(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) A Pennsylvania Judiciary Committee passed a bill that could force doctors to prescribe puberty blockers and perform sex reassignment surgeries, according to a Democrat state representative on the board.
Rep. Emily Kinkead emphatically affirmed that bill HB 300 would require doctors to provide so-called “gender affirming care” if it becomes law, the Post Millennial reported.
“When we talk about are physicians going to be required to do X, Y, Z? Yes! If it does not harm, if it in fact helps people,” said Kinkead. “And when we deny gender-affirming care to people who do not identify with the gender that they were assigned at birth, that is causing harm.”
In addition to the possibility of holding doctors liable for not treating mentally ill patients, HB 300 would also make it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Kinkead also claimed that doctors who refused to provide such care would be causing harm to people who want to transition.
Twitter users called out Kinkead for her baseless claims.
“Anyone promoting the surgical or medical process of removing or changing sexual organs in order to ‘change the gender’ of a child belongs in prison,” user Wade Miller said.
“Wow. She not only drank the Koolaid, she’s like the Mom who mixed it up in the kitchen and then called all the kids in and force it down their throats,” said one critic.
“If this bill passes Pennsylvania can say goodbye to millions of residents,” another user noted.
Scientific opinion on experimental sex changes via hormone therapy and surgery, particularly for minors, is varied. Recent research led several European countries to ban the practice outright, and other countries such as Sweden, Finland, England, France and Norway moved away from immediate medical transitions to therapy in order to help the troubled minors.
Several Republican-led states also banned the practice altogether.
People called Kinkead’s claim that such surgeries and mutilations are “life-saving” into question as side effects from hormones and surgery are under continued scrutiny.
(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) On Monday, Senate Republicans accused President Joe Biden’s Federal Housing Finance Agency of attempting to “social-engineer the U.S. housing market” to punish those with good credit and subsidize those with poor credit, Fox News reported.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., joined several other GOP Senators, penning a letter to FHFA Director Sandra Thompson asking for details regarding the policy decision.
According to Marshall and his colleagues, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, federally-sponsored banking entities, will begin taking on high-risk mortgages at the expense of lower-risk mortgages, cutting against basic financial sense.
“This announcement, scheduled to take effect May 1, 2023, will invert the common-sense risk financing structure at the GSEs in an effort to decrease mortgage rates for riskier individuals with low credit scores and forcibly raise rates for those with higher scores,” they wrote.
They also called the policy “shortsighted and counterproductive” suggesting that it “demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the necessity of accurately tailoring housing finance products to credit risk and establishes a perverse incentive that punishes hardworking Americans for their fiscal prudence.”
The senators further claimed that the Biden administration was exploiting the housing market to “pander to targeted demographics” and thereby secure political support from those groups.
In a separate interview, Marshall noted that Biden and Democrats more generally seem to have no idea of the struggles of the average American.
“Joe Biden couldn’t be more out of touch with the hardships Americans are facing due to his failed economic agenda, skyrocketing interest rates, and record high Bidenflation,” he said.
The president, he added, is now “penalizing responsible Americans with good credit scores” in an attempt to redistribute wealth to favored racial or economic classes.
“This is illogical,” he concluded. “The Biden administration must answer for why they are punishing Americans who have diligently met their financial obligations and earned higher credit scores.”
(Headline USA) An Iranian court issued a $312.9 million judgment against the United States over a 2017 Islamic State-claimed attack on Tehran, authorities said Wednesday, the latest judicial action between the nations amid their decadeslong enmity.
Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency, in reporting the decision, offered no direct evidence to support the court’s allegation that American officials had any part in the June 2017 attack that killed at least 18 people and wounded 50 others. The assault saw gunmen attack Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s mausoleum and the country’s parliament, starting an hourslong siege.
However, the court ruling comes after the United Nations’s highest court in March rejected Tehran’s legal bid to free up some $2 billion in Iranian Central Bank assets frozen by U.S. authorities.
Meanwhile, U.S. judges have issued rulings that call for billions of dollars to be paid by Iran over attacks linked to Tehran, as well as those detained by Iran and used as pawns in negotiations between the countries.
