Washington Free Beacon

Eugene Daniels, the Politico White House correspondent who was supposed to be the “breakout star” of the 2024 election but ended up being one of the biggest losers, is leaving the mid-tier news website to join MSNBC. Daniels, an alleged “expert in all things Kamala Harris” with a “fashion sense that mirrors his bold style of reporting,” will cohost a weekend roundtable show as part of the left-wing network’s ongoing reorganization efforts. It is unclear whether the self-described “walking Beyoncé encyclopedia” will face any wardrobe restrictions at MSNBC, but a Washington Free Beacon photographic analysis confirmed that Daniels has a bold sense of fashion, and certainly appears to admire Beyoncé, the former Destiny’s Child singer best known for being married to Jay-Z.

Bold.

Brave.

Beguiling.

Fierce.

Friendly.

Fabulous.

Joyful.

Masked.

Hired.

The post MNSBC’s Newest Anchor Eugene Daniels Is a ‘Kamala Harris Expert’ and ‘Walking Beyoncé Encyclopedia’ Who Has Revolutionized the DC Fashion Scene appeared first on .

The Trump administration on Tuesday stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) of the power to determine which outlets can participate in the White House press pool. The association’s leader, Eugene Daniels, Politico correspondent and soon-to-be MSNBC host, is known as a “Kamala Harris expert” who once asked the former vice president whether Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s campaign rhetoric stemmed from “irredeemable racism.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the WHCA “should no longer have a monopoly” on which outlets can include a reporter in the 13-member White House press pool, which is allowed into the Oval Office, on Air Force One, and at any event that cannot accommodate the entire White House press corps, Politico reported Tuesday.

“All journalists, outlets and voices deserve a seat at this highly coveted table,” Leavitt said. Going forward, the White House will include additional outlets as part of the press pool, without consulting the WHCA.

Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer described the change as “amazing news,” saying it will allow “new voices” from “media outlets from outside of the DC Beltway bubble.” Spicer said that WHCA members angry over the change should “direct blame” toward Daniels, who repeatedly expressed sympathies with Harris while covering her failed 2024 campaign.

Daniels, whom the liberal Poynter Institute described as “the Kamala Harris expert,” gave favorable coverage to Harris throughout the campaign. In one Mediaite interview in July, he said that “the excitement” for Harris is “insane” and insisted that Harris, whom former president Joe Biden tasked with leading the administration’s efforts on “stemming the migration to our southern border,” was not Biden’s border czar.

Two months later, Daniels, who had told the Poynter Institute that he was “tough” on Harris, interviewed the then-vice president during a National Association of Black Journalists panel, asking her whether Trump and Vance’s comments on Haitian migrants in Ohio were “a case of irredeemable racism that can’t be mitigated by any rational action.”

Daniels said in a statement Tuesday that the administration’s decision to include more outlets in the pool “tears at the independence of a free press.”

Daniels is reportedly expected to leave Politico and cohost a weekend show on MSNBC, according to Puck News.

As president of the WHCA, Daniels picked comedian Amber Ruffin to host the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, praising her as the “perfect fit for the dinner this year.” Ruffin has long expressed her dislike for the president, from mocking him in 2020 to saying that “no one wants” Trump to attend this year’s dinner.

This month, Ruffin told CNN that she disagrees with former hosts who told her that “you have to make fun of everybody,” rather than just “the people you disagree with.”

“I am not going to do that,” she said. “Maybe I’ll do it a little bit, but probably not.”

Trump did not attend the correspondents’ dinners during his first term.

The post Trump Strips Power From Left-Leaning White House Correspondents’ Association Led By ‘Kamala Harris Expert’ appeared first on .

Joy Reid hosted the final episode of her MSNBC show on Monday, but it was her exorbitantly paid white colleague, Rachel Maddow, who made headlines later that evening by accusing her bosses of racism. “I will tell you it is also unnerving to see that on a network two, count ’em, two non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows,” Maddow said. “That feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.” She was referring to Reid and Alex Wagner, the half-Asian MSNBC personality who was expected to begin hosting the 9 p.m. hour in April, but that plan was scrapped. Jen Psaki, a white woman and former White House press secretary under President Joe Biden, will take over instead.

