Bill Barr Says He Hasn't Seen Much. Yet.
DOUGLAS ANDREWS There’s been a DOJ sighting.
After weeks of wondering about the seeming disappearance of our nation’s federal law enforcement apparatus, Attorney General William Barr sat down with the Associated Press yesterday to briefly discuss a matter that’s been of passing interest to some 74 million of us: whether the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.
We’re sure Barr and the 113,000 taxpayer-funded employees his office oversees have been busy with other things — prosecuting James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and the rest of those Spygate conspirators for one. And nailing that senior-level mastermind of the entire plot, Kevin Clinesmith, to the wall for another.
Oh, wait. But they’ve been busy. With other things. Honest.
“Disputing President Donald Trump’s persistent, baseless claims,” the AP gleefully reports, “Barr declared Tuesday the U.S. Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.”
Right. Baseless claims. Like the baseless claim of the massive ballot dump of Pennsylvania votes that favored Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a margin of 570,000 to 3,200 — or 99.4% to 0.6% for you math majors. Or the similar-though-not-as-stark “spike anomalies” in — miraculously enough — three other swing states: Michigan (twice), Wisconsin, and Georgia.
As the AP piece continues, “Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but ‘to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.’”
“Other administration officials who have come out forcefully against Trump’s allegations of voter-fraud evidence have been fired,” notes the AP goadingly but incorrectly. “But it’s not clear whether Barr might suffer the same fate.” (Only a single administration official, DHS cybersecurity head Christopher Krebs, was fired — not the AP’s plural “other administration officials.” As for Krebs, one wonders how thorough an election-security analysis he might’ve been able to do in just a few short days — enough to have self-servingly declared it, as he did, “the most secure in American history”?)
As for the massive fraud that involves data manipulation, Barr notes, “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that. … Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations. And those have been run down.”
Barr’s assertion about the “very particularized” nature of the many fraud allegations that have been collected by the Trump legal team makes perfect sense. But all it would take to turn an election is a handful of “spike anomalies” like the ones mentioned above. We wonder whether the AG is aware of these particular allegations and has run them down as well.
And we wonder, more generally, what ever happened to the Bill Barr who gave a dire warning to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer three months ago when he was asked about the potential for fraud when massive mail-in balloting is introduced.
“This is playing with fire,” Barr warned Blitzer in early September. “We’re a very closely divided country here, and people have to have confidence in results of the election and the legitimacy of the government. And people trying to change the rules to this methodology — which as a matter of logic is very open to fraud and coercion — is reckless and dangerous. And people are playing with fire.”
As for Rudy Giuliani and the rest of President Trump’s legal team, they clearly see things a bit differently than Barr. “With all due respect to the attorney general,” Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis said yesterday, “there hasn’t been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation. We have gathered ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined. We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud. … As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ. The Justice Department also hasn’t audited any voting machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth.” ~The Patriot Post
Barr Appoints Durham as Special Counsel
Durham was first appointed by Barr in May 2019 to investigate the origins of the Russia-collusion hoax, and his probe soon became a criminal one. He had been expected by President Donald Trump and many other conservatives to not only unearth more damning evidence regarding illegal actions undertaken by members of Barack Obama’s deep state in their efforts to oust Trump but also to bring charges against some big-name players. Unfortunately, after a year and a half of investigating, only one low-level individual, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, has been held to account, as he pleaded guilty to altering an email for the FBI’s Carter Page FISA warrant application. (That’s part of the reason for Page’s lawsuit.)
Even Barr tacitly admitted his expectation had thus far gone unmet. “Although I had expected Mr. Durham to complete his work by the summer of 2020,” Barr said, “the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as additional information he uncovered, prevented him from doing so.”
It’s unclear if Barr’s action would truly prevent a Joe scumbag/liar-Biden administration from ending and closing the books on Durham’s investigation on day one of taking office. One reason is that Durham’s appointment may not hold up. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy warns, “Under Section 600.3 of the regs, ‘The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government.’ At the time Mueller was appointed, for example, he was a private lawyer no longer in government service.” Durham was not “outside” the government.
