Monthly Archives: January 2024

When regime-approved journalists arent pretending election illegalities dont exist, theyre fomenting unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Republican voters.

In the months leading up to and following the 2022 midterms, legacy media have run story after story decrying the avalanche of alleged threats levied against election workers by GOP voters, whom they cast as extremists seeking to disrupt democracy. Predictions of such widespread interference in the 2022 contests have (unsurprisingly) never materialized and numbers from President Bidens own Justice Department have undermined such a narrative. But nevertheless, the scaremongering from the Democracy Dies in Darkness crowd persists.

This seemingly coordinated effort has prompted Democrats in state legislatures throughout the country to base legislation on such election falsehoods. In Virginia, for example, a Democrat state senator filed a bill this month that would classify threatening an individual because of his roles as a current or former election official as a hate crime. The bill could also result in a net increase in periods of imprisonment for Virginians charged with crimes related to threatening election officials.

Threatening election workers is already explicitly prohibited under both Virginia and federal law. SB 364 is currently awaiting action from the Senate Courts of Justice Committee.

Despite Democrats insistence, evidence does not support the notion that election workers everywhere are facing constant threats from conservatives.

During hisAugust 2022 testimonybefore the U.S. Senate, Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the DOJ, claimed the agencys Election Threats Task Force which waslaunchedin July 2021 to address this alleged rise in threats against election workers had reviewed and assessed roughly 1,000 allegedly threatening and harassing communications directed toward election officials. But two days before Polites testimony, the DOJ issued apress releasedisclosing that only about 11 percent of those 1,000 communications met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation and that the remaining reported contacts did not provide a predication for further investigation. According to an agency press release a year later, the Justice Departments Election Threats Task Force had charged 14 cases involving threats against the election community and secured nine convictions as of Aug. 31, 2023.

Got that? In a country with a population of more than335 million people, only about 100 individuals were investigated by the DOJ for supposedly threatening election workers, and only 14 of them were officially charged.

Virginia isnt the only state where Democrats are pushing legislation based upon the medias phony election workers are under siege! narrative. Leftist legislators in Florida, Missouri, and Washington introduced bills in recent weeks seeking to increase penalties for those convicted of threatening election officials.

Even worse, some elected Republicans have lent credence to this baseless talking point by prioritizing Democrat proposals. GOP legislators in New Jersey and Nebraska joined their respective Democrat colleagues in cosponsoring legislation cracking down on threats towards election workers this year. In South Dakota, Secretary of State Monae Johnson, a Republican, is spearheading a bill that would deem Any person who, directly or indirectly, utters or addresses any threat or intimidation to an election official or election worker with the intent to improperly influence an election guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

The measure unanimously passed the Senate State Affairs Committee (8-0) on Wednesday, even after Deputy Secretary of State Tom Deadrick told senators that South Dakota hasnt yet experienced threats against poll workers.

Meanwhile, GOP governors such as Joe Lombardo of Nevada and Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma signed respective bills last year into law that similarly increased penalties for threatening election officials. The Oklahoma bill was sponsored by three Republicans.

Other states that have passed laws inspired by Democrats election lies include California, Colorado, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont.

Much like Democrats war against basic election security measures like voter ID, their lying about widespread threats against election officials is a strategy aimed at bringing less not more integrity to U.S. elections.

Their strategy of using anecdotal incidents to cast a broader narrative about Republicans isnt just crafted to scare away independents and moderate voters from the GOP. Its also designed to dissuade conservatives from partaking in legitimate forms of election oversight, such as poll watching.

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, for example, the Republican National Committee recruitedmore than 70,000new poll watchers and workers ahead of Election Day to help deliver the election transparency that voters deserve. And of course, Democrats went berserk,parrotingthe same threat to democracy talking point.

Federal law already prohibits individuals from threatening and harassing election workers. Performative proposals to enhance state charges against such crimes are less about protecting people and more about furthering Democrats unsubstantiated talking points and scaring away conservatives engaged in the elections process.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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By 'Protecting Election Workers,' Democrats Mean Protecting Control Over Election Administration - The Federalist

Fresh off winning the national college football championship, University of Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh championed the right to life in the nations capital on Friday. Speaking before thousands of marchers gathered for the annual March for Life rally on the National Mall, Harbaugh introduced former NFL tight end Benjamin Watson.

