Stepping out into freedom

 

Stepping out into freedom

The FBI and other left-leaning entities have left us in our own Truman Show

 Roger Kimball, The Spectator 

Given the fire-hose disgorgement of revelations about the behavior of the FBI, the CIA and their infiltration of the mainstream media, there is ample justification for believing that we are living in some dystopian, distinctly unfunny version of The Truman Show.

In the movie, the gormless Truman Burbank grows up thinking he is living a normal, happy life in a normal, happy town. Only gradually does he realize that something is amiss. Slowly, piece by piece, the awful truth dawns on him: his entire social world is a fabrication, a gigantic product-placement concession with him as the unwitting MacGuffin.

The deception is played for laughs, mostly. There are not many laughs in our Truman Show, the one in which the FBI hatches a fake plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, enlists some pathetic lowlifes to participate, then blows the cover and arrests the saps who joined them. One was just sentenced to sixteen years in the big house, another to nearly twenty.

In our Truman Show, various police and intelligence entities, including the FBI and the CIA, are in cahoots with Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies. We wouldn’t have known much about this except for the courageous action of Elon Musk, who everyone thought overpaid to acquire Twitter — $44 billion of the crispest — but who has been demonstrating almost daily that the deal was cheap at the price.

The journalists he has given access to Twitter’s files — including Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger — have ripped the putrid bandage off a suppurating orifice of deception, lies and politicized interference.

Glenn Greenwald provided a meticulously researched summary of that assault on his internet video show “System Update.” The episode in question exposes the FBI’s “propaganda partnership with Twitter.” Senior Twitter officials, Greenwald shows, met regularly with what amounted to FBI handlers. In the end, they “degraded Twitter into little more than a full-on Democratic Party activist machine, all while lying to the public about its function. This was a massive public fraud and 2020 election interference.”

Swirl that around in your mouth before swallowing: “a massive public fraud and 2020 election interference.” Forget about people screaming that you are a “conspiracy theorist” disseminating “disinformation.” In truth, you are acting as a documentary reporter.

Greenwald’s show aired on December 20 on the new(ish) video platform Rumble. If you don’t know Rumble, you should. It is the free-speech alternative to YouTube, that thoroughly compromised media outlet that is owned by Google, which itself is part of the surveillance apparatus of the regime.

The FBI emitted a blustering but ultimately pathetic denial that its hand-in-glove work with Twitter and other outlets was anything but normal investigative activity, designed to keep the public safe and free from “foreign influence” and perfidious “misinformation.”

The public centerpiece of this sorry development was the all-hands-on-deck effort — a successful effort — to bury the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 election. The FBI was there, leaning on Twitter (which didn’t require much pressure) to shove the potentially catastrophic revelation into the oubliette of pseudo-national-security censorship.

The story was first reported by the New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper and still its fourth largest. That didn’t matter. Twitter suspended the Post’s account and the deep state, abetted by its agents in the FBI, went to work to discredit the story. Presto, that regime media lapdog Politico pumped out a story about how more than fifty — count ’em! — senior intelligence officials dismissed the story as “Russian disinformation.”

But it wasn’t disinformation. And it had nothing to do with Russia. On the contrary, its sordid revelations were not just about Hunter Biden and his whores and drug use, but — far more damaging — Joe Biden’s possible role as “the big guy” receiving his 10 percent cut from Hunter’s business deals in China, Ukraine and elsewhere. Those deals, by the way, were secured only because Hunter was able to trade successfully on his father’s name as vice-president. Absent that suppression, there is a very good chance that Donald Trump would have been acclaimed president in 2020.

I understand there is a sense in which this is old and familiar news. If Hillary Clinton were in the room, I would expect to her to ask, “What difference at this point does it make?”

The answer is “a lot.” Yes, we’ve had warnings about what is happening now at least since Dwight Eisenhower, who in his farewell address, warned about the rise of a “military-industrial complex” whose unprecedented size and technological power could “endanger our liberties” and democracy.

Greenwald touched on Eisenhower’s warning in his video. He also mentions Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s warned that “the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny” on American society.

We’re past the point where stage lights are falling out of the sky and landing at Truman Burbank’s feet. The question is: will we muster the wit and the courage to step out into freedom?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2023 World edition. 

Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of the New Criterion, publisher of Encounter Books and a Spectator columnist and contributing editor.

Show us Biden’s records in Delaware

Forget classified docs, show us the real haul of Biden’s records in Delaware

Jonathan Turley, New York Post

President Biden made a deal with the University of Delaware to lock away documents to protect his political name.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has repeatedly assured the public that President Biden is committed in the classified document scandal to move forward in “a very transparent way.” Putting aside the refusal to share any information beyond a desire to be fully transparent, Biden has one major test awaiting him on his pledge: his senatorial records.

There has been much discussion of a classified document being found in his personal library in Wilmington, but there is a huge library of Biden documents sitting in the University of Delaware. The university is sitting on Biden documents due to a cynical 2012 arrangement made by Biden when he was vice president and contemplating a run for the presidency.

The president effectively locked away his records by giving them to the university, which has claimed for a decade that it is still working to organize and catalog the documents. He has refused to allow the public or the press to see the documents. With the recent reports that Biden may have included classified information in notebooks found at his residence, the status of the University of Delaware documents is becoming more and more untenable for the White House.

University ‘lockbox’

The University of Delaware has been used for years to shield potentially embarrassing documents from public review for the Biden family, including allegations that the president engaged in sexual harassment or assault as a member of the Senate. The university effectively agreed to serve as a type of lockbox for the Bidens to prevent a review of his senatorial records as he ran for higher office.

At great public cost, the university has fought efforts by the media and the public to allow access to the documents. It is a troubling position for any institution of higher education to fight access to historical materials … for years.

Now, however, there is growing concern that the files may not only include incriminating information on past sexual assault allegations but actual classified information. There is already confirmation that Biden removed classified information from the Senate more than 14 years ago. It now appears he also may have transferred classified information from briefings and documents to his notebooks. That raises the question of whether such information is contained in the notebooks and papers housed at the university.

If President Biden is ready to embrace transparency, he can start by finally dropping his opposition to any review of his senatorial documents. At a minimum, the FBI should request access to determine if his violation of classified rules extends to this mountain of material given to the university.

No way to secure files

For decades, I have written and testified on why public servants should not be able to claim records from public service. This work includes a work on presidential papers published by Cornell in 2003 where I traced the flawed arguments of public servants that such documents are entirely their property.

Biden is the poster boy for how the claim of private ownership can run against principles of good government and the public interest. Biden became hugely wealthy while in public service, as did his family. The Bidens have long been accused of open influence peddling to garner millions of dollars and choice jobs or contracts for family members. These documents could shed light on that corrupt history.

More importantly, the university is actively involved in stopping inquiries into whether Biden may have assaulted a staff member or engaged in a pattern of sexual harassment of female staffers. It could also be shielding classified information from being located.

