Biden Plans To Target America’s Industrial Backbone With New Climate Crackdown: REPORT

If President Joe Biden wins a second term, his administration aims to undertake even more climate initiatives that would target key industries, according to The New York Times.

Biden, in a potential second term, would target industries he views as heavily polluting, including steel mills, cement plants, factories and oil refineries, according to the NYT. The new green initiatives could threaten his chances in the upcoming 2024 presidential election, though, as steel and cement manufacturers in swing states who are often unionized could turn on him after hearing about his climate plans for their industry.

“If you are seen as imposing debilitating regulations on heavy industry that employs large numbers of people, you’re not only going to get a backlash from manufacturing, but labor as well,” David Axelrod, chief strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns, told the NYT. “How to do that without looking like you are stabbing these industries in the back, or in the front for that matter, is a real political challenge.”

Biden’s plan to go after industrial emissions involves subsidizing new technologies that he believes would cut down on factories’ carbon footprint, including wind and solar power to create green hydrogen to power steel mills and cement production methods that do not release carbon dioxide when heating limestone, according to the NYT. The second half of his plan involves imposing tariffs on steel, cement and aluminum based on their carbon emissions.

The Biden administration has already pledged $370 billion to climate initiatives through the $750 billion spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation includes a multitude of subsidies for domestic manufacturers of green energy technologies.

The move to place new restrictions on industry follows the president’s goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by the year 2050. Biden has pumped huge subsidies into the electric vehicle industry to meet this goal, aiming for half of all new cars to be electric by 2030.

In addition to electric vehicles, the president has also targeted power plants in an attempt to encourage greener energy sources like solar and wind power, creating new Environmental Protection Agency regulations that have yet to be finalized that would compel the phaseout of coal-fired power plants, according to the NYT. The Biden administration has also put restrictions on oil and gas production through tightening requirements related to methane emissions.

“Apparently skyrocketing gas and energy prices weren’t enough for Biden, he wants to raise the prices on building and infrastructure costs and put hard working Americans further into debt,” Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, told the NYT. “Biden will not be elected to a second term — American families can’t afford it.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

WILL KESSLER

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Soros-Funded ‘Gen Z’ Organization Is Fueling Joe Biden’s ‘TikTok Army’

An organization largely funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros’ philanthropic network is bankrolling a “Gen Z” group that works to advance Democratic priorities and President Joe Biden’s agenda on social media, the New York Post reported.

Accelerate Action, Inc. received over $5.5 million in 2021 and 2022 from the Open Society Foundations, a group founded by Soros and currently run by his son Alexander Soros, according to the Foundation’s website. That group gave, among other grants, $300,000 to “Gen Z for Change” a non-profit activist group that produces left-wing content uploaded onto social media websites such as TikTok and Instagram for voters to consume, according to its tax forms.

The Open Society Foundations made up around two-thirds of Accelerate Action’s funding in 2020 and 2021, according to the New York Post. Moreover, Accelerate Action is the only nonprofit that has donated to Gen Z for Change, which would trace much of its funding back to the Open Society Foundations, according to the Post.

“[W]e’ve supported a variety of progressive campaigns, from union solidarity and fighting abortion bans to holding social media companies accountable for their role in spreading disinformation,” Gen Z for Change writes on its website, which lists a dozen different left-wing campaigns. “Through our 2022 electoral work, we launched effective creator activations that generated a total of over 26 million views and supported many crucial campaigns with various celebrities and lawmakers.”

The Daily Caller previously reported that the one of Gen Z for Change’s founding board members was a Biden campaign staffer, and the group frequently works with Democratic operatives and White House officials.

Gen Z for Change has been in direct contact with the White House and Biden administration regarding its campaign efforts. In 2022, a representative was invited to the Oval Office for an audience with President Joe Biden, while its other officers received a White House briefing about the war in Ukraine and a meeting with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy about the coronavirus, the New York Post reported.

The group’s website lists a dozen different campaigns that work to advance left-wing causes and stymie Republican administrations’ conservative policies. One initiative, known as “CRT Mail,” allows users to spam Virginia’s tip line email address created by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin for parents to report instances of “critical race theory” being taught in classrooms.

“[T]his website autogenerates randomized reports to Virginia’s CRT tip email. [T]he reports aren’t real of course, they’re mostly song lyrics. [J]ust click the button below and send the email 🙂 [A]lternatively, you could replace my message with a new one. [F]eel free to spice it up!” the group writes.

Another campaign, known as the S.A.F.E.R. Initiative — which stands for Spam, Assist, Fund, Educate [and] Register — targets crisis pregnancy centers, or locations where pregnant women may receive support for an unwanted pregnancy as an alternative to an abortion. As a result of their efforts, “Yelp added a disclaimer to all [centers], stating that they provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals,” according to the website.

Gen Z for Change did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

ARJUN SINGH

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Soros’ Devious Plan To Control Americans Gets Exposed

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘Dirty Tricks Campaign’: Elon Musk Is Battling Biden Admin As Investigations Pile Up Since Twitter Takeover

  • Billionaire Elon Musk is confronting numerous investigations launched by President Joe Biden’s administration, many of which have occurred since he acquired social media platform Twitter — now X — under a year ago, and released documents revealing censorship by the previous regime.
  • Musk has criticized the Democratic Party and exposed left-wing censorship through the release of the “Twitter Files.”  
  • “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk posted on X in May 2022, while still in the process of purchasing the platform. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”

Billionaire Elon Musk has faced an investigative onslaught from President Joe Biden’s administration since he acquired social media platform Twitter — now X — less than a year ago, and exposed censorship against conservatives by his predecessors.

The billionaire has condemned the Democratic party and exposed left-wing censorship, including from Biden himself. The president encouraged investigations into Musk soon after he assumed control of X in October: Musk is currently the owner or CEO of X, Tesla and SpaceX, all of which have faced investigations from the Biden administration since his takeover of the social media platform.

“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk posted on X in May 2022, while still in the process of purchasing the platform. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”

Shortly following Musk’s acquisition of X, Biden said that Musk’s relationships with foreign governments warranted investigation.  “I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries … is worthy of being looked at, whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that,” Biden said in November. “I’m suggesting that [it’s] … worth being looked at … that’s all I’ll say.”

