Politics

Copper Scrappers Target Tesla Superchargers As Metal Prices Soar  In the early 1950s, a notorious bank robber, one of the first fugitives on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, was asked after his capture: Why did you rob banks? William Sutton’s response: “Because that’s where the money is.” Fast-forward to today. Thieves are targeting electric vehicle charging stations because the charging cords at each stall contain a ‘gold mine’ of copper that can easily be scrapped.  Targeting EV charging stations is nothing new (read here). Still, thieves are noticing copper prices moving higher, mainly due to strained mining supplies and robust demand for powering up America in the digital age. And this trend might spark concern with Elon Musk, as his Tesla Superchargers are being targeted in imploding California.  One Bay Area Supercharger Station had all charging cords severed. This is terrible news for EV drivers rolling up with low battery.  Tesla Supercharger station in Bay Area hit by thieves …

‘Good News Is Bad News’ Is The Worst News For Stocks Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist, We’re back in a “bad news is good news” regime for stocks, where weak economic data prompts higher prices. That’s typically a supportive backdrop for equities, but investors should be alert for when stocks fail to rally on good news as this signals the economy is potentially in or about to be in a recession, with the stock market poised to see its worst returns. “Bad news sells best. ’Cause good news is no news,” says Kirk Douglas’s journalist in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. But bad news isn’t just a boon for newspapers; stocks also frequently rally on news that intuitively should see them selling off. Blame central banks for this perverse state of affairs, with their implicit backstop for markets. Stocks have recently been rallying …

Commencement addresses have far too often become a sounding board for mediocre advice and bad politics. Kansas City Chiefs Kicker Harrison Butker, however, offered something different to 2024 graduates when he encouraged them never to shy away from defending what is good and right — even when the so-called Catholic president of the United States does the opposite.

One year after he encouraged students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to get married and have children to save the world, Butker was back behind a commencement stage podium at Benedictine College invigorating the newest generation of young adults to stay strong in their faith and values.

The three-time Super Bowl champion kicked off his speech with praise for the grads who muscled through government-mandated lockdowns during their late high school and early college years and gave a warning that our nation is rapidly declining.

“While Covid might have played a large role throughout your formative years, it is not unique. Bad policies and poor leadership have negatively impacted major life issues,” the 28-year-old said. “Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values in media all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.”

This disorder, Butker noted, is not an accident.

“Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith, but at the same time is delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally,” Butker said incredulously.

President Joe Biden made headlines in April after invoking the religious gesture during an abortion rally where Democrat activists complained about Florida’s protections for unborn babies. Butker said Biden’s repeated “vocal … support for the murder of innocent babies” through all nine months of gestation gives people the wrong impression that “you can be both Catholic and pro-choice.”

“He is not alone,” Butker said. “From the man behind the Covid lockdowns to the people pushing dangerous gender ideologies onto the youth of America, they all have a glaring thing in common: they are Catholic.”

Simply claiming to be Catholic but failing to act on it, Butker said, “doesn’t cut it.”

“These are the sorts of things we are told in polite society to not bring up. You know, the difficult and unpleasant things. But if we are going to be men and women for this time in history, we need to stop pretending that the ‘church of nice’ is a winning proposition,” Butker continued.

Because there is no such thing as moral neutrality, Butker encouraged the new graduates to take a stand against the evils plaguing our world.

“We must always speak and act in charity, but never mistake charity for cowardice,” Butker said.

Butker is right. The moment Christians cede cultural ground to the dangerous whims of the world, they have floundered. There is nothing God-honoring or Christlike about turning a blind eye to the serial manufacturing of children who will be “discarded” or doomed to life in a freezer; the ripping apart of unborn babies in their mothers’ wombs; the irreversible sexual experiments on minors that will permanently mangle their bodies; and the celebration of “pride” and a rainbow flag that represents a version of sex and marriage outside what God prescribed.

The player who wears his faith on his sleeve on and off the field reminded the audience that he did not plan to become a public critic of our culture’s dastardly shortcomings. Yet, his loyalty to God demanded more from him than sitting on the sideline.

“I never envisioned myself nor wanted to have this sort of a platform. But God has given it to me, so I have no other choice but to embrace it and preach more hard truths about accepting your lane and staying in it,” Butker said.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Israeli Tanks Plunge Deeper Into Rafah As 500,000 Palestinians Flee Israeli tanks have been seen plunging deeper into the southern Gaza city of Rafah amid reports that some 500,000 people have fled amid the escalating ground offensive. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have initially focused their operation on the eastern section of the city, having seized a key roadway that essentially cuts Rafah in half. “The tanks advanced this morning west of Salahuddin Road into the Brzail and Jneina neighborhoods. They are in the streets inside the built-up area and there are clashes,” one resident told Reuters via a messaging app. Regional media also reports that “Video on social media showed one tank on George Street in Al-Jneina neighborhood.” Via AP The Guardian also writes Tuesday that “Officials estimate that as many as 500,000 people have fled Rafah since being told to evacuate by the Israel …

Biden Administration Quadruples Tariffs On Chinese EVs Authored by Terri Wu via The Epoch Times, The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that it will impose a 100 percent tariff—quadrupling the current 25 percent—on electric vehicles imported from China in 2024. In addition to EVs, the White House has significantly increased tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum products, lithium-ion batteries, and solar cells. “China’s using the same playbook it has before to power its own growth at the expense of others by continuing to invest despite excess Chinese capacity and flooding global markets with exports that are underpriced due to unfair practices,” Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, told reporters at a call ahead of the announcement. “China’s simply too big to play by its own rules.” She added that the tariff increases are consistent with President Joe Biden’s China policy of “responsibly managing competition with China.” …

Zelensky Thanks Americans For Billions In Aid, But Pleads For More Patriot Systems Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made another trip to Ukraine, appearing in Kiev alongside Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday, and the US top diplomat vowed that some of the US aid from Biden’s recently approved $60 billion for Ukraine is “now on the way”. But Zelensky immediately pivoted to begging for Patriot missiles amid Russia’s new Karkhiv assault, saying that “of course we are very thankful for this to Americans, to American people” but that “We need, really we need today two Patriots for Kharkiv, for Kharkiv region because people there are under attack, civilians and warriors, everybody there is under Russian missiles.” As we noted earlier of this perhaps awkward moment… Ukraine has entered the “where is the money, Lebowski” phase https://t.co/llv6KOmUGb — zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 14, 2024 Blinken did not say that Patriots are on the …

Mike Johnson Expected To Attend Trump Trial In Manhattan Now that Donald Trump’s Manhattan ‘hush money’ trial has revealed itself to be yet another Democrat farce, Republicans are coming out of the woodwork to support him now that it’s safe. On Monday, GOP Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio (a VP hopeful) and Tomy Tuberville of Alabama went to the courthouse. Now, in a display of loyalty to Trump (and of course, optics), House Speaker Mike Johnson is reportedly expected to attend Trump’s trial, according to Axios, Other names  expected to attend are North Dakota Gov. Burgum as well as Vivek Ramaswamy, both Trump VP contenders. The flood of support comes after a former attorney for Stormy Daniels – who claims she had a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, and …

I’ve Got A Bad Feeling About This By Michael Every of Rabobank Ideally, I would have written this on May 4th not 14th, but I am going to talk Star Wars. I was a fan in 1977, kept the flame alive when only battered VHS cassettes of the original trilogy existed, and was delighted to get prequels. Until the opening crawl announced, “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.” I recall thinking, “This is my job – boring!” But the prequels were better than the sequels and all the TV shows I don’t watch. Indeed, the prequels’ clunky theme of democracy crumbling into autocracy, dispute over trade routes, then war, seems even more prescient than my 2016 ‘Thin Ice’ report, which underlined how the 21st century could echo the 20th, and our more detailed fragmented ‘World in 2030’ report in 2020. In just the last …

Unfixable: Michael Cohen Faces Reckoning Of Biblical Proportions On Cross Examination Authored by Jonathan Turley, Below is my column in the New York Post on the first day of the examination of Michael Cohen. He is expected to start his cross examination today. How bad will it be? After lying to Congress, courts, banks, and most everyone else, it will be bad. Years ago, Cohen threatened a journalist and told him “what I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting.” Well, that bad. On cross examination, Cohen faces a reckoning of biblical proportions. Michael Cohen apparently wants a reality show but, if his testimony Monday is any indication, reality is about to sink in for not just Cohen but the prosecutors and the court. In stoking interest in his own appearance, the former Trump counsel promised the public that they should be “prepared to be …

Watch Live: Will Fed Chair Powell Admit He Can Now See The ‘Flation’? Squeezed in between today’s (hotter than expected) PPI and tomorrow’s CPI, Fed Chair Jay Powell will join The ECB’s Dutch Central Banker Klaus Knot at the annual general meeting of the Foreign Bankers’ Association. After PPI – and a wave of higher prices across various indicators – will Powell admit that he can now see the ‘flation’? …and if not, will he explain why he is so desperate to start cutting rates (before November?)… Watch Powell speak live here (due to start at 10amET)… (FBA has blocked playback on all other sites except YouTube, so no embed: click on the image to link to the YouTube stream)… …

Supreme Court Justices Thomas And Alito Issue Warnings About State Of America Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), In separate remarks at two different events on Friday, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito issued warnings about the state of affairs in America today, including support for freedom of speech “declining dangerously” and the nation’s capital becoming a “hideous” place where cancel culture runs rampant. Supreme Court Associate Justices Elena Kagan (L), Clarence Thomas ((2L), Samuel Alito (2R) and Chief Justice John Roberts (R) arrive for services for former President George H.W. Bush at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 3, 2018. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo) Justice Thomas spoke at a conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Point Clear, Alabama, while Justice Alito delivered a commencement address at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a …

US Producer Prices Accelerating At Fastest Rate In 12 Months Ahead of tomorrow’s CPI, traders are eyeing this morning’s Producer Prices for any hints that the disinflation trend will return…or not. The answer is “not!” April Producer Prices rose 0.5% MoM (vs +0.3% exp), with March’s +0.2% MoM revised down to -0.1% MoM. The downward revision did not stop the YoY read rising to 2.2% (from +2.1% in March)… Source: Bloomberg This is the highest YoY read since April 2023 and is the fourth hotter than expected headline PPI print… Source: Bloomberg Producer Prices have been aggressively downwardly revised for 4 of the last 7 months… Source: Bloomberg Services costs soared, dominating April’s …

Markets Now Face Make Or Break Inflation Data By Michael Msika, Bloomberg markets live reporter and strategist European stocks are hovering around record highs on conviction that interest rates will come down and revive the economy, making this week’s inflation data a key to extending the rally. Monetary policies in the US and in Europe are expected to diverge for a few months, with the European Central Bank seen cutting rates earlier than the Fed with inflation looking more in check on the old continent. Yet, US data is always in the driver’s seat when it comes to financial markets, and this week should be no exception, making it all about US CPI. Whatever the print, the impact that the figure may have on bond yields is looking increasingly important as the correlation between European equities and US treasury yields is now the most negative since the mid-1990s, a pre-condition …

AMC Raised $250 Million In ATM Offering As ‘Meme’ Stocks Rocket Higher With AMC Entertainment and GameStop’s short squeezes causing significant losses for short sellers on Monday, we noted the growing likelihood that “bankers are burning the phones at GME and AMC pitching ATM equity offerings for after the close.”  You know jefferies bankers are burning the phones at GME and AMC pitching ATM equity offerings for after the close — zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 13, 2024 Fast forward to Tuesday morning. And there it is AMC Raised About $250M of New Equity Capital in ATM Offering Thank you retail investors https://t.co/MPu8vfEmNz — zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 14, 2024 And this.  And 99% of the stock was sold yesterday bro — zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 14, 2024 Bloomberg reports that AMC completed a previously disclosed ATM on March 28. The deal was completed through Citigroup Global Markets, Barclays Capital, B. …

The Republican National Committee (RNC) appears to have little to no on-the-ground operations in key battleground states despite former President Donald Trump narrowly leading President Joe Biden, local GOP and conservative group leaders tell The Federalist. They expressed optimism, however, that the RNC will step up its efforts and suggested it’s “typical” for the RNC not to have its ground game going until about now.

Grassroots organizations are targeting key states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Texas to improve “election processes at the administrative level well before Election Day,” director Josh Findlay of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Elections Protection Project told The Federalist. 

Findlay touted the groups’ “huge successes” throughout battleground states with regard to drop box security, absentee ballot procedures, observer access and absentee processing centers. But despite all the work being done on the ground to elect Republicans, the RNC doesn’t seem too involved – though grassroots leaders are hopeful that won’t be the case for long. 

Findlay said he believes RNC Chairman Michael Whatley “will get the proper infrastructure in place to secure the upcoming election.”

“I have worked with Chairman Michael Whatley extensively in the past, and he knows the weight that party bears in making sure elections run smoothly,” Findlay said, adding that while grassroots “excel at identifying local election integrity issues and fighting for solutions to those issues,” it’s the political parties that have the most resources to “recruit, train, and shift the large numbers of poll workers and poll watchers needed for election season.”

Arizona

Trump lost Arizona by 10,457 votes in 2020 after winning it in 2016 by 91,234 votes. It’s key to his reelection. But the current on-the-ground effort to ensure a Trump victory rests on the backs of grassroots activists and appears to lack robust national party support.

“There is a very active effort on the ground. We have over 15,000 grassroots activists in the state,” President of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club Scot Mussi told The Federalist. Mussi said the group is focused on get-out-the-vote efforts and outreach to voters, especially Hispanic and faith-based communities.

“This is a total team effort here in Arizona,” Mussi said. “There are multiple organizations, on the ground here in Arizona, engaged in these efforts.”

So far, however, the RNC doesn’t seem to be one of them. Mussi said he hopes the RNC will step up its involvement for the general election, saying he didn’t see a huge presence from the national party in 2016 but “we’d love to see any increase in engagement from the RNC at this point.”

“I think many swing states can speak to this — it feels like here in Arizona, the Left is pouring in millions of dollars into Arizona into their own ground game and it doesn’t seem, at least what we’re seeing on the ground, that there’s the same emphasis from a lot of these national groups, and that includes the RNC,” he said. “Our hope is that they come in and they come in big to assist with a lot of these efforts.”

The Arizona Republican Party did not respond to repeated inquiries from The Federalist nor did the RNC respond to inquiries about their involvement in the state.

Pennsylvania

Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020 by 81,660 votes after winning the state in 2016 by 44,292. Grassroots activists are gearing up to flip the state again come November.

The Sentinel Action Fund (SAF) is one of those organizations focused on turning out “low-propensity voters” via absentee ballots, early and day-of voting with its year-round operation, SAF President Jessica Anderson told the Federalist.

Anderson explained that SAF — which is dedicated to winning Senate races in Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania but still focusing on electing Republicans down-ballot — has also teamed up with the Republican State Legislative Committee and Keystone, the super-PAC for Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick.

When asked whether the RNC has been working with SAF in Pennsylvania, Anderson said she wasn’t “sure how to answer that since I don’t think their operations are up and running yet.”

“As the RNC kind of gets up their efforts after the changeover of their leadership — and Lara Trump has been, I think fully embracing all of this — I have to expect that they will put a robust office in place and then at that point we will work with them,” Anderson said.

When asked if he’s seen anyone from the RNC on the ground locally, Erie County GOP Chairman Tom Eddy told The Federalist “not here.”

The county has long been a bellwether for the presidential race, with the candidate winning the county also winning the general.

During the 2016 race, in which Trump won the county by fewer than 2,000 votes, his team set up an office in Erie County that brought in outside resources and had 10-12 people canvassing each Saturday, Eddy told The Federalist. Trump lost the county in 2020 by fewer than 1,500 votes.

“I’d give anything to have a few people on the ground here helping,” Eddy told The Federalist, adding, however, he thinks “this is typical” for RNC involvement at this point in the game.

Eddy says the RNC usually works with the state party, which in turn works with counties. The Pennsylvania Republican Party did not respond to repeated inquiries from The Federalist but an RNC representative told Eddy they were looking to place three or four staffers in the area starting in mid-May.

Eddy said he had to “give the Democrats credit … on the ground here in Erie” for their current canvassing efforts.

The Pennsylvania Democratic Party, in coordination with Biden’s campaign, has set up more than a dozen offices across Pennsylvania, according to the Pennsylvania Capital Star. The offices are reportedly set to “host training sessions for volunteers, canvassing kickoffs and volunteer recruitment events.” Democrats have also placed offices in swing counties, like Erie, to reach voters, according to the report.

When asked about their on-the-ground operations in Pennsylvania, the RNC pointed to poll watchers during the primary race. Gates McGavick, a senior adviser to Whatley, said “The RNC has worked closely with the PA GOP and county parties across Pennsylvania to place trained poll watchers on the ground in each of the Keystone State’s 67 counties for Primary day.”

RNC Election Integrity Communications Director Claire Zunk forwarded an RNC press release about its recruiting of primary-day poll watchers and “volunteer lawyers.” The release also said the RNC “activated more than 2,200 poll watchers” across the state. The Federalist has inquired for additional information but did not receive a response. The RNC also didn’t give details about what it is doing on the ground between now and November to increase voter registration, support mail-in ballot initiatives, and increase voter outreach.

North Carolina

North Carolina Election Integrity Team President Jim Womack worries his state could swing for Biden: “The RNC hirings are helpful to some degree, but the real movement in the state, the real groundwork, is done by the activists and activists’ groups across the state.”

Womack estimates there are “easily 75-100” grassroots organizations working statewide to increase “neighborhood level organizational activity,” making North Carolina’s local efforts “one of Trump’s strongest states.” Womack highlighted activist groups unaffiliated with the RNC like Asheville Tea Party, Conservative Coalition of NC, the Liberty Party, and North Carolina Grassroots Government as doing “quality work.”

