Category Archives: Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Christopher Kimball of Milk Street joins Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech to share tips from his new book Milk Street Vegetables Cookbookand offer his advice on the best ways to prepare food for the holidays.

Cooking whats available is what people used to do until fairly recently. So instead of planning your meals ahead of time, based on looking at a recipe, if you start the other way around, the way people have for tens of thousands of years, thats really helpful because then you also become a better cook because you adapt to whatever is good, Kimball said. So sometimes its better to cook with what you have or what you can find, and for a lot of people thats the reverse, but I think thats probably the better way to do it if you want to take the time to figure it out.

When it comes to cooking for a particular occasion, Kimball said you dont always have to diverge from your normal kitchen routine.

I dont feel a great need, especially around the holidays, to actually do something different, Kimball explained. There are times when I do like to completely improvise, and once in a while, I would.

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Chef Christopher Kimball Shares What's Cooking This Christmas - The Federalist

The last time I visited the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, it was to review a superb exhibition on the work of Edward Hopper. Returning more than two years later to see two exhibitions on the same visit, I was once again impressed by how this institution, located outside the major power centers of the art world in this country, can manage to mount extraordinary shows.

This time round, the VMFA is celebrating two of the most important American photographers of the 20th century, Man Ray and Ansel Adams. While their work could not be more divergent, when considered in tandem, its striking to realize how much successful photography, and indeed art in general, depends upon achieving a certain mastery of artifice in order to succeed with the viewer.

Man Ray: The Paris Years is not only big, with well more than 100 photographs and a number of other objects, it is hands down the best exhibition Ive seen so far this year. Fortunately the show is focused on Rays photography rather than his paintings and sculpture, of which the less said the better.

Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890-1976), or Man Ray, as he came to call himself after the family changed their last name, was born in Philadelphia but grew up in Brooklyn. He first made a public name for himself as an avant-garde artist in New York, befriending photographer and Modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), and collaborating with the regrettable Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Like a number of young American thinkers after World War I, he moved to Paris in 1921 to seek inspiration and opportunities in an atmosphere of intellectual debate, artistic experimentation, and of course, plenty of booze and jazz.

During Rays first stay in Paris, he concentrated primarily on photography, and captured everyone from socialites such as the duchess of Windsor (1896-1986) to cutting-edge fashion designers like Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) and rule-breaking writers like Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) or Raymond Queneau (1903-1976). His portraiture dominates the VMFA installation overall, but there are also examples of his forays into other types of images.

Glamorous fashion magazine covers are displayed alongside more candid photos of men and women driving their new, fast cars. Innovative use of photogram and solarization techniques are employed to create Surrealist compositions. Theres even a screening room in which you can sit and watch some early examples of Rays arthouse films, including one focused on the fancy footwork of a flapper dancing the Charleston.

Many of Rays friends and colleagues, including Duchamp, composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), and sculptor Constantin Brncui (1876-1957), make multiple appearances in the show, and the exhibition has the feel of strolling along and observing Parisian caf society of the inter-war period.

Upstairs at the VMFA, meanwhile, the smaller but still impressive exhibition Ansel Adams: Compositions in Nature at first glance seems a vastly different affair. A younger contemporary of Ray, Adams (1902-1984) is well-known as a photographer of the American West, a long-serving director of the Sierra Club, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He also ventured into other types of photography, including commercial work, portraiture, government commissions, and photojournalism, and even maintained a lifelong practice of writing music in his spare time. The exhibition bears tribute to this both audibly and in describing how music influenced Adamss pictorial compositions.

Born and raised in California, Adamss deep interest in preserving the natural landscape of places like Yosemite and the Sierras, alongside efforts to advance the art of photography through new techniques, equipment, development, and printing, had a lasting impact not only on landscape photography, but also on photography in general being taken seriously as an artistic medium.

Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1944, Ansel Adams (American, 19021984), gelatin silver print, printed 19731975. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund, 75.29.2. Photograph by Ansel Adams The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Surprisingly perhaps, this led to Adams, whom one might assume felt more at home working from a Woodie somewhere outside of Taos, helping to establish the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art In New York. While today, we may be accustomed to institutions such as the VMFA hosting photography exhibitions and collecting photographic images, thanks to Adamss guidance and input MoMA was the first major American museum to do so.