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has investigated the company’s alleged lack of adherence to a 2022 administrative order related to privacy, and depositions “revealed a chaotic environment at the company that raised serious questions about whether and how Musk and other leaders were ensuring X Corp.’s compliance,” according to a September Department of Justice (DOJ) filing. This violation could lead to fines for the company, according to The Washington Post.

The FTC has also issued over 350 solicitations for information from X since Musk took over, including the social media platform’s work with journalists, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio asserted in July. Musk enabled journalists to release batches of internal documents from X which precede his takeover, called the “Twitter Files,” revealing that Biden campaign staff flagged posts related to his son Hunter for the company to censor.

Before Musk took over, X censored the Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post in the month before the 2020 election, preventing people from sharing the link both publicly and privately. Former executives now regret suppressing the story.

“You’ve asked for every single communication relating to Elon Musk, not communications that he just sent to someone or communications he received, but any time he’s mentioned,” Jordan said. “More than harassment, that seems like almost an obsession.”

Furthermore, the DOJ and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are also investigating Musk’s electric car company Tesla’s alleged allocation of funds toward a discrete project, rumored to be construction of a glass house for its CEO, The Wall Street Journal reported in August.

The alleged project is internally called “Project 42” and involves the construction of an expansive glass building in the vicinity of Austin, Texas, according to the WSJ. “I’m not building a house of any kind, let alone a glass one!” Musk posted on X.

Moreover, Musk’s SpaceX is currently under investigation by the DOJ for alleged discrimination over its hiring policies, according to an August filing. The DOJ accused SpaceX of discrimination against people seeking asylum and refugees by not hiring them.

The U.S. mandates employees to have “at least a green card” due to rockets’ classification as “advanced weapons technology,” Musk posted on X, However, this is inaccurate, according to the lawsuit.

Musk was recently asked on a podcast if the Biden administration has it out for him. “Ha. What ever gave you that idea?” Musk joked, eliciting laughter from the hosts and live audience.

“I don’t think the whole administration has it out for me,” he added. “But I think there’s probably aspects of the administration … or aspects of interests aligned with President Biden who probably do not wish good things for me.”

The White House, DOJ, Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

The FTC and SEC declined to comment.

AUTHOR

JASON COHEN

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Do Not Wish Good Things For Me’: Elon Musk Explains Why He Thinks The Biden Admin Could Be Out To Get Him

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Déjà vu — Attempted Assassination of Democrat Presidential Candidate RFK, Jr. in Los Angeles Thwarted

On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, the Democrat candidate for president in 1968, was shot by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California and pronounced dead the following day.

NOTE: To date Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. has not authorized secret service protection for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Rather, RFK, Jr. is forced to pay for his own protection by hiring Gavin de Becker and Associates security personnel.

Fifty-five years and three months later we have RFK, Jr., the Democrat president for president in 2023, tweeting this from the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, California:

In an article titled What happened with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Assassination attempt controversy explained as video goes viral Shalini Mahato reports,

An armed man [Adrian Aispuro] impersonating part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s security detail was arrested on September 15, 2023. Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) confirmed that the name of the perpetrator was Adrian Paul Aispuro. CNN reported that the LAPD has charged the 44-year-old with carrying a concealed weapon. A video of the interaction has been going viral on social media since the arrest.

The man was carrying “loaded pistols and spare ammunition magazines” as reported by Kennedy himself on X. Kennedy’s security quickly detained the Aispuro at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles and LAPD arrived at the location to arrest him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has since reiterated his request for Secret Service protection from Joe Biden, according to CNN.

It is worth noting that at the time of the incident, the Democratic Presidential candidate was set to attend a campaign event.

[ … ]

Raymond Aispuro dropped his brother Adrian at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on Friday. Raymond insists there was some misunderstanding as Adrian Aispuro was told that he had a security job there.

According to the New York Post, Adrian’s 38-year-old brother said the former was an unemployed Emergency Medical Technician. Raymond continued to say that his brother approached a security guard and asked about a “point of contact for someone.”

“They didn’t know who he was talking about. They told him to stay right there. He did, and next thing happens, the cops show up and arrest him,” Raymond said.

Raymond was also briefly detained by the LAPD, and he insisted his sibling had no criminal record or a history of stalking. He said Adrian was not even political and added that his brother wasn’t aggressive.

“My brother got bad information from someone or was misled somehow. I really don’t think he was there for any other purpose except for work. He had his gun holstered, never took it out, never displayed any aggression,” Raymond said in defence of his brother.

Adrian Aispuro was charged with carrying a concealed weapon at the station and booked on $35,000 bail, as per the New York Post.

©2023. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Did Someone Just Try to Assassinate RFK Jr.?

VIDEO: Canadian Muslims hold ‘Million Man March’ Against State-Sexualization of Children

A planned, ‘Million Man March’ against state-sexualization of children with all its subcategories is planned for Wednesday morning across various Canadian cities. The planning was by a Muslim community leader, and is not without internal drama, although I don’t know the specifics. In any case, one of our readers posted this about (the state thugs with the illusion of a degree of separation such as) ANTIFA etc. who are planning a counter-protest. This is interesting as so far, whenever Muslims protest SOGI or any of the other hideous state programs to remind parents that the state has total control of children, right up to sexually mutilating them and sterilizing them without parents even having the right to argue privately to the children that maybe this is a bad idea, the media and leftists ignore it, figuring that in classic Marxist thinking, if no one knows the Muslims are protesting these policies, then the state-dialectic that Muslims are a victim group along with all the various sexual-deviations from the norm are a united front against classical Western thought.

The dialectic is that the revolutionaries refer to as, “racists, Islamophobes, bigots, haters, transphobes” and every other kind of rhetorical device used to silence and ideally, destroy, de-bank and so on, anyone with counter-revolutionary views using Repressive Tolerance and Discourse theory

To be clear, one must look at the entire issue as one of total Hegelian-Marxist revolution Vs. classical civilization including, and especially the method of thought deployed and how policies are created from that method of thought. We are Socratic. We believe there is an objective reality that can be determined through reason, evidence and logic, at least to a degree, and that policies can be created for the greater good as applied to the individual. Much in the sense that a pilot knows that if he can get down and off the aircraft safely, chances are so will his passengers. The new way, at least for North America, is the Hegelian standard. “And the state shall be unto like a God that bestrides the land”.

