed at the border & created the worst border crisis in modern history,” she said.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for strong border security, also said that nothing would change as long as Mayorkas remains in his position.
Chloe Cole, who was prescribed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and had her breasts removed when she was 15, says she will sue the medical group and hospital that facilitated the gender transition she underwent as a minor that she now deeply regrets.
“The adults who were supposed to take care of and guide me as a child failed to do so and they will take responsibility for it,” Cole told The Epoch Times on Nov. 11.
Cole, now 18 years old, and her legal team—including Dhillon Law Group and LiMandri & Jonna LLP in conjunction with the Center for American Liberty—sent a letter of intent on Nov. 9 to sue The Permanente Medical Group, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, and several doctors who “performed, supervised, and/or advised transgender hormone therapy and surgical intervention for Chloe Cole when she was between 13-17 years old.”
Kaiser Permanente stands accused of gross negligence, causing “permanent irreversible mutilation and damage to her body,” according to the letter.
A Kaiser Permanente Medical Center facility in Anaheim, Calif., on March 24, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
The letter alleges that medical professionals informed Cole’s parents that she was “at a high risk for suicide, unless she socially and medically transitioned to appear more like a male.” Her parents were allegedly asked, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?”
Cole is seeking “punitive damages based on the evidence of malice, oppression and fraud,” according to the letter.
“The medical system shouldn’t dictate the future of young children’s lives. Through this legal action, the ‘professionals’ involved will be held accountable for their despicable plot to mutilate children and financially benefit from it,” said Harmeet Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty. “We will break the cycle of them breaking our children before it’s too late.”
Cole recently testified against “gender-affirming health care” legislation that made California a transgender sanctuary state. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 107 authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) into law last month.
The legislation has been widely protested by parental rights groups opposed to minors receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender transition surgeries.
“My teenage life has been the culmination of excruciating pain, regret, and, most importantly, injustice,” Cole said on Nov. 10 in a statement. “What is worse is that I am not alone in my pain. I will see to the fact that the blood and tears of detransitioners like myself will not lay waste. It is impossible for me to recoup what I have lost, but I will insure no children will be harmed at the hands of these liars and mutilators.”
Chloe Cole tearfully shares her detransition journey in Anaheim, Calif., on Oct. 8, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
The Center for American Liberty also alleged Kaiser didn’t inform Cole’s parents of psychiatric treatment options or any approach that would attempt to treat her underlying psychological conditions “to bring about a mental state congruent with Chloe’s biological sex.”
Cole alleges she was told by medical professionals that the distress she was experiencing due to gender dysphoria would resolve as she transitioned, but after undergoing several phases of transition over multiple years, her mental condition only deteriorated.
“Indeed, her mental health and suicidality issues worsened significantly after she had the double mastectomy,” the letter states. “Eventually, Chloe realized that the answer to her struggle was not surgery and hormones, as she had been advised, but a shift in her mental perspective. She realized that the only way she would be happy is if she mentally accepted her biological sex and chose to live a life that aligned with her natural sex.”
Kaiser Permanente has 90 days to settle the case or respond to the letter of intent to sue before a lawsuit will be filed.
Kaiser Permanente officials didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on Nov. 11.
Terror group pivots online in new front to wage terror on Israel
The Iran-backed Hamas terror group is investing great resources in its cyber espionage capabilities, opening an increasingly dangerous front in its war against Israel, according to a new report.
“Hamas has demonstrated steady improvement in its cyber capabilities and operations over time, especially in its espionage operations against internal and external targets,” the Atlantic Council think tank said in a report this week. “The group’s burgeoning cyber capabilities, alongside its propaganda tactics, pose a threat to Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and U.S. interests in the region—especially in tandem with the group’s capacities to fund, organize, inspire, and execute kinetic attacks.”
While Hamas is well-known for its deadly terror strikes on Israel, the group is putting an increased emphasis on its virtual attack networks, which should not be underestimated, according to the report. “It comes as a surprise to many security experts that Hamas—chronically plagued by electricity shortages in the Gaza Strip, with an average of just 10 to 12 hours of electricity per day—even possesses cyber capabilities,” the Atlantic Council said.
Cyber espionage campaigns allow Hamas to wage outsized influence on its enemies, particularly Israel. Hack attacks orchestrated by Hamas in recent years have exposed Israeli military secrets and infiltrated the country’s law enforcement apparatus, highlighting the danger the terror group poses in the virtual world.
Cyber campaigns, the report says, allow Hamas “to engage and inflict far more damage on powerful actors, like Israel, than would otherwise be possible in conventional conflict,” where munitions and other expensive military hardware is needed.
The newfound capabilities were on full display in April, when a Hamas-led cyber espionage campaign targeted Israel’s military, law enforcement, and emergency services networks. The attack “used previously undocumented malware featuring enhanced stealth mechanisms,” according to the report.
Through social media networks like Facebook—”a hallmark of many Hamas espionage operations”—Israeli targets were fooled into downloading applications with malware. Once downloaded, Hamas was able to gain access to “a wide range of information from the device’s documents, camera, and microphone, acquiring immense data on the target’s whereabouts, interactions, and more,” according to the report.
This behavior, the Atlantic Council warns, “is in some ways similar to the Russian concept of ‘information confrontation,’ featuring a blend of technical, information, and psychological operations aimed at wielding influence over the information environment.”
Hamas’s progress in the cyber domain has not gone unnoticed by Israel, despite little media attention on the issue.
In 2019, for instance, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) destroyed one of Hamas’s cyber headquarters, making the strike “one of the first acknowledged kinetic operations by a military in response to a cyber operation,” according to the report. While an IDF spokesman claimed at the time that “Hamas no longer has cyber capabilities” as a result of the strike, the Atlantic Council notes that “public reporting has highlighted various Hamas cyber operations in the ensuing months and years.”
Hamas is also targeting its political rivals with hack attacks, an effort meant to undermine Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Multiple cyber campaigns have been aimed at Fatah, Abbas’s political party, as well as government officials in Egypt.
“Hamas’s ability to leverage the cyber domain to shape the information landscape can have serious implications on geopolitics,” according to the report. “Given the age and unpopularity of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas—polling shows that 80 percent of Palestinians want him to resign—as well as the fragile state of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian public’s desire for elections, and general uncertainty about the future, Hamas’s information operations can have a particularly potent effect on a discourse that is already contentious.”
Hamas is expected to put even greater resources into its cyber capabilities given the success of past attacks.
“As outside pressures change the group’s incentives to engage in provocative kinetic operations, cyber capabilities present alternative options for Hamas to advance its strategy,” according to the report. “Hamas’s cyber capabilities will continue to advance, and the group will likely continue to leverage these tools in ways that will wield maximum influence over the information environment.”
The Twitter executive who censored news reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop and referred to Trump officials as “actual Nazis” has quit the social media company.
Yoel Roth resigned as head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety division on Thursday, joining several other executives who quit in protest over the Twitter subscription service implemented by owner Elon Musk.
Roth was at the center of some of Twitter’s most controversial decisions. It was Roth who blocked user access to an October 2020 story in the New York Post about emails from Biden’s laptop related to his business dealings in Ukraine, the Washington Free Beaconreported. Roth told the Federal Election Commission his decision was based on briefings from government officials who said there were “rumors” that a foreign government had hacked Biden and planned to release derogatory information about him before the election.
Roth’s interactions with government officials have stoked longstanding concerns that social media companies collude with the federal government to censor unflattering content. Government officials also briefed Facebook before the social media giant blocked access to the Biden story. Two FBI officials who met with Facebook before that decision, Laura Dehmlow and Elvis Chan, donated to Democratic campaigns in 2020, the Free Beaconreported. It is unclear if they also met with Roth.
Roth worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security’s ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board. According to an internal agency document, the Board planned to meet with Roth in April to ask Twitter to “become involved” in its efforts to monitor disinformation on social media websites. The Board faced intense blowback not only for its Orwellian-sounding name, but also because its chairwoman, Nina Jankowicz, had pushed the baseless theory that Russia was involved in the release of Biden’s laptop emails.
Roth was already the face of Twitter’s anti-conservative bias by the time he censored the laptop story. Conservative news outlets reported on Roth’s tweets from 2017 referring to Trump administration officials as “ACTUAL NAZIS.” He referred to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) as a “bag of farts.”
After Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D., Ga.) church failed to respond to an Oct. 12 inquiry into its charity registration, the Georgia Office of Secretary of State is weighing whether to file a subpoena against the group, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
Authorities are mulling how to ratchet up the pressure on the Ebenezer Building Foundation, including whether to issue a formal subpoena against the church if it does not respond when a Georgia state investigator delivers another investigative letter, a spokesman for the state charities division told the Free Beacon on Thursday. Though it is not clear precisely when the second letter will be delivered, authorities are expected to do so in the coming days.
The Securities and Charities Division of Georgia’s Office of Secretary of State instructed the foundation, which is controlled by Warnock’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, to answer its initial letter by Nov. 2.
The state’s threat of an investigative subpoena against Ebenezer’s charity could pose problems for Warnock as he launches his runoff campaign against Republican challenger Herschel Walker. The Dec. 6 runoff contest could determine which party controls the Senate if Republicans notch a victory in Arizona or Nevada, which are still tabulating votes from Tuesday’s election.
The church, which pays Warnock a $7,417-per-month tax-free housing allowance, intermingles its finances with the charity. The two entities ended 2021 with combined cash and “cash equivalents” exceeding $1.2 million, according to audited financial statements obtained by the Free Beacon.
The charity, which owns a low-income apartment building that moved to evict residents during the pandemic, has claimed in IRS tax filings dating back to 2011 that it is registered to operate in Georgia. But state authorities told the Free Beacon in October that this claim isn’t true. Charities operating without registration can face civil fines, and in more extreme cases, the Georgia secretary of state can bar offenders from raising funds in the state.
Warnock’s ties to his church’s low-income apartment building dogged him in the last weeks of his campaign. Warnock accused Walker of trying to “exploit” the disadvantaged residents who faced eviction during the pandemic and that the Republican was sullying the name of civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. for “short-term political gain.” Walker has placed the issue at the center of his runoff campaign, launching the “Evict Warnock Bus Tour” on Thursday.
The secretary of state’s probe is not the only investigation looming over Warnock. Former senator Kelly Loeffler (R., Ga.) called on authorities to fast-track an investigation into illegal activity at failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s (D.) New Georgia Project, which Warnock chaired from 2017 through early 2020. The Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission confirmed Monday that it was aware of the allegations against the New Georgia Project but said its hands were tied until after the 2022 election is decided.
Ebenezer executive pastor John Vaughn and board chairman Ken Palmer did not return requests for comment.
THE ANTI-TRUMP BLAME GAME IS JUST THE GOP PROJECTING ITS OWN FAILURES ONTO THE FORMER PRESIDENT. BELIEVE ME – THEY DID IT TO ME, TOO.
The corporate media is working overtime to hide the Republican establishment’s failures in the 2022 midterm elections –perpetuating a myth that Donald J. Trump dragged his endorsed candidates down. This is a complete lie, told in order to embolden GOP leaders in Washington D.C., and ignores the fact that in so many instances, this same “McLeadership” set MAGA candidates up for failure.
In my situation, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) – led by Chairman Tom Emmer – backed one of my opponents in the primary. She finished in third place, with less than 30 percent of the total Republican vote. Now Tom Emmer wants a promotion.
During my primary, the local, establishment GOP shunned me. In fact, the Erie County GOP apparatus even went so far as to write a letter to the local liberal media giving them their endorsement, violating their own charter. Right before the primary, establishment operatives from the Lucas County Young Republican Club posted false images on Twitter claiming I sent messages calling Trump an idiot in an effort to sway him from endorsing me. It worked, in part, thwarting an early endorsement. But Trump still graciously gave me a shout out at the rally in Gallion, Ohio, boosting my standing, which led to my primary win.
Right after that, Trump gave me his full endorsement and made a contribution to my campaign. We also had several telephone calls, wherein he offered me his complete support. The NRCC, on the other hand, offered nothing but passive support, dragging their feet behind the scenes. They delayed implementing me into their Young Guns program, which cost our campaign a significant amount of donor exposure.
Finance.
Once I finally did become part of that program, I was given a commitment of $970,000, to be contributed to my campaign, in pre-bought media. I was assigned a field director who was extremely invasive. They demanded involvement in creating and reviewing my campaign budget.
Little did I know, this intervention would leave me desperately dependent on them for all television and radio advertising. And despite my attempts at better judgment, they intervened on fundraising efforts, and in many cases prohibited me from raising money from Washington, D.C.
This involvement also stretched into communications. Their representatives expressed frustration after I took part in interviews and pledged support for President Trump, despite the fact that Trump carried the district during previous election cycles. They simply did not want me talking about him. My staff would tell me the NRCC was angry, and that I needed to tighten it up on their messaging, or lose campaign funds. They hung this threat over our necks like the sword of Damocles.
Then – when the Associated Press put out a hit piece on me – I was instructed how to respond, with NRCC staff actually writing the reply. A reply that I didn’t even totally agree with. But again, I was told to put it out, or I would risk losing their support. I was placed under a gag and told not to speak to media until told otherwise – a strategy which had me sitting around for two days while the story caught wind. Finally, I had enough and spoke out on Facebook, angering the NRCC, and eventually causing them to pull out of the race entirely.
Here’s the kicker: I disproved that hit piece on me, and the Associated Press made multiple corrections. The story didn’t have much impact locally, but it did nationally. What made the most impact was the fact that the NRCC left the campaign to die. Tom Emmer’s team gave my Democrat opponent the chance to tell constituents that the Republican Party had abandoned me. With limited funding, I could not effectively fight back. Meanwhile, my opponent capitalized.
‘It Was a Mistake’.
NRCC leadership continued to call me, apologizing profusely, admitting that it was a mistake for them to pull out. After all that, they still claimed to privately have my back, and told me that I could still win. They claimed their actions were a function of their Political Action Committee (PAC), and that they had no actual control. In hindsight, I realize it all of this was just an effort to keep tabs on me.
A few weeks later they had me conduct a poll with Fabrizio. I was told if I was within margin, their support would return. So much for all the establishment GOP claims that it is Trump who only backs people when he is sure they can win. That’s actually what the GOP – not Trump – does!
The polls showed I was down, but also concluded I was only down because of my inability to fight back against the Democrat narrative. Thanks again, NRCC!
It also showed there were still enough undecided voters, and that all I needed was to get on TV. This still wasn’t good enough for the D.C. Republican clique. They continued to watch my campaign bleed in an R3 winnable race.
Before I was set to speak at a recent rally, I received a call telling me that I was winning, and that “the cavalry was coming”. I assumed this meant they would be buying media. It didn’t happen. They just wanted me to believe they were supporting, in case I won, and in case I had a one-on-one conversation with Donald Trump.
As for President Trump himself, he held a number of rallies in the state and invited me to every one of them. Not only did he recognize me at the rallies, he offered me a chance to speak. He held a telephone town hall that garnered 15,000 attendees from my district. In conclusion to that call a poll question was asked “can President Trump count on you to vote for J.R. Majewski on November 8?”. There was a 99 percent response rate with 86 percent saying yes, four percent saying no, and 9 percent undecided.
Joe Biden announced increased investments in countries and projects related to climate change in an effort to adhere to global climate targets, while declaring steps to limit methane emissions within the country in remarks given at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27).
“Today as a downpayment we’re announcing a $150 million in initiatives that specifically support adaptation efforts throughout Africa,” Biden said in his speech in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, on Nov. 11. “Alongside the European Union and Germany, a $500 million package to finance and facilitate Egypt’s transition to clean energy [will] enable Egypt to deploy 10 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030 while bringing offline 5 gigawatts of inefficient gas-powered facilities reducing emission in Egypt’s power sector by 10 percent.”
Besides that, Biden announced another project underway “between American firms and the government of Angola to invest $2 billion building new solar projects” in the country.
He reiterated his commitment to climate change projects, and said that “the science is devastatingly clear. We have to make vital progress by the end of this decade.” The global methane pledge was part of the efforts, and started with the European Union and eight other countries, which has now grown to more than 130 countries “covering more than half of the global methane emissions.”
“Methane is 80 percent more potent than carbon dioxide, and it accounts for nearly half of the net warming we’re experiencing now, so cutting methane by at least 30 percent by 2030 can be our best chance to keep within reach of 1.5 degree celsius target.”
Biden said that a methane emissions-reduction plan will be released today that lays out how United States is committed to meeting the pledge.
“We’re investing more than $20 billion and domestic methane mitigation to do things like [capping] wells leaking methane, improving industrial equipment in the oil and gas sectors … [introducing] strong regulatory actions, including new proposals from our Environmental Protection Agency, to strengthen standards on methane across sectors especially from super emitters.”
According to the president, these steps will reduce U.S. methane emission from various sources by 97 percent below the levels of 2005 by 2030.
Climate Change Agenda
Biden claimed that, “according to the world meteorological organization, the past eight years have been the warmest on record.”
“In the United States, you’re seeing historic droughts, wildfires in the West, devastating hurricanes and storms in the East.”
As for Africa, “home to many nations considered to be most vulnerable to climate change,” there was food insecurity, droughts, and floods spanning the continent.
Biden said that his administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which included “the biggest climate bill in the history of the country,” will give “$368 billion to support clean electricity for everything from onshore, offshore wind to distributed solar, zero emission vehicles, and sustainable aviation fuels.”
