Obama’s Gerrymander Group Launches Activist Training Campaign to Flip Red States

Ben Sellers
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‘There is a fundamental structural barrier that prevents progress: manipulated electoral maps drawn … by politicians to preserve their party’s political power…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Former President Barack Obama‘s failures in leadership led to one of the most significant electoral “shellackings” against his party in modern political history.

Now, he has made it his priority to flip the script, claiming that the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014—which together yielded a loss of 90 Congressional seats—were part of yet another ‘vast right-wing conspiracy.’

Obama this week announced via Twitter the rollout of a new re-education program to “train volunteers, give them the tools to impact the redistricting process in their state … and empower them to be leaders in the movement for fair maps,”according to the web page for his Redistricting U.

The program is one of several being run through All On The Line, a supposed nonprofit “social welfare” advocacy campaign underwritten by the National Redistricting Action Fund that, nonetheless, reserves the right to “engage in grassroots electoral work,” according to the website.

Blaming the Maps

Obama and Holder Team to Take Out Walker in 2018, Flip Ryan's Seat
Eric Holder & Barack Obama/PHOTO: WhiteHouse.gov

Although Obama and his flunkies—including Eric Holder, his self-declared wingman, former campaign bundler and disgraced ex-attorney general—have long claimed that unfair electoral maps were created during the 2011 redistricting, when Republican legislatures dominated many states, the bulk of his losses came prior to that.

After Obama forced his disastrous signature healthcare legislation through Congress by a party-line vote on Christmas Eve 2009, the next year’s election netted six gubernatorial gains for the GOP and 20 state-legislature turnovers (699 total seats) on top of 63 U.S. House and six Senate losses for the Democrats.

Ignoring the clarion-call for bipartisanship, Obama pressed forward on his unilateral, auto-pen agenda, with many of his executive actions later being ruled unconstitutional.

Democrats reclaimed 10 congressional seats during the 2012 election but lost 21 in 2014, for a net loss of 80 during Obama’s presidency.

It was reportedly during the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia that party elites including then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe—a longtime Clinton stooge—hatched a plan to scapegoat the centuries-old, bipartisan practice of gerrymandering for their political failures.

Not long after, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by Holder, came into being—first as a nonprofit, but later boasting its own political-action committee and fundraising operations.

As the All On The Line website noted, one of the top obstacles for far-left Democrats has been facing the political backlash of efforts to enact their radical agenda.

“Whether you care about making sure everyone has access to quality, affordable health care, achieving equal pay, reducing the gun violence that plagues our schools and communities, protecting voting rights, or dealing with the urgent threat of climate change,” said the website, “there is a fundamental structural barrier that prevents progress: manipulated electoral maps drawn with surgical precision by politicians to preserve their party’s political power and silence the will of the people.”

Red States in the Crosshairs

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

Earlier this year, Obama folded his own campaign organization, Organizing for Action (formerly Obama for America) into the NDRC, adding to its massive network of resources and political infrastructure, with speculation that it may be part of a behind-the-scenes prelude to a presidential run by former First Lady Michelle Obama.

For now, though, its main focus is on legal battles and activism to coerce states into making their districts more favorable to Democrats—often employing a “Sue til Blue” strategy that relies on favorable decisions from activist liberal judges.

In one case, even though a liberal candidate for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court had denounced the funding and support of outside interest groups, Holder and the NDRC continued to run ads and campaign heavily on her behalf.

Despite a setback when the U.S. Supreme Court this year ruled that partisan gerrymandering was outside the purview of federal judges, the NDRC network has pressed onward in its mission of targeting red states in the hope of flipping legislatures, state courts and other key positions prior to the next round of redistricting so that they, themselves, may gerrymander the districts to favor their party.

They have succeeded already in using court orders to force the redrawing of several crucial swing states—including Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

This contributed to some of the pickups that Democrats flaunted in the 2018 midterm election—where they had a net gain of 41 U.S. House seats and seven governorships.

