TRUST IN GOD AND KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY

Exposing the Gun Control Industry’s Financiers: The Joyce Foundation.

NSSF launched a new campaign this year called Gun Rights Insights. The goal is to drag the big money donors that fuel the gun control campaign into the sunlight. No more hiding behind veils and in corporate boardroom ivory towers.

Gun Rights Insights pulls back the curtain to show that the gun control agenda is nothing more than an astroturf agenda living off the funding and the backing of a few billionaires and progressive activist foundations flooding the field with waves of cash, up to $400 million annually.

With this money, they buy influence, media airtime and followers who buy into the false narrative that surrendering God-given rights will make America safer while they surround themselves with armed security in gated compounds.

Gun Rights Insights previously exposed antigun billionaire Michael Bloomberg, George Soros and Hollywood A-list celebrities.

Allow Gun Rights Insights to introduce…The Joyce Foundation.

Who They Are

The Joyce Foundation, based in Chicago, was founded by Beatrice Joyce Kean in 1948, the heiress of an Iowa lumber executive. They now pitch the foundation as a “private, nonpartisan philanthropy that invests in public policies and strategies to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation in the Great Lakes region.”

Founder Kean passed away in 1972, leaving 90 percent of her estate — or $120 million — to the foundation, according to InfluenceWatch, a watchdog group run by the Capital Research Center. Soon after, The Joyce Foundation shifted focus to include government policies. Notably, they target gun control with a board comprised of anti-gun activists.

Chief of among those steering The Joyce Foundation’s work was President Barack Obama, who was on the foundation’s board of directors from 1994–2002, before he entered public life. President Obama espoused strict gun control, calling for a ban on modern sporting rifles, America’s most-popular selling centerfire rifle. He also demanded a national firearm registry through a universal background check scheme.

Valerie Jarrett was a former senior advisor to President Obama and is currently the CEO of the Obama Foundation. She’s a former board member of The Joyce Foundation.

Today, other members of his White House still serve on The Joyce Foundation’s board. Margot Rogers, was the Chief of Staff to the Obama administration’s U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Today, Rogers is The Joyce Foundation’s Chair of the Board. The Vice Chair of the Board is filled by Tracey Maeres, who was on President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Cecilia Munoz served eight years in the Obama administration, including five years leading the White House Domestic Policy Council. Today, Munoz is a board member for the Joyce Foundation.

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Anti-gunners Hilariously Claim the CDC is Wrong, the Gun Violence Archive is Right

By Lee Williams

The Trace, the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control empire, moved a story Monday that has caused a bit of laughter—actually, a lot of laughter.

“Inflated Claim About Guns and Self-Defense Returns to CDC Website” claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, better known as the CDC, estimates “a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.”

“The change reflects the Trump administration’s staunch Second Amendment advocacy, putting the president in lockstep with a gun lobby that’s long promoted the idea that a ‘good guy with a gun’ is the only thing that can stop a ‘bad guy with a gun,’” wrote reporter Jennifer Mascia.

Ms. Mascia describes herself as “a senior news writer and founding staffer at The Trace. She previously reported on gun violence at The New York Times and was a contributor to CNN’s Guns in America team.”

Whom does Ms. Mascia use to call out the CDC and the Trump administration for publishing this inaccuracy? Well, it’s none other than the Gun Violence Archive and its leader, Mark Bryant.

Gun Violence Archive executive director Mark Bryant. (Photo courtesy Mark Bryant).

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Larry Correia
@monsterhunter45
Looks like it is time to once again post my A to Z Guide to Anti-Gun Vulture Talking Points!

A. Gun owners are never trained enough so are dangerous and shouldn’t be armed at all.

B. Gun owners who do train are crazy psychos living out their wannabe fantasies itching to shoot someone.

C. Even though it takes orders of magnitude more effort to become marginally effective with martial arts than a gun, you are better off using martial arts and not having a gun.

D. *Real Men* use their hands. This is why your mom and grandma shouldn’t have guns either.

E. Twitter randos who have never been punched in the face are experts on real life violence, and whatever you have personally experienced doesn’t count.

F. No matter how trained you are, it is never enough for the hypothetical attacker they make up. Sure, your concealed handgun might be enough to stop a regular robber or rapist, but what about if you get attacked by 20 Chechen terrorists with AKs, huh? Huh? (we call this the Dracula Riding Godzilla rule)

G. If the anti-gun vulture was ever in the military, this makes them a Military Trained Expert. Even though most of the time this means they got to put 20 rounds through an M-16 once in 1992.

H. No matter how many certified MMA bad asses or combat vets go “lol wut, dork? I’d rather have a gun.” the anti-gun Twitter vulture will remain undeterred.

I. Goldilocks Rules apply. No matter how much you know about guns, you’re either too ignorant and dangerous, or you know too much and that makes you dangerous. Whatever amount the anti-gun zealot knows is Just Right.

K. Whatever stats they pull out are sacrosanct. If you cite any numbers they reflexively scream “SOURCE?!” and then have some reason they won’t accept that source when provided. “The actual FBI Crime Statistics? LAME!”