However, Barr’s action does make it far more politically difficult for scumbag/liar-Biden to simply make the investigation disappear, as it would rightly be seen as a purely partisan and self-serving move — one that Republicans would effectively argue was intended as a cover-up to prevent the American people from seeing what Durham discovered. By ending it early, scumbag/liar=Biden would only be inviting a scandal.
Finally, while Trump and others have been clearly disappointed by Durham’s seeming slowness and lack of results, the fact that he has remained steadfastly unmoved by political pressure from either side should lend greater credibility to his findings when they are eventually released.
~The Patriot Post
Georgia Republicans Must Unify or Risk Losing Senate
LOUIS DEBROUX If anything, the campaign for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seat runoffs is even more chaotic and contentious than the general election. It’s become a perfect storm of legitimate concerns, unfounded conspiracies, process ignorance, political brinksmanship, and fratricidal infighting. And it threatens to hand Democrats these critical Senate seats.According to election results certified by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, scumbag/liar-Joe Biden won Georgia by a narrow 12,000-vote margin. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed the results are fraudulent, focusing on issues surrounding signature verification on absentee ballots and the unusually low number of rejected absentee ballots.
This has stoked fierce anger and frustration among his loyal supporters. That’s certainly understandable, but it’s being directed toward fellow Republicans — Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger, and, shockingly, even against Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who are now fighting for their political lives. Both Perdue and Loeffler closely tied themselves to President Trump during the election campaign, a fact that hurt them with voters in Atlanta’s northern suburbs, which hold a large number of traditionally Republican voters who simply don’t like Trump.
Unfortunately, frustration is not always properly focused and, ironically, in this case is often directed at the grassroots party officers and activists who have worked the hardest to reelect Trump.
As a GOP county chairman in Georgia, I’ve received literally hundreds of calls since the election from angry and distraught Trump supporters who feel the election was stolen. Some complaints are legitimate or understandable, like concerns surrounding the March consent decree between the Georgia Democrat Party and Secretary Raffensperger, which many argue makes absentee ballot voter fraud easier, though Raffensperger disputes that claim.
Other complaints are from people who have never been directly involved in the election process before, so they don’t have the knowledge or experience to separate fact from fiction. For example, I’ve received countless calls from people saying they received multiple absentee ballots, when what they actually received were absentee ballot applications.
Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Democrats have spent the better part of the last decade filing lawsuits to weaken Georgia’s election security, and then dumping mountains of fraudulent voter applications on the secretary of state only to then claim racism when they are rejected. This was primarily the work of the New Georgia Project, founded by failed Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (who, Democrats should note, has still not conceded the 2018 election to Kemp) and run by CEO Raphael Warnock — the same radical leftist currently running against Senator Loeffler.
Secretary Raffensperger is currently investigating the New Georgia Project for attempting to register non-Georgians to vote in Georgia, which is a felony.
Even so, at this point, the biggest problem is that President Trump, who loves to speak in hyperbole, is not differentiating between legitimate issues with the election process and the human error that occurs with every election. And he is attacking his Republican allies in the process.
President Trump recently tweeted of Governor Kemp, a loyal ally, “The governor’s done nothing. … I’m ashamed that I endorsed him.” For “good” measure, he added that Kemp is “hapless.” Trump’s attacks on Raffensperger for his handling of the election resulted in Raffensperger having to accept a security detail after receiving death threats.
It should be noted that Georgia law prohibits Governor Kemp from intervening in elections, which are the jurisdiction of the secretary of state, an elected, constitutional office. Elections themselves are administered at the county level and then certified by the secretary of state.
President Trump has demanded an audit of signature matches on absentee ballots, but this is impossible. Envelope signatures are verified by county elections boards before tabulating, and then the ballots are separated from the envelopes to protect ballot secrecy. There is no way to reunite them.
Lin Wood, an Atlanta attorney and Trump ally litigating voter fraud, recently tweeted to his 700,000 followers that they should motivate Senators Perdue and Loeffler to demand action regarding the November 3 election by “threaten[ing] to withhold your votes & money.” He later tweeted about boycotting the runoff election.