Watch: Joy Reid Concludes Lackluster Career at MSNBC

Reports suggest MSNBC fired Reid for perfectly legitimate reasons. The host was constantly inviting “external scrutiny” with her vitriolic and racially charged diatribes, according to former CNN media expert Oliver Darcy. Also, her ratings were terrible. Last Thursday’s episode of The ReidOut drew just 59,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, the only demographic advertisers care about. That was the lowest figure among all MSNBC hosts between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m. MSNBC is in the process of being spun off from parent company Comcast, which viewed the left-wing network as a “declining asset” whose elderly viewing audience is literally dying off. To survive as a separate entity, MSNBC will have to massively curtail its payroll costs. Getting rid of Reid, a low-performing loose cannon with an annual salary believed to be in the range of $3 million, was probably an easy call.

More: Gravy Train Derails at MSNBC: Top Anchors Face Huge Pay Cut After Comcast Severs Ties With Left-Wing Network

Maddow’s rant against MSNBC’s white supremacy was rich with irony, given the fact that until recently, Maddow was earning $30 million a year to host The Rachel Maddow Show just one night per week. That’s roughly 10 times what the network was paying Reid, a proud black woman, to work significantly more hours. MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who are white, are also believed to have negotiated a “Maddow-esque” compensation package, while Maddow look-a-like Chris Hayes is believed to earn a salary in the $4-5 million range. These highly paid network personalities are often eager to discuss topics such as income inequality and the “racial wealth gap,” but they have yet to express public outrage about the alarming racial disparities within MSNBC.

Related: MSNBC Host Claims ‘There Isn’t a Strain of Racism on the Left’

Reid and Wagner weren’t the only non-white employees who lost their hosting gigs. As a result of the network’s ongoing reorganization, MSNBC announced plans to cancel the weekend shows hosted by Ayman Mohyeldin, Jonathan Capehart, Jose Diaz-Balart, and Katie Phang. Mohyeldin, the Egyptian-born commentator best known for defending Hamas terrorists, is believed to earn a salary in the range of $500-750K per year. Al Sharpton, the scandal-plagued charlatan and notorious anti-Semite who appears to have survived what former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann described as a “racist purge,” is believed to earn a similar salary.

Related: Biden White House Fuels Gender Pay Gap

Salary information for Phang was unavailable due to the fact that no one has heard of her. The Katie Phang Show has apparently been on the air since 2022. She also hosted a 2023 special on MSNBC about female “trailblazers in the [Asian American and Pacific Islander] community.” Phang enjoyed a brief moment of relevance in November 2024 after she criticized Scarborough and Brzezinski for meeting with Donald Trump after the election. “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea,” she wrote. “Period.” It’s not yet known whether the Morning Joe hosts played a role in the cancellation of Phang’s show.

Watch: Media Go on Racist Tirade Against Black Republican Tim Scott

These are precisely the sort of changes MSNBC will be required to make if the network’s ultra-wealthy (and white-privileged) hosts are unwilling to sacrifice a “fair share” of their massive salaries. Maddow has reportedly already taken a modest pay cut and is now believed to earn $25 million a year for part-time work, money that could be used to fund hundreds if not thousands of full-ride university scholarships for marginalized non-white students. Think of all the non-white jobs Maddow, Scarborough, and Brzezinski could save by agreeing to earn just $1 million per year. Better yet, they could channel the wise words of Barack Obama (net worth: $70 million), who once said, “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money,” by forgoing their entire salaries or agreeing to donate 100 percent of their earnings to anti-racist charities dedicated to the eradication of white supremacy.

Related: Lib Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Defends Membership in Exclusive All-White Beach Club

In any event, it’s unclear why MSNBC’s alleged concern about minimizing “external scrutiny” due to outbursts of vitriolic insanity did not extend to the Morning Joe duo, whose coverage of Trump during the election was so unhinged the network briefly suspended the show after Trump was nearly assassinated in July. Maddow’s deranged activism has also caused problems for the network, which recently settled a $30 million defamation lawsuit filed after Maddow and several of her white colleagues made “verifiably false” statements about a Georgia doctor they accused of harvesting uteruses at an immigration detention facility.

