Category Archives: Federalist

Canadaexpelleda Chinese diplomat early this week, and Chinaretaliatedby expelling a Canadian diplomat. The allegation of Chinas aggressive political interference in Canada is at the center of this tension.

On May 1, The Globe and Mail, a Canadian media outlet, disclosed a 2021top-secret assessment by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the nations top spy agency. The CSIS warned that Beijing is the foremost perpetrator of foreign interference in Canada and that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operatives have employed incentives and punishment as part of their overseas operations, directly targeting Canadian legislators, business executives, and Chinese immigrants in the nation.

The CSIS assessment identified Michael Chong, a member of parliament (MP) from the Conservative Party, as one of the CCPs targets. Chong, the son of a Chinese immigrant, is an outspoken critic of the CCP. In 2021, a non-binding motion sponsored by Chong to declare that the CCPs treatment of the Uyghur Muslims constituted genocide was passed by the House of Commons 266-0. The Chinese ambassador to Ottawa, Cong Peiwu, condemnedthe motion and claimed, There is no so-called genocide in Xinjiang at all.

Soon after, China put Chong and several other MPs on its sanction list. The CSIS alleged that Zhao Wei, a diplomat at the Chinese embassy in Toronto, instructed Hong Kong authorities to locate Chongs relatives in the city. Zhao sought to make an example of Chong and silence other China critics in Canada by going after Chongs relatives.

Other than offering Chong a vague warning, CSIS never shared the specifics of its assessment with him in 2021. Chong only learned about it afterThe Globe and Mail contacted him recently. Since Chong cut off ties with relatives in Hong Kong years ago to protect them, he didnt know if the Chinese authorities had hurt any of them due to his political activities in Canada. In astatement, Chong called Beijings political interference in Canada a serious, national threat. He accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of withholding the CSIS report from him for more than two years and failing to address the foreign interference activities of China.

Since March, the Trudeau government has struggled to deal with allegations of Chinas meddling in Canadas 2019 and 2021 elections. CCP operativesreportedlyhelped keep China-friendly Trudeau and his Liberal Party in power while defeating several Conservative Party MPs who were critical of Beijing. When he first came to office, Trudeau vowed to improve Canadas relationship with China and explored signing a free-trade agreement with Beijing.

According to CSIS, Chinas sophisticated interference operations in Canada are managed by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), a CCP agency tasked with helping the party aggressively and yet covertly dictate its messages and narratives about China domestically and overseas. The CSIS report alleged the interference tactics UFWD deployed in Canada included utilizing Chinese diplomats and pro-Beijing Chinese-Canadian organizations to spread misinformation about Conservative Party MPs who are critical of the CCP; donating money to liberal organizations such as the foundation for Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau, named after the father of Justin Trudeau; co-opting some Chinese language media to publish pro-Beijing articles; and spying on and silencing critics of the CCP, especially if they are ethnic Chinese who have families in China.

One of the most severe allegationswas that Chinas Toronto consulate directed a large clandestine transfer of funds to a network of at least eleven federal election candidates and numerous Beijing operatives who worked as their campaign staffers in 2019. Chinas former consul-general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling,reportedly bragged about how she helped defeat two Conservative MPs in 2021. Tong has since returned to China.

Under tremendous public pressure, Trudeauorderedan independent investigation in March to help identify and combat foreign interference in Canadas elections and its democracy. This months revelation about Chinas attempted intimidation operation against Chong only fueled more public furor that Trudeau has failed to prevent authoritarian regimes like China from undermining the nations democracy. Trudeau did an about-face byannouncing the expulsion of Zhao Wei, the Chinese diplomat identified by the intelligence report.

China retaliated byordering Jennifer Lynn Lalonde, consul at the Canadian consulate in Shanghai, to leave China. In addition, the Chinese government vowed to take other retaliatory measures to punish Canada. Given the precedent that Beijing wrongfully detained Canadian citizensMichael Kovrig and Michael Spavor for nearly three years as political retaliation for Canadas detainment of a high-level Chinese business executive, Canadian citizens and businesses in China are understandably concerned about whether they will become the next victims of Beijings hostage diplomacy.

Canada wasnt the only target of Chinas foreign interference. In 2016, Australias Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ordered an investigation into Chinas interference in his country after Chinese-Australian businessmen with close ties to the CCPreportedly made campaign contributions and covered the expenses of a prominent politician in the Labor Party. The investigation led to an explosive intelligence reportalleging Beijing has attempted to influence Australias political parties for years and there had been infiltration at every layer of the Australian government, right down to local councils.

The revelation prompted the Australian legislature to enact the Foreign Interference Law in 2018. But early this year, former PM Turnbull complained that the law wasnt rigorously enforced, despite the fact that the most active state and political party seeking to influence public affairs in Australia is that of China and the Communist Party of China we know that.

What happened in Australia and Canada illustrates how the CCP, under its leader Xi Jinping, has taken brazen actions that far exceeded legitimate diplomacy in exploiting other countries loopholes in their espionage and counterintelligence laws, infiltrating their political systems and seeking to influence and shape public opinions and policies by all means necessary.

Undoubtedly, the CCP has conducted similar interference campaigns in the United States as in Australia and Canada. In 2020, a suspected Chinese spy, Fang Fang,reportedlydeveloped extensive ties with local and national politicians in the U.S., including Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. The U.S. Department of Justice recentlychargedtwo individuals with the operation of an illegal Chinese police station in New York City, targeting ethnic Chinese who are critical of Beijing.

Early this week, Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountabilitypresentedevidence that foreign nationals, including those from China, sought access to then-Vice President Joe Biden through questionable business dealings with Bidens family members and business associates. All these cases are the tip of the iceberg of the CCPs meddling in the United States.

The CCP is unconcerned about repercussions whenever it gets caught because it has plenty of tools in its toolbox. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the CCP relies on a range of economic and non-economic tools to punish, influence and deter foreign governments in its foreign relations.

The U.S. government has been complacent and has been slow to counter Chinas political interference. Canada and Chinas diplomatic tit-for-tat should serve as a warning. Since another presidential election is coming, if President Biden is serious about defending democracy in the U.S., he should reach out to his counterparts in Canada and Australia and learn from their experiences in dealing with the CCPs political interference, especially the mistakes they made.

