Category Archives: Federalist

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra falsely claimed there is no law banning partial-birth abortions on Wednesday.

When asked whether he would uphold a law banning partial-birth abortions during the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Health Subcommittee hearing, Becerra denied there was a law against it.

There is no law that deals specifically with the term partial-birth abortions, Becerra told Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis.

Becerra also claimed that there is no medical term like partial-birth abortion.

Roe v. Wade is a very clear, settled precedent and a woman has a right to make decisions about her reproductive health, and we will make sure that we forced the laws protect those rights, Beccera said.

Despite Becerras assertion, there are laws that define partial-birth abortions. Not only does the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 characterize it, but the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the law and its definition in Gonzales v. Carhart.

According to the law, partial-birth abortion is an abortion in which a physician deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living, unborn childs body until either the entire babys head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the babys trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother and only the head remains inside the womb, for the purpose of performing an overt act (usually the puncturing of the back of the childs skull and removing the babys brains) that the person knows will kill the partially delivered infant.

Becerra previously dodged questions about his stance on partial-birth abortions during his Senate confirmation hearing in February

You voted against a ban on partial-birth abortion. Why? Sen. Mitt Romney asked.

I understand that people have different deeply held beliefs on this issue. We may not always agree on where to go, but I think we can find some common ground, the former California attorney general said.

Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser condemned Becerras comments and said the HHS Secretary works hand-in-glove with the White House to expand abortion on demand.

Becerra can hardly plead ignorance on this topic. As a freshman congressman, he voted against the ban. This shameless lie is standard for the most radical pro-abortion administration in history. It should not be hard to recognize that partially delivering a baby and then suctioning his or her brain is not only illegal, but utterly inhumane, Dannenfelser said.

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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HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra Claims There Are No Laws Banning Partial-Birth Abortions - The Federalist

If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated for their rhetoric following the 2016 election.In fact, the last time they accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.

After the 2000 election, which hinged on the results of a recount in Florida, Democrats smeared President George W. Bush as selected, not elected. When Bush won re-election against then-Sen. John Kerry in 2004, many on the left claimed that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver fraudulent votes to Bush. HBO even produced and aired Hacking Democracy, a documentary that added fuel to the conspiracy theory fire of conversations about the 2004 results. But nothing holds a candle to what happened in 2016 after Donald Trumps surprising defeat of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Rather than accept that Trump won and Clinton lost, the political and media establishments desperately sought to explain away Trumps victory. What they settled on was a destructive conspiracy theory that crippled the government, empowered Americas adversaries, and illegally targeted innocent private citizens whose only crime was not supporting Hillary Clinton.

With baseless claims of hacked voting totals, illegal voter suppression, and extensive media manipulation, the Russian collusion hoax had it all. But more than anything, the belief that Trump stole the 2016 election had the support of the most powerful institutions, individuals, and even government agencies in the country.

You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you, Clinton told her followers in 2019.

I know hes an illegitimate president, Clinton claimed of Trump a few months later. She even claimed during an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that voter suppression and voter purging and hacking were why she lost.

Former President Jimmy Carter agreed.

[Trump] lost the election and was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf, he told NPR in 2019. Trump didnt actually win the election in 2016.

Their view was widely shared by most prominent Democrats in Congress. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, for example, said he was skipping Trumps inauguration in 2016 because he believed Trump was illegitimate, and that the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. Lewis also skipped the inauguration of President George W. Bush, claiming that Bush, too, was an illegitimate president.

A few members of Congress joined him in 2001. In 2017, one out of every three Democrats in the U.S. House boycotted Trumps inauguration. Many said they refused to take part in the installation of an illegitimate president.

Not only did corporate media not condemn leading Democrats refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election, the media were also super spreaders of wild conspiracy theories about how Trump and Russia colluded to steal the election from Clinton. They dutifully regurgitated false leaks from corrupt intelligence officials suggesting that Trump and his staff had committed treason. They ran stories suggesting that Republicans who didnt support their conspiracy theory were insufficiently loyal to the country.

