Category Archives: Federalist

U.S. Customs and Border Protection confiscated more fentanyl in the first half of 2021 than in the last three years.

CBP seized 6,494 pounds of the drug between October 2020 and April 2021, according to recently released data. Nearly 2,000 more pounds of fentanyl have been seized by CBP officials compared to last year amid the southern border surge. CBP seized 4,776 pounds in 2020 and 2,801 pounds in 2019.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott told reporters Friday that the Texas Department of Public Safety has seen an 800 percent increase from April 2020 to April 2021 of the amount of fentanyl that has been apprehended.

We have obtained enough fentanyl coming across the border to kill every single person in the state of New York, Abbott said.

Fentanyl is a fatal drug that is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. Around 87,000 Americans died in 2020 from a drug overdose the record in one year. Lora Ries, Senior Research Fellow in Homeland Security at The Heritage Foundation, told The Federalist that this is clearly a crisis and one that the White House caused.

It is of the Biden Administrations own making and messaging. Instead of working to prevent illegal immigration, the current administration works to process illegal immigrants into the U.S. faster and claim they are getting a handle on it, all without any regard for the cost to U.S. taxpayers, Ries said. Americans do not agree with the Biden Administrations handling of the border. He should listen to them and reinstitute order, not raise our taxes to pay for this dereliction of duty.

CBP has noted an increase in fentanyl smuggling since 2018. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., received a memo briefing Tuesday after putting in a request for further information on alleged terrorists arrested at the border. The memo was classified, but McCarthy told Fox News the border crisis has spiraled into a national security crisis.

Although the briefing I received today was classified, I can tell you that Im even more concerned for Americas security than I was before, McCarthy said. More than 1,500 individuals evade law enforcement at the border every day, it must be immediately addressed.

Last week, CBP announced it encountered over 178,000 migrants in the month of April. This is a 900 percent increase in comparison to a year prior. 172,000 migrants were encountered in March and 178,622 migrants in the same category this April. The 172,000 marked the most substantial number in the last 20 years.

As Ries alludes to, the Biden administration has been blamed for much of the influx. Bidens repeal of Trumps Remain in Mexico policy has resulted in migrants being released into the United States. Recent data from Syracuse University indicates that approximately 8,387 migrants previously enrolled in the Trump-era program were allowed to walk free in the U.S. in April.

Back in September 2020, acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan said Mexican cartels are bringing more hard drugs across the southern border. One kilogram of fentanyl the equivalent of about 2.2 pounds has the potential to kill 500,000 people, as cited by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.

The DEA announced a program titled Project Wave Breaker last month to target Mexican crime groups that smuggle fentanyl into America.

While a major entry point for fentanyl is the Southwest border, the cartels are spreading their poison into communities across the Nation, said DEA Acting Administrator D. Christopher Evans. Through this initiative, were tackling a very real public health, public safety, and national security threat, identifying the most egregious street-level networks in our communities and working our way up through the supply chain.

A recent poll shows that voters are discontent with the Biden administrations handling of the southern border. The Associated Press-NORC at the University of Chicago poll found that only 43 percent of voters approve of Bidens actions on immigration and the border. A Harvard-Harris poll conducted between April 27 and 29 indicates that 80 percent of voters determine that there is a surge.

Twenty governors urged Biden to take action on the border crisis last week, saying it is unacceptable for migrants to be housed throughout the country.

We call on you to take action on the crisis at the southern border immediately, the letter states. Contrary to statements from your Administration, the border is neither closed nor secure. In fact, the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) reports a staggering surge in recent crossings: 172,000 encounters in March, the highest number in nearly 20 years, as well as 18,890 unaccompanied children, the largest monthly number in history.

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More Fentanyl Seized At The Border So Far This Year Than All Of 2020 - The Federalist

If its true that Macys is dropping Chrissy Teigens cookware line over 10-year-old tweets for which shes apologized, that meets the definition of cancel culture. Does that mean she deserves to be saved? No. Teigen is being asked to live by the standards she helped set.

