Tag: politics

Swalwell Ordered By FEC To Return Campaign Contributions

Former California congressman Eric Swalwell was ordered by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) June 15 to return all donations received during his bid for governor before dropping out of the race.

The agency charged with enforcing federal campaign finance laws threatened Swalwell with an audit or enforcement action if he fails to give back $30,075 in contributions that 16 donors made to his campaign committee, according to a letter sent to the former candidate.

“Failure to comply with the provisions of the Act may also result in an enforcement action against the committee.“

In the letter, FEC Senior Campaign Finance Analyst Mary Seiler also stated Swalwell would not be eligible to request a time extension to give the money back.

According to the letter, the FEC requires candidates to return contributions to the donors if they drop out of a race. Swalwell did return some of the donations, but not all of them, according to the agency.

General election contributions can’t be used to pay off primary debts or other obligations, the FEC noted.

All refunds were required to be made by July 20. If not, the commission may take further legal action in the case, the FEC said.

Swalwell and his attorney, Sara Azari, didn’t return requests for comment about the FEC’s demands.

Swalwell dropped out of the governor’s race in April after multiple women stepped forward with sexual assault allegations, which he has denied. He also faced a U.S. House of Representatives ethics investigation over the accusations and a call from his party to resign.

The former congressman and candidate continues to face criminal and ethical investigations over the allegations.

His official state campaign finance disclosure information shows Swalwell collected donations from individuals and organizations until the day he resigned April 13. The last-minute donors included the United Food and Commercial Workers Western States Council Candidate PAC, California Dairies, real estate developer Jeff Worthe, and Greater Anesthesia Service and PAC – each of which gave him $39,200.

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The Official Platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Includes Abolishing the Senate, the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and More

The Democratic Socialists of America or DSA, is behind the campaigns of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, Graham Platner of Maine, AOC, and many others.

These people are complete radicals, but they are winning elections across the country and must be taken seriously.

In addition to creating their own paramilitary group called the Red Rabbits, the DSA has adopted an official platform that must be seen to be believed. They want to remake the United States of America in their image, which means completely destroying it first.

From City Journal:

The Democratic Socialists of America Just Adopted a Radical New Platform

Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met for an in-person meeting of their National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing authority. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

As more and more members seek election to local and national positions, the platform represents a clear statement of the DSA’s views. Its radicalism, therefore, gives a glimpse into how the equivalent of the DSA’s board of directors—some of whom have appeared to moderate—actually think about politics.

“Workers Deserve More!” emerged from another DSA committee that spent two months grappling with and debating its language. When the NPC took up the document, its presenter urged the DSA to pass it unamended after it cleared the committee unanimously.

Instead, DSA leadership added four amendments: one on “real democracy”—calling for the replacement of “the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress”—another on police and prison abolition, a provision explicitly naming Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, and a ranked-choice voting section. The NPC passed two of these four amendments unanimously, while the “real democracy” provision prevailed by a razor-thin margin.

“Workers Deserve More!” has revolutionary aspirations. It aims to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” The document makes clear that achieving this vision would require “building a new society from the ground up,” accompanied by sweeping structural changes…

It would also defund the Department of War, close overseas bases, and end all economic sanctions—which would include those in states like Iran, Cuba, and Russia. The platform further endorses universal amnesty for illegal immigrants, and ending “restrictions on . . . marriage,” which would presumably entail the legalization of polygamy.

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News Outlet Caves to Democratic Senate Candidate, Kills Poll That Makes Her Look Bad

The already-dramatic Democratic primary contest in Michigan just got a new plot twist.

A poll run on behalf of a news outlet ended up getting killed from coverage after complaints from the third-place candidate’s campaign, according to Politico.

And one of the nation’s best-known pollsters has gone public with his contempt for the decision.

Washington Beltway-based Politico reported Wednesday that state Sen. Mallory McMorrow’s campaign raised serious questions about the poll’s results with Michigan Information & Research Service, a news outlet that covers the state’s lawmakers in Lansing.

It’s understandable that any campaign might object to a poll that shows its candidates with single-digit support — and the poll in question had McMorrow at only 6 percent.