The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The IRNA report described those named in the lawsuit as including the U.S. government, former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the CIA, the American military’s Central Command, the Treasury and others. It said the case before Branch 55 of the Tehran Court of Justice came from the families of three people killed in the June 2017 attack.
“The reasons for attributing these crimes to the United States … is based on the central and main role of the government and officials of this country in organizing and directing terrorist groups,” the IRNA report said.
It cited “reliable news” and unidentified speeches by American officials as its evidence.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump described Obama as the “founder” of the Islamic State group. While later calling his comments “sarcasm” based on Obama’s decision to earlier withdraw troops from Iraq, conspiracy theorists across the Middle East, including Iran’s supreme leader, seized on the remarks.
The Islamic State group, a Sunni extremist group born out of al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Iraq, declared itself a caliphate across the vast territory it held in Iraq and Syria in 2014. A U.S.-led coalition and separately Iran-allied Shiite forces ultimately dislodged the extremists, who became notorious for their gruesome killings of prisoners and attacks abroad.
The June 2017 attack in Tehran marked the first time the Islamic State’s extremists could penetrate tightly controlled Iran and carry out of a massive assault. The assault shocked Tehran, which largely has avoided militant attacks in the decades after the years-long tumult surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran a year later executed eight men sentenced to death over the attack.
Since the revolution, a series of U.S. court cases have been filed against Iran, particularly over attacks like the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people.
A 1996 U.S. law allows Americans to sue nations identified by the U.S. government as sponsoring terrorism, like Iran, for damages suffered in militant acts linked back to them. Others have sued for being wrongfully imprisoned by Tehran, like Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian.
The court decision announced Wednesday comes as tensions between Iran and the U.S. remain high over Tehran’s nuclear program enriching uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels under reduced oversight from international inspectors. Meanwhile, Iran is still reeling after months of protests and a violent security force crackdown following the September death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after her arrest by the country’s morality police.
On Wednesday, Iran’s judiciary acknowledged two reporters who broke news on Amini’s death, Niloufar Hamedi and Elham Mohammadi, had been indicted on charges of collaborating with the U.S., acting against national security and creating “propaganda against the system.” Nearly 100 journalists have been arrested amid the demonstrations, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) In the wake of Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney advertisement debacle, the brand’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, attempted to reverse course with a patriotic advertising campaign.
The ad, which tells of “a beer rooted in the heart of America,” was released on April 14, soon after the initial Mulvaney campaign began, the New York Postreported.
“This is the story of the American spirit,” the narrator says as the Clydesdale horses trot across the American heartland.
But, expressing the views of many Americans, celebrity podcaster Joe Roganslammed the beer corporation on his show, The Joe Rogan Experience, for its too-little-too-late attempt to win back its alienated customer base.
“It’s like the f–ing dumbest, pro-America rah-rah [ad],” Rogan said, suggesting that the commercial was so formulaic that it could have been generated by artificial intelligence.
“That’s probably a ChatGPT 4.0 version of the perfect American commercial,” Rogan said. “That’s really what it is … But it’s so obvious what they’re doing.”
Rogan likewise turned his ire to Mulvaney, expressing the absurdity of the situation in which we find ourselves.
“And so they’re going to change that with this crazy attention w***e on day 365 of being a woman,” he said. “I mean, we are in a f***ing Coen Brothers movie.”
Rogan also had harsh words for Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, the marketing guru who was recently put on a leave of absence by the beer corporation.
Prior to the Mulvaney experiment, Heinserscheid had previously stated in a video that “Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
Rogan ripped Heinerscheid and her marketing underlings for “dismissing the people and like the humor of the people that liked Bud Light.”
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The prestigious Columbia Journalism School is holding a conference on building a democratic press this week, featuring speakers from the New York Times, Washington Post and The New Yorker.
Absent from the conference is the reporter who once wrote groundbreaking stories for all of these publications: Seymour Hersh, the legendary watchdog who recently exposed the Biden administration for allegedly by sabotaging Russia’s Nord Stream natural gas pipelines last September.
On Tuesday, one audience member wanted to know why Hersh was absent from the supposedly elite journalism conference.
“Is this the lecture hall with Seymour Hersh? I’m looking for the panel with Seymour Hersh because it’s a “policy and press” panel. Shouldn’t we talk about the Nord Stream since that’s the biggest story of the century?” asked a man who later revealed himself to be Jose Vega.
