DOJ Prosecutors Gave J6 Snitch Secret Plea Deal

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DOJ Prosecutors Gave J6 Snitch Secret Plea Deal

(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Justice Department prosecutors disclosed Monday that they gave a secret plea deal to a Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill rioter who pepper-sprayed police and urged protestors to “take their guns”—citing the man’s cooperation with law enforcement as the reason for his secret, sweetheart deal.

The DOJ’s disclosure came after a coalition of media outlets filed a motion to have records of the defendant, Samuel Lazar, unsealed. Lazar, 37, of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, was arrested in July 2021 on charges that he came to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, dressed in tactical gear and protective goggles, and used chemical spray on officers.

“The press, the public, and presumably even the police victims of Lazar’s violence on January 6 therefore have no idea how or why this January 6 riot participant, deemed just a couple of years ago to be too dangerous to release, is now free,” the media outlets said in a Friday filing.

In its filing on Monday, the DOJ responded to the press outlets’ efforts to have the Lazar case made public. According to prosecutors, Lazar was sentenced to 30-months imprisonment in March, at a hearing held behind closed doors.

The DOJ didn’t oppose to making some of Lazar’s records public, but asked for 30 days to redact certain information in those records—revealing that the defendant apparently snitched on his fellow J6 protestors.

“The parties respectfully request the redacted documents be filed on the (then unsealed) docket,” prosecutors said.

“This is because public dissemination of the information the Defendant supplied could impair or interfere with ongoing investigations and because Defendant named individuals responsible for criminal conduct who may not have been charged.”

The judge overseeing Lazar’s case previously rejected a request from media outlets in May to release any sealed records that may exist.

The case is raising concerns about transparency in the massive Jan. 6 investigation — the largest in Justice Department history. Court hearings and records — including sentencing hearings and plea agreements — are supposed to be open and available to the public and the press unless there’s a compelling need for secrecy.

Lazar was transferred in July from FCI Fort Dix — a federal lockup in New Jersey — to “community confinement” overseen by the Bureau of Prisons, which means he was either in home confinement or a halfway house, according to a prisons system spokesperson.

A social media post from Lazar’s sister that month shows Lazar standing outside waving an American flag with the caption: “Hallelujah Praise God free at last … #walkingfree.”

Secret plea hearings are not unheard of, though the records are often unsealed ahead of sentencing.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

Woke N.C. City Sued for Making Race a Prerequisite in Local Gov’t Leaders

Molly Bruns
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Woke N.C. City Sued for Making Race a Prerequisite in Local Gov’t Leaders

(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The Pacific Legal Foundation sued the city of Asheville, North Carolina last week, after city officials issued a ruling requiring members of the Human Relations Commission be of certain races and sexual orientations.

Created in 2018, the stated goal of the commission was to “promote and improve human relations and achieve equity among all citizens in the city by carrying out the city’s human relations program.”

The recently established procedure demanded that two of the six members of the committee were “African-Americans,” and the other two are “Latinx,” according to Conservative Firing Line, which reported the story Monday.

The procedure also required two members to have be “of the LGBTQ+ community,” two young adults between ages 18 and 25, two residing in public housing and two with a disability.

In a press release last week, the Pacific Legal Foundation criticized these requirements as racist and discriminatory.

“The opportunity to serve your local community should not depend on your race. Asheville’s candidates for public service should be treated as individuals, instead of mere members of arbitrary racial groups,” said Andrew Quinio, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation.

“Asheville needs to stop making assumptions about people’s experiences and qualifications based on arbitrary and offensive racial classifications.”

Candidate John Miall grew up in Asheville and worked as the city’s director of risk management for 30 years before applying to join the Human Relations Committee. However, his application faced rejection simply because of his race.

The complaint sought a court declaration against the racial requirements for appointments as unconstitutional, and to stop the city from mandating frivolous requirements.

The suit also requested class action status for all applicants rejected on the basis of their race, age and status.

“Under the HRCA’s membership criteria, the city council will not endeavor to appoint white residents unless they also satisfy a separate category, such as being a member of the LGBTQ+ community, a youth member, disabled, living in public housing, or recognized as a community leader,” the complaint charged.

Gaslighting Garland Claims He ‘Would Resign’ if Biden Told Him to Target Trump

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Gaslighting Garland Claims He ‘Would Resign’ if Biden Told Him to Target Trump

(Headline USA) Attorney General Merrick Garland said in an interview that aired Sunday that he would resign if asked by President Joe Biden to take action against Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. But he doesn’t think he’ll be put in that position.

