Category: Enemies Domestic

This leftist didn’t understand why he was just arrested for running over, killing an 18-year-old “Republican extremist.” Huh.

8-year-old Cayler Ellingson was attending a street dance in McHenry, North Dakota, when he encountered a drunken 41-year-old, Shannon Brandt. At some point, they began to argue about politics, and when the street dance was over, Ellingson started walking home.

But Brandt was waiting for him.

Ellingson’s mom said that the teen called her and asked that she come and get him because Brandt was chasing him through the small town with his SUV, but by the time she arrived, it was too late. Brandt had run down and murdered her son.

Brandt called the police himself to inform them that he had helped them stop a Republican extremist, and that they could come pick up the suspect.

Video interviews show Brandt visibly confused over why he was the one being arrested. The guy really did think he was doing a good thing killing a conservative kid.

A judge ordered Brandt held on $50,000 bail, which he objected to, saying he’s not a flight risk.

“I have a job, a life and a house and things I don’t want to see go by the wayside — family that are very important to me,” Brandt told the judge.

Brandt has so far been charged with vehicular homicide and faces a minimum of 10 years in prison because of a previous DUI on his record. The maximum is 20 years. The police are still interviewing witnesses at the street dance and have not ruled out adding further charges due to the intentional nature of the crime.

Can we really be that surprised that it has come to this?

Welp, Biden’s divisive and hateful anti-Trump and MAGA speech has had its desired effect of making Americans hate each other even more.

As a parent, my heart is heavy for Cayler Ellingson’s mother. I cannot imagine the pain she is going through.

It can’t bring back her son, but there is a GoFundMe me set up to help with his funeral expenses.

Update

Brandt posted bail, and is back on the streets. He is now in the process of scrubbing his social media.

Whistleblower Alleges FBI Schemed to Distort January 6 Cases Into Nationwide ‘Domestic Violent Extremism’ Epidemic

A whistleblower has accused the FBI’s Washington Field Office of using cases related to the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot to “overstate” the threat of “domestic violent extremism” in America, according to Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

The whistleblower alleged the FBI office did not follow standard investigative practices for the January 6 cases when it moved the cases to various local Field Offices around the country based on where the case subjects were from, Jordan revealed in a letter addressed to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday.

January 6 cases “should all be officially led by the WFO [Washington Field Office] and categorized as WFO cases,” according to the letter, but instead, a “task force” dispatched instructions to open January 6 investigations to local field offices nationwide.

Those local offices received the cases, making it look as if they were conducting the investigations on the cases, when, in reality, the Washington Field Office continued to conduct the bulk of the work, according to the letter.

The whistleblower told Jordan:

The manipulative casefile practice creates false and misleading crime statistics. Instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from a single, black swan incident at the Capitol, FBI and DOJ officials point to significant increases in domestic violent extremism and terrorism around the United States.

Jordan noted in the letter, “Such an artificial case categorization scheme allows FBI leadership to misleadingly point to ‘significant’ increases in DVE threats nationwide,” which supports a narrative being perpetuated by the Biden administration.

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Trump/Russia investigator hid ties to Russian billionaire.

If there is one thing you can count on with The Swamp it’s that every time they accuse a Republican of doing something, they themselves are likely to be guilty of that very thing themselves.

That may be the case with Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City. In an exclusive report by Military and Defense Insider it was revealed that McGonigal appears to be under grand jury investigation for–get ready–improper ties to Russia.

 

McGonigal was no bit player in the Russia Russia Russia drama: he was one of the key instigators who got the ball rolling back in 2016. When he was at the FBI he was quite the bigwig, playing major roles in a number of high profile cases.

Before his retirement in 2018, McGonigal led the WikiLeaks investigation into Chelsea Manning, busted Bill Clinton’s national security advisor Sandy Berger for removing classified material from a National Archives reading room, and led the search for a Chinese mole inside the CIA. In 2016, when reports surfaced that Russia had hacked the email system of the Democratic National Committee, McGonigal was serving as chief of the cybercrimes section at FBI headquarters in Washington. In that capacity, he was one of the first officials to learn that a Trump campaign official had bragged that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, sparking the investigation known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Later that year, FBI Director James Comey promoted McGonigal to oversee counterintelligence operations in New York.

He has apparently been swept up into a grand jury investigation that is looking into his ties to a Russian billionaire and work he appears to have done with his representatives. It isn’t totally clear what exactly is being investigated and how central McGonigal is to the inquiry, but it looks pretty bad.