“The new law will reduce emissions in the United States by about 1 billion tons in 2030 while unleashing a new era of clean energy-powered economic growth.”
Biden also said that his administration is requiring government suppliers to disclose their commitment to climate change initiatives “and set targets for themselves that are aligned with the Paris agreement.”
“Thanks to the actions we’ve taken, I can stand here as president … and say with confidence that the United States of America will meet our emissions target by 2030.”
He also called on Russia to stop using “energy as a weapon and holding the global economy hostage.”
Methane Emissions
The Biden administration is pushing forward efforts to reduce methane emissions, mainly focusing on the oil and gas industry.
The new rules on emission is expected to be announced Friday, which follows up on commitments given at the UN climate change summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
According to the Associated Press, the latest regulations take aim at all drilling sites, including smaller wells that emit less than 3 tons (2.7 metric tonnes) of methane per year. Small wells are rarely inspected for leaks.
Oil and gas firms want the Biden administration to make small wells exempt from rules aimed at controlling methane emissions, arguing that such measures are unnecessary for the segment.
The industry claims that the smaller wells produce an insignificant amount of methane and usually run on small margins. Forcing oil and gas companies to follow stringent rules of the proposal could turn them unprofitable.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has been in politics for decades, and never has an election bewildered him as much as the 2022 midterms.
“I’ve never been as wrong as I was this year,” Gingrich, an Epoch Times contributor, said on Nov. 10.
“It makes me challenge every model I’m aware of, and realize that I have to really stop and spend a good bit of time thinking and trying to put it all together.”
People from both sides of the aisle were projecting substantial losses for the Democratic Party amid rising discontent over inflation, the economy, and crime. But that expected red wave didn’t happen.
The Senate is currently a tossup. And with 211 House seats won against the Democrats’ 192, the GOP is still poised to take charge of the lower chamber when Congress convenes in the new year, but with less leverage than initially hoped.
Gingrich, having previously expressed confidence that his party would score sweeping gains in both chambers, is, like many others, at a loss trying to explain what went awry.
He pointed to a vote tracking sheet by the Cook Political Report, a bipartisan newsletter that analyzes elections, which shows a roughly 50.7 million Republican turnout for the House—outnumbering Democratic votes by nearly 6 million.
Gingrich noted this gap could shrink to 5 million when ballots in deep blue California are fully processed. “But it’s still 5 million more votes,” he said.
“And not gaining very many seats makes you really wonder what’s going on,” he added. “I want to know, where did those votes come from?”
It’s a puzzle that the former speaker hasn’t been able to solve.
Questions and Inconsistencies
Part of what made a difference in this race was how the incumbent lawmakers have fared. In both the 1994 and 2020 House elections, no Republican incumbents lost seats to their Democratic challengers, while 34 and 13 Democratic incumbents, respectively, were ousted. Had the same scenario played out this time, “we’d be six or seven seats stronger than we are now,” Gingrich said.
So far, Republicans have flipped 16 seats while Democrats have flipped six— Michigan’s 3rd District, New Mexico’s 2nd District, Ohio’s 1st District, North Carolina’s 13th District, Texas’ 34th District, and Illinois’ 13th District—of which three GOP incumbents lost their seats.
In exit polls by the National Election Pool, about three-quarters of voters rated the economy as weak, and about the same number of people weren’t satisfied with the way things were going in the country.
On Election Day, Facebook’s parent company Meta said it will cut 11,000 jobs, reducing its workforce by 13 percent, which Gingrich noted as a further sign of economic anxiety.
“But their votes didn’t reflect that,” said Gingrich.
The former speaker said he struggled to reconcile multiple such inconsistencies he observed in this election, particularly in the two races that decided the New York governor and Philadelphia senator, which were won by Democrats Gov. Kathy Hochul and John Fetterman respectively.
Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman speaks to supporters during an election night party at Stage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 9, 2022. Fetterman defeated Republican Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
“How can you have 70 percent of the people in Philadelphia say that crime is their number one issue, but they voted for Fetterman even though he had voted to release murderers and put them back on the street?” he said.
“Of the New York City voters, about 70 percent voted for the governor even though she had done nothing to stop crime in New York.”
Hochul won the race with a 5.8 percent edge against Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), with 96 percent of the votes counted as of Nov. 11.
“It makes me wonder, you know, what’s going on? How are people thinking?” he said, questioning why people’s attitudes didn’t align with the voting patterns.
“I don’t fully understand how the American people are sort of rationalizing in their head these different conflicting things, and I think it’s going to require some real thought on our part to figure out what to do next.”
Senate Hangs in the Balance
Control of the Senate hangs on three key swing states: Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia that is heading to a runoff on Dec. 6. Republicans need to win at least two of these races to claim a majority. Both Arizona and Nevada have a sizable portion of votes to be counted.
In Arizona, incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly has a 5.6 percent advantage over his Republican challenger Blake Masters, with 82 percent of the votes counted as of Nov. 11. In Nevada’s senate race, Republican Adam Laxalt was 1 point ahead of incumbent Catherine Cortex Masto as of Thursday morning, with 90 percent of the votes in.
Nevada Republican U.S. Senate nominee Adam Laxalt speaks as his wife Jaime Laxalt (R) looks on at a Republican midterm election night party at Red Rock Casino on November 08, 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Gingrich is sure Laxalt can beat his rival, but certain questions about the vote count keep him on edge.
“I worry about how the Nevada count is coming because they have a propensity to steal the votes if they can, so that has a certain amount of concern for me,” he said.
“The places where Laxalt is doing really well tend to have already voted, and the places where she [Mastro] has done pretty well tend to have a huge number of votes outstanding. So you sort of have to wonder exactly what’s going on.”
Two of Nevada’s most populous counties, Clark and Washoe, had over 50,000 and 41,000 mail-in ballots to count, respectively, as of Nov. 10.
Nevada ballots postmarked by Nov. 8 but delivered by Nov. 12 to election officials will still be counted. In cases where the signature on the mail-in ballots doesn’t match with the one on file, election officials have until Nov. 14 to “cure” the ballot by verifying the voter’s identity.
‘A Majority is Still a Majority’
Another data point that doesn’t make sense to Gingrich was how voters decided to punish Donald Trump’s presidency during the 2018 midterms, but seemingly decided to let President Joe Biden off the hook this time around.
According to exit polls, of those who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s presidency, 49 percent still voted Democrat while 45 percent voted Republican, marking a sharp contrast to 2018 when voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Donald Trump overwhelmingly voted Democrat, at 63 percent.
Joe Biden in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt on Nov. 11, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“I don’t know to what extent it’s because Biden seems so old and so weak, that people don’t hold him personally accountable,” he said. “It’s almost like he’s your uncle. He’s really a nice guy, and the fact that he doesn’t seem to remember things and the fact that things don’t seem to work—you can’t quite get mad at him and blame him.”
It was not an election that Gingrich expected, but he noted that the GOP’s anticipated control of the House was still a bright spot.
“Democrats should feel very good that they managed to totally mess up everything and got away with it,” he said.
“The biggest change in Washington will be Pelosi giving the gavel to McCarthy,” he said, referring to the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). “Because you’re going to go from a very liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican.”
“It’s binary,” he added. “As my wife, who used to be the chief clerk of the Agriculture Committee, said to me, ‘The majority is a majority, no matter how small it is,’ and changing who holds the gavel is a very big change, because it changes every committee.”
Former President Donald Trump criticized Fox News parent News Corp after several negative articles were published after the Tuesday midterms.
A News Corp-owned publication, the Wall Street Journal, excoriated Trump and declared him the “Republican Party’s biggest loser.” It came after Republicans gained fewer-than-expected seats in the House and Senate after promises of a “red wave.” Meanwhile, Paul Ryan, the former House speaker and vice presidential candidate who sits on the News Corp board, attacked Trump.
Another News Corp outlet, the New York Post, criticized Trump and appeared to blame him for the GOP’s midterm performance. “Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall,” the NY Post headline read. “Can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?”
In response, Trump went after Fox News, the NY Post, and Paul Ryan, the former House speaker who became a News Corp board member on his Truth Social platform.
“The New York Post today has a story about the Wall, but my progress on the Wall was slowed down by News Corp Board Member Paul Ryan, who together with the Broken Old Crow Mitch McConnell, weren’t able to get me the funds,” Trump wrote. “I ended up getting them anyway, after two-and-a-half years of lawsuits, through another source, and completed the Wall plus certain additions that were made, which could have been done in three weeks, but no, the Biden Administration stupidly wanted Open Borders.”
As for the midterm results, Trump celebrated by saying: “WE WON! Pelosi is gone, we take Congress and, if we can stop their very obvious CHEATING, will also take the Senate. Big Victory, don’t be stupid. Stand on the rooftops and shout it out loud!”
Some former advisers called on Trump to delay his announcement next week. A day before the midterms, the former president said he would be hosting an event at his Mar-a-Lago resort and making a major announcement, leading many to speculate that it might be a presidential bid.
“I’ll be advising him that he move his announcement until after the Georgia runoff,” former Trump adviser Jason Miller told the Associated Press Thursday. On Tuesday night, Miller joined Trump at Mar-a-Lago while watching the midterm results, he told AP.
Officials in Georgia earlier this week declared that the Senate race between Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and GOP candidate Herschel Walker is heading to a runoff, scheduled for Dec. 6. Neither candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote.
“Georgia needs to be the focus of every Republican in the country right now,” Miller said.
Fox News did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.
In one of the most disappointing results of Tuesday’s election, a deep-red state voted against a law that would have protected infants born alive during botched abortions.
On Tuesday, voters in Montana rejected Legislative Referendum 131, which would have required that medical treatment be given to infants who survive attempted abortions.
Conservatives and pro-lifers expressed shock and dismay at the outcome, with Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips writing on Twitter, “We deserve the judgment we will face for our wickedness.”
This decision was just wrong and disturbing. Now a state has not only legalized the killing of the unborn but the negligence of born babies as well.
Unfortunately, this was not the only disappointment that awaited the pro-life cause on Tuesday.
In Kentucky, another deep-red state, voters decided to reject Amendment 2, which would have declared that there is no constitutional right to an abortion.
Meanwhile, California, Michigan and Vermont all voted to enshrine the “right to abortion” in their state constitutions.
Abortion was a hot issue in this election following the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion nationwide.
Democrats made the protection of “abortion rights” a top priority in their campaigns, even going so far as to describe their pro-life opponents as “extremists” for their opposition to abortion.
Tuesday’s election results demonstrate the deep spiritual and moral rot in our nation, not just in left-wing havens like California, but in deep-red states like Montana as well.
In the midst of these results and as our minds are drawn to the fast approaching Christmas season, I am reminded of the story of King Herod.
It was Herod’s megalomania that caused him to kill all the infants in Bethlehem in an attempt the kill the Christ child. Matthew’s Gospel describes the slaughter, echoing the words of the Prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (Matthew 2:18).
We are a nation filled with Herods, those whose selfishness has allowed the slaughter of untold millions of children in the last 50 years all in the name of “women’s rights” and “equality.”
Much like Herod was judged harshly at the end of his life, we too, as Phillips said, deserve any judgment that we get for permitting this outrage to take place.
Our nation is in need of a deep spiritual conversion. We pray for the soul of our nation, that we all may someday be free from this great evil.
A poll worker’s mistake has led to a court order to open two voting machines in New Jersey’s Monmouth County.
The issue took place in the town of Manalapan, according to the New Jersey Globe.
Deputy Attorney General George Cohen said Thursday that a poll worker “inadvertently failed to get vote results” before the machine was sealed.
Cohen said a poll worker removed two USB sticks from the machine before the results were completely uploaded. Because one has results on it and one does not, officials are unsure of the actual results.
Superior Court Judge David Bauman has given the Monmouth County Superintendent of Elections approval to open the machines.
“The entire process will be bi-partisan,” Cohen said to the judge.
It is unknown if the results found in the machine could change Tuesday’s elections.
Vote totals released Wednesday showed the two candidates elected to the Township Committee with handy margins over their rivals, according to CentralJersey.com.
Initial results showed the two seats going to Republicans Mary Ann Musich, who had 8,986 votes, and Eric Nelson, who had 8,740 votes. Democrat Jamie Herr received 5,082 votes, while fellow Democrat Lisa Lenn received 5,056 votes.
Scanning problems on Tuesday with machines made by Dominion Voting Systems resulted in a large number of paper ballots being required in the county.
Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami-Covello asked the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office to “investigate as to whether this scanning problem occurred based on an error or whether something was intentionally done to create chaos and distrust in the election system.”
Sollami-Covello said officials are “not suspicious of any specific wrongdoing,” but they “do need to investigate the matter fully.”
On Thursday, Mercer County Superior Court Judge William Anklowitz approved an order to open the voting machines, according to northjersey.com.
“Out of an abundance of caution the superintendent and board would like to go in to open all of the tabulator storage compartments that have both a main compartment and an emergency ballot compartment to ensure that any votes cast during the Nov. 8, 2022 general election have been collected and to make sure none are inadvertently left in those compartments,” Cohen said at the Mercer County hearing.
“There are paper ballots that would usually be scanned in and instead of being scanned. They were to be put inside of the machine for security until they were able to be collected and counted,” he said. “To make sure that there is nothing left behind in the machines and that every vote is counted, the court agrees with the position of the superintendent that the machines can be checked to make sure.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—U.S consumer prices rose less than expected in October, pushing the annual increase below 8% for the first time in eight months, the strongest signs yet that inflation was starting to subside, which would allow the Federal Reserve to dial back its hefty interest rate hikes.
The report from the Labor Department on Thursday also showed underlying consumer prices increasing moderately last month, sending the dollar tumbling against a basket of currencies and U.S. Treasury prices rallying in early trade. U.S. stocks opened sharply higher. The report followed on the heels of data last week showing some loosening in labor market conditions.
“Inflation is still too high, but there is evidence that the Fed has turned the corner in its fight and that the pace of future interest rate increases will begin to slow,” said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at FWDBONDS in New York.
“The market is on fire with the long-wished for inflation moderation finally starting to appear.”
The consumer price index rose 0.4% last month after climbing by the same margin in September. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the CPI would advance 0.6%. Soaring rents accounted for more than half of the increase in the CPI. Gasoline prices rebounded after three straight monthly decreases.
While food prices increased 0.6%, the pace was much slower relative to prior months. The price of food consumed at home rose 0.4%, the smallest gain since December 2021. There were increases in the prices of meats, poultry, fish, eggs, cereals and bakery products. But fruits and vegetables cost less.
In the 12 months through October, the CPI increased 7.7% after rising 8.2% on the same basis in September. It was the first time since February that the annual increase in the CPI was below 8%, and the smallest gain since January. The annual CPI peaked at 9.1% in June, which was the biggest advance since November 1981.
Annual inflation is slowing as last year’s big increases drop out of the calculation.
The Fed last week delivered a fourth consecutive 75-basis-point interest rate hike and said its fight to lower inflation to the U.S. central bank’s 2% target would require borrowing costs to rise further. It, however, signaled it may be nearing an inflection point in what has become the fastest rate hiking cycle since the 1980s.
Despite the rebound in gasoline, goods inflation is slowing as demand rotates back to labor-intensive services and fractured global supply chains recover.
Retailers are also sitting on excess merchandise, forcing them to offer discounts to clear shelves.
UNDERLYING INFLATION EASING
Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the CPI increased 0.3% last month after gaining 0.6% in September. The so-called core CPI is being driven by surging rents as soaring mortgage rates price out prospective buyers.
Owners’ equivalent rent, a measure of the amount homeowners would pay to rent or would earn from renting their property, increased 0.6% after shooting up 0.8% in September.
There are, however, signs that rental inflation could soon moderate. The Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), viewed by some economists as a good predictor of rental inflation, looks to have peaked in February on an annual basis. The divergence between the rent measures in the CPI, ZORI and other independent gauges is due to differences in rent growth for new tenants relative to the average increase for all tenants.
The CPI was also held back by decreases in the prices of used cars and trucks as well as apparel. Core goods prices fell 0.4% after being unchanged in September.
The core CPI increased 6.3% in the 12 months through October. The core CPI jumped 6.6% on a year-on-year basis in September.
The inflation boost from services is coming from wages amid tight labor market conditions. A second report from the Labor Department on Thursday showed the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits increased moderately last week.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 7,000 to a seasonally adjusted 225,000 for the week ended Nov. 5.
Economists had forecast 220,000 applications for the latest week. Though job growth is slowing, the labor market remains extremely tight. The government reported last week that nonfarm payrolls increased by 261,000 in October, the smallest gain since December 2020. Employment growth has averaged 407,000 per month this year compared with 562,000 in 2021.
The unemployment rate rose to 3.7% from 3.5% in September. Still, there were 1.9 job openings for every unemployed person at the end of September.
(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Paul Simao, Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci)
Buta Biberaj’s office is plagued by ‘almost weekly mistakes’
A Virginia prosecutor backed by the progressive billionaire George Soros botched yet another homicide case, freeing a second murder suspect in less than a month.
Loudoun County judge James Plowman said the office of Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj (D.) “exhibited a phenomenal series of missteps” while prosecuting a delivery driver charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Biberaj’s office was delinquent in providing defense attorneys with evidence and subpoenas for expert witnesses, prompting Plowman to dismiss the case last week, the Loudoun Times-Mirrorreported.