If ANTIFA and other revolutionaries under whatever rubric they claim, decide to show up and intimidate what is supposed to be mostly Muslims protesting SOGI, it means they have a strategy for regurgitating the event to the public in cooperation with the media. Either the media will not show it at all, or carefully tailer the footage to make sure that they show only non-Muslims as targets of the revolutionary thugs so they can present it in the manner in accordance with the usual dialectic. In any case, learning about it by CBC and comparing it to footage here or on Twitter or whatnot should be interesting. Twitter however buries a lot of posts it seems. In one post I did, I wrote as a 3 word part discussing solutions, “Grannies not Trannies” in terms of the program of transsexuals and transvestites reading to kids and it was suppressed for hate speech. One can be confident that any post suggesting Trump supporters not be allowed to do something, would not be treated this way. So be cautious with Twitter as well.

It is also quite likely that this is fake. The people are real, and their views, most likely are what is presented. But that they intentionally leaked this as disinformation (deliberate falsehoods intended to damage a target as opposed to naïve spreading of it by those who fall for it which is misinformation) as they include “Islamophobia” as one of the reasons they want to counter-protest when it is Muslims who are organizing the event.

There is simply NO WAY they would not know that this is in fact organized by a Muslim community leader.

If you go to around 21 minutes you can hear the tactic. She names the groups they want to protect. This means this video was likely created and released to maintain the illusion that there are two groups: Every possible victim of Western civ, including Muslims, Vs. evil white supremacist-colonialists. I add colonialists because of the excessive land claims statement at the beginning of the zoom, which clearly is meant to replace any form of national allegiance or pledge to the crown or nation-state. So there is the dialectic. The video itself is the weapon. They cannot show up and counter-protest and be seen to be against people who will be conspicuously Islamic in appearance and clothing. Instead, they leak a video which continues the narrative that Muslims are victims of counter-revolutionaries as much as ‘trans-kids’ are. This would be in keeping with Leftist thought and tactics. One imagines that we will know on Wednesday. For all we can know, there are more layers of disinformation and the tactical use of words involved. Perhaps that could explain some of the behind the scenes drama betwixt the organizers. No details on that have been provided though.

This is said to be a complete transcription of the video, although we have not checked it.

Here is an interesting paragraph demonstrating they are aware of the issue of who organized the march and are hiding it to preserve the dialectic of Islam and sexual deviant groups together Vs. who they have sculpted as the acceptable villains.

What is unique about this is that it’s now being under the guise of being led by parents, it’s being led by the guise of being led by religious faith, and it’s being led by religious faith and some sort of ethnic communities. And we need to be very sure that we make sure that our response is based on the hate and not on the people. And it’s a very easy way to divide many diverse communities by pitting us against each other.

The slide presentation in this video is also useful.

To be clear on who the people created as targets of acceptable, even mandatory hate, watch this short clip from the Trans-march in Ottawa from this summer:

CUPE Ontario appears to be recruiting for the counter-protests which is data suggesting the organization of the counter-protest is real and the video may in fact be a real leak. So hard to tell these days.

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column posted by Eeyore is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Google Founder and Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Engineers: ‘We’re Creating God’

The leftists’ dream – any god but G-d.

Google Founder And Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Engineers Admit ‘We’re Creating God’

By Jacob M. Thompson, WP, September 14, 2023:

“It’s just the next step in evolution. I’m serious,” Larry Page, the Google co-founder, said.

An engineer from Silicon Valley, California, the home to some of the latest and cutting edge technologies in the world, has said that they and others who are working on artificial intelligence are “creating God,” this all-knowing, all-powerful machine that can do it all for mankind that cuts like a double-edged sword.

Nick Bilton for Vanity Fair explored these tech engineers research to understand the process, and one researcher told him plainly:

We’re creating God. We’re creating conscious machines.

One AI engineer working on large language models (LLMs) recently told Bilto

Bilton wrote in his piece that AI has been touted as being able to ‘solve all of the world’s problems or destroy every single human on the planet in the snap of a finger—or both. Machines that will potentially answer all of our unanswerable questions: Are we alone in the universe? What is consciousness? Why are we here?’

Bilton added, ‘Thinking machines that could cure cancer and allow us to live until we’re 150 years old. Maybe even 200. Machines that, some estimate, could take over up to 30 percent of all jobs within the next decade, from stock traders to truck drivers to accountants and telemarketers, lawyers, bookkeepers, and all things creative: actors, writers, musicians, painters. Something that will go to war for us—and likely against us.’

In a span of just six months Bilton highlights just some of the things AI has transformed and openly accomplished in the world today, such as LLMs learning to “write stories in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Bugs Bunny or the King James Bible while you’re drunk with peanut butter stuck in your mouth;” or things like making highly customizable pornography, to voiceovers and music covers, to AI therapists or emulating dead relatives to keep the memories lively; and people are even “discussing using AI to create entirely new species of animals (yes, that’s real) or viruses (also real). Or exploring human characteristics, such as creating a breed of super soldiers who are stronger and have less empathy, all through AI-based genetic engineering,” Bilton writes.

It excites me and worries me in equal proportions. The upsides for this are enormous, maybe these systems find cures for diseases, and solutions to problems like poverty and climate change, and those are enormous upsides.

The downsides are humans that are displaced from leading the way, or in the worst case, extinguished entirely, [which] is terrifying.

David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at NYU, said

Larry Page, the famed computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Google, also said that the AI is on course (very soon) to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI), creating “superintelligent machines” that will simply just simply be rid of us living folk, adding that this is only the next step in human evolution.

It’s just the next step in evolution. I’m serious.

Page told Bilton’s friend during a conversation

Elon Musk has also confirmed that chaps like Page really are trying to recreate an AI God. “My perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough. He really seems to want digital superintelligence, basically digital God, if you will, as soon as possible,” Musk said on Fox News earlier this year.

Nate Soares, executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit focused on identifying and managing potential existential risks from AGI, chastised Page’s reckless ambitions:

If Larry Page said, ‘I’m going to obliterate the planet with a nuke and nuking the entire planet is just the natural order of things and so we shouldn’t mourn it,’ we would all say, ‘What the f***, that’s a terrible idea!’

