Category Archives: Federalist

After 10 years with ESPN, sideline reporter Allison Williams said she will be leaving her job after the company tried to medically coerce her into getting the COVID-19 jab while she and her husband are trying to get pregnant with their second child.

Williams said she applied for accommodation after her doctor advised her against getting the shot, but ESPN denied her request.

Effective next week I will be separated from the company, she said in an Instagram video.

Williams initially thought she would be free to choose whether to get the shot after ESPN, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, said it would be a personal decision for their employees. After the company mandated the vaccine for most employees in July, Williams said she was left without the choice to move forward in her career without the jab.

Their values have clearly changed. I understand that. I dont know what its like to run a multibillion-dollar company and to have shareholders and board members and financial quotas to answer to and not to mention societal and political pressure, so I respect that their values have changed. I had hoped that they would respect that mine did not, Williams explained.

Ultimately, I cannot get a paycheck over principle, she added. I will not sacrifice something that I believe and hold so strongly to maintain a career.

Williams also expressed sympathy for others who have found themselves facing similar situations.

I know Im not the only one walking away from a career they love, a profession that is passion. And so many of the people who are in the same situation as me are serving society and benefiting this country in ways I could never do, she said. They are nurses, they are teachers, they are doctors, they are police officers and first responders, they are most importantly our military, and they too are pilots. They too are choosing to put their beliefs first, and I just want you all to know I stand with you.

Williams implored anyone else facing medical coercion from their employers and the government to stand up for what they believe and fight back against tyranny.

There will come a time when the government or corporations mandate you to get something that does not align with your values, she said. Power given is seldom returned. When that day comes, I want you to know that we fought. And we tried.

Williams said she does not know what is next for her or her career, but she said she is clinging to her faith and praying for things to get better.

Until then, Im going to go hug my baby, she said through tears.

Williams announced last month that ESPN would not allow her to continue her travel sideline work while she remained unvaccinated.

While my work is incredibly important to me, the most important role I have is as a mother. Throughout our family planning with our doctor, as well as a fertility specialist, I have decided not to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at this time while my husband and I try for a second child, she said in a statement. This was a deeply difficult decision to make and its not something I take lightly. I will miss being on the sidelines and am thankful for the support of my ESPN family. I look forward to when I can return to the games and job that I love.

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

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ESPN Reporter Allison Williams Forced Out Of Job Over Vaxx Coercion - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Andrew Langer, president of the Institute for Liberty, joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss the tension between the First Amendment right to free speech and what is often labeled dark money.

If youre advocating for ideas and for changes in the public discourse, thats something that should be very much protected speech, and the publics interest in knowing who was giving money to those things should not outweigh someones right to engage in speech anonymously or engaging their freedom of association anonymously, Langer said. Because as others have pointed out this is an essential element of that free speech. Sometimes people cannot speak out in their own names without having retribution taken against them.

Langer said dark money is often weaponized and used as a pejorative term, but the regulation of people who advocate for ideas needs to be more nuanced.

The standards as theyve been for the last 30 years in terms of reporting, lets say even 20 years, shouldnt change. The bright line should be about electioneering and not about ideas because ideas should stand and fall on their own merits, Langer said.

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Where Is The Line Between Free Speech And 'Dark Money'? - The Federalist

It was reported earlier this year that the University of Pittsburgh used taxpayer funds, specifically grants from Dr. Anthony Faucis National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to run barbaric experiments splicing lab rats with organs harvested from aborted children. In response, pro-life activists and elected officials have called for state and federal investigations into the university, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, NIAID, and the local Planned Parenthood, which supplies body pieces from aborted babies for experiments.

On Tuesday, a panel hosted in Pittsburgh by the Pennsylvania Family Council featured several of these pro-life activists and former Pennsylvania elected officials. They discussed the shocking details that have emerged over the last several months and what we now know about the funding and sourcing of Pitts fetal tissue harvesting.

The first panelist to speak was Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden, whose undercover videos have previously featured abortionists at Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania and the abortion training director at the University of Pittsburgh.

Daleiden explained how, in grant applications to receive NIH funding, the University of Pittsburgh essentially advertised their facilities as the best location for the GUDMAP aborted fetal kidney harvesting program. Pitt described how aborted babies are still alive at the time their kidneys are cut out. This was a selling point for why Pitt should receive millions of taxpayer dollars.

