Monday, April 21, 2025

Anti-CNN Defamation Ruling May Set Up SCOTUS Showdown on Press Protections

Ben Sellers
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‘It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts…’

CNN Suddenly Shows Concern About Classified Leaks
Photo by red, white, and black eyes forever (CC)

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) How far can an off-the-rails media go before it hits the limits of its First Amendment protections?

The question has been raised before, as the George W. Bush administration attempted to prosecute journalists and Obama’s Justice Department actively spied on them, as well as issuing subpoenas for records.

But the liberal press‘s animus toward President Donald Trump has thrust the debate even farther into the spotlight—and they may not like the answer.

Although CNN recently won a court-ordered injunction against the White House from barring disruptive correspondent Jim Acosta, the Georgia-based left-wing mouthpiece was dealt a blow on Friday when a defamation ruling in the 11th Circuit made it easier to sue the media in federal court, said the Hollywood Reporter.

The question at hand relates to the state-passed protections from Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP), meaning frivolous suits that people might pass to discourage or penalize media investigations.

On one hand, states like Georgia require that there be a “probability” of winning in order to pursue litigation in a defamation case. At the federal level, however, there need only be a “plausibility.”

In addition to protecting media companies, the protections can apply to anyone involved in a defamation suit, including President Trump, who had a frivolous suit from porn star Stormy Daniels recently dismissed under Texas anti-SLAPP laws.

However, 11th Circuit Judge William Pryor ruled against CNN’s efforts to have dismissed a suit stemming from a 2015 series about Florida’s St. Mary’s Medical Center. The series accused the hospital of having a mortality rate three times the national average for infant heart surgeries. Its then-chief executive, David Carbone, who was forced to resign as a result, sued saying it was a false comparison, including both open- and closed-heart statistics which carried different risks.

Pryor said the objective in the anti-SLAPP laws was the same regardless of the different wording, and that Georgia’s legislation did not necessarily support the First Amendment simply by discouraging and dismissing cases before going to trial.

“That the aim of the statute is to protect First Amendment rights is irrelevant, because the anti-SLAPP statute advances that end by imposing a requirement on a plaintiff’s entitlement to maintain a suit,” he wrote.

Because other courts have issued opinions upholding the state anti-SLAPP laws, the case could garner the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court, said the Hollywood Reporter.

However, doing so may be a gamble for the media companies, as recently-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh, now a crucial swing vote, had previously written an opinion that Pryor himself used to frame his argument.

CNN, MSNBC Have Given Stormy Daniels Lawyer Avenatti $175 Million in Free Media
Michael Avenatti (screen shot: Fox News/Youtube)

While that may frighten away media companies from pressing the issue, it could possibly lead to what would, no doubt, be a highly followed showdown involving Stormy Daniels and her attorney, Michael Avenatti, that could rival Hustler v. Falwell as the sleaziest defamation case ever to go before the bench.

But even the 1988 Hustler ruling—which upheld the media’s right to satire public figures and later was turned into a Hollywood movie—could be put to the test if Trump has any say.

The president issued an outraged tweet over the weekend charging NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” with defamatory statements and saying it ought to be tested in court, potentially setting up a definitive legal answer to the much wondered question, “Is ‘SNL’ still a comedy show?”

NeverTrump Movement Suffers Major Setback as Weekly Standard Shutters

Ben Sellers
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‘Some of them may lose their jobs next week. But they should be applauded for holding on to their dignity…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The NeverTrump resistance movement suffered another casualty on Friday as a once venerable conservative publication, The Weekly Standard, abruptly announced that its Dec. 17 issue would be its last.

Even for those who were not regular readers and subscribers, the magazine’s personalities—including Editor Stephen Hayes, co-founders Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol, and many of its contributing editors—have been familiar faces from the pundit circuit, often making regular panelist appearances on Fox News.

Hayes described the magazine in a tweet as an “unapologetically conservative and fiercely independent voice,” adding, “That voice is needed more now than at anytime in our previous 23 years.”

While some commended it for acting as a guardian of traditional conservatism, however, others saw in its steadfast refusal to adapt to the changing Trumpian political imperatives an archaic—if not altogether traitorous—worldview.

As leftist politics became increasingly radicalized, pushing both media and legislators to its fringe, The Weekly Standard remained firmly entrenched in the middle, straddling the former battle lines of Right and Left.

For Hayes, it was a point of pride. According to CNN, he wrote in an email to staff on Friday, “Many media outlets have responded to the challenges of the moment by prioritizing affirmation over information, giving into the pull of polarization and the lure of clickbait.”

Ryan McKibben, chairman of the magazine’s publisher, MediaDC, suggested it was the broader challenges of print media that ultimately led to The Weekly Standard‘s demise, among them “double-digit declines in its subscriber base,” according to CNN.