“I am sure that that will not happen, but I would not do anything in that regard,” he said on CBS 60 Minutes. “And if necessary, I would resign. But there is no sense that anything like that will happen.”

That’s likely because Garland has not needed to speak directly to Biden to understand clearly what the marching orders from the White House are in an era when there are both regular public statements and back-channel communications between the two entities.

Recent reports, for example, revealed that Garland’s Justice Department was in communication both with Hunter Biden’s attorneys and with the White House while deciding how to handle a search of Biden’s home prior to a sweetheart plea deal for the president’s son.

There is every reason to believe that Garland and Biden also are colluding through back channels with special counsel Jack Smith and D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkhan, the two responsible for bringing the case against Trump that is linked most directly to the federal government. All have exposed themselves as unabashedly partisan idealogues but have refused to recuse themselves.

While Trump was speedily prosecuted for allegedly retaining classified documents at his private residences, including his Mar-a-Lago resort, a similar investigation into Biden being led by special counsel Robert Hur has all but vanished from the headlines and appears to be getting the slow-walk treatment until it is rendered legally or politically moot.

The Justice Department is at the center of not only indictments against Trump that include an effort to overturn the 2020 election and wrongly keeping classified documents, but also cases involving Biden’s son Hunter, the aftermath of the riot at the U.S. Capitol and investigations into classified documents found in the president’s home and office. Garland has appointed three separate special counsels.

Garland has spoken only sparingly about the cases and reiterated Sunday he would not get into specifics, but dismissed claims by Trump and his supporters that the cases were timed to ruin his chances to be president in 2024.

“Well, that’s absolutely not true. Justice Department prosecutors are nonpartisan. They don’t allow partisan considerations to play any role in their determinations,” Garland said.

Garland said the president has never tried to meddle in the investigations, and he dismissed criticism from Republicans that he was going easy on the president’s son, Hunter, who was recently indicted on a gun charge after a plea deal in his tax case fell apart. Hunter Biden is due in a Delaware court this week.

“We do not have one rule for Republicans and another rule for Democrats. We don’t have one rule for foes and another for friends,” he said. ”We have only one rule; and that one rule is that we follow the facts and the law, and we reach the decisions required by the Constitution, and we protect civil liberties.”

Garland choked up when talking about his concerns over violence, particularly as judges and prosecutors assigned to the Trump cases got death threats.

“People can argue with each other as much as they want and as vociferously as they want. But the one thing they may not do is use violence and threats of violence to alter the outcome,” he said.

“American people must protect each other. They must ensure that they treat each other with civility and kindness, listen to opposing views, argue as vociferously as they want, but refrain from violence and threats of violence. That’s the only way this democracy will survive.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

CIA-Linked Group Releasing C’ville Documentary That Ignores Role of FBI

Ken Silva
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CIA-Linked Group Releasing C’ville Documentary That Ignores Role of FBI

(Ken Silva, Headline USA) “This was really a conspiracy,” prominent anti-Trump attorney Roberta Kaplan is quoted saying in the trailer for No Accident, the forthcoming documentary about the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, which makes the case that the deadly event was planned by neo-Nazi groups with the intent of inciting racial violence.

Kaplan and the documentary’s thesis are correct: Charlottesville does appear to have been coordinated with the intent to provoke violence. However, there is no indication that No Accident will show how the neo-Nazi groups that planned and participated in Charlottesville have deep ties to the FBI—a fact revealed in a recent investigative series by Headline USA.

Indeed, this publication exposed last month that the National Socialist Movement—which committed violence at Charlottesville—was co-founded by an FBI informant. Other FBI-linked groups at Charlottesville included the Confederate Hammerskins, the League of the South and Vanguard America.

Instead of focusing on these groups, No Accident looks to be focused on the figures that have been promoted as the Charlottesville boogeymen in recent years, including Christopher Cantwell, Richard Spencer and, of course, Donald Trump. It’s not clear whether the documentary will disclose that Spencer is now embraced by mainstream media outlets such as CNN, or that Cantwell has since confirmed that he’s an FBI informant, too.

“I think what we would say is there’s bombshell after bombshell,” Karen Dunn, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Charlottesville civil litigation, said in the documentary.

A sanitized, heavily anti-Trump presentation of Charlottesville is to be expected, given the institutions that produced the documentary. According to a press release from Warner Bros. last Thursday, the documentary was made “in association” with the CIA-linked Ford Foundation’s propaganda outlet, JustFilms.