While he doesn’t know the RNC’s plans for North Carolina, Womack says he hopes it will be “well-resourced” since RNC Chairman Whatley comes from the state. In the 2020 contest, the RNC sent regional representatives “that were like deputy campaign managers.” They gave trainings and distributed campaign materials.

Womack said since Trump was automatically the nominee in the 2020 primary, there wasn’t as big a push so it is difficult to compare to this year. The NCGOP did not respond to a request for comment nor provide any response about their efforts in the state.

On April 19, the RNC announced the launch of a “100,000 person strong election integrity program” comprised of “volunteers and attorneys,” but the RNC did not respond when asked by The Federalist how many of those 100,000 people had been recruited so far.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

If you think firing poorly performing federal employees is too hard, you are not alone. Most federal employees agree. Now President Biden has made this problem worse. New regulations will make dismissals of poor-performing and subversive employees even more difficult. The rule reinforces removal restrictions and prohibits the reclassification of federal bureaucrats. This broad regulatory change was built specifically to block the reinstatement of Trump-era reforms. The deep state will soon become even less accountable.

The federal employee dismissal process is broken. Agencies take six months to a year to remove poor performers, followed by lengthy appeals that often result in reinstatement with back pay. If the employee wins, agencies must typically cover their attorney fees — at rates of $400 to $1,000 per hour. This makes removing employees for even the worst offenses expensive and uncertain.

For example, the Department of Justice suspended two prosecutors who withheld exculpatory evidence from a U.S. senator’s defense team. The federal judge overseeing the case said he had “never seen such mishandling or misconduct.” Nonetheless, the prosecutors appealed and got the suspensions overturned on a technicality. The government restored two months of back wages and paid out $643,000 in attorney fees.

This dysfunction is all too common. Removing problematic employees is difficult in every federal agency. Just one-half of 1 percent of tenured federal employees were fired in 2023 for poor performance or misconduct.

Surveys show that federal employees themselves object to this system. Half report chronic poor performance in their unit, and most don’t believe their agency effectively addresses poor performers. Fewer than half of federal career supervisors feel confident they could dismiss an employee for serious misconduct. Just a quarter believe they could remove a poor performer. Federal employees recognize the system is broken.

Unfortunately, this dysfunction empowers bad actors, and it is not uncommon for career employees to inject partisanship into their official duties.

Such partisanship was particularly evident during the Trump administration. The press widely reported on career employees opposing the president’s policies; some even boasted about their “resistance.” Many career bureaucrats acted as though they — not elected officials or presidential appointees — should set policy. Most Americans recognize unelected bureaucrats have too much control over federal policy. The “deep state” is real, and it is a serious challenge to our democracy.

President Trump addressed these problems with an executive order creating “Schedule F” for career officials in policy-influencing jobs. The order made them at-will employees, just like most private sector workers, without removal restrictions. Schedule F gave agencies the ability to effectively and quickly address poor performance or misconduct. At the same time, the order continued protections against politically motivated or discriminatory removals.

Schedule F was designed with successful state-level reforms in mind. Many states have made most or all state employees at-will employees. These reforms have generally shown positive results without the feared abuses materializing.

Texas and Florida — two of America’s three most populous states — have embraced at-will employment. Their state governments operate quite well. Schedule F would have expanded these successes nationally. The government can operate effectively if it has the will to do so.

Despite Schedule F’s potential, President Biden revoked it shortly after taking office. His administration has now issued a new rule designed to prevent a future administration from bringing back Schedule F. The new regulations reinforce career employee removal restrictions and prohibit reclassifying career employees into an at-will status. Federal bureaucrats who inject partisanship into their duties will remain hard to dismiss. So will chronic poor performers.

The Biden administration’s rule cements major flaws in the federal workforce. The rule protects poor performers and bureaucratic resistance. It seems designed to ensure the deep state will remain unaccountable to the president — and the American people.

Even government employees recognize the federal dismissal process is broken. President Biden’s new rule will make it even harder to fix. That is not good for America or democracy.

Jacob Sagert is a policy analyst in the America First Policy Institute’s Center for American Freedom. James Sherk is the director of the Center for American Freedom at the America First Policy Institute. He previously served as a Special Assistant to the President in the Domestic Policy Council at the White House during the Donald J. Trump administration.

Ohio Sen. J. D. Vance reminded the public on Monday that the judge overseeing the Manhattan lawfare case against former President Donald Trump has a daughter who is a Democrat political operative. It’s an entirely true statement, yet it’s one Trump is prohibited from making himself thanks to a gag order from partisan Judge Juan Merchan — which is why congressional Republicans must show up daily to serve as a voice for the former president and 2024 front-runner.

“The thing that the president is prevented from saying, which is a disgrace, is that every single person involved in this prosecution is practically a Democratic political operative. The judge inside, his daughter is making millions of dollars running against Donald Trump, raising money for Donald Trump’s political opponents,” Vance said outside the courthouse. Notably, Judge Merchan himself donated to Biden’s campaign.

Vance’s comments echoed those of Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who joined Trump last week when pornographer Stormy Daniels took the stand. Scott also noted that the daughter of the judge overseeing the case “is a political operative and raises money for Democrats.”

Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, is reportedly president of the Chicago-based political consulting firm Authentic Campaigns, whose clients include Russia hoaxer Adam Schiff and the Senate Majority PAC. Both Schiff and the Senate Majority PAC have used the Manhattan-based indictment against Trump to fundraise, according to the New York Post. Loren Merchan also worked for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Judge Merchan has refused to recuse himself despite requests from Trump’s team.

Vance’s appearance came on the same day that convicted felon Michael Cohen took the stand. Cohen lied to a Senate committee in 2017, then pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress. He also told the public he did not commit tax evasions “despite having told a federal judge, U.S. District Judge William Pauley, in court that he had,” Politico reported. Federal prosecutors said they had “substantial concerns about Cohen’s credibility as a witness” and that after Cohen was sentenced, he “made material false statements” while meeting with prosecutors and the FBI, Politico reported.

But Trump is prohibited from noting those facts as well, meaning he needs fellow Republicans like Vance and others to remind the public that the so-called justice system is corrupted by partisan actors, including the lead prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, who campaigned on targeting Trump once in office.

“Does any reasonable, sensible person believe anything that Michael Cohen says? I don’t think that they should,” Vance rightfully asked during his press briefing.

“To all the American voters and American people who are watching this, the one opportunity you get to speak up against this sham prosecution and to say the American people elect their president, not corrupt DNC prosecutors, is to vote for Donald Trump in November,” Vance said.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., also appeared alongside Vance, with Tuberville decrying the “mental anguish” being “pushed on” Trump.

“This is New York City, the icon of our country, and we got a courtroom that’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever been in,” Tuberville said. “Mental anguish is trying to be pushed on Republican candidate for the president of the United States this year — that’s all this is.”

The trio’s appearance at the courthouse brings the grand total of Republican members of Congress who have visited Manhattan to witness the political persecution of Trump to four.

Unity among Republicans in the face of lawfare has been sorely absent — despite there being a total of 49 Republican senators and 217 Republican representatives, including 10 total from New York.

The lack of appearances from fellow Republicans, however, though shameful, is not surprising given the near radio silence from GOP Senate leadership, including Mitch McConnell, when Trump was first hit with a series of indictments.

When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg first indicted Trump on 34 felony counts for which he currently sits in a courthouse, McConnell “refused to condemn the overt weaponization of law enforcement,” as my colleague Tristan Justice pointed out. When McConnell finally spoke out, he called for increasing funding for federal law enforcement agencies.

McConnell’s absence was so notable during the second indictment that CNN headlined a piece: “On Trump indictment, Senate GOP leaders silent while top House Republicans vow payback.”

When Trump was indicted for a third time by Special Counsel Jack Smith, Justice noted that it was Republican Conference Chair John Barrasso of Wyoming acting as the lone wolf in calling out the “two-tiered system of justice” and the weaponization of “the justice system against” a political opponent.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Anglo Goes Bold: Unveils Breakup Plan To Transform Into Copper Giant Amid BHP Takeover Battle London-listed Anglo-American has unveiled a “clear, compelling, and decisive plan to unlock significant value from its portfolio.” This strategy involves selling its platinum and diamond business units while concentrating on copper, positioning itself to prosper off the ‘Next AI Trade’ as data centers and power grids will use an enormous amount of the base metal to ‘power up’ the digital economy. Also, it’s a move to thwart a hostile takeover attempt from BHP Group.  Anglo was forced to radically transform itself into a copper giant because of BHP’s twice-rejected takeover bid, now worth £34 billion ($43 billion). The move also responds to shareholder pressure to focus on copper assets and demerge its stakes in less profitable ones, such as its steelmaking unit, coal business, Anglo American Platinum, and De Beers (diamonds).  Anglo Chief Executive Officer Duncan Wanblad’s major overhaul aims to replicate rival BHP CEO Mike Henry’s proposed idea …

The Broken Magic Trick Behind Dollar Dominance Authored by Peter Reagan via Birch Gold Group, The total debt owed by the United States federal government has reached incredible levels. Today, the total is $34,541,727,970,599.17 – but by the time you read this article, it’ll probably be higher. I say “probably” because the debt is growing exponentially that by the time you read this, it’s quite possible that another few hundred billion have taken the total over $35 trillion. Look at the official chart and attention to how fast total debt has risen since the turn of the century: In the year 2000, total government debt was $5.7 trillion. Ah, the good old days… The nation’s debt has grown more than $5.7 trillion since President Biden took office! Let me put it another way: It took the …

A recurring theme in The New York Times’ 2024 campaign coverage in recent weeks is that President Biden’s poll numbers suck relative to Donald Trump’s because voters clearly don’t remember the “chaos” of the Trump years.

The paper’s most recent attempt at making “fetch” happen was in an article published Friday, with reference to a new Times survey showing Trump with a substantial lead in all but one of the six swing states that will decide the election.

“Two of the biggest U.S. news events in decades, the Covid pandemic and the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, are seldom the first thing on people’s minds when it comes to their memories of the Trump administration, for example…,” the Times said. “When asked to describe the one thing they remembered most from Donald J. Trump’s presidency, only 5 percent of respondents referred to Jan. 6, and only 4 percent to Covid.”

In other words, the Times would like to know why you morons aren’t still gaping over the things they believe indisputably disqualify Trump from ever being president again.

Covid was “chaos,” yet it looks like enough people now know the panic was manufactured by the hysterical media (Jake Tapper) aiming to unseat Trump. Jan. 6 was “chaos,” yet it looks like enough people now know it was, at worst, an inconvenient day for Washington, D.C.’s incompetent police force, plus the drama queens in Congress who won’t stop talking about how much they cried that day. None of it compares to what voters are going through under this president.

I call it the media “chaos” paradox. What the Times neutrally declares to be “chaos” is not chaos. That any one event enraptures journalists and TV people in Washington, driving them to the internet and their microphones to scream, “UNPRECEDENTED!” doesn’t require everyone else to care as much or even at all. A tweet is not chaos. A government worker being fired is not chaos. A phone call is not chaos.

The word “chaos” was used in the aforementioned article four times. Though, to be sure, it’s not just the Times that presses the “chaos” paradox. An obtuse editorial in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday asserted, “A second Trump term is likely to be as chaotic and divisive as the first…”

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-host and main squeeze Mika Brzezinski pondered aloud last week why more people weren’t sensationalized by the “riveting TV” that is the so-called “hush money” prosecution of Trump in New York. She didn’t use the word “chaos,” but the sentiment was the same — Don’t you dummies get it?! Trump is creating more frenzy, and it’s not good! It’s bad! And this time a porn actress is involved! And it’s sex! What more do you dummies want?!

With apologies to the Marcel Marceaus of MSNBC, outside of Washington, outside of the media, it’s just not that interesting. A person who has sex for money and then wanted money for sex, only to end up as a witness in a bookkeeping trial, just isn’t that interesting. Looking back, a lot of people are inured by the “chaos” that Trump brought, but not because of Trump. It’s because of the media.

When everything is “chaos,” nothing is. They said everything was, and voters now know none of it was. But you know what really is chaos? Precisely the things the media say are not.

Watching your savings dwindle and your debt climb? That’s chaos. Witnessing your downtown decay amid roaring rent costs and business foreclosure? That’s chaos. Lying awake at night wondering when the next global war directly implicating the U.S. might break out? That’s chaos. Watching the border overrun by millions of Third World migrants seeking welfare in America, who are sure to make their way into neighborhoods across the nation? That’s chaos.

For countless reasons you already know, those aren’t matters of urgency for Washington and the media. To the extent they even bother to acknowledge any of them, it’s to insist that the economy has never been better (as middle income-earners actively become poorer), that illegal border crossings are helpful (as local authorities cope with an influx of migrants by rationing public services to real citizens), and that “violent crime” is at a record low (excluding Los Angeles, New York, and also armed robberies and carjackings).

To be fair, that Times survey referenced earlier did show that what a plurality of voters remember most about Trump’s term in office was his “personality.” Well, yeah, because it was unlike anything history has ever seen before. But the novelty — the “chaos” — of that personality has long worn off now that he’s out of office and the vacuum has been replaced by real chaos.

Washington and the media are still pretending to care about the “norms” and the “unprecedented.” But voters know actual chaos when they feel it. And they’re feeling it.

I recently was back in the basement of my parents’ home, digging through old yearbooks and photo albums. My brother nagged me to find the old stereo with the turntable and vinyl records. In an age of modernity, it seems we can’t help but long for the things that have been indeed “crushed,” as recently illustrated by Apple’s new iPad ad.

Last week, Apple faced so much backlash to its new commercial bragging about the destruction of humanity, that the company quickly apologized and admitted it “missed the mark.” Particularly for those of us who are old enough to remember all of the musical, gaming, and artistic icons crushed by the huge hunk of metal’s descent to generate the “thinnest iPad ever,” the ad justified every fear we have of technology overtaking our lives. It also goes to show how out of touch the technocratic elites are with not only the experience of everyday Americans but humanity.

British actor Hugh Grant said it best in his caustic criticism of the ad: “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley.”

Many of us long for the days when we had more contact with the material world and a reality that forced us to interact with the tangible. We turned pages of books and magazines. We made our own brownies and cookies, even if they were from a box or tube. Despite more convenient packaging, many still made food from scratch. We ran or biked out on roads rather than in place with digitized scenery and climatized rooms. We felt a stronger connection to the environment around us and our interplay in it.

While technology makes life more convenient, it doesn’t alter the fundamental reality of human nature. To thrive, humans need connection with the physical world, including other humans. We see the devastating effects technology has had on physical and mental health, particularly in younger children during the years when establishing healthy relationships and habits is crucial for proper development, maturity, and happiness.

The Effects of a Disembodied Culture

When we disengage from the reality of the world around us, with all its challenges and obstacles, we become fragmented and disembodied. The mind disconnects from the biological signals the body uses to communicate with us, losing our ability to discern truth at the deepest level. The very idea of truth becomes malleable, as evident in the oft-used phrase among the left, “my truth.” In this state, humans are highly susceptible to groupthink and even the most egregious of lies.

This kind of schism can be highly destabilizing, its effects evident in everything from the protests rampant on college campuses to transgender confusion to babies being torn from their mothers at the moment of birth to be placed on a stranger’s hairy chest. Chaos seems to be the order of the day. Younger people in particular seem to have no understanding of the reality of conflict or war and the complex calculus that needs to be done when making moral judgments about competing cultural traditions. 

Yet the ruling-class elites insist this is the new way and that any rebellion against it is some form of phobia, a literal fear of another religion, sex, or culture.

Those of us who wish to preserve human nature and a teleological perspective on the world are not afraid of anything. We simply wish to protect the goodness, beauty, and truth of God’s creation and man’s ability to express that through art, music, and creativity. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” We should care for nothing more than the thing that connects us to God — our souls.

Those who insist on progress decoupled from human mediation destroy all that is good, true, and beautiful not only in the world but also in ourselves. They believe they can erase the sin of man in pursuit of a perfect utopia because they mistake themselves for the one who already did that. History tells us what happens to men such as these. Because of that, we should have hope even amidst the destructive consequences of their false idolatry.

How to Live a Life of Quiet Disobedience

While the ruling class insists on our compliance, those of us who still believe in a soul and the ability of man to express its highest good must not only continue to express our discontent in the public square but also ensure our everyday choices and actions are aligned with our beliefs. We must, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn prescribes, “live not by lies.”

“Even the most timid can take this least demanding step toward spiritual independence,” scholars Edward Ericson and Daniel Mahoney write in their Solzhenitsyn Reader. “If many march together on this path of passive resistance, the whole inhuman system will totter and collapse.”

As I filed through memorabilia in my parents’ basement, I realized that relics of the past — a turntable, a mixing bowl and whisk, a lawnmower, even my own two feet — can be used for small acts of “passive resistance” to reengage with the reality of life around us. They are the small but not insignificant tools of defiance against those who believe they can fashion the world in their image rather than the One who created us and make us less resistant against their tyrannical power. Or, we can simply not buy another iPad, no matter how thin it is.