Let us not forget, Teigens cultural leftist social justice ideology is crucial to her brand, earning her uncritical and fawning media coverage that made the Chrissy Teigen brand higher profile and more attractive to companies like Macys. She made money off being woke and attacking our social fabric.

According to the Daily Mail, Chrissy Teigens Cravings kitchen line of cookware has been dumped from retail giant Macys website after she admitted she bullied Courtney Stodden when she was just a teen.Teigen, 35, has come under fire over the past several days, after tweets in which she told a then 16-year-old Stodden, now 26, to take their own life, resurfaced.

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In 2011, Teigen published a barrage of tweets telling then-16-year-old Stodden to go to sleep forever.

Stodden said this was only part of the picture, saying Teigen would also privately DM me and tell me to kill myself.

Teigen responded last Wednesday posting a lengthy apology on Twitter saying she was mortified by her past behavior and had tried to reach out to Stodden to apologize.

Stodden claims Teigen did not privately apologize for her bizarrely aggressive bullying of a teenager. None of this is the least bit surprising. Teigens obnoxious conduct has been on full display on Twitter for a decade.

The principle of yanking deals over bad 10-year-old tweets is wrong. When corporations and celebrities make these decisions, they enhance cultural norms that affect people with less power and money than John Legends wife. Those norms include the standard that apologies and grace are insufficient. They also include the standard that brief news cycles induced by social media mobs are bad for business. Both are wrong and dangerous.

Macys move, in this case, will empower those destructive cultural norms. I think the principle is deeply wrong, but Teigen should be happy to live by her own bad standards, which, again, helped make her a lot of money and power. Supporting perhaps even enjoying the attempted cancelation of Teigen is not the same as supporting cancel culture more broadly since the sad reality is that elites will only revoke their own support for these bad standards when they affect elites.

Whats both much more outrageous and interesting is actually Macys decision to work with Teigen in the first place. Shes a sanctimonious political extremist, hypocrite, and a frequent jerk who appeals to the small slice of cultural leftist America that populates coastal newsrooms.

Even from a business perspective, shes polarizing. But the medias extreme cultural leftism warps our countrys self-image to the point where businesses and the broader public dont recognize each other. Further, the niche-ification of our economy and culture means that the slice of the public that inexplicably finds Teigen appealing can exert outsize power over corporations and media outlets.

Shed no tears for Chrissy Teigen. She did this to herself. Worse yet, she did this to our culture.

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Chrissy Teigen Got Rich Setting The Cancel Culture Norms That Now Bite Her - The Federalist

The Middle East is in turmoil again. From Kabul to Riyadh, and Beirut to the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem, people are frightened and forced to hear the horrifying blasts of emergency sirens that had long been silenced. If one were to search anywhere other than in Iran for the detonators of these blasts, they would be wrong again.

An explosion in front of a girls school in Kabul, Afghanistan two weeks ago killed dozens of innocent people, embarrassed the Afghan government, and jeopardized the Biden administrations plan to withdraw U.S. forces by September 2021. There is no question that such a heinous crime, which will cause further insecurity in Afghanistan, only benefits the regime in Tehran, which thrives on crises beyond its borders.

As most victims were from the Shiite Hazara ethnic minority, the Iranian state authorities and media claimed to protect that community and argued that the Afghan government has failed to protect the most persecuted community. Some are already arguing that the Hazaras must pick up arms and defend themselves. Guess whos feeding these talking points?

Similarly, the mullahs reaped the windfalls of sectarian conflict in Iraq because the carnage increased their leverage during every negotiation. Political observers remember all too well how the Islamic Revolutionary Guard CorpsQuds forces killed Shiites in Iraq. They then laid the blame on Sunni groups in order to fuel the cycle of sectarianism in the hopes of pushing the United States out of Iraq, thereby allowing the Iranian regime to fill the remaining vacuum.