The “very transparent way” should also extend to other matters of great public interest. Even if Biden is not willing to give the public and press general access to these records, he should be willing to allow an independent third party to remove any documents related to matters of great public interest, including allegations of sexual misconduct and influence peddling.

Biden has yet to come up with a plausible reason why he is using the University of Delaware to prevent review of the documents. Indeed, the University of Delaware continues to expend public funds by making technical arguments against access while ignoring questions about the use of an academic institution to shield potentially embarrassing records.

Of course, the FBI does not need permission. It has ample reason to demand access in light of the president’s serial violations. Indeed, past discoveries form a perfect overlaid map of where the president has lived or worked in the past decade. Yet although there is new interest in searching his other residence, there has been little discussion of the largest trove of documents sitting in the bowels of the University of Delaware.

Presumably, this is one question that Jean-Pierre could actually answer. If the president is truly striving to be “very transparent,” he should be able to tell the University of Delaware that his records should be open to outside review. Otherwise, Biden’s pledge is nothing but transparently dishonest.

Five Things That Are Killing America

Five Things That Are Killing America

Cowardice, Dishonesty, Ignorance, Sloth and Mush

William Otis, Ringside at the Reckoning 

What really explains why the country is in the state it’s in, with inflation, worker shortages, propaganda replacing education, race huckstering galore, and Oprah-style gooey sentiment getting poured over everything?

I can’t answer that in one post, but I can at least begin. Our reaction to COVID is a good place to start. COVID was a new and ominous disease, and a good deal of caution was justified when we were first dealing with it. But it soon became clear that it posed significant mortal danger only to old people and those with serious health problems to start with. There was some danger to people under 60 but not much, and next to no danger to children, teenagers, and people in their twenties.

Nonetheless, we were seized with fear. We shut down schools, where COVID’s danger was minimal, telling parents that education would proceed via Zoom (or, you know, whatever). That was false. An entire generation of kids lost major ground in their education, as Paul has documented elsewhere on Ringside.

We also shut down the economy, even though for the great majority of workers and consumers, that was an obvious overreaction. Because workers were at home, and not earning paychecks at their jobs, they got sent government checks ($1400, if I recall correctly — I never got one) for doing nothing. Then they got sent a second round, also for doing nothing. The may have been sent a third; I’ve lost track.

What happens when you pay people for doing nothing? Well, two things to start with. First, they get used to getting paid for doing nothing, so they’re in no big rush to get back to work, and haven’t. Hence worker shortages from coast to coast, and masses of those still employed are still, even now, allowed to “work” from home on, say, Mondays and Fridays. If you think a loss of productivity is a big surprise when millions of people are “working” from home for 40% of the workweek, I have this bridge……….

The second thing that happens when you print of millions of fat government checks that correspond to no goods or services getting produced is inflation. No surprise there either: The very definition of inflation is expanding the money supply without a corresponding expansion of real wealth.

In other words, while alarm and caution were plainly justified initial reactions to COVID, they ballooned into something resembling national cowardice, then stuck around longer and in a more stringent form than even arguably warranted, producing disastrous effects for the education of our kids and our national wealth. A principal reason they stuck around was dishonesty. The dangers of COVID were relentlessly fearmongered and overhyped; any questioning of this orthodoxy was condemned and suppressed, including on social media; and there was never anything approaching an honest accounting of the enormous and probably years-long cost of the shutdowns, lockdowns and authoritarian stay-at-home orders.

(For those who might think that this is easy enough for me to say because I’m young, well………..ummmmmm………..I’m actually 76 and immune-suppressed because of a transplant. I also had my own bout with COVID. Too bad. People need to grow up and understand that when you get old, you’re going to have health problems and some of them are going to be serious. That’s a good reason to be cautious. It’s no reason to live your life in fear, much less try to force others to live theirs in fear).

In future posts, I hope to say more about the astronomical cost we’ve paid for cowardice, dishonesty, and the other vices I noted in the sub-head. But what I’ve said up to now is only by way of introducing a piece by Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish. Sullivan is far to my left on policy questions, but wonderfully honest and straightforward in calling out the devastation Wokeism has wreaked and is wreaking.

It will come as no surprise to Ringside readers to hear that Wokeism lives on dishonesty, ignorance, race huckstering, and bullying. What may come as a surprise is the extent to which children, and black children in particular, are its victims. What Sullivan shows is that our inability or unwillingness to quash Wokeism has betrayed black children, first by the mushy Leftist propaganda we shove at them as “education,” and then by murdering them in grossly disproportionate numbers.

Here’s how the Sullivan piece starts:

In my web-reading this week, I stumbled across two statistics that made me sit up straight. The first came from a devastating story last September about my home city’s public schools. I had just watched a slick new video from DC Public Schools about their new “equity” push, which aims to go “beyond students’ academics” and “call out inequities.” The video is full of vague-sounding pabulum — they never define what they mean by “equity,” for example, apart from invoking Ibram X Kendi’s term “antiracism” — but the message is very clear: “equity” is now the central focus of the school district. And it’s a bright new day!

Now check out the data on how the DC Public School system is faring. A key metric is what they call “proficiency rates” — a test of whether the kids are passing the essentials of reading and math at every stage of their education. Overall, only 31 percent of DC students have proficiency in reading and just 19 percent have proficiency in math. Drill down further in the racial demographics and the picture is even worse: among African-American kids, the numbers are 20 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Among black boys, it’s 15 percent and 9 percent. Which means to say that DC Public Schools graduate kids who are overwhelmingly unable to do the most basic reading and math that any employer would need.

Moral of story: You won’t learn long division or reading, but you’ll learn that white people are rapacious oppressors and black people are entitled victims. In other words, you’ll learn stuff that’s even more poisonous than it is false.

This is not a function of money. In the most recent federal analysis: DC spends far more per student — $30,000 a year — than any other state, double the amount in many states across the country.

Let’s put it this way: if this were a corporation, it would be in liquidation. If it were a house, it would be condemned. But since it’s a public school system, it can avoid this catastrophic failure by emphasizing “equity”!

There are more important reasons the country is 30 trillion or so in the hole, but spending $30,000 a year per student to learn essentially nothing useful has to be on the list, too.

Call this the woke dodge. As they fail to educate kids in the very basics, they brandish a shiny object over there — “Diversity! Equity! Inclusion! ” — to distract us. Or they claim that these scores are caused by “white supremacy” or “systemic racism.” Or they argue that now, they are educating “the whole child.” From the DCPS video: “The racial equity lens is a critical component of ‘whole child’ for us because being a ‘whole child’ means thinking about all of your identities, but certainly the racial identity is a gap in what we’re discussing as a country.” Anything but do the basic job of teaching math and reading as they are supposed to do.

That nails it as well as it gets nailed.

Still, there’s something even worse than keeping children, and black children in particular, ignorant of anything that might help them succeed in the adult world. There’s killing them before they reach the adult world.