Late last year, according to internal court documents obtained by Insider, US attorneys secretly convened a grand jury that examined the conduct of Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City. The Justice Department declined to comment on what the grand jury was investigating or whether it remained ongoing. But a witness subpoena obtained by Insider seems to indicate that the government, in part, was looking into McGonigal’s business dealings with a top aide to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who was at the center of allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to interfere in the 2016 election.

The subpoena, issued in November, requests records relating to McGonigal and a shadowy consulting firm called Spectrum Risk Solutions. A week after the subpoena was issued, a Soviet-born immigrant named Sergey Shestakov said in a separate filing that McGonigal had helped him “facilitate” an introduction between Spectrum and Deripaska’s aide. The filing also states that McGonigal helped introduce the aide to Kobre & Kim, a New York law firm that specializes in representing clients who are being investigated on suspicion of “fraud and misconduct.” Shestakov, who has been identified on TV panels as a former Soviet foreign ministry official and former chief of staff to the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, reported receiving $33,000 for the referrals.

It’s not clear that anything McGonigal did for the sketchy Russians was illegal, but he failed to report doing any work for them. That in itself may be a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Depending upon the exact scope of what the former FBI agent did he may or may not have violated the law.

While it wouldn’t necessarily have been illegal for McGonigal to work on behalf of Deripaska, failing to disclose activities covered by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such as lobbying and public relations, is punishable by a $250,000 fine and up to five years in prison. Deripaska was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2018 for acting as an agent for the Kremlin, and has been accused of ordering the murder of a businessman. “If McGonigal is mixed up in any way shape or form with Deripaska, that strikes me as unseemly, to put it politely,” says Tim Weiner, the author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI.”

There is little doubt that McGonigal’s ties to a sketchy Russian oligarch are clear evidence that he isn’t as squeaky clean as a top FBI official would like to appear. After all, one of the great perks of having had such a position is peddling the prestige of having had such a job. He certainly has been capitalizing off his status, and getting tied up with sanctioned Russian agents of the Kremlin might hit him in the pocketbook. Perhaps that is why he decided to hide his relationship.

It’s impossible to know at this stage whether McGonigal’s super-friendly ties to Russians played a role in his zeal to get Donald Trump, but these revelations certainly raise questions. Despite the constant repetition that Trump was Russia’s puppet, he was actually far more antagonistic in policy to Russia than Obama ever was. And we know that Hillary Clinton used her ties in Russia to stir up suspicion that Trump was colluding with Russia (she colluded with Russians to fake a narrative that Trump colluded with Russia; how ironic), faking the whole Steele Dossier narrative with Russian help.

Was McGonigal somehow involved? Did he have any contemporaneous or future financial interests? At the moment nobody but the grand jury knows.

These days McGonigal presents himself as a pious and wise man who is using his expertise to defend truth, justice and the American way. He compares the FBI to the FSB favorably.

Since he left the FBI, McGonigal has continued to trade on his expertise in counterintelligence. In 2020, months after his reported assistance to Deripaska’s aide, he appeared on a panel at the Atlantic Council, where he condemned the corruption of Russia’s security services. “You are seeing an erosion in any rule of law as it relates to the FSB,” he said. “It would be akin to having in the United States the FBI as a rogue element, operating at the behest of the highest bidder.”

Unfortunately too many Americans have come to suspect that the FBI actually is a rogue element, operating at the behest of, if not the highest bidder, then the most powerful one.

As Donald Trump would say: sad.

Should we be surprised at this point?

BIDEN DEMANDS WHITE SUPREMACY

FBI whistleblowers–in this case, the term is probably warranted–have come forward to say that the Bureau is pressuring them to come up with “white supremacists” to investigate, in order to advance the Biden administration’s agenda:

Current and former FBI agents have come forward saying the Biden administration is deliberately exaggerating the danger posed by white supremacists. They claimed that high-ranking FBI officials were pressuring field agents to fabricate domestic terrorism cases and label people as white supremacists in order to “meet internal metrics.”

To the best of my knowledge, I have never met a white supremacist, so this doesn’t surprise me. What ought to surprise all of us is that the FBI’s politicized hierarchy is so willing to do the corrupt bidding of the Democratic Party.

“The demand for white supremacy” coming from FBI brass “vastly outstrips the supply of white supremacy,” one agent told the Washington Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate white supremacists than we can actually find.”

The FBI agent, who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal bureau politics, said that top officials in the FBI “have already determined that white supremacy is a problem” and established a policy to prioritize investigations into racially-motivated domestic extremism.