Its a great example that youre setting. Its testimony for the sanctity of life, Harbaugh said to demonstrators crowded in the snow. Its a great day for a March! Its a great day. This is football weather!

Harbaugh gave the podium to Watson, who encouraged pro-lifers to advocate for unborn children in the new fight for life following the milestone Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Roe is done, Watson said, but we still live in a culture that knows not how to care for life.

Roe is done, Watson added, but abortion is still legal and thriving in too much of America.

This years gathering marks the second annual March for Life since the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization overturned the 1973 precedent claiming a constitutional right to kill preborn children. An analysis from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics last fall found about 32,000 babies have been saved in states that implemented the strictest abortion bans since the reversal of Roe in 2022.

Harbaugh expanded on his commitment to life in an interview on the sidelines of the rally.

Theres no right without the right to be born, Harbaugh said. No other rights matter if you dont have the right to be born.

Harbaugh also spoke about his teams religious revival after 70 players were baptized into Christianity this season.

Theres a spiritual mission to our team, Harbaugh said, and Im inspired by them.

The head football coach made headlines in summer 2022 just one month after the Dobbs decision when he pledged to raise any babies his staff or players couldnt.

Ive told [them] the same thing I tell my kids, the boys, the girls, same thing I tell our players, our staff members, Harbaugh said. I encourage them if they have a pregnancy that wasnt planned, to go through with it, go through with it. Let that unborn child be born. And if at that time, you dont feel like you can care for it, you dont have the means or the wherewithal, then Sarah and I will take that baby.

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Harbaugh Champions Right To Life After Football Championship - The Federalist

The Houthis, Ansar Allah, [are] doing what [Monkey D.] Luffy would do, streamer Hasan Piker gleefully cheered during a recent livestream interview with a Yemeni influencer seemingly aligned with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, likening the Shia terrorist groups attacks on Western cargo ships in the Red Sea to the romantic idealism of anime characters locked in nautical combat against an evil global government.

If that sounds stupid, I promise it gets worse.

Timhouthi Chalamet, aka Rashid Al Haddad, the individual being interviewed by Piker, became an online sensation after sharing a TikTok of himself sailing around and walking aboard the Galaxy Leader, a Houthi-seized cargo ship.

In a show of solidarity with residents of the Gaza Strip, following Israels response to Hamas Oct. 7 attack, the Yemeni Houthis began firing upon and seizing ships in the Red Sea associated with the Jewish state or heading toward its ports. The U.S. and its allies subsequently provided the Houthis with an ultimatum: Stop the attacks, or else. Naturally, or else occurred, and according to The Wall Street Journal, the Western allies responded by striking Houthi weapons caches and bases of operation.

But this deals with the facts of the matter, not the ideologically poisoned topic at hand.

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, Piker (who has millions of viewers across multiple platforms) has routinely used his time to run cover for Hamas and the atrocities carried out by radical Islamists.

[Read: Leftist Streamer Hasan Piker Justifies Hamas Baby Beheadings As Both Legal And Moral]

This interview was no different. It was nothing more than glad-handing the literal piracy of a probable terrorist whose cause is to cause destruction to the shipments that Americans have interest in until [Israel] stops bombing Gaza.

What is the mood in Yemen overall since America started bombing positions in Sanaa and other places? and What do you think about [how] American media, in general, keeps claiming that Yemeni militants are intercepting vessels is for completely belligerent reasons and not for Palestine? Piker asked.

Most of the time, Timhouthi would simply respond by expressing his solidarity with Palestine.

Pikers interview, along with the overwhelming majority of the discourse surrounding Israel and Hamas, is steeped in and poisoned by the faux messianic oppressor-oppressed worldview of leftism.

For these people, the world is cleanly split into good (oppressed) and bad (oppressor). Anything resembling Western civilization, as it is the hegemonic model for society and culture, is deemed oppressive. Anything not outwardly presenting as excellent within this system is deemed oppressed. No other factors are taken into account.

It is a profoundly unserious way of perceiving reality that presents real consequences. Its only mechanism for salvation correcting historical injustice is through revolution. The oppressed must cast off their oppressors shackles and implement their ideal version of society.