Moreover, a political lobbyist consultant told Bilton in a statement: “All of the people leading the development of AI right now are completely disingenuous in public. They are all just in a race to be the first to build AGI and are either oblivious to the consequences of what could go wrong or they just don’t care.”

Simply put, the general consensus and open goals of the “leaders in Silicon Valley seem to think it’s time that we should outsource all of that time and thinking to their AIs.”

Furthermore, May Habib, who, as the cofounder and CEO of Writer – an AI start-up that helps people at companies write with the same style and voice – is still critical of the technology, blasting it for not having basically zero diversity and “no women in AI.” She did note, however, this whole craze centers around one driving principle:

You look around AI today and everyone is a generative AI capitalist. The way they sell, what they build, their vision for the future, is that it’s all about money.

Bilton additionally wrote:

In 1965 the statistician I.J. Good, when envisioning what the world would look like once we created ultraintelligent machines, said that the second machines became smarter than people, there would “unquestionably be an intelligence explosion” as machines quickly created smarter machines, and that “the intelligence of man would be left far behind.” We’d likely understand what they were doing in the same way our pets understand the words of a book we read aloud.

“Thus,” Good wrote, “the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

Howbeit the geeks working on this are relentless in creating their new God that will bring prosperity to all. Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open-AI and founder of Worldcoin, is, according to Bilton, “a god. An AI messiah. He’s fawned over in news articles. Doted on in interviews.”

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden Wants to Shrink Marine Sanctuary That Protects Endangered Whales to Accommodate Wind Energy Factory Owned By Dem Donor

In case you were still in the dark how evil and full of shit these Democrat environ-mentalists are……

The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary is a biodiversity hotspot, with a range of habitat types from coastal estuaries to deep sea canyons, and migratory paths frequented by marine mammals such as dolphins and whales.

The Democrats would burn it all down.

Just like mining for EV batteries (lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and graphite) destroys the environment. Solar panels and wind turbines never degrade – they are put in landfills where they will sit in eternity.

And inefficient offshore wind turbines are decimating the whale population and use tons of oil to operate and kill whales.

Biden Wants To Shrink Tribal Marine Sanctuary to Accommodate Wind Energy Factory Owned by Dem Donor

By: Susannah Luthi, Washington Free Beacon, September 12, 2023

President Joe Biden wants to shrink a Pacific Ocean marine sanctuary meant to protect endangered whales in order to accommodate offshore wind energy factories—one of them owned by a major Democratic donor.

The Biden administration late last month proposed cutting about 1,400 square miles of ocean and coastline from an Indian tribe’s proposed national marine sanctuary to make room for wind turbine infrastructure. One of these factories would belong to Invenergy, whose founder and CEO Michael Polsky has given more than $400,000 to Democrats since 2016. His company shelled out $2.4 million to lobby the White House, federal agencies, and Congress this year.

The proposal reflects a conflict between efforts to fight climate change and those to preserve natural habitats. The Biden administration’s proposal would benefit green energy companies and generate renewable energy, but environmental groups have sounded the alarm on such projects noting that they kill birds and whales—the very wildlife that the marine sanctuary seeks to preserve. The proposal also reflects the green energy industry’s status as a major player in the Democratic Party. Biden has invested billions of taxpayer dollars into renewable energy projects backed by liberal billionaires, enriching them in the process.

Polsky’s major contributions from the past several years include a total of $72,000 to the House Democrats’ campaign committee in 2020 and 2022, and $35,500 to the Democratic National Committee in 2016—the same year he poured $75,000 into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Polsky has also donated to Republicans and Invenergy’s political campaign committee, but of the roughly $500,000 he has contributed to political causes since 2016, more than $400,000 has gone to Democrats according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

While Polsky did not contribute to Biden’s presidential bid in 2020, Invenergy employees gave more than $120,000 to his campaign, federal contribution records show.

This isn’t the first time Democrats have rewarded Polsky’s energy companies. In 2016, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose campaign Polsky funded helped secure him a $1.2 billion natural gas plant, the Free Beacon reported at the time. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Invenergy received more than $20 million in taxpayer-funded grants.

The Northern Chumash tribal council first petitioned for a 7,600 square mile marine sanctuary in the region in 2015, years before the Biden administration announced it wanted massive offshore wind turbine development in the same vicinity. The wind turbines will be built just outside the sanctuary’s northwestern boundary.

The feds’ latest proposal to cut into the marine sanctuary would slash about 29 miles of coastline and a total of about 1,400 square miles from the preserve as it was originally conceived, the tribal council said. Its final boundaries will be determined after a public comment period that ends Oct. 25. Meanwhile, the Biden administration already awarded ocean leases to Invenergy and two other energy corporations late last year, although they haven’t started construction.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—which is in charge of creating the Chumash marine preserve—noted in proposing its alternative boundary to allow for industrial development that “certain concentrations of this infrastructure may not be compatible with a national marine sanctuary.”

The administration’s proposed revision must undergo public comment before being finalized. Regardless, the wind turbines could sabotage the preserve’s goals by killing off the whales, birds, and other marine life that it is supposed to protect. Environmentalists have warned that offshore wind factories on the East Coast may be killing whales—concerns that the Biden administration has condemned as “misinformation” even though more than 70 whales have died since December.

A spokesperson for the Department of Interior division overseeing the offshore wind development did not respond to questions about the turbines’ potential harm to whales but deferred to NOAA for queries about the sanctuary.

AUTHOR

RELATED VIDEO: The Film “Thrown to the Wind” That Could Save an Entire Whale Species is Now Free to Watch

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Iran’s Terror Airfield 12 Miles From Israel

Not content with having supplied Hezbollah over the years with 150,000 rockets with which to threaten Israel, nor with its financial aid, and more weapons, sent to the terror group Hamas in Gaza, nor with continuing to smuggle even more weapons, including drones, to Hezbollah via Syria, nor quite satisfied with its steady march toward manufacturing nuclear weapons with which to destroy the “Zionist entity,” Iran is now building a new airport in southern Syria, just 12 miles from the Israeli border, for its future use against Israel. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on this terror airfield and why Israel is so worried can be found here: “Israeli Defense Minister Reveals Iranian-Built Terror Airfield in South Lebanon,” by Andrew Bernard, Algemeiner, September 11, 2023:

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Monday accused Iran of building an airstrip near the Israel-Lebanon border for use in terrorist attacks against the Jewish state.