“You guys have the executive editor of the New York Times, which came out with a phony story to try to block Seymour Hersh.”
My friends and I confronted the executive editors for @nytimes, @washingtonpost, @latimes, @Reuters on their censorship of Seymour Hersh, Uhuru, Julian Assange, Tucker Carlson, Russiagate..Then the Dean of Columbia and security pushed me to the ground and tried to silence me. pic.twitter.com/Tm1u48n5Xu
— Jose Vega — Vote Diane Sare! (@JosBtrigga) April 25, 2023
Vega was referring to a New York Times story that purported to debunk Hersh’s story with an article about a “pro-Ukrainian group” sending divers from a 50-foot pleasure yacht to attack the pipelines. The Times backtracked on this half-baked theory earlier this month and admitted that its story is tenuous—while also calling for the truth of the matter to be ignored.
Vega then listed other recent failures by the mainstream press: Uncritically reporting lies about weapons of mass destruction being in Iraq, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gassing his own people and Donald Trump colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
“Is there anything you’ve’ gotten right over the last 20 years? Iraq? Wrong. Syria? Wrong. Russiagate? Really wrong,” he said. “The list goes on and on.”
Vega added that none of the journalists on the panel compare even to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson—let alone Hersh.
“Tucker Carlson ain’t no Seymour Hersh, but he did something none of you had the courage to do: Speak the truth and actually be critical of the war,” he said.
“We had to find out through leaks that Zelensky was going to bomb Moscow on the anniversary,” Vega said, referring to a recent Post story. “If you’re so impartial, Shouldn’t you at least say Zelensky was going to bring us to the verge of World War 3?”
The journalists on the panel never answered any of Vega’s questions before he was thrown out of the event. He later said on Twitter that his knee was slightly hurt after being tossed by security guards, but he is otherwise unharmed.
The Columbia Journalism School event was scheduled to continue today, with a video message from former President Barack Obama on the agenda.
(Headline USA) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held trade talks with South Korean officials in Seoul on Wednesday, on the second leg of his four-nation trip, as the possible rival to Donald Trump seeks to build his diplomatic profile ahead of a widely anticipated presidential campaign launch.
Leading a trade mission from Florida, DeSantis met with South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo and expressed hopes to create more jobs by facilitating South Korean trade and investment in his state, according to Han’s office.
Han, Seoul’s No. 2 official behind President Yoon Suk Yeol, called for stronger cooperation in industries such as space and aviation, which he described as Florida’s “strengths.”
DeSantis earlier on Wednesday met with Kim Dong-yeon, the governor of South Korea’s largest Gyeonggi province, to discuss exploring partnerships in industries such as biotechnology and solar power generation, Kim’s office said.
According to DeSantis’s office, merchandise trade between Florida and South Korea exceeds $1.3 billion, making Florida the country’s 7th largest bilateral trade partner in the Asia and Middle East region.
DeSantis is considered the biggest challenger to Trump for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential race. He is expected to announce his candidacy sometime next month.
DeSantis, who was accompanied by state officials and his wife, Casey DeSantis, began his multi-country trip in Japan, where he met with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Monday and exchanged views on bilateral and regional issues, according to Japan’s Foreign Ministry. Following South Korea, DeSantis will travel to Israel and Britain.
(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) As the most influential political commentator in America, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has a lot of options in the media space as a free agent.
Already broadcasting remotely from his own studios in Maine and Florida, and once any non-compete agreements expire, Carlson could launch an independent channel or join another existing news organization. Or go in a different direction.
OANN and Blaze TV immediately made overtures to Carlson, who was fired by Fox News on Monday, for whatever reason, in what will likely prove to be one of the more impactful blunders in media history.
Another option, a more mainstream one, may be on the table, although after stints at CNN, PBS, MSNBC and FNC, Carlson may be done with corporate media venues.
According to Hollywood gossip site TMZ, which generally has access to inside sources when it comes to celebrities, the struggling NewsNation cable channel may be contemplating adding Carlson, as well as fired ex-CNN anchor Don Lemon, to their on-camera lineup because “they both could bring in big swaths of a diverse audience on both the right and the left.”
