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Three hundred emails and more than 50 phone calls in just eight weeks: either I had been targeted by a spam factory, or someone desperately needed my help.

It was a cry for help, from a young man who is too much like me. I fell for one of the biggest medical frauds in history in April 1983 when I agreed to what they call sex change surgery.

This young man was in his mid-20s and, in the spring of 2021, concluded that he had one great hope in life: to be a husband and father with a family of his own. For him lets call him Adrian that conclusion was not easily reached. Sexually abused as a child, diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and assailed with relentless post-traumatic stress disorder, his life has been hard.

His mother recently passed; his father rejected him after his forays into drugs, homelessness, and gender-confused behaviors; his older brother died only months ago. Adrians life had been in deep despair for some time.

Then came an unexpected answer: doctors and therapists told him his mental chaos was driven by gender dysphoria. Swiftly following that diagnosis, the doctors and therapists affirmed his social transition to female and prescribed feminizing hormones. His rebirth into a trans identity was praised and celebrated by new circles of friends.

But changing behavior and dosing hormones didnt help. There was a next step, and he took it. Making no effort to address his multiple, serious psychiatric disorders, one of Americas largest health-care providers sent him to the surgeons who, after a brief consultation, assured him that excising his healthy organs and fabricating female-appearing genitalia would resolve his mental distress.

That was March 2021. A scant five months later, he reached out to me, extremely upset, and wanting to restore what had been inalterably taken from him. All I want is to be a husband and a father, he said, I want to detransition.

His hundreds of emails and phone calls were one extended plea to restore his male reality. It resonated painfully with my own experience of suffering regrettable, unnecessary surgery. Yet having successfully gone back to life as a male allowed me to provide comfort and encouragement to Adrian that his life, too, can get better, although detransitioning is neither easy nor quick.

When I agreed to so-called sex change surgery in 1983, I had suffered 25 years of psychological distress, confused about my gender identity. Twenty-five years and no escape, until I sought out the advice of top experts in the novel field of gender identity, a surgeon and a gender therapist. They assured me that realigning my male body to confirm my female feelings would heal my broken psyche.

This promise of a medical miracle was incredibly encouraging. But its reality played out differently: it took me eight years living as Laura to rediscover the truth. Sex is who I really am; gender is simply a feeling. No hormones, no surgery, and no feeling will ever be strong enough to undo the truth of being irrevocably male or female, which is established at conception.

The promise of being a true woman was a lie; the promise of improved mental health was fiction. The day I returned to understanding that I was a man began a long journey back to objective reality.

Psychosis and despair dogged me for much of that time. The physical toll and complications of the sex change surgery wore at me. Yet I would not relent in restoring reality as best I could. With the grace of a good woman who became my wife and a God who would not leave my side, today I am a sound and healthy male.

I wish that my story and suffering were unique. But they are not, and for many years my role has shifted to helping others detransition from a misperceived gender identity and to restore a life grounded in their male or female reality.

These surgeries amount to fraud in so many ways. Medical doctors and surgeons have never objectively proven the effectiveness of any gender-affirming technique in relieving the mental stress termed gender dysphoria of a trans-identifying person.

For Adrian, the future it offered was a fraud. Nothing was said about his impending, permanent sterility, or the true burdens and impacts of having to take cross-sex hormones for the rest of his life. No effort was made to deal with the mental health issues detected and diagnosed by the providers own staff before clearing him for surgery.

If this sounds like malpractice to you, it sounds like it to me, too. Thankfully, Adrian is now working with an attorney to gain justice. But Adrian hopes for more than that that exposing the dangerous, ineffective treatments to the public eye and legal liability will protect the next Adrian, or the next Laura, from making the mistake of a lifetime.

That mistake was believing the doctors tale that counterfeit womanhood would be a real solution. And counterfeit it is. Adrians breast implants are purely cosmetic; they will never serve the motherly function of breastfeeding. His bottom surgery is no more a gateway to a womb and new life than a cul-de-sac is a freeway on-ramp. Where once was a man with the great hope of fathering and raising a child, surgeons left a faux woman lacking any capacity to procreate.

Adrian and I are scarcely alone in having erred so deeply, been misled so wildly, and working so hard to restore our true selves after suffering devastating gender affirmation surgery. When I wrote Trans Life Survivors, I had to sift through hundreds of similar, agonizing stories to focus on a manageable number of 30 detransitioners stories.

