Importing Problems

There are too many immigrants, legal and illegal, and there are certainly too many immigrants committing ordinary crimes once they are among us.

by Christopher Roach for American Greatness

In Texas, two terrible mass killings recently took place. Both involved perpetrators who were immigrants or the children of immigrants. In many cases, so were their victims. With the latest surge of humanity on the border, it’s worth considering the connection between these high-profile crimes and an uncontrolled border.

In the Houston suburb of Cleveland, a drunk man shooting guns in his backyard massacred his neighbors when they dared to ask him to keep it down. The victims were all illegal alien immigrants from Honduras, save for the youngest who was born here in the United States. Governor Greg Abbott got into some hot water when he described the victims as illegal. While this was a fact, even I think it was a bit insensitive to highlight that when announcing they were victimized by a violent maniac.    

For a moment, this became a story about gun violence and the inability to care for our illegal immigrant neighbors. But this narrative became less compelling when, predictably, the alleged killer himself was also an illegal alien from Mexico. The man was previously deported multiple times, with the later arrivals constituting the new crime of “illegal reentry.” He could not have done this so easily or so often if the border were a higher priority. 

Whether he obtained the AR-15 he used through theft, straw purchase, or private sale, his possession of any gun was itself a crime. Even if he were in the country legally, his criminal record would have been disqualifying. He should have been arrested for the gun charge and turned over to ICE in earlier encounters with local police. 

But the local police observed the de facto refusal of most local law enforcement to assist in the enforcement of our immigration laws. They did nothing after responding to earlier complaints by neighbors. This is best understood as a story of illegal alien victims and illegal alien perpetrators, a commingled group of struggling, non-English speaking people living in a subculture that shields itself, as much as possible, from scrutiny by (and cooperation with) law enforcement. 

Democrats want to make this a story about “gun crime,” but how do they think they will ever control guns when they cannot even control the border? How much “mass incarceration” of blacks and other minorities would they tolerate in the name of gun control? 

To point out the obvious, if we controlled our border, this massacre would not have happened. In that case, neither the killer nor the immigrant family from Honduras would have been able to put down roots here.

We are told sometimes that immigrant crime is lower than native crime. This may be true, but the right rate of immigrant crime is “zero.” Anyone we let in this country should be a net positive, not a new source of problems. And the foundation of assimilation, productivity, and being a good neighbor is respecting our laws, including our immigration laws. Most illegal aliens, while not arch criminals or even violent, are lawbreakers by definition.

Crime by immigrants, while mostly confined to immigrant communities, is not exclusively so. More importantly, law enforcement must investigate and imprison those who commit serious crimes, even when the perpetrators are illegal aliens. There are too many immigrants, legal and illegal, and there are certainly too many immigrants committing ordinary crimes once they are among us. 

The other shooting took place in suburban Dallas and was also undertaken by a Mexican-American. Some conservatives instantly harped on his name and figured he must be illegal. This faulty assumption is understandable among people who have not spent much time in Texas. 

A great many U.S. citizens are Hispanic. In Texas in particular, many are of Mexican heritage. Some have long roots going back to Spanish settlements in the Rio Grande Valley, but hundreds of thousands per year have arrived since 1970 as immigrants, illegal and legal. Many stayed and eventually had kids. And those kids, born here, are now legal, the so-called “anchor babies,” permitting parents to have their status upgraded under ill-conceived “family reunification” provisions of our immigration laws. Adults who arrived earlier received amnesty in 1986. This amnesty was supposed to restore the border and put an end to illegal immigration. Ha!

Mexican-Americans (and Mexican illegals) are ubiquitous in Dallas, with many inner-city neighborhoods now nearly 100 percent  percent Mexican. The parents of the Dallas-area shooter, who apparently needed a translator, lived in a modest home in the North Dallas area. The young man himself wore American-style clothing, was into heavy metal, and tried to join the Army, eventually working as a security guard.

He was apparently having a mental crisis and also may have been attracted to extreme, neo-Nazi ideology. Of the last part, I am not wholly convinced. The CIA-connected source of this information claims to have found the killer’s profile on a Russian website no one has ever heard of. It would be very easy to photoshop offensive tattoos and upload items you obtained from elsewhere. Others suggested one of his tattoos exposed him as a member of a Texas prison gang called Tango Blast. This is possible, but the hand tattoo of the Big “D” may have just been a tribute to his hometown. 