The bungled murder case is the latest misstep by the Soros-backed prosecutor. Biberaj’s office in October mistakenly released a man charged with murder who fled to Georgia before he was caught by police. Plowman—who served as the county’s commonwealth’s attorney from 2004 to 2019—this year took the rare step of pulling Biberaj from two cases, one of which involved her office’s attempt to “sell” a plea agreement by concealing past robbery charges.
Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC contributed over half-a-million dollars to Biberaj’s 2019 campaign. She is among three other progressive prosecutors who that year ousted veteran prosecutors in Northern Virginia, along with Fairfax County’s Steve Descano (D.) and Arlington County’s Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.).
Michele Burton, a deputy prosecutor in Biberaj’s office, was set to argue that Abdul Waheed knew and served as a getaway driver for Furqan Syed. Both Waheed and Syed were charged with the murder of Najat Chemali-Goode, a 57-year-old mother of two who was shot to death in her home in December 2021. Burton planned to have a forensic pathologist and a member of the Loudoun County sheriff’s office testify.
The testimony would have substantiated Waheed’s ties to Syed, allowing Plowman to put the matter before a jury. Biberaj’s office obtained phone records and text messages between the two that apparently showed their plans to kill Chemali-Goode.
But Burton didn’t send Waheed’s defense attorney the records, nor the notification of witness testimony, in time for a trial.
As a result, Plowman granted the attorney’s request to dismiss Waheed’s charges, given the lack of evidence from the prosecution. Syed will stand trial in April for the murder, along with five related charges. He is being held without bond at the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center.
Burton, who also handled October’s missing murderer case, took responsibility in court for the failure. “I told my paralegal I would do it, and I got preoccupied,” she told Plowman. “I will fall on my sword and say that was my fault.”
But Andrew Kersey, a former prosecutor in nearby Fairfax County, told the Washington Free Beacon that Burton should go further and resign.
“If that was an attorney in private practice, that would be a malpractice issue—it would be an issue with the bar,” Kersey said. “It seems that we have almost weekly mistakes coming from that office—big mistakes on big cases. And I don’t know how you face the victims of crime in Loudoun County and say, ‘My bad. We’re going to do better next time.'”
Biberaj’s office declined to comment.
Loudoun County sheriff Mike Chapman said his office gave Biberaj’s prosecutors a “detailed, thorough, and compelling case for trial,” and he was “extremely disappointed” with how the case was handled.
“Our detectives, analysts, digital forensics examiners, and crime scene investigators poured their hearts and souls into this investigation, working countless hours to ensure that Najat’s family received justice,” Chapman said. “Our community deserves better.”
After many polls had already closed on Tuesday night, former Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki implied that Democrats support socialism.
Democrats lost a huge amount of Latino support in Florida because “socialism does not play there,” Psaki tweeted, saying “the Latino vote is not the same everywhere.”
Psaki’s comment came as Democrats had a terrible night in Florida, even losing the majority-Latino Miami-Dade County, once a blue stronghold. Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio, both Republicans, cruised to victory, with DeSantis winning an astonishing 60 percent of the vote to Democrat Charlie Crist’s 40 percent.
“The Florida Democratic Party has completely collapsed,” Republican strategist Giancarlo Sopo wrote. “This wasn’t just a wave or a tsunami. It was a red asteroid that hit them in Florida.”
Psaki’s tweet also comes as Democrats grow increasingly open about supporting socialism. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D., Nev.) said last month that she was “proud to stand” with a self-proclaimed socialist, while the Democratic National Committee adopted a slogan from Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro for its Latino outreach program.
The party’s shift toward the controversial ideology is likely turning off Latino voters, especially Cuban immigrants and their families. Forty percent of Latinos are “concerned about Democrats embracing socialism,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Psaki’s comment also indicates that Democrats have stopped using the made-up term “Latinx” to describe Hispanic people. Another 40 percent of Latinos say the term offends them, while 30 percent say they are less likely to support a politician who uses it, the Free Beaconreported.
(Reuters)—The Biden administration issued a directive on Thursday saying that pregnant migrant children should be sheltered in states that allow abortions, following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.
The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in guidance issued to staff also said that girls who are sheltered in states such as Texas that ban abortion and request abortion services should be transferred to states that allow the procedure.
ORR is responsible for sheltering unaccompanied minors who enter the U.S. illegally.
The U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned Roe v. Wade, its landmark 1973 ruling that recognized a constitutional right to have an abortion. At least 20 states now have full or partial abortion bans, although some have been blocked by litigation.
About one-third of the 123,000 unaccompanied migrant children who were taken into U.S. custody in fiscal year 2021 were female, according to ORR data. The data does not identify how many of them were pregnant.
Thursday’s guidance builds on a memo ORR issued last year that said pregnant unaccompanied minors should not be sheltered in Texas, after the state passed a restrictive abortion ban. The directive makes the guidance the agency’s official policy.
During the Trump administration, ORR prohibited staff from facilitating abortions without permission from the agency’s director. In 2019, a U.S. appeals court said that policy was unconstitutional.
Thursday’s guidance ensures access to abortion and other reproductive health services for migrants who would otherwise face major hurdles in crossing state lines, according to Brigitte Amiri of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Abortion is essential health care, and accessing it shouldn’t depend on your immigration status, whether you’re incarcerated, or which state you’re in,” Amiri said in a statement.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Leslie Adler)
Republicans nominated a historically diverse, equitable, and inclusive slate of candidates in the 2022 midterms elections. Some were victorious.
Sens. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) cruised to reelection, as did Gov. Greg Abbott (R., Texas), who shrugged off his ableist critics to retain his title as America’s preeminent (and only) wheelchair-bound governor.
Rep.-elect Josh Brecheen (R., Okla.) will be the only member of the Choctaw Nation in the House of Representatives, and if Herschel Walker defeats Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) in next month’s runoff election, there will be more black Republicans in the U.S. Senate than black Democrats.
Alas, more than a dozen Republican minorities were swept away Tuesday by what some are calling the Democratic Party’s “white wave.” In what can only be viewed as a deliberate act of bigotry, Democrats nominated white candidates to run against GOP candidates of color and proceeded to defeat those candidates, thereby excluding them from the halls of power.
Anyone familiar with the mainstream media’s coverage of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama knows that simply running against a woman or person of color is the moral equivalent of trying to exclude all women and all people of color from ever holding political office. It is tantamount to committing violence against an entire community of vulnerable citizens.
Scroll down to see the Democratic politicians standing athwart the GOP’s efforts to abolish hate and create a culture of diversity and inclusion.
(Reuters) -A federal judge in Texas on Thursday ruled that Joe Biden’s plan to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt was unlawful and must be vacated, delivering a victory to conservative opponents of the program.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump in Fort Worth, ruled in a lawsuit backed by the Job Creators Network Foundation on behalf of two borrowers.
The debt relief plan had already been temporarily blocked by the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals while it considers a request by six Republican-led states to enjoin it while they appealed the dismissal of their own lawsuit.
Biden’s plan has been the subject of several lawsuits by conservative state attorneys general and legal groups, though plaintiffs before Thursday had struggled to convince courts they were harmed by it in such a way that they have standing to sue.
Pittman in a 26-page ruling wrote that the HEROES Act – a law that provides loan assistance to military personnel and that was relied upon by the Biden administration to enact the relief plan – did not authorize the $400 billion student loan forgiveness program.
“The Program is thus an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated,” Pittman wrote.
The White House and representatives for the plaintiffs did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office in September calculated the debt forgiveness would eliminate about $430 billion of the $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt and that over 40 million people were eligible to benefit.
The plan, announced in August, calls for forgiving up to $10,000 in student loan debt for borrowers making less than $125,000 per year, or $250,000 for married couples. Borrowers who received Pell Grants to benefit lower-income college students will have up to $20,000 of their debt canceled.
Georgia Republican governor Brian Kemp is slated to join Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker on the campaign trail as soon as next week, sources tell the Washington Free Beacon—their first joint appearance of the Senate race.
A Walker campaign source confirmed the two Georgia Republicans are planning a joint event. Other sources told the Free Beacon that it is expected to take place sometime next week.
The campaign appearance would signal a united front between Kemp, whose primary election was strongly opposed by former President Donald Trump, and Walker, who Trump vigorously endorsed, in a race that could determine party control of the U.S. Senate. Walker and Democratic senator Raphael Warnock were within a point of each other in Tuesday’s general election, but neither received the 50 percent needed to avoid a head-to-head rematch next month.
Walker and Kemp didn’t appear together during the general election, but the two are said to have a good relationship behind the scenes. The governor won reelection this week by 53.4 percent in a nine-point blowout against two-time loser Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams, and his support could give Walker a boost heading into the runoff.
Kemp signaled on Wednesday that he is planning to play a larger role in the Senate race ahead of the December runoff. “We’ve already been in conversations with [Walker’s team] already today and other folks that will be engaged there,” said Kemp during an interview with WSB-TV on Wednesday. “I’m committed to helping the whole ticket.”
In a Thursday night interview with Fox News, Walker said he welcomed help on the campaign trail from any Republican.
“I’m bringing in everybody,” Walker said. “Everybody who wants to help bring this seat back for the American people.”
A spokesman for Kemp did not respond to a request for comment. The distance between Walker and Kemp raised eyebrows during the general election. Atlanta Journal Constitution columnist Patricia Murphy noted that “the two never campaigned together. On the day before the election, Walker held his own events, while Kemp and the rest of the GOP ticket stumped together in a final pre-election push.”
Rather than consolidate their election night celebrations, the two candidates held separate events just a block away from each other near Truist Park in Atlanta.
The Georgia runoff is expected to be a cutthroat battle as both parties vie for control of the upper chambers, and with the Senate races in Arizona and Nevada still yet to be determined. If Republicans win either of those pending seats, Democrats will need to win Georgia to hold on to the Senate majority.
The Walker campaign signaled this week that it plans to aggressively challenge the Democratic incumbent’s character and record. On Thursday, the Walker campaign launched an “Evict Warnock” bus tour that highlighted the Democratic senator’s church-owned apartment building’s attempts to evict low-income residents, a story that was first reported by the Free Beacon. High-profile surrogates, including Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, will also hit the campaign trail with Walker starting Thursday.
China’s communist regime plays a significant role in several types of transnational crimes, according to a report from a Washington-based think tank.
The report by Global Financial Integrity highlighted the issues of forced labor and intellectual property infringement.
The regime itself engages in criminal activity, said the report (pdf) titled “China’s Role in Transnational Crime and Illicit Financial Flows,” released in October.
It also scrutinized the CCP’s role in drug trafficking, counterfeiting and IP theft, human trafficking, and wildlife trafficking.
“China serves as a major source, transit, and destination for narcotics trafficking, with the annual value of the domestic ‘drug industry’ an estimated US$82 billion,” the report said.
It cited data from the Global Slavery Index (GSI) on human trafficking. GSI estimated that, as of 2016, there were more than 3.8 million victims of modern slavery in China. Paring this data with the International Labor Organization’s average annual profit of $5,000 per victim in the Asia-Pacific region, Global Financial Integrity concluded that the value of human trafficking in China reached $19 billion.
“China has high levels of domestic human trafficking with the presence of both forced labor and forced sexual exploitation. Sexual exploitation most commonly involves forced prostitution, forced marriage, and online sex exploitation. Forced labor by state and non-state actors most frequently is used in the manufacturing, construction, fishing, and agricultural sectors,” the report said.
It also named China a “preeminent” player in counterfeit and pirated goods.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated (pdf) that 86 percent of counterfeit goods in international trade originated in mainland China and Hong Kong, worth almost $438 billion when applied to the most recent international trade estimate.
Going into wildlife trafficking, the report quoted a 2017 official document from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, which estimated the value of domestic legal wildlife trade at $74 billion. In other words, China is responsible for more than 62 percent of the global market.
“This makes China the biggest player in both the legal and illegal wildlife trades,” the report said.
Global Financial Integrity emphasized that the Chinese regime not only tolerates these crimes, but also actively engages in certain types of criminal activities.
“The People’s Republic of China (PRC or China) plays an extremely impactful role as a source, transit and/or demand country in many of the most widespread and serious transnational crimes. The country is unique in that the government itself engages in certain types of criminal activity—specifically forced labor and intellectual property (IP) rights violations. In addition, the country’s political, economic, and social policies have extensive repercussions on the presence and prevalence of these crimes, both domestically and internationally. Furthermore, the country’s willingness to cooperate and act on these crimes within the global context has been relatively limited,” it said.
Reliance on Labor Camps
Political activists as well as members of religious groups are targeted by the Chinese communist regime to perform forced labor “as part of detention,” according to the report.
Yin Liping holds up a picture of Masanjia Forced Labor Camp as she testifies before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing titled “China’s Pervasive Use of Torture” in Washington on April 14, 2016. Yin is a Falun Gong practitioner who survived torture, forced labor, and sexual violence in Masanjia and other forced labor camps in China. (Lisa Fan/The Epoch Times)
Although the CCP claimed at its 2013 national congress to have ended the reeducation-through-labor system and closed most of its sites, forced labor continues secretly with the existing facilities changing the name to drug rehabilitation facilities or administrative detention centers.
Channing Mavrellis, Illicit Trade Director at Global Financial Integrity and author of the report, told The Epoch Times that the Chinese communist regime gains two benefits from forced labor: first, it is “how they see the best way to respond to dissidents;” and second, it provides free or low-cost labor.
According to minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that documents the persecution of spiritual group Falun Gong in China, before the persecution began, prisons and forced labor camps across China were mostly short of funds. Many were on the verge of bankruptcy, with dilapidated facilities.
After former Chinese dictator Jiang Zemin launched the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999, the CCP injected huge amounts of money into prisons and so-called reeducation-through-labor camps, enabling them to imprison large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners. The regime then fully guaranteed prison funding and exempted prisons from corporate income tax and land use tax. These prison enterprises took advantage of the preferential policy and used the land, plants, facilities, and slave laborers who receive no compensation for their work, to engage in manufacturing and trade.
IP Theft
The CCP also plays a role as a state criminal when it comes to intellectual property theft. The National Bureau of Asian Research, a U.S. think tank, estimates that China is responsible for 50 to 80 percent of international intellectual property theft worldwide. The Global Financial Integrity report points out that the majority of IP theft is sanctioned by the Chinese regime.
Citing the Chicago Tribune, the Global Financial Integrity report said that the regime not only relies on spies to engage in commercial espionage, but also encourages and rewards Chinese citizens studying and working abroad to steal technology.
The Chicago Tribune report detailed the IP theft lawsuit involving two Chinese nationals working for Apple Inc. These two former Apple employees were indicted in the United States for allegedly stealing intellectual property related to the self-driving car program, including photos, schematics, and manuals. Both individuals were in the process of applying for positions at Chinese companies involved in self-driving car development.
Joe Biden brushed off a question regarding potential investigations into himself and his son Hunter Biden’s overseas business ventures.
In answering the question of what message he would send to the Republicans that floated an intent of launching a probe into his family, Biden replied, “Lots of luck in your senior year, as my coach used to say.”
The comments were made at a White House press conference one day after Election Day, when Biden said he let out a sigh of relief that a “red wave” did not come as projected.
In the president’s opinion, Americans would pay no heed to potential investigations, as “they want us to move on and get things done for them.”
Biden pointed to rumors that former President Donald Trump had called his top allies in Congress to push for details on their plans for impeaching President Joe Biden should the Republicans take back the lower House in the midterms.
“It was reported—whether it’s accurate or not, I’m not sure—but it was reported many times that Republicans are saying and the former president said, ‘how many times you’re gonna impeach Biden?’”
Biden said. “I think the American people will look at that for what it is—it’s just almost comedy.”
“Look, I can’t control what they’re going to do, all I can do is continue to try to make life better for the American people,” he added.
Federal Investigation of Hunter Biden
About a month after the 2020 election, Hunter Biden and Joe Biden both confirmed Hunter is being investigated due to his tax affairs.
The probe has been conducted by U.S. Attorney David Weiss for the District of Delaware, a Trump appointee.
According to an October report citing unnamed sources from The Washington Post, federal investigators believed they have gathered enough evidence to charge Hunter Biden with “tax crimes and a false statement related to a gun purchase” in relation to his purchase of a firearm in 2018.
The dealings of Hunter Bidden with Chinese companies came under the spotlight in late 2020 after the New York Post published messages obtained from a laptop he allegedly left at a computer repair shop in Delaware. Contents of the laptop showed that he had overseas business ties, including with individuals that had links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The fact was confirmed by bank records revealed by Republican senators in March.
Entities connected to Hunter Biden in 2017 and 2018 received millions from Chinese energy giant CEFC China Energy and firms tied to the company, the documents show.
President Joe Biden has maintained that his son has done nothing wrong and that he has never discussed with Hunter his business dealings, a claim that has drawn increasing skepticism from Republican lawmakers.
Republicans have repeatedly called for an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China and Ukraine and have vowed that if they take control of the House after the midterm elections they will conduct a thorough investigation into his dealings during the time Joe Biden was vice president.
“Hunter Biden has gotten away with too much for too long,” Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote on Twitter on Oct. 6. “It’s time for him to be CHARGED! No more delays!!”
Zachary Stieber and Frank Fang contributed to this report.
