Monthly Archives: September 2021

President Joe Bidens Justice Department is suing the state of Texas over its newest pro-life law, which prohibits killing babies in utero if they have a detectable heartbeat.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the lawsuit on Thursday and asked an Austin district court to block Texas officers, employees and agents, including private parties who would bring suit under the law from implementing it.

The act is clearly unconstitutional under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, Garland said on Thursday.

The lawsuit argues that the law, which allows private citizens to bring civil suits against anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion, is in open defiance of the Constitution and make[s] it too risky for an abortion clinic to operate in the state, thereby preventing women throughout Texas from exercising their constitutional rights, while simultaneously thwarting judicial review.

This kind of scheme, to nullify the Constitution of the United States, is one that all Americans, whatever their politics or party, should fear, Garland said.

The White House previously expressed discontent with the law and promised to take action against the Lone Star State.

In a 5-4 decision issued last week, the Supreme Court declined to block the lawdespite protests from Planned Parenthood, other abortion activists, and even journalists.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Biden's Justice Department Is Suing Texas Over Pro-Life Law - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist D.C. Columnist Eddie Scarry joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss his article Corporate Media Once Again Target Ron DeSantis While Democrats Ruin Everything.

Any one of them on their own, a writer at the New York Times or a host on MSNBC, is not going to do too much damage but when you have them as a chorus creating a narrative and its everywhere, Scarry said, unless you happen to be watching Fox or listening to conservative radio or reading The Federalist, you are going to otherwise just be exposed to this nonstop drumbeat of COVID and death and infections and all that stuff.

There are some people who really do just enjoy the pandemic. They love the pandemic and they want you to love it too, he added. The medias malfeasance and dedication to push an agenda, especially about COVID-19, Scarry said, should push Americans to seek out alternative news sources.

The only way I think for people to realize that thats happening to them, theyre not getting the truth and they are more and more going to have to seek out alternative sources of information, he noted. They are not going to get it from the big entertainment corporate media. They just are not going to get it there.

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How The Corporate Media Is Indoctrinating Americans With Fear And Lies - The Federalist

(Watch the video for the monologue and an interview with the Conservative Partnership Institutes Rachel Bovard on whats wrong in Washington and how to fix it.)

Washington Republicans are excited for the 2022 elections, and they have reason to be theyre going to do well. Theyre heavy favorites to take back the House of Representatives; and despite a very bad Senate map, its a coin flip theyll retake that too.

None of this is too shocking: First-term presidents usually face a backlash, and often its a bloodbath.

President Barack Obama crushed Sen. John McCain, then lost 63 House seats two years later; President Donald Trump lost 42 seats in 2018; President Bill Clinton lost 54. In fact, the only first-term president to not lose House seats in the midterms in the past 55 years was President George W. Bush, in the post-9/11 2002 midterms.

This is the nature of politics: A new man is swept in and carries fellow party members with him, then two years later enthusiasm has waned, the presidents promises have turned into a more frustrating reality, and opposition voters are angry and fired up. So what happens? They punish the party in power.

All of that figures to be even worse for President Joe Biden. Nobody is passionate about Biden himself, and in 2022 Democrats wont be turning out to vote against Trump, so even if Biden were doing a bang-up job hed still be in for what his old boss called a shellacking.

But Biden is not doing a great job hes doing terribly. He ran on solving COVID, but COVID is, of course, still here. Even worse, so are the absurd restrictions COVID has placed on our lives: Our children are still masked, flying is still miserable, big businesses are being coerced into injecting their employees with a leaky vaccine, and small businesses are still being executed at the decree of state and local health officials.

Biden ran on bringing humanitarian values to the border. Instead, he has virtually abolished the border. By the end of the year, 2 million people may have arrived there, and hundreds of thousands more will have crossed undetected or simply arrived by flying here and then overstaying a visa.

Many of those arrivals have already disappeared into the U.S. interior, and some of them have been picked up by sex and labor traffickers. It turns out when you stop enforcing laws and backing the men and women on the line, crime takes over and people suffer.

Inflation is setting in because of course it is: You cant go out and complain about setting $2 trillion on fire over 20 years in Afghanistan, then try to more than double it in one go right here at home.

