Ramaswamy, ramped up his criticism of McDaniel during the third GOP debate following a disappointing Nov. 7 election cycle in key bellwether states including Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky.
.@VivekGRamaswamy SLAMS Ronna McDaniel "Ronna if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign I will yield my time to you." pic.twitter.com/qa3V4vJOTv
“Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022—no red wave, that never came,” Ramaswamy said in his opening remarks onstage, according to MSN.
“We got trounced last night in 2023, and I think that we have to have accountability in our party,” he continued. “For that matter, Ronna, if you wanna come onstage tonight, you wanna look the GOP voters in the eye and tell ’em you resign, I will turn over my—yield my time to you.”
He went on to launch a scathing attack on the GOP more broadly for its inability or unwillingness to appeal to voters.
“We’ve become a party of losers at the end of the day,” he said.
McDaniel reportedly did not take the insubordination kindly, calling Ramaswamy an “a**hole” and vowing, “He won’t be getting a cent from us.”
A source who was sitting near @GOPChairwoman at tonight's debate told Timcast News that she called @VivekGRamaswamy an “asshole” and declared that the party would not be giving him “one cent.”
“He’s an asshole. Total asshole,” McDaniel said. “He’s desperate because he’s doing… pic.twitter.com/7yZ5cQHCRk
Now, however, Ramaswamy has fired back with has now started a new website, FireRonna.com, calling for her dismissal from the position.
The site appears to be little more than a fundraising gimmick. After inviting visitors to vote on whether McDaniel should be fired (and requiring the input of some basic personal details) it redirects to a WinRed page accepting pledges in various dollar increments.
Nonetheless, the escalation of his feud with the RNC chair (and niece of retiring RINO Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah)
In a recent tweet announcing the website, Ramaswamy said he was “sick & tired of this Republican Establishment that has made us a party of losers.”
I am sick & tired of this Republican Establishment that has made us a party of losers. Where is the accountability for years of losing: 2018, 2020, 2022 and now 2023? A week ago on the GOP Debate stage, I called on Ronna Romney McDaniel to resign. Now, I'm asking grassroots…
In a subsequent tweet that again shared the link he called on followers to “End the back-to-back-to-back-to-back losing sprees.”
In response to his overtures to take McDaniel down, among other things, Ramaswamy’s pro-Establishment opponent, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, called him “scum.”
When asked about it at the debate, Haley said thatshe showed “a lot of restraint” in her name-calling.
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) More than 30 years before the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were charged with seditious conspiracy in relation to Jan. 6, 2021, another group of right-wing dissidents was on trial for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government.
Kirk Lyons, an attorney from the 1988 case, recently talked to Headline USA about how the defendants were able to successfully take on the government more than three decades ago, and what has changed since then.
Gordon Kahl and The Order
The 1988 Fort Smith sedition case stems from the FBI slaughtering a tax protestor who had killed two U.S. Marshals in a shootout in February 1983. The protestor, Gordon Kahl, had gone on the lam following the shootout, and the FBI mutilated and conflagrated his body when agents finally tracked him down.
The charred remains of tax protestor Gordon Kahl after the U.S. government killed, mutilated and conflagrated his body.
Kahl’s death inflamed the far-right movement at the time.
“I remember when Gordon Kahl was killed, and that really set off a ripple among the right wing. ‘Damn, are they going to kill us all?’ is what they thought,” Lyons said of the early 1980s right-wing dissident movement.
“And it militarized a lot of thinking. People were thinking, ‘We’re going to have to resist at some point, or else they’re going to murder us in our beds.’”
In direct response to the Kahl killing, a legitimately terroristic group known as The Order was formed later in 1983, going on to assassinate a Jewish radio host and rob millions of dollars from banks with the goal of funding a right-wing insurgency. The group’s leader, Bob Matthews—whom the FBI also killed and conflagrated in December 1984—cited Kahl’s murder in a declaration of war he drafted against the federal government.
Following The Order’s takedown in December 1984, the U.S. government convicted 10 of its members under Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act statutes. Additionally, two members were convicted in a separate trial for the assassination of the Jewish radio host.
However, the U.S. government was criticized for only prosecuting the foot soldiers of the right-wing insurgency, as extremism researcher Kathleen Belew put it. The 1988 sedition trial was aimed at the movement’s leaders—including controversial former Texas Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam, who ended up being Lyons’s client.
Lyons said Beam first approached him in 1985 to be his attorney. Beam apparently had already been tipped off that he was about to be indicted for sedition.
Beam wouldn’t be indicted for about another two years, and by that time he had taken his wife and daughter down to Mexico.
Lyons said the FBI surveilled his home and questioned him about Beam’s whereabouts, but the lawyer said he didn’t know where he was.
