
Matthew Vadum, formerly senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, "[Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers](http://www.amazon.com/Subversion-Inc-Terrorizing-American-Taxpayers/dp/1935071149)."


Matthew Vadum

Here's that aforementioned <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/analysis-hunter-bidens-hard-drive-shows-firm-took-11-million-2013-2018-rcna29462">NBC News report </a>on the exciting adventures of Hunter Biden.

<blockquote>
	
		Biden made $5.8 million, more than half his total earnings from 2013 to 2018, from two deals with Chinese business interests.
</blockquote>


	There's little new in the details themselves, but they're a helpful reminder that the Biden crime family is in hock to the Peeps in a big way.

<blockquote>
	
		A review of the personal and corporate emails on Biden’s hard drive yield little information about any business he conducted on behalf of Hudson West III, and his autobiography doesn’t discuss his Chinese business dealings in any detail.&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	Which is itself revealing.


	What are you doing to get paid millions of dollars that you (or more likely your Chinese partners who have more self-control) aren't putting in writing?

<blockquote>
	
		In 2018, Chinese prosecutors accused Ye Jianming of “economic crimes,” including alleged fraud and bribery, and detained him for questioning. He hasn’t been seen in public since.

	
		A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told NBC News, “We are not familiar with the case you mentioned, and I’m afraid we can’t offer information on this.”

	
		According to the Republican Senate report, Hudson West III, CEFC and another firm were involved in certain transactions that were&nbsp;“among those identified as potential efforts to layer funds.”

	
		The U.S. Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network describes the layering of funds as “separating the illegally obtained money from its criminal source by layering it through a series of financial transactions, which makes it difficult to trace the money back to its original source.”

	
		But the report doesn’t say whether or not Hunter Biden was personally involved in any transactions that were suggested to involve “layering.”

	
		Biden also appears to have done work for one of Ye’s business associates. Patrick Ho was convicted in U.S. federal court of bribing top officials in Chad and Uganda in pursuit of oil deals in those countries starting in September 2014. A jury found that Ho, while working for CEFC, bribed or attempted to bribe officials as much as $2 million. He was sentenced to three years in prison in March 2019 and then expelled from the U.S. at the end of his prison term.&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	The underlying question is what was Hunter Biden and the larger clan doing to make all that money from these guys?


	It's implausible that Hunter Biden, an unstable crackhead with no self-control, was getting paid a fortune for any skill other than his political connections. If Joe Biden had been a retired Senate member, it's unlikely that Hunter would have gotten this kind of payday.


	There's no scenario in which this was anything except an attempt to use Joe Biden's crackhead son for his political connections. And those connections all go through Joe.

Hunter Biden Made Most of His Money From China

Here's that aforementioned NBC News report on the exciting adventures of Hunter Biden.


	
		Biden made $5.8 million, more than half his total earnings

Hunter Biden Made Most of His Money From China

First the New York Times and the Washington Post, now NBC News.


	Before we dig into the details of the NBC News report, let me note that it is once again a mainstream media news report digging into a story that the media denied so vocally in 2020 that it was censored across social media platforms as disinformation.


	<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/analysis-hunter-bidens-hard-drive-shows-firm-took-11-million-2013-2018-rcna29462">Now suddenly</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		NBC News obtained&nbsp;a copy of Biden’s laptop hard drive&nbsp;from a representative of Rudy Giuliani and examined Biden’s business dealings from 2013 to 2018 based on the information available on the hard drive and the scope of the documents released by the Senate.
</blockquote>


	NBC News' experts all have unflattering things to say about Hunter Biden.

<blockquote>
	
		Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former assistant director for counterintelligence, said there is a national security risk when foreign powers like China see an opportunity to get close to someone like Biden. “It’s all about access and influence, and if you can compromise someone with both access and influence, that’s even better,” said Figliuzzi, now an NBC News contributor. “Better still if that target has already compromised himself.”

	
		NBC&nbsp;News&nbsp;analyst Chuck Rosenberg, a former Justice Department official, said that Biden’s paying what he owes&nbsp;could&nbsp;even be seen as an admission of criminal violations. Not paying taxes for many years, rather than one or two, Rosenberg said, helps establish intent, which can otherwise be a struggle for prosecutors in white-collar cases.

	
		Paying the bill, Rosenberg said, might help Biden if he faced sentencing and “mitigate some of the damage, but it doesn’t undo the crime. That would be like returning money to a bank that you robbed. You still robbed the bank.”
</blockquote>


	It's almost as if Hunter Biden is a Republican.


	NBC News is the latest in a series of mainstream media outlets to run extensive pieces digging into the laptop materials. Why?&nbsp;


	In 2020, the Hunter Biden stuff was opposition research against a candidate the media opposes. Now, it's opposition research against a candidate some in the media would like to see step down after his first term.


	Joe Biden keeps talking about running again. It's no coincidence that the media got interested in Hunter Biden's laptop as part of an emerging consensus that Joe Biden shouldn't run again.


	As<a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/democrat-plan-stop-joe-biden-daniel-greenfield/"> I wrote in</a>,&nbsp;The Democrat Plan to Stop Joe Biden, "Biden’s son is the leverage. During the election, Democrats and their media feverishly suppressed any coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop only to now revive the story. In recent weeks and months, the&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Washington Post&nbsp;have legitimized the laptop."

<blockquote>
	
		"Democrats and the media are best served with Schrödinger's Hunter, not indicted or exculpated, but the subject of an ongoing investigation that can be used as leverage on his father, that holds out possible consequences for the son without severely damaging Joe’s election chances.&nbsp;

	
		They would like Joe Biden to say that he’ll be stepping down after one term and for the Hunter Biden investigation to go away with a slap on the wrist."&nbsp;
</blockquote>

The Mainstream Media is Suddenly Very Interested in Opposition Research on Hunter Biden

First the New York Times and the Washington Post, now NBC News.


	Before we dig into the details of the NBC News report, let me note that it is once again

The Mainstream Media is Suddenly Very Interested in Opposition Research on Hunter Biden

The difference between disinformation and information is often a matter of perspective.&nbsp;


	Disinformation is an Orwellian term which seeks to delegitimize opposing or different points of view by treating them as a "fundamental crisis of democracy". The Disinformation Governance Board, an illegitimate and disturbing institution, and even contemplating such a thing was an offense against the First Amendment.


	And, appropriately enough, what brought the Disinformation Governance Board down was exactly information of the sort that it would like to get rid of.


	Critics made Nina Jankowicz, her personality, her videos and her views, an issue. And they did so successfully enough that the board will get reset.


	It will, like every movie monster and slasher movie villain, be back. Anything else is unthinkable.


	Ever since Dems embraced the notion of a&nbsp;disinformation crisis after losing the 2016 presidential election, the concept has become crucial to their war on free speech and efforts to monopolize online narrative spaces.


	But&nbsp;&nbsp;Nina Jankowicz likely won't be a part of it.

The Disinformation Board was Brought Down by Information

The difference between disinformation and information is often a matter of perspective.&nbsp;


	Disinformation is an Orwellian term which seeks to

The Disinformation Board was Brought Down by Information

Elon Musk threatening to hold off on a purchase of Twitter because of spam is an interesting argument. Granted there are legal disclosure issues, but we've known that Twitter is bots for a very long time.


	The "bot" argument often comes up, It's also mostly meaningless.

<blockquote>
	
		Half of Joe Biden's Twitter Followers Are Fake, Audit Reveals - Newsweek
</blockquote>


	Like his real-life followers.&nbsp;


	But Twitter really is just a bunch of bots. Much like Amazon reviewers. The problem really took off when influencers came into being. A new wave of sophisticated campaigns were initially used to swell follower accounts in a crude way, but then became machines distributing messages and ideas on a massive scale.


	Much of this isn't even political.


	Whether you're selling one side or another of a war, or dishwasher detergent or a brand of cosmetics, you need followers to bolster your influence and spread your message.


	The bot armies routinely follow popular accounts and interact with them to create the illusion of legitimacy. The folks replying to everything with canned remarks or animated gifs may be real, but they may also be bots.


	That means most popular accounts have a high ratio of bot followers, it means that any popular trend with have bots attach to it, and it means that any company doing Twitter marketing is likely going to make us of bots to amplify its message.


	Basically, bots are to Twitter what spam is to email. It's an inescapable reality.&nbsp;

Twitter is a Bunch of Bots

Elon Musk threatening to hold off on a purchase of Twitter because of spam is an interesting argument. Granted there are legal disclosure issues, but we've

Twitter is a Bunch of Bots

This may not be the incredibly <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-frustrated-constantly-explaining-things-to-trump-fiona-hill-2022-5?op=1&amp;scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4">damaging argument</a> that Fiona Hill thought it would be.


	Hill, the British NSC adviser on Russia, a leftist currently at Brookings, keeps trying to bash Trump and praise the Democrats, but this isn't having quite the intended effect. Hill tries to explain away the obvious problem of why Putin invaded Ukraine under Obama and Biden, but not Trump.&nbsp;


	Apparently, he didn't like having to explain things and did like easy surrenders and predictable weakness.

<blockquote>
	
		Russian President Vladimir Putin often became frustrated with President Donald Trump over his lack of knowledge on geopolitical issues, Fiona Hill said, adding that this played into Moscow's decision on the timing of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

	
		One of the reasons Putin invaded Ukraine with President Joe Biden in the White House was that he expected the US to "sue for peace" and thought it would be better to deal with Biden than trying to negotiate with someone like Trump, whom the Russian leader had "to explain everything to all the time,"

	
		"He thought that somebody like Biden — who's a transatlanticist, who knows all about NATO, who actually knows where Ukraine is, and actually knows something about the history, and is very steeped in international affairs — would be the right person to engage with," Hill said.

	
		"You could see that he got frustrated many times with President Trump because he had to keep explaining things, and Putin doesn't like to do that," Hill said, adding: "Even though he loves to be able to spin his own version of events, he wants to have predictability in the person that he's engaging with."
</blockquote>


	Again, not the compelling pro-Biden argument that Hill thought it would be.


	Seems like maybe we need someone in the White House whom Putin doesn't want to have to deal with rather than the predictable fellow who will surrender on cue.


	Mind you, this does inconveniently rub up against the whole, "Putin wants Trump in the White House" conspiracy theory that's been at the heart of every Dem attack from the Steele dossier to the Mueller investigation.

Fiona Hill: Putin Invaded Ukraine Under Biden, Because He's "Predictable", Would Surrender

This may not be the incredibly damaging argument that Fiona Hill thought it would be.


	Hill, the British NSC adviser on Russia, a leftist currently at

Fiona Hill: Putin Invaded Ukraine Under Biden, Because He's "Predictable", Would Surrender

Left-wing character assassin and inveterate liar David Brock has created yet another cancel-culture group, this time aimed at punishing lawyers who dared to defend the Trump campaign in post-election litigation or challenged the 2020 presidential election results.


	In other words, the Left is now in the business of crushing lawyers for trying to do their job as lawyers. The fact that these attorneys lost in court, and in some cases were sanctioned by judges, isn’t enough for Brock – he and his comrades want their blood because they tried to help Donald Trump.


	The stated goal of The 65 Project, a so-called dark money group, is to spend millions of dollars to disbar 111 pro-Trump lawyers in 26 states, ruin their lives, and make them homeless for participating in election lawsuits that courts rejected. The group has already initiated bar complaints and reportedly intends to lobby the American Bar Association and state bar associations for new rules forbidding certain kinds of &nbsp;election challenges and to adopt model language stipulating that “fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results violate the ethical duties lawyers must abide by.”


	The new group aspires to frighten conservative legal talent away from any future Republican efforts to challenge elections, such as this year’s midterms, and 2024. Democrat consultant Melissa Moss, a veteran of the Clinton administration reportedly came up with the idea. Moss <a href="https://whcinsider.com/2012/03/06/dc-power-trio-launches-mlh-strategies-llc/">has been described</a> as a former senior political appointee at the U.S. Department of Commerce and as former finance director of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).


	Among The 65 Project’s advisory board members are former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and alleged conservative Republican Paul Rosenzweig, who was formerly senior counsel for the Clinton-era Whitewater investigation and who held a position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.


	Rosenzweig’s presence on this toothless board of bloviation helps support The 65 Project’s claim to be bipartisan.


	But Rosenzweig isn’t much of a conservative and he’s a confirmed Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) sufferer.


	“With great power comes great responsibility. Lawyers have a special role in and special obligation to society,” Rosenzweig told Axios, which <a href="https://www.axios.com/trump-election-lawyers-disbar-5c2b9252-d15d-495f-a759-2446d9fa62e8.html">broke the story</a> of The 65 Project’s formation on March 7, 2022.


	“It is all the worse, then, when they use their special position to attack the foundations of the rule of law,” he said, toeing the leftist line on Trump-related post-election litigation.


	Rosenzweig is comfortable repeating proven lies about former President Donald Trump.


	In a discussion of senile then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Rosenzweig recounted that Mueller said Trump had been involved in an “apparent welcoming of Russian interference in our election.”


	Instead of challenging the “welcoming” assertion, which presumably a sharp, honorable attorney would do, he accepted the smear as gospel, even though it is <a href="https://matthewvadum.com/2016/12/myth-trump-called-russian-hack-started-katy-tur-lie/">a lie created</a> by TV talking head Katy Tur. Later in the NPR interview <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/07/24/745028801/former-federal-prosecutor-paul-rosenzweig-discusses-muellers-testimony">aired</a> July 24, 2019, Rosenzweig said the testimony reinforced his beliefs about Trump. “Those who were convinced that he has committed crimes for which he could be charged outside of the context here, like me, came away reaffirmed in that belief,” he said.


	During Trump’s first impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, Rosenzweig performed for the TV cameras, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/whitewater-prosecutor-paul-rosenzweig-slams-trumps-impeachment-defense/story?id=68405854">telling</a> ABC News in a segment aired January 20, 2020, that Trump’s defense heading into the trial was akin to the “scream of a wounded animal” and “a raging against the tide.”


	In the headline on a May 5, 2021 column at the lefty rag, The Atlantic,<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/facebook-oversight-board-ban-donald-trump-forever/618807/"> Rosenzweig summed up</a> his fascistic feelings about Trump’s presence on Facebook: “Ban Him Forever: To send the right message, Donald Trump’s removal from Facebook must be permanent.”


	In another Atlantic column, this time from May 8, 2020, Rosenzweig <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/attack-fundamental-principle-justice/611395/">argued</a> the Mueller investigation of Trump’s alleged connections to Russia was not a “hoax,” and that the Trump Justice Department’s move to drop the baseless, politically motivated case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn was, as the author stated in his headline, “An attack on a fundamental principle of justice.” Ignoring the exhaustively documented shortcomings of the Mueller probe, Rosenzweig wrote that then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s “action is a manifest politicization of the prosecutorial process, all in order to benefit the president.”


	If another Atlantic contributor, the holier-than-thou Obamacare fan and would-be gun grabber, David Frum, who viciously <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/andrew-breitbart-1969-2012david-frum">mocked</a> Andrew Breitbart on the day of his death, is a conservative, well, then Rosenzweig must be one as well.


	This loathsome group of ambulance chasers that Rosenzweig advises reportedly plans to spend around $2.5 million in its first year.


	The “65,” by the way, is a reference to the number of lawsuits the group claims were filed that sought to invalidate the 2020 election results.


	“Following Biden’s victory an army of Big Lie Lawyers filed 65 lawsuits based on lies to overturn the election and give Trump a second term,” the group’s website lectures.


	“While the nation’s legal institutions stood up to this attempted ‘coup-via-courtroom,’ Trump has worked to further seize control of state and local election processes and ramp up malicious election litigation efforts — which only embolden future fraudulent legal actions aimed at overturning legitimate elections. Simultaneously, the lies and disinformation included in these lawsuits continue to give oxygen to the Big Lie, which festers in right-wing political and media circles and social media discussions and is a long-term threat to American democracy.”


	This kind of blatherskite is what Brock has become known for.


	Once upon a time, <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/david-brock">Brock</a> was a conservative journalist who rose to prominence by targeting the Clintons. Eventually he realized there was much more money in doing the Clintons’ bidding. The famously paranoid publicity hound hallucinated widespread anti-gay animus in Republican circles, changed sides, and became a Machiavellian political operative, prolific fundraiser, and propagandist for the Democrats. He also founded Media Matters for America, a George Soros-funded, fake fact-checking outfit, and two super PACs – Priorities USA Action and American Bridge 21st Century. Media Matters for America, which purports to fight “conservative misinformation,” has trumpeted the absurd Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory and promoted Hillary Clinton for years.


	The 65 Project’s malicious mission is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them [i.e. the lawyers] and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms,” Brock told Axios.


	“I think the littler fish are probably more vulnerable to what we’re doing,” Brock said. “You’re threatening their livelihood. And, you know, they’ve got reputations in their local communities.”


	The 65 Project is going after three categories of lawyers, Axios reported after reviewing the group’s plans.


	The first is, “Trump's legal inner circle, including lawyers such as campaign hands Jenna Ellis and Boris Epshteyn and post-election lawyers like Sidney Powell and Joe DiGenova.”


	The second is, “Lawyers who signed on as ‘alternate electors,’ who planned to submit their names to the Electoral College in lieu of legitimate elector slates if Trump-aligned legal challenges succeeded.”


	And the third is, “Licensed attorneys who participated in or were present at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.”


	The 65 Project website brags about the bar complaints it has lodged so far against attorneys who have committed the grievous sin of supporting former President Donald Trump inside, and in some cases, outside, of court.


	The lawyers marked for career death to date are: Paul M. Davis (<a href="https://the65project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-65-Projects-Ethics-Complaint-Against-Vexatious-Attorney-Paul-Davis.pdf">pdf</a>); Cleta Mitchell (<a href="https://the65project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-65-Projects-Ethics-Complaint-Against-Trump-Attorney-Cleta-Mitchell.pdf">pdf</a>); Jenna Ellis (<a href="https://the65project.com/ethics-complaint-against-trump-attorney-jenna-ellis/">pdf</a>); Joseph diGenova (<a href="https://the65project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-65-Projects-Ethics-Complaint-Against-Trump-Attorney-Joseph-diGenova.pdf">pdf</a>); Boris Epshteyn (<a href="https://the65project.com/ethics-complaint-against-trump-attorney-boris-epshteyn/">pdf</a>); William McCall Calhoun (<a href="https://the65project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-65-Projects-Ethics-Complaint-Against-Insurrectionist-Attorney-William-Calhoun.pdf">pdf</a>); William Bradley Carver (<a href="https://the65project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-65-Projects-Ethics-Complaint-Against-False-Elector-William-Carver.pdf">pdf</a>); Daryl Moody (<a href="https://the65project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-65-Projects-Ethics-Complaint-Against-False-Elector-Daryl-Moody.pdf">pdf</a>); and James Troupis and Andrew Hitt (<a href="https://the65project.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-65-Projects-Ethics-Complaint-Against-False-Elector-Andrew-Hitt-and-Trump-Attorney-James-Troupis.pdf">pdf</a>). Carver, Moody, and Hitt are alleged to have falsely claimed to be presidential electors. Troupis is alleged to have coordinated false elector slates.


	Davis, of Texas, told Axios The 65 Project “is nothing more than a desperate attempt by leftist hacks and mercenaries.” Its goal is “to neutralize anyone on the right with the ability to stand in the way of the Left’s efforts to hide malfeasance in the 2020 elections and to clear the path nor a repeat of similar malfeasance in the 2022 mid-terms.”


	High-profile lawyer Sidney Powell told this writer The 65 Project is “unconstitutional, un-American, abusive, and hateful.”


	Speaking of Brock, she said by email, “I can’t even imagine how soulless and sick he and his comrades have to be to dedicate themselves and millions of dollars to try to destroy the lives and livelihoods of others. Those dollars could be spent instead to build Habitat [for Humanity] homes or shelters for the homeless. Brock and his ilk don't solve problems; they create them. Pathetic.”


	Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, said Brock is “doing this just to destroy the lives of the attorneys who defended Trump,” but “everyone, even people that David Brock hates, deserve vigorous legal representation.”


	The 65 Project is an example of “a particularly vicious streak of cancel culture,” Levey said.


	The Committee for Justice describes itself as “devoted to restoring the Founders’ vision of a federal judiciary governed by the rule of law and anchored by the Constitution.”


	Former Department of Justice civil rights attorney J. Christian Adams said lawyers should steer clear of “flimsy legal theories and only bring cases with merit.”


	That said, the fact that The 65 Project has been created “shows the Left is swimming in so much cash that they can implement any thuggish program they choose to,” said Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.


	PILF calls itself “the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity,” and says it “exists to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity and fight against lawlessness in American elections.”


	In the end, The 65 Project won’t accomplish anything noble or public-spirited – it seems much more likely to undermine America’s legal and political systems by intimidating lawyers and discouraging candidates from seeking justice in the courts.


	Which is exactly the point.

Disbarring Trump’s Lawyers

Left-wing character assassin and inveterate liar David Brock has created yet another cancel-culture group, this time aimed at punishing lawyers who dared to

A radical Arkansas judge in the mold of Jeremiah Wright struck down four new common-sense election integrity laws approved by the Republican-controlled state legislature, declaring the statutes unconstitutional last month. The state is appealing the ruling.


	Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen is, like Wright, also a critical race theory-friendly, black nationalist, African dashiki-wearing preacher. He is also a diversity consultant, profiting from race-mongering and dividing people. He founded his firm Griffen Strategic Consulting PLLC, in Little Rock in 2008.


