Login
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
Garland Favorito and Voter GA have evidence that 1.7 million ballot images across Georgia from the 2020 Election disappeared and/or were destroyed.
Favorito and VoterGA presented information in a press conference in November of 2021. In this presentation, VoterGA reported that ballot images that are required by law to be maintained by the state after every election were missing and apparently destroyed in multiple counties across Georgia. He provided a map of these counties.
74 out of 159 counties did not provide ballot images indicating that they were destroyed.
Again, destroying ballot images goes against Federal and State law.
Here is one slide from the presentation showing 325,000 missing ballot images in Cobb County alone.
Favorito and VoterGA reported this information in a presentation that is now online and shared below:
At the time of that presentation, VoterGA apparently did not have the total number of ballots represented by the 74 counties that could not supply ballot images when requested.
A slide from a presentation a few weeks later included that amount.
1.74 million ballot images disappeared and/or were destroyed in Georgia after the 2020 Election.
This is not entirely a surprise as we now know that signature verification was not performed for mail in ballots in Fulton County.
Despite all this evidence, Georgia’s Secretary of State office employee Gabe Sterling calls those who report on election issues in the 2020 election in Georgia “Liars”.
The post Voter GA Reports 1.7 Million 2020 Election Ballot Images Were Destroyed in Georgia appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article was written by Swedish independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen, also known as PeterSweden. You can follow him at PeterSweden.com.
This is big news for freedom and sovereignty.
I recently reported on how in the latest draft of the WHO pandemic treaty, it was being watered down.
Now it is being reported that Britain is REFUSING to sign on to the World Health Organisation’s pandemic treaty and that they will not sign any form of the treaty that undermines Britain’s sovereignty.
However, the reason they are against the treaty is because countries will be obliged to give away 20% of pandemic related health products. In other words, things such as vaccines, medicines and protection equipment like face masks.
In other words, it is basically a form of Global Communism.
Because that is what it is. The WHO is a bunch of unelected elites that want to control your life.
Did you know that Dr. Tedros, the leader of the WHO actually worked for a Communist junta in the regime of a Marxist dictator in Ethiopia.
The now WHO leader also joined the TPLF party back in the day which began as a Communist party.
So the leader of the WHO has a Communist background, and they are here telling people how they should life their lives?
Rich countries will be forced to give away medicine and equipment and give it to the WHO.
So what about the other parts in the treaty, like the fact that the WHO could come with “recommendations” to countries to implement lockdowns or vaccination? That was fine, but giving away medicine and vaccines to the WHO, that was a line too far?!
But it is a good thing that a major country now will be refusing to sign the treaty in its current form.
Britain has said they will require that any pandemic treaty will have to respect national sovereignty.
Could this be the beginning of the WHO pandemic treaty failing?
How many other countries could join in rejecting this, following in Britain’s footsteps?
This is a massive development and I will be keeping an eye on what happens next. Make sure to stay subscribed and you will get my updates as it happens!
Independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen has dedicated years to reporting the things the mainstream media ignores. You can follow him at https://petersweden.com/
The post Peter Sweden- IT’S HAPPENING: Britain REFUSES to Sign WHO Pandemic Treaty appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Keith T. Holcomb
Real Clear Wire
Public confidence in the military has slipped. One major reason is the politicization of senior military officers, who show an increasing propensity to compromise their integrity to gain influence and achieve both budgetary and policy goals. Their willingness to spin carefully parsed and knowingly misleading testimony and advice compromises civilian control of the military. Simply stated, these generals and admirals are not providing full and complete representations of plans, concepts, and assessments to senior civilians in the executive and legislative branches, thereby depriving them of the unbiased information they require to make decisions required by the Constitution.
In an era of increasing complexity, cleverly constructed narratives that present simplified, politicized positions to the general population have taken on out-sized importance. Senior officers increasingly are attempting to manipulate policy making by intentionally reducing complex reality to simple narratives designed to appeal to partisan audiences.
Integrity has two meanings pertinent to this issue: the common understanding of integrity as honesty and the less common and more formal understanding of integrity as the quality of being whole and complete.
Preparation for and experience in combat develops strong wills. Senior officers motivated by the desire to get the biggest possible piece of the pie for their services are tempted to dissemble to win the internecine budget and policy fights that are the lifeblood of official Washington. When these wills are not properly constrained by higher commitments to integrity and respect for the decision-making province of civilian authorities, generals and admirals can succumb to the temptation to deceive.
These deceptions can take many forms. A senior officer can choose to highlight some information. Conversely, they can obfuscate, discredit, or ignore other information. They can allude to expert knowledge or classified information to undercut or deflect questions that challenge their assertions. They can use the age-old technique of making strawmen of opposing views. Worse, they can engage in or encourage subordinates or cultivated commentators to engage in ad hominem attacks on the messengers of alternate views.
While the hyper-political environment sees daily evidence of such behaviors, some senior officers have exercised considerable self-discipline and have not let advocacy for a position override respect for the prerogatives of senior civilians. In short, just because they have the leadership persona, verbal skills, and communication staffs to construct one-sided positions and perhaps even succeed in the manipulation of some people, they have worked to develop full and balanced representations of the issues at hand. Theirs has been a triumph of professional ethics over the abuse of information to achieve their ends.
Regrettably, that admirable conduct is in decline and that decline is a contributing factor for decreasing public trust in the military. The American public may not know the specific capabilities of various weapons or the operational implications of various policies. But constant exposure to spun narratives has trained them to recognize manipulation when they see and hear it. Many resent being manipulated, and their sense that such techniques are being used by the Nation’s most senior officers undermines their trust and confidence in the military. The military was once recognized as a profession culturally apart from the rest of society, but no longer. America’s military, and its senior officers especially, are increasingly viewed as no less cynically self-interested than the rest of the elite class.
The decline of senior officer integrity increasingly impacts civilian decision makers. Not long ago, overbooked national leaders could confidently “repose special trust and confidence” in the senior officers providing assessments and recommendations to them. The disciplined and honorable behaviors of past generations of generals and admirals certainly validated this special trust and confidence. But, with a rise in manipulative narratives, civilian leaders and their staffs are more likely to feel compelled to dig into the details of complex military matters to gain the full and complete picture they need to discharge their responsibilities.
In short, it is past time for senior officers to forego their increasing addiction to the power opiate of clever narratives and work to present full and balanced representations of the issues at hand.
Absent immediate internal reform by the Department of Defense, civilian leaders will increasingly have to turn, just as they have with other federal agencies, to independent investigations to gain a more complete understanding of national security issues.
Brigadier General Keith T. Holcomb, (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.), is a former USMC Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His last assignment was as Director of the Training and Education Division, U.S. Marine Corps Combat Development Command.
The post Decline of Senior Officer Integrity and Civilian Control of the Military appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
High levels of dissatisfaction with company’s LGBT ‘engineering’ of children
Disney, which has plunged neck-deep in the pro-LGBT ideation in recent years, turning away both once-faithful fans as well as economic stability, should return to the days when parents could safely consider its products a go-to option for their children, a poll shows.
Rasmussen Reports revealed that 71% of American adults say the entertainment company that openly has tried to indoctrinate children with the leftist beliefs, “should return to wholesome programming and allow parents to decide when their children are taught about sexuality.”
A report in the Washington Stand revealed that Rasmussen exposed Disney’s agenda with quotes from Karey Burke, who heads the company’s General Entertainment Content.
That individual, during a conference call in 2022, boasted of being “a mother of two queer children … one transgender child and one pansexual child …”
Further, she bragged that Disney had introduced “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories.”
But Rasmussen’s report said 54% of American adults say such programming and content is “inappropriate” for children.
In fact, most of Disney’s recent major projects have been both critical and financial flops.
Joseph Backholm, of the Family Research Council, told the Stand, “Teaching values in media isn’t a new idea. … The innovation Disney has made in recent years is to teach a new morality. Disney sincerely believes teaching children to love sensuality and embrace self-created identities rooted in our self-perceptions is a moral good that leads to happiness and human flourishing. The moral problem is that they are wrong. The business problem is that hundreds of millions of Americans disagree with them.”
Disney in the last year dealt with a $5.5 billion budget cut, resulting in 4,000 jobs being eliminated, because of the collapse of public interest in its productions.
“The company’s market capitalization dropped to a nine-year low and streaming service Disney+ fell nearly one million subscribers short of projected goals,” the Stand reported.
“More recently, Disney’s stock has fallen by nearly 10%,” the report said.
Backholm noted, “What Disney sees as foundational moral truths, many Americans see as deception and perversion. The pushback this survey reveals is not to the idea of moral lessons in movies, but to the specific moral lessons Disney has prioritized.”
The company also lost a fight with the state of Florida, which removed the special treatment the company had had for decades at its properties there, it has faced accusations of discrimination, criticized for its insurance plan – which pays for mutilating bodies for transgender ideation but not repair them – and it has been accused of breaching its fiduciary duties.
The Stand noted the poll showed only 46% of Americans hold a favorable view of the company, and 45% do not.
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of Disney’s support comes from Democrats. Almost two thirds (63%) of Democrats hold a favorable view of the media giant, compared to only 33% of Republicans and 36% of independent voters,” the Stand said.
Half of Democrats like the “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters” displayed to children under 12, while only 12% of Republicans and 24% of independents agree.
The fight Disney picked with the state of Florida was over its Parental Rights in Education Act, which would stop teachers from promoting “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to children through third grade.
The report noted that in video conference recordings, leaked to the public, executives talked about how to promote their LGBT agenda with Executive Producer Latoya Raveneau boasting the company “has been so welcoming to like, my like, not-at-all secret gay agenda.”
The Catholic League and Meath Television Media also released a documentary with Catholic League president Bill Donohue describing the company’s “sexual engineering” of children.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post ‘Hundreds of Millions of Americans’ Have Strong Message for Woke Disney appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Verdict puts schools on notice to provide ‘fair procedures’ in disciplinary actions
An announcement from a prominent legal team reveals that a $1 million verdict in a fight over the alleged wrongful expulsion of two students from St. Francis High School in California means that schools now are on notice to provide “fair procedures” to students in disciplinary actions.
“This case is significant not only for our clients but for its groundbreaking effect on all private high schools in California, which are now legally required to provide fair procedure to students before punishing or expelling them,” charged Krista Boughman, of the Dhillon Law Group that fought the case.
“The jury rightly confirmed that St. Francis High School’s procedures were unfair to our clients and that the school is not above the law.”
The fight had an odd origination.
The legal team said the two students, in solidarity with a friend who was instructed by a doctor to use an acne-fighting face mask, also wore the medication.
A photograph was taken. Then several years later, that surfaced, and school officials charged they were in “blackface.”
The legal team noted, “The students, who were minors at the time, became the center of a controversy due to a photograph of them wearing green acne facemasks. The photo, which was taken three years earlier, was misinterpreted by the school as ‘blackface’ in June 2020, amidst heightened racial tensions and unrelated racist incidents within the school community. St. Francis expelled the boys within 24 hours, without considering their evidence or offering any hearing.”
The Dhillon team explained that protections previously offered to university students in the state now, because of the precedent, are required for high-school students.
“The jury’s verdict finally cleared our clients’ names after four long years of repeated personal attacks from St. Francis High School. Schools are supposed to protect and nurture children, not sacrifice them when it is convenient for public relations purposes,” said Dhillon Law Group counsel, Karin Sweigart.
The students have been identified in reports only as H.H. and A.H.
The dispute developed just as the nation was in an uproar, and charges of racism were everywhere, following the death of George Floyd.
The school initially told the family’s lawyer, “Your clients, or their friends, are responsible for the posting of the photograph on social media and the resultant publicity and unfortunate consequences.”
The boys’ family, in a statement, said the fight was over the school’s assumption of their guilt “without giving a child the opportunity to show their innocence.”
“We would never wish the pain, humiliation, and suffering St. Francis has inflicted on our families on anyone, but we are thankful that the jury has spoken, and vindicated our boys, and forced St. Francis to finally take responsibility for their repeated personal attacks on the boys.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Expelled Students Win $1 Million for ‘Blackface’ that Wasn’t Blackface appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Speculated about taking pictures of him in his ‘Depends’
The evidence is becoming more and more clear as court cases against President Donald Trump progress: Democrats appear to have weaponized the judicial process to support their claims that Trump was guilty of “fraud” in a case where no one lost money, is guilty of a felony over misdemeanor business document violations, interfered with an election by having – and expressing – his opinions.
And more.
On the other side, it seems, the U.S. Secret Service investigated a man for doing no more than making jokes about the Bidens.
“The Secret Service didn’t identify actual threats to Biden or his family, instead predicating the case on what it called the man’s ‘unusual interest’ in the family. This ‘unusual interest,’ however, appeared to be comprised of nothing more than obvious jokes that were critical of Biden,” according to an analysis published by The Daily Signal. “Zero comments by the Twitter user suggested a serious intent to engage in violence, according to the Secret Service documents released to the Oversight Project.”
The report said the Secret Service opened a formal investigation, and even took it to the next level, because of the social media posts of a Maine man. He was not identified in the report, and has not been charged with anything.
The Oversight Project discovered the apparent weaponization of the investigatory process through a Freedom of Information Act case.
“A senior Secret Service agent, John Mazza, conducted the investigation of the Twitter user in summer 2022, documents released to the Oversight Project show. (The Heritage Foundation, home to the Oversight Project, launched The Daily Signal in 2014.) In July 2022, about 18 months after Biden became president, a regional Secret Service office requested that agents conduct a ‘preliminary protective intelligence investigation’ targeting the Maine man, an Army veteran, for one or more posts on Twitter,” the report said.
The only justification was the “unusual interest,” records show.
“What appears to have gotten the Secret Service’s attention? One of the man’s posts suggested, apparently jokingly, that he planned to ‘invade the White House and get pics of Biden in his ‘Depends,” referring to a brand of adult diaper,” the report said.
Meanwhile, routinely social media users threaten to assault or assassinate President Trump, the likely GOP nominee for president this year.
Even Biden has talked publicly about wanting to physically assault Trump.
The analysis explained under the law, the Secret Service can investigate and prosecute “threats” against the president and certain others, but it must “show the existence of a threat…”
The FOIA documents, however, that the Secret Service investigation was based on First Amendment-protected comments.
The analysis noted Kara Frederick, of The Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center, previously warned, “The growing symbiosis between Big Tech and government, the constriction of digital life, the pernicious targeting and exploitation of the next generation, and the expansion of digital surveillance will accelerate the stratification of American society. If current patterns are not disrupted, conservatives will bear the brunt of [a] tech-enabled classification system implemented hand-in-glove with the government.”
The analysis noted, “The use of subpoenas indicates that the Secret Service conducted a criminal investigation of a U.S. citizen for activity on social media protected by the First Amendment.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Secret Service Investigates Man for Making Jokes About Bidens appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by former Republican member of Montana House of Representatives Rick Maedje
Congress is increasingly malfunctioning as far too many lobbying interests, foreign actors and ideologues force the institution to cater to elites over the needs of the people. Voters overwhelmingly agree Congress is broken. The question becomes what can be done about it?
Both Democrat and Republican state legislators have noticed Congress’s institutional decline, and about three years ago, a bi-partisan group began quietly working together on possible solutions to this Federal problem. After countless meetings, it appears something remarkable is about to happen. There is a tenable, bi-partisan way to fix Washington DC.
We forget who owns our Constitution. It is not Congress. It is not the President. It is not even the Supreme Court. The people who “own” our Constitution, for lack of a better word, are the approximately 7,500 state legislators in the fifty states. The original legislatures created the Federal government to be of service to the states, and the states purposefully retained the power to reign in Congress if the time ever arose.
In the past, when the Constitution was amended, Congress would suggest changes. We’ve done that at least 17 times. Today though, the states are poised to finally use their Article V powers to do something Congress will never do: Constitutionally Reform Congress. All the states have to do is agree to meet, and it looks like they will.
The states have a primary incentive to reform Congress on Budget matters, but agency overreach and lack of concern for the people are important concerns. Congress is woefully unable to stop its disconnect from the people.
In fact, Congress recently separated itself even more. In April, they re-authorized a FISA bill allowing agencies to spy warrantless inside America but required warrants for Congress members. They long ago exempted themselves from insider stock trading bans, but now still allow what amounts to legal bribery for themselves through Leadership PACS and high paying campaign jobs for their spouses and family members. Worse yet, Congress is increasingly controlled by anonymous money influencers- the ‘donor class’ who provide all this “member funding.”
It is reported by members of Congress themselves that 30 hours are spent each week raising money from donors, and it shows. Most members seem to care less what people back home need until a few months before election time. They then use lobbyist money to persuade voters they really care. In the meantime, billions are funneled to “contractors” in and out of the country and not directed towards citizens and programs. State legislators noticed.
It is one thing when Congress misleads the media and voters, but when Congress misleads state legislators, Congress is agitating the wrong people- the very people who have the power to do something about it.
As such, there now exists a bi-partisan draft of a 28th Amendment to the Constitution proposing to reform Congress. No other part of the Constitution is altered. State legislators even went so far as to prohibit other topics without 3/4ths agreement prior. That rule prevents political issues such as the gun control, the Electoral College, or abortion from ruining the effort. The goal is to reform Congress and Federal overreach- nothing else.
So what does this new 28th Amendment to Reform Congress do?
It requires Congress submit a complete budget each year and on time. If they do not, the nation goes to an automatic Continuing Resolution budget- something we have been doing on and off for 50 years. Congress then loses its salary until they complete the budget.
However, the states will have the right to Veto the Budget if three-fifths oppose it. If that happens two years in a row, every member serving the last 24 months is banned from holding any Federal office after their term expires. This provision forces Congress to work together for the people back home- not for lobbyists in DC. In short, Congress essentially fires itself. No one has to do a thing.
Additionally, the budget can no longer be political. No law in the budget is allowed- only spending. Social Security and entitlements are finally protected from Congressional raids of trust funds. As well, Congress is forever banned from exempting itself from any law.
All law must be submitted to the states through a non-budget process. The people will have a final say. Essentially, the states become a much needed check and balance the Federal mess in DC. Congress will continue to have power over Defense with limits, which is after all, what Congress was largely created for.
Further, and very importantly, the 28th Amendment bans all out of state money for campaigns.
Lobbyists and billionaires are prevented from unfair electioneering advantages. If you are not a registered voter in a state- you will not be able to fund electioneering in that state. It levels the playing field absolutely. This is called “electoral equity.” Billionaires will have to buy islands instead of elections.
The 28th Amendment also requires the Federal government to obtain permission of a state for new immigration. Both blue and red states are overwhelmed by Federal policies that harm their cities, overburden their services, and negatively impact the environment. “Ask first” will be the new rule for all regulations.
The states will consider this 28th Amendment package in 2025 January sessions and likely schedule the meeting of the states for late 2025. The website for the final draft and summary will go live June 1 at Task28.com.
Our Constitution is never finished or perfect, and one can argue endlessly about philosophical interpretations of the past, but that does not mean we as a people should not reform Congress to make our country better.
Congress and dark money donors will fight hard against this- very hard. It won’t be pretty. However, using the Article V process, reform may very well become Constitutional law based on the positive reception it has received from the only people with the power to reform Congress- the state legislators.
Rick Maedje is a former state legislator, a graduate of Harvard University, and co-author of the 28th Amendment to Reform Congress. He has been a legislation consultant and bill drafter for 25 years.
The post The State Legislatures Can Reform Congress — Make Congress Fire Themselves appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on Leo Hohmann’s Substack and was republished with permission.
The backlash is growing against Democrat plans to import tens of thousands of Hamas-supporting, Jew-hating Gazans into American cities and towns as so-called refugees.
A group of 35 Republican senators led by Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa has published an open letter petitioning the Biden White House to halt plans to accept Gazan refugees into the United States, citing national security concerns. This many Senators don’t sign anything unless they are getting swamped with letters and phone calls from their constituents.
The senators expressed dire concerns over potential terrorist connections within the refugee population from Gaza. In a letter dated May 1, they argued that the administration should suspend these plans until further scrutiny and security measures are assured.
The letter states:
“Your administration’s reported plan to accept Gazan refugees poses a national security risk to the United States. With more than a third of Gazans supporting the Hamas militants, we are not confident that your administration can adequately vet this high-risk population for terrorist ties and sympathies before admitting them into the United States. We are further worried that accepting Gazan refugees might cause a crisis at the Egypt-Gaza border, leading to chaos that would only empower Iran-backed Hamas. We are also frustrated that your administration is pushing ahead with a plan to evacuate Gazans from the Strip when there are still American citizens held hostage by Hamas.”
The call for action follows a CBS News report from April 30, which indicated that the Biden administration is considering the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza who have family ties to American citizens or U.S. permanent residents. This would mean that the majority of the Palestinians would be bound for the Detroit and Dearborn metro areas of Michigan, a key battleground state in presidential elections.
The senators’ letter highlighted the complicated security dynamics in Gaza, noting Hamas’s control over the area and the limited access of U.S. officials for vetting purposes. They expressed concerns about the integrity of the vetting process, given the current political influence in Gaza.
A Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll conducted in March showed strong local support for Hamas, complicating the narrative around the Gazan refugees. According to the poll, 71% of Palestinians in Gaza endorsed Hamas’s actions in an attack on Israel on October 7th, and 52% of Gazans supported the continuation of Hamas’s governance.
This Biden plan sounds to me like a great favor to Netanyahu, who you will remember said after the October 7 slaughter of nearly 1,200 Israelis that he was going to “eliminate” Hamas completely from his country’s borders. Since he was unable or unwilling to eliminate Hamas militarily, he is simply going to ship the bulk of them to America and transfer his terrorism problem to the good ole U.S. of A., and the America-last Biden administration is encouraging it!
America already has an anti-semitism problem, as evidenced by what’s been occurring on university campuses over the last several weeks. All we need are more soldiers brought in to fill the ranks of the military wing of the Democrat Party, which basically consists of Antifa and other leftist groups combining forces with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic groups here in America.
More Democrat soldiers means more chaos on the streets of America leading up to the 2024 election and beyond, guaranteed. But don’t kid yourself, there are many Republicans who love refugees too because they see them as cheap labor for their corporate buddies on Wall Street.
I’m glad to see a sizable group of GOP Senators standing up to Biden on this issue, but it may be nothing more than lip service so they can cover their behinds and say “we told you so” when it blows up in our faces.
Do you think this backlash from the Senators will stop the Biden White House from going through with its wicked plans to bring tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, of radical Jew-hating, Hamas-supporting Palestinian jihadists to America? Remember, this hatred goes way back. The Grand Mufti of Palestine was a big supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. Anyone who says the Palestinians have it out for the Jews just because they “stole their land” in 1948 is not looking at the complete historical record with a critical eye.
Palestinian chidren are taught in school and at Hamas-sponsored summer camps to hate Jews and to murder them. Sounds like they would fit right in on the campuses of Columbia, Harvard and UCLA.
This hatred pre-dates the creation of the Israeli state. Let me know your views in the comments below.
To receive new posts and support Leo Hohmann’s work, consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t yet at leohohmann.substack.com
The post Leo Hohmann: Backlash Growing Against Biden Plans to Import Tens of Thousands of Palestinian Refugees appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest post by Joe Kovacs
The political activism of celebrities was mercilessly mocked on this weekend’s edition of “Saturday Night Live.”
The late-night NBC comedy series aired a fictitious commercial for “Teeny Tiny Statement Pins,” voicing messages often worn by the stars of movies and music on the red carpet.
“With so many complicated issues out there, it’s hard to know when to join the conversation, and how,” said singer and episode host Dua Lipa.
Another celebrity says: “It’s wrong to stay silent, but it’s also wrong to say too much. I just wish there was a way to split the difference.”
An announcer then provides the solution: “Introducing Teeny Tiny Statement Pin, the new red-carpet accessory that’s so small, it’s barely visible.”
One celebrity indicates: “This way, not everyone has to be bombarded with my opinions. But if they want them, they can just zoom in. Way, way, way, way in.”
Lipa noted: “I can say whatever I want and no one has to know.”
“It’s the perfect statement piece to style it with any outfit because it’s invisible. I’m even wearing one right now,’ says an Anna Wintour lookalike, sporting her tiny pin reading: “‘The Devil Wears Prada’ is not about me.”
Some of the tiny messages in the ad proclaim:
“Love is love.”
“Protect democracy.”
“Free Ellen.”
“Ceasefire now.”
“Pay teachers more.”
“We have the meats.”
“Or for vegans, ‘We no have no meats.'”
One celebrity says, “I feel very confident in my opinion. But unfortunately, it is a bad one, and I don’t want people to know that.”
Her Teeny Tiny Statement Pin indicated: “I hate paper straws. Trump is hot.”
If you don’t know what to say but want something that sounds like it could be important, the commercial also touts a “Vague Collection,” with items including a random flag that belongs to no country, a cat and baby together that just says “no,” a li’l pretzel, and messages stating: “It has to stop” and “It has to start.”
Reaction online to the fake spot includes:
“This was genius.”
“This joke is actually so good.”
“Cat and baby and the word NO. That’s a cause I can get behind.”
“That sums up how much your opinion is worth nowadays.”
WATCH THE SKETCH:
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post WATCH: Hell Freezes Over as ‘SNL’ Brutally Mocks Celebrity Activism appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Jeff M. Smith
Real Clear Wire
Four years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan, what do we know about the origin of the SARSCOV2 virus?
We were presented at the outset with two competing theories: natural-origin spillover from animals to humans, and accidental lab leak. And at the outset, a cadre of elite scientists passionately argued that the evidence overwhelmingly favored a natural origin. With comparable fervor, they dismissed the possibility that SARSCOV2 leaked from a lab as a “conspiracy theory.”
With a few notable exceptions, mainstream media outlets and the larger scientific community vehemently nodded in agreement. NPR said the lab-leak theory was “debunked,” Vanity Fair called it a “right-wing coronavirus conspiracy,” and Facebook banned posts suggesting the virus may have been manufactured in a lab.
Four years later that narrative has begun to crack—and rightly so.
It was always a lie; one of the most consequential lies of the 21st century. Like all great lies it perfectly inverted the truth: the evidence supporting natural spillover has always been thin. Conversely, the evidence pointing to a lab leak has always been compelling and has grown substantially more persuasive with time.
A coalition of elite scientists and complicit media outlets have proven remarkably effective in suppressing the truth for this long. But in recent months, as congressional investigations have intensified, honest scientists and journalists have begun challenging the false consensus with greater alacrity as new revelations have tipped the scales toward lab leak even further.
The clique of elite scientists propagating the natural-spillover theory have always had several problems on their hands. Despite an exhaustive four-year search, no intermediate animal host has ever been found. The closest natural relatives to SARSCOV2 are found in bats in Laos and in Yunnan Province over 600 miles away.
Two of the more popular arguments advanced by spillover partisans—that pandemic began at the Huanan wet market in Wuhan and that it jumped to humans from raccoon dogs and pangolins—have withered under scrutiny. The academic papers supporting both arguments have been hollowed out by fatal challenges to the underlying data, methods, or conclusions.
To date, a natural-spillover explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic remains little more than a distant theoretical possibility.
The Lab-Leak Theory
The most obvious piece of incriminating evidence for the lab-leak theory has always been the existence of a biolab in Wuhan just miles away from the initial outbreak. This wasn’t just any old biolab—the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was an advanced research facility studying coronaviruses that “collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military.” And this wasn’t just any old coronavirus research—the WIV was conducting the riskiest viral research in the world.
Gain-of-function research of concern—which can make viruses more transmissible to humans, ostensibly in order to create vaccines—was so risky, and the chance of causing an accidental pandemic was so great, that the U.S. government banned funding for this research in 2014. Nevertheless, U.S. agencies continued funding this dangerous research at the WIV, even before the moratorium was officially lifted in December 2017.
This was a spectacularly irresponsible decision. U.S. authorities had visited the WIV and found it to have wildly inadequate safety protocols. In a truly Strangelovian twist, we later learned that the WIV was conducting virus research that theoretically could end human civilization in BSL-2 conditions, roughly the equivalent of a dentist’s office safety protocols. “That’s screwed up,” responded Dr. Ian Lipkin, an early proponent of natural spillover, after learning of the WIV’s safety protocols. “People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”
As well it should have. Mere miles from Ground Zero of the coronavirus pandemic, in chronically unsafe conditions, a government lab collaborating with the Chinese military was doing extremely risky research on coronaviruses—including the closest known relatives of SARSCOV2.
Brace yourself, there’s more.
The Chinese Coverup
If the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t the product of a lab leak, one might reasonably expect the Chinese government to provide a degree of cooperation with the international community, if for no other reason than to clear its name.
China, of course, did the exact opposite. It swiftly arrested doctors and whistleblowers. It ordered labs to transfer or destroy any related viral samples and “not to publish any information related to the unknown disease.” And shirking its obligations to international health regulations, it refused to provide key data to international investigators.
When the World Health Organization requested to do an audit of the WIV and the wet market, China again refused. It also refused to turn over vital pieces of evidence, such as the blood samples of the lab workers or the animals at the wet market.
Adding to the mystery, a few months before the acknowledged outbreak in December 2019, “several researchers inside the WIV became sick.” The WIV changed its security protocols, ordered an expensive new air incinerator and ventilation system, and – in the middle of the night – mysteriously took down an online database of 22,000 bat virus samples.
And let’s not overlook the fact that Beijing was inexplicably able to produce a vaccine in record time, with a patent filed in February 2020. Most scientists believe the timeline to create a vaccine implausibly short – unless someone in China had access to SARSCOV2 before December 2019.
Notably, this mystery vaccine was created by a Chinese military scientist. Rather than being hailed as a hero for creating a vaccine with improbable speed, Mr. Zhou Yusen suspiciously died months later and was virtually scrubbed from the record by the Chinese Communist Party. At least one report claimed he “fell” to his death from the rooftop of the WIV.
In sum, rather than providing any semblance of cooperation or transparency on the origins of the deadliest event of the 21st Century, China acted pretty much exactly as you would expect from a paranoid communist country trying to cover up a lab leak.
Brace yourself, there’s more.
The Smoking Gun
This list of giant red flags grew even longer with the discovery and examination of the “DEFUSE” proposal, submitted to the Pentagon in 2018 by a group of organizations led by Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance.
Under lab examination, SARSCOV2 was always a bit of a mystery, adorned with some peculiar characteristics. The virus appeared better designed to target humans than animals, “fully optimized for interaction with the human ACE2 receptor” and “consistent with a laboratory optimized coronavirus which entered the human population fully evolved.”
An even more consequential peculiarity was the presence of a Furin Cleavage Site (FCS), which has the unfortunate property of enhancing a viruses’ transmissibility. The presence of an FCS was particularly puzzling because none of the over 1,500 of known sarbecoviruses (the sub-genus of SARSCOV2) has ever been found in nature with a FCS. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for virologists to insert an FCS while doing gain-of-function experiments in a lab.
For a while, it looked like the presence of an FCS in SARSCOV2, located at the S1/S2 boundary, would remain a vexing, unsolved mystery. Then we learned the details of the $14 million DEFUSE proposal. One year before the pandemic, Mr. Daszak and his collaborators requested funding from the Pentagon to conduct gain-of-function research at the WIV. Specifically, they proposed inserting a FCS into a coronavirus at the S1/S2 boundary—precisely the never-before-seen characteristics present in SARSCOV2 that aided the virus’ rapid transmission.
The Pentagon wisely declined to fund the DEFUSE proposal, but a growing pile of evidence suggests this research went ahead in some form anyway—or was already being conducted—and likely escaped from the Wuhan lab and started the COVID-19 pandemic. “If you study hundreds of different bat viruses at BSL-2 [safety protocols], your luck may eventually run out,” admits one of the godfathers of gain-of-function research and a frequent WIV collaborator, Dr. Ralph Baric.
Of the two possible theories of COVID-19’s origins, only one stands atop of mountain of increasingly persuasive evidence. Natural-spillover proponents have nevertheless sought to dismiss this damning indictment as merely a chain of misinterpreted coincidences. The proximity of the WIV, the gain-of-function research, the dead PLA scientists, the mysterious vaccines, the dentist-office security protocols, the Furin Cleavage Site, the deleted databases, the silenced doctors, the DEFUSE proposal, the lack of an animal host are all just … coincidences.
Any one of them would have been a legitimate cause for inquiry and concern. A dozen of them, by the laws of probability and basic common sense, constitute a smoking gun.
The Real Conspiracy
Which begs a final question: How could this group of elite scientists have gotten this paramount question so horribly wrong?
The inevitable answer is: they didn’t. They weren’t wrong. They were lying.
We know from leaked internal communications that some of the same scientists most ardently dismissing the lab-leak theory took one look at SARSCOV2 and concluded it was, in the words of biologist Kristian Andersen, “so friggin’ likely” the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab “because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
The virus seemed “pre-adapted from the get go,” observed virologist Edward Holmes. The presence of an unprecedented Furin Cleavage Site in SARSCOV2 kept scientist Bob Garry “up all night.” The SARSCOV2 genome was “inconsistent with evolutionary theory,” concluded Dr. Andersen on January 31, 2020.
One day later, some of the same scientists held a phone call with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci and rapidly did an about-face, condemning the lab-leak theory as a “crackpot” conspiracy and viciously attacking anyone questioning their fabricated consensus. A larger network of scientists and science journalists quickly fell in line. The coverup had begun.
The Coverup
A tight network of elite scientists soon engaged in a remarkably effective effort to deceive the world. They collectively briefed the U.S. government, World Health Organization, and any media outlets that would listen: The science was settled, this wasn’t a lab leak. Some of them went on to publish the now-infamous Proximal Origins paper in March 2020 in Nature Medicine, ranked as the most impactful science article of that year. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the paper’s authors asserted.
Their efforts to discredit the lab-leak theory were aided substantially by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak. He had been involved in multiple collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including the now-infamous DEFUSE proposal which included a veritable blueprint for creating SARSCOV2. The experiments were so dangerous, and the WIV safety protocols so poor, Daszak intentionally sought to deceive the Pentagon by suggesting the research would be conducted in the U.S.—not China.
(Shockingly, Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance are still receiving tens of millions of dollars in U.S. government research grants, including a seven-figure grant awarded in December 2022.)
After the pandemic outbreak, Daszak conveniently avoided disclosing his personal connections to risky coronavirus research at the WIV as he organized and co-drafted a letter in The Lancet to “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
“The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true,” Daszak proclaimed in an April 2020 interview.
Daszak also managed to get himself appointed to join the World Health Organization’s (WHO) investigation into COVID’s origins. The investigation produced a March 2021 report that concluded it was “extremely unlikely” SARSCOV2 leaked from a lab. (Under growing scrutiny, the second phase of the WHO investigation was “quietly shelved.”)
Daszak also positioned himself to lead The Lancet’s “COVID-19 Commission.” The following year, chairman Dr. Jeffrey Sachs disbanded the commission over “concerns about the conflicts of interest of one its members and his ties…to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Sachs later lamented how Dazsak was “not telling me the truth” and was “filled with misdirection,” admitting “it’s time to fess up [SARSCOV2] might have come out of a lab.”