Some even suggested Russia may have hacked voting machines and vote totals in a bid to steal the election from Clinton. It was all nonsense. Even Robert Mueller, who ran a multi-year and multi-million-dollar government investigation into claims that Trump personally colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin to steal the election from Clinton, found there was no evidence to support the claim.

Rather than being shunned by their peers for peddling leaks and lies that had no basis in reality, the reporters who pushed this conspiracy theory were lauded by their peers, received raises and promotions, and were given Pulitzers for reporting that turned out to be detached from reality.

From 2016 through 2020, the easiest way to achieve stardom on the political left was to loudly proclaim your belief that 2016 was an illegitimate election stolen by the Russians on behalf of a corrupt traitor. Dissent, up to and including the assertion that the President of the United States was a secret Russian spy, was the highest form of patriotism.

And then 2020 happened.

With the snap of their fingers, Americas electoral system went from irredeemably corrupt and broken in 2016 to unquestionably safe in 2020. Voting methods that were allegedly used to steal elections in 2004 and 2016 suddenly became sacrosanct and impenetrable in 2020. Whereas so-called election experts repeatedly warned pre-2020 about the pitfalls of electronic voting and widespread mail-in balloting, by November of 2020, any discussion about the vulnerabilities of those methods was declared to be verboten.

If, as I believe, concerns about election integrity were valid in 2000, and 2004, and 2008, and 2012, and 2016, then surely those concerns were even more valid in 2020, an election unlike any other in American history due to the COVID-19 pandemic that gripped the world and radically altered Americas electoral system.

Across the country at the state, local, and federal level, hundreds of significant structural changes to the manner and oversight of elections were instituted, resulting in what Time Magazine called a a revolution in how people vote. Some of these changes were enacted by state legislatures, some by courts, and others by county and state election officials. Many changes were allegedly justified by the global pandemic, although Democrats had long advocated for them and now seek to make them permanent.

The bedrock of the American republic is that elections must be free, fair, accurate, and trusted. Election lawyers will tell you that fraud is almost impossible to conclusively find after the fact, and that to fight it, strong rules and regulations are needed on the front end. Thats why Democrats and Republicans fight so bitterly about the rules and regulations that govern the process.

What happened during the 2020 election deserves to be investigated and discussed. It must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to it, but because of that opposition. That is why I am writing a book about what happened before, during, and after the 2020 presidential election.

The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect of flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while outright censoring stories they now admit were true.

The American people deserve to know why courts, without the consent of the accountable legislative bodies charged with writing election laws, were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the game. Voters deserve to know why so many in government so vociferously fought to avoid audits and recounts and hide the vote-counting process from the public.

Republicans began sounding the alarm about how difficult it might be to trust the outcome of the 2020 elections long before November. They talked about how widespread changes in the manner the country conducts elections would lead to uncertainty, confusion, and delays. They were worried about universal mail-in balloting, which led to some addresses getting a half dozen ballots for previous residents who had once registered to vote at the address.

They knew that a bipartisan commission co-chaired by Jimmy Carter himself found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in United States elections. They were worried about how lowering, or in some cases outright eliminating, standards for signature verification on mail-in ballots could make it impossible to challenge fraudulently cast ballots.

They were worried about unsupervised drop boxes that enabled third-party ballot harvesting becoming vectors for voter fraud. They worried about how ballot management in some areas was privately funded by corporate oligarchs who are overtly hostile to the Republican Party. They continued their complaints about how lack of updates to voter rolls would cause worse problems in an election based on mail-in balloting.

Republicans also screamed bloody murder about tech censorship of conservative voices and news stories about Democrats that the public had a right to know. They were horrified by a media complex that moved from extreme partisan bias to unabashed propaganda in defense of their preferred political party. They watched as a completely legitimate story about international corruption involving the Biden family business and implicating Joe Biden himself was crushed by media and tech companies colluding to suppress it.

None of those problems went away after the election. If anything, the concern grew as tens of millions more Americans saw the problems associated with sloppy elections in which it takes days to find out just how many people voted, much less how they voted.