When they say they track and record the warm ischemia time, that means they know the time at which fetuses lose their circulation and lose their blood supply, Daleiden said reading from the grant application. They specifically say labor induction, not just a forceps extraction abortion, but a labor induction abortion where they induce labor and the mom pushes out a baby at 24 weeks.

Those two statements together that they know how to keep the time of blood loss in the kidneys to a minimum and that they perform induced-labor abortion show these are clear, classic cases of partial-birth abortion or this is just straight-up infanticide, Daleiden said.

Daleiden also explained how the fetal experimentation programs may have violated Pennslyvania state law and federal partial-birth abortion law, and how these potential criminal violations should be investigated by lawmakers.Pennslyvanias Abortion Control Act includes a felony prohibition on infanticide, a ban on any consideration whatsoever for fetal tissue, and a specific prohibition on any experimentation on a living fetus, whether inside or outside the womb.

The federal statute against partial-birth abortion applies to delivering the baby alive with the purpose of killing the baby after delivery through organ harvesting or through other means, Daleiden said. If theyre maintaining blood flow to the kidneys extracting the baby up to the level of the kidneys and then kill the baby its a clear pattern for criminal violation.

Retired Pennsylvania Superior Court Judge Cheryl Allen spoke on Planned Parenthoods history of racism, the abortion industrys targeting of black people under the guise of wanting to help poor, black women, and Pitts racial quota for the babies used in their experiments.

Pitts grant application stated its fetal harvesting program would choose individuals on the basis of sex/gender, race, and ethnicity, setting quotas of 50 percent white patients and aborted fetuses, and 50 percent minority patients and fetuses, with 25 percent of those minority fetuses to come from black women.

Allen pointed out that in Western Pennslyvania, compared to other metropolitan areas like Philadelphia or New York, there are smaller Hispanic and Asian populations, and so the largest minority population here would be African American. Therefore, Allen said she finds its disingenuous to even suggest that black babies are less than 25 percent of the 50 percent minority patients and fetuses.

The studys quotas could lead to abortion providers pushing women to have abortions depending on their race, one panelist suggested. Thats what putting profits before people does, Allen said.

Allen also pointed out the hypocrisy of the University of Pittsburgh, whose Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion issued an anti-racism statement claiming to eradicate all forms of racism and ethnic oppression, while it still works with Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry which were founded to eliminate black people.

Daleiden explained how in his initial reporting on publicly available documents, they concluded that researchers received $1.4 million from NIH in grants. After reviewing subsequent grant applications from NIH obtained by Judicial Watch, however, we now know that NIH actually granted the University of Pittsburgh twice that amount, more than $3 million.

In a House Appropriations hearing in May, Fauci was asked about the NIAIDs funding of Pitt experiments grafting scalps from 18- to 20-week aborted fetuses onto rats, and if the agency is aware of where the fetuses come from. Fauci replied that the study went through all the appropriate guidelines and oversight.

Daleiden skewered Faucis response as outrageous for two reasons. First, intact scalps used, which can be seen in pictures included in the study, are only obtainable at the size shown through a partial-birth abortion. Intact heads would not be obtainable through dismemberment abortion where the skull is going to be crushed, Daleiden explained.

Second, in terms of what oversight is being done, it was recently reported that the vice chair of the University of Pittsburghs Institutional Review Board, Dr. Beatrice Chen, is also the medical director of Planned Parenthood Western Pennsylvania and oversees Planned Parenthoods abortion training fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Chen is a supervising participant in every single field citation study that is approved at the University of Pittsburgh, so shes the one supposed to be in charge of making sure that the abortion doctors are not doing partial-birth abortions, are not delivering infants alive, that they are taking them to the NICU to get medical care and she is the person who is in charge of all the abortions, Daleiden said.

The panel discussion on Tuesday concluded with a call for more disclosure, more investigations, and more pressure on lawmakers and law enforcement to make sure not a single dime of federal taxpayer money or Pennsylvania taxpayer money goest to any institution that is promoting the destruction of life, said former U.S. House Rep. Keith Rothfus.