“We don’t have definitive evidence of either hypothesis,” Sachs posited. “But what we do have is definitive evidence that officialdom has tried to keep our eyes away from the lab leak.”
Dr. Fauci was also working overtime to deflect attention from the lab-leak theory. In multiple bouts of congressional testimony, Fauci engaged in semantic games to insist the U.S. wasn’t involved in funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV. (It was.) On several occasions, Fauci publicly argued the evidence “very, very strongly” leans toward natural origin. (It doesn’t.) Those challenging Fauci on these questions, he famously told CBS’s Face the Nation, were “really criticizing science, because I represent science.”
Fauci also tried to explain away China’s stunning lack of cooperation with the international community and elaborate coverup that cost the world countless lives by blaming the Trump administration’s “accusatory nature” for China’s deadly obfuscation.
Fauci also led an effort to brief other U.S. government agencies on COVID’s origins, reportedly leaning on the intelligence community, White House, and State Department to conclude a lab leak was unlikely. One whistleblower later claimed Fauci’s “opinion substantially altered the conclusions that were subsequently drawn.”
Oddly, U.S. intelligence agencies proved largely split and indecisive in their conclusions, with nearly all submitting “low confidence” assessments it was either a lab leak, natural origin, or the evidence was inconclusive. Only one agency had a “medium confidence” assessment in either theory: the FBI is convinced SARSCOV2 is the product of a lab leak. So too is former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who explained in 2023: “a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense.”
The Conspiracy
This was the real conspiracy. Many of the elite scientists seeking to discredit the lab-leak theory knew all along it was the most credible explanation. Not only did they intentionally deceive the world, they slandered any scientist or journalist that challenged them. For daring to question this fraudulent consensus, scientist Alina Chan was viciously attacked as an “intellectually dishonest, manipulative conspiracist with very little subject matter expertise who has…compensated for her mediocrity by pursuing personal profit.”
So, why did the scientific establishment act with such disgrace and deception? Their motivations were multi-causal.
First, some of these scientists were direct collaborators with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Dr. Peter Hotez had channeled U.S. government funds to five coronavirus research projects conducted by the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences and the WIV between 2016 and 2019. Mr. Daszak’s DEFUSE proposal included a veritable blueprint for SARSCOV2. They were rightly concerned they could be held personally accountable.
Second, some of these scientists had for years been quietly waging a behind-the-scenes battle to defend risky gain-of-function research over the considerable objections of other virologists. If the pandemic was, in fact, the product of a lab leak, it might deal a fatal blow to their crusade to preserve this controversial research. Even worse, from their perspective, it would mark the death knell for scientific cooperation with China.
Third, some of these scientists had strong financial and reputational incentives to suppress the lab-leak theory, especially after Dr. Fauci weighed in. Dr. Andersen, for example, had a roughly $9 million grant pending with Fauci’s government agency at the time—a grant that was approved two months after he co-authored the seminal academic paper supporting natural spillover, Proximal Origins. “There were people that did not talk about [the lab leak], because they feared for their careers,” Dr. Filippa Lentzos of King’s College later admitted. “They feared for their grants.”
Fourth and finally, the lab-leak debate was hyper-politicized from the outset. Once President Donald Trump suggested a Wuhan lab might be responsible, scientists felt compelled to pick a side. Supporting with the lab-leak theory was “siding with President Trump” and nothing—not science, honesty, morality, credibility, or public health—was more important than opposing the “racist” conspiracy theory adopted by Trump, even if it was likely to be true.
The Conclusion
Presented the evidence objectively, the American people can now decide for themselves whether the natural origin theory of COVID-19 represents the most implausible string of coincidences imaginable or the lie of the century.
Jeff M. Smith is the Director of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.
The post The Lie of the Century: The Origin of COVID-19 appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Paul Dabrik
Terry Newsome of Behind Enemy Lines podcast has been covering the ever-expanding issue of illegal immigration in the city of Chicago. The sanctuary city crisis has become a burden too heavy for the blue states to carry. In recent months, Chicago citizens have flooded city council meetings lambasting the Johnson administration for continually catering to the illegal immigrant population while housing them in facilities across the city. As the Gateway Pundit reported in March, migrant facilities in Chicago appear to be hot spots for imported crime of myriad sorts.
Illinois taxpayers are on the hook for everything from transportation, to food, shelter, phones, and childcare. The multiple modern ghettos that pose as migrant facilities have put an undue burden on both the emergency responders and the Cook County taxpayer. So much so that Mayor Brandon Johnson has recently asked the Chicago City Council for an additional $70 million to manage the illegal immigration crisis. This is on top of the $300 million already spent to sustain the crisis.
The irony is that Chicago faces record crime and violence in recent years due to the Illinois Safe-T act passed in 2022. The Act puts violent criminals back on the street through cashless bail. As Newsome covered in January, the homeless are left to freeze in the sub-zero temperatures of Chicago while migrants are housed, fed, and cared for on the taxpayer dime. The juxtaposition of increasing crime and cost of living with the uncapped spending on illegals has stressed the political tension to a breaking point. Recently an African American voter chastised the City Council while wearing a MAGA hat. The concerned citizen observed that previous funds going to illegal immigrants came from an opiate settlement fund. The harrowing story of a mother who lost her child from a stray bullet, and turning to opiates for solace is not out of the ordinary in Chicago.
It would seem that the situation in Chicago could not be more chaotic. However, the Freedom of Information Act is always bearing fruit. As previously mentioned, a FOIA to the Chicago Police Department in March for the period between January 2023 and February 2024 showed multiple criminal referrals from the Inn of Chicago migrant facility. Crimes such as assault, burglary, robbery, sexual assault, child abuse, child abduction, and endangering a child were exposed. Terry Newsome’s latest FOIA request regarding the migrant facility in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago has brought forth more troubling revelations.
Many similar criminal offenses were found at the Pilsen migrant facility, however it was a non-criminal report that is most concerning. Event number 2405108322 details the case of a lost phone. When examined, the phone showed recognizable evidence of human trafficking via WhatsApp messaging. The report also details a curious description of the phone itself. The phone is described as “1 Black Vortex Cellphone.” The model number is listed as “Vortex.” Interestingly, there is a company called Vortex Cellular. More interestingly Vortex Cellular has a government issued phone initiative. A recent LinkedIn article notes, “In this era, getting a phone for free has become possible, especially if you qualify for government assistance programs.” The article goes on to say that the phones are, “… funded by the government and facilitated by various wireless service providers.”
The post Human Trafficking Evidence in Chicago Migrant Facility appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Reprinted with permission by Joe Hoft and People’s Audit.
Well, I made a business out of eliminating waste and fraud along with scaling organizations. I believe you can always find ways to improve processes. With constant improvements in technology, it is just a matter of leveraging the latest proven technology to make things simpler and reduce costly errors with better monitoring of the transactions.
Along with better monitoring of those processes, you typically find some bad apples that need to be tossed because they refuse to stop wasting money or worse, get caught stealing it.
Every one of our business endeavors typically was self-funded in less than 3 months and it was a win-win because the waste we eliminated resulted in FAR MORE MONEY in the pockets of our shareholders than they ever had to pay to us for eliminating it.
Also, the employees of those same companies learned to love us because once they got over the habitual fear of change, we showed them how easy we could make their jobs by eliminating problems caused by recurring issues.
So how does that relate to elections?
Well, here is my Lake County, Florida Supervisor Election and former Florida Senator, Alan Hays proudly standing next to a baker’s rack full of undelivered voter information cards back in June 2022.
We know there were exactly 27,774 pieces of undelivered voter information cards in that rack because the Ladys of Lake County Election Team scanned every one of them. All the while Mr. Hays removed the chairs from the room so they couldn’t even rest while feeding them through the scanner.
I wish I could say he is a model public servant, but he has a nasty habit of blowing his top and yelling at you if you ask him questions.
So let’s say conservatively, the county paid $3 to print and postage each one of those voter information cards. That is $83,322 of Lake County taxpayer money this dentist-turned-mail-in election expert hauled off to the dump.
Was that one of the reasons why Hays got $195,000 in Zuckerbucks in 2020?
Keep in mind. This was just one mailing and I’m not considering storage, handling, transportation, and shredding of this mail because that all depends on your local rates. I do hope they securely dispose of these since they could be used to steal votes. But he told us he wasn’t going to look at them till after the 2 election cycles (Aug 2022 Primary & Nov 2022 General) were complete.
We counted about 572 primary voters who were somehow still able to vote by mail in the Aug 2022 Primary while their voter information card sat in that rack as undeliverable.
Think there may be a problem with waste and potential fraud here?
As for mail-in ballots, you could conservatively estimate $5-$10 per mail-in ballot if you consider the special paper, folding, and stuffing into envelopes.
But it’s a good thing Leon County’s Supervisor of Election, Mark Early is married to Stacey Early who heads the elections division of Cathedral Printing in Orlando. Catherdral, a New York-based company whose CEO was a monthly contributor to ACT BLUE, purchased Fidlar Elections in 2017. Do you think Earley gets us all a FAMILY DISCOUNT on the 2/3 of the state’s mail-in ballots that are printed at Cathedral?
You would think when Mark Early was president of the Florida Supervisors of Election, Inc. he would be promoting best practices on dealing with bulk mail since his wife is a long-time expert on the topic. I would have no problem with nepotism if she were training other countries on these best practices because large printers are typically experts on them.
That is because major print companies must follow USPS CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) processes to qualify to send bulk mail.
In late September 2022, less than 2 months before the November General Election, The People’s Audit found about 100,000 undeliverable voters requesting mail-in ballots in that election. It was probably even higher than this number because this was just days before Hurricane Ian flattened and flooded parts of Florida.
Printers know which voter is undeliverable using the same type of software that we use. It works with the US Post Office to determine if the address is deliverable or not. It also corrects and correctly formats the address and most recognizably adds an extra 4 digits to the zip code.
If you ever bought anything online you probably saw a step asking you to confirm your address. This is the CASS Verification step most online retailers and Internet companies do. Here is an example from Google.
The software the printers use also has the capability of doing NCOA (National Change of Address) checks because the Post Office requires you to do these checks on your mail lists every 90 days to qualify for discount postage.
But in the printer’s contracts that we looked at in multiple counties, the printer will state that if the address cannot be verified, they will just print the address as is and cannot guarantee it will be delivered.
But the one thing you can guarantee is the printer still charges the counties to check that address along with printing the item and applying postage to it. EVERY TIME THEY ARE ASKED TO BULK PRINT ANYTHING FROM THE ELECTION OFFICES.
So let’s go with a conservative estimate of $5 per mail-in ballot time for 100,000 requests that were showing to be undeliverable. That is about $500,000 that the printers still charged the state. Our election officials then haul around the bakers’ racks continuing the cycle of waste each election cycle. I wonder if the election officials get any donations from the printers to keep business as usual running.
On top of all this waste, there is a return service fee charged by the US Post Office on every piece of returned mail.
Strangely, when you try to reconcile what the USPS charges the county for being undeliverable vs what the county records as undeliverable, it never seems to balance. Wherever we looked, the USPS seems to be charging for more items than the election offices are recording as undeliverable.
Is it because some ballots get harvested and counted in the elections or is the county office staff poor at manually reviewing all those envelopes and properly recording them?
Something does not add up here.
First and foremost, local election offices MUST adopt the same practices that companies use when dealing with bulk mail.
I AM NOT PROMOTING MAIL-IN BALLOT VOTING!
I still think mail-in voting is prone to fraud, but those election offices still need to mail out voter information cards, sample ballots, and notices along with keeping our voter rolls clean.
In my +20 years of building systems that clean organizational data, fixing addresses not only saves a tremendous amount of money that would otherwise get wasted, it also gives you more accurate ways to compare your data to other systems.
For instance, the people who are stored in the NCOA database are stored in CASS format.
If you have an address like “123 Main Street, Fort Lauderdale, Florida” in your database, even though a human may see it is the same address, A COMPUTER WILL NOT MATCH the CASS formatted address which is: “123 MAIN ST, FT LAUDERDALE, FL.” Unless you tell a computer to ignore the case of the letter, it might not match just for being in a different case. That is why CASS CAPITALIZES the address. This makes it faster for the mail scanners to read them if they are all uniform and standardized.
So to reiterate, standardize your address for better matching:
If all your addresses are in CASS Format, the record matches with address changes, deaths, and felony charges will match more accurately.
So this small change will domino out into multiple areas. How do I know this? The reality is anyone who does anything with addresses in business and online retail knows this and has been doing this for nearly 20 years.
That is why it was so shocking to me to see election officials promoting mail-in ballots without even understanding the basics of mail. This is Fortune 500 standard practice in the private sector.
In the bulk printing industry, this knowledge would be the equivalent of a plumber knowing how to use a plunger to unplug a toilet. But you also don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see how the waste allows for mail ballots to be stolen as well as a LOT OF TAXPAYER MONEY to be spread across multiple government agencies and vendors.
When we started with the Nov 2020 voter rolls, Florida had 694,187 Active Registrations with both of their addresses UAA (Undeliverable As Addressed). Or unreachable by mail because both their residential and mail addresses were bad.
Fast forward to today, and with the grassroots efforts in Florida using The People’s Audit, we cut that number in half to 356,548 Active UAA Voters.
So just think about how much Florida is now saving with this reduced amount of undeliverable mail throughout the state. If we go back to that voter card example and $3 per mail piece, that is over 1 MILLION DOLLARS PER MAILING!
But wait…there’s more…
ERIC is now irrelevant. Why do we need to share our data with 3rd party left-leaning vendors when the election offices could easily check NCOA (National Change Of Address) in-house because all their addresses are already stored in the correct CASS format?
If the locals simply store the addresses using US Post Office CASS standards, they can easily acquire the same software they are currently paying the printers to charge them to use for EVERY SINGLE MASS MAILING.
That postal software requires you to do an automatic NCOA check every 90 days to qualify for discount postage. So the election offices would also know who has moved without the need for ERIC.
Also, this same software allows you to generate tracking IMB bar codes that will track that individual piece of mail to see if it is delivered or not..MOST IMPORTANTLY RECEIVE AN ELECTRONIC NOTIFICATION WHEN IT DOES OR DOES NOT ARRIVE!
The USPS discontinued the previous system in which these bar codes we optional on some mail in late 2023 and now ALL MAIL is being tracked with these IMB codes. So either we are having our elections office use them directly OR we are paying the 3rd parties to apply them to every mailing.
Why on earth are we also paying 3rd part left-leaning organizations to do our mail ballot tracking when this can all be done SECURELY within our county election offices?
And why are they wasting resources manually documenting returned mail MONTHS AFTER AN ELECTION HAPPENS? The election notification on returned mail would come back during the mail ballot stage weeks before the election and could immediately VOID THAT BALLOT so it can’t be harvested.
After reading this I hope you understand how wasteful and frankly unprofessional what elections officials are currently doing.
So in summary, what can local election offices do?
NO EXCUSES! Not only does this save taxpayers MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ANNUALLY, but it also cleans our voter rolls and secures our election mail.
And there should also be enough left over to pay your staff more and hire some cybersecurity experts at the state and local levels.
The post THE PEOPLE’S AUDIT: Save Millions in Taxpayer Money + Secure Elections?? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
On Saturday in Springfield, Missouri, conservatives took back the Republican Party.
Like many other states, Missouri’s America First citizens don’t have a voice in their government. Although they are the super majority in the state, they are not being heard, and what they want for their state is not happening. Even though the GOP runs the state with a huge majority, key conservative policies and beliefs are pushed aside.
Leading up to the event, platform amendments were passed at county and district caucuses to be reviewed by the platform committee and implemented at the convention. The draft presented by the GOP completely ignored every amendment passed and watered down the current version of the platform.
Because of the disenfranchisement of the conservative base in Missouri, the grassroots rose up against the RINOs at the convention. They planned to unseat every RINO, swap the RINO agenda with an America First agenda, and force a revised platform to be voted on.
When the convention began, the effort to bring MAGA back to Missouri started. The RINOs in the party were shocked and spent the next three hours talking about all sorts of nothing while they tried to figure out ways that they could overcome the conservative coup.
Let the shenanigans begin. These stalling tactics aren’t going to work. Let’s get this show on the road #MOGOP #mograssrootstrong pic.twitter.com/BOv40Yw1GG
— Kristen Haftrak (@Kristen_Haftrak) May 4, 2024
The stalling from the GOP RINOs went on for three hours as they tried to figure out how to overcome the grassroot majority’s effort to take back the party.
https://t.co/tLDXVz8rDq pic.twitter.com/M0koAJedlv
— Kristen Haftrak (@Kristen_Haftrak) May 4, 2024
Eventually, Sophia Shore was voted in as the GOP Chairwoman of the convention. This was a win and the beginning of the grassroots efforts in taking back their party.
#mograssrootstrong https://t.co/NQWJpz41qZ
— Kristen Haftrak (@Kristen_Haftrak) May 4, 2024
GOP conservatives cheered when the grassroots supported GOP Chairwoman was elected to her new role instead of a RINO.
What an incredible day for Missouri Grassroots and bad day for the establishment. This is what a grassroot revolution looks like. We flipped the chair, committeeman/woman, the slate, and we voted down the RINO platform draft. #letsgomo #mograssrootstrong #grassrootrevolution pic.twitter.com/xHAZ47Yp0J
— Kristen Haftrak (@Kristen_Haftrak) May 5, 2024
And just like that, the RINO platform was voted down!!!
And the RINO platform was voted down!!! But those amendments were just suggestions, right? #mograssrootrevolution #weredone #mograssrootstrong #cleansweep pic.twitter.com/wPQPohwvAe
— Kristen Haftrak (@Kristen_Haftrak) May 4, 2024
The post Breaking: Grassroots Revolution Overthrows RINOs at Missouri State GOP Convention appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on Leo Hohmann’s Substack and was republished with permission.
The eminent Professor Masayasu Inoue at Osaka City University Medical School in Japan recently warned that the Japanese government became the first in the world to approve a new type of jab called the “self replication replicon vaccine” that is being rushed to market as we speak. The goal is to have it ready by this fall or winter.
In the video below, the professor, who specializes in molecular pathology, condemns the COVID “pandemic” as propagated by the U.N. World Health Organization, for the purpose of driving genetically modifying COVID jabs into the bodies of all peoples worldwide. He also condemned the U.S. “Warp Speed” project under then-President Donald Trump, which rushed mRNA toxic injections to market that were used to cover up problems with the gene-based shots. The false pretext of Warp Speed was “saving time.” The professor then states that the Japanese government’s rush to market of its new injection will be similar and must be avoided at all costs. We are seeing deception magnified in the world today like perhaps never before. Jesus warned this would be the case in Matthew 24 of the New Testament.
It’s not often such a prominent scientist goes public with a warning of this magnitude. Please share this important 8-minute video with all your loved ones.
To receive new posts and support Leo Hohmann’s work, consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t yet at leohohmann.substack.com
The post Leo Hohmann: Prominent Japanese Medical Professor Warns Against Taking ‘Self Replication Replicon’ Jab This Fall or Winter (Video) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By W. Caffey Norman
Real Clear Wire
Concerning new reports reveal that the drug shortage in the U.S. has reached its highest level since the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists began tracking data. In total, 323 medicines are now in short supply.
However, the problem is about to get worse because of government regulations on an entirely different issue. Counterintuitive measures from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are set to effectively ban the domestic production of chemicals that are used in the process of manufacturing vital prescription drugs and vaccines.
Shortly after Congress amended the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in 2016, the EPA began the rulemaking process on 10 chemicals currently in use in the United States using a broad and overreaching definition of “unreasonable risk.” Now, the EPA is expected to release a final rule on methylene chloride under TSCA.
Methylene chloride has several applications, including in the process of manufacturing hundreds of medicines and vaccines like those that treat Hepatitis B and HIV infections, mental illnesses and epilepsy, heart failure and high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
If this rule goes into effect, it will exacerbate the drug shortage by bringing domestic manufacturing to a halt while making our supply chains more reliant on foreign nations like China for pharmaceuticals. This runs in direct contradiction to the Biden administration’s “Investing in America” agenda, which aims to onshore supply chains critical to our economy and security.
For example, methylene chloride is used to make hollow fiber cartridges which are used in the manufacture of monoclonal antibodies and vaccines, including the COVID-19, HPV, Hepatitis B, and flu vaccines, as well as therapies for arthritis, migraines, osteoporosis, and autoimmune diseases. In a letter to the EPA, the company that produces these cartridges wrote their product is used in at least 190 human therapeutics and vaccines. Their supply is so essential that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department awarded the company funding to expand its manufacturing capacity here in the U.S.
While HHS and DoD give taxpayer money to this company to operate in the United States, the EPA is simultaneously regulating out of domestic existence the necessary ingredients for their products. Ultimately, the final EPA rule could “impact millions of patients worldwide.”
Another company warned the EPA ban “would disrupt the critical infrastructure of biotechnology, including medical uses such as vaccine manufacturing and industrial biotechnology.” While the EPA would argue that pharmaceutical usage is exempt from the rule, the upstream supply chain of products necessary to manufacture these medicines is not.
The biggest winner with this new EPA rule will be China, which has grown to be the largest chemical producer in the world and the top exporter of methylene chloride. In the last decade, the U.S. has imported 17% of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) from China. Even countries like India, which supplies approximately 40% of generic pharmaceuticals used in the U.S., rely heavily on China. According to a 2021 U.S. Department of Commerce report, India imports nearly 70% of its APIs from China. By effectively banning the domestic production of methylene chloride, the EPA ensures that even more of the drug supply chain is dependent on China.
Despite the Biden administration’s stated goal to reduce “reliance on high-risk foreign suppliers” for medicines, the EPA is actively stifling the domestic production of ingredients needed to manufacture life-saving drugs that Americans rely on. The administration must carefully reevaluate what’s at stake.
W. Caffey Norman is a senior partner at Squire Patton Boggs. He has represented and advised American chemistry producers and associations for years, particularly in connection with evolving EPA chemical regulations.
The post Historic Drug Shortage Exacerbated by EPA Overreach appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Adam Andrzejewski
Real Clear Wire
Topline: The federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud every year, according to a new study from the Government Accountability Office.
Key facts: The fraud losses represent 3 to 7 percent of the $40 trillion the federal government obligated from 2018 to 2022, a ratio the GAO says is comparable to other large governments like the U.K.
The dollar figure includes only crimes that cause the government to lose money it already has — not tax fraud or other ways the government loses potential revenue.
It does include over $100 billion lost to unemployment insurance fraud and $200 billion in fraudulent business loans from the Small Business Administration during the pandemic.
The lowest estimate, $233 billion, is still larger than the 2022 budget of all but eight federal agencies.
Only $4.41 billion to $7.31 billion was reported as “confirmed fraud” each year with an official court ruling. The rest was settled out of court or, more likely, never recouped at all.
Some of the biggest risk factors for fraud are expanding government programs or adding new ones, allowing state governments to control payments, and relying on officials with limited training or experience, the GAO wrote.
The report does not necessarily predict how much will be lost to fraud in the future.
Background: The federal government arguably does a poor job of getting money back once it’s lost to fraud.
The Justice Department announced in April that it recovered only $1.4 billion of money stolen during the pandemic, less than 1% of the total amount. OpenTheBooks contributed to a report in the Washington Times detailing the process, explaining that tens of thousands of businesses on the Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” list received loans anyway.
Critical quote: The Office of Management and Budget said the GAO report was “misleading” and will “create confusion” because it relies on projections and estimates and not just hard data.
Even the GAO admitted “we cannot eliminate the possibility that the actual amount of fraud could be outside of the range of our estimate.”
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com
The post Waste of the Day: Federal Government Loses Up to $521 Billion to Fraud Annually appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Chris Clem
Real Clear Wire
If the majority of Americans agree on something, you may want to pause and learn more. If almost 90% of Americans agree, that’s a gamechanger. When it comes to border security and immigration, Americans are much more united than you might think.
A new poll commissioned by Americans for Prosperity, where I’m an advisor on border security, reveals 87% of Americans say they would like to see immigration policy that:
As a former border patrol agent with over 27 years of service under my belt, I believe in each and every one of these reforms, and know that without them, our southern border will continue to be in a state of crisis.
In nearly three decades of service, I’ve never seen Americans so concerned about their border. And there’s a reason why. Since President Biden took office, over 8 million people illegally crossed the southern border, creating an unprecedented crisis for the country.
Immigration reform isn’t a Republican or Democrat issue. It’s an American issue. Clearly Americans from all points of the political spectrum are fed up with the status quo and ready for meaningful reforms. Over 80% are pessimistic about the security of our southern border. Yet, like me, they are fairly optimistic about the options available to turn things around.
According to the poll, Americans nearly universally support improving inspections at ports of entry, increasing screenings of the guardians of young migrants, and improving Border Patrol agents’ working conditions. The poll also found specific legislation, like making it easier for foreign doctors who studied in the U.S. to stay in the U.S., garners 90% support from all Americans.
While these actions may seem more obviously nonpartisan, actions to secure the southern border aren’t partisan either. In the poll, 89% of Americans said they would like to see the U.S. government hire more Border Patrol agents and raise their pay. Additionally, 85% supported hiring civilian personnel to monitor asylum seekers so Border Patrol can focus on securing the border itself. And 90% want to see monthly data on the number of migrants appearing on the Terrorist Screening Database.
Clearly, what the American electorate wants is immigration reform that benefits both American citizens and immigrants coming into the U.S. What’s holding up meaningful immigration reform isn’t a lack of solutions— it’s inaction by Congress and lack of leadership from the White House. President Biden loves to blame everybody but himself for this border crisis. But I remember his 100-day deportation moratorium and cessation of all border wall construction on Day 1 of his presidency. And I also remember the message his actions and rhetoric sent to migrants – come on in, the border is open. It’s no surprise that there were almost 100,000 more apprehensions in March of 2021 than there were in January of that year.
But Congress has also turned a deaf ear to the concerns of their constituents, not only by failing to pass these specific reforms but also by standing idly by as the dysfunctional system helps cartels and smugglers at the expense of everybody else. For example, Congress hasn’t demanded that DHS disclose the number of migrants it has lost track of within the US or that it disclose the number of people who have evaded border patrol (known colloquially as “gotaways”), even though the vast majority of Americans want these statistics publicly shared every month.
If Congress can’t hold the executive branch accountable to reforms that are as basic as sharing monthly data or pass solutions that nearly all Americans can agree on, are they really working for the American electorate?
This new polling reveals what I and others in this space already knew – border security and immigration aren’t nearly as divisive as politicians and the media would have us believe. The majority of Americans are united on securing our borders, reforming immigration rules to be clearer and more predictable, and creating a system that benefits the United States and those who want to come contribute, while removing threats to our security and the rule of law.
We will be a stronger, safer, more prosperous country for having those reforms in place.
It’s high time Congress listens to the American people by securing the border, by being transparent about the crisis, and by making meaningful, lasting reforms to the immigration system.
Chief Chris Clem is a retired Chief Patrol Agent who served as a U.S. border patrol agent for over 27 years.
The post Americans Want Congress to Act on Border Security. Will They? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Michael R. Shevock
Real Clear Wire
DEI is a bad idea. It is divisive, racist, and anti-meritocratic. Coleman Hughes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali , Elon Musk, and a host of other first-rate minds have vigorously come out against it. Yet, our Coast Guard leadership continues to promote it without discussion or debate. For an objective observer, that should be the first clue that something is very, very wrong.
Supporters of this ideology are fond of the term ‘cultural competence,’ which they seem to believe is obtainable in a seminar or a classroom, but there are other paths to knowledge. For example, I enjoyed twenty-eight years in federal law enforcement, which, among other things, afforded me familiarity with the inside of a crack-house. Here are are some things I learned first-hand:
(1) Underclass black America is indeed suffering unacceptable levels of violence and generational poverty;
(2) Malcolm X was absolutely correct when he identified white liberals as an impediment to the progress of black America;
(3) the most pernicious condition afflicting underclass black America, yielding drug use, poverty and crime, is the lack of fathers in the home; and
(4) the dominance of the progressive/postmodern agenda, of which DEI is a cornerstone, is almost solely to blame for the pitiful state of our urban poor.
For the first hundred years after the Civil War, black America made the astonishing transition from chattel slavery to the beginning of a thriving middle class. This amazing achievement hit a stone wall, concurrent with the advent of Lyndon Johnson’s welfare state. Eminent economist Dr. Thomas Sowell documents how, after a century of black families remaining basically intact, the 1960s saw a sharp (and continuing) decline in the number of black, two parent families. Dr. Sowell could not put it more clearly when he says, “The welfare state is no favor to the blacks.”
The original manifesto of Black Lives Matter specifically stated, “We disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages.’”
Our credentialed DEI experts, products all of the grievance studies pipeline in academia, are promoting a deeply flawed narrative. The bedrock assumption upon which all their ideas rest is that certain communities of color are being held back (oppressed) by patriarchal white supremacy. As per philosopher Eric Hoffer, a movement can succeed without a god, but not without a devil.
As it turns out, their guiding belief melts in the presence of the little-known fact that black immigrants from Nigeria are outperforming the U.S. national average both in terms of education and earned income. There are also compelling claims that they’re underrepresented in the prison system.
Additionally, using the same criteria of educational achievement and earned income, of the six main ethnic/racial groups in the U.S.: whites, Hispanics, blacks, East Asians, West Asians (Indians & Pakistanis), and Native Americans, whites do not even land in the top two.
One would expect so-called advocates for underclass black America to trumpet these facts from the mountaintops, as they clearly and thoroughly destroy any suggestion of racial superiority of whites, but that would only apply if said advocates were actually interested in the welfare of the people they claim to care about. The boogey-man of white supremacy is a terrific gravy-train.
At the University of Virginia in 2023, the Chief Diversity Officer and the VP for DEI both received annual compensation packages valued in excess of at $520,000.
To demonstrate the degree of scholarly rigor in the DEI community, I draw on the Coast Guard Academy Alumni Association. It maintains a website with a DEI section. Despite my repeated complaints over a period of years about factual and grammatical failings in said website, one can still find the following definitions:
“Systemic Racism: Systems and structures that have procedures or processes that disadvantages (sic) African Americans(.)”
“Minoritized: … As used by the Coast Guard Academy, an adverb (sic) deliberately used to describe cadets of color or underrepresented minorities (URM) that refers to the actions (intended or unintended) taken by institutions that lead to the socially constructed minoritization of racial and gender and other groups that make up our diverse community.”
“Race: A social construct, meaning the notion of race was created by people. As a scientific tool for categorizing different types of human beings’ “race” has no value (sic). …”
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the sickle cell anemia trait is inherited, and is present in babies born of Sub-Saharan African heritage (i.e. black) at a rate over ten times higher than babies of Hispanic heritage, over twenty times higher than babies born of European (white) heritage, and over thirty times greater than babies born of Asian heritage. Apparently, our DEI experts do not know medical research qualifies as science.
(And, finally, this nugget that our social justice experts mysteriously believe belongs on the DEI portion of the website.)
“Intrusive Leadership: A leadership style that is not about analyzing your direct reports and reading them and jumping to conclusions. It is simply about getting to know them. This is a skill but can be developed with practice. It is important to be patient because you are also establishing trust and rapport with them. Intrusive leadership is not about analyzing your direct reports and reading them and jumping to conclusions. It is simply about getting to know them (sic).”
These examples are not offered merely to show that many of our social justice experts could not pass for competent fourth graders, but also to highlight how the magical stamp of ‘DEI’ inoculates flawed scholarship from being challenged. Cue the Coast Guard Academy’s new initiative, the CGA Diversity & Inclusion Action Plan 2024-2026. It runs the gamut from cringe-comedy to disturbing.
A line edit would have helped – there are instances of inconsistent spelling and capitalization. Small ideas are camouflaged with academic buzzwords such as, “effective modalities” and “robust pedagogies.”
The real humor, however, is how too much DEI is never enough. Every conceivable component of the academy is relentlessly tasked with making DEI a prime objective. Finally, we’ll have an “Athletic Cultural Competence Initiative.” In addition to mysteriously demanding input from academy components not directly involved in sports, it will require coaches to hold “Cultural Competence sessions.” No, really: in the plural. I’m trying to picture how this would go. “Hey guys, I mean, ‘team,’ I’ve been noticing how some of you come in different colors, which is okay because we’re inclusively inclusive, and diverse diversity is our strength, and also really diverse, which we all know is an imperative for victory. And equity. We’re all about equity. Lots and lots of equity. Any questions?” One thing for certain, it won’t be awkward.
Just kidding. It’s going to be awful. Only someone pitifully disconnected from reality could think this is a good idea. Much of private industry is already backing away from ad nauseum diversity training because it has been shown they make interracial relations worse, not better.
The CGA initiative is suffering from a common failing among the over-educated, and that is confusing quantifiable effort with progress.
But amidst the clown-like silliness, the plan turns dark. In addition to setting a goal of attracting prospective cadets who are “DEI-mature” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), it states that candidates for prospective faculty positions shall be assessed “on cultural competence including their diversity, equity & inclusion philosophy.”
Stalin and Mao would laughingly recognize this demand for intellectual conformity, and it is evil. Reasonable minds must be allowed to disagree, at least privately. Mandating that faculty candidates provide in advance a declaration of mental obedience absolutely guarantees we’ll be hiring liars. Lying is poison to the soul. It’s a one-way door, through which one surrenders his or her capacity to stand up for principle. Is this the type of officer we’re hoping will populate the service? I fear we’re already halfway there.
Perhaps the worst thing about the Coast Guard’s position on DEI is how it does not allow for discussion or examination. I wholly appreciate the sentiment behind the movement, but the idea breaks down and turns sour when we assign the absurd goal of massaging standards to immediately yield proportional representation of all ethnic/racial groups.
According to the Brookings Institute, on the SAT math exams in 2019, only 7% of black test-takers scored at least 600, contrasted with 11%, 31%, and 62% of Hispanic, white, and Asian test-takers, respectively.
What this means, is that for every black high school senior with at least minimal academic qualifications, there will be at least three Hispanics, four Asians, and eighteen whites. To expect the Coast Guard Academy to attract proportional-to-population numbers of black high school students (i.e. 13%) who are also qualified to be admitted in the immediate short term would require individual members from the qualified pool of black candidates to apply with a greater proportional frequency than the other groups by a factor of three. This will never happen.
The service academies are competing with all the other elite institutions for qualified applicants, especially those that improve their optics. There are simply not enough qualified black and brown minorities to satisfy the demand. It’s tempting to bend entry standards, but, contrary to the fashionable myth, performance on the SAT exams is the best indictor of academic success in college.
Aside from degrading the effectiveness of the service, dropping standards for minority cadets will yield the perverse effect of casting doubt on the capability of all minority officers, increasing resentment on both sides, guaranteeing the opposite overall result of what DEI was originally supposed to accomplish.
