Republicans should stop playing defense when they haven’t done anything wrong lest they be consumed. Preempt the ineffective policy prescriptions of the left, which only serve to garner unrelated political goals, by introducing actual “common-sense” reforms. Have those reforms not target the Second Amendment, but rather focus on the direct protection of schools, enforcing existing laws, and getting the mentally ill the help they need. If Democrats want to say no to all that, let them go on the record.

Now that Georgia’s early primary voting turnout has blown tallies from the last few elections out of the water, the left is pretty quiet.

Remember when our president claimed that Georgia’s election-integrity law was “Jim Crow on steroids”? And his vice president insisted similar laws were voter suppression because rural bumpkins don’t have “Kinkos” or “OfficeMax” and thus can’t possibly be expected to figure out how to photocopy their IDs?

Now that Georgia’s early primary voting turnout has blown tallies from the last few elections out of the water, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are pretty quiet. So are the rest of the corporate media, which dutifully parroted the narrative that the Peach State’s push for election security represented Republican efforts to kill democracy with vicious racism.

According to Georgia’s secretary of state, 857,401 people voted in the state’s 2022 midterm election, including almost 800,000 of them in person by the end of early voting on Friday. By the end of early voting in 2020, the number of in-person voters was 326,351, and in pre-pandemic 2018 that number didn’t even break 300,000.

That makes this midterm tally a pretty dramatic spike. But even more impressive is the rise in the number of non-white voters, of which approximately 100,000 more voted early compared to 2018.

How could it possibly be that early voting significantly increased, especially among minorites, under a Republican regime of racist “Jim Eagle” suppression? //

Note that this smear operation entirely worked to get Democrats more of what they wanted: elections that are weeks long instead of one day, which increases their ability to affect the election outcome unfairly by checking what votes are in and what areas favorable to them they need to harvest votes from still.

Whether lab or market origin, anyone trying to cover for China should remember both scenarios are humiliating for the Chinese government.

The only Covid narrative that doesn’t directly aim to control people has to do with determining the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Discovering the origin of the virus should have been a top priority, but it was not. Why? Perhaps, instead of controlling people, the goal in this case was to cover for complicit behavior.

There are only two plausible competing virus origin hypotheses: “lab leak” and “wet market.” Instead of imploring scientists to work together and discover the truth, then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins wrote in an email to presidential medical advisor Anthony Fauci early in the pandemic: “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy [i.e., ‘lab leak’], with what seems to be growing momentum.”

Knowing that SARS-CoV-1 leaked from a Chinese lab on at least two occasions in the early 2000s, why would Collins and Fauci be so quick to “put down” the lab leak hypothesis? //

Either way, whether lab or market origin, anyone trying to cover for China apparently must be reminded that both scenarios are humiliating for the Chinese government. Both represent extremely careless and unhygienic behavior, especially considering that wet markets are places where endangered animals like pangolins are slaughtered for completely unscientific medicines.

The difference, of course, is that the lab scenario also implicates powerful interests in the United States. Thus, it’s not difficult to understand why stifling the lab leak would be important to those in power.

Covid caused those in power to react to events that they had little to no influence over with narratives designed to give the illusion of taking control of the situation. What makes this pandemic different are the tools available to control the narratives, namely the addition of Big Tech and their willingness to suppress debate.

Still, the truism noted by Aldous Huxley that “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored” remains. The challenge is to ensure that people in our society are never too intimidated to offer counter-narratives or debate the edicts from those with power. ///

If the origins were not a lab leak, would there not be more interest in confirming that it was not not? The amount of effort out into dismissing the lab leak origin suggests there is something there.

Francis Collins may very well be a believer and a good follower of Christ, but that does not mean that he is not a sinner and a flawed man, just like all of us. It also does not mean that he shares the same morals or morés as other Christians, including oneself. Without knowing someone personally and knowing something of their heart, "Christians" in positions of power should be treated with the same disinterested suspicion as any other politician.

The flaws of an old hypothetical also illuminate the weakness of contemporary arguments for abortion grounded on claims of bodily autonomy.

Judith Jarvis Thompson’s hypothetical: If you were kidnapped and used as a life-support system for an ailing virtuoso, would you have the right to disconnect him? Nonetheless, its argument from autonomy is, if anything, now more central to the case for abortion.

This emphasis is largely a byproduct of the ultrasound pictures on our fridges and social media feeds. It is difficult to dismiss human lives in utero as worthless clumps of cells when you can count their fingers and look at their faces. So abortion supporters increasingly echo Thompson’s claim that no one should be compelled to sustain another person, whether violinist or fetus. Thus, a woman has an absolute right to violently end the human life developing in her womb. //

The violinist scenario is a hypothetical freak of medicine, whereas pregnancy is the normal reality of human reproduction. This normalcy, in turn, reminds us that we were all once utterly dependent in utero, and that most of us will be dependent again, whether from illness, injury, or old age. In short, we are all the violinist.