Thousands of sex change regretters like Adrian are not counted in the medical literature. No regret database exists where regretters officially can make their complaints known to researchers or even to their own medical providers.

Medical researchers say regret is rare, based on junk science. They fail to disclose that up to 90 percent of trans-identifying people included in research studies have been lost to follow-up, according to the book Principles of Transgender Medicine and Surgery. Any conclusion about the percentage who regret is based on the 10 percent or so that could be found: hardly a meaningful number.

Consider this: my wife and I have spoken directly to, exchanged emails with, and sat directly across from thousands of sex-change regretters. Adrian is just one among the thousands I have had the pleasure of knowing personally. Not one has ever been included in any systematic, rigorous research.

Why do so many sex change regretters contact me? Its because I was among the first to speak out through my website sexchangeregret.com and ask others for their stories. More than 2 million visitors in the last seven years have come to the website to read the stories of sex-change regret.

We thought we were following the science to find healing, not knowing that gender identity ideology is unhinged from sound, controlled, reliable research. Now we know better. With Adrian and others courageously seeking not just personal healing but reform through the legal system, there is hope that these wayward, dangerous transgender treatments will soon fall away into a dark corner of history.

If you, like Adrian and myself, regret your so-called transition, feel you were misled by the idea, and want to detransition, or even file a medical malpractice case against a medical provider or therapist, drop me a note at sexchangeregret@yahoo.com and we will do all we can to help you get your life back. Just remember you do indeed count with me.

Walt Heyer is an accomplished author and public speaker with a passion for mentoring individuals whose lives have been torn apart by unnecessary gender-change surgery.

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He Wanted A Family. Trans-Crazed Doctors Left Him Hopeless And Sterile - The Federalist

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the worlds ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a meritocracy strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expertor, like me, just someone who reads and has common sensepredicted this false cure would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a limited hangout. Thats admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.

Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled Americas Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).

CNNs Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable mental health crisis from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored public health experts at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that Covid zero isan impossibility and the CDC has turned into a punchline.

Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had blood on its hands for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.

Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and theyre trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.

Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.

The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC, he tweeted.

Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the viruss spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit, he noted in the article.

No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?

Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites demanded Covid response?

Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans civil rights, human lives, and the worlds future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.

All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.

The corporate lefts morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.

Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the worlds future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.

All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education experts and leaders who didnt spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, thats basically all of them.

Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they dont want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.

Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health experts the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nations children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.

These experts and leaders have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.

For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling brownouts of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didnt feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.

After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It wont be limited to schools, either.

If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that dont serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power theyve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.

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Those Who Brutalized Children To Grab Power Aren't Experts, They're Evil - The Federalist

Nothing can separate the geniuses behind Reno 911 from their own brilliance. From Bush to Biden, every iteration of the show is consistently hilarious. Reno 911!: The Hunt For QAnon extends the franchises long record of greatness, and thats despite todays crippling pressures of groupthink.

Few comedic offerings have mocked the absurdity of post-Obama politics with much success. Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a holdover from the Bush era, which explains its ability to skewer right and left without forcing some vapid and ritualistic partisan endorsement. Reno 911! premiered two years earlier, all the way back in 2003, lampooning both sides of the culture wars just as they began congealing. The Q-centric film on Paramount+ retains that strength at a time when most comedy writers feel compelled to couch satire of the left with cheap signals of their progressivism.

The Hunt for QAnon also retains another key feature of the show from its Comedy Central days. Unlike most modern comedy, Reno (and Sunny) is perfectly comfortable as satire. Its absurd, its offensive, its crass, and its not going to take you on an emotional journey.

The Hunt For QAnon relies on some easy tropes and swings lazily at some low-hanging fruit, but the grand Q conspiracy, for all its insanity, is objectively hilarious. It always should have been seen as such, instead of breathlessly treated as a threat to national security, which helped the web of theories metastasize into something bigger.

Writers Robert Ben Garant, Keri Kenney, and Thomas Lennon (who you know as Junior, Wiegel, and Dangle) let us relax and see the grifty Q movement for what it isa collection of crazies, cynics, and disaffected people looking to make sense of a bizarre world.

Spoilers ahead.

The moment its clear they still get it comes when a Q cruise the officers are on turns out to be absolutely loaded with undercover law enforcement. Basically nobody in our political establishment or popular culture concedes this is a real part of the narrative. But, as always, Reno 911! is here to save the day.