TRUMP’S ENDORSEMENT SUCCESS RATE IS OVER 90 PERCENT THIS YEAR. NO ONE ELSE CAN DELIVER SUCH RESULTS, DESPITE WHAT THE MEDIA WANTS YOU TO FIGHT EACH OTHER OVER.
The cable news experts keep repeating their new mantra of division, claiming Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is now set up to take out President Trump for 2024. Consider where this information is coming from and what their motivations might be, before you buy into it in the slightest.
If Governor DeSantis does in fact wants to be president some day, he should be willing to express his gratitude to President Trump for getting him over the line in 2018. Instead, many DeSantis backers are echoing the sentiments of CNN this week. It’s an unnecessary distraction.
The Make America Great Again movement needs a long line of successors to Trump. DeSantis could absolutely be one if he can just be patient. But to try and crown him king of the GOP one day after several of his endorsed candidates lost (and where Trump won 219 out of 235 endorsements) doesn’t really work in America First’s favor.
In potential 2024 presidential polling, DeSantis polls at just 10 percent compared to Trump’s 70+ percent. In brief: that dude was born on third base and he thinks he hit himself a triple.
Nothing that happened this week makes DeSantis – who rightfully enjoyed a large victory in my home state, in large part due to the massive inward migration of MAGA Republicans, and in a slightly lesser part due to his laughably hopeless opponent Charlie Crist – the king of the America First movement.
As we begin to get some perspective after the risible “red trickle” falsehoods peddled over Tuesday night, people have begun to realize this midterm election went about as well as any of us had believed.
Trump’s 93% Endorsement Success Rate.
Not only did President Trump win 219 of his 235 endorsed races (that’s a 93 percent success rate at last count), but the Democrats just guaranteed themselves Joe Biden as their nominee for 2024.
In their zeal to create a “no red wave” narrative, they gave Beijing Joe credit for the disjointed, apoplectic, panicked messaging of abortion and the death of democracy. They have backed themselves into a Biden 2024 corner that is going to be long, arduous, and ultimately, defeated.
MAGA Republicans should also remember that they also do not simply fight the corporate media, the left, and the far left all at the same time. They also fight the same Republican moderates who are now whipping up division inside the party. Think about it. In the week Republicans retake the House, and probably the Senate, win a host of victories around the country and with more to come – the corporate Republican class wants to pick a fight with the man and the movement that got us here.
The real Red Wave: When the entire Murdoch empire — Fox News, the N.Y. Post, and the WSJ Opinion section — turns simultaneously on Trump pic.twitter.com/mFY41KqgDp
For example, the establishment GOP in Pennsylvania was dead set against Colonel Doug Mastriano, and they worked hand-in-hand with Democrats to defeat him. When your gubernatorial candidate is being attacked from all sides, including your own, your Senate candidate will also be dragged down, along with congressional candidates on the ballot.
If the GOP had actually rallied around the top of the ticket – Mastriano and Oz – they could have won together and delivered a down-ticket boost. But not only did the GOP establishment in that state lose the governor and the U.S. Senate race, they lost congressional races that should have been pickups. The blame lies with them, and they know it. Hence their projection – as always – onto Trump.
If I were in charge of the Republican National Committee, I would be spending more time talking about how Katie Hobbs – the presiding Secretary of State in Arizona and also conveniently the gubernatorial opponent to Kari Lake – has botched the election process in the Grand Canyon State.
That’s right: Democrat Katie Hobbs is in charge of counting her opponent’s votes. Are you surprised we don’t have results yet? This slow walking isn’t an accident. It is a feature, not a bug. Democrats know they lose those Arizona races if all the legal votes are counted, so it was imperative to withhold the biggest red wave wins of the night so the media could push the “red trickle,” instead. And shame on the Republicans who are singing from their hymn sheet.
Imagine this scenario: the votes in Nevada and Arizona were all counted as efficiently as Florida, reported quickly, and the winners were declared. Would sneering CNN talking heads be able to deny the efficacy of this Trump-led wave in the face of those champagne bottles popping across MAGA country? No. So don’t fall for it.
2024.
The 2022 midterm Senate races were always going to be tougher for Republicans because of the seats up for grabs. Now look forward to 2024, when Biden will be dragging down every Democrat on the ticket, and when Democrats will be defending several vulnerable seats. They are sure to lose several, and will have to spread their resources thin to defend them all:
Kirsten Sinema in Arizona
Jon Tester in Montana
Joe Manchin in West Virginia
Jacky Rosen in Nevada
Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin
Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota
Bob Casey in Pennsylvania
All of those are potential pickups with Trump at the top of the ticket in 2024 to pull MAGA candidates across the finish line and flip those seats red. No one else in the Republican Party has an endorsement rate as successful as Donald J. Trump’s. And no one else will even come close for years.
There will be another red wave in 2024, and don’t let anyone tell you that there was no red wave this time.
New York Democratic congressman Sean Patrick Maloney made history Wednesday, when he became the first Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair to lose reelection in four decades.
Maloney called his opponent, Republican Mike Lawler, to concede the race around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, according to the New York Times. Maloney trailed Lawler by roughly 3,000 votes at the time of the call. The result is a deeply embarrassing one for Democrats, given that a DCCC chair has not lost reelection since 1980, when congressman Jim Corman lost to Republican Bobbi Fiedler in California’s 21st Congressional District.
Maloney’s tenure as House Democrats’ campaign head was marked by months of gaffes and infighting. In February 2021, Maloney hired a former “triggerman” for an upstate New York gang to run the committee’s diversity and inclusion unit. Months later, in August 2021, the Democrat defied State Department guidelines when he traveled to France to party maskless at a billionaire’s estate. Maloney went on to publicly attack one of his party’s most vulnerable House incumbents in November 2021, prompting some battleground district members to call Maloney’s performance as campaign chair “a real fucking problem.”
Still, none of those incidents match the firestorm Maloney started in May 2022, when he opted to run in New York’s 17th Congressional District instead of the 18th, which he currently represents. The decision forced fellow Democratic congressman Mondaire Jones, a black man who was elected to the 17th district in 2020, to run elsewhere. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) responded by calling on Maloney to “step aside from his responsibilities of the DCCC,” while Rep. Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) accused Maloney of “thinly veiled racism.”
Maloney also faced ethics issues during his campaign after he used taxpayer funds to hire both his husband’s personal trainer and a longtime family friend, both of whom had no political experience. And as Maloney’s race tightened in its closing weeks, the Democrat told families struggling with inflation to eat Chef Boyardee.
Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, celebrated Lawler’s win Wednesday.
“Mike is the first candidate to defeat a DCCC chair since 1980 because he kept the Hudson Valley at the center of his campaign,” Emmer said in a statement. “The voters of Putnam, Westchester, and Rockland resoundingly rejected Sean Patrick Maloney’s pro-criminal policies.”
Republican senator Ron Johnson secured reelection to a third term as Wisconsin senator, holding on to a seat crucial to Republican efforts to win majority control of the Senate.
Johnson received 50.5 percent of the vote, and his opponent, Democrat Mandela Barnes, received 49.3 percent of the vote with 94 percent of votes counted as of Wednesday morning.
It was also a major blow to Democrats, who have spent years—and tens of millions of dollars—attempting to oust Johnson, an outspoken conservative and former businessman who was first elected in 2010.
Although polls showed Barnes leading Johnson after the August primary, Wisconsin voters quickly soured on the Democratic candidate as his work with far-left activist groups and history of controversial statements, including his praise for anti-American dictators and criticism of capitalism, came to light.
In September, the Washington Free Beaconpublished a video of Barnes telling a United Nations panel that the world needed to “stymie capitalism” in order to combat climate change and adding that he opposed any “new pipeline construction” because “if the infrastructure is there, then people are going to use it.”
Barnes has praised Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei for supporting Black Lives Matter and said he wanted to be the “Dennis Rodman” of the Assad regime. He claimed Americans who support “God, country, and guns” are espousing the same “dangerous” rhetoric as members of the terrorist group ISIS. He also posed for a photo with anti-Semitic pastor Jeremiah Wright and called the controversial preacher “brilliant” after attending a speech in which Wright accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and the United States of committing “war crimes.”
Barnes, who received significant campaign funding from an organization led by “Defund the Police” activists and was a member of an anti-Israel activist group, struggled to appeal to voters in a state where crime was a leading election issue.
He was slammed by law enforcement supporters for failing to stand up for police during the Kenosha riots, posing in an “Abolish ICE” T-shirt, and for partnering with anti-police groups, including the Center for Popular Democracy, which sponsored defundpolice.org.
Pete Deates, the president of the Kenosha Professional Police Association Board, told the Free Beacon that Barnes’s anti-police rhetoric “100 percent” fueled the rioters in Kenosha in 2020. “He has shown and said things that prove he does not support law enforcement,” Deates told the Free Beacon.
Barnes, who sponsored legislation to end cash bail while in the state assembly, also made several appearances on the Russian state-owned news network RT, where he criticized the police alongside a prominent white nationalist.
Johnson ran on a law-and-order platform while highlighting his opponent’s support for soft-on-crime policies and alliance with the “Defund the Police” movement.
CNN reports: “The first thing you’ll see is a bill to control the border first,” McCarthy told CNN when asked for specifics about his party’s immigration plans.
“You’ve got to get control over the border. You’ve had almost 2 million people just this year alone coming across.”
“there’s a number of different ways” Republicans could tackle the migrant crisis, McCarthy added that party lawmakers would not present a bill to fix the broken immigration system until the border is secure — something that would help stem the flow of fentanyl.
“I think ‘Stay in Mexico’ you have to have right off the bat,” said McCarthy, referring to the Trump administration’s policy that forced migrants to remain in Mexico while awaiting their immigration proceedings in the U.S.
In fiscal year 2022, U.S. border encounters with illegal migrants topped two million, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
But tackling Biden’s border fiasco is just one of several GOP priorities.
The GOP to-do list also includes tackling Democrat-enabled, out-of-control crime and runaway inflation.
Republicans will also be investigating the hell out of Team Biden.
And there is so much that needs investigating.
Newsmax added that “McCarthy said Republicans also would perform oversight and conduct investigations into administration behavior concerning the disastrous troop pullout from Afghanistan, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in dealing with parents and school board meetings.”
And then they should dig into the increasingly ‘woke Pentagon’ and the extreme ‘trans’ agenda.
So, expect investigations galore, and Hunter Biden’s laptop and shady international business dealings will also take center stage.
But what about impeaching Joe?
While McCarthy insisted, “We will never use impeachment for political purposes,” he left the door open to launching eventual impeachment proceedings when he added: “That doesn’t mean if something rises to the occasion, it would not be used at any other time.”
Biden should walk on eggshells for the next two years if he makes it that far without having the 25th Amendment invoked to remove him for senility.
The political power pendulum is about to swing back to the right, and karma is a b*tch. ALD
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
The father of a murdered 20-year-old called out New York governor Kathy Hochul (D.) for her repeated dismissals of increasing crime in her state.
Jason Williams, whose son Ethan was fatally shot in New York City two years ago, said Hochul’s constant downplaying is “tone-deaf to the suffering of families like mine.” Ethan was fatally struck by a stray bullet during a vacation with friends.
“To hear one candidate say to another, ‘I’m not sure why that’s so important to you’ in regards to crime surges in New York is tone-deaf,” Williams said in reference to Hochul’s comment during the Oct. 25 gubernatorial debate when Republican Lee Zeldin pressed the governor to speak on crime and cashless bail.
“The weight of silence of your elected leaders has not gone unnoticed,” Wiliams added.
A suspect in Ethan Williams’s murder was arrested last week, more than two years after the killing. The suspect has nine prior arrests dating back nine years.
“My son is dead because a criminal with nine previous arrests was free, walking the streets of New York City,” Williams said.
Hochul also called the topic of crime a “conspiracy” and said that it’s just a few “high-profile instances” creating a “sense of fear.”
Marc Elias has faced sanctions and condemnation over his efforts to undermine duly elected Republicans
Senate candidate John Fetterman has tapped a scandal-plagued Democratic superlawyer to force Pennsylvania’s election boards to count undated mail-in ballots, which the state supreme court outlawed earlier this month.
Elias Law Group, the firm founded by veteran Democratic attorney Marc Elias, filed a federal lawsuit Monday on behalf of the Fetterman campaign and two Democratic groups to require the state’s 67 county election boards to count mail-in ballots that are undated or dated incorrectly. The 11th-hour legal challenge is a response to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling earlier this month that those ballots cannot be counted. Republicans have raised concerns about mail-in ballots, claiming they are prime targets for voter fraud. Democrats say the date requirement violates the Civil Rights Act because it denies the right to vote for reasons that are “not material to determining that individual’s eligibility.”
Elias Law Group claims that “thousands” of undated mail-in ballots have been cast so far in the pivotal race.
In turning to Elias, Fetterman is allying himself with an attorney who has faced legal sanctions and widespread condemnation over his efforts to undermine duly elected Republicans.
As a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Elias commissioned the Steele Dossier, a discredited but influential opposition research report that accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia. Elias, who frequently accuses Republicans of undermining democracy, fed the dossier to journalists and political operatives in a bid to prevent Trump’s election.
In a lawsuit last year, Elias claimed without evidence that New York’s voting machines were compromised in a race between his client, Anthony Brindisi, and Rep. Claudia Tenney (R.). U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, called Elias’s lawsuit a “Hail Mary pass” and laughed Elias out of court before tossing the suit.
Elias unsuccessfully pressured House Democrats last year to overturn Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks’s (R., Iowa) win over his client, Rita Hart. He also pressured Democrats to overturn an Iowa state court’s certification of the election results.
The Washington Free Beaconreported Elias represented a Virginia-based political action committee that falsely posed as a conservative group in ads criticizing Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin (R.) over his stance on gun rights. A Texas appeals court sanctioned Elias last year for making “misleading” filings in order to overturn the Lone Star State’s ban on straight-ticket ballot options.
Elias represented the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee earlier this year in its bid to redraw New York’s congressional maps so that multiple districts held by Republicans would be redrawn in favor of Democrats. Elias’s gerrymandering effort was criticized even by his fellow Democrats, including former attorney general Eric Holder. More recently, Elias signed on to represent former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum against charges that he defrauded the progressive billionaire George Soros.
The Fetterman campaign has paid $110,646 to Elias’s firm so far this election cycle, according to campaign disclosures. Neither the campaign nor Elias’s firm returned requests for comment.
The Biden administration is facing congressional pressure to fire U.S. special envoy for Iran Robert Malley and suspend nuclear negotiations with the hardline regime in the wake of a growing protest movement that threatens to topple the Islamic Republic.
Rep. Pat Fallon (R., Texas), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, issued these demands in a letter sent Tuesday to the White House and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
“The leadership in Iran,” Fallon wrote, “is beyond reform and deserves nothing from the civilized world. The United States must lead through action, not empty rhetoric.” President Joe Biden must “remove Rob Malley as U.S. special envoy for Iran and permanently halt negotiations on a revival of the [Iran nuclear deal] or a lesser than agreement.”
Fallon is one of the first lawmakers to call for Malley’s resignation in the wake of a protest movement that has swept across Iran and led to a deadly crackdown by the country’s theocratic government. The Biden administration has faced criticism from Iranian dissident groups for its muted response to what could be a burgeoning revolution in Iran after more than 40 years of oppressive rule. While the administration has condemned the Iranian government’s human rights crimes and issued some new economic sanctions, it has stopped short of expressing support for the protesters’ calls to oust Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Malley is seen as the administration’s most prominent supporter of the Iranian government, given his ongoing attempts to revive the 2015 nuclear accord and solidify the regime’s grip on power.
“Enough is enough,” Fallon wrote in his letter to Biden. The United States must immediately get serious about helping Iranian protesters realize their goals of removing the regime from power, he said.
In addition to firing Malley, the Biden administration must rally U.S. allies to isolate the Iranian government by cutting off trade and all diplomatic relations, Fallon said.
The United States should also initiate efforts at the United Nations to reimpose all international sanctions that were lifted as part of the original 2015 nuclear deal, Fallon wrote. This option, known as “snapback,” is a dispute resolution mechanism written into the original agreement that allows any U.N. member nation to trigger the reimposition of sanctions if Iran is found to be in violation of the deal. The Biden administration has refrained from exercising this right to avoid upsetting the Iranian government amid its diplomatic efforts.
Fallon also directs the Biden administration to begin enforcing a cadre of sanctions that were “loosened because of the negotiations” with Tehran. These include executive orders issued by the Trump administration that sanction Iran’s banking institutions, oil trade, precious metals sector, and other industries controlled by Khamenei and his allies.
Iranian officials tied to the regime’s human rights abuses—which include the imprisonment of more than 14,000 protesters and the murder of others—should be barred from entering the United States as part of renewed efforts to isolate the regime, Fallon says in his letter.
The United States should also undertake efforts to thwart Iranian terror operations across the Middle East and provide allies with the resources they need to crack down on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is funding and orchestrating terror attacks across the region, according to Fallon.
The Biden administration must also increase its efforts to provide the Iranian people with internet access, a primary tool used to keep the protest movements alive and coordinate anti-regime activities. Since the protests broke out last month, the Iranian regime has attempted to disrupt these networks and plunge Iranian dissidents into darkness.
“This policy of appeasement must end,” Fallon told the Free Beacon. “That starts with the removal of Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley, permanently halting nuclear negotiations with this thuggish regime, and by substantively supporting courageous Iranian protesters.”