Crime is rampant, and why wouldnt it be? Just like on the border, stopping crime doesnt require any complicated dissertations on root causes its been with us forever, and its always been stopped by arresting and punishing the bad guys. Thats it. So naturally, thats the one tactic its now unacceptable to deploy.

Its all gotten so bad even corporate media are beginning to wonder if the semiconscious man theyve spent nearly two years now essentially holding upright might not be all there. Who would have guessed?

And hey: If the old man decides to step down today, his replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, who is somehow even less popular. So all in all, Washington Republicans have reason to be happy.

But heres the bad news: Conservatives dont have reason to be happy or at least we have just as much reason to be happy as we do for basically any Republican congressional majority.

Why? To explain, lets take a step back first and look at the budget fights raging right now: Trillions of dollars in spending on what? From Cradle to Grave, The New York Times headline blared, Democrats Move to Expand Social Safety Net.

The $3.5 trillion social policy bill that lawmakers begin drafting this week, it reads, would touch virtually every American, at every point in life, from conception to old age.

Its amazing: The Times is so excited theyre actually admitting that unborn children are alive.

True, theres no guarantee Democrats will get everything they want in this fight, although if they dont it will be because of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, not Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But thats not the point: The point is theyre choosing to pick this battle in the first place, and damn the torpedoes. They know its dangerous and theyre doing it anyway. Why? Therein lies conservatives problem.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is 81 years old. Shes worth tens of millions of dollars at least. She owns a vineyard. She has a refrigerator filled with expensive ice cream. And every single day she comes to work with the full intention of changing this country.

What did she say about the Democratic budget? That, This legislation will be the biggest, and perhaps the most controversial, initiative that any of us have undertaken in our official lives.And then she did it.

You see that in a lot of places. Do you think the public is happy that the military is giving out free transgender operations and having generals learn about white rage? Do they like their children being fed critical race theory? Do they like COVID relief being handed out based on skin color rather than need?

Of course not, but Democrats know that if they can get those policies implemented now, many of them will remain forever. Theyll lose Democrats in the process, but so be it there will be more Democrats in the future. Its impossible to watch politics professionally for over a decade, through some of its liveliest battles in a long time, and not come to the understanding that Democrats in general do politics differently.

Modern liberal politicians often come to Washington as activists they want to change the world. Republicans, on the other hand, most often come to Washington because its prestigious. They want a feather in the cap of their successful career in business or law.

Heres how this dynamic plays out: When Democrats are legislating on something major, they look around the field and say to themselves, Yeah, were going to take some casualties on this one, but were going to change America. And then they blast right through it. Pelosi is going to lose members for this overhaul of our country and she knows it shes just decided that given the trouble theyre already heading into, its worth it.

Shes thrown away a House majority before, back in 2010. But guess what? Before she did, she changed the entire country with Obamacare. That was her exit bomb; that was the sacrifice she made. And now shes back, Obamacare is still the law (because of the Republicans and the legacies), and the temptation is going to return to laughing at her when she loses again in 2022.

But if she gets this budget through, well then who cares. Her legacy will be remaking the role of government and its interactions with an increasingly dependent class of citizens in the most major way since President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society 60 years ago.

Now, what do Republicans do when theyre in charge? And not just having the House when they get to pass whatever they want without consequence but when it matters.

When it matters, Republicans look around and say, Oh no we cant do that, wed lose a man. The Democrats would take seats. They are virtually a majority for the sake of being a majority. They just want to polish it up, put it on the shelf, and look at it. Border? Abortion? Woof, those are tough fights, well lose members. Its an election year, after all, or if it isnt, it will be soon.

To put it simply, Republicans approach politics like America fights wars: They dont want to lose a single man. Democrats, on the other hand? They look at politics like the Russians looked at Stalingrad: The congressman in front votes now; when they fall the next man gets elected and he will vote too.

So you see a repeating pattern to American politics: There isnt a true back-and-forth. Instead, Democrats change the country a lot while theyre in power. Then Republicans hold power and push the pause button. Theres no rollback that a new executive order cant undo.

Maybe they cut taxes; bring back the Mexico City policy; junk a regulation that Democrats created but didnt manage to implement; but thats about it. When was the last time Republicans passed a huge law one that changed America forever the way Democrats do every time they hold serve in American politics? You dont see it.

This is how you use politics to remake the country. This is why it always feels like conservatives are fighting a rearguard action because they are.

