Thursday, June 4, 2026

Eric Holder Has Plan to Bypass SCOTUS’s Gerrymandering Decision

‘History will not be kind in its assessment of the ways in which this court has undermined voting rights and core democratic principles in America…’

Eric Holder, Dems Have Plan to Bypass SCOTUS Gerrymandering Decision
Eric Holder / IMAGE: Mother Jones via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) When the Supreme Court last week ruled in a pair of landmark cases that federal courts had no jurisdiction in dictating how states determine their voting districts, conservatives hailed it as a victory against the Left’s efforts to undermine duly elected state legislatures.

But, in fact, it merely added an extra step for groups like former Attorney General Eric Holder‘s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which has considerable resources tied in its plan to forcibly redraw the political map using liberal judges.

The focus is now on installing radical activists on state Supreme Courts, who can then use their authority to gerrymander both federal districts and the state districts in order to turn state legislatures blue before the next round of redistricting in 2021.

And with the U.S. Supreme Court having washed its hands of the matter, there will be no legal remedy if they succeed.

Already, Democrat activists in North Carolina, one of the two states—along with Maryland—that was represented in the recent court decision, have pushed the very same complaint to the state level, where a solid liberal majority on the state Supreme Court bench is poised to forcibly redistrict the state’s Republican legislative seats.

Meanwhile Holder has shifted his list of targets from national races to hone in completely on state-level races in vulnerable regions.

There, he is able to leverage the massive infrastructure and funding from NDRC’s tax-exempt trust and political-action committee to influence key local elections with implications for the entire country.

Earlier this year, former President Barack Obama merged his own campaign arm, Organizing for Action, into the Holder-led gerrymandering group, giving his self-declared wingman and donation bundler access to an army of social-justice warriors ready to mobilize at the click of a button.

Although conservatives recently established their own counterpart, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, with former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker helping to raise the group’s profile, it has nowhere near the level of resources needed to go toe-to-toe with the NDRC in courtroom battles.

Scott Walker Tells NFL Players to Focus on Not Beating Their Wives 1
Scott Walker/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)

Walker’s home state of Wisconsin is among the 12 historically red or battleground states that the NDRC has directly targeted for upcoming elections.

Issuing a menacing statement in response to the recent Supreme Court decision, Holder—who notoriously has declared that America was never great—threatened the conservative judiciary that it will suffer for not ruling in his favor.

“History will not be kind in its assessment of the ways in which this court has undermined voting rights and core democratic principles in America,” he said.

In its decision last week, however, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the effort to use the courts as a means of reversing unfavorable election outcomes.

Chief Justice John Roberts cautioned that the result could be having every future election challenged and decided ultimately by the ideological leanings of the court rather than the people of the district.

“The expansion of judicial authority would not be into just any area of controversy, but into one of the most intensely partisan aspects of American political life,” Roberts said.

“That intervention would be unlimited in scope and duration—it would recur over and over again around the country with each new round of districting, for state as well as federal representatives,” he said.

Despite those bipartisan concerns, Holder continued to use misinformation to sway the partisan Left into supporting his efforts, with the goal of securing a permanent Democrat majority in both the legislatures and the courts.

Holder collaborated with far-left mouthpiece Mother Jones to create a propaganda video in order to spin his efforts to the general populace.

NYTimes Unhinged by Satirical Joe Biden Website

‘Mr. Mauldin’s website hews far closer to the disinformation spread by Russian trolls in 2016 than typical political messaging…’

BIDEN: 'Regret That I am Not President'
Joe Biden/IMAGE: YouTube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Leftist media, who have long ducked behind the cover of anti-conservative political comedy, are far less bemused by a humor site mocking former Vice President Joe Biden, which The New York Times likened to a Russian cyber-attack.

From websites like The Onion to television programs like “The Daily Show,” satire often has played a pivotal role in the Left’s attacks on conservatism.

Ridiculing one’s opponent ranks as No. 5 on Saul Alinsky‘s “Rules for Radicals“—which helped to lay the foundation of political strategies like those used by the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns.

A few months prior to the 2016 election, in fact, The Boston Globe (owned until 2013 by The New York Times) ran a fake front page spoofing then-candidate Donald Trump, among a litany of questionable journalistic practices.

More recently, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was criticized by media leftists after filing a defamation suit over a Twitter profile that claimed to represent his mother and one claiming to be his cow.

Nunes said the sites “repeatedly tweeted and retweeted abusive and hateful content” against him.

Yet, in a scathing, 2,400-word, front-page report in Saturday’s Times, writer Matthew Rosenberg came unhinged over the popularity of JoeBiden.info.

The site lampoons Biden on his many gaffes and his creepy invasion of other people’s personal boundaries, including that of many underage girls.