Those challenges, however, also included declines in online traffic that some attributed directly to Trump’s inauguration.

Speculation loomed recently that philosophical differences between the editorial staff and publishers may have played a role and that the magazine’s founding members had been shopping around potential buyers.

Among those lamenting the magazine’s loss was The Washington Post, which noted in an opinion piece last week by columnist Megan McArdle that it was facing grim financial prospects.

Offering an array of backhanded compliments to the magazine for opposing the president—while also acknowledging a tinge of Schadenfreude and delight in its failure—McArdle said, “The past two years have given the lie to many of the nastiest accusations the left levels against conservative intellectuals … selling self-justification to the richest bidder. If that were true, there would be no civil war shattering the movement, and there would certainly be no #NeverTrump conservatives holding firm.”

Ironically, as elements of the conservative old-guard may have faltered financially (along with many left-wing publications), the Democrats have gleefully assumed their place as the party of elitism and billionaire special interests.

With the support of plutocrats like George Soros, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg and Washington Post publisher Jeff Bezos leading the charge, Democrats outspent Republicans by more than $300 million in the record-shattering $5.2 billion 2018 midterm, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

And as long as institutions like The Weekly Standard do not threaten the liberal dogma, leftists are more than happy to toast their ‘principled’ anti-Trump stance.

“Some of them may lose their jobs next week,” said McArdle. “But they should be applauded for holding on to their dignity.”

‘Fact-Checkers’ Turn Against Facebook After Negative Soros Stance

Ben Sellers
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‘Working with Facebook makes us look bad…’

State Dept., USAID Sued for Docs on Funding to Soros’s Foreign Campaigns
George Soros/Photo by boellstiftung (CC)

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After reports surfaced that Facebook hired a firm that discredited critics by linking them to extreme leftist billionaire George Soros, many of the so-called journalists hired to help it with fact-checking following the 2016 election are now thumbing their noses.

The irony? They, themselves, may have Soros financial ties, or at least strong sympathies in his favor.

When Facebook first unveiled its consortium of “fact-checkers,” an effort driven largely by the Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network that currently includes around 50 partner outlets worldwide and five in the United States, conservatives scoffed.

One of the chief concerns was that outlets such as Snopes.com demonstrated bias in the selection process and in the way they qualified false claims on the Right versus Left.

In fact, the social-media giant’s sole conservative token for U.S. news, The Weekly Standard (which recently said it would be shutting down) was hardly a representative of contemporary conservative thought, having early on assumed a strong NeverTrump stance.

To make matters worse, it was revealed that the IFCN had accepted considerable amounts of funding from extreme leftist groups, some of which were tied to billionaire George Soros.

Many, as a result, borrowed from the Roman poet Juvenal in asking, “Who’s checking the fact-checkers?”

But despite one disclosure after another revealing the serious questions about bias and doubts about the efficacy of its fact-checking operation, it wasn’t until November 2018 that the story gained steam.

That was when The New York Times published a highly critical report that linked Facebook to a PR firm that used Soros ties to bludgeon criticism and that Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg had encouraged employees to research Soros’s finances.

Now, the embattled company has faced everything from charges of anti-Semitism (a familiar trope for those critical of the Soros family) to complaints from its fact-checkers that they don’t value facts enough.

“They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” whined Brooke Binkowski, a former managing editor at Snopes, to The Guardian. “They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care.”

Another journalist, whom The Guardian allowed to speak anonymously—although standard journalistic conventions on transparency would frown upon it—said the unfavorable position on Soros had created a mistrust of Facebook.

“Why should we trust Facebook when it’s pushing the same rumors that its own factcheckers are calling fake news? It’s worth asking how do they treat stories about George Soros on the platform knowing they specifically pay people to try to link political enemies to him?”

Conservative charges against Soros have long been dismissed as conspiratorial, despite a preponderance of evidence that links him to dark-money campaigns and shell organizations that are designed to sway American politics toward his globalist, open-borders agenda.

During the lead-up to the 2018 midterm, including the highly contentious Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, many protest groups—some advocating incivility and violence—were linked back to his Open Society Foundations.

However, a review of Snopes’s fact-checking claims against him show a consistently sympathetic approach, often using the debunking of outlandish claims to gloss over the realities of Soros’s efforts by painting him as a mythical boogeyman for the Right.

The fervor with which the journalists dismissed negative Soros stories suggests, however, that they themselves may have a conflict of interest, more concerned with their own prestige than with the journalist’s primary goal of pursuing truth.

Simply questioning the leftist dogma was, in their minds, an attack on journalism.

As the anonymous fact-checker complained to The Guardian, “Working with Facebook makes us look bad.”