The problem is multiple-fold in Washington, where calcified think tanks lack both the faculties and vision needed to defeat an enemy theyve been losing to for so long, and where politicians are either lazy, risk-averse, easily led by corporate interests, or a combination of all three.

Hopefully this is changing. The intelligentsia of the city is disrupted, with new and interesting people and organizations rising to the occasion. At the same time, there are also more active, populist, hard-hitting Republicans coming to the fore Republicans who want real change, not just the promise of one.

Its a culture shift and its long needed, but like anything so entrenched as culture, change takes time time that we dont really have.

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Why Democrats Are Always Winning, Even When They Lose - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Digital Dunkirks Alex Plitsas joins Federalist Senior Editor Chris Bedford to discuss how hes helping American citizens and other at-risk Afghans escape the grasp of the Taliban.

I look at these efforts kind of like what happened in World War II where people were hiding Jews in the attic or other places, where these were civilians who were not in the military but they had an opportunity to help and provide safe passage and harbor. And if you have the opportunity to do it, you do, Plitsas said.

Rescuing those stranded and in need of help, Plitsas said, is not only an honor but a duty.

We have warrior ethos in the army, and its part of the oath when you take and you say it: I will never accept defeat, I will never quit, Ill never leave a fallen comrade, Plitsas said. We dont leave anybody behind. Thats been the U.S. mantra forever, and we cant hold that line as a value of the United States if we dont do that. And there are Americans left behind. We owe it to them to get them out as well.

Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky also weighs in on the conversation and reflects on Americans reactions to the disaster in Afghanistan.

Learn more about Digital Dunkirk here.

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Behind The Incredible Rescue Efforts Of 'Digital Dunkirk' - The Federalist

The National Archives Records Administration placed a harmful content warning on the Constitution, labeling the governing document of the United States as harmful or difficult to view. The warning applies to all documents across the Archives cataloged website, including the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

NARAs records span the history of the United States, and it is our charge to preserve and make available these historical records, the administration said in a statement. As a result, some of the materials presented here may reflect outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions. In addition, some of the materials may relate to violent or graphic events and are preserved for their historical significance.

The NARA, which is responsible for preserving and protecting documentation of American heritage, noted that so-called harmful historical documents could reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes; be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more, and include graphic content of historical events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, natural disasters and more.

Along with committing to diversity and equity, the NARA said it would [work] in conjunction with diverse communities, [and] seek to balance the preservation of this history with sensitivity to how these materials are presented to and perceived by users.

This isnt the first time the National Archives has catered to a leftist view of history. In June, the National Archives racism task force claimed that the Archives rotunda, which houses founding documents, is an example of structural racism. The task force also pushed to include trigger warnings around displays of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which are all in the rotunda.

The warning is a blanket statement atop all documents in the archived catalogs that links to a Statement on Potentially Harmful Content.

As news of the websites warning circulated on Twitter, the NARA issued a standard response to those concerned by the harmful label on the Constitution.

This alert is not connected to any specific records, but appears at the top of the page while you are using the online Catalog. To learn more about why the alert about harmful language appears in our Catalog, please go to NARAs Statement on Potentially Harmful Content, the tweet said.

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National Archives Slaps 'Harmful Content' Warning On Constitution - The Federalist

A pair of massive wildfires within 150 miles of each other are terrorizing thousands in northern California two years after Gov. Gavin Newsom cut resources for fire prevention efforts.

The Caldor Fire, which burned down dozens of cabins at Lake Tahoe, threatens nearly 40,000 people living in its five-mile radius. The Dixie Fire further north, billed as the largest in modern California history, poses risk to another 15,000 as of this writing.

Together, the fires that are each less than 60 percent contained have burned upwards of 2,300 structures and nearly 1.2 million acres, according to a tracker by The New York Times. Another four infernos are currently blazing through northern California with more on the way sending smoke across the western United States.

We are seeing generational destruction of forests because of what these fires are doing, Californias Chief of Forestry and Fire Protection Thom Porter said last month. This is going to take a long time to come back from. Indeed, nearly half of Lassen Volcanic National Park has been burned by the Dixie Fire.

Yet the crisis was just as predictable as it was preventable. While Democrats and their allies in legacy media knee-jerk blame climate change, the true culprit is negligent land management.

