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Brussels authorities shuttered the National Conservatism Conference on Tuesday, sending police to block entry to the conference and announcing that those inside would be permitted to leave but not to return.
However, the action was not the result of any public disturbances or threats. It was a political action by left-progressive politicians who do not like the views being ventilated at the conference—and who fear the increasing success of nationalist and conservative ideas in European politics.
Initial coverage of the incident is posted here and here, with no doubt more to come. And see this article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the incident.
I am a trustee of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is sponsoring the conference, and I have been chairman of its regular “NatCon” conferences in the U.S., U.K., and Europe for the past five years.
My colleagues and I have strong views on such urgent issues as uncontrolled immigration; the corruption of schools and cultural institutions by race and gender ideologies; the transfer of government authority from nations to international bureaucracies; and the erosion of freedoms of speech, religion, and inquiry. These are the central issues on the agenda at this week’s conference in Brussels.
All of our conferences are carefully planned to include top-tier conservative thinkers, writers, scholars, activists, and political figures, and to provide a good mix of speeches, panel discussions, and debates (with a few brave souls on the Left to keep us sharp).
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who agrees with some NatCon positions but disagrees with others, has given terrific addresses at earlier conferences and has been received with enthusiasm and appreciation. Several other Heritage friends are at this week’s Brussels conference, although I have had to miss it myself because of commitments in the U.S. (now to my special regret!) (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
That an earnest gathering of political officials, activists, and thinkers should be bullied by a mayor and sequestered by the police is, of course, outrageous and worthy of severe condemnation. And few liberal as well as conservative leaders have issued critical statements.
But there is a larger meaning to the incident. It demonstrates that forthright, unapologetic conservatism is gaining serious momentum in Europe as well as the U. S.—and that the progressive Left, in its desperation to stop us, is increasingly willing to employ means that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Unfortunately, the progressives’ effort to anathematize national conservatives as a “far right” threat to democracy and civil order is being adopted by others who should know better. Some on the moderate left and right are portraying the Brussels “controversy” as a case for standing on principle for freedom of speech—even for those with so-called deplorable ideas and values, as if NatCons were Nazis marching through Skokie. Thanks for your support, guys, and have a nice free-speech day yourself.
The incident is actually the latest example of establishment timorousness and liberal decay. Two fancy Brussels venues, Concert Noble and a Sofitel hotel, abruptly canceled the NatCon conference at the insistence of city officials before the no-nonsense Tunisian owner of the Claridge event hall agreed to host us, refused to back down, and treated us to warm hospitality to compensate for the hostility of the city fathers.
This gentleman is in today’s avant-garde. The progressive strategy of meeting conservative ascent with shallow demagoguery and forceful suppression, rather than forthright argument or reform of their ruinous policies, is coming in for a richly deserved political reckoning.
The post Brussels Authorities Shut Down Conservative Conference, Afraid of Conservatism Gaining Momentum in Europe appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Rep. Ralph Norman reintroduced a bill Wednesday aimed at stopping a form of federal spending known as earmarks.
“I’ve always said that earmarks are evil,” Norman, R-N.C. told The Daily Signal. “They are sneaky in the way that they get tacked onto big, important spending packages to be automatically passed by the ‘uniparty’ with the hope that no one looks into the details.”
Lawmakers use earmarks, often referred to as “pork,” to receive funding for projects in their districts. Earmarks are often inserted into large spending bills where they are likely to largely go unnoticed. A congressional earmark dedicates federal funds for a specific purpose, such as the construction of a bridge, the restoration of a city landmark, or a local program.
“Basically, an earmark is taxpayer funding for a personalized pet project for a particular district or special interest group,” Norman said.
The six-page bill he reintroduced Wednesday prohibits Congress from considering legislation that contains earmarks, thus banning the practice.
Norman introduced the bill, known as the Earmark Elimination Act, twice before, and most recently in February 2021.
Five Republican lawmakers are currently co-sponsoring the bill, including Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Matt Rosendale of Montana, Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, Tom McClintock of California, and Andy Ogles of Tennessee.
Earmarks have long been debated and were even temporarily banned in Congress from 2011 to 2021. Among the most notorious congressional earmark schemes was in 2005 when two lawmakers from Alaska earmarked $223 million to build a bridge from Ketchikan to the island of Gravina, which at the time had a population of about 50 people. The project was nicknamed the “Bridge to Nowhere.”
“Attaching earmarks to large spending packages doesn’t allow for public discussion,” Norman criticized. “Congress, with the power of the purse, should be primarily looking out for the people’s tax dollars and getting federal spending down as soon as possible.”
Bloomberg Government reports that among the federal government’s 2024 spending bills, Republican and Democrat lawmakers inserted 8,099 earmarks accounting for $14.6 billion.
“To me, this is the most wasteful, abusive way to use hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” Norman said.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Conservative Lawmaker Reintroduces Bill to Ban Earmarks appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra refused on Tuesday to condemn or even distance himself from abortions of unborn babies who are ready to be delivered.
During a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Becerra repeatedly told Sen. John Kennedy that he supports the abortion limitations that were encompassed in Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court overturned in June 2022, when asked if he supports aborting babies up until the moment of birth.
Kennedy, R-La., pressed Becerra: “Would you support making it illegal to abort a baby, if the mother is healthy, and the baby is healthy, on the day before that baby is scheduled to be born?”
WATCH:
.@SenJohnKennedy to HHS Secretary Becerra: "Would you support making it illegal to abort a baby, if the mother is healthy, and the baby is healthy, on the day before that baby is scheduled to be born?"
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 16, 2024
Becerra refuses to directly answer.
pic.twitter.com/uSuX9RO1NI
The HHS secretary would not directly respond to the question, claiming that no one wants to get abortions so late in pregnancy.
“I certainly would support the reestablishment of Roe v. Wade,” he responded, adding, “Senator, if you talk to any woman, she’ll tell you that she uses common sense in making her decisions.”
Republican Alabama Sen. Katie Britt similarly pressed the HHS secretary on Kennedy’s line of questioning.
“If Roe v. Wade were the law of the land, and a woman wanted to take the life of her child the day before her child was due, or the day after her child was due, then you support her ability to do that?”
She followed up on this by adding: “There’s seven states in this country, and the District of Columbia, that allow you to take the life of a child the moment before a child is born, so clearly you support a woman’s right to choose to do that?”
Becerra told Britt that the example she gave was “fiction.”
“Can you give me a particular example?” he asked.
“If it actually is fiction, then why not say no?” she asked. “That that is out of the realm of possibility?”
WATCH:
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra refused today to condemn the abortion of a baby that is about to be born: “The example you gave is fiction.”@SenKatieBritt: “Then why not say no?”
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 16, 2024
pic.twitter.com/kLQFnZl1HS
Britt then went on to passionately describe a graphic abortion procedure in which the abortionist crushes and dismembers the unborn baby, delivering the baby breech, opening the baby’s head with scissors, and sucking out the baby’s body.
“If that child is then delivered alive, do you believe that the child on that table, that we should be able to save that child, or do you believe that our taxpayer dollars give this woman the right to say, ‘Don’t save my child?’” she asked.
Becerra is among many officials in President Joe Biden’s administration who refuse to specify what abortion restrictions, if any, they support. Becerra did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.
The post WATCH: HHS Secretary Won’t Condemn Abortions Up Until Birth appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The House delivered the two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate on Tuesday afternoon.
The articles are expected to be acted on quickly by the Democrat-controlled Senate, but not in the manner House GOP lawmakers are seeking.
“We want to address this issue as expeditiously as possible,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said during a floor speech Monday discussing the articles of impeachment.
Republicans who backed the impeachment of Mayorkas are concerned that Schumer will hold a vote to dismiss the articles of impeachment altogether. Dismissal only requires a simple majority, which is not out of the question, given Democrats’ control of the upper chamber.
Schumer also has the option to refer the articles to committee, where they would likely die, or to hold a full Senate trial, which Schumer is not expected to do, given his own vocal opposition to Mayorkas’ impeachment.
“Impeachment should never be used to settle a policy disagreement,” Schumer said, adding, “That would set a horrible precedent for the Congress.”
House and Senate Republicans supporting impeachment have maintained a pressure campaign on Schumer to force a Senate trial.
“Under the Constitution, the responsibility of the Senate is simple and straightforward: The Senate must hold a trial,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
“Chuck Schumer doesn’t want to do that,” Cruz added. “Instead, he wants to move to table the entire thing for three reasons. First, he does not want to allow the House managers to present evidence of Mayorkas’ willful decision to aid and abet the criminal invasion of this country. Second, he does not want the American people to see the facts. Third, he does not want Senate Democrats on the ballot in November to have to vote ‘not guilty’ because the evidence is indisputable—Alejandro Mayorkas is guilty.”
Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., serves as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and led the impeachment effort against Mayorkas.
“The American people demand accountability,” Green wrote on X, in response to House Speaker Mike Johnson signing the articles of impeachment Monday.
Tomorrow I’m joining @SpeakerJohnson to deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate. The American people demand accountability. https://t.co/PLkTs9yOyL
— Rep. Mark Green (@RepMarkGreen) April 15, 2024
The Republican-controlled House voted 214 to 213 on a party-line vote to impeach Mayorkas on Feb. 13 after a failed attempt a week prior.
The House’s first article alleges that the homeland security secretary has failed to secure America’s border and enforce immigration laws, and instead has executed policies that incentivize illegal immigration.
The House’s second article of impeachment contends that Mayorkas is in breach of the public trust and knowingly has made false statements to Congress and the American people.
Like his conservative colleagues in the House, Cruz says Mayorkas bears much of the responsibility for the record high number of encounters of illegal aliens at America’s borders.
“Mayorkas has aided and abetted the criminal invasion of the United States,” Cruz said. “This is a humanitarian, public safety, and national security crisis.”
Schumer told his fellow senators in a “Dear Colleague” letter on April 5 that when the articles of impeachment arrive in the Senate, senators will be sworn in as jurors the following day and that Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray, D-Wash., will preside over the chamber.
The House was originally going to deliver the two articles of impeachment to the Senate on April 10, but Johnson delayed the delivery after a group of GOP senators asked him to do so to allow more time for debate on the Senate floor before the weekend.
Schumer said Monday that his plan of action in the Senate has not changed despite the arrival of the articles being delayed six days.
The post Long-Awaited Articles of Impeachment Against DHS Secretary Mayorkas Arrive in Senate appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., announced on social media Tuesday that he’s co-sponsoring a motion to vacate the chair against House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
In doing so, Massie joined the motion to vacate push against Johnson launched by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., in March. Massie is the first other Republican to back Greene in the effort.
“I just told Mike Johnson in conference that I’m co-sponsoring the Motion to Vacate that was introduced by [Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene],” Massie wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “He should pre-announce his resignation (as Boehner did), so we can pick a new Speaker without ever being without a GOP Speaker.” That’s a reference to another former House speaker, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.
I just told Mike Johnson in conference that I’m cosponsoring the Motion to Vacate that was introduced by @RepMTG.
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 16, 2024
He should pre-announce his resignation (as Boehner did), so we can pick a new Speaker without ever being without a GOP Speaker.
Johnson, according to NBC’s Jake Sherman, said that he’s not resigning.
“I am not resigning. And it is in my view an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs,” Johnson said.
.@SpeakerJohnson responds: "I am not resigning. And it is in my view an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs." https://t.co/XAwQWDanh5
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 16, 2024
Johnson—who became the speaker after the ouster of his predecessor as speaker, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., by a motion to vacate in October—has been facing increasing pressure from conservatives in the House. In particular, Johnson has been criticized for working with Democrats on a bill to fund the Ukraine war effort.
Johnson continues to receive the support of former President Donald Trump. Trump said on Friday that Johnson is doing a “very good job” when the two appeared together at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Friday.
“I stand with the speaker,” Trump said.
Johnson was elected House speaker in October with 220 Republicans supporting him. Johnson’s election came after McCarthy was removed as speaker after eight Republicans and all Democrats voted against him.
Since Johnson became speaker, McCarthy and Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., resigned and left Congress. Former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., was expelled in a House vote, and Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., will resign effective on Friday. After Gallagher leaves office, there will be 217 Republicans and 213 Democrats, a razor-thin Republican majority.
The post Johnson Vows Not to Resign, as Second GOP Lawmaker Announces Support for Ouster appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The federal government increasingly looks like an Ivy League classroom, combining therapy for fragile souls with indoctrination into specious ideology.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at the State Department, where employees are encouraged to take courses in the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, or DEIA, that stress their differences, trauma, and status on the victim-oppressor continuum.
As reported by The Daily Wire, the State Department spent a whopping $77 million on DEIA programs last year for its staffing shop, the Bureau of Global Talent Management.
Just this past month, the State Department offered a training session called “Unveiling the Hidden Wounds: Exploring Racial Trauma and Minority Stress.” It promised a “space for empathy” where “voices are heard, wounds are acknowledged, and action is taken towards justice and equity.”
Then there was “A Conversation on Racial Equity and Social Justice” with Bryan Stevenson, who pulled in $55,000 in donations per minute for a single TED Talk.
Employees could also take the half-day course “Intersectional Gender Analysis Training,” which “explores how gender and systems of power shape an individual’s lived experience.” Alternatively, they could attend a seminar called “Embrace Equity and Inspire Change” or a series of female empowerment sessions such as “Elevating Women in Technology and Beyond.”
Anticipating resistance, the State Department offered the course “Understanding Backlash to DEIA and How to Address It,” in which psychologist Kimberly Rios claimed to “highlight evidence demonstrating that DEIA initiatives can challenge the power, values, status, belonging, and cultural identity of dominant group members, particularly White Americans whose racial identity is important to their sense of self.” Rios will do this, the announcement said with unwitting irony, “to promote intergroup harmony.”
Government employees are required to take a variety of training courses to advance in their careers. Even five years ago, most of these were about doing your job better—courses on leadership, management, and other skills. But in the “woke” era, employees are also subjected to ideological sessions such as those mentioned above.
Given what all these courses and speakers cost taxpayers to provide, is there any evidence that they are based on sound information or that they improve the workforce?
Let’s examine one offering more closely.
The State Department runs a “DEIA Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series” that “highlights cutting-edge scientific research,” under which the agency recently brought in Yale professor John Dovidio to give a talk titled “Racism Among the Well-Intentioned—Challenges and Solutions.”
In a 2013 speech, Dovidio said: “About 80% of white Americans will say they are not sexist or they’re not racist … but work with the IAT will show that 60% to 75% of the population are both racist and sexist at an implicit level.”
So, what is this “IAT” that Dovidio cites?
Harvard’s Implicit Association Test is a favorite tool of social scientists who want to prove that people are inherently racist and sexist. This is a necessary premise for critical race theory, which posits that nebulous concepts such as “structural bias” and “systems of oppression” can explain all variances in performance between racial groups rather than individual factors such as education, industry, and behavior. The Implicit Association Test offers the evidence the Left needs to support this theory.
But the Implicit Association Test isn’t an accepted measure of bias. One of its own inventors said, “I and my colleagues and collaborators do not call the IAT results a measure of implicit prejudice [or] implicit racism.”
And in a 2015 review, Hart Blanton of Texas A&M wrote that “all of the meta-analyses converge on the conclusion that … IAT scores are not good predictors of ethnic or racial discrimination and explain, at most, small fractions of the variance in discriminatory behavior in controlled laboratory setting.”
In a 2021 academic paper, Ulrich Schimmack came to the same conclusion, writing that “IATs are widely used without psychometric evidence of construct or predictive validity.”
As far back as 2008, in an article for the American Psychological Association, Beth Azar wrote that a person’s scores on the Implicit Association Test “often change from one test to another.” German Lopez, writing for Vox, took the test two days apart and found that in the first, he “had a slight automatic preference for white people,” and in the second, “a slight automatic preference … in favor of black people.”
Summing up, Greg Mitchell of the University of Virginia said, “The IAT is not yet ready for prime time.”
That’s hardly a firm foundation for using taxpayers’ money to train federal staff in a worldview that will affect their careers and lives. And of course, all of the hours employees spend auto-flagellating with critical race theory is paid time they are not working on matters of national interest.
One can’t put too much blame on race merchants such as Dovidio, Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah-Jones for simply trying to sell their product. But the question is: Why is the government buying it with our money?
Taxpayer-funded institutions shouldn’t pay for courses and speakers whose premises are contentious and whose efforts won’t measurably improve the workforce.
Federal employees are free to explore social theory on their own time. On our dime, they should get on with their real job.
Originally published by the Washington Examiner
The post Taxpayers Shouldn’t Have to Fund State Department’s DEI Pseudoscience appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—President Joe Biden’s efforts to deflect blame for the border crisis and high cost of living aren’t working with swing voters, according to new polling from Echelon Insights.
An even higher percentage view his administration as a failure.
The survey of 2,401 registered voters in six battleground states—shared exclusively with The Daily Signal—reveals key insights about swing voters, a segment of the U.S. population who aren’t strongly aligned with either political party.
Asked to rate the Biden administration, 65% of swing voters described it as a failure. A majority of Hispanic men, young voters (18-35), and married women also give the Biden administration a failing grade.
The poll finds 59% of swing voters blame Biden’s policies for the crisis at the southern border, compared with 23% who say it’s due to factors outside of his control, while 18% are unsure or don’t view it as a problem.
On the issue of inflation and the high cost of living, 51% of swing voters blame Biden’s policies. According to the survey, 37% think the problem is outside of Biden’s control, while 13% are unsure or don’t view it as a problem.
Of the issues surveyed, violent crime is the only one that a majority of swing voters don’t blame on Biden’s policies. In that specific case, 38% attribute a rise in crime to Biden, compared with 39% who think it’s not his doing.
These issues are regularly cited as Americans’ top concerns. They are also contributing to a gloomy outlook on America’s future and have resulted in Biden’s dismal disapproval rating.
Echelon Insights conducted the survey for The Heritage Foundation in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
When asked about the 2024 presidential election, swing voters give former President Donald Trump higher marks on America’s biggest issues: addressing immigration and border security, ensuring a strong U.S. economy, maintaining world peace, bringing down the high cost of living, keeping their families safe, supporting the middle class, instilling confidence in America, and protecting rights and freedoms.
Biden outperformed Trump on just two issues: health care costs and student loan debt.
Trump’s dominance on a wide range of policy issues translates into a strong showing in five of the six states where the survey was conducted. Trump leads in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Biden had the edge in Wisconsin.
A whopping 73% of swing voters in those six states disapprove of Biden’s job performance, compared with 40% for Trump. In each of the individual states, Trump holds the advantage.
When asked to rate a conservative governing agenda compared against a liberal agenda, swing voters in all six states favored a plan that grows the economy, reduces the cost of living, cuts government spending, secures the border, and implements tougher penalties for violent criminals.
The conservative agenda performed best in Michigan, followed closely by Georgia.
Swing voters cited the high cost of living as a major concern, worrying about the economic future of their kids, ability to save for retirement, and the cost of health care.
With a national debt of more than $34 trillion and government spending exploding on Biden’s watch, these voters are more receptive to spending cuts than other ideas such as combating corporate greed and junk fees or increasing taxes on wealthy Americans.
On the issue of border security, swing voters are more likely than the overall population to worry about social services being stretched thin. They also cite drug trafficking and rising crime as problems connected to the massive influx of illegal aliens.
Some of the Trump administration’s priorities—instituting the Remain in Mexico policy, completing the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and closing the southern border to asylum seekers—rate positively among swing voters.
The survey also asked swing voters about education and the role of parents. By a significant margin, 63% to 30%, they think parents are in the best position to address controversial issues, such as sexuality, with their children.
Echelon Insights conducted the survey March 12-19 among approximately 400 voters in each of the six states. It has a margin of error of +/-2.3 percentage points overall.
The post Swing Voters Deliver Harsh Verdict: Biden Administration Is a Failure appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Standing next to former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced legislation to require proof of citizenship to vote.
Non-U.S. citizens are already banned from voting in federal elections now. However, the National Voter Registration Act—better known as the Motor Voter Law—doesn’t allow states to check because the federal forms already contain a check box.
Johnson said that polling showed 78% of Americans supported requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote. He suggested he would put the bill straight to the full House for a vote, bypassing the committee process.
“When we put this bill on the floor, you’re going to see a recorded vote by Republicans and Democrats. You’ll see that Republicans stand for election integrity,” Johnson said. “We’ll be able to ask this very important question of the Democrats. They are going to have to go on record. Do you believe that Americans and Americans alone should be the ones who vote in American elections? We are about to find out.”
Since Biden took office, more than 7.2 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border.
During his opening remarks, Trump addressed both issues.
“We have a border that’s open. We have a lot of problems in our country. We have an election problem and that’s really what we’re here to talk about today,” Trump said. “I would like to demand that our border be closed because we have millions of people coming into our country, millions and millions of people at levels that nobody is reporting, nobody is going to talk about.”
Johnson said the legislation will require states to remove noncitizens from their existing voter rolls, with help by allowing states access to databases from the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.
My book “The Myth of Voter Suppression” details how several watchdog groups found voter registration rolls filled with ineligible foreign citizens, dead people, and people who have long moved out of a state despite the National Voter Registration requirement to update voting lists.
Johnson referred to the border crisis resulting from dozens of executive actions from President Joe Biden. He says he constantly gets questions about why it’s happening.
“Why would they do this? It’s chaos. Why the violence?” Johnson said, before answering his own question. “Because they want to turn these people into voters. Right now the administration is encouraging illegals to go to their local welfare office to sign up for benefits. Guess what? When you go to a welfare office, they also ask you if you would like to register to vote. Many people, we think, are going to do that.”
Weeks after coming into office in 2021, Biden signed an executive order directing every federal agency, including social service offices, to boost voter registration.
Earlier this week, the House advanced legislation that would require a citizenship question on the census form and that officials no longer count noncitizens of jurisdictions when drawing up congressional maps.
The post Speaker Johnson to Put Democrats on Record With Vote on Proof of Citizenship to Vote appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Progressives are using legal loopholes and the power of the federal government to maximize Democrat votes in the 2024 election at taxpayers’ expense, RealClearInvestigations has found.
The methods include voter registration and mobilization campaigns by ostensibly nonpartisan charities that target Democrats using demographic data as proxies, and the Biden administration’s unprecedented demand that every federal agency “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”
A dizzying array of overwhelmingly “democracy-focused” entities with ties to the Democratic Party operating as charities and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from major liberal “dark money” vehicles are engaged in a sprawling campaign to register the voters, deliver them the ballots, and figuratively and sometimes literally harvest the votes necessary to defeat Donald Trump.
These efforts, now buttressed by the federal government, amplify and extend what Time magazine described as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people ranging across industries and ideologies,” who had worked behind the scenes in 2020 “to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information” to defeat Trump and other Republicans. The “shadow campaigners,” Time declared, “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”
Heading into 2024, “there is not a ‘shadow’ campaign,” said Mike Howell, executive director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. “There is an overt assault on President Trump and those who wish to vote for him occurring at every level of government and with the support of all major institutions.” (The Daily Signal is the news organization of The Heritage Foundation.)
By contrast, Republican Party stalwarts lament that no comparable effort exists on their side. The GOP’s turnout and messaging efforts seek to thread a difficult needle by encouraging early and absentee voting and ballot-harvesting—pandemic-era measures that Trump and supporters blame for his 2020 electoral defeat—while the party simultaneously fights the mainly blue-state laws that made the practices possible. The party’s position is further complicated by its standard-bearer’s warnings of a rigged election bigger than in 2020, which some speculate could turn off moderate swing voters.
The IRS permits tax-exempt nonprofit groups to engage in voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives so long as they do not “refer to any candidate or political party” nor conduct their activities “in a biased manner that favors (or opposes) one or more candidates prohibited.”
These entities have become magnets for funds not only from wealthy donors, who can contribute without traditional campaign finance limits—and get a tax break to boot—but also abundantly endowed private foundations that are prohibited from engaging in partisan activities.
In recent years, dozens of progressive-oriented 501(c)(3)s, now pulling in upward of $500 million annually, have engaged in purportedly neutral efforts to impact elections, according to Hayden Ludwig, director of policy research at the election integrity-focused advocacy group Restoration of America.
In practice, critics like Ludwig argue, left-leaning charities flout the law by registering and mobilizing demographics that tend to vote disproportionately Democratic behind a veil of nonpartisan democracy promotion.
During the 2020 election, for example, the Voter Participation Center solicited millions of ballot applications in swing states—many of them prefilled for respondents. This nonprofit, like its peers, is clear that it isn’t targeting just any voters, but what it and progressive activists have dubbed a “New American Majority” of “young people, people of color and unmarried women.”
Tom Lopach, a longtime Democratic Party operative and the center’s president and CEO, told RealClearInvestigations in a statement: “We do the work that state election officials typically do not do—seeking out underrepresented voting-eligible Americans … This is difficult but necessary work that brings democracy to eligible Americans’ doorsteps.”
In 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan showed how supposedly neutral efforts can have a partisan impact when they funneled some $400 million through two progressive–led but purportedly nonpartisan nonprofits into election offices across the country.
That money disproportionately went to jurisdictions that Joe Biden won in the pivotal battleground states that delivered his victory, often flowing to left-leaning nonprofits to whom election offices outsourced the administration of sometimes critical functions.
In April 2022, a primary conduit of these so-called Zuckerbucks, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, announced the launch of a successor to the 2020 effort—the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a five-year $80 million program “to envision, support, and celebrate excellence in U.S. election administration.”
“The left has assembled an impressive ‘election-industrial’ complex of nonprofit organizations that is constantly working towards goals like ‘promoting participation’ targeting ‘underrepresented minorities,’” said Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project. Such terms, Snead says, “are code for identifying and mobilizing liberal voters.”
Election experts view such activities as potentially decisive.
“‘Nonpartisan’ and ‘charitable’ voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups” are the Democratic Party’s “electioneering super-weapon[s],” said Parker Thayer, an analyst with the conservative-oriented Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C.
Of these, Thayer sees the Everybody Votes Campaign as of paramount importance.
Born of a plan “commissioned by [Hillary] Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, funded by the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, and coordinated with cut-throat Democratic consultants,” Thayer writes in an extensive analysis of the group’s efforts, “the Everybody Votes campaign [has] used the guise of civic-minded charity to selectively register millions of ‘non-white’ swing-state voters in the hopes of getting out the Democratic vote.”
It does so by funding and training over 50 community groups to register voters to close “the voter registration gap in communities of color,” which it attributes to “modern forms of Jim Crow laws,” such as voter ID requirements, the group’s executive director, Nellie Sires, said in a January 2024 interview.
From 2016-2021, the Everybody Votes Campaign, doing business as three entities, collected over $190 million from major Democratic Party donors, unions, and environmental activists. Some of the largest donors include the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund; the New Venture and Hopewell funds, managed by for-profit consulting firm Arabella Advisors; and the George Soros-funded Foundation to Promote Open Society—all 501(c)(3) public charities or private foundations forbidden from supporting “voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias.”
The Everybody Votes Campaign distributed the funds to a slew of left-leaning state-based voter registration organizations largely in eight pivotal states from 2016 to 2019—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Nevada—and then to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2021.
According to Thayer’s analysis, the Everybody Votes Campaign’s voter registration push “would have provided Democrats more votes than the total margins of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania,” securing Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
One notable backer of the Everybody Votes Campaign is Mind the Gap, a “Moneyball-style” Silicon Valley Democratic super PAC founded by Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, and connected to the political activities of her convicted crypto-fraudster son, Sam Bankman-Fried.
The analytics-focused outfit prepared a confidential strategy memo leaked in advance of the 2020 election, noting that “501(c)(3) voter registration focused on underrepresented groups in the electorate” would be the “single most effective tactic for ensuring Democratic victories”—“4 to 10 times more cost-effective” on after-tax basis at “garnering additional Democratic votes” relative to alternatives like “broadcast media and digital buys.”
Mind the Gap recommended that donors contribute to three organizations: the Voter Participation Center and its sister organization, the Center for Voter Information for mail-based registration efforts, and Everybody Votes for site-based registration efforts.
The largest grant recipient, receiving $24 million during the 2016-2021 period, was State Voices, which describes itself as a “nonpartisan network of 25 state-based coalitions … that collectively partner with over 1,200 organizations” consisting of “advocates, organizers, and activists … work[ing] together to fight for a healthy democracy and political power for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), and all people of color (BIPOC).”
Another top recipient, raking in over $10 million, was the Voter Participation Center.
According to the Capital Research Center, the Everybody Votes Campaign would collect and spend over $50 million in connection with the 2022 midterm elections—the most recent period for which financials are available. All told, since its founding in 2015, the campaign says, its network has registered 5.1 million voters, of whom 76% are people of color; 56% are women; and 47% are under the age of 35.
Last November, the news outlet Puck reported on a secret memo circulated by Mind the Gap regarding its plans for 2024. “Our strategy early in the 2024 presidential race will be to massively scale high-performing voter registration and mobilization programs,” the memo read. The PAC again specifically directed donors to the Everybody Votes Campaign, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Lopach, who has worked in Democratic Party politics his entire career, bristled at RealClearInvestigations’ questions regarding critics’ claims of a partisan bent to its work. “The presumptions baked into the questions … emailed to us are inaccurate and reveal the reporter’s own biases,” he responded, while emphasizing the organization’s targeting of “underrepresented voting-eligible Americans.”
Thayer has dubbed Everybody Votes the “largest and most corrupt ‘charitable’ voter registration drive in American history.”
Of such organizations’ claims of nonpartisanship, Howell told RealClearInvestigations: “If they were truly interested in an informed participatory constitutional Republic, they would have an even-handed approach to registering voters.”
“Call me when they show up to a NASCAR race, Daughters of the American Revolution event, or a gun show,” Howell added. “Then we can pretend for a minute that these are beyond just facial efforts to appear somewhat neutral.”
But NASCAR races have not been hubs for GOP-led voter registration efforts either. Restoration of America’s Ludwig estimates that the Right may spend as little as 1% of what the Left spends on voter registration efforts.
A recent memo from the Sentinel Action Fund, a super PAC that aims to elect conservatives, noted that in the 2022 election cycle, while $8.9 billion was spent on federal elections, there were zero large independent expenditure organizations on the Right focused on get-out-the-vote efforts or “ballot chasing.”
Republican Party vehicles and conservative outfits like grassroots-oriented Turning Point Action, a 501(c)(4), are engaged in such efforts in the 2024 cycle, but the scale and sophistication of their political counterparts’ efforts would appear unrivaled at this point.
Election experts attribute this gap to several factors beyond the GOP’s focus on other tactics to win elections, or ineffectiveness. They note that Democratic voters tend to be more concentrated in urban areas and college campuses, making it easier to run efficient registration drives. As regards early and absentee voting and ballot harvesting, it is not clear if these efforts will substantially grow the pool of Republican voters versus merely enabling the party to “bank” votes earlier.
With respect to the use of 501(c)(3)s to conduct such activities, Ludwig said some conservatives may still be fearful of running afoul of the IRS—through exploiting tax laws to pursue efforts perceived to be partisan effectively on the taxpayers’ dime—in the wake of its targeting of tea party groups for extreme scrutiny during the Obama years.
Since the 2020 election, Democrats have opened a second apparent electioneering front that Republicans could not match even if they wanted to: The rise of so-called Bidenbucks, which uses the “unlimited funding, resources, and reach” of the federal government and agency offices located nationwide to turn out favored voters, according to Stewart Whitson, legal director of the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden introduced Executive Order 14019. The directive on “promoting access to voting” orders every federal agency, more than 600 in all, to register and mobilize voters—particularly “people of color” and others the White House says face “challenges to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” It further directs the agencies to collaborate with ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits in pursuit of its goals.