Around the same time as the school explosion, the U.S. Navy seized a ship carrying thousands of Iranian weapons and ammunition headed towards Yemen to arm the Houthis. A U.S. Navy initial investigation found that the vessel came from Iran. This is yet more proof that the Iranian regime is actively arming the Houthis despite a United Nations arms embargo.

The Houthis were removed from the State Departments Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list in February this year, allegedly because some voices in Washington were arguing that the blacklisting was hindering human rights organizations from providing aid to the Yemeni population.

Last week, the same proxy group targeted the Abha International Airport in Saudi Arabia with an explosive-laden drone last Monday. While international media reported that the Saudi-led coalition had intercepted eight drones and three missiles, the Houthis and Iranian state-run media insisted that the operation was conducted successfully and the target was hit accurately.

On the very same day, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps speed boats harassed the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf, trying to provoke a military confrontation. Add to this the recent developments in the Gaza Strip and the alarming escalation of hostilities that could lead to a regional war.

One might wonder why is all this happening all at once? The answer lies with the mullahs in Tehran and their representatives in Vienna. Ever since the new administration has taken office, the Iranian regime has resorted to what it does best: terrorism and extortion.

Before the Vienna talks, the regimes economy was suffocating under crippling international and U.S. sanctions, impeding funding its proxies in the Middle East and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). Enraged over four decades of oppression and censorship, Iranian citizens were suffering further from the regimes vast and endemic corruption.

Since 2017, several nationwide uprisings and constant street protests have shaken the regime to its core and the religious dictatorship has had to resort to bloodshed to prevent its overthrow. Thus the regimes leadership had no other choice but to accept to engage in talks, albeit indirectly, with a foe it called the Great Satan for decades.

But as it increased its aggression against the U.S. military in Iraq and ramped up uranium enrichment during January, March, and April, Tehran only heard calls for more engagement and diplomacy from Western capitals. That is why it was emboldened to increase its uranium enrichment and to blackmail the Biden administration and its European partners back to the negotiation table.

As the United States started to show signs of goodwill and promised to lift sanctions, the regime demanded lifting all sanctions at once. It detected weakness and reluctance to take firm action against its belligerence on the part of its international interlocutors.

There is one thing that diplomats in Vienna are not discussing: the Iranian people. If Western negotiators were to pay attention to the numerous waves of unrest and daily protests in Iran since 2017, they might be in a better and stronger position.

The regime only understands the language of strength. A coward regime that hides behind proxies and kills innocent people should not be rewarded with international credibility and concessions.

For years, Iranian lobbyists in Washington cried wolf about war with Iran to legitimize appeasement with the biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Now the Biden administration should take stock of how that kind of diplomacy is bearing fruit in the Middle East.

It might be wise to start thinking about a third option: standing with the Iranian people and their resolute and repeated calls for the overthrow of the ruling theocracy, reflected in the chants of death to the dictator by millions during the January 2018 and November 2019 nationwide uprisings.

The West knows that showing weakness in front of bullies invites even more aggression. So it should consider a change in approach.

Ali Safavi is a member of the foreign affairs committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

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Biden's Weak Posture Toward Iran Invites More Aggression In The Middle East - The Federalist

Comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan railed against the rapid escalation of aggressive wokeism Thursday for spoiling good comedy and silencing those who dont fit the characteristics of favored groups under the progressive mold of victimhood.

On his program with fellow stand-up comic Joe List, Rogan complained comedy today suffers from risk-aversion to cancel culture, where jokes made even ten years ago would be career-ending in todays environment.

Can you make a good comedy movie anymore, or have they made it so dangerous in terms of being canceled, that comedy movies are no longer something you can do? Rogan said, highlighting how films such as Superbad likely wouldnt survive in 2021 without detrimental scrutiny.

You can never be woke enough, Rogan went on.