They saw how difficult it was to maintain independent oversight of the counting process, whether in Atlanta, where observers were told that counting had stopped for the night but hadnt, or in Philadelphia, where observers were kept so far away from the ballot counting that a court had to intervene. They began to see the significance of the mad rush to change voting laws, sometimes surreptitiously or otherwise outside the purview of the state legislatures. And they saw how the media didnt even bother investigating before dismissing all concerns about how the election was run.

The fact of the matter is that the elite powers did whatever it took to make sure that Trump lost re-election in 2020. They admitted as much in a victory lap masquerading as a news article in Time Magazine that referred to the individuals and institutions behind the efforts to oust Trump as a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.

The story of how these institutions worked to rig the 2020 results needs to be told, and I plan to tell it. My book, entitled Rigged: How The Media, Big Tech, And Democrats Seized Our Elections, tells the story of how the political, media, and corporate establishments changed election laws and procedures, reduced or eliminated oversight of ballots, manipulated the COVID-19 response, stoked the violent racial unrest, published fake news, censored accurate news, and did everything in their power to make sure what happened in 2016 a Trump election victory would never happen again in 2020.

The book will include interviews from lawyers, campaign activists, and election officials who were on the ground in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and other swing states. It will include discussions with elected lawmakers from across the country, including senators and members of Congress, about the importance of election integrity.

My book will contain never-before-told eyewitness stories about what really went down in 2020, not just in the presidential race, but in tight House and Senate races as well. The book will contain analysis of how media and Big Tech oligarchs used their power to control information on the Internet to manipulate peoples behavior before and after the 2020 election. My book will contain not just interviews about the election with top officials from the Trump White House and presidential campaign, but also interviews with Trump himself.

It will give a behind-the-scenes look at election night at the White House, and at pivotal moments in the campaign, such as the planning and execution of the surprisingly successful Republican National Convention. It will answer which of the many fake news stories published about Trump bothered him the most, how the Democrats caught Republicans flat-footed on mail-in balloting, what the Trump administrations biggest COVID mistake was, and who the Trump campaign thought was Bidens best media representative. (Hint: Its not who you think.) And it will show what went wrong during the electoral challenges in battleground states, and who was responsible for them.

Rigged: How The Media, Big Tech, And Democrats Seized Our Elections will be published by Regnery Publishing and is available for pre-order now. I have no doubt that the same powers that worked to oust Trump in 2020 will do everything they can to suppress this book in 2021, but I dont care.The story has to be told.

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Mollie Hemingway Writes 2020 Election Book Media Don't Want Read The ruling class did everything - The Federalist

In aftermath of a cyberattack shutting down the Colonial Pipeline causing gas shortages up and down the East Coast, President Joe Biden said the solution is to educate people.

When asked what words he had for Americans worried about climbing fuel prices and shortages, Biden said that he thought a better-educated workforce is the answer.

Id also point out that, I think what this shows is that I think we have to make a greater investment in education, as it relates to being able to train and graduate more people proficient in cybersecurity, Biden said. I think that one of the most important things we have to do to really claim our place as the leading innovator in the world is to have a better-educated workforce.

A skilled, educated workforce and cybersecurity, Biden claimed, is part of the long-term answer because Fortune 500 companies told him that while he was vice president.

Its important that we do this and the cybersecurity piece is one I think youre gonna see where we need significantly larger number of experts in the area of cybersecurity, working for private companies as well as private companies being willing to share data as to what how theyre protecting themselves, Biden said. I think thats part of the long-term answer not just in terms of energy but across the board.

Biden also touted his administrations efforts to lift restrictions on fuel transportation.

In the meantime made it easier for us to have lifted some of the restrictions on the transportation of fuel, as well as access to the United States military providing fuel and with vehicles to get it there were places where its badly needed, Biden said.

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

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Biden Claims Education Is The Key To Solving Gas Shortages - The Federalist

I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing that it was all started by a mouse. So said Walt Disney in a 1954 television special, referring to Mickey Mouse, which brought his eponymous company enduring success. Nearly seven decades later, executives at The Walt Disney Company apparently think everything stems from race. Disneys embrace of critical race theory has turned a company created by its namesake to provide wholesome entertainment for the entire family into a hotbed of division.

Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute recently obtained a presentation given by Disney to its employees regarding its Reimagine Tomorrow diversity initiative. The presentation instructs Disney cast members to challenge colorblind ideologies and rhetoric, and avoid conflating the black experience with other communities of color, because of a unique history that has led to anti-black racism.

The presentation does not merely attempt to define employees by race and gender, or reference concepts of critical race theory like white fragility, intersectionality, and microaggressions. It goes further, actively indoctrinating cast members by telling them to examine and work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness to understandwhat needs to [be] healed. And it pits workers against each other, encouraging cast members to be accountable by flagging problematic posts on company message boards.

The presentations obsessive focus on race, racial and cultural divisions, and Americas flaws directly contradicts the image of a company firmly rooted in Americana. One cannot easily reconcile the images of Main Street, U.S.A. fashioned to resemble Disneys boyhood home of Marceline, Missouri with language instructing employees to reflect on the countrys racist infrastructure. Does CEO Bob Chapek consider America a racist country, and if so, why does the company promote nostalgia for a nation with a long history of systemic racism and transphobia?

After Rufos reporting was published, Disney issued a statement but then removed the entire diversity and inclusion program from its internal company portal.

Disneys fixation on race relations in the United States also contrasts with its behavior in China, where the company has arguably profited from racial genocide. Rather than condemning Chinas brutal crackdown on its Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang province, Disney filmed its live-action remake of Mulan there, going so far as to thank Chinese government bodies in the credits.

While current Executive Chairman and former CEO Bob Iger said in an internal training video that Disney should be taking a stand on political controversies, in 2019 he said just the opposite regarding Chinas human rights crackdown in Hong Kong: To take a position that could harm our company in some form would be a big mistake.

Finally, the presentations focus on equity focus[ing] on the equality of the outcome belies the behavior of company executives. According to the companys proxy statement, in 2020 outgoing CEO Iger received over $31.5 million in total compensation, with incoming CEO Chapek receiving another $19.5 million. If Disney wants to promote equity, does it plan on capping executive compensation at the companys median salary, to ensure all cast members receive equal outcomes?

Disney aficionados know that Roy E. Disney not once but twice used shareholder activism to defend the company his uncle founded. His first Save Disney campaign, in the 1980s, sought to prevent a hostile takeover that would dismantle the company. Twenty years later, Roy Disneys second proxy campaign ultimately led to Michael Eisners removal as CEO. As a longtime Disney owner appalled by the messages sent by this presentation, I believe that conservatives may need to embark on a third Save Disney shareholder campaign this one to sever the companys reliance on critical race theory.

On July 17, 1955, the parks namesake dedicated Disneyland by reading a plaque that began To all who come to this happy place, welcome. Little did Walt Disney suspect that decades later, his company would seek to define and divide cast members by race. Like any mortal man, Walt Disney had his faults, but he deserves better than the companys current descent into progressive indoctrination and cultural Marxism.

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It's Time For A Third 'Save Disney' Campaign To End Racial Segregation - The Federalist

Senior Editor Christopher Bedford joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinksy to talk this week in politics including the potential ousting of Rep. Liz Cheney, and how it raises the question: To what is extent is loyalty to Donald Trump a litmus test Republican leaders and Republican voters?

On the one hand, you have a good chunk of the Republican base that is more loyal to Trump than they are to the Republican party, Jashinsky said. At the same time there is the contingency of suburban voters that are Trump isnt why they vote Republican.

Listen here:https://mp3.ricochet.com/2021/05/FRH_May7_withad_mixdown.mp3

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Podcast: Liz Cheney And The GOP's Trump Litmus Test - The Federalist

Like the Schuman Declaration in 1950, the Conference on the Future of Europe could pave the way for a reform of the EU, the Spinelli Group which gathers federalist MEPs and national parliamentarians with the Union of European Federalists and the European Movement International has said.

In its appeal Our federal, sovereign, democratic Europe, the group demands a federal Europe. While the demand itself is not new, the document has catapulted it into the mainstream after it was signed by hundreds of political and cultural personalities from all over Europe and from different political forces.

According to Social Democrat MEP Brando Benifei (S&D), president of the Spinelli Group, the initiative stems from the groups conviction that the EU needs to change, and that action is needed now.

