Is it time to cancel PBS? Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt is leading the charge and says it’s time to stop using taxpayer dollars to fund controversial programming to indoctrinate kids.
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – More than two years after ceasing construction on former President Donald Trump’s border wall, and more than two million illegal immigrants flooding into the United States, Joe Biden is quietly restarting the oft criticized by the left, but critical, border barrier.
According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) led by the incompetent Alejandro Mayorkas, Team Biden has used executive action to suddenly waive 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow emergency border wall construction.
The Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and Endangered Species Act were some of the federal laws waived by Biden to allow immediate construction of the border wall using funds appropriated by congress in 2019.
The waivers, also criticized by left wing activists and environmentalists, avoid time-consuming reviews and lawsuits challenging violation of environmental laws.
The initial construction would be in Starr County, Texas, which is part of a busy Border Patrol sector seeing “high illegal entry.” Around 245,000 illegal entries have been recorded this fiscal year in the Rio Grande Valley Sector which contains 21 counties.
“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS secretary, stated in the notice, according to Newsmax.
“So interesting to watch Crooked Joe Biden break every environmental law in the book to prove that I was right when I built 560 miles (they incorrectly state 450 in story!) of brand new, beautiful border wall.”
Biden ceased the border barriers that Trump had earlier begun, on Inauguration day Jan. 20, 2021, stating then that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott renewed some of those efforts after Biden halted them on day one of his presidency. But the state can only do so much.
Apparently, it took Biden more than two years and massive waves of unvetted, illegal immigrants crowding our major cities, to realize that the border wall is a serious policy solution after all.
Trump added on Truth Social: “As I have stated often, over thousands of years, there are only two things that have consistently worked, wheels, and walls! Will Joe Biden apologize to me and America for taking so long to get moving, and allowing our country to be flooded with 15 million illegals immigrants, from places unknown. I will await his apology!”
I don’t know if 15 million illegals have come in under Biden, but it is a huge number. Border control advocates hope this major reversal will lead to a total overhaul of Biden’s failed border and immigration policies.
“After years of denying that a border wall and other physical barriers are effective, the DHS announcement represents a sea change in the administration’s thinking: A secure wall is an effective tool for maintaining control of our borders,” Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said in a statement. “Having made that concession, the administration needs to immediately begin construction of wall across the border to prevent the illegal traffic from simply moving to other areas of the border.”
It’s time for the dysfunctional GOP congress to push Biden on this issue. It should be a battle cry for the next House speaker.
Conservative firebrand Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chair, who has thrown his name into the race for speaker, said his first focus as leader would be border security.
‘The very first thing I would focus on is that no money can be used to process the release of migrants into this country,’ he told Fox. That, and accelerating border wall construction should be priorities, followed by reinstalling most , if not all of Trump’s effective border and immigration policies.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America,
ANALYSIS – In his Twitter Spaces debut Tuesday night, called “Tucker on Twitter,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson immediately accused Ukraine of being responsible for the catastrophic attack on the Nova Kakhovka dam in Southern Ukraine.
And he may be right.
Ukraine and Russia have routinely accused each other of shelling the dam, the hydroelectric station and the nearby Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
Both sides have blamed the other for the attack, in what appears to be a war crime. Kyiv blamed Moscow for the “terrorist attack,” but the Kremlin claimed that Ukraine had struck the dam to impact Russian-controlled Crimea’s water supplies.
And, despite his spotty track record on speculation, in this case, he may be right. Or at least, the assumption that Russia is always the culprit is no longer valid.
Based on recent reporting, which I wrote about here, Ukraine may, in fact, have been responsible for the serious sabotage of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines in September 2022, which was long blamed on Russia.
This makes the always-blame Russia crowd look less credible. But that doesn’t mean Tucker’s always-blame-everyone-except-Russia approach is any better.
While on Fox, Tucker repeatedly blamed the United States and Joe Biden for being behind the Nord Stream attack.
On Feb. 24 he said: “So the Biden administration committed the single largest most profound act of industrial terrorism of sabotaging history. They blew up the Nord Stream pipeline …”
Thus, as far as we can tell, Biden knew about it beforehand but was unwilling or unable to do anything about it.