While their subject matter differed substantially, Ray and Adams similarly created their images by employing equipment and techniques they developed or adapted over many years of trial and error. Neither simply pointed his camera, snapped a picture, and then published the result. Yet what really unites two such seemingly disparate shows, apart from their both featuring the work of American photographers who loved music, is that in their respective genres, Ray and Adams were absolute masters of artifice.

The difference between art and artifice, of course, is to some extent in the eye of the beholder. The former usually carries a positive or at least neutral connotation regarding the creative impulse, while the latter takes that impulse and seeks to deceive the observer. However, if I may be forgiven for splitting entomological hairs in a wince-inducing way, you cannot have art without artifice. For a deception to work, one must either be unaware of the deception, or, perhaps more importantly for all forms of art, willing to be deceived.

Films are of course a perfect example of this. Currently there are no manned vehicles capable of intergalactic space travel, nor were there cameras rolling during the Revolutionary War. Yet if a movie is well-crafted, we engage in a suspension of disbelief: we allow ourselves to forget that what were witnessing is not reality, but a work of art arising out of someone elses imagination. We willingly go along for the ride, even though we know what were seeing is artificial.

In his celebrated 1884 lecture, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, the English art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) noted that while we perceive natural phenomena such as clouds with our gift of sight, portraying clouds via an artistic medium will always be hampered by the limits of artificiality. The bright reflected colors of clouds can be represented in painting, he notes.

However, because the natural colors as we observe them are brighter than even the purest white pigment an artist could obtain, the artist can only indicate the location and nature of the colors that appear in the clouds. Only artificial, and very high illumination would give the real effect of them, Ruskin concludes, painting cannot.

Self-Portrait with Camera, 1930, Man Ray (American, 18901976), solarized gelatin silver print. The Jewish Museum, New York, Photography Acquisitions Committee Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Fund, and Judith and Jack Stern Gift, 2004-16 Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris 2021.

To take this observation a bit further, we might (reasonably) conclude that, no matter how talented the artist or how advanced the medium or technique, we are willing to overlook the inevitable loss that occurs in the translation from the real to the artificial. What we perceive in person cannot be entirely recreated in artand that includes the art of photography. The photograph, after all, is no less artificial a way of conveying an image than any other form of art.

We might think of Rays famous photograph Noire et Blanche (1926), for example, an image of model Kiki de Montparnasse (1901-1953) leaning her head to the side while holding an African tribal sculpture, to be profoundly artificial; we might even use a descriptor such as posed in a pejorative sense to categorize it.

Yet a carefully cropped and meticulously developed Adams image such as Aspens, Northern New Mexico (c. 1958), depicting part of a stand of aspen trees in deep blacks and pale grays, is not less artificial or posed simply because it depicts tall, leafy things growing out of the dirt. We like the artifice involved in creating such images because we like to be deceived.

Just as Ruskin observed in his remarks on painting, photography typically seeks to reproduce the natural through unnatural means. While a photograph is certainly capable, under the right circumstances, of capturing an instant, fleeting moment, the moment itself is not recreated in the process. The image merely records the moment as seen from the photographers particular perspective, at a particular point in time, using particular methods and techniques.

This is a fundamentally artificial means by which man has sought to capture some aspect of reality, and we are all taken in by it on a daily basis. After all, photographs, of both the still and moving varieties, are the primary artistic medium by which contemporary society conveys both truths and falsehoods to a wider audience. We can easily forget that photography is no less malleable in the hands of an accomplished photographer than is a lump of clay in the hands of an accomplished ceramicist.

Sand Dunes, Sunrise, Death Valley National Monument, CA, 1948, Ansel Adams (American, 19021984), gelatin silver print, printed 1974. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Andrea Gray Stillman, 2018.584. Photograph by Ansel Adams The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Ray and Adams were well aware of what they had to do, within their respective areas of interest, to employ artifice in order to sell us an image or a concept that we want to look at, talk about, or hang on the wall. If youve ever trimmed or slapped a filter on an image you uploaded to social media, youve done exactly the same thing.

While your shooting and editing skills may not be on a par with theirs, comparing their work at the VMFA will certainly give you a great deal to think about for your own photography, as well as in more widely considering how we allow images to alter our perceptions in the pursuit of visual pleasure.

Ansel Adams: Compositions in Nature is at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia through January 2, 2022. Man Ray: The Paris Years is on show through February 21, 2022, and is accompanied by a large, hardback exhibition catalogue filled with great images and plenty of research that would look great on an Art Deco coffee table. As of this writing the VMFA website is undergoing maintenance, but tickets can be booked by visiting here.

