Read it.

If Congress won’t ban AR-15s, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer (VA) wants to slap a 1,000% tax on them – which would of course mean only people with lots of money, such as drug dealers and rich people, could afford them, while punishing lower-income Americans.

Freeberg nails it.

I can’t think of a worse political opinion to have, than one that has recently prevailed right before everything got worse, with demonstrable and definable lines of cause-and-effect between what you wanted done & what got worse. One should expect even the faintest desire to have a good opinion, would inspire serious introspection. If not “I can see my idea wasn’t good,” then at the very least, “I can see my idea was open to misinterpretation in ways I did not foresee.” There should be some kind of learning…

But in American politics, we often don’t get that. Instead, the constant shelter of the bad-idea-people, the architects of pain, is some running narrative about nuance and complexity. Oh no, just because I wanted to get rid of Trump, doesn’t mean I’m pro-Biden, Oh no, just because I’m pro-Biden doesn’t mean I hold him blameless for the high gas prices. Oh no, just because I hold Biden blameless for high gas prices, doesn’t mean I want them to be high. Oh no, just because I want gas prices to be high, doesn’t mean I want the economy to sputter. Oh no, just because I want the economy to be wrecked, doesn’t mean I hate people. Oh no…you misunderstand…

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The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby has written a valuable and scrupulously detailed column exploring the handiwork of BDS Boston in “A roadmap for Jew-haters.” You may not have heard much about the roadmap. The news would have been blasted around the world and repeated for days on end if some American minority group other than Jews were the subject of the map. The derangement it manifests is familiar to Power Line readers and yet the baldness here is shocking.

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Democratic Senator Ron Wyden (OR) – who last year blocked a bill that would punish Chinese forced labor before receiving $60K from Nike execs – wants to punish US oil companies by slapping a 21% surtax on profits that exceed 10%.

If Ron Wyden could run an oil company, why isn’t he doing that (and making a lot of money) rather than peeing in the soup of those that do?

The program of the Democrat Party appears to be (a) find something that you don’t understand and (b) use the power of government to muck it up.

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Pennsylvanians are moving to red states in search of smaller government, school choice, and lower taxes.

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The attempt on Kavanaugh’s life has only emboldened the Democrats’ efforts to intimidate conservative justices. Thus, the dark money group called “Ruth Sent Us,” which has been behind much of the publication of justices’ home addresses and threats against their families, is calling for action against Justice Amy Barrett.

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A former congressman has pleaded guilty to participating in a conspiracy to fraudulently create votes for Democratic candidates in five different election years.

Michael “Ozzie” Myers, 79, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges of conspiracy to deprive voters of civil rights, bribery, obstruction of justice, falsification of voting records, and conspiring to illegally vote in a federal election.

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If someone attempts to murder a Supreme Court justice, but corporate media barely covers it, did it actually happen?

Sure, most outlets covered the news of the arrest of man who, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, arrived at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, armed with a “tactical knife, a pistol with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, screwdriver, nail punch, crowbar, pistol light, [and] duct tape,” per the Justice Department.

But after reporting the basic facts—that the suspect’s name was John Nicholas Roske, that he had been deterred by the sight of two deputy marshals outside Kavanaugh’s home—America’s journalists didn’t seem to rush into any analysis.

Because, of course, when it comes to political violence in the United States today, here’s a maxim you can always rely on: If the victim or likely victim is on the right, the perpetrator is simply a lone wolf. But if the victim or likely victim is on the left, the perpetrator was fueled by dangerous rhetoric.

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Democrat leaders in the House of Representatives on June 9 blocked a bill to increase security for Supreme Court justices, asserting that more time is needed to alter the legislation and that nobody is in danger.

I wonder whether she’d change her tune if it were some deranged Republican outside her house with a gun?

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

The Democrats should be held accountable for last night’s attempt on the life of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Most notably, of course, Chuck Schumer issued a fatwa against Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch, which last night’s would-be assassin apparently attempted to execute.

But that’s not all. The GOP’s communications staff reminds us of the Democrats’ shameful history of encouraging violence against conservative Supreme Court justices.

UPDATE: Liberal Media Encouraged TARGETING Justices at Home Before Assassination Attempt

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

It seems like a timely moment to review the threats of then Democratic Senate Minority Leader — now Democratic Senate Majority Leader — aimed specifically at Justices Kavanaugh et al. in a March 2020 tirade on the steps of the Supreme Court (video below). What a sinister lowlife he is.