Ibram X. Kendi even acknowledged this when he wrote, The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

The goal isnt an end to whatever the intersectional coalition is currently bemoaning, such as so-called occupation, systemic racism, etc. The goal has always been to destroy the metaphysics through which people perceive reality and implement new hierarchies that allow for seamless friend-enemy distinctions to be made, subsequently facilitating perpetual animus until they can actually oppress (realistically, kill) those they hate.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett

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Oppressor Matrix Gives Leftists Like Hasan Piker Brain Worms - The Federalist

Have you ever met a college admissions officer? Who does he or she remind you of?

The answer is: someone who works at the DMV. Put nicely, theyre people whove done the best they could with limited options. Put cruelly, theyre midwits on a power trip. Perhaps a tad less cynical. A little skinnier. Glasses a bit higher end. But platonically speaking, college admissions officers and DMV workers emanate toward the same form: the ultimate low busybody.

DMV workers afflict the immense class of drivers with their mediocrity. Admissions officers victims are a smaller set people who go (or dont go because of them) to college. An even smaller set are those who go to colleges that matter, usually measured at about 200 or 300 schools in the mass field of 4,000 predatory loan farms that offer college degrees. And even smaller still are those who go to the best of the best, the places that supposedly mint the leaders of the Western World, the Ivy League.

All higher education institutions share more or less the same middle layer: admissions officers and an army of related bureaucrats that effectively run the institution. Stanford, for instance, has 15,750 non-teaching employees nearly double the amount of undergraduates at the school and almost seven times the number of faculty.

The responsibility for the destruction of the Ivy League lies not with wokeness nor diversity hires nor a naive donor class, but with the people who are supposed to be keeping the lights on. Middle management.

Robert Conquest, an eminent historian and funnily enough, a longtime research fellow at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution, coined three laws that go as follows:

Taken as a whole, these laws depict the decomposition process of institutions. They reveal why they inevitably swim left, at least in countries like America, where explicitly right-wing internal policy has been all but abandoned, even in supposedly right-wing organizations.

This covers the first two Conquest Laws, but its the third incomprehensible at first glance where the real magic lies. Its a modified Occams Razor: Institutions decline along the same leftward course so reliably that, when they arrive into our perceptive field, the simplest way (the best way) to understand them is to assume theyve been taken over by such parasites.

What hes saying, put simply, is that most operating non-reactionary institutions are zombies. They might look alive, going about their business making widgets, but in reality, they seek only to survive long enough to bite another institution and spread their disease.

Another way to think of this is POSIWID, an acronym used by systems engineers that stands for the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. Essentially, the idea is outcomes are a more reliable way to determine what a system is about than the stated intentions of the people who created it.

An example of POSIWID is what happens with most SaaS (software as a service) companies. Founders create SaaS companies because they earnestly want to make systems cheaper and more efficient. But what happens over time? Does their product actually make anything or anyone more efficient? If youve ever worked at a major corporation, you know the answer is almost never. Many corporations that adopt expensive software systems find that over time, things arent any more efficient than back when they used paper for everything. People work more hours in the day, and its all more expensive than it used to be.

What most SaaS companies do is make things less efficient while costing more money. This isnt because the company has failed, its because the company has succeeded in its true purpose, which is to serve as a blood feast for the enemies of its original founders those who want things to be more expensive and less efficient because they dont have the ability, knowledge, or desire to do better.

If theres ever been an institution more clearly run by a cabal of its enemies, its Americas elite universities. Harvards original 1636 mission statement was:

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.

Quite obviously, Harvard exists today to do precisely the opposite. If we take this as its true mission, then its run by its worst enemies. But lets take a more practical view, which is that Harvards 1836 motto VERITAS is the purpose of the institution. Even then, it would appear that Harvard exists mostly, if not entirely, to obfuscate the truth, rather than reveal it. This is because its enemies, who run it, cant determine the truth and resent anyone who can.

I dont mean woke diversity hires like Claudine Gay, as she (in some ways) still benefits from VERITAS, at least insofar as speaking her truth as a black woman is concerned. Its also not cynical elitist donors looking for ways to one-up each other at dinner parties, nor is it even wokeness itself, with all its manipulative agitprop. The true enemies of Harvard University are exactly the people Conquest warned us about the midwit managers in charge of the institution itself: the admissions department.

DMV workers hate you. You know it. They know it. Its obvious. Similarly, the Harvard admissions department hates Harvard students. The elite students are (or were) the class enemies of the admissions officers, who are always middles, lower middles, or even proles. Thus the admissions officers did what middle managers always do to institutions over time, actively dismantling the reactionary rules that gave the institution its original form. There are no greater explicitly right-wing rules than extremely high admissions standards. They kept the Ivy League important for a long, long time, but inevitably the rot became too great, and the managers, the enemies of the institution of truth, found a way to destroy those standards and open the floodgates to their own class.