More than 100 years of fire suppression by the U.S. Forest Service has culminated in the build-up of wood fuel powering the megafires seen today. While high-intensity blazes primarily grow on federally mismanaged lands, state agencies still play critical roles in fire prevention efforts with Good Neighbor Authority (GNA) agreements with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct cooperative forest management. Nearly half the state is owned by the federal government.

Newsom, who faces a recall election Tuesday, dramatically cut Californias budget for wildfire prevention and resource management from $355 million in 2019 to $203 million, a more than 40 percent decrease on the heels of some of the worst seasons on record since modern-day tracking began in 1983.

Lawrence McQuillan, a senior fellow at the Oakland-based libertarian think tank Independent Institute, called the lack of resources devoted to prevention efforts deliberate in an effort for Democrats to prove their theories on climate change are correct.

Climate change isnt necessary nor sufficient for this problem to occur. What is necessary and sufficient for what were seeing in California is the lack of proper land management and fuel reduction, McQuillan told The Federalist.

Californias forests are now dramatically overgrown, standing as colossal tinder boxes waiting to go up in flames the moment ignition strikes, whether it be from a lightning strike or a decrepit power line, as happened with the Camp Fire in 2018 that devastated the town of Paradise. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the company that pled guilty 84 counts of manslaughter over the blaze its powerlines ignited, is also suspected in causing the Dixie Fire, but has cut backroom deals with the governors office to avoid full liability payments.

Overgrown forests are also susceptible to beetle infestations that kill the trees and leave the dead wood as excess fire fuel. According to the Record Redding Searchlight, more than 163 million trees were killed in California between 2010 to 2019 primarily by bark beetles, raising the risk for mega-wildfires.

Without forest thinning, prescribed burns to trim the landscape, and salvage logging of trees knocked down, all barred by successful activism from radical environmentalists opposed to any human activity in wild spaces, Californias forests will continue to wreak havoc as they have always done pre-European arrival.

According to ProPublica, between 4 and 12 million acres burned naturally in prehistoric California every year. Between 1989 and 1998, however, state bureaucrats only burned an average of 30,000 acres a year. That number fell to 13,000 acres between 1999 and 2017. More than 4 million acres still burned across the state unmanaged. The difference between the fires of pre-historic California and today is their intensity and catastrophic nature.

Ultimately, youre going to have to remove excess fuels from forest land in California, or Mother Nature will do it for you. Theres only two options here, McQuillan said. If humans do this work, we can do it without seeing these megafires sweep California and cause so much property damage and loss of life not to mention the toxic wildfire smoke released into the atmosphere.

Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency transition team member and founder of JunkScience Steve Milloy outlined how the pollution caused by Californias wildfires has more than offset the progress made by its expensive cap-and-trade emissions program.

Since 2012, Californias cap-and-trade system has reduced emissions by 180 million tons extrapolating through 2021 (at the 2019 level), Milloy wrote last month. But since 2012, approximately 12.35 million acres have burned. At 23 tons per acre, that makes 280 million tons of emissions.

If you blame the government for not managing forests, Milloy told The Federalist this week, then perhaps the greatest emitter in California is the government.

So how responsible is Newsom in todays wildfire crisis? After cutting the states prevention resources by nearly half in the face of an entirely predictable disaster, the governor misled the public about its readiness to confront the seasons ahead.

According to an investigative report published by CapRadio in June, Newsom overestimated the number of acres treated with prevention efforts, including fuel breaks and prescribed burns by 690 percent, when he repeatedly touted 35 priority projects by executive action at the start of his first term.

Newsom has claimed that 35 priority projects carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres, the paper wrote. But the states own data show the actual number is 11,399.

When he claimed mission accomplished in a 2020 press release touting completion of his 90,000-acre goal over 35 projects, he was way off.Meanwhile, the governors unfinished target of 90,000 acres treated remains far, far below what is necessary for effective prevention efforts to keep fires from developing into high-intensity infernos.

We need to be doing a million acres a year, for a long time, Stanford Professor Michaele Wara explained to the paper. Thats the scale where you start to achieve strategic goals like fewer structures lost.

In other words, Newsom needed to up the goal and meet it, not oversee aggressive divestment.