A Mexican Shootout
Then, on the night of Nov. 6, 1987, Lyons received a phone call from Beam’s daughter. Mexican authorities had raided Beam’s Mexican property, and Beam’s wife shot one of the agents—thinking that he was a robber.
“Her dad told her to memorize my number and call me as soon as she got out of Mexico,” Lyons said of Beam’s daughter.
Lyons told Headline USA previously unpublicized details about of what happened in Mexico. The lawyer’s info comes from his friend and former colleague David Hollaway—a pilot who worked for a CIA front company in the 1980s, reportedly claimed inside knowledge of the Oklahoma City bombing in the 90s and, bizarrely, currently works as a contractor for NASA.
Lyons said he sent Hollaway to retrieve Beam’s wife from Mexican prison.
“The FBI tailed one of Louis’s buddies who went to give him money so he could make do. The FBI followed him, and then tracked Louis to Chapala. Apparently, the FBI had energized the police is Guadalajara by telling them Beam was a drug lord. They had every drug agent in the region. According to my friend Dave Hollaway, they had a company of infantry soldiers—Yaqui Indians with machine guns,” Lyons said.
“So they raided the house. What’s ironic and tragic is that Louis got there, he went inside and checked to burglars and bandits. He came back out and Sheila [his wife] went inside. It was at that time when the raid hit. They got Louis immediately. Only Sheila’s in the house, and it’s dark,” he said.
“They sent their Mexican agent who spoke English to get her out. He just said, ‘Get down here.’ She found the pistol she was trained to use. He was coming upstairs with a shotgun. She wouldn’t comply because she didn’t know who this guy was, opened fire, and put two rounds in him and took out half of his liver.”
In response, the “Yaqui Indians with machine guns” outside opened fire, spraying some 500 rounds into the Beam residence, according to Lyons.
It was after the gunfire stopped that Sheila’s troubles began, the lawyer lamented.
“Many bad things happened to her. I think she was tortured and worse,” he said, declining to go into the gruesome details. “And that all happened with the FBI in the next room … The FBI didn’t lift a finger because if she’s in a Mexican prison, that’s pressure they can put on Louis, who is on a short trip to the U.S.”
How Sheila was eventually released from prison remains something of a mystery.
Lyons said his initial understanding is that Mexican authorities were furious that the FBI misled them that Beam was a drug lord, apparently releasing Sheila because they didn’t want to deal with her. A Mexican judge ruled that she acted in self-defense.
However, Lyons said FBI Agent Norm Stephenson later told him that former KKK leader Tom Metzger bribed Mexican authorities with proceeds of The Order’s multimillion dollar armored-car robbery.
“Take it with a grain of salt, but [Stephenson] told me that Tom Metzger put up the money to get her out … Money from The Order. That’s what Norm Stephenson said. I didn’t believe it, but that’s what he told me,” Lyons told Headline USA.
“I told him, ‘It’s still a miracle.’ We thought we’d never get her out of there. That’s what brought me back to the Lord.”
In any event, Beam’s Mexican ordeal ended up benefitting him at the 1988 sedition trial.
Sedition Trial
Beam caught an early break when U.S. Judge Morris Arnold tossed evidence mishandled by Mexican authorities.
But what really collapsed government’s case was its use of unreliable snitches.
Government’s witnesses included James Ellison, a former militia leader affiliated with The Order, who had turned on his former colleagues in exchange for a lighter sentence for his activities as the leader of his militia, The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord.
According to Lyons, his client and other defendants in the sedition trial all signed a document, under the impression that it would put them on a mailing list for Ellison. But Ellison told authorities that the document was, in fact, a declaration of war against the government.
During the trial, Ellison was reportedly caught lying on the stand multiple times, including when he accused one of the defendants of buying explosive materials when that defendant had already been in jail.
Another government witness, Glenn Miller, was implicated by the defense as having been involved in several murders at a Shelby, North Carolina porno store in 1987, according to journalist Arthur Bloom. Miller, who died in 2021, would later shoot up a Jewish community center in 2014.
Former KKK leader Louis Beam carries his wife outside the courtroom after being acquitted of sedition. PHOTO: Associated Press
Lyons said Beam’s acquittal was one of the proudest moments of his career.
“As far as I know, he’s the only person to make the FBI’s Most Wanted list that was acquitted,” Lyons said.
Critics have blamed a lenient judge and friendly jury for the acquittals—one of the jurors wound up marrying a defendant after the trial—but Lyons said that’s because the Justice Department made the defendants likeable.
“They brought in a lot of The Order’s wives to testify against them … I don’t think the jurors liked that, because those guys were already in prison,” Lyons said, mentioning one of the particularly tactless strategies employed by DOJ prosecutors.
