GOP Sen. Warns of New Weapon Communist China Is Using against U.S.

Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji Bello
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GOP Sen. Warns of New Weapon Communist China Is Using against U.S.

(Abdul–Rahman Oladimeji Bello, Headline USA) Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., raised an alarm about a new artificial intelligence weapon the Chinese Communist Party is using against the United States, the Daily Wire reported.

He said China is using AI create to digitally manipulated photos and videos known as “deep fakes,” which can alter the voices and images depicted in the selected content, making it appear authentic in the eye of its viewer. 

“The threat of disinformation, weaponizing information against the United States and our allies to divide us—divide our citizens—is on the rise,” Ricketts warned at a Foreign Relations subcommittee this week.

“It’s especially so because we all have access to [smart phones] now, so citizens and policymakers all have access to that through social media or other sorts of platforms,” he continued. “But the idea that our adversaries would try to use disinformation to devise is not new.”

The freshman senator added that the Soviet Union spent millions on disinformation campaigns during the Cold War. This was part of their concentrated efforts to destabilize the United States and its allies at the time. 

“And I believe that in 1980, for example, there was a conservative estimate, the Soviet Union spent $3 billion on disinformation campaigns as part of their overall strategy,” Ricketts said.

Moreover, he noted that the Soviet Union’s disinformation campaigns surpassed those of the U.S. on a scale of 10 to 1.

“And they’ve been developing for a long time now something called ‘deep fake’ technology, and it has progressed along to the point where they’ve been able to use AI to distort public figures,” Ricketts continued. “An example of how a public figure might be distorted is when [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy was portrayed as announcing a surrender last year.”

Ricketts warned that the “deep fake” programs not only were able to alter existing photos but also to invent new people.

“So we’ve got this deep fake video technology that can create fictitious people,” he said. “They can be used to really further cloud people’s ability to discern what’s real information, what’s not real information.”

Howard Stern Mocked for Whining that Black NBA Players Don’t Like Him

Contributing Author
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Howard Stern Mocked for Whining that Black NBA Players Don’t Like Him

(Headline USA) Radio host Howard Stern complained this week that “black players” on the New York Knicks don’t speak to him when he’s sitting courtside, claiming their behavior is offensive.

“The Knicks have been very kind to me,” Stern said on his satellite radio show.

“They put me right in the front row,” he continued. “That’s when I knew I was famous. When I, you know, I have courtside, they put me courtside, and the black players won’t come over and say hello to me, but they go over to Spike Lee.”

Stern went on to say that players will not acknowledge him at all, even when he is sitting next to other celebrities.

“I’ll be sitting next to Tracy Morgan or Chris Rock—you know, they seat you where they seat you,” he said.

“And a lot of times when I’m there, I’m next to Tracy Morgan, who is so funny,” Stern continued. “And he’s sitting there and like, couple of the players will come over. They, like, give him that bro shake and stuff. And I’m like—these guys should hug me, too.” 

Stern went on to add that he “grew up in a black neighborhood,” but still gets “ignored.”

When asked if he believes the Knicks players have “a racial thing” against him, since he is white, Stern suggested that this was the case.

“Maybe they don’t like me. I don’t know,” he said. “I’d like to think it’s a white thing, not my personality. I hope it’s racial. That’s all.”

Stern complained that “fame to me is very important … I like people to recognize me.”

“I want them to talk to me,” he said of the Knicks players. “I want them to come up and go, ‘Hey Howard, fan of the show’ or something. I don’t get that. And, you know who comes up to me sometimes — the referees. White guys and black guys, they’ll come up to me, white referees and black. Like, ‘Hey, Howard, hey.’ But yeah, a lot of the white referees. So I’m like, ‘Oh, is everything racial now? Can I get a shout-out from some of the players?”

Critics blasted Stern, calling him an arrogant “idiot.”

Leftist Media Try to Spin Kari Lake’s Legal Victory at Ariz. Supreme Court

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Leftist Media Try to Spin Kari Lake’s Legal Victory at Ariz. Supreme Court

(Headline USA) Former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake won a legal victory before the state’s Supreme Court this week, with the court striking down all but one of the sanctions filed against her by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’s campaign, and expediting a review of more than 300,000 mail-in ballots in Maricopa County.

Hobbs’s attorneys claimed Lake and her attorneys should face sanctions for alleging voter fraud during Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election.

Lake’s lawyer’s argued that sanctions were not appropriate because Lake honestly believed her campaign had been hurt by inappropriate electoral conduct.

