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This article originally appeared on JoeHoft.com and was republished with permission.
It’s clear that the selection of women’s basketball players for the Olympic team is not based on results or merit; it’s based on politics.
The roster of the 2024 US Women’s Olympic team is out and Caitlin Clark, who broke every record possible in college, and who has made more threes than any other woman in the WNBA this year, is not on the team. OUTRAGEOUS.
CBS Sports reported (Per The Gateway Pundit):
Indiana Fever rookie Caitlin Clark is expected to be left off the Team USA women’s basketball roster for the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris, David Eickholt of 247Sports confirms.
USA Today’s Christine Brennan first reported shortly after midnight Saturday.
Clark became the college basketball all-time leading scorer earlier this year, and she is currently putting up some impressive numbers in the WNBA.
… Clark has also already put up two 30-point games — one of them being during the Fever’s 85-83 win over the Washington Mystics in which she reached a career-high seven 3-pointers. With that performance, Clark became the fastest rookie in WNBA history to record 200+ points and 50+ assists.
The list of women on the US basketball roster is reportedly as follows:
Clark has brought more people to women’s basketball than anyone in history. She owns nearly every women’s NCAA basketball record for scoring and assists.
Clark has more 3-pointers made to date this season in the WNBA than any woman selected to the Olympic team.
Brittney Griner has played in only one game this year in the WNBA. She made 11 points.
This year, Clark blew away Griner’s record for most points in a career in college. But that doesn’t matter to the Olympic committee choosing the WNBA team.
Was the committee wooed by the fact that Griner was arrested in Russia?
Griner was arrested in Russia after trying to bring an illegal substance into the country.
“As a US citizen was passing through the green channel at Sheremetyevo Airport upon arriving from New York, a working dog from the Sheremetyevo customs canine department detected the possible presence of narcotic substances in the accompanying luggage,” a statement from the customs service said.
“The customs inspection of the hand luggage being carried by the US citizen confirmed the presence of vapes with specifically smelling liquid, and an expert determined that the liquid was cannabis oil (hash oil), which is a narcotic substance.”
Griner was eventually set free via a prisoner exchange in December 2022.
WNBA star Brittney Griner was free Thursday after the Biden administration negotiated her release from a Russian penal colony in exchange for an arms dealer, according to a senior administration official.
President Joe Biden signed off on the trade, which took place in the United Arab Emirates, even though it meant leaving behind Paul Whelan, a U.S. corporate security executive who remains jailed in Russia…
Some on the right attacked Griner as being less deserving of release than Whelan, because she once protested during the playing of the national anthem at WNBA games to raise awareness of racial justice issues.
After that experience, Griner said that the only way she’ll play basketball overseas again is if she’s representing her country in international competition.
The post OUTRAGEOUS: Rookie Caitlin Clark Made More 3s in WNBA This Year than Anyone on Olympic Team, Beats Most in Scoring AND Assists! – Yet Pothead Brittney Griner Makes Team After Playing in ONLY ONE GAME! appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Leo Hohmann at Substack – republished with permission.
Says Leo: Must-read article I hope everyone will share with their sleeping friends and family members; If our people knew how close we are to nuclear war they would be in the streets demanding peace talks now!
I’ve been warning for two years about NATO putting itself on an escalator toward World War III. Many people thought I was a little over the top in my analysis, but now suddenly I’m not feeling so alone in my assessment.
Over the last several weeks and months, many other astute observers have finally taken off the blinders, opened their eyes and acknowledged just how close we are to the point of no return in the rush to war with the world’s largest nuclear-armed country, Russia.
I can’t tell you how many times in recent weeks I’ve read or heard comparisons to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The only difference is back then we had sane American leaders who realized the importance of diplomacy and talking directly with our adversaries in order to avoid a devastating nuclear exchange.
Some Westerner commentators, even some very smart ones, still deny that nuclear war is a real possibility in today’s world, or if it is, it’s very remote. My sense is that it’s not remote at all, given the leadership we now have in Washington.
If what we’ve seen so far is any indication, the Third World War will start as a conventional war between the U.S./NATO and Russia and quickly escalate to nuclear warheads exploding on military and civilian targets.
Why to I believe this?
It doesn’t matter if you like Putin, hate Putin or are indifferent towards Putin, there are some indisputable facts:
Opposition to nuclear war would seem to be the one issue that could unite the right and left in today’s divided America. We see the left protesting the war in Gaza while ignoring the war in Ukraine, when it’s this European theater that presents the most imminent threat to human life. The American right is always asleep and living in a false sense of security, so that’s no surprise.
Below is an excellent analysis by economist and attorney James Rickards explaining how we got to this point and why it’s not likely to end well.
By James Rickards at The Daily Reckoning
The steady path toward World War III continues. U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine in the war with Russia has been one long failure, but that hasn’t stopped them from escalating the war with new weapons and tactics.
Russia has met the escalation with its own escalation every step of the way. At what point do rational leaders in the West (if there are any left) pause, consider that the war is lost in Ukraine, deescalate and seek a treaty to end the war?
There’s no sign of that yet. In fact, all of the signs point to further escalation, which is a sure path to nuclear war. What good has escalation accomplished?
The West supplied Ukraine with HIMARS precision-guided artillery, but that largely failed because the Russians quickly learned how to jam the GPS guidance systems, so the missiles went off course.
That doesn’t mean the Russians shoot down or jam every HIMARS rocket Ukraine launches. Some will always get through. But overall, their effectiveness has been limited compared with expectations.
The U.S. and NATO also supplied Ukraine with Abrams, Leopard and Challenger tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles that have been left burning on the battlefield. They also require intensive maintenance Ukraine can’t necessarily provide, and are often unsuited for the battlefield conditions in Ukraine. Many Ukrainian soldiers have actually expressed a preference for Russian-made equipment over NATO’s.
Meanwhile, the Patriot anti-missiles systems cannot shoot down Russian hypersonic missiles and have been destroyed one-by-one at a cost of $1 billion each. F-16s are the next wonder weapon promised. But Russia fields the most sophisticated air defense system in the world. Many planes will be shot down by Russian S-400 anti-aircraft batteries and other systems.
These planes are also old, obsolete models from NATO inventories at the end of their service lives. And they can’t even be flown by Ukrainian pilots since they barely read English (the training manuals and maintenance manuals are all in English) and have not had enough time to train.
It takes about two years to become a competent F-16 fighter pilot; the Ukrainians have barely had six months to learn. F-16s are also unsuited for the often rugged airfield conditions in Ukraine (they require pristine runways so debris doesn’t get sucked into their engines on takeoff).
They can be operated from NATO bases but that opens another can of worms.
What’s the next harebrained scheme from NATO? Here’s the latest example. The U.S. and its allies have green-lighted missile attacks deep inside Russia using U.S.-made ATACMS ballistic missiles with a range of up to 190 miles.
These attacks have hit civilian targets such as the Russian city of Belgorod and critical military targets such as the Russian nuclear missile radar warning arrays. Both types of attacks are prompting a severe Russian response, including the final destruction of the entire Ukrainian power grid.
The attack on Russia’s early warning system is particularly provocative. Ukraine used U.K.-supplied drones to strike this radar system used by Russia to detect incoming nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The U.S. and Russia already adhere to what’s called the “launch on warning” doctrine. This means that if you detect incoming nuclear missiles, you don’t wait for them to hit their targets.
Instead, you launch your counterattack as soon as you detect the missiles. When it comes to nuclear war, it’s use it or lose it.
That puts the world on a hair trigger. Hitting a radar facility that’s part of a nuclear defense creates a blind spot in that defense and makes the hair trigger even more sensitive and launch prone.
And while Ukraine may have technically launched the missiles into Russia, it could not have done so without precise targeting data provided by the U.S. and its NATO allies. How do you think the U.S. would react if Mexico attacked U.S. targets using targeting data provided by Russia? It would directly implicate Russia and hold it responsible.
Here’s another question: Why would Ukraine attack this radar system at all? Ukraine doesn’t have nuclear missiles so it has no reason to compromise Russia’s nuclear defenses. The radar has no impact on the ground war in Ukraine. It wasn’t an airfield or ammo depot or any other militarily relevant target.
This plan is just another example of dangerous escalation by the U.S. and NATO and moves the world one step closer to nuclear war. Ukraine is all too happy to comply.
Proponents of escalation dismiss these concerns, saying we’ve already crossed multiple “red lines” and Russia hasn’t directly retaliated against us. Maybe against Ukraine, but not us. We can therefore go ahead and cross another red line, the Russians won’t do anything.
First off, that just provides more evidence that Vladimir Putin isn’t some bloodthirsty maniac who can’t be deterred. He obviously can be, and clearly recognizes the dangers of escalation. He doesn’t want war with the U.S. and NATO. Why would he?
Secondly, and more importantly, NATO’s arming and equipping of Ukraine was never a red line for Russia. Western observers simply assumed that providing HIMARS, ATACMSs and tanks would be red lines for Russia. But Russia never specifically said they were. They warned about the overall threat of escalation, but these weren’t specific red lines.
But direct attacks on Russian soil are a different matter. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Putin himself have issued specific warnings about NATO facilitation of attacks within Russia itself. That’s the difference. Here’s what Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, had to say:
Russia regards all long-range weapons used by Ukraine as already being directly controlled by servicemen from NATO countries. This is no military assistance, this is participation in a war against us. And such actions could well become a casus belli. Nobody today can rule out the conflict’s transition to its final stage.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand what he means by the conflict’s “final stage.” Now, Medvedev often issues provocative statements. But listen to the comments of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. It’s about as strongly worded as a diplomatic statement can get:
I would like to warn American leaders against miscalculations that could have fatal consequences. For unknown reasons, they underestimate the seriousness of the rebuff they may receive.
Except the reasons aren’t unknown. It’s because the West is led by incompetent and reckless people who don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t understand that they’re playing with fire.
I began studying nuclear war fighting in 1969 and have continued my studies for decades, which includes all the leading thinkers about nuclear war. While the experts disagree in certain respects, they all agree on one thing:
The most likely path to nuclear war is escalation. No one wakes up and says, “Nice day for a nuclear war. Let’s start one.”
Instead, war will be the result of a process of one side raising the stakes, the other side responding in kind and escalating further and so on in successive rounds until one party is backed into a corner and has no choice but to use nuclear weapons in an existential response.
Ironically, in that situation, the party that is less threatened may actually start the nuclear war in order to get the first-strike advantage. The result is annihilation: not just World War III, but possibly the end of most human life on Earth. Those that survive would probably wish they hadn’t.
This is incomprehensible. Ukraine is trying to drag the U.S. directly into the war with U.S. boots on the ground. Events may not get that far.
We may be destroyed in a nuclear World War III if this reckless escalation continues. Will anyone stop it?
LeoHohmann.com is 100 percent independent, not beholden to any corporate ads or sponsorships. If you appreciate my work and would like to support it, you may send a donation c/o Leo Hohmann, P.O. Box 291, Newnan, GA 30264, or via credit card here.
The post Dire Warning From Economist Jim Rickards: ‘Are They Trying to Start a Nuclear War?’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission.
Intellectual Froglegs comes out with his latest video — WAR.
Joe Dan Gorman released the latest Intellectual Froglegs video. Again, it’s an award-winning effort.
Joe Dan Gorman shares this at Intellectual Froglegs:
The massive level of fraud that’s been perpetrated against us is not even believable. The illusion of freedom. The illusion of electing a president. The illusion of justice… the innocent are persecuted and the guilty roam free.
And all while these evil people were commandeering the levers of government power… they were simultaneously maintaining the illusion that we were a free country….
The battle will be fierce, it will be difficult for many, but failure is not a choice.
We must keep our wits during this critical time. We do that with truth. And for that, I turn to God.
…Look at our timeline going back to 1776— we are in this ungodly mess because, in the mid-20th century, America turned away from God. And we need to turn back.
2024 requires that I do more episodes… so we’re going to pick up the frequency of intellectual froglegs and bring you calls to action and other patriotic activities as only intellectual froglegs can.
In closing, the financial health of Intellectual Froglegs is directly related to the financial health of our viewers…and these are tough times for a lot of us. For the first time in years, the Frogleg coffers are in the danger zone.
So for the next year, EVERYONE that donates will be in the CREDITS of the next show. To remain anonymous, drop a quick email to IntellectualFroglegs@gmail.com
Thank you for your support… and thank you for fighting to save our nation.
God bless you guys… and God bless our nation.
The post Intellectual Froglegs Releases His Latest Video Masterpiece: WAR appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by John Kachelman, Jr. – republished with permission from JoeHoft.com
There is an undeniable cycle of a nation’s lifespan that is sadly chronicled. The birth of a great nation is an exhilarating read. The ascendancy of a nation to “super-power” status is exciting. But the ascendant status is tenuous at best. Just as the rise of a nation to superpower status evolves, so is the loss of that status as the national greatness devolves into anarchy. Repeatedly, undeniably, and inescapably, the national degeneracy that subtly began becomes a juggernaut, and the once great “superpower” has become a “failed nation.” The greatness remains only in the past. The present is turbulent. The future portends absolute erasure.
In recent days we have celebrated the heroism that is framed by “D-Day.” That heroism is supported by endless journal entries from all “fronts” and all “wars.” Take a sociological look and contrast the culture then and now; the religious devotion then and now; the mutual respect then and now; the political commitment to the electorate then and now; the tolerance for immorality, crime and inhumanity then and now. The sad conclusion is that the greatness then has devolved into an abysmal failure now.
Only those unwilling to accept the facts of reality, who rest apathetically and ignorantly anticipate a “better” tomorrow think things are good. Incredibly these applaud the devolving culture and congratulate the uptick in criminal behavior and cheer the erasure of the governing statutes that secure personal freedoms. These curse the history that melded our nation’s greatness. These invent a “new perspective” that further corrupts the truth. These see no need to change. These see no corruption in the government that was established to serve the people but has now morphed into an imperial Government demanding that the people serve the Elite. Such a governing is no longer a governing “of,” “for,” and “by” the people, but it has devolved into a governing of tyrannical bureaucratic censure that ignores the “inalienable rights” with which every human is endowed.
The political Elite no longer praises the challenge: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.” The social justice warriors curse those who voice the dream “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Today’s reality undeniably presents the national disintegration from greatness to failure.
It is a choice
The national decay results from a choice of the citizen. Differing governing formats offer citizens differing methods of making their choices known. Some governing is totalitarian, but even then, the citizens will ultimately make choices regarding their nation.
The United States of America is a Constitutionally Represented Republic. It is not a democracy. This difference is treated under a separate article, but it is a significant factor that led the United States of America to become a great nation. In fact, it can be argued that this is the singular factor undergirding our nation’s greatness. Remove this element and you remove our nation.
The governing
The Constitution of the United States of America is a masterpiece of national governing. This document has protected our national integrity and has allowed a governing system to accomplish unparalleled feats on the worldwide stage. The Constitution has earned unique respect for its equity and foresighted precepts.
The Constitution of the United States has received accolades from many respected voices. Perhaps this comment by John Adams, to the Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798, is most appropriate: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Adams’ insight is remarkable. The United States Constitution is effective ONLY for “a moral and religious people.” He specifically notes that the Constitution is “wholly inadequate” to govern those who are not moral and religious. The conclusion is evident—those who are immoral and irreligious refuse the Constitution’s tenets! Admas further notes the consequence of the United States failing to respect the governing of the Constitution, “this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World.”
One would think that an undisputed respect and defense of the United States Constitution would be eagerly practiced by those elected to the governing levels of our nation. But evil is restless as it seeks destruction of mankind’s happiness. As Adams noted, evil seeks only to make man’s life an existence in “the most miserable habitation in the world.”
The Challenge
The United States Constitution has faced attacks from “activists” seeking to make the governing of our nation different from that envisioned by the Founding Fathers. In the most recent years the Democratic Party has targeted the literalist limitations of the United States Constitution so that little-by-little the personal rights that are endowed upon mankind are erased or even criminally prosecuted. The Republic that was to be equally represented, has devolved into an electoral who votes but whose votes do not count. Those “elected” arrogantly legislate saying “We know what the people need better than they know what they need.”
A personification of this attitude is found in Barack Obama’s attitude toward the United States Constitution. A 2001 interview with then Senator Obama recorded his views of the inadequacy of our Constitution. These views frame the “fundamental change” that the Democratic Party seeks to make in the United States Constitution.
The central tenet of the United States Constitution is that all were created by the God of the Bible. As the article cited states, “Consequently, God—not government—had endowed each of us with rights, first among which were life, liberty, and property, the combination of which allowed the pursuit—but no guarantee—of happiness…That understanding led them to create for the first time in history a government built out of and respecting these universal rights of man, a government that was ‘of, by, and for’ the people, not the other way around. And it also led them to craft our Bill of Rights.”
However, Obama views the Constitution as merely “a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
Another article is, Top 10 Ways Obama Violated the Constitution during His Presidency. This article validates how the Obama administration, and its bureaucrats, have been the most lawless executive administration in the history of the United States of America. This rejection of governing by the United States Constitution was allowed because Obama (and his administration, the politicians, and the judicial decisions) thought they were professionally above the law! They then ignored the legal limits of the separation of powers and disrespected constitutional bounds that are to control the tyranny of governmental overreach.
The difference in the views of the United States Constitution is simple—one view maintains the citizens know what is best for them while the other view maintains only the Politicians know what is best for the citizens.
The Critical Moment
Our nation’s existence has faced many attacks. Today the existence of our nation is threatened from the evil within the governing structure. This is the evil that curses the Constitution as archaic and outdated. This is the evil that attacks personal liberties. This is the evil that corrupts the basis for free elections. This is the evil that compromises the elected officials.
Our nation stands perilously close to erasure. Our glorious past is voided by its decadent present and its future is destined to be confined to the dustbins of “has been nations.”
In history past a world power completed the cycle of national existence. The alarming announcement was made, “You have been weighed in the scales and founding deficient.” The ominous words failed to spark any response and “that same night” the World Power was felled (The Bible, Daniel 5:23-31).
Let us not ignore history’s lesson. In order for citizens to salvage our Represented Republic we must expect and demand compliance with the United States Constitution. This coming election will determine our nation’s existence. The worthless Elite will make speeches and boast in promises, but after November 5, they will return and continue as they have ever since their freshman year.
The post John L. Kachelman, Jr.: Our Nation Stands Perilously Close to Erasure – The USA “Weighed in the Scales” appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Cash often distributed through outside aide organizations
A federal watchdog report reveals that after America had been at war with the Taliban for two decades, the Joe Biden administration now has delivered at least $11 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to the terrorists. Probably much more.
A Center Square report posted at Just the News explains much of the cash has been delivered through various aide groups that get federal tax dollars.
And, the report warns, “experts” suggest the actual total Biden has delivered to the Taliban could be much higher.
The Taliban, previously in control in Afghanistan, took control again within days of Biden’s abrupt decision to yank American troops out, a scheme that cost American lives and left behind tens of billions of dollars in American war machinery for the Taliban to use or sell.
Further, Biden left behind hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghanis who had worked with the American presence there for years – all in danger of death at the hands of the Taliban.
The report cited the conclusion of SIGAR, a federal watchdog, which found, “The U.S. government has continued to be the largest international donor supporting the Afghan people since the former Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.”
The report continued, “Since then, the U.S. government has provided more than $2.8 billion in humanitarian and development assistance to help the people of Afghanistan.”
The report also found “the $10.9 million paid by 38 U.S. Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development, and U.S. Agency for Global Media implementing partners is likely only a fraction of the total amount of U.S. assistance funds provided to the Taliban in taxes, fees, duties, and utilities because UN agencies receiving U.S. funds did not collect data or provide relevant information about their subawardees’ payments.”
SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, explained, “To carry out their programs, U.S. agencies rely heavily on nongovernmental organizations and public international organizations, such as the UN, to implement humanitarian and development assistance. Both the former Ghani administration and the current Taliban-controlled government benefited from U.S. aid by imposing taxes, fees, duties and utilities on implementing partners as a condition of operating in Afghanistan.”
The report noted that an independent government watchdog, Judicial Watch, previously documented how the Taliban created fake nongovernmental organizations to “siphon away” tax dollars.
That group reported, “Since the terrorist group returned to power in August 2021, Uncle Sam has continued to fund Afghanistan’s education sector through six programs that cost $185.2 million even though the Taliban has issued decrees drastically limiting access to education for girls and women as well as restricting women’s ability to work and other basic freedoms.”
“SIGAR has reported on the importance of U.S. funds being spent on U.S. priorities and not in ways that benefit the Taliban, which represses women and girls, denies the human rights of the Afghan people and remains unrecognized as a legitimate government by the U.S. government and the international community,” the watchdog said.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Biden Has Delivered Millions in Taxpayer Money to … the TALIBAN! appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
OP-ED by Nevada US Senate Candidate Dr. Jeff Gunter, MD:
As a former U.S. Ambassador for President Trump, I have witnessed more corruption than most people can imagine. President Trump was right when he said that the true threat to the Republican Party is the enemy from within.
During my tenure as ambassador, China was unleashing bioweapons, and I was criticized for fighting back. I was unanimously confirmed to my position and I have donated millions and volunteered countless hours to serve Republican leadership. I even contributed to Senate election chief Steve Daines, and he had no problem accepting my money.
For 17 years, I have sat on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. I have treated cancer patients, saving the lives of children, veterans, family, and friends. I know exactly what it’s like to fight outside enemies. But what this race has taught me is that the enemy fighting from within is more dangerous than any adversary.
I declared my candidacy in July of 2023, poised to start strong. Then, I received a call from my general consultant informing me that they received a threat from the NRSC, threatening to pull over $20 million of business from the group if they continued to support me. Consequently, they abandoned me. A similar call came from my friends at the RJC, who received similar threats. We lost vendors, donors, and belief in the system.
But we fought on and gained ground. The harder we fought, the more corruption we encountered. Republicans, heavily led by the NRSC RINO Swamp, spent more time and money fighting me than fighting Democrats. They insulted my patients and even suggested I needed professional help. They called me a crackpot and a weirdo.
I’ve always said that President Trump is the Deep State’s worst enemy. They know this, and so they work tirelessly to keep him down. And just like President Trump, I won’t be fazed by these efforts.
The level of corruption and betrayal I have seen from within the party is staggering. It’s not just about money or power; it’s about a complete disregard for the principles and values that we, as Republicans, are supposed to stand for. The NRSC and other party elites have shown that they are more interested in maintaining their control and influence than in supporting candidates who genuinely want to make a difference. They support a candidate who stole money from the people of Nevada to pay off his own debts through a “Scam” PAC. A ghost candidate who refuses to debate and is down 14 points in general election polls.
I have often wondered if this resistance is driven by antisemitism, as the NRSC hasn’t supported a Jewish candidate in decades, or if it’s simply because my record shows that I won’t be intimidated. They see my strength, my resilience, and my dedication to fighting for what is right, and they feel threatened. But Nevada, take note: I will never stop fighting.
When I become the next United States Senator from this great Silver State, the corruption ends on day one. I will work tirelessly to ensure that the voices of the people are heard and that the true values of our party are upheld.
The Republican Party is at a crossroads. It’s time to take a stand. It’s time to say enough is enough. We must hold our leaders accountable and demand that they put the interests of the people above their own. We must root out the corruption and ensure that our party is one that we can all be proud of.
I will continue to stand strong, to fight for what is right, and to represent the people of Nevada with honor and integrity. Together, we can bring about the change that we so desperately need. Together, we can restore the Republican Party to its true greatness. Thank you for your support, and God bless America.
Dr. Jeffrey Gunter, MD, is an American healthcare executive, philanthropist, diplomat, and former U.S. Ambassador serving as the 24th United States Ambassador to Iceland. He is currently a candidate for U.S. Senate in Nevada.
The post (OP-ED) President Trump Was Right: The True RINO Versus MAGA Threat is the Enemy from Within appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
Is the court working with former Dominion executive Eric Coomer in his defamation lawsuit against President Trump and others?
On Thursday, in a deposition with Colorado businessman and entrepreneur Joe Oltmann, Coomer’s attorneys and the court demanded Oltmann disclose his source, who he used to infiltrate the local antifa group online.
Former Dominion executive Eric Coomer became famous after the 2020 Election when videos like this of Coomer showing how to alter votes were found on the Internet.
At the same time, after the 2020 Election, Joe Oltmann disclosed that he heard Coomer share on a conference call before the election that he (Coomer) would ensure that Trump would not win the 2020 Election.
This information went viral and was shared by The Gateway Pundit and others.
In late December 2020, Coomer sued Oltmann and a select group of others who shared Oltmann’s disclosure, including Sidney Powell, Jim Hoft, radio host Eric Metaxas, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, and more.
This case has been overseen by numerous judges, who have taken some questionable actions. Thursday’s actions were no exception.
Clark, TGP, and others are being sued for sharing the information that Oltmann reported. It’s questionable why any judge would include these individuals in this case.
Oltmann was deposed by Coomer’s attorneys, who were scheduled to take oral and video testimony.
DEPO Notice-Joe Oltmann Set for 06-06 by Joe Ho on Scribd
Here is the related order:
128-Level 1 Restricted MINUTE ORDER Re Oltmann (20240409) by Joe Ho on Scribd
The venue, as noted above, was the Jury Room of the Courtroom of the Honorable Magistrate Judge Kathryn A. Starnella, located in the Byron G. Rogers Federal Courthouse in downtown Denver.
Oltmann disclosed that the room was very hot on Thursday, at around 78 degrees. This likely was to make it look like he was sweating when answering questions.
The Coomer team went on to ask Oltmann about 100 questions over a three-hour period. There was a short lunch break, and after that, when Oltmann came back to the courthouse, Eric Coomer joined his attorneys in the room.
Coomer’s attorneys asked Oltmann, who gave him the information about the phone call that Joe attended, where Coomer allegedly made the statements that made headlines. Oltmann would not provide that information. (Note that Oltmann believes he doesn’t have to provide this information because Oltmann was a journalist with Conservative Daily at the time of the event.)
Coomer’s attorneys also asked how Joe gained access to Eric Coomer’s Facebook page, which was covered with comments and articles about Antifa, hating Trump, and more. Oltmann would not share that as well.
Eventually, Oltmann left before giving up his sources.
It now appears that this deposition was held in the courthouse so that the judge could step in and compel Oltmann to give up his source. This may have been coordinated between Coomer’s attorneys and the judge.
Oltmann refused to give up his source and left the building. This infuriated the Coomer attorneys. We will post updates as soon as we hear more.
More from Behizy:
“In Colorado, Dominiom Voting attorneys and a corrupt judge tried to force a journalist to reveal his source that gave up damning information on Dominion. They cornered him in a deposition, he held his ground and WALKED OUT of the courtroom
The Conservative Daily journalist & businessman Joe Oltmann also said they set the room temperature at around 78 degrees. This was likely done to make it look like he was sweating when answering questions.
The case has been overseen by a few different judges, a clear sign that they wanted to find the most crooked judge.
Dominion is in desperation mode, trying everything to silence the truth.”
BREAKING: In Colorado, Dominiom Voting attorneys and a corrupt judge tried to force a journalist to reveal his source that gave up damning information on Dominion. They cornered him in a deposition, he held his ground and WALKED OUT of the courtroom
The Conservative Daily… pic.twitter.com/K2M7yEHeEf
— George (@BehizyTweets) June 7, 2024
The post Joe Oltmann Walks Out of Deposition with Eric Coomer’s Attorneys After They Attempt to Force Him to Give Up His Sources appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire
After an impressive close second-place finish in the women’s 400-meter medley at the World Aquatics Championships in Qatar earlier this year, Israeli swimmer Anastasia Gorbenko acknowledged the emotional weight of representing her country amid global turmoil over the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s counter-offensive in Gaza.
“I’m just so happy to be here and represent my country in this hard time. Being here with the Israeli flag means a lot to me and to my country, so that’s the best I can do,” Gorbenko, whose parents are from Ukraine but was born and raised in Israel, said in an interview that was amplified to the crowd.
Some boos rained down from the crowd when Gorbenko crossed the finish line, but louder heckling began at the swimmer’s first mention of Israel in the interview. Others in the crowd quickly tried to drown out the jeers and boos with applause and cheers. It was the first time Gorbenko has medaled in the World Championships in the 400-meter medley, though she’s been a strong competitor in the past, finishing the 2021 World Championships with a gold in both the 50-meter breaststroke and the 100-meter medley.
The meet’s organizers provided more security for the medal ceremony and the victory walk, and the crowd wasn’t allowed as close to the ceremony as usual. The award presentation went off without a hitch, but the anti-Israel message was delivered, making international headlines on CNN, the Associated Press, Reuters, and numerous other news outlets.
The incident came as no surprise to parents and supporters of the Israeli Olympic swimming team, who had spent months urging the World Aquatics Federation to relocate the February meet planned for Doha to a more neutral location.
They argued that failing to do so would risk the Israeli team’s security and subject the young athletes to a predictable intimidation campaign that could impact their performances. Nearly all of those who didn’t attend were training on U.S. college campuses, including the University of California at Berkeley, Northwestern University, and Stanford University, where intense antisemitic protests have been roiling campuses for months, with many Jewish students expressing outrage and fear over being targeted for their faith and Jewish and Israeli heritage.
But the federation didn’t budge and moved forward with the World Championship in Doha as planned.
That event typically would have determined who qualifies for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Gorbenko obviously qualified, and several others on the team are well positioned to make the cut. But those supporting the Israeli team argue that the athletes who decided to sit out the Doha meet are no longer operating on a level playing field with their peers in other countries.
Even the three Israeli women’s team members who decided to compete in Doha took precautions by traveling with extra security and covering any logos mentioning Israel on their clothing and gear.
Now, some of the team’s supporters are pressing the International Olympic Committee and the World Aquatics Federation to provide more Olympic qualifying opportunities for the Israel athletes who decided to stay home and not risk competing in Doha.
Those supporting the Israeli swim team are pressing the federation for answers – Why should the athletes who decided not to attend the Doha event out of concern for their safety and ability to compete at their highest performance levels while under duress be punished when there’s such an easy fix?
The IOC and World Aquatics could easily allow make-up qualifying opportunities during the team trials in Netanya, Israel, scheduled this week from June 5-8, or at the European Championships in Belgrade June 10-23, advocates of the accommodation argue. Adding time trials, which are routinely conducted in connection with major meets, wouldn’t require extra costs or logistical issues.
Proponents argue that any qualifying Israeli relay could easily be added to the roster as a 17th team, and the athletes could swim in an unused lane in each of the added preliminary heats during the Olympics.
“I urgently request the IOC allow the Israel team to implement time-trials during their own Olympic trials in Netanya [this week] – where they can try to qualify for three additional relay events,” said Eric Spitz, a Jewish tech and sports businessman whose daughter is a dual citizen of Israel and the United States and an Israeli women’s swim team member. “This would allow Israeli athletes who could not compete safely in Doha a fair chance to chase their Olympic dreams.”
In his letter to the IOC, Spitz also referenced the 1972 Olympics massacre that occurred in Munich’s Olympic Village more than a half-century ago. Attackers affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization infiltrated Munich’s Olympic Village and carried out the attack, which would eventually leave 11 Israeli athletes dead, along with a West German policeman and five of the eight assailants.
After the death of his Olympic teammates, legendary swimmer Mark Spitz (no relation to Eric Spitz), who won seven gold medals and set seven world records at the 1972 Munich games, was forced to flee Germany in haste, hidden under a blanket and fearing for his life.
During a 2022 event in Tel Aviv, IOC President Thomas Bach demonstrated a keen awareness of Jewish athletes’ security concerns. During a 2022 event in Tel Aviv, he apologized for waiting 50 years to commemorate the Israeli victims of the Munich Massacre “in a dignified way,” labeling the event one of the “darkest days in Olympic history.”
Earlier this year, Bach also acknowledged the need for “special measures” to be taken to protect Israeli athletes, given the “heinous attack” on the Israeli team in 1972.
“The 1972 Munich Olympics serve as a tragic reminder of what happens when Olympic values are compromised, so let us not repeat those mistakes,” Eric Spitz wrote in his letter, addressed to IOC members.
The IOC declined to comment on whether it would provide more qualifying opportunities for the Israeli swimmers and suggested to RealClearPolitics that World Aquatics would be better suited to respond to questions about the need for more qualifying times for relays. World Aquatics did not provide a response to RCP’s repeated inquiries.
Deciding not to move the World Championship out of Qatar rankled advocates for fair treatment of Jewish and Israeli athletes in all sports. The country has recently tried to burnish its image, hosting the World Cup in 2022 despite an avalanche of criticism from human rights groups, but the comments of its minister of foreign affairs blaming Israel for the Oct. 7 assault drew intense international condemnation.
Other efforts to discriminate against or treat Jewish or Israeli athletes differently this year have sparked international controversy. The International Ice Hockey Federation earlier this year banned Israeli athletes from international competitions as a way to protect their security but then abruptly reversed that decision after a fierce backlash.
The Israeli hockey team won the silver medal last year in its division. After the Oct. 7 attacks, the IIHF decided to move a portion of a competition, originally to be held in Israel, to Bulgaria. But the move to ban Israeli hockey players from all international competition did not sit well with the National Hockey League, which expressed “significant concerns” about the decision.
FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, in mid-May postponed a decision on whether to temporarily suspend Israel over its offensive in Gaza and the West Bank, saying it would seek legal advice before considering a request by the Palestinian Football Association to expel the Israeli team. The motion called for Israel’s suspension over what it characterized as “international law violations committed by the Israeli occupation in Palestine, particularly in Gaza.”
Iran made a similar request in February to bar Israel’s national and club teams from competing in international play. Palestine Football Association Jibril Rajoub formally submitted the request, urging FIFA to “stand on the right side of history.” But Rajoub is hardly an ideal spokesman for the cause, as David May, research manager for Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, points out in a recent article.
Rajoub earned a life sentence from Israel in 1970 for throwing a grenade at an Israeli military truck – though Jerusalem released him 15 years later in a prisoner exchange. Rajoub has continued the open public threats, declaring in 2013 that he would drop a nuclear bomb on Israel if given the opportunity.
