Category Archives: Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, author Michael Shellenberger joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss how leftists drug policies are contributing to declining urban hubs and inhumane street conditions.

One of the things that happened is just that they basically ended both in the United States but more heavily in California and more heavily in San Francisco, we just liberalized drug use so that now basically, theres no consequence for criminal behaviors that are related to ones addiction or drug use. I would say that my change of mind was maybe a little bit less dramatic than the one around energy and environment but certainly, I strongly believe that there should be consequences for breaking the law. I think in the past, I never imagined it would spiral out of control in the way that it has.

Shellenberger said progressivism has created drug policies that do not promote rehabilitation and health, which is inhumane and lacking the social justice leftists often preach.

You hear a lot of people say completely incorrectly that crime is caused by inequality, the idea that people are sort of forced to commit crimes. Its total nonsense. I mean, theres literally never been any evidence for any of that, Shellenberger said. Its just ideological but I think that thats a big part of what I write about in San Fransicko, you know, both in terms of the justification given for things like shoplifting and drug use and public camping but also for things like defunding the police and anti-incarceration things that have actually been pretty terrible for poor and black communities.

You can find Shellenbergers book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities here.

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The Progressive Experiment Is Failing America's Cities - The Federalist

Voters in at least four cities are headed to the polls on Tuesday to determine whether they will defund the police amid rising urban crime rates. These referendums come on the heels of a growing crime surge in the United States, especially in urban areas.

While ballots in Austin, Texas, are asking voters to decide on an initiative that will actually increase staffing and law enforcement funding if passed, most of the defund the police proposals on the ballot in Cleveland, Denver, Minneapolis, and Albany, New York use vague language such as police reform to mask the policies true intent of dismantling law enforcement departments.

Minneapoliss proposal is by far the largest and most expansive law enforcement overhaul on the ballot. If passed, City Question Two will restructure the Minneapolis charter to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety managed by the leftist mayor or a possibly more progressive replacement and the City Council. The Department of Public Safety would be staffed by mental health and social workers who would take a comprehensive public health approach to fighting crime and only include traditional police officers if necessary.

While some cities such as Los Angeles got away with defunding the police after referendums during the 2020 election, public support for pulling funding from law enforcement is down across the board. In Minneapolis, 55 percent of voters said they dont support reducing the police force in the city.

A poll from the Pew Research Center published last week indicated that a rising number of Americans in general, 47 percent, actually want police spending in their areas to increase. That number is up 16 points from the beginning of the summer of rage in June 2020. Twenty-one percent of those who said they support funding hikes said the law enforcement spending should go up a lot, citing concerns about rising crime. Even 34 percent of Democrats admitted they wanted more funding for police moving forward.

Even some cities that dont have specific referendums or proposals to yank money from law enforcement are set to vote on whether they will elect a mayor who supports defunding the police. In Boston, Atlanta, New York City, and Buffalo, New York, voters must choose between supporting a Democrat mayor who plans to rally around defunding the police in the name of racial justice or a Democrat mayor who has estranged themselves from the progressive policy.

Democrat mayoral candidate Annissa Essaibi George in Boston has openly supported adding hundreds of officers to the citys police force to combat crime, but her progressive opponent Michelle Wu has already debuted a public safety plan that prohibits trained law enforcement officers from certain duties and hands them to unarmed civilian personnel.

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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Multiple Cities Voting Whether To 'Defund The Police' Amid Crime Surge - The Federalist

HAMILTON, Va. We attended a gathering of roughly 20 parents and other concerned residents of Loudoun County to tape footage for a documentary when the news broke last Thursday night that Superintendent Scott Ziegler had emailed the Loudoun County School Board on May 28 to notify them of the sexual assault that occurred at Stone Bridge High School earlier that same day. From indignation to validation to hope, heres how they reacted.

Its unbelievably shocking, but I think we all kind of assumed that that was the case, as heartbreaking as it is, I think we all kind of knew that he knew and were just waiting for someone to find proof, Gina Anders told us, as she and three other women gathered around an iPhone to read the breaking news. That the superintendent of LCPS actually knew about the alleged rape that occurred in the schools from the very beginning and failed not only lied to us at the school board meeting but also transferred the alleged perpetrator to another school where he victimized a second girl.

The most important part of all of this is they staged a question to the superintendent and had him answer it, and it was a lie, added Pegah Fowler. They staged an actual situation where they asked him this question and gave him a platform and an opportunity to actually lie about what he knew. Scott Ziegler flat-out lied.

At this point in time, its crystal clear that Loudoun County Public Schools are corrupt, Fowler added.

We need to get them all out, the entire school board, the superintendent, I mean, and this is an issue of accountability, noted Anders. I mean, they dont want to be, obviously, accountable to the parents. But these are our kids. Parents need to run the schools, not bureaucrats. I couldnt have imagined it even just a few years ago.

Several of the women emphasized that LCPS has promoted a facade of being an excellent school system. We moved here a few years ago to the best school district, and I feel totally lied to, jumped in Markie Sheets, holding her baby on her hip.

Its a facade: Lets repeat this lie over and over and over again. Lets pretend that we are providing the best education in the states, because Loudoun was the No. 1 growing county I mean talk about a facade, Fowler added. They flat-out lied, and they repeated it over and over and over again to a point where it caught on. And lets just pretend so we can line our own pockets, and then at the end of it all, lets sacrifice children, lets strip them of their innocence, lets take their souls, lets victimize them.