The race’s two leaders, meanwhile, were “Dr.” Abdul El-Sayed — a far-left progressive endorsed by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and a candidate who has made potentially questionable claims to being a physician — and U.S. Rep. Haley Stephens, a more establishment pick who has been endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

El-Sayed had 42 percent support, according to the poll. Stevens had 33 percent.

With the Aug. 4 state primary date fast approaching, the McMorrow team hit back hard.

According to Politico, the campaign approached Michigan Information & Research Service with serious questions about the poll’s findings — beyond the dismal showing of the candidate herself — the only Caucasian among the three serious contenders.

For instance, Politico reported, the poll found zero percent of black voters saying they were undecided. Stevens, a black woman, dominated in that demographic with 69 percent, according to the poll, while El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, brought in 31 percent.

It also found Stevens with only 5 percent support in Oakland County, her home base, according to Politico.

Kyle Melinn, a news editor with Michigan Information & Research Service, told Politico the news outlet abandoned coverage of the poll after hearing from McMorrow’s campaign.

However, he said he first talked to other pollsters about concerns about the poll’s findings. He said they agreed there was a problem.

MIRS didn’t run with the poll, Melinn told Politico, “because I didn’t feel comfortable with it.”

The pollster behind the survey, Steve Mitchell of Mitchell Research & Communications, told Politico that McMorrow’s campaign put “intense pressure” on MIRS not to run with the poll.

“The poll, in the eyes of the McMorrow campaign, understated their support,” Mitchell, whose firm Mitchell Research & Communications conducted and paid for the poll, told Politico. “And they put intense pressure on MIRS, and therefore MIRS decided that they weren’t going to run the survey. That’s their decision, and I support their decision.”

One potential area of concern was the method used to solicit responses. According to Politico, the poll relied on the technique known as “text to web,” in which potential respondents are contacted by text. If they are participating in the survey, they go to a link included in the text to fill out their answers.

According to Politico, McMorrow’s campaign said that it opened the door to text recipients abusing the link, either by participating in the poll numerous times or passing the link on to others who aren’t part of the initial polling survey. That could have polluted the results.

However, Nate Silver, founder of the polling website FiveThirtyEight and a national voice when it comes to political polling, published a post on the social media platform X Wednesday, excoriating the MIRS decision.

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A Republic or an Empire?

The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, embraces two value sets. The first is natural rights, and the second is limited government. After 250 years, neither value has survived, and the opposite of each currently prevails in America.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration in three days while staying at a rooming house in Philadelphia. He had been greatly influenced by the British philosopher John Locke. Locke is the godfather of the theory of natural rights, which he extrapolated from the natural law teachings of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) did not argue that humans have inherent natural rights, but rather that the concept of justice demanded by human nature should be “naturally just” when addressing claims for protection of persons and property, whether those protections were legislated or not. The “whether legislated or not” is the first known articulation of a higher civil law, higher than the government’s own laws.

St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) also did not define explicitly the existence of natural rights, but he did argue that norms of human behavior are knowable from the exercise of reason aided by revelation. He is the seminal thinker to express the view that right and wrong is knowable to all persons, whether legislated or not; and this knowledge — because it is common to all — is itself a higher law. He called this universal knowledge the natural law.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) did not articulate natural rights, but he did proceed deep into the ideas of Aristotle and Augustine and taught that all human beings possess innate moral claims and innate moral obligations to honor the moral claims of other persons; and these claims and obligations are knowable by the exercise of reason.

John Locke (1632-1704), whose writings Jefferson read at the College of William and Mary, and which James Madison read at Princeton, drew upon all three philosophers to argue that Aquinas’ moral natural law claims are really natural rights, and these, too, just like knowing right from wrong, are inherent in our humanity and are superior to the government.

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Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger Picks LGBT Activist Who Fought Girls’ Bathroom Protections for State Board Role

Virginia’s Democrat Governor Abigail Spanberger has chosen and LGBT activist who has fought against protections for girls’ bathrooms to sit on a state board that directly influences related policies.

During the election, Spanberger regularly dodged questions on this issue when asked by reporters. No we know why.

Her decision to appoint this person to this role just shows that Democrats have not changed at all. They are not budging on this issue and will go right back to where they were before the 2024 election the instant they retake power.