Then there’s the other stat that blew my mind — on the post-BLM surge in murders of African-Americans, including many children. The rise in homicide has cooled off somewhat, as Robert Verbruggen notes. But check this out:

Between the 2018–2019 and 2020–2021 periods, the black homicide rate went up by about 40 percent and the white one by 15 percent — already a glaring disparity. But since the black homicide rate started out so much higher than the white one, this translated to an increase of just 0.4 per 100,000 for whites and 9.7 per 100,000 for blacks — nearly 25 times as large. The increase in the black homicide rate was greater than the total homicide rate for the nation as a whole.

Read that last sentence again….

[W]hat is the response of the DC Council to this sort of crisis? Roughly what the completely broken school system has done in the face of its catastrophic failure: distract the public by getting even woker, by lowering sentences for violent crimes, and giving alleged murderers more tools to dodge or delay justice. The woke dodge again.

It’s all true. Over the very liberal Mayor’s veto, and in the face of some of the ugliest crime statistics in the country, the DC City Council enacted bill going even softer on criminals than is the (scandalous) case now.

Worse, the DC Council is clearly sending a signal not only that we are not in a crisis, but that, if anything, we need to be more lenient on criminals, and let the kids fare as best they can. Because “equity.” And for good measure, the woke dismiss or try to cancel anyone who dares to make these obvious points. Or they accuse us of bad faith. Or even being racists because we care about this stuff. (You are racist if you don’t care about this, but also racist if you do — see how that works?) Or that the color of our skin means we have no standing to talk or write about this at all.

But hear this racist out: wouldn’t it be an improvement if schools focused on reading and math to the exclusion of almost everything else, if crime against black people were treated like crime against white people, and if there were a focus on “equity” for black victims of crime rather than for the criminals themselves?

You can say I’m a dreamer — but someone’s got to be.

Biden family = 'The Sopranos'

Want to understand Joe Biden and his family? Just watch 'The Sopranos'

Tony Soprano and his fictional family would be very proud of the Bidens, their real-life Delaware copycats

Newt Gingrich, Foxnews 

Biden’s problems will only get bigger

Finding Biden’s classified documents is the beginning of the unraveling of his criminal family operation.

Watching HBO’s "the Sopranos" can really help you understand the Biden family. 

Between Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, and the Bidens’ various shady private-equity schemes with foreign fraudsters, it’s not too hard to make the analogy.

President Joe Biden is clearly the head of a family. He has repeatedly exploited his public offices to make money. His son, Hunter Biden, is like the ambitious-but-dull son who wants to inherit the family business but always screws up. 

Some of what the Bidens have done is clearly inappropriate. Even more of what they have done is an abuse of public office. Most of what they have done is simply secret.

The best example of Bidens’ manipulation of the system for profit surrounds the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. The center has given the Bidens remarkable access to Chinese Communist Party money. According to reports in the New York Post, the university, "raked in a total of $54.6 million from 2014 through June 2019 in donations from China, including $23.1 million in anonymous gifts starting in 2016."

As the paper reported, about $15.8 in anonymous Chinese gifts came after the Biden Center was announced in 2017. As soon as Biden left the White House as vice president, he was tapped to lead the center and given a professorship. Shortly after the center fully opened, another $14.5 million in anonymous Chinese gifts were delivered in May 2018. 

In another report about this flood of money, The Free Beacon said $61 million in Chinese donations went to the university from 2017 to 2020.

The numbers vary because there is virtually no public accountability or transparency about the money trail. It’s a given that Chinese sources aren’t going to share any information. And the University of Pennsylvania is simply refusing to obey the law and report the foreign donations.

I worked with the Trump administration’s Department of Education on this for several years, and we simply could not get the University of Pennsylvania to open its books and explain where all the Chinese money was coming from. 

Consider that now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken was the manager of the Penn Biden Center. Several other Biden team members were paid by the University of Pennsylvania in the period between Joe Biden’s vice presidency and presidency. 

Meanwhile, in apparent appreciation for setting him up at the center, Joe Biden appointed former University President Amy Gutmann to be U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Similarly, David Cohen, the former chairman of the university’s board of trustees, is now the U.S. Ambassador to Canada.

As Jonathan Turley wrote for the New York Post, the Biden family corruption is exceptional – even for Washington: "Even in a city where influence-peddling is a virtual cottage industry, the Bidens took the corrupt practice to a truly Olympian level," he said.

Turley asserted that the traditional news media, for some reason, is still bending over backwards to protect the Bidens. The elite media spent months pretending that the laptop fiasco was Russian propaganda. They have repeatedly parroted Joe Biden’s claim that he doesn’t know anything about Hunter Biden’s business dealings. But it’s all not true. As Turley pointed out: 

"Dozens of emails, pictures and witness accounts prove the president was not just aware but a possible beneficiary of this corruption. His personal interactions with his son’s business associates include at least 19 visits to the White House by Hunter’s partner, Eric Schwerin, alone from 2009 to 2015, when Biden was vice president.

"Emails on Hunter’s laptop make repeated reference to not only Joe’s knowledge but efforts to hide his involvement. … Emails used code names for Joe Biden such as ‘Celtic’ or ‘the big guy.’ In one, ‘the big guy’ is mentioned as possibly receiving a 10% cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm. There are also references to Hunter paying off his father’s bills from shared accounts.

"Code names, cuts for ‘the big guy’ and millions in mysterious foreign transactions would ordinarily send the media into a frenzy."

As Turley lays it out, the elite legacy media has become Biden’s – and the larger Democrat Party’s – de facto state media.

The Sopranos would be proud of their Delaware copycats. The Biden family is an influence-peddling center of corruption worthy of HBO fantasy. Unfortunately for America, it isn’t fiction.

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. 

Biden pushing trans indoctrination with kids

This is partially what I was talking about the other night at our January LCMB meeting… our kid’s education!

I seldom agree with Bill Maher, but here I do… ‘Dems and allies have completely lost control’ 

Bill Maher says Biden administration 'all in' on pushing trans indoctrination with kids

HBO host says Democrats 'have to answer for' how they 'completely lost control' over schools

Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News. 

"Real Time" host Bill Maher took Democrats to task on the 21st season premiere of his HBO show over how they have "completely lost control" over schools across the nation.

"I thought a great subject to talk about would be schools, because they're in the news a lot," Maher began the panel discussion on Friday. "We live in a prison yard in this country, which is everything is tribal. And like anything that has to do with schools or education is something really the Democrats have to answer for because they control it. I mean, when you look at the Democratic Convention, it's like three-quarters of them are teachers. My sister's a teacher. I'm a big defender of teachers, but what's going on in schools is outrageous, and somebody needs to answer for it."

Maher highlighted a recent incident in Virginia where a six-year-old brought his mother's gun to school and shot his teacher and how the school librarian told the press how "routine" teachers, students and other staff are assaulted. 

"How did we completely lose control?" Maher asked. "How could any kid learn in this atmosphere when you can't even survive? And these are all schools. This is not just inner-city schools. I hear this anecdotally from people. We've completely lost control of our schools."

The HBO star suggested it's the parents who are ultimately the "problem" with how children behave in school but "no one wants to go after" them since they're voters. 