And lets pass [Policy 8040] so that more students can be victimized in bathrooms like the one they just covered up, chimed in Anders. They actually passed it, knowing that this incident occurred. Thats whats so just unbelievable.

Fowler added that out of roughly 81,000 students in Loudoun County, there are 29 of them, and thats probably a high number, that would have a need for transgender bathrooms. So were going to sacrifice our children for 29 people when we could accommodate those 29 appropriately by giving them a bathroom? Youve got family bathrooms in grocery stores, youve got family bathrooms in malls. Why cant we provide that for those individual kids and leave the rest of the children alone?

Fowler noted emphatically that she is absolutely not anti-trans. I think that as a child of Christ we need to love them, we need to embrace them, we need to have them part of our community, we need to extend that love.

Despite their disappointment and indignation at the actions of Ziegler and the Loudoun County School Board, the women felt validation for their efforts and hope for the future.

I think weve made incredible progress, Anders said.

All the time away from our families, all the nights, I mean, its incredible because its allowed us to bond, but I think its so worth it though, Fowler added. You know whats amazing about this, our Founding Fathers and the government that they created tonight, it validates what were capable of.

When we get engaged, Anders agreed.

Once we know we have the power to do so, thats why COVID was the best thing that happened to us because it allowed us to educate ourselves and come to the realization that we have complete control, Fowler concluded. A Third World country doesnt have this kind of control. And you know what, our civil rights, our liberty, our freedom, its just like a muscle. You dont use it, you lose it, and thats where we are right now.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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How These Loudoun Parents Reacted To Proof Of School Board Lies - The Federalist

The investigation into the fatal shooting of movie camerawoman Halyna Hutchins by actor Alec Baldwin with a prop gun on the set of the latters movie, Rust, last Thursday is ongoing, with new information and speculations appearing daily, so prudent people will let the investigation run its course before reaching conclusions. The fact that Mr. Baldwin has been a hard-core leftist activist, particularly against the right to keep and bear arms, should not lessen conservatives self-restraint in this regard.

We have been told several key elements so far. During a rehearsal, Baldwin pointed in Mrs. Hutchinss direction a single-action revolver that a film crew member had claimed was unloaded. The gun fired, perhaps because Baldwin cocked the hammer prematurely or pulled the trigger unintentionally, something got caught on the trigger, the gun malfunctioned, or Baldwin fired the gun intentionally for rehearsal purposes, thinking it was unloadedand Hutchins and film director Joel Souza were struck, the latter non-fatally. Also, the same gun may have been used by some film crew members for target shooting with conventional ammunition earlier in the day.

However, as with peoples reactions to many other topics in modern societys news cycle, in this instance self-restraint against conclusion-jumping is not universal. Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who normally gadflies on topics more within his area of expertise, knee-jerked, What is needed now is a clear law that categorically prohibits any real gun or real bullet from being used on a film set.

Of course, no such need has been established. Movies have a good, if not perfect, track record where firearm safety is concerned and, although we should still wait for the results of the investigation, what has been reported thus far suggests, if anything, not that the movie industrys safety procedures are inadequate, but that they may not have been followed by Baldwin and some members of his crew.

One fact about the tragedy appears to have emerged: an effort to exonerate Baldwin, one of the hard lefts favored Hollywood personalities. Most conspicuously, Democrats and leftwing civilian disarmament activist groups, who would otherwise be using the tragedy as the launchpad for an indignant and self-righteous campaign against the right to keep and bear arms, are being silent.

More subtly, a Fox News article quoted a movie prop master explaining how people in his line of work are responsible for checking firearms before they get into actors hands. If you do enough safety checks along the way, nothing should happen. But, obviously, the gun on Alec Baldwins set was not checked. Because if it was, they would have seen the bullet in there, he reportedly said.

Another Fox News article stated that a camera operator who was working on the films set [the day of the tragedy] noted to detectives that Baldwin was very careful when it came to the use of prop firearms while filming prior to the tragic accident, and the actor observed all the safety protocols and even did an extra check-in with the crew to make sure no one was near him. Specifically, he made sure a child who was on set that day wasnt anywhere near him when discharging the weapon.

However, whatever the movie industrys protocols may be, in the firearm training world its universally understood that once a person takes a gun into his or her hands, he or she is responsible for it. And while the cameraman Fox quoted may be correct that Baldwin was safe previously, it wouldnt necessarily mean that he was without fault in Hutchinss death.

Furthermore, in the firearm training world, the Baldwin incident would not be considered an accidenta mishap that occurs despite someone doing everything correctly. Unless someone deliberately loaded the gun with conventional ammunition, knowing it would be fired by Baldwin in that conditionwhich at this point there is no publicly known reason to suspectthe tragedy was the result of negligencesomething that occurred because one or more people failed to follow safety rules and procedures.

Leading voices among firearm instructors, their organizations, and the firearm industry commonly advise many safety rules. Some apply to all firearms, some to certain types of firearms because of how they function mechanically, and others to certain situations, such as training classes, shooting competitions, and the making of movies. Furthermore, several rules are widely considered cardinal and may be relevant in this instance.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), which has thousands of certified instructors nationwide, has long advised three safety rules that apply to all firearms at all times. The military, which trains almost as many Americans annually as NRA instructors do, uses basic firearm safety rules that track with the first two of the NRAs rules.

The NRAs first rule is Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Normally that means, among other things, not at another person. Its meaning and purpose is so obvious that even someone with no experience handling firearms can understand it.