	Griffen is controversial in his home state, known for his strident left-wing activism. He delights in sticking his thumb in the eyes of Republican state lawmakers -- they have tried to impeach and remove him as a judge. Griffen was <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/lethal-injection/arkansas-judge-barred-ruling-executions-after-showing-protest-n747501">barred</a> from hearing cases on a death penalty track after he went to a protest outside the governor’s mansion in 2017 strapped down to a gurney, as if he were a condemned man about to be executed by lethal injection. The protest took place the same day as Griffen issued an order blocking the state’s execution schedule.


	Griffen bitterly denounced then-President-elect Donald Trump days after his election in November 2016, spewing paranoid leftist conspiracy theories and racist, white-hating nonsense.


	“White nationalism and white male supremacy never left this country,” Griffen said, according to <a href="https://www.armoneyandpolitics.com/evins-interview-with-wendell-griffen/">Arkansas Money and Politics</a>. It is a “fallacy … that somehow the nation had moved on beyond the hatefulness, the fearfulness, the misogyny.”


	At his personal blog, “Justice is a verb!” Griffen lamented the election of Trump, which he wrote “means the end of the brief dawn of progress in civil liberty witnessed during the Obama presidency the same way the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction.”


	“Remember what happened when Rutherford Hayes was elected President by the House of Representatives in 1876,” Griffen <a href="https://wendelllgriffen.blogspot.com/2016/11/1876-1933-and-2016_9.html">wrote</a> November 9, 2016.


	“Reconstruction ended. Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from the South despite knowing those troops protected former slaves from violence and reprisals from white southerners.&nbsp;After&nbsp;the federal troops were withdrawn from the former Confederate states, the Ku Klux Klan was born.&nbsp;Jim Crow segregation began twenty years later (1896) when the Supreme Court decided that racial segregation on a Louisiana railroad car was acceptable in the&nbsp;Plessy v. Ferguson&nbsp;ruling that ushered in the term ‘separate but equal.’”&nbsp;


	He added that Trump was the new Hitler, or something.


	“We should not only&nbsp;remember what happened in the United States after the election of 1876 if we want to know what could happen in coming years during the presidency of Mr. Trump.&nbsp;Patriots and prophets should recall what happened in Germany, later in Europe, and ultimately to the world after Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933 on the promise that he would make Germany great again.”


	Returning to the court case, in League of Women Voters of Arkansas v. Thurston, court file 60CV-21-3138, Griffen permanently enjoined the election laws --Acts 249, 728, 736, and 973— on March 18 after a four-day trial. The league, Arkansas United, and five voters, had claimed the statutes disproportionately harmed voters of color.


	Act 249 regulated the counting of provisional ballots. Act 728, enacted after complaints about groups providing food and water to voters, prohibited individuals from standing within 100 feet of a polling station. Act 736, aimed at ballot-harvesting, declared the possession by an individual of more than four absentee ballots “creates a rebuttable presumption of intent to defraud.” Act 973 cut the timeframe for voters to request absentee ballots.


	After the laws were passed in 2021, the ACLU predictably <a href="https://www.kark.com/news/local-news/arkansas-lawmakers-approve-changes-to-states-election-laws/?ipid=promo-link-block1">denounced</a> them.


	“What we’re seeing in Arkansas is the most dangerous assault on the right to vote since the Jim Crow era,” hyperbolized Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas.


	“Legislators are moving at breakneck speed to erect new barriers to the ballot that will disproportionately impact voters of color, as well as elderly and low-income Arkansans. These bills don’t just make it harder to vote, they also make it easier for partisan politicians to interfere with local election administrators – something that could have disastrous consequences for democracy. These bills will make it harder for all voters – of all political stripes – to make their voices heard.”


	In court, Griffen reportedly said from the bench that the defendants, among them Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston, a Republican, had not shown there was a need for the laws and that the state’s worries about election integrity were “based entirely on conjecture and speculation,” which “cannot be permitted to supply the place of proof.”


	Griffen issued a formal, 86-page order (<a href="https://arktimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/fm-60CV-21-3138-LEAGUE-OF-WOMEN-VOTERS-OF-ARKANSAS-et-al.-v.-JOHN-THURSTON-et-al.-CV21-3138_MEMORAN-1.pdf">pdf</a>) on March 24, that at times reads like a platitude-laden, over-the-top essay by a high school student trying a bit too hard to impress a communist history teacher. The injunction (<a href="https://arktimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/fm-60cv-21-31358-Order-Granting-Injunctive-Relief.pdf">pdf</a>) issued by Griffen indicates that election integrity law-killer Marc Elias’s D.C. law firm, Elias Law Group, represented Arkansas United in the lawsuit.


	The election laws Griffen struck down were a step down the road to fascist dictatorship, the judge suggested near the end of the order as he inexplicably pulled an irrelevant Martin Luther King Jr. quotation out of thin air:


	“We do not need to look far to detect the dangers of softmindedness. Dictators, capitalizing on softmindedness, have led men to acts of barbarity and terror that are unthinkable in civilized society. Adolf Hitler realized that softmindedness was so prevalent among his followers that he said, ‘I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.’ In Mein Kampf he asserted: ‘By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell – and hell, heaven…The greater the lie, the more readily will it be believed.’”


	“King did not need to be a lawyer, judge, legislator, or governor,” Griffen wrote, “to recognize that softminded embrace of what he termed ‘legions of half-truths, prejudices, and false facts’ is a recipe for fascism.”


	You get the picture.


	This kind of lunacy, had it come from a university professor, would not be surprising nowadays, but coming from a judge sworn to uphold the Constitution and mete out justice impartially, it is disturbing.


	Hallucinating fascism is a dangerous habit for someone who has power.


	Mercifully, this lawless, belligerent leftist judge announced his retirement February 1, effective when his term of office expires at year’s end. “I look forward in retirement to devoting more time and energy [to] writing, lecturing, and discoursing about social justice and public theology,” the judge <a href="https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/02/01/judge-wendell-griffen-announces-retirement-at-the-end-of-2022">said</a>.


	But how many more Wendell Griffens are out there waging war against America from the bench?

Leftist Judge Kills Election Integrity Laws

A radical Arkansas judge in the mold of Jeremiah Wright struck down four new common-sense election integrity laws approved by the Republican-controlled state

The Supreme Court may be on the verge of clawing back some of the sweeping regulatory authority it unwisely gave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 15 years ago at the height of Al Gore-promoted global warming hysteria.


	This about-face by the high court could come if conservative justices have the courage to do the right thing in West Virginia v. EPA, which the court heard Feb. 28. In all, 19 states are challenging how much power the federal Clean Air Act gives the agency.


	West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican leading the legal challenge, told this writer <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-interview-w-va-ag-hopes-supreme-court-will-curb-epa-authority-to-crack-down-on-co2-emissions-prevent-it-from-becoming-a-central-energy-planning-authority_4289707.html">recently</a> he is concerned the EPA is transforming itself from “an environmental regulator into a central energy planning authority.”


	Morrisey said this case is “so important because it gets to the fundamental question as to who gets to decide the major questions of the day in our society.”


	“Should major issues of the day be decided by Congress, or by an unelected bureaucracy that has no accountability to the American public?” he said.


	Admittedly, whether the six conservative justices on the nine-member court will do the right thing is a pretty big if, especially given their fondness for fetishizing stare decisis, instead of putting the U.S. Constitution first.


	A year after the Gore-centered agitprop film, An Inconvenient Truth, began brainwashing audiences, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/549/497/#tab-opinion-1962181">Massachusetts v. EPA</a> (2007) that the EPA is free to regulate so-called greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, as “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act.


	The high court bought into Gore’s nonsense big time, declaring climate change “the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”


	Propaganda disguised as science found its way into the majority opinion. The court cited the findings of the dubious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and accepted that “the rise in sea levels associated with global warming has already harmed and will continue to harm Massachusetts.”


	Carbon dioxide was to blame, the majority claimed.

<blockquote>
	
		A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse, trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is therefore a species—the most important species—of a ‘greenhouse gas.’
</blockquote>


	But those who still cling to common sense in this irrational age have long ridiculed the designation of carbon dioxide, the invisible gas people push out of their lungs when breathing, as a pollutant.


	After all, carbon dioxide is life – without it, there would be no photosynthesis, which is essential to the growth of plants.


	The majority opinion in 2007 was written by the late Justice John Paul Stevens. His opinion was joined by current Justice Stephen Breyer, retired Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


	The dissenters from this jurisprudential rubbish of were Chief Justice John Roberts, current Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, and the late Justice Antonin Scalia.


	Breyer, who is retiring at the end of the court’s present term, seems unlikely to flip on his comrades because it would hurt his legacy.


	But if the three dissenters still on the court hold fast, two of the three new conservative justices – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, or Amy Coney Barrett, could overturn or at least weaken Massachusetts v. EPA.


	Unless he was playing devil’s advocate Feb. 28, Kavanaugh may be on-board with the 19 states’ challenge under the Clean Air Act.


	“Congress must speak clearly if it wishes to assign an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance,” the Trump appointee said during oral arguments.


	The court is skeptical when agencies “claim to have found in a long extant statute an unheralded power to regulate a significant portion of the American economy,” Kavanaugh said.


	Alito also seems eager to curb EPA authority.


	The justice told U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar that her approach would not impose any “concrete limitations” on EPA’s powers.


	“What your interpretation of the statute claims for EPA is not a technical matter,” Alito said.


	“It is not a question of how to reduce emissions from particular sources, but you are claiming that the interpretation gives you the authority to set industrial policy and energy policy and balance such things as jobs, economic impact, the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change, as well as costs.”


	We’ll probably find out in May or June how the justices ruled.

A Supreme Crackdown on the Environmental Protection Agency?

The Supreme Court may be on the verge of clawing back some of the sweeping regulatory authority it unwisely gave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 15

In an effort to kick Republican candidates off the ballot for the crime of supporting Donald Trump, Democrats are reaching back more than 150 years to a rarely invoked constitutional provision designed to prevent Confederates from serving in Congress.


	Democrats and a handful of Trump Derangement Syndrome-suffering Republicans claim the disturbance on January 6, 2021, that delayed formal congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election results for several hours, was an insurrection or rebellion aimed at overthrowing the United States government.


	Facts are no impediment to this durable leftist fantasy.


	The facts are that the crowd carried no guns, that police invited many of the alleged trespassers into the facility, that no hostages were taken, and that only minor damage was done to the United States Capitol building.


	Although the democratic process was assaulted relentlessly by leftist election officials and judges from coast to coast throughout the 2020 election cycle and its aftermath, it was never under threat on January 6 a year ago.


	When the mainstream media falsely reported what happened January 6 was a coup attempt, instead of an anguished cry for help by the unjustly disenfranchised, the news must have come as a surprise to the vast majority of Americans who innocently visited the Capitol that day. And the only person who was actually killed, Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, was martyred by Michael Byrd, an overzealous policeman who <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/officer-who-shot-ashli-babbitt-during-capitol-riot-breaks-silence-n1277736">claims</a> the senseless murder he committed somehow “saved countless lives.”


	Yet this protest action that got out of control has hardened into an insurrection in leftist myth. Unlike the pure-minded Black Lives Matter and Antifa ruffians who burnt down American cities in 2020, the January 6 protesters were hellbent on destroying the republic by overturning the results of a corrupt, illegitimate election.


	Tactic


	Prominent Republican congressmen who vocally stood by the Trump campaign and challenged suspect electoral votes in Congress are now being targeted by the Left.


	The vehicle for attacking them is the Disqualification Clause, that is, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified in the wake of the Civil War to exclude from office violent Democrats who engaged in a bloody insurrection aimed at undoing the Union. There has been <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/fourteenth-amendment-follies-matthew-vadum/">an awful lot of talk</a> in Democrat circles and in Congress about using the clause, part of an amendment ratified in 1868, against Trump, but so far it’s just hot air.


	The part of that constitutional provision relevant to congressmen states: “No person shall be a … Representative in Congress … who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same …”


	Yet today, Democrats, who routinely tolerate, downplay, and applaud violence directed at their enemies, are using this language that was drafted to keep thuggish Democrat subversives out of office against Republicans who, compared to Democrats, are virtually pacifists.


	It appears <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/fourteenth-amendment-follies-matthew-vadum/">the last time</a> the Disqualification Clause was used was 1919, against Rep. Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin, the first Socialist elected to Congress.


	Berger was convicted of violating the Espionage Act for publicly opposing U.S. participation in World War One, a war prosecuted by President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who was arguably the closest thing to a fascist ever to occupy the Oval Office. Congress denied Berger his seat. After the Supreme Court overturned his Espionage Act conviction, Berger went on to be elected to three more terms in the House of Representatives.


	This insidious tactic is the brainchild of the exquisitely sleazy lawyer Marc Elias, a principal conspirator in the “Russiagate” hoax.


	Elias represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 presidential election cycle, retaining Fusion GPS in April 2016 to conduct opposition research against then-candidate Donald Trump. That research effort culminated in the salacious, now-discredited 35-page dossier written by former British spy Christopher Steele that purported to tie Trump to the Russian government. The hoax is now the focus of special counsel John Durham.


	During post-Election Day 2020 litigation, Elias and other members of his law firm, Perkins Coie, were <a href="https://www.heritage.org/courts/commentary/top-democratic-election-lawyers-sanctioned-misleading-conduct">sanctioned</a> by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit for deceiving the court.


	Elias also famously <a href="https://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2009/06/franken-wins-minnesota-election-case-with-help-from-perkins-coie.html">engineered</a> Democrat Al Franken’s theft of Republican Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat in the farcical recount saga in 2008-2009, a move that helped secure the Senate votes needed to pass Obamacare.


	Elias, who has a long history of successfully&nbsp;challenging&nbsp;electoral integrity laws in court, began laying out a blueprint for using the 14th Amendment to boot Republicans off the ballot in a provocative Twitter post on December 20, 2021.


	“My prediction for 2022: Before the midterm election, we will have a serious discussion about whether individual Republican House Members are disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving in Congress[,]” Elias <a href="https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1473118873302056961">tweeted</a>. “We may even see litigation.”


	“It seems quite likely that one or more Republican members of Congress will be subject to this disqualification, and it is important that we start to identify them now,” Elias <a href="https://www.democracydocket.com/news/naming-the-insurrection/">added</a> three weeks later at his Democracy Docket website. (Ever notice how whatever Democrats want is “democracy,” but whatever Republicans want isn’t?)


	Preferably, the U.S. Department of Justice would lead this effort and “evaluate not just the criminal liability of people involved in the insurrection, but constitutional disqualification under the lower civil standard of proof.” If the DoJ&nbsp;doesn’t do it, “Congress and private litigants will need to step in to vindicate this constitutional disqualification.”


	Days after his tweet, Republicans quite rightly objected to this anti-democratic tactic, just as they did when a young Barack Obama used technicalities to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121918996082755013">disqualify</a> rivals from the ballot.


	But Elias <a href="https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1474061423772946439">laughed</a> at them.


	“This tweet has completely triggered the GOP and right-wing. They are losing their minds over the idea that the Constitution might actually be followed.”


	Assaulting Democracy


	Law professor Jonathan Turley, one of the very few left-wing commentators capable of speaking the truth because he is not blinded by leftist ideology, called out the Elias tactic.


	“Nothing says democracy like barring people from running for office apparently,” Turley <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/01/04/turley_to_marc_elias_nothing_says_democracy_like_barring_republicans_running_for_office.html">told</a> Tucker Carlson on January 4 of this year.


	“It’s very common in countries like Iran. They just disqualified hundreds of people from their ballot.”


	The tactic is “based on a very flawed understanding of” the Disqualification Clause, which was inserted into the Constitution after Alexander Stephens, who had been vice president of the defeated Confederate States of America, “showed up in 1865 to resume being a member of Congress.”


	His appearance “didn’t go over very well,” so an amendment was proposed that said “if you took a previous oath to the United States and you broke it, you went with the rebellion, then you really can be disqualified from office.”


	But at that time there really had been “a rebellion,” the Civil War, in which “750,000 people died,” Turley said.


	“And so what they are suggesting here is that this [i.e. January 6] was really a rebellion and that these members, by supporting the challenge to the electoral votes, were giving essentially aid and comfort to the rebels. And they could be disqualified. One Democratic number has suggested disqualifying 120 Republicans because they signed on to a brief supporting a challenge of the election in Texas.”


	Turley <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/588132-democrats-loose-talk-of-disqualification-still-dangerous">separately noted</a> in a column in The Hill that “members of Congress who supported challenging the electoral votes (<a href="https://jonathanturley.org/2021/01/01/treason-is-a-matter-of-dates-boxer-and-democrats-denounce-republicans-for-the-same-challenge-previously-raised-against-republican-presidents/" target="_blank">as Democrats have done in prior years</a>) were exercising constitutionally protected speech.”


	In Congress, Democrats, who are now pushing “to federalize elections” and “negate” election laws in many states, “cannot simply use their razor-thin majority to disqualify opponents willy-nilly. Punishments like&nbsp;<a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-5/clause-2/" target="_blank">expulsions take two-thirds votes</a>, and any disqualifications can be challenged in the court,” he wrote.


	The year after the constitutional amendment was ratified, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase ruled in a&nbsp;<a href="https://cite.case.law/f-cas/11/7/?full_case=true&amp;format=html" target="_blank">circuit opinion</a>&nbsp;that the Disqualification Clause “was not self-executing,” Turley wrote. Chase “suggested that allowing Congress to simply bar political opponents from office would be a form of punishment without due process and would likely violate the prohibition on bills of attainder.”


	Target: Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana


	So far in the 2022 election cycle, the Disqualification Clause has been used against GOP congressmen in Indiana and North Carolina.


	The Indiana challenge <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/indiana-officials-unanimously-reject-democrats-effort-to-disqualify-rep-jim-banks-from-2022-election-run_4289041.html">failed</a> February 18.


	The bipartisan Indiana&nbsp;Election Commission unanimously dismissed a legal challenge brought by Aaron “A.J.” Calkins of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who is running in a three-way Democratic Party primary for the right to face third-term U.S. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) in the November general election.


	In a rambling, at times incoherent, oral presentation, Calkins claimed that Banks, an outspoken Trump supporter, participated in an insurrection by voting during a joint session of Congress Jan. 6 and Jan. 7, 2021, against certifying Democrat Joe Biden as the winner of the electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania.


	“They wanted to steal the election. They wanted to turn off the results and make Trump president,” he said. When Banks “co-signed into” a lawsuit contesting the results, he wanted “to basically disenfranchise 30 million voters from five states,” according to Calkins.


	What took place on Jan. 6, 2021, was “an insurrection, people invading the U.S. Capitol,” he said.


	“When I saw that happen, I thought this is horrible. This is as bad as burning it down in 1812,” Calkins said, seemingly a reference to the burning of the U.S. Capitol building by the British on Aug. 24, 1814, during the War of 1812.


	“There was a violent insurrection by the people who had invaded the Capitol. And then there was a political insurrection, people that were going to try and take it down, just like they did in 1776.”


	Paul Mullin, Banks’s lawyer, said the allegation was “baseless,” and that his client had denounced the security breach at the Capitol. “This challenge itself is an attempt to undermine democracy,” he said.


	Commission chairman Paul Okeson said January 6, 2021, was “a regrettable mark in history,” but there was no evidence showing Banks participated in an insurrection.


	After the hearing, Banks issued a warning to Americans.


	“Many Democrats in Washington hope to weaponize the 14th Amendment to disenfranchise President Trump’s 74 million voters,” the congressman said. “I hope they watched today’s unanimous decision.”


	Target: Congressman Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina


	Like Banks, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) voted against certifying the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania.


	Unlike Banks, he spoke at the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rally on the National Mall on January 6, 2021, hours before Capitol security was breached.


	“This crowd has some fight in it,” Cawthorn said at the rally.


	“The Democrats, with all the fraud they have done in this election, the Republicans hiding and not fighting, they are trying to silence your voice. Make no mistake about it, they do not want you to be heard.”


	Later, Cawthorn forcefully <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/05/madison-cawthorn-capitol-riot-rally/">denounced</a> the breach, calling it “despicable.”


	“I thought it was conducted by weak-minded men and women who are unable to check their worst impulses and had very little self-control.”


	The North Carolina State Board of Elections is not currently blocking the first-term congressman from running again, but <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/nc-board-cannot-disqualify-rep-cawthorn-from-2022-election-on-14th-amendment-lawyer_4276396.html">stated</a> in a recent federal court filing that it has the power to do so under the Disqualification Clause.


	The state has “authority to police which candidates should, or should not, be disqualified per Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”


	Cawthorn attorney James Bopp Jr. told this writer that the board has no such legal authority and that the word “fight,” which the lawmaker used during the rally, is everyday political rhetoric that is protected by the First Amendment.


	“There was absolutely nothing–none of his speech encouraged anyone to perform any illegal acts or to even go into the Capitol at all in any way,” he said.


	Using speech such as “‘we need to fight for our political rights,’ cannot possibly be used … to punish somebody.”


	The challenge lodged against his client is an “unconstitutional effort to undermine democracy,” and an example of “projection … [something] the Left does all the time.”


	“This is a classic example of the Left claiming Republicans are undermining democracy where they are trying to do that themselves,” Bopp said.