The Biden administration must understand the CCPs strategy and tactics and work with Congress to develop comprehensive measures to curtail the CCPs interference operations in the U.S. and protect the integrity of our elections and Americans right to free speech.

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Canada And China's Tit-For-Tat Is A Warning For America - The Federalist

Elon Musk shared a Federalist article on Twitter this week that detailed how Zuckbucks were used to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, and leftists are livid.

On Tuesday, the Twitter CEO linked to an October 2021 article, written by Federalist contributor William Doyle, that examines how Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gavehundreds of millions of dollarsto nonprofits such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) leading up to the 2020 presidential contest. CTCL and CEIR then poured these Zuckbucks into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsupervised election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes.

Notably, Doyles article examines how these grants were heavily skewed toward Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive, privately funded Democrat get-out-the-vote operation. Organizations such as the Capital Research Center have also released detailed analyses on the partisan distribution of these funds.

While Musk simply referred to the article as interesting, that was apparently too much for Washington Post columnist Philip Bump to handle. In response, Bump penned an article titled, Musk shares baseless election claim with millions of Twitter users, in which he attempted to smear the Twitter CEO and discredit The Federalists article.

This is a common way in which Musk elevates right-wing rhetoric. Hell often engage with fringe voices by declaring their commentary to be concerning suggesting its just something worth mulling over, complained Bump in melodramatic fashion.

But then Bump openly admits the purpose of Zuckbucks wasnt to help election offices promote safe and reliable voting during the Covid outbreak, as CTCL and CEIR originally claimed, but to increase voter turnout in Democrat-majority areas.

Much of the analysis in the Federalist article centers on the idea that these investments were larger in more-Democratic counties, using that as a peg for the argument that the investments were partisan and critical to Bidens success.

But that argument is easily countered. CTCLs investments were often in heavily Democratic areas because those areas often have lower turnout rates. If you want to increase turnout, the smartest place to try to do so is places where turnout is lowest. In the United States, thats often lower-income communities and communities that have high populations of Black and Hispanic residents, two groups that often vote heavily Democratic.

In trying to explain away the disparities in Zuckbucks distribution, Bump instead admits a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort is exactly what happened. While Zuckerbergs donations to CTCL and CEIR were marketed as just a good-faith initiative to ensure Covid didnt disrupt local election administration, House Republicans later discovered that less than 1 percentof CTCLs 2020 funds were spent on personal protective equipment.

The argument has gone from: Private funding from CTCL for election administration offices was only meant to help the elections run smoothly, to CTCL poured money into Democratic strongholds to boost turnout and thats a good thing, tweeted Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project.

Whether they realize it or not, Bump and the Post are admitting the main purpose of Zuckbucks was to boost turnout among voters in Democrat strongholds. Its a remarkable fact that, for once, the Post got right.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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WaPo Admits 'Zuckbucks' Were Used To Turn Out Dems In 2020 - The Federalist

From Rosa Parks to George Floyd, the left has reduced complex events to singular images that help its cause. Parks, for example, was a lifelong activist before the bus incident. George Floyd was a massive violent criminal high on meth and fentanyl. The screaming woman in the Little Rock Nine photo became close friends with the girl she yelled at, and Jane Roe became an anti-abortion activist, at least for a while. But these details dont matter. Americas ceaseless leftward march runs on reductive imagery. Poke the right until it bites, snap a picture of it, and use it to win.

The left is now trying to do this with its manufactured image of Daniel Pennys arrest. It wants us to see a brusk, racist, out-of-control white man finally, thankfully, corrected by the rainbow alliance.

Given that Penny surrendered himself, his photographed perp walk was entirely unnecessary, conducted only for the sake of theater. But not every manufactured image works out the way they want it to.

When Bernie Goetz shot four black subway attackers in the 1980s, the left painted him as a crazed racist, but he became, much to their surprise, a local hero among New Yorkers regardless of race or politics. Liberal DA Robert Morgenthau a DNC fixture if there ever was one had to charge him twice to even get an indictment. At trial, the jury acquitted Goetz of everything besides a gun charge, for which he served eight months.

Malcolm Gladwell later identified Goetz as the tipping point between hellish 1980s New York and the pinnacle years of the 1990s. Having worked at the Manhattan DAs office under Morgenthau himself the same office where Pennys fate now lies in the hands of Soros-funded DA Alvin Bragg I can say for certain that the Goetz case serves as a foundational New York myth for cops, prosecutors, and citizens alike. Even as recently as 2017, a Brooklyn DA refused to charge William J. Groomes, who shot and killed a guy on the subway, even though Groomes himself seems to have initiated the conflict. Despite being a working-class victory, the Goetz case is not seen as a Dem win.

And now this one too is blowing up in their faces. In the image, Penny looks like a superhero oppressed by a dark and grumpy empire. It has already sparked $2.4 million and counting in GiveSendGo donations, a link to which both Google and Fox News attempt to hide. Venomous headlines sought to control the damage: The Right Has Raised $2 Million For the Guy Who Choked a Homeless Man to Death. They tried different angles, upping the contrast and making it fuzzy, and making it a collage with other, darker images. They even sent in a body language expert for reinforcements.

He believes hes highly attractive. Its obvious his appearance is important to him, a body language expert told The Sun. Hes not showing fear, hes not showing shame.

None of it worked. Penny still looks like a total Chad, and everyone knows it. When I posted the image on Instagram without comment, my gayest, most progressive friend DMed me: he can choke me to death any time. Nobody is buying that this guy is an evil racist. He and his family have been incredibly smart and disciplined about staying silent so as not to fall into any rhetorical traps.

The reason the image backfired is because of a principle best articulated by Osama bin Laden: When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse. You see this same pattern replicated elsewhere in culture right now, such as in the Bud Light fiasco, as self-hating propagandists scramble to create images that arent as ugly as their souls.