Its often described as the most important rule, on the reasoning that even if someone failed to follow every other rule, and as a result fired a gun unintentionally, if that person were pointing the gun in a safe direction at the time the gun fired, he or she might be embarrassed and would almost certainly be read the Riot Act by the range safety officer at a shooting range, but no one would have been hurt.

The NRAs second and third rules are Always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot and Always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use, the intents of which are also easy for almost anyone to understand.

Whether the intents of these rules were violated in Baldwins instance would depend on whether the scene he was rehearsing called for him to fire the gun (loaded with blank ammunition, of course) in the direction of Hutchinss camera with her manning the camera, whether crew members in the chain of custody of Baldwins gun inspected the gun according to movie industry safety protocols, and whether there was any lapse, even for a moment, in that chain of custody.

People who train seriously with firearms load, unload, and otherwise handle firearms so frequently that they must adhere to safety rules religiously, lest Murphys Law force a mishap. In training and competition events, participants are frequently required to unload firearms while observed by supervisory personnel, and go through various steps to demonstrate beyond any doubt that their guns are unloaded.

Serious gun owners dont follow safety rules only most of the time, or when they feel like it, or when someone else is looking, or when theyre not in a hurry, or when theyre not distracted. They do things correctly each and every time. This is because doing things the safe way is more safe, and because by doing things correctly every time, they program themselves to do those things even if tired or distracted.

No one is born knowing how to handle firearms safely. Liking guns is not the same as knowing how to handle them. Even having owned guns for many years, and having shot guns many times, is not proof of knowing how to handle firearms correctly. The right to keep and bear arms is, at a last resort, our most important right, thus its one that should be exercised with the utmost care and attention to detail.

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What The Baldwin Mishap Says About Guns Isn't What You Might Think - The Federalist

Watch the video for a monologue on article, followed by an interview with David Azerrad, a professor of political theory and government at Hillsdale Colleges campus in Washington, D.C., on what comes next.

The story of the past 100-plus years is the story of the rout of American conservatism and the near complete and total takeover of the country and its Commanding Heights by a cadre of highly intelligent, determined, and ruthless individuals.

How did the century begin? The left started from a humble base: a few people here and there, but certainly not dominating the levers of society. They were scattered about entertainment and Congress, and only truly formidable in the union halls and universities.

One hundred years later, its all over. The old rebels now control Hollywood and Silicon Valley and sports and television and the American Medical Association and both houses of Congress and Wall Street and the White House and the Boy Scouts and your childs elementary and the bathrooms therein. Oh, and they still have the big unions and nearly all the universities too.

So how did they do it? How did all their rage against the machine become the machine? How did they win the Second American Revolution? Its worth understanding how they won the second if well have any hope to win the third.

The first thing we need to do when figuring out the conservative revolution is to understand this: We may have been good at it once when men like John Adams, James Madison, and John Jay strode the earth but no longer.

Today, the left is better at revolutionary ideas, in part because theyre willing to be revolutionary in their thinking and in their governing. Notice: They dont tinker around the edges quite the same way we do. Read a left-wing publication like Vox or Mother Jones or The Washington Post, and theyre bursting with a whole list of things they want done to ensure the left gets what it wants in the years to come.

To them, theres no barrier too difficult to remove, no norm too sacred to violate. If the U.S. Senate stands in the way, just abolish the filibuster. Electoral College causing you heartburn? Come up with a clever go-around to negate it!

Conservatives actually believe in the Constitution and tradition so we arent willing to go these distances to get what we want. Thats fine its what sets us apart from the lesser beasts. But conservatives also have to escape from their self-imposed paralysis.

Too bad, we tried, time to go post a meme on Facebook owning the libs then feel sad when Facebook bans it.

Seriously: How many times have you heard its the law of the land delivered as some unassailable reason that thousands of years of Western tradition rooted in Gods laws ought simply to be abandoned?

We cant afford the political assumption that nothing thats been done can be undone. We need to look around us at the systems and institutions of the United States in 2021 and realize that in our current state, precious little of this is worth conserving at all.

Large aspects of our power structures are cancerous, but from time to time and place to place we have the ability to change that; we live in a representative democracy, and when we hold the levers of power, we are able to act without being shackled by the mistakes of the generations that lost the Second American Revolution.

How to go about this is a broad and serious discussion, but heres another idea: Take away the lefts privileges and their immunities the different protections and power perches theyve carved for themselves over the years.

These privileges and immunities are not self-evident rights by God, and they are not inalienable. They, like much of the rot in our society, are the product of policies from our executive, legislatures, and courts, extended at a time when we may have been feeling more generous, maybe more trusting and certainly less rebellious.

For example: Why are we funneling more than $45 billion every year to colleges and universities in the form of federal student loans?Think about how the system works: Weve given colleges a stranglehold on access to the upper tiers of the economy. There are people who succeed without a college diploma, but for far too many, its a functional necessity.

So colleges have been cashing in, raising tuition 5, 6, 8 percent a year and the federal government dutifully ponies up every time. We pony up by automatically giving massive student loans to every student who asks for one.

Who benefits from those loans? In the short run, its not the students its the schools. But the schools have no responsibility for that loan being paid back; that responsibility is the students alone. By the way, if a student drops out or his career doesnt pan out, he cant discharge those loans in bankruptcy.

Young people get crushed while colleges get a boom time that never ends: limitless federal dollars they can use to fund fat administrator salaries and tenured professors of anti-American studies. We dont need to accept this. Theres nothing in the Constitution that says colleges need limitless federal support. Conservatives can and should demand a better system.

At a minimum, a good start would be making colleges co-sign every loan taken out for a student to attend. If a student doesnt succeed enough to pay off his student loans, then the college should be on the hook; they sold the taxpayers a bill of goods and didnt deliver.