Rosenberg’s piece sought primarily to expose the owner of the site, Patrick Mauldin.

The reporter deployed all of his investigative skills to root out the unidentified jokester and then to breathlessly attack Mauldin for having the audacity to parody the current Democratic front-runner.

“[I]n anonymously trying to exploit the fissures within the Democratic ranks—fissures that ran through this past week’s debates — Mr. Mauldin’s website hews far closer to the disinformation spread by Russian trolls in 2016 than typical political messaging,”Rosenberg whined.

Rosenberg then linked to a September 2017 article about Russian conspiracies and election meddling that seemed to cast aside the nearly two-year-long Mueller investigation, which debunked many of the underlying claims that the Times and others had relentlessly perpetuated.

“With nothing to indicate its creator’s motives or employer,” the Times griped of the Biden spoof, “the website offers a preview of what election experts and national security officials say Americans can expect to be bombarded with for the next year and a half: anonymous and hard-to-trace digital messaging spread by sophisticated political operatives whose aim is to sow discord through deceit. Trolling, that is, as a political strategy.”

REPORT: Focus on Climate Change Takes Away from REAL Disaster Planning

‘The more urgent problem of our lemming-like march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A leading climatologist said that blaming things like carbon-dioxide emissions while ignoring the real policy issues surrounding natural disasters left regions more vulnerable for future catastrophe.

Judith Curry, president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network and a professor emeritus of Georgia Tech’s climatology department, became a leading climate-change skeptic after looking at the scientific evidence.

Curry was among the expert witnesses to testify recently before a House Oversight subcommittee on the topic of “Recovery, Resilience and Readiness,” where she was pitted against climate-change dogmatists and research manipulators including Penn State’s Michael Mann.

Curry followed up on her written testimony for the committee by adapting it into a report, which was released Monday by The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Even if evidence fails to support man-made climate change as a cause for natural disasters, she said, the recurrence and unpredictability of extreme weather patterns meant more should be done to anticipate them in order to minimize risk.

“Many regions of the U.S. are not well adapted to the current weather and climate variability or to the extremes that were seen earlier in the 20th century,” Curry said in a GWPF press release. “We can do much to improve our resilience to extreme weather regardless of climate change.”

In fact, the illusion of climate change—which taps into a long continuum throughout history of blaming extreme weather on the sins of mankind—creates greater risk in suggesting that the weather will somehow become less severe simply by going green.

“Since no level of decarbonisation will prevent hurricanes or wildfires from hitting towns and cities, only a pragmatic policy of preparedness and adaptation will make communities saver and more resilient,” said the GWPF press release.

To illustrate the point, Curry noted, as have some in Congress, that a discrepancy between wildfires on public and private lands proved it was poor forest management that was, in effect, fueling fires in places like California, where environmental regulations prevented foresters from clearing brush.

“The abundance of fuels is the most important controlling variable in fire regimes of these semi-arid forests,” noted the report. “Reduction of widespread fires over the last century reflects extensive human impacts on forests and fire regimes.”

To the extent that climate variability factored into the equation—such as periods of drought—the current uptick mirrors one from the early part of the 20th century when the fires were even more prevalent.

Curry’s report also examined the alleged man-made impact on Atlantic hurricanes.

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2018’s Hurricane Michael, the fourth deadliest U.S. hurricane on record since the 20th century recording began, left parts of southern Florida in rubble. /IMAGE: The Washington Post via Youtube

“In spite of the low confidence in attributing changes in hurricane activity to human influence, the public discourse on the threat of hurricanes in a changing climate is often characterized by exaggerated alarm, fueled by statements from some climate scientists,” she wrote, taking a dig at Mann’s claims of major cities being lost.

Although a period in the mid-2000s saw back-to-back years with four and three major hurricanes, lending to the perception of increased weather severity, it was immediately followed by a span of nearly that broke records for having no major hurricanes.

This results in a negative overall trend, a slight downturn in the number of hurricanes, since the early 20th century.

The fact that there was no consensus on the 2019 hurricane season underscored the challenges scientists continued to face in predicting the weather, Curry said.

“The variation among these forecasts reflects different assumptions about the important factors that drive seasonal hurricane activity,” she said. “The relatively low skill of seasonal hurricane forecasts reflects a combination of incomplete understanding and unpredictable weather variability.”

Curry’s own models, based on the prevalence of La Niña events—essentially the cooling phase of ocean surface temperatures—would indicate a 2019 season with heavy hurricanes and an overall upward trend of hurricanes lasting into the 2020s before shifting into another period of decline, noted the report.

Curry said that adapting a “resilience” mindset geared more toward recovering from extreme weather than trying to prevent it would lessen the impact.