Further responding to critics, Lyons noted that the sedition trial’s venue—Fort Smith, Arkansas—was where the government had already successfully prosecuted multiple members of The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. The fact that multiple CSA members were successfully prosecuted in Fort Smith should put to rest the notion that jurors there were in alliance with the right-wing militias, Lyons argued.
When it came to sedition charges, the DOJ just bit off more than it could chew, Lyons contended.
To Lyons’s point, the FBI agreed with him at the time.
“The bottom line was, the jury couldn’t understand how a dozen people could get together and overthrow the country,” said Horace Mewborn of the bureau’s domestic terrorism unit, according to the book, Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed, and Why it Still Matters. “We learned that the hard way at Fort Smith.”
Lessons Learned
Nevertheless, Lyons said he thinks the Fort Smith failure taught the government a valuable lesson: “If you’re going to use sedition, put it in a venue like Washington DC. That’s the lesson.
“And you’re not going to get a jurist like Morris Arnold let loose in DC. They learned that lesson: Be careful who the judge is. They might actually believe in all that shit [constitutional rights],” he added.
Lyons added that the events of Jan. 6 fail to even come close to seditious conspiracy.
“Calling that an insurrection is absolute bullshit. But they got a venue where they could make it work,” he said.
“They’re doing it because they can. They’ve just become a little more naked with their Stalinist show trials in the 2020s than they were in the 1980s.”
(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Just two weeks after the shocking 2020 election, divine inspiration struck me in the form of a satirical epic poem, not unlike the heroic couplets of Restoration-era British influencer Alexander Pope (with obvious nods to a few more contemporary holiday favorites).
Its rhyme scheme borrowed from the likes of Clement Clarke Moore and Dr. Seuss makes it seem, in hindsight, deceptively simple.
At the time, however, little was known of what lay ahead, and so there is an uncanny prescience to it. It would be nearly two months before Trump did, in a sense, “rally his elephants” in a charge on Capitol Hill.
Those parallels between Jan. 6 and Nov. 5 make the Guy Fawkes Day undercurrent all the more intriguing, but for the purposes of the poem, the revolution in question is a symbolic one, of course, that will take place democratically via the ballot box rather than riding literal elephants into Washington, D.C.
The poem’s only failing may be that it didn’t go far enough in predicting just how awful—and how egregiously crooked and corrupt—a Biden administration would actually be.
Of course, there are a few things that were immediately off the mark, like the short-lived rumors of Hillary Clinton becoming the United Nations ambassador. Others have fizzled out over time, like the relationship between Trump and his one-time confidante Mark Meadows.
Then there was Twitter, which changed its name to X (although Headline USA has yet to acknowledge it in our own style). Serendipitously, I discovered that the alternative many journalists in my networks were trumpeting, Mastodon, used “toots” to replace “tweets,” which I like even better.
I have taken the liberty of updating some of the weaker parts of the original, as well as adding a brand-new stanza about Trump’s whereabouts prior to his grandiose entrance, which seem particularly apropos to where we are in the current state of political discourse.
Return of the MAGA
’Twas the Fifth of November, and all through the nation,
Journalists tingled in anticipation.
“Another election,” they tooted, self-sure,
Remembering how they had thrown it before.
The stock market teetered, but bullish it closed,
In hopes that Kamala might soon be deposed,
And the nation restored from its four-year-long saga
By a shiny, new sequel: ‘Return of the MAGA.’
Joe never suspected—till it was too late
To avoid his nefarious, Epstein-like fate—
That political allies might foster a grudge,
Burying Biden ‘neath decades of sludge.
His demise was the one thing poor Joe couldn’t fake.
“C’mon, man,” he pled, as he sank in the lake.
The piranhas, like proles in a Squad-run breadline,
Were fierce as Hamas and Antifa combined.
Meanwhile, Kamala had scuttled the rescue
And clung to her throne like Nicolae Ceaușescu.
She cackled aloud in a Karen-ish twang,
“I’ll own the whole world, even take back Pyongyang.”
But something remained that would stand in her way:
A crimson ball-cap on a blaze-orangetoupée.
As sunbeams awoke from the darkest of winters,
They lumined the figure in glimmering splinters,
And shadows, like curtains, drew back on the sight
Of a familiar face in the dawn’s early light.
“This race will be yuuuger than Rosie’s fat shanks,”
Said President Trump as he surveyed the ranks.
Fresh from the gulag he’d newly been sprung
After kangaroo courts condemned him to be hung,
Boiled in oil, disemboweled, drawn and quartered
For ignoring an Obama judge’s gag order.