The result is not the mass elevation of proles to elite status, which is of course impossible, but chaos. And chaos has a certain look. It looks like this:

In a recent Atlantic article, the reader learns that members of ultra-elite Yale secret society Skull and Bones ripped down posters of old white guys and replaced them with woke apologia. Then you learn that Skull and Bones classes have been exclusively non-white since 2020. Then you learn that on a visit to Skull and Bones alumni George Bushs home, this new cohort confronted and denigrated the ex-president, accusing him of war crimes and racism.

An institution run by its enemies.

Chaos is not random. It has a look of its own. Its poop on the street. Its open-air drug markets. Its food deserts and bread lines. Chaos is not a sandwich. Its not the Chicago Bears. Its not just anything. Chaos is the shape of things when a better shape isnt forced, isnt mandated by people who care.

This is Conquests point about institutions. If we dont enforce reactionary right-wing rules such as elitism and meritocracy inside them, they wont just dissolve into nothing. They will become the undead, hellbent on turning every institution into hideous monsters like themselves. Its happened in almost every experiment with communism the world over. And its quite obviously happening here.

Theres a bitter irony in the fact that Conquest became famous as a historian for exposing the mass murder and atrocities when communists took over governments. But he was also a poet of some note, and aside from his famous laws about institutional decline, it was in verse where he explicitly warned what would happen when bureaucrats came to dominate academia:

Those teach who cant do runs the dictum, But for some even thats out of reach: They cant even teach so theyve picked em To teach other people to teach. Then alas for the next generation, For the pots fairly crackle with thorn. Where psychology meets education A terrible bullsh-t is born.

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How And Why The Ivy League Will Die - The Federalist

In Wednesdays oral arguments, the right-wing legal world reached an inflection point it had been working towards for decades.

The 6-3 supermajority conservative Supreme Court got the chance to scrap Chevron deference, a pillar of agency power. Chevron deference is the principle that when laws are silent or ambiguous on the particulars of how they should be enacted, courts should let regulatory agencies and their experts fill in that gap, as long as their interpretation is reasonable.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose past writing formed the spine of the briefs for those fighting to hobble agency power, abandoned any pretense at neutrality Wednesday in even his earliest colloquies with the lawyers.

Who decides? Gorsuch asked, interrupting the lawyer opposing the government to better make his argument for him. Is the judge persuaded at the end of the day, with proper deference given to a co-equal branch of government, or does the judge abdicate that responsibility and say, automatically, whatever the agency says wins?

Its not hard to tell where Gorsuch comes down, as he twists agency deference into a heads big, scary government wins, tails judges are hamstrung and ordinary citizens lose proposition.

Chevron has long been an obstacle to these right-wing forces efforts to unspool and defang regulation, to create an even friendlier legal environment for business. Unwinding it has been the driving thrust of the movement, the source of its endless funding and resources.

Gorsuch, son of a mother who boasted about eliminating Environmental Protection Agency regulations while she was the agencys Reagan administration chief, is the perfect face for the nearly successful effort and served as its spokesperson during the oral arguments. With his abstract libertarianism, the justice maintained that Chevron means the government never loses a surprise to those of us who have watched Biden agency actions from student debt forgiveness to power plant regulations fall at the hands of this Court. With Chevron in hand, Gorsuch waxed, the tyrannical government can run roughshod over Congress, judges and the citizens pitted against its might.

Flanked by his right-wing colleagues, many of whom were incubated in the same environments, Gorsuch is poised to lead the Court in overturning or at least, fatally weakening Chevron and fulfilling the promise for which they were chosen.

The right-wing justices strained credulity Wednesday in their argument that its the little guys who Chevron hurts, the everyday Americans who supposedly keep getting ensnared in an aggressive regulatory scheme.

This is what niggles at so many of the lower court judges: the immigrant, the veteran seeking his benefits, the social security disability applicant, who have no power to influence agencies, who will never capture them and whose interests are not the sorts of things on which people vote, Gorsuch bemoaned (switching out his earlier preference for the word alien for the more sympathetic immigrant). I didnt see a case cited perhaps I missed one where Chevron wound up benefiting those kinds of peoples.