“A focus on policies that support resilience, anti-fragility and thrivability reduces our vulnerability to extreme weather events and doesn’t rely on highly uncertain predictions of the future climate,” she noted in the report.

However, in terms of prevention efforts, one of the leading factors was that government policies encouraged risk. While Western states’ tree-thinning regulations increased risk of fires, so, also, did its insurance industry regulations, by inviting people to build near coastal areas prone to greater risk, increase the devastation caused by the major events.

“[T]he more urgent problem of our lemming-like march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention,” noted Curry and a coalition of scientists in a 2006 statement. “We call upon leaders of government and industry to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of building practices, and insurance, land use, and disaster relief policies that currently serve to promote an ever-increasing vulnerability to hurricanes.”

JUDICIAL WATCH: Obama Justice Dept. Gave Immunity to Hillary Lawyer Who Vetted Emails

Ex-White House liaison contradicted previous FBI deposition in which she claimed no knowledge of private server during public service…

JUDICIAL WATCH: Obama Justice Dept. Gave Immunity to Hillary Lawyer Who Vetted Emails
Heather Samuelson / IMAGE: Screenshot via State.gov

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In its ongoing efforts to shed light on Hillary Clinton‘s campaign corruption and the subsequent cover-up efforts, Judicial Watch revealed new testimony from a top Clinton lawyer who helped destroy crucial evidence, acknowledging that she got an immunity deal.

Heather Samuelson, who became Clinton’s personal attorney after serving a stint as her White House liaison at the State Department, “was primarily responsible for conducting the review of Clinton emails and sorting out ‘personal’ emails from government emails,” said the nonprofit accountability watchdog.

Clinton’s team later used a BleachBit software to wipe clean all of the emails on her server that Samuelson deemed unnecessary to return to the State Department servers.

During a sworn deposition with Judicial Watch, Samuelson acknowledged that she, like several other Clinton associates who helped oversee the cover-up, secured from the Loretta Lynch-headed Justice Department an immunity deal from prosecution around June 2016, according to her estimation.

Fox News previously reported on side-deals with the James Comey-led FBI that both Samuelson and Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills had been offered, which included having the agency destroy their laptops after reviewing them.

Judicial Watch said Samuelson in her recent testimony also contradicted her previous FBI deposition by saying she was, in fact, aware of Clinton’s use of a private server during the latter’s time as secretary of State.

“I believe I first became aware when either she e-mailed me on personal matters, such as wishing me happy birthday,” Samuelson said, “or when I infrequently would receive e-mails forwarded to me from others at the department that had that e-mail address listed elsewhere in the document.”

Then-President Barack Obama similarly denied knowledge of the private server, only to have it be revealed later that he, himself, had sent official messages to and from her [email protected] address while using a fake name himself.

Samuelson also acknowledged but was unable to account for a gap in the emails from January to March of 2009, Clinton’s first two months as head of the State Department.

She blamed the gap on Platte River Networks, the private, Colorado-based company that had maintained the server.

“My understanding is—well, I’m sorry, I should say my recollection is—when we received the documents, the file from Platte River Networks, there was a period of time that was missing in her e-mails,” Samuelson said. “… They said they did not have that information.”

Judicial Watch conducted the investigation as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that originally focused on the cover-up surrounding the Benghazi embassy attacks during Clinton’s State Department tenure.

Was Pinocchio-Plagued Flip-Flopper Kamala REALLY the Thurs. Night Debate Winner?

‘You’re not answering the question directly…’

Candidates during the first Democratic primary debate raise their hand in response to a question over their support for eliminating private health insurance and extending public health benefits to illegal immigrants. / IMAGE: America Rising PAC

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Kamala Harris was touted as one of the big winners of Thursday night’s Democratic primary debates thanks to a carefully orchestrated race-baiting attack on former Vice President Joe Biden, the current front-runner.

But, once again, Harris proved that she is far weaker when put on the spot, often struggling to explain where she stands on even the most basic of positions in the current Democratic platform.

Harris in the past has waffled on issues such as whether she supported the debunked Jussie Smollet case and whether she would allow incarcerated felons to vote.

She put her flip–flopping skills on display again during the debate over a controversial call for extending universal healthcare that would forcibly end private insurance plans and socialize the entire medical industry.

After raising her hands in support, Harris promptly walked back her position the next morning, noted the conservative America Rising PAC.

“Less than 12 hours later, she said on ‘Morning Joe’ that she is not in support of eliminating private insurance and had a different interpretation of the question than the 9 other Democrats on stage, the moderators, and the millions of Americans watching,” they said in a release on Friday.

Harris clarified on the MSNBC show, “The question was, ‘Would you give up your private insurance for that option,’ and I said yes.”

However, America Rising noted that it wasn’t her first time walking back a statement that she would eliminate private insurance and switch to a single-payer system.

