• Pragerisms

    For a more comprehensive list of Pragerisms visit
    Dennis Prager Wisdom.

    • "The left is far more interested in gaining power than in creating wealth."
    • "Without wisdom, goodness is worthless."
    • "I prefer clarity to agreement."
    • "First tell the truth, then state your opinion."
    • "Being on the Left means never having to say you're sorry."
    • "If you don't fight evil, you fight gobal warming."
    • "There are things that are so dumb, you have to learn them."
  • Liberalism’s Seven Deadly Sins

    • Sexism
    • Intolerance
    • Xenophobia
    • Racism
    • Islamophobia
    • Bigotry
    • Homophobia

    A liberal need only accuse you of one of the above in order to end all discussion and excuse himself from further elucidation of his position.

  • Glenn’s Reading List for Die-Hard Pragerites

    • Bolton, John - Surrender is not an Option
    • Bruce, Tammy - The Thought Police; The New American Revolution; The Death of Right and Wrong
    • Charen, Mona - DoGooders:How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help
    • Coulter, Ann - If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans; Slander
    • Dalrymple, Theodore - In Praise of Prejudice; Our Culture, What's Left of It
    • Doyle, William - Inside the Oval Office
    • Elder, Larry - Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card--and Lose
    • Frankl, Victor - Man's Search for Meaning
    • Flynn, Daniel - Intellectual Morons
    • Fund, John - Stealing Elections
    • Friedman, George - America's Secret War
    • Goldberg, Bernard - Bias; Arrogance
    • Goldberg, Jonah - Liberal Fascism
    • Herson, James - Tales from the Left Coast
    • Horowitz, David - Left Illusions; The Professors
    • Klein, Edward - The Truth about Hillary
    • Mnookin, Seth - Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media
    • Morris, Dick - Because He Could; Rewriting History
    • O'Beirne, Kate - Women Who Make the World Worse
    • Olson, Barbara - The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House
    • O'Neill, John - Unfit For Command
    • Piereson, James - Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism
    • Prager, Dennis - Think A Second Time
    • Sharansky, Natan - The Case for Democracy
    • Stein, Ben - Can America Survive? The Rage of the Left, the Truth, and What to Do About It
    • Steyn, Mark - America Alone
    • Stephanopolous, George - All Too Human
    • Thomas, Clarence - My Grandfather's Son
    • Timmerman, Kenneth - Shadow Warriors
    • Williams, Juan - Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It
    • Wright, Lawrence - The Looming Tower

That Smile of America’s MOST CRIMINAL POLITICAL CONARTIST!

joe biden
President Joe Biden repeatedly shares alleged memories trying to relate to Black Americans, that many believe are lies.Getty Images/Tasos Katopodis

MORE FROM:MICHAEL GOODWIN

We have reached the stage in Joe Biden’s presidency where he tells lies about himself and it’s no longer news. Such was the case over the weekend.

The president marked the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday with predictable chameleon-like claims to black audiences. He insisted at King’s storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta that, as a child and young adult, he routinely attended a black church after going to Catholic Mass. 

In a second speech, in Washington, he claimed to have fought against South African apartheid and was a civil rights activist who marched to desegregate Delaware. 

His Walter Mitty fantasies might be endearing if he weren’t the president of United States and if he didn’t have such a sketchy relationship with the truth on serious matters throughout his career. Remember, this is a man who once plagiarized parts of another man’s life story and tried to make it his own! 

This is also the same man who implausibly insists he never once spoke to his son Hunter about his multimillion-dollar paydays with foreign firms and governments.

Now, at the ripe age of 80, it’s reasonable to wonder if Biden can separate fact from fiction, or if flights of fancy and convenient political lies are so jumbled in his addled brain that no one in the White House can untangle them or persuade him to stop repeating falsehoods. 

All that aside, Biden did say a few very important things in his weekend pander-fest. They were demonstrably false and so inflammatory, they can’t be ignored.