By making a commitment to DEI a career imperative, the Coast Guard has disincentivized both honesty and common sense. The collective and damning absence of those qualities can be found in the Coast Guard’s reprehensible and ongoing Fouled Anchor scandal. God help us.
To erase the glaring disparities in achievement of certain groups, America needs to honestly address the root causes of dysfunction and failure, and that will require our leaders in academia and government to acknowledge that the current set of assumptions is bogus. Any objective examination of the numbers bears that out. Instead of studying grifters like Ibram X. Kendi, leaders of every stripe would be well-served to read the life story of Robert Smalls, who escaped slavery in the Civil War and, through amazing heroism, became a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy. After the war, he opened a school for former slaves, got elected as a state senator, and worked to make free education available to all South Carolina children. He earned the rank of major general in the state militia and was elected 3to five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. His monument in the Beaufort cemetery bears this quote which he spoke to the South Carolina legislature:
“My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”
The sons and daughters of Africa have already performed amazing feats, with many more to come. DEI is a counter-productive insult to everyone.
Michael R. Shevock is a 1976 of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Following graduation, he served three years afloat in the Bering Sea, and four years with Coast Guard Intelligence. From there, he worked as a criminal investigator/special agent with the Naval Investigative Service, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Department of Homeland Security.
The post The Coast Guard Academy’s Newest DEI Push appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Authorities claim there’s no need for sentencing hearing, bail option
A state legal action in Pennsylvania is sparking outrage, online and elsewhere, for the result it demanded: Two farmers arrested and jailed on 30-day sentences with no sentencing hearing and no option for bail.
Authorities say that’s the process they use for contempt charges, for which Ethan Wentworth of Airville, York County, and Rusty Herr of Christiana, Lancaster County, have been serving time since last month.
Broadcast outlet WPMT in Harrisburg reported the government’s complaint concerns their company, NoBull Solutions, which offers to help dairy farmers with their reproductive management of cattle.
Here’s a video podcast, by Yanasa TV, explaining the conflict:
Their lawyer, Robert Barnes, charges, “This is the craziest thing I’ve every seen.”
The fight apparently stems from allegations the two were practicing veterinary medicine without a license for running ultrasound test on cattle, a procedure that is common for farmers to use for various reasons.
The result was an investigation by the state of Pennsylvania, where officials demanded that the two turn over their records.
They failed to do what state officials demanded, and the report notes that resulted in contempt orders against the men.
The state’s court officials told the broadcast outlet that there is no option for bail, and no “sentencing hearing” required for contempt charges. Authorities simply arrest the suspects and jail them, the report said.
Eventually, a judge signed arrest warrants for the two, as well as orders to jail them in their respective counties, warrants that just recently were executed.
A critic of the two say there was ample due process, but Barnes issued a statement:
This is an unlawful civil contempt order. There are certain procedures that must be followed in a civil contempt action and to our knowledge those were not followed here. Even if they had been followed, the maximum allowable punishment is 15 days in jail which must be conditional, with keys to your own jail cell – meaning there is a condition you can meet to immediately end your incarceration. None of that is true in this case.
The state claims this is a punishment for not complying with a subpoena to turn over documents, but an agency can’t just order anyone to turn over any document they please. For a subpoena to be valid, the jurisdictional validity of the subpoena must be established, and it has not been in this case. Both men had sought the advice of an attorney regarding the case and had been told that the Veterinary Medical Board had no jurisdiction over them, that the subpoena was therefore invalid, and that there was nothing Ethan and Rusty needed to do.
There is no evidence that Ethan or Rusty ever saw the order the state claims to have mailed to them last August which threatened them with arrest if they did not comply. Ethan and Rusty were unaware that this was a possibility. It was a complete shock to them and to their families when they were arrested.
He explained his clients were “denied the ability to see the case against them or NoBull Solutions because the state had the docket sealed and hidden – a highly unusual move.”
He said, “It gives the appearance that the intent was to secretly establish an excuse to arrest them and shut down NoBull Solutions without due process.”
He said he was pursuing an emergency motion to reverse the imprisonment order.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Outrage Erupts When Pennsylvania Authorities Toss 2 Farmers in Prison on 30-day Sentences appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Now credited to Uzziah, who built ‘towers’
Over and over again, archaeological discoveries have confirmed the biblical accounts of portions of history, and now it has again.
A report from the Daily Mail blasts out that there are ruins “that could prove the Bible was TRUE: Stretch of wall in ancient Jerusalem vindicates the holy book’s account, archaeologists claim.”
The controversy involves the new confirmation about one piece of wall in Jerusalem.
Until now, experts thought a stretch of wall in the original heart of the city was built by Hezekiah, King of Judah, whose reign straddled the seventh and eighth centuries BC, the report said.
At that time, Hezekiah had seen the Kingdom of Israel, to his north, destroyed by Assyrians. It was thought he built the wall in defense.
“But now an almost decade-long study has revealed it was built by his great-grandfather, Uzziah, after a huge earthquake, echoing the account of the Bible,” the report said.
The wall is at a site in the City of David that was part of the original Jerusalem.
The report notes Joe Uziel, from the Israel Antiquities Authority, explained that it’s long been assumed that Hezekiah built the wall, to “defend Jerusalem during the Assyrian siege.”
“But it is now becoming clear that it dates back to the days of King Uzziah, as hinted at in the Bible,” he said. “It is now apparent that the wall in its eastern part, in the area of the City of David, was built earlier, shortly after the great earthquake of Jerusalem, and as part of the construction of the city.”
In 2nd Chronicles, part of the history of the ancient peoples, it states, “Uzziah built towers in Jerusalem at the Corner Gate, at the Valley Gate and at the angle of the wall, and he fortified them.”
Hezekiah is explained in the report as being considered one of the greatest kings of Judah, reigning from about 715 BC to about 686 BC after his father, Ahaz, died.
It is Hezekiah who is credited with throwing off the oppression of the Assyrians, who had beleaguered the nation.
“The Hebrew Bible also describes how Hezekiah made a miraculous recovery from a sickness after praying to God. He went on to live for another 15 years,” the report said.
The Bible also clearly outlines “seismic activity,” documenting for the time frame for one prophet as being “two years before the earthquake, when Uzziah was king of Judah.”
The research project involves the IAA, Tel Aviv University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Carbon-14 dating was used partly to set the time frame. Tested were organic artifacts found at the site, including grape sees and date pits.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Archaeology Confirms Biblical Account of Jerusalem Wall Construction, Report Says appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This post was originally reported at JoeHoft.com – we are republishing it here with permission.
While conservatives argue over whether we should vote early or on Election Day, the Election Industrial Complex is adding, deleting, and managing entities that are clandestinely operating behind US elections.
A document produced by Higher Ground Labs entitled the – 2022 Political Tech Landscape Report – outlines what we have labeled the Election Industrial Complex (see document at the end of this article.)
This document begins with an introduction and summary of the results of the 2022 election using the left’s bastardization of the word “democracy” and projection of their communist actions upon those who want fair and transparent elections (emphasis added):
Voter suppression and 2020 election deniers presented onerous challenges in 2022, with active efforts to attack vote by-mail, close polling places, harass nonpartisan election administrators, and spread misinformation in Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and beyond. Technology is playing an increasingly important role in supporting coordinated responses to attacks on democracy, from refining message development to enhancing on-the-ground organizing to informing and protecting voters.
The corruption in the 2022 Arizona election processes, for example, where tens of thousands of voters were disenfranchised was obviously ignored in this document while claiming the election was “an affirmation of the Biden Administration’s focus as well as a rejection of far right extremism.”
A review of Higher Ground Labs website shows the leadership team to include many far-left actors, including:
Derek Parham, FORMER DEPUTY CTO, HILLARY FOR AMERICA
Deval Patrick, FORMER GOVERNOR OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS
Michael Podhorzer, POLITICAL DIRECTOR, AFL-CIO
Julius Genachowski, FORMER FCC CHAIRMAN AND MANAGING DIRECTOR AT CARLYLE
Genachowski was Obama’s FCC Chairman in his first term. Genachowski’s connections with Higher Ground Labs indicates that this effort may have started during the Obama administration although Higher Grounds Labs indicates it was launched after the Obama regime ended:
Since 2017, Higher Ground Labs has built an enduring platform for technological experimentation and iteration. We have invested in dozens of companies, many of which have become integral components of political tech for the Left. In 2020 alone, our companies reached 7,500 campaigns and 70 million voters.
If this effort started during the Obama years, it was likely paid for using government funds during the Obama years and then it was moved to the non-profit arena after 2016.
Higher Ground Labs claims its mission is as follows:
Higher Ground Labs is a startup accelerator and venture fund. We support startups building technology that helps candidates win.
Higher Ground Labs created and published its 2022 report that describes its landscape and connections in the election industrial complex. This document outlines the many initiatives, connections and activities it is involved in and the players it interacts with to ensure radical far-left and increasingly communist anti-American Democrats win elections.
This landscape involves “non-profits” and publicly traded companies which prevent the public from requesting information that would be required to be provided by the government in FOIA requests.
In February, Mike Benz was interviewed on Tucker where he outlined the military rule taking place in America today and how it is the opposite of democracy. The Election Industrial Complex appears to be much of the same.
The Election Industrial Complex is professionally designed and thought through. The landscape shows relationships between non-profits and publicly traded companies. It uses the law, money, and influence as weapons in an environment of political warfare.
Evil uses money for engagement because money influences immediately, whereas trust takes time.
Money is used to incentivize. “Trust issues” in a grass roots environment are minimized through the use of money and funding. This landscape runs like a corporation that can add to and delete from at any time at will. Successful ventures get paid, unsuccessful ventures are eliminated. But the money necessary to keep it running doesn’t appear to be a problem.
The heart and soul of the landscape is the Data Analytics and Modeling framework identified in the middle of the diagram above.
The entire landscape appears to revolve around real-time advanced communications which is why the Data Analytics and Modeling framework is so important. Similar to military operations, accurate up-to-date information is the key. This also can be the landscape’s Achilles heel. It’s difficult to obtain up-to-date information in complex organizations.
In the military, operation fusion centers are the hub of information management. With good information, a fusion center can tell you where to focus and where to make command decisions. Authentic information in a military operation is beneficial while inauthentic information can lead to your death.
In the fog of war, if you can present an environment that is believable then you can leverage it to win.
The Data Analytics and Modeling framework lists a number of entities but it omits those that have been identified since the 2020 Election. ERIC, Dominion, BPro, KNOWiNK, CIS and other entities are omitted.
Like a military operation, the placement of the commander is hidden at all times. Critical components in this framework, like the entities mentioned above are not identified in the framework because they are so key. Data Analytics and Modeling relies on these entities for up-to-date information coming from these key entities.
The landscape includes segments and related entities used to manipulate Democrat election wins. This landscape includes the Democrat-owned media and digital content using entities like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many more. Notably, these social media giants are referred to as “Owned Media”.
The biggest concern of the Left in the report is that messaging about the stolen 2020 Election was allowed on social media. No discussion of the massive Censorship Industrial Complex is mentioned. Also, no discussion of the mountains of evidence proving the 2020 Election never should have been certified is mentioned.
The truth doesn’t appear to be necessary. Trust is not an issue. Money runs the operation and messages that aren’t consistent with the Election Complex Industry are attacked through the Censorship Industrial Complex.
The fundraising landscape includes ActBlue, Stripe and Bonterra. The landscape shares the following about ActBlue:
Once again, ActBlue helped funnel billions of dollars to Democratic campaigns and causes throughout the 2022 cycle. The platform processed $3.5 billion to 27,305 campaigns and organizations. These contributions came from 7.4 million unique donors who, in tandem, made 86 million individual contributions; their average donation size was $40.05. In comparison to the 2018 midterm cycle, the total number of contributions and dollars raised doubled, reflecting both the growth of the Party’s small dollar donor base and the sense of urgency felt across this cycle to take action in response to unprecedented challenges to our long held freedoms.
This document omits evidence that shows that millions in these “donations” are coming from “donor mules” with many of these individuals unemployed and unaware that their name is being used to launder money to the Democrat Party. Of course, this type of information is omitted from this landscape because it is criminal.
Other frameworks within the Election Industrial Complex are also discussed in the document below that is referred to above – 2022 Political Tech Landscape Report – from Higher Ground Labs.
HGL 2022 Political Tech Landscape Report_033023 (Clean) by Joe Ho on Scribd
(Joe Hoft is the author of three books related to the 2020 Election which have been referred to as “definitive documentation of the enormous fraud in the 2020 Election” and “classics”.)
The post EXCLUSIVE: The Left’s ELECTION INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Discovered and Defined appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Polling shows huge numbers of voters get their information there
A new polling reveals some startling American voter perspectives on the media, and it offers an explanation about why the Biden administration has been so intent on censoring social media.
It was a congressional report just this week that confirmed social media companies had tried to defend the First Amendment against attacks by Biden’s bureaucrats – mostly unsuccessfully as White House demands for censorship have turned into a major component of most online platforms.
Now there’s an explanation why Biden’s advocates are so intent.
It’s because the polling shows about half of Americans rely on social media for their primary source of news.
Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley explained that’s why “it is not surprising that the censorship of social media has been a priority among many liberal groups.”
He pointed out the polling, from the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center, revealed that a majority of Americans also are extremely worried or very concerned about bias in the media and the reporting of false or misleading information.
“Only 48% of Republicans and 34% of independents still receive their news from national news outlets and expressed the greatest trust of the media,” Turley explained, citing the poll results.
“The poll shows that 47% of Americans have serious concern that news outlets would report information that has not been confirmed or verified, and 44% worry that accurate information will be presented in a way that favors one side or another.”
Turley explained:
For years, the journalists have sawed on the branch upon which they are sitting. Even National Public Radio, which receives federal funding, is unrepentant in the face of criticism over its overt political bias.
Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones declared recently that “all journalism is activism.” Advocacy journalism is all the rage in journalism schools and on major media platforms.
A recent series of interviews with over 75 media leaders by Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this shift. As Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, stated: “Objectivity has got to go.”
But that objective seems to depend heavily upon what ideology you are advocating.
He said nowadays the mainstream media basically talks to itself.
“So we are left with the variation of a common Zen-like question: if the media reports and no one is listening, does it still make a noise?” he asked.
The actual polling report explained, “Although most adults, regardless of age, race or ethnicity, or partisanship, tune into news about elections, only 14% express a great deal of confidence in election-related information they receive from national sources, and 11% say the same about local news media.
“In particular, people are worried about the news containing misinformation and amplifying divisions. About half of adults say they are extremely or very concerned about news organizations reporting inaccurate information (53%). Almost as many worry news outlets will report unverified information (47%) or focus too much on divisions or controversies (48%).”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Here’s Why Biden Censorship Schemes Targeted Social Media appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest Post by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch
Hiding in plain sight is the singular person who would do more for the Trump candidacy, the ticket, the party, and the country than any other person.
His name is Dr. Ben Carson.
When I say dark horse, I do not refer to some racial trope on his distinguished African American heritage, either. I mean, he is not being talked about or considered by the political class, by the effete leftwing media, or all the so-called pundits know it all’s.
What are they missing?
Dr. Carson is without question a world-renowned surgeon and first-class mind. He is a gentle soul who served loyally as a cabinet secretary in the first Trump term, one of the few persons to do so pillar to post—for the full duration. Less you forget, he was also the dedicated vice chair of Trump’s transition team.
As a person who always seems to calm the storm, he figuratively also — walks on water. Yes, Carson knows and acknowledges Jesus Christ as his personal savior. He is a devout man in every fiber of his being. He is not only an exemplar role model for all men, black or white, red, or yellow, as the famous bible song goes, but he embodies the way of the Lord expressed in the Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes.
He is humble, so full of humility in fact, he scares no one because he knows who he is, and the purpose God has sent him here to achieve. He is virtuous in that he both knows and keeps the Word. He speaks truth to power and has the touch of grace that comes with such a spirit and demeanor.
Carson would be a perfect running mate and vice president for Trump.
He knows and him and trusts him and the former President should in this hour of need turn to him and put the country at rest. There simply is no better choice. All the other familiar names torn from the headlines pale in comparison to this courageous and brilliant man. They are hacks and pols, and he embodies old fashion–goodness.
Many people in recent weeks have been amazed at Scottie Scheffler’s winning ways in the world of golf. His swing is so perfect and easy that he wins nearly every shot. He is a master. The secret behind his success is his confession that he believes in the power of Christ and depends entirely on Him. He feels His power and gives Him all the glory.
Carson is the exact same in the world of medicine, where he was the top neurosurgeon at America’s number one hospital, Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, Maryland.
He entered politics reluctantly as a cultural calling. I first met him in 2013 when he gave the keynote address at the National Prayer Breakfast. He was different—honest and wise. You just have to love him.
He is right on every issue from life to economics and from war & peace to the border. But the way he is right marks him from every other politician—that’s because he is not a politician.
He is a healer. He is also the most significant black conservative in the land.
Carson has attained amazing accomplishments as a person and as a most decent human being. He became the director of pediatric surgery at the age of just 33. He led the first separation of conjoined twins and was the first to perform new surgical procedures on a fetus inside the womb. He developed new methods to treat brain-stem tumors and to control brain seizures. Yet, Carson is not only a genius but a miracle worker.
Receiving so many honors they fill page after page, Carson has been awarded 60 honorary doctorates and merit citations. He was bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. He has written six best-selling books and was himself the subject of the award-winning bio television film: Gifted Hands. It is not an over statement.
Born into severe poverty, living on food stamps, Carson nonetheless overcame what life dealt him. He maintained a faithful attitude and a sure resolve that others have rarely exhibited. He is one of a kind.
As a public servant and a servant leader, Carson is what is sorely needed in 2024.
When Donald Trump, who is going to be our 47th President, thinks and hopefully prays about it, pondering his next one short term in office and what both he and the country most need, he should focus in on Dr. Carson. That is because Carson more than any other individual will help Trump win and carry out his true and intended mission.
Think about it.
The good doctor would never challenge him, he would support and console him. The good doctor would not be a traitor, like another Vice President but would constantly stand in his corner. The good doctor would not have his own agenda or try to take over to become another counter-force but would quietly lead through influence and wise counsel. He would be there when and as needed, he would literally calm the storm and guide us into the night that surrounds us as a nation on every front. He would benefit Donald Trump enormously both personally and politically. He is what Trump deserves. He is what American cries for.
What are the political benefits over and above all the traits listed above that the likeable Carson brings to the table?
There are more than a few. He most certainly would bring in voters, and not only blacks. Yes, that number would rise significantly. He also appeals to women, to Evangelicals and Catholics, and to everyone who wants to return to sanity, who wants goodness back, who wants to retore American greatness.
The improbable political career that Carson embarked on late in his life’s trajectory, has witnessed him surging in the national polls, raising significant funds, and bringing a larger community together in the public arena. At Trump’s side as a formidable team, they would win an overwhelming majority. They would carry the House and take back the Senate.
Born into poverty and surviving the travails of a single parent family, Carson excelled best at education. But it was the Book of Proverbs that he applied to his real-life situations allowing him to overcome anger and temptations. It brought him into a lasting relationship with a higher power. When he won a full ride scholarship to Yale, he was on his way down a most illustrative career, but it was always because of his faithfulness that he exceeded expectations and became a truly great American, or a par it could be argued, with Martin Luther King or Frederick Douglass.
Trump should say now, today, that he has decided. He has chosen the best qualified, best mind, most decent and sound conservative he could possibly find to be at his side. It is his close friend and stalwart defender.
Benjamin Solomon Carson, Sr. is what America wants and needs.
He is the choice President Trump should make for a more perfect union, for harmony and unity. He would serve him well. His is a voice for reason and civility in a nation that is increasingly devoid of common sense.
Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, is Chairman and CEO of Global Fiduciary Governance LLC, a leading strategy thought leadership company. Ted Malloch conceptualizes and executes some of today’s most dynamic international projects. He was President of the World Economic Development Congress sponsored by CNN, where Lady Margaret Thatcher dubbed him a “global sherpa”.
The post Ted Malloch: The Dark Horse Candidate for Vice President appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
By Aaron Maté, RealClearInvestigations
April 30, 2024
In successfully lobbying Congress for an additional $61 billion in Ukraine war funding, an effort that ended this month with celebratory Democrats waving Ukrainian flags in the House chamber, President Biden has cast his administration’s standoff with Russia as an existential test for democracy.
“What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas,” Biden declared in his State of the Union address in March. “History is watching, just like history watched three years ago on January 6th.”
While Biden’s narrative is widely accepted by Washington’s political establishment, a close examination of the president and his top principals’ record dating back to the Obama administration reveals a different picture. Far from protecting democracy from Kyiv to Washington, their role in Ukraine looks more like epic meddling resulting in political upheaval for both countries.
Over the last decade, Ukraine has been the battleground in a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia – a conflict massively escalated by the Kremlin’s invasion in 2022. The fight erupted in early 2014, when Biden and his team, then serving in the Obama administration, supported the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Leveraging billions of dollars in U.S. assistance, Washington has shaped the personnel and policies of subsequent Ukrainian governments, all while expanding its military and intelligence presence in Ukraine via the CIA and NATO. During this period, Ukraine has not become an independent self-sustaining democracy, but a client state heavily dependent on European and U.S. support, which has not protected it from the ravages of war.
The Biden-Obama team’s meddling in Ukraine has also had a boomerang effect at home.
As well-connected Washington Beltway insiders such as Hunter Biden have exploited it for personal enrichment, Ukraine has become a source of foreign interference in the U.S. political system – with questions of unsavory dealings arising in the 2016 and 2020 elections as well as the first impeachment of Donald Trump. After years of secrecy, CIA sources have only recently confirmed that Ukrainian intelligence helped generate the Russian interference allegations that engulfed Trump’s presidency. House Democrats’ initial attempt to impeach Trump, undertaken in the fall of 2019, came in response to his efforts to scrutinize Ukraine’s Russiagate connection.
This account of U.S. interference in Ukraine, which can be traced to fateful decisions made by the Obama administration, including then-Vice President Biden and his top aides, is based on often overlooked public disclosures. It also relies on the personal testimony of Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and Democratic Party-tied political consultant who worked closely with U.S. officials to promote regime change in Ukraine.
Although he once welcomed Washington’s influence in Ukraine, Telizhenko now takes a different view. “I’m a Ukrainian who knew how Ukraine was 30 years ago, and what it became today,” he says. “For me, it’s a total failed state.” In his view, Ukraine has been “used directly by the United States to fight a [proxy] war with Russia” and “as a rag to make money for people like Biden and his family.”
The State Department has accused Telizhenko being part of a “Russia-linked foreign influence network.” In Sept. 2020 it revoked his visa to travel to the United States. Telizhenko, who now lives in a western European country where he was granted political asylum, denies working with Russia and says that he is a whistleblower speaking out to expose how U.S. interference has ravaged his country. RealClearInvestigations has confirmed that he worked closely with top American officials while they advanced policies aimed at severing Ukraine’s ties to Russia. No official contacted for this article – including former CIA chief John Brennan and senior State Department official Victoria Nuland – disputed any of his claims.
The Biden team’s path to influencing Ukraine began with the eruption of anti-government unrest in November 2013. That month, protesters began filling Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) after then-President Viktor Yanukovych, a notoriously corrupt leader, delayed signing a European Union (EU) trade pact. To members of what came to be known as the Maidan movement, Yanukovych’s decision was a betrayal of his pledge to strengthen Western ties, and a worrying sign of Russian allegiance in a country haunted by its Soviet past.
The reality was more complex. Yanukovych was hoping to maintain relations with both Russia and Europe – and use competition between them to Ukraine’s advantage. He also worried that the EU’s terms, which demanded reduced trade with Russia, would alienate his political base in the east and south, home to millions of ethnic Russians. As the International Crisis Group noted, these Yanukovych-supporting Ukrainians feared that the EU terms “would hurt their livelihoods, a large number of which were tied to trade and close relations with Russia.” Despite claims that the Maidan movement represented a “popular revolution,” polls from that period showed that Ukrainians were evenly split on it, or even majority opposed.
After an initial period of peaceful protest, the Maidan movement was soon co-opted by nationalist forces, which encouraged a violent insurrection for regime change. Leading Maidan’s hardline contingent was Oleh Tyahnybok of the Svoboda party, who had once urged his supporters to fight what he called the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia running Ukraine.” Tyahnybok’s followers were joined by Right Sector, a coalition of ultra-nationalist groups whose members openly sported Nazi insignia. One year before, the European Parliament condemned Svoboda for “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views” and urged Ukrainian political parties “not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party.”
Powerful figures in Washington took a different view: For them, the Maidan movement represented an opportunity to achieve a longtime goal of pulling Ukraine into the Western orbit. Given Ukraine’s historical ties to Russia, its integration with the West could also be used to undermine the rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As the-late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the influential former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, once wrote: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Two months before the Kyiv protests erupted, Carl Gershman, head of the National Endowment for Democracy, dubbed Ukraine “the biggest prize” in the West’s rivalry with Russia. Absorbing Ukraine, Gershman explained, could leave Putin “on the losing end not just in the near abroad” – i.e, its former Soviet satellites – “but within Russia itself.” Shortly after, senior State Department official Nuland boasted that the U.S. had “invested more than $5 billion” to help pro-Western “civil society” groups achieve a “secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”
Seeking to capitalize on the unrest, U.S. figures including Nuland, Republican Sen. John McCain, and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy visited Maidan Square. In a show of support for the movement’s hardline faction, which went beyond supporting the EU trade deal to demand Yanukovych’s ouster, the trio met privately with Tyahnybok and appeared with him on stage. The senators’ mission, Murphy said, was to “bring about a peaceful transition here.”
The Maidan Movement’s most significant U.S. endorsement came from then-Vice President Joe Biden. “Nothing would have greater impact for securing our interests and the world’s interests in Europe than to see a democratic, prosperous, and independent Ukraine in the region,” Biden said.
According to Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian government official who worked closely with Western officials during this period, the U.S. government’s role went far beyond those high-profile displays of solidarity.
“As soon as it grew into something, into the bigger Maidan, in the beginning of December, it basically was full coordination with the U.S. Embassy,” Telizhenko recalls. “Full, full.”
When the protests erupted, Telizhenko was working as an adviser to a Ukrainian member of Parliament. Having spent part of his youth in Canada and the United States, Telizhenko’s fluent English and Western connections landed him a position helping to oversee the Maidan Movement’s international relations. In this role, he organized meetings with and coordinated security arrangements for foreign visitors, including U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland, and McCain. Most of their briefings were held at Kyiv’s Trade Unions Building, the movement’s de-facto headquarters in the city’s center.
Telizhenko says Pyatt routinely coordinated with Maidan leaders on protest strategy. In one encounter, the ambassador observed Right Sector members assembling Molotov cocktails that would later be thrown at riot police attempting to enter the building. Sometimes, the U.S. ambassador disapproved of his counterparts’ tactics. “The U.S. embassy would criticize if something would happen more radical than it was supposed to go by plan, because it’s bad for the picture,” Telizhenko said..
That winter was marked by a series of escalating clashes. On February 20, 2014, snipers fatally shot dozens of protesters in Maidan square. Western governments attributed the killings to Yanukovych’s forces. But an intercepted phone call between NATO officials told a different story.
In the recorded conversation, Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet told EU foreign secretary Catherine Ashton that he believed pro-Maidan forces were behind the slaughter. In Kyiv, Paet reported, “there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new [opposition] coalition.”
In a bid to resolve the Maidan crisis and avoid more bloodshed, European officials brokered a compromise between Yanukovich and the opposition. The Feb. 21 deal called for a new national unity government that would keep him in office, with reduced powers, until early elections at year’s end. It also called for the disarmament of the Maidan forces and a withdrawal of riot police. Holding up its end of the bargain, government security forces pulled back. But the Maidan encampment’s ultra-nationalist contingent had no interest in compromise.
“We don’t want to see Yanukovych in power,” Maidan Movement squadron leader Vladimir Parasyuk declared that same day. “… And unless this morning you come up with a statement demanding that he steps down, then we will take arms and go, I swear.”
In insisting on regime change, the far-right contingent was also usurping the leadership of more moderate opposition leaders such as Vitali Klitschko, who supported the power-sharing agreement.
“The goal was to overthrow the government,” Telizhenko says. “That was the first goal. And it was all green-lighted by the U.S. Embassy. They basically supported all this, because they did not tell them to stop. If they told them [Maidan leaders] to stop, they would stop.”
Yet another leaked phone call bolstered suspicions that the U.S. endorsed regime change. On the recording, presumably intercepted in January by Russian or Ukrainian intelligence, Nuland and Pyatt discussed their choice of leaders in a proposed power-sharing government with Yanukovich. Their conversation showed that the U.S. exerted considerable influence with the faction seeking the Ukrainian president’s ouster.
Tyahnybok, the openly antisemitic head of Svodova, would be a “problem” in office, Nuland worried, and better “on the outside.” Klitschko, the more moderate Maidan member, was ruled out as well. “I don’t think Klitsch should go into government,” Nuland said. “I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s a good idea.” One reason was Klitschko’s proximity to the European Union. Despite her government’s warm words for the European Union in public, Nuland told Pyatt: “Fuck the EU.”
The two U.S. officials settled on technocrat Arseniy Yatsenyuk. “I think Yats is the guy,” Nuland said. By that point, Yatsenyuk had endorsed violent insurrection. The government’s rejection of Maidan demands, he said, meant that “people had acquired the right to move from non-violent to violent means of protest.”
The only outstanding matter, Pyatt relayed, was securing “somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing.” Nuland replied that Vice President Joe Biden and his senior aide, Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s National Security Adviser, had signed on to provide “an atta-boy and to get the deets [details] to stick.”
Just hours after the power-sharing agreement was reached, Nuland’s wishes were granted. Yanukovich, no longer protected by his armed forces, fled the capital. Emboldened by their sabotage of an EU-brokered power-sharing truce, Maidan Movement members stormed the Ukrainian Parliament and pushed through the formation of a new government. In violation of parliamentary rules on impeachment proceedings, and lacking a sufficient quorum, Oleksandr Turchynov was named the new acting president. The Nuland-backed Yatsenyuk was appointed Prime Minister.
In a reflection of their influence, at least five post-coup cabinet posts in national security, defense, and law enforcement were given to members of Svoboda and its far-right ally Right Sector.
“The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kyiv’s current government – and the protesters who brought it to power – are, indeed, fascists,” wrote Andrew Foxall, now a British defense official, and Oren Kessler, a Tel Aviv-based analyst, in Foreign Policy the following month. While denying any role in Yanukovich’s ouster, the Obama administration immediately endorsed it, as Secretary of State John Kerry expressed “strong support” for the new government.
In his memoir, former senior Obama aide Ben Rhodes acknowledged that Nuland and Pyatt “sounded as if they were picking a new government as they evaluated different Ukrainian leaders.” Rather than dispel that impression, he acknowledged that some of the Maidan “leaders received grants from U.S. democracy promotion programs.”
In 2012, one pro-Maidan group, Center UA, received most of its more than $500,000 in donations from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and financier George Soros.
By its own count, Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation spent over $109 million in Ukraine between 2004 and 2014. In leaked documents, a former IRF board member even bragged that its partners “were the main driving force and the foundation of the Maidan movement,” and that without Soros’ funding, “the revolution might not have succeeded.” Weeks after the coup, an IRF strategy document noted, “Like during the Maidan protests, IRF representatives are in the midst of Ukraine’s transition process.”
Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor who advised Ukraine on economic policy in the early 1990s, visited Kyiv shortly after the coup to consult with the new government.
“I was taken around the Maidan where people were still milling around,” Sachs recalls. “And the American NGOs were around there, and they were describing to me: ‘Oh we paid for this, we paid for that. We funded this insurrection.’ It turned my stomach.” Sachs believes that these groups were acting at the behest of U.S. intelligence. To go about “funding this uprising,” he says, “they didn’t do that on their own as nice NGOs. This is off-budget financing for a U.S. regime-change operation.”
Weeks after vowing to bring about a “transition” in Ukraine, Sen. Murphy openly took credit for it. “I really think that the clear position of the United States has in part been what has helped lead to this change in regime,” Murphy said. “I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office.”
Far from resolving the unrest, Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster plunged Ukraine into a war.
Just days after the Ukrainian president fled to Moscow, Russian special forces stormed Crimea’s local parliament. The following month, Russia annexed Crimea following a hasty, militarized referendum denounced by Ukraine, the U.S., and much of the world. While these objections were well-founded, Western surveys of Crimeans nonetheless found majority support for Russian annexation.
Emboldened by the events in Crimea, and hostile to a new government that had overthrown their elected leader Yanukovych, Russophile Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region followed suit.
On April 6 and 7, anti-Maidan protesters seized government buildings in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv. The Donetsk rebels declared the founding of the Donetsk People’s Republic. The Luhansk People’s Republic followed 20 days later. Both areas announced independence referendums for May 11.
As in Crimea, Moscow backed the Donbas rebellion. But unlike in Crimea, the Kremlin opposed the independence votes. The organizers, Putin said, should “hold off on the referendum in order to give dialogue the conditions it needs to have a chance.”
In public, the Obama administration claimed to also favor dialogue between Kyiv and the Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine. Behind the scenes, a more aggressive plan was brewing.
On April 12, CIA chief John Brennan slipped into the Ukrainian capital for secret meetings with top officials. Russia, whose intelligence services ran a network of informants inside Ukraine, publicly outed Brennan’s visit. The Kremlin and Yanukovych directly accused Brennan of encouraging an assault on the Donbas.
The CIA dismissed the allegation as “completely false,” and insisted that Brennan supported a “diplomatic solution” as “the only way to resolve the crisis.” The following month, Brennan insisted that “I was out there to interact with our Ukrainian partners and friends.”
Yet Russia and Yanukovych were not alone in voicing concerns about the CIA chief’s covert trip. “What message does it send to have John Brennan, the head of the CIA in Kiev, meeting with the interim government?” Sen. Murphy complained. “Does that not confirm the worst paranoia on the part of the Russians and those who see the Kiev government as essentially a puppet of the West?… It may not be super smart to have Brennan in Kiev, giving the impression that the United States is somehow there to fight a proxy war with Russia.”
According to Telizhenko, who attended the Brennan meeting and spoke to RCI on record about it for the first time, that’s exactly what the CIA chief was there to do. Contrary to U.S. claims, Telizhenko says, “Brennan gave a green light to use force against Donbas,” and discussed “how the U.S. could support it.” One day after the meeting, Kyiv announced an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” (ATO) against the Donbas region and began a military assault.
Telizhenko, who was by then working as a senior policy adviser to Vitaliy Yarema, the First Deputy Prime Minister, says he helped arrange the Brennan gathering after getting a phone call from the U.S. embassy. “I was told there was going to be a top secret meeting, with a top U.S. official and that my boss should be there,” he recalls. “I was also told not to tell anyone.”
Brennan, he recalls, arrived at the Foreign Intelligence Office of Ukraine in a beat-up gray mini-van and a coterie of armed guards. Others in attendance included U.S. Ambassador Pyatt, Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov, foreign intelligence chief Victor Gvozd, and other senior Ukrainian security officials.
