Capitol Hill is in a frenzy over the latest debt deal reached between lawmakers.
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
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ANALYSIS – The ‘Woke Wars’ at the Pentagon will be heating up now that Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives, but few know how bad the problem is.
And what exactly do we mean by ‘woke.’
Well, to me, woke is a catchall term invented by the left to describe a full spectrum of leftist and socialist agendas. Among them are diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), better described as DIE.
DIE includes Critical Race Theory (CRT), anti-white racism, extreme feminism as well as the radical transgender agenda.
All flow from the Frankfurt School of modern socialism and intend to radically transform our institutions and society along socialist lines.
Not only are these policies wrong, but in many cases, they are illegal and unconstitutional; they simply codify reverse discrimination and racism in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Many of these concepts have thoroughly infected our colleges and universities and are being pushed down to even our high schools and grammar schools.
Some of this goes back to the 1980s, but most recently they have been pushed hard at the Pentagon by hardcore leftists with Team Clinton, Team Obama and now the same radicals with Team Biden.
This aggressive push for ‘diversity’ and the obsession with race totally undermines our military culture, where our troops are supposed to think less about our differences, not more.
As Michael Washburn of The Epoch Times writes:
The U.S. military’s increased push for diversity and inclusion, as reflected in the far-reaching National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by President Joe Biden on Dec. 23, 2022, aims to remake the military’s culture and ethos along the same lines as left-wing policies that have been put to use at elite colleges and other areas of the private sphere, defense experts say.
While efforts to diversify the armed forces along racial and gender lines at the expense of traditional standards, aren’t new, the NDAA signals dramatically increased civilian input on and oversight of a culture once deemed to be the domain of professional soldiers, the experts told The Epoch Times.
Provisions of the NDAA that aim to boost diversity are so similar to policies enforced by private institutions, such as Harvard University, that an organization opposing the “woke” agenda in the armed forces, and supporting traditional standards and requirements [Veterans for Fairness and Merit- VFM], has gone so far as to lend its expertise in a lawsuit over Harvard’s admissions policies, in the form of an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) filing (pdf), obtained by The Epoch Times. The filing argues that diversity and inclusion policies have harmed the military and aren’t a good idea in either the public or private spheres.
Part of Biden’s NDAA pushes illegal racial preferences in training and recruitment.
Scott McQuarrie, president of Veterans for Fairness and Merit (VFM), explains how bad this is: “[advocates of diversity] make this assertion that it’s a national security imperative that the military be allowed to use racial preferences in order to meet that high bar. Most people being candid with you would say that’s a very far-fetched argument.”
“In fact, our military has operated over the last few generations effectively without having to suspend the Constitution. In Bosnia, Panama, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the military did quite well, and we don’t need to violate the Constitution for the military to execute its mission,” he added.
The Pentagon’s aggressive push for diversity and inclusion, as reflected in Biden’s far-reaching NDAA signed on Dec. 23, aims to radically transform the military’s culture and ethos along the same lines as left-wing policies that are ruining many colleges, corporations and civilian institutions.
They can’t be allowed to destroy our military, as they are destroying everything else. The GOP House needs to focus like a laser beam on these issues at the Defense Department, and private groups like VFM need to continue and ramp up their legal battle against DIE.
This is a war for the soul of our armed forces and our Republic.
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It was only a matter of time until things would come full circle… even in Hollywood.
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The U.S. military has now sh*t down four high-altitude aerial objects over the United States or Canada within a week.
One object was the massive Chinese spy balloon downed off the coast of South Carolina Feb. 4 after it completed its eight-day journey conducting surveillance of sensitive military and nuclear sites across the entire United States.
The three other objects remain unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) – the new term for UFOs.
The Chinese spy balloon and UAPs are raising concerns over major gaps in North American security.
On Sunday U.S. military jet fighters shot down its fourth high-altitude aerial object, an octagonal entity over Lake Huron, Michigan.
Prior to that, on Friday, a second object was shot down over sea ice near Deadhorse, Alaska. And a third object was destroyed over Canada’s Yukon on Saturday, with investigators still hunting for the wreckage.
The U.S. military used AIM-9X Sidewinder short-range heat-seeking, supersonic missiles to bring down all four airborne objects.