Most cheered the great statesman, but a look of resign
Crossed the countenance of those who’d been holding the line—
Then, like Hannibal Smith, he lit up a cigar,
And rallied his elephants near and afar:
“In earlier races, I did it for fun,
But this time it’s personal; they shouldn’t have won.
Without me to guard, the Deep State got its wishes;
They even made Sleepy Joe sleep with the fishes.
“His passion for people, I don’t doubt at all,
But his drug-addled brain was two sizes too small.
And now, through the back door, he let in the thieves,
Who have plenty of leftover tricks up their sleeves.
“Gaslighting, censorship, lockdowns and more,
Seem ripped from a page of 1984.
But we’ll stop it again, as we did one time prior;
Kamala’s agenda, we must now deny her.”
Then, dropping some dance moves, he shuffled away,
As up rose the strains of the “YMCA.”
His stogie extinguished with one final chomp,
On a red pachyderm, Trump charged toward the Swamp.
The story, from there, still remains to be told.
As a gift to the MAGA, Trump gave up the gold
Of his real-estate empire, and saved the whole land
From globalists’ clutches and anarchists’hands.
(Headline USA) A liberal family in Las Vegas was forced not only to deal with the grief of their 17-year-old son’s brutal murder, but also to fend off any insinuations of racial motives in the attack committed by up to 15 black classmates.
“Any comments about racism will be requested to be removed,’ they wrote on a GoFundMe page dedicated to Jonathan Lewis Jr. “We absolutely condemn racism and hate!”
Nonetheless, critics contended that if Lewis’s murder was not an explicit hate crime, it was, at the very least, racially adjacent in the same way that many other high-profile crimes have been.
Hang on.
There is still no evidence that the death of George Floyd had anything to do with race.
There is still no evidence that the death of Trayvon Martin had anything to do with race.
There is still no evidence that the death of Michael Brown had anything to do with race.…
Lewis was beaten to death by classmates between the ages of 13 and 17 in an alleyway around the corner from campus, in a prearranged fight that authorities said broke out over a pair of headphones and a vape pen.
However, police homicide Lt. Jason Johansson said that detectives think the victim wasn’t originally supposed to be involved in the brawl, which the students agreed would take place after classes were done for the day at Rancho High School in eastern Las Vegas.
Lewis walked to the alleyway with his friend, whose headphones and vape pen had been stolen, Johansson said.
The deadly beating on Nov. 1 was captured on cellphone video and widely shared on social media. Johansson described the footage as “very void of humanity.”
In the video, he said, the victim is seen taking off his shirt to prepare for the fight, and then 10 students “immediately swarm him, pull him to the ground and begin kicking, punching and stomping on him.”
Eight of the students were arrested Tuesday by Las Vegas police and the FBI on suspicion of murder. They were not immediately identified because they are under 18.
Las Vegas police said they haven’t yet been able to identify two remaining suspects who will also face murder charges. The police department released images of the teenagers, asking for help from the public to identify them.
On Wednesday afternoon, as classes ended for the day and students were leaving campus, a small memorial with flowers and eight candles sat against a fence in the alleyway where Lewis was killed.
Rancho High School principal Darlin Delgado said in a letter this week to parents that support and resources were available for students and staff members as the beating “has and will continue to impact our school community.”
Scott Coffee, a deputy public defender with 28 years of experience in Las Vegas, said it is unusual to have so many co-defendants of such young ages charged with murder in a single case. Coffee said he had not seen court documents and does not represent any of the defendants.
“When kids are involved in this kind of activity, they take the risk by being involved,” Coffee said. “But the flip side is this: Does it look like anybody intended to kill anyone?”
A family court judge on Wednesday ordered four of the students who are 16 or older to be transferred to the adult court system, the Review-Journal reported. Hearings will be held at later dates to determine if the students under 16 will be charged as adults.
Police and prosecutors will have to measure the level of culpability for each of the 10 defendants as the case moves through the court system, Coffee noted.
“Was there somebody in charge of this group? Was somebody younger just going along with the older folks?” he said, adding that although the students face similar charges at the time of their arrests, “it doesn’t mean the resolutions are necessarily going to be similar.”
After the brawl, a person in the area found the teenager badly beaten and unconscious in the alleyway and carried him back to campus, where school staff called 911, police said.
Lewis was hospitalized with severe head trauma and other injuries until his death a week later. The coroner’s office in Las Vegas ruled the beating a homicide.
The victim’s father, Jonathan Lewis Sr., didn’t respond Wednesday to requests for an interview. But on a fundraising page he created to help with funeral and medical expenses, he wrote that his son was attacked while standing up for his friend.