Every now and then, an actual superhero appears. Theyre not super because of their physical powers, but because of their heightened image in our collective consciousness. Some criticize this mythologization, but why? Humans create demi-Gods; its just what we do. In being instantly elevated to myth status, Daniel Penny isnt like a superhero, he actually is one.

Behold the most popular movies of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. All kinds of movies, all kinds of stories, all kinds of protagonists. Then in 2000, abruptly, only one kind of movie, only one kind of story, only one kind of protagonist: the superhero.

Most people pass this off as global monoculture. Sheep love big explosions and recognizable IP, so thats what they get.

But I take a contrary view: Our love of superheroes betrays an innate populist intelligence. It reflects an overwhelming frustration at our loss of control, especially in the cities. Sheep dont turn to superheroes only for escape, but for hope too.

Western society grounds itself in the rights of the individual, yet gig-ified techno-urbanity entirely subsumes the individual into its panopticon. Work. Live. Play. All in your neat little box. We own nothing, and were not happy pillars of salt crumbling at the hands of an invincible surveillance state that packs us in like sardines.

Only an individual with great powers powers that match that of industrialized urbanity itself can save us. So Batman fights corrupt Gotham. Superman protects innocent Metropolis. Spiderman spins his web on erratic New York. Lately, we mix and match our superheroes and their cities, sampling them like our flights of local IPA.

Neelys recorded death transformed Penny into something far greater than himself: a literal urban legend. Not just because Penny chose to risk his life protecting innocents on a subway car, but because hes up against monumental forces of evil and their best weapons: the violence of the state-sanctioned drug zombie, the corruption of the Soros-funded DA, and the venom of the corporate media.

What sets superheroes apart from normal heroes? Heroes vanquish threats to innocent people. Superheroes take it a step further. They dont just vanquish the threat, they go to the source of the problem. The source is always conveniently embodied by a supervillain.

Supervillains, usually out of resentment from past wrongs, decide to take out their fury on the world by trying to conquer it. They are the final boss in a third-act showdown, the brain criminal behind the body criminals that the superhero faces in the first act. At the core of supervillain efforts always lies some half-brained moral plan about how things will be better for everyone once theyre in control, even if we cant understand it yet.

George Soros, a global citizen, never sets foot on the streets of cities he corrupts by electing ultra-liberal DAs that refuse to enforce the laws. Working-class, ordinary people have to send their children through dangerous filthy parks and subways because a random man from Hungary has decided it must be so.

Soros shares a similar backstory to the X-men supervillain Magneto, which is why Elon Musk just tweeted that Soros reminds [him] of Magneto, and that Soros wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. He hates humanity, which is something youd only say about a supervillain. Magneto turned against humanity after being thrown into a concentration camp during World War II. A Hungarian Jew, Soros is also a Holocaust survivor who helped the Nazis confiscate fellow Jews property, something he is on record saying he doesnt regret.

Even as crime rates spike and innocent people pay the price for Soros strange ideology, his true motivations remain shrouded. But they arent really mysterious at all. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one. Soros isnt like a supervillain, he literally is one. Hes driven by a genuine hatred of humanity. Thats it.

Like all fundamentally Marxist regimes, ours struggles with naturally occurring heroism. Moral flatness abhors tall trees. Historically, totalitarians solve this via blind adoration for a handful of leaders: cults of personality.

This also works in the other direction. Totalitarians form anti-personality cults toward their enemies Orwells two Minutes Hate. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a communist takeover that saw students literally imprisoning their teachers on campus, Red Guards used Big Character Posters to identify the crimes of their enemies. They were sort of text-only wanted posters put up in public places with long lists of accusations toward specific individuals. They often preceded struggle sessions.

The Daniel Penny arrest photo is an American Big Character poster. His stated crime is racist violence, but this is obvious fiction. In reality, his crime is being white, strong, and bold enough to stand up to the regimes drug-addled shock troops, on whose behalf they willingly destroy entire cities. Penny violated their ideology that protects the most vulnerable, but their real ideology is resentment, and the real protectors of the vulnerable are who they resent.

But unlike a Big Character Poster, an image speaks words of its own. In warping truth, the regime has flipped a hero into a villain. It does this a lot, and usually it works. But theres something different about Penny, just as there was something different about Goetz. They were meant to be images of fear and division, but they were transmuted into images of strength and honor.

Were naturally drawn to them, these strong horses next to weak ones. They both did something we all yearn to do a fulfillment of the hopes we pin on dreams and superheroes: First, to protect innocent people against bodily harm. Second, to stand up to an oppressive regime. And third? To look great doing it.

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Daniel Penny Is A Real-Life Superhero - The Federalist

Democrats pursued the most recent Republican president with impeachment three times over allegations he had partnered with a foreign government to influence U.S. government policies. If equal standards were applied to the Biden family, Joe Biden would be impeached both in the press and in Congress for treasonous collusion with foreign governments.

Democrats claimed Donald Trump committed treason because his son had met with a Democrat-planted Russian lobbyist. In exchange for Russian assistance with election-influencing social media memes, the allegations went, Trumps campaign promised a more Russia-friendly U.S. foreign policy.

Joe Bidens familys use of his high-level U.S. government positions to rake in millions from product-free business deals has been documented since before the Obama administration, perhaps most extensively by journalist Peter Schweizer. Last week, Republicans in Congress added more evidence to the accruing pile indicating the Biden family has been selling influence with the American government to foreign bidders for decades.

House Republicans called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate evidence at least nine Biden family members functioned as cutouts for some $10 million in foreign payments to the big guy. The nest of foreign payments to Biden family members under nearly two dozen shell companies looks like a mafia ledger.

Corporate outlets largely ignored the new evidence that would have led to another impeachment push if Trump were president. The same day Republicans called on the Department of Justice to investigate the Bidens millions in payments, DOJ arrested their Republican colleague over trumped-up tax charges concerning an allegedly errant couple hundred bucks. Democrats play for keeps, while Republicans for some reason still cant figure out what year it is.

Its been eight years since Democrats openly used their political power to upend every norm in the playbook. They filed impeachment charges on the first day of Trumps presidency. They spent years contesting presidential elections. They are sweeping elections with low-quality absentee ballots. Their cronies are turning domestic disagreement into domestic terrorism, targeting Christian pro-life moms as extremists who warrant surveillance and curtailment of online speech.