Speaking at a security conference at Reichman University in Israel, Gallant revealed what he described as images of the airfield showing the flags of Iran and its chief proxy force, the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah. Gallant said the airstrip, which is about 12 miles north of the Israeli border near the Lebanese village of Birket Jabbour, was intended to be used for “terrorist objectives.”

Presumably, once the airfield is completed, the Iranians will be able, when they wish, to launch terror drones as well as be able to deliver weapons to terrorists inside Israel from the air.

“The land is Lebanese, the control is Iranian, and the target is Israel,” Gallant said. “If it comes to a conflict, we will not hesitate to activate the lethal force of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. Hezbollah and Lebanon will pay heavy and painful prices.”…

In practice, US and other diplomats have said the peacekeepers, formally known as the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), have allowed Hezbollah to operate with impunity in south Lebanon.

“We know UNIFIL has been unable to access a range of troubling sites across the Blue Line, including illegal firing ranges, Green Without Borders sites, rocket launch sites, and tunnel sites,” said US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, referring to the boundary separating Israel and Lebanon. “It is clear the main purpose of these sites is to facilitate Hezbollah’s operations in southern Lebanon along the Blue Line.” 

UNIFIL has been unable to fulfill its mandate from the UN to keep a strip of southern Lebanon demilitarized. It has been unable to stop Hezbollah from building firing ranges, rocket launch sites, and terror tunnels which are dug by Hezbollah from southern Lebanon into the northern Galilee. There is no reason to think that UNIFIL will now be able to face down Hassan Nasrallah’s fighters guarding the airfield site; it’s up to Israel alone to protect itself from Iranian encroachments in Lebanon.

But why did Israel announce to the world that Iran was now building an airport in Lebanon just 12 miles from the border with Israel? Was that meant to be another warning to the world of Iran’s continued malevolence? But the Western world knows that already. Was it meant to warn Iran to stop building the airfield, sending a message that “we are watching you, nothing you do is hidden from us”? That wouldn’t stop the Iranian project, as it hasn’t them in the past; the Iranians continue relentlessly to enrich uranium to a level just below weapons-grade. I cannot help thinking that the IAF should have simply bombed the airfield, destroying it, but instead of mentioning Iran, it should only have said that “we destroyed a Lebanese site where activity of an unknown nature was going on; we believe a handful of Hezbollah fighters may have been killed.” In that way, Iran would not feel the need to retaliate against Israel; the fiction that it was a purely Hezbollah project could be maintained. The Iranians would have been angry, but also would realize that they are in no position right now to retaliate, lest they give the IAF all the excuse it needs to conduct a massive attack on Iran’s nuclear project. The Bidenites’ appeasement of Tehran — with $6 billion freed up for payment to Tehran, in exchange for five hostages, one of them an Iranian agent — has now made such an attack much more likely.

AUTHOR

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Texas AG Ken Paxton Acquitted In Impeachment Trial

The impeachment trial of Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton came to an end Saturday, with the eligible state senators voting not to remove him from office.

The GOP-held state House voted to impeach the attorney general in late May over alleged corruption, bribery, obstruction and other charges related to the FBI’s investigation into real estate developer and Paxton donor, Nate Paul. The senators acting as the jury did not sustain the 16 articles of impeachment, and voted to acquit Paxton, according to the trial livestream.

The senators voted to acquit Paxton on the first ten articles of impeachment, as well as articles 15 – 20, according to the trial livestream. Two-thirds of the 30 eligible senators had to have voted to sustain at least one of the 16 articles in order for Paxton to have been convicted and removed from office.

The four articles that the Senate previously voted to be deliberated on at a later date, articles 11 – 14, were dismissed via a motion following Paxton’s acquittal, according to the trial livestream. Paxton’s wife, Angela, a Republican state senator, was not permitted to take part in the vote, but was still required to attend the proceedings.

Paxton pleaded not guilty to the 16 articles on the first day of the trial, and his defense attempted to discredit the prosecution’s arguments through evidence. The impeachment trial centered around testimony from former Paxton staffers, whistleblowers, current employees and other key witnesses.

Former President Donald Trump rushed to Paxton’s defense ahead of the verdict on Thursday, which the attorney general touted on social media.

“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was easily re-elected last November, but now establishment RINOS are trying to undo that Election with a shameful impeachment of him,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Who would replace Paxton, one of the TOUGHEST & BEST Attorney Generals in the Country? Could it be a Democrat, or even worse, a RINO? The voters have decided who they want! Democrats are feeling very good right now as they watch, as usual, the Republicans fight & eat away at each other. It’s a SAD day in the Great State of Texas!”

Paxton served in both chambers of the state legislature before being elected as attorney general in 2014, according to Ballotpedia. The attorney general was reelected in 2018 by 3.6 points and in 2022 by nearly 10 points.

The attorney general announced Wednesday that he will sit down with Daily Caller News Foundation co-founder Tucker Carlson next week for an interview about the impeachment trial.

AUTHOR

MARY LOU MASTERS

Contributor.

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Post-Postmodern America, Meet Mao’s Cultural Revolution

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.

Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution:

  • The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing into the United States anyone who could walk across the southern border.

More than 7 million did just that. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 annual American fentanyl deaths.

Then border states finally wised up.

They grasped that the entire open-borders, “new Democratic majority” left-wing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.

So, cash-strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once magnanimous liberals—whether in Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, or Manhattan—stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon they went berserk over the influx.

So, now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming, but to stay far away from their advocates—by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the U.S. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

  • Pre-civilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.

They couldn’t care less that their targeted reservoirs help store water in droughts, prevent flooding, enhance irrigation, offer recreation, and generate clean hydroelectric power.

Now an absurd green California is currently destroying four dams on the Klamath River. In adding insult to injury, it is paying the half-billion-dollar demolition cost in part through a water bond that state voters once thought would build new—not explode existing—dams.

  • The Biden administration is mandating new dates when electric vehicles will be all but mandatory.

To prove their current viability, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm led a performance-art EV caravan on a long road trip.

When she found insufficient charging stations to continue her media stunt, she sent a gas-powered car ahead to block open charging stations and deny them to other EVs ahead in line.

Only that way could Granholm ensure that her arriving energy-starved motorcade might find rare empty charger stalls.