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”

That is consistent with the disgraceful behavior we have seen from the FBI in recent years. The Bureau is one more once-great institution that has been destroyed by the Left.

“We’re doing things that help those of us in the anti-Trump world bond with one another and that help people in the Trump world bond with one another.”

“We’re locking in the political structures that benefit Trump…. We are in the middle of a cultural/economic/partisan/identity war between more progressive people in the metro areas and more conservative people everywhere else. To lead the right in this war, Trump doesn’t have to be honest, moral or competent; he just has to be seen taking the fight to the ‘elites.’… Trumpists tell themselves that America is being threatened by a radical left putsch that is out to take over the government and undermine the culture. The core challenge now is to show by word and deed that this is a gross exaggeration. Can Trump win again? Absolutely. I’m a DeSantis doubter…. And then once Trump is nominated, he has some chance of winning, because nobody is executing an effective strategy against him.”

David Brooks slogs along, ahead of his crowd, which is moving even more slowly, pondering the mystery, “Why Is There Still No Strategy to Defeat Donald Trump?” (NYT).

The needed “effective strategy” against Trump is “to show by word and deed” that it’s “a gross exaggeration” to think that “a radical left putsch… is out to take over the government and undermine the culture.” I’m not even persuaded that Brooks believes it’s all that much of an exaggeration to think there’s a “radical left putsch… out to take over the government and undermine the culture.” He just wants Trump defeated and hopes anti-Trumpsters execute a good strategy to take him out.

What would work on these “conservative people” who live everywhere but where everyone who needs to think up the strategy lives? Brooks doesn’t know! He doesn’t even know why all these millions of people love Trump. Does he think it’s because they haven’t yet been cajoled out of believing the “gross exaggeration”? If they haven’t abandoned this belief yet, why would it happen now or in the next 2 years?

I saw that Brooks column yesterday and passed on it, but I gave it another look this morning after Meade texted it to me, which he did because I’d posed the question, in real life here at Meadhouse, “Do you think Trump will run and win?” Meade said the column answered my question. I take it that means the answer is yes.

ADDED: The fact that Brooks talks about a “gross exaggeration” reveals that he thinks there is something true. If there weren’t something true, you’d call it a lie, not an exaggeration.

If a foreign goobermint forced this kind of education system on us, it would be considered an act of war.

Students cannot pass a basic citizenship exam: A shameful indictment of our education system.

A new semester is upon us, and as a political science professor at Suffolk Community College in New York, it’s important for me to gauge what my students already know about American government and politics.

Early on in my teaching career, I found that students came into college lacking a basic understanding of the founding of our country, the Constitution, the roles and responsibilities of our institutions, and the core American political philosophies, including concepts of liberty and freedom.

I decided the best way to measure my students’ understanding of the American government was to issue two assignments. On the first day of class, I give my students a citizenship exam asking very basic questions about our founding and our system of governance. Some of the questions include:

The overwhelming majority of students fail the exam. After twelve years of administering this exam, only 348 students have passed out of 2,176. A shameful indictment of our K-12 education system.

Even worse, the passing rate has dropped compared to when I first began giving the exam and has been stagnant over the last five years.

Sadly, this semester is no different. The pass rate for the test is 70%. Out of the approximately 175 students, only 11 of them were able to pass the exam.

For the second assignment, I provide them with Chapter 1 of the Russian Constitution, replacing Russian Federation with the United States, and Duma with Congress. It is important to note that the Russian Constitution, crafted in 1993, begins with “We the multinational people…,” and that Chapter 1 consists of 16 Articles.

Students are asked to provide a one-paragraph written response sharing their thoughts on this constitution. Realistically, their response should be one sentence: this is not the United States Constitution.

Instead, many will write how they never actually read the U.S. Constitution, which is horrifying given the number of years they have attended school prior to taking my course. Others will reference Article 7 where it explains “…guaranteed minimum wages and salaries shall be established, state support ensured to the family, maternity, paternity and childhood, to disabled persons and the elderly, the system of social services developed, state pensions, allowances and other social security guarantees shall be established,” and praise the foresight of the founding fathers.

Needless to say, when I reveal the results and my deception, the look on the students’ faces is priceless. The shock, embarrassment, and shame can be seen in their expressions. These exercises, however, have proven to be an invaluable tool to make my classes more successful, and they dramatically improve student engagement.

There are three objectives behind these assignments.