Like Reno 911!: Miami, The Hunt For QAnon is a low-budget, low-logic romp, casting the shows best guest stars in new roles, taking the characters out of their usual environment into something even stranger. Its just fun. Its not trying to be anything other than fun. Doing that and doing it well is a lost art.

Even Quibi couldnt dull the spirit of Reno 911! When a new, bite-sized version of the show premiered on Jeffrey Katzenbergs ill-fated streamer, it was like the team hadnt missed a beat. The same is true of The Hunt For QAnon.

Given all the time elapsed since the show first hit the airwaves, the consistency of the humor and the characters is absolutely remarkable. Nothing from new formats, the politics of the Trump era, or the pressures of the Biden era has made so much as a dent in the quality of Reno 911! Thats pretty cool.

While I do have a very legitimate complaint about Terrys absence from the movie, it harkens to a freer time in comedy and culture, where 1) generally liberal comedians felt comfortable breaking boundaries and mocking everything that deserved mockery and 2) people put money behind comedy for the sake of comedy, not comedy delivered with a half-baked emotional subplot. If streamers can fund these niche projects to lure niche audiences, the next step is to make sure more artists are willing to make them.

Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young Americas Foundation. Shes interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including Fox News Sunday, Media Buzz, and The McLaughlin Group. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center and a visiting fellow at Independent Women's Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.

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'Reno 911!: The Hunt For QAnon' Is A Work Of Art - The Federalist

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosis January 6 Commission was supposed to help Democrats hold onto their slim majority during tough 2022 midterm elections. Instead, it stumbled out of the gate, failed to gain legitimacy among the public, and has been plagued with serious legal and ethical problems.

Pelosis decision to politically exploit the riot at the Capitol was a no-brainer. Democrats nearly lost the chamber in 2020 when Democrats took control of the Senate and presidency. The presidents party almost always loses significant numbers of House seats during midterm elections. The only time that didnt happen in recent history was 2002, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Pelosi understandably felt her best bet to preserve power was, with a massive assist from left-wing media, to somehow turn disgruntled Donald Trump supporters riot at the Capitol into the next 9/11.

There were massive problems with the scheme. For one thing, Republicans had immediately and vociferously denounced the riot. This was a far cry from the Summer of Violence, when Democrats and their media enablers cheered as leftist groups destroyed sectors of cities throughout the country, resulting in some 15 times more injured police officers, 23 times as many arrests, and estimated damages in dollar terms up to 1,300 times more costly than those of the Capitol riot.

Democrats did not condemn these serious and lengthy attacks on the White House, federal courthouses, police buildings, private businesses, and homes. Instead, they joined with the rioters in calling for the defunding of police and other radical measures.

The riots were the result of a deeply destructive lie, pushed by top Democrats, that the country and its policing are irredeemably evil and racist. Whats more, any and all attempts to quell the siege of federal buildings were condemned in the most hysterical terms by Pelosi and other Democrats.

Kamala Harris, then a senator from California and the Democrats vice-presidential nominee, supported bailing out rioters who destroyed much of Minneapolis. Pelosi pooh-poohed the destruction of federal statues and historical markers. Republicans had consistently opposed political violence, beginning in the summer of 2020, but Democrats had not.

Still, the plan might have worked had Pelosi put together a decent committee. Yet she made several critical errors if she hoped it would be taken seriously.

Consider, first, how Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy managed a similarly important committee with a confidence that Pelosi has lacked.

Democrats threw together their first impeachment of President Trump in 2019 after their long-promised Russia collusion impeachment fell apart due to lack of evidence. Democrats and their media enablers had been claiming for years that Trump was an illegitimate president, and some Republicans had helped them in their general efforts to oust him. McCarthy had a difficult task, knowing that Republican voters werent nearly so weak as some of their leaders and would desert the party if it helped Democrats impeach President Trump.