It keeps going. It keeps going further and further and further down the line, and if you get to the point where you capitulate, where you agree to all these demands, itll eventually get to straight white men are not allowed to talk. Because its your privilege to express yourself when other people of color have been silenced throughout history.

Eventually, Rogan prophesized, highlighting the direction of leftism at breakneck speed, It will be, youre not allowed to go outside, because so many people were imprisoned Im not joking, it really will get there. Its that crazy.

As cable news ratings slide, Rogans podcast was the most listened to in 2020 with more than 190 million downloads every month. Last year, the Austin-based podcast which migrated to the Lone Star State from Los Angeles was acquired by Spotify for $100 million.

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Joe Rogan: 'Woke' Culture Is Silencing 'Straight White Men' - The Federalist

The Washington Post this week published a long hit piece by investigative political reporter Michael Kranish on Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, framed as a profile tracing his path to the insurrection, from elite establishment Republican to dangerous MAGA populist.

Its hard to imagine a more dishonest and condescending piece of journalism. Kranish and his editors obviously blame Hawley in part for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol (more on that later), and they clearly think hes a dangerous and hateful figure in American public life.

But instead of just running an editorial saying so, Kranish spends thousands of words conveying his contempt for Hawley through selective interviews and quotes. He does a deep dive into Hawleys past, digging up and quoting columns the senator wrote in high school, tracking down and interviewing elementary school classmates, and talking with the mayor of Hawleys small hometown in western Missouri.

He interviews former professors, political associates, and even the University of California at Los Angeles law professor who coined the term critical race theory, who told Kranish that Hawley walks in the footsteps of many demagogues in Americas historical past, whose trajectory into the center of power has been through racialized scapegoating.

But for all this, the piece is not really about Hawley. Its about ordinary Americans who live in small towns, go to church, and believe their country is a decent place worthy of their affection. Kranish despises those people even more than he despises Hawley, and he goes to great lengths to show it.

Take Hawleys hometown of Lexington, Missouri. Lexington is a small town on the Missouri river of about 4,700 people. Like a lot of small towns in the South, it was once home to black slaves and white slaveowners.

It was also the site of two of the largest battles in the western theater of the Civil War, the First Battle of Lexington in 1861 and the Second Battle of Lexington in 1864, and a center of operations for Confederate guerilla forces under William Quantrill, including a young Jesse James, who was wounded by federal troops while riding into town to surrender after the war.

Kranish isnt interested in any of this rich and varied history, though. He just wants his readers to know that Lexington has a racist legacy and insular, ignorant residents. People like Hawley, in other words.

Lexingtons lack of recognition of its role in slavery has meant that the city did not have the kind of introspection about inequality that might have broadened Hawleys outlook, writes Kranish, quoting a random former classmate who declares that Hawley had an insular life in this small town.

Its unclear if the person quoted even knew Hawley, let alone knew him well enough to know whether he had an insular life growing up in Lexington. The point is, according to Kranish, that if you come from an obviously racist, backwards place like this theres a good chance youre a racist, or at least racially insensitive. You know, like Hawley.

Kranish would also like his readers to know that evangelical Christians like Hawley hate gay people. Why else include a lengthy aside about how Hawley in 2015 expressed support for Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was arrested and jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because of her religious beliefs?

We hear from Thom Lambert, a University of Missouri law professor who recruited Hawley but later became alarmed that Hawley began making pronouncements that didnt square with his background in constitutional law but instead appeared designed to attract political support, writes Kranish, citing the Davis case. Kranish quotes Lambert, a gay evangelical Christian, saying that Hawleys support for Davis was him trying to establish his credentials as a religious-freedom warrior. This is where I thought, youre kind of lying here. Youre misrepresenting how the Constitution works.