FOX News reports:

Spanberger taps LGBTQ activist who fought girls’ bathroom protections for state board

Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger appointed an LGBTQ activist who pushed back against efforts to bar biological males from girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms to a state advisory board that helps shape recommendations on LGBTQ-related policies.

Spanberger’s appointment of Kellen MacBeth on May 22, who previously led the LGBTQ nonprofit Equality Arlington, follows a gubernatorial campaign during which she ran as a moderate and sidestepped questions about transgender participation in women’s sports and access to female-only spaces.

MacBeth, the founder of Equality Arlington, has become one of Northern Virginia’s most visible LGBTQ advocates. Under his leadership, Equality Arlington has urged Virginia school districts to implement policies allowing transgender students to use bathrooms that align with their “gender identity” and has encouraged local governments to resist efforts to reverse those protections. The organization also advocated for preserving transgender-inclusive policies in Arlington Public Schools despite federal pressure to change them.

MacBeth has also opposed Virginia legislation that would require schools to notify parents when a student identifies as transgender or permit parents to exempt their children from classroom instruction involving LGBTQ-related topics.

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Democratic Party’s Corollary to the Donroe Doctrine

Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington’s efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute – if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering – is less about ends than means.

Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it – with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy.

The central role of sanctions in projecting imperial coercive power

Under Democratic administrations, the US forged and institutionalized what may be its most effective instrument of hegemony. Coercive economic measures, commonly called “sanctions,” were first deployed by Franklin D. Roosevelt against Mexico in the 1930s. They were used by Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure Guatemala in 1954 and then – most drastically – against Cuba by both Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Today, one-third of the world’s nations are under US sanctions.

Sanctions – a form of collective punishment – are held by legal experts to be contrary to international law. Paradoxically, not only does Washington disregard international law in imposing sanctions, but the US then behaves as if they are applying the law when, for example, they pirate a ship delivering humanitarian supplies to a sanctioned country.

Use of sanctions has accelerated because successive administrations have seen their unique advantages. Compared with “forever wars,” they are more easily justified to US voters as cost-free and as not imperiling US lives. If sanctions are the precursor to military intervention – as in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and, of course, Venezuela in 2026 – the interventions have usually been limited, with few US casualties.

Yet sanctions are very potent: between 2010 and 2021, they caused around 560,000 deaths globally each year – more than five times the number of people killed annually in direct armed combat.

While sanctions are made more palatable by being described as “targeted” at governments or individuals seen as undesirable by Washington, in practice the “targeting” is deliberately far wider. Sanctions do most damage to the poorest sectors of societies – the sectors most likely to support progressive governments. The barely veiled message is that only by withdrawing this support will such communities be able to prosper and avoid the threat of even greater US intervention.

The frequent description of sanctions as “targeted” carries another implication – that they are intended to have a precise and conclusive effect. However, while sanctions cause severe economic damage, there is little evidence that they achieve intended regime change. Even so, sanctions on countries which refuse to change are maintained and – very frequently – intensified. Democrats are as guilty of this folly as Republicans.

Indeed, US sanctions have imperial utility through their “demonstration effect”: attempting to cripple progressive alternatives to the neoliberal world order. Recently subjected to draconian sanctions, Cuban President Díaz-Canel proclaimed: “Cuba is not a failed state; Cuba is a besieged state.” Still, infant mortality in Cuba is lower than among African Americans.

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The World Government That Wasn’t

There are certain episodes in Cold War history that modern conservatives are expected to treat as either sinister fantasy or liberal delusion. The McCloy–Zorin Accords of 1961 occupy a curious place. Explain the concept today and half of the audience assumes you are describing a proto-globalist fever dream hatched in Manhattan conference rooms full of Scandinavian furniture and earnest men in rimless spectacles.

Yet for a brief moment — and this is the part that ought to unsettle both the utopians and the cynics — the United States and the Soviet Union formally agreed that the ultimate goal of international politics should be the abolition of war itself.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

The “Joint Statement of Agreed Principles for Disarmament Negotiations,” better known as the McCloy–Zorin Accords, was negotiated between American statesman John J. McCloy and Soviet diplomat Valerian Zorin in September 1961 and endorsed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1961. It envisioned phased and verified general disarmament under international control, including the eventual elimination of national military establishments and the creation of a United Nations peace force.