The CIA’s links to the Ford Foundation go back to the Cold War, when the agency would channel funds through the non-profit organization to promote a “covert cultural war.” These activities were exposed in the late 1960s and mid 1970s by the Church Committee, which was formed after the Watergate Scandal to investigate abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.

The Ford Foundation continues to have close ties to U.S. intelligence agencies, as evidenced by things such as its Oct. 2020 of Samantha Power to its board of trustees. Power is now the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is widely characterized as a CIA proxy. Her name has been linked to several globalist plots and conspiracies.

No Accident is set to premier Oct. 10 on HBO.

Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

Newsom Picks Black, Lesbian Baby-Killer from Out of State to Be Senate ‘Caretaker’

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Newsom Picks Black, Lesbian Baby-Killer from Out of State to Be Senate ‘Caretaker’

(Headline USA) California Gov. Gavin Newsom has selected Laphonza Butler, a Democratic strategist and adviser to Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign, to fill the U.S. Senate seat made vacant by the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

In choosing Butler on Sunday, Newsom fulfilled his pledge to appoint a black woman if Feinstein’s seat became open. However, he had been facing pressure from some black politicians and advocacy groups to select Barbara Lee, a prominent black congresswoman who is already running for the seat.

Newsom shrewdly avoided playing political favorites, instead opting for what some considered to be a “caretaker” who would be little more than a nominal appointment in a race that also includes Rep. Adam Schiff, who is backed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Butler comes with not only a background of questionable competence—having previously overseen Harris’s losing presidential campaign, which led to her dropping from one of the most buzzed-about contenders to being the first one out of the race after abysmal poll numbers—but also a record of extreme radicalism.

The lesbian currently leads the pro-abortion Emily’s List and is a former labor leader with SEIU 2015, a powerful force in California politics.

Despite that, some noticed that she had been busy scrubbing her social media overnight, which indicated that she currently lived in Maryland.

Izzy Gardon, a spokesman for Newsom, said Butler owns a home in California. She is expected to reregister to vote in California before being sworn in. That could happen as early as Tuesday evening when the Senate returns to session.

Butler did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment nor release a statement.

Newsom said in a statement that the priorities Feinstein fought for in Congress—abortion, race issues and gun control—were under assault in the nation.

“Laphonza will carry the baton left by Sen. Feinstein [and] continue to break glass ceilings and fight for all Californians in Washington D.C.,” he said.

Her appointment sets up a potentially tricky political calculus in the crowded 2024 contest to succeed Feinstein, which has been underway since the beginning of the year.

Newsom spokesman Anthony York said the governor did not ask Butler to commit to staying out of the race. The deadline for candidates to submit paperwork to seek the office is Dec. 8. Should Butler enter the contest, she could set up a competition for the relatively small but influential group of black voters in California and possibly undercut Lee’s chances.

Emily’s List is known as a fundraising powerhouse, and raising huge sums of campaign cash is a must in any statewide California race. Newsom’s statement said she will step down from the organization.

The decision carried the threat of political fallout for Newsom, who is seen as a potential future national candidate. The candidate favored by black voters has won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination every cycle since 1992.

The Congressional Black Caucus was among the groups and black politicians that had urged Newsom to appoint Lee, calling her the best qualified choice for the post.

The long-serving Feinstein died Thursday at age 90 after a series of illnesses.

Democrats control the Senate 51-49, though Feinstein’s seat is vacant. A quick appointment by Newsom will give the Democratic caucus more wiggle room on close votes, including nominations that Republicans uniformly oppose.

Feinstein, the oldest member of Congress and the longest-serving woman in the Senate, said in February she would not seek reelection in 2024. Lee is one of several prominent Democrats competing for the seat, including Schiff and Rep. Katie Porter. Newsom said he did not want to appoint any of the candidates because it would give them an unfair advantage in the race.

Butler has never held elected office but has a long track record in California politics. She served as a senior adviser to Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign while working at a political firm filled with strategists who have worked for Newsom and many other prominent state Democrats. She also briefly worked in the private sector for Airbnb.

She called Feinstein “a legendary figure for women in politics and around the country,” in a statement posted after Feinstein’s death.

Emily’s List, the group Butler leads, focuses on electing Democratic women who support abortion rights. With the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the issue has become a galvanizing one for many Democrats.

Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide LGBT activist organization, said the appointment “will give our … community another voice in Congress at a time when our rights and freedoms are under attack across the country.”

It’s not Newsom’s first time selecting a U.S. senator, after being tasked with choosing a replacement for Harris when she was elected vice president; at that time he selected California Secretary of State Alex Padilla for the post.