If Republicans cant figure out what era were in and how to stop the lefts destruction of self-government, our country is toast. Republican voters figured this out good and hard when the Russiagate hoax was unraveled. Why cant their representatives? Its long past time for Republicans to start using Democrats standards against Democrats until they agree to play fair.

When Democrats were pushing for impeaching Trump, the source of the fabricated dossier used as a pretext both for the Obama administration spying on the Republican presidential nominees campaign and later for impeaching Trump told Congress that Don Trump Jr. merely talking to a Russian lawyer indicated treason.

Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson testified: [T]he issue with the Trump Tower meeting, as I understand it, is that the Trump people were eager to accept intelligence from a foreign government about their political rivals and that is, you know, I would say, a form of interference. If youre getting help from a foreign government and your help is intelligence, then the foreign governments interfering.

Again, apply this to the Biden familys business deals, and Joe Biden should have been impeached as a traitor the day he took office. According to Schweizer, many of the Chinese officials who paid Biden family members were connected with high-level Chinese government intelligence.

[T]he Biden family received some $31 million from Chinese businessmen with very close ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence during and after Joe Bidens tenure as vice president, Schweizer documented in his 2022 book, Red-Handed.

Is the same true about Ukrainian payments to Hunter Biden? A 2020 U.S. Senate committee report said those illustrate serious counterintelligence and extortion concerns relating to Hunter Biden and his family.

Although the suggestion will surely prompt howls from the uniparty, its an entirely fair question whether and how any of these payments have affected Bidens foreign policy that includes proxy war with a nuclear power. What do Ukrainian officials know about the Biden familys years of financial dealings in their famously corrupt country that the U.S. president might not want American voters to know? Isnt it election interference to withhold that information from the public?

The Biden administration has committed an amazing amount of American funds and materiel to Ukraines war with Russia. That extensive backing may be damaging U.S. readiness for other looming conflicts, such as with China over Taiwan.

Americans need to know what the Biden family did and may still be doing for Ukrainian officials in exchange for Hunter Bidens well-documented Ukranian sinecure. How many of those American war billions for Ukraine that we cant trace are going to oligarchs who made payments to Biden family members?

The Biden administration is also ignoring South American drug cartels highly profitable war on the U.S. border. That war is boosted by the same Chinese government whose officials also reportedly bought Biden family influence. Funny how foreign payouts seem to manifest everywhere the United States is bleeding out.

Its farcical for Republicans to demand that the Biden-corrupted Department of Justice investigate the president of the party on whose behalf theyve been repeatedly ignoring congressional oversight, protecting corrupt politicians, raiding opposition party leaders homes, leaving opposition court justices homes surrounded, and endlessly leaking lies to media outlets. Its the height of political wankery to complain for TV about rogue federal agencies Republicans ridiculously keep pretending have any legitimacy and agreeing to fund.

Its long past time for elected Republicans to take their opponents seriously and metaphorically, feds return political fire with loaded guns. All Im asking is for Republicans to apply to the Bidens the same alleged standards Democrats cynically brandished against Trump.

Its not that complicated. Here are a few ideas in the right direction that could be refined by congressional lawyers: Tell Democrats no votes for any federal judicial nominees until the U.S. Department of Justice enforces federal law against the agitators menacing the homes of U.S. Supreme Court justices. Defunding every department, grant, and personnel member involved in suppressing Americans speech as misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation is now a non-negotiable precondition for voting on any federal spending bill.

The Biden administration will enforce federal law and deport border-crossers immediately, or Republican governors will send their National Guards to do it. Agencies that dont respond in the legally required timeframe to congressional inquiries and subpoenas will lose a tenth of their funding for every infraction. The FBI will be broken up into its useful departments, such as child trafficking and drug cartel dismantling, and those departments headquartered in red states like Utah, Florida, and Texas.

Red-state police will be instructed to refuse to cooperate with the FBI on any cases that arent of an obvious criminal nature, such as child sex crimes and kidnapping. Republicans will vote nothing else for the war in Ukraine until the Biden familys business dealings there are fully investigated and published.

Refuse to work with these people or their corrupted institutions in any way until they start manifestly obeying the U.S. Constitutions guarantee of equal protection of the laws. No one is above the law, right? Including the Bidens.

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By The Standards Democrats Applied To Trump, Biden Is A Traitor - The Federalist

Whatever your view of immigration, there can be no doubt that the Biden administrations border policies have been an abject failure. This is especially true of Title 42, the pandemic-era public health order that for the last three years, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, allowed border officials to expel illegal immigrants quickly back to Mexico.

Title 42 came to an end on Thursday when the Covid public health emergency officially ended, and its ending has coincided with what can only be described as absolute chaos along the U.S.-Mexico border this past week.

Border Patrol agents are now arresting more than 10,000 illegal immigrants every day. If you have no context for that figure, consider that in March 2019, at the onset of the last border crisis, Border Patrol was arresting 4,000 illegal immigrants a day. At the time, President Obamas Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnsonsaid, I know that 1,000 [apprehensions] overwhelms the system and I cannot begin to imagine what 4,000 a day looks like.

What 10,000 a day looks like is a humanitarian catastrophe. Put bluntly, Border Patrol has nowhere to put these people. If it keeps up for much longer, well see a string of what amount to massive migrant camps appear across south Texas think of the encampment of 15,000 Haitians under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021, multiplied many times over all up and down the border.

What 10,000 a day means is that our southwest border is collapsing. The Texas cities of Laredo, El Paso, and Brownsville have issued emergency declarations, as has New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who still refuses to order state law enforcement and military units to arrest and deport illegal immigrants caught crossing the Rio Grande, has deployed a new National Guard unit, the Texas Tactical Border Force, to try to deter illegal crossings.

Its unclear what this will entail, but video circulating on Twitter this week taken by Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies showed Texas DPS troopers blocking a group of migrants along the north bank of the Rio Grande.