The facts are still coming out, but, like the massacre in Cleveland, Texas, the Allen killings would not have happened if the alleged murderer were not in the country. He would not have been born in the country if his parents were not allowed in this country. They have lived here since at least 1989 and still do not speak English.  

Like the U.S.-born Pulse Nightclub killer, the San Bernardino killers, and the Asian dance studio killer in Los Angeles, the story of immigration is not chiefly about talented people finding the cure for cancer and improving their communities. More often than not, it includes average people doing menial jobs, and, in some cases, doing much more harm than good. It is also a story about people from disorderly and violent countries bringing that disorder and violence with them.

Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are not the way they are because of the dirt or the geography or because their legal systems are rooted in Spanish law. They are the way they are because of the people. The people make the country. Like the Californians who have moved to Colorado, Arizona, and Montana, these newcomers are starting to transform our country into one resembling the places whence they came.  

Every time you hear about an immigrant committing a crime or being victimized by one, it was a completely unnecessary occurrence, a burden on real Americans, and a direct and expensive consequence of our uncontrolled border.

X22, Red Pill News, and more- May 12

 

You would never believe the whirlwind day I've had. When I say that 1 interview or O and A can ultimately change everything, I really do mean it.

That's right. Everything just got even more intense. What happens on Sunday may ultimately determine whether or not I'll even have a reason tune into the final episode! I may not have proof, but I'm almost 100% certain Nell and Eric will be back somehow, which means Kensi can't be pregnant. Otherwise, I'll lose my only reason to see this live at the end. Because there is no chance anyone is dying before this ends.

1 of a few things I will not miss of all this: The nail biting speculating on things that should happen. Especially when it comes to what I want!

Trump Camp is Raising Money for a GOP Ballot Harvesting Operation

Kerry Picket reporting for Washington Times 

The Trump campaign is taking on Democrats’ ballot-harvesting in key battleground states where billionaire liberal activist George Soros’ groups are spending tens of millions targeting to energize President Biden’s base.

“We recently alerted you that a Soros-linked Super PAC has begun targeting 6 battleground states with a $75 MILLION spending blitz to buy Crooked Joe the White House,” the campaign said in a fundraising email Thursday. “But there’s something important we want to add … some of those states have legalized BALLOT HARVESTING.”

The campaign highlighted the Soros-linked effort in battleground states Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“At the beginning of the year, President Trump made a major announcement that our campaign would ballot harvest in the states where it’s legal to counter the Left’s schemes,” the email said before asking for contributions to support the Trump campaign’s Ballot Harvesting Fund.

Ballot harvesting is when someone besides a voter turns in a voter’s ballot, usually a mail-in ballot. Mail ballots can be absentee ballots and ballots cast in vote-by-mail states.

Republicans have long derided the practice and campaigned on eventually eliminating it in states where it is legal.

The GOP more recently have promised their donors they will become as savvy at ballot harvesting as the Democrats.

In mid-April, Mr. Trump, who previously took issue with early voting and vote-by-mail methods, told wealthy GOP donors that it was important for Republicans to lean into these strategies.

He said the GOP needs “every vote we can get, whether it’s early or late,” according to a Washington Post report.

“Our goal will be one-day voting with only paper ballots. But until that day comes, the Republican Party and the RNC must compete using every lawful means to win,” Mr. Trump said. “That means swamping the left with mail-in votes, early votes and Election Day votes. Where we can’t get rid of drop boxes, we need them in every church and veteran center. And until we can eliminate ballot harvesting, we must become masters at ballot harvesting.”

The Voter Registration Machine Flipping the States Blue

New documents reveal the Center for Election Innovation and Research’s true purpose: Juicing Democrat registration in the states, thanks to data provided by ERIC.

by Hayden Ludwig for American Greatness

In modern elections, the candidate who can turn out the bigger base is usually the winner. Put differently, the campaign with better voter data holds the trump card.