As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, Executive Order 14019 appears to have been designed by left-leaning think tank Demos and implemented in consultation and sometimes coordination with a slew of progressive, labor, and identity-focused groups with the goal of generating up to 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations annually.
The ACLU and Demos have reportedly helped execute the order. RealClearInvestigations additionally found that at least two recipients of grants under the Everybody Votes Campaign, the NAACP and UnidosUS—formerly the National Council of Raza—were also listed on an email as participants in a July 2021 listening session on the executive order convened by the White House and agency officials.
Whitson, whose organization unearthed that email in its fight to expose details about the order, emphasized that “[U]nlike 2020 wherein the shadow campaign was conducted by private citizens seeking to influence government election operations from the outside, the threat we face in 2024 is being launched from within the government itself.”
Facing both congressional scrutiny and litigation, the administration has closely guarded the strategic plans agencies were to develop to carry out the order, how they are implementing them, to what end, and with whom.
Perfunctory press releases, reports from groups supportive of the order, and documents slowly ferreted out via Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, however, demonstrate that relevant agencies have sought to drive voter registration via public housing authorities, child nutrition programs, and voluntary tax preparation clinics.
In August 2023, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued updated guidance calling for the agency to register voters at naturalization ceremonies.
More recently, the Department of Education did the same, blessing the use of federal work-study funds to pay students for “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration,” and other activities. Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, recently told The Epoch Times that the department had previously threatened schools “that you better be registering students or you could lose your federal funds.”
When asked by RealClearInvestigations to respond to Walter’s claim, the Department of Education would not. Over two dozen Pennsylvania state legislators challenged the order via a lawsuit in January. Citing alleged unlawful attempts by several agencies to register Keystone State voters, the lawmakers asserted:
By engaging in a targeted voter registration effort of this magnitude, focused specifically on these agencies and the groups of potential voters they interact with, leveraging the resources and reach of the federal government, this effort appears to be a taxpayer-funded get-out-the-vote effort designed to benefit the current President’s political party.
Echoing this view, Whitson’s Foundation for Government Accountability submitted an amicus brief noting that “all of the federal agencies FGA has identified as taking active steps to carry out EO 14019 have one thing in common: They provide government welfare benefits and other services to groups of voters the vast majority of which have historically voted Democrat.”
The plaintiffs alleged the executive order violated both Pennsylvania law limiting voter registration efforts to non-federal actors and constitutional provisions reserving election laws to the states.
On March 26, a district court dismissed the case, claiming the plaintiffs lacked standing. Whitson told RealClearInvestigations that others would likely lodge similar lawsuits, building on the Pennsylvania legislators’ case in the wake of the dismissal. Days later, The Federalist reported that the plaintiffs intended to appeal their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A White House spokesperson did not reply to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiries regarding the executive order.
Republicans have had more success opposing the use of Zuckerbucks and other private monies used to finance public elections. More than two dozen states would move to ban or restrict such grants in response to the activities observed during the 2020 election.
Most recently, Wisconsin, where some of the most controversial Zuckerbucks-related efforts took place, was added to that list when, on April 2, voters approved a constitutional amendment barring the private funding of elections.
Despite this crackdown and the feds seemingly stepping into the breach, efforts to privately finance election administration persist. The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence bills itself as an initiative to bolster “woefully unsupported” election offices to “revitalize American democracy.”
The organization says it services jurisdictions—11 listed on its website, ranging across states from Arizona to California and Wisconsin—with “training, mentorship, and resources.” Alliance officials did not respond to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiry about whether it would be terminating the relationship with the city of Madison, Wisconsin, in light of the passage of the recent ballot measure that would seem to have barred it. Nor did it respond to RealClearInvestigation’ other inquiries in connection with this article.
Most of these partnerships were initiated with jurisdictions in states that have not banned Zuckerbucks, though it has sought to circumvent such prohibitions in Georgia and Utah. The stated goal of the Alliance for Election Excellence is to support voters via measures like assisting participating centers in “redesigning” forms to make them more intuitive and purchasing infrastructure “to improve election security and accessibility.”
Alliance launch partners include entities such as:
Critics argue this seemingly more modest effort is, in reality, an ambitious Zuckerbucks rebrand.
Snead’s Honest Elections Project published a report in April 2023, based in part on documents received from FOIA requests, indicating “that the Alliance is a reinvention of CTCL’s scheme to use private funding to strongarm election policy nationwide.”
Among other takeaways, it found that:
The report shows that many of the alliance’s launch partners, starting with the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Civic Design, are funded by major Democrat-tied, so-called dark money groups such as the Democracy Fund and Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund and Hopewell Fund.
The Democracy Fund is led by Democrat tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar, which has granted some $275 million to like-minded organizations from publications like Mother Jones and ProPublica to the Voter Registration Project since its founding.
The District of Columbia recently closed a criminal investigation into Arabella, whose fund network reportedly spent nearly $1.2 billion in 2020 alone, after probing it over allegations its funds were pursuing political ends in violation of their tax-exempt statuses. The Center for Secure and Modern Elections, the Honest Elections Project says, pushes “left-wing priorities like automatic voter registration” and is run by the New Venture Fund. The Elections Group’s CEO and co-founder, Jennifer Morrell, previously served as a consultant at the Democracy Fund.
The Capital Research Center’s Walter uses a football analogy to explain why he sees these efforts as untoward. He told RealClearInvestigations:
Election offices are the refs in elections; the parties are teams trying to score. You’d be puzzled if you heard Super Bowl refs say they’re trying to boost points scored. You’d be outraged if you learned those refs had received money and training from people who previously worked for one team’s offensive coaching staff. That’s what left-wing political operatives, using left-wing money, are doing, and it’s clearly unfair.
Democrat-aligned groups continue to engage in litigation, like that brought by chief election lawyer Marc Elias, aimed at loosening election laws to their benefit. Snead told RealClearInvestigations, “There are more than 70 active lawsuits right now targeting voter ID laws, anti-ballot harvesting laws, signature verification, drop box regulations, and more.”
After securing victory in a lawsuit requiring signature verification for mail voting in Pennsylvania, the Republican National Committee touted its engagement as well in 81 election integrity cases this cycle. Swing-state Wisconsin is another major battleground for such efforts.
There, Elias’ legal team has challenged witness signature requirements and bans on election clerks filling address information on mail-in ballots. It and others are also working to overturn a state Supreme Court decision finding drop boxes illegal. The Badger State’s now liberal-majority Supreme Court announced in March it would take up the case.
Cutting against these efforts are not only the state’s citizen-approved Zuckerbucks ban, but another Badger-passed April 2 ballot measure amending the state’s constitution to prohibit those other than “an election official designated by law” from carrying out election-related tasks.
Watchdogs like Howell are concerned that left-leaning electioneers and lawfare forces collectively are pursuing an “election ‘dis-integrity’ strategy … to greatly expand the universe of ballots while limiting any ability to ensure that they are fairly cast and counted.”
“It’s a basic recipe for fraud.”
Elias says those seeking to combat such efforts are engaged in “voter suppression and election subversion.”
Democrats also have the federal government working on their side on the litigation front—and in ways extending beyond the veritable lawfare barrage the Biden Justice Department has leveled at Trump.
Speaking in Selma, Alabama, on the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the 1965 police assault on civil rights marchers, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared that “the right to vote is still under attack.”
Garland vowed the Department of Justice was punching back, including “challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements.”
The post How Taxpayers Will Heavily Subsidize Democrat Boots on the Ground This Election appeared first on The Daily Signal.
During a conference call with White House officials, top state election officials wanted to know how the Biden administration intended to implement its government-backed get-out-the-vote effort in 2024.
The White House answer essentially was that “those plans are not public and they never intended for them to be public,” according to two secretaries of state who were on the call last week.
“The sad part is, that answer should have been a surprise but it wasn’t,” Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, told The Daily Signal.
Secretaries of state typically are their states’ chief election officials. Their growing frustration comes as more than two dozen state lawmakers in Pennsylvania, a major battleground state, ask the Supreme Court to block President Joe Biden’s executive order to increase voter registration.
Mississippi’s Watson noted that in 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife spent $400 million for election administration grants targeting key jurisdictions that would drive up the Democrat vote.
But, he added, Biden’s putting the power of the federal government behind a similar effort is “1,000%” worse.
The call with White House officials was coordinated by the National Association of Secretaries of State, Watson said.
“We might join in that Pennsylvania case with an amicus brief,” West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, a Republican, told The Daily Signal. “Now we are leading an effort among secretaries of state to push back against partisan election interference and a get-out-the-vote effort using federal tax dollars.”
In 2022, Warner led a group of 14 other secretaries of state who asked Biden to rescind his executive order from the year before, since states are supposed to run elections.
“There is something surreptitious about the Biden administration and the lack of transparency that reveals what is going on here,” Warner said. “The federal government is not supposed to be doing this. We need states to stand firm on this.”
Federal plans largely have been shrouded in secrecy since Biden signed Executive Order 14019 in March 2021, directing federal agencies to work with nonprofit groups to boost voting.
Involved nonprofits include left-leaning organizations such as Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Brennan Center for Justice, as The Daily Signal has reported using details obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“It was troublesome on the phone call [with the White House]. Several spoke up that none of these third-party groups partnering with federal agencies are associated with Republicans or conservatives,” Watson said. “They responded, ‘We welcome anyone.’ Well, they aren’t bringing them to the table.”
In July 2021, the White House held a “listening session” with dozens of left-leaning groups on plans for implementing Biden’s executive order, according to documents obtained by the Foundation for Government Accountability through the Freedom of Information Act.
Those groups include the Southern Poverty Law Center, People for the American Way, the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action, an the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center.
The White House did not respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries for this report.
In Pennsylvania, 27 Republican members of the state Legislature sued both Biden over his executive order on elections and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, also a Democrat, over his own executive order implementing automatic voter registration.
The plaintiffs contend that both orders violated the constitutional rights of state legislators to make election law.
“The executive order is beyond the scope and powers of a president, not to mention he is interfering in an election where he is on the ballot,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Dawn Keefer, a Republican who is chair of the Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus and lead plaintiff in the case.
“We need courts to clarify if legislators have standing. We believe it is a solid case,” Keefer said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “We believe we have standing not only as legislators but, for most of us, as candidates who will be affected by these actions.”
In late March, a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed the case on standing without considering the merits, stating that the Pennsylvania Legislature wasn’t harmed as an institution. The lawmakers are appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, asserting that the rights of individual legislators were violated.
“The judge’s decision would imply that every single member of the Legislature [must] agree on something before the constitutional and civil rights of legislators can be enforced,” Heather Honey, executive director of Election Research Institute, a watchdog organization whose lawyers represent the suing lawmakers, told The Daily Signal. “There is no way you could ever get agreement.”
Honey noted that Democrat legislators twice proposed automatic voter registration, but the bills were defeated in committee.
The effort, she said, was a tacit acknowledgment that such a measure would require legislation and couldn’t be done through a governor’s executive order. Shapiro implemented automatic voter registration through an executive order anyway.
The federal government’s coordination of voter registration efforts has the most far-reaching impact, Honey said.
“The federal government has no right getting involved in the method of selecting presidential electors,” Honey said. “Time, place, and manner of elections is to be decided by Congress, such as the Help America Vote Act. Otherwise, it’s up to the states.”
“There is no role for the president in regulating elections. The full force of the federal government unleashed by an unlawful executive order is interfering in a presidential election,” she added. “Obviously, the Founding Fathers never intended for a president to have the power to use the government for a get-out-the-vote campaign.”
GOP lawmakers contend that the president’s executive order puts the federal government’s thumb on the scale in elections, which are supposed to be the purview of states.
Republicans also argue that Biden’s order could prompt federal employees to violate the Hatch Act, which bars them from any political activity on government time or using government resources.
The post How States Are Punching Back on Biden Federal Election Takeover appeared first on The Daily Signal.
After a key House committee advanced legislation this week to require a citizenship question on the U.S. Census, support for the measure could be growing in the backdrop of the border crisis and its potential impact on congressional reapportionment.
Heritage Action, a policy advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation, announced Friday the Equal Representation Act would be scored as a key vote. The bill is S 3659 in the Senate and HR 7109 in the House. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Under current law, foreign citizens living in the United States are counted in the Census, and thus toward congressional apportionment. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., publicly admitted, “We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants. … I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.”
Democrat Congresswoman Yvette Clarke on illegal immigrants in America:
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 9, 2024
"I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes."
The end game: Dems are willing to destroy what it means to be an American citizen to help themselves politically. pic.twitter.com/3XmBDqYEsH
“Joe Biden’s deadly border policies have made the illegal immigration crisis the number one concern of the American people, and voters are pleading for Congress to fight back,” Heritage Action Executive Vice President Ryan Walker said in a statement.
The House version has 100 co-sponsors and was approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. After being in all but one census from 1820 to 2000, the Census citizenship question was abandoned in the 2010 questionnaire during the Obama administration.
?PASSED?
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) April 10, 2024
We just passed this commonsense bill through our committee.
Unsurprisingly, every Oversight Democrat voted against it.
On to the floor! https://t.co/DztcpKaBZN
“Congressional apportionment and electoral votes should be based solely on the needs of American citizens. Heritage Action is proud to have helped push this bill past the 100 cosponsor mark and will keep working with conservatives across the country to finish the job,” Walker said.
The Heritage Action announcement comes the same day House Speaker Mike Johnson was set to join former President Donald Trump for a press conference on election integrity Friday, The Hill reported.
Reps. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, introduced the House version and Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., introduced the Senate version. The goal is to protect Americans’ electoral power and congressional representation.
“Members of Congress represent U.S. citizens, not foreigners,” Davidson said in a statement. “Under the Democrats’ open border policies, sanctuary cities and states inflate their population with illegal aliens. Then they’re rewarded with more congressional representation by a Census that counts illegals. The inflated count is then used to draw congressional maps, undermining fair representation for our citizens.”
Edwards stressed only American citizens can legally vote, “so only American citizens should be counted when determining federal representation.”
“In the 2008 Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, the justices defined ‘the people’ to mean all members of the political community. To be a member of a political community, you must be an eligible voter,” Edwards said in a statement. “The Equal Representation Act addresses one of the many consequences of our open border—illegal immigrant influence in America’s electoral process. America is waking up to this insidious threat to our democracy.”
The post This Bill Would Prevent Illegal Immigrants From Swaying Congressional Representation appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A host on liberal MSNBC claimed that teaching students the Bible off-campus during school hours would make them a part of what she called the “Church of Trump” and help “determine what happens at the ballot box.”
Alex Wagner’s remarks came in the most recent in a series of three reports over the past two weeks on MSNBC and/or parent company NBC on the nonprofit LifeWise Academy, whose buses pick up some 30,000 students across the country during the school week and take them to an affiliated church or other off-campus religious institution, presents them with Bible lessons, then returns them to their schools.
The three news and/or commentary pieces were critical, to varying degrees, of the nonprofit for supposedly “blurring” the lines of church and state, with one claiming that LifeWise has become a tool of the Right to turn liberal, Democrat-run cities more conservative.
In the most recent piece, Wagner even sought to link LifeWise to former President Donald Trump.
The left-leaning host said that Trump has “managed to turn his Christian followers into politically pious voters, members of the Church of Trump.”
The connection of Trump to the Bible-teaching nonprofit, Wagner claimed, lies in that LifeWise influences “the minds of public school kids in progressive cities like Columbus [in Ohio].” She went so far as to say the Bible program would “determine what happens at the ballot box.”
Neither MSNBC nor NBC responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
LifeWise’s practices might surprise some, but they’re entirely legal in the United States, says Joel Penton, the nonprofit’s founder and CEO.
The Supreme Court, in a 1952 case, Zorach v. Clauson, permitted New York City students to leave their classrooms for religious instruction. Since that case is largely unknown, Penton says, many parents are often surprised when offered the option of midday Bible lessons for their children. Parents often assume that the government has full control over their child’s school day.
“I know what people are feeling,” Penton said. “They’re feeling that the school owns that time—the state owns the time of 8 a.m. [to] 3 p.m., or whatever the school day is, and that’s just not true.”
Currently, LifeWise serves 323 schools in 12 states, totaling about 30,000+ K-12 students, Penton said in a recent phone interview.
The nonprofit founder says that LifeWise serves students in 12 states, from kindergarten through 12th grade. Some 250 of the programs serve elementary schools, a majority of the total.
There’s no charge for participation in LifeWise, Penton said, for either school systems or the student participants.
“We want to make the Bible available to all of them [students]. And that’s what we’ve been trying to build, a plug-and-play program any community can implement,” he said. Forthcoming programs are set for schools in Washington state and even California, in a Los Angeles County school.
He said he hopes to have LifeWise operating in at least 20 states and 500 schools by this fall.
The post K-12 Bible Lessons Program Akin to Proselytizing for ‘Church of Trump,’ MSNBC Host Claims appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Rep. Austin Scott, a Republican from Georgia who has criticized conservatives and is campaigning actively against the House Freedom Caucus chairman, is Speaker Mike Johnson’s choice for a newly vacant seat on the powerful Rules Committee.
Scott’s selection Wednesday infuriated conservatives on Capitol Hill. The Daily Signal spoke with several lawmakers and staffers whose reactions ranged from shock to disappointment that Johnson, R-La., would pick someone who is openly trying to unseat one of the House’s most prominent conservatives.
“This the wrong person for the wrong role at the wrong time,” a Republican member of Congress told The Daily Signal.
By picking Scott for the Rules Committee, one of the oldest and most powerful in the House of Representatives, Johnson revealed whom he trusts to determine floor activity and advance the speaker’s agenda.
“It’s hard to see Johnson’s move here as anything except needing an attack dog against conservatives,” said a former Republican staffer, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “You get the impression he’s going to use Austin Scott to help as a blockade on the Rules Committee and throughout the [Republican] conference. That’s the signal it sends.”
Johnson’s staff acknowledged The Daily Signal’s request for comment, but did not provide a response.
Scott, a close ally of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sought the speaker’s job in October in an ill-fated run against Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
At the time of McCarthy’s ouster as speaker, Scott issued a statement calling the eight members who voted to remove McCarthy “nothing more than grifters who have handed control of the House to the Democratic Party in the name of their own glory and fundraising.”
Scott continued, “There is nothing principled about what they did, and Republican leadership will have to decide to either hold these members accountable or lose the faith of the rest of the conference.”
Months later, he took aim at one of the eight in particular: Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. Scott donated to Good’s primary challenger, John McGuire, in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. Last month, Scott was a featured guest at a McGuire fundraiser.
Despite Scott’s actions, Johnson handpicked him for a coveted seat on the powerful Rules Committee.
“Speaker Johnson keeps saying, ‘We’re on the same team, knock it off, please stop this.’ But he’s not actually doing anything to stop it,” a Republican staffer told The Daily Signal. “Now, Austin Scott, one of the guys who started this civil war on the primary campaign trail, is put on the Rules Committee. The speaker isn’t ending the war, he’s escalating it by rewarding people going after conservatives.”
And while Scott’s public actions have revealed his contempt for conservatives, lawmakers and staff said he is even more hostile to them in private settings.
“He’s got a short fuse and a hot temper,” another Republican member said of Scott. “Quite honestly, he doesn’t have the temperament to be a legislator.”
Scott’s communications director declined to make him available for an interview with The Daily Signal and instead pointed to his brief statement on X.
It is our sworn duty as members of Congress to govern, and I look forward to serving on the Rules Committee to help advance legislation that benefits the American people.
— Rep. Austin Scott (@AustinScottGA08) April 11, 2024
Known as the “speaker’s committee,” the Rules Committee includes nine Republicans and four Democrats. One of those seats became vacant this week when Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., won the gavel for the House Appropriations Committee.
Two members of the House Freedom Caucus—Reps. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., and Chip Roy, R-Texas—currently serve on the Rules Committee with another conservative-leaning member, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. Their three votes, combined with four Democrats, are enough to sink the speaker’s plans.
After years of being shut out of the Rules Committee—and any semblance of negotiation over its membership—conservatives scored seats on the panel as part of a deal with McCarthy, resulting in his election to speaker in January 2023.
Unlike when McCarthy negotiated with members, Johnson instead moved swiftly without consulting conservatives about Scott’s selection.
“It is the speaker’s committee, and he can do whatever he wants with it. But in a one-seat majority, there should be a conversation,” a GOP staffer told The Daily Signal. “You talk to people about who’s interested, who might be a good fit, who might be a productive addition on the Rules Committee.”
A former Republican staffer described it as a curious move on Johnson’s part.
“You already have conservatives angry at you for a variety of reasons,” the former staffer said. “You have a one-seat majority. You have a pending motion to vacate [the speaker]. It’s not exactly the time to poke the bear.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., filed a motion to vacate March 22, but has not yet forced a vote. If it’s successful, Johnson would lose the speaker’s job, just as McCarthy did before him.
“Speaker Johnson lives in peril every day for his job depending on what he does,” a Republican member said. “It’s a dicey situation. It appears to me that there are other candidates who are interested in being speaker in the new term.”
Since joining Congress in 2011, Scott has focused his attention on serving the rural Georgia district he represents. He is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and the Agriculture Committee. He has a lifetime score of 77% on Heritage Action’s Scorecard.
Scott also has developed a reputation among conservatives on Capitol Hill, according to lawmakers and staff who spoke to The Daily Signal.
“Austin Scott is a hothead, a notorious hothead,” a Republican staffer said. “He frequently loses his temper inside conference meetings with other members. He’s threatened, berated, cursed out members.”
Scott’s decision to endorse Good’s primary opponent, therefore, didn’t necessarily come as a surprise. However, it did anger conservatives, particularly because Johnson has privately counseled GOP members not to engage in primaries between fellow Republicans. The speaker recently made another appeal at GOP lawmakers’ retreat last month in West Virginia.
“Austin Scott endorsed Bob Good’s primary challenger, attended a fundraiser with him,” a Republican staffer said. “Mike Johnson, repeatedly for several weeks, has lectured the conference about what he calls the hot war on the campaign trail with primaries against incumbent Republicans. The moderates started this by going after Bob Good.”
Good, who boasts a 99% lifetime score on Heritage Action’s Scorecard, joined the House in 2021 after knocking off an incumbent Republican. He took over as chairman of the House Freedom Caucus in January.
Scott is one of at least six House Republicans who are backing Good’s opponent. Others include House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Reps. Jen Kiggans, R-Va.; Ryan Zinke, R-Mont.; Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis.; and Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas.
“Conservatives were appealing to the speaker to end the civil war before it got out of hand,” a Republican member told The Daily Signal. “And when he refused to, we let everyone know that we’re not going to take all the casualties.”
That’s led some conservative members to make their own endorsements against moderate Republicans.
Good, for example, is backing GOP challenger Derrick Evans in West Virginia’s 1st District against incumbent Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., a leader of the moderate Republican Main Street Caucus. Its affiliated PAC, the Republican Main Street Partnership, is actively spending money against Good.
Notably, Johnson has withheld his own endorsement from Good, whose primary election is June 18. A spokesman for the speaker’s political operation did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
The post Speaker Johnson’s Choice for Key House Committee Sparks Backlash appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Caught on camera making disparaging remarks about the Chicago Fire Department, Rep. Jonathan Jackson, D-Ill., now says he “did not mean to offend” the brave men and women who serve the city.
In a statement posted to X on Tuesday night, Jackson said he was simply trying to “shed light on the need for diversity, training, and equipment upgrades within the Chicago Fire Department.”
A video of Jackson, uncovered Monday by the X account Chicago Contrarian, originally was posted on Instagram by the Black Fire Brigade, a nonprofit group based in Chicago.
This is Rachel Maddow-level bonkers conspiracy mongering.
— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) April 8, 2024
U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson is propagating a malevolent conspiracy theory which alleges white CFD respond differently to South and West Side fires as a method of exacting revenge for having "to leave" the neighborhoods in… pic.twitter.com/GuFZRabSu4
In the video, Jackson, son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a liberal political activist for decades, accuses white firefighters of providing an inferior response to fires in certain parts of the city because of their racial makeup. He says these firefighters are “angry” after being displaced from their former neighborhoods.
“When there is a fire, they go there and watch the building burn,” Jackson tells the audience as it responds disapprovingly. He then cites the city’s predominantly white North Side.
“Go to the North Side. If you see 16 units, 25 units in a building, they go and put out the fire in the single unit. We have a fire in a single unit and the whole building gets evacuated,” Jackson continues. “Because we didn’t have people that lived in the community, that cared about the community, that wanted to put the fire out. They had so much contempt, they let the building burn.”
In the video, Jackson concludes his remarks with a plea: “We need more black first responders, we need more black firefighters.”
Shortly after the video was posted on X, Chicago Fire Fighters Union Local 2 issued a lengthy response condemning Jackson’s language and revoking its political endorsement of the Democrat congressman.
CFD Local 2 has responded to the comments delivered by Rep. Jonathan Jackson.
— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) April 8, 2024
Contrarian applauds Local 2 for its swift condemnation of Mr. Jackson's sickening and ignorant remarks. pic.twitter.com/wn8lkMnvYT
“These comments propagated on social media are not only patently false and maliciously divisive—they are dangerous to our membership,” the union’s executive board wrote in a statement issued Monday. “Local 2 firmly demands Congressman Jackson publicly renounce his comments and issue our membership an apology.”
The union also called on Fire Commissioner Annette Nance-Holt to denounce “this hateful rhetoric and unwarranted attack.”
More than 24 hours after the union’s response to the video, Jackson issued his own three-paragraph statement on X but stopped short of an apology.
In his Tuesday post, Jackson wrote: “My pledge is to help, not harm. I promise to raise awareness of the needs and challenges Chicago firefighters face every day. I will continue to make clear and emphasize why diversity within the ranks of the fire department is so important and why providing better training and tools is crucial.”
I have great respect and admiration for our First Responders – our Chicago Firefighters. I want to acknowledge your sacrifice and thank you for the years of friendship and service. I sincerely did not mean to offend. My intent was to shed light on the need for diversity,…
— Rep. Jonathan L. Jackson (@rep_jackson) April 9, 2024
Jackson also recounted the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Lewis v. Chicago, a 2010 case involving the Chicago Fire Department’s hiring practices. The congressman contended that, even today, “black firefighters continue to call attention to alleged ongoing workplace discrimination regarding hiring and advancement.”
Jackson isn’t the only Chicago politician to make race-based accusations against the city’s fire department.
Two other videos, posted Tuesday on X by Chicago Contrarian, show city Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor making comments of her own while flanked by Alderwoman Pat Dowell and Aldermen Lamont Robinson and David Moore.
Flanked by Alds. Dowell, Robinson, and Moore, here is Ald. Jeanette Taylor openly stoking racial antagonism.
— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) April 10, 2024
In the first video, Taylor accuses CFD of distributing new equipment only to white CFD personnel and claims black CFD personnel receive second-hand equipment.
In the… pic.twitter.com/yKAn7MItQY
In the first video, Taylor asks the audience: “Did you know that firefighters’ equipment only lasts five years, but they give the black firefighters the 3-year-old equipment? They never get the new equipment.”
The department provides new equipment to firefighters upon starting and replaces equipment on a regular schedule, contrary to Taylor’s assertion. It does not hand down equipment.
She also asserts that white firefighters have special access to the Chicago Fire Department’s promotional exam while black counterparts are left to fend for themselves.
“They’ve got a secret club, they hand out the test to them, but we ain’t invited,” Taylor said. “We actually have to do the work.”
A spokesman for the Chicago Fire Department, asked about the allegations of Jackson and Taylor, rejected them in a statement to The Daily Signal.
“The Chicago Fire Department is aware of recent claims regarding our department,” spokesman Larry Langford said. “We want to assure the public that these allegations are inaccurate and do not reflect the values or actions of our dedicated members. The Chicago Fire Department remains committed to serving and protecting our communities with integrity and professionalism.”
The Daily Signal contacted both Jackson and Taylor for comment but has not heard back.
The post Chicago Firefighters Union Revokes Endorsement After Rep. Jackson’s Allegations appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Back on May 30, 2023, after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy cut a deal with President Joe Biden to suspend any limit on the federal debt through all of 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer praised the deal as an act of “responsible” government.
“Again, nobody got everything they wanted,” said Schumer, “but this bill is the responsible and prudent and necessary way forward.”
At the close of business on the day Schumer made this statement, the federal debt was $31,463,988,658,765.75.
At the close of business on April 8 of this year, the debt was $34,608,412,560,642.47.
In just over 10 months since Biden and McCarthy made their deal, the debt has increased by more than $3 trillion ($3,144,423,901,876.72).
To put this in perspective, the total federal debt did not top $3 trillion for the first time until fiscal year 1990—214 years after the nation was founded in 1776.
Schumer and his colleagues in the current Congress borrowed more money in less than one year than their pre-1990 predecessors did in more than two centuries.
What is the fiscally “responsible” Schumer talking about now? He is bragging about how he is spending federal money on pet projects in New York state.
In the seven days from April 2 through April 8, Schumer’s Senate office posted eight press releases announcing projects that would funnel $79,174,581 in federal funding to New York.
His communications staff was especially busy on April 2.
The first press release they put out that day said that Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., had “secured $3,822,000 for critical local projects.”
“This nearly $4 million in federal funding makes vital investments in the Capital Region’s top-notch educational institutions, helping give students the equipment and hands-on training they need,” Schumer said.
The second press release they put out that day said Schumer and Gillibrand “secured $3,000,000 for the Syracuse University and CenterState CEO in the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills to upgrade facilities at the Syracuse University’s South Side Innovation Center and prepare local small business to succeed in the semiconductor industry through CenterState CEO.”
The third press release they put out that day said Schumer and Gillibrand “personally secured $1,000,000 for Binghamton University to purchase state-of-the-art advanced packaging equipment for its Nanofabrication Laboratory (NLAB) in Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills as a Congressionally Directed Spending request to bolster workforce training for advanced chip manufacturing in cleanroom environments.”
A fourth press release they put out that day said Schumer and Gillibrand “secured $1,200,000 in the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations package for DAY ONE Early Learning Community, a preschool in Poughkeepsie that serves low-income children and families.”
A fifth press release published that same day said Schumer and Gillibrand “announced $5,633,581 through the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Great Lakes Environmental Justice Grant Program to develop and implement the Western New York Environmental Justice Grant Program for underserved communities in Lake Erie and Niagara River’s watershed.”
Two days later, on April 4, Schumer “announced $1,559,000 from Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills to support vital semiconductor and healthcare workforce training programs and higher education infrastructure upgrades in Rochester.”
Four days after that, on April 8, Schumer declared that he was “proud to deliver a whopping $39 million to help rehabilitate the South Grand Island Bridges and bolster resilient infrastructure needed to maintain these vital corridors for Western NY.”
That same day, he also announced that a “whopping nearly $24 million from our Bipartisan Infrastructure & Jobs Law to bolster flooding mitigation on Cortlandt’s Route 6 will drive our communities towards a safer and more resilient future.”
Who is going to pay for these projects in Schumer’s home state?
Federal taxpayers in New York, of course, will carry some of the burden—but so, too, will taxpaying workers in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Alaska, and every other state in the union.
Because the federal government is continuing to run a massive deficit—it was $828.135 billion through the first five months of this fiscal year—not only will current taxpayers fund such projects but so, too, will future generations who will be required to pay the interest on the money the federal government borrows to fund them.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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Recently appointed 4th Circuit Judge Nicole Berner is legally married to the pro-abortion lawyer who represented Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her.