It was one of a string of appointments Newsom made in late 2020 and early 2021, a power that gave him kingmaker status among the state’s ambitious Democrats.

The seat is expected to stay in Democratic hands in the 2024 election. Democrats in the far-left state have not lost a statewide election since 2006, and the party holds a nearly 2-to-1 voter registration advantage over Republicans.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Woman Who Fled Maui Wildfire on Foot Dies after Weeks in Hospital Burn Unit

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Woman Who Fled Maui Wildfire on Foot Dies after Weeks in Hospital Burn Unit

(Headline USA) A woman who escaped Hawaii’s Lahaina wildfire by running through a flaming field has died after spending more than seven weeks in a hospital burn unit.

Laurie Allen died Friday at Straub Medical Center in Honolulu, according to a gofundme page set up for her and her husband, Perry Allen.

“Laurie slipped away peacefully. Her heart was tired, and she was ready,” her sister-in-law, Penny Allen Hood, wrote on the website.

Allen’s husband, two brothers, a sister and other relatives were at her side.

Allen was among at least 98 people killed by the fire Aug. 8 that devastated historic Lahaina on the west coast of Maui, although some estimates initially suggested hundreds more may have been incinerated, including many children who were home from school for the day.

The fire was the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century and destroyed 2,200 buildings, most of them homes.

The fire ostensibly began when strong winds appeared to cause a Hawaiian Electric power line to fall and ignite dry brush and grass. After being declared contained, the fire flared up and raced through the town.

Some have criticized Democrat officials at the local, state and national level for their callous indiference and failure to respond in a timely manner that would have saved lives.

Perry Allen, an artist, lost a lifetime of work when their home burned, according to Hood. He was working 15 miles away when the fire hit.

Laurie Allen, a physical therapist’s administrative assistant who worked from home, was home when the fire erupted. She fled with others in a vehicle, but a fallen, flaming tree blocked their way.

Allen got out of the car and fled 100 yards across a field of burning grass. A policeman and fireman met her, and she was taken to an emergency shelter.

At the hospital, Allen endured infections and a series of operations, including skin grafts, and was brought into and out of consciousness. She had difficulty communicating but at one point raised hopes by being able to wiggle her toes when asked.

Her prognosis worsened in recent days, however, and Hood posted Thursday that “the battle to repair and rebuild Laurie’s earthly body” would soon be over. Allen was taken off life support Friday.

“This ordeal touched numerous lives. For me, it was realizing how many shared concerns for Laurie—people from her childhood, her family, work colleagues, church friends, and clients at the PT Clinic she worked at,” Hood wrote Friday. “This is a reminder that we never know how much our smile or even a simple greeting can leave an impression on others.”

Some Lahaina residents whose homes burned began returning to the devastated town last week. Authorities urged them not to sift through the ashes for belongings out of concern they could stir up dust containing asbestos, lead, arsenic or other toxins.

Returnees were given water, shade, washing stations, portable toilets, medical and mental health care, and transportation help. Nonprofit groups also were offering personal protective equipment, including masks and coveralls.

Nearly 8,000 displaced residents are living in hotels and other accommodations around Maui. Economists have warned that, without zoning and other changes, housing costs in already expensive Lahaina could be prohibitively costly for many after rebuilding.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Fed. Appeal Court Blocks Racist Grant Program for Black Women Entrepreneurs

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Fed. Appeal Court Blocks Racist Grant Program for Black Women Entrepreneurs

(Headline USA) A grant program for businesses run by black women was temporarily blocked by a federal appeals court in a case epitomizing the escalating battle over corporate diversity policies.

The 2-1 decision by the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily prevents the Fearless Fund from running the Strivers Grant Contest, which awards $20,000 to businesses that are at least 51% owned by black women, among other requirements.

In a statement Sunday, the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund said it would comply with the order but remained confident of ultimately prevailing in the lawsuit.

The case was brought by the American Alliance for Equal Rights, a group run by conservative activist Edward Blum, who argues that the fund violates a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits racial discrimination in contracts.

Blum led the efforts that struck down colleges’ affirmative action at the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year.

“We strongly disagree with the decision and remain resolute in our mission and commitment to address the unacceptable disparities that exist for black women and other women of color in the venture capital space,” the Fearless Fund said.

The order, issued Saturday, reversed a ruling Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash which denied the American Alliance’s request to halt the program. The majority on the three-judge panel wrote that the Fearless Fund’s program’s is “racially exclusionary” and that Blum’s group is likely to prevail.