At the end of September, more than 100 U.S. congressmen and senators sent a letter to the heads of DOJ, NIH, and HHS demanding details and documentation on the federally sponsored experiments. The given deadline for their demands was Tuesday, Oct. 12.

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Here's What We Know About Pitt's Sadistic Experiments On Babies - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to go behind the scenes of her new book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

After 2020, which was easily the weirdest national election weve gone through in memory it was, you know, massive changes to election laws, massive changes to the procedures by which we handled voting, massive propaganda, massive tech suppression like all these things that made people feel very uncomfortable about how things were done, Hemingway said.

Then you werent allowed to have a single complaint about it, she continued. And I thought the fact you werent allowed to talk about it or have questions was deeply suspicious and weird considering it came from the same people who had for years been claiming the other thing. And its not just 2016 and the Russia collusion hoax. There are many presidential elections weve had in recent years that people claim were stolen by Republicans.

Hemingway said 2020 showed that we need to be more prepared to deal with future takeover strategies employed by hierarchical institutions.

People who care about knowing whats happening in elections and having trust in what they are shouldnt just be looking at what they did in previous elections, Hemingway warned. The people who did this knew that people were going to figure out that they did this crazy embedding into systems. So presumably, they know that people are going to make it illegal and theyre going to move on to the next thing. So people need to be kind of imaginative about how the election administration can be corrupted so that they can be ready to see whats going to happen in the future.

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Mollie Hemingway Goes Behind The Scenes Of Her New Book 'Rigged' - The Federalist

Failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton overlooked years of her own doubts that former President Donald Trump was legitimately elected to accuse him of leading a very dangerous continuing high-level attack on the legitimacy of our government and the election of our president on Monday.

Our former president is not only behind it, he incited it, he encouraged it, and he continues to do so, Clinton told the hosts on ABCs The View. And you have leaders of the Republican Party who have willingly gone along as though theyre members of a cult, not a political party but a cult, and theyre continuing attacks on the election.

Clinton also complained about the disinformation network known as Facebook and said the nation is in a full constitutional crisis as a result of Trump.

We are still in the midst of a concerted, well-funded effort to undermine American democracy, she said.

As noted by Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway in her new book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, Democrats such as Clinton have labeled decades of presidential victories for their opponents as illegitimate.

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

For months leading up to the 2016 election, Clinton worked with the corrupt corporate media and Democrats to create and amplify false narratives about Trump colluding with the Russians. This conspiracy theory was not only used to spy on the Trump campaign but fed into lies post-Clintons election loss that there were hacked voting totals and illegal voter suppression.

Clinton especially sowed doubts about the legitimacy of Trumps presidency and questioned whether she actually lost the 2016 election.

You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you canhave the election stolen from you, Clinton said in 2019.

I knowhes an illegitimate president, Clinton later said.

Just last October, Clinton claimed that there was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level, and We still dont know what really happened.

Theres just a lot that I think will be revealed. History will discover, she said on The Atlantics politics podcast. But you dont win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, Whoa, somethings not right here. That was a deep sense of unease.

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

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Election Conspiracist Hillary Clinton Whines About Trump's 2020 Criticisms - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Jill Simonian, the director of outreach for PragerU Resources for Educators and Parents, joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss the new PragerU documentary Miseducated: The Decline of Americas Schools and explain why American schools are obsessed with race, gender, and revisionist history.

What were facing now in education really started decades ago and it has been a slow and steady roll. And, like you said, the rot is so deep. And what is that rot? Christopher Rufo explained it quite frankly, long story short, as Marxism, Simonian said.

Simonian said parents should keep speaking up and speaking out even when they are nervous about repercussions.

I think weve gotten to a point in our social structure where, really, people are really scared about being labeled something awful if they happen to say you know what, I dont necessarily agree with that and I question that narrative,' Simonian said. Fear, I think, has overtaken a lot of whats going on in education now.

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How US Educational Institutions Turned Into Havens For Indoctrination - The Federalist

It was just above freezing on Capitol Hill the night of Jan. 8, when Twitter banned President Donald Trump from messaging his nearly 90 million followers.

The censorship of a sitting American president by unaccountable and unelected billionaires in California was a dangerous escalation, but here in Washington, Democrats were overjoyed, most Republicans were relieved, and the corporate press was ecstatic. To even question the decision publicly in D.C. was to support an imagined insurrection.