The Washington Post describes Berner as “the first openly gay judge and the first labor lawyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit,” which covers Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Berner, who is also pro-abortion, formerly served as a staff attorney for Planned Parenthood, where she focused on “protecting and expanding access” to chemical abortion drugs.
Debra Katz represented Ford in her high-profile #MeToo accusations against Kavanaugh. In subsequent remarks, Katz said that her client was partially motivated to accuse Kavanaugh out of a desire to protect Roe v. Wade, the monumental Supreme Court case that was overturned in June 2022.
Ford recently reappeared in the national news cycle through the announcement of her upcoming book, “One Way Back,” a memoir about her experience accusing Kavanaugh.
Katz issued a joint statement at the time with fellow attorney Lisa Banks, saying, “Five years ago, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s courageous testimony changed the world. She told the truth to the United States Senate, she stood up to enormous public pressure, and she sparked a national reckoning on sexual assault. Her bravery empowered countless survivors to speak out and seek justice.”
“We are proud to have fiercely represented her during the Senate proceedings,” they added. “The impact of Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony changed American culture. We stand beside Dr. Blasey Ford and all our brave clients who have come forward to hold powerful individuals accountable.”
The book was published on March 19, the same day that Berner was confirmed to the court. Representatives did not immediately share with The Daily Signal whether this was a coincidence.
During Berner’s nomination hearing in December, Republicans grilled her about her past statements and related political topics, including the Kavanaugh confirmation, according to The Washington Post.
“I believe Justice Kavanaugh, just like every other justice of the Supreme Court, was legitimately confirmed, and were I to be confirmed, I would follow his opinions and the opinions of every justice,” she told the Republicans present at the hearing.
“The role of a judge is a very different role than that of an advocate,” she added.
Pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood Action Fund celebrated her confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in late March in statements that suggest confidence that she will consistently side with abortion advocates.
Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said that Berner “knows firsthand the evolving state of our nation’s reproductive and other fundamental rights,” and Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO Mini Timmaraju emphasized that Berner “understands that reproductive freedom is a fundamental right.”
CONFIRMED: Nicole Berner to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
— Senate Judiciary Committee (@JudiciaryDems) March 19, 2024
Ms. Berner is a highly experienced litigator, as well as a steadfast advocate for workers’ rights, reproductive rights, and civil rights for all.
She’s also now the first LGBTQ+ judge to serve on this court. pic.twitter.com/2b980Mzdd3
Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh sparked a media circus, stories filled with debunked anonymous sources, a Senate investigation, a highly televised Senate hearing, and more. The Senate Judiciary Committee ultimately found “no evidence” to corroborate the claims against the Supreme Court justice, who was confirmed to the court on Oct. 5, 2018.
“After an extensive investigation that included the thorough review of all potentially credible evidence submitted and interviews of more than 40 individuals with information relating to the allegations, including classmates and friends of all those involved, Committee investigators found no witness who could provide any verifiable evidence to support any of the allegations brought against Justice Kavanaugh,” the 414-page report says.
Katz has been described as “the feared attorney of the #MeToo movement.” She is a founding partner of Katz Banks Kumin LLP, where she focuses on sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation.
In video footage obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation in 2019, Katz revealed that putting “an asterisk next to” Kavanaugh’s name before “he takes a scalpel” to Roe v. Wade was “part of what motivated” Ford to speak out.
“In the aftermath of these hearings, I believe that Christine’s testimony brought about more good than the harm misogynist Republicans caused by allowing Kavanaugh on the court,” Katz explained in April 2019 at the University of Baltimore’s 11th Feminist Legal Theory Conference.
Why would a competent lawyer say this? I'm stunned. https://t.co/7oJcyOISEm
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) September 4, 2019
“He will always have an asterisk next to his name,” Katz continued. “When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him, and that is important; it is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.”
The video was first reported by Ryan Lovelace in his book “Search and Destroy: Inside the Campaign Against Brett Kavanaugh.” The author told the Daily Caller News Foundation at the time that it calls into question everything that Ford and Katz have previously said on the matter.
Lovelace additionally suggested that had this information been known during the Kavanaugh hearings, there might have been different questions and different results. Ford had told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she came forward out of a sense of “civic duty.”
“Ford’s audience was not the Senate, as Katz had previously suggested, but the American people,” Lovelace wrote. “If they could be persuaded that Justice Kavanaugh was a predator, then they might not accept a future ruling by the five Republican-appointed justices altering the right to obtain an abortion established by Roe v. Wade.”
“Had the Senate understood Ford’s real motivation, as described by Katz, it might have appreciated more fully the pressure that ‘organized forces’ were applying,” he added.
Katz’s remarks at the Baltimore conference rang partially true: The notoriety of the Kavanaugh hearings caused Kavanaugh to become a target for protesting. In the days following the leak of the draft opinion indicating that Roe would soon be overturned, protesters repeatedly showed up outside Kavanaugh’s home where they yelled, sang, and chanted, often accusing him of being a rapist.
Shortly before Roe was overturned, authorities arrested a man near the Kavanaugh family home who said that he had traveled from California to kill the justice out of a desire to protect abortions in the United States. That man’s name is Nicholas Roske. Almost two years later, there is still no trail date or plea agreement in his case, as The Washington Free Beacon reported.
The post Newly Appointed 4th Circuit Judge Married to Pro-Abortion Christine Ford Lawyer appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Amid increasing suspicion of China’s aggression, the leaders of the United States and Japan are touting an “enhanced” security agreement.
“Our alliance we have with Japan is purely defensive in nature,” President Joe Biden said during a Rose Garden press conference Wednesday with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
“It’s not aimed at any one nation or a threat to the region,” Biden added. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with conflict. This is about restoring stability in the region.”
Under the new agreement, the U.S. and Japan will upgrade a joint base in Tokyo with 54,000 U.S. troops, set up a joint military council to produce more missiles and other weapons, and increase joint research on artificial intelligence. The two countries also will join a security partnership with the United Kingdom and Australia as a deterrence to China.
Biden met with Kishida at the White House, where a state dinner was set for Wednesday night. On Thursday, the two are scheduled to meet with Philippines President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. at a time when Chinese and Philippine vessels have had run-ins in the South China Sea.
The United States already has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. Chinese ships also have been repeatedly intimidating Taiwanese ships in the area.
For Japan’s part, Kishida stressed the need for “rule of law” with regard to China’s hostilities at sea.
“Regarding the challenges concerning China,” Kishida said during the White House press conference, “Japan and the U.S. as global partners should work in close coordination. The president and I are committed to continuing our dialogue with China, but we continue to call on China to fulfill its responsibilities as a world power.”
Biden said he recently spoke to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“I spoke at length to President Xi and we agreed to No. 1, have personal contact with one another … so we know exactly what the other is thinking,” Biden said. “We had a discussion about two weeks ago now. It’s the best way to reduce the chance of miscalculation and misunderstanding.”
The president stressed that the U.S.-Japanese alliance isn’t aimed at China.
“The things we discussed today improve our cooperation and are purely about defense and readiness,” Biden said. “It’s not aimed at any one nation or a threat to the region. And it doesn’t have anything to do with conflict. This is about restoring stability in the region.”
The post Biden Says Enhanced Military Alliance With Japan ‘Not Aimed’ at China appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, left Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas stumbling during a Wednesday hearing by rhetorically asking him what powers Congress had stripped him of to enforce the border.
Mayorkas testified during a hearing of the House Appropriations’ homeland security subcommittee titled “Budget Hearing: Fiscal Year 2025 Request for the Department of Homeland Security.” Cloud questioned Mayorkas about whether he lacked the power and authorization to secure the U.S.-Mexico border due to congressional action since he took office.
“Could you speak to any authorities that Congress has removed from you or the president since taking office?” Cloud asked Mayorkas, in reference to claims by President Joe Biden that he is unsure whether he has the power to take certain steps to prevent illegal immigration. Biden said he was “examining” what powers he had to close the border during a Univision interview that aired Tuesday.
“Has Congress removed any authorities from you or the president since taking office?” Cloud asked as Mayorkas stammered in response.
“That is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question,” Cloud added. “Why are you filibustering? I asked you a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question.”
Biden reversed numerous policies initiated by his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, during his first days in office. Mayorkas has claimed that the border is secure on several occasions, despite U.S. Customs and Border Protection reporting more than 6.6 million encounters with illegal immigrants since the start of fiscal year 2021.
“You have approximately a 20% larger budget than Trump had,” Cloud said. “The president has made the point that he can’t secure the border, he can’t get down to it, because he is waiting on Congress to move, and I just point that out to belay that and to point out the truth, the fact that he has every single authority as President Trump, he has more resources at his disposal than President Trump, yet he’s done everything he can to undermine the security of our border.”
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post ‘Why Are You Filibustering?’: Mayorkas Stumbles Over Answer When Asked What Powers He Lacks to Enforce Border appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In the earlier decades of the Public Broadcasting Service, conservatives could feel that they had some fraction of a platform on William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line.”
That PBS presence no doubt spurred the makers of the “American Masters” series to offer a two-hour program titled “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” In the opening credits, they typed in “Insufferable” first, then crossed it out. That word reflects the view of the political and financial base of PBS.
Fans of Buckley might enjoy the video clips of Buckley jousting with the elites in the 20th century, but the style of this show was annoying in that whenever experts were speaking, they were entirely off-screen.
This documentary by Barak Goodman is neither a valentine to Buckley, nor a fair and balanced recitation of his life and times. Conservatives are interviewed, but the final product carries the distinct odor of PBS’ liberal arrogance.
In the tainted timeline of this program, Buckley triumphs with the election of Ronald Reagan and then the end of the Cold War, and then it’s all downhill for the troglodytes on the Right.
Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice speaks over footage of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh about conservatism being taken to an extreme as the Republicans took Congress in 1994.
Gingrich, he claims, “teaches Republicans to talk in a new way about Democrats being a source of infection and disease and disloyalty and decay.” Then there’s footage of Limbaugh making fun of the “ugly broads” of feminism.
Over ominous music implying villainy, Kabaservice argues, “Buckley did endorse Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. At some level, he understood that politics requires emotion, as well as intellect, and maybe it requires dark emotions and even hatreds.”
This would match the spirit of PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,” where the liberal Republican puts on guests like journalist Tim Alberta, who recently denounced the Limbaugh show as poisoning Christians with “an unceasing stream of venom and ugliness and hostility, antagonism, hatred.”
Leftists have an annoying habit of thinking fear and loathing and ugliness and venom are somehow unique to the Republican half of America. They, by contrast, are apparently all sugar and spice and everything nice.
Have they watched five minutes of “The Reidout” or “The View”? Both sides (and center-huggers like Kabaservice) are capable of love and hatred, comfort and fear, civility and incivility.
But on PBS, they must locate experts to slam Buckley for “tolerating and sometimes even encouraging some of the nastier, more extreme aspects on the Right … by the end, it was clear the nastier forces had won out.” There’s no name on screen to figure out who’s the mudslinger here.
PBS can never be judged for encouraging the nastier, more extreme aspects of the Left, because in their bubble, no one is ever nasty or extreme where they reside, in a perfect Eden of politics.
Kabaservice returns for the final pitch on that “dark side” of the conservative movement, which was “white Americans” didn’t like “change” (because they were racists, apparently): “Buckley understood that it was part of his role to keep a lid on the dark energies that fueled the conservative movement, but not to repress them entirely, because it was those kind of resentments that he was drawing on that gave conservatism its power as a movement.”
Once again, PBS thinks the Democrats get their power from warm wellsprings of idealism and compassion. The Republicans get theirs from nurturing racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.
Watching this program gives this conservative one overwhelming reaction: I want my involuntary contributions to PBS refunded. Insult me with someone else’s money.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: The head of the Arizona Freedom Caucus condemned the “calculated political decision-making” exhibited by Arizona Republicans who sought to distance themselves from the state’s most massive pro-life victory yet.
Some high-profile Arizona Republicans had decried news on Tuesday that the state’s Supreme Court had upheld an 1864 law protecting almost all unborn babies in the state, except when the mother’s life is at risk.
Senate candidate Kari Lake, former Gov. Doug Ducey, Rep. David Schweikert, and Rep. Juan Ciscomani, were among the Republicans who condemned the news and suggested that pro-abortion legislation was needed to rectify the situation.
But the Arizona Freedom Caucus, led by Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman, came out swinging on Tuesday evening, declaring in a statement that the court “upheld the intent of the legislature, and preserved the rule of law” by “ruling that the pre-Roe law will remain effective.”
“We will not compromise on the core value of cherishing and protecting life,” the statement said. Numerous members of the state’s Freedom Caucus promoted the post on “X” and voiced their support.
? STATEMENT ON ARIZONA SUPREME COURT’S PRO-LIFE RULING ?
— Arizona Freedom Caucus (@AZFreedomCaucus) April 9, 2024
Today, the Supreme Court of Arizona made the correct ruling, upheld the intent of the legislature, and preserved the rule of law today by ruling that the pre-Roe law will remain effective.
Protecting the lives of… pic.twitter.com/SPbr7Bamhe
“This is why I am proud to be a member of the AFC,” said state Rep. Rachel Jones, and state Rep. Austin Smith chimed in, “We will continue to lead the way and be unabashedly in favor of supporting both the mother and the unborn child.”
In a phone interview with The Daily Signal on Wednesday, Hoffman emphasized that life is not an issue Republicans should be willing to compromise on.
“We should be resolute in our convictions and in our principles and in our party platform, to be willing to make the case that we cherish life, and that we are going to do everything we can to protect it,” said the Arizona Freedom Caucus chair.
This respect for life should include caring for mothers and families as well, he said.
“What the Arizona Freedom Caucus saw, is this calculated political decision-making yesterday, with people diving for the bushes and effectively abandoning everything that they claim to believe in for the last decade, two decades, three decades in some cases,” he said.
“We just don’t believe that’s how we should operate in this environment that is truly a battle between good and evil. So our statement was simply based on our convictions, and it certainly did send a warning flare up into the sky for those who were hiding in the bushes that no, we need to stand and unabashedly for protecting life and for our principles,” Hoffman added.
Though Arizona has a law protecting unborn babies after 15 weeks, Arizona’s pro-abortion, Democrat governor Katie Hobbs signed an executive order in 2023 giving the state’s Democrat attorney general the power to enforce abortion laws. That attorney general, Kris Mayes, promised not to enforce any protections for the unborn and to “fight like hell” to protect abortions in the state.
Hoffman described Arizona Democrats as supportive of “ripping children apart, limb by limb, in the womb” and working actively to “normalize abortion” and create a “culture of abortion on demand until the moment of birth.”
“This is deeply embedded in Democrat culture,” he said, speculating that some of the reactions from Arizona Republicans on Tuesday may have been a reaction to the energy of the massive abortion messaging machine that is Democratic leadership.
On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump weighed in on the Arizona ruling, asked by reporters if the ruling went too far.
“Yeah they did, and that will be straightened out,” he said.
“As you know, it’s all about states’ rights,” he added. He also said he thinks Hobbs will “bring it back into reason.”
The former president also made an announcement on Monday that he believes each state should follow “the will of the people” and pass state-specific laws on abortion. He also said he supports “exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.”
“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in a video posted Monday morning on Truth Social.
“This 50-year battle over Roe v. Wade took it out of the federal hands and brought it into the hearts, minds, and vote of the people at each state,” Trump added. “Now it’s up to the states to do the right thing.”
The former president encouraged Americans to “follow” their “hearts on this issue” but to remember that “you must also win elections to restore our culture and in fact to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline.”
Virginia Allen contributed to this report.
The post Arizona Freedom Caucus Leader Slams Republicans ‘Calculated Political Decision-Making’ Following Abortion Ruling appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Two months ago, the House voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Next week, the Senate will receive the two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is expected to dismiss the charges just as quickly as he receives them.
“Schumer is going to table it,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., predicts of the impeachment articles.
The articles were originally expected to be delivered to the Senate on Wednesday, but some Senate Republicans asked House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to delay the delivery until next week. Fox News reported that the benefit of delaying the delivery of the articles is to allows more time for debate without the time restraint of the coming weekend.
Schumer has not indicated he plans to change his position on the articles of impeachment if they arrive next week instead of Wednesday.
If Schumer does dismisses the charges against Mayorkas, it will be a historic first, according to Marshall.
“This has never happened before,” the Kansas lawmaker said, adding that there have “been 21 impeachment trials over on the House side. Four of those, the person died [or] they resigned, but 17 of them still had the person in office when those impeachment articles were delivered, and every one of those was followed through with the trial. Again, this is so toxic that Chuck Schumer is going to table it. That’s certainly what it looks like, but we’re going to go down screaming and fighting,” Marshall says.
The Republican-controlled House voted 214 to 213 on a party-line vote to impeach Mayorkas on Feb. 13 after a failed attempt a week prior.
The House’s first article alleges that the homeland security secretary has failed to secure America’s border and enforce immigration laws, instead executing policies that incentivize illegal immigration.
The House’s second article of impeachment contends that Mayorkas is in breach of the public trust and knowingly has made false statements to Congress and the American people.
Marshall joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the Senate’s expected course of action on the articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, and to explain what course of action remains for conservative lawmakers seeking to secure America’s borders.
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Senator Vows to Go Down ‘Screaming and Fighting’ in Mayorkas Impeachment Battle appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The foreign policy establishment that once thrived under the control of both political parties has used Big Tech and the Biden administration to codify a “war on wrongthink” that stifles dissent from the elites’ narrative, a journalist and an online censorship analyst warned.
“What we’re up against here are not pink-haired, ambi-gendered LGBT-BLM-maximizing identitarian politics when we’re talking about censorship on the internet,” Michael Benz, a former State Department official under President Donald Trump and founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said Tuesday at an Oversight Project event at The Heritage Foundation.
It’s not “partisan politics” driving censorship, said Benz, but “the foreign policy establishment.” Conservatives and populists “don’t think about the American empire, they don’t think about the managers of the American empire, which is the foreign policy establishment, our State Department, our Pentagon, our intelligence services.”
“When you go upstream on internet censorship and what’s driving it, you will find that foreign policy establishment,” Benz argued.
Benjamin Weingarten, editor-at-large at RealClearInvestigations, also attributed “the leading edge of all the attacks on Donald Trump as an avatar for tens of millions of dissenting Americans” to the administrative state and the “deep state” within it. (The “deep state” refers to bureaucrats who oppose the agenda of the duly-elected president.) These entrenched bureaucrats “felt most threatened that [Trump] would upend the uniparty foreign policy blob,” he said.
“You also had the tech companies identify that what happened in 2016 could never happen again,” Weingarten said, referring to both the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election victory.
“They kind of used the pretext of Russian mis-, dis-, and malinformation, grafting a Cold War paradigm” to define a new enemy—Americans who disagree with their agenda, he said. “We are the enemy that’s engaging in wrongthink that threatens to undermine their power.”
After 2016, “Big Tech platforms became perceived as—rather than vehicles for free and open discourse—now they needed to be weaponized as assets of this security state, essentially.”
These bureaucrats used the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, as a pretext to launch “a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” Weingarten claimed, referring to the Biden White House strategy released in June 2021.
He warned that the strategy “codifies a war on wrongthink in this country,” based on the idea that “you can’t have an information environment that enables what we saw on Jan. 6.” He described as “terrifying” the idea that the federal government would take upon itself the task of “confronting the longterm contributors to domestic terror” in the context of the misinformation panics of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Benz, the former State Department official, highlighted what he called the “foreign-to-domestic switcheroo,” noting that federal powers created to oppose terrorism in the War on Terror became tools to silence dissent at home.
The narrative that Donald Trump represented a threat to the U.S. from Russia enabled the foreign policy establishment to target conservatives, he said. Yet special counsel Robert Mueller’s report found no smoking gun evidence of Trump as a Russian agent, so the establishment had to move on to something else.
“Instead of shutting down the censorship apparatus when Russiagate died, they changed the predicate,” Benz noted. Suddenly, the foreign policy blob started warning about “a threat to democracy.”
“Democracy is the watchword of the foreign policy establishment to overthrow governments,” Benz said.
He noted that the National Science Foundation has given over $60 million in the past year to “specially-constructed censorship labs” to study “misinformation as a threat to democracy.” This bolsters “the ability to overthrow a government that is not doing the bidding of the U.S. foreign policy establishment,” he warned.
Benz described a symposium with “some of the most important thought leaders in the industry” convened after Space X founder Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now known as X.
Benz said the “censorship industrial complex” suffered a serious setback when Musk purchased Twitter and with the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case revealing the extent to which the federal government pressured social media companies to censor dissent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet he said the censors still have “two tricks” up their sleeves.
He explained that the European Union Digital Services Act—which he dubbed “the NATO censorship law”—intends to “stop the rise of populist parties,” going beyond “the simple hate speech laws” in Europe to establish a new rule on disinformation.
“You cannot be a multinational tech platform without access to the EU market,” Benz warned. This disinformation rule will come from “the same people who constructed the election censorship apparatus in 2020,” which urged Big Tech to censor concerns about voting by mail, for example.
He also warned about state governments launching “state-mandated programs on media literacy” in public schools, teaching students that “if you read the wrong media sources, you are illiterate.”
The “censorship industrial complex” is becoming an industry employing millions of people,” Benz warned.
Benz said Americans need to pressure Congress to cut funding to the “censorship industrial complex.”
Weingarten, the RealClearInvestigations editor, agreed, saying that “cutting off the federal funding … is imperative.”
“I would advocate for criminal penalties” for those who use social media and “misinformation” programs to censor Americans, he added. “There’s a censorship-to-criminalization pipeline and all we have is oversight? There needs to be something more than oversight.”
The post TERRIFYING: The True Force Behind the ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A number of Arizona Republicans are rapidly distancing from the state’s controversial Supreme Court ruling protecting almost all unborn babies from abortions.
The state Supreme Court upheld a 1864 law on Tuesday that bans almost all abortions in Arizona, except when the mother’s life is at risk. In a 4-to-2 decision, the court said that the law is “now enforceable,” though it will likely not go until effect for a number of weeks.
Though Arizona has a law protecting unborn babies after 15 weeks, Arizona’s Democrat governor Katie Hobbs signed an executive order in 2023 giving the state’s Democrat attorney general the power to enforce abortion laws. That attorney general, Kris Mayes, promised not to enforce any protections for the unborn and to “fight like hell” to protect abortions in the state.
News of the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision was celebrated by pro-life groups like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, but it prompted outcry from some Arizona Republicans who had formerly expressed desires to protect as many unborn lives as they could.
Senate candidate Kari Lake, who had previously drawn praise from pro-life groups for her staunch defense of life and exposure of Democratic abortion extremism, announced on Tuesday that she not only believes the old law is “out of step with Arizonians,” but she also wants Hobbs and the state legislature “to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.”
“Ultimately,” she said in a statement wherein she promised to oppose a federal ban on abortion, “Arizona voters will make the decision on the ballot come November.”
Lake, during remarks delivered at the American Leadership Forum in 2022, had previously referred to a “great law” that Arizona had “on the books” as she discussed her hope that Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned.
“If that happens, we will be a state where we will not be taking the lives of our unborn anymore,” she said at the time.
Her campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.
.@KariLake in 2022: “Obviously I think Roe should be overturned…we have a great law on the books right now. If that happens, we will be a state where we will not be taking the lives of our unborn anymore.” pic.twitter.com/KtoaGBdiOT
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 9, 2024
The state’s former Republican governor, Doug Ducey, issued a similar statement calling on the state lawmakers to “heed the will” of the people.
“I signed the 15-week law as governor because it is thoughtful conservative policy, and an approach to this very sensitive issue that Arizonans can actually agree on,” he said. “The ruling today is not the outcome I would have preferred, and I call on our elected leaders to heed the will of the people and address this issue with a policy that is workable and reflective of our electorate.”
Republican Arizona Rep. David Schweikert, one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the state, has publicly expressed gratitude to his mother for choosing last minute not to abort him. He similarly voiced his disapproval of the ruling on Tuesday.
“I do not support today’s ruling from the AZ Supreme Court,” he said Tuesday in an “X” post. “This issue should be decided by Arizonans, not legislated from the bench. I encourage the state legislature to address this issue immediately.”
The congressman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
I do not support today’s ruling from the AZ Supreme Court. This issue should be decided by Arizonans, not legislated from the bench. I encourage the state legislature to address this issue immediately.
— Rep. David Schweikert (@RepDavid) April 9, 2024
Republican Arizona Rep. Juan Ciscomani, who has described himself as strongly pro-life and supportive of exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, called the ruling a “disaster for women and providers,” insisting that the state’s 15-week-protections for the unborn “protected the rights of women and new life.”
“It respected women and the difficult decision of ending a pregnancy—one I will never personally experience and won’t pretend to understand,” he continued. “As my record shows, I’m a strong supporter of empowering women to make their own healthcare choices and I oppose a national abortion ban.”
Ciscomani similarly did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement celebrating the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Ciscomani had said that he “will always defend life as a member of Congress.”
“As a husband and a father, I believe that life is precious, and as a country, we must protect women and children in every way possible,” he said at the time.
My statement on the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling today. pic.twitter.com/A1Do8AjYlb
— Congressman Juan Ciscomani (@RepCiscomani) April 9, 2024
The slew of statements follow former President Donald Trump’s Monday announcement that each state should follow “the will of the people” and pass state-specific laws on abortion.
“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in a video posted Monday morning on Truth Social.
Trump’s position on abortion was unclear heading into the election, though the former president appointed three Supreme Court justices who ultimately made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022 by a majority vote — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
“I want to thank the six justices: Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch,” Trump said. He called them “incredible people, for having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.”
“This 50-year battle over Roe v. Wade took it out of the federal hands and brought it into the hearts, minds, and vote of the people at each state,” Trump added. “Now it’s up to the states to do the right thing.”
Further clarifying his view on abortion, he said he supports “exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.”
“You must follow your heart on this issue, but remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and in fact to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline,” he added.
Trump also criticized Democrats’ extreme abortion positions in his remarks, saying: “Democrats are the radical ones in this position, because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month. The concept of having an abortion in the later months and even execution after birth—and that’s exactly what it is, the baby is born, the baby is executed after birth—is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.”
Virginia Allen contributed to this report.
The post Arizona Republicans Back Away From the Unborn Following State Supreme Court Ruling appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A prominent Catholic organization is calling on the Department of Justice to defend Catholic churches from anticipated pro-abortion attacks, pointing to the disparities in the DOJ’s enforcement of a law protecting both abortion clinics and churches.
In a letter first obtained by The Daily Signal, CatholicVote President Brian Burch calls on Attorney General Merrick Garland to detail what steps the DOJ plans to take to “combat the incessant attacks against Catholic churches.”
“How much more violence needs to happen before you will act?” he asks Garland. “Why is the FACE Act being enforced against Holocaust survivors, but not [against] those who attempt to destroy churches or even kill Catholics?”
The letter references President Joe Biden’s administration’s focus on prosecuting pro-life activists through the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. As recently as April 3, the DOJ announced that a federal judge found four pro-life activists guilty of violating the FACE Act—including an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Eva Edl.
“We have had enough of the Biden administration prosecuting pro-lifers while ignoring attacks against Catholic churches across the country,” Burch told The Daily Signal on Tuesday.
“Attorney General Garland’s silence on these hate crimes is deafening,” he added. “Many more attacks are expected this year if he continues to turn a blind eye. It is well past time for the Biden administration to act.”
CatholicVote points out to the DOJ that a man in Verona, New Jersey, set a Catholic Church on fire on April 4. This was the third time since 2018 that this individual, named Elliot Bennett, 42, had “engaged in violence and vandalism against the church,” Burch said. Bennett had been charged with criminal mischief and a hate crime related to prior incidents.
“The Verona incident was the 21st attack on a Catholic church in 2024, the 247th attack since Catholic churches across the country were put under organized siege by pro-abortion domestic terrorists after the Supreme Court leak [of a pending ruling overturning Roe v. Wade] in May 2022, and the 412th attack since general civil unrest swept the nation in May 2020,” Burch wrote. “We have found evidence of arrests in only about 25% of these cases, and zero federal prosecutions.”
The FACE Act protects churches in the same way that it protects abortion clinics, Burch emphasized.
“And yet under your leadership, the Biden administration has refused to prosecute a single act of violence against a Catholic church despite many other cases of arson and firebombing; pro-abortion protesters blocking church entrances and disrupting Masses; and even physical assaults on priests and parishioners, among many other types of violence,” the CatholicVote leader said.
“These attacks have caused at least $25 million in quantifiable damage to churches and instilled fear into hundreds of Catholic communities,” he added.
Though the DOJ promised CatholicVote in December 2021 that it would conduct a 15-day review to ensure that appropriate resources are being deployed to protect houses of worship, this review apparently has not occurred. And according to Burch, the violence has not only continued, but “increased, unabated.”
“This problem is taking on new urgency this year,” he wrote. “Up to a dozen states will be voting on abortion-related ballot initiatives. We have seen surges of attacks against Catholic churches during voting on abortion ballot initiatives in Kansas, Michigan, and Ohio, which had signs expressing their opposition to abortion.”
CatholicVote argues that Catholic churches and individuals have an absolute right to practice their faith, and that these attacks against churches that stand for the right to life are “textbook examples of voter intimidation and voter suppression.”
He added: “You have sued multiple states which you allege are engaging in voter suppression, comparing their laws to those of the Jim Crow era, yet you have not devoted a single minute of federal time to addressing the intimidation and suppression of Catholic voters, which bears striking similarities to the prejudice and violence against African Americans during the Jim Crow era.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.
Since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade would soon thereafter be overturned, there have been at least 236 attacks on Catholic churches and at least 90 attacks on pro-life pregnancy resource centers, according to CatholicVote trackers.
Yet the Biden DOJ charged only pro-life activists with FACE Act violations in 2022, and has since charged only five individuals with violating the FACE Act for targeting pregnancy centers.
In February, conservative leaders called on House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., to pass the FACE Act Repeal Act of 2023 “as soon as possible.”
“In the aftermath of additional pro-life activists being convicted by the Biden administration under the FACE Act for peacefully protesting outside an abortion business, we respectfully urge you to take immediate legislative action to protect peaceful pro-life activists from the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Justice and an unconstitutional law,” the leaders said in a letter first obtained by The Daily Signal.
“The Biden administration has weaponized the FACE Act against peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors and activists who want to save lives and change hearts and minds,” Advancing American Freedom Executive Director Paul Teller told The Daily Signal at the time.
The failure to prosecute attacks on Catholic churches under the FACE Act has drawn particular attention in light of the fact that Biden is the nation’s second Catholic president and is often described by the media as a “devout Catholic”—though the president heads the most pro-abortion administration in U.S. history; promotes transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers, even for children; and celebrates transgender ideology.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is a crime against human life, that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” and “close the sexual act to the gift of life.”
In an Easter weekend interview, the left-leaning archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Wilton Gregory, described the president as a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” which parts of Catholicism to adhere to.
“I would say there are things, especially in terms of the life issues, there are things that he chooses to ignore,” Gregory said.
“The issues of life begin at the very beginning. And they conclude at natural death,” the cardinal said. “And you can’t pick and choose. You’re either one who respects life in all of its dimensions, or you have to step aside and say, ‘I’m not pro-life.’”
The post EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Must Defend Catholic Churches From More Expected Pro-Abortion Attacks, Leader Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Biden administration is proposing a new rule that would further entrench unelected federal bureaucrats from accountability to President Joe Biden or his elected successors.
Key to the new rule from the Office of Personnel Management is the effective “grandfathering” of federal employees into their current category of employment, making it harder for a future president to issue an executive order like the one that then-President Donald Trump signed in October 2020 to rein in the bureaucracy.
