During an episode of her podcast this week, Megyn Kelly tore into Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Hillary Clinton for the recent interview they did where Hillary laughed about the Trump indictments.
Kelly was especially disgusted with Maddow, who acted more like a Hillary fangirl than a journalist. The video of Kelly’s rant is going viral on Twitter. Here’s a partial transcript via Real Clear Politics:
“That was a disgusting display by both women on the set. I would vote for Ron DeSantis over Joe Biden any day of the week, I made that clear. I tell you what my bias is.
When I sat across Ron DeSantis, I pressed him on the weaknesses of his arguments, things that he said were inconsistent, positions he had that would fall apart if you really drilled down. And he stood on his own. That’s what a journalist does. That’s your obligation is as a member of the media.
You failed Rachel Maddow, you failed, I don’t care how much they give you, 30 million dollars a year, you’re not worth thirty cents. That was an embarrassment. You fell down on the job, you embarrassed yourself and network, and you ceded the entire discussion to a dishonest broker who set us down this disgusting path that we now are on.
Sage Steele has broken her silence about what she says is “hypocrisy” at ESPN. Steele, now a former ESPN employee, was a guest on Megyn Kelly’s YouTube show Thursday, just days after leaving the network.
Steele provided the “life update” on X, formerly Twitter, saying her lawsuit against the company was settled, and she decided to leave so she can “exercise my first amendment rights more freely.
Before Steele spoke, Kelly showed a montage of ESPN broadcasters voicing political opinions on the air.
“All I ever wanted was consistency,” Steele told Kelly. “And if we are allowing my peers to go on social media, much less on our own airwaves, saying things that have nothing to do with sports, that are political … then I should be allowed on my personal time to give my opinion on my experiences personally, without telling others what to do or how to feel being biracial or being forced to take a vaccine.
“I think that’s just what breaks my heart. That there were different rules for me than everyone else.”
Steele reflected on the time she felt forced to apologize after another incident with ESPN brass.
ESPN’s Sage Steele also expressed support for Riley Gaines.(Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)
“I did not want to apologize. I fought. I fought, and I begged and I screamed. And I was told that if I want to keep my job, I have to apologize. And I need my job,” she said. “And they knew that.”
However, Steele said, issues continued, and “there were events taken away as I’ve worked years to get.”
“It’s interesting. I think in anything in life, quite often, we say, ‘All right, one more time and it’s over, and I’m done …’ I knew that there was a line somewhere,” she explained.
That line was the Rose Bowl Parade. Steele had covered it previously but not this year.
“I knew that, mentally, I had checked out and was heartbroken again at the hypocrisy of the rules. A rule’s a rule for everybody or nobody. You can’t pick and choose, especially if it’s just one person. It’s just me.”
Sage Steele speaks onstage during The Players Tailgate Hosted By Bobby Flay for Super Bowl LVII Feb. 12, 2023, in Phoenix, Ariz.(Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Bullseye Event Group)
Steele’s lawsuit accused ESPN of selective enforcement of its policy that bars news employees from commenting on politics and social issues.
The suit alleged ESPN “violated Connecticut law and Steele’s rights to free speech based upon a faulty understanding of her comments and a nonexistent, unenforced workplace policy that serves as nothing more than pretext” and claimed the network relied on “inaccurate third-party accounts of Steele’s comments” and “did not immediately review the actual comments or the context in which they were made.”
She joined ESPN in 2007 after starting out at Comcast SportsNet. She became one of the mainstays on “SportsCenter” and made appearances on “NBA Countdown.”
The Georgia Indictment Was Triggered by Fake News.
The indictment against President Donald Trump and 18 lawyers, aides, and supporters has been widely criticized, but even many of the critics have missed the most important flaw: the fact that the entire grand jury investigation began with a bit of fake news.
The fake news was reporting that Trump had told Georgia officials, by telephone, to fabricate votes.
In early January 2020, for example, Trump was reported to have told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to win.
Actually, what Trump said was: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state” (emphasis added).
Trump was not giving an order. He was talking about his own feelings. And as Scott Adams noted this week, Trump was speaking in the context of believing he had already won the state. He believed the proof was out there; he didn’t need to make anything up.
As George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley has noted: “While others have portrayed the statement as a raw call for fabricating the votes, it seems more likely that Trump was swatting back claims that there was no value to a statewide recount by pointing out that he wouldn’t have to find a statistically high number of votes to change the outcome of the election. It is telling that many politicians and pundits refuse to even acknowledge that obvious alternate meaning.”
The term “find” is also used colloquially, and often, in the context of counting votes. Political analysts on television routinely say that a candidate needs to “find” votes in one area or another, having already been cast, as results are reported by local precincts.
A week later, there was a mistaken report in the Washington Post on Jan. 9, 2021, that Trump had urged a Georgia election investigator, later named as Frances Watson, to “find the fraud.” The original headline was: “‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.”
The Post later had to issue a correction: “Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there.” But the inaccurate version of the Post‘s original story was repeated throughout the mainstream media before the correction was made.
That does not mean Trump’s conduct was praiseworthy. But there was nothing in his conversations — properly reported, at least — to suggest that he had done anything illegal, especially given that he knew lawyers and skeptical officials were listening to him.