McCarthy was constrained by Democrats avoidance of the Judiciary Committee as the venue for the impeachment investigation. Pelosi was concerned that Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, didnt have what it would take to run impeachment. Impeachment was instead run through the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, then led by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

That committee included a few Republican members known for opposing Trump, such as Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas. He and Mike Conaway, also of Texas, had already announced they werent running again. Some were urging McCarthy to remove Hurd and replace him with someone else. But McCarthy let everyone who wanted stay, while also encouraging any members who enjoyed performing oversight of the intelligence community but didnt want to take part in an impeachment circus to step away temporarily. When Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Arkansas, graciously agreed to such a move, McCarthy replaced him with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

Even that choice showed McCarthys confidence, since both McCarthy and Jordan had run for the top leadership spot not long prior. Jordan had also successfully helped block McCarthy from becoming speaker a few years prior. But once McCarthy was made Republican leader, he made Jordan the top Republican on the Houses Oversight and Reform Committee, even over the objections of his supporters on the Steering Committee.

The diverse Republican group on the Intelligence Committee ran an effective opposition, even with Schiff and Pelosi manipulating the proceedings for maximum gain. In the end, Republicans held together, with not a single member of the conference voting to impeach Trump over his phone call with the Ukraine president. It was significant that conservatives and moderates all agreed the charges didnt pass muster. In the Senate, only Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah fell for the impeachment trial as led by Schiff, leading to Trumps first acquittal.

By contrast, Pelosis roster management has been something of a disaster.

Chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi is not even pretending to aim for impartiality and is not well versed in due process. He filed a lawsuit against Trump months before Pelosi chose him as her chairman. And he recently told rabid MSNBC conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow that if you invoke your constitutional rights against being forced to testify, you are part and parcel guilty of crimes.

Pelosi picked Schiff for the committee despite or perhaps because of his years of fabulism and lies concerning the Russia collusion hoax. Schiff falsely claimed for years that he had secret evidence that Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, leaked fake Donald Trump, Jr. emails, fabricated the transcript of a 2019 phone call between former President Donald Trump and Ukraines president, and lied about his interactions with the so-called whistleblower behind House Democrats first impeachment of Trump.

Far from protecting members from the politicized committee, Pelosi also harmed a few vulnerable members by putting them on it. Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Florida, was viewed as a rising star in the party, even being floated in May as a tough potential opponent for Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. But a few weeks ago, she announced she would not even try to win re-election for her House seat.

Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia is also facing a tough re-election race, in a district the Republican governor-elect just won. Her seat is being targeted by Republicans. Being part of a uniparty probe with ethical problems can not be helping.

Pelosis fatal error, however, was blowing up her own committee by taking what she herself admitted was the unprecedented step of removing the Republican ranking member and another top member from it. Pelosi said that she would not allow Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, a distinguished Afghanistan veteran and leader of the Republican Study Committee, from serving. She also banned Jordan, now ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.

Pelosi later claimed the members concerns with the integrity of the 2020 election were the reason. But that made no sense, since she appointed Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, and he objected to Trumps election in 2017. Pelosi herself objected to President George W. Bushs election in 2004 and said there was no question that the 2016 election was hijacked.

The resolution establishing the committee requires the committee to follow House rules on the ranking member and minority party representation. But since Pelosi removed the ranking member, its subpoena and deposition activities are at best questionable, and at worst illicit.

Worse, the committee has been falsely claiming to witnesses to have ranking representation. Pelosis hand-selected co-chair is Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who is expected to lose her re-election bid in a few months. The Republican Party of Wyoming does not recognize her as a member, and she lost her Republican leadership position last year because of her vindictive obsession with fighting Trump, whose less interventionist foreign policy she regularly opposed during his time in office.

Known for being a primary pusher of the false Russian bounties claim, Cheney has falsely been presented as the ranking member of the committee. She is not. She was chosen even before the Republican-appointed members were removed by Pelosi.

After Pelosi removed the choices of the Republican conference, she added another hand-selected Republican to represent her Democratic conference. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, also announced he would decline to run for re-election, rather than face defeat from his voters. No Republican-appointed member serves on the committee.

Pelosi wanted to run the commission as a star chamber, and thats precisely how its being run. Its being used to persecute political opponents, violate due process, and obtain the private communications of Republican members, citizens, and journalists. It has been exposed for repeatedly fabricating evidence. And Pelosi herself has blocked the release of evidence implicating her office in mishandling security at the Capitol.

Pelosi is expected to step down from Congress following her lame-duck term and expected loss of the majority in November. Her handling of her J6 Committee shows she has lost her leadership skills and lacks the confidence necessary to run such a political operation.

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Pelosi Owns The J6 Commission, And That's Why It Failed - The Federalist

House Democrats appear to be making up more stuff about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in whats become a routine practice for their latest hoax.