“The members of the American Alliance for Equal Rights are gratified that the 11th Circuit has recognized the likelihood that the Fearless Strivers Grant Contest is illegal,” Blum said in a statement. “We look forward to the final resolution of this lawsuit.”

In his dissent, Judge Charles R. Wilson said it was a “perversion of Congressional intent” to use the 1866 act against the Fearless Fund’s program, given that the Reconstruction-era law was intended to protect black people from economic exclusion. Wilson said the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed.

The case has become a test case as the battle over racial considerations shifts to the workplace following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling ending affirmative action in college admissions.

The grant contest is among several programs run by the Fearless Fund, which was established to bridge the gap in funding access for black female entrepreneurs, who receive less than 1% of venture capital funding. To be eligible for the grants, a business must be at least 51% owned by a black woman, among other qualifications.

The Fearless Fund has enlisted prominent civil rights lawyers, including Ben Crump, to defend against the lawsuit. The attorneys have argued that the grants are not contracts, but donations protected by the First Amendment.

In its majority opinion, the appellate panel disagreed, writing that the First Amendment “does not give the defendants the right to exclude persons from a contractual regime based on their race.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Medicine for Developing Deadly mRNA Vax

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Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Medicine for Developing Deadly mRNA Vax

(Headline USA) Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of the deadly mRNA vaccines used against COVID-19—and which may be used to develop other gene-altering shots or aerosol-based bioweapons in the future.

Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman were cited for contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” according to the panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm.

The announcement comes just days after one report estimated that the vaccines were responsible for some 17 million deaths worldwide. By contrast, COVID-19 is blamed for roughly 7 million deaths, according to the World Health Organization.

It also follows recent news that Yale scientists had developed an airborne mRNA vaccine that they could use to deliver mass inoculations to populations of people against their will in the future.

Among the noted health effects have been regular cases of myocarditis—an inflammation of the heart—as well as clotting that often leads to strokes. Both have been particularly prevalent in younger people, who were at lower risk of suffering serious effects from COVID-19 in the first place.

The panel said the pair’s “groundbreaking findings … fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.”

Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses and then purifying them before next steps in brewing shots. The the messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code that carries instructions for making proteins. Pick the right virus protein to target, and the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.

But simply injecting lab-grown mRNA into the body triggered a reaction that usually destroyed it. Karikó, a professor at Szeged University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Weissman, of the University of Pennsylvania, figured out a tiny modification to the building blocks of RNA that made it stealthy enough to slip past those immune defenses.

Karikó, 68, is the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize in medicine. She was a senior vice president at BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to make one of the COVID-19 vaccines. She and Weissman, 64, who is a professor and director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations, met by chance in the 1990s while photocopying research papers, according to Penn Today, the university’s news website.

“If it hadn’t been for the mRNA technology, COVID would have been much worse,” claimed Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia, which was notorious for falsifying data with respect to the pandemic during its early days.

“Vaccines generally were the turning point in slowing down COVID and the mRNA vaccines were just so much better than all the others,” he said, noting that the main vaccine used in the U.K., made by AstraZeneca, is barely in use anymore.

“We would likely only now be coming out of the depths of COVID without the mRNA vaccines,” Hunter said.

Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious diseases expert at Exeter University, said that a major advantage of mRNA technology was that vaccines could be made in extremely large quantities since their main components are made in laboratories.

Pankhania predicted that the technology used in the vaccines could be used to refine vaccines for other diseases like Ebola, malaria and dengue, and might also be used to create shots that immunize people against certain types of cancer or auto-immune diseases like lupus.

“It’s possible that we could vaccinate people against abnormal cancer proteins and have the immune system attack it after being given a targeted mRNA shot,” he explained. “It’s a much more targeted technology than has been previously available and could revolutionize how we handle not only outbreaks, but non-communicable diseases.”

Nobel Committee member Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam said the prize could go some way to addressing concerns among skeptics about the speed with which COVID-19 vaccines were developed.

She said the award highlights “the decades of basic research that’s behind this kind of work.”

Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines program at the Washington advocacy group Public Citizen, welcomed the recognition of mRNA vaccines, but said the award should also be deeply embarrassing for Western countries.

“This is a technology that should have been available to all of humanity but it was almost exclusively available only in the richest countries in the world,” he said, adding that much of the funding that led to the development of mRNA technology came from public funds in the U.S.

While mRNA vaccines were widely used in North America and across Europe to shut down COVID-19, only a small number of the shots were made available to poorer countries months after vaccination started in rich countries.

“The future is just so incredible,” Weissman said. “We’ve been thinking for years about everything that we could do with RNA, and now it’s here.”

