The only way to curb the power of the federal government is to DEFUND much of what it does. If the federal government stopped funding the FBI, it would no longer be able to harass, hunt down and arrest people who disagree with the government. If the EPA were defunded, it wouldn’t be able to halt Western civilization and return us to the horse-and-carriage era (or worse), or force us to paralyze the electric grid by eliminating fossil fuels. If we shut down the Dept. of Education by no longer funding it, then states and localities (better yet: private sources) would have to find ways to fill kids’ brains with woke, psychotic ideology.

In short: if we take away their money, they will stop hurting us.

It seems to me that this is a peaceful, nonviolent way to avoid the civil war and/or breakup of the United States that seems increasingly imminent. By defunding and disempowering the worst elements of our government and the parts of culture it funds, then we can concentrate on electing a President and Congress to do the few, very important things our Constitution does require them to do: have a strong military and a strong border.

Republicans in Congress, for the most part, claim to agree with all this. Yet they don’t lift a finger to defund ANY of this. They can’t even manage to defund Planned Parenthood or NPR, for God’s sake! So how can we trust them to do anything else? Remember, the President cannot defund programs or federal agencies. Only Congress can.

They had better get their act together on this. Because time is running out. If the DemComs manage to hold onto power in Congress and the White House, they’ll know there are no incentives left to rein themselves in. They will see that all their efforts to establish a one-party dictatorship have worked, and there will be nothing now to stop them. That will be the absolute end of freedom in America. So it’s now or never Republicans. It may already be too late.

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My grandma loves to joke about how she got a tooth knocked out by a motorizado (biker) in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. “¡Dame el aro!” (Gimme the hoop!) exclaimed what looked like an off-duty bodyguard. “My hoop? What the hell?” Grandma thought to herself, before realizing the man was talking about her wedding ring. 

“I never wear it when we go to church; I must’ve forgotten that day,” she tells us, in what feels like a skit. “I don’t know what got into me, but after the man pointed at his pocket and said he had a revolver, I said, ‘I have one too!’”

“Show me,” the motorizado inquired as my frozen grandpa thought to himself, “What the hell is she talking about?” She then busted open a drawer of her Toyota Corolla, expecting to scare the guy away, and proceeded to grab a Kleenex box and throw it at his face. 

“Gimme the hoop!” he aggressively repeated. My grandma refused. “I could’ve gotten killed. No one knows how you’ll respond in a situation like that one,” she says. And then voilà — my grandma recalled the advice of a radio host, “be crazier than they are.” “I began fake convulsing, beating my own chest,” she says, dramatically reenacting the scene.

After a marvelous performance, the motorizado, maybe revolver-less, maybe prudent, gave up, throwing a a punch to her jaw before driving away. “Take me to the doctor!” she exclaimed to her still paralyzed husband.

The story reveals something dark about life in Caracas: tales without the happy endings abound. I remember watching a man snatch my mom’s BlackBerry and during childhood always hiding phones and sometimes crouching in the backseat. 

Retelling anecdotes like these to my friends in the States often leads to amazement and laughs, and sometimes horror. Today, however, those stories feel increasingly less foreign. 

Early on June 3, two New York City Police Department officers were shot, reportedly by a Venezuelan migrant on a moped. The suspect had crossed the southern border illegally in Eagle Pass, Texas. In April, another man on a scooter killed one man and injured four others in the Bronx. 

“We have taken 9,500 scooters, dirt bikes and ATVs off the streets since January 1 until now. Out of those 9,500, 2,500 in the Bronx alone,” deputy commissioner of operations Kaz Daughtry said in April, following what has become a widespread rise in moped crime. 

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, moped-riding Venezuelans have become ubiquitous. Some celebrate how the motorizados have transformed of DC’s food delivery scene; others are less enchanted with their recklessness.

According to the city’s DMV, moped registrations increased from fifty-four in 2022 to 143 in 2023, not counting those with missing tags. The Motorized Vehicle Registration Accountability Amendment Act of 2024 was proposed to attempt to regulate what has become uncontrollable.

Three months ago, Georgia, a Venezuelan American who usually drives around Columbia Heights, told me that she frequently finds herself yelling in Spanish at the zig-zagging moped-drivers. A friend, Owen, recently texted, “I now do bets whenever I’m driving around to see if they’ll run a stop sign or a red light. I’m right basically every time. Zero regard for any traffic laws and very few of them have plates. It’s insanity.”

“I saw one guy smash the side view mirrors of an SUV off on Constitution Avenue outside the Air and Space Museum,” another friend, Vinny, said. “He was lane splitting and got angry that a car was stopped trying to get into another lane.”

Even in Miami, it has become a problem, with Univision’s Vianca Rodriguez saying that “they’ve almost made me crash in three different occasions this month.”