POLICE FORCE
Biden wants to see improvement in police training to reduce the use of deadly force.

We have to retrain cops as to why should you always shoot for that with deadly force? The fact is, if you need to use your weapon, you don’t have to do that,” he said Monday.

The president was talking to an audience of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, and like both Biden and Sharpton, the claim is long past its prime. Worse, it is rooted in ignorance and anti-police bias.

The inference is that trigger-happy cops needlessly kill when, if they were better trained, they would aim for an arm or a leg. That way, the assailant could be stopped but not killed.

It is a prime argument of the “defund the police” crowd that routinely paints cops as cold-hearted killers. Biden says he ­rejects the defund idea, but then repeats one of the movement’s central tenets. 

Moreover, the idea that cops can always shoot to wound is a Hollywood fantasy that’s been debunked repeatedly by police officers and those who train them. They warn that the view can embolden some perps to believe they don’t have to worry about pulling a gun on a cop and influences the public to believe that fatal police encounters are almost always avoidable if only the cops were better trained and more humane. 

defund the police
Biden’s comments support the idea of defunding the police, that paints cops as cold-hearted killers.

Yet here we are, with the president of the United States believing and saying such a stupid thing. 

If he said it in private, the offense would be bad enough. That Biden said it publicly to a black audience, effectively priming it to distrust and dislike police, is ­unforgivable. It also a smear on every law-enforcement officer in America.

It echoes his 2012 race-flaming campaign speech to a black audience when he said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wants to “put you all back in chains.”

Cops and others in law enforcement are authorized to use deadly force in certain circumstances, but it is a lie that they are taught to shoot-to-kill. Instead, when they perceive a serious risk to themselves or others and draw their weapons, they are trained to aim for the biggest body mass to stop the immediate threat.

That happens to be the chest, home of the heart and lungs, and shots there can be fatal.

Irresponsible talk 

Still, the police motive is not to kill the assailant. The motive is to save the lives of the innocent.

Biden must know that, or certainly should. Instead, as he faces a special-counsel probe over his mishandling of classified documents, he plays the race card and gives a clear suggestion cops routinely opt for “deadly force” when other options are available.

joe biden
Biden greats supporters after speaking at the National Action Network’s Annual Martin Luther King Day.

And he didn’t stop there, trotting out another dated trope to make himself look like a hero to his audience.

He urged “a fresh approach to how we recruit, how we hire, how we train, how we promote and how we retain, retain in law enforcement that come from the neighborhoods that they serve and know the people they’re charged to protect.”

He obviously aimed to draw a provocative image of an all-white police force acting as an occupying army in non-white neighborhoods. In doing so, he revealed his own willful ignorance.

SEE ALSO

End of an error of shielding the Bidens as classified documents scandal puts Joe’s presidency in peril

Take the NYPD. It has been ­majority-minority for nearly two decades. And New York has a black mayor, a black female police commissioner and nonwhite officers in numerous positions of ­authority.

Many cities and their police ­forces have similar racial make-ups. Does Biden know any of that? Does he care?

From there, he went on to sound another false note when he claimed, “Now, I know a lot of people say community police is not a good idea.”

Nobody says that, certainly nobody in policing. Yet he was just getting started, adding that people in a black community in Delaware he claims to be familiar with “want cops who are fair. They want cops who know their communities. They want cops who are going to be doing it by the numbers.”

Once again, the suggestion is that most cops are not fair and don’t know or understand the people in the communities where they work. The assumption was that all black Americans agree with him, or should.

As he infamously said in another context, if you don’t, “you ain’t black.” 

Cornered animals are dangerous animals, and Biden’s desperation is showing. He faces, in addition to the special-counsel probe, a GOP House vowing to investigate his role in his family’s influence-peddling schemes. 

So far, he’s behaving the way you would expect a guilty swamp creature to behave: attack your opponents’ motive and tell your supporters they will lose everything they hold dear if the other side wins. 