L. At some point they’ll need to talk about how big our penises are, because guns are for compensation. Obviously the female gun owners are compensating for their tiny uteruses.

M. “I believe in the Second Amendment BUUUUUUUUT-” (insert statist BS here)

N. If you insist on using terms correctly and words having actual definitions, clearly this demonstrates you are a fanatic. Words mean whatever they need to mean in that moment, especially legal ones.

O. “Castle Doctrine” is a secret right wing code word that means that you can just shoot whoever you want.

P. Get ready for a history lesson about “what the founders really intended” from some dummy who was stoned through every history class in high school.

Q. Everybody knows big blue cities are way safer than the scary red state flyover country.

R. Gun control isn’t racist! Sure, historical gun control was all about keeping guns out of the hands of the “undesirables” like freed slaves, Indians, and the Irish, but that’s totally different now!

S. AR-15s are the most dangerous gun that’s ever existed. It can fire ten thousand ultra deadly murder bullets a second and each one can explode a moose from a thousand yards away. There is nothing this miracle death machine can’t do.

T. lol your AR-15s are utterly useless against a tyrannical government.

U. The NRA is an all-powerful, super evil entity which has tricked innocent Americans into wanting ultra deadly assault rifles, to satisfy their incessant blood lust. They do this through their ultra powerful marketing, like giving out free hats.

V. Anti-gun organizations are all totally innocent grass roots movements made up of moms, orphans, and kittens, funded entirely by bake sales, who just want the best for all Americans.

W. “I grew up around guns” makes you an unassailable subject matter expert on the topic.

X. The gun industry is made up of giant soulless mega corporations who make trillions of dollars off of selling Glocks to preschoolers. This message was brought to you by benevolent small businesses like the six companies that own most of the world’s media.

Y. Even though everything the anti-gunner proposes is ass backwards and would just make the problems they are crying about worse, and everywhere they get their way good people are disarmed while evil doers are empowered…they CARE HARDER than we do. So we’re the real bad guys.

Z. “You sound angry.”

Don’t DSA the USA, Protect Liberty to Stop Communism

By Larry Keane

There’s a dark mood creeping into American politics that has even the most die-hard gun control politicians worried. Democrats, typically (but not always) aligned with gun control, are facing the prospect of their political party turning their gaze to complete control.

Enter the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

These candidates for political office aren’t your grandfather’s Democrats or even limousine liberals. They can’t even honestly call themselves socialists. They’re cosplaying communists who are shredding any pretense of respect or admiration for the U.S. Constitution.

This is what George Orwell warned of in his novel, “1984.” They want complete and total control of the American government, including openly calling for abolishing of the U.S. Constitution, tearing down the balance of powers between the three branches of government, destroying of Department of War and most ominously, seizing the “resources and production.”

Make no mistake. Controlling the firearm and ammunition industry would be on the top of that list.

Who is the DSA?

The DSA has been making waves by striking out against Democratic candidates in primaries. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Most notably, disgraced former Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Graham Platner, the fabled “oyster farmer” whose scandal-ridden past finally crashed his run for office, is an avowed member of the DSA.

But Platner wasn’t democratic by any means. He was full-on Communist. That was uncovered in his previous online postings, which he attempted to delete. Holding his hand the whole way along was U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). That’s the same Sen. Sanders who honeymooned in Moscow in 1988, while the Communist Soviet Union was still in power.

Platner’s rise and inglorious immolation only emboldened members of the DSA. More candidates are on tickets in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, FloridaMichigan and Wisconsin. Democrats, who are notoriously anti-Second Amendment, are suddenly finding themselves having to defend against a communist flank in their own party.

That should concern everyone who believes the U.S. Constitution is the founding document that guides America’s form of government and protects Second Amendment rights. The DSA’s party platform essentially calls to tear it all down. They would burn it to rule over the ashes.

DSA Platform

The DSA’s platform includes abolition of the U.S. Senate (sorry, Sen. Sanders for losing your job), replacing the President of the United States and U.S. Supreme Court with an Executive and Judicial Branch that would be subordinate to what’s left of Congress.

That’s not reforming the U.S. Constitution. That’s complete annihilation of it. The first three articles of the U.S. Constitution set up the federal government’s Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches. Each branch is co-equal and is a check and balance on the other.

The DSA would give their new form of government complete authority, with the Executive and Judiciary subservient to the authority of what’s left of the Legislative Branch. It’s spelled out in their platform where they call for “a new democratic constitution.”

The DSA platform also espouses seizing control of the means of production. The DSA’s Constitution & Bylaws state in Article II that “We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production…”

Further, in 2018, the DSA explicitly called for the repeal of the Second Amendment, stating, “… the only way to guarantee that we will dramatically reduce acts of violence involving guns is to remove guns from society…” The DSA called for adoption of a 28th Amendment, repealing the Second Amendment and the prohibiting of “manufacturing, transportation or importation in or into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of pump-action, semi-automatic or automatic firearms.”