The first is to open students’ eyes to how unfamiliar they are with the country they are living. As I explain to the students, they have opinions about everything, but how can they say what the government should/should not be doing when they do not know why the government exists, the institutions within the government, and the roles and responsibilities of these institutions?

The second objective is to teach students to think critically, ask questions, be suspicious, and speak up. After I tell the students what they read, some students will respond that they found it strange that the founding fathers would be talking about minimum wage, pensions, and other 20th and 21st century issues.

My response is always the same, “Why didn’t you say anything or do a quick internet search?” Interestingly enough, they reply that since I am the professor, they trusted me, and I would know more about the subject matter than they do.

Even though they had questions, they went against their gut instincts and blindly complied with the assignment. I explain to my students the importance of questioning everything and thinking critically, regardless of who is providing them with the information.

My final objective is to get the students eager and more interested in the subject.

After the exercises, I begin to probe the students in an effort to understand how it’s gotten this bad. The overwhelming majority of students state that throughout their K-12 education, they were never required to read the U.S. Constitution. This is extremely frustrating, because by the time these students get to my course, not only should they be able to easily identify the Constitution, but it should also be seared into their minds.

The good news is that as my students progress throughout the semester, they understand the intent of government and how our system works. They gain the ability to formulate their own ideas on the issues and develop stronger arguments supported by solid evidence.

As an educator, it is not my role to indoctrinate them on what they should believe. Instead, it is my responsibility to assure they know how the American government operates, nurture their academic development, spark their intellectual curiosity, and get them to think critically about the issues.

After “The Great Shaming,” they are eager to learn.

While many criticize the younger generations, out of my nearly two-decades of experience, I am always amazed at how my students show a profound respect for one another and are much more open-minded than many would believe—far more open-minded than some of the people doing the teaching. Every semester, my students learn as much from me as I do from them, and I have little doubt the same will happen this semester.

BLUF
While this reference guide is by no means a comprehensive list of the administration’s entire gun control agenda, there is one thing that is not missing.

Nowhere in any of the Biden-Harris administration’s plans is there a single mention of how they intend to disarm criminals. Only law-abiding citizens are targeted for disarmament, not the bad guys.

That, friends, is all you need to know of their true intent.

A reference guide to Joe Biden’s war on guns
Documenting the administration’s anti-gun agenda.

The Biden-Harris administration’s war on guns is the most comprehensive and multi-faceted gun control scheme ever created.

Former Obama national security advisor Susan Rice, who has admitted meeting with gun control groups regularly at the White House, likely drafted most of the plan.

Under Rice, the administration nimbly exploits any anti-gun gain, while quickly pivoting away from pushback from the media, the public or Congress.

By design, most of their gun control agenda skirts any oversight — legislative or constitutional — and is immune from other normal checks and balances.

With their weaponized foot soldiers in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives willing to carry out any order regardless of its constitutionality, the Biden-Harris administration has become one of the biggest threats to the Second Amendment since the Bill of Rights was first written.

Because it is so vast and comprehensive, simply tracking all of the administration’s gun control initiatives has been difficult, which is why this reference guide was drafted.

What follows is a partial list of the Biden-Harris administration’s gun control agenda. It will be updated as needed.

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Well, I had never supported SloJoe for as long as I can remember, I always know him as plagiarist who was a pathological liar.
Nice to see some who used to support him seeing the light.

How Joe Biden Lost My Vote

“The new puritans, then, are best understood as a clergy for a godless age, presiding over a dreamscape of their own making, rewriting our language, history and traditions as they go along. Yet, for all their clout, there are still some among us who steadfastly refuse to praise the elegance of the emperor’s new clothes, who would rather point and laugh at the naked man in our midst. Not for the first time in human history, our way out of this madness will depend upon the heretics.” – Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans

Joe Biden emerged from his speech last week “on the continued battle for the soul of our nation” like a squalling infant birthed from the loins of blue-check Twitter, bathed in the blood-red light of militant fascism.

He was finally their guy. Gone was the empathy guy. Gone was the unity guy. Gone was the moderate guy. Be mean, Joe. Get them, Joe. Get tough, Joe. Tell them their participation in Democracy is a threat to … Democracy!

Yes, tell them, Joe. Tell the “MAGA Republicans” they’re not welcome in their own country. Tell them their participation is a threat to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Tell them that Democracy means they have to sit down and shut up.