But we can dream bigger: Our public colleges and our public K-12 systems have massive diversity, inclusion, and equity bureaucracies. We all know what those really are: sinecures for the woke; ransom that we pay to the barbarians hoping they will spare our village for another day.

As Rudyard Kipling wrote, however, paying tribute simply means more will be demanded in the future. The diversity tumor only grows unless we tear it out.

There is no reason a single publicly funded school in a red state should have a diversity bureaucracy. Get rid of them; we have the power to act. The left wont like it; I can already hear the howls of execration. But so what?

For a moment, think like youre fighting for the survival of your country: Their disingenuous, shrieking street theater doesnt matter in a state where citizens disagree with them, and have chosen their politicians accordingly.

So lets look to the courts next. The right has been so fixated on overturning Roe v. Wade for so many decades its easy to forget how many other bad precedents are out there.

Why, for example, do we still have racial discrimination in school admissions and government hiring when it plainly violates the U.S. Constitution? Because of bad court rulings rulings that could be overturned if we made it a priority to select judges who do that.

Or how about this: If the University of Texas Austin wants to discriminate, then break their board and reconstitute it. The governor of Texas can do that; he doesnt even need to wait for Ron DeSantis to go first.

Heres another ruling that deserves a second look: New York Times v. Sullivan. That was a banger of a case where the Times libeled the leaders of a local police department.

That wasnt even in dispute: The Times printed damaging lies about them. But the Supreme Court ruled that because the police leaders were public figures, the standard for libeling them was almost impossibly high to meet.

You know what? That standard might have worked when we had a broadly bipartisan media that wanted to hold government accountable without being sued into oblivion for any mistake, but today we have hired creeps who lie with impunity to push the lefts agenda.

How about corporations? They havent had the best interests of the American people in mind in a very long time. In fact, nearly every single terrible move this country has made for the past 30 years has originated in a boardroom. So why are we protecting them?

Would our corporate executives act differently toward their colleagues, clients, and shareholders if they were responsible to more than just an ever-shifting stock market? Or if their own personal wealth and cars and car elevators were on the line?

Right now, top Wall Street bankers arent personally on the hook for massive losses (even when they receive a huge taxpayer bailout) because weve chosen to make the law that way. It used to be different, and we could go back to the old way at any time.

There are things worth conserving in this country: religion and the family, for example, even in their tattered states. But we need to think differently about the institutions that have been weaponized against us and we need to break them.

Once we understand how we got here, well realize this hypothesis isnt so scandalous. What is scandalous is our leaders refusal to know what time it is.

In the early 1960s, as the radicals raged and the liberals watched, the late great M. Stanton Evans wrote an article for Young Americans for Freedoms college-aged magazine, The New Guard. In it, he asked, can conservatives be revolutionary? Sixty years ago, he thought this was the correct way to think.

Today, its the only way.

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Conservatives As Revolutionaries: How To Fight When You're An Alien In Your Own Land - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Gen. Keith Kellogg, former acting National Security Adviser in the Trump administration, joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss what happened behind the scenes of former President Donald Trumps foreign policy.

He would use language in his unscripted way of getting a point across and he would make it a common language, common to the people of United States. It wouldnt be diplomatic language. There was clarity with the president. It was simple, it was direct. It was hard, and you understood it, Kellogg said.

Kellogg also said that Trump wasnt afraid to stand up to the corrupt corporate media and offered insight into the former presidents real stance on Julian Assange.

I thought President Donald J. Trump was treated unfairly by the press. I think there were people out there in every, for the most part, most major mainstream media who, it became a personal attack, it was an ad hominem attack, it was [not just] an attack on his policies. And he wouldnt back down, I mean, not at all. And I think he kind of saw that with Julian the same way, like okay, this guys not backing down,' Kellogg said.

You can find Kelloggs book War by Other Means: A General in the Trump White House here.

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Behind The Scenes Of Donald Trump's Foreign Policy - The Federalist

Racine County, Wisconsin law enforcement blew the 2020 election integrity question wide open on Thursday after an investigation into one nursing home. It revealed not only that state election officials flagrantly broke the law and ordered health-care employees to help them, but that the problem likely runs much deeper throughout the swing states other 71 counties.

An election statute was in fact not just broken, but shattered by members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said during a Thursday press conference in which he and Sgt. Michael Luell detailed the findings of an investigation into Ridgewood Care Facility.

The investigation came about when a woman named Judy signed a sworn affidavit with the Wisconsin Elections Commission after she discovered that her mother, who had died on Oct. 9, 2020 after a period of severe cognitive decline, had voted in the 2020 presidential election. The affidavit was later passed along as a complaint to the county district attorney.

Judy alleged that her mother Shirleys mental state had deteriorated so far that she was having hallucinations and wasnt able to recall what she had eaten during a day or even what day it was. According to Judy, her mother couldnt see her glasses were broken, and she couldnt even recognize her own daughter so even if she were of a sound mind, she wouldnt have known whether someone assisting her with a ballot had voted according to her wishes.

Luell, who led the investigation at the request of the district attorney, found an unusual spike in voting at this care facility: 42 people had voted in the 2020 presidential election. That number is usually 10. Furthermore, in 2020, 38 people had requested absentee ballots, up from the usual 0-3 in normal years.