That night, as friends and I discussed the damage done and the battles ahead around my kitchen bar, we foresaw a world where these kinds of sweeping actions would become common to the point of mundane, losing any fig leaf of justification along the way. As the hours wore on and the beer animated our discussion, one of our company, Martn Avila, sat aside and said little.

It was strange: Avila was a technologist who stayed in a guest room when he was in town. Hed been predicting this moment for years, but the night it happened he chose to retire with barely a word.

Early the next morning, I heard the engine start on his 94 Range Rover as he pulled the truck into the winter air. He was heading to North Carolina to meet with some old friends.

President Trump was far from the first to be banned by Twitter, but his permanent suspension marked the start of a long, dark night, when anyone anywhere might be banned for anything at the whim of a technocrat.

Wed seen warnings the sun was setting on a free internet: Mozilla Firefox President and cofounder Brendan Eich was fired over his Christian religion in 2014; Google worked openly to demonetize content it didnt like in 2020; and that same year social media giants censored a true story from a major newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton in order to assist their political allies. Treating the U.S. president worse than a terrorist spokesman, however, was something new.

In response, President Trumps followers flocked to Parler, a Twitter competitor that hadnt banned him from their platform, quickly making it a top-downloaded app in the Apple and Google Play stores. Seeing the threat to their censorship, on Saturday both stores announced they would ban the companys app. That evening, their web host, Amazon Web Services, took Parler entirely off the internet.

These actions cant be overstated: To ban an app from the major stores is to essentially ban it from being used by any of your customers and at the moment of its greatest momentum. To ban it from the very servers it uses is to lower it into its grave. For three of the most powerful companies on the planet to do so in concert is nothing less than the end of a crucial idea that if you dont like the way somethings done, you can do it yourself, and if youre good and lucky enough you might even succeed. We called that idea the American dream.

But the very existence of men like Eich, as well as the ongoing occasional leaks and small rebellions within the tech giants, speak to a community of dissidents throughout Silicon Valley that until this final moment had seen few reasons to start something new. By the end of the weekend, that calculus had irrevocably changed and Avila and a small number of other conscientious objectors had launched the first salvo against the core of Big Tech by starting a new company called RightForge.

The mission is simple on its face: create an internet governed by the principles enshrined in our Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. The execution, however, requires something more than previous attempts to combat Big Tech supremacy: Instead of playing whack-a-mole by challenging platforms and software, go after the rot at the core, creating a separate, sprawling infrastructure built on hard work, skill, and servers. That is, a second internet.

Its a fundamental problem wed never had to think about before. What happens when the companies that own the ground say you cant build here anymore if youre a conservative, a free-thinking scientist, an upset parent, or simply a Christian?

Thats no hyperbole: Just last month, GoDaddy cut the legs out from Texas Right To Life for providing a forum to protect the constitutional right to life by reporting violations of the states new law. The publicity GoDaddy received from the corporate press was so unanimously positive, a company called DigitalOcean jumped on the bus, crowing that they deserved credit for deplatforming Christians they werent even officially doing business with yet.

The tyrants who seek to control arent brave, nor are they new and its far from the first time the lords who own the land have told the rest they cant build there anymore. Four hundred years ago, the Puritans set sail for the Americas under just such circumstances. Theyd hoped to land in the colonies down south, just as Americans had hoped for a free internet, but forces outside their control had a different plan so they chartered their own founding and forged their own destinies.

RightForge seeks to do just that, because today that is the only way forward. While Ive devoted my life to journalism, everything is at stake; if the internet is not free, honest journalism itself is threatened along with honest political debate, education, science, and the rest.

Wherever despotism abounds, President Calvin Coolidge warned the American Society of Newspaper Editors nearly a century ago, the sources of public information are first to be brought under its control.

Few in politics, the press, or tech recall his warning; worse yet, few still believe it. The most powerful insiders in the world have turned on the American people and the heritage of liberty we cherish, proudly taking aim at our open society. The only choice remaining is to create an alternative; if we dont forge our own path free from their control, this night weve entered will only grow darker and longer.

So, on the first Monday of the month I joined them in their fight as chief communications director, where Ill be defending and expanding an internet where people of all politics and religions can communicate, interact, and conduct commerce free from arbitrary power.

This mission stands in support of honest journalism and against those who seek to censor it, so far from leaving, Ill be remaining at The Federalist. Were on the front lines of every single battle for our culture and country, and Im anxious for the fray.

This fight is a crucial one. One by one, from science and the universities to banking and commerce, press and opinion, conservatives are losing access. We may soon need alternates to all these things and will need access to an internet infrastructure to build them.

Its as easy to be optimistic as it is pessimistic neither posture requires much effort beyond a smile or a frown. Assuming everything will be OK that the rulers will overreach and grow weary, or that some mythical backlash is coming isnt realistic, and is as incompatible with the American way as defeatism in the face of difficult odds. Big Tech might be big, but were a strong people with the intelligence, the technology, the means, and the grit to fight for our freedoms and forge our own destinies.

Weve done it before; were doing it again.

Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist and chief communications officer at RightForge.

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Freedom From Censorship: Inside The Battle To Build A Second Internet - The Federalist

Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffes disastrous interview with a local station on Friday didnt just show his unpreparedness and inability to budge from one-line talking points, it also outed him as a bald-faced liar.

How do you define critical race theory? asked WAVY News 10s Anita Blanton.

I answer this question very clearly, McAuliffe responded, before not answering the question. Its not taught in Virginia, its never been taught in Virginia. And as Ive said this a lot: Its a dog-whistle. Its racial, its division, and its used by Glenn Youngkin and others this is the same thing with Trump and the border wall to divide people.

So how doyoudefine it? Blanton pressed.

Anita! It is not taught here in Virginia, McAuliffe snapped.

But how do you define it?

Doesnt matter, its not taught here in Virginia, McAuliffe said. Im not even spending my time because the school board and everyone else has come out and said its not taught. Its racist. Its a dog-whistle.

But if we dont have a definition how can we say its racist? I just want a definition from you, Blanton continued, promptingMcAuliffe to blame her for wasting precious viewers time by asking.

Even worse than McAuliffes condescending tone or hostility to answering a basic question was the obvious untruth of the talking point he fell back on. Yes, critical race theory is indeed in Virginia classrooms. There may be no other state in the union where examples of radical and pervasive critical race theory in the public school system abound more.

In Alexandria, a page on the Alexandria City Public Schools website promotes resources including How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, White Rage by Carol Anderson, and White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy and Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black by Bettina Love.

Another ACPS webpage encourages parents to let go of colorblindness and ensure your kids are aware of race, while also linking to aForbes articlethat suggests understanding our countrys deeply rooted racism with resources such as:

In Loudoun County, Loudoun County Public Schools firsthired consulting firm The Equity Collaborative in April 2019 and has since poured money into critical race theory consultants. The Equity Collaborative, which LCPS paidmore than $400,000 for an equity audit,operateson the assumption that racism controls the political, social, and economic realms of U.S. society.

Monica Gill, a 25-year veteran government and history teacher in Loudoun County, observed in June: Much of what is being touted in Loudoun County teacher trainings and trickling down into classrooms are poisonous fruit straight off the critical race theory tree.

The Loudoun County School Board also infuriated teachers and parents in fall 2020 when it tried to introduce a code of conduct for employees that wouldprohibit even private speech that was not in alignment with the school divisions commitment to action-oriented equity practices. Those equity practices include the school districts Action Plans to Combat Systemic Racism and its Comprehensive Equity Plan.

Andrea Weiskopf, an English and Latin teacher at River Bend Middle School in Loudoun County, tweeted in June, The best thing about the summer is that I can spend all my time planning how to incorporate Critical Race Theory into my lessons.

In Fairfax County, Superintendent Scott Brabrand announced in a survey to parents over the summer that Fairfax County Public Schools would be developing a new Anti-Racism, Anti-Bias Education Curriculum Policy. The survey came from a New York consulting firm, which FCPS has contracted with for a four-year CRT program and which has been paid nearly $50,000 from FCPSs chief equity officer.

Fairfax schools also sent a PowerPoint to teachers in July explaining that CRT is an interpretive framework that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression.

CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice, the PowerPoint claimed, adding that critical race theory is a useful approach to issues such as school funding, segregation, language policies, discipline policies, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and accountability policies.

In Arlington County, the director of diversity and inclusion at Arlington Public Schools asked Amazon to send the school district copies of Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by critical race grifter Kendi, after which Amazon sent hundreds of copies of the book to the school system to the tune of $5,000.

In conservative Powhatan County, as Ashley Bateman reported for The Federalist in July, County Supervisor David Williams shared slides from theVirginia Inquiry Collaborative (VIC), a consortium encouraging race-based teaching to include the oppressiveness of white culture and learning through the lens of systemic racism.

And at the Virginia Department of Educations 2020 equity summit, critical race theorist Bettina Love gave a keynote address about systemic racism and dismantling capitalism.

McAuliffes cringe-worthy conversation with Blanton about CRT comes on the heels of his comment in a debate against Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin that I dont think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.

A majority of Virginians disagree with McAuliffes sentiment, however, with a new poll showing that 52 percent of respondents believe parents should have more control of school curricula than school boards, and only 33 percent saying school boards should have more power than parents.

Critical race theory is rampant in Virginia public schools, and McAuliffe is either lying out of his rear or ignorant to a disqualifying degree about one of the hottest topics in his state.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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Yes, Terry McAuliffe, Critical Race Theory Is In Virginia Schools - The Federalist

In recent weeks, the Biden administration has begun asserting that the spending bill independent experts believe could cost $5.5 trillion over a decade will actually cost zero. Putting aside the way these patronizing assertions insult voters intelligence, does the kernel of the Biden claimthat the Democratic reconciliation proposals will be fully paid-forstand up to scrutiny?

In a word, hardly. Multiple elements in the history of Democrats last big spending bill, Obamacare, have turned it into a budget buster, suggesting that Bidens zero legislation will follow the same fiscally irresponsible path.

First, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress employed numerous fiscal gimmicks. While drafting the bill, they delayed implementation of the bills main provisions from 2013 to 2014, lowering the upfront spending.

In his September 2009 speech to Congress, Barack Obama claimed his proposal will cost around $900 billion over ten years. Not only did the final legislation come in hundreds of billions over his claim, it also counted the laws Medicare savings as both funding Obamacare and extending Medicares solvencya budgetary trick refuted by both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Medicare actuary.

Another Obamacare gimmick came in the CLASS Act, a long-term care program. Kent Conrad, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, famously called CLASS a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would have been proud of, because it would generate a mirage of surpluses in its initial ten-year budget window, only to run huge losses in future decades. When in 2011 the Obama administration couldnt certify CLASSs actuarial soundness, the program never got off the ground, and $70.2 billion in phony savings suddenly evaporated.

Democrats plan to employ many similar gimmicks in their current spending spree. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, suggested lowering the bills cost by cutting programs from ten years to fivewith every expectation that future Congresses will extend them.

Democrats also are counting on funny money from dynamic scoring, making the illogical and contradictory claim that expanding the welfare state will increase economic growth and tax revenue. And the Treasury Department proposed that one tax increaseclosing the loophole that Biden himself exploited to reduce his familys payroll taxes by nearly $517,000get deposited into the Medicare Trust Fund, reprising Obamacares double-counting scheme.

The second ding on Obamacares soundness comes from provisions repealed by subsequent Congresses. Repealing the health insurer tax and the medical device tax, as a bipartisan spending bill did in 2019, lowered insurance premiums, but also added to federal deficits.

Congress also repealed two other Obamacare provisionsthe Cadillac tax on high-cost employer insurance, and a cap on per-beneficiary spending in Medicarewith the potential to lower long-term health costs and contain entitlement spending. Both provisions had significant flaws. For instance, the unelected board was directed to enforce the Medicare spending cap in ways that could have impaired access to treatments.

Lawmakers, including Republicans, should have insisted on creating better alternatives before repealing these cost-containment provisions outright. They did not.

Obamacares third fiscal flaw comes via provisions that future Congresses will likely need to revisit. While providing a one-time increase in the number of hospitals patients with health coverage, the law reduced their Medicare payments in perpetuity.

Every year since Obamacares passage, the Medicare actuary has released reports calling these productivity adjustments unsustainable. The most recent version noted that within two decades, the perpetual payment reductions would cause one-third of hospitals and 60 percent of nursing homes to lose money, raising the possibility of access and quality-of-care issues for Medicare beneficiariesissues that Congress would have to address.