This is insanity of the highest order, and the danger here cannot be overstated.
President Trump rightly rejected that call, tweeting, “No, the 2020 Election was a total scam … but we must get out and help David and Kelly, two GREAT people. Otherwise we are playing right into the hands of some very sick people.” His son, Donald Jr., has launched a super PAC to win these seats and recently tweeted, “I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for @KLoeffler and @PerdueSenate. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people. We need ALL of our people coming out to vote for Kelly & David.”
The issues of voter fraud are now the purview of the courts. But if the courts’ decisions in litigation continue to go against President Trump, and scumbag/liar-Biden becomes president, losses by Perdue and Loeffler in these runoffs would create a 50-50 split in the Senate, giving lowlife-Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote.
loelife-Harris is currently the Senate’s most left-wing member, but it’s worth noting that neither of the Georgia Democrat candidates are remotely like old-school Southern Democrats Zell Miller or Sam Nunn. Warnock and Jon Ossoff are radical leftists who want to defund the police, socialize healthcare, raise taxes, gut the military, pass the Green New Deal, etc.
One of President Trump’s greatest successes was in motivating and inspiring millions of Americans who had not voted in years, or ever, to come out and actually do so. Many of these voters are not traditional Republicans but are instead Trump loyalists. If Trump supporters don’t turn out for Perdue and Loeffler, it could be devastating.
In 2018, with Democrat Stacey Abrams crying voter suppression, I wrote, “How fitting it would be if Abrams lost a close race because she convinced her own voters that their votes wouldn’t count.”
It would be tragic if President Trump’s legacy, all of the phenomenal good he has accomplished, were destroyed because his supporters didn’t turn out to vote in the January 5 runoffs, convinced that Georgia’s elections were rigged with the aid of allegedly traitorous Republican leaders or that their votes didn’t count.
But that is exactly what gleeful Democrats are banking on.
Republicans need to unify immediately to save these Senate seats and to save President Trump’s legacy. ~The Patriot Post
Horowitz: Where We Are and What We Face
“This is the perennial challenge,” he writes: “to teach our young the conditions of being human, of managing life’s tasks in a world that is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age.”
There it is. The Rosetta Stone of the radical Left, as deciphered by a man who attended his first Communist Party USA political rally in 1948 at age nine; who, as a Sixties radical, made common cause with murderous Black Panthers and helped found the New Left; and who then, as a Reagan conservative, helped the rest of us understand the pathology, the destructiveness, and the dishonesty of his former colleagues on the Left.
No wonder they hate his guts.
As Horowitz now writes, “The New Left was a socialist movement that began as an attempt to rescue the ‘Old’ Communist Left from the ‘mistakes’ it had made in serving masters who murdered more than 100 million people. In peace time. ‘Mistakes’ was our weasel term for the epic crimes our fellow Marxists committed against ordinary human beings who refused to go along with their utopian schemes. Our goal was to revive the quest they had begun and finally create a world of ‘social justice.’”
Horowitz says he had two awakenings during his days as a radical. The first was his realization of the impossibility of true equality “because people are not equal, and the attempt to make them so requires taking away the freedom of most for the benefit of what turns out to be a few.”
His second awakening “came with the success of the New Left’s ‘antiwar movement,’ which forced America out of Vietnam.” He says their “anti-war” claims were actually a pair of lies that doomed 2.5 million peasants in Cambodia and Vietnam. “There wasn’t a single demonstration against the slaughter,” he writes. “Not one. I realized then that it was never an ‘anti-war’ movement. It was an anti-American movement. The Left wanted the Communists to win and didn’t care how many innocent Asians were murdered in the process.”
And that’s when he left the Left.
These days, as Horowitz notes, “We live in an atmosphere of intimidation, where people can lose their livelihoods, their careers and even their lives if they get on the wrong side of leftist crusaders. That is a terrible thing to have to say in this once free country, but it is something that has become too obvious to deny.”