	The Left is relying upon an “absurd and ridiculously unconstitutional interpretation” of the Disqualification Clause, he said.


	Meanwhile, the 2022 election cycle is barely underway.


	Chances are Democrats will invoke the Disqualification Clause again in their drive to make America a one-party state.

Beating Republicans By Disqualifying Them

In an effort to kick Republican candidates off the ballot for the crime of supporting Donald Trump, Democrats are reaching back more than 150 years to a rarely

[Photo above: Pages 136 and 137 of the Salinas Union High School District Ethnic Studies Curriculum. Credit: Kelly Schenkoske].


	The good news is that California education authorities <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/california-settles-parents-lawsuit-drops-aztec-prayers-from-public-school-curriculum_4216128.html">have agreed to drop</a> part of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that encouraged public school students to pray to bloodthirsty Aztec deities. The quaint religious practices of Mesoamericans about 700 years ago included slicing out human hearts along with flaying victims and wearing their skin.


	The ESMC is needed, the devoutest left-wingers insist, to help teach children about the systemic racism that supposedly defines America.


	“We are reminded daily that racism is not only a legacy of the past but a clear and present danger,” said California State Board of Education president Linda Darling-Hammond, a leftist who headed the Biden-Harris regime’s education transition team. “We must understand this history if we are finally to end it.”


	Worshiping these gods that belong in torture-porn horror movies will somehow advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism, the board of education must have reasoned when it approved the nearly 900-page ESMC in March 2021, making California “the first state in the nation to offer a statewide ethnic studies model for educators,” the board&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr21/yr211rel21.asp" target="_blank">boasted</a>&nbsp;at the time.


	Under pressure from the <a href="https://thomasmoresociety.org/">Thomas More Society</a>,&nbsp;a highly effective national public interest law firm that filed a lawsuit last year on behalf of angry parents and the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, the state agency agreed in January to nix the Aztec devotions.


	The bad news is that the destructive Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum bursting with virulent anti-Americanism still exists, and California law mandates that it will spread dramatically in coming years.


	Ethnic studies, by the way, comes from a weird place.


	In the upside-down leftist world of ethnic studies, race itself is a concept invented by white oppressors. The term is defined as “a (neo)colonial social construction” that is “based upon a Eurocentric biological fallacy that is central to inequitable power relations in society.” Race also “produces racial consciousness and facilitates the process of racialization and racial projects, including both the oppositional projects of racism/colorism/anti-Blackness/anti-Indigeneity and anti-racism/racial justice,” according to the preface to the model curriculum available on the California State Board of Education’s <a href="https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/esmc.asp">ESMC page</a>.


	The preface borrows from the 2019 book&nbsp;Rethinking Ethnic Studies, co-authored by R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, who headed the committee that developed the ESMC. To Cuauhtin, there are only two races in America today: whites and everyone else.


	“In the United States today, races very broadly break down as people of color (POC) and white people,” Cuauhtin’s book states.


	This turns the American experience in its entirety into an ugly “us” versus “them” situation. It goes without saying that this politically useful dichotomy would send a thrill up the leg of any practitioner of the dark art of Saul Alinsky-style community organizing.


	Cuauhtin also “demonstrates an animus towards Christianity and Catholicism—claiming that Christians committed ‘theocide’ (i.e., killing gods) against indigenous tribes,” according to&nbsp;<a href="https://eadn-wc01-1479010.nxedge.io/cdn/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Complaint-09-03-21-CA-Education-FINAL.pdf">court documents</a> in the lawsuit filed by the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation.


	The model curriculum will reach many Golden State children in the not-too-distant future.


	California’s pathologically dishonest, woke Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a piece of&nbsp;<a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB101" target="_blank">legislation</a>&nbsp;known as Assembly Bill 101 that will make ethnic studies required across the state for graduating high school beginning in the 2029–30 school year. The law also forces junior high schools to offer at least a one-semester course in ethnic studies, starting in the 2025–26 school year, The Epoch Times <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/parent-complains-of-anti-american-anti-christian-themes-and-dark-imagery-in-ethnic-studies-program_4108084.html">reported</a>.


	Some California schools are ahead of schedule.


	Ethnic studies is already being taught in the ninth grade in the Salinas Union High School District in California’s Monterey County.


	Schoolchildren there learn that capitalism is bad and are encouraged to embrace “redistribution of wealth” and a “shift in economic thinking.”


	One chart students examine identifies Christians as the “privileged/hegemonic” group that is responsible for “creedism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.” The chart also describes “Muslims, Jews, non-major world religions, atheists and indigenous spiritual traditions” as “oppressed/marginalized” groups. It states that “religious freedom/regenerating indigenous spiritual traditions” are a form of resistance to “oppression.”


	One young man who graduated in 2019 from Branham High School in San Jose <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/06/critical-race-trove-from-california-district-tells-students-how-to-use-witchcraft-on-people-who-say-all-lives-matter/">told</a> The Federalist in December 2021 that the school urged white students to dismantle, that is, hate, themselves.


	“The idea that white students must ‘dismantle themselves’ in the context of their personality is cultish,” Samuel Martin said.


	"Not only is it cultish, but it is deliberate in that this school system wants its white students to hate themselves. Do these people honestly think that drilling racial identitarianism into childrens’ heads from a young age is going to make them less racist?”


	The local school district also steered students to something called the Black Lives Matter Resource Guide, which, among other things, encourages the use of witchcraft against people who disagree with the left’s twisted racial agenda.


	“Hexing people is an important way to get out anger and frustration,” it states. People who say “all lives matter” or commit “microaggressions,” need to be targeted, it continues. “Write your own hex poem, cursing that person,” it adds.


	Returning to the state’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, the document itself is focused “on the traditional ethnic studies first established in California higher education which has been characterized by four foundational disciplines: African American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, Native American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies,” according to the preface to the model curriculum at the <a href="https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/esmc.asp">ESMC page</a>.


	This “provides an opportunity for students to learn of the histories, cultures, struggles, and contributions to American society of these historically marginalized peoples which have often been untold in US history courses.”


	“Ethnic studies is for all students,” Chapter 1 of the model curriculum opines. Embracing neo-Marxist concepts, the chapter claims that the coursework, “through its overarching study of the process and impact of the marginalization resulting from systems of power, is relevant and important for students of all backgrounds.”


	The document admits that indoctrination, not education, is the real goal, painting a happy face on this hateful, divisive ideology that elevates race over all other concerns.


	“By affirming the identities and contributions of marginalized groups in our society, ethnic studies helps students see themselves and each other as part of the narrative of the United States. Importantly, this helps students see themselves as active agents in the interethnic bridge-building process we call American life,” the chapter states.


	“Ethnic studies helps bring students and communities together … by simultaneously doing three things: (1)&nbsp;addressing racialized experiences and ethnic differences as real and unique; (2)&nbsp;building greater understanding and communication across ethnic differences; and (3)&nbsp;revealing underlying commonalities that can bind by bringing individuals and groups together.”


	Citing dubious research, the chapter claims ethnic studies helps “foster cross-cultural understanding among students of color and white students, and aids students in valuing their own cultural identity while appreciating the differences around them.”


	“By asking students to examine and reflect on the history, struggles, and contributions of diverse groups within the context of racism and bigotry, ethnic studies can foster the importance of equity and justice,” the chapter states.


	Of course, patriotic, more traditional American education doesn’t ignore the nation’s past racial problems: it tries to place those challenging times in context, instead of arguing, as ethnic studies enthusiasts do, that they have always been the norm in this supposedly racist hellhole of a country we call home.


	Chapter 5 of the model curriculum references popular left-wing brainwashing techniques, including “several ethnic studies-oriented chants, proverbs, and affirmations.” Such things “can be used as energizers to bring the class together, build unity around ethnic studies principles and values, and to reinvigorate the class following a lesson that may be emotionally taxing or even when student engagement may appear to be low.”


	The chapter notes that at “Social Justice Humanitas Academy (SJHA) … in the Los Angeles Unified School District, various Ethnic Studies unity chants were combined into one and are recited in a call and response format.”


	Call and response, of course, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/features/2011/occupy_wall_street/what_is_ows_a_glossary_of_the_protest_movement_.html">was a big part</a> of the mass meetings of the America-hating Occupy Wall Street movement.


	Read more for yourself about ethnic studies in the bizarre chapters of the model curriculum at the above-referenced <a href="https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/esmc.asp">ESMC page</a>.


	It seems fair to say that good rarely triumphs over depravity in the wacky world of California public policy nowadays, but every once in a while a little bit of sanity prevails – even if it is forced upon the educrats by way of litigation.


	It is undeniably a good thing that the Aztec prayers were dropped from California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, but dismantling this evil ultra-leftist indoctrination is going to take a lot more work.

Evil Ethnic Studies

[Photo above: Pages 136 and 137 of the Salinas Union High School District Ethnic Studies Curriculum. Credit: Kelly Schenkoske].


	The good news is that

Un-American woke values have been infecting popular culture, governments, and corporations at an astonishing pace for some time but now they are spreading with potentially deadly consequences to the professions that provide medical care and the schools that train those professionals.


	Race-based health policy got a big booster when COVID-19 arrived on the scene.


	The pandemic became “a testbed for deploying racist equity measures like determining vaccine and medication distribution by race,” Daniel Greenfield recently <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/equity-medicine-racist-and-lethal-daniel-greenfield/">wrote</a>.


	For example, the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, and National Academies&nbsp;of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine “produced a framework which claimed that ‘COVID-19 illnesses and deaths are strongly associated with race’ due to ‘systemic racism’ and that it was the job of the medical system to reduce these ‘health inequities.’”


	The argument is that “minorities, especially black people, are disadvantaged, and that moving them to the head of the line will remedy the ‘inequity.’”


	The most recent case in point is the profession of pharmacy, whose practitioners have traditionally dispensed healing medicines. Now they are expected to dispense social justice.


	In the United States, the profession has adopted a new official Oath of a Pharmacist intended “to incorporate contemporary language and address diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism,” according to a joint statement issued December 16, 2021, by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) and the American Pharmacists Association (APhA). The new wording of the oath, which is to be used for all spring 2022 pharmacy school commencement ceremonies, was approved by a joint AACP and APhA oath revision steering committee and approved by their boards in November 2021.


	The relevant part of <a href="https://pharmacist.com/About/Oath-of-a-Pharmacist">the new oath</a>, now freighted with neo-Marxist cant, states: “I promise to devote myself to a lifetime of service to others through the profession of pharmacy. In fulfilling this vow: I will consider the welfare of humanity and relief of suffering my primary concerns. I will promote inclusion, embrace diversity, and advocate for justice to advance health equity.”


	Oddly enough, the words “diversity,” “equity” as part of “health equity,” and “inclusion,” appear in the oath, but “antiracism” does not.


	Perhaps the word “antiracism” is absent from the pledge because in the leftist mind it is implied by the language in the oath.


	Social justice profiteer Lakesha M. Butler, director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville School of Pharmacy, sat on a committee that redrafted the previous oath.


	“The joint committee led a critical charge of boldly expanding our professional oath to include the necessary elements of DEIA,” Butler said in a <a href="https://www.siue.edu/news/2022/01/SIUEsButlerServesonNationalTaskForcetoRevisePharmacistsOath.shtml">press release</a> from her university. “The revised oath charges all pharmacists to take an active responsibility in promoting health equity and commit to being change agents in the system of pharmacy practice and beyond.”


	So pharmacists now apparently use the acronym DEIA to stand for diversity, equity, inclusion and antiracism.


	Antiracism, as expounded by its most prominent advocate, $20,000 per hour lecturer Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers), is “a simplistic reiteration of critical race theory’s core concepts,” writes Christopher Rufo at <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/ibram-x-kendi-master-marketer">City Journal</a>. Kendi’s thesis is that “if the races are equal, then racial disparities can owe only to racism and must be rectified through ‘antiracist discrimination.’”


	According to those in the topsy-turvy world of antiracism, whites hold the power in America, a country which itself is systemically racist, and engaging in racial discrimination against whites doesn’t count as racism – it’s actually praiseworthy behavior.


	After drug-addled career criminal George Floyd, who happened to be a black man, happened to die of fentanyl poisoning after rough handling by the Minneapolis police, sparking a series of leftist-led riots nationwide that caused more than $2 billion in damage, Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, took the opportunity to use the incident to condemn America as a racist hellhole.


	“Racism is a longstanding systemic structure in this country that must be dismantled, through brutally honest conversations, policy changes and practices,” he stated in a May 29, 2020 <a href="https://www.apha.org/News-and-Media/News-Releases/APHA-News-Releases/2020/Racism-is-a-public-health-crisis">press release</a>. “Racism attacks people’s physical and mental health. And&nbsp;racism is an ongoing public health crisis&nbsp;that needs our attention now!”


	“We see discrimination every day in all aspects of life, including housing, education, the criminal justice system and employment,” Benjamin continued. “And it is amplified during this pandemic as communities of color face inequities in everything from a greater burden of COVID-19 cases to less access to testing, treatment and care.”


	The high priests of wokeness regard everything in America as racist, even the medical field.


	Disturbing evidence of this kind of thinking ran in the medical journal, the Lancet, on October 10, 2020, in <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32076-6/fulltext">an article</a> titled “From race-based to race-conscious medicine: how anti-racist uprisings call us to act,” as Black Lives Matter was burning cities to the ground.


	“The brutalisation of Jacob Blake and murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and countless others—coupled with horrifying statistics about the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black and Brown communities—have forced the USA and the world to reckon with how structural racism conditions survival,” the article begins.


	Of course, the individuals cited above are not victims supporting the claim of “structural racism.”


	Blake is an alleged rapist wanted on a felony warrant who was shot several times by police during a domestic disturbance investigation. He was armed with a knife. The U.S. Department of Justice said in October 2021 it wouldn’t be bringing charges against the white shooter, police officer Rusten Sheskey.


	Floyd was a drug-addled career criminal who died in Minneapolis police custody in May 2020 after resisting arrest. White police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted in the death but medical evidence showed the Fentanyl in Floyd’s system killed him.


	Taylor was killed by police in a botched drug raid after her accomplice-sometime boyfriend fired on police. There is <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/breonna-taylor-anatomy-racial-hoax-david-horowitz/">no proof</a> racial animus had anything to do with it, despite the public relations campaign conducted by Oprah Winfrey aimed at whipping up racial hostility in the case.


	Three white men were convicted of murder and given life sentences on January 7 of this year in the February 23, 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery. While race was apparently a factor in their crimes, they were not police officers, so the “structural racism” argument goes out the window.


	McDade, who was reportedly born female but identified as male, was a suspect in the fatal stabbing of Malik Johnson and was killed by police investigating the stabbing scene who said the suspect was found with a bloody knife and a gun. On September 3, 2020, a grand jury found that the policeman’s use of force was justified. A self-recorded video showed the suspect contemplating committing suicide-by-cop, promising to die “through a shootout … because I don’t want to be here on earth.” A police bodycam showed McDade with a gun during a confrontation with police but was not recording when he allegedly pointed a gun at police and fired.


	Although the examples cited failed to show proof of “structural racism,” the Lancet article continued, assuming the accusation was true.


	“Although clinicians often imagine themselves as beneficent caregivers, it is increasingly clear that medicine is not a stand-alone institution immune to racial inequities, but rather is an institution of structural racism.”


	This is the way it goes with this kind of thing. Racial hoaxes are perpetrated routinely by the Left to advance their various causes.


	Now pharmacists have become complicit in this dishonest push.


	On January 18 AACP and APhA hosted what they described as “a profession-wide virtual event for all pharmacists, faculty members, administrators, and student pharmacists to reaffirm their commitment to the oath.”


	Butler led the brief indoctrination session on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/APhAASP/videos/2118396274990081">Facebook Live</a>. Butler’s <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlakeshabutler">LinkedIn</a> profile, which proudly displays her pronouns as “she/her/hers” in case there was any doubt, lists her as CEO and founder of her own consultancy “whose mission is to disrupt and dismantle inequities and injustices in healthcare and higher education.”


	“This is personal for me as we are not just reciting words,” Butler said during the online event.


	“But this is an important step for all members of our profession to take an active role in promoting health equity, and commit to being change agents for the patients that we serve. All patients that we serve, directly and indirectly, need us more than ever.”


	This thing called “health equity” is a variant of social justice ideology that one source has defined as “the absence of unfair and avoidable or remediable differences in health among population groups defined socially, economically, demographically or geographically.”


	In other words, health equity seems aimed at eliminating the myriad differences that make every individual person unique.


	John Sailer, researcher at the National Association of Scholars (NAS), studies the politicization of medical schools. NAS&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nas.org/about-us" target="_blank">characterizes</a>&nbsp;its mission as “uphold[ing] the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.”


	The changed pharmacists’ oath “is an especially stark example of a quickly accelerating trend—the blending of politics and medicine,” Sailer told this writer.


	“Already, medical schools across the country are bending their curricula and practice to promote the ambiguous but politically charged notion of ‘health equity.’ It’s no surprise that the AACP and APhA have followed suit—though requiring a commitment to inclusion, diversity, and health equity in an oath is something of an innovation,” he said.


	“Ultimately, the move subordinates science to the goal of social justice. Inevitably, this will further politicize medicine and science, and, in the long run, that hurts everyone.”


	How this ideological push will affect pharmacists’ jobs and the prescriptions that Americans take is not yet clear.


	But it cannot be a good thing.

Pharmacists Ingest Woke Poison

Un-American woke values have been infecting popular culture, governments, and corporations at an astonishing pace for some time but now they are spreading with

A new California law known as AB 979 now forces the more than 600 publicly held corporations headquartered in the state to appoint board members based solely on their race and sexual orientation, whether real or imagined.


	This law takes woke thinking to a whole new level by - for lack of a better way of putting it - perverting the already-perverse idea of identity politics. It does this by taking identity politics, which is already bad, and untethers it from actual group identities.


	If wokeness is the flu, then this new, uniquely Californian approach to hyper-balkanizing America is flesh-eating disease.


	Another state law, SB 826, already required that corporations meet a quota of female board members or face financial penalties. Existing law requires that by the end of 2019, a corporation with its principal executive office in the state had to have at least one female on its board. By the end of 2021, a corporation with 5 directors had to have a minimum of 2 female directors, and one with 6 or more directors had to have a least 3 female directors.


	But as of this past December 31, the new law, <a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB979">known as AB 979</a>, has required corporations to uphold an additional quota for board members based on race and sexual orientation, real or imagined. By the end of 2021, a corporation headquartered in the state was required to have at least one director from “an underrepresented community.” By the end of 2022, such a corporation with 5 to 8 directors had to have at least 2 directors from underserved communities; a corporation with 9 or more directors had to have a minimum of 3 directors from those communities on its board.


	The statute codifies make-believe and guarantees legal uncertainty by not requiring the “director from an underrepresented community” to actually belong to that community.


	“Director from an underrepresented community” is defined as “an individual who self-identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self-identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.”


	A first violation is punishable by a fine of $100,000; for subsequent violations the fine is $300,000.


	AB 979 grew out of the 2020 race riots that caused more than $2 billion in property damage&nbsp;nationwide and were instigated by Black Lives Matter and Antifa.


	As he signed AB 979 into law in September 2020, California’s radical Democrat governor, &nbsp;Gavin Newsom, said he did so to advance “racial justice.”


	“When we talk about racial justice, we talk about empowerment, we talk about power, we need to talk about seats at the table,” Newsom said, according to the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-30/california-law-requires-diversity-corporate-boardrooms-gavin-newsom" target="_blank">Los Angeles Times</a>.


	Those who drafted AB 979 even referenced a pseudoscientific study by Dalberg Global Development Advisors in the legislative language of the bill that claimed that race-based hiring would create vast riches. The study was said to have “found that the high tech industry could generate an additional $300 billion to $370 billion each year if the racial or ethnic diversity of tech companies’ workforces reflected that of the talent pool.”


	Chance Layton, communications director for the National Association of Scholars, denounced AB 979.


	“It’s a shame that this horrible law ever passed California’s legislature,” Layton told this writer.


	“Laws like these often begin with good intentions, but quickly get out of hand. If this law is left to stand, we might as well throw in the towel on the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” he said.


	“Race or sex discrimination should never be practiced by an American government. California’s legislature … have already shown their desire to discriminate and act with prejudice [in 2020] in the fight over Proposition&nbsp;16. That ballot measure was defeated, thankfully, because regardless of what those in power believe, the people understand that allowing the state to discriminate based on unchangeable attributes of individuals is fundamentally wrong.”


	In 2020, when she was a member of the California State Assembly, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, who now oversees enforcement of AB 979, introduced the bill that led to Proposition 16, which would have repealed the state constitution’s ban on race-based and sex-based affirmative action. A radical left-wing academic before she entered politics, Weber is <a href="https://africana.sdsu.edu/our-faculty">professor emeritus</a> of Africana Studies at San Diego State University.


	While a state lawmaker, Weber championed AB 3121, a law creating a task force to draft proposals to give reparations to blacks to compensate them for having ancestors a century and a half ago who were slaves. California has an “ugly past,” and its “systemic injustice” needs to be confronted,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/09/30/governor-newsom-signs-landmark-legislation-to-advance-racial-justice-and-californias-fight-against-systemic-racism-bias-in-our-legal-system/" target="_blank">she said</a>&nbsp;when her bill became law in 2020.