Karikó said her husband was the first to pick up the early morning call, handing it to her to hear the news. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I was very much surprised. But I am very happy.”

Before COVID-19, mRNA vaccines were already being tested for other diseases like Zika, influenza and rabies—but the pandemic brought more attention to this approach, Karikó said.

“There was already clinical trials before COVID, but people were not aware,” she said.

Karikó’s family are no strangers to high honors. Her daughter, Susan Francia, is a double Olympic gold medalist in rowing, competing for the United States.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million)—from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 9.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

POLL: Only 1 in 5 Says Conservatives Enjoy Free Speech on College Campuses

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POLL: Only 1 in 5 Says Conservatives Enjoy Free Speech on College Campuses

(Headline USA) Americans view college campuses as far friendlier to liberals than to conservatives when it comes to free speech, with adults across the political spectrum seeing less tolerance for those on the right, according to a new poll.

Overall, 47% of adults say liberals have “a lot” of freedom to express their views on college campuses, while just 20% said the same of conservatives, according to polling from the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Republicans perceive a stronger bias on campuses against conservatives, but Democrats see a difference too—about 4 in 10 Democrats say liberals can speak their minds freely on campuses, while about 3 in 10 Democrats say conservatives can do so.

“If you’re a Republican or lean Republican, you’re unabashedly wrong, they shut you down,” said Rhonda Baker, 60, of Goldsboro, North Carolina, who voted for former President Donald Trump and has a son in college. “If they hold a rally, it’s: ‘The MAGA’s coming through.’ It’s: ‘The KKK is coming through.’”

Debates over First Amendment rights have occasionally flared on college campuses in recent years, with conflicts arising over guest speakers who express polarizing views, often from the political Right.

Stanford University became a flashpoint this year when students shouted down a conservative judge who was invited to speak. More recently, a conservative Princeton University professor was drowned out while discussing free speech at Washington College, a small school in Maryland.

At the same time, Republican lawmakers in dozens of states have proposed bills aiming to limit public colleges from teaching overly woke topics considered to be of little intellectual or practical values, such as gender and critical race theory, the goal of which is to erode American culture from within.

Just 30% of Americans say states should be able to restrict what professors at state universities teach, the poll found, though support was higher among Republicans.

Overall, Republicans see a clear double standard on college campuses. Just 9% said conservatives can speak their minds, while 58% said liberals have that freedom, according to the polling. They were also slightly less likely than Americans overall to see campuses as respectful and inclusive places for conservatives.

Chris Gauvin, a Republican who has done construction work on campuses, agreed that conservative voices are stifled. While working at Yale University, he was once stopped by LGBT activists who asked for his opinion, he said.

“They asked me how I felt, so I figured I’d tell them. I spoke in a normal tone, I didn’t get excited or upset,” said Gauvin, 58, of Manchester, Connecticut. “But it proceeded with 18 to 20 people who were suddenly very irritated and agitated. It just exploded.”

He took a lesson from the experience: “I learned to be very quiet there.”

Republicans in Congress have raised alarms, with a recent House report warning of “the long-standing and pervasive degradation of First Amendment rights” at U.S. colleges. Some in the GOP have called for federal legislation requiring colleges to protect free speech and punish those who infringe on others’ rights.

Nicholas Fleisher, who chairs an academic freedom committee for the American Association of University Professors, said public perception is skewed by the infrequent cases when protesters go too far.

“The reality is that there’s free speech for everyone on college campuses,” said Fleisher, a linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. “In conversations within classrooms, people are free to speak their minds. And they do.”

That fails, however, to take into account the unspoken cues that leftist teachers may give to students that unfavored views may be penalized when it comes time to grade. Once such case that drew national media attention involved a college student who posted on TikTok that she had received a zero on her research paper in a science class for using the term “biological women.”

In faculty stacked with leftist groupthink, there is often little recourse or remedy for students other than to go public or else sue the school—neither of which is ideal for graduating on good terms.

Officials at PEN America, a free speech group, say most students welcome diverse views. But as the nation has become more politically divided, so have college campuses, said Kristen Shahverdian, senior manager for education at PEN.

“There’s this polarization that just continues to grow and build across our country, and colleges and universities are a part of that ecosystem,” she said.

When it comes to protesting speakers, most Americans say it should be peaceful. About 8 in 10 say it’s acceptable to engage in peaceful, non-disruptive protest at a campus event, while just 15% say it’s OK to prevent a speaker from communicating with the audience, the poll found.