Tucker’s claims aren’t helped when he spouts pro-Russian talking points in his video, such as:
The Kakhovka dam was effectively Russian. It was built by the Russian government. It currently sits in Russian- controlled territory. The dam’s reservoir supplies water to Crimea, which has been for the last 240 years home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Firstly, the ‘Soviets’ built the dam during the USSR, not the ‘Russians,’ and the USSR no longer exists. Secondly, it doesn’t matter how long Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was based in Crimea; it belongs to Ukraine because that’s what happened when the USSR dissolved in 1991 and Ukraine became independent.
Tucker’s Trumpian personal insults, like describing Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “sweaty and rat-like comedian-turned-oligarch,” probably don’t help his credibility much either.
Tucker is on firmer ground when he argues that: “Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more, and for precisely that reason, the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it.”
Especially when he cites a December report from The Washington Post in which a Ukrainian general spoke of using U.S.-made HIMARS launchers to “test strike” on the Kakhovka dam.
So, what are the facts?
The dam spanning the Dnipro River was breached on Tuesday, flooding swaths of territory and threatening crucial water supplies to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
At least 42,000 people and 1,500 square miles of land are at risk from the flooding caused by the destruction of the dam, likely slowing any potential Ukrainian military advance in the Dnipro River delta.
Much of the Dnipro River delta will become inaccessible for land operations, raising suspicions that Russia deliberately sabotaged the dam to prevent an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.
However, the flooding has disproportionately affected the Russian-occupied side of the river.
The Kakhovka reservoir does supply Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast and the Crimea peninsula with fresh water.
Zelensky has said that the only way to destroy the dam is through mining and explosives and emphasized that Russian forces have now occupied the dam for over a year.
In a statement, Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command said, “Russian occupation troops blew up the dam” at Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region.
Blaming “Russian terrorists” for the attack, Zelensky said on Twitter that “the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land.”
In the end, Tucker may be right. Ukraine could have been behind the attack.
But he is far more credible when he is less bombastic and emphatic with his theories. Such as when he states:
So really, once the facts start coming in, it becomes much less of a mystery what might have happened to the dam, and a fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up, just as you would assume they blew up Nord Stream, the Russian natural gas pipeline last fall.
Tucker ended his new Twitter show by promising to be back with “much more, very soon.” I’m looking forward to it.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Ted Eytan from Washington, DC, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
ANALYSIS – Two Proud Boys leaders have been sentenced to more than a decade each in jail after being convicted of the rarely used ‘seditious conspiracy’ charge for storming the Capitol.
They tried to overturn President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, which they considered fraudulent.
These sentences are much less than the three decades of jail time proposed by prosecutors but still very long prison terms for a few hours of rioting.
And yes, I understand that the rioting was at the U.S. Capitol and that the certification of the Electoral College vote was in process. I also understand these two guys and the two others convicted on this same charge were intimately involved in organizing what became violent chaos that day.
I was there, at the Capitol, as an observer with a TV camera crew. And I denounced the violence the next day. It was outrageous.
I believe any violent rioter who attacked police or media, or anyone else, on Jan. 6 should be put in jail – as should all the BLM rioters who earlier caused $2 billion in damages throughout the country and injured 2,000 cops months earlier.
But a decade or two behind bars for ‘conspiracy’?
Biggs and Rehl are the first Proud Boys convicted of the Civil War-era seditious conspiracy charge to be sentenced for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
The sentences kicked off a series of hearings scheduled for this week and next, where punishment will be meted out against the former chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio (who was not in D.C. on Jan. 6 but was unbelievably arrested earlier for burning a BLM banner!), and two other members of the group.
All were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other crimes at a landmark conspiracy trial this spring. But was what they did really as bad as the Biden Justice Department tries to portray?
Seditious conspiracy is a broad statute that concerns attempts to overthrow the government, levy war against it or prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law. It also can be applied in cases where suspects seize any government property and carries up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Partly because seditious conspiracy allegations carry so much political weight, prosecutors have generally been hesitant to bring such charges in the past. “Seditious conspiracy charges are rarely used in American jurisprudence,” said Jeffrey Ian Ross, a criminologist and expert on political crime at the University of Baltimore. Prosecutors can be wary of issuing such charges, even in cases that may fall under its broad statute, he added.
In the only similar case in the 20th century, federal prosecutors secured a seditious conspiracy conviction against Puerto Rican nationalists who stormed the Capitol building in 1954.
These four armed Puerto Rican independence militants entered the House floor and fired dozens of bullets around the chamber, wounding five legislators.
The four shooters and co-conspirators were convicted of seditious conspiracy and spent over two decades in jail until Jimmy Carter commuted their sentence in 1979.