Even with those advances, though, the “fairness” that the Left seeks will not be achieved until it has secured permanent legislative majorities for Democrats.

In North Carolina, for instance, after the state was forced to redraw its maps due to what the courts determined was race-based gerrymandering, Democrats still were unable to flip the state legislature and are now suing again, claiming the redrawn maps they approved were unfair.

Sore Losers, Soros and Secretaries of State…

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Stacey Abrams / IMAGE: Late Night with Seth Meyers via Youtube

The Obama–Holder juggernaut is not the only left-wing group seeking to manipulate election outcomes through backdoor efforts to redraw the maps.

Stacey Abrams, whose failed gubernatorial campaign in Georgia last year was backed by billionaire investors like Tom Steyer and George Soros, has announced her plans to flip the conservative legislature in her home state.

Her Fair Fight 2020 PAC is also targeting at least 19 other “battleground” states in a multi-million-dollar campaign before next year’s election.

Abrams, who refused to concede the governor’s race to her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, has insisted that voter suppression was the cause of her loss—even as the state made substantial gains in minority voter participation while Kemp was its secretary of state.

In addition to her own adocacy group, Abrams is supporting an initiative led by the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State to flip the state-level offices charged with certifying elections—as well as other down-ballot races, like district attorneys and state attorneys general.

Soros previously funded a similar campaign, the Secretaries of State Project.

“We looked at the states that are going to have the strongest impact, based on the margins of victory or loss from the 2016 election and also [the] 2018 [midterm elections],” Abrams told NPR’s “On Point” in an interview broadcast Tuesday, revealing the sheer political motives of the group’s activism.

“We looked at states where we have Senate elections that will help determine control of the Senate for 2020, and we looked at states that have [secretary of state] races, but also states that have chambers that may flip and influence who controls redistricting for 2021 and beyond,” she said.

Far-Left Activists Propose Plan to Put More Socialists on Judicial Benches

Ben Sellers
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‘Our overall mission is not to get any one person nominated. It’s to get judicial issues more into the marrow of Democratic activists…’

Brian Fallon / IMAGE: MSNBC via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Following in the footsteps of President Donald Trump—only backward—activist Democrat organizations have begun compiling their wish-list of future judicial nominees that will help advance a partisan agenda.

For some of the Left’s leading social engineers, that means fewer judges from corporate law firms and more from pro-bono advocacy outfits that value their own ideology over an impartial interpretation of law.

Ironically, noted The American Prospect, activists like Obama-era legal advisers Brian Fallon and Christopher Kang benefited from precisely the sort of cronyism and good-old-boy networking that they claim to be fighting against.

After launching their careers as leading staffers for high-profile Democrats including Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, former Attorney General Eric Holder and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the pair went on to found the group Demand Justice, where they helped to orchestrate the “resistance” against Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination.

Noting their backgrounds, the magazine said, “These are not résumé items you would typically associate with people who want to burn down the dominant frameworks for judicial nominations.”

But the two radicals claimed their effort to politicize the judiciary is a necessary quid-pro-quo since appointing lawyers who built their careers representing corporate clients “tilts the federal bench in favor of corporate interests.”

The two Demand Justice co-founders penned a piece in the far-left Atlantic that laid out their “provocative” proposal, Fallon said, in order to begin “socializing the concept” among the Left’s radical-progressive base.

Invoking the coded dog-whistle language of the Left, Fallon claimed that it was not an anti-capitalist agenda he was seeking to unleash on the judiciary; rather, it was in need of more “diversity.”

“[T]here’s a widespread recognition of the lack of professional diversity,” he said. “… We felt the need to get a little bit more intense about it, and put it in starker terms. If you want to put the onus on people to look at different types of nominees, you need to put firmer point on it.”

Yet, Fallon was also candid about his eventual goal of using the judiciary to force the Left’s socialist lurch into the mainstream by seeking the “AOC equivalent of a federal judge.”