Do you suppose anyone in the mainstream media will be asking him to take a look back today? Schumer means to preempt such inquiries. In a statement sent to Newsweek, Schumer’s team asserted that the senator has “been clear that he supports peaceful protests and is thankful law enforcement arrested this person today.”

Quotable quote: “I wanna tell you Gorsuch, I wanna tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Sounds like incitement to me. Kavanaugh ought to sue.

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Abortion activists firebombed a pro-life pregnancy center outside Buffalo, N.Y., the latest in a series of attacks on pro-life offices and churches since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

The pro-life organization CompassCare reported that early Tuesday morning, activists smashed windows and set fires in the group’s Amherst, N.Y., medical office. The assailants graffitied the phrase “Jane Was Here” on the building, a tagline associated with a group called Jane’s Revenge that has claimed responsibility for attacks on pro-life institutions across the country.

If the DHS is worried about ‘domestic terrorism’, this would be a prime candidate. They’ll ignore it, of course.

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Latinx is the word that just won’t die.

The word reentered the national consciousness Monday when New York Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attempted to boost the word, and accused people of starting drama over it.

In a video posted on her Instagram, Ocasio-Cortez said “”I want to have a note on gender inclusivity in Spanish language. People sometimes like to make a lot of drama over the term Latinx.”

“Gender is fluid, language is fluid,” she said before concluding, “Don’t have to make drama.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ocasio-Cortez is not just wildly out of step with the American people, but Latinos as well.

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The globalist left has made its agenda clear. They don’t want us living in comfortable suburban homes, they want us to live in densely packed industrial rabbit warrens like New York and Hong Kong; in 500-square-foot apartments decorated in IKEA furniture. They don’t want us driving cars, they want us dependent on government-run mass transit, operated by unionized government employees, according to government-set schedules. They do not want us to eat meat, they want us to eat soy and bugs. And we are to be continuously monitored by the government for compliance with policy edicts.

Coincidentally or not, due to Biden and Democratic Party policies, the price of homes has skyrocketed and inflation-driven increases in mortgage rates are making them unaffordable (unless you’re a giant hedge fund bent on buying houses and converting them into rental stock because government policies encourage that sort of thing). The price of used cars and gasoline has likewise skyrocketed. Likewise meat of all kinds. Which has led Glenn Reynolds to ask whether the Democrats are inflicting these policies deliberately in order to get the desired result and Dan Greenfield to answer, “Hells yeah, they’re doing it on purpose.”

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Before we even knew how the killer of 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, had obtained his guns, Sen. Chris Murphy was engaging in his customary performative emotionalism on the Senate floor, literally begging Republicans to “compromise.”

Compromise on what exactly? Murphy has never once offered a single proposal that would have deterred any of these mass shooters. Literally minutes after his routine, Murphy was asked about the obvious mental illness prevalent among most of these shooters. “Spare me the bulls— about mental illness,” the Connecticut senator responded, “ripping” the GOP. “We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world.” That’s how serious he is about compromise.

Whether America is more prone to mental illness or not, these incidents are almost exclusively perpetrated by young men who have exhibited serious antisocial behavior. All of them break a slew of existing laws. All of them have either obtained guns illegally, or legally before having any criminal record. In many, if not most, cases, the shooter is already on the cops’ radar because he has threatened others or written insane, violent manifestos.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The category of vile Democrats is a large one and the competition for most vile is stiff. As a Minnesotan, I would nominate Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar and Attorney General Keith Ellison for the honor.

I have been writing about them for about as long as they have been running for office — since 2016 in Omar’s case, since 2006 in Ellison’s case (running for Congress, Ellison was a state senator at the time I tuned in). I think I am something of an expert on both of them, but most of all I am an expert on what it feels like to beat your head against the wall for years at a time.

The Other McCain is on the case.

November is probably going to be one of the worst beatings the Democrats have ever experienced, and O’Rourke — who couldn’t win a statewide race in Texas even in the high-tide year of 2018 — is going to get smashed flatter than an armadillo trying to cross I-10 in rush hour.

Read it.

Missing the days of 2020, when angry mobs were fixtures on America’s streets? If you’re nostalgic for the arson, destruction, and looting, abortion activists are promising more of it. Back by unpopular demand, the left’s riots are set to return once the final Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade is handed down.

“This will be a Summer of Rage across America,” the Women’s March vowed after protests earlier this month. “We will be ungovernable,” the radicals threatened, until the violence they bring to our cities can be replicated in every mother’s womb.