	At least two nonprofits have filed suit against AB 979, arguing that it perpetuates discrimination by dealing with people based on their immutable characteristics, and not as individuals.


	The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a pro-free market research and shareholder advocacy organization, filed a legal complaint aimed at halting the law in November 2021 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.


	The problem is “these diversity quotas apply to all businesses across every industry in perpetuity, regardless of whether there is any specific evidence of discrimination,” NCPPR, which is represented in the action by Pacific Legal Foundation&nbsp;(PLF), stated in its&nbsp;<a href="https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/01-PLF-Complaint-11.22.21.pdf" target="_blank">legal complaint</a>.


	“These laws, which dole out benefits and impose burdens on the basis of race, sex, and sexual orientation, are unconstitutional.”


	PLF attorney Daniel Ortner told this writer that “California has decided that they can intervene and force private companies to impose race quotas and sex quotas and all kinds of quotas.”


	But the Supreme Court sees quotas as “invidious because all they care about is one’s membership in a class—they’re not treating you an individual anymore … and that is deeply, deeply, deeply contrary to the Constitution and to the ideals of equality under the law that the Constitution stands for.”


	PLF client and shareholder activist Creighton Meland is suing over SB 826 in the same federal district court. The state tried to have the case thrown out but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit&nbsp;<a href="https://pacificlegal.org/press-release/ninth-circuit-says-challenge-to-california-woman-quota-law-can-proceed/" target="_blank">unanimously determined</a>&nbsp;in June 2021 that a shareholder of a California company has standing to sue over SB 826.


	Judicial Watch <a href="https://www.judicialwatch.org/jw-sues-cali-quotas/">filed a lawsuit</a> against AB 979 on behalf of plaintiffs in October 2020 and before that <a href="https://www.judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-sues-california-over-gender-quota-mandate-for-corporate-boards/">against SB 826</a>.


	“California’s government has a penchant for quotas that are brazenly unconstitutional,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said when his group’s lawsuit targeting AB 979 was initiated.


	“Gender quotas and now new quotas for numerous other groups for corporate boards are slaps in the face to the core American value of equal protection under the law. While California skirts bankruptcy and burns up due to fiscal abandon, its leftist political leadership would waste tax dollars to implement illegal and divisive quotas.”&nbsp;


	So what’s going to happen with the lawsuits?


	No one should expect California’s racially discriminatory laws to go down without a vigorous fight and no one should expect the litigation to wrap up soon.


	These insane laws in California, a state known for launching trends that spread across the country and the world, are too important to the Left.

California’s Diversity Psychosis

A new California law known as AB 979 now forces the more than 600 publicly held corporations headquartered in the state to appoint board members based solely

Leftists like to keep criminals, rioters, and illegal aliens out on the streets where they can do damage to American society instead of behind bars where they belong.


	Leftist groups like the Kamala Harris-endorsed <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/09/08/bail-fund-backed-by-kamala-harris-freed-man-charged-with-murder/">Minnesota Freedom Fund</a>, National Lawyers Guild, and the ACORN successor group, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (<a href="https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/ferguson-rent-mobs-exposed-matthew-vadum/">MORE</a>), set up bail funds for rioters to get them back out on the streets causing mayhem.


	Now radicals are doing the same thing for illegal aliens.


	The best friend of illegal aliens right now is the Brooklyn, New York-based Vera Institute of Justice, which spends much of its resources freeing illegals who often fail to appear for immigration hearings, from immigration detention facilities.


	The extremist open-borders and anti-law and order narratives on Vera’s website, reeking of anti-Americanism, read like they were written by Noam Chomsky.


	According to Vera: “In its scale and brutality, the American justice system is a global aberration[,]”; “The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world[,]”; and “People of color are incarcerated at an unmistakably higher rate than white people.”


	The group’s <a href="https://www.vera.org/about">mission</a> is “[t]o end the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.”


	Vera was founded in 1961 by philanthropist Louis Schweitzer and magazine editor Herbert Sturz, who “recognized the injustice of a bail system in New York City that locked people up simply for being poor.” Schweitzer died in 1971. Sturz, who died in June 2021, served on the board of leftist billionaire George Soros’s grantmaking behemoth, the Open Society Institute, since renamed Open Society Foundations.


	Originally called the Manhattan Bail Project, it focused on helping low-income New Yorkers meet bail conditions they could not afford. Nowadays, much of Vera’s work is concerned with immigration-related issues. “Because very few can afford to hire a lawyer, most immigrants face deportation proceedings alone and without any legal defense,” according to Vera.


	It is a well-heeled nonprofit that gets much of its funding from the federal government. In <a href="https://www.vera.org/downloads/about/financials/2020/FY20-form-990.pdf">fiscal 2019</a> it employed 334 people, took in $178.5 million, and ended with year with $97.3 million.


	Vera is a pioneer in the field of the “deportation defense program,” which can be defined as any initiative that provides legal representation to a non-citizen in deportation proceedings, typically at little or no cost to the client.


	This deportation defense movement grew out of the sanctuary city movement, which gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Both of these activist agglomerations demonize U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).


	These two movements “come from the same philosophy, namely that non-citizens should have the same or even superior rights to those afforded to legal citizens,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI, the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). IRLI is a public interest law firm founded in 1986 that describes itself as being “dedicated to achieving responsible immigration&nbsp;policies that serve our national interest.”


	“In this case, if a citizen were in need of legal services for a civil matter, they would be required to find an attorney at their own expense. Aliens facing deportation in a civil matter are being given taxpayer-funded legal representation that citizens would not get. The residents of the community did not have an opportunity to vote on this; it was done as a deal between local government officials and groups like Vera,” Wilcox said.


	"Sanctuary policy opposes the practice that aliens with criminal records who are in city or county jails can be detained at the request of ICE for transfer of custody and possible deportation,” he said. “This comes from agreements between local sheriffs' departments and ICE to safeguard a community. Sanctuary laws would nullify those agreements because one or more local politicians want to terminate&nbsp;them for self-serving partisan reasons, in many cases as a result&nbsp;of lobbying efforts from groups like CASA de Maryland and Vera.”


	Vera favors expanding the right to taxpayer-provided counsel and supports the creation of a taxpayer-funded federal defender service to provide legal representation to everyone in immigration proceedings who can’t afford a lawyer.


	But until that day arrives, Vera is working with city and county governments across America to establish programs that offer free legal representation at taxpayer expense to illegal aliens&nbsp;fighting deportation, according to a <a href="https://www.irli.org/illegal-aliens-are-getting-free-lawyers-and-youre-paying-for-it/">recent report</a> from IRLI, which states that Vera “<a href="https://www.vera.org/initiatives/safe-initiative">claims that</a>, out of the more than 50 publicly funded local and state deportation defense programs across the U.S., its SAFE Initiative (Safety &amp; Fairness for Everyone) is formal partners with 22 of these communities.”


	IRLI estimates that a minimum of $5.6 million will be spent by taxpayers living in these communities on these programs in fiscal 2022.


	“These programs are an insult to every law-abiding American citizen and legal resident,” according to Wilcox.


	“Our laws clearly state that non-citizens charged with civil offenses do not have a right to legal representation. Yet we have radical anti-borders groups starting these programs and sticking unknowing citizens with the bill. It’s outrageous.”


	According to IRLI, “under U.S. law, illegal aliens and other non-citizens facing deportation orders do not have a right to legal representation because immigration law is a civil matter, not a criminal one.”


	At first it may be jarring to read that would-be deportees “do not have a right to legal representation” – that just doesn’t seem right. This is America, after all.


	The phrase doesn’t actually mean what you may think it means. Of course, people accused of immigration law violations have a right to retain counsel to act for them in legal proceedings but they do not have a right to the services of a lawyer paid for by the government.


	Leftist groups like Vera want to change that.


	They hope to build on a sliver of a legal right that is known as “Civil Gideon.”


	In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution applies the Sixth Amendment, which states that a defendant in criminal proceedings has a right to “the Assistance of Counsel,” to the states, thereby creating a right for criminal defendants unable to afford their own lawyers to have the state appoint and pay for attorneys on their behalf.


	The left-leaning&nbsp;<a href="https://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_aid_indigent_defense/civil_right_to_counsel1/" target="_blank">American Bar Association</a>, asserts that there is such a thing as a “civil right to counsel,” but acknowledges it is not a widely accepted concept.


	Civil right to counsel, or “Civil Gideon,” is the idea that “people who are unable to afford lawyers in legal matters involving basic human needs—such as shelter, sustenance, safety, health, and child custody—should have access to a lawyer at no charge,” according to the ABA.


	While this right to counsel “exists in criminal matters, it exists at present only in very limited circumstances in civil matters.”


	Vera, meanwhile, “has served as the main catalyst for the proliferation” of existing deportation defense programs for illegal aliens, according to IRLI.


	Vera doles out one-time grants to local governments that create these programs in the hope they become permanent. Its first program began in New York City in 2013 and was called the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project.


	Programs like it have multiplied since 2013, IRLI reports. In July 2021, Vera&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vera.org/newsroom/the-movement-for-universal-representation-grows-stronger" target="_blank">boasted</a>&nbsp;that various “communities successful[ly] demand public investment in representation for immigrants.”


	Vera states that in California, Santa Ana “increased and made permanent funding for its universal representation program,” and Long Beach “committed to leveraging federal sources of stimulus and recovery funding to aid an increase in public funding for the Long Beach Justice Fund.” San Diego began a new $5 million legal defense program, “the first of its kind in a border county.”


	Indianapolis initiated “a new immigration legal defense fund,” and Philadelphia boosted fiscal 2022 spending on the Pennsylvania Immigrant Family Unity Project (PAIFUP), according to Vera.


	Philadelphia won’t call itself a sanctuary city, opting instead to dub itself a “Welcoming City,” according to a <a href="https://www.phila.gov/2018-01-08-immigration-policies/" target="_blank">statement</a> from 2018: “We do not allow our City employees, including police officers, to ask about the documentation status of people they encounter.”


	In 2019 Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, unveiled PAIFUP, a joint effort between Vera and the city to&nbsp;combat all the imagined “hate” coming out of the Trump administration. Local taxpayers shelled out the initial $100,000, and Vera and the Samuel S. Fels Fund kicked in &nbsp;an additional $200,000, IRLI reports.


	PAIFUP was in financial trouble during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 when Philadelphia was poised to eliminate its funding but city leaders “somehow not only found a way to maintain the program amid a financial crisis, but doubled&nbsp;taxpayer commitment to $200,000 for next fiscal year.”


	PAIFUP acknowledged it had “no eligibility criteria other than income and a lack of private counsel” and that it did not “exclude individuals based on prior criminal convictions, residency, or any other reason.”


	Lots more government money is in the pipeline for the Vera Institute of Justice.


	The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded Vera a $158 million taxpayer-funded contract in 2021 to assist unaccompanied minors in avoiding deportation from the U.S., IRLI told <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/left-wing-158m-taxpayer-immigrants-deportation">Fox News</a>.


	ILRI investigator Jason Hopkins told the media outlet that Vera states on its website that it “is committed to ensuring that every person facing deportation receives legal representation regardless of … history with the criminal legal system.”


	“That really opens up the door to—is this an illegal alien who’s been charged, convicted of murder, rape and any other heinous crime?” Hopkins said.


	“Vera is very open that they really don’t care about their criminal history."

Taxpayer-Funded Lawyers for Illegals

Leftists like to keep criminals, rioters, and illegal aliens out on the streets where they can do damage to American society instead of behind bars where they

Incorporating the depraved racial ideology of the woke Left into the fabric of state courts is abominable, a Michigan Supreme Court justice argued as his impassioned pleas against creating a modern judicial inquisition to enforce wokeness on the bench fell on deaf ears.


	Justice David Viviano was weighing in on the court’s profoundly un-American <a href="https://www.courts.michigan.gov/48d342/siteassets/rules-instructions-administrative-orders/proposed-and-recently-adopted-orders-on-admin-matters/adopted-orders/2021-38_2022-01-05_formattedorder_ao2022-1dei.pdf">Administrative Order No. 2022-1</a> of January 5 that created a commission “with the initial goal of exploring issues related to the demographics of the workforce that support our judiciary and training within the judicial branches.”


	Viviano dissented from a recent majority opinion creating the commission to weave the leftist holy trinity known as DEI –diversity, equity, and inclusion— into Michigan’s judicial system.


	The stated mission of this new inquisition, the 24-member Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Michigan Judiciary, is “to assess and work towards elimination of demographic and other disparities within the Michigan judiciary and justice system,” the order states.


	According to the order, the commission came out of the work of a DEI Committee that was formed in January 2021 “with the initial goal of exploring issues related to the demographics of the workforce that support our judiciary and training within the judicial branches.” Over time the committee’s “work grew to include exploration of other topics that impact our communities.”


	The commission, the order continues, will develop policies and standards to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, assist in eliminating disparities within the justice system, assist local courts in implementing DEI-related plans, and “increase participation of members from under-represented communities in judicial branch leadership.”


	But Viviano, whose dissent was joined by Justice Brian Zahra, sounded the alarm, writing that diversity, equity, and inclusion is “a catchphrase that is politically fraught—and for that reason alone should be approached with extreme caution by the judicial branch.”


	Despite “an expansive purpose statement,” the order “nowhere establishes the scope or meaning of the critical terms, ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion,’” Viviano wrote.


	“It is no small thing to leave unstated the meaning of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’,” he wrote. “This catchphrase occupies disputed terrain in our politically polarized society.”


	“I am concerned that the Commission will endow these core concepts with meanings that will produce heated disputes and call into question the judiciary’s neutrality,” he wrote.


	“The way to be equitable, diverse, and inclusive is to stop taking account of race and other protected characteristics,” Viviano wrote.


	“By plunging ahead, I believe that this Court, and the commission it creates today, will serve only to engender conflict and undermine the public’s faith in the judicial branch as impartial arbiters.”


	A useful idiot on the court dismissed Viviano’s objections.


	Punctuating her prose with empty politically correct rhetoric, Justice Elizabeth Welch argued in her opinion concurring with the order that her dissenting colleagues’ fears were unfounded.


	Welch, of course, is a Democrat on the Michigan Supreme Court, whose seven members are &nbsp;elected by the public. And she has a vested interest in pushing the commission, which she has been named to co-chair.


	The other Democrats are Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack and Justices Richard Bernstein and Megan Cavanagh. Justice Elizabeth Clement is a Republican.


	The two dissenters both have ties to Michigan’s Hillsdale College, an independent academic oasis of patriotic education and traditional constitutionalist thinking.


	Viviano, a Republican, <a href="http://hillsdalecollegian.com/2014/10/viviano-runs-for-michigan-supreme-court/">earned</a> his bachelor of arts degree from Hillsdale in 1994.


	“I find myself using what we all learned at Hillsdale about the founding principles set by our founding fathers, the separation of powers, and idea of individual liberty,” Viviano&nbsp;told the college’s newspaper in 2014.


	Zahra, also a Republican, <a href="https://www.courts.michigan.gov/courts/supreme-court/justices/justice-brian-k.-zahra/">serves</a> as the judicial advisor to Hillsdale’s Federalist Society chapter.


	Welch justified the inquisition by writing that the DEI Committee spent “hundreds of hours meeting and working with the State Court Administrative Office, the State Bar of Michigan, individual members of the bench and bar, various other stakeholders, and representatives of commissions created in other states.”


	The recommendation to create the commission was based “not merely on the work completed over the last year, but also on decades of prior research and recommendations, including those of the 1987 Supreme Court Task Force on Gender Issues in the Courts, the 1987 Task Force on Racial/Ethnic Issues in the Courts, the 1996 State Bar of Michigan Task Force on Race/Ethnic and Gender Issues in the Courts and the Legal Profession, the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts (of which Michigan is a founding member), the National Center for State Courts, the Conference of Chief Justices, and the Conference of State Court Administrators.”


	Welch claimed the “[l]eadership in these varied groups has been nonpartisan and includes judges of different ideologies from around the nation.”


	“Over the decades, all of these bodies have called on state courts to do more and to take direct action to ensure that the courts, as institutions existing for the benefit of the people, reflect the people they serve,” she wrote.


	Welch added that decades ago the Michigan Supreme Court issued Administrative Order No. 1990-3, which directed “[t]hat judges, employees of the judicial system, attorneys and other court officers commit themselves to the elimination of racial, ethnic and gender discrimination in the Michigan judicial system.”


	“Despite calls for change over 30 years ago, ongoing internal work, and the growing number of voices calling on the Courts to take a lead on DEI issues, it was not until now that our Court has finally and publicly taken that next necessary step,” Welch wrote.


	Viviano pointed out in his dissent that the DEI Committee has already inflicted damage on the judicial system. The committee recommended adopting a questionnaire to be used on would-be judges that solicits information about the individual’s experience and training in DEI and includes DEI as a competency to be assessed in the selection process. The State Court Administrative Office now operates using the suggested policy and the questionnaire is a reality, he wrote.


	“Two of the 10 questions now involve ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ including one that asks the applicant to describe how he or she has ‘demonstrate[d] alignment with the judiciary’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion[,]’” Viviano wrote, describing an ideological purity test.


	Welch claimed she shares Viviano’s dedication to safeguarding the court’s neutrality, but she “struggles to understand how creating a more inclusive and welcoming workplace or court system fails to achieve those goals.”


	“This new commission will assist the Court in recognizing its deficiencies and blind spots as an institution and an employer,” Welch wrote. “It is only with this knowledge that we can begin visualizing and building a judiciary that is more reflective of and better situated to serve the people of Michigan.”


	Welch <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Elizabeth_Welch">bragged</a> in a candidate biography that she has “worked extensively as an unpaid advocate on issues involving conservation, voting rights, and public education.” Her past service included working for the Michigan League of Conservation Voters and doing election protection work with NAACP WIN,” also known as the Women in NAACP Committee.


	It’s no surprise that someone like Welch lacks the capacity to understand that race should not be a consideration in the judicial process.


	No wonder this unfit justice voted to create a taxpayer-funded commission that will poison her state’s judicial system and bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

Michigan Supreme Court Blesses a Woke Inquisition

Incorporating the depraved racial ideology of the woke Left into the fabric of state courts is abominable, a Michigan Supreme Court justice argued as his

The bewildering array of false statements offered by the three left-leaning Supreme Court justices at the special Jan. 7 hearing on President Joe Biden’s unprecedented vaccination diktats for private-sector and health care workers is now a matter of public record.


	It took just a few hours of people tuning into the live broadcast of oral arguments to open a window into why the federal government - filled as it is with ignoramuses, posterior-osculators, charlatans, and grifters - doesn’t work.


	All across social media Americans quite properly ridiculed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan for their fear porn and astonishing ignorance about COVID-19, as if these jurists got all their news from the professional misinformers at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC.


	Sometimes it seemed like the liberal law lords got their professional degrees from arguing on social media comment threads as they amplified COVID-19 hysteria.


	The at-times abysmal quality of the justices’ colloquys prompted the satirical Babylon Bee to <a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/nations-fate-now-in-the-hands-of-8-dummies-and-clarence-thomas">publish a piece</a> titled “Nation’s Fate Now In The Hands Of 8 Dummies And Clarence Thomas.”


	Hyperbolic? A little, maybe.


	At issue in the rare Friday sitting of the Supreme Court was the Biden administration’s attempt to ram through without the consent of Congress a mandate forcing employers with at least 100 employees - or most of America’s private workforce - to require their employees to receive the still-experimental vaccines aimed at preventing COVID-19 or to endure the inconvenience of regular testing to detect it. That affects about 84 million people. (The transcript of the oral argument in NFIB v. Department of Labor <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2021/21a244_7k47.pdf">may be found here</a>.)


	Also at issue was the emergency regulation –halted by lower courts— compelling the vaccination of more than 10 million employees at health care facilities that take part in Medicare and Medicaid. (The transcript of the oral argument in Biden v. Missouri <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2021/21a240_7648.pdf">may be found here</a>.)


	The most radical member of the court, the “wise Latina,” Sonia Sotomayor, also turns out to be the most radically misinformed about the Chinese plague.


	Sotomayor’s resistance to reality makes her the “ideal” Supreme Court justice to the Left, Dinesh D’Souza <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1479826855951847428">tweeted</a> the day after the arguments:


	“Sotomayor is, from the Left’s point of view, the ideal #SCOTUS justice: she’s indifferent to the text of the Constitution, unfettered by facts, a militant activist who has no qualms about twisting and bending the law to achieve the ideological result.”


	D’Souza also <a href="https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1469366668728098818">called her</a> a “petulant crank” in December, which sounds about right.


	Sotomayor insisted the private-sector mandate was necessary because the “Omicron [variant] is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as Delta did … we have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators. We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before … in serious condition and many on ventilators.”


	In fact, Omicron is <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/01/07/supreme-courts-liberal-justices-slammed-over-vax-mandate-statements/">considered</a> less severe than Delta and federal data show there had been only “3,342 confirmed pediatric hospitalizations with COVID-19 across the US as of Friday — making the justice’s math off by a factor of nearly 30,” the New York Post noted.


	The 100,000 figure is so egregiously wrong that even the leftists at the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/08/sotomayors-false-claim-that-over-100000-children-are-serious-condition-with-covid/">Washington Post</a> and <a href="https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jan/07/sonia-sotomayor/fact-checking-sotomayor-kids-severe-covid-19/?1">PolitiFact</a> felt they had to shiv Sotomayor. WaPo awarded her statement “Four Pinocchios” and PolitiFact rated it “False.”