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., shared how she was labeled a "bad mom" by her kids for taking away their iPhones and called on children to be off of social media, namely TikTok, since it's "literally ruining our kids' brains."

"One thing we used to tell kids was that there is someone in authority. And at some point, you have to take note of that person in authority," Substack writer Andrew Sullivan said. 

"Children who are taught there's no such thing as authority, the most important thing is expressing yourself at all times, are never held responsible for anything or constantly being excused for everything, they're gonna end up this way. They need direction. People need authority."

"Especially kids!" Maher exclaimed. 

"Why does a four-year-old come in, instead of teaching them the colors, you're telling them, ‘Pick your pronoun’? Where on earth did that come from? And who told us it was going to be imposed on children?" Sullivan asked. "More and more, when you look at this curriculum, it's all about that stuff. It's all about identity, it's all about being queer or trans. Children can't understand that stuff, not in kindergarten."

"And you say that as a queer," Maher pointed out with a chuckle.

"I don't want to teach five-year-olds about being gay. I think wait a little bit, and they'll pick it up anyway. It's not like they can't watch the TV," Sullivan quipped. 

He added, "They're not telling them that, they're telling them something worse. They're telling that people can choose to be a boy or a girl or neither or both or something else entirely. That is a lie. You can't. And it's done in order to placate certain special interests in Washington, mainly the LGBTQIA+ people who've also been captured by the far left. We should say no to this."

"I just don't understand why this is the hill the Democratic Party wants to die on," Maher said. 

"Because they're too scared. Both parties are too scared," Sullivan responded. "They're bullied by the extreme right, they're bullied by the extreme left, and no one has the balls to say no."

Maher said this argument isn't "anti-trans" and that "most people" who agree are "liberal people" who accept the trans community, but also stressed that actually being trans is "rare."

"We all seem to have to pretend that we're born- I don't know, jump ball," Maher joked. "It's just bulls---. It's just bulls---."

After the panel blasted how kids are being encouraged to "identify as a tree" and being taught that "boys can menstruate" and that "girls can have penises," Sullivan took aim at the younger generation, who claim he's a hater for opposing the woke ideology. 

"It sometimes gets to me when the younger ones tell me that I'm the dinosaur. Do you know what we of our generation went through as gay men or women? Do you know what we really did?… Do you know the actual oppression of dying in the streets, of dying of AIDS, of fighting for basic civil rights and how they turn around and tell us you are an old has-been, you need to just go away, and not only that you hate trans people. ‘F--- you’ is what I'd say," Sullivan said. 

"But I'm tired of it. I'm tired of it. And the way they can't debate you. They say immediately you hate people. I don't hate people. I would cherish a trans kid. I just don't want a little gay kid to be told suddenly he might be a girl inside. I don't want kids who are not able to make these kinds of decisions decide to have medication, medicalization, sterilization, drugs before they even hit puberty. It's just wrong."

Mace shared how parents back in her state of South Carolina were "bragging" that their kids started transition at ages four-six and pointed to the case of Chloe Cole, the teenage girl who at 15 had her breasts removed because she thought she had gender dysphoria and at 16 realized she made a mistake. 

"And I think the Biden administration is all-in on that," Maher reacted. 

Sullivan pointed out that European countries are more restrictive when it comes to allowing minors to transition and that even the legacy media like The New York Times has expressed skepticism over whether children should receive medical treatment, yet the Biden administration will say "this is essential."

"I don't think Biden is behind this, but he's certainly controlled by people who are," Sullivan added. 

"Well, medical schools are behind this actually," Mace said. "We read stories. They're training these medical students to say that puberty blockers are reversible." 

"And that's, and this is coming from the ‘We're the science people,'" Maher mocked the left. 

Joseph A. Wulfsohn is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to joseph.wulfsohn@fox.com and on Twitter: @JosephWulfsohn.

10.9 Million 2022 Midterm Mail-In Ballots ‘Unaccounted For’

 

Have to ask! What could or has gone wrong?

Election Integrity Watchdog Finds 10.9 Million 2022 Midterm Mail-In Ballots ‘Unaccounted For’ in California

'Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap'

Rit6a Li, Epoch Times

An election integrity group said 10.9 million out of a total 22.1 million ballots that had been mailed out to registered voters during the 2022 midterm elections went “unaccounted for,” according to a Jan. 18 report.

“Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap,” the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) said on Monday. “The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.”

The watchdog released the two-page report (pdf) detailing what it called “the failures” of California’s first mass-mail balloting election following the passage of Assembly Bill 37 (AB 37), which requires that ballots automatically be mailed to all active registered voters statewide. The bill, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2021, makes vote-by-mail ballots, a practice implemented in the 2020 general election in conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic, permanent for all elections.

California has more registered voters than any other state. Yet its vote-by-mail policies—among the nation’s most expansive—have resulted in large numbers of ballots “disappearing at poll closing time,” PILF’s data show.

“After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them,” reads the Wednesday report.

“It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass-mail elections, we can only assume what happened,” it continued.

Besides the almost half unaccounted-for mail ballots, data show that 9.8 million were accepted, over 120,000 were rejected, and 1.4 million were counted from in-person voting centers.

The Golden State, which has been a Democratic stronghold for over two decades, mailed out more than 22.1 million ballots to its registered voters—nearly 47 percent Democrats and 24 percent Republicans—during the 2022 elections. A GOP victory in California on Nov. 16 granted the party slim control of the U.S. House.

Mail-In Ballot Rejects

PILF, after finding that election officials in California had rejected 226,250 mail-in ballots during the 2022 primary and general elections, argued that the switch to mail balloting has taken away voters’ rights.

According to the report, the state would reject mail ballots primarily for nine reasons, including mismatched or missing signatures, and double voting when a registrant casts a vote both in-person and by-mail, which took place 813 times in the past midterms.

The most common reason, which researchers said is “endemic to mail voting,” turned out to be late-arriving ballots—taking up 48 percent of all rejects during the 2022 elections, finding show.

Every registered voter in California should receive a ballot in the mail a month prior to Election Day. All ballots returned by mail must be postmarked by Nov. 8 to be counted, and received within seven days by county election officials, who would then verify the signatures on the return envelopes and process ballots through their vote tallying system.

“In the November contests, more than 57,000 ballots arrived after November 15, setting them up for rejection,” PILF stated.

“The official datasets do not differentiate between ballots postmarked too late or delivered too late. The U.S. Postal Service also touts its 2022 performance by claiming that 99 percent of mail ballots were delivered nationally within 3 days to officials for counting once in their custody,” the repost reads, noting that the Post Office sets the success rate at 94 percent for timely delivery of political mail.

“So the failure to deliver ballots on time is not surprising.”

PILF President J. Christian Adams agrees that mail-in ballots can “disenfranchise” voters.

“There are many reasons mail ballots fail ultimately to count. No one casting a ballot at home can correct an error before it’s too late,” the chairman said. “California’s vote-by-mail demonstration should serve as a warning to state legislators elsewhere.”