For more than a decade now, Democrats unquestionably have owned that trump card and used it to carve deep inroads into once solidly red states such as Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, while Republicans have looked on in bafflement. It’s no secret why the Left is winning elections despite shrinking in the polls: They register new voters in droves, and conservatives do not.

More than 160 million people cast a ballot in the 2020 election. Yet there may be as many as 60 million more eligible-but-unregistered individuals (EBUs) out there—people who could  lawfully vote but may not until they register in their state. They’re typically hard to reach and politically disinterested. Yet the party that can tap into this electoral goldmine—that is, identify and reach these potential voters—would be unbeatable.

For years, that party has been the Democrats. It may soon be the Republicans. Here’s why.

Permanent Democrat Power

In 2010, the Supreme Court ushered in a torrent of new political spending through its Citizens United v. FEC decision. “Progressives” who were convinced that big business would back Republicans to the hilt saw doom written on the wall. To counter this Republican tide, groups such as the Brennan Center proposed adding “millions of new voters onto the rolls through a modernized registration system—starting in 2010.”

In short, they needed to balloon the Democratic Party’s ranks to survive a GOP onslaught—an onslaught that never came.

“Voter registration modernization” proved a euphemism for inserting operatives into state election machinery. But EBU data is protected behind layers of federal privacy laws and across multiple state agencies (e.g. motor vehicle departments) and thus not available to political groups. It was Pew Charitable Trusts, a powerful left-of-center funder, that discovered the back door.

Between 2010 and 2012, Pew incubated the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that billed itself as the solution to an entirely different problem presented to the states: Maintaining their voter rolls, which are notoriously inaccurate and constantly in flux. For a fee, ERIC would graciously warehouse states’ voter roll data and identify potential double voters using sophisticated data-matching software.

That’s the sales pitch, anyway. In truth, ERIC makes the removal of ineligible voters entirely optional and tedious, while mandating member states spend hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars to register new voters. Far from streamlining voter rolls, ERIC expands them, which is why non-ERIC states have cleaner rolls than their ERIC counterparts.

More furtively, ERIC would also gain access to invaluable data on tens of millions of EBUs—a database that no other group in the world has access to. But how to use it?

Project Get-Out-The-Vote

We know from public records requests that ERIC soon established a data-sharing agreement with a heretofore obscure nonprofit, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). Amazingly, the corporate leftist media continues to claim this inconvenient fact is “without evidence.”

ERIC and CEIR share a founder: David Becker, a partisan elections lawyer who previously worked for the far-left People for the American Way and the Justice Department’s voting rights arm. Becker is well known as a “hardcore leftist” who can’t “stand conservatives.” Yet Pew presented him as the nonpartisan face of its ERIC project.

Becker spent four years persuading nearly two-thirds of the states to join ERIC before departing to found CEIR in 2016. Yet until recently, Becker remained a nonvoting member of ERIC’s board, courtesy of a carve-out in ERIC’s bylaws made specifically for him to ensure continued oversight of the ostensibly “neutral” and state-led organization.

If ERIC is the face presentable to election officials, CEIR is Becker’s policy shop. The group was founded with seed capital from the Hewlett Foundation and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who routed the cash through Arabella Advisors’ massive “dark money” network.

More funding may have come from Pew, which continued to fund CEIR’s “sister” group, ERIC, for years. We know that CEIR’s other co-founder, Amy Cohen, led Pew’s Google-funded Voting Information Project, part of the “voter registration modernization” push. Yet strangely, Cohen never appears in CEIR’s disclosures as a paid employee, perhaps because her salary was paid by Pew.

CEIR supports vote-by-mail expansion and ever-earlier voting. It also pushes the lie that conservatives and Trump supporters are a threat to election workers while barring center-right reporters from its press conferences. Becker himself dismisses critics as “fueled by disinformation” because we “want our democracy to fail.”

CEIR received $70 million from Mark Zuckerberg in 2020, funds that drove Democratic turnout in Maryland and helped subsidize ERIC’s voter registration mandate in other states. Pennsylvania received $13 million, Michigan $12 million, New York $5 million, Georgia $5.6 million, and Arizona $4.8 million. How each grant was spent remains largely unknown, despite watchdog groups’ best efforts.