After a customary exchange of medals and souvenir trophies, the topic turned to the unrest in the Donbas. “Brennan was talking about how Ukraine should act,” Telizhenko says. “A plan to keep Donbas in Ukraine’s hands. But Ukraine’s army was not fully equipped. We only had stuff in reserves. They discussed plans for the ATO and how to keep Ukraine’s military fully armed throughout.” Brennan’s overall message was that “Russia is behind” the Donbas unrest, and “Ukraine has to take firm, aggressive action to not let this spread all over.”
Brennan and Pyatt did not respond to a request for comment.
Two weeks after Brennan’s visit, the Obama administration offered yet another high-level endorsement of the Donbas operation when then-Vice President Biden visited Kyiv. With Ukraine facing “unrest and uncertainty,” Biden told a group of lawmakers, it now had “a second opportunity to make good on the original promise made by the Orange Revolution” – referring to earlier 2004-2005 post-electoral upheaval that blocked Yanukovych, albeit temporarily, from the presidency.
Looking back, Telizhenko is struck by the contrast between Brennan’s bellicosity in Donbas and the Obama administration’s lax response to Russia’s Crimea grab one month prior.
“After Crimea, they told us not to respond,” he said. But beforehand, “the Americans scoffed at warnings” that Ukraine could lose the peninsula. When Ukrainian officials met with Pentagon counterparts in March, “we gave them evidence that the little green men” – the incognito Russian forces who seized Crimea – “were Russians. They dismissed it.” Telizhenko now speculates that the U.S. permitted the Crimean takeover to encourage a conflict between Kyiv and Moscow-backed eastern Ukrainians. “I think they wanted Ukraine to hate Russia, and they wanted Russia to take the bait,” he said. Had Ukraine acted earlier, he believes, “the Crimea situation could have been stopped.”
With Russia in control of Crimea and Ukraine assaulting the Donbas with U.S. backing, the country descended into a full-scale civil war. Thousands were killed and millions displaced in the ensuing conflict. When Ukrainian forces threatened to overrun the Donbas rebels in August 2014, the Kremlin launched a direct military intervention that turned the tide. But rather than offer Ukraine more military assistance, Obama began getting cold feet.
Obama, senior Pentagon official Derek Chollet recalled, was concerned that flooding Ukraine with more weapons would “escalate the crisis” and give “Putin a pretext to go further and invade all of Ukraine.”
Rebuffing pressure from within his own Cabinet, Obama promised German Chancellor Angela Merkel in February 2015 that he would not send lethal aid to Ukraine. According to the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Peter Wittig, Obama agreed with Merkel on the need “to give some space for those diplomatic, political efforts that were under way.”
That same month, Obama’s commitment gave Merkel the momentum to finalize the Minsk II Accords, a pact between Kyiv and Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels. Under Minsk II, an outmatched Ukrainian government agreed to allow limited autonomy for the breakaway Donbas regions in exchange for the rebels’ demilitarization and the withdrawal of their Russian allies.
Inside the White House, Obama’s position on Ukraine left him virtually alone. Obama’s reluctance to arm Ukraine, Chollet recalled, marked a rare situation “in which just about every senior official was for doing something that the president opposed.”
One of those senior officials was the State Department’s point person for Ukraine, Victoria Nuland. Along with allied officials and lawmakers, Nuland sought to undermine the Minsk peace pact even before it was signed.
As Germany and France lobbied Moscow and Kyiv to accept a peace deal, Nuland addressed a private meeting of U.S. officials, generals, and lawmakers – including Sen. McCain and future Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – on the sidelines of the annual Munich Security Conference. Dismissing the French-German diplomatic efforts as an act of appeasement, Nuland outlined a strategy to continue the war with a fresh influx of Western arms. Perhaps mindful of the optics of flooding Ukraine with military hardware at a time when the Obama administration was claiming to support to a peace agreement, Nuland offered a public relations suggestion. “I would like to urge you to use the word ‘defensive system’ to describe what we would be delivering against Putin’s offensive systems,” Nuland told the gathering.
The Munich meeting underscored that while President Obama may have publicly supported a peace deal in Ukraine, a bipartisan alliance of powerful Washington actors – including his own principals – was determined to stop it. As Foreign Policy magazine reported, “the takeaway for many Europeans … was that Nuland gave short shrift to their concerns about provoking an escalation with Russia and was confusingly out of sync with Obama.”
As Nuland and other officials quietly undermined the Minsk accords, the CIA deepened its role in Ukraine. U.S. intelligence sources recently disclosed to the New York Times that the agency has operated 12 secret bases inside Ukraine since 2014. The post-coup government’s first new spy chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, also revealed that he established a formal partnership with the CIA and MI6 just two days after Yanukovych’s ouster.
According to a separate account in the Washington Post, the CIA restructured Ukraine’s two main spy services and turned them into U.S. proxies. Starting in 2015, the CIA transformed Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the GUR, so extensively that “we had kind of rebuilt it from scratch,” a former intelligence official told the Post. “GUR was our little baby.” As a benefit of being the CIA’s proxy, the agency even funded new headquarters for the GUR’s paramilitary wing and a separate division for electronic espionage.
In a 2016 congressional appearance, Nuland touted the extensive U.S. role in Ukraine. “Since the start of the crisis, the United States has provided over $760 million in assistance to Ukraine, in addition to two $1 billion loan guarantees,” Nuland said. U.S. advisers “serve in almost a dozen Ukrainian ministries,” and were helping “modernize Ukraine’s institutions” of state-owned industries.
Nuland’s comments underscored an overlooked irony of the U.S. role in Ukraine: In claiming to defend Ukraine from Russian influence, Ukraine was subsumed by American influence.
In the aftermath of the February 2014 coup, the transformation of Ukraine into an American client state soon had a boomerang effect, as maneuvers in that country increasingly impacted U.S. domestic politics.
“Americans are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process,” Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky observed in November 2015. “The U.S. embassy in Kyiv is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.”
One of the earliest and best-known cases came in December 2015, when Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid unless Ukraine fired its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, whom the vice president claimed was corrupt. When Biden’s threat resurfaced as an issue during the 2020 election, the official line, as reported by CNN, was that “the effort to remove Shokin was backed by the Obama administration, European allies” and even some Republicans.
In fact, from Washington’s perspective, the campaign for Shokin’s ouster marked a change of course. Six months before Biden’s visit, Nuland had written Shokin that “We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government.”
An Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the [U.S.] Interagency Policy Committee on Ukraine stated, “Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its [anti-corruption] reform agenda to justify a third [loan] guarantee.” … The next month, moreover, the task force drafted a loan guarantee agreement that did not call for Shokin’s removal. Then, in December, Joe Biden flew to Kyiv to demand his ouster.
No one has explained why Shokin suddenly came into the crosshairs. At the time, the prosecutor general was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm that was paying Hunter Biden over $80,000 per month to sit on its board.
According to emails obtained from his laptop, Hunter Biden introduced his father to a top Burisma executive less than one year before. Burisma also retained Blue Star Strategies, a D.C. consulting firm that worked closely with Hunter, to help enlist U.S. officials who could pressure the Ukrainian government to drop its criminal probes.
Two senior executives at Blue Star, Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, formerly worked as top aides to President Bill Clinton.
According to a November 2015 email sent to Hunter by Vadym Pozharsky, a Burisma adviser, the energy firm’s desired “deliverables” included visits from “influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine.” The “ultimate purpose” of these visits would be “to close down” any legal cases against the company’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. One month after that email, Joe Biden visited Ukraine and demanded Shokin’s firing.
Telizhenko – who worked in Shokin’s office at the time, and later worked for Blue Star – said the evidence contradicts claims that Shokin was fired because of his failure, among other things, to investigate Burisma. “There were four criminal cases opened in 2014 against Burisma, and two more additionally opened by Shokin when he became the Prosecutor General,” recalls Telizhenko. “So, whenever anybody says, ‘There were no criminal cases, nobody was investigating Burisma, Shokin was fired because he was a bad prosecutor, he didn’t do his work’ … this was all a lie. No, he did his work.”
In a 2023 interview, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, said Shokin was seen as a “threat” to Burisma. Both of Shokin’s cases against Burisma were closed after his firing.
While allegations of Russian interference and collusion would come to dominate the 2016 campaign, the first documented case of foreign meddling originated in Ukraine.
Telizhenko, who served as a political officer at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, D.C., before joining Blue Star, was an early whistleblower. He went public in January 2017, telling Politico how the Ukrainian embassy worked to help Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign and undermine Trump’s.
According to Telizhenko, Ukraine’s D.C. ambassador, Valeriy Chaly, instructed staffers to shun Trump’s campaign because “Hillary was going to win.”
Telizhenko says he was told to meet with veteran Democratic operative Alexandra Chalupa, who had also served in the Clinton White House. “The U.S. government and people from the Democratic National Committee are approaching and asking for dirt on a presidential candidate,” Telizhenko recalls. “And Chalupa said, ‘I want dirt. I just want to get Trump off the elections.’”
Starting in early 2016, U.S. officials leaned on the Ukrainians to investigate Paul Manafort, the GOP consultant who would become Trump’s campaign manager, and avoid scrutiny of Burisma, as RCI reported in 2022. “Obama’s NSC hosted Ukrainian officials and told them to stop investigating Hunter Biden and start investigating Paul Manafort,” a former senior NSC official told RCI. In January 2016, the FBI suddenly reopened a closed investigation into Manafort for potential money laundering and tax evasion connected to his work in Ukraine.
Telizhenko, who attended a White House meeting with Ukrainian colleagues that same month, says he witnessed Justice Department officials pressing representatives of Ukraine’s Corruption Bureau. “The U.S. officials were asking for the Ukrainian officials to get any information, financial information, about Americans working for the former government of Ukraine, the Yanukovych government,” he says.
By the time Telizhenko spoke out, Ukrainian officials had already admitted intervening in the 2016 election to help Clinton’s campaign. In August, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) released what it claimed was a secret ledger showing that Manafort received millions in illicit cash payments from Yanukovych’s party. The Clinton campaign, then in the early stages of its effort to portray their Republican rival as a Russian conspirator, seized on the news as evidence of Trump’s “troubling connections” to “pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine.”
The alleged ledger was first obtained by Ukrainian lawmaker Serhiy Leshchenko, who had claimed that he had received it anonymously by mail. Yet Leshchenko was not an impartial source: He made no effort to hide his efforts to help elect Clinton. “A Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy,” Leshchenko told the Financial Times. For him, “it was important to show … that [Trump] is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world.” Accordingly, he added, most of Ukraine’s politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”
Manafort, who would be convicted of unrelated tax and other financial crimes in 2018, denied the allegation. The ledger was handwritten and did not match the amounts that Manafort was paid in electronic wire transfers. Moreover, the ledger was said to have been stored at Yanukovych’s party headquarters, yet that building was burned in a 2014 riot by Maidan activists.
Telizhenko agrees with Manafort that the ledger was a fabrication. “I think the ledger was just made up because nobody saw it, and nobody got the official documents themselves. From my understanding it was all a toss-up, a made-up story, just because they could not find any dirt on the Trump campaign.”
But with the U.S. media starting to amplify the Clinton campaign’s Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, a wary Trump demanded Manafort’s resignation. “The easiest way for Trump to sidestep the whole Ukraine story is for Manafort not to be there,” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a Trump campaign adviser, explained.
The release of the Manafort ledger and cooperation with the Democratic National Committee was not the end of Ukraine’s 2016 election interference.
A recent account in the New York Times revealed that Ukrainian intelligence played a vital role in generating CIA allegations that would become a foundation of the Russiagate hoax – that Russia stole Democratic Party emails and released them via WikiLeaks in a bid to help elect Trump. Once again, CIA chief Brennan played a critical role.
In the Times’ telling, some Obama officials wanted to shut down the CIA’s work in Ukraine after a botched August 2016 Ukrainian intelligence operation in Crimea turned deadly. But Brennan “persuaded them that doing so would be self-defeating, given the relationship was starting to produce intelligence on the Russians as the C.I.A. was investigating Russian election meddling.” This “relationship” between Brennan and his Ukrainian counterparts proved to be pivotal. According to the Times, Ukrainian military intelligence – which the CIA closely managed – claimed to have duped a Russian officer into “into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group.”
“Fancy Bear” is one of two alleged Russian cyber espionage groups that the FBI has accused of carrying out the 2016 DNC email theft. Yet this allegation has a direct tie not just to Ukraine, but to the Clinton campaign. The name “Fancy Bear” was coined by CrowdStrike, a private firm working directly for Clinton’s attorney, Michael Sussmann. As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, CrowdStrike first accused Russia of hacking the DNC, and the FBI relied on the firm for evidence. Years after publicly accusing Russia of the theft, CrowdStrike executive Shawn Henry was forced to admit in sworn congressional testimony that the firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers took data from the DNC servers.
CrowdStrike’s admission about the evidentiary hole in the Russian hacking allegation, along with the newly disclosed Ukrainian intelligence role in generating it, were both kept under wraps throughout the entirety of Special Counsel Robert Muller’s probe into alleged Russian interference. But when Trump sought answers on both matters, he once again found himself the target of an investigation.
In late September 2019, weeks after Mueller’s halting congressional testimony – which left Trump foes dissatisfied over his failure to find insufficient evidence of a Russian conspiracy – House Democrats kicked off an effort to impeach Trump for freezing U.S. weapons shipments in an alleged scheme to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens. The impeachment was triggered by a whistleblower complaint about a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky two months prior. The “whistleblower” was later identified by RealClearInvestigations as Eric Ciaramella, an intelligence official who had served as Ukraine adviser to then-Vice President Biden when he demanded Shokin’s firing and to the Obama administration’s other key point person for Kyiv, Victoria Nuland.
Yet Trump’s infamous July 2019 phone call with Zelensky was not primarily focused on the Bidens. Instead, according to the transcript, Trump asked Zelensky to do him “a favor” and cooperate with a Justice Department investigation into the origins of Russiagate, which, he asserted, had Ukrainian links. Trump specifically invoked CrowdStrike, the Clinton campaign contractor that had generated the allegation that Russia had hacked the Democratic Party emails. CrowdStrike’s allegation of Russian interference, Trump told Zelensky, had somehow “started with Ukraine.”
More than four years after the call, and eight years after the 2016 campaign, the New York Times’ recent revelation that the CIA relied on Ukrainian intelligence operatives to identify alleged Russian hackers adds new context to Trump’s request for Zelensky’s help. Asked about the Times’ disclosure, a source familiar with Trump’s thinking confirmed to RCI that the president was indeed referring to a Ukrainian role in the Russian hacking allegations that consumed his presidency. “That’s why they impeached him,” the source said. “They didn’t want to be exposed.”
The first impeachment of Donald Trump once again inserted Ukraine into the highest levels of U.S. politics. But the impact may have been even greater in Ukraine.
When Democrats targeted Trump for his phone call with Zelensky, the rookie Ukrainian leader was just months into a mandate that he had won on a pledge to end the Donbas war. In his inaugural address, Zelensky promised that he was “not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings,” and even “my own position – as long as peace arrives.”
In their lone face-to-face meeting, held on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Trump tried to encourage Zelensky to negotiate with Russia. “I really hope that you and President Putin can get together and solve your problem,” Trump said, referring to the Donbas war. “That would be a tremendous achievement.”
But Ukraine’s powerful ultra-nationalists had other plans. Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Yarosh, commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded: “No, he [Zelensky] would lose his life. He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk [Kyiv’s main street] – if he betrays Ukraine” by making a peace with the Russian-backed rebels.
By impeaching Trump for pausing U.S. weaponry to Ukraine, Democrats sent a similar message. Trump, the final House impeachment report proclaimed, had “compromised the national security of the United States.” In his opening statement at Trump’s Senate trial, Rep. Adam Schiff – then seeking to rebound from the collapse of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory – declared: “The United States aids Ukraine and her people, so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
Other powerful Washington officials, including star impeachment witness William Taylor, then serving as the chief U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, pushed Zelensky toward conflict.
Just before the impeachment scandal erupted in Washington, Zelensky was “expressing curiosity” about the Steinmeier Formula, a German-led effort to revive the stalled Minsk process, which he “hoped might lead to a deal with the Kremlin,” Taylor later recounted to the Washington Post. But Taylor disagreed. “No one knows what it is,” Taylor told Zelensky of the German plan. “Steinmeier doesn’t know what it is … It’s a terrible idea.”
With both powerful Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and Washington bureaucrats opposed to ending the Donbas war, Zelensky ultimately abandoned the peace platform that he was elected on. “By early 2021,” the Post reported, citing a Zelensky ally, “Zelensky believed that negotiations wouldn’t work and that Ukraine would need to retake the Donetsk and Luhansk regions ‘either through a political or military path.’”
The return of the Biden team to the Oval Office in January 2021 appears to have encouraged Zelensky’s confrontational path. By then, polls showed the rookie president trailing OPFL, the opposition party with the second-most seats in parliament and headed by Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian mogul close to Putin.
The following month, Zelensky offered his response to waning public support. Three OPFL-tied television channels were taken off the air. Two weeks later, Zelensky followed up by seizing the assets of Medvedchuk’s family, including a pipeline that brought Russian oil through Ukraine. Medvedchuk was also charged with treason.
Zelensky’s crackdown drew harsh criticism, including from close allies. “This is an illegal mechanism that contradicts the Constitution,” Dmytro Razumkov, the speaker of the parliament and a manager of Zelensky’s presidential campaign, complained.
Yet Zelensky won praise from the newly inaugurated Biden White House, while hailed his effort to “counter Russia’s malign influence.”
It turns out that the U.S. not only applauded Zelensky’s domestic crackdown, but inspired it. Zelensky’s first national security adviser, Oleksandr Danyliuk, later revealed to Time Magazine that the TV stations’ shuttering was “conceived as a welcome gift to the Biden Administration.” Targeting those stations, Danyliuk explained, “was calculated to fit in with the U.S. agenda.” And the U.S. was a happy recipient. “He turned out to be a doer,” a State Department official approvingly said of Zelensky. “He got it done.”
Just days after receiving Zelensky’s “welcome gift” in March 2021, the Biden administration approved its first military package for Ukraine, valued at $125 million. That same month, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council approved a strategy to recover all of Crimea from Russian control, including by force. By the end of March, intense fighting resumed in the Donbas, shattering months of a relatively stable ceasefire.
Russia offered its own reaction. Two days after its ally Medvedchuk’s assets were seized in February, Russia deployed thousands of troops to the Ukraine border, the beginning of a build-up that ultimately topped 100,000 and culminated in an invasion one year later.
The Kremlin, Medvedchuk claimed, was acting to protect Russophile Ukrainians targeted by Zelensky’s censorship. “When they close TV channels that Russian-speaking people watched, when they persecute the party these people voted for, it touches all of the Russian-speaking population,” he said.
Medvedchuk also warned that the more hawkish factions of the Kremlin could use the crackdown as a pretext for war. “There are hawks around Putin who want this crisis. They are ready to invade. They come to him and say, ‘Look at your Medvedchuk. Where is he now? Where is your peaceful solution? Sitting under house arrest? Should we wait until all pro-Russian forces are arrested?’ ”
Along with encouraging a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, the first Trump impeachment also promoted the highly dubious Democratic Party narrative that scrutiny of Ukrainian interference in U.S. politics was a “conspiracy theory” or “Russian disinformation.” Another star impeachment witness, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who leaked the Trump/Zelensky phone call to Ciaramella, testified that Telizhenko – who had blown the whistle on Ukrainian collusion with the DNC – was “not a credible individual.”
Telizhenko was undeterred. After detailing reliable evidence of Ukrainian’s 2016 election interference to Politico, Telizhenko continued to speak out – and increasingly drew the attention of government officials who sought to undermine his claims by casting him as a Russian agent.
Beginning in May 2019, Telizhenko cooperated with Rudy Giuliani, then acting as Trump’s personal attorney, in his effort to expose information about the Bidens’ alleged corruption in Ukraine. During Giuliani’s visits to Ukraine, Telizhenko served as an adviser and translator.
That same year, Telizhenko testified to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as part of a probe into whether the DNC’s 2016 collusion with the Ukrainian embassy violated campaign finance laws. By contrast, multiple DNC officials refused to testify. Telizhenko then cooperated with a separate Senate probe, co-chaired by Republicans Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, on how Hunter Biden’s business dealings impacted U.S. policy in Ukraine.
By the lead-up to the 2020 election, Telizhenko found himself the target of a concerted effort to silence him. As the Senate probed Ukraine, the FBI delivered a classified warning echoing Democrats’ talking points that Telizhenko was among the “known purveyors of Russian disinformation narratives” about the Bidens. In response, GOP Sen. Johnson dropped plans to subpoena Telizhenko. Nevertheless, Telizhenko’s communications with Obama administration officials and his former employer Blue Star Strategies were heavily featured in Johnson and Grassley’s final report on the Bidens’ conflicts of interest in Ukraine, released in September 2020.
The U.S. government’s claims of yet another Russian-backed plot to hurt a Democratic Party presidential nominee set the stage for another highly consequential act of election interference. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published the first in a series of stories detailing how Hunter Biden had traded on his family name to secure lucrative business abroad, including in Ukraine. The Post’s reporting, based on the contents of a laptop Hunter’s had apparently abandoned in a repair shop, also raised questions about Joe Biden’s denials of involvement in his son’s business dealings.
The Hunter Biden laptop emails pointed to the very kind of influence-peddling that the Biden campaign and Democrats routinely accused Trump of. But rather than allow voters to read the reporting and judge for themselves, the Post’s journalism was subjected to a smear campaign and a censorship campaign unparalleled in modern American history. In a statement, a group of more than 50 former intelligence officials – including John Brennan, the former CIA chief – declared that the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter prevented the story from being shared on their social media networks.
The FBI lent credence to the intelligence veterans’ false claim by launching a probe into whether the laptop contents were part of a “Russian disinformation” campaign aiming to hurt Biden. The bureau initiated this effort despite having been in possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which it had verified as genuine, for almost a year. To buttress innuendo that the laptop was a Russian plot, a CNN report suspiciously noted that Telizhenko had posted an image on social media featuring Trump holding up an edition of the New York Post’s laptop story.
In January 2021, shortly before Biden took office, the U.S. Treasury Department followed suit by imposing sanctions on Telizhenko for allegedly “having directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign influence in a United States election.”
Treasury, however, did not release any evidence to support its claims. Two months later, the department issued a similar statement in announcing sanctions on former Manafort aide Konstantin Kilimnik, whom it accused of being a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf.” Treasury’s actions followed a bipartisan Senate Intelligence report that also accused Kilimnik of being a Russian spy. As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, neither the Treasury Department or Senate panel provided any evidence to support their allegations about Kilimnik, which were called into question by countervailing information that RCI brought to light. Just like Telizhenko, Kilimnik had extensive contacts with the Obama administration, whose State Department treated him as a trusted source.
The U.S. government’s endorsement of Democratic claims about Telizhenko had a direct impact on the FEC investigation into DNC-Ukrainian collusion, in which he had testified. In August 2019, the FEC initially sided with Telizhenko and informed Alexandra Chalupa – the DNC operative whom he outed for targeting Paul Manafort – that she plausibly violated the Federal Election Campaign Act by having “the Ukrainian Embassy… [perform] opposition research on the Trump campaign at no charge to the DNC.” The FEC also noted that the DNC “does not directly deny that Chalupa obtained assistance from the Ukrainians nor that she passed on the Ukrainian Embassy’s research to DNC officials.”
But when the Treasury Department sanctioned Telizhenko in January 2021, the FEC suddenly reversed course. As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, the FEC closed the case against the DNC without punitive action. Democratic commissioner Ellen Weintraub even dismissed allegations of Ukrainian-DNC collusion as “Russian disinformation.” As evidence, she pointed to media reports about Telizhenko and the recent Treasury sanctions against him.
Yet Telizhenko’s detractors have been unable to adduce any concrete evidence tying him to Russia. A January 2021 intelligence community report, declassified two months later, accused Russia of waging “influence operations against the 2020 US presidential election” on behalf of Trump. It made no mention of Telizhenko. The Democratic-led claims of Telizhenko’s supposed Russian ties are additionally undermined by his extensive contact with Obama-Biden administration officials, as journalist John Solomon reported in September 2020.
Telizhenko says he has “no connection at all” to the Russian government or any effort to amplify its messaging. “I’m ready,” he says. “Let the Treasury Department publish what they have on me, and I’m ready to go against them. Let them show the public what they have. They have nothing … I am ready to talk about the truth. They are not.”
Just as Telizhenko has been effectively silenced in the U.S. establishment, so has the Ukrainian meddling that he helped expose. Capturing the prevailing media narrative, the Washington Post recently claimed that Trump has “falsely blamed Ukraine for trying to help Democratic rival Hillary Clinton,” which, the Post added, is “a smear spread by Russian spy services.” This narrative ignores a voluminous record that includes Ukrainian officials admitting to helping Clinton.
As the Biden administration successfully pressured Congress to approve its $61 billion funding request for Ukraine, holdout Republicans were similarly accused of parroting the Kremlin. Shortly before the vote, two influential Republican committee chairmen, Reps. Mike Turner of Ohio and Mike McCaul of Texas, claimed that unnamed members of their caucus were repeating Russian propaganda. Zelensky also asserted that Russia was manipulating U.S. opponents of continued war funding: “When we talk about the Congress — do you notice how [the Russians] work with society in the United States?”
Now that Biden has signed that newly authorized funding into law, the president and his senior aides have been handed the means to extend a proxy war that they launched a decade ago and that continues to ravage Ukraine. In yet another case of Ukraine playing a significant role in domestic U.S. politics, Biden has also secured a boost to his bid for reelection. As the New York Times recently observed: “The resumption of large-scale military aid from the United States all but ensures that the war will be unfinished in Ukraine when Americans go to the polls in November.”
Aaron Maté has provided extensive coverage of corruption within federal intelligence agencies as a contributor to RealClearInvestigations. He is also a contributor to The Nation, and his work has appeared in Democracy Now!, Vice, Al Jazeera, Toronto Star, The Intercept, and Le Monde Diplomatique. Maté is the host of the news show Pushback with Aaron Maté.
For media inquiries, please contact media@realclear.com.
The post MUST READ: What 10 Years of U.S. Meddling in Ukraine Have Wrought (Spoiler Alert: Not Democracy) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Jabs linked to side effects such as ‘Alzheimer’s and ‘Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease’
Dr. Joseph Mercola, an expert on natural health remedies and avowed critic of the government-mandated COVID shots that were imposed on the American public during the pandemic, now is warning about the evidence of a link between those mRNA shots and dementia.
At his Mercola.com website, he discusses his research and research by others into the links, often devastating, that are being confirmed between the COVID shots that so many governments and corporations demanded citizens take, and some very bad health outcomes.
Among those is dementia, and related mental issues.
“According to mounting data, one of the more serious side effects of the COVID mRNA jabs appears to be dementia, and worse yet, this previously untransmissible disease may now be ‘contagious,’ transmissible by way of prions,” he warned.
“In my 2021 interview with Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., she explained why she suspected the COVID shots may eventually result in an avalanche of neurological prion-based diseases such as Alzheimer’s. She also published a paper detailing those mechanisms in the May 10, 2021, issue of the International Journal of Vaccine Theory.”
He noted in that paper she wrote, “A paper published by J. Bart Classen (2021) proposed that the spike protein in the mRNA vaccines could cause prion-like diseases, in part through its ability to bind to many known proteins and induce their misfolding into potential prions. Idrees and Kumar (2021) have proposed that the spike protein’s S1 component is prone to act as a functional amyloid and form toxic aggregates … and can ultimately lead to neurodegeneration.”
Mercola explained, “The take-home from Seneff’s paper is that the COVID shots, offered to hundreds of millions of people, are instruction sets for your body to make a toxic protein that will eventually wind up concentrated in your spleen, from where prion-like protein instructions will be sent out, leading to neurodegenerative diseases.”
Mercola’s life work had included his wellness clinic in Illinois, through which he began exploring the world of natural medicine.
He’s worked with patients on ailments including rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, allergies, autism and ADD.
The medical industry pays him a perhaps back-handed compliment when it accuses him of spreading “disinformation” during the COVID pandemic because he expressed doubts about the mRNA treatments that were in some situations forced on unwilling recipients and his advocacy for alternative treatments.
Of course, many of those alternatives, condemned by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex during the pandemic, now are known to provide benefits.
Mercola’s article notes the evidence now confirms a side effect of the mRNA jobs “could be dementia, and the prions that cause it may be contagious.”
“Frameshifting, as we now know occurs in the COVID shots, can induce prion production and lead to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD),” he explained.
His warning is some clinical trials and “observational studies” that suggest the safety of the shots “are biased,” and those conclusions “massively overstated.”
He said “prions” are “proteinaceous infectious particle” and are known to cause “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or ‘mad cow disease’) in cattle, and chronic wasting disease in deer and elk.”
Key characteristics include “the formation of holes in the brain giving it a sponge-like appearance, and failure to induce an inflammatory response.”
“In short, prions are infectious agents composed entirely of a protein material that can fold in multiple, structurally distinct ways, at least one of which is transmissible to other prion proteins, leading to a disease that is similar to viral infections but without nucleic acids,” he explained.
“According to the prion disease model, the infectious properties of prions are due to the ability of the abnormal protein to convert the normal version of the protein into the misfolded form, thereby setting off a chain reaction that progressively damages the nervous system,” he said.
He noted that on top of Seneff’s theory, there now is, from 2022, tech entrepreneur Sid Belzberg’s writings about the neurological side effects of the jabs.
His site, within months, had gotten 15,000 hits and gathered 60 reports from people who got the jab and suffered neurological deficits shortly thereafter, including six cases of diagnosed CJD.
Belzberg noted CJD normally affects one in a million.
“To get 6 cases you would need 6,000,000 hits to the site assuming everyone reports. The chances of getting 1 case in 15,000 hits is 1 in 66.”
And his report noted Dr. Kevin McCairn, a British neuroscientist, has suggested the those affected prions “are infectious and can be transmitted from one person to another.”
Mercola noted Dr. David Cartland has posted 13 scientific papers linking the COVID jabs to prion diseases and that he, too, expects an “epidemic” of prion problems.
Mercola noted a recent study in the journal Vaccine about the side effects of COBID jabs and “it confirms what I and many other alternative news sources have been saying all along, namely that the mRNA jabs are the most dangerous medical products to ever hit the market.”
Other known side effects include increased risk of myocarditis, pericarditis, blood clots and Guillain-Barre syndrome.
Mercola said, “Based on data from across the world, it’s beyond clear that the COVID shots are the most dangerous drugs ever deployed. If you already got one or more COVID jabs and are now reconsidering, you’d be wise to avoid all vaccines from here on, as you need to end the assault on your body. Even if you haven’t experienced any obvious side effects, your health may still be impacted long-term, so don’t take any more shots.”
If there already are side effects, “Two remedies shown to bind to and facilitate the removal of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. I don’t know if these drugs will work on off-target proteins and nanolipid accumulation as well, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to try.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Dr. Mercola: Expect an ‘Avalanche’ of COVID-Shot Dementia appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘A return to common sense and an overdue recognition that women’s well-being and safety matter’
The transgender agenda, the belief that men can simply say they are women and they are women, has hit headwinds with a new decision by the National Health Service in the United Kingdom.
A report in the Telegraph explains that the organization that serves the health care concerns of millions has proposed a definition change that states sex is a matter of biology.
The report noted that’s a “landmark shift against gender ideology.”
The change means, among other things, that men who claim to be women now are banned from women-only wards, and women have the right to request a female physician for intimate care.
The changes are coming as part of an update to the organization’s constitution that is required to be reviewed every 10 years, and last was done in 2015.
Women’s groups for years had expressed concern that the service had fallen victim to “gender ideology” promoters. It was only a few years ago that NHS guidance said transgender individuals could be placed in single-sex wards based on what they claimed to be.
But now the new constitution change states: “We are defining sex as biological sex.”
The women’s groups said the move is a “return to common sense and an overdue recognition that women’s wellbeing and safety matter.”
There have been battles in the United Kingdom, like in the United States, over the ideology that sex is changeable as a man or woman desires. However, being male or female is embedded in the human body down to the DNA level and doesn’t change, despite whatever chemicals may be administered or what mutilating surgeries done.
In the U.S., Joe Biden has adopted the agenda as one of the major goals for his term as president, and has been busy rewriting rules and regulations to promote his beliefs.
The report explained, “The proposed changes will also see discrimination requirements updated, with the word gender replaced with sex.”
And it noted, “The document also places a duty on health providers to use ‘clear terms’ to communicate and take account of biological differences. It follows pledges from ministers to stop NHS trusts using terms like ‘chestfeeding’ and ‘people who give birth.'”
Maya Forstater, chief executive of Sex Matters, told the Telegraph, “It is excellent news that the NHS constitution is being revised to put ‘sex’ in its rightful place – at the heart of principle 1, which sets out that the NHS must treat everyone with equality and respect for their human rights. The confusion between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in official policies like the NHS constitution is what has enabled women’s rights to be trampled over in the name of transgender identities.”
Just the News noted that the NHS constitution is what sets out the principles and values of the service, and rights of patients and staff.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Landmark Shift Against Gender Ideology: Sex Defined as Biological Sex appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article was written by Swedish independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen, also known as PeterSweden. You can follow him at PeterSweden.com.
Watch my interview with OAN.
Recently I went on One America News to talk about the World Economic Forum agenda.
At the annual WEF meeting in Davos this year, Klaus Scwhab said that they were the “trustees of the future”.
Meanwhile, another speaker at Davos wanted to label farming and fishing as “ecocide”.
Yet another speaker at the WEF talked about how it was important to have digital ID so that they could track who has been vaccinated.
All of this was going on, yet almost nothing about it on the mainstream media.
So I am speaking out about it.
Click here to watch my video interview with OAN on Rumble:
Did you know that Bill Gates has donated a whopping $1.27 BILLION towards funding the UN Agenda 2030 “global goals”?
You see, the UN Agenda 2030 and the WEF agenda is pretty similar. But perhaps the Agenda 2030 is even more worrisome as this is an agreement that many countries have already signed on to!
A large sum of the money that was donated is going towards GLOBAL DIGITAL ID.
Have you ever wondered why you never heard anything about that in the mainstream media?
Well, Bill Gates has also donated $319 million to the mainstream media, including millions to the BBC.
Follow the money.
You can read all about that and “The New Agenda” in my earlier article here.
Independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen has dedicated years to reporting the things the mainstream media ignores. You can follow him at https://petersweden.com/
The post Peter Sweden EXPOSING the WEF Agenda on OAN (Video) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Kevin Bardosh & Jay Bhattarcharya
Real Clear Wire
The World Health Organization is urging the U.S. and 193 other governments to commit next month to a new global treaty to prevent and manage future pandemics. Current estimates suggest over $31 billion per year will be needed to fund its obligations, a cost most lower income countries cannot afford. But that isn’t the only reason to oppose it. Validating this treaty is a vote for the disastrous policies of the Covid years. Rather than taking time for deep reflection and serious reform, those pushing the pandemic treaty are set on ignoring and institutionalizing the WHO’s mistakes.
