Category Archives: Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Charles Payne, host of Fox Businesss Making Money, joins Senior Editor Chris Bedford to discuss woke capital, COVID-19 economic recovery, rising inflation risk, and why the U.S. is the best country to climb the economic ladder.

You talk about not wanting to be American or wanting to be global and being afraid to be proud of your American roots, thats one of the reasons I think we really have seen these corporations become so involved in as to take on conservative American values to the degree that they have over the last few years, Payne said.

You can take on conservatives because you know you can grow your business around the rest of the world a lot quicker, Payne explained.

Its a stepping stone, the notion of stepping and moving up the ladder. And each rung bringing a different level notches of economic success but a certain pride and we can do that in this country better than anywhere else in the world, Payne said.

And I dont care what kind of weird survey some leftists will show you, theres no other country with better upward mobility than America. We just have to apply ourselves, he said.

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Charles Payne On Woke Capital, COVID Recovery, And Inflation Risk The Federalist 10.05.2021 21:51 - The Federalist

To the extent that Americans are aware of them at all, the Anti-Federalists are remembered as a band of vaguely disreputable second-raters who failed to prevent the 1788 ratification of the US Constitutiona document that for many Americans has become, over the past two centuries, something approaching a divine instrument.

But now, at a moment when so many of the Constitution's vaunted democratic safeguards seem to be breaking down, the Anti-Federalists' legacy may be due for a more respectful reassessment. As a matter of fact, the Anti-Federalists deserve credit for seeing the future quite clearly, and for perceiving, long before the rest of us could, some of the Constitution's most dangerous latent defects. So what did the Anti-Federalists believe? And what led them to oppose the Constitution's ratification?

Anti-Federalist thinking was complex, and Anti-Federalists disagreed with one another on many specific policy questions. Indeed, their fractiousness explains, in part, why they failed to defeat the Constitution. But at the core of Anti-Federalism was a coherent set of beliefs about human nature, the promise and peril of democracy, and how to design democratic institutions. The late, great political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams summed up the Anti-Federalists' fundamental beliefs this way:

The Anti-Federalists believed that democratic government depended on the virtue of individual citizens andstrange as this may sound to usthat government must be designed to foster that virtue, by creating the "public happiness" that grows out of citizens having an intimate connection to self-government as a collective enterprise.

Public happiness is what Thomas Jefferson refers to in the Declaration of Independence when he declared that government is instituted to secure our rights to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This is not the same as personal satisfactionindeed, public happiness requires citizens to subordinate their personal satisfaction to the public good (or, in ideal circumstances, to merge the two).

Because democracy both depended on and created this sort of public engagement, the Anti-Federalist model insisted that as many decisions as possible must be pushed out from the center to the states. Only in those smaller, more homogeneous communities, the Anti-Federalists argued, can individuals meaningfully participate in public debate, directly experience the benefits of legislating in the common good, and feel the ties of affection to fellow citizens that undergirds public happiness. (Note that though the Anti-Federalists were localists, they nevertheless were not tied to the classical model of the Greek city-state. They understood that modern life required greater scale.)

By contrast, the Federalists were far more skeptical about democracy leaning heavily on the virtue of the mass of citizens. "A dependence on the people," James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, "is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

The Federalists imagined democracy for a large, diverse and fractious America in which citizens engaged with the public interest only occasionally and more likely acted according to their grubby private interests than some noble conception of the public good. The Federalists aimed to fit democracy to these hostile conditions.

The key innovation, laid out in Federalist No. 10, was the view that Anti-Federalist localism was upside-down. Only a large, diverse republic, Madison said, could "break and control the power of faction," by which he meant a private or group interest inconsistent with the public good. First, in an extended republic, Madison wrote, it would simply be more difficult for a faction to gain enough leverage to dictate policy:

Madison acknowledged that scale was not a complete answer. Factional interest may gain majority support even in a large country. In that instance, the Federalists relied not upon the virtue of citizens, but of their representatives. Because representatives in a large republic are chosen by a larger and more diverse body of citizens, the results of elections, Madison wrote, "are more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters." Once in office, these men will act "to refine and enlarge the public views," blunting factional proposals "by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations."