Per the report, “Sources with direct knowledge tell TMZ…the television network…is interested in potentially hiring DL and TC and adding them to their growing roster of high-profile anchors…We’re told the announcements of their oustings Monday came at a perfect time for NewsNation — which just started running 24-hour programming starting this week.”
TMZ added that “we’re told NewsNation is serious about this — and that their executive team flew to NYC Monday to discuss this internally. So, it sounds like they might just pursue this plan — as they clearly feel it could work out.”
TMZ also claimed that NewsNation execs are of the opinion that they can manage the “baggage” that Carlson and Lemon would bring to their channel. This is a fast-moving situation, with probably more revelations and questionable scoops to come.
NewsNation is basically a liberal network that positions itself as presenting nonpartisan journalism. Launched in 2020, the channel is definitely ratings-challenged and thus “the fact both of these guys are huge, recognizable names in the news game is appealing to NewsNation honchos,” TMZ insisted.
“According to Nielsen, NewsNation averaged 96,000 total viewers in primetime in March, ranking 71st among all cable networks. That is far less than the lowest-rated major cable news network, CNN, which averaged 473,000,” Deadline Hollywood reported earlier this month.
The cable startup features an array of leftist anchors.
This includes Lemon’s former CNN colleague Chris Cuomo, Elizabeth Vargas formerly of ABC News, and entrepreneur Dan Abrams, who still works for ABC as well as hosting On Patrol: Live (the successor show to ratings-powerhouse Live PD, which got cancelled in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder).
Ironically perhaps if the NewsNation initiative ever comes to pass, Carlson regularly ridiculed both Lemon and Cuomo on his Fox show.
In another form of irony, both newly-fired hosts have reportedly retained the same high-powered entertainment lawyer “to navigate their exits,” according to the New York Times.
Attorney Bryan Freedman also represents Cuomo, who is still wrangling with CNN over a big-money severance package. The same barrister reportedly enabled Megyn Kelly to walk away from NBC with a full contract payout.
The Wall Street Journalreported that Fox was paying Carlson approximately $20 million annually, and he is also leaving with the balance due on this current contract.
“Mr. Carlson found out he was being let go about 10 minutes before the network announced his departure,” WSJ reported, citing unnamed insiders.
The conservative channel has already lost market share and a massive amount of stock value as a result of the departure of the populist pundit from the top-rated Tucker Carlson Tonight program, which, in the interim, is being replaced by Fox News Tonight.
Many theories are being advanced as to why Fox let Tucker Carlson go.
It could be that his opposition to the Big Pharma narrative, the January 6 narrative, and/or the Ukraine war narrative apparently made the globalists who seem to be on the ascendancy within the Murdoch-owned channel nervous.
Some sources claimed that all this went down while Carlson was actually negotiating a contact extension.
There is also speculation that existing contract terms, since he is taking the Fox cash, prevent Carlson from launching a new venture until well into 2024. It’s also very likely that a non-disclosure clause is in the mix.
Whether a contract provision precludes any appearances on other platforms as a guest to discuss political issues is another matter.
In addition, it’s hardly unusual for revisionist history to emerge between employer and employee in a separation scenario in any industry.
According to the far-left Rolling Stone magazine, however, things could get ugly in this particular situation.
“Fox News executives have in their possession a dossier of alleged dirt on Tucker Carlson should he attack the network in the wake of his departure, eight sources at and close to the network tell Rolling Stone.”
(Headline USA) Sexual abuse in the nation’s federal prisons must be rooted out, the Justice Department’s second-highest-ranking leader told prison wardens gathered for their first nationwide training since revelations that a toxic, permissive culture at a California prison allowed abuse to run rampant.
The policy of allowing transgender male prisoners to identify with females and be transferred to women’s prisons was quickly exploited after leftist Gov. Gavin Newsom began allowing it in 2021.
The DOJ’s decision finally to address the issue—at least nominally—follows a bombshell report from investigative journalist James O’Keefe, who recently exposed a Washington state corrections center’s shocking prison-rape culture.
It also comes after two biologically female inmates in a New Jersey facility turned up pregnant following the arrival of trans prisoners.
Additionally, the DOJ sought to address the issue of prisoners being forcibly abused by guards and other authority figures within the prison.