From the Spring of 2020, many experts warned that the panic begun in Wuhan’s unprecedented lockdown would cause wide-ranging damage—and indeed they did. School closures deprived a generation of children—especially poor children—of access to basic education. Businesses were shuttered. Vaccine and mask mandates made public health an authoritarian exercise of power devoid of science. Border quarantines promulgated the idea that the rest of the world is unclean.
But few experts care to seriously dissect these errors. How many schools of public health—in America or Europe—held serious debates during the Covid response, or since? Very few.
Opposing the treaty is a signal to the WHO and global health community that they cannot whitewash these mistakes. Next time, we need to ensure a better balance between trade-offs, evidence-based policies, and democratic rights. Such a view seeks to restore the WHO’s own definition of health into pandemic response: “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Yet the governing philosophy of the WHO emergency program is the exact opposite. Its leaders chastise the world to “move faster’ and “do more.” Bill Gates, the agency’s single largest private donor, is convinced lockdown benefits vastly outweighed their harms. He’s wrong.
Read through the current draft of the treaty itself and you will find a whole section dedicated to “fighting misinformation.” There is no section focused on preventing harm. Those speaking out about these dangers have been subjected to harsh censorship. Once esteemed professionals were summarily fired for describing the reality of what was happening. The authors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration—professors at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford—were subject to a “devastating takedown” at the hands of Dr. Fauci and top scientific bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health and the WHO.
Public health came to resemble the police, and those pushing the new WHO treaty want to go further. It calls for more mandates, more vaccine passports, and more censorship—our new global health “Lockdown Doctrine.”
Proponents of the treaty would have you believe that it is merely a tool that countries can use to guide future pandemic response efforts, that it cannot trump national sovereignty or be used to force failed policies on entire populations. But the lifeblood of international treaties is not in the dried ink. Treaties are constantly ignored. Nonetheless, they do one thing very well: they create an illusion of consensus, signaling to those with power and influence. These priorities are then filtered down into national laws and plans where they can do tremendous damage.
How can national governments seriously endorse an international agreement when their own domestic Covid evaluations are ongoing? The UK Covid Inquiry is set to end in 2026. Australia’s commission is ongoing. Italy and Ireland have only recently announced them. Most have none planned.
The rush needs to slow down. The U.S. should avoid signing until a thorough, bipartisan review of WHO’s Covid pandemic management is accomplished. Until then, a vote for a pandemic treaty is a vote against real, positive change.
Kevin Bardosh is Director and Head of Research at Collateral Global. Jay Battacharya is a Professor at Stanford School of Medicine.
The post The World Health Organization’s Pandemic Treaty Ignores Covid Policy Mistakes appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘Sadly, American culture is increasingly hostile’ to faith
Long have reports of the persecution of Christians highlighted China and Pakistan, multiple Islamic nations in Africa, those hotbeds of hate for Christians in the Middle East.
But now it’s the “West” that is being called out.
A report at the Washington Stand explains that now international religious freedom organizations “are monitoring religious freedom conditions in the United States … and it’s easy to see why.”
Arielle Del Turco, of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council, added, to the publication, “Sadly, American culture is increasingly hostile to traditional Christian beliefs.”
Two recent situations both have developed in the leftist state of Colorado, run now by Democrats in the governor’s office, state House and state Senate. There bureaucrats first accused Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips of discrimination because he wouldn’t promote same-sex marriages with his cake artistry, and then they demanded a web designer promote same-sex weddings if she provided any wedding services.
In both cases the principals are Christians who refused state demands they violate their faith, and in both cases the state was summarily slapped down by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, the state still maintains the so-called “anti-discrimination” agenda under which the two were charged.
Del Turco told the Stand, “To a large extent, we can all intuit that by browsing through a streaming service or scrolling on social media. But these cultural shifts are also having real-work impacts for Christians in America who simply want to go about their lives while staying true to their faith.”
She pointed out, “When Christian couples are denied a foster care license because their faith is at odds with gender ideology or fifth graders are prevented from starting an interfaith prayer club at school, these are critical reminders that religious freedom isn’t something we can take for granted — it must be defended. Thankfully, the U.S. still has strong legal protections in most cases and religious freedom is the victor in court more often than not. However, cultural support for religious freedom is in peril and we must be intentional about fostering that.”
A report from the FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty just months ago, called “Free to Believe? The Intensifying Intolerance Toward Christians in the West,” documented 168 incidents of anti-Christian hate or discrimination in recent years – including 33 in 2023.
Many happened during the wildly out-of-synch government lockdowns during COVID.
That report found, “As the mainstream culture moves further and further away from a Christian worldview, Christian beliefs that contradict progressive secular values are increasingly denounced by the culture and wrongly portrayed as being hateful or bigoted.”
Tony Perkins, chief of the FRC, said in the Stand report, “It is shocking to see Western countries — the same ones we think of as free and open societies — take authoritarian measures against Christians simply trying to live out their faith.”
He warned “hostility” to Christians – which was what the Supreme Court found Colorado had exhibited – “is clearly and steadily rising in the West.”
Also, there have been a flood of reports in recent years of vandalism, fire-bombing or more at Christian churches whose congregations are unwilling to endorse Joe Biden’s radical abortion and transgender ideologies.
The report noted even the FBI, through a field office, “compiled and circulated a memo detailing plans to spy on Catholics who attend the Tridentine Mass, the form of the Mass most common prior to 1969.”
The report explained there also are increasing attacks on Christians across Europe.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Now It’s the United States That Gets Caught Persecuting Christians appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – repubished with permission
Evidence Shows that Rep. Adam Schiff, who is running for US Senate in California, has committed election fraud, has ineligibly voted, and/or committed mortgage fraud.
One year ago, in April 2023, we reported that an ethics complaint was filed against corrupt US Rep. Adam Schiff. Today, we can report that Schiff’s corrupt and even criminal acts involve much more.
In April 2023 we reported at The Gateway Pundit that an ethics complaint had been filed against US Rep. Adam Schiff.
TGP reported:
US Congressman Adam Schiff from California is in deep trouble. An ethics complaint has been filed against Schiff by a concerned citizen alleging that Schiff has committed election and voter fraud claiming he was both a citizen of California and Maryland.
A concerned citizen from the state of California uncovered what is believed to be crimes committed by Adam Schiff.
In 2000 Schiff was elected to Congress and has served as a US House member from the state of California ever since. Schiff reportedly purchased a home in Maryland with his wife in 2003 stating they would occupy this home for 12 consecutive months as their “primary residence”. Despite this claim, Schiff continued to vote in California.
Schiff refinanced his home in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013 claiming the Maryland home was his primary residence. In 2009, a House Ethics investigation claimed that Schiff did this and Schiff claimed it was an error and he repaid the exempt taxes to the state of Maryland.
A fellow member of Congress was charged with criminal counts for doing the same thing, Steven Watkins, of Oklahoma.
In addition, the amount of the home mortgage has remained basically the same this entire time. Congress should look into this as well.
When asked about his residence in Maryland a couple of months ago while on the campaign trail running for US Senate in California, Schiff called it a "non-issue." He added that his primary residence was in California and neglected to mention that he had repeatedly claimed his Maryland home was his primary residence.
It turns out that there is much, much more to this story.
Earlier this month, Californian Chris Bish who is running for US Congress in California's District 6 issued a draft report along with Darren Ellis who is running for California State Assembly. The report is below, but here are a few highlights.
According to the draft document below:
Maryland Code §7-401 defines mortgage fraud as “(d)any action made by a person with the intent to defraud that involves (1) knowingly making any deliberate misstatement, misrepresentation, or omission during the mortgage lending process with the intent that the misstatement, misrepresentation, or omission relied on by a mortgage lender, borrower, or any other party to the mortgage lending process;” or “(6) filing or causing to be filed in the land records in the county where a residential real property is located, any document relating to a mortgage loan that the person knows to contain a deliberate misstatement, misrepresentation, or omission”.
Adam Schiff, despite claiming to live and represent the people in the state of California, filed and reaffirmed through refinancing documents, his primary residence at 8204 Windsor View Terrace, Potomac Maryland, 28054. Adam Schiff’s on the record acknowledgement of the mortgage document filings (primary residence in Maryland) during a House Ethics hearing via claim of a “mistake” evidences acknowledgement of mortgage fraud.
Schiff received better rates on his mortgage on the Maryland property by claiming it was his primary residence as opposed to his secondary residence.
(Remember that former Baltimore top prosecutor Marilyn Mosby was recently convicted of mortgage fraud in Maryland.)
At the same time that Schiff claimed his property in Maryland was his primary residence, he must have claimed that he was a resident of California to run for the US House in California.
The Heritage Foundation has an excellent piece describing election integrity where it defines various types of "voter fraud". False registrations are a type of voter fraud. "Voting under fraudulent voter registrations that either use a phony name and a real or fake address or claim residence in a particular jurisdiction where the registered voter does not actually live and is not entitled to vote."
A number of California residents have been convicted of voter fraud over the past few years.
According to the report below:
Adam and Eve Schiff sold their California home at 425 Amhurst Dr, Burbank CA in May of 2003 just prior to the purchase of their “primary residence” at 8204 Windsor View Terrace, Potomac Maryland, 28054 in June of 2003. In 2009, around the same time as a House Ethics hearing pertaining to the Maryland residence, Adam and Eve Schiff purchased the condominium at 250 N First St #427, Burbank CA, 95102, subsequently registering to vote in California at that address. It is important to note that the condominium is 650 sqft, has 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom. It is also of note that Adam and Eve Schiff had two minor children of approximately middle school age at the time of purchase.
California Elections Code §2022 “If a person moves to another state with the intention of making it his or her domicile, the voter loses his or her domicile in this state”. California Elections Code §2026 “The domicile of a Member of the Legislature or a Representative in Congress of the United States shall be conclusively presumed to be at the residence address indicated on that person's currently filed affidavit of registration”. Adam and Eve Schiff, having sold their home in California in 2003 and subsequently purchasing a home in Maryland as their primary residence, remained voters in California despite being non-residents from 2003 until 2009, the date in which they purchased the Condominium at 250 N First St #427, Burbank CA, 95102. California Domicile records pertaining to change in voter registration are absent / could not be located, implying voter registration fraud between 2003 and 2009.
In order to qualify as a candidate to represent California in the US House of Representatives (and/or Senate), one must be 25 years of age, a US Citizen, and a Resident in the state of California. For election years 2004, 2006, and 2008, Adam Schiff was not a resident of the State of California, evidenced by the 2003 sale of his home at 425 Amhurst Dr, Burbank CA and subsequent purchase of “Primary Residence” at 8204 Winsor View Terrace, Potomac Maryland, 28054. California Election Code §349(a) “’residence’ for voting purposes means a person’s domicile (b) The domicile of a person is that place in which his or her habitation is fixed, wherein the person has the intention of remaining, and to which, whenever he or she is absent, the person has the intention of returning. At a given time, a person may have only one domicile”. Adam Schiff, knowingly and willfully registering as a candidate while being a resident of Maryland would constitute a violation subject to California Election Code §18203 “[a]ny person who files or submits for filing a nomination paper or declaration of candidacy knowing that it or any part of it has been made falsely is punishable by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000) or by imprisonment. . .”. Further, Adam and Eve Schiff remained registered voters in California despite being residents of Maryland from 2003. CA Elec Code §18560(a) [a person] “Not being entitled to vote at an election, fraudulently votes or fraudulently attempts to vote at that election” is subject to imprisonment pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 1170 of the Penal Code for 16 months or two or three years, or in a county jail not exceeding one year.
Heritage describes ineligible voting as follows:
Illegal registration and voting by individuals who are not U.S. citizens, are convicted felons, or are otherwise not eligible to vote.
The report below states:
It has been understood that Adam Schiff and Eve Schiff, as residents of Maryland, have been voting absentee in California. CA Elec Code §18578 “Any person who applies for, or who votes or attempts to vote, a vote by mail ballot by fraudulently signing the name of a fictitious person, or of a regularly qualified voter, or of a person who is not qualified to vote, is guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 1170 of the Penal Code for 16 months or two or three years, by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment.”
See the entire document below:
Schiff Complaint Draft by Joe Ho on Scribd
Adam Schiff should not be running for US Senate in California. He is ineligible. He should be charged for election crimes.
Also, it may be too late to replace him.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Evidence Shows Adam Schiff Falsely Registered, Ineligibly Voted, and/or Committed Mortgage Fraud appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest Post by Jon Kopel
The Arizona Republican Party is now the second state Republican Party to pass a ‘Ban the Jab’ resolution and declare COVID-19 injections biological and technological weapons.
Patriot, Dan Schultz, of PrecinctStrategy.com submitted the ‘Ban the Jab’ resolution that the Republican Party of Arizona. The Arizona GOP voted today and passed the resolution with approximately 96% of the vote.
The resolution declares the COVID-19 injections to be biological and technological weapons and calls on the Governor to prohibit their distribution and the Attorney General to confiscate the vials and conduct a forensic analysis of their contents.
In addition to being an attorney, Dan Schultz is a former West Point graduate and former U.S. Army counterintelligence and human intelligence officer.
Mr. Schultz advocates the Precinct Strategy, which seeks to wrestle control of the Republican Party back to the people. Previously, Dan Schultz submitted the ‘Ban the Jab’ resolution to the Maricopa County GOP.
On Saturday January 13th, the Maricopa County GOP passed the resolution with 87.4% of the vote! A total 1494 votes were cast, 1306 in favor, 188 against. Maricopa County is the largest Republican County in the nation.
The first ‘Ban the Jab’ resolution was authored by psychotherapist, Dr. Joseph Sansone, in February of 2023.
The Gateway Pundit recently reported that Dr. Sansone currently has a lawsuit that seeks Ban the Jab in Florida. The case was dismissed and is on its way to the appellate court.
To date, approximately 10 Florida Republican County Parties have passed ‘Ban the Jab’ resolutions declaring Covid 19 injections biological and technological weapons, also calling on the Governor to prohibit their distribution and the Attorney General to confiscate the vials and conduct a forensic analysis.
The Florida Republican Assembly, The National Federation of Republican Assemblies, the Republican Liberty Caucus of Florida have passed Ban the Jab resolutions.
Recently, the Florida Department of Health has joined the call to Ban the Jab. Clackamas County GOP in Oregon and the Idaho Republican Party has passed the Ban the jab resolution.
Previously, the Arizona GOP was scheduled to vote on the resolution on January 27th, however, other business and debates caused delays to prevent getting to the vote.
Attorney Dan Schultz was persistent and reintroduced the resolution that was approved by the state’s resolution committee by a vote of 13-0.
Arizona is considered an important state in politics and passage of this resolution will help build support for prohibiting biological warfare against Americans and civilian populations at large.
The text of the resolution submitted by Dan Schultz follows:
Arizona ‘Ban the Jab’ Resolution:
Whereas:
Strong and credible evidence shows Covid 19 and Covid 19 injections are biological and technological weapons, and Pfizer’s clinical data revealed 1,223 deaths, 42,000 adverse cases, 158,000 adverse incidents, and approximately 1,000 side effects, and an enormous number of people have died and or have been permanently disabled after having been injected by the Covid 19 injections, and strong and credible evidence from Sweden exists that Covid mRNA shots alter human DNA, and government agencies, media, and tech companies, and other corporations have committed enormous fraud by claiming Covid injections are safe and effective, and The Florida Department of Health has called for a halt to the mRNA injections, and continued experimentation on humans and denial of informed consent are violations of the Nuremberg Code and therefore constitute crimes against humanity,
Resolved:
On behalf of the preservation of the human race, the 2024 Arizona Republican Party Presidential Nominating Convention Delegates call upon Governor Hobbs and the state legislature to prohibit the sale and distribution of Covid injections and all mRNA injections in Arizona, and for the Arizona Attorney General to immediately seize all Covid injections and mRNA injections in Arizona and perform a forensic analysis on these so-called “vaccines.”
The post BREAKING: Arizona Republican Party Declares Covid-19 Injections Biological and Technological Weapons, Passes Ban the Jab Resolution! appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Zachary Marschall
Real Clear Wire
The long-awaited return to normal has started in America.
Google swiftly fired 28 employees who occupied their boss’s office in protest against a corporate contract with Israel. Educational institutions such as Vanderbilt University and Columbia Universityhave suspended or expelled student protesters who occupied buildings and spaces illegally. Pomona College, American University, and the University of Georgia have similarly suspended student activists for causing disruptions.
American institutions are no longer willing to put up with selfish, entitled, and unrealistic direct actions. That is a good thing. The nation went crazy in 2020 and has taken four years to regrow a backbone against the tiny, vocal minority trying to upend American values and our daily lives.
The rule of law, respect for authority, tolerance of difference, and civil behavior are all core American values that higher education has thrown away and our national institutions are now scrambling to reclaim. Institutions’ experiment with placating activist intolerance is over.
These disciplinary measures are the first step in a long road back to sanity. The path will have roadblocks, and quite literally did on April 15 when protesters across the country used their bodies to blockade airports, bridges, and highways. But at least America now appears oriented in the correct direction.
The greatest evidence for this trend comes from Claire Shipman, the board of trustees co-chair at Columbia University, who testified before the House Committee on Education & the Workforce hearing on antisemitism on that campus. Shipman’s April 17 testimony made clear that universities are overrun with antisemitic protests because they have lost their ways as institutions of learning and are now incubators for anti-American revolutionaries.
Shipman’s vision for a better Columbia thoroughly rejects the prevailing attitudes in 2020 that tasked higher education to create the next generation of politically active social justice warriors. Like a butterfly shedding its cocoon that kept it ignorant of what was always there, Shipman’s attitude can serve as a roadmap for universities to restore their founding values, de-politicize their curriculum, and narrow their focus to academic rigor and excellence.
A return to basics will benefit American institutions on and off campus because these virtues are the necessary ingredients for robust liberal educations that foster intellectual curiosity, civil debate, and respect for humanity. The students occupying their campuses in pitched tents possess none of these characteristics. Their jeers, physical attacks, and calls for death project a future America devoid of our core values.
The last four years set American society and education back a generation. But hope is not lost. Some businesses and universities have found their authority to assert civility and tolerance.
Google moved past its problematic employees much faster than Netflix did in 2021 when a hoard of LGBTQ workers walked out in protest of a Dave Chapelle special. This semester, university presidents are more decisive than in November 2023, when the University of Michigan tolerated more than 200 anti-Israel student protesters who occupied an administrative building.
Yale University warned its protesters that they would face consequences for occupying campus and promptly arrested over 40 students. Columbia University is an exception to this trend. Its president, Minouche Shafik, is a deer in headlights too afraid to move against Jew-haters as the campus anti-Semites continue to occupy the Manhattan campus. The trendline resembles Yale’s actions more than Columbia’s inaction.
Swift removals and firings are good for business, whether that business is software technology or higher learning. Zero tolerance for disruptive political actions also benefits workers and students focused on learning new skills and getting ahead.
Productivity grinds to a halt when Americans cannot use their highways, airports, offices, and classrooms. Americans cannot succeed when we cannot utilize our resources to the greatest potential.
We all deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness free from those who would ruin our days to satisfy their selfish causes. But our inalienable rights will become unattainable rights if universities — which shepherd undergraduates into the real world — fail to instill the right values in students. Higher education getting its act together will pay dividends for our economy, communities, and society.
The post The Road Back to Normalcy Starts Where the Problem Began: College Campuses appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘They simply want to be part of current protest movements’
There are hundreds, no thousands, of university-age students participating now in the anti-Israel protests on campuses across the nation.
Most of them have little idea of the reason for their protests, according to longtime liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
He said they’re “useful idiots” to those who have a more nefarious motive behind the protests and the violence.
But the threat is that they are being groomed for future terrorists.
Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurther Professor of Law, emeritus at Harvard, wrote in a column at the Gatestone Institute, where he is a fellow, that those protesters include university, high school and even middle school students.
They are protesting Israel, the U.S., and Jews.
“Some of the signs say ‘pro-Palestine,’ ‘ceasefire now’ and ‘end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.’ But these benign statements hide a far more malignant agenda, the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, the end of America as the world’s leading power and the end of democracy and the free market economy. Even if there were a unilateral ceasefire, accompanied by massive humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, many of these protests would continue, because Gaza is merely an excuse for a much wider agenda: to destroy Israel and destroy America,” he warned.
New York protesters, he pointed out, recently called to repeat the atrocities of Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, “a thousand times.”
“There were shouts of ‘We are Hamas,’ ‘Death to America,’ ‘Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,’ ‘Israel go to hell’ and ‘Jews to back to Poland.’ The chant of ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is pervasive. Free of what? Free of Jews,” he said.
Nobody, he said, has been caught with a sign calling for a two-state peace solution.
The calls for “revolution” actually bypass the Middle East issues and aim directly at America, he said.
“As in the 1960s, many of these students are being groomed to be the terrorists of the future – in the manner of Kathy Boudin and Bernardine Dohrn back then – and, in the United States, a fifth column, the aim of which is taking down America,” he said.
The are four players in the protests: Arabs and Muslims who hate Israel and Jews, “old line radicals,” anarchists and America-haters, organizers who handle money and organize violence, and then those “useful idiots.”
They have “little or no knowledge of the substantive issues. They simply want to be part of current protest movements, which are popular on campuses and among many of their peers. It is this last group that is most troubling, because many of its members are good and decent people who are being led into dangerous territory by their elders.”
He said, “That these useful idiots are young does not make them less dangerous. Young students were instrumental in bringing to power tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot and Mao.”
He conceded that because they’re young, they still can change ideologies. But he said consequences should accrue to those who are violent.
Those should include “arrest and prosecution – for physically intimidating, blocking and harassing Jews or any minorities. Such actions are not protected by the First Amendment, university disciplinary rules, or employers after graduation.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Dershowitz Warns the ‘Useful Idiots’ Now Protesting are Being Groomed for Terrorism appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The Utah State GOP Nominating Convention will be held on Saturday, where State GOP Delegates will decide who is eligible for the June primary and the November general election.
Trent Christensen told The Gateway Pundit, “One Day 1, my administration will begin an investigation into every aspect of Utah’s electoral system. We will look into the ballots and the mail-in ballots; we will test the voting machines; we will interview the country clerks and their staffs; we will investigate the voter rolls. We will also work with the State Legislature to change the laws as needed and ensure that Utah’s elections are, in fact, the safest and most secure elections in the country.”
Guest post by Utah Attorney General Candidate Trent Christensen:
The tactics currently being used against President Trump—arresting and indicting him, and his lawyers, and his advisors, and his supporters, etc.—show the desperation of the left. But it would be a mistake to think those tactics are reserved only for the liberal left in the D.C. Swamp. The cowardly tactics of personal destruction used to win elections at all costs have spread, and are being used now even by those who claim to be on the right.
It’s happening here in “red state” Utah.
Last year, a coordinated attack was made against our Attorney General. It was a two-sided attack, with open, brazen, and spurious legal actions taken against him on the one hand; and,additional threats of ongoing attacks against him and his office being made behind closed doors. Now, after the Attorney General declined to run for re-election, some would want to brush this under the rug and move on. I, for one, believe that the fight is far from over.
The Republican State Convention happens this Saturday, April 27, where the Republican State Delegates will make their voices heard. This will not be a normal convention—it’s impact will have national ramifications. The votes of the delegates will not only decide who advances to the Primary, their voices will demonstrate whether the same tactics being used against our former (and hopefully future) President will be condoned here in Utah.
Will we allow it? The lawfare and the intimidation? Will we bow to the pressure and the propaganda, slick ads paid for by those who prefer the Governor have a hand-picked Attorney General, rather than a check against his power and an ally to President Trump?
Or will we stand up and vote to drain the Salt Lake Swamp, to save both our state and our country?
Make no mistake, our new Attorney General must be willing and ready to stand up and fight alongside President Trump. Utah has critical issues that the next Attorney General must contend with, issues with Utah’s election integrity, supporting law enforcement, securing Utah’s borderfrom the invasion of illegal aliens, crushing the fentanyl trade, fighting to protect and reclaim our lands from the federal government, and many others.
At the same time, President Trump will need the support of those Attorneys General who will actively, and gladly, push back on all the liberal, unconstitutional, and oftentimes insane policies enacted over the last four years. We have several such Attorneys General already around the country. We need more.
President Trump will only have four more years to enact his America First agenda, and to dismantle the liberal policies currently destroying this country. I am ready to fight this fight with him on Day 1. Sign me up, and let’s Make Utah and America Great Again!
With gratitude,
America First Candidate for Utah Attorney General
The post OP-ED: Ready to Fight the Good Fight by America First Candidate for Utah Attorney General Trent Christensen appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article was written by Swedish independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen, also known as PeterSweden. You can follow him at PeterSweden.com.
New poll finds that a large majority of Swedish people want to keep physical cash
I have some good news to bring you from my home country of Sweden.
A new poll finds that a whopping 83% of people want to keep using cash as a payment option in the future, a new record high!
Looks like people are beginning to realize that the cashless society is not what we want after all.
The biggest reason that people want to keep cash was for emergency preparedness, with 51% giving that as their main reason. But 29% of people said that freedom of choice was the main reason for wanting to keep cash, and another 19% said that inclusion was their reason.
So it appears one major reason for people wanting to keep cash is because of FREEDOM.
As we all know, going cashless would make it very easy for the state to keep track of everything that people do. Dissidents could easily be locked out from buying and selling.
Sweden has been one of the main countries pushing for a cashless society for many years now.
For example, over 6000 people have already gotten microchip implants in their hands to use for cashless payments. You can read all about that here.
Many shops in Sweden have gone cashless. For example, I visited a Burger King last year that had a sign proudly stating that they were cashless.
And now we see that a large majority of the people want to keep cash.
Looks like the cashless dystopia has been postponed!
Independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen has dedicated years to reporting the things the mainstream media ignores. You can follow him at https://petersweden.com/
The post Peter Sweden: GOOD NEWS: Swedes REJECT Cashless Agenda appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
Joe Feldman has faced many tough crowds in the course of successfully selling his “Grading for Equity” program to school districts across the nation. During the consultant’s presentations, teachers concerned that his approach lowers standards have rolled their eyes, questioned his understanding of students, and worse.
“A guy in the front row got his stuff together and walked out of the room,” Feldman told RealClearInvestigations.
Despite the frequent resistance from teachers, dozens of districts from California to Massachusetts are giving the consultant’s ambitious project a shot. As schools face a series of crises, including a spike in chronic absenteeism and sharp academic decline, grading for equity offers a path to better grades and higher graduation rates. Its practices include the removal of behavior in calculating grades, the end of penalties for late assignments, allowing students to retake exams, and a ban on zeros as the lowest mark.
Since the pandemic, districts have been lowering standards by making grading more lenient to help struggling students, according to several studies. But Feldman insists that his sweeping overhaul isn’t part of that controversial trend. He says the practices he promotes are a matter of fairness and accuracy in an educational system that’s stacked against blacks, Latinos and other disadvantaged students.
Grading for equity, however, stirs enough dissent among teachers and parents that some districts have dropped the difficult revamp in mid-stream. They say Feldman’s reforms are a form of leniency that brings out the worst in some students, hurting the very kids he wants to help.
“What’s most troubling are the practices that lower expectations, like giving a 50 percent grade instead of a zero even when a student doesn’t attempt the assignment,” said Meredith Coffey, a former teacher and now a researcher at Thomas B. Fordham Institute who co-wrote a report on grading for equity. “If students know that they could do nothing and get 50 percent, why would they work hard? Many would do nothing.”
In some districts, grading for equity is part of the controversial agenda that’s taken hold in urban areas and seeks to wash away perceived “systemic racism” in classrooms in the wake of the George Floyd murder in 2020. In Fairfax County, a district that’s embraced grading for equity, leaders have also pushed “anti-racist” education for students and paid author and crusader Ibram X. Kendi $20,000 to give a one-hour Zoom presentation, telling staff that anti-racism means working to achieve equitable outcomes.
Like critical race theory, cops in schools, and transgender bathrooms, grading for equity is galvanizing divisions in the cultural conflict over public education. Progressives support it as a path to closing the stubborn achievement gap between rich and poor students while conservatives fear it further undermines high expectations that encourage all students to strive to improve.
A savvy promoter, Feldman frequently posts on X, expressing his excitement to schools and conference organizers who tap his expertise. He likes to plug his book, too. “Grading for Equity,” with a second edition in 2023, has sold 175,000 copies, a top-five bestseller from publisher Corwin.
Grading for equity, a term coined by Feldman, isn’t a fringe movement. Some districts adopted pieces of the program before the pandemic undermined the ability of many students to keep up academically. Since then, many more districts have embraced it.
Last year, with Feldman’s help, Boston Public Schools approved a shift to equity grading. In Oregon, Portland Public Schools is making plans to implement similar grading reforms by 2025, and thousands of New York City and Los Angeles teachers have been trained in equitable grading practices. Smaller districts in California, Nevada, New York, and other states have also adopted the program.
Feldman, a former teacher and principal with degrees from Stanford, NYU, and Harvard, is part of an army of educational consultants who charge as much as $10,000 per day. They work in every facet of public education, typically promising districts major transformations in teaching, leadership, technology, and performance. Big firms like Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Co. as well as smaller outfits like Feldman’s Crescendo Education Group are in the game, vying for the sizeable “professional development” pool of funding that’s part of every district’s budget. It totals an estimated $26 billion.
The pandemic’s harsh toll on students – chronic absenteeism almost doubled to 26% of students, contributing to many months of learning loss – has boosted demand for consultants. Some 50 of them work in grading practices, and Feldman, who has consulted with hundreds of schools, is perhaps the most popular.
Feldman’s program calls for a profound change in grading practices that raises fundamental questions about human motivation. He believes the traditional practice of grading almost everything a student does is antiquated and superficial. It relies on the extrinsic motivation for points, turning students into grade grubbers, rather than the intrinsic desire to learn because the subject is inspiring and meaningful.
The consultant says the pre-eminence of grades disproportionately harms disadvantaged students, who often get dinged for missing homework, late assignments, and misbehavior – issues that can stem from a lack of parental support and resources at home, research shows.
Feldman asserts that schools have a “moral obligation” to close the achievement gap, and his fix is far-reaching: no points for daily homework and classroom behavior, eliminating the distinction in the gradebook between students who lead discussions and those who disrupt them, and no penalties for the late submission of assignments, which shouldn’t be given much weight in grading.
Grades are all about tests. Teachers assess only what really matters – learning – based on a set of well-defined standards and demonstrated on a test at the end of a unit. This summative evaluation doesn’t really count either, because students who don’t ace it get a chance to review their mistakes and take the exam again, and possibly a third time. It’s better to encourage them to master the material, the consultant says, than accept a demoralizing low mark.
Here’s the kicker: Even the student who keeps failing the test, or doesn’t show up to take it, gets 50% credit. On a 100-point scale, Feldman says, a zero is disproportionately punitive for the lowest mark, when a passing grade begins at 60%.
Teachers who support Feldman’s program say it gives them better insight into students’ academic progress and problems, making them more effective. “I have more meaningful conversations with students about the English standards and how grades are not arbitrary points for effort, but directly reflect their knowledge of the skills,” said Savannah Berry, a high school English teacher in the predominately Latino and black San Leandro district in California.
School districts and their elected boards tout the program’s main result – fewer kids fail – and that plays well politically in many communities. In an examination of four high schools that have embraced grading for equity, non-white students had 37% fewer Ds and Fs at the end of a school year, and white students, no longer benefiting from extra credit and good behavior points, saw a 19% drop in As, according to a report by Feldman’s firm.
In Virginia’s diverse Fairfax County Public Schools, the significant drop in Ds and Fs for blacks and Latinos led to a 4% increase in the graduation rate between 2018 and 2022.
Critics dismiss such progress as a mirage produced by lenient practices that inflate low grades. Students are also getting the wrong message about the importance of meeting expectations, several teachers told RCI, leading some to blow off studying and just coast. With less focus in class, more kids are also misbehaving.
Zenaida Perez says half of the teachers in her Fairfax district, the largest in Virginia, oppose grading for equity but are afraid to speak up because they fear retaliation. “At least 30 percent of my students definitely make less effort,” said Perez, who has taught in the district for 16 years. “Sometimes they do not come to school and I still must give them a 50%. That is absolutely ridiculous.”
In some ways, Feldman’s biggest roadblock are the students, who like all humans procrastinate if given the chance. DePaul University psychologist Joe Ferrari, who has written extensively about the condition, says 20% of people are chronic procrastinators. If schools remove deadlines with penalties, he says most students would likely also delay and delay doing their work. “People will always gravitate to the easiest path,” he said. “Humans seek pleasure and avoid pain.”
Feldman didn’t come up with the grading practices he tirelessly promotes. He borrowed the ideas from others, including consultant Ken O’Connor, a pioneer in standards-based grading, and reframed them with a lens on equity for disadvantaged kids.
“All of the basic ideas in Feldman’s book are exactly the same as my guidelines,” said O’Connor, who published his first paper on standards-based grading in 1995. “His popularity is probably from having the right idea at the right time. I respect his work.”
Feldman’s boutique shop in Oakland, Calif., operates with seven staffers, including a chief operations officer and a marketer. Education consultants say their fee averages between $5,000 and $10,000 a day. Feldman says he might charge a couple hundred thousand dollars to help a district roll out his program over three years.
“We are not making much money,” he said. “If people think I’m buying a boat, that is not happening. I’m not trying to gouge districts.”
Consultants tap into the big bucket of funds that districts set aside for the professional development of teachers. In a study by education nonprofit TNTP, districts spent about $18,000 per teacher each year, or the equivalent of perhaps a third of their salaries, on “PD,” as it’s known.
The study and other research found that despite spending almost 20 days a year in PD sessions, most teachers don’t become more effective over time because of the training. They learn more from classroom experience and peers than from consultants who often pitch the latest educational gimmicks, says Tim Daly, the president of TNTP when the 2015 study was done.
“Teachers don’t see PD as a primary vehicle for improving,” said Daly, a former teacher and now CEO of EdNavigator. “It’s something for the most part that they tolerate, not something that they look forward to.”
That’s particularly true when consultants push ambitious programs like grading for equity. At its core, it requires a new way of thinking about education for everyone in a school, overturning an embedded tradition that awards points on a frequent basis to keep students on track toward a final goal of a good grade. Since many students have yet to develop executive functioning skills, or the ability to create their own study plan and stick to it, external pressures from deadlines play a key role in education, researchers say.
For students to develop a new mindset about the value of doing work without getting an immediate reward takes a tremendous amount of persistence and encouragement by teachers, says O’Connor, who has consulted with schools in 47 states. He says students must think like athletes, who devote themselves to weeks of hard practice in hopes of later excelling in a competition. One school brought in a football coach to give students pep talks on the importance of practice.