Last week on the House floor, Maryland Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin read a text message sent to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows purportedly from a House lawmaker to overthrow President Joe Bidens electoral college majority.

HEREs an AGGRESSIVE STRATEGY, the text read. Why can t [sic] the states of [Georgia] [North Carolina] [Pennsylvania] and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS.

Raskin later retracted his initial attribution to House lawmaker, with a spokesman for the congressman telling CNN it was a mistake. Anonymous sources told the network that it was, as CNN described it, an inadvertent error.

CNN reported that the text likely came from former Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry, whose phone number allegedly matched the number provided by the Select Committee on Jan. 6. The Federalist has not been able to independently verify that the text came from the former governor and Trumps energy secretary, a spokesman for whom did not respond to The Federalists inquiries.

Neither the offices for Raskin nor Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the Select Committee, immediately responded to The Federalists request for comment.

The apparent fabrication comes on the heels of The Federalist reporting last week that California Rep. Adam Schiff was caught doctoring a text message to Meadows from Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan.

The text exchange, which Schiff said exposed a lawmaker pressing the vice president to unilaterally deny certification of the electoral college votes as unconstitutional, actually came from Washington attorney and former Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz. It was merely forwarded by the Ohio congressman.

The message, which Schiff took out of context with added punctuation to make it appear complete and a cooked-up graphic to illustrate it, was part of a four-page document that outlined the legal reasons behind Vice President Mike Pences authority to object to electoral certification from a handful of states. The document waspublished publiclyahead of Jan. 6 on everylegalvote.com.

The Jan. 6 Committee laterconfirmedThe Federalists reporting and admitted that the messages were manipulated.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosis hand-picked vice-chair of the Select Committee on Jan. 6, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, also fabricated a timeline last week to indict President Donald Trump as complicit in Capitol chaos.

Speaking in a prime-time performance on Dec. 13, Cheney went after Trump for waiting 187 minutes to act on the riot when action by our president was required, indeed essential, and compelled by his oath to our Constitution. An actual examination of the days events, however, reveals no such delay. The outgoing president made an online statement calling for peace within 25 minutes of the first building break-in.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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Jan. 6 Committee Cooks Up Another Misleading Text To Demonize GOP - The Federalist

President Joe Biden is now faced with the same issues that plagued the final year of the Trump presidency, only this time the president had 12 months to prepare.

On Tuesday, Biden addressed reporters on the administrations efforts to ramp up testing as the nation confronts a new wave of the coronavirus pandemic introduced by the Omicron variant.

This is not March of 2020, Biden said. Two hundred million people are vaccinated. Were prepared; we know more.

Except, just as abysmal testing at the surprise onset of the pandemic nearly two years ago was billed as a failure of the Trump administration, poor capability of meeting testing demand today is back in the headlines.

At the White House, Biden announced the military deployment of 1,000 medical professionals to coincide with construction of new vaccination and testing sites and a bulk order of 500 million rapid COVID-19 tests that would begin distribution in January.

The president also continued to scapegoat the unvaccinated as purveyors of the pandemic, despite infection in vaccinated people who continue to spread the virus.

The presidents speech was less reassuring of the 79-year-old presidents capacity to deliver on promises to manage the coronavirus. After fumbling through the brief address, Biden pivoted to questions seemingly out of nowhere.

Let me answer some questions, the president said, abruptly concluding his remarks mid-sentence.

Biden was peppered with questions surrounding the administrations failure to prepare for a COVID surge that would require the radical expansion of rapid testing.

Public health officials have been saying for months you need to surge rapid tests for just this moment, said CNNs Phil Mattingly. Is it a failure that you dont have an adequate amount of tests for everyone to be able to get one if they need one right now?

Biden explained the shortage as a consequence of the coronavirus spreading so rapidly.

It just happened almost overnight, just in the last month, Biden said, 14 months after the president hinged his entire candidacy on shutting down the virus. Biden entered office with two effective vaccines immunizing 1.3 million Americans a day.

PBS Reporter Yamiche Alcindor pressed the president to offer a message to Americans who are trying to get tested now, and who are are not able to get tested and who are wondering what took so long to ramp up testing.

Cmon, what took so long? said Biden. What took so long is it didnt take long at all. What happened was, the Omicron virus spread more rapidly than anybody thought.

When the topic pivoted to the presidents signature legislation, the Build Back Better bill set up to fail in the Senate following West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchins opposition, Biden touted the bills importance before cutting himself off.