The Associated Press gained exclusive access to the DOJ-sponsored training Tuesday for wardens of the country’s 122 federal prisons, the first since AP investigations uncovered deep, previously unreported flaws within the federal Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Department’s largest law enforcement agency.
Teams of experts and officials will soon be fanning out to women’s prisons around the country to follow up on on reforms the agency adopted last fall, and they’ll speak to both staff and incarcerated people, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a speech at the training facility outside Denver.
At the training, wardens sat at round conference tables dotted with quotes about wellness and leadership from Malcolm X and Mahatma Gandhi. It was the first gathering of its kind in five years.
“This is urgent, urgent work,” Monaco told AP in an interview. “It’s incumbent upon us as leaders to call that out and make those changes and really be vigilant about it.”
Any sexual activity between a prison worker and an inmate is illegal. Correctional employees have substantial power over inmates, and there is no scenario in which an inmate can give consent.
At California’s Dublin prison, a culture of predatory employees was fueled by cover-ups that largely kept their misconduct out of the public eye for years, AP’s reporting found.
The prison’s former warden was convicted of molesting inmates and forcing them to pose naked in their cells. He was one of several employees charged with sexual abuse of inmates. Its chaplain was also convicted.
Prosecutions in other similar cases are expected to continue. Monaco told U.S. attorneys last week to prioritize cases of sexual abuse allegations against correctional staffers.
“But most importantly, we’ve got to do all of the work to prevent that from happening in the first place,” she said.
Most wardens are dedicated leaders who can preside over a culture that “does not tolerate even one instance of sexual abuse,” she said in the speech to wardens, which hit notes of both warning and encouragement.
Fundamental change in the Bureau of Prisons culture is part of a new mission statement announced Tuesday by the bureau’s new director, Colette Peters. She was hired last year after her predecessor resigned amid mounting pressure from Congress. That came after the AP investigations exposed widespread corruption and misconduct.
Cultural change points at the direction Peters says she wants to take the agency, including ramping up rehabilitation for incarcerated people to become “good neighbors” outside of prison.
Making prisons more “normal and humane” will also create better work environments for American correctional workers, who she says often suffer from PTSD and have shorter lifespans, unlike their counterparts in countries like Norway.
“That,” Peters said, “equates to a safer environment for both our employees and those in our care custody.”
(Headline USA) Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Tuesday that he would forgo another presidential bid of his own and instead endorse President Joe Biden’s reelection.
The far-leftist socialist, who was Biden’s chief rival in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, told The Associated Press that he would “do everything I can to see the president is reelected.”
“The last thing this country needs is a Donald Trump or some other right-wing demagogue who is going to try to undermine American democracy or take away a woman’s right to choose, or not address the crisis of gun violence, or racism, sexism or homophobia,” Sanders said in an interview. “So, I’m in to do what I can to make sure that the president is reelected.”
Biden on Tuesday announced his decision to seek a second term, even as polls suggest that voters in both parties don’t want him to run again. The Democratic president will face the winner of the crowded Republican primary, which features former President Donald Trump and a half dozen conservatives.
For much of the year, Sanders had left open the possibility of running again himself. On Tuesday, he said that he would not run and he discouraged any another high-profile progressive candidates from doing so either. The party has already shut down any debates for the primary, and now seems intent on paving the way for Biden’s nomination.
Sanders’ decision also signals that, at 81 years old, he will never again seek the presidency.
In forgoing another presidential bid of his own, Sanders said he would continue to fight for progressive policies as chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in addition to helping form new labor unions.
He said it was too early to say what specific role he would play in helping Biden win reelection in 2024.
(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Speculation has run rampant on both the Right and Left about the reason behind Fox News’s decision on Monday to part ways with America’s top-rated cable news host, Tucker Carlson.
The costly decision led Fox’s stock to crater and has led many to cancel their subscriptions to the Fox Nation streaming service, where Carlson’s in-depth specials were a popular draw.
Unlike the Fox’s past decision to cut bait with longtime ratings-leader Bill O’Reilly, whose curmudgeonly onscreen persona made plausible the behind-the-scenes allegations of a toxic work environment, the Left’s incessant attempts to tarnish Carlson’s image only reaffirmed for his loyal viewers that he was hitting the mark.