So the Federalists relied heavily on deliberation by national elites. They downplayed citizen virtue in favor of elite virtue. The Anti-Federalists objected furiously. They saw the Federalists as centralizing power, removing virtue from politics, elevating representatives as a sort of aristocracy, and, ultimately, as setting loose the power of self-interest which inevitably, they feared, would usher in tyranny and corruption.

None of this is to deny that the Anti-Federalists had their blind spots; it's difficult to imagine that their program of localism and citizen virtue could possibly have worked in a country as large and individualistic as America. And yet in light of what we've all witnessed, who can say now that the Anti-Federalists didn't, in general, see the defects of the Federalist project more clearly than the Federalists who defeated them?

The Anti-Federalists feared that the national government would wax in power at the expense of the states. They were correct. They feared that future presidents would make claims to monarchical power. They were again correct. The Anti-Federalists feared that the legislature would become oligarchic. Today's United States Congress, comprised of a majority of millionaires, bears the Anti-Federalists out on this one, too.

The Anti-Federalists were perhaps most prescient, however, in predicting how the United States Supreme Court would become glutted with powerto the point where we risked, in the view of the Anti-Federalists, becoming a nation ruled by judges.

The Federalists believed the federal courts were, in Hamilton's words, the "least dangerous" branch. He argued in Federalist No. 78 that we had little to fear from courts, because they were powerless relative to the president and the Congress:

But the Anti-Federalists understood the likely role of the Supreme Courtthe only court established in the Constitutionvery differently. Those views are best summed up by the Anti-Federalist "Brutus," who, in the months prior to the Constitution's ratification, wrote a series of editorials in a New York newspaper detailing his fears that the Supreme Court would exercise essentially unreviewable power:

Unlike in England, Brutus wrote, where rulings are subject to correction by Parliament, under the proposed Constitution the courts are subject to no check:

And also unlike in England, where courts claim no power to set aside democratically-enacted laws, Brutus predicted that the Supreme Court would insert itself into lawmaking by striking down legislation:

And finally, Brutus predicted that the Constitution's vague text wouldn't constrain the Supreme Court's power, but rather further expand it. Most of the Constitution's articles, he wrote, and especially the most important ones, "are conceived in general and indefinite terms, which are either equivocal, ambiguous, or which require long definitions to unfold their meaning." The Supreme Court would feel little constraint from "any fixed or established rules, but would determine, according to what appears to them the reason and the spirit of the constitution." Brutus expected the Court would take every opportunity to expand its power to control the Constitution's meaning:

"This power in the judicial," Brutus concluded, "will enable them to mould the government, into almost any shape they please."

Brutus's Anti-Federalist account of the Supreme Court has proven far more accurate than Hamilton's conviction that the Court would act with "neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment." The Anti-Federalists were correct in anticipating that the Constitution's oracular text would license the Supreme Court to make political judgments, cloaked (barely) in the language of law. They were correct in anticipating there would be no possibility of democratic recourse in most instanceseven where the Supreme Court exercised its great "latitude of interpretation" to issue deeply unpopular decrees. And the Anti-Federalists were prescient in predicting the Supreme Court would refuse to be constrained by "any fixed or established rules."

We saw an example of that when the court reversed course after decades of First Amendment Free Exercise precedent, introducing a new formula for deciding those casesone more favorable to claims that religious organizations should be exempt from generally-applicable laws and regulations. The court did so not in the context of a case on its regular docket, but in a "shadow docket" case decided outside the court's normal procedure and with minimal briefing and no oral argument. In so holding, the court broke its own rules, which bar changing the law in a shadow docket decision. But who is going to hold the court accountable? The Anti-Federalists knew. No one.