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How Much Is Gavin Newsom To Blame For California's Wildfires? - The Federalist

I was in college when the planes hit the towers, studying that Tuesday morning before class in the student union. The woman who ran the student snack bar and I were the only people there, and together we watched the second plane hit on live TV.

At that moment, my stomach dropped. After the first plane hit, no one really knew what was going on, whether a small aircraft had accidentally crashed into the tower or if it had been an explosion or something else. But when that second plane hit, we knew. This wasnt an accident. Someone had planned this. It was an attack. Suddenly, we were at war.

In the months and years that followed, my classmates and I tried to wrap our minds around what we thought was coming: a generational struggle against jihadist networks that seemed to span the globe, that had even infiltrated the United States. We all read Samuel P. Huntingtons The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. We all scoffed at Francis Fukuyamas notion of the end of history. We thought the United States was the only power capable of stamping out Islamic terrorism. We assumed there would be many more attacks on the homeland.

Twenty years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, its safe to say they did not herald the defining, all-consuming civilizational struggle we had anticipated. The thing we most feared, Islamic terrorism, did not prove to be our worst enemy or the greatest threat to our republic. The real enemy, it turns out, came from within.

In the 20 years since the attacks, Americas own totalitarian left has proven to be a far more dangerous and committed enemy of the United States than any distant jihadists, harboring as much hatred for our heritage of freedom and chaotic way of life as Osama bin Laden ever did.

Christopher Hitchens famously described bin Ladens animating ideology as, fascism with an Islamic face, later adopting the apt term, Islamofascism. Hitchens thought the fascist comparison appropriate because both movements, in his view, are murderous cults, hostile to modernity and the life of the mind, nostalgic for empires of past glory, and obsessed with past humiliations and a desire for revenge, among other things.

But the fascism of bin Laden and his ilk, while obviously dangerous (and likely to become more so after our utter defeat in Afghanistan), hasnt proved as durable or tangible as the fascism of the Democratic Party under the Biden administration.

As I write, the president is announcing a plan to force all federal workers to get a COVID-19 shot, and major employers to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for their workers or test them weekly, with crippling fines for those who dont comply.

This is not about freedom or personal choice, said Biden. Indeed its not. Its about total federal control over what the administrative state has come to view as its subjects, not citizens to whom it must answer. In the tyrannical worldview of the president and his advisors, nothing can stand in the way of government coercion, not even federalism. If these governors wont help, said Biden, I will use my powers as president and get them out of the way.

Bin Laden, who correctly foresaw disaster and eventual defeat for the invading Americans in Afghanistan, could not have guessed that by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Americas ruling elite would have become this fascist. Indeed, when a regime uses the power of the state to compel major corporations to enforce its mandates and enact its agenda, thats actual textbook fascism. Hitchens, if he were alive to see it, might have called it fascism with a bureaucrats face, or bureaufascism.

Bidens vaccine mandate is of course just one example, plucked from yesterdays news cycle, of the lefts hatred of America and the freedom of its people. Over the past year-and-a-half of the pandemic, we have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of rule by executive fiat, with governors and mayors and public health officials wielding powers too often directed against churches and independent businesses. The 9/11 hijackers hated our freedoms, to be sure, but the pandemic has revealed that the left hates those freedoms at least as much as the terrorists, and would like very much to stamp them out.

Like the hijackers, the left holds almost everything about America in contempt. We are told in our workplaces and our children are taught in their schools that the United States is irredeemably racist, founded on violence, and that our constitutional experiment amounts to nothing more than a massive crime. We are called upon to repudiate our past and pull down monuments to our forebears not just Confederate generals but also our Founding Fathers.

We are instructed that men can be women if they so choose, and those who disagree should probably lose their jobs and be ostracized. If you object to your daughter being forced to compete in school sports with boys who claim to be girls, youre a bigot who must be silenced.

The reductive, totalizing ideology of the left has seeped into nearly every institution of American life, and dominates our culture and our politics. It is profoundly anti-American, and in the final analysis, it is a far greater threat to the future of our republic than even the wildest plots and most murderous fantasies of all the worlds jihadists combined.

When it comes to tearing down America, brick by brick, the Islamofascists of 9/11 had nothing on those who now command the heights of our culture, and purport to rule us from Washington.

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The 9/11 Attacks Have Proved Less A Threat To America Than The Left - The Federalist