Human solidarity recognizes this shared dependence. Ignoring it, or trying to avoid it, has been a great failure of the liberal political tradition. Liberal discourse privileges independent, rational adults (or at least adults who imagine themselves such). But independent, rational adults don’t need solidarity, they need a non-aggression pact and mechanisms for conflict resolution—which is what classical liberal theorists such as John Locke sought to provide. //

Abortion’s dissolution of family solidarity poisons everything. Abortion culture encourages men and women to use each other rather than to love each other. Abortion culture teaches us to treat children as expensive commodities, rather than welcoming them as blessings. //

Family requires solidarity, which abortion destroys, both directly by violently ending unborn lives and indirectly through the culture this enables and encourages. And when solidarity decays within family life, it will not endure socially or politically.

This is why the promises of abortion advocates have proven false. Thompson’s weird hypothetical invites us to disconnect the violinist, but abortion disconnects all of us from the love and solidarity that enable genuine human flourishing.

Democrats like Biden don’t want to look at solutions that might actually do something about addressing such situations such as making the schools more secure with things like single-point entry at schools as Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed in the Parkland shooting, advocates.

Then you might also want to try to enforce the laws that already exist and follow up on the warning signs that always seem to be there in such cases. It’s easy to shout “do something.” It’s harder to try to deal with difficult issues in a way that will truly have a result.

But Democrats have instead concentrated on things like “defund the police” which has made things harder. We’ve also seen progressive prosecutors not holding criminals to account. We see a lack of consequence for a lot of criminal actions now. Even in the case of Hunter Biden, gun laws weren’t enforced when it came to him allegedly not truthfully responding about his past drug use in filling out an application for a gun.

What we should be looking to stop is criminal action, not trying to once again further demonize guns, and once again not truly addressing the issues.

For decades, the Supreme Court’s decision to hijack the abortion question blunted the moral impetus for secular and religious leaders alike. It allowed for a dishonest debate, and for the left to claim our elected representatives alone have jurisdiction over matters of life and death, while rarely exercising this jurisdiction.

For decades, from both the church pulpit and the bully pulpit, it allowed for cowardice. Soon that may be ending. It might not make for a less contentious time in American life, but it will sure make for a more honest one.

K-12 schools must allow boys into girls’ private areas to obtain federal funds for lunches, breakfasts, and snacks, the Biden administration announced this month. A U.S. Department of Education spokesman told The Federalist the Biden administration’s press releases from several agencies announcing this policy will be followed by formal rulemaking in June. //

Before many schools shut down in response to Covid-19, the National School Lunch Program fed nearly 30 million kids every school day, in approximately 100,000 public and private schools and residential care facilities.

Under this new demand, establishments that accept any federal food funding, including food stamps, must also allow males who claim to be female to access female private spaces, such as showers, bathrooms, and sleeping areas. Such organizations must also follow protocols such as requiring staff to use inaccurate pronouns to describe transgender people and allowing male staff to dress as women while on the job.

Religious institutions, however, qualify for a waiver exempting them from these requirements, said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Greg Baylor in an interview Monday. According to the 1972 Title IX law, he said, religious institutions don’t have to file any paperwork to be exempt, although they can if they wish.

Baylor noted, however, that publicly affirming a commitment to sexual reality by seeking an exemption acknowledgment from federal agencies may assist extremist pressure campaigns. //

“The Biden administration is grossly extending the Bostock holding where it does not belong. Like many of the Biden administration’s power grabs, this imposition transgresses areas of proper state and local authority. As the principal guardians of federalism, state attorneys general have the ability to combat such overreach where it injures state functions,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, told The Federalist in a statement. //

While the majority opinion said Bostock only applied to Title VII, or employment law, it provided the rationale and excuse to extend this reasoning elsewhere. And the Biden administration’s press releases are ignoring the ruling’s claimed limits to apply it to other areas of federal code, particularly education’s Title IX, as many predicted.

Not only is the Biden administration’s use of federal food subsidies to impose sexual politics legally suspect in substance, it’s also legally suspect procedurally, Baylor said. That’s because press releases are not legally enforceable. Only federal regulations that have followed proper legal procedures are.

That hasn’t happened yet with this Biden administration demand, although the USED spokesman said the proposed regulation will be issued in June. Yet even after the regulation is issued, federal agencies are required to accept public comments for several months, then they must spend several more months reviewing all comments and responding, then writing and issuing a final regulation, which then can — and will be, Baylor said — challenged in court.