Photo Aspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958, Ansel Adams (American, 19021984), gelatin silver print. The TurtleBay Exploration Park, Redding, CA, 2002.13.3. Photograph by Ansel Adams The Ansel AdamsPublishing Rights Trust

Photo Half Dome, Cottonwood Trees, Yosemite, California, 1935, Ansel Adams (American, 19021984), gelatin silver print, printed 1979. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Andrea Gray Stillman,2018.586. Photograph by Ansel Adams The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

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The Best Art Exhibition I've Seen This Year Is Of Photographs In Richmond - The Federalist

The Heritage Foundation unveiled its Election Integrity Scorecard on Tuesday, which seeks to assess and compare election laws and regulations that affect the security and integrity of the democratic process in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

According to RealClearPolitics Philip Wegmann, the scorecard allows lawmakers and voters to see how Heritage ranks each state by hovering their mouse over an interactive color-coded map of the United States, with the entire country lit up with reds, yellows, and greens to easily indicate which states have done the best to live up to the Heritage standard of running an election.

States such as Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee are colored forest green, ranking them first, second, and third, respectively. Hawaii, Nevada, and California, on the other hand, are colored red and come out at the bottom of the list.

The RealClearPolitics report goes on to note how the conservative think-tank assigned grades out of a possible perfect score of 100 according to a dozen categories, each weighted differently, from implementation of voter ID requirements and maintenance of voter registration rolls to prohibition of private election funding to access for election observers. In creating the scorecard, Heritage conducted its own analysis in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, while also inviting input from election law experts.

According to John Malcolm, vice president for the Institute for Constitutional Government and the director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, the organization will regularly update the scorecard as states make changes to their election laws.

If that changes the ranking, Malcolm said, underscoring the entire point, it changes the ranking.

Executive Director of Heritage Action Jessica Anderson detailed her optimism over the new project, saying grassroots activists will be able to use Heritages Election Integrity Scorecard as a roadmap to go back to their legislators and advocate for further election integrity measures.

The scorecard represents the single best resource for Americans in all 50 states to understand election integrity laws and advocate to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat in their state, she added.

Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at The Federalist and a student at the University of Mary Washington, where he plans to major in Political Science and minor in Journalism. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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See Whether Your State Has Safe And Secure Elections - The Federalist

President Joe Biden, a longtime supporter of a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, claimed this weekend that hes always been against the prolonged war in the Middle Eastern country.

Well, Ive been against that War in Afghanistan from the very beginning, Biden lied in an interview with CBS News Rita Braver. We spent $300 million dollars a week in Afghanistan over 20 years.

Congressional records, however, indicate that Biden, who was a Democrat senator from Delaware at the time, did vote in favor of Authorization for Use of Military Force on Sept. 14, 2001, just three days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He was one of the 98 yeas who agreed to move forward with the legislation that authorized the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.

In the interview with Braver, the president also tried to deflect blame for the disastrous withdrawal and subsequent national collapse.

Now everybody says you could have gotten out without anybody being hurt. No ones come up with a way to ever indicate to me how that happens, Biden added.

This isnt the first time the now-president has lied about his stance on Afghanistan. For months, the president has tried to shed responsibility for his chaotic and deadly military withdrawal from Afghanistan by blaming others. In August, Biden told ABC News George Stephanopoulos that none of his military advisers had suggested keeping troops in Afghanistan.

So no one told your military advisers did not tell you, No, we should just keep 2,500 troops. Its been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that? Stephanopoulos asked.

No, Biden said. No one said that to me that I can recall.

In September, Gen. Frank McKenzie confirmed that multiple military advisers had, in fact, recommended that Biden keep at least a partial U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan.

I recommended we keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, McKenzie told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and, eventually, the Afghan government.

Biden and his administration also repeatedly skirted acknowledging that there are still Americans who were abandoned in Afghanistan, which is now under Taliban control, to instead congratulate themselves for withdrawing.

Read more of Bidens presidential lies here in The Federalists ever-growing lie tracker.

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

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PANTS ON FIRE: Biden Lies About His History Of Supporting Afghanistan War - The Federalist

Theres a little game the national media have enjoyed playing in recent weeks wherein they talk about Kamala Harris floundering in her role and then guess what she can do to fix it. Its all stupid because it presumes Harris is actually at all interested in being vice president.