Back at the Supreme Court justices’ houses, the five conservatives (and Chief Justice John Roberts) are getting a preview of what’s to come, as crowds of abortion extremists stake out their neighborhoods with bullhorns and signs.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

I took the occasion of the testimony in the Sussman trial last week to weigh “Watergate in the balance.” John reviewed what we already knew in “Hillary did it.” On Saturday, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal — I think this is Kim Strassel’s beat as a member of the board — played it straight in the editorial “Hillary Clinton did it.”

The Journal editorial lays out the template of the Russia hoax, minus the active participation of the FBI in pursuing the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, promoting the Steele Dossier in the FISA court and the Comey briefing of Trump as well as the conditions that led to the crippling Mueller investigation.

Read it.

Background: The left loves to caterwaul about how Republicans have an advantage in House elections because of gerrymandering, and how this is not merely unfair, but a “threat to democracy.” I observe merely that you never heard this when Democrats enjoyed the fruits of gerrymandering for decades when the New Deal coalition was riding high. This 230 year-old practice only became a scandal and a “threat to democracy” when Republicans got good at it. (Come to think of it, for the left, a “threat to democracy” really just means, “Whenever Republicans win elections.”)

Read it.

In the ongoing Sussman trial, campaign manager Robby Mook testified that Hillary Clinton personally approved spreading the lie about Donald Trump and Alfa Bank. This has been treated by some as a revelation.

Read it.

According to a new letter released by San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will no longer be allowed to receive the Eucharist at Mass in her home diocese.

“A Catholic legislator who supports procured abortion, after knowing the teaching of the Church, commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others,” Cordileone writes in the letter addressed to Pelosi, D-Calif.

About time somebody called out Pelosi for being a CINO.

Next up: Biden.

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The Democratic socialist lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, who suffered a stroke days before the primary and drew ire on the campaign trail for pulling a gun on an unarmed black man, cruised to victory in Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary.

Not exactly a ‘yellow dog’ but about as close as one can come in modern politics.

Read it.

Mostly by just holding out their hands with a For Sale sign around their necks.

To truly understand the gentrification of the Democratic Party, we need only observe how the class composition of the Democratic presidential primary electorate shifted between 2008 and 2020. Looking at the 16 states that voted in both 2008 and 2020 before the winner was all but decided, the trend is the same: poor and working-class voters are shrinking as a share of the Democratic electorate, while middle-class and affluent voters are growing.

In these 16 states, counties where the median household income (MHI) is under $60,000/year went from contributing 35.3% of the presidential primary vote in 2008 to just 28.6% in 2020. By contrast, counties where the MHI is over $80,000/year rose from 24.5% to 30.7%, with about half of that growth in counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year.

“Will Steal For Votes”

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

“The most important thing about this vote is that we’ve got 49 Democrats on record supporting abortion up until birth. Remember that this November.”

Indeed.

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A tweet from Rumble’s official account reads, “MAJOR UPDATE: Within the last 24 hours Rumble has been under an unprecedented attack. Our engineers are working around the clock to mitigate these attacks and prepare for a smooth rollout of our 1st movie launch ‘2000 Mules’ tomorrow.”

Free speech is not a Progressive value.

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Neither the web publisher nor its employees innocently picked up the draft opinion from off the street. They knew that it was stolen. They knew that no Supreme Court opinion has ever, in the history of the United States of America, been released without the Court’s authorization, no matter how important or controversial its subject. They knew that, in the normal course of its activity, the Court would have published its decision within the next two months. They knew that the Justices often continue considering and refining opinions until shortly before they are announced. They knew that the Court’s effectiveness has for over two centuries depended crucially on trust among the Justices and their staff.

They knew and didn’t care. For the frisson of a “big story”, and almost certainly with the hope of assisting the Democratic Party, they peddled their ill-gotten goods and inflicted serious harm on our nation’s highest judicial body. Honorable men would have written a story beginning, “Today, a person connected to the Supreme Court attempted to give Politico confidential Court documents concerning an upcoming decision. Politico has returned the documents unread to the Court chambers and advised the Justices of the identity of the miscreant.”

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In the last three years, political operative Jason Belton joined a billionaire Democrat’s presidential campaign, became a campaign manager for a U.S. Senate race, and won election to a South Carolina Democratic Party leadership position—all while under federal indictment for trafficking nearly nine pounds of cocaine.

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Currently there is somewhere around $1.6 trillion outstanding in unpaid student loans. That is approximately twice the amount of all credit card debt. And many thousands of college graduates and dropouts find themselves unable or unwilling to repay their student loans.