Unfortunately, the Anti-Federalists did not anticipate all the harm that would eventually be done by our imperial Supreme Court. Most importantly, they did not predict that a political party would attempt, as Republicans did under Donald Trump and will do again the next time a Republican occupies the White House, to harness the Supreme Court's overweening power for partisan political ends. Republicans have built their recent political strategy around stocking the federal bench with right-wing judges. And they've done this with a greater goal in mind. The party can effectively stay in power even if it can't win. The furious energy with which Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the Federalist Society worked to elevate partisan conservativesby far the most consequential achievement of Trump's presidencyis all about frustrating the ability of the Democrats to do much with power once they have it.

That said, the Anti-Federalists' lesson for us is that the problems with the Supreme Court are much deeper than the politics of the moment. It's not just that the justices are too conservative or too liberal. It's that they are too powerful. That is why the Americans need to be looking back to the Anti-Federalists for ideas about how to shrink the power of the Supreme Court. Recent proposals have focused mostly on shifting the Court's composition through court packing and the introduction of judicial term limits. But the Anti-Federalists would have wanted a deeper reform. One that is focused not on who sits on the court but on creating accountability for it.

There is such a mechanismone that the Federalists wrote into the Constitution itself but the implications of which the Anti-Federalists, unfortunately, failed to apprehend. Article III gives Congress power to strip jurisdiction: a power that can be employed to rein in politicized courts and even override judicial decisions, at least when courts are standing in the way of change that a substantial and enduring political coalition wants.

The implications of Article III power are potentially profound. Congress's power over courts' jurisdiction means that it can reclaim from an unaccountable Supreme Court authority to interpret the Constitution in particular cases. It would give us, in other words, some of the accountability that the Anti-Federalists warned we lacked.

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These key defects in the Constitution threaten democracy because we ignored the warnings - Raw Story

One of the teenagers who pled guilty to murdering an UberEats delivery driver is going to be able to walk free by her 21st birthday.

Claire Huber, a spokeswoman for the Washington D.C. Superior Court, said Tuesday the 15-year-old girl will be held in a juvenile facility until the age of 21, but might get out sooner if deemed rehabilitated. The D.C. Attorney Generals Office dropped other charges in exchange for her pleading guilty to felony murder.

The killing of Mohammed Anwar in a March 23 carjacking made national headlines upon its graphic footage being released. The 66-year-old Springfield, Va., resident died after the 15-year-old and a 13-year-old dragged him while taking the vehicle. The car flipped and Anwar went flying on the sidewalk. Anwar was assaulted with a Taser. The 13-year-old girl was likewise charged with felony murder, in addition to other crimes. A verdict has not been rendered.

Attorneys in the case are not permitted under law to comment publicly on the case since it is a juvenile matter. One of Anwars family members has said the family will not make a comment until the other teenagers verdict comes in. There is a hearing for May 19 scheduled for the 13-year-old. Sentencing will occur on June 4 for the 15-year-old.

Anwars family published a GoFundMe page shortly after the incident. As of writing, it has raised more than $1 million.

Mohammad Anwar was a hard-working Pakistani immigrant who came to the United States to create a better life for him and his family, the page description states in part. He was simply at work yesterday evening, providing for his family, when his life was tragically taken in an appalling act of violence.

Anwar was a beloved husband, father, grandfather, uncle, and friend who always provided a smile when you needed one, it continues. He leaves behind a family, near and far, who cherish, love, and miss him dearly. Words can not describe how our family is feeling currently. Devastation, confusion, shock, anger, heartache, and anguish are just a few that come to mind.

CNN referred to the murder as an accident, which caused an uproar on Twitter.

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Teenager Who Murdered An Uber Driver Will Be Out By 21, If Not Earlier - The Federalist

Do Republicans have an obsession with or a fixation on critical race theory? The Atlantics Adam Harris sure thinks so. He penned an article last week explaining this supposed obsession, making note of various GOP bills in state legislatures and Congress that would prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, or bar government contractors from training that promotes division between, resentment of, or social justice for groups based on race, sex, or political affiliation, as one bill passed by the Arkansas legislature put it.

For Republicans, wrote Harris, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years. The GOP, he adds, is fixated on nothing more than an academic approach.