He acknowledged that liberals from the Obama administration and earlier had succeeded in doing similar things for social causes like abortion, but said even the current left-leaning judicial philosophies remained too moderate.

“[T]he courts are a theater where this war is being contested and there’s no one on the battlefield,” he said. “It’s a place to advance the interests as well.”

Fallon urged Democrats to cull their nominees by consulting with groups—like the Open Market Institute—that are working to unseat centrist Democrats in districts where more radical representatives are needed.

Likewise their congressional counterparts who still value antiquated notions of bipartisan compromise, the traditional concept of jurisprudence that many judges base their decisions on is inadequate to enact the new world order envisioned by Demand Justice.

“Our overall mission is not to get any one person nominated,” Fallon said. “It’s to get judicial issues more into the marrow of Democratic activists. People must center the courts as a needed element of the movement’s activities and goals.”

Elitist DC Attorneys Fight Dems’ Political Battles for Free to Boost Prestige

Ben Sellers
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‘The popularity of the lawsuits … appear[s] to be perceived as a boon for various firms’ reputations…’

Elitist DC Attorneys Fight Dems' Political Battles for Free to Boost Prestige 1
House Counsel Doug Letter and his team of DC attorneys parade to the courthouse for a lawsuit over subpoenas of Trump’s tax returns. / IMAGE: Ruptly via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) One of the primary plans of attack for Democrats in the Trump era has been legislation by lawsuit.

No matter the cause, from immigration to school lunches and everything in between, lawyers have clogged the legal system with spurious suits and injunctions that will delay the president’s agenda and pose unprecedented checks on executive authority.

According to The National Law Journal, bias within the ranks of attorneys is helping the left-wing politicians run interference.

Along with Douglas Letter, the general counsel for the Democrat-led House of Representatives, a legion of activist lawyers is coordinating with the Left to undermine Trump. Fortunately, they aren’t charging taxpayers to do it, since many work for free.

By contrast Republicans had to pay top dollar to wage legal defenses against the Obama administration, with some attorneys charging upward of $500 an hour.

President Barack Obama’s disregard for the rule of law may have resulted in a record number of policies deemed unconstitutional under what most agree to have been an ideologically balanced Supreme Court.

Even so, the GOP’s own counsel during the Obama era, Kerry Kircher, admitted that high-powered D.C. lawyers were more “aroused” by aiding the Left’s agenda and less interested in fighting it.

“It wasn’t like I could have gotten top-notch representation on a pro bono basis to do that,” he told the NLJ‘s Law.com.

While the precise reasoning for the leftward lean of attorneys is not easy to nail down, the American Bar Association has historically given to Democrats in political races much more than to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

On one hand, the very basis of the Left’s philosophy—an increase in regulatory and oversight practices—favors the legal industry, which needs more laws to make more money. Thus, throwing charity work to radical lawmakers may be something of a loss-leader.

Cronyism within the industry may also play a role, as is the case in academia and other fields where powerful influencers rely on virtue-signaling to steer the success of their anointed proteges and weed out ideological diversity.

In that sense, the elitist lawyers make up in social capital among their like-minded peers what they forgo in actual revenue.

“[T]he popularity of the lawsuits—and in some cases the novelty of the lawsuits—also appear to be perceived as a boon for various firms’ reputations,” noted the legal blog Law & Crime.

AOC Taunts Right in Latest Push to Abolish Electoral College ‘Scam’

Ben Sellers
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‘If the GOP were the “silent majority” they claim, they wouldn’t be so scared of a popular vote…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After claiming last week that the U.S. Constitution was a scam, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY, raised the stakes by saying her Republican detractors were too chicken to abolish it.

Specifically, Ocasio–Cortez was referring to the Electoral College, the process outlined by the 12th Amendment for determining proportional representation among each state polity in the national presidential election.

Without evidence, the race-baiting freshman congresswoman alleged last week that the system inherently suppressed minority votes.