It’s shameful. And a disgrace to the man of peace he supposedly was honoring to use the holiday as an excuse to smear the brave Americans who, regardless of their race, make up the Thin Blue Line.

Why Do Devoted Liberals Usually BECOME LEFTY FASCISTS?

JANUARY 18, 2023 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN ACADEMIC LEFTADMINISTRATIVE STATE

WHY DECEPTION IS ESSENTIAL TO THE LEFT

News item: Stanford University withdraws its “Harmful Language” list after it received widespread publicity—and universal ridicule. But other universities are quietly imposing similar “language guidance” albeit without high-profile master lists that would expose them to the withering laughter and contempt they deserve.

News item: The Biden Administration rushes to reassure Americans that there is “no plan” to ban natural gas stoves. This is a lie, of course. Lots of progressive cities—and even New York state—are moving to impose bans on all natural gas appliances. There is no doubt that the climatistas are determined to take away your gas stoves.

What do these two stories have in common? In both cases the left was too open and explicit about what they wanted, drawing unwanted and premature attention. In looking at the fumble by the Consumer Product Safety Commission on gas stoves, I’m reminded of an early line from Col. Trautman (played by the late great Richard Crenna) when he first shows up in First Blood: “Frankly, Rambo screwed up. You should all be dead.” The CSPC screwed up by not quietly pursuing a slow-roll regulatory rule-making, and springing a fait accompli on the American people. That is the usual procedure of the administrative state when it wants to do something unpopular, like ban plastic straws, dish soap that works, and toilets that only need a single flush. This time, Richard Trumka Jr. just couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and blew the whole thing. And some boneheaded staff at Stanford made the mistake of posting online the “Harmful Language” list before it could be formally institutionalized with a punishment procedure for anyone who engages in wrongspeak.

But the language police and the gas stove-grabbers will be back, you can be assured. The left never accepts defeat. But it also knows it must conceal and deceive to get what it wants, because it knows it does not have the support of the American people. As Michael Walsh never tires of reminding us, the left never stops, never sleeps, and never quits. (P.S. Almost on cue, The New Republic—a former magazine—is calling the backlash “gas stove denialism,” because that’s all they’ve got.)

Liberals are also the world’s biggest hypocrites.

Loony Tunes At The Dem’s American News Front!

JANUARY 18, 2023 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

CLARITY, KJP STYLE

There is a flood of stories on the Biden classified documents matter in the media today. Before we turn to them, let us review the clarity White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre shed on her state of knowledge when she briefed the press this past Friday (transcript here). We subsequently learned that her account was “inoperative,” to borrow a resonant Watergate term, at the time she gave it. It had already been superseded by the discovery of another tranche of classified documents that she had left unmentioned.

Was KJP lying or clueless? I take it that it was ABC News White House reporter Cecilia Vega who posed the question to KJP at yesterday’s briefing (transcript here):

On Friday, you stood here, though, and were asked about this documents issue, by our count, some 18 times. At that point, the President’s lawyers had found these five additional pages of classified documents. So, did you not know on Friday that those documents had been found when you were at the podium? Or are you being directed by someone to not be forthcoming on this issue?

KJP responded:

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: I have been forthcoming from this podium. What I said yes to was what the statement at the time that we all had. Right? You all had the statement. And I was repeating what the — what the Counsel was sharing at that time. And so —

Q Right. And we had that statement, so we knew what was in it.

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Exactly.

Q But you also knew — did you not know that the other documents had been found?

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: I’m telling you — I just answered the question. I just said that I was repeating what the information that we had at that time — right? — that you all had — I was confirming from what the Special Counsel had provided to all of you and that we knew as well from here. So just to be very, very clear.

And, look, I’ve also been very clear about being prudent from here. I was also being very clear about being consistent from here and not going beyond what is currently happening. Right?