Nevertheless, these reports were partly what prompted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to launch her investigation, starting with a “special grand jury” and leading to the current indictment.
CNN recently reported that the conversation with Brad Raffensperger were what “kicked off the local district attorney’s investigation.” That conversation, and others, were reported — and misquoted — in a highly partisan context, when Democrats were looking for any way to punish Trump and his supporters.
In Trump’s second impeachment trial, for example, which centered on the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, the Democrats’ House impeachment managers presented the fake “find the fraud” quote as if it were real, effectively falsifying evidence in the Senate.
It was not the first time fake news had factored into an impeachment.
Trump’s first impeachment was prompted by misleading, second-hand, anonymous media reports about his telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The transcript, which Trump declassified and released, showed that there had been no “quid pro quo” for an investigation into (accurate, it turns out) suspicions of Joe Biden’s role in Ukraine. But Democrats stuck with the fake news, even making up a fake transcript.
The pattern in both cases was the same: incriminating media reports, based on leaks that likely came from anti-Trump sources, triggered an investigation that had too much political momentum to be stopped once the contrary, first-hand evidence emerged.
Another fake news story that helped launch an investigation was the claim that Trump asked Russia to hack into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails. Trump joked about Russia finding Clinton’s emails during a press conference in July 2017. His critics claimed that his rather obvious attempt at humor was, in fact, an invitation to a geopolitical rival to commit espionage.
That prompted then-CIA director John Brennan to start a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. That investigation fed the “Russia collusion” hoax, which became an attempt to undo the results of the 2016 election. No major figure — not Clinton, nor her lawyers, nor the officials responsible for pushing the lie — was indicted, though Special Counsel John H. Durham convicted an FBI lawyer of falsifying an email (and lost two other cases, likely, in part, because of jury nullification).
It is unclear whether the “special grand jury” in Georgia heard about the calls to Raffensperger and Watson, though it reportedly heard recordings of another call, with Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives David Ralston.
All three calls are referred to in the indictment approved by a formal, subsequent grand jury on Monday. But the indictment does not cite the falsely reported quotes from those calls, or even an accurate version of Trump’s statement to Raffensperger, which launched Willis’s investigation.
That is because the actual quotes from those calls are, arguably, exculpatory, just like the Ukraine transcript. But it is too late.
Once again, the partisan media, amplifying the political prejudices of anti-Trump officials, has brought the country to the brink.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Inside the progressive war on the Supreme Court. The longer the spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds.
In the basement of a Washington, DC restaurant, 200 ticket-purchasing fans have gathered to witness the live recording of a multifaceted conversation about the villainy and corruption of the Supreme Court, and one justice in particular. It only seems appropriate to order the shrimp and grits: it costs $19.99 and comes with a white-wine tomato sauce. This may seem rather hifalutin, but it also comes in a glass mason jar that references tired hipster kitsch — perfectly suitable for a live podcast hosted by Slate.
Shrimp and grits are the uptown incarnation of staples from the Carolina Lowcountry, where the Gullah Geechee people, who live on the Sea Islands along the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, would catch small creek shrimp in their bare hands to eat themselves or sell on the streets of the cities and towns. Grits, from ground dried corn, have a more troublesome history: they were distributed by slaveholders as part of slaves’ food allowances. Historical records show Carolina slave children would get one pint of grits a day for most of the year, with salt.
Clarence Thomas’s mother tongue was not English, but Gullah — a lilting language that sounds like music, a mysterious linguistic cocktail of English, Creole and West African. (Experts disagree on its exact origin.) Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, the second child of Leola Williams. His father abandoned them when he was two. When he was six, his younger brother accidentally burned down the shack they lived in, and they were both sent to be raised by his grandfather in Savannah.
This is the origin story of today’s most hated Supreme Court justice, if you poll the Slate audience. It is also the main focus for a well-funded, well-organized Democratic campaign to put the Supreme Court under siege — not just in the press, but in the public too. And many on the left seem to like it that way. If you can’t transform the judiciary through the process of government, transform it by making it a job people are afraid to take.
In March 2020 Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer stood surrounded by protesters and pointed at the Supreme Court Building, bellowing: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Since then, the last of the three branches of government with respect for norms has indeed been at the center of a whirlwind — even as Democrats repeatedly claim to be the stalwart defenders of democracy, norms, the Constitution and the rule of law.
When the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the most significant culture-war decision in a generation — was leaked, the justices’ families and children were mapped and targeted, and their homes picketed illegally without any reaction from Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice. A twenty-six-year-old man even traveled across the country intending to murder Brett Kavanaugh and his family. He showed up on the justice’s suburban street with a Glock-17 and a plethora of tools — zip ties, duct tape, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a crowbar and padded boots for stealth. With last-minute misgivings, he called 911 and told the operator he had traveled from California “to kill a specific United States Supreme Court justice.” His online messages showed he had wanted to kill as many as three; he had conducted internet searches for “most effective place to stab someone,” “assassin skills,” “assassin equipment” and “assassinations.” He was arrested and indicted — he pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. (Authorities still claim to have no idea who leaked the opinion.)