She did the same thing in January during a CNN town-hall forum, it noted.

Despite being a co-sponsor of the Medicare for All bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., within 24 hours after pronouncing her support Harris reversed course when other Democrats in the field rejected the position.

America Rising compiled its own four-minute montage of the many times Harris had second-guessed herself on her own private insurance stance.

Harris has also been the recipient of several “Pinocchio” ratings by Washington Post fact-checkers, particularly over a policy she endorsed as a San Francisco district attorney that resulted in the incarceration of parents due to their children’s school truancy.

Other issues that have been called out by fact-checkers include a false statement about President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and a deceptive video about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his nomination hearing.

Harris’s confusion problem has even come into play during high-profile testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

She notably attacked Attorney General William Barr at a hearing over the Mueller Report, demanding to know whether then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—who oversaw the bulk of the investigation—had been cleared to do so, given what Harris claimed was a conflict of interests.

Rosenstein was approved directly by the Senate in a 96–4 vote following the recusal of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“I think they cleared it when he took over the investigation,” Barr said, noting what appeared to be a flip–flop by Democrats who had strongly favored Rosenstein in the past.

“Sir, the flip–flop in this case, I think, is that you’re not answering the question directly,” Harris said, cutting off the attorney general.

As the Left Celebrates Census Delay, SCOTUS Decision Could Be Great News for Trump

‘A court may not set aside an agency’s policymaking decision solely because it might have been influenced by political considerations or prompted by an Administration’s priorities…’

SCOTUS Set to Rule on Landmark Cases in Census, Gerrymandering
PHOTO: Fred Schilling, Supreme Court Curator’s Office

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Pundits on both sides of the aisle interpreted as a victory for leftist open-border advocates the complex ruling by the Supreme Court over the Commerce Department‘s inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 U.S. census.

But by striking down arguments that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was “arbitrary and capricious” in his decision to include the question, the court in fact delivered a victory to the Trump administration—provided it can outmaneuver activist stall tactics to delay the census.

The Court’s decision on Thursday sent the Department of Commerce v. New York back to the Southern District of New York, leaving the liberal district court to determine whether Ross can provide a “reasoned explanation,” in keeping with the Administrative Procedure Act, for including the citizenship question.

The Court rebuked what it characterized as a “contrived” explanation provided by Ross that the measure was done in coordination with the Justice Department to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Instead, the justices contended that Ross’s true aim was pretextual, coming well before he approached the attorney general’s office to provide him with the voting rights rationale.

“The record shows that the Secretary began taking steps to reinstate a citizenship question about a week into his tenure, but it contains no hint that he was considering VRA enforcement in connection with that project,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a unanimous decision that nonetheless received three separate dissents, comprising the objections of all eight other members of the bench.

While casting doubt on Ross’s official explanation, however, the court also upheld the authority of the Commerce secretary to use his discretion in what questions to include of the census.

It thus limited the ability of activist judges in the lower courts to reject his rationale simply because it was politically motivated.

“[A] court may not set aside an agency’s policymaking decision solely because it might have been influenced by political considerations or prompted by an Administration’s priorities,” Roberts wrote.

Renegade Judge, w/out a Jury, Blocks Citizenship Question on 2020 Census 1
Wilbur Ross/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)

In essence, the court’s ruling told Ross to admit there were other factors involved in his decision while also asserting that those other factors could not prevent the inclusion of the question.

At several times, the ruling opinion pointedly observed that it was not the court’s place to substitute its own judgment for that of a government agency.

“It is not for us to ask whether his decision was ‘the best one possible’ or even whether it was ‘better than the alternatives,'” wrote Roberts, who criticized the district court and dissenting justices for imposing their own value judgments.

Opponents’ challenge to the decision rested largely on their own political motives—among them, the fear of losing funding and political power if illegal immigrants being harbored in “sanctuary states” declined to be included in the official census count.

The court agreed, saying evidence supported the likelihood that the question would result in fewer responses from illegals.

Even so, it said, that concern did not present a valid legal challenge to Ross’s authority, maintaining that the inclusion of a citizenship question was entirely permissible in the eyes of the law.

“[W]e decline respondents’ invitation to measure the constitutionality of the citizenship question by a standard that would seem to render every census since 1790 unconstitutional,” Roberts wrote.

The question was included on every census up until 1950 when, in order to simplify the process, the Census Bureau began putting it only on a long-form census questionnaire to be completed by a smaller, representative sample of the population.

The Census Bureau then used estimates provided by other agencies to fill in the gaps, but Ross contended that those estimates were not sufficient to provide an accurate count of legal residents.