	CDC boss Dr. Rochelle Walensky piled on, <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/01/09/cdcs-walensky-corrects-justice-sonia-sotomayors-covid-19-claim/">telling</a> Fox News there were&nbsp;actually fewer than 3,500 children hospitalized with the virus.


	Yet Twitter, which routinely banishes users for spreading what it deems COVID-19 misinformation, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/twitter-justice-sonia-sotomayor-supreme-court-covid-free-speech-jonathan-turley">refuses</a> to ban the statement by Sotomayor, who was appointed by then-President Barack Hussein Obama in 2009.


	Sotomayor also appears to have missed a few lectures in law school about the Constitution and basic legal concepts.


	The justice said “I’m not sure I understand the distinction why the states would have the power” to enact something like Biden’s private-sector mandate “but the federal government wouldn’t.”


	Answer: the police powers in the various state constitutions and in the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”


	These police powers, to use constitutional parlance, include the ability to regulate the health, safety, and morals of the population.


	But Sotomayor cut off Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers after he said “the federal government has no police power.”


	She insisted the federal government has “power with respect to protecting the health and safety of workers.”


	“We have accept[ed] the constitutionality of OSHA,” she said, adding that the federal government has “a police power to protect workers.”


	Sotomayor scolded National Federation of Independent Business attorney Scott Keller, telling him: “You forget that there are certain states now that are stopping employers from requiring vaccines. There are certain states stopping employers from requiring masks. Why shouldn't the federal government, which it has already decided in OSHA, to give -- Congress has decided to give OSHA the power to regulate workplace safety, have a national rule that will protect workers?”


	Keller replied that “Congress would have to clearly state in a statute if it wanted to give an occupational health agency the power to require employees to get certain medical treatment.” Congress did not tell OSHA “you now have statutory authority to regulate all communicable diseases.”


	OSHA has regulated bloodborne pathogens, he said, referring to when the agency required employers to protect employees from occupational exposure to infectious agents. But “even that rule did not mandate vaccines or widespread testing.”


	Justice Neil Gorsuch later offered some nuanced constitutional clarity that no doubt went over Sotomayor’s head.


	“I think we’ve all kind of come to the point where we all agree that states … have a wide police power under our constitutional system that Congress has to regulate consistent with the Commerce Clause … and make the major decisions while agencies can do the work that Congress has given them to do but not other kinds of work,” the justice told Flowers.


	“And the major questions doctrine kind of regulates that interaction between Congress and agencies,” he said, meaning that Congress is supposed to make laws about major issues, instead of delegating its decision-making powers to federal agencies.


	“So it’s not that judges are supposed to decide some question of public health,” Gorsuch said. “It’s about regulating the rules of the system to ensure that the appropriate party does.”


	Sotomayor also suggested that human workers could be regulated through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) like machines or toxic chemicals.


	The justice asked NFIB’s Keller: “So what’s the difference between this and telling employers, where sparks are flying in the workplace, your workers have to … wear a mask?”


	Keller replied: “When sparks are flying in the workplace, that's presumably because there's a machine that's unique to that workplace.”


	Sotomayor interjected, saying: “Why is the human being not like a machine if it’s spewing a virus, bloodborne viruses?”


	Yes, she actually said that.


	Sotomayor also doesn’t know what the word “mandate” means.


	Sotomayor interjected again when Keller said the OSHA mandate was invalid because “Congress would have to clearly state in a statute if it wanted to give an occupational health agency the power to require employees to get certain medical treatment …”


	“There’s no requirement here. It’s not a vaccine mandate. It's something totally different.”


	In fact, a mandate is something a government requires a person or entity to do. For example, the individual mandate in the Obamacare statute required individuals to purchase health insurance, or face a penalty for failing to do so.


	The OSHA mandate requires employers to create a vaccine-and-testing regime, but the justice&nbsp; seemed to think the mandate is not really a mandate because an employee can opt to be tested weekly instead of getting the shot.


	But Sotomayor is more Humpty Dumpty than jurist because when she uses a word it means just what she chooses it to mean – neither more nor less.


	So somehow Sotomayor reasons that this mandate isn’t a mandate.


	Stephen Breyer, who is 83 and under intense pressure from the Left to retire to give Biden a chance to replace him with another, younger liberal justice to carry on the important work of undermining the republic over coming decades, said there were “750 million new cases yesterday or close to that is a lot.”


	“That’s why I said I would find it … unbelievable that it could be in the public interest to suddenly stop these vaccinations,” said Breyer who was appointed in 1994 by then-President Bill Clinton.


	According to the <a href="https://www.census.gov/popclock/">U.S. Census Bureau</a>, the current total U.S. population is only 332.4 million.


	Breyer also claimed that the nation’s hospitals were “full almost to the point of the maximum,” a statement that doesn’t even remotely approximate the truth.


	Of the 714,247 inpatient beds in 5,607 hospitals reporting, 555,883 were in use as of Jan. 11, which means only 77.8 percent of the beds were occupied, according to <a href="https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization">data provided</a> by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Only 145,982 of inpatient beds were in use for COVID-19.


	After U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, a former <a href="https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/almID/1202790713323/This-Beauty-Queen-Turned-DOJ-Lawyer-Could-Mean-Trouble-for-Trump/?slreturn=20220008162225">Miss Idaho 2004</a>, laid out the upcoming timeline for enforcing the OSHA mandate, Breyer jumped in, implying vaccinations are 100 percent effective in stopping COVID-19.


	“So if we delay that one day — maybe I’m wrong, and please tell me if I am — but the numbers I read is when they issued this order, there were approximately 70-something-thousand new cases every day,” Breyer told Prelogar.


	“And yesterday, there were close to 750,000. So if we delay it a day, if it were to have effect, then 750,000 more people will have COVID who otherwise, if we didn’t delay it, would not have.”


	But even the CDC <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/effectiveness/why-measure-effectiveness/breakthrough-cases.html">admits</a> that vaccinations are not foolproof.


	“COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing infection, serious illness, and death. Most people who get COVID-19 are unvaccinated. However, since vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing infection, some people who are&nbsp;fully vaccinated&nbsp;will still get COVID-19,” according to CDC’s website.


	Elena Kagan, who was appointed by Obama in 2010, implied vaccinated people cannot spread SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19.


	In a discussion of the health care worker mandate, Kagan said the government told health care providers, “the one thing you can't do is to kill your patients, so you have … to get vaccinated so that you’re not transmitting the disease that can kill elderly Medicare patients, that can kill sick Medicaid patients. I mean, that seems like a pretty basic infection prevention measure. You can't be the carrier of disease.”


	Vaccination only reduces the risk of a person spreading COVID-19, the CDC <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythingstoknow.html">acknowledges</a>.


	Kagan also claimed “the best way” to stop the spread of the virus is “for people to get vaccinated,” and the “second best way” is to “wear masks.”


	“Neither claim is true,” Kaylee McGhee White writes at the <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/liberal-supreme-court-justices-spread-covid-19-misinformation">Washington Examiner</a>.


	"While the vaccines appear to slow the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the chance of death, there is absolutely no evidence that they prevent transmission, especially not against the much more contagious omicron variant.”


	Kagan, Breyer, and especially Sotomayor amply demonstrated at the recent hearing why they are unfit to serve on the Supreme Court.


	Every day they remain on the bench America is in peril.

Three Leftist Supreme Court Judges - and Fear Porn

The bewildering array of false statements offered by the three left-leaning Supreme Court justices at the special Jan. 7 hearing on President Joe Biden’s

California’s long-running descent into madness continues as its bizarre Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) now encourages public school students to pray to bloodthirsty Aztec deities.


	The California State Board of Education approved the almost 900-page ESMC in March 2021, saying teaching children about the systemic racism that supposedly plagues America has never been more urgent, as Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-ethnic-studies-curriculum">reported</a> at the time.


	“The curriculum’s unequivocal promotion of five Aztec gods or deities through repetitive chanting and affirmation of their symbolic principles constitutes an unlawful government preference toward a particular religious practice,” Frank Xu, president of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/california-requires-aztec-prayer-in-schools-and-civil-rights-group-sues_3984497.html">said months ago</a> as his organization filed a lawsuit against the state.


	“This public endorsement of the Aztec religion fundamentally erodes equal education rights and irresponsibly glorifies anthropomorphic, male deities whose religious rituals involved gruesome human sacrifice and human dismemberment.”


	The legal action, Californians for Equal Rights Foundation v. State of California, was filed Sept. 3, 2021, in the Superior Court of California, County of San Diego, by attorneys from the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm focusing on religious freedom. The foundation is a non-profit civil rights organization headquartered in San Diego.


	Golden State officials say this is the first statewide ethnic studies model curriculum in the country. Oregon is developing ethnic studies standards for its social studies curriculum, while Connecticut will require its high schools to offer courses in black and Latino studies by autumn this year.


	“We are reminded daily that racism is not only a legacy of the past but a clear and present danger,” said California State Board of Education president Linda Darling-Hammond, a leftist who headed the Biden-Harris regime’s education transition team. “We must understand this history if we are finally to end it.”


	The California curriculum is intended to educate high school students about the travails of “historically marginalized peoples which are often untold in U.S. history courses.” It reportedly focuses on the four groups examined in college-level ethnic studies courses: African Americans, Chicano/Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.


	Somehow this leads to the Aztec religion, complete with its cast of characters one might expect to find in a Tobe Hooper movie.


	The ESMC includes a section on “Affirmation, Chants, and Energizers,” among which is the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” an invocation of five Aztec deities. This pagan prayer recognizes the cosmic beings as sources of power and knowledge, seeks their assistance, and gives them thanks.


	The five beings are Tezkatlipoka, Quetzalkoatl, Huitzilopochtli, Xipe Totek, and Hunab Ku.


	Tezcatlipoca is “an omnipresent god capable of shapeshifting into a jaguar,” according to <a href="https://mythopedia.com/aztec-mythology/gods/tezcatlipoca/">Mythopedia</a>. In <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nahuatl-language">Nahuatl</a>, an American Indian language&nbsp;of the Uto-Aztecan family that is still spoken in central and western Mexico, Tezcatlipoca means “smoking mirror,” a reference to the obsidian mirrors Aztecs used in ceremonies. He was often depicted as having one of his feet replaced with an obsidian mirror. Two of his many alternative names, Titlacauan and Ipalnemoani, attest to his status among the gods, meaning “we are his slaves” and “he by whom we live,” respectively.


	Tezcatlipoca was celebrated annually during Toxcatl, the fifth month of the Aztec calendar.


	“Every year, a young man—typically a prisoner of war—was chosen to represent Tezcatlipoca … and [this]&nbsp;ixiptla, or impersonator …&nbsp;was treated with great respect and trained to speak in a courtly style. He was also taught to play the flute, the sound of which was thought to be the voice of Tezcatlipoca.&nbsp;A month prior to the festival of Toxcatl, he would be wed to four young women impersonating the four goddess wives of Tezcatlipoca:&nbsp;<a href="https://mythopedia.com/aztec-mythology/gods/xochiquetzal/">Xochiquetzal</a>, Xilonen, Atlatonan and Huixtocihuatl.”


	The high point of the festival was when the ixiptla walked up the steps of a pyramid and his heart was cut out with an obsidian knife. When the next’s year impersonator was chosen, he was given his predecessor’s skin to wear as a cloak.


	Quetzalcoatl, known to the Mayans as Kukulcan, was initially <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Quetzalcoatl">depicted</a> as a feathered snake. Portrayed as both the morning and evening star, Quetzalcoatl became a symbol of death and resurrection. Accompanied by his loyal companion, the dog-headed god Xolotl, he descended to hell to collect the bones of the ancient dead, and poured his own blood on them, thereby creating the people who live in the present universe. Quetzalcoatl sacrificed snakes, butterflies, and birds, but never humans.


	Huitzilopochtli was the Aztec god of war, Mythopedia reports. His mother’s other 400 children were unhappy about his approaching birth and according to various versions of the story: a) they killed her; b) they tried to kill her; or c) they tried to kill Huitzilopochtli before he was born. In what must have been a challenging childbirth, somehow Huitzilopochtli escaped the womb while fully armored and promptly defeated his siblings. Sacrifices, including human sacrifices were made to him after every military victory and defeat.


	Xipe Totec, meaning “Our Lord the Flayed One,” had a diverse set of responsibilities, according to <a href="https://mythopedia.com/aztec-mythology/gods/xipe-totec/">Mythopedia</a>. He was Aztec god of agriculture, seasons, disease, and goldsmiths. Xipe Totec “was often depicted wearing a suit of flayed skin, and his associated ceremonies emphasized his choice of attire. Such rituals usually culminated in a fresh skin suit being made and worn by either a statue of Xipe Totec or one of his priests.”


	Hunab Ku, meaning “One-God,” was a creator deity worshiped by Aztecs and some Mayans but thought to have Aztec origins.


	“The Aztecs regularly performed gruesome and horrific acts for the sole purpose of pacifying and appeasing the very beings that the prayers from the curriculum invoke,” said Paul Jonna, a partner at LiMandri &amp; Jonna LLP and Thomas More Society Special Counsel.


	“The human sacrifice, cutting out of human hearts, flaying of victims and wearing their skin, are a matter of historical record, along with sacrifices of war prisoners, and other repulsive acts and ceremonies the Aztecs conducted to honor their deities,” Jonna said.


	“Any form of&nbsp;prayer&nbsp;and glorification of these bloodthirsty beings in whose name horrible atrocities were performed is repulsive to any reasonably informed observer.”


	Yet the ESMC is now a reality.


	It came about after the board of education named R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, a co-author of the 2019 book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, to head a committee tasked with developing it. In his book Cuauhtin “demonstrates an animus towards Christianity and Catholicism—claiming that Christians committed ‘theocide’ (i.e., killing gods) against indigenous tribes,” according to <a href="https://eadn-wc01-1479010.nxedge.io/cdn/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Complaint-09-03-21-CA-Education-FINAL.pdf">court documents</a>.


	In March 2021, the board approved the ESMC, also including the “Ashe Affirmation,” which “invokes the divine forces of the Yoruba religion four times—honoring this divine force and seeking assistance for the school day.” Yoruba is “an ancient philosophical concept that is the root of many pagan religions, including santeria and Haitian vodou or voodoo,” according to the Thomas More Society. It&nbsp;<a href="https://web.ccsu.edu/afstudy/supdt99.htm" target="_blank">reportedly</a>&nbsp;has 100 million believers worldwide in West Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guyana, and in various Caribbean nations.


	How the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, with its invocation of witch doctors and Aztec gods like Xipe Totec, who wears suits made of flayed human skin, will enlighten California schoolchildren has never been explained.


	Maybe enlightenment isn’t the goal.

California Pushes Kids to Worship Aztec Gods

California’s long-running descent into madness continues as its bizarre Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) now encourages public school students to pray to

Ritualized humiliation and self-abasement are becoming the norm for those in higher education who defy the campus enforcers of wokeness.


	In a scene out of Communist China’s Cultural Revolution, current law professor Jason Kilborn and former college administrator Jodi Shaw -- both white people -- are the latest victims of mandatory reeducation at the hands of the race-weaponizing radicals who run the academy.


	This disturbing move in the direction of normalizing academic brainwashing comes as things go the opposite way for parents nationwide who, thanks to well-publicized examples of arrogant leftist educrats’ damaging public admissions, are making great strides attacking critical race theory (CRT) at the local and state levels.


	But taking on school boards over CRT doesn’t help Kilborn, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. He has been ordered by his employer to endure mandatory reeducation as punishment for using an abbreviated version of a racial slur in a legal hypothetical about race-based employment discrimination on an exam. The issue was whether the information concerned in the hypothetical was work product.


	Students whined that the use of the term, even with 5 of its 6 letters redacted, was hurtful, and the school’s Black Law Students Association demanded that Kilborn be fired.


	The final exam on December 2, 2020, in Kilborn’s Civil Procedure II course included the following sentence in a question that had appeared in the exam for years:

<blockquote>
	
		Employer’s lawyer traveled to meet the manager, who stated that she quit her job at Employer after she attended a meeting in which other managers expressed their anger at Plaintiff, calling her a ‘n_____’ and ‘b____’ (profane expressions for African Americans and women) and vowed to get rid of her.
</blockquote>


	A Change.org&nbsp;<a href="https://www.change.org/p/dean-dickerson-and-chancellor-michael-amiridis-insensitive-and-racist-content-on-uic-john-marshall-law-school-exam" target="_blank">petition</a>&nbsp;denounced the “dark and vile verbiage” in a question that “was culturally insensitive and tone-deaf,” and lacking in “basic civility and respect for the student body, especially considering our social justice efforts this year. … We cannot ignore the history and violence the N-word represents and the psychological impact, and mental trauma students were subjected to.”


	The university conveniently produced reports from anonymous students who claimed Kilborn called minorities “cockroaches,” an allegation he strongly denies.


	The school advised Kilborn’s attorney in a <a href="https://legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Jason-Kilborn-Letter-December-16-U-Illinois-Chicago-Law-School.pdf" target="_blank">letter</a>&nbsp;that his client will have to receive “individualized training and coaching … to facilitate his return to the classroom.” This includes <a href="https://teaching.cornell.edu/programs/faculty-instructors/workshops-and-other-opportunities/teaching-learning-diverse-classroom" target="_blank">enrollment</a>&nbsp;in an extended Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation’s “Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom Online Course.”&nbsp;


	Upon finishing each course module, Kilborn will “prepare a written self-reflection paper&nbsp;in response to specific prompts.” He must also work “one-on-one” with “an instructional advisor” who has “earned a certificate in Diversity and Inclusion from Cornell.”


	Kilborn will be forbidden from teaching while taking the course but that is “not punitive,” according to the school lawyer’s spin. “We note that faculty, administrators, and executives routinely engage in these programs as a means of continuing their education and broadening their skillset.”


	“The common goal is to return Professor Kilborn to the classroom,” the lawyer wrote. “The Law School is committed to ensuring that the entire Law School community benefits from a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment.”


	William A. Jacobson, himself a law professor, wrote at his website, <a href="https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/12/the-cruel-and-unusual-punishment-of-prof-jason-kilborn-by-u-illinois-chicago-john-marshall-law-school/" target="_blank">Legal Insurrection</a>, “This is nothing short of an attempt to humiliate Prof. Kilborn through a reeducation and supervisory program that would make Maoist Red Guards blush.”


	Jacobson opines that the school is&nbsp;“psychologically torturing a professor just because it thinks it can.”


	Although Jacobson’s statement may be “hyperbole, the abusive nature of the behavior of UIC officials is undeniable,” Kilborn told me via email.


	“The whole episode is a despicable commentary on the sorry and irresponsible state of higher education administration today. I hope the truth attracts as much attention when it is fully revealed in a federal lawsuit that is all but inevitable at this point,” Kilborn said.


	By the way, the school at which Kilborn teaches was called the University of Illinois–Chicago John Marshall School of Law until this past summer, but the University of Illinois Board of Trustees&nbsp;<a href="https://today.uic.edu/board-approves-new-name-for-uic-law" target="_blank">canceled</a>&nbsp;the name for the sins of its namesake who changed the course of American history by inventing judicial review in the landmark 1803 Supreme Court ruling of Marbury v. Madison.


	According to the radicals running that university, it was discovered “that despite Chief Justice Marshall’s legacy as one of the nation’s most significant U.S. Supreme Court justices, the newly discovered research regarding his role as a slave trader, slave owner of hundreds of slaves, pro-slavery jurisprudence, and racist views render him a highly inappropriate namesake for the Law School.”


	Unlike Kilborn, Shaw isn’t waiting to sue.


	The former Smith College administrative employee filed suit in federal court in Massachusetts on Dec. 16 for retaliation and racial discrimination including forced participation in ideological indoctrination sessions.


	David Pitvorak, who calls himself in his Twitter profile an “individual rights attorney taking on Critical Race Theory in the courts,” is acting for Shaw.


	“We allege that Smith forced Shaw to undergo ritual racial humiliation and tasked her with implementing policies that racially segregated and discriminated against students,” Pitvorak&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/piv4law/status/1471890827710320644?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">tweeted</a>.


	In the last few years Smith College has “fostered a toxic climate of racial fear, hostility, and exclusion” that has been “felt most deeply by lower-level employees” such as single mother Shaw, who, “while simply trying to make ends meet, suddenly found themselves thrust into the middle of an ideologically driven campaign of race-essentialism and collective guilt pushed by the school,” her&nbsp;<a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ac03e14ec4eb74c10016931/t/61bcbb8de3cfe174add26ed7/1639758778264/2021-12-16+Shaw+Complaint.pdf" target="_blank">legal complaint</a> states.


	Smith College “adopted an official policy of viewing every aspect of its operations through a racial lens; one that distorts all whites into malevolent oppressors and all people of color into hapless victims, regardless of any individual’s actual position or status.” This outlook “permeated every decision and action taken by the school.”


	While employed at the college, Shaw “was denied a significant professional career advancement opportunity when she was told by her supervisors that they canceled an orientation program she organized ‘because you are white.’” She was required to administer a “Residential Life Curriculum” which asked students “to project stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others based on skin color.” Shaw was required to operate “affinity houses,” consisting of student housing segregated along racial lines.


	At a professional development retreat Shaw was forced to attend, she “was publicly humiliated for not admitting to ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege’ and was continually expected to submit to shaming and harassing group race therapy as an ongoing condition of employment.”