A rule listed in the Federal Register, like this one was Thursday, could be more difficult to overturn than an executive order because it would have to be reversed under the provisions of the Administrative Procedures Act, one former senior OPM official said.
“If such a rule were allowed to stand, it would tie a future president’s hands—at least temporarily—in carrying out his responsibilities to make and implement his policies,” said Robert Moffit, who was at OPM during the Reagan administration and is now a senior research fellow for health and welfare policy at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
The president cannot run the huge federal government from his office in the West Wing of the White House, Moffit told The Daily Signal.
Some career federal employees who have civil service protection are neither impartial nor nonpartisan, he added.
“To effect his policy, therefore, the president must not only have the ability to hire political personnel who will carry out his electoral mandate, but also remove career personnel who attempt to obstruct that mandate,” Moffit said. “So, any attack on any president’s capacity to carry out the policies upon which he was elected is fundamentally ant-democratic; it is an attack on the American people who elected him.”
Among other things, the OPM’s proposed rule would clarify that “the status and civil service protections an employee has accrued cannot be taken away by an involuntary move from the competitive service to the excepted service, or from one excepted service schedule to another.”
“Once a career civil servant earns protections, that employee retains them unless waived voluntarily,” the rule says.
In October 2020, just before the election he lost to Biden, Trump signed an executive order to create a new category of federal employee called Schedule F. Personnel in this category are in confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions that remain on the payroll when a presidential transition occurs.
The executive order from Trump, who faced resistance to his policy changes from within the federal bureaucracy, gave agencies more flexibility and oversight for career employees in critical positions that affect policy.
Upon taking office in January 2021, Biden scrapped the Trump order. The final version of the new rule would make it more difficult for a future president to reverse, because it is a regulation published in the Federal Register rather than an executive order. Undoing it would require going through a time-consuming administrative procedure.
Career federal employees enjoy civil service protection, making it nearly impossible to fire them; by contrast, political employees serve at the pleasure of an elected president.
Career federal bureaucrats tend to be overwhelmingly Democrat-leaning based on their campaign donations; federal employee unions donate between 70% and 90% to Democrat candidates. Republicans have accused some career employees of blocking implementation of Republican presidents’ policies.
Project 2025, an initiative led by The Heritage Foundation that establishes a plan for the next conservative presidential administration, calls for restoring Trump’s Schedule F as part of a broader effort to rein in the federal bureaucracy.
This has been a long-standing policy goal for Heritage, Moffit noted.
“Respecting the president’s prerogatives to have the appointees necessary to carry out policies is one of the major reasons why former Heritage President Ed Feulner strongly opposed Republican attempts to hamstring Democratic President Clinton and reduce the number of his political appointees,” Moffit said.
“Political appointees can formulate the details of the president’s policies and see to it that they are implemented all the way down the chain through departments, agencies, subagencies, and bureaus of the federal government.”
Biden’s Office of Personnel Management issued the final rule Thursday, asserting it received 4,000 comments about it, and said the rule would be published Tuesday in the Federal Register.
“This final rule honors our 2.2 million career civil servants, helping ensure that people are hired and fired based on merit and that they can carry out their duties based on their expertise and not political loyalty,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said in a public statement. “The Biden-Harris administration is deeply committed to the federal workforce, as these professionals are vital to our national security, our health, our economic prosperity, and much more.”
According to the OPM press release, the new rule also would clarify that the phrase “confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating” refers to positions that are noncareer, political appointments.
The rule also would establish procedural requirements for moving positions from “career” to “political,” and set up an appeals process for employees.
“Career officials are obviously crucial in the implementation of presidential policy,” Moffit told The Daily Signal. “Those of us who served in presidential administrations all have war stories, however, about how politically hostile civil servants, through various means, including intentional slow-walking or foot-dragging, can delay, thwart, or undermine the president’s policies.”
“A career civil servant who does not or will not carry out the policy of any president, regardless of party affiliation, should have the honor and the decency to resign,” he said. “They should not enjoy regulatory protection.”
The post Biden Protects Deep State Bureaucrats With ‘Anti-Democratic’ Rule appeared first on The Daily Signal.
They call themselves the “PBS NewsHour,” but if you watch them routinely, you might call them the “PBS Opposition Research Hour.”
They often sound like a Democrat consulting firm as they analyze former President Donald Trump as a dangerously extreme figure. Then they can turn around and proclaim that President Joe Biden is very bipartisan in negotiating “objectively historical achievements,” as PBS anchor Amna Nawaz claimed at the State of the Union address.
On April 2, PBS aired a segment titled “Analyzing Trump’s use of inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail.” Two days later, it was changed to “Anatomy of a Trump speech.”
They decided to watch all the scary passages in Trump’s recent speeches with Jennifer Mercieca, who reporter Lisa Desjardins blandly described as “an author and Texas A&M professor who specializes in political and Trump rhetoric.”
PBS didn’t note that Mercieca wrote a book in 2020 titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” (It was shown on screen.) Its dust cover promises to explain “how a bombastic pitchman emerged as America’s authoritarian P.T. Barnum, using nothing more than his weaponized words to transform a polarized and dispirited nation into his own reality TV show.”
Does this expert shopping sound fair and balanced to anyone?
As Trump denounced Biden for a “border bloodbath,” Desjardins explained he’s attacking “anyone who calls it a humanitarian crisis.” Mercieca lamented, “It can’t be neutral. It can’t be a situation at the border. It has to be violent. It has to be an invasion. It has to be a bloodbath.”
Seriously? Last October, their anchor Nawaz wasn’t neutral as she compared separating children from their families at the border under Trump as “one of the darkest chapters in our modern history” that echoed slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans.
Naturally, Desjardins repeated the Democrat spin that “there’s no evidence of a bloodbath for Americans living there” (at the border), and “multiple studies show that migrants are actually less likely to commit crime than others here.”
Trump lamented, “If we don’t win on Nov. 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have.” Desjardins explained Mercieca’s thesis: This is “what separates Trump,” it’s not “political razzle-dazzle, but dangerous, hyperbolic fearmongering.”
If that “last election” talk is dangerous, will PBS rewind to Biden’s first campaign speech back on Jan. 5? Biden said of Trump: “He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power … Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future. … We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.”
These “public” broadcasters know what Biden has said in his campaign speeches, and they’re fine with it. No one thinks it’s a lie or that it’s dangerous. Mercieca acknowledged, “All presidents run as heroes. It’s not uncommon. Joe Biden is running as a hero right now. He’s running as a hero to save democracy.” But she claimed, “Donald Trump is running as a different kind of hero.”
How so? Desjardins concluded the segment with this about Trump: “When he’s saying the situation is dire, when he’s saying democracy will end if I’m not elected, he is implying to some of his followers, violence may be OK.”
Biden is saying democracy will end if he’s not elected, but PBS can’t imagine his followers would ever believe “violence may be OK.” PBS makes “news” by Democrats, for Democrats. But it’s subsidized involuntarily by tens of millions of allegedly democracy-squashing Republicans.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post PBS ‘News’ Hounds OK With Biden’s Inflammatory Rhetoric appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Former President Donald Trump used political jujitsu to grab a left-wing anti-Trump lie and turn it against his opponent, President Joe Biden.
Trump told Ohio voters on March 16 that if he lost his comeback bid in the November election, Biden would welcome imports of Chinese-designed, Mexican-built electric vehicles. This, Trump said, would trigger an economic “bloodbath” in the auto sector.
Biden and other leftists disinformed Americans by claiming that Trump threatened to unleash a political bloodbath if Biden won. Trump did no such thing.
Trump got even in Michigan last Tuesday when he unveiled a slogan that electrifies America’s No. 1 issue: Angst over the hordes of illegal aliens who Biden welcomes daily.
“It’s a border bloodbath, and it’s destroying our country,” Trump said. “It’s going to end on the day that I take office.”
“Biden’s Border Bloodbath” correctly describes the mayhem fueled by Biden’s deliberate demolition of America’s southern frontier.
Because illegal aliens often are shadowy, the problem is tough to gauge precisely. Nonetheless, Customs and Border Protection counted eight foreign-citizen criminals convicted of homicide or manslaughter from fiscal Year 2017 through fiscal 2019, under Trump. During Biden’s first three fiscal years, the CBP has tallied 151 such convictions—up 1,787.5%.
Consider these cases, thanks largely to documentation by the Federation for American Immigration Reform:
“He wasn’t awake for it,” his sister, Taylor, told Fox News anchor Steve Doocy. “He didn’t get to experience anything. So, did he really actually make it to 12?”
Travis was on life-support until March 6, when his catastrophic brain injuries finally killed him.
Travis Wolfe, a 12-year old Missouri boy killed by an illegal migrant. This is what an open border does. Say his name https://t.co/zjllQKRwTa
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) March 11, 2024
This lethal crisis began the day Biden took power. His 94 executive actions shredded Trump’s effective border-tightening initiatives.
Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, told Fox News on Wednesday: “Biden’s border policy is as effective as a screen door on a submarine.”
The Border Patrol has caught 7,444,297 illegal aliens on the U.S.-Mexico boundary through February, Biden’s 37th month as president. Trump’s analogous number was 2,138,696. Biden trounces Trump by 348%. These apprehensions included 351 people on the terrorist watch list during Biden’s “return to normal,” versus just 11 under Trump—up 3,090%.
Add 1.6 million gotaways (including terrorists) who The Washington Post estimates were detected, but not detained, and at least 9 million illegal aliens have cascaded through the “border” under Biden.
Trump and his supporters should remind voters constantly about the victims whom illegal aliens are killing while Biden snores. These deaths remain 100% preventable, if Biden simply keeps these killers out.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post RIP: The Death Toll of Biden’s Illegal Alien Bloodbath appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A Nebraska state legislator is transitioning from blue to red after his own party censured him for having a pro-life stance. Nebraska state Sen. Mike McDonnell officially left the Democratic Party last week after 40 years and became a Republican.
In a written statement explaining his decision, McDonnell wrote: “I have asked the Democratic Party to respect my religious based pro-life position. Instead over the last year they have decided to punish me for being pro-life.”
Last month, the Nebraska Democratic Party voted to censure McDonnell, a Catholic, over his pro-life record, contending that his stance “adversely affected the reproductive rights of Nebraskans and the rights of transgender individuals in the state.”
Douglas County Democrats also voted in January to deny party funding to McDonnell due to his votes against abortion measures and against gender-transition procedures for minors.
“The state Democratic Party voted to censure me because I am pro-life,” McDonnell wrote. “Being a Christian, a member of the Roman Catholic Church and pro-life is more important to me than being a registered Democrat. Today I am changing my party affiliation to Republican.”
In a speech addressing his decision, McDonnell explained that he registered as a Democrat in 1984 and ran for the state Legislature in 2016.
“I wanted to see how we could grow our state and reduce property taxes at the same time,” he said. “I asked the Democratic Party of Douglas County to respect that I’m pro-life, that I’m a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and my beliefs are based on that. But Douglas County Democrats, instead of respecting that, they decided to punish it. … I continued to vote pro-life.”
“This is not an easy decision,” the state senator added. “After 40 years of being a registered Democrat, having your grandfather tell you when you’re 10 years old, ‘What are we? We’re Irish, we’re Catholic, and we’re Democrats.’ That kind of stuck with me.”
Pointing to his new Republican Party colleagues, McDonnell said: “Over the last year, regardless of my decision [on] switching parties, they have been so supportive. … We had great discussions about what the Republican Party is doing, where they’re trying to go, how I potentially could fit in there. But the greatest thing about [it] is now I can participate again.”
U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., a former governor of the state, responded to McDonnell’s decision by writing on X: “I am pleased to welcome Sen. Mike McDowell to the Republican team.” He added: “The extreme new Democrats are pushing commonsense officials and voters to our party.”
McDonnell is far from the only Catholic abandoning the Democratic Party due to what many consider mandatory abortion extremism.
Recent studies show that white American Catholics have been drifting away from the party for decades, but in increasing numbers over the past two decades, coalescing instead around the GOP.
A survey of Michigan voters found last month that former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee credited with appointing three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who enabled the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, holds a significant lead among Catholic voters over President Joe Biden, a Democrat and self-described Catholic.
A week ago, the Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Wilton Gregory, called Biden a “cafeteria Catholic” due to his rejection of the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion.
In response to McDonnell’s new party affiliation, Nebraska Democratic Party Chairwoman Jane Kleeb issued a written statement saying: “The Nebraska Democratic Party will continue to stand up for reproductive freedom and the human rights of the LGBTQ community.”
Kleeb added: “Our decision to censure Sen. McDonnell was never about him being a pro-life Catholic. Our decision was based on our party reaffirming our core values to protect women’s ability to make health decisions and to keep politicians out of our personal health decisions.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
The post Citing Pro-Life Views, Nebraska State Senator Switches Parties appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Vatican on Monday issued a declaration, “Dignitas Infinita,” on human dignity, warning that the practice of surrogacy, transgender surgeries, and gender theory are contrary to human dignity.
“In the face of so many violations of human dignity that seriously threaten the future of the human family, the Church encourages the promotion of the dignity of every human person, regardless of their physical, mental, cultural, social, and religious characteristics,” the document says. “The Church does this with hope, confident of the power that flows from the Risen Christ, who has fully revealed the integral dignity of every man and woman.”
The name of the document translates to “Infinite Dignity,” and it’s a five-year-long product of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith that reaffirms Catholic Church teaching on the topics. It addresses a number of weighty topics that have entered the political sphere, including surrogacy.
“The Church also takes a stand against the practice of surrogacy, through which the immensely worthy child becomes a mere object,” the document states.
“First and foremost, the practice of surrogacy violates the dignity of the child,” it continues. “Indeed, every child possesses an intangible dignity that is clearly expressed—albeit in a unique and differentiated way—at every stage of his or her life: from the moment of conception, at birth, growing up as a boy or girl, and becoming an adult.
“Because of this unalienable dignity, the child has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the giver and that of the receiver,” the document adds.
It also addresses “critical issues present in gender theory,” warning that “it intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference.”
“This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference, but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them,” the Vatican document says. “In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvelous of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world.”
As for attempted sex-change operations, “Dignitas Infinita” emphasizes that the “dignity of the body cannot be considered inferior to that of the person as such.” It quotes the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that “the human body shares in the dignity of ‘the image of God.’”
“Any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document states. “This is not to exclude the possibility that a person with genital abnormalities that are already evident at birth or that develop later may choose to receive the assistance of health care professionals to resolve these abnormalities. However, in this case, such a medical procedure would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here.”
The post Vatican Warns: Surrogacy, Trans Surgeries, Gender Ideology Violate Human Dignity appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Former President Donald Trump says each state should follow “the will of the people” and pass state-specific laws on abortion.
“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in a video posted Monday morning on Truth Social.
Trump’s position on abortion has previously been unclear looking toward the 2024 presidential election, despite the fact that the former president appointed three Supreme Court justices who ultimately made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022 by a majority vote.
“I want to thank the six justices: Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch,” Trump said. He called them “incredible people, for having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.”
Trump appointed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
“This 50-year battle over Roe v. Wade took it out of the federal hands and brought it into the hearts, minds, and vote of the people at each state,” Trump added. “Now it’s up to the states to do the right thing.”
Further clarifying his view on abortion, he said he supports “exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.”
“You must follow your heart on this issue, but remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and in fact to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline,” he added.
“We are deeply disappointed in President Trump’s position,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement Monday morning.
“Unborn children and their mothers deserve national protections and national advocacy from the brutality of the abortion industry. The Dobbs decision clearly allows both states and Congress to act,” Dannenfelser said, referring to the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ultimately used by the high to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“Saying the issue is ‘back to the states’ cedes the national debate to the Democrats who are working relentlessly to enact legislation mandating abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy,” Dannenfelser said. “If successful, they will wipe out states’ rights.”
Trump criticized Democrats’ abortion positions in his remarks, saying: “Democrats are the radical ones in this position, because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month. The concept of having an abortion in the later months and even execution after birth—and that’s exactly what it is, the baby is born, the baby is executed after birth—is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.”
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life Action, praised Trump for “celebrating ‘the ultimate joy in life’—children and family” in his comments.
“That kind of love and support for the bedrock of society, the family, will be a welcome change in the White House,” Hawkins said. However, she added, “We clearly have some work to do to educate the Trump administration to come on the many ways that abortion has been made federal.”
CatholicVote President Brian Burch also responded to Trump’s abortion video, arguing that the “federal government cannot abandon women and children exploited by abortion. Leaving abortion policy to the states is not sufficient.”
“President Trump’s latest statement also reflects the electoral minefield created by Democrat abortion fanaticism,” Burch said. “The fact remains that pro-life voters need to win elections to protect mothers and children. Further, Democrats are now preparing a billion-dollar election-year barrage with radical abortion as its centerpiece. While Trump did not commit to any specific pro-life policies, he notably will not stand in the way of states that have acted to protect innocent children from the violent abortion industry.”
Trump began the video, which runs 4 minutes and 23 seconds, by expressing his support for the family and the creation of families through in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
“Under my leadership, the Republican Party will always support the creation of strong, thriving, and healthy American families,” Trump said. “We want to make it easier for mothers and families to have babies, not harder. That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every state in America.”
“Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the vast majority of Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and pro-life Americans, I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” the former president said.
The post Trump Makes His Position on Abortion Clear: ‘States Will Determine’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Before voters approved a constitutional amendment to make their state the 28th in the nation to ban private funding of election administration, Wisconsin’s capital city, Madison, already had spent over $1 million in private grants.
Madison, like jurisdictions in three other states that ban private dollars from paying for elections—Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri—is a member of the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The organization, founded by the left-leaning Center for Tech and Civic Life, doled out $350 million in election-administration grants in 2020 funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
Wisconsin’s move to ban private money to pay for elections was significant progress for election integrity but not a silver bullet, said former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative.
“It is like staying ahead of hackers,” Cuccinelli told The Daily Signal. “But this is the real world and not digital, where we are dealing with votes and maintaining clean elections.”
“The other side will keep trying to muddy the waters and we will keep trying to clean it up,” he said. “Some jurisdictions are bragging about already spending the money. Good. This is about stabilizing elections going forward.”
In the book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” I detail the impact of the Zuckerberg grants in battleground states. Democrat-leaning counties in Pennsylvania got about 92% of the grant money. In Arizona, more than half of the “Zuckerbucks” went to Maricopa County.
A special counsel appointed by the Wisconsin Legislature concluded the Zuckerberg grants functioned as a state-sanctioned get-out-the-vote campaign conducted almost entirely in the heavily Democrat areas of Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Madison.
The city of Madison got $1.5 million in private dollars before the ballot initiative, which won’t be affected by the voter-approved ban.
“The city has spent the second grant it received from CTCL in the amount of $1.5 million to purchase equipment that will automate the process of mailing absentee ballots and sorting them upon return, as well as security carts to transport voting equipment,” Madison City Attorney Michael Haas told The Daily Signal.
“There was also a grant to help the city pay for its membership in the [Alliance] for Election Excellence,” Haas said in a written statement. “Since that grant was made and the membership was purchased prior to the constitutional amendment being passed, I do not believe the amendment applies to it.”
“Plus, the amendment prohibits the use of money or equipment from a grant to conduct elections,” the city attorney added. “I think it is a stretch to argue that learning and developing best practices, which is what [the alliance] does, is actually conducting an election.”
The Daily Signal previously reported that DeKalb County, Georgia, accepted a $2 million grant from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence last year despite a 2021 Georgia law that banned the use of private money to administer elections.
DeKalb County contended that it could accept the money because the 2021 law said only that “no superintendent” who oversees elections could accept the money. So the county’s general treasury accepted the money and then passed it to election officials.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other Georgia Republicans accused DeKalb County of skirting the ban. In 2023, the Georgia Legislature closed the loophole and made it a felony for any public official to accept private dollars intended for elections.
DeKalb County officials acknowledged an inquiry from The Daily Signal, but didn’t respond before publication of this report.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life was founded in 2012 by Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges, and Whitney May, who previously worked together at the New Organizing Institute, which The Washington Post referred to as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts of digital wizardry.”
For the Alliance for Election Excellence, CTCL partners with several nonprofits, including the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, that are funded by Arabella Advisors, a left-wing dark money organization.
Coconino County, Arizona, is also a member of the alliance. But it’s not getting any grants, County Recorder Patty Hansen said.
“We received a $614,000 grant from the CTCL in 2020 before the Legislature passed the ban,” Hansen told The Daily Signal. “We don’t accept any money from the alliance. We accept services. … The alliance works on developing best practices and standards that can be shared across the country.”
Both Arizona and Georgia were formerly solid-red states that flipped blue in the 2020 election. Joe Biden’s narrow victory over Donald Trump in each state was assisted by large margins of victory in Coconino County, where the largest city is Flagstaff, and DeKalb County, where the largest city is Decatur.
Two Missouri counties, Boone and Scotland, are also members of the Alliance for Election Excellence and neither received grants, Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said. She made it clear when the county signed up that it couldn’t receive private funds, Lennon said.
“Boone County is a member of the Alliance for Election Excellence; however, we do have the prohibition in Missouri law for private funding and, as a result, our county has not received grant funding from the alliance,” Lennon told The Daily Signal in a written statement.
Missouri, which leans heavily Republican, isn’t a battleground state in elections.
Boone County, which includes Columbia, the state’s fourth-largest city, also went heavily to Biden in 2020. Scotland County, with a population under 5,000, went overwhelmingly to Trump.
“Scotland County, Missouri, is our other Missouri member of the alliance and they also have not received private funding,” Lennon said in the written statement, adding:
The membership gives us access to subject matter experts that are current or former local election officials on administrative areas like poll worker recruitment (finding enough election judges, especially judges that affiliate as Republicans, is a perennial problem for us), better ways to design forms and applications so that voters can understand them, and ways to make our existing elections processes more efficient.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this report.
The center’s Alliance for Election Excellence gave $3 million to Clark County, one of the larger jurisdictions in Nevada, which is considered a battleground state in 2024 with no ban on private money to run elections.
The other jurisdictions in the alliance are in solidly blue areas and have no ban on private dollars bankrolling local elections. They are Shasta and Contra Costa counties in California; Kane and Macoupin counties in Illinois; and the city of Greenwich, Connecticut.
The post Left-Wing Election Group Still Rooted in These Areas With ‘Zuckerbuck’ Bans appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Staffers at a pro-life pregnancy resource center in Rochester, New York, are criticizing the FBI for failing to provide any kind of status update of investigations into pro-abortion vandals’ attacks on the pregnancy center.
Nearly two years after the initial June 2022 attack, CompassCare pregnancy medical center says that the FBI has put up billboards offering a $25,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest of the criminals who firebombed the pregnancy center.
The billboard is placed about a mile away from the center, CompassCare said in a release. The group added that the billboard appeared shortly before the sentencing of a separate pro-abortion arsonist, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, who in December pleaded guilty to attacking a pro-life organization in Madison, Wisconsin.
CompassCare says that the FBI won’t communicate with them about the billboard, first noticed by the organization on April 1, and won’t provide a status update on its investigation into the attack.
“Supporters have asked if CompassCare paid for this expensive billboard,” said the Rev. Jim Harden, CompassCare CEO, in a statement provided to The Daily Signal. “We did not. The FBI refuses to communicate.”
“The erratic nature of [Department of Justice] and FBI behavior around cases of violence against pro-life groups appears to be PR related, bolstering their reputation when under pressure to produce results by media and congressional judiciary committees,” Harden speculated.
“Perhaps they anticipate more violence against Christian pro-lifers ahead of the next big Supreme Court ruling in June and want to make it look like they care?” he questioned.
The FBI and DOJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this article.
CompassCare was attacked a second time in March 2023. The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen reported at the time that surveillance footage from the attack showed an individual wearing a hoodie walk up to the front of the pregnancy center, spray paint the word “Liars” over the CompassCare sign, then walk away back down the street.
The radical pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge took responsibility for the June 2022 firebombing of the pro-life center. Pro-abortion activists also spray-painted the words “Jane was here” on the side of the building.
Since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade would soon thereafter be overturned, there have been at least 236 attacks on Catholic churches and at least 90 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers, according to Catholic Vote trackers.
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act) prohibits the intentional destruction or damage of reproductive health care facilities, theoretically protecting not only abortion clinics, but also pro-life churches and pregnancy centers.
But President Joe Biden’s DOJ charged only pro-life activists with FACE Act violations in 2022, and has since charged only five individuals with violating the FACE Act by targeting pregnancy centers.
In February, conservative leaders called on House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to pass the FACE Act Repeal Act of 2023 “as soon as possible.”
“In the aftermath of additional pro-life activists being convicted by the Biden administration under the FACE Act for peacefully protesting outside an abortion business, we respectfully urge you to take immediate legislative action to protect peaceful pro-life activists from the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Justice and an unconstitutional law,” the leaders said in a letter first obtained by The Daily Signal.
“The Biden administration has weaponized the FACE Act against peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors and activists who want to save lives and change hearts and minds,” Advancing American Freedom Executive Director Paul Teller told The Daily Signal at the time.
Virginia Allen contributed to this report.
The post Pregnancy Center Slams FBI For Failure to Arrest Pro-Abortion Firebombers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
John Eastman is a lawyer, a legal scholar, and a friend.
I got to know John—a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, candidate for California attorney general, and dean of Chapman University School of Law—during my weeklong 2018 legal fellowship with the Claremont Institute, which he oversaw. We have stayed in touch and done at least one event together for Claremont since that time.
Unfortunately, since the 2020 presidential election, John has been put through the wringer more than just about anyone in American public life.
He was forced to retire from the law school where he was a longtime constitutional law professor and even dean. He was let go by the University of Colorado’s Benson Center for Western Civilization, where he was a visiting scholar. Armed Stasi—sorry, FBI—agents accosted him in a parking lot and seized his phone without a warrant. He has been suspended from academic conferences and lost board seats. He and his wife have endured death threats, spikes in their driveway, and threatening graffiti in their neighborhood. He has been debanked by Bank of America and the USAA. He is being criminally prosecuted by scandal-ridden Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis. And last week, State Bar Court of California Judge Yvette Roland devoted 128 pages to explaining why he should lose his law license.
All this because John had the chutzpah to do what every law school student is taught to do in legal ethics class: defend and zealously advocate for one’s client, no matter how unpopular or even disreputable that client may be. In this case, John’s unpopular client was a high-profile one: former President Donald Trump.
There has been an astronomical amount of misinformation about John’s activities in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol jamboree, as well as the legal advice that he offered his high-profile client during that time. The corporate media and the Democrat-lawfare complex typically speak of John’s legal advice as encouraging the “overturning of an election” or “fomenting an insurrection,” but such hyperbolic talk is irresponsible and wildly off base.
John acquitted himself well in a compelling essay he penned for Claremont’s American Mind online journal on Jan. 18, 2021, titled “Setting the Record Straight on the POTUS ‘Ask.'”
His 12th Amendment argument about the vice president’s more active role in certifying the states’ slates of electors and his accompanying argument regarding the constitutional dubiousness of the Electoral Count of 1887 might not be correct (although it could be), but it is well within the bound of plausible, nonfrivolous legal argumentation an attorney can (indeed, should) press upon an embattled client.
That is doubly so here, because the U.S. Supreme Court has never authoritatively interpreted the relevant 12th Amendment provision. Countless legal arguments more frivolous than this are advanced every day in courtrooms across America.
Nor is John Eastman the only man being prosecuted, and possibly disbarred, for his legal activity after the 2020 election. Former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark is also being prosecuted in Georgia, and he was just found by the District of Columbia Bar to have violated an ethics rule, which might lead to his own disbarment there—all stemming from an internal Department of Justice memo that Clark never even sent.
Once upon a time, the American Left understood the moral imperative of ensuring that all Americans have adequate access to legal representation, no matter one’s popularity in the eyes of the government or societal elites.
Indeed, the definitive American example of such unpopular legal representation actually dates back to before the United States was even independent: In 1770, a young lawyer named John Adams, the man who would become the young republic’s second president, took it upon himself to defend the British soldiers accused of killing five colonists at the Boston Massacre. Years later, in his dotage, Adams reflected that this was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”
Presumably, Willis and Roland would have preferred to see Adams tarred and feathered for his treachery. One also cannot help but wonder how they might have viewed the NAACP’s legal representation in the Deep South during the days of Jim Crow.
The ultimate aim of those Jacobins prosecuting and disbarring lawyers for having the temerity to practice the legal profession is clear: the subordination of the rule of law to the Jacobins’ own friend/enemy-level politics, and the cowing into submission of those lawyers who would so much as consider representing a high-profile Republican client or work in a Republican Department of Justice. Ironically, and without any hint of self-awareness, they do all this in the name of “our democracy.”
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The post John Eastman and the Left’s War on the Legal Profession appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The places where they were raised and to which they traveled formed the Founding Fathers’ geographic orientation, which influenced their view of the nation and what the country could become, according to Michael Barone.
While George Washington had “a map that goes north by northwest,” Thomas Jefferson “saw the country from [the] perspective of the West,” says Barone, a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and a co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics” since its first edition in 1972.
In his new book “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” Barone explains how the differing “mental maps” of Founders such as Washington, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton were sometimes in opposition, but together formed our great nation.
Barone joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the little-known facts about the Founding Fathers he uncovered while researching the new book.
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Understanding the Founding Fathers’ ‘Mental Maps’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A ballot initiative OK’d by the Florida Supreme Court perpetuates abortion advocates’ favored strategy of using vague definitions of “health” to expand abortion on demand.
Florida voters will face a referendum measure in November that would allow abortion up to the moment of birth if deemed “necessary to protect the patient’s health” after the state Supreme Court’s decision on Monday allowing the measure on the ballot.
Amendment 4, the so-called Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion, is being pushed by a pro-abortion political committee, Floridians Protecting Freedom.
The proposal’s vague definition of “health” is similar to that of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Doe v. Bolton, which defined “health” of the mother as “all factors” affecting the woman.
The Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that same year that states could issue no regulations for first-trimester abortions and some regulations for second-trimester abortions, but only for the purpose of protecting the “health” of the mother. In the third trimester, when the unborn child is viable, the since-overturned Roe allowed states to make abortion illegal contingent on the existence of exceptions to protect the mother’s life and “health.”
Doe v. Bolton, the lesser-known case decided on the same day as Roe, defined the “health” of the mother as “all factors” that affect the woman, including “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age,” drastically expanding the allowable abortions legalized by Roe.
Florida’s Amendment 4 similarly would prohibit restrictions on abortion when “necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.”
The proposal would circumvent current state law protecting unborn children with a heartbeat. On the same day the Florida court approved the ballot initiative, it upheld a state law protecting unborn children from most abortions after 15 weeks, enabling a six-week abortion ban approved last year to take effect on May 1. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the six-week ban into law last April, but it couldn’t take effect unless the 15-week ban survived legal challenges in the state Supreme Court.
Because the text of the constitutional amendment contains no definition of “health” or “health care provider,” the measure would likely legalize abortion at any stage of the pregnancy if anyone who claims medical expertise asserts the mother would benefit from it physically, emotionally, or otherwise.
Florida statutes define a health care provider as “a physician licensed under chapter 458, an osteopathic physician licensed under chapter 459, a podiatric physician licensed under chapter 461, or an advanced practice registered nurse registered under 464.0123.” If it receives 60% of the vote in November, the ballot initiative would allow any doctor, osteopath, podiatrist, or nurse to determine if a woman’s health could in any way benefit from ending the life of her unborn child.