That’s not just ending an individual right to keep and bear commonly-owned firearms (the DSA would “allow” individuals to maintain ownership of single-shot firearms), it means the DSA would seize control of the firearm and ammunition industry, since the DSA platform calls for “popular control of resources and production.”

That’s full-on communism, which is marked by brutal violence.

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Is China Also Meddling in Second Amendment Fight?

I do not hate any groups of people because of where they come from, what their ancestors did, or anything beyond their own actions as individuals, which might then land them in a group that I hate. People who hurt others, especially children, for example.

But I don’t blink about hating governments, and China has been a special case in my mind for years.

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump took to (most of) the airwaves to announce some disturbing evidence regarding China and its attempts to meddle in the 2020 election.

Considering Trump and his election integrity fight, I understand him bringing it up, though the American Left is looking at the same evidence we are and claiming it’s nonsense, as is the fact that American intelligence personnel downplayed the threat.

What I got out of that, though, beyond the obvious, was a reminder of how China isn’t just meddling in our elections. As a nation, I honestly believe they are trying to destabilize us entirely. It’s speculation on my part, to be sure, but let me put it out there for your consideration.

First, let’s talk about so-called Glock switches.

These devices have been around for decades, but were just some obscure toy that only a handful of people ever got to lay eyes on. Then, a few years ago, they started showing up on American streets. They were thrown on the back of Glocks and similar firearms, then used to spray rounds throughout our inner cities.

While these can be printed domestically, a large number of the devices recovered come from Chinese manufacturers. They’re then shipped into the United States, often with some ridiculous nomenclature that obscures what they really are, and then end up in the hands of some of the worst people in our communities.

Meanwhile, what is China doing? They’re using their own English-language media outlets to pretend that gun rights are a human rights violation. In light of these two facts, their concern rings extra hollow.

But it’s easy to dismiss Chinese media as propaganda because that’s what it is.

However, in his speech, President Trump also alleged that China intended to pay American “journalists” large sums of money to amp up the criticism against the president in their work. Yes, this is a violation of journalistic ethics, but how many will figure that they’re just being paid to say the same thing they always would?

To be clear, I’m not sure if any accepted the offers or if the offers were actually made. That information didn’t seem to make it into any of the coverage of the recently declassified documents.

Yet, if they would do it about elections, might they also pay journalists to ramp up the pressure for gun control? What about using a billionaire and his network of NGOs to fund anti-gun organizations?

After all, China does not benefit from a strong United States. It wants to be the dominant power in the world, and we stand in the way of that. Even if there’s never been any discussion of invading the American mainland, thus needing gun control to minimize the risk to Chinese troops, the gun control debate creates a kind of pressure point that can be exploited.

Especially if gun confiscation were to ever come to pass in a meaningful way.

At that point, the United States would explode into civil war. Our ability to project power abroad has to be drawn down while we deal with such massive destabilization domestically. China, naturally, would fill in the gap.

Look, I’m not saying this is happening. Again, this is speculation, but it’s not something I pulled out of the ether, either. There’s evidence they’ve tried this with our elections, for crying out loud. Influencing a political debate would be trivial by comparison.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the need to preserve all the things that matter. Not just items or ideas, but skills and competencies. Above all of that, though, there’s a profound need to protect the United States and our basic civil liberties, for which the Second Amendment stands as the insurance policy for all the others.

China is a global threat, and nothing that the president said downplays that in the least. The question is, what else are they meddling with while no one is or was willing to pay attention?

DeSantis Officially Calls Antifa and CAIR What They Really Are.

It’s a sign of what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the rest of us are up against that the Miami area’s PBS station, WLRN, headlined its story about Florida’s new designation of Antifa and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as terrorist groups this way: “DeSantis: Florida set to label Muslim civil rights nonprofit a terrorist group under new law.”

The obvious intent of that headline is to give WLRN’s remaining handful of readers, who are no doubt all already hardcore leftists, the impression that DeSantis, drunk on “Islamophobia” and right-wing “hate,” is gratuitously naming an innocent, and indeed, noble, civil rights organization a terrorist group just because it’s non-Christian and presumably full of “brown” people.

In reality, however, CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements about how Islamic law should be imposed in the U.S. (Ahmad denies this, but the original reporter stands by her story.)

CAIR has opposed virtually every anti-terror measure that has been proposed or implemented, and the United Arab Emirates has declared it a terror organization. CAIR’s Hussam Ayloush in 2017 called for the overthrow of the U.S. government. CAIR’s national outreach manager in 2019 was an open supporter of Hamas. CAIR top dog Nihad Awad said the October 7 jihad massacre of 1,200 Israelis made him “happy.”

Awad and Omar Ahmad, two officials of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), founded this Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood group in 1994. The federal government shut down the IAP in 2005 as a Hamas front. Over the years, several CAIR officials have been convicted of participating in violent jihad activities.