Actually, Hawleys support for Davis was based on Missouris Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which bars the government from compelling or restricting a persons exercise of religion. At the time, Hawley said that Davis should not have been compelled against her conscience to issue the marriage licenses and should not have been arrested, but also that others in her office should have been allowed to issue the licenses, which is what ended up happening. Far from animosity against gay Americans, Hawley was expressing support for individual rights of conscience.

Its ironic, then, that Kranish later tries to paint Hawley as an enemy of conscience and individual liberty by misleadingly summarizing an essay Hawley wrote in June 2019 for Christianity Today on Pelagius, a fourth-century theologian who was declared a heretic by the Catholic Church for his teachings on free will.

Hawley wrote, correctly, that Pelagius believed human beings could achieve perfection without the aid of divine grace, through the exercise of their will. He argues that Pelagianism persists today in the concept of unfettered individual liberty, which in America most benefits powerful and wealthy elites who have embraced what Hawley calls a philosophy for the privileged.

Because if freedom means choice among options, then the people with the most choices are the most free, wrote Hawley. And that means the rich. And if salvation is about achievement, then those with the most accolades are righteous, and that means the elite and the strong.

Hawleys column is really an overview of a larger and more subtle argument, backed by mountains of research, that suggests wealthy and highly educated people tend to thrive in a society that embraces autonomy and unconstrained choice, while less-educated and working class people tend to suffer.But for Kranish, who seems to revel in reducing complex ideas to personal insults, all of this is just more evidence that Hawley finds liberty abhorrent.

But all these meandering and insubstantial attacks on Hawley are really just filler for Kranishs main complaint against the Missouri senator: he dared to object to the certification of the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, and therefore bears some responsibility for the ensuing riot at the U.S. Capitol that day.

Unsurprisingly, Kranish misrepresents what Hawley was objecting to. He writes: Hawley focused on Pennsylvania, saying the state had violated its constitution by widening access to mail-in ballots. But it was a Republican-controlled legislature that approved universal mail voting in 2019, and the GOP had encouraged its use.

But of course it doesnt matter whether Pennsylvanias legislature was controlled by Republicans or Democrats. If it violated its constitution, thats a problem, and Hawley understandably wanted to raise the issue.

It also wasnt the only issue in Pennsylvania that Hawley and others raised. About six weeks before the election, the states supreme court had overridden the legislatures rules for counting mail-in ballots, extending by fiat the deadline for when absentee ballots must be postmarked and received in order to be counted. The Pennsylvania legislature had already set down rules for these things, but the court sided with the state Democratic Party, which had sued to push back the deadline in contravention of state election law.

In a Dec. 30 statement announcing his plans to object, Hawley alluded to these issues, saying, I cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws.

Tens of millions of Americans share these exact concerns about the 2020 election, not because theyre conspiracy theorists but because they understand the importance of the rule of law and election integrity. Its one reason why so many state legislatures are trying to pass election reform laws, to ensure that last-minute lawsuits and activist judges or unelected bureaucrats cant change state voting laws by decree.

But for Kranish, who apparently feels free to inject his opinion into what the Post bills as political news coverage, such concerns exist largely because Hawley, Trump and their allies stoked them with false claims.

No, they dont. Such concerns would exist even if Hawley and Trump had never breathed a word about them for the simple reason that Americans saw for themselves what happened around the country on Election Day and the days following, and concluded that something wasnt right. A week after he lodged his objections, Hawley wrote, For months, I heard from these Missourians writing, calling my office, stopping me to talk. They want Congress to take action to see that our elections at every level are free, fair, and secure. They have a right to be heard in Congress.

In other words, Kranish gets the whole thing backwards. Hawley wasnt stoking fears and ginning up the mob, he was responding to concerns that his constituents had raised repeatedly after the election. Those concerns are grounded in real problems with our election system that need to be solved if Americans are going to have confidence in the vote moving forward.