Michigan voters legalized abortion up until birth with similarly vague language in a November 2022 ballot initiative. Proposal 3 prohibited laws against abortion if a “health care professional” deemed it to be “medically needed to protect a patient’s life or physical or mental health.”
Broad and unclear definitions of health have allowed half a century of violence against the unborn after Doe v. Bolton, and have ended thousands of lives in Michigan with the passage of Proposal 3.
In November, Florida voters will have the chance to stop another vague definition of health from turning the Sunshine State from one of the states with the most protections for the unborn to the most pro-abortion state in the South.
The post Pro-Abortion Ballot Initiative in Florida Aims to Trick Voters With Vague Definition of ‘Health’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Documents reveal an organization backed by Obama White House alumni such as Valerie Jarrett and bankrolled by liberal dark money donors advocated using tax dollars to pay college students to get out the vote in the 2024 election, doing so before the Biden administration announced the same policy.
The Daily Signal obtained the documents through a public records request in which it sought documents from the Wisconsin Elections Commission related to President Joe Biden’s controversial executive order to promote voting.
In January, an activist with ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a project of the liberal group Civic Nation, contacted officials with the state of Wisconsin and its capital city, Madison, about a need to allow money from the Federal Work-Study Program to pay for students to engage in election-related work.
By late February, the U.S. Department of Education and Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the Biden administration was doing exactly that.
A new Wall Street Journal poll of voters in battleground states found former President Donald Trump tied with Biden in a two-way race in Wisconsin, which Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by only about 20,000 votes of over 3.2 million cast.
In a Jan. 18 email, Ryan Drysdale, director of impact and state networks for the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, sent an email to Bonnie Chang, voter outreach coordinator in the Madison city clerk’s office, about U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s plans to revise how taxpayer money may be used.
“Lastly, as you may be aware, the secretary has been working on clarification about Federal Work-Study being eligible for supporting student workers with local election officials and feels confident another letter will come from the WH/Dept of Ed with guidelines,” Drysdale wrote to Chang, referring to the White House and the Department of Education.
The Federal Work-Study Program, funded by the Department of Education, provides financial aid to eligible undergraduate and graduate students at colleges and universities.
The youth vote helped stop an anticipated “red wave” for Republican candidates in 2022. It once was perceived as a core Democrat constituency, which is one reason the Biden administration has tried repeatedly to “forgive” student loan debt.
ALL IN asserted that the youth vote was the deciding factor in 2022 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The initiative announced that 394 colleges and universities across 44 states and the District of Columbia were part of its first program recognizing “Most Engaged Campuses for College Student Voting.”
“I was invited to join a meeting with the secretary, the UW-Superior campus team and surrounding local election officials who are exploring both internship and FWS opportunities,” Drysdale wrote to Madison’s Chang, referring to Cardona, the University of Wisconsin in Superior, Wisconsin, and the Federal Work-Study Program.
“There was a lot of excitement even without the FWS component,” he wrote. “They hope to use UWS [University of Wisconsin-Superior] as a case study for other [Wisconsin] institutions and local election officials to learn from. Happy to share more on a quick call if that would be helpful. There’s a big interest from partners and funders about FWS and these types of opportunities so we’ll be following these developments in WI.”
On Jan. 19, Chang forwarded Drysdale’s email about the Federal Work-Study Program, or FWS, to Madison City Attorney Michael Haas.
She noted that University of Wisconsin-Madison officials said that “it’s in the federal language that FWS students are not able to work at the polls on Election Day nor engage in GOTV/voter engagement spaces.”
GOTV is a reference to “get out the vote.”
That same day, Haas wrote to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe.
“If I understand correctly, there is a request to change the FWS rules regarding work as election inspectors but I don’t think that has happened yet,” Haas said of Federal Work-Study rules. “In any event, the secretary of state is trying to help make it happen.”
The Wisconsin Secretary of State’s Office didn’t reply to inquiries from The Daily Signal by publication time.
The Daily Signal previously reported that Civic Nation’s board includes Jarrett, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama; Tina Tchen, former chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama; and Cecilia Muñoz, former director of the Obama White House’s Domestic Policy Council.
Funders of Civic Nation include left-leaning grantmakers such as the Democracy Fund, established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; the Carnegie Corporation of New York; the Environmental Defense Fund; and the Joyce Foundation, which included Barack Obama on its board before he became president.
Besides ALL IN, other groups run by Civic Nation include United State of Women and When We All Vote.
Amanda Hollowell, When We All Vote’s national organizing director, was among activists who met Feb. 27 at a White House event with the vice president to talk about turning out voters.
“We have been doing work to promote voter participation for students. And, for example, we have—under the Federal Work-Study Program—[we] now allow students to get paid, through federal work-study, to register people and to be nonpartisan poll workers,” Harris told the gathering at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“As we know, this is important for a number of reasons,” she said. “One, to engage our young leaders in this process and activate them in terms of their ability to—to strengthen our communities. But also, this is the work that we need to do, knowing that so many poll workers have left this work for a variety of reasons that we will also discuss.”
The city of Madison played no role in pushing for a clarification of U.S. Education Department policy on allowing the program to pay students for election work, the city attorney told The Daily Signal.
“City of Madison officials did not lobby the Biden administration to change FWS rules. We have not been involved in that issue except for receiving the email from Ryan Drysdale so I do not [know] details about the FWS regulations or how they changed as they do not affect the city’s operations,” Haas said. “The city of Madison hires a number of UW-Madison students as poll workers and pays them in the same way as other poll workers with city funds.”
The Daily Signal sought comment from ALL IN’s Drysdale and the press contact for Civic Nation. Neither responded.
The Education Department referred The Daily Signal to a “Dear Colleague letter” to college administrators, dated Feb. 26, from Nasser H. Paydar, assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education.
In part, the letter says: “The department is today clarifying that FWS funds may be used for employment by a federal, state, local, or tribal public agency for civic engagement work that is not associated with a particular interest or group.”
The documents released to The Daily Signal by the Wisconsin Elections Commission also showed consultation between state officials and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency within the Commerce Department.
NIST was putting together its strategic plan to comply with Biden’s executive order on getting out the vote, which it later made public.
The institute is one of at least four federal agencies to make such a strategic plan public. The Justice Department, however, has claimed presidential privilege to prevent public release of its own plan for complying with Biden’s order.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Left-Wing Group Pushed a Policy That Could Shape 2024 Election Outcome—Using Your Tax Dollars appeared first on The Daily Signal.
An executive subpoenaed in the House’s investigation of companies involved in so-called ESG policies claims conservative legal activist Leonard Leo is behind a “crusade” to stop the corporate practice.
ESG is an acronym for environmental, social, and governance practices that promote left-leaning activism among companies and corporations. The House Judiciary Committee is investigating numerous companies and organizations for potential violation of federal antitrust laws in collaborating on such practices.
Leo, long affiliated with The Federalist Society and currently co-chairman of its board, is well known in such conservative legal circles.
Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, an ESG-advocating nonprofit, brought up Leo’s name in an interview Friday with the left-wing broadcast and internet program “Democracy Now!” hosted by Amy Goodman.
“Leonard Leo, he’s the, you know, co-chair of The Federalist Society—those are the folks, all of the right-wing judges, particularly the Supreme Court, but across the whole landscape—he was given $1.6 billion in mid-2022 to lead this crusade,” Behar said on “Democracy Now!”
“It’s a very orchestrated campaign,” he added.
Behar’s syntax may have been scrambled, but the CEO of As You Sow appeared to claim that Leo, backed by a $1.6 billion slush fund, is leading the charge against ESG investment policies.
Reached for this story, a spokesman for Leo said the conservative attorney had never heard of As You Sow and doesn’t respond to conspiracy theories.
Behar likely was referring to reports in 2022 from two left-leaning media outlets, The New York Times and ProPublica, that Chicago billionaire Barre Seid had donated $1.6 billion to various networks associated with Leo. But that donation extended well beyond ESG as a target of conservative advocacy.
>>> Related: Ted Cruz Slams Left’s Attacks on Leonard Leo as a ‘Full-on Assault on Our Constitution’
A source with knowledge of the House Judiciary Committee’s ESG probe was dismissive of the notion of shadowy motives behind it.
“To suggest that the committee is investigating As You Sow because of Leonard Leo is completely ridiculous and laughable,” the person, who asked not to be identified, told The Daily Signal. “It seems that As You Sow is scared of what the committee is uncovering and working overtime to save face for their lack of cooperation with the investigation.”
For his part, Behar said during the “Democracy Now!” interview that his organization provided 12,000 pages of documents to the House Judiciary Committee before getting another subpoena March 28.
>>> Related: ‘2 Things That Can’t Both Be True’: Tennessee AG Sues BlackRock Over ESG Deception
An August letter to As You Sow signed by Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and other committee members says:
We write because As You Sow is potentially violating U.S. antitrust law by entering into agreements to ‘decarbonize’ corporate assets and reduce emissions to net zero—with potentially harmful effects on Americans’ freedom and economic well-being.
As You Sow is a member of Climate Action 100+. Through Climate Action 100+, As You Sow appears to have colluded with other institutional investors to ‘work with the companies in which [they] invest to . . . deliver net zero [greenhouse gas] emissions by 2050. … Collusive agreements harm competition and consumers and are illegal under the Sherman Act.
The post ‘Ridiculous and Laughable’: Subpoenaed CEO Blames Conservative Legal Activist for ESG Probe appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden’s Justice Department announced Wednesday that it had filed a lawsuit accusing the state of Utah, and its Department of Corrections, of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act in failing to give a man hormones for his gender dysphoria.
The prisoner, who identifies as a transgender woman, is said to have requested to purchase women’s clothing and “personal items in the commissary,” such as women’s underwear and makeup.
He also wanted to be housed with female prisoners, the DOJ said. The Utah Department of Corrections assigns prison accommodations based upon sex at “commitment,” when staffers conduct a visual search of genitals, according to the Justice Department.
The Utah Department of Corrections did not grant those requests, the DOJ said, accusing the Utah agency of causing the man’s gender dysphoria to worsen.
“Twenty-two months after entering custody,” the DOJ said, the trans-identifying prisoner “performed dangerous self-surgery and removed [his] own testicles.”
“People with gender dysphoria, including those held in jails and prisons, are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act and are entitled to equal access to medical care, just like anyone else with a disability,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
“Delays or refusals to provide medical treatment for people with gender dysphoria can cause irreparable harm, including debilitating distress, depression, attempts at self-treatment and even death by suicide,” Clarke added. “The Civil Rights Division is committed to protecting the rights of all people with disabilities in our country, including those who experience gender dysphoria—and those rights are not given up at the jailhouse door.”
The DOJ also accused the Utah Department of Corrections of “imposing unnecessary eligibility criteria for assessment and treatment for gender dysphoria that it does not require for other conditions.” A letter of findings to the Utah agency states that the prison system routes requests for “medical care” for gender dysphoria through its gender dysphoria committee.
If a man in the Utah Department of Corrections self-identifies as a transgender woman, he will have to request an evaluation by the agency’s mental health staff, and these staffers then present their findings to the gender dysphoria committee. The committee will decide whether or not to refer the man to a health care provider for a diagnostic evaluation for gender dysphoria, and if the committee approves the evaluation, the Department of Corrections will refer the individual to its contract psychologist, according to the letter of findings.
“If the committee denies the evaluation, the incarcerated person must wait one year before they are eligible to request diagnostic services again,” the letter said. “After a diagnostic assessment, [the Utah Department of Corrections] medical staff will consider the psychologist’s recommendations and may order treatment with hormones, but not ‘[c]osmetic or elective surgical procedures for the purpose of sex reassignment.’”
The Justice Department claims that the committee included people who were reluctant to prescribe hormones for gender dysphoria, calling that “overt bias against the individuals seeking care.”
When the Department of Corrections finally allowed the prisoner identified in the Justice Department’s lawsuit to start hormonal medication, the DOJ claimed, the prisoner’s Department of Corrections doctor tried to talk him out of taking hormones. The DOJ claims that the doctor then failed to take “basic steps to ensure that it was provided safely and effectively,” such as conducting routine laboratory testing.
The Justice Department is calling on the Utah agency to adopt, revise, and implement new policies that let men who think they are women or women who think they are men to obtain “health care services” for gender dysphoria, and to “reasonably modify UDOC policies, practices, and procedures when necessary to ensure that individuals with gender dysphoria have equal access to all UDOC services, programs, and activities including commissary, pat and visual searches, housing, and required and optional programming.”
The Utah Department of Corrections said in a March 12 statement that it is working to address the “complex” issue and described itself as “blindsided” by the DOJ’s announcement regarding its findings in March.
“We have also taken steps on our own, and as a state, to address the needs of inmates while maintaining the highest safety standards,” Executive Director Brian Redd said in a statement. “We fundamentally disagree with the DOJ on key issues, and are disappointed with their approach.”
The post Biden DOJ Targets Utah Prisons After Trans Prisoner Removes His Own Testicles appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—a law guaranteeing equality between the sexes in education—has been on the chopping block from Day One of the Biden administration.
But after a lengthy delay, the federal Department of Education has formally announced it will punt on the announcement of its new Title IX sports rule, one that would permit biological males who identify as females to participate in women’s scholastic sports in accordance with their gender identity.
The civil rights law has been subject to rulemaking, both on the trans-sports issue and on the broader application of gender-identity protections in federally funded education programs.
While the administration has announced that it will delay announcing its new sports rule, at least for now, the broader, earlier proposed Title IX rule is already in the final stages of review at the White House, with a likely release date in August or September. Once released, it would apply to private spaces (restrooms, locker rooms, dorm rooms), preferred pronouns, sexual assault and harassment, and more.
The seismic changes included in the rule will affect any educational program that is funded directly or indirectly by the federal Department of Education—whether public school, private school, higher education institution, recreation center, charter school, or the like.
In reporting on the delay of the sports rule, The Washington Post quoted an insider who said, “Folks close to Biden have made the political decision to not move on the athletics [regulation] preelection. It seems to be too much of a hot topic.”
It sounds like the White House is finally waking up to the radioactivity of the trans-sports issue, a notion borne out by recent polling that indicates nearly 70% of Americans support separating sports by biological sex.
That polling, and the delay of Biden’s sports rule, means that now more than ever, state legislatures must act in the interest of female athletes and pass legislation protecting women’s equal educational opportunity before it’s too late.
That’s due to two developments; namely, the temporary suspension of the Title IX sports rule and the fact that even though the administration cleaved out a Title IX sports rule from the broader Title IX rule, a closer reading of the fine print indicates that, despite the administration’s attempts at legerdemain designed to fool the public, sports are included in the broader, earlier rule after all.
The earlier proposed Title IX rule explains, “preventing any person from participating in an education program or activity consistent with their gender identity would subject them to more than de minimis harm on the basis of sex and therefore be prohibited.” School sports? They’re “an education program or activity.” The proposed rule also prohibits gender identity discrimination in “extracurricular activities.”
Extracurricular activities include school sports.
There are 25 states with women’s sports laws on the books. And while Wisconsin’s governor, Democrat Tony Evers, just vetoed a state bill that would have maintained sex separations in school athletics, other states—Nebraska, for instance—still have time to act before the close of their legislative sessions.
Nebraska’s “Sports and Spaces” Act, LB 575, is sponsored by state Sen. Kathleen Kauth of Omaha, who is hopeful the bill will be voted out of committee sometime within the week. The bill would restrict access to school bathrooms and locker rooms based on biological sex and would add similar restrictions to most school sports teams.
Some have dubbed it one of the “most controversial bills” of the legislative session, likely due to the hot-button nature of its subject matter. As a result, the bill has been sitting in committee since its introduction by Kauth last year.
But controversial it isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be. With 70% of Americans backing these kinds of commonsense restrictions, it’s a wonder the legislation has stalled, especially in light of increasing evidence that women aren’t just losing playing time and athletic titles to transgender-identified men, but are now increasingly injured as a result of competing against them.
Nebraska’s legislative session ends on April 18. But all pending legislation must be debated on the floor before the end of this week to advance.
The speaker of the Nebraska Legislature, John Arch, has urged senators to consider the truncated time frame of legislative debate and hold off on bills that are unlikely to have enough votes to progress.
Such timidity is misguided.
Fifty years ago, the feminists of yore worked tirelessly to secure equal educational opportunity for women and girls. But choosing to support self-proclaimed “females” over biological girls who simply want a chance to play is wrong.
The time for legislative action is now—before it’s too late.
The post Biden Admin Punts on Radical Title IX Sports Rule Change for Now, but Nebraska Has Chance to Act appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Cross-dressed by his grandmother as a child, abused by his uncle, confused and hurting, Walt Heyer sought to become a woman. As a young man, he underwent attempted gender-reassignment surgery, lived as a trans-identifying woman for eight years, and ultimately detransitioned.
Heyer, now 83, has spent the past few decades offering support to men and women who also have been taught to believe they were born in the wrong body. As part of that effort, he told The Daily Signal, he’s written a number of books and answered “thousands” of letters from individuals, often men, who seek his help.
Now, he’s partnering with Ascend Pictures Productions to produce a movie about his story, tentatively titled “Who Am I.” That movie will pose the question, Heyer says: “Who do we think we are?”
“There’s been nothing like it,” he said in a Tuesday telephone interview. “It is a powerful movie.”
Heyer knows his story has inspired many people, and he believes it should be shared through movie. When he was only 4 years old, he has shared, his grandmother would secretly dress him in a purple chiffon dress.
The attention and affirmation—which made Heyer feel very special as a child—“would be his mustard seed of torment.”
His film’s website shares: “The dress also became a source of his turmoil once his parents found out about his secret. His father’s spankings became more intense and also led to his being sexually abused by his uncle. This manifested into Walt’s affliction—thoughts and feelings that maybe he should have been born a girl. Andrea and then Laura were born in his mind, and they wanted Walt gone.”
Heyer sought transgender treatments that “promised relief,” but those treatments only “led to the destruction of his marriage, his family, and his career.” The movie would explore Heyer’s journey, he said, which includes his ultimate discovery of his Christian faith and the “road back to redemption” and forgiveness.
Heyer emphasized to The Daily Signal that he wants the film to focus on sharing his story, rather than being preachy: “We really want it to appeal to people who don’t know Jesus. And I think it will.”
He wants viewers to understand that the issues he was dealing with, and the issues that other individuals who try to transition are experiencing, go much deeper than gender. And gender therapists are not going to be able to help individuals struggling in this way, Heyer maintains.
But the movie will need financial support to make it happen. Heyer encourages supporters to visit the prospective film’s website, where they can sign up for updates.
“We need support,” he noted. “We need the crowdfunding to get it off the ground. Crowdfunding is the most important part.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: Movie Would Share ‘Gut-Wrenching Story’ of Man Who Tried to Become a Trans Woman appeared first on The Daily Signal.
California Democrats’ incorrigible obsession with racial preferences is the definition of insanity: They keep trying and failing to legalize racial preferences, and yet, they expect a different outcome each time.
When will they learn from their failures?
Not any time soon.
Their futile cycle has restarted with another effort to legalize racial preferences. The California state Assembly passed a proposed constitutional amendment, ACA 7, that would effectively nullify a provision of the California Constitution that prohibits the state from “discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”
That anti-discrimination provision, known as Proposition 209, affirms the constitutional right to equal protection under the law for all individuals, regardless of race.
Left-wing politicians and activist groups have assailed it relentlessly and continuously since its adoption in 1996. They want to reinstate racial preferences within California’s institutions, but they have failed every time.
Before ACA 7, California legislators had attempted to overturn the anti-discrimination provision in a measure known as Proposition 16, which was decisively rejected by California voters in the November 2020 general election. A comfortable majority of voters voted “No” on the measure, despite the “Yes” proponents outspending the opposition by more than 19 to 1.
Although California voters emphatically rejected racial preferences in education and hiring, the supporters of racial preferences still have not taken “No” for an answer.
This time, they’re hoping to trick the people into changing their minds. Whereas Prop 16 was open and honest about abolishing racial neutrality, ACA 7 is much more deceptive. Rather than repeal race neutrality, ACA 7 creates “exceptions” that look modest, but which would effectively nullify the rule.
Assemblyman Corey Jackson introduced the bill to create a procedure for agencies to appeal to the governor for “exceptions” to Prop 209. The amendment would give the governor power to approve exceptions if a state-funded, “research-informed” program that uses racial preferences “increases the life expectancy of, improves educational outcomes for, or lifts out of poverty specific groups based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex, or sexual orientation.”
In other words, this bill is just an attempt to restore racial discrimination under the guise of science.
Find some ideologically driven, low-quality research that appears to support a program that allegedly “increases the life expectancy” or “educational outcomes” of any minority group, and voila, racial discrimination is lawful again.
Jackson insists that Prop 209 is an “unjust law” and a “barrier.” Yes, it’s unjust, he says, not to discriminate on the basis of race. He’s wrong about that, but he’s right about Prop 209 being a barrier. Prop 209 bars the state government from racially discriminating against the state’s residents.
It guarantees one of the fundamental tenets of justice; namely, that all are equal before the law.
Jackson is happy to sacrifice equal justice to “rectify the enduring disparities that have afflicted California for far too long.” But even assuming that racial discrimination would rectify disparities and would do so without causing even worse problems (both faulty assumptions), that doesn’t change the fact that racial discrimination is unjust and immoral.
Most Californians know this. So, thankfully, there’s still hope in the fight against racial preferences.
The resounding defeat of Prop 16 in 2020 pointed to the reality that California voters, despite their infamously deep-blue political leanings, are not in favor of considering race in education or hiring decisions.
According to Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies’ post-2020 election survey of Californians, although 56% of African American voters supported Proposition 16, only 30% of Latinos and just 35% of Asians did.
If ACA 7 passes the California state Senate, it will appear on the November ballot. If past is prologue, California voters will demonstrate—as if twice wasn’t enough—that racial discrimination is not tolerated in California, no “exceptions.”
The post Some in California Want to Legalize Racial Discrimination—Yet Again appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C., said in an interview over the weekend that President Joe Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” which parts of Catholicism he will adhere to.
Gregory appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday with the female Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, where he discussed the Catholic president’s open support for issues such as abortion that are in direct contradiction with Catholic Church teaching.
Biden, who describes himself—and has been described by establishment media—as a “devout Catholic,” is open about frequently attending weekly Mass. But the president heads the most pro-abortion administration in United States history; promotes transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers, even for children; and celebrates transgender ideology.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is a crime against human life, that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” and “close the sexual act to the gift of life.”
Although Gregory said that Biden is “very sincere about his faith,” the cardinal added that Biden “picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts.”
“There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a ‘cafeteria Catholic,’ [in which] you choose that which is attractive and dismiss that which is challenging,” Gregory explained.
DC’s @WashArchbishop Wilton Gregory: Joe Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” what parts of Catholicism to actually adhere to or ignore (like abortion). pic.twitter.com/i0Cbs226Uf
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 1, 2024
Gregory continued: “I would say there are things, especially in terms of the life issues, there are things that he chooses to ignore.”
“The issues of life begin at the very beginning. And they conclude at natural death,” the cardinal said. “And you can’t pick and choose. You’re either one who respects life in all of its dimensions, or you have to step aside and say, ‘I’m not pro-life.’”
The Archdiocese of Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal. But the cardinal’s remarks drew praise from Catholics on social media, among them The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who described Gregory’s comments as “marvelous.”
Good to see some faithful moral leadership from the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington, especially at a time when the seat of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington is vacant. https://t.co/QqHcI7pKWf
— André Béliveau (@TheRealBeliveau) April 1, 2024
Gregory sparked a backlash in November 2020 when he said in an interview with a leftist Jesuit outlet, America Magazine, that he would not deny Communion to Biden at Mass.
“The kind of relationship that I hope we will have is a conversational relationship, where we can discover areas where we can cooperate that reflect the social teachings of the church, knowing full well that there are some areas where we won’t agree,” Gregory told America Magazine at the time.
His stance drew criticism from traditional Catholics, who argued that Biden’s open embrace of unrestricted abortion constituted a grave scandal.
In September 2021, however, the cardinal offered a rare rebuke of Biden’s denial that life begins at conception, telling the president: “The Catholic Church teaches, and has taught, that human life begins at conception, so the president is not demonstrating Catholic teaching.”
He added: “Our church has not changed its position on the immorality of abortion. I don’t see how we could, because we believe that every human life is sacred.”
The White House would not address Gregory’s most recent remarks. Instead, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates mocked The Daily Signal, the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, saying, “We refer The Heritage Foundation to the Office of Public Engagement. You have reached the press office.”
The post DC Archbishop: Joe Biden Is a ‘Cafeteria Catholic’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Ronna Romney McDaniel was with MSNBC for just four days. Sharing airwaves with the former Republican National Committee chairwoman was more than her colleagues could bear. They curled their lips, as if she had the cooties.
“It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on ‘Morning Joe’ in her capacity as a paid contributor,” Mika Brzezinski huffed.
Rachel Maddow snarled, “I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable.”
After McDaniel’s only appearance as a contributor, Chuck Todd growled at “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker: “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation.”
MSNBC’s anchors gave their brass the bird, turned them into plucked peacocks, and tossed them into the Potomac. The emasculated executives soon took on water.
“No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” gasped NBCUniversal’s Cesar Conde, extolling groupthink rather than intellectual diversity.
“I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down,” Conde gurgled, just before he sank into the river.
MSNBC’s mutiny was the newsroom equivalent of what too often befalls conservative speakers on college campuses.
“Cancel him!”
“Boot her!”
“SHUT UP!”
The only thing missing at MSNBC was a mob of black-clad bookers breaking cameras and setting makeup rooms ablaze.
As a news organization, MSNBC botched a perfect opportunity. Several times each week, in an election year, its hosts could have put cameras in McDaniel’s face and asked her tough questions on live TV:
Why focus solely on Trump? MSNBC could have grilled McDaniel like a salmon across GOP-related topics:
MSNBC staffers could have interrogated McDaniel, and she would have had to take it. Unlike her old job, she could not say, “No comment,” and then hide in her office (which was not her style). McDaniel could have fulfilled her contract and faced on-air questions or clammed up and surrendered her reported $300,000 annual salary.
Turn the tables: Imagine that Fox News Channel hired Biden’s former climate czar John Kerry. Rather than implode on camera, my Fox News colleagues eagerly would ask Kerry such questions as:
Nothing analogous will face the ex-chief of the RNC because NBC = DNC.
John Chancellor and David Brinkley must be revolving in their graves.
Rather than crumple like aluminum foil, NBC’s brass should have sacked their insolent, insubordinate “talent.” Ambitious journalists from newsrooms across America would have leapt to replace them.
Brzezinski, Maddow, and Todd are all replaceable. Especially Todd.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post REVOLTING: Crybaby Journos Give NBC Brass the Bird appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Tim Murtaugh became a familiar face to many Americans as President Donald Trump’s communications director for his 2020 reelection campaign. As one of Trump’s most visible spokesmen, Murtaugh had a front-row seat to the most-watched campaign in history.
But just a mere four years earlier, Murtaugh found himself in a much different spot. After struggling with alcoholism for years, he was jailed in 2015 for public drunkenness and unsure of his fate. That’s when he decided to give up alcohol and focus on turning his life around.
Murtaugh would go on to work for Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue before joining Trump’s reelection campaign. Today, he’s running his own communications firm. He joined “The Daily Signal Podcast” to talk about his new book—out today—called “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It: My Escape from Addiction and Shot at Redemption on the Trump Campaign.”
Listen to the interview, watch the video, or read an abridged and edited transcript below.
Rob Bluey: Tim Murtaugh, you’re the author of a new book, “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It.” You’re somebody who our Daily Signal audience will probably remember as a return guest to this show. You’re the founder and principal at Line Drive Public Affairs and the former communications director for the Trump 2020 campaign.
Tim Murtaugh: Good to see you, Rob. Thanks very much. And there was a time where I was a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation as well.
Bluey: We appreciate your contributions during that time. And I’m thankful to you for telling this story. Take us back to in 2015. You are in a Fairfax County jail. It illustrates so much how far you have come in just a few short years.
Murtaugh: On May 16, 2015, I went out and as I liked to do at the time, got drunk. And at that time, I was charged with drunken public intoxication, something along those lines. I ended up in the Fairfax County Adult Correctional Center and that’s where I came to.
That day was different from many of the other times that I had been drinking too much because I was on probation for the second of my two DUIs, and I had 80 days of suspended jail time hanging above my head. And if I had gotten convicted of that public intoxication charge, I was going to have to go serve nearly three months in jail, and it would have been pretty much the end of everything. I would have lost my job on Capitol Hill. I would have lost my career.
My family was about at the end of their rope. My new wife didn’t know what to do with me, and so it really could have been the end of everything. And that’s the day I took my last drink, and I have never looked back.
I wrote this book for two reasons. One, because when I was in rehab—and I went to rehab five times—when I was there, I spent a lot of time in the bookstore buying titles and just devouring them. They were more autobiographical in nature, people writing about their own stories and how they made it through their battles with addiction. I wanted to write a book that helped people like me who are in rehab.
The other reason was, I had some opposition researchers coming after us on the Trump campaign. Back in 2020, they were trying to get reporters to write stories about me and my background. And I thought, if I just write a book about it myself, they’ll never be able to attack me with it again.
This is the story of my 2 lives – one with alcohol and one without. (Spoiler: one is better than the other.)
— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) January 26, 2024
Oh, and half of it is about politics & the 2020 Trump campaign.
It would be so kind if you’d take a moment, check it out & consider ordering:https://t.co/RIgo9dWk59
Bluey: Was it difficult for you to put it all out there?
Murtaugh: Writing it, actually, was cathartic. I’m not sure that there’s any single person who knows everything that I went through. My wife certainly knows a lot about it. My parents and my brother, my close friends and close relatives, know big parts of it. But I don’t know that anybody, except for me, knows everything else that I went through.
I’m coming up on nine years now since I took my last drink. And I know that any day I could slip and pick one up. If I had that first one, it would be a downward spiral from that moment. Writing the book was an exercise that helped me stay sober for that period of time.
When you have been an addict—and you’ve managed to defeat it—there is always that lingering fear that if I’m not careful this could come back and get me.
Bluey: What have you found to be effective in terms of resisting that urge?
Murtaugh: This is really just a story of how I did it. It’s not entirely about this. It’s half a political book, half about my life in the Trump 2020 campaign, which at the time, until this next one, was the most-watched political campaign in world history. There are a lot of stories from behind the scenes from that campaign.
But the other half of the book, it is about my struggles with alcoholism and my whole story. It is not a how-to book—it’s just a story of how I got through it.
>>> An Insider Takes You Behind Scenes of Trump’s Campaign
People might find some parts of it that they can relate to or at least laugh about because not every word of it is deadly serious. There are some ridiculous things that people like me do when they’re in the throes of all that. It shouldn’t be looked at as a how-to fix-it sort of manual—just how one guy got through it. That’s all it is.
Bluey: You work in a high-stress environment, political communications, and I would imagine being right there in the forefront on the Trump campaign was at the pinnacle of that. What were some of the ways you found to be effective in terms of keeping your mind on your work and not getting distracted by alcohol?
Murtaugh: There’s a lot of pressure in politics. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the presidential campaign, which I was, or on lower campaigns, which I have also done. Whether they’re races on the state level, congressional, Senate, governor’s races—it doesn’t matter. There’s varying amounts of pressure. It all seems like the most important thing in the world when you’re going through it.
It helps to stay busy for sure. I broke the day up into little chunks. Could I get out of bed and get dressed and get ready to go to work without having to stop for a drink? Could I get from home to the office without stopping to buy a drink? Could I make it through the day and not sneak out somewhere at noon? And then at the end of the day, can I make it all the way home without stopping somewhere to pick up a bottle or to stop and get a drink?