Nowhere is this intimidation, this personal destruction, more apparent than in the Left’s use of race as a weapon. Leftists use it, he says, because it works.
“For 30 years before he descended the famous escalator in Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for the White House,” Horowitz writes, “Donald Trump was a well-known public figure. Everybody in America knew who he was. In all those 30 years, no one ever referred to him as ‘Donald Trump, host of "The Apprentice” and white supremacist.’ Nobody ever said, ‘This is Donald Trump, New York builder and white nationalist.’ That only happened when he ran against the Democrats.“
Horowitz notes that George W. Bush, rino-John McCain, and rino-Mitt Romney were all smeared with the same racist brush. Remember when, in 2012, scumbag/liar-Joe Biden warned a largely black audience that rino-Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, were "gonna put y'all back in chains”? (Horowitz could’ve also included Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat whom the Left smears to this day for a speech he gave at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, just seven miles and 16 years removed from the notorious murders of three civil rights activists.)
Aside from its effectiveness, though, Horowitz says there’s another reason why the Democrats keep moonlighting as race pimps: for political cover. “Democrats control 100% of every major inner-city in America,” he writes, “and have for 50 to 100 years. … Every injustice in these inner cities — real or imagined — that policy can affect, Democrats are 100% responsible for. Every rotten school system, which year in and year out fails to provide mainly black and Hispanic kids with the basic tools they need to succeed, is 100% controlled by the Democrat Party and its teacher unions.”
Donald Trump saw an opportunity here, and his outreach to the black community bore fruit. “What do you have to lose?” he famously asked. And the Left, seeing its hold on the black vote become more tenuous, redoubled its attacks on Trump with a viciousness unlike any seen by an American president.
It didn’t work. According to election exit polling, support for Trump rose among blacks, Asians, and Latinos. And not just a little. His support among black men stood at 18%, and his support among black women doubled from 2016 to 2020. (The actual numbers are probably higher, given the social risk attached to admitting one’s support for such a vile racist of a candidate.) So there’s hope, and, thanks to President Trump, there’s a blueprint for pushing back against the Left’s reflexive racism canard.
“Forty years ago,” writes Horowitz, “I left the left when I saw that it was a destructive force that would never change. Leftists do not tolerate dissenters in their ranks. They suppress politically incorrect ideas and cast out their perpetrators, demonizing them in the process.”
“The good news,” he says, “is that a patriotic movement has risen, rededicated to the propositions that all men are created equal and endowed with God-given rights to life and liberty, and is prepared to defend them.” ~The Patriot Post
HANS VON SPAKOVSKYIn Trump v. New York, the Supreme Court should be looking only at the constitutional and statutory issues: whether President Donald Trump was within his legal authority to direct that noncitizens in the country illegally be excluded from the population used for congressional apportionment. The policy issue is very important, of course. What the president did was fundamentally fair. And, under the Supreme Court’s precedent in Franklin v. Massachusetts, Trump was also within his legal authority to do so.
First on the policy issue and the question of fairness. For the past four years, the political arena has been filled with claims of Russian “interference” in our elections. Special Counsel Robert Mueller actually indicted a number of Russians for involvement in those efforts. If you were to ask members of the public if they believe that any one of the indicted Russians should be allowed to make a political donation to a federal candidate — be it Trump or someone running for Congress — if he were here illegally, I have no doubt they would uniformly say “no.”
If you then ask whether that same Russian should be allowed to be a candidate for Congress, you would receive the same adamant answer. And if you ask whether that Russian should be able to vote in federal elections, including congressional elections, the answer would still be a resounding “no.”
So why would the state of New York or any of the other Democratic-controlled state and local governments who are challenging the president’s action argue that Russians (and other noncitizens) who are not here legally should be included in the population used to apportion the political power of the House of Representatives? Only one reason: to distort the House and give states with large illegal immigrant populations more members of Congress (and more political influence) than they are entitled to receive according to their citizen population. This gives states an incentive to obstruct federal immigration law in order to boost the number of illegal immigrants residing in those states.