And again, this is an ongoing — I also said this was an ongoing review that was happening with the Department of Justice and, as we know, with the Special Counsel. I’ve been very consistent about that as well.

And that’s one of the reason — your question to me is one of the reasons why I’m — I — we are being very, very careful and very mindful and — to not interfere here and to make sure — to make sure the Department of Justice has their independence.

Your question actually proves that, and that’s why we’re going to continue to refer you to Department of Justice and refer you to the Special Counsel or my colleagues —

So what was her answer? CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang wasn’t sure. followed She stated that she “want[ed] to follow up on Cecilia’s question, and sorry if I missed it.” I don’t think she missed it. “But on Friday, did you or did you not know about the additional five pages?” KJP responded:

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: I — I already an- — I literally just answered that question. I just —

Q Was — but I — I missed it. So, was it yes or no?

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Well, I — I mean, you’re — you’re not too far sitting next to her. So, I was very clear. I provided — I provided the information that you all had at the time. And I confirm —

Q But I’m asking, “Did you know?”

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: No, I did not know. I’m saying I had the information — I actually said this to Cecilia — I had the information that you all had at the time, right?

And so, this is why — I also said to Cecilia — this is why we are trying to be very prudent here and we are trying to be very consistent and say this is an on-going legal process. And this is why I say we’re just not going to comment from here. That is a perfect example in Cecilia’s question, and I was very clear about that.

Well, that was painful. Prudence and consistency never had it so bad. We may infer that KJP is out of it in more ways than one. It was painful, but we have achieved clarity on that point.

NPR White House correspondent Tamara Dawnell Keith pursued the point: She asked whether KJP was “upset that you came out to this podium on Friday with incomplete and inaccurate information? And are you concerned that it affects your credibility up here?” Good question!

KJP responded:

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Well, what I’m — what I’m concerned about is making sure that we do not politically interfere in the Department of Justice, that we continue to be consistent over the last two years, and — and that is — continue to refer you all, when it comes to an ongoing process. And — and I’ll just leave it there. And let’s not forget — there was actually a statement from the Counsel’s Office that you all had at the same time as well.

I’m — I’m just not going to go down any rabbit hole here. I’m going to be very consistent. I’m going to be very prudent.

And, again, I’ve been asked — just asked that question. I’ve answered it. It’s been noted, the question. And we’re just going to move on.

Duly noted.

Via Tim Haims/RealClearPolitics (who highlights another exchange of KJP with Jiang).

Kevin and Company GOING LEFTY?

Kevin McCarthy Is Already a Gift to Democrats

COMMENTARY

By A.B. Stoddard at RealClearPolitics:

January 13, 2023

By the middle of next year, House Democrats fighting to regain the majority, Senate Democrats working to maintain their majority, President Biden or another Democrat running for president – and any Republican running for president – will all be running against the House GOP.

Why? Because much of all that House Republicans have promised to do in the 118th Congress will backfire on them politically, turn off independent voters, and bolster Democrats as they head into the critical 2024 election. Battling GOP extremism just helped Democrats stop a red wave in the 2022 midterms. Yet new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has elevated fringe figures like Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene to first-string players in the House GOP conference.

Swing voters were “frightened” of Republicans, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell said after the midterms. McConnell said they believed Republicans “were not dealing with issues in a responsible way and we were spending too much time on negativity and attacks and chaos.”

But chaos and attacks, and possibly even a debt default, are what McCarthy has enabled. A bipartisan select committee to investigate economic competitiveness with China, an open and more transparent floor process, allowing 72 hours for members to read a bill before voting – all of this is fine. But detailing a ransom payment in a secret three-page “addendum” and putting three Freedom Caucus members on the Rules Committee? That’s disastrous. The Fundraising Caucus members who dragged McCarthy through 15 ballots to become speaker now have veto power over which bills make it to the House floor: The hostage-takers are gatekeepers too.