Im not supposed to be having this press conference right now, Biden said.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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Sleepy Joe Can't Explain Why He Slumbered On Omicron Testing - The Federalist

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Federalist 78: Foundation for Marbury v. Madison | Columnists | willistonherald.com - Williston Daily Herald

Last week, the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life finally filed its 2020 federal tax return and the list of grant recipients is shocking.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated approximately $350 million to the formerly unknown liberal organization CTCL. The group then gave grants to local election offices, along with explicit instructions regarding how electionprocedures were to be changed. This greatly benefitted Democrat candidates.

Although hundreds of jurisdictions received tiny gifts of a few thousand dollars, which probably made no difference in their actions, a surprisingly large number of jurisdictions received multi-million dollar grants of these so-called ZuckBucks.

Having spent many hours reviewing CTCLs tax information and speaking with researchers at the Capital Research Center and the Rodney Election Research Institute, I am now more convinced than ever that this unprecedented type of election spending by CTCL and Zuckerberg is a serious violation of the spirit of free and fair elections. I am unable to recall any comparable effort ever having been undertaken in the entire history of U.S. elections.

It is hard to imagine President Biden wanting to add any city or county to the list of CTCL grant recipients, or him needing to ask them to perform any activities that were not already on the list of conditions thatelection officials had to meet in order to fulfill theCTCL grant requirements.

The adversarial election system in America works largely as intended. The parties fight each other in advertising with few restrictions, and may the best man win. But in 2020, liberal activists affiliated with CTCL conducted a massive and unprecedented intrusion into the administration of elections that was immoral, wrong, and violated the neutral manner in which all elections should be conducted. Election offices and procedures should not favor any candidate. They should not exhibit any prejudice or favoritism toward any class, party, or segment of voters. They should simply make access to voting consistent for all voters.

A SuperPAC can raise unlimited amounts of money, but its donors and every check it writes must be reported. Candidates cannot raise unlimited sums of money, but their spending must also be transparent. The law dictates that SuperPACs must operate without any collaboration or coordination with campaigns.

The same rules apply to Democrats and Republicans, and this system works well. Sometimes one party raises considerably more money than the other, but each willsucceed or fail based on their own efforts, with no government interference. They make their case to the voters, who judge the arguments on their merits and vote accordingly.

Overall, it is a fair system, even when the sums being spent are enormous. Americans get to decide, in the privacy of their own hearts and minds, who is telling the truth and who is the better candidate.

An integral part of any such system is that neither side gets to run the administration of the election. Neither candidate gets to design the rules. Election offices are supposed to be guided by the principle of neutrality, and both teams get to look over election officials shoulders to assure that neutrality.

The funding of election administration should be roughly equal on a per-capita basis, should be equally distributed to all election offices in a state, and must come from taxpayers. Neutrality in election administration, funding, and staffing must be paramount.

Election offices must never be subject to outside influences that might favor a particular candidate. Wealthy and powerful people should not be allowed to use their money to influence the manner of administering elections. There is too much potential for such financial influence to result in elections favoring the party of the wealthy and the powerful.

CTCL was tiny until last year. For almost a decade, it had an annual budget of less than $3 million annually. And that is with Chicagos sky-high cost of living. Then Zuckerberg decided to give them $350 million in 2020.

CTCLs website claims they not only operate in a nonpartisan fashion, but that CTCL officials are a mixture of Republicans, Democrats, independents, liberals, and conservatives. But all Republican operatives know its leadership to be hard-left political activists, with long and extensively documented relationships with the most notorious, high-dollar donors in the world of leftist election activism.

CTCLs chief officials are considered even by Democrats to be radical progressives. Tianna Epps-Johnson, Whitney May, and Donny Bridges have spent many years on the barricades of liberal election activism.

One look at the cities that got the most money shows many that were widely discussed in Democratic Party circles during 2017 to 2019 as places in which more votes would be necessary than Hillary Clinton received in 2016 to flip the state against Trump and into Joe Bidens win column. Milwaukee got $3.4 million. Madison, Wisconsin got $1.3 million. Detroit got $7.4 million. Ann Arbor got $400,000. Atlanta got $10.7 million. Phoenix got $1.8 million. Las Vegas got $2.4 million.

These grants are on top of existing state and local election funding, and in addition to the approximately $400 million of extra funding the federal government passed in the CARES Act last year. In most cases, these massive grants more than doubled the operating budgets of these election offices.