How did we get into this mess? It goes back to the Higher Education Act of 1965, but, as with so many government programs, the senators and representatives who voted for it never imagined how it would transform higher education, in part by driving costs relentlessly higher. Now the Biden administration is trying to buy votes in the midterm elections by promising to cancel the entire $1.6 trillion outstanding debt.

Read it.

Liberal comedian Chelsea Handler on Thursday endorsed for Congress an anti-Israel activist who served as a lawyer for Palestinian terrorists.

“Let’s get some new politicians elected,” Handler tweeted, sharing a link to a Huwaida Arraf campaign video. Arraf, who launched her campaign in November, has defended terrorists who in 2010 imported weapons and military equipment for Hamas to the Gaza Strip. Arraf was also on the legal team that fought for citizenship rights for Rasmea Odeh, who orchestrated a 1969 Jerusalem bombing that killed two Jewish college students.

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Elbridge Gerry, for whom this trick was named, was a Democratic-Republican, which eventually became today’s Democrat party. The roots of corruption reach deep.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will engage in voter registration efforts that in some cases allow mass collection of voter registration forms by public housing officials, raising concerns about the potential for voter fraud among other legal issues.

HUD’s voter registration drive comes as part of the “all-of-government” approach described in an executive order from President Joe Biden.

The Democrats invented the urban political machine. Why not stick with what works?

Read it.

Three vulnerable Senate Democrats have received substantial campaign help from a prominent donor and a liberal lawyer linked to some of the biggest political disinformation scandals in recent years.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Administration and the Biden Clown Show that go beyond inflation, energy market disruptions, foreign policy cluelessness, and other totems of the dismal 1970s.

Carter, we tend to forget today, was the Democratic establishment’s necessary and acceptable choice to outflank George Wallace, who had a real shot of winning the Democratic nomination in 1976. In 2020, it was the credible threat that Bernie Sanders might win the Democratic nomination that sent the Democratic establishment to rally behind Slow Joe Biden to stop Sanders. One thing Carter and Biden have in common is that both largely sold out to the left wing of the party, despite prior reputation as “moderates.”

But even Carter started getting a clue by the fourth year of his presidency, increasing defense spending in the face of a growing Soviet threat, installing Paul Volcker to fight inflation seriously, and beginning, however haltingly, to de-regulate domestic energy production. Biden shows no sign of progress on the easiest of learning curves.

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Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, a reliable barometer of certified liberal opinion inside the Beltway, has a column up about the matter of Dianne Feinstein, which even a careless reader can make out as another loud note in chorus of coordinated voices that has determined that Feinstein needs to be forced from office.

The article breaks no new ground in terms of news value or reporting, as with one small exception it simply recycles the details of the San Francisco Chronicle story.

I wish I had a job like that.

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I have been writing for years about how progressive policies championed by the Democratic Party and served up under the guise of caring about low-income Americans wind up hurting these very communities.

The latest chapter in this saga is the newly unleashed round of inflation, the worst our country has seen in 40 years.

Two important points here are that first, we can lay responsibility for this inflation directly at the doorstep of the Biden administration, and second, those being hurt most by this inflation are the very low-income Americans that this administration claims to care so much about.

Read it.

Democrats love to propose wealth taxes.

California Democrats have done it, congressional Democrats have done it many times, and now it looks as though President Joe Biden wants to get in on the game. If only they’d pause for a moment to consider—or care—whether wealth taxes are constitutional.

Biden’s proposed wealth tax, styled as a minimum income tax on households worth more than $100 million, will claim least 20% of both income and “unrealized capital gains.” If that phrase sounds familiar, that’s because taxing whatever those are was the key feature of congressional Democrats’ short-lived proposal last year.

Unrealized capital gains don’t exist. You can no more tax them directly, as congressional Democrats tried to do, than reclassify them as “income,” as Biden wants to do.

A capital gain is the profit you get when you sell an investment for more than you paid for it. When the sale is complete and the money in your hand, a tax lawyer would call it a “realized” capital gain.

If, on the other hand, you choose not to sell an investment that has increased in value since you bought it, your capital gain is “unrealized,” which means it exists only on paper. That’s because its value could just as easily go down tomorrow, and the only way to lock in, or realize, that gain is by selling the investment.

The congressional Democrats’ proposal would have taxed those gains even though they didn’t exist. That, as I’ve written previously, is likely unconstitutional.