“Due to severe racial disparities in certain states, the Electoral College effectively weighs white voters over voters of color, as opposed to a ‘one person, one vote’ system where all our votes are counted equally.”

Following push-back over her outlandish rhetoric, she followed up with a tweet on Friday.

Critics have pointed out that a popular-vote method would leave the door wide open for corrupt blue states with lax election laws to commit widespread voter fraud.

A study released this month found that a majority of states had counties with more registered voters on their rolls than residents, resulting from failures to enforce voter-registration procedures required by the Bill Clinton-era “Motor Voter” law.

In California alone, a recent audit turned up 84,000 duplicate voter records, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Additionally, several major “sanctuary cities” allow non-citizens to vote in local elections and provide them with government-issued identification cards that closely resemble driver’s licenses.

Many on the Left insist that verifying voter identity at the polling place is also “racist.”

While Ocasio–Cortez’s tweet claimed to be calling the GOP on its bluff about the ‘silent minority,’ left-wing activists fought tooth-and-nail to prevent a comprehensive census count from determining what proportion of the population comprised illegal immigrants.

The U.S. Supreme Court determined the Trump administration’s citizenship question to be valid, but due to a relatively minor procedural issue it remanded the case back to a lower court in New York, where a liberal judge threatened to delay congressionally mandated printing deadlines for the decennial population count.

Top Environmentalist Groups Aren’t Backing Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/IMAGE: screenshot via Twitter

Instead, far-left Democrats, including ‘AOC’ and her fellow ‘Squad‘ members, have been vocal advocates for open borders, comparing detention facilities to Nazi concentration camps, and demanding that illegal immigrants be released into the U.S. without processing or adjudication.

Current efforts to abolish the Electoral College—along with other once-dismissed Democratic agenda items, such as slavery reparations and packing the Supreme Court—promise to figure prominently into next year’s election should one of several socialist-leaning candidates in the presidential primary race be nominated.

Led by top contenders Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., many on the Left have expressed openness to the policies being pushed by the party’s extreme fringe.

Sanders recently acknowledged that energy policies widely supported by Democrats, such as Ocasio–Cortez’s Green New Deal, would require that the entire energy sector be nationalized, much as it was in Venezuela.

It remained unclear whether Ocasio–Cortez planned to follow up on her earlier taunt about the election process by double-dog-daring the GOP to cede private industry to government hands.

ICE-Defying NC Sheriff Blames Opponents, Changes Subject

Ben Sellers
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‘We are so focused on immigration, we have neglected our community…’

Urban Areas Nix ICE Partnerships for Criminal Aliens, As Rural Areas Join Up
Charlotte Sheriff Gary McFadden/IMAGE: Garry Mcfadden 4Sherrif via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Garry McFadden, the sheriff of North Carolina’s Charlotte and the surrounding Mecklenburg County, built his career as a homicide detective and even cashed in with a reality television series.

But now, the controversial lawman is playing the victim while catching political flak for his refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

McFadden is one of several sheriffs in the conservative state’s blue urban centers who have declared their districts to be ‘sanctuary’ locales while running afoul of state lawmakers.

After a second high-profile episode in which McFadden released a dangerous criminal in defiance of a detainer request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Republican-led General Assembly this week passed HB 370, which would have forced the sheriffs to comply or face removal.

However, the bill was vetoed by Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper.

McFadden has pinned the blame on everyone but himself for the failures to protect the community.

He blamed ICE for neglecting to obtain a federal warrant that would have forced cooperation.

He blamed judges for setting the bail and terms of release.

He blamed the conservative politicians, alleging their legislative efforts were racially motivated since the three North Carolina sheriffs in defiance of immigration agreements were all black.

And now, he is blaming the constituents themselves for making their displeasure known.

“It’s very nasty,” he complained to WSOCTV. “It’s a very nasty debate. People fear for their lives.”