The Scouts Formerly Known as ‘Boy Scouts’ Now Face Bankruptcy

Ben Sellers
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‘We’re trying to find the right way to say we’re here for both young men and young women…’

Photo by postal67

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Rocked by abuse scandals and a controversy over their decision to allow girls to join, the Boy Scouts of America now face dwindling membership and may be seeking to declare bankruptcy.

The BSA currently is defending several lawsuits over abuse allegations, some dating back to the 1960s, according to a Wall Street Journal article.

But if claims of pedophilia weren’t damaging enough for the once revered civic institution, the group has done little to help its case, seeming to embrace politicization and sexual deviancy as the latest informal additions to the Scout code.

It first raised eyebrows in 2013 with a decision to take a formal position supporting homosexuality in its ranks. In 2015, it also lifted a ban on gay men and lesbians serving in leadership roles, said the Wall Street Journal.

Despite the objections of some religious groups—including a longtime partner, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, which announced the withdrawal of teen members this year with plans to develop its own program—that controversy alone, prompted by legal challenges, may have been surmountable for the Scouts.

But as the Left pressed on with its cultural warfare against middle-American values, the BSA seemed all too willing to follow suit. After widely criticized announcements recently that it would allow first transgender Scouts, then females, and then that it would provide condoms at BSA events, the transformation seemed a bridge too far for many.

In May, the organization announced that effective in February 2019, it would cease to call itself the Boy Scouts, removing the “Boy” part in favor of the more gender-ambiguous “Scouts BSA.”

“We wanted to land on something that evokes the past but also conveys the inclusive nature of the program going forward,” Chief Scout Executive Mike Surbaugh told The Telegraph. “We’re trying to find the right way to say we’re here for both young men and young women.”

The BSA currently includes about 2.3 million youth members, but the withdrawal of its Mormon members alone, set to be formalized in 2020, could account for an 18.5 percent membership drop, according to the Associated Press.

In addition to its legal bills, costing millions of dollars to defend against both the liberals’ gender-neutrality warfare and the sexual-abuse cases, the BSA also now faces a lawsuit from the Girl Scouts of the USA, which says its marketing to new female members constitutes a trademark infringement, according to the Journal.

Pocahontas’s Biographer Defends DNA Test, Native American Claims

Ben Sellers
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‘Native identity is about one’s lived experience with a culture and its history…’

Some Native Americans: Trump Calling Warren 'Pocahontas' Was Racial Slur
Elizabeth Warren/Photo by mdfriendofhillary (CC)

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Despite a waning margin of support in the 2018 election that caused even her home-base newspaper, the Boston Globe, to turn against her, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is not yet ready to abandon her place in the history books.

That place, of course, would be her claim as the first Native American to run for the presidency. Unfortunately for Warren, no less than two parts of that distinction are slipping farther and farther from her grasp.

The October release of a DNA test, which showed at most 3 percent Cherokee heritage—less than the average Caucasian American—drew reactions ranging from bemusement and derision to excoriation, with the Cherokee Nation itself blasting the political ploy.

Even Democrats now recognize that Warren’s appropriation of a minority identity early in her career creates a serious liability, as well as a moral and ethical dilemma, raising issues over whether during the nine years she claimed to be Native American she benefited professionally from the designation at the expense of actual minorities.

However, at least one prominent Warren apologist, her biographer, has come out (or been dispatched) to defend not only the release of the test, but also the lie itself.

Antonia Felix wrote an opinion piece for the New York Daily News on Wednesday saying Warren’s decision to get out in front of the dubious claim by providing even more dubious supporting evidence was not a mistake.

“Native identity is about one’s lived experience with a culture and its history,” Felix wrote. “DNA has nothing to do with that any more than ‘race’ is some scientific constant.”

Such an assertion, whether one can self-identify one’s own status, has been hotly discussed on the national stage and disputed within the Left’s own ranks as some question what constitutes an embrace of multiculturalism versus theft of someone else’s culture.

Felix, who received a Master of Fine Arts for fiction writing from Witchita State but now identifies as a nonfiction authority, made little effort to counter—or even address—the facts behind Warren’s DNA test, never mentioning in the opinion piece that it was the result that made it most troublesome.

Rather, she focused on Warren’s reasoning, citing precedent in President Barack Obama’s long-delayed release of his birth certificate in 2012, amid growing speculation over whether Obama was, in fact, born in Hawaii and constitutionally eligible for the presidency.

“The senator had a choice,” Felix said of Warren. “Endure Trump’s DNA taunts and racial slurs until 2020—or learn a lesson from Barack Obama and push back firmly.”

Felix’s article seemed to take as a given the validity of Warren’s heritage claims: “Like many whites from Oklahoma, Warren acknowledges family lore about Native ancestors but has never sought an affiliation with a Native community or tried to become a tribal member.”