Wanted: The Most In-Demand Jobs Of The Next Decade Ever since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and other AI tools that have followed in its wake, people have been pondering the potential of artificial intelligence to replace certain occupations, trying to figure out if and how the nascent technology will change the way people work. And while the focus of discussions like this is often on the risk of certain jobs being replaced by emerging technologies; as Statista’s Felix Richter reports, these shifts, as well as societal changes, usually offer new employment opportunities as well. Think of the rise of e-commerce for example: while it has led to a decline in retail jobs, it has supported strong job growth in transportation and warehousing and still does. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Projections, transportation and warehousing is going to be among the fastest growing sectors over the …

During an episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” James Carville, a Democrat and political strategist, expressed his opinion that Speaker Mike Johnson and other “Christian nationalists” are a bigger threat to America than al-Qaeda. In a more recent rant posted on X, Carville urged young people to recognize the potential dire consequences of not voting for Biden in this year’s November election, at least as he sees it:

If Trump, and Roberts, and Alito, and Gorsuch, and Thomas, and Leonard Leo, and the Heritage Foundation — if they get a hold [of power], there will be no government left, there will be no rights left, you will live under theocracy, you’ll end up [with] Christian Nationalism. My advice to tell these young people is to get off your motherf**king a** and go vote because you should vote like your entire future, and the entire future of this United States depends on it because, quite frankly, it does, and that’s not an exaggeration.

Carville is not alone in employing this divisive and vitriolic rhetoric. President Biden and many other Democrat politicians have repeatedly stated that the Republican Party of today, led and influenced by Donald Trump, is “a threat to this country” and has continuously called “MAGA extremists” a “threat to the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions.”

This demonization of Republicans as an existential threat that must be completely vanquished from American politics altogether is now commonplace rhetoric for even supposedly centrist Democrats such as Carville and Biden. And yet far too many Republican leaders and conservative pundits cling to the notion that the response to this extremism is to defeat liberals in the “marketplace of ideas,” while chastising their own allies about their perceived lack of civility in the face of eliminationist rhetoric. This is not the way to win an election, much less save America from leftist tyranny.

The unwillingness of many leaders on the right to confront Democrats directly is hard to stomach; however, this rhetoric should come as no surprise, given the ideological origins of left-wing politics. Leftist hero Mao Zedong succinctly characterized politics as “war without bloodshed,” though his cultural revolution was still eager to use violence to achieve its political ends. Accordingly, the “wokeness” we see unfolding in all aspects of American life bears striking resemblances to Mao’s cultural revolution, including the use of political violence as evidenced throughout the 2020 George Floyd protests and, more recently, within the “Free Palestine” movement.

As such, one would think the Republican Party would take Democrats at their word and finally wake up and realize “what time it is,” but regrettably, that is not the case. Conservative gatekeepers act as if anyone on the right who exercises political power to put the left in their place is dangerous, and all the while the left is amassing power for the sole purpose of harassing, intimidating, and even jailing those on the right. Instead, they make outdated and ineffective overtures to the “three-legged stool” of conservatism as a way to appeal to moderates and fight the leftist onslaught. To say this belief is naïve would be an understatement. To say this is the rhetoric of controlled opposition would be more accurate.

Like it or not, our politics now fundamentally revolves around discerning “friend” from “enemy” — and rewarding the former and directly engaging the latter. German political philosopher Carl Schmitt introduced the friend/enemy distinction in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political. According to his theory, political entities define themselves by identifying friends (allies) and enemies (adversaries), a differentiation that profoundly influences political decisions and actions. This distinction constitutes the core of political and power dynamics, central to our contemporary politics.

It’s important to note that this does not pertain to mere rivalries or political disagreements. We are not talking about political battles over marginal tax rates or economic tariffs, as was the case in our politics of old. The friend/enemy distinction explicitly deals with what would be an extensional threat to one side or another.

During both the Cold War and the initial phases of the war on terror, the focus on an external adversary somewhat alleviated the intensity of internal political disputes in America while fostering solidarity and patriotism at home, especially when juxtaposed with the existential concerns of nuclear conflict or significant terrorist threats. However, the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union and the disillusionment with the war on terror, combined with the election of Barack Obama and later Donald Trump, awakened something within American politics that has been absent for decades:

The enemy within.

Whether it was when Obama designated working-class Americans in the Midwest as people who “cling to guns or religion” and have “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” or Hillary Clinton designating Trump voters as a “basket of deplorables” or, as mentioned earlier, President Biden likening “MAGA Republicans” as extremist threats to the nation, the escalation by Democrats designating their political opponents as the “enemy” has been deliberate.

That said, while it’s vital to designate who the “enemy” is within this binary, it is equally important to identify who is a friend. Once again, the left excels at this.

Perhaps one of the most egregious historical examples of how the left “rewards friends” without a care for their moral failings is with Bill Ayers, the leader of the Weather Underground, an FBI-designated far-left Marxist domestic terrorist group. Not only did he participate in a rash of political bombings that injured and killed innocent people, but after his charges were dropped due to misconduct by the FBI, the University of Illinois had no issues hiring him as a professor.

Eventually, no doubt due to his radical leftist beliefs, Ayers even found a way to cross paths with then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Ideological friends tend to find themselves frequenting the same political circles. Most recently, Bill Ayers has been seen at a campus protest offering the violent “Free Palestine” movement his public support.

And if you think the friend/enemy distinction is relegated only to political theory, you should know that a lot of supposedly mainstream liberal organizations are directly offering their financial support to the campus protests, as well as other left-wing purveyors of street violence, such as Antifa and the environmentalists that have been blocking roads around the country. This is a highly coordinated effort utilizing specific tactics to undermine law and order to achieve radical political ends.

In electoral terms, in a moment of brutal honesty Obama specifically alluded to the friend/enemy distinction during an interview with Univision when discussing Latino voters.

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us’ — if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election — then I think it’s going to be harder. And that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on Nov. 2,” he said.

Obama’s statement clearly embodies the friend/enemy dynamic in political alliances and reflects how identity politics, despite many internal contradictions, is a highly effective way of signaling who is a friend and who is an enemy.

If you’re in a war and only your opponent is going on the offensive, you’re guaranteed to lose. To thrive and win in politics as it exists today, conservatives must wholeheartedly embrace the reality of obtaining and wielding political power within this friend/enemy binary. Like it or not, in politics, as in warfare, the distinction between friend and foe is an indispensable guiding principle, intricately shaping the contours of our modern political landscape.

For those on the political right, recognizing and embracing the friend/enemy distinction isn’t a mere choice; it’s a strategic imperative.

Last week, President Biden said he would withdraw military aid to Israel if it commenced military operations to go into Rafah and go after Hamas. There were many reactions to this announcement because it seemed to perfectly encapsulate the incoherent Israel policy the Biden administration has been developing since Hamas’ brutal attack last October that touched off the war in Gaza.

On one hand, the American people are broadly supportive of Israel and the moral justification for this war. Lest anyone forget, Hamas is still holding American citizens hostage at this very moment. On the other, the hard-left grassroots that are an important part of the Democrat Party’s coalition are radically pro-Palestinian and eager to engage in street violence domestically to prove the point. It’s also worth noting that the hard-left shock troops aren’t just emblematic of the party’s activist heart — their efforts to destabilize colleges and worse are being funded by George Soros, the Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and those that hold the purse strings for billions of dollars of funding for Democrats and their lefty causes.

The issue is drastically polarizing the Democratic coalition. For instance, normally America’s celebrities are engaged in overt social media campaigning for Democrats six months out from an election. Well, here’s a video of Jewish actor Michael Rapaport, an avowed Trump hater, unendorsing Biden in characteristically profane fashion.

Also, last week, rapper Macklemore released a banger of an old-school hip-hop track in support of the Palestinian protests, which isn’t a huge surprise given his antisemitic bona fides. (Hope the ADL feels good about defending Macklemore now!) Anyway, Macklemore’s song is primarily notable for one verse: “The blood is on your hands, Biden/ we can see it all/ and f-ck no/ I’m not votin’ for you in the fall.”

Of course, it seems pretty tawdry to look at a conflict where children are dying half a world away and view it through the lens of politics. However, examining this viewpoint may be necessary because politics is unmistakably determining policy here. Since the beginning of the Gaza war, the Biden administration has done little but try to follow the shifting political winds, hoping to find some Goldilocks zone between extremes in his coalition — and this is all being done with an eye toward November.

Biden has plainly flip-flopped on his support of Israel, his administration is making up reasons to withdraw support, there are no principles here, there’s no attempt to articulate and stake out a position, and there’s no attempt to lead. Meanwhile, the Gaza conflict has significantly disrupted global shipping and threatens to turn into a full war in the Middle East.

Like almost every other major challenge of his presidency, nay his entire political career, Biden’s approach has been defined by his incompetence. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” to quote Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Of course, when Biden was a senator and vice president, his terrible judgment wasn’t nearly as consequential. Now that he’s president, it’s a different story.

Biden wonders why he’s down in the polls. Biden’s incompetence on Israel and beyond is so evident that it’s far outstripping voters’ fear of the chaos that might accompany another Trump presidency.

Panic!

What’s more is that you can see the panic in real time. Even the compliant media are noticing. “Biden’s nuanced position [on Israel] has created different fault lines of division within his own Democratic Party,” observes NBC News. “Nuanced” is an odd way of describing what Biden is doing, especially since NBC’s own reporting indicates voters don’t view it that way:

“It’s starting to seem as if he is supporting the wrong side,” Dovid Jacobowitz, a Democrat from Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, told NBC News. Jacobowitz wouldn’t say if he’ll vote for Biden in November. 

Nasir Raza, an undecided voter from Scottsdale, Arizona, who voted for Biden in 2020, said the president’s shift in position on Israel “may be too late for a lot of people that I know,” but added: “I may yet still vote for Joe Biden if I see a complete cease-fire, if I see a hope for Palestinians to go on in there, to have their own rights and the homeland for themselves.”

Obviously, this is causing tremendous consternation among the pundit class, whose entire reason for being is opposing Trump. Jonah Goldberg has been quite vocal about his opposition to Donald Trump for many years, but for him to even acknowledge Biden is losing support results in angry anti-Trump pundits chastising those voters for not supporting Biden in spite of his terrible Israel policy.

On some level, the denial really is astonishing. Biden hasn’t led in the polls against Trump since last September. Insisting the voters are wrong to be concerned at this point is just asking to lose. Moreover, it ignores the possibility that voters are making a pretty rational choice.

Indeed, the Trump presidency was a lot of chaos. Some of that was Trump’s fault, but much of the chaos that surrounds him — such as the Russia hoax and the current spate of absurd and politically motivated criminal charges against him — is unfairly manufactured controversy. And on the issue dominating the news right now, foreign policy, Trump legitimately excelled.

The Abraham Accords achieved by the Trump administration were such a diplomatic success at building peace in the region that when Iran launched missiles at Israel last month, Jordan and Saudi Arabia helped shoot them down. That kind of collaboration between Israel and Arab states, let alone in the middle of a conflict with the Palestinians, would have been unthinkable not that many years ago.

On top of that, Trump was the first president since Carter not to start any new foreign wars — and he managed to maintain relative peace exhibiting serious strength against American adversaries, such as going after Russians in Syria and killing Iranian terror chief Qasem Soleimani.

And through all this, he was mocked by D.C.’s profoundly terrible foreign policy establishment, not to mention our free-riding European allies. Remember when Trump went to the UN and told the Germans not to become too dependent on Russian energy, and “German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas could be seen smirking alongside his colleagues”? Well, one new Ukraine war and an exploded Nordstream pipeline later, both of which happened on Joe Biden’s watch, who’s smirking now?

Cui Bono?

But foreign policy is just the start of bad news for Biden. There are other very significant issues right now, chiefly the economy and immigration, where a rational voter not bound by ideology would easily prefer Trump’s track record in the wake of Biden’s demonstrable failures. Indeed, the most recent New York Times poll, which has Trump leading in five of the six key swing states, notes that “Mr. Trump’s strength is largely thanks to gains among young, Black and Hispanic voters.” Not exactly the typical GOP demographic.

It seems a lot of voters don’t recall Trump’s presidency being as chaotic or miserable or, based on who’s supporting him in the polls, as racist as his opponents are convinced it was. Indeed, one way of judging Biden’s competence is simply a matter of cui bono.

If you’re a member of institutional Washington, the government gravy train is rolling along, and the fine folks at The Atlantic Council et al. have their fingers on the levers of foreign policy, and it’s all working out for them. The rest of the country is scared and not better off than it was during Trump’s presidency — or they were at least until Covid hysteria shut down the country. (Even now, somewhat incredibly, pro-Biden influencers think it’s a mark against Trump that he was trying to keep America’s schools open during Covid.)

Accordingly, in retrospect, Trump’s presidency looks like the inverse of Biden’s: Voters outside Washington felt safer and more prosperous, and the people who most acutely felt the pain and chaos of his presidency were inside the Beltway.  

But given Biden’s obvious age and mental acuity issues, Democrats were probably hoping they could once again stuff Biden in the basement and run a campaign focused on Trump and the circus around him. They might have gotten away with that if the economy weren’t in bad shape and the world wasn’t on fire. However, things are a mess, the buck now stops with the current resident of the White House, and voters need a positive reason to reelect the guy currently in office.

Based on how he’s handling Israel, along with every other big issue he’s faced, his incompetence is now the biggest issue in this election — and voters simply have a hard time believing at this point that Biden’s even capable of rising to the occasion.

UNC Chapel Hill Trustees Vote To Redirect DEI Money To Campus Safety Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), The board of trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has unanimously voted to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and instead use the millions of dollars to boost campus safety. A barricade protects the American flag at Polk Place at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C., on May 1, 2024. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images) At a special meeting on Monday morning to discuss budget plans, the board voted to divert the $2.3 million the university invests in DEI programs toward police and other public safety measures. The public university had an operating budget totaling more than $4 billion in the previous fiscal year. “I think that DEI, in a lot of people’s mind, is divisiveness, exclusion, and …

Transitioning Fleet Trucks To Electric Raises Costs By Up To 114 Percent, Report Warns Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Transitioning conventional truck fleets to electric vehicles (EVs) pushes up annual operational costs, which subsequently increases economic inflation, according to a recent report from transportation and logistics firm Ryder. Florida-based Ryder analyzed the potential cost of transportation if internal combustion engine trucks are converted to EVs. There is a 5 percent cost increase for light-duty EVs and a 94–114 percent increase for heavy-duty trucks, the May 8 report states. For a fleet of 25 mixed vehicles—light-, medium-, and heavy-duty trucks—costs surge by 56–67 percent. As transportation costs have a direct bearing on the price of goods sold in markets across the country, Ryder estimates such increases to eventually add about 0.5–1 percent to overall price inflation in the economy. “There are …

For years, President Joe Biden was flying west to east with the prevailing winds, economically speaking. During Covid, politicians (primarily Democrats) closed down large portions of the economy. When Covid ended, the economy “grew” because that’s what happens when you go from a partially closed economy to an entirely open one.

Why economists fail to recognize this easy-growth environment is befuddling. Now, in rapid succession, we have a weak GDP report, poor jobs and unemployment reports, another terrible fiscal report, and more awful inflation reports. Horrible data that even the pro-Biden media can’t cover up.

The truth is that Biden’s economic numbers were never any good. And now that the easy-growth environment of the post-Covid era is well behind us, Biden — and the country — face a terrible economic reckoning.

Biden’s Economic ‘Growth’ Has Always Been a Mirage

Before Covid, U.S. GDP reached $20.95 trillion and the Trump administration was achieving real GDP growth of about 2.8 percent annually. Had that rate of growth continued, it would today yield a real GDP of $23.56 trillion. The United States is not close to that number. In fact, first-quarter 2024 GDP reflects annual growth of less than 2 percent from the pre-Covid GDP.

Now, if the U.S. economic situation had deteriorated in 2020 because of long-term fundamental weaknesses, Biden’s so-called “growth” might not look so bad. But that is not what happened. Politicians artificially closed down a strong economy.

When the economy reopened, competent leadership would have gotten us quickly back to where we should have been all along. Instead, we got Biden and people like Jared Bernstein — Biden’s music major-turned-chief economic-adviser who literally has no idea what he’s talking about.

The Trump Administration Accomplished Most of the Covid Recovery

As it turns out, the Trump administration did most of the heavy lifting during the Covid recovery. From the depths of the Covid crisis (Q2 2020) through the end of Trump’s term, real GDP rose by about $1.69 trillion in just six months. Under Biden, GDP has grown by about $2 trillion. But that took Biden 39 months. 

Real GDP does not tell the whole story because it is adjusted for inflation but not population growth. All things being equal, a society of 11 people should have a higher GDP than a society of 10. Under the Trump recovery, real per capita GDP increased by $5,028 in just six months. Under Biden, per capita GDP has increased by about the same amount ($5,291) in three-plus years. The Trump administration added $2,514 per quarter back to real per capita GDP compared to Biden’s $407 per quarter — six times stronger performance.

One might argue that Trump benefited as well from the same easy-growth environment during this period. Not so. Many of the government-enforced business closures and restrictions remained in place throughout 2020, the end of Trump’s term.

Moreover, Covid vaccines — a catalyst for much of the “return to normalcy,” particularly in Democrat-controlled localities — did not become widely available until well into 2021. Thus, Trump began rebuilding GDP even while the economy remained partially closed. By contrast, Biden has benefitted from an entirely open economy for several years. In any event, even if both men received the benefit of reopenings, Trump took advantage of it and outperformed Biden six to one.

The Airplane Has Been Losing Altitude for More Than a Year

Under Biden, cumulative inflation is 20 percent. Everyone is aware of the painfully high prices for everything. The Biden administration and its media allies have facially done a better job hiding myriad other distressing economic realities. I say “facially” because Americans nonetheless intuitively understand that the Biden economy is awful.

Employment has been bad for more than a year. Last year at this time, 134.4 million Americans had full-time jobs. That number has dropped to 133.9 million. A declining full-time workforce is not a sign of a healthy economy.

Moreover, the true employment level has always been masked by poor labor force participation data under Biden. Labor participation is an important number because it measures the percentage of Americans who are working. By contrast, the unemployment rate does not measure the percentage of Americans actually unemployed because it excludes from its calculation unemployed people who are no longer looking for work.