McFadden claimed he personally had become a target of abuse and was afraid of what the dangerous criminals at large in the community could do to him.

“I have to be more cautious,” he said. “I get death threats. I get people openly telling me what they want to do to me and my family.”

But still he remained dug into his position on non-cooperation. The debate, he claimed, no longer had anything to do with immigration but was now about his authority as a duly elected public official to decide how to interpret the laws he was paid to enforce.

“Do not erode the powers and duties of an elected sheriff,” he said.

McFadden griped that the political turmoil was distracting him from his ability to conduct business as usual.

“We aren’t even discussing the 70-some murders in Charlotte,” he said. “We aren’t discussing mass shootings. We aren’t discussing school shootings. We are so focused on immigration, we have neglected our community.”

After a mass shooting occurred at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte in May, police were largely praised for their fast response.

However, when some observed that preventative measures like a wall around the campus and tighter enforcement of security would best enhance safety, the proposals were dismissed in short order.

“The open campus is a feature of American higher education that will never go away,” campus security consultant Steven Healy told USA Today. “We want people to be able to freely travel across campus. This is who we fundamentally are, a place for the open exchange of ideas.”

McFadden, for his part, put the blame for the nationwide shooting epidemic on an uptick in “hate,” echoing unsubstantiated talking points from many scaremongering Democrat politicians that “white supremacy” was on the rise.

“I think we need to focus on violence in the schools, mass shootings and the hate that we are now seeing,” he said.

Infighting RINOs Shut Down Their Caucus After Big 2018 Losses

Ben Sellers
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‘It just all smelled really bad…’

Sarah Chamberlain / IMAGE: Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) With the veering of the Democratic left wing toward a socialist platform, many have fretted over the vulnerability of battleground Democrats who managed to flip historically conservative districts.

Meanwhile, center-leaning Republicans also have struggled with their own identity crisis in the age of Trump.

Now, even their own support structure seems to be eroding from within.

In February, quibbling from within the Republican Main Street Partnership, an outside funding group that raises money for GOP moderates, led to the dissolution of its official congressional caucus, reported NPR in a profile published Friday of the group and its financial dispute.

The RMSP has been around since the mid-1990s, “driven by a desire to counterbalance the weight of the conservative wing inside the House GOP,” NPR’s Susan Davis wrote. “Lawmakers believe that rebuilding the centrist coalition is key to improving the GOP’s odds of winning a House majority in 2020.”

Its eponymous caucus, however, lasted only two years. Although it began in 2017, the heavy casualties among moderate GOP representatives in the 2018 midterm election left the lawmakers “licking their wounds,” NPR said.

Of the roughly 40 incumbent members in the Republican Main Street Caucus, 18 were defeated. That accounts for nearly half of the net loss of 37 GOP seats (with one GOP seat in North Carolina still pending the outcome of a special election).

Some former caucus members fear the infighting and divisions will spill over into the 2020 races as well.

In the wake of the election disaster (although still relatively mild when compared with Democrats’ 63-seat loss under Obama in 2010 and 54-seat loss under Clinton in 1994) the caucus members blamed RMSP chief Sarah Chamberlain

They questioned why RMSP had left more than $722,000 in the account of its super-PAC, Defending Main Street that might have been put to good use.

Chamberlain said that the partnership’s organizations had invested nearly $6 million in the races, but the legislators’ subsequent demands for an independent audit went unanswered.

“It just all smelled really bad,” said one unnamed former congressman, according to NPR.

Compounding the outrage was that Chamberlain received at least $700,000 in compensation—or roughly 20 percent of the operating budget—according to disclosure reports.

In response, the RMSP disputed the figure, saying her salary was a mere $500,000, and claimed that the criticism was the result of underlying sexism.

“It is not surprising that Sarah Chamberlain is being attacked,” wrote RMSP board member Doug Ose in a statement to NPR. “RMSP is the only Republican organization other than the RNC that is [led] by a woman.”

But with many crediting the defection of suburban women for the 2018 Democratic upsets, RMSP’s emphasis on women’s issues has rightfully come under scrutiny.

Among the operations funded by the RMSP umbrella was Women2Women, a speaking tour that Chamberlain founded that claims to support female empowerment as its main goal but does not appear to be aligned with any specific GOP objectives.

The organization’s website quotes Chamberlain as saying, “There are more men name John in the US Congress than there are Women in Congress.”

However, that claim is demonstrably false. Currently, there are 25 women in the Senate (17 Democrats and eight Republicans) and 102 in the House (89 Democrats and 13 Republicans)

According to a search of the Congress.gov database, 75 percent (15) of the 20 men named John in the 116th Congress are Republican.

Additionally, two incumbent Republicans named “John” (Reps. John Culberson in Texas-07 and John Faso in NY-19) were among those who lost their seats to Democrats in the 2018 election. Culberson—a nine-term incumbent—lost to a woman, Rep. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher.

With Chamberlain exercising near-complete control over the operations, several prominent congressmen chose to disassociate themselves with the RMSP.

Among them was Rep. John Katko, R-NY, who drafted a formal resolution for the lawmakers in the caucus to suspend their association with the RMSP. The group also outlined its concerns in a December memo.

“How does money flow between each entity?” asked the lawmakers in the memo. “Is there any wall in place? If so how do we prove it? Sarah is the only person in a position to know as the only check signer.”

OFFICIALS: Trump Plans to Snub UN Climate Summit Next Month

Ben Sellers
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‘It is to make country by country assume leadership and assume this ambition that is necessary…’

Trump at U.N. Security Council
President Donald Trump chairs the U.N. Security Council/IMAGE: Fox News via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Senior White House officials said President Donald Trump has no plans to attend the United Nations‘s Climate Action Summit being put on by Secretary–General António Guterres next month.

Instead, they said, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler will represent the U.S. at the Sept. 23 event, which mark’s the opening of a new session for the global body’s General Assembly.

An EPA spokesman said that Wheeler plans “to highlight America’s environmental progress” while attending the summit, McClatchy reported.

However, the sources who spoke to McClatchy said that official word on who will attend remained up in the air should the president exercise his prerogative to change plans.

“The United States is considering the nature of our participation at the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit,” said one State Department official.

The news outlet said it remained to be seen whether UN Ambassador Kelly Craft, who replaced Nikki Haley in February, will attend.

Democrats attacked Craft during her confirmation hearing over her husband’s links to the coal industry, forcing a promise from her to recuse herself from her on any UN discussions on climate change or coal.

Wheeler also worked as a pro-energy lobbyist representing the coal industry prior to his EPA appointment.

Both have aligned themselves with Trump in expressing skepticism over some of the scientific claims regarding global warming, though Craft has said she agreed that man-made emissions play a part in climate change.

Even so, many dispute the scope and urgency of the so-called crisis, with even former Vice President Al Gore, a strident green activist, acknowledging that previous UN reports had “torqued up” the alarmism.

Other skeptics question the cost—benefit breakdown of solutions as members of the far left pitch extreme proposals like the Green New Deal that would fundamentally alter the American economy and lifestyle.

Globally speaking, one of Trump’s first acts was to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

The Obama-era agreement imposed sharp restrictions and penalties on carbon-dioxide emissions, even though some of the world’s largest greenhouse-gas producers either were not a part of the pledge or were not complying in good faith with it.

Critics called it a glorified wealth-redistribution effort to shift money to poorer, non-industrialized countries.

Despite the withdrawal from the agreement, Trump officials said the U.S. will outline the progress it has made toward reducing CO2 emissions, including the encouragement of private-sector innovations for carbon capture and storage.

Last month, Guterres asked participating countries to submit by early August “concrete, realistic plans” for lowering emissions prior to the renewal date of the Paris accord next year.