The court sided with Lake’s team on all but one count, ruling that she did not have to pay attorney fees to cover the costs of defending Hobbs, but that she did need to pay a fine of $2,000 for making “false factual statements” that more than 35,000 ballots had been improperly added to Maricopa County’s total ballot count.

The state Supreme Court also acknowledged that Lake’s challenge of the signature verification procedure in Maricopa County is ongoing, and urged the lower courts to expedite a review of it.

In a previous ruling upholding Lake’s right to question the signature verification process, the state Supreme Court said,  “Contrary to the ruling of the trial court and the Court of Appeals Opinion, this signature verification challenge is to the application of the policies, not to the policies themselves. Therefore, it was erroneous to dismiss this claim…because Lake could not have brought this challenge before the election.”

At the time, Lake celebrated the court’s decision hoped the lower courts would give “our signature verification evidence the appropriate forum for the evaluation it deserves,” she said.

“For years signatures have been a third rail for Maricopa County,” she said in a statement.

“The process of verifying these signatures is the only security measure on mail-in ballots,” she added. “The amount of time allotted to check these signatures was only 8 seconds, which is not humanly possible. The system is completely broken. That’s why they are absolutely terrified of letting anyone take a look at their signatures.”

Berkeley Prof. Sorry for Being a ‘White Person Who Incorrectly Identified as Native’

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Berkeley Prof. Sorry for Being a ‘White Person Who Incorrectly Identified as Native’

(Headline USA) A University of California, Berkeley professor issued an apology this week for being a “white person who has incorrectly identified as Native my whole life.”

Professor Elizabeth Hoover, an expert on environmental health and food justice in Native American communities, said she recently found out that she was not Native American despite having claimed that as her ethnicity for decades.

Hoover lived this “identity based on family stories without seeking out a documented connection to these communities,” she wrote in an apology letter, according to Mercury News.

“Having my family claim Native identity does not mean Native nations claimed us,” she wrote. “By claiming an identity as a woman of Mohawk and Mi’kmaq descent without confirming it with communities of origin, and by not confirming kinship ties back to politically and culturally affiliated Indigenous peoples, I betrayed and hurt my students, collaborators, and friends.”

Hoover then shared a long list of commitments she hopes will “meaningfully make amends.”

One such promise is to “put away my dance regalia, ribbon skies, moccasins, and Native jewelry,” she said. “I’ve begun to give away some of these things to people who will wear them better.” 

As of right now, Hoover does not plan to resign from UC Berkeley, despite a call for her to do so from more than 360 people, including Native American scholars and activists, as well as current and former students from the school.

“This is a matter of misconduct with wide-reaching effects,” said Audra Simpson, a Columbia anthropology professor and Mohawk scholar. “Whether intentional or not, she has committed a form of fraud [and] she has benefited enormously from doing so.”

Adrienne Keene, an assistant professor in American studies at Brown University and former close friend and colleague of Hoover, agreed: “The waves of harm extending from this are immense and difficult to even capture,” she tweeted.

Dems and Former Dems Blasting Biden on Border Chaos

Robert Jonathan
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Dems and Former Dems Blasting Biden on Border Chaos

(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) During a national TV interview earlier this week, Democrat-turned-independent U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona rebuked Biden administration officials for absurdly claiming that the border is secure.

In a perhaps surprising development, even her likely far-left challenger in 2024 has also levied criticism at the unprepared Democrat-run White House and executive branch in this context.

U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., insisted that southern border cities and towns “are simply unequipped to handle the surge of migrants,” with Title 42 expiring on May 11, NBC News reported,

The congressman indicated that that the there is a lack of communication from Team Biden down to the local level about their actual strategy, which includes limited resources such as the deployment of 1,500 troops to certain border areas, for the crisis.

“Title 42 was eventually going to get stripped down, and we needed to have a plan to move forward. In the meantime, what we can do is agree that these towns need help,” Gelled said. “They should not be taking it on the chin because the federal government has failed to come up with a solution and surge forward a lot of resources and money that they need.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has already announced that the relatively small number of soldiers will handle so-called administrative tasks rather than actual interdiction.

Implemented under the Trump administration during COVID, Title 42 allows border officials to reject asylum claims and turn away some undocumented migrants on the basis of public health.

Sinema, who left the Democrat Party last December but generally still votes for most of the Biden agenda as she has previously been doing, has yet to formally announce whether she will seek another term in the upper chamber.

In the meantime, she has reportedly raked in about $2 million in campaign donations in 1Q, including from various RINOs.