Labor force participation was trending upward under Trump before lockdowns. And, post-lockdowns, the Trump administration added 1.4 percent back to labor participation in just eight months. The Biden administration has added just 1.2 percent back to labor participation over the last 39 months. Labor participation still hasn’t fully recovered under Biden and remains below its pre-lockdown level. In fact, labor participation has actually declined under Biden over the last eight months.

According to court data, total bankruptcy filings increased by 16.8 percent in 2023. Business bankruptcies increased by a whopping 40 percent. Similar increases in U.S. bankruptcy filings were reported again in the first quarter of 2024.

Over the last year, six major U.S. banks have failed. In truth, bank failures are not that uncommon. However, the Biden bank failures are unique. By asset size, three of the four largest bank failures in U.S. history — Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, and Signature Bank — have occurred in just the last year. For context, according to a Forbes analysis, the 157 banks that failed in 2010 due to the mortgage crisis combined had less than one-half the assets of either Silicon Valley Bank or First Republic Bank alone.    

Even the GDP numbers that Biden touts have, in reality, been rocky and poor for quite some time. Over the last nine calendar quarters, the United States has experienced two quarters of negative growth (-2.0 percent, -0.6 percent), the most recent quarter of poor growth (1.6 percent), and four additional quarters below the Trump pre-lockdown average of 2.8 percent.

Average annualized growth under Biden across all of the last nine quarters has been an anemic 1.9 percent. That is low. But it is astonishingly low in an economy that moved from partially closed to entirely open.

The Parachutes Are Disappearing

At the same time Biden was wrecking the economy, he was also wrecking our available solutions to economic problems. The United States has a consumer economy. It depends on consumer spending to thrive. Because of Biden, consumers do not have money to spend.

Real median household income has dropped under Biden from $76,600 to $74,580, according to the most recent data. For context, under Trump, median household income increased from $70,840 to $76,660, and that includes the worst Covid period. During his so-called “recovery,” Biden took $2,020 out of American paychecks. Americans no longer earn enough to spend our way out of a bad economy.  

Before lockdowns, personal savings in the U.S. increased each year under Trump from $746 billion in 2016 to $1.2 trillion in 2019. Personal savings peaked at $2.7 trillion in 2020 during lockdowns. Under Biden, savings have plummeted below pre-lockdown levels to $911 billion as Americans have tried to keep up with inflation. Americans no longer have enough savings to spend our way out of a bad economy.

Under Biden, credit card debt skyrocketed from $717 billion in 2021 to $1.13 trillion in 2023. In December 2023, credit card delinquency rates hit their highest level in over a decade. Under Biden, interest rates on credit cards, auto loans, and home mortgages have hovered at decades-long highs.

This means people are paying more in the future for things that they already purchased in the past, leaving them with less for future consumption. Americans no longer have enough credit to spend our way out of a bad economy.

The savings and debt trends are problematic not only going forward but also looking back. They show that Biden’s growth numbers — as lackluster as they are — were artificially supported by draining savings and racking up debt. Stealing from the future is not a healthy way to maintain short-term economic “growth.”

Even the left’s preferred, albeit usually wrongheaded and always misapplied, Keynesian solution — i.e., government deficit spending — is off the table. Put aside that this is one of the things that put us in this inflationary predicament in the first place. Further, put aside that three additional American generations now know this to be true based on lived experience. The fact is that, in just three years, Biden has incurred more national debt than any other president has incurred in four full years in office.

To compound matters, interest rates on the federal debt — like all other interest rates — have skyrocketed with Bidenflation. This year, simply paying interest on the debt will surpass national defense as the government’s third-largest spending program. The government can no longer spend our way out of a bad economy even in a Keynesian fantasyland.  

The next president will be flying east to west into severe Bidenomics headwinds.

Joseph LoBue is a retired Naval officer and attorney.

Poland’s Border Fortification Buildup Has Nothing To Do With Legitimate Threat Perceptions Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack, Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz announced last week that his country will build bunkers and trenches along its border with Russia and Belarus, which was followed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk confirming that security will be bolstered, including on anti-illegal immigrant pretexts. The reality though is that this development has nothing to do with legitimate threat perceptions since Russia isn’t going to invade Poland while Tusk’s liberal-globalist coalition government favors illegal immigrants. The premier has sought to appeal to Polish patriotism since January in order to distract from his country’s domestic political crisis and its comprehensive subordination to Germany under his rule. To that end, he’s hyped up the Ukrainian cause in parallel with fearmongering about World War III, which he predicts could happen through an impending Russian invasion of NATO. What he always dishonestly ignores, however, is …

US Says Putin’s Dramatic Cabinet Reshuffle Smacks Of ‘Desperation’ The Biden administration has reacted to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s significant cabinet shake-up announced Sunday, wherein Putin tapped Andrey Belousov, a former deputy prime minister who specializes in economics, to move into the position of defense minister. Sergei Shoigu meanwhile has been moved to head Russia’s Security Council at the expense of Nikolai Patrushev. Shoigu can be seen as having in essence been given a promotion. This big shuffle was unexpected, and the surprise has been registered in European capitals and Washington, with the US saying that this shows signs of “desperation” for Moscow sustaining the high costs of the Ukraine invasion. “Our point of view is that this is further indication of Putin’s desperation to sustain his war of aggression against Ukraine, despite it being a major drain on the Russian economy and the heavy losses of Russian troops, with …

1000s Of Islamists Protest Against ‘Censorship’ After Calls For A Caliphate In Germenay Are Banned Authored by Thomas Brooke via ReMix News, The Salafist group organizers claimed unfair censorship after strict conditions were imposed on Muslims calling for a caliphate in Germany and against anti-Semitic rhetoric… Thousands of Islamists took to the streets of Hamburg again on Saturday for what organizers called a “defense of Islamic values” in the face of political intimidation and media censorship. The protest was organized by Muslim Interaktiv, a group under investigation by Hamburg’s domestic intelligence agency for “extremism.” It claimed on its social media accounts that over 6,000 Muslims had turned out to participate, although police estimates put the figure closer to 2,300. The demonstration was in response to recent attempts by German politicians to restrict the group’s activities after a recent march in the port city sparked outrage …

WHO Makes Key Concessions Ahead Of Pandemic Treaty Vote Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), The World Health Organization (WHO) has watered down some provisions of its pandemic agreements ahead of the upcoming World Health Assembly on May 27. Critics in the United States, however, say the changes don’t do enough to address the concerns over the policy. Provisions in prior drafts of the WHO pandemic treaty and International Health Regulations (IHRs) together aimed to effectively centralize and increase the power of the WHO if it declares a “health emergency.” The release of the latest draft of the amendments, dated April 17, are the first public update on the IHR draft, which was initially made public early 2023. “In most areas, and for all of those which most concerned us from a legal perspective, the interim draft reflects a major retreat by …

South Korea Still Dominates The World With The Highest Density Of Robot Workers China’s huge investment in industrial robotics has made it one of the most automated nations on the planet in the space of just a few short years. As Statista’s Anna Fleck reports, according to the latest study by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), the number of operational robots in China’s manufacturing industry reached a ratio of 392 units per 10,000 employees in 2022, a robot density now similar to that of Japanese industry. China currently ranks fifth in the world, behind South Korea (1,012 per 10,000 employees), Singapore (730), Germany (415) and Japan (397). As the following infographic shows, China and South Korea are the countries that have made the most progress in the race to industrial automation in recent years. You will find more infographics at Statista In Europe, robot density has seen a pretty big jump in Swiss industry, …

Which Countries Have The Highest Infant Mortality Rates? Infant mortality rates are generally regarded as the barometer of an overall population’s health. A higher rate indicates unmet needs of a population, especially with regards to food availability and sanitation. Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao visualized the top 15 countries with the highest infant mortality rates, according to 2023 estimates from the CIA World Factbook. It is measured as the number of infant deaths under the age of one, per 1,000 live births in a given year. ℹ️ Comoros has been excluded from the map for visibility reasons. Ranked: Countries With the Highest Infant Mortality Rates Afghanistan currently has the highest infant mortality rate in the world at 103 deaths per 1,000 babies born. Decades of conflict have pushed the country to the brink and a prolonged drought since 2021 has made food more scarce. …

Go Nuts About Nuts To Help Keep Cancer At Bay Authored by Alexandra Roach via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), In their many variations, nuts are a superfood praised as rich sources of minerals, vitamins, amino acids, proteins, and other bioactive compounds. (Pavel Kalenik/Unsplash) Chestnuts are champions for vitamin C, for instance. Pistachios contain the most vitamin A and potassium. Both are high in folic acid. Cashews enrich us with magnesium. The level of vitamin B3 (niacin) is the highest in peanuts, and vitamin E (tocopherol) is found in almonds. Walnuts are especially high in alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), a neuroprotective omega-3 fatty acid important for normal growth and development. It also has been shown to induce apoptosis (programmed death of cells) in breast cancer cells. Our bodies cannot produce ALA, hence, nutritional intake is a must, as it is with many other key nutrients. Research Supports …

Services No Longer Required: Which Jobs Are Most At Risk? Long before the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI tools threatening to take over our jobs, technological advancements have altered the way people work, making some occupations disappear, while others emerged. Did you know, for example, that people used to work as living alarm clocks before actual alarm clocks became a thing? “Knocker uppers”, as they were called, would walk around in industrial England, wielding a long stick with which they’d tap on workers’ doors to wake them in time for their shifts. There also used to be “computers” long before the arrival of personal computers. They were persons performing mathematical calculations, a service that is no longer required today. So which jobs might be next? As Statista’s Felix Richter reports, each year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its Occupational Employment Projections – a report that’s looking at …

Oil – A Global Tax Authored by Robert Burrows via BondVigilantes.com, Few commodities wield as much influence in the intricate web of global economics as oil. Oil is pivotal in driving economic growth and development as the primary energy source for transportation, manufacturing, and countless other sectors. However, beneath its surface lies a hidden truth: oil can act as a tax on growth, imposing significant costs on economies worldwide.  The Economic Impact of Oil Prices Oil prices have a profound impact on virtually every aspect of the economy: 1. Cost of Production: For industries reliant on oil as a primary input, such as transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture, fluctuations in oil prices directly influence production costs. Higher oil prices translate into increased business expenses, squeezing profit margins and potentially leading to higher prices for goods and services. 2. Consumer Spending: Rising oil prices can have a ripple effect on consumer spending patterns. As the …

How Americans Feel About Federal Government Agencies Come election time, America won’t hesitate to show its approval or disapproval of the country’s elected political representatives. That said, feelings about the federal bureaucracy and its associated agencies are a little harder to gauge. Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao charts the results from an opinion poll conducted by Pew Research Center between March 13-19, 2023. In it, 10,701 adults—a representative of the U.S. adult population—were asked whether they felt favorably or unfavorably towards 16 different federal government agencies. ℹ️ Access Pew Research’s methodology document to find out how they conducted their survey. Americans Love the Park Service, Are Divided Over the IRS Broadly speaking, 14 of the 16 federal government agencies garnered more favorable responses than unfavorable ones. Of them, the Parks Service, Postal Service, and NASA all had the approval of more than 70% of the respondents. …

Pressure On China Heightens As Capital Outflow Chokes Liquidity Authored by Simon Black, Bloomberg macro strategist, The latest money data from China shows its capital-outflow problem is worsening, pressuring policymakers to allow a further weakening in the currency. China released money and inflation data over the weekend. CPI and PPI were not great reading, but money supply data was even more downbeat: M2’s growth disappointed, while M1 growth is moldering, falling 1.4% year-on-year versus +1.2% expected. Real M1 growth is now also contracting, which is ominous for China’s thus far gingerly-improving growth. China has a capital-outflow problem that is putting pressure on liquidity. It has a nominally closed capital account, but we can infer capital outflow by looking at the difference between the trade surplus and official reserves at the central bank, plus FX held at other banks. …

Man Who Attacked Times Square Police Officers With Machete Sentenced To 27 Years Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), A federal judge has handed down a 27-year prison sentence to the suspect who pleaded guilty to attacking a trio of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 2022 in the name of radical Islamic extremism. A file photograph of a judge’s gavel. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Trevor Bickford, 20, of Wells, Maine, pleaded guilty in January to multiple counts of attempting three attempted murder charges and three charges of assaulting U.S. employees or officers just over a year prior on Dec. 31, 2022. Together, the charges carried a maximum potential penalty of up to 120 years in prison. On Thursday, May 9, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel sentenced Mr. Bickford to serve 324 months in prison for …

“Combat Illegal Corporate Behavior” – Dem Lawmakers Urge Biden To Use Executive Action Against High Food Prices  Greedflation is a myth, and Democrats are well aware of this. However, they will never acknowledge that corporate greed isn’t the root cause of inflation, as greed tends to be constant in the economy. What changed is the overstimulation of the economy through failed Bidenomics, which involves spending $1 trillion every 100 days.  In the early days of Russia’s ‘special operation’ in Ukraine, the Biden administration was able to scapegoat any failed economic policy on the ‘Putin Price Hike’ narrative – but not so much anymore – as they’ve pivoted the propaganda cannon from Putin to mega-corporations through their cheerleaders at leftist corporate media outlets. Now it’s all about popular buzzwords ‘greedflation’ and ‘shrinkflation.’  Shown below via Bloomberg data, headlines featuring ‘greedflation’ in corporate media spiked in the summer of 2023, right around the time the administration launched the Bidenomics propaganda …

‘I Gave Up Shame Years Ago’: Clinton Denounces Trump For Doing What She Did In 2016 Authored by Jonathan Turley, “I gave up shame years ago.” Those words from actor John Lithgow appear to have been taken to heart by Hillary Clinton who has severed any sense of self-awareness or shame in her public comments. Lithgow, who played Bill Clinton in Broadway production of Hillary and Clinton, appears to have inspired the subject of his play. In a recent interview, Hillary Clinton heralded the prosecution of former president Donald Trump in Manhattan as “election interference” by keeping “relevant information” from voters before an election. For those of us who criticized Clinton for the funding of the infamous Steele dossier, it was a perfectly otherworldly moment. In the interview, Clinton went after the Supreme Court for delaying a trial of Trump despite the push by Special Counsel …

Pro-Israel PAC Guns For Massie – Did Speaker Johnson Encourage Attack? A prominent pro-Israel super PAC is gunning for Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, in retribution for his many recent votes against bills that advance Israel’s agenda in Washington. The group may have had some high-placed encouragement: Massie says House Speaker Mike Johnson recently threatened to sic the Israel lobby on Republicans who didn’t toe the pro-Israel line.  In March 2020, Massie explains his effort to prevent a massive Covid stimulus package from being adopted without a recorded vote (Susan Walsh-AP)  The vaguely-named United Democracy Project — the independent campaign-spending arm of the mighty American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — announced that it’s pouring $300,000 into advertisements on Fox television affiliates in Massie’s home state of Kentucky. “We are trying to shine a light on the radical anti-Israel record of Tom Massie,” spokesman Patrick Dorton told …

Will The Fed Lose Control? Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity, According to new reports from the Social Security and Medicare trustees, Social Security and a Medicare fund that pays for hospital expenses will both begin running deficits in 2035 and 2036. Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, Congress was too preoccupied spending billions more on military aid for foreign countries and banning TikTok to pay attention to the looming bankruptcy of the two largest federal entitlement programs. Many in Congress no doubt believe they can ignore the impending bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare because they can count on the Federal Reserve to do the “dirty work” of cutting real benefits and raising taxes. This result can be produced via the hidden, and regressive, “inflation tax.” The Federal Reserve makes the debt-financed welfare-warfare state possible by monetizing the federal debt. …

“Sand Volcano” Emerges In Central Florida Devo Seereeram, a Consulting Geotechnical Engineer and the owner of Devo Engineering has deemed the anomaly that has emerged in Central Florida to be a “sand volcano”.  The issue surfaced at a 300-million-gallon wastewater reservoir located west of State Road 429 in Apopka, near Golden Gem Road. This facility holds water intended for irrigating Apopka, Altamonte Springs, and nearby regions. It stores excess rainwater for use during dry periods, according to FOX 35. But mother earth has responded that the facility may not be located at the best possible location, Seereeram said: “This is ‘Mother Nature’ telling us we can’t do certain things, and we are going to respect that and respond and modify.” Speaking about the facility, Seereeram continued: “It’s one of the most important facilities we can be built in Central Florida. From an environmental standpoint, there’s absolutely no way we can keep putting …

Leftists Triggered By Trump Policy To Potentially Execute Child Sex-Traffickers Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, Leftist outlet The Huffington Post is upset that Donald Trump has suggested that the death penalty should be extended to drug kingpins and child sex traffickers. In an article headlined “There’s A GOP Plan For An Execution Spree If Trump Wins The White House,” the outlet points to remarks Trump made two years ago. The Huffington Post is freaking out that #DonaldTrump allies are planning to expand the #deathpenalty to include sexual abuse of children – There’s A #GOP Plan For An Execution #Spree If Trump Wins The White House – https://t.co/07ovo9g9Sv — Jeff Hertzog (@_jeffhertzog) May 11, 2024 He stated that while it “sounds horrible” to advocate for the death penalty, countries that don’t have a “drug problem” are “those that institute a very quick trial, death penalty sentence” for traffickers. “You …

Fast Casual Dining Foot Traffic “Plummets” Across New York-New Jersey As Consumer Cracks  The cost-of-living squeeze is crushing low-income consumers, so much that Goldman’s top consumer trader, Scott Feiler, recently pointed out that his desk is “getting bearish on consumer and our soft landing basket.” Days ago, Goldman analysts led by Bonnie Herzog provided clients with a fascinating list of corporate America’s warnings about mounting cracks materializing in the consumer space.  A Bloomberg report, citing new data from research firm Black Box Intelligence, continues the theme of the low-income consumer under severe financial stress. This data shows that fast-casual dining foot traffic across New York and New Jersey has abruptly plunged into early spring.  The slide in foot traffic comes as Red Lobster is considering a bankruptcy filing, and TGI Friday’s is in distress, closing stores and working with Guggenheim Partners to address its debt problem as sales decline.  Moody’s Ratings wrote in a …