In some California charging stations, diesel generators are needed to produce enough “clean” electricity to power the stalls.

The state has steadily dismantled many of its nuclear, oil, and coal power plants. It refuses to build new natural-gas generation plants.

Naturally, California’s heavily subsidized solar and wind plants now produce too much energy during the day and almost nothing at night.

So, the state now begs residents to charge their EVs only during the day. Then at night, Californians may soon be asked to plug them in again to transfer what is left in their batteries into the state grid.

Apparently only that way will there be enough expropriated “green” electricity for 41 million state residents after dark.

  • One of the loudest leftist voices to defund the police, and decriminalize violent crimes in the post-George Floyd era, was Shivanthi Sathanandan, the second vice chairwoman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

She was recently not shy about defunding: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE.”

But recently the loud Sathanandan was a victim of the very crime wave she helped to spawn.

Last week, four armed thugs carjacked her automobile. They beat her up in front of her children at her own home, and sped off without fear of arrest.

The reaction of the arch police dismantler and decriminalizer on her road to Damascus?

The now-bruised and bleeding activist for the first time became livid that criminals had taken over her Minneapolis: “Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.”

  • Andrea Smith was an ethnic studies professor at the University of California at Riverside. But now she has been forced out after getting caught lying that she was Native American.

Prior to her “outing,” she was well-known for damning “white women” (like herself) who opted to “become Indians” out of guilt, and (like her) for careerist advantage.

The Takeaway

The common theme of these absurdities is how contrary to human nature, impractical, and destructive utopian wokeism is, whether in matters of energy, race, crime, or illegal immigration.

There are two other characteristics of the woke revolution.

One, it depends solely on its advocates never having to experience firsthand any of the nonsense they inflict on others.

And two, dangerous zealots with titles before (and letters after) their names prove to be quite stupid—and dangerous.

COPYRIGHT 2023 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY LLC

AUTHOR

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

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Here’s Why the Left Is So Determined to Destroy the New College of Florida

The Biden administration is attempting to crush a small Florida liberal arts school for not being left-wing.

The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights recently announced that it would launch an investigation into the New College of Florida.

The school, which previously had been known for its liberal politics, is being transformed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a notable trustee, Christopher Rufo.

Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the recently released “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.”

Rufo explained in City Journal what the investigation is about.

He said it began with a complaint from ACLU attorney Jennifer Granick. She said that the school’s board and trustees violated civil rights law by “removing ‘gender neutral’ signage from bathrooms, defunding the [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and gender studies programs, and ‘misgendering’ the former DEI director and a former student, who use ‘ze/zir’ and ‘they/them’ pseudo-pronouns, respectively.”

As Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez wrote for the Washington Examiner, neither “ze” nor “zir” are words in the English language—or any other language. They are an invention of far-left ideologues who have come up with “‘neo-pronouns’ that must now be used in place of the third-person singular ‘he’ or ‘she’ for people who say they are of unspecified sex.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

The complaint against the school included that Rufo “mocked” the contrived pronouns. He didn’t deny it.

“You know what? I did mock her,” Rufo said in a conversation with Gonzalez. “Her pronouns are ridiculous. They are trying to make mockery illegal.”

Is mocking the ridiculous a federal crime now?

My colleague Fred Lucas reported that several members of Congress in the House Anti-Woke Caucus wrote a letter to the assistant education secretary for civil rights, Catherine Lhamon, questioning the investigation.

The three Republican legislators, Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana, Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, wrote:

The original complaint alleges that opposition to ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ programming is a violation of federal law. In effect, it argues that conservative political beliefs are illegal. [The Office of Civil Rights’] decision to investigate the New College of Florida based on a clearly politically motivated complaint calls into question its commitment to impartially enforcing civil rights law.

The New College of Florida is bucking every trend that’s poisoned modern academia. The board of trustees is abandoning the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It is also seeking professors with an actual diversity of views and backgrounds, and it’s ending overtly ideological programs like “gender studies” on campus.

Those ideas will instead be discussed in traditional programs like “history, biology, and psychology,” according to another board member, Matthew Spalding, a professor and dean at Hillsdale College.

I imagine that, to most taxpaying Americans, that sounds entirely reasonable. Given that the New College of Florida is a publicly funded school, why should it serve as an sinkhole of left-wing indoctrination?

If you thought that the Left would see what happened there and just move on, I’d say you don’t understand how the Left operates.

The New College of Florida takeover triggered not only a deluge of media coverage immediately declaring the school “broken” and a “failure,” but it has drawn out a hostile federal regime looking to squash it.

This is an example of why it is impossible to escape the culture war. The Left simply won’t abide an institution, anywhere, rejecting its view of the world. Any institution the Left doesn’t control it immediately seek to destroy, whether it’s the Supreme Court or a small school in Florida.

The transformation of the New College of Florida from an extremely left-wing liberal arts school into an institution that embraces classical learning, a “Hillsdale of the South” as DeSantis called it, represents a total defeat for the Left.

Never mind the fact that New College will be an extreme outlier in the liberal-dominated sea of higher education. For the Left, what’s happening at the New College of Florida amounts to heresy from the secular faith. Higher education is the gatekeeping institution of the American elite, and losing their near-monopoly on that power is perceived as an existential threat.

And that gets to the biggest reason why Democrats are desperate to destroy the New College of Florida. If the project succeeds, even just a little bit, other states may soon copy its model. After decades of complaining about the radicalism of our colleges and universities, Republican governors and legislators might now actually attempt other school takeovers.

That will be especially the case if the experiment is successful.

It wouldn’t just be a victory for the Right; it would be a victory for free thought and higher education in general. Our college campuses have gone from bastions of liberalism, to hotbeds of radicalism, to monolithic enforcers DEI ideology.

The growth of schools that reject that model would mean that there are serious alternatives.

Despite accusations of “chaos” at the New College of Florida from grumbling opponents of the school’s rightward turn, things seem to be working out just fine. Enrollment is up, with 2022 setting a record for the school.

As ridiculous as the Biden investigation is, it isn’t surprising. The Left is highly invested in seeing the New College of Florida fail, and lawfare is one of its favorite tactics. Stopping the changes by traditional political means isn’t working out for Democrats right now. DeSantis won his reelection bid for governor by a wide margin, and the state is getting redder.