In the opening episode of a podcast series focused on Clarence Thomas, Slate host Joel Anderson begins with his own peaceful version of a home confrontation. In “America’s Blackest Child,” he knocks on the screened-porch door of a modest single-story white house on a Savannah street. The ninety-four-year-old Leola Williams, happy to oblige a visitor, welcomes Anderson inside, where he discovers the shocking scene you would expect from any proud Southern mother: pictures of her family, including her son Clarence, covering the walls.
Anderson sounds awkward in the podcast audio from Mrs. Williams’s home, as if he knows he’s crossed a line. But he showed no such qualms when he appeared on television with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan to promote the episode, instead expressing surprise there was no security to stop him outside the house. “If they had had a chance to tell me to not come, they probably would have, but when you show up it’s hard to turn someone away from your front door,” he said. The MSNBC segment is mostly devoted to accusing Thomas of being a hypocrite for his anticipated ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v. Harvard. (Thomas joined the 6-3 majority in the decision announced on June 29.) Speculating on his likely vote, Hasan described it as an example of a minority “pulling up the drawbridge after themselves.” Asked why Thomas would choose to become a member of the “radical right,” Anderson had the answer: “He wanted to make money.”
Money is central to the story the left wants to tell about Thomas and the Supreme Court more generally. As is this little white house in Savannah. A ProPublica investigation revealed this spring that billionaire conservative Harlan Crow bought the property from Thomas and his family several years ago.
The relationship between Thomas and Crow, a major Republican donor the justice and his wife Virginia say is a close friend they’ve known for years, has been the primary focus of ProPublica’s “Friends of the Court” series, which seeks to pin all manner of ethical lapses and alleged inappropriate and illegal behavior on conservative justices.
ProPublica’s work has been the centerpiece of a flood of reporting across multiple media outlets focusing on what is being framed as a Supreme Court irrevocably compromised by relationships with well-heeled benefactors. The original series is a slog of filings and reports interspersed with vacation photos dug up from corners of the internet and quotes from various ethics experts — who also are of the left — denouncing the dire nature of a corrupt court.
At first glance, many of these stories look pretty bad. They paint a picture of lifetime-appointed justices palling around with powerful billionaires who shepherd them on fishing trips and to hunting lodges, take them on vacations to exotic locales and contribute indirectly or directly to supporting their legacies. It’s not a pretty picture. Yet even slightly closer inspection reveals that there are enormous reasons to take the breathless reporting with a pinch of salt.
The best example yet of the absurdly disproportionate reporting came in an over-the-top piece by Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian. The article revealed that seven Washington attorneys had used Venmo to send Christmas party money to a top aide of Thomas’s. Noticeably absent from the hair-on-fire “conflict of interest!” piece were the amounts in question, which turned out, according to one of the payers, to be $20 for an annual “lunch buffet consisting of hot dogs, hamburgers and chicken tenders” held for Thomas’s former clerks. Scandalous!
Then there’s the travel. The Judicial Conference, the administrative body which sets the rules for things such as travel disclosures, requires justices to report where they go, when they went and the nature of expenses, but not total costs. They are not required to disclose “any food, lodging or entertainment received as ‘personal hospitality of any individual.’” The rules further define the scope of hospitality: “hospitality extended for a non-business purpose by one, not a corporation or organization… on property or facilities owned by [a] person.”
The argument that the loophole should be smaller might be valid, but the rules are what they are. Demanding justices retroactively report something they weren’t required to report at the time is absurd — ex post facto rulemaking, if you will — and implying they were doing something untoward by following the rules as written is disingenuous. And it’s clear enough that justices of many stripes have long proceeded by the ethics rules as they stand.
The New York Times acknowledged in their editorial on the issue that “Justice Stephen Breyer took at least 225 subsidized trips from 2004 to 2018, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, including trips to Europe, Japan, India and Hawaii… Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got a private tour of Israel in 2018 that was paid for by an Israeli billionaire, Morris Kahn, who has had business before the court.” And OpenSecrets reported that the top two trip-getters in 2021 and 2022 were tied, with Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan both at eight. So yes, both sides do it.
In fact, the single most overlooked story in recent years may relate to the Notorious RBG. According to the Washington Free Beacon, a $1 million prize given to her by the left-leaning globalist Berggruen Institute raised eyebrows (the Judicial Conference limits honoraria to $2,000), but RBG said she would instead donate the amount to a variety of charities. Only later did it become clear that she had wanted the list of recipients to remain hidden, and Berggruen complied on its requisite Form 990 — preventing the public from knowing if any of the recipients had business before the court.
Republican senator Mike Lee raised the issue in a July Judiciary Committee hearing on a court-targeting bill backed by Democratic senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin. “This might have some very significant ramifications if she was still serving on the court,” Lee said. “We don’t yet know exactly what was done with that, whether she carried out the apparent intention of the stated purpose of intent at the outset to donate it to charity.”
As for that house in Georgia: Crow’s spokesman has said he ultimately wants to turn Thomas’s childhood home into a museum, “telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court justice.” Thomas’s share of the sale was a third of $133,000, and it’s still not entirely clear if he even reported it incorrectly, though he reportedly intends to amend it as necessary.
