Trump Wows CPAC Crowd: Torches ‘Weak’ Biden, Calls Ukraine Crisis ‘An Assault on Humanity,’ Decries Crackdown of ‘Peacefully Protesting’ Canadian Truckers

ORLANDO, Florida – President Donald J. Trump was in full-fighting form, less than two years before the 2024 Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary as he whipped up a packed-out crowd into a frenzy at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference.

“The socialists, globalists, Marxists, and communists who are attacking our civilization have no idea of the sleeping giant they have awoken,” said the 45th president to the more than 5,000 conservatives at 95,000-square foot Gatlin Ballroom in Orlando’s Rosen Shingle Creek resort.

Read More

DOJ Kills the China Initiative, Kowtowing to a Chinese-American Group with Documented Chinese Communist Party Ties

Matt Olsen

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the termination of the China Initiative Wednesday citing agreement with Asian-American groups critical of the anti-espionage strategy.

While announcing the termination of the China Initiative Wednesday, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen launched the Strategy for Countering Nation-State Threats, a program aimed to counter espionage stemming from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In addition to the high-profile December 2021 conviction of Harvard nanotechnology professor Charles Lieber, the Department of Justice website lists eight examples of successful 2021 China Initiative cases, which include crimes such as the theft of GE trade secrets, misleading global financial institutions, lying on government grant applications, illegally exporting $100,000 of U.S. goods to a Chinese military university, economic espionage against Coca-Cola, two cases involving the theft of trade secrets related to pediatric medical conditions and the illegal exportation of cesium atomic clocks.

Read More

Commentary: They Can’t Make Trump Go Away

Donald Trump

In the election of 2016, Donald Trump appealed to citizenship, sovereignty, and borders. This was a direct entreaty to the people as the ultimate source of sovereign authority, bypassing the ruling-class elites that dominate the media and the universities; his appeal also ignored political experts, pollsters, and government bureaucracy. In the postmodern world, the nation-state is under attack everywhere as the source of all evil, the cause of war, selfishness, racism, white privilege, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and all the other irrational phobias that make up the universe of political correctness. The idea of the nation-state itself is said to be irrational and arbitrary.

All of this overwrought criticism of nationalism and the nation-state overlooks a very significant point developed in my new book, The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State: the nation-state is the only form of political organization that can sustain constitutional government and the rule of law.

No empire has ever been a constitutional democracy or republic, nor will constitutional government exist in global government. If, as is widely alleged, the dialectic of History is inevitably tending toward global governance and universal citizenship, then it is also tending toward tyranny.

Read More

Commentary: Russian Roulette in Ukraine

Kamov Ka-52

I admit, I was surprised by Russia’s attack on Ukraine. I thought Vladimir Putin had decided, instead of invading, to recognize the separatist republics and send in “peacekeepers.” Given the binary choice of invading or losing face, Plan C seemed the most clever, something similar to the limited “hybrid” campaign in Crimea. Instead, he has launched a massive, multipronged attack on Ukraine with the goal of “demilitarizing” the country. 

The best analogy is the Russian attack on Georgia in response to its attack on the separatist province of South Ossetia in 2008. There, Russia surprised the West with its swift, decisive, and effective action against the pro-Western Georgians. Russia succeeded in its aims to degrade Georgia’s military and strengthen the separatists. These actions sent a message to Georgian leaders and its neighbors that a dalliance with the West may come at a high cost if Russia perceives it as a threat.

A war of some kind has been going on for eight years in Ukraine. While the West is now hyper-focused on the Russian invasion and its costs, the people of Donetsk have been shelled nearly every day by Ukrainian forces since 2014. And the so-called Revolution of Dignity was the culmination of a months-long violent riot in Kiev. 

Read More

Commentary: The Reasons the Night Sky Isn’t White

night sky reflecting on a lake

The night sky, in all its astral beauty, has ever been a source of wonder for the human race. But over a century ago, some astronomers looked up and saw a paradox.

Why, they wondered, if the Universe is infinite, with an infinite number of stars, is the night sky not white? Every direction we look, there should be a star whose light has traveled all the way to Earth. So the night sky should be a sea of sunlight!

