Tag Archive for: Presidential Politics

Media Participated in Coverup of Biden’s Decline, Experts Say

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As more details continue to emerge regarding the alarming extent of former President Joe Biden’s mental and physical incapacities while serving in the most powerful office in the world, insiders are pointing out that the mainstream media willingly followed the lead of White House officials who insisted that Biden was perfectly fit to perform his duties despite a multitude of audio and video evidence showing otherwise.

According to a new book coming out this week by CNN reporter Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson entitled “Original Sin,” Biden’s cognitive decline began almost a decade before his 2024 presidential campaign for reelection, when glaring examples of Biden’s mental and physical struggles began occurring in front of cameras on a weekly basis. “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015,” Tapper and Thompson write. A ghostwriter for Biden admitted in 2017 that he “was really struggling. … His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”

Despite the clear signs of Biden’s decline to those in his inner circle years before the 2020 election, his enablers pushed ahead with his presidential campaign. By 2021, Biden’s closest aides began scripting Cabinet meetings, to the point that his agency secretaries would be asked ahead of a meeting, “‘Well, what are you going to ask? If he asks a certain question, what is your answer going to be?’” By the beginning of 2023, the president’s cognitive condition had become so serious that senior White House aides were attempting to “shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline.” Even Cabinet secretaries were eventually “kept at bay” and “didn’t get a chance to interact with the President.” The truth was that “five people were running the country,” an unnamed source close to the Biden administration told Tapper and Thompson.

Despite this, no members of Biden’s Cabinet came forward to reveal what was happening. “When they would complain internally, they were told, ‘He’s fine, be quiet,’” Tapper noted in a New Yorker interview. As Tapper and Thompson wrote, however, “The presidency requires someone who can perform at 2:00 a.m. during an emergency. Cabinet secretaries in his own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this.”

As observed by National Review, Biden’s inner circle “admitted to each other that Biden was becoming so physically frail that he might need to use a wheelchair in his second term. But their primary concern appeared to be that nothing be seen that would endanger his reelection — or their own hold on power, which they enjoyed as a result of Biden’s weakness.”

Notably, mainstream media reporters such as Tapper himself spent much of Biden’s term reacting with incredulity whenever the topic of the president’s fitness for office surfaced in the news. As National Review has pointed out, Tapper castigated Republicans like Lara Trump on air as far back as 2020 for highlighting Biden’s cognitive decline. “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” he snapped. Less than a year before his book “Original Sin” was released, he stated on air, “[Biden] is sharp mentally.” Tapper also insisted that a Wall Street Journal article published in June 2024 included “false claims … about President Biden’s mental fitness and acuity.” He also derisively dismissed the article on the grounds that WSJ is “owned by News Corp which is run by the Murdochs.” Tapper even remarked during a segment with Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), “[Biden]’s 81, and his memory, you know, it doesn’t seem great, it’s not horrible, but I don’t understand the outrage.”

Experts like Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway say that the media’s peculiar lack of curiosity about Biden’s noticeable decline must be held to account. “This was a man who was president until January of this year — holding nuclear codes,” she pointed out on Fox News. “Anyone who was involved in suppressing information about the true state of his mental decline should absolutely be asked questions about that, be held to account. And until the media start moving things in that direction, where you’re actually talking to the people who knew and what they did to cover this up, and how the media themselves were co-conspirators in that, there’s no accountability being had.”

Some accountability on the matter may be coming. The House Oversight Committee announced last week that it would “continue its investigation into the cover-up of President Biden’s mental decline and use of autopen.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter observed that the results of the 2024 election were partly in reaction to how Biden’s staff, reelection campaign, and the Democratic Party attempted to cover up the former president’s cognitive decline.

“As many suspected, former President Biden was never up to the task of running the country,” he noted. “Early in his presidency, it became clear President Biden was not up to the job when his administration would call it a day at 4 p.m. As soon as Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report surfaced and his recommendation against pressing charges for Biden because he was a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,’ many understood what Hur was really saying: Biden is suffering from cognitive decline.”

“This fact puts into question every policy decision, personnel decision, pardon, and other action from the Oval Office,” Carpenter concluded. “Contrast this with the high-energy pace set by President Trump in his second term, and the American people should be encouraged to raise their expectations for our nation’s top executive.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Poll: Majority of Americans Say Biden Is Worst President Since Nixon

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According to a newly released Gallup poll, Americans rate President Joe Biden as the second worst U.S. president since the 1960s, just barely above Richard Nixon.

The survey, released Tuesday, asked respondents to rate how 10 presidents from the last 60 years will go down in history. The presidents included JFK, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump’s first term, George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and Richard Nixon.

Just 6% of respondents gave Biden an “outstanding” rating, with 13% giving him an “above average” rating, 26% giving him an “average” rating, 17% giving him a “below average” rating, and 37% giving him a “poor” rating. Cumulatively, Biden scored a net positive rating of -35 percentage points — only Richard Nixon fared worse, with -42. Biden’s 37% “poor” rating was the highest of any of the 10 presidents in that category.

Overall, a majority of Americans — 54% — said Biden will be remembered as “below average” or “poorly.”

Under Biden’s four-year term, America has experienced a series of disastrous outcomes across a wide array of fronts.

On the economic front, a recent Economist report found that the U.S. currently ranks 20th in the world on a combined scale over the past year of gross domestic product growth, stock market performance, core inflation, change in unemployment rate, and government deficits. Despite this, Biden claimed last month that “we’ve entered a new phase of our economic resurgence.” He also stated, “I believe the economy I’m leaving at the moment … [is] the best economy, strongest economy in the world and for all Americans, doing better.”

But American voters did not appear to share the president’s enthusiastic economic outlook. After experiencing record-high inflation on food, gas, and housing prices and significant spikes in homelessness under Biden’s watch, almost 70% of Americans characterized the nation’s economy as “not so good” or “poor” in exit polls following the November election.

On America’s borders, a true crisis emerged after Biden reversed President Donald Trump’s border security policies shortly after taking office in February 2021. As a result, 10 million illegal border encounters occurred (compared to 2.4 million under Trump’s first term), child sex-trafficking more than tripled, and fentanyl trafficking increased, with over 250,000 Americans dying from fentanyl overdoses (an 80% increase since Trump’s first term). In addition, violent crime spiked significantly across the country under the Biden administration.

Regarding foreign affairs, global stability unraveled drastically following Biden’s decision to abruptly withdraw American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, resulting in the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers from a suicide bomber outside Kabul Airport and the deaths of an unknown number of American allies in the country (in addition to $7 billion worth of military equipment left behind, which the Taliban acquired). Six months later in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of approximately 80,000 Ukrainian troops and 200,000 Russian troops and a combined 800,000 wounded. In addition, approximately 12,100 Ukrainian civilians have also been killed, and there is currently no end in sight to the conflict, with North Korean troops joining the war in October 2024. A year and a half after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in October 2023, the terrorist group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, resulting in 1,200 Israeli deaths. This engulfed the Middle East in widespread conflict between Israel and the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others. The Iranian regime also launched direct attacks against Israel.

On the domestic policy front, Biden made highly polarizing and controversial issues the focal point of his administration, including completely unrestricted abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, the targeting of pro-life advocates and political opponents through the Department of Justice, the promotion of gender transition procedures for minors, and more.

“I think the American people are very kind to only give the outgoing administration the second worst grade of any administration since JFK,” Matt Carpenter, director of FRC Action, told The Washington Stand. “To my knowledge, the Nixon administration didn’t publish guidelines for biological males to ‘chestfeed’ their infants, subsidize abortion in the Pentagon, promote dangerous and irreversible gender transitions for minors, flood the country with millions of illegal aliens, and so forth. In my mind, Biden was the worst president since JFK and it’s not even close.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Dems ‘Tilted the Scales of Justice’ Regarding J6, Lawmaker Says

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As Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) continues to focus on prosecuting individuals involved in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, lawmakers and experts say the administration and the Democratic Party have embellished the facts of what occurred, misallocated federal resources, unjustly prosecuted nonviolent protestors, and weaponized the incident for political gain.

On Monday, the fourth anniversary of the riot, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a statement claiming in part that “five officers … lost their lives in the line of duty as a result of what happened to them on January 6, 2021.” But as noted by National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, “no police officers died in the line of duty during the Capitol riot.” As he went on to write, some of the officers involved in protecting the Capitol tragically passed away after the incident as a result of medical complications and suicides, but “[n]ot a single charge of murder of a federal officer, nor conspiracy or attempt to murder a federal officer, was alleged by DOJ” related to January 6 (J6).

Despite this, Garland’s DOJ has filed charges against almost 1,600 individuals in connection with J6, with reports on Monday indicating that as many as 200 more individuals may be charged as well. As Garland acknowledged in his statement, “Over the past four years, our prosecutors, FBI agents, investigators, and analysts have conducted one of the most complex, and most resource-intensive investigations in the Justice Department’s history.”

But Republican lawmakers argue that much of the narrative surrounding J6 has been distorted to paint anyone who was present at the Capitol that day as a violent “insurrectionist” and blame President Donald Trump for instigating the violence. On Monday, Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to discuss an interim report released by the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight regarding J6.

“[Garland] certainly, I think, overdid it” with regard to the number of individuals charged, Griffith contended. “That’s not to say there weren’t bad actors on January 6th,” he added. “There were some, but the vast majority of folks were there to protest, but they were planning on a peaceful protest. And then, you know, everything broke loose and got out of control, but it is amazing how they don’t want to tell the whole narrative. And you know, what we need to do is tell the whole truth, right? [The] good, the bad, the ugly on both sides of this thing.”

Griffith went on to point out that Trump attempted to contain the chaos on that day with the National Guard.

“[O]ne of the biggest things that has struck me from our investigation is the fact that President Trump authorized the National Guard to come in,” he emphasized. “[But] it was the D.C. politicos … Nancy Pelosi and company who — and I can’t say that she made the decision herself — but they didn’t want to have this image of the National Guard coming in. They had bicycle racks up for a perimeter, knowing that there were going to be tens of thousands, if not more than 100,000 people in Washington that day to protest. Today, for example, they’ve been putting up for about a week … these huge fences that kept people from getting anywhere near the Capitol. None of that was done in advance [of J6].”

“Our law enforcement was not prepared,” Griffith continued. “Nobody in D.C. was prepared. And then the people who could have ameliorated this issue were left sitting on the sidelines. The National Guard was told just to sit by and wait for orders. And then even after the military folks gave the orders at the highest level, a general decided he wasn’t going to issue that order right away and held on for another couple of hours before sending in the National Guard. So we need to look at all the totality of the circumstances and look at each individual case if we’re really going to make a decision as to whether or not these people had evil in their hearts on that day. I would submit a lot of them did not.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins concurred, observing that officials took extra precautions with barricades in D.C. following the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, but curiously did not implement the same security measures ahead of J6. “When you add those facts and these perceptions with what happened post January 6th with the sham investigation that took place by Nancy Pelosi and the January 6th committee, it only fuels that idea that this was politically motivated to advance a narrative.”