The longer this spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds. The Washington Post devoted a 3,300-word hit piece on the effort spearheaded by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to honor Thomas on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment. The public relations campaign was designed to push back against a fictionalized HBO glorification of Anita Hill, who testified against Thomas during his confirmation hearings, and included the promotion of a documentary, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.
The Post paints this entirely typical PR campaign in dark, secretive terms, even drilling down to investigate a “Justice Thomas Fan Account” which posted clips and quotes from the justice. “The account’s posts about the justice generated nearly 21,000 impressions,” the Post reports — a laughably small amount, no offense to the earnest creator.
The Post has yet to conduct a similar deep dive into the promotional campaign around the 2018 documentary RBG, which was acquired and distributed by Participant Media, a production company with an explicitly leftist activist mission founded by Canadian billionaire and former eBay president Jeff Skoll, who has given millions to leftist causes. Nor have they shown any interest in investigating the promotion and creation of the 2018 dramatic film, On the Basis of Sex, based on a script by Ginsburg’s nephew, and starring Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer (though the Post’s Style section did publish a meet-cute piece titled “That time Ruth Bader Ginsburg checked out Armie Hammer,” doing their part to promote the film’s Washington premiere). Participant Media also produced this laudatory fictionalized biopic for roughly $20 million, though it’s unclear if that amount also paid for the movie’s promotional pop rap “Here Comes the Change” performed by Ke$ha, with official artwork by Shepard Fairey, or the Jonas Åkerlund-directed music video, which as of this writing has 818,000 views on YouTube — tragically, the fewest of any Ke$ha music video.
Stepping back from all of this, what we see is a series of breathless reports designed to inflate perceptions of bias without the facts necessary to establish anything of the sort. At most, justices may have to refile forms or clarify their reporting to the ethics body. Due to a change in policy by the Judicial Conference this spring, they’ll also have to report when they fly on a private jet — something they didn’t have to do before. But if that’s all you think it takes to buy a Supreme Court justice, imagine what Hunter Biden could get you for $5 million.
“All these breathless ‘investigations’ amount to nothingburger concern-trolling of justices whose opinions progressive activists don’t like,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court. “The left simply can’t stand that a majority of the Supreme Court is finally, after decades of hand-waving, interpreting the Constitution based on what it says instead of nebulous conceptions of social justice.”
At the Slate podcast taping, Anderson’s first guest of the night was Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of course — his Democratic colleague, Illinois senator Dick Durbin, was supposed to be there too, but he came down with Covid. Anderson’s first question jumped right to the point: given all the horrible things now established about Clarence Thomas, he asked: “So Senator Whitehouse, do you think he should resign?”
“In all decency, he should,” Whitehouse said, to applause. “But there’s just no world in which that happens that I can foresee. He’s just that determined to stay there and make his points and exercise his resentments.”
“I told my caucus, the Senate caucus, that we have a problem with the Supreme Court: it’s now a political organization, we have to treat it as such. And I basically got booed back into my chair,” Whitehouse said. “I got told ‘oh, no, no, the Supreme Court relies on public confidence, we can’t possibly do that.’ So I realized I had to do my homework. And that’s where… the book and all of that came from. Prove your case, write your prosecution memo.”
In Whitehouse’s frame, an “omertà” of secretive groups funded by malevolent billionaires — whom he tags as fossil-fuel interests bent on preventing bipartisan climate-change policy — are operating the court like shabby robed puppets.
“We don’t know all of that yet,” Whitehouse said. “I think we’re going to find out a lot more.” Invited to make the case for his latest piece of legislation targeting all of this (is this a Slate podcast or a Democratic activism group?), Whitehouse calls it “one of the silver linings of this set of really sickening revelations about the Supreme Court.”
“This is a multi-front battle,” Whitehouse said. “Moving the legislation forward, I think we’ll hit tipping points as the behavior of the Supreme Court justices becomes more well known, as further revelations come. We’re preparing for that moment.”
There’s little subtlety in Whitehouse’s comments to a friendly DC crowd about the degree to which the activity swirling around the Supreme Court is an ideological information operation. Democratic politicians have all the reason in the world to promote the effort to do so: the biggest funders of their partisan priorities are all paying for it.
Of the justices targeted in the recent spate of hit pieces, Samuel Alito has been the most aggressive in pushing back. He wrote a prebuttal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal after ProPublica sent him a series of questions inquiring about a fishing trip he took as a guest of right-leaning billionaire Paul Singer. Alito’s response was thorough and ruthless, detailing the skewed and inaccurate framing of the piece and prompting ProPublica’s story to be redrafted, with an explainer for the “Unprecedented Wall Street Journal Pre-buttal.”
If leaking Alito’s opinion in Dobbs was supposed to have cowed the justice, it clearly hasn’t. “Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” he told the Journal in April. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.” The experience prompted the justice to be more confrontational. If he were a meme, one former clerk joked, Alito would be Michael Jordan in The Last Dance: “And I took that personally.”
Whitehouse and his fellow leftists would do anything to alter the conservative course the court has taken in recent years — even radical steps like court-packing. In the fall of 2019, along with four other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Whitehouse sent a brief to the court on a New York gun rights case. “The Supreme Court is not well, and the people know it,” they warned. “Perhaps the court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured.’”