So, when we have political power, we don’t have to cede every single institution to far Left radicals? What a crazy idea. It just might work.

It turns out that governing as a conservative isn’t just effective; it can be popular to boot. That’s what scares the Left, which will use every tool in its arsenal to ensure that this green shoot of liberty fails.

AUTHOR

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of the book “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Send an email to Jarrett.

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Biden’s Broadband Plan Subsidizes Delaware, Mansions, Vacation Homes, Senate Panel Finds

The Biden administration’s $42.5 billion high-speed internet program favors heavily Democrat regions and remote vacation homes, including President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, according to a new report by Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee.

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, known as BEAD, designated as “unserved” locations places that include mansions, beachfront resort communities, and mountain vacation homes, the report says.

“Unserved” locations also include areas of Washington, D.C., close to the Smithsonian Institution.

“Although the unprecedented $42.45 billion in BEAD funding should be more than sufficient to bring broadband connectivity to every last household and business in America, the country cannot achieve this goal if the Biden administration wastes money through unnecessary, duplicative spending and anti-competitive, anti-consumer technology bias,” the report by committee Republicans says.

A federal agency, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, already has distributed the $42.5 billion.

The Senate report states:

Specifically, taxpayer dollars should not be used to:

1) Overbuild areas that already have broadband service or are slated to receive support from other federal or state programs.

2) Fund unnecessarily expensive solutions. The administration’s technology bias is not only inconsistent with the text of the law but is likely to lead to overspending at the expense of connecting unserved communities.

The report found that the Biden administration’s broadband program provided 10 states and territories with more than $10,000 per unserved location—including $547,254 per unserved location in the nation’s capital and $52,000 per unserved location in Delaware.

Delaware, Biden’s home state, got about $108 million in broadband aid for 2,166 “unserved” locations in June.

“One of these locations is the Biden Environmental Training Center … a state-run conference, training, and retreat center situated just 11 miles north of Rehoboth Beach,” the report says.

One of the president’s vacation homes is in Rehoboth Beach.

Of the 184 locations deemed to be lacking broadband in the nation’s capital, 58 are near the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. This includes well-traveled areas in the District of Columbia such as Butterfly Garden, Lion-Tiger Hill, and Otter Pond, according to the report.

The Senate report found duplication, noting that more than 5 million locations already were being funded by other federal programs for similar purposes.

Democrats’ Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set out how states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico would be allocated funding, including a guaranteed minimum of $100 million to every state, according to the Commerce Department, which oversees the broadband program.

“Just like [President] Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act brought electricity to nearly every home and farm in America, the Biden-Harris administration is connecting everyone in America to reliable, affordable high-speed internet by the end of the decade—including Americans in rural communities,” a Commerce Department spokesperson told The Daily Signal in a written statement on the issue Friday, adding:

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides the largest investment in internet expansion in history—including a minimum $100 million budget for each state—and requires funding go to the areas that need it most. Ultimately, states will determine the specific locations that receive funding and are required to account for other state and federal funding commitments to avoid duplication of efforts.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote in the summary of the report that $42 billion is more than enough money to deliver broadband to every American.”

Yet Cruz was skeptical that the tens of billions could be spent effectively on broadband improvements.

“Will it succeed in doing so? In light of these findings, count me skeptical,” Cruz wrote. “This report should serve as a call to action for the Biden administration and the states to ensure BEAD dollars are not funneled to duplicative and wasteful purposes, and instead are used to solve the nation’s connectivity challenges once and for all.”

The report also says that the Biden administration has a “technology bias” against nonfiber broadband and discourages what the committee Republicans say would be cost-effective and serve more areas.

This story was updated within an hour of publication to include a comment from a Commerce Department spokesperson.

AUTHOR

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is chief news correspondent and manager of the Investigative Reporting Project for The Daily Signal. Lucas is also the author of “The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections.” Send an email to Fred. @FredLucasWH

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Pentagon’s ‘Clarification’ on Gender Pronouns? When You’re in a Hole, Quit Digging

Earlier this week, after we exposed the Pentagon’s woke gender-pronoun policy for the top joint military awards and the ensuing political firestorm it caused, the Pentagon issued a “clarification.”

But here’s the problem: The clarification only confirms our worst fears and raises other related questions.

This issue isn’t going away anytime soon.

On Sept. 1, we exposed the little-noticed update to the Defense Department’s “Manual of Military Decorations and Awards: DOD Joint Decorations and Awards.” The change, effective Aug. 7, required the six top joint awards to use the nonsensical and grammatically incorrect word “themself” instead of the pronouns “himself” or “herself” for each award.

Our post went viral, for obvious reasons, and members of Congress took note.

On the day of our post, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., posted a scathing response on X, formerly known as Twitter, stating that “the Pentagon has once again chosen to waste time and resources on wokeness instead of warfighting.” He accurately called the new policy “insane” and called on Congress to ensure that the Pentagon is focused on “lethality, not pronouns.”

On Sept. 8, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote a public letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, which both poked fun at the Pentagon’s misguided priorities and demanded answers to some very legitimate questions.

Cotton addressed the letter “Dear Mr. Secretary,” with the footnote reading, “If I may be so bold as to assume your ‘preferred gender.’” The senator’s use of humor is appropriate, as the new policy would be laughable if it weren’t such a damning indictment of the state of the Pentagon’s leadership.

He went on to inquire about the origins of the policy, asking:

  1. Did you personally approve the change? If not, when did you learn of it?
  2. Under the new change, can service members request the use of the male or female pronoun on their award citations and at promotion and retirement ceremonies? How will those requests be treated?
  3. What other official documentation with DOD requires gender-neutral language?

Cotton closed his letter writing: “I also would welcome a reply that this whole episode was just a practical joke, or a decision you immediately reversed when it came to your attention.”

He demanded an answer by Sept. 15.

On Tuesday, instead of doing the right thing and simply repealing Change 5, the Pentagon said that Change 5 will stand as is, but with language that “clarifies” that the change does not ban the use of the pronouns “himself” or “herself.”

So, the default pronoun is “themself,” and proper pronouns aren’t banned.

To make matters worse, a Pentagon official said the following to a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation: “The change in the DoD Manual was not intended to restrict the use of the citation pronouns. However, in order to avoid confusion in the future, we are adding a clarifying comment that “themselves” can be replaced with ‘himself’ or ‘herself’ as appropriate.”