Of course, most white Oklahomans also never try to formally designate themselves as minorities, which Warren did, even contributing to a cookbook to bolster her claims.

But no spin job would be complete without a thorough redirection. Felix attempted just that, saying rather than focus on the lie, the point should be how much Warren knows about minority identity from having lived years of her life in the trenches—even though it may be up for debate whether she was the persecuted or the persecutor.

“Instead of playing into Trump’s hands, progressives should celebrate Warren’s lifetime work in documenting systemic racism,” Felix wrote. “… Those now wringing their hands might instead look at the arc of Warren’s life and what it says about her progressive leadership [emphasis added—ed.] and commitment to equity and fairness.”

Indeed.

Dem. Duplicity: What’s Fraud in N.C. Voting Scandal Is Fair Game in California

Ben Sellers
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‘I’m asking you, is it right or wrong?’

Texas Women Indicted for Filing 'Thousands' of Fake Democratic Ballots
Direct Action Texas’ Aaron Harris/IMAGE: CBS Dallas-Fort Worth via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Among the many hypocrisies present during the closely watched election-fraud investigation in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, Democrats who long have dismissed GOP concerns suddenly have found religion when the result adversely affects them.

While liberal influencers such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Bernie Sanders previously scoffed at well-documented accusations that illegal immigrants, convicted felons and other ineligible voters could be padding the final tallies in large numbers, Fox News said “Democrats have seemingly taken a more sober tack” in the recent ballot scandal.

The issue centers around charges that unsealed absentee ballots in North Carolina’s Bladen County were “harvested,” meaning collected by a third party who then may have tampered in a variety of ways. Evidence points to the likelihood that GOP-paid operative McCrae Dowless conducted such an operation, which even the state’s GOP leaders and the winning candidate, Mark Harris, acknowledge will likely result in a district-wide re-vote at the investigation’s conclusion.

Notwithstanding that the exact concerns over absentee ballots were derided by partisan investigators when former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory raised them in the 2016 election—after he was defeated by current Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper—still, some on the Left continued to split hairs at the difference between the “polling-place” fraud that Republicans have long objected to and the “mail-in” ballot fraud that transpired in NC-09.

Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the leftist Voting Rights Project, told Fox News: “There is no evidence that [in-person] voter fraud exists to any discernible degree.”

However, he added, there was no comparison between that issue, which has prompted GOP legislatures like that in North Carolina to push for tough voter ID laws, and the falsification of absentee ballots.

“The sort of organized, wide-scale fraud, allegedly engineered by organizations such as those reported to have been involved in North Carolina is a different animal altogether,” Rosenberg said. “It actually is ‘fraud on voters,’ on a group basis, because others are allegedly fooling huge batches of voters by casting their votes for candidates the voters themselves did not intend.”

In asserting the high ground on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews seemed to make a similar distinction while framing it as a moral and ethical issue to Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party.

Dem. Duplicity: What's Fraud in N.C. Voting Scandal Is Fair Game in California
Chris Matthews and Dallas Woodhouse/IMAGE: MSNBC

“I’m asking you, is it right or wrong” to pay someone to deliver the most absentee ballots, Wallace said, directing his attack not on Dowless but on the candidate, Harris—a Baptist minister who has denied knowing at the time of Dowless’s alleged illegal activity.

“I think that’s at the heart of this corruption, the belief that you can deliver victory among the absentee ballots if you—in that county especially, in Bladen County—if you control the way that they were harvested,” Matthews said.

Never known for his self-awareness, Matthews’ line of questioning ironically finds him and his Democratic allies fixating on the splinter in the GOP’s eye while ignoring the log in their own.

In California, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law two years ago that legalizes precisely the sort of ballot-harvesting activity that is at issue in North Carolina. Not coincidentally, Democrats were able to flip seven of the GOP’s 14 Congressional seats, including many where the GOP’s election-night victories were reversed by late returns.

Some Democrats, including Califoria’s secretary of state, mocked retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan after a recent forum for pointing out how “bizarre” the new law was.

“When you win the absentee ballots and you win the in-person vote, where I come from, you win the election,” Ryan said.

Although Ryan stopped short of accusing California Democrats of “nefarious” activity, it was reported in November that at least nine people in the Los Angeles area were arrested for soliciting votes from homeless people, paying them in cash or cigarettes for signatures on ballot petitions.

Somehow, nobody on the Left clamored for the result to be reversed, and L.A. County elections chief Dean Logan seemed to downplay the concerns at the time. “It’s not really voter fraud, in terms of illegal voting and manipulation,” Logan told the Los Angeles Times. “But I am certainly concerned about any activity that causes voters to lose faith in the process.”