“Our son is a kind, loving, gentle young man who has the heart of a champion and the brightest loving energy that attracts people to him with love,” the page reads.
As of Thursday afternoon, it had received more than $120,000 from an initial goal of $25,000.
The family also created a page for future activism and events, Team Jonathan, which outlines several of their new-wave “pillars.”
Like the Lewis family, many on the Left—including the Associated Press—appeared to be bending over backward to scrub any references to race in the case, in what critics contended was an egregious double standard.
On social media, however, the issue seemed to dominate in reactions with many seeing the efforts to deny any racial component as adding insult to injury.
(Headline USA) Police and pro-Hamas rioters clashed outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters on Wednesday night during a cease-fire protest, the latest reflection of the precarious line that the Left must walk as its pro-Israel establishment faces an outright revolt from its base.
Scores of Democratic representatives and candidates, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, were inside the building for a campaign reception when it was interrupted by chanting outside.
Despite a troubling history of anti-Semitism, Jeffries has come out strongly in favor of Jewish issues since launching his political career and has conveyed his support for Israel whine being notably mute about the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Democratic “Squad” members.
Protesters said they wanted to block entrances and exits to force politicians to encounter their candlelight vigil and their calls for an end to the fighting. Many of them wore black shirts saying “Cease Fire Now.”
However, the situation swiftly devolved. U.S. Capitol Police said about 150 people were “illegally and violently protesting” in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington. But protesters blamed police for the violence, saying officers rushed them without warning.
“It is shameful the way that nonviolent protesters and members of our community were met with violence tonight,” said Dani Noble, who came from Philadelphia for the demonstration. “It is absolutely shameful.”
Noble said police, some of whom were wearing riot gear, started “pulling on folks that are disabled or have have chronic illnesses, pulling people to the ground.”
Inside the DNC headquarters, police rushed into the reception and directed lawmakers to the basement, according to Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif. Some were later evacuated in police vehicles.
Capitol Police said six officers were treated for minor injuries and one protester was arrested for assaulting an officer. Video posted on social media showed shoving and scuffles as police moved in.
The Metropolitan Police Department said its officers also responded to the disturbance. Congressional staffers received an alert telling them no one would be permitted to enter or exit any House office buildings, but authorities later reopened the entrances.
Sherman accused protesters of trying to break into the Democratic headquarters in a tweet. However, protesters denied that was their intention.
The protest was organized by a coalition of groups, including If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace Action, that have spearheaded other demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere.
Wednesday’s clashes were the latest example of roiling tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas.
Last week, a large number of House Democrats joined nearly all Republicans in voting to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, over her anti-Semitic rhetoric and pro-terrorist dogwhistles.
President Joe Biden has also faced increasing pressure from the Democratic Party’s left flank over his support for Israel’s military operation. He has resisted calls for a cease-fire, instead saying there should be pauses in the fighting to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance and the potential extraction of hostages.
Among the participants Wednesday night was Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who interrupted Biden’s speech at a recent fundraiser in Minneapolis.
She said Democrats are “not listening to the people who they claim to represent,” adding that “actions like this are only going to increase.”
“We are not slowing down,” she said. “The call for a ceasefire is going to keep growing. And our representatives need to take action, yesterday.”
If the war continues into next summer, it could remarkably mirror the last time that Democrats held their national nominating convention in Chicago.
The 1968 event was marred by violence, some of it tied with protest over the war in Vietnam and the recent assassination of Martin Luther King.
The increasingly unpopular incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson, opted not to run again, allowing his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to become the establishment pick.
However, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., entered the race and quickly gained momentum until he was assassinated by a Palestinian radical following his victory in the California primary.
Republican Richard Nixon would go on to win the race and withdraw the country from Vietnam.
Biden—if he makes it through the primary season—currently faces competition from Kennedy’s eponymous son, RFK Jr., who is running as an independent after having been frozen out of debates and support by the DNC. The Biden administration also has refused to provide the younger Kennedy with Secret Service protection despite multiple threats.
(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) John Sullivan, a left-wing instigator whose presence in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 debunked narratives that it was right-wing insurrection, took the witness stand Wednesday, during the closing arguments of his federal trial, to insist that he was an innocent bystander, NBC reported.
Sullivan, a Black Lives Matter activist from Utah who had been previously known for agitating and fomenting violence at right-wing events, was allegedly “wearing a ballistics vest and gas mask,” according to a press release from the Justice Department.
With his camera running, Sullivan “entered the U.S. Capitol through a window that had been broken out, pushing past U.S. Capitol Police once inside,” said the DOJ.
While inside, Sullivan famously filmed the video of Ashli Babbitt’s murder by USCP Lt. Michael Byrd as she crawled through a broken doorway into the Speaker’s Lobby.