Mail-in ballots may still be counted when a postmark is missing or illegible, but it depends on the circumstances. Under the new legislation, Californians can also bring ballots to a polling place in person or drop them in an official ballot box, if they wish.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the California secretary of state’s office and Newsom’s office for comment.

Rita Li is a reporter with The Epoch Times, focusing on U.S. and China-related topics. She began writing for the Chinese-language edition in 2018.

A Plan for Rescuing America

First, let's throw out some trash...

A Plan for Rescuing America

Jack Gleason, American Thinker 

Americans who have taken off their blinders now realize that our country is systematically being disassembled from the inside.

Our laws, our morals, our views about life, family and justice, have been under assault for the last 40 years. Our basic freedoms of speech and religion are almost gone along with the right to bear arms.

The institutions that we trusted and relied on to keep us safe have been corrupted. A majority of the press, the media, corporations, doctors, scientists, our education system, and social media now actively work against the best interests of the United States.

Our justice system has been so compromised that a citizen can be given solitary confinement for two years for the political equivalent of jay-walking — without a trial - and a violent criminal with a mile-long rap sheet who attempts murder on a senior citizen is released by a Soros-controlled prosecutor within hours.

No longer can an ordinary American, no matter where they came from, get ahead simply through hard work. Owning a house is now out of reach, under-measured inflation means that saving money for the future is an illusion, investing money in the stock market is a losing game for the average citizen while congressional insiders benefit from every upward and downward swing.

Our dollar is purposely weakened through insane spending bills slid through Congress at the 11th hour containing hidden provisions that weaken our voting laws. Anyone who voted for the recent 4,000-page bill has pinned a badge on themselves as being an anti-American member of the OmniParty.

We think of the competition between the two political parties as a balance of power. Conservatives look at African-Americans and shake their heads, wondering how they could be so blinded to the deception of the Democrat leadership that has ruined the inner cities - while still demanding their votes. Wake up Conservatives, the GOP sees us as just as gullible — they pretend to care about America, but whenever they can, they cave to the Democrats.

There is no two-party system — we are a government of the Elites, by the Elites and for the Elites. Oppose them and you will be destroyed.

Worst of all, we've lost our right to vote to change the system peacefully from the inside.

Their goal is to make patriotic Americans feel hopeless and intimidated, "resistance is futile." America is the ultimate prize and the only obstacle to total world control.

But the truth is that they can only win if we let them.

So what can one person do?

First, realize that you are far from alone. Even liberal polls say over 70% of Americans know that the last two elections were corrupt.

Second, know that we are not helpless, we are Americans, freedom is baked into our DNA. Other countries have histories of tyrants, dictators, czars and kings. We rose out of rebellion to tyranny and have fought it successfully for the last 250 years. Patriots voluntarily join the military and law enforcement in order to serve and protect. Even if they are no longer in service, they're still around.

Third, understand that technology, even though the Elites try to control it, is more powerful than we can imagine. Everyone now has a video camera on their phone and can upload what they see to uncensored video websites (Rumble.com and BitChute.com), which can be picked up by uncensored news websites (American Thinker, American Greatness, Canada Free Press, Washington Examiner, and The Gateway Pundit), and shared through uncensored communications (ProtonMail.com).

Elon Musk, no matter how you feel about him, has given us a platform to use to communicate with each other on a mass level. Use it.

Fourth, nothing beats person-to-person communication. Quietly thanking police officers or military members for their service, a few words at the grocery line about insane prices, a comment in church about political immorality, shows we're not alone and there is hope. Find ways to share this article and others like it that show how to take our country back.

Fifth, the riches of America that the OmniParty tries to control is another key to their weakness. Americans spend trillions of dollars a year on the very institutions that have abandoned us. Turn off Fox News, which is a shell of its former self, spend your money on local and American businesses, even if it costs a few pennies more, take your kids out of liberal colleges, never give another cent to the GOP, instead support Conservative candidates directly.

Finally, get involved politically on the local level. Become a poll worker. Join the GOP and lobby for conservative principles from within, run for school board. Vote for conservatives in local elections — especially for sheriff.

Where should we focus right now?

Our first action is to get the right leader in the House of Representatives. Kevin McCarthy is a RINO in sheep's clothing tainted by contributions from FTX. He's suddenly become a staunch Conservative making all sorts of promises, but he hates Trump and worked overtime to undercut MAGA candidates, even when it meant the "Red Wave" became a red trickle.

If he is elected Speaker he'll pretend to be Conservative, but there will always be excuses why he can't fix anything. There will be a vote on January 3rd, and there are five brave congressmen (and seven more) who oppose him and want Andy Biggs as an alternative. Biggs has promised real investigations into all levels of OmniParty corruption.

Even if we get new leadership in the House, there is little we can do legislatively other than to slow down spending, although the Omnibus Spending Bill has tied our hands. But controlling the House has one huge advantage, we would have subpoena power to hold hearings on every issue that is threatening our country. "Sunlight is the great disinfectant" and we need a nationwide solar collector.

The January 6 hearings are the prototype. Each committee in the house can begin investigations and have preliminary hearings on:

COVID and how the science and medical establishment lied.

The FBI and the DOJ conspiracy to suppress free speech on social media.

The pork and hidden voting changes inside the latest Omnibus spending bill.

Inner city crime and how Soros prosecutors have allowed criminals to go free.

The truth about the J6 hearings and how scores of Americans are rotting in prison with no civil rights.

Election fraud, including voting machine vulnerabilities, voter roll inaccuracies, and mail in ballot laws.

Our education system and how they abuse their power to influence our children.

Corporations and investments being pressured to use ESG rules to weaken America.

Insider trading for congress and their staffs.

Each can culminate with a well-organized public hearing where testimony is heard for all Americans to see. Since the media won't cover it, patriots can load the hearings onto Rumble and BitChute and share via email and twitter.

Imagine if there was a new hearing from a different committee every few days. When you turn on the lights, roaches run for a place to hide.

If we can't get back control of the GOP, everyone says that a third party will only be a spoiler. That's right, properly organized, a new Conservative Party would turn the GOP into politics' new CNN — irrelevant. The alliance of independents and conservatives voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and can strengthen America for the next 50 years.

Jack Gleason is a conservative political writer.  For reprint requests on other websites, inside information for important issues, article requests, or comments, contact him at jackgleason9@protonmail.com.  Recent articles: https://canadafreepress.com/members/1/JackGleason/1249 and https://www.americanthinker.com/author/jackgleason. 

Biden’s Church Of Diversity

 

Biden’s Commitment To The Church Of Diversity Has Saddled Us With Inept, Unqualified Officials

Deroy Murdock, Daily Caller 

Washington’s two biggest stories last week — are beyond embarrassing. President Joe Biden’s widespread abuse of government secrets and the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) first grounding of domestic flights in 21 years illustrate the perils of identity politics at America’s commanding heights.

The White House confessed that Biden’s lawyers discovered unsecured top-secret documents in at least three places: A closet at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, a reputed think tank; the library of Biden’s Delaware mansion, and — the finest comedy writers could not concoct this — inside that home’s garage, beside Biden’s little green Corvette.