Watch: Rachel Maddow Says MSNBC Won’t Broadcast ‘Untrue Things’

Olbermann, who did more than anyone to boost Maddow’s career at MSNBC, recently argued that Maddow would never “do anything for principle,” suggesting the network host is motivated by a desire to hoard wealth and power at the expense of vulnerable minorities. She has reportedly amassed considerable influence at the network. Nevertheless, she was apparently unable to stop Reid’s firing, which she claimed was “a bad mistake.” The extent to which Maddow lobbied MSNBC brass behind the scenes to make the network less diverse remains unknown. She might not look like a woman, but she is. Racism experts have repeatedly explained that white women, even the liberal ones, are guilty of “perpetuating the violence of White Supremacy, especially against Black bodies.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the smiling, bespectacled, and filthy-rich face of white supremacy.

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A British court determined in a preliminary ruling that Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters defamed John Ware, a veteran journalist who made a documentary critical of Waters’s anti-Semitic history, when he called Ware a “lying, conniving Zionist mouthpiece” who supports the “genocide of the Palestinian people.” The development puts both Waters and the Hamas-friendly network Al Jazeera on the hook for damages.

In the Tuesday ruling, the British High Court of Justice found that Waters’s “statements are defamatory” because they were offered as fact, not opinion. The decision sets the stage for Ware to receive financial compensation not just from Waters but also from Al Jazeera, the Arab network funded in large part by the Hamas-friendly nation of Qatar. Waters’s comments targeting Ware came during a 2024 interview on the Al Jazeera network, which Ware sued in addition to Waters. The case could go to trial to determine damages, though barrister Simon Myerson predicted that Waters and Al Jazeera will settle with Ware.

Ware, a documentarian who produced a 2023 film examining Waters’s vast anti-Israel advocacy, sued the musician and Al Jazeera last year. Waters appeared on Al Jazeera to bash Ware’s film and accused the journalist of “cheerleading the genocide of the Palestinian people like almost more than anyone else on earth.”

Ware’s documentary, The Dark Side of Roger Waters, was produced for the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British nonprofit that combats Jew-hatred. In it, Ware examined the singer’s long history of anti-Israel activism and embrace of anti-Semitic imagery. Waters, for instance, dressed in Nazi regalia during a 2023 show and displayed an inflatable pig emblazoned with Jewish stars. Ware’s documentary detailed the musician’s plans to add other slogans and symbols to the pig, including “dirty kike,” “follow the money,” and “scum.”

His Nazi cosplay earned a rare rebuke from the Biden administration State Department, which described Waters as having a “long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.”

In the wake of Oct. 7, Waters said Hamas’s terror attack was justified and accused Israel of “making up stories” about widespread rape and torture on that day.

“Was it justified for [Hamas] to resist the occupation? Yeah,” Waters said just a month after the attack. “They are absolutely legally and morally bound to resist the occupation since 1967.”

Referring to reports that Hamas raped women, killed babies, and tortured civilians during its rampage through Israel, Waters downplayed the revelations.

“We don’t yet know what happened,” he said at the time. “Maybe there were some individual cases of civilians getting killed.”

Waters is also a leading supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, an anti-Semitic global campaign to wage economic warfare on the Jewish state.

The post British Court Rules Against Anti-Semitic Pink Floyd Frontman in Defamation Case Brought by Pro-Israel Journalist—and Al Jazeera Could Pay Damages appeared first on .

Among a crowd mourning Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s death and chanting “Death to Israel, death to America” in Beirut on Sunday was Charlotte Kates, a leader of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which the United States sanctioned for providing financial support to terrorists. Just last spring, she was instructing Columbia University students on “Palestinian resistance” tactics.

Tens of thousands of black-clad mourners flooded the funeral at Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium, Lebanon’s largest sports arena. They vowed support for Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist group that began attacking Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in solidarity with its ally, Hamas, following the latter’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli civilians. Israel, in response to Hezbollah’s assaults, invaded Lebanon and killed Nasrallah on Sept. 27, 2024.

“It is such an honor to be here in Beirut today, one among a sea of over a million people in collective tribute, mourning, love and commitment to the road of resistance and liberation exemplified by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Sayyed Hisham Safieddine,” Kates posted to X on Sunday with photos of the crowd.

“The masses are truly out in the streets, affirming the indelible living legacy of the great anti-imperialist leader of our day, the great Arab and international revolutionary, the beloved speaker of truth and warrior of justice,” Kates, Samidoun’s international coordinator, added.