McCarthy and his detractors did not “sort out their differences” as he insisted. He gave them things we may never know of, and they will ask for more. There will be more differences, and more fighting soon as well, because fighting is the point. It keeps the hardliners relevant with the base and helps raise small-donor donations.

Irresponsible people have not only been empowered – McCarthy has promised to risk uncertainty on the debt limit by pledging to insurgents it would not be lifted without spending cuts, that he would hold to a cap on discretionary spending at FY 2022 levels, and that they will balance the budget in 10 years.

As Rep. Bob Good, one of the leading rebels, put it on Fox News, “We will have zero leverage … if we’re not willing to threaten [a government shutdown] and willing to follow through on it.” These comments immediately became a DNC alert on Twitter.

Responsible House Republicans who did not take McCarthy hostage are worried. They are already working with Democrats to figure out a path to avert a debt default. To find $130 billion in savings, both Democrats and Republicans are concerned that the Pentagon will get hit by a 10% cut.

Not surprisingly, far-right House Republicans are already talking out of both sides of their mouths on this critical question which would have been unheard of in the party just a few years ago. Rep. Chip Roy said on Twitter that defense cuts were “NEVER DISCUSSED” And that there were “broad agreements spending cuts should focus on NON-DEFENSE discretionary spending.” But Jordan said everything is on the table including military spending, particularly in Ukraine.

“If we’d focus on getting rid of all the ‘woke’ in our military, we’d have the money we need to make sure our troops get the pay raise they deserve, we’d have the weapons systems and training that needs to be done so that we’re ready to deal with our adversaries around the planet,” Jordan said on Fox.

Rep. Michael Waltz, a former Green Beret, fired back on Fox Business Channel, saying “I’m all for a balanced budget but we’re not going to do it on the backs of our troops and our military. If we really want to talk about the debt and spending, it’s the entitlement programs.” White House chief of staff Ron Klain tweeted the Waltz video with the comment, “They are going to try and cut social security and Medicare. It could not be clearer.”

The White House has already accused Republicans of planning to “defund the military in the name of politics,” and is relishing the opportunity to paint Republicans as threats to our readiness.

While they battle among themselves over spending cuts, Republicans have promised multiple investigations into the FBI, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and the U.S.-Mexico border. Should these probes fail to turn up significant revelations, we can be assured of high-wattage hearing theater from those intending to go viral. There is fundraising to do after all. And that combat footage will help the anti-establishment rebels, even if it threatens the House majority come November of 2024.

Throughout this cycle, McCarthy will walk a fine line trying to recruit and run GOP candidates who can beat Democrats in blue districts – to grow his majority – while he helps more far-right candidates come to the next Congress to join Greene, Gaetz, and the gang. That is because the cliffhanger of McCarthy’s speaker vote was partially resolved – don’t laugh – by two super PACs agreeing that McCarthy would no longer support more mainstream candidates in safe GOP seats like he did this cycle through the Congressional Leadership Fund. Not only did the agreement require that McCarthy back off with his money in open primaries of solid red districts, but that he wouldn’t donate to other entities to do so. Safe seat or not, every radical Republican running anywhere, even where a Democrat doesn’t contest the race, helps the Democrats national narrative.

Meanwhile, McCarthy agreed to weaken the House Ethics Committee that will investigate embattled freshman Rep. George Santos, the New York congressman who lied about his whole life to get elected. McCarthy has insisted on supporting Santos, who will be another poster child for the House GOP – as they say, the ads write themselves.

New Navigator polling shows House Republicans are already in a deep hole with independent voters, only 21% of whom approve of their new majority so far. Republicans promised to combat inflation and crime, but that’s not what voters are going to be hearing about this year. They will be hearing mostly about the Biden family and the FBI. Perhaps what Republicans uncover about the Bidens will be enough to drown out their own circus when it comes to governance – but it’s doubtful. Just like it’s doubtful Republicans can balance the budget by de-working the military.