In that case, however, the perpetrators had firearms and used them to try to kill Congressmen. That’s a pretty big difference.
The last successfully prosecuted seditious conspiracy was in the mid-1990s, when authorities charged Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine Islamist co-conspirators for plotting to bomb the United Nations, the FBI building, and several other landmarks around New York City.
Again, this was very serious and involved planning mass murder and terrorism.
There is little or no evidence that any Jan. 6 rioters planned any offensive violence.
To date, of those charged in relation to Jan. 6, former Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes holds the record with an 18-year sentence, after he was convicted of seditious conspiracy earlier this year.
Even Rhodes, who is not believed to have actually stormed the building, is alleged to have plotted to bring weapons to the area and coordinate militia movements.
In the weeks before the insurrection, Rhodes allegedly purchased tens of thousands of dollars worth of weapons and began communicating to other Oath Keepers in an encrypted group chat. “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” he messaged days after the presidential election. One Oath Keeper admitted as part of a plea deal last year that he brought an M4 rifle to a Comfort Inn hotel near the Capitol, while Rhodes and others allegedly discussed “quick reaction force” teams that could move into Washington DC with firearms. Once inside the Capitol, prosecutors state in their indictment that one group of Oath Keepers moved in a military “stack” formation and went in search of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
And at first glance, this does seem serious.
But Rhodes claims that despite earlier texts about possible ‘civil war,’ Oath Keepers who entered the Capitol went “totally off mission” and that he was only there to prevent his militia members from getting into trouble.
He has also stated that the armed ‘reaction force’ in Virginia was there to respond if armed leftist antifa thugs attacked pro-Trump protestors.
In the largest manhunt in FBI history, more than 1,100 people have been arrested on charges related to the Capitol assault. Of those, 597 defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences. About 366 of them have been given jail time.
The vast majority of these Jan. 6 defendants, though, accepted plea deals for minor, nonviolent offenses such as trespassing or obstructing an official function. Many of them still got jail sentences totally out of proportion to their alleged crimes.
And these four got the worst of it.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk. It was first published in American Liberty News.
In a controversial decision that critics say undermines basic electoral integrity, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a preliminary injunction Thursday blocking the Trump administration from implementing key provisions of its election reform order — including a requirement that individuals provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.
The Trump administration’s order, signed in March, sought to address the widespread public concern over election security by aligning U.S. registration standards with those used by many developed nations — where proof of citizenship is a basic requirement to cast a vote. Yet, in her ruling, Judge Kollar-Kotelly sided with Democratic operatives and partisan groups, granting their request to halt implementation of what should be a commonsense safeguard.
It’s already a felony for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. So why oppose a mechanism to verify that voters are, in fact, eligible citizens? The administration’s proposed policy simply sought to enforce existing law, not change it. But for activists and partisan lawyers, that’s apparently too much.
Critics of the ruling argue that it demonstrates a disturbing disconnect between legal theory and electoral reality. While the plaintiffs claimed the executive order infringes on the “Elections Clause” of the Constitution — which delegates much of the authority over elections to the states — the Trump order targeted the federal voter registration form, which is a product of federal law and administered by a federal agency.
Among the more absurd arguments presented during the case was the suggestion that requiring proof of citizenship would complicate voter registration drives at grocery stores and public venues. In other words, ensuring that only citizens vote is too inconvenient for activists looking to register voters en masse.
But this framing reveals the central issue: voter registration is being treated like a political campaign tactic, not a civic responsibility. If accuracy and integrity are seen as barriers to convenience, something is deeply wrong with the system.
If the courts won’t even allow the federal form to be updated to reflect current law, critics argue, how can Americans have confidence that elections are fair and secure?
Ironically, while liberal groups celebrate the decision as a “victory for voters,” many Americans see it as a victory for loopholes and ambiguity. The same people who insist elections are sacred and democracy is under threat are now openly opposing the most basic eligibility checks used around the world.
Meanwhile, Trump’s other proposed reforms — including tighter mail ballot deadlines and review of voter rolls against immigration databases — were allowed to stand. But with the citizenship requirement blocked, many worry that the core vulnerability in the system remains unaddressed.
When noncitizens can easily register to vote — intentionally or accidentally — and the federal government is barred from checking, who exactly benefits?
This article originally appeared on American Liberty News. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk. It is republished with permission.