One Sidewinder reportedly missed its target and landed harmlessly in Lake Huron.
Fox News reported:
“First shot missed. Second shot hit,” Milley told reporters. “We go to great lengths to make sure that the airspace is clear and the backdrop is clear up to the max effective range of the missile. And in this case, the missiles land, or the missile landed, harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron.”
While the weapons are primarily manufactured for U.S. forces, the missile is also sold in large quantities to a range of American allies, including South Korea, the UAE and Indonesia.
Canada, which is part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) uses Sidewinders as well, but has not yet received its order of these latest, more capable, AIM-9X missiles.
One ex Canadian Air Force general stated that the older Sidewinders still fitted on Canadian CF-18s could not take down these objects at that high an altitude.
Canada’s Global News reported:
Retired Canadian general Tom Lawson, who flew CF-18s before serving as Norad deputy commander and then chief of the defence staff, said Canada’s CF-18s currently use an older version of the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
“When I was flying CF-18s, I did not have a weapon that would shoot down something over 40,000 feet if it was moving too slowly,” he said. “My radar wouldn’t have locked onto it. My heat-seeking missile, my AIM-9, would not have locked onto this thing.”
Meanwhile, the downing of China’s alleged spy balloon by the stealth F-22 Raptor jet fighter marked the first time the 5th generation jet has shot down an airborne target, and may be the first time an AIM-9X was fired in anger since it debuted in combat in Syria and Iraq almost a decade ago.
It was also likely the first time the missile was ever fired at the mind-boggling height of 60,000 ft, which is also near the top reported operational ceiling of 65,000 ft for the F-22.
The rapid-fire series of shoot-downs over Alaska, Canada and Michigan beginning February 10, after the initial balloon downing near South Carolina on Feb 4, has raised pressure on the Biden administration to explain the nature of the high-altitude craft and whether they pose a threat to national security.
From mid-October to December 2022, the National UFO Reporting Center catalogued some 1,255 new sightings of UAPs.
One U.S. official attributed the rise in the sightings to boosted surveillance capabilities by the military and not a rush of new foreign objects flying over American airspace.
However, later on Sunday, the U.S. Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said it still wasn’t clear how the objects were remaining aloft or being propelled through the air, or where they originated.
He also said he had not ruled any explanation out – including extraterrestrial life.
Since then, the U.S. government has announced that it suspects that three unidentified flying objects downed since last Friday were benign commercial or research craft and not linked to China’s alleged surveillance balloon program.
The comments may ease concerns that China is conducting an even more aggressive surveillance effort against the United States than initially believed.
They should also dampen fears of a UFO invasion.
However, these sightings and downing of UAPs over North American airspace still appear to be generating far more questions than answers.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – The fight against China’s growing global network of illegal police outposts has finally heated up here in the United States with the FBI raiding the large Chinese station in New York City (NYC).
This is the mission the FBI should be focused on, rather than raiding pro-life activists or colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans.
I’ve written about these extraterritorial Chinese police stations several times, highlighting the ones in NYC, as well as those in Canada and Europe.
Beijing says these outposts aren’t doing any police work, only helping Chinese citizens abroad, but Chinese state media reports that they in fact “collect intelligence” and solve crimes far outside their jurisdiction.
But they do far more than that.
They are accused of conducting illegal surveillance on legal U.S. residents and citizens of Chinese extraction and intimidating, threatening, and coercing them.
In some cases, they have reportedly even kidnapped people outside of China.
According to the New York Times (NYT), the FBI raided the suspected Chinese police outpost, hidden in New York City’s Chinatown last fall, seizing materials from one of the secretive operations for the first time.
The Chinatown outpost was on the third floor of a six-story office building on a busy street. It was raided by FBI counterintelligence agents working on a criminal investigation with the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
Of course, as the NYT reports, the Chinese Embassy in Washington downplayed the outposts, claiming they are staffed by volunteers who help Chinese nationals perform routine tasks like renewing their Chinese driver’s licenses.