Just like that, evidently driven by mass migration, American cities have observed the Venezuelafication of their streets. Of course, not all of these new drivers are from from the oil-rich country, but personal experiences and the correlation of more low-skilled Venezuelan migrants with more mopeds provides sufficient evidence to justify the use of the label. 

With moped crime on the rise in the US, Venezuela — and Caracas, which has often battled for first place in the “cities with most crime” list — has seen its numbers trend in the opposite direction. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence reported a 25 percent drop in violent deaths from 2022 to 2023.

I was surprised by improvements in safety when I visited two years ago, and called my childhood friend Luis Fernando for an update on life in Caracas.

“It’s a different country, man,” he told me, arguing that while “Venezuela is still Venezuela, most motorizados seem to be doing Yummy [an Uber equivalent] now.”

“I haven’t heard of an incident for so long. People now drive with their windows down, at any time.”

That might sound like your average Friday, but for the Venezuelans who lived there these past two decades, it sounds like Disneyland. The worst of Venezuela, including the Tren de Aragua gang , has come to El Imperio. Who would have thought? Moped crime in the Land of the Free. Just like the Americans fascinated by my childhood stories, back in Caracas, people can’t believe it. America is, quite literally, importing the third world.

Freddy Gray, American Spectator

By Josh Hammer, Daily Caller News Foundation • Jun. 21, 2024

During the Constitution ratification debates between the Federalists (who supported ratification) and the Anti-Federalists (who opposed it), one of the most strident areas of disagreement was the extent to which the proposed position of president of the United States was actually an ersatz king.

Leading Anti-Federalists thought the new president would be a thinly veiled monarch. In response, leading Federalists—including those who would eventually hold radically different views of presidential powers—joined forces to assuage Anti-Federalist concerns.

Multiple essays of The Federalist Papers, the Federalists’ eponymous effort to publicly promote the ratification of the Constitution, were dedicated to explaining the nature of the office of the presidency.

Trending: Ex-FBI Undercover Asset Risks All to Prove J6 Was a “Fedsurrection”

In Federalist No. 69, Alexander Hamilton—who would in subsequent years take a much stronger view of Article II presidential power than his contemporary and Federalist Papers coauthor James Madison—dedicated an entire essay to arguing that the president is not nearly as powerful as the British king. In making his case, Hamilton noted that the president “can confer no privileges whatever,” whereas the king “can make denizens of aliens” and “noblemen of commoners.”

This must be emphasized: During the fledgling nation’s constitutional ratification debates, which assumed existential importance after the failure of the Articles of Confederation, Federalists felt compelled to distinguish the presidency from the Crown on the grounds that the king “can make denizens of aliens” but the president has no such power. Indeed, the Framers cared so much about this that they explicitly accorded to Congress, in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, the power to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” The message was clear: The president is not a king.

Well, so much for that. This week, President Joe Biden became the second straight Democratic president to unilaterally engage, absent any authorization from the Congress, in the quintessentially kingly act of “mak[ing] denizens of aliens.”

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In June 2012, former President Barack Obama issued his signature Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive amnesty, notwithstanding the fact that Congress had expressly rejected the DREAM Act amnesty legislation on which DACA was predicated. Two years later, Obama followed it up with Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, another executive amnesty that lacked any congressional authorizing legislation. Former President Donald Trump repealed DAPA in 2017; DACA has consistently been stymied by the federal courts, including the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022.

This Tuesday, Biden joined his former boss in unilaterally promulgating a mass amnesty for the ages—this time, for an estimated half million illegal aliens now married to U.S. citizens and who have lived in the U.S. for a decade or more. In a radical departure from extant law, Biden’s amnesty would allow those illegal aliens to remain in the U.S. while they seek a green card—as opposed to forcing them, as the law requires, to return to their home country while applying for permanent residency (and thus eventually citizenship).

Biden’s amnesty is blatantly, flagrantly and offensively unconstitutional. Only Congress, not the president, can “establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” Prosecutorial discretion, which Biden (like Obama before him) laughably invokes, is only legitimate when applied on an individualized, case-by-case basis. Prosecutorial discretion does not apply to a blanket refusal to enforce large swaths of immigration law—an act which itself violates the president’s Article II, Section 3 prerogative to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

The president has plenary statutory authority under 8 U.S.C. 1201 to deport any alien (legal or illegal) at any time for any reason, but he does not have any reciprocal power to naturalize aliens outside of Congress.