Thats a step in the right direction, but as a long-term strategy, rolling out razor wire along stretches of the Rio Grande isnt going to cut it. Neither is the Biden administrations plan to send hundreds more U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) personnel to the border as part of a just-finalized new policy to process migrants within days of their arrival and deport them if they fail an initial screening. The USCIS agents will be joined in this effort by some 1,500 military troops not to enforce the border butto do data entry, mostly.

But the new Biden policy amounts to little more than a slap-dash propaganda campaign to make it look like the administration is doing something about the crisis. It might result in fewer illegal immigrants ultimately being granted asylum, but it does nothing to reduce the use of catch-and-release as Americasde factoborder policy, because it allows anyone who is denied a credible fear claim toappeal to an immigration judge a process that takes years to complete thanks to the growing backlog of asylum cases in the system.

And since Bidens new rule does nothing to speed up the adjudication process, it just means this backlog will grow faster than it was before, providing an even greater incentive for illegal immigrants to cross the border and file bogus asylum claims, knowing they will be released with work authorizations as their cases wind their way through the system. On some level, even Biden knows this, which is perhaps why he said this week that the border was going to be chaotic for a while.

What all of this reveals is that our entire corpus of immigration law is woefully defective and has been for many years. Its this defective underlying body of law that made bureaucratic expedients like Title 42 necessaryto control the border. If we dont fix the law, though, well never be able to fix the border no matter how many Title 42-like policies a future GOP president might institute.

Recall that Title 42 was invoked during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic as a tactic to slow the spread of the disease. In that context, it made sense. The last thing you want in a pandemic is uncontrolled mass illegal immigration.

But it soon became clear that ending Title 42 would risk unleashing complete chaos at the border. For as much as the Biden admin denounced Trumps border policies, he kept Title 42 in place for years as a way to manage the flow of illegal immigration long after the pandemic justification for it was obsolete.

Now that Title 42 is finally ending, we see the federal governments immigration bureaucracy grinding into action once again to manage a situation our defective laws cannot handle. Whatever the outcome of Bidens plan, it amounts to government by administrative fiat, demonstrating the ongoing corruption of the rule of law in America and the triumph of the administrativestate.

In the end, the only thing that will end the ongoing border crisis is to fix our asylum and immigration laws so they cant be exploited by illegal immigrants making bogus asylum claims. Programs like Title 42, or even the Trump administrations Remain in Mexico policy, are stop-gaps at best. To secure the border, were going to need laws that mandate a secure border, which means closing the asylum loopholes, immediately deporting those who cross illegally, and building a really high wall.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Title 42 Was Never Going To Fix Illegal Immigration - The Federalist

Following the lead of other Republican-led states, Virginia announced on Thursday it would be withdrawing from the leftist-controlled voter roll management group known as ERIC.

In a letter obtained by The Virginia Mercury, Virginia Elections Commissioner Susan Beals informed the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, that the commonwealth will no longer be a participant in the program, citing concerns about the confidentiality of voter information and controversy surrounding the historical sharing of data with outside organizations leveraged for political purposes.

As The Federalist previously reported, ERIC is a widely used voter-roll management organization founded by Democrat activistDavid Beckerthat was sold to states as a quick and easy way to update their voter rolls. In actuality, ERICinflates voter rollsby requiring member states to contact eligible but unregistered residents to register to vote.

In short, ERICs mandate has expanded beyond that of its initial intent to improve the accuracy of voter rolls, Beals reportedly wrote. We will pursue other information arrangements with our neighboring states and look to other opportunities to partner with states in an apolitical fashion.

Notably, Virginia was one of the seven states to found ERIC in 2012.

In addition to founding ERIC, Becker is also the founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), which, along with the Center for Tech and Civic Life, received hundreds of millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leading up to the 2020 election. These grants were poured into local election offices throughout the country to push sloppy Democrat-backed voting policies, such as mass mail-in voting and the widespread use of ballot drop boxes.

Analyseshave shown these Zuckbucks were heavily skewed toward Democrat municipalities, especially in swing states, effectively making it a giant Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.

CEIRs interference in the electoral process isnt exclusive to the 2020 election, however. As The Federalist previouslyreported, CEIR enjoys an active relationship with ERIC, which transmits the voter-roll data it receives from states to CEIR. Upon receiving the data, CEIR then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach. In other words, CEIR a highly partisan nonprofit with a history of left-wing activism is creating lists of potential (and likely Democrat) voters for states to register in the lead-up to major elections.

Virginia is just the latest in a string of Republican-led states to depart from ERIC in recent months. West Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Iowa all announced they were leaving ERIC in March. Alabama and Louisiana announced their respective departures last year.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Virginia To Exit Leftist-Controlled Voter Roll Group ERIC - The Federalist

Dianne Feinstein is back at her Senate perch and ready to roll up her sleeves and get to work. At least thats what her colleague Chuck Schumer says. [I]ts clear shes back where she wants to be and ready to deliver.

Feinstein doesnt appear to have gotten that memo. After her months-long absence from Congress with shingles, shes back ish. Im still experiencing some side effects, Feinstein said in a statement accompanying her return to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, adding that shell have to work a lighter schedule.

That seems like an understatement. Photos of the senator, who will be 90 years old next month, are quite grotesque, as if Getty Images asked AI to generate a photo of Sen. Dianne Feinstein starring in The Toxic Avenger.

I mean no disrespect to the senator, who cant do anything about contracting a nasty virus and aging just like everybody else. Her countenance is certainly as sad as it is startling. But since she refuses to appease her fellow Judiciary Committee members with a letter of resignation, and leftist lawmakers are champing at the bit to ram as many norm-shattering judges as possible through Senate confirmation, theyve got her propped up in a wheelchair Weekend at Bernies-style. All Democrats need is a body and an aye, and the party can go on as usual.

But this is no goofy 80s film, and the comedy factor runs out when you realize Feinstein isnt the only Bernie at this soire. Since before he was even elected in 2022, Sen. John Fetterman has been surrounded by an entourage of heartless staffers and his succubus wife who have been doing their darnedest to make him appear as lively as possible despite severe side effects of a stroke. These handicaps have included obvious mental deficiencies, incoherence, and ultimately clinical depression that took him out of the Senate and into the hospital shortly after he assumed office.