When Luell attempted to contact the families of these voters to check whether their loved ones had the cognitive capacity to cast a vote, seven replied no, and almost all of them hadnt voted since 2012. One of the family members said his mother would ask him who he was, meaning she didnt recognize her own son. She hadnt voted since 2012 yet MyVote Wisconsin revealed she voted twice in 2020.

This surge in voting was the result of Wisconsin Elections Commission officials breaking state law. The commission which is made up of six commissioners, including three Democrats and three Republicans, who are appointed by legislative leaders or the governor and serve as an agency in the executive branch under the governor authorized nursing home employees to help residents vote, which Luell noted is a direct violation of law.

According to Luell, employees would ask residents how they voted in the past and then vote according to that party. In other words, if Judys mother could only recall JFK, staff would vote Democrat for her.

According to state law, however, nursing home staff cant assist residents with voting. In fact, nobody can help the voter other than a relative or special voting deputies, which are people appointed by municipal clerks or elections boards to conduct absentee voting at care facilities.

In March, however, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent out a letter mandating that municipalities should not use the special voting deputy process.

Ladies and gentleman, its not a process. Its the law, Luell said, citing state Statute 6.875.

The original letter was issued under the guise of COVID guidelines. Nevertheless, in September, after the governors lockdown orders had expired and the initial shock of the pandemic had passed, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent a letter to all residential care facilities telling the workers how to help residents vote, including even marking the ballot for them, in direct violation of state law.

Racine law enforcement looked at 2020 visitor logs and found that other visitors were let into the nursing home throughout the pandemic, about 900 times between the decision in March not to use special voting deputies and November 2020. Those visitors included someone to clean the fish tanks and birdcages and even DoorDash delivery people.

Those people were allowed into the Ridgewood Care Facility, but heaven forbid we make an exception for special voting deputies, Luell said.

Under Wisconsin state statute 12.13, breaking these laws about special voting deputies constitutes election fraud, which is a felony.

Were just one of 72 counties, Racine County, Schmaling noted. Ridgeland is one of 11 facilities within our county. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these facilities throughout the entire state of Wisconsin. We would be foolish, we would be foolish to think for a moment that this integrity issue, this violation of the statute, occurred to just this small group of people at one care facility in one county in the entire state. I would submit to you that this needs the attorney generals investigation, the sheriff said, calling for the AG to launch an immediate probe into the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

This bombshell investigation is only the latest in the long list of malfeasant actions by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, especially regarding the 2020 election. As Wisconsin radio host and lawyer Dan ODonnell put it, the commission was downright derelict in its duty to fairly and impartially oversee an election.

As ODonnell documented, the commission unlawfully allowed clerks to cure ballots, illegally permitted clerks to go home on election night and return to finish counting in the morning, and illegally told clerks they could relocate polling locations in the weeks before the election.

Furthermore, the commission failed to issue relevant laws and rules for training municipal election workers, special voting deputies, and election inspections. Worse, it failed to investigate voter rolls for the hundreds of thousands there incorrectly, including more than 45,000 first-time voters whose names didnt match Department of Transportation records, among other issues.

As The Federalists Mollie Hemingway outlines in her new book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, the Wisconsin Elections Commission also wrongly kept third-party candidates off the ballot, including Kanye West and the Green Partys Howie Hawkins. Third parties can significantly affect elections in the Dairy State.

Following the [Legislative Audit Bureau] report, what Sheriff Schmaling has uncovered + disclosed might only be tip of the iceberg of fraud in the 2020 election. The Legislature must be given the time, resources, and cooperation of election officials to conduct a complete investigation of allegations, tweeted Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin following the Racine press conference. Using elderly residents with cognitive decline to commit election fraud is reprehensible, and should concern every Wisconsinite and American.

Johnson continued: If Democrats will stoop this low to impact elections, one can only imagine what else theyre willing to do.

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Wis. Election Panel Told Nursing Home Staffers To Illegally Cast Ballots - The Federalist

President Joe Biden will leave for the United Nations global summit on Climate Change in Glasgow next week to seek an international deal to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The world must limit warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels, so the story goes, with a preferential target set at below 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to stave off a manmade Armageddon. Current trajectories, however, put the globe on path to warm 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to a new UN report out Monday released in anticipation of the COP26 in Scotland, which stands for the conference of parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The mess from this update is loud and clear: Parties must urgently redouble their climate efforts, warned Patricia Espinosa, the executive secretary of the convention, ahead of the 26th conference.

Yet Biden will arrive with nothing to show by way of enhanced U.S. commitment after congressional Democrats failed to pass major legislation this month. Even if the president promises to reduce emissions through executive order, the signal is clear Biden possesses no legislative mandate, and orders could be rolled back in three years as they were under President Donald Trump.

Heres why its a good thing Biden is showing up in Glasgow empty-handed.

The UN was characteristically dramatic with demands the world must rapidly meet ambitious targets of net-zero emissions to save the planet. But the world isnt ending. In fact, with the help of abundant reliable energy, the world is safer than ever before. To pretend otherwise to justify systematic change coerced through panic would itself prove catastrophic.

The exponential growth in development for the past century powered by fossil fuels supplying cheap, dependable energy has turned a climate thats always been dangerous to one in which humans can flourish. Climate-related deaths have plummeted more than 98 percent since 1900, with weather to blame for 0.07 percent of deaths worldwide, and 0.01 percent of deaths in the United States between 1980 and 2014. Thats after the planet already warmed 1 degree Celsius since the Little Ice Age century of the 1800s, which puts the real goal of the Paris Climate Accords at preventing average temperature rise by another half degree.

While catastrophic climate activists often highlight heat-related fatalities on the rise over the prior two decades, cold-related deaths have declined 150 percent more than heat-incident mortalities increased, as shown in the chart below from the Wall Street Journal.

Freezing temperatures are far more difficult to deal with than desert-like heat waves, where hydration and shaded areas may provide relief even without air conditioning. Heat deaths have still fallen where access to centralized air conditioning has risen.

Homes in the winter, on the other hand, require heat that is often prohibitively expensive for the poor. Thanks to innovation in hydraulic fracturing, the cost of natural gas has come down, saving more than 11,000 lives on an annual basis by 2010, according to one study.

The best way to protect people from heat or cold is access to plentiful, cheap energy, Copenhagen Consensus President Bjorn Lomborg reported for the Journal. That often means fossil fuels.

The central climate provision of the Democrats colossal reconciliation bill was given the ax after objections from Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. The $150 billion Clean Energy Power Performance Program (CEPP) sought to radically subsidize sources of unreliable renewable energy with monetary rewards to utilities that make the switch and penalties for those that did not.

The taxpayer-funded incentive to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind would have transformed the power grid from the reliable network most states enjoy today to a high-priced utility with intermittent blackouts seen in Texas and California becoming the norm. Europe is already bearing the consequences of undue reliance on unreliables amid a low-wind season.

Californias chase of 60 percent clean energy with renewable power by 2030 sparked repeated blackouts, which fueled the gubernatorial recall this summer. To make up for gaps in reliable power, California was forced to import more than a quarter of its electricity in 2019 from fossil-fuel heavy states such as Utah, Nevada, and Arizona.

In Texas, the only state that operates on its own power grid and relies on wind for more than a fifth of its electricity, an energy crisis left millions without power when residents were hit by record-low temperatures. The intermittency of the power grid by overreliance on wind power caught operators by surprise when they underestimated peak demand.

It appears that ERCOT, Texass grid operator, was caught off guard by how soon demand began to exceed supply, explained former State Rep. Jason Isaac for The Federalist in February. Failure to institute a managed rolling blackout before the grid frequency fell to dangerously low levels meant some plants had to shut off to protect their equipment. This is likely why so many power plants went offline, not because they had failed to maintain operations in the cold weather.

Bidens climate plans in the reconciliation bill seek to generate 50 percent of the nations power by wind and solar by the end of the decade.While the CEPP is dead, Democrats still plan to stack the partisan reconciliation bill with $235 billion in subsidies for non-carbon-emitting sources of energy. The new package carves out enhanced subsidies for wind and solar in particular, threatening to raise power bills while the handouts raise the unreliability of the grid.

The bills pending status, however, will still hinder the presidents overseas leverage to craft a climate deal that would do far more harm than good by restricting the developing worlds access to reliable fossil fuels when billions of people still need power.

Bidens failure to pass major climate initiatives beyond executive order in the run-up to the Glasgow summit tosses cold water on the presidents efforts to convince world leaders the United States is committed to European-style transformation of the power grid. The absence of a congressional mandate signals a repeat of back-and-forth commitment to the Paris Agreement, where the political pendulum could revoke a U.S. pledge to forfeit energy independence through the use of reliable fossil fuel by the end of the decade.

The Paris Agreement, which President Biden re-signed on his first day in office, did more to enhance the influence of global adversaries than achieve meaningful reduction in emissions. Renewable-reliant Europe, where more than half a dozen countries ban fracking, has become increasingly dependent on Russian natural gas just as California has relied on neighboring states to meet demand for instantaneous power. Even the Biden administration has come to acknowledge the Kremlins grip months after the president stripped the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline but gave the green light for the Nord Stream 2 to feed natural gas into Germany.

The climate agenda is expensive and is not even possible to implement in a medium-sized wealthy industrial economy, said former Trump EPA transition member Steve Milloy, pointing to the $500 billion renewable push in Germany, where residents pay the second-highest power prices in Europe. Yet the pressure to implement these demonstrably failed policies has taken on the air of hysteria.

In 2019, Germany was Europes largest consumer of natural gas, relying on Russian imports.

While Democrats demand billions in taxpayer dollars to meet emissions targets outlined by the Paris Agreement, a U.S. reduction in greenhouse gases means nothing without global cooperation. China is the worlds largest polluter, and with Russia, the two nations constitute 33 percent of global CO2 emissions. Neither nations leaders will be in Glasgow next week.

See more here:

Biden Is Showing Up Empty-Handed In Glasgow. That's A Good Thing - The Federalist

The extent to which corporate media rigs elections for Democrats has been rigorously documented since at least Tim Grosecloses 2012 book, Left Turn. In that book, the political scientist concluded through data-driven analysis that media bias on average shifts the electorate 20 points to the left on a 100-point political worldview scale. Without media bias, he argued, the average American state would be as Republican-leaning as Texas or Kentucky, and those two states would be even more conservative.

Media bias was highly visible even before Rush Limbaugh made it a regular feature of his top-rated radio show that became nationally syndicated in 1988. As the Trump era dawned, however, media coverage moved from biased to outright propaganda.

Corporate media went from picking left-friendly frames and omitting facts that reinforced right-leaning views about public affairs, as Groseclose documented in 2012, to outright mass hoaxing of voters by 2016. While hyperventilating about the minority of Americans who believe conspiracy theories like QAnon, leftist media not only inflamed but also outright fabricated conspiracy theories that the majority of Democrat voters believe.

For example, in 2020, a majority of Americans including 81 percent of self-described liberals believed the lie that Donald Trump committed treason for Russia. That claim was disproven by a two-year, Democrat-populated special counsel investigation that spent $32 million to find no evidence for this hoax, which effectively hamstrung a president from pursuing what voters put him in office to accomplish.

This corporate media smear machine was only one of the numerous unfair advantages Democrats exploited in the 2020 elections. My colleague, Mollie Hemingway, just put out a new, bestselling book that also documents things like big tech hiding election-shifting news from voters and Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg embedding Democrat get-out-the-vote operations inside local election offices which are supposed to be nonpartisan! Whats more, all these cheats affixed into our nations election machinery havent been scrubbed away, not by a long shot.

While I work with Mollie and am highly aware of media corruption since its our bread and butter here at The Federalist, she still had many surprises for me inside Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Here Ill share a few things she reports in the book that made me gasp out loud.

I had to read this section of the book two or three times to absorb what it was saying. I couldnt believe it could possibly be true. Yet it is: Shockingly, the 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Reagans first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations.

What? Next sentence: For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systemic advantage over its Republican counterpart: the Republican National Committee had been prohibited by law from helping out with poll watcher efforts or nearly any litigation related to how voting is being conducted.

This section in chapter 1 goes on to explain how such an insane thing could be real. Essentially, after Democrats accused Republicans of cheating in a New Jersey race in 1981, a judge banned the RNC from poll-watching and voting litigation everywhere in the country, then kept re-upping the order until 2018, when it finally expired three years after he died.

This handicapped Republicans for almost 40 years while Democrats were free to do things Republicans couldnt, like give boosts to their voters all along the voting process and track them extensively, challenge ballots, document irregularities, and sue over election disputes. By 2020, then, Mollie writes:

Democrats had spent the last forty years perfecting their Election Day operations while everyone at the Republican National Committee walked on eggshells, knowing that if they so much as looked in the direction of a polling site, there could be another crackdown. As a result, there was no muscle memory about how to watch polls or communicate with a presidential campaign.

Thats a pretty big handicap walking into the election chaos of 2020, in which Americans filled out an unprecedented 65 million mail-in ballots, which are known not only for their margin of error, but also for being structurally biased towards Democrats.

Also made clear throughout Rigged is that lazier and sloppier elections strongly advantage Democrats. This means long election seasons, mail-in balloting, and loose ballot behavior such as mailing millions and opening dropboxes all tilt elections towards Democrats.

As Mollie writes, the vote-by-mail system was becoming a major part of the Democratic Partys get-out-the-vote operation. Regardless of fraud and other concerns, the press saw the success of the mail-in ballot effort in Wisconsin for what it was: an effort to turn out more Democratic voters. Republican voters, she shows, prefer to vote in person because they want to make sure their votes are reliably counted.

Why Republicans would ever allow voting procedures that structurally advantage their opponents is, to put it bluntly, only understandable as self-hatred. Democrats would never, ever do that, because they actually want to win.

In 2020, Facebooks interference in the election was a one-two punch. Mollie notes: [Mark] Zuckerberg didnt just help Democrats by censoring their political opponents. He directly funded liberal groups running partisan get-out-the-vote operations. In fact, he helped those groups infiltrate election offices in key swing states by doling out large grants to crucial districts. That funding was the means by which [Democrat] activists achieved their revolution and changed the course of the 2020 election.

Elsewhere in the book, Hemingway notes that Facebook executives have boasted that they can shut off 80 percent of the traffic to any link they want. Facebook and Google blacklisting of conservative news sites such as The Federalist, The Daily Caller, and Breitbart has been documented since 2017.

Atop this were whats been termed Zuck Bucks, the nearly half a billion dollars Zuckerberg gave to essentially fund a shadow elections system that again structurally advantaged Democrats.To list just a few things the book shows Zuck Bucks facilitated: literally designing mail-in ballots and their envelopes; sending partisan activists to help local elections offices in conveniently located swing districts; fix unclear or illegal mail-in ballots; designing absentee balloting instructions; and collecting absentee ballots.

The details are breathtaking. Mollie gives so many facts about the partisan tilt and effectiveness of Zuckerbergs grants to local elections offices that it truly leads one to conclude Zuckerberg flat-out bought the election for Joe Biden.

Id also never heard about this shocking story that illustrates the extent to which political repression is tolerated within the Democrat Party. In her chapter about the 2020 Summer of Riots, Mollie writes:

In 2017, Portland canceled its annual Rose Parade after violent threats from Antifa, which objected to the Multnomah County Republican Partys being included as one of the many civic groups marching in the parade. Forget Trump; it was unsafe for even an ordinary Republican to walk down the streets of Portland. And in canceling the parade, [Portland Mayor Ted] Wheeler effectively conceded that Antifa ruled the streets.

Mollie later quotes former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr describing how Antifa a violent group implicated in actual domestic terrorism use[s] legitimate demonstrations as a host body. Further, Mollie writes, they operated in liberal cities in blue states where local authorities were both reluctant to stop them and unwilling to help federal law enforcement go after them.

In other words, Democrats are willing to concede the safety of Americans lives, limbs, and property to ideological allies, even when those allies openly commit violent crimes and threaten more.

In discussing why Antifa is allowed to threaten peaceful American citizens with violence, Mollie uncovers one of the political problems with addressing this: The FBI is systemically biased on behalf of the left. [T]he agency had long focused its attention on right-wing extremists and was ill-equipped to deal with threats from the left, she notes.

Yes, this is the nations top law-enforcement agency that helped hatch the Spygate plot to frame a Republican president. Politically biased you think? Mollie writes further:

Even though decades had passed, the FBI was still skittish about the criticism it had received for infiltrating radical left-wing groups in the 60s and 70s.