Meanwhile, CAIR has exhorted Muslims in the U.S. to refuse to cooperate with law enforcement. In Jan. 2011, it came to light that a CAIR chapter in California had circulated a poster reading “Build a Wall of Resistance” and “Don’t Talk to the FBI.” Cyrus McGoldrick, a former official of CAIR’s New York chapter, even threatened informants, tweeting with brutal succinctness: “Snitches get stitches.” Zahra Billoo of CAIR-San Francisco has declared that Muslims have no obligation to talk to the FBI and should contact CAIR if the FBI asks to talk to them.

Yet despite its connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, the terror convictions of several of its former officials, and its virtually unanimous opposition to counter-terror laws, investigations, and other initiatives, CAIR remains widely respected. Nearly everyone (particularly in Washington) assumes that it is exactly what it says it is: a Muslim civil rights organization, working for the rights of Muslims in the U.S. and deeply loyal to Constitutional principles and freedoms. The organization’s website features testimonials from congressmen and senators of both parties, as well as security and military officials, testifying to how the organization has perfected the art of deception.

So great is CAIR’s influence, and presumably Antifa’s as well, that WLRN’s report warned darkly that DeSantis’ move could blow up on the Republicans. Former Florida Panhandle state House Republican Joel Rudman said: “I think that when you give that much authority to an elected, or, in the case of this bill, sometimes non-elected officials, I think that’s very dangerous.”

Related: Arizona School Board Member in Hot Water for… Criticizing Islam

Rudman explained: “Now, my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, I’m sure they’re looking at this bill, saying, ‘These statutes. They can’t be warped. They can’t be abused. We have no intention of abusing them.’ But you have to understand that every bill you pass into law, there’s going to have some unintended consequences, and you have to be prepared for how those statutes are going to be interpreted when you’re not the majority party.… I think any constitutional conservative Republicans should have a problem with that bill.”

No one should ever allow himself to be intimidated into refraining from doing something right for fear that someone else will do something wrong in response. Nevertheless, Rudman was essentially predicting that Florida Democrats will, if they gain power, start declaring groups they dislike to be terrorist organizations, and indeed, the left is so morally bankrupt and power-mad at this point that this is a very real possibility.

Nevertheless, regarding CAIR and Antifa, DeSantis is absolutely correct and should stand his ground.

This Is Why Some Want Your Guns

In 2023, Jason Aldean made waves with “Try That in a Small Town.” The song and accompanying video made it pretty clear that much of the lawlessness we see in American cities, particularly the political sort, such as riots, wouldn’t fly in small-town America. In fairness, it’s a good way to get your butt handed to you.

Whether or not you’re left alive to learn from your mistakes would directly depend on how stupid you were.

Of course, a lot of people on the left got very butthurt over it, claiming that the song was endorsing political violence, racism, and everything else they deem horrible in society…unless it’s them doing it.

The point, though, was that small towns didn’t play around, and since people are far more likely to be armed, their refusal to play around would not make them attractive places to try such shenanigans.

Well, someone on Reddit seemed to not get the memo, and it’s actually kind of funny.

It seems that the author hasn’t realized that rural Americans don’t rely on the police to protect them. If “The Revolution” were to start in small towns, what you’re going to see is something that will make the Battle of Athens look like a thumb-wrestling convention.

Sure, rural communities only have a couple of cops–my father, when he was chief in Leary, Georgia, had three officers at the department’s largest, and by the end, he was flying solo–but that’s because a lot of the time, the police are just there to draw the chalk line around the bad guy’s body.

What we need to understand, though, is that while this is just one rando on Reddit, where anyone can post anything, it represents what a lot of people would like to do.

Is it any wonder that these same people want to inflict gun control on the rest of the country? See, while right now, small-town America can generally handle itself just fine from a rampaging mob, the reason most people won’t bring up a “suggestion” like this is that the rural communities have the guns to fight back, even in states like California or New York.

Removing the guns from the equation is critical, especially as most people live in the cities, so even if they’re not part of this so-called revolution, they’re not going to be the ones impacted directly. They think that guns lead to the crime they see in their communities, so they support gun control with the misperception that it is a benefit to society.

The truth is that while not every gun control advocate is an authoritarian, every authoritarian favors gun control. Removing a civil liberty, though, is an inherently authoritarian act, and it can’t be successfully framed otherwise. Many try, but it fails simply because they can’t get away from the fact that it impacts the innocent far more than the guilty.

And, for those inclined to incite some communist “revolution” on the rest of the country, their masses must meet unarmed opposition. Guns are equalizers, and they can’t have that.

For now, it really is “Try That in a Small Town.”

If they get their way, though, make no mistake, they will. The fact that so many Democrats are swooning over “Democratic Socialists”–which are still just commies, but commies with sprinkles–suggests that more of them want to do this than we might otherwise suspect.

Luckily, Antifa is now officially a terrorist organization, and a group of them got a few centuries in prison for being lefty terrorists, which means anyone trying to do this is going to have a problem even before they get to Mayberry.

But if they make it there, the Second Amendment makes damn sure we can start stacking them before they can be offended by the fact.