House Republicans know all this, but they chose a maelstrom anyway.

A.B. Stoddard is associate editor and columnist at RealClearPolitics and a guest host on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel.

“At the behest of President Joe Biden, the unelected bureaucrats at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives plan to finalize a rule that will turn the up to ……”

With New Pistol Brace Rule, ATF Seeks To Turn Millions Of Law-Abiding Gun Owners Into Felons

BY: JORDAN BOYD at the Federalist:

JANUARY 17, 2023

Brace yourself: The ATF is back with another rule that puts up to 40 million law-abiding gun owners at risk for a federal felony.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

At the behest of President Joe Biden, the unelected bureaucrats at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives plan to finalize a rule that will turn the up to 40 million estimated Americans who legally obtained pistol brace-equipped firearms into federal felons.

The rule seeks to reclassify firearms with pistol braces as short-barrel rifles (SBR), which require extra registration with the government and a tax stamp that normally totals $200 under the National Firearms Act (NFA). The ATF signaled it may waive the fee, which it does not technically have the authority to do since the Treasury collects the tax.

To avoid 10 years in jail and a potential $10,000 fine, gun owners must reclassify their legally obtained weapons as short barrel rifles through a months-long, red tape-plagued, and expensive process or destroy the pistol brace. Once the ATF publishes its final rule in the federal register, gun owners will have 120 days to bring their firearms into compliance. Yet the ATF warns that Americans with pistol braces are likely already “violating the [National Firearms Act] by possessing an unregistered rifle with a barrel of less than 16 inches.”

Those who refuse to register their non-compliant firearms as NFA items and pay the $200 tax stamp that accompanies them will be required to surrender their pistol brace-equipped guns to the ATF. Firearms owners in the 21 states with SBR bans will also be forced to relinquish or destroy their pistol brace-equipped firearms to avoid penalty and punishment.

When Biden personally requested the rule in 2021, “hundreds of thousands” of members of the public expressed opposition to it. Every 117th Senate Republican, except Rob Portman and Susan Collins, also urged the ATF to abandon the rule that would “turn millions of law-abiding Americans into criminals overnight, and would constitute the largest executive branch-imposed gun registration and confiscation scheme in American history.”

“The proposed rule is worse than merely abdicating your responsibility to protect Americans from criminals; you’re threatening to turn law-abiding Americans into criminals by imposing the largest executive branch-initiated gun registration and confiscation program in American history,” the senators wrote.

Despite strong public opposition and the threat of legal and congressional involvement, the ATF didn’t budge.

‘Legislative Rulemaking’

ATF Director Steven Dettelbach claimed last week that the rule “prevents people from circumventing the laws Congress passed almost a century ago.” Yet he and Attorney General Merrick Garland shamelessly admit that it is the executive branch, not Congress, that is redefining “rifle” beyond what is constituted in statute.

“Almost a century ago, Congress determined that short-barreled rifles must be subject to heightened requirements,” Garland said in a statement. “Today’s rule makes clear that firearm manufacturers, dealers, and individuals cannot evade these important public safety protections simply by adding accessories to pistols that transform them into short-barreled rifles.”

The ATF determined a decade ago in 2012 that pistol braces do not “alter the classification of a pistol or other firearm.” The agency based its approval on the fact that “this device is not designed or intended to fire a weapon from the shoulder.” The ATF reconfirmed in 2017 that the brace, barring modifications and misuse, still doesn’t qualify as a “heavily regulated” SBR.

That approval was monumental for AR pistol owners who coveted the comforts a brace provides without subjecting them to the SBR regulation an AR with a stock and a less than 16-inch barrel would have.

Garland, however, justifies the ATF’s new rule with claims that “certain so-called stabilizing braces are designed to just attach to pistols, essentially converting them into short-barreled rifles to be fired from the shoulder.”

That distinction may not seem like a big deal, but it constitutes what Second Amendment attorney Stephen Halbrook calls “legislative rulemaking” by the ATF.