Trump Tells Massive Crowd: “Day One” Executive Order Will Target Offshore Wind To Save Whales Former President Trump revealed at a large rally on Saturday evening in Wildwood, New Jersey, that if re-elected, he would sign an executive order on his first day in office to address offshore wind development along the East Coast.  Trump told a crowd of thousands that windmills are killing whales and fish. He pointed out that only a small number of whales died before wind farm developments, but now, whales are dying “all the time.”  A dead humpback whale washed up at Atlantic City on Jan 7, and was observed to have head trauma (via @AtlanticCity911 on Twitter)  “We are going to make sure that that ends on day one,” he said, adding, “I’m going to write it out in an executive order.” Made the claim back in 2022 President Trump would end offshore …

Squeezed For Decades, America’s Working Class Is Finally Up Against The Wall Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, The net result is America’s working class is up against the wall, maxed out. Let’s start by defining the working class in a meaningful way rather than by tossing around meaningless income metrics which implicitly suggest that exceeding some semi-arbitrary income bracket will magically lift a working class household into the middle class. In the real world, in terms of class status it doesn’t matter whether the household income is $30,000 or $130,000; what matters is 1) ownership of assets that have bubbled higher in the Everything Bubble which then provide a buffer of wealth that can be tapped when misfortune strikes, and 2) a cost of living that is consistently and significantly lower than net income, enabling regular savings. In other words, a household earning $130,000 that owns negligible assets / wealth buffers and consumes every dollar …

“If Mr. Trump Is Hitler, Think Of Newsom As Godzilla With Hair Gel…” Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com, Monster Mash-Up “My take is that the US is incredibly unstable right now, and could go in almost any imaginable direction between now and the election, as well as some unimaginable ones.” – John Michael Greer Did you notice that it took just a little bit of internal chaos to alert the Party of Chaos that maybe chaos wasn’t the greatest thing to be the party of? Something went awry the past two weeks when thousands of creamy coeds on every campus across America donned the keffiyeh and, in effect, demanded submission to history’s most notorious misogynist cult. It struck a most cacophonous chord among progressives, like Kumbaya as orchestrated by Karlheinz Stockhausen. To awaken from Wokery, you see, is a brutal shock to the brain. And so, …

Hedge Funds Hammered As ‘Roaring Kitty’ Returns; Bitcoin & Black Gold Bid The return of ‘Roaring Kitty’ sent GME soaring higher (up 110% at its highs)… Source: Bloomberg …and prompted squeezes/panic-covering across the ‘most shorted’ names and ‘retail favorites (memes)’ soared… Source: Bloomberg As John Flood noted from Goldman’s trading desk: “GS Most Short Rolling basket in focus having a top 5 move over the past 5 Years (3.3std).” Source: Bloomberg Volume/activity has been abysmal recently and today was no better with overall activity levels -7% vs the trailing two weeks average. HF buy skew sticks out @ +16.6% unsurprisingly, that’s 97th %-ile & the highest level in 6wks.  Covering most acute …

Turkey Treating Over 1,000 Wounded Hamas Members In Hospitals: Erdogan The NATO country with the second largest military in the alliance has just admitted to aiding and abetting a US-designated terror organization. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in surprisingly frank statements acknowledged that Turkey is currently treating over 1,000 Hamas members in various hospitals across the country. In the remarks he stressed that Turkey does not consider them terrorists, but as part of a “resistance movement” against Israel. Via AFP Also surprising is that such an admission, which is sure to anger other Western allies, came as Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was on an official visit with Erdogan in the capital city of Ankara. “Hamas is a resistance organization whose lands have been occupied since 1947, and it has protected its lands after the occupation,” Erdoğan said, clashing …

What’s The Inflation Rate Under Biden Vs 7 Previous Presidents? Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com, Voters seem angry about inflation despite economists telling us how great things are. A few pictures explain. Why Biden Is Losing on the Economy The Wall Street Journal comments on Why Biden Is Losing on the Economy Democrats and the press keep telling Americans that they don’t know how good they have it. The U.S. economy is great, Bidenomics is the reason, and don’t worry, be happy. Yet the voters, those numbskulls, keep telling pollsters they don’t feel the boom and they don’t approve of President Biden’s economic performance. If our friends on the left want to stop berating voters and admit reality, they might look at the chart nearby from Dan Clifton of Strategas Research Partners. It compares the average annual consumer-price inflation rate across the first term of the …

“An Absolute Disaster”: Media Freaks As Trump Dominates Battleground States A new set of polls reveals that Donald Trump is leading President Biden in five out of six critical battleground states, as young and nonwhite voters grow increasingly dissatisfied with the current president. The surveys, from the New York Times, Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer found that Trump is smoking Biden in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania, while Biden is barely clinging to Wisconsin. The top grievances among disaffected voters are cost of living, immigration, and the war in Gaza, in what the NY Times characterizes as “widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the country and serious doubts about Mr. Biden’s ability to deliver major improvements to American life.” Nearly 70 percent of voters say that the country’s political and economic systems need major changes — or even to be torn down …

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has a history of using lawfare to target people who want to protect unborn babies, is furthering her campaign against pro-lifers by suing nearly a dozen pregnancy centers for offering women abortion pill reversals.

In a complaint filed at the beginning of May, James alleged Heartbeat International and 11 pregnancy centers, including one firebombed by abortion terrorists following the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson draft decision, made “false and misleading statements” about life-saving treatments used to reverse attempted abortions induced by mifepristone. She said that offering women who decided they did not want to complete their chemical abortions a safe way out amounts to “fraud, deceptive business practices, and false advertising under New York law.”

The timing of James’ lawsuit is no coincidence. She not only sued the defendants in question after they sued for relief from her “politically motivated campaign,” but she also timed the lawsuit to make headlines as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) likely violated the law when it approved abortion pills, which are responsible for more than half of the nation’s abortions, for mail order and other expansions.

“Based on NY AG Letitia James’ irresponsible record of protecting big abortion, it appears that her lawsuit against us is a smokescreen to obscure the rampant malpractice and fraud that is the chemical abortion industry ahead of an anticipated June Supreme Court decision on that very subject,” CompassCare CEO Rev. Jim Harden said in a statement.

James also falsely claimed abortion pill reversal (APR) is not “backed by science and does not meet clinical standards” because the “only clinical trial conducted to evaluate APR had to be halted due to concerns about patient safety.”

Several studies have determined that increasing intramuscular and high-dose oral progesterone in women who ingest the abortion drug regimen and regret it is “safe and effective” and resulted in “no apparent increased risk of birth defects.”

James is correct that the University of California, Davis researchers who conducted a 2019 study on abortion pill reversal canceled their work, citing the “risk to women.” The “risk” in question, however, came after three of the 12 women who took mifepristone, the abortion drug, for the sake of the study “required ambulance transport to a hospital for treatment of severe vaginal bleeding.” Two of them hadn’t ingested any reversal drug.

James’ targeting of pregnancy centers over a life-saving treatment that she says lacks “safety and effectiveness” is ironic given the abortion pill’s proven history of causing dangerous and sometimes fatal complications.

Mifepristone is responsible for a 500 percent increase in abortion-related emergency room visits for side effects such as hemorrhage, “fast, weak pulse,” “shortness of breath,” diarrhea, dizziness, headache, vomiting, “pain” across the back, arms, neck, and abdomen, and myriad other risks. The FDA even admits on the drug’s label that nearly 1 in 25 women who take it will end up in the emergency room or hospitalized.

A peer-reviewed article published this month found that the FDA used “flawed studies with significantly undercounted complications” when it quietly modified its regulation to allow abortion pills via remote prescription, mail-order, and chain pharmacy pickup to accommodate the Biden White House’s post-Roe activism.

“This will increase the risk of complications due to failure to adequately determine the gestational age or rule out ectopic pregnancy by ultrasound or physical exam, failure to perform labs to document whether RhoGAM is indicated, and failure to obtain appropriate informed consent to prevent unwanted abortions, among other concerns,” the article’s authors warn.

As James continues her conquest against pro-lifers and pregnancy centers that give women the hope and support they need to nurture and raise surprise babies, New York is preparing to earmark $36 million of the state’s 2025 budget to advance Democrats’ abortion agenda.

The budget, approved by Gov. Kathy Hochul at the end of April, sets aside $25 million in taxpayer dollars for abortion nonprofits to expand their efforts to kill preborn babies. The governor also appropriated $10 million in security grants to abortion facilities “to help ensure the safety of the providers performing this vital care.”

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

With “Exceptionalism” Like This, Who Needs Enemies? Authored by Peter Tchir via Academy Securities, Last weekend we suggested that “I Like My Exceptionalism to Be Exceptional” and highlighted data that was anything but exceptional. As the Citi Economic Surprise Index continues to fall, and CONsumer CONfidence showed anything but confidence, it seemed like a good idea to add to last weekend’s theme. More on “Exceptionalism” In Jobs Let’s start with “full-time” jobs. Full and part-time jobs come from the “Household” part of the NFP data. From my perspective, full-time jobs are more important than part-time jobs. There are certainly other views on the matter, but I prefer full-time jobs. I find a few things “interesting” on this chart (and by interesting, I mean less than exceptional). Depending on the time horizon, we are below trend growth in full-time jobs (this time horizon captures that). …

At Least 360,000 Flee Rafah As Israel Touts ‘Precision Operation’ Against Biden Criticism An estimated 360,000 Gazans have fled the southern city of Rafah as the Israel Defense Forces concentrate a ground operation on the eastern half of the city, the main UN aid agency UNRWA says. This figure is likely to grow higher by the day as IDF tanks and ground units press forward. The official Palestinian death toll, issued by the Hamas-run Health Ministry, has surpassed 35,000 – tallied at 35,091 Gazans killed and other 78,827 wounded since Oct.7. The last 24 hours of fighting has seen 57 killed and 82 injured, according to the figures. Anadolu Agency Gaza’s health system is “hours away” from collapse, the health ministry has told international aid groups and news outlets, due primarily to fuel shipments being not getting into the Strip amid fighting. Hospitals and clinics rely …

Biden Calls Illegals Crossing The Border “Hispanic Voters” Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, In a telling slip of the tongue earlier this week, Joe Biden referred to the unprecedented rise in illegal immigrants entering the US as an “influx” of “Hispanic voters.” During an interview with a Spanish radio show, Biden was talking about the border crisis, and stated “It’s even a bigger influx now in terms of Hispanic voters, or Hispanic – Hispanic citizens, who want to become citizens.” Listen: In a telling slip of the tongue earlier this week, Joe Biden referred to the unprecedented rise in illegal immigrants entering the US as an “influx” of “Hispanic voters.” Full report here: https://t.co/FYpTpE1j1m pic.twitter.com/ybcjVggVih — m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) May 11, 2024 ILLEGAL ALIENS! Looks like Dementia Joe had a Freudian slip. He told the …

Melinda Gates Abruptly Quits Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Melinda Gates revealed on X that she is resigning as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with her final day being June 7. “After careful thought and reflection, I have decided to resign from my role as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. My last day of work at the foundation will be June 7th.” She plans to focus on her own philanthropic efforts, supported by a $12.5 billion grant. Gates said: She continued: Gates explained more about her new chapter in life:  Let’s examine the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in depth. Here, data from the research …

Why The Establishment Fears A Trump-Led Fed Via SchiffGold.com, While in office, Trump blamed the Fed for tightening monetary policy. Now members of Trump’s team allegedly plan to give a re-elected Trump more power over the Fed, igniting panic from mainstream economists about a politicized Fed. Our guest commentator explains why the real risk, from the establishment’s perspective, is not that Trump will turn the Fed into a political organization but that he will expose that it already is one. The following article was originally published by the Mises Institute. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold. Discourse about the Federal Reserve is frequently full of myths, dishonest framing, and outright lies. Listen to a press conference by Chairman Jerome Powell or read an article from a major outlet’s lead Fed correspondent and you’re bound to hear at least a few. For instance, it’s common …

Ukraine Admits Frontlines In Kharkiv Are Collapsing  For the first time since Russia launched its major cross-border offensive into Ukraine’s Kharkiv region (it began last Friday), Ukraine’s government has acknowledged that Moscow forces have made rapid gains. Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the military administration of the Kharkov Region, has said Russia is pushing past the frontline. “Essentially, the frontline is expanding as the enemy is advancing from multiple positions,” he admitted during an interview with Sky News. Via AP Sinegubov blamed the delay in Western arms reaching frontline positions, explaining that “We feel it, and our soldiers on the battlefield feel it. We have been conducting a defensive operation for practically six months, awaiting new supplies. And, of course, the enemy outweighs us in armaments – not in quality but in quantity.” This assessment of Ukrainian lines collapsing in Kharkiv region is consistent with the latest Kremlin …

Rep. Mills Files Articles Of Impeachment Against Biden For Withholding Israel Aid Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com, Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) formally filed articles of impeachment against President Biden on Friday due to his recent comments about withholding deliveries of heavy bombs to Israel if it launches a major attack on “population centers” in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. Mills compared his move with the 2019 impeachment of then-President Donald Trump for briefly delaying weapons shipments to Ukraine and claimed Biden abused his power by trying to leverage military aid to get Israel to change its military tactics. Rep. Cory Mills “In violation of his oath to faithfully execute the office of President and to uphold the Constitution, President Biden abused the powers of his office by soliciting a ‘quid pro quo’ with Israel while leveraging vital military aid for policy changes,” Mills said in a statement, according …

Household Finance Fears Worst Since COVID As Inflation Expectations Surged In April, NY Fed Survey Finds Well if Fed Chair Powell couldn’t see the ‘flation’ before, perhaps he can now… After flatlining around 3.,0% for the last four months the median one-year-ahead inflation expectations increased to 3.3%, according to The New York Fed’s April Survey of Consumer Expectations. They also increased to 2.8 percent from 2.6 percent at the five-year-ahead horizon, while decreasing to 2.8 percent from 2.9 percent at the three-year horizon. Home price expectations ticked up to 3.3 percent after seven consecutive months at 3.0 percent, reaching their highest level since July 2022. Consumers also anticipated faster price growth for gasoline, food, medical care, a college education and rents, according to the New York Fed survey. The data follow a string of reports that have indicated sticky inflation and a relentless run-up …

Jen Psaki Claims Biden Never Looked At Watch, Suggests Gold Star Parents Lied You know it’s bad when Axios is calling out Jen Psaki for lying about President Biden checking his watch during a ceremony for soldiers killed during the botched 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. In her new book, “Say More,” the former White House press secretary claims that Biden looked at his watch only after the ceremony had ended, contradicting fact-checks (even Snopes) and on-the-record statements from Gold Star families who were there. Psaki says Biden critics were engaged in “misinformation” and used the image to make “him appear insensitive, concerned only about how much time had passed.” The Associated Press photographer on the tarmac snapped two photos of Biden looking at his watch twice and 10 minutes …

Lindsey Graham Suggests Nuking Iran And Hamas Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, Warmonger in chief Lindsey Graham suggested Sunday that Israel, with the help of the US, should use nuclear weapons on Iran and Hamas fighters in Palestinian territories. Appearing on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” the Republican Senator asked “Why did we drop two bombs, nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” “To end a war that we couldn’t afford to lose,” Graham continued, adding “You don’t understand, apparently, what Israel is facing. They’re facing three groups: Iran, who has received $80 billion in aid… They’re taking that money to kill all the Jews.” Graham claimed that Israel is facing a significant threat to its existence, and therefore should do whatever it takes, just as the US did in World War Two. Lindsey Graham suggests dropping big fat NUKES on Iran and Hamas. …

Market Manipulation Trial Over Bill Hwang’s Spectacular $36 Billion Implosion Begins This Week The trial over Bill Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management begins this week. The charges in Hwang’s trial come from the 2021 collapse of the $36 billion dollar Archegos and Reuters has said that testimony could last up to 8 weeks. Prosecutors have said that Archegos’ collapse led to $100 billion in shareholder losses at companies he held. The trial is set to shed a light on how major Wall Street players accommodated, and potentially turned a blind eye, to risky tactics from a wealthy client. Hwang is being accused of using total return swaps to take massive positions in companies without holding their underlying stock.  As Reuters notes, the company faced crippling margin calls in March 2021 due to falling stock prices. This, in turn, led to significant losses for Archegos and its lenders, including Credit Suisse and Nomura Holdings. …

Key Events This Week: All Eyes On CPI As Fed Speakers Galore After a very slow week, the key event for markets this week will be US inflation data with April’s PPI (Tuesday) and CPI (Wednesday) the highlights. We’ll see if the higher-than-expected US inflation seen in Q1 extends into Q2 or not. Markets will also hear from Powell (tomorrow) and Vice Chair Jefferson (today) as the highlights of a busy Fedspeak calendar that are included in the day-by-day list at the end. The next most important US data release is Retail Sales on Wednesday. Elsewhere China’s monthly activity numbers (Friday) are important, and staying in Asia, we also have Japanese PPI (tomorrow) and Q1 GDP (Thursday). In Europe tomorrow’s ZEW survey in Germany and UK labor market stats are highlights. Swedish CPI (Wednesday) may get a little extra attention after last week’s Riksbank cut, …

Apple Reportedly Near Deal To Infuse ChatGPT Into iPhones Apple is nearing a deal with Microsoft-backed OpenAI to infuse its large language model, known as ChatGPT, into the future iPhone operating system, according to Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the discussions.  The two sides have been finalizing terms for a pact to use ChatGPT features in Apple’s iOS 18, the next iPhone operating system, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Apple also has held talks with Alphabet Inc.’s Google about licensing that company’s Gemini chatbot. Those discussions haven’t led to an agreement, but are ongoing. -Bloomberg Bloomberg reported a few weeks ago that the discussions with OpenAI had intensified.  In a note to clients on Monday, Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives “expect exclusivity around a number of…advanced OpenAI features on the iPhone that Apple will build around a broader AI strategy on iPhone 16 and …

Nvidia Rivals Gold As Shield Against Inflation Authored by Edward Harrison via Bloomberg, The biggest US tech stocks are not only a bet on innovation but also a possible hedge against inflation, according to some respondents in the latest Bloomberg Markets Live Pulse survey. Gold, the haven of choice for decades, is still seen as the best safeguard against the risk of rising prices, according to 46% of survey participants. But nearly a third said the tech behemoths are their first pick for the role. Source: Bloomberg MLIV Pulse survey May 6-10. Respondents who chose `other’ wrote in: bonds, cash, commodities, large caps. The response highlights the dominant role that companies like Nvidia Corp., Amazon.com Inc., and Meta Platforms Inc. are playing in the US financial markets as they expand their sway over major swaths of the economy. That has allowed them to generate steady profits, stoking rallies that are making investors confident …

GameStop’s ‘Roaring Kitty’ Returns, Sends Shares Skyrocketing As ‘Million Apes Go Insomniac’  “My god it’s him, he’s really back. To give a hedgefund bitch a heart attack. To make a million apes insomniac. It’s the guy… who’s not a cat ;-),” wrote one user on Reddit’s GameStop message board on Sunday evening following an X post from ‘Roaring Kitty.’  Roaring Kitty, also known as Keith Gill, led an army of ‘meme-traders’ against hedge funds shorting GameStop (Melvin Capital) in 2021. He returned to X last night, posting a meme that suggested he’s back after going silent on X since June 2021. The X post has gone viral. It has been viewed more than 8.5 million times, with 14k retweets and 51k likes. pic.twitter.com/YgjVqtgcNS — Roaring Kitty (@TheRoaringKitty) May 13, 2024 X users are beyond ecstatic for his return: pic.twitter.com/4DbjCcfjz1 — TaraBull (@TaraBull808) May 13, 2024 pic.twitter.com/fzSgGQTRDi — Inverse Cramer (Not Jim Cramer) (@CramerTracker) May 13, 2024 I NEVER SOLD …

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s paralegal testified on Friday that his office deleted from their evidence three pages of phone records between convicted liar Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson without notifying former President Donald Trump’s legal team, according to reports.