By attempting to selectively assert their partisan upper-hand in the 9th District and ignore or rationalize other instances of fraud, Democrats may win the battle in North Carolina, but in the process they will sacrifice any vestiges of moral authority.

Ex-Teacher, Now Rep.-Elect, Will ‘Die Trying’ to Fight DeVos School Reforms

Ben Sellers
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‘I can’t not make facial expressions!’

Jahana Hayes/IMAGE: Late Night with Seth Meyers via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) On one hand, Rep.-elect Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., has an Oscar-caliber story that could be an inspiration to young people everywhere.

On another, she may be a parent’s worst classroom nightmare—symbolizing the growing epidemic of schools, at every level, morphing into indoctrination centers under the influence of radical left-wing educators and administrators.

Hayes, a former high-school history teacher, received a prestigious national teacher-of-the-year-award in 2016 and was able to translate that accomplishment into a successful run for Congress this year.

“I had really been teaching kids to get involved in their communities, to be a part of the solution, and it felt like that narrative was slipping away, that people weren’t conducting themselves in a way that was solution-driven,” she told Seth Meyers on his late-night show Monday.

An antidote to the millennial entitlement mentality of some, like her soon-to-be freshman House colleague Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, the bubbly-but-well-spoken Hayes, 45, no doubt resonated with her students, and went on to walk the walk with her own civic engagement.

But conservatives may be left wondering how Hayes’s deeply partisan underpinnings impacted her classes—and how they now could impact education policy throughout the entire country.

Hayes’s conversation with Meyers on Monday started off innocuously enough, with a clip of her receiving the national teacher award from then-President Barack Obama.

It would be easy to laugh off her over-zealousness in the moment, during what might have been a crowning career achievement for many, even as Obama chided her, “All right, you need to settle down.”

That is, until Hayes again let her private emotions slip in the Seth Meyers interview, rolling her eyes as the former “Saturday Night Live” comedian-turned-liberal-mouthpiece set her up to attack Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

“I can’t not make facial expressions!” she said.

Here, parents may have started to imagine Hayes doing the same in a classroom discussion, using nonverbal cues to show her disdain as a student brought up a dissenting perspective during a debate.

Where in her previous role, though, Hayes might have been limited to injecting bias that was plausibly deniable, as a powerful congresswoman protected by the smokescreen of liberal media, she is now free to let her extremist positions be known.

Meyers bemoaned the unwinding of Obama-era education policies, such as “sexual assault on campus” (coded language for the Obama/Holder exploitation of Title IX statutes that allowed the Justice Department to strong-arm campuses into submitting to alarming new federal regulations and oversight) and “predatory lenders” (a dog-whistle for the socialist-driven push for free—taxpayer-subsidized—college tuition).

“Is that something you are hopeful you will be able to address once, uh, things get started for you?” he asked.

Hayes replied, “I’m gonna die trying.”

She continued: “These are not ‘Obama-era regulations.’ These are things that are put in place that improve outcomes for kids. … It’s ridiculous that we’re even having conversations that begin with not protecting children.”

Unfortunately, many in Meyers’ audience likely failed to cut through the subtext of what “protecting children” means for the Left.

High-profile cases like the 2014 false rape accusations at the University of Virginia—which Rolling Stone magazine published in coordination with the federal Office of Civil Rights—and many other instances of fraud have called into question the Obama narrative on campus rape while raising concerns about the removal of due-process rights for the accused.

However, one place students have found no campus “protection” is in the systemic assault on their minds.

Increasingly, under the influence of intolerant left-wing extremism, ideas that counter the politically-correct dogma have been strangled out on campuses in the name of “protecting children” from what those within the academic power structure arbitrarily deemed disagreeable.

And increasingly, the Left has succeeded in establishing its own de facto “deep state” within the education system, using absurd regulations and instructional demands to create a hostile environment for conservative thinkers while recognizing and rewarding liberal fundamentalists like Hayes.

It is no wonder, then, that being confronted with the threat of having this web of corruption undone by DeVos is enough to evoke in Hayes the same reaction one might expect of an Al-Qaeda operative: to “die trying” to preserve it.

Meyers and Hayes went on to discuss what is shaping up to be the central focus for the Democratic majority in the next legislative session of Congress: impeaching the president.

Meyers asked Hayes—who, he claimed, ran on local issues rather than attacking the president—whether anything had changed for her since being elected, eliciting from her a string of “nobody is above the law” hemming-and-hawing platitudes.

“We want to get to governing—we want to work hard to improve lives for people—but if something comes out of this investigation that says there was collusion… we have a responsibility to act on that,” Hayes said.

As Trump tweeted over the weekend, in response to recent filings from the office of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, no evidence of collusion thus far has been presented linking Trump to Russia.

Yet, that won’t stop Democrats from devoting themselves to seeking new ways to attack Trump that they hope will achieve the same outcome.