	The kind of brutal treatment meted out to Kilborn and Shaw is becoming more commonplace with each passing day.


	This in-your-face weaponized institutional racism is supported by governments, big corporations, the media, and academia itself.


	And few outside of conservative circles seem to care.

Campus Struggle Sessions USA

Ritualized humiliation and self-abasement are becoming the norm for those in higher education who defy the campus enforcers of wokeness.


	In a scene out

Voters in the nation’s capital made history by electing a convicted murderer who is still behind bars for his crime to an Advisory Neighborhood Commission, or ANC, which counsels the local government on neighborhood issues such as garbage collection, police patrols, liquor licenses, zoning, and parking.


	Joel Caston, 44, has been imprisoned for 26 years following a first-degree murder conviction in the August 14, 1994 killing of 18-year-old Rafiq Washington. Victim and shooter knew each other and there was some unspecified animus between them that cannot easily be divined from online court records. Caston, who was elected June 15, will reportedly be liberated from the D.C. Central Detention Facility this year or next.


	Evidence at his 1996 trial <a href="https://caselaw.findlaw.com/dc-court-of-appeals/1750042.html">demonstrated</a> Washington “was shot and killed in front of the New China Carry Out … at the corner of 16th Street and Good Hope Road, S.E.” A witness saw Caston “run toward Washington, place a revolver inches from Washington’s body, almost touching Washington’s head, and fire ‘about five’ additional shots.’”


	Despite his dark past, Caston was elected to the ANC for Ward 7, becoming the first incarcerated person to be elected to public office in the District of Columbia.


	Caston has taken&nbsp;for-credit courses through Georgetown University, mentored young prisoners, practiced yoga, and edited a prisoner newspaper. On its website, the university <a href="https://prisonsandjustice.georgetown.edu/news/prison-scholar-joel-caston-elected-to-local-government/">slobbers</a> all over Caston, calling him a “Prison Scholar” even though he’s not a penologist or a criminologist.


	“I’m incredibly proud of Joel for his election,” said Georgetown Prisons and Justice Initiative Director&nbsp;Marc M. Howard, who has taught Caston. “Joel is brilliant, dedicated, compassionate and full of integrity.”


	“He’s an inspiration to everyone who is lucky enough to know him,” Howard added. “And I’m counting down the days until he comes home, a free man, to share his talent and positivity with the world.”


	Although he may not be a cop-killer groupie like Mumia Abu-Jamal-worshipping Marc Lamont Hill, the judgment of Howard, who fancies himself an original thinker, must be called into question because he apparently views the American criminal justice system through a Marxist prism.


	Below follows a small sample of the radical drivel in his 2017 book, Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism.


	In it Howard moans that compared to the United Kingdom and other democratic countries, “the U.S. is particularly harsh … in terms of how severely it punishes crime and how ruthlessly and unforgivingly it treats those who are (or have been) incarcerated.”


	He argues that “the problems with the American criminal justice system go far beyond the innocent people it has trapped and mistreated, and that at core it is astoundingly and unacceptably punitive, vindictive, and unforgiving, while also based on underlying racial discrimination.”


	To many leftists, especially in this era of wokeness, all prisoners of color are presumed to be victims put behind bars merely because of the color of their skin. In their perverse worldview, instead of being some of the worst of society, they represent potentially some of the best that society has to offer precisely because they defy societal norms by not obeying laws.


	Then there’s the sick subculture of those who collect prison art – but I digress.


	Returning to Caston, in a&nbsp;<a href="https://prisonsandjustice.georgetown.edu/news/prison-scholar-joel-caston-elected-to-local-government/" target="_blank">campaign video</a> he sounded like a polished politician:


	“My platform will be used to restore the dignity of incarcerated people, that we will no longer be judged by our worst mistake and to establish equality for both the male and the female populations. I will be your biggest advocate to make sure your voice and your concerns are heard.”


	Caston triumphed over four other candidates, all of whom live with him in the jail, reportedly receiving 48 of the 142 votes cast. It was just last year that D.C. <a href="https://lims.dccouncil.us/downloads/LIMS/45307/Introduction/B23-0825-Introduction.pdf">enacted legislation</a> letting incarcerated convicted felons like Caston vote, something <a href="https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-rights.aspx">allowed</a> by only two states –Maine and Vermont— according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.


	He now represents a small district known as 7F07, consisting of the jail, a women’s shelter, and an apartment complex in Southeast Washington. The position pays nothing. The term of office lasts two years.


	Caston the murderer joins an exclusive club, managing to do the nearly impossible by getting elected while incarcerated.


	According to a 2004 <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/12/how-to-govern-from-jail.html">Slate article</a>, Congressman&nbsp;Matthew Lyon&nbsp;of Vermont won re-election in 1798 in the midst of a four-month jail term for violating the&nbsp;Sedition Act. In 1851, anti-Catholic crusader Joseph Barker was elected mayor of Pittsburgh while serving a one-year sentence for inciting a riot. James Michael Curley, who eventually went on to become Boston mayor, member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, congressman, and Massachusetts governor, won an alderman’s seat in Boston in 1904 while doing time for taking a civil-service exam while impersonating a friend. In 1977, Boston City Council candidate Paul Ellison <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/11/04/in-jail-on-ballot-the-latest-act-in-boston-political-drama/c4e68def-ea71-4734-8828-f1772621c21c/">won a spot</a> on the final ballot in a runoff election while serving a one-year prison term for grand larceny.


	Overseas, Bobby Sands, the Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorist bomber, was elected to the British Parliament in 1981 while hunger-striking in prison. A handful of candidates in India, Taiwan, and Colombia have also been elected while behind bars.


	More recently, Joseph D. Morrissey, originally a Democrat, was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/morrissey-in-midst-of-six-month-jail-term-wins-special-election-to-virginia-house/2015/01/13/8676f33a-9b2b-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html" target="_blank">reelected</a>&nbsp;behind bars as an independent candidate to Virginia’s House of Delegates in January 2015, a month after being sentenced to six months&nbsp;on a misdemeanor conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Morrissey is now a member of the Virginia Senate and is once again a Democrat.


	If a prisoner had to be elected to office somewhere, it may as well have been Washington, D.C.


	This is the same District of Columbia that voted for far-left race-mongering poverty pimp Jesse Jackson in the Democrat presidential primaries in both 1984 and 1988, the same District of Columbia that refuses to honor the basic civil rights of its residents, particularly their Second Amendment gun ownership rights. Even as the murder rate climbs in D.C., its local leaders treat gun owners like they’re mentally ill criminals, treating them as would-be spree killers and making them jump through hoop after hoop to acquire a gun for self-defense.


	In February of this year, Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, embraced leftist pseudoscience in her fight against the Second Amendment as she <a href="https://mayor.dc.gov/release/mayor-bowser-launches-first-its-kind-gun-violence-prevention-emergency-operations-center">unveiled</a> a new program.


	“Today we are recognizing the scourge of gun violence for what it is: a public health crisis that requires a whole-government approach focused on people and places in our community,” Bowser said. “Too many lives have been taken, too many families have been traumatized, and too many neighborhoods have been left broken.”


	District of Columbia voters already vote for pro-criminal politicians like Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis, along with unindicted criminals like Hillary Clinton, in more or less every election, so electing an imprisoned murderer is a logical enough next step.


	Since the Twenty-third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect in 1961, allowing U.S. citizens residing in the District of Columbia to vote in presidential elections, the District has overwhelmingly voted each and every time for the candidate from the anti-law and order Democratic Party. According to official results, semi-brain-dead Joe Biden garnered 92.15 percent of the vote in 2020, compared to the 5.4 percent Donald Trump received.


	And this federal enclave whose delusional leaders like to pretend the jurisdiction is a state complete with an elected “shadow” U.S. senator and a “shadow” U.S. representative, has long been pro-criminal quite apart from its electoral history.


	Its well-deserved reputation for being soft on crime stretches back way before its embrace of the rioters and looters of Black Lives Matter and the defund-the-police movement. Defending residents’ property has long been an afterthought in D.C. One of the reasons so much lasting damage scarred the city during the 1968 civil unrest after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was because officials were too lacking in intestinal fortitude to use force to put down the riots. This cowardice and bleeding-heartism infects the local government. For the most part, criminals in Washington have little to fear from the police. Remember that this is a city that elected crackhead and frequent lawbreaker Marion Barry mayor, a man who famously said in 1989: “Except for the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”


	Just days ago, no less than Metropolitan Police Department Chief Robert Contee <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/washington-dc-police-chief-city-is-coddling-criminals-after-latest-shooting_3916013.html">himself said</a> D.C.’s criminal justice system goes too easy on criminals and is itself contributing to rising crime rates.


	“The justice system that we have right now is not functioning the way that it should,” Contee&nbsp;said July 22. “The courts are not open. That is a fact.” Throughout last year violent criminals “have not been disposed of” and are now at large, instead of behind bars.


	“The real issue is, we have a vicious cycle of bad actors who do things, no accountability, and they end up back in community,” he said in what may end up being a case of career suicide.


	Apparently, the D.C. jail isn’t functioning the way that it should, either. Caston, who will soon be back in the community, seems to be enjoying himself in the hoosegow.


	“Here, I don't feel like I'm in prison,” the jailbird who has done part of his sentence in federal prisons, <a href="https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/young-men-emerging-inside-the-dc-jails-experiment-to-prepare-inmates-for-freedom/2183134/">told the local NBC affiliate</a> in a human interest package in 2019. “This is the closest thing that I have for a community, and it’s in straight contrast to how it is in the [U.S. Bureau of Prisons].”


	Caston was referring to Young Men Emerging, a mentorship program in which corrections officials pair long-imprisoned criminals like Caston with newly arrived ones so they can compare notes.


	“Every day I’m mentoring ‘younger me;’ other individuals who were confused, couldn’t see themselves out of a dark corner,” Caston said. “I think that the work that I'm doing here, it provides me the platform to right my wrongs.”


	The woke Thought Police are hard at work in the D.C. jail.


	“At a recent group session, the crowd of male inmates and a handful of corrections officials talked about heady social issues as toxic masculinity and feminism, as well as more practical matters such as fiscal responsibility and budgeting,” according to the media outlet.


	Caston said the program’s participants don’t use the word “inmate” because “it does something psychologically.”


	That the word triggers something is clearly true.


	Some call it denial; others, psychosis.

D.C. Elects Imprisoned Murderer

Voters in the nation’s capital made history by electing a convicted murderer who is still behind bars for his crime to an Advisory Neighborhood Commission, or

Paul Allard Hodgkins was sentenced to 8 months in prison this week after pleading guilty to felony-level obstruction of an official proceeding for supposedly interrupting the congressional count of Electoral College votes that took place during the breach of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 of this year.


	Hodgkins’ is the first felony conviction to arise out of the events that the mainstream media insist on inaccurately describing as an “insurrection.”


	Contrast the treatment of the non-violent Hodgkins with what happened when Islamist-socialist Linda Sarsour and her band of screaming protesters disrupted another official proceeding in 2018, in this case the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.


	“At least 227 demonstrators were arrested between the start of the nomination hearings on Tuesday and the end of testimony on Friday, according to the U.S. Capitol Police. Most of those charged this week with disorderly conduct, crowding or obstructing paid fines of $35 or $50,” NPR <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/09/08/645497667/the-resistance-at-the-kavanaugh-hearings-more-than-200-arrests">reported</a> at the time.


	The lesson here with this double standard on official proceeding-disrupting appears to be that conservatives who do it go to prison, but leftists who do it go home. Many of the people arrested in connection with January 6 are still rotting in jail awaiting trial.


	Essentially, what Hodgkins did was trespass and demonstrate without permission on the Senate floor where he stood for 15 minutes waving a pro-Trump flag and taking selfies.


	He did not wield a weapon, threaten anyone with injury, or intimidate anyone into abandoning the electoral vote count that was in progress when the breach began. He merely seized an opportunity to make a political statement in an abandoned Senate chamber after others had forced their way in.


	Prosecutors openly acknowledged in their sentencing memorandum filed July 14, 2021, in United States of America v. Hodgkins, case 1:21-cr-00188 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, “that Hodgkins did not personally engage in or espouse violence or property destruction[.]”


	Hodgkins deeply regretted what he did and confessed early in the process. “[H]e accepted responsibility early and in a fulsome manner, and he has taken significant steps toward his rehabilitation,” according to the memorandum.


	According to USA Today, Hodgkins “said he had no plans to enter the Capitol when he traveled to Washington&nbsp;to attend&nbsp;Trump's rally earlier in the day, but he got swept up in the march along Pennsylvania Avenue. Once inside the Capitol, he said, he apologized to police officers for the trouble and he offered medical care to an injured rioter.”


	“I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I am truly remorseful and regretful for my actions in Washington," Hodgkins reportedly told the court. “This was a foolish decision on my part that I take full responsibility for."


	Sarsour, on the other hand, a co-founder of the Women’s March, reveled in the waves of adoring publicity she received from the mainstream media, acknowledging its role in advancing her cause, whatever that happened to be for the America-hating anti-Semite at that moment.


	“Disrupting the hearings was a way for us to go directly into the homes of the American people to say, ‘We will not be silenced and you need to be as outraged as we are,’” she said.


	Sarsour said “the women who have been arrested over the last few days” helped to generate “political will for Senate Democrats to show some moral courage.”


	She took credit for Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) decision <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/09/06/645307229/kavanaugh-hearings-day-3-booker-has-his-sparticus-moment-a-mulligan-on-mueller">to make public a memo</a>&nbsp;on racial profiling drafted by Kavanaugh but labeled “Committee Confidential,” which meant it was not intended to be circulated outside senators on the committee.


	“We believe the movement helped encourage that,” Sarsour said, according to NPR.


	This kind of political messaging isn’t much different from what Hodgkins and most of the unauthorized visitors to the Capitol building hoped to achieve.


	They wanted to draw attention to the Democrat-led presidential election theft that ultimately allowed the senile left-winger Joe Biden to be installed as placeholder president under the auspices of the U.S. military.


	Sarsour’s scheme failed to prevent Kavanaugh from being confirmed to the Supreme Court. The actions by the uninvited Trump supporters on January 6 didn’t work, either – in fact they backfired rather spectacularly as frightened lawmakers dropped their objections to certifying the election results when Congress got back to business a few hours after it abruptly recessed.


	Yet Hodgkins finds himself behind bars as Sarsour remains free. Also free are most of the Antifa-Black Lives Matters rioters and looters and arsonists from last year who used public outrage over the death in police custody of a drug-addled loser in Minneapolis to get away with causing an estimated $2 billion in damage across America.


	It hardly seems fair.


	Strangely, the Obama-appointed judge who sentenced him also ordered Hodgkins to pay $2,000 in restitution to the government for a portion of the damage to the Capitol building, even though prosecutors admitted he did not cause it.


	Rioters “injured over a hundred law enforcement officers and terrified individuals on scene that day, leaving significant emotional scars. They destroyed over $1.4 million in property. This number understates the extent of the property damage, as it does not include the irreparable and unquantifiable damage to artwork, statues, and other artifacts that were stolen or damaged,” stated the sentencing memorandum.


	It was as if a tax had been assessed against Hodgkins because others who happened to be present in the Capitol at the same time destroyed government property.


	U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, condemned Hodgkins as a threat to the republic, attaching a great deal of meaning to the breach of the Capitol.


	As if Hodgkins had been adhering to some kind of an Americanized Führerprinzip instead of merely being a justifiably pissed off loyal American citizen, Moss said that waving a Trump flag showed Hodgkins was loyal to one person, then-President Donald Trump, instead of to the country.


	“Although Mr. Hodgkins was only one member of a larger mob, he actively and intentionally participated in an event that threatened not only the security of the Capitol but democracy itself,” Moss said, as reported by <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/19/capitol-riot-defendant-paul-hodgkins-first-felony-sentence-jan-6/8011859002/">USA Today</a>. "That is chilling, for many reasons."


	Moss was <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Randolph_D._Moss">appointed</a> in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama after barely being confirmed by the U.S. Senate on a vote of 54 to 45.


	Moss <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/courts-strike-down-trump-administration-rule-limiting-asylum_3029850.html">struck down</a> then-President Trump’s <a href="https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&amp;did=819149">Proclamation 9822</a>, which limited asylum claims to those entering the United States at an officially designated port of entry. The policy was aimed at curtailing the flow of Central American migrants coming to the United States, many in international caravans through Mexico.


	So, given the judge’s apparent inclinations and the mass hysteria prevalent in official circles in the nation’s capital, people who actually seem to believe Donald Trump was plotting a coup, maybe 8 months in prison was the best deal Hodgkins could get.


	At times, the government’s sentencing memorandum read like a CNN report.


	“The defendant, Paul Hodgkins, participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol—a violent attack that forced an interruption of the certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote count, threatened the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 Presidential election, injured more than one hundred law enforcement officers, and resulted in more than a million dollars’ worth of property damage,” the document stated.


	Except the “peaceful transfer of power” was never in jeopardy at the hands of random Trump supporters running around the Capitol. The most the few who really did want to interfere with the process could hope for was a few hours’ delay in certifying the presidential winner. The government of the United States of America, the most powerful country on earth, with millions of employees scattered across the fruited plain, cannot be overthrown simply by shutting down Congress briefly.


	And that $1-million-plus in property damage is insignificant in the scheme of things. That’s how much damage Antifa and Black Lives Matter did to property every few minutes after the death of the left’s newest patron saint, George Floyd.


	“The government recognizes that Hodgkins did not personally destroy property or engage in any violence against law enforcement officers,” the sentencing memorandum continued.


	“But he was surrounded by others who were doing both, and he entered the Capitol as others had paved the way with destruction and violence. Time and time again, rather than turn around and retreat, Hodgkins pressed forward until he walked all the way down to the well of the Senate chamber. Hodgkins came to D.C. preparing to encounter violence around him. He was a rioter, not a protester, and his conduct shows that he was determined to interfere with the vote count and the peaceful transition of power in the 2020 Presidential election. Hodgkins entered the Senate chamber, where he joined the chanting and ranting at the dais. This was precisely where, only 40 minutes earlier, the Vice President had been sitting at the desk on the elevated platform, surrounded by Senators who were considering a procedural issue related to the certification of the Electoral College vote. In the end, Hodgkins, like each rioter, contributed to the collective threat to democracy, physical safety, emotional well-being, and property on January 6, 2021.”


	For this sensationalized account of January 6, prosecutors wanted to put this man who had no criminal record behind bars for 18 months.


	They did not succeed.


	Prosecutors also failed to put official proceeding disrupter Linda Sarsour behind bars.


	They never even tried.

Capitol Breacher Gets 8 Months

Paul Allard Hodgkins was sentenced to 8 months in prison this week after pleading guilty to felony-level obstruction of an official proceeding for supposedly

Cubans took to the streets in cities across the desperately impoverished police state to protest the island nation’s brutal 62-year-old communist dictatorship in what are said to be the largest public demonstrations against the regime in decades.


	Thousands of Cubans in at least 16 cities from Havana all the way to Santiago de Cuba chanted “libertad,” the Spanish word for freedom, as they demanded an end to government oppression. Many wore or waved American flags and were beaten by police, Breitbart News <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2021/07/12/cuba-thousands-nationwide-take-streets-against-communism/">reported</a>. Hundreds were reportedly arrested. Cuban journalists were arrested for covering the protests, according to <a href="https://www.cubanet.org/destacados/miles-de-personas-salen-a-la-calle-en-cuba-exigiendo-libertad-manifestacion/" target="_blank">Cubanet</a>.


	Cuban President Miguel&nbsp;Mario&nbsp;Diaz-Canel&nbsp;did what communist dictators do when their grip on power is threatened: he appeared on television July 11 to urge his fellow communists to use violence against the protesters.


	“We are willing to give our lives. They will have to pass over our corpses if they want to confront the revolution,” Diaz-Canel said. “We are willing to do anything.”


	“We are convening all revolutionary communists to go out to the streets where these provocations are happening and confront them with firmness,” he declared. “The order of combat is issued, revolutionaries to the streets.”


	The protests seemed to start in San Antonio de los Baños, a town in western Cuba the morning of July 11, a Sunday. Local independent media outlets reported crowds were chanting anti-government messages including “down with communism,” “they [the regime] must leave,” and “fuck Diaz-Canel.”


	Some managed to sneak past the 12-year-olds in electronic sweatshops who moderate content on Facebook and livestream protests as they happened.


	“The American flag, popularized as a protest symbol in Cuba by dissident&nbsp;<a href="https://www.breitbart.com/tag/daniel-llorente/">Daniel Llorente</a>, made multiple appearances among Cubans on Sunday. Video authenticated by the Miami broadcaster AméricaTeve showed a group of Cubans carrying an American flag through the streets of Havana on Sunday while chanting ‘freedom!’ Videos taken by Cubans on social media and distributed through other Latin American news organizations also show the presence of the U.S. flag,” Breitbart reported.


	“In Mayabeque, a Havana suburb, a crowd of hundreds congregated in front of an image of the Virgin Mary to pray for an end to the communist regime. At least one participant can be seen wearing an American flag shirt while praying.”


	A Roman Catholic priest, Father&nbsp;Castor Jose Alvarez Devesa, reportedly&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/GLALegalDefense/status/1414532008420646918" target="_blank">disappeared</a>&nbsp;in Camagüey, a hotbed of protest activity, and then resurfaced in secret police custody. Persecution of the religious is an everyday occurrence in communist Cuba.


