The president's speech closed out the second remote convention in American history, and marked the first done right. //

The most impressive political fireworks display most will recall ever seeing on their TV sets finished President Donald Trump’s address at the close of the four-day Republican National Convention Thursday evening, wrapping up the party’s rallies, energizing the president’s supporters, and changing the convention genre forever.

Just one week after a physically isolated, professionally awkward, and visually timid Democratic National Convention finale featured Joe and Jill Biden walking down an empty hallway to a cute fireworks display while socially distanced cars honked their horns in a Delaware parking lot, the Washington sky was alight and a live concert played while hundreds of attendees applauded on the White House’s South Lawn. //

The president’s speech began and finished with American history, distilling the platform he ran on and the accomplishments of his administration into an hour-long address focused on “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” Its themes included industry and fairer trade deals versus outsourcing and China; law and order and police versus lawlessness, murder, and defund movements; and late-term abortion versus the innocent unborn and a moral America.

Why didn’t four reporters from the NYT run this down before impugning Benevenuto’s professional integrity? They couldn’t risk it.

Impugning Benevenuto’s professional integrity was part of the narrative that Bill Barr was doing something corrupt right up to the end.

Bill Barr is working on a book. The first effort from the Democrats will be to prevent any publisher from agreeing to print the book. But that won’t work.

So the fallback position is to continue to hammer away on Barr in advance of his recounting of events.

It’s all about the narrative for the NYT — fact or fiction doesn’t factor into it.

Chris Wallace: So just to button this up, I’m gonna ask you one more question. Do you believe that the virus came from a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute?

Mike Pompeo: I do!

Wallace sat for almost 5 seconds, silently, after the former secretary of state answered, possibly stunned that he received such a direct, unequivocal answer on such a loaded question. No follow-up question was needed with that response.

On June 1, 2020 and afterward, corporate media didn't simply get it wrong, they flagrantly and shamelessly lied to Americans in order to hurt the president //

We were treated to what at first appeared to be rare mea culpa this week as reporters read the Department of the Interior inspector general’s report on the riots and police response in Lafayette Park last summer and appeared shocked to find that the Park Police and Attorney General Bill Barr and even President Donald Trump were telling the truth when they said the crowd was going to be dispersed before police knew the president was thinking of coming down there.

“My [county] judges are asking for one thing in particular,” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) told Newsmax. “I sit in front of them and I go, ‘If I can do one thing for you, what would that be?’ And this is the ask I’m getting. They go, ‘Tony, we need more body bags.’ And I’m going, ‘Body bags? Why do you need body bags?’ They go, ‘Migrants are dying at record numbers, and we don’t have body bags to handle the situation.’ //

Further, even if migrants are lucky enough to make it across the U.S. border, the chances are high that they’ve been raped and/or abused along the way. Men, women, and children are being used as drug mules, and in some cases, murdered. In short, while exposure, including dehydration and starvation, is taking lots of lives, that’s hardly the only threat faced. And on the topic of exposure, deaths as a result of that will skyrocket as the summer heat sets in.

All of this was preventable. The “remain in Mexico” policy and other safe-third-country agreements the Trump administration negotiated had stemmed the flow. We’ve seen an explosion since Joe Biden took office, and it’s solely his fault. That’s become so obvious that even the President of Guatemala is placing blame where it belongs.

Do you know what you call causing a tragedy that was otherwise completely preventable by elected officials? You call it immoral. Joe Biden may be absolved of the great sin of mean tweets, but the immorality of his presidency far surpasses anything the left ever accused Donald Trump of.

Imagine being so anti-Trump that you would throw even historic peace agreements between Israel and neighboring Arab nations down the memory hole just because President Donald Trump brokered those deals.

Well, according to a report from the Washington Free Beacon, that’s exactly what’s happening. According to the report, based on emails reviewed by The Washington Free Beacon, Biden’s State Department is discouraging employees from “referring to the historic peace agreements signed by Israel and its Arab neighbors by its official name, the Abraham Accords.” The name “Abraham Accords” has also “been erased from a wide array of official State Department communications as the new administration presses officials to refer to the Trump-era deals as ‘normalization agreements.'”

The fireworks display at the RNC last August caused more than $42,000 in damage to federal property.
The RNC has reimbursed the federal government for damage on the Washington Monument's grounds.
Trump's unprecedented use of the White House and National Mall for the convention drew criticism from ethics experts.

The controversial fireworks display celebrating former President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention last August caused more than $42,000 in damage to the National Mall, according to Department of Interior documents obtained by the Democratic group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.