“Weighing that uncertainty against the value of obtaining more complete and accurate citizenship data, he determined that reinstating a citizenship question was worth the risk of a potentially lower response rate,” Roberts wrote. “That decision was reasonable and reasonably explained, particularly in light of the long history of the citizenship question on the census.”

Although government officials are prevented by law from using the citizenship information collected by the census to enforce immigration policies, Ross can certainly make the case that there is strong national interest in having a thorough count of the number of illegal immigrants residing in the country.

In criticizing Ross’s claims about the Voting Rights Act being his primary motivation, Roberts cited a 1977 opinion that justices were “not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free.”

While that may hold true, however, it also means the justices would likely accept the ongoing national emergency and contentious debate over immigration to be a valid reasons on their face for including the question.

Regardless, the race to come up with a more plausible and legally sound rationale for the citizenship question is likely to mean delays for the Census Bureau, which had set next Monday, July 1, as its target to begin printing.

While in Japan at the G20 summit, President Donald Trump weighed in, saying he would seek to push back the deadlines pending a court resolution.

Supreme Court Upholds Partisan Gerrymandering

‘What the appellees and dissent seek is an unprecedented expansion of judicial power…’

Dem. Attorney Marc Elias Used Activist Court Rulings to Redraw GOP Districts 1
North Carolina’s Congressional districts/IMAGE: USA Today via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In a pair of cases challenging largely left-wing efforts to subvert state legislatures’ ability to establish their own voting districts, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the courts had no authority to force partisan maps to be redrawn.

“No one can accuse this Court of having a crabbed view of the reach of its competence,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, delivering the majority opinion. “But we have no commission to allocate political power and influence in the absence of a constitutional directive or legal standards to guide us in the exercise of such authority.”

The decision remanded two cases back to the lower courts with the charge to dismiss due to lack of jurisdiction: Rucho v. Common Cause, an appeal to a federal court ruling that forced North Carolina‘s GOP-led legislature to redraw its lines making the map more favorable to their opponents; and Lamone v. Benisek, in which Republicans in Maryland challenged the Democratic legislature over a lost seat.

The court’s conservative majority not only affirmed the role of duly-elected representatives to make redistricting decisions, but it also delivered a stinging rebuke to those attempting increasingly to use the courts for their own partisan, political purposes.

“What the appellees and dissent seek is an unprecedented expansion of judicial power,” Roberts wrote.

In a 2017 ruling, Cooper v. Harris, also from North Carolina, the court struck down race-based gerrymandering as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

But despite repeated efforts to get the court to do so over the past 45 years, Roberts said it has never once ruled a a partisan gerrymander to be unconstitutional.

Doing so would establish an alarming precedent for the court, already criticized for having lost its objectivity as politically motivated forces continue to pressure it to be the final authority on divisive issues—including elections themselves.

“The expansion of judicial authority would not be into just any area of controversy, but into one of the most intensely partisan aspects of American political life,” Roberts said.

“That intervention would be unlimited in scope and duration—it would recur over and over again around the country with each new round of districting, for state as well as federal representatives,” he said.

In tackling the question of fairness, Roberts expressed skepticism that any courtroom was more fit than any legislative chamber to make those determinations.

SCOTUS Set to Rule on Landmark Cases in Census, Gerrymandering
PHOTO: Fred Schilling, Supreme Court Curator’s Office

Citing the late Justice Antonin Scalia in a previous decision that attempted to tackle a judicial standard of “fairness,” Roberts wrote, “The initial difficulty in settling on a ‘clear, manageable and politically neutral’ test for fairness is that it is not even clear what fairness looks like in this context. There is a large measure of ‘unfairness’ in any winner-take-all system.”

That is why the Constitution specifically vested the power to those who were elected and could be held politically accountable, he added.

“Even the most sophisticated districting maps cannot reliably account for some of the reasons voters prefer one candidate over another, or why their preferences may change,” noted Roberts.

“Voters elect individual candidates in individual districts, and their selections depend on the issues that matter to them, the quality of the candidates, the tone of the candidates’ campaigns, the performance of an incumbent, national events or local issues that drive voter turn-out, and other considerations.”

It was not immediately clear what the implications might be for other states, such as Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia, where, prior to the 2018 elections, the lower federal courts already had mandated that legislative maps be redrawn due to alleged partisan influence.

The court previously had punted on challenges to lower court decisions from Wisconsin and Virginia, saying that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the cases. It had recently put on hold the cases pending in Ohio and Michigan.

Thursday’s landmark decision determined that the states themselves must decide what standards to follow, which also left open the possibility of judicial activism at the state level rather than the federal level.

Joined by the court’s other liberal members, Justice Elena Kagan said in her dissenting opinion that by choosing not to impose its own activist demands on state legislatures, the court was effectively breaking precedent.

“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities,” she began, accusing the recent gerrymandering efforts of having “debased and dishonored our democracy.”