Mobilisation, organisation, participation, will be the key words of the next years if we actually want to produce the change that the European Union needs, Benifei said.

Renew Europe MEP Sandro Gozi, president of the Union of European Federalists (UEF), stressed the need to exploit the full political potential of this unprecedented Conference, and the appeal would kickstart a permanent dialogue with all the citizens attending the conference and with national and European parliamentarians.

The speeches by Costa and Von der Leyen were very cautious, especially on the possible objectives to be taken as a follow-up to the conference, for example on the revision of the treaties. We need to create a strong pressure from below. We will ask to participate in the conference as NGOs: its a tough battle, but we have all the requirements to ask for it, Gozi said.

Such broad support shows that after the EUs strong response to the pandemic, the Conference on the Future of Europe has raised high expectations in European society.

A recent Eurobarometer showed that citizens understand that the EU can be an instrument for solving fundamental problems, but should be strengthened in crucial areas such as health, security and defence, social policy where the EU has little competences and powers.

This would require EU treaty reform, something that shall not be taboo, according to European Parliament President David Sassoli.

Proponents believe the appeal may at least give the European Parliament the option to use for the first time its power of initiative on treaty reform as a follow up to the conference.

[Edited byAlexandra Brzozowski]

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Federalists: Conference on the Future of Europe could kickstart EU reform - EURACTIV

The Walt Disney Corporation has been allegedly holding extensive critical race theory training for employees.

Internal documents obtained by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute, show Disney launching a diversity and inclusion program called Reimagine Tomorrow. The trainings discuss the leftist ideas of systemic racism, white privilege, white fragility, white saviors, microaggressions, and antiracism. The subtitle of the booklet guide reads: Allyship for Race Consciousness.

Disney, which owns ABC, ESPN, Touchstone Pictures, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and other major media companies, instructed employees to take ownership of educating yourself about structural anti-Black racism as well as not rely on your Black colleagues to educate you, which would be emotionally taxing.

When Americas storied places of joy and refuge from the cares of the world turn themselves into partisan actors and political indoctrination factories, the harm to our social fabric is immeasurable, Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told The Federalist. Disney is dividing the country it once helped to inspire, inviting entirely justified blowback from the vast number of Americans it now derogates, disregards, and caricatures. I thought politicized baseball was the unkindest cut of all, but now this. As Disney and other woke corporations plunge America into the bitterest cultural conflict in memory, they deserve to feel shame, not pride.

The training modules centralize the notion of anti-racism the idea that Americans must acknowledge their country is systemically racist and eradicate any semblance of a colorblind society. The company told employees they must also work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness to understand what is beneath them and what needs to be healed, harping on the notion of implicit bias. The phrase All Lives Matter was communicated as derogatory, and so was the phrase I dont see color.

One module in the training titled What Can I Do About Racism? instructed staff to denounce the idea of equality and instead favor equity. The corporation crafted a 21-Day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge that was followed by a white privilege checklist. The checklist claims a variety of statements, if affirmed, indicate a persons privilege. This includes some of the following statements:

Below is the full document Rufo obtained from a Disney whistleblower:

In addition to other modules, employees were provided several outside resources. This included a guide titled 75 Things White People Can Do For Racial Justice that claims readers should support defund[ing] the police and decolonize your bookshelf.

The guide also claims employees should read The New York Timess inaccurate and divisive 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Streaming service Hulu, owned by Disney, is streaming a docuseries on Hannah-Joness work. The company described the 1619 Project as a landmark undertaking of the brutal racism that endures in so many aspects of American life today.

Dr. James A. Lindsay, the founder of New Discourses and the author of

This is happening pretty much everywhere, Lindsay said. Whats happening at Disney, while it looks very extreme, is actually quite typical. We see almost exactly the same kinds of things playing out in terms of what these trainings are made up of and what they include. The picture that has to come across somehow is these arent isolated incidents. This is government agencies. This is churches. This is virtually every university. This is many if not most school districts.

Further dividing its employees by race and sex, Disney crafted affinity groups for minority employees to join. The groups are titled Hola for latino individuals, Compass for asians, and Wakanda for blacks. The objective of the groups is to provide culturally-authentic insights for employees and encourage diversity, inclusion, belonging, identity, and allyship. There is no group provided for all individuals to join.