Why Black Codes Shouldn’t Be Viewed as Legal Precedent

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took an interesting position in her Wolford dissent. In it, she actually argued that measures enacted prior to the 14th Amendment, which were meant to disarm black Americans following the Civil War, should be viewed as constitutional, if for no other reason than they didn’t explicitly say they just applied to black people.

But the thing is, we all know what they were about.

Cam hit on that on Thursday shortly after the decision came down.

Over at The National Review, Dan McLaughlin also had thoughts about the inane commentary from Jackson.

Jackson writes this as if she is completely oblivious to both the cause-and-effect relationship between the Black Codes and the enactment of the 14th Amendment and the fact that states could violate the Second Amendment with impunity before 1868 because until then it only bound the federal government. (Of course, nearly all such states had their own state constitutional guarantees, but Jackson just blows past the distinction.)

The 14th Amendment problem with these laws is not just that they would be struck down as racially discriminatory; it’s that even race-neutral laws that aimed to restrict the rights of freed black Southerners were a big reason the Republican Congress went beyond banning race discrimination and included within Section 1 of the 14th Amendment much broader guarantees against states stripping their citizens of rights. In 1865, Louisiana could ban guns or speech without violating federal law; in 1868, it could not.

Also, the fact that the laws were discriminatory in intent, often discriminatory on their face, regionally particular, broke with how white men were regulated across the country, and flew in the face of prior practice, are certainly all reasons to consider them a poor representative of an established, nationwide tradition. (Jackson cites the opinions of Daniel Sickles, but Sickles’ views of gun rights were hardly consistent, given that he shot the U.S. attorney for D.C. to death in the street for sleeping with his wife.)

The race discrimination isn’t merely an embarrassing footnote; it’s in many cases a sign that laws were being imposed on the minority that the majority would not have tolerated and did not tolerate in states without large populations of newly freed slaves. In the case of the 1865 Louisiana law cited by Katyal, it should be noted that putting the burden of applying the law on the decision of a private actor (the property owner) was fairly clearly a way of ensuring that it could be applied in discriminatory fashion.

It would be a different story if these were widely adopted laws that were also used by racists for racist reasons. There are many such cases. But the Black Codes were such a prominent part of Hawaii’s argument here because there were so few other straws to grasp.

And let’s be real here, while Jackson seems to think that because they weren’t explicitly racist, and because they weren’t overturned at the time by the courts of the era, they’re somehow an acceptable analog that should be used.

However, the whole idea of historic analogs from Bruen wasn’t about looking for the laws that might have prompted the 14th Amendment–one of the two eras Bruen tells judges to look at for analogs–but that were considered constitutional afterward.

To my knowledge, there were no cases that expressly upheld the law prohibiting carrying a firearm on plantation property without permission following the ratification of the 14th Amendment.

McLaughlin quotes Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “But even if Hawaii is right that the how is analogous, it also must identify an analogous why. The Black Codes were enacted to subordinate newly freed slaves. Hawaii obviously does not contend that its law promotes an analogous interest. So it’s law, and the default rules in the Black Codes are not relevantly similar.” She also notes that most would be happy to know that their law isn’t considered racist, unlike the Black Codes.

The important distinction here is that the Black Codes, particularly this one, were purely about disarming black Americans. They were racist on the surface and were only about empowering racism. In that way, they were no different than poll taxes and land ownership requirements for voting registration. They were created explicitly to limit the rights of freed slaves who were, at this time, American citizens.

When the only measures you can find that justify your preferred policies are inherently racist, most of us would take a step back and wonder exactly what the hell we’re doing with ourselves. Hawaii, and anti-gunners as a group, have no such self-awareness. They simply push the idea that laws which were unconstitutional because of how they targeted particular people at the time, as if that shouldn’t matter.

I honestly don’t see how either Hawaii’s attorneys or these two justices were able to look at themselves in the mirror for believing such blatantly racist measures were totally fine precedents for curtailing the rights of others.

It’s like looking at Ted Bundy as a role model for how to talk to girls.

American universities’ Chinese Students and Scholars Associations are Communist Party’s foreign missions in disguise.

‘At a time when China is escalating its attacks on our republic and the rest of the free world, the risks of not acting to restrict these associations far outweigh the benefits.’

Erik Durneika Opinion Editor

China is aggressively expanding its influence operations across the United States, with higher education acting as a major conduit for such malign activity. Most attention has been focused on U.S. universities accepting Chinese funding and China-linked researchers receiving taxpayer money. However, there’s another aspect of Chinese infiltration that deserves more attention: Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs).

There are 150 CSSA chapters at colleges and universities across the country. Though they appear to be harmless cultural groups at first glance, these organizations play a central role in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) united front work, which aims to monitor Chinese students abroad, stifle any form of opposition to the regime, and co-opt individuals who aren’t affiliated with the party.

CSSA constitutions, websites, and members reveal that Chinese consulates supervise and provide direct support to these groups. For example, the University of Connecticut CSSA chapter’s website says that it is an “official Chinese association supported by the Consulate General of the P.R. China in New York,” while the University of Michigan CSSA’s constitution states that it is accredited by the Chinese consulate in Chicago.