“I don’t think there’s any question,” Griffith agreed. “The January 6th select committee that Nancy Pelosi put together was politically motivated. I think the evidence is clear on that from the very beginning, from day one. They wanted to project that this was all Donald Trump’s fault, that he was the big bad guy, and the evidence just didn’t bear that out.”

The congressman further contended that the January 6th Select Committee “gave partial truth, and sometimes maybe even given Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, was clearly in error, if not just falsehoods. … And the witnesses who were on the scene that the January 6th Select Committee had in their possession before they issued their report was not in that report. And they should have given the American people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They chose not to do so because they had a political agenda.”

Griffith additionally noted that Pelosi kept “conservative Republicans off of the commission, who could have asked the pointed questions, who could have brought out [further] information,” further detailing that “there was about a terabyte of information that was deleted or attempted to be deleted by the J6 Select Committee. That should have gone to the archives of the United States. That’s just gone.”

“[L]et all the proper evidence in and let the chips fall where they may,” Griffith concluded. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But you know what? They didn’t do that. They tilted the scales of justice for political reasons, and it’s atrocious.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

America’s New Mental Health Crisis: Trump Derangement Syndrome

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Many could see it approaching, but veteran political journalist Mark Halperin called it with clarity.

Mere weeks before the 2024 election in the middle of a two-hour interview on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Halperin predicted that if Donald Trump won the vote, America would face a mental health crisis unparalleled in its history:

TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of Democrats, maybe the majority, believe that Trump becoming president again is the worst thing that could ever happen. So how do they respond to that?

MARK HALPERIN: I say this not flippantly, I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country. I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision of what their future, and the future for their children, could be like. I think it will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals. I think it’ll lead to trauma in the workplace. I think there will be some degree of…

CARLSON: Are you being serious?

HALPERIN: 100% serious. I think there’ll be alcoholism, broken marriages … yeah. They think he’s the worst person possible to be president. Having won by the hand of Jim Comey and a fluke in 2016, and then performed in office for four years, and denied who won the election last time, and January 6th … the fact that under a fair election, America chose by the pre-agreed rules Donald Trump again — I think it will cause the biggest mental health crisis in the history of America.

And I don’t think it will be a passing thing that, by the inauguration, we’ll be fine. I think it will be sustained, unprecedented, and hideous, and I don’t think the country’s ready for it.

This side of Election Day, Halperin’s prediction appears to be spot-on. Almost immediately after Donald Trump’s victory became apparent, countless reactions by his opponents began to circulate on social media. There was no shortage of reactions that fell into the sphere of unhinged. The ritual seemed to involve recording one’s unfavorable reaction to the election and posting it for the world to see without regard for how personally embarrassing or damaging it might be. Much screaming, crying, cursing, and angst are present in almost every video. Sometimes the expressions are accompanied by threats — to leave the country, to withhold actions, or to take retribution in some way.

Reactions in the Extreme

Some dissatisfied women (it’s unclear whether or not they voted themselves) are going on sex strikes with men to protest the election, or even giving up on men altogether. Many women are promoting South Korea’s “4B” movement as a protest against Trump and his followers. As USA Today explained:

“The ‘4B’ movement gets its name from four Korean words that all start with the letter ‘b’: bihon (heterosexual marriage), bichulsan (childbirth), biyeonae (dating) and bisekseu (sex). You join the movement by giving up all four with men.”

Not quite as extreme as 4B, but nevertheless highly visible, is the blue bracelet movement. Here, white women who voted for Kamala Harris commit to wearing a blue bracelet to show that they are a “safe space” for non-white women among a majority who voted for Trump. Whether or not these budding movements persist remains to be seen.

Reactions among the Evangelical Left-of-Center

Sometime in the past four years, the “never Trump” movement among evangelical Christians all but disappeared. Those who previously labeled themselves as such either reconciled their doubts or moved solidly past the center toward leftist ideologies. David French, Russell Moore, and Curtis Chang developed what they called the “After Party” — a collection of resources developed, they claim, to help Christians “reframe our political identity as we take the lead in healing what’s broken.”

For never-Trumpers, the 2024 election means only more brokenness. In a podcast recorded immediately after the election, Chang, French, and Moore all lamented the meaning of Trump’s victory for people like themselves. David French recounted feelings of pain:

FRENCH: It’s going to require courage. Because one thing that we know after dealing with MAGA for nine years is even engagement is painful. It’s not just painful to lose an election — that is painful, of course, but it’s often just painful to engage because you then find yourself subject to an extreme amount of cruelty.

Curtis Chang expressed feelings of anguish:

CHANG: I was just wanting to blame people for this outcome. And then I was like, ‘Oh, I’m actually feeling like anguish. I’m feeling sadness.’ I think [of] especially immigrants, the people of Ukraine. Yes — our planet in terms of our future generations, I was feeling anguish for my daughters, who I know are growing up as young women who have interpreted this election result as a rejection of women at some level and a bequeathing of them of [a] world that feels like despairing to them.

Russell Moore expressed weariness:

MOORE: I fit myself more in the exhausted category. Or maybe you fit me more in the exhausted, and I claim it. But I think that’s kind of still where I am. Especially because I know that we now have a lot of drama that is going to be […] in every American’s life all the time from now on.

Pain, anguish, sadness, despair, and exhaustion — all felt in the wake of Donald Trump’s win. The distress among these never-Trumpers is nowhere near like those who are shaving their heads for a TikTok video or swearing off men for four years, but it’s nevertheless distress.

A Relapse of an Old Disease

Solomon wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” That maxim holds true with hatred toward today’s politicians. During the presidency of George W. Bush, when many of the president’s opponents began acting in increasingly irrational ways toward him, the late conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer coined a new term:

“It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: ‘Secondary Mania,’ Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven’t been looking for new ones. But it’s time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land.

“Bush Derangement Syndrome: The acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.”

While Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) may not have made an entry in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM), it did enter the viral public vernacular. Bush was labeled by detractors as the “worst president ever,” and if you believed their rhetoric, the nation could never recover. Thankfully, we can all rest easy that BDS wasn’t a chronic disease, and its symptoms subsided with the end of Bush’s presidency.

Not so fast. Around 2015, the virus mutated, and BDS morphed into a more sinister malady: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Whereas sufferers of BDS were content simply to make public arguments, TDS patients pushed for full quarantine from anyone who had any exposure to Trump. What first began as a denial (“There’s no way he’ll ever be president!”) quickly turned to angst in November 2016 as Trump’s victory became apparent and spread during the next four years.

But unlike Bush Derangement Syndrome, TDS didn’t go away as Trump left the presidency. The long-COVID of presidential derangements, TDS symptoms didn’t go into remission during the Biden presidency. President Biden was overshadowed by his predecessor during his entire term, as during most of 2024, TDS kicked into full-blown relapse.

The above description is partly in jest, but only in part. Trump Derangement Syndrome is here, and it is sure to stay for a few years more.

Life among the Afflicted

To be clear, most people who oppose Trump are not suffering from TDS — nor will they exhibit adverse mental health symptoms. But the sheer number of vocal opponents who seemingly define their entire well-being around Donald Trump’s position of power is alarming. And it should be alarming to Christians.

It would be easy for conservative Christians to write off TDS sufferers as beyond repair and simply step aside and avoid them. Worse, we could mock these people with real problems with our own counter-memes. But Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the crowds, “… he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Christ had compassion for the harassed, and we should follow his lead.

After all, Christians have the help that TDS sufferers need. Explaining Trump to them will not help. In fact, it will only enrage them. This doesn’t mean Trump voters need to keep quiet about their politics and tiptoe around those with TDS. Just because burn victims exist doesn’t mean you should never build a fire. But we don’t treat burn victims with more fire. The prophet Isaiah, speaking about the coming messiah, said, “a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.”

Those with TDS may look like the enemy, but they are also captives. However misaligned their worldview, TDS sufferers are ultimately calling for justice. They’re looking in the wrong place. They won’t quench their wrath by bringing about a Trump-free world, nor will they find it by converting to MAGA.

The justice that eludes them can only be found in the wrath of God toward sin being poured out on a man who died in their place. The cure for TDS is to replace the fixation and angst against Trump with fixing their eyes on the one who for our sake God “… made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Only in him is derangement demolished.

AUTHOR

Jared Bridges

Jared Bridges is editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: This is the best video meme of President Donald J. Trump, ever!

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

American Dream 2.0: The Remarkable Rise of J.D. Vance

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Most Americans are familiar with the concept of “the American Dream.” It’s that romantic idea, rooted in grit and determination, that anyone from any socioeconomic background can “make it” in America so long as they work hard.

But in recent years, many of America’s intellectuals, prognosticators, and the public in general have declared the American Dream dead. The Left has convinced a large segment of society that Americans of color are inherently disadvantaged simply because of their ethnicity (despite America electing a black man to the most powerful office in the world not once, but twice). But to be sure, studies have shown that at least half of working Americans today do not make as much money as their parents — a sign that, at least economically, the Dream has begun to fade for many.

Still, the remarkable rise of J.D. Vance serves as an example of how the American Dream may not be completely lifeless after all. There are a number of lessons that Christians can draw from his story and from the enduring power of the Dream.

As poignantly described in his autobiographical bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance grew up in the hollowed-out former steel town of Middletown, Ohio, and experienced a turbulent upbringing full of domestic strife. His mother became pregnant in high school and quickly married Vance’s father, but the couple divorced soon after when he was a toddler. As a succession of more than 15 stepdads and boyfriends cycled through his childhood, Vance fell victim to domestic violence, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Still, he was able to spend much of his childhood with his mother’s parents, “Papaw” and “Mamaw,” who provided a relatively stable home life.

As his mother’s drug addiction and Papaw’s death caused her behavior to become increasingly more erratic, and as Vance’s own adolescent behavior and peer group influences worsened, he moved in with his grandmother Mamaw during his sophomore year of high school. It was then that Vance’s grandmother began to instill in him the importance of work ethic and discipline, his grades began improving, and he got a steady job at a grocery store.

After high school, Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps, where he gained crucial formation in discipline and working with others. He then completed a bachelor’s degree at Ohio State in two years before being accepted to Yale Law School. During his time at Yale, he received career mentorship through the generosity of a professor and met his future wife Usha, who he credits with teaching him how to patiently work through familial conflict. After completing his law degree, Vance worked in both corporate law and the technology sector. He then decided to run for U.S. Senate in 2022 and won. After being picked as former President Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election, Vance is now one of the youngest to ever become a vice president-elect at age 40.