Finally, the estimates of budget scorekeepers can miss the mark, sometimes wildly. A December 2017 Congressional Budget Office analysis demonstrated that CBO greatly overestimated enrollment in and federal spending on subsidized coverage in Obamacares exchanges, while underestimating enrollment and costs in free Medicaid coverage in states that chose to expand that program.

Recall too that while CBO claimed the federal takeover of student loans would save $58 billion over ten years at the time of its inclusion in Obamacare, an Education Department analysis last year concluded that this pile of toxic debt could cost taxpayers $435 billion.

As Democrats attempt to enact a second Great Society agenda, the Medicare program they want to expand provides a cautionary tale. In 1965, Medicare coverage of physician services was estimated to require federal appropriations of about $500 million a year from general tax revenues. Last year, general revenue transfers to Medicare Part B totaled $328.4 billionan 76-fold increase, even after accounting for inflation.

It seems that no matter the president, nothing becomes so costly as a free government program.

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Only An Idiot Would Believe Congress's Spending Spree Will Cost 'Zero' - The Federalist

The New York Times reported over the weekend that major cities are reacting to surging violence by reinvesting in their depleted police departments. Thats great news, but lets not forget how we got here and whos to blame for the horrific crime waves were experiencing to begin with.

All of the rioting, the looting, the vandalism, and, most devastating, the 30 percent nationwide increase in homicides of 2020, were the direct result of Democrats and leftists in the media instigating, justifying, and excusing violent crime in the wake of the death of George Floyd. This, as Mollie Hemingway reminds us in her new book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, was solely done for the purpose of winning the most disgusting political war theyve ever waged: the fight to deny Donald Trump a second term.

Rigged is an expansive look at the overt and covert coordination among the Democrat Party, the corrupted national media, behemoth internet companies, and other major institutions to tip 2020 in their favor, even as it meant lying to and manipulating voters, and, yes, violence.

Despite its radical extremism, Black Lives Matter received a tremendous amount of support from corporations and other elite groups, writes Hemingway. Its website even proclaimed the movement wanted to disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure and sought to defund the police.

As far as policing goes, thats exactly what happened. Across the country, governments at the local level began slashing budgets for law enforcement, Democrat mayors ordered police to dramatically reduce arrests related to looting and vandalism, and leftist prosecutors declined to pursue major offenses. All of this was done with the nodding approval of CNN, MSNBC, the major networks, and national papers.

The scenes that came out of the riots around the country the first weekend in June were apocalyptic, although the media did their best to downplay the carnage, writes Hemingway. In one memorable image, MSNBCs Ali Velshi stood in front of a massive burning building in Minneapolis one night and said, I want to be clear on how I characterize this. This is mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly. At a protest a couple of months later, CNN was mocked for describing a Kenosha riot as a fiery but mostly peaceful protest as fires and chaos raged in the background.

The carnage and chaos resulted in dozens of deaths and themost expensive insurance claims tab for rioting ever (which could be as high as $2 billion and maybe more). Hemingway counts at least 25 people who died in the horror.

The left romanticized it the entire time. In June of 2020, now-Vice President Kamala Harris warned that everyone beware because the protests are not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.

Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said in an interview on MSNBC two months later, There needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as theres unrest in our lives, and unfortunately, theres plenty to go around.

Yeah, they were sure to offer the obligatory peaceful qualifier so as to give the sacred fact-checkers in the media a reason to rebut every accurate and legitimate charge from critics who could see with their own eyes what was happening that Democrats and their friends in the press were tacitly approving of the havoc taking place around the nation.

It was in every sense a hostage situation. All major cities were boarded up as the mayhem continued, and just as soon as things seemed to calm down heading into the fall, the plywood was reinforced in anticipation of an election outcome that might not go the way Democrats wanted. A Trump victory would be another excuse to continue the rioting over a media-generated narrative that such an outcome was yet more proof that this is a racist country and black people are perpetually in life-threatening danger.

Were only just now recovering from the strain of it all. And if we dont want a repeat in 2022 or 2024, we cant forget who caused it.

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Police Rebuild After Democrats Tore Them Down To Win An Election - The Federalist