“It’s not to convene a conference to come to a consensus on a document,” Guterres told Time magazine as part of a June cover story hyping global warming. “It is to make country by country assume leadership and assume this ambition that is necessary,” he said.

WATCHDOG: Taxpayer-Funded Islamic Propaganda Forced on Teachers

Ben Sellers
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‘This type of infiltration amounts to an Islamic Trojan horse within our public-school systems…’

Huda Essa / IMAGE: TEDx Talks via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As students file back to school, one pro-Christian advocacy group is shedding light on the questionable sensitivity training their teachers have been subjected to by left-wing virtue-signaling school districts.

According to the Thomas More Law Center, Michigan’s Novi Community Schools District paid an Islamist public speaker $5,000 for a two-day session that essentially amounted to indoctrination and bashing of other religions, they said.

The TMLC, noted for defending Maryland’s Bladensburg Cross in a recent Supreme Court victory, said that the August 2017 in-service training included promoting Islam as the only true, unadulterated monotheistic religion and bashed Western “cultural genocide” while overlooking that which was promoted by Muslim jihadists.

“We found that the teachers were subjected to two days of Islamic propaganda, where Islam was glorified, Christianity disparaged, and America bashed—all funded by Novi taxpayers,” said Richard Thompson, TMLC president and chief counsel.

The speaker, Huda Essa, was billed as a consultant in “culturally responsive teaching.” However, TMLC noted that no such speakers had been brought in to discuss other major religions.

“This type of infiltration amounts to an Islamic Trojan horse within our public-school systems,” Thompson said. “No other religion gets this kind of special treatment in our schools.”

The community, just northwest of Detroit, is known to have robust Asian communities, including those from Japan and the Indian subcontinent, but is not known to have a large population hailing from predominantly Muslim countries.

As of 2010, the school system was its largest employer, with just over 800 jobs.

Although more than 400 teachers were in attendance at the Islamic workshop, “not one teacher challenged Essa’s denigration of Christianity or attacks on America,” noted the TMLC press release.

TMLC was able to investigate the seminar after filing a public-records request, which included audio recordings of the presentation and dozens of school documents, it said.

It found that there were no specific guidelines for determining speakers and the district did little to vet Essa beforehand, even though it granted access to sensitive data about the school district, teachers and students.

It comes as schools throughout the country face growing indignation and outrage over brazen indoctrination to far-left principles. Several schools have come under fire or been sued for teachers’ incorporation of transgender and LGBT curriculum supplied by advocacy groups. Some states, like California, have even made this cultural re-education mandatory.

Meanwhile, schools continue to suppress not only Christian religious principles, but also have punished students for expressions of patriotism or support for President Donald Trump.

TMLC noted two other separate cases where it is representing students who complained about the incorporation of Islamic propaganda in the curriculum.

In New Jersey’s Chatham Middle School, seventh-graders were told in a world-history class that “Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian” and “Islam at heart is a peaceful religion.”

In Maryland’s La Plata High School, students were taught that the term “jihad” referred to a “personal struggle” and had nothing to do with the promotion of religious violence or intolerance.

Which Dem Is Bilking the Most Billionaires? Not Biden, Sanders or Warren…

Ben Sellers
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Despite renouncing big-money donations, Elizabeth Warren had racked up at least three billionaire donors by mid-July…

2020 Dems Obsess Over Race on Debate Stage 1
Pete Buttigieg/IMAGE: CNN via YouTube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Most Democratic primary polls show former Vice President Joe Biden maintaining a solid lead, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., continuing to gain momentum among the party’s radical fringes.

But one revealing metric tells a much different story.

Although he is currently polling in the single-digits at around 5 percent, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is leading the pack in what may be Democrats’ most influential identity group, billionaire donors.

Based on the most recent quarterly filing report—as of mid-July—Buttigieg had the direct financial support of 23 well-heeled plutocrats, followed by Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey (18), Kamala Harris of California (17) and Michael Bennet of Colorado (15), according to Forbes.