Trump attorney Emil Bove questioned paralegal Jaden Jarmel-Schneider on Friday about three pages of 2018 phone records between Davidson and Cohen that Bragg’s office had deleted, according to CNN. Additional phone records between Daniels manager Gina Rodriguez and then-National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard regarding Daniels’ claim about her alleged affair were also deleted, according to The Epoch Times.

The altered call records were submitted into evidence, but Bragg’s office did not tell Trump’s team that three pages were missing, The Epoch Times reported.

Tampering with evidence is a class E felony in the Empire State under New York Consolidation Laws, Penal Law § 215.40, which states in part:

A person is guilty of tampering with physical evidence when: Believing that certain physical evidence is about to be produced or used in an official proceeding or a prospective official proceeding, and intending to prevent such production or use, he suppresses it by any act of concealment, alteration or destruction, or by employing force, intimidation or deception against any person.

Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took to X on Friday calling the developments “insanity.”

“How on earth is this not a felony committed by Bragg and his minions? It sure would be if team Trump did it,” Trump Jr. posted to X.

Bragg — who campaigned for office on targeting Trump — indicted the former president in April 2023 on 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records. Bragg alleges Trump’s lawyer at the time, Cohen, paid Daniels before the 2016 election to stay quiet about an alleged affair that the former president denies. Bragg alleges Trump made this payment to help win the 2016 election so the expenditure should have been classified as a campaign expense rather than a legal expense.

Trump’s defense also made a motion for a mistrial, which Judge Juan Merchan denied. Merchan also kneecapped Trump’s team from defending the former president by limiting what former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith could say when testifying about campaign finance-related issues, noted Steve Roberts and Oliver Roberts in The Federalist Friday.

Smith was expected to testify, as Roberts and Roberts note, that “almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to ‘influence an election’” though “not every expense that might benefit a candidate is an obligation that exists solely because the person is a candidate.”

Merchan ruled Smith can now only testify to the “general background as to what the Federal [Election] Commission is, background as to who makes up the FEC, what the FEC’s function is, what laws, if any, the FEC is responsible for enforcing, and general definitions and terms that relate directly to his case, such as for example ‘campaign contribution.’”

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Congressional Democrats insist that the SAVE Act — which requires proof of citizenship to establish eligibility to vote in federal elections — is unnecessary because federal law (18 USC § 611) already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

Those making this argument ignore a glaring problem: the government officials who register voters and conduct federal elections aren’t allowed to require proof of citizenship.

It’s therefore shockingly easy for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, leaving our elections dangerously vulnerable to foreign interference. Anyone — even an illegal alien or other noncitizen — can register to vote in federal elections, just by checking a box and signing a form.

This is all on the honor system. No proof of citizenship is required.

It’s not just that state officials — who are responsible for federal voter registration and elections in our country — don’t verify citizenship in this context; it’s that the Supreme Court has told them that they’re not allowed to do so. In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., 570 U.S. 1 (2013), the Court held that the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, also known as the “Motor Voter” law) prohibits states from requiring proof of citizenship when processing federal voter registration forms.

The SAVE Act would fix this gaping loophole by requiring anyone registering to vote in federal elections to provide proof of citizenship. It would also require states to review existing federal voter registration files and remove all noncitizens.

Remember: nearly every state issues driver’s licenses to noncitizens, and 19 states issue them to illegal aliens. This, coupled with the Motor Voter law and the Supreme Court’s ruling, makes it shockingly easy for aliens — legal and illegal — to vote in federal elections, even though they’re prohibited from doing so. Considering that there are now nearly 30 million noncitizens in the U.S., including about 12 million who have entered illegally since the last presidential election, we desperately need the SAVE Act.

While Democrats are already mocking the SAVE Act, they don’t dispute that noncitizens shouldn’t vote in federal elections. Rather, they insist that there’s no need for the bill because noncitizens — being prohibited by law from voting in federal elections — categorically do not vote in such elections. That argument fails for one simple reason: it implausibly assumes universal compliance with a law that has become breathtakingly easy (and correspondingly tempting) to violate.

Some say that noncitizens wouldn’t dare register to vote in federal elections, as doing so is illegal and could adversely affect their present or future immigration status. Even if this assumption were correct with regard to many (or even most) noncitizens in the U.S., that still wouldn’t disprove the need for the SAVE Act.

If even a tiny percentage of America’s 30 million noncitizens were to vote, they could change the outcome of a close federal election. And, as noted by the Immigration Accountability Project, it’s odd for the left to insist so vehemently that illegal aliens don’t vote, given that congressional Democrats have inserted language “to waive inadmissibility for illegal voting in all [their] amnesty bills.”

Democrats can’t have it both ways; they can’t (1) credibly say that illegal aliens don’t vote in federal elections, and then (2) expect us to forget their own proposals, which assume the opposite is true. In any event, and regardless of how many (or few) noncitizens may have voted in the past, why not take steps to prevent it from happening in the future?

The sanctity of your vote is at stake. Now more than ever, we need to make sure that our elections are fair, lawfully conducted, and free of foreign influence. To do that, it’s imperative that Congress pass the SAVE Act.

In 2018, Nellie Bowles wrote a scathing profile of Jordan Peterson for The New York Times, portraying him as a grifter and the patron saint of incels. In 2021, Bowles obliquely apologized. Not mentioning Peterson by name, she lamented all the past collateral damage from her addiction to going viral.

At the Times, she would write stories that she called “kills,” and her metric of success was how loud the Twitter mob roared in response. This approach made her famous. She also felt it was making her a sociopath. So she left the Times and resolved to be more careful with her words.

Her new essay collection, Morning After the Revolution, is certainly light on “kills,” but, unfortunately, it’s light on conviction as well. Reviewing some of the insanity of the past few years — BLM, CHAZ and abolish the police, trans activism — Bowles seldom offers insight, instead rehashing widely covered events with some wisecracks and colorful reporting thrown in. Whereas her takedown of Peterson was mean-spirited but unambiguous — she was a foot soldier of the progressive left — her new persona is a “hemming-and-hawing moderate” willing to poke fun at anyone.

In the format of her satirical weekly news roundups, this positioning works well. But that same tone doesn’t translate well to a book-length review of the hottest issues of the past five years. By eschewing principled stances in favor of sarcasm, Bowles adds little to the conversation besides entertainment.

When Johns Hopkins defines a lesbian as “a non-man attracted to non-men,” she can wisecrack, “Yep, that’s me,” but she does not follow that with a defense of her position on gender and sexuality. Her analysis falls prey to cynicism and the fallacy of moderation.

The Fallacy of Moderation

Aristotle posited in the Nicomachean Ethics that a virtue is the golden mean between two vices. Between cowardice and recklessness lies courage. Between shyness and shamelessness lies modesty. This is a compelling ethical theory, but applying this principle in all situations — believing that truth is always found at the midpoint — is fallacious.

For instance, if I say the sky is red and you say it’s yellow, that doesn’t mean it’s orange. By the same token, if one side is pro-LGBTQIA+ and the other side supports traditional marriage, that doesn’t make pro-LGB correct. On fundamental questions like, “Are all white people racist?” or “Are trans women and biological women the same?” humans need and deserve principled, thorough responses, not merely a splitting the difference between the rhetoric of the extreme left and right. Otherwise, your position depends on the whims of radicals.

Nevertheless, Bowles, a married lesbian, is mealymouthed when examining whether the trans movement is a logical extension of the gay rights movement or a hijacking of it. In a brief aside, she admits that she had a “tomboy” phase and may well have undergone hormone therapy were she a child today.

She worries that trans activists claiming that biological males would have no advantage in sports — an obvious falsehood — will undermine something that seemed already settled: that gay marriage should be legal. She joked: “I was feeling, honestly, a little crazed about it all — these doctors are neutering little gay kids was my tone at dinner parties. Everyone is erasing women was something I would try to bring up in really inappropriate settings.”

Then her Reform Jewish synagogue announced that the next “Tot Shabbat” — the children’s service — would be a drag queen story hour. Bowles initially panicked, but when the day came, the drag queen ended up giving a “very, very deeply Jewish Tot Shabbat.” Bowles concludes, “Our daughter loved it and so did I,” because after all, she remembers “being at drag bars as a teenager and how amazingly fun it was.” On the biggest lightning-rod issue of our day, Bowles’ conclusion is a shoulder shrug.

Flippant to a Fault

When Bowles’ book was first announced, the press release called it Struggle Sessions, evoking the repressive Soviet regime (and implying parallels with Bowles’ former employer, The New York Times). But Bowles turns out to be no bomb-thrower, so perhaps it makes sense that the title ended up being Morning After the Revolution, implying that the BLM riots, CHAZ, and TERF/trans showdowns have more in common with a one-night stand or binge drinking than a police state. The “morning after” can be a little embarrassing upon reflection, but it’s hardly cause for shock and alarm.

This same lax attitude holds for Bowles’ opinion of her own contributions to cancel culture. Here again, as an NYT darling-turned-outcast, one might expect some gory detail or hard-earned wisdom. Instead, the chapter “The Joy of Canceling” opens by describing the “pleasure” of canceling someone:

To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends.

Then, instead of meditating on the perverse incentives of cancel culture and what she learned, she merely says she lost her taste for blood once she fell in love. Bowles would end up marrying Bari Weiss, who was an editor for The New York Times until she wrote a viral resignation letter accusing the Times of illiberalism, antisemitism, and a culture that viciously punished Wrongthink. Bowles left quietly a few months later.

Bowles admits that she was never canceled the way Bari was. One wonders whether it’s because she was too canny to be canceled or merely too milquetoast to be problematic. As the saying goes, it’s good to have enemies: it means you’ve stood up for something, at some time in your life. Bowles seems to have few.

What Could Have Been

Morning After the Revolution is plagued by all the books it could have been.

There could have been Nellie Bowles, bona fide counter-elite: a product of San Francisco private schools, Columbia University, and The New York Times, now a columnist at The Free Press and critic of the culture she came from. Or Nellie Bowles, award-winning reporter, here to give the definitive retrospective on the insanity of 2020 bolstered with on-the-ground observations. Or Nellie Bowles, Hillary Clinton-supporting lesbian who finds herself now feted by the right-wingers in her comments section, trying to make sense of our new coalitions.

Bowles does none of this. Instead, we have a book of outdated reporting — we already know BLM was a front, DiAngelo is a race hustler, and San Francisco is a hellhole — with wishy-washy analysis, punctuated with some blessed respites of humor. Bowles’ refusal to make normative judgements makes her arguments tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfying because she never stakes out a position, never steps into the arena.

Funnily enough, Jordan Peterson talks about just this challenge. In his view, maturity requires progressing from naivete to cynicism to courage. Cynicism is better than naivete — at least you’re not being fooled — but courage is better still: to stand for something, to aim higher rather than merely tear down.

Morning After the Revolution feels like a work in progress, a disillusioned progressive using irony as cover until she gets her bearings again. Bowles is smart, witty, and talented. A little more courage and conviction (dare I say, a little more Peterson?) would stand her in good stead.

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, pro-abortion states have begun devising measures to shelter abortionists whose operations were hampered by states that chose to protect unborn life. These so-called “abortion shield laws” — many of which are likely unconstitutional — will defeat any ability for pro-life states and their citizens to hold abortionists accountable for violating their health and safety standards. Diligently enforced, shield laws invite a new war between the states over not just the lives of unborn children, but also our system of government.

The extradition clause of the Constitution requires that “[a] Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.” In short, a state cannot turn down another state’s request to extradite fugitives within its borders.

Shield laws, such as those in New York and Massachusetts, hug the edges of the extradition clause by prohibiting the surrender of non-fugitives. Accordingly, a person who promotes abortions while physically present within a pro-abortion state cannot be handed over to a pro-life state in which the abortion has occurred. After all, he has not actually fled from the pro-life state. As The New York Times points out, such laws de facto protect those who prescribe abortion pills through telemedicine to women out-of-state.

Several anti-extradition laws also indicate that abortionists are not their only concern. New Jersey protects those “charged in [another] state whose executive authority is making the [extradition] demand with … traveling to obtain reproductive health care services that are permitted under the laws of this State.” Language like this appears to falsely assume that pro-life states are criminalizing women and girls for seeking abortions out-of-state, concerns that reflect the media’s narrative distortion.

NBC News, for instance, reported in April 2023 that “Idaho becomes one of the most extreme anti-abortion states with law restricting travel for abortions.” Yet, the law in question does not actually criminalize out-of-state travel. It merely criminalizes adults who transport children outside of Idaho “with the intent to conceal an abortion from the parents or guardian.” In that sense, anti-extradition laws — by covering abortion seekers who are at no risk of going to jail — are part of a broader campaign to smear pro-life states as cruel and extremist simply for trying to protect girls from adult abusers who often force them to undergo an abortion to hide the abuse.

Making Prosecution Impossible

Not content with harboring abortionists, abortion shield laws also make it impossible to charge or prosecute them in the first place. Several pro-abortion states have banned their courts from issuing subpoenas following another state’s abortion-related investigations. State law enforcement agencies have been ordered to stop working on abortion cases with their counterparts from pro-life states. Existing subpoenas can be quashed if a state court finds that they violate public policy regarding “protected health care services,” a euphemism for abortions and transgender surgeries.

“It will be virtually impossible for a prosecutor or civil attorney in a pro-life state to build a case against an abortionist who injures a woman or girl during a surgical or drug-induced abortion when the state where the abortionist lives will not cooperate,” observes Mary E. Harned, an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. 

On top of that, Washington even bans businesses from complying with subpoenas, warrants, and other court orders issued as part of an out-of-state abortion investigation. This represents an unprecedented attack on private employers who have conscientious objections to abortion, as the right to do business is made contingent upon complicity in the abortionist agenda.

Meanwhile, abortionists are given a comfortable life thanks to abortion shield laws that remove any negative professional consequences. Some states prohibit state medical boards from disciplining abortionists based on abortions performed out-of-state. Malpractice insurance companies are not allowed to impose higher premiums on abortionists despite the risk of out-of-state sanctions. These privileges are often extended to genetic counselors, psychologists, and other healthcare professionals who might push their patients to get an abortion.

Abortionists Will Relocate

Given the many benefits abortion shield laws offer, one can expect abortionists to migrate en masse to pro-abortion states. From there, they will set up telemedicine hubs and “underground railroads” that serve abortion tourists.

The architects of abortion shield laws openly admit that they intend for this to happen. For example, Colorado’s Senate Bill 23-188 states that “reproductive and gender-affirming health-care providers in states with abortion and gender-affirming health-care bans will want to relocate to states that protect their practice and values, thereby becoming an important part of Colorado’s health-care infrastructure.”

Ultimately, certain abortion shield laws enable abortionists to enact vengeance upon anyone who seeks to hold them accountable for their malfeasance. A “clawback provision,” as The Hartford Courant labels it, typically creates a new right of action for “tortious interference” with abortion.

As such, an abortionist held civilly liable in a pro-life state can sue the original plaintiffs for damages on the grounds that the latter had sued him first. This includes women and girls who suffered abortion-related injuries. When abortionists can recover litigation costs from their victims, the deterrent effect of pro-life laws is all but dead.