“Essentially, ATF has tried to redefine and expand on the definition of rifle which has criminal implications and that’s a no-no,” Halbrook said in an interview on Monday. “…There would be nothing wrong with ATF telling the public what it considers when it tries to decide or analyze whether an item is a pistol or rifle. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when they try to make this binding, in other words, they try to add to the regulation, basically, it’s called legislative rulemaking. And then they say ‘we’re going to prosecute people who are acting not in accord with this regulation,’ that’s where it goes beyond the pale.”

For years now, the ATF felt emboldened to legislate by regulation instead of enforcing what is already on the books. That behavior went largely unchecked by Congress but recently landed the agency in hot water with federal courts over its bump stock ban.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held last week that the ATF’s attempt to redefine non-mechanical bump stocks as “machineguns” did not match Congress’s statutory definition. Additionally, the court determined that the ATF performed “an exercise of legislative power, in violation of the Constitution’s vesting of all such power in Congress. U.S. Const. art. I, § 1.” 

The same is likely true for the ATF’s pistol brace rule. Already, Second Amendment organizations have vowed to take the Biden administration to court over its attempts to retroactively criminalize law-abiding Americans over pistol braces.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News.

Racist Representative Liar, Shirley Jackson Lee, MAKING NOISE AGAIN!

 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

DEMOCRATS TRY TO CRIMINALIZE FREE SPEECH

Representative Shirley Jackson Lee has introduced legislation that would make advocates of “white supremacy” guilty of conspiracy if someone commits a “hate crime” that supposedly is inspired by them.

The legislation, H.R.61 “Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023,” introduced last Monday by Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, seeks to “prevent and prosecute white supremacy inspired hate crime and conspiracy to commit white supremacy inspired hate crime.”

The congressional bill, which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, states that someone engages in a white supremacy inspired hate crime “when white supremacy ideology has motivated the planning, development, preparation, or perpetration of actions that constituted a crime or were undertaken in furtherance of activity that, if effectuated, would have constituted a crime.”

Accordingly, “conspiracy” to engage in white supremacy inspired hate crime entails the publishing of material “advancing white supremacy, white supremacist ideology, antagonism based on ‘replacement theory’, or hate speech that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person or group.”

You can read the text of the bill here. It is, on its face, ridiculous.

* It does not define “white supremacy.” Having never met a white supremacist, I am still waiting to learn what it is all about.

* It does not require a causal link between any “white supremacist” speech and a subsequent crime, nor, of course, any knowledge of the crime by the speaker. If a jury finds that the speech “could motivate actions” by “predisposed” persons, and the criminal was exposed to the speech, the speaker is a co-conspirator.

* The bill is obviously unconstitutional. It attempts to criminalize “hate speech” by making the speaker a co-conspirator. But “hate speech,” as such, is constitutionally protected, as the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 not long ago. I am not sure exactly what “replacement theory,” for example, refers to, but talking about it cannot be made a crime, no matter how much Democrats don’t like it.

* I suppose the bill fails on equal protection grounds, too. It doesn’t touch “black supremacy” or any other type of “hate speech,” even though vastly more crimes are committed by blacks against whites than by whites against blacks.

* The statute attempts to chill criticism of black politicians like Shirley Jackson Lee (but not white politicians). If you engage in “hate speech [undefined] that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person” and someone else hears your speech and thereafter commits a “hate crime,” and a jury thinks such a person “could” have been motivated by your speech, you are guilty.

Such things can happen, of course. Chuck Schumer and many other Democrats vilified Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other Supreme Court justices, and threatened them with violence. Sure enough, an armed man showed up outside Kavanaugh’s house, intending to kill him. But that wouldn’t have been covered by Lee’s statute: Kavanaugh is white.

I assume Lee’s bill won’t go far, but it illustrates how crazy things can get when you have a political party that is hostile to free speech.