“Intimidation and harassment of Israeli athletes, sadly, is nothing new,” May told RealClearPolitics in an interview. “While young Israelis face the greatest competitors in the world, they must also contend with hostile venues.”
“Fortunately for Anastasia, she was wearing earplugs, which helped drown out the jeers as she earned the silver medal, but the hostile, inhospitable environment added for her another layer of adversity,” he argued. “Qatar – and any other prospective host – should ensure that all athletes can compete fairly. Ensuring fair play is the bare minimum for hosting athletic events, which should bring people together, not serve as stages for discrimination and hostility.”
The IOC and World Aquatics is obligated, May said, to provide Israeli swimmers with opportunities to qualify “that don’t require them to travel to one of the main patrons of Hamas, a terrorist group committed to Israel’s destruction.”
Spitz argues it’s only fair to allow the Israeli swimmers, including his daughter, who sat out the Doha meet, a chance to qualify for the summer Olympic games at a location where she and others feel secure and can fully concentrate on their performances.
“[Anastasia] Gorbenko’s unfortunate experience is a testament to the resilience and spirit of Israeli athletes,” Spitz said. “It also serves as vindication for the decision of those athletes who declined to attend.”
“The IOC must step up and show the courage to do what is right,” Spitz implored. “You have the responsibility and the power to make a decision that prioritizes the safety and well-being of all athletes.”
The post Will the Olympics Committee Play Fair With Israeli Swimmers? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
We’ve reported multiple times about the attacks against Caitlin Clark in her WNBA games since joining the league this year.
Clark’s games at the WNBA are the most watched WNBA games on ESPN and ABC ever.
Clark is bringing an estimated $100 million to the league and this is how the women respond.
This play by the WNBA team in Jersey was not called a foul.
Never seen a savior of a league get treated like this https://t.co/TXNEd4umbl
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) May 18, 2024
This assault in another game was not called a penalty. The woman nearly knocked Clark’s head off.
I invested $100,000 into WNBA stocks just before Caitlin Clark was drafted, thinking she would take this eye sore of a stud league to the next level. 5 games into her career & I’m pulling my investments. This league is beyond saving. No foul calls on assault & battery. Cooked. pic.twitter.com/GhSygLTZXa
— J. Mulholland (@MulhollandL0ver) May 23, 2024
This past weekend, Clark was assaulted again on the court. This time during a game with the Chicago team in the WNBA.
ASSAULT!
— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) June 1, 2024
Angel Reese celebrated the assault from the bench.
Angel Reese cheering cheap shot ball pic.twitter.com/uhddcJnMR3
— Heavens! (@HeavensFX) June 1, 2024
Chicago player Angel Reese gave Clark an elbow later in the game to no foul.
Angel Reese cheering cheap shot ball pic.twitter.com/uhddcJnMR3
— Heavens! (@HeavensFX) June 1, 2024
Indiana congressman Jim Banks has had enough. He sent a letter to the WNBA requesting that the league take action.
Indiana U.S. Representative Jim Banks is calling on WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert to take action to protect Indiana Fever rookie Caitlin Clark.
In a June 4 letter to Engelbert, Banks referenced Clark’s ability to increase viewership and attendance this season. The news of Banks’ letter to Engelbert was first reported by Outkick.
“Unfortunately, since joining the WNBA, Clark’s exceptionalism has been met with resentment and repeated attacks from fellow players,” Banks wrote.
Banks specifically mentioned the foul on Clark by the Chicago Sky’s Chennedy Carter, which was later upgraded to Flagrant 1. Carter shoulder-checked Clark as the Fever rookie was waiting for an inbound pass. Clark fell to the ground, and it was originally called an away-from-ball foul.
“During the Fever’s win over the Chicago Sky on Saturday, Chennedy Carter went out of her way to knock Clark to the floor while neither player had the ball,” said Banks, who is running against Democrat Valerie McCray to fill Mike Braun’s U.S. Senate seat. “Further, the excessive attack was visibly cheered on and supported by Carter’s teammate Angel Reese.”
The post Indiana Congressman Jim Banks Calls on WNBA to Take Action to Protect Rookie Caitlin Clark from Attacks appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Elie Mischel
In a revealing monologue, Steve Bannon disclosed that he had proposed an audacious plan for President Trump’s first official act after his 2017 inauguration – immediately relocating the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The former White House chief strategist said his suggestion was to skip the traditional inauguration luncheon and have Trump formally announce the historic embassy move that same day before addressing a joint session of Congress.
“My recommendation, in the transition, was that we actually move the embassy to Jerusalem right after the inauguration. Skip the lunch… do the parade, go to the White House, all the folks are there, and we actually move [the embassy], on the historic day of his inauguration, to Jerusalem right then,” Bannon stated on his War Room Battleground, late afternoon show.
“And then President Trump would go back to the Capital for a joint session of Congress and we’d then lay out our 100 day plan,” he added.
Bannon claims the bold plan was nixed due to pushback from the State Department, who he says warned of hyperbolic scenarios like “3,000 U.S. embassies” being seized and “9,000 American hostages taken” if the move happened so quickly.
“All of it was a lie, all of it was spin…The permanent State Department hates Israel, full on,” Bannon alleged.
The dramatic story was corroborated by former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who was a guest on Bannon’s show.
“I remember your whiteboard – right at the top of your list was moving the embassy on day one. What you said brought back a really present memory – I remember that well,” Friedman confirmed.
It wasn’t until over a year later in May 2018 that the embassy relocation – a longstanding priority for Israel’s government – was finally carried out by the Trump administration after repeated delays by previous presidents. The move was celebrated as historic recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Bannon’s revelations came during a special War Room episode focused on the Jewish vote heading into the 2024 presidential election. The program featured discussions on whether secular and liberal Jewish Americans may shift towards supporting Trump’s re-election due to President Biden’s policies towards Israel, which Bannon believes have been disastrous.
Left-wing critics have accused Bannon of antisemitism in the past, but he has emerged as a fierce defender of Israel during the recent conflict with Hamas militants in Gaza.
On the show, Bannon vehemently rejected the Biden administration’s support for a two-state solution, calling it catastrophic for Israel’s security. He has frequently argued that Israel is fighting not just for its own survival, but for the preservation of Western civilization and Judeo-Christian values against radical Islam. According to Bannon, Israel’s military campaigns are as much for the security of the West as they are for its own people.
Knesset member Ohad Tal, another guest, made a direct appeal to American Jews to vote for President Trump, while Ambassador Friedman called on the Biden Administration to “Let Israel be great again” and win the war against Hamas.
The special episode of Bannon’s show was co-hosted by Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, host of Eyes on Israel, a weekly 1 hour show covering Israel related issues on the Real America’s Voice network, the same network Bannon is on daily.
https://israel365news.com/380385/for-israels-sake-bring-back-trump/
https://americasvoice.news/playlists/show/eyes-on-israel/ – Eyes on Israel
There are increasing indications that many Jewish voters could swing towards the Republican Party and Donald Trump in the 2024 election. A poll of New York voters in February found that 53% of Jewish respondents intended to vote for Trump, a striking shift from typical Jewish voting patterns that have leaned heavily Democratic in recent decades.
Another data point suggesting a potential Jewish rightward drift: an article in The Bulwark reported that major Jewish donors appear to be redirecting contributions toward the GOP, seemingly in response to Biden administration policies viewed as problematic on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
With Jewish voters being a crucially important demographic in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania, even a modest Jewish shift to the GOP could profoundly impact the 2024 election outcome.
The post Steve Bannon: We Tried to Move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem on Trump’s Inauguration Day appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Newest ruling addresses exclusion of Catholic preschools from program
For at least the third time, the state of Colorado’s anti-Christian agenda has been cited – and condemned – by the federal courts.
The latest ruling said the state broke the law by excluding Catholic preschools from a universal preschool program – solely because those schools consider religious affiliate in making enrollment decisions.
It is the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty that explained a federal court ruling cites the state’s illegal exclusion of those preschools from a program that funds 15 hours per week of free preschool to more than 40,000 families.
During its first year, it benefited families with children in private, public and faith-based preschools.
But leftist activists inside the state’s bureaucracy refused to authorize benefits to families who sent their children to St. Mary’s and St. Bernadette’s Catholic preschools because those institutions ask families to share their Catholic beliefs.
The court found, in its 101-page opinion, that the state’s discrimination “created an unworkable scheme that breaches the appropriate limits on state power.”
The court found the state had “no compelling interest” in its discriminatory policy.
“Last year, a different federal judge in Denver also issued a ruling against the state, in a case brought by a separate religious preschool raising similar claims,” Becket reported.
“Of course a Catholic school shouldn’t be punished for caring about its students’ religion,” explained Nick Reaves, a Becket lawyer. “Colorado richly deserves this injunction, as it did the earlier one.”
The schools explained the state’s discrimination violated the Free Exercise, Free Speech and Establishment clauses of the First Amendment.
Integral to the state’s agenda is that it demands schools incorporate sexual orientation and gender identity ideologies into their programs. The state has plunged headfirst into that ideology since the election of homosexual Gov. Jared Polis.
The judge said, “The department has allowed faith-based providers to deny children and families equal opportunity based on their religious affiliation, or lack thereof, and has cited no compelling interest for permitting that discrimination while denying plaintiffs’ request for a related exemption. On that narrow basis, I conclude defendants have violated plaintiffs’ free-exercise rights and that judgment in favor of plaintiffs is warranted. I consequently grant Plaintiffs relief in the form of a limited permanent injunction, declaratory judgment, and nominal damages.”
It ruled, “The court immediately and permanently enjoins defendants Lisa Roy and Dawn Odean, acting in their official capacities on behalf of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, from requiring, as a condition for participation in the Colorado Universal Preschool Program, that the preschools operated by plaintiffs St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton and St. Bernadette Catholic Parish in Lakewood agreed to provide or provide eligible children an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of religious affiliation for as long as defendants allow exceptions from the religious affiliation aspect of the equal-opportunity requirement set out in [state law] and in the Colkorado Universial Preschool Program Service Agreement.
The defendants were ordered to pay $1 nominal damages.
The total hasn’t been announced, but Colorado taxpayers likely won’t get off so easily in the attacks on Christianity earlier, under the administration of Polis.
It recently lost the 303 Creative case at the U.S. Supreme Court.
There, state officials demanded that a Christian web designer follow the state’s anti-Christian “non-discrimination” mandate and promote events that violated the web designer’s faith.
A judge recently ruled that the state – the taxpayers – must pay the costs and fees for the plaintiff in that caser.
Such cases, by the time they are all the way through the high court, can accumulate tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars in lawyers’ time and costs.
The leftist state’s failed attack was on Lorie Smith and her 303 Creative company, through which she intended to create websites for couples being married.
However, the state demanded that should she begin that service, she also must provide the same services to same-sex duos, in violation of her Christian faith.
She sued for the First Amendment violation demanded by the state, and won.
The state earlier lost a similar battle with Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who challenged the state’s “non-discrimination” plan that also would require him to promote ideologies that violate his Christian faith.
In that case, the Supreme Court specifically cited Colorado’s “hostility” to Christianity under Polis.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post State Scolded AGAIN for Violating Rights of Christians appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Ahmad Massoud
The Taliban seized power in Kabul almost three years ago, and the disasters are already considerable. The population is malnourished and even starving. The country has no government and is in a state of total anarchy.
Afghanistan has become a pariah state and a sanctuary for regional and international terrorism. The economy is in a catastrophic state, the healthcare system is deplorable, women are erased from public life, the education system is devalued, and girls’ education is reduced to nothing. Basically, gender and ethnic apartheid reign the country today.
Terrorists continue to commit crimes, murder, and stalk citizens in their homes. They even organized several attacks against me, all of which were fortunately thwarted thanks to our networks and trusted men.
These obscurantists from another era also plunder the properties of the people of Afghanistan, occupy houses, loot businesses in contempt of all local customs and principles, not to mention international law.
Ethnic cleansing operations have clearly taken place in Kabul, Daykundi, Takhar, Faryab, the Kandahar region, and the Andarab district. How many war crimes will have to be counted before the international community finally agrees to react?
The evidence is there, irrefutable, patiently collected and painstakingly verified. The risk that terrorism supported by the Taliban will spill over their borders and inspire other regional and international extremist groups has already started. History is full of lessons in this regard, which show that when a geographical base is established, when a movement obtains a vast territorial base, it creates emulators.
When Daesh seized Raqqa in Syria and then Mosul in Iraq in 2014, the terrorist organization attracted thousands of extremists from all over the world, including Western countries.
But hope remains. Hope for a better world, hope for a Muslim world free of the imposters who impose extremism and distort the true convictions and values of Islam. I am convinced that the aspirations of the people of Afghanistan for freedom, peace, and democracy will one day be realized. It is impossible for the yoke of terror and totalitarianism to prevail in the long term. History has demonstrated this on many occasions.
There is always a turning point in history when a dictatorship collapses, and this will soon be the case in Afghanistan. Our future can only be freedom in democracy and pluralism.
The people of Afghanistan and the international community now know that the Taliban’s exercise of power and their radical Islamism are in total contradiction with the teachings of Islam, and that they have distorted its holy precepts to nurture extremism.
Although over the last twenty years, the people of Afghanistan have undergone notable changes, particularly in education, the brutal policies applied by the Taliban terrorist group prove that they have changed neither their dogmas nor their objectives.
The Taliban’s determination to establish a regime based on an erroneous and abusive interpretation of Islam makes it impossible to establish an inclusive and democratic political system in Afghanistan’s diverse society. It is, in fact, a criminal syndicate, as I argued in my bachelor’s thesis, that hides its face behind a hypothetical intention to return to religion, while its aim is to confiscate power for its own benefit and secure its gains and privileges, including royalties from drug trafficking.
Opponents of their politico-religious line are massacred or at best thrown into prison, and ethnic, sectarian, and religious groups such as the Hazaras, Twelver and Ismaili Shias, Sikhs, and Hindus are in no way protected from attacks and bombings by the Taliban or their henchmen and extremist merchants. In fact, it is quite the contrary.
The attack on worshippers at the Sayed Abad mosque in Kunduz, at mosques in Kabul, Kandahar, and Balkh, and the massacre of Hazara children at the Kaaj school are all crimes committed by the Taliban against humanity.
Subjugation and the prohibition of rationality and critical thought are intrinsic to the Taliban ideological system. In this dark nebula, all Muslims are obliged to consider the hypothetical and self-proclaimed commander of the believers, the so-called supreme leader of the Taliban, as the shadow of God on Earth.
Whereas, as we have seen, the essential question is whether this terrorist group’s actions of imposing their demands on the citizens of Afghanistan are in line with the very essence of Muslim doctrine. Coercion is intended to conceal this gross deception.
Clearly, the exercise of domination and the sanctification of violence to ensure an oppressive order can only lead to tyranny, unlike a system based on the will of the people. And tyranny only serves to engender all manner of corruption and destruction within society.
Among the many benevolent theories and ideas that have been propounded to curb despotism throughout history, democracy is the only way to guarantee the legitimacy of a government by ensuring democratic rights, justice, and values. The Taliban condemn the democratic system all the more because they fear the electoral process and the verdict of the ballot box.
Hope is also the clandestine action of women, mothers, teachers. Braving many dangers, they meet, occasionally protest, defy the regime, organize secret meetings, and set up parallel education to provide a proper education for girls.
Despite the near certainty that the Ministry of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice will intervene to disperse any gathering, Afghanistan’s women regularly take to the streets to protest against the restrictions imposed on freedoms. I admire their action all the more as most of these women have very little means and are often deprived of a job because of the prohibitions put in place by the Taliban’s iniquitous power.
The actions of our resistance forces and the civil society are converging. As every day passes our operations are increasing in precision and intensity. Many local Taliban commanders and repentant Taliban have joined the National Resistance Front.
Every link of the population is important, in urban as well as rural areas, and creates connections between the military and the civilian. Little by little, we forged relationships, even underground, with personalities from different ethnic and religious groups, women’s rights activists, civil society groups, human rights defenders, intellectuals, political figures, party leaders, and former parliamentarians.
The physiognomy of the resistance has thus completely changed in the space of a few months, with ramifications on the international scene.
Ahmad Massoud, an ethnic Tajik from Northern Afghanistan, is the leader of the National Resistance Front (NRF) of Afghanistan. Mr. Massoud is the son of the late anti-soviet and revolutionary commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud. Following the Taliban’s takeover on August 15, 2021, Ahmad created the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan to struggle for justice and freedom. According to NRF’s strategy, they are struggling for a democratic, decentralized and pluralistic Afghanistan where all citizens enjoy equal rights regardless of their ethnicity, religious beliefs, and gender.
His new book, The Name of My Father: Struggling for Freedom in Afghanistan, details his part in the resistance against the Taliban, his father’s assassination, Joe Biden’s foreign policy mistakes in Afghanistan, and what the future looks like for the country.
The post Combating Extremism and Terrorism, the Two Cancers appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire
The political ground shifted in Texas last week, and the impact of the electoral shakeup could send aftershocks across the nation for months, if not years, to come.
A wave of Republican incumbents fell to conservative challengers in the Texas House in last week’s primary run-offs, turning an already red legislature crimson and threatening the state House GOP leader’s hold on power. Those who helped lead the intra-party Texas fight now have their sights set on defeating centrist Republicans in other red states, including Tennessee, Georgia, Idaho, and South Carolina.
A concerted joint effort by Gov. Greg Abbott, outside groups, and a deep-pocketed donor flipped the seats of 14 Republicans who had opposed Abbott’s school-choice measure – a state record.
Abbott’s effort to pass school choice died last fall when 21 House Republicans – mostly from rural districts – voted to strip a voucher program out of a larger education bill. Of those 21 voucher opponents, 15 now aren’t returning. The coalition defeated six GOP incumbents in March, then three more in last week’s run-offs. Additionally, the group filled four of the five retiring Republican seats with voucher supporters, and then a voucher backer won a special election run-off.
The leading factor in these Republicans’ historic defeats hasn’t been making the most national headlines or even the most local news. It’s unrelated to Abbott’s border fight with President Biden, state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s resentment over efforts to impeach him, or even widespread local protests over the state’s skyrocketing property taxes.
Those issues all played out in the election, but school choice was far and away the most lethal campaign issue across the Lone Star state. Its impact was especially potent considering the totality of political spending and blitz of advertisements focused on school vouchers and related issues dominating the Texas airwaves and inundating inboxes.
Abbott was determined to make good on his threats to boot anti-school voucher Republicans who have blocked his ambitious crusade to give parents taxpayer-funded options to educate their children outside public schools. After several challengers he backed won their run-offs last week, the governor declared victory and announced that the House “now has enough votes to pass school choice.”
“While we did not win every race we fought in, the overall message from this year’s primaries is clear: Texans want school choice,” said Abbott. “Opponents can no longer ignore the will of the people.”
House Speaker David Phelan, who supported the effort to scrap the school voucher language from the bill last fall, managed to eke out a run-off win by less than 400 votes. But that razor-thin victory likely dooms his chances of holding onto his leadership post next year.
On the national level, Abbott is best known for his immigration showdown with President Biden, which included the deployment of thousands of Texas Guard members to shut down the border and the decision to send busloads of illegal immigrants from the southern border to places like New York, Washington, D.C., and Texas.
Texans, however, are well aware that Abbott has made school vouchers his top priority, pouring more political capital into the vouchers than any other issue in his eight years in office. The sometimes-cautious governor campaigned for reelection on the issue in 2022 and made universal education saving accounts a central theme of his most recent State of the State addresses. The ESAs would use taxpayer funds to provide parents a voucher worth $10,500 a year per student to use at a private school.
The Texas legislature cannot vote on any bill until 60 days into its legislative session unless the governor declares the measure an “emergency item.” Abbott gave the voucher issue this expedited status. He held two special sessions devoted to passing the initiative, including the one last fall in which opponents, including Phelan, stripped it from a bill providing $6 billion in additional funds to Texas public schools. Those funds would have boosted teacher pay and other public school funding – key negotiating chips that still failed to attract enough supporters.
Heading into the fight, opponents were well aware that they could face consequences at the ballot box if they continued to oppose Abbott’s voucher language.
In response to a ballot question in 2022, 88% of GOP primary voters indicated that they support parents’ “right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.” Another poll conducted by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs in January found that 66% of Republican primary voters said they would be less likely to vote for an incumbent who rejected school choice last year.
“[Abbott] made it very clear during the special session that there’s an easy way and a hard way,” Dave Carney, the governor’s longtime political strategist, told RealClearPolitics. “The hard way was we’ll pass it in 2025 with a new legislature. They were informed, well-warned.”
Carney said Abbott has done nearly 100 events on school choice so far this year, cutting television, cable, and digital ads and directing millions of digital impressions to targeted audiences. Abbott’s political action committee also paid for advocates to knock on 400,000 across the state.
Still, Abbott had some powerful help, what Carney describes as a seamless, collaborative effort.
“We’re not taking a victory lap yet, because we still have to get through the general election,” he added. “But we’re anticipating to pick up seats.”
Last fall’s voucher defeat attracted national groups with deep pockets, including the American Federation for Children, a national pro-school choice group, and the Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group. Along with Abbott’s PAC, the groups spent a combined $27 million to back pro-voucher challengers against incumbents.
A big portion of those funds came from Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire and national Republican megadonor who strongly supports school vouchers. Worth nearly $30 billion, Yass is a co-founder and managing director of Susquehanna International Group, a Philadelphia-based trading and investment firm. The firm was an early investor in TikTok, which nearly doubled Yass’ net worth in the years since the pandemic when the app’s popularity soared.
Working with Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, a longtime proponent of helping parents subsidize private school tuition, Yass has spent tens of millions boosting the issue, channeling $23 million to the DeVos-backed American Federation for Children’s political action committees since 2021.
In December, Yass cut Abbott’s PAC a $6 million check, the largest single donation in Texas history. He’s also a multi-million dollar donor to the Club for Growth, which has long supported Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Chip Roy, who represents Austin and San Antonio.
The Club for Growth, through its School Freedom Fund, spent roughly $4 million in the Texas primary and $4 million more in the run-offs, including $1.5 million against Phelan. David McIntosh, the group’s president, credited Abbott with the leadership to take on his fellow Republicans, who blocked school-choice options for Texas’ 5.4 million public school students.
“I give Gov. Abbott a lot of kudos for his leadership,” McIntosh said in an interview. “Many Republican governors don’t want to take on sitting members of their own party and would not have done the same … that was a crucial factor in us being able to win.”
Early in the effort, McIntosh told his team that big victories in Texas would build momentum for similarly aggressive campaigns in other red states, including Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and Indiana.
“Texas now shows that you can’t be a conservative Republican and oppose education freedom,” he said. “It’s now a marker for whether somebody is a genuine conservative or not. It’s going to be something the Club and our School Freedom Fund champion for years to come.”
McIntosh says the school choice initiatives align with the group’s conservative economic agenda because giving parents more alternatives to public school creates market pressure in the education system.
“That benefits the kids,” McIntosh said. “They get a better education, and it benefits the parents who have more control over the resources, and [it] takes the education bureaucracy out of the equation. Schools start operating like a business world, saying, ‘Who’s my customer?’ Right now, they don’t have that pressure.”
The American Federation for Children’s Victory Fund, another key group in the school-choice fight, spent $7 million on the Texas primary and run-offs alone – boosting Texas challengers’ campaigns and helping establish school choice as a GOP litmus test.
“The primary election results in Texas – the Lone Star earthquake – represent the single biggest movement in favor of school choice in modern history, a result that will prove life-changing for countless Texas families,” Tommy Schultz, the group’s CEO, told RCP. “Republicans lost the moment they chose loyalty to unions and corrupt establishment over students.”
Schultz said he and the coalition of school-choice proponents “anticipate that many other states will remember the Lone Star Earthquake ahead of their own primaries and legislative sessions.”
“If you’re a candidate or lawmaker who opposes school choice and freedom in education – you’re a target,” he added. “If you’re a champion for parents – we’ll be your shield.”
Some Texas insiders are already making comparisons to Colorado’s rapid transformation from a Republican-dominated state in the mid-2000s to a Democratic one over a four-year time frame. For years, progressives have touted their success in Colorado in turning a red state blue, an effort by Democratic politicians and outside groups taking advantage of new campaign finance laws and working with donors willing to commit unprecedented resources to promote progressive policies and win local races.
In a book titled, “The Blueprint: How Democrats Won Colorado,” the authors hailed the joint effort as a model for creating permanent Democratic majorities across the country.
Texas was already a solid red state before the school choice fight, but now its legislature has shifted even further to the right, undermining years-long Democratic efforts to cast it as trending purple based on its growing Latino population. Instead, t he school-choice coalition’s Texas successes have sparked a conversation over whether they’ve developed a “redprint” model that can help solidify permanent conservative majorities across the country.
Yet, Carney points out that Abbott isn’t the first governor to target GOP incumbents opposed to school vouchers. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds started the trend in 2022 when the Iowa legislature tried to pass school choice but failed by one vote. It was an election year, and Reynolds and school choice advocates challenged six school anti-school choice incumbent lawmakers. They unseated all nine and passed the measure during the next legislative session.
After the string of defeated GOP incumbents in Texas, other governors are already pledging a similar political litmus test. Late last week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee vowed to vet future GOP primary candidates in the next election cycle to determine whether they support school choice, although he didn’t commit to working to defeat Republicans who oppose school choice.
“This year what I’m talking to candidates about is education freedom and choice for parents,” he told a local broadcast station late last week. “I want to know where new candidates stand on that issue because it’s so important to me, so you’ll see me talking to candidates.”
Earlier this year, Lee said he expected a school choice “revolution” to take place in Tennessee, but those hopes were dashed in March when a school-choice bill died in the state legislature. But given strong GOP voter support for the issue, the state Republican Party is poised to adopt a strongly worded pro-school-choice platform over the next few months, which will ratchet up the pressure on Republican legislators with a history of opposing voucher programs.
The Club for Growth and the American Federation for Children are monitoring Tennessee closely to see if Lee will follow in Reynolds’ and Abbott’s footsteps.
“It’s a hard decision for governors to make, and you hope you can persuade people to do the right thing, and you don’t have to take out incumbents, but I will have to see what they decide to do,” McIntosh said.
Yet, the most effective advocate for school choice wasn’t Abbott, Reynolds, or any other GOP governor or outside group, Carney argues. That honor, he says, goes to American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who fought children’s return to public school during the COVID pandemic and used the global health crisis to extract union concessions for teachers, sparking a parent revolution in the process.
“Most families can’t afford to make that choice to give their kids a different option,” Carney remarked, decrying what he called the public education system’s “Praetorian Guard” who try to keep parents at bay while implementing “woke” programs and teaching methods while students’ test scores continue to plummet.
The post After Texas Win, School-Choice Groups Eye Other Red States appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest Post by Pro-life Leader Frank Pavone, National Director, Priests for Life
Priests for Life is among the leading groups working nationally and on the state level on various abortion-related ballot initiatives that will or may be on the ballot this Fall in several states.
These initiatives, with some variations, attempt to claim something that Supreme Court jurisprudence of the last 50 years did not claim, namely, that abortion is a fundamental right subject to few, if any, restrictions.
The Supreme Court, under its numerous abortion decisions, always considered the abortion “right” subject to reasonable limitations. Even Roe vs. Wade stated, “[S]ome … argue that the woman’s right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree.”
And Planned Parenthood vs. Casey in 1992 introduced a novel, ambiguous “undue burden” standard regarding abortion laws. For all its ambiguity, what was perfectly clear was that abortion was not a “fundamental right.”
And the American people have agreed with limitations on abortion, for instance, regarding parental involvement, limits on abortion in the latter months of pregnancy, especially when the unborn can feel pain and survive an early delivery, health and safety regulations for abortion clinics, requirements that only doctors perform abortions, and limits on taxpayer funding of abortion.
The abortion ballot initiatives in several states this year seek, for the most part, to eliminate even the most reasonable restrictions and limitations, contrary to established state law and strong public opinion.
A second characteristic common to these initiatives is that they deprive American citizens of an honest, robust, participatory debate on abortion. These initiatives do not simply seek to create public policy on abortion. They seek to short-circuit the legislative process by putting the “right to abortion” into state Constitutions.
This cuts off debate. By means of a few lines of text that most voters will not even have read, much less debated and considered, a policy will be embedded in the state Constitution that will then prohibit any further laws from extending protection to children in the womb or to the mothers who undergo the abortion procedure.
New medical and scientific information that comes to the state legislatures regarding the nature and development of the baby in the womb, or the harmful effects of abortion on women’s health, will not even be able to be considered, much less become the motive for new legislation, because the Constitution will be saying “Hands off abortion policy – you can’t change it!”
Not a single state Constitution in our nation’s entire history has ever expressed a “right to abortion.” Why now?
The Supreme Court, in Dobbs, left it to the people and their elected representatives to shape abortion policy, recognizing that an issue on which Americans have such deeply-held and varied beliefs should enjoy wide-open and detailed debate and analysis, for which legislatures are much better equipped than courts. If supporters of abortion want unlimited abortion, the legislatures are open for business. Introduce a bill. Let there be hearings. Let it be debated and let there be a vote.
By contrast, these ballot initiatives try to rush a process that hamstrings legitimate and open legislative debates. The American people deserve better, especially for such a crucial life-and-death issue.
Priests for Life is working with state and national leaders to defeat these ballot initiatives wherever they are being introduced, and to help the American people understand their implications before it is too late.
Frank Pavone is national director of Priests for Life and the national pastoral director of Rachel’s Vineyard Ministries and the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. The books he has authored include Abolishing Abortion and Proclaiming the Message of Life.
The post Frank Pavone: How Abortion Ballot Initiatives Deprive the American People of a Robust Debate appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on Leo Hohmann’s Substack and was republished with permission.
The latest federal data from the Centers for Disease Control shows that the fertility rate among U.S. women plummeted to just 1.6 births per woman in 2023.
This is the lowest recorded birth rate since the U.S. government began keeping such statistics in the 1930s. But why? We’ll break it down.
The drop-off in fertility rates for white women fell some 3% from the previous year and stands even lower than the national average. The fertility rate is an estimate of the number of babies a woman would normally have in her lifetime. A rate of 2.1 births per woman is needed for a generation to replace itself. We are not even close to that. And all of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Russia are in similar free fall. India, the African nations and a few countries in the Middle East are pretty much the only ones experiencing growing populations.
While this catastrophic demographic trend has been in motion for decades in the U.S., the explanations for the fall in reproduction by the corporate media have mostly skirted the crucial factors driving the birth dearth.
In its coverage of the story, The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Calfas and Anthony DeBarros cited such factors as “women establishing fulfilling careers,” and that they have more access to contraception.
The most fertile child-bearing group – young women – are putting off motherhood because they are uncertain about the future and are “spending more of their income on homeownership, student debt and child care,” according to The Journal.
Even as Americans fail to replace themselves, the U.S. government has opened up its borders and invited illegal aliens from more than 100 nations to replace dead and dying Americans in the work force.
An article posted by The Burning Platform notes that the reasons The Journal and other commentators give to explain the decline in birth rates are the consequences of what took place in America and the Western world decades ago. Leftists had always wanted to break down and corrupt the traditional family.
According to the article: “A splintered and dysfunctional family structure would be less likely to act as bulwark against the leftist agenda of more government interventions into the private affairs of its citizens.”
One of the ways to accomplish this, the article states, was to get women out of the household and into the work force, as working and career women would have fewer opportunities to have children.
The feminist movement was more than just the attainment of “equal rights” for women. Its main objective was to lead women out of the home and away from their traditional roles as mothers and homemakers. The record drop in birth rates is evidence of how well this plan has worked.
And, as a result, look how much more empowered the government has become over the everyday lives of Americans.
I also would not dismiss the impact that toxic mRNA injections have had on fertility. There have been a few studies that suggest these jabs have had a negative effect on the reproductive organs of both men and women, but more work needs to be done in this area. One thing you can count for certain, you won’t find any government funding or Gates or Rockefeller funding of such studies. They are all on board the the eugenics program to wipe out billions of people and get the global population down to 1 or 2 billion, from the current 8 billion.
WHO expert James Roguski says that one of the major objectives of the proposed WHO Pandemic Treaty and amended International Health Regulations is to fund Big Pharma’s vaccine gravy train with the tax dollars of citizens of wealthy countries. This will pay for new vaccine factories in poor countries, which had a much lower uptake of the Covid shots than we saw in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia. Now they need to even the score and inject more poor people living in Third World countries.
Henry Kissinger called for a depopulation of the Third World as far back as 1974 in The Kissinger Report.
Dennis Meadows, co-author of the Club of Rome-published book Limits to Growth, also let the cat out of the bag about the globalist elites’ plan for depopulation. Don’t forget the interview in which Meadows said, “I hope the depopulation will occur in a civil and peaceful way.”
This also explains the globalists’ anti-human climate agenda and the demonic thirst for World War III. It’s all part of the same overarching strategy to eliminate 70 percent or more of the world population.
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: U.S. Birth Rate Hits New Record Low But Media Refuses to Address Core Reasons appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on JoeHoft.com and was republished with permission by The Gateway Pundit.
In July 2023, Renz writes:
The enemies of freedom are continuing by continuing gain-of-function work and pushing “vaccines” into other products such as food, items applied to the skin, and even aerosolizing them. This is because we have succeeded in waking so many people up to the dangers of the injections that no one is taking them. This also means we MUST double down on our work.
In November 2023, Renz shared:
As the freedom fight continues a lot of our work has moved into lawfare. We are filing and/or supporting strategic litigation, pushing legislation, and working incredibly hard to wake up a sleeping public. It’s working. Uptakes for the new boosters are at around 1.3% and that is a big deal. We also just submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States regarding a J6 case and are working CBDC legislation, mRNA in food legislation, and election issues in multiple states.