Abortion shield laws put the commercial interests of abortionists ahead of the safety of women and girls, not to mention the damage done to long-standing traditions of interstate cooperation. Pro-abortion states are turning themselves into impregnable fortresses for the abortion industry and havens for abortion tourism. The battle for life and liberty is just beginning.

Guzi He is a J.D. candidate at the American University Washington College of Law. He is a legal fellow intern at Americans United for Life and a contributing writer for Merion West magazine.

Decades ago, there was a major ad campaign for New Coke. The problem was that people hated it and the campaign became one of the greatest flops in advertising history. Today’s 81-year-old president looks a lot like New Coke.

Biden is proving you can advertise a bad product, but you can’t sell one. Despite a massive March ad blitz, Biden barely moved his numbers. Arguably, this is as good as it gets for Biden, and good doesn’t look to be good enough.

March marked a “month of action” for Biden’s reelection campaign. It began with his State of the Union address. A scripted set-piece in a controlled setting before a national television audience, it was tailormade for Biden. Following it, Biden and his cabinet secretaries fanned out across the country. Simultaneously, Biden’s campaign was spending $29.2 million — almost five times the previous month’s $6.3 million — predominantly on advertising.

Biden’s March effort played to his strengths. Incumbency has its advantages, and few are as large as a SOTU. The same applies to having a cabinet’s worth of surrogate campaigners. And of course, there’s the money: Biden looks to have about $100 million more in his campaign chest. Not only did Trump have none of these, he faced weeks’ worth of courtroom hearings in New York that would require his attendance, severely limiting his chance to respond.

So, what did Biden get from his advantages? According to RealClearPolitics’ national average of Biden’s job approval polling, the president’s approval stood at 40.6 percent and his disapproval at 56 percent on March 1. On April 2, the two numbers were 40.7 percent and 55.9 percent — a 0.1 percentage point swing in Biden’s favor. On May 1, the two numbers were 40 percent and 56.2 percent — both worse than they had been before Biden’s “month of action.” 

Biden’s poll numbers in a match-up against Trump were better, but not by much. According to RealClearPolitics. on March 1, Biden trailed Trump 47.1-45.1 percent in a two-way race. On April 1, he trailed 45.5-46.5 percent; on May 1, he trailed 45.1-46.6 percent. 

In a five-way race, Biden fared a little better. On March 1, Biden trailed Trump 37.7-41.2 percent; on April 1, he trailed 39.6-42.1 percent and on May 1, he trailed 39.2-41.4 percent.

However, in the all-important battleground state polling, Biden again dropped back in the second month. On March 1, Biden trailed Trump 43.04-47.21 percent. On April 1, he trailed 45.3-48.49 percent, and on May 1, he trailed 44.67-47.91 percent. 

Overall, Biden’s “month of action” didn’t get him much, certainly no momentum, and it didn’t last long. In both a two-way race and in the battleground state polling, Biden began giving up gains in just the second month.

These results should be very concerning for Biden. First, he was forced to spend a huge sum for a race that was then just under eight months away. Second, he got very little for it. 

Reelections are a referendum on the incumbent. Biden’s numbers are poor. He is roughly in the mid-40s in both the two-way and battleground races. In a five-way race, he doesn’t break 40. 

With such poor numbers, Biden will naturally try to make November into a referendum on Trump. However, in trying to do so, he is swimming against the historical tide. He’s also swimming against Trump’s. According to Gallup, Biden’s approval rating in the 13th quarter of his presidency is just 38.7 percent (the lowest of any president since Truman), while Trump’s at the same point was 46.8 percent and that came with America in the throes of a pandemic.

Nor is Gallup an outlier. According to RealClearPolitics’ May 7 average of national polls gives Biden just a 39.2 percent approval rating. Trump’s, at the same point in his presidency, was 44.6 percent.

The most concerning point for Biden is that this may be as good as it gets for him. Biden essentially has the field to himself, a large money advantage, countless surrogates, plus other incumbency assets. Yet with all this, he barely moved the needle. What little he did could be undone with a single gaffe—and Biden has called himself a “gaffe machine.” 

Unlike four years ago, Biden will have ample opportunity to make them too. Then he held double-digit leads in the polls and a pandemic’s pass to stay off the trail and away from potential gaffes. Now, he doesn’t. What’s more, it’s hard to see what issue can save him from himself. According to RealClearPolitics averages on specific issues, Biden’s below 40 percent on his handling of the economy, foreign policy, immigration, inflation, crime, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Instead of establishing New Coke, the ad campaign proved advertising can only go so far. Ultimately, publicity cannot overcome the product, or packaging its contents. Biden has been president for over three years. His problem is, as demonstrated by his polling numbers, not that he’s not well known, but that he’s not well-regarded. More money, more ads, and more exposure aren’t going to change that. 

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.

Green Bay’s law-bending elections chief is at it again, but this time City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys admits she didn’t understand the election law she was breaking. 

In response to a complaint filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation on behalf of three Green Bay citizens, Jeffreys “concedes that she has not been strictly adhering to the statutory requirements in Wisconsin Statutes … but the failure to do so was inadvertent and due to a lack of awareness of the statutory requirements.” 

In short, the much-troubled clerk was ignorant, not willful, according to the legal response. It’s more of the same from Jeffreys, the former chief of staff for Green Bay’s far-left mayor in a city that made national news during the Zuckerbucks scandal of 2020 and turned punitive when its bumbling clerk previously twisted state election law. 

The Law is Clear

Last month, PILF filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) alleging Jeffreys ignored laws aimed at detecting abuse of the Badger State’s same-day registration process. Wisconsin is one of 20 states and the District of Columbia that offers election day registration, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. 

The law is clear. The Elections Commission after each election is required to mail postcards to voters who registered on election day, part of its post-election audit demanded under state statute. Undelivered postcards are sent back to the clerk’s office of the city of origin. 

According to the law, for any postcard that is returned undelivered, or if the clerk is informed the voter resides at a different address than the one provided on election day, the election official must change the status of the voter “from eligible to ineligible on the registration list.” Then the official must mail the voter a notice of the change, “and provide the name of the elector to the district attorney for the county where the polling place is located and the elections commission.” 

In February 2023, WEC “updated guidance regarding the handling and processing of Election Day Registration postcards returned to a clerk’s office after an election,” confirming the requirements are mandatory. Jeffreys failed to do this part of her job at every turn, according to the complaint. 

‘Inactivated Zero Residents’

PILF’s lawsuit notes that Green Bay reported 3,497 Election Day registrations in the hotly contested 2020 presidential race in which Democrat candidate Joe Biden narrowly defeated then-President Donald Trump in the battleground Badger State. Of those, 170 were returned “undeliverable” to the clerk’s office. WEC’s Election Day Registrations report found Green Bay elections officials “inactivated zero registrants and referred zero registrants to the district attorney.”

That line — ‘inactivated zero residents’ — comes up again and again. The 2021 elections, the primary and general elections in 2022, in which Wisconsin Democrat Tony Evers and most leftist statewide officers won, and again in the 2023 spring election in which the far-left Wisconsin Supreme Court justice candidate claimed victory and turned control of the court over to leftists. In the latter contest, of the 672 election day registrants, 24 postcards were returned as undeliverable to Jeffreys’ office. 

Instead of following the law, Jeffreys recorded the postcards as “undeliverable” in WisVote and took no further action. All the stuff she’s supposed to do — mark the voter as ineligible on the registration list, mail the voter an alert about the change, and alert the local DA and the elections commission of the possible fraudulent activity — Jeffreys isn’t doing any of it, according to the lawsuit. 

Oops. 

‘This is Bad’

In the response to the complaint, Green Bay Assistant City Attorney Lindsay Matther assures the Wisconsin Elections Commission that after receiving the complaint Jeffreys “began formulating a plan for addressing the undeliverable postcards going forward that algins [Sic] with both the statutory requirements and the guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and she will comply with both for all future elections.” 

“Clerk Jeffreys was unaware that she was required to do each of these things, but plans to do so going forward, and is in the process of drafting written procedures for doing so. In the future, in accordance with statute and with the WEC guidance, Clerk Jeffreys will take the following actions when her office receives an undeliverable EDR postcard,” the response states. 

But the damage has been done — in multiple election cycles.  

“This is bad,” said Lauren Bowman Bis, PILF’s director of communications. “People need to have faith and trust in their elected officials. For her to not be following the law, not even knowing the law, … is unbelievable.” She added that Jeffreys’ failure to inactivate the individuals on the undeliverable list “could be easily used for fraud and abuse.” 

“It’s not often you have an elected official admit she doesn’t know the law,” the spokeswoman said. “Wisconsin is a critical state. We’re going into the 2024 election. This doesn’t just affect the people in Green Bay or Wisconsin. We all want faith in our elections, that the rules are being followed. In Green Bay, that’s not the case.” 

‘Contrary to Law’

Jeffreys has a history of trouble with election law. In December, the state elections commission found that Jeffreys violated election law in the 2022 spring election when she accepted multiple absentee ballots brought in on behalf of voters. Resident Matt Roeser alleged that he and two other witnesses saw the clerk “accept, many times, multiple absentee ballots from an individual voter,” according toGreen Bay’s WBAY News. 

The city fired back with an indignant response, insisting Jeffreys acted within the law and that the city of Green Bay “ran a fair, free, and accessible election on April 5, 2022 in compliance with state and federal law.” Furthermore, the city “fulfilled its equal protection obligation to accept ballots on behalf of voters who were unable to personally deliver their own as a result of a disability or impairment.” 

WEC didn’t see it that way. In its ruling, the commission determined that Roeser had shown probable cause that Jeffreys violated Wisconsin election law on ballot harvesting. The commission found Jeffreys abused her discretion in accepting the ballots on behalf of voters who were said to have been “sick.” Those with a confirmed disability may receive ballot return assistance under Wisconsin law. 

“Sickness alone may or may not constitute a disability, and thus it cannot be a qualification to receive ballot return assistance,” WEC said in its decision, adding that Jeffreys “should ensure that voters who qualify for ballot return assistance under the Voting Rights Act are able to receive such assistance.”  

“The Commission hereby orders Celestine Jeffreys to amend the policy described in the Response or any current or future policy in a manner consistent with this decision,” the ruling states. “Accordingly, to the extent that the Respondent’s policy accepted ballots from voters who are ‘sick,’ but not disabled, it is contrary to law.”

Oops. 

The city responded with an “our bad” mea culpa, but insisted there was “significant confusion” in the April 2022 spring election about receiving absentee ballots. It also claimed to have corrected the mistakes. 

Center of Zuckerbucks

Jeffreys was tapped to serve as city clerk following the contentious 2020 election. Jeffreys replaced Christine Teske after the longtime Green Bay clerk resigned amid the embedding of leftist activists in the clerk’s office.

Green Bay was one of the “Wisconsin-5” cities that signed a contract with and received millions of dollars in election administration grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life. The Chicago-based CTCL was launched by far left, former Democrat operatives. The group used hundreds of millions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg, founder of conservative-silencing Facebook. 

Teske grew increasingly frustrated by the meddling of former Democrat operative Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein’s meddling in Green Bay’s election administration, according to emails obtained by Wisconsin Spotlight. Spitzer-Rubenstein was with the National Vote at Home Institute, one of the left-wing organizations in CTCL’s network that the Wisconsin-5 cities were told to work with under the terms of the grant agreements.  

Among other legally suspect actions, Spitzer-Rubenstein offered to “cure” or correct absentee ballot information. Teske repeatedly objected to Green Bay’s Democrat mayor, Eric Genrich, and to Jeffreys, his chief of staff, in the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election. She complained the “grant mentors” didn’t know Wisconsin election law and that their “help” likely was illegal. 

“I don’t understand how people who don’t have knowledge of the process can tell us how to manage the election,” Teske wrote in one email in late August. 

The mayor’s office applied pressure. 

“The grant mentors would like to meet with you to discuss, further, the ballot curing process. Please let them know when you’re available,” Jeffreys demanded of Teske.

Teske threw up her hands just weeks before the election, taking a leave of absence before officially resigning at the end of the year. 

‘Retaliatory’

In January, a Brown County Circuit Court Judge tossed out the city’s disorderly conduct citation against election observer and attorney Janet Angus, calling the city’s action “retaliatory.” Jeffreys, again, was in the middle of the matter.

Angus had confronted Jeffreys about election integrity concerns, but did not do so in a disorderly manner, Judge Tammy Jo Hock said. 

“I don’t have to address the other concerns and arguments that are made about election integrity because I don’t find that Miss Angus’ behavior was disorderly, but I will observe that it does appear the municipal citation was retaliatory due to the Wisconsin Elections [Commission] complaint that was filed,” Hock said, according to court transcripts obtained by The Federalist.  

The judge’s finding is a damning statement on how the city of Green Bay, with Genrich at the helm, conducts business, particularly against political enemies. And it’s a reminder that, contrary to the left’s breathless cries about elections officials and poll workers being under assault, actual government-led attempts to silence conservative election observers are happening in cities like Green Bay.  

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Months from the 2024 presidential election, Americans remain mostly in the dark about a sweeping executive order Joe Biden signed early in his presidency that could swing the entire contest in his favor. New bombshell documents obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project reinforce that is precisely the point of the directive — and the administration is working in cahoots with left-wing activist groups to achieve it.

In March 2021, President Biden signed an “Executive Order on Promoting Access to Voting.” The administration inked the directive, apparently the brainchild of leftist think-tank Demos, to cheers from dozens of like-minded but officially nonpartisan nongovernmental organizations.

As I have been reporting at RealClearInvestigations, Executive Order 14019 mandates that every single federal agency register and mobilize voters with the express intent of increasing election participation among minority groups that tend to vote disproportionately Democrat. In pursuit of its aims, the order calls on agencies to “solicit[] and facilitat[e] approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations … to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”

That language has raised alarm bells among the right, who suspect the leftist groups supportive of the order — that may be unconstitutional or violate several laws — could coordinate with agencies to implement it and increase registration only of Democrat voters.

Such an effort could well prove decisive. A since-deleted but archived Demos analysis indicates that, if fully implemented, the order could lead to 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations annually — a massive figure considering recent presidential elections have been decided by mere thousands of votes in a handful of states.

Bombshell Memo

Details from a July 2021 listening session the Department of Justice (DOJ) conducted with leftist activists about implementing the order, revealed for the first time in a May 1 Oversight Project memo, suggest fears of collusion between federal agencies and leftist activist groups are more than merited. The details come from a set of unredacted notes taken by a DOJ attorney.

During those proceedings, Biden administration officials heard from activists overwhelmingly from the left. According to its review of the listening session roster, the Oversight Project found that “Every participant whose party affiliation or political donation history could be identified by the Oversight Project was identified as a Democrat except for one Green Party member.”

Here were some of their recommendations, as recounted by the unnamed Justice Department official:

• Keeda Haynes of The Sentencing Project indicated that eligible voters who are incarcerated “have been left out of voting,” and emphasized that those held in pretrial custody also have the right to vote. Haynes proposed a variety of ways the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) could provide voter registration information during prisoner admission, orientation training, and various other touch points with prison personnel. She also recommended that authorities “provide in-person voting options, such as voting machines” at facilities where “eligible voters” reside. “Felony disenfranchisement is voter suppression,” the DOJ attorney recorded.

• Dana Paikowsky of the Campaign Legal Center indicated a desire to “develop infrastructure in jails and prisons and also help people understand their eligibility after they are released.” She related that her organization remained “concerned about BOP’s focus on voter registration only, and only on individuals from ME, VT, and DC. Felons in Puerto Rico are also eligible to vote. In Mississippi, don’t lose right to vote for federal convictions, and AL also has some eligibility. Those individuals with convictions for federal misdemeanors can usually vote, too.”

• Terry Minnis of Asian Americans Advancing Justice pushed not only for agencies to create multi-lingual materials pertaining to voting, but for making “voter registration info mandatory at naturalization ceremonies.”

• Michelle Bishop of the National Disability Rights Network reportedly called on increasing the access to vote for people in long-term care facilities — without any apparent concern suffering patients could be taken advantage of by partisan operatives.

• Nik Youngsmith of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund seemed to acknowledge that under the order, noncitizens could be registered to vote, noting “Federal employees need to know who should be properly registered and not. Don’t want someone to face charges for registering based on bad info.”

The documents obtained by the Oversight Project date back to a July 2021 meeting, yet represent something of a major revelation in May 2024. That illustrates how surreptitious this effort has been.

Administration Partnering with Leftist Groups

Although the Biden administration has stonewalled congressional Republicans over the strategic plans each agency was to develop in accordance with the order, evidence has slowly emerged through primarily conservative media reportage and watchdog groups’ Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, suggesting the administration took the groups’ suggestions to heart.

In January, The Daily Signal reported that BOP “has partnered with and regularly consults on voting issues with the League of Women Voters, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee” — several of which were represented at the July 2021 listening session — in connection with the executive order. A BOP spokesman detailed that the bureau had partnered with such groups to offer “civics education classes” and “voter registration drives” at several correctional facilities nationwide.

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson wrote a letter in March to Attorney General Merrick Garland raising concerns that under Executive Order 14019, the U.S. Marshals Service was being directed to “modify agreements with jails” to mandate that they “provide voter registration materials and facilitate voting by mail,” on top of requiring the DOJ “to facilitate voter registration and mail voting for individuals in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons.” According to Watson, this could lead to not only ineligible voters but among them noncitizens — including illegal aliens — being encouraged to illegally register to vote.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is working to register voters at naturalization ceremonies. Other agencies ranging from the Departments of Housing and Urban Development to Labor and Agriculture have also been executing plans to register voters who favor Democrats.

In connection with a federal lawsuit challenging the order brought by 27 Pennsylvania state legislators, the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) — which has sued the Biden administration to unearth documents and communications associated with the order — filed an amicus brief asserting that:

all of the federal agencies FGA has identified as taking active steps to carry out EO 14019 have one thing in common: They provide government welfare benefits and other services to groups of voters the vast majority of which have historically voted Democrat.