Gerrymandering practices, originally named after a Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, have been in existence since at least 1812.

The challenges to the practice picked up momentum after a coalition of leftist politicians and investors established the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, which has been at the forefront of many of the “Sue till Blue” legal challenges targeting red states.

Additional reporting drawn from the Los Angeles Times contributed to this piece.

SCOTUS Set to Rule on Landmark Cases in Census, Gerrymandering

Contrary to expectations, conservative justices have kept people guessing on recent decisions by siding with liberal minority…

SCOTUS Set to Rule on Landmark Cases in Census, Gerrymandering
PHOTO: Fred Schilling, Supreme Court Curator’s Office

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As the final day of the Supreme Court’s current session arrived, it had yet to announce the decisions in several landmark cases that will likely impact the political landscape in next year’s presidential election and beyond.

Those cases will determine whether state legislatures are permitted to factor in partisan advantages when drawing the lines of voting districts and whether the national census, which the Commerce Department will soon undertake, may include a question about citizenship.

Although some had anticipated that the court’s addition of Justice Brett Kavanaugh might help entrench its conservative bloc, either by design or happenstance justices have kept court-watchers guessing.

While it was expected that Chief Justice John Roberts might fill the former niche of the retired Anthony Kennedy as a moderate swing vote, instead the recent decisions have seen some of the bench’s most conservative members—including justices Clarence Thomas and the libertarian-leaning Neil Gorsuch, siding with the liberals in several cases.

In keeping with past sessions that pushed major cases on matters like Obamacare and gay marriage to the very end, Thursday’s cases are, with little dispute, the most impactful and politically divisive of the current session.

The first issue will be decided in a pair of cases: Lamone v. Benisek, in which Republicans in Maryland challenged the Democratic legislature over a lost seat; and Rucho v. Common Cause, an appeal to a federal court ruling that forced North Carolina‘s GOP-led legislature to redraw its lines making the map more favorable to their opponents.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, has been at the forefront of many of the legal challenges targeting red states, which enabled Democrats to pick up seats last year in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

But many were left struggling to read the omens after the court last week dismissed a challenge brought by Virginia’s Republican legislature.

The majority opinion in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune–Hill said that the legislators lacked standing and that only the state’s left-wing attorney general, Mark Herring, had the authority to pose a legal challenge to the lower court’s decision.

While it could possibly signal reason for the Republican plaintiffs to worry in the other two cases, it is equally likely that the court simply sought to clear the docket knowing that the Lamone and Rucho cases would provide a stronger basis for the same outcome.

The court’s decision in Department of Commerce v. New York, whether to allow Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to include a citizenship question on next year’s census will also have implications on the balance of political power.

Democrats, who have pushed for open borders an allowing illegal immigrants to reside in sanctuary states, stand to gain funds and, possibly, congressional seats by importing new residents, regardless of whether they have the ability to legally vote in the state.

On the other hand, they have raised objections to the addition of the censorship question out of the fear that it will cause illegals not to participate in the census, thus costing seats.

Ross has said the purpose of its inclusion was to help ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its efforts to ensure that all legally voting citizens have equal access.

Challengers have lately sought to urge the justices to send the case back to the lower courts, claiming they have discovered new evidence of Ross’s partisan intentions.

However, the effort seems a likely stall tactic as the Supreme Court initially had agreed to fast-track its hearing because the printing of the census needs to begin soon.

The decisions, regardless of how they break, are likely to draw a firestorm of criticism from opponents.

One more case remaining on the docket, Mitchell v. Wisconsin, may offer the justices a brief respite, as they decide whether blood drawn from an unconscious motorist is a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s search and seizure protections.

The court will begin its session at 10 a.m., according to the SCOTUSblog website. Stay tuned to Liberty Headlines for the latest developments as they come.

Fake Neuroscientist Rehashes Claims that Trump Supporters Are Ignorant Rubes

‘For some voters, it’s just not cool to be smart, and the view seems to be gaining popularity…’

Research into 'Disgustology' May Help Explain Left's Lax Ethical Attitudes
Donald Trump/ IMAGE: AFP news agency via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A recent piece in Psychology Today is the latest effort by partisan liberals to deconstruct the elusively enigmatic appeal of President Donald Trump using dubious scientific research.

Their conclusion: He dumbs things down.

Many academics, sequestered in the left-leaning ivory towers of college campuses, were shocked and overcome with righteous indignation at the results of the 2016 election.

The reasons for Trump’s political success—notably, his ability to take on the corrupt Hillary Clinton campaign, his refusal to capitulate to blatantly biased media smears and his promise to dismantle the years of radical social-engineering during the Obama administration—may seem obvious to the president’s supporters.