No wonder, then, that Kranish cant quite grasp why Hawley is so popular with half the country. Near the end of his 5,000-word hatchet job, Kranish finally gets around to acknowledging how popular Hawley is with Republicans, noting that he raised $3 million in the first quarter of this year and appears to enjoy broad popularity among GOP voters in Missouri, where he was given a standing ovation after speaking in the town of Ozark on April 17.

Kranish notes these things, but he is not the least bit curious why Hawley is so popular. For him, as for the great mass of corporate media, its enough to declare that Hawley has embraced the false claims of election fraud, and leave it at that. Republican voters are stupid, you see, and Hawley seems to have figured that out.

Or so it is according to Michael Kranish, who never met an intelligent and charismatic Republican he couldnt smear as a hypocritical, racist conspiracy theorist if you just give him 5,000 words and a ticket to a place like Lexington, Missouri.

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WaPo Hit Piece On Josh Hawley Is Really A Hit Piece On All Conservatives - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist Political Editor John Daniel Davidson joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss Austins rampant homelessness problem and how voters united to reinstate the citys public camping ban.

[The city of Austin] wanted to target everyone who wanted to reinstate the camping ban as evil, conservative, elderly, Republican NIMBYs who wanted to lock up all the homeless people. Thats absolutely not true, Davidson said. These were ordinary Austinites, by which I mean, they were Democrats. This is a super-majority Democrat city.

While leftists tried to spin the homeless problem as a humanitarian crisis that only bigots and careless GOP supporters opposed, Davidson said the city allowing camping without public input showed even the overwhelmingly Democrat voters that woke agendas are not realistic.

This was really a case of Democrats, turning on the city because they had to deal with the very visceral, real-world consequences of an ideologically driven policy that was a complete disaster, Davidson said.

Its in cities across the country. Its ordinary, middle-class, working people that have to bear the brunt of these ideological decisions made by progressive leaders who dont have to face the consequences of their policies, he added.

Read Davidsons op-ed, Austin Loses Patience With Camping in the Streets, in the Wall Street Journal.

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How Austin's Homeless Problem Exposes The Failures Of Leftist Agendas - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, OutKicks Bobby Burack joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss the politicization of sports, sports news, and how corporate media outlets are missing opportunities to meet the demand for non-woke news.

Whether its ESPN, The Washington Post, The Ringer, all these major outlets that cover sports, they covered those social issues they cover that as if most Americans agree, Burack said. I think all these issues right now are 50/50. If amajor outletlike ESPN covers it where only one side is presented, do the math. That leaveshalf the country without a voice represented in that discussion.

This same principle applies to Hollywood, TV, and other pop culture, Burack said.

We ignore our consumers and try to appeal to our critics, Burack said. That is poor business because you will never appeal to these guys because their job is to bring you down,be critical of you. And your most hardcore loyal fans are being pushed to the side because their voice is not loud, influential. I cant think of a bigger disservice to viewers than shows no longer caring about them.

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Why Woke Sports And The Media Outlets That Cover Them Don't Understand Viewers - The Federalist

The Intercept released a video report touting lies about the violent riots that broke out over the summer of 2020 and targeting the conservative journalists who reported on them.

By focusing on sensational, graphic images of violence on the margins of protests and entirely ignoring peaceful demonstrators, even members of the Riot Squad who are not as far right as Schaffer have contributed to a political project: the right-wing medias campaign to portray racial justice protests as anarchic and dangerous, Intercept claimed.

In the media outlets video, a narrator details how conservative reporters made up an informal Riot Squad that followed the violence, destruction, vandalism, and arson that occurred in cities all over the U.S. last year. While the riots, 95 percent of which are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, caused more than $2 billion in damages from May 26 to June 8, corporate media organizations, including The Intercept, hold fast to the idea that these protests were mostly peaceful.

the broader picture is that Black Lives Matter protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, the Intercept claimed without evidence.