Consequently, it is highly unlikely that either Carlson or the network took lightly the implications of this unexpected personnel change.
Initially, many mainstream/leftist media outlets reported that Carlson’s departure was linked to Fox’s recent $787.5 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit waged by Dominion Voting Systems.
The settlement avoided a trial in which Carlson’s private text messages—some disparaging President Donald Trump and his legal team in the aftermath of the disputed 2020 election, as well as criticizing his Fox colleagues—might have forced him to the witness stand.
Although the network was not obliged to apologize formally, many left-wing pundits also construed the settlement as an acknowledgement of defeat in a case where the Wilmington, Del., judge had perplexingly predetermined guilt, even though the burden in a defamation suit is all on the plaintiff’s side to prove statements were false.
It was thus, just two days after the settlement was announced, that Carlson entered into his long-booked speaking arrangement at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala with a defiant mindset, both angered and embarrassed by the network’s tail-tucking choice to back down in the lawfare attack.
During the speech, Carlson celebrated those who still had the courage and conviction to speak truth over the past few years, in a world in which mass formation psychosis had led many should have known better to become victims to a “herd mentality.”
“The second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this power,” Carlson said. “… And, of course, the opposite is true: The more you lie, the weaker and more terrified you become.”
According to the Washington Examiner, the speech offered hints, in hindsight, that Carlson was on a collision course with network brass.
“He believes what he believes and no one at Fox News was going to force him to say something he didn’t believe,” wrote Examiner commentary editor Conn Carroll.
Yet, others speculated that it was the speech itself that may have effected his demise.
Vanity Fair cited an unnamed source saying that Fox executives, including CEO Lachlan Murdoch, made the decision to fire Carlson on Friday night, due in part to the apocalyptic undertones of the speech, in which he framed the current political rift as a clash between good and evil.
“We have got to reassess the terms we use to describe what we’re watching,” Carlson said in the moments captured by Headline USA in the exclusive video at the start of this article.
“So, when I stated in Heritage, the presumption was—and this is a very Anglo–American assumption—that the debates we’re having were kind of rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed upon outcomes,” Carlson continued. “So, like, we all want the country to be more prosperous and free and people to be less oppressed or whatever.”
However, at some point during the Trump era, he noted, it became clear that the Left no longer saw value to the bipartisan consensus-building at the core of democracy, instead regarding political disputes as a zero-sum, winner-take-all war of attrition.
“I don’t think we’re watching a debate over how to get to the best outcome,” Carlson said.
“I think that’s completely wrong, and I’ve come to this conclusion that… there is no way to assess, say, the transgenderism movement with that mindset,” he continued. “Policy papers don’t account for it at all. If you have people that are saying, ‘I have an idea: Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually manipulate children’—I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate.”
Modern leftists have, in fact, become so intent on controlling the reins of power that they would destroy humanity altogether in the process.
“I don’t think anyone could, like, defend that as a positive outcome, but the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that,” Carlson said.
Whereas the debate over abortion used to be framed as those who thought it was bad versus those who thought it was sometimes necessary, one side now has begun, irrationally, to celebrate the mutilation and dismemberment of unborn children as a goal unto itself, he added.
“If you’re telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying?” he asked. “Well, you’re arguing for child sacrifice.”
According to Vanity Fair writer Gabriel Sherman, Carlson’s stark—albeit poignant and well reasoned—way of framing the present conflict may have rubbed his corporate overlords the wrong way.
“Rupert Murdoch was perhaps unnerved by Carlson’s messianism because it echoed the end-times worldview of Murdoch’s ex-fiancée Ann Lesley Smith,” Sherman wrote, again citing the unnamed source.
Whatever the reason behind Carlson’s ouster, it has only added to his legend following the speech—which is sure, for better or worse, to go down in the annals of history as an inflection point, during which democracy’s greatest contemporary champion made his final statement as the reigning king of cable news.
However, there is hope that wherever Carson lands—be it on the campaign trail, or in a partnership with recent interviewee Elon Musk, or back at the Heritage Foundation as a powerful policy analyst—this momentous occasion will be but a prologue to his greatest work yet as America’s premier truth-teller.
See Carlson’s complete speech at the Heritage Foundation gala below:
