The latest Rasmussen poll is reporting some unfortunate facts about the state of America. A plurality of those polled said that our country’s best days are behind it…Do you agree?
Watch Amanda break down the problem below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Amb. Robert C. O’Brien, the Former Trump National Security Advisor, joins Liberty & Justice to discuss the Brittney Griner prisoner swap, the current state of global affairs and the Ukraine war.
Per Matt Whitaker:
Co-founder and chairman of American Global Strategies LLC. He was the 27th United States National Security Advisor from 2019 – 2021. O’Brien served as the President’s principal advisor all aspects of American foreign policy and national security affairs.
O’Brien brought a renewed focus to defense and industrial base issues to the NSC. A long-time advocate of a sea power and a 355 ship Navy, O’Brien visited leading shipyards during his tenure. He also spent time at defense plants and with our troops at bases around the world.
During O’Brien’s time as National Security Advisor, the United States orchestrated the historic Abraham Accords in the Middle East, brokered economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, achieved significant defense spending increases among our NATO allies and increased cooperation with America’s allies across the Indo-Pacific.
Prior to serving as NSA, O’Brien was the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs with the personal rank of Ambassador. He was directly involved in the return of over 25 detainees and hostages to the United States. O’Brien previously served as Co-Chairman of the U.S. Department of State Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan under both Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton.
O’Brien was also a presidentially-appointed member of the U.S. Cultural Property Advisory Committee from 2008-2011. In 2005, O’Brien was nominated by President George W. Bush and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as a U.S. Representative to the 60th session of the UN General Assembly. Earlier in his career, O’Brien served as a Senior Legal Officer for the UN Security Council commission that decided claims against Iraq arising out of the first Gulf War. He was a Major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the U.S. Army Reserve.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
A lawsuit from a non-profit public interest law firm has uncovered documents showing the Biden administration’s rushed efforts to cover up a Federal Bureau of Investigations operation that spied on Catholic churches, even as Catholics were targeted by pro-abortion terrorists.
Judicial Watch, working with CatholicVote Civic Action, received 131 heavily redacted pages of records from the FBI “showing top officials rushing to craft a public response to the leaked FBI intelligence memo that revealed its targeting of Catholics who adhere to traditional beliefs on church issues,” JW reports.
“After seven months of delay and more to come, Joe Biden’s FBI remains committed to one thing: covering up their un-American spying on Catholic citizens,” said former Congressman Huelskamp, Ph.D., Senior Advisor to CatholicVote. “By fully withholding more than 200 pages of public documents, the Biden administration is more interested in hiding the truth than ending this unconstitutional witch hunt of Catholics and other faithful Americans.”
“The FBI launched a vicious spy effort against Catholics and sought to spy on parishioners as they sat in church pews,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These records show top FBI officials were panicked in response about their domestic spying abuse leaking out.”
Judicial Watch received the records “in response to an April 2023 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit it filed along with CatholicVoteCivic Action against the FBI and the Department of Justice after their failure to respond to March 2023 requests for records about an FBI intelligence memo targeting “radical traditionalist” Catholics (CatholicVote Civic Action and Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Federal Bureau of Investigations and Department of Justice (No. 1:23-cv-01166)).”
In February 2023, an FBI intelligence document was leaked that revealed FBI infiltrated and spied on several Catholic churches as part of a fruitless operation that claimed traditional Catholics and pro-life Americans were a terrorist threat – even as the liberal pro-abortion terrorist group “Jane’s Revenge” carried out a nationwide campaign of terrorism and arson attacks.
According to JW, the newly obtained records include a February 8, 2023, email with the subject line “Media Request: FBI Richmond Document cites SPLC” from the FBI’s National Press Office alerting FBI officials regarding media inquiries:
We have inquiries from the Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal (Heritage Foundation) about an article written by [redacted]. It references a January intelligence product from the Richmond Field office. After speaking with SC Goodwater, I am alerting all of you so we can get a copy of the actual document and hear any recommendations on how to respond. I am attaching a cut and paste of the [redacted] article.
JW reports Miriam Coakley of the Office of General Counsel then forwarded the email on to other FBI officials, noting, “Adding InTo [Insider Threat Office], SecD [Security Division] and OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility]. The date of the leaked domain perspective appears to be 23 Jan. 2023.”