Gallego has raised almost double that amount, however. Whoever is the endorsed Democrat in an anticipated three-way race will likely benefit from the usual Maricopa County election hocus-pocus.

The GOP candidate will emerge from what is shaping to be a multi-candidate primary.

In the 50-50 Senate in the last Congress, Sinema could have used her all-important vote as leverage for border security, but apparently did not do so. A looming reelection campaign, however, sometimes focuses the attention of a politician.

Sinema’s support — along with that of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., — for retaining the filibuster, however, arguably prevented America from devolving into full-on socialism in the prior legislative session

Sitting next to her in the studio during a Fox News Special Report interview earlier this week, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., pointed out that, with advice from the cartels, illegal aliens are easily gaming the asylum system to gain entry and stay in the U.S.

In addition to teaming up with Lankford on the illegal immigration issue, Sinema and U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., are reportedly crafting legislation “that would grant a temporary two-year authority to expel migrants from the United States similar to what is currently allowed under Title 42,” Politico reported on Thursday.

Sens. Machin and John Cornyn, R-Texas, are co-sponsors of the measure.

“A key distinction is that the extension being proposed by Tillis and Sinema…does not rely on a public health order, making it functionally different from the Trump-era program that Biden kept in place.”

In the FNC appearance, Sinema slammed the Biden administration for failing to plan ahead though it had plenty of notice that Title 42 was coming to an end.

Upon taking office, the Biden administration threw open the southern border, which promptly created a humanitarian, law enforcement and national security disaster that is ongoing and appears about to get even worse.

Eleven Senate Republican have called upon Joe Biden to keep Title 42 in place.

CDC Chief Rochelle Walensky Resigns in Wake of Agency’s Superspreader Conference

Mark Pellin
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CDC Chief Rochelle Walensky Resigns in Wake of Agency’s Superspreader Conference

(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is leaving the embattled agency, the White House announced in a Friday news dump.

Walensky’s departure comes on the heels of the CDC launching an internal investigation after it hosted a superspreader conference in Georgia earlier this month that led to at least 35 coronavirus infections.

Walensky’s resignation letter to President Joe Biden reportedly offered no specifics for her decision and expressed “mixed feelings” about stepping down. 

“I have never been prouder of anything I have done in my professional career,” she wrote. Walensky’s last day as CDC director will be June 30. Critics said it can’t come soon enough and was long overdue.

Those critics inlcude Walensky, who last August conceded that “It’s not lost on me that we fell short in many ways,” when addressing CDC pandemic failures.

“To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes — from testing, to data, to communications,” she said at the time. “I feel like it’s my my responsibility to lead this agency to a better place after a really challenging three years.”

Walensky’s change of heart and decision to leave the CDC came as an increasing number of Biden regime officials are scrambling to absolve themselves of myriad COVID policy disasters and distance their actions from the dire repercussions they caused.

During Walensky’s tenure, the Biden regime enforced vaccine mandates that an increasing body of science is showing might have caused widespread harm, while also policing wildly unpopular and ineffective mask mandates, crowd capacity limits and remote-learning for public education. The draconian policies created massive economic disruptions, job losses, business closings and steep learning losses for students at all grade levels and all demographics.

Former COVID Czar Anthony Fauci spent last week furiously trying to rewrite history and erase his own fingerprints from years of medical monarchy.

“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” Fauci gaslit in an interview with regime collaborator New York Times. “Never. I never did.”

Fauci claimed he simply “gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.”

Walensky’s departure from the agency that Fauci was tossing under the bus to save his own skin comes as the federal government is slated to end its COVID-19 public health emergency. The World Health Organization proclaimed this week that the pandemic “global health emergency” is now over.

MURDOCK: Biden’s Woke Military Moves from Green Berets to Green New Deal

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MURDOCK: Biden’s Woke Military Moves from Green Berets to Green New Deal

(Deroy Murdock, Headline USA) President Joe Biden wants all Pentagon vehicles to be electric by 2030—in just six years and seven months. America’s fearless leader previewed this policy on Earth Day 2022.

“We’re going to start the process where every vehicle in the United States military, every vehicle, is going to be climate-friendly — every vehicle,” Biden said in Seattle that April 22. “I mean it.”

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm just reiterated this objective.

Senator Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, asked Granholm at an April 26 Armed Services Committee hearing, “Do you support the military adopting that EV fleet by 2030?”

“I do, and I think we can get there,” Granholm replied.