“When they do things some other way, just by some regulatory guidance or a press release or a memo, that in itself can be a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and that’s precisely what we’ve argued in some of the cases we’ve filed on this issue,” Baylor said. “…We think they’re making shortcuts and we’ve challenged that in court.”

So it appears with this demand, just like with the Biden administration’s so-called vaccine mandate, the administration is slow-walking the legal procedures required. That delays inevitable lawsuits, which themselves take years to work out. This process effectively imposes unpopular, extremist gender policies extra-legally, through fiat and intimidation. Meanwhile, many elected officials can and do sit on their hands and claim it’s the courts’ job to solve what they can end immediately through legislative action. //

Remedies include withdrawing children from public schools, school boards refusing to follow regulations that are not legally binding until all court challenges are resolved, schools refusing to accept federal funding that comes at such a high cost, and state legislatures and Congress passing new laws to limit and undo the disastrous Bostock decision.

“The uncertainty is really unfortunate, and what we need are courageous parents who share their views with school administrators and school boards. We need courageous school administrators and school boards to do the right thing and push back on this interpretation of Title IX, because there are real harms to kids as a consequence,” Baylor said.

Last Thursday, something extraordinary happened: A senior HSBC banker, Stuart Kirk, told the world that climate change, though real, is not something financial markets need worry about. “Unsubstantiated, shrill, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong,” one of Kirk’s presentation slides read.

The reaction was instantaneous. Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations climate secretariat, denounced Kirk’s remarks as “abhorrently outrageous,” words that might well describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but a banker’s presentation analyzing climate financial risk for what it is?

Four hundred years ago, people were burnt at the stake for believing the wrong things about religion. Today, they get fired for questioning the climate-change catechism.

Figueres demanded HSBC immediately cleanse itself of Kirk’s remarks and fire the climate heretic. “I do not agree — at all — with the remarks made at last week’s FT Moral Money Summit,” bank chief executive Noel Quinn duly declared, avoiding any mention of Kirk by name. “I am determined that our team won’t be distracted by last week’s comments.” On Monday, it emerged HSBC had suspended Kirk.

Kirk’s problem is that he is telling the truth, one contrary to the central tenet of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — which holds that it is the duty of finance and business to save the world from a planetary catastrophe. In his presentation, Kirk complained about his team being buried in an avalanche of climate-risk reporting.

Article 2 of the 2015 Paris climate agreement has the objective of “making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low” emissions. As a result, central banks and financial regulators are using every regulatory weapon in their armories to suppress investment in fossil fuels and direct capital flows toward renewables like wind and solar.

Their weapon of choice is the spurious but plausible-sounding notion of climate-related financial risk. In reality, modern economies are remarkably resilient against extreme weather. “How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?” a November 2021 paper by Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff asked. The answer: “Not very.” Federal Emergency Management Agency-level disasters over the last quarter-century had insignificant or small impact on banks’ performance.

In a rational world, this finding would be welcomed. But that would be to miss the point. It is not the reality of climate resiliency that matters but the use of climate risk to push financing flows in the direction of net zero. “There’s a lot to like about climate stress tests,” Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell exclaimed at a Green Swan conference of central bankers and regulators last year. //

The need to hype up climate alarm to drive investment flows to net zero comes at a bigger cost than Stuart Kirk’s job. Painfully high oil and natural-gas prices are hurting consumers and businesses and pushing up the cost of food. Normally, high prices would trigger more investment and more output that would help bring prices down. Not this time. Wall Street — with the full support of the Fed and bank regulators — is stomping down on investment in oil and gas. That’s not just hurting the little guy. It’s hurting the Biden administration and the Democrats.

Two months ago, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was begging oil executives to invest. “I hope your investors are saying these words to you as well: In this moment of crisis, we need more supply,” Granholm told them. “Right now, we need oil and gas production to rise to meet current demand.”

It could well be that woke bankers on Wall Street — backed to the hilt by purveyors of scary climate scenarios in the Fed, financial regulators and the media — help sink Democrats’ election hopes in the November midterms.

Most aspects of American life today are more secure than the average elementary school. It takes more to walk into most concerts than it does to enter into most schools. Is that ok with you? If we can have measures in place to protect attendees to sporting events, surely we can do the same for our children.

I hope that this time we can actually focus on getting something done, instead of immediately retreating to our partisan corners and fighting with each other. If our leaders are truly interested in making our children safe, they will make sure that no school in the United States is a soft target. It won’t prevent all of these tragedies, but it will go a long way to preventing most of them.

Finally, we have to admit something that we rarely discuss in public life anymore. We will never truly and fully fix this problem until we turn our hearts back to God. I know that is offensive to some, but the truth is freedom without God is not freedom, but anarchy. Laws, while important, cannot fix the heart. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, “Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Savior.”

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February this year, many observers believed China’s Xi might be motivated to attack Taiwan while the Russian military was keeping the West occupied. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, warned that “an invasion of Taiwan could happen within this decade.” He introduced a bill recently to “increase coordination between the U.S. and Taiwanese militaries to ensure Taiwan is equipped to defend against an attack and invasion by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).”

The calls for the United States to abandon “strategic ambiguity” and offer Taiwan an explicit security guarantee have grown louder. Many pointed to China’s military buildup, the expansion in the South China Sea, the brutal crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and its increasing military pressures on Taiwan as evidence that China’s aggression has become a threat to the peace and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific region, affecting the U.S. and its allies’ interests and security.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is one who has made this argument. He called on the Biden administration to abandon the U.S. government’s long-held “strategic ambiguity” position on Taiwan and clarify that the United States would intervene if China invaded the island. Abe argued that “strategic clarity” is the best deterrence strategy to prevent China from going to war with the United States and its allies over Taiwan. //

Yet the Biden administration so far has created more confusion domestically and internationally rather than presenting any strategic clarity. Since day one, the Biden administration has stated it would continue the “strategic ambiguity” policy toward Taiwan. But President Biden publicly declared several times that the U.S. military would help defend Taiwan in a Chinese invasion. Each time, senior administration officials immediately walked back Biden’s comments as if he never meant what he said.

There are three possible explanations. It could be that Biden’s comments were indeed blunders, and there is no change of U.S. policy on Taiwan. It could also be that he did mean what he said, but his staff simply undermined his authority publicly to avoid antagonizing China.

The third explanation is that the Biden administration has yet to formulate a clear China policy. It probably feels a bipartisan pressure to defend Taiwan but is war-weary and doesn’t want to actually go to war with China. All of these explanations are dangerous, for three reasons.

First, it signals to Beijing that U.S. political leadership is weak and has neither the ability nor the will to confront China. Second, it doesn’t build confidence among U.S. allies. The Biden administration’s policy confusion and perceived weakness may even convince some allies and partners to switch to China’s side.

Third, the Biden administration’s policy confusion and perceived weakness have increased the risk of a conflict with China rather than deterring China. China’s Xi may decide that the best time to invade Taiwan is when the United States is led by an aging politician who often appears confused. Xi can certainly strengthen his argument to his generals by pointing to America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s long history of abusing its power is once again prominent amid the continued expose by Special Counsel John Durham. His prosecution is demonstrating the FBI’s use of its power to deploy federal intelligence assets against political opponents of Democrats.

The FBI routinely intervenes in politics, such as when the FBI assisted the Hillary Clinton campaign in painting former President Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset, as Durham’s investigation is emphasizing with more evidence. By getting a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on Carter Page, the FBI also likely spied on Trump and his inner circle via something called the two-hop rule.

Stunningly, it appears the FBI’s animus for Trump was rooted in disagreements about the foreign policy that Trump campaigned on. Spygate, however, is only a more recent manifestation of a long history of FBI abuses that Congress must rein in as soon as possible. //

When breaking up the FBI, locate the headquarters of those agencies across America, especially in the Midwest, rustbelt, and southeastern United States. The organized crime agency can be placed in Indiana, the counterterrorism agency in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the anti-human trafficking agency in Kansas City. The heads of all these new, smaller, agencies will still be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The upside is obvious. The FBI’s roughly $10 billion budget can be apportioned across these agencies, but the creation of separate agencies allows Congress much more control over funding. //

In other words, this new framework would create more direct and less opaque accountability to Congress and the president. This then would allow the public—who are actually smarter than the politicians—to better hold the government accountable.

The public would be stunned to know how little our federal government spends on measures to fight against trafficking and child exploitation. The public would also be stunned to know how much more we are spending on entrapping people in the name of fighting “domestic terrorism,” which the public would rightly judge far less a problem than the human trafficking problem. So let the sunlight in. //

The whole point of America’s founding documents is that too much power concentrated in too few hands is always corrupting, especially when this power is unaccountable to the people. The D.C. bureaucracy and specifically the intelligence agencies have long become powers unto themselves, and a threat to our democracy. The FBI is a poster child for this perversion of our system, and no political movement will save our democratic republic without reforming it.

here we are some 14 months since all the “Jim Crow” smears about the state that came from the likes of President Joe Biden, 2022 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, Sen. Raphael Warnock and others, and the claims have proven to be demonstrably false, seeing as early primary voting numbers are setting records in the state, with increases in the triple digits in comparison to other recent gubernatorial and presidential primaries: //

The Secretary of State’s office says these numbers show a 168% increase in early voting turnout from the last gubernatorial primary in 2018 and 212% increase from the last presidential primary in 2020.