The three-judge district court that granted summary judgment to New York and issued a permanent injunction prohibiting the Commerce Department, the Census Bureau and all other government agencies from implementing Trump’s July 21, 2020 memorandum got it legally wrong, too, and misapplied the Franklin decision.
Under Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.” The secretary of commerce is given the statutory authority under 13 U.S.C. § 141(a) to conduct the census “in such format and content as he may determine” and then send a report to the president.
Pursuant to 2 U.S.C. § 2a(a), the president is directed to send Congress “a statement showing the whole number of persons in each State” as determined by the decennial census and “the number of Representatives to which each state would be entitled … by the method known as the method of equal proportions.” Trump’s July 21 memorandum specifically instructed the secretary to exclude noncitizens who are in the country illegally from the base population number for apportionment purposes “to the maximum extent feasible and consistent with the discretion delegated to the executive branch.”
As the Supreme Court said in Franklin, the president’s role in applying the “equal proportions” formula to the base population is ministerial. However, his role in determining what the base population is — the number to which the formula will be applied — is not ministerial. In fact, the court noted that 2 U.S.C. § 2a(a) does “not curtail the President’s authority to direct the Secretary in making policy judgments” regarding the conduct of the census.
As the Justice Department persuasively argues in its brief, one such “judgment” is “whether a person should be deemed an ‘inhabitant’ or ‘usual resident’ of a State, which is ‘the gloss’ that has historically been given to the constitutional and statutory phrase ‘persons’ in each State.” Furthermore, the court stated in Franklin that the key phrase of “persons in each state” used in both the Constitution and the statute “mean[s] more than mere physical presence, and has been used broadly enough to include some element of allegiance or enduring tie to a place.”
Noncitizens who are here illegally — like tourists or other temporary visitors — have no element of political allegiance to any state or the federal government. They cannot be drafted for jury duty or for military service (if we still had a draft), because they owe their political allegiance to the native country of which they are a citizen. Moreover, they have no “enduring tie” to any state since they are illegally present in the country. They can be picked up, detained at any time by federal authorities, and removed from the United States.
Thus, excluding individuals who have no allegiance or enduring tie to a state is well within the precedent set by the court in Franklin — and well within the precedent set by prior censuses that have always excluded certain individuals. It is uncontested by the challengers in this case, for example, that the “Residence Criteria” established by the Census Bureau in 2018 for the 2020 Census — following the same rules used in prior censuses — excludes noncitizens who were lawfully “visiting the United States, such as on a vacation or business trip.” If we can exclude noncitizens who are here temporarily and legally from the census count, why can we not exclude noncitizens who are also here illegally and temporarily — that is, until they are caught and removed?
The district court’s analysis fails on all counts to correctly apply the statute and the Franklin precedent. The court held, for example, that the president’s memorandum would somehow “chill” participation in the census. It did that without evidence to support that conclusion; however, even if it were true, it would be irrelevant. If the president has the statutory authority to determine the population used for apportionment purposes, then any chilling effect cannot be used to prevent him from exercising his statutory authority.
The court also held that the president’s role in making this determination is, in fact, ministerial, and that he cannot direct the secretary to report a different population for apportionment purposes from the total population determined by the census. But that is directly contrary to the Supreme Court’s decision in Franklin that the president can make policy judgments on what population will be used for the apportionment formula. It also conveniently ignores the fact that the Census Bureau has long excluded other “whole persons” from the count, such as noncitizens who are in the country as tourists or for business purposes.
Including noncitizens living here illegally in the population used for apportionment makes no sense in a representative, democratic republic, any more than it would make sense to allow them to vote, make political donations or run for office. And as the Franklin case shows, and as pointed out in a persuasive amicus brief filed by constitutional scholars John Eastman and John S. Baker about the original meaning and history of the apportionment clause in the Constitution, the president is well within his authority to exclude these noncitizens. Eastman and Baker note that including noncitizens who cannot legally establish residence would be inconsistent with the Constitution since they are not “inhabitants,” the “term used in the Constitutional Convention, The Federalist Papers, and Census instructions for much of our history to identify those to be counted.” (Baker elaborates on that argument for SCOTUSblog in a previous entry in this symposium.)
The Supreme Court should overturn the lower court opinion, dissolve the injunction and not allow the votes of citizens to be diluted, and the distribution of the political power of the states to be unfairly distorted, by an apportionment calculation that includes noncitizens without legal status and without allegiance to our nation. ~The Patriot Post
GARY BAUER
Yesterday we mentioned the absurd media reaction to scumbag/liar-Joe Biden doing what President Trump has already done — appointing an all-female press team. But I neglected to make the most important point.
Not only did the president have female press secretaries and media advisers during his four years, they were harassed, smeared, and libeled by the same crowd that is now extolling scumbag/liar-Biden.
Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Hope Hicks, and Kayleigh McEnany have been bullied, and their families have been threatened. Some of have been accosted when they went out in public. They have been called liars. No one cared that they are working mothers.
The left constantly harps about a “war on women.” Well, there is a war on women alright — a war on conservative women. Conway, Sanders, Hicks, and McEnany can give you first-person accounts of what it is like to be a pro-life, God-fearing conservative woman in American public life today.
The media should be ashamed of its gross double standards. But as one commentator likes to say, if the left didn’t have double standards it would have no standards at all!
A Divisive Choice
Another of scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s nominees is running into major opposition. Neera Tanden, scumbag/liar-Biden’s choice to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), currently serves as president of the Center for American Progress, a far-left think tank founded by scumbag/liar-Clinton loyalist John Podesta.
After Buzzfeed broke the news about the fake Steele dossier, Tanden launched the “Moscow Project” to promote the dossier. She repeatedly defended the accuracy of the dossier even though it was totally false and full of Russian disinformation. Incredibly, Tanden even defended the FBI’s abuse of the FISA courts.
Tanden’s position as director of OMB requires Senate confirmation. But Tanden praised Stacey Abrams after she referred to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as “Moscow Mitch.” Sen. Lindsey Graham called Tanden “a nutjob,” and for good reason. She’s been busy deleting past offensive tweets — more than a thousand of them!
And this is scumbag/liar-Biden’s nominee, the man who claims he wants to unite the country?
Speaking of Offensive Tweets…
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is also busy deleting offensive tweets. Over the weekend, she retweeted a post celebrating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people. But the post also included the anti-Semitic phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
As our friends at The Washington Free Beacon noted, that phrase is widely used by terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah because it is a call for the destruction of the entire state of Israel. And if Israel ceased to exist, what would become of the nearly seven million Jews who live there?
I am not aware of any statement of condemnation from Speaker scumbag/liar-Pelosi regarding Tlaib’s latest anti-Semitic outburst. Tlaib was also called out last week for attacking Antony Blinken, scumbag/liar-Biden’s nominee to be secretary of state, who happens to be Jewish.
Sadly, given Tlaib’s well-documented record of anti-Semitism, I’m certain this won’t be her last call for the elimination of Israel.
Twitter Bows to Communist China
As we have previously reported, communist China is taking increasingly aggressive actions against Australia due to its alliance with the United States, support for democratic values and human rights, as well as Australia’s call for an independent and thorough investigation of COVID-19.
The latest incident involves a tweet from the spokesman of the communist Chinese foreign ministry that depicted an Australian soldier beheading a child. The picture is fake, and it has been condemned by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison as an “outrageous and disgusting slur.” Other nations, including France, have condemned the Chinese tweet.
But Twitter refuses to block it, merely labeling it as “sensitive.” Even though Chinese citizens are banned from using Twitter, the tech platform allows communist leaders to tweet whatever they want, while censoring legitimate news stories and almost anything President Trump says about the election.
This is just another example of how corporate America’s desire to do business with communist China is changing us, not China.
And it gets worse. Major U.S. corporations like Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola are lobbying against legislation that would ban Chinese products made from forced labor, including the concentration camps where millions of Chinese Uyghur Muslims are imprisoned.
I can appreciate a business’s desire to lower labor costs. But no American company should be defending slave labor from communist Chinese concentration camps!