Shes not. Harris was an affirmative action hire, and her interest in the job was limited to the photo-ops she could partake in as a woman of color in the White House.

The Wall Street Journals Peggy Noonan was the latest player of the game with a column last week under the stern headline, Kamala Harris Needs to Get Serious.

Who doesnt love a schoolmarm?

We face grave challenges China, Russia, the endurance of the American economy, wrote Noonan. Who leads us matters. Ms. Harris should set her mind primarily on the deep and profound responsibilities of the job she may have to fill. She should do this as an act of will. Only secondarily should she be thinking about her political prospects.

Its so naive. Harris is not going to get serious about her role because she never believed it was serious to begin with. She didnt become Joe Bidens 2020 running mate because she was a serious person for that serious job. He hired her because he said he was going to pick a woman, and in the year of the lefts George Floyd riots, there was no way that woman wasnt going to be black.

She had no other qualifications. Democrats rejected her in the partys presidential primaries, and she dropped out before even the first contest. Her sole contribution to Biden was her status as a black woman. And there has been no indication that Harris is interested in doing anything other than looking in charge, even as she shirks all responsibility.

She was named in control of the border more than half a year ago, but the number of illegal alien crossings has consistently remained at record highs. Not her fault, shes just there to study root causes! She was supposed to navigate a terrible voting deregulation bill through Congress, and it has gone nowhere. Dont blame her, shes dealing with racism and sexism!

Harris thought this was going to be one long media relations gig wherein she got to look good on camera as the first woman of color in the White House. To make that work, she needed to look busy. Unfortunately for her, claiming to be busy while not actually fixing problems isnt really compatible in terms of making people believe youre important. The result is an approval rating thats lower than Dick Cheneys.

Harriss latest media interview showed no signs that shes actually interested in becoming the person who might have to take her bosss place. She got short on questions from the San Francisco Chronicle about accountability but had a lot to say about her offices new decor. She was defensive about criticism but happy to pose looking busy with other women in a government office.

Thats what she wants the job to be and how she believes it should go. Stop trying to make her something she isnt.

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Stop Trying To Rehab Affirmative Action Hire Kamala Harris - The Federalist

U.S. inflation rose to the highest its been in nearly 40 years in November, according to the consumer price index report released by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Since November 2020, inflation rose by 6.8 percent, which according to the Labor Department is the largest 12-month increase since the period ending June 1982.

Energy prices shot up by 33.3 percent and gas prices, which are known for indicating inflation to the American public, skyrocketed by 58.1 percent. Food prices went up by 6.1 percent in just 12 months.

These changes are the largest 12-month increases in at least 13 years in the respective series, the report states.

Since October of this year, gas prices increased by 6.1 percent, which contributed to the 3.5 percent overall increase in the energy index. Consumers also experienced rising food prices, which increased on the out-of-home food index 0.7 percent while food at home increased o.8 percent.

Other indexes across the board saw rising prices including shelter, used cars and trucks, and new vehicles, the indexes for household furnishings and operations, apparel, and airline fares.

One day before the consumer price index report was released, the Biden administration, Democrats, and Twitter promoted an article that ignored the fact that the economy is still in dire need of pre-pandemic recovery to praise President Joe Biden for the strongest two-year performance on growth, jobs, and income in decades, which the author dubbed the Biden Boom.

This propaganda-like response prompted an outpouring of tweets from Republicans and others who mocked the administrations attempts to spin Americans economic frustrations.

Just last month, a CBS News poll found that 67 percent of Americans disapprove of Bidens handling of inflation.

Polling also suggests that rising inflation due to an economy bloated by federal spending is one of the top issues voters who are mulling over which candidates they want to see in office following the 2022 midterms are considering.

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

Photo President Joe Biden participates in a meeting on cybersecurity, Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2021, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

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Biden Boom? November Inflation Highest In Nearly 40 Years - The Federalist

After a 10-month review of the 2020 election in the Dairy State, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has compiled its findings which set off alarm bells about the states massive election integrity shortcomings and reveal weaknesses the swing state must shore up before the next election.

The review, which WILL said it approached without presumption as to what it would find, included polling, surveys, an inspection of the law, interviews with elected officials, an analysis of almost 20,000 ballots and 29,000 absentee ballot envelopes, as well as a review of tens of thousands of documents obtained through more than 460 open records requests.