The House Small Business Committee recently subpoenaed the Small Business Administration (SBA) over its stonewalling regarding an agreement the agency came to with all-important swing state Michigan to “promote civic engagement and voter registration” — including through allowing state officials to engage in in-person voter registration efforts at SBA’s business outreach events.

Consistent with FGA’s brief, Fox News reported that:

An investigation by the House Small Business Committee found that 22 out of 25 such outreach events have taken place in counties with the highest population of Democratic National Committee (DNC) target demographics.

Meanwhile, 11 of 15 Michigan counties that showed the largest voter registration increase over the last year have ranked highest in population of young voters and Black voters, according to the committee — two of the left’s most-sought voting blocs.

To the extent the Biden administration is using the full resources of the federal government to turn out Democrat voters under the facially nonpartisan guise of expanding the franchise to allegedly underrepresented groups, this would echo Democrats’ related efforts to use nonprofit organizations to achieve the same. As I recently reported at RealClearInvestigations, at least one major Democrat Super PAC has written to donors that:

501(c)(3) voter registration focused on underrepresented groups in the electorate would be the ‘single most effective tactic for ensuring Democratic victories’ – ‘4 to 10 times more cost-effective’ on after-tax basis at ‘garnering additional Democratic votes’ relative to alternatives like ‘broadcast media and digital buys.’

In recent election cycles, Democrat fat cats and dark-money vehicles have given hundreds of millions of dollars to left-leaning, state-based voter registration organizations targeting demographics that tend to vote Democrat in pivotal states. These outfits have arguably flouted IRS restrictions on charities engaging in political activity by targeting their “nonpartisan” electioneering activities toward populations likely to vote blue.

As reported, at least two recipients of grants under the Everybody Votes Campaign — the left’s preferred vehicle for driving out voters via 501(c)(3)s — were listed on an email as participants at the July 2021 listening session.

Legal Challenge’s Urgency

With the 2024 election fast approaching and the Biden administration executive order beinge implemented, Pennsylvania legislators’ challenge to it has taken greater urgency. Several weeks ago a district court judge dismissed the case on standing grounds. On April 23, the legislators filed a petition for writ of certiorari at the Supreme Court, and asked the court to expedite the case.

The legislators believe the executive order violates state laws “prohibiting the influence of outside organizations in election operations” enacted over concerns regarding the influence of “Zuckerbucks” — private financing of public election administration from the Zuckerberg-Chan Foundation — during the 2020 election. In their motion urging the Supreme Court to swiftly take up the case, the legislators explain that Congress neither authorized the executive action nor appropriated funding for it, and that Pennsylvania law therefore bars such voter registration activities.

When the relevant law was introduced, its sponsor’s memo “explained the need to prevent public officials from partnering with third party non-governmental organizations ‘for the registration of voters or the preparation, administration or conducting of an election in this Commonwealth.’”

“Exactly what the legislators sought to prevent through their law-making authority has now been facilitated by executive action by the President who is also a candidate in the 2024 election and, as such, stands to benefit personally from the executive action,” the legislators wrote.

Time will tell whether the Supreme Court will hear their case, rule that they do in fact have standing, and thereby give them a chance to seek an injunction that would halt the executive order before voting begins. Even then, much damage will have been done.

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

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Not a single state had universal school choice prior to 2021. In the past three years, eleven states have enacted it. This is a monumental achievement — and more victories for America’s children are imminent. School choice advocates are grateful to the power-hungry teachers unions, which overplayed their hand and sparked a parent revolution.

The teachers unions-induced school closures harmed students academically, mentally, and emotionally, with virtually no reduction in overall coronavirus transmission or child mortality. Parents were understandably furious at the public schools that had broken faith with them during their time of need, and they weren’t going to just sit there and take it.

How did the unions respond to efforts to exert more control? By attacking parents, of course. No, it wasn’t the virus that needed to be defeated. It was you, mom and dad.

The unions publicly smeared parents who had the temerity to suggest that schools should do their jobs. In Chicago, home of the nation’s third-largest public school system, the local union took to Twitter to demonize those who favored reopening schools: “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny,” tweeted the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) on Dec. 6, 2020.

A few months later, a union member in California named Damian Harmony would say “hold my beer” to the CTU by smearing parents who wanted schools reopened for their supposed “cynical, pearl-clutching, faux-urgency, ableist, structurally white-supremacist hysteria.” That same month, the United Teachers of Los Angeles union called California’s school reopening plan “a recipe for propagating structural racism,” and its president, Cecily “There’s No Such Thing As Learning Loss” Myart-Cruz, accused “white, wealthy parents” of “driving the push behind a rushed return.”

I’m old enough to remember when the term “white supremacist” referred to those — such as neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan — who believed that the white race is superior to other races. Now the unions and their allies were smearing parents as “white supremacists” for the horrible thought crime of wanting their children to go to school.

The smear became a running theme. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the local union voted to reject the school reopening plan as they endorsed a letter by the Educators of Color Coalition, which claimed that the reopening plan was “rooted in white supremacy norms, values, and culture.”

Likewise, 140 members of the Pasco Association of Educators in Washington state claimed in January 2021 that the “culture of white supremacy and white privilege can be seen in our very own community in regards to the decision to reopen schools in a hybrid format, despite rising cases and community spread.” The Washington Post even ran a blog post by a union member in New Haven, Connecticut, lambasting the supposed “racist effects of school reopening” and claiming that a “comorbidity is white supremacy.”

Not to be outdone, a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, Mike Friedberg, penned an article asking: “Will We Let ‘Nice White Parents’ Kill Black and Brown Families?” In his telling, it was “white privileged parents” who wanted schools open while “Black and Latine” parents wanted them closed. The reality was that although white parents were, on average, more likely to be ready to return to in-person instruction before minority parents, significant portions of families across the racial and ethnic spectrum wanted in-person instruction.

When the Chicago school district conducted a survey of parents in March 2021, more than four in ten wanted to return to in-person instruction. Although the survey did not identify the race or ethnicity of respondents, about three in ten students who returned that month for in-person instruction at campuses were majority black and majority Latino.

Ironically, the Friedberg article spent several paragraphs claiming that “remote learning is not a lost cause” and that the “‘learning loss’ argument is incredibly flawed.” Not only has massive learning loss been unquestionably documented, but it’s also significantly worse among black students.

According to McKinsey, by the end of the 2020–21 academic school year, students “in majority-Black schools ended the school year six months behind in both math and reading, while students in majority-white schools ended up just four months behind in math and three months behind in reading.” If any policy had racist results, it was the union-pushed school closures and remote learning — which really should be called remotely learning — not parent-backed school reopenings.

The California Teachers Association (CTA) even stooped to spying on parents, conducting what amounts to opposition research, the same as political candidates do on their opponents. A public records request uncovered emails from a union employee asking a public school principal for information about “the ideological leaning of groups that are funding the reopen lawsuits.” She noted that she had heard the principal had “lots of information regarding the Parents Association.”

When another union employee in the email exchange realized that they had accidentally used the principal’s work email, they went into damage control mode, asking him to “delete and disregard” the emails. One union employee was more sanguine, however. “I don’t think there will be an issue,” she wrote, “unless someone does a record request for his work email.”

The hypocrisy of the unions knows no bounds. In March 2021, while the CTA was still fighting tooth and nail to keep schools closed while spying on parents who wanted them open, the president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, Matt Meyer, was caught on camera taking his own kid to an in-person private preschool.

The unions even did oppo research on parents trying new ways of educating their children during the lockdowns. When the unions closed the schools, groups like Prenda helped parents open new “microschools” in their or other parents’ homes, church basements, and anywhere they could find space. Rather than embracing the idea, the unions sought to sabotage it.

Prenda was founded in 2018 by Kelly Smith, an MIT grad who was inspired by his kids’ experience at an afternoon coding club to create a network of small schools (typically five to ten students each) where learning is self-directed with the assistance of online tools and an in-person “guide.” While schools were closed during the pandemic, Prenda received a surge in interest from parents —especially those who wanted the benefits of in-person instruction while limiting their children’s potential exposure. Prenda began 2020 with about one thousand students at one hundred microschools and ended the year with four times that.

Where parents saw an opportunity, the unions saw a threat. Prenda’s rapid growth sent the unions into a panic. What if the kids who left their public schools liked Prenda better? What if they never came back?

The National Education Association hatched a plan: Scare parents away from trying Prenda in the first place. To do that, they wrote up two “opposition reports” (their words), one on microschools generally and one on Prenda specifically. The first one warned union members and their allies: “The Opposition Report has documented widespread support for micro-schools.”

The report identified more than 20 additional microschool networks and related organizations, and recommended that their staff and allies familiarize themselves with a list of anti-microschool talking points the NEA had developed, such as that the microschools “do not guarantee students or educators the same civil rights protections that are required in public schools,” their staff are “not required to be credentialed,” and their students “are not held accountable to state standards of learning.” Of course, none of these issues topped parental concerns about schools being closed.

The second opposition report focused on Prenda specifically and included personal information about Kelly Smith, including his home address and a picture of his house. The report also raised concerns about the “safety” of Prenda and other microschool students who might be exposed to guns, drugs, and unfenced swimming pools.

Union-backed groups like Save Our Schools Arizona used these talking points to lobby the legislature to regulate Prenda and other microschools. Fortunately, state legislators saw through their absurd and self-serving arguments, and microschools continued to flourish.

It was particularly ironic for the unions to argue that using parents’ homes for microschooling was unsafe while the unions were simultaneously arguing that students were not safe at school during the pandemic. Apparently, they weren’t safe anywhere.

Friedberg had claimed his support for keeping schools closed was because he did “not want to risk my students’ lives, their families’ lives, or my own life.” He may well have been sincere in his fears, but not all his colleagues were. Some, like CTU executive board and area vice president Sarah Chambers, seemed to have other motivations for working remotely.

How remotely? Thousands of miles, apparently, as she was tweeting from poolside at a resort in Puerto Rico. “Spending the last day of 2020 poolside,” Chambers wrote from her @sarah4justice Instagram account alongside a selfie of herself lounging by the pool, adding: “We have the whole pool to ourselves.”

These are just some of the egregious union actions that awakened a sleeping giant. For far too long in K-12 education, the only special interests represented were the employees — the adults — in the system. But now, America’s kids finally have a union of their own: their parents.

This is an adapted excerpt from The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools (Center Street, May 14).

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China Is Facing An Epic Deflationary Crash That It Can No Longer Hide It has long been understood that most financial data provided by the Chinese government is propaganda designed to misrepresent the country’s true economic circumstances.  At best, their statistics provide half the truth and the rest has to be discerned through deeper investigation.  When systemic crisis events take place in China it usually comes as a shock to much of the world exactly because they expend considerable resources in order to hide instability behind a thin veneer of fabricated progress. The biggest story in China in the new millennia has been nation’s debt explosion.  China’s debt-to-GDP ratio is currently estimated at nearly 300% (official numbers), with most of the liabilities accrued in the past 15 years.  Chinese debt spending accelerated in part because of the global credit crash of 2008, but a lesser known factor is their entry …

Shocking Headline Of The Day: Germany To Re-Introduce Slavery Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com, Young Germans will have to choose between the Bundeswehr (military service) and unpaid social service work. Libertarians to a person, will call this slavery, because that is what it is. Germany to Re-Introduce Slavery Please consider the Eurointelligence headline story Germany to Re-Introduce Slavery The headline might be bordering on the hysterical, but the big idea in German politics right now is to re-introduce the general draft. This is not happening because Germany expects to be at war. It is not about the military at all. Under the plans, young people, male and female, can choose between the Bundeswehr or a year of forced labour in the social services, essentially uncompensated. The main reason we see is that their fiscal rules have depleted them with the resources to fund the …

RFK Jr. Unleashed: Biden’s Israel “Bait And Switch”, COVID Censorship, And Backing Treasuries With Gold And Bitcoin Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance This weekend I had the pleasure of sitting down with independent 2024 Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for an hourlong interview. Our interview started with me asking Mr. Kennedy why, if you don’t follow the mainstream media narrative, you are automatically painted in a vile and unfavorable light. He told me: “I think a lot of it is driven by, or fortified at least, by financial interests. Upton Sinclair made this very, very useful statement that it’s almost impossible to persuade a man of a fact if the existence of that fact will diminish his salary.” “And we know that the media is dependent on the people that I’ve been suing and critical of for many, many years: the military-industrial complex, …

CFTC Aims To Ban Derivatives Based On Elections, Athletic Competitions And Awards Contests Previously enjoyed betting on the outcome of an event, like a Presidential election? The CFTC wants to make sure that doesn’t happen again. According to the Wall Street Journal, the regulator is now targeting “derivatives contracts based on political elections, athletic competitions and awards contests” to try and draw more prominent lines between investing and gambling.  The Commodity Futures Trading Commission proposed a regulation to oversee event contracts, a rapidly growing market where investors bet on event outcomes, the report said.  The proposed regulation won’t affect sports betting through traditional sportsbooks regulated by state commissions or popular online platforms like DraftKings. Nor will it impact offshore platforms like Betfair, which currently allows U.S. election bets. The proposal, approved 3-2 along party lines, will undergo public review before a final vote in the coming months. Democratic commissioners emphasized …

The New York Times Denounces Cancel Culture… After Fueling Cancel Culture For Years Authored by Jonathan Turley, For those of us who have criticized the cancel culture in higher education for years, the attacks and shunning have been unrelenting. The media has played a role in that culture and none more prominently than the New York Times. Recently, however, the mob came for liberal professors and media who have remained silent for years as conservatives and others were targeted on campus. Suddenly, there is a new interest in free speech and academic freedom, including by the Times editors who blamed cancel culture for the recent demonstrations and disruptions on campus. Until good liberals were targeted on campus, cancel culture was treated as free speech. It did not matter that preventing others from speaking or being heard is the very antithesis of free speech. The New York Times …

Seattle Could Shutter 20 Elementary Schools Due To Budget Constraints When happens when your city pisses away all of your tax revenue on trying to feed, shelter and coddle activists and homeless people? You wind up having to make budget cuts. And, in Seattle, those cuts could be coming in the form of closing up to 20 elementary schools.  The district’s budget deficit has reached more than $100 million, according to new reporting from MYNorthwest.  And Superintendent Brent Jones’ proposal for ‘Well-Resourced Schools’ might lead to the shutdown of over a quarter of the district’s 73 elementary schools, the report says.  According to the Seattle Public Schools, 29 of these schools have fewer than 300 students each, and are considered under-enrolled. The district warns that keeping these schools open may necessitate cuts or the elimination of preschool programs, a reduction in core staff, larger class sizes, and fewer curriculum offerings. …

Newsom Forced To Slash California Budget, Blames Crippling Deficit On “Rain Bombs” And Tax Shortfalls In the course of two years, California has turned a $100 billion surplus into a $73 billion deficit, forcing governor Gavin Newson (D) to propose painful (token) spending cuts on Friday while announcing his revised state budget. California Governor Gavin Newsom unveils revised 2024-25 state budget on Friday, May 10 (photo: AP, Rich Pedroncelli) When asked how the state was able to achieve such a monumental fail, Newsom – who claims the deficit is actually $27.6 billion (to which even AP called him out) – blamed a reduction in taxes from capital gains income, which surged in 2021 amid a raging stock market and plummeted in 2022. Then, in 2023, the state ‘continued to collect less tax revenue than projected’ due to capital loss carryovers. He also blamed “unexpected rain bombs” …

Kansas Democrat Governor Vetoes Bill Restricting Foreign Ownership Of Land Near Military Bases Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a bill on Friday that aimed to prevent companies of China and other “foreign adversaries” from acquiring real property near military installations in the state. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly gives her inaugural address for her second four-year term on the south steps of the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan., on Jan. 9, 2023. (John Hanna/AP Photo) Senate Bill 172 aims to block individuals or companies from “countries of concern” from owning any interest in land located within a 100-mile radius of a military installation in Kansas. Under the bill, any foreign principal that owns or acquires any interest in real property in Kansas would be required to file registration with the attorney general and divest of the property. The …

Ukraine Warns Against Questioning Zelensky’s Legitimacy Due To Wartime Suspension Of Elections The end of Volodymyr Zelensky’s five year term as president of Ukraine is set to end by the close of May, at least according to what was stipulated upon his getting elected, however, the government has made it clear there will be no new election. Officials have cited martial law due to the Russian invasion to say that after his five-year term ends on May 21, there won’t be a new election until after martial law and wartime regulations are lifted. Creative Commons Image Ukraine’s Minister of Justice, Denys Malyuska, confirmed this in a fresh weekend interview with BBC News Ukraine. “The president’s powers endure until the election of his successor. However, certain provisions of the Constitution are open to interpretation, inviting speculation or conspiracy theories,” Malyuska said when asked about ongoing speculation over what happens after …

Israeli Attacks Intensify Across Gaza, Rafah Civilians Have Nowhere To Go Via Middle East Eye Israeli tanks have moved into eastern Jabalia in northern Gaza following a night of intense bombardment, which has killed some 19 Palestinians and flattened residential blocks, according to health officials. Israeli fire targeted ambulances near the camp’s Unrwa clinic, Wafa news agency is reporting. The Israeli army said that the latest incursion on the camp was to prevent Hamas from “rehabilitating military capabilities” there. Via Reuters In other areas of Gaza, Israeli air strikes reportedly killed some 27 Palestinians overnight. In Rafah, 18 Palestinians were killed in air strikes,  including several children, according to Wafa. Wafa is also reporting that the continuing air strikes have killed dozens more in the past few hours, with 12 bodies arriving at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza. The director of the UN …