Left-wing elitists, however, have continued to interpolate other factors, with the foundational assumptions being their own superior intellect and emotional complexity.

Often, the suggestion is that the public was, in some way, duped into voting for Trump over Hillary Clinton—which these so-called scholars condescendingly assert was an irrational decision, clearly indicative of a lack of healthy, normal reasoning capacity.

Such was the thrust of a 2017 study conducted by a University of Texas at Austin graduate student and her professor, a leading social psychologist in the area of linguistics.

In “The exception or the rule: Using words to assess analytic thinking, Donald Trump, and the American presidency,” Kayla N. Jordan and James W. Pennebaker concluded that Trump measured low on a scale devised by Pennebaker to gauge a person’s intellectual processes based on his use of low-level vocabulary words.

In fairness, such linguistic analysis has been the focus of Pennebaker’s research throughout his career, and Trump’s unique rhetorical approach certainly invited a study of this kind.

“The analysis of speeches, debates, and various documents demonstrates that Trump stands out from other politicians as being very low in analytic thinking,” the researchers wrote in their abstract.

“However, he represents the next step in a trend wherein most Presidents and presidential candidates have been becoming less analytic. Trump may be an anomaly, but he is also a part of a long-developing presidential pattern,” they said.

The “findings” played well into a common left-wing trope—the same thread that insisted Yale-educated George W. Bush was a cowboy dummy while Barack Obama was  “cerebral” and “erudite,” casting aside his failures in leadership because he was too busy being immersed in deep thoughts.

More interesting than its discoveries about Trump (revealing his language to register nearly 20 points lower than Clinton’s on the scale, 23.8 to 42.8) were that Ben Carson—a literal brain surgeon—scored the lowest among Trump’s Republican competitors (39.1), while Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, scored the highest (62.1).

The study also looked at the broader historical trends, suggesting presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt have declined in their analytical-thinking quotients based on Pennebaker’s linguistics scale.

This coincides, conveniently, with the emergence of broadcast media as a primary communications platform, one that lends itself to the sort of concise “sound bite” statements that Trump—a public figure and television personality for the past four decades—seems to have mastered.

It was from this study that Bobby Azarian—a partisan hack with a long history of promoting a political agenda under the auspices of science—staged his recent attack via the Psychology Today blog “Mind in the Machine.”

Although he purports to be a doctor of neuroscience, Azarian’s degree is a Ph.D, not a medical degree, and he appears to have worked in no professional research capacity other than a few short-term stringer assignments since graduating from George Mason University in 2014.

But as a freelancer for far-left media—including Salon, Slate, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast and the Huffington Post—Azarian has received a warm embrace due to his willingness to lend pseudo-scientific authority to outlandish and sensational conservative-bashing claims.

Azarian wrote similar hit pieces on Trump—attempting to diminish the intellectual faculties of his supporters—prior to the 2016 election, and he was more recently vaulted into the liberal echo chamber for claiming a link between religious fundamentalism and brain damage.

His latest blog post, just in time for the new election cycle, rehashed one he originally published in 2017, shortly after the UT linguistics study was first released.

“While the analytically-minded may see Donald Trump’s opinions and answers as superficial and uninformed, many people view them as straightforward and relatable,” Azarian said.

Azarian acknowledged that a less complicated style of communication could prove to be a political asset—as it did in Trump’s case.

“A certain degree of perceived ignorance can be beneficial for a presidential candidate, especially if he can pass it off as being ‘folksy,'” he said.

However, he then strayed from the research in order to do some editorializing of his own.

“Perhaps presidents are just becoming better at simplifying complex information into direct, simple language. But the case of President Trump seems to tell a different story,” Azarian wrote.

“It appears to indicate a thriving movement composed of individuals who are anti-intellectual and anti-science, and they want a president who is the same,” he continued. “For some voters, it’s just not cool to be smart, and the view seems to be gaining popularity.”

Of course, when this is what passes for ‘science’ in scholarly publications, it is easy to see why some conservatives might come across as “anti-science”—but that, too, is likely to become a topic in need of further (government-funded) research by progressive “thinkers.”

Google Official Stonewalls Senate Committee on Anti-Conservative Bias

‘You guys could literally sit down at your board meeting, I believe, and determine who’s gonna be the next president of the United States…’

Senate Panel of AI Experts Denies Anti-Conservative Bias, Downplays Evidence
Ron Johnson / IMAGE: Senate Commerce Committee screenshot

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The day after Project Veritas released an exposé providing both documents and a hidden-camera confession from a Google executive that it was engaged in anti-conservative bias, senators had the chance to grill a company representative about it during a committee hearing.

But even when faced with evidence of bias, a panel of so-called expert researchers in artificial intelligence continued to downplay tech companies’ efforts to manipulate their algorithms in service of a partisan agenda.