He added that the other side, which makes the argument powerfully, asserts that Chevron has a disparate impact on different classes of persons.

Again, he leaves out certain details. This case, for example, is nominally about federally mandated monitors on commercial fishing vessels to prevent environmentally damaging overfishing. The lawyers for that side made much of the thin margins in the fishing industry, the struggle for those blue collar workers to keep afloat. If thats what this case was truly about, we would have heard much more about herring Wednesday and much less philosophical debate over agencies place in society.

This case, like all of those gunning for strong regulatory agencies, is backed by the much less pitiable interests of big business, powerful corporations who want to dump waste in rivers or underpay their workers without threat of government-inflicted punishment. These lowly, maligned fisherpeople are backed by the might of Koch Industries CEO Charles Koch. Lawyers working for the nonprofit he funds are arguing the case for free, hidden behind a shell law firm, according to New York Times reporting.

Gorsuch himself also has reported close and long-standing personal ties to an oil and gas billionaire who has given money to the Koch-funded right-wing nonprofit for whom these lawyers work.

The right-wing justices hit talking points that have grown very familiar to anyone who has listened to recent oral arguments.

Empowering agencies, they argued, shifts power to unelected agency staff from Congress, the peoples branch. If Congress had wanted to afford the agencies the option to interpret a given law in a range of possible ways, the lawmakers would have said so explicitly. This vein of argument has helped the conservatives spin up the major questions and nondelegation doctrines: the first of which demands a level of specificity rarely present in congressional delegations of power in matters of great economic and political significance, and the second of which holds that Congress cant outsource its legislative responsibilities. In this Courts hands, these largely made-up and embellished notions have become tools to beat back Obama and Biden administration actions the conservatives dont like.

What Gorsuch and co. dont say is that weakening agencies does not actually empower Congress. The legislature, hamstrung by the Senate filibuster, a polarized Congress and a lack of interest in policymaking on the right, can barely fund the government each year, much less pass a bill every time the Occupational Safety & Health Administration wants to tweak a factory workplace regulation or the Food and Drug Administration has to decide if a new product qualifies as a dietary supplement or a drug. It also lacks the expertise to do those things, given that much of what agencies do is highly technical. This is the reason justices devised Chevron in the 1980s the recognition that neither Congress, nor the courts, had the ability and expertise to speak to all questions in American federal policy.

What went unsaid in Wednesdays arguments is what a post-Chevron administrative state would look like. With a handicapped Congress and handcuffed agencies, the remaining branch the judiciary is itself the arbiter of what agencies can do.

Im worried about the courts becoming uber-legislators, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. If were talking about a policy question there are several reasonable meanings why should courts make that determination? Couldnt we be in a world where Congress intended for the agency to actually decide which choice is best?

Gorsuch and his peers, completing the trifecta of disingenuousness, feigned great distress at the chaos Chevron had introduced into the legal system, as agency actions change based on which party currently holds the White House.

The reality is you say dont overrule Chevron because it would be a shock to the system but the reality of how this works is that Chevron itself ushers in shocks to the system every four or eight years when a new administration comes in, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said, talking over Biden administration Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.

The justices seemed less interested in Prelogars recurring point, that overturning Chevron could reopen dozens of Supreme Court cases and thousands of lower court cases that rest on the judges showing some level of deference to agencies experts. Doing away with Chevron would also, she reminded the Court, not sweep away the many cases arising from statutory ambiguity, and would deprive judges of a useful tool for deciding them which also serves as a check against judges acting in accordance with their own partisan preferences.

Jackson questioned the merits of stability itself.

I suppose judicial policy making is very stable but precisely because we are not accountable to the people and have lifetime appointments, she said.

Whether Gorsuchs bloodlust or Chief Justice John Roberts mealy-mouthed hand waving the Court barely uses Chevron deference anymore, he said the right-wing, decades-long quest to kill Chevron seems very near victory.

The issue were deciding here is more like the countless policy issues that are going to confront this country in the years and decades ahead, Justice Elena Kagan said. Will courts be able to decide these issues as to things they know nothing about, courts that are completely disconnected from the policy process, from the political process and that just dont have any expertise and experience in an area? Or are people in agencies going to do that? Thats what this case is about.

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Gorsuch Gleefully Leads Right-Wing Cohort In Fulfilling Their Federalist Society Quest - TPM