In October, the United States sanctioned Samidoun and Kates’s husband, Khaled Barakat, for providing support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist organization that participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Less than a year before Nasrallah’s funeral, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the Ivy League school’s most notorious anti-Semitic student group—invited Kates and Barakat, a PFLP member, to deliver speeches on “the fight for liberation,” as part of a lecture titled “Palestinian Resistance 101.” Shortly after the event, which the Washington Free Beacon attended virtually, Columbia student radicals launched the anti-Israel encampment and eventually stormed a campus building.

In November, a month after the sanctions were issued, CUAD passed out pamphlets just outside Columbia’s Morningside Heights gates encouraging attendees to “get involved” with Samidoun. They included a QR code that sent users to Samidoun’s website, which touts an “Amsterdam free from Zionism” and calls to “globalize the intifada!”

“The fact is that October 7 changed the world … we saw the potential of a future for Palestine liberated from Zionism,” Kates told a group of keffiyeh-clad Columbia students during her March 24 speech.

She also praised Iran—Hezbollah’s backer—as “a nation on the side of the Palestinian people, intervening and building a movement of resistance to free this entire region … from U.S. imperialism.” She advocated for a campaign to eliminate America’s list of designated terror organizations.

“It is important to popularize campaigns to … scrap the U.S. terror list entirely, or at the very least to get Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, Filipino, and other revolutionary organizations off the terror list,” Kates said. “Because that’s a weapon that’s being used against the Palestinian people, against the Arab people, and against the solidarity movement as a whole, and in order to kind of fundamentally deform the politics of the movement.”

In August, Kates traveled to Tehran where Iran awarded her the “Eighth Annual Islamic Human Rights and Human Dignity Award.” Other recipients included Hamas head Ismail Haniyeh and Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the secretary general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a U.S.-designated terror group.

Barakat, meanwhile, explicitly endorsed terrorism against Jews during his own lecture for CUAD and lauded airplane hijackings as “one of the most important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

Barakat is not the only person to have glorified plane hijackings at Columbia. In October, Joseph Slaughter, a member of Columbia’s top disciplinary body and an English professor who defended the illegal encampment at the Ivy League school, delivered a lecture that lauded a string of terrorist plane hijackings as “spectacular” and “remarkable,” the Free Beacon reported.

CUAD has continued to terrorize campus. Last month, for example, anti-Israel radicals dumped cement into a campus building’s sewage system. A week earlier, pro-Hamas agitators stormed an Israeli history class and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers.

The post Terror Group Leader Who Trained Columbia Students on ‘Palestinian Resistance’ Attends Hezbollah Chief’s Funeral appeared first on .

Migrant encounters at the southern border have dropped to the lowest level since 2017 amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Border authorities recorded around 15,700 encounters in the 30 days since Trump’s inauguration, the lowest 30-day total since April 2017 and a 91 percent decline from the 166,900 monthly average under the Biden administration, according to Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen.

Encounters have plummeted 94 percent from their December 2023 peak of 263,900 under former president Joe Biden. During Biden’s term, an estimated 8 million migrants entered the United States illegally, with more than 13,000 migrants convicted of murder remaining at large as of late September.

Since his return to the White House, Trump has declared a national border emergency, which allowed him to deploy thousands of active-duty troops to help secure the southern border. Trump also signed an executive order ending what he called Biden’s “catch and release” policy, and he reinstated the “Remain in Mexico” program from his first term.

A total of 42,048 illegal migrants were removed from the United States between January 21 to February 18, Thiessen reported.

On February 16, border agents encountered only 229 migrants at the southern border. “I started as a Border Patrol Agent in 1984 and I don’t remember the numbers ever being that low,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said in an X post.

The Trump administration has also terminated all taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal migrants and designated Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa cartel, and six other drug cartels as global terrorist organizations.

Earlier this month, Trump used tariffs to pressure Mexico and Canada into deploying troops and personnel to secure their borders with the United States and curb the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants.

Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has widespread public support. Eighty-seven percent of Americans support deporting illegal migrants with criminal records, while 63 percent support removing all who entered illegally in the past four years, according to a New York Times poll.

The post A Month Into Trump’s Presidency, Border Encounters Fall to Lowest Level Since 2017 appeared first on .

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said Monday that she has no regrets about retweeting a post supporting Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel and blamed racism for the backlash to her pro-Hamas sympathies.

“I make no apologies for standing on the side of Palestinian liberation, at all,” Attiah said after a woman confronted her over the pro-Hamas post at a book signing, according to footage recorded by Algemeiner‘s Corey Walker.

The post, which Attiah retweeted soon after it was posted on the day of Hamas’s massacre, read, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”

Attiah said at the signing that the confrontation is “actually an example of … how violent it is, the response is, to anyone who speaks about, uh, Israel-Palestine and, frankly, I’d say, particularly if you’re black.” She did not mention that the woman who confronted her was also black.

The Post columnist has a long history of condemning the Jewish state and its people for defending themselves. One week after the October 7 attack, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Attiah in a column rebuked Israel for fighting back against terrorists. Around the same time, she said she would “never forgive” then-president Joe Biden for supporting Israel.

She has also defended former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, who has used the genocidal phrase “From the river to the sea,” and the anti-Semitic “Squad,” Commentary noted in December 2023.

Attiah was among the loudest critics of Post owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. While several Post employees have quit their jobs in protest, Attiah has yet to resign.

The columnist also faced accusations of racism in 2020 for a since-deleted tweet in which she floated the idea of “revenge” against white women, blaming them for everything from “the 1921 Tulsa Massacre” to the election of President Donald Trump.

“White women are lucky that we are just calling them ‘Karen’s’ [sic],” Attiah wrote. “And not calling for revenge.”

The post WATCH: WaPo Columnist, Confronted at a Book Event Over Her Hamas Sympathies, Says She Makes ‘No Apologies’ for Supporting October 7 appeared first on .

In the buildup to the House’s recent recess, the left-wing groups Indivisible and MoveOn touted their plans to organize DOGE protests at GOP town halls and congressional offices. In an Associated Press piece headlined, “The anti-Musk protest movement is expected to ramp up with Congress on recess,” the groups took aim at Elon, with MoveOn executive director Rahna Epting saying “people are mad as hell” about the billionaire’s efforts to slash government spending.

When some of those protests went viral days later, mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and CBS News cited them as proof of broad bipartisan “backlash” against DOGE. None mentioned Indivisible or MoveOn.

The groups, both of which have received generous funding from George Soros over the years, “were at the center of the demonstrations,” the Free Beacon‘s Collin Anderson reports. They launched “‘national mobilization’ efforts targeting the ‘Trump-Musk agenda‘ and ‘Trump-Musk coup‘ during the recess period.” Indivisible issued a “Musk or Us Recess Toolkit” that showed members how to find local town halls and gave them talking points.

Those materials, like the Associated Press piece, were publicly available. They didn’t end up in CBS, the Times, or the Post. CBS, for its part, did quote one organizer of a viral town hall protest targeting Georgia’s Rich McCormick, describing the woman, Maggie Goldman, as a McCormick constituent. She’s also a former campaign volunteer coordinator for Pete Buttigieg and a Democratic donor. She ran for her local county commission on an “inclusive policy agenda.”

READ MORE: Mainstream Media Outlets Cited Red-District DOGE Protests as Proof of Broad Musk ‘Backlash.’ Soros-Funded Liberal Groups Organized Them.

When it comes to states you’d expect champion race-conscious hiring policies at K-12 schools, Iowa probably isn’t high on the list. But scores of public districts in the Hawkeye state have “affirmative action plans that encourage race-based hiring and other diversity initiatives,” the Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium reports, and for now, they haven’t gotten rid of them.

The plans, which are required under state law, could imperil the districts’ federal funding under new Trump administration guidance.

While the law requiring the plans does not instruct districts to use racial preferences, it does expect them to set “goals and timetables for reduction of underrepresentation.” The result, in practice, has been a glut of race-conscious hiring initiatives across Iowa’s public school system, putting a state that Donald Trump won comfortably in 2024 on a collision course with his administration’s priorities.

The Department of Education said in a “Dear Colleague” letter this month that it would treat any form of race-based decision-making as a violation of federal law. The guidance, which takes effect on Feb. 28, even applies to programs that do not use race directly but are “motivated by racial considerations,” such as trainings that traffic in “crude racial stereotypes” or decisions that rely on “non-racial information as a proxy for race.”

That language could implicate a host of programs enshrined in the affirmative action plans. Des Moines Public Schools, for example, has a goal of increasing “the number of teachers of color in Kindergarten by 8%” and the “number of teachers of color in Third Grade by 5%.” While those goals “are not to be treated or understood as rigid and inflexible quotas that must be met,” according to the plan, race will “serve as a selection criteria” for any roles “where underrepresentation exists.”

READ MORE: Affirmative Action Plans Remain in Iowa Public Schools Despite Trump Order

Over on MSNBC, Joy Reid concluded a lackluster career at the left-wing network, donning a company-branded tracksuit to rant about “how to defend democracy and defeat white supremacy.”

That’s according to our Andrew Stiles, who watched Reid’s final episode so you wouldn’t have to. Reid “discussed Trump’s authoritarian assault on the Constitution with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a so-called fascism expert and history professor at New York University, as well as Ben Rhodes, the former Obama speechwriter who spearheaded the Iran nuclear agreement, attended the funeral of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and cried like a bitch when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016,” writes Stiles. “They also discussed the importance of black women.”

Speaking of crying like a bitch, Reid shed tears of her own while discussing MSNBC’s decision to fire her for low ratings. Speaking to the podcast “Win With Black Women” via Zoom on Sunday, Reid “sobbed sloppy tears while she defiantly defended her show from critics, insisting she was ‘not sorry’ that she ‘went hard on so many issues.'” She specifically referenced Nikole Hannah-Jones’s historically inaccurate 1619 Project, saying Jones “put into our spirit that we need to understand 1619 as the real founding of this country.”

Reid will be replaced by a trio of MSNBC weekend hosts: former Kamala Harris adviser Symone Sanders, anti-Trump “Republican” Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez, the daughter of former Democratic senator and convicted felon Bob Menendez. Notorious anti-Semite Al Sharpton appears unaffected by the overhaul.

Reid is still searching for the culprit who hacked her blog and left homophobic posts.

READ MORE: Joy Reid Concludes Lackluster Career at MSNBC

Away from the Beacon:

• A top Hamas official who leads the terror group’s foreign relations office expressed regret over Oct. 7, telling the New York Times that he wouldn’t have supported the rampage “if he had known of the havoc it would wreak on Gaza.” Oops! He backtracked after the Times published the interview, assuring his terrorist buddies that he supports the attack as “an expression of our people’s right to resistance.”
• Everybody hates Kathy: Antonio Delgado, New York’s lieutenant governor, is ditching his reelection bid, saying he won’t run alongside Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2026. Hochul fired back, saying she “had already begun taking steps to identify a new running mate for 2026.”
• 81 percent of voters support “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes” and 76 percent support “undertaking a full-scale effort to find and eliminate fraud and waste in government expenditures,” according to a new Harvard-Harris poll.

The post Left-Wing Groups Drum Up Red-District Doge ‘Backlash’ and Joy Reid Cries Her Way Out of MSNBC appeared first on .

Scores of Iowa public school districts now have affirmative action plans that encourage race-based hiring and other diversity initiatives, according to a new report by Parents Defending Education, potentially imperiling their federal funding under new guidance issued by the Trump administration.

The plans, which are required by state law, include hiring goals for minority teachers, courses on “equity in mathematics,” and bonuses for teachers who specialize in “culturally responsive leadership.” Some set percentage targets for “BIPOC representation” or explicitly say that race is “considered when making employment decisions.”

While the law requiring the plans does not instruct districts to use racial preferences, it does expect them to set “goals and timetables for reduction of underrepresentation.” The result, in practice, has been a glut of race-conscious hiring initiatives across Iowa’s public school system, putting a state that Donald Trump won comfortably in 2024 on a collision course with his administration’s priorities.

“The fact that this is taking place in a state that President Trump carried by such a wide margin in 2024 serves as a reminder of just how pervasive identity-based policies are in America and that identifying and terminating these programs is going to be an ongoing process for the foreseeable future,” said Nicole Neily, the director of Parents Defending Education. “Hiring on the basis of race was reprehensible during Jim Crow, and it’s just as odious—and illegal—as it was then.”

The Department of Education said in a “Dear Colleague” letter this month that it would treat any form of race-based decision-making as a violation of federal law. The guidance, which takes effect on Feb. 28, even applies to programs that do not use race directly but are “motivated by racial considerations,” such as trainings that traffic in “crude racial stereotypes” or decisions that rely on “non-racial information as a proxy for race.”

That language could implicate a host of programs enshrined in the affirmative action plans. Des Moines Public Schools, for example, has a goal of increasing “the number of teachers of color in Kindergarten by 8%” and the “number of teachers of color in Third Grade by 5%.” While those goals “are not to be treated or understood as rigid and inflexible quotas that must be met,” according to the plan, race will “serve as a selection criteria” for any roles “where underrepresentation exists.”