Team Biden wants Americans to believe that sensitive documents about Iran, Ukraine and the United Kingdom were all perfectly secure, perhaps nestled between the snow tires and cans of brake fluid.

Facing the toughest questions ever posed to her from non-Fox News journalists, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre withered worse than usual. She evaded and dodged virtually every query on Garagegate.

KJP asserted that Biden “takes classified documents and information very seriously…very seriously…very seriously…” Like a Stepford Wife with a fried circuit board, KJP invoked the “very seriously” defense 15 times during Thursday afternoon’s press briefing. Millions of Americans buckled in derisive laughter.

The Sideshow Bob lookalike’s performance was the most pathetic since Team Nixon created the “modified limited hangout” to drown inconvenient truths about Watergate in clouds of squid ink.

In another humiliation, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg flailed as a faulty line of code in an FAA program forced a nationwide aviation ground stop on Wednesday morning. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, struggled to explain what went awry and, of course, took no responsibility for this colossal failure.

He should have apologized for wasting his department’s time and the American taxpayers’ dollars to battle “racist roads” and neuter the FAA’s traditional pilot advisory from “Notice to Airmen” to “Notice to Air Missions.”

God knows, the real risk to the flying public was the gender-biased title of an oft-updated FAA safety report.

Now that the testosterone has been squeezed from these announcements — at long last! — passengers can jet across America with no worry greater than whether the stewards and stewardesses will offer Pinot Noir or merely Cabernet Sauvignon.

All seriousness aside, critics “relentlessly mocked” the Alfred E. Newman doppelganger for the airline ground stop, the latest float in Buttigieg’s slow parade of epic fails.

“Pete Buttigieg couldn’t organize a one-car funeral,” Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton laughed via Twitter. “He was never remotely qualified for this role.”

“All flights in America are grounded because of an FAA computer error,” Texas Republican Congressman Troy Nehls observed via Twitter. “Is Pete Buttigieg on vacation again?”

Buttigieg cemented his reputation for sloth when he took a one-month paternity break in August 2021, amid that year’s supply-chain meltdown. Also, last Sept. 1, while a national rail strike loomed, Buttigieg posted a video on Twitter that appeared to show him at a U.S. airport. In fact, he was vacationing in Portugal.

Aside from these matching, hers and his, high-profile belly flops, what else do these two have in common?

KJP and Buttigieg won Left-wing plaudits as key diversity hires in an Administration that just can’t get enough identity politics. Jean-Pierre was cheered from the White House podium as the first black, openly gay person to serve as top presidential mouthpiece.

Likewise, Democrats waved their pom poms for Buttigieg, supposedly, America’s first self-proclaimed gay Cabinet secretary. Republicans quickly exposed this resume inflation: President Donald J. Trump’s Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell already earned this distinction. Naturally, the Left could not grant the evil “DonaldTrump” credit for making such a groundbreaking appointment.

After this pesky fact was shot and buried, the Left’s hosannas for Buttigieg roared ahead. Buttigieg “shattered a centuries-old political barrier with overwhelming bipartisan support, and that paves the way for more LGBTQ Americans to pursue high-profile appointments,” one former official crowed like a cock.

Not so fast.

Last week’s events, and how these two mishandled them, sloppily delineated the deep-seated problem with identity politics. KJP’s and Buttigieg’s obvious ineptness instantly repeated this question: “Are they in their posts thanks to their talents or merely to help Biden check off a few political boxes and please multiple factions of his base?”

If KJP and Buttigieg each were doing a heckuva job, no one would care about these factors.

But the blazing haplessness of these duds could impede qualified gay Americans who merely wish to be hired for their superior job records — wherever they might sit astride the gender and sexuality rainbow.

Team Biden values demographics above ability.

It officially ballyhooed Alejandro Mayorkas as “the first Latino and immigrant confirmed to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security.” He relentlessly lies that “the border is closed,” even under oath before Congress.

Perjury charges, anyone?

Mayorkas also slandered perfectly innocent mounted Border Patrol agents. He falsely accused these federal officers of using their horses’ stirrups to flog Haitian illegal aliens as they invaded America via the Rio Grande. Although this was thoroughly debunked, Mayorkas kept defaming and disciplining these officials. Despite this malfeasance, the oh-so diverse Mayorkas continues his reign of error at DHS.

Biden personally pledged to nominate America’s first black female to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill Justice Stephen Breyer’s vacated seat. Biden kept his word and named Ketanji Brown Jackson to the post.

This perhaps unfairly led critics to question whether KBJ were prepared for that role (her far-Left jurisprudence notwithstanding) or if she merely filled another politically priceless niche.

In a March 2020 Democrat presidential primary debate, Biden publicly declared that he “would pick a woman to be my vice president.” All hail Biden’s spare: Kamala Harris.

Biden’s communion in the Church of Diversity is reflected across his administration.

By contrast, President Trump largely avoided identity politics. He named John Ullyot as Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs in March 2017 and appointed him chief spokesman for the National Security Council in October 2019.

Trump never mentioned that he made Ullyot, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, one of the highest-ranking gay officials in history — Republican or Democrat. Trump just called Ullyot the best qualified candidate for the job.

And, even when the Washington Post’s three-time plagiarist Lisa Rein cooked up a phony controversy over the VA’s response to the August 2017 Charlottesville race riot, Trump never tried to refute this disinformation by deploying Ullyot’s status as the VA’s highest-ever-ranked gay appointee.

Biden and his team disserve so many of his appointees by stressing their identities over their abilities. This too often raises the question: Can these people do their jobs, or are they here just to be “firsts.”

Biden’s shopworn identity card wounds Karine Jean-Pierre and Pete Buttigieg by unmasking them as demographic giants and managerial midgets.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor.

Is the Deep State Coming After Joe Biden?

 

Is the Deep State Coming After Joe Biden?

Josh Hammer, Jewish World Review

The second half of Joe Biden's presidential term has officially gotten off to an ignominious start.

Earlier in the week, CBS News first broke the story that Biden had been storing classified documents, taken from his previous stint as vice president to Barack Obama, at the Chinese-funded Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement "think tank." Those classified documents were first identified by Biden's personal attorneys, CBS reported, on Nov. 2 — a full six days before the midterm elections. Richard Sauber, Biden's special counsel, claimed that the White House counsel's office quickly notified the National Archives, which seized the documents posthaste.

That alone would be bad enough for a president who utterly excoriated former President Donald Trump in the aftermath of last August's unprecedented predawn FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's palatial Palm Beach estate, due to Trump's own classified document retention scandal. Biden openly wondered to CBS' "60 Minutes" news program weeks after the FBI raid "how anyone could be that irresponsible."

The galling hypocrisy from the Penn Biden Center incident would have been bad enough. But then, Joe Biden's week got even worse.

Adding insult to injury, on Thursday two separate tranches of additional classified documents from the Obama-Biden administration were found in Biden's Wilmington, Delaware, personal home. All but one of the documents was found in a storage space in Biden's garage. That garage was "locked," the president quickly pointed out in a flippant attempt at de-escalation, and also housed his prized Corvette. One other classified document was found strewn about elsewhere in the house, outside the garage.