Its clear many Republicans, like Democrats before them, are convinced that there was a Big Steal. And much of the legacy media is of the view that, since there is little or no evidence that Trump won the election, any effort to look into whether proper procedures were followed is just part of the baseless conspiracy-mongering that pushes the Big Lie, WILL attorneys wrote in their review of the studys findings. But WILLs review indicates the truth may lie between these two poles.

While WILLs work also showed some state election procedures and outcomes to be above bar including no significant issues with voting machines and limited instances of ineligible people successfully voting some findings were troubling. Here are the top takeaways.

Tens of thousands of Wisconsin votes cast in the 2020 election did not comply with state law, especially regarding ballot drop boxes and indefinite confinement.

As a recent audit by the states Legislative Audit Bureau showed, absentee ballot dropboxes were used prevalently at the behest of the Wisconsin Elections Commission in violation of state law. These dropboxes were connected to an extra 20,000 votes for now-President Joe Biden, with no noteworthy effect for then-President Donald Trump.

Additionally, more than a quarter of a million Wisconsinites acquired absentee ballots and didnt have to show voter ID because they claimed to be indefinitely confined because of the COVID-19 pandemic. That voting status, however, only applies to people who are confined due to age, physical illness, or infirmity, or is disabled for an indefinite period, meaning many of those more than 265,000 voters cast an absentee ballot illegally.

According to WILL, 54,259 ballots were cast by individuals who have never shown a voter ID in any election. 3,718 were cast from addresses that were on the 2019 Movers List. 7,747 failed their DMV check when they registered.

While instances were limited, WILLs review did reveal a number of times ineligible Wisconsinites voted or tried to vote, including 42 deceased people for whom ballots were cast but were rightly tossed out. WILL found 130 times where voters were flagged by Registration List Alerts as felons but cast a vote anyway, plus 129 times where people voted from a commercial address. All of these addresses were mailing centers or post offices, but its illegal in Wisconsin to register to vote with a P.O. box.

Even though Wisconsin is required by both state and federal law to keep its voter rolls up to date, neither local clerks nor the Wisconsin Elections Commission took the necessary action to clean up incorrect registrations in the 2020 election. This means tens of thousands of active registrations were connected to out-of-date addresses.

More than 23,000 ballots came from voters who didnt pass a check by the Department of Motor Vehicles, meaning a discrepancy in at least the name, address, or date of birth on file with the government agency. Additionally, more than 31,000 Dairy State voters were in the National Change of Address Database and thousands more were still on the Movers List.

As Wisconsin voters have witnessed before, a lack of uniformity in election procedures means disparate treatment for various areas of the state, often manifesting in different treatment for rural red areas versus blue hubs.

This is true for the number of hours residents are able to vote absentee, but its especially true with so-called ballot curing. Although state law doesnt allow the practice whereby election officials, who arent authorized to do so, fix absentee ballots that have mistakes or are missing information the Wisconsin Elections Commission gave it the green light. That means some municipalities followed the elections commission guidance and tampered with ballots while others simply followed the law and rejected ballots with errors.

Relatedly, far fewer absentee ballots were rejected in 2020 than in prior years.

Due to the partisan split in absentee voting, WILL estimates that if absentee ballot rejection rates were similar to the rates in 2016, the final election margin would have narrowed by 6,000 votes making a very close election even closer, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty said.

Additionally, as one law enforcement investigation in Racine County found, the Wisconsin Elections Commission suspended special voting deputies from nursing homes, which are people appointed by municipal clerks or elections boards to conduct absentee voting at care facilities. Instead, the commission instructed nursing home staff to break the law by helping residents to vote, a task nobody is permitted to do except the residents families or special voting deputies. Law enforcement found an unusual spike in voting in at least one care facility, so the statewide suspension of the special voting deputies indicates that trend could have been pervasive.

WILLs analysis also turned up the Zuckerbucks malfeasance thats been documented extensively by The Federalist and Mollie Hemingway in her bookRigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

The Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonprofit bankrolled largely by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, doled out conditional private grants to government election offices disproportionately in Democrat-concentrated areas. As The Federalist has noted, there were strings attached to the grants, and the funds were used for Democrat voter outreach, designing and translating ballots, and staffing ballot harvesting, curing, and counting operations.

When large numbers of voters question the authenticity of an election, WILL said, those fears need to be addressed.

Read the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Libertys recommended election reforms here.

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5 Takeaways From A New Review Of Wisconsin's Rigged 2020 Election - The Federalist

Is Lois Lerner in charge of determining which politicians to audit at the IRS?