Employees told Rufo the corporation sends almost daily memos on such issues and that Disney is completely ideologically one-sided. Numerous employees concurred and one claimed the corporate environment is very stifled.

Its been very stifling to feel like everyone keeps talking about having open dialogue and compassionate conversations, but when it comes down to it, I know if I said one thing that was truthful, based on data, or even just based on my own personal experience, it would actually be rather unwelcomed, a Christian and conservative employee said.

In a video obtained by Rufo, Executive Chairman Bob Iger allegedly said Disney will not shy away from politics and should be taking a stand on identity politics issues. Iger also allegedly said the films Dumbo, Aladdin, and Fantasia are racist content. The company fired The Mandalorian actress Gina Carano in February for not displaying allegiance to identity politics while continuing to do business with a genocidal Communist China.

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Bombshell Report: Disney Pushing Critical Race Theory On Employees - The Federalist

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The Texas House has advanced legislation that would require K-12 school districts and open-enrollment charter schools to teach informed American patriotism through the founding documents of the U.S. starting in the 2021-22 school year.

The House passed House Bill 4509, by state Rep. Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood, by a voice vote Thursday afternoon. It will need one more vote before it can be sent to the Texas Senate, which has already approved the similar Senate Bill 2026, authored by state Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood.

HB 4509 would, among other things, mandate that students study documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers to promote understanding of the fundamental moral principles of the country.

Before voting on the bill Thursday, the House adopted an amendment proposed by Bonnen to include speeches by Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.s I Have A Dream speech as part of the required texts mentioned in the bill. That came after criticism that the bill initially focused on writings by white historical figures.

At a House Public Education Committee hearing last month, Bonnen said documents like the Constitution and Declaration of Independence captured firsthand struggles, triumphs, challenges and beliefs upon which America was founded.

To ensure Texas students gain access to receive exposure to these founding documents, we must ensure these primary historic sources are incorporated into the state education curriculum across all grade levels, he said last month.

But Maggie Stern, a youth civic engagement and education coordinator at Childrens Defense Fund, said at last months hearing that the curriculum should also highlight the contributions of women; Black, Native, Latino and Asian people; and other people of color in addition to the white Founding Fathers.

In a state with a growing multiracial youth population, its particularly vital that this education is inclusive and relevant to all students, Stern said. Comprehensive civic education requires more than just memorizing facts without context or application. Civic knowledge is important.

The approval of HB 4509 came only a few days after the Texas House gave final approval to House Bill 3979 amid pushback from education, business and community groups and multiple proposed amendments from Democrats. HB 3979 would limit what public school students can be taught about the United States history of racism and how racism has shaped systems within the nation. That includes limits on critical race theory. And critics of HB 3979 said some of its provisions would discourage students civic engagement.

While HB 3979 focuses on what teachers cannot teach, HB 4509 outlines what concepts must be taught, such as the structure, function, and processes of government institutions. The bill also lists the instructional materials students will be required to learn from, including the first Lincoln-Douglas debates and excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville s Democracy in America.

Bonnen said at last months hearing that only 23% of Texans under age 45 can pass the civics test from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services while 90% of immigrants can pass the test. He said founding documents make up the historical truths surrounding Americas birth, and they need to be incorporated into K-12 education.

The proposal comes after Gov. Greg Abbott asked lawmakers to prioritize expanding civics education in Texas during the 2021 session. Republican state legislators have proposed multiple bills to modify what children are taught in schools, including limiting the teaching of critical race theory and a greater emphasis on the countrys founding documents.

Thomas Lindsay, distinguished senior fellow of higher education and constitutional studies at the conservative-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, testified last month that the bill would lead to more-informed voting.

Weve got a lot of action and weve got a lot of passion, Lindsay said. We need thinkers. Think first. Learn first. Understand the U.S. Constitution first, and then you will see the stakes involved and then you will become involved in an informed way.

Michael Baumgartner is a representative of Civics 4 Yall, a student-led advocacy group at St. Edwards University working to provide young Texans with civic engagement opportunities. He said the founding documents are vital to learn, but civics education should also promote active citizenship and student activities outside of the classroom.