His body and his hoodies are back as of mid-April, but hes still not all there. Heres Fetterman chairing a subcommittee hearing.

Its hard to watch. But its par for the course for todays Democrats and the Washington establishment in general which are motivated far more by ideological fidelity than by competent and decisive governance. And nobodys more faithful to the party script than those who are too mentally unfit ever to be unscripted. Heres a post-hearing Fetterman, sticking with his staffer and apparently reading lines for a casual conversation from a teleprompting iPad.

Unfortunately, the worst offender is also the one with the nuclear codes and a family owned by Americas biggest adversaries. On the rare chance President Joe Biden takes questions from the press, the queries and answers are written down ahead of time with handy mugshots of the reporters who will be asking them so the bumbling commander-in-chief can appear as though he has command of the conversation. When his team takes a break from their regular lid-calling to let him give a speech, he either shouts incomprehensible nonwords, whispers zany nonsense, makes up stories, calls for regime change in Russia, or reads cues off his teleprompter: End of quote. Repeat the line.

And even though polling shows a strong majority of voters dont think Biden is mentally sharp or physically healthy enough to be an effective president 63 percent and 62 percent, respectively the 80-year-old is running for the office again. If hes successful, that will make him 86 by the completion of his second term, assuming his bucket remains unkicked.

But just like Weekend at Bernies, the real story about Feinstein or Fetterman or Biden isnt about the corpse so much as about the dudes propping it up; in the Washington version, none of the people orchestrating the ruse are accountable to voters. Like the administrative state, where Congress delegates its rule-making to ideologically motivated career bureaucrats with nothing to lose, similar power-wielding by staffers and spouses is a disaster. Whos really in charge? You never can tell.

Though Feinstein is about to join the nonagenarian club and many of her fellow lawmakers are soon behind her Washingtons mental and physical handicaps arent just an age thing. The faltering Fetterman is only a Gen Xer. On the flip side, Trump, who will be 78 by the next election and has faced scrutiny over his age too, just mopped the floor with 31-year-old CNN hotshot Kaitlan Collins during a town hall this week.

The truth is, the incapacitation Democrats have got going on in Washington right now isnt a mistake. Its part of the plan. Sure, the whole Feinstein bit didnt work out quite so well when Republicans shockingly didnt cave to Democrats demands to replace her seat on the Judiciary Committee, and their legal aspirations were thwarted. But otherwise, its important to understand: Democrats dont need good leaders in Congress or the Oval Office, they just need good Democrats and a good Democrat is any Democrat thats a vehicle for the lefts extreme agenda.

While establishment Republicans consistently screw over their own partys voters with petty attacks of candidate quality and hubris, Democrats know the best allies are any in power. Even if theyre horrible or incoherent or almost dead, theyll do just fine for holding majorities, passing legislation, installing judges, and keeping the lefts agenda du jour alive.

Just slap on some glasses and a Walkman and get them in a conga line.

More:

D.C. Democrats Have Gone Full 'Weekend At Bernie's' - The Federalist

Netflixs new docudrama series Queen Cleopatra has come under fire from a wide variety of publications, this one included, for its ahistorical depiction of the famed Egyptian monarch as dark-skinned. These sorts of race-blind castings are all the rage in Hollywood these days, from Bridgerton to Hamilton. Where Queen Cleopatra differs, however, is in its claims to historical truth. The series is presented as a docudrama, with interviews from purported scholars and historians who promote the idea that the last monarch of ancient Egypt was indeed black.

One such classicist Netflix relied on is Shelley Haley, a professor at Hamilton College who specializes in viewing classics through the lens of black feminism and critical race theory. She also leads the preeminent organization in the field, the Society for Classical Studies (SCS). The SCS has been at the forefront of the history wars the leftist quest to revise history in line with the mandates of equity. It promotes antiracist education and Queering the Past, while foregrounding noxious DEI ideology in its mission statement and blog. This leftist program is meant to reforge the past to appease the woke in the present, the opposite of doing history.

Haleys approach to defining Cleopatra as black slots into this broader agenda and was the subject of a New York Times piece titled Fear of a Black Cleopatra. Her anti-historical ideas are given favorable treatment by the authors, who defend not just Netflixs casting choice, but the claim that Cleopatra was herself black, if not ethnically then culturally.

The piece lays out the crux of Haleys claims about Cleopatra: the idea of so-called cultural Blackness. This concept is explained as follows: When we say, in general, that the ancient Egyptians were Black and, more specifically, that Cleopatra was Black, Dr. Haley wrote, we claim them as part of a culture and history that has known oppression and triumph, exploitation, and survival.

Her point is that we are not limited to considering only representations of what Cleopatra looked like or descriptions of her ancestry. We can also use what we know of her life, reign, and resistance to understand her race as a shared cultural identity.

The idea that cultural Blackness is defined as the knowledge of oppression and triumph, exploitation and survival is not only deeply reductive, but it is also so broadly defined as to be useless in historical analysis. Blackness as oppression and exploitation ignores the wild successes of African history, including Mansa Musa, arguably the richest monarch in world history. This myopic focus on the negative defines blackness as perpetual victimhood, removing agency from black figures in the past and the present. It demeans or avoids the history of black achievement and culture, ignoring impressive accomplishments in favor of a simplistic view of race and enslavement. This does black history and black people a profound disservice.

The idea of cultural Blackness defined as overcoming oppression is so broad as to encompass nearly every culture on Earth. The Russians overcame oppression when they threw off the Mongol Yoke in the 1400s; the Germans did so when they ejected the Napoleonic interlopers from their fragmented lands in 1814; Americans overturned a repressive imperial government with the victory at Yorktown in 1781; the Chinese escaped from oppression when Imperial Japan was ejected from its territory at the end of World War II; Jews have overcome the challenges of hatred and intolerance more times than can be counted. Does that mean that all of these groups are now culturally Black? Can African-Americans claim the suffering of Jews in Tsarist Russia as their own? How about the infamous Rape of Nanking? Is that going to be retconned as an anti-black hate crime? And why does this not work both ways?