But CEIR’s founding documents reveal the truth about its origins. It was created to encourage ERIC membership and “work closely with ERIC” to register millions of new voters using exclusive EBU data in order to “turn non-voters into active participants” in future elections.

Imagine having a picture-perfect map of everyone—both registered and unregistered—living within your state’s borders. A campaign knows that an individual’s age, race, county of residence, and marital status are enough to strongly indicate how that person will vote. How difficult would it be to only target your own party’s likely voters?

Armed with this near-perfect picture of every person living in ERIC’s 32 member states—more than 200 million Americans—there is nothing stopping CEIR from doing it exactly that: registering only its preferred voters.

If that sounds far-fetched, consider that in 2020 alone, the left-wing groups funneled $434 million through a vast array of tax-exempt nonprofits, such as Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight in Georgia, that do nothing but register new Democrats. Virtually all of that money came from the Tides, Ford, Open Society, Wyss, and Buffett Foundations, among other donors supposedly engaged in charity.

These organizations would be near-worthless without EBU data, which is only available through ERIC. So where do they acquire it? The smart money would pin it on Becker’s CEIR.

CEIR operates virtually in the dark with little scrutiny from the “progressive” press, who are less interested in covering CEIR’s misdeeds than covering for them. Contrast that with the work of investigative reporters like Todd Shepherd of the right-leaning outlet Broad + Liberty. He recently reported that Pennsylvania transferred partial data profiles of hundreds of thousands of EBUs to CEIR in 2020. That information would have proved invaluable to partisan groups active in Pennsylvania that year. Yet CEIR refuses to say what it did with the trove of voter data.

But CEIR’s founding documents give us every reason to believe this is precisely what it’s doing. It’s up to Becker and Co. to convince the public that it isn’t misusing this priceless data, despite having the means, motive, and opportunity to do so.

A Right-Wing Wrecking Ball

So what can conservatives do to level the playing field?

A good axiom in warfare applies here: Turn your enemy’s strength into his greatest weakness. 

Japan famously turned many Pacific islands into impenetrable fortresses in World War II and dared U.S. forces to attack them. Instead, we sailed around them to take weaker targets and let the garrisons starve. After Rome’s devastating defeat at the hands of Hannibal’s mighty army in the Second Punic War, Rome divided its legions into smaller forces to cover more ground. Like wolves wearing out a bear, they could be everywhere while the Carthaginians could not. Hannibal lost. 

Likewise, we won’t defeat this powerful cabal in a single battle, but by nibbling it to death. The House should demand to know why the IRS refuses to strip these groups of their tax exemption for trespassing the law on biased voter registration campaigns. Conservative legislatures ought to hold hearings on out-of-state nonprofits running partisan registration drives in their jurisdiction. The states can tighten rules about who gets to register voters the same way they restrict ballot harvesting—either restricting it to family members or banning it altogether. Where there’s room for abuse, the Left will abuse the law.

Watchdogs and citizens can and should file complaints with the IRS and FEC against these groups. Conservatives are used to being attacked for their political views; very few leftists have ever faced the same kind of scrutiny. They can also demand 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) groups’ annual Form 990 disclosures, which reveal how much they took in and spent. (Here is atemplate and some guidelines.)

To date, nine states—Ohio, Florida, Missouri, West Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Iowa, Alabama, and Alaska—have left or are about to leave ERIC. Their leaders know that they don’t need ERIC to maintain good voter rolls because they already have the tools necessary for the job.

That leaves Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin for election integrity advocates to address.

The good news? In almost all cases, the decision to leave ERIC is entirely within the purview of the governor and secretary of state. Red states with a blue governor can look to the others on this list for legislation to leave ERIC without the governor’s consent.

Every one of these states to depart is one less state transmitting EBU data to the Left’s registration machine.

LEAKED: Emails Show Biden State Department Sought to Protect China During Spy-Balloon Fiasco

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

With so much domestic rancor going on as the next election season heats up, it’s worth remembering that there are serious foreign policy issues to deal with. It’s also worth remembering that the Biden administration is doing its level best to screw every single one of them up.