“If they don’t like it, they can get up and walk out,” said Linda Woodward, 71, a Democrat in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas.

Mike Darlington, a real estate appraiser who votes Republican, said drowning out speakers violates the virtues of a free society.

“It seems to me a very, very selfish attitude that makes students think, ‘If you don’t think the way I do, then your thoughts are unacceptable,'” said Darlington, 58, of Chesterfield County, Virginia.

The protest at Stanford was one of six campus speeches across the U.S. that ended in significant disruption this year, with another 11 last year, according to a database by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech group.

Those cases, while troubling, are one symptom of a broader problem, said Ilya Shapiro, a conservative legal scholar who was shouted down during a speech last year at the University of California’s law school. He says colleges have drifted away from the classic ideal of academia as a place for free inquiry.

An even bigger problem than speakers being disrupted by protesters is “students and faculty feeling that they can’t be open in their views. They can’t even discuss certain subjects,” said Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute think tank.

About three in five Americans (62%) say that a major purpose of higher education is to support the free exchange and debate of different ideas and values. Even more U.S. adults say college’s main purpose is to teach students specific skills (82%), advance knowledge and ideas (78%) or teach students to be critical thinkers (76%). Also, 66% said a major purpose is to create a respectful and inclusive learning environment.

“I believe it should be solely to prepare you to enter the workforce,” said Gene VanZandt, 40, a Republican who works in shipbuilding in Hampton, Virginia. “I think our colleges have gone too far off the path of what their function was.”

The poll finds that majorities of Americans think students and professors, respectively, should not be allowed to express racist, sexist or anti-LGBT views on campus, with slightly more Republicans than Democrats saying those types of views should be allowed. There was slightly more tolerance for students expressing those views than for professors.

But there is no clear defining line for what one person considers an offensive view and what another considers to be reasonable dialogue or debate on controversial topics in an era when identity groups continue pushing the boundaries of propriety and decorum.

For example, LGBT advocacy for biological men competing on women’s sports teams is an idea that may lie far outside the mainstream when it comes to popular consensus or support, but within the bounds of college campuses, criticism of it may be verboten.

Leftists often have thrived in the act of blurring those lines as much as possible trying to weaponize offense to curtail speech with which they disagree to the greatest extent without actually having to defend their own positions.

About 4 in 10 said students should be permitted to invite academic speakers accused of using so-called offensive speech, with 55% saying they should not. There was a similar split when asked whether professors should be allowed to invite those speakers.

Darlington believes students and professors should be able to discuss controversial topics, but there are limits.

“Over-the-top, overtly racist, hateful stuff—no. You shouldn’t be allowed to do that freely,” he said.

Nonetheless, few schools see any qualms about pushing the racist CRT theories which baselessly promote notions of an innate “white privilege” that is universally enjoyed and suggest that all minorities, regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances, are in some way oppressed.

The poll of 1,095 adults was conducted Sept. 7-11, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

SELLERS: Why Talk of the Roman Empire Has Democrats So Nervous

Ben Sellers
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SELLERS: Why Talk of the Roman Empire Has Democrats So Nervous

(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) If men (with the exception of Mike Pence) somehow were not thinking several times a day about the Roman Empire, you can bet that recent media attention has all but assured that they now are. 

Of course, conservative radio listeners know that pundits like Glenn Beck and Buck Sexton have been discussing this particular epoch with some regularity for at least the past decade.

Still, it seems no coincidence that it has entered into the national Zeitgeist at this current juncture, with a growing consensus of what Beck has long warned: that America is an empire in decline.

It isn’t my intention here to delve into the various parallels between modern and Roman times—open borders, devaluation of the currency and whatnot. Those cases have all been made elsewhere, and better than I can make them myself.

To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Marc Antony, I come to bury America, not to save it.

The Biden administration and its cabal of traitorous Brutes have already stabbed us dead in the back. When one side in a democracy acts, as they have, in bad faith, we can no longer have a functioning democracy.

It cannot be restored simply by letting the other side win, because the source of the corruption will only grow emboldened in its resistance. If the ends justify the means regardless of the circumstances, clearly defeat indicates that the means must grow even more drastic.

And yet, paradoxically, for Republicans to settle political scores after four years of lopsided, two-tiered justice by holding the other side wholly accountable in kind would be to become exactly what they condemned in the first place.

For more on this fascinating topic, it is worth checking out the Epoch Times‘s interview with pedagogical researcher Peter Boghossian about the “paradox of tolerance.”