Those who have worn America’s uniform find this jaw-droppingly stupid.

“Anyone who has even a little experience in military logistics recognizes Joe Biden’s E.V. mandate as a political farce,” House Armed Services Committee member Jim Banks, R-Ind., told me.

“As an Afghanistan war veteran, I wish Biden DoD’s top brass had the courage to put our national security before Green New Deal fantasies and call out this harmful and ridiculous order,” the Navy Reserve officer and U.S. Senate candidate added.

​“I encountered a lot of IEDs on dirt roads in Afghanistan, but no charging stations,” said Matt Pottinger, who served three combat deployments as a Marine and later as Deputy national security advisor.

“We rely on China for most of our EV supply chain, and that trend is worsening,” Pottinger added. “It was hard enough when we depended on Middle Eastern allies for our energy needs. To put those needs—even for our military—in the hands of our chief adversary is, to use a technical term, pretty dumb.”

Biden’s pretty dumb political farce raises numerous unintentionally hilarious questions:

Where exactly would one plug in a Jeep, truck, tank or armored personnel carrier in a blistering desert or steamy jungle?

If such charging stations existed, wouldn’t the enemy neutralize them, to hobble US armed forces?

If American GIs discovered functioning charging stations, would they halt their advance for, say, 30 to 45 minutes to recharge—at least once or twice daily?

Would US soldiers bring travel adapters to plug their EVs into overseas charging stations?

How would the Allied march from D-Day to Berlin have looked if George S. Patton, Maxwell Taylor, Bernard Law Montgomery and other commanders had relied on electric vehicles?

Would Adolf Hitler have left charging stations conveniently connected to the grid and ready for the Third Army to refresh their Sherman tanks en route to the Battle of the Bulge? Or, more likely, would der Führer have ordered SS saboteurs to dynamite every one of those damn things as the Nazis retreated, from Burgundy to Bastogne?

Alternatively, Patton and his men could have hauled mobile, solar-powered charging stations, so tanks and other vehicles could boost their voltage while dodging incoming Wehrmacht artillery.

Allied troops also would have confronted, in Monty Python’s words, “a teensy problemette.”

The skies above the Battle of the Bulge were notoriously cold, dark and overcast in December 1944. The clouds were so thick that Allied pilots could not parachute supplies to friendly forces who were invisible beneath the dense gray.

Theoretically, had Patton roared into Nazi-occupied Belgium under an EV mandate, tapping into a woke, solar-powered grid would have been useless. There and then, particularly around the winter solstice, sun rays were as scarce as synagogues.

Obviously, 2023 is not 1944. That said, relying on the enemy’s green infrastructure or schlepping solar- and wind-power generators would cripple U.S. troops as they attacked hostile combatants.

So, what’s next from the geniuses at Joe Biden’s Green New Pentagon and the Department of Energy, the guardians of America’s nuclear arsenal?

Why not an electric-ship mandate?

U.S. Navy aircraft carriers could stop every two days in mid-ocean, plug into solar-powered buoys, wait 12 hours, and then proceed on their merry way.

Why?

Climate!

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.

Charlottesville Torch Marchers Brace for Mass Arrests

Ken Silva
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Charlottesville Torch Marchers Brace for Mass Arrests

(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The men who participated in the infamous 2017 Charlottesville torch march are bracing for mass arrests after three of them were charged last month under a little-used law that makes it a crime to burn objects with intent to intimidate.

Indictments were unsealed last month against three of the alleged torch marchers—Tyler Bradley Dykes, Dallas Medina and Will Zachary Smith—nearly six years after the fact.

The previous Charlottesville D.A., Robert Tracci, had declined to press charges. But his replacement, the Soros-backed Charlottesville district attorney, Jim Hingeley, made it a campaign promise to prosecute torch-carriers, and there is no statute of limitations for felonies in Virginia.

White nationalist blogs and message forums are abuzz in response to the indictments, expecting mass arrests in a Jan. 6-like prosecutorial crackdown.

“A Soros-backed prosecutor has fulfilled his campaign promise by bringing meritless charges against attendees of a 6-year-old political demonstration, which was coordinated with law enforcement,” wrote white nationalist Christopher Cantwell.

“Since then, a few names have been released, and we can expect more to follow. There is a distinct possibility I may be one of them.”

The torch marchers have expressed pessimism about being arrested, but optimism about ultimately being acquitted.