The National Park Service wrote in a February letter to the Republican National Committee that turf on the grounds of the Washington Monument was damaged by a forklift operator "who drove at a high rate of speed" and scorched by fireworks, while "extensive compaction damage" was caused by "improper setup and security/setup/takedown vehicles." A water fountain was also damaged by a dumpster truck.

The RNC has reimbursed the federal government for the damages related to the show, which included fireworks spelling out "TRUMP 2020." The RNC also paid the government more than $177,000 in labor costs for almost 4,000 hours of work by NPS employees on the fireworks show.

Ratings from Neilsen Media Research reported Tuesday indicated that CNN lost 67% of its total viewers since January, when Donald Trump left the White House.

During the primetime hours of 8:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. (EST), CNN lost around 65% of its total viewers since January. In the critical 25-54 age demographic, the network lost 71% of its viewers for both the day and primetime. //

All networks had a drop in viewership since January (Fox had a 12% drop overall) so there is some burnout naturally. Yet the massive loss over at CNN is something to behold and amazing to watch. Well, actually not watch, being a lot of you aren’t.

So if I’m reading all of that correctly, it looks like the mainstream media approached the entire issue with deep skepticism from the start, not necessarily because they didn’t believe it was possible, but because they didn’t like the guy making the claims. And every bit of their reporting and fact-checking on the claim from that point forward was framed around that belief and was clouded by their hostile, mistrustful feelings towards Trump.

While a healthy dose of media skepticism towards claims made by politicians is always warranted, it’s not an excuse to slack off of doing exhaustive due diligence when it comes to investigative reporting and fact-checking, especially on a topic as important as this one. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened here. Also unfortunate is that this visceral anti-Trump mindset was pervasive in other reporting on the administration as well on issues that had nothing to do with the coronavirus.

May 24, 2021 By Christopher Bedford

President Joe Biden launched an unprecedented purge of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts Monday, according to a letter reviewed by The Federalist demanding resignation letters by 6 p.m. from four of the seven members, including the chairman.

Those members include sculptor Chas Fagan, architect Steven Spandle, landscape architect Perry Guillot, and Chairman Justin Shubow, a writer and expert on architecture and civic beauty. //

The commission is an independent federal agency established by Congress that advises Congress and the White House on public (civic) architecture on federal lands and in the District of Columbia. Established in 1910, its seven members are chosen from “disciplines including art, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design,” and are appointed by the president to serve four-year terms. No commission member has ever been asked to tender their resignation before their term was up.While classical architecture remains the hands-down favorite of the American public, its opponents are powerful in academia, elite architecture circles, and, it seems, in the Biden White House.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-14/classical-buildings-beat-modern-ones-in-u-s-poll

On Friday, a Georgia State Court Judge ruled that approximately 145,000 absentee ballots cast and counted in Fulton County, Georgia, must be copied and turned over for inspection to Plaintiffs in lawsuits brought in the aftermath of the outcome of the November 2020 presidential election contest in Georgia.

Friday’s decision came in a lawsuit filed by nine plaintiffs, including Garland Favorito, a Fulton resident and self-styled election watchdog. It’s one of more than 30 Georgia lawsuits stemming from the November presidential election and the January runoff for the U.S. Senate. Some of the lawsuits are still winding their way through the courts.

Back on December 5 of last year, I wrote about a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign in Georgia state court challenging the outcome of the Presidential election contest in Georgia (see Trump Campaign Files Georgia Election Contest in Fulton County Court).

This lawsuit was separate from the ones filed in federal court by Lin Wood and Sydney Powell. The Campaign’s lawsuit being focused on allegations that tens of thousands of invalid votes had been unlawfully counted in favor of Joe Biden. //

What actually happened in the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign was exactly as predicted in my two articles — no judge was assigned in a timely manner, the Campaign was never given access to the evidence in the hands of the state election officials, and the Electoral College met and cast its votes while the lawsuit was pending. There could have been 2 million, illegally-cast ballots in Georgia, but if the state courts and election officials simply stalled the process for an election contest lawsuit to proceed, nothing was going to happen.

Judge Amero has ordered that high-resolution copies be made of the 145,000 absentee ballots, while the originals will remain in the custody of election officials. But the copies should allow the plaintiffs to look for certain kinds of possible irregularities such as whether any ballots were machine marked and then copied in large numbers. Mailed-in absentee ballots should all be hand-marked by the voter. //

Raffensperger adopted this conciliatory tone, only after his office opposed the effort by the Plaintiffs to gain access to the mail-in ballots counted in Fulton County.