Perhaps what is most evident from the remarkable rise of Vance from a high school sophomore on the verge of dropping out to vice president-elect is that diligence, hard work, and determination really can accomplish even the most far-fetched of outcomes. A key truth here is that it is very unlikely that a story like this could have happened in any other country other than America. Despite all of its ills and challenges, including the continued surge in drug abuse and record-high overdoses particularly in the Rust Belt where Vance is from, America is still capable of producing an almost stranger-than-fiction American Dream like that of J.D. Vance. Yes, conservatives really can graduate from a progressive, left-wing haven like Yale Law School with their values intact!

But what is equally evident is the inestimable value that mentorship can have in a person’s life. Throughout his memoir, Vance continually points out that if it wasn’t for his beloved Mamaw and others in his life, he likely would never have seen the kind of success he has been able to achieve.

Here lies an important lesson for the Christian life. In order to help establish the renewal of society, our first order of business must be to ensure that our own children are thriving in mind, body, and spirit. In addition, we must always be cognizant of providing a helping hand to those around us who may not have the same opportunities that we or our children have had. This could mean becoming a mentor for an after-school program or for a young father. Or it could mean supporting your local pregnancy resource center to help a young mother in need, or even considering adopting a child ourselves. Or it could simply mean giving a little guidance to an intern at work. Who knows how many future J.D. Vances we can help foster through being intentional about mentorship?

Whether or not J.D. Vance harnesses the unique opportunities that America has provided him in order to do good as vice president remains to be seen, and we must continually pray for him and President-elect Trump.

But what is certain is that the American Dream of rising above one’s difficult circumstances in life and building a solid future for yourself and your family is still alive, even if it is not as well as it once was. Only in a country with free enterprise, the rule of law, and individual constitutionally-protected rights can a dream like the American one even be possible.

With God’s grace, may we not only maintain the Dream for the sake of our children and our children’s children, but build upon it by building not only a great nation, but a good one.

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Fame Fatale: How the Elite Celeb Culture Doomed Dems

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If there’s anything more gratifying than watching conservatives win, it’s watching celebrities lose. The pampered, out-of-touch A-listers who shilled for Kamala Harris have not coped well since Tuesday’s results (if threats of death-by-Drano are any indication). But in every meltdown, one thing is clear: their despair isn’t just that the vice president failed, but that the country is too stupid to understand that famous people know better. It’s the same campaign of condescension that led to the demise of woke corporations. And with a little luck, celebrity endorsements will meet the same fate.

Of course, as plenty of news outlets are pointing out, using star power in politics isn’t new. More than 100 years ago, “Al Jolson led a march of fellow actors through the streets of Ohio in support of Republican Warren G Harding’s bid,” The Guardian explains. “Endorsements from Babe Ruth, Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand have all been coveted by the candidates of their day.” But that was before the vast majority of Hollywood and pro athletes became an arm of the socialist Left and lost all touch with the average American.

“Even though Harris’ slogan was, ‘We are not going back,’ the campaign was firmly in reverse,” the New York Post’s Kirsten Fleming insists, “taking the DeLorean to 2008 … [b]ack when Hollywood A-listers meant something. … Before the Democratic Party completely abandoned the working class. Talked down to them. Told them they were racist or bigoted for not putting their pronouns in their bio.”

They put down their caviar and step off their private jets fully expecting their celebrity cache to supersede a person’s opinions, values, or lived experience. Ricky Gervais mocked this idea over the summer before Harris introduced her cast of star surrogates. “As a celebrity, I know all about stuff like science and politics, so trust me when I tell you who you should vote for,” Gervais mimicked. “If you don’t vote the right way, it’s like a hate crime and that makes me sad and angry, and I’ll leave the country — and you don’t want that!”

A bandwagon of actors and NBA players may have worked in the glamour days of the Obamas, who seemed like celebrities themselves but always managed to resonate with the normal family. The difference now is that the Democratic Party is so far outside the mainstream ideologically (try Jupiter) that the stars who endorse them seem even more unrelatable. Not only are they rich and beautiful with massive platforms and industry accolades, but they’re embracing an agenda of extremism that never made sense to begin with.

Oprah, Christina Aguilera, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Harrison Ford, Taylor Swift, Cardi B, LeBron James, Jennifer Aniston, Beyoncé, Anne Hathaway, Sally Field, Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Lawrence, Julia Roberts, Martha Stewart, Steph Curry, George Clooney, Spike Lee, Ariana Grande, Eminem, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert De Niro, and all of Ben Affleck’s former wives and girlfriends have the luxury of caring about the fringe issues because they’re not living on a budget, scared by crime, or losing jobs and housing to migrants. They’re too divorced from reality to understand what America wants or needs. And despite their capacity for great acting, they never bother to put themselves in the role of the average person.

That’s what makes the grassroots popularity of Donald Trump, a billionaire who owns 16 golf courses and lives in gold-gilded homes, such a paradox. But then, the 45th president never implied that Americans couldn’t think for themselves or prioritize what’s important. He didn’t reduce them to their education status, skin color, or reproductive organs. He made it his business to listen to the country — not preach. And unlike the Left’s elites who reek of moral superiority and disdain for hard-working families, he embraced them.

Of course, the former president had his own famous friends. And like the enigma they threw their support behind, these endorsements were different — and quite possibly, more effective. In our vicious media culture, standing with Trump took guts, and Americans know it. Unlike Harris’s backers, who were treated like heroes for accepting a zero-risk offer to step into the political limelight, Trump’s public allies — people like Mel Gibson, Danica Patrick, Brett Favre, Joe Rogan, Buzz Aldrin, Dr. Phil, Roseanne Barr, Paula Deen, Elon Musk, Harrison Butker, Brittany Mahomes, Kelsey Grammar, and Kid Rock — understood that they would not only face extreme ridicule and backlash, but, quite possibly, career consequences. In a battle between the fearless and the smug, it’s not hard to see who would earn more respect.

At the end of the day, the country objects to Hollywood’s moralizing for the same reason they objected to corporate America’s: it’s snobbish and patronizing, yes, but it’s also not their lane. If you throw a football, throw a football. If you sing, sing. But stop telling us that rooting out “white privilege” or banning plastic straws is more important than global stability, decent schools, or feeding our families.

And practically speaking, at least where politicians are concerned, this glitzy echo chamber does nothing to move the needle. Arizona State University professor Margaretha Bentley, whose classes have studied the “social importance” of Taylor Swift says, “In the academic literature, research has shown that, while celebrity endorsements can increase civic engagement and voter registrations, it has not proven to have a direct impact on how people make their voting decisions.”

Or if it does, it moves them in the wrong direction. When the biggest pop star on the planet endorsed the vice president, a poll from YouGov found that “only 8% of voters would be ‘somewhat’ or ‘much more’ likely to vote for Harris — with a surprising 20% saying [Swift’s support] actually made them less likely to vote for her.” In other words, it backfired. Harris was not only worse off for it, but Swift lost a good chunk of her fans’ goodwill.

So will Cardi B, who, like most of these personalities, aren’t exactly graceful losers. “I hate y’all bad,” the rapper complained after Election Day. She responded to someone asking if she’d appear at Trump’s inauguration by saying: “I’m sick of you! Burn your f****** hats, motherf*****. I’m really sad. I swear to God I’m really sad.” Singer Christiana Aguilera ordered fans to “unfollow me if you voted against female rights. … Unfollow me because what you did is unreal. Don’t want followers like this. So yeah. Done. Also after today I will be shutting down this fan account that I have had for so many years because this is sick.”

All of this adds to the country’s growing revulsion for the insulated and detached celeb scene. The reality is, Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm told The Washington Stand, “It’s normal for people to respect and admire another person, but if we don’t know them personally, our respect for them is generally limited to the thing we know them for. I can respect a musician or an athlete for their elite talents, but I need a lot more information about them before I start taking parenting advice from them,” he said. “The Left seems to assume that because we like someone’s music or movies we’re going to defer to their judgment about what’s good for us. Most people may believe Taylor Swift is better at writing songs than they are, but that doesn’t mean they believe she’s better at deciding what’s best for their family.”

Some on the Left are waking up to this reality for the party in general. Democrat Chris Cuomo outright blamed wokeism for Harris’s loss. “You are forcing new social norms on people in this country. ‘No, I’m not,’ [they insist]. ‘We’re just doing what’s fair. Trans people have rights too.’ Yes, but if it’s communicated as if you must be forced to accept and be indoctrinated with ideas that you do not share — is that fair? ‘That’s not what we were doing.’ That’s how they felt you were treating them about it,” Cuomo argued. “That’s the women in sports thing. It’s not that it happens a lot. … [But] it’s that the fact that it happens at all, to them, is a gross violation of norms and unacceptable. And you find it okay, and they believe that is wokeism run amok.”

What you’re seeing, Rasmussen head pollster Mark Mitchell told FRC President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch,” is that these people “fleeing the Democrat Party and the Republicans, the Donald Trump movement, are really starting to become the core culture of the counterculture. … The mainstream media has jumped the shark, has lost its credibility, is losing its sway. And look at all the actors and actresses and authority figures that [threw] endorsements to Kamala Harris, and none of them moved the needle because people just don’t care anymore. So I think that trend is going to continue.”

And for Americans sick of being lectured by woke politicians, companies, actresses, and athletes, maybe that’s one of the biggest Election Day victories of all.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Donald Trump Wins Arizona and Nevada in 31-State ‘Landslide’

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Former President Donald Trump has won the remaining swing states of Arizona and Nevada as he cruises to the most decisive Republican victory in 20 years. Trump prevailed in 31 states, winning more than 300 votes in the Electoral College and defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the popular vote.

The 45th and 47th president of the United States appeared to win an outright majority of votes in both states. With nearly all votes counted on Thursday morning, President Trump received 52% of the vote in both Nevada and Arizona, leading DecisionDeskHQ to call both states Wednesday night.

“We congratulate President Donald Trump on his victory in the 2024 presidential election,” said Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life. “The defeat of Vice President Harris represents a clear rejection of the extreme abortion agenda that she placed at the center of her campaign.”

Trump won 81% of white evangelical Christian voters, as well as 91% of pro-life voters on his way to victory. Kamala Harris won two-thirds (66%) of Jewish voters, 63% of Muslims, and 59% who belonged to “something else.” Voters who listed “None” as their religion made up nearly one in four voters (23%); Harris carried them by a whopping 40 points (69% to 29%).