Malley’s position in the administration has become more tenuous since the protests erupted and negotiations over a revamped nuclear deal hit a stalemate. Malley and the State Department have declined in recent weeks to state that Iranian protesters are calling for regime change, eliciting outcry from Iranian-American groups and others that say they have lost faith in Malley’s ability to support the protest movement.
“Robert Malley will go down in the history books as the most ineffective and feckless State Department official of the last 50 years. It’s time for him to go,” Bryan Leib, executive director of Iranian Americans for Liberty, a grassroots group that supports democracy, told the Free Beacon last month. Bryan Leib, executive director of Iranian Americans for Liberty, a grassroots group that supports democracy, who has led efforts to force Malley’s ouster, told the Free Beacon that more lawmakers should be speaking out on the issue.
“Robert Malley has done nothing during the last 20 months to prove he is competent enough to be in this role—he should be taking orders at McDonalds—not leading negotiations between our country and the world’s leading sponsor of terrorist groups,” Leib said. “It’s time for Malley to go.”
Fallon says that ongoing efforts to revive the nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, are yet another sign the Biden administration is not serious about backing Iran’s citizenry in its quest for freedom.
“A revival of the 2015 JCPOA or a lesser than agreement would reward Tehran with billions, if not trillions, of dollars,” he said. “Every dollar of sanctions relief that Tehran receives will facilitate the proliferation of their weapons systems, military expertise, and narcotics throughout the Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.”
Rachael Rollins may have violated rules barring government employees from political activism, outside payments
The Department of Justice’s inspector general is investigating a George Soros-backed U.S. attorney for violating federal ethics laws that bar government employees from political activism and accepting payments from outside groups, the Associated Press reported on Monday.
Rachael Rollins, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, attended a Democratic National Committee event featuring first lady Jill Biden in a Boston suburb last summer. Rollins likely violated the Hatch Act, which precludes government employees from political activism. Rollins also attended a swanky Hollywood gathering in June on a talent agency’s dime, a potential ethics violation.
The Senate in December 2021 voted to confirm Rollins along party lines following a contentious hearing. Republicans opposed her confirmation on the grounds that Rollins refused to prosecute crimes such as drug dealing, theft, and property destruction. She has worked closely with a group pushing to defund police.
A Boston Herald reporter at the June fundraiser asked Rollins if her attendance violated the Hatch Act, and she claimed it did not. Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) in July requested Inspector General Michael Horowitz to investigate Rollins for her “blatant violation” of the Hatch Act.
Creative Artists Agency, a Hollywood talent agency, paid for Rollins to speak at its annual gathering in California. The Justice Department bars employees from accepting payments for travel.
The Associated Press also said investigators have obtained phone data from Rollins and some of her employees as part of the probe. Rollins reportedly used her personal phone for some federal casework, which raises security issues.
A spokeswoman for Rollins confirmed to the Associated Press that their office is “fully cooperating with the [inspector general’s] investigation.” Another watchdog agency, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, opened an investigation on Rollins in August following the fundraiser.
Massachusetts’s Democratic attorney general opened an investigation into Rollins after she pulled over and threatened to issue a traffic citation to a motorist who she claimed cut her off in traffic. When a reporter last year asked her about the incident, Rollins threatened to call the police.
“I’ll call the police on you and make an allegation and we’ll see how that works with you,” Rollins said. She was later cleared of wrongdoing by the attorney general’s office and a state ethics commission.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVES HAVE LESSONS TO LEARN ABOUT THE STATE OF BRITAIN’S RIGHT WING MOVEMENT, OR LACKTHEREOF.
If the polling is even nearly correct, 2024 will produce the first Labour government in the United Kingdom in 14 years – likely in a coalition with the far-left Scottish National Party (SNP) – which also means there is the strong possibility of the utter annihilation of the Conservative Party.
Rishi Sunak is unlikely to lead the country out of these troubling times within the next two years. Instead, his premiership will likely intensify the current sense of calamity and decline. Some will be inclined celebrate this opportunity for a fresh start, but the threat posed by a Keir Starmer (Labour) and Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) coalition is potent.
The thought of Labour’s shadow cabinet – Angela Rayner as Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy as Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry as Attorney-General, and no doubt professional race-grifter Shola Mos-Shogbamimu as the leading intellectual figure – is petrifying to the reasonable person. Though there is a greater menace with a new, Labour government.
Labour’s Litany of Constitutional Vandalism.
Labour’s radical constitutional reform would make Tony Blair’s time in office (1997-2007) seem tame. And given the damage he did, that is saying something.
When the ordinary voter plods into the polling station after an arduous day in the office, constitutional reform will not be at the top of their voting agenda. Modern, celebrity-style politics have ousted the civilized and self-respecting political argument. Few people will even enter the voting booth with working knowledge of Britain’s ancient, uncodified constitution, what it means and from where it comes. As a result, the electorate is both uninterested and unaware that constitutional change is on the way.
Malevolent megalomaniacs wishing to preserve political power indefinitely need not make it a priority in their party manifestos, nor need they be vociferous in their advocacy. People simply don’t know, and aren’t interested in knowing.
Such was the case under the first few years of Blair’s ‘New Labour’, during which – per Professor Jeff King at the University of Oxford – the British constitution was changed more than it had been in the previous 250 years. Then, Britain suffered the catastrophe of Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish devolution, as well as an attack on the legal system itself under the guise of the Constitutional Reform Act (2005), the establishment of the Supreme Court, abolishing the ancient position of Lord Chancellor, as well as politicising the nomination of judges. Then came the effective destruction of Britain’s upper parliamentary chamber – the House of Lords.
Killing the Kingdom.
What would the next Labour government introduce? There’s a strong possibility that we would see a second Scottish referendum follow from the inevitable governing coalition with the SNP.
This would cause the Labour Party a dilemma, because to obtain office, Labour needs Scotland. But that means the electoral system would have to be altered, perhaps with a proportional representation system of voting, and the voting age itself lowered to sixteen. This would also lead to a reduction in age necessary to sit on a jury. It would likely lead to the total abolition of the now neutered House of Lords, perhaps in favour of a “more democratic house” replicating the American Senate.
The likelihood of a conservative-leaning party obtaining office in these circumstances would be diminished.
Then, there is the effect a Labour-led government may have on the death of Elizabeth II. Do we want to leave the passing of the crown and the opportunity created thereof to these constitutional vandals? This has drawn little attention in the last few weeks. It hasn’t even crossed the minds of complacent Conservative Party, which seems more interested in choosing between one candidate representing six and the other representing half a dozen. The difference between all these “Tory leadership candidates” is non-existent and of no consequence at all.
Over the next two years, the threat of radical change – not to the un-reformable mammoth of the NHS – must be prioritised. It must be at the forefront of our national conversation. It is not going to be straightforward given the overall sense of public indifference. But it is necessary as a matter of existence.
The British constitution – although uncodified, often illusory, and unapproachable – occupies a far different position from, for example, the American constitution.
The U.S. Constitution is an elephant in a narrow corridor. One can neither ignore, nor work around it. The British constitution is an introverted and inconspicuous set of values and laws, passed down from generation to generation, as it has been for the last 800 years. It is spread thinly across centuries and documents, reflecting both the beauty and the frustration of Englishness. Its beauty lies in its quietness.
One cannot point and say, ‘here are our values and what we stand for,’ as is the case for those across the Atlantic. The closest document in existence is that of the 1689 Bill of Rights. It created the first modern state by way of being run with a supreme electoral assembly, which was then utilised by the proceeding generations to their benefit. Within the Bill, frequent parliaments, free elections, freedom of speech for members of parliament, no taxation without parliamentary consent, freedom from governmental intervention or interference, the right to petition, as well as the just treatment of people by the courts were all guaranteed.
This became a source of immense pride amongst the British of the proceeding centuries. No parades had to be held, no songs sung, no guns fired, nor any political fights due to the rigidity of an entrenched constitutional order. It has allowed Britain to regularly modernise without overthrowing the previous constitution. It was and remains the most modern constitution in the world, for its timelessness. It has never been a hurdle to progress. Yet, it unites generations spanning more than three hundred years. France, on the other hand, has had five since 1789 alone.
It should concern conservatives of all types how much has been changed and worsened in the past twenty-five years since we decided to tinker with this document. It has already seen much of its value and importance removed or diminished. And with further destruction on the way, it’s about time to ask ourselves whether it is worth fighting for. Because without it, although we may continue calling ourselves British and still wave the Union flag and sing God Save the King, or Jerusalem – we will become that bit more detached from our past.
At some point, so much would have changed that we will turn around and find even these things unrecognisable. Conservatives in Britain have conserved nothing.
The next few years presents perhaps a final opportunity for our first victory in a long time.
Georgia voters on Nov. 6 sued officials over absentee ballots that a county acknowledged were never sent.
Madison Cook, Tessa Parker, Margaret Wolfe, and Linda Walton sued the Cobb County Board of Elections & Registration, Cobb County officials, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and members of the Georgia State Election Board. The case was filed in Cobb County Superior Court.
The voters want the court to require election officials to send the unsent absentee ballots via overnight mail, to extend the receipt deadline for absentee ballots from affected voters, and to let the affected voters use federal write-in absentee ballots at the polls on Election Day.
“Absent such relief, Plaintiff voters, and all those similarly situated, will be disenfranchised—an injury that money cannot compensate. Public interest will be served by ensuring voters have the opportunity to vote and have their votes counted,” the lawsuit says.
The Cobb County Board of Elections and a spokesperson for Raffensperger didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Cobb County officials said on Nov. 5 that an investigation revealed more than 1,000 absentee ballots were never sent out.
“I am sorry that this office let these voters down,” Elections and Registrations Director Janine Eveler said in a message to the board. “Many of the absentee staff have been averaging 80 or more hours per week, and they are exhausted. Still, that is no excuse for such a critical error.”
The situation was attributed to human error.
The office said it was sending unsent ballots overnight to voters with out-of-state addresses and that some of the remaining voters canceled their ballot requests. The remaining voters were urged to vote in person on Nov. 8.
Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center, who are representing the plaintiffs, said further action was necessary.
To ensure the affected voters can vote, the deadline for receiving the absentee ballots should be moved to Nov. 14, the lawyers said. And all voters who didn’t receive ballots should be allowed to use a federal write-in absentee ballot, typically used for members of the military and relatives of those members, the suit says.
“Hundreds of eligible Cobb County voters did everything right and yet find themselves on the brink of total disenfranchisement because they were never mailed their absentee ballots, as is required under Georgia law. Even Cobb County has acknowledged they made a ‘critical error’ and ‘let these voters down,’” Jonathan Topaz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement.
“Only this court can right the wrong done to these hundreds of voters and ensure that they are able to exercise their fundamental right to vote in this November election.”
Just days before the Nov. 8 midterm election, a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge was asked to sequester the state’s military absentee ballots until they are properly verified.
The lawsuit (pdf), called Concerned Veterans of Waukesha County (et al) v. the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), was filed on Nov. 4 by a team of lawyers from the Thomas More Society.
The action arose after a major vulnerability in the state’s military absentee ballot verification process was brought to light by a whistleblower working within the City of Milwaukee Elections Commission.
To expose a major flaw in the military mail-in vote system, the high-ranking election official, who has since been fired, successfully applied online for three military absentee ballots under three different names and had them all delivered to the residence of State Assemblywoman Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls).
Brandtjen, who is one of the plaintiffs in the case, told The Epoch Times that none of the three names on the envelopes reside or have ever resided at her address.
Wisconsin military elector absentee ballots erroneously sent to the residence of a state legislator on Oct. 27, 2022. (Courtesy of Rep. Janel Brandtjen)
She said she immediately thought the mysterious mail delivery may have been the work of a citizen concerned with election integrity who was trying to draw the attention of the legislature to a big flaw in the security of the system.
Brandtjen, who is chairperson of the state assembly’s Committee on Campaigns and Elections, said, “I did not request the ballots. I did not open the envelopes. I turned them over to the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Office for investigation.”
One of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Army veteran Erick Kaardal, said in a prepared statement, “This situation is particularly egregious as it demonstrates how easily the military absentee mail-in vote can be manipulated due to the commission’s (WEC’s) lack of compliance with Wisconsin election law.
“What a disgraceful way to dishonor our military service men and women,” he said.
Plaintiffs allege that in its written guidance to local election officials, WEC completely ignored a statutory mandate that states that county and municipal clerks must have and maintain “an up-to-date, complete, verified, current, accurate” military elector list.
The local clerks are required by law to supply every polling precinct with at least one copy of the list.
The list is a safeguard put in place by the legislature to ensure that military elector absentee ballots are not sent to people who are not qualified to receive them.
The plaintiffs’ brief states in part: “WEC’s … unauthorized guidance regarding the legally-required security check [of the military elector list] has demonstrably resulted in an absentee ballot process so deficient that it allows the unrestricted manufacture of fake ballots.
“The plaintiffs want to ensure that any close election result is not determined by non-qualified people voting military elector ballots.
Special Counsel Erick G. Kaardal of the Thomas More Society. (Courtesy Erick G. Kaardal)
“Once a non-qualified person’s military elector ballot is counted, the action is complete and irrevocable,” adding that “The damage will already be done.
“The purpose of the narrow temporary injunction is to get through the November 8, 2022 election without any counting of unlawfully cast military elector ballots,” the motion said.
Senior Counsel for the Thomas More Society Michael Gableman alleged in a statement, “By its refusal to implement the most basic level of security required by law, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has been permitting an election system which facilitates the procurement, manufacture, and distribution of fraudulent ballots.
“This inexcusable failure must end.”
The Wisconsin Elections Commission did not respond to a request for comment.
A psychologist is accusing Google of manipulating American citizens to influence the outcome of the November midterm elections.
Robert Epstein and his research team from the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology have been monitoring online political content being sent to voters in swing states. As part of the research, the team is looking into search engine results on Google and Bing, messages displayed on Google’s homepage, tweets sent by Twitter, email suppression on Gmail, auto-play videos suggested on Google-owned YouTube, and so on.
The study found over 1.9 million “ephemeral experiences” that Google and other firms were using to “shift opinions and voting preferences,” Epstein wrote in a Nov. 6 article for the Daily Caller. “Ephemeral experiences” are short-lived content that immediately disappears without leaving a trace after user consumption.
The team expects such “ephemeral experiences” to number over 2.5 million by Election Day. Epstein has identified roughly a dozen new forms of online manipulation using ephemeral experiences which are almost exclusively controlled by Google and a few other tech firms.
The impact created by the experiences is “stunning,” Epstein says.
Search engine results that favor one political candidate were found to influence undecided voters so much that up to 80 percent of such people in some demographic groups shifted their voting preferences after only a single search.
“Carefully crafted search suggestions that flash at you while you are typing a search term can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split with no one knowing they have been manipulated,” Epstein writes.
“A single question-and-answer interaction on a digital personal assistant can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by more than 40 percent.”
Ahead of the 2022 election, “a high level of liberal bias” is being seen in Google search results in swing states like Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin, Epstein wrote. Search results from Bing did not indicate such bias.
In multiple swing states, liberal news sources make up 92 percent of auto-play videos being sent to YouTube users, which can potentially shift “hundreds of thousands of votes” on Election Day, he warned.
Manufacturing Bias
Back in 2020, Epstein and his team collected 1.5 million ephemeral experiences from 1,735 field agents which were “sufficient, in theory,” to shift over 6 million votes to Joe Biden’s favor. Epstein had supported Biden at the time, he said.
He found that Google sent more voting reminders to moderates and liberals than conservatives, which Epstein calls a “brazen and powerful manipulation.”
Google also “turned off all manipulations” in the 2020 Georgia Senate races after three Republican senators sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai which discussed Epstein’s findings on manipulation (pdf). Political bias in Google search results “dropped to zero” after the letter, he pointed out.
In an April interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” Epstein also talked about online platforms using surveys to “help” users decide whom to vote for. In such surveys, users are given a quiz and the platforms tell them how good a match they are for specific candidates.
In an experiment, Epstein’s team found that they were able to shift a significant number of people’s voting preferences to the candidate that was presented as being their best match.
“Opinion matching is a fantastic way to manipulate people because you can shift people very, very, very dramatically, and they have no clue. They do not suspect any kind of bias or manipulation.”
About 96 percent of donations from Silicon Valley firms, including Google, go toward the Democratic Party, he added.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Google for comment.
Two leaders of the election integrity group True the Vote were released from jail after an appeals court overruled a judge’s order that they be detained for contempt of court.
Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were ordered released by a panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit late on Nov. 6.
“IT IS ORDERED that Petitioners’ opposed motion for release from detention is GRANTED pending further order of this court,” the panel said in the order, which was obtained by The Epoch Times.
The panel consisted of Circuit Judges Catharina Haynes, a George W. Bush appointee; Kurt Engelhardt, a Donald Trump appointee; and Andrew Oldham, a Trump appointee.
Engelbrecht and Phillips were released on Nov. 7.
Engelbrecht and Phillips were sent to jail on Oct. 31 by U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt, a Reagan appointee, who found them in contempt of court for not revealing the identities of people who allegedly accessed information from Konnech, a Michigan-based election management software company whose founder was recently arrested for allegedly stealing poll worker data and hosting the information on servers in China.