“Further along the chain, an official in the Office of Public Affairs forwards the chain to more people, saying, ‘Adding Pamela Bryon from the DI. [Deputy Asst. Director of Intelligence Pamela Byron.] Any info on how this product came about would be appreciated,’” JW repors.
In a heavily redacted reply, Byron responds:
As mentioned on FBINET, the type of product leaked is a Domain Perspective (DP) – the purpose of DPs is to offer information and/or highlight how a shift or new development in an AOR (domain) related to an environmental variable could impact the threat. Environmental variables include demographic shifts, technology development, economic conditions, special events, social/cultural conditions, etc. In particular, the analysis in DPs (as in FBI products in general) is focused on the activity of identified or potential threat actors, not on the environmental variables themselves, and how those threat actors react to shifts in the environment and the subsequent impact on the threat posed by those actors.
In that context, there are a couple of things to note with this situation: [redacted].
We stand by to assist with any other questions.
Additional records secured by JW include a February 9 email with the subject line “Coordination of Draft statement regarding leaked RH intel document” from Office of Public Affairs official Douglas Goodwater to top FBI officials, including FBI Chief of Staff Johathan Lenzner, Asst. Dir. for Intelligence Tonya Ugoretz, Asst. Dir. for Counterterrorism Robert Wells and others:
Draft/pre decision, Coordination for media statement – DI/CTD/OGC [Directorate of Intelligence/Counterterrorism Division/Office of General Counsel]
Potential statement for review/edits-: [Redacted].
Asst. Director for Public Affairs Catherine Milhoan then responds:
All, we have received two new inquiries in addition to the three last night and are making the decision to respond in the next hour. We want to get our statement out before this picks up any steam.
DI/CTD/OCG,
Please review the draft and let us know if you have any edits or concerns.
JW then notes:
Stanley Meador, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Richmond Field Office, replies, “Looks good. One small suggestion in yellow. I would send it out. It is migrating onto Fox. https://www.foxnews.com/media/purported-fbi-document-suggests-agency-targeting-catholics-attend-latin-mass.”
On February 10, 2023, FBI Chief of Staff Jonathan Lenzner emails FBI colleagues with the subject “intel piece that has been withdrawn,” saying, “I don’t know if we are there yet, [redacted].”
Lenzner then follows up on February 13, writing, “Looks like at least one religious organization is speaking out publicly: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/catholic-league-condemns-fbi-internal-memo-targeting-catholics.”
Ryan T. Young, the Executive Assistant Director of the Intelligence Branch replies to Lenzner, “Not a good look … Real frustrating when it is self-inflicted. I’ll be back in town Wednesday. We can look into next best steps.”
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Is the mainstream media finally waking up? Not so fast…
However, tensions between the press and the Biden administration are definitely heating up after what has been widely regarded as a friendly relationship…
Let Amanda explain the rising feud below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
A leading House conservative and member of the Budget Committee used his time in a committee hearing on the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” spending package to explain that the bill does little to reform spending and the supposed spending cuts are pushed to future years, giving future congresses and the next president time to repeal them.
Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy explained that while the bill does deliver tax relief it dramatically increases budget deficits by putting off spending reform:
“I appreciate my friend from Texas, the chairman, and you know, my Democratic colleagues keep telling things that are not true. The vast majority of Americans will get tax benefits under this bill. It’s just simply false to say that that’s not true. Hardworking Americans who will benefit from the standard deduction increase, hardworking Americans who will benefit from child tax credits and lower tax rates—stop saying things that aren’t true. Those things are true. The fact is, we have money in here for the border to undo the damage of Joe Biden. We have more money in here for defense to undo the damage of Joe Biden, but we also address Medicaid and Medicaid spending goes up. Stop lying. Medicaid spending goes up. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle are profoundly unserious when it comes to being real about what’s happening with the numbers. I applaud Chairman Arrington. I applaud my colleagues on this side of the aisle for taking a step forward in dealing with the spending problem in this town.
But I have to now admonish my colleagues on this side of the aisle: this bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits. The fact of the matter is, on the spending, what we’re dealing with here is tax cuts and spending a massive front-loaded deficit increase. That’s the truth. That’s the truth. Deficits will go up in the first half of the 10-year budget window. And we all know it’s true, and we shouldn’t do that. We shouldn’t say that we’re doing something we’re not doing.