Not only does The Intercept downplay the violence that destroyed businesses, cities, and ended in more than 47 riot-related fatalities, but also targets conservative reporters, many of whom were some of the only on-the-ground journalists in ravaged areas, for choosing to cover the destruction. Reporters Elijah Schaffer, Shelby Talcott, Julio Rosas, and Jorge Ventura are slandered as spurring on false narratives in exchange for appearances on Fox News and fueling online conspiracy theories.

These reporters choices to turn their cameras away from peaceful marches over racist policing to the dangerous and violent looting and rioting that occurred, The Intercept claims, is just meant to add fuel to the fire.

The impact of their work is hard to overstate. Even as they remain relatively unknown, this tight-knit group has produced many of the most viral videos of Black Lives Matter protests over the past year. And those images have helped create the false impression, relentlessly driven home by Fox News and Republican politicians, that the nationwide wave of protests that erupted after George Floyd was killed was nothing but an excuse for mindless rioting, The Intercept narrator said.

The Intercept also accused conservative journalists covering the riots of staking out in aggravated areas such as Portland to record and exaggerate.

It was no accident that Rosas and Ventura chose to spend Inauguration Day this year in Portland. The liberal citys strong anti-fascist protest culture, in a metro area surrounded by ultraconservative exurbs, has for years provided right-wing video journalists with a steady stream of skirmishes to record and exaggerate, the narrator stated.

Reporters were faulted for their coverage of the shooting by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin and The Intercept even speculated that the Daily Callers Chief Video Director Richie McGinniss refused to release video of the shooting right away because he decided to suppress or delete footage that could be used to convict the young right-wing vigilante.

That fueled speculation that McGinniss might have withheld incriminating visual evidence to shield Rittenhouse, who quickly became a heroto many of the Daily Callers far-right readers and wasdefended by the sites founder, Tucker Carlson, the narrator continued. McGinniss, however, told The Intercept that while he thought he had recorded video of the shooting, he discovered later that he had accidentally hit the wrong button on his iPhone and it did not start recording until after the shots were fired.

Even the one reporter in the so-called Riot Squad who does not work in conservative news faced scrutiny from Intercept for attendingat least 24 Trump rallies before the 2018 midterms and describing them as exhilarating on his video blog. And despite almost all of the reporters coverage of the Capitol riot and pro-Trump thugs, The Intercept still blamed the journalists because all this video evidence of right-wing violence was not used to vilify the rioters the way that clips of far less significant events at left-wing protests were last summer.

The Intercept concluded by scolding Scriberr field reporter Kalen DAlmeida and other reporters for contributing to an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust, making assaults on journalists more frequent.

Violence against journalists, even ones operating in bad faith, is inexcusable. Unfortunately, videographers like DAlmeida have contributed to an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust, making assaults on journalists more frequent. And this has also made the work of scrupulous and fair reporting on the politics that plays out on our streets much harder, and more dangerous, The Intercept concluded.

The narrator ends the video with a propagandist statement lamenting the fact that attention on the riots has taken away from criticizing law enforcement.

Its been a year since the horrifying cellphone video of George Floyds murder drove millions of Americans to the streets to demand justice, he said. But its important to keep in mind that the conservative media has been working almost nonstop to undercut the movement for black lives by spreading the lie that the nations main problem is the protesters, not the police.

Some journalists targeted by The Intercept report responded to the outlets attacks on Twitter.

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

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Intercept Touts Lies About Riots While Maliciously Attacking Conservative Journalists For Reporting On Them - The Federalist

The same day a troubling national jobs report showed businesses cant hire workers partly because politicians have risked inflation to make everyone welfare recipients in the name of COVID relief, Wisconsin Democrats put out a video calling for people to show us your stimmy shimmy. After an outcry on Twitter, the Democrat account deleted the video, but another user saved it:

The video shows people dancing about getting a stimmy, or stimulus check, and having $$$ in the bank and $$$ in the pocket. Thank you POTU$, reads one caption.