The order for confinement was to be in place until the defendants “fully comply” with an order that they reveal certain information, including the identities, Hoyt said.
Engelbrecht and Phillips say they passed on information that was legally obtained from Konnech to the FBI. One of their attorneys identified one of the individuals in question, Mike Hasson, during an October hearing. But they have declined to share the name of the second person. Both the individuals are FBI informants, Phillips asserted during one hearing.
“Those who thought that imprisoning Gregg and I would weaken our resolve have gravely miscalculated. It is stronger than ever,” Engelbrecht said in a statement. “The right to free and fair elections without interference is more important than our own discomforts and even this detention, now reversed by a higher court.
“We are profoundly grateful for that. We will continue to protect and defend those who do the vital work of election integrity, and we will make sure that their findings become a matter of public record.”
The contempt order came after Konnech sued True the Vote and its founders for defamation.
Hoyt entered a temporary restraining order against the defendants, ordering them to return all property and data to Konnech and identify people who were involved in accessing the company’s computers.
In their filing for release, Engelbrecht and Phillips said that Hoyt’s confinement order “represents a clear abuse of discretion and a manifest miscarriage of justice.”
“Petitioners pray that this Court enter an Order releasing them from the district court’s draconian order of detention for refusing to identify a federal confidential informant in open court whose identity in any event has no bearing on the merits of this defamation case hinging on competing accounts of alleged historical events,” they added.
The pair also said that they never possessed or controlled the information in question. Phillips said Engelbrecht doesn’t know the name that he is withholding and that, if the name were revealed, the person’s life would “be jeopardized by border drug and smuggling cartels.”
In its opposition to the petition, Konnech said that the True the Vote founders were trying to “strip the District Court of its contempt power” and that they “have no one but themselves to blame for their confinement” after defying Hoyt’s order.
Lawyers for the firm said, “Petitioners’ imprisonment is not an emergency especially in this case where the Petitioners are contemnors and recalcitrant witnesses who hold the keys to the jailhouse, and can free themselves immediately upon purging their contempt.”
Twitter fact-checked a Sunday post by Joe Biden over what he dubbed “the most common” gas price—a top voter issue in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
“Right now, the most common price at gas stations across the country is $3.19 per gallon,” Biden said in a Nov. 6 post. “That’s progress,” the president added.
Users, however, found “the most common price” is far from the average price, which the president failed to distinguish. AAA suggested the average U.S. price for a gallon of regular gasoline is $3.80 as of Nov. 6—more than 60 cents higher than that cited by Biden.
Only two states across the nation, Georgia and Texas, had an average price of regular gasoline under $3.19 on Sunday, while the majority of states were between $3.50 per gallon to $4.00 per gallon, according to the gas prices tracker.
Following Biden’s post Twitter added “context” from its experimental fact-checking program, explaining what the “most common” gas price means.
“Biden is referring to the ‘most common gas price’ as oppose [sic] to the average gas price of $3.800 (11/6/22). The most common is the ‘mode’ gas price. Neither are wrong and politicians tend to reference the one that is lower. The mode diminishes high gas states from the equation,” reads the Twitter notes, linking to the AAA and a Wall Street Journal report on the price gap over the two measures of typical gas prices.
Right now, the most common price at gas stations across the country is $3.19 per gallon. That’s progress.
The fact-check, known as “Birdwatch,” isn’t necessarily a correction but contrasted the average price with the mostly displayed price at hundreds of thousands of gas stations nationwide, both of which can be seen as accurate. As rising prices and living costs are key issues for American voters ahead of the midterms, lower figures would portray the country’s economic prospects in a more positive light.
Twitter has at least twice fact-checked the president since billionaire Elon Musk became the sole director of the social media giant over a week ago. Biden claimed in an Oct. 28 post that “55” big corporations nationwide paid no taxes for 2020, while the platform affirmed that “only 14” of them were eligible to be taxed.
In a speech in late October, Biden incorrectly claimed that the price of gasoline was over $5 a gallon when he entered the White House, despite the then-average price of regular gasoline being just $2.39. The average national retail price topped $5 for the first time ever this June, about a year-and-a-half after Biden took office.
A White House spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continues his effort to ensure the integrity of Florida’s election process, he is discovering the one thing leftists say does not exist; voter fraud.
DeSantis just announced that his Election Crime Unit has found yet another instance of voter fraud with the announced arrest of Cheryl Ann Leslie, who has been charged with casting multiple ballots in more than one state.
The 55-year-old Florida citizen was arrested and charged on two third-degree felony counts of voter fraud for voting in several elections in both Alaska and Florida, Florida’s Voice News reported.
The Florida Secretary of State’s office told the media that Leslie sent in an absentee ballot to Alaska and then also voted in person in Palm Beach County during the state’s early voting time.
The case was sent to the Election Crime Unit for further investigation and she was booked into the Palm Beach County jail on $1,000 bail.
Leslie, a resident of Loxahatchee, Florida, and a registered Democrat, apparently voted illegally in the 2020 elections, according to Fox News.
“The Florida Department of State, Office of Election Crimes and Security is grateful for our partnership with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement,” Secretary of State and Chief Election Officer Cord Byrd, said in a statement. “This arrest is yet another confirmation to every eligible Florida voter that the Department of State and FDLE are working together to ensure the integrity of their vote and Florida’s elections process.”
Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security is a new police unit created in 2021 under legislation signed by Gov. DeSantis (Senate Bill 524).
DeSantis announced his intention to create the new police unit as part of his election integrity reforms back in November of last year.
The charges against Leslie are not the first results coming out of the election crime unit. The unit has also filed voter fraud charges across the state including charges filed against 20 people who allegedly voted in 2020 despite having criminal convictions that bar them from voting.
The violations were perpetrated by convicted murderers and sex offenders who voted without receiving restoration of voting rights from the government.
Convicts had their voting rights restored in Florida in 2018, but there are certain rules to that restoration. For instance, convicted murderers and sexual assailants do not qualify for the restoration of their right to vote.
“They are disqualified from voting because they’ve been convicted of either murder or sexual assault, and they do not have the right to vote. They have been disenfranchised under Florida law … That is against the law, and now they’re going to pay the price for it,” the announcement said.
If convicted, those accused could be sentenced to a five-year prison sentence for the third-degree felony charge.
When DeSantis signed the legislation for the new office in April, he insisted that Florida was sending a “clear signal” to those looking to subvert the election process.
“Today’s actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting. If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis has continually focused on election fraud since coming to office. In September of last year, he even began an investigation of Facebook for manipulating the 2020 election.
Florida is not alone in working to put an end to election fraud. Just last week, the Milwaukee Election Commission fired commissioner Kimberly Zapata for trying to illegally take possession of military mail-in ballots requested under false names.
Also, an election worker in Michigan was arrested for “extremely egregious” tampering with voting equipment. And Los Angeles authorities arrested the CEO of an election software company for possible theft of voters’ personal information and ties to China.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman made some contradictory remarks about abortion at a Saturday campaign rally at Temple University in Philadelphia attended by President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama.
Fetterman, who suffered a stroke nearly six months ago, continues to have auditory processing and speech issues because of it.
“And also, of course, codifying Roe v. Wade. I run on Roe v Wade,” Fetterman told the crowd at the rally. It’s at this point that Fetterman’s slurred speech caused some confusion.
“I celebrate the demise of Roe v. Wade. That’s the choice that we have between us, in front of us. This is one of the biggest races in this nation,” Fetterman appeared to say.
Some Fetterman supporters are claiming he said “Oz celebrates the demise of Roe v. Wade,” but it’s difficult to tell. Even if that’s what he did say, the confused looks on the faces of his supporters, as well as their muted and awkward response, was noticeable.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, sending the contentious issue of abortion back to the states.
In his speech, Fetterman addressed abortion prior to his verbal slur, going after his Republican opponent in the race, Dr. Mehmet Oz.
“Abortion rights is all on the ballot right now,” he said. “Oz believed that local political officials should be the person making those kind of choices. That choice comes between a woman and their doctors. And that’s what I’m always going to fight for.”
The two men clashed on abortion during their one and only debate on Oct. 26 that, beyond highlighting the candidates’ different policy prescriptions on a variety of issues, was largely seen as having exposed Fetterman’s health problems.
In the debate, Oz was asked if abortion should be banned with exceptions.
He responded by saying he doesn’t want the federal government involved in abortion laws.
“I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward, so states can decide for themselves,” Oz said.
Fetterman’s campaign focused on Oz’s phrasing and used it against him in an advertisement released a day after their debate.
Fetterman’s attempt to capitalize on any advantage doesn’t appear to have worked, as multiple polls have had Oz owning a slight edge. Even the largest Oz skeptics would have to admit that, at the very least, this race is a dead heat.
RCP: Insider Advantage, Trafalgar, Susquehanna and Emerson are among most accurate 2016-2020 multi state pollsters
PA SENATE FINAL POLLING:
⦿ Trafalgar: Dr. Oz +2 (48/46) ⦿ Emerson: Dr. Oz +1 (48/47) ⦿ Susquehanna: Dr. Oz +1 (48/47) ⦿ Insider Adv: Dr. Oz +2 (48/46) pic.twitter.com/isc2lcQxaE
Those who watched the debate couldn’t help but notice that Fetterman struggled at times to respond to the moderators’ questions, even with the assistance of a closed captioning device, raising further questions about his fitness to hold political office.
“Hi, goodnight everyone,” Fetterman said during his opening remarks, before addressing his health. “Let’s also talk about the elephant in the room: I had a stroke. [Oz] never let me forget that.”
Asked to clarify his position on fracking, Fetterman gave a halting, meandering response that was difficult to decipher.
“I do support fracking – I don’t, I don’t – I support fracking, and I do support fracking,’ he answered.
During the debate, Fetterman demurred on releasing his full medical records to the public, citing a note from his doctor saying he is fit to serve.
Oz has faced his own challenges in the campaign, with critics attacking him for his association with former President Donald Trump, but also pointing to his former career as a daytime television star, claiming he pushed and gave a platform to controversial medical advice.
Neither Fetterman nor Oz will have to worry about polls or perception for much longer. The 2022 midterms will take place on Tuesday, and shortly thereafter, Pennsylvania will know who its newest senator will be.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, will not recuse herself from election duties for the 2022 midterm elections.
Her opponent, Republican Kari Lake, and some former secretaries of state have called on Hobbs to not oversee the election. They noted that it could create the appearance of a conflict of interest in a state where there have been claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election.
“Elected secretaries of state in Arizona have overseen elections where they’re on the ballot since statehood. This has never been an issue until now,” Hobbs told CNN’s Jake Tapper last week.
Hobbs added she is “not going to recuse myself from the job that the voters elected me to do, and for which I took an oath of office, to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution and laws of the State of Arizona. I have done that throughout my tenure, as secretary of state. And I will continue to do that, until I leave office on Jan. 2.”
A polling average provided by RealClearPolitics shows the Donald Trump-endorsed Lake is leading Hobbs by about 4.5 percentage points. Hobbs has refused to debate Lake, a former local TV host.
Hobbs said the demands for her to recuse are a distraction.
Arizona Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake speaks with supporters at a rally in Phoenix on Nov. 3, 2022. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Former Arizona Secretaries of State Richard Mahoney, a Democrat, and Ken Bennett, a Republican, called on Hobbs to recuse herself in a recent interview with Time magazine.
“I think it would be wise if the secretary of state seconded responsibility for ministerial oversight to either the attorney general or the Maricopa County recorder,” Mahoney told the publication. Bennett said she should allow “a deputy secretary or somebody else” to oversee the election.
She’s also faced criticism for refusing to debate Lake.
“The fact is, at this point in the game, we’re five days off on the election, I am not second guessing any decision we made,” she said on CNN about not debating. “I am proud of the campaign that we are running, I am confident in the campaign we’re running.”
And last month, Hobbs said Lake is “only interested in creating a spectacle,” which is why she won’t debate her. “She only wants a scenario where she can control the dialogue, and she’s refused to sit down in a one-on-one, lengthy conversation to really clarify with Arizonans where she is on the issues. She’s the one who’s afraid of talking to voters where she’s at,” Hobbs said in response to a comment from CNN’s Dana Bash that “a lot of Democrats are questioning your decision.”
Elon Musk on Nov. 5 confirmed claims that Twitter employees were selling verification badges for certain users.
“Twitter employees were selling verification for upwards of $15,000. For certain accounts, mine included, they would refuse to verify you through the standard application and then privately offer to verify you for $$ behind the scenes. Investigation needed,” WSBChairman—a user with 900,000 followers—claimed on the platform on Nov. 5. Musk confirmed that user’s claim, responding: “Yup.”
Neither WSBChairman nor Musk provided further details or evidence. Meanwhile, no prominent former Twitter executives have publicly commented on the matter.
“Far too many legacy ‘verified’ checkmarks were handed out, often arbitrarily, so in reality they are *not* verified,” Musk wrote. “You can buy as many as you want right now with a Google search. Piggybacking off payment system plus Apple/Android is a much better way to ensure verification.”
The Tesla CEO last week unveiled a plan to get verified users to pay $8 per month to keep their blue checkmark, which has become something of a status symbol on the social media platform. Verification badges were proposed as a system to show that an account is authentic, but Musk said that it created a “lord-and-peasant” system on the platform.
Musk also confirmed he carried out layoffs in recent days because the firm was losing more than $4 million per day. Reports have indicated that he terminated the employment of thousands of Twitter workers.
“Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50 percent more than legally required,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, some Democrat lawmakers have already set their sights on Twitter and Musk. A letter from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen requested an investigation into the acquisition because members of the Saudi royal family are prominent investors in the company. However, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal had bought a stake in the company many years before Musk acquired it last month.
“I write to draw your attention to potential national security concerns arising from the recently completed takeover of Twitter, Inc. by Elon Musk and a number of private investors,” Murphy wrote, according to reports. “Setting aside the vast stores of data that Twitter has collected on American citizens, any potential that Twitter’s foreign ownership will result in increased censorship, misinformation, or political violence is a grave national security concern.”
Musk last week announced that the newly acquired firm has suffered significant revenue losses after prominent advertisers pulled out. The tech billionaire accused activist groups of leading the charge against him and said that “they’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
Michigan lieutenant governor Garlin Gilchrist (D.), who is up for reelection with Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer on Tuesday, promised supporters at a rally in Ann Arbor he would shut down more coal plants in his second term.
“We’re gonna strengthen our state’s response to the climate crisis,” Gilchrist said Saturday evening. “We’re gonna close more coal plants.”
Gilchrist’s remarks came just after the White House walked back President Joe Biden’s comments at a Friday rally in Pennsylvania in which he promised that his administration will be “shutting these [coal] plants down all across America” and replacing them with renewables.
Biden’s speech prompted backlash from lawmakers including West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin, who called it “outrageous and divorced from reality.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre released a statement on Saturday saying Biden’s comments about coal “have been twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended.”
Federal data show Michigan is heavily reliant on coal for anything from manufacturing to keeping the lights on. In 2021, coal provided nearly a third of all the state’s electricity, the largest share of all energy sources.
The Washington Free Beacon previously reported that Michigan voters named energy costs a top concern ahead of Tuesday’s Election Day. Recent polling shows the Michigan governor and lieutenant governor race tightening, with RealClearPoliticsranking the contest a “toss up.”
Race-conscious credit agreements are incentivizing illegal hiring practices across corporate America
Amid an uptick in race-conscious hiring programs throughout corporate America, many prominent businesses are now writing racial and gender quotas into their credit agreements with banks, tying the cost of borrowing to the companies’ workforce diversity, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.
Over the past two years, each of those companies has secured a lending agreement, known as a credit facility, that links the interest rate charged by banks to the company’s internal diversity targets, creating a financial incentive to meet them. If the business achieves its targets, it won’t have to pay as much interest on the loans it takes out; if it falls short, it is required to pay more.
Under the terms of BlackRock’s $4.4 billion credit facility, for example, Wells Fargo will lower the firm’s interest rate by 0.05 percent if it hits two benchmarks—a 30 percent increase in the share of black and Hispanic employees by 2024, and a 3 percent increase in the share of female executives each year—or hike the rate by the same amount if it misses both.
The agreements, which typically involve multiple banks, are effectively credit cards for businesses: Rather than make a onetime loan, lenders extend a continuous line of credit that companies can dip into at will, either to cover operating costs or as a rainy day fund for emergencies. That means changes in a facility’s interest rate—even modest ones like BlackRock’s 0.05 percent diversity adjustment—can have an appreciable effect on a business’s bottom line.
Companies have advertised these agreements as proof of their progressive bona fides. Trimble CEO Rob Painter, for example, said the company’s credit facility—which conditions interest rates on the percentage of female employees—illustrates Trimble’s “commitment” to “gender diversity in the workplace.” In press releases announcing their own credit facilities, executives at BlackRock, Prudential, and Definity say the agreements demonstrate their commitment to “accountability.”
But critics see something far more sinister: a form of blatant discrimination that will harm consumers, credit markets, and the rule of law.
“If a bank penalized a company’s credit rating because it had too many women or was too racially diverse, we would be appalled,” said one senior government regulator, who managed a nine-figure credit facility as a lawyer in private practice. “This is the exact same thing, except the penalized target is white men.”