But Change 5 was specifically designed to restrict the use of citation pronouns based on sex and required the use of the androgynous, asexual pronoun “themself.” It wasn’t until we called them out on it and exposed this stupidity that they backtracked.

Notice also that the Pentagon did not answer Cotton’s other questions.

Austin owes Cotton answers to his questions, and, given the “clarification,” we have some additional questions.

  1. To whom would service members need to submit a request for gendered pronouns in their award ceremony? Can those requests be denied?
  2. Who decided to keep Change 5 and issue a clarification? Did the secretary of defense approve of keeping Change 5?
  3. Were there any communications between the White House, or those acting on behalf of the White House, in advance of this change being implemented in the first place? If so, what were those communications, with whom, and when?
  4. Did the chairman or vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff approve of Change 5? If so, when? If not, why was the change made nonetheless?

Change 5 is an abomination. It should be rescinded immediately. The clarification is unacceptable, and only reinforces the fact that this administration and this Pentagon are focused on silly and dangerous social policies at a time when China and others are sharpening their swords.

No doubt, they’re laughing at Austin for allowing this silliness to happen on his watch.

AUTHORS

Cully Stimson

Charles “Cully” Stimson is a leading expert in national security, homeland security, crime control, immigration, and drug policy at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Read his research.

Dakota Wood

Dakota Wood is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense and editor of Heritage’s Index of U.S. Military Strength. Previously, he served for two decades in the U.S. Marine Corps.

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. —All rights reserved.

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Uh Oh: Trump Surges Past Biden In Swing State Polls

Former President Donald Trump appears to have an advantage against President Joe Biden in 2024 among key battleground states in the 2020 election, according to a Friday poll.

The states that had the narrowest margin of victory for either candidate last cycle were Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with Biden winning all but North Carolina. Across those key swing states, Trump is ahead of Biden 41% to 35%, and 24% of voters remain undecided, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Among independent voters, the former president also held a slight advantage over Biden, according to the poll. Trump received 32% support among independents compared to Biden’s 30%, and 38% were undecided. Uncertain voters favored Biden over Trump at 49% to 38%.

Biden and Trump are tied at 39% for a hypothetical head-to-head matchup in 2024, according to the survey. Many voters said they were concerned over the president’s age, as well as the economy and crime.

An overwhelming majority of voters at 77%, including 65% of Democrats, think Biden is too old for another term, and only 39% believed he had enough mental acuity for the job, according to the poll. Nearly 90% of respondents said crime would be a large determining factor of who they vote for, and 73% said the economy is the same or worse now than it was prior to the pandemic.

The RealClearPolitics (RCP) average for a 2024 national Democratic and Republican primary, based on the most recent polling , indicates Biden and Trump are leading their respective fields with 67.8% and 56.6%, respectively.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed 4,413 adults nationwide between Sept. 8 and Sept. 14, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2%.

Neither Trump nor Biden immediately responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

MARY LOU MASTERS

Contributor.

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Gun Charges Against Hunter Biden Are Meant To Protect The President, Legal Experts Say

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision to bring felony gun charges against Hunter Biden protects both him and his father, legal experts argued.

Hunter Biden was indicted on three counts Thursday for making false statements and possessing a gun while addicted to drugs, charges stemming from his purchase of a Colt Cobra revolver in October 2018. Legal experts said the gun charge, which is based on a statute that may soon be found unconstitutional, protects the Bidens, as it is the only charge that does not implicate the President.

“It’s the one charge that will not lead to President Biden,” Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, describing the charges as a “cover-up” in a separate tweet. “Tax fraud, wire fraud, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and Foreign Agent Registration Act—all those charges could have led to President Biden. But the Biden Justice Department declined to pursue those charges and instead pursued a gun charge that is in serious constitutional doubt.”

Former Assistant United States Attorney Andy McCarthy similarly said on Fox News Thursday that it was “the only charge that this prosecutor could’ve brought against Hunter in which Hunter’s father is not implicated.”

An appeals court ruled in August that the statute Hunter was charged with violating, which bars gun possession for anyone who is an “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance, violates the Second Amendment.

“In short, our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage,” the ruling written by Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee, states. “Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users.”

Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell already pointed to the ruling to argue the case will “be dismissed before trial.”

“The only change that has occurred between when they investigated [this alleged crime] and today is that the law changed,” Hunter’s attorney Abbe Lowell told ABC News Friday. “But the law didn’t change in favor of the prosecution. The law changed against it.”

Lawyer and former federal prosecutor Bill Shipley said on Twitter the charge is “on shaky legal ground with the trend in 2nd Amendment jurisprudence.”

“Doesn’t matter if it is Hunter or someone else, the DOJ should not be filing these counts until there is further clarity in the appeals courts that some kind of effort under this statute going forward is going to survive a Second Amendment challenge,” Shipley said.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of 25 years and $750,000 in fines, according to court documents.

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said on his podcast Friday that the charge was brought “by design, to insulate Joe Biden.”

“The reason this matters is because there’s considerable evidence that Hunter Biden solicited and received tens of millions of dollars from corrupt foreign players in exchange for official favors from his dad, Joe Biden, now the president of the United States,” he said.

“The Biden DOJ was prepared to give him [Hunter] complete and total immunity for any and all criminal conduct, especially, the criminal conduct that implicated his father, and that really, I believe, was the entire objective of this whole thing,” Cruz continued.

However, Politico reported in 2021 that Secret Service agents asked the owner of the store where Hunter purchased the gun to hand over paperwork from the sale in 2018, which the owner refused to do, though he later provided it to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Neither Joe Biden nor Hunter Biden were under the protection of the Secret Service at the time.

Special counsel David Weiss requested to dismiss tax charges filed against Hunter Biden in August in order to refile in another venue, a motion District Judge Maryellen Noreika approved. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss as special counsel in August.

Biden’s initial plea deal, which would have had him plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and enter a diversion agreement allowing him to avoid jail time for the felony gun charge, fell apart under Noreika’s questioning during a July 26 hearing after she highlighted a section of the diversion agreement promising broad immunity for future charges.

Weiss and the White House did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

KATELYNN RICHARDSON

Contributor.

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