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FLASHBACK: Cynical Media Used COVID As Excuse for Anti-Trump Rampage

Filed Under: INVESTIGATIONS, Newsbusters

Five years ago this week (March 13, 2020), President Trump declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency. It was the beginning of a national trauma. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 1.2 million Americans have died of COVID in the past five years, while millions more suffered severe illness.

Compounding the misery, government-ordered shutdowns triggered an economic calamity. The March 2020 jobs report showed an immediate loss of 20 million nonfarm payroll jobs, as unemployment skyrocketed to 14.8%, the worst level since the government began tracking the rate in 1948. The U.S. economy contracted by a devastating 31.4% in the second quarter of that year, representing more than $2 trillion in lost economic activity.

But 2020 was also an election year, and President Trump had just emerged victorious from a Democratic-led impeachment effort. The COVID virus was definitely bad news for America, but liberal journalists weren’t about to let a crisis go to waste. So, during those precarious first weeks of the pandemic, the media unleashed a punishing assault on the President, claiming he was personally responsible for the suffering.

“More people are dead and dying in America tonight because Donald Trump is President,” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell thundered on March 12. “This is what happens when you elect a sociopath as President,” PBS’s David Brooks sneered the next night.

“We will see that the Trump administration, because of the character of the person at the top, created a reality distortion field that slowed and warped a response that is going to kill more people than the Vietnam War did,” ex-Newsweek editor Jon Meacham claimed on April 3.

While the airwaves were jam-packed with journalists blaming Trump, viewers heard almost nothing negative about China’s government for its role in creating the crisis. From January 17 through March 13, 2020, the weekday broadcast evening newscasts aired 634 minutes of coronavirus coverage, yet less one percent (just 3 minutes, 14 seconds) presented topics unflattering to the Chinese government.

Five years later, here are the most extreme quotes from the NewsBusters archives showing how liberal journalists cynically exploited the bad news to bash Trump in order to turn the crisis to Democrats’ advantage:

■ “This [coronavirus] may be Donald Trump’s Katrina….If there was any moment that would shake that 40 percent, the folks who would allow him to shoot someone and right down [on] Fifth [Avenue] — if there is any a moment, it’s this one. Because it’s babies, it’s friends, it’s loved ones….It’s grandparents. It’s your Nana….This is an event that could take down a presidency.”— MSNBC contributor/Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, March 6, 2020.

■ Host Stephanie Ruhle: “You’ve called this his Chernobyl. Can you explain?”…Washington Post columnist Brian Klaas: “Since the beginning of this crisis, the important thing for Donald Trump has been protecting myths around his alternative reality which is to say that he has this completely under control. And in Chernobyl, what you had was a moment in which protecting the Soviet state’s myths were the most important thing and that caused people to die.”— MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle, March 12, 2020.

■ “More people are sick in American tonight, because Donald Trump is President. More people are dead and dying in America tonight because Donald Trump is President.”— Host Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, March 12, 2020.

■ “This is what happens when you elect a sociopath as President, who doesn’t care, who has treated this whole thing for the past month as if it’s about him, ‘How do people like me,’ minimizing the risks, ‘Does the stock market reflect well on me,’ and he hasn’t done the things a normal human being would do.”— New York Times columnist David Brooks on PBS’s NewsHour, March 13, 2020.

■ “I would stop putting those briefings on live TV…If he keeps lying like he has been every day on stuff this important, we should — all of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it’s going to cost lives.”— Host Rachel Maddow on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, March 20, 2020.

■ “The cocktail of all his [Donald Trump] worst qualities is mendaciousness, his constant telling of lies, his narcissism, his lack of empathy for people in general, his obsession with money, classes, et cetera, has led to disaster, has led to delay….History will prove this — this will be something that’s paid in human lives, and that’s an enormous tragedy.”— New Yorker editor David Remnick on CNN’s Reliable Sources, March 29, 2020.

■ “Do you think there is blood on the President’s hands, considering the slow response? Or is that too harsh of a criticism?”— Host Chuck Todd to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on NBC’s Meet the Press, March 29, 2020.

■ “Mr. Vice President, what is President Trump’s level of culpability, what’s his level of responsibility, say, toward the illness and fatalities we’re witnessing every few minutes these days?”— Host Brian Williams to Biden on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, March 31, 2020.

■ “We will see that the Trump administration, because of the character of the person at the top, created a reality distortion field that slowed and warped a response that is going to kill more people than the Vietnam War did.”— Presidential historian and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham on PBS’s Amanpour & Company, April 3, 2020.
 