President Joe Biden has defied a federal law, which he signed, requiring him to declassify all government documents on the origins of the COVID-19 virus, including intelligence on leaks from Communist China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And, as U.S. Senator Mike Braun (R-IN) notes, Biden’s failure to release the documents under a mandated 90-day deadline came on the same day his administration met with Communist Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
“The White House is now overdue to declassify their COVID lab leak intel, and there is no ‘Secretary of State is meeting with Xi Jinping’ exception in the law President Biden signed,” Senator Braun said.
“We need to know the truth about how this pandemic started and China’s role in covering it up, and the White House must respect the text of the law passed unanimously in both chambers by the people’s representatives,” Braun added.
“Last week, Senators Braun and Hawley sent a letter to President Biden demanding he implement the COVID Origins Act of 2023, and declassify and release all information related to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” a statement from Braun continued.
That letter asked Biden to comply with the COVID Origins Act of 2023, which Biden signed into law in March, requiring Biden to “declassify intelligence related to any potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the Covid pandemic within 90 days.”
That deadline passed June 18, while the Biden Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with, and praised, Xi.
That has not stopped others from uncovering more evidence of the role of Communist China’s regime in causing the global pandemic.
“Last week, reporters Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi reported the names of the three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers who were the first to contract COVID, as sourced from multiple government officials,” Braun’s office notes.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Leonard Leo, a billionaire activist often credited as the architect of the conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court, has announced a $1 billion investment aimed at countering what he calls “liberal dominance” in corporate America, the media and entertainment sectors.
In a rare interview with the Financial Times, Leo detailed his plans through his nonprofit group, the Marble Freedom Trust, which will focus its resources on the private sector. “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious,” Leo said, explaining that the initiative will build talent and capital pipelines in industries where he believes left-wing extremism is most pervasive.
Leo also emphasized targeting companies and financial institutions that he claims are influenced by “woke” ideology. “Expect us to increase support for organizations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs,” he said, vowing that these entities would face consequences for prioritizing “extreme left-wing ideology” over consumers:
Leo has spent more than two decades at the influential Federalist Society, guiding conservative judges into the federal courts and the Supreme Court itself. In 2018, conservative justice Clarence Thomas joked that Leo was the third most important person in the world.
Leo’s efforts culminated under Trump’s presidency, when three Federalist Society-backed judges were appointed to give conservatives on the Supreme Court a 6-3 supermajority, and profound influence over US law. The court has since then ruled to overturn the right to an abortion, among other long-sought rightwing causes.
In 2020, after Trump lost the election, Leo stepped back from running the daily operations of the Federalist Society, while remaining its co-chair.
The following year, Leo founded Marble, with a $1.6bn donation from electronic device manufacturing mogul Barre Seid, to be a counterweight to what he said was “dark money” of the left. He spent about $600mn in its first three years, according to public financial disclosures.
During the interview, Leo identified several potential targets for his campaign, including banks, China-friendly corporations and companies that have institutionalized diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) frameworks, as well as those adhering to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing principles.
He added that his goal is to find “very leveraged, impactful ways of reintroducing limited constitutional government and a civil society premised on freedom, personal responsibility and the virtues of Western civilization.”
Article Published With The Permission of American Liberty News.
ANALYSIS – Former President Donald Trump faces a slew of legal onslaughts, the latest being a federal indictment by Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) for violating the Espionage Act by mishandling classified information.
Like the FBI raid on his Florida home, this divisive and politically charged indictment is an unprecedented development that makes him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government.
And the political fallout will be huge.
Trump denies any wrongdoing and is calling the indictments a witch hunt. And yes, he has been unfairly targeted before – many times.
But is this case really part of that same anti-Trump vendetta? And does it matter?
The latest indictment is for the willful retention of highly classified national security documents at his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate, corruptly concealing documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements.
Many will point to the later discovery of classified documents in Joe Biden’s homes and properties connected to him without him facing criminal charges (yet) as proof that this is an anti-Trump witch hunt.
Last week, the DOJ also cleared former Vice President Mike Pence of any wrongdoing after a small number of classified documents were found at his Indiana home in January.
Trump posted a slew of angry social media posts against federal investigators Tuesday highlighting different treatment.
“The Marxists and Fascists in the DOJ & FBI are going after me at a level and speed never seen before in our Country, and I did nothing wrong,” Trump wrote in one of several posts.
And yes, as I have repeatedly written about, the DOJ and the FBI have been heavily politicized, or even weaponized against conservatives.