And in a Chinese social media post that has since been deleted, the University of Pittsburgh’s CSSA apparently admitted to receiving $6,000 per year from the Chinese consulate. These associations are doing as much as possible to obfuscate their ties to the CCP.

 

 

So, what’s at stake? First, and perhaps most immediately apparent, academic freedom and free speech.

There are countless instances of CSSAs censoring and intimidating students, researchers, and groups that challenge Beijing’s propaganda machine — a CSSA member assaulting an anti-CCP student protester at a Harvard University event, Columbia University canceling a human rights panel after CSSA backlash, a group of Chinese students disrupting a Brandeis University virtual event, and Chinese students taunting an Uyghur student speaker at Cornell University.

This type of behavior is a direct assault on our national sovereignty and seeks to create an environment of fear, all while pushing Beijing’s narrative. But I’d expect nothing less from America’s top adversary that operates in the gray zone, below the threshold of armed conflict.

These groups also pose a threat to U.S. national security. They act as another channel through which Beijing can recruit and mobilize Chinese nationals to steal intellectual property and sensitive information to aid its military buildup, which has accelerated in recent years. Intellectual property theft costs the U.S. economy anywhere from $400 billion to $600 billion per year, with China being the primary offender.

The response from American higher education to Chinese malfeasance through these associations has been abysmal and outright infuriating.

Columbia University suspended its CSSA branch in 2015 due to financial and student policy violations, only to reinstate the group’s club status not long after.

And at Harvard University, the Office of Academic Integrity and Student Conduct placed three anti-CCP undergraduate protestors on disciplinary probation and sent the CSSA-affiliated student who forcibly removed one of the protestors from the event an apology letter.

Caving to CSSAs’ demands to cancel events that the CCP considers sensitive counts as compliance. It serves only to legitimize these groups.

Given American academia’s lack of interest in addressing this issue, it’s time for the Trump administration to take action. The next best thing to banning these associations would be for the U.S. Department of State to label them as foreign missions under the Foreign Missions Act, coupled with aggressive enforcement. Such a designation is deserved considering CSSAs’ sources of funding and the manner in which they operate.

A foreign mission label would require chapters to receive official government approval for public events and to disclose information about financial transactions and personnel. In other words, CSSAs would be put under the federal microscope.

For too long, foreign adversaries have exploited the openness of American higher education. CSSAs are merely one part of the CCP problem on campuses across the country, but they’re an important one. At a time when China is escalating its attacks on our republic and the rest of the free world, the risks of not acting to restrict these associations far outweigh the benefits.

Washington must rise to the occasion as colleges and universities choose to look the other way.

We Won’t Let Anti-Gun Billionaires Who Finance Civilian Disarmament Live in the Shadows Anymore.

For far too long, anti-gun groups have been nothing more than snake oil salesmen. They claim to speak for a vast army of grassroots citizens, but the reality is these groups are astroturf. They aren’t rooted in anything more than anti-gun animus. They’re also not nearly as down-to-earth with the people they claim to represent.

They’re a high-price, but cheap knockoff of the real thing. It’s fugazi grassroots.

NSSF has called them out in the past for their bought-and-paid-for activism and it’s time to do it again. Pull back the curtain and it’s easy to see that the antigun movement isn’t much more than a few billionaires and activist foundations pouring cash into their pet gun control projects…to the tune of over $400 million every year.

gun control orgs organizations

It’s also a willing media that goes right along with them, parroting half-truths and twisting narratives to demonize American gun owners and the firearm industry that serves them.

No more. Welcome Gun Rights Insights.

Gun Rights Insights is a new outreach initiative, including periodic videos, to pull back the veil that these anti-gun billionaires creep around telling America to give up their Second Amendment rights while they enjoy paid armed security. The “rules-for-thee, not-for-me” era must come to an end. That’s why NSSF’s Gun Rights Insights will be taking note of the gun control hypocrisy.

Anti-Gun Billionaire Michael Bloomberg

Take for instance, anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg. The former New York City Mayor has made it his life’s goal to eliminate Second Amendment rights across the nation, spending over $50 million to attack lawful firearm ownership. While mayor, he organized Mayors Against Illegal Guns. That group was discredited when they “honored” the terrorist and Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a “gun violence victim” in 2013. Add to that, several MAIG members have, ironically, been charged with firearms-related offenses.

Bloomberg, of course, is the financier of Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action and funds their anti-gun media mouthpiece The Trace.

Michael Bloomberg Angry
Michael Bloomberg (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams)

The Trace was seeded with funding tied to the gun control movement. The Trace claims to be “editorially independent,” but when a newsroom is funded by and built around a single political issue with the backing of major gun control activists, it’s fair — necessary, even — to scrutinize how it frames the facts.