Beyond the students, all the stakeholders in a district have to be willing to change their views on the role of grading. While board members debate the practices for months, and teachers sit in days of training, administrators must sell the plan to families and deal with the inevitable complaints and protests. Even the district’s grading software needs to be updated.
The report card on grading for equity is mixed. After districts hire Feldman and start making changes, a “significant number” abandon the project, the consultant says. A lack of follow-through from school leaders to stick with the overhaul and opposition from teachers are often to blame.
New York City made a mess of grading for equity. While suffering an exodus of students in the wake of the pandemic, officials tapped Feldman for help. Teachers in District 6 attended his workshop at the National Museum of the American Indian. They received a copy of Feldman’s book and were urged to bring his ideas back to their schools and lead the effort to implement them.
Janessa Tamayo, a high school math teacher who attended the training session, says she initially saw value in the program for her students from low-income families. But the grading changes she made backfired, with fewer students participating in class and doing homework. When she offered retakes on tests, she was frustrated that many students didn’t bother to take them.
“To participate and turn assignments in on time is a life skill these students need to learn to be successful,” Tamayo said. “Grading for equity works fine for the small percentage of kids who are highly motivated. For the rest, it encouraged them to do the minimum.”
After teachers tested the program for a year, Tamayo says, administrators never followed up to assess its effect. No one collected data and asked for feedback. The program just faded away. Teachers like Tamayo have mostly returned to their old grading practices.
Arlington Public Schools in Virginia had big plans for Feldman, hiring him for what was envisioned to be a three-year project. But teachers at Wakefield High, a school with mostly Latino and black students, sent a letter to the board and superintendent, saying the changes would harm students by removing accountability and high expectations. Early this year, the district backtracked on several of Feldman’s practices, allowing penalties for late work and limiting retakes of exams.
“It’s the politics of the place, whose voices are loud,” Feldman said of the rollback in Arlington. “They could resolve it and continue down the path.”
To be sure, some districts make it to the finish line. Solon, a small, mostly white and high-achieving district near Iowa City, pulled off grading reform, thanks to the devotion of its then leader, Matt Townsley. It took four sometimes rocky years, with a handful of teachers quitting.
Townsley, now a professor of education and consultant, says districts must hang on through the tough times to get through the “implementation dip.” Initially, there’s a big decline in effort, with some districts seeing less than half of the students doing their work. But eventually, the vast majority of students get over the dip, realizing that practice prevents them from bombing the test, and taking it again.
Placer Union, another small and predominately white district in Northern California, also made it work. With Feldman’s support, the high-performing district directly involved teachers in shaping the program – a key to winning their support. For students who used to struggle and give up, retakes on exams gives them hope that they can achieve academically, says Superintendent Jeff Tooker.
“This process takes patience, support, communication, grace, and a lot of time,” he said.
Even for districts that fully implement grading for equity, a big question looms: Does it result in more learning, the ultimate goal of public education? No one knows for sure. Feldman says he would like to know if his program improves state test scores, the most objective measurement of learning, but researchers haven’t tackled this question.
Several studies, including a peer-reviewed examination by Fordham’s research director Adam Tyner, have looked at what happens with learning when grading standards are lifted – test scores go up too. Tyner says students strive to meet the expectations that teachers set for them, whether high or low.
“The grading for equity advocates don’t have any research showing that their changes lead to greater learning, and that’s very concerning,” said Tyner.
The post ‘Grading for Equity’: Promoting Students by Banning Grades of Zero and Leaving No Class Cut-Ups Behind appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission.
President Trump said two years after he met Obama before his 2017 Inauguration that Obama was on the brink of starting a war with North Korea. Trump claimed that Obama was “close to starting a big war” with North Korea.
Obama must not have liked this.
The corrupt and criminal Obama/Biden gang was after documents related to North Korea years later when it raided President Trump’s iconic home of Mar-a-Lago and took President Trump’s documents that he legally had possession of per the Presidential Records Act.
Julie Kelly touched upon this in the latest revelations coming out of the corrupt Biden/Obama/Jack Smith classified documents case against President Trump. The latest unredacted documents that Jack Smith argued not to release show that the Obama/Biden gang was working with multiple government organizations to set up President Trump.
Blockbuster News@julie_kelly2 tells of a more than three month battle involving Judge Aileen Cannon, the Department of Justice, Special Counsel Jack Smith, and President Trump’s attorneys and co-defendants. The objective: to unseal and make public documentation and records that… pic.twitter.com/Dh4QE9KGiA
— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) April 23, 2024
But there is more. Per a document released this week after months of fighting to make the documents available to the American Public, there is a clue as to what the corrupt Biden/Obama gang was after in its raid of Mar-a-Lago. Not only did the regime want to take back all documents that President Trump had possession of that highlighted their crimes, but the regime wanted another key document or set of documents as well.
The corrupt and criminal Biden/Obama regime had to conjure up a reason for why they raided President Trump’s home and stole his documents. They apparently had their reason outlined before they raided President Trump’s home and stole documents he legally had in his possession per the Presidential Records Act.
In the document below there is a clue:
MORE NEW INFO from unredacted evidence in classified documents case.
Within 24 hours of receiving 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago, here is assessment by NARA.
F*cking clown show– pic.twitter.com/yc6RKR7TXg
— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) April 22, 2024
The first document above is a report that was generated after the raid that provides a clue as to what they were after – and it’s not only the accordion folder of Deep State crimes.
“There is one accordian [sp] folder in the mess so it stood out. It contained, among other things, the Obama letter and North Korea correspondence. We need to verify that all of the correspondence is there. But I think we are in good shape.”
The DOJ writes “I think we are in good shape”.
We can guess but based on the corrupt Biden/Obama DOJ’s actions to date, we know that for this regime to believe they were “in good shape”, they were either happy about what they obtained that removed the risk of their crimes being exposed, or they were happy about obtaining documents they were going to use to set up President Trump (North Korea communications), or both.
The post Revealed: Court Document Release Indicates Jack Smith and FBI Were After Obama- and North Korea-Related Documents in Mar-a-Lago Raid appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Far-left media outlets have been accusing Israel of digging a mass grave to bury the bodies of dead Palestinians. It’s part of the “big lie” progressive Democrats are pushing that Israel is committing genocide, and it’s just been debunked.
Here are some of the reports accusing Israel:
Al Jazeera: Uncovering of mass grave at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital: What you need to know
CNN: UN demands investigation after mass graves found at Gaza hospitals raided by Israel
Reuters: UN rights chief ‘horrified’ by mass grave reports at Gaza hospitals
Unfortunately for the leftist/Islamist narrative, it’s all fake news.
X account @GeoConfirmed has posted images and video that irrefutably prove the grave was the work of Palestinians themselves!
“Palestinians are exhuming bodies from the grounds of the Nasser Medical Complex hospital complex in Khan Younis, Gaza.”
“This is occurring at the same location where mass graves were dug and burial ceremonies had taken place by Palestinians in recent months. (Proof in this thread)”
GeoConfirmed ISR-PAL Investigation.
Palestinians are exhuming bodies from the grounds of the Nasser Medical Complex hospital complex in Khan Younis, Gaza.
This is occurring at the same location where mass graves were dug and burial ceremonies had taken place by Palestinians in… pic.twitter.com/4UgFcTEpPn— GeoConfirmed (@GeoConfirmed) April 22, 2024
Here is a video of Palestinians digging the grave. This video was not hidden and could have been found by any of the news agencies repeating the now-debunked claims.
03 FEB 2024 – In this footage you see Palestinians digging a mass grave 50m east, at the other side of the building visible in the footage above. (VID 03)
With this text: “The bodies of thirty martyrs were buried in the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis.”
03 FEB 2024 – In this footage you see Palestinians digging a mass grave 50m east, at the other side of the building visible in the footage above. (VID 03)
With this text:
“The bodies of thirty martyrs were buried in the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis.”31.3457065,…
— GeoConfirmed (@GeoConfirmed) April 22, 2024
Recapping: In February, Hamas created this mass grave and used it for a propaganda narrative about evil Jews not letting Jihadis receive a proper burial.
Now, just 2 months later, Hamas and their lapdog pals in the media are using the SAME grave to blame Jews for genocide.
If Israel was committing “genocide,” would Gazans need to fake mass graves?
The post DEBUNKED! Palestinians Caught Red-Handed Blaming Their Own Mass Grave on Israel (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
By Joe Hoft:
The attorneys representing the corrupt DA in New York, Alvin Bragg, in their case against President Trump, have made a serious error in their case. President Trump’s attorneys must move to dismiss.
DA Bragg’s case is in serious trouble. The gang behind the prosecution of President Trump made a serious error that should lead President Trump’s team to move to dismiss.
Prosecutors in New York have revealed what the other crime is that Donald Trump was allegedly trying to conceal when he was falsifying business records and they claim it was to unlawfully promote his candidacy. The fatal error is that the NY Statute they cite only applies to elections within the State of New York and not Federal Elections!
Trump was running for the federal office of President of the United States and not a State Office and therefore the premise of what the prosecution is trying to prove as the second crime used to get around the statute of limitations issue and to elevate this business records case to a felony must fail!
Prosecutors also cannot use a federal law as the second crime and additionally, the FEC, Federal Election Commission, declined on two occasions to prosecute the claim against Trump that the alleged hush money payment was in fact a federal violation.
In this case, Bragg and Colangelo, in an exercise of their legal analysis of the law maintain that Trump, Cohen, and Pecker conspired to get Trump elected to President of the United States. This is the basis for the elevation of charges.
This is enough to end the case but that’s not all.
The case refers to accounting entries “made” by President Trump (which is lunacy) or entries President Trump forced others to make. But these entries were made in 2017. So how could President Trump possibly impact the 2016 election with accounting entries that were made (clearly not by the President but by some entry-level accountant in his multi-billion dollar organization) in 2017?
On top of that, even far-left radical liberals are shaking their heads at this case and the evidence used to “get Trump”.
Trump, who faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election, was discussed on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” where legal analyst Lisa Rubin presented a skeptical view of the prosecution’s case.
“The big takeaway is that this is a crime about falsification of business records, and yet, what the government seems to have the most evidence of is the underlying conspiracy,” Rubin explained on the show. She highlighted a lack of direct evidence linking Trump to the specific crimes charged: “What’s still unknown to me is how they’re going to prove Donald Trump’s own involvement in the falsification of the business records.”
President Trump handed over his companies to his sons before his inauguration in January 2017. The accounting entries in question were made after the handover occurred.
President Trump didn’t make any entries because no CEO of any multi-billion dollar company makes entries to the financials.
The accounting discussion in this case doesn’t make sense to anyone who’s ever worked in a large financial reporting operation.
This story appeared on JoeHoft.com
The post DA Bragg’s Attorneys Make Fatal Error When Revealing Underlying Crime in ‘Hush Money’ Case – Trump Attorneys Must Move to Dismiss Now appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Via Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
It’s official – a group of prominent Trump-hating media commentators have been meeting weekly for two years on how to bring down Trump.
Above left to right clockwise:
Bill Krystal – Never-Trumper who’s gone wacko
Andrew Weissmann – enough said – Deep State prince
Lawrence Tribe – member of Biden/Obama tribe and Harvard nutcase
George Conway – arguably the most abusive husband ever
Jeffrey Toobin – CNN commentator caught spanking it during a conference call
John Dean – Deep stater who set up Nixon then testified in Trump impeachment
Trump Attorney Jeffrey Clark nailed this one:
I called it!
A group of leftist legal commentators has been meeting weekly for about two years to strategize about how to bring down Trump using the media.
I even coined a term for the phenomenon: “JournoLawfare
” as my followers will be well familiar with.
This Politico article admits it.
Just like the Molly Ball Time article about how they “fortified” the 2020 election, they always have to brag about what they are trying to do to kill off Trump.
Just some of the participants listed here: Tribe, Weismann, Kristol, Conway, John Dean, and Toobin. Not pictured — Luttig.
I called it!
A group of leftist legal commentators has been meeting weekly for about two years to strategize about how to bring down Trump using the media.
I even coined a term for the phenomenon: “JournoLawfare
This Politico… pic.twitter.com/DspU9oZmHZ
— Jeff Clark (@JeffClarkUS) April 23, 2024
Politico reported that the group started meeting when they were coordinating their January 6 Committee lies to the public:
As the Jan. 6 committee was working on its bombshell investigation into the Capitol riot and President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, committee staffers took some time out of their seemingly 24-hour jobs one day in 2022 to brief a group of lawyers and legal pundits on a Zoom call.
The people on the call weren’t affiliated with the investigation or the government. But they would have been familiar to anyone who watches cable news. They were some of the country’s most well-known legal and political commentators, and they were there to get insights into the committee’s work and learn about what to look for at the hearings.
The group’s gathering was not a one-time event, but in fact an installment in an exclusive weekly digital salon, whose existence has not been previously reported, for prominent legal analysts and progressive and conservative anti-Trump lawyers and pundits. Every Friday, they meet on Zoom to hash out the latest twists and turns in the Trump legal saga — and intellectually stress-test the arguments facing Trump on his journey through the American legal system.
This more proof that the media not only lies but coordinates their lies and gaslighting before it reaches their gullible audience.
The post Revealed: Group of Prominent Trump-Hating Media Commentators Have Been MEETING WEEKLY for Two Years to Strategize on How to Bring Down Trump appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Delaney Duff
Real Clear Wire
Google’s difficulty in mitigating bias from their artificial intelligence systems – even after explicitly going to great lengths to minimize bias – spells trouble for the Department of Defense. Bias can cause AI tools to irrevocably malfunction and derail AI development. Google recently paused Gemini, their largest and most capable AI model, from generating images after it created historically inaccurate and offensive images of people. Google explained that their attempts to design a less biased, more inclusive image generation tool caused the model to malfunction instead.
This is especially concerning as the Defense Department plans to leverage AI at scale, including for training simulations, intelligence analysis, recruiting personnel, translating documents, drafting policy, and even powering autonomous weapons. If the U.S. continues to prioritize the speed of AI development over safety, biased AI systems will ultimately slow the adoption rate, ceding the country’s technical edge to China.
Biased AI systems are ultimately dangerous. They make mistakes or generate inaccurate assessments leading to poor decision making or even system failures that harm people. Unanticipated AI failures could cause problems ranging from erroneous intelligence reporting to inaccurate targeting.
In the Defense Department, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) is tasked with accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies across the national security ecosystem. CDAO’s Responsible AI team is tackling the problem of biased AI models by instituting a “bias bounty” program, which recruits the public to identify instances of bias in its large language models, starting with chat bots, in exchange for a cash prize.
By identifying bias in generative AI tools, the Pentagon hopes to understand the benefits and risks posed by these systems in order to implement safeguards. Mitigating the risks is crucial as the U.S. increasingly relies on AI development to provide warfighters with a competitive edge over its adversaries.
Relying on infrequent, small-scale public participation programs for identifying AI bias is inadequate because it assumes bias is easily detectable and does not account for the way biased outputs morph overtime, even after developers implement “fixes.” Biased AI systems disproportionately disadvantage certain groups especially when AI model training data is under representative of reality or already reflect existing biases.
Even more concerning are failures in AI-powered weapons targeting. AI systems could inadvertently select targets that violate rules of engagement such as women and children noncombatants. Recent reports accuse two IDF artificial intelligence targeting systems of increasing civilian casualties in Gaza by purposefully targeting Hamas operatives at home and erroneously identifying individuals as militants even when they had no or very tenuous links to these groups.
Policymakers, military officials, and private industry increasingly frame AI development as an arms race with China because Beijing hopes to leverage AI to enhance its power and gain a strategic advantage over the U.S. and its allies. Substantial ethical issues and discrimination as a result of AI bias should be enough to give lawmakers pause.
Overfocus on development speed sidelines real concerns over AI safety. Holding AI to high ethical standards is not an impediment to progress. Rather, it ensures greater system success that is essential for broad trust and adoption.
Removing bias requires more than technical solutions alone. In addition to periodic bias testing to ensure the models are operating properly, the Defense Department should provide and expedite clearances for data scientists and others involved in training AI models, so they have access to larger portions of datasets. Greater access allows those most knowledgeable about AI systems to spot instances where the model is producing biased outputs and correct mistakes more easily.
Operators of these tools should receive more extensive training programs that include instruction on identifying biased outputs enshrining the practice of not blindly trusting the system results. These tools are not perfect, and operators must know when and how to question or override a decision suggested by AI. The DoD should mandate their developers follow CDAO’s Responsible AI Toolkit that aligns with the DoD’s AI Ethical Principles and continuously evaluate and update the framework to keep pace with rapid technological advancement.
Finally, the U.S. should invest greater funding into STEM programs for underrepresented groups and communities. Only 26% of people in computing are women, and women only make up 18% of researchers at lead AI conferences. Representation for people of color is even worse, with less than 7% of employees at lead technology companies being Black or Hispanic. Greater access to STEM education creates a more diverse workforce and this diversity is essential for creating less biased AI systems. These new perspectives disrupt organizational group think and echo chambers, foster creative problem solving, and promote innovation.
Short-sighted focus on AI development speed over safety could spell disaster for the Defense Department. If the United States hopes to shape the future of the 21st century, it must make minimizing AI bias a top priority.
Delaney Duff is a Fellow at the Pallas Foundation for National Security Leadership whose mission is to to foster the education and professional development of emerging leaders from traditionally under-represented groups in global and national security. She is a master’s student in the security studies program at Georgetown University.
The post Defense Department’s Efforts To Combat AI Bias Don’t Go Far Enough appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft – republished with permission.
The people were right. The 2020 Election results in Georgia never should have been certified. The 2020 election in Georgia was stolen. It’s a fact.
Georgia’s Gabe Sterling who was involved in the certification of the stolen 2020 Election claimed that there were no issues with the Georgia election results. This was false and is false. Even Governor Kemp agreed that there were issues with the 2020 Election.
Georgia citizen Joe Rossi looked into the 2020 Election and the recounts after the election and he found numerous issues with the election results in Fulton County.
After the 2020 Election, a Risk Limiting Audit (RLA) was carried out by Georgia’s Secretary of State’s (SOS’s) Office that included numerous errors.
Thanks to the efforts of Georgian Joseph Rossi, thirty-six errors were found in the Fulton County data in the RLA report posted on Georgia’s Secretary of State’s website.
Rossi went after those in authority requesting that they review his data. He was turned down and ignored numerous times. But eventually after a series of events, Rossi was able to get his work showing numerous errors in front of members of Governor Kemp’s office.
As a result of Rossi’s work and Kemp’s team’s investigation, the Georgia State Elections Board (SEB) initiated an investigation into the Fulton County data from the RLA report. This investigation was labeled SEB2021-181. Eventually the SEB identified violations and errors in the recounts of the 2020 Election in Fulton County.
Another complaint related to Fulton County was filed that specifically called out 3,125 duplicate ballot counts and 17,852 votes counted without corresponding ballot images. These ballots should never have been included in the election. This complaint resulted in the creation of investigation SEB2023-25. This investigation is complete and the results of this investigation will be presented to the SEB on May 7, 2023 per a letter recently received by Joe Rossi. This complaint has been categorized by the Board as “violations found.”
Despite numerous issues that should have prevented the 2020 Election from being certified, the election was certified and then the SOS’s office lied about the accuracy of the recounts in Georgia.
[Remember that the 2020 results were certified for Biden three days after the election after he overcame President Trump’s 200,000 vote lead on election night to steal the election by less than 12,000 votes in Georgia. – See The Steal – Volume II: The Impossible Occurs for more information.
Note also that that the investigations noted above were independent of two court cases that occurred in Georgia after the 2020 Election. At least three individuals involved in a recount that occurred in the state after the election identified 148,000 ballots that appeared to have been created by a machine and to be fraudulent. Fulton county and others in the state are still preventing access to these ballots even though the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiffs have the right to audit these ballots.
In addition, a separate audit of voting machines was initiated after the 2020 Election which was finally released years later which showed that the systems used in Georgia had security issues and bad actors could hack into them and change the results of an election.
And, we recently found out that there was no signature validation for tens of thousands of votes counted in Fulton County. A Fulton County Commissioner voted not to certify the election based on this issue.]
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: The Errors, The Lie, and The Cover-Up in Georgia’s 2020 Election – PART II
Since being notified of the second investigation classified as “violations found”, Rossi requested that Gabe Sterling provide an explanation for his comments and email responses where he claimed that there were no issues in the 2020 Election in Georgia.
This is Rossi’s 11th email to Sterling:
After being behind the efforts to certify the uncertifiable election in 2020 and getting caught with not one, but two investigations into the 2020 Election results, and two court cases identifying thousands of issues with election results, and uncovering that no signature validations occurred in Fulton County for over 100,000 votes, Gabe Sterling is nowhere to be found.
Gabe is hiding.
The post Georgia’s Gabe Sterling Goes Silent and Is “In Hiding” Since Georgia State Election Board Finds Violations in Second 2020 Election Investigation appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘A large swath of them have become terrorist sympathizers’
In a stunning statement about the intolerance exhibited by members of Gen Z, a new poll shows that fully one in three says Israel does not have a right to exist as a nation in the Middle East.
Israel, of course, was established subsequent to World War II and Adolf Hitler’s determined campaign to exterminate the Jewish community, killing millions in his gas chambers.
One such attack was last Oct. 7, when terrorists from Hamas, based in Gaza, invaded Israel and killed some 1,200 civilians, often in horrific and brutal ways.
Now a new poll shows 33% of Gen Zers, those ages 18 to 24, say that Israel does not have a right to exist as a nation in the Middle East.
The terror attack on Israel prompted Israel’s military to launch a campaign to eliminate that terror threat, and that has prompted a wave of antisemitism around the globe. In the U.S., it’s become common on college campuses for hate rallies to be assembled to condemn Israel.
It is Summit.org, in partnership with RMG Research, founded by Scott Rasmussen, that released the new poll results.
“We are now seeing the logical outcome of an education system that teaches students to see the world through a lens of racialist resentment. Gen Z is so embarrassed about being American that a large swath of them have become terrorist sympathizers,” explained Summit chief Jeff Myers.
“Gen Z is three times as likely as the general population to deny Israel’s right to exist. Sympathy for Hamas has grown. This should be a massive wake-up call to parents, educators, and cultural leaders – we now have a generation primed to accept without question the propaganda of those who wish to overturn Judeo-Christian civilization.”
The online polling took place March 20-21 by RMG Research, and included 1,002 registered voters with an additional oversample of 495 of those 18 to 24.
The sample was lightly weighted by geography, gender, age, race, education, internet usage, and political party to reasonably reflect the nation’s population of registered voters, the report said. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is +/- 3.1 percentage points.
Among the findings was that 81% of American voters overall agree with the U.S. government classifying Hamas as a terrorist group; among Gen Z it was 61%.
And 58% of American voters overall believe Israel’s campaign against Hamas is just, while 21 percent believe that Israel having greater wealth and military power makes its military campaign against Hamas unjust. Only 42% of those in Gen Z fall into the category believing the campaign is just, and 47% say it is unjust.
Overall, 10% of voters say Israel does not have a right to exist, while 77% say it does.
The post Huge Chunk of Gen Z: Israel Has No Right to Exist as Nation in Mideast appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Dr. Joseph Sansone
On March 3rd, 2024, Dr. Joseph Sansone filed a Writ of Mandamus in the Supreme Court of Florida seeking to compel Governor Ron DeSantis to prohibit the distribution of Covid 19 injections (nanoparticle injections/mRNA injections) in the State of Florida.
The mandamus also seeks to compel Attorney General Ashley Moody to confiscate the vials and conduct a forensic analysis of their contents.
Mandamus is a Latin word that means ‘we command.’ The Florida State Constitution grants the Supreme Court of Florida the jurisdiction to force state officers to do their lawful duty.
The Florida Supreme Court, state Appellate, and Circuit Courts, have concurrent jurisdiction. However, on March 20th the Florida Supreme Court exercised its discretion and transferred the case to the Circuit Court of the Second Judicial Circuit, in and for Leon County, Florida. The Court is located in the state capital of Tallahassee, which is a trial court.
Dr. Sansone’s litigation is the only pending case in the United States, and possibly the world, seeking to prohibit the distribution of the Covid 19 nanoparticle injections.
The 74-page document cites state and federal biological weapons laws, domestic terrorism laws, treason laws, murder, fraud, and informed consent laws, as well as other laws being violated. It even cites Florida’s accessory after a fact law, which makes it a felony to allow a crime to continue to be permitted or shield perpetrators from prosecution.
To date, approximately 10 Florida Republican County Parties have passed ‘Ban the Jab’ resolutions declaring Covid 19 injections biological and technological weapons, also calling on the Governor to prohibit their distribution and the Attorney General to confiscate the vials and conduct a forensic analysis.
Dr. Sansone states that he provided evidence last summer to 67 County Sheriffs, 20 State Attorneys, and to the Governor and Attorney General and received no response.
Sansone also stated that he received no response from the Governor or Attorney General again in October of 2023. In February he sent a final demand letter to the Governor and Attorney General that also went unanswered.
Governor Ron DeSantis or Attorney General Ashley Moody have not publicly responded to the Mandamus. Dr. Sansone stated that he hoped the Governor would be open to signing a settlement agreement now that he was presented with so much evidence.
The Mandamus also cites the fact that the Florida Department of Health has called for the shots to come off the market and also quotes Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Ladapo.
(19) On January 3, 2024, the Florida Department of Health called for the halt of the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in human beings, with Florida Surgeon General Dr. Ladapo, specifically stating, “DNA integration poses a unique and elevated risk to human health and to the integrity of the human genome… If the risks of DNA integration have not been assessed for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, these vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings.”
(20) At a minimum this is a clear violation of Florida Drugs and Cosmetic Act § 499.005 (2) Fla. Stat. (2023)—It is unlawful for a person to perform or cause the performance of any of the following acts in this state, “The manufacture, repackaging, sale, delivery, or holding or offering for sale of any drug, device, or cosmetic that is adulterated or misbranded or has otherwise been rendered unfit for human or animal use.”
(21) Dr. Ladapo went on to rebuke the FDA stating, “It is my hope that, in regard to COVID-19, the FDA will one day seriously consider its regulatory responsibility to protect human health, including the integrity of the human genome.” In public statements Dr. Ladapo went as far as calling the Covid mRNA injection the “Anti Christ of drugs” and stated that they are evil.
On April 27th the Arizona Republican Party is scheduled to vote on a ‘Ban the Jab’ resolution declaring Covid 19 injections biological and technological weapons. Last summer, the Idaho Republican Party passed a similar resolution.
Recently, the Leon County Circuit Court dismissed the case. Dr. Sansone has filed a motion for a rehearing and states that if rejected he will file a notice of appeal in the First District Court of Appeal.
Sansone says that if the evidence is allowed to be heard, he will win. Regardless, he states that he will likely appeal if he does not prevail and said, “If this path gets blocked, we will find another. We will not allow the genocide to continue in the State of Florida”.
Sansone stated, “Nobody is going to save you. You need to take action now to stop this. Call the Governor and Attorney General and tell them to stop this now!”
Dr. Sansone writes regularly at JosephSansone.Substack.com
PETITION FOR A WRIT OF MANDAMUS
(1) This petition for a writ of mandamus is brought under Article V, § 3(b)(8) Florida Constitution, and under Florida Rules of Appellate Procedure 9.03O(a)(3), 9.100 and other relevant authorities to enforce state and federal laws including, and not limited to Biological Weapons 18 USC § 175; Weapons and Firearms § 790.166 Fla. Stat. (2023); Federal Crime of Treason 18 USC § 2381; Treason § 876.32 Fla. Stat. (2023); Domestic Terrorism, 18 USC § 2331, Terrorism § 775.30 Fla. Stat. (2023); Murder § 782.04 (1)(a) Fla. Stat. (2023); and Genocide 18 USC §1091. Petitioner seeks an order of mandamus, requiring the Respondents to immediately prohibit the distribution, promotion, access and administration of COVID-19 injections, mRNA nanoparticle injections, and all mRNA products in the State of Florida.
Read the full Writ of Mandamus here
The post Lawsuit Seeks to ‘Ban the Jab’ in Florida — Declares Injections Biological and Technological Weapons appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Mandatory queer indoctrination at school causes huge uproar
Schools across America many times are run by managers who come with baggage from the extreme-left ideologies of higher academia.
Their plans often include spreading those ideals to students – whether or not they or their parents want such indoctrination.
But one such plan, in a school in Minnesota, has been taken down a notch, according to a new report from Mat Staver, chief of Liberty Counsel.
The dispute developed in Osseo, Minnesota, where officials scheduled a “gay pride” indoctrination class for all students, prepared scripts from which teachers were to read word-for-word, under a scenario that required teachers to take part regardless of their religious beliefs and rights, and more.
“And the district went out of their way to make it nearly impossible for parents to review the material or to opt their children out of the indoctrination,” the report said.
The push for the far-left agenda came from “four radical school board members,” Liberty Counsel reported.
“Teachers were not allowed to ‘opt out’ of teaching the ‘LGBTQIA+ History and Culture’ lesson, and the district deliberately made it difficult for parents to review the lesson materials in advance, or opt their children out of the politically charged, nonsensical course.”
Parents, in fact, had to apply for permission to see the materials, had to appear in person at the school, and had to document their identity, the report said.
The actual curriculum conflicted with science and used pop culture to push students to adopt fake pronouns and more.
“The lesson then encouraged students to question their own sexuality, asking the children if they are ‘confused’ about, ‘curious about,’ and ‘questioning’ their sexuality, fitting within at least one of the ‘Q’ categories in its lengthy acronym: ‘LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer & Questioning, Intersex, & Asexual),'” the report said.
Students were to be told failure to “embrace” the ideology risked having their assignments labeled “incorrect.”
But then Liberty Counsel notified the school district of its need to allow students, parents and teachers to exercise their right to opt out of such ideologies.
The district caved, and, “as a result of our work, more than 1,000 students were allowed to opt out of the indoctrination classes at just one school. At another school, over 400 students opted out. In fact, so many parents opted their children out of the lesson that schools had to open their cafeterias and auditoriums to accommodate the teachers and students who refused indoctrination,” Liberty Counsel’s report said.
“In addition, at least 500 other children did not attend school at all on the day of the instruction.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Mandatory Queer Indoctrination at School Causes Huge Uproar appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on AbleChild.org and JoeHoft.com and was republished with permission.
The parents of the victims of the Covenant School in Nashville, TN, have begged Davidson County Chancery Court to withhold from the public Audrey Hale’s manifesto and all documents belonging to the shooter, which were legally gifted to the parents of the victims by the shooter’s parents.
Gifting the documents to the parents of the victims is odd. But for the parents of the victims to then assert that they hold some kind of “copyright” on those documents is twisted on its face and one cannot help but wonder what really is behind this enormous effort to withhold information about Audrey Hale.
Let’s think about it for a minute. What we know is that Audrey Hale went to elementary school at Covenant, transferred out to Isaiah T. Creswell Middle School and Nashville School of Arts then on to Nossi College of Arts. Everything was seemingly okay.
At 28 years old, the now transitioning female, was identifying as the male, Aiden and, while living at home with mom and dad, began purchasing seven firearms, including shotguns, rifles, and handguns. It was also at this time that we find Hale being “treated” for an emotional disorder.
On the morning of March 27, 2023, Hale drove to her elementary alma mater and discharged 150 rounds, killing three children and three adults. Why? Why did Hale choose Covenant School for her murderous actions? Why not Middle or High School or how about the local fast-food joint? This was a specific hit. Planned. Hale knew where she was going and why.
The problem is that the public doesn’t know why. The public doesn’t know why Hale decided to take the lives of six innocent people. But the public will have to live with any legislation that comes from her murderous behavior… legislation that may limit its right to own firearms or increases funding for mental health services that may actually be responsible for Hale’s actions.
So now let’s consider what we don’t know. We don’t know the name of the doctor or psychiatrist that was “treating” Hale for the emotional disorder. We don’t know what “treatment” was provided to Hale. Did Hale have talk therapy or was Hale prescribed psychiatric mind-altering drugs? Did Hale’s doctor know whether she was a threat to herself or others? If yes, was this information passed along to law enforcement? Did the doctor know Hale was buying guns and was that information shared with law enforcement?
Moreover, the autopsy explains that there was no positive hit for many different types of prescription drugs, and that doesn’t take into consideration that Hale could have gone off the medications prior to the shooting. Knowing whether Hale had been prescribed any psychiatric medications is imperative because the adverse events associated with going cold turkey off drugs are extremely serious and even deadly, depending on the drug. Furthermore, there still are some questions regarding the therapeutic levels of psychotropic drugs that may have been excluded from the lab report.
Crazier still, let’s also ask why in the world did Hale’s parents think it was a good idea to gift the shooter’s personal writing history to the victim’s families? That’s a first. Why? What did these parents think would come from this bizarre action? Is it possible that Hale’s parents thought this would somehow make it easier for the victims’ families? Or did Hale’s parents believe giving away their daughter’s writings would relieve them of any culpability?
One also must wonder whether the Covenant School’s history of sexual abuse that is widely reported on social media had any role in Hales attack on the school. Was Hale aware of the rumored sexual abuse or, God forbid, was Hale a victim? Who knows? It’s anyone’s guess. And this is the problem with withholding any data that may shed light on what led to Hale’s inexplicable murderous actions.
The conflicts of interest of some of the parents of covenant school are shockingly obvious, having created two cash cows, the Covenant Families for Brighter Tomorrows, and the Covenant Families Action Fund, will surely be used to generate attacks against the second amendment and push for coercive mental health programs of all parents across the State.
In addition, a trustee of the board of the covenant school, Dr. C. Buddy Creech, is a vaccinologist, at Vanderbilt Medical Center, which also happens to be a major stakeholder in the transitioning industry. It would be interesting to know where Hale was seeking guidance for her transition. This is why it is important to release as much information as possible about the school and the shooter.
Keeping the public in the dark about Hale’s motives only leads to speculation and conspiracy theories. The families of the victims say that releasing the manifesto and documents will lead to copycat shootings. Naturally, they could be right, but withholding the information may also lead to more shootings. Keeping Hales motives secret does not get the public to why the murders occurred. Only sunshine on the issue can get the public the information it needs to come up with solutions to these deadly acts of cowardice.
The post Breaking: Massive Cover-Up of Trans Shooter’s History in Nashville Covenant School Mass Murder Case appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Senator Marco Rubio
Real Clear Wire
“It’s better to be the United States’ enemy than its friend.” Foreign officials tell me this is their perception under the Biden Administration, which has a strange habit of appeasing our adversaries while holding our allies to impossible standards. It’s bad foreign policy, plain and simple. Moreover, it’s encouraging chaos in our region.
Just look at what’s happening in the Dominican Republic. The Caribbean nation is facing extraordinary migratory pressure from neighboring Haiti, which has all but collapsed into anarchy. President Luis Abinader has made it clear he will protect Dominican sovereignty by enforcing deportations. Yet the Biden Administration, influenced by radical left-wing groups like Amnesty International, is pushing him to accept three million Haitians at any moment.