It is worth noting that the infamous telephone call between President Trump and Raffensperger was part of a “confidential settlement discussion” over the state court lawsuit brought by the Campaign that I referenced above. Raffensperger now applauds the effort to examine the vote-counting in Fulton County, based on a “longstanding history of election mismanagement”, but had no interest in doing so during the call with President Trump, wherein he denied there was any reason for such an examination or investigation.

The media and Democrats claimed that in this call, Pres. Trump was urging Raffensperger to “find” more Trump votes to overcome the 11,000 vote deficit that decided the election.

That was false.

What Pres. Trump was urging Raffensperger to do was to “find” 11,000 invalid votes that had been included in Biden’s vote total in the state — his margin of victory. The lawsuit alleged such invalid votes were cast and counted, and that an investigation by Raffensperger — part of the mandate of his office — would reveal that to be true. Pres. Trump was calling on Raffensperger to conduct that investigation.

There is nothing more corrupt than an investigation that is in desperate search of a crime. But, make no mistake, that is exactly what is happening here.

The Attorney General of New York literally campaigned on prosecuting Donald Trump even before she knew anything about me. She said that if elected, she would use her office to look into “every aspect” of my real estate dealings. She swore that she would “definitely sue” me. She boasted on video that she would be, and I quote, “a real pain in the ass.” She declared, “just wait until I’m in the Attorney General’s office,” and, ”I’ve got my eyes on Trump Tower.” She also promised that, if elected, she would “join with law enforcement and other Attorney Generals across this nation in removing this President from office,” and, “It’s important that everyone understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end.” The Attorney General made each of these statements, not after having had an opportunity to actually look at the facts, but BEFORE she was even elected, BEFORE she had seen even a shred of evidence. This is something that happens in failed third world countries, not the United States. If you can run for a prosecutor’s office pledging to take out your enemies, and be elected to that job by partisan voters who wish to enact political retribution, then we are no longer a free constitutional democracy.

John Hayward
@Doc_0
·
Oct 11, 2019
I wonder if any of the super-duper-principled True Conservatives are going to criticize the totalitarian Democrats for their LGBT town hall, which was filled with vows to shred the Constitution and use raw State power to socially engineer the American people.

We hear a lot of nasty cracks from that crowd about religious conservative voters selling their souls to support Trump. Let them explain how conservative purity requires handing the country over to the left-wingers who just spent all night vowing to destroy religious freedom.

This was never difficult to understand, and it was never hypocrisy from evangelicals. The handwriting was on the wall during the Obama administration. They knew perfectly well what a President Hillary would unleash upon them.

It's not just a religious freedom issue, either. Criticize Trump however you like, but he isn't aggressively trying to use the power of the State to forcibly remake the electorate. His most aggressive uses of executive power have been efforts to PREVENT others from doing so.

You want to talk about bedrock conservative principles? Intrinsic to the very notion of conservatism is resisting the use of coercive force to make people abandon their beliefs and live according to the whims of those who have power over them.

If only these people had as much energy for the George Floyd riots as they do for the assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Indeed, despite what the left would have you believe, Cheney did not lose her position because she criticized Trump. She was not ousted because she supported the second impeachment sham. It was her constant need to bring up the riots and Trump’s comments about the 2020 election that eventually did her in.

When she faced the same consequences in February, she still enjoyed enough support to keep her in as conference chair. But now, even her allies have grown sick of her incessant relitigating of the election and the riots that followed. While the rest of the party wishes to move forward and work with Trump, regardless of their disagreements with his comment, people like Romney, Cheney and the rest of the Never Trump crowd present themselves as obstacles to progress on the right.

Eighty percent of Republicans agreed with the vote to remove Cheney. Of that group, their various reasons included her being “off-message, unsupportive of Mr. Trump, and that she’s wrong about the 2020 presidential election.” Interestingly, even the twenty percent that didn’t agree said they were less likely to vote in Republican primaries, according to CBS, making them even less likely to be an important factor.

The poll also showed, by big numbers, that Republicans want the party to follow Trump’s example on issues like the economy (89%), immigration (88%), leadership (80%) and how to treat the media (77%). Sixty-six percent said being loyal to Trump was important, 33% said it wasn’t important. Sixty-seven percent said they didn’t believe that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the election. While concerns about what happened in the 2020 election were important, it was most important to be focused on the right policies — that important legislation and agreeing on economic policy was more important.

What separates us from the Third World in our politics, he opined, are the twin concepts of peaceful transfer of power via the ballot box rather than by military intervention and the unwritten and unspoken principle that victors do not use the police power of the state to punish the vanquished. Without the second concept, no sane person will ever relinquish office if they run the risk of ending up imprisoned or on the gallows. Once politics become a blood sport, he said, there is no way to stop the slide into rule by people with guns. I’d never really looked at it that way and can’t, even today, disagree with him. If there is any debt owed to Gerald Ford, it is his preservation of the republic by pardoning Richard Nixon.