I relied a lot on Alcoholics Anonymous, going to meetings like that. I found using the Serenity Prayer, just helped me if I had a little storm going on in my brain and I was worried that maybe I was going to veer off to the side and do something that I shouldn’t do. Stopping for 15 to 20 seconds to say the Serenity Prayer really helped me sort of refocus and get back on the rails.
Books about Biden are not selling well, so maybe this will interest people.
— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) March 28, 2024
It’s not like any other political book you’ve ever read – it’s partly about the 2020 Trump campaign & partly about my battle with alcohol.
Order now for Tuesday’s release:https://t.co/RIgo9dWk59
Bluey: Family played a big part in your recovery. You come from a proud family. Your grandfather is Danny Murtaugh, the legendary manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a two-time World Series champion. What role does family play for others who might be struggling with alcoholism?
Murtaugh: It’s a really big, very important part of it. My wife is a very private person and she doesn’t relish a lot of these details getting out—or any of them really. But in fact, a few years back, it was her idea to write this book. And if she had not been on board with it, I wouldn’t have done it. And the fact that she is on board, is an illustration of how important she has been to me throughout my entire recovery.
Without her, I think there’s no question that I would either still be in jail or I would be dead. I don’t think there’s any two ways about it. And my parents were very instrumental in guiding me to rehab and helping me.
Bluey: In 2015, you found yourself at a low point. Then, within a span of four years, you are the communications director for the most-watched presidential campaign in history. Did President Trump know about your circumstances and did others on the campaign know about what you were going through?
Murtaugh: I felt like it was my responsibility to tell them. I started on the Trump campaign in February 2019. It was about four years after I had already taken my last drink. However, I did have pretty checkered past and I did have a history with law enforcement. I had two DUIs, served five days in jail with some suspended time for the first one, served 10 days in jail with 80 days suspended for the second one. I also had a variety of different drunk in public and different public intoxication charges.
Opposition researchers, and anybody who looked into it, would find all that stuff in about 10 minutes. So there wasn’t any point in hiding it.
When I went to work in the Trump administration for Secretary Sonny Perdue—I was his communications director for two years before I went to the Trump campaign—I told Secretary Perdue up front as I was interviewing. And then when I was being considered for the Trump campaign, I told Brad Parscale, the campaign manager, that very same thing. I said, “You should look into this because this is what I’ve got in my past and the president needs to know this.”
At the time, Sonny Perdue said, “Listen, as long as you’re not drinking now, I really appreciate you telling me, you’re going to be fine.” And then Brad Parscale went and ran it past the president and came back and he said, “Look, the president likes a good redemption story. He likes a good comeback story.” He himself doesn’t drink because he blames alcohol for the death of his brother, but the president was aware of it. And Brad said, “You know what? You’ve conquered it, let’s move on. And if anybody comes after you, I’ll stand by you.”
And he did because a lot of reporters called us because they had gotten the material from the opposition researchers, and they were threatening to write stories. Brad stood by me, and the campaign stood by me, and the president stood by me.
None of those stories ever got written. We managed to talk them out of it and talk them into agreeing with us that that was in the past.
Bluey: Are there any resources that you would recommend to individuals who may be struggling with addiction right now?
Murtaugh: There is always going to be an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that you can find and get to. And they truly are welcoming. Anyone can walk in off the street and find people who understand what you’re going through. That helped me an awful lot.
If you need more than that, then find a way to check yourself into a 28-day program. An inpatient rehab program can do wonders for people. As for me, I went to rehab five times. So sometimes it doesn’t take right away.
I would hope that people pick up the book. It’s called “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It,” available on Amazon.com right now, or other retailers as well. I hope that they can find some humor in it, and also maybe find some way to look at it and say that I can relate to it.
Bluey: Tim Murtaugh, thanks so much for having the courage to share your story. We’re proud of all that you’ve accomplished.
Murtaugh: Rob, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
The post An Addict’s Shot at Redemption on the Trump Campaign appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Ronna McDaniel, formerly chair of the Republican National Committee, was recently hired and subsequently fired by NBC News when the “talent,” unable to countenance even moderate dissent, revolted on air. The entire kerfuffle is unsurprising considering the state of modern “media.”
But one of the funniest moments of the McDaniel blowup came when host and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, another political operative hired by NBC, argued that, actually, the distinction between her and McDaniel was “truth versus lies.”
What in the holy hell is she talking about?
Only last week, Psaki was lying about Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” comment—which every sentient being understands was a metaphor for economic collapse, not, as the MSNBC host explained, an “embrace of political violence” or “dehumanizing language.”
And let’s set aside the “election denialism” of the 2016 contest, which she claimed was “rigged” by Russia. Psaki is proficient in lies big and small, whether she’s spreading run-of-the-mill lies about how Democrats don’t support abortion until birth (almost all do) or whether she’s telling the press that President Joe Biden’s dog Major had not bitten Secret Service officers (he’s bitten them 24 times, at least), or she’s spreading hoaxes about Border Patrol agents “whipping” Haitian migrants, Psaki is a wellspring of misinformation.
Even considering the normal mendacious parameters of a White House press secretary, she excelled.
When Democrats were campaigning to cram through that massive welfare expansion agenda—first named “Build Back Better” and later “Inflation Reduction Act” [sic]—she told the media that “no economist” in the country was predicting higher inflation because of massive government spending. Biden, at least, had the decency to contend that a “serious economist” was warning of disaster.
Of course, numerous respected economists, including well-known Democrats, had warned that injecting trillions into a hot economy would exacerbate inflation, as Psaki well knew. She made her claim in November 2021. A month earlier, inflation had risen at its fastest rate since 1990.
During the Biden administration’s deadly botching of Afghan withdrawal, which saw 13 American servicemen murdered at the Abbey Gate outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, Psaki lied.
When the administration, tied to a political timeline, ignored warnings from intelligence officials that terrorists were taking advantage of unsecured paths that the U.S. was encouraging civilians to use to get to the airport, Psaki bragged that all “American citizens,” “Afghan partners,” and “allies” were being rescued.
When someone asked her how many Americans had been left behind in the country, she indignantly told them it was “irresponsible to say Americans are stranded.” But they were. John Kirby, Pentagon spokesperson, flippantly told the press only days later, “We have Americans that get stranded in countries all the time.” Everyone knew.
Later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee found that as many as 9,000 Americans were left in Afghanistan during the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal. A nongovernmental organization report found that the U.S. “left behind” 78,000 Afghan allies in the chaotic withdrawal.
Then again, even before Psaki was a White House press secretary, she had been deputized to enact Iran-booster Ben Rhodes’ “echo chamber,” in which the Obama administration manipulated young, pliable, credulous journalists into spreading misinformation about a nuclear deal to empower the Islamic terror state, one of the administration’s highest priorities at the time.
When the State Department deliberately cut embarrassing answers within press briefing videos to avoid scrutiny over their concerted effort to mislead the media, Psaki lied to the American people about that as well.
That is only a small sample of the former press secretary’s prodigious work. And, no doubt, McDaniel lied for political expediency as well. But let’s face it, she is a mere piker next to Psaki.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Only Democrats Get to Lie on NBC News appeared first on The Daily Signal.
James Madison is the Father of our Constitution, and the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at Madison’s Montpelier provides educational programming for teachers, law enforcement officers, and others.
That seems appropriate. After all, not only did Madison—our country’s fourth president—help draft the Constitution, but he also served as a key delegate at the Constitutional Convention, authored the Bill of Rights, and urged ratification of the Constitution through his practical and philosophical arguments in The Federalist Papers.
But these accomplishments are, at best, downplayed at his historic home. Montpelier has no exhibits dedicated to Madison and his contributions.
Worse still, Montpelier is equipping educators to teach Marxist-based theories to elementary, middle, and high school students. And the programs doing this are, in part, funded by the state of Virginia.
Issues surrounding policing and prosecution could be fair game for seminars at Montpelier. The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The Fifth Amendment, among other protections, guarantees that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The Sixth Amendment guarantees the “right to a speedy and public trial” by an “impartial jury” and the ability to confront those testifying against you. And the Eighth Amendment protects against excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments.
Madison drafted all of those.
Yet next week’s “Educator Seminar: Policing and Public Safety” will instead focus on the “history of policing, civil rights, and Constitutional change in African American contexts for the purpose of providing educators with key strategies and historical tools to teach topics in black history about law enforcement, social justice, and the Constitution.”
It will “help teachers be more inspired to teach hard histories that invite students in their classrooms to imagine equitable possibilities for promoting public safety for all.” And it will explore “why community approaches to public safety surfaced to counteract police violence and discrimination within the criminal legal system leading up to today’s age of mass incarceration.”
There’s a lot to unpack in those statements, but underlying all of them is the belief that our criminal justice system is systemically racist and that, as a result, we lock up too many people—particularly too many young black men.
But that’s not true. Our criminal justice system isn’t systemically racist, and mass incarceration is a myth.
If someone commits the crime, they should do the time. And it’s a sad fact that a disproportionate number of young black men commit violent crimes in the United States and often victimize other young black men in the process.
But these aren’t the only terms that stand out. Of particular note in the description are the phrases “equitable” and “hard history.” Equity is about equality of outcomes, not opportunity. And “teaching hard history” is a mantra of the radical Southern Poverty Law Center, which often labels those it disagrees with as “hate groups.”
In fact, the SPLC’s “teaching hard history” curriculum and initiatives are not simply about discussing slavery’s role in American history. Like “The 1619 Project” and other critical race theory programs, they place slavery as the central animating force in America’s Founding. The preface of the curriculum states that “Some say slavery was our country’s original sin, but it is much more than that. Slavery is our country’s origin.”
This curriculum is also about forming students into activists. For example, it notes that those in K-2 should “examine how power is gained” and be able to “contrast equity and equality, identifying current problems where there is a need to fight for equity.”
This overlap is no coincidence. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, the host of the SPLC’s “Teaching Hard History” podcast as well as an author of the curriculum standards quoted above, also serves as the chairman of the board at Montpelier, which is the historic home’s governing body. (Currently, no Madison scholars are on the board.)
Jeffries—the brother of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.—helped develop and appears in a video in Montpelier’s basement featuring encounters with police officers and protesters carrying signs that read “Stop police brutality,” “I can’t breathe,” and “Black Lives Matter.”
Per the Montpelier website, “[f]rom mass incarceration, to the achievement gap, to housing discrimination, and the vicious cycle of poverty, violence, and lack of opportunity throughout America’s inner cities, the legacies of 200 years of African American bondage are still with us.”
It’s sad that Montpelier has chosen to focus on a Marxist-motivated movement fueled by critical race theory, instead of on the many astounding achievements of the home’s former owner and the Father of our Constitution, James Madison.
It’s a disservice to the public, teachers, and students.
The post Why Is Marxism—But Not Madison—Being Taught at Montpelier? appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Tucker Carlson Network founder Tucker Carlson has accused President Joe Biden’s administration of targeting a pro-life father for praying and singing outside of an abortion clinic, warning that the administration “fears” that type of activity.
Carlson interviewed Paul Vaughn, the Tennessee father of 11 children who was arrested by the FBI in October 2022 and charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. During an interview with The Daily Signal at the time of his arrest, Vaughn said that the FBI came to his home, “guns pointed at the door, banging on the house, yelling and screaming, ‘Open up! FBI.’”
“I had kids in the yard walking out to get in the car to go to school. I was about to take them to school, and other kids in the house,” he told The Daily Signal at the time. “So, seeing that the easiest path to de-escalation was me in handcuffs, I stepped outside and put an end to the ranting and the banging and the yelling.”
Video of the FBI's arrest of Paul Vaughn of Centerville, Tennessee. DOJ charged him with “conspiracy against rights secured by the FACE Act, and committing FACE Act violations" for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic. Paul tells me the footage was taken by his wife. pic.twitter.com/KSDvLRSrlF
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) October 7, 2022
Carlson asked why exactly the Biden Justice Department would arrest Vaughn in such a dramatic manner.
“The question is,” the former Fox News Channel host asked, “what exactly did he do? Was he a terrorist, a serial killer? Was he trying to invade the country? No. Paul Vaughn, the father of 11 children, had dared to pray and sing hymns in the hallway of an abortion clinic.
“In other words, he did what the Biden administration really fears,” Carlson continued. “He prayed. And for doing that, he faces 11 years in prison.”
Video provided to The Daily Signal by Vaughn, taken by his wife, shows FBI agents outside the family’s home. Vaughn’s wife follows them, videotaping their conversation.
“I want to know why you were banging on my door with a gun,” she says. “Are you not going to tell me anything?”
“No, we are not,” one agent replies, while another says, “I tried.”
“No, you didn’t!” she shouts back. “You did not try.”
Carlson asked Vaughn whether he had ever thought that praying would be a federal crime with a penalty of 11 years in prison.
“I always thought praying for our nation is what we were instructed to do,” the pro-life father responded. “I thought that was what was required for freedom. And liberty is to beseech the favors of God on our land and to reach out to him. And, of course, we’re praying because our nation has allowed the sinful, atrocious action of abortion and killing unborn children. So, that’s ultimately what the Biden DOJ doesn’t like.”
Vaughn said that he believes the Biden DOJ’s intent with its “heavy-handed raid” was to “strike fear into Christians in the nation.”
WATCH:
When you start putting people in jail for praying, it’s pretty clear who you’re actually working for. Paul Vaughn is facing 11 years in Biden’s prisons. pic.twitter.com/X54sysL5w0
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 26, 2024
“It’s an act of war against religious people,” he said. “And so that was their intent. Fortunately, God is gracious and kind, and his grace has been poured out upon our family, in ways we never could have experienced. And my children are growing up seeing a level of persecution that strengthens them, that provides a meaning in a foundation for their faith.”
He says he sees two ways of responding to these events.
“We can be bitter and upset and angry,” Vaughn said, “or we can be gracious, and we can be forgiving to the enemies. And trusting God is a God of justice, and he will work this out. And that’s the message that I’m telling my children. And I see them growing in this and understanding this.”
Vaughn praised the Christians all over the United States who have reached out to him to let him know they were praying for him. Asked by Carlson whether high-profile Christian leaders had drawn attention to his case, he said that he had not experienced much support from Christian leaders.
“It really is a moment for the church,” Carlson reflected. “If you’re an American Christian leader and you’re standing by without saying anything as a man faces 11 years in prison for saying prayers, I think it’s time to assess yourself.”
“Yep,” Vaughn replied, “I would absolutely agree. I would call on them to actually do that … we tend to divide the spiritual and material, and we either make it all one or the other, and we don’t do a good job as the American church of understanding that it’s both.”
Vaughn’s arrest came amid the Biden DOJ’s targeting of pro-life activists with the FACE Act. The FACE Act protects not only abortion clinics, but also pregnancy resource centers and houses of worship, but the Biden DOJ has largely used it to prosecute pro-life individuals.
Since 2022, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has charged dozens of pro-life individuals with FACE Act violations. In 2023, the DOJ charged four individuals with FACE Act violations related to attacks on pregnancy resource centers in Florida, though pro-abortion vandals have attacked at least 88 such centers and 218 churches since the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, according to CatholicVote.
In February, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, urged the DOJ to comply with Republican demands to release FACE Act data. Though he had called on the DOJ in October 2022 to disclose FACE Act prosecution data, the DOJ didn’t release that data (even though the DOJ’s Kristen Clarke told Roy that she would ensure that he received the requested data in December).
Roy, who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, warned that “DOJ’s failure to produce FACE Act prosecution data is particularly troubling in light of the apparent disparity between prosecutions targeting pro-life protesters and pro-abortion attacks on places of worship and pregnancy resource centers.”
“DOJ’s refusal to comply with this request hampers the committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight over the Department and the Civil Rights Division,” he said in the February letter, first obtained by The Daily Signal. “DOJ must return to its core mission of protecting all Americans, not simply those that it favors.”
“The Civil Rights Division continues to use the FACE Act to unfairly target pro-life advocates,” Roy wrote. “On January 30, 2024, six pro-life advocates were found guilty of violating the FACE Act, and they now face up to [10-1/2] years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $260,000.”
Roy specifically mentioned pro-life activist Mark Houck, another father with a large family.
“These prosecutions come after DOJ conducted an aggressive raid on the home of pro-life advocate Mark Houck to arrest him on an overzealous FACE Act charge stemming from Mr. Houck’s earlier encounter with a belligerent abortion activist who attacked his young son,” Roy said. “A Pennsylvania jury rightly acquitted [him] in January 2023.”
Houck and his wife, Ryan-Marie Houck, previously told The Daily Signal that they were targeted by the Biden DOJ in an effort to intimidate, silence, and scare the family for their pro-life work—praying outside abortion clinics for the women headed inside to abort their unborn babies.
In November, the Houcks sued the Biden administration for “malicious and retaliatory prosecution.”
The post Biden DOJ ‘Fears’ Those Who Pray, Sing Outside Abortion Clinics, Tucker Carlson Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The word broke on March 26 that NBC News was reversing its decision to hire former Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel as a political commentator. MSNBC hosts across the schedule broke out into frenzied denunciations of whichever executive who thought that McDaniel should be paid to speak anywhere on this hypnotically/robotically anti-Trump network.
In one of her typical half-hour jeremiads, Rachel Maddow compared McDaniel to a mobster and a pickpocket. “You wouldn’t—you wouldn’t hire a wise guy, you wouldn’t hire a made man, like a mobster, to work at a DA’s office, right? You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener. And so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable. And I hope they will reverse their decision.”
There was no need for NBC News to hire McDaniel. One can look at the election results during her tenure at the Republican National Committee and question her expertise at winning elections. But this mobster talk underlines once again that MSNBC is not a “news” channel. It’s a hyperbole channel, constantly fearmongering its audience that the end times are near for democracy.
Maddow claimed this hiring wasn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about “bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of democracy to end democracy.” There are no “fact-checkers” who will get in the way of this talk. Maddow is like Bluto in “Animal House” saying, “when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.” Facts don’t matter. Rallying your audience is all that matters.
This was the essence of Maddow’s rant:
I want to associate myself with all my colleagues both at MSNBC and at NBC News who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company putting on the payroll someone who hasn’t just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who still is trying to convince Americans that this election stuff, it doesn’t really work. That this last election, it wasn’t a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.
Every conservative who’s ever watched Maddow lowlights knows that she was a leader in the Collusion Corps, someone who obsessed night after night over how the 2016 election was fraudulent because the Russians interfered with it. MSNBC doesn’t suggest that every election is fraudulent. It’s only when Democrats lose that they imply (for years) that it was fraudulent.
Since Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 and ran around telling people it was stolen from her, Maddow has hosted a series of fawnathons with her. They discussed why Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to back Donald Trump in 2016. In 2018, Clinton even suggested the Russians may have used the National Rifle Association to funnel money into the election.
Maddow concluded by lobbying the executives who allow her on air: “Acknowledge that maybe it wasn’t the right call. It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to acknowledge when you are wrong. It is a sign of strength. And our country needs us to be strong right now.”
That may be the funniest line of all. Maddow is notorious for refusing to concede she’s wrong, especially about Trump.
In 2019, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple constructed a devastating timeline of all of Maddow’s promotions of the baseless dungpile called the Steele Dossier. He noted Maddow called it “creepy” and “unwarranted” when Michael Isikoff said she’d “given a lot of credence” to the dossier on his podcast.
Why couldn’t she acknowledge she was wrong? Instead, “Maddow declined to provide an on-the-record response to the Erik Wemple Blog.”
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Hyperbolic MSNBC’s Ronna McDaniel Debacle appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case dealing with the Food and Drug Administration’s removal of safeguards on chemical abortion drugs.
Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, four national medical associations and four individual doctors sued the FDA for removing almost all safety standards for pregnant women taking the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol.
Safeguards formerly included initial in-person visits to make sure the mother did not have an ectopic pregnancy or other serious medical condition, as well as follow-up check-up visits for internal bleeding and infection.
Pro-abortion advocates gathered at the Supreme Court on Tuesday to rally in support of unrestricted chemical abortion drugs. Multiple pro-abortion protesters who spoke with The Daily Signal said they wanted women to have unfettered access to the drugs and pushed back against the idea that safeguards were necessary.
Pro-life advocates who spoke with The Daily Signal emphasized the need to protect women’s health, sharing stories of women who have suffered severe medical complications from taking the drugs without proper medical supervision.
Back at the Supreme Court as the court hears oral arguments in U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. Case deals with FDA removing safety standards for pregnant women who use abortion drugs pic.twitter.com/HmloE1QxiB
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) March 26, 2024
“Today, I argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of doctors and medical associations who are witnessing firsthand the harm to women caused by the FDA’s recklessness,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Erin Hawley said in a press statement on Tuesday.
Hawley accused the FDA of violating federal law and its duty to keep women safe by removing crucial safeguards.
“Regardless of one’s views about abortion, we should all agree that women’s health matters,” she emphasized. “Women deserve for the FDA to do its job. Women deserve for the federal government to look out for their health and safety.”
At the Supreme Court on Tuesday, The Daily Signal spoke with Catherine Herring, a woman whose husband allegedly sought to drug her seven times after he found out she was pregnant. Herring said she became violently ill after the first attempt to abort her baby, and then kept watch until she ultimately caught him on video putting abortion drugs in her drinks.
WATCH:
Outside the Supreme Court this morning, abortion pill victim Catherine Herring tells @DailySignal that her husband "poisoned" her "seven times with abortion pills in attempts to kill" her daughter Josephine.
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) March 26, 2024
"He said the pregnancy would ruin his plans."
pic.twitter.com/NGxztO2UOs
“I was the victim of abortion pill poisoning in Texas,” Herring said. “My husband poisoned me seven times with abortion pills, in attempt to kill my daughter, Josephine.”
“He said the pregnancy would … make him look like a jerk,” she said.
“He was using an enormous amount of powder each poisoning,” Herring told the The Daily Signal. “I got violently ill. I ended up in an emergency room, with a urine sample that was black in color.”
Regarding the child Herring was pregnant with when poisoned, she said “Josephine is the sweetest little 18-month-old. She has a lot of health issues, a lot of developmental delays. She has spent many months in the hospital, in ICU. She has a feeding tube in her abdomen… I’m so grateful she’s alive.”
Kelly Lester, a rape victim, post-abortive mother, and former abortion clinic worker, also shared her experience with the rally attendees.
Lester, who aborted her unborn baby through a chemical abortion, explained that she felt her traumatic experience must have been unique since she never heard anyone else discussing how isolated and terrifying it was.
“If this was the norm, we would hear about it, there would be people out there talking about how dangerous it was, how painful it was, how traumatic it was,” she said. “But I wasn’t hearing that, so I thought that my experience must have been isolated.”
“While working in the abortion industry as the receptionist, I dispensed the abortion drug regimen,” Lester shared, “I handed these women a bag and I told them the same lies that had been told to me. I told them it’s going to be like a heavy period, you’re going to have light cramping. It’s going to be simple and easy. It’s the best thing for you.”
“I believed the lies that I was fed,” Lester said.
The post Victims of Chemical Abortions Speak Out as Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly insist that Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, illegally appointed the director of the state’s renamed Office of Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion. And they say they’re willing to give over $2 million more to commercial marijuana sellers to dramatize that point.
Created in 2020 under Youngkin’s predecessor, Democrat Ralph Northam, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion sprang from a concept popularized by the Left and commonly known as DEI.
However, in his second week as governor, Youngkin signed an executive order Jan. 19, 2022, removing the term “equity” from the office’s name and replacing it with “opportunity.“
In November 2022, the Republican governor appointed Martin Brown, who is black, as Virginia’s chief diversity, opportunity, and inclusion officer—as well as director of the renamed Office of Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion.
In response to Youngkin’s name change for the diversity office, Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, successfully offered an amendment to the state’s budget bill requiring that the office revert to its original name.
Youngkin has criticized the budget passed March 9 by the Virginia General Assembly, and the spending plan awaits the Republican governor’s signature. Democrats hold a 21-19 majority in the state Senate and a 51-49 majority in the House of Delegates.
In a statement emailed Monday to The Daily Signal, Surovell said he “introduced the amendment because the governor has refused to hire a chief DEI officer which is a position created and titled in state law.”
“If the governor is going to violate state law, the money needs to be directed,” the Senate majority leader added, apparently meaning “redirected.”
Surovell’s budget amendment requires Youngkin to change “Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion” back to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” by June 1, or the diversity office’s $2.3 million funding would go to the Virginia Cannabis Equity Business Loan Fund, a program to help licensed marijuana sellers.
“Governor Youngkin has been clear that he doesn’t have any interest in a retail market for marijuana; instead, we should be working to fix a backward budget written by Democrats that has $2.6 billion in new taxes on Virginia families,” Youngkin press secretary Christian Martinez said Monday in a written statement to The Daily Signal.
“Since the beginning of the administration, the governor has challenged the groupthink of the progressive Democrats’ pursuit of equity at any cost, instead focusing on advancing equal opportunities, not equal outcomes for all.”
Surovell didn’t respond before publication to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on why his amendment tied the sale of marijuana to the diversity office’s name change.
Last year, Surovell and Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, wrote to Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, inquiring whether Youngkin’s name change for the office violated state law.
In the letter, the two Democrats argued that Youngkin illegally renamed the office, saying the action violated the 2020 law that established the office in the executive branch with a director of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Here is the letter that @DonScott757 and I sent to @JasonMiyaresVA seeking an opinion regarding the Governor DEI actions – our first question is whether the Governor is bound by Virginia Law because apparently he doesn't think he is@FairfaxNAACP @charlottewords @LVozzella pic.twitter.com/E2PzbTvGL6
— Senator Scott Surovell (@ssurovell) May 2, 2023
The Senate and House leaders argued in their letter to the attorney general that Youngkin illegally named Brown as director since the governor didn’t appoint him to the office named in state law.
In his written statement to The Daily Signal, Surovell said Youngkin had “hired someone for that office [and] renamed the person a diversity, opportunity, and inclusion officer who then made offensive comments regarding equity.”
“DEI is dead,” Brown said last April in a speech at Virginia Military Institute referencing the office’s name change.
“We’re not going to bring that cow up anymore. It’s dead,” Brown said. “It was mandated by the General Assembly, but this governor has a different philosophy of civil discourse.”
The move caused an uproar in the General Assembly as many Democrats, joined by the Virginia chapter of the NAACP, demanded Brown’s resignation.
The governor’s office defended Brown at the time, saying that Youngkin would “continue to advance equal opportunities—not equal outcomes—for all Virginians.”
“This is too important of an issue to succumb to those seeking to cancel Chief Brown for challenging the groupthink of the progressive Left’s pursuit of equity at any cost,” the statement said.
Ken McIntyre contributed to this report, which was modified with additional details within 24 hours of publication.
The post Youngkin Stands Firm as Virginia Democrats Prefer to Give Millions to Pot Instead of Opportunity appeared first on The Daily Signal.
An Interior Department mining agency sought to purge its website and field offices of traditional language that could offend LGBTQ individuals, to comply with an executive order from President Joe Biden.
Employees of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement are directed to go through all agency messaging and remove language that presumes traditional views on gender or marriage, according to documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
Biden, who lied about being a coal-miner and has told miners to "learn to code" is now forcing miners to use woke LGBTQ+ terms
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) March 26, 2024
We got the documents from the @DOI @OSMRE ? pic.twitter.com/uKEJys0eYS
The documents also show that Interior’s mining agency sought new staff and more resources to change signage at regional and field offices throughout the country, to ensure sensitivity to the LGBTQ population. The agency has offices in 36 states.
One document about Biden’s executive order says the effort includes discarding any written assumptions that marriage is between one man and one woman, or “that a person’s gender is always either male or female.”
Traditional beliefs about men and women and marriage that have been held by the majority of people for all of history? Offensive and outdated. pic.twitter.com/YpJafUbd5m
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) March 26, 2024
Biden’s Executive Order 13988, signed on Jan. 20, 2021, his first day in office, is titled “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.”
Section 1 of the president’s executive order says:
It is the policy of my administration to prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, and to fully enforce Title VII and other laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. It is also the policy of my administration to address overlapping forms of discrimination.
Biden’s order goes on to say in Section 2:
The head of each agency shall, as soon as practicable and as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, including the Administrative Procedure Act (5 U.S.C. 551 et seq.), consider whether to revise, suspend, or rescind such agency actions, or promulgate new agency actions, as necessary to fully implement statutes that prohibit sex discrimination and the policy set forth in section 1 of this order.
In 2022, employees with Interior’s mining agency answered a questionnaire to help them spot potentially offensive language.
Among questions employees of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement were asked: “Does the language of this action use gendered pronouns?”
The agency flagged the term “manways” a technical term used in mapping, and “man-made,” but recommended no change.
This is what your taxpayer $$ is funding! pic.twitter.com/j1KkOkV6kp
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) March 26, 2024
The questionnaire, or checklist, allows for yes or no responses. It reads: “For any issues you describe in the previous item, how might they affect LGBTQIA+ people differently than other people, or otherwise be inconsistent with the policy in Section 1 of EO 13988?”
It adds: “His/her’ is inconsistent with the policy established in Section 1 of EO 13988.”
The mining agency needs more staff and resources to replace signage at field offices to ensure that offensive language isn’t posted, according to the documents.
“While conducting this review process, considerable time has been invested by the [Office of Communications] team members and other personnel,” a follow-up document in October 2022 says. It adds:
Action and Strategies to comply with EO 13988 (to review signage in regional and field offices to change or improve signage for persons who might identify as LGBTQIA+) will require additional personnel and resources, as well as collaboration with other OSMRE administrative office (OA) personnel.
A spokesperson for the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.
Editor’s note: The original version of this story incorrectly said the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement recommended replacing the words man-made and manway with neutral terms. The agency flagged those terms for consideration but recommended no action.
The post Here’s How Biden Agency Mandates Pro-LGBTQ Language on Marriage, Gender appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is calling for a federal investigation into reports that Planned Parenthood is providing aborted baby body parts to the University of California San Diego in exchange for “valuable consideration”—while also maintaining intellectual property rights over the fetal tissue.
“If confirmed, this relationship represents a flagrant violation of federal law, which explicitly prohibits the transfer of fetal tissue for any compensation,” Rubio wrote in a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, first obtained by The Daily Signal.
“I request that both of you open an investigation into the matter, publish your findings for the American people to see, and hold any guilty parties accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” he wrote.
The senator’s letter explains that the University of California San Diego and Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest entered into a contract in 2009, recently obtained by pro-life activist David Daleiden through a public records request, wherein Planned Parenthood would provide “fetal and placental tissue” to the university “for the purpose of deriving cell lines from and determining gene expression, genomic, and epigenetic profiles of the materials.”
Under that contract, Rubio said, Planned Parenthood retained “all right, title, and interest in and to the [fetal tissue], including … patents and patent applications and other intellectual property rights relating to the [fetal tissue].” And the university had agreed to provide Planned Parenthood with credit as the source of the baby tissue if any publications or studies resulted from its use.
Though federal law forbids acquiring, receiving, or transferring human fetal tissue for “valuable consideration,” the Planned Parenthood and University of California contract was made for “valuable consideration,” Rubio noted. He called the inclusion of the phrase “valuable consideration” in the contract “significant,” given that the language is specifically in federal law.
In the past, Planned Parenthood has publicly acknowledged payments for aborted fetal tissue but said that it was only reimbursed for actual costs. Soon after that acknowledgment in 2015, Planned Parenthood said it would no longer accept even reimbursements.