Last week we were able to testify in Congress. The testimony was given in a hearing set by MTG and saw many heroic congresspeople attend – Matt Gaetz, Ron Johnson, Thomas Massie, Clay Higgins, and others. This hearing allowed us to ensure our elected officials heard, for the first time, new information about the DoD and CIA involvement in both the creation of COVID and the shots. We also shared additional information related to DMED, shedding, and explained that there are likely causes of action available to file suit directly against big pharma.
We desperately need resources at the moment. The fight for freedom is going well on all fronts but resources are very limited. We need as much help as possible to do everything possible before the 2024 election. We have learned that the same people that were behind COVID were behind the election fraud, CBDCs, and all the other issues we are facing. In a nation of 320+ million if we could find 100,000 to give $20 a month we could do a lot to free our country and change the world.
Next on May 24, about a week ago, Renz shared:
Attorney Tom Renz was sanctioned by Judge James Carr of the Northern District of Ohio, Western Division, Toledo despite the fact that there was no evidence on record of wrongdoing and three day’s worth of evidence, including testimony from 6 other attorneys from around the country, that Renz’s work was good and proper. Judge Carr used his power in the court to request motions for sanctions and then moved forward despite the complete lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.
The stated basis of Carr’s actions was that the case was frivolous, and the proceedings were vexatiously multiplied. Not only did 6 licensed attorneys and Renz himself testify as to the validity of the case, the Sixth Circuit had previously accepted oral arguments on the case and, while the 6th ultimately ruled against Renz, they did agree in part with his position in the case. By rule the 6th Circuit will not grant oral arguments if they determine, “(1) the appeal is frivolous; (2) the dispositive issue or issues have been authoritatively decided; or (3) the facts and legal arguments are adequately presented in the briefs and record, and the decisional process would not be significantly aided by oral argument. Fed. R. Bankr. P. 8019(b).”
In terms of vexatiously multiplying the proceedings the only actions in the case were filing a complaint and responding to a motion to dismiss. The appeal to the 6th Circuit cannot be considered multiplication of proceedings by law.
In this case, the Judge seemed bent on reaching a conclusion and ordering sanctions regardless of the facts. It may be fair to ask whether it is because a finding was issued on a complaint filed by Renz’s co-counsel in the case against Judge Carr. In the finding the 6th Circuit recognized that the Judge accepted an ex parte statement that was important (substantive) nature to the case from one of Governor Mike DeWine’s lawyers in another COVID case. So, again, it seems reasonable to ask whether the ruling in this case– based on no evidence – was retaliatory.
Renz is hoping to appeal this abysmal miscarriage of justice and ensure actual law is followed here. Please help us fight against another shady court and push for reform of the justice system so we can bring these cases effectively when disease X is released.
You can help Attorney Renz by donating to his Give Send Go account.
Americans need to support America’s strong, smart and righteous attorneys before the left puts them all in prison on fascist charges. Help Tom today!
The post ATTORNEY TOM RENZ: Another American Under Attack for Demanding the Truth appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Reprinted with permission from AbleChild and JoeHoft.com.
The tragic cases of the father in Miami who killed his daughter and the mother in Missouri who turned herself in after killing her two children last week highlight the devastating consequences of the government-backed mental health system embedded with the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industrial complex. The result of which is that no one seems to be getting better.
In fact, the data are never shared with the public about who is the treating psychiatrist or the name of the mind-altering drug or cocktail of drugs these killers have been prescribed.
Why? One would think government agencies would demand the stats of these deadly outcomes and use the information as a kind of measure. Knowing the prescribed psychiatric drugs, the killers were taking would be a first step in holding the court-appointed behavioral health vendors accountable.
Both individuals named above were engaged with their state family court systems and were known to have mental health conditions. Both had been suffering from mental disorders, and the Miami father had been prescribed psychiatric drugs as “treatment.”
Whether the Missouri mother had been prescribed a psychiatric drug is still unknown. The problem with the diagnosis is that it is not based in science and is purely subjective in nature.
Worse still, the psychotropic drug “treatments” have lists of possible dangerous and deadly side effects, including mania, psychosis, abnormal behavior, suicidality and even homicidally. Federal and state agencies have received billions of dollars to provide mental health services in the form of psychiatric “experts” within custody cases.
In Miami, Jeronimo Duran, a father under the influence of psychiatric medication, took the life of his two-year-old daughter. Despite being under the care of mental health professionals, the details of his treatment, including the specific drugs prescribed and the psychiatrist responsible, remain undisclosed to the public.
In Missouri, Ashley Parmeley, a 36-year-old mother, confessed to fatally shooting her 9-year-old daughter and drowning her 2-year-old son. Parmeley, who had a known mental health condition, walked into the Festus police station in a disheveled state, admitting to her horrific actions.
Court authorities were aware of both suspects’ mental health struggles, yet the system failed to prevent these heartbreaking outcomes. Why? Are the behavioral health “experts” of the court unaware of the possible serious adverse events associated with psychiatric drugs? Hardly. Is it possible that the push by the psycho/pharmaceutical industry far exceeds the need to err on the side of caution?
Are behavioral health contracts too lucrative? Too many of these tragic cases are occurring on a weekly basis and they raise serious concerns about the effectiveness of government-backed mental health services and the behavioral health industry.
Despite significant investments in mental health treatments, nobody seems to be getting better and the more money shoved at the mental health industry, the greater the mental health crises and increased devastating consequences for families and communities.
The lack of transparency surrounding the specific medications and treating psychiatrists involved in these cases is deeply troubling. The public has a right to know the details of the treatment provided, as these professionals and institutions are entrusted with the care and well-being of individuals struggling with mental health issues.
Courts often rely on the expertise of mental health professionals in making critical decisions, yet these tragic events call into question the reliability and accountability of the system.
It is imperative that we reevaluate the practices and protocols in place to ensure that individuals receive the appropriate care and support they need, and that public safety is prioritized.
The failures in these cases have had catastrophic outcomes, and they serve as a wake-up call for the urgent need to reform and replace mental health services. Families, communities, and society deserve better protection and assurance that the systems in place are truly equipped to prevent such tragedies from occurring in the future.
It is long past time to provide the public with mental health information of those accused of violent crimes. Who is the treating psychiatrist and what is the psychiatric drug “treatment?” Only with that information in hand can the public start to understand that despite enormous increases in psychiatric drugging, no one is getting better, and violent, murderous behavior is increasing.
Every dollar you give is a powerful statement, a resounding declaration that the struggles of these families will no longer be ignored. Your generosity today will echo through generations, ensuring that the rights and well-being of children are fiercely guarded.
Don’t let another family navigate this journey alone. Donate now and join us in creating a world where every child’s mind is nurtured, respected, and given the opportunity to thrive. As a 501(c)3 organization, your donation to AbleChild is not only an investment in the well-being of vulnerable children but also a tax-deductible contribution to a cause that transcends individual lives.
The post Murders in Miami and Missouri Highlight the Need for Sunshine on Psychiatric “Treatments” appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘This is the stuff that happens in mob movies’
A wrinkle suddenly has appeared in a federal case in Minnesota in which the federal government alleges seven defendants stole millions of dollars of COVID aid funds – intended for the federal Child Nutrition Program through the Feeding Our Future charity — and bought cars, homes and vacations.
Delivered to the home of one juror hearing evidence was a bag containing $120,000 in cash.
Along with instructions to vote for acquittal.
The result was that all seven of the defendants were re-arrested, the courthouse where the trial was taking place was locked down, and more.
A report in the Post-Millennial explains that the seven are “part of a larger case that has seen 70 charged with stealing a total of $250 million in COVID aid.”
“They allegedly delivered few, if any, meals,” the report said.
The wrinkle happened over the weekend when juror No. 52 arrived home “to find that someone had dropped off a gift bag containing $120,000 in cash with a promise of ‘more’ if she moved to find the defendants in the case not guilty.”
The 23-year-old opted to call law enforcement immediately, the report said.
“As a result, all seven defendants accused of using a charity to steal $41 million in federal aid meant to go towards feeding children in need were re-arrested at the request of United States Assistant Attorney Joe Thompson,” the report said.
The juror was released from the panel and the remaining members were sequestered to prevent further attempts to tamper with justice.
The report explained the juror got home, and was told by her father-in-law a woman “possibly Somali,” with an accent gave him the gift bag for delivery to the juror, “whose real name she knew.”
“An affidavit stated, ‘The woman told the relative to tell Juror #52 to say not guilty tomorrow and there would be more of that present tomorrow,'” the report said.
The cash was turned over to the FBI, which was joined by the Spring Lake Park police department in its investigation.
The report said the defendants were arrested, had their phones confiscated and were ordered not to leave the courthouse, and the rest of Monday’s proceedings continued.
The jurors then started deliberating.
“This is the stuff that happens in mob movies,” attorney Joe Thompson said.
Commentator Charlie Kirk explained, “The defense, meanwhile, is hiring college professors to lecture that scamming the government and sending suitcases full of cash abroad is a part of Somali culture, and trying to stop them is of course ‘racist.'”
During Covid, the federal government doled out money to provide free meals to children. It was Covid, so the government decided to abandon any pretense of preventing fraud — and plenty of people noticed immediately.
In Minnesota, members of the Somali community built one of the…
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) June 4, 2024
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Juror Handed Huge Bag of Cash to Say COVID-Fraud Suspects Are Innocent appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Newt Gingrich
Real Clear Wire
Americans are now being forced to think through the first fake conviction in the history of presidential politics.
As an historian, I am really bothered when I hear lawyers on television describe these proceedings as though they were somehow related to the rule of law and the normal legal process.
It is clear that what happened to President Donald J. Trump in Judge Juan Merchan’s court was not a legitimate conviction. Nearly every element of the prosecution was false. Therefore, the outcome is false.
To say President Trump is now a convicted felon – as the left and its propaganda media allies are practically singing – is to legitimize the most corrupt judicial event in American presidential history.
The burden of proof is not on President Trump. He remains an innocent citizen framed by an astonishingly corrupt district attorney, judge, and Biden Justice Department.
Don’t take my word for it alone. Consider what a host of experts have to say.
Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard, sat through much of the trial and condemned it with strong language in his newsletter:
“I have observed and participated in trials throughout the world. I have seen justice and injustice in China, Russia, Ukraine, England, France, Italy, Israel, as well as in nearly 40 of our 50 states.
But in my 60 years as a lawyer and law professor, I have never seen a spectacle such as the one I observed sitting in the front row of the courthouse yesterday.
“The judge in Donald Trump’s trial was an absolute tyrant, though he appeared to the jury to be a benevolent despot. He seemed automatically to be ruling against the defendant at every turn.”
George Washington Law professor and legal analyst Jonathan Turley said, “Before jurors left, however, Judge Juan Merchan framed their deliberations in a way that seemed less like a jury deliberation than a canned hunt.”
Attorney Mike Davis on the Just the News “No Noise” TV show said: “I would say the first one is there is no crime here. They waited until after this multi-week trial to even tell the criminal defendant what the legal allegations he was supposed to defend himself in that prior trial. He had no opportunity to defend himself.”
An innocent citizen being “hunted,” in Turley’s language, cannot be honestly convicted. That is why I argue this is a fake conviction.
Again, I’m not the only one who thinks this.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is hardly a fan of President Trump, said, “These charges never should have been brought in the first place. I expect the conviction to be overturned on appeal.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson called it “a shameful day in American history,” and continued, “Alvin Bragg targeted a political opponent, made up unprecedented charges, and denied him his Constitutional right to a fair trial.”
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik summarized the corruption and dishonesty brilliantly:
“The facts are clear: this was a zombie case illegally brought forward by a corrupt prosecutor doing Joe Biden’s political bidding in a desperate attempt to save Joe Biden’s failing campaign.
She pointed out that the case hinged on the word of Michael Cohen, who has a history of perjury and an axe to grind with Trump. She pointed out that Judge Merchan’s own family members benefited financially from the case, that he levied unconstitutional gag orders on Trump, and repeatedly sided with the prosecution throughout the case.
Mark Steyn captured why we must insist that the conviction is fake and reject any effort to suggest that Trump is guilty. As Steyn wrote: “pretending that there is anything ‘great’ about this that should command our ‘respect,’ is making evil and corruption respectable and bi-partisan.”
Ironically, in a Senate hearing involving smears and sexually salacious accusations chaired by then-Sen. Joe Biden 33 years ago, we were taught how to stand up to outrageous, corrupt, and disgusting behavior by then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas.
After being repeatedly slandered by senators on Biden’s committee, on Oct. 11, 1991, Thomas said:
“This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”
A generation later, President Trump, is learning what Justice Thomas learned in 1991: Challenge the establishment, and it will go all out to destroy you.
Every time you talk with someone who says President Trump is a convicted felon, point out it is a fake conviction. Challenge them to defend the dishonest, corrupt people who are putting the nation through this mess – starting with President Biden, the leader of the corrupt and dishonest.
For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.
The post Newt Gingrich: The Fake Conviction appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by John D. O’Connor
The Washington Post’s pompously pretentious masthead daily proclaims: “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as if its stellar journalism will protect us all from those who cover up the truth. But as we have seen from the recent Trump verdict, the Post’s Watergate-style journalism is being used to promote falsehood and degrade those who would help our country.
The trial just concluded of a former President featured the admission of irrelevant, highly prejudicial and deceptive hearsay, such as Michael Cohen’s sham guilty plea to election crimes, while highly pertinent expert testimony, rejecting any campaign violation, was prohibited. The slanted jury instructions virtually directed the jury to find guilt. Yet mainstream media gave little clue of any of the foregoing.
What does Watergate journalism have to do with this? Fifty years after Nixon resigned in disgrace, the Washington Post is still dining out on causing a theretofore popular President’s downfall. As it did with Nixon, the paper has been telling the world for the past nine years that Trump should be the next to be impeached or voted down, because he is a threat to democracy, as evidenced by his claimed lies. With Trump’s recent conviction, the Post is putting these attacks on steroids, pretending he received a fair trial. He did not.
Examination of its Watergate reporting proves that the paper has been for over five decades perpetrating lies, first falsely accusing the likes of Nixon, and now Trump, among others. These two, with their easily villainized personas, have proven easiest to convict in the court of public opinion. One seemed characteristically sneaky, complete with a five o’clock shadow, while the other bloviates and blusters, caricatured with an orange, gravity-defying combover. Anyone who watches television knows that these are two bad guys who should be exposed within forty-four minutes, an irrational, sophomoric impression promoted by this self-proclaimed intellectual powerhouse paper.
What the paper is now trying to do to Trump, it successfully did to Nixon. A President overwhelmingly re-elected by a landslide of 49 states in 1972, was “proven” by the Post to have won in part by a massive criminal conspiracy, thus delegitimizing what seemed theretofore to have been a fair, democratically achieved victory. Of course, if Nixon were “convicted” in the court of public opinion by a journalistic fraud, wouldn’t this deception epitomize the true danger to democracy?
In fact, that is precisely what happened to the cartoonishly skulking Nixon, brought down by two seemingly clean-cut, sleeves-rolled-up reporters, who in fact concealed highly pertinent exculpatory information from the public, facts of which even Nixon’s Oval Office team was unaware.
To this day, the Washington Post still claims, dishonestly, that the Watergate burglary, ridiculously silly though it seemed, was a campaign operation by a President who was irrationally afraid to lose and could not play fair. However, the burglary, the Post had known, but will not admit, was not a campaign operation at all.
While the paper repeatedly told the public that the CIA was falsely spotlighted by Nixon as somehow being involved, the Post knew, more so than the speculating President, that the CIA was indeed behind the burglary. The burglary’s moneyman, Gordon Liddy, years later claimed he had been duped and that the prior wiretapping and subsequent bungled burglary were about prostitution. In the face of the crazed but honest Liddy’s late-blooming accusation in the 1990s, the Post adamantly, but falsely, assured its readers that this caper had not been about prostitution.
While in fact the Post’s gold-plated source “Deep Throat”, FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, had originally hypothesized that the burglary may have been part of a White House “dirty tricks” campaign, that hypothesis was ultimately disproved. But the paper continued to tout it as proven, even though Felt later told Woodward, in the tense May, 1973, garage meeting, that the CIA was threatening murder to keep its involvement concealed.
Did the Post print this dramatically revealed fact? It printed not a word at the time, doing so only later, and at that elliptically, in the book and the movie, to provide sensationalism, while continuing to absolve the CIA, an absolution it knew to be false.
The Post had far more knowledge of what really happened than did Nixon’s Oval Office, which remained befuddled about who ordered the burglary and why. The Post knows that falsely accused former Attorney General John Mitchell did not order the burglary but has not reported on the logical implication of the paper’s prior incorrect reporting.
I wrote a recent book about this journalistic coverup, thinking, naively it turns out, that the Post would give the public its best defense of these charges, which it would have done if it had acted in good faith during the scandal. But it kept mum. Isn’t this an example of democracy dying “in darkness”?
Now to Trump, who, like Nixon, pursued popular, successful policies. Putting aside the question of election irregularities, which Trump complains prevented a narrow 2020 victory, the far greater harm to Trump came from a series of knowingly false anti-Trump accusations which the Post, together with other outlets, reported, while covering up strong contrary evidence, well before the farcical trial just completed.
The Post and other media acolytes knew, for example, that the anti-Trump “Russian collusion” claims were most likely false, and in fact participated through one of its reporters in the entrapment of one Trump official, General Michael Flynn, the only aide who could have easily punctured this jejune “Russiagate” narrative.
Did the Post know that Christopher Steele was in fact a regular retainer of Putin friend, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska? And that Steele’s employer Glenn Simpson represented oligarch Denis Katsyv’s and Putin’s interests in trying to undo the Putin-despised Magnitsky Act? It knew or easily could have known these facts but covered them up. Or that Hillary Clinton and Jake Sullivan had created this story out of whole cloth?
It also concealed that the newly-elected Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky had been supported by the country’s most corrupt oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, represented by Hunter Biden, meaning that further foreign aid should be premised on a new anti-corruption certification, as per State Department requirements. By concealing these pertinent facts, the paper dishonestly covered up a valid basis for Trump’s demands to investigate Biden corruption. Today, we are finally realizing that much of our foreign aid to the war-torn country has been stolen. Had the paper been honest, Ukraine might have a much better chance of victory over Russia. But impeaching the hated Trump was higher on the Post’s partisan agenda.
Of course, the Post and its bedfellows knew that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not “Russian disinformation” but covered up the story, causing Trump’s narrow loss. It knew shortly after the COVID pandemic hit that there were two successive “CGG” sequences in the virus, proving it had been developed in a lab, but adamantly advocated against the lab leak theory. Why? Because that would likely have helped Trump and hurt Anthony Fauci, thereby damaging Biden. Instead, the paper suggested that Trump was trying to falsely blame the pandemic on China and Dr. Fauci’s covert contract to fund the lab through the Obama Administration.
While the Post was engaged in covering up the truth about COVID, it made sure to sensationally keep a list of 30,573 lies Trump had allegedly told. One Post claim about Trump, comprising hundreds of separate alleged falsehoods, was that the President lied when he claimed he was building a “wall” along the Mexican border. This, the Post absurdly claimed through its intrepid lie-tracking department, was in fact a “bollard-styled fence,” not a wall! I’m not making this up. Now, in the face of a grossly unfair trial, the Post gives the false impression that Trump actually committed a felony, as opposed to being the victim of a kangaroo court.
In light of the above, who is it that is trying to see to it that our “democracy dies in darkness?” The answer is that it is not politicians who put their best foot forward, as every politician does. It is a media who, like the ancient Pharisees, stand in front of the temple to thank God that they are not sinful like other men. So, if in fact our democracy is dying in darkness, and there is strong evidence of that, exactly who are the parties attempting to kill it?
John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.
The post Watergate-Style Journalism: The Biggest Threat to Our Democracy appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Paul Drabik
The fight for Border Security started long before the pivotal Presidential election of 2024. Tom Homan is the former Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration. Homan and his new non-profit, Border911, will be in Chicago on June 12th 2024.
Border911 is teaming up with Behind Enemy Lines podcast hosts Terry Newsome and Paul Drabik to bring awareness to the border security crisis. At 115 Bourbon Street in Chicago, Homan will be joined by Sarah Carter, Derek Maltz, Jaeson Jones, Rodney Scott, and Victor Avila. Doors will open at 6 pm. The group will discuss the impact of the wide open border and what will be done under a Trump administration to reverse the damage done by Joe Biden.
Bringing a wealth of experience to the subject, Homan has served the government across multiple administrations. Homan has repeatedly pointed out the failings of the Biden administration by noting that he directed ICE during the Trump Administration which presided over the most secure border of his service history. The implication is that a secure border is possible. It has been suggested that the current crisis is being deliberately manufactured.
Illegal immigration has become anathema to the citizens of a country where Joe Biden has put non-citizen priorities ahead of those who unwillingly fund such priorities via tax increases. For example, Illinois legislators have recently passed a new $53 billion budget which will help fund the care for illegal immigrants. According to Illinois Policy, the record setting spending bill will include $1.1 billion in new taxes. Of those new taxes the bulk will be allocated to the “human services” category. The majority – $182 million – will be applied to “emergency funding” to service migrants coming to Chicago.
In stride with New York and Biden administration policy, Chicago has become notorious for harboring illegals and prioritizing them ahead of its own citizens. In January, Behind Enemy Lines interviewed homeless people enduring freezing temperatures in Chicago. The irony of their plight was juxtaposed against the backdrop of illegal immigrants housed in hotels and facilities across the very same city.
Chicago has also been notorious for the steady increase in violent crime over the years. The introduction of the Safe-T Act in 2022 ushered in a cashless bail system resulting in a surge in crime. Chicago saw the rate of violent crime climb to its highest level in a decade in 2023. Concurrently, arrests were down year over year. Given that detail, it would not seem prudent to import violent crime from an unknown and unvetted population of non-citizens. Yet, that is precisely what Chicago and greater Illinois has done.
Gateway Pundit has previously reported on bombshell FOIA findings in Chicago migrant facilities. Terry Newsome of Behind Enemy Lines requested details from both the Inn of Chicago and Pilsen facilities. The shocking responses revealed myriad violent crimes including: battery, assault, burglary, criminal sexual abuse, child abuse and multiple stabbings. In a May 5th article Gateway Pundit reported that human trafficking evidence was found on a migrant’s cell phone. In that instance the most concerning aspect was that the phone appeared to be a unique model made by the company named Vortex. Coincidentally, Vortex phones are part of a program funded by the government for assistance programs.
As the Democrat National Convention approaches, Chicago finds itself in a state of chaos. Certainly throwing money at the problem will help. However, Chicago is hosting, and August 19th is rapidly approaching. Mayor Brandon Johnson needs to make a good showing but the disapproval amongst citizens, particularly in minority communities, is resulting in mounting pressure. Recently, Johnson was rebuked by City Council after an attempt to oust ShotSpotter. The company offers technology around the city that detects gunshots. With the increase in violence and the preferential treatment of non-citizens the protests are sure to be lively during the convention.
Logic would suggest that an open border and a lack of vetting illegal immigrants would invite crime and national security concerns. It follows, with an increase of more than 10 million human beings flowing into cities, the flow of dollars out of the pocket of tax paying Americans will need to increase exponentially. With the Democrat Party and Joe Biden’s rapid decline in the polls, the political persecution of Donald Trump, the import of violent crime through the border, and the distrust of the National Security apparatus, Tom Homan and Border911 present a welcome message of reform. Tune into Behind Enemy Lines on June 12th to hear more about a promising future of border security and immigration in the United States.
The post Tom Homan, Sara Carter, Victor Avila, and Border 911 Will Hold Event with BEHIND ENEMY LINES Founders in Chicago on June 12th appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The Lee County Republican Assembly, which is a grassroots conservative Republican organization, passed a resolution introduced by Joseph Sansone, declaring the UN, WHO, and WEF, terrorist organizations.
The resolution additionally brands cooperation with these organizations as an act of treason against the United States and the State of Florida. Unfortunately, the Executive Board of the Lee County Republican Party refused to allow the declaration to come up for a vote by the full Executive Committee, which would have likely passed the resolution as well.
The resolution passed by the Lee County Republican Assembly calls on the Florida Legislature and Governor to pass legislation declaring cooperation with the United Nations, World Health Organization, and World Economic Forum, an act of treason against the United States, and the State of Florida.
The full text of the resolution follows:
Whereas the United Nations, the World Health Organizations, and the World Economic Forum are terrorist organizations seeking to depopulate humanity, and to usurp the sovereignty of the United States and the State of Florida; and
Whereas the World Health Organization, World Economic Forum, and the United Nations are actively involved in a global coup; and
Whereas this coup is attempting utilize the Federal government and State Governments to implement United Nations, World Health Organization, and World Economic Forum policies; and
Whereas legitimate international treaties have no jurisdiction over domestic policies;
Be it Resolved:
The Lee County Republican Assembly calls upon Governor DeSantis and the Florida legislature to pass legislation declaring cooperation with the United Nations, World Health Organization, and World Economic Forum, an act of treason against the United States, and the State of Florida.
We also call for legislation specifically stating:
“No rule, regulation, fee, tax, policy, or mandate of any kind of the World Health Organization, United Nations, and the World Economic Forum shall be enforced or implemented by the state of Florida or any agency, department, board, commission, political subdivision, governmental entity of the state, parish, municipality, or any other political entity.”
Please contact your state legislators and ask them to enact this legislation.
You can read more here.
The post UN, WHO, and WEF Have Just Been Declared Terrorist Organizations By a Republican County Assembly in Florida appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Newt Gingrich & Jim Frogue
Real Clear Wire
President Joe Biden’s full-frontal assault on Medicare is becoming visible to America’s seniors. It will result in fewer patient choices, reduced benefits, and ultimately worse health outcomes. Biden’s efforts, assisted by Congressional Democrats, are destroying Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage.
Medicare Advantage was originally created as Medicare Part C in 1997 when I was Speaker of the House. It was introduced to create more comprehensive health plan options for seniors that included, for the first time, prescription drug coverage. The idea was to leverage consumer choice and market competition by insurers. Seniors can change plans annually for any reason.
More than 30 million seniors are in Medicare Advantage, which is more than half of all Medicare-eligible seniors. Enrollment has been on a “steady climb for the for past two decades,” according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. All MA enrollees have voluntarily chosen to join because it is better for their health.
A 2021 poll by Better Medicare Alliance showed seniors in MA have a 98 percent satisfaction rate. Ninety-five percent said it is important to have options beyond traditional Medicare. Ninety-three percent said a candidate’s position on MA would affect their vote. A bipartisan poll by the Healthcare Leadership Council in November, 2023 found more than 9-in-10 said they were pleased with their MA coverage.
Last week, CVS Aetna Chief Financial Officer Tom Cowhey told investors that the company may shed up to 10 percent of their four million MA enrollees next year. Humana CFO Susan Diamond suggested 5 percent of their enrollees may be dropped. This translates into as many as 1.5 million seniors losing their coverage of choice. And this figure is dwarfed by the millions of MA beneficiaries who will see reduced coverage around prescription drugs, vision, dental, transportation, gym memberships, and many other popular benefits that are only offered in Medicare Advantage.
A new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation noted that most states offer Medicare Advantage plans to their state retirees. Twelve states, including key swing states Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, offer only Medicare Advantage plans. Senior voters in Philadelphia’s Main Line are unlikely to appreciate attacks on Medicare Advantage.
Biden’s war on Medicare doesn’t end with just Medicare Advantage. The so-called Inflation Reduction Act – passed in 2022 with exclusively Democratic votes and was signed into law by President Biden – is wrecking the popular Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage.
Medicare Part D was created by Congressional Republicans in 2003 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush. For nearly two decades, Part D prescription drug-only plans were stable, affordable, competitive, and did something truly amazing for a health care program – stayed within original budget projections. To the surprise of even the bill’s authors, more than 1,000 plans signed up to participate within a year.
The Democrats promised that their Inflation Reduction Act would increase drug coverage for seniors and limit their out-of-pocket costs to $2,000 per year in 2025. It also allows seniors to pay their drug costs in installments. Sounds great. But seniors will be shocked on Oct. 1 when their Part D premiums skyrocket. Premiums were up 21percent last year and are likely to jump 50 percent this year. Awkward timing for Biden and fellow Democrats who are hoping to campaign on “lowering prescription drug costs.”
The Inflation Reduction Act is negatively impacting patient cost-sharing for prescription drugs in Medicare Part B as well. According to a new analysis in the trade publication Drug Channels, the inflation adjuster for most drugs is increasing instead of decreasing. Even instances where a drug price may be declining, it could still trigger big jumps in patient out-of-pocket costs.
IRA proponents boasted of their Medicare reforms saving $266 billion from 2023 to 2031. Even if that projection ends up holding true (and it doesn’t look likely), that amount is only a partial down payment on $670 billion for the IRA’s various green energy tax credits and new environmental spending.
How well is the Biden administration’s green energy spending going? The $7.5 billion in federal spending has resulted in only eight new charging stations for electric vehicles. And this at the same time consumer interest in electric cars is plummeting.
It is well known that the political left in America wants to move us toward government-run single payer health care. Imagine just one insurer and if you don’t like it you can’t leave. So, it is no surprise that Democrats would want to destroy the private sector’s involvement in Medicare, no matter how popular with seniors. But it is somewhat surprising that Democrats would be so politically obtuse to have smoking wreckage appear just before the presidential election. It remains to be seen if Republicans will capitalize.
Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-1999 and a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He is chairman of Gingrich 360. James Frogue was a senior health policy advisor to Trump for President in 2016. He is cofounder of FrogueClark .
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This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Had been demanding details about ‘internal communications and records’
The top law enforcement agent in Washington state, the attorney general, has called a halt to his own extremist campaign against two faith-based, pro-life nonprofits after being told his “investigation” was illegal.
Officials with ADF explain that AG Bob Ferguson had been demanding privileged records and international documents from Obria Group and Obria Medical Clinics.
He had singled them out for targeting because he disagreed with their “life-affirming views,” the organization explained.
“No one should be investigated by the government simply because they hold views the government doesn’t like. We’re pleased Washington’s attorney general has ceased his unlawful investigation into our clients, and that Obria Group and Obria Medical Clinics PNW will be free to continue their life-saving work in the community,” explained Lincoln Wilson, a lawyer with ADF.
“We look forward to a ruling from the court confirming that the attorney general unlawfully targeted and harassed these clinics because of their pro-life stance. The Constitution protects Obria medical clinics, and all other pro-life organizations, to freely speak their beliefs, exercise their faith, and continue compassionately serving women and couples facing difficult pregnancy circumstances,” he said.
ADF had brought a lawsuit against Ferguson, prompting him to shut down his review.
Ferguson previously had claimed that he wasn’t harming the clinics.
However, the ADF report revealed, “one of the clinics showed that Ferguson’s investigation caused it to lose insurance coverage and to pay seven times more for replacement coverage.”
That prompted Ferguson to formally close his investigation.
His demands had included that the organizations provide documentation, “for a time period exceeding 13 years,” as well as answers to various questions for Ferguson’s investigation into “possible” consumer protection violations.
The broadside against the organizations was just part of what appears to be a nationwide move to bludgeon pro-life centers.
Attorneys general from New Jersey and California also have created controversy because of their lawsuits against pro-lifers.
They claim that the centers are “misleading” women about abortion.
Earlier, the ADF’s Gabriella McIntyre told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We’re seeing this as part of a larger trend of hostility towards pro-life organizations and particularly towards pro-life pregnancy centers across the nation.
“These attorneys general are targeting and harassing pregnancy centers, because of their religious and pro-life views. They are using their consumer protection authority to accomplish their purpose, which is clearly to divert and impede the mission of these organizations to serve women and families, and instead shift their focus to complying with these unfounded and unjustified demands.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post State AG Ends Campaign Against Pro-Life Centers After Being Told It Was Illegal appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Please Note: The Gateway Pundit is one of five plaintiffs along with the states of Missouri and Louisiana in the Murthy vs. Missouri case noted below.
We expect the Supreme Court to decide on the case later this month.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Ben Weingarten, RealClearInvestigations
May 31, 2024
This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps “the most massive attack against free speech” ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and mal-information – on issues ranging from COVID-19 to election integrity.
The case has helped shine a light on a sprawling network of government agencies and connected NGOs that critics describe as a censorship industrial complex. That the U.S. government might aggressively clamp down on protected speech, and, certainly at the scale of millions of social media posts, may constitute a recent development. Reporting by RCI and other outlets – including Racket News’ new “Censorship Files” series, and continuing installments of the “Twitter Files” series to which it, Public, and others have contributed – and congressional probes continue to reveal the substantial breadth and depth of contemporary efforts to quell speech that authorities deem dangerous. But the roots of what some have dubbed the censorship industrial complex stretch back decades, born of an alliance between government, business, and academia that Democrat Sen. William Fulbright termed the “military-industrial-academic-complex” – building on President Eisenhower’s formulation – in a 1967 speech.
RCI reviewed public records and court documents and interviewed experts to trace the origins and evolution of the government’s allegedly unconstitutional censorship efforts. It is a rich history that includes the battles to defeat America’s adversaries in World War II and the Cold War; the development of Silicon Valley; the post-9/11 War on Terror; the Obama administration’s transition to targeting domestic violent extremism broadly; and the rise of Donald Trump.
If there is one ever-present player in this saga, it is the storied institution of Stanford University. Its idyllic campus has served as the setting over the last 70-plus years for a pivotal public-private partnership linking academia, business, and the national security apparatus. Stanford’s central place, particularly in developing technologies to thwart the Soviet Union during the Cold War, would persist and evolve through the decades, leading to the creation of an entity called the Stanford Internet Observatory that would serve as the chief cutout – in critics’ eyes – for government-driven censorship in defense of “democracy” during the 2020 election and beyond.
Although it bears the name of the railroad magnate who founded the school in 1885, Leland Stanford, the powerhouse university we know of today, represents the vision of another man, Frederick Terman.
The son of a Stanford psychology professor, Terman began his tenure at the campus where he was reared teaching electrical engineering during the 1920s and 1930s. He also harbored ambitions to turn the university and its surrounding area into a major high-tech hub to rival that of MIT on the East Coast.