But critical race theory isnt just an academic approach, and Republicans arent the ones who initiated this battle. Theyre responding rather mildly, given the stakes to an aggressive, long-term campaign on the left to ratchet up racial tension, divide Americans by race, and insert frankly racist ideas into every facet of public life as part of a larger strategy to gain and wield political power.

Even if you agree, as Harris seems to, with critical race theory gurus like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, who teach that people should be treated differently based on their race, the sudden ubiquity of critical race theory and its accompanying jargon white privilege, racial equity, systemic racism isnt because GOP state lawmakers suddenly decided to make a fuss out of it. Its because left-wing ideologues decided to push it in the places most familiar to them: elite private schools and executive boardrooms.

Thats why private schools across the country are incorporating critical race theory into their curricula, ignoring the concerns of parents who oppose it on the grounds that its academicized racist garbage. Corporate America, Big Tech, and Hollywood are all explicitly pushing critical race theory, sometimes in rather ham-fisted and offensive ways. The U.S. Navys top brass even included Kendis book, How To Be An Antiracist, on its 2021 reading list (prompting Republican Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn, to introduce a bill last week to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory at U.S. military academies).

On the same day last week The Atlantic published Harriss explainer about GOP efforts to combat critical race theory, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute published a trove of whistleblower documents related to the Walt Disney Corporations diversity and inclusion program, somewhat creepily called Reimagine Tomorrow.

The documents are, or should be, a scandal and an embarrassment to Disney because they lay bare a program that is openly racist despite being framed as a program about antiracism. In a training module called, Allyship for Race Consciousness, writes Rufo, Disney tells employees that they should reject equality, with a focus on equal treatment and access to opportunities, and instead strive for equity, with a focus on the equality of outcome.

Disney is also actively encouraging racial segregation among employees as part of its Orwellian-named diversity and inclusion program, with racially segregated affinity groups for minority employees, reports Rufo. Disney employees, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Rufo that these racial affinity groups are technically open to employees of all races but in practice have become almost entirely segregated by race, with the occasional exception for white executive champions who attend on behalf of corporate leadership.

In his Atlantic article, Harris describes Rufo as the person who bears the most responsibility for the surge in conservative interest in critical race theory. That may be so, but its not because Rufo is making this stuff up. Its actually happening, and writers like Harris are pretending that its healthy and necessary, not abjectly racist.

But does anyone outside corporate media and elite institutions believe that? When ordinary Americans read Kendis declaration that, The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination, do they buy it? Or is critical race theory something that appeals to a narrower and more privileged segment of society?

It appears so. A pair of academics at Yale University recently completed a study that tested the effectiveness of various types of messaging for a handful of left-wing policies, which is common enough research among political scientists. But these researchers, Josh Kalla and Micah English, framed the issues things like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All differently to see how it might change support for them.

For one group, they emphasized how the issues would benefit a certain racial group or promote racial equity. For another, they emphasized benefits for the working class. For a third group, they combined the race and class frames, and for the final group they didnt emphasize any benefits but just described the policies in neutral terms.

Journalist Zaid Jilani interviewed Kalla and English on their findings, and they told him that the class frame was more effective than either the race or the race plus class frames. After this summer, everyone wanted to believe that you know we had this great awakening that everyone now is aware of racial equity and we need to fix it, but I think our results suggest kind of the opposite, English told Jilani.

Whats more, they found that for black voters the race and class appeals were about equally effective. According to Jilani, there was only one group in the survey for whom the race appeal was most effective: white Democrats.

Why, wonders Jilani, are white Democrats so fixated on racial messaging? My guess is that the progressive movement is simply captured by an upper-class elite for whom anti-racism is now an all-dominating philosophy, he writes. It might not sway voters to frame every policy debate around race, but it probably does impress your social cohort.

In other words, it turns out Kendis core constituency is surprise! white readers of The Atlantic.

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Republicans Aren't Obsessed With Race Theory, White Democrats Are - The Federalist

More than 100,000 fans packed Atlantas Truist Park this weekend for a three-game series between the Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies as the Georgia stadium returned the largest crowds since the start of the pandemic open at 100 percent capacity.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, nearly 40,000 fans nearly sold out the stadium both Friday and Saturday night, with nearly 30,000 in attendance Sunday.