While a true history teacher might have sought to clarify and contextualize, Hayes showed she is already a natural for D.C., pointedly allowing Meyers’s false implication to stand, that some Congressional “oversight” of the White House was warranted.

Although her partisan rhetoric may be ready-made for Capitol Hill, Hayes told Meyers her new role will still take some getting used to. The hardest part: no longer having a captive audience of impressionable and vulnerable minds to allow her statements—and her authority—to go unchallenged:

“Young people are open to just hearing about ideas that are different from theirs, learning about other people—and of course you have an adult in the room who says, you know, ‘These are parameters by which we behave,’” Hayes said. “All bets are off in D.C.”

UNC Instructors Throw Temper-Tantrum Over Confederate Statue, Withhold Grades

Ben Sellers
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‘They’re putting their personal agendas ahead of the students…’

Silent Sam
Silent Sam/IMAGE: KFXK Fox 51 via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) It’s been a banner semester at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—but not necessarily in a good way.

Beginning with a mob-driven removal of the Silent Sam statue on the day before fall classes began, now a proposed agreement to rehouse the statue in a new facility has teaching assistants trying to make sure the semester never ends.

The school’s student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, reported that nearly 2,200 grades will be withheld as the TAs go on strike because they are unhappy with the Board of Trustees’ decision to house the iconic monument honoring the school’s Civil War veterans in a new facility on campus.

The board last week announced a plan to establish a new History and Education Center that would help to contextualize the statue, housed on the site of an apartment complex on the school’s southern end. The construction would be estimated at $5.3 million with $800,000 in annual operation costs, The Daily Tar Heel reported.

But the 79 graduate student–teachers participating in the protest countered with their own list of demands, which included not allowing the statue to be returned to campus in any context, and mandating that the board hold “listening sessions” for the students to voice their grievances.

Naturally, the group also called on the money to be re-allocated to better pay, dental insurance and the elimination of fees for teaching assistants.

After attempting to meet with the graduate students on Thursday to discuss the issue, university Provost Bob Bruin issued a campus-wide e-mail strongly condemning the students for holding grades hostage.

“Our students are entitled to receive their grades in a timely manner,” wrote Blouin. “It is especially critical for the students preparing to graduate next Sunday, as well as the thousands of students whose scholarships, grants, loans, visa status, school transfers, job opportunities and military commissions may be imperiled because lack of grades threaten their eligibility.”

Blouin invoked the First Amendment, calling the move a “coercion and an exploitation of the teacher-student relationship,” as well as a violation of federal law. He warned that those who neglected to “meet the legal, ethical and moral responsibilities for which they have been contracted” would face unspecified “serious consequences.”

Marty Kotis, a member of the UNC’s Board of Governors, also blasted the TAs for their selfish behavior.

“When people start saying you have to believe something or we’re not going to release your grades unless this is done, they’re putting their personal agendas ahead of the students,” Kotis told the Carolina Journal.

He called on swift action, which would include the dismissal of the TAs from their positions.

Amid nationwide uproar over college campus’s sudden transformation from bastions of free speech to safe-spaces for militant liberal dogma, UNC has garnered several other feathers in its progressive cap recently.

Among the highlights:

  • An assistant Asian studies professor with Antifa connections was charged with assaulting a conservative blogger.
  • Petitioners attempted to get the nearby town of Carrboro—named in honor of a slave-holder—renamed “Unicornboro.”
  • Protestors forced the school to rename its William Kenan Sr. Memorial Stadium in honor of William Kenan Jr. due to the elder’s support of an 1898 race riot.
  • An English professor proposed nominating Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford for a Distinguished Alumna award. Ford testified at her Senate hearing that she had been a poor student at UNC, blaming it on her allegedly having been assaulted by a drunken Kavanaugh at a party several years prior.
  • The school’s chancellor formally apologized for slavery.
  • A student found guilty of vandalizing the Silent Sam statue in the spring—costing more than $4,000 in damage—was given no punishment.

NC GOP Backs Mark Harris While Embracing Ballot-Fraud Investigation

Ben Sellers
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‘It was not that important to him to win. His integrity, his bringing people to Christ, is more important to him personally…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Although North Carolina Republicans say “the ground is shifting” amid allegations of absentee-ballot fraud in the state’s 9th Congressional District, they continue to stand behind candidate Mark Harris and vouch for his integrity while embracing calls for a thorough investigation.

“We want people to be able to cast legal votes, and we want to run out corruption any way we can,” said Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC program Thursday.

The interview came as the investigation and national attention on the controversial race intensified. As it pursues what is currently a Dec. 21 deadline to investigate, the North Carolina State Board of Elections has issued subpoenas to the Harris campaign and to a now-dissolved independent contractor, Red Dome Group, which Harris paid nearly $430,000 for work in both the primary and general-election campaigns.