CTCL grants completely re-defined the procedures of every city that received a large gift, and in many cases involved changes not authorized nor anticipated by state election laws. CTCL and election officials in these cities may not have committed actual crimes, but the actions they took should never be ordered by political activists and high-dollar partisan mega-donors.

A deeper analysis shows election offices in left-leaning suburbs and exurbs on the list receiving large grants alongside the bigger cities, while similar-sized suburbs known to lean conservative are missing. Again, there were lots of token gifts of $5,000 or $10,000 to Republican areas, but the big gifts went to liberal areas where Democrats have continually stated their need to improve theirvote totals, and their belief that there were untapped pockets of Democratic voters within those areas that could somehow be persuaded to vote.

Grant recipients were required to promote absentee voting over in-person voting, and to conduct outreach efforts targeted at historically disenfranchised voters. Perhaps the biggest string attached was a wave of hiring that resulted in a swarm of young and inexperienced activist employees descending on local election offices to replace the usualgray-haired and sober election volunteers that normally staff polling locations and election offices during election season. Suddenly electionoffices were hiring 25-year-old Democratic activists to manage the many procedures normally managed by seasoned, nonpartisan election officials.

The only comparable examples in American history that I can think of are situations in the 19th century where political parties and business trusts tried to force poor factory workers to vote for theirfavoredcandidates through even more blatantly corrupt procedures.

The full details of this story are not widely known yet, and due to the vast scale of CTCL spending and the number of election offices it affected, it is likely there are several years of revelations yet to come. Courts and legislative committees will undertake investigations and public records requests and reveal more about how CTCL manipulated the 2020 election.

Joseph Arlinghaus is the president and founder of Valor America, a conservative federal election SuperPAC founded in 2016 to use the latest social science research and randomized controlled election experiments that revolutionized the Democratic election world after 2005. Arlinghaus earned a BA in politics from the University of Dallas in 1993. He serves on the advisory board to the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute. He lives in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains with his wife and two youngest children.

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New Tax Returns Further Reveal How Zuckbucks Swayed 2020 Election - The Federalist

CNN frequently uses the kill shot metaphor in its coverage, but after Fox News Jesse Watters used the same rhetoric at a Turning Point USA conference to make a point about tyrannical health bureaucrats, the corporate media network is throwing a hissy fit.

Over the weekend, Watters implored college students to confront Dr. Anthony Fauci about the havoc he has wreaked on the American public by lying during the pandemic.

Now youre going for the kill shot. The kill shot with an ambush is deadly because he doesnt see it coming, Watters said.This is when you say, Dr. Fauci, you funded risky research at a sloppy Chinese lab. The same lab that strung this pandemic on the world. You know why people dont trust you, dont you? Boom, he is dead! He is dead!

In an interview hosted by CNNs John Berman on Monday, Fauci demanded that Fox News fire Watters for the horrible comments.

The only thing that I had ever done throughout these two years is to encourage people to practice good public health practices, to get vaccinated, to be careful in public settings, to wear a mask. And for that, you have some guy out there saying that people should be giving me a kill shot, to ambush me? I mean, what kind of craziness is there in society these days? Fauci asked. Thats awful that he said that. And hes going to go very likely unaccountable. I mean, whatever network hes on is not going to do anything for him. I mean, thats crazy. The guy should be fired on the spot!

The New Day co-anchor gladly amplified Faucis concerns and even refused to play the clip of Watters because he believed it was too dangerous to share even though, for years, the leftist network and its employees have used the same language to describe the former administration and Republicans without reprimand.

In a 2018 article blaming former President Donald Trump for the nations border woes and family separation, CNN authors claimed that his opposition to a House immigration bill, manipulated to meet the demands of certain moderates, was a kill shot to the entire House exercise.

The vocabulary was repeated by CNN congressional correspondent Phil Mattingly on-air when discussing the same immigration legislation.

If the President wont sign it, the Senate wont take anything up. So, if what the President said is what he means about the second bill that theyre going to consider next week, its a kill shot. And so the interesting right now is Ive been told theyre waiting for a tweet that might clarify things, but they dont know, he said.

Mattingly had previously used kill shot in 2016 to explain that Hillary Clinton [is] doubling down on the state her advisers see as the kill shot to Donald Trumps campaign.