Biden came in fifth, with 13 billionaires.

The magazine urged caution in divining too much from this statistic since wealthy liberals were likely making the bulk of their contributions through super-PACs, where they could spend unlimited resources in support of candidates as opposed to the direct-contribution cap of $2,800.

Still, some wealthy individuals—like Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda—have pledged only to make individual donations in the interest of transparency, Forbes said.

Among the top Buttigieg supporters are record-label executive David Geffen; media magnate Barry Diller, whose InterActiveCorp includes several online brands and TV networks; and Emily Blavatnik, the wife of Russia-born oil baron Len Blavatnik.

Buttigieg also has attended fundraisers sponsored by Hamilton James of the financial services firm Blackstone, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Gates is one of several noteworthy billionaires backing Booker. Others include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

Despite a pledge to renounce big-money donors, Warren had notched three billionaires by mid-July. She has been prominently bolstered in the past by billionaire George Soros, presently claiming he will sit out the Democratic primary race.

However, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who continues to poll ahead of Warren, was among the four candidates with no billionaires to his name.

Others were New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, former HUD Secretary Julian Castro and Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan.

At least one billionaire, hedge-fund investor Tom Steyer, is presumably self-funding his own campaign after having benefited many radical left-wing candidates in the past.

Dem in Key Race, Who Denounced ‘Dark Money,’ Wants Super-PAC Help

Ben Sellers
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‘Dark money and corporate money have no place in our democracy…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) With voting already underway in the special election for North Carolina‘s 9th Congressional District, Democrat Dan McCready has gone silent.

Unfortunately for his Republican opponent, state Sen. Dan Bishop, that doesn’t mean McCready has disappeared.

Rather, McCready’s campaign recently published a four-minute clip of soundless ‘B-roll’ footage intended to help unaffiliated left-wing organizations run ads on his behalf, the Associated Press reported.

McCready—who has benefited tremendously from fundraising support outside the district in the last remaining Congressional tossup before the 2020 election—nonetheless made a point of decrying the ‘dark money’ spending of political-action committees.

Despite the claims, McCready has continued to embrace big-money contributions from ideologically based advocacy groups, including several far-left environmental lobbying PACs.

Bishop, meanwhile, has largely benefited from the support of super-PACs like the conservative Club for Growth and industry PACs like the National Association of Realtors.

Super-PACs are not allowed to coordinate with a campaign but may spend unlimited amounts in support or opposition of a candidate.

Groups promoting an anti-McCready message thus far have outspent pro-McCready groups by nearly a million dollars, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’s OpenSecrets.net. That promises to surge even higher in the build-up to the Sept. 10 special election.

Even so, Bishop’s personal war-chest trails far behind that of McCready, who started the current race with surplus funds from his contest last year with Mark Harris.

The 2018 results—a narrow victory for Harris by a 905-vote margin—were nullified by the state’s board of elections after widely publicized allegations of ballot-harvesting in some of the district’s rural counties.

As of last week, McCready had raised roughly $3.2 million to Bishop’s $1.2 million and had considerably more cash on hand, reported the Center for Responsive Politics.

Many of McCready’s donations come from aggregation sites like ActBlue and Democracy Engine, which mask the donor names from public disclosure.

However, among the top individual donors who have attached their names to sizeable McCready contributions, according to the Federal Election Commission, are: Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell; Michael Bloomberg’s daughter, Emma Bloomberg; and Cindy Horn, the wife of Disney chairman Alan Horn.

While the district, largely based around the suburbs south of Charlotte, historically has been solid red, left-wing activists—after claiming the state legislature had used race to gerrymander the electoral map—successfully led a court-forced redistricting effort in 2017. That expanded NC-09 farther east and cut off many of its affluent, suburban constituents.

Democrats are hoping to claim a victory as a political upset that would deflate GOP hopes leading into next year’s presidential election, where the increasingly vulnerable North Carolina is likely a must-win state for President Donald Trump.

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