Tell the truck driver who travels coast to coast, working the graveyard shift, to bring freshly cut meat to supermarket shelves. Tell the police officer, the waitress, the bartender, the cable guy, the grocery store clerk, the grandmother, the garage mechanic, the veteran who served in Afghanistan who now has been kicked out of the military for not taking the vaccine, the mother of two who now must home school her children – that they are the violent extremists posing the biggest threat to the country they call home.

Tell them, Joe, that you’ve decided to throw them away like human garbage and that you’re hoping for another January 6th so you can arrest anyone who ever voted for or supported Donald Trump. Tell them that you and you alone ARE America, and any threat to your power is a threat to the State because that’s not fascism at all.

Why did Joe Biden give that speech? Who thought that was a good idea? Obviously, Joe Biden and his administration know that the “MAGA Republicans” are not a dangerous threat to the country. Otherwise, the Democrats would not have meddled in primary elections, spending upwards of $46 million pushing those very same MAGA candidates towards a win, blocking the more moderate GOP picks.

Surely the Democrats know what they’re doing, right? I mean, they’re asking for America’s vote to stay in power. Joe Biden wouldn’t lie to the people about something as serious as a threat to the Republic, right?

Wrong. Joe Biden did lie. The speechwriter lied. They would do anything, say anything, and put any community or even the country at risk just to stay in power and hold onto the past, the America under Barack Obama from 2008 to 2016.

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John Francis Kirby is a retired Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy serving as Coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council in the White House

Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant

Today, Special Counsel John Durham moved to unseal this motion in limine in the false statements case against Igor Danchenko.

This motion provides new information on the details of Danchenko’s lies to the FBI, further information on how Special Counsel Mueller ignored Danchenko’s false statements, expected testimony from Clinton-connected executive Charles Dolan, and one crazy development.

But we’ll start with the the most damning development: Danchenko was on the FBI payroll as a confidential human source (CHS) from March 2017 through October 2020.

The purposes of making Danchenko a CHS should be quite clear. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was plagued with problems from the outset. The reasons for opening the investigation were bunk. Those problems continued as the investigation went on, with claims of Trump/Russia collusion proven unverified or outright false. (Thus the targeting of Flynn for a Logan Act violation.)

That developed into the Carter Page FISA applications, first submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in October 2016, and which relied substantially on the Steele Dossiers (aka Steele Reports). The FISA applications were renewed three times – more on that later. Each application had its own problems, from FBI lawyers lying about Carter Page to the Court being generally misled.

Realizing its own misconduct, the FBI made Danchenko a paid CHS in March 2017 – just before the third FISA warrant was submitted in April 2017. This would allow Comey’s FBI to work directly with Danchenko in support of its counter-intelligence investigation against President Trump.

Danchenko being a CHS also served another purpose: it protected the Bureau and the Mueller Special Counsel from revealing their “sources and methods.” How do you hide misconduct? Bury the witness.

(Read again Inspector General Horowitz’s report concerning the Carter Page FISA warrants. Did Horowitz know that Danchenko was a CHS?)

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DOJ Subpoenas Targeting Trump Associates Contain Disturbing Demands

News of dozens of subpoenas being sent by the DOJ to Trump supporters broke on Friday and was finally confirmed on Monday. The subpoenas, which were ostensibly tied to investigations surrounding January 6th, targeted over 40 people. Two more phones were seized from Trump associates as well, including his in-house counsel.

It marked another move in what appears to be a highly politicized investigation targeting the political enemies of Joe Biden for nothing more than wrong-speak. RedState obtained and published the subpoena Friday, and Monday night Tucker Carlson, who also obtained some of the subpoenas, highlighted some of the disturbing demands within them.

 

In the clip, Carlson provides an excerpt from the subpoena that purports to define what the current investigation is about. Here’s how that reads.

Any claim that the Vice President and/or the President of the Senate had the authority reject or choose not to count presidential electors.

To put it frankly, it is chilling to think that the DOJ could base an investigation on something that is clearly under the bounds of free speech. And to be clear, it is completely irrelevant whether Mike Pence had the above-mentioned authority or not. Americans are allowed to hold opinions, and they are allowed to discuss those opinions, even if they don’t hold up to factual scrutiny.

It is a violation of the First Amendment for the government to criminally target individuals based simply on what they said unless it is a direct incitement to violence or a threat. Nothing about that passage is either of those things. In other words, the DOJ is firmly in the territory of trying to prosecute thought crimes.

There’s also the issue of precedent here. Carlson brings up the fact that the DOJ did not seek to go after leading Democrats in 2016 that sought to stop the counting of electors for Donald Trump. He’s correct, and it’s a blind spot in all this that is simply being ignored because it’s convenient to ignore. That January 6th occurred at the hands of protesters does not suddenly wipe out the free speech rights of others.

The Fox News host then lists some of the names these subpoenas are targeting, including Stephen Miller and Jenna Ellis, but the most shocking is Boris Epshteyn. That is Trump’s current lawyer. Yet, the DOJ is demanding his communications, many of which are privileged, with a wink and a nod promise to sort through everything. That’s banana republic stuff.

Read the entire subpoena here:

Redacted Subpoena by Jennifer Van Laar on Scribd

I’ll end with something Carlson mentions near the beginning of the clip, which is that there is no accountability or transparency being demanded in the face of all this. Instead, the American press, with few exceptions, is spending its time either ignoring these overreaches or outright supporting them. That’s terrifying because it feels like we’ve reached a place where anything goes as long as seeks to harm Donald Trump, and it won’t stop there. These precedents being set are going to be abused by left-wing officials long into the future. It’s another reason why Republicans must retake the White House in 2024 and that there must be a will to gut these out-of-control agencies.

And the U.S. goobermint still ran a multiTrillion dollar deficit

Americans Spent More on Taxes Last Year Than on Food, Health Care, Education, and Clothing Combined.

Yikes. New consumer spending data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides some sobering perspective on how much Americans are paying in taxes. The data covers consumer spending across a wide variety of categories in 2021. Overall, taxes accounted for about 25 percent of average consumer spending.

The BLS measures spending per “consumer unit,” which it describes as “either (1) all members of a particular household who are related by blood, marriage, adoption or other legal arrangements; (2) persons living alone or sharing a household with others or living as a roomer in a private home or lodging house or in a permanent living quarters in a hotel or motel, but who is financially independent; or (3) two or more person living together who use their income to make joint expenditure decisions.”

On average, each “consumer unit” paid more than $16,000 in taxes last year. This outpaces average spending on food, clothing, education, and health care combined.

The mean for total spending per unit on health care, food, education, and clothing was $16,721.42. This included an average of $8,289.28 on food, $5,451.61 on health care, $1,226.14 on education, and $1,754.39 on apparel.

The mean for total spending per unit on taxes was $16,729.73. This included $8,561.46 in federal income tax, $2,564.14 in state and local income taxes, $2,475.18 in property taxes, $5,565.45 in Social Security deductions, and $105.21 in other taxes, offset by an average stimulus payment of $2,541.71.

In addition to this disturbing tidbit, the new BLS data contains a wealth of other information on American spending habits and offers an interesting glimpse at recovery—and inflation—during the second year of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Average annual expenditures for all consumer units in 2021 were $66,928, a 9.1-percent increase from 2020,” BLS reports. “During the same period, the Consumer Price Index…rose 4.7 percent, and average income before taxes increased 3.7 percent.”

The highest expenditure category was housing, at an average $22,623.55 per consumer unit (including property taxes). Major spending categories aside from housing, food, health care, education, and clothing included transportation ($10,961.18), utilities/fuels/public services ($4,223.49), entertainment ($3,567.89), household operations ($1,638.42), and personal care products and services ($770.51).

Spending was up last year in all sorts of categories that had been depressed by the pandemic in 2020. For instance, spending on entertainment was up nearly 23 percent over 2020 and up 15.5 percent from 2019.

The average spending per consumer unit on alcohol was $553.77, up 15.9 percent over 2020 (but still below 2019 levels). “The increase was driven by alcohol away from home spending, up 69.4 percent, which was offset by a decrease in alcohol at home spending, down 7.9 percent,” the BLS reports.

Overall, spending was up across all income categories. The highest quintile of earners had the most increase in spending (up 11.6 percent), while the second-lowest quintile had the smallest increase (up 4.6 percent). “In each quintile, the increase in total spending outpaced the increase in income,” notes the BLS. “Overall average annual income before taxes rose 3.7 percent in 2021, while expenditures increased 9.1 percent.”

Income rose between 3 and 4 percent for the top three income groups but just 0.6 percent for the second lowest income group. It decreased 0.4 percent for the bottom quintile.

Lies, Damn Lies and President Joe Biden

If the old chestnut concerning “lies, damn lies and statistics” was referring to a U.S. president, it would almost certainly be current President Joe Biden (D).

That fact was proven, once again, during the president’s late-August campaign-style appearance in Pennsylvania. Speaking to an audience at Wilkes University, Biden made another one of his preposterous statements about the AR-15—a type of semi-automatic rifle that he loves to hate and wants to ban.

“Do you realize the bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun?” the president asked those in attendance. Apparently, he received no answer to that somewhat rhetorical question, and the White House press corps hasn’t followed up on the outright lie.

In truth, there are many rifle calibers that fire projectiles at a higher velocity than the roughly 3,000 feet per second (fps) of the .223 or 5.56 mm rounds that an AR-15 is typically chambered in, including the .220 Swift, .257 Weatherby Magnum and the .30/378 Weatherby. In fact, the average bullet out of an AR-15 moves less than three-times faster than a typical 115-grain 9 mm pistol bullet commonly used for home and self-defense. Recall, however, that the president once lied about that round, too, saying, “A 9 mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.”

Apparently not believing the president would simply lie about the easily researched speed of a rifle bullet, the dubious “fact-checking” website, Snopes, looked into the matter. In the end, however, the “fact checkers” treated the asinine statement by the president with kid gloves: “The president’s claim is incorrect, and generalizes the varying speeds of bullets fired from different kinds of guns,” Snopes reported. Rather than sticking to “fact-checking,” Snopes went on to editorialize, “However, the AR-15 is still an especially lethal weapon and has been used to murder hundreds of people in mass shootings in the United States.”

Biden also used the occasion to take yet another shot at those Americans who rightly believe that the Second Amendment was written to ensure citizens could defend themselves against a tyrannical government.

“If you want to fight against a country, you need an F-15,” Biden said sarcastically. “You need something a little more than a gun. No, I’m not joking.”

Having a leader threaten law-abiding gun owners with hi-tech jet fighters seems like something you’d be more likely to hear in an authoritarian state. Hearing Biden make the statement didn’t sit well with freedom-loving citizens.

“While we’re here, let’s also acknowledge that ‘your AR-15 is useless because the government could just carpet bomb you into submission’ isn’t an argument in favor of gun control,” said Amy Swearer, a legal fellow with the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. “It’s actually an argument for a better armed citizenry and against trusting whoever said that.”

Additionally, in the same speech the president once again made his tired, oft-repeated statement about deer and bulletproof vests—a statement so ignorant that it’s hard to believe the so-called “most powerful man in the world” would continue to repeat it.

“And by the way, how many—my dad used to love to hunt in the Poconos when we lived in Scranton,” Biden said. “How many deer or bear are wearing Kevlar vests, huh? Not a joke.”

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: The Second Amendment isn’t about hunting. Somebody should tell Biden that—or at least tell whoever keeps adding that dopey line to his speeches.

Lastly, Biden encouraged attendees to vote based on a candidate’s willingness to curtail Second Amendment rights for all Americans.

“It’s time to hold every elected official’s feet to the fire and ask them: ‘Are you for banning assault weapons? Yes or no?’ Ask them. If the answer is no, vote against them.”

Biden is correct about one thing: It is time to hold every elected official’s feet to the fire and ask them if they are for banning common AR-15-style rifles. If the answer is yes, it’s time to vote them out and replace them with someone who respects the Second Amendment.

9/11 and Biden’s Destruction of America’s Soul

When I think back to 9/11, the memories are very clear. It was the beginning of my senior year of college. It’s difficult to picture the United States responding differently than we did. A nation that was bitterly divided over a prolonged presidential election less than a year earlier united against a common enemy.

“A terrorist attack designed to tear us apart has instead bound us together as a nation,” President George W. Bush observed in his radio address days after the attack.

For a little while, anyway.

Disagreements over the Iraq War and the 2004 election quickly tore the country apart again, and they continued to worsen. Barack Obama’s presidency saw unprecedented partisan bitterness. Despite campaigning as a uniter, Obama shunned Republicans during the global recession, passing an expensive and ineffective stimulus plan and a national healthcare plan without Republican support. After losing one-party control, Obama unconstitutionally legislated via executive order instead of making any attempt to work with Republicans on any compromise legislation. He would then go on to use a weaponized government to target conservative individuals and groups and eventually spy on Donald Trump’s campaign and frame him over bogus allegations of Russian collusion. Adding insult to injury, Democrats would go on to shamelessly blame Trump for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is national unity possible ever again? For over twenty years, I’ve held onto the hope that it could be, and that it wouldn’t take another deadly terrorist attack to do it.

But that dream is over.

In the past month, we’ve seen an unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s home over a presidential records dispute and Joe Biden’s recent primetime speech, in which he declared half the country enemies of the Republic. Despite all the bitter division that plagued us before, that speech felt like the point of no return. Joe Biden destroyed the soul of America, and it’s impossible to see how we can ever recover from that. Where Al Qaeda failed to tear this nation apart, Joe Biden succeeded.

Related: White House: Trump Supporters Are an ‘Extreme Threat to Our Democracy’

America no longer stands united. We are two different countries repeatedly proving we can’t coexist peacefully.

On this 21st anniversary of 9/11, we remember the bravery of the first responders at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and of those who took down Flight 93 before it reached its intended target. Many will reflect on the attack on our nation and remember those we lost, and some will offer platitudes about American resolve.

When I look back on 9/11, what I remember most is the way Americans were able to put aside their differences and treat each other as neighbors and fellow citizens. And now I mourn that such national solidarity will never happen again.

San Diego teacher defines ‘fascist’ to class as ‘whites,’ ‘heterosexuals,’ and ‘Christians.’

EXCLUSIVE — A teacher from Madison High School in San Diego claimed fascists are synonymous with the “modern-day Republican Party” and “white, Christian, heterosexuals,” according to a student at the school. Speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, the high school student detailed the teacher’s unhinged definition of a “fascist.”

The school began the 2022-23 year on Aug. 29. The alleged incident occurred at the high school last Thursday.

“Immediately, I walk in and notice on the board, it says, ‘The Republican Party is the fascist party, and it does not fit the mold of a Democratic Party,'” the student told me. “It’s the first thing I saw when I came in.”

The student took a picture of this and shared it with me. It read, “As it is currently constituted, the Republican Party is now a fascist organization that no longer fits the category of a conventional Democratic Party.”

School board at San Diego high school
Dry-erase board in San Diego high school where a teacher categorized today’s Republican Party as a fascist organization
Taken by an anonymous student

But the teacher didn’t stop there. He continued with his radical left-wing indoctrination by listing whites, Christians, and heterosexuals as groups that are “fascist.” The student took a picture during the class that shows how the teacher defined “fascist.” On the classroom’s white dry-erase board, the teacher wrote the word “fascist,” underlined it, and listed the words: Trump, heterosexual, white, Christian, and hatred of foreigners, immigrants, and minorities, among others.

“Then, he goes to this board and writes ‘fascist’ on it, and this really struck me. He immediately made the comparison of the Republican Party to the Nazi Party. And that was really offensive to me,” the student said. “He listed the Republican Party and the Nazi Party as similar. And that’s just ridiculous, and I took offense to that. So I took a picture of it.”

Then, the teacher continued to insult and denigrate different groups of people, according to the student.

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“He goes on to insult white people and Christian people, automatically putting them under … that they’re automatically fascist,” the student said.

When I asked the student if the teacher said anything specifically about insulting whites and Christians, the student expanded on what the teacher said.

School board at San Diego high school
Picture of how a teacher defined “fascist” on a dry-erase board at a San Diego high school
Picture taken by an anonymous student

“He just kind of put up that they’re fascists, and they support a fascist government,” the student said. “Immediately — he didn’t even ask the class about it. He just made the assumption right away that whites and Christians automatically support a fascist government.”

This happened in an English class at the high school. I asked the student to elaborate on what learning about fascism has to do with the class’s syllabus.

“We were supposed to be learning how to make an argument for an argumentative essay,” the student said. “And the first thing he turns to is that. Then, he just got to the definition of fascism and what he thinks. He put down the Nazi Party and the modern-day Republican Party, which is just ridiculous.”

This is the dangerous kind of indoctrination that occurs in schools today. Parents who lack alternatives to public schools must be vigilant. What happened in this classroom wasn’t education. It wasn’t teaching about the sins of our country’s past — a justification left-wingers often use to brainwash students subtly to parrot their own political beliefs. No, this was overt indoctrination through bullying high school students at a public school in California. Taxpayer money was used to teach students that fascists are akin to whites, Christians, heterosexuals, or Trump supporters.

“This completely caught me off guard,” the student said. “This is an English class. This isn’t a political class or anything. I signed up for the class to learn how to write papers and stuff,” the student said. “I didn’t sign up for the class for a teacher to be trying to shove his ideology down my throat.”

Unfortunately, this is what many teachers do today. Their priority is spreading such radical, left-wing political ideologies. They want to indoctrinate, not educate. And they feel so comfortable about it that they do it openly.