■ “They believe him! There are people who believe him because he’s the President of the United States, and he’s giving misinformation to their own peril. People are dying because of some of the information that’s being disseminated from these clown press conferences.”— Co-host Sunny Hostin on ABC’s The View, April 6, 2020.

■ “What the President showed us today is what the nation’s top scientists have to deal with every day, a President who now uses these briefings as a re-election platform, an opportunity to lie, to deflect, to attack, to bully, and cover up his own deadly dismissals of the virus for crucial weeks.”— Host Anderson Cooper on CNN’s AC360, April 6, 2020.

■ “I don’t think it’s actually an overstatement to say that Donald Trump has — there are tens of thousands of people who will die in the country, or have some hope of them have already died, more are still going to die because of Donald Trump’s incompetence and lack of leadership.”— MSNBC national affairs analyst and Showtime’s The Circus host John Heilemann on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, April 8, 2020.

■ “People are dying because of his foolishness. It’s really foolishness at this point. You know, America — you know, folks who loved him, fine. You voted for him. You stuck it to the elites for three years. But now your loved ones can die. The game’s over. This isn’t reality TV anymore. People are dying, and this guy is acting a fool.”— Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik on CNN’s Reliable Sources, April 12, 2020.

For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
 

Sen. John Fetterman Dunks on AOC, Doesn’t Care For Her Views: ‘I’m Going to Sleep Just Fine’

Filed Under: Gateway Pundit, INVESTIGATIONS

John Fetterman / ABC

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman clearly has no time for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The far-left Congresswoman has attacked Senate Democrats, most notably Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for voting to advance the funding bill that will keep the government running until the end of September.

Fetterman, who has styled himself as one of the more “moderate” Democrat senators, said he doesn’t care what she has to say.

“I hope you can relay how little I care about her views on this,” Fetterman said in an interview with The Hill.

“I’m going to stand on what I happen to believe is the right thing to do but ask her, ‘What’s the exit plan once we shut the government down?’ What about all the millions of Americans who are going to have their lives damaged?” he asked.

“What about the ones that won’t have any paycheck? She’ll have her paycheck, though.”

“If we’re worried about Musk going to shut down the government or damage the government, we have the power to do the one thing that Trump and Musk can’t do, shut it down.”

His comments come after AOC told reporters she felt a “deep sense of outrage and betrayal” at Schumer’s decision to advance the bill.

“There are members of Congress who have won Trump-held districts in some of the most difficult territory in the United States who walked the plank and took innumerable risks in order to defend the American people, in order to defend Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare,” AOC said.

“Just to see Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing Elon Musk — I think it is a huge slap in the face,” she continued.

LOVE TO SEE IT: President Trump Trolls Chuck Schumer with a Savage Roast After He Caves on the Government Shutdown While AOC Refuses to Rule out a Primary Challenge

There is growing speculation that following this so-called betrayal, AOC may run for Schumer’s New York Senate seat when he next comes up for re-election in 2028.

While AOC has not confirmed her intention to do so, she has also refused to rule it out.

Fetterman, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to care either way.

“Whatever her views, I’m going to sleep just fine,” he said.

The post Sen. John Fetterman Dunks on AOC, Doesn’t Care For Her Views: ‘I’m Going to Sleep Just Fine’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Karoline Leavitt Has ALREADY Passed Jen Psaki In PolitiFact ‘Fact Checks’

Filed Under: INVESTIGATIONS, Newsbusters

PolitiFact, the Poynter Institute’s liberal-tilting “independent fact-checking” website, has given White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt a third fact-check within her first two months at the podium — two False ratings and one Half True. On March 13, Lou Jacobson threw a False flag for Leavitt fighting with AP reporter Josh Boak, where she claimed “Tariffs are a tax cut for the American people.”

The first two fact checks came on January 28.

Biden’s first press secretary Jen Psaki has two — on False and one True. Psaki drew her first fact check on November 18, 2021 — almost ten months into her tenure. She was never tagged while she was State Department Press Secretary under John Kerry in the Obama years, and hasn’t been tagged for anything she’s said as an MSNBC host.

We can guess that Leavitt will soon surpass the other Biden press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who has four fact-checks — two Mostly True and two False. There were lame checks, like this: KJP claiming “Because wages are rising, this Thanksgiving dinner is the fourth-cheapest ever as a percentage of average earnings.”

MUST READ: The Left’s Judicial Insurrection Against Trump Is a Constitutional Crisis — Here’s Why It Must Be Stopped

Filed Under: Gateway Pundit, INVESTIGATIONS

Credit: The White House

Since returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump has been met with an unprecedented legal onslaught from far-left activist judges and radical groups determined to sabotage his administration at every turn.

These rogue judges—many appointed by Clinton, Obama, and Biden—have launched a relentless legal coup to undermine the will of the American people and prevent Trump from carrying out his constitutional duties.

Appearing on The War Room with Steve Bannon, Josh Hammer, Senior Counsel for the Article III Project, warned that what America is witnessing is no ordinary judicial activism—it’s a full-blown judicial insurrection.

So far this year, President Trump has faced 125 legal challenges in just two months.

The full list of 125 legal challenges remains active and is documented on the Just Security website.

The Constitution and historical precedent are clear: activist judges have no authority to interfere with the President’s executive powers. The Supreme Court settled this issue in Mississippi v. Johnson (1867), ruling that courts cannot restrain the President from carrying out his executive duties.

Mississippi v. Johnson (1867) – Presidential Discretion is Not Subject to Judicial Interference

In 1867, when President Andrew Johnson was tasked with enforcing the Reconstruction Acts—despite personally opposing them—Mississippi sued, asking the Supreme Court to stop him.

The Court unanimously ruled against Mississippi, stating that a president’s executive duties are beyond the reach of the judiciary.

Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, writing for the Court, distinguished between the president’s ministerial duties (which could be subject to judicial review) and executive/discretionary duties (which could not be interfered with by the courts).

Ministerial Duties (Subject to Judicial Review)

These are duties where the President (or an executive officer) has a clear legal obligation to perform a specific act in a prescribed manner, leaving no room for discretion. Courts can compel the performance of these duties through writs of mandamus.

Examples:

  • Issuing a Commission
    • In Marbury v. Madison (1803), Chief Justice Marshall held that delivering a judicial commission was a ministerial duty. The courts could compel an executive officer (like the Secretary of State) to perform this duty.
  • Processing a Pardon Application
  • Enforcing a Congressional Appropriation
  • Certifying Electoral Votes
Executive (Discretionary) Duties (Not Subject to Judicial Interference)

These are duties where the President has policy-based discretion, meaning courts cannot order or prohibit the exercise of such functions.

Examples:

  • Pardon Power
    • The President has absolute discretion to issue or deny a pardon under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. Courts cannot force the President to grant a pardon.
  • Commander-in-Chief Decisions
    • The President’s military decisions, including troop deployments, orders to engage in combat, or withdrawal from treaties, are discretionary and not subject to judicial review.
  • Foreign Policy and Treaty Negotiations
    • The President has discretion over recognizing foreign governments (Zivotofsky v. Kerry), conducting diplomacy, and negotiating treaties. Courts cannot compel the President to engage in or alter diplomatic relations.
  • Executive Orders and Policy Prioritization
  • Appointments and Removals of Officials
    • The President has discretion over firing executive officers (Myers v. United States). Courts cannot force the President to retain or remove an official unless removal is statutorily restricted.

Based on Mississippi v. Johnson and Marbury v. Madison, courts can only interfere with ministerial duties—tasks that are strictly procedural and leave no room for discretion.

However, the cases against President Trump involve his executive and discretionary powers, which are off-limits to judicial interference.

Despite this clear legal precedent, activist judges continue violating the Constitution by ruling against President Trump’s executive authority. If the Supreme Court refuses to intervene, it risks setting a dangerous precedent where radical judges hold more power than the elected President.

The judicial branch was never meant to govern the nation—that responsibility belongs to the executive and legislative branches, which are accountable to the people.

The judicial coup against Trump is an unconstitutional power grab that must be stopped before it dismantles our republic.

According to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, “Judges have no authority to administer the executive branch. Or to nullify the results of a national election. We either have democracy, or not.”

This is not just about Trump—it’s about protecting the Constitution, the Presidency, and the will of the American people. The Supreme Court must follow historical precedent and strike down these illegitimate cases. Anything less is a dereliction of duty.

The post MUST READ: The Left’s Judicial Insurrection Against Trump Is a Constitutional Crisis — Here’s Why It Must Be Stopped appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Atheists talk tough, but even they can’t deny this inconvenient truth

Filed Under: INVESTIGATIONS, The Blaze

It is widely accepted in the Western world today that morality is relative.

People who say this usually mean that morality is a matter of personal or cultural sentiment that has no objective basis in reality. Many modern people tend to think of the physical world as consisting of matters of fact (it’s not relative whether water is H2O), but of morality as being a matter of subjective opinion.

If we accept the modern, secular story of the world, this is a natural belief. If there is no higher authority on moral issues than individual or group opinion, then moral judgments are indeed subjective. Further, if the naturalistic story is true, and all that exists are matter and energy governed by natural laws, then good and evil are illusory concepts with no basis in reality.

After all, no material thing has the property of being good or evil; there are no good or evil atoms or molecules. Thus, neither good nor evil exists. Yes, one could have ideas about good and evil on this view, but they wouldn’t be any different from ideas about unicorns or leprechauns — none of these, in reality, would exist.

Many nonbelievers, when presented with this observation, will typically say something like, “I don’t have to be religious to know right from wrong,” or “Lots of atheists are good people,” or “Christians do so many evil things.” We can agree with all of these statements, but they miss the point that naturalism undermines any basis for objective moral values and duties.

The key word here is objective, meaning something that exists or is true regardless of what any person or group of people believes about it. Even if every person in an ancient culture believed that human sacrifice was a good and necessary practice, they would still be objectively wrong — that is, if an objective standard of morality exists. And the only plausible candidate for such an objective standard is God, whose very nature determines what is good.

‘The religious fundamentalists are correct: Without God, there is no morality.’

Many who hold to a naturalistic worldview have never thought through its logical implications, especially in relation to morality. A number of leading naturalistic thinkers, though, have recognized and acknowledged that morality and naturalism are incompatible. This doesn’t mean that they became outlaws in their personal lives, but they certainly had to confront the cognitive dissonance of having deep moral intuitions (as all humans do), while also believing those intuitions have no relation to reality (though most don’t admit to this inevitable struggle).

Well-known biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins declared in his book “River Out of Eden,” “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” Dawkins recognizes that good and evil have no place in a naturalistic universe.

Existentialist philosopher and atheist Jean-Paul Sartre acknowledged that it was “very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him. … As a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.”

Atheist philosopher Joel Marks recalled that he once believed in objective morality but was eventually driven to abandon that position. He experienced a “shocking epiphany” that “the religious fundamentalists are correct: Without God, there is no morality.” He was forced to conclude that “atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality.”

Atheist philosopher Julian Baggini confessed, “In an atheist universe, morality can be rejected without external sanction at any point, and without a clear, compelling reason to believe in its reality, that’s exactly what will sometimes happen.”

In a debate with a Christian at Stanford University, the late Cornell biology professor William Provine stated, “There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. … There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.”

I belabor this point somewhat because it is difficult for most secular moderns to come to grips with. One can hardly blame them because the implications of naturalism are truly horrifying. It represents the complete dissolution of all objective meaning, value, purpose, and morality.

Thankfully, however, naturalism is not true, and there is an objective basis for right and wrong, which is God’s own supremely good nature. Because all human beings are made in God’s image, we have deep moral intuitions that help us discern right from wrong. This remains true even for those who reject belief in God, which is why many nonbelievers live basically moral lives, even while discounting the very foundation of right and wrong (Genesis 1:26-27; Romans 1:32; 2:14-15).

Due to the Edenic fall, our moral intuitions have been corrupted by sin, and we need the moral guidance God has provided in His Word. God’s commands in scripture represent our moral duties and obligations and provide a firm foundation for living a life that reflects God’s own wholly good nature.

This article is adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Worldview Bulletin Substack.

Weekend Beacon 3/16/25

Filed Under: INVESTIGATIONS, Washington Free Beacon

Last week, while Trump hosted Ireland’s prime minister at the White House, the parish of St. John the Beloved, just across the river, held its annual Irish-Italian cookoff. The competition is closer than you think—one side is a cornucopia of potatoes, corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes (did I mention potatoes?) and the other side is a sea of red.

Speaking of seeing red, Harvey Klehr returns to the Weekend Beacon with an incisive review of Clay Risen’s Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.

“Risen covers virtually all the episodes that transfixed America during this era, from HUAC hearings on Hollywood to the Henry Wallace presidential campaign of 1948, from the Smith Act trials of leaders of the CPUSA, to the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, from the Chambers-Hiss confrontation to the government campaign against labor boss Harry Bridges. He delves into the China Lobby, recounts the Rosenberg case and its aftermath, the controversy over ‘naming names’ before congressional committees, the farcical pageants that reenacted supposed communist takeovers of American towns, investigations of teachers, and McCarthy’s rise and fall. He concludes with an examination of how external events and President Eisenhower’s careful campaign led to McCarthy’s overreach and the Supreme Court cases that drove a stake in the government’s war on domestic communism.

“While Risen makes an effort to incorporate the revelations of the past quarter-century that have so discomfited proponents of the argument that all of the hoopla about Soviet spies was concocted by troglodytes anxious to discredit the New Deal, he also minimizes their significance. While ‘almost all [communists] were loyal Americans,’ he writes, ‘a small fraction did spy for the Soviet Union.’ Thus, while the ‘threat of Soviet espionage was minor, it was not an invention of the administration’s enemies.’ Paradoxically, he admits it included ‘some of the New Deal’s best and brightest,’ among them Alger Hiss and Larry Duggan, high-ranking officials in the State Department, but glosses over the abundant evidence that Harry Dexter White, the number two man in the Treasury Department, was a Soviet source, and does not mention dozens of the government officials implicated by Elizabeth Bentley, regretting that her testimony about ‘the humdrum flow of stolen information that she had ferried out of Washington [was turned] into a firehose of secrets fatal to the health of the republic.’ Most American communists were not spies, but virtually all the spies were communists.

“Contra Risen, the American security apparatus at the end of World War II did not go ‘looking for new threats to counter.’ Several investigations in 1944-1945 had turned up evidence of Soviet espionage, including the Amerasia case and the involvement of Arthur Adams and Clarence Hiskey in stealing atomic bomb secrets. Beginning in 1947, the Venona intercepts began yielding clues indicating that some 350 Americans had worked for Soviet intelligence during the war. A significant number were government officials and virtually all were communists. Only 125 to 150 were ever identified by American counterintelligence (after the 1989 opening of archives that number increased), but the flow of information they turned over included material on radar, sonar, proximity fuses, jet propulsion, and, most significantly, the atomic bomb. Internal discussions of American diplomatic negotiating tactics, arms production, and a host of other topics went from sources in virtually every government department to Moscow. Minor it was not.”

From Moscow to Beijing, David J. Garrow reviews Seven Things You Can’t Say About China by Sen. Tom Cotton.

“Cotton’s title encapsulates the seven threats he believes the CCP poses: above all military—’China is preparing for war’—but also economic, political, and cultural. Cotton has read very widely in the scholarly and journalistic literature on China, and this energetically written, richly documented book is a political tour de force that should be read by all of his congressional colleagues and by every Trump administration policymaker.”

“The CCP has … undertaken ‘the largest peacetime military buildup in history,’ generating not only ‘the largest military on earth’ but also ‘the world’s largest submarine fleet’ and ‘the world’s largest ballistic-missile stockpile.’ In stark contrast, ‘the U.S. Army has shrunk to its smallest size since the start of World War II,’ the Navy ‘to its smallest size since World War I,’ and the Air Force ‘has never been smaller, older, or less ready for combat.’

“What’s worse, ‘the day is fast approaching when China’s nuclear forces will overmatch ours,’ and China’s and Russia’s combined—don’t forget their ‘no limits partnership’—’already overmatch America’s nuclear forces today.’ China’s nuclear weapons are ‘much newer and more advanced’ than America’s, and ‘our senior military leaders believe that China is abandoning its long-standing no-first-use policy,’ Cotton reports. In short, China’s nuclear forces ‘threaten our national survival and way of life.'”

“There’s much more in this tightly argued book, from acknowledging how with the COVID epidemic, ‘all the evidence from the beginning pointed to a lab leak’ from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology to how ‘no social-media app has harmed our kids more than TikTok.’ Yet three nonmilitary topics merit brief mention. It may seem arcane to all of us who don’t focus on international trade policy, but Cotton persuasively suggests that ‘the worst geopolitical mistake in American history may have been granting China permanent most-favored-nation status and allowing it to enter the World Trade Organization,’ in 2000 and 2001 respectively. By doing so, ‘we built up our most formidable enemy and empowered it to devastate our economy and threaten our national security’ as China gained dominance both in manufacturing and in technologically essential rare metals.”

Good thing there are other places we can get those rare earth metals!

From enemies abroad to heroes at home, Stuart Halpern reviews A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Douglas R. Egerton.

“Born in Massachusetts in 1823, Higginson was a crusader for many causes, encouraged by his mother’s wish that he set himself ‘on a course that will lead to perfection.’ A boxer in his teens and a graduate of Harvard by 17 (he later returned for his graduate studies), Higginson dedicated his life to fighting for what he called a ‘Sisterhood of Reforms’ that would enable America to live up to the promise of its principles. Though he was the descendant of New England’s first white settlers, he, as Egerton puts it, ‘cast his lot with the persecuted and oppressed.’ Along the way, he interacted and often befriended his era’s most seminal figures. He mentored a young Emily Dickinson, sipped tea with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and maintained close ties with Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau. He debated abolitionist strategies with Frederick Douglass, hosted Ralph Waldo Emerson, and had frequent dinners with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

“In one of his 100 essays in the Atlantic Monthly, Higginson argued for the compatibility of ‘physical vigor and spiritual sanctity.’ Though he treasured the quiet that would enable his writing, brashness was his preferred strategy. ‘Loud language,’ he once asserted, was needed to reach those whose ears were ‘stuffed with southern cotton.'”

“When he assumed command of the First South Carolina Volunteers in 1862, Higginson did so with full faith that his troops, despite their earlier brutalization as slaves, would make mighty and courageous soldiers. The role was a dream realized. Earlier he had written that leading free blacks in defense of those enslaved would be ‘the most important service in the history of the War,’ though, Egerton notes, he never imagined he would be the one to do it. The unit’s success earned Lincoln’s praise.

“Alas, the colonel’s military career ended after a cannonball nearly took off his head. The sword was quickly replaced with a pen. Higginson petitioned Congress for equal pay for black soldiers and never forgave Lincoln, even after he had been assassinated, for not achieving this goal. His book about the experience, Army Life in a Black Regiment, emphasized his troops’ heroism while downplaying his role. Though Egerton doesn’t mention it, Army Life, written as it was by the pugilist preacher, stresses the biblically infused sense of mission his troops held. ‘Their memories,’ Higginson wrote, ‘are a vast bewildered chaos of Jewish history and biography; and most of the great events of the past, down to the period of the American Revolution, they instinctively attribute to Moses.'”

The post Weekend Beacon 3/16/25 appeared first on .

SpaceX Crew-10 Successfully Docks with the International Space Station, Paving Way for Stranded Astronauts’ Return After 9 Months

Filed Under: Gateway Pundit, INVESTIGATIONS

Screenshot: International Space Station / X

Early Sunday morning, the SpaceX Crew-10 mission successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS), delivering four astronauts: NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA’s Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos’ Kirill Peskov.

This mission marks the 10th crew rotation facilitated by SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

According to the press release:

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, as the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the orbiting complex at 12:04 a.m. EDT, while the station was roughly 260 statute miles over the Atlantic Ocean.

Following Dragon’s link up to the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module, the crew members aboard Dragon and the space station will begin conducting standard leak checks and pressurization between the spacecraft and the station in preparation for hatch opening scheduled for approximately 1:45 a.m. on Sunday.

Crew-10 will join the Expedition 72 crew of NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Don Petitt, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov, Alexey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner. The number of crew aboard the space station will increase to 11 people before Crew-9 members Hague, Williams, Wilmore, and Gorbunov return to Earth following the crew handover period.

WATCH:

The arrival of Crew-10 enables the return of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been aboard the ISS since June 2024 due to technical issues with their original return vehicle.

After an eight-day mission on the maiden crewed voyage of Boeing’s Starliner became a 9-month stay in the International Space Station, the two American astronauts who have been stranded in space since June are now expected to return to Earth later this week using a different SpaceX capsule.

It can be recalled that NASA’s stranded astronauts have acknowledged that Joe Biden deliberately abandoned them in space for political purposes.

Barry Wilmore and his crewmate Sunita Williams have been stuck on the International Space Station since July last year after their Boeing Starliner ran into technical issues.

At a virtual press conference earlier this month, Wilmore was asked about Elon Musk’s claim that Joe Biden declined his offer to bring them back on a SpaceX flight several months ago for “political reasons.”

“I can only say that Mr Musk, what he says, is absolutely factual,” Wilmore said.

Wilmore went on to say he and his partner at the “utmost respect” for Musk and Trump.

I can tell you, at the outset, all of us have the utmost respect for Mr. Musk, and obviously respect and admiration for our President of the United States, Donald Trump.

We appreciate them, we appreciate all they do for us, for human spaceflight, for our nation. We’re thankful that they’re in the positions they’re in.

The words they’ve said — politics — I mean, that’s part of life. We understand that, and there’s an important reason why we have a political system, and the political system that we do have.

And we’re behind it 100 percent. We know what we’ve lived up here. We know the ins and outs and the specifics that they may not be privy to.

And I’m sure they have some issues that they’re dealing with, information that they have that we are not privy to.

So when I think about your question, that’s part of life. We are on board with it, we support our nation, we support our nation’s leaders and we’re thankful for them.

The post SpaceX Crew-10 Successfully Docks with the International Space Station, Paving Way for Stranded Astronauts’ Return After 9 Months appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

‘Queer, BIPOC-Led,’ ‘Antiracist’ Abortion Business Will Kill Babies Up Until Birth

Filed Under: INVESTIGATIONS, Newsbusters

A self-described “queer” and “BIPOC-led” abortion business has just opened in Albuquerque, New Mexico, offering to murder babies up to birth.

The Valley Abortion group, also known as the “VAG” clinic (quite a fitting acronym), boasts they’re “one of the few” clinics that provide “care” for “all genders” in “all stages of pregnancy.” 

“At VAG our providers deliver care through an antiracist, survivor-centered, trauma-informed approach,” they advertise on their Facebook page. By “antiracist,” they mean murdering babies of all races… equitably!
In fact, free abortions are the only form of “care” they provide, thanks to New Mexico forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. 

For $17,500, VAG ensures a slow and painful death per each 32 week old baby. Their M.O.L.D procedure injects four deadly products into the mother, Misoprostol, Oxytocin, Laminaria, and Digoxin over the span of 3 to 4 days.

With the help of a guiding ultrasound, according to LifeNews, the abortionist injects a lethal dose of Digoxin into the baby’s heart either directly through the mother’s abdomen or vaginally. The drug, which is usually meant to treat heart disease, gives the child a heart attack. 

The mother’s cervix is then packed with thin tampon-like sticks named laminaria to expand it gradually over the next day. She’s repacked with larger sticks and pumped with Misoprostol, preparing her for active labor. 

On the final day of the barbaric procedure, LifeNews reports the abortionist injects Oxytocin into the mother, inducing labor to mimic the delivery of a healthy baby. Except the baby’s dead and delivered into either a toilet or a garbage can. 

It’s a “compassionate model of care,” according to VAG, which congratulates itself for “dismantling supremacy ideologies” while peddling some of the deadliest.

Aside from a throwup of every other woke cause imaginable, the abortionists at VAG also call for a “Free Palestine” on their social media pages.

Commitment to liberation is a core value at Valley Abortion Group. Therefore, we stand with the Palestinian people and their fight for liberation.
We believe all oppression is interconnected, and as a reproductive justice organization, we recognize the genocide in Gaza as a reproductive justice issue.

That’s fitting for a group who wages jihad on pre-born babies to support a terrorist organization which butchers babies in front of their mothers.

When America Was Really Red

Filed Under: INVESTIGATIONS, Washington Free Beacon

The Red Scare—the era from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s during which fears of domestic communism became one of the major issues in American political life—has generated innumerable books and articles dedicated to documenting its alleged victims and searching for those ultimately responsible for the harm it inflicted and the ways in which it distorted American culture. During the 1960s and ’70s the dominant motif was that hysteria and fear had demonized American communists and their supporters, and contributed to framing such innocents as Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and Robert Oppenheimer for crimes they did not commit.

That campaign hit roadblocks with the release of FBI material under the Freedom of Information Act and the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to the availability of reams of data from once-secret American and Soviet archives. It turned out that many of those accused of being Soviet spies during the Red Scare (with the notable exception of Oppenheimer) had been ones—and that there were hundreds of other Americans, most of them members of the Communist Party of the United States, who had also spied and gotten away with it.

These revelations did not mitigate the many injustices that had occurred during the Red Scare—the sometimes absurd or frivolous charges that derailed individual lives, the overreach that caused states to deny fishing licenses to communists, or the use of anonymous informants to fire individuals for such “subversive” activities as entertaining black friends in their homes. People lost their jobs or faced ostracism and penalties for having unpopular opinions.

Writing a balanced account of the era did become much harder. While such conventional villains as Senator Joseph McCarthy, who gave his name to the era, turned out to have been right about the big issue—there had been extensive communist infiltration of the American government—he had been wrong about many of those he accused. The other archvillain of the era, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, had missed some major spies and crossed the line into illegality with warrantless wiretaps and burglaries, but had ferreted out a serious national security threat.

Clay Risen, a reporter for the New York Times, attempts to thread the needle in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. He does provide numerous examples of government overreach and injustice but only partly succeeds in detailing why the campaign took place or the culpability of the Communist Party and its allies in why it went so viral.

Risen covers virtually all the episodes that transfixed America during this era, from HUAC hearings on Hollywood to the Henry Wallace presidential campaign of 1948, from the Smith Act trials of leaders of the CPUSA, to the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, from the Chambers-Hiss confrontation to the government campaign against labor boss Harry Bridges. He delves into the China Lobby, recounts the Rosenberg case and its aftermath, the controversy over “naming names” before congressional committees, the farcical pageants that reenacted supposed communist takeovers of American towns, investigations of teachers, and McCarthy’s rise and fall. He concludes with an examination of how external events and President Eisenhower’s careful campaign led to McCarthy’s overreach and the Supreme Court cases that drove a stake in the government’s war on domestic communism.