After all, The Trace is headed by John Feinblatt, who also heads Everytown for Gun Safety and once served as a senior advisor to Bloomberg when he was mayor. Feinblatt is the principal officer listed on tax filings for The Trace. Everytown, of course, is a gun control organization that wants to see lawful firearm ownership eliminated in America.

john feinblatt president of everytown for gun safety
John Feinblatt (Image: NBC News)

To top it all off, The Trace admits that it has “more than a thousand readers who have stepped up to support financially.” The Trace reported they received over $6.3 million in 2024, according to the watchdog group InfluenceWatch. That means to make its budget work, each of those readers would have had to donated over $6,300.

That’s not likely. The Trace’s own website states they make public all donors who give over $1,000 or more per year. The Trace lists over 60 donors and donating foundations that reads like a veritable “who’s who” of gun control supporters.

The Soros Family and Foreign Money

George Soros, and now his son Alex, are another source of deep pockets for anti-gun efforts. George Soros’s entities spent $9 million for lobbying efforts to attack Second Amendment rights, including fighting to allow frivolous lawsuits to clog the courts and attempt to bankrupt the firearm industry through their “legislation-through-litigation” strategy.

By World Economic Forum – Flickr: George Soros CC BY-SA 2.0

Soros even worked with the Gun Action on Gun Violence, which assisted in the ill-fated and frivilous $10 billion lawsuit by Mexico against U.S. firearm manufacturers.

Alexander Soros
Alexander Soros (Image: Open Society Foundations)

That doesn’t even take into account the Hollywood celebrities who regularly harangue gun owners and the firearm industry. They do this while making movies and television shows featuring firearms, many times being used in irresponsible and illegal ways. And they do it while enjoying the safety of armed bodyguards.

The time is past due to expose this astroturf effort for what it is. It’s a paper-thin campaign to ostracize lawful firearm ownership, funded by wealthy elites who can afford their own armed security, but want to deny Second Amendment rights to law-abiding Americans. Poking holes into that false narrative is what Gun Rights Insights aims to do. Stay tuned.

Democrats Built a Patronage Hive and Act Shocked That the Radicals Want the Keys

The Party of Algae and ‘Our Democracy’
“. . .a political party doesn’t lose 95 percent of a registration advantage because voters are kinda annoyed. Something much, much deeper is going on.” — Richard Landwirth

Okay, convince me that gay-Islamic-race-communism is a “progressive” political program America is going to buy like corn flakes. The Lefty-left wants to think so, as it lurches from one peak of mental illness to an even greater one in the 130 days to the midterms. Look how successful they’ve been with open borders, defunding the police, men in the girl’s swim lane, no cash bail, sex-change surgery for kids, free-for-all elections, hatin’ on white people, and open Medicare fraud. The new re-branding strategy as “Democratic Socialism” only tells you that reality has ceased to interest them.

No, winning electoral districts stuffed with illegal aliens in bright blue cities with tiny overall voter turnouts won’t sweep the nation like love. More likely it’s a harbinger of the party’s approaching death, like the Whigs going down the drain in 1852, gurgle-gurgle. Advocating to destroy American society is a poor sales pitch. The party’s old-line leadership frantically seeks some way to neutralize the rising influence of Zohran Mamdani and his disciples, but so far nothing works. An odor of desperation fills the air.

One thing you can say about the gay-Islamic-race-communists is that they are well-organized, which is understandable since their political program resembles an ant farm, a dis-individuated collective with insectile characteristics, workers and soldiers toiling in mindless solidarity to occupy more electoral territory so as to vanquish their “oppressors,” Trump and the big feet of his capitalist minions.

Meanwhile, though, the money flows dry up as the old Big Donor Dawgs freak-out at the prospect of having their fortunes confiscated, eaten by this advancing ant-swarm, while Scott Bessent and Todd Blanche work to disassemble the giant, hive-like matrix of NGOs that, for years, laundered US taxpayer dollars through the Democratic Party’s patronage system. In New York City, Philly, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Portland, the NGOs furnished comfortable salaries for young activists churned out remorselessly by Higher Ed, but all that’s starting to look like a bygone Shangri-la, a lost world.

“Many Democratic primary voters, however, are in no mood for defensiveness. As they see it, they’ve been failed by a cautious, compromising establishment, and they’re going to overthrow it.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

Of course, the loss of those cushy jobs and perqs has pitched that young demographic into a yet greater rage, prompting them to wreak vengeance and havoc on the system that took their “entitlements” away. Activists want to do activism, which is not necessarily the same as working for a living. It’s working for an ideal, a cause — to abolish the very society based on working for a living and replace it with a parent-like, hovering, all-powerful government that provides your every need by “seizing the means of production.”

The trouble is, this has been tried before, many times in the previous century, and the track-record is discouraging, exhibit-A being the old Soviet Union, the experiment that failed. Why? Because after seizing the means of production, the state bureaucracy lacks the skills, the spirit, and the creative juice to produce much of anything, and especially to do it well. All it can actually contribute to the process is its intrinsic bureaucratic entropy and, to put it ultra-simply, entropy is just not a force for good in this world.