This is unfair to the D.R., which is a developing nation with limited resources, and which is already bearing significant burdens on Haiti’s behalf. Anyone who doubts this should consider the fact that more than a third of all births in the D.R. are currently to Haitian citizens.
But encouraging illegal mass migration is also unfair to our country. The Biden Administration seems unaware that many Haitians view the D.R. as a stepping stone to Puerto Rico—and that a well-established smuggling ring to facilitate that journey already exists. Because our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico have their own fiscal constraints, illegal migrants that reach the U.S. territory would likely move on to the continental United States.
Like most Americans, I recognize that what is happening in Haiti is horrible and tragic. The breakdown of law and order, the displacement of more than 300,000 people, and the need of roughly five million for some form of aid—all of these are matters of grave concern. This is why I support the international peacekeeping mission that Kenya proposes to lead once Haiti has established a provisional government. In addition, I have reintroduced legislation to preserve U.S. trade benefits for Haitian manufacturers, which could prove a lifeline to legitimate Haitian businesses in this time of crisis.
But, like most Americans, I also recognize that no country should experience illegal mass migration—not the D.R., and not the United States. Illegal mass migration does no good for the nation people are migrating from. When all able-bodied, law-abiding citizens leave their homeland, there is no one left to defend it from criminals and tyrants—and no one left to provide for the vulnerable who remain there. On a more fundamental level, though, I cannot support illegal mass migration because the job of elected officials is to protect their citizens first, not anyone else’s.
This is why I have asked the U.S. State Department to prioritize U.S. citizens trapped in Haiti, as well as their adopted Haitian children. Moreover, it’s why we cannot allow Haitian citizens to surge across our borders. As U.S. Senator Rick Scott and I noted in a recent letter to President Biden, Haiti is rife with gangs, and jailbreaks have allegedly released thousands of dangerous criminals. This means illegal mass migration from Haiti would put Americans at risk.
Since President Biden took office, more than eight million people have crossed our insecure southern border, and 90,000 have immigrated from Afghanistan un-vetted. The resultant threats to our national security—from the rise of Tren de Aragua to the infiltration of Islamist terrorists—are severe and out of control. The tragedy in Haiti is great, but it’s no excuse for letting these threats increase.
The post President Biden Must Not Encourage Illegal Mass Migration From Haiti appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘Are anticipating he’s going to win’
President Donald Trump has yet to be named the GOP nominee for president for the fall election. And then there’s the campaigning, debates if Democrats allow the “diminished” Joe Biden to participate, and the election.
But a number of NATO leaders believe they know what will happen: they’re making tracks to Trump.
“These leaders are anticipating that Trump’s gonna win,” Kurt Volker, a former ambassador to NATO, told the Washington Examiner.
“And so, they also want to reestablish relationships.” He also said there’s a lot of concern among European leaders about Biden’s failure so far to orchestrate more American support for Ukraine, which is fighting a war against an invading Russia.
The most recent visitor, the report explained, was Polish President Andrzej Duda, who “joined the list of foreign leaders beating a path to Donald Trump’s door this week.”
“It was a friendly meeting in a very nice atmosphere,” Duda explained to media in his home country.
The report noted Trump also described the visitor as a “friend.”
And he said, “We’re behind Poland all the way.”
That was reassuring, the report explained, to European leaders who watch “with alarm” the declining poll numbers for Biden.
The report noted Duda is “at least the third European leader to travel to the United States to visit Trump, following British Foreign Secretary David Cameron — himself a former prime minister — and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary.”
Biden’s State Department has been trying to downplay the visits, explaining that foreign governments often “engage with the nominees of major parties.”
And “engage” is what a number have sought.
“We see that the functioning of the U.S. has been paralyzed towards Ukraine, and Trump has influence even if he’s not in power — even if he’s under criminal investigation — he’s influencing what is happening or not happening,” the report explained was the conclusion of a “senior European official.”
The dilemma facing European leaders is their hope that Biden will be able to get something done regarding Ukraine, but their impression that they will need to fall into line behind Trump in the event he is elected.
Ex-NATO strategist Stefanie Babst told the Examiner, “They will try not to upset the Biden administration too much, but their greater concern is that they haven’t even had a chance to speak to Trump to get a personal impression of what the guy is really up to. To me, [the visits are] a sign of despair.”
Babst noted that what Biden has “decided” in dealing with Ukraine and Russia is “not working.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post NATO Leaders Making Tracks to Trump appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article was written by Swedish independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen, also known as PeterSweden. You can follow him at PeterSweden.com.
Farmers are now protesting for fairer wages. No farmers = No food.
As you will have heard if you follow my reporting, there has been massive farmers protests all over Europe. I recently reported from Germany where the farmers were protesting.
Now the Norwegian farmers are protesting as well, and I met with them.
In fact, there was a tractor convoy on the E6 motorway and I managed to catch up with them for an interview – And I got some videos and photos as well.
As far as I’m aware, I’m the only journalist that went to this protest and got videos, so please share widely!
They were driving a tractor convoy on the motorway in very slow speed to make their point.
One tractor had a homemade banner saying “Our food – Increase self reliance”.
So what is happening is that small farms are having to shut down because they cannot live on the wages they are getting, and it ends up being converted into large farms instead.
Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the state talked about essentially SEIZING 3000 farms to meet new 2030 emissions goals…
Farmers are facing huge costs. For example, new requirements for animal welfare requires one farmer to invest over $700.000 in a new barn. He won’t be able to afford this and risks going out of business.
The farmers are hard working people. They rise early and go to bed late. They work hard to provide us with good food. Without farmers, people will starve so it is essential to support them.
The farmer I spoke with told me that a large group of farmers were heading down to the capitol of Oslo to protest outside parliament, but not everyone could take part as they had animals to take care of.
The farmers have set up empty fridges outside parliament with signs saying “No farmer, no food, just empty fridges”.
Farmers have several things they want to ensure fair wages for their work. The average yearly wage corresponded to almost $45.000 for a farmer. This is not a lot.
I’m seeing reports that farmers are struggling financially to pay their bills.
People are being forced away from a career as a farmer because they don’t get enough paid for it.
Please share this article if you stand with the farmer!
Independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen has dedicated years to reporting the things the mainstream media ignores. You can follow him at https://petersweden.com/
The post Peter Sweden: FARMERS PROTEST- Norwegian Tractor Convoy appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Paul Drabik
Terry Newsome and Paul Drabik of Behind Enemy Lines have been fighting back in Illinois. The Gateway Pundit has been following their stories including reporting on illegal immigrants, Joe Biden, and Mike Lindell.
Throughout their fight against radical leftists Newsome and Drabik have encountered a glaring opposition. Surprisingly, it has not come from the left but the right.
As discussed in Part 1 and Part 2, the RINO betrayal in Illinois runs deep and starts at the top with figures like the Chairman of the Illinois GOP, Don Tracy. Tracy once ran for Illinois State Senate as a Democrat.
Tracy’s family business, Dot Foods, also donated to both Joe Biden and the DNC. There’s also State Senate Minority Leader John Curran. Curran famously advocated and voted for Amendment 1.
This amendment cemented Illinois State Constitutional powers for public unions effectively making them a fourth branch of government and Illinois a Communist state.
These leaders are an immense danger to the party and the public who they purport to represent. However, more dangerous are the local level leaders. In a Republic such as ours it is the direct conduits to the public such as County Sheriffs or local Republican leaders who can have the greatest impact on policy.
In part 2 we saw that the exposure of RINOs donating to Democrats – in a clear pay for play scheme – will get you censored and canceled.
Newsome and Drabik certainly did call out the RINOs in Illinois when they found out that some donated to radical Soros funded prosecutor Kim Foxx. On their podcast, Newsome & Drabik displayed a Nazi meme of the Republican who censored them for criticism of the party.
Soon enough Newsome and Drabik would find that there were no depths to which the RINOs would not sink. Local Republican leadership had supported Sheriff James Mendrick of DuPage County in a previous race.
When Newsome and Drabik became a nuisance for the party the Sheriff was brought in to provide a level of intimidation. The Sheriff engaged both Drabik and Newsome via email and phone conversation.
The Sheriff threatened Newsome through proxy about the rhetoric he’d been using on his podcast. Newsome sent out an email to colleagues as a warning that he was fearful that he would be targeted by law enforcement on Sunday, November 5th.
Coincidently or not, the Illinois State Police showed up on Newsome’s doorstep on Tuesday, November 7th. Their inquiry revolved around comments made by Newsome’s criticism of State Senate Minority Leader John Curran.
This was not enough to deter Newsome and Drabik however. They went on to discuss these events on their podcast showing these details and expressing concern that the Sheriff was potentially engaging in weaponization of his office for political purposes.
The attacks from the RINO establishment did not stop there. As Behind Enemy Lines and the grassroots movement grew their following, the establishment took measures to discredit Newsome because of a criminal background of 35 years ago.
Prior to a Republican organization meeting they disseminated a packet exposing Newsome’s record but also listing his family’s names and addresses.
The finishing touch was to add sex offenders registered in Newsome’s neighborhood so as to imply that he had some sort of connection with them. It should be noted that Newsome’s criminal background was related to drug and weapons possession.
Subsequently, Newsome approached the private business owner of the venue where this doxxing attack had occurred. That business provided security camera images showing certain Republican leadership had to have been aware of the doxxing attack.
Shockingly, you will see in the video below that the Sheriff admits to being tasked by a political operative to approach a business owner about sharing information with a private citizen.
The Sheriff then seemingly brags about intimidating a private business owner into not sharing information with another private citizen ever again, and training their staff in this manner.
This was not enough to deter Newsome and Drabik however. They went on to discuss these events on their podcast showing these details and expressing concern that the Sheriff was potentially engaging in weaponization of his office for political purposes.
The attacks from the RINO establishment did not stop there. As Behind Enemy Lines and the grassroots movement grew their following, the establishment took measures to discredit Newsome because of a criminal background of 35 years ago.
Prior to a Republican organization meeting they disseminated a packet exposing Newsome’s record but also listing his family’s names and addresses.
The finishing touch was to add sex offenders registered in Newsome’s neighborhood so as to imply that he had some sort of connection with them. It should be noted that Newsome’s criminal background was related to drug and weapons possession.
Subsequently, Newsome approached the private business owner of the venue where this doxxing attack had occurred. That business provided security camera images showing certain Republican leadership had to have been aware of the doxxing attack.
Shockingly, you will see in the video below that the Sheriff admits to being tasked by a political operative to approach a business owner about sharing information with a private citizen.
The Sheriff then seemingly brags about intimidating a private business owner into not sharing information with another private citizen ever again, and training their staff in this manner.
Mendrick has been touted in years past for being responsible for a low recidivism rate amongst inmates of DuPage County. He has been a proponent for second chances. That is, unless you become a political rival to the Sheriff. Below you can see how he speaks to a concerned citizen labeling Terry Newsome as a “drug dealer,” and to “…leave me alone.”
Denigrating someone for their past seems petty if you are in support of second chances. The real hypocrisy is that Sheriff Mendrick had accepted upwards of $100k from a convicted sex offender. ABC news covered the story in 2018.
Apparently, the Sheriff’s sympathy for offenders is only available to those who donate to his political campaign.
We reached out to the Sheriff for comment on the matter and it appears he is suggesting we are violating an Illinois criminal code – 720 ILCS 5 Article 26.5: Harassing and Obscene Communications – by seeking his comment in a news story.
After a final attempt to let the Sheriff know we were seeking comment for a media story, he repeated the screenshot of the Illinois Criminal code. It’s not entirely clear what was meant by this. The implication of course is that we are harassing him in accordance with this particular Illinois criminal code. Certainly, a journalist reaching out to a public official for comment is covered under the first amendment.
The pressure on the local Republican Party by Behind Enemy Lines and the grassroots movement has pushed the party and Sheriff Mendrick to go full authoritarian.
Mendrick has since become the vice chair of his local organization who lost 40% of their participation since instituting censorship. The Sheriff has intimidated multiple committeemen in the organization, including Drabik, suggesting there are police reports filed for things they’ve said in public.
The danger of people like Sheriff James Mendrick cannot be overstated. Intimidating private businesses and people for exercising their first amendment rights can be expected from the left.
While the Democrats in America have essentially become Communists, it is the people on the right like Sheriff Mendrick who pose the greater threat. They are helping the Democrats by silencing the true opposition to Communism in America: THE PEOPLE.
The post Illinois RINOs Part 3: Weaponizing Law Enforcement appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Idea ‘is not provided for by law’
A state official in Ohio has rejected Democrats’ illegal plan to sneak Joe Biden’s name onto the 2024 presidential ballot.
A lawyer for the leftist party had wanted the state of accept a “provisional” certification of Biden, and Kamala Harris, as candidates, but Attorney General Dave Yost’s office found the move “simply is not provided for by law.”
“Instead, the law mandates the Democratic Party to actually certify its president and vice-president candidates on or before August 7, 2024. No alternative process is permitted,” the statement said.
The problem is that Democrats, focused for the last few years on trying to exclude President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot, overlooked state requirements for certification. Their convention, to officially name Biden as the candidate, doesn’t happen until the end of August.
After the deadlines in Ohio and Alabama will have passed by the time their decision is made.
The Ohio state decision said, “Thus, the secretary of state lacks authority to accept ‘provisional certifications’ from the Democratic Party pursuant to [the law]. The Democratic Party must actually certify its presidential candidates on or before August 7, 2024 to be placed on the 2024 general election ballot.”
The state earlier had offered two solutions to the Democrats. One is that the state legislature could change the law, the other is that the Democrats could reschedule their convention for earlier.
A report from Fox News described the Democrat plan as trying to “skirt” the law.
The report said documents show correspondence between Yost and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose as well as lawyer Donald McTigue, representing Democrats.
McTigue claimed that the state had the authority to take a “provisional certification” to accommodate the Democrats.
The AG shot down the idea.
“The Democratic Party’s notion of providing a ‘provisional certification’ by the statutory deadline simply is not provided for by law,” Yost’s office said. “Instead, the law mandates the Democratic Party to actually certify its president and vice-president candidates on or before August 7, 2024. No alternative process is permitted.”
Biden’s campaign continued to confirm he will be on the ballot in “all 50 states.”
Officials in Alabama also have warned Biden of similar circumstances there.
Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen said the law requires the nominations by Aug. 15.
“It has recently come to my attention that the Democratic National Convention is currently scheduled to convene on August 19, 2024, which is after the State of Alabama’s statutory deadline for political parties to provide a certificate of nomination for President and Vice President on August 15, 2024,” officials there told Democrats. “The certificate of nomination must be signed by the presiding officer and secretary of the convention and by the chair of the state executive committee of the political party making the nomination.”
The American Center for Law and Justice, which has fought on behalf of election integrity and ballot fairness, pointedly noted, “Remember when the far Left tried to disqualify President Donald Trump from state primary ballots? The ACLJ won at the U.S. Supreme Court to protect your right to vote for the candidate of your choice.”
In fact, Democrats across America have spent months and likely uncounted dollars trying to get President Donald Trump banned from the 2024 presidential ballot.
They’ve pushed the “insurrectionist” talking point over the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, ever since those events happened.
They’ve worked at the state level, in Colorado, to obtain a ruling from an all-Democrat state Supreme Court that his name shouldn’t appear. Two other states followed Colorado’s agenda, but that agenda was stopped in its tracks by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Democrats even have assembled a long list of questionable claims against Trump – in court – to try to make sure Americans are not allowed to check his name on the ballot in November.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post State Official Rejects Dems’ Illegal Plan to Sneak Biden’s Name on 2024 Ballot appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Jenn Baker
CondemnedUSAcom
The egregious overcharging and sentencing of January 6th Political Hostages continues to happen daily, over three years later.
53-year-old Jeffery Sabol has spent 3+ years locked up for that day. He was sentenced at the end of March to 63 months (about 5 and 1/4 years), 3 years probation, and over $32,000 in fines and restitution. Sabol, a Geophysicist, is from Colorado. He is a devoted father, son, and partner to his beautiful fiancé.
Sabol has been a friend to many, and probably the most liked and respected guy in the DC Gulag. He has always provided hope, great “Dad” jokes, and advice to those detained in the Gulag as well as to the thousands that tune into the Freedom Corner Vigil. For over 620 nights, www.4Ashli.com has held a vigil outside the DC Gulag. The Hostages get to call in and talk to the world via livestream. Every night over the last year, Jeff would be the last phone call of the night and conduct the “J6 choir” in the National Anthem and then wrap up the call with news of the day.
Sabol has asked that the readers of the Gateway Pundit see the allocution he provided to his judge, U.S. District Judge, Rudolph Contreras. He has also provided two video exhibits that he’d like you to see as well. While you read and watch all of this, Jeff is enduring a dose of “Diesel Therapy” provided by the Bureau of Prisons and the US Marshals. He has recently been removed from the DC Gulag after 3+ years, and he, along with his family and friends, will know where he’s going when he gets there. For now, he remains strong and has faith that all of this will turn around in the not-too-distant future.
This written allocution is from Jeffrey Sabol and contains the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth, so help me, God.
Your Honor, Thank You for accepting my written allocution. This allocution contains 8
points.Point 1: I take Full Responsibility for my actions.
Point 2: Please allow me to set the record straight in regard to two items that were
discussed by my previous lawyer during my initial bond hearing that was approximately
three years ago. *A) I do not recall telling my previous lawyer that I thought that the 2020 election was not
stolen.B) It is true that my vocation was to use geophysics to locate buried unexploded ordnance (UXO). It is also true that (at times) I have excavated UXO; however, my previous lawyer misspoke when he said that I disarm/diffuse them. This I do not do.
Point 3: Please forgive my indulgence in defining two terms before moving forward. *
Allocution is defined as, “In a criminal procedure, allocution usually refers to the statement of a defendant, made following conviction, and is made prior to sentence. It is the defendant’s opportunity to offer mitigating argument.” * Mitigation is defined as “to make less severe”.
Please help Jeff here.
Point 4: Below is an excerpt from Mr. Tucker Carlson’s interview of Congressman Clay
Higgins that was conducted on January 6, 2024.Mr. Higgins: “I’m following the evidence and to my end it implicates our FBI, the highest level, and a conspiracy within our government at the highest level to create, to set the stage, for a compromised election cycle in 2020 and then the actions that took place on January 4, 5, 6; and then the criminal investigation, arrest, and prosecution, of Americans that they were able to entrap and document with the thousands of cameras that were operating that day. They used that evidence that they knew they were setting up to investigate, arrest, and prosecute the Americans that they had entrapped.”
* Please note that the text above is from a United States Congressman. I humbly offer this quote as a mitigating argument to support the claim that nefarious elements of a potential Federal nature may have been involved that then had an impact on my actions on January 6. On January 6 I initially followed those that instigated, agitated, and motivated the crowd and as such I became engaged in the situation. I was wrong to follow and to get engaged. For that I apologize.
Point 5: The 1512 charge is titled: Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant.
Section c2 of this charge is defined as relating to whoever corruptly obstructs,
influences, or impedes any official proceeding or attempts to do so. * per U.S. v Throckmorton (98 U.S. 61 25 L. Ed. 93 – 1878), “There is no question of the general doctrine that fraud vitiates the most solemn contracts, documents, and even judgements.”Additionally, Gorman v Johnson (46 Ind App. 672, 91 N.E. 971 (Ind App. 1910)), “It is elemental that fraud vitiates all that it touches…” [Vitiates is defined as: legally ineffective; to invalidate] Exhibits 1 and 2 contain evidence that supports that the 2020 election was rife with fraud. I readily admit that this evidence is currently unsubstantiated in a court of law. My mitigating argument for the 1512 c2 charge is that although I am guilty of disrupting an official proceeding; per Exhibits 1 and 2 (and the case law provided above), there is mounting evidence that this was not a valid official proceeding. *
Note that Exhibit F is 281 pages in length and is titled: “The Fingerprints of Fraud”. This document can be found at http://fingerprintsoffraud.com. *
Note that Exhibit G is 32 pages in length and is Titled “Summary of Election Fraud in the 2020
Presidential Election in the Swing States.”** Please help Jeff Sabol here.
Point 6: In regards to the 2111 charge of robbery in which I was guilty of robbing Officer AW of his baton, Exhibit H (long video) shows that there were multiple bodies on the ground in front of officer AW. My mitigating argument for this charge is that upon seeing bodies on the ground my reflex was to remove the object that I believed was the cause.
Please note that I show no intent to engage with officer AW after the baton is removed. *
Point 7: In regards to the 111B charge in which I was found guilty of assault with a dangerous or deadly weapon on Officer BM, my mitigating arguments are (per Exhibit H):
A) My intent was to help someone pull a body away from the chaos that existed at the tunnel entrance.
B) From my initial angle there is no way that I could know that this was an officer until he was already moving down the stairs.
C) The video shows that I exhibit no malice towards officer BM once he is at the bottom of the stairs.
Please note that I immediately then go to my left to help someone who is unconscious. In the span
of approximately 20 seconds, my mindset was: remove baton, assist with moving person from tunnel entrance, help unconscious person.Point 8: Please note that the intent of this allocution is not to negate my guilt, nor to
negate any acceptance of responsibility. Per the definition of an allocution, the intent of
this written allocution (and Exhibits) is to solely offer mitigating arguments.Thank You Your Honor.
Very Respectfully,
Jeffrey SabolWhat you just read was my written allocution that my lawyer submitted to my judge (along with 2 videos) just prior to my sentencing. On March 21, I was sentenced to 63 months for robbing an officer of a baton, assaulting an officer with a dangerous and deadly weapon; and disruption of an official proceeding.
Please watch the 2 videos and you decide if my actions warrant a 5 ¼ year sentence.
On a different but related topic, I need your help.
Prior to my incarceration, I prided myself on never missing an alimony or child support payment. My alimony payment ended 7 years ago, but my child support payments continued (even though I had 50% custody).
During the past 38 months that I have already been incarcerated (While I awaited sentencing), I have paid a total of $19,000 in child support, all of which came from my GiveSendGo account.
To be blunt, I will not be able to continue to pay child support unless I have your help. I am not asking for a handout; I am asking for your help in supporting my daughter when I can’t.
Please help Jeff here.
Thank you.
God Bless You –and- God Bless America
Jeffrey Sabol
The post J6 Political Hostage Jeff Sabol Asks Readers to Review Video of His Actions and Decide If He Deserves 5 Years in Prison – Faces $32,000 in Fines – Please Help This Dad Below! appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘If you don’t believe in God, something’s wrong with you, seriously’
A coalition whose goal includes censoring select Christians who make reference to their personal faith has demanded that the University of South Carolina censor its women’s basketball coach.
But officials with the Rutherford Institute have volunteered to help defend the school from the attack by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
The fight is over comments by Dawn Staley, the coach of the Gamecocks, which came after the team defeated Oregon State last month to advance to the NCAA’s Final Four. The team later won the title.
Staley was interviewed, and was asked, “Since the last two games have been close and tough,…what’s impressed you about this [team]?”
She praised the players’ resilience and added, “I’m giving all the glory to God, though. …The devastating loss that we had last year, to put us back here with a totally different team—if you don’t believe in God, something’s wrong with you, seriously. I’m a believer. I’m a believer because He makes things come true. When you’re at your worst, He’s at His best.”
Within hours, the FFRF had ordered the school to “take action to protect its student athletes and to ensure that Staley understands that she has been hired as a basketball coach and not a pastor.”
It also issued a demand that Staley “be educated as to her constitutional duties under the Establishment Clause.”
The protest group also complained that Staley had posted Bible verses on her own social media accounts and was involved in devotionals.
Rutherford now has advised the school that, “To prohibit Coach Staley from making any reference to biblical passages as a source of motivation and team building, while allowing her to make references to secular writers and stories, would be discriminatory and ‘may evidence hostility to religion…,'” the letter said.
“Coach Staley is tasked with motivating her players as a team to win. After winning the NCAA championship this year, freshman Tessa Johnson credited the team’s success with the environment Staley helped create: ‘We’re unselfish people and that’s how we win it,'” the letter said.
“Indeed, the Bible contains many passages that call for people to be unselfish and work as a team: ‘Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interest of others;’ ‘the body is one and has many members,…[i]f one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together;’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.'”
The letter to South Carolina chief Michael Amiridis explained that while the Constitution says the government “may not establish or compel a particular religion, it also may not silence and suppress religious speech merely because others take offense.”
It continued, “People are free to ignore, disagree with, or counter the religious speech of others, but they cannot compel the government to censor such speech.”
So, the letter said, the FFRF “has the right to complain about the actions of the university’s women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley, but it does not have the right to compel the University of South Carolina to suppress the religious speech and expression made by Coach Staley as a private citizen.”
It notes the Supreme Court previously has ruled: “Learning how to tolerate speech or prayer of all kinds is part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society.” The court further has affirmed that while public officials and employees “can act on behalf of the state, they are also private citizens with their own constitutional rights.”
“While the government may not establish or compel a particular religion, it also may not silence and suppress religious speech merely because others take offense,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Holy War Erupts When Basketball Coach Dares to Voice Christian Faith appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
City leaders ‘seem to hate what it represents’
A pitched battle has erupted in California over the decision by one city to take an easement away from the Lions Club and remove a Christian cross the organization had illuminated at holidays for years.
The situation has been profiled by CBN, which noted the effort to restore the cross continues.
The cross has been on the site since several owners sold the city 1.1 acres of land in the 1970s, but the Lions retained an easement for the cross, the report said.
Atheists in recent years had complained they didn’t like it, so the city’s solution was to take over the easement and remove the monument.
Now a coalition of Christians is renewing their campaign to have the 28-foot-tall cross restored.
The metal and plexiglass structure had been illuminated on a hill overlooking Albany Hill for decades, CBN said.
It was the East Bay Atheists who began insisting in 2015 that the cross on the private easement be torn down.
They claimed it showed a “preference” for one religion and offended them.
The city’s mayor at the time in 2017 soon joined the campaign. Peggy McQuaid, in office, said the city did not support the “continued presence” of the cross.
Then in 2018 a judge claimed the cross, on a private easement, violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, which forbids setting up a state religion.
The city could have sold the plot of ground that was covered by the easement, but instead opted to pursue the destruction of the cross.
The Lions club now has sued to regain its easement, and the cross, the report said.
The complaint notes the court refused to acknowledge that the club had a property right “to display the cross.’
“The First Amendment of the Constitution protects individuals and private entities from such blatant state hostility to those wishing to express symbols of faith and hope,” Brad Dacus, president and founder of Pacific Justice Institute, told CBN.
“We at PJI are committed to defending such constitutionally protected expression.”
Lions Club chief Kevin Pope told the Washington Times in an interview that city leaders “seem to hate what it represents, and rather than take an amount of money for the land … they’ve decided to spend what we think is probably close to $1 million” fighting the cross.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post ‘Blatant State Hostility’: Legal Battle Erupts When Town Tears Down Cross appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
cross-illuminated-christians-crucifix-jesus-bible-church-pexels_16x9
Image: World Net Daily
This article originally appeared on Leo Hohmann’s Substack and was republished with permission.
Former Google engineer Geoffrey Hinton warns of ‘very nasty things’ now that AI is being relied on to make battlefield decisions.
The world could experience multiple untold disasters before the use of Artificial Intelligence weapons comes under proper regulation, according to award-winning scientist and tech pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who is known in tech circles as the Godfather of AI.
Hinton says AI is becoming much more intelligent than people and could soon take over the battlefield. With wars breaking out all over the world, in Ukraine, the Middle East, and potentially the Far East, this is a major concern for humanity.
There has already been speculation that the recent death of aid workers in Israel could have resulted from an AI-powered military decision that would not have been made if actual people had full control of the battlefield strategy.
RT.com reports that Hinton, the former Google engineer who quit the company last year, compared the use of AI for military purposes to chemical weapons deployment – warning that “very nasty things” will occur before the global community arrives at a comprehensive agreement comparable to the Geneva Conventions.
“The threat I spoke out about is the existential threat,” Hinton told Irish broadcaster RTE News on Tuesday, emphasizing that “these things will get much more intelligent than us and they will take over.”
The computer scientist highlighted the impact of AI on disinformation and job displacement, and also on weapons of the future.
“One of the threats is ‘battle robots’ which will make it much easier for rich countries to wage war on smaller, poorer countries and they are going to be very nasty and I think they are inevitably coming,” Hinton warned.
He urged governments to put pressure on tech majors, especially in California, to conduct in-depth research on the safety of AI technology.
“Rather than it being an afterthought, there should be government incentives to ensure companies put a lot of work into safety and some of that is happening now,” Hinton said.
He underscored huge benefits that AI can bring to humanity, particularly in healthcare, adding that he does not regret any of his contributions to the technology.
Of course, one of the “benefits” of AI in healthcare is the ability to rapidly develop genetically modifying “vaccines,” using synthetic mRNA, so even this so-called benefit Hinton refers to is a fraud.
RT goes on to note that “Despite the mounting interest in AI, several high-profile figures in the tech industry have warned of the potential dangers posed by the unregulated adoption of the technology. Hinton has waged a media campaign to warn of the risks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Yoshua Bengio, who is considered an AI pioneer for his work on neural networks, were among the top industry figures to co-sign a letter last year calling for aggressive regulation of the AI sector.”
A paper was published by the U.S. Army War College in 2020 stating that current military research supports the emergence and synchronization of AI and robotics.
So the guys who created AI are now warning of its risks. How rich. They create the beast, then fear-monger the public into believing this beast could take over the world, setting the stage for the beast’s creators to offer an even more frightening solution — total regulation of all information and all human behavior. Classic Hegelianism.
To receive new posts and support Leo Hohmann’s work, consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t yet at leohohmann.substack.com
The post Leo Hohmann: Godfather of AI Says ‘Battle robots’ Will Soon Dominate War-Making Abilities of Major Nations, Posing ‘Existential Threat’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
army
This article was written by Swedish independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen, also known as PeterSweden. You can follow him at PeterSweden.com.
It’s now gone a few years since the British left the EU, in part because they didn’t like all the restrictions and rules that they were coming up with.
Now there is a new rule.
People will be banned from starting bonfires in their garden to burn garden waste such as grass, leafs and sticks.
This is because the new law requires that food and organic waste be sorted and recycled.
Meaning that people who are tending their garden will have to either compost their garden waster or deliver it in for recycling.
In Scandinavia it is tradition in the spring where homeowners tend their garden and start bonfires to burn up garden waste, which will now be banned.
What’s next, will they ban wood stoves too? Probably sooner or later…
So what if you are grilling and want to use sticks or wood from your garden on to fire up the grill? Looks like that will be illegal now, because garden waste must be recycled.
As far as I’m aware, I’m the only one reporting on this new law in English so far, so if you appreciate my work, please consider helping me out by becoming a paid subscriber.
Independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen has dedicated years to reporting the things the mainstream media ignores. You can follow him at https://petersweden.com/
The post Peter Sweden: WHAT? – New EU Rule BANS Garden Bonfires appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Bonfire
AI Generated
Peter Sweden
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘We have to remove the stigma between life and death’
The campaign for euthanasia has been bathed in altruistic claims for several years already.
It relieves the terminally ill of pain. It allows them to die with dignity. It gives them control over their demise, which they otherwise might not have in a hospital or hospice. It is a right they should be allowed to exercise. And more.
But a new report from European Conservative documents that the chief of a health insurance conglomerate in Belgium, Luc Van Gorp, admits it is a “money-saving solution.”
He heads a group that styles itself as “Christelijke Mutualiteit,” or Christian Mutual Insurance.
He is lobbying for changes in the law that would allow people to be allowed to signal that their lives “are done with” and get state help in dying.
The prerequisite right now is that there be evidence of “unbearable suffering.”
The report explained the head of the “Christian-in-name-only” corporation expressed his hopes during a recent interview.
“We have to remove the stigma between life and death,” he said. “I have never understood why we always debate the quantity of life. We want people to get as old as possible, we do everything to accomplish this. But we never ask the question of how quantity relates to quality of life.”
He added, “This debate needs to be placed high on the political agenda. As a society we are going to have to consider how to organize that care [for the elderly] in the future, knowing that we are short on hands already today.”
He said an in-house study confirmed an aging population is becoming an issue in Belgium, because by 2050, the number of people over age 80 will double to 1.2 million.
“How are we going to prepare for that?” he wondered. “Not by building mass residential care centers if they won’t contribute to quality of life. If we are not going to be able to sustain the mass of people who need care, how are we going to engage in a talk with them?”
He insists people “should have the freedom to end their lives” “even if there is no unbearable suffering…”
“What if the quality of care is perfect, but the person still does not experience quality of life? What do you do then, when there are still people who indicate that they are done with life?”
He continued, “We have to remove the stigma between life and death. Not through harsh euthanasia, because that scares people away. But by allowing people to indicate that it [their life] has been good [and that it can end now].”
The Christian Institute explained Van Gorp was bluntly pushing for people who are “tired of life” to be allowed to die to “avert a social funding crisis.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Euthanasia Campaign Now Admits When People Die it Saves Money! appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
euthanasia
By Johann Leonhard
After days of agitation in the European mainstream media, the popular AfD politician Petr Bystron has now become the target of a death threat combined with blackmail. As BILD reports, Bystron’s Bundestag office in Berlin received an anonymous letter with the text: “…if you value your life, then you quickly collect €100,000 and call here…”
The blackmailer insulted the AfD foreign politician as an “asshole” and added a collage with Bystron’s photo with a painted Hitler beard. The Bundestag police are taking the matter seriously and have started investigations (file number Vg/949/2024). The AfD politician said to the German Newspaper BILD of the death threat: “These are the fruits of the smear campaign of the last few days. I ask Czech Prime Minister Fiala: ‘Is this what you wanted to achieve?'”
Several insider authorities in Prague are accusing Czech Prime Minister Fiala of being personally responsible for mentioning Bystron’s name in connection with an affair surrounding the news portal “Voice of Europe.” At the beginning of last week, the Czech secret service made it public that it suspected two Ukrainians of covert propaganda for Russia. The accusations of collaborating with the portal and even taking money were directed against six European parties, all of which are against the war in Ukraine.
Bystron told the Czech newspaper BLESK that this was revenge for his appearances at the anti-government demonstrations in Prague, such as the demonstration on Wenceslas Square last year, where hundreds of thousands of Czechs cheered the AfD politician and at the same time loudly demanded the resignation of the hated Fiala government. According to the latest surveys, only 2% of its own citizens trust the Czech government.
Investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger and Gregor Baszak recently reported in the magazine “Public” that during the EU elections, state-financed NGOs such as “Correctiv” were used by the respective governments to create sentiment against the opposition in the run-up to the EU elections the respective countries. On behalf of NATO, they are supposed to publicly discredit the opposition forces fighting against the war in Ukraine with disinformation. In Germany, this particularly affects the AfD. The campaign against Bystron was also carried out in the Czech Republic by the local counterpart to Correctiv, “Dennik N” and the NGO “European Values,” which is financed by the USA and Soros.