The inaction in response to Antifa certainly helped take the pressure off Biden [in the 2020 campaign], who never had to answer for the bricks flying through windows, rampant looting, toppling of statues, and assaults on innocent business owners that defined urban life throughout the summer of 2020. To do so would have been to confront an uncomfortable truth the Democratic Party and its allies have been tolerating, encouraging, and mainstreaming political violence for decades.

As my opening to this essay explains, Im aware media bias has been transcended by outright propaganda. In her book, however, Mollie makes an excellent point about this after detailing other cases proving this shift.

She makes it in relation to what Id call a relatively minor offense The New York Times publishing a Trump-smearing piece from an anonymous author it described as a senior administration official, meaning someone in the upper echelon of an administration. Of course, it turned out this person wasnt any such thing. He was just a mid-level bureaucrat.

After giving the truly asinine details of that story, Mollie makes this comment:

If the New York Times was willing to lie about how high-level an anonymous source was for its very high-profile September 2018 information operation, what lies was it willing to tell about all the other anonymous sources it used? And if this is how one of Americas biggest newsrooms operates, readers are right to ask how much other papers and media outlets were willing to lie in support of their anti-Republican narratives.

If you dont believe it already, after you read Mollies book, you will come away with the inescapable conclusion that Trump was right when he called corporate media the enemy of the people.

Up to a quarter of a million votes were cast in Wisconsins presidential election without any identification check at all, Mollie writes on page 66. I already knew a lot about how error-riddled mail-in voting is I wrote about that when few would. But just encountering this new fact and realizing this represented just one swing state was another mind-blowing moment for me about just how corruption-enabling and confidence-destroying are vote-by-mail-tainted elections.

There are many more shocking things in Mollies book, and Im not even done. I just started the Hunter Biden chapter, and holy mackerel. Until I read further, a few thoughts.

Republicans expect to win a wave election in 2022. How many points will they have to beat Democrats by to prove it? How many dubious ballots will be produced or negotiated away by partisan election workers or judges? How many urban areas run by Democrats will produce suspicious numbers of ballots that outweigh the votes in the rest of their states? How many Republican voters will stay home because they cant trust elections run by some of the loosest rules in the developed world?

We shouldnt even have to be asking these questions right now. If Republicans genuinely want to win elections and that is sadly in doubt they have no choice but to use whatever power they have to make those elections trustworthy again. That means in-person voting, with ID, for everyone except the truly disabled, and returning to an election day, not an election season.

The left and their media are going to lie about Republicans no matter what they do, so they might as well get secure elections out of the never-ending smear cycle. Republican voters dont believe the media anyway, so why do any of their elected officials? Remember, admitting you have a problem is the first step towards recovery.

Original post:

7 Insane Things I Just Learned About How US Elections Are 'Rigged' - The Federalist

I am literally shaking right now. I cant believe the Biden administration is creating such an unsafe space. On the internet, no less, where it literally affects the whole globe.

Their new infographic depicting The Life of Linda for their Build Back Better campaign is so problematic, I dont even know where to start. If Joe Biden wants to really be an ally with the oppressed of the world, its time for him and the entire White House to do the work.

That work starts with getting their language right. Right here in the first slide, however, the gender-normative oppression begins.

Just let me count the ways this image equals genocide.

For one, they use the offensive term pregnant woman. Biden got this right with using birthing people instead before, so why not in public advertisements like this one? As even the Centers for Disease Control and aging House Democrats have established, its not just women who become pregnant. Its also transgender women and, soon, robots.

Second, the image above also misgenders the misshapen blob sucking the life out of Lindas body. We cant know a persons gender until that person himself, herself, or xyrself identifies it through a mystical experience of the Inchoate Self.

Thirdly, the image above falsely attributes personhood to womb invaders. Babies arent people unless they are wanted.

Fourthly, the White House missed a golden opportunity to enlighten Americans and celebrate trans individuals by replacing the dated Linda with a transwoman, perhaps one named Larry, if Democrats still have to somehow get votes from those disgusting flyover swamp creatures to cement their universal brotherhood of political power. The world needs not more white-presenting, white-named Lindas which kind of sounds like Karen, when you think about it but a more vibrant and forward-thinking image of a female Larry.

The Biden administration figured this out by naming a completely unqualified transgender woman to a four-star admiralcy last week. Thats what were going for here. Stop regressing.

Heres another highly problematic image in this series.

I cannot believe the Biden administration did not increase OSHA protections for manufacturing workers to prevent Lindas hearing loss. Since government decrees can save lives, its unthinkable that Biden wouldnt show how government can truly assume god-like powers and prevent all suffering, want, and need if only people do what it says.

None of the people in these depictions are wearing masks. Since the Centers for Disease Control is indicating this devastating pandemic will go on for at least three more years, after which we will need to pursue lockdowns to stop the climate apocalypse and limit the human population, this is an unconscionable image decision that will kill billions.

As the racially distinguished womyn notes below in her reply to a domestic terrorist, these images also display cultural appropriation by mimicking the work of indigenous Chinese artists.

The Biden administration has worked really hard to be a lot better than the Obama administration at fighting white men and championing government as their replacement so all people who arent white can live as their authentic selves. But they cant even do better than President Obamas Life of Julia?

I literally cant even. Im so overwhelmed with all the evil in the world right now. I need a personal health day.

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7 Problematic Things In 'The Life Of Linda' That Require Cancellation Now - The Federalist