“Furthermore, the relationship between Planned Parenthood and UCSD [University of California San Diego] appears to be much more than a mere contract,” Rubio added. “Not only was Planned Parenthood providing the aborted fetal tissue in exchange for ‘valuable consideration,’ but emails between the groups show that Planned Parenthood and UCSD were actively collaborating and meeting at regular intervals to discuss the progress of the research.”
One of the newly obtained documents shows a $10,000 donation from the university to Planned Parenthood as recently as 2021, the senator said.
The Florida Republican pointed out that the University of Pittsburgh is already under investigation for its “experimentation on aborted babies and its cozy relationship with Planned Parenthood.”
His letter specifically calls on the Department of Justice to uncover how many babies Planned Parenthood gave to the university, what the fetal tissue was used for, how much money the university had given to Planned Parenthood, how much Planned Parenthood has gained monetarily from its control over the intellectual property rights of the fetal tissue, and whether the National Institutes of Health or other agencies have provided funding for that fetal tissue research.
The New York Times reported in 2015 that the NIH had spent “$76 million on research using fetal tissue in 2014 with grants to more than 50 universities.” Those universities included the University of California San Diego, according to the publication.
And the Times acknowledged at the time that companies that were obtaining fetal tissue from abortionists and selling it to laboratories were existing in a “gray zone, legally,” since “federal law says they cannot profit from the tissue itself, but the law does not specify how much they can charge for processing and shipping.”
“I ask that you launch an investigation into University of California San Diego and its use of Planned Parenthood’s aborted fetal tissue in an apparent violation of federal law,” Rubio concluded. “Both of these organizations receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year, and the American people deserve answers.”
Rubio’s letter comes amid multiple disturbing reports about fetal tissue and the handling of aborted baby bodies. In February, lawmakers raised an outcry over the possibility that the Washington, D.C., medical examiner might dispose of the bodies of five preemie-sized aborted baby bodies from the Washington Surgi-Clinic located in downtown Washington. Those babies are related to the DOJ’s case against pro-life activist Lauren Handy, her attorney argued.
On March 25, 2022, five murdered babies were found outside of the Washington Surgi-Center
— Rep. Chip Roy Press Office (@RepChipRoy) March 25, 2024
2 years later, the DOJ is trying to brush their death under the rug
Congress must investigate this case and reassert its constitutional power over Washington D.C. to protect human life pic.twitter.com/84so8vewov
And last week, as The Daily Signal’s Elizabeth Troutman reported, pro-life activist Daleiden released videos purportedly showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing mutilating the bodies of living babies to bypass federal law against partial-birth abortions.
Daleiden told The Daily Signal that the footage, revealed during a House of Representatives hearing led by Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, adds to Planned Parenthood’s record of barbarism toward premature babies.
Daleiden posed as a fetal tissue procurer to secretly record and publish videos of Planned Parenthood employees in 2013 and 2014 allegedly discussing the sale of fetal body parts. Planned Parenthood has accused Daleiden of deceptively editing the videos. The abortion giant sued Daleiden and his organization, the Center for Medical Progress.
“The new videos show Planned Parenthood’s financial interest in selling the body parts from aborted babies is even bigger than previously discussed, and their criminal intent is irrefutably documented,” Daleiden told The Daily Signal last week. “The new footage also shows the barbaric lengths Planned Parenthood will go to in order to cover up their illegal abortion harvesting.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: Rubio Calls for DOJ to Investigate Planned Parenthood’s Handling of Aborted Baby Tissue appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—To comply with an executive order from President Joe Biden, the Peace Corps pushed to make its headquarters a voter registration center, upped efforts to register U.S. citizens abroad, and moved to supply multilingual voter registration forms.
The Peace Corps, a federal agency, assigns volunteers to provide services and meet needs in over 60 countries.
The agency released its plan to implement Biden’s order late last week in response to a request by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project under the Freedom of Information Act. (The Daily Signal is the news and commentary outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
The Peace Corps completed a Sept. 23, 2021, draft of “the compliance plan that Peace Corps is prepared to execute” to implement Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which requires federal agencies to help boost voting.
“Overseas citizens are protected by federal law that does not require an ID to vote,” the Peace Corps plan says, a reference to voter ID requirements in many states. “Only requirement is SS# [Social Security number] and overseas address. For domestic citizens, Peace Corps will include usa.gov/voter-id hyperlink on the landing page, which provides information on voter ID requirements.”
The Peace Corps’ strategic plan says the agency will connect more citizens in the U.S. as well as citizens living abroad to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, known as FVAP, for information about registering and voting.
“For overseas citizens, registration forms are only in English; however, Peace Corps can highlight that FVAP has registration instructions in French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. Provide translated instructions to post via Diplomatic Pouch. For domestic citizens, we can provide those same instructions either in hard copy format or pdf,” the plan says.
Biden’s order, issued in March 2021, required most federal agencies to submit a strategic plan for getting out the vote.
House Republicans advanced legislation to rescind the Biden executive order on elections, asserting that it could put the federal government’s thumb on the scale in elections.
Meanwhile, GOP state legislators in Pennsylvania have sued to challenge the constitutionality of Biden’s order.
The Peace Corps is at least the third agency to make a plan public even as the Justice Department invokes presidential privilege to block release of its own strategic plan to implement Biden’s order.
“If requested by the District of Columbia, Peace Corps HQ agrees to be designated as a voter registration agency,” the strategic plan says.
Neither the Peace Corps nor the D.C. city government responded to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this report.
The Daily Signal previously reported, based on documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act, that taxpayer-backed federal agencies were partnering with transparently left-leaning organizations—among them Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union—to implement Biden’s executive order.
The Peace Corps plan mentions working with nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, but doesn’t specify which groups.
“For domestic citizens, invite NGOs to Peace Corps HQ to provide informational seminars to staff, unless COVID keeps Peace Corps HQ at Phase I. If so, invite NGOs to conduct virtual informational seminars,” the plan says.
The agency’s plan uses 12 steps to explain how the agency will expand its website to promote greater voter participation.
“Peace Corps will build out an information/landing page on peacecorps.gov (a public website), PC Live and Intranet (for both staff and Volunteers) that covers both domestic and overseas access to voting,” the plan says, adding:
For overseas citizens, have FAQ [frequently asked questions] and video to show How to Register. Provide the hyperlink to the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) which provides registration services/information to overseas citizens. Additionally, Peace Corps will use State Department’s Diplomatic Pouch to distribute voter registration forms to each post. For domestic citizens, include vote.gov hyperlink on the landing page, which provides access to on-line registration forms.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Biden’s Peace Corps Pushes Expanded Overseas Voting appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Washington Post and TikTok are under fire over apparent attempts to discredit stories women have been sharing about the negative effects of hormonal birth control on their physical and mental health.
The Post reported Thursday that “women are getting off birth control amid [a] misinformation explosion,” referring to the onslaught of viral videos of young women in their teens and 20s discussing how dramatically their lives have improved since getting off hormonal birth control and using natural fertility awareness methods.
“For more and more Gen Z women, there’s an intuitive sense that hormonal birth control might be messing with us, and our brains,” one young woman wrote for the New York Post. “And research is backing it up, showing correlations between the pill and a decreased sex drive, as well as higher rates of depression and suicide, and even stress reactions similar to [post-traumatic stress disorder] survivors.”
“Many of my friends are independently doing the same, whether it’s driven by concern for their mental health, desire for something more natural—or curiosity about what the world looks like when you’re not in a hormonal fog,” she added.
Written by Lauren Weber and Sabrina Malhi, The Washington Post article boasts that “TikTok recently removed at least five videos linking birth control to mental health issues and other health problems after The Post asked how the company prevents the spread of misinformation.”
One of those videos was from The Daily Wire’s Brett Cooper, who argued that birth control can have an effect on who women are attracted to, as well as affect their weight gain and their fertility. That video “racked up over 219,000 ‘likes’ before TikTok removed it following The Post’s inquiry,” the newspaper noted.
TikTok did not immediately explain to The Daily Signal whether it vetted Weber and Malhi’s claims of misinformation before it removed the videos. Weber and Malhi did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Alex Clark, host of “The Spillover” podcast, who has drawn fire for her outspokenness on the harms of birth control, called The Washington Post piece “dishonest reporting” that suggests only conservatives are against hormonal birth control.
“Women of all political backgrounds have been screaming from the rooftops that [hormonal birth control] has led to a litany of health issues all the way back to the ’70s,” Clark explained to The Daily Signal. “Teenage girls are prescribed birth control like candy. No in-depth conversation is had about side effects, and now those teenage girls have grown up, have differing political views, and are dealing with the physical consequences of HBC.”
Clark maintains that birth control is pushed upon women by the pharmaceutical industry as a huge moneymaker.
“Big Pharma is doing everything they can to squash this conversation, because women are their biggest cash cow,” she said. “Get us on birth control as teens. Recommend antidepressants for the side effects. Birth control works as a band-aid covering up warning signs of deeper hormonal or fertility issues.”
“When we’re ready to have a family, we find out,” she added. “Now, we need to pay [$20,000] for fertility treatments. Birth control is the gateway prescription drug to a lifetime of being Big Pharma-reliant. If they lose the next generation of young women on birth control, they worry they won’t have us hooked for life. It was never about women. It was always about our money.”
The anti-birth control movement is not conservative, historically or currently. It started in the 1970s by a group of feminist, liberal women who spoke up and risked their reputations questioning Big Pharma at the Nelson Pill hearings.
— Alex Clark (@yoalexrapz) March 24, 2024
Emma Waters, a senior research associate in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, also pointed out to The Daily Signal that current resistance to birth control has little to do with religion or politics. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“For years now, women have been sounding the alarm about the harms of hormonal birth control,” Waters said. “In many cases, it has little to do with religious or ideological belief. Women are tired of a ‘one sized fits all’ approach to health care that actively harms them. Gen Z women have had enough.”
The viral accounts and videos about birth control and its effects show Gen Z “rebelling against the hyper-medicalized approach to dealing with any issue, from acne to painful or inconsistent hormonal cycles,” Waters said.
And the researcher suggested that those defending birth control may be more out of touch than they realize.
“Frankly, The Washington Post piece really showed its age as older millennials lectured and dismissed the very real women whose own stories about the harms of hormonal birth control are driving this movement to make women, not Big Pharma, the driver in women’s reproductive health,” she added.
Lila Rose, the founder of the pro-life organization Live Action, called TikTok’s censorship of Cooper’s video “insane and ridiculous,” adding that the “harms of birth control are well-documented, and the fact that TikTok is deleting content criticizing birth control should concern everyone.”
“To be anti-fertility is to be anti-woman,” Rose told The Washington Post, “and the proliferation of hormonal birth control is just another way of trying to force women to be more like men, with significant consequences for our emotional and physical health.”
The Washington Post wrote about me and my company in an article titled “Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion.”
— Brittany Martinez (@BritMartinez) March 23, 2024
It was a horrible (yet predictable) hatchet job full of fear-mongering and, ironically, misinformation. @LaurenWeberHP, you should be… pic.twitter.com/glfEJwiydu
And Brittany Martinez, the founder of Evie magazine, told The Washington Post’s Weber that she should be ashamed of “contributing to the mass gaslighting and dismissing of women’s horrible experiences on birth control.”
“I’d say you are out of touch and uninformed at best, but you’re also directly complicit in TikTok censoring and removing viral videos of women speaking out,” she added.
Research psychologist Sarah Hill, who went off the pill herself and experienced positive health effects, told the New York Post earlier this year that after going off the pill, “I had a lot more energy, and I was exercising and cooking again. Suddenly, I was interested in sex.”
She credits the pandemic with helping young women take a serious look at their health.
“The pandemic allowed us to focus attention on our health,” Hill told the New York Post. “For women who were not in relationships and weren’t sexually active, it was an opportunity to break up with their birth control … . They wanted to find out how they would think and feel and experience the world without it.”
“This generation of women is demanding they get information about what’s going into their body,” Hill added. “A younger generation of women are saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. You can’t just tell me what to put in my body and expect me to blindly obey.’”
Dr. Taraneh Shirazian, a gynecologist at NYU Langone Health, similarly told the publication that she sees a “generational shift” in attitudes toward birth control.
“I have noticed that many patients prefer non-hormonal birth control,” she explained. “Many are keen on limiting their body’s exposure to outside hormones so that they can feel more natural and like themselves.”
The post Washington Post, TikTok Target Young Women Speaking Up About Birth Control appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Daily Caller News Foundation and Judicial Watch have asked a Delaware court to reopen their case seeking the release of President Joe Biden’s Senate records held at the University of Delaware.
Special counsel Robert Hur’s February report on his investigation into Biden’s retention of classified documents contained findings that contradicted the university’s claims that no tax dollars were used in processing the records sought by the Daily Caller News Foundation and Judicial Watch.
The Delaware Supreme Court previously sided with the university in July, shielding the documents from release.
“The stunning revelations from the Hur report extend beyond the president’s memory lapses and mental state,” Daily Caller News Foundation Editor-in-Chief Michael Bastasch said. “The court needs to reopen this case to determine whether the University of Delaware lied.”
Judicial Watch initially sued the university on behalf of itself and the Daily Caller News Foundation in July 2020 after it denied the request, claiming the records were not related to the expenditure of public funds.
Documents requested by the Daily Caller News Foundation included agreements relating to the storage of 1,850 boxes and 415 gigabytes of records from Biden’s 1973 to 2009 Senate career, as well as communications between university staff and Biden’s staff, log sheets of individuals who have visited the collection, and the actual collection records.
“In sum, the report shows that President Biden directed his former staffers’ work in reviewing and cataloging the Senate papers, received the benefit thereof—and the university paid for it,” the Daily Caller News Foundation and Judicial Watch motion filed with the Superior Court of the state of Delaware states. “Such payments constitute consideration paid on President Biden’s behalf in connection with the donation of senatorial papers to the university—contrary to the representations in the supplemented affidavit.”
Biden gave his records to the university on the condition that they would not be publicly released until “they have been properly processed and archived,” according to the university’s website. They have been housed at the university since 2012.
“The search for Senate documents took place at Mr. Biden’s direction, required the participation of many, and was paid for by the university,” the motion continues. “Even the university general counsel was involved in coordinating with Mr. Biden’s chief of staff.”
Hur’s report noted that Biden “asked two of his former longtime Senate staffers to review his boxes in courtesy storage” in the spring of 2011 in preparation to donate the papers. The staffers “were paid by the University of Delaware to perform the pre-gift review,” according to the report.
“The Hur report provides disturbing evidence the University of Delaware misled the courts in order to hide Biden’s Senate papers,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
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The post Did University of Delaware Lie About Biden’s Senate Papers? Lawsuit Seeks Answers. appeared first on The Daily Signal.
For the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, the partisan Democrats of our “legacy media” treated the “Pelosi-Picked Panel” on Jan. 6 as a dominant story, worthy of hundreds of hours of television, both live coverage of the hearings and breathless cycles of previews and reviews.
Once Republicans took over the House, would we have predicted this kind of committee oversight coverage would go from “hero” to “zero”?
On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee held public hearings that were supposed to feature live testimony by Hunter Biden. The GOP-led committee titled the hearing “Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office,” which was already a turnoff for Biden-voter reporters.
That night, NBC offered two minutes. ABC and CBS did nothing. In January, Hunter Biden pulled a stunt by showing up and demanding a public hearing, and the networks covered that. On Feb. 28, Hunter showed up for a hearing behind closed doors, and the networks covered that. But when he skipped the public hearing he allegedly wanted, they skipped the story?
Even those prestigious national newspapers—with the slogans about “All the News That’s Fit to Print” and “Democracy Dies in Darkness”—offered a big fat zero in their print editions. Nothing on Joe Biden’s abuse of office was published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal.
Then consider “public” broadcasting—the ones who have automatic and undeserved prestige because of their “for the people” branding. The “PBS NewsHour” offered nothing, not 10 hot seconds. It offered eight minutes on a potential government shutdown, so its journalists were working on Capitol Hill.
The taxpayer-funded hour also carried five minutes on the “controversial” Texas border-enforcement law, five minutes on the Biden administration setting a timeline for ending the gasoline-powered automobile, and almost seven minutes on a Mississippi police “goon squad” that brutalized some black men. “Systemic racism” is always a staple.
National “Public” Radio was a bad joke, as in its show “All Things Considered” never considered a story on the Biden abuses hearing. NPR’s homepage was topped the next morning by its hot story: new details on Rupert Murdoch’s British phone-hacking scandal of 2011. Its media reporter, David Folkenflik, files a hostile story on Murdoch or Fox News on a regular basis, like he was an operative being paid by MSNBC and CNN.
NPR had a Biden mention on its homepage. Its young White House reporter, Deepa Shivaram, had a TikTok-like video shoot on Joe Biden grabbing a trendy boba tea in Las Vegas under the headline “Food stops can tell you a lot about a campaign.” Shilling Shivaram cheerfully explained, “Asian Americans make up a critical voting bloc in Nevada,” and, “Experts on food and politics say that Biden ordering this could also send a message to people who think he’s too old for the job.”
I scrolled all the way down the homepage looking for a Biden-hearing story, to no avail. At the very bottom, there was this news from the insect world: “Scientists studied how cicadas pee. Their insights could shed light on fluid dynamics.”
That makes it easy to describe the quality of NPR’s coverage of the Biden family scandals. It’s a warm bucket of cicada urine.
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By a vote of 286-134 over conservatives’ objections, the House passed a $1.2 trillion spending package late Friday morning, avoiding a partial government shutdown but putting House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in jeopardy of losing the speakership.
The bill now goes to the Senate, where it is expected to pass because Democrats have a working 51-49 majority with three independents.
The 1,000-plus-page package of bills includes funding for the State, Education, Defense, Labor, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services departments in fiscal year 2024 as well as for “general government and foreign operations” and the Internal Revenue Service, The Hill reported.
The spending package met significant opposition from conservatives who blasted the combined bills as a surrender to the Left before and after the package passed.
#SwampOmnibus pic.twitter.com/HJBsavXqks
— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) March 22, 2024
With 218 House seats to Democrats’ 213, plus four vacancies, Republicans hold a five-vote majority.
“More Republicans voted against the DC Cartel’s minibus than voted for it,” Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., tweeted. “112-101. The Uniparty has once again sold Americans out.”
More Republicans voted against the DC Cartel's minibus than voted for it.
— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) March 22, 2024
112-101.
The Uniparty has once again sold Americans out.
“Once again, the D.C. Cartel has unified against the American people. We are now on the hook for another $1.2 TRILLION in spending,” Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., said in an X post. “We call it the uniparty for this reason exactly, not even a majority of the majority agreed with this bill.”
A majority of Republicans voted against the #SwampOmnibus.
— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) March 22, 2024
Unfortunately, 101 Republicans joined Democrats to pass this $1.2 trillion boondoggle that fully funds Biden’s “open borders” policies and includes earmarks for late-term abortions and transgender organizations. Insane. pic.twitter.com/L3EcOmR6Xv
Although more Republicans in the House opposed the bill than supported it, some came out in favor of its passage, as the conservative House Freedom Caucus noted.
“Democracy is messy,” Johnson said on CNBC the day before, as the House speaker acknowledged opposition to the spending package from conservatives. “It’s particularly messy right now and in a moment like this, but we have to get the job done and there are some very substantial wins in here.”
House Democrats mostly supported the spending bill, with just 22 voting against it.
“We had to work within difficult fiscal constraints—but this bipartisan compromise will keep our country moving forward,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, said Thursday.
Heritage Action for America, the grassroots arm of The Heritage Foundation, issued a press release Thursday evening detailing what’s wrong with the spending bill and identifying it as a key “no” vote on the organization’s legislative scorecard. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news and commentary outlet.)
?KEY VOTE?
— Heritage Action (@Heritage_Action) March 21, 2024
Heritage Action OPPOSES the Second FY24 Six-Bill Minibus (Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024).
This $1.2 trillion spending package continues the disastrous spending that fuels inflation & funds Biden’s border crisis.
Learn more?https://t.co/jI8QI3uNI4 pic.twitter.com/tTqND0OXX7
“This bill doesn’t deviate from Congress’ charted course toward financial catastrophe and participation in the border crisis,” the key-vote description reads. “Inflation and job losses caused by Congress’ failures to cut spending penalizes America’s working class and those struggling to afford the American dream. The American people have pleaded for responsible spending and border security for years, but unfortunately, this minibus represents a continuation of business as usual.”
A majority of Republicans just voted against the $1.2 trillion spending bill packed with earmarks and funding for Biden's border crisis.
— Cody Sargent (@codydsargent) March 22, 2024
Their commitment to conservative principles will be reflected on the @Heritage_Action scorecard.
Why we opposed:https://t.co/AVbne7Kb1X
Many lawmakers criticized the bill for spending so much but doing so little to provide border security.
“Less than 24 hrs to review – the #SwampOmnibus – 1000+ pages & $1.2 Trillion – busts spending caps to fund the WHO, woke DOD, a weaponized FBI new headq, & 100% fails to stop Progressive Democrats’ mass releases of criminals across our borders,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, wrote Thursday in a post on X.
Some proponents said voting against the spending package would be a boon to China. Opponents countered that the bill would empower potential Chinese terrorists who are crossing the border.
“A vote for today’s atrocious spending bill is a vote for Chinese terrorism,” Biggs wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “We’ve had over 30,000 illegal aliens from China cross our border under this Administration’s border policies. You vote for it, you own it.”
A vote for today's atrocious spending bill is a vote for Chinese terrorism.
— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) March 22, 2024
We've had over 30,000 illegal aliens from China cross our border under this Administration's border policies.
You vote for it, you own it. pic.twitter.com/nlrLGh99IU
“Well, the D.C. cartel is at it again. They released a $1.2 trillion minibus at 2:32 a.m. this morning, giving us somewhere in the neighborhood of about 48 hours to review it before they’re going to bring it up for a vote,” Rosendale said in a video he shared on X.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., filed a motion Friday to vacate the chair, meaning to remove Johnson from the speakership after only five months. Greene told reporters that the move isn’t personal, but reflects the views of other House conservatives.
BREAKING NEWS — @RepMTG has filed a motion to vacate @SpeakerJohnson, according to multiple sources on the House floor.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) March 22, 2024
Stay tuned for more info…..
Ken McIntyre contributed to this report, which is a developing story that will continue to be updated.
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The post Conservatives Protest as House Passes $1.2 Trillion Spending Package appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON DAILY SIGNAL: A District of Columbia library sought to engage a drag queen with a criminal background to perform at pride-themed Drag Story Hours for children.
A staff member at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library solicited drag queen Latrice Royale, otherwise known as Timothy Wilcots, to sing and dance in drag before children, according to an email obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet).
According to that May 17, 2023, email, the library employee was under the impression that the LGBTQ organization the Human Rights Campaign would pay the drag queen’s travel fees and $10,000 performance fee. Wilcots ultimately proved too pricey for the event, the HRC’s Brandon Hooks shared in a later email (neither Hooks nor the HRC responded to requests for comment).
“Before I ping her manager again, I just want to make sure HRC would be able to cover 10k fee plus, hotel, ground, and air. Please let me know if this is possible,” wrote the library’s youth services manager, Paula Langsam. The library did not immediately address The Daily Signal’s inquiries.
I’m 52 today!!! #BirthdayGirl pic.twitter.com/SlDqcMniVt
— Latrice Royale Inc. (@LatriceRoyale) February 12, 2024
That email was addressed to both Hooks and Amy Oden of the HRC. The email’s subject line read: “Pride Family Day at MLK Update.”
Wilcots, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, was previously arrested and incarcerated for possession of oxycodone, clonazepam, cannabis, and ecstasy, court records show.
Wilcots has described his time in prison in a number of media interviews since then.
The library’s interest in Wilcots, despite his criminal background, underscores concerns that drag queen story hour organizers are failing to perform background checks on the adults who dress in drag and read LGBTQ books to children at drag queen story hours.
Wilcots is a biological man who stands at 6 feet, 4 inches tall, weighing almost 400 pounds. When dolled up and wearing heels, one media report says, Wilcots “towers close to seven feet tall.” He is legally married to a man, describes himself as “large and in charge chunky yet funky bold and beautiful,” and has over a million followers on social media.
Drag queen story hours began as niche events on the West Coast that spread to libraries and schools across the U.S. The official Drag Queen Story Hour website boasts of almost 50 independently operated chapters across the U.S., including in New York City, D.C., and Chicago, as well as two international chapters in Tokyo and in Berlin.
According to the Drag Queen Story Hour’s official website, the events are designed to be about 45 minutes long for children aged 3 to 8 years old and intended to capture children’s imagination and help children explore their gender fluidity through “glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.”
For example, The Daily Signal previously reported that drag queen “VV Majesty” led a Capital Pride Alliance drag queen story hour in Washington, D.C., where “VV Majesty” read a book about a trans-identifying little boy to toddlers.
The drag queen was dressed in a voluminous tulle princess dress with a black bodice and an exposed red bra—a “fairy rose princess,” as the drag queen told The Daily Signal. He also sported a long black wig, a three-horned crown with red paper roses on it, and a large glittery necklace.
Critics on both sides of the aisle have expressed strong concerns about lasciviously dressed men, often in corsets, heels, wigs, and heavy makeup, reading books about gender ideology to very young children.
These concerns are heightened by news reports, such as the arrest of a Milwaukee judge on child pornography charges. That judge was the former president of an organization sponsoring Drag Queen Story Hour
The Justice Department sentenced Brett Blomme in December 2021 to nine years in prison followed by 20 years of supervised release for distributing child pornography showing abuse of young boys. At his sentencing, District Judge James Peterson described the child pornography that Blomme was distributing as “the worst of the worst.”
Drag queens who perform for children at story hours insist that they are well intentioned.
“I’m a nonviolent offender, not a child molester, or a pedophile,” Wilcots reportedly said in an interview with NewNowNext. “I wasn’t standing in front of schools targeting kids.”
Today in DC: a @CapitalPrideDC sponsored drag queen story hour takes place at Stead Park. Drag queen reads a book about gender ideology to a big crowd of little kids and enthusiastic parents. pic.twitter.com/GrZ7LBQHBq
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) June 10, 2023
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When veteran pollster Scott Rasmussen surveyed a group of Americans he calls the elite 1% earlier this year, he discovered a startling number who say it’s OK to win an election by cheating.
The elite 1%—individuals who make over $150,000 a year, live in densely populated areas, and have postgraduate degrees—are overwhelmingly liberal. They give President Joe Biden an 82% approval rating, compared to his 40% average from the rest of Americans.
Rasmussen asked these liberal voters: “Suppose that your favorite candidate loses a close election. However, people on the campaign know that they can win by cheating without being caught. Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?”
Among all Americans, just 7% said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. But that number rose to 35% among the elite 1% and skyrocketed to 69% among those who are part of the politically obsessed 1%, meaning they talk about politics every day.
“I’ve been polling for a very long time and the last finding is the most terrifying poll result I’ve ever seen,” Rasmussen told The Daily Signal.
Rasmussen spoke to “The Daily Signal Podcast” about his findings and his upcoming plans for a weekly TV show. Listen to the full interview or read an edited transcript below.
Rob Bluey: Your firm, RMG Research, takes a different approach to polling and public opinion, trying to understand where voters stand on key issues. You’ve coined the term counterpolling. Tell us what that means.
Scott Rasmussen: Counterpolling is designed literally to counter misleading information that’s that comes out from a lot of establishment polls. Our belief is that most public opinion polling that comes out of Washington is presented and analyzed in the language of a Georgetown cocktail party. They use words that nobody else in America uses.
We go out and we make a strong effort to ask questions in the language of everyday Americans. We respect voters. We think they are intelligent. We have great hopes for the commonsense wisdom of the American people, but we also know they have better things to do with their lives than talk politics every day.
Bluey: It reminds me of after the 2016 presidential election when so many media organizations had a reckoning that they were out of touch with everyday Americans.
Rasmussen: We start by trying to understand. We don’t want to get into the innards of what you think about this policy detail vs. that policy detail. We want to know their attitudes. We want to know because that is something that is constant.
I’ve been polling on immigration for decades. And you know what’s never changed. About 80% of Americans say legal immigration is good for America and about 80% say illegal immigration is bad for America. That’s constant.
Bluey: One of the polls you did recently was on what you call the elite 1%. Can you give us some toplines on what you learned?
Rasmussen: The elite 1 % are people who make at least $150,000 a year. They live in a densely populated urban area, more than 10,000 people per square mile. And they have a postgraduate degree.
That last one is very important. We hear a lot about the diploma divide—that people with a college degree are more Democratic. Actually, it’s the postgrads who are different. The gap between postgraduates and people with a bachelor’s degree is often bigger than the gap between people with a bachelor’s and without a bachelor’s degree.
The elite 1% represent 1% of the population. They are extraordinarily influential. A heavy concentration of them went to one of 12 elite schools. The reason I bring that up is about half the policy positions in government, half the corporate board positions in America, are held by people who went to one of these dozen schools.
Their views really play a large role in the country, and it all feeds into this elite 1%.
They are in power centers. Somebody who is in Manhattan or Washington, D.C., is in a different circle of public influence than somebody who lives in McKinney, Texas.
If you’re thinking of who’s shaping the mainstream media narrative, it’s this group.
The Elite 1% are even more out of touch than you think https://t.co/q1Um2YuqSy
— Scott Rasmussen (@ScottWRasmussen) January 26, 2024
Bluey: The biggest headline for me was what this group thinks about the issue of cheating in elections. Can you unpack that one for us?
Rasmussen: We asked voters, 1,000 voters, to suppose there was an election and it was close but your candidate lost. And if their campaign team knew they could win by cheating and not get caught, would you want them to do so?
Among voters, only 7% say they’d rather cheat than win. I wish it was 1% or 2%, but 7% is not bad. Among the elite 1%, 35% would rather cheat than win. Then among a group that we call the politically obsessed elite—people who are not only in the elite 1%, but they talk politics every day—69% of them would rather cheat to win the election.
It’s because they don’t have much respect for the opinions of voters.
Bluey: What are their views on government compared to the general population?
Rasmussen: Let’s start with a very simple one. Most Americans think we don’t have enough individual freedom. Among the elite 1%, about half say, “No, we’ve got too much freedom.” And among that politically obsessed group, about 7 out of 10 say, “There’s too much individual freedom in America.”
That’s just mindboggling to me, but part of the reason is because they trust government. In America, it’s been 50 years since most voters trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. But among the elite 1%, 70% trust the government.
When I look at all the data, there’s a sense that most of us believe in government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And I think they would say, it’s of and by the elites that is what’s best for the people. They really believe that if they could just make the decisions and get us out of the way, we would be a lot better off.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN NUMBER OF THE DAY:
— Scott Rasmussen (@ScottWRasmussen) January 29, 2024
47% of the Elite 1% of American voters believe that the U.S. provides too much individual freedom.
In contrast, a separate survey found that most voters (57%) believe there is too much government control. pic.twitter.com/1UTXTYNDt5
Bluey: As somebody who’s been in the polling business for a long time, what is it that keeps you going?
Rasmussen: I remain convinced that most of the polling data is misleading. Most of the data that guides the polling narrative is misleading. And as someone who believes deeply in our nation’s founding values, I want to lift up the voice of the people so loudly that it can’t be ignored in this city.
That’s the objective. We want to transform the debate. We want to help people see most Americans still embrace those founding ideals.
It just offends me to no end to see this misleading impression of the American people. And by the way, as a people, we are far more united than we are politically. In our day-to-day lives, there’s an awful lot of unity and common ground.
Bluey: On April 7, “The Scott Rasmussen Show” will premiere. Could you give us some details on the show and where people can tune in to watch?