This was not drafted by Woodstock pacifists smoking hashish in Vermont. McCloy was the very model of the American establishment insider: Wall Street lawyer, banker, Assistant Secretary of War, and one of the founding grandees of the postwar Atlantic order. Zorin, meanwhile, was a hard Soviet apparatchik who had spent decades navigating the darker corridors of Kremlin diplomacy.

And yet there they were, at the height of the Berlin Crisis and only a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, jointly sketching a roadmap toward “general and complete disarmament.”

The irony is that the men closest to this project were not starry-eyed internationalists in the modern sense. They were realists in the older and more serious tradition. They had lived through industrial slaughter on a civilizational scale. Twenty-seven million Russians had died in World War Two. They understood that thermonuclear war was not a talking point but an extinction event. The generation that built the United Nations had watched Europe commit suicide twice in thirty years and concluded, however imperfectly, that sovereign states armed to the teeth and gripped by ideological hysteria might not indefinitely coexist.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish Secretary-General of the UN, became the moral and administrative face of this ambition. Today he is remembered, if at all, as the Nordic bureaucrat whose name adorns the plaza outside the UN building by the East River in New York and the library inside that skyscraper. In his own time he was treated almost as a secular pope. The press followed him obsessively. In the newsreels, he emerged from turboprop airliners with a mysterious Swedish smile. A new conflict, a new day for Dag. For a few years from the mid-fifties to very early sixties, the UN became a repository for a tired planet’s hopes. Diplomats regarded him with awe, irritation, or both. He believed the UN could become not merely a debating chamber but an actual mechanism for preventing great-power war.

This is the part modern conservatives are supposed to laugh at.

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When A Hate Group Tries To Destroy You: Moms For Liberty Stands Against The SPLC

The Southern Poverty Law Center placed the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty on its “hate map” alongside the KKK, Antifa, and neo-Nazi organizations in 2023.

But last week in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the SPLC, Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., vindicated Moms for Liberty by slamming Bryan K. Fair, the SPLC’s interim president and chief executive officer, for placing them on the map.

Tiffany asked Fair, “Why was it important for your organization to put the Moms for Liberty on a hate map?”

Fair responded, “Moms for Liberty is listed on our hate map because it demeans and vilifies people based on mutable characteristics,” he said, referring to biological sex.

Tiffany replied, “Moms for Liberty is not a racist organization. They may differ with you [regarding] gender mutilation for children … but I think that’s a fair debate to be having!”

The SPLC is a leftist advocacy group that claims to “dismantle white supremacy” and “eliminate economic inequality.” The organization started a “hate map” in 2000 to flag racist groups, but it now flags practically any organization that supports parental rights, Christianity, or opposes LGBT insanity and transgender mutilation surgery.

The SPLC has many Christian, conservative organizations besides Moms for Liberty flagged as “hate groups” on its website, leading Moms for Liberty chapter leader Alexandra Bougher to speak up on their behalf on The Vicki McKenna Show on iHeartRadio.

“People have been doxxed, swatted, lost their jobs … because of this hate map,” she said on the radio interview. “The fact that the [SPLC] has no remorse over it is disturbing.”

The hate map led to worse than a lost job in 2012 when a gunman stormed into the lobby of the Family Research Council, a conservative family and education non-profit. The gunman shot a security guard before being subdued. An FBI interrogation revealed that the shooter chose FRC after he found it on the SPLC’s hate map for being anti-LGBT.

“We as Americans should be able to disagree on things without being smeared or demonized … we don’t need to destroy someone’s life because we don’t see eye to eye,” Bougher said in the interview. The DOJ announced an 11-count indictment in April against the SPLC for fraud and false statements, and scheduled a federal trial for October. The DOJ found that the “SPLC is lying to everyone, saying that they’re warning people of hate, meanwhile funding the hate groups to make more money,” Bougher explained. “It’s absolutely sickening.”