With that said, it seems as though the left, which has long detested America, is hellbent on crossing that redline and pushing this nation ever closer to one where the abuse of law and the use of the judicial apparatus as stormtroopers and enforcers rather than the rule of law and respect for tradition prevails. If Politico is to be believed, stay with me here, the left is anticipating that President Trump will soon be indicted on state felony charges in New York: POLITICO Playbook: How Palm Beach is preparing for a possible Trump indictment: //

We need to anticipate that President Trump will, indeed, be indicted by a New York grand jury. The New York attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney have too much political capital involved in their highly public investigation of President Trump to shrug and say, “nothing there, folks.” With the New York power structure in utter chaos thanks to Andrew Cuomo’s predatory behavior, casual cruelty, calculated evasion of the law, and superhuman hubris, there is literally no mechanism left within that state to prevent a revenge indictment that could very well propel the instigator to national prominence. They will give no thought to the long-term damage done to our political life or even the damage done to the Democrat party in 2022 and 2024. The lizard-brain urge to lash out at President Trump is simply too strong to be resisted. //

There won’t be any kind of a face-off between Ron DeSantis and Cyrus Vance over the corpus of Donald Trump. If he’s indicted, he will end up on trial. He will be convicted. He will spend the rest of his life in jail. The left will think they have taught us a lesson, and they will be right. The next Republican president will be under enormous pressure to take a similar Democrat scalp. To be on the safe side and make it hurt, he’ll probably have to take down several prominent Democrats. And the left will ‘wave the bloody shirt’ and demand retribution the next time they occupy the White House. The real question becomes why a Republican from a Blue or even a Purple state would even bother to run for the presidency and what he would do when leaving office meant either prison or financial ruin in defending himself? //

Laocoon • 12 hours ago

Outstanding post!

Take a look at the events that led up to the Spanish Civil War sometime. This criminalization of political opposition, anti-religious fanaticism, doctrinaire socialism/communism/anarchism, a willingness by the state to tolerate political violence from the forces of the left, the personal danger of opposing the favored factions of the Republic...all these combined to spark the Spanish Civil War. The persecution of any non-socialist political opposition to the Republic forced many of their victims to take up arms just to survive.

Increasingly the US is starting to resemble that awful conflict.

Usernotfound Laocoon • 12 hours ago

I’m afraid there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed and the left is desperately searching for it. //

uplateagain • 17 hours ago

The indictment of Trump could well be an historical turning point. A match to pooled gasoline. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The British march on Concord to confiscate weaponry. Anyone thinking such an act won't inevitably portend a lot of retribution at the least (actual physical retribution... not political) and quite possibly ultimately full scale civil war, has no concept of how abused and righteously indignant half or more of the country is already feeling about Democratic criminality, bullying, and their working attempt to establish a one-party system and eventual overthrow of Constitutional government and the free market system.

The symbolism of arresting Trump on trumped-up charges would be too great for way too many people to stomach.

Fyrch uplateagain • 2 hours ago

While I may agree with you in spirit, I don't believe the actual anti-fascists in America are cohesive enough to fight back.

The Progressive fascists yell about breaking the system & Whyte Soup/Remacy because they count on the citizenry to meekly bend the knee to outrageous demands simply in order to get on with their lives. It's not just this silliness with wearing masks; we were already letting high school dropouts sexually molest us simply to board a plane, and meekly allowing those in power to get away with the most egregious abuses of law because some paid to watch big men chasing little balls while the rest of us paid to applaud (quoting Michael Crichton).

America's Republic was already sliding into the abyss, not because of a fake insurrection but because people were watching a horde of hOOrs called the Kardashians. //

clconnett • 2 days ago
If the Democrats go down this road there are two options: they stop with one scalp, and we don't retaliate, or we retaliate and they do the same. The problem is that we can't not retaliate. Once they use the state to arrest and detain the politico opposition, there's no closing that door. Either we concede the nation, or violence reigns.

This is not something we should cheer for, but a result we should mourn. //

metalman304 • 2 days ago

Nice theory but think about this....Cy Vance was and is, bossom buddies with Hillary Cankles Clinton. There is no way in blue hell he would retire before taking the first chair on the prosecution of the 45th President and Hillaryś arch enemy. His retirement is more like a signal that a ham sandwhich will be easier to indict than DJT. //

clconnett • 2 days ago

No. It's stupid to wish for further deterioration of our political discourse. This isn't something we callously invite, it's a reality we face with stoicism.

