Ohio Democrat takes page from GOP firebrand Lauren Boebert in attempt to distance himself from party
What do you do when running for office as a Democrat in resident Joe Biden’s America? Talk like a Republican—at least if you’re one Ohio Senate candidate.
From praising former president Donald Trump on trade to sounding the alarm about the southern border, Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) is trying his hardest to avoid being lumped in with the rest of the Democratic Party. Earlier this month, Ryan proposed a House resolution that would designate fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.” That resolution appears to be lifted from a bill proposed the day before by one of the most right-wing members of the House, Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert (Colo.), who also called fentanyl “a weapon of mass destruction that is destroying our nation.”
Ryan, who will face against Republican nominee J.D. Vance in November, is considered a long shot by political analysts. Trump won Ohio by more than 8 points in 2020 and the seat Ryan is running for is occupied by a Republican, the retiring Sen. Rob Portman.
His strategy highlights the difficulty for Democratic candidates trying to pitch themselves as moderates in the current political environment. Biden is the most unpopular president at this point in his term in almost a century, according to the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, a fact largely driven by skyrocketing inflation. For Ryan, executing this strategy could prove difficult: FiveThirtyEight also found that Ryan votes in line with Biden’s position 100 percent of the time.
“Any Democrat running this November is gonna have a tough time running with Biden as president,” said Democratic political consultant Dick Harpootlian, a longtime friend of Biden, when asked about Ryan’s conservative messaging. “Biden is beset by huge issues and problems that are not playing well in America right now. I mean, we saw it in 1994 after [former president Bill] Clinton did well in 1992.”
At campaign stops around Ohio, Ryan seeks to distance himself from the Democratic Party by offering a moderate and pragmatic message. In May, Ryan was conspicuously absent from a Cincinnati event where Biden spoke about the necessity of passing a domestic manufacturing bill. The White House later said Biden and Ryan were “in close touch.”
“We’ve got to get away from the Democrat-Republican thing, all these stupid fights,” Ryan said at a campaign event last month. “And we can only do that by being Americans first. China and Russia, they want us to keep fighting with each other. And to me, it’s playing right into their hands.”
Ryan’s rebrand attempt began in April when he released an ad claiming he has spent his entire political life “sounding the alarm on China” and voting “against bad trade deals.” That ad backfired after left-wing Democrats accused him of xenophobia against Chinese Americans.
Following the Biden administration’s announcement that it would end Title 42 restrictions on the southern border—a federal power first used by Trump that gives law enforcement the ability to rapidly deport migrants—Ryan called the decision “wrong and reckless,” breaking with top Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.).
“Prematurely ending this policy without a path forward does nothing to keep Americans safe, support our Border Patrol agents, protect asylum-seekers, or bring about the comprehensive fix our immigration system needs,” Ryan said at the time. He has also called a “strong border” a “basic American value,” a stark contrast to his rhetoric in 2018 when he said Trump’s “zero-tolerance immigration policy” showed he didn’t have an “ounce of humanity.”
His change of heart could be a product of problems on the minds of Ohio voters. As one of the states hardest hit by the opioid crisis, many voters in Ohio blame the Biden administration’s lax border policies for the influx of fentanyl there. Ryan’s rhetoric on the issues, however, hasn’t been followed by action in the House. Although Ryan introduced a fentanyl resolution nearly identical to Boebert’s Republican proposal, for example, he has yet to cosponsor her bill—a move that would increase its likelihood of passing.
Ryan’s office did not respond to a request for comment asking whether he plans on cosponsoring the Republican bill.
Shortly after Vance clinched the Ohio Republican Senate nomination in May, Ryan offered praise for Trump—who endorsed Vance in the Republican primary.
“I agreed with Trump on trade,” Ryan says in an ad that debuted earlier this month. “I voted against outsourcing every single time. We’ve gotta get tough on China. Let’s make things in Ohio again.”
Ryan sent a letter on June 10 to Biden demanding the White House not lift any tariffs against China, alleging that such a move would “strip the U.S. of leverage in negotiations” and “inundate American companies with a slew of imports they may not be able to withstand.” He implored Biden to “prioritize American workers and American manufacturing companies.” The letter came after reports that Biden was considering lifting many of the tariffs in an effort to lower inflation.
As the midterms approach, Ryan seems to have pivoted on trade issues as well. During the Trump administration, Ryan called the China tariffs just a way for Trump to “look tough.” In an interview with the Washington Post, he called Trump’s actions “abominable and must be revised immediately.”
“[Trump’s tariffs are] designed to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy, for minimal gain,” Ryan tweeted in July 2018.
Vance has labeled Ryan an opportunist and dishonest. Ryan has responded by saying he is happy to talk about his past comments on a variety of issues, including trade.
“My record is very, very clear,” Ryan said last week. “We can squabble about some of the details of it, how things are implemented and all the Washington stuff in the details we have to deal with. But my record is very, very clear on this.”
Update, June 21, 11:15 a.m.: This piece was updated with additional information on Ryan’s voting record.
They are not just desperate. Remember from, their standpoint, all the issues that really matter doesn’t matter what Biden is doing. They are desperate to guarantee the right to have a tax paid abortion on the last day of the birth. They’re desperate to impose radical values in second and 3rd grade. They are desperate to keep the border open. I mean, this is a very issue oriented rather than personality oriented movement. And they look at the Republican’ potential victory and it scares them. Because the Republicans are going to stand for less government. Less inflation. Controlling the border. Locking up criminals, a tragic story we just heard a few minutes ago. I think on the left, there is a sense that this could be the moment they really do start getting defeated as a force in America.
NEWT:
Politics is a tough business. People are allowed to do anything they can to win. Within the law. And, if you figure out that you can help nominate somebody that’s easier to beat, that’s, you know, that’s your right. But it’s very dangerous. Because, in fact, in a lot of these cases, they are going to nominate people who they really deeply dislike but who are going to win. And they are going to govern based on their values not based on money from the democratic party. So, I have a hunch that whether it’s Dr. Oz winning in Pennsylvania or J.D. Vance winning in Ohio, there are a whole number of places people who are really populist and really against socialist big government are going to come out on top this fall. And the left sitting there thinking what happened? How can could this have happened?
NEWT:
Well, I think they are in a different position. Every week that goes by, Donald Trump’s presidency looks better. Look at his inflation rate, look at the price of gasoline when Trump was president. People find his I think his personality too aggressive and at times too annoying. But his policies certainly had turned America around. And in Biden’s case, he doesn’t just fall off his bicycle, he takes the country him with him. And you look at Biden’s inflation record which is worse than Jimmy Carter. Look at Biden’s open door policy in the southern border. Biden’s allies releasing murderers. A lot of reasons why the country on policy grounds would favor Trump over Biden and the latest poll I link was like 6 or 8 points.
Fox Business host Larry Kudlow didn’t hold back on a recent segment of his show and told his audience the full extent of the Biden Administration’s failing economic policies.
In part of the segment, Kudlow gives an insight into the latest Fox News poll numbers which show waning confidence in the President’s ability to lead an economic recovery.
He also refuted a common talking point the left often uses about wealthy individuals and major corporations not paying their fair share of taxes.
Notably, Kudlow actually agreed on a few observations recently made by resident Biden about issues plaguing the nation – before highlighting the fact that Biden’s own policies have led to the problems he wants to solve.
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.—An Alabama man who personalized his license plate with “LGBFJB” on a state-issued “Don’t Tread on Me” yellow license plate that the state found “objectionable” now says he can keep it.
Nathan Kirk, Blount County resident and owner of Blount County Tactical, a store that sells firearms and ammunition, received a letter from the Alabama Department of Revenue dated March 9 stating that the license plate would “not be recalled.”
“The state had telephoned me [on March 11] and told me that they would not be recalling the plate and that a letter would be forthcoming,” Kirk told The Epoch Times in a telephone interview. “I wanted to make sure and verify with that letter that it was real.”
Kirk believes the amount of attention his story garnered was the reason behind the state changing its mind.
“Jefferson County Sheriff David Clarke tagged the governor [Kay Ivey] about what was happening to me,” he said. “Then, before you know it, I was getting a telephone call and now a letter. I don’t think they wanted the backlash.”
Kirk said his advice to anyone who is getting “bullied” by government officials is to “not lay down.”
“Unless it’s something bad or vulgar in expressing your opinion, it’s nobody’s right to tell you you can’t do something,” he said. “America in general needs to start standing up.”
Kirk said that he is meeting with legal counsel soon to discuss his options and said that litigation is not off the table.
“I will listen to what they have to say,” he said. “As long as they don’t mess with me any longer—it shouldn’t have ever happened and my main thing was shutting it down, and I’ve accomplished that.”
In October Kirk received his new Ford truck that he had ordered a couple of months prior. He registered the vehicle in his wife’s name and ordered a specialty plate, sometimes called a “vanity plate,” displaying in bold black letters “LGBFJB” against a yellow background with the Gadsden coiled snake logo for his new silver Ford F-150 King Ranch pick-up truck from the Alabama Department of Revenue, Motor Vehicle Division.
“I wanted to do something ‘goofy’ with the tag,” Kirk told The Epoch Times in a telephone interview. “Being in the firearm industry and knowing how [President Joe] Biden feels about firearms, yeah, it’s derogatory against Joe Biden, I’ll admit that.”
Kirk said in Alabama tags “normally” arrive within two weeks of ordering them, but “not this one.”