Rasmussen: It’s going to be on the Merit Street Media, which is Dr. Phil’s new television network. It’ll be available everywhere. And I’m sure that they’ll have something on the website to tell you about specifics in your local area.
The show came about because of the counterpolling concept and because of my belief that most Americans still believe in those founding ideals and traditional values.
The show is going to be a lot of politics because as a pollster you can’t get away from that. But we’re also going to touch on other things. We’ll do some holiday types of stories and how people are reacting to cultural twists.
My favorite polling question every year is about New Year’s Eve. Most people are shocked to learn that more Americans pray than drink on New Year’s Eve. Now, that’s because a lot of Americans pray every day. It’s not because they’re out there just on that one day. That’s just a different perspective of the world. And we want to highlight that. Again, it’s all part of lifting the voice of the American people up so loudly that you can’t ignore it.
The post ‘Most Terrifying Poll Result I’ve Ever Seen’: Scott Rasmussen Surveys America’s Elite 1% appeared first on The Daily Signal.
As an historian, I found it fascinating to watch the Left try to impose new language to describe people in the country illegally.
The Left has gradually pushed accepted language away from “illegal aliens” (the term in law), to “illegal immigrants” (the most common term), to “undocumented immigrants” (the Left’s current favorite term), and now to “newcomers” (the Joe Biden White House’s latest experiment in gaining language dominance).
It all reminds me of Vladimir Lenin’s great language coup of 1903.
The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party met secretly in Brussels. (The czar’s secret police made it impossible to meet openly in Russia.) At the meeting there was a split between Lenin’s hard-line revolutionary faction and a more moderate democratic wing.
Lenin’s faction was the smaller group, but it claimed the title Bolshevik (which means “greater faction” or majority). Group with the most votes were foolish enough to accept the title Lenin gave them, which was Menshevik, meaning minority. That language dominance and branding gave Lenin an enormous advantage in the following two-decade struggle to overthrow the czar and create Soviet Russia.
At least as far back as the French Revolution, the Left has had a passion for labeling things and ideas to gain language dominance. This process as applied to illegal immigration began at least 25 years ago for me.
That’s when I first remember being lectured that using the term “illegal immigrants” was wrong, and I should learn to say “undocumented.”
I thought this was nuts then, and I still do now. By definition, the people we were describing are illegal. Their first act on entering the United States is to break the law. Their decision to do so is an insult to every legal immigrant who patiently followed the rules and entered the United States legally.
In late February, the Biden White House had a handout, which said, “The bill also includes $1.4 billion for cities and states who are providing critical services to newcomers.” The reaction to replacing “illegal immigrant” with “newcomer” was so harsh that the Biden team dropped it. But its goal was clear.
This process of normalizing weird and radical ideas goes on constantly on the Left. Think of pushing transgenderism on children, kneeling during the Pledge of Allegiance, ignoring the destruction caused by the Black Lives Matter riots, etc.
The problem for the Left is that illegal immigration may be the battlefield on which they can’t win.
The latest absurdity began when Biden responded to jeers from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., during his State of the Union address. He said, “Lincoln (sic) Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal. That’s right. But how many of thousands of people are being killed by legals?”
Note that even in acknowledging a young woman who was killed by an illegal immigrant, Biden had to immediately cover it with thousands being killed by legal immigrants and citizens. The illegal immigrant could not be the focus.
Of course, he got Riley’s first name wrong, but the Left immediately attacked him for using the term “illegal.” That included former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Biden promptly began trying to backtrack. In an interview with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart on the following Saturday, Biden acknowledged his sin of language, “I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal.’ it’s ‘undocumented.’”
But Biden couldn’t stop there. He had to be pro-illegal immigrant. “I’m not going to treat any, any, any of these people with disrespect. Look, they built the country. The reason our economy is growing,” he said.
Biden’s defense of illegal immigration hurt him with the average American—and his use of “illegal” hurt him with his left-wing allies.
His confusion made him look weak. So, in another act of language dominance, the White House simply decided he really never apologized for saying “illegal” in the first place.
As The Hill reported:
White House deputy spokesperson Olivia Dalton attempted to clarify on Monday, telling a reporter that ‘the president absolutely did not apologize’ despite his expression of regret.
‘There was no apology anywhere in that conversation,” Dalton told reporters on Air Force One. “He did not apologize. He used a different word. I think what we should be really clear about is the facts.’
Biden (and his press team) may be confused, but the American people are not. As Scott Rasmussen reported:
Our recent polling found that 55% of voters believe ‘illegal immigrant’ is the proper term and another 8% prefer ‘illegal alien.’ While 63% favor use of ‘illegal,’ just 24% prefer ‘undocumented migrant.’
Among traditional Democrats, 54% prefer ‘illegal’ and 33% ‘undocumented.’ But [Bernie] Sanders Democrats prefer ‘undocumented’ by a 48% to 30% margin. It is the progressive Democrats who forced Biden to apologize. This just moves him even further from the mainstream.
Let’s be clear: Laken Riley was reportedly killed by an illegal immigrant. That illegal immigrant was in Athens, Ga., because of Biden’s insane policies, which favor an open border and prioritize illegal immigrants over American citizens.
No word games can overcome those facts.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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The post Biden, the Left Channel Lenin in Language Manipulation on Illegal Immigration appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A nonprofit organization dedicated to “assisting migrants with their paperwork and legal needs” in New York City has been caught on video illegally filling out residency documents for a man without procuring any form of identification from him.
Video shot by Muckraker.com and obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project appears to show the nonprofit organization, La Jornada, saying that distributing such documents is against the law but then proceeding to do so with another person the next day. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
The video also shows the organization distributing paperwork to get a government-issued New York City identification card through the city’s IDNYC program.
Such a process suggests that an illegal alien easily could get a city ID card under a phony name through the nonprofit.
La Jornada, which operates out of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Queens, describes itself as an organization that is “helping migrants navigate the complex asylum processes and other legal procedures.”
The organization’s website states that La Jornada is “committed to justice and equality” and adds that “we strive to provide comprehensive support and expert guidance to those seeking safety and opportunities in a new country.”
The video, narrated by Muckraker.com founder Anthony Rubin, first shows him speaking to La Jornada employees about obtaining residency documents. Rubin tells one employee that a friend said he could obtain or buy those papers at the facility.
?Election Integrity Under Attack – Undercover Video
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) March 20, 2024
Illegal Alien "Charity" Distributing Fraudulent Papers Exposed
In Queens, New York, the organization La Jornada provides services to illegal aliens
The Oversight Project obtained video from @realmuckraker discovering a… pic.twitter.com/FOIDDn28jy
“How can you buy that here?” the woman responds. “No, you could do your process of asylum.”
Rubin asks, “Not possible here?”
She says in response: “Buy papers here? No, we cannot do that. … We could help you do your documentation if you need to get a Social Security or work permit.”
Later in the video, the woman is seen saying to Rubin: “You cannot go asking how much is the residency we sell, because that’s illegal … that’s something that you could do that you could get in trouble. That’s not what we could do. … They will think we are doing something illegal.”
However, the next day, a Mexican associate of Muckraker’s went back to the La Jornada office in Queens. Another employee gives the man residency and IDNYC paperwork although he hasn’t produced any form of identification.
In the video, the man is heard giving only his first and last name to the organization’s employee.
“Do you have a first and last name? Nothing else? Only have Jose Rubiano?” she asks.
The man affirms that.
The La Jornada employee says: “I’m going to get this signed and then I’ll be right back.”
Next, the employee produces documents with the name “Jose Rubiano” for both residency and the IDNYC card.
Muckraker’s Rubin explained why illegally facilitating residence and official identification cards is so problematic.
“Anyone, from someone seeking unauthorized employment to spies, saboteurs, or even terrorists, could obtain a government issued ID by visiting La Jornada and acquiring fraudulent papers,” Rubin said. “This risk also includes those who enter this country legally and overstay their visa.”
Such fraud, he said, potentially has allowed thousands of illegal aliens to obtain a new identity and integrate themselves into New York City undetected.
This is also a problem when it comes to illegal immigrants voting in local elections. With fraudulent residency papers, illegal aliens could take the first step toward voting in New York, which requires 30-day residency.
La Jornada is one of countless nonprofit organizations in New York and across the country that use U.S. taxpayers’ money to facilitate the increase in illegal immigration since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
In 2023, Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., secured $250,000 in federal taxpayer dollars for La Jornada.
The failed Senate border bill promoted by Biden in February was set to send $1.4 billion to nonprofits that cater to illegal immigrants.
“What started out decades ago as faith-based organizations supporting the State Department to resettle genuine refugees in the U.S. after a legitimate application process has evolved into mass illegal immigration and downstream activities, creating an immigration industrial complex worth billions of dollars,” Lora Ries, director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, wrote in May for The Daily Signal.
The Daily Signal sought comment about the video from La Jornada, but the organization didn’t respond by publication time.
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New polling suggests the country is about to see a “racial realignment” in upcoming elections.
A recent analysis shows a consistent downturn in the number of “nonwhites” who call themselves Democrats.
John Burn-Murdoch is the chief data reporter for the Financial Times. His March 11 analysis shows that since 1960, there has been a steady decrease in black people, Latinos, and other nonwhites identifying as Democrats. As it currently stands, about 50% of minorities self-identify as Democrats.
NEW ?:
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024
American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.
I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood. pic.twitter.com/QeRsuMSKaL
Burn-Murdoch said he foresees that a majority of nonwhite voters could identify as Republicans in future elections.
“The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realizing they’ve been voting for the wrong party,” Burn-Murdoch said.
Other polls have produced similar data. According to Gallup polling, Democrats have lost nearly 20 points in support from black Americans switching party preference in the last three years—down from 86% to 66%.
The Financial Times reporter chalks this up to reduced stigma for voting conservative among nonwhite voters. Basically, conservative people of color are now choosing to vote their values, not party loyalty, Burns-Murdoch says.
One example he shows is on the issues of gun rights and abortion. The percentages of nonwhite voters who vote pro-Second Amendment and pro-life are growing.
These data points could have importance in the upcoming election. For example, in Georgia, eligible black voters make up a third of the population.
In a statement to The New York Times, Joe Biden pollster Celinda Lake said, “We have to get the [African American voter] numbers up and we have to get African American voters out to vote, and we have to get the numbers up with young people and we have to get them out to vote.”
Biden presently has 73% support with black men and 83% support from black women. According to The New York Times, no Democratic candidate has won less than 80% of the black vote since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Also according to The Times, former President Donald Trump currently has almost four times the support of black voters than he had in 2020. A New York Times-Siena Poll has him at 23% black support, up from 4% support in 2020 and 6% in 2016.
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FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio responded to GOP consultant Kellyanne Conway’s abortion advice by urging lawmakers to expose Democratic extremism.
Last week, Conway urged Republicans to stop highlighting that their Democratic opponents support unfettered abortions of unborn babies, though Democratic Party leaders and most Democratic politicians have repeatedly refused to specify any protections for the unborn that they would support.
Her advice is a marked shift from what the pro-life movement has focused on as of late—prominent pro-life groups, such as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, encourage Republicans to highlight Democratic extremism on abortion.
Rubio had similarly urged Republicans, in a January memo first reported by The Daily Signal, to engage a three-pronged approach: to fight for a pro-family agenda, to highlight Democratic extremism on the issue, and to tell the truth about the horrors of abortion.
He also emphasized to his colleagues that Republicans have the moral high ground on the issue, one that deals with the killing of an unborn child.
“Pro-lifers should recall that protecting unborn human beings is the moral center and purpose of our movement—and we cannot be shy about saying so,” he noted. “No pro-life strategy deserves the name without advocating just limits on abortion.”
On Tuesday, Rubio reiterated this stance.
“Protecting life is the moral center and purpose for the pro-life movement,” the Florida Republican told The Daily Signal.
“We should not shy away from exposing the extremism of Democratic lawmakers and abortion advocates, who believe it should be legal to kill babies until the moment of birth,” the senator added.
Conway had laid out an abortion-related political strategy during Politico’s Health Care Summit last week, where she also touched on her support for both TikTok and in vitro fertilization.
Conway emphasized that she is “100% pro-life” and encouraged Democratic lawmakers and commentators to “stop being science-deniers” and “stop pretending you don’t know what you see on a sonogram.” She pointed out that Americans, when polled more granularly on abortion, are both supportive of abortion exceptions and supportive of protecting unborn babies that can feel pain.
But Conway, who formerly served as Donald Trump’s senior adviser, also said that she does not encourage Republicans to point out that their opponents support abortion up until birth.
“Notice how I did not say, and counsel clients against saying, ‘Democrats are for abortion up until the moment of birth.’ You know why that’s not the best way to say it?” she asked. “Nobody knows anybody … who is about to give birth and says, ‘You know what? I don’t really like stretch marks. I’m not really ready to have another person in my life. I changed my mind.’ Nobody knows anybody like that.”
Conway then went on to imply that Trump was speaking metaphorically when he said to failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: “If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.”
“That’s sort of a metaphor for who is really extreme here, and people reflexively said, ‘Oooh, could that be true?’ And I think it changed a lot of the conversation,” Conway explained.
In a statement to The Daily Signal following publication of this story, Conway accused The Daily Signal of “barking up the wrong tree,” praised Rubio’s efforts exposing abortion extremism, and back-tracked on her suggestion that Trump was speaking metaphorically about born-alive abortions.
“Senator Rubio and I agree on the importance of defending Life and exposing the extremism of pro-abortion Democrats, and have been doing so for decades,” Conway said. “His leadership on the issue, including on the debate stage against a female Democrat in 2022, is part of why I recommended him in a recent NYT oped (LINK) to be on President Trump’s short list for Vice President.”
“President Trump spoke unequivocally, not metaphorically, leading the way for the professional politicians who had shied away from saying it,” Conway added. “We changed the conversation and gave courage to others to speak out against the no-limits, no-shame Democrats. Our Administration lodged significant, historic gains for Life.”
She also explained:
“Our pre-Dobbs polling in February 2022 showed that a Republican who opposes abortion with the three exceptions beats a Democrat who support allowing abortion ‘for any reason, up until the moment of birth’ (56% – 34%). I’ve used the phrase ‘up until the moment of birth’ dozens of times publicly and privately. Yet, we have found that alone has not and will not move hearts and minds and expand a culture of Life. All the lesser-included offenses, e.g., sex-selection abortion, taxpayer-funded abortion, fetal pain abortion, late-term abortion, are widely unknown and deeply unacceptable to a majority of Americans. We are actively encouraging leaders to add these facts to their “all f the above are onerous” appeal, finish their sentences and not limit themselves to ‘up to the moment of birth.'”
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The legacy media is clipping and spinning Donald Trump’s comments where he stated that if he doesn’t get elected, the country’s going to experience a bloodbath, saying it’s a call to violence.
Trump spoke at a campaign rally Saturday for Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, in Vandalia, Ohio. At the event, he said:
Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.
Taken out of context, this line from the former president sounds like a call to violence to some.
However, in the previous line, he said, “We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line [into the U.S.], and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars.” He was criticizing the importation of foreign-made vehicles, specifically, those made by Chinese manufacturers.
See the full clip:
The media has jumped on the issue, saying Trump’s comments are hearkening back to Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters protested at the U.S. Capitol Building during the certification of the 2020 election results after Trump asked them to “peacefully and patriotically” protest outside the Capitol.
Numerous media outlets called out Trump for what they considered his call to violent action.
CNN analyst Maria Cardona said Trump has a history of “dark, violent, dangerous, rhetoric.” Cardona also said that Trump’s “cult MAGA supporters and followers totally know exactly what he was telling them. They demonstrated that on January 6.”
MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s former press secretary, brought Biden campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler onto her show, who said, “This is who Donald Trump is: A loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience, doubles down on his threats of political violence.”
On ABC’s “Face the Nation,” former Vice President Mike Pence fought back against allegations that the former president was calling for violence, saying, “The president was clearly talking about the impact of imports devastating the American automotive industry.”
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was visibly angry after he was criticized for promoting the idea that Trump was calling for violence and for saying “democracy was on the line” in connection with Trump’s comments. Scarborough said those who claimed Trump was not calling for violence are “idiots” and that their comments were “bull—-.”
The “Morning Joe” host said, “He [Trump] knew what he was doing. We’re not stupid. Americans aren’t stupid. He was talking about a bloodbath. Sometimes a bloodbath means a bloodbath.”
Joe Scarborough is having an UNHINGED Meltdown because he got called out for amplifying the fake “Bloodbath” Hoax ?
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 18, 2024
pic.twitter.com/IRkQGPo3nB
Trump responded to the media’s reaction with a Truth Social post, saying, “The fake news media, and their Democrat partners in the destruction of our nation, pretended to be shocked at my use of the word BLOODBATH, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry.”
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The post Egregious Examples of the Media Spinning Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Comment as Call for Violence appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Two leading conservative organizations are calling for the regulation of the in vitro fertilization industry amid media hysteria over a recent Alabama state Supreme Court ruling and Republican consternation over how to handle the issue.
Following the Alabama court ruling in favor of protecting embryonic human life, Republicans on Capitol Hill have suddenly found themselves required to position on a nuanced subject matter tied closely to the dignity of the human person and the fight for life.
Despite media hysteria suggesting the contrary, the Alabama Supreme Court did not ban IVF, but merely ruled in favor of protecting embryonic human life. Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in his opinion that “unborn children are ‘children’” under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
Experts, such as The Heritage Foundation’s Emma Waters, have argued that the ruling brings “much-needed regulation” to the fertility industry in the United States. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Waters noted that only a handful of state laws actually address the “moral and ethical questions raised by the artificial creation of human life.”
“This decision ensures that the well-being of children, not financial gain, is the top priority when it comes to IVF and embryonic cryopreservation,” Waters argues.
In a fact sheet released Tuesday, The Heritage Foundation cautioned that the IVF industry must be regulated and recommended imposing a standard of care on IVF clinics that would prevent “the wanton or careless destruction of embryonic human beings.”
“The willful or reckless loss of an embryonic child should not be treated as a loss of merchandise, where the parents simply get their money back,” the Heritage fact sheet said. “The law should recognize the
gravity of the harm and allow parents proper compensation under the wrongful-death provision.”
Parents should have a legal recourse if a fertility clinic destroys their embryonic children due to “willfulness, neglect, or carelessness,” the fact sheet noted, as the Alabama decision made clear.
Heritage also recommends codifying the recommended guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to make sure only one embryo is implanted into the mother at a time. That would help avoid health complications for the mother and poor outcomes for the baby, the fact sheet said.
Heritage also calls for limiting the number of embryos created per round of IVF, following the practices of countries such as Germany; for mandating that fertility clinics secure true informed consent from parents; for prohibiting anonymous egg and sperm donations for IVF treatments; and for promoting access to non-assisted reproductive technology fertility treatments.
Former Vice President Mike Pence’s organization, Advancing American Freedom, similarly issued a memo on Tuesday, first obtained by The Daily Signal, that calls for Republicans to promote only IVF practices that promote life.
The top line of AAF’s messaging reminds lawmakers that “life begins at conception.”
“The law must recognize that millions of Americans are alive today due to IVF, and that embryos created via IVF should be afforded legal protection,” the AAF memo said.
At the same time, the conservative organization stressed that IVF presents a moral conundrum, since it often results in “the creation of frozen human beings, and those that are not implants remain frozen for an indefinite period.” The memo says there are about 1 million embryos in existence domestically, and points out that IVF can be used to “pursue a specific genetic result” that will lead to the destruction of embryos or “indefinite freezing of the unwanted child.”
IVF must be pursued responsibly, AAF cautioned, noting that the U.S. is largely out of line with the rest of the world when it comes to regulating the industry.
“Life begins at conception, and our laws should reflect this,” the memo stressed, emphasizing as a bottom line that “Republicans should never shy away from defending life” and unborn children and families deserve better safeguards.
IVF promises to be a complicated thorn in the side of Republicans, many of whom are already unsure how to successfully message on abortion ahead the 2024 election cycle. And it’s an issue that staffers may have to educate themselves on in order to message effectively.
Ethics and Public Policy President Ryan Anderson warned that IVF presents a pitfall that Republicans would do well to study and avoid.
“Republicans should not fall for the Left’s trap here,” he wrote. “They should not hesitate to say that America’s best social and political reforms were suffused with religious conviction. Or that the deepest reasons for our laws lie in God’s eternal law.”
“Nor should Republicans follow pollsters selling them on new government entitlements to IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies,” Anderson added. “There is no political appetite for bans on these procedures, and the GOP should call out the media’s lies suggesting there is. But our current state of unregulated embryo fabricating, freezing, and destroying does need fixing. The medically superior alternatives to IVF warrant promotion. And at the very least, embryos created through IVF deserve legal protection.”
Democrats are eager to harness both abortion and IVF this election cycle.
President Joe Biden was quick to call the Alabama ruling “outrageous and unacceptable,” saying in a statement: “Make no mistake: This is a direct result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.”
Former President Donald Trump reacted to the Alabama ruling by promising that the Republican Party “will always support the creation of strong, thriving, healthy American families,” emphasizing that “we want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder!”
“The Republican Party should always be on the side of the Miracle of Life,” he added, “and the side of Mothers, Fathers, and their Beautiful Babies. IVF is an important part of that, and our Great Republican Party will always be with you, in your quest, for the ULTIMATE JOY IN LIFE!”
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“Both sides furious” was one reporter’s summary when special counsel Robert Hur testified in a House hearing to explain his decision not to prosecute President Joe Biden for willfully retaining classified documents, not just from his vice-presidential years but from his Senate career.
The network TV stories that night were the closest thing to “fair and balanced” we’ve seen in a long time. The Republicans decried the double standard, that Donald Trump is being prosecuted and Biden is not. The Democrats complained Hur’s report made Biden look feeble-minded (like nobody’s drawn that conclusion).
But let’s take a look at the bigger picture. While Hur was conducting his investigation, we joked that you should put his face on a milk carton. He was missing from the press.
Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in January 2023. Bill D’Agostino reported at NewsBusters that over about nine months of morning and evening news coverage—from Feb. 1, 2023, through Nov. 20, 2023—ABC, CBS, and NBC spent just four minutes and 52 seconds on Hur’s inquiry.
But then there’s the breakdown. ABC aired 204 of those 292 seconds, or 70% of that airtime. NBC barely offered a minute (64 seconds), and CBS offered one paltry, 24-second news brief.
That’s not the way the network news covered Russian collusion and Robert Mueller, is it? They obsessed almost daily over that probe. From Jan. 20, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2018, NewsBusters reported the Big Three evening newscasts alone aired 2,092 minutes on investigations of Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russian government. It should not be surprising that this was the single most covered topic in their coverage of Trump in that time frame.
Here’s some rough math: Trump was punished with 858 overwhelmingly negative minutes on Russiagate in 2018, while Biden drew less than five Hur minutes over most of 2023. Very roughly, that’s about 170 to 1. But remember, the 858-minute number is only for the evening newscasts.
If Trump was “scandal-plagued,” the newscasters were the plague. If they made the political weather, it was a daily hurricane for Trump, while Biden was rewarded with “mostly sunny.”
That doesn’t mean Trump was damaged. In 2018, Trump’s approval rating actually improved, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. But that’s not how the anti-Trump media designed it.
These numbers underline the fraudulence of former Washington Post Editor Martin Baron’s slogan when he claimed, “We’re not at war. We’re at work.” Metaphorically, they were at war under Trump as the Scandal Police, and now they spend most days at the doughnut shop.
This is why the media has a major trust problem with anyone who’s not a Democrat. Trump gets Scandal Police brutality. Biden scandals are avoided until they cannot be avoided, and then reporters often repeat the taunting mantra of “no evidence, no evidence.” As if it’s not their job to look for evidence.
This bifurcated media approach to scandal presents each and every Democrat prosecutor of Trump—whether elected or appointed by Biden—as nonpartisan and apolitical. Well, unless someone like Hur spurs a bad news cycle for Biden; then he’s a “Trump appointee”—ahem, before he became a Biden administration appointee.
The Biden Justice Department is also treated like it’s as pure as newly fallen snow.
People see through this. But journalists keep thinking that people are stupid when they don’t accept their preaching. Their eternally smug self-righteousness ensures they will never be trusted again.
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President Joe Biden’s recent foreign policy moves are baffling. By any rational standard, they are undermining Israel and helping Hamas.
When Biden was caught on an open microphone following his State of the Union address telling Democrat Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado that Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were “going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting,” you have to wonder what he’s thinking.
It was a weird comment for two reasons. First, it is unlikely the leader of the Jewish state will have a “come-to-Jesus moment.” (Maybe a come-to-Moses or Abraham moment—but not a come-to-Jesus moment.) I have known Netanyahu since the 1980s. I am confident he was amused rather than intimidated by Biden’s comment.
Second, the American president cannot dictate to the prime minister of Israel. Israel is a sovereign country. Furthermore, its entire history has been a series of heroic victories in which it had to rely on its own courage and ingenuity to provide for its peoples’ security. The United States has historically been an ally of Israel (although in Suez Crisis of 1956, we intervened decisively against an Israeli victory). But the United States can only advise—it cannot dictate.
Biden grandly announced that an Israeli occupation of the city of Rafah would cross a red line. Of course, we remember President Barack Obama’s famous red line about the Syrian use of chemical weapons, which disappeared the minute Syria used the chemical weapons.
Netanyahu responded clearly to Biden’s threat. He told Politico’s parent company, Axel Springer, “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave … You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is, that Oct. 7 doesn’t happen again.”
At that point, Biden’s red line faded just like Obama’s. Biden said on MSNBC, “It is a red line, but I’m never going to leave Israel.”
Even Netanyahu’s political opponents in Israel know invading Rafah is a requirement of lasting peace. Israeli War Cabinet member Benny Gantz explained, “Finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending in firefighters to put out 80% of a fire.”
The case for totally destroying Hamas is overwhelming. Hamas’ official founding document calls for the complete destruction of Israel. One of its most important leaders said publicly, “not a single Jew will remain.” Hamas has run a terrorist state, which stole enough construction materials from the people of Gaza to build 300 miles of tunnels (the stolen material was reportedly meant to build hospitals and homes).
Hamas has proven its willingness to use the people of Gaza as human shields behind which it protects its key leaders and military assets. The number of dead and wounded in Gaza since Oct. 7 has been a function of Hamas’ willingness to sacrifice its own people to build a humanitarian outcry against Israel.
Tragically, the Biden administration and much of the American news media accept the case set up by Hamas’ ruthlessness and focus their attention on the Israelis. The fact is: This is an urban war that Hamas started. In urban warfare, civilian deaths are unavoidable. The news media’s anti-Israel, antisemitic bias leads it to accept the Hamas propaganda.
As Richard Goldberg wrote, “Biden should draw red lines for Hamas, not for Israel.”
Biden’s proposal for Israel to stay out of Rafah would effectively create a sanctuary city for Hamas terrorists. It would be an irrational act that guaranteed the survival of those whose goal is the complete destruction of Israel. The conflict would remain endless.
When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Iranian Parliament chant, “Death to America, death to Israel,” they mean it. We know because the Ayatollah went on national television and pledged to the Iranian people that these words were not a slogan—but a policy.
The seriousness of Hamas’ desire to destroy Israel is captured in its map-making. As Louis Rene Beres wrote in jurist.org on Dec. 23, 2023:
Unhidden, both the Arab world and Iran still have only a ‘One-State Solution’ for the ‘Israel Problem.’ It is a ‘solution’ that eliminates Israel altogether, a physical solution, a ‘Final Solution.’ Even today, official Arab maps of ‘Palestine’ (PNA and Hamas) show the prospective Arab State comprising all of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria), all of Gaza and all of Israel. They knowingly exclude any references to a Jewish population and list ‘holy sites’ of Christians and Muslims only.
Biden should be firmly on the side of Israel and civilization—and against Hamas’ barbarism, terrorism, and genocide.
Sadly, he is failing that test.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.
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The post Why Is President Biden Helping Hamas? appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Fulton County, Georgia, Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee’s decision is one fine muddle.
McAfee ruled on Friday in the Fani Willis-Nathan Wade sexual-kickback case: It takes two to tango, but only one is too corrupt to stay on the dance floor.
How does that work?
McAfee gave Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis the option to continue her election-interference persecution against former President Donald Trump, but only if she booted Wade, her lead prosecutor and former boyfriend/high-flying travel companion.
McAfee’s ruling only makes sense if Willis and Wade conducted their torrid love affair with Wade awake and Willis comatose. Not even Helen Keller would have been so oblivious of events in which she was, literally, intimately involved.
“It’s like finding two people in a bank vault and taking one off to jail,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told Fox News. “They were the two parts of this relationship, and only one of them was disqualified.”
BREAKING: Jonathan Turley blasts Judge Scott McAfee over ruling that Fani Willis either recuse herself or remove lover Nathan Wade from the Trump case, says, “It’s like finding two people in a bank vault and taking one off to jail. WATCH pic.twitter.com/iCdzyDOrQ2
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) March 15, 2024
Turley added: “Why should Willis escape that same penalty? The opinion leaves us feeling like the court went and shot the wounded.”
The decision should have been either: Wade and Willis are clean. So, proceed. Or Wade and Willis are crooked. So, you’re fired!
Instead, McAfee ruled: Willis is clean, and Wade is crooked. So, she should stay or leave with Wade, as she wishes. Whatever.
Huh?
McAfee’s pretzel logic might involve his reelection in two months. Perhaps by leaving Willis some wiggle room, McAfee reckons he can tiptoe around the land mine that would have exploded had he disqualified Willis and blown this case and himself sky-high.
This underscores the urgent need to eliminate all judicial elections and make local, county, and state judges like federal jurists; namely, appointed by executives, confirmed by legislators, and unbeholden to voters. Justice cannot be blind while shaking hands and kissing babies.
McAfee might have ruled 100% on the law and evidence and 0% on his own political prospects. And yet he is on Fulton County’s May 21 ballot, according to his election website.
Thus, speculation stirs that McAfee’s decision was a self-serving campaign stunt. Such thoughts, justified or not, corrode confidence in a justice system already sinking into a quicksand of public doubts.
Meanwhile, Trump’s attorneys responded to McAfee.
“While respecting the Court’s decision, we believe that the Court did not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade, including the financial benefits, testifying untruthfully about when their personal relationship began, as well as Willis’ extrajudicial [Martin Luther King Day] ‘church speech,’ where she played the race card and falsely accused the defendants and their counsel of racism,” declared Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead counsel in the alleged election-interference prosecution. “We will use all legal options available as we continue to fight to end this case, which should never have been brought in the first place.”
These “legal options” most assuredly involve appeal motions. Wiser jurists might return a more rational result, perhaps based on McAfee’s finding that there was at least the appearance of corruption in this case. In legal matters, appearance alone tends to be sufficient to jettison parties too tainted to remain in place. Appearance should be enough to dismiss Willis, now that Wade has resigned in disgrace.
No less a Trump hater than Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department Deep Stater, considers Willis too crippled to continue. As he commented via X: “For the good of the case, given that ethics issues will abound now as to Willis, she should voluntarily recuse herself from the case and allow another prosecutor to oversee the GA trump [sic] case.”
For the good of the case, given that ethics issues will abound now as to Willis, she should voluntarily recuse herself from the case and allow another prosecutor to oversee the GA trump case.
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)? (@AWeissmann_) March 15, 2024
Willis cannot stand in court and challenge the propriety of Trump and 18 other co-defendants without the entire country—and the jury—thinking: “Go look in the mirror!”
And now, this circus moves on to appellate court. Whatever other judges decide, these appeals will take time. And right now, time is Trump’s best friend.
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