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Doubling Down on Wrongness: Anti-Gun Jurisdictions Don’t Let Little Things Like the Bruen Decision Get In Their Way.

Why is it that, after being told their gun laws are unconstitutional, so many areas that are run by anti-gun extremists seem to respond with something along the lines of, “Oh yeah? Watch what we do next!” We saw this type of response after the landmark NYSRPA v. Bruen decision that affirmed law-abiding gun owners have a right to carry firearms for self-defense away from the home.

Like spoiled children who run to their room when told they can’t do something by their parents, anti-gun extremists ran to anti-gun legislatures to ram through more anti-gun laws that seek to circumvent the Bruen decision. We saw several states, including HawaiiNew Jersey, and New York, quickly pass and enact new laws to restrict the lawful carry of firearms.

The laws in both New Jersey and New York—based on expanding so-called “sensitive places” where carry is prohibited to the point where virtually nowhere is deemed suitable for lawful carry—have suffered losses in court, while Hawaii’s may soon be dealt a crushing blow to its anti-self-defense regime by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In apparent preparation for a loss, anti-gun extremists ran to the Hawaii legislature shortly after the Supreme Court heard the challenge to its unconstitutional law, filing yet another feeble attempt to potentially circumvent a ruling by the Court.

Meanwhile, Bearing Arms recently reported the U.S. Virgin Islands, has adopted “a massive gun control bill,” even as the U.S. territory is already facing a lawsuit challenging existing policy relating to the issuance of their gun permits.

In December of last year, the Second Amendment Section of the Civil Rights Division of the DoJ announced its intent to sue the Virgin Islands Police Department for “an unconstitutional permitting process” in the V.I. As part of that announcement, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who’s in charge of the Civil Rights Division and created its Second Amendment Section, was quoted in a release, stating . . .

The newly-established Second Amendment Section filed this lawsuit to bring the Virgin Islands Police Department back into legal compliance by ensuring that applicants receive timely decisions without unconstitutional obstruction.

So, similar to other anti-gun jurisdictions, the most virulently anti-gun operators in the V.I. responded to being told they were doing something wrong…by doubling down on the wrongness.

Bearing Arms describes the VI effort as an attempt to moot the lawsuit challenging the permit issuing process, a procedure Hawaii should have probably considered in light of the hard questions its counsel faced during the Supreme Court hearing on its initial attempt to circumvent Bruen.

But along with the apparent attempt to moot the suit regarding carry permit issuing in the island territory, Bearing Arms reports there’s also language seeking to impose bans on popular semi-automatic firearms and magazines capable of holding more than 15 rounds, as well as adding restrictions on where permit holders may lawfully carry firearms for self-defense—the so-called “sensitive place” restrictions on carry that jurisdictions like New Jersey and New York implemented that led to their laws being challenged in court.

Similarly, semi-auto and magazine bans are also being challenged by Harmeet Dhillon’s team of attorneys, most notably in Denver, Colo., and Washington, D.C.

So, as with others, the V.I. appears to be thumbing its nose at the Second Amendment and the Trump administration by doubling down on anti-gun efforts when told they are already doing something unconstitutional. Disappointing, but hardly surprising.

We will be sure to continue to post updates on these cases, as well as what we presume will be other cases coming out of other anti-gun government agencies at the state, local, or territorial level.

AP Poll Shows Dems Not As Worried About Threat to Gun Rights They Don’t Value.

Our friends at the Associated Press have polled about 2500 Americans in an effort to take their collective temperature on the level of security they feel in some of their most fundamental civil rights, They include freedom of speech, religion, voting rights and — you guessed it — the right to keep and bear arms.

The non-news here is that the Democrats who were polled are largely dismissive of any perceived threats to their gun rights in the current climate while Republicans surveyed in the AP-NORC America 250 poll were less sanguine. Of course, you’d expect those who find less value in the right to keep and bear arms to be less worried about efforts to limit that right.

And for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, those efforts are alive and well and progressing in almost all of the usual suspect states. According the Grok’s AI gnome miners, here’s a selection of anti-gun measures enacted in the last year or so

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Cynical Publius

RE: The Reflecting Pool

Let’s review a few undeniable, irrefutable facts about this subject:

1. The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has been a leaking, algae-overgrown mess for years.
2. Having a national monument in such disrepair reflects poorly on our nation.
3. President Trump saw these problems and decided America deserved better for our 250th Birthday, and has been trying to resolve those problems in time for July 4th.
4. Democrats everywhere want the repair efforts to fail.

*******************

These are FACTS people, not my opinion.
FACTS.

So what logical conclusion do all these facts lead to?
Simple.

***Democrats would rather see the United States of America fail than see President Donald J. Trump succeed.***

Democrats are not patriots. They do not care about our nation or our national pride.
They only care about power, and to achieve power they would destroy our nation if that was what they deemed necessary.
It’s basically the same ethos that caused them to burn down our cities in 2020 rather than see Trump win a second term.

I really do not see how it is possible to coexist with these people unless they change.