The Harris-Walz campaign’s abortion focus did not peel off enough women to win every facet of that voting bloc, exit polls from Fox News show. Although Harris won women across age demographics, Trump won white women by six points (52% to 46%) and women without a college degree by four points (51% to 47%). Trump narrowly lost Hispanic men, winning 46%, and earned a quarter (24%) of black men’s votes. The most Democratic-voting demographics were black women and black voters over the age of 45, who voted nearly nine-to-one for Kamala Harris (89% and 88%, respectively).

President Trump won white voters across the board, except for college-educated white women, whom he lost by 16 points (57 vs. 41%). Harris carried 85% of black voters, 56% of Hispanics, and 55% of those of other ethnic backgrounds (Asians, Pacific Islanders, etc.). Kamala Harris won every category of Hispanics except the traditionally conservative Cuban American community, who favored Trump by 21 points (59% to 38%). Black and Hispanic voters made up 10% of the electorate each; those of other ethnic backgrounds made up 5% of the electorate. In all, Harris carried 67% of non-white voters.

“This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will let us make America great again,” declared Donald Trump early Wednesday morning.

“We also have won the popular vote,” he added — a first for a Republican in two decades.

Trump credited his election to “a historic realignment uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense. We’re the party of common sense. We want to have borders. We want to have security.”

“We want a strong and powerful military, and ideally, we don’t have to use it,” said Trump. “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” Hamas called for a ceasefire with Israel overnight Wednesday night.

The Democratic campaign’s attempt to cast the election as a defense of “democracy” — claiming that President Trump flirts with fascism and presents a unique threat to the Constitution — fell flat, because voters harbored similar concerns about both parties. A majority (55%) of voters believed Donald Trump “would bring the U.S. closer to being an authoritarian country” — but 46% believed the same of Kamala Harris. Most voters (55%) said Trump bore only “some” or no blame for the violence on January 6. A majority (50%) of voters said that Democratic rhetoric “is leading to an increase in acts of violence.”

“This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. Together, we’re going to unlock America’s glorious destiny, and we’re going to achieve the most incredible future for our people,” said President-Elect Trump on election night. The president-elect’s assessment garnered support from an unexpected corner.

“The strong turnout in this election is a sign of the health of our republic and the strength of our democratic institutions,” said the last Republican to win the popular vote, George W. Bush, in an Instagram post on Wednesday.

Notably, Trump swept every battleground state. “I think we’re in landslide territory right now,” Democratic consultant Julian Epstein told Fox Business on Wednesday morning.

Trump’s victory drew congratulations from some who had been hostile to him. “Karen and I send our sincere congratulations to President-Elect Donald Trump and his family on his election as 47th [p]resident of the United States,” said former vice president and 2024 Republican primary challenger Mike Pence, who had withheld his endorsement from Trump. “We will continue to pray for all those in authority and urge every American to join us in praying for our incoming [p]resident, [v]ice [p]resident and elected officials at every level.”

Former President George W. Bush congratulated the Trump and Vance families, in addition to thanking President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris for their service.

“We join our fellow citizens in praying for the success of our new leaders at all levels of government,” he concluded. “May God continue to bless our great country.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED PODCAST: Breaking Down an Election for the Ages

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Early Vote Tally Surpasses 60 Million with 4 Days to Go

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Nearly 62 million Americans had cast a ballot by early afternoon on October 31, according to the University of Florida Election Lab, with five days left until Election Day, 2024. Early voting in-person and by mail has already surpassed the early vote totals for the 2012 and 2016 elections and may yet approach or surpass the share of early votes cast in 2020. “The meta-trend overall is a dip in the number of mail-in ballots that have arrived,” with more early voters choosing to vote in person, said Matt Carpenter, director of Family Research Council Action, on “Washington Watch” Wednesday.

“Voters really like that early, in-person option … going into the voting booth, filling in your bubbles, handing in your ballot,” Carpenter continued. “Voters are responding to that option, and they’ve been telling pollsters for a while now.”

While early votes are not tallied until Election Day, some states do compile data on the party registration of early voters. “We don’t know how these voters are voting, but you can draw some inferences that you don’t really get with standard, head-to-head polling at this stage,” Carpenter explained. “Typically, Republican voters prefer to vote in person, and Democrat voters tend to vote by mail.”

Based on early voting party registration information, “the Republicans are in a much better position this time around than they were in 2020,” Carpenter described. “The Democrat[ic] margin is shrinking a little bit here. We’re seeing Republican enthusiasm across the board.” In the 2020 election, 44.8% of early votes were cast by registered Democrats, and 30.5% were cast by registered Republicans. So far in 2024, 38.8% or early votes have been cast by registered Democrats, and 36.1% have been cast by registered Republicans.

Carpenter suggested this was “indicative of, maybe, Republicans getting some confidence in voting early and kind of getting the idea.” Namely, if “you vote early, you bank your vote, and then, the campaign can spend resources looking after low-propensity or no-propensity voters.”

More important than national trends, however, is the data coming out of seven swing states, where polling of the candidates has remained the closest throughout the entire cycle. These states happen to fall into three geographic regions, with Arizona and Nevada in the southwest, Georgia and North Carolina in the southeast, and Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt. The results from these seven states will determine the results of the 2024 presidential election.

Let’s take these states in alphabetical order.

Arizona

So far in 2024, 1,826,892 early votes have been cast in Arizona, 75% of the 2020 total, according to the Election Lab’s latest data. These are all mail-in ballots, since Arizona does not offer in-person early voting. So far, 755,131 registered Republicans have voted (41.3% of ballots cast), compared to 616,680 registered Democrats (33.8% of ballots). In 2020, registered Democrats and Republicans each comprised 37% of the vote.

Counting only by party registration, Arizona Democrats held an advantage of 9,633 votes before Election Day in 2020. So far this year, Arizona Republicans hold an enormous advantage of 138,451 votes.

Georgia

So far in 2024, 3,482,352 early votes have been cast in Georgia, 87% of the 2020 total and perhaps on track to surpass the 2020 early vote tally. Only 214,689 of those votes are mail-in ballots, while 3,267,663 are in-person votes. By comparison, Georgia’s early vote in 2020 included 1,320,154 mail-in ballots and 2,694,763 in-person ballots. That is both a substantial decrease in mail-in ballots and a substantial increase in in-person early voting.

Georgia does not record the party registration of early votes. However, it does record age category, sex, race/ethnicity. So far, early voters in Georgia this cycle are most likely over 40 (75%), female (55.6%), and white (58.8%). Georgia also tracks the county of mail-in ballots, including the rates at which requested mail-in ballots are turned in. So far, four of the five counties with the lowest ballot return rates (under 60%) are urban, covering much of Atlanta, Macon, and Savannah, while the counties with the highest ballot return rates (as high as 90%!) are rural, Republican strongholds.

Michigan

So far in 2024, 2,390,559 early votes have been cast in Michigan, 84% of the 2020 total. Only 158,377 of those ballots were cast in person, compared to 2,390,559 ballots turned in through the mail.

Similar to Georgia, Michigan tracks other demographics, but not party registration, for early voters. Early voters in Michigan are more likely to be over 65 (46%) or 41-65 (36.1%) and female (55.1%). Breaking the mail-in data down by county, six of the 10 counties with the lowest return rates are urban, covering the three Detroit counties, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, and Saginaw. However, the return rate for Michigan counties occupied a narrower range, between 76% and 88%.

Nevada

So far in 2024, 872,011 early votes have been cast in Nevada, 78% of the 2020 total. These were roughly split between mail-in ballots (441,209) and in-person early votes (430,802). So far, 339,407 registered Republicans have voted (38.9%), compared to 297,255 registered Democrats (34.1%). In 2020, registered Democrats led registered Republicans 39.7% to 35.6% in the pre-Election Day vote.

This means that, on Election Day 2020, 45,103 more registered Democrats had voted than registered Republicans. This time around, 42,152 more registered Republicans have voted than registered Democrats.

North Carolina

So far in 2024, 3,621,936 early votes have been cast in North Carolina, 79% of the 2020 total. Only 191,078 are mail-in ballots, compared to 977,186 mail-in ballots cast in 2020. Meanwhile, 3,430,858 early votes have been cast in-person, compared to 3,620,531 in 2020. So far, 1,230,318 registered Republicans have voted (34.0%), compared to 1,183,577 registered Democrats (32.7%). In 2020, registered Democrats led registered Republicans 37% to 32% in the pre-Election Day vote.

This means that, on Election Day 2020, 260,112 more registered Democrats had voted than registered Republicans. However, so far in 2024, 46,741 more registered Republicans have voted than registered Democrats.

Pennsylvania

So far in 2024, 1,615,637 early votes have been cast in Pennsylvania, 61% of the 2020 total. All these votes are technically mail-in, since the state “doesn’t have typical in-person voting,” Carpenter explained. But voters “can go down to your precinct office, get an absentee ballot, and vote by mail there, in person,” and many have done just that. So far, 526,337 registered Republicans have voted (32.6%), compared to 913,074 registered Democrats (56.5%). By contrast, in 2020, registered Democrats led registered Republicans 64% to 23% in the early vote.

This means that, on Election Day 2020, 1,079,080 more registered Democrats had voted than registered Republicans. “Joe Biden had banked, I think, a 1.1 million-vote ‘firewall ‘going into Election Day that then Republicans had to overcome — just a monumental task,” Carpenter noted. So far in 2024, more registered Democrats have voted than registered Republicans, but it is a significantly smaller number: 386,737.

Wisconsin

So far in 2024, 1,224,779 early votes have been cast in Wisconsin, 63% of the 2020 total. In-person early votes (705,326) hold a modest lead over mail-in ballots (519,453), but there is no more information available about the Wisconsin early vote.

Summary

All told, 2024 early voting seems to be booming in the seven key swing states, especially in Georgia and Michigan, and less so in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Additionally, in all the states where party registration is available (Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania), Republicans are running far ahead of their mark in the 2020 election. In three of the states, they have replaced an early vote deficit with an early vote advantage, while in Pennsylvania they have slashed the Democratic early vote advantage by more than half.

(It’s worth stating again that the available data only provide information on whether a voter who cast a ballot was registered with a certain party, not which candidate they actually voted for. However, it can provide a reasonable approximation of where the candidates stand, as it’s reasonable to expect — and, in large numbers, will likely prove true — that voters affiliated with a particular party will vote for that party’s candidates.)

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

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The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Election Time Nazi Smears Are Back

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Remember when a major candidate for the U.S. presidency was nearly assassinated twice, and a chorus of voices momentarily urged everyone to tone down the political rhetoric? That ceasefire is officially over. At a CNN town hall last Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly called former President Donald Trump — get this — a “fascist.” I bet you’ve never heard that one before.

The impulse to restrain violent rhetoric was never going to run through Election Day. In fact, it couldn’t even make it a whole fortnight. But now, the rhetoric has built once again to a white-hot crescendo, as a last-minute media frenzy seeks to squeeze every last possible vote out of The Narrative before vote-counting begins. Now is not a time to discourage political violence, the rationalization goes; there’s an election to win, after all.

According to The Narrative, voters need look no further for proof of Trump’s fascist — even Nazi-like — preferences than his latest rally, an all-day affair in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden (MSG). The connection — obvious only to historians with a magnifying glass and a debilitating case of confirmation bias — is that the wrestling, hockey, basketball, and concert venue was once the site of a pro-Hitler rally in 1939, three years before Joe Biden was born.

That was a sufficient connection for MSNBC to play footage from the 1939 rally along coverage of Trump’s 2024 event, along with a chyron informing viewers, “Trump’s MSG rally comes 85 years after pro-nazi rally at famed arena.” The live commentary held the same note: “that jamboree happening right now — you see it there on your screen — in that place is particularly chilling because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the Garden for a so-called pro-America rally.”

It wasn’t just the far-Left media. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D), Harris’s vice presidential running mate, alleged a “direct parallel” between Trump’s rally and “a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.” He added, “Don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there. So, look, we said we’re all running like everything’s on the line because it is.”

If Trump’s MSG rally was, subtly, a pro-Nazi event, it chose a strange way of showing it. Israeli flags hung from the rafters. Speakers included businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump’s running mate Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who has two children with his Indian wife. Black attendees from Harlem and Bronxville, N.Y. told National Review that all the black people in their circles are planning to vote for Trump. This is hardly the stuff of Aryan supremacy.

The only evidence from the rally the media could use to propel its “racism” narrative were some poor jokes from a little-known insult comic who was booed by the crowd.

But that hasn’t stopped the media from trying, nor from finding political figures eager to assist them in building that narrative. Even Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump after making similar Nazi allegations, suggested on CNN that the Trump rally was “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.”

A more neutral interpretation is that the Trump campaign chose MSG as the site of their New York rally because it is a large venue, capable of seating 20,000 attendees. If Trump himself had any mental associations with the site, they probably had more to do with WrestleMania than with American Nazism.

Indeed, more recent political associations with MSG are both bipartisan and mainstream. It has hosted four Democratic National Conventions and one Republican National Convention, including those for Carter (1976), Clinton (1992), and Bush (2004) — three out of the six living former presidents. Was Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939” at his nominating convention? Or is there a double standard at play?

In any event, “Attacking Trump’s Fascism Is Not That Persuasive,” admitted a recent email from Future Forward, which The New York Times described as “the leading pro-Harris super PAC.” Future Forward urged the Harris campaign to adjust its messaging to those that play better with focus groups. “Purely negative attacks on Trump’s character are less effective than contrast messages that include positive details about Kamala Harris’s plans to address the needs of everyday Americans,” they wrote.

Future Forward may be correct that voters would rather hear a candidate talk about what they will accomplish, rather than their opponent’s faults. But the Harris campaign and its allies also perceive correctly that their messages about Harris’s policy agenda are weaker than their messages about Trump’s faults — when they can make them stick.

Trump’s rally in MSG was not the only recent occasion for his opponents to reopen cans of Nazi Smear Sauce that expired eight years ago. Last Tuesday, The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published an article suggesting that Trump wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” according to Trump’s estranged, former chief-of-staff John Kelly.

Goldberg devoted the majority of the article to Vanessa Guillén, a U.S. Army private of Mexican descent who was murdered by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood in Texas. In Goldberg’s telling, “Trump became angry” over the cost of funeral arrangements, declaring, “it doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a [explicit] Mexican!” Goldberg added that Trump ordered White House Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows not to pay.

But there was a problem. Virtually everyone present when these exchanges allegedly took place went on record denying Goldberg’s account, some before the story was published. Trump spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer “emailed me a series of denials,” writing “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie,” said Goldberg. Similarly, he recorded, Meadows “denied having heard Trump make the statement” and “also denied that Trump had ordered Meadows not to pay for the funeral.”

Former Trump National Security official Kash Patel added a characterization of events that contradicts the ethnic disdain portrayed by Goldberg. “As someone who was present in the room with President Trump, he strongly urged that Spc. Vanessa Guillen’s grieving family should not have to bear the cost of any funeral arrangements, even offering to personally pay himself in order to honor her life and sacrifice,” he said. “In addition, President Trump was able to have the Department of Defense designate her death as occurring ‘in the line of duty,’ which gave her full military honors and provided her family access to benefits, services, and complete financial assistance.”

Goldberg published the story anyways, presenting his version of events as factual, without citing his first-hand source. This provoked further denials from those who were actually present. “Wow. I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics,” tweeted Guillén’s sister Mayra. “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.” Trump official Theo Wold, who was present that day as a translator, was more direct: “The Atlantic hit piece is a lie.” Meadows issued a public denial of the story, and his spokesman Ben Williamson took The Atlantic to task for watering down the denial he issued from Meadows from “Trump ‘absolutely did not say that,’” to he “didn’t hear Trump say it.”

The mainstream media is not known for letting the facts get in the way of a good narrative, even if that should be their primary purpose. Sometimes, it seems that they self-consciously assume the role of the titular villain from “Larry-Boy and the Rumor Weed.” So, it’s no wonder that “most people believe the media is biased,” admitted Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in a recent op-ed.

Their ceaseless and unsubstantiated accusations of “Nazi” and “fascist” seem to be hurting their own cause. In a recent focus group of undecided voters in Pennsylvania, one man said that “part of the reason why I’m being pushed towards Trump so strongly is I find that the Democrats and the Left keep going straight to Hitler all the time with everything. … It pushes me away from their position. It’s so hyperbolic that it makes it impossible to have good discussions, and I think it ruins the discourse.” When asked, the other focus group participants also agreed that bringing up Hitler so often is not helpful.

Some partisans may respond by declaring that Trump represents a unique threat to democracy, making the Trump-Hitler comparison apt. But progressives undermine that argument when they smear other politicians, advocating mainstream policy positions, as “fascist.” For instance, left-wing opinion-maker Joy Reid recently declared that standard pro-family positions were “fascist.” When progressives label normal Americans with the same smear they use against Trump, the only effect is to convince normal Americans that Trump is a lot like them.

Following Trump’s MSG rally, a sect of Satmar Hasidic Jews led by Grand Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum endorsed Donald Trump for president. Trump is many things, but a Nazi is not one of them.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Supermajority of Americans Support Photo ID, Only U.S. Citizens Voting in Elections: Poll

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An overwhelming supermajority of Americans from all political parties and ethnic backgrounds believe that only Americans should vote in U.S. elections, and that voters should have to provide a photo ID before casting their ballot, a new survey has found.

In all, more than eight out of 10 Americans — including a majority of Democrats — support the provisions designed to enhance election integrity, which most Democratic elected officials oppose.

In all, 84% of Americans favor requiring voters to show a photo identification before being given a ballot, and 83% are in favor of “requiring people who are registering to vote for the first time to provide proof of citizenship.” Only 15% of Americans oppose each measure.

Support for the election integrity measures cuts deep across members of all political parties and ethnic identities, according to the Gallup poll, released last week. Republicans favored the measures by a near-unanimous margin: 98% of Republicans favor photo identification, and 96% support proof of citizenship for voters. But so did more than eight in 10 registered Independents (84% support both measures). Surprisingly, the vast majority of rank-and-file Democrats also say they would support laws “requiring all voters to provide photo identification at their voting place in order to vote” (67%) and limiting elections to those who can provide reliable proof of their U.S. citizenship (66%).

Although Democratic politicians have likened voter ID laws to Jim Crow — or, as President Joe Biden has said, “Jim Eagle” — the measure has intense support among minority voters. Laws stating that voters must show photo identification are favored by 86% of white voters and 80% of minority voters. (Minority voters are those who identify as Alaska Native, American Indian, Asian, black, Hispanic, or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.) Limiting the franchise to those who can prove their U.S. citizenship is backed by more than three-quarters (76%) of non-white voters, as well as 87% of white, non-Hispanic voters.

The question about restricting the vote to U.S. citizens is new; however, the numbers largely track with previous Gallup polls asking about photo identification. In October 2022, the polling organization found 79% of Americans favored such laws, and 21% opposed. Similarly, a Gallup poll conducted in August 2016 found that 80% of U.S. voters favored photo identification laws, and 19% opposed them.

Significantly, Democratic support for photo ID laws plummeted 10 points during the Trump and Biden years. While similar supermajorities of Republicans and Independents favored photo ID laws in 2016, so did nearly two-thirds (63%) of Democrats, compared to a bare majority (53%) of Democrats in 2022.

These widely-supported policies make up the core of the SAVE Act, sponsored by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and supported by former President Donald Trump and current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.).

The issue takes on added salience, as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found that, if a fraction of illegal immigrants turned out to vote, they could, change the course of the election in swing states and well beyond. “Mathematically, there are 12 states, plus the Nebraska 2nd congressional district, where the voting-age non-citizen population is larger in 2024 than the state winner’s margin of victory in the last presidential election,” found a new CIS report.

A relatively small turnout of illegal immigrants could change election results from Donald Trump to Kamala Harris in Georgia (4.5%) and Arizona (5.1%), the group found. They could even impact a seeming impenetrable bastion of Republican electoral votes such as Texas. If 54% of illegal immigrant residents in Texas turned out to vote, and two-thirds voted for Harris-Walz, it could tip the nation’s largest Republican state in favor of the Democratic ticket for the first presidential election since 1976. Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has led state efforts to remove non-citizens from the voting rolls.

Although audits have found thousands of non-citizens were registered to vote — and had, in fact, cast a vote — in swing states, the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice Department has sued to prevent states from removing non-citizens from the voting rolls. The DOJ alleges election integrity measures in Virginia and Alabama violate the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day Quiet Period Provision, curtailing all such actions during the 90 days before an election.

Surging numbers of illegal border crossings have catapulted the issue of illegal immigration into the top three issues on voters’ minds ahead of the 2024 election. Before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office, the largest number of illegal border crossings in American history took place in 1986, the last year Congress gave amnesty to illegal immigrants: 1,692,544 illegal crossings took place that year. All four years of the Biden-Harris administration have broken that record.

There were 1,965,519 illegal crossings during FY 2021 — 1,577,840 since February 2021, when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris officially took office. However, many illegal immigrants began arriving before that date in anticipation of a Biden-Harris victory, some wearing campaign paraphernalia.

Some pro-life advocates intend to help secure the vote on election day and beyond. Students for Life Action is recruiting election integrity volunteers for the states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Election year irregularities may be confounded by another factor: Illegal immigrants also favor Donald Trump at slightly higher rates after four years of the Biden-Harris administration than in 2016. “[T]here is some evidence naturalized citizens may prefer Harris over Trump by roughly a 60 percent to 40 percent margin,” reports CIS. “If non-citizens had this voting preference it would require 7.48 percent of non-citizens in Georgia and 8.55 percent of non-citizens in Arizona to vote in 2024 for the net gain in support for Harris to exceed the margin of victory in the last presidential election.” That margin would require more than 90% of illegal immigrants to vote in order to paint Texas blue.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Meet the Groups Funding Harris: Abortionists, Pornographers, and Trans Activists

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Journalists across the political spectrum regret that interviews with Kamala Harris shed precious little light on her views or the policies she intends to implement if elected president. However, some of society’s most noxious forces — including abortionists, those who support transgender surgeries for minors, and pornographers — plan to shape the direction of a Harris-Walz administration and have donated more than $100 million dollars to ensure the pair take power next January.

Abortionists

The abortion industry alone has dedicated tens of millions of dollars to its business interests, and candidates who support them, in the 2024 election. The nation’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood, dedicated $40 million to promoting pro-abortion candidates in eight swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“Abortion will be the message of this election, and it will be how we energize voters,” enthused Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes. Lawson said her message would highlight the alleged “devastation that comes when anti-abortion politicians have power” — a theme the Democratic ticket has adopted with relish. Kamala Harris has falsely accused “Trump abortion bans” of claiming the lives of women who died as a result of complications from the abortion pill, mifepristone.

One of the nation’s most influential pro-abortion PACs, EMILY’s List, amplified this message with a fearmongering $6 million ad buy telling female voters in swing states that lifesaving laws will kill them. The group’s first ad features someone dressed as an emergency room doctor claiming “a pregnant patient” comes in “every shift” bleeding. But “it’s against state law for me to provide life-saving care, because Donald Trump took away a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions,” she lies. No pro-life law at any level makes it illegal to care for miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies, nor forces women to wait until they are at the point of death to receive medical treatment.

The abortion industry has banded together with the legal Left to launch an enduring, $100 million campaign under the new name Abortion Access Now (AAN). AAN describes itself as “a long-term federal strategy to codify the right to abortion, including lobbying efforts, grassroots organizing, public education, and comprehensive communication strategies to mobilize support and enact change.” Its leadership includes:

  • Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF)
  • Reproductive Freedom for All
  • American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
  • Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR)
  • National Women’s Law Center (NWLC)
  • In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda
  • National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice (Latina Institute)
  • National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF)
  • Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity (URGE)

Its steering committee also includes the oxymoronic, dissenting group Catholics for Choice, as well as EMILY’s List, the National Abortion Federation, MoveOn.org, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Abortion Hotline.

Many of these groups worked in concert to support Ohio’s Issue 1, which wrote the “right” of minors to obtain abortion and other “reproductive” services into the state constitution last November. The groups support abortion for minors without parental consent or notification, transgender surgeries for minors, legalizing prostitution, hampering law enforcement, and forcing taxpayers to fund abortion-on-demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy.

Abortion Access Now’s opening statement signals that it, too, aims at far more than simply abortion. “We envision a future where abortion, and all sexual and reproductive health care, is not only legal but also accessible, affordable, and free from stigma or fear,” the group said in a press release announcing its formation in June. “We are operating with a really big vision, but we’re also living in the world of the possible,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, told Politico.

For the short term, the group intends to fund abortion through Medicaid and other federal programs, expand the “right” of taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand to illegal immigrants and other pregnant “people in federal custody facilities,” and corporate welfare for abortionists to rebuild “the abortion care ecosystem.” Its statement also hinted at the abortion industry’s fear-based misinformation strategy, alleging, “People are struggling to get lifesaving medical care for miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other pregnancy complications.”

Planned Parenthood state affiliates in California, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio will also launch localized campaigns on the issue, many focused at the state level. A total of 10 states will host ballot initiatives on abortion this November. But ultimately, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson vowed that her industry will use all the resources at its disposal to “fight for federal” pro-abortion legislation.

SBA Pro-Life America has announced it will spend $92 million in eight swing states, including Michigan, this election cycle aiding those who respect the unalienable right to life.

Pornographers

The New York Times reported that the “porn industry” — whose products often feature incest, rape, violence, and themes of pedophilia — has thrown its support behind Kamala Harris in 2024. The industry launched a $100,000 “Hands Off My Porn” campaign, running anti-Trump ads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. The advertisements accuse the former president of secretly seeking to implement provisions of Project 2025, a conservative policy document he has repeatedly disowned, which would harm the smut industry’s bottom line.

The porn industry has a long history of endorsing Democratic candidates, and the party seemingly looks out for its interests, as well. The 2024 Democratic Party platform promises to keep “fighting” parents who want to place sexually graphic books in age-restricted parts of the library and ensure schools are not promoting such content to their children. The Democratic platform refers to these parental modesty initiatives as “book bans that censor LGBTQI+ content.” Both Kamala Harris and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (D), who has a long history with the LGBTQ movement, have said they oppose efforts to spare minors from exposure to porn in schools.

Groups That Support Transgender Surgeries for Children

The nation’s leading LGBTQIA+ pressure group, the controversial Human Rights Campaign (HRC), has dedicated $15 million to the 2024 presidential election. As this author has written at The Washington Stand, HRC opposes laws protecting minors from transgender procedures and surgeries, and its controversial K-12 curriculum encourages employees to teach children radical transgender ideology beginning in preschool:

“HRC’s ‘Welcoming Schools’ program instructs teachers to read the book ‘They, She, He, Easy as ABC’ to children in preschool or kindergarten. Its pre-K lesson plan defines ‘gender identity’ as ‘How you feel. Girl, boy, both or neither. Everyone has a gender identity,’ conducts school trainings, and creates lesson plans for teachers beginning in ‘pre-K.’ By third grade, it encourages students to use the ‘Gender Snowperson’ exercise to ‘understand the differences between gender identity, sexual orientation and sex assigned at birth.’”

“The HRC, an LGBT activist group with a $46 million budget, opposes laws protecting minors from transgender procedures and has denounced laws ‘allowing misgendering of transgender students’ or regulating ‘drag performances.’”

HRC is joined by the so-called Equality PAC, which is co-chaired by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), which has raised $12 million for the 2024 election.

“Welcome to our annual convening of the gay mafia,” Torres told the group’s star-studded fundraiser in June. “Vice President Harris, some of you from California may remember that she began marrying gay couples when she was the DA in San Francisco — before gay marriage was even legal across the country,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) told the crowd.

The group has raised so much money that it has branched out from supporting candidates who identify as LGBT to spreading LGBTQIA+ activists’ money throughout Democratic congressional campaigns broadly. “We recognize that without a pro-equality Congress, without a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president, we will never be able to make the Equality Act the law of the land,” said Torres. Besides, Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told the group a future Democratic majority could “pull back” the Senate filibuster to pass the so-called “Equality Act” with a bare majority.

A new Democratic Congress may have a much stronger ally in the White House next January. In all, the movement aims to “build a world where it’s no longer noteworthy when a trans candidate runs and wins,” insisted a Democratic Delaware state senator born Tim McBride, who now goes by the name Sarah.

Torres linked the LGBTQIA+ cause with abortion-on-demand, telling NPR, “A woman born in 2024 has fewer rights than she did in 1973, which is a tragic reminder that progress cannot be taken for granted, that LGBTQ rights can be every bit as fragile as reproductive rights.”

A poll from the LGBTQ pressure group GLAAD found that those who identify with the movement favor any generic Democrat over any generic Republican by 63 points (77% vs. 14%).

Dr. Jennifer Bauwens has also pointed out at the 2024 Pray Vote Stand Summit that, according to federal election data, “92% to 96% of research psychologists and social workers” have “given to a liberal Democrat candidate” for office.

Researchers have found politicians prove remarkably responsive to people or organizations who donate to their campaign. Rest assured that if Kamala Harris is elected, pornographers, abortionists, and the transgender industry will have her ear.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Poseur Politics: Guns, Gardening, and French Fries

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Positioning a candidate to appeal to the everyman isn’t a new concept in political campaigns. To gain the attention and support of voters, politicians (and their handlers) will do many things that the candidate wouldn’t ordinarily do.

When Lincoln was running for president in 1860, the new Republican Party positioned him as the “Woodchopper of the West.” In 1952, Eisenhower was portrayed as a man you couldn’t help but like with “I like Ike.” In 1978, Tennessee gubernatorial candidate Lamar Alexander walked across the entire state wearing a flannel shirt to show that he connected with average flannel-shirt-wearing Tennesseans. He won handily.

Some efforts feel more contrived than others. Think Vladimir Putin shirtless on horseback — maybe he does things differently, but I just can’t buy that it’s an everyday practice for the Russian tyrant. Ronald Reagan on horseback was a little more believable — after all, he owned a ranch and at least acted in cowboy films.

The more recent campaign 2024 is no exception when it comes to candidates downplaying their elite sensibilities to show solidarity with the common American. President Donald Trump’s shift at a McDonald’s restaurant is easily the most visible example of this. While his opposition had a veritable meltdown over the stunt, most Americans didn’t have to suspend much disbelief. No one thinks that Trump is a minimum-wage fast food employee at heart. The whole event did its job, drawing attention to the candidate, and bringing French fries to the people.

Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has had her own efforts to appeal to average middle-class Americans. For one, she’s made herself out to be a gardener who grows her own food. Never mind how she seemed to struggle with using a shovel when dumping dirt on a tree with her husband — Harris has set herself out to be the green thumb of America.

Faced with an image that wasn’t connecting with gun owners, Harris’s running mate Governor Tim Walz (D) decided to go on a hunting trip, complete with media retinue (be vewy, vewy quiet…). While Walz had all the talking points down about his Beretta shotgun (nice gun, but not exactly a gun of the everyman), he didn’t appear quite as comfortable with the firearm as would a seasoned hunter.

For a party that places so much emphasis on gun control measures (just read their platform), Democrats lately seem to be having a hard time controlling their own guns. This week, Democratic Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Lucas Kunce held a campaign event with former Illinois Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger at a shooting range where a reporter covering the event was hit with shrapnel deflected from Kunce’s gun. From the photos of the event, the men appeared to be shooting at steel targets from 10 yards or less with rifles outfitted with optics for much further distances.

If indeed they were shooting steel from that close range, it would be no surprise to any experienced shooter that ricochet could very well occur. I’ve shot steel targets many times, but usually with lower-velocity handguns, not high-velocity, and it’s always at much further distances than 10 yards, because anything that close is unsafe. Safety didn’t seem to be the primary order of the day, as Kinzinger was shown in one photo shooting with his eye protection not on his eyes, but on top of his head, as he shot the AR-platform rifle at 10-yard targets over what appeared to be cans of explosive Tannerite. Apparently, posing beats protection every time.

For all its faults, most political posing is harmless. It gives us all insight that you’re not a complete creation of a political machine. It’s harmless, that is, until it’s not. In Kunce’s case, somebody did get hurt. Not to worry, though, you can’t let a good shooting go to waste. In a good day’s posing, all is good after all. Kunce himself tweeted:

“Great day at the range today with my friend @AdamKinzinger. We got to hang out with some union workers while exercising our freedom. Always have your first aid kit handy. Shrapnel can always fly when you hit a target like today, and you’ve got to be ready to go. We had four first aid kits, so we were able to take care of the situation, and I’m glad Ryan is okay and was able to continue reporting.”

For the poseur, it’s all in how you posture yourself. It may indeed have been a great day at the range, for Kunce and Kinzinger. For me, however, I’d be posturing myself at a gun range the next county over. Just because someone is smoking at the gas pump next to you doesn’t mean you have to stay at your pump until your tank is full. And that’s the problem with political poseurs — it’s all fun and games until the shooting starts.

AUTHOR

Jared Bridges

Jared Bridges is editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand.

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RELATED VIDEO: WATCH: Tampon Tim Walz Hunting Photo Op Backfires When He Has Trouble Loading His Own Gun

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Jesus Is Lord’? A Tale of Two Rallies

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Political campaigns all too often come down to one memorable moment: Nixon’s debate with JFK, Reagan asking if Americans are better off today than four years ago, Bush promising “no new taxes,” or Trump descending a golden escalator. Two rallies — and three events — over the last week presented a series of revelatory moments that should burn themselves into Christians’ minds, culminating with the way two of the most important figures in the election responded to the phrase, “Jesus is Lord.”

Kamala Harris presided over the first event at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse last Thursday. As she delved into a monologue castigating pro-life protections for the unborn, two university students declared, “Christ is King!” and “Jesus is Lord!”

“Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally,” replied the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States.

The students — Grant Beth and Luke Polaske, two juniors at the university — said Harris singled them out during the speech. “She was actually waving to me. I took this cross off my neck that I wear, and as we were getting asked to leave, I held it up in the air and waved at her and pointed at her, and she looked directly in the eye, kind of gave me an evil smirk,” Polaske told “Fox and Friends Weekend.” Sadly, the liberal university crowd shared Harris’s disrespect for Christians and, allegedly, for Christ. The New York Post reports:

“I was pushed by an elderly woman. We were heckled at, we were cursed at, we were mocked, and that’s the biggest thing for me personally,” Beth said. “In reflection of the event, Jesus was mocked. You know, [H]is disciples were mocked, and that’s OK.”

Contrast that scene with a rally Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance held in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Sunday. During a lull in his speech, someone in the audience cheered, “Jesus is king!”

“That’s right. Jesus is king,” Vance responded, as the Republican crowd erupted in approval.

One candidate signaled that the Name of Jesus Christ — the Name at which every knee shall bow and every tongue confess His eternal lordship — is unwelcome speech at any of her rallies. And if the Democratic nominee banishes Jesus’s Name from her campaign, when she’s trying to earn the votes of the largest share of U.S. citizens (and, alas, others), how much more will Jesus find disfavor once she’s comfortably ensconced in the Oval Office for the next four years?

On the other hand, J.D. Vance rhetorically affirmed, not merely empty praise for Jesus, but the notion that God’s sovereignty supersedes even his own. The phrase “Jesus is King!” recognizes the view that government, and those to whom it is temporarily entrusted, are subordinate to the will of God. Their will is circumscribed by the rights, priorities, privileges, and kingdom rights of Christ the King. Vance’s words pumped oxygen into the heart of the American experiment, that U.S. citizens enjoy certain unalienable rights which no government can ever take away.

Those two images should stand preeminent above all others. Yet in true, post-2020 fashion, the campaigns have given us an overabundance of definitive moments.

Another came at the 79th Annual Al Smith Dinner in New York, where former President Donald Trump highlighted the empty chair reserved for Vice President Kamala Harris. The two candidates’ remarks offered another enduring contrast.

First, Trump managed to come across as the more humble candidate. At one point, he declined to tell any self-deprecating jokes, saying, “I guess I just don’t see the point of taking shots at myself when other people have been shooting at me.” But he actually began with a self-effacing quip: “These days, it’s really a pleasure [to be] anywhere in New York without a subpoena for my appearance.” And he humbly admitted, “I went overboard” in attacking Hillary Clinton during his remarks at the 2016 event.

Kamala Harris broke with tradition to send in a video featuring “Saturday Night Live” alumna Molly Shannon as Mary Katherine Gallagher. After a few stale references to her character (who debuted on SNL 29 years ago and has not been a regular recurring character since 2001), the very funny Shannon gave a laughless, identity-focused monologue about the importance of electing a woman, because women are smarter than men. She closed by calling the incumbent vice president “Momala,” as Drew Barrymore did recently. Secular leftists are looking for a matriarch. Christians bask in the love of the Father and seek no substitute.

The incumbent vice president’s celebrity video sent a subtle message to the Al Smith crowd: Kamala Harris would rather be praised on the accident of her birth by her Hollywood friends than tell self-deprecating jokes around Christians. As she has said, she is “not aspiring to be humble.” Donald Trump seeming humbler than anyone is a miracle potentially qualifying Al Smith for sainthood.

But Trump offered a second moment in the speech worth remembering. Highlighting the Democratic Party’s increasingly strident anti-Catholic record, Trump quipped, “Instead of attending tonight, she’s in Michigan receiving Communion from Gretchen Whitmer.” (Trump also joked that Governor Tim “Walz isn’t here himself, but don’t worry, he’ll say that he was.” That is, of course, a reference to Walz’s erroneous claims that he served in battle and had been in the Far East during the Tiananmen Square massacre, which Walz explained away by saying “my grammar’s not always correct” and calling himself a “knucklehead” — which would have made a good punchline at the Al Smith Dinner. As an explanation for stolen valor, not so much.)

Harris asked Shannon’s character for tips in addressing the Catholic crowd. “Maybe don’t say anything negative about Catholics,” Shannon/Gallagher advised.

“I would never do that, no matter where I was,” replied Harris.

But, of course, that could hardly be further from the truth, as Harris’s record proves:

  • While in the Senate, Harris grilled nominee Brian Buescher, a nominee to the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, in 2018 over his membership in the Knights of Columbus, classifying it as an “all-male society” that “opposed a woman’s right to choose” and “marriage equality.”
  • As California attorney general, Harris supported the misnamed “Reproductive FACT Act,” which compelled pro-life pregnancy resource centers to engage in self-defeating speech and refer mothers to abortion facilities. (The Supreme Court struck down the law in 2018’s NIFLA v. Becerra)
  • As a senator, Harris sponsored the so-called “Do No Harm” act, which would deny Christians the right to live out their faithful convictions on the issues of abortion, LGBTQIA+ business practices, and transgender surgeries.
  • The Biden-Harris administration’s FBI investigated alleged “violent extremists in radical-traditionalist Catholic” circles who attend the Traditional Latin Mass.

Of course, Harris’s animus extends beyond Roman Catholics. As California attorney general, she signed onto a brief in the Supreme Court’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case, attempting to force the evangelical Christian family-owned business to purchase potentially abortifacient birth control in violation of their Bible-based, pro-life beliefs.

The third moment Christians should remember comes from a Univision town hall. A Hispanic woman asked both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to name three good things about their opponent. Trump answered that Harris “seems to have an ability to survive. … She seems to have some pretty long-time friendships … and she seems to have a nice way about her.” Harris stumbled before saying, “I think Donald Trump loves his family” — a fact as controversial as saying Trump breathes oxygen (or loves McDonald’s). “But,” she continued, “I don’t really know him. I only met him one time … so I don’t really have much more to offer you.”

Kamala Harris’s refusal to come up with a perfunctory list of good attributes signals the most concerning shift: the perpetual demonization of one’s political opponents. As Harris’s interview with Bret Baier showed, every issue eventually comes back to an anti-Trump screed. American political discourse has slipped from a search for comity to the stoking of perpetual hatred. In fact, Harris’s refusal to appear at the Al Smith Dinner was said to be based on fears that doing so might “humanize” President Trump — an odd phrase to use about a human being.

Roman Catholic commentators offered another explanation for her absence: “None of us like to go to a party where we feel out of place. This explains why Kamala Harris decided to stiff New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan and skip the Al Smith Dinner,” said Bill Donohue of the Catholic League in an email sent to The Washington Stand.

But perhaps her video message to the dinner summed up the contrast best. At one point, she lectured Molly Shannon, “You should never let anyone tell you who you are: You tell them who you are.”

We’ve been told, loud and clear.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Harris Struggles with Hispanic Voters, Pitches Abortion

RELATED VIDEO: This moment just won the election as Latino leaders pray for Donald J. Trump

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

State of the 2024 Election

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Much has been made about what’s at stake in the upcoming 2024 election, and rightfully so. The last three and a half years have seen wars emerge on almost every continent, a dramatically weakened dollar with persistently high inflation and declining standard of living, the deterioration of military readiness, a wide-open southern border, the politicization of our legal system, an unprecedented all-out assault on the unborn and those standing up for life, attacks on religious freedom, a disconcerting rise in political violence, and more. As a result, just 28% of Americans say the country is on the right track, and they are primed to make their voice heard.

Presidential Election

The presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump has generated most of the attention and campaign spending and will be the main driver of turnout among voters. Every day, there are several new national and battleground polls released to the public, and in general they show a race within the margin of error (give or take 2-4 points depending on the specific poll) at the national level. Harris currently enjoys a two-point edge in the head-to-head polling average at RealClearPolitics. However, this lead is not enough to allow the vice president to rest on her laurels. During this time in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden led then-President Trump by 10 points, and Hillary Clinton led Trump by 5.8 points. The former would go on to win (thanks in large part to relaxed mail-in voting rules) by less than 85,000 votes and the latter would go on to lose by less than 45,000 votes. Harris is polling significantly behind the other Democratic candidates to have faced off against Donald Trump at this point in the election.

The Democratic candidate has traditionally won the national popular vote, but because of the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, the Electoral College is determinative. If you live in a state like Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin, you are no doubt tired of the ads and text messages. Both campaigns know your vote will be important for their candidate to prevail in your state, which could likely determine the outcome of the election. The two-point lead Harris enjoys in the national popular vote translates, at this moment, to an Electoral College loss. At the time this was written, the RealClearPolitics average for the battleground states would give Trump a win in the electoral college 296-242, with the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in the Republican’s column. Among the battleground states Harris is currently projected to carry, Wisconsin and Nevada, she is trailing Biden’s 2020 performance in the polling by five points in each state — again, not where the Harris campaign wants to be.