The panel appeared before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet, chaired by Sen. John Thune, R-SD, on the topic “Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms.”

Among the witnesses was Maggie Stanphill, director of Google user experience, who repeatedly stonewalled questions about the company’s use of “persuasive technology.”

Several senators, after criticizing Stanphill for refusing to give direct answers, turned to the other three panelists, who offered a sometimes damning account of what companies like Google did to maximize their profit margins.

Tristan Harris, of the Center for Humane Technology, likened the user-optimization experience that kept people coming back to tech companies “crawling down the brain stem” of their platform’s users.

Panelists testified to the dangerous and subversive effects of algorithms that deployed data-mining to influence a user’s perspectives and choices in a variety of ways.

Citing Instagram and its parent company, Facebook, as examples, Harris said, “What it actually is doing is an attempt to cause you to come back every day because now you wanna see, ‘Do I have more followers now than I did yesterday?'”

If someone attempts to delete a site like Facebook, a screen will pop up asking users if they are sure they want to leave, along with the faces of five close connections.

“They’re calculating which of the five faces would be most likely to get you to hit cancel and not delete your Facebook account,” Harris said.

The panel also addressed the dangerous social impact that the platforms could have on non-users, such as a traffic app, Waze, that redirected vehicles through a residential neighborhood, resulting in increased accidents.

But when it came time to discuss allegations of anti-conservative bias, despite recent evidence, all four witnesses seemed to dismiss the notion that the overtly left-leaning Silicon Valley monopolies would be engaged in such a thing.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., told the panel that five conservative staff members of his, as an experiment, had sought suggestions from the photo-sharing Instagram app on whom to follow, only to be bombarded with a litany of radical, far-left organizations and political candidates.

Only a single conservative-leaning institution, the Wall Street Journal was included in the list, Johnson said. (The Journal‘s opinion page leans conservative, while the newspaper’s reporting mostly leans left.)

Johnson said the experiment made clear it was not user habits dictating the results but some outside influence steering them in the opposite direction.

“If there are really algorithms shuffling the content that they might want to—that they would agree with—you would expect they would see maybe Fox New, Breitbart, Newsmax,” he said. “You might even see like a really big name, like Donald Trump.”

Even so, Harris rejected the possibility of bias and suggested that the prior “click pattern” of the staffers may have driven the recommendations.

Two other panelists—Rashida Richardson of the AI Now Institute and Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research—said that the overwhelmingly left-wing results from the five conservative staff members likely had to do with what was popular and trending at the time on Instagram.

Stanphill, the Google representative, claimed ignorance but broadly denied (contrary to evidence) that the company played political favorites in its search results.

“I can speak for Google’s stance, just generally, with respect to AI, which is we build products for everyone, so we’ve got systems in place to ensure no bias is introduced,” she said.

Johnson remained skeptical and called on further investigation into the matter.

“Conservatives have legitimate concern that content is being pushed from a liberal/progressive standpoint to the vast majority of users of these social sites,” he said.

Thune agreed with him.

“If you Google yourself, you’ll find most of the things that pop up right away are gonna be from news organizations that tend to be to the Left,” he said.

“I have had that experience as well,” he continued, “and it seems like if that actually was based upon a neutral algorithm or some other form of artificial intelligence, that since you’re the user and since they know your habits and patterns, you might see something, instead of from the New York Times, pop up from Fox News or from the Wall Street Journal.”

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., expressed a similar line of concern over the alarming addictiveness he had observed in his own grandchildren while engaged in online content and the potential impacts it could have in swaying public sentiment.

“I will tell you that I’m probably gonna be dead and gone—and I’ll probably be thankful for it—when all this shit comes to fruition,” Tester told the panel.

Addressing Google, he said, “… You guys could literally sit down at your board meeting, I believe, and determine who’s gonna be the next president of the United States.”

Sen. Ted Cruz also confronted Stanphill directly on the report from Project Veritas, including the hidden-camera admissions from Jen Gennai, Google’s head of “responsible innovation,” that top brass there saw a duty to influence election outcomes and “prevent” another 2016.

Cruz grilled Stanphill over a PowerPoint presentation leaked to Project Veritas in which Google’s internal memos proposed actively intervening in the machine learning process to account for what they considered “fairness” that might not otherwise be reflected in user-driven algorithms.

“Google according this whistleblower, deliberately makes recommendations—if someone is searching for conservative commentators—deliberately shifts the recommendations … [to] organizations like CNN or MSNBC or left leaning political outlets. Is that occurring?” Cruz asked.

Again, Stanphill pleaded ignorance, claiming that it was outside her realm of expertise.

“I can’t comment on search algorithms or recommendations given my purview as digital well-being lead,” she said. “I can take that back to my team, though.”