Meanwhile, between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, more than 70,000 people broke the record of attendance for an indoor boxing match between Mexicos Canelo Alvarez and Billy Joe Saunders at AT&T Stadium. Masks were encouraged, but not required.

The previous record had stood at just more than 63,000 set in 1978 when Muhammed Ali beat Leon Spinks at the New Orleans Superdome.

On the same day boxing fans in Texas roared towards normalcy, Americas supposed parent on coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who runs the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said Americans might be as close to back to normal as we can for next years Mothers Day in another 12 months. The same doctor championed two weeks to slow the spread 14 months ago, though shortly after said the quiet part out loud, that under his purview, the world would never return to normal.

If back to normal means acting like there never was a coronavirus problem, I dont think thats going to happen, Fauci said at an April 2020 White House press briefing, until the arrival of a vaccine where you can completely protect the population.

Now that vaccines are here however, Fauci has only doubled-down on demands for lockdown, holding nothing to gain and everything to lose with the erasure of restrictions, and with it, the loss of his television role as the arbiter of science. On Sunday, Fauci encouraged mask-wearing to become a permanent fixture of American life.

Americans who remain in free states however, relieving themselves of Faucis partisan commentary have moved on while Fauci pretends millions of Americans outside the beltway dont live their lives in perpetual fear of the virus with vaccines available to those who want them.

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Crowded Weekend Scenes Showcase A Nation Moving On From Dr. Fauci - The Federalist

On the same day Facebooks oversight board upheld its decision to ban former President Donald Trump from its platform, Facebook removed a Federalist article, claiming independent fact-checkers found the story was missing context.

The Federalist article, titled Pentagon Develops Microchip Detecting COVID-19 By Tracking Your Blood is based on a 60 Minutes report by Bill Whitaker that aired on April 11. In the segment, Whitaker interviewed Dr. Matt Hepburn, a retired infectious disease physician in the army who headed up a U.S. Department of Defense initiative to develop a chip that goes under the skin. The chip, or sensor, tracks chemical reactions and sends notifications to an individual if they will have COVID-19 symptoms the following day.

Independent fact-checker Science Feedback, a group Facebook outsources many of its health-related fact checks to, claims The Federalists article is missing context. The editor, Marina Yurieva, who did not reach out for comment to The Federalist prior to her fact-check, writes that calling the hydrogel sensor a microchip is inaccurate.

Science Feedback says it is false that the Pentagon has developed a microchip to detect the coronavirus under ones skin. Here is the transcript from the 60 Minutes interview in which Hepburn explains how the sensor works:

Dr. Matt Hepburn: Its a sensor.

Bill Whitaker: This tiny green thing in there?

Dr. Matt Hepburn: That tiny green thing in there, you put it underneath your skin and what that tells you is that there are chemical reactions going on inside the body and that signal means you are going to have symptoms tomorrow.

Bill Whitaker: Wow. Theres an an actual transmitter in that

Dr. Matt Hepburn: Yeah. Its like a check engine light.

Bill Whitaker: Check this sailor out before he infects other people?

Dr. Matt Hepburn: Thats right. Sailors would get the signal, then self-administer a blood draw and test themselves on site.

It is also unclear how The Federalists reporting could be missing context when it includes a quote from Hepburn that provides more than enough context about how the sensor works.

Its not some dreaded government microchip to track your every move, but a tissue-like gel engineered to continuously test your blood, Hepburn said.

Facebooks fact-checkers determined an article is missing context when The Federalist quotes a scientist but not when a 60 Minutes report does.

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The Federalist And '60 Minutes' Reported The Same Story. Guess Who Facebook 'Fact Checked?' - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, lawyer, Federalist senior contributor, and co-host of the Conservative Minds podcast Kyle Sammin joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss how big business has become more of a threat to free speech than big government.

We were not that concerned with big business, Sammin explained. We were concerned with big government, but we didnt really see business as a threat to us because it mostly just wanted to make money and as capitalists, thats something were pretty comfortable with usually. But it seems to have shifted a lot lately.

Regulating Big Tech, Sammin said, isnt necessarily ideal, but it could be the best solution for now.

I dont like the idea of saying Lets regulate them so they dont do this, because that brings problems too. Everything has trade-offs and there will be abuses but I think the abuses are a lot smaller on that end and affect a lot fewer people, Sammin said.

If we can regulate them to the extent of saying here you have this code of conduct, enforce it honestly. Across the board, hire people instead of using algorithms to ban people. Do it effectively. Do the work. Make the effort. Do it fairly, he said.

[READ: Is Big Business Now A Greater Threat To Free Speech Than Government?]

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A Conservative Answer To The Free Speech Dilemma Posed By Woke Capital - The Federalist

Image via iStock.

DC is of course not a state, let alone a country, but Federalist assistant editor Kylee Zempel recently wrote a piece explaining why the third world country of Washington DC does not deserve statehood.

To repurpose a poetic line from former president and wordsmith Donald Trump, the District of Columbia is a sh-thole country, Zempel wrote in the conservative web magazine. Though there have been several interesting arguments against granting statehood to the District, Zempel offers yet another: Its that Washington, D.C., despite its stately marble halls and rich history, is a Third World country. Thats right: America would be better off giving statehood to Somalia.

This story brought up some of Zempels old Instagram posts, which began circulating on Twitter over the weekend. I live here. I dont think Ill ever get over that she captioned a 2018 photo of the Washington Monument. The screenshots include comments mocking what she wrote in The Federalist, and her Instagram is now private.

She certainly seems over it now. In her Federalist piece, Zempel describes appalling conditions in the Wild Wild West of Washington, citing messy Starbucks bathrooms and homeless encampments.

Zempel has publicly contradicted herself before, but in song. Her personal blogwith the subtitle Sometimes Im wrong; other times I writefeatures a song she wrote called This is Empowerment to Me. The song, which has roughly 131,000 views, is a parody of the viral Lynzy Lab song A Scary Time, viewed more than 1.5 million times.https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1388563449098158083?s=20

Lyrics to the song include, Got a uterus inside me, dont need one on my head, a reference to the pink pussy hats made popular at the Womens March in January 2017. Another lyric says, The future is human. It isnt female, which makes fun of the popular feminist slogan, the future is female.

In the song, Zempel also sings, If I need some inspiration, I just look in the mirror. She then pauses to say, Thanks, Leslie Knope. Knope is Amy Poehlers character on Parks and Recreation, who is not only a feminist, but has a framed photo of Hillary Clinton in her office and is starstruck upon meeting then-Vice President Joe Biden.

It begs the question: When did Zempel stop viewing D.C. as a beautywood and cure her self-diagnosed Potomac Fever? We reached out, but Zempel did not respond to a request for comment.

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Conservative Writer Who Railed Against Statehood for "Third World" DC Raved on Instagram About "Dazzling City" of DC -...

In his speech to Congress last Wednesday and his multi-trillion-dollar plan for human infrastructure released earlier that day, President Biden proposed yet another tax increase, this one on purportedly wealthy individuals and families. In his address Wednesday evening, Biden used the words fair share on no fewer than five separate occasions to justify these proposed revenue hikes.

Yet with his own taxes, Joe Biden didnt pay his fair share. Upon leaving the vice presidency in early 2017, he and his wife Jill exploited a tax loophole of questionable legality to dodge hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxesand used the savings to fund lavish real estate holdings.

Bidens personal conduct raises two obvious questions: How can someone who avoided more than $500,000 in taxes to fund his luxury lifestyle demand that others pay their fair share? And how can someone proposing the biggest expansion of government since Franklin Delano Roosevelt claim he supports more federal spending, when he wouldnt pay for that spending himself?

I previously reported on the details of the Bidens tax avoidance in the years following Joe Bidens service as vice president. From 2017 through 2019, Joe and Jill Biden classified a total of $13.5 million in book and speech income as profits from their two corporations, rather than as cash wages.