In addition to its lawlessness, Biden’s amnesty is also profoundly unjust. It rewards lawbreaking by prioritizing those who break the law over those who follow the law. It saps national sovereignty and vitiates the single most consequential decision any self-governing people can ever make: who else is allowed to join the community. It magnetizes illicit mass migration, incentivizing millions to throw in their lot with nefarious criminal cartels, human trafficking rings, and smugglers in the hopes that they too can cross our border in the shadows, plead “asylum” and attain amnesty. The cartels are enriched and emboldened; Americans, by contrast, pay for it in the form of increased crime, drained public sources, lost jobs and cultural balkanization.

Unsurprisingly, recent public polling shows the American people have had enough. A much-discussed CBS/YouGov poll taken earlier this month revealed that a whopping 62% of Americans—including 53% of Hispanics—support deporting all illegal aliens. Biden’s executive amnesty is thus not merely illegal and immoral. It will also backfire.

Biden, like Obama before him, may view himself as a king. But unlike Britain’s king, America’s president must face the voters when he seeks reelection. And therein lies the rub.

To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Suddenly, the leftist Commiefascist elites in media and entertainment are concerned about the possibility of … tyranny.

On “The View,” Joy Behar and others were screaming that if Trump is elected, their show will be canceled by him, since he will install a dictatorship and censor his critics. Based on what evidence? Obviously, it’s projection. They’re trying to portray themselves as victims in advance. Yet they are the censors. The Democrats and leftists — the Party of The View — are actively censoring and also arresting, and putting on trial, people with opposing views. Victimizers who portray themselves as victims are qualities you find in narcissists, sociopaths and gaslighters. What an esteemed bunch of psychopaths too many of us have anointed as our cultural spokespersons.

Additionally: Leftists are screaming that if Trump wins, they will be jailed. Well, what are we supposed to do with traitors who have violated the entire Constitution, decimated our Bill of Rights and prosecuted people for their political views? They imposed experimental medical treatments, ridiculous mask mandates, inflated the currency to increase spending beyond all rational limits, sided with ruthless Palestinian savages against our sole ally in the Middle East, imposed censorship by proxy through social media companies, and opened up the borders to any and all comers ..
All this while turning the military into a gigantic drag show, and openly rigging elections. Imprisonment is the kindest thing these monsters deserve. My vote is to charge them with treason and give them the harshest punishment under the law. Will this happen? Likely not. But millions and millions are furious beyond belief, and after November that rage could boil over.

What the boiling over will look like, we can only guess. But we can be certain: It cannot go on like this indefinitely.

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Leftists call anyone who disagrees with them — on anything — “haters.”

But consider all the things leftists hate.

Leftists hate the Constitution. They won’t say why, other than it was written by white men. Leftists hate white men. Some leftists are white men, so we can only assume they hate themselves.

They don’t really say why else they hate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We can only assume it’s because it doesn’t impose Communism or fascism on the country. Leftists hate freedom, and in order to wipe out economic freedom you need socialism; in order to wipe out other kinds of freedom, you need fascism; in order to wipe out ALL freedom you need Commuism. Leftists hate the Constitution because it gets in the way of legislating absolutely everything and everyone the way they think we all should be.

Leftists hate guns — except when in the hands of government agencies doing what they want. When agents with guns show up at Donald Trump’s house, or at the house of a less well-known dissenter, then they LIKE guns. Otherwise; not so much.

Leftists hate free speech. They claim to love free speech, but they pressure social media companies to eliminate hate speech, defined as any speech they dislike. The whole purpose of free speech is that the government does not restrict anyone’s speech, ever. With leftists, it’s selective. When you bring this up to a leftist, he or she becomes irate, even hateful.

Leftists hate capitalism. Except when it’s their OWN economic choices. They hate wealth. Except when the wealthy are progressives and fellow leftists. They hate religion, except when they can manipulate or exploit religious people into doing what they want, as with environmental fascism or other kinds of controls. They count on us overlooking that their own religion — Government intervention in absolutely every aspect of our lives — is a form of state-sanctioned religion bigger than anything seen since the Holy Roman Empire of the middle ages.

I have never seen people as hateful as leftists, when they’re screaming about their leftism. Some of them are highly reasonable, personable, seemingly nice people, unless the subject of Donald Trump or anything remotely nonleftist comes up. Then they become intimidating, rude, nasty, threatening and more hateful than anyone else you’ve ever read about from Hitler or the KKK. And make no mistake: People carrying around this much hatred will, eventually, act on all of it — or at least stand passively by (silently satisfied) when their own version of Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini takes everything over and runs all dissenters out of town. Look around at what’s happening today. They don’t need a Hitler. They can do it with a demented puppet. And they’re doing it.

Michael J. Hurd

NBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann on Friday said President Joe Biden’s campaign’s largest concern is that persuading certain voters the president is competent may be a lost cause.