	The government worked hard to crush dissent in Camagüey. Footage of police publicly beating protesters there circulated, as well as of protesters fighting back with rocks after police opened fire on unarmed civilians. A video showing Cubans flipping over a police car and mounting it in triumph also made the rounds, though it is not clear where in the country it was made.


	Reports also indicate police fired upon protesters in Havana, apparently to keep them out of the Plaza of the Revolution, which is sacred ground for communists. Come to think of it, its hallowed status must explain why then-President Barack Obama <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/03/21/these-photos-of-obama-in-cuba-are-going-viral/">posed</a> for a photo there in 2016.


	“Diario de Cuba, citing a reporter on the ground, stated that police surrounded the Plaza and deployed a communist mob to wave photos of Fidel Castro. Police carrying baseball bats offered protection to the state-sponsored mob. Photos of the pro-Castro mob in Havana&nbsp;<a href="http://www.granma.cu/cuba/2021-07-12/por-cuba-habra-que-darlo-todo-12-07-2021-01-07-54" target="_blank">appeared</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;Granma,&nbsp;the official newspaper of the Communist Party,&nbsp;late Sunday appear to confirm those reports,” according to Breitbart.


	Early reactions from the Biden administration were predictably timid and unduly diplomatic towards the monstrous regime.


	Julie J. Chung,&nbsp;Acting Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, <a href="https://twitter.com/WHAAsstSecty/status/1414334778095046656">mumbled</a> some nonsense on Twitter on July 11 at 5:24 p.m. about Cubans&nbsp; exercising “their right to peaceful assembly” to protest COVID-19 and “medicine shortages,” and praising a charity drive, or something.


	“Peaceful protests are growing in #Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases/deaths &amp; medicine shortages. We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need,” Chung tweeted.


	A day later whoever controls what remains of Joe Biden’s brain released a statement in the name of the placeholder president that sounded somewhat like something a major world leader would say about the civil unrest in the giant, sunny prison with beaches 90 miles from Florida:

<blockquote>
	
		We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime. The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights. Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected. The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.
</blockquote>


	Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced the Cuban regime and its violent crackdown on dissent:

<blockquote>
	
		The United States stands with the Cuban people seeking freedom and respect for their human rights. Violence against peaceful protestors is abhorrent. We urge restraint and respect for the voice of the people.
</blockquote>


	But does the Biden-Harris administration, which is fine with communist-inspired critical race theory indoctrination stateside and the ongoing terrorism of Black Lives Matter, really want to help the Cuban people throw off their socialist shackles?


	Don’t count on it.

Cubans Rising

Cubans took to the streets in cities across the desperately impoverished police state to protest the island nation’s brutal 62-year-old communist dictatorship

After being banned from most major social media platforms, Donald Trump launched class-action lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and their corporate leadership this week claiming Big Tech’s intensifying wave of digital repression directed at the former president, conservatives, and Republicans is unconstitutional.


	“We’re going to hold big tech very accountable,” Trump said July 7 at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “If they can do it to me, they can do it to anyone.”


	Trump condemned “cancel culture” and called for the end of “shadow banning” and “blacklisting,” and said, “we are asking the court to impose punitive damages on these social media giants.”


	“There is no better evidence that big tech is out of control than the fact that they banned the sitting president of the United States earlier this year, a ban that continues to this day,” he added.


	The crackdown on patriotic Americans that began with Trump’s surprise victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, reached a fever pitch six months ago.


	After the mostly peaceful sit-in at the United States Capitol on January 6, involving selfie-taking with welcoming police officers, some trespassing by overzealous Trump supporters including one who put his feet up on the desk of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a naughty prankster who briefly absconded with her lectern, known Antifa organizer <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/left-wing-organizer-charged-us-capitol-riot-matthew-vadum/">John Earle Sullivan</a>, and <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-fbi-has-a-history-of-creating-crimes">possibly the FBI</a>, which Tucker Carlson correctly stated “sometimes … creates crimes,” the leftist enforcers of Silicon Valley leapt into action to save Americans from themselves.


	<a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/facebook">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/twitter">Twitter</a>, and Google-owned YouTube banned Trump within days of each other, falsely accusing him of inciting a so-called insurrection, in which interestingly enough, none of the insurrectionists had guns and no one was killed, except for unarmed Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt who was shot to death by a still-unidentified cop even though she posed a threat to no one.


	Trump was executing a coup d’état, our social media overlords shrieked in the absence of evidence, so even though he was the leader of the free world he needed to have his microphone cut.


	These are the same people who cheered on the rolling coup attempt against President Trump that then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden set in motion by authorizing the use of the nation’s intelligence agencies against Trump, along with Hillary Clinton’s phony Russian dossier about Trump.


	Trump is serving as lead plaintiff in the class-action suits. Class members are defined in the legal complaints as users of the three platforms “who have resided in the United States between June 1, 2018, and today” and “had their access to their social media accounts wrongly restricted or curtailed by these Defendants and who were damaged thereby.”


	“Additionally, the lawsuits take aim at several of Big Tech’s censorship policies including their ‘hate speech’ rules (which the lawsuits describe as ‘vague, broad, ill-defined, or not defined at all’) and COVID-19 ‘misinformation’ rules (which the lawsuits describe as censorship of users who ‘engaged in speech with a different opinion regarding the COVID-19 vaccination’ than the three tech companies),” according to an excellent overview at <a href="https://reclaimthenet.org/president-trump-sues-facebook-google-twitter-ceos/">Reclaim the Net</a>.


	Leaders of the America First Policy Institute, which was involved in filing the lawsuits, spelled out how potentially important these legal actions are.


	“There’s not much precedent for an American president taking major-media corporations to court — nor is there much precedent for an American president engaging the judiciary to shape the landscape of American freedoms after his presidency,” AFPI president and CEO Brooke L. Rollins said in a statement.


	“President Trump often remarked that if Big Tech is out to get him, it’s because they’re out to get the American people — and he was just standing in the way. The actions of the Big Tech firms we’re taking to court illustrate the point perfectly. What they’ve done, what they’ve wrought in the past few years staggers the imagination. ALL Americans need Donald Trump to win — not for what it will mean for him, but for what it will mean for every American man, woman, and child.”


	Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, now chairman of AFPI’s <a href="https://americafirstpolicy.com/latest/afpi-announces-constitutional-litigation-partnership/">Constitutional Litigation Partnership</a>, weighed in.


	“Things have changed over the past several years, and the First Amendment rights of all Americans are on the line in this case. The law and Constitution are on our side. America is the great country that it is because our Constitution protects our freedoms, including freedom from censorship - this lawsuit ensures that those rights are properly defended.”


	The three legal proceedings were filed July 7 in the Miami division of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The <a href="https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/trump-july-7-lawsuit-facebook.pdf">legal complaint</a> against Facebook also names the artificial life form known as CEO <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/mark-zuckerberg">Mark Zuckerberg</a> as a defendant. The <a href="https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/trump-july-7-lawsuit-twitter.pdf">legal complaint</a> against Twitter also names its nose ring-wearing hipster billionaire CEO <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/jack-dorsey">Jack Dorsey</a> as a defendant. The <a href="https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/trump-july-7-lawsuit-youtube.pdf">legal complaint</a> against YouTube, which is owned by Google, which in turn is owned by Alphabet, names the endlessly uninteresting CEO of both Google and Alphabet, <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/sundar-pichai">Sundar Pichai</a>, as a defendant.


	The three companies are vast and unaccountable and able to shut down the democratic process on a whim.


	The legal complaints assert that “censorship runs rampant” against the class members and “the result is a chilling effect cast over our nation’s pressing political, medical, social, and cultural discussions,” according to Reclaim the Net.


	“Facebook’s power and influence are immense,” one complaint states. “It currently boasts close to three (3) billion registered Users worldwide and over 124 million Users in the United States. Defendant Facebook had $86.0 billion in total revenue, for a net profit margin of 33.9%, in fiscal year 2020.”


	“Twitter is a social media platform with more than three hundred fifty (350) million active Users worldwide, including approximately seventy (70) million daily active Users in the United States,” another complaint states. “Since 2018, approximately 500 million tweets are sent out, or ‘tweeted,’ each day. Twitter reported $3.72 billion in annual profit in 2020.”


	“YouTube has accumulated an unprecedented concentration of power, market share, and ability to dictate our nation’s public discourse,” the final complaint states.


	“YouTube generated $19.7 billion in revenue in 2020, up from $80 million in 2010. Over 2.3 billion people access YouTube at least once every month,” the complaint continues. “YouTube ranks second in global engagement behind Facebook. YouTube could be worth $140-300 Billion if ‘spun into’ its own company, according to Business of Apps, citing VentureBeat.”


	The argument that the companies are too big and powerful may be easy to make, but Trump’s argument that the companies are violating class members’ First Amendment rights is a tough one. The conventional legal thinking holds that as private companies they are not bound by the First Amendment, which restricts government activity, so the companies can do pretty much whatever they want in terms of content moderation and users have no legal recourse.


	The lawsuits claim the companies not only ran roughshod over the First Amendment but also that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is unconstitutional.


	“The lawsuits assert that by ‘acting in concert with federal officials’ to censor speech, ‘the Defendants’ censorship activities amount to state action’ and therefore contravene the First Amendment,” according to the Reclaim the Net analysis.


	“Examples of such censorship activities that are cited in the lawsuits include Big Tech’s partnerships with groups such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to ‘curb the spread of vaccine misinformation,’” the analysis states.


	“The Section 230 count argues that Section 230(c)(1) (which prevents online service providers from being treated as the publisher or speaker of content posted to their platform) and Section 230(c)(2) (which protects online service providers from civil liability when acting in ‘good faith’ to remove or edit content that they or their users deem to be ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected’) are unconstitutional.


	“Section 230(c)(1) and 230(c)(2) were deliberately enacted by Congress to induce, encourage, and promote social medial companies to accomplish an objective—the censorship of supposedly ‘objectionable’ but constitutionally protected speech on the Internet—that Congress could not constitutionally accomplish itself,’ the lawsuits state.


	“The lawsuits go on to argue that Section 230(c)(1) and (c)(2) are unconstitutional because they ‘immunize social media companies for action they take to censor constitutionally protected speech.’”


	Again, it’s an uphill climb in court, but it’s not impossible.


	Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz was promptly and widely mocked by the legal Left for the crime of taking the new Trump lawsuits seriously.


	Dershowitz was attacked <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/alan-dershowitz-trump-lawsuit-against-twitter-will-shake-things-up-considerably_3892621.html">because he said</a> the suits are “very, very important” for the future of free speech in America, arguing that the Big Tech companies receive special treatment from the government and are not ordinary private enterprises.


	The social media titans’ behavior is “inconsistent with the spirit of free speech that underlies our First Amendment.” The lawsuits “will shake things up considerably, though I can’t predict in the end how it will come up.”


	Trump’s lawsuits, Dershowitz said, are “a complicated case because, as the president pointed out … these are not just ordinary private companies—they have special exemption … and therefore they partake of some kind of government action, and the courts will have to parse this issue.”


	No less a figure than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has said social media companies may have to face a reckoning in the future.


	In a <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-197_5ie6.pdf">concurring opinion</a> in Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute on April 5, Thomas criticized Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, saying Twitter’s ban of Trump showed that "applying old doctrines to new digital platforms is rarely straightforward."


	"As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms. The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions," Thomas wrote.


	Facebook and Google, he noted, hold largely unchecked control over online marketplaces.


	"It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail," Thomas wrote. "But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today's digital platforms, nothing is."


	Just as a telephone company cannot prevent a person from making a call, social media companies should not be able to stifle speech, the justice implied. Social media companies are "sufficiently akin" to a common carrier, like a public utility, and ought to be "regulated in this manner," Thomas wrote.


	That really is the nub of the issue.


	Who is going to rule America?


	Silicon Valley oligarchs functioning as semi-official arms of the government?


	Or We The People?


	Americans are going to have to take sides.

Trump Sues Social Media Oligarchs

After being banned from most major social media platforms, Donald Trump launched class-action lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and their

Racist Mayor: Nikuyah Walker

Editor's note: This is the 11th part in Frontpage Mag's series on Racist Mayors. (See previous parts below this article). Stay tuned for more installments

Conservatives across America have to be asking themselves why they put so much time, money, and energy into electing Republicans&nbsp;when&nbsp;the&nbsp;supposedly&nbsp;conservative&nbsp;Supreme Court&nbsp;justices&nbsp;who&nbsp;follow&nbsp;side&nbsp;with&nbsp;the Left&nbsp;in&nbsp;important&nbsp;cases.


	The latest jurisprudential atrocity is&nbsp;the high court’s&nbsp;dreadful but not altogether unexpected&nbsp;betrayal of the U.S. Constitution in&nbsp;California v. Texas,&nbsp;a challenge to the Obamacare&nbsp;redistribution&nbsp;statute lodged by&nbsp;Texas and 17 other&nbsp;states&nbsp;that had been backed by the former Trump administration.


	“It’s never been a proper role for the federal government to regulate health care and health insurance,”&nbsp;Robert&nbsp;Henneke&nbsp;of the&nbsp;Texas Public Policy Foundation,&nbsp;who represented&nbsp;two individual plaintiffs,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/lawyer-in-successful-challenge-to-obamacare-sees-victory-for-freedom_2740907.html">said after winning at the trial court level</a>.&nbsp;“It is a proper role for the states.”


	There are 6 conservative justices and 3 liberal justices&nbsp;on the Supreme Court, or so the conventional wisdom goes.


	Yet instead of dealing&nbsp;with&nbsp;the&nbsp;legal&nbsp;controversy&nbsp;head on, a majority of the court chickened out,&nbsp;failing&nbsp;for a third time&nbsp;to&nbsp;mete out&nbsp;a&nbsp;richly&nbsp;deserved death blow to&nbsp;the&nbsp;flagrantly unconstitutional,&nbsp;un-American&nbsp;monstrosity that is&nbsp;the&nbsp;Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act&nbsp;(ACA).&nbsp;By a vote of 7–2&nbsp;on June 17,&nbsp;the Supreme Court&nbsp;cavalierly&nbsp;brushed aside&nbsp;questionsof&nbsp;the law’s&nbsp;constitutional&nbsp;validity&nbsp;by&nbsp;finding&nbsp;that those challenging it lacked the required legal standing to do so.


	Of the three Trump appointees, two –Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—&nbsp;voted to&nbsp;protect the ACA.&nbsp;Even the most brilliant member of the court, conservative stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas, bought into&nbsp;this&nbsp;cowardly&nbsp;nonsense, siding with the majority&nbsp;on standing.


	This ruling should disabuse Americans once and for all of the claim, repeated&nbsp;ad nauseam&nbsp;by the Left, that the Supreme Court,which&nbsp;momentarily&nbsp;is dominated by Republican appointees,&nbsp;is somehow “conservative” or “right-wing.”


	It also demonstrates that threatening to pack the court, as Democrats&nbsp;vow&nbsp;to do, is an effective way of making sure&nbsp;the court fails to do its job.


	After all, the Supreme Court does what it wants to do.&nbsp;In controversial cases, it&nbsp;sometimes&nbsp;adheres to the Constitution, as its members are sworn to do; other times it just makes&nbsp;stuff&nbsp;up, issuing incoherent decisions written to justify a predetermined conclusion.&nbsp;Invoking standing is a tried and true method of copping out.


	After the court opinion in&nbsp;California v. Texas&nbsp;was released,&nbsp;Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said what needed to be said.


	“Obamacare was sold on a lie to the American people,” the Republican&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/KenPaxtonTX/status/1405584760823595012">wrote on Twitter</a>.&nbsp;


	“Its&nbsp;crown jewel —the individual mandate— was unconstitutional when it was enacted and it is still unconstitutional. Yet, seven justices decided to avoid the question of the constitutionality by limiting its decision to a ruling on standing.&nbsp;If the government is allowed to mislead its citizens, pass a massive government takeover of health care, and yet still survive after Supreme Court review, this spells doom for the principles of federalism and limited government.”


	“The failed Obamacare system will stagger on as a result of this decision,”&nbsp;said Sen. John&nbsp;Barrasso&nbsp;(R-Wyo.), a&nbsp;physician&nbsp;who has worked to repeal the law.&nbsp;“Every American’s health care has been harmed by Obamacare.”


	Recall that in the 2008&nbsp;campaign, then-candidate Barack&nbsp;Hussein&nbsp;Obama&nbsp;lied to&nbsp;voters, claiming&nbsp;that his health care&nbsp;scheme&nbsp;would&nbsp;drive&nbsp;annual premiums&nbsp;down&nbsp;by $2,500, and that patients would not see their health care arrangements disrupted. Even left-leaning PolitiFact&nbsp;<a href="https://www.politifact.com/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/">deemed</a>&nbsp;Obama’s mantra, “If you like your health care&nbsp;plan, you can keep it,”&nbsp;its&nbsp;“Lie of the Year”in 2013.


	After&nbsp;BHO&nbsp;conned his way into the Oval Office, the law was enacted in 2010 without a single Republican vote in Congress&nbsp;onfinal passage.&nbsp;Later,&nbsp;Obamacare&nbsp;“architect”&nbsp;and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/11/10/aca-architect-the-stupidity-of-the-american-voter-led-us-to-hide-obamacares-tax-hikes-and-subsidies-from-the-public/?sh=15f734487c05">said&nbsp;lying&nbsp;was essential</a>&nbsp;to&nbsp;getting&nbsp;it&nbsp;done. It was&nbsp;“the stupidity of the American voter”&nbsp;that&nbsp;made it important to conceal Obamacare’s true costs from the public. “That was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” he said.


	Insurance premiums have&nbsp;shot up since then.&nbsp;The Kaiser Family Foundation&nbsp;reports that&nbsp;the total cost of the average employer-sponsored family health insurance premium&nbsp;<a href="https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2019-summary-of-findings/attachment/figure-a-36/">increased</a>&nbsp;to $20,576 in 2019, up&nbsp;from $13,375 in 2009, a 54 percent increase.&nbsp;In individual markets, premiums&nbsp;<a href="https://www.kff.org/private-insurance/issue-brief/individual-insurance-market-performance-in-2019/">rose</a>&nbsp;from&nbsp;an average of&nbsp;$2,640&nbsp;($220 per month) in 2011&nbsp;to $6,960&nbsp;($580 per month) in 2019, a 164&nbsp;percent increase.&nbsp;Many consumers haven’t been&nbsp;able to afford premiums and have lost their insurance.


	Finally, the case of&nbsp;California v. Texas&nbsp;came along, affording the Supreme Court a wonderful opportunity to at long last drive a stake through Obamacare’s heart.


	Congress teed up the case by making the&nbsp;ACA’s&nbsp;individual mandate&nbsp;disappear in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 by reducing the tax penalty for not purchasing insurance to zero. Those fighting the statute in the current case argued that the revised law ran afoul of the Constitution because the individual mandate was so integral to the law that Obamacare couldn’t function without it.


	At the end of&nbsp;2018,&nbsp;Texas-based&nbsp;federal&nbsp;Judge Reed O’Connor&nbsp;sided&nbsp;with the challengers, ruling&nbsp;they&nbsp;had standing and that the Obamacare law was unconstitutional in its entirety.


	In 2017, Congress “sawed off the last leg [Obamacare] stood on,”&nbsp;wrote&nbsp;O’Connor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.&nbsp;The “mandate ‘is essential to’ and inseverable from ‘the other provisions of’” the&nbsp;law, he wrote.


	But the Supreme Court had no interest in doing&nbsp;the&nbsp;right thing.


	The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-840_6jfm.pdf">majority opinion</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;California v. Texas&nbsp;was written by liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, though it reads like something written by the weaselly&nbsp;virtue-signaling fake conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts,&nbsp;along with conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, joined the majority opinion.&nbsp;Naturally, liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan also joined&nbsp;it.


	Roberts,&nbsp;who wrote the&nbsp;NFIB v. Sebelius&nbsp;decision,&nbsp;had said&nbsp;during&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/with-the-mandate-gone-the-obamacare-law-is-unconstitutional-supreme-court-hears_3573893.html">oral arguments</a>&nbsp;November&nbsp;10, 2020, that the Supreme Court had no business striking down unconstitutional statutes.


	“On the severance question, I think it’s hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire Act to fall if the mandate were struck down when the same Congress that lowered the penalty to zero did not even try to repeal the rest of the Act,” Roberts told&nbsp;Texas&nbsp;Solicitor General Kyle D. Hawkins.


	“I think, frankly, that they wanted the Court to do that. But that’s not our job,”&nbsp;Roberts said in an assertion that would no doubt surprise his predecessor John Marshall, who invented judicial review in 1803 in the&nbsp;seminal&nbsp;Marbury v. Madison&nbsp;ruling.


	Roberts&nbsp;was in fact wrong when he said&nbsp;Congress&nbsp;did&nbsp;not try to repeal the Obamacare law. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that zeroed out the mandate-related penalty came out of the 115th Congress (2017–2018). In fact,&nbsp;<a href="https://ballotpedia.org/115th_Congress_on_healthcare,_2017-2018">lawmakers voted on several bills</a>&nbsp;in that Congress that&nbsp;would have&nbsp;repealed&nbsp;Obamacare.


	Returning to the case at hand, Breyer wrote&nbsp;that the 18 states argued that&nbsp;without the penalty the&nbsp;law’s&nbsp;“minimum essential coverage requirement,”&nbsp;as&nbsp;he&nbsp;put it&nbsp;in pleasant-sounding language,&nbsp;was&nbsp;unconstitutional.


	They said “neither the Commerce Clause nor the Tax Clause (nor any other enumerated power) grants Congress the power to enact it,” Breyer wrote. “They also argue that the minimum essential coverage requirement is not severable from the rest of the Act. Hence, they believe the Act as a whole is invalid.”


	Then Breyer began&nbsp;the excuse-making.


	But the Supreme Court does&nbsp;“not reach these questions of the Act’s validity” because “Texas and the other plaintiffs in this suit lack the standing necessary to raise them.”


	Article III of the Constitution “gives federal courts the power to adjudicate only genuine ‘Cases’ and ‘Controversies[,]’ … [and] includes the requirement that litigants have standing,” Breyer wrote.


	A&nbsp;“plaintiff has standing only if he can ‘allege personal injury fairly traceable to the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be redressed by the requested relief.’”


	Citing two precedents, he stated&nbsp;fatuously&nbsp;that,&nbsp;“Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have shown that the injury they will suffer or have suffered is ‘fairly traceable’ to the ‘allegedly unlawful conduct’ of which they complain.”


	Come again?


	Another way of putting this is to say that&nbsp;the Supreme Court&nbsp;didn’t care about the needless hardship and suffering Obamacare has imposed on Americans&nbsp;without controlling costs, which keep rising and rising.


	The court&nbsp;lacked the resolve to do the right thing and actually interpret the Constitution, so, as it has done many times before,&nbsp;the court&nbsp;chose the result it wanted and then&nbsp;after the fact&nbsp;threw together yet another poorly reasoned written opinion to justify the desired outcome.


	“Standing, after all,&nbsp;is not a complicated concept,” Andrea&nbsp;Widburg&nbsp;<a href="https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/regarding_the_supreme_court_dick_morris_says_an_unsayable_truth.html">wrote</a>&nbsp;at American Thinker, citing&nbsp;Whitmore v. Arkansas&nbsp;(1990).


	It requires a litigant to clearly demonstrate he has suffered an “injury in fact,” which “must be concrete in both a qualitative and temporal sense.” The litigant must allege an injury to himself that is “distinct and palpable,” not merely “abstract … and the alleged harm must be actual or imminent, not ‘conjectural’ or ‘hypothetical.’” The litigant must also show the injury “fairly can be traced to the challenged action” and “is likely to be redressed by a favorable decision.”


	So what would it take to demonstrate an “injury in fact”?&nbsp;Surging health care cost-related bankruptcies?&nbsp;Reduced hiring by employers because health insurance is unaffordable?&nbsp;An increase in morbidity rates because patients can’t afford to go to the doctor?&nbsp;Rising suicide rates resulting from sick patients killing themselves&nbsp;because they can’t get the care they need?Dead bodies overflowing from morgues?


	If the Supreme Court doesn’t want to rule on the merits of a case, the standing excuse is an easy out.


	Justice Samuel Alito&nbsp;used sarcasm to slam his colleagues for engaging in legal sophistry because they didn’t want to do the right thing.


	“Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two,” Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.


	“In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the Court has pulled off an improbable rescue.”


	Let’s go over the&nbsp;other two&nbsp;constituent parts&nbsp;of the trilogy.


	In&nbsp;NFIB v. Sebelius&nbsp;(2012), the Supreme Court upheld the statute 5–4, on the theory that the individual mandate—which&nbsp;compelled&nbsp;Americans to buy health insurance even if they didn’t want it—was&nbsp;somehow&nbsp;a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax.


	The court again&nbsp;threw a lifeline to&nbsp;Obamacare&nbsp;in&nbsp;King v. Burwell(2015),&nbsp;finding&nbsp;6–3 that even though the&nbsp;law&nbsp;provides&nbsp;that Congress makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State,” the latter phrase actually means on an “Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government,” as the&nbsp;justifiably angry&nbsp;late&nbsp;Justice Antonin Scalia&nbsp;wrote&nbsp;in his dissenting opinion.


	In his dissent in&nbsp;California v. Texas, Alito wrote,&nbsp;“No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats.”


	“A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. So a tax that does not tax is allowed to stand and support one of the biggest Government programs in our Nation’s history. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again. But I must respectfully dissent.”


	Perhaps&nbsp;Justice Thomas’s conscience bothered him so instead of doing the right thing he&nbsp;slammed&nbsp;his colleagues&nbsp;for&nbsp;wrongly&nbsp;deciding&nbsp;NFIB v. Sebelius&nbsp;and&nbsp;King v. Burwell.


	“But, whatever the Act’s dubious history in this Court, we must assess the current suit on its own terms. And, here, there is a fundamental problem with the arguments advanced by the plaintiffs in attacking the Act—they have not identified any unlawful action that has injured them,” he wrote&nbsp;in an opinion concurring with the majority.


	Tedious stuff.


	And although Gorsuch may have done the right thing in this case, his&nbsp;brief tenure on the court does not inspire confidence.


	With&nbsp;Gorsuch’s&nbsp;majority opinion&nbsp;last year&nbsp;in&nbsp;the 6-3 decision inBostock v. Clayton County,&nbsp;the justice&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-finds-illegal-firing-employees-for-being-gay-or-transgender_3389113.html">used the court</a>&nbsp;as a&nbsp;national&nbsp;super-legislature and amended a law without involving actual elected lawmakers.&nbsp;(Roberts was the only other conservative in the majority.) Gorsuch&nbsp;stretched&nbsp;the meaning of the word “sex”&nbsp;in&nbsp;Title VII of the&nbsp;Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sexual orientation and gender identity, something nobody thought it meant in 1964.&nbsp;As then-Solicitor General Noel Francisco said&nbsp;during oral arguments, “Sex means whether you’re male or female, not whether you’re gay or straight.”


	“Many will applaud today’s decision because they agree on policy grounds with the Court’s updating of Title VII,” Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion.


	“But the question in these cases is not whether discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity should be outlawed. The question is whether Congress did that in 1964. It indisputably did not.”


	But I digress, sort of.


	Over the past year the Supreme Court has left the American people at the mercy of radical leftists.&nbsp;


	Power-mad governors and mayors inspired by swamp creature Anthony&nbsp;Fauci&nbsp;and&nbsp;fed bogus data by&nbsp;lying, monomaniacal epidemiologists, declared war on the American people as they combated the Chinese virus that causes COVID-19.&nbsp;


	The Supreme Court stood by for the most part and allowed the Left’s ongoing experiment in social control to proceed unimpeded. Ditto for the election-related challenges brought by President Donald Trump and Republicans, which seem more and more justified&nbsp;with each passing day&nbsp;as post-election audits and investigations continue.


	There was so much justice to be done, but the Supreme Court refused to do it.


	As it turns out,&nbsp;what seemed true&nbsp;before&nbsp;the ruling has only come into sharper focus after it: good, patriotic people who believe in the American idea cannot count on the Supreme Court, which has long enjoyed reverence it does not deserve, to save America.


	We will have to do it ourselves.

The 'Conservative' Supreme Court's Love-Affair With Obamacare

Conservatives across America have to be asking themselves why they put so much time, money, and energy into electing Republicans&nbsp;when&nbsp;the&nbsp;

The Biden-Harris administration is promising to press on with a blatantly unconstitutional $4 billion farm relief program that deliberately excludes white people even after a federal judge ruled it was racially discriminatory and temporarily blocked it.


	Democrats view the explicitly racist government program as a down payment on the slavery reparations package they want to force on Americans a century and a half after Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans took Democrats’ slaves away from them.


	Twelve plaintiffs in nine states sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in a case called Faust v. Vilsack to enjoin officials from implementing a loan-forgiveness program for farmers and ranchers under Section 1005 of the grotesque $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), the recent so-called pandemic-related stimulus legislation. The plaintiffs say Section 1005 denies them equal protection of the law because eligibility to participate in the program is based solely on racial classifications.


	“The Court recognized that the federal government’s plan to condition and allocate benefits on the basis of race raises grave constitutional concerns and threatens our clients with irreparable harm,” said Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).


	“The Biden administration is radically undermining bedrock principles of equality under the law. We look forward to continuing this litigation but urge the administration to change course now.”


	WILL <a href="https://will-law.org/federal-court-puts-a-hold-on-biden-administration-race-based-loan-forgiveness-program/">represents</a> the 12 farmers and ranchers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Oregon, and Kentucky. Each plaintiff would be eligible for the federal loan forgiveness program, but for their race.


	U.S. District Judge William Griesbach of Green Bay, Wisconsin, cut through the woke nonsense argued by placeholder president Joe Biden’s legal team and <a href="https://will-law.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ORDER-on-TRO.pdf">issued</a> a temporary restraining order against the program June 10.


	“Plaintiffs are excluded from the program based on their race and are thus experiencing discrimination at the hands of their government,” Griesbach wrote.


	Only someone who is a member of a “socially disadvantaged group,” meaning “a group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities,” is eligible for loan relief.


	“In other words, the loan forgiveness program is based entirely on the race of the farmer or rancher,” the judge wrote. Only individuals “who are one or more of the following: Black/African American, American Indian, Alaskan native, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, or Pacific Islander,” are eligible under the ARPA program.


	“Congress can implement race-neutral programs to help farmers and ranchers in need of financial assistance, such as requiring individual determinations of disadvantaged status or giving priority to loans of farmers and ranchers that were left out of the previous pandemic relief funding,” the judge wrote.


	“It can also provide better outreach, education, and other resources. But it cannot discriminate on the basis of race.”


	Matt Herrick, USDA director of communications, justified the racist, obviously unconstitutional program and told the Washington Post his agency would continue to discriminate against whites.


	“We respectfully disagree with this temporary order and USDA will continue to forcefully defend our ability to carry out this act of Congress and deliver debt relief to socially disadvantaged borrowers,” Herrick said.


	“When the temporary order is lifted, USDA will be prepared to provide the debt relief authorized by Congress,” he predicted.


	Ignoring Judge Griesbach’s order, USDA officials, who say 17,000 farmers of color qualify for taxpayer-provided apartheid alms, are urging borrowers to keep filing.


	The WaPo article claims that the farmer giveaway “sought to correct long-standing disadvantages faced by Black, Latino, and other minority farmers in getting loans from banks and the government.” The Biden administration asserted the dubious claim that people in communities of color “had a more difficult time accessing relief programs due to systemic racism and other issues.”


	“Over the last 100 years, policies were implemented that specifically twisted in a way that disadvantaged socially disadvantaged producers,” said immortal swamp creature Tom Vilsack, the U.S. agriculture secretary, invoking critical race theory-based lies.


	“There’s no better example of that than the COVID relief efforts. Billions of dollars went to White farmers, because the system is structured in a way that gives them significant advantages.”


	Biden’s Zimbabwe-style farm loan forgiveness program hearkens back to the Pigford scandal that began in the Clinton era and resurfaced in the Obama era.


	The Section 1005 program brings to mind an earlier program administered by the USDA that led to a class-action lawsuit known as Pigford v. Glickman, which was settled in 1999. Black farmers claimed they were discriminated against by the agency’s allocation of farm loans and assistance.


	The government agreed to pay $50,000 to black claimants who said USDA loan administrators discriminated against them. The proof required was minimal, critics said, which led to fraud. In 2010, Congress appropriated $1.2 billion for claims that were filed late, in addition to the estimated $1 billion already paid out. Critics said the Obama administration dispensed settlement funds using even looser evidentiary standards than those that applied in the original settlement.


	“Conservative crusader Andrew Breitbart was correct when he exposed a multibillion-dollar redistribution scheme to African-American farmers based on largely dubious claims of discrimination,” Investor’s Business Daily <a href="https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/breitbart-was-right-about-pigford-case/">editorialized</a> in April 2013.


	The New York Times concluded years after the scandal broke “that Breitbart was right, that Pigford became not a redress of legitimate grievances but ‘a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees.’”


	“Pigford was the kind of social justice championed by Van Jones, Obama’s former green jobs czar who advocated the redistribution of wealth from successful capitalists and entrepreneurs to minorities and American Indians who he says have been shut out of the system and exploited by it,” according to IBD.


	“In a now famous rant, Jones talked about how minorities were ‘pushed,’ ‘bullied,’ ‘mistreated’ and ‘shoved into all the land that we didn’t want.’ Jones then thundered, ‘Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth!’”


	Things have changed since then.


	The self-admitted communist and black nationalist Van Jones has blended into the Democratic Party’s mainstream. The Democratic National Committee officially <a href="https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/dems-officially-endorse-anti-cop-blacklivesmatter-matthew-vadum/">endorsed</a> Black Lives Matter in 2015. Left-wingers were fine with last year’s Black Lives Matter and Antifa-led riots that reportedly caused more than $2 billion in damages nationwide and were encouraged by Democrat governors and mayors.


	And the aggressive, in-your-face racism of our dangerously senile president, who claims “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” is not even&nbsp; acknowledged.

Biden’s Racist Farm Reparations

The Biden-Harris administration is promising to press on with a blatantly unconstitutional $4 billion farm relief program that deliberately excludes white

Hollywood actress and Stockholm syndrome sufferer Ellie Kemper made headlines recently when she issued a desperate, groveling apology for attending a debutante ball when she was 19 that was hosted by an organization that abolished its whites-only membership policy a year before she was born.


	Seriously. That’s it. She apologized for that.


	Vicious left-wing attacks on the already left-leaning and apparently hyper-sensitive entertainer caused her to pull a Patty Hearst and embrace the woke mob that has taken her hostage. Kemper, like Hearst, comes from a wealthy and influential family. She has acknowledged she “had a very privileged, nice, warm childhood.”


	Lefty Twitter smeared Kemper as a “KKK queen” after old photos appeared in cyberspace showing her being crowned the “Queen of Love and Beauty” at the Veiled Prophet Ball in 1999. The event, hosted by the Veiled Prophet Organization, which has no historical ties to the Ku Klux Klan, was later renamed the Fair Saint Louis.


	The Veiled Prophet Organization&nbsp;(VPO) was founded in 1878 by 14 prominent St. Louis, Missouri businessmen, race-obsessed leftist academic Kelsey Klotz <a href="https://commonreader.wustl.edu/c/uneasy-past-veiled-prophet-organization/">wrote</a> in two 2018 articles in The Common Reader, but “many&nbsp;attribute the idea of the Veiled Prophet (VP) to Confederate Colonel Alonzo Slayback and his brother, Charles Slayback, a New Orleans grain broker who was a Confederate cavalryman.”


	According to myth, “the Veiled Prophet is a mystical traveler from the ambiguous East who decided to establish St. Louis as a beautiful city. The fact that St. Louis was chosen was meant to be indicative of its worth and value as a city based in the grand traditions of the Old World, but prepared to progress to the New World.”


	“Critics of the organization have charged the Veiled Prophet Organization (VPO) with maintaining power within St. Louis through intersecting race, class, and gender-based ideologies, in which power was nearly always meant for white, upper-class men (the race of its membership has changed somewhat since the 1980s, but the gender dynamics remain almost exactly the same),” she <a href="https://commonreader.wustl.edu/c/uneasy-past-veiled-prophet-organization-part-ii/">wrote</a>.


	But as historian Thomas Spencer has argued, “this made the VPO an organization of its time—it did not appear to have been any more or less racist than other fraternal organizations,” Klotz wrote. “Like others, the VPO did initiate a few minority members, including foreign-born immigrants and a handful of Jewish members (black members were only admitted beginning in 1979).”


	Activists protested VPO’s racially exclusionary membership policy for decades.


	After Michael Brown, a young black man, was shot and killed in August 2014 while he tried to murder a white police officer in nearby Ferguson, Missouri, activists targeted VPO for destruction, arguing it was a tool of wealthy elites.


	One group called Power Behind the Police launched a Twitter campaign, <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/UnveilTheProfit" target="_blank">#unveiltheprofit</a>, and


	“Missourians Organized for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) compiled information on&nbsp;<a href="http://www.powerbehindthepolice.com/1" target="_blank">St. Louis’s 1%</a>, and linked that information to the VP organization,” Klotz continued.


	MORE, of course, is the successor organization that took the place of Missouri ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). ACORN filed for bankruptcy in 2010 after Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, who went on to found investigative journalism powerhouse Project Veritas, exposed the corrupt leftist group’s criminal inclinations.


	During the destructive Ferguson protests, which leftist billionaire George Soros <a href="https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/ferguson-rent-mobs-exposed-matthew-vadum/">funded</a>, MORE worked to free jailed demonstrators so they could continue vandalizing businesses, intimidating perceived adversaries, setting fires, throwing projectiles and human waste at cops, and engaging in the Left’s usual modes of mostly peaceful protest. MORE, like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, believes that protesters should be given a blank check to inflict whatever harm they wish on the community in pursuit of social justice.


	“MORE sponsored a&nbsp;<a href="https://wagingnonviolence.org/2015/07/unveiling-prophets-profit-st-louis/" target="_blank">weeklong protest</a>&nbsp;entitled ‘Unveil the Profit’ around July 4, 2015. They traveled to the homes and businesses of seven of St. Louis’s wealthiest businessmen with portraits and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.powerbehindthepolice.com/stl_1_cakes" target="_blank">cakes</a>&nbsp;decorated to highlight St. Louis’s ‘history of injustice and corporate control’ (meant to counter the 250th birthday cakes that appeared around St. Louis that year),” Klotz wrote.


	According to&nbsp;community organizer Molly Gott, the anti-VPO protests of 2015 were intended to expose the “power behind the police”: “Police don’t really have the power—the 1% does … most people realized that the movement was not just about police accountability; it was also about ending structural racism and economic inequality and creating a future in which Black Lives Matter.”


	After the Kemper controversy erupted, the VPO distanced itself from its past.


	"Upon reflection, the Veiled Prophet Organization acknowledges our past and recognizes the criticism levied our way. We sincerely apologize for the actions and images&nbsp;from our history. Additionally, our lack of cultural awareness was and is wrong. We are committed to change, allowing our actions to match the organization we are today," according to a statement it released.


	"The VP Organization of today categorically rejects racism, in any form. Today's VP is committed to diversity and equity in our membership, community service initiatives&nbsp;and support for the region," the group continued. "Our hope is that moving forward, the community sees us for who we are today and together we can move this region forward for everyone. We are, and always will be committed to the success of the region and making St Louis a better place to live for all."


	Then Kemper distanced herself from her younger self.


	In what has become a popular rite of self-denunciation for those who run afoul of ultra-leftist orthodoxy, Kemper took to social media to debase herself and beg for forgiveness even though she didn’t do anything wrong.


	Her confession on Instagram to her 1.2 million Instagram followers is filled with the kind of woke cant one might expect to read in a pro-critical race theory book. It reads like it was prepared for her signature by a KGB officer after she was tortured during an extended stay at Lefortovo Prison.


	The document, a case study in the psychopathology of brainwashing victims, is worth reprinting in its entirety.


	Kemper wrote:


	“Hi guys - when I was 19 years old, I decided to participate in a debutante ball in my hometown. The century-old organization that hosted the debutante ball had an unquestionably racist, sexist, and elitist past. I was not aware of this history at the time, but ignorance is no excuse, I was old enough to have educated myself before getting involved.


	“I unequivocally deplore, denounced, and reject white supremacy. At the same time, I acknowledge that because of my race and my privilege, I am the beneficiary of a system that has dispensed unequal justice and unequal rewards.


	“There is a very natural temptation when you become the subject of internet criticism, to tell yourself that your detractors are getting it all wrong. But at some point last week, I realized that a lot of the forces behind the criticism are forces that I’ve spent my life supporting and agreeing with.


	“I believe strongly in the values of kindness, integrity, and inclusiveness, I try to live my life in accordance with these values. If my experience is an indication that organizations and institutions with pasts that fall short of these beliefs should be held to account, then I have to see this experience in a positive light.


	“I want to apologize to the people I’ve disappointed, and I promise that moving forward I will listen, continue to educate myself, and use my privilege in support of the better society I think we’re capable of becoming.


	“Thanks for reading this.”


	Of course, no normal, reasonable person, would equate participating in a gala event thrown by a group that conspicuously abandoned its racially discriminatory past with burning a cross on a black family’s lawn or hunting down runaway slaves.


	Moreover, taking the bizarre woke standards of this week and applying them retroactively to something that happened in 1999 when America was culturally different is an example of “presentism” that ought to offend even some people on the Left.


	And Kemper’s denunciation of her own so-called white privilege ought to sicken everyone capable of rational thought.


	“Ellie Kemper doesn't deserve this,” the headline of a column by CNN bloviator Jill Filipovic <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/opinions/elie-kemper-internet-shaming-filipovic/index.html">declares</a>, referring to the abuse the actress experienced when the world recently learned she was once crowned Queen of Love and Beauty by an organization whose racial attitudes, though considered repugnant today, were common and unremarkable in the past.


	I’m not sure I agree. It depends on the meaning of the word “this.”


	Kemper does not deserve to be ridiculed for attending a debutante ball when she was 19, but she deserves heavy criticism for embracing and validating the ideology known as critical race theory.


	She has helped to advance an evil cause that if not stopped will tear America apart.

Ellie Kemper’s Bizarre Self-Denunciation

Hollywood actress and Stockholm syndrome sufferer Ellie Kemper made headlines recently when she issued a desperate, groveling apology for attending a debutante

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