Like his MIT colleagues, Terman was also deeply connected to the government’s budding national security apparatus. During World War II he was tabbed to head Harvard’s Radio Research laboratory, established by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development to develop countermeasures against enemy radars. Through its good work, the lab would save an estimated 800 Allied bomber aircrafts.
Returning to Stanford with the insights and contacts he had developed during the war, Terman took over as the dean of the engineering school in 1946 determined to implement an ambitious plan: to use government funding to erect “steeples of excellence” in critical disciplines that would continually attract new investments in a virtuous cycle that would raise Stanford to preeminence among research institutions.
Terman would win Pentagon contracts to help fund Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory and the Applied Electronics Laboratory, which included work on classified military programs, bringing Stanford firmly into the military-industrial-academic complex fold. Additional labs – some engaged in basic or theoretical research, and others applied research – followed, deepening the school’s ties to the national security state during the Cold War.
While reportedly advising every major branch of the military, Terman cultivated ties with private industry. He encouraged graduates to start firms in nearby communities that would come to be known as Silicon Valley, and urged professors to consult.
In 1951, Terman helped establish the Stanford Industrial Park, a high-tech cooperative on university land that would attract electronics firms and defense contractors – the first such university-owned industrial park in the world. Its tenants would include among others Hewlett-Packard, GE, Eastman Kodak, and a host of other notables, later including the likes of Facebook and Tesla. Lockheed Martinwould relocate its Missiles Systems Division to Silicon Valley in 1956 and go on to serve as the largest industrial employer in Silicon Valley during the Cold War.
Under Terman’s leadership, first as engineering school dean and then as provost, Stanford and the firms it helped incubate and attract generated advances in everything from microwave electronics and electronic warfare, to missiles and satellites, and semiconductors and computers – meeting the demands of military and civilian consumers alike.
Stuart Leslie, author of “The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial Complex at MIT and Stanford,” wrote that “[b]y nearly every measure” Terman achieved his goal of challenging “MIT for leadership” in the sciences. The relationship Terman fostered between the feds and Silicon Valley companies would be responsible for producing “all of the United States Navy’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, the bulk of its reconnaissance satellites and tracking systems, and a wide range of microelectronics that became integral components of high-tech weapons and weapons systems” during the Cold War, according to one study.
Leslie Berlin, formerly a historian of the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, would writethat “All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from” underwriting research and development.
One Stanford institution to which the money flowed with an indirect link to current controversies regarding social media censorship was the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Incorporated on campus as a nonprofit in 1946, it would pursue lucrative contracts for often-classified military R&D projects. By 1969, SRI ranked third among think tanks in total value of defense contracts garnered.
Anti-war activists helped force Stanford to divest from the outfit in 1970 – though it would continue to work with government on an array of initiatives. Among them was one building on a Pentagon-backed project to network computers, known as ARPANET. In 1977, an Institute van would transmit data in what is regarded as the first internet connection.
Stanford would open an Office of Technology Licensing in 1970 to manage the university’s growing IP portfolio. The office would execute thousands of licenses covering many thousands more inventions – sometimes in tandem with the security state. For example, Google was built in part on National Science Foundation-supported research; its development has also been tied to work done under a joint NSA and CIA grant.
The 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 would reinvigorate and fundamentally transform a military-industrial-academic complex that had demobilized to an extent following the Cold War, during which it had been largely foreign-facing. It would come to see not only foreign clandestine communications but public conversations between Americans promoting disfavored viewpoints as national security concerns.
To combat jihadists, Washington demanded sophisticated new surveillance tools and weapons. When combined with the explosion in communications technology, and the creation of massive new reams of digital data that could be collected and analyzed, Big Tech would prove a natural supplier.
The advent of social media – including Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) – would significantly impact these efforts.
To the public, social media platforms comprised a digital public square that empowered citizens as journalists and enabled the free flow of ideas and information.
But governments and non-state actors, including terrorist groups, realized they could harness the power of such platforms, and use them for intelligence gathering, waging information warfare, and targeting foes.
Initially U.S. authorities focused almost exclusively on foreign jihadist organizations’ exploitation of social media. That began to change when the Obama administration created a series of policies and associated entities – most of which worked closely with Big Tech and academia – targeting a broader array of adversaries.
In 2011, the Obama administration deployed its “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States” strategy. While identifying Al-Qaeda as “our current priority,” the policy broadened the national security apparatus focus to “all types of extremism that leads to violence, regardless of who inspires it.”
That same year, the State Department stood up an entity aimed at “supporting agencies in Government-wide public communications activities targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations” that in 2016 would morph into the Global Engagement Center (GEC). It would serve as a broader “interagency entity” that would not only partner to build “a global network of positive messengers against violent extremism” including NGOs, but leverage data analytics “from both the public and private sectors to better understand radicalization dynamics online.”
Also that year, the Defense Department announced its Social Media in Strategic Communication program, launched to “track ideas and concepts to analyze patterns and cultural narratives” as part of an effort “to develop tools to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information, reducing adversaries’ ability to manipulate events.” Millions of dollars flowed to both Big Tech and academic hubs in connection with the project.
In conjunction with these programs, the Obama administration also consulted with outside advisors to study how jihadist groups engaged in online disinformation campaigns. Included among the advisors was Renée DiResta, future technical research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory – which would later play a key role in the government’s effort to identify and quell speech disfavored by the government.
With terrorist organizations increasingly exploiting social media platforms to proliferate propaganda and in pursuit of other malign ends, Silicon Valley came to play an increasingly key role in U.S. counterterrorism efforts. As Kara Frederick wrote in a 2019 report for the Center for a New American Security, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies:
… hired talent to fill gaps in their counterterrorism expertise, created positions to coordinate and oversee global counterterrorism policy, convened relevant players in internal forums, and instituted a combination of technical measures and good old-fashioned analysis to root out offending users and content. Major and minor tech companies coordinated with each other and with law enforcement to share threat information, drafted policies around preventing terrorist abuse of their platforms, updated their community guidelines, and even supported counter-speech initiatives to offer alternative messaging to terrorist propaganda.
Frederick, now at the Heritage Foundation, would know. A counter-terrorism analyst at the Department of Defense from 2010-16, she departed for Facebook where she helped create and lead its Global Security Counterterrorism Analysis Program.
Facebook’s chief security officer during Frederick’s tenure, Alex Stamos – future founder of the Stanford Internet Observatory – would boast that “there are several terrorist attacks that you’ve never heard of because they didn’t happen because we caught them … some local law enforcement agency … took credit for it, but it was actually our team that found it and turned it over to them with a bow on it.”
“Once clearly public sector responsibilities,” Stamos would add, “are now private sector responsibilities.”
With government broadening its focus to domestic violent extremism and its nexus to social media, and a revolving door opening between the national security apparatus and the platforms, Donald Trump’s election would prove a catalyzing event in the creation of what critics would describe as the censorship industrial complex.
His victory, which followed Brexit, another populist uprising that stunned Western elites, sent shockwaves from Washington, D.C., to Silicon Valley.
A narrative quickly arose that social media was to blame for Trump’s unexpected win. It held that dark forces, especially Russia, had manipulated voters through dishonest posts, and that the platforms enabled Trump’s victory through allowing supporters to advance corrosive conspiracy theories.
The national security apparatus sprang to action.
In January 2017, outgoing Obama DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson made protecting election infrastructure part of his agency’s mandate. Subsequently:
These key components of what would come to be known as the censorship industrial complex – one that would ultimately target the speech of Trump’s own supporters and the president himself – emerged at the very time he was fending off the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory that gave rise to them.
Government concerns over foreign meddling in domestic politics would drive demand for putativelyprivate sector actors, often with extensive government ties and funding, to engage in what the NGOs cast as research and analysis of such malign operations on social media.
In 2018, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee would solicit research, including from DiResta, on Russia’s social media meddling – research that would bolster something of a pressure campaign against social media companies to get them to quit dithering on content moderation.
The committee also commissioned Graphika, a social media analytics firm founded in 2013, to co-author a report on Russian social media meddling. Graphika lists DARPA and the Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative, which funds “basic social science research,” on a company website detailing its clients and research partners. It would serve as one of the four partners that would comprise the Stanford Internet Observatory-led Election Integrity Partnership – a key cog in government-driven speech policing during and after the 2020 election.
Another entity that would join the Stanford-led quartet is the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, established in 2016. Funded in part by the Departments of State – including through the Global Engagement Center – and Energy, the think-tank counts among its directors CIA chiefs and Defense secretaries. The lab’s senior director is Graham Bookie, a former top aide to President Obama on cybersecurity, counterterrorism, intelligence, and homeland security issues. In 2018, Facebook announced an election partnership with the lab wherein the two parties would work on “emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”
The third of four entities later to join the Election Integrity Partnership was the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, formed in 2019. Stanford grad and visiting professor Kate Starbird co-founded the Center. The National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research have provided funding for Dr. Starbird’s social media work.
That same year, the Stanford Internet Observatory emerged. Founded by Alex Stamos, who had led substantial research on Russia’s social media operations while Chief Security Officer at Facebook and routinely interfaced with national security agencies throughout his cybersecurity career, the Observatory would serve as a “cross-disciplinary initiative comprised of research, teaching and policy engagement addressing the abuse of today’s information technologies, with a particular focus on social media … includ[ing] the spread of disinformation, cybersecurity breaches, and terrorist propaganda.”
The Observatory is a program of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, which counts former Obama National Security Council official and Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul, among other notables on the faculty list with backgrounds in or ties to the security state.
Stamos stood up the Observatory with a $5 million gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies – which also gave $1 million to Starbird’s work. The Craigslist founder’s charitable vehicle contributed some $170 million to “journalism, countering harassment against journalists, cybersecurity and election integrity,” between 2016 and 2020, areas he argued constituted the “battle spaces” of information warfare – information warfare waged implicitly against President Trump and his supporters.
The National Science Foundation also provided large infusions of money to the sprawling network of academic entities, for-profit firms, and think tanks that would emerge in the “counter-disinformation space.”
This network produced a mass of research and analysis redefining and expanding the perceived threat of free and open social media. It argued America was plagued by a pandemic of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” with a nexus to domestic violent extremism that could be created and disseminated by almost anyone – thereby making everyone a potential target for surveillance and censorship.
Ideas authorities found troubling would come to be treated as tantamount to national security threats to be neutralized – as the future Biden administration would codify in the first-of-its-kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.
DiResta described this paradigm shift in a 2018 article for Just Security – a publication incidentally also funded by Newmark.
“Disinformation, misinformation, and social media hoaxes have evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war,” DiResta wrote.
She continued:
…Traditional analysis of propaganda and disinformation has focused fairly narrowly on understanding the perpetrators and trying to fact-check the narratives (fight narratives with counter-narratives, fight speech with more speech). Today’s information operations, however, are … computational. They’re driven by algorithms and are conducted with unprecedented scale and efficiency. … It’s time to change our way of thinking about propaganda and disinformation: it’s not a truth-in-narrative issue, it’s an adversarial attack in the information space. Info ops are a cybersecurity issue.
This re-definition of what arguably amounts to speech policing of social media as security policy could be seen a year later when NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged that “NATO must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: From tanks to tweets.” (Emphasis RCI’s)
In the run-up to the 2020 election, DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which took as its mandate protecting election infrastructure, would expand its focus to include combatting misinformation and disinformation perceived as threatening the security of elections – regardless of its source. This would ultimately encompass the protected political speech of Americans, including speculation and even satire to the extent it called into question or undermined state-approved narratives about an unprecedented mass mail-in election.
Social media companies, chastened after having come under withering political and media attack for their content moderation policies during the 2016 election, would recruit dozens of ex-security state officials to fill their “Trust and Safety” teams dealing with policing speech to likewise combat this purported threat.
Frederick told RealClearInvestigations that Silicon Valley leaders believed the teams’ past focus on Islamic terror, which receded under Trump, reflected a bias, requiring platforms to “reorient toward domestic extremism” – the new target of the political establishment.
Combining the platforms’ political leanings with the tools they had developed to take on jihadists, in Frederick’s words, would create a “powder keg” threatening to obliterate Americans’ speech.
Still, the Constitution stood in the way to the extent the government wanted to police the platforms’ speech. In the run-up to the 2020 election, both federal authorities and like-minded NGOs recognized a “gap:” No federal agency had “a focus on, or authority regarding, [identifying and targeting for suppression] election misinformation originating from domestic sources,” as the Stanford Internet Observatory-led Election Integrity Partnership would put it. DiResta acknowledged any such project faced “very real First Amendment questions.”
In response, the government helped create a workaround via that very Election Integrity Partnership – a government driven, advised, and coordinated enterprise run by NGOs to surreptitiously surveil and seek to censor speech that did not comport with government-favored narratives on election administration and outcomes.
One hundred days from the 2020 election, the Stanford Internet Observatory, alongside Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public launched the EIP as a “model for whole-of-society collaboration,” aimed at “defending the 2020 election against voting-related mis- and disinformation.”
As RCI previously reported, the project had two main objectives:
First, EIP lobbied social media companies, with some success, to adopt more stringent moderation policies around “content intended to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters as to election processes, or delegitimize election results without evidence. …
Second, EIP surveilled hundreds of millions of social media posts for content that might violate the platforms’ moderation policies. In addition to identifying this content internally, EIP also collected content forwarded to it by external “stakeholders,” including government offices and civil society groups. EIP then flagged this mass of content to the platforms for potential suppression.
As many as 120 analysts, records show, created tickets identifying social media content they deemed objectionable. They forwarded many tickets to officials at platforms including Google, Twitter, and Facebook which “labeled, removed, or soft blocked” thousands of unique URLs – content shared millions of times.
An RCI review of the nearly 400 of those tickets produced to the House Homeland Security Committee found that government agencies – including entities within the FBI, DHS (CISA), and State Department (GEC) – involved themselves in nearly a quarter of the censorship tickets. Those tickets almost uniformly covered domestic speech, and from the political right; in dozens of instances, the project made “recommendations” to social media companies to take action.
The tickets RCI reviewed illustrated the project’s efforts to push social media platforms to silence President Trump and other elected officials.
One EIP analyst would say of the effort that it “was probably the closest we’ve come to actually preempting misinformation before it goes viral.”
In response to RCI’s inquiries in connection with this story, CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales shared a statement reading in part: “CISA does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship. Such allegations are riddled with factual inaccuracies.”
Given “concerns from election officials of all parties regarding foreign influence operations and disinformation that may impact the security of election infrastructure,” Wales said, “CISA mitigates the risk of disinformation by sharing information on election security with the public and by amplifying the trusted voices of election officials across the nation” – work he indicated is conducted while protecting Americans’ liberties.
Dr. Starbird told RCI that:
Falsehoods about elections – whether accidental rumors about when and how to vote or intentional disinformation campaigns meant to sow distrust in election results – are issues that cut to the core of our democracy. Identifying and communicating about these issues isn’t partisan and, despite an ongoing campaign to label this work as such, isn’t ‘censorship.’
All had come full circle. Stanford had once again connected the security state to Silicon Valley for a project involving both basic and applied research aimed at perceived foes – studying how narratives emerged, and then seeking to get offending ones purged.
That project would again garner new funding from the security state in the form of a $3 million grantfrom the National Science Foundation split between the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public for “rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation.” Their partners in the EIP would receive millions more from the federal government under the Biden administration.
The relationship between DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and EIP would only grow. As RCI reported:
In the days following Nov. 3, 2020, with President Trump challenging the integrity of the election results, CISA rebuked him in a statement, calling the election “the most secure in American history.” The president would go on to fire CISA’s director, Christopher Krebs, by tweet.
Almost immediately thereafter, Krebs and Stamos would form a consultancy, the Krebs Stamos Group. In March 2021, Krebs would participate in a “fireside chat” when EIP launched its 2020 report.
CISA’s top 2020 election official, Matt Masterson, joined SIO as a fellow after leaving CISA in January 2021. Krebs’ successor at CISA, Director Jen Easterly, would appoint Stamos to the sub-agency’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, established in 2021, for a term set to expire this month.
Director Easterly would appoint Kate Starbird … to the committee. Starbird chaired the advisory committee’s since-abolished MDM (Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-Information) Subcommittee, focusing on information threats to infrastructure beyond elections.
SIO’s DiResta served as a subject matter expert for the now-defunct subcommittee. DHS scrapped the entity in the wake of the public furor over DHS’ now-shelved “Disinformation Governance Board.”
Starbird, her University of Washington colleagues, and a former student member of the Stanford Internet Observatory who had matriculated to the Krebs Stamos Group would publish a report in June 2022 building on their EIP efforts, titled “Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization: A Comprehensive Dataset of Misinformation Tweets from the 2020 U.S. Election.” Its publication coincided with, and seemed aimed at buttressing the partisan House January 6 Select Committee’s second public hearing.
Documents obtained via FOIA from the University of Washington and recently published by Matt Taibbi’s Racket News and Substacker UndeadFOIA, suggest the committee’s chief data scientist met with Starbird and DiResta in January of that year to discuss the report the EIP produced following the 2020 election and its underlying data – a report that linked mis-, dis-, and mal-information regarding the 2020 election to the capitol riot.
In the interim, EIP would morph into the Virality Project, which would be used to target dissent from public health authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic – dissent those authorities argued could lead people to die, as dissenting views on the 2020 election spurred the capitol riot.
Among those targeted by the government for silencing, and who social media companies would censor, in part for his opposition to broad pandemic lockdowns, was Stanford’s own Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – one plaintiff in Murthy v. Missouri (Dr. Bhattacharya and Taibbi were recipients of RealClear’s first annual Samizdat Prize honoring those committed to truth and free speech). As he sees it, the Virality Project helped “launder” a “government … hit list for censorship,” which he finds “absolutely shocking” and at odds with the Stanford’s past commitments to academic freedom and general “sort of countercultural opposition to government overreach.”
As chilling as these efforts were, a House Homeland Security Committee aide told RCI:
EIP and VP were largely comprised of college interns running basic Google searches. Imagine a similar effort leveraging artificial intelligence to sweep up and censor ever greater swaths of our online conversations. We are at the beginning of the problem, not the end, which is why it is so vital to get right today because without action, tomorrow could be far worse.
It is unclear whether such action is forthcoming. Oral arguments in Murthy, heard this past March, suggested the Supremes may diverge from the lower courts. A federal district court found, and an appellate court concurred in the view that in coordinating and colluding with third parties and social media companies to suppress disfavored speech, government agencies had likely violated the First Amendment. Those courts barred such contact between agencies and social media companies during the pendency of the case – an injunction the nation’s highest court stayed over the objections of Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch.
At least one companion case targeting the likes of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and its Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project as co-conspirators with the federal government in violating Americans’ speech, Hines v. Stamos, is pending.
GOP legislation to deter and/or defund the activities illustrated in these cases has languished in Congress, but oversight efforts have raised the cost for NGOs to continue partnering with the government.
When asked in June 2023 about the Stanford Internet Observatory’s future plans, Stamos told the House Judiciary Committee, which has been probing alleged public-private censorship efforts, that “Since this investigation has cost the university now approaching seven figures legal fees, it’s been pretty successful I think in discouraging us from making it worthwhile for us to do a study in 2024.”
Bhattacharya responded in an interview with RCI, “Why is Stanford putting so much of its institutional energy into [defending] this [the Observatory]?”
“It seems like they are putting their thumbs on the scale partly because they’re so closely connected with government entities.”
Months later, according to his LinkedIn profile, Stamos would depart from the Observatory, while remaining a part-time Stanford Adjunct and Lecturer in Computer Science.
On the eve of oral arguments in the Murthy case, Stanford University and its observatory castigated critics for promoting “false, inaccurate, misleading, and manufactured claims” regarding its “role in researching and analyzing social media content about U.S. elections and the COVID-19 vaccine.”
Stanford called on the Supreme Court to “affirm its right to share its research and views with the government and social media companies.”
It vowed the Internet Observatory would continue its work on “influence operations.”
Starbird has echoed Stanford. In response to a series of questions from Taibbi pertaining to the trove of FOIA’d documents Racket obtained, she said:
Our team has fielded dozens of public records requests, producing thousands of emails. Not one confirms the central claims of your thesis falsely alleging coordination with government and platforms to “censor” social media content. But, instead of acknowledging that fact, abuse continues of the Washington State public records law to smear and spread falsehoods based on willful misreadings of innocuous emails, ignorance about scientific research, and, in several instances, a lack of reading comprehension.
She too vowed that: “At the Center for an Informed Public, our research into online rumoring about election procedures and our work to rapidly identify and communicate about harmful election rumors will continue in 2024.”
Stanford’s Internet Observatory and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public will not be spearheading the Election Integrity Partnership for 2024 or future election cycles however, per a link to the EIP’s website to which a Stanford spokesperson referred RCI in sole response to our queries.
Some experts are doubtful alleged social media censorship is going away anytime soon. “I don’t know how to ‘put the genie back in the bottle,'” said Frederick.
“There’s a thing about intel analysts in general where you have a sense of superiority because you have access to things that the plebes don’t. But, you know, these people have taken their G-d complexes to the next level and turned it against their neighbor.”
Of the alleged speech police, she said “they’re drunk with power obviously and they think they know what’s best for us.”
Amb. Alberto Fernandez, vice president at MEMRI and a former leader of the precursor to the State Department’s GEC, an observatory stakeholder that had itself funded adjacent efforts, told RCI “there needs to be transparency and preferably, a ‘firewall‘ of some sort between the Feds and social media.”
In May, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) – who had himself submitted an amicus brief siding with the agencies in the case, contra Republican colleagues led by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan – revealed that in the wake of the oral arguments in Murthy, federal agencies had resumed communications with social media companies.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), who had originally brought the Murthy case as Missouri attorney general, replied: “It appears DHS, FBI and potentially other agencies are quietly ramping up their efforts to censor Constitutionally protected speech ahead of the 2024 election.”
The post Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the Rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex 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.
The infamous Swedish city is ranked in the top 100 most dangerous cities in the world.
I have some news from Sweden that goes to show just how bad the situation actually is.
A new list from Numbeo has been ranking how safe and unsafe different cities in the world are.
The Swedish city of Malmö which has several no-go zones, is ranked as the number 76th most dangerous city in the entire world, listed right between Portland at number 75 and Tehran at number 77.
In fact, Malmö comes just a few spots after Baghdad in Iraq!
What is the most dangerous city in the world then you might wonder? That spot goes to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela – A Socialist country.
But Malmö is not the only Swedish city on the list. Stockholm is ranked at number 157 and Gothenburg at number 154.
However, other Nordic countries are much more peaceful. Oslo is ranked at number 244 and Helsinki in Finland is ranked at number 305.
But can you guess the most dangerous city in Europe? That would be Marseille at number 40, closely followed by Birmingham and Coventry in Britain.
Sweden used to be a very peaceful country. In fact, one of the most peaceful countries in the entire world.
But something has happened.
Last year there was a shocking 149 bombing attacks in Sweden. This is the highest number of attacks for a country that is not at war.
We have almost 60 no-go zones where gang crime has been spiraling out of control. And the problem is, for many years, the mainstream media tried to cover it up. Nobody wanted to talk about it.
But I have reported extensively on the problems in Sweden.
You can read my previous article here on the truth about the rape crisis in Sweden.
In almost 50 years, there has been a whopping 2200% increase in the number of rapes in Sweden. That is horrible.
If you ever need proof that Socialism doesn’t work, just show them this article.
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: Shocking Truth About Malmö appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Official claimed petitions to God were ‘harassment’
Members of the city council in Carlsbad, California, have been scolded for insisting that a chaplain who has prayed “in
Jesus’ name” is guilty of harassment.
It is First Liberty Institute that has sent a letter to the council members urging them to revoke an order from their city manager that “forbids police chaplain JC Cooper and fire chaplain Denny Cooper from concluding prayers at some events ‘in Jesus’ name.'”
“The city council should follow the Supreme Court’s clear statements with respect to prayers such as the chaplains’ and allow them to pray according to their sincere religious beliefs,” explained Kayla Toney, counsel for First Liberty.
The institute explained that JC Cooper is a local pastor who has faithfully served as a volunteer chaplain for the Carlsbad police agency for six years. His father, Denny Cooper, has served as the volunteer chaplain for the fire department for 18 years.
Both provide support, encouragement, and prayer to first responders as they face traumatic situations, the institute said.
“When asked by the police chief to give the invocation at the Carlsbad Police Department Awards Ceremony, JC concluded his prayer, consistent with his long-held beliefs, ‘in Jesus’ name.’ He was later told by the city manager that unless he removed ‘in Jesus’ name’ from his invocation, he would be subject to discipline. He was then told that he could refer to any other name for God, just not ‘Jesus,'” the institute said.
The letter recommending a course correction for the city noted, “The city manager misunderstands the law concerning public chaplains and invocations, and we urge the city council to revisit the decision to censor the chaplains’ prayers. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause does not require government ‘to purge from the public sphere anything an objective observer could reasonably infer endorses or partakes of the religious.'”
The letter explains in the Kennedy v. Bremerton decision, the Supreme Court overruled the long-criticized ‘endorsement’ test established in the now-defunct Lemon decision, instead providing, “the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by reference to historical practices and understandings.”
The letter to the city explains it is city manager Scott Chadwick who “claimed that invoking ‘Jesus’ was considered harassment, created aa hostile work environment, and lifted one religion above another.”
The legal team explained, “Dating back to the Continental Congress in 1776, the United States has a robust and widely recognized tradition of both public prayer and chaplain programs. The court has explicitly held that governmental bodies may begin their meetings or other events with a prayer or invocation. … While such prayers or invocations may not proselytize or disparage other faiths, chaplains do not have to scrub their prayers of language identifiable to their faith.
“Government should not censor prayers in an attempt to make them ‘generic’ or ‘nonsectarian.’ … Indeed, in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic environment, it would be ‘daunting, if not impossible,’ to write an invocation that would be ‘inclusive beyond dispute,’ nor does the Constitution require anything of the sort—and ‘some may feel that they cannot in good faith deliver such a vague prayer.'”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
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Guest post by Briana G. Céspedes, U.S. Air Force
Why does someone join the United States military? Service members are the one percent who voluntarily raise their hands and swear to defend the Constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic. Sometimes, the domestic enemies pose great threats that have gone unnoticed for too long.
From 2020 to the present, one such service member could never have imagined the illegal actions that would be made against her for simply protecting the oath she took.
Not many know that at least 8,500 active duty members were discharged, most without an honorable characterization, and tens of thousands were placed on permanent non-pay status in the Reserves and National Guard.
And every member has different experiences ranging from loss of pay, coercion, threats from leaders, loss of promotion, and mental and physical injury. For Céspedes, the moment of leaving the military was a sad sigh of relief. In other words, involuntary discharge was the final blow in a long series of mistreatments.
On July 11, 2022, Céspedes was generally discharged from the U.S. Air Force due to her convictions to not participate in a new experimental vaccine. Her conviction was clear as she researched what products the mRNA technology contained and spoke with her Christian mentors.
She could not disregard her body and did not believe she had to force herself though she received pressure on all sides. Secretary of Defense Austin stated in a memo to the Armed Forces that they would not mandate non-FDA approved vaccines (Mandatory Vaccination Program, 2021).
This however, was not the case when it came to implementation and her unit was given a deadline of 2 months before all of them had to be fully vaccinated with only Emergency Authorized Products.
She couldn’t understand why the mandates coming through were not matching with the promises their leaders were telling them. She could not get herself to inject some new product in her body that was not tested as all other vaccines are required to.
With this conviction, she went to the base Chaplain and told him her reasons for requesting a religious exemption. He found her conviction to be sincere and forwarded that information to the commander of her wing.
This was back in September of 2021, when, she received an email directly from her Wing Commander, without anyone cc’d, directly stating that if she did not get the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the month, she would be disobeying a lawful order.
The email also stated that because she would be disobeying a lawful order, she could face court martial and dishonorable discharge. At that moment, she realized, this was going to be a big, long, hard fight. Her MAJCOM (Major Command) Commander had taken the time to individually reach out to her with haste, this was a big deal and obviously pressure coming from the top. She was filled with fear.
But, as her father told her, “Bri, maybe you’re in the military for such a time as this, maybe you’re fight for freedom is different than you thought.” She remembered why she joined and remembered what kept her there.
The U.S. Air Force taught her a few core values: Integrity First, meaning we will always show true character despite pressure; Service Before Self, meaning we will regard other’s lives and livelihoods above our own; and, Excellence in All We Do, meaning taking this fight to the end and excelling with precision.
She realized that many of her peers did not want to take the shot either, but they responded with, “I have no choice, when I joined the U.S. military I gave over my rights.” Dale Saran has a response to that.
“No one’s really litigated that issue,” Saran said. “. . .But we’ve come so far down the road that we just believe it, we just accept that. It’s not correct to say, as a matter of law, that you are suddenly property of the U.S. government once you join the military. For example, if the military said tomorrow ‘we’re going to sterilize everybody who comes into the military because we don’t want to have pregnancies, would anybody think that that was legitimate? I mean you could make a very good argument for it, you could make a very good case for the practical nature of it, but it would be completely illegal, immoral and just terrible,” Saran said. “So as soon as you go with that you could think of all kinds of limits on that power. Does it give you the right to experiment on troops? No.”
This was just the beginning. After submitting her Request for Religious Exemption in September of 2021, she was under the impression that she would be receiving a response to this question which would change her life and service forever, within 140 days.
In Air Force policy 52-201, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN THE DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE, it requires that the Air Force respond to the Airmen within this timeline requirement. This mandate can only be exempted by Congress as a T-0 waiver level.
Congress never gave this exemption to the Air Force. It was not until 168 days after submission that she received her first notification on February 14, 2022.
During those almost 6 months, a lot happened. She had been sent to quarantine 8 times, which equals to 112 days in isolation. She had transferred to a new unit where she was the only one required to wear a mask since she was the unvaccinated Airman and could not be in the same room as her coworkers during lunch.
She had received threats of dishonorable discharge, loss of all benefits and was not able to leave the local area as an unvaccinated Airman. When regulations started to ease, they only got stricter for her.
Without the vaccine, she could not enter even a coffee shop because she did not have the COVID Passport. And, at her new unit she experienced another long series of quarantines counting to almost 4 months that she spent in the barracks alone.
This led to long periods of inactivity, wastefulness, and ultimately, mental strain. If the Department of Defense is so worried about suicide among the ranks, then why would they threaten, pressure and isolate to this extent? If not for her faith, Céspedes would have resorted to other options to get out of her misery.
Her appeal was denied promptly after submission on March 24, 2022 and at this point, she knew she would be discharged but not sure when. She prepared herself to make a new way in the civilian world without the GI Bill (where the government covers the cost of a 4-year degree).
She was afraid to fail more than what she had already been told she was failing in. Supervisors, coworkers, friends, commanders, her first sergeant, who is supposed to protect the morale and welfare of the unit, all told her the same thing, “just get the dang vaccine! Then we can help you!” Even her commander told her that he did not want “an essential worker who is valued like you” to be discharged, but “my hands are tied,” he said.
On April 12, 2022, she was given a Letter of Reprimand for violation of UCMJ Article 92, Disobeying a Lawful Order. That same month, as she was supposed to put on her next rank, her commander wrote a Nonrecommendation for Promotion and pulled her Staff Sergeant, E-5 line badge.
Then, May 19, 2022, she received the Notification of Recommendation for Discharge with MISCONDUCT SERIOUS OFFENSE as there reason for discharge. It was here that she learned she would not be getting a dishonorable discharge. She cried from relief. It was not an honorable discharge but, at least she would not be on the same level as a criminal.
She was thankful to the Congressmen and women that worked hard to stop President Biden’s attempt at giving service members like her a dishonorable discharge. She hopes that they will continue to push to upgrade the characterization to honorable, since involuntary veterans cannot continue to be punished for an illegal mandate that has now been rescinded. Many involuntary veterans are not able to pursue school because they are not eligible for the GI bill and are barred from employment opportunities and even third party benefits like membership with national veteran support organizations.
At this point, she was ready to get out. She had made plans with her family, she was prepared to start over. Waiting is what killed her the most. Day to day she had to show up to work in uniform knowing that it would be stripped from her.
For her, it was hard to be proud to wear the uniform when everyone saw her as a threat and a rebel. She got close to the Lord, her family over FaceTime and the local church. She fought for the principle more than the product, realizing the wrong done to everyone. How could we, as the most brave, be known to bow to the most illogical of rules?
This vaccine did not provide immunity nor safety, and more than that, rules were being broken left and right in the implementation of it. The beauty of the United States is the accountability the people are required to keep their leaders to based on the Constitution. That is what kept her standing.
And, on July 11, 2022, she was out. She sat on the kitchen floor in disbelief, full of sadness because she was now returning without the honorable stamp from the military, but with its rejection. But, keeping to her oath had just begun.
And that beginning includes sharing stories of the thousands upon thousands of service members that have suffered the same consequence for their convictions.
We need to raise awareness on the illegality and immorality that was done to those the U.S government says they honor the most. We need to honor our veterans and make sure they receive the veterans support and basic characterization of honorable they deserve.
We train our service members with the principles of liberty, integrity, and honor. So, let’s acknowledge the wrong done and thank our members for maintaining those principles we all are required to defend.
With the recent Declaration of Military Accountability, she joins in the movement to ensure that service members like her, the junior enlisted in the barracks is protected. Protected from willful illegality and misuse of authority within the ranks.
Junior enlisted should be able to trust their leaders, yet, we are facing a crisis of recruitment and retention because of the way DOD leadership has chosen to treat their members. The military should be known for honor and we expect our leaders to be honorable no matter the cost.
This is the story of one Involuntary Veteran.
There are many more out there.
And we won’t stop reminding the DOD leadership what oaths they have taken and keep them accountable to that.
The post Involuntary Veterans: Speaking up About Unlawful Discharge appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘We cannot remain silent against such explicit tyranny’
Christians across America, and anyone who endorses “faith, family and freedom,” have been given their marching orders for the November presidential election.