The fact of the matter is, this bill has back-loaded savings and front-loaded spending, nowhere near the Senate Budget top line, by the way. The Senate Budget top line of six and a half trillion dollars, which, by the way, is what we were pre-COVID, inflation-adjusted, on interest, on Medicare and Social Security. And if we would reform Medicaid, we could actually get to the core of the problem, but we refuse to do it. And I’m not going to sit here and say that everything is hunky-dory when this is the Budget Committee. This is the Budget Committee. We are supposed to do something to actually result in balanced budgets, but we’re not doing it. Look at what happens under deficits… Only in Washington are we expected to bet on the come that in five years, everything will work, then we will solve the problem.
We have got to change the direction of this town, and to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: yes, that means touching Medicaid. It went from $400 billion in 2019 to $600 billion this year. It’ll be over a trillion in the 2030s. We are making promises that we cannot keep. We do need to reform it. We need to stop giving seven times as much money to the able-bodied over the vulnerable. Why are we sticking it to the vulnerable population, the disabled and the sick, to give money to single able-bodied male adults? We shouldn’t do that. We should reform it. But guess what? That message needs to be delivered to my colleagues on this side of the aisle too.
We are writing checks we cannot cash, and our children are going to pay the price. So I am a no on this bill unless serious reforms are made today, tomorrow, Sunday. We’re having conversations as we speak, but something needs to change, or you’re not going to get my support.”
Sometimes reality is even stranger than fiction…
Is conservative satire site Babylon Bee psychic?
Let Amanda explain the controversy below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ALERT – “I’m sorry, you’re screwed.” It is long known among intelligence and border control officials that the powerful Mexican drug cartels use illegal migrant flows to smuggle drugs into the United States.
As the migrant numbers surge, so does the drug smuggling. And illegal immigration has exploded under Joe Biden to unprecedented levels.
Migrant encounters increased from 480,000 in 2020 to 2.3 million last year, according to CBP.
This is partly why we have a deadly fentanyl crisis in America right now.
As Fox News previously reported:
The cartels have established effective — and lucrative — smuggling operations and use the migrant surge to bypass overwhelmed Border Patrol officials, according to Lines. Migrants can pay the cartels to help them cross the border, but if they can’t afford the cost, then they can traffic drugs or work off their debt in lieu of cash.
A George Mason University professor told The New York Times that cartel fees for migrants crossing the border range between $4,000 and $20,000.
This is why many migrants reportedly remain “indebted to the cartel” after crossing into the U.S., and are forced to work off their debts.
And now Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) has said that these Mexican narcos are preparing to overwhelm U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) by inundating the southern border with between 700,000 and one million illegal immigrants as soon as Title 42 is lifted.
This, Biggs says, is according to a county supervisor from his state, whose county sits right on the border.
The county official was just briefed by the CPB sector chiefs from San Diego through Yuma to Tucson. They warned that there are between 700,000 and one million migrants currently massing south of the border.
And as soon as Title 42 is lifted the cartels plan to “overwhelm the system.” Biggs said CBP officials are telling local officials: “I’m sorry. You’re screwed.”
Biggs reported this on Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room.’
Referring to the incoming tsunami of illegal migrants, Rep. Biggs said the CBP does not have the resources to “keep them in detention and processing facilities.”
“When those facilities get full…they’re going to just take pictures. They’re not even going to do full on processing. They’re going to take pictures. If we’re lucky fingerprints, [but] probably not even that,” Biggs warned. “And then they’re going to release them right into the local communities along the border.”
In January, Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines told Fox News that Mexican cartels control the southern border in his Arizona county and they endanger Americans as they smuggle drugs and violent criminals into the U.S.
“This is not a political discussion,” Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines warned. “This is a national security issue.”
“Unless this situation changes and we take back control from the cartels, for the trafficking coming across our border, it will only get worse,” Lines said.
Not only that, but terrorists are coming through as well. According to CPB, nearly 100 known or suspected terrorists were arrested at the southern border last year. That is four times the number of 26 arrests over the previous five years.
How many terrorists can we expect to be hidden now among the one million migrants ready to swarm the border?
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – Every now and then you see a story that just hits home, and you know you need to write about it and spread the word. This one, reported by CBS News, is absolutely one of them.
Caleb Morse, 39, an Army combat veteran, set up Rustic Renegade, a gun shop and shooting range in 2018 in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Morse had served two combat tours in Iraq with the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division Special Troops Battalion, followed by service in the National Guard, and then worked as a military contractor in Iraq for four years.