Biden’s cognitive capabilities have repeatedly been raised as a possible problem, with NBC political analyst Elise Jordan earlier on Friday saying voters tell her they will be tuning into the upcoming presidential debate to “make sure that he’s up to the task” of being president. Heilemann on “Morning Joe” said the campaign’s deepest fear is that there may be no solution to persuading voters who have “stubborn concerns about” the president, based in part on an interview he conducted with Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon.

“I think that the thing, Katty, that worries them, is that the information environment is what it is,” Heilemann told MSNBC contributor Katty Kay. “And so I asked [O’Malley Dillon] to kind of try to make the case for, you know we see surrogates all the time go on TV and say, ‘I was in a meeting with Joe Biden recently and he seemed great.’ And I said, ‘Look, most of those people have been at one meeting with Joe Biden or a couple. You spend more time with him or as much time with him as anybody in the White House over the course of the last three years. How do you make the case that Biden is, give me a vivid reason to believe that for those who say Joe Biden is not up to the job?’”

“And she told a great story … emotional, powerful, vivid, but it’s a four or five-minute long story,” he added. “And in this information environment … the voters they have to reach are people who don’t hear the five-minute story. They’re never going to see Joe Biden that way. What they’re going to see is deep fakes, cheap fakes and not fakes, but images, quick images that leave a certain impression. And trying to reach people in this environment is really hard, reach anyone in the environment we live in now in the information ecosystem.”

Former President Barack Obama on Saturday seemed to guide Biden off a stage during a campaign event where he appeared to freeze. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday endeavored to downplay worries about Biden appearing to wander off at the latest G7 Summit, calling it a “cheap fake” orchestrated by Republicans following a video of it circulating recently.

“And I think they are grappling with that, a small set of voters that are very hard to reach with some very significant, stubborn concerns about Biden,” the analyst said. “How do you get through to those people? How do you move the needle with those people? There is no answer. There’s no secret silver bullet answer to that question. And that’s, I think, the thing, Katty, I think they worry about more than anything else.”

Back-to-back listeners on Tuesday called into popular hip-hop radio show, “The Breakfast Club,” to attack the president, as well as Democrats who assert he is fine.

The first caller dubbed Biden “demented Joe,” and the second said “these Democrats keep wanting to tell us not to believe our lying eyes, like everybody can’t see Joe Biden.”

“He is 81. And God bless him, but that don’t mean you capable and you the only person to run this country. We see what’s going on,” the second caller continued. “You can tell us this is not happening … but we see it. We actually out here living it. I’m actually seeing people having to put their groceries back at the cash register. People barely can afford energy bills now.”

Jason Cohen, Liberty Daily

America is an occupied country. Our government is a bunch of unaccountable mobsters. Elections don’t matter to them.

One way or another, they will win. Trump entered the White House in 2017, for 4 years. Still, they won. They undercut him in ways nobody realized at the time, and they managed to get him out — and later prosecute him for fake felonies. The legal system does not matter to them; neither do elections.

This is not negativity. It’s not a “lack of faith.” It’s not a refusal to believe, “This is America, and this cannot happen here.” It IS happening here, because it can happen anywhere.

Dictators, sociopaths, tyrants and (actual) felons do not care about the things that you — as decent, liberty-loving Americans — take for granted that everyone with power cares about. Think of the worst criminal or mobster you ever read about. Then imagine that criminal or mobster with unlimited power, zero accountability and — through it all — getting to call himself an advocate of “democracy” or even freedom.

That’s what it means to say we have an occupied country. The Nazis and the Japanese never got this far, in World War II, not in America. The Soviets never got this far, in the Cold War. But we’re there now. There are Jew-hating Nazis, money-grubbing fascists and ideological, woke Communists in charge of everything. So accept this fact, and realize what we’re up against. Otherwise, no strategy is going to work.

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If Trump wins, it won’t be enough. All hell will break loose. You saw what the tyrants did after Trump’s first election, and throughout 2020. It will be much worse.

Trump has to win. It’s a bare minimum. But we will have to reclaim our republic. This will mean investigating, arresting and prosecuting Biden, his attorney general, and others in his regime for treason. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s offenses should be brought to justice, too. Don’t call this revenge. It’s an absolute necessity. Otherwise: they will come back. They’ll destroy Trump’s second term like his first, and they will come for us all. Punishment for treason is the only way to reverse course, and ensure we become a republic again. A convention of states will also be required, not to rewrite our Constitution, but to reestablish it by massive (I mean MASSIVE) reductions in federal spending and power. The FBI, the EPA, the Department of Education–these and much, much more must GO.

I remain doubtful Trump will win. The magnitude of the fraud and manipulation is too great, and ALL of it from 2020 remains unpunished. Millions of Americans are, quite frankly, ignorant and stupid. Somebody has to say it, because it’s true. But maybe Trump will still somehow win. If he does, it won’t be enough.

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