The instructions do not include WHO to vote for, but the messaging is clear.
“The Left is not only waging legal warfare against Donald Trump. They are attempting to prevent half the country from having any say in the governance of our nation, and they have weaponized the legal system to ensure their success at any cost,” began a statement from Gary Bauer, senior vice president of public policy for the James Dobson Family Institute.
“They are already using our legal system to go after pro-life activists and patriotic Christians who defend religious liberty. The Deep State is spying on conservative parents and churches, treating them like enemies of the state. They have even gone so far as to compare caring parents to terrorists.
“The Left has repeatedly [contended] that conservatives are a threat to our democracy. Yet, they are the ones who are aggressively attacking our constitutional Republic with blatant disregard for our fundamental rights. We cannot remain silent against such explicit tyranny.”
The statement continued, “But here’s what we must understand: What just happened is not only about Donald Trump, and it will not stop with him.”
The verdict “is a clarion call for every God-fearing, America-loving Christian and our fellow citizens who believe in faith, family, and freedom to run, walk, or crawl, if necessary, to the polls this November.”
Bauer described the conviction, on Thursday, of Trump on business records-related claims as “a tragic day for America” and a “clear abuse of our justice system.”
“This politically motivated and stacked trial is what we have come to expect in communist China or North Korea—not in the United States of America. The totalitarian impulse of the neo-Marxist Left is to suppress and silence political opposition using any means necessary.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Voters Who Support Faith, Family, Freedom Implored to ‘Run, Walk or Crawl’ to the Polls appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
The following comes from Kat’s Meow Substack account. It’s a discussion of recent events in the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF).
This particular move has the distinct odor of sneaky, back-room stuff. We were made aware of it by their latest victim.
As the RPOF chose their national delegates this past week, they managed to cut out a long-time party regular, RPOF National Committeeman, Peter Feaman, from meaningful committee assignments. His crime? He supports grassroots conservatives and Donald Trump.
Here is Mr. Feaman’s message about what went down, released Thurs., May 16.
“As an RPOF leader I thought you should be aware of what happened last week.
Now that we have chosen our Florida convention delegates, Republican National Committee (RNC) Rule 41 requires that all of the delegates meet in order to elect individuals to serve on the convention committees, including the Rules Committee and the all-important PLATFORM COMMITTEE.
Last week, your RPOF had its so called “election”. Except that there was no real election. There was a rubber-stamp of committee members pre-selected by an unknown cabal.
-HERE IS HOW IT WENT DOWN-
Last Tuesday, May 7, I had a phone conversation with Evan Power. In that conversation he made no mention of any upcoming Delegate phone call. I told him I was in Hawaii visiting family which is why I missed this past quarterly meeting. That is why I was very surprised to receive later on that same day an email announcing a telephone call for all delegates set for the following day at 6:00 pm. (Wednesday, May 8), less than 24 hours away. There was no mention in that email that there would be an “election” of committee members to be held during the call. I sent an email to Evan asking for an agenda for the telephone meeting, especially since we had just spoken and he knew I was in Hawaii, and he said nothing about a call the next day. I received no reply from Evan or anyone else.
The next day we received a reminder email about the call from Bill Helmich. The email mentioned only that the call was necessary for “some quick bookkeeping and information.” In hindsight, that description was purposefully misleading.
I then sent an email to Helmich asking him for an agenda. Again, I received no reply.
Then, less than 15 minutes before the phone conference the bombshell email arrived. The email said the phone conference would include “selection” of convention committee members “who have agreed to serve.” To my surprise, the list of pre-selected committee members was included.
This was not to be an election, as specifically required by RNC Rule 41. This call was meant to be a rubber-stamp of members already SECRETLY CHOSEN by the elites.
Imagine my surprise when I saw Kevin Cabrera as the male platform committee designee, (each convention committee must consist of one male and one female from each state). This was the same person who, only 3 months before, had failed in his bid to be RPOF Vice-Chairman. The Platform Committee will write the RNC Platform for the next 4 years.
Imagine my surprise when I saw Evan Power as the male representative on the Rules Committee. After having served for 12 years on the RNC Rules Committee and having served on the 2016 Convention Rules Committee, when we successfully fought off the Never-Trumpers, I naively thought I would be informed at some point about this.
RNC Rule 41 specifically requires an election by the convention delegation so that the convention committee members represent the majority consensus of each state’s convention delegation. Our delegation had no say other than to rubber-stamp those pre-selected.
After 20 years of leadership on the RPOF Executive Committee, one would think I should not have been so naïve as to think the Republican Party of Florida leadership would actually follow the RNC rules. Silly me.
Peter M. Feaman
RNC National Committeeman, Florida
2012-2024”
The message is very clear. NO ONE, even party regulars, WHO SUPPORTS GRASS ROOTS CONSERVATIVES – WHO HAPPEN TO SUPPORT DONALD TRUMP – IS WELCOME IN THE RPOF. I am guessing that Mr. Feaman had a clue about this when he tried to become the Party Chair.
Initial concerns from members of another Republican group in Florida – The Florida Republican Assembly (FRA) – were that the RPOF wanted to shut them down. After stepping back for a moment, it’s now feared that the actions of the RPOF in placing anti-Trumpers on National Convention committees is to derail President Trump’s RNC nomination.
The post Republican Party of Florida Pushing Out Trump Republicans – Are Elites Preparing to Overthrow Trump Nomination at GOP Convention? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
We learned a week ago that the FBI was authorized to use deadly force at Mar-a-Lago when agents raided the President’s home in an uncalled for and unprecedented raid.
Julie Kelly Reports New Revelations about the Mar-A Lago Raid
In a nutshell..
• The FBI authorized the use of deadly force
• Agents were prepared to engage in with Trump and his Secret Service team
• they had an onsite medical team available in case it got deadly
The FBI risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests for a publicity stunt to make it look like Trump stole national security files.
People need to be arrested for this.
Julie Kelly Reports New Revelations about the Mar-A Lago Raid
In a nutshell..
• The FBI authorized the use of deadly force
• Agents were prepared to engage in with Trump and his Secret Service team
• they had an onsite medical team available in case it got deadly
The FBI… https://t.co/DJm14f21Pk pic.twitter.com/I4vVbEP0zE
— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) May 21, 2024
Merrick Garland personally approved the raid.
Garland: “I personally approved” the Mar-a-Lago raid. pic.twitter.com/qw8HJOcsGZ
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 11, 2022
The far-left communists who are using corrupt courts to put President Trump in prison, say that it was standard practice to use lethal force against the President of the United States when the FBI raids his home and steals documents from the President. However, Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service Agent, shared that nothing about the raid on Mar-a-Lago was standard.
If there is anyone more qualified to comment on this I do not know about them.
“There was nothing standard about the raid on Mar a Lago.
These people do not get to do anything they want.”
Credit:@dbongino pic.twitter.com/zJpAzwBObf
— Big Fish (@BigFish3000) May 22, 2024
President Trump shared that the Democrats were authorized to use deadly force and that he and his family may have been in the line of fire if something broke out. The Libs countered to say he wasn’t supposed to be at home that day.
Libturds are saying that they knew Trump was not home at the time. That doesn’t matter . He could have come home during the raid . They obviously were expecting something or they would not have had medics there. Were they expecting a shootout with Secret Service ? The… pic.twitter.com/KPtJbc3gMF
—
Ames
Per a discussion with Liz Harrington today on the Joe Hoft Show, Liz shared that she believes that President Trump was supposed to be there that day.
“I was trying to remember, and I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure he was supposed to be there.”
Here is what Harrington shared.
Biden’s DOJ and FBI Thought President Trump Would Be at MAL on the Day of the Raid! pic.twitter.com/6XFGtEYwdb
— Joe Hoft (@realJoeHoft) May 30, 2024
The post EXCLUSIVE: “I’m Pretty Sure” President Trump Was Supposed to be at Mar-a-Lago on Day of Raid (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Families of U.S. veterans snubbed by bureaucracy on Memorial Day
Families of America’s veterans interred at the Cheyenne National Cemetery were snubbed by bureaucrats on Memorial Day: A memorial event was announced for 11 a.m. but no one showed up to conduct it or honor the veterans.
The Cowboy State Daily reports the official explanation is that it was a mixup – that an event had been announced for 11 a.m., when families showed up, but it actually then was changed to 3 p.m.
The report explained, “As many as 100 showed up at Cheyenne National Cemetery on Monday morning for an advertised Memorial Day service in honor of fallen heroes and loved ones. But the VA never showed up to host the service.”
Among those who were there were Carol Anne Hopkins and Dale Hopkins, who traveled four hours from Riverton, Wyo., for the event.
They were “stood up,” the report said. “No one was there to play the taps, which is played during patriotic memorial ceremonies and military funerals. No honor guard showed up, no 21-gun salute, and no prayers — at least not until four hours after a scheduled observance posted by the U.S. Veterans Administration at 11 a.m.”
The event had been announced on the VA website for 11 a.m., and drew a multitude of families, many from out of state.
“I’m kind of amazed that there isn’t a (memorial) service happening,” Keith Jobes, a veteran, told the publication.
“We the people showed up today, but the government didn’t,” added Diane Fritsch of Cheyenne.
There were no cancellation notices or anything for those who wanted to express their patriotism.
The report explained William Washington, the cemetery’s manager for the VA, said the mixup could have been the result of a failure to update the VA website.
Plans were uncertain, and then Washington met up with Justin Tripp, commander of VFW post in Cheyenne.
Tripp offered to send some veterans for a 3 p.m. event.
But the website of the national organization continued to report the observance time as 11 a.m.
Tripp said, “This frustrates me. I’m a veteran. This isn’t about picnics, but about people who died and never came home.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
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This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has remained mum about her recent veto of legislation aimed at curbing China’s gruesome forced organ-harvesting trade, which targets detained ethnic and religious minorities, mostly Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans, Christians, and Falun Gong practitioners.
The April 10 veto has proponents of the legislation and human rights activists scratching their heads. Over the last year, Texas, Utah, and Idaho have enacted similar legislation, and legislatures in Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina are debating similar measures. The bipartisan bills would prevent health insurance plans from reimbursing individuals for any organ transplants in China or other U.S. adversaries. They also would bar insurance payments for post-operative procedures related to organ transplants if the organ came from China or any other nation that funds or engages in forced organ harvesting.
Idaho’s and Arizona’s versions also included language prohibiting medical reimbursement for DNA and other genetic sequencing procedures conducted on sequencing devices from China and other adversary countries.
For decades, China has harvested prisoners’ organs even though the government initially asserted that all of its organ extractions were from voluntary donors. Yet, as far back as 2005, the top transplant doctor in China, then serving as the nation’s vice minister of health, admitted that roughly 95% of all organ transplants come from prisoners killed for their body parts.
Despite an international outcry over this practice, China ramped up its organ harvesting trade over the last two decades to become a $1 billion-a-year industry, according to international human rights experts. A growing body of research has revealed a particularly reprehensible aspect of the life-ending extractions: Religious minorities and political dissidents are the primary victims, with an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 being killed for their organs each year.
Other research has shown that Chinese authorities have used DNA tests on prisoners in forced labor camps to identify which prisoners would be ideal for organ harvesting.
China has vehemently denied these findings, but in 2019, the China Tribunal, a non-governmental commission in the U.K., concluded otherwise. The Tribunal found that the Chinese organ trafficking industry is harvesting organs from executed prisoners at an industrial scale, actions that constitute crimes against humanity.
Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and co-chair of the annual International Religious Freedom Summit, hailed the passage of the state measures aimed at prohibiting any U.S. complicity in China’s organ-harvesting trade, calling the steps “greatly encouraging.”
“For years, we have known that China is engaged in the despicable and ghoulish practice of forced organ harvesting. We also know that the victims of this crime are most often religious minorities and political dissidents,” she said in a statement. “Sadly, the beneficiaries are usually wealthy patients who may not know the details of this illegal practice. Still, their ignorance does not excuse them from being complicit in this crime against humanity.
“I commend the states that are acting to cut off any healthcare funding for this barbaric practice,” she added. “The demand from wealthy westerners for healthy organs cannot justify, and must never encourage, the brutal harvesting of organs from helpless victims in China and elsewhere.”
In issuing her veto, Katie Hobbs provided a three-line explanation, arguing that the measure “includes overbroad provisions for genetic sequencing equipment that create compliance challenges for hospitals, healthcare providers, and researchers.”
But the bill’s sponsors included language to accommodate concerns from the insurance industry that it would be punished for unwittingly breaking the law. Michael Lucci of State Armor Action, an organization that is spearheading the state-by-state legislative push to curb China’s organ-harvesting trade, said that neither Hobbs nor her staff engaged with him or other proponents to voice concerns while the measure was making its way through the Arizona legislature.
“Gov. Hobbs’ veto of HB2503 is shameful,” Lucci told RealClearPolitics. “Gov. Hobbs speaks of championing women’s medical rights and medical privacy. Yet her veto … undermines all that rhetoric.”
“Arizonans will continue to have DNA harvested by China’s government, and Arizona has failed in a state’s basic duty to stand up against the murderous practice of foreign organ harvesting,” he added.
Hobbs’ office did not respond to repeated RCP inquiries. While China’s transplant practices have spurred international condemnation for its organ “tourism trade,” there is no clear paper trail to determine whether U.S. insurance companies have reimbursed residents for any costs involving transplants performed in China or other countries. Proponents designed the bill to guard against any reimbursements and also to bar coverage for any post-operative care associated with organ transplants that occurred in China or other U.S. adversaries.
“We should make clear that when Americans interact with China’s communist government, what seems too good to be true is too good to be true,” Lucci told RCP. “China’s low costs are built on slave labor, and organ transplants come from political prisoners.”
“In other words, if you get an organ transplant from China, you are on your own,” Lucci told RCP. “You have to pay for the transplant and all follow-up care associated with the transplant.”
In recent years, efforts to curb China’s organ-harvesting practices have increased at the federal level. Last year, the House passed GOP Rep. Chris Smith’s Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act, which would impose sanctions on any person who sponsors or facilitates forced organ harvesting or the trafficking of persons for the purpose of removing their organs. It would also require U.S. federal agencies to issue annual reports assessing the practice in China and other foreign adversaries.
Congress is also taking action against Beijing Genomics Institute, or BGI, which is already under U.S. export control restrictions, and Wuxi AppTec for their role in illegally collecting Americans’ and others’ genetic material and for its tracking of ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region of China where the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide against the Uyghur people. BGI, a company that developed its DNA technology with China’s military, has faced international condemnation for harvesting data from millions of pregnant women in the U.S. and around the world.
In Europe, BGI used a pre-natal test to collect genetic data on more than 8 million pregnant women without notifying them that their data was going to the Chinese government. The Chinese military would later use this data to conduct research, according to the House Select Committee on China.
U.S. security agencies are concerned that the enormous bank of genetic information could help China dominate pharmaceuticals and also potentially lead to engineered pathogens targeting the U.S. and other foreign populations and their food supplies.
BGI has faced several U.S. lawsuits over the theft of U.S. intellectual property. Wuxi AppTec, which has also been accused of stealing U.S. technology, has sponsored events with China’s military and jointly operated genetic collection sites with China’s military. Wuxi AppTec makes over 60% of its revenue from the U.S. market.
In mid-May, a bipartisan group of House members, including Reps. John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, and Rep. Grad Wenstrump, an Ohio Republican, praised the Oversight Committee’s passage of the Biosecure Act, which is aimed at curbing these Chinese companies’ U.S. operations.
“The United States will not sit idly by as the CCP steals our genetic data,” the trio said in a statement. “We are proud to lead the Biosecure Act and look forward to working with House leadership to get this bill on the floor as soon as possible.”
The measure would prohibit medical reimbursement for genetic sequencing procedures conducted by China or another foreign adversary and bar any U.S. federal agency from obtaining any biotechnology equipment or service by BGI and Wuxi AppTec or any other “biotechnology company of concern.” It also directs the Office of Management and Budget to publish a list of entities constituting biotechnology companies of concern in coordination with secretaries of Health and Human Services, Commerce, the State Department, Homeland Security, and the director of National Intelligence.
The post Hobbs’ Veto of China’s Organ-Harvesting Bill Spurs Questions appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘One of the most egregious examples of government religious discrimination’
A new student-led Bible club has been approved at a school in California after seven months of “anti-Christian hostility” from school officials.
The report comes from Dean Broyles, of the National Center for Law & Policy, which wrote to school officials explaining the students’ right to have their own club in the Oceanside Unified School District.
“This flagrant mistreatment and abuse of these courageous religious student leaders and other OHS students who desire to participate in the A-Team Bible Club is one of the most egregious examples of government anti-Christian religious discrimination and hostility that I have seen in my nearly thirty years of practicing law,” Broyles explained.
He cited the opposition from OHS ASB cashier and clerk Robbin Pollard.
“Pollard’s actions and communications towards these Christian students were arbitrary, capricious and discriminatory. Such state anti-religious bigotry is unacceptable and is unlawful. But this is precisely what happens when the state delegates too much unchecked discretionary government power to a single ‘gatekeeper,’ who either does not know the law or does not care to abide by it. The OHS ASB, particularly Pollard, owes these student leaders an apology.”
He said the law requires government to be neutral, not hostile, toward religion.
Part of that, he said, is “Accommodating religious students on campus by giving them equal access.”
His report on the dispute explained how the school had thrown up “relentless red tape and overt religious discrimination.”
The breakthrough, the approval from the board, happened only days after the district got an 18-page letter from NCLP charging the school with anti-Christian hostility.
“The student leaders attempting to launch the Christian Club had endured more than seven months of significant anti-Christian hostility and blatant religious discrimination from a rogue teacher at Oceanside High School since first attempting to form the club at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year,” he said.
The report noted the Religious Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, the Equal Access Act and OUSD’s own policies and regulations protect such student-led clubs on high school campuses.
Pollard, the report said, repeatedly had claimed to the students that there were too many Christian clubs on campus and they would have to wait a year.
The first meeting of the A-Team Bible Club was held just days ago.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
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This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
Real Clear Wire
The post Remembering a Death in Battle appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
‘Americans no longer have to be guilty to be stripped of their property, rights and liberties’
It’s been called by some “a modern-day form of highway robbery,” but the Supreme Court nevertheless has gone along with it.
It’s the practice by police of using delay tactics when they confiscate cash, jewelry, cars and other valuables from people who sometimes are completely innocent of any offense.
They are “asset forfeiture” cases and often involve no criminal charge against the property owner, according to a report from the Rutherford Institute, which fights in America’s courts for constitutional, religious and civil rights.
The latest high court action came in a 6-3 decision in Culley v. Marshall, where the justices held that there are “no due process protections for citizens in asset forfeiture proceedings to have an early court hearing to contest the government keeping possession of their seized property while they await trial.”
Lawyers for the Rutherford were joined by those from the ACLU and Cato Institute to argue that an early hearing was needed to “protect citizens against the government’s delay tactics, which make it difficult for individuals innocent of any wrongdoing to recover their property in a timely manner from police who stand to profit from the forfeiture.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch said it is a problem to have police delay proceedings and keep citizens’ private property for as long as a year or more.
He said that could coerce the owners to “settle” the dispute by paying a penalty for property they need for their work, or that they love.
But the majority overruled him.
“Americans no longer have to be guilty to be stripped of their property, rights and liberties,” warned constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. “You just have to possess something the government wants.”
The institute explained, “Asset forfeiture has become a ‘booming business’ for the government, with federal forfeitures alone having brought in $2.5 billion during 2018. Civil asset forfeiture is a practice where government agents (usually the police) seize private property they ‘suspect’ may be connected to criminal activity, then, whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure.”
The government claims in such cases that some sort of property is “tied” to a crime, and then takes it. Then it forces the owner to prove the “innocence” of that property.
But the government sets up hoops and obstacles for the owners to negotiate in trying to regain their own property.
“Challenging these takings in court can cost an owner more than the value of the confiscated property itself, which, as Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence explained, is why some agencies reportedly place special emphasis on seizing low-value items and relatively small amounts of cash,” the institute reported.
The case developed when police in Alabama confiscated cars belong to Halima Culley and Lena Sutton which had been used by other individuals who were accused of drug possession.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
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This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
Real Clear Wire
What is good for defense contractors is not necessarily good for the military, nor the taxpayer, they are supposed to serve. Consider the F-35 program, which was supposed to deliver a jet that would make all other military jets obsolete. It has yet to do so, and the failures of the program sustainability speak to the idea that we need diversity in our procurement.
For one thing, too many F-35 sit idle. At a recent congressional hearing, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall claimed that “55% is the number we have for operational availability” of F-35s. That percentage sounds low; imagine if your car would get you to work only 55% of the time. You would be looking for another option!
But things are even worse than that for the F-35 program. Under further questioning, Kendall and his team admitted that fewer than a third of F-35s are “fully operational.” That tracks with a report from the Project on Government Oversight, which reported this year: “The Pentagon’s top testing office, the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E), recently released its office’s annual report, which showed that the F-35 program has a fleet-wide full mission capable rate of only 30%.”
Under criticism that the F-35 has become a “paperweight,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin responded at another congressional hearing that he disagreed with the characterization and “in the future we should take [and] we should have a different approach” to “get our aircraft operational.” That would seem like the least we, as taxpayers and citizens, should expect.
Another lawmaker, Rep. Donald Norcross, (D-N.J.), notes that the F-35 is “our largest weapons program.” It is certainly the most expensive. “The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter program remains DOD’s most expensive weapon system program,” the GAO wrote last year. “It is estimated that it will cost over $1.7 trillion to buy, operate, and sustain these aircraft.”
The F-35 is also the Pentagon’s most expansive program, “with more than 1,700 going to the Air Force, more than 420 to the Marine Corps and more than 270 to the Navy,” USNI reports. “The program is expected to move from its acquisition phase to full-rate production next year.”
The F-35 will be a great asset to our national security, but putting all your financial backing in one weapons system doesn’t make sense. F-35 readiness has been negatively affected by maintenance challenges and software issues as of late causing the low capability rates. From the latest GAO report to congress, the F-35 mission capability rates are being negatively impacted by a heavy reliance on contractors, inadequate training, a lack of technical data, a lack of support equipment, a lack of spare parts and funding prioritization. The report passed recommendations for the Secretary of Defense, along with the Secretary of the Air Force and Navy, to assess primary use of contractors versus military personnel in the maintenance and sustainment of the F-35 program.
The F-35 has significant advanced war fighting capabilities, but unless the jets are utilizing their full capabilities what is that worth to each Combatant Commander? As more jets come off the line a solid plan will be needed to be in place for sustainment to ensure the warfighters are given a Full Mission Capable platform to meet Air Tasking Order Missions at home and abroad.
I flew the F-15Cs for 16 years, which has an unmatched Air to Air combat record. The Eagle is presenting its own sustainability problems as the jets get older and fly past its intended life. In my opinion, the F-15EX, in addition to the F-35 program, should be the future. The FY23 NDAA stopped the retirement of F-22 block 20s until FY27 but continues to retire 65 F-15C/D aircraft, mostly from the Air National Guard. It appears Congress is not happy with our current fighter fleet numbers and combat readiness, which is why we are still moving forward with buying up to 104 F15EXs. I spent 11 years on Active duty and 10 years in the Air Guard. Historically, the Air Guard is a much cheaper way to maintain and fly fighters, while continuing to preserve combat pilots and maintenance personnel who have years of experience. Buying more F15EX and placing them in the Air Guard would be an easy way to save money for our taxpayers and also keep Combat Capabilities in place for our Homeland Defense Missions as well as supporting Missions overseas.
The United States is certainly spending huge dollars on the F-35, but are we getting the full value yet? I do believe the jet will prove to be a game changer, but it is clearly falling far short today. The military needs weapon systems it can rely on every day to succeed. Spending billions on a jet, without a reliable sustainment plan of action, is not a responsible use of our taxpayer dollars. Our taxpayers deserve better but more importantly our warfighters deserve better.
Jared “Chowda” Conaboy, Commissioned in 1998 from UMASS ROTC, 21 years in Air Force/ANG with Over 2000 hours in F-15C, Instructor Pilot, and Weapons School Graduate.
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This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire
House Republicans who have led a nearly two-year investigation into a $500,000 State Department grant to an organization that promotes humanism and secularism are pressing the agency to conduct more diligent oversight after it admitted that the organization may have misused taxpayer funds.
Rep. Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who heads the panel’s human rights subcommittee, have accused the State Department of trying to promote atheism overseas under the guise of advancing religious pluralism, a longtime U.S. foreign policy priority. Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who chairs the panel’s oversight and accountability subcommittee, has also helped spearhead inquiries into the grant.
For more than a year, the trio has been investigating the decision-making behind the State Department’s April 2021 solicitation bid for a $500,000 grant titled “Promoting and Defending Religious Freedom Inclusive of Atheist, Humanist, Non-Practicing and Non-Affiliated Individuals.” The agency awarded the grant to Humanists International, or HI, an organization aimed at promoting humanism, an outlook and system of thought attaching prime importance to human effort rather than divine or supernatural powers.
In a letter sent to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Verma Wednesday, McCaul, Smith, and Mast charged the State Department with engaging in a “pattern of obfuscation and denial” throughout the investigation in order to “expand atheism networks” overseas. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause of the Constitution bars the use of tax dollars to promote theocracy, a specific religion or belief system.
It was not until Foreign Affairs Committee staff contacted the HI to schedule a transcribed interview, and the organization retained legal counsel, that the “true scope” of the grant’s programming was revealed, the GOP House members asserted. HI’s attorneys contacted the State Department and admitted it had provided the wrong slides presented during its training session in Nepal.
“Legal counsel for the grantee uncovered in a matter of weeks what the Department obfuscated, misrepresented and denied for years,” they wrote, expressing skepticism about the agency’s stated commitment to recoup any misused funds and take action to bar HI from further State Department grants.
“We do, however, appreciate your statements, and we expect to be informed fully and without delay of all developments in this matter,” they continued. “The Department can reasonably expect congressional oversight of grant funding to continue since the need for it is all the more pressing in light of the recent revelations.”
According to its website, HI promotes “human-rights priorities based on humanist values at international organizations,” including the United Nations. It also champions the rights of individuals persecuted or discriminated against for failing to adhere to a country’s predominant religion or those who face harsh penalties under their country’s blasphemy and anti-conversion laws.
A statement on HI’s website praises a Nigerian court for upholding the appeal of Mubarak Bala and reducing his prison sentence from 24 years to five years for violating the country’s blasphemy laws. In 2020, Bala was arrested in northern Nigeria, where Islam is the government’s dominant religion and thousands of Christians are killed each year, for a series of Facebook posts expressing his humanist beliefs.
The latest war of words comes after the State Department acknowledged in late April that the agency had provided the House Republicans with the wrong PowerPoint slides about what HI was using U.S. funds to accomplish.
Naz Durakoglu, the State Department’s assistant secretary for its bureau of legislative affairs, notified McCaul that HI had recently contacted the department to say it had initially provided the wrong slides about the information conveyed at training sessions the grant funded. The agency then passed the wrong slides on to the committee in response to its probe.
“This new information directly contradicts Humanists International’s previous representation to the Department that the slides it had earlier provided were the ones used at the training,” Durakoglu wrote to McCaul in an April 29 letter, noting that the “department is deeply concerned about this development.”
The State Department stressed that it’s taking “immediate action” to request additional information from HI to ensure its work complies with federal laws and regulations.
“Should the Department determine that any such charges were not in accordance with applicable statutes and regulations, including activities outside the grant agreement, it will take all necessary actions to recoup misused funds” and take steps to bar HI from being eligible to receive federal funds in the future, Durakoglu wrote. He also noted that it would refer any misrepresentations HI made to the State Department Office of Inspector General for further investigation.
But McCaul, Smith, and Mast aren’t convinced the State Department is acting in good faith, considering that the agency had pushed back against their concerns for more than a year. The House Foreign Affairs Committee obtained the PowerPoint slides from the actual HI training sessions and argued they show that only humanists or atheists attended the sessions, instead of members of several faith traditions. They also complained that the slides appeared to show that HI was using the grant to advance the humanist cause and its influence on government policy and touted the benefits of setting annual numerical goals for recruiting new humanist or atheist members.
For more than a year, U.S. officials claimed that the grant’s work was not aimed at increasing the number and influence of atheists abroad but was merely a routine award aimed at promoting the larger goal of religious tolerance in South and Central Asia or the Middle East and North Africa, the grant offering’s targeted area.
The State Department’s stated aim for the grant was to prevent discrimination against individuals who do not adhere to the predominant religious tradition. In several countries across those regions, blasphemy and anti-conversion laws, such as those in Nigeria, prohibit insults to the prevailing religion and are often used to enact harsh penalties against religious minorities, atheists, and other nonbelievers.
The State Department provided another grant opportunity in 2021 to help “expand” religious freedom and tolerance in Mozambique, where Christians face horrific levels of persecution despite making up roughly 50% of the population.
“The genesis of these activities is how do we bring the most persecuted and the most marginalized [when it comes to religious freedom] and bring them into the conversation,” a senior department official of the State Department’s Office of Religious Freedom told RealClearPolitics in a lengthy interview. “In Central Asia, there’s significant persecution of Christians, there’s significant persecution of religious minorities, and most of these folks just want to live their lives in accordance with their own conscience.”
The average Muslim in Saudi Arabia doesn’t necessarily want to practice Islam the way the government dictates, the senior official said, so the purpose of the grant offering was to acknowledge that people who don’t adhere to approved religious belief are often the victims of religious discrimination.
“The idea behind the request for proposal was not to make a program for atheists or for members of a particular group,” he added. “It was to make sure that when we think about promoting religious freedom for everyone, we’re doing things that are inclusive and [including] members of those communities who often get left out because they don’t have an obvious spokesperson.”
The official vigorously defends that rationale for providing the grant, but says his office is deeply concerned that HI may have engaged in misconduct.
“I will stand proudly behind the [rationale], but as soon as there’s the potential whiff of fraud or misrepresentation, that’s a very different matter entirely,” he said. “We take that very seriously and want to ensure that, as stewards of taxpayer dollars, that not one penny of taxpayer money is being misappropriated or misused.”
The State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, which was created in 1998 by an act of Congress, promotes universal respect for religious freedom or belief as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy. The office monitors religiously motivated abuses and discrimination worldwide and engages with faith-based actors, groups, and organizations to help promote democracy and pluralism.
In 2016, Smith, a longtime human rights champion in Congress, worked to update the religious freedom law to expressly protect the rights of people around the world who practice no religion at all.
“We want to make clear that … nobody is coerced into believing in God if they don’t want to,” Smith said at the time. “I’m a Catholic, and I believe very deeply in God, but Christ said, ‘I stand at the door and knock. If you welcome me, I come in.’ And that’s the way religious liberty ought to be, absolutely voluntary. People have the right not to believe.”
Smith also said the language clarifying that the law is meant to protect nonbelievers was noncontroversial even among the more evangelical members of Congress.
“It speaks well of all of, of everyone, that we really want to protect freedom of conscience for all people,” Smith said.
But Smith is now deeply concerned that the State Department is using taxpayer funds to directly benefit the atheist and humanist cause and possibly grow its numbers. In the coming weeks, the New Jersey Republican plans to introduce legislation explicitly barring grants violating the Establishment Clause. He cited language in the Notice of Funding Opportunity, the official agency notice describing the grant and requesting applicants, as potentially violating the First Amendment prohibitions. The notice states that the “expected program outcome” was to “[i]ncrease capacity among members of atheist and heterodox individuals to form or join networks or organizations.”
“It is hard to believe that Department officials refused to read the words right in front of them, but we are not sure what else may have happened,” the GOP members wrote in their Wednesday letter to Verma.
They also cite HI’s state strategic goals, which include having member organizations in “every part of the world,” according to its website.
Gary McLelland, HI’s CEO, has been very vocal about his animus against the Roman Catholic Church, arguing in one podcast that, “It’s obviously my job in [the international HI organization] to combat the Vatican policies and to push against them.”
The timing of the grant may have helped HI recover from a tough financial period. An RCP analysis of HI’s charitable 990 tax forms shows that the organization operated at a net loss every year from 2019 until 2021, ending that year with a net loss of $322,000, although it listed $3.8 million in assets. In 2022, roughly the time of receiving the State’s $500,000 Department grant, the organization reported only a $3,000 loss and $3.2 million in assets.
As recently as March 21, during an appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Verma dismissed the Republicans’ concerns that the grant was promoting converts to atheism or humanism instead of tolerance for all religious minorities. At one point during his testimony, Verma deemed the grant “exactly the right kind of program.”
“I have looked at the grant. I have looked at the materials,” he said. “[Promoting atheism] is not what the grant is for, and that is not what the work would be for. We would never authorize such a grant to any organization.” I have seen no evidence of any grant to promote atheism in Nepal … I have looked at the materials this grantee has used. It was about supporting civil society.”
In February, a State Department assistant secretary told the House Republicans that the grant-funded training in Nepal only concerned “creating guidelines … for the promotion of human rights and dignity.”
The agency continued to deny that it provided funds to any organizations with “the aim of using the funds to promote or advance specific ideologies or beliefs,” even though the official State Department “scope of work” for the program stated that participants would “conduct advocacy and members activities promoting humanism” and would work to “increase and diversify their membership network.”
The post State Dept: ‘Atheism Grant’ May Have Been Misused appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
But his 1st Amendment claim still pending in federal court
Prosecutors in Fort Bend County, Texas, have given up on their campaign to convict a citizen journalist who was singled out by police and arrested from among a number of other reporters at the scene of a police response.
The Institute for Justice notes, however, that the federal lawsuit by journalist Justin Pulliam against authorities in the county continues.
But they no longer will be prosecuting him for misdemeanor offenses.
The decision came after a hung jury in a trial, in which five jurors decided on acquittal, and one held out for a conviction.
The institute explained the county now has dropped charges that Pulliam interfered with police officers.
“We’re supposed to enjoy liberty and justice for all, to be able to speak our beliefs, but prosecutors can violate the Constitution with retaliatory prosecutions to silence political opposition. It’s alarming and outrageous,” Pulliam said in a statement released by the institute.
“I was saved only by a jury of my peers, who stopped the political persecution after watching the video—my video—that showed exactly what happened.”
The background is that he was arrested in December 2021 while recording the Fort Bend County sheriff’s office’s response to a mental health call. Justin had permission from the property owner and was nowhere close to the scene.
“But then-Sgt. Taylor Rollins, a defendant in Justin’s free speech challenge, arrested him within 60 seconds of arriving on scene because Justin questioned why he was being ordered off scene while others were allowed to stay,” the organization confirmed.
He filed his lawsuit in December 2022, and shortly later, the state prosecutor took him to trial for allegedly interfering with Rollins.
That resulted in the mistrial.
“Those five jurors got it right,” explained IJ lawyer Jeff Rowes. “Not only did Justin not break the law, his arrest was blatantly unconstitutional and a threat to citizen journalists everywhere. The DA never should have prosecuted in the first place and it was right to drop the charges now.”
A federal court already has rejected the sheriff’s claim that the resulting First Amendment lawsuit by Pulliam should be dismissed.
The IJ said, “Justin’s lawsuit with IJ seeks to protect First Amendment rights in two ways. First, the public is allowed to record police subject only to reasonable restrictions. Again, Justin was far from interfering with police activities. Second, government officials cannot treat independent journalists differently from members of the established media or other members of the public. The deputy who arrested Justin singled him out from others on the scene just because Justin was recording.”
The IJ noted, “As part of his project to instill more accountability and transparency into the actions of public officials, Justin tracks calls on a scanner and drives to the scene to document law enforcement responses. His particular focus is on recording calls where no one was accused of a crime, such as mental health checks. Afterward, his videos are uploaded onto his YouTube channel, Corruption Report. Justin’s viewpoint is clear: He is suspicious of authority and doesn’t take kindly to government officials who want to hide from the public.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Prosecutor Gives Up On Interference Case Against Citizen Journalist appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Leo Hohmann at Leo Hohmann Substack
In case there was any confusion over what NATO really stands for, the military alliance’s general secretary cleared things up with a bold tweet.
The U.S. military will pull all of its troops and assets out of Niger by mid-September, the Pentagon has announced, after days of talks with the country’s military junta finalized a timeline.
The Hill reports that a group of military leaders executed a coup in Niger last year, forming a military junta government that has geopolitically aligned with Russia. Talks of leaving Niger have lasted several weeks, with the timeline “finalized Sunday after four days of high-intensity negotiations,” according to The Hill, which adds:
“About 1,000 U.S. troops have been stationed in the country, for the purpose of counterterrorism operations against ISIS and al Qaeda-affiliated groups.”
That’s a big fat lie put out there by The Hill, a corporate media outlet based in Washington, D.C. But to be fair, the outlet did add this to its story:
“The Americans stayed on our soil, doing nothing while the terrorists killed people and burned towns,” Nigerien Prime Minister Ali Lamine Zeine told The Washington Post last week. “It is not a sign of friendship to come on our soil but let the terrorists attack us.”
But even this leaves a distorted view of the reality of why Americans and French are in Niger. The full story would be too harsh for the American masses to process but I’m going to give it to you because I know my audience can handle it.
The CIA, in cooperation with other Western intelligence assets, created al-Qaeda and ISIS and the real reason it built a $100 billion base in Niger has nothing to do with eliminating Islamic terrorism. The real reason that base is there, and why the French have been there for even longer, is because Niger is rich in Uranium and has vast untapped oil reserves, gold-mining operations, coal mining and other resources that the West has been exploiting for decades. And when I say “exploiting,” I mean in the worst way.
Here’s the dirty little secret I found hiding in plain sight on the website World Atlas, among other places on the Internet:
“Niger’s mineral sector faces several challenges such as the employment of children in the mines and fluctuating prices of minerals in the international market. A report by the US government estimated that more than 40% of children younger than 14 were working in mines. About 5% of the children were involved in hazardous activities. The government of Niger has made several efforts to eliminate child labor from the country’s mines. The efforts have been relatively unsuccessful, and in 2014 the US government reported that children were still working in Nigerien mines.”
Niger’s Uranium has been mined mostly by the French dating back to the 1950s when it was discovered there in large quantities. The country is currently the third or fourth-largest producer of Uranium in the world, depending on what source you believe. According to Mining-Technology the country’s Imouraren mine is the largest single Uranium deposit in Africa and the world’s second-largest Uranium deposit.
Gold mining causes lead poisoning in chidren. Uranium mining is even more horrific.
And, yet, with all this wealth of natural resources, the United Nations ranked Niger as the second least-developed country in the world in 2016 with serious problems of “food insecurity.”
A French company, Orano, to this day boasts about its ability to strip-mine Uranium in the northwest desert region of Niger.
Russia apparently offered the new government in Niger a better deal for its resources and so now it’s flipped sides. This is reportedly happening in more than a few countries in Africa. Chad is the next to potentially flip.
While staying silent about the West’s history of stripping Niger of its resource wealth and focusing instead on the “terrorism” angle, The Hill reports that “the U.S. withdrawal plan from Niger is for most equipment to be airlifted from the country before September, with everything out by midway through the month. Military infrastructure and some items too large to transport will be left to the Nigerien military… Niger ordered France to withdraw troops before negotiating with the U.S. on a withdrawal agreement. The coming withdrawal is another setback for the U.S. in the African Sahel region, which has experienced multiple coups in the past few years that have ultimately benefited Russia.”
Let’s face it. A big part, maybe the biggest part, of the post-World War II liberal rules based order has been about protecting the world’s resources for Western commercial interests. This has led to cheap electronics and other goods for America, Canada, Europe, etc. As that world order gets upended and shifts to a more bipolar arrangement, I anticipate the American standard of living will further decline and eventually collapse. The dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency has also allowed the U.S. to run up an insane amount of debt, and that is getting ready to come to an end as well.
If you appreciate my research, news updates and analysis and would like to support my independent journalism, you may send a donation of any size c/o Leo Hohmann, P.O. Box 291, Newnan, GA 30264, or consider becoming a paid subscriber. You may also donate via credit card here.
The post The real reason why U.S. and French troops have been in Niger for Years appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
RINOS do the same. When they are campaigning, RINOs display a lovely shade of Republican Red, working to convince those who vote for them that they truly care and are working in the best interest for the American Family and the American Dream. But watch closely and you will see, when vote tallies are completed, most Missouri Establishment Republicans, move from Republican Red to RINO Pink.
One RINO, who is especially adept with this form of camouflage, is Mark Anthony Jones, Chairman of the Jackson County Republican Central Committee.
To understand this change of colors, let us take a walk in the woods and follow the hypocrisy trail, which starts here and then turns left. Look closely and see if you find any chameleons.
On May 4, 2014, an article about the amazing feat of the Missouri Grassroot Patriots who were able to achieve some of their American First plans at the GOP convention held on that day in Springfield at JoeHoft.com. This Herculean achievement did not come easily.
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: GRASSROOT REVOLUTION OVERTHROWS RINOS AT MISSOURI STATE GOP CONVENTION
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Grassroot Revolution Overthrows RINOS at Missouri State GOP Convention
There were two primary objectives that day. The first was to select a slate of GOP delegates to go to the National GOP convention in July. The second was to pass the Missouri 2024 Republican Platform.
A tug-of-war between the RINOs and Grassroot Patriots started immediately. The RINOs opened the meeting and, to maintain control of the day, the RINOs stalled and stalled some more. As RINOs do often and well, they spent the next three hours “talking about all sorts of nothing” all the while crafting ways to overcome the Grassroots’ America First agenda and simply to “run out the clock.”
Another favorite RINO “go-to” playbook, is to manipulate parliamentary procedure to make sure the Grassroot Patriots would not be able to achieve an America First Missouri Republican Platform.
Both “running out the clock” and manipulating parliamentary procedures were on full display during the convention.
Eventually, the Grassroot Patriots were able to achieve the day’s first objective and nominated a slate of America First delegates to go the national convention. Then the Grassroot Patriots started the second objective to discuss and pass a 2024 America First Republican Missouri Platform. Again, the RINOs stalled, forcing the meeting to continue late into the afternoon.
Missouri State Representative Dan Stacey, well aware of parliamentary procedure and knowing many first-time attendees were not, knew without the required quorum; the Grassroot Patriots would be unable to pass their America First 2024 Republican Missouri Platform.
In true RINO fashion, Representative Dan Stacey (who, several years ago, filed a bill for Rank Choice Voting in Missouri) along with one of his congressional colleagues, convinced many attendees to leave the meeting, implying, due to the late hour, cars could be towed. Many attendees, now exhausted, left not knowing that without a quorum, the newly drafted America First platform would not be able to pass.
Late into the day and due to the lack of having a quorum, the American First platform failed. Stacey’s plan was successful!
At the end of the day, Stacey and his congressional colleague were seen laughing and high fiving as they exited the Expo Center. Both are senate hopefuls.
However, Stacey and his colleague were not the only RINOs “working the room” – in attendance was Mark Anthony Jones, Jackson County Republican Center Committee Chairman.
Jones is well known for his support of Missouri Establishment Republicans. Jones has fully supported Jay Ashcroft, Missouri Secretary of State, who has been provided with documentation that the 2020 election was uncertifiable, but Ashcroft has continually stated the Missouri 2020 election was totally acceptable. In 2020, Ashcroft used ERIC for Missouri’s voter rolls and is still using voting machines known to connect to the internet.
Missouri Freedom Principle Organization Urges Secretary of State Ashcroft to Terminate ERIC System in the State
Why Is Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft Moving to Block an Investigation Into Election Fraud?
RINOs and Democrats Running as Republicans Are Called Out in Jackson County, Missouri
Mark Anthony Jones fully supports Senator Mike Cierpiot, who has received tens of thousands of dollars from child transitioning PACs, supports Planned Parenthood and most recently introduced a bill to allow illegals to vote in Missouri.
Missouri RINOs Suspected of Creating an Entity to Endorse Themselves as Pro-life for Election Purposes After Losing Missouri Right to Life’s Endorsement
RINOs and Democrats Running as Republicans Are Called Out in Jackson County, Missouri
Missouri Republicans join Dems and pass Senate bill that allows non-citizens to vote and foreign governments to spend money in Missouri elections.
The Gateway Pundit in March 2023 reported on Jones’ belief, as Chairman of the Jackson County Republican Committee, he could ignore and completely over-rule the majority of the Committee who wanted to censure Cierpiot for Cierpiot’s support of Planned Parenthood. Additionally, at that same time, other bills were being proposed that would essentially soften the Republican platform to include changing the definition of marriage between a man and a woman, to a new definition that marriage was between two individuals.
When the February 27, 2023, Central Committee meeting came around, the committee members were looking forward to a full discussion and vote on the issues related to maintaining a strong Republican platform. Jones did not wish for an open dialog, or a committee vote on these critical issues. In order to have total control of the meeting, Jones first had a vote to close the meeting at 8:30 pm. Most of the committee voted against ending the meeting at 8:30 pm because, the last meeting agenda item, was the discussion NOT to abandon important pillars of the Republican platform. As noted, the committee wanted sufficient time to allow for this discussion.
Chairman Jones, then proceeded to stall the meeting where Jones alternately praised various entities outside the committee and then admonished members within the committee. After his extended criticism on the failures of the committee members, Jones gave the committee several minutes to read the committee’s concerns related to the unwanted changes to the Republican platform and then permitted two minutes for discussion. After the two minutes were up, Jones took the microphone from the speaker and turned the meeting over to another individual who read a lengthy letter about the committee not having any authority to admonish elected officials.
Once this long letter was read, Jones banged his gavel and closed the meeting at 8:30 pm. Most of the committee members were shocked and dismayed at Jones’ behavior and his complete disregard for the majority of the committee.
Subsequently, Jones said he knew members wanted him to step down but was not going to do so.
Chaos erupted in Jackson County Missouri Republican Central Committee as RINOs Admonished and then Silenced New Grassroots Committee Members
RINOs and Democrats Running as Republicans Are Called Out in Jackson County, Missouri
Returning to the May 4th meeting, while having employed the same stall and manipulation of parliamentary procedures against his own committee members, Jones’ hypocrisy is on full display as he is now criticizing Chairman Myers’ for the same method Jones used on his committee for keeping the Establishment Republicans in control and marginalize the Grassroots.
Excerpt of the May 20, 2024, letter from Mark Anthony Jones to Chairman Nick Myers.
“Chairman Nick Myers, you must be held accountable for the embarrassment caused by the poorly managed beginning of the May 4th State Convention. The start of the Convention was delayed for approximately 5 hours, tarnishing our party's reputation. The unfinished platform can be directly attributed to the delay by the Chairman, which we consider completely unacceptable. The process broke down to a very amateurish level, reflecting poorly on our party's leadership.”
Mark Anthony Jones further wrote:
“We call for the immediate resignation of Chairman Nick Myers. The Convention's embarrassment and ignoring the people's will by refusing to include platform amendments is altogether unacceptable. When combined with the embarrassment regarding a lack of vetting of candidates by accepting a filing fee from a known KKK member, it is a clear demonstration of incompetence. We believe Chairman Myers has lost his ability to lead the Republican Party.”
Here is Mark Anthony Jones's letter to Chairman Myers:
MO RINOs - Letter to Chairman Myers by Joe Ho on Scribd
Jones is demanding Myers to resign but when Jones was faced with a similar and valid request, Jones simply refused to step down.
One must ask why is Jones changing his colors to be the champion of the Grassroots?
Could it be Mark Anthony Jones envisions, by romancing the Grassroots, he can gain their support and with the Grassroots support can become Missouri’s State Republican National Committee Chair? Does Jones feel he can become state chair immediately by removing the current state chair Nick Myers? Could Mark Anthony Jones, if elected RNC state chairman during the 2024 Presidential Election, implement the Establishment Republican agenda and further marginalize the Grassroots?
In Matthew 24:24, “the Bible warns false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.”
The post What Do Missouri RINOs and Chameleons Have in Common? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on Leo Hohmann’s Substack and was republished with permission.
One of NATO’s primary missions is to spread instability throughout the world, using the military-industrial complex to bully and intimidate countries non-compliant with a militant anti-family anti-God agenda flowing out of Western capitals and promoted by Western media.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg asserted on Friday the alliance’s commitment to defending the rights of LGBTQ individuals, aligning with numerous Western officials, institutions, and organizations in commemorating the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia.
Author Jose Nino summed it up nicely in a piece for Big League Politics:
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is committed to spreading degenerate values abroad. With Russia seemingly making major gains against NATO-backed Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine, NATO leaders have been engaging in bizarre virtue signaling to divert attention away from the abject failure of this proxy war against Russia.
“Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 24, 2022, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg has been particularly vocal about NATO’s values and why it’s an institution that has to be trusted despite its long track record of causing instability abroad — from Serbia all the way to Libya.”
On Friday, May 17, Stoltenberg, reaffirmed NATO’s commitment to LGBTQ+ values by arrogantly proclaiming in a post to X the current Western value system and what it is based upon:
#NATO exists to defend 32 nations, and our peoples’ right to live freely & in peace. On the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia & Transphobia, and every day: all love is equal. LGBTQ+ people deserve respect & dignity, and I am proud to call myself your ally. #IDAHOBIT
— Jens Stoltenberg (@jensstoltenberg) May 17, 2024
Nino reminds us of why NATO was founded in the first place, in the wake of World War II in 1949. It was to counter the Soviet Union’s influence on the European continent.
“However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has worked to remake the world in America’s increasingly dysfunctional image. Its interventions in the Balkans all the way to Libya have brought nothing but harm and instability.”
NATO is no longer seen by most nations of the world as a defensive alliance.
NATO launched offensive wars against Yugoslavia in 1999 and Libya in 2011, as well as its protracted occupation of Afghanistan, leaving the country no freer and no better off in 2021 than when it was invaded 20 years prior, but rather much more dangerous with billions of U.S. and Western military weapons in the hands of the Taliban terrorists.
But even more destructive is the fact that NATO teams up with an army of neo-Marxist and Cultural Marxist nonprofits to promote values antithetical to those found in the Bible, including gay “marriage,” abortion on demand up to birth, and children being able to choose their own gender, along with the whole idea of gender as a social construct meant to “oppress” the sexual deviants and mentally confused. Why do they promote ideas so destructive of society? Because they know no nation can survive for long without moral restraints and some sort of devotion to a higher authority above that of carnal man.
Nino adds:
“In effect, any country that gets in bed with NATO catches the STD of multiculturalism, sexual degeneracy, and societal decay. More importantly, NATO is an entangling military alliance with a crusading ideology that is a threat to world peace. “
No nation can survive without strong men. Transgendered females (biological men who pretend to be women) running around in skirts do not tend to make good military officers, but that’s exactly the type of behavior that is now being promoted and encouraged by the military forces of the U.S., Europe, Australia, Canada and Israel. This group of nations will all suffer catastrophic defeats at the hands of Russia and China if they continue with their plans to poke the bear and create a World War III scenario while at the same time indulging the lowest form of human behavior.
At the heart of this Western globalist agenda lies a demonic attempt to depopulate the world in accordance with the principles laid out in the Georgia Guidestones and other globalist screeds. Because everyone knows that gay marriages don’t produce children. Emasculated, mutilated and transgendered young people don’t reproduce, either.
Any nation that is truly free and independent should immediately exit this military alliance and even non-members should totally free themselves from NATO’s Luciferian psychological clutches. Because NATO’s psychopathic leaders base their speech and their actions on moral alchemy, warmongering and a Satanic lust for power over the free minds of people everywhere.
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The post Leo Hohmann: NATO Has Become the Military Wing of a Globalist Power Structure That Promotes the Self-Destruction of All Nations and a Depopulated World appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
Real Clear Wire
The American Dream in Pennsylvania has a price tag: $230,464.
That’s the cost for a family of four to live “comfortably” in The Keystone State.
The tally is based on the “50/30/20 Rule,” which holds that half of a household’s income should be spent on housing and necessities, a third on nonessentials like eating out and entertainment, and the rest on savings and debt.
Here’s the problem: the average household income in Pennsylvania is $100,837, which falls short of the American Dream sticker price by more than a factor of two.
In fact, only 10% of Pennsylvania households have an income that exceeds $200,000. Nine out of ten are nowhere close to living comfortably, according to the standards of financial planners.
To get by, Pennsylvanians are pulling out all the stops.
Cohabitation has skyrocketed. Children and grandchildren of Baby Boomers are moving in with their parents to serve as caregivers in exchange for rent-free living and dipping into their elders’ retirement savings. Culturally, moving back in with your parents in your mid-forties has never been part of the American Dream.
Pennsylvania credit card debt is at an all-time high. Nearly 10% of accounts are delinquent. For many, credit cards serve as temporary supplemental income.
The number of beneficiaries of SNAP federal food benefits has grown 75% despite flat population growth in the Commonwealth. With unemployment at record lows, more Pennsylvanians than ever need help paying for groceries.
With homeownership out of reach, nearly nine renters compete for each available apartment unit throughout the state. Pennsylvania rental rates are growing faster than the national average, especially in tertiary markets like Scranton and Reading.
It is no surprise why Pennsylvania lottery jackpots and gaming revenues have never been higher. Our luck has to change somewhere, right?
Comfort is a central tenet of the American Dream. In the past, savvy leaders understood that comfort is in the eye of the beholder.
From the right, Ronald Reagan championed the American Dream as the freedom to become whoever God intended you to be. With personal responsibility and self-reliance as first principles, comfort is life on your terms.
From the left, Barack Obama portrayed the American Dream through the “Life of Julia,” who enjoys the cradle-to-grave helping hand of government. Through social equality and egalitarianism as core values, comfort is life free of risk.
What both visions have in common is that they deliberately avoid kitchen table politics. They do so for two reasons.
First, for a long time, the difference between expectation and reality wasn’t so great. Voters accepted the status quo.
Second, in a sense, voting is a negotiation. Political parties are organized solely to win. In a negotiation, the political party who names its price first loses.
Pennsylvanians know they are losing. Bootstrapping one’s way to success seems a fantasy when daily life is riskier than ever. The gap between expectation and reality is fueling palpable resentment and anger.
Times have changed. Talk is cheap. Comfort costs $230,464.
For today’s policymakers, the math is simple but daunting: double household incomes, or halve household expenses.
Pennsylvania State House Democrats have pushed for corporate tax cuts, record public education funding, increasing property tax rebates for seniors, and more mass transit support.
Pennsylvania State Senate Republicans passed the largest personal income tax cut in state history, repeal of a century-old tax on electricity, and school choice for families trapped in failing schools.
These are the current table stakes for the annual budget negotiations going on in Harrisburg. All these proposals can get enough votes to become law. But would they double incomes or halve costs for Pennsylvania families?
Maybe, but probably not quickly enough to rescue many Pennsylvanians from drowning. At least policymakers in Harrisburg are trying to use the tools they have at their disposal. But state government can only do so much.
There is little evidence that voters are paying attention to much of it, anyway. For now, Pennsylvanians are more focused on immediate survival.
They will reengage this fall. Until then, here’s hoping a scratch-off ticket hits.
The post In Pennsylvania, the Cost of the American Dream Is Out of Reach appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Asks if Americans finally have ‘had it’ with Scranton Joe
Victor Davis Hanson is a name that draws both recognition and respect.
He’s an American classicist, military historian and political commentator. While he often adopts conservative perspectives, his work has been acknowledged, and used, by leftist publications include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and more. His style is markedly reserved, and he seldom throws “bombs” in his writing.
He’s the Martin and Illie Anderson senior fellow in resident in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, and a professor at California State-Fresno.
But now he’s written at FrontPageMag questioning whether Americans finally have “had it” with Joe Biden.
He explains Biden’s approval ratings are at historic lows, he trails President Donald Trump in most of the swing states, and “now he lies serially even to sympathetic interviewers. In short, finally Biden has been exposed for what he always was and represented.”
That would be, he said, a “sort of a buffoon. He is by nature a grandstander who handsomely profited from his office while posing as good ole Joe from Scranton.”
But he’s really a “a blowhard meddler, one who proverbially has been ‘wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades (Robert Gates),’ from dissenting on the Bin Laden raid to his trisection of Iraq scheme.”
Hanson points out Biden routinely misleads people – he’s repeatedly and wildly claimed that inflation was 9% when he took office. It was 1.4%.
He slurs people, calling them “semi-fascists,” “fat” and “lying dog-faced pony soldiers,” among the nicer.
“He is a confessed plagiarist. And he has also invented much of his biography, from would be star, college-scholarship athlete and brilliant law student to semi-truck driver and jailed civil rights activist. His uncle, we are instructed, was eaten by cannibals. Joe assures us that he was the first in his family to go to college,” Hanson wrote.
His racism, “boy,” “you ain’t black,” “Put y’all back in chains,” never is far below the surface.
“Biden has always had a mean streak that explains why for years he lied about the tragic, fatal auto accident of his first wife and child, using it to libel the truck driver, who was neither drunk nor culpable but smeared publicly for years by Biden as intoxicated and guilty. For years he ignored the pleas of the trucker’s family to please stop libeling an innocent driver,” he said.
A change came about recently, though, he said.
“Biden has reached a nadir and even the Left is resigned to him as a mere construct. After bragging after October 7 that his support for Israel was rock-solid he is now cutting off military aid as it attempts finally to end the Hamas murderous threat—a reversion to old Joe Biden who in his long past has previously threatened to cut off Israel while boasting later that anyone who did so was reprehensible. (Leveraging congressional mandated aid for political advantage is precisely the (false) allegation of politicking that the Democrats demagogued to impeach Trump—to the then cheers of Biden himself),” Hanson said.
So he’s a sellout on Israel, he’s drawing down the strategic petroleum reserve to lower gas prices – specifically to enhance his election changes, “he has illegally forgiven billions in student loan aid to regain the elite youth vote. And as the campaign season begins, so too Biden suddenly poses as a border enforcer—after letting in nearly 10-million illegal aliens.”
The Biden family’s lucrative schemes, including Hunter Biden’s “Burisma skullduggery,” shows he always puts his own interests ahead of the nation’s.
And then there’s the creepy: “Any other major politician who habitually invaded the private space of women and preteens to blow on their hair, gobble their necks, squeeze and hug far too long, and be accused of sexual assault would have long since been cancelled by the left,” he said.
“Add the old disturbing narrative of a naked Vice President Joe Biden exiting his pool in front of female secret service agents, the showering with his pre-teen daughter, the Frank Biden and Hunter naked selfies, and there seems something eerie among the Biden family.”
And Hanson blames Biden for the “entire lawfare scheme directed at Trump.”
He concluded, “If Biden makes it to and through the convention, he and his record remain indefensible. And so expect his campaign largely to be waged through lawfare against Trump, and massive infusions of leftist cash to ensure record mail-in and early voting.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Victor Davis Hanson: Biden’s Record ‘Indefensible’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Here is the latest from the Recall Vos campaign.
Of course, Robin Vos is the highly controversial anti-Trump Wisconsin Speaker who approved ballot drop boxes in Wisconsin.
The Recall Vos people
In our commitment to transparency and integrity, Recall Vos wishes to address concerns surrounding the petition collection process.
First, it is important to note that the current Wisconsin recall process relies on the honesty of all participants. There is no requirement to either request or confirm the identification of individuals signing the petition.
Additionally, the “Circulator,” who signs at the bottom of the petition page, merely verifies that “a person” has indeed signed the petition. Since there is no requirement for identity verification, the Circulator cannot be sure if the signer is being truthful.
Thus, they are only confirming that they witnessed a person signing the petition without any assurance of the signer’s honesty on the form. Our campaign recognized this significant weakness in the recall process and took proactive steps to mitigate this vulnerability.
Throughout the campaign, we endeavored to identify and segregate questionable petition sheets, such as those suspected of forgery or fraud. Despite our best efforts, a small fraction of these sheets were inadvertently mixed with the nearly 11,000 valid signatures submitted.
It’s crucial to emphasize that hundreds of signatures were proactively withheld and never submitted due to suspicions of fraud, highlighting our good-faith effort to eliminate suspicious signatures.
In late February 2024, our campaign observed suspicious activities between February 27 and March 2, where several individuals from across the nation suddenly appeared in Burlington, WI, and attempted to infiltrate the campaign.
All six individuals tried to insert fraudulent signatures. These actions were immediately flagged by our team. Remarkably, these individuals, independently, flew from various parts of the country (New York, Florida, Ohio) to assist in the recall campaign.
They sought compensation but left the state without any. Their involvement abruptly ceased upon the submission of the questionable signatures. This behavior, combined with their unverified nationwide origins and the submission of inauthentic signatures, raised significant concerns.
Despite the challenges posed by the self-authentication process of the Wisconsin petition process, Recall Vos implemented verification measures beyond the legal requirements.
When faced with approximately 400 (about 40 pages) suspiciously pristine signatures, our volunteers took the additional step of conducting thorough in-person verifications at over 15 residences.
As anticipated, we were unable to verify any of the signatures, leading us to consider them potentially fraudulent; thus, they were not included in our submission to the Wisconsin Election Commission.
The individuals identified as sources of these fraudulent signatures, including Carlo Green, Jade Hilton, Jason Lopez, Lavelle Hester-Bey, Kiara Rivera, and Xavier Pittman, were excluded from our petition efforts.
Regrettably, some sheets with questionable signatures were mistakenly included by a volunteer in the final submission, a matter we deeply regret.
Recall Vos stands firm on the principle of election security and integrity. We advocate for stringent legal action against anyone implicated in falsifying documents and undermining the public’s trust in electoral processes.
Our proactive stance against potential fraud demonstrates our unwavering commitment to uphold the highest standards of legitimacy and transparency in the Recall Vos campaign.
Our internal review concerning the fake signatures led us to identify several individuals who were acting on their own in an apparent organized effort to infuse fraudulent signatures into the Recall Vos campaign. We are turning over all the information we have on these individuals.
Background: In addition to the numerous volunteers from Wisconsin, RECALL VOS hired three US companies to enhance the signature collection activity. Only one is relevant to this issue. (NOTE: All three companies were US-based and agreed/contracted to follow Wisconsin laws as they pertain to recall elections.
The first company, “4ward Canvassing LLC” (POC: Missy Ward, Phone: 719-896-1536), was hired on February 2 and fired on February 11, 2024, due to poor performance.
The second company, “Trailblazing Canvassers” (POC: Mr. Edward Blaszak, Phone: 503-481-9052), was hired on February 12 and fired on February 28, 2024. The third company was “Wool Canvassing” (POC: Mr. Greg Wool, Phone: 201-452-4923), which only collected signatures from March 1st to 10th.
The company connected to this issue is Trailblazing Canvassers. We were dissatisfied with their performance/lack of management, etc., leading to their dismissal on February 28, 2024.
(Important Note: All of these companies use “Independent Contractors” (ICs), thus none are employees.) After firing Trailblazing Canvassers, we offered to pay some of their best ICs to continue gathering valid signatures, provided they submitted a W9 tax form. Some of the Trailblazing crew stayed and wanted to continue gathering signatures.
We agreed to continue paying them as ICs if they delivered the required number of verifiable signatures. Recall Vos was assured by the CEO of Trailblazing Canvassers (Edward Blaszak) that all ICs were US citizens.
(NOTE: After news reports suggested that the RECALL Vos campaign employed illegal workers from Ukraine to gather signatures, we asked the three individuals in question to provide proof of US citizenship, which they did promptly, thus disproving the news reports.
The best explanation we have is that some kind of “disruptive operation” was run against the RECALL Vos campaign. The initial approach occurred on February 26, 2024, when Mr. Lavelle Hester-Bey and Jason Lopez approached Mr. Litvin while he was collecting signatures at the Burlington Post Office. Suddenly, they offered to help him gather signatures.
Needing assistance, Litvin quickly agreed to let them join his team, and Litvin even had them fill out W9 forms. (NOTE: Recall Vos had nothing to do with Litvin’s activities concerning getting more people for this team.)
Mr. Litvin, explained the petition process to them and they went to collect signatures. Then, two days later, Mr. Litvin was approached by a Mr. Curtis Peterson, out of the blue, who offered to collect signatures and bring in three other people to assist.
This is where Xavier Pittman, Carlo Green, and Jade Hilton entered the picture. On February 29 and March 1st & 2nd, they collected signatures.
Then, abruptly, all of them left due to personal issues, car problems, etc., without even being paid. Only Mr. Peterson was paid a sum of $300 for what appeared to be 30 valid signatures. None of the others were paid by the Recall Vos campaign.
After looking at their petition sheets, it was suspected that Mr. Green and Mrs. Hilton had forged names. A few days later, approximately 400 signatures were mailed to Mr. Litvin by a woman named Kiara Rivera, who claimed she collected the signatures on February 27 & 28 but had to leave WI because her brother was shot. She requested payment for the 400 signatures.
Although the signatures appeared authentic, her story was not credible, and the documents were too pristine to have been handled by numerous people.
Even though we suspected the signatures were fraudulent, we took the extra step of physically visiting at least 10-15 houses listed on the petition to verify if they had signed. After our canvassing, we determined that not one signature was valid. As such, we withheld the names and never submitted them.
What is interesting is that all the fraudulent signatures originated from six out-of-state individuals. Who paid for their flights? Who covered their lodging, food, and miscellaneous expenses? How did they know to approach Mr. Litvin?
They all apparently arrived and left within a 5-day period without being paid. They all collected signatures and pressured Mr. Litvin for immediate payment. All found reasons to quickly depart the area without any compensation.
** Wisconsinites reach out to www.racinerecall.org…. 262-864-2309
When we questioned Mr. Litvin, he cooperated with us and promptly shared documents he had gathered about these individuals: (NOTE: see attached pictures).
1. Kiara Rivera, Female, Florida DL. (NOTE: She mentioned that Jason Lopez was her former boyfriend). She attempted to pass what appears to be 400 fraudulent signatures.
2. Jason Lopez, Male, Ohio ID of some kind. His W9 lists the same address as Mrs. Rivera above, from Litvin.
3. Lavelle Hester-Bey, Male, New York ID, info from Litvin.
4. Carlo Green, Male, W9 Form from Litvin
5. Jade Hilton, Female, W9 Form from Litvin.
6. Xavier T. Pittman, W9 Form from Litvin.
The post Wisconsin’s Recall Vos Campaign Exposes Suspicious Individuals from Out of State Who Attempted to Sabotage Signature Campaign – With Photos and Evidence appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Jack Cashill
An excerpt from ASHLI: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6
Although the “Reichstag fire” metaphor is often abused, in the case of January 6, it hits pretty close to the mark. In February 1933, the German parliament building—the Reichstag—went up in flames. “The Nazi leadership and its coalition partners used the fire to claim that Communists were planning a violent uprising,” the Holocaust Encyclopedia reports. “They claimed that emergency legislation was needed to prevent this. The resulting act, commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolished a number of constitutional protections and paved the way for Nazi dictatorship.”
This is one of those rare occasions where a Hitler comparison makes sense. In fact, the response of the Biden administration to January 6 differs little from Hitler’s response to the Reichstag fire. “On the basis of a wholly created myth about what happened that day,” said Tucker Carlson accurately, “the Biden Pentagon conducted an unprecedented political purge of the entire U.S. military. The FBI and various intel agencies increased their control over the American media and most obviously, the DOJ has been allowed to prosecute and jail hundreds of nonviolent political protesters whose crime was having the wrong opinions.”
In both Hitler’s Berlin and Biden’s Washington, it was necessary to maintain the illusion of government as victim. To pull this off, the storytellers had to reaffirm the heroic role of the Capitol Police in the insurrection drama. They had, however, one major plot problem to overcome: the only person who fired a gun on January 6—in Micki Witthoeft’s words—was “the son of a bitch who murdered my daughter.” It wasn’t enough to undermine Ashli Babbitt. The Jacobins had to create a martyr of their own. How they accomplished this was disgraceful even by their own abysmal standards.