While the couple paid full income taxes on all their revenue, classifying most of their earnings as corporate profits rather than wages allowed the Bidens to avoid paying $513,540 in payroll taxes on their $13.5 million in declared corporate profits. Tax experts interviewed by the Wall Street Journal in 2019 called the Bidens maneuvers pretty aggressive, and stated that they existed solely to circumvent paying payroll taxes.

Moreover, the $513,540 in payroll taxes the Bidens avoided were imposed by Medicare and Obamacare, and help fund both of those laws. During his campaign, Joe Biden ran ads claiming that Obamacare is personal to meexcept, it appears, when it comes to paying the bill.

At the same time the Bidens were dodging payroll taxes, they spent significant sums expanding their real estate holdings. In 2017, the same year Joe Biden received a reported $8 million book advance, the Bidens paid more than $2.7 million for a beach house at the Delaware shore. At the time, Biden told a local paper the move fulfilled a lifelong dream to own a beach house. But in achieving that dream, Biden dodged paying Obamacare and Medicare taxes on the vast majority of his book advance.

Also in 2017, the Bidens rented a house in suburban Washington from a donor and friend, Mark Ein. While the family did not disclose how much they paid their friend, other than to call it substantial monthly rent, the Zillow website estimates the property would rent for about $20,000 per month. To put that sum in perspective, the estimated rent for that property for one month exceeds the average Americans rent for an entire year.

What did that substantial rent bring to the Bidens? A rental house with nearly 12,000 square feet of spacealmost a third more than the vice-presidential residence the Bidens vacated in 2017. A home that features a grand piano in the living room, contains both a sauna and home gym, and advertises parking for 20-plus cars. The property contains so much bling that a local real estate brokerage created a video advertising all its luxury features.

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Given his behavior, President Bidens speech last week sounded a bit richnot in terms of wealth, but his own hypocrisy. The current president engaged in a series of transactions Democrats often like to ascribe to his immediate predecessor, deliberately dodging more than $500,000 in payroll taxes that fund a law he claims to support, all to finance an extravagant lifestyle worthy of a plutocrat.

Donald Trump should have released his taxes as president, and if he underpaid his tax bills, the appropriate authorities should hold him to account. But at least Trump didnt go around trying to raise other peoples taxes while dodging taxes himself. Joe Biden, however, does rise to that level of chutzpah.

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Joe Biden Dodged Taxes, And Wants You To Pay Your 'Fair Share' - The Federalist

During a classified mission in Syria, Navy SEAL John Kelly (Michael B. Jordan) seizes a massive stash of illicit weapons amidst heavy fire and barely escapes with his life. He returns home to Washington, D.C. to face an even worse hell.

Russian operatives systemically hunt down and assassinate the few members of his unit who survived the Syrian ordeal. When they reach Kellys house, only his pregnant wife lay sleeping in their bed. Hearing the intruders, Kelly defensively shoots into the shadows, taking out several men but not before his wife and daughter in the womb are taken from him.

Waking up in a military hospital, he quickly demands one thing of his superior officer: All I need is a name. Give me a name! So begins Without Remorse from director Stefano Sollima (Sicario 2) which premiered last week on Prime Video. If the set-up of a rogue agent out for revenge seems familiar, maybe you too have seen the action-thriller films that clearly inspired it.

Backed by Paramount and Skydance, the Hollywood shingles behind Tom Cruises Mission: Impossible franchise, Without Remorse gives viewers a remix of 90s Jack Ryan flicks, Jack Bauer 24 heroism, and some Jason Bourne intrigue for good measure. Some hardcore action fans will surely cheer a viewing option that evades comic-book superheroes and flashy set pieces in the style of John Wick.

Yet, even with charismatic leading man Jordan, two memorable action scenes that show where they spent the eight-figure budget, and a bold third-act plot twist, Without Remorse ends up being less than the sum of its parts. Audiences have seen this before, and usually on a grander scale.