The Des Moines plan also gives teachers a salary bump if they complete Drake University’s “Culturally Responsive Leadership” degree program, which includes courses on “Urban Education” and “Equity in Mathematics.”

In the Waterloo Community School District, a program provides “financial resources and resilience support for Waterloo staff of color seeking a teaching certification.” In the Pella Community School District, “race, sex, or disability” can serve as a “‘plus’ factor for individuals from an underrepresented background,” while in the Sioux City Community School District, there are “multiple committees and teams devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusivity.”

All of those districts could lose federal funding if they do not suspend their affirmative action plans by the Feb. 28 deadline.

A spokeswoman for the Waterloo school district, Emily Frederick, said that the plan referenced in Parents Defending Education’s report was “outdated” and had not been in use since 2022. But the district’s most recent plan, which was active through the end of 2024, includes a long list of race-based programs as well as outright quotas, such as a policy of ensuring that “a person of color is represented on every hiring committee.”

“We are currently in the process of updating [our policies] per further guidance from the U.S. Department of Education and our attorneys,” Frederick told the Washington Free Beacon.

A spokeswoman for Sioux City Community School District, Leslie Heying, noted that its plan “is dated 2022-2024” and said that the district was “working to align our protocols and processes” with the “Dear Colleague” letter.

Representatives from other districts did not respond to requests for comment.

The law requiring the plans was passed in 1989, at a time when affirmative action was less politically salient. Its language of “goals and timetables” came directly from the executive order that Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1965—and which President Trump repealed on his second day in office—mandating affirmative action in federal contracting.

While that order forbade the use of racial quotas, it also forced contractors to create plans to remedy the underrepresentation of minorities.

The result was an unstable compromise between principles of non-discrimination and principles of equal results. Iowa’s education law, which uses the phrase “equal employment opportunity,” shows how that compromise can collapse into quotas and lead to the very sort of preferences that civil rights law officially prohibits, creating major liabilities for employers now that the political winds have shifted.

The plans themselves exemplify this dynamic. On page six of its “equal employment” plan, the West Des Moines Community School District states that an “affirmative action ‘goal’ is not a rigid ‘quota’ or a ‘set-aside’ of a specific position for a person of a particular race.” But on page 13, it outlines a set of “numerical goals” that are extremely specific, such as hiring “two non-unit and/or supervisor/specialists who identify as a race/ethnicity that is underrepresented.”

A plan for the College Community School District likewise includes detailed “goals” for each job category. By 2026, the plan states, there should be a “a minimum of 11% BIPOC” representation among the district’s 12 school principals, only one of whom—or 8 percent—is currently a minority. The same goal applies to elementary, secondary, and special education classroom teachers.

For roles where “BIPOC” are overrepresented relative to their share of the population—such as assistant principals, 20 percent of whom are minorities—the plan does not call for reductions in hiring. Instead, it says that the district should “continue to meet the staffing goal of a minimum of 11% BIPOC,” ensuring a permanent underrepresentation of white staffers.

As of Monday morning, the plan had been removed from the College Community School District’s website.

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When angry voters confronted Rep. Rich McCormick over DOGE at a town hall held in the Georgia Republican’s deep-red district, the New York Times, Washington Post, and CBS News cited the scene as proof of emerging bipartisan “backlash” over Elon Musk’s efforts to slash government spending. CBS included a quote from one of the protest’s organizers, Maggie Goldman, describing her only as a McCormick constituent.

Goldman does live in McCormick’s district, though she’s far from a concerned supporter of the two-term Republican. A self-described “Democrat & Political Activist,” Goldman, who did not respond to a request for comment, coordinated volunteers for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign in 2019 and 2020, according to her LinkedIn. Shortly thereafter, she ran for her local county commission as a Democrat seeking to enact a “more inclusive policy agenda.” Goldman has donated exclusively to Democrats and sent Kamala Harris’s campaign more than $1,500 last year, according to campaign finance records. On her Facebook page, she boasted of the national media attention the McCormick protest received, sharing screenshots of headlines alongside the caption, “We really were on .”