Former NYPD officer Sara Carpenter opened a window on this unseemly plot. After leaving Washington late on the afternoon of January 6, Sara headed back to New York City. On the way home, she called an old friend from grade school who lived not far from I-95 in Maryland. When Sara mentioned she had been at the Capitol, her friend started screaming at Sara “like a rabid dog.” She had never spoken to Sara like that before. “You killed somebody,” the friend yelled, the “you” referring to the protestors. “You killed a Capitol Police officer with a fire extinguisher.”
The woman’s husband had once been a Capitol Police officer. Sara presumed he had inside information. She had no reason to doubt him or his wife. “It sent me reeling,” said Sara. By the time she got back to New York City, her Maryland friend had posted news of Sara’s presence at the Capitol on Facebook. The next day, said Sara, “I never felt so sick in my life.”
The conspirators caught a break on January 7 when Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died after suffering what would prove to be a pair of strokes. Someone in authority—the New York Times would cite “two law enforcement officials”—made the conscious decision to wed Sicknick’s death to the rumored death of an officer by fire extinguisher. On January 8, the New York Times told its readers that “pro-Trump rioters” were the ones who struck Sicknick with a fire extinguisher. The Times added this chillingly fraudulent detail: “With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”
Glenn Greenwald, an independent journalist, made a screen shot of the Times story before it could be revised. “This horrifying story about a pro-Trump mob beating a police officer to death was repeated over and over, by multiple journalists on television, in print, and on social media,” said Greenwald. He called this counterfeit murder “the single most-emphasized and known story of the event.”
When Sara heard on January 6 about an officer being killed, Sicknick was very much alive. Video released later would show him matter-of-factly performing his duties at the Capitol after the time of his supposed murder. To secure Sicknick’s status as hero before the video surfaced or the medical examiner completed his report, the Jacobins got to work. Their operatives in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives honored Sicknick with a public memorial service in the Rotunda of the Capitol. The previous American so honored was Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, before her, civil rights hero John Lewis.
“The circumstances of his death do matter to the public,” observed Naomi Wolf, “as without his death having been caused by the events of Jan 6, the breach of the capitol, serious though it was, cannot be described as a ‘deadly insurrection.’” Sicknick bore no responsibility for this civic blasphemy—he was rumored to be a Trump supporter and served six years in the Air National Guard—but the record remains uncorrected. “He succumbed to his injuries on January 7, 2021,” reads the official Capitol memorial. From the Rotunda, Sicknick’s ashes were moved to Arlington National Cemetery where they were buried with full military honors.
Not content with misrepresenting Sicknick’s death, the Biden White House launched into a grotesque inflation of the day’s body count. On the first anniversary of the protest, Attorney General Merrick Garland named five men “who demonstrated what true courage looks like” and “have since lost their lives.” On the second anniversary, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries made the lie more specific, saying, “As a result of the events on January 6, the lives of five heroic officers were lost.” In the trials of the J6ers, judges or prosecutors would routinely repeat the saga of the five martyrs to provoke the jurors. In reality, of the five, one died of a stroke, and four committed suicide within two hundred days of January 6.
It was unfortunate that the men died, but it was opportunistic in the extreme to exalt the men as martyrs. The ample video footage shows that, with only a few exceptions, most of the officers faced less peril that day than did the thousands of urban police officers injured in the George Floyd riots by Molotov cocktails, bricks, guns, and frozen water bottles. “We will not only remember them,” Garland concluded, “we will do everything we can to honor them.”
Despite her fourteen years of service and multiple deployments to military hot spots, Ashli got nothing. According to Micki, the Air Force denied Ashli a military funeral because of her participation in the “insurrection.” Said Micki, “It’s just an outrage. It’s an outrage. Like so many other things.”
The post Imaginary Martyrs: An Excerpt From Jack Cashill’s New Book ‘ASHLI: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6 appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished here with permission
Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever lost their fifth game in five tries last night, giving up another lead and failing in the fourth quarter.
Clark has received a lot of attention since breaking all the major scoring records in the NCAA last season and becoming the all-time greatest scorer in women’s basketball.
But the girls in the WNBA are jealous. Even Charles Barkley notices. He says the players in the WNBA should be sending her flowers after all she has done for them.
Charles Barkley with some words for the Caitlin Clark haters…
TALK TO EM CHUCK pic.twitter.com/HtYI7C73EC
— Barstool Iowa (@BarstoolUIowa) May 23, 2024
This has not been the case as the WNBA has given Clark the welcome that Jason Whitlock predicted.
Jason Whitlock Crowns Caitlin Clark
“Basketball is a black sport and this little white girl is dominating!!! Caitlin Clark is like the underdog
She’s something unexpected. That’s why we love her.” pic.twitter.com/Pnokdsqi7h
— liveXclique (@liveXclique) April 23, 2024
Clark had a rough first half with plays like this where she was creamed by the Seattle player and no call again by the refs.
This would lead to an ejection if it was the men and for Caitlin Clark it’s not even a foul https://t.co/ToXQPGHzHe
— Bad Sports Refs (@BadSportsRefs) May 23, 2024
After catching fire late in the game following a slow start, Clark brought the Fever back into the game in the 3rd Quarter.
Caitlin Clark pic.twitter.com/9ZyfX5dvw9
— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) May 23, 2024
Then after taking the lead, Fever Head Coach Christie Sides took Clark out of the game and the time fell behind. After 3 minutes on the bench, Clark came in and got the team back into the game. Then on the last play the team tried to get Clark the ball but the pass was way behind her and Clark couldn’t get it.
Still wondering what if the pass to Caitlin Clark was a good one… we really woulda seen her first game winner as a pro man pic.twitter.com/cvz0UPLVTR
— LeLakers 2⃣3⃣ (@LeLaker) May 23, 2024
Clark ended up with good numbers, 21 points, 7 assists and 7 rebounds. But the team lost after the coach pulled Clark out of the game for three minutes with only six minutes left. This was insane.
A solid performance for CC
Despite the loss, Caitlin Clark had a game for the Fever dropping 21 PTS, 7 REB, 7 AST, & 2 BLK#WelcometotheW pic.twitter.com/qHLEZdxYXS
— WNBA (@WNBA) May 23, 2024
And Clark set some more records.
Caitlin Clark joins Sabrina Ionescu & Candace Parker as the only WNBA players to record:
85+ PTS
25+ AST
through their first 5 career games. pic.twitter.com/jklyC0guEC
— StatMamba (@StatMamba) May 23, 2024
Many people believe that the head coach Sides needs to go. This is understandable.
The post Fans Want Indiana Fever Coach Fired After Benching Caitlin Clark in the 4th Quarter and Losing Again appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.
With the FBI scrambling desperately to claim the authorization to use deadly force in the Mar-a-Lago was “standard operating procedure” for an FBI raid, the fact remains the force authorization documents allowed the FBI to exchange fire with the Secret Service should former Donald Trump be perceived to be taking steps to impede the FBI search for classified documents.
The question arises whether the Biden administration and the FBI would go so far as to kill a former president, who is the leading presidential contender to President Biden in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
The question also arises as to why the Biden administration still refuses to provide Secret Service protection to independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? Secret Service protection was offered by law to all presidential candidates 120 days out from the election after Kennedy’s father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. was shot dead in Los Angeles in 1968.
What is apparent is that the Biden administration’s Department of Justice has become a purely partisan political enforcement agency more concerned about Catholics who, like the Latin Mass, that military age foreigners crossing the Mexican border into the United States, without first applying for visas to enter the country.
The Department of Justice’s disgrace is compounded by lawfare prosecutions of President Trump in both New York and Georgia. We have yet to see the prosecutor in either of these cases present evidence of an actual crime. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s visage displays loathing for Trump, in a case that should have been dismissed along with Smith’s admission that his office lied about the location of certain boxes seized in the now suspect Mar-a-Lago raid.
These questions are especially pertinent in light of the book Dr. David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D. and I published recently, The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis .l’, in which Dr. Mantik presents forensic evidence based on his optical density measurements of the three extant JFK autopsy skull X-rays in the National Archives today.
Dr. Mantik’s analysis proves all three X-rays are forgeries, altered to mask evidence of frontal shots. Moreover, Dr. Mantik produces CSI evidence from his analysis of the skull X-rays that two shots from the front hit JFK’s head, plus a shot from the rear, fired at a low angle.
None of the JFK headshots evident in the X-rays was from the angle required for the shot to have originated from the sixth-floor corner window of the Texas School Book Depository.
In other words, Dr. Mantik has proved the JFK assassination was a deep state coup d’état that the federal government has lied about for 61 years, refusing even today to release thousands of yet secret JFK assassination documents required to be released by the 1992 JFK Records Act.
November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated, was the day the deep state decided to take over the operation of the U.S. government.
We now know the Department of Justice has gone rogue in a mad determination to prevent former President Donald Trump from campaigning. We also know the Department of Justice has forced Robert Kennedy, Jr. to spend thousands of dollars on private security. Instead of protecting both candidates, the Biden administration appears to be taking orders from deep state operatives who are reluctant to allow into power two candidates who every day have new reasons to ensure that as president, they would make sure all secrets about the JFK assassination are revealed—information that would put light on the deep state’s efforts today to make sure neither Donald J. Trump or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are inaugurated president on January 20, 2025.
Dr. Corsi’s most recent book is his second book on the JFK assassination: David Mantik, M.D., Ph.D. and Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis: Forensic Analysis of the JFK Autopsy X-Rays Proves Two Headshots from the Front and One from the Rear. Since 2004, Jerome R. Corsi has published over 30 books on economics, history, and politics, including two #1 New York Times bestsellers. In 1972, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. His book, Volume I, in his Great Awakening Trilogy, The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, received highly positive reviews from prominent climate scientists and professional meteorologists. Volume II, The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation, was published in August 2023. Dr. Corsi has resumed podcasting on his new website TheTruthCentral.com.
The post Jerome Corsi Exclusive: Is the Biden Administration Trying to Kill Presidential Contenders Donald J. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on JoeHoft.com and was republished with permission.
The WNBA is giving “the savior of their league” a very unfriendly welcome, yet she overcomes the hate.
We previously reported on the horrible reception that the WNBA gave Caitlin Clark.
WHAT A DISGRACE: The WNBA, the Coach, and the Refs Are Cooking the Golden Goose – Caitlin Clark
Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports commented on how terrible the WNBA has been to Caitlin Clark. In this play from Saturday, last year’s league MVP puts an unnecessary and brutal pick on Clark when she wasn’t looking. Breanna Stewart is bitter towards Clark and may be jealous because no one knows who she is, but everyone knows who Clark is.
Never seen a savior of a league get treated like this https://t.co/TXNEd4umbl
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) May 18, 2024
The league is calling turnovers on Clark and doing something unheard of when reporting them. The statistician at the WNBA adds “bad pass” to the sheet. This is something we’ve never seen before. The following was from the game earlier this week.
Here is an example of a “bad pass” from Caitlin Clark that was labeled a turnover on Clark. (Hint – if the ball hits your teammate’s hands it’s not your fault if they can’t catch the ball.)
This was credited as a turnover on Caitlin Clark
pic.twitter.com/J6gcx8QDHe
— Jordan Stocks (@StockTalks21) May 18, 2024
Here is another moment where Clark’s team can’t keep up with her.
Here is another perfect Caitlin Clark pass that her teammate can’t handle and the WNBA stat recorder said it was a turnover on CC.
What is going on with these stat recordings? pic.twitter.com/y4RbamR4cF
— Jordan Stocks (@StockTalks21) May 18, 2024
Despite all the hate, Caitlin Clark became part of WNBA history in her first three games.
In elite company
Caitlin Clark joins Candace Parker, Sue Bird and Nikki McCray as the only WNBA players to tally 50+ PTS and 15+ AST in their first 3 career games!#WelcometotheW pic.twitter.com/wfUUb0GSjj
— WNBA (@WNBA) May 18, 2024
In addition, the game on Saturday was the largest paid gate in WNBA history.
The New York Liberty and Indiana Fever made history Saturday, as their game had the largest paid gate of any WNBA game since the league’s inception in 1997.
According to Spotify’s Bri Lewerke, the Liberty and Fever drew over $2 million in ticket revenue. They also sold out the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, which holds nearly 18,000 fans for basketball.
Fans were on hand to witness just the third WNBA regular-season game in the career of 2024 No. 1 overall pick Caitlin Clark, plus a pair of former No. 1 overall picks in Sabrina Ionescu and Breanna Stewart played for the Liberty as well.
After all of this, here is where Clark stands in the WNBA after three ‘bad’ showings.
How Caitlin Clark Ranks in the WNBA so far:
Mins played – 97 (5th)
Assists – 17 (2nd)
Rebounds – 13 (22nd)
Points – 51 (7th)
F T % – 100% (Tied 1st)
3 P M – 9 (1st)
F G M – 16 (13th)
EFF – 40 (18th)I’ll update this after every 10 games. pic.twitter.com/YpyisQQwqq
— Law | CC = (@TLaww22) May 20, 2024
Will the WNBA destroy Caitlin Clark and the league, or will Caitlin Clark stand above them all and show the world the “savior” she is?
To receive new posts and support Joe Hoft’s work, please visit JoeHoft.com.
The post “Never Seen a Savior of a League Get Treated Like This” – Caitlin Clark Sets Records Despite Wicked Welcome to the WNBA appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
This article is republished with permission from AbleChild
The psychiatric drug industry and big tobacco share striking similarities in their tactics, particularly when it comes to downplaying the risks associated with their products and targeting vulnerable populations like youth. The psychiatric community has gotten away with pretending it is based in science and medicine to sell its snake oil, while the tobacco industry wasn’t so lucky.
A key difference lies in the government’s stance – while tobacco companies face increasing regulations and warnings, the psychiatric drug industry enjoys substantial government support and promotion despite the existence of black box warnings on many of their medications. Both industries have a history of misleading marketing practices and minimizing potential harms.
Big tobacco companies notoriously concealed evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and other diseases for decades. Similarly, psychiatric drug manufacturers have been accused of selectively publishing favorable trial data and underreporting adverse effects.
Despite black box warnings – the FDA’s strongest safety alert – on many psychiatric medications, big pharma’s marketing often portrays an overly rosy picture. A prime example is antidepressants carrying a black box warning about increased suicidality risk in youth. Yet, these drugs continue to be heavily promoted, with limited emphasis on this severe side effect. Worse yet, antidepressants are not approved for under 18’s and still they are prescribed off-label to the age group in increasing numbers. Atypical antipsychotics like Seroquel and Zyprexa also bear a black box warning about increased mortality risk in elderly dementia patients, but their use in this vulnerable population remains widespread.
Moreover, both industries have targeted youth, securing future customers through early exposure and addiction. Big tobacco’s calculated efforts to market to adolescents are well-documented. Many of us remember getting boxes of candy cigarettes as children. The tips of the candy cigarettes were even painted red to simulate they were lit. Likewise, the psychiatric drug industry has been criticized for driving the dramatic rise in childhood psychiatric diagnoses and medication use, despite limited long-term safety data.
However, a crucial difference emerges in the government’s approach. Tobacco companies face intense scrutiny, with advertising restrictions, graphic health warnings on packaging, and mounting litigation. In contrast, the psychiatric drug industry enjoys considerable government financial support, 10.8 billion in the 2024 budget, and lack of stringent oversight.
Government agencies like the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) actively promote psychiatric medication use, often minimizing or omitting mention of black box warnings. School systems and foster care readily embrace psychotropic drugging of children, sometimes without proper consent. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies wield immense lobbying power, shaping mental health policies and curricula.
While the harms of smoking are widely accepted, psychiatric conditions remain poorly defined, lacking any scientific proof that they even exist as an abnormality in the brain, allowing the psychiatric drug industry to operate with less public scrutiny. Additionally, the medical establishment’s embrace of the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness has solidified psychotropic drugs as the dominant treatment paradigm, despite the theory finally being completely debunked in 2022 by Professor Joanna Moncrieff and Dr. Mark Horowitz.
Unlike big tobacco, which profits from maintaining addiction, the psychiatric drug industry can present itself as providing medical treatment for alleged disorders, shielding it from harsh criticism. This veneer of therapeutic intent, combined with deep institutional ties and lobbying clout, has allowed the industry to expand relatively unencumbered compared to its tobacco counterpart. In short, no one…no governing body has ever requested the psychiatric community prove even one diagnosis alleged by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) exists as an abnormality of the brain. To date, the science of psychiatric diagnosing consists entirely of lists of behaviors with the APA deciding what behaviors are abnormal.
In essence, while both industries prioritize profits over public health and target vulnerable groups like youth, the psychiatric drug industry has managed to embed itself within the medical-government establishment in a way big tobacco never could.
Black box warnings exist for many psychiatric medications, but unlike tobacco’s graphic packaging warnings, these are often overshadowed by aggressive marketing and institutional support for psychotropic treatment. .As public awareness grows regarding psychiatric medication risks, particularly for children and adolescents, increased scrutiny, and regulation akin to big tobacco may become necessary.
Perhaps prioritizing non-pharmacological interventions, informed consent, and restricting marketing could help realign the system toward a more balanced, ethical approach to mental health care.
Ultimately, both industries have engaged in unethical practices that undermine public well-being. However, the psychiatric drug industry’s ability to operate under the guise of medical treatment, coupled with powerful institutional backing, has allowed it to avoid the level of public condemnation and stringent regulation faced by big tobacco, despite carrying similarly severe black box warnings.
Please donate today and join our mission to get complete and factual risk information into the hands of every person before starting psychiatric drugs. Everyone deserves to make a truly informed choice about what goes into their body. Together, we can shed light on this important issue.
The post ABLECHILD: What’s the Difference Between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission.
Indiana Fever’s head coach Christie Sides believes she needs to teach the greatest shooter in NCAA women’s basketball history when to shoot. She announced after the Fever’s latest drubbing that she was going to make Caitlin Clark, the game’s greatest three-point shooter of all time, into a two-point shooter.
Just how clueless is this coach?
Here is a reminder of some of the records Caitlin Clark set in women’s basketball in the NCAA while at the University of Iowa:
NCAA records
Most career points — Division I, men’s and women’s (3,951)
Most points in single season — Division I, women’s (1,234)
Most career 3-pointers — Division I, men’s and women’s (548)
Most 3-pointers in a single season — Division I, men’s and women’s (201)
NCAA Tournament records
Most career points — Division I, men’s or women’s (491)
Most career assists — Division I, men’s or women’s (152)
Most career 3-pointers — Division I, men’s or women’s (78)
Most points in single tournament — Division I, men’s or women’s (191)
Most 3-pointers in single tournament — Division I, men’s or women’s (32)
Big Ten records
Most career points in Big Ten history
Most career 3-pointers in Big Ten history
Most career assists in Big Ten history
Most points in single season in Big Ten history
Most 3-pointers in single season in Big Ten history
Most assists in single season in Big Ten history
Most free throws in single season in Big Ten history
Most Big Ten Player of the Week honors in Big Ten history
Iowa records
Most career points in Iowa history
Most career assists in Iowa history
Most points in single game in Iowa history
Most points in single season by a freshman in Iowa history
Most assists in single season by a freshman in Iowa history
Clark was the player of the year in her junior and senior years in school and won numerous awards in the process.
But she joined one of the worst teams in the WNBA. Watching them play, you can see why they are so terrible.
To fix the situation, the coach of the Indiana Fever believes she needs to teach Caitlin Clark how to shoot better to remedy the situation… THIS IS INSANE!
Reporter: Christie, when you look at Kaitlyn, she took two two-pointers in the first preseason game, three today. Is there a balance? What are you seeing that’s causing that? Is there a balance you’d like to see with that, or is that something you plan to address?
Coach Christie Sides: Yeah, I think she’s used to some shots that she’s taken in the last few years that are just those deep shots. I don’t know if there’s times she comes off ball screens where she’s open in that long two area, and we’ve got to get her comfortable taking that long two. She’s going to get looks. She’s going to get open looks. She’s got to figure out, like I gave her a rule the other day, she’s got 0.5 seconds to make a decision. When she gets off the ball, and she hits one of our high posts and somebody in the high post, she has a habit of hanging out and dancing. That’s what she’s done. It’s these habits that we’ve got to break. She’s got players around her now that she can get out, she can go screen, and the ball is going to get back to her. That’s what she hasn’t had in the past. That’s what we’ve been trying to show her and explain to her.
Absolutely clueless. She wants to change basketball’s greatest shooter to fit her losing program! It is unbelievable!
She is out to destroy Clark and the league’s first major star in 28 years. What an ego!
Clark, the greatest shooter in women’s basketball history, only took eight shots in Thursday night’s game. She can’t score if she can’t shoot! Her lost teammates do not even look to pass to Clark. Clark spends a lot of time in the corner of the court based on the Fever’s coach’s directions. The team is happy throwing up airballs and ignoring Clark.
That is the problem!
The league is filling EVERY arena in the country where Clark is set to play in the coming weeks. Tickets are at an all-time high. The fans did not come to see Caitlin Clark sit in a corner and not shoot.
The clock is ticking… The WNBA better figure this out before it’s too late and they lose their new found fan base forever! Fans are not filling arenas to watch Clark take only 9 shots a game!
Other teams foul Clark and get away with it and Sides does nothing. Clark is called for fouls that look like non-fouls, Sides says nothing.
So the solution to the second-year head coach with a losing record, who’s 0-2 so far this year, is to teach Clark how to shoot better.
The solution should be to tell Clark to shoot every time down court. and tell her teammates to get her the ball.
That would be too easy.
How stupid. You better wake up!
The post INSANITY: Indiana’s WNBA Coach Christie Sides Tells Reporters She Wants to Reshape Caitlin Clark’s Game and Make the Greatest Scorer in NCAA History a 2-Point Shooter – You Just Can’t Make This Up! appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Has been weaponized against President Donald Trump
Democrats long have claimed that President Donald Trump and his supporters are a “threat” to democracy.
But they’ve been unable to say how they’re a threat, except that if they were in the majority in Washington, that would mean that Democrats were not in the majority, and therefore away from the central positions of power.
But now an expert is warning that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, with its weaponization of the nation’s justice system, actually is “a threat to the Republic.”
The comment comes from Gene Hamilton, a lawyer and official at the America First Legal Foundation.
His comments came during a hearing this week before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which is exploring just how the Biden administration has turned the authorities of the government into arms of the Democrat party.
He said, “Prosecution and charging decisions are infused with racial and partisan political double standards. Immigration laws are ignored. The Federal Bureau of Investigation harasses protesting parents (branded ‘domestic terrorists’ by some partisans) while working diligently to shut down politically disfavored speech on the pretext of its being ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation.’
“A department that prosecutes numerous FACE Act cases while ignoring dozens of violent attacks on pregnancy care centers and/or the coordinated violation of laws that prohibit attempts to intimidate Supreme Court Justices by parading outside of their homes has clearly lost its way. A department that has twice engaged in covert domestic election interference and propaganda operations—the Russian collusion hoax in 2016 and the Hunter Biden laptop suppression in 2020—is a threat to the Republic.”
“The Biden Administration—and most notably, the Department of Justice—appears to have embarked on a journey of political persecution of those with whom it disagrees, with the end result being the total social, economic, and political domination of the populace.”
FULL STATEMENT: pic.twitter.com/wQdmDGJzUe
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) May 15, 2024
The organization explained, “The Biden administration—and most notably, the Department of Justice—appears to have embarked on a journey of political persecution of those with whom it disagrees, with the end result being the total social, economic, and political domination of the populace.”
According to HeadlineUSA, President Donald Trump now is facing “a myriad of legal troubles” but those attacks appear to be the operation of the DOJ under “the supervision of President Joe Biden.”
The report noted longtime New York attorney Robert J. Castillo, who has been “involved in many different types of cases.” But he said he’s never before encountered “the types of politically motivated cases that have been brought in this presidential election season. These political cases are being used as a weapon of war to damage, defeat or impede political adversaries and their allies.”
In fact, Biden’s appointees are prosecuting Trump for having papers from his presidency at home, but are not prosecuting Joe Biden for having documents from the Barack Obama administration in his home. They are prosecuting Trump for expressing his opinions about the 2020 election, but are not prosecuting Democrats who openly claimed the 2016 election was stolen. They are trying to convict Trump of felonies over misdemeanor bookkeeping violations in New York. And more.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Expert Charges DOJ Actually is ‘a Threat to the Republic’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission
Republished with permission from AbleChild
The United Hospital Fund, a research and analysis organization, has released a report titled “The Ripple Effects of the Adolescent Behavioral Health Crisis” which apparently reflects survey data on substance use, mental health issues, and treatment (or lack thereof) among adolescents in the U.S., New York State and New York City. Based on this report, it appears that nobody is getting better.
This forty-page report spews so many numbers it’s hard to comprehend just how bad the mental health problem is for any given age group. But the report has bigger problems. For example, the smartest guys in the room who put together this report made a fatal error, and the report should be used as confetti. One only need review the survey used to collect the data to see that the highfalutin analysts apparently have failed to ask those surveyed whether or not they had been on prescription psychiatric drugs, when, what kind and for how long. Why? Where are the “fact checkers?”
How is this possible unless the goal of the data collectors is to create a behavioral health problem where one does not exist? And, perhaps, if one were to see the numbers of those surveyed, complaining of thoughts of suicide and depression, were actually on prescription psychiatric drugs, maybe the public might understand the role those drugs are playing in the increased numbers of suicide, depression and other mental health conditions.
Can one really accept that these respected analysts just decided not to separate which adolescents were on prescribed psychiatric drugs for “treatment” of a mental illness and those who are not on a psychiatric drug? Clearly those numbers would reflect totally different data. It actually becomes embarrassing trying to accept that such respected organizations would leave out important prescription drug data. But maybe the reason for the missing data is reflected in the associations for those producing the data.
The United Hospital Fund, a nonprofit that claims to have no ties to big pharma has partnered in producing this report with Boston Consulting Group that has a division devoted to servicing biopharma. It doesn’t take much to realize that pushing “unmet” needs equates to swaying the funding of massive behavioral health and big pharma with taxpayer dollars. This massive billion-dollar industry has created a survey that leaves out the most important question… Are you currently on, or have you been prescribed in the past, behavioral health medications?
This is important information in today’s world. Too often the behavioral health community cries that more resources (money) are needed. But those cries are based on incomplete data like what is provided in this recent report. What appears to be happening is that the mental health community does not want the world to know, that despite decades of mental health intervention (prescription drug use) NO ONE IS GETTING BETTER.
More importantly, a large portion of these prescribed psychiatric “treatments” carry black box suicide warnings that increase the likelihood one will commit suicide and, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) even taken as prescribed these drugs can be addictive. One can only wonder why those putting the surveys together don’t want to capture and separate behavioral health medication data in the targeted population to determine whether the drugs are helping or actually contributing to the increased suicides and continual poor mental health of the US population. One thing is perfectly clear. Despite decades of prescribed psychiatric drugs to “treat” those suffering from mental health diagnoses, the problems get worse, and nobody is getting better. That’s a problem.
The post National Mental Health Survey Fails to Ask About Prescribed Psychiatric Drugs – Why Is That? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
‘A blatant violation of the First Amendment’
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
A fight – that could end up before the federal courts – has erupted in Virginia because officials in the National Park Service abruptly have decided to censor all “religious” events planned to honor Memorial Day at Poplar Grove National Cemetery in Petersburg.
Officials with First Liberty Institute have written to federal officials offering advice on “the right” thing to do to resolve the standoff.
“Our hope is that the National Park Service will immediately correct this error and grant the permit,” said John Moran of the McGuireWoods law firm working with the institute. “This policy and the decision to block the Knights of Columbus from continuing their long-standing religious tradition is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
Roger Byron, of First Liberty, added, “Due to the religious nature of the Knights’ annual service to honor and pray for the nation’s fallen soldiers, they have been assigned a second class status and relegated to the proverbial back of the bus. That is precisely the kind of unlawful discrimination and censorship the First Amendment was enacted to prevent. Surely this decision was an oversight.”
The problem is that while the Knights of Columbus Petersburg Council 694 has held Memorial Day services in the cemetery since the 1960s, the Parks Service now is banning them, because there is a new prohibition on “religious services.”
Disrupting a long tradition of holiday events recognizing American’s veterans, the Park Service last year denied the fraternal organization a permit to continue.
Park Service officials, under the Joe Biden administration, now are claiming that masses, or even prayer events, are now “demonstrations.”
The letter to the chief ranger at the federal location said, “There is no reason under NPS regulations or Policy Memorandum 22-01 to deny the Knights a permit to hold the service within the cemetery. Indeed, even since the adoption of Policy Memorandum 22-01, the Park Service has authorized Memorial Day masses in other National Cemeteries.”
The legal team, while it has not yet filed a formal case in court, explained that it is a violation of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act “to discriminate against and censor the Knights’ activities solely because of their religious character.”
The letter details, “The NPS’s prohibition of the Knights’ Memorial Day service due to its religious nature is not merely unlawful content-based discrimination on speech—it is textbook viewpoint discrimination, which is per se unconstitutional. … The Knights ask NPS to do the right thing and grant them permission to host their annual Memorial Day mass in Poplar Grove National Cemetery, as the Park Service has done since time immemorial—before last year—and as it has continued to do in other National Cemeteries.”
And it included a notice to the federal facility: “We strongly urge you to reconsider your decision and promptly to grant the Knights a permit to host their annual Memorial Day mass within the walls of the Poplar Grove National Cemetery. If you persist in denying the permit, our clients intend to take all appropriate steps to protect their rights, including though litigation. We therefore ask that you preserve all relevant documents and materials in anticipation of litigation.:
The letter advised that “the right thing” to see is for the permit to be issued as it has been for decades.
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Fight Erupts When Feds Ban ‘Religious’ Memorial Day Event appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Guest post by Jenn Baker, CondemnedUSA
Enrique Tarrio, Proud Boys Leader and January 6th Political Hostage, is serving a 22-year sentence for NOT being in Washington DC, and yet, being one of the “masterminds” of that day. While being imprisoned in Kentucky, Tarrio has vowed to make the most of the time that he is being forced to endure.
While incarcerated, prisoners are given an opportunity to work. They have several programs that are offered in the various facilities. At FCI Manchester, where Tarrio is serving his time, they offer a program that allows inmates to train and bord dogs. The dogs are trained initially to become service dogs. Some of them don’t make it as a service dog, however, they continue to train so they can be adopted by a good home.
Tarrio became involved with this program and received his first dog named Blue. Blue is an Australian Shepherd/ Poodle mix. He is black and white with steel blue eyes, big paws, and A LOT of energy. The dogs do everything with their trainer.
Blue would be with Tarrio 24/7, sleeping in a kennel next to each other within a locked cell.
The day came when it was time for Blue to start getting ready for adoption. Tarrio reached out to CondemnedUSA asking for help in finding Blue a wonderful forever home, and they answered his call and found the perfect family.
We found Jimmy and Amy of Texas, and they were ecstatic at the possibility of adopting Blue. These two Patriots recently lost one of their beloved dogs to cancer and didn’t need to be asked twice. Last weekend, Jimmy and Amy hopped in their RV and headed to Kentucky to pick up the newest addition to their family.
Pawsibilities Unleashed , out of Frankfort Kentucky, is the organization that makes this program possible. They provided Blue’s new owners with all the necessary medical and training paperwork. There are fees that go along with the adoption which can vary depending on the program and medical needs of the individual dog.
Once they arrived in Kentucky, Jimmy and Amy met Blue and fell in love with him instantly. Although they did not get to meet with Tarrio, he made sure they received his personal daily journal, which he kept while training Blue. Here are a few excerpts:
On the trip home to Texas, Jimmy and Amy took note of Enrique’s journal and continued with the training Blue had received from him. At first, Blue was nervous and anxious, as the ride in the RV seemed to be overwhelming. His newly found freedom was full of smells, sights, and feelings this puppy had never experienced before. He wanted to stay next to Jimmy while the RV was moving and kept trying to lay by his feet, which was not ideal since Jimmy was driving. It is noteworthy that at only five months old, Blue had spent over a month with all men, and it seems he was very comfortable with the male energy Jimmy was giving off.
Amy took Blue out for walks, training, and to use the bathroom while traveling. After a good day on the road, Blue finally got comfortable in the RV just in time for the last part of the trip.
Once home, Amy and Jimmy introduced Blue to their other two dogs, and it was not easy at first. When Amy checked in after three days of Blue being in his new home, it was nothing but praise and happiness. Blue and the other dogs have adapted to each other and are playing, sleeping, and eating together. There is more life and pep in the two older dogs, who seemed melancholy since the passing of their “brother.”
This is a new chapter for Amy and Jimmy’s family. They have a wonderful new puppy, and it was all due to a small but meaningful program that has made a difference in so many lives.
Tarrio will, hopefully soon, have another dog to train and be able to send that one off to find an amazing forever home, as he did with Blue. He has spoken with Amy since they returned to Texas and is checking on Blue’s training. He couldn’t be happier that Blue is adapting to his new family and surroundings.
CondemnedUSA will continue to help with the little things, as well as the big, for the J6 Political Hostages. They will be there to answer the call. Tarrio knew he could trust CondemnedUSA to give Blue his forever home and knew he would see Blue again because he called them first.
For more information or to donate to CondemnedUSA for their efforts, please visit their website here.
Jenn Baker
J6 Advocate/ Journalist/ Podcaster
Rumble – Flip The Switch w/ Jenn
X/ Truth Social ~ @JennBakerMJB
Telegram ~ JennBakerMJB
The post In a Time When it Feels Like We’ve Been Abandoned by Feel Good Stories, J6 Political Prisoner Enrique Tarrio and CondemnedUsa Share Heartwarming Story appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
‘Oh Allah, annihilate the brothers of apes and pigs’
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
A Florida dentist and Islamic imam who has called for the annihilation of “the tyrannical Jews” now could be facing punishment for his vicious anti-Semitism, which he included in a recorded sermon to fellow Muslims.