Approximately 83 percent of American tax filers were sent the latest round of stimulus checks Congress approved after Joe Biden took office, including tens of millions who never lost jobs in the past year of rolling government lockdowns. Couples could earn as much as $160,000 per year and still get one of the deficit-funded checks that totaled up to $1,400 per person.

Nine million net jobs were lost due to COVID shutdowns, while so far 161 million Americans have gotten checks. In addition to repeatedly sending nearly everyone checks, Congress also boosted unemployment benefits so that many Americans can currently make more money not working than by going back to work.

Studies have found that while most used some stimulus money to pay bills and maintain their pre-pandemic levels of spending, recipients are also spending a significant amount of stimulus checks on restaurant takeout, discretionary spending, paying down debt, boosting savings, and investing not exactly items required to keep people alive. Half of those ages 24 to 35 reported on one survey that they were spending half the stimulus on the stock market.

Explosions in government spending and constant bailouts that have flooded state, local, and individual budgets with unneeded and unearned cash have brought the national debt to approximately $28 trillion, and unfunded federal liabilities (the amount Congress has promised to pay out in the future above what it has required welfare programs like Social Security to take in) to the unfathomable level of $148 trillion.

Contrary to claims that government debt isnt a major problem, abroad rangeof facts show that it can have serious negative consequences, such as lower wages, weak economic growth, increased inflation, higher taxes, reduced government benefits, or combinations of such results. These, in turn, impair peoplesquality of lifeand can reduce theirlife expectancy. Some of these impacts may have already begun, writes James Agresti for the Foundation for Economic Education.

Agresti notes that the Government Accountability Office warns that the costs of federal borrowing will be borne by tomorrows workers and taxpayers, which may reduce or slow the growth of the living standards of future generations. Economists also note that governments overwhelmed with debt at these levels almost always use inflation to steal from citizens more than they tend to notice when governments take that money directly through higher taxes.

Completely ignoring all of these factors, Wisconsin Democrats instead chose to celebrate the fact that Congress has encouraged people to take money from the nations future and lose the self-support, self-respect, and job skills that accrue from employment.

This is so disrespectful to all the people who lost their livelihoods and their businesses to lockdowns, noted Federalist Senior Contributor Georgi Boorman. Its not a jackpot at a Vegas slot machine, its money our great-grandchildren will be paying back.

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Wisconsin Democrats Try To Hide Shameful Video Celebrating Welfare - The Federalist

Former President Donald Trump said comparing former President Jimmy Carters presidency to the Biden administration is unfair.

I see that everybody is comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter. It would seem to me that is very unfair to Jimmy Carter. Jimmy mishandled crisis after crisis, but Biden has CREATED crisis after crisis, Trump wrote in a statement Wednesday.

Trump then listed off all of Bidens self-inflicted crises.

First there was the Biden Border Crisis (that he refuses to call a Crisis), then the Biden Economic Crisis, then the Biden Israel Crisis, and now the Biden Gas Crisis, Trump wrote. Joe Biden has had the worst start of any president in United States history, and someday, they will compare future disasters to the Biden Administrationbut no, Jimmy was better!

Trump isnt the only one to notice the similarities between the two Democratic presidencies.

Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter: -Stagflation -Higher taxes -And rising gas prices 2021 meet 1979, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted on Tuesday.

President Biden has been in office for nearly four months and is already having his Jimmy Carter moment. This is crushing for our country and U.S. leadership around the globe, said Rep. Mike Waltz in a statement. As Jimmy Carter put it best, there is a crisis of confidence and President Biden is lost in the wilderness.

Biden isnt the next FDR hes the next Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter last week.

Twitter used Trump Jr.s tweets to spin the topic and claim that Carters presidency was marked with successes such as the former Democrat presidents Nobel Peace Prize.

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

Photo The U.S. National Archives/Falconer, David

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Trump: Comparisons Of Biden And Carter Are Unfair ... To Carter - The Federalist