Thats a relevant question from a recent Washington Post article looking into Joe Bidens taxes. The Post received confirmation that the Internal Revenue Service declined to audit Bidens returns from the years before he became president. But separate reporting confirmed that the IRS did audit Donald Trumps returns from the years before he became president.

This raises an obvious question: Why the disparity?

This important question comes as Democrats want to give the IRS $80 billion in new funding over a decade, along with new enforcement authorityincluding to obtain additional information about ordinary Americans bank accounts. It also applies to a government agency that, thanks to Lerner, harassed conservative non-profits, and faces unanswered questions about the mysterious leak of tax records to the leftist website ProPublica.

Given these developments, its worth asking whether the audit disparity represents another instance of federal bureaucrats politicizing the tax codeand whether such an agency deserves even more funding and power.

The Post column, from its Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, came after he said a readerfull disclosure: measked him to look into whether Biden paid his proverbial fair share. I want to give Kessler credit publicly for examining the matter in detail, unlike reporters at Politico and other outlets like the Associated Press and New York Times, whose reporters, when I raised the issue of Biden underpaying his taxes, gave me a polite brush-off.

That said, Kessler dodged a definitive judgment on either of the two separate issues regarding Bidens taxes. The first is the fact that, from 2017 through 2019, Biden exploited a loophole he now wants to closebecause his own Treasury Department says it allows business owners, particularly those with high incomes, to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

As I had previously explained, Biden and his wife Jill funneled their book and speech income through two S-corporations. Because they characterized most of that revenue as corporate profits rather than wages, they avoided payroll taxes (which fund Medicare and Obamacare) on more than $13 million worth of income.

Kessler said, Whether Biden is being hypocritical or not is in the eye of the beholder. To which Biden himself might respond, Come on, man! If you spent the past four years using a loophole that your own Treasury secretary declined to employ for her speech income, you have absolutely no right to close it for othersand if you try, you have every right and expectation to get called on it.

The second question involves whether Biden, having used a legal, albeit politically hypocritical, loophole, did so in an illegal manner. That is, did he deliberately underpay his salary (as opposed to end-of-year profits for the corporation) in a way that violated IRS guidelines on reasonable compensation?

On this, the experts Kessler interviewed, as well as others, agreed. Biden likely underpaid himself, and by a substantial amount. After all, in 2017 Biden paid himself only $145,333 in salarya roughly 37 percent drop from his $230,700 salary as vice president the prior yearwhile reaping more than $10 million in corporate profits at years end. The low salary vis--vis his amount of profits, particularly when all the income came from his own intellectual work productas opposed to, say, a factory or restaurant where dozens of other employees contribute to the businessall suggest Biden violated the IRS guidelines.

Yet Kessler says that whether his tax strategy was especially aggressive or par for the course is also a matter of interpretation. The thin reed Kessler uses to cling to this position stems less from the fact that Bidens actions were appropriate, and more from the fact that several experts said the IRS wouldnt bother to challenge Bidens questionable conduct. But speeding is still speeding, whether a cop pulls you over for it or not.

That gets to the most interesting nugget in Kesslers piece: A White House official said the IRS declined to do any audits of the Biden tax returns in 2017, 2018, or 2019. Presidents are subject to automatic audit only for those returns filed while in office, and Kessler reported the returns from the time he was out of office did not get extra IRS scrutiny.

But a New York Times article last year confirmed the validity of statements Trump had made about his tax returns remaining under audit: The records that the Times reviewed.match his lawyers statement during the 2016 campaign that audits of [Trumps] returns for 2009 and subsequent years remained open.

So why did Trumps returns get subjected to what the Times called a decade-long battle with the Internal Revenue Service, while Bidens returns got a free pass from the IRS, notwithstanding the articles and public scrutiny of Bidens conduct? Does the IRS (as it claims) lack the resources to investigate items like the Biden controversy, or is something more nefarious or explicitly political afoot?

Of course, theres one way to find out. If House Democrats want to investigate the way the IRS administers presidential tax returnsthe stated claim behind their subpoena for Trumps taxesthen they can request documents from the IRS regarding how it handled Bidens returns for 2017, 2018, and 2019. For instance, they can study whether the public articles about Bidens use of this loophole prompted any re-assessment of his returns by IRS staff, or should have.