Democrats love to tax people, not on what they have, but on what Democrats think they have. “Billionaires” don’t have shit until they sell the stuff the estimated value of which excites the envy of the greedy. Jeff Bezos is considered a billionaire because he owns a lot of stock in Amazon; such estimates are based on taking the recent price of a share of Amazon stock and multiplying it by his stock holdings. Of course, anyone who knows elementary economics knows that you won’t get that price for all of those shares. But Democrats daily demonstrate that they know nothing about economics. They see the world as just chock-full of piles of cash that they would just love to steal and spend.

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Are you starting to notice a pattern by now? For the past six years, the American people have been emotionally manipulated by what I call “manufactured waves of outrage”. Once the corporate media identifies a trigger, it will obsessively focus on it for weeks or months on end, and the narrative that develops will be echoed and magnified by millions upon millions of social media denizens. Before too long, much of the population is whipped up into an irrational emotional frenzy, and that frenzy is used to move certain agendas forward.

Read it.

Higher energy prices worrying you? Be afraid because Congress is coming to the rescue. Legislators are introducing a new bill called the “Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act.” The bill’s objective is to reduce the price of oil. The bill pans to tax the windfall profits of large energy companies at a 50% rate. They define windfall profits as profits above and beyond those in the year before Covid. The proceeds from the tax would be returned to consumers earning less than $75k through direct payments.

If Congresses goal is to inflate oil prices further and generate more inflation in the process, the bill, as currently written, is right on track. This article walks through the proposed legislation to better understand why it is grossly flawed. As we will discuss, the bill will not only generate higher prices at the gas pump, but the premise behind the bill, windfall oil profits, is dubious.

But first, it is worth looking beyond Russia’s effect on energy prices and reviewing another reason oil prices have been rising.

‘Windfall profits” is the term Democrats use when they want to pick somebody’s pockets.

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In the segment, CNN’s Anderson Cooper describes Buttigieg (without evidence) as a “very skilled politician” who became “the first openly gay cabinet secretary to be confirmed by Congress.” The latter phrase is deliberately worded to elide the fact that Richard Grenell, a Republican, was the first openly gay cabinet member in U.S. history. Grenell served as acting director of national intelligence under President Donald Trump and was also confirmed by Congress in 2018 for the role of U.S. ambassador to Germany.

While Cooper’s description is technically accurate thanks to the word “secretary,” the 60 Minutes Twitter account wrote that Buttigieg is “the first openly gay Cabinet member to be confirmed by Congress,” which is not correct. Journalists and other Democrats are in the habit of ignoring “historic” Republican political figures because, in their view, only Democrats are allowed to “make history.”

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Federal authorities are investigating three Democratic megadonors who made an enormous bet on shares of Activision Blizzard just days before Microsoft agreed in January to acquire the video game company for $69 billion.

The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are both looking into the suspiciously timed trading activity of Barry Diller, owner of the Daily Beast, his stepson Alex von Fürstenberg, and his friend David Geffen, a longtime Democratic donor who gave $500,000 to the scandal-plagued Lincoln Project in 2020.

Prediction: Nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.

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A majority of Democrats would abandon their country in the face of Russian aggression, according to a Quinnipiac poll published on Monday. By contrast, most Republicans and independents—a majority of American adults—would stand their ground and fight for freedom.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Democratic leadership in the House is shutting down an investigation into illegal use of taxpayer funds by Rep. Val Demings (D., Fla.), who was caught abusing mailing privileges as she runs in a high-profile statewide race.

The Washington Free Beacon has learned that the bipartisan House Communications Standards Commission last month opened an investigation into Demings following a complaint that she sent a 12-page, campaign-style mailer to Floridians outside her district. The Democratic chairwoman of the commission, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (Pa.), told her Republican colleagues in a letter obtained by the Free Beacon that she does “not believe that further inquiry is warranted” and on Tuesday will vote against investigating the matter further. Her vote against further action will effectively end the investigation.

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They’re not as stupid as black people, so they must be oppressors like white people.

“White-adjacent” is the new Hitler.

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Anti-Semite Rashida Tlaib will target admin’s failures to deliver policies on far left’s wish list.

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What Strassel also notes is that the Durham revelations that the Clinton Campaign was spying on candidate Trump and then, later, President Trump, have been ignored by the liberal media.

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Billionaires that majority of Democrats approve of: an entertainment celebrity, founder of the company that was found to engage in anticompetitive practices, and trader of private information. The only one they dislike more than Republicans is the one investing in green solutions

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In 2020, we saw more lawsuits filed over election laws and rule changes than in any prior year of American history. And with the congressional midterms fast approaching, litigation and other developments just keep coming.

Democrats, having successfully stolen the last Presidential election, say to themselves ‘Hey, that was easy’ and are eager to try it again.