One day an Army buddy Morse served with in Iraq showed up at his gun store with his car and his dog. Then he brought a lot of guns inside the store, Morse said, adding: “And I’m like, brother, what are you doing?”
Morse knew well that often when people, especially combat veterans, start giving away their things, they may be considering suicide.
But before Morse could have a chat with his buddy, the vet simply left. And for six months his buddy didn’t answer his phone.
Meanwhile, Morse decided to hold his friend’s guns at Rustic Renegade in case he ever came back.
Thankfully, as CBS News reported:
…his friend called and explained he had been in a bad spot and wondered where his guns were. Morse said he told him, “They’re your guns, man. They’re yours, you may want them back. And whenever you’re ready, they’re here for you.
“More than half of all gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 2022, the CDC reported that 26,993 people died by firearm suicide. Deaths by gun suicide are at an all-time high and have steadily increased, nearly uninterrupted, since 2006 according to researchers at John Hopkins School of Public Health.
In the veteran population the problem is acute; in its 2022 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Report, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that the suicide rate in 2020 was 57.3 % greater for veterans.
Guns are more commonly involved among veteran suicides, at 71%, than the rest of the population, at 50.3%, according to the CDC.
Soon after his first buddy chose to drop off his guns with Morse, another veteran came by to do the same, telling Morse that he was “in a bad spot.”
Morse, who had similarly been very depressed after returning from Iraq, accepted the vet’s gun and decided to set up a system to hold and track guns being left for storage by troubled vets in his store’s inventory, telling them to pick up their firearms when they felt better.
Within a year, other veterans dropped off guns “about a dozen times,” CBS reported. Since then, he has stored about 100 firearms.
Soon after the second vet asked for gun storage, Morse was contacted by Gala True, an associate professor at Louisiana State University School of Medicine who specializes in efforts to prevent veteran suicides.
According to CBS, she met with Morse in 2021 to work on a project she was coordinating with gun store owners who wanted to store firearm storage for those in crisis who, for a time, didn’t want their firearms in their homes.
The Armory Project was launched in Louisiana that same year with three different gun shop owners interested in providing storage for firearms.
Through a Veterans Administration (VA) grant, True and her team helped the gun dealers build local networks and partnerships.
Mike Anestis, a suicide prevention expert, professor at Rutgers University, and Executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and a professor at Rutgers University, said that in a country with roughly 400 million guns, the solution can’t be about banning firearms or stopping people from buying them.
And Anestis is absolutely correct. Voluntary outside storage, like preventing drunk driving by “taking away the car keys,” is a far better solution for preventing suicide by gunshot, than bans that violate our 2nd Amendment rights.
However, storing guns as part of a gun store’s inventory can cause liability issues.
So, as CBS reported, in July 2023 the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) got involved (in a good way this time). It issued an open letter to Federal Firearms Licensees (FFL) and gun shops advising how to legally and safely store firearms for these individuals.
Providing gun storage lockers at the gun store that individuals can open themselves and put their firearms inside, is one option.
As the ATF letter states: “In this situation, an FFL does not “receive “or “acquire ” the firearm into its inventory, nor does the FFL assume control of the individual’s firearm.” This can reduce liability for gun shop owners like Morse, who want to provide outside storage for others in need.
This is a great idea, and a great story. Look up The Armory Project and see if you can help with the effort in your state, city, or locality.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – It is becoming sadly clear that this may be the last generation of any real freedom in America as Generation Z (Gen Z or Zoomers) increasingly supports the surveillance and punishment state. Many are also exhibitionists craving 24-7 attention.
As I wrote about earlier – Gen Z ‘loves Big Brother.’ Big Brother is the term used by George Orwell to describe the totalitarian surveillance state in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984).
In that piece, I noted a CATO Institute poll that showed 30 percent of people under 30 support allowing the government to install video cameras in our homes to “reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.”
And we can blame a lot of that on the far-l*ft w*ke culture at our colleges and universities.
It’s bad enough that many of this generation is willing to let faceless bureaucrats watch us in our homes, but Zoomers appear willing to go beyond even that. They are the generation of snitches, and punishers, going after anyone they disagree with.
This generation has been taught to equate ‘unapproved’ speech with actual violence, so it makes sense that they’ll do whatever it takes to eliminate it.