But, as with Richard Nixon and Watergate, the problem for Trump here is the cover-up. Had he simply returned the documents once they were discovered, it would have been far less likely he would have been indicted.
Instead, Trump repeatedly refused to turn over the materials to federal officials once he left the White House, and then provided a series of bizarre justifications for his actions, before the FBI raided his home.
A separate special counsel is investigating Biden’s handling of classified material after documents were found at his Wilmington, Del., home and a Washington, D.C., office from his time as vice president.
The difference here is Biden’s team alerted federal officials upon discovering the documents and promptly turned them over.
Trump’s own former Attorney General Bill Barr pushed back on Trump’s claims that a special counsel’s ongoing documents probe is politically motivated.
“Over time, people will see that this is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt,” Barr said in an interview on CBS on Tuesday. “In fact, they approached this very delicately and with deference to the president, and this would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.”
The indictment carries serious legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if he’s convicted. Trump will appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on June 13.
In March, the notoriously liberal, Soros-backed Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicted Trump on state charges related to hush-money payments to a former porn film star in 2016.
That local indictment appears far more political and ‘Trumped-up’ (pun not intended) than this federal one. The trial for this case begins in March 2024.
Jack Smith, the special counsel coordinating federal investigations into the Espionage Act indictments, oversees other inquiries related to Trump, including those regarding the Capitol Riot on January 6, 2021.
But none of this will prevent Trump from continuing his campaign for president. “Nothing stops Trump from running while indicted, or even convicted,” University of California, Los Angeles law professor Richard Hasen told CNN.
The Constitution requires only three things of candidates. They must be a natural-born citizen (not a naturalized one), at least 35 years old, and residents of the U.S. for at least 14 years.
So theoretically, Trump could be convicted and still be elected President.
Not only won’t this keep Trump from running, but it will probably help him with his core base of supporters in the GOP primary.
And Trump won’t even go to trial for any of this until well into the next presidential term.
But the optics and politics of all this is the biggest issue.
As the Daily Caller reported Pence as saying: “I think this is going to be terribly divisive for the country. I also think it sends a terrible message to the wider world that looks at America as a standard of not only democracy, but of justice.”
The question is when does all of this come to a head? And what will happen when it does?
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Former President Donald Trump is right: There’s no reason he should sign a GOP loyalty oath in order to participate in the candidates’ debates.
Such oaths, which the Republican National Committee employed in the 2016 presidential primary – only to see the last remaining candidates, including Trump, abandon it – aren’t just signs of a party’s weakness; they are also profoundly silly and even un-American.
Yes, we swear plenty of legally enforceable oaths – in court cases, for example, or declarations on tax forms and other legal documents. But oaths binding candidates to support someone who they’ve campaigned against, throwing elbows, mud and other rhetorical barbs at them for months to convince voters the guy was a bum?
I’ll defer to what Sen. Ted Cruzsaid of such an oath back in the 2016 presidential primary:
Cruz has dodged the question of whether the pledge still holds by insisting he will be the nominee. Though on Friday, in an apparent reference to Trump, Cruz said, “I don’t make a habit out of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my family.”
We all know that Cruz eventually did support Trump’s candidacy and became one of his biggest defenders in the Senate (which was amusing).
But the oath? Nah. The 2016 primary should have been instructive to party leaders that such commitments are transactional at best and unenforceable in fact. Which brings us to the state parties.
They have been long-time players in loyalty oaths, often attempting to bind voters to the party’s eventual nominees. While such pledges are even sillier and utterly unenforceable, that hasn’t stopped new ones from cropping up this year. Consider the case of Florida‘s pledge:
Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida GOP, said in an email that the loyalty pledge is an effort to “ensure maximum unity” headed into the 2024 general election.
“The days of outlier party grifters – such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – using Republican Party resources to secure a title and then weaponize that title against our own team must end,” Ziegler said, referring to two former House members, who are among Trump’s most vocal GOP critics.
“Contested primaries are part of the process,” he said, “but we must always remember that the Democrats are the true threat to the America we love and we must be unified to defeat every single one of them.”
The true threat to America is noxious oaths that bind us to men rather than pledges or oaths that bind individuals to uphold the law or tell the truth.
You know, like the only oath that should ever matter for a presidential candidate: the one the Constitution requires:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Every other partisan oath is legally dubious, intellectually suspect and, in the end, not worth the paper it’s printed on.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk. It first appeared in American Liberty News.