Attorney General Merrick Garland responded to the news with the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Biden's misdeeds. Garland, of course, had done the same for Trump almost two months prior, on Nov. 18. At least from Garland's perspective, it seems both men are "irresponsible" enough and present sufficiently politically delicate positions so as to require a special counsel.

But obvious similarities — hence, Biden's egregious hypocrisy stemming from his earlier attempt to seize a moral high ground — in these situations aside, there are some crucial differences. Those differences do not reflect well on the current White House occupant.

By far the most important difference is the constitutional distinction in the statuses of the two men at the center of this two-pronged saga: Donald Trump was president of the United States, while Joe Biden was merely vice president of the United States during the time that he absconded with classified documents.

That distinction may not seem like a big deal, but from a constitutional perspective, it makes all the difference in the world. The president of the United States alone is vested by Article II of the U.S. Constitution with the "executive Power" of the national government. This prosaic textual truism forms the crux of what constitutional lawyers — who, being lawyers, make things seem more complicated than they really are — refer to as "unitary executive theory." The vice president of the United States, in fact, possesses no more "executive Power" than does a Cabinet official, a White House janitor, or even a reader of this column.

The upshot is that, as this column argued after August's Mar-a-Lago raid, "Trump had unilateral, plenary authority to declassify any document that he wanted to declassify — period." Biden possessed no such similar power (he does now, as president). Furthermore, as the same August column argued, "all ex-presidents receive various taxpayer-funded accoutrements, among them a staff with security clearances and secure facilities (SCIFs) for the maintenance of classified records." Biden, as an ex-vice president and not an ex-president, had no such niceties; he merely had a garage with a lock secure enough for his Corvette. What's more, the Presidential Records Act also permits departing presidents to take personal copies of any of their records; the statute affords no such similar protection for departing vice presidents.

From a legal perspective, we will see where freshly minted special counsel Robert Hur goes with his investigation. And from a political perspective, the Biden administration's astounding hypocrisy on this matter will surely face a blowback.

But perhaps the most pressing question is: Why? Why was there a leak to CBS News just now, over two months after Biden attorneys discovered the first tranche of classified documents deep in the bowels of a Penn Biden Center office? Why has there been such a slow, drip-drip, dramatic leaking and reporting of various classified document tranches throughout this whole week?

It is thoroughly unsurprising that the federal law enforcement apparatus and the corporate media buried the news of Biden's malfeasance on the precipice of the midterm elections. The "Democrat-Media Complex," as the late Andrew Breitbart called it, demands nothing less than such complicity.

But the timing of the leak from various federal law enforcement actors now, just as Biden is beginning his second term, suggests there is real internal turmoil over at the Democratic National Committee. Perhaps someone at the DNC instructed deep state spooks that now would be a particularly propitious time to leak sordid details to the media. Perhaps someone at the DNC thought that Joe Biden did his job by shepherding his party through the midterms without succumbing to the much-feared "red wave," but that he is now disposable and should be replaced at the ballot in 2024 by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA). Loath though I am to speculate, it is difficult to think of a sounder explanation as to why, only now, all of this is coming out.

There are many, many open questions here. Here's hoping Special Counsel Hur can provide some answers.

Ashli Babbitt Shooter

 

Ashli Babbitt Shooter

Thousands of Taxpayer Dollars Were Spent to House Ashli Babbitt Shooter and His Pet for Several Months in ‘Distinguished Visitor Suite’ at Joint Base Andrews

Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch 

The shooting death of Ashli Babbitt is discussed frequently by the corrupt liberal media and their allies in Congress. So, it is up to Judicial Watch to uncover the full truth about the ONLY homicide tied to the January 6 disturbance.

We just received 31 pages of documents from the Department of the Air Force that show U.S. Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd was housed at taxpayer expense at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland after he shot and killed U.S. Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt inside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Judicial Watch obtained the records in response to a September 2022 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after Joint Base Andrews, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, and the FBI failed to respond to three July 2022 FOIA requests about Byrd’s housing at Joint Base Andrews while his name as the shooter of Ashli Babbitt was being withheld from the public by the government (Judicial Watch v U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:22-cv-02948)).

In our complaint, we explained to the court that we had asked all three government agencies for all records relating to the billeting of Byrd at Joint Base Andrews during the period from January 6, 2021, to July 2022, including authorization papers, housing, meals, transportation, and visitor logs.

The documents show that Lieutenant Byrd and a pet stayed in a “Distinguished Visitor Suite” at the “Presidential Inn” (part of Air Force Inns) under a “Capitol Police Presidential Inn Reservation” for the period July 8, 2021, through January 28, 2022.

A representative at Joint Base Andrews informed us that a “Distinguished Visitor Suite” is typically reserved for officers at the rank of O-7 (Brigadier General or higher.).

An August 2021 email from the assistant hotel manager indicates that the U.S. Capitol Police had been paying Byrd’s bills by phone “every 10 days.”

In an email thread beginning in November 2021, an accounting officer from the U.S. Capitol Police asks the Presidential Inn’s assistant lodging manager to provide detailed invoices reflecting all of the charges incurred by Lt. Byrd while staying at the Inn, in an email titled “Reservation Information-USCP [US Capitol Police] guest.” The manager then provides “folios” for Byrd’s reservation at the Inn from July 8 through November 11, 2021. When asked to explain pricing changes for Byrd’s lodging, the hotel manager explains that higher rates were due in part to the fact that Byrd moved from a “Temporary Lodging Facility” into a “Distinguished Visitors Suite.”

The records and an email dated November 15, 2021, indicate the cost of Lt. Byrd’s lodging fluctuated: from $161 in July 2021, to $158 for August 2021, to $184 for September 2021, to $185 for October 2021, and to $165 for November 2021.

On February 7, 2022, the U.S. Capitol Police again asked the hotel manager for detailed invoices for Byrd’s stay. The manager confirmed that Byrd checked out on January 28, 2022, and that there were “sundry items that were used in the room that were not paid for before the guest left.

The email appears to confirm that the Capitol Police were covering the cost of Byrd’s stay at the Presidential Inn, when a Capitol Police accounting officer tried to clarify Byrd’s hotel bill, asking the hotel manager, “So the hotel is charging USCP for the room and pet fee for January 28-30, or not?”

These extraordinary revelations forced out by our FOIA lawsuit show Defense Department facilities were used to provide long-term housing for the Capitol Hill police officer who shot and killed Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt.

In June 2022, we produced DOJ records related to the shooting of Babbitt that included a memo recommending “that the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia decline for criminal prosecution the fatal shooting of Ashli McEntee [Babbitt],” also noting that the shooter, Byrd, “did not create a police report or documents” related to the shooting of Babbitt. A footnote details missing evidence: “During the debrief of Lieutenant Byrd, he did recall writing a few sentences on an evidence bag the evening of January 6, 2021, at the request of a crime scene officer. To date, the bag has not been located by USCP or MPD.”