The credit contracts will divert resources away from consumers, critics say, and toward diversity initiatives, where the promise of discounted loans will encourage the use of illegal hiring quotas. They will also hurt companies that don’t negotiate a diversity discount on their loans, because those firms will face higher borrowing costs than their competitors—a dynamic that could steer entire industries toward race-conscious policies.
“Let’s say Wells Fargo will loan to BlackRock at 1 percent if it meets diversity quotas, and the market interest rate is 5 percent,” said Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research. “Every other company that has to borrow at 5 percent is now at a disadvantage vis-à-vis BlackRock. So other companies will have to follow BlackRock’s lead, or they will go out of business, because BlackRock will be able to subsidize its products through Wells Fargo.”
BlackRock, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, which manages the credit facilities for Trimble, Carlyle, and Pfizer, did not respond to requests for comment.
The contracts represent a new twist on the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-linked loans that have proliferated in recent years. When banks lend to businesses, they typically base interest rates on several factors, such as a company’s cost structure or debt ratio, that drive credit risk. Since 2017, however, some banks have also factored in ESG considerations—a borrower’s carbon footprint, for example—in addition to the ability to pay back a loan.
With diversity quotas in the mix, that gap between credit risk and credit access has only grown. “There is no evidence that diversity makes a borrower likelier to repay its loan,” the government regulator said. “It’s like handing out credit based on astrological sign.”
When a bank lends irrationally to one client, the regulator added, it “invariably makes its loan terms less fairly priced for everyone else.”
The credit deals come as race-conscious programs are exploding across corporate America—and sometimes in the companies’ own faces. Pfizer, one of the businesses that has tied its lending costs to diversity, was sued in September over a prestigious fellowship that bars white and Asian applicants. Programs at Microsoft, IBM, and Google use similar criteria, as do American Express and Amazon, both of which are now facing civil rights lawsuits.
Race-conscious loans will encourage such policies, legal experts said, and could expose companies to legal liability. Even if businesses don’t adopt overt quotas, said Adam Mortara, a prominent civil rights litigator, the agreements could be used as evidence that the firing of a white or Asian employee was racially motivated, “because of the incentives this kind of race-based discounting creates.”
That said, it’s not clear whether the contracts are illegal in and of themselves. There is no federal civil rights law that directly bans discrimination in business loans, three lawyers said, unlike discrimination in consumer lending and employment, and lawyers were divided on whether the agreements would hold up in court.
“You could argue the agreements themselves are permissible as long as the businesses reach their diversity targets without violating civil rights law,” said Hild, who also founded the public interest law firm Cause of Action. “Of course—if there were a way to do that—they wouldn’t need these agreements.”
Other lawyers said the contracts created such a strong incentive to discriminate that courts might strike them down. If a business cannot boost its minority employment through race-blind means, said James Copland, the director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute, hard quotas will be the only way for it to avoid losing money under the terms of the lending agreement.
“This is an implicit violation of the Title VII,” the law that prohibits employment discrimination, Copland told the Free Beacon. “It has to be illegal.”
Credit facilities are the product of complex, confidential negotiations between a company and its lenders, making it difficult to know which party proposed what provisions, though all clauses must have the signoff of both banks and borrowers.
It might seem odd for businesses to risk a choice between breaking the law or hurting their pocketbooks, and odder still for them to celebrate it. But if a company is ideologically committed to quotas, Hild said, the credit deals can make a kind of circular sense, in both economic and legal terms.
Economically, the company gets a discount for a policy that it was already going to implement. Legally, it gets a shield against shareholders who see diversity initiatives as a drag on business performance—because, under the terms of the loan agreement, more diversity means lower costs.
“The company can argue that its diversity policies make borrowing less expensive, and thus fulfill its legal obligation to shareholders,” said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, who has filed shareholder lawsuits against corporate executives over their race-conscious programs.
The counterargument, Morenoff added, is that these policies are very vulnerable to civil rights complaints. If a court enjoins a company’s race-conscious programs, it might not be able to meet the diversity targets specified in its credit agreement, in which case the cost of borrowing would go up.
The calculus is similarly complex for banks. On the one hand, lenders will make less money if they loan to businesses at a discounted rate. On the other hand, Hild said, linking the discounts to ESG objectives, including diversity, may boost banks’ ESG scores and thus attract capital from ESG investors—some of which, like BlackRock, are themselves the recipients of ESG loans.
The private equity firm also owns 7.1 percent of Wells Fargo, the bank managing its credit facility, and likely holds stock in other participating lenders as well, Morenoff said. So when BlackRock secures an ESG loan from those banks, it may indirectly be boosting the value of its own equities.
The result—if nobody sues—is a win-win for both lender and borrower. The losers are innovators, pensioners, and the consumers, who will bear the costs of a distorted market.
“The purpose of bank lending is to allocate capital to its best use so that we can have better products at a lower price,” Hild said. “If you subsidize diversity, you are focusing the market on other things.”
“I regret what I did because it was so selfish,” Walt Heyer, 82, told The Epoch Times. “I destroyed my career, I destroyed a family with a wonderful wife and two wonderful children, because no one would speak up and talk about the fact that you can’t change your gender.”
Born in California, Heyer, an author and advocate now living on the east coast, said he suffered trauma as a child. In adulthood, he underwent gender reassignment surgery and lived for eight years as a trans woman, before detransitioning in 1991.
Citing immense regret for choosing transition in response to trauma, Heyer now runs the website sexchangeregret.com to help steer others away from irreversible surgery or life choices toward therapeutic solutions.
“I wanted to be the voice that people could listen to, and the voice that would stop them going through a totally unnecessary hormonal, surgical change that could destroy their life,” he said.
A Secret Life, and Under the Knife
Heyer recalled being beaten and molested at a very young age by family members, fueling trauma that led him to, at age 13, secretly identify as “Christal West.” In adulthood, that female alter-ego found expression in clubs and bars in San Francisco and San Diego. Meanwhile, he led a double life during the day with a good job and a family.
Although he was married and had two children, Heyer’s secret life persisted under cover of darkness. “You can shave the mustache off. It grew back fast, it wasn’t a big deal,” he said. “That was just part of the cover up.”
In 1981, he was diagnosed with gender dysphoria by psychologist Dr. Paul Walker and started taking female hormones. In the summer of 1981, he met Dr. Stanley Beiber, who, by the end of his career, would perform 5,000 sexual reassignment surgeries.
Two years later, in April 1983, Heyer went under the knife in Trinidad, Colorado.
(Left) A photo of Heyer in the 1980s; (Right) Heyer after transitioning. (Courtesy of Walt Heyer)
“They don’t cut the penis off, they just use the penis, reverse it, and turn it inward,” he said. “Nobody ever talks about consequences. The consequences are horrible. They can never have children.”
Although Heyer already had children, his choice to undergo surgery had serious ramifications. He got divorced and almost immediately lost his coveted career as an associate design engineer working in cryogenics for the Apollo space missions, he said. He became “unemployable,” and since Oct. 25, 1983, Heyer never had another real career again.
“I was there for myself, doing my thing, instead of being a father to my children,” he said. “I abandoned them for my own purposes, that’s why I call it ‘sex change regret,’ because I regret the harm that I did to the people around me whom I love very much.
“Surgery fixed nothing except destroy my career. I was homeless for a while. I became an alcoholic and a drug addict. … I bounced around and did a lot of things to survive. I went from having a great income to being broke.”
Redeemed and Restored … Almost
A lot has changed in the last 40 years of Heyer’s life. Maybe not enough.
“I was able to stay in a recovery center normally costing $4,000 a month for free,” he said. “I started going to meetings. … I decided that I would start going to church. … I was ‘Laura Jensen.’ It was a women’s recovery center, and I was going to church as Laura.”
In 1986 Heyer found a state-sponsored room in an addiction treatment program at Alcohol Drug Recovery Center in San Francisco.
Now he says his diagnosis of gender dysphoria was totally out of line. That trauma—the physical and sexual abuse he suffered as a child—was not treated the way an “appropriate caregiver” would have done. He needed a trauma therapist, not a surgeon.
From his sponsor, Heyer, then 50, found a place to stay after leaving the center. But, with so many bridges burned, he had few places to turn besides faith. That would open up a pivotal new lane leading to a place of soulful redemption, if not a physical one.
A recent photo of Heyer. (Courtesy of ADF via Walt Heyer)
A prayer session with his assigned psychologist at the time led to an unexpected, almost supernatural vision.
“I could see the Lord looking down. … The Lord was coming for me, but not coming for me at 50 years old,” he said. “He was coming to me from my childhood that was so broken. He redeemed me at that point, and said, ‘You’ll be safe with me forever.’
“I just needed to take responsibility for my life and not blame others for what had happened to me. … The prayer was just profound,” Heyer said, who by now was identifying as “Walt” again.
He knew he had made a mistake, but also that he had been forgiven.
“I was redeemed and restored back to who I was. I also realized that I was never ‘Laura Jensen,’” he said. “No one in the history of mankind has ever changed their gender. It’s never been done. It’s not scientifically, medically, surgically, hormonally … it’s just not possible. I stopped living the masquerade and realized that I got my life back.
“I was one of the fortunate ones.”
“People Are Being Duped”
Now totally sober, Heyer sought to reclaim his life. He underwent painful reversal surgery, admitting “there’s only so much you can do,” and floundered in various jobs—selling cars and working as a barista. Eventually, he realized he needed to chart a new course and attended college to study counseling. He became director of care ministries for a church, where he continues after three and a half years.
Today, he worries about the “social contagion” that younger generations face, and the fact that gender dysphoria has been promoted and propagated to dangerous degrees in society. Students are indoctrinated in schools, and, bolstered by certain official narratives, even some parents feel compelled to facilitate changing their child’s gender on their behalf.
“Better to have a living son than a dead daughter,” so goes the maniacal aphorism.
“No child on this earth should undergo surgical procedures to remove any parts of their body,” said Heyer. “These children’s brains aren’t fully developed until they’re 24 or 25. Why are we intervening?
“You don’t have to look too far to see that people are being duped into this, the people who are getting hormones and having the surgical procedures. … Any time you’re using children to destroy the next generation, we have to step back and take a deep breath and look at who’s doing it.”
There are anti-religious, anti-family, and anti-male ideologies driving this agenda to dissolve gender identity, he said, adding, “Marxism talks about just wanting ‘workers,’ they don’t want ‘male’ and ‘female.’ … If you can destroy this terminology, then you begin to destroy the very fabric of our society.”
Avoid Hormones, Avoid Surgery
More realistically, traumatized children should undergo talking therapy or EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), a form of psychotherapy, Heyer recommends.
“I’m asking people to be treated for the traumatic event that caused them to have generalized dysphoria,” he said. “When I do speak with those people, and they do get treatment for generalized dysphoria, they tell me that they are able to avoid hormones, able to avoid surgery. … Their bodies aren’t altered, and they don’t have to live with the consequences of surgical procedures.”
Now remarried, Heyer continues his advocacy and has spoken at various conferences and events globally. In 2010, when sexchangeregret.com was launched, they attracted a miniscule 700 hits. By 2015, that number had increased to 356,000.
“I realized there’s a tremendous appetite for somebody to be out there that has a safe place for people to go, to talk about their regret,” he said. “We’re able to help a lot of people. Some of them we can’t, but the ones that we can help, we do. It’s been very rewarding.”
Heyer is troubled by the stories that people write him via the website but hopes that his story and outreach will help prevent others from making irreversible decisions such as surgery.
“It really grabs me how much money is being filtered in to the left for this insanity,” he added. “I just hope that people begin to realize how much harm they’re doing. … It destroys people’s lives.
“There’s just not enough people standing up saying, ‘Do not do this.’”
Florida health officials on Friday, Nov. 4 voted to forbid doctors from providing “gender-affirming care” to minors in the state.
Meeting in Orlando, the Florida Board of Medicine and state Board of Osteopathic Medicine voted 6-3, with five members not present, to ban the prescribing of puberty blockers or hormones and performing of sex-reassignment surgery for children. Minors already receiving the drugs may continue treatment.
The act does allow non-surgical treatments for gender dysphoria in minors to continue under the auspices of the Institutional Review Board, though such clinical trials must include long-term longitudinal psychological assessments.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo said on Friday: “Today, the Boards of Medicine & Osteo Medicine voted to protect our children from irreversible surgeries & highly experimental treatments. I appreciate their integrity for ruling in the best interest of FL children despite facing tremendous pressure to permit these risky & unproven treatments. Children deserve to learn how to navigate this world without harmful pressure. Florida will continue to fight for kids to be kids.”
Florida Board of Medicine inside Department of Health. (Screenshot/Google Maps)
While Florida isn’t the first state to seek to ban this type of treatment, it is the first state to do so through the state’s medical board, under the executive branch. Florida also joins at least nine other states prohibiting Medicaid coverage for gender transition treatment.
Critics of the decision have expressed that transition treatments can be effective and potentially life-saving. The American Medical Association said that it “opposes the dangerous intrusion of government into the practice of medicine and the criminalization of health care decision-making,” adding that gender-affirming care is “medically necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people.”
The move comes in response to a letter sent by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to all state attorneys general late March, warning that they could be violating civil rights laws should they keep minors from receiving “gender-affirming care.” Biden released a video message reinforcing this point.
In April, Florida Department of Health issued guidance rejecting the federal government’s endorsement of using puberty blockers and “partially-reversible” hormone therapy on minors.
“They are actually giving very young girls double mastectomies, they want to castrate these young boys,” Governor Ron DeSantis said over the summer. “You don’t disfigure 10, 12, and 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria. 80% of it resolves anyway by the time they get older.”
On Friday, Sept. 29, the state boards of medicine held a workshop to discuss new statewide rules and hear public testimony, including that of Chloe Cole, who underwent a double mastectomy at the age of 15. Cole said, “The overall picture of my life just went completely unaddressed.”
Florida Surgeon General Ladapo said the federal government’s guidance failed to meet the “most basic level of academic rigor” and was “about injecting political ideology into the health of our children. Children experiencing gender dysphoria should be supported by family and seek counseling, not pushed into an irreversible decision before they reach 18.”
Recently, a clinic offering gender transition services in the UK was closed down after the NHS England determined these were “not a safe or viable long-term option.” Last year, the UK’s Health Advisory Board determined that there is “very low” evidence that puberty blocking for children with gender dysphoria has any benefits.
Every election season people say “this is the most important election in our lifetimes.”
This time, I believe they are correct.
The lives of millions of unborn children are at stake in this election. Democrats are threatening to codify Roe into Federal law if they get power, while Republican states are promising to enforce existing laws on the books or pass new ones to stop the satanic murder of babies in this country. Our economy is in shambles. Our cities are war zones. Our border is being invaded to the tune of millions of people including criminals, drug dealers, and worse. Our elected officials are sending billions and billions of dollars of our money to a foreign country for a war that has nothing to do with you or me. This country is a mess.
If you are a Christian the choice is clear: vote Republican. If you call yourself a Christian and are voting Democrat you need to be under church discipline for voting to empower evil. If your Pastor or Priest is encouraging you to vote for “pro-choice” Democrats you need to find a new church. That’s how serious this issue is. God is very clear in His Word: Thou Shalt Not Kill.
As many of you know I have endorsed many candidates this election cycle, but the one race that really matters to me on a deeply personal level is the race for Governor in PA. Pennsylvania is my home. I grew up here. My family is here. I am raising my children here. I am building Gab here.
I watched over the past decade as Democrat policies have destroyed our amazing cities like Philadelphia and my own hometown area of Scranton. I watched as Josh Shapiro, the Democrat candidate for Governor and current Attorney General of PA, tweeted days before the the 2020 election that “If all the votes are added up in PA, Trump is going to lose. That’s why he’s working overtime to subtract as many votes as possible from this process.” I watched the fraud and rigging that unfolded after his brazen display of “chutzpah.”
I watched this entire election cycle as the mainstream media praised Josh Shapiro for embracing his Jewish faith on the campaign trail, while labeling his opponent Doug Mastriano an “extremist” for embracing his Christian faith. Are you paying attention yet, Christian? When a Jew embraces their faith on the campaign trail it is “stunning and brave.” When a Christian does it, it’s “dangerous and extreme.” I’ll also note that the “journalists” writing these articles also happen to be Jewish, but I digress.
The PA Gubernatorial race is the single most important race of the midterms. I’m not exaggerating. Doug Mastriano was one of the only elected officials in the PA state legislature to fight back against the 2020 election fraud in PA, and he was one of the only elected officials in the country to fight back against the lockdowns, the masks, the vax mandates, and so much more.
In short: he is /our guy./
He’s the Christian warrior we need in leadership and will be a great example for the rise of other Christian candidates across the country. I’m proud to personally endorse him as a PA voter myself. This election is the first step to taking back this country for the glory of God. We need to win. I’m asking you to please vote for Republicans in your state and pray specifically for Doug’s victory here in PA.
Gab’s 2022 Election Policies
Finally I’d like to address Gab’s election policies as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others gear up to censor any and all conversations exposing voter fraud. Gab’s election policy is simple: the First Amendment. We are not going to police discussions about the election before, during, or after the vote. We will not be “fact-checking” content. You are free to speak freely on Gab and see what others are saying as well without interference from Gab as a platform. No other social network can say this. For that reason alone Gab is the place to be on election night and beyond.
Andrew Torba CEO, Gab.com Jesus Christ is King of kings
America’s oil supply problem is worse than most predictions, Ezra Yacob, president of EOG Resources Inc., told analysts during a third-quarter earnings call.