Civics education should be about learning the history of our great nation and providing young citizens a place to discuss policy problems while being taught efficient ways to engage in the process of solving them, Baumgartner said.

Disclosure: St. Edwards University and the Texas Public Policy Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribunes journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Texas students must learn informed American patriotism in bill House OKs - The Texas Tribune

Twitters trending topics took issue with a post from Donald Trump Jr. which compared President Joe Biden to former President Jimmy Carter as opposed to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Biden isnt the next FDR hes the next Jimmy Carter, Trump Jr. wrote, hours after a new jobs report Friday morning signaled a long, slow recovery ahead with missed expectations by 700,000 jobs added in April.

Twitters editorialized trending topics highlighted the post, branding users confused as if Trump Jr.s tweet was a personal attack of character.

People are confused by a Tweet from Donald Trump Jr., saying that President Biden isnt the next FDR hes the next Jimmy Carter, the platform-publisher wrote, given that former president Carter is a Nobel Peace Prize winner whose humanitarian record is largely respected.

Trump Jr. published another post on the topic after Twitter began amplifying confusion.

Anyone who is supposedly confused, by my below tweet should probably read the awful Biden job report out today, Trump Jr. wrote. Then take a peek at the rising prices of raw materials that were seeing and then finally google Jimmy Carter inflation.Things will make a lot more sense to you!

The report out Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows about 266,000 new jobs were added for the month of April, far short of the million jobs predicted as millions of Americans rake in more on government assistance as opposed to an earned paycheck. School closings endorsed by the Biden administration meanwhile, have kept millions of working parents home, unable to re-join the workforce.

Generous government handouts combined with school closures ticked the unemployment rate up to 6.1 percent despite more jobs available this spring than there were in the days leading up to the pandemic last year.

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Twitter Employees Confused Why Biden Is Comparable To Jimmy Carter - The Federalist

More than 120 retired flag officers are calling on Americans to rally and reject the nations excessive embrace of a radical leftist agenda, particularly the antiracism efforts the left weaponizes to suppress dissent.

Our nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776, wrote the prominent group of 124 retired generals and admirals. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.

The signatories, which include President Ronald Reagans former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, President George W. Bushs former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Gerald Boykin, and retired Army Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who is now running for Senate in New Hampshire, rail against a litany of left-wing pursuits showcased in the first 100 days of the new administration led by President Joe Biden, who has redefined what it means to run a far-left presidency.

The retired flag officers blasted the Democrats assault on election integrity, pursuit of open borders, rampant Silicon Valley censorship, re-engagement with the Iran nuclear deal, dismissal of energy independence highlighted through the elimination of the Keystone Pipeline, weaponization of the military to gaslight the public of right-wing threats, excuses for left-wing anarchists in city streets,and the recent confusion over nuclear code procedures at the White House.

Under a Democrat Congress and the Current Administration, our Country has taken a hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyrannical government, the officers wrote.

Biden has aggressively pursued this agenda in large part through the power of the pen, with no clear legislative mandate to enact a hard-left agenda given a November victory of less than 43,000 votes across three tipping-point states, an evenly divided Senate, and narrow six-seat majority in the lower chamber after unexpected Democrat losses in the House.

The Current Administration has launched a full-blown assault on our Constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner, bypassing the Congress, with more than 50 Executive Orders quickly signed, many reversing the previous Administrations effective policies and regulations, write the retired officers, noting Biden has the most orders signed since President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Moreover, population control actions such as excessive lockdowns, school and business closures, and most alarming, censorship of written and verbal expression are all direct assaults on our fundamental rights.

The group is calling on Americans to throw out far-left politicians in favor of candidates at the federal, state, and local levels who place value in fiscal responsibility and individual rights over socialist collectivism as conditions present prime and necessary circumstances for the revival of a new 21st-century Tea Party movement.

The survival of our Nation and its cherished freedoms, liberty, and historic values are at stake, they wrote.

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thefederalist.com More Than 120 Retired Flag Officers Call For Revival Of A New Tea Party - The Federalist