Despite the official Chinese denials, the NYT reports, “Western officials see the outposts as part of Beijing’s larger drive to keep tabs on Chinese nationals abroad, including dissidents. The most notorious such effort is known as Operation Fox Hunt, in which Chinese officials hunt down fugitives abroad and pressure them to return home.”
In October, prosecutors in Brooklyn — the same office that searched the New York office — charged seven Chinese nationals with harassing a U.S. resident and his son, pressuring the man to return to China to face criminal charges.
As reported by the NYT, “It’s outrageous that China thinks it can come to our shores, conduct illegal operations and bend people here in the United States to their will,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2020.
At least 102 such outposts have been documented in 53 countries in recent months by the human rights group Safeguard Defenders. Wray said in November that he’s “very concerned” about the outposts, which he called “police stations.”
“It’s a long-arm power to show their own citizens inside China that their government is so strong,” said Safeguard Defenders researcher Chen Yen-ting. “We have the power to reach globally, and even if you go out, you’re still under our control.”
These outposts are ostensibly set up by local Chinese municipalities or regions. At least four Chinese localities — Fuzhou, Qingtian, Nantong and Wenzhou — have reportedly set up dozens of foreign police outposts in Japan, Italy, France, Britain, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other nations.
These don’t include the ones in Canada and the U.S.
Let’s hope the FBI keeps up the pressure on illegal Chinese police activity in the U.S., and the State Department gets involved in controlling any Chinese entities and personnel it has allowed to enter and operate on U.S. soil.
Communist Chinese influence and subversion in the U.S. is the greatest domestic threat we face, not Americans exercising their constitutionally protected right to free speech.
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The federal government could no longer use taxpayer-funded retirement accounts to push companies to adopt leftist political policies, under a new bill from U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
The move counters a recent strategy by leftist radicals to gain control over the voting shares of publicly-held corporations, then vote in radical leftist policies that push “woke” social goals and divert billions in cash to activist groups.
One of the biggest shareholders in many corporations are retirement funds held by and managed for federal employees by BlackRock, a far-left, multinational hedge fund.
Cruz has introduced the Stop TSP ESG Act, which “will prevent companies that manage investment funds held in federal employee retirement accounts from using those holdings to vote in corporate shareholder meetings to force leftist Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies onto private sector businesses.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) is co-sponsoring the bill in the Senate.
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) previously introduced companion legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“BlackRock is able to leverage its position as the fund manager to vote in shareholder meetings and to force publicly traded companies to adopt ESG and DEI policies, even if doing so adversely affects investor value. As such, BlackRock prioritizes its political agenda over the interests of employees and retirees who are seeking to maximize their return on investment,” a statement from Cruz’s office reads.
“I am proud to join Congressman Buck and sponsor this legislation in the Senate to hold investment fund managers accountable and ensure they do not misuse their position as a fiduciary to advance an agenda contrary to the interests of their investors,” said Cruz.
“As the managing entity of TSP, BlackRock is leveraging the financial weight of the federal retirement system to push their woke ESG and DEI ideology through other peoples’ investments. BlackRock’s manipulation and brazen politicization of federal retirement accounts is wrong and should not be tolerated,” said Cruz.
“For years, BlackRock has been leveraging taxpayer money to force unwilling businesses to accept ESG and DEI policies. Through its position as the manager of the federal Thrift Savings Plan, BlackRock has abused public capital to push a radical agenda and censor conservative media,” said Buck.
“Woke Wall Street has been using the federal Thrift Savings Plan to force a radical left-wing agenda on the country. That’s a violation of their fiduciary duty and the basic precepts of democracy. Policy should be made in Congress, not BlackRock’s C-Suite,” said Will Hild, Executive Director at Consumers’ Research.
“The Stop TSP ESG Act is an important step in stopping the radical ESG agenda by protecting TSP account holders. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink admits to ‘forcing behaviors.’ Shareholders may be unknowingly supporting companies that disparage their values as proxy voting decisions are made by these radicals. Thank you, Rep. Buck, for introducing this legislation,” said Penny Nance, CEO and President of Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee.
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New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) called Vice President Kamala Harris the clear winner of Tuesday night’s presidential debate.
“Oh, Kamala definitely won the debate,” Sununu said during a Wednesday morning appearance on CNN. “There’s no question about that. So the question is, what does it mean, right? And it’s not just, what does it mean to everybody? What’s going to do that 10 percent of swing voters?”