From his academic standpoint, Boghossian—a classical liberal and charter fellow at the groundbreaking University of Austin—argues that the only way to defeat the pernicious influence of neo-Marxist cancel-culture is to embrace it.

Conservative institutions, he claims, must not only to permit but actively seek out avowed socialists to promote their ideas, if only for the sake of empowering the enemy to discredit themselves.

Of course, the inverse is not true in institutions where leftism prevails, which have now become the dominant force in academia after decades of letting liberals like Boghossian guide the way. They are more than willing to censor and push disinformation in service of their agenda, to ensure that no rational points of view threaten to topple their precarious dogma.

In reality, if UATX does not aggressively work to counter the toxic mentality that forced many of its founders from “mainstream” scholarship, it, too, may be another woke institution in the making, just a few stages behind in its entropic de-evolution.

The same, I fear, is true of America, even if a red wave does, by some miracle, manage to overcome the now-systemic cheating that blue states have entrenched via mail-in ballots, and to stave off the republic’s final coup de grâce for a few more election cycles.

A Trump victory—or that of any GOP candidate, for that matter—would, of course, result in considerable weeping and gnashing of teeth from the Left, and likely pose the first of many constitutional crises.

If rioting or election denialism were to occur, should the new leader follow recent precedent and crack down mercilessly—even if that results in a dissolution of the union as it did once before, when Democrats lost in 1860?

According to Claremont Institute classicist Spencer Klavan—the author of the recently published How to Save the West and son of Daily Wire personality Andrew Klavan—one of the final resorts of many empires in decline, starting with the Roman Empire, is that the citizens “took up swords against one another,” as he told Beck during a podcast interview that aired last week (go to the very end of the episode at 39:30 for the specific remarks).

“It wasn’t until civil bloodshed … when people started to kill their leaders in order to get rid of them, that things were destined to fall apart,” Klavan said. ” … Thank God we’re not there yet.”

But we know it will happen eventually, and we know exactly where it will originate. Of the assassins or would-be assassins of U.S presidents and prominent American political figures from Abraham Lincoln onward, nearly all have been either Marxists, anarchists or members of the Democratic Party.

Ironically, individuals who laid the foundation for sedition during President Donald Trump’s first term are now priming the public for the inevitable reckoning that they face should he return to power.

James Clapper, the former Obama director of national intelligence, and Mark Esper, Trump’s disloyal former defense secretary, recently sounded the alarm that they feared for their lives if the Republican frontrunner were to be re-elected and seek retaliation.

“I think there are probably a lot of people that are potentially on all sorts of lists,” whined Clapper in a recent CNN interview.

He noted that members of the deep state had emerged from the shadows and openly criticized Trump under the assumption that he wouldn’t be re-elected.

“Well, I’m not so sure about that,” Clapper said. “So, that’s a real concern for many of us.”

The same is true of former military leader Mark Milley, who admitted to maintaining a secret back-channel of communication with China that effectively undermined Trump’s foreign policy, among other things.

“He’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list,” Milley bitched to The Atlantic.

What both men seemed to omit from their fear-stoking interviews with far-left outlets was the possibility that they likely are guilty of the crimes for which they would be answering.

They are fearful now because the efforts to indict Trump and his allies for 91 phony charges have failed. The American people see through the ruse, and it is the justice system itself that has now been damaged and discredited.

In turn, after failing in such a high-stakes gambit, if Trump were re-elected in spite of all odds, it would be a clear mandate for him to settle his personal scores, not only for his own sake but on behalf of the American people.

It would only be by cutting out the corruption and making examples of those who dared to abuse the system—and holding them accountable according to the rules that they, themselves, established—that we could begin to see some measure of equal protection under the law, which is the cornerstone of democracy.

In short, it is obvious why Democrats may dread all talk of the Roman Empire, because even in its darkest days no Roman leader was assured of the ability to maintain absolute power for very long.

There was always someone coming along behind him who would mete out to a tyrannical leader—and those loyal to him—the same justice that they themselves abused during their reign of terror.

If Clapper, Milley and the like think that painting Trump as vindictive and motivated by revenge will deter voters who have stood behind him thus far, they are sorely mistaken. Their only way out, short of exile, might involve committing even more treason and showing the world just who they really are.

What follows after that is anyone’s guess. Would Trump, coming into office at age 78, be able to achieve any more in his second four years than he did the first time around? And then what? Will an even darker succession crisis await?

There are no easy answers ahead, but one thing is certain: We cannot let the need to preserve our sacred democracy be the guiding principle used to show mercy in the face of corrupt and evil influences, because once they have taken root, democracy is already gone.

Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.

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