The SPLC secretly funneled over $3 million to racist, extremist groups, including the KKK and the American Nazi Party, while simultaneously claiming to fight them between 2014 and 2023, according to the DOJ. “The objective of the scheme and artifice was to obtain money via donations through materially false representations and omissions about what the donated funds would be used for,” the DOJ stated.

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SICK: Michigan Muslim Dem Senate Candidate Cracks a Disgusting Joke About President Trump Dying 

A man who could be Michigan’s next Senator is under fire for making an absolutely sick joke about President Trump’s death during a podcast this week.

Failed far-left House candidate Kat Abughazaleh hosted Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on a live-stream on Tuesday to discuss his campaign. As TGP readers know, El-Sayed is a socialist Muslim with extreme views on issues ranging from health care to foreign policy.

El-Sayed, a Muslim, is currently the frontrunner for the Senate nomination according to some polls, which has prompted fears that he will prove a weak candidate against the presumptive GOP nominee Mike Rogers.

When the topic inevitably turned to Trump during Abughazaleh’s podcast, El-Sayed could not help but crack a nasty joke about the President’s death.

“If going swimming in coins wouldn’t actually kill you, he would do it,” El Sayed said while Abughazaleh laughed. “I’m like, bro, you’re going to break your neck if you do that.”

“Maybe he should try it,” Abughazaleh replied, which prompted chuckling from El-Sayed.

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California Has Gay-Certification Program To Tap Into $633 Million For “LGBT” Businesses

Americans are used to handouts for favored groups. Affirmative action in university admissions, corporate “diversity” initiatives, and minority-owned contracting requirements direct opportunities, resources, and contracts to supposedly “oppressed” groups, such as women, Native Americans, blacks, and Hispanics.

In California, state Democrats have embraced another kind of favoritism: contracts for state-certified gay-owned businesses.

The scheme operates through the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates privately owned utility companies. California utilities spent more than $43 billion in 2024 on contractors—fuel suppliers, surveyors, engineers, and others—whose work helps deliver water, gas, electricity, and internet service to California’s 39 million residents.

In 1986, Governor George Deukmejian signed Assembly Bill 3678, which required certain CPUC-regulated utilities to submit annual “plans” for buying goods and services from woman- and minority-owned companies. Two years later, CPUC created its “Supplier Diversity Program,” which would enforce the law and set contracting “goals” for large utilities.

Under a series of Democratic governors, the program has expanded to include gay-owned businesses. In September 2014, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring CPUC to recognize “LGBT-owned businesses” as eligible for supplier-diversity benefits. Five years later, Governor Gavin Newsom expanded the program further, “encouraging” other companies involved in the energy sector to award contracts to gay-owned firms.

In the years that followed, CPUC faced activist pressure as it implemented the gay expansion. BuildOUT California, a since-rebranded LGBT building-industry organization, sent a letter to the commission arguing that “homophobia” existed within “the ranks of the utility companies.” The state’s legislative LGBTQ caucus suggested in a 2021 letter that even considering lower gay-procurement targets was “an insult to the LGBTQ+ community.”

By 2022, CPUC had fully implemented the expansion. In practice, this meant establishing a “goal” for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million to buy things from state-certified LGBT businesses: 0.5 percent of procurement in 2022; 1 percent in 2023; and 1.5 percent in 2024 and beyond. If “large” CPUC-regulated utilities met these “goals” in 2024, they would have sent roughly $633 million to LGBT-owned firms.

This scheme raises an obvious question: How does a business qualify as officially gay? Paperwork. Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website. Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an “LGBT organization” attesting to their sexual preferences; proof that a newspaper identified them as “LGBT”; or three letters from “personal contacts” written “on company letterhead” attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who “falsely represent” their business as gay face up to a year in county jail.

Supplier Clearinghouse also accepts gay-certification letters from the National LGBTQ+ & Allied Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has its own list of accepted documents, including human resources complaints or police records claiming LGBT discrimination. As NGLCC states on its website, “Certification is a journey, not a destination.”

Mary Ann Horton has experienced this “journey” firsthand. Horton, an early internet pioneer credited with helping develop the e-mail attachment, is a white male who “transitioned” and is now married to a woman. Horton’s company, Red Ace, is registered in California as a woman- and LGBT-owned business.

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