In November 2021, we received multiple audio, visual and photo records from the DC Metropolitan Police Department about the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021, in the U.S. Capitol Building. The records include a cell phone video of the shooting. An audio file of a police interview of the shooter, Byrd, indicates he declined to cooperate.

We previously uncovered records from the DC Metropolitan Police showing that officers reported they didn’t see a weapon in Babbitt’s hand before Byrd shot her and that Byrd was visibly distraught afterward. One officer attested that he didn’t recall hearing any verbal commands before Byrd shot Babbitt. The records include internal communications about Byrd’s case and a crime scene examination report. Investigators who wrote the January 6, 2021, Metro PD Death Report for Babbitt (identified as Ashli Elizabeth McEntee-Babbitt Pamatian) note that the possible Manner of Death was “Homicide (Police Involved Shooting).”

We are engaged in a comprehensive, independent investigation into the January 6 disturbance:

• February 2022: we filed an opposition to the U.S. Capitol Police’s (USCP) effort to shut down our federal lawsuit for January 6 videos and emails. Through its police department, Congress argues that the videos and emails are not public records, there is no public interest in their release, and that “sovereign immunity” prevents citizens from suing for their release.

• In November 2021: Judicial Watch – in its FOIA lawsuit asking for records of communication between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and several financial institutions about the reported transfer of financial transaction records of people in DC, Maryland and Virginia on January 5 and January 6, 2021 – told a federal court that the FBI may have violated law in its January 6 probes.

Our investigations and litigation are far from complete, so be sure to check back here often for updates.

Great Reset Redux, Uh Oh!

 

Herr Soros hands us our future Globalist vision...

Great Reset Redux: WEF Prepares Robust Globalist Agenda for Davos 2023

Simon Kent, Breitbart 

Banking, finance, cryptocurrencies, climate, racism, artificial intelligence, workplace robotics, global governance, and cybercrime. Are there any issues the unelected, private club that is the World Economic Forum (WEF) can’t tackle on behalf of the serfs?

Clearly not.

When the preening elites fly in to Davos, Switzerland, a week tomorrow expect to see – and hear – about all those topics and more as the WEF seeks to “address the state of the world and discuss priorities for the year ahead.”

Following its foundation in 1971 by German engineer and academic Klaus Schwab, the WEF has met annually to tackle what it sees as the issues of the day and deliver guidance to invited members and guests, and through them influence the world at large.

John Kerry link...

In 1973, the annual meeting endorsed the Davos Manifesto, a “code of ethics for business leaders” which was updated in 2020 to set out the purpose of business in the Fourth Industrial Revolution – itself a concept coined by Schwab in his 2016 book.

This year’s meeting will be no different. It is headlined  “Cooperation in a Fragmented World”  and will follow on from the Great Reset as declared at the Davos summit of 2021.

In the run-up to the 2023 event, Schwab announced last November that Communist China will likely serve as a “role model” for many countries as the global community embarks upon a “systemic transformation of the world,” as Breitbart News reported.

In an interview with the Chinese state-run television network CGTN, Schwab heaped praise on the Communist government in Beijing for being a leading figure in his vision of the aforementioned Great Reset of capitalism to usher in the “world of tomorrow.”

A visit to the WEF’s own previews shows just what is going to be tackled at the luxurious ski resort in a few weeks time, what command and control mechanisms are possible to align the world with WEF objectives, and what has come before.

“Global rules to crack down on cybercrime” is one issue already addressed by the WEF. It has published a paper with that title, looking at how criminals use the online world to fleece innocents of their money.

A “major structural change to the internet” is just one simple solution the WEF points to, adding “We urgently need international rules that are enforced as well as a more expansive approach that fosters cyber resilience.”

Ditto the inherent racism the WEF sees in healthcare, declaring it “can cause avoidable disease and premature death among groups of already disadvantaged people.”

The future course of business is also addressed against a background of Schwab’s previous praise of WEF members as representing the very best of humanity, endowed with the collective means “to change the world.”:(Video found on Breitbart link)

A new WEF paper enthuses that online “bots” can take many of the jobs humans undertake in the workplace today while working alongside them.

It sets out we will all be happier working with robots, alleging:

Digital workers are intelligent software bots that automate everyday business processes like data entry, invoicing, or system queries.

They will take over many repetitive and mundane tasks, creating new opportunities for businesses and workers.

People aren’t just more productive when they work with digital workers; they are also happier.

Just what the future holds for cryptocurrencies is another issue that consumes the WEF.

The organization has a paper on that, announcing “We could now see the handover of crypto technology and blockchain infrastructure to more regulated and established institutions.”

It concludes: “Cryptography and blockchains will continue to be integral parts of the modern economic toolkit, despite the great harm these tools may have caused when wielded by the wrong people.”

The paper does not set out just who “the wrong people” are, although the WEF has previously known just who to groom to help disseminate its message:

WEF video... 

The WEF Annual Meeting for 2023 runs from January 16 to January 20 in the luxury ski resort town of Davos, Switzerland.  Some 2,500 representatives of national governments, businesses and civil society will fly in from around the world to attend.

The “Speaker’s Fight” Was A Modern-day Civics Lesson

 

The “Speaker’s Fight” Was A Modern-day Civics Lesson

Joe Sullivan, LCMB President

Friends…

What took place over the past 5 days in the US House of Representatives was a CELEBRATION OF DEMOCRACY and nothing less!

After YEARS of Democrat controlled lock-step tyranny under Nancy Pelosi and her cadre of socialist drones, many Americans may have forgotten that the government’s business is supposed to be an exercise in seeking COMPROMISE and CONSENSUS…

There really is no matter that comes before Congress where some Representatives will see it as being disadvantageous to their home folks.  In these cases, we expect our Representatives to seek “change” in the legislation to make the law less problematic for their constituents.  Sometimes they win, sometimes they don’t…

SEEKING TO AMMEND (Change) pending legislation is the very definition of “representative government”…  What has been happening in the House of Representatives and the Senate in recent years is legislation being “slammed-thru” by tyrannical leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer is what happens under the “tyranny of the majority”.  This happened where a heavy-handed numerical majority - driven by leadership hell-bent on “winning at any cost” - trampled under any effort by Pelosi’s own caucus to moderate arch-liberal legislation.  Consequently, there are no “moderate Democrats” in Congress anymore.

BY CONTRAST - What just happened in the contest to elect a Republican Speaker of the House is an example of what is SUPPOSED to happen where a relative small - but SIGNIFICANT minority of Representatives held-out against about 200 of their fellow Republicans in order to gain “concessions” from Kevin McCarthy…

Please don’t believe anybody who tells you that this “fight” weakens the Republican Party or Speaker McCarthy’s future leadership…  This result is EXACTLY WHAT OUR REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS REALLY ALL ABOUT!

Now that this chapter is over, JUST WATCH WHAT HAPPENS FROM NOW ON IN CONTRAST TO WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING UNDER THE DE FACTO “SOCIALISTS”!

God Bless America…. DEO VINDICI…