Then again, given the way House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Massachusetts, ignored questions about Bidens taxes when the issue first emerged two years ago, he and his colleagues might want to keep their focus solely on Trump. But a Democratic majority focused on Trumps taxes to the exclusion of Bidens might give Trump added grounds to challenge and quash the subpoenas in court as a political fishing expedition.

Of course, another possible scenario looms: If Republicans take control of the House next year, they can use any legal precedents set in the case of Trumps taxes to investigate Bidens. In other words, Democrats should be careful what they wish for on subpoenaing information regarding presidential tax returns, because they just might get it.

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Why Did The IRS Audit Donald Trump, But Not Joe Biden? - The Federalist

The Federalist premiered a new documentary on Monday called Meet the Parents highlighting how parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, banded together to address the radical, divisive, and tyrannical ideologies plaguing their local schools and school boards.

From critical race theory, to teaching students its OK to disregard their biological sex in favor of twisted gender theory, to keeping students out of in-person learning for months, parents quickly realized that the education their children were receiving was not up to par. These fed-up parents, however, didnt get any help from their local school board, which targeted them for speaking out and actively worked to cover up sexual misconduct in the district. Instead of backing down after facing criticism and even doxxing, these parents took matters into their own hands and used grassroots activism to make their voices heard.

Ill tell you when I first started, I was scared that people were going to call me names or talk about me behind my back, but it really doesnt matter because if you believe that you are doing the right thing for your community and your children and your family, then you have to just stand up and be brave, one Loudoun County mother told The Federalist.

Whats the worst thing that can happen? she continued. Somebody calls you a name? You lose your job? Thats hard, I understand that, but at some point, you have to be able to make sacrifices for doing the right thing. And I truly believe that what were doing is not partisan, its parents-ian. Its not left, its not right, its right or wrong.

Watch the full documentary here or here:

Read more of The Federalists coverage of Loudoun County and other education issues here.

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

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Meet The Parents: How The Moms And Dads Of Loudoun County Took Back Virginia - The Federalist

Donald Trumps former lead attorney during his second impeachment proceedings slammed the state of New Yorks criminal investigation into the former president. Bruce Castor, who said he still represents Trump, indicated he thinks Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.s probe is politically motivated.

What New York is doing to the former president is an outrage. Anyone connected with that effort is doomed at the polls when the political motivation for this attack becomes known, Castor told me, referencing the move by former federal prosecutor and Trump impeachment lawyer Daniel Goldman to drop out of the New York attorney general race. I cannot recall ever there being a more overt smear prosecution effort than is going on here. But of course, its OK because the target is Donald Trump.

The investigation is centered around Trump and his business, the Trump Organization, and related to allegations of bank and insurance fraud. Vance is looking into whether Trump and his company inflated properties, undervalued properties to avoid taxes, and did not pay taxes on compensation to leading executives.

Trump similarly slammed the investigation in May as politically motivated, after being under investigation from the time I came down the escalator 5 years ago, including the fake Russia Russia Russia Hoax, the 2 year, $48M, No Collusion Mueller Witch Hunt, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment hoax #2, and others.

Last week, two sources familiar with the matter told The New York Times that New York state attorney general Letitia James plans to subpoena Trump to testify in a separate investigation. James seeks to question the former president in January in connection to a civil inquiry into fraud that began in March 2019.

James determines that, among other items, the Trump Organization may have illegally obtained tax breaks in Westchester County, New York. Her office is working with the Manhattan district attorneys office in regard to the criminal probe.

As far as the subpoena is concerned I am not at liberty to say, Castor also told me. I cannot discuss strategy. What I was telling you is that anybody involved in the outrageous investigation being conducted by the New York attorney general is likely to have their head handed to them in an election when their political machinations become public and the lack of basis and potential abuse of office becomes evident.

A spokesman for The Trump Organization said in a statement that New Yorks criminal investigation is another political witch-hunt. Ronald Fischetti, a lawyer representing Trump as the investigations proceed, said that he determines the attorney generals subpoena move as an opportunity for them to get Donald Trumps testimony under oath and then turn it over to the district attorneys office.

New York is being overrun by violence, children are being shot in Times Square, arsonists are setting Christmas decorations ablaze and homelessness is through the roof, yet the only focus of the New York AG is to investigate Trump, all for her own political ambitions as she attempts to run for Governor. This political prosecution is illegal, unethical, and is a travesty to our great state and legal system, the Trump spokesman said.

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Exclusive: Trump Impeachment Attorney Slams New York AG Investigation Into Former President As 'Smear Prosecution' - The Federalist