While Risen makes an effort to incorporate the revelations of the past quarter-century that have so discomfited proponents of the argument that all of the hoopla about Soviet spies was concocted by troglodytes anxious to discredit the New Deal, he also minimizes their significance. While “almost all [communists] were loyal Americans,” he writes, “a small fraction did spy for the Soviet Union.” Thus, while the “threat of Soviet espionage was minor, it was not an invention of the administration’s enemies.” Paradoxically, he admits it included “some of the New Deal’s best and brightest,” among them Alger Hiss and Larry Duggan, high-ranking officials in the State Department, but glosses over the abundant evidence that Harry Dexter White, the number two man in the Treasury Department, was a Soviet source, and does not mention dozens of the government officials implicated by Elizabeth Bentley, regretting that her testimony about “the humdrum flow of stolen information that she had ferried out of Washington [was turned] into a firehose of secrets fatal to the health of the republic.” Most American communists were not spies, but virtually all the spies were communists.

Contra Risen, the American security apparatus at the end of World War II did not go “looking for new threats to counter.” Several investigations in 1944-1945 had turned up evidence of Soviet espionage, including the Amerasia case and the involvement of Arthur Adams and Clarence Hiskey in stealing atomic bomb secrets. Beginning in 1947, the Venona intercepts began yielding clues indicating that some 350 Americans had worked for Soviet intelligence during the war. A significant number were government officials and virtually all were communists. Only 125 to 150 were ever identified by American counterintelligence (after the 1989 opening of archives that number increased), but the flow of information they turned over included material on radar, sonar, proximity fuses, jet propulsion, and, most significantly, the atomic bomb. Internal discussions of American diplomatic negotiating tactics, arms production, and a host of other topics went from sources in virtually every government department to Moscow. Minor it was not.

While Risen underplays how revelations and concern about the extent of Soviet espionage contributed to the Red Scare, he does note how many liberals felt betrayed by American communists who suddenly shifted their foreign policy stances after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Risen argues that “the 1930s left was a near-seamless spectrum, running from center-of-the-road liberals to hard-core communists, united behind FDR.” But the CPUSA only fully supported FDR during one of his four campaigns for president, opposing him twice (1932, 1940) and coyly approving of him once (1936). While Earl Browder proclaimed that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” in 1937, the CPUSA abandoned the slogan at the order of the Communist International in 1938. At no time in its history did it ever deviate from blind obedience to Soviet foreign policy aims.

By the late 1940s, with Soviet testing of an atomic bomb—the fruits of espionage—the blockade of Berlin, a communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and Mao Zedong’s victory in the Chinese civil war, most Americans had had enough and concluded that any cooperation with domestic communists who apologized for and justified Soviet authoritarianism was no longer tenable. Liberal organizations, most notably the labor movement, had had enough of duplicitous communists in their ranks whose cooperation always depended on whether it furthered Soviet foreign policy.

Communists pretended to be adherents of democracy but by insisting that the USSR was a true democracy, while the United States was lapsing into fascism, they discredited themselves. Because they often concealed their party membership, they confirmed the suspicion of many Americans that they could not be trusted. The party leadership had cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies and abetted efforts to infiltrate non-communist organizations.

Risen, to his credit, agrees that in 1948 Henry Wallace was surrounded by secret members of the CPUSA, who pushed his presidential candidacy to positions favoring Soviet foreign policy. But he then suggests that the anti-communism of such leaders of Americans for Democratic Action as Walter Reuther, Arthur Schlesinger, and Eleanor Roosevelt “helped poison the well of public sentiment against the policy of the left generally,” when it actually targeted those unwilling to call a communist a communist.

Risen exculpates Harry Bridges from charges he was a communist, but never mentions that documents from Russian archives confirm he was a perjurer who was not only a secret communist, but also a member of the party’s Central Committee.

Risen makes a valid point when he argues that prosecution of the party leadership for violating the Smith Act and conspiring to “teach and advocate the overthrow” of the U.S. government was a weak case, but, as he later admits, the Supreme Court reversed itself within several years and the worst excesses of the Red Scare petered out. There were, however, real demons targeting America; the leadership of the CPUSA was a tool of the Soviet Union and an ally of Soviet intelligence.

Democratic societies can go overboard when they undertake crusades against real or perceived enemies. Demagogues can and will latch onto causes and some of the guard rails against unwise and extreme solutions can break. Given the dangers democratic societies faced from international communism, the response to domestic communists sometimes was excessive, but it was also understandable, and it was corrected.

Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
by Clay Risen
Scribner, 480 pp., $31

Harvey Klehr is the author of numerous books and articles on communism and Soviet espionage.

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