A new report backed by leaked emails and inside sources is shedding light on a shocking policy Joe Biden is pursuing in regard to China. According to Reuters, during the Chinese spy balloon fiasco that captivated the nation in early 2023, embattled Secretary of State Antony Blinken was actually seeking to protect the communists.

When an alleged Chinese spy balloon traversed the United States in February, some U.S. officials were confident the incursion would galvanize the U.S. bureaucracy to push forward a slate of actions to counter China.

Instead, the U.S. State Department held back human rights-related sanctions, export controls and other sensitive actions to try to limit damage to the U.S.-China relationship, according to four sources with direct knowledge of U.S. policy, as well as internal emails seen by Reuters.

(…)

Rick Waters, deputy assistant secretary of State for China and Taiwan who leads the China House policy division, said in a Feb. 6 email to staff that has not been previously reported: “Guidance from S (Secretary of State) is to push non-balloon actions to the right so we can focus on symmetric and calibrated response. We can revisit other actions in a few weeks.”

The sources said many measures have yet to be revived. The decision to postpone export licensing rules for telecom equipment maker Huawei and sanctions against Chinese officials for abuses of Uyghurs, has damaged morale at China House, they said.

In other words, instead of punishing China for its insanely provocative violation of US airspace and sovereignty, Blinken had his lackeys pause major human rights and trade measures. That included already planned actions to sanction Chinese tech companies like Huawei and to combat China’s genocide of the Uyghurs.

It gets worse. Though the buck stops with Blinken, he apparently farmed out US policy toward China to Wendy Sherman, his second-in-command.

Speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, they said Blinken had largely delegated China policy duties to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the United States’ second ranked diplomat.

Who is Wendy Sherman? She’s the China-loving official who led the lobbying effort against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021. So not only is Blinken derelict in his duties by passing off the biggest US foreign policy issue in existence to an underling, but he gave those duties to someone with a long history of being suspiciously soft on the Chinese.

Sherman was also at the forefront of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, infamously proclaiming that the “Taliban seek legitimacy.” If there’s a diplomat with worse instincts, I’m not sure who it would be. Sherman is just terrible and has managed to be on the wrong side of just about every major foreign policy issue she’s been involved with.

But as I’ve speculated in the past, it’d be a mistake to chalk all this up to sheer incompetence. The Biden administration continually operates as if it is bought and paid for by the Chicoms. From COVID to economics, the Chinese are allowed to dominate. It’s long past time for people to start asking why.

Despite What Leftists Claim, Property Absolutely Is Worth Getting Deadly Over

posted by Brandon Morse at RedStateVIP 

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of…property.

That was actually the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, featuring the three things the founder’s influencer, John Locke, held important for a free society. Thomas Jefferson would replace it with “the pursuit of happiness,” but property maintained one of the key goals of many a free American.

The founders considered property to be so important that they figured one of the government’s primary jobs was to protect the property of the people on behalf of the people. John Adams noted that if God made not stealing the property of someone else one of his chief commandments, then the idea of protecting property is one that a government should see as important.

“If ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free,” said Adams.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, held a very similar view.

“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses,” wrote Madison. “This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”

Personal property is, without question, one of the hallmarks of a free society. A thing belonging solely to a singular person and not forcibly shared between multiple people allows one to build their own personhood freely. It is a mark of true independence and is, in a way, an extension of that person’s liberty.

Naturally, the left doesn’t see things that way. Their ultimate goal is to make a society where no one owns anything except the government. However, none but the boldest (and possibly stupid) will say something like that outright. While the left’s mentality has pervaded the mainstream, you’ll still not see a lot of people sign on to giving up their personal belongings to the government so other people can use them. Tell the ardent communist that she has to give up her iPhone or laptop so someone else can use it for a while and you’ll see how communist they actually are.

But the left’s lack of respect for personal property doesn’t stop at wishing to manage it themselves. The more radical leftists believe that property is so unimportant that having it stolen from you by criminals isn’t a big deal. They believe that if you attempt to defend your property from criminals, then you should be punished, not the criminal.

Case in point, democratic socialist and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Dean Preston, believes that security guards hired to protect businesses and property in San Francisco should have their firearms stripped from them because human life is worth more than the things they steal.