Think about it: Where does something like this end? They take Trump, so we arrest, try and imprison Pelosi, Schumer, and Nadler. So they come for Cruz, DeSantis, Noem, Hawley, etc. The heat is always ratcheted up until... what? What's the final outcome?

I get the attitude of, "We'll let them have it!" Okay. And how many will you, personally, visit in prison, in the hospital, or at their wake? The violence of policing will lead to violence in the streets. And we're all losers then. //

hawkeye1903 • 2 days ago

Yes, stupid to wish for. However - it's very much like the situation facing Israel. We would live in peace with democrats if they would as well, but the democrats have zero intention of letting us live in peace or "otherwise live" if we don't succumb to their boot on our neck. I already know where the democrats intend "it" to end.... we can mourn it, and face it, and prepare for it at the same time.

Matt Bruenig
@MattBruenig
More important insights from today's Catalist data release. Trump increased his margins with all race+gender groups except white men. Women of color were the most swayed by Trump's style of governing. //

According to the data, Trump gained across all demographics, all racial and gender groups, except white men where he lost only a percentage point. The share of Trump voters who were women or people of color in 2020 was 57.2%, up from 54.8% in 2016, with a 7-point gain among nonwhite women, a 4-point gain with nonwhite men, a 1-point gain with white women. While Democrats still won the majority of the Hispanic vote, Trump got a big increase of eight points in the share that swung to him. In 2020, Trump pulled in 11% of the black vote, again an increase of 3% over 2016.

Literally, every reason the left and the media used to convince Americans to support their geriatric prop of a candidate has completely disintegrated. The entirety of the lies, the hatred, the vitriol was to defeat Trump simply because they didn’t like him. They destroyed our prosperity, our success, and our nation’s greatness, just to defeat Trump. I wonder how many of them are starting to miss him.

I ask the left this:

Was It worth it? Are you happy and satisfied with what you’ve done?

Are we done being glad that Trump isn’t President anymore?

Daily Caller
@DailyCaller
NEW: President Trump releases a statement on the conflict between Israel and Gaza:

"Under Biden, the world is getting more violent and more unstable because Biden's weakness and lack of support for Israel is leading to new attacks on our allies."

Jordan Schachtel
@JordanSchachtel
They kicked Donald Trump off of Twitter. Meanwhile, the leader of Hamas is on this platform celebrating "the bombing of Tel Aviv."

Daily Caller
@DailyCaller
Does the leader of the terrorist organization Hamas celebrating rocket attacks against Israel violate your terms of service @TwitterSupport? https://twitter.com/IsmailHaniyyeh/status/1392214479363051520
6:57 PM · May 11, 2021

Here are the questions I want answered.
-- If Democrats didn't rig and steal the election, why are they so afraid of forensic audits in key battleground states, specifically the current audit in Arizona?
-- When Trump was an 8-to-1 landslide favorite with bettors around the world late on election night and clearly headed toward a landslide electoral victory, why did five states suddenly announce they would pause counting for the night? And how come Biden was suddenly ahead by morning?
-- How come Michigan apparently had a dump of 149,772 votes at 6:31 a.m. on Nov. 4, 96% of which went to Biden?
-- How did Wisconsin count 149,520 votes for Biden from 3:26 to 3:44 a.m. on Nov. 4?
-- How come Philadelphia vote counters were so desperate to keep witnesses out of the counting room? Why did they refuse entry to witnesses (to Republicans) until those witnesses had a court order in hand?
-- Why were the windows in a vote-counting location in Detroit covered with cardboard so nobody (no Republican) could see inside?
-- There are videotapes filmed in Detroit of vans pulling up in the middle of the night with what obviously look like boxes of ballots. In Atlanta, there are videotapes that clearly show ballot containers appearing at a vote-counting location after a fake water main break was used to force all GOP witnesses out of the counting room. Why can't we discuss these videotapes?
-- How come Twitter banned me for life over mentioning these videotapes?
-- How come the Arizona Senate's liaison for the vote audit says Maricopa County hasn't complied with the subpoena by turning over passwords to Dominion voting machines?
-- How come the Biden DOJ suddenly wants to stop the Arizona audit?

These are all valid questions. Why do we get backlash for asking them and posting them on social media? What are Democrats hiding? What are they so afraid of?

In the end, that's the proof Democrats rigged and stole the 2020 presidential election. The truth is in their ridiculous, heavy-handed overreaction. They're desperate to stop you from looking into or even talking about this.

Democrats are guilty as sin.