On Thursday, Harris’ Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, formally withdrew his election-night concession.

Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi, poised to assume the speaker role in the next U.S. House of Representatives, also indicated that she reserved the right to refuse to seat Harris under the current circumstances, in what is now the last uncertified Congressional race in the country out of 435 House seats.

Woodhouse told Hayes that was all the more reason to make sure the investigation was thorough and comprehensive.

“The innocent victims are the voters that cast illegal votes—the people who are not going to be represented in Congress—I know you’re concerned about that,” Woodhouse said.

“But it seems like U.S. House Democratic leadership has indicated they’re not going to seat Mr. Harris, so they’re unlikely to be unrepresented at the beginning of the term anyway,” he added.  “So, let the investigation go, and let the facts emerge, and we will abide by the facts.”

The crisis first surfaced the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, when the NCSBE unexpectedly voted on an 11th-hour motion to delay certification of the race, prompting calls of foul-play from many on the Right.

Left-wing media such as MSNBC hopped on board after it became apparent that Republicans had been party to some measure of wrongdoing, with the revelation that a maverick get-out-the-vote worker in Bladen County, McCrae Dowless, may have illicitly collected hundreds of votes through ballot harvesting, in which a third party collects mail-in absentee ballots and submits them on behalf of voters.

After hiring people to collect unsealed absentee ballots—in some cases assisting the voters with filling out the ballots and serving as witnesses—Dowless’s operation allegedly mailed in only those that favored the candidates they were working for, including Harris and Bladen County Sheriff Jim McVicker.

Ironically, although illegal in North Carolina, the ballot-harvesting practice was recently legalized in California and likely played a role in the state’s overturning seven tightly contested GOP election night victories, whittling the state’s Republican representation to a mere seven of 53 total Congressional seats.

Another irony raised has been that Democrats, including North Carolina’s sitting governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, may also have engaged in and benefited from the same sort of activities. State Republicans have called on those allegations—and others stemming back several election cycles, since at least 2010—to be included in the current investigation.

Several state senators in the N.C. General Assembly criticized the elections board chairman, Joshua Malcolm, who said he has known for years about the ballot-fraud issues in Bladen County. The legislators said the NCSBE should have addressed it sooner, and called on Cooper to work with them in establishing an independent, non-partisan taskforce to take over the current investigation.

Pastor Turned Congressional Candidate Under Fire from Left for Past Sermons
Mark Harris/IMAGE: YouTube

But despite the “taint” looming over the race—with the increasing likelihood that the outcome will be a district-wide re-vote—Republican leaders like Woodhouse have largely rallied behind Harris, a Baptist minister in the Charlotte area, and maintained that he had no knowledge of the practices being used by Dowless.

“I and all the party leadership know Mr. Harris—we know him to be an honorable, good man,” Woodhouse told Hayes on MSNBC.

“It is my belief … that people associated with the Harris campaign, consultants or whatever, would have had to mislead Mr. Harris, because he never would have been a part of it,” Woodhouse said. “It was not that important to him to win. His integrity, his bringing people to Christ, is more important to him personally.”

Despite the moral support, however, it remains unclear how much help the NCGOP will be in offering up a legal defense or financial support to the challenges Harris may face in defending his seat.

A 145-page post-election fundraising document filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission revealed that the Harris campaign still owed about $34,000 in payments to Red Dome for the Bladen County “get-out-the-vote” operations.

NC Election Fraud That Helped Dems in 2016 Only Investigated After GOP Win

Ben Sellers
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‘This is a fiasco that could’ve been prevented…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As evidence mounted that a maverick campaign contractor working for the Republican in a tightly contested North Carolina congressional district may have committed ballot fraud, GOP leaders in the state legislature said they support an investigation while insisting on a nonpartisan solution to fix the state’s longstanding fraud issues.

Republican State Sens. Dan Bishop, Tommy Tucker, and Paul Newton said during a press conference Thursday that an independent task force was needed to address concerns of absentee ballot fraud, which the increasingly partisan elements on the State Board of Elections (NCSBE) have failed to resolve over at least the past four election cycles.

Despite parallels between the suspicious activity in Bladen County—and other counties—that helped give current N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, the absentee-ballot advantage in 2016 over then-incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and the 2018 operations in the 9th District congressional race that gave Republican Mark Harris the edge over Democratic opponent Dan McCready, the NCSBE’s inconsistent actions lent a waft of “taint” to the process that further eroded electoral confidence, said the GOP legislators.

Bishop said newly appointed Democratic NCSBE Chair Joshua Malcolm, who last week filed 11th-hour motions to delay certifying the 9th District race, pending investigation, was the same board member who had motioned to dismiss an investigation in 2016, when the outcome of the alleged ballot fraud favored Cooper.