In a video posted to Twitter, Preston announced he’d be pursuing this idea after a security guard shot and killed 24-year-old Banko Brown on April 27. While San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said her office wouldn’t be pressing charges on the security guard, Preston said he will be pursuing legislation to make sure security guards can’t protect property with deadly force anymore.

This is an incredibly short-sighted move.

For one, removing the ability of people to protect their property with deadly force will only embolden criminals to steal more. Moreover, what would be the point of hiring a security guard if they can hardly do anything to stop the theft of property? On top of that, what would be the point of having a store in San Francisco then?

If people can’t defend their property then there is no freedom in San Francisco. You can’t own anything because it could be taken from you at the drop of a hat. Sure, you could try to use less than deadly force to protect it, but that would wildly increase the chances that you yourself will fall into harm’s way as the thief attempts to defend themselves from you.

Also, they’re a criminal. There’s no guarantee that they won’t use deadly force on you.

And it’s here we see the door opening to another issue.

The willingness to disrespect property isn’t too far away from being willing to disrespect the person. If a thief can claim ownership of the extensions of yourself, then at some point the idea will seep into the minds of some that they can take ownership of you in some ways.

This is an open door for needless violence, murder, and rape. The vast majority of criminals don’t have a code of honor, and the more you embolden them, the further they’ll go in committing evil.

Protecting property is just the beginning of protecting life. In that view, protecting property with deadly force absolutely is justified.

No one should ever be withheld from defending what’s theirs.

Ted Cruz Zeroes in on the Bigger Problem Dianne Feinstein’s Return Signals for Joe Biden

Sister Toldjah reporting for RedState 

As expected, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) returned to her seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) Thursday after creating a whirlwind of confusion Tuesday among her Democratic colleagues, many of who including Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) had not been expecting her to arrive until later in the week and who were unaware that she was already there.

Feinstein, who in a statement said she is on a “lighter schedule” under the order of her doctors, had been out of the Senate for over two months battling health complications from shingles, a situation that caused much wailing and infighting among Democrats who were furious that they were unable to ram Joe Biden’s most radical judicial nominees through the Judiciary Committee thanks to the tie vote scenario her absence created.

But on Thursday, SJC Democrats wasted no time getting Feinstein, who arrived an hour late, to do what they publicly shamed her into coming back and doing, casting the tie-breaking votes on a handful of troubling nominees that Republicans would not allow to pass through the committee while Feinstein was at home in California recovering:

Michael Delaney (First Circuit Court of Appeals), another nominee Democrats had been trying to push through, didn’t get a vote, presumably due to pressure from far-left activist groups who think Delaney is not left-wing enough or something.

The problems with the “qualifications” of the three who did advance included not being able to remember certain Articles from the Constitution, not knowing what a Brady Motion was, and seeming to have sympathy for sex offenders:

The three advanced with only Democratic support as all had earned unanimous GOP opposition on the panel. Bjelkengren stumbled during her confirmation hearing when asked what Article 5 of the Constitution is, Gaston was grilled during her hearing over her past writings about sex offenders, and Crews was unable to define what a Brady Motion is.

Though RedState detailed some of those issues here and here, SJC member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) laid out the most troublesome in a Twitter thread Thursday:

The Biden Admin and Senate Democrats are supporting a nominee who advocates for convicted child molestors to be able to live next door to day care centers.

That’s not exaggeration, that’s not hyperbole.

Here’s what Marian Gaston said:

“Children are not safer because registered sex offenders are prohibited from residing near schools, parks, day care centers and other places where children tend to gather.”

“The conclusions and recommendations are that – difficult as it might be – laws that regulate where sex offenders may not live should be repealed or substantially modified in the interest of public safety.”

Is there anyone too radical for the Democrat Party?

… and during the Thursday SJC session:

Joe Biden is going to have to defend his most controversial choices during the course of his reelection campaign. No matter who the GOP nominee is, they are going to call him out on it – especially on Gaston, considering that directly relates to the safety of America’s children at a time when Democrats are on record as saying that parents shouldn’t have a say in their child’s education, including when it comes to sexually explicit classroom lessons and library books.