The Schellenberg report unmasked the campaign in which Soros-NGOs and Czech intelligence services joined forces to fabricate a news story aimed at six European populist parties. Among them was the only true opposition party in Germany – the AfD (Alternative for Germany), with prominent figures in the line of fire. Our well-known friend Petr Bystron and his colleague Maximilian Krah, two leading candidates on the AfD election list for the European Parliament were named. Since the AfD is expecting to get around 20 seats, both are eager to join the ranks of the conservative movement in Brussels to fight the globalists on their home court.
Nevertheless, those facts don’t stop various German media as Spiegel and BILD from continuing the agitation against Bystron and accusing him of “dubious Kremlin contacts” and calling him a “Putin friend”, in spite of the fact, that Bystron never met Putin once (in contrast to Donald Trump) and did not express any expressions of friendship with Putin and only visited Moscow during an official business trip together with party head Alice Weidel. Bystron commented: “Everyone who has stood up for Germany’s interests in the last two years has been defamed as a Putin hooker. Anyone who advocated for U.S. interests was hailed as the great savior of Ukraine. Both are wrong.” The strategy of the campaign is quite clear: Portray the promising right-wing candidates as “Russian agents” and propaganda-slingshots.
Smear-Campaign presented by NATO?
In his report Shellenberger writes, Soros-funded NGOs like the German “Correctiv” and the “Institute for Strategic Dialogue” are de-facto “military and intelligence front groups spreading disinformation about German farmers and politicians”. He goes on to say: “Government, military and intelligence agencies are engaged in essentially political activities unrelated to national security and thus illegal.”
Particularly interesting for our case is the revelation, that this covert operation aims at German politicians and critical voices against the Ukraine war:
“Both NATO-funded and government-funded NGOs are working with government bodies to interfere in German elections. Their “influence operation” aims to keep Germany in line with American foreign policy objectives and undermine the European peace movement.”
It is in this context that the attacks on AfD-lawmakers Petr Bystron and Maximilian Krah make sense. The narrative is basically this: Bystron, Krah and other conservatives around Europe supposedly took bribes from Russia funnelled through a news-outlet called “Voice of Europe” with its main office in Prague. The evidence? Less than zero!
The agitation has reached its sad climax with the death threat against Bystron. Hopefully, it won’t go as far as the case with party leader Tino Chrupalla. He was stung by Antifa radicals with a syringe containing an unknown substance at an election campaign event,
The post After Several Days of a Coordinated Media Smear Campaign – Germany’s AfD Foreign Politician Petr Bystron Becomes Target of Death Threat and Blackmail appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
000000000000000000000000002
Petr Bystron
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
A new documentary being released by the organization behind the American Greatness website, next week on April 17, is exposing the “four corrupt, political motivated” prosecutors now pursuing cases against President Donald Trump.
The narrator of “Chasing Trump” explains, “They say they’re upholding the law. But a close examination reveals politics of the very worst kind meant to influence the 2024 election.”
He cites, “Four corrupt, politically motivated prosecutors. One target: Donald Trump.”
The trailer:
“Can there be any doubt there’s a sentiment of ‘This is get Trump?'”
The video documentary is coming just as a trial is starting in which leftists are claiming Trump violated business regulations with a non-disclosure agreement, a common practice in business transactions.
In fact, the facts of the case were reviewed, then rejected for lacking evidence of wrongdoing, before it was resurrected and turned into a felony case.
A comment from the Daily Mail said, “Trump allies will step up their attacks on prosecutors investigating the former president next week, with the launch of an online documentary accusing them of political activism and electioneering.”
“‘Chasing Trump’ is an important documentary that exposes the leftwing prosecutors weaponizing the government to target my father,” Donald Trump Jr. told DailyMail.com. “It’s the first documentary to do a deep dive into the backgrounds of the prosecutors behind the four cases against him and is a must watch for anyone who cares about preserving the rule of law and protecting our constitutional rights.”
Among the subjects is Alvin Bragg, the prosecutor in Manhattan, who has created a list of 34 charges against Trump over that non-disclosure agreement.
Another subject is Fani Willis, a Georgia prosecutor who is bringing an organized crime case against Trump and a dozen others for their comments after the 2020 presidential election, which was, in fact, subjected to multiple undue influences that likely benefited Joe Biden. Willis has been accused of racism in the case, and a judge already has confirmed she had the appearance of a conflict of interest for hiring her paramour to work on her anti-Trump allegations.
Then there’s special counsel Jack Smith who is claiming Trump committed crimes by having documents from his presidency in his home after leaving office. Another special counsel found Joe Biden was in essentially the same position, but recommended against charging him because of his obviously “diminished” capacity.
Finally, there’s New York Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned on the promise to “get Trump,” even without any allegations of wrongdoing. She found a judge who agreed with her agenda and declared Trump guilty of fraud before the trial, which was only to establish damages. The judge, Arthur Engoron, then ordered a penalty of $454 million for Trump in the case that had no victims, no one losing money, and no one making any complaints.
The Mail explains the documentary “makes the case that Trump is being punished for taking on the status quo and echoes his constant refrain that he is subject to a witch hunt.”
Even the judges in the cases cannot escape criticism, and one, Juan Merchan, who is hearing one of the cases, has a daughter to is an activist who benefits financially from her work for Kamala Harris and others who have attacked Trump.
The report said “Chasing Trump” is the first in a series to be produced by American Greatness.
The documentary is to appear on a number of streaming sites, including Rumble and X.
Curt Mercadenta, managing editor of American Greatness, explained to the Mail the video will shock anyone “who believed the legal system was free from partisan political considerations.”
“With the 2024 election starting to heat up, it’s imperative that Americans have the opportunity to learn more about the truth behind the prosecutions targeting President Trump, along with the partisan prosecutors behind the cases,” he explained.
And Mike Davis, of the Article III Project, said, “These four prosecutions against President Trump are nothing more than partisan political activism masquerading as the rule of law.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Prosecutors in Trump Cases Being Put Under Microscope in New Documentary appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Prosecutors in Trump Cases Being Put Under Microscope in New Documentary | The Gateway Pundit | by Guest Contributor
This article originally appeared on WND.com Guest by post by Bob Unruh A new documentary being released by the organization behind the American Greatness website, next week on April 17, is exposing the "four corrupt, political motivated" prosecutors now pursuing cases against President Donald Trump
fine_rotative_table_microscope_11_12996688414_16x9
Image: Wikicommons
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘I strongly suggest that you do not treat this lightly, congressman’
Comments by members of Congress, even stupid and irrational, mostly are protected by the “speech and debate” clause of the Constitution – as long as the comments are part of the legislative process.
But now a letter from a legal team representing congressional witness Tony Bobulinski is charging that U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Democrat from Maryland most famous for leading the impeachment case against former President Trump, stepped outside of that authority when he publicly slammed the witness, who has provided key evidence to Congress in its investigation into the evidence for impeaching Joe Biden.
In fact, according to the letter from lawyers Jesse Binnall and John C. Sullivan, representing Bobulinski, Raskin “mocked” various witnesses to Congress and posted a “freeze frame” that shows Bobulinski, with the chyron, “A disgruntled Wannabe Business Partner Turned Trump World Hype man.”
Raskin further publicly described Bobulinski as “a bitterly frustrated would be business partner who collaborated with the Trump campaign” and a “dubious” witness. And he called Bobulinski a “political pawn” and accused him of lying.
The letter warns Raskin, “You are not entitled to any immunity for your defamatory statements. The Speech and Debate Clause comes from Article I, Section 6, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution, and it includes, in relevant part: ‘for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.'”
But that only protects activities “undertaken in the House and Senate,” and provides no immunity “beyond its carefully defined scope,” the lawyers warn. “Anything that is not a legislative activity will not be protected.”
The letter warns Raskin, “Your statements are derogatory falsehoods, rendering them legally actionable. Your pattern of maliciously defaming Mr. Bobulinski is well-established and will not be tolerated.”
The lawyers explain that they will file litigation over Raskin’s public and social media statements “if you fail to delete and publicly retract recent defamatory statements and publications you made about Mr. Bobulinski, including on X (formerly Twitter). Be further advised that you should identify and preserve all hard copy and electronically stored documents, information, and data that relate, in any way, to the subject matter of your incessantly malicious defamatory conduct. It was a mistake to believe that your publications were made without consequence. It must, and will, stop immediately.”
The lawyers also cite “evidence” of Raskin’s “malice,” in that he’s following a “blind adherence to a preconceived narrative.”
Bobulinski, a onetime business associate of Hunter Biden, has provided testimony to Congress that confirms the influence peddling operations run by the Biden family, which generated millions for family members, was focused on access to Joe Biden, who was, in fact, party to those operations.
Bobulinski, during his appearance in Congress, called leftists in the body liars, and a ruling from the committee found that he was not out of order in doing so.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Trump Impeachment Manager Threatened with Defamation Charges appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Raskin
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin appears on CNN's "State of the Union." (@CNNSOTU / X screen shot)
Guest post by Paul Drabik
In part one The Gateway Pundit highlighted some examples of how Illinois is fast becoming a Communist state based on the style of legislation that is becoming law.
We further showed how Illinois Republicans appear more concerned about aligning with Democrats than promoting conservative policy. To say nothing about the corruption, the political conceptualization of the problem is wholly misinterpreted.
Terry Newsome and Paul Drabik of Behind Enemy Lines podcast attempted to work within the system. However, the system itself is constructed by Democrats and Republicans are just along for the ride.
Illinois suffered, and likely still suffers, from the 40 years of political control under the most powerful state politician in the country, Mike Madigan.
Madigan, representative of the 22nd District and Speaker of the Illinois House for over 30 years un-consecutively, constructed a patronage army that still wields power in Illinois state politics to this day.
Currently under Federal indictment, Madigan was able to patronize many people in the bureaucracy and unions with political favors. However, that power was also wielded within the legislative body. Akin to Nancy Pelosi-style House rules, Madigan was able to institute the following over the years:
These rules are merely a fraction of the totality of his control. Over the years this kind of power has effectively created a “frog in the boiling water” scenario for Illinois Republicans.
Madigan’s shrewd political power plays have shifted ALL politics in Illinois to the left. The current makeup of the legislature favors the Democrats in the House 78 to 40 and the Senate 40 to 19. Governor Pritzker enjoys his second term as of 2022.
Newsome & Drabik of Behind Enemy Lines podcast both became elected precinct committeemen only to find that things are just as bad at the local level of the Township organization.
Drabik worked as a contracted consultant for the local political organization and was told that combating pornography in schools was, “not how to get independent voters.”
Newsome approached State Senate Minority Leader John Curran whose daughter went to school with Newsome’s son. Newsome had asked the Senator to speak out against openly pornographic books like “Gender Queer” and was told that it would be “too political” if the Senator weighed in on the matter.
Here are some images (pixilated) from the porn book for children Gender Queer where they actually show cartoon photos of two boys having oral sex.
Curran’s indifference regarding the pornographic material in the schools should not be surprising to anyone who is aware of the $30K in donations from the Illinois Teachers Union. These donations coincide with Curran’s support for Amendment 1. Amendment 1 is the most sweeping overstep for unions in the country giving unions plenary power through protection to collectively bargain via Illinois Constitutional Amendment.
Newsome and Drabik quickly found how deep the RINO infestation reaches. The podcast duo witnessed a fellow committeeman attempt to put a vote of censure to the Downers Grove Township Republican Organization regarding two County Republicans who donated to radical Soros funded prosecutor Kim Foxx.
The Chairman summarily dismissed the motion while breaking Parliamentary rules which govern the organization. Following standing ovations for Newsome and Drabik who challenged the organization during public comment, the Chairman proceeded to remove the public comment section from future meetings in August of 2023. This CENSORSHIP continues to this day.
Once he had the bully pulpit the chairman denigrated members who have had the courage, for years, to attend school board, village council, or library board meetings to speak out against issues like pornographic books available to children. According to the chairman these people are “radicals” and “anarchists.”
It appears the local hypocrisy is merely an echo of county-level RINOs. DuPage County Chairman, Jim Zay, disseminated a letter in April 2023 addressing the controversy of donations to Democrats from Republicans.
Zay dismissed the concerns of pay-for-play from Republicans to Democrats stating, “A Republican in elected office is better than one of the other party.” Zay also lamented the concerns about elections, “There are many saying our system is rigged but no one has brought any evidence forward.”
Zay is apparently unaware of the reporting by The Gateway Pundit which showed the analysis of the Illinois voter roll by civic group United Sovereign Americans.
The group analyzed a 4 year period where the Illinois population decreased by 150,000 but the voter roll increased by 650,000. In addition the analysis found, “…more than 4 million apparent registration violations…”
The same can be said in townships across Illinois. Grassroots movements are not to be tolerated. And yet, there’s a certain tone-deafness to the Illinois Republican Party. In 2022 the establishment candidate for governor, Mayor Richard Irvin of Aurora, lost the primary by a mind-blowing 43 points. Irvin was backed by a staggering amount of $50 million by Citadel CEO Ken Griffin.
The billionaire has since packed up his toys and pouted off to Florida. All the establishment Republicans pushed Irvin. Why, you ask? The overwhelming response to the peasant voting class was because he had a “better chance at beating Pritzker.”
These so-called Republicans have no conscious awareness of the Overton Window shifting their political perspective to the left through corruption and intimidation. The perception is “Illinois is a blue state.”
Without the industrial level corruption of someone like Mike Madigan would that be true? Are people in Illinois really radical leftists? Perhaps perception has inverted reality. And perhaps, a Republican Senate minority leader voting to give public unions Constitutional power to collectively bargain is just a Democrat in Republican clothing.
The post Illinois RINOS Part 2: How Republicans Help Democrats Become Communists appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
john-curran-and-jim-zay
DuPage County Republican Chairman Jim Zay and Illinois Senate Minority Leader John Curran (R)
mike-madigan-illinois
Former Speaker of the Illinois House Mike Madigan
Gender-Queer
gender queer book
donations-teachers-union-curran
This article originally appeared on JoeHoft.com and was republished with permission and edited by The Gateway Pundit.
Government Agencies are illegally soliciting non-citizens to vote and potentially entrapping them. Government workers who perform these acts are committing felonies.
Joe Hoft previously reported on how Illegals are being registered to vote in Florida. This is likely the case in many other states.
The path non-citizens who cross our border illegally take to get on voter rolls in Florida is as follows. There are some loopholes and practices that allow this to happen:
Here is the solicitation letter from Florida noted above:
Translation:
“You have received this voter registration application because you answered “yes” to the voter preference question that was listed on the ACCESS Florida application or Medical Assistance application that asked if you wanted to register to vote, change your address for voting purposes or update your voting records.
Complete the Voter Registration application and submit it to your local county supervisor of elections office (see the addresses provided on the application to find your local county supervisor of elections) or to your local department of children and families office (DCF, for its acronym in English). If you would like assistance completing the voter registration application, please contact your local county Supervisor of Elections office or your local DC office.
Acceptance or rejection of the voter registration application, or assistance in completing the voter registration application, will not affect your eligibility for or the amount of public assistance benefits you may receive. If you believe that someone has unlawfully interfered with or prevented you from exercising your right to register to vote; to refuse to register to vote, to choose a political party, or if you believe that your right to privacy in choosing whether to register to vote or not has been violated, you may file a complaint with the Secretary of State, Florida Department of State, R. A. Building, 500 South Bronough Street, Tallahassee, Florida 32399-0250 or by calling 1-877-868-3737.”
In the above situation, which we believe is happening across the country, government officials are committing crimes. Here is what we know. (See the related regulations referred to at the end of this article.)
1) If Florida public assistance agencies are soliciting non-citizens to register to vote (as discussed in the above article BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: How Illegals Are Registered to Vote in Florida | Joe Hoft ), they are knowingly soliciting non-citizens to violate both state and federal laws. The DCFS voter registration solicitation letter does not even inform the recipient that it is against state and federal law to register to vote if you are not a U.S. citizen, so why would a recipient of the letter believe otherwise (s 104.011, s 104.041; 18 U.S. Code § 611)?
2) Soliciting non-citizens to register to vote exposes public assistance officials to becoming felons because they are enabling ineligible voter registrations and voting (s 104.91).
3) Soliciting non-citizens to register to vote exposes election officials to becoming felons because current interpretation of s 98.045 is that verifying the citizenship box is checked on applications is sufficient, thus by not verifying citizenship using available DMV data they are enabling ineligible voter registrations and voting (s 104.91)
4) It is likely that multiple government agencies have or are soliciting non-citizens to register to vote, leading non-citizens to believe they are eligible to vote and then unknowingly become felons by unintentionally lying on the voter registration application. Under Florida statutes the following agencies may be conducting voter registrations to non-citizens: public libraries, centers for independent living, offices that serve persons with disabilities, food assistance program, Medicaid program, Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the Temporary Cash Assistance Program, and secondary and post-secondary education institutions.
5) Non-citizens who violate Florida election laws may be able to avoid prosecution by claiming entrapment or that they did not know they are breaking the law (s 777.201, s 104.15)
6) If it is shown that enough non-citizens voted to change the outcome of an election, that election could be challenged based on (s 102.168)
7) It is inconsistent interpretation of state and federal law that the FHSMV (DMV) does not offer voter registration to non-citizens while public service agencies do. Both organizations know based on documentation provided by an applicant if they are a non-citizen.
The Florida Constitution Article VI, Section 2.
Only a citizen of the United States who is at least eighteen years of age and who is a permanent resident of the state, if registered as provided by law, shall be an elector of the county where registered.
97.041 Qualifications to register or vote.
(1)(a) A person may become a registered voter only if that person:
1. Is at least 18 years of age;2. Is a citizen of the United States;3. Is a legal resident of the State of Florida;4. Is a legal resident of the county in which that person seeks to be registered; and5. Registers pursuant to the Florida Election Code.
A person registering to vote must subscribe to the following oath: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Florida, that I am qualified to register as an elector under the Constitution and laws of the State of Florida, and that all information provided in this application is true.”
104.011 False swearing; submission of false voter registration information; prosecution prohibited.
(1) A person who willfully swears or affirms falsely to any oath or affirmation, or willfully procures another person to swear or affirm falsely to an oath or affirmation, in connection with or arising out of voting or elections commits a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
104.15 Unqualified electors willfully voting.
Whoever, knowing he or she is not a qualified elector, willfully votes at any election is guilty of a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
98.045 Administration of voter registration.
(1) ELIGIBILITY OF APPLICANT.—The supervisor must ensure that any eligible applicant for voter registration is registered to vote and that each application for voter registration is processed in accordance with law. The supervisor shall determine whether a voter registration applicant is ineligible based on any of the following:
(a) The failure to complete a voter registration application as specified in s. 97.053.(b) The applicant is deceased.(c) The applicant has been convicted of a felony for which his or her voting rights have not been restored.(d) The applicant has been adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to the right to vote and such right has not been restored.(e) The applicant does not meet the age requirement pursuant to s. 97.041.(f) The applicant is not a United States citizen.(g) The applicant is a fictitious person.(h) The applicant has provided an address of legal residence that is not his or her legal residence.(i) The applicant has provided a driver license number, Florida identification card number, or the last four digits of a social security number that is not verifiable by the department.
104.041 Fraud in connection with casting vote.
Any person perpetrating or attempting to perpetrate or aid in the perpetration of any fraud in connection with any vote cast, to be cast, or attempted to be cast, is guilty of a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
104.091 Aiding, abetting, advising, or conspiring in violation of the code.
(1) Any person who knowingly aids, abets, or advises the violation of this code shall be punished in like manner as the principal offender.
(1) A law enforcement officer, a person engaged in cooperation with a law enforcement officer, or a person acting as an agent of a law enforcement officer perpetrates an entrapment if, for the purpose of obtaining evidence of the commission of a crime, he or she induces or encourages and, as a direct result, causes another person to engage in conduct constituting such crime by employing methods of persuasion or inducement which create a substantial risk that such crime will be committed by a person other than one who is ready to commit it.
(2) A person prosecuted for a crime shall be acquitted if the person proves by a preponderance of the evidence that his or her criminal conduct occurred as a result of an entrapment. The issue of entrapment shall be tried by the trier of fact.
18 U.S. Code § 611 – Voting by aliens
(a)It shall be unlawful for any alien to vote in any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing a candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, Member of the House of Representatives, Delegate from the District of Columbia, or Resident Commissioner, unless—
(1) the election is held partly for some other purpose;
(2) aliens are authorized to vote for such other purpose under a State constitution or statute or a local ordinance; and
(3) voting for such other purpose is conducted independently of voting for a candidate for such Federal offices, in such a manner that an alien has the opportunity to vote for such other purpose, but not an opportunity to vote for a candidate for any one or more of such Federal offices.
(b)Any person who violates this section shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
SECTION 7 – VOTER REGISTRATION AGENCIES
Under Section 7 of the NVRA, which offices must offer voter-registration services?
Any office in a covered State that provides either public assistance or state-funded programs primarily engaged in providing services to persons with disabilities must offer voter-registration services. Armed Forces recruitment offices must also provide voter registration services. In addition, a State must designate other offices in the State as voter-registration agencies. (See Question 15 below for a description of these other offices).
What is an office that provides public assistance under Section 7?
“Public assistance” offices that must offer voter-registration services under Section 7 of the NVRA include each agency and office in a State that administers or provides services or assistance under any public assistance programs. This includes any of the following federal public assistance programs: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food-Stamp Program), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program (formerly the Aid to Families with Dependent Children or AFDC program), the Medicaid program, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). This also includes state public assistance programs.
Other agencies that are required to offer voter registration are described here: Civil Rights Division | The National Voter Registration Act Of 1993 (NVRA) (justice.gov)
Entrapment is a complete defense to a criminal charge, on the theory that “Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person’s mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute.” Jacobson v. United States, 503 U.S. 540, 548 (1992). A valid entrapment defense has two related elements: (1) government inducement of the crime, and (2) the defendant’s lack of predisposition to engage in the criminal conduct. Mathews v. United States, 485 U.S. 58, 63 (1988). Of the two elements, predisposition is by far the more important.
To receive new posts and support Joe Hoft’s work, please visit JoeHoft.com.
The post Government Agencies Illegally Soliciting and Potentially Entrapping Non-Citizens to Register to Vote appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
get-out-the-vote-florida
spanish-speaking-memo-to-illegals
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Ben Weingarten, RealClearInvestigations
Real Clear Wire
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.”
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 upwards 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 non-partisan 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 RCI in a statement: “We do the work that state election officials typically do not do – seeking out underrepresented voting-eligible Americans Tom Lopach … 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 non-profit 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 Joe 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 2016-21 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 RCI’s 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 RCI: “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 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 RCI has previously reported, EO 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. RCI 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 FOIA 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 RCI 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 briefnoting 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 RCI 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 RCI’s 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 RCI’s 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 RCI’s 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 fundswere 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 RCI:
“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 RCI, “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 RNC 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 Donald Trump.
Speaking in Selma, Ala., 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 Gateway Pundit.
Vote Here sign
(WGN News / YouTube screen shot)
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
New ‘nondiscrimination’ rule takes aim about ministries’ employees
“Nondiscrimination” schemes under the Joe Biden regime in Washington often have been used to advocate for blatant discrimination against Christians and Christian organizations.
One such situation recently developed when Democrats in Colorado insisted they could force a web designer to promote same-sex weddings if she provided any services to couples getting married.
The Supreme Court slapped down the state for violating the Constitution in its leftist agenda.
But those issues have developed over and over, and now it involves the State Department, which is proposing a new “nondiscrimination” demand that could affect the employment decisions of Christian ministries.
So officials with Samaritan’s Purse, the Christian Legal Society, the Accord Network and other ministries have written to the State Department protesting the agency’s plans.
The new proposal would ban discrimination against beneficiaries of programs that are sometimes given grants by the government “on specified bases.”
But then the State Department bureaucrats also want to demand that those organizations providing benefits on a nondiscriminatory basis also hire employees on a nondiscriminatory basis.
The ministries in a letter to State explain that they “affirm” the idea of not discriminating against any benefit “recipient.”
But the problem is the rules as planned by State threaten their right to hire employees they choose, and possibly could force them to stop partnering with the government on aid programs.
It’s not a small problem, they explain. “To illustrate the full extent of the potential loss of foreign assistance of USAID’s top 50 largest foreign assistance recipients, religious organizations comprise $613 million in obligated agency funding in FY ’23. They have worked in over 100 countries programming in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), displaced persons and refugee support, countertrafficking, and strengthening of civil society structures like health care and justice systems.”
The aid organizations explain that the rule needs to provide that their religious character, affiliation, practices, and expressions of religious beliefs “will not preclude” them from participating in various programs.
They cite the Constitution, the religion clauses of the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and more to explain that the laws of the land require nondiscrimination rules to provide “overriding protection for religious freedom.”
Without a provision for religious rights, the organizations told State, the proposed rules are “arbitrary and capricious” for failing “to consider a reasonable alternative, specifically, categorical exemption of religious organizations applying for foreign assistance grants and federal acquisition contracts…”
Without changes, the groups warn the Biden administration, “the regulations will infringe statutory and constitutional rights, frustrate the regulations’ stated purpose, impede the delivery of foreign assistance, threaten the U.S. government’s foreign policy objectives, foment expensive litigation and result in the unintended exclusion of religious organizations from being applicants and offerors for the department’s grants and contracts.”
Online, there’s a petition procedure for people to sign up to agree with the comments: “I strongly oppose the U.S. State Department’s consideration of new regulations that will cut off grants and contracts to Christian – and all faith-based – relief organizations that require their employees to share their faith and their religious values.”
The charge to the government came from the Accord Network, Samaritan’s Purse, Christian Legal Society, and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and others.
Specifically, the government is warned that there are such things as religious rights protected by the Constitution and the proposal would “not allow [faith-based organizations] to consider sexual orientation and gender identity or expression in the hiring process in order to remain eligible for foreign aid funding.”
The ERLC explained, “Hiring staff members that reflect the religious beliefs of an organization is a long-standing pillar of religious liberty protections.”
Franklin Graham, who heads Samaritan’s Purse, added, “These proposed State Department regulations could be used to force faith-based organizations like Samaritan’s Purse to hire staff who disagree with our core biblical beliefs about God’s design for marriage, sexuality, and gender in order to be eligible for government grants.”
He continued, “Samaritan’s Purse is a Christian organization and we will not compromise on the fundamental principle of hiring like-minded Christians who share our calling, our stand on the authority of God’s Word, and our statement of faith.”
The groups explain in their letter to the government there needs to be a “categorical exemption” from religious belief requirements in the process.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Faith Groups Protest Biden Plan to Control Their Employment Decisions appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
prayer
Guest post by Endangered Speechies
PART I. America’s Recurring Nightmare: Unconstitutional Intelligence Gathering Abuses and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
FISA’s section 702 and other components that permit and govern warrantless intelligence gathering on foreign targets located abroad were originally set to expire on December 23, 2023.
Only months prior, a fresh scandal broke that the FBI had abused the warrantless search tool yet again by weaponizing it against American citizens for their activities while on US soil.
According to the well-established doctrine of the exclusionary rule in this country, this intelligence and all subsequent evidence gathered from these illegal, warrantless searches is tainted and inadmissible.
At least that’s what any reasonable person would think, were it not for the judges in D.C. who have been subverting the rule by repeatedly allowing cases built in this way to proceed.
Per the letter of the current law, any and all incidental data gathered on American citizens anywhere in the world ought to be destroyed and unactionable, whether it was gathered “downstream,” “upstream” or anywhere in between.
Given the FBI’s practice of violating the law with impunity under the Biden DOJ, if FISA 702 were allowed to expire, how naïve do we have to be to believe that they won’t just continue to flout the law and do whatever they want?
FISA section 702 and other amendments were not allowed to sunset last December, and due to Speaker Johnson’s penchant for playing kick the can, the mass, warrantless data gathering, along with other subsections of the 2008 amendments, are set to expire on April 19.
A myriad of intelligence agencies are scheduled to descend upon Congress on Wednesday, April 10 to make their case that, despite rampant abuses that have violated the fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth and fourteenth amendment rights of American citizens en masse, their ability to gather intelligence without a warrant should be extended or even expanded.
A fly on the wall in these upcoming meetings would likely report that the IC reps employed hybrid tactics, resembling both a protection racket and blackmail operation, to coerce Congressional members to grant their collective will. We can’t tell the future, but this is our educated hunch: the probability is high that unscrupulous proverbial arm twisting will take place.
It’s also likely that Speaker Johnson, after postponing the vote on proposed reforms and the sunset from December 23, 2023, will conduct this matter in the same disrespectful manner that he brought the minibus to the floor in March for a vote. (He only allowed 72 hours for members to read the thousand-plus page bill that spent 1.2 trillion dollars while also prohibiting any and all debate and amendments.)
This after the House Rules Committee scheduled consideration of the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act of 2024 for February 14, only to abruptly and inexplicably cancel the meeting without rescheduling.
So, what is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978,) Section 702 (2008)? You may or may not remember that the 2008 amendments codified Stellar Wind abuses that occurred during George W. Bush’s consecutive terms.
Chances are, you’re not too young to remember when former President Obama and his DOJ illegally and fraudulently abused FISA. They did so in collusion with a myriad of absurd and villainous characters, orgs and law firms which included self-described communist 1James Comey, diabolical freak show John Podesta and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, to spy on then candidate Donald John Trump in a fallacious attempt to set him up as a Russian agent. Yes, that FISA.
Intelligence agencies, although not specifically described in The Constitution, are the purview of the Executive Branch (Article II, Section 2 and 3.) However, these agencies often have been caught acting as rogue entities, violating the constitutional rights of American citizens both without the knowledge of the Commander in Chief or at the direction of the Commander in Chief and his proxies.
It has been at times of such scandals and constitutional crises that Congress sought to balance the power of the Executive by instituting some legal guardrails.
This is how both FISA (1978), born out of the Church Committee hearings, and the FISA Amendments of 2008 came to be. Both are fruit of the poisonous tree as the actual effect of both laws was to codify the abuses but regulate them with a secret court (FISC).
The purpose of this article is not to delve into the specifics of these hearings and the subsequent legislation. For anyone who has read this far that is interested in the history of FISA, there are voluminous writings on this.
Many of them are not worth the time. we reviewed dozens of them so that you don’t have to. The most objective, thorough and well written is from Jeff Clark for the Center for Renewing America.
It’s true that espionage is a filthy affair. At its core, the work of spies is deception which is the devil’s business. However, a nation without “intelligence” agents, aka spies or spooks, won’t remain a nation for very long.
With that in mind, to anyone who believes that Congress intends to just allow FISA section 702 to expire, we’re happy to be the one to inform you that the earth is not flat, Nancy Pelosi is never sober (upon information and belief) and Joe Biden did not get 81 million legitimate votes.
On the other hand, the abuses of the FISA program, particularly section 702 and its betrayal of our Constitutional Republic, have become so widespread and widely known that the American electorate is demanding meaningful reforms and many of our elected officials have lost all patience with being targeted by what has always been a rouge intelligence function.
Rather than serving at the pleasure of the President who serves at the pleasure of We The People, evidence supports that US intelligence agencies serve a permanent, unelected ruling class. Our Republic cannot withstand this constant onslaught from agencies filled with Benedict Arnolds.
The current target of this country’s federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies is turned inward upon the people they have a duty to serve. Where are the FISA 702 cases against the Mexican cartels’ massive human and drug smuggling operations?
Why is the FBI failing to bring cases against the CCP’s standing army sleeper cells or the Caliphate Jihadists imported over our southern border for the past three years? In refusing to serve “the people,” the Biden Regime’s DOJ has lost all legal authority granted to them by our constitutional system. They only rule by unconstitutional fear, coercive mandate and force.
Although Republicans currently hold a small majority in the House, recent analysis portends that Speaker Johnson will again betray his Constitutional duty to the American people and fail to enable meaningful reforms that require the Biden DOJ to heel.
The best hope for relief is coming from the Democrat controlled Senate where senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) have drafted the SAFE Act. The most hawkish civil rights orgs on the left are dissatisfied with the SAFE Act but at the same time critical of the Biden Regime’s rejection of this draft.
These orgs overwhelmingly prefer the Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2023 by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) which has bipartisan support in both houses of Congress. (Note that the Brennan Center conspicuously omits facts RE weaponization against J6 protestors, as if protesting an obviously stolen election renders them unhuman, or something.)
Regardless of what happens in Congress, Biden is unlikely to sign any reforms into law. The Daily Caller reported back in February that Biden’s DOJ has sought court approval to continue warrantless spying on American citizens until April of 2025.
According to the ACLU, FISC granted Biden’s request and they are not happy. It’s very hard to sympathize with their complaint even though they’re correct. The ACLU sits silent while the Biden Regime holds political prisoners without trial for over three years. They likely voted for him with the knowledge of Biden’s domestic spying legislation that he sponsored in the 1990’s and beyond.
These so-called “Civil Liberties” organizations took no action to challenge the obviously rigged election that installed this pathologically lying despot, who’s been on the take his entire career, into the White House. They are among many complaining now who are complicit in this unconstitutional tyranny.
In part two of this series, we will explore how Joe Biden’s legislative career demonstrates that he has only just begun to live out his long-running authoritarian dream of being a despot in the White House.
The post Part 1: Despots, Spooks, and Goons — Unconstitutional Intelligence Gathering Abuses and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
video-surveillance-people
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘Zero findings. Not a single one. Not one’
It was all over the headlines only months ago when the Joe Biden administration sued Grand Canyon University, the largest Christian school in the nation, as part of what school officials described as a coordinated attack by Biden.
It was the Federal Trade Commission that filed a lawsuit against the school, making allegations that it didn’t reveal how long it would take for doctoral students to finish its accelerated program and marketed itself as a nonprofit.
The Department of Education, earlier claiming misinformation about the doctoral program, announced a fine of $37.7 million against the school.
Now a report from the Georgia Star News confirms that a state investigation has confirmed there’s no proof of any wrongdoing by the school.
So the federal agencies decided to continue their agenda against the Christian organization anyway.
The report said University President Brian Mueller told KSTAR, “They said, ‘Zero findings. Not a single one. Not one.'”
School spokesman Bob Romantic said in an interview with The College Fix that the audit covered all three allegations charged by the Biden regulators.
But he said the school still is being “targeted” by “systemic attacks … against GCU that we believe are retaliation for filing our lawsuit against the DOE.”
The school sued after the Department of Education brought out a list of its complaints and announced that $37.7 million fine.
Then the FTC sued, claiming telemarketing and marketing violations, concerns that now have been addressed by the state investigation.
Mueller suggested Biden is “maliciously targeting” the school, the report explained.
While the FTC claims the school misrepresented its cost, the report said “a degree calculator function on their website currently states the average number of continuation courses required for past students for each doctoral degree program in clear, red font above the program’s price listings.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post State Investigation Clears Christian School, But Feds Don’t Drop Case appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
classroom school
Vaunce News 
.jpg){kind=link}