He posted the video online under the name “Jayden X.”
At his trial, prosecutors framed Sullivan as an “antiestablishment” grifter who was attempting to create chaos through his company, Insurgence USA.
“I’m gonna side with anyone who is ready to rip this s**t down,” prosecutors quoted him as saying.
In response, Sullivan claimed he was just a filmmaker trying to get the best footage possible.
“I was only observing,” Sullivan told the court. “I followed the crowd. I’m there to document.”
When shown footage of himself pulling out a knife in an attempt to encourage protesters to go to the House floor, Sullivan said that he forgot.
“I don’t remember bringing a knife specifically,” Sullivan said. “I’m not sure if that’s a knife.”
Further, he claimed to have been saying radical things in order to not be harmed.
“I say whatever I can to keep myself safe,” he told the jury.
But prosecutors countered with video evidence that showed Sullivan on camera actively attempting to incite people to commit acts of violence.
“We accomplished this s**t,” he was recorded saying in one video introduced as evidence by prosecutors.
“We did this together. F**k yeah! We are all a part of this history,” he continued. “… Let’s burn this s**t down.”
While mainstream media has widely condemned and vilified the Jan. 6 political dissidents, Sullivan, along with suspected government informant Ray Epps, may be one of the few to have gained the media’s support.
Although the race wasn’t close (Dashevsky lost by 60,019 votes, or a 43.4% margin in the deep-blue district) it was a personal battle for the Uzbekistan native, who grew up in the totalitarian USSR and is passionate about preventing his adopted country from turning into a communist regime.
The leftist rhetoric from figures like Jeffries, who went on to become the House minority leader after his re-election, rang all too familiar to someone who spent time steeped in Soviet propaganda.
“[Even] if we [immigrants from USSR] do not realize it ourselves, we are suspicious of power, suspicious of the government,” Dashevsky said in an exclusive interview with Headline USA.
“Whatever they tell us, [we don’t believe that],” he added. “… We love the flag. We love the American Constitution.”
He ran his campaign without any help from the Republican National Committee, which had written off the seat as a bad allocation of resources.
Aside from a few volunteers, and a man who designed the website, posters and flyers, Dashevsky said he personally was the one doing nearly everything for his campaign.
Even though Jeffries never bothered to acknowledge him and most conservative outlets never helped get his message out, Dashevsky said his one brush with fame came after local leftists attacked him in one of their mass mailings over his support for reforming the broken education system.
“It was very short. It was very quick,” he said wryly of his fleeting moment as a local celebrity and person of notoriety for Democrats.
An acquaintance sent him a digital photograph of the flyer, which featured Dashevsky’s photograph alongside pictures of former President Donald Trump and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
“I asked him to bring me the original just for my personal ‘museum,’ but he said that he threw it away. So I don’t even have the paper copy,” Dashevsky lamented.
Nonetheless, he said he was glad to see “his arrogant mug in a MAGA cap” in the same frame as Trump and DeVos.
From early on, Dashevsky may have been destined for a career using media to deliver important social critiques and messages, but his path to becoming a right-wing pundit and politician was far from conventional.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Dashevsky earned his master’s degree in architecture and established himself as a documentary filmmaker, becoming a member of the SSSR Kinematograflar uyushmasi, the Soviet cinematographers union.
After immigrating to the United States in 1996 and eventually settling in Brooklyn, in 1999, Dashevsky worked as a web designer and, later, a language interpreter. However, like many others in the Big Apple, the city’s draconian COVID-19 policies brought his professional opportunities to a sharp halt. This led to Dashevsky becoming a conservative political blogger.
In addition to his views opposing communism and the Marxist indoctrination of American schoolchildren, Dashevsky highlighted abortion as one of the core values about which he cared most passionately.
“I am pro-life,” he said. “I hate seeing human beings suffer. I’m all for the happy continuation of human life. That’s my position.”
While praising last year’s abolishing of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, he added that the issue should be left to the individual states and not resolved on the federal level with legislation (or future court rulings) that would impose either a blanket abortion ban or mandate.
Dashevsky also expressed his support for both Ukraine and Israel in their respective wars with Russia and Hamas, both of which he condemned.
Although Dashevsky offered high praise to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on many of his domestic political views, calling him “prophetic” and “effective” about what’s going on “within the borders of the United States,” he criticized Carlon’s well-known skepticism surrounding the Ukraine war effort and its underlying motives.
He further accused Carlson of lying about what’s going on in Ukraine, including his past assertions that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had the banned Russian Orthodox Church because Ukraine is anti-Christian.
Carlson has questioned Zelenskyy’s commitment to religious freedom and tolerance in the broader context of claims that the war for Ukraine is a fight to defend “democracy,” noting also that Zelenskyy has suspended democratic elections in the country pending a decisive military victory over Russia, which Ukraine is not likely to see given the numerical odds against it.
Carlson has accused corrupt U.S. officials of waging a proxy war with Russia for their own vindictive purposes and using Ukrainian soldiers as cannon fodder in the conflict, which might easily have been averted through diplomatic means but for the Biden administration’s needless provocations.
While he is now a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, the current 2024 GOP frontrunner, Dashevsky admitted he was suspicious, at first, of the Manhattan business mogul when he announced his run in 2015.
But he changed his mind after seeing the personal sacrifices Trump was willing to make for the sake of the country—how the elite establishment that had once counted him as one of their own had turned against him as soon as he announced that he would run for the GOP nomination, and how no person in his position would subject himself to such hate from every institution in the country without having sincere motives.
“If you’re so rich, why would you [allow yourself] to get dragged through the dirt by the dirtiest people in the world, like Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Joe Biden and most of the Democratic Party—spineless, poisonous, nasty jellyfish?” Dashevsky asked.
He said that this solidified his belief that Trump was the only man in politics who would “drain the Swamp.”
“I felt that this country needs to hire somebody to fix it. And Trump was in the business of fixing things,” he said.
In the end, Dashevsky added that if conservatives want to save the United States, they must reelect Trump, become more politically active, stop the influx of illegal immigrants, restore Trump’s energy policy and, generally speaking, do anything else to make America a strong country again.
While it may seem a daunting directive—like challenging a powerful Democrat incumbent in a deep-blue district, Dashevsky sees no other choice but to try. Otherwise, he warned, the world will change in a not-very-pleasant way.
“If America sneezes, the rest of the world has a heart attack,” he said.
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A family evicted amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, left homeless and scrounging for its life in the Idaho wilderness, where they would be hunted down by undercover federal agents.
It sounds like a nightmare about the Great Reset. For Brooks Roberts and his family, it’s reality.
The Roberts family had been living out of travel campers on Idaho federal land since they lost their home in 2020, according to Roberts’ attorneys. During that time, Judy Roberts lost a foot to frostbite in the winter of 2021/22, while Brooks severely injured his leg at his Walmart job and needed a wheelchair since June 2022.
The family was getting assistance from a local non-profit, but the federal government was hounding them throughout that time to leave the public land.
“Rather than work with the Robertses and their social worker and attorneys to help them recover from the hardship the pandemic had wrought on their lives, the Forest Service and BLM collaborated to trick the family,” said the lawyers, who who are seeking $50 million in damages from the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
“The massive force they marshaled to arrest Mr. Roberts for ‘camping for a period longer than allowed’ and ‘occupying a developed recreation site for other than recreation purposes’ was an outrageous and reckless violation of human rights and common sense.”
More than 12 undercover feds were involved, the lawyers said. Footage of the May 19 incident can be seen here:
According to Roberts’ lawyers, the undercover feds lured his brother to them by asking for his help to jumpstart their truck.
“The government knew Mr. Roberts and his family would help a stranger. Exploiting the family’s kindness and charity, the Forest Service sent two plainclothes officers to the Robertses’ door to ask for a jump for their truck,” the lawyers said.
“Not long after Mr. Roberts’ brother came out to help get the truck started, the plainclothes officers forcibly took him to the ground.”
Roberts, hearing his brother’s cries for help, wheeled out in his wheelchair to find what he thought was his brother being carjacked or robbed, his lawyers said. As he approached his brother to save him, officers saw the .22 revolver Roberts was legally carrying, and they opened fire on him.
“Over five long seconds, at least two officers repeatedly shot Mr. Roberts. They shot him in the back when he was defenseless and immobile,” the lawyers said.
“Indeed, even after Mr. Roberts lie prostrate and bleeding into the dirt, his hands empty after he dropped his gun several feet away from him once he realized police were present, law enforcement continued to fire at Mr. Roberts’ broken body.”
Adding insult to injury, Roberts was charged with a handful of misdemeanors for camping longer than allowed on BLM land and leaving trash there.
Roberts struck a plea deal in September, agreeing to plead guilty to improperly disposing garbage on BLM land and illegally occupying a recreation site. He’s set to be sentenced on Jan. 4, and should get time served plus three years of unsupervised probation, as per his deal with the government.
His lawyers have filed their $50 million injury claim directly with the Forest Service. They said they’ll file a lawsuit if the government doesn’t address the claim to their liking.
“Mr. Roberts is still in the hospital, paralyzed from the chest down and with limited use of his right arm. His prognosis is guarded. He likely will never recover the use of his lower body. He cannot control his bowels and requires a diaper. His recovery will be slow and difficult,” the lawyers said.