Simply put, Feinstein’s return is not the “win” Democrats have been making it out to be, and that’s something that they may not figure out until, politically speaking, it’s too late for them to change course.

Biden’s Push To Make Military Vehicles ‘Climate-Friendly’ Hands America’s Military Infrastructure To Red China

Transitioning the military into a ‘green’ fighting force would outsource America’s military hardware to its greatest adversary and damage its readiness.

Shawn Fleetwood reporting for The Federalist

President Joe Biden’s newest bid to make the American military “climate-friendly” wouldn’t just weaken our military advantage, it would put Red China in control.

During a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked by Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst whether she supports efforts by the Biden administration to make the U.S. military an “EV [electric vehicle] fleet by 2030,” to which Granholm replied, “I do, and I think we can get there, as well.”

“I do think that reducing our reliance on the volatility of globally traded fossil fuels where we know that global events like the war in Ukraine can jack up prices for people back home… does not contribute to energy security,” Granholm claimed. “I think energy security is achieved when we have homegrown, clean energy that is abundant.”

Granholm’s testimony was hardly the first time the Biden administration has outwardly endorsed the idea of overhauling America’s military to fit the left’s unrealistic vision of a so-called “environmentally friendly” fighting force. On Earth Day last year, Biden gave a speech in Seattle, in which he laid out his vision of using “billions” of taxpayer dollars to make “every vehicle” in the U.S. military “climate-friendly.” Unsurprisingly, the president failed to explain how he intends to achieve this ludicrous goal.

“I’m going to start the process where every vehicle in the United States military — every vehicle is going to be climate-friendly. Every vehicle,” Biden said. “No, I mean it. We’re spending billions of dollars to do it.”

Last month, Biden signed an executive order titled “Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All,” which stipulates that pursuing so-called “environmental justice” is a “duty of all executive branch agencies and should be incorporated into their missions.” According to Fox News, the order was issued the same day the White House launched an “Environmental Justice Scorecard,” which the administration claims is “the first government-wide assessment of federal agencies’ efforts to advance environmental justice.”

“The administration’s efforts are already being carried out by the Department of Defense,” the Fox report reads. “The scorecard revealed the agency has ‘at least 640 staff that work on environmental justice, either in a full- or part-time capacity.'”

A ‘Green’ U.S. Military Puts China in Control

While leftists obsessed with climate alarmism are undoubtedly thrilled with the Biden administration’s energy-themed “transitioning” of the U.S. military, another likely proponent of the policy is Red China.

As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice previously reported, Beijing controls the vast majority (up to 70 or 80 percent) of key materials and components needed to make electric car batteries, including electric motor magnets. The supply of rare earth minerals, several of which are needed to construct these batteries, is also heavily dominated by China.

“China either directly controls the battery components or has secured long-term agreements with their respective producers to effectively control the markets for its necessary metals,” a recent Federalist report reads. “As a result of how China has positioned itself in any major transition to electric vehicles, it could not only be the world’s exclusive EV battery manufacturer, but it could very well be the sole manufacturer of the EVs themselves.”

In other words, if the U.S. military revolutionizes its automobiles to meet Biden’s impractical demands, it would put the military’s core infrastructure needed for combat and national defense in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

A National Security Disaster

Whether it’s incompetence or negligence, Biden’s bid to compel service members to rely on unreliable and lower-quality tactical vehicles during military operations would give the Chinese government greater influence over America’s armed forces. If the United States were to get involved in a major, armed conflict, a “climate-friendly” military in need of the batteries and components required to power these new automobiles would largely be dependent on markets dominated by Chinese state-owned enterprises.

Moreover, using EVs during military operations is wholly impractical. Unlike gas-powered vehicles, which can be filled up and used within several minutes, EVs often require extensive time to fully charge. According to Kelley Blue Book, for example, many of the new electric vehicles produced today “can take up to 12 hours to charge using a Level 2 outlet.” Gas-powered vehicles furthermore remain superior when it comes to mileage and repair costs.

Transitioning the military into a “green” fighting force would both outsource America’s military hardware to its greatest adversary and damage its readiness and capabilities. But as with other disastrous policies, Biden will continue ahead without a second thought.