Control of the U.S. Senate

Sixty-one percent of Americans agree the country is on the wrong track, and while this portends trouble ahead for the Harris campaign in persuading voters to continue the Biden-Harris policies in a Kamala Harris administration, it does translate to some anti-incumbent sentiment among voters, which plays to the benefit of Senate Republicans hoping to take the majority in the upper chamber in Congress. With a slim 51-49 seat majority, the Senate Democrats stand severely disadvantaged this election. Of the 34 Senate seats up for a vote this cycle, 23 are held by Democrats, many of which are in states that are also highly competitive at the presidential level. Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin all have Senate Democrats running for reelection in tough matchups — in particular, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are incredibly tight at the moment with incumbents Sen. Bob Casey, Jr., (D-Pa.) and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) leading their Republican challengers by a mere three points.

In other states, like West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio, Democratic candidates for Senate are running at a disadvantage because their states are expected to vote for Trump by more than 10 points, endangering Democratic incumbents Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mt.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Tester, for example, is trailing his Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, by seven points. Brown, on the other hand, is doing better in the public polling, leading Republican Bernie Moreno by just two points. West Virginia will not be competitive, as former Governor Jim Justice is favored to win this race comfortably.

In Michigan, incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow (D) announced she would not run for reelection, which has pitted Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin against former Republican Representative Mike Rogers, and in Arizona, Democrat-turned-Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced she would also not run for reelection, creating a match-up between Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake. The Michigan race is a toss-up, with Slotkin leading in the public polling average by less than two points. In Arizona, Gallego leads by just under seven points. Both states feature prominently in the Electoral College calculus of the Harris and Trump campaigns, so it’s possible the coattails of whichever presidential candidate wins the state will play an outsized role in who wins these races; this is true more so for Michigan than Arizona, because Lake is trailing outside the margin of error.

Republican Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) are also running this year and are facing well-financed challengers, but both are the favorites in their respective races. If the GOP doesn’t lose in either Texas or Florida and wins the Senate races they are expected to win in West Virginia and Montana they will take overcontrol of the Senate with 51 seats. Bernie Moreno in Ohio is likely to benefit from Trump’s coattails in that state, which would bring the GOP to 52 seats. With few exceptions, ticket-splitting is all but gone these days. So, if Trump were to carry Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin, and carry Republican Senate candidates over the finish line with him the GOP would have 57 seats in the Senate. Some GOP candidates in a few of these states are polling far enough behind Trump that were he to win some of these states his coattails might not be enough to deliver for them, however.

Control of the U.S. House of Representatives

After redistricting in 2020, the number of competitive races in the House of Representatives dipped. Gone are the days of 40-60 seat swings like we saw in the Tea Party era. This year, Cook Political Report has identified just 26 toss-up races in the U.S. House of Representatives. Of these 26, Republicans are defending 14, and Democrats are defending 12. For the current razor-thin, three-seat Republican majority , winning every one of these toss-up races is a must. With just 23% of voters approving of the job Congress is doing, the GOP is swimming against the tide to keep their majority.

Since there are 435 members in the U.S. House of Representatives, pollsters ask respondents to state whether they prefer a “generic Republican” or “generic Democrat” to represent them in Congress to get a sense of how the race for the majority House will play out. Now, the RealClearPolitics generic congressional vote average shows Democrats leading by just one point. In 2022, when the GOP won back control of the House of Representatives after the Democrats held the House since the 2018 midterm elections, the GOP had a three-point lead in the generic congressional polling at this time in the 2022 midterm elections. This victory for the GOP in wresting the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi was earned by winning just a four-seat majority by a mere 4,500 votes. It doesn’t get much closer than that. I think we’re likely to see a similarly paper-thin result decide which party controls the House this November.

Unlike the Senate, where a presidential candidate’s coattails can be decisive, most of the toss-up races in the House are in states that are not particularly competitive at the statewide or presidential level. Each individual candidate will have to win or lose in their own foxhole. Alaska, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington account for 16 of the 24 most competitive House races and will not see a competitive result at the presidential or Senate level, or do not have a competitive Senate race. GOP incumbents in these states will have to win in an environment of supercharged Democrat turnout, and vice versa for Democrat incumbents in toss-up races in Republican states. If you’re the GOP, of particular concern are GOP incumbents in California and New York. There are eight GOP incumbents between these two states alone, and both states are likely to go for Kamala Harris by as much as 20 points, or more. Combine anti-incumbent sentiment with deep blue states and you have a strong headwind for GOP incumbents in these states.

Conclusion

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans, have updated their voter registration or registered to vote for the first time this year. All this data is important and tells us some early signs of how the election will go. Florida, for example, once the preeminent swing state, is now firmly in the grip of the GOP, as Florida Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than a million voters. Pennsylvania, a state that as recently as 2008 had 1.2 million more Democrats than Republicans and was once firmly within the Democrats’ Rust Belt “blue wall” has replaced Florida as the preeminent swing state, and Democrats have the lowest voter registration edge they have ever held in the Keystone State: 343,000 voters. Republicans have been winning the voter registration battle elsewhere as well.

Similarly, early vote data shows a dramatic decline in the number of mail-in ballots requested compared to 2020. Using Pennsylvania again as an example, the 2020 election saw a total of 2.7 million mail-in ballots requested, or 39% of the total vote came from mail. So far this cycle, just 1.4 million mail-in ballots have been requested (mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania can be requested until October 29th, so this number will go up. But it will likely not be anywhere close to the 2.7 million number from 2020). Mail-in voting is likely to play a smaller role in the 2024 election than it did in the 2020 election when so many were still dealing with COVID-19.

Then there’s the campaign spending. Kamala Harris’s campaign has raised $678 million to Donald Trump’s $313 million. The Democratic National Committee similarly enjoys a fundraising advantage over its Republican counterparts, raking in $385 million to the Republican National Committee’s $331 million. The Republicans enjoy a slight campaign finance edge in the Senate contests, outraising their Democrat counterparts $200 million to $173 million. In the House, the National Republican Congressional Committee raised $183 million to the Democrats’ $250 million. This all amounts to billions of dollars flooding the airways and cell phone towers with campaign messaging.

All of this to say, the respective candidates and political parties have their own advantages and disadvantages. It’s incredibly difficult to say which advantages will determine outcomes, whether it’s a campaign cash advantage or public polling, voter registration or mail-in ballot requests, we will not know for sure until election night. Right now, the presidential race looks like it’s trending toward Donald Trump, the Senate is securely within reach of the Republicans, and the speaker’s gavel is at risk of being handed back over to the Democrats. If that’s the case, then we’ll look back and say 2024 was clearly an anti-incumbent election, and the country is asking for change. If Harris wins, the Democrats retain control of the Senate, and win back the House, then we can say campaign funding is the decisive factor in elections. If Trump wins, the GOP wins the Senate, and retains control of the House, we can say it was a repudiation of the Biden-era with its excessive social engineering, abortion extremism, runaway spending, foreign policy blunders, and all.

As followers of Christ, we know God is sovereign. This is not an excuse for inaction, but an acknowledgement that no election outcome surprises Him. The best day of the republic still falls short of the glory of the New Heaven and New Earth to come. We should pray for righteous leaders to prevail in November and pray that our nation would once again humble itself before the Lord acknowledging how far we have fallen from His righteous standard. The 2024 elections are incredibly important because of the stark differences in worldview represented by the major parties, but their importance pales in comparison to the work needed to repair our nation’s spiritual walls.

AUTHOR

Matt Carpenter

Matt Carpenter is the director of FRC Action.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Porn Industry Runs Ads for Harris in Wake of VP’s Appearance on Sex Podcast

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The pornography industry often makes headlines related to human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, or social media regulations, but this time it’s in the news for running political ads. With less than a month to go before the presidential election, a coalition of pornography producers, distributors, and “performers” is running ads online, encouraging porn users to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The $100,000 “Hands Off My Porn” campaign claims that former President Donald Trump will ban pornography if elected again. The claim is based on policy recommendations in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Trump has repeatedly disavowed. Senior Trump campaign advisor Danielle Alverez responded, “Since the Fall of 2023, President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term.”

Project 2025 authors and “Trump allies” are labeled “weirdos” in the ads, which claim that Trump will imprison porn producers. Holly Randall, a porn producer and “director” involved in the ad campaign claimed that the pornography coalition has not coordinated with the Harris campaign or the Democratic Party but intends to increase their advertising budget.

Despite Randall’s protests, Family Research Council Senior Fellow Meg Kilgannon observed that the Harris campaign must at least be aware of the advertising venture. “It is now legal for outside groups to coordinate expenditures with presidential campaigns,” Kilgannon noted. She continued, “While the fact of the porn expenditures themselves is shocking, the messaging around Project 2025 and the targeting of swing states would lead one to believe that these ads are coordinated with the DNC and the Harris campaign.”

She continued, “Is this all the sitting Vice President of the United States has to offer those who use pornography — empty threats that porn will be banned if she loses? Does she hope to distract the young men in this demographic from the very real prospect that in a Harris-Walz administration they will be drafted for military service and shipped overseas to die on foreign soil?”

Kilgannon concluded, “It would be better to promise lower taxes, lower prices, and more jobs, but since Harris-Walz is not credible on those topics, it’s not surprising that the expert fearmongers at DNC would supplement their dire abortion messaging to women with porn-based ads for men.”

The ads will reportedly run in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. However, the claim that a second Trump administration would outlaw pornography may be at least partially undermined by the fact that over a third of U.S. states — including North Carolina and Georgia — have enacted age verification laws to prevent minors from accessing online porn, and pornography behemoth PornHub has outright stopped operating in many of those states.

When Utah passed age verification laws last year, PornHub’s parent company — then called MindGeek, now called Aylo — blocked access in Utah to PornHub and a number of other pornographic websites it owned. PornHub has also shut down in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. When internet users visit the site, they are now met with a message criticizing the states’ laws barring minors from accessing pornography and urging porn users to contact their state representatives to complain.

The ad campaign comes in the wake of Harris’s recent appearance on “Call Her Daddy,” a sex podcast known for its vulgar and explicit language.

Child protection and anti-trafficking advocates have observed in the past that pornography creates a heightened demand for human trafficking, including child trafficking. PornHub and its parent company even admitted in federal court last year that the companies profit from illegal sex trafficking: PornHub hosted videos from a sex trafficking pornography production company and profited from those videos. According to court documents, PornHub and Aylo either knew or should have known that the profits they were receiving were from human trafficking. There are a number of allegations that PornHub and other major pornography distributors knowingly host and profit from human trafficking and videos depicting rape, pedophilia, bestiality, and other aberrant content.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.