“He will carry the harm done to him for the rest of his life. The government’s conduct here is unconscionable, and it cannot be excused in a civil society.”
“It’s not right that the state can enter an incredibly intimate moment, the tender days of childbirth, and take something from our children which is then held on to for 23 years,” said the Rev. Hannah Lovaglio, a Cranbury mother of two, who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, according to the Institute for Justice.
The little-known practice allows doctors to take the blood and keep it for decades, permitting medical facilities to use the material in whatever way they choose.
“The lack of consent and transparency causes me to question the intent and makes me worried for my children’s future selves,” Lovaglio said. “As a mother, I deserve the right to decide whether or not the government takes blood from my son and holds onto it for decades past its claimed use.”
State law requires medical institutions to take blood samples and test for various diseases. All 50 states require blood screenings for newborn babies by law, but what hospitals do with the blood afterward changes locally.
New Jersey’s Department of Health reportedly stores blood samples for 23 years.
State law does not require hospitals to gain parental consent for the blood samples or inform parents that they plan to store residual blood for other purposes, including: selling the blood to unidentified third parties, giving the blood to police without a warrant and selling it to the Pentagon to create a national DNA registry.
“Parents have a right to informed consent if the state wants to keep their children’s blood for decades and use it for purposes other than screening for diseases,” said IJ Senior Attorney Rob Frommer. “New Jersey’s policy of storing baby blood and DNA and using that genetic information however it wants is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment rights of all New Jersey parents and their newborns.”
IJ’s complaint said hospitals hid information about the blood storage on a third-party website listed on an informational card providing details about the blood draw. Parents had to actively seek out the information on the obscure website in order to find it.
“What makes New Jersey’s program so uniquely disturbing is the complete lack of safeguards for future abuse and the lack of consent, which leave the program ripe for abuse,” said Christie Hebert, another IJ attorney. “Parents should not have to worry if the state is going to use the blood it said it was taking from their baby to test for diseases for other, unrelated purposes.”
States such as Texas, Minnesota and Michigan have faced similar lawsuits, with varying results.
Texas destroyed 5.3 million blood samples, and now all samples taken must be destroyed after two years.
State courts forced Minnesota to destroy 1.1 million blood samples.
Michigan agreed to destroy 3 million samples but has yet to do so as the case continues to circulate through the courts.
(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) As the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden gains momentum, GOP committee leaders have turned their focus towards Hollywood agent Kevin Morris, a longstanding friend of Hunter Biden.
We are calling on Kevin Morris to appear for a transcribed interview.
Kevin Morris is a Hollywood lawyer and Democrat donor who reportedly lent millions of dollars to Hunter Biden to help him pay back taxes and pay off his legal bills and China debt.… pic.twitter.com/SfvW2IHdqH
In a pointed move, Reps. James Comer, R-Ky; Jason Smith, R- Mo; and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio penned a letter on Nov. 15, summoning Morris for a transcribed interview, citing Morris’s ties to the embattled Biden family.
“The Committees have identified you as possessing information relevant to our investigation and seek your testimony regarding these and related topics,” the three-page letter read.
“Both public reporting and evidence reviewed by the Committees suggest that you have personally lent money to, or otherwise satisfied debts on behalf of, Hunter Biden,” the lawmakers stated.
According to CBS News, Morris — known for his ties to the animated series South Park, his authorship of two novels and a Tony award — reportedly extended a sum exceeding $2 million to aid Hunter Biden in alleviating his mounting financial obligations.
Oversight Committee Chairman Comer expressed apprehension regarding the alleged large payment. “It sure seems that the Bidens get a lot of ‘loans’ that raise many questions,” he said in statement. “These ‘loans’ have occurred both during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and presidency, which raise serious ethical concerns.”
🚨BREAKING🚨
As part of the impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, I am calling on Kevin Morris to appear for a transcribed interview.
Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden’s Hollywood lawyer, reportedly has lent the President’s son millions of dollars to help him pay back taxes. pic.twitter.com/aNu6bjVBf8
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Smith echoed Comer’s sentiments in response to the purported loans.
“Both public reporting and evidence reviewed by the Committees suggest that Kevin Morris had an expansive role as a financier, confidant, and would-be avenger for Hunter Biden,” Smith said. “It’s time that Americans learn the truth about Kevin Morris’s monetary contributions to the Biden family business dealings.”
CBS further reported on Morris’s involvement in Hunter’s legal troubles, including attending meetings with Biden’s attorneys. Morris even allegedly led a forensic analysis regarding the contentious the Hunter laptop’s public disclosure.