Oil production in the United States will maintain a low growth rate in 2023, he said.
The number of oil rigs, frac spreads, and workers indicated a low growth rate in the near future, he said.
Also, fewer companies have the capacity to produce oil after the pandemic and the companies are more cautious about investing more in this sector.
“I do think coming out of the pandemic, we’ve had a consolidation across the industry. … You’ve been left with less companies, and those companies that have the size, the scale, balance sheets, things of that nature to be able to continue to drill and operate,” he said. “And the majority of those companies are drilling and investing in a way that’s more disciplined than what was in favor prior to the pandemic.”
Yacob believes the trend will not end soon.
“And quite frankly, a lot of those things that I’ve talked about are not necessarily transitory in nature. Some of these things will really continue into 2023 as well,” he explained.
EOG holds a view more pessimistic than many other estimations, Yacob acknowledged.
EOG was known as Enron Oil & Gas before it separated from Enron in 1999.
Biden to Talk With Oil Companies
Oil production has been recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic since August 2020. However, the pace of oil production is relatively slow, though oil prices increased fast after the pandemic.
Oil production still hasn’t reached the level before the pandemic.
Industry insiders and experts warned that companies are hesitant to make long-term investments in the fuel industry because of uncertainty in Washington and hostile attitudes toward the industry by the Biden administration.
Low domestic oil production in America and oil production cuts by OPEC+ caused oil prices to stay high and drove gas prices up.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has blamed the oil companies and gas stations for high gas prices.
Biden said that he’s going to talk with the oil companies directly soon.
“I’m working like hell to deal with the energy prices. I’m going to have a little, as they say, come-to-the-Lord talk with the oil companies pretty soon,” he told the audience during an event in California on Friday.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed in October that the Biden administration is in touch with the oil companies.
“The Department of Energy has been in regular contact and has held meetings … with these different companies, and they’ll continue to have those conversations. Members of our team at the White House have also been in close contact,” she said on Oct. 17.
A watchdog group that seeks to hold government officials accountable has called for an investigation into whether a recent tweet posted by the White HouseTwitter account was later deleted illegally.
Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT), which seeks to expose “the self-dealing and conflicts of interest, and the improper and illegal behavior of senior officials,” issued a statement on Friday demanding a probe into whether deletion of the tweet ran afoul of the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which prohibits the unauthorized destruction of government and presidential records.
“Enforcement of public records laws, such as FOIA, is virtually impossible if records retention policies are not enforced, including those covering social media,” Michael Chamberlain, PPT director, said in the statement.
The controversy centers on a Nov. 1 tweet posted—and later deleted—by the White House after it was fact-checked for making a context-lacking claim about the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) that was recently announced.
“Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership,” the now-deleted White House Twitter post said.
The post failed to mention, however, that the COLA adjustment was due to inflation that’s running close to a 40-year high.
Federal law requires annual COLA adjustments, which are calculated based on the rate of inflation rather than presidential policies.
Twitter added “context” under the White House post, writing that seniors will get a “large Social Security benefit increase due to the annual cost of living adjustment, which is based on the inflation rate,” while providing a link to the Social Security Administration’s website.
Asked about the deletion of the tweet, a White House official told The Epoch Times via an earlier email that “the point was incomplete,” adding that a recent statement by press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre provided the full context.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the PPT’s request for an investigation.
After Twitter added context, the White House deleted a Twitter post about Social Security on Nov. 2., 2022. (Twitter screenshot via The Epoch Times)
‘Policies Must Be Enforced Equally’
Besides calling for a probe, the watchdog group also penned a letter (pdf) to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), asking whether the White House followed the law in deleting the tweet.
“While personal records are exempt from the preservation requirements, the Nov. 1 tweet on the official White House account is almost certainly a record that belongs to the public and subject to the Act’s destruction protocols,” the watchdog group wrote.
“Subsequent explanations provided by White House officials raise concerns over whether the appropriate retention process was adhered to or whether authorization to destroy an official record was received prior to the Presidential record being permanently destroyed, as required by law,” PPT added.
The watchdog also asked NARA to provide documents related to the deletion of the tweet, including a possible letter authorizing the destruction of the tweet or an explanation why it may not have been subject to preservation as an official public record.
“If the American public is going to trust its government, these policies must be enforced equally, regardless of who is in power, and skirting the requirements to avoid embarrassment or political backlash must not be seen as legitimate justifications,” Chamberlain said in a statement.
Republican lawmakers reacted with criticism to the since-deleted White House Twitter post.
“Next year’s Social Security increase will be one of the largest in decades [because] of Biden’s disastrous policies, which have caused prices to rise, fueled record inflation, & cut it into critical retirement savings,” wrote Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) on Twitter in response to the post.
“Biden social media geniuses are giving Biden credit for the biggest Social Security COLA in 10 years, but neglect to mention that SS COLA is an automatic formula based on government inflation metric (CPI),” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) added on the platform.
The Social Security Administration announced on Oct. 13 that the COLA boost would be 8.7 percent due to decades-high inflation.
Checks that are scheduled to go out in January 2023 will see the COLA bump.
Judges should uphold the U.S. Constitution, not be activists, director says
If Republicans take the Senate majority after the Nov. 8 midterm elections, they could have a significant impact on how many of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees get approved, said Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center.
Since taking office, Biden has nominated 144 judges to district and circuit courts, with 27 nominees announced on Oct. 14 amid over 80 current judicial vacancies.
These judges are there to uphold the U.S. Constitution, ensuring equal protection under the law, not to be activists for any ideology or party, he added.
“[The Constitution] is only as good as those men and women who are gaveling in,” Helfenbein said during a recent interview with NTD News Today.Play Video
If the GOP takes back the majority in the Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will become the majority leader, “and certainly he will wield the power in the Senate to bring the opposition to the president,” Helfenbein said.
“McConnell certainly is going to be the leader when it comes to judicial appointments,” he added, noting that the appointments come from the president, though they are vetted in the Senate.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on July 26, 2022. (Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images)
The conservative majority in the Supreme Court recently decided that Washington High School football coach Joseph Kennedy should be reinstated and that firing him for praying on the 50-yard line after games violated his freedom of belief. In June, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the sacking of Kennedy, who is a Christian, violated First Amendment religious freedom protections.
During the Trump presidency, Republican senators were instrumental in approving the three constitutionally conservative Supreme Court judges that now make up the majority in the Supreme Court and the 231 federal district court judges.
The federal court system has three main tiers: district courts (the trial court), circuit courts (the first level of appeal), and the Supreme Court (the final level of appeal). There are 91 district courts, 13 circuit courts, and one Supreme Court across the nation. The district courts have 670 district judges, and there are 179 judgeships in the circuit courts, with the number in each ranging from six (on the First Circuit) to 29 (on the Ninth Circuit). There are nine judges on the Supreme Court.
Map of the federal court of appeals. (Courtesy of United States Courts)
All federal judges are nominated by the president and approved for lifetime appointments by a Senate majority. While the Supreme Court hears about 80 cases annually, the court of appeals handles tens of thousands of cases each year, making them highly influential.
The lower court judges play a critical role in ensuring religious freedom, said Helfenbein.
“The lower courts are greatly consequential when you consider how many cases, especially on the issue of free speech and religious liberty, … are determined at the lower court level,” said Helfenbein
Democrat Kwanza Hall, a former member of the Atlanta City Council who also briefly served in Congress, has broken with his party to endorse two Republican candidates for offices in Georgia in the upcoming midterm election.
Hall on Friday endorsed Gov. Brian Kemp, the GOP nominee for reelection, snubbing Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
“Over the last four years, I’ve witnessed Governor Kemp make tough decisions—ones that weren’t always popular at the time—in unprecedented circumstances,” Hall said in a statement obtained by The Epoch Times.
“While we don’t agree on every issue, it’s abundantly clear that Brian Kemp is a man of character, a strong leader, and someone who Georgians can trust to put them and their interests first,” he added.
Then-Atlanta city councilman Kwanza Hall attends an event in Atlanta, Ga., on May 17, 2016. (Moses Robinson/Getty Images for Qatar Airways)
In a statement, Kemp thanked Hall for his endorsement and called for the setting aside of partisan differences.
“I greatly appreciate Congressman Hall’s support in this campaign,” Kemp said in the statement. “Kwanza has ably served our capital city and state for many years, and I look forward to working with him and other hardworking Georgians to put political differences aside and keep our state the best place to live, work, and raise a family for the next four years.”
Abrams has not commented publicly on Hall’s endorsement of her opponent, but in a Saturday statement on Twitter said she’s someone Georgians “can count on.”
Hall also endorsed Republican Burt Jones in his bid to serve as Georgia’s lieutenant governor.
“Burt is the only candidate in the race with a plan to invest in our communities, lower costs, improve our K-12 education system, and reduce crime,” Hall said, according to Fox5.
Jones’s campaign was cited by Fox5 as saying that he looks forward to working across the aisle “to create more opportunities for hardworking Georgians and continue to make our state the best place to live, work and raise a family.”
Hall served three terms on the Atlanta City Council and later unsuccessfully ran for mayor. He also won a special election and served out the remainder of the late Rep. John Lewis’s term, a Democrat who represented Georgia’s 5th Congressional District.
Hall also ran for lieutenant governor earlier this year but lost out to fellow Democrat Charlie Bailey in a runoff after the latter was endorsed by Abrams.
The latest poll compilation by FiveThirtyEight shows Kemp ahead of Abrams by 7.7 points, with election day on Nov. 8.
WASHINGTON—Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes told a federal court on Nov. 4 that the 2020 presidential election was invalid, spoke of his love for America, and his motivations for starting the Oath Keepers.
Rhodes, 57, is one of the defendants in the highest-profile trial related to the events of Jan. 6, 2021. On Nov. 4, he described himself as a patriotic quarter-Mexican born in Fresno, Calif., with both sides of the family serving in different military branches.
Although he wanted to join the Marines, Rhodes served in the Army doing special operations and became a weapons expert. He wa injured training in parachute jumping and was honorably discharged as a disabled veteran.
In a packed courtroom, under direct examination with his attorney, Rhodes summarized his life journey as talking to a friend. Rhodes looked relaxed, smiled, and made constant eye contact with the jurors, who listened attentively to his testimony. Some took notes.
Judge Amit Mehta, who usually keeps his body posture facing everyone in the courtroom, tilted his body to the right and watched Rhodes closely.
“Do you believe the [2020 presidential] election was stolen?” asked Rhodes’ defense attorney.
“I believe the election was unconstitutional,” Rhodes responded, explaining it was invalid since it didn’t comply with Article 2 of the Constitution. Under COVID-19 restrictions, he said, swing states changed their laws which made the election invalid.
Rhodes testified that he founded the Oath Keepers organization in 2009 to educate the military and law enforcement on distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate commands. He wanted people to be aware of their constitutional rights. His main concern was how authorities responded to natural disasters and how citizens were treated.
“We haven’t seen sufficient training,” Rhodes said.
He mentioned officers helping restrain George Floyd should have disregarded orders to restrain him.
Despite the recent label of the Oath Keepers organization as a racist white supremacist far-right group, Rhodes said the organization has members who are native Americans, Filipino Americans, African Americans, and others. He denied having any racist members. “We wouldn’t tolerate that,” he said.
After his discharge, Rhodes had various jobs: he parked cars at night and trained security guards during the day; he said he taught women and LGBT groups self-defense techniques.
Rhodes said that his organization puts the Constitution and the country above all. “The Constitution is for righteous people,” he added.
The suicide rate among former military members is high, he said. Many Oath Keepers, primarily elders, find their purpose in his organization since they desire to serve the country.
Rhodes recounted various times when he and other Oath Keepers provided security services, including for African Americans, and did volunteer work in different parts of the country. He said he against the heavy tactics used by law enforcement to restrain protestors. However, Rhodes added he doesn’t support violent rioters who destroy property and other goods.
The defense attorney asked Rhodes about why the Oath Keepers wear helmets and tactical vests. Rhodes said they use the gear for self-defense because rioters use weapons such as frozen water bottles, chains, knives, and clubs;
Rhodes told the court that he graduated from Yale Law School and received an award for his paper on the Bill of Rights.
“America is the best example of democracy because of our Constitution,” Rhodes said.
The U.S. government charged Rhodes, the three Oath Keepers on trial, and an affiliate with seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, aiding and abetting, conspiracy to prevent an officer from carrying out any duties, destruction of government property, civil disorder, and tampering with documents.
The prosecution has officially started to rest and won’t bring any new witnesses.
Rhodes will finish his direct testimony on Nov. 7 and will the face questions from prosecutors.
When you open a bank account, do you surrender all rights to your privacy and personal data?
Today, the answer is yes. The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (BSA) and subsequent amendments mandated that your bank must inform the federal government about any customer’s transactions that they consider suspicious, however broadly defined that may be, in the form of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs).
How often do banks think their customers are doing something suspicious? According to the U.S. Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, there were approximately 20 million bank reports of suspicious activity in 2019.
An August report by the Cato Institute titled “Government Surveillance Doesn’t Stop at Your Bank’s Door” states that this reporting requirement doesn’t just apply to banks but also to currency exchanges, payments companies, broker-dealers, casinos, pawnbrokers, travel agencies, and car dealerships.
All of this would seem to be illegal under the U.S. Constitution; the Fourth Amendment, for example, prohibits “unreasonable search and seizure” by our government and establishes the requirement for the government to obtain a warrant and show “probable cause” of a crime. But according to Jennifer Schulp, co-author of the Cato report, one reason that government surveillance-by-proxy has been allowed by U.S. courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, is something called the “Third Party Doctrine.”
Schulp told The Epoch Times that the Third Party Doctrine is a legal principle that “essentially removed the expectation of privacy that an individual has from information that they share with a third party, including their banks. So under current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the information that you give to your bank is no longer private.”
Given that it is nearly impossible to function without a bank account in America today, this effectively blurs the line between public and private surveillance. When the Third Party Doctrine was adopted in the 1960s and 1970s, the courts began to allow government to conduct warrantless searches in the interest of preventing crime.
The Cato report points out that “while the government’s interest in stopping crime is certainly an important one, the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment already balances that interest with an individual’s interest in privacy by requiring the government to obtain a warrant to access a person’s documents and information.”
Another reason the Supreme Court allowed the Bank Secrecy Act to stand was that the law as originally written was more narrowly tailored, and only required reporting of transactions over $10,000. Taking inflation into account, this would be about $75,000 today. The limits of the BSA were never adjusted up for inflation, casting a much wider net today than when the law was passed.
How Extensive Is Government Surveillance?
Since being signed off on by the Supreme Court, the law has since been expanded to include many more types of transactions and institutions. But the fact that, according to the law, banks do not tell customers that they’re being surveilled, means that there are few challenges for courts to take up in order to reconsider their verdict.
“Banks are not allowed to let individuals know that this type of report is being filed on them,” Schulp said. “So to the extent that individual citizens might have objections to their information being shared with the government in a Suspicious Activity Report, they have no way of knowing that that’s happening to them, and thus can’t really bring the legal challenge themselves.”
Even at the time of the BSA’s original passage, some justices expressed concerns that the constitution was being violated. Justice Thurgood Marshall, for example, stated that “by compelling an otherwise unwilling bank to photocopy the checks of its customers, the government has as much of a hand in seizing those checks as if it had forced a private person to break into the customer’s home or office and photocopy the checks there.”
This issue is now being raised again today not only about bank surveillance but also about tech surveillance and even tech censorship. The question is: If the government is barred from warrantless searches, can it get around this simply by getting private corporations to search Americans’ data on its behalf? Likewise, if the government is barred from censoring Americans’ speech, can it just get private tech companies to do this instead?
The extent of bank surveillance has made headlines this year, in three cases in particular. The first was a New York Post report that Bank of America had data-mined its customers’ accounts to see which customers had made purchases or traveled to Washington, D.C., around the time of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol. The names of customers who had done so, or who had recently bought a firearm, were handed over to the FBI for investigation. One customer was reportedly questioned by the FBI as a result, but no charges were filed.
The second case regards a decision by credit card companies—Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, in particular—to begin tracking their customers’ purchases at gun shops. The CEO of Amalgamated Bank, a progressive bank that had lobbied heavily for the tracking of gun sales, stated that “where there may be gun sales that are intended for black markets or we see patterns of gun purchases made in multiple gun shops … we can provide that information to authorities to investigate.”
Gun rights advocates were quick to criticize this action.
“They’ve created this merchant category code that if you go into a gun store and you purchase anything from that gun store, and it looks like it may be something outside the norm, then that information could be turned over to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network,” Mark Oliva, public affairs director for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told The Epoch Times. “What we’re talking about with this is a heavy-handed approach that’s going to put people who are exercising their Second Amendment rights onto a government watchlist, simply for exercising that right.”
The third case occurred in February, when Canadian banks data-mined the private accounts of truckers protesting pandemic regulations, as well as those who had donated in support of protesters via crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe and GiveSendGo. Under orders from the Canadian government, banks froze the accounts of targeted customers, blocking them from accessing their own money or making credit card payments.
“That Third Party Doctrine has come under criticism a lot over the years, by current Supreme Court justices from very different schools of thought,” Schulp said. “Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Sonia Sotomayor have indicated that the Third Party Doctrine needs to be revisited. So I think it’s something that the current court might look at differently than the court did in the 1970s.”