This conundrum is commonly called Olbers’ paradox, named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, who wrote about it in the early 1800s, though he was not the first, nor the only, thinker to ponder it.

Read More

Lawmakers Call for Investigation, Criticize Federally-Funded Critical Race Theory Program

Gus Bilirakis

Republican lawmakers blasted a federally funded education program that trains researchers and teachers in critical race theory after The Center Square’s investigation broke news of the program. Now, one Florida U.S. Congressman is calling for an investigation into whether the program violates state law.

Newly uncovered Department of Education grant documents show that the department awarded $1,020,800 in a 2017 grant and $1,498,620 in a 2021 grant to a Florida-based program called Partners United for Research Pathways Oriented to Social Justice in Education (PURPOSE).

The taxpayer-funded program – led by Florida State University, which has partnered with Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University – offers participants one-year fellowships. Participants receive training in a range of issues, including critical race theory, during the fellowships.

Read More

Texas District Attorneys Fighting Governor’s Order to Treat Sex Change Surgeries for Children as Abuse

District attorneys for five of the largest counties in Texas are defying Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order to treat sex change surgeries for children as child abuse.

Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (TDFPS) Tuesday to investigate instances of children undergoing sex change procedures, including “reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty-blocking drugs or supraphysiologic doses of testosterone or estrogen.”

Read More

Biden Officials Repeatedly Pleaded with Chinese Communist Party Counterparts to Talk Sense into Putin; Were Rebuffed: Report

Over the past several months, senior Biden administration officials held six “urgent meetings” with Communist Chinese officials pleading with them to convince Russian  President Vladimir Putin not to invade, according to the New York Times.

The Americans presented the CCP officials—which included the foreign minister and the ambassador to the United States—intelligence showing Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine’s borders, U.S. officials told the Times.

Read More

Commentary: An Etude on Time, Chance, and Charters

The words “in the course of human events” open the Declaration of Independence. These words were delivered in a specific context, overturning a form of government, based on a principle of the divine right of kings. Divine right of kings would be displaced in favor of government republican in form and rooted in notions of consent which had made appearances in the colonies of America, in documents such as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, even before these ideas were whispered among and penned by the high intellects of Enlightenment Europe. Today, a course of human events has brought us to a place of discord, or crisis, if you will. In one direction lies a path that is increasingly compulsory. In another lies a kind of restructuring grounded in reflection and choice. 

Read More

New Jobless Claims Dip to 232,000

The number of Americans who filed new unemployment claims decreased to 232,000 in the week ending Feb. 19, the Labor Department announced Thursday.

The Labor Department’s figure showed a decrease of 17,000 compared to the week ending Feb. 12, when claims increased to 249,000. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones estimated that new claims reported Thursday would total 235,000.

Last week’s jobless claim figure marked the first increase after three straight weeks of decline as the Omicron coronavirus variant caused workers to call in sick and businesses to temporarily close.

Read More

Biden SCOTUS Nominee Went Beyond Call of Duty to Defend Terror Suspects

Ketanji Brown Jackson

President Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court represented suspected terrorists when she was a federal public defender, going well beyond a bare-bones defense to lambaste the U.S. government for some if its counterterrorism policies and broader approach to the War on Terror.

Biden on Friday nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson, currently a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court.

Jackson’s record will no doubt be heavily scrutinized in the coming days as the Senate prepares for its confirmation hearings. Perhaps no aspect of her past legal work will come under more scrutiny than her advocacy on behalf of prisoners detained at the Guantanamo Bay military prison as enemy combatants for their alleged role in terrorist activities.

Read More

Phoenix Police Forced to Transfer Specialty Officers to Patrol to Deal With Shortage

The Phoenix Police Department (PPD) announced on Wednesday that around 100 officers and detectives from specialty divisions such as Violent Crimes are being transferred to patrol units due to a severe lack of officers on the streets and handling 911 calls. Their goal is to get the number of officers on patrol duty back up over 1,000. 

The PPD acknowledged officer attrition reached an “unprecedented” rate in early 2021. “These trends indicated the loss rate would become critical due to insufficient hiring and increased employee separations,” Phoenix Police Department Chief Jeri L. Williams said in the plan. 

Read More