Much of this can be traced back to higher education. Our colleges and schools are teaching our kids to be hypersensitive, ideological, w*ke snitches.
After providing various scary examples, including one where a professor used the oft-used term “sacred cow,” and a student filed a complaint that said the student would “not feel safe around him” any longer, Christian Schneider writes in National Review:
…part of the reason Gen Z has an unquenchable thirst for surveillance is what they are being taught at their colleges and universities. All the above examples were reports filed with campus “Bias Response Teams” — programs set up by institutions of higher education that incentivize students to narc on each other for expressing unpopular opinions or engaging in disfavored behavior.
Decades ago, courts threw out college “speech codes,” finding that public universities banning language was impermissible under the First Amendment. So when the internet grew as a tool, schools crafted a workaround: What if, instead of the schools targeting students for unpopular speech, it was the students themselves doing the targeting? And thus a majority of public colleges and universities began crowdsourcing their speech codes.
In fact, bias-response teams are actually worse than the traditional speech codes, which outlawed specific words: The new standard for determining whether speech is forbidden is simply anything that offends someone. Any oversensitive campus resident now has the power to log on and anonymously report a fellow student or professor.
Not to be outdone by its elite competitors, Stanford University implemented its own Orwellian system in which the school offered students a cash bounty if they reported insensitive speech on campus. In April, the school backtracked on the plan after an ensuing episode of national outrage.
You can’t get much more Orwellian than that.
But there is a big added factor in why this generation loves surveillance, “cameras are what young people now seek, hoping to parlay their everyday goings-on into a Kardashian-like media empire.”
Schneider notes that one poll found that nearly one-quarter of Zoomers in the United States planned to be internet ‘influencers,’ making their living creating videos for YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
Apparently, we no longer need doctors, engineers, scientists, or lawyers (well, maybe not so many lawyers).
I don’t know about you, but a nation of empty-headed TikTok influencers scares me almost more than the Orwellian surveillance they like so much.
Schneider adds: “Today’s young people have become both informers and self-exposers. If we’re not careful, their snitch culture will threaten privacy and freedom.”
I would go further. If we aren’t careful, very soon, America, as a free country, will be totally unrecognizable.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
UN Legal Body Normalizes Sex With Children – Crimes Against Humanity Next?
ANALYSIS – No, this isn’t a story of a wacky conspiracy theory about global elites and pedophilia, it is real news. And this time the truth is close to the mark.
According to a shocking report produced by legal experts backed by the United Nations, children can consent to sex with adults.
This is not only despicable; it violates the very UN principles that protect children from sexual violence.
The widespread raping of women and children is an especially serious concern in the world’s war zones, where the heinous acts are considered war crimes.
And in other UN documents, allowing sex with children “may amount to grave breaches of international humanitarian law.”
The findings of these supposedly enlightened jurists only blurs the lines of perverse criminal behavior and will embolden those animals who abuse children.
And, in an insult to all women, the report was released on March 8 ‘in recognition of International Women’s Day,’ suggesting some sort of connection between women’s rights and the age of consent.
While the report does not specifically call for decriminalizing sex between adults and minors and doesn’t define an age of sexual consent, it states that children have both the mental ability and legal right to make sexual decisions.
We should note that while there is a difference between mature, sexually active older teenagers, and young children, these experts appear to simply reference all minors under age 18.
Listed under Principle 16 – ‘Consensual Sexual Conduct,’ the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, aided by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote: “Sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law.”
If that is true, then how long before the UN and ‘global elites’ do in fact decriminalize adults having sex with children?
Well, the commission answers that question when it added in its report, “In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them.”
According to Influencer Ian Miles Chong, “This has been the plan all along.”
The perverse findings which seem to open the door to normalize sex with minors appears in a report with the esoteric and convoluted title: “The 8 March Principles for a Human Rights-Based Approach to Criminal Law Proscribing Conduct Associated with Sex, Reproduction, Drug Use, HIV, Homelessness and Poverty.”
The report is posted prominently on the Commission’s website.
Its deranged conclusions also clash directly with the reality the UN Human Rights Commission reports on the ground in many countries.
As noted by the UN’s own organization “Children and Armed Conflict:
The UN group clearly states:
So, which is it, UN? Where do you draw the line? If children can consent to sex, when is it a humanitarian or war crime and when is it just fine?
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.