“Oh Allah, annihilate them, for they are no match for you. Oh Allah, annihilate the brothers of apes and pigs,” demanded Fadi Kablawi in a sermon first broadcast on Facebook, adding the current Israeli government is “worse than the Nazis.”
A report at Newsweek explained Kablawi demanded death for Jews, with, “Oh Allah, annihilate the tyrannical Jews.” The sermon then was translated by Shirion Collective, a pro-Israel account on X.
PROPAGANDA: Miami’s “Dr.” Kablawi Teaches, Preaches, and Prays for Jewish Genocide
Know the business address of this terrorist? DM us!
WATCH: In a North Miami sermon, “Dr.” Fadi Kablawi accuses Israel of organ theft and invokes hateful, genocidal prayers against Jews.… pic.twitter.com/2dZvgPl9Wo
— Shirion Collective (@ShirionOrg) May 13, 2024
The report explained Kablawi is an imam at Masjid As Sunnah An Nabawiyyah.
Florida state Rep. Randy Fine, chairman of the Florida House Health and Human Services Committee, now has sent a letter to Jose R. Mellado, chairman of the Florida Board of Dentistry, calling for Kablawi’s dental license to be suspended. And calling for an investigation into Kablawi’s practice.
The letter from Fine includes, “North Miami, where dentist Kablawi practices, contains many Jewish residents, none of whom could be considered safe in Imam Kablawi’s dental chair, where he could personally implement what he is asking Allah to do. Practicing medicine in Florida is a privilege—not a right—and as the chairman of the Florida House Health and Human Services Committee, I call on you to immediately suspend Dr. Kablawi’s license and commence a thorough investigation into his practice. The lives of some of Florida’s Jews could hang in the balance.”
Fine noted he’s already heard from patients who were alarmed that “this guy” was their dentist.
The report noted Fine also shared an email from Mellado expressing concern about the antisemitism.
“I am deeply concerned with this inflammatory rhetoric and the potential danger it poses to Jewish and other ethnic groups. It is our utmost responsibility to protect and ensure the safety of the citizens in Florida. Please, review and act accordingly to protect the patients and the public in Florida.”
Kablawi did not respond to a Newsweek request for comment.
The report noted other statements, attributed to Kablawi’s rantings, and translated, include:
“Oh Allah, bring annihilation upon the accursed Zionists.”
“Oh Allah, show us the black days that you inflict upon the Jews.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post U.S. Dentist Calls for Jews to Die, Now Faces Serious Action appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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 diagram above).
This document shows the many entities and interactions between these entities and groups involved in the Left’s Election Industrial Complex. Higher Ground Labs is led by a group of far-left zealots and politicians. It started in 2017 after Hillary lost the 2016 Election.
Higher Ground Labs created and published its 2022 report that describes its landscape and connections in the election industry 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.
Based on our initial analysis of this Complex, the Left uses money to manipulate these groups where conservative entities for the most part run on trust. Money is used to incentivize. “Trust issues” in a grass roots environment are minimized through the use of money and funding.
See our first post on this topic below:
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: The Left’s ELECTION INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Discovered and Defined
A deeper dive into the Left’s Election Industrial Complex from a military expert’s point of view indicates that this system runs more like a 5th generation weapons system.
A military weapons system is an integrated system, usually computerized, for the control and operation of weapons of a particular kind. With this in mind, It appears that the Left has weaponized US elections.
5th Generation warfare is described by Dr. Robert Malone as follows (emphasis added):
5th-Gen warfare is an extension of Asymmetric and Insurgent Warfare strategies and tactics, whereby both conventional and unconventional military tactics and weapons are incorporated and deployed, including exploitation of political, religious and social causes. This new gradient of warfare uses the internet, social media and the 24-hour news cycle to change cognitive biases of individuals and/or organizations. It can be conducted by organized or unorganized (ergo decentralized) groups; it may be led by nation states, non-nation state actors and organizations, non-governmental organizations or even individuals. A key characteristic of 5th Gen warfare is that the nature of the attack is concealed. The goal is to disrupt and defeat opponents by creating new cognitive biases.
The most effective 5th-Gen warfare strategies employed by those lacking integrity are not purely based on pushing false narratives, mis- dis- or mal- information. The most effective strategies mix truth with action, and act to increase confusion and disorder.
This Left’s Election Industrial Complex communicates real-time election operations. It’s a psychological war that uses activists and volunteers as troops. It relies heavily on messaging and influencers are highly valued. The ultimate goal is to obtain committed hearts and minds.
This is why the “New Media” is so despised by the Left. The Truth reported by New Media is the enemy of the Left.
See this brief and brilliant explanation below.
Here is a document that outlines the comments shared in the video above.
Real Time Operations 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 Is Run Like a 5th Generation “Weapons System” appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Jeff Bloodworth
Real Clear Wire
Congratulations class of 2024! Today we celebrate your high school graduation. High school graduation is America’s national “coming of age” tradition. Today, you are adults. Your future is finally yours.
Gen Z is America’s most educated generation ever. Your strong political opinions surely account for the “generation gap” between you and your parents and, especially your “Ok, Boomer” grandparents.
I laud your idealism and activism. The world needs it. But to become effective, authentic change-makers, you need bona fide examples.
Dr. Sam Mason is a trailblazing plastic pollution scientist. She was the first researcher to uncover the prevalence of plastic pollution in our freshwater ecosystems. Gen Z’s top concern is the environment. You know that plastic pollution is endemic. But you only know that because Dr. Mason discovered it—and then publicized it. That’s a change-maker. I want you to be like Sam, be a change-maker.
Like you, Dr. Mason became an activist at a young age. At 9, acid rain turned her favorite sitcom character’s hair green. That’s the moment when she became an environmentalist and fell in love—with chemistry.
10-year-old Sam loved chemistry’s “certainty” and “black-and-white” answers.” Life for her in Farmer’s Branch, Texas was riddled with insecurity and improbabilities. At 6, Sam’s mother abandoned her. One day she was there. And then she was not.
Overnight her single father took on multiple jobs to pay the bills. Young Sam was left in the care of an older brother. In those dark and lonely times, he sexually abused his younger, vulnerable sister. I know Gen Z struggles with mental health. Be like Sam, turn your pain into emotional rocket fuel.
Sam’s work ethic was born out of pain. In 1961, nearly 70% of college students studied 20 hours per week. Today, that number has fallen to 10%. Change-makers aren’t skipping class for protests. To be a change-maker requires discipline and thousands of hours of intense study.
In college, she spent 20 hours per week in a library study cubicle. There, she built 3-D models to better envision molecular interactions and chemical bonding. Those efforts paid off. In 1995 Sam graduated with a 3.99 GPA in chemistry.
Today, the average grade at the University of Texas is a B+. In the mid-1990s, when Sam was an undergrad, the average GPA at public universities was 2.8. To become a change-maker, ignore today’s lax standards and grade inflation. By not requiring excellence, we professors have failed you. So, be like Sam, and set your own high standards.
Sam essentially raised herself. All that independence created a fiercely unconventional young woman. She said of her path, “It was good to find my own way. I constantly followed my own heart.” Your helicopter parents mean well. Children don’t change the world; adults do. If your parents are doing your tax returns and paying your cellphone bill, be like Sam, and break free.
After college, Sam moved to Montana where she cleaned hotel rooms and was, in her words, a “terrible waitress.” After a year, she enrolled in the chemistry Ph.D. program at the University of Montana. She could have gone to Yale or Stanford. But she found a mentor who told her, “I like to think of my lab as a sandbox and I want people to play with.” He gave Sam the “freedom to think, play, and be creative.”
Internships, informational interviews, and intense careerism have their place. Be like Sam, sometimes bumbling is the best plan.
With that confidence, Sam soared. In graduate school, she gleaned an intellectual lesson that became her life’s metaphor, “The dissertation is a blank sheet. You are writing it. You are examining it. It is up to you to do the work, much of which is terribly mundane.” Be like Sam, do what is hard and mundane—that’s what changes the world.
Campus protesters make noise. Our attention economy rewards them. But it is the serious thinkers who bend the arc of a moral universe toward justice. Dr. Mason made her mark. But she told me, “It took 20 years of being a chemist before I was ready for ground-breaking research.”
In 2009, the skipper of the US Brig Niagara asked dozens of scientists to offer a summer class on board his vessel. Everyone said “no”—except Dr. Mason. I understand why. On the brig, she slept on a hammock next to 50 of her new best friends. When she wasn’t sailing into freezing rain, there was the heat. As for the bathroom, there wasn’t one. Then there were the “big biting black flies.” It was misery. It was torture. She loved it. For 25 weeks over 4 years, she sailed the Great Lakes in search of plastic.
Before Dr. Mason, plastic pollution meant the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. no one studied micro-plastic pollution in fresh water. The very first time, Dr. Mason hauled in her manta trawl sailors gathered around excitedly. They were crestfallen. They saw plants, bugs, algae, and zoa plankton. But Mason saw a bead of Styrofoam. That meant plastic. She said of this moment, “I grew up in Texas. If you see one cockroach there are 20,000.”
Most humans don’t change the world because the admission price is too high. Be like Sam, and see opportunities where others don’t.
These long voyages rewarded Mason with hundreds more hours in the lab. Hunched over a microscope, she searched for and then counted microscopic bits of plastic. She describes this labor as “lonely, isolating. It is the opposite of popular or social. It surely doesn’t feel heroic.”
Micro-beads were her first major discovery. The Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 resulted. This put plastic pollution into the national consciousness. What looked like overnight success was anything but. Mason laughed as she told me, “It only took 20,000 hours [of labor] before the EPA called me.” That’s when the Environmental Protection Agency phoned Dr. Mason with the news that plastic pollution was an official field of research.
To Dr. Mason the secret of changing the world is “It can’t be your aim to change the world.” She told me, “When you are in the field, you must be intellectually open to being wrong. Because sometimes what you are expecting isn’t what happens. In the field, you must be a worker ant. But you must have passion. And that is built by decades of intense intellectual labor.”
Graduates, the world needs serious, dedicated, and intellectually open people. We have enough ideologues already. Go into your labs and libraries and learn something. Be like Sam, protest less, and study more.
The post To Change the World, Protest Less, Study More appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story was originally published by Real Clear Wire
By Mead Treadwell
Real Clear Wire
America’s attention to Arctic security has intensified in recent years. Our force structure has grown deliberately, a word that usually means “on purpose.” For this Alaskan, particularly when Russia and China practice war games with live ammunition in Alaska’s fishing grounds, “deliberate” can also mean “slowly,” or “not fast enough.”
More intensive U.S. security “deliberation” might best be directed now toward Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, too.
In geopolitics, the Antarctic has been quiet to date, or at least less competitive. A great circle air route over the South Pole has less traffic, and southern shipping has less strategic significance to world markets or military logistics. The Antarctic treaty system bans military activity and mineral exploitation on the Southern Continent. Environmental and science cooperation has been stronger at times in the South than in the North polar region.
But great power competition knows no bounds. Russia abandoned international law by invading Ukraine. China, an ally of Russia, has refused to renounce violence in its goal of “reunification” with Taiwan. Both nations have put trust in treaties – and trade deals – at serious risk. Reminiscent of the Cold War, we must wake again to counter superpower “positioning” in far reaching places, from the Moon to the Antarctic.
Now, experts such as General Chuck Jacoby – who earned his Arctic credentials as chief of U.S. Army Alaska, NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command – are warning that the power struggles playing out in the Arctic today could be a preview of what is to come in Antarctica. The time has clearly come to view polar security through an Antarctic lens as well.
To suggest the Antarctic could be a battle zone may sound a bit fantastic. The continent has been demilitarized for over 65 years by a treaty which has also put territorial grabs off limits. But in a 2021 joint essay with the Air Force Academy’s Ryan Burke that was published by West Point’s Modern War Institute, the two caution that “Antarctica faces many of the same realities (and capability gaps) as the Arctic, only delayed by ten to fifteen years” and that “well-intended international agreements rarely stand up against the realities of evolving technology, interests and opportunity.”
Some observers believe that China and Russia may be counting on the Antarctic Treaty System to fall apart or even actively working towards its demise. Apparent collaboration by the two countries to block new conservation areas under the Treaty may help set up a 2048 repeal of its ban on mining and energy production. That could set off global competition for natural resources in and around the continent.
Chinese concerns are often voiced about America’s growing alliance with Australia. Down under, China’s recent construction in Antarctica has caused fear that a dual use spying facility on now exists on Antarctica with potential threats to the security of America and its allies.
Against the backdrop of these challenges, the United States has, unfortunately, been reducing its Antarctic presence. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has had to curtail its Antarctic research programs, with over half of the 131 projects and activities funded for 2023-24 austral summer cancelled due to budget, housing, and logistical problems. We should support robust polar research programs at both ends of the world.
Some U.S. security footwork happening now in the Arctic could pay off in the Antarctic. New U.S. Coast Guard Polar Class heavy icebreakers on order will work both North and South. Army Paratroopers from Alaska who train making winter jumps far above the Arctic Circle also run joint maneuvers with our southern allies, like Australia and Chile. To counter Arctic cold, dark and distance, DoD has hired more ice pilots for Navy Arctic-capable submarines (not all U.S. subs can surface through the ice). An Army Cold Regions Test Center near Delta Junction, Alaska helps military procurers ensure that equipment and weapons work well in extreme cold. DoD’s Ted Stevens Arctic Security Studies Center, and Homeland Security’s Arctic Domain Awareness Center (ADAC), are helping the U.S. fill response gaps with useful innovations for security at both ends of the earth.
There’s more to be done. Antarctica is barely mentioned, if at all, in our services’ strategic plans. While military aircraft and Coast Guard icebreakers support U.S. logistics for Antarctic research now, it doesn’t hurt to build DoD familiarity in the region with more support, too.
When it comes to Arctic security, I try never to cry wolf. But missile technology is changing, and once fringes of the world now shape the defense realities of the world. For too long we have been playing catch up in the Arctic. Defense preparation for the Southern Ocean, compliant with Antarctic treaties, will help us deter war – and maintain surer footing in both polar regions.
Mead Treadwell served as Lt. Governor of Alaska 2010-2014, and a Commissioner of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, 2001-2010, Chair under Presidents G.W. Bush and Barack Obama, 2006-2010, during the last International Polar Year which brought greater science cooperation to both the Arctic and Antarctic.
The post Antarctic and Arctic Security Threats Are Converging appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
A school district that just weeks ago had refused students permission to begin an interfaith prayer club – even though a wide range of other special interest organizations like a Pride club and a Green club were approved – abruptly has reversed itself.
“We are very pleased that the Issaquah School District is allowing our clients to start a prayer club at their school this spring,” explained Kayla Toney, associate counsel at First Liberty Institute, in a prepared statement.
“Schools should always respect the religious beliefs of their students. This is a victory for students of all faiths and a reminder that people of faith have a constitutional right to express their religious beliefs and pray, even in a public school setting.”
The fight erupted when two elementary school students proposed an interfaith prayer club at Creekside Elementary in the district in Washington state.
They were denied, even though the district “actively promoted more than a dozen non-religious clubs, including a Pride Club and the Green Team.”
When First Liberty and its lawyers intervened, the school reversed its direction.
First Liberty explained, “Creekside Elementary School is in Sammamish, WA, just a short distance from Bremerton High School, where Coach Joe Kennedy was fired for praying on the football field after each game. Coach Kennedy won his right to pray on the field in a 6-3 Supreme Court decision. The Court’s holding in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District made clear that the First Amendment protects the right of students and employees to express their faith in public schools.”
At the time, she explained, “I think that this is something that I am very passionate about. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t really want to make this happen, if I didn’t think that it would be a great opportunity for everyone.”
First Liberty had pointed out that the district’s actions looked like “religious discrimination.”
The Fox report said Laura and her mother allegedly met with the Creekside principal in February, and “The principal claimed that all funding for school clubs had already been allocated back in October. However, a Pride club had allegedly launched just a week before the meetings.”
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post School Makes Tremendous Reversal on Prayer Club appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on Leo Hohmann’s Substack and was republished with permission.
Some say the coming one-world religion will be Islam. Others say it will be a blended version of the three “Abrahamic” faiths — Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Any of these theories could turn out to be the correct one, but I think Patrick Wood, editor in chief at Technocracy News and Trends, deserves to be heard regarding another possibility. He just released a new article about the fast-spreading earth worship-based One Health Initiative, which is supported and promoted by the United Nations World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation and World Economic Forum all the way down to our state and local healthcare systems. He connects all the dots in the excellent article below, while including helpful graphics and a video. This is something all Christians need to be aware of.
By Patrick Wood at Technocracy.news
The First Amendment starts with, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Congress has largely been asleep as forces with the Administration have proliferated “One Health” policies that seek to merge man and the earth into oneness. However, this is an age-old religion associated with paganism, Wicca, and Gaiaism, and it needs to be called on the carpet for what it is!
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) defines One Health as:
“One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach — working at the local, regional, national, and global levels — with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.“
Another 19 Federal agencies are wrapped into the One Health mantra, having been sucked into the “whole-of-government” vortex created under the Clinton administration. Because of the myriad regulations created to enforce it, states, counties, and cities are steeped in it.
The pictorial below depicts a minuscule man relating to public health, global health, one health, and finally, planetary health. Since the planet is sick, mostly by the actions of man, it needs to be healed, resuscitated and made whole again.
One occultic site explains:
“Gaianism is an earth-centered philosophical, spiritual, holistic, scientifically-rational, opinion that shares expressions with various religions such as earth religions and paganism while not identifying exclusively with any specific one.
“Practitioners of Gaianism are called “Gaians”, or sometimes Gaianists. Followers typically approach the philosophy with the perspective that we should honor the earth, reduce or soften the human impact on the earth, and be respectful of all life on earth. The latter perspective is extended to all forms of life such as plant, animal, or human, and followers will often try to maintain a close relationship with the planet.“
Another site dedicated to Wicca states:
“In a world buzzing with technology and fast-paced living, reconnecting with the profound energies of the earth has become more important than ever. One fascinating facet of this connection is the concept of Gaia, a deity embodying the Earth itself in various spiritual traditions.“
Gaia: The Earth Mother
“Gaia, often revered as the Earth Mother, symbolizes the interconnectedness of all living things. Drawing inspiration from ancient Greek mythology, Gaia is the primal goddess who birthed the Titans and gave life to the world. In modern contexts, Gaia is embraced by practitioners of various spiritual paths, including Wicca and Paganism, as a representation of the Earth’s nurturing and life-giving essence.“
The Spirit of Gaia in Wicca
“For Wiccans, Gaia is an elemental force intricately woven into the fabric of their beliefs. The reverence for nature and its cycles aligns seamlessly with the Wiccan wheel of the year, where practitioners celebrate the changing seasons and honor the Earth’s bountiful gifts. Gaia’s presence is palpable in rituals that emphasize grounding, connecting with the land, and fostering a harmonious relationship with the environment.“
In Paganism, “human beings are seen as part of nature, along with other animals, trees, stones, plants and everything else that is of this earth.”
The “inventor” of Gaiaism was scientist James Lovelock (1918-2022), a climate alarmist who pictured the earth as a living organism. He was also a Technocrat who stated “We need a more authoritarian world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say […] it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”
Two scholars at the University of Westminster continued,
“This threat of eco-authoritarianism is often linked to a rising tendency towards technocracy, which suggests that decisions should be left to those with relevant scientific and technical expertise: this, it is implied, will speed up decision-making and generate more effective green outcomes.“
Since One Health has been crammed down our throats by the government, it is safe to say that a new state-mandated religion has been declared. The final proof is this: just try to criticize it (especially if you are a Christian) and see where it gets you.
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: Patrick Wood Explains Link Between Global ‘One Health’ Initiative, Gaia Worship and Technocracy appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story was originally published by Real Clear Wire
By Alfredo Ortiz
Real Clear Wire
The specter of stagflation has returned. On April 25th, The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that GDP only grew by 1.6% in the first quarter of this year, well below expectations.
Consumer spending on goods actually declined in the quarter as ordinary Americans are financially tapped out. The report also showed inflation remains stubbornly high, continuing a recent trend of resurgent inflation running about twice the Federal Reserve’s target rate.
American small businesses are the biggest victims of the stagflationary economy, which is being weighed down by big government policies. This was the most important storyline coming out of this Month’s National Small Business Week.
President Biden is claiming a small business “boom” under his administration. The reality is entrepreneurs grapple with a triple threat: a decelerating economy, soaring inflation, and escalating credit expenses due to his bad policies.
American consumers have a record $1.2 trillion of credit card debt. They are experiencing declining real wages and face a cost-of-living crisis. They can’t afford to keep up their discretionary spending, which small businesses rely on to survive and thrive.
It now costs the average American family $12,000 more to enjoy the same living standards as before President Biden took office.
Since Biden’s inauguration, wholesale costs for small businesses have risen by 20%. To maintain their slim profit margins, entrepreneurs are forced to raise prices, alienating loyal customers and reducing demand. Commentators and the media don’t understand that there’s only so much customers are willing to pay for nonessential goods and services.
To contend with outrageous inflation, the Fed raised interest rates to a 22-year high. High credit costs have dried up access to capital, making it impossible or prohibitively expensive for small businesses to expand or even continue operating.
The Fed was supposed to start cutting interest rates soon, but as I predicted, given resurgent inflation, they have no other choice but to maintain today’s elevated levels, continuing the credit crunch.
Given these headwinds, it’s no surprise that Job Creators Network’s national poll of small businesses finds two-thirds of respondents say the current economic climate may force them to close their doors. Most businesses say the price hikes they are facing are more than the official inflation numbers suggest. One-third say elevated neighborhood crime is reducing their earnings. Small businesses are whimpering, not booming.
Coverage of National Small Business Week was no surprise – the mainstream media refuses to admit that big government policies are why small businesses are suffering. Consider the reckless spending fueling inflation’s fire. The annual deficit is on track to surpass $2 trillion this year, and the nation adds another $1 trillion to the national debt every three months. This money printing is rapidly devaluing the value of the dollar, hurting small businesses and consumers.
The Biden administration is also in the midst of a regulatory onslaught that’s hitting small businesses hard. It recently issued rules expanding overtime pay, banning noncompete contracts, mandating electric vehicle use, and regulating internet access. According to the American Action Forum, the Biden administration has issued more than $1 trillion of regulations – 30 times more than under President Trump.
Biden’s biggest threat to small businesses is still to come. He recently promised that if he’s reelected, he will dramatically raise taxes on small businesses by letting the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire in 2025 as scheduled. That means small businesses would face a 20% tax hike, the end of bonus depreciation, and higher tax brackets on their earnings. This massive tax hike would throw today’s stagflationary economy into recession.
Here’s the real message of National Small Business Week: Biden and Democrats are waging a war on small businesses that won’t end until they’ve been voted out of office.
Alfredo Ortiz is CEO of Job Creators Network, author of “The Real Race Revolutionaries,” and co-host of the Main Street Matters podcast.
The post Entrepreneurs Face Major Headwinds Due to Big Government Policies appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This article originally appeared on WND.com
Guest by post by Bob Unruh
Joe Biden is on record, on social media, stating that President Donald Trump “must” be impeached, at the time, because he withheld “congressionally appropriated aid” from Ukraine in exchange for a political favor.
Biden’s statement, from 2019, in fact, is, “President Trump withheld Congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine unless they granted him a political favor. It’s the definition of quid pro quo. This is no joke—Trump continues to put his own personal, political interests ahead of the national interest. He must be impeached.”
Which is causing a problem now in that Biden has withheld congressional approved aid to Israel, to put himself in a better light.
President Trump withheld Congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine unless they granted him a political favor. It’s the definition of quid pro quo.
This is no joke—Trump continues to put his own personal, political interests ahead of the national interest. He must be impeached. https://t.co/puPgevx568
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 19, 2019
“This is awkward,” one commenter said.
A commentary at Twitchy explained, “Biden once pledged full support for Israel but that support ended when [Benjamin] Netanyahu going full speed after Hamas angered some voters which could cost Biden a swing state in November. The White House is now kicking Israel under the bus by withholding aid that’s in a package Congress passed and Biden signed.”
Joe Biden endorses his own impeachment https://t.co/Xko5Y7Uhls
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) May 9, 2024
The report continued, ” During yesterday’s interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, President Biden admitted that the White House is holding back aid for Israel because Benjamin Netanyahu won’t help out his election campaign and avoid going into Rafah to placate the pro-Hamas wing of the Democrat Party.”
“The White House National Security Council sought to keep the decision out of the public eye for several days… until Biden could deliver a long-planned speech on Tuesday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.” https://t.co/Qn9Er7sfbv
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) May 9, 2024
Biden has been getting away with double standards his entire career
3 strike laws for thee but not for me (Hunter)
Keeping classified documents without punishment
And now withholding aid to an ally
We’ll see what happens this time https://t.co/cUh8qCRbMY
— Shaun Maguire (@shaunmmaguire) May 9, 2024
Copyright 2024 WND News Center
The post Biden’s Social Media Statement Calls for Biden’s Impeachment appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story was originally published by Real Clear Wire
By Brett Schaefer
Real Clear Wire
The United Nations General Assembly is expected to vote Friday on one of the worst resolutions to come before that body – one that would confer upon the “State of Palestine” many of the rights and privileges reserved for member states. The U.S. and other U.N. member states should reject it.
The resolution is based on false premises, for one thing. It would also invite financial distress on the UN, throw chaos into the membership process of the General Assembly, and, most importantly, reward terrorism.
Considering the ongoing support for indiscriminate violence against Israeli civilians by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, a majority vote of the General Assembly in favor of this resolution is tantamount to encouraging terrorism and endorsing hostility toward a fellow UN member state.
Among the false premises are the claim that “the State of Palestine is qualified for membership in the United Nations… and should therefore be admitted to membership…” Although over 100 governments recognize the State of Palestine, this is a political determination. In truth, the Palestinian territories lack key characteristics of statehood, including a defined territory – its formal borders are subject to future negotiations with Israel – and a government that exercises sovereign authority over that territory. The Palestinian Authority arguably does not control the entirety of the West Bank, much less Gaza.
The second false premise in the resolution is the judgment that Palestine is a “peace-loving state” as required by Article 4 of the UN Charter for membership in the organization. In fact, the governing authorities of the “State of Palestine,” the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, are the furthest thing from peace-loving. Both are extremist organizations that actively encourage and reward terrorism against civilians. They indoctrinate hate among ordinary citizens to the point where they overwhelmingly support the terrorist atrocities committed on October 7, and their founding documents endorse the destruction of Israel.
So much for the UN Charter principles and purposes to maintain international peace and security and develop friendly relations among nations.
But there could also be other significant broader ramifications for the organization that should give all legitimate UN member states pause.
The resolution “decides” to confer many of the rights and privileges reserved for member states to the “State of Palestine.” As laid out in an annex to the resolution, among other privileges, the Palestinians would be granted the right to: be seated among the member states in alphabetical order; offer proposals and amendments; make statements; raise procedural motions; and stand for and be elected as officers in the General Assembly and its Main Committees.
In effect, the Palestinians would be member states except for the inability to “put forward its candidature to United Nations organs” and vote in the General Assembly. Depending on how the resolution is interpreted, they might, however, be able to vote in UN conferences and meetings. This is a dramatic elevation in status for the Palestinians, granting them the same standing as UN member states with two, albeit significant, exceptions.
Should the resolution be adopted, two U.S. laws prohibiting U.S. funding could be triggered.
One, adopted in 1994 in Public Law 103-236, prohibits funding if “to any affiliated organization of the United Nations which grants full membership as a state to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood.”
This law would likely not apply. Although the resolution would confer many privileges of UN membership to the Palestinians, they would not be full members as the UN Charter requires the Security Council to recommend new members to the General Assembly. The Security Council has not made such a recommendation. In fact, it has rejected past proposals for Palestinian membership. Thus, while the resolution would confer most rights and privileges of membership to the Palestinians, they would not be called a member state.
However, a second law could apply.
U.S. Code Title 22, Section 287e states, “No funds authorized to be appropriated by this Act or any other Act shall be available for the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states.” This law was adopted in 1990 as Public Law 101-246.
The Biden administration will seek to continue funding by arguing that the Palestinians don’t have the exact same standing as member states. But what if Donald Trump wins the presidency in November?
Regardless, congressional support for the UN is eroding for several reasons, including institutionalized anti-Israel bias. It already ended funding to UNRWA over its ties to Palestinian terrorism. Sympathy for the UN after a vote granting rights and privileges to the Palestinians might be in short supply. Indeed, Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho and 22 co-sponsors have already proposed amending U.S. law to ensure the funding prohibition applies in this instance.
The U.S. provides 22 percent of the UN regular budget and 25 percent of the peacekeeping budget – over $2 billion in 2023. Thus, in one rash moment, the General Assembly could deny the UN over a fifth of its total revenue.
The resolution also upends the membership process outlined in the UN Charter. In essence, supporters of the Palestinians are attempting an end run around the Security Council to grant the Palestinians quasi-membership. This is an assault on the authority of the Security Council. If this effort is successful, what is to stop the General Assembly from further infringement of Security Council authority?
More immediately, it will introduce potential chaos into the UN system. Although the resolution says that conferring these rights and privileges to the Palestinians is being done “exceptional basis and without setting a precedent,” the horse will have left the barn.
If the Palestinians can gain most membership rights without Security Council approval, why can’t Kosovo or Western Sahara or Somaliland or Northern Cyprus?
What is to stop some avaricious country from using the UN to recognize the independence of Crimea or Esequibo or Kashmir with an eye toward annexing them in the future?
What is to stop governments from seeking to destabilize their adversaries by recognizing Kurdistan or Chechnya and seeking UN recognition?
Success would only require enough votes in the General Assembly. But the ramifications of such provocative actions won’t stay in Turtle Bay.
If only to protect their authority, this resolution should elicit fierce opposition from the five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). However, the potential impact on international peace and security is serious enough to justify opposition even absent selfish motivation.
The situation in Gaza has raised many concerns in the UN, but it’s time for a moment of lucidity. As noted by the U.S. this month, “We also have long been clear that premature actions here in New York, even with the best of intentions, will not achieve statehood for the Palestinian people.”
Indeed, conferring membership rights and privileges on the Palestinians would diminish odds for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Why would the Palestinians concede anything to Israel if intransigence and extremism leads to rewards rather than condemnation? And why would Israel accept a resolution imposed by the UN, not reached through direct negotiations?
The purported goal of the UN is to promote international peace and security. This resolution would, instead, undermine prospects for peace and reward extremism. If it passes, U.S. funding should be immediately cut. If the Biden administration will not follow through, Congress should—as should the next President.
Brett D. Schaefer is the Jay Kingham Senior Research Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs in The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.
The post The UN Should Not Reward the Palestinians for Oct. 7th appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
This story was originally published by Real Clear Wire
By Kevin Schmidt
Real Clear Wire
Nearly two years after Nina Jankowicz briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security, she’s launched an organization demanding transparency and the public release of documents about the public debate on disinformation. An interesting move, likely without true transparency in mind.
My organization, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, has spent the same two years fighting DHS for documents on the federal board Jankowicz managed. We’re filing a second lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to fight continued government stonewalling of our requests. Thus far, DHS has refused to provide unredacted versions of documents that outline its purported authoritiesto regulate disinformation. Nor will the agency release more information about its work on misinformation related to “irregular migration” and “Ukraine” before the board was disbanded in August 2022.
So, taxpayers are unable to find out what legal authority DHS is exercising, and they aren’t allowed to learn about the work being done with their tax dollars. Does this sound like a dystopian novel yet?
Why do the documents from a defunct government board matter? Because DHS and Jankowicz sold the board as necessary. They claimed to be worried that DHS’ various offices’ ongoing disinformation work threatened Americans’ free speech rights.
Jankowicz tweeted in April 2022, “one of the key reasons the Board was established, is to maintain the Dept’s committment to protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights, & civil liberties.”
DHS told reporters in April 2022, “[I]ronically, this Board is designed to protect the freedom of speech that critics are falsely claiming it is attempting to trample.” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas also said, “[I]t was quite disconcerting, frankly, that the disinformation work that was well underway for many years across different independent administrations was not guided by guardrails.”
In May 2022, Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the board was necessary to make sure ongoing disinformation work in DHS “does not infringe on people’s free speech rights” and that the board would be developing “guidelines” and “guardrails.” That same month, the board was paused and then ultimately disbanded in August 2022.
Disconcerting, indeed. If DHS and Jankowicz were telling the truth about the board’s necessity, then DHS offices across the country continue to do disinformation work without any guardrails to protect free speech.
So the disinformation work is ongoing, but the work to provide “guardrails” has stopped. We want to know what guidance that work currently operates under, but DHS refuses to provide the information. What are they trying to hide?
We aren’t the only ones denied basic transparency about what DHS is doing with your tax dollars. Members of Congress have repeatedly asked for documents and direct answers to straightforward questions about agency authority.
In a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last month, Rep. Mike Ezell (R-MS) asked Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, “What congressional authority does DHS have in the [misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information] space?” Mayorkas dodged the question. Rep. Ezell received a similar non-answer from a DHS assistant secretary in a December hearing.
A DHS Fact Sheet defending the creation of the Disinfo Board from May 2, 2022, said, “the Department has renewed its commitment to transparency and openness with the public and Congress.”
Much like the name “Disinformation Governance Board,” these claims of commitment to transparency are Orwellian doublespeak. Last month, Jankowicz and Álvarez-Aranyos sent a letter to Congress demanding they release their work on disinformation, while, at the same time, Jankowicz’s former colleagues at DHS refuse to do so, despite being legally obligated to, unlike Congress.
Jankowicz and her former government employer have an interest in making sure the records showing what they did with the Disinfo Board never see the light of day. DHS will continue stonewalling unless a federal court orders them to follow the law, and we won’t stop until they provide transparency about its authorities and actions that threaten free speech.
The post Why Is DHS Keeping ‘Disinformation’ Regulation Docs Secret? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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.
Vaunce News 