“A reasonable summation of the situation might be: ‘If you are doxed and known to have held a torch at the demonstration, you might be arrested in the near future and should plan for the possibility. If you have not been identified as a participant or did not touch a torch, you probably are safe for now,” someone wrote on the blog Full Haus, which markets itself as “the world’s finest show for white fathers.”

Full Haus said the charges should ultimately be defeated in court because “there was zero intent via the organizers or the rank and file to seek out or confront any specific group or individual.”

“Holding a tiki-torch burning, self-contained citronella fuel while walking on public property regardless of slogans is not remotely in the same category as burning a large wooden cross in front of your black neighbor’s house,” the blog said, referring to the slogans such as “you will not replace us” and “blood and soil.”

“Due process and First Amendment issues will jump off the page of any lawyer who agrees to fight this.”

The Charlottesville rally turned deadly the day after the torch march, when a man rammed his vehicle into a group of counterprotesters and killed a woman. The driver, James Alex Fields Jr., was convicted of murder and given life imprisonment.

The law being used to pursue the peaceful protestors from the night before was enacted by the state in 2002 in response to Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings. It was challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately found the law constitutional in a 6-3 vote.

Individuals convicted under the law face one to five years imprisonment.

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

Oregon Alters Health Records, Claims ’50 Male Hysterectomies’ Performed in 2022

Molly Bruns
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Oregon Alters Health Records, Claims ’50 Male Hysterectomies’ Performed in 2022

(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) According to the state of Oregon’s health records, 50 males had hysterectomies in 2022.

The Oregon Health Authority provided data to state Rep. Ed Diehl on “gender affirming” care and procedures that took place in the state, as a bill that would require health insurance companies to cover the cost of transgender care is up for debate.

According to the Post Millennial, the report included 47 instances of males receiving “chest masculinization” surgery and 13 males needing “genital masculinization.”

Patients in Oregon do not have to report their actual sex, but may, under the law, report only their gender identity.

Diehl asserted that this change makes the tracking of sex extremely difficult, as people are now permitted to fill out forms based on how they feel on any given day.

“Sex dis-aggregated data has been vitally important in the medical field because men and women have different health outcomes, respond to medications differently, respond to disease differently, and require different approaches to surgeries, etc. This will limit our ability to study and improve health outcomes,” tweeted Diehl.

Experimental gender transition surgeries are dangerous and often have devastating long-term side effects.

The bill, known as HB 2002, passed through the Oregon house on May 1. If passed, health insurance companies would become responsible for “medically necessary” transgender care, including hair implants, tracheal shaves and facial feminization.

Diehl proposed an amendment, requesting that people who wish to detransition also receive full coverage. Democrats vehemently rejected the amendment.

“To detransition is to demonstrate that gender identity is not immutable,” tweeted Diehl. “By including detransition treatment coverage in the bill, the true believers would be acknowledging that detranstion is real, that some children and young adults are being harmed, and that the professional can be wrong. And that is simply something they cannot admit.”

The bill continued on to the Oregon state senate, where it awaits its second reading.

Census Projections for 2030 Already Show Huge Losses for Blue States

Jacob Bruns
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Census Projections for 2030 Already Show Huge Losses for Blue States

(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Projections for the 2030 census predict potentially massive population drops in Democrat-run blue states, Real Clear Politics reported.

Republicans had already made substantial gains in the House of Representatives–and therefore the Electoral College— as a result of the 2020 census, despite potential foul play on the part of the Left.

The report, pulling from an American Redistricting Project forecast, projects that leftist strongholds like California, New York and Illinois stand to lose big in 2030.

Projections indicate that California stands to lose five seats, New York, three, and Illinois, two.

The numbers reflect the larger American flight from large, congested urban centers to more spacious–and more conservative–regions.

The states expected to pick up electoral college votes are almost exclusively centrist or right-leaning, including Texas and Florida, which are each projected to gain four seats, as well as and Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Delaware, all of which are on the docket for one.

If those projected numbers were applied to the Trump vs. Biden race in 2020, Trump’s likelihood of victory would spike.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the predictions are not certain. The left’s commitment to open border policies, supported by those at the highest levels, could continue to radically shift the political landscape.

Further, the U.S. Census Bureau is expressing increasingly woke opinions, which could undermine trust in its numbers over time.

Earlier this year, for example, the bureau announced that it is taking preliminary steps toward revising racial and ethnic classifications following calls for more accurate categories for how people identify themselves in federal data gathering.

Also some census-takers who falsified information during the 2020 count didn’t have their work redone fully, weren’t fired in a timely manner and in some cases even received bonuses.

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