Another CNN article detailing Sen. Ted Cruzs 2016 strategy to try to secure the GOP presidential nomination used the phrase at the top of the article.

Ted Cruz is going for the kill shot, the articles lede states.

Not only does the terminology appear in print, but the network has aired the language with no apparent problems.

The phrase also made regular appearances on CNN shows including New Day. Now-disgraced Chris Cuomo, who was fired from the network over his role in covering up his brothers sexual harassment scandal, used the term multiple times in May 2018 when discussing Trumps comments about the late Sen. John McCain.

CNNs Jake Tapper used the vocabulary in a 2016 conversation with Dilbert creator Scott Adams to describe Trumps rhetorical mannerisms.

Give me an example of something. Like the linguistic kill shot, whether calling Jeb Bush low energy or something else? Tapper asked.

Yes. So, the linguistic kill shot is finding some kind of an insult, if you can call it that, that sticks like other insults would not. He likes to pick things that are visual. You look at the person and say, yes, that feels kind of right. But he also picks words and phrases that havent been used before, so they havent been polluted by other meaning, which is a good technique, Adams explained, re-using the term.

CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin also used kill shot in an interview with Adams about the same topic.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordangdavidson.

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CNN Loved The 'Kill Shot' Phrase Until Jesse Watters Used It Against Fauci - The Federalist

When I started my car and turned the radio on, the host was halfway through an interview with Jimmy Fallon, discussing a new song he was releasing with Ariana Grande. Fallon detailed the story of how he managed to get Grande and Megan Thee Stallion in studio to record a song he had written, for what I incorrectly assumed was for some over-produced comedy bit on his late-night show. I could not have been more wrong, or disturbed.

The song, It Was A (Masked Christmas), is not comedy at all, but a troublesome and despairing celebration of spending Christmas isolated, masked, and in line for a booster.

It was a masked Christmas, we stayed in the houseWe covered our nose and covered our mouthBut its Christmas timeWell be in line for a booster (For a booster)It was a masked ChristmasWe hopped on a Zoom (Hopped on a Zoom)I can only get Wi-Fi in the laundry room (Laundry room)But its Christmas timeWell be in line for a booster

The music video depicting Fallon and Grande on Zoom calls and isolated behind windows at Christmas time offers an even more depressing message, just a week before families plan to celebrate together.

In an era of elites who play by the lockdowns for thee, but not for me mantra, we have to ask, will Fallon himself really be spending Christmas alone on Zoom in his laundry room? No, of course not. But it sure makes for catchy a tune!

This is just one of the gaudier displays of COVID propaganda recently pushed by our betters in Hollywood and Washington D.C. On Friday, the Biden administration recruited the popular acapella singing group Pentatonix for a cringe performance of the song, Get your booster.

The same day, the Jonas Brothers posted a TikTok collaboration with the White House to promote vaccinations

Are you vaccinated? the JoBros say in the audio-dubbed clip. Yes, sir! they exclaim.

Perhaps theres a small sliver of die-hard Ariana Grande or Pentatonix fans who legitimately enjoyed these COVID-themed performances, but besides that suspect demographic, who are these songs really for? Is there any unvaccinated American who has, for whatever reason, chosen not to be vaccinated nearly two years into the pandemic and but would suddenly have her heart or mind changed by a Jonas Brothers TikTok?

What if that hypothetical JoBros fan did then get the vaccine or the booster only to contract COVID two weeks later, as has happened to a number of recently boosted Americans this week? What did that video accomplish then?

After having a widely available vaccine for anyone who wants it for more than a year, we now know that the vaccine effectively reduces the number of hospitalizations and deaths, but does not reduce widespread COVID-19 cases, which we are seeing spike now. Yet the Biden administrations best idea for fighting COVID is an acapella song about getting a booster?

Why not distribute at-home tests or at least provide information about how to get tested and when its appropriate to get tested? Why not distribute information on the most effective therapeutics for treating COVID and where to get them?

Its safe to assume those are not on the White House communication teams whiteboard because it would undercut the messaging that Biden and Democrats have desperately clung to, that masks and vaccines work, so nothing else is needed.

The Biden administrations only alternative idea to celebrity vaccine endorsements is to, quite literally, threaten the unvaccinated with death. While thats not effective messaging either, I think I still prefer it to cringe pop song propaganda.

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The Vaccine Propaganda Is Creepy And Not Stopping The Spread - The Federalist