Second Amendment at Stake
Raphael Warnock, a Democrat candidate in one of the Georgia Senate runoff elections, has said a lot of bizarre things. The latest revelation from Warnock is that he mocked the idea of churchgoers exercising their Second Amendment rights in order to protect their churches.
There have been several incidents in recent years where people carrying firearms in church prevented a mass slaughter. It’s unfortunate that a parishioner wasn’t armed when Dylann Roof opened fire at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Most Americans understand that we have nothing to fear from law-abiding citizens exercising their rights. What we do fear is armed criminals with no respect for the law and no one around to stop them.
Unfortunately, today’s left, which embraces the “defund the police” movement, seems to have it backwards. It wants to empty the jails while restricting our rights. That mentality isn’t working out so well in New York City, Dallas, Minneapolis, or Seattle.
To our friends in Georgia: No matter how angry you may be at the GOP leadership in your state, do not boycott the upcoming Senate runoff elections.
It makes no sense to claim we can punish Governor Kemp by handing the Senate to Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, and Bernie Sanders, who will punish the entire country with their radical policies, including extreme gun control legislation. ~The Patriot Post
KAY C. JAMES
Life is precious in all of its forms, and I will not be complicit in its destruction. Or as my friend, Ivanka Trump, recently put it, “I am pro-life and unapologetically so.”
That stance isn’t a choice or a preference — it’s a conviction, and it’s a conviction that takes genuine courage to hold in today’s Washington, because it is under constant attack.
The pro-abortion left, which is a unanimous position of the progressive elites, seeks out every opportunity to force pro-life lawmakers to violate this sacred principle. The reason is simple, they want to force an impossible choice. When a pro-life lawmaker offers a proposal, the left will force them to either compromise on the pro-life stance in order to get most of the proposal passed, or do nothing.
The issue of life cannot be compromised. Numerical data or regulatory policy often has middle ground that is built-in or quite obvious. That type of compromise isn’t available on the issue of life. To pro-life Americans, no amount of abortion or abortion funding is tolerable.
Knowing this, liberals see every federal program and federal dollar as an opportunity for advancing their pro-abortion worldview. They believe all federal money must be available for abortion. Where they have the power, they force every conservative to answer the question: Do you support your proposal enough to violate your deeply held convictions?
In this way, progressives create a win-win for themselves. Either they have killed a good conservative policy idea, or they undermined the pro-life cause. This is a tried-and-true tactic that they will never abandon. I am a decades-long veteran of this war and I have seen it countless times.
Amongst the cruelest way that they wield this weapon is on the issue of women’s advancement. They have wrongly labeled abortion as a women’s issue and incorrectly assert that “abortion is health care.”
Neither statement could be further from the truth, but as talking points, these statements build fences around conservatives. In Washington, they make sure you can’t work on women’s issues unless you also support abortion.
Ivanka Trump had the courage to challenge this stalemate, and more may follow her lead.
In 2019, under her leadership, the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative was established. The Heritage Foundation is deeply supportive of the ideals and policy goals of this initiative, and we’ve partnered with the White House to promote them.
Recently, there was a proposal to include the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative within the mandate of the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues. However, discussions to incorporate the initiative as part of the annual Defense Authorization Bill hit a roadblock.
Pro-abortion members of Congress, who have thus far resisted any attempt to allow a simple protection against abortion, prevented the proposal from being attached to this important legislation.
There is no conceivable reason for this stance unless they intend to use this office to promote abortion abroad. Additionally, they get the added benefit of — once again — challenging the pro-life commitment of someone on the right: this time, the very prominent and successful figure of Ivanka Trump.
I am proud of Ivanka Trump’s commitment to protect life, and I will stand by her to support that conviction, come what may. This isn’t the first time that conservative women have been treated this way in Washington, and it won’t be the last. But, it is my sincere hope that it will be one of the times that conservative women stick together and succeed together.
The Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative is a worthy initiative and deserves widespread support. But given the history of the Office of Global Women’s Issues, that office should not be codified absent a guardrail in place to prevent it from promoting abortion. ~The Patriot Post
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