For Whitehouse and those who would blow up the Supreme Court, dark money spent to this end is the good kind, and the activist groups and the journalists they push to echo their priorities are the noble pursuers of truth. The Judicial Crisis Network is a conspiracy, but progressive organizations like Fix the Court and Demand Justice are pure crusaders. The conservative Federalist Society is evil, but the leftist American Constitution Society is good. What this effort seeks to establish is a mutually justifying feedback loop. Democratic senators level severe allegations, activists parcel fever swamp stories to the press who then report on it, allowing the senators to point to these reports as legitimizing what was claimed in the first place.
Assisting in this effort are multiple billionaire-funded advocacy groups, bent on echoing the case for extreme measures to transform the court. They include Fix the Court, a spinoff from the New Venture Fund, managed by for-profit company Arabella Advisors, the center of the left’s dark money network — it spent over $1 billion in liberal efforts in 2020. Demand Justice, another Soros-backed group, was more explicitly focused on the push to pack the court — its board includes Elie Mystal, an MSNBC commentator who is most famous for calling the Constitution “trash.”
“While Whitehouse is championing supposed ‘ethics reform’ at the Supreme Court, he himself has sponsored environmental legislation pushed by the Ocean Conservancy, a group that has paid his wife as a consultant and policy advisor for years,” JCN president Carrie Severino said. “This isn’t about ethics for Whitehouse, but rather increasing the number of tools the left has at its disposal to intimidate the conservative members of the court.”
The central role of ProPublica should not escape notice. It was founded and continues to be funded by the Sandler family of San Francisco, who sold their bank Golden West to Wachovia right before its ludicrously profitable collection of dubious adjustable-rate mortgages played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. Their family foundation is a huge backer of leftist causes, including the Center for American Progress, Human Rights Watch and Earthjustice.
Today ProPublica is also backed by a who’s-who of partisan Democratic billionaire donors, including George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Laurene Powell Jobs, Donald Sussman and, until it was compelled to return the first tranche of a $5 million donation, notorious crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried. All this billionaire largesse helps ProPublica pay top dollar for staff — its editor in chief currently makes more than $100,000 more each year than a justice of the Supreme Court.
For some reason, these billionaires don’t raise the hackles of Sheldon Whitehouse or Joel Anderson, or lots of others who are likely to tune into a multipart Slate podcast framing Clarence Thomas as a man who sold out black people for white money. Or, as one of the night’s other guests proclaimed of Thomas’s long ago divorce, “trading the black doll for the white doll.” There are hoots, laughs and murmurs in response.
At the opening of the show, Anderson led off with an odd extended monologue focused on Thomas’s high-school sports prowess, interspersed with audio from interviews with multiple figures from his past, most of whom spoke in praise of his arm strength with a football and gift for quick passing on the basketball court. The audience laughed when they are told he tried out for the Holy Cross football team but that he struggled taking hits; Anderson closes by expressing skepticism that the 5’8” Clarence could ever dunk. The audience claps.
They clap to confirm each other in their viewpoints. To remind each other that anger at the Supreme Court, over abortion or affirmative action or everything else, isn’t a mark of Democratic impotence or foolish mismanagement of the filibuster or RBG’s refusal to retire under Obama, you see — it’s those evil fossil-fuel billionaires like Harlan Crow who are to blame. Because as the good Senator Whitehouse, a son and grandson of ambassadors and bishops, assured them at the podcast party, it’s Thomas who is a creature of “resentments.” It’s the skinny Gullah kid who ran through the Lowcountry scrub, the place where his ancestors ate their pint of grits and the creek shrimp they could catch, boiled in the brackish salt water for flavor. That kid is the one who took the wrong lesson from the American experience, who wants to pull up the drawbridge behind him. You see, you understand. He’s the resentful one. We can all agree about that.
There is no apparent awareness that the persecution of Thomas is rooted in their resentments: not of his rulings as such, but the fact that he survived the full force of their apparatus, that his origin story is his survival. They have to destroy him because he exists: because the force of the counterexample shows them to be impotent, shows there is another path. It is a species of derangement. As a threat, Clarence Thomas is literally existential. Of course Clarence Thomas can dunk. He’s been dunking on these folks for years. All they can do is podcast about it.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2023 World edition.
In reporting on a Montana case in which a judge ruled that the state had to include the climate effect of oil and gas permits before deciding on them, the Associated Press showed just how brain-dead the discussions of “global warming” have become.
District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled in favor of several young plaintiffs – ranging in age from 5 to 22 – saying they “have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate as part of the environmental-support system.”
As proof of the harm the plaintiffs are suffering, the order has a list of horribles that includes:
“Olivia expressed despair due to climate change.”
“Badge is anxious when he thinks about the future that he, and his potential children, will inherit.”
“Grace … is anxious about climate change.”
“Mica gets frustrated when he is required to stay indoors during the summer because of wildfire smoke.”
(Perhaps the judge should have ruled against the adults who are filling these poor children’s minds with climate alarmist fantasies, but that’s another story.)
The ruling was heralded by the likes of Julia Olson, executive director of the Oregon-based Our Children’s Trust, which has filed similar lawsuits in other states, who said: “Today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos.”
(Apparently, after “global warming,” and “climate change,” and “climate crisis” failed to move the needle, the left is trying out “climate chaos.”)
We will admit that we find ourselves in wholehearted agreement with Emily Flower, spokesperson for Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, who called the ruling “absurd” and said that this “same legal theory has been thrown out of federal court and courts in more than a dozen states. It should have been here as well, but they found an ideological judge who bent over backward to allow the case to move forward and earn herself a spot in their next documentary.”
In any event, it was up to the crack reporters and editors at the once respectable Associated Press to come up with what is perhaps the most asinine sentence ever written about this issue.
“The ruling following a first-of-its-kind trial in the U.S.,” the AP reported, “adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change.”
“A government duty to protect citizens from climate change”?
Think about that for a minute.
Do they mean any sort of climate change, such as the climate change that occurs around the world every year when temperatures can change from sub-zero to 90 degrees in a matter of months?
Or perhaps they mean that the government should protect citizens from things like El Nino, that naturally recurring – but scientifically inexplicable – climate phenomenon that we are currently experiencing, and underwater volcanic eruptions, both of which have driven this summer’s heat waves.
Or, longer term, what about ice ages? There have been five of them in the earth’s history – also for reasons nobody can fully explain. The last one ended 10,000 years ago, which is about how long these “interglacial” periods last. A few years ago, some researchers predicted the next ice age could begin in 2030. Is it the government’s duty to protect us from this climate variation?
Someone should take these AP reporters aside and explain to them a basic fact of life: The climate is always changing. Always. Sometimes for the worse. Sometimes for the better.
They might go on to explain to these reporters that the best way to deal with an ever-changing climate isn’t to wish change away, or pretend that denying a drilling permit will make one iota of difference, but to encourage human ingenuity and prosperity.
That’s how you deal with a climate that is always changing. By adapting to it. It’s why deaths from naturally occurring disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and so on, have steadily fallen as mankind has become smarter and more prosperous.
It’s radical anti-growth environmentalists – aided by brain-dead reporters – not oil and gas companies, who are the biggest threats to the health, safety, and well-being of those kids in Montana.
Yes, Virginia Joey Boy used an Alias not a Pseudonym to hide his secret conversations. Biden was using fake names and a different e-mail address when he was chatting with the folks in the Ukraine. Not just one, but three.
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) demanded Thursday that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) hand over all documents and communications in which then-Vice President Joe Biden used pseudonyms such as “Robert Peters,” “Robin Ware,” and “JRB Ware.”
One email, which Comer says the committee has already seen, includes an attachment with the vice president’s schedule, indicating that he had spoken by phone to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The email was sent to a “Robert L. Peters” and cc’ed to the vice president’s son, Hunter Biden.
Joe Biden was the designated foreign policy point person to Ukraine during the Obama administration. The House Oversight Committee argues that Joe Biden threatened to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine in 2015 until the president of Ukraine fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had jurisdiction for an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
(NewsNation) — Last week, I called for something which I knew was highly controversial. I said that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should drop her case against former President Donald Trump after federal officials indicted him for basically the same conduct. Not because she doesn’t have a case — Willis certainly has the legal ability and right to move forward — but I argued it simply wasn’t the right thing to do.
I stand by what I said now that Willis and her office have officially indicted Trump and 18 other codefendants in a 41-count indictment, 13 of which are against Trump himself. It’s a wide-ranging racketeering case alleging Trump and his allies conspired to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Now, my comments were never related to the others, just the former president. Let me be clear, this indictment reminds us of the absurd lengths that Trump and his team went to try to overturn the actual results of the election.
Trump, of course, denies the charges and has set his own news conference for next week. He says he will present “a large, complex, detailed but irrefutable report on the presidential election fraud which took place in Georgia” which he says will lead to a “complete exoneration” of him.
We shall see. But there are two main reasons that remain as to why Willis shouldn’t be doing this.
No. 1: The federal case makes the Georgia case against Trump duplicative and unnecessary. No. 2: Willis’ case is riddled with conflicts and political considerations that will be easy for the Trump team to exploit.
Willis bringing this case is just bad for everyone, and I mean everyone.
The more important issue is that the federal indictment makes Willis’ case unnecessary. It goes into depth on the Georgia allegations and both indictments highlight similar quotes.
Do we need another case brought on basically the same set of facts?
Jack Smith goes state by state in the federal indictment, very meticulously addressing conduct. So, now are prosecutors in other states going to bring cases against Trump, too? Now, that is different from charging the actual fake electors as Michigan and now Georgia have done.
The biggest argument I hear again and again is that if Trump is reelected, he couldn’t make state charges go away, only federal. That’s true, but that is not a reason for a prosecutor to act and there is no way the state trial is going to happen any time soon.
And if Trump wins the 2024 election, the U.S. Supreme Court barely let Bill Clinton get sued while in office; they will not let a state prosecutor try the sitting president of the United States in a criminal case.
That could be why Willis has pledged to do the impossible, which is to get this case to trial within the next six months. She currently has a gang-related RICO case that is still in its eighth month of jury selection.
But, even the DOJ itself has a policy seeking to limit multiple prosecutions. It says: “The purpose of this policy is to protect persons charged with criminal conduct from the burdens associated with multiple prosecutions and punishments for substantially the same act(s) or transaction(s), to promote efficient utilization of department resources, and to promote coordination and cooperation between federal and state prosecutors.”
The reverse should be true, as well. But, it’s not just that. It’s also Willis’ conduct before Monday night.
She has given more than three dozen media interviews on the investigation. Even the judge overseeing the grand jury said she is “on national media almost nightly talking about the investigation.”
In many of those interviews, she repeatedly kept hinting at the outcome of the case. In the end, it was certainly not a question of if the indictment would come, but when.
Her explanations for why it’s taken two and a half years to get here have made little sense.
“The right to have your vote protected is a serious one and so, you know, I’ve told people many times I’m not going to be rushed. We are doing what is needed for justice,” Willis said in one interview.
That can’t be true. With the special counsel, the delay is more easily understood. Attorney General Merrick Garland likely wasn’t going to bring charges against Trump for trying to overturn the election. Even after the Jan. 6 committee’s criminal referrals, it sure didn’t seem the attorney general was going to act on it, much to the frustration of liberals.
Then, the documents case landed on his lap with the former president seemingly trying to prevent the DOJ from getting back highly sensitive government documents stored at Mar-A-Lago.. At that point, Garland apparently feels he has to deal with it and eventually he appoints a special counsel who then essentially takes it where he wants. That explains that delay.
Jack Smith has only been investigating since November of last year, but what could possibly have taken Willis this long? It took her a year to even request a special purpose grand jury. Why? And that “special purpose” grand jury was just advisory. They heard evidence for eight months and then clearly recommended indictments in February. We know that because the foreperson, just like Willis, sort of hinted at it in an interview.
“We definitely heard a lot about former President Trump and we definitely discussed him a lot in the room. And I’ll say that when this list comes out, there are no major plot twists waiting for you,” the foreperson said.
It all felt like a game. Meanwhile, Willis has also regularly appeared to express her own personal opinions that what Trump did was illegal. After all, the key legal question is: Did he have corrupt intent?
Willis has long made it clear that in Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where he asked the secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes, that he had that corrupt intent, even before the indictment ever came down.
“You look at facts to see did they really have intent? Did they know what they were doing? Detailed facts become important, like asking for a specific number and going back and investigating and understanding that number is one more than the number that is needed. It lets you know someone had a clear mind that they knew what they were doing,” Willis said in a 2021 interview.
So, if you know that, why has it taken two and a half years? Yes, the RICO case she’s now charging is sweeping and has moving parts that took time. But it still just feels like she has been milking this.
That’s not all. She has also overtly politicized it. Last July, less than two weeks after Willis subpoenaed South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, she used her campaign Twitter account to tweet out a cartoon.
The cartoon showed her fishing Graham out of a swamp with what appears to be a depiction of Trump saying: “I know you’ll do the right thing for the swamp, Lindsey.” All the while, her campaign was using the account to solicit donations.
Can you imagine if that was a Republican prosecutor seemingly exploiting the subpoena of a progressive liberal Democrat to solicit campaign donations? There would be no end to the mainstream media’s hysteria.
But this wasn’t the only time Willis and her surrogates referenced the Trump investigation to solicit followers, tweets and donations for her campaign. And that doesn’t even address the actual documented conflict of interest she had.
Willis subpoenaed alleged fake elector Burt Jones, a Republican state senator who at the time of the subpoena was running for lieutenant governor. Willis then hosted a fundraiser for Jones’ political opponent.
Jones went on to win the election, but Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney could not believe the actions of Willis. In a hearing, he called what she did a “what are you thinking?” moment.
Look, Willis is too far in politically to let this go. I understand that. I also get the arguments about accountability, pardons and state vs. federal cases.
But, I think the right thing to do would have been to let the feds handle a case that is about conduct by the president of the United States while he was president.
And to those who desperately want to see Trump locked up and believe that any prosecution of him is a noble one, well you may come to regret this case. Already Monday, there was the release of what appeared to be a draft indictment of Trump hours before the official indictment was handed up.
The DA’s office called the document “fictitious” but in fact, the charges listed on it turned out to be identical to the final indictment. They weren’t the final charges, but it was a huge blunder and one Willis wasn’t even willing to address.
“No, I can’t tell you anything about what you refer to. What I can tell you is that we had a grand jury here in Fulton County. They deliberated until almost 8 o’clock, if not right after 8 o’clock. An indictment was returned and it was true billed. And you now have an indictment. I am not an expert on clerk’s duties or even administrative duties so I wouldn’t know how to work that system and so I’m not going to speculate,” Willis said.
Except, it immediately gave the Trump team a legitimate argument. I am betting this case will end up giving Trump and his supporters many more legitimate arguments to make about the unfairness the prosecutor and the process.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not of NewsNation.