“I think if you poll those swing voters, they want results,” he said. “They’re results-driven. It’s the cost of living, it’s the border, it’s public safety, those types of issues, you can be the change agent to make that better in their lives.”
The outgoing New Hampshire governor, who considered a presidential run of his own, praised Harris’s debate strategy Tuesday night.
“She kind of talked confidence in her answers, and then she took the last 30 seconds of almost every question and hit him with a personal attack, knowing that that would get under his skin,” Sununu said. “It was a very effective measure, and I give her a lot of credit on that. It kept him on the defensive, to be sure, and it’s ultimately, definitely, stylistically, why she openly won the debate.”
Sununu said the debate would move the needle “a little bit,” but argued neither candidate explained to voters how they would help lower costs for average Americans. The GOP governor added Trump failed to take advantage of openings to go on the offense over the economy.
“He should have talked about price controls,” Sununu said. “He should have talked about the cost of living more. I think he went like an hour, not even talking about inflation and those are real issues.”
Sununu said the ex-president should also draw a bigger contrast on foreign policy with Harris, saying on CNN there “was clearly more peace when” he was in office.
“That is a strength that he has, that he has not exploited in this campaign,” he said. “There is chaos in Ukraine, chaos in Israel. You know, there’s a lot of pressure going on in Taiwan. Let’s not forget about that. Let’s not forget about Afghanistan.”
Alabama Sen.-elect Katie Britt was a bad call and it looks like Americans are already learning the hard way…
The massive $1.7 trillion omnibus bill was released with the expectation that Congress shall vote on it Wednesday. Several Republican figures, including House Speaker hopeful Kevin McCarthy, criticized the 4,200-page bill as more wasteful spending from the federal government.
Watch Amanda explain the latest controversy:
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ANALYSIS – While the establishment media has tried to spin France’s recent wave of rioting as a response to unfair or racist French policing, like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020 in the United States, they really aren’t.
For both, that is only the pretext. But they are very similar in other ways.
As I wrote before, both were about much more. In the case of BLM, it was part of a bigger far-left agenda.
In the case of France, it is an uprising of racial, cultural and religious resentment with Islamist overtones.
Both also caused substantial physical damage ($1-2 billion) and injured many hundreds of police.
The damages and injuries to police from the BLM riots across multiple cities in the U.S. were larger and spread over a few months.
In France, the first protests occurred in Nanterre, but then spread to other towns and cities, including Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Lille.
And in France, they only lasted about a week. France is also smaller in terms of population and its economy. So, overall, the impact was greater, and impossible to downplay as it was in the United States.
The response to the rioting though has been very different in each country.
The damage following a week of violence in France is expected to cost more than $1.1 billion, excluding damage to public buildings.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has promised support as thousands of insurance claims pour in. Insurers have received 5,900-plus claims worth some $305 million, according to the chair of the insurance industry lobby group ‘France Assureurs.’
Rioters lit an estimated 23,000 fires and damaged 273 buildings belonging to the security forces, along with 168 schools and 105 mayor’s offices. In total, more than 1,100 buildings and 5,850 vehicles have been damaged or destroyed.
More than 800 French law enforcement officers have been injured.
According to Fortune, “The videos of the riots that circulated around the world hurt the image of France,” Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, the outgoing head of the French employers’ lobby Medef, told Le Parisien newspaper.
“It’s always difficult to say if the impact will be long lasting, but there will certainly be a drop in reservations this summer.”
France’s Interior updated senators on the destruction carried out by primarily teenage mobs in ‘multi-ethnic’ areas of French cities. He said about 90 per cent of the 3,502 people arrested during the riots were French nationals.
That doesn’t change the racial or demographic facts that most of the rioters were young Muslims of Arab and North African descent. They were born in France as part of the most recent immigration wave.
The average age of the French rioters was 17.
“What’s happening there is the consequence of a failure to integrate the country’s Muslim immigrant population,” Alan Mendoza, co-founder and executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News Digital.
President Macron sparked controversy on Wednesday by suggesting social media could be “cut off” if “things get out of control,” according to media reports.