“That [problem of ballot fraud] has been mentioned to investigative authorities … but [it] was the subject of ridicule rather than investigation,” Bishop told Liberty Headlines ahead of the press conference.

The central issue, he said, was a long history of fraud in Bladen County—which was only added to the 9th District since the last election as the result of Democrat-led, court-forced gerrymandering to undo the state legislature’s 2011 congressional map.

Often, the apparent fraud there has broken in favor of the Democrats, including allegations of “a massive scheme to run an absentee ballot mill involving hundreds of ballots” that some say was orchestrated in 2016 by the Democrat-funded Bladen County Improvement Association.

Those crying foul in the current congressional race point to discrepancies between Harris’s absentee vote in Bladen and elsewhere, along with several sworn witness allegations that McCrae Dowless, an independent “get-out-the-vote” contractor working with the Harris campaign, paid people to collect unsealed absentee ballots.

But others point out that the same sort of questions plagued Cooper’s 2016 election, where he won Bladen’s mail-in absentee vote by a margin of 61 percent over McCrory’s 38 percent, despite McCrory having won the county overall by a margin of 52 percent to Cooper’s 46 percent.

Former Gov. McCrory Compares Statue Vandals to Nazi Book Burners 1
Former N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory

McCrory charged widespread voter fraud during the 2016 election, resulting in some recounts, but after those re-examinations continued to add significantly to Cooper’s margin, he ultimately dropped his challenge and conceded.

McCrory told Charlotte ABC affiliate WSOC that he wasn’t at all surprised that political shenanigans are once again tarnishing the integrity of the state elections.

“This is a fiasco that could’ve been prevented,” he said. “… Those complaints were well known in 2016, and there were obviously some who didn’t want it investigated.”

At Thursday’s press conference, the three state senators attempted to strike a bipartisan tone, condemning fraud on both sides. “The allegations in the congressional race make me sick, and Republicans must hold their own accountable for any confirmed fraud,” said Tucker. “By the same token, Democrats must identify and condemn any fraud in their party.”

Tucker said jail time or ethics investigations should be on the table for those found to have knowingly engaged in fraud, but he doubted that every politician who contracted with Dowless as a GOTV operative had vetted him as extensively as the media now has. He pointed out that Dowless had worked on Democratic campaigns as well.

The senators also declined to rule out the possibility of a re-vote in the current investigation, if the investigation shows that the fraudulent ballots in question exceeded Harris’ 905-vote margin of victory over McCready. That would require evidence of fraud in more than just Bladen County, which cast a total 0f 684 mail-in ballots.

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Roy Cooper/Photo by NCDOTcommunications (CC)

But despite the spirit of reconciliation they expressed at the press conference—seeking to work with Cooper to investigate and resolve issues in time for the 2020 election—the Republican lawmakers worried about the motives of the Left, given their bad-faith actions leading up to the current crisis.

Some have speculated that even if the result of the NCSBE investigation does not show clear evidence that would overturn the Nov. 6 election, the partisans controlling the board, with Cooper’s support, may attempt to use a broad interpretation of state code to force a re-vote. Democrats could then direct additional outside resources into swinging the race for McCready.

Bishop told Liberty Headlines that in light of a nationwide pattern of post-election challenges often reversing outcomes that favored GOP candidates, he wouldn’t be surprised if the NCSBE investigation turned up new irregularities that would be just enough to surpass Harris’ margin of victory.

In many instances, “it’s not that votes are fraudulent,” Bishop said, “it is, case after case, that ballots continue to be ‘found.'”

Like McCrory, Harris now faces the daunting prospect of defending his seat against the legal and political maneuverings of a well-oiled and well-funded national Democratic apparatus.

“There’s this sort of swarm” that often gives Republicans in such fights the feeling of being beset on all sides, Bishop said.

Pastor Turned Congressional Candidate Under Fire from Left for Past Sermons
Mark Harris/IMAGE: YouTube

Both Bishop and Tucker said at the press conference that they had spoken with Harris’ team but could not disclose the conversations.

Beyond offering political solutions like the bipartisan taskforce and others floated at the press conference—including a statewide absentee ballot database and the possibility of an investigation in the General Assembly—the legislators’ hands may be tied.

However should the GOP’s overtures for bipartisan cooperation to resolve the fraud issues break down, Bishop said that Cooper can expect state Republicans to be ready to go toe-to-toe and continue to press the dubious circumstances surrounding the governor’s own election.

“We’re sort of here to serve notice, if you will,” Bishop told Liberty Headlines. “If the governor is going to make the election machine a bare-knuckles political operation, we are going to call it out.”

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