Since March of 2021 the FBI is sitting on a case from the state of Michigan where a Democrat operative showed up with 8-10,000 phony ballots. The person wasn’t arrested but the state turned this over to the FBI.
To this day nothing. Why? The person who dropped the phony ballots works for GBI Strategies. Who are they? A group hired by the DNC. Need I say more?
Democrats Denied Election Results 150+ Times Before Trump Was Indicted for Challenging Election.
Although a Georgia grand jury indicted former President Donald Trump on Monday for challenging the 2020 election result, Democrats have refused to accept the results of elections they lost for decades.
In fact, everysingle Democrat president since 1977 has questioned the legitimacy of U.S. elections, according to the Republican National Committee. In both 2013 and 2016, Biden claimed that Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election. In May 2019, Biden said he “absolutely agrees” that Trump was an “illegitimate president.” Biden cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2022 midterms this year.
In 2006, then-DNC Chairman Howard Dean stated that he was “not confident that the [2004] election in Ohio was fairly decided.” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said it is “appropriate” to have a debate concerning the 2004 election and claimed that there were “legitimate concerns” regarding the “integrity” of U.S. elections. Then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) cast doubt on the security of electronic voting machines in the 2004 election, saying he was “worried” that some machines do not have a paper trail.
Democrats also cast doubt on the 2016 election. Seven House Democrats tried to object to the 2016 election electoral votes. After President Trump’s victory in 2016, 67 Democrats boycotted his inauguration, with some claiming Trump’s victory was not legitimate.
In September 2017, Hillary Clinton said she would not “rule out” questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election. In October 2020, she added that the 2016 presidential election was not conducted legitimately, saying, “We still don’t really know what happened.”
In addition, Democrats supported Stacey Abrams in her stolen election claims. Hillary Clinton said Stacey Abrams “would have won” Georgia’s gubernatorial race “if she had a fair election” and that Stacey Abrams “should be governor” but was “deprived of the votes [she] otherwise would have gotten.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said, “I think that Stacey Abrams’s election is being stolen from her.” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) contended that “if Stacey Abrams doesn’t win in Georgia, they stole it.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said, “the evidence seems to suggest” the race was stolen from Stacey Abrams.
“We won,” Abrams falsely claimed about the 2018 election. “I didn’t lose; we got the votes,” and “we were robbed of an election.” She also called it a “stolen election” multiple times and argued, “It was not a free and fair election.”
Some of the charges and you be the judge. Well just like Trump predicted, number four went down last night. Same as the other three. Hearsay and 1st amendment violations. Breitbart had this.
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is among those in the group of co-defendants in the late night indictment, bizarrely, for simply asking for a phone number.
On or about the 21st day of November 2020, MARK RANDALL MEADOWS sent a text message to United States Representative Scott Perry from Pennsylvania and stated, “Can you send me the number for the speaker and the leader of PA Legislature. POTUS wants to chat with them.” This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
Other actions taken by co-defendants and Trump were considered “overt act[s] in furtherance of the conspiracy.” Such actions include Trump tweeting about election integrity hearings. In one tweet, for instance, Trump said, “Georgia hearings now on @OANN. Amazing!’” According to the indictment, “this was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” It categorized similar tweets that way as well, as Trump encouraged people to watch public hearings about the allegations of voting irregularities:
On or about the 30th day of December 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP caused to be tweeted from the Twitter account @RealDonaldTrump, “Hearings from Atlanta on the Georgia Election overturn now being broadcast. Check it out. @OANN @newsmax and many more. @BrianKempGA should resign from office. He is an obstructionist who refuses to admit that we won Georgia, BIG! Also won the other Swing States.” This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
…
On or about the 30th day of December 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP caused to be tweeted from the Twitter account @RealDonaldTrump, “Hearings from Atlanta on the Georgia Election overturn now being broadcast LIVE via @RSBNetwork! https://t.co/ogBvaKfqG.” This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
Trump’s lawyers responded to the indictment early Tuesday morning, deeming it “undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been.”
“So, the Witch Hunt continues! 19 people Indicated [sic] tonight, including the former President of the United States, me, by an out of control and very corrupt District Attorney who campaigned and raised money on, ‘I will get Trump,’” Trump said of the indictment on Truth Social.
“And what about those Indictment Documents put out today, long before the Grand Jury even voted, and then quickly withdrawn? Sounds Rigged to me!” he exclaimed, inquiring why he was not indicted two and a half years ago.
“Because they wanted to do it right in the middle of my political campaign. Witch Hunt!” he exclaimed.
Republican allies have also jumped to Trump’s defense.
“Same playbook. New partisan DA trying to make a name for themselves,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) remarked.
“Another sham indictment of Trump timed to do maximum damage in the 2024 election—this time with the indictment posted before the grand jury even voted—is no coincidence,” he added. “Americans see through this witch hunt.”
“Justice should be blind, but Biden has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said.
“Now a radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career,” he added. “Americans see through this desperate sham.”
Justice should be blind, but Biden has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election.
Now a radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career.
Just another day of fear from the left. I guess Trump will address this next week in a live news conference. Should be very interesting. NewsMax I’m sure will carry it live. So how many more points will Trumps popularity grow? This just causes Trump to be more outspoken and vocal.
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