“The paper tag that I had on the truck was expired and I called the tag office and they told me that there was an aluminum shortage at the courthouse where I ordered the tag—that was news to me because everyone was still drinking out of aluminum cans,” he continued.
On Jan. 21, Kirk said he received his tag in the mail, put it on his truck, took a picture of it, and posted it on his Facebook account.
Then on Feb. 25 he received a letter telling him that the tag was “inappropriate and “objectionable.”
“That doesn’t sound right to me,” he said of the letter. “I thought somebody had seen it and then reported it, but that turned out not to be the case.”
He said he received a telephone call “a few days” after receiving the letter and told him the “exact reason” why they found Kirk’s tag to be “objectionable.”
“They told me they have ‘reviewers from the review department’—that’s the exact terminology they used,” he said. “The reviewer said they thought the “F” meant the explicative word.”
But Kirk said the letter “F” that has “everyone’s feather’s ruffled” doesn’t stand for that, it stands for the word “forget.”
“In my interpretation, it doesn’t stand for that,” he said. “I can’t help what they make it stand for, but regardless, it’s up to your own interpretation.”
Don’t Tread on Me sample license plate from the state of Alabama. (Alabama Dept. of Revenue)
Kirk said he issued a challenge to the department by telling them he would surrender his tag if they “revoked every single license plate in the state of Alabama that has the letter ‘F’ in it.”
“They said they’re not going to do that,” he laughed. “Then I said you’re probably not going to get mine either.”
Kirk said while researching license plates throughout the state he came upon something “very interesting.”
“I found out just a year ago, the state was issuing tags for the Freemasons, the Masonic Lodge, and you’ll never guess what the first three letters were on the tag—FJB 001, FJB 002 and the numbers go up from there,” he said. “But my “F” tapping is offensive?”
Florida attorney Charles Heekin said that if the state of Alabama had carried through with its plan of revoking Kirk’s license plate he had a “good case” against the state.
“Alabama, because it has censored political speech, has set itself up as an arbiter of political speech and therefore has violated the man’s First Amendment rights,” Heekin told The Epoch Times during a telephone interview. “This is a breathtaking ignorance of the law regarding free speech and the First Amendment, which is the most sacred.”
The anthem of “Let’s go Brandon” reportedly has cemented itself into the vernacular of American citizens who do not particularly care for the sitting president originated from a cheer that broke out at Alabama’s Talladega Speedway in May 2021 when a reporter mistook the crowd’s cheers of “[expletive] Joe Biden” for a cheer of “Let’s Go, Brandon,” referring to the NASCAR driver she was interviewing, Brandon Brown, after he won the race.
The phrase subsequently caught on like wildfire on social media, with numerous public figures, from rappers to politicians, using the term, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed legislation ending mask and vaccine mandates in Brandon, Florida.
First amendment rights and expressing oneself came at a price for Kirk and his family, however, as they, and even their pets, have received death threats because of his gun store and now his license plate dispute with the state.
He said that he gets calls from “private numbers” saying “awful things” about his wife and her salon business.
He said he does not think that it is anyone local, he believes it is someone who has seen the story on “other media outlets” and has gone to great lengths to obtain his and his wife’s cell numbers, and the calls are “relentless.”
He said that people will call and say derogatory things about his wife, and his children were singled out by telling him they were “going to find them and slap them.”
“They called my wife and said the same things,” he said. “They even said I wasted my money on a car tag when I could’ve gotten my wife a facelift and a boob job.”
“It can’t be anyone from around here,” he said about his hometown. “They’re not the same breed of people. I would never do anything like that to someone no matter their political views—it’s just a smear campaign and they tried the cancel culture thing and failed.”
A Facebook digital sign is seen in Menlo Park, Calif., on Oct. 23, 2019. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
Kirk has also had an issue with Facebook canceling his page in an attempt to “silence his opinions” and “hurt his firearm business.”
“I have had four profiles that I’ve had to make because of my affiliation with a firearm store,” he said. “They will either take them down or say I am violating their community standards.”
Kirk said he has lost his Facebook pages due to advertising sales that he has in his store and that Facebook is violating its advertising policies on the Marketplace site located within the Facebook domain.
“They said that a brick-and-mortar firearms store can post things for sale at your store,” he said. “But they cancel it anyway—and they have moved my feed to where nobody can see it—I’m basically irrelevant.
Kirk said his personal Facebook page has been banned because of comments he posted during the pandemic involving vaccines.
“I got banned from Facebook for 30 days because I called a woman a liberal, but she wished death on me and my family—even my dogs—and she gets to keep her page,” he said.
Kirk is now seeking the advice of a constitutional attorney to not only take on the state of Alabama over his license plate, but Facebook as well.
“I want Mark Zuckerberg to know who I am,” he said.
According to the department’s website, In Alabama, “every motor vehicle operator who operates a motor vehicle upon any city street or other public highway of or in this state shall at all times keep attached and plainly visible on the rear end of such motor vehicle a license tag or license plate as prescribed and furnished by the Department of Revenue at the time the owner or operator purchases his license.”
“Anyone violating the provisions of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall, upon conviction, be punished by fine not exceeding $500.00 and, in addition thereto, shall be prohibited from driving a motor vehicle in Alabama for a period of not less than 60 days nor more than six months,” the website says.
The Alabama Department of Revenue responded via email to The Epoch Times that the “matter is now closed.”
The new heir to the late Richard Trumka at the AFL-CIO hailed resident Joe Biden on Tuesday as the “the most pro-union president in history,” indicating in her first days as its elected president that her election will not interrupt the decades-long alliance between the nation’s largest union federation and the Democratic Party.
Liz Shuler was elected to a four-year term Sunday and spoke of the need to modernize union organizing, declaring “this is not your granddaddy’s labor movement.” But critics of the group’s leadership note Shuler served as Trumka’s number two since 2009 as secretary-treasurer and was his handpicked successor. Grassroots labor organizers teased a potential challenge to the group’s establishment over concerns it prioritizes Democrats in Washington, D.C., over local organizers, but were unable to propel a candidate that could compete with leadership’s choice.
The AFL-CIO and its affiliated PAC have since 1995 spentroughly $25 million to elect Democrats and $5 million annually on lobbying. Shuler’s ascent comes as the AFL-CIO pushes the Senate to pass the PRO Act, which was renamed after Trumka and is touted by Biden as the most pro-union legislation since the New Deal. If passed, the legislation will overturn right-to-work laws in 27 states. Biden, in a speech at the group’s convention Tuesday, pushed Congress to pass the legislation and spoke of his close relationship with Trumka in past decades.
“I promise you, I am gonna keep fighting for you, are you prepared to fight with me?” Biden asked the delegates.
Shuler pushed to keep her members unified amid speculation over potential challengers. Left-wing leaders, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), and their mediaalliespropped up Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, as a challenger to the Trumka establishment who could build a “militant” and “progressive” labor movement. Nelson has pushed unions to limit their political activity in the nation’s capital and shift resources toward more radical left-wing organizing at the local level. It is unclear why Nelson declined to run for AFL-CIO president.
Shuler told Axios in a story published ahead of her Sunday election that the union can engage in both national politics while also supporting grassroots movements. She presented herself as a progressive leader for a new generation of labor.
“The emerging workforce is people of color, is young people, is women, particularly women of color,” Shuler said. “This is not your granddaddy’s labor movement.”
Patrick Semmens, vice president for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, said the narrative that Shuler will be a fresh voice for the federation is nonsense. The focus, he said, will remain to bankroll political allies so they push pro-labor legislation to counter declining union membership nationwide.
“Coronation is more apt than election given there hasn’t been a contested election for the head of the AFL-CIO in decades,” Semmens told the Washington Free Beacon. “Shuler swept into power unopposed using the same machine that backed Trumka, so the idea that this is any new direction for big labor doesn’t really seem plausible.”
Shuler has not been without controversy as president. She refused to release information about an investigation into AFL-CIO Pennsylvania president-elect Frank Snyder after he faced a dozen accusations of workplace harassment, largely toward women. To release this information, she said, would be a political risk in a purple state.
“The report was never written,” Shuler told Axios. “We decided to take action prior to official findings because I knew it would divide the labor movement, and we are going into an important election year. Pennsylvania is a critical state.”
Snyder retired days before he was set to take the lead of the Pennsylvania chapter.
Frank Ricci, a fellow at the Yankee Institute, said Shuler’s decision to keep the matter internal shows that the AFL-CIO “puts politics above the very workers it’s supposed to fight for.”
The AFL-CIO represents more than 12 million active and retired workers from 56 national and international unions. The last contested election for president was in 1995, which marked the start of Trumka’s run as secretary-treasurer.
IS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT FULL OF CHINESE AGENTS? IT SEEMS SO.
Jack Markell – resident Joe Biden’s pick to serve as ambassador to the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – has a long history of partnering with Chinese Communist Party foreign influence groups and has called on Americans to “welcome” and “understand” the communist regime.
Markell, a former Governor of Delaware, was also tapped by the White House to lead its Afghan refugee resettlement program “Operation Allies Welcome” in September before his ambassadorship was confirmed by the Senate.
In 2011, Markell penned an op-ed – “How We Can Use China’s Growth To Fuel American Jobs” – where he called for increased ties with the communist country.
“The Chinese growth that has long stirred fear among many Americans is increasingly opening up new opportunities for US workers and exporters,” Markell argued in the piece before calling on Americans to “welcome” and “understand” the brutal, communist regime:
It’s obvious that our political systems are different, but the differences in our legal systems, business culture, and consumer expectations have a far greater impact on companies. If we want to attract Chinese investors and local jobs, we need to welcome them, understand them, and be prepared to help them understand our expectations.
“From my work in the private sector, I know that competitiveness is fortified by cooperation. These efforts will make our country and each of our states stronger,” he added.
Markell also details his work with the National Governors Association (NGA), including inking deals with Chinese Communist Party officials.
“At the NGA Winter Meeting this February, I was pleased to sign an agreement with the top official from China’s Hunan Province, Secretary Zhou Qiang, to cooperate on job creation,” he outlined before praising the group’s effort to “promote cooperation” with China:
I applaud the initiatives by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the National Governors Association to promote cooperation between “subnational” (state and local) governments in China and the United States.
In a separate NGA forum taking place in July 2011, Markell signed another memorandum of understanding with the secretary of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China Zhao Hongzhu. Markell would later go on to serve as the Chairman of the NGA from 2012 to 2013.
The NGA has a long history of collaboration with the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) – a premier state-run foreign influence group that functions as part of the country’s United Front Work Department (UFWD). The U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission has flagged the UFWD as Beijing’s weapon “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing.”
The Trump administration designated the group a foreign mission, noting it has “sought to directly and malignly influence” American officials to promote China’s global agenda and relies on NGA forums to do so.
While in office, Markell also partnered with the Chinese company Wanxiang to fund delegations of Delaware students to study in China.
Wanxiang, however, is run by high-ranking Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks and has a long track record of adding relatives and associates of establishment American politicians to its rolodex to secure legislative and regulatory favors.
As Peter Schweizer points out inSecret Empires, the company leverages these connections to circumvent federal regulations aimed at curtailing predatory acquisition and investment at the hands of Beijing-linked firms:
“It has also collected powerful political friends on both sides of the aisle, by putting them and their family members on the payroll. Along the way, it has skated past federal regulations and avoided sanctions for doing business in North Korea that have plagued other companies. It offers a powerful illustration of how politically connected firms make members of the American political class wealthy while getting special treatment in the United States.”
Since departing the Delaware Governor’s office, Markell has stayed in the Chinese Communist Party’s orbit, including attending events sponsored by another Beijing-backed influence group: China General Chamber of Commerce-U.S.A.
We are now back to a national average gas price of $5.00/gallon. This is a subject of serious concern for almost everyone. Conservatives will (rightly) point to the Biden Administration’s hostility toward domestic oil production and distribution as the primary cause of the growing crisis, yet struggle to frame the problem in terms other than “the naïveté of environmentalist policy.” While the American ruling class is indeed dominated by extremely stupid people, its environmentalism is not “oh whoops we accidentally made gas cost way too much, who could have predicted that!”
Allowing it to be framed that way while giving conservative satirists plenty of low-hanging fruit to work with, is a massive mistake. It is easy to poke fun at the stupidity of people like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and AOC. And that’s entirely the problem. These people are not sincerely-yet-naively attempting a solution to what they see as a truly apocalyptic disaster. It is a major mistake to assume they are ever operating in good faith. None of these people actually believe this stuff. They all have massive multimillion-dollar homes on coastlines they say will not exist by the end of the decade. It has been demonstrated ad nauseum that these people fly around in private jets, expending more fossil fuels in a single vacation than the average person will in their entire lives. You have to understand these are deeply cynical people. They do not care about the stuff they say they do. But what do they care about?
The most important filter to understand politics, especially politics in the Current Year, is Friend/Enemy distinction. Do not look at what these people say, look at what they do. And, look at who benefits from what they do or who is harmed by what they do. Who are the enemies of the occupational regime? Obviously, they will never explicitly state who it is they seek to destroy. Unless the pharmaceutical cocktail that allows the current president brief moments of lucidity is badly messed up, you are never going to hear him say “we want to totally impoverish and destroy the American middle and working class.” But every single day the actions of the regime speak as clearly as possible.
You need to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt. They are not stupid, at least not the ones that truly matter. They are not misguided. They are not simply mistaken. They are intentionally malicious. It is not the naïveté of bleeding-heart liberals who get teary-eyed at the thought of punishing violent criminals that have caused the ruling regime to empty prisons and violent crime to exponentially increase. Yes, the naive liberal useful idiots who give them power are easily deluded by propaganda, but those who wield power know exactly what they are doing. They want the people they hate to be punished. They want white women and their babies to be run over by violent criminals who never should have been let out of prison. They want violent criminals to be released back into the wild, they want police to be terrified to fight them, and they want you to go to prison if you ever have to defend yourself against them. These are not accidents caused by well-meaning-but-naive libs—this stuff is by design.
“Climate change” is no different. For his entire presidential campaign, Joe Biden read carefully crafted scripts about reducing the use of fossil fuels, cutting oil production, increasing “clean energy,” etc. That the cost of gasoline is nearly triple what it was when he took office is not some accident of the inscrutable forces of the free market. The people who rule the American people want gasoline and diesel to be unaffordable for most of the country. Regular people—with jobs and families and mortgages—those people are the enemies of the regime. They want things to be more expensive for you. They want you to suffer.
They not only don’t care if you are impoverished, but it also brings them sick pleasure. You are their enemy. They want to destroy you. This should have been evident during the Wuhan Flu, the Mostly Peaceful Summer of George, and the Most Secure Election in History. What were those events, in truth? Whether you believe those events were 100% organic or they were operations of alphabet agencies and aligned NGOs or (most likely) some mixture of both, it doesn’t matter. What matters is both who benefited from these events and who was harmed. Who benefited from the lockdowns? Megacorporations, especially trillion-dollar hedge funds like Blackrock, which got the overwhelming majority of newly printed trillions (while you got a couple of tiny checks). In short, the greatest constituency of the regime benefitted from everything that happened in 2020. Every industry got hundreds of billions for almost nothing, Big Pharma got a huge boon, and the military-industrial complex now likewise gets to cash in on an absurdly expensive (even by War on Terror standards) proxy war with Russia. Everyone who was already filthy rich got even richer, all at your expense. Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and especially billionaire retailers like the Waltons and Bezos raked in the dough while their competitors were shut down.
And who was harmed by the events of 2020 (and beyond)? The greatest enemy of the regime, that’s who: the middle class, the people who have spent their entire lives toiling away to build businesses that provide services and goods and jobs for their neighbors, who donate to the things that make their communities worth living in, churches, local sports teams, youth activities, and service organizations. The regular people who have a stake in the places they live, who love their country and their neighborhoods, who want to live in peace and quiet, who simply want good order. That is who the regime hates the most. The few Norman Rockwell Americans who have the audacity to still exist. The regime was happy to allow your businesses to be locked down, while their billionaire friends could stay open. The regime was happy to allow organized violent revolutionaries to burn down your neighborhoods with almost no arrests and no investigation into the machinations behind the scenes. All of this while spending years holding men without trial in solitary confinement for walking through wide-open doors to the U.S. Capitol and spending years investigating an understandably overly exuberant protest of a fraudulent election. You need to filter everything that happens today through the friend/enemy distinction and politics becomes absolutely crystal clear.
This is why it cost so much to fill up your car and your grocery cart. The people in power hate you and your family. They are stupid and incompetent, but even worse, they are malicious. If you are a normal person, who just wants to have a job and home and family, who loves his country and loves his God, the people in power do not want you to exist. They want to make life as hard as possible for you. They do not want you to have children. And if you somehow can even have children, they want the children you do have to be groomed into disgusting freaks. You have an enemy that hates you. Do not ever forget it.
But you also have friends. The good news is that more and more people are starting to see they no longer live in the America they grew up in. More people are beginning to see that the America of “at the end of the day everyone is an American on the same team and we just disagree about some things” is dead. And while this is a great tragedy it is a necessity. We have to realize the thing we love is gone before we can begin to bring it back. And many people are now beginning to have that realization.
This is the very first step in things being made right again. Now you can organize around this principle, knowing who your friends are and who is on your side. From there you can build churches, build neighborhoods and towns, build communities dedicated to rebuilding Christian civilization, communities that will have the strength to weather together the difficult years to come. One in which you can recognize who your friends are and who your enemies are, only then will you have the ability to fight and build.
Andrew Isker is the pastor of 4th Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, MN. He is a graduate of Minnesota State University and Greyfriar’s Hall Ministerial Training School, and he has served churches in Missouri, West Virginia, and Minnesota. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Boniface Option. Andrew, his wife Kara, and their five children reside in his hometown of Waseca, MN. He can be found on Gab @BonifaceOption.
Amid continually increasing gas prices, White House officials have continually recommended that Americans feeling pain at the pump should switch to electric vehicles.
During a live streaming event this week, the Biden administration’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, said a way to deal with $5 per gallon gas is to purchase an electric vehicle
“If you filled up your EV [electric vehicle] and you filled up your gas tank with gasoline, you would save $60 per fill-up by going electric rather than using gasoline, but it’s a very compelling case. But again, we want to bring down the price at the point of purchase,” she said in a clip circulated by Republicans on social media on June 14.
Her comments received significant criticism from Republican lawmakers and conservatives on social media, who accused Granholm, a former Michigan governor, of being out of touch. Last year, Granholm sold millions of dollars in stock options from Proterra—a company that manufactures electric buses.
“If you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you,” she said in May 2021 in reference to the elevated gas prices.
And several weeks ago, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg touted electric vehicles to a House panel amid increasing gas prices and Republican concerns that motorists in rural areas won’t benefit from more federal spending on electric vehicles.
“It is actually rural drivers who would benefit the most,” Buttigieg said in May. “The more they drive, typically, the more of their income is going to gas, so the more money they are going to save if they can afford an electric vehicle, which allows them to fill up on electrons.”
Last year, Buttigieg drew criticism for telling families who are struggling with high gas prices to buy an electric vehicle, because if they do, they’ll “never have to worry about gas prices again.”
According to Kelly Blue Book’s late 2021 figures, the average price of a new electric vehicle hovered at roughly $56,000. In contrast, the average price of a new compact was about $25,000 at about the same time. The average price of a new, non-electric SUV was $34,000, while the electric version was nearly $45,000.
The 2022 Chevrolet Bolt EV starts at about $31,500, according to the website.
As of June 16, data from auto club AAA show that the average price for a gallon of regular gas fell by about 1 cent to $5.009 across the United States. California, as usual, led the way with prices hitting $6.428, the figures show, and no other state had a gas price of $6 per gallon.
Biden himself said in late May that the record gas prices will spur Americans to purchase electric vehicles. Earlier this year, Biden announced the release of 180 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which the White House said would cause gas prices to “come down fairly significantly.”
“[When] it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” Biden said during a trip to Japan.
Minority voters have turned on Joe Biden, Quinnipiac also finds
Fewer Americans support a ban on so-called assault weapons than Quinnipiac has ever recorded, the pollster reported on June 8.
Americans are about evenly divided on whether the government should ban assault weapons, the poll found, the lowest show of support for such a ban since February 2013, when Quinnipiac first started asking about it.
These results come even as mainstream media outlets and Democratic politicians, including resident Joe Biden, have ramped up calls for an assault-weapon ban in light of recent mass shootings and ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
A plurality of respondents, including most Republicans and independents and 31 percent of Democrats, told Quinnipiac that mental health issues are the main cause of mass shootings committed by young people. Only 19 percent of all respondents say “the availability of guns” is the main cause. A majority of Americans, meanwhile, oppose any efforts to limit the number of firearms in the country.
Only 32 percent of respondents approve of how Biden has handled gun violence, just one aspect of Biden’s dismal approval ratings. Only 33 percent of Americans approve of the president’s performance, while 55 percent disapprove. A wide majority of independents—61 percent—frown on what the president’s doing.
Minority voters have turned on the president, the poll found, in line with previouspolling. Nearly 60 percent of Hispanics disapprove of the president. Biden’s approval among blacks, meanwhile, cratered from 63 percent in May to just 49 percent this month.
A plurality of voters told Quinnipiac that they want to see the Republican Party retake control of Congress this year.
God…please bring back our true president, and evict the current resident. [US Patriot]
The White House and its allies are circulating a misleading talking point that the Biden administration is overseeing the most oil production in U.S. history.
Both White House chief of staff Ron Klain and resident Joe Biden have used the talking point as a response to Republican criticism that Democrats are discouraging domestic energy production through regulation and not issuing new drilling permits. Earlier this month, Klain shared a chart on Twitter showing oil production under Biden—at an annual average of 11.18 million barrels a day—was higher than any of his five predecessors. In March, Biden said the United States was “approaching record levels of oil and natural gas production.”
The claim from Democrats that domestic production is higher now than during the Trump administration is based on a comparison of four-year averages that includes the tremendous drop in economic activity at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Domestic oil production under Biden has yet to come close to the pre-pandemic levels reached under the prior administration, a more detailed Free Beacon analysis found.
The Free Beacon analysis of domestic crude oil production data shows that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States produced just under 13 million barrels of oil per day at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020. For comparison, that figure is more than 20 percent higher than the amount of oil the United States produced per day in September 2021. Energy industry expert James Wilson, who runs an oil and gas economics consulting firm, says the White House is abusing statistics to fit a narrative.
“You can claim anything with statistics,” Wilson told the Washington Free Beacon. “When COVID hit, the price of oil dropped and then production dropped. Surprise, surprise.”
The White House’s insistence on repeating the oil production claim bolsters the impression increasingly held by the public and some Democrats that the Biden administration is out of ideas to tackle rising prices. Even as the cost of gas skyrockets, the White House is sharing a months-old graph from liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias, a symptom of an office “defined by insularity,” as Politico has described it.
Lots of assertions on this website about why gasoline production is not keeping up with demand, but here’s a fact about US oil output: pic.twitter.com/VP0Rf95eP8
Domestic oil production trends prior to the pandemic show how misleading these sorts of claims are. For example, the United States produced an average of a million barrels more per day between the start of 2019 to April 2020 than the 11.185 million barrels a day averaged under Biden.
Biden told a group of labor union leaders on Tuesday that “I’m doing everything in my power to blunt Putin’s gas price hike” and blamed rising prices on “nothing else but that.” Despite that claim, federal data show that average daily domestic oil production in March, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was lower than in November of last year.
Unlike during Trump’s final year in office, consumer demand for energy is elevated today. Total U.S. petroleum consumption is estimated to rise 730,000 barrels per day this year over last, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Some industry analysts point to macroeconomic trends out of the Biden administration’s control, such as oil companies’ reluctance to invest in new drilling sites because of shareholder pressure, as reasons for lower domestic production. That explanation, Wilson says, does not tell the full story.
“Another thing that’s inhibiting these guys from drilling is uncertainty about what this administration was and is going to do,” Wilson said, referring to new and potential future regulations against the oil and gas industry. “The bottom line is that when Trump was president, these companies started producing and oil was cheaper.”
Earlier this month gas prices hit an average of $5 a gallon nationwide. Industry analysts expect that price to only increase throughout the summer when more Americans travel for vacation.
The rising price of gas and household goods is the driving force behind Biden’s plummeting approval rating. A majority of voters say the economy is their top concern in multiple surveys, and a RealClearPolitics aggregate of recent polls shows Americans’ approval of Biden’s job performance is lower than at any time since he entered office.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) and Gun Owners of America (GOA) both issued statements Sunday after a bipartisan group of senators announced they’d reached an agreement on a gun control and safety package.
“Here we go again, Republican legislators compromising your rights and getting nothing in return,” GOA wrote in a Twitter post, referring to proposals in the framework deal. “Federal dollars to bribe your state legislators into enacting unconstitutional ‘red flag’ laws, which could allow a court to seize your weapons, without any due process, simply based on anonymous tips.”
It added that the bill would entail “wait periods and extensive review for those under 21 seeking to exercise their Second Amendment rights … we will not allow the government to make those who can vote and fight our wars second class citizens.”
The proposal, which has the backing of 10 Republicans in the Senate, includes initiatives to support state crisis intervention orders, an enhanced review process for gun buyers under the age of 21, expansions on various mental health programs, a ban on straw purchases, and other measures.
Notably, the framework bill includes a red flag provision giving “resources to states and tribes to create and administer laws that help ensure deadly weapons are kept out of the hands of individuals whom a court has determined to be a significant danger to themselves or others,” according to a news release from the senators on Sunday.
The NRA, meanwhile, said that it is “committed to real solutions to help stop violence in our communities. We encourage our elected officials to provide more resources to secure our schools, fix to our severely broken mental health system and support law enforcement,” according to a statement released to Fox News.
“As is our policy, the NRA does not take positions on ‘frameworks’. We will make our position known when the full text of the bill is available for review,” the NRA added.
But overall, the group will “continue to oppose any effort to insert gun control policies, initiatives that override constitutional due process protections and efforts to deprive law-abiding citizens of their fundamental right to protect themselves and their loved ones into this or any other legislation,” the statement continued.
Resident Joe Biden, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and various gun control activists lauded lawmakers for the bipartisan agreement. Biden and Democrats signaled that while they support the bill, they want even more gun-control policies enacted.
“Today, we are announcing a commonsense, bipartisan proposal to protect America’s children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country,” 20 senators said in a news release on Sunday. “Families are scared, and it is our duty to come together and get something done that will help restore their sense of safety and security in their communities.”
The measure does not include more controversial gun control measures pushed by Democrats such as bans on semiautomatic rifles or magazines that hold 10 rounds or more, or raising the age to purchase certain firearms like AR-15-style rifles from 18 to 21.
“Today’s announcement of a bipartisan gun-safety framework is a good first step to ending the persistent inaction to the gun violence epidemic that has plagued our country and terrorized our children for far too long,” Schumer said in a statement. “Once the text of this agreement is finalized, I will put this bill on the floor as soon as possible so that the Senate can act quickly to advance gun-safety legislation.”
CBS opted to bump a Young Sheldon rerun from its 8 p.m. primetime slot in favor of the Jan 6th committee hearing on Thursday evening. The decision backfired.
Just 3.24 million people watched the network’s “Capitol Assault Hearings” coverage Thursday night, according to the TV Ratings Guide. Exactly one week prior, 3.86 million people tuned into CBS to watch a Young Sheldon rerun, meaning an old episode of the coming-of-age sitcom garnered roughly 600,000 more viewers than the inaugural hearing.
That gap is even more pronounced for new Young Sheldon episodes. More than seven million people, for example, watched the show’s season five finale, titled “A Clogged Pore, a Little Spanish, and the Future,” during CBS’s 8 p.m. slot on Thursday, May 19. Three weeks earlier, 6.9 million people watched a new episode titled, “Uncle Sheldon and a Hormonal Firecracker.”
The revelation suggests that Democrats will struggle to use the hearings to attract voters ahead of the November midterm elections, particularly as Americans experience record-high inflation and gas prices. Just hours after the hearing’s conclusion, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation rose 8.6 percent in May, the fastest rate in more than four decades.
Republicans pointed to that announcement Friday morning to argue that Democrats are not prioritizing issues that are important to voters. Google trend data show midterm voters have “very low interest” in the January 6 riots compared to issues including jobs, taxes, and inflation, according to Axios.
“While resident Biden and Nancy Pelosi are detached from reality and focused on their political smokescreen January 6 hearings, Kansas families are struggling just to make ends meet each day as they deal with a level of inflation many of them have never seen in their lifetimes,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) said in a statement. “I call on Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats to hold a prime-time hearing on the out-of-control inflation their policies have created,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy added in a Friday morning tweet.
Thursday night’s hearing is not the last for the Jan. 6th committee, which will meet three more times next week alone. Those hearings, however, will almost certainly get fewer viewers—none are scheduled to air during primetime.
Resident Joe Biden is considering issuing executive orders to blunt the effect of an upcoming Supreme Court ruling that may overturn Roe v. Wade.
Biden’s comments came during a taping of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on June 8. Kimmel, a comedian and left-wing activist who is an outspoken supporter of Obamacare, gave the president a softball interview that was punctuated with applause by the studio audience.
The face-to-face conversation was reportedly Biden’s first major media appearance since 118 days before, when he sat down with NBC’s Lester Holt on Feb. 10 before the Super Bowl.
The TV spot came five weeks after a leaked draft majority opinion indicated the Supreme Court was poised to reverse Roe v. Wade, the seminal 1973 precedent that federalized abortion policy, overriding the states and making the procedure lawful throughout the entire United States. The draft opinion was from a pending case from Mississippi: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Biden told Kimmel that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, “I think we have to legislate it. We have to make sure we pass legislation making it a law that is the federal government says, ‘This is how it works.’”
The abortion ruling is “just going to be the beginning,” Biden said, adding that the Supreme Court would then outlaw the use of contraception “because in the Constitution there was no right to privacy.”
“It’s just ridiculous in my view, and I don’t think the country will stand for it, but I think what we’re going to have to do, there’s some executive orders I could employ, we believe, we’re looking at that right now,” Biden said, without elaborating.
If Roe v. Wade is reversed “and these states impose the limitations they’re talking about, it’s going to cause a mini-revolution and they’re going to vote a lot of these folks out of office,” he said.
“We’ve got to keep it focused on–if they overrule Roe v. Wade and the state of California won’t do it, but other states say that you cannot do the following, and so as a law you can’t cross the border, you can’t–all the things that some states have, then you’ve got to make sure that you vote, you got to vote and let people know exactly what the devil you think and change it.”
Biden’s interview also came the same day a suspect was arrested for plotting to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who, according to the leaked draft opinion, supports overturning Roe v. Wade, and a day after 25 Democratic U.S. senators wrote a letter (pdf) urging the president to “immediately issue an executive order directing the federal government to develop a national plan to defend Americans’ fundamental reproductive rights, including their right to an abortion.”
“The dramatic escalation of attacks on abortion access—spearheaded by right-wing justices, lawmakers, and activists—demands comprehensive and creative strategies from every corner of the federal government,” the letter states.
The senators encouraged Biden to increase access to medication-based abortions, use federal resources to increase access to abortions, provide resources for individuals seeking abortions in other states, and clarify protections for sensitive health data.
Among those signing the letter were Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Dianne Feinstein of California, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to release opinions in pending cases on June 13 and 15. It’s unclear which opinions will be made public. Activists are planning to blockade the Supreme Court building on June 13 in hopes of preventing the court from functioning, as The Epoch Times has reported.
According to a White House statement, President Biden so far has appointed more federal judges than any president since John F. Kennedy.
Last year, Biden surpassed the most judicial confirmations in the last 40 years. A recent wave of confirmations means he’s appointed the most judges at this point in a president’s second year in office—the highest in nearly 60 years. To date, the Senate has confirmed nearly 70 Biden appointees to the federal bench.
For people of faith worried about religious freedom, they should not only pay attention to how many, but also the ideology of the judges being confirmed. They must know this: President Biden’s record on judges is alarming. The nominees he’s put forward have raised serious red flags when it comes to religious liberty.
First on the list is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court at the end of the current term. First Liberty thoroughly reviewed Jackson’s record and our analysis revealed significant concerns about her judicial philosophy. Multiple red flags in the record suggest she could be hostile to religious liberty.
For example, Jackson was one of the most frequently reversed judges on the D.C. federal district court. The high rate at which appellate courts have overturned her decisions signals that Jackson frequently engages in judicial activism—intervening where she should not—and gets the law wrong on constitutional matters. Jackson has been endorsed by virtually every liberal activist group in America, receiving praise from Planned Parenthood, Center for Reproductive Rights, American Civil Liberties Union, American Atheists, Human Rights Campaign, Demand Justice, and other radical organizations.
But the Supreme Court is not the only place where Biden has put forth a radical nominee.
We cannot ignore those picked for the federal district and circuit courts. Remember, these courts have immense influence in protecting our freedoms—including religious liberty. The Supreme Court only takes about 65 cases each year, which means lower court judges decide a vast majority of cases.
Of the 66 Biden nominees confirmed so far, 16 have been confirmed to appeals courts, just one level below the Supreme Court. Biden is surpassing many of his recent predecessors. Only President Trump appointed more circuit court judges at this point in his presidency:
First Liberty reviewed the record and background of several Biden nominees to important vacancies on appellate courts. We uncovered that while in private practice, many of these judicial picks—who are now sitting on the federal bench for life—have expressly worked against Americans’ First Freedom.
Similar to Judge Jackson, Biden has selected nominees whose resumés show they’ve worked for radical activist organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, the latter being infamous for labeling political opponents as “hate groups” or “extremists.”
It does not appear Biden’s momentum is slowing down any time soon. More nominees could be confirmed in the coming weeks and months. Just this week, two appellate court nominees advanced to the full Senate for a final vote. About 20 total are waiting for a Senate vote. Slightly more than a dozen are pending a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing or vote.
In the most recent wave of nominations, President Biden announced three picks for appellate court judgeships on the Sixth Circuit, Seventh Circuit and the influential D.C. Circuit—often referred to as the “second highest” court in country. Approximately 50 district and appellate court vacancies still do not have a nominee.
Religious Americans alarmed about the judges being confirmed need to look at the bigger picture, however. Biden has been able to effectuate some change. But it does not mean he’s completely overhauled the composition of the judiciary.
Biden judges currently comprise less than 10% of the judiciary. If he filled every vacancy right now, there would be 140 total Biden judges. That’s still only about 16% of all district and appellate courts. If we compare this to his predecessors, Biden would be the president with the lowest total number of confirmations dating back to Gerald Ford.
Because federal judges make critical legal decisions about your religious liberty, First Liberty’s team of experts continues to keep a close eye on judicial vacancies and remains committed to our work of analyzing and evaluating the records of the nominees to America’s federal courts.
If our legal experts uncover any nominees who have a radical or unacceptable record on religious freedom, we will provide the facts and information to prevent those nominees from being on the federal bench for life.
THE ATTACKS ON THE SUPREME COURT BY THE EXTREME LEFT PICKS UP PACE.
Joe Biden’s White House intentionally fanned the flames of the violent, irate political left after the recent Democrat leak of a Supreme Court opinion, as well as the latest Uvalde school shooting. The result has been an attempt on the life of a Supreme Court Justice.
In amongst the political fracas, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is said to be holding up a Senate bill which would grant more security for Supreme Court justices. The U.S. Senate fast tracked the new security plans after Democrat extremists leaked an expected Roe v. Wade opinion from the court in May, but Pelosi has thus far refused to bring the legislation up for a vote in the House, stalling more security for Supreme Court justices.
Would-be assassin Nicholas John Roske is believed to have been radicalized by far-left reactions to the abortion issue, as well as the shooting in Uvalde. The aspiring gunman is said to have had a Glock 17 handgun, a knife, pepper spray, zip ties, a nail punch, a crow bar and a hammer, and said he found Kavanaugh’s address on the internet.
And while resident Biden himself has failed to condemn the attempted attack, a White House spokesman tepidly said that “any violence, threats of violence, or attempts to intimidate justices have no place in our society.”
But the left’s rhetoric on the run up to the latest incident is indicative of the political climate they seek to create around their “core” issues of abortion and gun control in the run up to the mid term elections.
GOP operatives point out a timeline of events that show no remorse or attempt to cool the heated rhetoric around the time Roske was being radicalized by their behavior:
May 5: Press Secretary Jen Psaki refused to condemn activists posting the justices’ home addresses online.
May 6: Psaki refused to say if Biden “has a view” on activists harassing justices at their homes.
May 6: Nancy Pelosi called on protesters to actively pressure justices to influence their decisions.
May 8: Pelosi said “the focus” is to influence and change the Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision on Roe v. Wade. May 9: Psaki refused to condemn protests at justices’ homes even though it is against the law.
Psaki also refused to condemn the doxing of justices’ personal information even as threats of violence grew.
May 10: Psaki downplayed the harassment, claiming protests “have been peaceful to date and we certainly continue to encourage that outside of judges’ homes.”
May 11: Chuck Schumer answered “yes” when asked if he was “comfortable with protests…outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.”
“It’s past time for Biden and Democrats to condemn this violence,” said a GOP spokesman in an e-mail Wednesday.
The incident follows a number of high-profile Democrat extremists attacking political figures, including the Washington, D.C. attack on reporter Jack Posobiec, as well as the Bernie Sanders-supporting gunman who attempted to assassinate Republican legislators en masse at a baseball practice in 2017.
He promised to ‘shut down the virus.’ He failed miserably.
Resident Joe Biden celebrated another grim milestone this week as his approval rating continues to flounder. Despite pledging to “shut down the virus” during the 2020 campaign, Biden has now presided over the deaths of more than 600,000 Americans from COVID-19.
That is more than twice the number of U.S. soldiers who perished in combat during World War II.
The virus our president promised to shut down has killed approximately 1,008,712 Americans, according to Johns Hopkins University, which means that Biden is responsible for almost 200,000 (or 50 percent) more COVID deaths than his predecessor, Donald Trump.
By his own logic, Biden should have resigned a long time ago.
The approximately 600,261 Americans killed on Biden’s watch is three times the number of COVID deaths he said should disqualify a president from serving in the White House. During an October 2020 debate against Trump, he argued that any leader who presided over more than 200,000 COVID deaths “should not remain as president of the United States.”
Days later, Biden delivered an emphatic message to the American people via his Twitter account. “I’m not going to shut down the economy,” he wrote on the popular social networking website. “I’m going to shut down the virus.”
Inflation levels are closer to the peaks of the Jimmy Carter era than the White House or media would have Americans believe, according to a report coauthored by Clinton administration Treasury secretary and Obama administration economic adviser Lawrence Summers.
At first glimpse, the inflation rate, which sits at roughly 8.3 percent, seems a far ways off from the March 1980 peak of 14.8 percent. Yet Summers and his colleagues argue that U.S. economic conditions are much bleaker than many policymakers assume and that inflation levels during these periods are actually similar.
Government data on inflation rates in years past are themselves inflated, Summers and his colleagues find. The 1951 inflation rating was 9.4 percent, for example, according to the consumer price index (CPI)—the index the federal government uses to measure the inflation rate. Summers and his colleagues found after calculating the rate using a formula that measures rising prices more accurately that the 1951 CPI was actually 3.3 percent.
The report paints a grim picture of the economic challenges facing President Joe Biden, who has been reluctant to call inflation an economic crisis and unwilling to curb domestic spending to help lower consumer costs. The only solution—if the inflationary environment is as dire as Summers and his coauthors allege—may be for the Federal Reserve to induce a recession by dramatically hiking interest rates and further harm consumers who have been spending an increased share of their income on household goods for nearly a year.
Summers’s paper never uses the word “recession” but makes repeated references to actions taken by former Fed chairman and Carter appointee Paul Volcker, who along with the fiscal policies of former president Ronald Reagan gets credit for helping the United States escape the stagflation malaise that defined the 1970s. Summers’s paper goes as far as to say “to return to 2 percent core CPI inflation [the Fed’s target rate] today will thus require nearly the same amount of disinflation as achieved under Chairman Volcker.”
While most economists believe Volcker’s policies were a success in the long term, the policies resulted in two harsh recessions in 1980 and 1981. Those policies included nearly doubling interest rates from 11.2 percent in 1979 to 20 percent in 1981. The interest rate today is set at around 1 percent, for comparison.
Summers and his colleagues believe that failures to adjust CPI measures have led to a misconception by policymakers that the United States can lower inflation without “large macroeconomic consequences.” Because the government-provided inflation rate appears far lower than the 14.8 percent peak in March 1980, many policymakers wrongly assume such drastic rate hikes are not necessary.
Biden and other White House officials appear unaware that the Fed may be forced to institute harsh rate hikes that will temporarily harm economic growth. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the president proclaimed that his agenda of respecting the Fed’s independence and domestic spending can help the United States “transition … to stable, steady growth, and bring down inflation without giving up all these historic [economic] gains.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last month echoed those remarks, saying all economic indicators suggest “that the Fed has a path to bring down inflation without causing a recession.”
Policymakers who use faulty data to inform their response to high inflation could not only fail to lower prices but could also make the problem worse, Summers’s paper alleges. Because such government services as Social Security benefits, federal retirement plans, and food stamps are tied to the CPI, “a slower than desired decline in the CPI could become self-reinforcing” and lead to inflation that takes “more time to exit the system,” the paper states.
Summers has become one of the most prominent liberal critics of the Biden administration’s handling of the economy. At the start of Biden’s presidency, Summers warned that the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan was far too large and could cause inflation. A study from economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve vindicated Summers, finding that COVID stimulus resulted in roughly 3 additional points of inflation during Biden’s first year in office.
Rising costs remains the number-one most concerning issue for voters, with more than 80 percent of Americans telling an ABC News/Ipsos pollster that inflation is “an extremely or very important factor in how they will vote.” That same poll found that only 37 percent approve of Biden’s handling of the economic recovery and that only 28 percent approve of how he is tackling inflation.
Polling does perhaps present one bright spot for Biden if the Fed decides to implement a Volcker-type response to rising inflation: A Maru Public Opinion survey released earlier this month found that 62 percent of Americans already believe the U.S. economy is in a recession.
It’s time for a comprehensive fact-check on the origins and purposes of the Ukrainian war.
The underlying issue is the ultimate disposition of the 14 republics apart from Russia that seceded from and produced the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991. Russia has never acknowledged the legitimacy of those secessions, and they were accomplished abruptly by the governments and legislatures of the jurisdictions involved, without the formality and legitimacy the break-up of countries requires.
As the Soviet Union fell like a soufflé without a shot being fired (after a Cold War in which there were routine reciprocal threats of nuclear annihilation), many promises were made by the major powers, including Russia and the United States, and none of them was kept. When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, acceded to the reunification of Germany, then-Secretary of State James Baker assured him that NATO would not advance “one inch” to the east of Germany. The president whom he served, George H. W. Bush, famously gave what Nixon speechwriter William Safire called the “Chicken Kiev speech” to the Ukrainian parliament recommending that it remain in union with Russia, in 1991. All of the major powers, including Russia and the United States, promised Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, that their borders would be respected, in exchange for the renunciation in 1994 of the nuclear weapons that they had inherited from the Soviet Union.
Needless to say, all of these solemn promises were forgotten almost as soon as they were made. In the next several years, NATO accepted as members Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria; and Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which had been constituent republics of the Soviet Union and had been fully integrated into Russia for more than 200 years prior to the end of World War I in 1918. President George W. Bush advocated the eventual admission to NATO of Ukraine and Georgia in 2008, but this was deferred as Russia invaded two largely Russian-speaking provinces of Georgia and intervened heavy-handedly in Ukrainian affairs. Russian meddling enabled the election of an outright puppet of the Kremlin in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, in 2010, and Western counter-meddling achieved his ouster and replacement by Petro Poroshenko in 2014.
It must be admitted that Ukraine has never shown the slightest aptitude for successful self-government until its inspiring performance following the Russian invasion of Ukraine three months ago. It’s an ethnic hodgepodge of Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, and Tatars, and approximately one-sixth of its population of over 40 million is Russian-speaking.
The likeliest explanation for what brought on the present war is that the on-again, off-again Western enticement of NATO membership for Ukraine collided with the ambition of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s most purposeful leader since Leonid Brezhnev, to assert Russia’s partial authority over its former fellow republics of the USSR.
It isn’t surprising that Putin thought that this was the time to act: The unimaginable shambles of the American flight from Afghanistan and the complete failure of the United States to enunciate any consistent policy about the former Soviet Union could well have convinced him that this was his chance to begin reassembling the involuntary Confederation of ethnicities put together over more than 250 years by Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, some lesser Czars, and Joseph Stalin.
Many readers will remember the inanity of President George W. Bush’s assertions that he looked Putin in the eye, and the reassuring importance that Putin attaches to his cross. President Barack Obama appeased Putin by withholding the promised anti-missile defenses for Poland and the Czech Republic, as if such defensive weapons could remotely be considered a provocation to Russia. The Pentagon has contributed to the present confusion by taking the immense budget granted it by President Donald Trump and failing to keep pace with Russia and China in hypersonic weapons, in providing adequate antimissile defenses for America’s Nimitz class aircraft carriers, and possibly in some areas of artillery as well. This may explain why the United States and NATO generally have been clearly intimidated by Putin’s nonsensical threats to resort to nuclear weapons.
Because of this saber-rattling, which is much less believable and nerve-racking than the antics of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, President Joe Biden allowed the Pentagon to repudiate Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s public pledge to facilitate the transfer of Polish warplanes to Ukraine as “escalatory” (what was the Russian invasion?), and has declined to provide high-altitude anti-aircraft missiles and any Ukrainian capability to reply with offensive weapons that would reach inside Russia as a response to the relentless Russian aerial assault on Ukraine’s civil population.
Apart from the Ukrainian government, which has played its hand, militarily and in public relations terms, brilliantly, almost every conceivable blunder has been made by both sides in the present conflict. It’s inconceivable how Putin and his advisers imagined that they could, with only 150,000 trigger-pullers, overrun a country of over 40 million people defended by a trained army and reserve of half a million well-armed men. Ukraine possesses the possibility of a high manpower advantage unless Russia conducts a general mobilization, which would be extremely unpopular, and hideously expensive for a country with a smaller GDP than Canada. Ukraine has the advantage of having most of its war effort paid for by rich NATO countries; in that sense only is there any truth in the Russian government’s claim, echoed by a number of conservative isolationist American commentators, that Russia is at war with all NATO.
But there’s no truth to the claim of those American commentators that Ukraine is of no strategic value to the West. It’s making a bona fide effort to make democracy work and it’s the subject of a brutal and completely illegal and unprovoked attack. The consequence of permitting Russia to succeed in this criminal enterprise would be to provide convincing evidence that the United States is in inexorable decline and that it’s open season on the crumbling Western alliance as the Kremlin took a giant leap toward undoing the West’s epochal strategic victory in the Cold War.
Readers will painfully recall the total defeatism of Biden and the joint chiefs at the outset of the Ukrainian war, when Kyiv was expected to be occupied within a few days and Biden offered to evacuate president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his family, and made sophomoric comments about the Russian ruble becoming “rubble” and the strength of sanctions, which since they’re being ignored by 155 countries in the world are a gigantic Swiss cheese. When the strength of Ukrainian resistance became clear, Biden spoke of Putin being mad and sick and a “war criminal” and that regime change was necessary, even as he backed down before Putin’s juvenile nuclear threats. There has been no clarification of Western war aims and a large quantum of aid is to some extent a substitute for giving Ukraine the weapons they need to provide the Russians an incentive to end the war.
As I have written since before the start of this war, we have the ability in the West to ensure that Ukraine is recognized as a sovereign state as long as we provide the Russians with some recognition of their traditional status in that country—assumedly the autonomy under Russian suzerainty of the Russian-speaking sections of the country but with an iron-clad Russia-NATO guarantee of the security of Ukraine’s modified borders. Zelenskyy cannot expect more; the geopolitical reality is that Putin doesn’t have to settle for less; American isolationists should be given a brief tutorial in geopolitical realities; the entire senior level of the Pentagon should be sacked; and NATO-U.S. will have to provide the weapons necessary to bring the war to a negotiated end. As long as the Russians can kill and terrorize Ukraine’s civilian population from the air with impunity, the war will go on and the tragedy will become greater.
As the U.S. military rolls out its new Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT), which imposes different physical standards and requirements for men and women, longtime defense analysts and observers say that the military’s push for diversity and inclusion—a trend that accelerated under President Barack Obama and that the Biden administration aggressively carries forward—undermines combat training and readiness.
“The Biden administration has assigned priority to diversity, inclusion, and equity as the primary criteria. That is a key decision and from it flows everything else that is problematic” in the military today, said Elaine Donnelly, founder and president of the Center for Military Readiness, a public policy organization in Livonia, Michigan.
Donnelly views the Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan 2021 released by the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as providing a good measure of the new priorities. The plan’s “Strategic Objective 2” is “Educate USSOCOM professionals and leaders to help facilitate and sustain a diverse and inclusive culture.” Another of its goals is to “Increase hiring rates of diverse applicants.”
The plan sets forth a far-reaching plan “to address and remediate bias” and calls diversity and inclusion “a strategic imperative” numerous times in the course of just 20 pages, Donnelly noted.
Members of the 182d Infantry Regiment load their weapons with live ammunition before heading into the field to train, firing on targets out in the field and working in concert with other squads, for deployment to the Middle East during live fire weapons training at US Fort Dix in New Jersey on May 16, 2022. (Joseph Prezioso /AFP via Getty Images)
Biden Follows Obama
Under Biden, the military has pushed a wide range of imperatives and priorities that have little to do with the traditional function of training soldiers to be as effective in combat as possible and to minimize U.S. casualties, observers say. But it would be a mistake to think that the current administration has taken a new direction when it is carrying on and expanding directives, policies, and programs that flourished under Obama.
“It seems like a third term for Obama on this score. We have a president who says that climate change is the greatest threat to U.S. security, who has reversed President Trump’s executive order banning reaching service members racially divisive concepts that sometimes go by the name ‘critical race theory,’ and who has lifted all restrictions on service by transgender persons (and promised to fit the bill for transitions),” said Kingsley Browne, a law professor Wayne State University and the author of the book “Co-Ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn’t Fight the Nation’s Wars.”
Browne sees the policy and cultural shifts within the military as not just the work of one president or cabinet official bent on promoting a “woke” agenda, but as an agenda that many military officials at different levels of command have endorsed, whether because they believe in it or because they are conscious of the impact that their stance on these issues will have on their career.
“We have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who talks about ‘white rage’ and a Special Operations Command that has declared that ‘diversity and inclusion are operational imperatives.’ Consistent with past practice, commanders are routinely evaluated by how well they satisfy diversity imperatives, even if those imperatives diminish readiness,” Browne said.
President Barack Obama sits alongside Vice President Joe Biden at Joint Base Myers-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Va., on Jan. 4, 2017. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Abandoning Traditional Requirements
The new ACFT is undergoing implementation just as controversy develops around gender-integrated training in another area of the services, namely the Air Force. An unnamed female trainee who recently left the Air Force’s Combat Control School reportedly wrote in an April 2021 memo that instructors lowered fitness standards to accommodate her.
The new ACFT, which has lower physical standards than its predecessors—requiring the ability to do nine push-ups instead of 10—and different requirements for men and women in categories such as strength, endurance, and running speed, did not come into being overnight. Rather it is the end result of a long-running effort to scrap standards and expectations that men were likelier to be able to meet, observers say.
In December 2015, then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter ordered the opening of all combat roles in the military to women within 30 days, denying a request from the Marine Corps for a partial exemption from the order for certain roles such as infantry and fire support reconnaissance. By the end of the 30-day period, all branches of the armed forces had to present Carter with their implementation plans for gender integration.
“Fully integrating women into all military positions will make the U.S. armed forces better and stronger,” Carter stated at the time, though he acknowledged that “there will be problems to fix and challenges to overcome.”
The official response to those who expressed concern about the realism of Carter’s plan was to offer assurances that standards for physical fitness and ability were and would remain gender-neutral, Browne said. But physical differences between the genders, in areas such as upper-body strength and stature, meant that things did not always play out as the advocates of diversity hoped.
“Use of gender-neutral standards creates a dilemma. You can adopt standards that are challenging for men, in which case few if any women will pass, or you can adopt standards that reasonable numbers of women can pass which will be a walk in the park for men,” Browne said.
“The choice made after 2015 was to try to thread the needle between these two options—to make it not too hard but not too soft. But even with that compromise you still had a disproportionate number of women who failed the test,” he recalled.
Faced with these difficulties in bringing about the complete gender integration ordered by Carter, lawmakers in Congress commissioned a RAND Corporation study, which set out to address the question of whether soldiers of all ages and genders should be subject to the same standards of physical fitness. The study came to the conclusion that a gender-normed Army fitness test would “ensure parity in pass rates between groups, but it would also require the Army to accept differences in potential combat readiness among soldiers who are held to different testing standards.”
The new ACFT that the Army is now in the process of implementing does not impose standards that anyone hoping to be a soldier must meet, as in the past, but instead sets forth varying standards for men and women and for people of different ages, Browne noted. Browne sees the name of the test as something of a misnomer given that it does not really seek to gauge how well people can perform on combat tasks, but rather to measure general physical fitness. It sets maximum and minimum scores on the basis of percentiles within the category or “cohort” in question. It sets a passing score at the fifth percentile for an age and sex cohort, which Browne considers a low bar, and the maximum score at the 96th percentile.
US soldiers walk in Poland near the border with Ukraine, on March 3, 2022. (Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images)
One illustration of the problems inherent in the new test, in Browne’s view, is the “sprint-drag-carry” test, which purports to measure not just a single aptitude but strength, agility, endurance, and aerobic maneuvering. The test allows an 18-year-old woman to pass with a time of three minutes and 15 seconds, but a man must take no longer than two minutes and 28 seconds to pass.
On a battlefield, heavy ordnance or the body of a wounded soldier that has to be moved under fire to safety does not make allowances based on the gender of the soldier who has to perform the task. In light of this reality, army officials have not explained how the test is useful or relevant.
“Who do you want to be trying to extract you and move you to safety if you’re wounded? I guess the Army’s answer is that it doesn’t matter, because both potential rescuers are equally ‘fit,’” Browne said.
The new norms are not the only impediment to readiness in a military where officers face intense political pressures to pass women, Browne and others believe.
“Even without gender-norming of the physical tests referred to above and using the same standards for men and women, it is still possible to cheat. There is a widespread belief that women are often given extra chances to pass training, especially in the Special Operations Forces,” Browne said.
In corroboration of this view, journalist and defense analyst Susan Katz Keating wrote an exposé for People magazine in 2015 reporting her findings that two women who passed the Army’s elite Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, received special treatment and instructors gave them a pass even after infractions for which male trainees were disqualified. This expose came on the heels of People’s reporting that Rep. Steve Russell, then a Republican congressman for Oklahoma, had become concerned about reports of a gender-based double standard in Ranger training and had asked the Department of Defense for documents relating to the two female candidates, Kristen Griest and Shaye Haver.
Double Standards
Among Keating’s findings were that Griest and Haver were able to take a special preparatory two-week pre-training course that male trainees were not able to take; that they received direct personal counseling and encouragement from an experienced Ranger that was not available to their male peers; that they were allowed to repeat patrols after making mistakes that disqualified male candidates; and that Griest herself expressed surprise that she and Haver passed the course after failing a key segment of training at Fort Benning not once but twice.
Keating agrees with Browne that the changes pushed heavily under the Obama administration have grown even more pronounced under Biden.
“The Biden administration has taken previous policies and amplified them. For example, soon after Biden came into office, he reversed the existing policy on transgender troops, opening the door for them to serve openly, and also to go through the transition process, including surgery, on the public’s dime,” Keating said.
Keating also sees relatively little dissent in the services over the change in course.