Filmmakers sought to ground this action flick in reality rather than invent a new James Bond-style franchise, yet some real-world context comes across as shallow and unrealistic.

(minor spoilers ahead)

Mirroring aspects of fictional spies like Ethan Mission Impossible Hunt, Navy SEAL Kelly carries the film as the exceptional agent-marksman-fighter who can be implicitly trusted.

Following his near-death injuries, his superior officer Karen Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith) implores the Secretary of Defense: It is my opinion that Senior Chief Kelly is not in the right state of mind to be in the field right now. But anyone who has seen Jason Bourne or Jack Bauer on-screen knows this similar hero wont be sidelined.

Reportedly, Jordan did most of his own stunts which enables action scenes to proceed efficiently without cuts. It reflects director Sollimas approach to the story. Reality, I feel, is much more interesting than fiction, he said in a recent interview. I dont like superheroes (and) action detached from reality. I like heroes, a human being that is pushed over his limit.

To their credit Jordan is also a producer on the film two highlight action scenes emerge organically from the plot rather than the far too typical action-flick contrivance for something cool to just happen. In the first of several off-book actions, Kelly stalks the Russian Embassy and maneuvers to interrogate a key figure. The two men face-off in a burning vehicle, lending this sequence a ticking-clock urgency.

The other standout set-piece occurs when the Kelly-led team heads to Russia on a covert flight, which comes under fire and crashes into the ocean. With Kelly submerged underwater and struggling to save his fellow agents, it has a visceral tension that signals the elaborate practical effects at play here, with CGI kept to a minimum. A later sequence using similar techniques shocks viewers with its sudden turn.

Isolated scenes in Without Remorse clearly work, making it a decent option for background viewing. Yet the film lacks grounding in depicting consequences and military chain-of-command while production design feels cheaper than it should. A Navy SEAL executing an embassy official with multiple witnesses outside the D.C. airport would not likely go quickly back out into the field for starters.

The film features an incredibly involved secretary of defense, played by Guy Pearce, who personally assigns Kelly to his mission. Its strange to see a man of such an elevated position show up in various claustrophobic rooms to issue directives.

As to production design, compare the films opening depiction of bombed-out Syria, clearly shot on a studio backlot, with the detailed scope of gritty Netflix military drama Mosul. While significant portions of this movie, ostensibly set in Russia, were filmed in Germany, viewers would barely know it from how locations are used. Action scenes often occur in poorly lit hallways and back alleys. This might reflect an attempt at realism the director previously worked in TV news but if viewers cannot see much, it doesnt connect.

Renowned military spy-genre author Tom Clancy released his blockbuster novel Without Remorse in 1993, and within months the film rights were snatched up. It took almost 30 years for this movie to release, with a script little resembling the original story (Jordans character given the alias John Clark by the end was previously played decades ago by Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber).

Specifically depicting covert missions, recent Oscar winners Zero Dark Thirty and even Argo show how its possible to balance applicable real-world military context with the demands of action-thriller tropes. Truth be told, even Jordans villainous turn as Erik Killmonger in the superhero blockbuster Black Panther carries the residue of real-world geopolitical conflicts better than this Clancy-inspired flick.

In a sequel teaser that closes Without Remorse, undercover spy Clark expresses his intent to coalesce international agents into the counter-terrorist unit Rainbow Six known in popular culture as a best-selling video game franchise. With this, producers tip their hand that perhaps gamers were the movies target audience all along.

By ending two hours of supposedly grounded action by teasing an Avengers-style team-up, some confused viewers will doubtless feel a little remorse.

Rated R for violence, Without Remorse is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Josh Shepherd covers culture, faith, and public policy for several media outlets including The Stream. His articles have appeared in Christianity Today, Religion & Politics, Faithfully Magazine, Religion News Service, and Providence Magazine. A graduate of the University of Colorado, he previously worked on staff at The Heritage Foundation and Focus on the Family. Josh and his wife live in the Washington, D.C. area with their two children.

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Relying On A Rogue Covert Agent, 'Without Remorse' Plays It Too Safe The Federalist juuri nyt - The Federalist