The authors address that last concern, of course, saying:

To recognize Cleopatra as culturally Black is not to pretend that skin color is meaningless now in the manner of recent figures like Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, who claimed a cultural identity that was not theirs. In our society, race and racism are deeply entwined with skin color and other inherited physical traits. We cannot understand modern forms of oppression without understanding how phenotypical difference contributes to them, and we cannot legitimately claim a racial history without having lived it.

Cleopatra lived it. And its that experience, not her physical attributes, that should determine how we imagine her life.

But did Cleopatra actually live that racialized experience? Was she, using Haleys rubric, culturally Black? If one is serious about the history, the answer is a resounding no.

Indeed, Cleopatra was a product of conditions almost exactly the opposite of those defined as culturally Black. The last Egyptian queen was no stranger to exploitation, but she was the oppressor, not the oppressed. Despite her knowledge of the local language, Cleopatra was no ordinary Egyptian. She was an absolute monarch in a line that began with forcible conquest. Sovereigns in ancient Egypt were almost comically powerful in comparison to modern political figures; although the cult of personality around current American politics is worrisome, U.S. presidents dont present themselves as the literal embodiment of God. Cleopatra did, depicting herself as the goddess Isis, a fact somehow spun by the Times as part of a narrative of oppression instead of megalomaniacal narcissism. She owned thousands of slaves and could command the obedience of any Egyptian citizen. Repressed, she was not.

The authors use negative depictions of Hellenized Egyptian culture by the Roman writer Propertius to claim that the scion of the Ptolemaic dynasty was scorned and debased by the dominant culture. A brief look at other passages from ancient writers puts the lie to this cherry-picked sourcing. Egypt was the jewel of the ancient Mediterranean world, rich in natural resources, population, and movable wealth, hence the reason why the Macedonians conquered it in the 300s B.C. and why the Romans in Cleopatras day were so invested in annexing it.

Cleopatra, as the queen of Egypt, was the ultimate owner of those riches, and she didnt exactly use them to uplift her subjects. Instead, she used them to woo Roman generals in an attempt to sell out her country while retaining her own power and prestige. The well-regarded Roman writer Plutarch describes these immense riches in his book Lives, specifically during his Life of Antony:

[Cleopatra] came sailing up the river Cydnus, in a barge with gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay all along under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture. The next day, Antony invited her to supper, and was very desirous to outdo her as well in magnificence as contrivance; but he found he was altogether beaten in both.

This passage details how absurdly wealthy and elite Cleopatra was, so much so that she embarrassed one of the preeminent Roman leaders of the time with his relative poverty and lack of sophistication. She used these riches to promote her own power and attempt to ensure the survival of her dynasty over that of Egypt itself. This approach backfired, ending with her suicide by poison after Antonys loss at the Battles of Actium and Alexandria in 31 and 30 B.C., respectively. But this loss and her self-inflicted demise do not make Cleopatra into an icon of the oppressed; in fact, subsequent Roman rule of the province was less arbitrary and capricious than was her own.

Not only does Haleys idea of cultural Blackness and the Times piece that parrots this contention fail dramatically in the case of Cleopatra, it fails as an overall historical theory. It reduces an entire ethnicity and culture to the experience of oppression, both narrowing the understanding of black history and appropriating the history of others.

In this way, it serves two leftist goals: expanding blackness to encompass whatever fits a presentist narrative and privileging black scholars in discussing these topics. In some ways, this follows the model of #ownvoices in young-adult literature, where authors must only create stories centering on the authors personal identity factors. In history, and thus classics, this would privilege white, Western scholars, especially given the paramount importance of European civilization in those fields. By creating an expansive definition of cultural Blackness which, if it includes Cleopatra, covers almost anything this problem is reversed. Under this new rubric, black scholars would be the true experts and others would be marginalized.

In short, it is part and parcel of the broader equity movement, and it should be treated as such. The academics who espouse this claptrap should be defenestrated, their universities razed, and the ground salted. Or, to put it in words even Cleopatra would comprehend: woke history delenda est.

Mike Cot is a writer and podcaster focusing on history, Great Power rivalry, and geopolitics. He has also written for National Review and The National Interest, blogs at rationalpolicy.com, and can be found on Twitter @ratlpolicy.

Read more:

NYT Warps History To Support Cleopatra's 'Cultural Blackness' - The Federalist

Democrats cant stop shooting themselves in the foot on gun control. Their mistake is that they refuse to connect their push for more firearm restrictions with, well, everything else they are doing.

The Democratic approach to guns is to wait until there is a mass shooting and then demand more gun control. But the narrow logic of their argument that we should ban, or at least further restrict, the weapons used to commit the latest mass murder is undermined by what Democrats do the rest of the time.

Except for those who are already ideologically committed to it, gun control is a high-trust proposal. People keep and bear arms to defend themselves, and so persuading citizens to limit or even give up their guns requires persuading them that they do not need them for protection. But voters do not view Democrats as prioritizing a country with low crime and high social trust. Rather, Democrats are seen as the soft-on-crime party, with a left flank that is committed to insane defund-the-police policies.

When Democratic prosecutors refuse to prosecute, when Democratic politicians enact revolving-door bail policies for violent criminals, when Democratic mouthpieces insist that violent and threatening lunatics on public transit should be accepted as a normal part of life, they are telling people they are on their own. And many Americans have gotten the message; the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots sold a lot of guns, many of them to new gun owners.

If Democrats want to convince Americans of the benefits of gun control, they should start by showing they are willing and able to control crime. But they often do not even bother to enforce existing gun laws against violent criminals. The more Democratic leaders and activists tolerate crime and disorder, the more they sabotage their demands for more gun control.

Similarly, Democrats are also hampered by the mistrust and animosity they stoke. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie got the causality backward when he wrote that an armed society is a world of fear and alienation, where people live in a state of heightened awareness, even anxiety. It is not a world of trust or hope or solidarity or any of the values we need to make democracy work as a way of life, much less a system of government.