“From what I’ve seen in several branches, the service members disagree with many of the policies, but are keenly aware that they are working within a command structure that doesn’t ask them to vote on policies. When it comes to policies, the services don’t ask, they tell,” Keating said.
The New Priorities
Besides the effects on what happens during training and the standards and requirements involved, the cultural shift within the military in favor of diversity, inclusiveness, and equity has caused far-reaching changes in how candidates for military service spend their time. In Browne’s view, the time that trainees spend learning about critical race theory, implicit bias, politically correct pronouns, and micro-aggressions—instead of traditional things like firing with precision or scaling obstacles with full-body gear—comes with a steep price.
“Any time that personnel are diverted away from training aimed at making the military more combat-effective has a cost. I think that a lot of people who are unfamiliar with the military assume that when personnel are not deployed, they are just sitting around with nothing to do. Under this view, giving them some extra training in how to be a social-justice warrior is relatively costless. In fact, however, time and resources spent on such matters is time and resources not spent on enhancing combat effectiveness,” Browne said.
When the inculcation of critical race theory, a Marxist-rooted framework that views the United States as a systematic “oppressor” of ethnic minorities, and new doctrines are priorities, Browne also sees a severe effect on morale and cohesion within military units. While the goal of training in the past has been to promote unity, doctrines that divide trainees into categories of oppressed and oppressors are unlikely to foster a sense of shared purpose, he said.
“Similarly, the message that male personnel often receive—that their female colleagues are more highly valued—creates resentment and is similarly destructive to cohesion,” Browne added.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the Department of Defense for comment.
consider myself one of the lucky ones as I had walked by the propane tank bombs that never exploded at Columbine High School. My friends weren’t as lucky. As parents gathered at my old elementary school to pick up their children, I will never forget the look of worry and desperation as my friend’s dad asked me, “Pat, have you seen him?” This father coached my soccer team growing up. He was always calm, direct and confident. He wasn’t that day, and he would never see his son alive again.
This was more than 23 years ago. At Columbine, the perpetrators used pipe bombs and firearms, (some obtained illegally) and tried to kill many more with propane tanks. This happened in the middle of the assault weapons ban, mind you.
Fast forward to the recent events in Buffalo and Uvalde. Last week, I cried as I dropped my kids off at school. I cried more as I read news stories and reflected. Haven’t we learned anything since that tragic day at Columbine?
While some have learned lessons from the tragedy, many politicians have not. The assault weapons ban, and other “gun control” measures didn’t save my friends, nor did a flashy sign declaring my school a “gun free zone.” A brave and heroic teacher did save many lives at my school. Yet, after every tragedy like this, Democrats immediately start beating the gun control drum. Sadly, many Republicans start looking for gun control policies to say they “did something.” They need to start looking through a different lens. Instead of restrictions and control, they need to empower citizens, teachers and parents to solve this problem.
An overwhelming amount of mass shootings occur in places where citizens are banned from carrying firearms. As more and more people realize this is a problem, states have started to adopt policies to allow people to equip themselves to protect our children.
While this is a step in the right direction, many times the training requirements are steep, and the incentives are practically non-existent. Teachers often have salary incentives for obtaining advanced degrees and additional certificates. Why don’t we have similar incentives in place for those who want to protect our children?
I personally like the idea of School Resource Officers (SROs). One of the reasons I continue to drop my kids off at school is because of its outstanding SRO. However, this can be controversial for some parents. Locking doors, tempered glass, site assessments, communication systems and resiliency training are not controversial, but they aren’t always done. It’s because of a lack of incentives, since most schools don’t have to compete for enrolling students.
When I shop for a car, I look for lots of things, but one of the most important to me is making sure it has features that will protect my most precious cargo, my children. The car market has responded to parents like me by providing all sorts of safety features. If we had more school choice the education environment would be different. Schools could have SROs or not based on market signals. Each school could feature different safety measures, whether site security or trained staff, and they could incentivize staff to go through the training.
Instead of seeing parents with the look of worry and desperation, I want to see parents with the look of being empowered. Empowered about restoring our God-given, constitutional rights and duties to protect ourselves, our families and our communities. We all need to work together to reverse the alarming trend of mass shootings, and take meaningful measures that will secure our schools, places of worship, and other vulnerable spaces that are often exploited by the worst of humanity. I, for one, will never stop working on finding solutions to this problem.
Citizens argue federal law doesn’t allow government to punish people for refusing to answer 100-question American Community Survey
Two U.S. citizens have filed a class-action lawsuit against the Census Bureau, claiming the long, detailed American Community Survey the agency requires millions to complete each year is illegal.
The lawsuit comes as the U.S. Census Bureau comes under fire for significant miscounts in the 2020 census, with population numbers in six states being undercounted, while eight states saw an overcount in population. Republicans say the botched census count unfairly prevented Florida and Texas from each gaining a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
President Donald Trump tried to prevent the counting of illegal aliens so they wouldn’t have an effect on the apportionment of political power among the states. The Supreme Court sided with him on Dec. 28, 2020, allowing the Trump administration to attempt to carry out its policy as the deadline for census figures was approaching. But on the day he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 13986, which reversed the Trump policy.
The 22-page legal complaint (pdf) in the new case, Murphy v. Raimondo, 3:22-cv-5377, was filed on May 24 in Tacoma in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge David G. Estudillo, who was appointed in September of last year by Biden.
The plaintiffs are U.S. citizens Maureen Murphy and John Huddleston. Murphy lives in Gig Harbor, Washington; Huddleston resides in Susanville, California.
The defendants are U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Director of the Bureau of the Census Robert Santos. Both are being sued in their official capacities. The U.S. Department of Commerce and the Bureau also are named as defendants.
Murphy and Huddleston don’t object to the normal census carried out nationwide every 10 years, which is fairly simple and designed to count people for congressional redistricting; they object to the much more detailed American Community Survey (ACS), which gathers information they say isn’t necessary for the census.
The enumeration clause in the U.S. Constitution states that an “Enumeration shall be made” every 10 years “in such Manner” as Congress “shall by Law direct.” Congress authorized the Census to be carried out in Title 13 of the United States Code.
The Census Bureau’s website states that it’s against the law to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business and that the personal information collected “cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court.” Bureau employees are “sworn for life” to protect the information gathered. Violating the law can lead to as many as five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000, or both.
Unlike the once-a-decade census, the ACS is conducted every year and “asks detailed and personal questions such as the person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, fertility history, marital status, and divorce history,” according to the legal complaint.
Other questions posed in the survey concern whether the household has internet access, how many cars the inhabitants own, whether the occupants receive food stamps, how many and which languages the occupants speak, and “details of the occupants’ physical, mental, or emotional conditions such as deafness or blindness, and any difficulty concentrating, remembering, making decisions, walking or climbing, dressing or bathing, or running errands.”
The ACS queries respondents about private health information, including whether the occupants have health insurance, and the effect of medical and psychological conditions on the individual’s daily activities. It also asks how much households pay in taxes and for utilities. “It even asks how many beds, cars, and washing machines the household has … [and] contains about 100 such questions.”
Unlike the 10-year census, which everyone has to answer, the Census Bureau chooses a sample of a few million households each year to answer the ACS. Individuals who decline to answer this detailed questionnaire face fines of up to $5,000 per question, the complaint states.
Murphy and Huddleston were selected to complete the ACS.
“They understand the importance of the decennial Census. They have in the past and will continue in the future to answer the ten-year Census. But they oppose the highly detailed and personal information demanded in the American Community Survey and have refused to answer it,” the complaint reads.
“As a result, they are subject to monetary fines for doing nothing more than keeping the private details of their lives private.”
Murphy and Huddleston argue that the Census Bureau doesn’t have the statutory or constitutional authority to compel them to answer the “detailed, intrusive questions” of the ACS, the complaint states.
“The Census Bureau does not have the authority to compel Americans to divulge any information it sees fit, beyond what’s needed for the 10-year census,” said attorney Adi Dynar of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a national public interest law firm headquartered in Sacramento, California, that is representing the plaintiffs.
“Congress has not authorized the Census Bureau to impose criminal penalties and fines for refusing to answer their intrusive, deeply personal questions,” Dynar said in a statement.
Officials at the Department of Commerce and the Census Bureau didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
Ahead of the 2020 elections, which saw Joe Biden take the seat of president, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the election. This money went to organizations and individuals with clear political bias, and financed some of the key systems that are suspected of fraud.
According to David Horowitz, bestselling author of “I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America,” the money from Zuckerberg was illegal, yet the IRS appears uninterested in investigating this. We speak with Horowitz about this money, and his allegations that it constitutes a “fix” of the election system for the Democrats.
As you may have guessed, even Senile Biden didn’t just come out and say this.
Here was the full context:
In remarks from the MLK Memorial in DC, Pres. Joe Biden says his DOJ has doubled voting rights enforcement staff, musing, “to something like…half the Republicans, or registered Republicans, I am not your president,” adding, with the sign of the cross, “Oh my God.” pic.twitter.com/smZafv7yqk
But now, can we talk about what I think is the most under-rated part of the clip?
How clueless is this guy?
What does “as we Catholics say” mean and then following that up with “oh my God”?
Isn’t that actually violating the Second Commandment?
Now I get that the Catholics don’t have the best track record when it comes to the Communist Pope and the Child Molester Priests, but don’t they at least claim to follow the Second Commandment?
Man, this guy is trying to break as many Commandments from God and Amendments to the Constitution as possible, huh?