 

Across the country, similar protests played out at House GOP town halls and district offices. The demonstrations drove mainstream media coverage of brewing backlash against the Trump administration as the lower chamber left Washington, D.C., for a week-long recess. Well-funded liberal organizations organized many of them.

The George Soros-funded groups Indivisible and MoveOn were at the center of the demonstrations. Both groups launched national “mobilization” efforts targeting the “Trump-Musk agenda” and “Trump-Musk coup” during the recess period. MoveOn said its “members and allies will show up at congressional-led town halls and congressional offices around the country, targeting House Republicans whose votes will be crucial in opposing Trump and Musk’s harmful policies.” Indivisible issued a “Musk or Us Recess Toolkit” that showed members how to find their local town halls and urged them to “take the fight to Elon.”

The groups’ local organizers heeded the call, launching protests against House Republicans at town halls and district offices that garnered widespread media coverage. MoveOn targeted the likes of Arizona’s David Schweikert, California’s Ken Calvert, and Virginia’s Jen Kiggans, while Indivisible organized protests against Michigan’s Tom Barrett and Wisconsin’s Bryan Steil and Scott Fitzgerald, among others.

Local outlets mentioned Indivisible’s role in the protests when covering them. Urban Milwaukee, for example, wrote that Fitzgerald’s town hall attracted “about 100 people, largely organized by an organization called Indivisible, mostly members of the Washington/Ozaukee County Democratic Party.”

The New York Times and CBS also mentioned the Fitzgerald town hall, though neither included Indivisible’s involvement.

The Times, after noting that Fitzgerald “was asked to defend the administration’s budget proposals as voters demanded to know whether cuts to essential services were coming,” acknowledged that “many of the most vocal complaints came from participants who identified themselves as Democrats.” The outlet did not disclose that those participants had professional organizing help.

CBS, meanwhile, said Fitzgerald “faced pushback on the task force and calls for Congress to subpoena Musk to testify.” It cited a “local news outlet” that “also reported that the Washington County Democratic Party had encouraged people to show up to the meeting with Fitzgerald with signs” but omitted Indivisible. So did the Washington Post, which covered the McCormick town hall and others by noting 14 paragraphs into a piece titled, “Back in their districts, GOP lawmakers get an earful on DOGE and Musk” that “liberal groups encouraged their members to show up to town halls in deep-red territory.” The Post did not give any examples of those groups.

The outlets had plenty of warning that deep-pocketed left-wing groups were organizing the demonstrations. Beyond their public press releases and toolkits, the Associated Press reported on Indivisible and MoveOn’s plans to host rallies “outside town halls and congressional offices” in a piece titled, “The anti-Musk protest movement is expected to ramp up with Congress on recess.” The AP published the piece on Feb. 17, days before the Times, Post, and CBS ran their pieces on the protests. None of the three outlets responded to requests for comment.

Indivisible has a long history of organizing town hall protests—and enjoys an expansive budget while doing so.

The group used to maintain a “comprehensive list of all upcoming town halls” but did away with it in 2023, arguing that its local chapters are usually aware of event schedules in their area before the national group. It does, however, keep an up-to-date event list and provides members with instructions on how to find town halls to add to it. Soros’s Open Society Foundations has funneled more than $7.6 million to Indivisible since 2017. It’s given MoveOn nearly $2.5 million since 2016.

Indivisible’s co-founder, Ezra Levin, teased the recess demonstrations by calling Musk a “major weak link” in the Trump administration. “I can’t think of something that polls worse than the richest man in the world is coming after your Social Security check or your Meals on Wheels or your Head Start,” he told the AP.

In some swing districts, focus group findings contradict that assessment. An Axios focus group that featured swing voters in Arizona—where Schweikert faced a MoveOn-backed protest—found that 8 of the 11 participants approved of “Musk’s efforts in the administration.”

“Several expressed views that ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ are so prevalent that government agencies can be slashed or eliminated without hurting services on which they depend,” the outlet reported.

For their part, Indivisible and MoveOn have both backed unpopular far-left policies. Indivisible called it “critical to defund the police and reinvest in community services that keep everybody safe” following George Floyd’s death in 2020. Two years earlier, its political director called to “get rid of” Immigration and Customs Enforcement and “reimagine it and build something that actually works.” MoveOn has taken similar positions, calling to release all illegal immigrants from federal detention centers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Neither Indivisible nor MoveOn responded to requests for comment.

Jessica Costescu contributed to this report.

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