But it is not guns that have created social alienation. Americans have always been well-armed for a while last century, it was possible to mail-order machine guns. Rather, it is the culture that has changed, along with the nature of American violence we have tended to be a violent nation, but regular mass shootings are a relatively recent development.

Americans are increasingly alienated, with a massive deficit of social trust. Trust in everything from the government to churches is down dramatically, and Americans are increasingly lonely. No wonder people are arming up, including many of those who still have strong families and communities they can tell what time it is, and they have others to protect as well as themselves.

Democratic leaders and their apologists at The New York Times and elsewhere may claim to want trust, hope, and solidarity, but these cannot be established by government edicts and programs though they can be destroyed by them. A little more gun control, or even a lot more gun control, wont do the trick. Nor will Bouie writing a column or two a week calling conservatives racist change anything for the better, or even advance his goals (other than his getting paid, which is a goal every writer should respect).

The ways of life that actually build trust, hope, and solidarity are not mysterious: Get married and stay married, have kids and raise them well, go to church, and get involved in your community. These patterns of life used to be normal for everyone, but now it is mostly conservatives advocating for them. And a nation with strong families and communities, united by shared values and high social trust, would probably have far fewer mass shootings, regardless of its gun laws.

It is not guns, but the lefts hostility toward traditional values and ways of life that is driving much of the alienation in our country. And while it is most destructive for those caught up in it (fatherless children being a leading example) it is also threatening for everyone else. Part of why it is so easy for many American gun owners to envision a tyrannical government that might need to be forcefully resisted is because they can see the cultural revolution the left is waging against them.

If Bouie and the rest want some more trust, hope, and solidarity, they could start by calling off the culture war, or at least admit to waging it one of the more surreal aspects of our political discourse is watching leftists proclaim their intention to radically remake American culture with every tool at their disposal, which they press to even the pettiest of points, and then turn around and pretend they are not the culture war aggressors.

The left can, for example, try to empower every schoolteacher in America to transition children without parental knowledge or consent, or it can try to increase trust, hope, and solidarity. It cannot do both. Likewise, the left can make the case for gun control, or it can demand that we defund the police. It cannot do both.

If leftists want our guns, they should stop trying to take our children.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Continued here:

How Democrats Shoot Themselves In The Foot On Gun Control - The Federalist

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) wants to lock up public land without hearing from those barred from critical grazing grounds.

On Monday, Wyoming lawmakers sent a letter to BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning demanding agency leadership recalibrate its schedule for a tour of western states to present a sweeping proposal for conservation leasing. The proposed framework threatens to undermine the agencys multiple use mandate by elevating conservation above grazing, recreation, and development, threatening ranchers access to public lands.

Every public-lands state in the West will be gravely impacted if this proposed rule is finalized, wrote Wyomings three-member congressional delegation. Yet it was announced without consulting many of the most important stakeholders; families, farmers and ranchers, tribes, and others throughout Wyoming and the Western states whose lives and livelihood are intertwined with these lands.

Congress required the BLM to abide by the long-standing multiple-use doctrine with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA). The law stipulates public lands must be available to best meet the present and future needs of the people, which means allowing lands to be used for a variety of purposes, from livestock grazing to resource development. Conservation leases outlined by the BLMs new Public Lands Rule would strip access to public lands locked off from multiple uses.

Republican representatives from Wyoming including Harriet Hageman and Sens. Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso, condemned the BLM effort to side-step Congress to re-define BLMs multiple-use mandate.

It would empower radical environmentalist groups to restrict public-access to the opportunities and resources Congress has ensured these public-lands provide, they wrote.

Wyoming lawmakers also took issue with the BLMs public meeting schedule, with a mere five two-hour hearings on the calendar, two of which are virtual. The other three are planned to be held in urban city centers such as Denver, Reno, and Albuquerque. No state with a single Republican senator is slotted to host BLM officials over the proposed framework.

[READ:In Tour Promoting New Rule, Bureau Of Land Management Ignores GOP Mountain States It Would Hurt Most]

Our rural and tribal communities in the West are sparsely populated, spanning thousands of miles, and often lacking the broadband infrastructure to participate in virtual meetings, lawmakers wrote.

BLM manages 245 million acres of federal property, more than 90 percent of which lies in western states. Nearly half the state of Wyoming is federally managed.

A resident of Anderson, MT on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, where broadband access is sparse, would have to travel 699 miles through Montana and Wyoming to attend the nearest scheduled meeting in Denver, Hageman, Lummis, and Barrasso wrote. Someone from Powell, WY, where BLM land surrounds the community in every direction, would travel 511 miles to the same meeting.

The letter from Wyoming lawmakers comes a week after the four-member Idaho congressional delegation sent a letter to the BLM with similar criticism.

As the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) considers a major shift in the longstanding and well understood multiple-use approach of federal land management, we are discouraged to see Idaho was not listed as one of the sites for in-person public meetings, Idaho Republicans wrote. Further, we were disappointed to see not only was Idaho not included, but the in-person locations are geographically concentrated away from many of BLMs constituents.

On Wednesday, a coalition of 16 Republican senators representing western states sent their own letter to the bureau demanding the agency withdraw the new rules altogether.

Its clear that anti-grazing and anti-development organizations would abuse this tool to attempt to halt ranching and block access to our nations abundant energy reserves located on public lands, they wrote.

Barrasso, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, proposed legislation with nine other Republicans in the upper chamber, including Lummis, to block the BLM rule.

The BLMs proposed framework appears to come straight from BLM Director Stone-Mannings graduate playbook. While the controversy surrounding the BLM directors nomination proceedings two years ago primarily focused on her past history as an ecoterrorist, her 1992 graduate thesis included proposals for population control and criticism of public grazing.

The framework is also likely to face a court challenge if successfully implemented. The Supreme Court narrowed the scope of authority for federal agencies to circumvent Congress with broad-range proposals in West Virginia v. EPA last summer.

Read the letter from Wyoming lawmakers to the BLM here:

05.16.2023 Letter to Tracy by The Federalist

See the article here:

Wyoming Lawmakers Demand BLM Hear From Constituents - The Federalist