Macron singled out platforms like Snapchat, TikTok and encrypted messenger Telegram for their role in helping organize and spread images of the violence.
Fox News reported:
Macron has provided a mixed response to the crisis, initially describing the shooting as “inexplicable” and “unforgivable” but then decrying the protests and blaming everything from social media to video games for the increasing violence.
Macron argued that social media platforms, including TikTok, Snapchat and others, helped fuel the riots, especially after the personal information of the officer who shot Nahel ended up circulating on the platforms. He said his government would work with social media sites to take down “the most sensitive content” and identify users who “call for disorder or exacerbate the violence.” Macron also denied there was systemic racism within the country’s law enforcement services.
Meanwhile, as I wrote last August, in a few months in the United States, the BLM riots caused $2 billion in damages and injured 2,000 police officers nationwide. 19 people were killed during just 14 days of BLM rioting – none by police.
The killing of police officers nationwide, though, surged 28% in 2020 during the BLM riots and protests.
Unlike the muted judicial response to BLM rioters, France’s Justice Minister issued an order on Friday that demanded a “ strong, firm and systematic” judicial response.
And unlike the United States, where President Donald Trump was attacked and vilified for trying to send federal officers to quell the violence – in France, Macron eventually deployed 45,000 officers and armored vehicles to control the riots.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – While I never claimed C*VID was a deliberately released Chinese b*oweapon or even explicitly that it was part of a b*oweapons program, I did point out that China had an extensive biowarfare program that could be involved with the creation and leak of the v*rus.
I also explored the likely theory that C*VID-*9 accidentally escaped from the BSL-4 bio lab at the W*han Institute of Vir*logy.
This was the W*han bio-leak theory.
To me, this was a no-brainer and something any intelligence analyst of any merit should have been evaluating when C*VID first surfaced in W*han, China, in December 2019.
However, the mere mention of any of these considerations was immediately crushed by so-called scientific experts, the media, left-leaning politicians and a host of others, branding it disinformation or misinformation to even mention the possibility that C*VID could be man-made.
Big Tech social media platforms quickly made it their job to ferociously suppress any discussion that China may have accidentally created C*VID, much less that it could be tied to a Chinese military b*owarfare program.
This censorship affected scientists, and others, and even resulted in many respected persons, including me, being canceled by social media platforms, such as LinkedIn. [Editor’s Note: This article is currently being censored]
This draconian response was partly due to President Trump noting this was a possibility, producing a visceral reaction to say the opposite.
But the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) was also part of the major effort to downplay any connection between C*VID and China’s b*oweapons, claiming in an October 2021 Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) assessment that S*RS-C*V-2 was “probably not a b*ological weapon.”
Over time, as the evidence piled up, and experts became less afraid to contradict the official narrative, more and more reporting was done pointing to the W*han bio lab as the potential source of an accidental leak.
And now we are going beyond that and potentially linking C*VID to China’s secretive military b*owarfare effort.
A new unclassified report released by GOP members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) argues that C*VID-*9 “may have been tied” to China’s b*ological weapons research program.
The minority report, released on Dec. 14 states that “there are indications that S*RS-C*V-2 may have been tied to China’s biological weapons research program and spilled over to the human population during a lab-related incident at the W*han Institute of Vir*logy (WIV).”
Significantly, the committee blamed the intelligence community when it further stated in its report that it has “reason to believe that the IC downplayed the possibility that S*RS-C*V-2 was connected to China’s b*oweapons program based in part on input from outside experts.”
These ‘outside’ experts the IC relied on were of course extremely biased, many with political, ideological or financial agendas.
The GOP report also highlights that the intelligence community has “failed to comply” with numerous requests for information—including bipartisan committee questions about the experts relied upon for its assessment.
As The Epoch Times reported, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, noted the IC’s non-compliance when he stated: “We should know who is making these decisions and how they are coming to their conclusions. I think that’s our responsibility as oversight, and to date, we have not received that information.”
Expect the Republican majority to push the intelligence community harder on this issue when it takes control of the HPSCI and other related committees.
It’s time we learn the full truth about how these assessments were completed. And also learn as much as possible about the true origins of C*VID.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
